Buddhist Thought in India

Three Phases of Buddhist Philosophy

Edward Conze

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134542383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Originally published in 1962.

This book discusses and interprets the main themes of Buddhist thought in India and is divided into three parts:

• Archaic Buddhism: Tacit assumptions, the problem of "original Buddhism", the three marks and the perverted views, the five cardinal virtues, the cultivation of the social emotions, Dharma and dharmas, Skandhas, sense-fields and elements.

• The Sthaviras: the eighteen schools, doctrinal disputes, the unconditioned and the process of salvation, some Abhidharma problems.

• The Mahayana: doctrines common to all Mahayanists, the Madhyamikas, the Yogacarins, Buddhist logic, the Tantras.

PART I

ARCHAIC BUDDHISM

CHAPTER 1

TACIT ASSUMPTIONS

Many of the metaphysical theories of Buddhism must appear remote, inaccessible and elusive to the average reader who is unprepared for them. This is because they presuppose a close and long-standing familiarity with the laws of the spiritual universe and with the rhythms of a spiritual life, not to mention a rare capacity for prolonged disinterested contemplation. In addition, Buddhist thinkers make a number of tacit assumptions which are explicitly rejected by modern European philosophers. The first, common to nearly all Indian,⁹ as distinct from European, ‘scientific’, thought treats the experiences of Yoga as the chief raw material for philosophical reflection. Secondly, all ‘perennial’ (as against ‘modern’) philosophers, agree on the hierarchical structure of the universe, as shown in (a) the distinction of a ‘triple world’ and (b) of degrees of ‘reality’, and (c) in the establishment of a hierarchy of insights dependent on spiritual maturity. Thirdly, all religious (as against a-religious) philosophies (a) use ‘numinous’ as distinct from ‘profane’ terms, and (b) treat revelation as the ultimate source of all valid knowledge. This gives us no fewer than six tacit assumptions which are unlikely to be shared by the majority of my readers. Since they define the range and context within which Buddhist thinking is relatively valid and significant, I must say a few words about each of them one by one.

1. The mutual incomprehension of Eastern and Western philosophy has often been deplored. If there is even no contact between ‘empiricist’ European philosophy on the one side, and that of the Vedānta and Mahāyāna on the other, it may be because they presuppose two different systems of practice as their unquestioned foundations—science the one, and yogic meditation the other. From the outset all philosophers must take for granted some set of practices, with specific rules and aims of their own, which they regard both as efficacious and as avenues to worthwhile reality.

It is, of course, essential to grasp clearly the difference between sets of practices, or ‘bags of tricks’ which regularly produce certain results, and the theoretical superstructures which try to justify, explain and systematize them. The techniques concern what happens when this or that is done. The theories deal with the reasons why that should be so, and the meaning of what happens. However gullible and credulous human beings may be about speculative tenets, about practical issues they are fairly hard-headed, and unlikely to persuade themselves over any length of time that some technique ‘works’ when it does not.

Yogic meditation, to begin with, demands that certain things should be done. There are the well-known breathing exercises, which must be performed in certain definite bodily postures. Certain foods and drugs must be avoided. One must renounce nearly all private possessions, and shun the company of others. After a prolonged period of physical drill has made the body ready for the tasks ahead, and after some degree of contentment with the conditions of a solitary, beggarly and homeless life has been achieved, the mind is at last capable of doing its proper yogic work. This consists in systematically withdrawing attention from the objects of the senses.¹ And what could be the aim and outcome of this act of sustained introversion—so strikingly dramatized by Bodhidharma sitting for nine years crosslegged and immobile in front of a grey wall? All the adepts of Yoga, whatever their theological or philosophical differences, agree that these practices result in a state of inward tranquillity (śamatha).

Many of our contemporaries, imprisoned in what they describe as ‘common sense’, quite gratuitously assume, as ‘self-evident’, that all the contents of mental life are derived from contact with external sense-data. They are therefore convinced that the radical withdrawal from those sense-data can but lead to some kind of vague vacuity almost indistinguishable from sleep or coma. More than common sense is needed to discover that it leads to a state which the Indian yogins, who under the influence of Sanskrit grammar were almost obsessed with a desire for terminological precision, called one of ‘tranquillity’, full of ease, bliss and happiness. Likewise a Bornean Dayak must find it difficult to believe that hard, black coal can be changed into bright light within an electric bulb. There is ultimately only one way open to those who do not believe the accounts of the yogins. They will have to repeat the experiment—in the forest, not the laboratory—they will have to do what the yogins say should be done, and see what happens. Until this is done, disbelief is quite idle, and on a level with a pygmy’s disbelief in Battersea power station, maintained by a stubborn refusal to leave the Congo basin, and to see for himself whether it exists and what it does. In other words, it seems to me quite unworthy of educated people to deny that there exists a series of technical practices, known as Yoga, which, if applied intelligently according to the rules, produces a state of tranquillity.²

