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Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) by Charles Eliot

C >> Charles Eliot >> Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3)




But Buddhist writers more commonly illustrate rebirth by fire than by
water and this simile is used with others in the Questions of Milinda.
We cannot assume that this book reflects the views of the Buddha or his
immediate followers, but it is the work of an Indian in touch with good
tradition who lived a few centuries later and expressed his opinions
with lucidity. It denies the existence of transmigration and of the soul
and then proceeds to illustrate by metaphors and analogies how two
successive lives can be the same and yet not the same. For instance,
suppose a man carelessly allows his lamp to set his thatch on fire with
the result that a whole village is burnt down. He is held responsible
for the loss but when brought before the judge argues that the flame of
his lamp was not the same as the flame that burnt down the village. Will
such a plea be allowed? Certainly not. Or to take another metaphor.
Suppose a man were to choose a young girl in marriage and after making a
contract with her parents were to go away, waiting for her to grow up.
Meanwhile another man comes and marries her. If the two men appeal to
the King and the later suitor says to the earlier, The little child whom
you chose and paid for is one and the full grown girl whom I paid for
and married is another, no one would listen to his argument, for clearly
the young woman has grown out of the girl and in ordinary language they
are the same person. Or again suppose that one man left a jar of milk
with another and the milk turned to curds. Would it be reasonable for
the first man to accuse the second of theft because the milk has
disappeared?

The caterpillar and butterfly might supply another illustration. It is
unfortunate that the higher intelligences offer no example of such
metamorphosis in which consciousness is apparently interrupted between
the two stages. Would an intelligent caterpillar take an interest in his
future welfare as a butterfly and stigmatize as vices indulgences
pleasant to his caterpillar senses and harmful only to the coming
butterfly, between whom and the caterpillar there is perhaps no
continuity of consciousness? We can imagine how strongly butterflies
would insist that the foundation of morality is that caterpillars should
realize that the butterflies' interests and their own are the same.


3

When the Buddha contemplated the samsara, the world of change and
transmigration in which there is nothing permanent, nothing satisfying,
nothing that can be called a self, he formulated his chief conclusions,
theoretical and practical, in four propositions known as the four
noble[435] truths, concerning suffering, the cause of suffering, the
extinction of suffering, and the path to the extinction of
suffering[436]. These truths are always represented as the essential and
indispensable part of Buddhism. Without them, says the Buddha more than
once, there can be no emancipation, and agreeably to this we find them
represented as having formed part of the teaching of previous
Buddhas[437] and consequently as being rediscovered rather than invented
by Gotama. He even compares himself to one who has found in the jungle
the site of an ancient city and caused it to be restored. It would
therefore not be surprising if they were found in pre-Buddhist writings,
and it has been pointed out that they are practically identical with the
four divisions of the Hindu science of medicine: roga, disease;
rogahetu, the cause of disease; arogya, absence of disease; bhaisajya,
medicine. A similar parallel between the language of medicine and moral
science can be found in the Yoga philosophy, and if the fourfold
division of medicine can be shown to be anterior to Buddhism[438], it
may well have suggested the mould in which the four truths were cast.
The comparison of life and passion to disease is frequent in Buddhist
writings and the Buddha is sometimes hailed as the King of Physicians.
It is a just compendium of his doctrine--so far as an illustration can be
a compendium--to say that human life is like a diseased body which
requires to be cured by a proper regimen. But the Buddha's claim to
originality is not thereby affected, for it rests upon just this, that
he was able to regard life and religion in this spirit and to put aside
the systems of ritual, speculation and self-mortification which were
being preached all round him.

The first truth is that existence involves suffering. It receives
emotional expression in a discourse in the Samyutta-Nikaya[439]. "The
world of transmigration, my disciples, has its beginning in eternity. No
origin can be perceived, from which beings start, and hampered by
ignorance, fettered by craving, stray and wander. Which think you are
more--the tears which you have shed as you strayed and wandered on this
long journey, grieving and weeping because you were bound to what you
hated and separated from what you loved--which are more, these tears, or
the waters in the four oceans? A mother's death, a son's death, a
daughter's death, loss of kinsmen, loss of property, sickness, all these
have you endured through long ages--and while you felt these losses and
strayed and wandered on this long journey, grieving and weeping because
you were bound to what you hated and separated from what you loved, the
tears that you shed are more than the water in the four oceans."

