I
Strange though it may seem, the fact is that Buddhist scholars are
engrossed too much in the study of what they regard as the Buddha’s
teaching and his disciples’ exposition of the Dharma, so called, while
they neglect altogether the study of the Buddha’s spiritual experience
itself. According to my view, however, the first thing we have to
do in the elucidation of Buddhist thought is to inquire into the
nature of this personal experience of the Buddha, which is recorded
to have presented itself to his inmost consciousness at the time of
Enlightenment (_sambodhi_). What the Buddha taught his disciples was
the conscious outcome of his intellectual elaboration to make them see
and realise what he himself had seen and realised. This intellectual
outcome, however philosophically presented, does not necessarily
enter into the inner essence of Enlightenment experienced by the
Buddha. When we want, therefore, to grasp the spirit of Buddhism,
which essentially develops from the content of Enlightenment, we have
to get acquainted with the signification of the experience of the
founder,—experience by virtue of which he is indeed the Buddha and the
founder of the religious system which goes under his name. Let us see
what record we have of this experience, and what were its antecedents
and consequences.[f48]
There is a Sutra in the Dīgha-Nikāya known as the _Mahāpadāna
Suttanta_, in which the Buddha is represented as enlightening his
disciples concerning the six Buddhas anterior to him. The facts
relating to their lives as Bodhisattvas and Buddhas are almost
identical in each case except some incidental details; for the Buddhas
are all supposed to have had one and the same career. When therefore
Gautama, the Buddha of the present Kalpa, talks about his predecessors
in this wise, including the story of Enlightenment, he is simply
recapitulating his own earthly life, and everything he states here as
having occurred to his predecessors, except such matters as parentage,
social rank, birthplace, length of life, etc., must be regarded as also
having happened to himself. This is especially true with his spiritual
experience known as Enlightenment.[f49]
When the Bodhisattva, as the Buddha is so designated prior to his
attainment of Buddhahood, was meditating in seclusion, the following
consideration came upon him: “Verily this world has fallen upon trouble
(_kiccha_), one is born, and grows old, and dies, and falls from one
state, and springs up in another. And from this suffering, moreover,
no one knows of any way of escape, even from decay and death. O when
shall a way of escape from this suffering be made known, from decay
and death?” Thus thinking, the Bodhisattva reasoned out that decay and
death arose from birth, birth from becoming, becoming from grasping,
grasping from craving, until he came to the mutual conditioning of
name-and-form (_namarūpa_) and cognition (_viññāna_).[f50] Then he
reasoned back and forth from the coming-to-be of this entire body
of evil to its final ceasing-to-be,—and at this thought there arose
to the Bodhisattva an insight (_cakkhu_)[f51] into things not heard
of before, and knowledge arose, and reason arose, wisdom arose, light
arose. (_Bodhisattassa pubbe ananussutesu dhammesu cakkhuṁ udapādi,
ñāṇaṁ udapādi, paññā udapādi, vijjā udapādi, āloka udapādi._)”
He then exclaimed: “I have penetrated this Dharma, deep, hard to
perceive, hard to understand, calm, sublime, no mere dialectic, subtle,
intelligible only to the wise. (_Dhammo gambhīro duddaso duranubodho
santo panito atakkāvacaro nipuṇo pandito vedanīyo._) But this is a race
devoting itself to the things to which it clings, devoted thereto,
delighting therein. And for a race devoting itself to the things to
which it clings, devoted thereto, delighting therein, this were a
matter hard to perceive, to wit, that this is conditioned by that,
and all that happens is by way of cause. This too were a matter hard
to discern:—the tranquillisation of all the activities of life, the
renunciation of all substrata of rebirth, the destruction of craving,
the death of passion, quietude of heart, Nirvana.”
The Buddha then uttered the following verse in which he expressed his
reluctance to preach the Dharma to the world at large—the Dharma which
was realised in him by ñāṇa,—which he saw visibly, face to face,
without any traditional instruction:
“This that through many toils I’ve won—
Enough! why should I make it known?
By folk with lust and hate consumed
Not this the Truth[f52] that can be grasped!
Against the stream of common thought.
Deep, subtle, difficult, delicate.
