As aid towards a better understanding of that personality of the
greatest significance for the mental life of mankind, there follow here
some remarks upon him and the age in which he lived.
Buddhism is the teaching of _the Buddha_, or as one may equally well
say--of _the Buddhas_. For “Buddha” is no private name, but the title
of one endowed with certain mental capacities. The word, therefore,
ought always to be accompanied by the article. It signifies, The
Awakened.
According to the teaching the number of the Buddhas is endless. He whom
we know by this name, for the time being the last of this beginningless
series, is the Buddha Gotama. His family name was _Siddhattha_. He came
of the ancient race of the Sakyas, well known for their pride, and as
such belonged to the warrior caste. He is, therefore, often alluded
to under the name of “Sakyaputta,” scion of the Sakyas, or as “Samaṇa
Gotama,” ascetic Gotama.
He was born in _Kapilavatthu_, the capital city of a small state
in Northern India, on the borders of present-day Nepal. His grave
was discovered in the year 1898 near Pipravā, in the jungle-covered
foothills of the Himalayas called the Terai.
The years of his birth and of his death cannot be exactly determined.
Meanwhile one does not go far wrong if one places the period of his
activity in the neighbourhood of the year 500 before the Christian era.
This would make him the elder contemporary of Heraklitus of Ephesus and
somewhat younger than Lao Tse in China.
He died at the advanced age of eighty years (if one does not choose to
regard the recurring statements in the texts as to age, on the part of
the most different personalities, as merely an indication of old age in
general), after almost fifty years of active life spent in travelling
about, preaching.
The precepts, discourses, and explanations--all that which makes up
the Buddhist canon--are gathered together into what is called the
_Tipitaka_, or _Three Baskets_. The language of the canon is Pāḷi.
Whether this was the Buddha’s own mother tongue or only related to it,
is a question upon which there exist differences of opinion between
native and European scholars.
The mental atmosphere in which the Buddha arose may be briefly
characterized as follows: A feeling of life as suffering, fermenting
throughout the entire Indian people; a firm belief in the
_transmigration of the soul_ and the endless prolongation of this
suffering conditioned thereby; the conviction that asceticism purifies,
after the effected purification from old guilt, heaps up merit, assures
re-birth in heaven, and finally procures deliverance from _Samsāra_,
this terrible, ceaseless wandering from existence to existence. Once
more, the fundamental theme in this Indian symphony of destiny,
recurring in unending variations, was this, _Life is Suffering_, or to
say the least of it, a somewhat doubtful blessing. But this statement
of life as suffering was not in ancient India the hollow phrase that
it is with us to-day; neither was it that cold play of thought found
in many philosophical systems. It was a grim reality which men sought
to escape with an energy of self-immolation, a determination, a
recklessness, an ardour of which we lukewarm creatures of to-day can
form no conception.
India in the days of the Buddha was full of companies of monks and
schools of ascetics, all of them wrestlers with the riddle of life. But
one only wrestles with life when one feels it as suffering.
The sons of noble families left their homes to search for truth either
out there in the frightful solitudes of the Indian forest, or in the
cloister of the monk. As in later days men went forth in search of El
Dorado, so in those days did men go forth upon the search for truth.
But what gives to the search for truth in ancient India a character
entirely its own is this, that all search here is turned towards the
_I_ itself; that the fight for truth did not as in ancient Greece
exhaust itself in elegant rhetorical disputations and exercises in
dialectic, but in full unmitigated rigour was lived out in one’s own
_I_, without a single thought as to whether the outward form would
support the heat of the friction within or not.
Amid this swarm of searchers for truth the young Siddhattha also made
his appearance. “Black-haired, in the bloom of manhood,” in spite of
weeping and wailing parents, in spite of a loved and loving wife, in
spite of a dear young son, he left his father’s halls where he had
led a life of rarest pomp and pleasure to enter shaven of head and
garbed in yellow, upon the inclement life-path of the penitent. It
was the force of thought that drove him forth. He gazed face to face
on the transiency of all that lives, and troubled, tormented by this
irresistible, unseizable flood of appearances, he turned his mental
eye inwards, resolved to find there in the depths of his own _I_ that
hold and stay which the outer world everywhere denied to him, the
weary. Truthfulness toward oneself, seriousness of search regardless of
consequences, an unfailing sense of reality, that was the foundation
upon which that most banal of all phrases, adapted as is no other to
coquetting with itself--the phrase, “All is transient,”--became for him
that unique teaching of which he himself could say with ample right,
“It is the teaching which is founded upon itself.”
