Part 17
A Buddha, in short, is a man who dares to _live_ this his insight that there are no concepts and accordingly nothing conceived, but only a “conceiving.” Hence his attitude towards many questions, and above all to that question as to how one ought to picture to oneself a Buddha, or one who after this life is re-born no more.
The scheme of the questions runs thus: 1. Where is he re-born? 2. Is he not re-born? 3. Is he re-born as well as not re-born? 4. Is he neither re-born nor yet not re-born?
To all these sophistical questions the stereotyped answer of the Buddha is, “That does not apply”--an answer, naturally, which gives plenty of scope for the profoundest conjectures and hypotheses, but which only means that the question is wrongly put and therefore renders impossible any answer at all. A being that with this as his last existence, is proceeding towards extinction, that will never again be re-born _is no longer existent_, even in the form of concept; hence the whole question is meaningless.
Here, again, it is impossible to do anything like justice to the whole problem with the chess-moves of a profound play of thought: only a witticism meets the case. All this ingenious logic that would fain take the measure of actuality with the laws of identity and contradictories as with some yard-stick, which advances against truth with the apparently irresistible demonstrating force of its “aut ... aut,” resembles nothing so much as those ingenious questions with which the child is wont to tease the grown-up person as to the nature and dwelling-place of Santa Claus. Another child would be able to answer these questions with an equal ingenuity; the grown-up person is powerless to meet them. In the same way the scholars of the west would be perfectly capable of meeting and satisfying the questions of a Vacchagotta with equal “acuteness of logic.” The Buddha cannot do it. All he can do is to try to sweep away the accumulated rubbish of misunderstood concepts, and on the thus cleared foundation, cause a new clean structure of thought to arise, the essence whereof resides in comprehending that such a thing as the foregoing question refers to has no existence, neither abstractly nor actually; hence, that the question is in itself devoid of meaning.
This is the whole secret here lying hidden. The interpretation given by Oldenburg to the words of the nun Khemā, are based upon a complete misunderstanding of the entire Buddha-thought, as is everything else he says concerning the final goal of Buddhism. But that pertains properly to the Nibbāna teaching.
Buddhism is the doctrine of actuality, and its value as a view of the world from the standpoint of epistemology, lies in the fact that it teaches us to accept actuality as actuality. To this idea it is itself a martyr, inasmuch as its own teaching here is nothing ideally fixed and fast, but only an incitation to experience it in one’s own self; it is “a raft, designed for escape; not designed for retention.” Hence, is it said in the powerful Dhātuvibhañga Sutta--Sutta CXL., _Majjhima Nikāya_--“‘I am,’ monk, is a believing. ‘Such am I,’ is a believing. ‘I shall be,’ is a believing. ‘I shall not be,’ is a believing. ‘I shall have a form,’ is a believing. ‘I shall be formless,’ is a believing. ‘I shall have perception,’ is a believing. ‘I shall be devoid of perception,’ is a believing. To entertain believings is to be ill. To entertain believings is to be infirm. To entertain believings is to be sick. When, however, all entertaining of believings is overcome, then is one called a right thinker.”
* * * * *
And now it may be objected:--
“If there are no concepts, _i.e._ things conceived, at all, but only an individual conceiving, an external, self-renewing reaction to the external world, how is the possibility of our various experiences to be explained?”
To this the reply is:--
Experiences, as understood in the vulgar sense, there are none whatever. Our perceptions are purely token-values out of which experiences may be derived in the same way that practical results may be derived out of a sum of algebraical token-values by cancelling out one against the other. Here must be borne in mind what was treated of in our sixth Essay. With the perception “green” I get no positive content of knowledge, but merely the fact “not-red, not-yellow, not-blue,” and so forth.
At this point we are confronted by the so-called epistemological problem, to the which, therefore, we now must devote some little attention.
The question which forms the subject-matter of this problem is this: How is it possible from bare perceptions, mere sense-impressions, ever to arrive at conscious ideas, concepts, experiences?
This problem is associated above all with the name of Kant.
Starting with the idea that the sense-impressions received from without, contain no element out of which experience, _i.e._ an inner connection of individual impressions, could ever be developed, he taught that in the subject there was contained a business capital, so to speak, which, given _a priori_ to all experience, upon the occasion of the activity of the organs of sense, came to fruition. This business capital he called the given _a priori_ faculty of cognition.
The practical significance of this teaching lies not so much in itself as in the fact that in contrast to it the position of the natural sciences is formulated all the more clearly and distinctly: the passage from bare perceptions to experience is of a purely empirical nature.
The erroneous features in such ideas find some support in certain misunderstood physiological and pathological facts.