It is remarkable that such statements aroused no contradiction. The
Buddha was not an isolated and discontented philosopher, like
Schopenhauer in his hotel, but the leader of an exceptionally successful
religious movement in touch and sympathy with popular ideas. On many
points his assertions called forth discussion and contradiction but when
he said that all existence involves suffering no one disputed the
dictum: no one talked of the pleasures of life or used those arguments
which come so copiously to the healthy-minded modern essayist when he
devotes a page or two to disproving pessimism[440]. On this point the
views and temperament of the Buddha were clearly those of educated
India. The existence of this conviction and temperament in a large body
of intellectual men is as important as the belief in the value of life
and the love of activity for its own sake which is common among
Europeans. Both tempers must be taken into account by every theory which
is not merely personal but endeavours to ascertain what the human race
think and feel about existence.

The sombre and meditative cast of Indian thought is not due to physical
degeneration or a depressing climate. Many authors speak as if the
Hindus lived in a damp relaxing heat in which physical and moral stamina
alike decay. I myself think that as to climate India is preferable to
Europe, and without arguing about what must be largely a question of
personal taste, one may point to the long record of physical and
intellectual labour performed even by Europeans in India. Neither can it
be maintained that in practice Buddhism destroys the joy and vigour of
life. The Burmese are among the most cheerful people in the world and
the Japanese among the most vigorous, and the latter are at least as
much Buddhists as Europeans are Christians. It might be plausibly
maintained that Europeans' love of activity is mainly due to the
intolerable climate and uncomfortable institutions of their continent,
which involve a continual struggle with the weather and continual
discussion forbidding any calm and comprehensive view of things. The
Indian being less troubled by these evils is able to judge what is the
value of life in itself, as an experience for the individual, not as
part of a universal struggle, which is the common view of seriously
minded Europeans, though as to this struggle they have but hazy ideas of
the antagonists, the cause and the result.

The Buddhist doctrine does not mean that life is something trifling and
unimportant, to be lived anyhow. On the contrary, birth as a human being
is an opportunity of inestimable value. He who is so born has at least a
chance of hearing the truth and acquiring merit. "Hard is it to be born
as a man, hard to come to hear the true law" and when the chance comes,
the good fortune of the being who has attained to human form and the
critical issues which depend on his using it rightly are dwelt on with
an earnestness not surpassed in Christian homiletics. He who acts ill as
a man may fall back into the dreary cycles of inferior births, among
beasts and blind aimless beings who cannot understand the truth, even if
they hear it. From this point of view human life is happiness, only like
every form of existence it is not satisfying or permanent.

Dukkha is commonly rendered in English by pain or suffering, but an
adequate literary equivalent which can be used consistently in
translating is not forthcoming. The opposite state, sukha, is fairly
rendered by well-being, satisfaction and happiness. Dukkha is the
contrary of this: uneasiness, discomfort, difficulty. Pain or suffering
are too strong as renderings, but no better are to hand. When the Buddha
enlarges on the evils of the world it will be found that the point most
emphasized as vitiating life is its transitoriness.

"Is that which is impermanent sorrow or joy?" he asks of his disciples.
"Sorrow, Lord," is the answer, and this oft-repeated proposition is
always accepted as self-evident. The evils most frequently mentioned are
the great incurable weaknesses of humanity, old age, sickness and death,
and also the weariness of being tied to what we hate, the sadness of
parting from what we love. Another obvious evil is that we cannot get
what we want or achieve our ambitions. Thus the temper which prompts the
Buddha's utterances is not that of Ecclesiastes--the melancholy of
satiety which, having enjoyed all, finds that all is vanity--but rather
the regretful verdict of one who while sympathizing with the nobler
passions--love, ambition, the quest of knowledge--is forced to pronounce
them unsatisfactory. The human mind craves after something which is
permanent, something of which it can say This is mine. It longs to be
something or to produce something which is not transitory and which has
an absolute value in and for itself. But neither in this world nor in
any other world are such states and actions possible. Only in Nirvana do
we find a state which rises above the transitory because it rises above
desire. Not merely human life but all possible existences in all
imaginable heavens must be unsatisfactory, for such existences are
merely human life under favourable conditions. Some great evils, such as
sickness, may be absent but life in heaven must come to an end: it is
not eternal, it is not even permanent, it does not, any more than this
life, contain anything that god or man can call his own. And it may be
observed that when Christian writers attempt to describe the joys of a
heaven which is eternally satisfying, they have mostly to fall back on
negative phrases such as "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard."

