Says the Buddha: “If the soul, as you say, exists in the relation between the sense-organs (indṛya) and their respective sense-objects (viṣaya), should we consider the soul as uniting and partaking the natures of these two incongruous things, viṣaya and indṛya? If the soul partakes something of each, it has no characteristics of its own. If it unites the two natures, the distinction between subject and object exists no more. ‘In the middle’ is an empty word; that is to say, to conceive the soul as the relation between the indryas and the viṣayas is to make it an airy nothing.”
The seventh and final hypothesis offered by Ânanda is that the soul is the state of non-attachment, and that, therefore, it has no particular locality in which it abides. But this is also mercilessly attacked by the Buddha who declares: “Attachment presupposes the existence of beings to which a mind-may be attached. Now, should we consider these things (dharmas) such as the world, space, land, water, birds, beasts, etc. as existing or not existing? If the external world does not exist, we cannot speak about non-attachment, as there is nothing to attach from the first. If the external world really is, how can we manage not to come in contact with it? When we say that things are devoid of all characteristic marks, it amounts to the declaration that they are non-existent. But they are not non-existent, they must have certain characteristics that distinguish themselves. Now, the external world has certainly some marks (lakṣana) and it must by all means be considered as existing. There then is no room for your theory of non-attachment.”
At this, Ânanda surrenders and the Buddha discloses his theory of Dharmakâya, which we shall expound at some length in the chapter specially devoted to it.
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By way of a summary of the above, let me remark that the Buddhists do not deny the existence of the so-called empirical ego in contradistinction to the noumenal ego, which latter can be considered to correspond to the Buddhist âtman. Vasubandhu in his treatise on the Yogâcâra’s idealistic philosophy declares that the existence of âtman and dharma is only hypothetical, provisional, apparent, and not in any sense real and ultimate. To express this in modern terms, the soul and the world, or subject and object, have only relative existence, and no absolute reality can be ascribed to them. Psychologically speaking, every one of us has an ego or soul which means the unity of consciousness; and physically, this world of phenomena is real either as a manifestation of one energy or as a composite of atoms or electrons, as is considered by physicists.
To confine ourselves to the psychological question, what Buddhism most emphatically insists on is the non-existence of a concrete, individual, irreducible soul-substance, whose immortality is so much coveted by most unenlightened people. Individuation is only relative and not absolute. Buddhism knows how far the principle could safely and consistently be carried out, and its followers will not forget where to stop and destroy the wall, almost adamantine to some religionists, of individualism. Absolute individualism, as the Buddhists understand it, incapacitates us to follow the natural flow of sympathy; to bathe in the eternal sunshine of divinity which not only surrounds but penetrates us; to escape the curse of individual immortality which is strangely so much sought after by some people; to trace this mundane life to its fountainhead of which it drinks so freely, yet quite unknowingly; to rise rejuvenated from the consuming fire of Kâla (Chronos). To think that there is a mysterious something behind the empirical ego and that this something comes out triumphantly after the fashion of the immortal phœnix from the funeral pyre of corporeality, is not Buddhistic.
What I would remark here in connection with this problem of the soul, is its relation to that of Âlayavijñâna, of which it is said that the Buddha was very reluctant to talk, on account of its being easily confounded with the notion of the ego. The Âlaya, as was explained, is a sort of universal soul from which our individual empirical souls are considered to have evolved. The Manas which is the first offspring of the Âlaya is endowed with the faculty of discrimination, and from the wrongful use of this faculty there arises in the Manas the conception of the Âlaya as the ego,—the real concrete soul-substratum.
The Âlaya, however, is not a particular phenomenon, for it is a state of Suchness in its evolutionary disposition and has nothing in it yet to suggest its concrete individuality. When the Manas finds out its error and lifts the veil of Ignorance from the body of the Âlaya, it soon becomes convinced of the ultimate nature of the soul, so called. For the soul is not individual, but supra-individual.
Âtman and the “Old Man.”
When the Buddhists exclaim: “Put away your egoism, for the ego is an empty notion, a mere word without reality,” some of our Christian readers may think that if there is no ego, what will become of our personality or individuality? Though this point will become clearer as we proceed, let us remark here that what Buddhism understands by ego or âtman may be considered to correspond in many respects to the Christian notion of “flesh” or the “old man,” which is the source of all our sinful acts. Says Paul: “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I live now in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal. ii, 20.) When this passage is interpreted by the Buddhists, the “I” that was annihilated through crucifixion, is our false notion of an ego-soul (âtman); and the “I” that is living through the grace of God is the Bodhi, a reflex in us of the Dharmakâya.