Physiology teaches that the human infant does not “see” but only “looks,” _i.e._ he is the percipient of impressions from without in virtue of the existence of sense organs, but he attaches no meaning to these impressions. It is the same with the grown-up person after certain lesions of the cerebral cortex, in animals from which the brain has been artificially removed, and so forth. From this the conclusion is drawn that bare perceptions may be transmuted into experiences and that the condition of experience can again sink back into a condition of bare perception.
Such ideas are supported by the teachings of many philosophers who make the young living being to enter the world as a _tabula rasa_, so to speak--as an empty pot which only now is to be filled with material from this world.
All such ideas of the existence of bare perceptions, apart from any content of experience, are based upon a misuse of the word “perception.” The infant has no “perceptions.” He “experiences” under the circumstances and antecedent conditions proper to himself. It is only we, the adult, who, looking back, can speak of the existence of bare perceptions at this stage, somewhat as, looking back, we can record of Cæsar’s Commentaries: “Written in the year so and so before Christ.” Wherever there are perceptions, a certain content of experience also is always present, were it only this, that with respect to any definite perception one has no experience at all! To separate perception from experience and then pose the question: “How can pure perceptions pass into experience?” is the same as to separate shell from kernel and then ask, “How can the kernel ever get into the shell?”
The truth is this: The kernel cannot get into the shell at all; both alike are the outcome of a single process of growth. And in the selfsame way experience cannot get into the perceptions at all; both alike are the outcome of a single process of growth. We learn to experience as the flame learns to burn, the flower to blow. We can do nothing save “conceive,” lay hold of the outer world. Experiences, as imagined in vulgar thought, there are not. Such would be “concepts,” and where there are “concepts” there must be “things conceived.” Where these are, there must be identities. Where there are identities, there can be no processes. Where there are no processes, there can be no actuality.
All that we call experience is, so to speak, of the nature of a parallax. Otherwise put: All our knowledge is only the expression of our ignorance. I can say of anything that I know it, only as set off against the total mass of all that I do not know. An _actual_ experience would require that I should be able to prognosticate something with _unconditioned_ exactitude.
It may further be objected:--
If there are no actual experiences, how can I ever come to have this experience--that there are no experiences? For if it also is no actual experience it has no value. If, on the other hand, it is an actual experience, how is such a thing possible?
The answer is:--
Through an intuitive comprehension of my own self, whereto I receive the inciting impulse from the Buddha-teaching.
With this, we come to the final objection:--
“If there are no concepts, what then is that as which I conceive myself?” In plain words, we are now confronted by that pivot and pole of all thinking--What is self-consciousness?
On the problem of self-consciousness, a teaching is compelled to show whether it is actual or not. For nothing in the world has sense and meaning in itself, but acquires such only through its relation to me, only from out of self-consciousness.
To the question, “What is self-consciousness?” the answer given is, “Consciousness of oneself.” That, however, is an answer which in subtlety and ambiguity outdoes every utterance of the Pythian oracle. For it may just as well mean, “The consciousness of a self in me”--the expression of a pure absolute--as, “The consciousness conscious of itself”--the expression of a pure relative. Self-consciousness is the oracle of nature. Faith interprets this oracle in the former sense; science in the latter.
Therewith, however, both are at odds with themselves. For a pure absolute that becomes conscious of itself, that enters into relation with itself, is an absolute no longer. And a pure relative that enters into relations with itself is equally no longer a pure relative.
“Transcending these two opposites the Tathāgata points out the Truth in the Mean.”
Is there any mean here betwixt these opposites?
A wandering monk asks the Buddha:--
“How is it, Gotama? Is there an _I_?”--an Atta, self, as identical with itself.
The Buddha remains silent. The other continues his question:--
“How is it, Gotama? Is there not an _I_?”
The Buddha still maintains silence, and the other goes his way.
If one does not understand the Buddha, it is impossible to interpret this colloquy other than does Oldenburg, for example, in his _Buddha_. But the meaning is quite otherwise than as there given. We here stand before that which from the standpoint of epistemology constitutes the keystone of the whole Buddha-thought. To understand it fully, we must take a plunge into the heart of modern physics.
One of the most important forward steps taken by physics--if not technically, perhaps, yet easily the most important epistemologically--is its insight in the domain of interference phenomena, especially in the examples of the same afforded by light. A ray of light reflected back upon itself interferes with itself, _i.e._ it forms in itself “stationary waves” which present light as “non-light.”