In one of the Buddhist monk’s chants there occurs the phrase, “One
single thing--he thinks it out!” This, in few words, is what the
Buddha did. He thought out to an end, _one_ thought--the thought of
transiency. I will not call his teaching the grandest or the deepest
of all teachings. Grand, likewise, is Heraklitus’s teaching of the
All-becoming; deep, likewise, is the Vedanta teaching of the All-one
in Brahman; but the teaching of the Buddha is more than this--_it is
actual_. Through this it obtains that really compelling character
such as is possessed by actuality alone. For there is only one
thing that is compelling--truth; and there is only one thing that is
true--actuality.
Through this its truthfulness, his teaching has conquered half a world;
not by fire and sword but even as truth conquers, by demonstration, by
teaching. And so it now stands, old by two thousand years, before the
portals of western culture, and claims entrance not into the cloudy
domain of a vague mysticism or a crude pantheism, but into the realm
of clear, clean thinking, as fulfilment of that which never can be
attained by the means at the disposal of science. Comprehension, a
world-conception, this goal of all mental life, made impossible by
science in its false apprehension of the task--this the Buddha resolves
in the limitation that reveals the genius.
Whoso, if only from afar, has scented the import of the Buddha and
his teaching, must feel that here he has to do with something wholly
unique. One can place on one side not only all the religions of the
world but also all the philosophical and scientific systems, and
upon the other Buddhism will take its place alone. Yet not as their
antithesis. Buddhism is the teaching of actuality, and actuality has
no antitheses, because itself the union of antitheses. The Buddha laid
hold of actuality there where alone it can be laid hold of--in one’s
own _I_. Here he found the secret law, the sacred riddle that the
chorus outside there mockingly sings us, like to some oracle of Delphi
at one and the same time revealing and concealing.
All religions founded upon revelation are of a decidedly revolutionary
nature. Buddhism is a pure evolution, a process of mental development
in which thought, so to speak, passes a culminating point and works on
with reversed signs. This reversal of all life-values has set in with
a new point of view, from which the _struggle for no more existence_,
so unintelligible for us, follows as a logical necessity. Henceforth
truth is no more the servitor of life, but life of truth. As a candle
manifests itself through itself, by consuming itself in burning, so
does the _I_ manifest itself through itself in expending itself in
thinking. In this teaching he is not great who loves most, but he who
thinks most.
The full scope of this can only be understood later; for the moment it
may serve the reader as preparation for what is to follow. Let him know
then, at the very outset, that here he enters the realm of a man who
seeks not life but truth--a man for whom life has no value in itself
but only as an instrument of truth. Him I call a sorry seeker for truth
who in his investigation of the riddle of life, sets life itself as
sacrosanct in a place of security, making that which is to be measured
into the measure itself.
To unite in passion, to contrive clever arrangements that insure the
success of the business of propagation and the rearing of the young
generation, these the animals also can do; their arrangements for
living together in herds are by far more ingenious than those of men;
but the capacity to doubt, to question, to seek--of these even the most
highly developed animals possess only faint suggestions.
To doubt is the duty of man, and the Buddha is the representative
type of humanity, because _the_ doubter. We common men, we do indeed
doubt of this and of that, and pique ourselves in no small measure
upon our powers of judgment; but we none of us get any further than
the symptoms. He alone seized at one grasp the entire, ever-changing
host of doubts and questions by the root, with the daring of genius
demanding to know the right to exist of life itself. This the reader
ought well to bear in mind, otherwise for him the Buddha-thought
must always retain something strange and forbidding, even as for the
honest townsman we all know, a man who dares go up to High Authority
Itself--whether established in heaven or on earth--and ask for its
identification papers, ever remains in some sort a fear-inspiring
figure.
I now pass on to a point more external, but one, none the less, that
has its own importance in an introduction to the thought-world of the
Buddha.
Buddhism is not only the oldest of the three world-religions, but also
the only one of the three that is of Aryan origin.
The significance of this fact lies for me not in the racial question,
but in the matter of language. The tongue in which the Buddha preached,
taught, and thought, whether it was the Pāḷi itself or some dialect
related to it, belongs to the Indo-Germanic stem. The root-words,
the grammatical constructions, are akin to those found in European
languages. Without any more said, we see how deep is the tie that binds
us to the Buddha. Mental life can mix and blend with mental life only
through the medium of language. If no congruity exists between one
language and another, neither can there be any congruity of thought. We
know what enormous difficulties block the way of any European scholar
who would force an entrance into the thought-world of the Chinese. So
much so, that even at this late day it is still possible to argue the
point as to whether the Chinese have any conception of deity at all.
To this day it remains open to every translator to interpret Lao Tse,
for example, either as a “god-inspired man”--to quote a good Christian
translator--or as a free-lance in the fields of thought.
Something similar, if in somewhat less positive terms, may be advanced
concerning the Semitic stem. Who can say whether the Indo-German has
ever rightly understood Semitism as the deserts of Judea and Arabia
have hatched it out. The absurdities and confusions of thought in which
Indo-German peoples find themselves entangled the moment they make the
attempt to understand and think it out leave it fairly open to doubt.