Unseen ’twill be by passion’s slaves
Cloaked in the murk of Ignorance.”[f53]
According to this report transmitted by the compilers of the Nikayas,
which is also confirmed by the other literature we have of the
Buddha’s Enlightenment, what flashed through his mind must have been
an experience most unusual and not taking place in our everyday
consciousness, even in the consciousness of a wise, learned, and
thoughtful man. Thus, he naturally wished to pass away into Nirvana
without attempting to propagate the Dharma, but this idea was abandoned
when Great Brahma spoke to the Buddha in verse thus:
“As on a crag, on crest of mountain standing,
A man might watch the people far below,
E’en so do thou, O Widsom fair, ascending,
O Seer of all, the terraced heights of Truth,
Look down, from grief released, upon the nations
Sunken in grief, oppressed with birth and age.
Arise, thou Hero! Conqueror in the battle!
Thou freed from debt! Lord of the pilgrim band!
Walk the world o’er, and sublime and blessed Teacher!
Teach us the Truth; there are who’ll understand.”
There is no doubt that it was this spiritual experience that converted
the Bodhisattva into the Buddha, the Perfectly Wise, the Bhagavat, the
Arhat, the King of the Dharma, the Tathagata, the All-knowing One, and
the Conqueror. In this, all the records we have, Hinayana and Mahayana,
agree.
Here then arises the most significant question in the history of
Buddhism. What was it in this experience that made the Buddha conquer
Ignorance (_avijjā_, _avidyā_) and freed him from the Defilements
(_āsava_, _āśrava_)? What was the insight or vision he had into things,
which had never before been presented to his mind? Was it his doctrine
of universal suffering due to Thirst (_taṇhā_, _tṛishṇā_) and Grasping
(_upādāna_)? Was it his causation theory by which he traced the source
of pain and suffering to Ignorance?
It is quite evident that his intellectual activity was not the
efficient cause of Enlightenment. “Not to be grasped by mere logic”
(_atakkāvacara_) is the phrase we constantly encounter in Buddhist
literature, Pali and Sanskrit. The satisfaction the Buddha experienced
in this case was altogether too deep, too penetrating, and too
far-reaching in result to be a matter of mere logic. The intellectual
solution of a problem is satisfying enough as far as the blockage has
been removed, but it is not sufficiently fundamental to enter into the
depths of our soul-life. All scholars are not saints and all saints are
by no means scholarly. The Buddha’s intellectual survey of the Law of
Origination (_paṭicca-samuppāda_), however perfect and thoroughgoing,
could not make him so completely sure of his conquest over Ignorance,
Pain, Birth, and Defilements. Tracing things to their origin or
subjecting them to a scheme of concatenation is one thing, but to
subdue them, to bring them to subjection in the actuality of life, is
quite another thing. In the one, the intellect alone is active, but
in the other there is the operation of the will,—and the will is the
man. The Buddha was not the mere discoverer of the Twelvefold Chain of
Causation, he took hold of the chain itself in his hands and broke it
into pieces so that it would never again bind him to slavery.
His insight reached the bottom of his being and saw it really as it
was, and the seeing was like the seeing of your own hand with your
own eyes—there was no reflection, no inference, no judgment, no
comparison, no moving either backward or forward step by step, the
thing was seen and that was the end of it, there was nothing to talk
about, nothing to argue, or to explain. The seeing was something
complete in itself—it did not lead on to anything inside or outside,
within or beyond. And it was this completeness, this finality that was
so entirely satisfying to the Buddha, who now knew that the chain was
found broken and that he was a liberated man. The Buddha’s experience
of Enlightenment therefore could not be understood by referring it to
the intellect which tantalises but fails to fulfill and satisfy.
The Buddha’s psychological experience of life as pain and suffering
was intensely real and moved him to the very depths of his being, and
in consequence the emotional reaction he experienced at the time of
Enlightenment was in proportion to this intensity of feeling. All the
more evident therefore it is that he could not rest satisfied with
an intellectual glancing or surveying of the facts of life. In order
to bring a perfect state of tranquillity over the waves of turmoil
surging in his heart, he had to have recourse to something more deeply
and vitally concerned with his inmost being. For all we can say of it,
the intellect is after all a spectator, and when it does some work it
is as a hireling for better or for worse. Alone it cannot bring about
the state of mind designated as enlightenment. The feeling of perfect
freedom, the feeling that “ahaṁ hi arahā loke, ahaṁ satthā anuttaro,”
could not issue from the consciousness of an intellectual superiority
alone. There must have been in the mind of the Buddha a consciousness
far more fundamental which could only accompany one’s deepest spiritual
experience.
