Part 3
Amid this swarm of searchers for truth the young Siddhattha also made his appearance. “Black-haired, in the bloom of manhood,” in spite of weeping and wailing parents, in spite of a loved and loving wife, in spite of a dear young son, he left his father’s halls where he had led a life of rarest pomp and pleasure to enter shaven of head and garbed in yellow, upon the inclement life-path of the penitent. It was the force of thought that drove him forth. He gazed face to face on the transiency of all that lives, and troubled, tormented by this irresistible, unseizable flood of appearances, he turned his mental eye inwards, resolved to find there in the depths of his own _I_ that hold and stay which the outer world everywhere denied to him, the weary. Truthfulness toward oneself, seriousness of search regardless of consequences, an unfailing sense of reality, that was the foundation upon which that most banal of all phrases, adapted as is no other to coquetting with itself--the phrase, “All is transient,”--became for him that unique teaching of which he himself could say with ample right, “It is the teaching which is founded upon itself.”
In one of the Buddhist monk’s chants there occurs the phrase, “One single thing--he thinks it out!” This, in few words, is what the Buddha did. He thought out to an end, _one_ thought--the thought of transiency. I will not call his teaching the grandest or the deepest of all teachings. Grand, likewise, is Heraklitus’s teaching of the All-becoming; deep, likewise, is the Vedanta teaching of the All-one in Brahman; but the teaching of the Buddha is more than this--_it is actual_. Through this it obtains that really compelling character such as is possessed by actuality alone. For there is only one thing that is compelling--truth; and there is only one thing that is true--actuality.
Through this its truthfulness, his teaching has conquered half a world; not by fire and sword but even as truth conquers, by demonstration, by teaching. And so it now stands, old by two thousand years, before the portals of western culture, and claims entrance not into the cloudy domain of a vague mysticism or a crude pantheism, but into the realm of clear, clean thinking, as fulfilment of that which never can be attained by the means at the disposal of science. Comprehension, a world-conception, this goal of all mental life, made impossible by science in its false apprehension of the task--this the Buddha resolves in the limitation that reveals the genius.
Whoso, if only from afar, has scented the import of the Buddha and his teaching, must feel that here he has to do with something wholly unique. One can place on one side not only all the religions of the world but also all the philosophical and scientific systems, and upon the other Buddhism will take its place alone. Yet not as their antithesis. Buddhism is the teaching of actuality, and actuality has no antitheses, because itself the union of antitheses. The Buddha laid hold of actuality there where alone it can be laid hold of--in one’s own _I_. Here he found the secret law, the sacred riddle that the chorus outside there mockingly sings us, like to some oracle of Delphi at one and the same time revealing and concealing.
All religions founded upon revelation are of a decidedly revolutionary nature. Buddhism is a pure evolution, a process of mental development in which thought, so to speak, passes a culminating point and works on with reversed signs. This reversal of all life-values has set in with a new point of view, from which the _struggle for no more existence_, so unintelligible for us, follows as a logical necessity. Henceforth truth is no more the servitor of life, but life of truth. As a candle manifests itself through itself, by consuming itself in burning, so does the _I_ manifest itself through itself in expending itself in thinking. In this teaching he is not great who loves most, but he who thinks most.
The full scope of this can only be understood later; for the moment it may serve the reader as preparation for what is to follow. Let him know then, at the very outset, that here he enters the realm of a man who seeks not life but truth--a man for whom life has no value in itself but only as an instrument of truth. Him I call a sorry seeker for truth who in his investigation of the riddle of life, sets life itself as sacrosanct in a place of security, making that which is to be measured into the measure itself.
To unite in passion, to contrive clever arrangements that insure the success of the business of propagation and the rearing of the young generation, these the animals also can do; their arrangements for living together in herds are by far more ingenious than those of men; but the capacity to doubt, to question, to seek--of these even the most highly developed animals possess only faint suggestions.
To doubt is the duty of man, and the Buddha is the representative type of humanity, because _the_ doubter. We common men, we do indeed doubt of this and of that, and pique ourselves in no small measure upon our powers of judgment; but we none of us get any further than the symptoms. He alone seized at one grasp the entire, ever-changing host of doubts and questions by the root, with the daring of genius demanding to know the right to exist of life itself. This the reader ought well to bear in mind, otherwise for him the Buddha-thought must always retain something strange and forbidding, even as for the honest townsman we all know, a man who dares go up to High Authority Itself--whether established in heaven or on earth--and ask for its identification papers, ever remains in some sort a fear-inspiring figure.
