Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism

by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

If I am requested to formulate the ground-principles of the philosophy of Mahâyâna Buddhism, and, indeed, of all the schools of Buddhism, I would suggest the following:

(1) All is momentary (sarvam kṣanikam).

(2) All is empty (sarvam çûnyam).

(3) All is without self (sarvam anâtmam).

(4) All is such as it is (sarvam tathâtvam).

These four tenets, as it were, are so closely interrelated that, stand or fall, they all inevitably share one and the same fate together. Whatever different views the various schools of Buddhism may hold on points of minor importance, they all concur at least on these four principal propositions.

Of these four propositions, the first, the second, and the fourth have been elucidated above, more or less explicitly. If the existence of a relative world is the work of ignorance and as such has no final reality, it must be considered illusory and empty; though it does not necessarily follow that on this account our life is not worth living. We must not confuse the moral value of existence with the ontological problem of its phenomenality. It all depends on our subjective attitude whether or not our world and life become full of significance. When the illusiveness or phenomenality of individual existences is granted and we use the world accordingly, that is, “as not abusing it,” we escape the error and curse of egoism and take things as they are presented to us, as reflecting the Dharma of Suchness. We no more cling to forms of particularity as something ultimate and absolutely real and as that in which lies the essence of our life. We take them for such as they are, and recognise their reality only in so far as they are considered a partial realisation of Suchness, and do not go any further. Suchness, indeed, lies not hidden behind them, but exists immanently in them. Things are empty and illusory so long as they are particular things and are not thought of in reference to the All that is Suchness and Reality.

From this, it logically follows that in this world of relativity all is momentary, that nothing is permanent, so far as isolated, particular existences are concerned. Even independently of the statement made above, the doctrine of universal impermanency is an almost self-evident truth experienced everywhere, and does not require any special demonstration to prove its validity. The desire for immortality which is so conspicuous and persistent in all the stages of development of the religious consciousness that the very desire has been thought to be the essence of all religious systems, is the most conclusive proof that things on this earth are in a constant flux of becoming, and that there is nothing permanent or stationary in our individual existences; if otherwise, people would never have sought for immortality.

If this be granted as a fact of our everyday experience, we naturally ask: “Why are things so changeable? Why is life so fleeting? What is it that makes things so mutable and transitory?” To this, the Buddhist’s answer is: Because the universe is a resultant product of many efficient forces that are acting according to different karmas;—the destiny of those forces being that no one force or no one set of forces can constantly be predominant over all the others, but that when one has exhausted its potential karma, it is replaced by another that has been steadily coming forward in the meantime. Hence the universal cadence of birth and death, of the spring and the fall, of the tide and the ebb, of integration and disintegration. Where there is attraction, there is repulsion; where there is the centripetal force, there is the centrifugal force. Because it is the law of karma that at the very moment of birth the arms of death are around the neck of life. The universe is nothing but a grand rhythmic manifestation of certain forces working in conformity to their predetermined laws; or, to use Buddhist terminology, this lokadhâtu (material world) consists in a concatenation of hetus (causes) and pratyayas (conditions) regulated by their karma. If this were not so, there would be either a certain fixed state of things in which perfect equilibrium would be maintained, or an inexpressible confusion of things of which no knowledge or experience would be possible. In the former case, we should have universal stagnation and eternal death; in the latter case, there would be no universe, no life, nothing but absolute chaos. Therefore, so long as we have the world before us, in which all the possible varieties of particularisation are manifested it cannot be otherwise than in a state of constant vicissitudes and therefore of universal transitoriness.

Now, the Buddhist argument for the theory of non-ego is this: If individual existences are due to relations obtaining between diverse forces, which act sometimes in unison with and sometimes in opposition to one another as predetermined by their karma, they cannot be said to have any transcendental agency behind them, which is a permanent unity and absolute dictator. In other words, there is no âtman or ego-soul behind our mental activities, and no thing-in-itself (svabhâva), so to speak, behind each particular form of existence. This is called the Buddhist theory of non-âtman or non-ego.

Âtman.

Buddhists use the term “âtman” in two senses: first, in the sense of personal ego,^[65] and secondly, in that of thing-in-itself, perhaps, with a slight modification of its commonly accepted meaning. Let us use the term “âtman” here in its first sense as equivalent to bhûtâtman, for we are going first to treat of the doctrine of non-ego, and later of that of no-thing-in-itself.

Âtman is usually translated “life,” “ego,” or “soul,”^[66] and is a technical term used both by Vedanta philosophers and Buddhists. But we have to note at the beginning that they do not use the term in the same sense. When the Vedanta philosophy, especially the later one, speaks of âtman as our inmost self which is identical with the universal Brahma, it is used in its most abstract metaphysical sense and does not mean the soul whatever, as the latter is commonly understood by vulgar minds. On the other hand, Buddhists understand by âtman this vulgar, materialistic conception of the soul (bhûtâtman) and positively denies its existence as such. If we, for convenience’ sake, distinguish between phenomenal and noumenal in our notion of ego or soul, the âtman of Buddhism is the phenomenal ego, namely, a concrete agent that is supposed to do the acting, thinking, and feeling; while the âtman of Vedantists is the noumenal ego as the raison d’être of our psychical life. The one is in fact material, however ethereal it might be conceived. The other is a highly metaphysical conception transcending the reach of human discursive knowledge. The latter may be identified with Paramâtman and the former with Jîvâtman. Paramâtman is a universal soul from which, according to Vedantism, emanates this world of phenomena, and in a certain sense it may be said to correspond to the Tathâgata-garbha of Buddhism. Jîvâtman is the ego-soul as it is conceived by ignorant people as an independent entity directing all the mental activities. It is this latter âtman that was found to be void by Buddha when he arose from his long meditation, declaring: