believe in the existence of a power-possessor separate from the power.
Brief survey of the evolution of Buddhist Thought.
In the earliest period of Buddhism more attention was paid to the four noble truths than to systematic metaphysics. What was sorrow, what was the cause of sorrow, what was the cessation of sorrow and what could lead to it? The doctrine of pa@ticcasamuppâda was offered only to explain how sorrow came in and not with a view to the solving of a metaphysical problem. The discussion of ultimate metaphysical problems, such as whether the world was eternal or non-eternal, or whether a Tathâgata existed after death or not, were considered as heresies in early Buddhism. Great emphasis was laid on sîla, samâdhi and paññâ and the doctrine that there was no soul. The Abhidhammas hardly give us any new philosophy which was not contained in the Suttas. They only elaborated the materials of the suttas with enumerations and definitions. With the evolution of Mahâyâna scriptures from some time about 200 B.C. the doctrine of the non-essentialness and voidness of all dhammas began to be preached. This doctrine, which was taken up and elaborated by Nagârjuna, Âryyadeva, Kumârajîva and Candrakîrtti, is more or less a corollary from the older doctrine of Buddhism. If one could not say whether the world was eternal or non-eternal, or whether a Tathâgata existed or did not exist after death, and if there was no permanent soul and all the dhammas were changing, the only legitimate way of thinking about all things appeared to be to think of them as mere void and non-essential appearances. These appearances appear as being mutually related but apart from their appearance they have no other essence, no being or reality. The Tathatâ doctrine which was preached by As'vagho@sa oscillated between the position of this absolute non-essentialness of all dhammas and the Brahminic idea that something existed as the background of all these non-essential dhammas. This he called tathatâ, but he could not consistently say that any such permanent entity could exist. The Vijñânavâda doctrine which also took its rise at this time appears to me to be a mixture of the S'ûnyavâda doctrine and the Tathatâ doctrine; but when carefully examined it seems to be nothing but S'ûnyavâda, with an attempt at explaining all the observed phenomena. If everything was
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non-essential how did it originate? Vijñânavâda proposes to give an answer, and says that these phenomena are all but ideas of the mind generated by the beginningless vâsanâ (desire) of the mind. The difficulty which is felt with regard to the Tathatâ doctrine that there must be some reality which is generating all these ideas appearing as phenomena, is the same as that in the Vijñânavâda doctrine. The Vijñânavâdins could not admit the existence of such a reality, but yet their doctrines led them to it. They could not properly solve the difficulty, and admitted that their doctrine was some sort of a compromise with the Brahminical doctrines of heresy, but they said that this was a compromise to make the doctrine intelligible to the heretics; in truth however the reality assumed in the doctrine was also non-essential. The Vijñânavâda literature that is available to us is very scanty and from that we are not in a position to judge what answers Vijñânavâda could give on the point. These three doctrines developed almost about the same time and the difficulty of conceiving s'ûnya (void), tathatâ, (thatness) and the âlayavijñâna of Vijñânavâda is more or less the same.
The Tathatâ doctrine of As'vagho@sa practically ceased with him. But the S'ûnyavâda and the Vijñânavâda doctrines which originated probably about 200 B.C. continued to develop probably till the eighth century A.D. Vigorous disputes with S'ûnyavâda doctrines are rarely made in any independent work of Hindu philosophy, after Kumârila and S'a@nkara. From the third or the fourth century A.D. some Buddhists took to the study of systematic logic and began to criticize the doctrine of the Hindu logicians. Di@nnâga the Buddhist logician (500 A.D.) probably started these hostile criticisms by trying to refute the doctrines of the great Hindu logician Vâtsyâyana, in his Pramâ@nasamuccaya. In association with this logical activity we find the activity of two other schools of Buddhism, viz. the Sarvâstivâdins (known also as Vaibhâ@sikas) and the Sautrântikas. Both the Vaibhâ@sikas and the Sautrântikas accepted the existence of the external world, and they were generally in conflict with the Hindu schools of thought Nyâya-Vais'e@sika and Sâ@mkhya which also admitted the existence of the external world. Vasubandhu (420-500 A.D.) was one of the most illustrious names of this school. We have from this time forth a number of great Buddhist thinkers such as Yas'omitra (commentator of Vasubandhu's work),
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Dharmmakîrtti (writer of Nyâyabindu 635 A.D.), Vinîtadeva and S'ântabhadra (commentators of Nyâyabindu), Dharmmottara (commentator of Nyâyabindu 847 A.D.), Ratnakîrtti (950 A.D.), Pa@n@dita As'oka, and Ratnâkara S'ânti, some of whose contributions have been published in the Six Buddhist Nyâya Tracts, published in Calcutta in the Bibliotheca Indica series. These Buddhist writers were mainly interested in discussions regarding the nature of perception, inference, the doctrine of momentariness, and the doctrine of causal efficiency (arthakriyâkâritva) as demonstrating the nature of existence. On the negative side they were interested in denying the ontological theories of Nyâya and Sâ@mkhya with regard to the nature of class-concepts, negation, relation of whole and part, connotation of terms, etc. These problems hardly attracted any notice in the non-Sautrântika and non-Vaibhâ@sika schools of Buddhism of earlier times. They of course agreed with the earlier Buddhists in denying the existence of a permanent soul, but this they did with the help of their doctrine of causal efficiency. The points of disagreement between Hindu thought up to S'a@nkara (800 A.D.) and Buddhist thought till the time of S'a@nkara consisted mainly in the denial by the Buddhists of a permanent soul and the permanent external world. For Hindu thought was more or less realistic, and even the Vedânta of S'a@nkara admitted the existence of the permanent external world in some sense. With S'a@nkara the forms of the external world were no doubt illusory, but they all had a permanent background in the Brahman, which was the only reality behind all mental and the physical phenomena. The Sautrântikas admitted the existence of the external world and so their quarrel with Nyâya and Sâ@mkhya was with regard to their doctrine of momentariness; their denial of soul and their views on the different ontological problems were in accordance with their doctrine of momentariness. After the twelfth century we do not hear much of any new disputes with the Buddhists. From this time the disputes were mainly between the different systems of Hindu philosophers, viz. Nyâya, the Vedânta of the school of S'a@nkara and the Theistic Vedânta of Râmânuja, Madhva, etc.
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