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])
CHAPTER VI NOTES.
[59] Cf. the Bhagavadgîtâ (S. B. E. Vol. VIII, chap. XIV, p. 107): “The Brahman is a womb for me, in which I cast the seed. From that, O descendant of Bharata! is the birth of all things. Of the bodies, O son of Kunti! which are born from all wombs, the main womb is the great Brahman, and I am the father, the giver of the seed.” ([return])
[60] This is translated from the Chinese of Çikṣananda; the Sanskrit reads as follows:
“Tarangâ hi udadher yadvat pavanapratyaya îritâ,
Nṛtyamânâh pravartante vyucchedaç ca na vidhyate:
Âlayodhyas tathâ nityam viṣayapavana îritaḥ,
Cittâis tarangavijñânâir nṛtyamânâḥ pravartate.”