* * * * *
To account for this spiritual experience the Buddhist writers exhaust
their knowledge of words relating to the understanding, logical or
otherwise. “Knowledge” (_vijjā_), “understanding” (_pajānanā_),
“reason” (_ñāṇa_), “wisdom” (_paññā_), “penetration” (_abhisameta_),
“realisation” (_abhisambuddha_), “perception” (_sañjānanaṁ_), and
“insight” (_dassana_),[f54] are some of the terms they use. In truth
as long as we confine ourselves to intellection, however deep,
subtle, sublime, and enlightening, we fail to see into the gist of the
matter. This is the reason why even the so-called primitive Buddhists
who are by some considered positivists, rationalists, and agnostics,
were obliged to assume some faculty dealing with things far above
relative knowledge, things that do not appeal to our empirical ego.
The Mahayana account of Enlightenment as is found in the
_Lalita-vistara_ (Chapter on “Abhisambodhana”) is more explicit as to
the kind of mental activity or wisdom which converted the Bodhisattva
into the Buddha. For it was through “_ekacittekshaṇa-samyukta-prajñā_”
that supreme perfect knowledge was realised (_abhisambodha_) by the
Buddha. What is this Prajñā? It is the understanding of a higher
order than that which is habitually exercised in acquiring relative
knowledge. It is a faculty both intellectual and spiritual, through
the operation of which the soul is enabled to break the fetters
of intellection. The latter is always dualistic inasmuch as it is
cognisant of subject and object, but in the Prajñā which is exercised
“in unison with one-thought-viewing” there is no separation between
knower and known, these are all viewed (_ikshaṇa_) in one thought
(_ekacitta_), and enlightenment is the outcome of this. By thus
specifying the operation of Prajñā, the Mahayanists have achieved an
advance in making clearer the nature of sambodhi: for when the mind
reverses its usual course of working and instead of dividing itself
externally, goes back to its original inner abode of oneness, it begins
to realise the state of “one-thought-viewing” where Ignorance ceases to
scheme and the Defilements do not obtain.
Enlightenment we can thus see is an absolute state of mind in which no
“discrimination” (_parikalpana_ or _vikalpa_), so called, takes place,
and it requires a great mental effort to realise this state of viewing
all things “in one thought.” In fact our logical as well as practical
consciousness is too given up to analysis and ideation; that is to say,
we cut up realities into elements in order to understand them; but when
they are put together to make the original whole, its elements stand
out too conspicuously defined, and we do not view the whole “in
one thought.” And as it is only when “one thought” is reached that we
have enlightenment, an effort is to be made to go beyond our relative
empirical consciousness, which attaches itself to the multitudinosity
and not to the unity of things. The most important fact that lies
behind the experience of Enlightenment therefore is that the Buddha
made the most strenuous attempt to solve the problem of Ignorance and
his utmost will-power was brought forth to bear upon a successful issue
of the struggle.
We read in the _Katha-Upanishad_: “As rain water that has fallen on
a mountain ridge runs down on all sides, thus does he who sees a
difference between qualities run after them on all sides. As pure water
poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the self
of a thinker who knows.” This pouring pure water into pure water is,
as we have it here, the “viewing all qualities in one thought” which
finally cuts off the hopelessly entangling logical mesh by merging all
differences and likenesses into the absolute oneness of the knower
(_jñānin_) and the known (_jñeya_). This, however, in our practical
dualistic life, is a reversion, a twisting, and a re-adjustment.
Eckhart, the great German mystic, is singularly one with the
“one-thought-viewing” of things as done by Buddhists when he expresses
his view thus: “Das Auge darin ich Gott sehe, ist dasselbe Auge, darin
Gott mich sieht. Mein Auge und Gottes Auge ist ein Auge und ein Gesicht
und ein Erkennen und eine Liebe.”[f55] The idea of reversion is more
clearly expressed in Jacob Boehme’s simile of the “umgewandtes Auge”
with which God is recognised.
Enlightenment therefore must involve the will as well as the intellect.
