Part 11

It would be wrong to suppose that the citations given offer any exceptional difficulty. As to the doctrine of the annihilation of Self, the testimony of nearly all those Buddhist texts now accessible to English readers is overwhelming. Perhaps the Sutra of the Great Decease furnishes the most remarkable evidence contained in the "Sacred Books of the East." In its account of the Eight Stages of Deliverance leading to Nirvana, it explicitly describes what we should be justified in calling, from our Western point of view, the process of absolute annihilation. We are told that in the first of these eight stages the Buddhist seeker after truth still retains the ideas of form--subjective and objective. In the second stage he loses the subjective idea of form, and views forms as external phenomena only. In the third stage the sense of the approaching perception of larger truth comes to him. In the fourth stage he passes beyond all ideas of form, ideas of resistance, and ideas of distinction; and there remains to him only the idea of infinite space. In the fifth stage the idea of infinite space vanishes, and the thought comes: _It is all infinite reason._ [Here is the uttermost limit, many might suppose, of pantheistic idealism; but it is only the half way resting-place on the path which the Buddhist thinker must pursue.] In the sixth stage the thought comes, _"Nothing at all exists."_ In the seventh stage the idea of nothingness itself vanishes. In the eighth stage all sensations and ideas cease to exist. And _after_ this comes Nirvana.

The same sutra, in recounting the death of the Buddha, represents him as rapidly passing through the first, second, third, and fourth stages of meditation to enter into "that state of mind to which the Infinity of Space alone is present,"--and thence into "that state of mind to which the Infinity of Thought alone is present,"--and thence into "that state of mind to which nothing at all is specially present,"--and thence into "that state of mind between consciousness and unconsciousness,"--and thence into "that state of mind in which the consciousness both of sensations and of ideas has wholly passed away."

For the reader who has made any serious attempt to obtain a general idea of Buddhism, such citations are scarcely necessary; since the fundamental doctrine of the concatenation of cause and effect contains the same denial of the reality of Self and suggests the same enigmas. Illusion produces action or Karma; Karma, self-consciousness; self-consciousness, individuality; individuality, the senses; the senses, contact; contact, feeling; feeling, desire; desire, union; union, conception; conception, birth; birth, sorrow and decrepitude and death. Doubtless the reader knows the doctrine of the destruction of the twelve Nidanas; and it is needless here to repeat it at length. But he may be reminded of the teaching that by the cessation of contact feeling is destroyed; by that of feeling, individuality; and by that of individuality, _self-consciousness._

*

Evidently, without a preliminary solution of the riddles offered by such texts, any effort to learn the meaning of Nirvana is hopeless. Before being able to comprehend the true meaning of those sutras now made familiar to English readers by translation, it is necessary to understand that the common Occidental ideas of God and Soul, of matter, of spirit, have no existence in Buddhist philosophy; their places being occupied by concepts having no real counterparts in Western religious thought. Above all, it is necessary that the reader should expel from his mind the theological idea of Soul. The texts already quoted should have made it clear that in Buddhist philosophy there is no personal transmigration, and no individual permanent Soul.

[Footnote 1: _Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King._]

II

"O Bhagavat, the idea of a self is no idea; and the idea of a being, or a living person, or a person, is no idea. And why? Because the blessed Buddhas are freed from all ideas."--_The Diamond-Cutter._

And now let us try to understand what it is that dies, and what it is that is reborn,--what it is that commits faults and what it is that suffers penalties,--what passes from states of woe to states of bliss,--what enters into Nirvana after the destruction of self-consciousness,--what survives "extinction" and has power to return out of Nirvana,--what experiences the Four Infinite Feelings after all finite feeling has been annihilated.

It is not the sentient and conscious Self that enters Nirvana. The Ego is only a temporary aggregate of countless illusions, a phantom-shell, a bubble sure to break. It is a creation of Karma,--or rather, as a Buddhist friend insists, it _is_ Karma. To comprehend the statement fully, the reader should know that, in this Oriental philosophy, acts and thoughts are forces integrating themselves into material and mental phenomena,--into what we call objective and subjective appearances. The very earth we tread upon,--the mountains and forests, the rivers and seas, the world and its moon, the visible universe in short,--_is the integration of acts and thoughts,_ is Karma, or, at least, Being conditioned by Karma.[1]

[Footnote 1: "The aggregate actions of all sentient beings give birth to the varieties of mountains, rivers, countries, etc. ... Their eyes, nostrils, ears, tongues, bodies,--as well as their gardens, woods, farms, residences, servants, and maids,--men imagine to be their own possessions; but they are, in truth, only results produced by innumerable actions."

--KURODA, _Outlines of the Mahâyana._

"Grass, trees, earth,--all these shall become Buddha."

--CHŪ-IN-KYŌ."