I now pass on to a point more external, but one, none the less, that has its own importance in an introduction to the thought-world of the Buddha.
Buddhism is not only the oldest of the three world-religions, but also the only one of the three that is of Aryan origin.
The significance of this fact lies for me not in the racial question, but in the matter of language. The tongue in which the Buddha preached, taught, and thought, whether it was the Pāḷi itself or some dialect related to it, belongs to the Indo-Germanic stem. The root-words, the grammatical constructions, are akin to those found in European languages. Without any more said, we see how deep is the tie that binds us to the Buddha. Mental life can mix and blend with mental life only through the medium of language. If no congruity exists between one language and another, neither can there be any congruity of thought. We know what enormous difficulties block the way of any European scholar who would force an entrance into the thought-world of the Chinese. So much so, that even at this late day it is still possible to argue the point as to whether the Chinese have any conception of deity at all. To this day it remains open to every translator to interpret Lao Tse, for example, either as a “god-inspired man”--to quote a good Christian translator--or as a free-lance in the fields of thought.
Something similar, if in somewhat less positive terms, may be advanced concerning the Semitic stem. Who can say whether the Indo-German has ever rightly understood Semitism as the deserts of Judea and Arabia have hatched it out. The absurdities and confusions of thought in which Indo-German peoples find themselves entangled the moment they make the attempt to understand and think it out leave it fairly open to doubt. It may be, that pure Semitism, that is to say, that flat contradiction to sound sense, a personal god, can only be perfectly digested with the help of the Semitic root language. The thinking of the Indo-Germanic peoples, or rather of the Indo-Germanic root language, has set itself against this bald crudity from the very beginning. At the idea of predestination, over which the Semite Paul balances his way with considerable natural agility, the half-Aryan Augustine only comes to grief. For the brutality with which the latter champions this dogma is nothing else but the expression of the brutality with which he forcibly squeezed his own mind beneath its yoke. For us the Aryan speaking and thinking, a religion that in its natural logical consequences conducts to such an anomaly as predestination, is either at bottom a moral monstrosity, and so incapable of becoming religion, or else it is a thing misunderstood.
On the other hand, I should refer the intellectual derailment which the Buddha-thought has undergone in Tibet, China, and Japan, in no small measure to the lack of congruity that exists between the Indo-German and the Mongolian languages. The tongue of the Mongol is simply incapable of rendering exactly the content of the Pāḷi syllables.
_Buddhism is the teaching of actuality_, and its language also--the Pāḷi--as regards content of actuality, takes a leading place among languages.
As upon one hand one may look upon the phenomena of life as processes, actualities, things alive, and upon the other as things rounded off in themselves, rigid, strictly defined, realities, according as, following mental disposition, here the one there the other mode of comprehension predominates, so in one language does the thrust of the actual predominate, and in the other the thrust of the real, the objective. In the one the _dynamic_ predominates, in the other the _static_.
A language of an eminently static character is the Latin; whence the impossibility of finding another equally good to take its place in a well-ordered _corpus juris_, with which latter capacity for definition counts above everything. What jurisprudence requires is the complete, the bounded (objectively as well as conceptually) realities. It lops away everything actual, which at all times and places is a _processive motion_, a species of _status nascens_, until comprehended it can be grasped, pretty much as out of the actual surface of the earth in a state of constant transformation the land-surveyor cuts out a piece, settles it as something real and seizable, so that as such its owner at will can exchange it, till the time when the millenium hand on the horologe of the world indicates an advance and renders necessary a new settlement, a new definition. This method is quite sufficient where it is only a question of arriving at definite ends. It corresponds to that which in another place was styled the _re-actual_ comprehension of things, and the Latin word _res_, considered etymologically, points directly to this “re-actual” feature.
In complete opposition to Latin the Pāḷi is a language of an eminently actual character. The seeming offences against logic, that with more or less good nature have been laid to the charge of the Buddha by western scholars, have their rise in this content of actuality that distinguishes the language on one hand and its thinking on the other. In actuality there is nothing defined or definable to be found--nothing but a relentless processive movement. Every definition is a compromise with actuality, and is always to be held, as such, by every genuine thinker.