It is an act of intuition born of the will. The will wants to know
itself as it is in itself, _yathābhūtam dassana_, free from all its
cognitive conditions. The Buddha attained this end when a new insight
came upon him at the end of his ever-circulatory reasoning from decay
and death to Ignorance and from Ignorance to decay and death, through
the twelve links of the Paṭicca-samuppāda. The Buddha had to go over
the same ground again and again, because he was in an intellectual
_impasse_ through which he could not move further on. He did not repeat
the process, as is originally imagined, for his own philosophical
edification. The fact was that he did not know how to escape this
endless rotation of ideas; at this end there was birth, there was decay
and death, and at the other end there was Ignorance. The objective
facts could not be denied, they boldly and uncomfortably confronted
him, while Ignorance balked the progress of his cognitive faculty
moving farther onward or rather inward. He was hemmed in on both sides,
he did not know how to find his way out, he went first this way and
then that way, forever with the same result—the utter inutility of all
his mental labour. But he had an indomitable will; he wanted, with the
utmost efforts of his will, to get into the very truth of the matter;
he knocked and knocked until the doors of Ignorance gave way: and they
burst open to a new vista never before presented to his intellectual
vision. Thus he was able to exclaim to Upaka, the naked ascetic, whom
he happened to meet on his way to Benares after Enlightenment:
“All-conqueror I, knower of all.
From every soil and stain released,
Renouncing all, from craving ceased,
Self-taught; whom should I Master call?
That which I know I learned of none,
My fellow is not on the earth.
Of human or of heavenly birth
To equal me there is not one.
I truly have attained release,
The world’s unequalled teacher I,
Alone, enlightened perfectly,
I dwell in everlasting peace.”[f56]
When we speak of enlightenment or illumination we are apt to
think of its epistemological aspect and to forget the presence of
a tremendous will-power behind it—the power in fact making up the
entire being of an individual. Especially as in Buddhism the intellect
stands forth prominently, perhaps more than it ought to, in the
realisation of the ideal Buddhist life, scholars are tempted to ignore
the significance of the will as the essentially determinate factor in
the solution of the ultimate problem. Their attention has thus been
directed too much towards the doctrine of the Paṭicca-samuppāda or the
Ariya-sacca, which they considered constituted the final teaching of
Buddhism. But in this they have been sadly at fault, nor have they been
right in taking Buddhism for a sort of ethical culture, declaring that
it is no more than a system of moral precepts (_śīla_), without a soul,
without a God, and consequently without a promise of immortality. But
the true Buddhist ideas of Ignorance, Causation, and Moral Conduct had
a far deeper foundation in the soul-life of man. Ignorance was not a
cognitive ignorance, but meant the darkness of spiritual outlook. If
Ignorance were no more than cognitive, the clearing-up of it did not
and could not result in enlightenment, in freedom from the Fetters
and Defilements, or Intoxicants as some Pali scholars have them. The
Buddha’s insight penetrated the depths of his being as the will, and
he knew what this was, yathābhūtam, or in its tathābhāva (thatness or
suchness), he rose above himself as a Buddha supreme and peerless. The
expression, “Anuttara-samyak-sambodhi,” was thus used to designate this
pre-eminently spiritual knowledge realised by him.
Ignorance which is the antithesis of Enlightenment, therefore, acquires
a much deeper sense here than that which has hitherto been ascribed
to it. Ignorance is not merely not knowing or not being acquainted
with a theory, system or law; it is not directly grasping the ultimate
facts of life as expressive of the will. In Ignorance knowing is
separated from acting, and the knower from that which is to be known;
in Ignorance the world is asserted as distinct from the self, that is,
there are always two elements standing in opposition. This is, however,
the fundamental condition of cognition, which means that as soon
as cognition takes place there is Ignorance clinging to its every act.
When we think we know something, there is something we do not know.
The unknown is always behind the known, and we fail to get at this
unknown knower, who is indeed the inevitable and necessary companion to
every act of cognition. We want however to know this unknown knower,
we cannot let this go unknown, ungrasped without actually seeing what
it is, that is, Ignorance is to be enlightened. This involves a great
contradiction, at least epistemologically. But until we transcend this
condition, there is no peace of mind, life grows unbearable. In his
search for the “builder” (_gahākara_), the Buddha was always accosted
by Ignorance, an unknown knower behind knowing. He could not for a long
time lay his hands on this one in a black mask until he transcended
the dualism of knower and known. This transcending was not an act of
cognition, it was self-realisation, it was a spiritual awakening and
outside the ken of logical reasoning, and therefore not accompanied
by Ignorance. The knowledge the knower has of himself, in himself,
that is, as he is to himself, is unattainable by any proceedings of
the intellect which is not permitted to transcend its own conditions.
Ignorance is brought to subjection only by going beyond its own
principle. This is an act of the will. Ignorance in itself is no evil,
nor is it the source of evil, but when we are ignorant of Ignorance,
of what it means in our life, then there takes place an unending
concatenation of evils. Taṇhā (craving) regarded as the root of evil
can be overcome only when Ignorance is understood in its deeper and
proper signification.