Part 12
The fact that a chemical compound decomposes, that its constituent elements are set free, always implies that from another direction forces more powerful are coming into play. Decomposition is nothing but the form of a new combination. In similar wise Kamma does not become free just for the sake of becoming free, just in order to be free. Not in any arbitrary fashion does it leap out of its old location; it does so only because its material falls away from under it. That it can take fresh hold and always can take hold, of this the guarantee is the simple fact that there is a world at all, for the latter is just the series of self-attunings each after other, itself. Were the world obliged to _come_ to this self-attuning first, never by any means could there be a world. What we find present is precisely something given--actuality, and this stands for no mere set of _possibilities_; it represents a _power_--its own power to exist; and the expression of this power to exist is just this eternal ability to take fresh hold.
To change the simile: For every falling stone there is always ready the spot on which it can fall. For along with the fact “falling stone” are also given all the prerequisite conditions in which such questions as, “Where can it fall? Will it find its spot?” are already met and answered. Its fall is nothing motiveless; it does not fall blindly, by pure accident. Neither is its fall any previously determined affair; it does not fall towards any given goal. Its fall is an attuning of itself, an accommodating of itself to its goal. In the act of falling it finds its goal. In the same way this my whole existence is simply my finding my way, my accommodating of myself to the new goal. Kamma does not _go_ to its new place as a spontaneous force, nor does it _fall_, as a mere reaction, but it advances itself as a flame advances itself. In the beginningless happenings of a world, living at every moment accommodates itself to living. It is like a universal round dance, this Samsāra. Kamma has seized his partner, and with her whirls through the infinitudes until she collapses with fatigue, is worn out, or, become clumsy and heavy, slips from him because she no longer suits him. She no longer suits him, however, because there is another whom she suits better. Thus does the material pass from hand to hand, because one lender snatches it away from the other.
Indeed ’twas only borrowed--the lenders are so many!
And thus is disposed of that other question: “Once set alight, could not an _I_-process burn for ever?”
Science, because it never can be actual science, makes an effort at least not to be of the laity, and endeavours to make good this its distinctive characteristic by the striking, one might almost say the sensational, manner in which it formulates its problems. Thus it tries to signalize the commanding nature of its standpoint with respect to the problems of life by telling the dumbfounded layman of a death that is purely a phenomenon of adaptation--yea more, of a death that is nothing but a bad habit. Upon this point, Weismann in his _Dauer des Lebens_ says: “From a purely physiological standpoint there is no perceivable reason why it should not be possible for the fission of the cells to proceed _ad infinitum_, _i.e._ for the organism to function eternally. To me the necessity for death is intelligible only from the standpoint of utility.... An individual that lived for ever would always become infirm and useless to the species. Death is merely a utilitarian arrangement; it is no necessity, grounded in the essential nature of life.” This is about as sensible as if one said, relying upon the facts of kitchen routine, “The going out of the fire is merely a utilitarian arrangement: it is no necessity grounded in the essential nature of fire.” To speak of death as a phenomenon of adaptation is to juggle with death as with some empty concept. In truth it is not as some think, death that accommodates itself to life, but simply thinking to the facts. The crass absurdity only becomes evident when out of this mere “reading” of the facts one seeks to evolve a truth of practical application, as Metchnikoff does in his “daring” surmises. I assert that science ought to be ashamed of herself for filling the nursery room of mankind with such fabulous tales of the future, when already the air is thick enough with the fables of the past. The old Salernitanian school of medicine used to ask: “_Cur moritur homo, cui crescit salvia in hortis?_” In much the same way the new--nay, the very newest--school of medicine demands: “Why does man die, for whom in the laboratory grows the Maya Yoghurt?” thereby showing that in the depths below the surface she grows on the same stock as the so much contemned “blind faith.”