"Even swords and things of metal are manifestations of spirit: within them exist all virtues (or '_power_') in their fullest development and perfection."--HIZŌ-HŌ-YAKU.

"When called sentient or non-sentient, matter is Law-Body (or '_spiritual body_')."--CHISHŌ-HISHŌ.

"The Apparent Doctrine treats of the four great elements _[earth, fire, water, air]_ as non-sentient. But in the Hidden Doctrine these are said to be the Sammya-Shin (_Samya-Kaya_), or Body-Accordant of the Nyōrai (Tathâgata)."--SOKU-SHIN-JŌ-BUTSU-GI.

"When every phase of our mind shall be in accord with the mind of Buddha, ... then there will not be even one particle of dust that does not enter into Buddhahood."--ENGAKU-SHŌ.]

The Karma-Ego we call Self is mind and is body;--both perpetually decay; both are perpetually renewed. From the unknown beginning, this double--phenomenon, objective and subjective, has been alternately dissolved and integrated: each integration is a birth; each dissolution a death. There is no other birth or death but the birth and death of Karma in some form or condition. But at each rebirth the reintegration is never the reintegration of the identical phenomenon, but of another to which it gives rise,--as growth begets growth, as motion produces motion. So that the phantom-self changes not only as to form and condition, but as to actual personality with every reëmbodiment. There is one Reality; but there is no permanent individual, no constant personality: there is only phantom-self, and phantom succeeds to phantom, as undulation to undulation, over the ghostly Sea of Birth and Death. And even as the storming of a sea is a motion of undulation, not of translation,--even as it is the form of the wave only, not the wave itself, that travels,--so in the passing of lives there is only the rising and the vanishing of forms,--forms mental, forms material. The fathomless Reality does not pass. "All forms," it is written in the _Kongō-hannya-haramitsu-Kyō,_[2] "are unreal: he who rises above all forms is the Buddha." But what can remain to rise above all forms after the total disintegration of body and the final dissolution of mind?

[Footnote 2: Vagra-pragnâ-pâramita-Sutra.]

Unconsciously dwelling behind the false consciousness of imperfect man,--beyond sensation, perception, thought,--wrapped in the envelope of what we call soul (which in truth is only a thickly woven veil of illusion), is the eternal and divine, the Absolute Reality: not a soul, not a personality, but the All-Self without selfishness,--the _Muga no Taiga,--_the Buddha enwombed in Karma. Within every phantom-self dwells this divine: yet the innumerable are but one. Within every creature incarnate sleeps the Infinite Intelligence unevolved, hidden, unfelt, unknown,--yet destined from all the eternities to waken at last, to rend away the ghostly web of sensuous mind, to break forever its chrysalis of flesh, and pass to the supreme conquest of Space and Time. Wherefore it is written in the _Kegon-Kyō_ (Avatamsaka-Sutra): "Child of Buddha, there is not even one living being that has not the wisdom of the Tathâgata. It is only because of their vain thoughts and affections that all beings are not conscious of this.... I will teach them the holy Way;--I will make them forsake their foolish thoughts, and cause them to see that the vast and deep intelligence which dwells within them is not different from the wisdom of the very Buddha."

*

Here we may pause to consider the correspondence between these fundamental Buddhist theories and the concepts of Western science. It will be evident that the Buddhist denial of the reality of the apparitional world is not a denial of the reality of phenomena as phenomena, nor a denial of the forces producing phenomena objectively or subjectively. For the negation of Karma as Karma would involve the negation of the entire Buddhist system. The true declaration is, that what we perceive is never reality in itself, and that even the Ego that perceives is an unstable plexus of aggregates of feelings which are themselves unstable and in the nature of illusions. This position is scientifically strong,--perhaps impregnable. Of substance in itself we certainly know nothing: we are conscious of the universe as a vast play of forces only; and, even while we discern the general relative meaning of laws expressed in the action of those forces, all that which is Non-Ego is revealed to us merely through the vibrations of a nervous structure never exactly the same in any two human beings. Yet through such varying and imperfect perception we are sufficiently assured of the impermanency of all forms,--of all aggregates objective or subjective.

The test of reality is persistence; and the Buddhist, finding in the visible universe only a perpetual flux of phenomena, declares the material aggregate unreal because non-persistent,--unreal, at least, as a bubble, a cloud, or a mirage. Again, relation is the universal form of thought; but since relation is impermanent, how can thought be persistent?... Judged from these points of view, Buddhist doctrine is not Anti-Realism, but a veritable Transfigured Realism, finding just expression in the exact words of Herbert Spencer:--"Every feeling and thought being but transitory;--an entire life made up of such feelings and thoughts being also but transitory;--nay, the objects amid which life is passed, though less transitory, being severally in the course of losing their individualities, whether quickly or slowly,--_we learn that the one thing permanent is the Unknowable Reality hidden under all these changing shapes._"