To this paradoxical mode of expression, however, one is only compelled so long as one identifies light with the energy itself. For the site of interference, the nodal point of the vibrations, is just as much “energy” as is the trough of the vibration. And so if one assumes light itself to be the energy, one here has a light without light. In truth, however, light is nothing but an expression of the energy in virtue of which it exists, and it is a stroke of genius on the part of modern physics--one, to be sure, which it has perpetrated unknown to itself--that in interference it has lighted on the one single possibility of making energies perceptible to sense in that one form in which alone they are capable of being made sense-perceptible--_as a pure negative_, a pure _privation_ in the sense-activity of me the observer. As all languages become alike in silence, so all energies become alike in interferences. As silence only means that there are languages, so interference only means that there are energies.
With the fact “interference,” accordingly, science bears witness against herself, inasmuch as thereby she brings before our eyes the existence of actual energies in the form of the negative itself. That is why I have just called the phenomena of interference the most important step epistemologically that modern physics has yet taken. For if science would but recognize this fact for that which it really is, she would find herself obliged to remodel her whole scheme of thought from the foundation upward.
The--for the beholder--purely negative character of the interference has its basis in the entry of the energy into itself. With this we stand in presence of the Buddha-thought.
Here the fact “self-consciousness” becomes a pure interference phenomenon of _I_-energy. As such it is a pure entering of the _I_-energy into itself. As such, again, it is, on the one hand, a pure negative for the whole external world; on the other hand, to the individual himself, it is a something _immediately_ given, where it is simply a matter for correct interpretation, and that, here, in an immediately given, perforce can only be intuitive.
In this insight into the nature of self-consciousness, the _I_, more sharply than anywhere else, defines itself as a something that only comprehends itself, while at the same time comprehending the world as being incomprehensible. In this insight the silence of the Buddha in the face of Vacchagotta’s questions explains itself. For, as long as the _terminus technicus_ “interference” is not formulated, the question is unanswerable. An interference at once is and is not. It is the immediately given for the individual himself--the not given at all for others, for beholders.
The acceptance and elaboration of this thought is facilitated by the data of physiology and psychology.
The entire course of man’s development is to be apprehended as a surging back by degrees upon himself, a “re-flecting” in the most literal sense of the word. Man is the “reflecting” living being, the word being understood as well in its physical as in its psychical sense. The whole process of development from infant to adult is a gradual becoming acquainted with himself. Disgust, shame, are as yet unknown to the infant. These are evolved only as phenomena of “reflection,” as a wave of experience running back upon the individual himself, and finding its conclusion in the matured self-consciousness. This self, however, is the stationary wave; at every moment the same and yet another; the--for me--_immediately certain_, as which it presents itself in consciousness; the--for others--not present at all.
In the foregoing it has been shown that both these varieties of attempts at world-conceptions, as well that based upon the concept of _substans_ as that which takes the whole play of world-events for pure relation-values, thereby deprive their own selves of the possibility of existence, since from both points of view a world of concepts never could come to be. The Buddha solves the problem by pointing out that there is no such thing as a world of concepts; in the _I_-world, however, the world itself and the world _as such_--the real world and the world of ideation--merge into one in the interference “self-consciousness.” And this is the answer to the question, “How must the world be fashioned to render possible the fact that it is present _as such_?”
* * * * *
The insight into the essential nature of self-consciousness is _the_ intuition.
The value of an intuition is to be judged by what it accomplishes as a working hypothesis.
What does the Buddha-thought accomplish here?
The answer is:--
It clears up the whole relationship of mental life towards the concept of _substans_.
Every consistent application of the laws of thought seems perforce to conduct to an “unconditioned constant” situated at the root of things, lying, however, beyond all possibility of demonstration.
In this matter three positions are conceivable:--
1. The position of faith which sees in this the proof of an imperceptible to sense in itself--an absolute.
2. The position of science which sees in this a consequence of the imaginative faculty. Its ally is philosophical scepticism--or rather, criticism, chiefly as represented by Hume.
3. That position formulated by Kant with his “thing in itself,” which may be briefly characterized as a position of the most resolute indifference towards this most important of all epistemological phenomena. When in his _History of Materialism_, Lange, in agreement with Kant, says: “What right have we to occupy ourselves with ‘things in themselves’ at all?” this simply means, “What right have we to think at all?” By this stroke, which Kant carried out by the formulation of his “thing in itself,” he has proved himself one of the most hurtful of all noxious creatures found on the tree of the mental life of humanity. Here he has done as much harm as scholastic obtuseness only can do when it steps forth in the polished, mirror-clear armour of a complete logic. But this is not the place to enter any further into that matter.
Upon all these three possibilities the Buddha sheds a simultaneous flood of light, illuminating sceptical criticism especially, in the most exceptional manner.
