CHAPTER V NOTES.
[42] Cf. The Udâna, chapter VI. ([return])
Svabhâvam parabhâvanca, bhâvancâbhâvameva ca,
Ye paçyanti, na paçyante tatvam hi buddhaçâsane.
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Astîti çâçvatagrâho, nâstîtyucchedadarçanam:
Tasmâdastitvanâstitve nâçriyeta vicaksanah
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Astîti nâstîti ubhe ‘pi antâ
Çuddhî açuddhîti ime ‘pi antâ;
Tasmâdubhe anta vivarjayitvâ
Madhye ‘pi syânam na karoti paṇditah.
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[46] This is the famous phrase in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad occurring in several places (II, 3, 6; III, 9, 26; IV, 2, 4; IV, 4, 22; IV, 5, 5). The Atman or Brahman, it says, “is to be described by No, No! He is incomprehensible, for he cannot be comprehended; he is imperishable, for he cannot perish; he is unattached, for he does not attach himself; unfettered, he does not suffer, he does not fail. Him (who knows), these two do not overcome, whether he says that for some reason he has done evil, or for some reason he has done good—he overcomes both, and neither what he has done, nor what he has omitted to do, affects him.” ([return])
[47] The Awakening of Faith, p. 59. Cf. this with the utterances of Dionysius the Areopagite, as quoted by Prof. W. James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 416-417: “The cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither number, nor order, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, nor similarity, nor dissimilarity. It neither stands, nor moves, nor rests.... It is neither essence, nor eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty nor wisdom; not one; not unity; not divinity or goodness; nor even spirit as we know it.”.... ad libitum. ([return])
Anirodham anutpâdam anucchedam açâçvatam,
Anekârtham anânârtham anâgamam anirgamam.
(Mâdhyamika Çâstra, first stanza.)
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Param nirodhâdbhagavân bhavatîtyeva nohyate,
Na bhavatyubhayam ceti nobhayam ceti nohyate:
Atiṣṭhamâno ‘pi bhagavân bhavatîtyeva nohyate,
Na bhavatyubhayam ceti nobhayam ceti nohyate.
(Mâdhyamika, p. 199).
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[50] He was the third son of king of Kâçi (?) in southern India. He came to China A.D. 527 and after a vain attempt to convert Emperor Wu to his own view, he retired to a monastery, where, it is reported, he spent all day in gazing at the wall without making any further venture to propagate his mysticism. But finally he found a most devoted disciple in the person of Shen Kuang, who was once a Confucian, and through whom the Dhyâna school became one of the most powerful Mahâyâna sect in China as well as in Japan. Dharma died in the year 535. Besides the one here mentioned, he had another audience with the Emperor. At that time, the Emperor said to Dharma: “I have dedicated so many monasteries, copied so many sacred books, and converted so many bhiksus and bhiksunis: what do you think my merits are or ought to be?” To this, however, Dharma replied curtly, “No merit whatever.” ([return])
[51] Another interesting utterance by a Chinese Buddhist, who, earnestly pondering over the absoluteness of Suchness for several years, understood it one day all of a sudden, is: “The very instant you say it is something (or a nothing), you miss the mark.” ([return])
[52] The Vimalakîrti Sûtra, Kumârajîva’s translation, Part II, Chapter 5. ([return])
[53] Deussen relates, in his address delivered before the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1893, a similar attitude of a Vedantist mystic in regard to the highest Brahma. “The Bhava, therefore, when asked by the king Vaksalin, to explain the Brahman, kept silence. And when the king repeated his request again and again, the rishi broke out into the answer: ‘I tell it you, but you don’t understand it; çânto ’yam âtmâ, this âtmâ is silence!’ ” ([return])
[54] It is a well-known fact that the Vedanta philosophy, too, makes a similar distinction between Brahman as sagunam (qualified) and Brahman as nirgunam (unqualified). The former is relative, phenomenal, and has characteristics of its own; but the latter is absolute, having no qualification whatever to speak of, it is absolute Suchness. (See Max Mueller’s The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, p. 220 et seq.)
Here, a very interesting question suggests itself: Which is the original and which is the copy, Mahâyânism or Vedantism? Most of European Sanskrit scholars would fain wish to dispose of it at once by declaring that Buddhism must be the borrower. But I am strongly inclined to the opposite view, for there is reliable evidence in favor of it. In a writing of Açvaghoṣa, who dates much earlier than Çankara or Badarayana we notice this distinction of absolute Suchness and relative Suchness. He writes in his Awakening of Faith (p. 55 et seq.) that though Suchness is free from all modes of limitation and conditionality, and therefore it cannot be thought of by our finite consciousness, yet on account of Avidyâ inherent in the human mind absolute Suchness manifests itself in the phenomenal world, thereby subjecting itself to the law of causality and relativity and proceeds to say that there is a twofold aspect in Suchness from the point of view of its explicability. The first aspect is trueness as negation (çûnyatâ) in the sense that it is completely set apart from the attributes of all things unreal, that it is a veritable reality. The second aspect is trueness as affirmation (açûnyatâ), in the sense that it contains infinite merits, that it is self-existent. Considering the fact that Açvaghoṣa comes earlier than any Vedanta philosophers, it stands to reason to say that the latter might have borrowed the idea of distinguishing the two aspects of Brahma from their Buddhist predecessors.
Çankara also makes a distinction between saguna and nirguna vidya, whose parallel we find in the Mahâyânist samvṛtti and paramârtha satya. ([return])
[55] While passing, I cannot help digressing and entering on a polemic in this footnote. The fact is, Western Buddhist critics stubbornly refuse to understand correctly what is insisted by Buddhists themselves. Even scholars who are supposed to be well informed about the subject, go astray and make false charges against Buddhism. Max Mueller, for example, declares in his Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (p. 242) that “An important distinction between Buddhists and Vedantists is that the former holds the world to have arisen from what is not, the latter from what is, the Sat or Brahman.” The reader who has carefully followed my exposition above will at once detect in this Max Mueller’s conclusion an incorrect statement of Buddhist doctrine. As I have repeatedly said, Suchness, though described in negative terms, is not a state of nothingness, but the highest possible synthesis that the human intellect can reach. The world did not come from the void of Suchness, but from its fulness of reality. If it were not so, to where does Buddhism want us to go after deliverance from the evanescence and nothingness of the phenomenal world?
Max Mueller in another place (op. cit. p. 210) speaks of the Vedantists’ assertion of the reality of the objective world for practical purposes (vyavahârârtham) and of their antagonistic attitude toward “the nihilism of the Buddhists.” “The Buddhists” this seems to refer to the followers of the Mâdhyamika school, but a careful perusal of their texts will reveal that what they denied was not the realness of the world as a manifestation of conditional Suchness, but its independent realness and our attachment to it as such. The Mâdhyamika school was not in any sense a nihilistic system. True, its advocates used many negative terms, but what they meant by them was obvious enough to any careful reader. ([return])
[56] Dharmadhâtu is the world as seen by an enlightened mind, where all forms of particularity do not contradict one another, but make one harmonious whole. ([return])
[57] The word literally means recollection or memory. Açvaghoṣa uses it as a synonym of ignorance, and so do many other Buddhist philosophers. ([return])
[58] Smṛti or citta or vijñâna. They are all used by Açvaghoṣa and other Buddhist authors as synonymous. Smṛti literally means memory; citta, thought or mentation; and vijñâna is generally rendered by consciousness, though not very accurately. ([return])