Like a grown man among children stands the Buddha towards such fictions. With him death is nothing but living in a new environment. The distaff keeps ceaselessly turning; it is only that a new clump of wool has been placed on it. The discernment that life is of the nature of a process involves of necessity the discernment that life can persist only so long as the active affinities concerned are not overmastered by other affinities. Here again, to be sure, I can interpret death as a phenomenon of accommodation, but equally as well can I so interpret life, for here I am just the beginningless self-accommodating, self-attuning itself. However varied the length of time during which the attuning may last, however it may be prolonged by the use of specific contrivances, to speak of a potential immortality is to do away with the process-like nature of life, to make the never-resting actuality stiffen into a childish counterfeit. With the fact that I am born, the fact of dying is _guaranteed_ me. For beings can only be born if previously they have died; they must buy themselves their birth with their own death. Were we not born, then, to be sure, we need not die either. But to be born and yet not to see in death a necessity grounded in the very nature of life, this demands place alongside that passage in the book of Joshua: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.” What a different ring has this word of the Master: “That that which has life should not meet with death--such a thing is not!” And yet it is so! We demand life-values at any cost; and, are the udders milked dry, then must death itself make good the lack!
If science and the Buddha-thought be placed alongside one another for mutual and unbiassed comparison, perforce the superiority of the latter must be acknowledged, since by it is neatly resolved in one single conception that which science with two distinct concepts makes an inextricable tangle of. From the point of view of science, dying is every whit as much of a miracle as being born, since in birth a new identity appears on the scene all entire, and in death all as entire vanishes; in the same way that to a child’s idea a thunderstorm as such, _i.e._ taken purely as a symptom, is something that arises all entire, and all entire passes away again. The simple fact is: despite all the technical skill with which she handles the problem of heredity, and notwithstanding all the suggestions made to the understanding to recognize as uninterrupted the passage from life to life, science has her abode in the realm of the miraculous. The technique of her descriptions, to which she gives the misleading title, “doctrine of evolution,” leave the actual problem of evolution entirely untouched. In face of the miracles of birth and death, science strongly resembles a boy making his first observations in natural history. Finding in his glass-case the caterpillar dead and the butterfly born, he will say, “Two miracles! The old has died and something new has made its appearance.” Instead of both facts merging into one another in a true conception of what has taken place, to his mistaken notion they fall apart from one another, and become problems defying solution. Even so is it with science. Through her failure to recognize that the facts of birth here and death there are forms of one and the same experience instead of a single comprehension of both under the one aspect, two miracles are found by her to be present. The noose of life has become a knot, and every attempt to undo it by continued pulling only makes worse the tangle. On this point the physicist has already left the stage of childhood behind. To-day he no longer says, “Two miracles! Heat is gone and motion is present.” He has found the clue, albeit, it is true, only in form of reaction. The biologist, however, still remains incapable of replacing two miracles with a true and genuine conception. He is still unaware that it is with dying that being born must be purchased. Hence he treats birth as a fact by itself, and death as a fact by itself, and so remains confronting both problems internally insoluble.
So much for that point. A further question that suggests itself is: “Could not a Kamma be simultaneously attuned in two or more places?”
To this the answer would be: “Theoretically, so long as one confronts the problem from the mechanistic standpoint, that is, from the standpoint that deals only with reactions, it is attuned in places innumerable.” In exactly the same way a drop of water, as it trickles downward, theoretically can have innumerable points as its resting-place; practically, however, it will have one single resting-place, and this latter will prove itself the resting-place and the one single resting-place among countless possibilities simply and solely by the fact that the drop comes to a halt just at this spot. Actuality is simple as singly determined. It only becomes complex in the mechanistic mode of apprehending it; that is, where reactions alone are dealt with.
Again, it may be asked: “Could not two Kammas attune themselves to one and the same body of material?”
But this question has just as much meaning as if one asked, “Could not two men appropriate to themselves, assimilate, and be nourished by, the same loaf of bread?” So long as one treats of “bread” in purely theoretical fashion, eats concepts, well and good! But if one eats in actuality, the absurdity becomes obvious.
Again: “Might it not happen for once that the ovum should conduct the lightning without the assistance of the sperm-cell?”
So far as mankind is concerned, the only reply is that here both factors are required. It simply is so! Why are certain reactions brought about only when certain catalytic agents or ferments are introduced? How weighty the above objection has always been to the mind of mankind is shown by the important rôle which “immaculate conception” has played from the earliest times. That in itself it is not impossible the animal kingdom sufficiently attests. With man, however, the conditions are so disposed that both, ovum- and sperm-cell, are required in order to conduct the Kamma and cause it to take hold.
