Chapter 5.

[53] Deussen relates, in his address delivered before the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1893, a similar attitude of a Vedantist mystic in regard to the highest Brahma. “The Bhava, therefore, when asked by the king Vaksalin, to explain the Brahman, kept silence. And when the king repeated his request again and again, the rishi broke out into the answer: ‘I tell it you, but you don’t understand it; _çânto ’yam âtmâ_, this âtmâ is silence!’”

[54] It is a well-known fact that the Vedanta philosophy, too, makes a similar distinction between Brahman as sagunam (qualified) and Brahman as nirgunam (unqualified). The former is relative, phenomenal, and has characteristics of its own; but the latter is absolute, having no qualification whatever to speak of, it is absolute Suchness. (See Max Mueller’s _The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy_, p. 220 et seq.)

Here, a very interesting question suggests itself: Which is the original and which is the copy, Mahâyânism or Vedantism? Most of European Sanskrit scholars would fain wish to dispose of it at once by declaring that Buddhism must be the borrower. But I am strongly inclined to the opposite view, for there is reliable evidence in favor of it. In a writing of Açvaghoṣa, who dates much earlier than Çankara or Badarayana we notice this distinction of absolute Suchness and relative Suchness. He writes in his _Awakening of Faith_ (p. 55 et seq.) that though Suchness is free from all modes of limitation and conditionality, and therefore it cannot be thought of by our finite consciousness, yet on account of Avidyâ inherent in the human mind absolute Suchness manifests itself in the phenomenal world, thereby subjecting itself to the law of causality and relativity and proceeds to say that there is a twofold aspect in Suchness from the point of view of its explicability. The first aspect is trueness as negation (_çûnyatâ_) in the sense that it is completely set apart from the attributes of all things unreal, that it is a veritable reality. The second aspect is trueness as affirmation (_açûnyatâ_), in the sense that it contains infinite merits, that it is self-existent. Considering the fact that Açvaghoṣa comes earlier than any Vedanta philosophers, it stands to reason to say that the latter might have borrowed the idea of distinguishing the two aspects of Brahma from their Buddhist predecessors.

Çankara also makes a distinction between _saguna_ and _nirguna vidya_, whose parallel we find in the Mahâyânist _samvṛtti_ and _paramârtha satya_.

[55] While passing, I cannot help digressing and entering on a polemic in this footnote. The fact is, Western Buddhist critics stubbornly refuse to understand correctly what is insisted by Buddhists themselves. Even scholars who are supposed to be well informed about the subject, go astray and make false charges against Buddhism. Max Mueller, for example, declares in his _Six Systems of Indian Philosophy_ (p. 242) that “An important distinction between Buddhists and Vedantists is that the former holds the world to have arisen from what is not, the latter from what is, the Sat or Brahman.” The reader who has carefully followed my exposition above will at once detect in this Max Mueller’s conclusion an incorrect statement of Buddhist doctrine. As I have repeatedly said, Suchness, though described in negative terms, is not a state of nothingness, but the highest possible synthesis that the human intellect can reach. The world did not come from the void of Suchness, but from its fulness of reality. If it were not so, to where does Buddhism want us to go after deliverance from the evanescence and nothingness of the phenomenal world?

Max Mueller in another place (op. cit. p. 210) speaks of the Vedantists’ assertion of the reality of the objective world for practical purposes (_vyavahârârtham_) and of their antagonistic attitude toward “the nihilism of the Buddhists.” “The Buddhists” this seems to refer to the followers of the Mâdhyamika school, but a careful perusal of their texts will reveal that what they denied was not the realness of the world as a manifestation of conditional Suchness, but its independent realness and our attachment to it as such. The Mâdhyamika school was not in any sense a nihilistic system. True, its advocates used many negative terms, but what they meant by them was obvious enough to any careful reader.

[56] Dharmadhâtu is the world as seen by an enlightened mind, where all forms of particularity do not contradict one another, but make one harmonious whole.

[57] The word literally means recollection or memory. Açvaghoṣa uses it as a synonym of ignorance, and so do many other Buddhist philosophers.

[58] _Smṛti_ or _citta_ or _vijñâna_. They are all used by Açvaghoṣa and other Buddhist authors as synonymous. _Smṛti_ literally means memory; _citta_, thought or mentation; and _vijñâna_ is generally rendered by consciousness, though not very accurately.