It is owing to this content of actuality in Buddhism and its language that so many expressions are found in it for which a fitting translation is scarcely or not at all to be found. In language, also, a gradual stiffening process is taking place amongst us which renders us ever more capable in definition, and ever more incapable in the comprehension of actuality. Here quite evidently we are caught in a vicious circle. We are proud of this our ability in defining, and imagine we have comprehended the thing itself when we have succeeded in decorating it with a definition. In such cases, however, all we have really done is to fling bridges of thought, as it were, high up over things, which permit us to hop from one conceptual “place” to another without once wetting even our toes in actuality. On the Rhine near Bonn there stands hewn in stone these words: “Caesar primus flumini pontem imposuit.” There are not a few minds associated with the lecture-room and laboratory who take themselves for Cæsars when they “impose” new definitions upon things, upon actuality. The riddles of life in this wise are neatly and perfectly resolved in definitions; which, after all, is nothing very much to wonder at with riddles of life that for the most part only exist in the form of definitions.
All things in the world are so constituted that with them concept and object are separable: the concept admits of being “manipulated” apart from the object. And all mental life in a certain sense just amounts to the attempt to get concept and object to coincide--an attempt that eternally fails, because eternally losing itself in unending series. One thing only in all the world is so constituted that in regard to it no separation of concept and object is found--I myself! For that which I conceive myself as, that even I myself am; and every attempt to form a concept is just a form of myself. Here the concept of myself is experience, actuality itself. I myself am the unique, to me accessible, pure actuality of the world. _Buddhism is the teaching of actuality._ It starts out with the only pure actuality of the world, and from this point proceeds to suck the entire play of world-events without exception into the whirlpool of its thinking. And with this we find ourselves in the presence of the Buddha-thought itself.
V
THE DOCTRINE OF THE BUDDHA
I begin with the question that concludes the third essay: “How can it be possible for faith and science to possess opposed conceptions when both actually start out from one and the same given thing, the world?”
All that exists presents itself on one hand as “something that is,” and on the other as “something that happens”--that is to say, as something found in a state of perpetual change, as processes.
Where something happens, there adequate causes must be present. These adequate causes must be forces.
All processes--_i.e._ the entire play of world-events--fall into two great classes: those _that are maintained_, dead processes, and those _that maintain themselves_, living processes; the latter presenting themselves, on the one hand, as processes of combustion, as flame, and on the other as processes of alimentation, as living beings.
All dead processes can be interpreted or read as falls. Their type is the falling stone. A stone does not fall because of an indwelling force that causes its falling; it only falls because it has previously been raised, because between it and the surface of the earth there exists a difference of tension. Its fall thus signifies that force must have been present, in the sense that it must _previously_ have been active; for otherwise the difference in position of stone and surface of the earth could never have come about. When physics interprets the fall of the stone in differing fashion--namely, by having it caused by the attractive force of the earth’s surface in action during the fall--this is purely a working hypothesis, advanced solely in the interest of a uniform physical world-theory.
To much the same effect as the falling stone, every physical happening without exception is to be interpreted or read, whether it concern mechanical, chemical, thermal, electrical, magnetic, or any other such-like phenomena. All alike are to be taken as falls from places of higher to places of lower tension. The import of each and all is only that forces, actuating impulsions, _must once have been present_. In each case we really have to do not with actions but with reactions.
The proof that no actual forces are here at work is to be found in the fact that the process ceases so soon as the differences of tension are adjusted.
This world of reactions is the given province of all science.
Science, because bent upon furnishing demonstration, has a title to existence only where there is nothing that is not perceptible to sense. Where there are actual living processes, there _actual forces must be present_. A force, however, can never be perceptible to sense; for everything perceptible to sense necessitates the question as to its adequate cause--that is, as to the force in virtue of which it exists. Where there are dead, re-actual processes, there forces are not in
## action themselves, and hence force is not a real but only a conceptual
necessity, a mere logical presumption. Hence also in the interpretation of this re-actual world, it is always possible to slur over, to eliminate the question as to actual forces, and to replace these latter by the various differences of tension, of potentiality, and thus remain wholly within the domain of the sensible.
Such a position is quite permissible to a science that devotes itself exclusively to technique, _i.e._ aims at nothing more than to measure and calculate in advance, for it is only re-actual proceedings that admit of being measured and calculated in advance. When such and such a planet will occupy such and such a position in the heavens, this admits of being calculated beforehand with the most perfect accuracy. But whether this next moment I shall twirl my thumb to the right or to the left, that no science, no academy in the world can compute in advance.
The position which science takes up towards the world--a rejection in principle of all that is not perceptible to sense--of necessity involves restriction to the re-actual world, and therewith the mechanical conception of the play of world-events.