This latter proves in entirely incontestable fashion that a _substans_ seated at the root of things has no existence, yet all its proving possesses not the slightest conclusiveness. Hume, with all his acuteness, falls completely under that paradigm given by R. Avenarius in his _Kritik der reinen Erfahrung_, where a savage contends with a missionary as to whether or no a spirit inhabits in all things. The (unbelieving) missionary is made to say, “I have investigated all these things and never anywhere have I found the spirit.” To which the savage counters, “I have investigated them all too, and never anywhere have I failed to find the spirit.” Indeed, this example admits of being extended thus far in that the savage must feel himself reinforced in his notion of an immaterial _substans_ by the very fact that the other, despite all his search, has found nothing. He would say, “Just _because_ you have found nothing, therefore I am right!”
Like the two opposing views of the world, criticism also operates with a contradiction of itself. To be consistent, the criticism of Hume, as every criticism, ought to run somewhat as follows:--
“A _substans_ in things is not demonstrable; these present themselves to me only as a bundle of relation-values. If there is no _substans_ in things, how comes it that the idea of a _substans_ finds a place in me? Through experience? That, here, were a contradiction in itself; for this idea exists in me, the critic, only in so far as I deny its existence. Consequently there must be something given in me which supplies the foundation for this idea. But I can unravel myself also, to the very last thread and here, too, find nothing but a bundle of relation-values. The one thing in this bundle which I cannot embrace in my comprehension, is this my own capacity of unravelling myself, _i.e._ my consciousness. On this, consequently, I must in fairness withhold myself from passing any judgment.”
With this, thought would have so prepared itself--so far as such a thing is possible from its own resources--as to be able to take up and work out the Buddha-thought as inciting impulsion.
From this point the Buddha-teaching, put briefly, would continue:--
All human thinking, without exception, operates with the concept of a _substans_ lying at the root of things. Thou also, the critic, must conform thyself to the rule. It is a _necessity of thought_. The ground of this is, that in point of fact a _substans_ does lurk in things; not as a “constant in itself,” however,--such a thing, to be sure, thou canst through thy rigid analysis exclude--but solely as _that which gives the continuity of the process_, its maintenance, as an _actual_ law of formation. This law of formation _becomes_ accessible to thee, the individual, in consciousness. To see into that, however, thou must be taught. So long as that does not come to pass, it is a matter of taste or of natural inclination as to whether thou wilt interpret the facts accessible to sense as significant of _substans_, or of the absence of _substans_. For in the facts themselves there lies nothing that impels either in the one direction or the other. The decision lies solely with that unique something _by means of which_ you bring all these facts before yourself--namely, with consciousness. To bring this itself before you, however, as a “fact,” this is as impossible as that any one should be able to bring his back before him though he should turn himself about never so swiftly and dexterously. To comprehend this unique something--for this, instruction is needed; and following upon this instruction, _growing insight_ (intuition). If, however, thou wilt permit thyself to be instructed, then shalt thou learn that both these thought-necessities--that of adequate cause as that of _substans_--here merge into one. _The idea of “substans”_ here becomes a form of the law of adequate cause. Both necessities of thought--that of adequate cause and that of _substans_--merge and blend into one in the Kamma teaching of the Buddha.
With this the circle is closed; the end interlocks with the beginning. We have discharged our self-imposed task of assigning the Buddha-thought its place in the life of the mind.
Nothing has been said touching the problem of the freedom of the will, nor on the problem of deity which involves that of immortality.
The former of these is the problem of morality; the latter, the problem of religion. Their due place is in the successor to this volume.
CONCLUSION
It is clear, without further need of demonstration, that with the Kamma teaching of the Buddha there is given the ferment of an actual morality as of an actual religion. A morality and a religion are _actual_ when they are functions of cognition.
All morality rests upon selflessness. If selflessness is not to be blind asceticism or equally blind training, it must have a motive.
This is supplied by the Kamma teaching.
For where I apprehend myself as a process that sustains itself through itself, _i.e._ through its volitions, I know that in every moment I myself fashion the next moment, and with this present life, the life that shall follow it. In correct insight I become in the most literal sense the architect of my fate.
From this, selflessness follows as an evident necessity.
All religion consists in the need of looking beyond this life, of relating it to another, a higher. The Kamma teaching reveals to me that it is the succeeding life to which this life “is related.”
From this, morality and religion follow as functions of cognition.
One perceives that such a teaching as this perforce involves profound changes in the appraisement of life-values, and along with this, changes in the relations of the individual to his environment, which includes changes in his social relationships.