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A Buddhist Manual of Psychological Ethics of the Fourth Century B.C - Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids, 1900 - Complete Book

English

Then the solid within, or ' belonging to the self,' is catalogued, with the injunction that it is to he regarded as it really is with right ivisdom (yathabhutam sammapannaya datthabbam). And this means that — while recognizing his kinship with the element to the full — the good student should not identify himself with it so as to see in it a permanent unchanging substance as which he should persist amid transient phenomena. He was to reflect, * This is not mine, it is not I, it is not the soul of me !' * It is void of a Self.'^ And so for the other three elements. In their mightiest manifestations — in the earthquake as in the flood, in conflagration as in tempest — they are but temporal, phenomenal; subject to change and decay. Much more is this true of them when collocated in the human organism. So far from losing himself in his meditation in the All, in Nature, in * cosmic emotion ' of any kind, he had to realize that the rupam in which he participated was but one of the ^yq factors of that life which, in so far as it engulfed and mastered him and bore him drifting along, was the great 111, the source of pain and delusion. From each of those five factors he had to detach himself in thought, and attain that position of mastery and emancipation whereby alone the true, the Ideal Self could emerge — temporary as a phenomenal khandho by element of the impulse to live (Lebenstrieb ; an expression doubtlessly prompted by Schopenhauer's philosophy). It would be very desirable to learn from the Papanca - Sudani (Buddhaghosa's ' Commentary on the Majjhima Nikaya), whether the Commentator interprets the term to the same effect in both passages. Dhamma- dinna, the woman-apostle, explains upadanam, used with a similar context, as meaning ' passionate desire in the five skandhas-of -grasping.' (M. i. 300.) ^ See above, p. xxxvi, where the context leaves no doubt as to what the reflection is meant to emphasize. Ixiii collocation, eternal by its ethical aspiration. And the practical result of cultivating * this earth-like culture ' and the rest, as Gotama called it in teaching his son, was that ' the mind was no longer entranced by the consideration of things as affecting him pleasantly or disagreeably,'^ but ' the disinterestedness which is based on that which is good was established.' 2 'And he thereat is glad' — and rightly so — ' for thus far he has wrought a great work !' These seem to me some of the more essential features in the Buddhist Dharma concerning Kupam. VII. On the Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Theory of Intellection. It would have been the greatest possible gain to our knowledge of the extent to which Buddhism had developed any clear psychological data for its ethics, had it occurred to the compilers of the Dhamma-Sangani to introduce an analysis of the other four skandhas parallel to that of the skandha of form. It is true that the whole work, except the book on r ti p a m, is an inquiry into arupino dhamma, conceived for the most part as mental phenomena, but there is no separate treatment of them divided up as such. Some glimpses we obtain incidentally, most of which have been pointed out in the footnotes to the translation. And it may prove useful to summarize briefly such contribution as may lie therein to the psychology of Buddhism. And, first, it is very difficult to say to what extent, if at all, such psychological matter as we find is distinctively and originally Buddhist, or how much was merely adopted from contemporary culture and incorporated with the Dharma. Into, this problem I do not here propose to inquire farther. If there be any originality, any new departure in the psychology scattered about the Nikayas, it is more likely to be in aspect and treatment than in new M. i. 423, 424. ^ j^, i igg. Ixiv matter. Buddhism preached a doctrine of regenerate personality, to be sought after and developed by and out of the personal resources of the individual through a system of intellectual self-culture. Thrown back upon himself, he developed introspection, the study of consciousness. But, again, his doctrine imposed on him the study of psychical states without the psyche. Nature without and nature within met, acted and reacted, and the result told on the organism in a natural, orderly, necessary way.^ But there was no one adjusting the machinery. ^ The Buddhist might have approved of Leibniz's amendment of Locke's ' Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu ' in the additional phrase * nisi ipse intellectus.' But he would not thereby have exalted vinnanam, cittam, or mano to any hypostatic permanence as prior or as immanent. He would only admit the priority of intellect to particular sensations as a natural order, obtaining among the pheno- menal factors of any given act of cognition. Psychological earnestness, then, and psychological in- quiry into mental phenomena, coexisting apart from, and in opposition to, the usual assumption of a psychical entity : such are the only distinctively Buddhist features which may, in the absence of more positive evidence than we yet possess, be claimed in such analysis of mind as Appears in Buddhist ethics. Of the results of this earnest spirit of inquiry into mental phenomena, in so far as they may be detached from ethical doctrine, and assigned their due place in the history of human ideas, it will be impossible, for several years, to prepare any adequate treatment. Much of the Abhi- dhamma Pitaka, and even some of the Sutta Pitaka, still remains unedited. Of the former collection nothing has been translated with the exception of the attempt in this volume. And, since Buddhist psychology has an evolution to show covering nearly a thousand years, we have to await fresh materials 1 Cf. Mil. 57--61. 2 gujji^ 194. Ixv from the yet unedited works of Buddhaghosa, the Buddhist Sanskrit texts, and such works as the Netti-pakarana, Professor Hardy's edition of which is now in the press. Meanwhile there is an increasing store of accessible material which might be sifted by the historical in- vestigator. There are, for instance, in the Dhamma-Sangani several passages suggesting that Buddhist scholars, in con- templating the consciousness or personality as affected by phenomena considered as external, were keenly alive to the distinction between the happening of the expected and the happening of the unexpected, between instinctive reaction of the mind and the organism generally, on occasion of sense, and the deliberate confronting of external phenomena with a carefully adjusted intelligence. Modern psychology has largely occupied itself with this distinction, and with the problems of consciousness and subconsciousness, of volition and of memory, involved in it. The subject of attention, involuntary and voluntary, figures prominently in the psychological literature of the last two decades. But it is not till the centuries of post-Aristotelian and of neo-Platonic thought that we see the distinction emerging in Western psychology contemporaneously with the develop- ment of the notion of consciousness.^ In the history of Buddhist thought, too, the distinction does not appear to have become explicitly and consciously made till the age of, or previous to, the writing of the great Commentaries (fifth century). A corresponding explicitness in the notion of consciousness and self-consciousness, or at least in the use of some equivalent terms, has yet to be traced.^ Buddhism is so emphatically a philosophy, both in theory and practice, of the conscious will, with all that this involves of attention and concentration, that we hardly 1 Cf. Siebeck,_oi). ciL, ii., pp. 200, 353, ^ In the Maha Nidana Sutta Gotama discourses on sihi conscire by way of nama-rupa. See in Grimblot's * Sept Suttas,' p. 255. e Ixvi look to find terms discriminating such notions from among other mental characteristics. We are reminded instead of Matthew Arnold's well-known remark that as, at Soli, no one spoke of solecisms, so in England we had to import the term Philistine. But, whereas it is the Atthasalinl, written from the standpoint of a later elaboration of thought, that makes explicit what it holds to be the intention of the classic manual, the latter work lends itself without straining to such interpretation. I pass over Buddhaghosa's comments on the limitations and the movements of attention repro- duced below, pp. 198, n. 2, 200, n. 1, as derived very possibly from thought nearer to his own times.