The European view of life differs from the Asiatic chiefly in
attributing a value to actions in themselves, and in not being disturbed
by the fact that their results are impermanent. It is, in fact, the
theoretical side of the will to live, which can find expression in a
treatise on metaphysics as well as in an act of procreation. An
Englishman according to his capacity and mental culture is satisfied
with some such rule of existence as having a good time, or playing the
game, or doing his duty, or working for some cause. The majority of
intelligent men are prepared to devote their lives to the service of the
British Empire: the fact that it must pass away as certainly as the
Empire of Babylon and that they are labouring for what is impermanent
does not disturb them and is hardly ever present to their minds. Those
Europeans who share with Asiatics some feeling of dissatisfaction with
the impermanent try to escape it by an unselfish morality and by holding
that life, which is unsatisfactory if regarded as a pursuit of
happiness, acquires a new and real value if lived for others. And from
this point of view the European moralist is apt to criticize the
Buddhist truths of suffering and the release from suffering as selfish.
But Buddhism is as full as or fuller than Christianity of love,
self-sacrifice and thought for others. It says that it is a fine thing
to be a man and have the power of helping others: that the best life is
that which is entirely unselfish and a continual sacrifice. But looking
at existence as a whole, and accepting the theory that the happiest and
best life is a life of self-sacrifice, it declines to consider as
satisfactory the world in which this principle holds good. Many of the
best Europeans would probably say that their ideal is not continual
personal enjoyment but activity which makes the world better. But this
ideal implies a background of evil just as much as does the Buddha's
teaching. If evil vanished, the ideal would vanish too.

There is one important negative aspect of the truth of suffering and
indeed of all the four truths. A view of human life which is common in
Christian and Mohammedan countries represents man as put in the world by
God, and human life as a service to be rendered to God. Whether it is
pleasant, worth living or not are hardly questions for God's servants.
There is no trace of such a view in the Buddha's teaching. It is
throughout assumed that man in judging human life by human standards is
not presumptuous or blind to higher issues. Life involves unhappiness:
that is a fact, a cardinal truth. That this unhappiness may be ordered
for disciplinary or other mysterious motives by what is vaguely called
One above, that it would disappear or be explained if we could
contemplate our world as forming part of a larger universe, that "there
is some far off divine event," some unexpected solution in the fifth act
of this complicated tragedy, which could justify the creator of this
_dukkhakkhandha_, this mass of unhappiness--for all such ideas the
doctrine of the Blessed One has nothing but silence, the courteous and
charitable silence which will not speak contemptuously. The world of
transmigration has neither beginning nor end nor meaning: to those who
wish to escape from it the Buddha can show the way: of obligation to
stop in it there can be no question[441].

Buddhism is often described as pessimistic, but is the epithet just?
What does it mean? The dictionary defines pessimism as the doctrine
which teaches that the world is as bad as it can be and that everything
naturally tends towards evil. That is emphatically not Buddhist
teaching. The higher forms of religion have their basis and origin in
the existence of evil, but their justification and value depend on their
power to remove it. A religion, therefore, can never be pessimistic,
just as a doctor who should simply pronounce diseases to be incurable
would never be successful as a practitioner. The Buddha states with the
utmost frankness that religion is dependent on the existence of evil.
"If three things did not exist, the Buddha would not appear in the world
and his law and doctrine would not shine. What are the three? Birth, old
age and death." This is true. If there were people leading perfectly
happy, untroubled lives, it is not likely that any thought of religion
would enter their minds, and their irreligious attitude would be
reasonable, for the most that any deity is asked to give is perfect
happiness, and that these imaginary folk are supposed to have already.
But according to Buddhism no form of existence can be perfectly happy or
permanent. Gods and angels may be happier than men but they are not free
from the tyranny of desire and ultimately they must fall from their high
estate and pass away.


4

The second Truth declares the origin of suffering. "It is," says the
Buddha, "the thirst which causes rebirth, which is accompanied by
pleasure and lust and takes delight now here, now there; namely, the
thirst for pleasure, the thirst for another life, the thirst for
success." This Thirst (Tanha) is the craving for life in the widest
sense: the craving for pleasure which propagates life, the craving for
existence in the dying man which brings about another birth, the craving
for wealth, for power, for pre-eminence within the limits of the present
life. What is the nature of this craving and of its action? Before
attempting to answer we must consider what is known as the chain of
causation[442], one of the oldest, most celebrated, and most obscure
formulae of Buddhism. It is stated that the Buddha knew it before
attaining enlightenment[443], but it is second in importance only to the
four truths, and in the opening sections of the Mahavagga, he is
represented as meditating on it under the Bo-tree, both in its positive
and negative form. It runs as follows: "From ignorance come the
sankharas, from the sankharas comes consciousness, from consciousness
come name-and-form, from name-and-form come the six provinces (of the
senses), from the six provinces comes contact, from contact comes
sensation, from sensation comes craving, from craving comes clinging,
from clinging comes existence, from existence comes birth, from birth
come old age and death, pain and lamentation, suffering, sorrow, and
despair. This is the origin of this whole mass of suffering. But by the
destruction of ignorance, effected by the complete absence of lust, the
sankharas are destroyed, by the destruction of the sankharas,
consciousness is destroyed" and so on through the whole chain backwards.