If one asks: “But could not this also happen outside a maternal womb?” I reply: “I do not know.” It certainly does not happen with man. It happens with cold-blooded creatures, with dogs, and so forth. In the botanical gardens at Peradeniya, Ceylon, in the climate the most perfect in the world for vegetation, there are several trees--the _Bertholetia excelsa_ of Brazil, for example--which, despite the similarity of the climate to that of their native haunts, as yet have resisted all attempts to propagate them. It simply is so! Actuality lays down its own laws because it is itself law. Science can do nothing but hobble along as best she may in the wake of all these facts, and endeavour to accommodate herself to them. But what bears witness in favour of the Buddha-thought is precisely the impossibility of getting fecundation to take place outside a womb, or of bringing it about by introducing sperm into the uterus by artificial means, of which latter proceeding a single, not altogether unequivocal instance is reported by an American gynæcologist. What is needed is the living energy which for a limited period vibrates in the material like the energy in the plucked string of a lute. It is just this vibrating energy in it which first makes the material to be material, _i.e._ the thing that is capable of a unique attunement.
And here we come to the most important question of all:--
“Is a human Kamma always obliged to take fresh hold precisely of human _I_-material? Would it not be possible for once, that human Kamma should be attuned to animal material or reverse wise, animal Kamma to human material?” To this the answer is: Kamma can take hold only where there is material that itself is the form of a Kamma. How far down in the kingdom of living creatures this material extends cannot be said any more than in the case of a flame can be indicated exactly how far the circle of its radiance extends, the precise limit stated at which it gives place to darkness. And just as, despite this, the flame has a definite circle of radiance, so Kamma has a definite sphere of operation, albeit no science--such as zoology or anthropology and so forth--is in a position to establish this thesis. Kamma takes hold where it can take hold--that is to say, where in the material of procreation there vibrate energies to which it is uniquely attuned; and in the scale of living creatures it reaches just as far as it is able to reach.
In the Jatakas, the birth-stories of the Buddha, we see him in Samsāra ranging this whole scale through from the lowest stages of the animal kingdom right up to the worlds of the gods, ever and again planting foot there where the Kamma was attuned at the moment of collapse.
It is a fact of experience that between living beings there exist peculiar consonances. To a stone or a tree no tie of compassion binds us. Compassion only begins at the animal world, and its limits are individual, and vary according to bringing up. With many compassion is entirely confined to human beings; more especially is this the case with those brought up in the shadow of monotheistic beliefs. In pantheism, on the contrary, as it has prevailed in India from the earliest days, the boundary line of compassion runs right down into the lowest animal kingdom. Meanwhile, among us, too, those incapable of feeling compassion for a dog, a horse, a cow, a cage-bird, are very few.
In the last analysis the capacity for compassion consists in the peculiar attunement, consonance existing between one _I_-energy and other _I_-energies. Where, as in the case of the stone, there are no _I_-energies, there can likewise be no compassion.
In the Buddha-thought the classification of the phenomena of life adopted is one peculiar to itself alone. The usual crude divisions into stone, plant, animal, and man, or into inorganic and organic, count for nothing here. All these are based upon the assumption that things are fixed quantities, identities; hence they prescribe artificial preconditions, and consequently have no value in themselves but only with reference to some such determined end as increased facility of comprehension. In the Buddha-thought all life-phenomena divide themselves into these two classes--those that have power to act upon me, stimulate or excite me, set me in sympathetic vibration and correspondingly be set in sympathetic vibration by me, and those with which this is not more or not yet the case.
We are bound to admit--and all physiological phenomena bear witness to it--that the ovum- and sperm-cell are those forms of development of the _I_-process in which the _I_-energy of the individuals concerned reveals itself in its purest and most intimate, because most intrinsic form. If they are torn apart from the whole in the act of generation, yet are they able to furnish the new _I_-material, because they keep the _I_-energy vibrating sufficiently long in themselves to be able to answer to the Kamma peculiarly attuned to them.
Such an apprehension of things would seem like a slap in the face for biology and the whole history of evolution, and here the task of the Buddha-thought is to come to an understanding with the theory of descent if it is to prove satisfactory to the man of education.