Likewise, the teaching of Buddhism, that what we call Self is an impermanent aggregate,--a sensuous illusion,--will prove, if patiently analyzed, scarcely possible for any serious thinker to deny. Mind, as known to the scientific psychologist, is composed of feelings and the relations between feelings; and feelings are composed of units of simple sensation which are physiologically coincident with minute nervous shocks. All the sense-organs are fundamentally alike, being evolutional modifications of the same morphological elements;--and all the senses are modifications of touch. Or, to use the simplest possible language, the organs of sense--sight, smell, taste, even hearing--have been alike developed from the skin! Even the human brain itself, by the modern testimony of histology and embryology, "is, at its first beginning, merely an infolding of the epidermic layer;" and thought, physiologically and evolutionally, is thus a modification of touch. Certain vibrations, acting through the visual apparatus, cause within the brain those motions which are followed by the sensations of light and color;--other vibrations, acting upon the auditory mechanism, give rise to the sensation of sound;--other vibrations, setting up changes in specialized tissue, produce sensations of taste, smell, touch. All our knowledge is derived and developed, directly or indirectly, from physical sensation,--from touch. Of course this is no ultimate explanation, because nobody can tell us _what feels the touch._ "Everything physical," well said Schopenhauer, "is at the same time meta-physical." But science fully justifies the Buddhist position that what we call Self is a bundle of sensations, emotions, sentiments, ideas, memories, all relating to the _physical_ experiences of the race and the individual, and that our wish for immortality is a wish for the eternity of this merely sensuous and selfish consciousness. And science even supports the Buddhist denial of the permanence of the sensuous Ego. "Psychology," says Wundt, "proves that not only our sense-perceptions, but the memorial images that renew them, depend for their origin upon the functionings of the organs of sense and movement.... A continuance of this sensuous consciousness must appear to her irreconcilable with the facts of her experience. And surely we may well doubt whether such continuance is an ethical requisite: more, whether the fulfillment of the wish for it, if possible, were not an intolerable destiny."

III

"O Subhûti, if I had had an idea of a being, of a living being, or of a person, I should also have had an idea of malevolence.... A gift should not be given by any one who believes in form, sound, smell, taste, or anything that can be touched."--_The Diamond-Cutter._

The doctrine of the impermanency of the conscious Ego is not only the most remarkable in Buddhist philosophy: it is also, morally, one of the most important. Perhaps the ethical value of this teaching has never yet been fairly estimated by any Western thinker. How much of human unhappiness has been caused, directly and indirectly, by opposite beliefs,--by the delusion of stability,--by the delusion that distinctions of character, condition, class, creed, are settled by immutable law,--and the delusion of a changeless, immortal, sentient soul, destined, by divine caprice, to eternities of bliss or eternities of fire! Doubtless the ideas of a deity moved by everlasting hate,--of soul as a permanent, changeless entity destined to changeless states,--of sin as unatonable and of penalty as never-ending,--were not without value in former savage stages of social development. But in the course of our future evolution they must be utterly got rid of; and it may be hoped that the contact of Western with Oriental thought will have for one happy result the acceleration of their decay. While even the feelings which they have developed linger with us, there can be no true spirit of tolerance, no sense of human brotherhood, no wakening of universal love.

Buddhism, on the other hand, recognizing no permanency, no finite stabilities, no distinctions of character or class or race, except as passing phenomena,--nay, no difference even between gods and men,--has been essentially the religion of tolerance. Demon and angel are but varying manifestations of the same Karma;--hell and heaven mere temporary halting-places upon the journey to eternal peace. For all beings there is but one law,--immutable and divine: the law by which the lowest _must_ rise to the place of the highest,--the law by which the worst _must_ become the best,--the law by which the vilest _must_ become a Buddha. In such a system there is no room for prejudice and for hatred. Ignorance alone is the source of wrong and pain; and all ignorance must finally be dissipated in infinite light _through the decomposition of Self._

*

Certainly while we still try to cling to the old theories of permanent personality, and of a single incarnation only for each individual, we can find no moral meaning in the universe as it exists. Modern knowledge can discover no justice in the cosmic process;--the very most it can offer us by way of ethical encouragement is that the unknowable forces are not forces of pure malevolence. "Neither moral nor immoral," to quote Huxley, "but simply unmoral." Evolutional science cannot be made to accord with the notion of indissoluble personality; and if we accept its teaching of mental growth and inheritance, we must also accept its teaching of individual dissolution and of the cosmos as inexplicable. It assures us, indeed, that the higher faculties of man have been developed through struggle and pain, and will long continue to be so developed: but it also assures us that evolution is inevitably followed by dissolution,--that the highest point of development is the point likewise from which retrogression begins. And if we are each and all mere perishable forms of being,--doomed to pass away like plants and trees,--what consolation can we find in the assurance that we are suffering for the benefit of the future? How can it concern us whether humanity become more or less happy in another myriad ages, if there remains nothing for us but to live and die in comparative misery? Or, to repeat the irony of Huxley, "what compensation does the Eohippus get for his sorrows in the fact that, some millions of years afterwards, one of his descendants wins the Derby?"

