When the Buddha was talking with his disciples concerning various speculations prevalent in his days, he made the following remarks about the knowledge of things in command by the Tathagata:
“That does he know, and he knows also other things far beyond, far better than those speculations; and having that knowledge he is not puffed up; and thus untarnished he has, in his own heart, realised the way of escape from them, has understood, as really they are, the rising up and passing away of sensations, their sweet taste, their danger, how they cannot be relied on, and not grasping after any of those things men are eager for, he the Tathagata is quite set free. These are those other things, profound, difficult to realise, and hard to understand, tranquillising, sweet, not to be grasped by logic, subtle, comprehensible only by the wise, which the Tathagata, having himself realised and seen face to face, hath set forth; and it is concerning these that they who would rightly praise the Tathagata in accordance with the truth, should speak.”[f62]
These virtues for which the Tathagata was to be praised were manifestly not derived from speculation and analytical reasoning. His intellectual sight was just as keen and far-reaching as any of his contemporaries, but he was endowed with a higher faculty, will-power, which was exercised to its fullest capacity in order to bring about all these virtues which belonged to the entire being of Tathagatahood. And naturally there was no need for him to face these metaphysical problems that agitated the philosophers of his days; they were solved in him, when he attained his spiritual freedom and serenity, in their entirety, in their synthetic aspect, and not partially or fragmentarily—which should be the case if they were presented to the Buddha’s cognition as philosophical problems. In this light is to be read the Mahāli Sutta. Some scholars wonder why two entirely disconnected ideas are treated together in one body of the Sutra, which however shows scholarly ignorance in regard to matters spiritual, as they fail to notice the true import of Enlightenment in the system of Buddhist faith. To understand this, we need imaginative intuition directly penetrating the centre of life, and not always do mere literary and philological talents succeed in unravelling its secrets.
The Mahāli Sutta is a Pali Sutra in the Dīgha-Nikāya, in which Mahāli asks the Buddha as to the object of the religious life practised by his disciples, and the following is the gist of his answer: The Buddhists do not practise self-concentration in order to acquire any miraculous power such as hearing heavenly sounds or seeing heavenly sights.[f63] There are things higher and sweeter than that, one of which is the complete destruction of the Three Bonds (delusion of self, doubt, and trust in the efficacy of good works and ceremonies) and the attainment of such a state of mind as to lead to the insight of the higher things in one’s spiritual life. When this insight is gained the heart grows serene, is released from the taint of Ignorance, and there arises the knowledge of emancipation. Such questions as are asked by you, O Mahāli, regarding the identity of body and soul, are idle ones; for when you attain to the supreme insight and see things as they really are in themselves, that is, emancipated from the Bonds, Taints, and Deadly Flows, those questions that are bothering you at the moment will completely lose their value and no more be asked in the way you do. Hence no need of my answering your questions.
This dialogue between the Buddha and Mahāli well illustrates the relation between Enlightenment and the problem of the soul. There is no need of wondering why the Buddha did not definitely solve the ever-recurring question instead of ignoring it in the manner as he did and talking about something apparently in no connection with the point at issue. This is one of the instances by which we must try to see into the meaning of Ignorance.
III
One of the reasons, however, why the Buddha left some metaphysical questions unanswered or indeterminate (avyākata) was due to the fact that Buddhism is a practical system of spiritual discipline and not a metaphysical discourse. The Buddha naturally had his theory of cognition, but this was secondary inasmuch as the chief aim of Buddhist life was to attain Enlightenment from which spiritual freedom ensues. Enlightenment vanquishes Ignorance lying at the root of birth-and-death and laying fetters of every description, intellectual as well as affective. And this vanquishing of Ignorance cannot be achieved except by the exercise of one’s will-power; all the other attempts, especially merely intellectual, are utterly futile. Hence the Buddha’s conclusion: “These questions[f64] are not calculated to profit, they are not concerned with the Dharma, they do not redound to the elements of right conduct, nor to detachment, nor to purification from lusts, nor to quietude, nor to tranquillisation of heart, nor to real knowledge, nor to the insight of the higher stages of the Path, nor to Nirvana. Therefore is it that I express no opinion upon them.” What the Buddha on the other hand expounded was: “What pain is, what the origin of pain is, what the cessation of pain is, and the method by which one may reach the cessation of pain.” For these are all practical matters to be not only fully understood and realised but actively mastered by any one who really desires to accomplish the great deed of emancipation.
That the Buddha was very much against mere knowledge and most emphatically insisted on actually seeing and personally experiencing the Dharma, face to face, is in evidence everywhere in the Nikāyas as well as in the Mahayana texts. This has been indeed the strongest point in the teaching of Buddhism. When a Brahman philosopher was referring to his knowledge of the Three Vedas and a union with that which he has not seen, the Buddha ridiculed him in one of his strong phrases: “So you say that the Brahmans are not able to point the way to union with that which they have seen, and you further say that neither any one of them, nor of their pupils, nor of their predecessors even to the seventh generation, has ever seen Brahma. And you further say that even the Rishis of old, whose words they hold in such deep respect, did not pretend to know, or to have seen where, or whence, or whither Brahma is. Yet these Brahmans versed in the Three Vedas say, forsooth, that they can point out the way to union with that which they know not, neither have seen.... They are like a string of blind men clinging one to the other, neither can the foremost see, nor can the middle one see, nor can the hindmost see. The talk of those Brahmans versed in the Three Vedas is but blind talk: the first sees not, the middle one sees not, nor can the last see.”
Enlightenment or the dispelling of Ignorance which is the ideal of the Buddhist life, we can see now most clearly, is not an act of the intellect, but the transforming or re-modelling of one’s whole being through the exercise of the most fundamental faculty innate in every one of us. Mere understanding has something foreign in it and does not seem to come so intimately into life. If Enlightenment had really such a tremendous effect on our spiritual outlook as we read in the Sutras, it could not be the outcome of just getting acquainted with the doctrine of Causation. Enlightenment is the work of Paññā which is born of the will which wants to see itself and to be in itself. Hence the Buddha’s emphasis on the importance of personal experience; hence his insistence on meditation in solitude as the means of leading to the experience. Meditation, through which the will endeavours to transcend the condition it has put on itself in the awakening of consciousness, is therefore by no means the simple act of cogitating on the theory of Origination or Causation, which forever moves in a circle starting from Ignorance and ending in Ignorance. This is the one thing that is most needed in Buddhism. All the other metaphysical problems involve us in a tangled skein, in a matted mass of thread.