To begin with, one must be quite clear on this point--that the whole theory of descent is nothing but a form of reading the biological facts, a theory in the strictest sense of the word. As a consequence it has value only with reference to certain ends. First, in order to group together under one main heading the enormous miscellany of facts--thus, for didactic ends. And secondly, read from below upwards instead of from above downwards, that is, apprehended as a theory of evolution instead of as a theory of descent, it suggests a life-value of such inspiring power as in this respect might also be set alongside the ideas of God and of the state--the idea of a development of mankind that progresses ever further and further. This idea, of course, is much older than Darwin, but it was only in his teaching that for the first time it assumed requisite reality.
The evolution theory is far removed from Darwin’s original teaching upon natural selection and the survival of the fittest. It has only been read into it by this age of ours ever hungering after life-values. Man must have something to which to cling in the dread wastes of endlessness; he must have something that points beyond this life--something to which he can relate this life as a whole. To an age whose belief in God more and more dwindles away, the evolution theory is an invaluable substitute. Even if it yields no real nourishment, yet does it point in emblem beyond this life of the individual, and soothes like the sight of a beautiful picture. That in reality one can only speak of evolution where one has at hand a standard one can apply to it, to the progress made--in other words, where one can measure it; this men forget and willingly forget, for this single consideration perforce flings the whole idea of progressive evolution into the category of illusions. We must have an absolute point of departure if we are to speak of evolution in itself. This we no more possess than we possess an absolute space to which we can relate its motion. Where an absolute point of departure is lacking, the idea of evolution is as meaningless as the idea of absolute motion. The evolutional is “interpreted into” the facts by main force. To declare man to be more evolved than the monads, savours of a limited despotism. The directly opposite view were every whit as possible. Since the monads achieve life with an infinitely much simpler apparatus than man, they therefore stand higher in evolution; for “it is in limitation that the master is revealed.” A great many animals can do very much more than man with his organ of thought, the main purpose of which, when all is said and done, would appear to consist in putting obstacles between him and actual life, and subjecting him to the tyranny of concepts. In point of fact, however, the miracle of the cells is everywhere the same, in the monads as in the brain-cells, and one position is all as futile as the other.
In the fact that science as represented by biology is particularly qualified to adopt the development-idea in the form of the theory of evolution, and to make use of it, she shows her deep-lying and essential fellowship with faith. For where in this sense there is development, there is beginning; where there is beginning, there is an absolute; and where there is an absolute, there is faith. To honest, genuine thinking, every thing, every moment of beginning, whether of a real or of a conceptual nature, leads back to a beginninglessness. In the simple existence of life, that is, of anything that is alive, its beginninglessness is already implied. With this the evolution idea is deprived of all possibility. Here development signifies nothing but the unfolding of the characteristics involved in the material laid hold of. Actual development proceeds just as much from seed to blossom as from blossom to seed. A moment of _evolution_ is as little to be found in the happenings of the world as in a burning flame. To hold one world-period as more developed than another is a childish position. Every moment demonstrates, simply by its existence, that it is _the_ form of adaptation which just at that moment is the only possible and therefore necessary one. The world of the cosmic nebula--as being the blossom of earlier worlds, the seed of later ones--is as developed as the world of the ichthyosaurus, as the world of the _homo sapiens_. All are forms of the series of self-attunings, each after other. To call the world of the _now_ more developed than the world of the Coal Age were somewhat the same as to call the descent of a stone after it has been falling for five seconds more developed than when it has been falling for one second. The downward velocity after one second is _the_ adaptation just as much as is the downward velocity after five seconds. It only shows the childishness of the biological apprehension of things that it should still continue to find satisfaction in such trivialities, based wholly as these are upon concepts of its own fabrication.
But as already said, in the original teaching of Darwin nothing is to be found of such conceptions. He was a good Christian who had not the remotest idea of setting up a primordial cell as competitor against the _bon dieu_, or of aping him with such like theories. And when he happens to meet him on his way, he humbly pulls off his hat like Hodge in presence of “squire.”
The essence of Darwinism is contained in the theory of selection. Against this theory reproach has been brought that it embraces in its scope only the transformations, not the arising of living creatures. Rarely has theory encountered reproach more childish and mistaken. That is found fault with, which precisely constitutes the very greatness of the thought.
Darwin’s thesis is as follows:--
“Given the existence of organic matter, given its tendencies to transmit its characteristics. Given, finally, the life conditions of the organic matter--these things in their totality are the causes of the present and past conditions of organic nature.”