The chain is also known as the twelve Nidanas or causes. It is clearly
in its positive and negative forms an amplification of the second and
third truths respectively, or perhaps they are a luminous compendium of
it.

Besides the full form quoted above there are shorter versions. Sometimes
there are only nine links[444] or there are five links combined in an
endless chain[445]. So we must not attach too much importance to the
number or order of links. The chain is not a genealogy but a statement
respecting the interdependence of certain stages and aspects of human
nature. And though the importance of cause (hetu) is often emphasized,
the causal relation is understood in a wider sense than is usual in our
idiom. If there were no birth, there would be no death, but though birth
and death are interdependent we should hardly say that birth is the
cause of death.

In whatever way we take the Chain of Causation, it seems to bring a
being into existence twice, and this is the view of Buddhaghosa who says
that the first two links (ignorance and the sankharas) belong to past
time and explain the present existence: the next eight (consciousness to
existence) analyse the present existence: and the last two (birth and
old age) belong to future time, representing the results in another
existence of desire felt in this existence. And that is perhaps what the
constructor of the formula meant. It is clearest if taken backwards.
Suppose, the Buddha once said to Ananda[446], there were no birth, would
there then be any old age or death? Clearly not. That is the meaning of
saying that old age and death depend on birth: if birth were
annihilated, they too would be annihilated. Similarly birth depends on
Bhava which means becoming and does not imply anything self-existent and
stationary: all the world is a continual process of coming into
existence and passing away. It is on the universality of this process
that birth (jati) depends. But on what does the endless becoming itself
depend? We seem here on the threshold of the deepest problems but the
answer, though of wide consequences, brings us back to the strictly
human and didactic sphere. Existence depends on Upadana. This word means
literally grasping or clinging to and should be so translated here but
it also means fuel and its use is coloured by this meaning, since
Buddhist metaphor is fond of describing life as a flame. Existence
cannot continue without the clinging to life, just as fire cannot
continue without fuel[447].

The clinging in its turn depends on Tanha, the thirst or craving for
existence. The distinction between tanha and upadana is not always
observed, and it is often said tanha is the cause of karma or of sorrow.
But, strictly speaking, upadana is the grasping at life or pleasure:
tanha is the incessant, unsatisfied craving which causes it. It is
compared to the birana, a weed which infests rice fields and sends its
roots deep into the ground. So long as the smallest piece of root is
left the weed springs up again and propagates itself with surprising
rapidity, though the cultivator thought he had exterminated it. This
metaphor is also used to illustrate how tanha leads to a new birth.
Death is like cutting down the plant: the root remains and sends up
another growth.

We now seem to have reached an ultimate principle and basis, namely, the
craving for life which transcends the limits of one existence and finds
expression in birth after birth. Many passages in the Pitakas justify
the idea that the force which constructs the universe of our experience
is an impersonal appetite, analogous to the Will of Schopenhauer. The
shorter formula quoted above in which it is said that the sankharas come
from tanha also admits of such an interpretation. But the longer chain
does not, or at least it considers tanha not as a cosmic force but
simply as a state of the human mind. Suffering can be traced back to the
fact that men have desire. To what is desire due? To sensation. With
this reply we leave the great mysteries at which the previous links
seemed to hint and begin one of those enquiries into the origin and
meaning of human sensation which are dear to early Buddhism. Just as
there could be no birth if there were no existence, so there could be no
desire if there were no sensation. What then is the cause of sensation?
Contact (phasso). This word plays a considerable part in Buddhist
psychology and is described as producing not only sensation but
perception and volition (cetana)[448]. Contact in its turn depends on
the senses (that is the five senses as we know them, and mind as a
sixth) and these depend on name-and-form. This expression, which occurs
in the Upanishads as well as in Buddhist writings, denotes mental and
corporeal life. In explaining it the commentators say that form means
the four elements and shape derived from them and that name means the
three skandhas of sensation, perception and the sankharas. This use of
the word nama probably goes back to ancient superstitions which regarded
a man's name as containing his true being but in Buddhist terminology it
is merely a technical expression for mental states collectively.
Buddhaghosa observes that name-and-form are like the playing of a lute
which does not come from any store of sound and when it ceases does not
go to form a store of sound elsewhere.