Yet once more. This conception is perfectly legitimate so long as it confines itself to the re-actual world. But it becomes an anomaly the moment it seeks to pass beyond this re-actual world--the moment a man tries to read the actual world, the living processes, according to the same scheme--that of a falling. For here it is actual forces that are at work; here the question as to actual forces declines to be eliminated or exempted by acts of intellectual violence that by their repugnancy to common sense bring about their own downfall. Later on we shall have to revert to these attempts to interpret physically living beings, the entire man as a falling, a mere process of adjustment, and to explain consciousness in purely mechanical fashion. Though one should be able to “read” the animal organism after physical formulas in never so far-reaching a manner, though one should be able to co-ordinate the whole process of alimentation, the housekeeping of life, in never so perfect a fashion with the law of the conservation of energy, nothing has been gained withal that might settle the question as to what exactly that is which keeps this mechanism going: such a question is never once touched on at all; nay, by this method of procedure it is deliberately pushed on one side, as much and as long as ever is possible, until straightforward, natural thinking rises in revolt against such behaviour as a learned pastime and demands actuality.
Hence:--
That particular form of mental life which rejects in principle what is not perceptible to sense, thereby of necessity is confined to the re-actual world. If it seeks to encroach upon actual processes, it must arbitrarily leave out of consideration that in them which is _essential_, the forces at work in them,--whereby it falls into absurdities that speedily take their revenge by raising problems that are insoluble.
This form of mental life is universally called “_science_,” whereby, it must be admitted, the more or less active counter-currents--those of the teleological conception of things--are passed over unnoticed. Science, properly speaking, is always _materialistic_, and its conception of the play of world-events always strictly _mechanical_. For it the adequate cause of each occurrence is simply another occurrence. Adequate causes remain perceptible to sense.
Opposite to it stands faith.
Faith is that particular form of mental life which recognizes an “imperceptible to sense in itself,” _i.e._ _believes_, and so doing, assumes a universal “adequate cause in itself” for the entire play of world-events. From this it follows that the living processes are the true province of all faith. In them alone are actual forces, _i.e._ that which is imperceptible to sense, actively at work.
As soon as faith seeks to make use of its intuition, _i.e._ seeks to supply a world-view, it finds itself in the same predicament as science. Just as this latter, as world-theory, is obliged to read the actual processes according to the scheme of the re-actual, so faith as world-theory is obliged to read the re-actual processes according to the scheme of the actual; in other words, it must represent the world, even to the extent that it represents itself as purely a falling, as guided by a divine force. Here not a hair can drop from my head, not a stone fall to the ground, without a divine decree having taken an
## active part therein as adequate cause, an idea which, thought out,
leads to the absurdity of the doctrine of predestination, with which doctrine faith robs herself of the possibility of her own existence. For, where there is predestination, there is no free will; where there is no free will there is no soul; and where there is no soul there is no God.
That which, in being thought out, deprives itself of the possibility of existence is contrary to sense, and as such, a nescience, like illusion and error.
Between and raised above both these opposed positions stands the Buddha.
This is his teaching:--
All that is, all processes whatsoever, whether they be re-actual or whether they be actual, all is Sankhāra. This is the epistemological key-word of Buddhism. Its meaning is, All is of a compounded, of a conditioned nature. The Buddha concurs with modern science in so far as it rejects an uncompounded, an unconditioned, a unity in itself, a soul-substance, or whatever else one chooses to style it. As already shown, for science one event is entirely conditioned by other events; she makes the adequate cause of one phenomenon of life simply other phenomena of life, and thereby frankly remains always in the realm of the sensible, the demonstrable--thereby limits herself, however, to the re-actual side of the world. Among the actual, self-sustaining processes, this position has no foothold whatever; for in these actual forces _must_ be present, and as such never by any means can be perceptible to sense, thus also can never be the subject of science.
One can only speak of an actual view of the world where the _actual_ world is concerned. I comprehend it when I discern the adequate causes of the actual processes, that is, the forces actively at work in them.
Now the word _Sankhāra_ signifies not only “the compounded,” “the conditioned,” but also “the compounding,” “the conditioning,” somewhat the same as the German word _Wirkung_ may equally well be held to signify the result effected by the cause as the actual effecting of that result itself. In the former case it signifies that forces have been present; it has reference to the re-actual world. In the latter case it means that forces _are_ present; it refers to the actual world. Like the word _Wirkung_, the word _Sankhāra_ embraces both these aspects.
With reference to the self-sustaining, actual processes, the teaching of the Buddha proceeds:--
All living beings exist by reason of forces. Accordingly the Buddha here agrees with faith, inasmuch as he recognizes the presence in living beings of what is imperceptible to sense; for a force can never be perceptible to sense.