“Many a life to transmigrate,
Long quest, no rest, hath been my fate,
Tent-designer[67] inquisitive for:
Painful birth from state to state.
“Tent-designer! I know thee now;
Never again to build art thou:
Quite out are all thy joyful fires,
Rafter broken and roof-tree gone,
Gain eternity—dead desires.”[68]
Buddha’s First Line of Inquiry.
Buddhism finds the source of all evils and sufferings in the vulgar material conception of the ego-soul, and concentrates its entire ethical force upon the destruction of the ego-centric notions and desires. The Buddha seems, since the beginning of his wandering life, to have conceived the idea that the way of salvation must lie somehow in the removal of this egoistic prejudice, for so long as we are not liberated from its curse we are liable to become the prey of the three venomous passions: covetousness, infatuation, and anger, and to suffer the misery of birth and death and disease and old age. Thus, when he received his first instructions from the Sâmkhya philosopher, Arada, he was not satisfied, because he did not teach how to abandon this ego-soul itself. The Buddha argued: “I consider that the embodied ego-soul, though freed from the evolvent-evolutes,[69] is still subject to the condition of birth and has the condition of a seed. The seed may remain dormant so long as it is deprived of the opportunity of coming into contact with the requisite conditions of quickening and being quickened, but since its germinating power has not been destroyed, it will surely develop all its potentialities as soon as it is brought into that necessary contact. Even though the ego-soul free from entanglement [i.e. from the bondage of Prakṛti] is declared to be liberated, yet, so long as the ego-soul remains, there can be no absolute abandonment of it, there can be no real abandonment of egoism.”[70]
The Buddha then proceeds to indicate the path through which he reached his final conclusion and declares: “There is no real separation of the qualities and their subject; for fire cannot be conceived apart from its heat and form.” When this argument is logically carried out, it leads nowhere but to the Buddhist doctrine of non-âtman, that says: The existence of an ego-soul cannot be conceived apart from sensation, perception, imagination, intelligence, volition, etc., and, therefore, it is absurd to think that there is an independent individual soul-agent which makes our consciousness its workshop.
To imagine that an object can be abstracted from its qualities, not only logically but in reality, that there is some unknown quantity that is in possession of such and such characteristic marks (lakṣana) whereby it makes itself perceivable by our senses, says Buddhism, is wrong and unwarranted by reason. Fire cannot be conceived apart from its form and heat; waves cannot be conceived apart from the water and its commotion; the wheel cannot exist outside of its rim, spokes, axle, etc. All things, thus, are made of hetus and pratyayas, of causes and conditions, of qualities and attributes; and it is impossible for our pudgala or âtman or ego or soul to be any exception to this universal condition of things.
Let me in this connection state an interesting incident in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Hui-K’e, the second patriarch of the Dhyâna sect in China, was troubled with this ego-problem before his conversion. He was at first a faithful Confucian, but Confucianism did not satisfy all his spiritual wants. His soul was wavering between agnosticism and scepticism, and consequently he felt an unspeakable anguish in his inmost heart. When he learned of the arrival of Bodhidharma in his country, he hastened to his monastery and implored him to give him some spiritual advice. But Bodhidharma did not utter a word, being seemingly absorbed in his deep meditation. Hui-K’e, however, was determined to obtain from him some religious instructions at all hazards. So it is reported that he was standing at the same spot seven days and nights, when he at last cut off his left arm with the sword he was carrying (being a military officer) and placed it before Dharma, saying: “This arm is a token of my sincere desire to be instructed in the Holy Doctrine. My soul is troubled and annoyed; pray let your grace show me the way to pacify it.” Dharma quietly arose from his meditation and said: “Where is your soul? Bring it here and I will have it pacified.” Hui-K’e replied: “I have been searching for it all these years, but I have never succeeded in laying a hand on it.” Dharma then exclaimed: “There, I have your soul pacified!” At this, it is said, a flash of spiritual enlightenment went across the mind of Hui-K’e, and his “soul” was pacified once for all.
The Skandhas.
When the five skandhas are combined according to their previous karma and present a temporal existence in the form of a sentient being, vulgar minds imagine that they have here an individual entity sustained by an immortal ego-substratum. In fact, the material body (rûpakâya) alone is not what makes the ego-soul, nor the sensation (vedanâ), nor the deeds (sanskâra), nor the consciousness (vijñâna), nor the conception (samjñâ); but only when they are all combined in a certain form they make a sentient being. Yet this combination is not the work of a certain independent entity, which, according to its own will, combines the five skandhas in one form and then hides itself in it. The combination of the constituent elements, Buddhism declares, is achieved by themselves after their karma. When a certain number of atoms of hydrogen and of oxygen are brought together, they attract each other on their own accord or owing to their own karma, and the result is water. The ego of water, so to speak, did not will to bring the two elements and make itself out of them. Even so is it with the existence of a sentient being, and there is no need of hypostasising a fabulous ego-monster behind the combination of the five skandhas.
Skandha (khanda in Pâli) literally means “aggregate” or “agglomeration”, and, according to the Chinese exegetists, it is called so, because our personal existence is an aggregate of the five constituent elements of being, because it comes to take a definite individual form when the skandhas are brought together according to their previous karma. The first of the five aggregates is matter (rûpa), whose essential quality is thought to consist in resistance. The material part of our existence in the five sense-organs called indryas: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and the body. The second skandha is called sensation or sense-impression (vedanâ), which results from the contact of the six vijñânas (senses) with the viṣaya (external world). The third is called samjñâ which corresponds to our conception. It is the psychic power by which we are enabled to form the abstract images of particular objects. The fourth is sanskâra which may be rendered action or deed. Our intelligent consciousness, responding to impressions received which are either agreeable or disagreeable or indifferent, acts accordingly; and these acts bear fruit in the coming generations.
Sanskâra, the fourth constituent of being, comprises two categories, mental (caitta) and non-mental (cittaviprayukta). And the mental is subdivided into six: fundamental (mahâbhûmi), good (kuçala), tormenting (kleça), evil (akuçala), tormenting minor (upakleça), and indefinite (aniyata). It may be interesting to enumerate what all these sankâras are, as they shed light on the practical ethics of Buddhism.