So much about the technical substructure. The ideological superstructure, in its turn, consists of a number of theoretical systems, by no means always consonant with each other. Theologically they are Hindu, Buddhist or Jain. Some are atheistic, some polytheistic, others again henotheistic. Philosophically some, like Vaiśeṣika and Abhidharma, are pluralistic, others, like Vedānta and Mādhyamikas, monistic. These two monistic systems, again, seem to be diametrically opposed in their most fundamental tenets—the one claiming that the Self (ātman) is the only reality, the other that it is just the absence of a self (nairātmya) which distinguishes true reality from false appearance.

On closer study these disagreements do, however, turn out to be fairly superficial. All these ‘yogic’ philosophies differ less among themselves than they differ from the non-yogic ones. They not only agree that yogic practices are valid, but in addition postulate that these practices are the avenues to the most worthwhile knowledge of true reality, as well as a basis for the most praiseworthy conduct, and that, as the source of ultimate certainty, the yogic vision itself requires no justification. Only in a state of yogic receptivity are we fit and able to become the recipients of ultimate truth. Observations made in any other condition concern an illusory world, largely false and fabricated, which cannot provide a standard for judging the deliverances of the yogic consciousness.

A closely analogous situation prevails in Western Europe with regard to science. In this field also we can distinguish between the technology itself and its theoretical developments. The prestige of the scientific approach among our modern philosophers seems to me entirely due to its applications. If a philosopher assures us that all the ‘real’ knowledge we possess is due to science, that science alone gives us ‘news about the universe’—what can have led him to such a belief? He must surely have been dazzled by the practical results, by the enormous increase in power which has sprung from the particular kind of knowledge scientists have evolved. Without these practical consequences, what would all these scientific theories be? An airy bubble, a diversion of otherwise unoccupied mathematicians, a fanciful mirage on a level with Alice in Wonderland. As a result of science, considerable changes have recently occurred in the material universe. Although by no means ‘more enduring than brass’, the monuments to science are nevertheless rather imposing—acres of masonry, countless machines of startling efficiency, travel speeded up, masses of animals wiped out, illnesses shortened, deaths postponed or accelerated, and so on. This scientific method demonstrably ‘works’, though not in the sense that it increases our ‘tranquillity’—far from it. All that it does is to increase ‘man’s’ power to control his ‘material environment’, and that is something which the yogic method never even attempted. Scientific technology indeed promises limitless power, unlimited in the sense that by itself it places no limitations, moral or otherwise, on the range of its conquests. Very little notice would presumably be taken of the thought-constructions of our scientists if it were not for their impressive practical results. Dean Swift’s Voyage to Laputa would then voice the general attitude, including that of the majority of philosophers.

As with Yoga, the bare technology is also here clothed in numerous theories, hypotheses, concepts and philosophical systems, capable of considerable disagreement among themselves. But all scientific philosophies agree that scientific research, based on the experimental observation of external objects,¹⁰ is the key to all worthwhile knowledge and to a rational mode of life.

But though I were to speak with the tongues of angels, my ‘empiricist’ friends will continue to shrug their shoulders at the suggestion that Yoga and other non-scientific techniques should be taken seriously. As professed ‘humanists’ they might be expected to have a greater faith in the depth and breadth of the human spirit and its modalities. As ‘empiricists’ they might have a more catholic notion of ‘experience’, and as ‘positivists’ a clearer conception of what is, and what is not, a ‘verifiable’ fact. And even as ‘scientists’ they ought to have some doubts as to whether the world of sense-bound consciousness is really the whole of reality. But alas, a staggering hypertrophy of the critical faculties has choked all the other virtues. Contemporary empiricist and positivist philosophers, in their exclusive reliance on scientific knowledge, are guilty of what Whitehead has charitably called a ‘narrow provincialism’. Usually unfamiliar with the traditional non-scientific techniques of mankind, they are also, what is worse, quite incurious about them. At best these techniques, if noticed at all, are hastily interpreted as approximations to scientific ones, worked out by ignorant and bungling natives groping in the dark. On the wilder shores of rationalism it is even rumoured that ‘the poet was the primitive physicist’.³ With a shudder we pass on.

To judge all human techniques by the amount of bare ‘control’ or ‘power’ they produce is patently unfair. Other goals may be equally worth striving for, and men wiser than we may deliberately have turned away from the pursuit of measureless power, not as unattainable, but as inherently undesirable. A graceful submission to the inevitable is not without its attractions, either. A great deal might be said, perhaps, for not wanting more power than can be used wisely, and it is much to be feared that the ‘captors of an unwilling universe’¹¹ may end as many lion tamers have ended before them.

Of all the infinite facets of the universe, science-bound philosophers will come to know only those which are disclosed to scientific methods, with their ruthless will for boundless power and their disregard for everything except the presumed convenience of the human race, and they cannot prove, or even plausibly suggest, that this small fraction of the truth about reality is the one most worth knowing about. As for the vast potentialities of the human mind, they will bring out only those which have a survival value in modern technical civilization. Not only is it a mere fraction of the human mind that is being used, but we may well wonder whether it is the most valuable section—once we consider the ugliness, noisiness and restlessness of our cities, or the effects which the handling of machines has on workers, that of scientific tools on scientists. At present it looks as if this mode of life were sweeping everything before it. It also demonstrably sweeps away much that is valuable.

2a. Turning now to the ‘triple world’, we find that the unanimous tradition of the Perennial Philosophy distinguishes three layers of qualitatively different facts—natural, magical and spiritual. The constitution of man is accordingly composed of three parts, reality presents itself on three levels, and threefold is the attitude we can adopt towards events.

In man we have body-mind as the first constituent, the ‘soul’ as the second, and the ‘spirit’ as the third. In the objective world, the first level is the body of facts which are disclosed by the senses and scientific observation, and arranged by common sense and scientific theory. The second comprises a great variety of facts which with some justice are called ‘occult’, because they tend to hide from our gaze. They weighed heavily with our forefathers, but are now widely derided. An example is astrology, or the study of the correspondences which may exist between the position of the celestial bodies on the one hand and the character, destiny, affinities and potentialities of people on the other. In addition this second level includes the activities of the psychic senses, such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, pre-cognition, thought transference, etc., the huge field of myths and mythical figures, the lore about ghosts and the spirits of the departed, and the working of ‘magic’, which is said to cause effects in the physical world by means of spells and the evocation of ‘spirits’. Thirdly, the spiritual world is an intangible, non-sensuous and disembodied reality, both one and multiple, both transcending the natural universe and immanent in it, at the same time nothing and everything, quite non-sensory as a datum and rather nonsensical as a concept. Indescribable by any of the attributes taken from sensory experience, and gained only by the extinguishing of separate individuality, it is known as ‘Spirit’ to Christians, as ‘emptiness’ to Buddhists, as the ‘Absolute’ to philosophers. Here our senses are blinded, our reason baffled, and our self-interest defeated.

The three worlds can be discerned easily in our attitudes, say, to cold weather. The common-sense reaction is to light a fire, to wear warm clothing, or to take a walk. The magician relies on methods like the gtum-mo of the Tibetans, which are claimed to generate internal heat by means of occult procedures. They are based on a physiology which differs totally from that taught in scientific textbooks, and depend on the manipulation of three mystic ‘arteries’ (nadis), which are described as channels of psychic energy, but which ordinary observation fails to detect, since they are ‘devoid of any physical reality’.⁴ Finally, the spiritual man either ignores the cold, as an unimportant, transitory and illusory phenomenon, or welcomes it, as a means of penance or of training in self-control.

Technical progress and scientific habits of thought increasingly restrict us to the natural level. Magical events and spiritual experiences have ceased to be familiar, and many people do not admit them as facts in their own right. By their own inner constitution the three realms differ in their accessibility to experience, the rules of evidence are by no means the same in all three, and each has a logic of its own. In the infinitude of the spiritual realm no particular fact can be seized upon by natural means, and everything in the magical world is marked by a certain indefiniteness, a nebulousness which springs partly from the way in which the intermediary world presents itself and partly from the uncertainties of its relation to the familiar data of the bright daylight world of natural fact. Every student of the occult knows that in this field the facts are inherently and irremediably obscure. It is impossible to come across even one magical fact which could be established in the way in which natural facts can be verified. There is a twilight about the magical world. It is neither quite light nor quite dark, it cannot be seen distinctly, and, like a shy beast when you point a torch at it, the phenomenon vanishes when the full light is turned on.⁵

The situation becomes more desperate still when we consider the spiritual. Here it is quite impossible to ever establish any fact beyond the possibility of ...