But the cosmic process may assume quite another aspect if we can persuade ourselves, like the Buddhist, that all being is Unity, --that personality is but a delusion hiding reality,--that all distinctions of "I" and "thou" are ghostly films spun out of perishable sensation,--that even Time and Place as revealed to our petty senses are phantasms,--that the past and the present and the future are veritably One. Suppose the winner of the Derby quite well able to remember having been the Eohippus? Suppose the being, once man, able to look back through all veils of death and birth, through all evolutions of evolution, even to the moment of the first faint growth of sentiency out of non-sentiency;--able to remember, like the Buddha of the Jatakas, all the experiences of his myriad incarnations, and to relate them like fairy-tales for the sake of another Ananda?

We have seen, that it is not the Self but the Non-Self--the one reality underlying all phenomena.--which passes from form, to form. The striving for Nirvana is a struggle perpetual between false and true, light and darkness, the sensual and the supersensual; and the ultimate victory can be gained only by the total decomposition of the mental and the physical individuality. Not one conquest of self can suffice: millions of selves must be overcome. For the false Ego is a compound of countless ages,--possesses a vitality enduring beyond universes. At each breaking and shedding of the chrysalis a new chrysalis appears,--more tenous, perhaps, more diaphanous, but woven of like sensuous material,--a mental and physical texture spun by Karma from the inherited illusions, passions, desires, pains and pleasures, of innumerable lives. But what is it that feels?--the phantom or the reality?

All phenomena of _Self_-consciousness belong to the false self,--but only as a physiologist might say that sensation is a product of the sensiferous apparatus, which would not explain sensation. No more in Buddhism than in physiological psychology is there any real teaching of _two_ feeling entities. In Buddhism the only entity is the Absolute; and to that entity the false self stands in the relation of a medium through which right perception is deflected and distorted,--in which and because of which sentiency and impulse become possible. The unconditioned Absolute is above all relations: it has nothing of what we call pain or pleasure; it knows no difference of "I" and "thou,"--no distinction of place or time. But while conditioned by the illusion of personality, it is aware of pain or pleasure, as a dreamer perceives unrealities without being conscious of their unreality. Pleasures and pains and all the feelings relating to self-consciousness are hallucinations. The false self exists only as a state of sleep exists; and sentiency and desire, and all the sorrows and passions of being, exist only as illusions of that sleep.

But here we reach a point at which science and Buddhism diverge. Modern psychology recognizes no feelings not evolutionally developed through the experiences of the race and the individual; but Buddhism asserts the existence of feelings which are immortal and divine. It declares that in this Karma-state the greater part of our sensations, perceptions, ideas, thoughts, are related only to the phantom self;--that our mental life is little more than a flow of feelings and desires belonging to selfishness;--that our loves and hates, and hopes and fears, and pleasures and pains, are illusions;[1]--but it also declares there are higher feelings, more or less latent within us, according to our degree of knowledge, which have nothing to do with the false self, and which are eternal.

Though science pronounces the ultimate nature of pleasures and pains to be inscrutable, it partly confirms the Buddhist teaching of their impermanent character. Both appear to belong rather to secondary than to primary elements of feeling, and both to be evolutions,--forms of sensation developed, through billions of life-experiences, out of primal conditions in which there can have been neither real pleasure nor real pain, but only the vaguest dull sentiency. The higher the evolution the more pain, and the larger the volume of all sensation. After the state of equilibration has been reached, the volume of feeling will begin to diminish. The finer pleasures and the keener pains must first become extinct; then by gradual stages the less complex feelings, according to their complexity; till at last, in all the refrigerating planet, there will survive not even the simplest sensation possible to the lowest form of life.

But, according to the Buddhist, the highest moral feelings survive races and suns and universes. The purely unselfish feelings, impossible to grosser natures, belong to the Absolute. In generous natures the divine becomes sentient,--quickens within the shell of illusion, as a child quickens in the womb (whence illusion itself is called The Womb of the Tathâgata). In yet higher natures the feelings which are not of self find room for powerful manifestation,--shine through the phantom-Ego as light through a vase. Such are purely unselfish love, larger than individual being,--supreme compassion,--perfect benevolence: they are not of man, but of the Buddha within the man. And as these expand, all the feelings of self begin to thin and weaken. The condition of the phantom-Ego simultaneously purifies: all those opacities which darkened the reality of Mind within the mirage of mind begin to illumine; and the sense of the infinite, like a thrilling of light, passes through the dream of personality into the awakening divine.[2]