On what do name-and-form depend? On consciousness. This point is so
important that in teaching Ananda the Buddha adds further explanations.
"Suppose," he says, "consciousness were not to descend into the womb,
would name-and-form consolidate in the womb? No, Lord. Therefore,
Ananda, consciousness is the cause, the occasion, the origin of
name-and-form." But consciousness according to the Buddha's
teaching[449] is not a unity, a thinking soul, but mental activity
produced by various appropriate causes. Hence it cannot be regarded as
independent of name-and-form and as their generator. So the Buddha goes
on to say that though name-and-form depend on consciousness it is
equally true that consciousness depends on name-and-form. The two
together make human life: everything that is born, and dies or is reborn
in another existence[450], is name-and-form plus consciousness.

What we have learnt hitherto is that suffering depends on desire and
desire on the senses. For didactic purposes this is much, but as
philosophy the result is small: we have merely discovered that the world
depends on name-and-form plus consciousness, that is on human beings.
The first two links of the chain (the last in our examination) do not
leave the previous point of view--the history of individual life and not
an account of the world process--but they have at least that interest
which attaches to the mysterious.

"Consciousness depends on the sankharas." Here the sankharas seem to
mean the predispositions anterior to consciousness which accompany birth
and hence are equivalent to one meaning of Karma, that is the good and
bad qualities and tendencies which appear when rebirth takes place.
Perhaps the best commentary on the statement that consciousness depends
on the sankharas is furnished by a Sutta called Rebirth according to the
sankharas[451]. The Buddha there says that if a monk possessed of the
necessary good qualities cherishes a wish to be born after death as a
noble, or in one of the many heavens, "then those predispositions
(sankhara) and mental conditions (viharo) if repeated[452] conduce to
rebirth" in the place he desires. Similarly when Citta is dying, the
spirits of the wood come round his death-bed and bid him wish to be an
Emperor in his next life. Thus a personality with certain
predispositions and aptitudes may be due to the thought and wishes of a
previous personality[453], and these predispositions, asserts the last
article of the formula, depend upon ignorance. We might be tempted to
identify this ignorance with some cosmic creative force such as the
Unconscious of Hartmann or the Maya of Sankara. But though the idea that
the world of phenomena is a delusion bred of ignorance is common in
India, it does not enter into the formula which we are considering. Two
explanations of the first link are given in the Pitakas, which are
practically the same. One[454] states categorically that the ignorance
which produces the sankharas is not to know the four Truths.
Elsewhere[455] the Buddha himself when asked what ignorance means
replies that it is not to know that everything must have an origin and a
cessation. The formula means that it is ignorance of the true nature of
the world and the true interests of mankind that brings about the
suffering which we see and feel. We were born into the world because of
our ignorance in our last birth and of the desire for re-existence which
was in us when we died.

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A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King's The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.

Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, is a frustrated writer who goes with his wife and son to spend the winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel in an attempt to get the novel he has always wanted to write started. But the hotel's grisly past and unquiet ghosts have their way with him, and his wife Wendy eventually finds that the manuscript he has been working on actually only contains the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", typed over and over again.

Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as "a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King", has self-published a book credited to Torrance, repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.

"The idea has probably been marinating for years, because I loved the movie and the Stephen King book," said Buehler. "I'd just finished my own obsessive art project [and] it was an idea I had over the Christmas holidays."

He said he decided to stick to type and formatting that could have been created on a typewriter, with the first ten pages duplicating shots of Torrance's work from the film. "I thought 'if he continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?'" he said. "I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on for about a week." His fiancée, who had neither read the book nor seen the film, became a little concerned about his actions. "I finally showed her the movie, and she realised I wasn't really losing it," said Buehler.

He's included a spoof review from the blog OverThinkingIt.com on the book's back jacket, which compares it to "the best of Beckett" in its "lack of forward momentum", and considers the struggles of the author, "heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence". "It's that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power," the review says. "Some will dismiss it as simplistic; that's like dismissing a Pollack canvas as mere splatters of paint."

So far, Buehler says that around 1,000 people have viewed the book, for sale on Blurb.com for $8.95 in paperback, or $22.95 in hardback, and he's sold "a few" copies, with sales now starting to pick up steam. "A few people have asked me to sign it - they're looking it as a piece of art rather than a funny thing to give to a Kubrick fan," he said. "If you're not a Kubrick or King fan, you might not even get it."

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