It may be, that pure Semitism, that is to say, that flat contradiction
to sound sense, a personal god, can only be perfectly digested with the
help of the Semitic root language. The thinking of the Indo-Germanic
peoples, or rather of the Indo-Germanic root language, has set itself
against this bald crudity from the very beginning. At the idea of
predestination, over which the Semite Paul balances his way with
considerable natural agility, the half-Aryan Augustine only comes to
grief. For the brutality with which the latter champions this dogma is
nothing else but the expression of the brutality with which he forcibly
squeezed his own mind beneath its yoke. For us the Aryan speaking and
thinking, a religion that in its natural logical consequences conducts
to such an anomaly as predestination, is either at bottom a moral
monstrosity, and so incapable of becoming religion, or else it is a
thing misunderstood.
On the other hand, I should refer the intellectual derailment which the
Buddha-thought has undergone in Tibet, China, and Japan, in no small
measure to the lack of congruity that exists between the Indo-German
and the Mongolian languages. The tongue of the Mongol is simply
incapable of rendering exactly the content of the Pāḷi syllables.
_Buddhism is the teaching of actuality_, and its language also--the
Pāḷi--as regards content of actuality, takes a leading place among
languages.
As upon one hand one may look upon the phenomena of life as processes,
actualities, things alive, and upon the other as things rounded off in
themselves, rigid, strictly defined, realities, according as, following
mental disposition, here the one there the other mode of comprehension
predominates, so in one language does the thrust of the actual
predominate, and in the other the thrust of the real, the objective. In
the one the _dynamic_ predominates, in the other the _static_.
A language of an eminently static character is the Latin; whence the
impossibility of finding another equally good to take its place in a
well-ordered _corpus juris_, with which latter capacity for definition
counts above everything. What jurisprudence requires is the complete,
the bounded (objectively as well as conceptually) realities. It lops
away everything actual, which at all times and places is a _processive
motion_, a species of _status nascens_, until comprehended it can be
grasped, pretty much as out of the actual surface of the earth in a
state of constant transformation the land-surveyor cuts out a piece,
settles it as something real and seizable, so that as such its owner
at will can exchange it, till the time when the millenium hand on the
horologe of the world indicates an advance and renders necessary a new
settlement, a new definition. This method is quite sufficient where
it is only a question of arriving at definite ends. It corresponds to
that which in another place was styled the _re-actual_ comprehension
of things, and the Latin word _res_, considered etymologically, points
directly to this “re-actual” feature.
In complete opposition to Latin the Pāḷi is a language of an eminently
actual character. The seeming offences against logic, that with more
or less good nature have been laid to the charge of the Buddha by
western scholars, have their rise in this content of actuality that
distinguishes the language on one hand and its thinking on the other.
In actuality there is nothing defined or definable to be found--nothing
but a relentless processive movement. Every definition is a compromise
with actuality, and is always to be held, as such, by every genuine
thinker.
It is owing to this content of actuality in Buddhism and its language
that so many expressions are found in it for which a fitting
translation is scarcely or not at all to be found. In language, also,
a gradual stiffening process is taking place amongst us which renders
us ever more capable in definition, and ever more incapable in the
comprehension of actuality. Here quite evidently we are caught in a
vicious circle. We are proud of this our ability in defining, and
imagine we have comprehended the thing itself when we have succeeded in
decorating it with a definition. In such cases, however, all we have
really done is to fling bridges of thought, as it were, high up over
things, which permit us to hop from one conceptual “place” to another
without once wetting even our toes in actuality. On the Rhine near Bonn
there stands hewn in stone these words: “Caesar primus flumini pontem
imposuit.” There are not a few minds associated with the lecture-room
and laboratory who take themselves for Cæsars when they “impose” new
definitions upon things, upon actuality. The riddles of life in this
wise are neatly and perfectly resolved in definitions; which, after
all, is nothing very much to wonder at with riddles of life that for
the most part only exist in the form of definitions.
All things in the world are so constituted that with them concept and
object are separable: the concept admits of being “manipulated” apart
from the object. And all mental life in a certain sense just amounts
to the attempt to get concept and object to coincide--an attempt that
eternally fails, because eternally losing itself in unending series.
One thing only in all the world is so constituted that in regard to
it no separation of concept and object is found--I myself! For that
which I conceive myself as, that even I myself am; and every attempt to
form a concept is just a form of myself. Here the concept of myself is
experience, actuality itself. I myself am the unique, to me accessible,
pure actuality of the world. _Buddhism is the teaching of actuality._
It starts out with the only pure actuality of the world, and from
this point proceeds to suck the entire play of world-events without
exception into the whirlpool of its thinking. And with this we find
ourselves in the presence of the Buddha-thought itself.
V