What Was the Original Gospel in Buddhism

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W H A T W A S T H E O R IG IN A L G O S P E L

I N ‘ B U D D H I S M 1 ?



BY THE SAME AUTHOR

To Decume or not to Become

The Dawn of Indian Psychology,and its Development inBuddhism

Buddhism (Home UniversityLibrary). New Edition

Indian Religion and Survival

Outlines cf Buddhism

A Manual of Buddhism

Sakya, or Origins of BuddhismThe Milinda Questions

Kindred Sayings about Buddhism

Gotama the Man

Translations

Psalms of the Early Buddhists,I and II

Points of ControversyThe Book of the Kindred Sayings,

I, II(with T. W. Rhys Davids)

Dialogues of the Buddha, II, III.



WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL

GOSPEL IN ‘BUDDHISM9?

by

MRS. RHYS DAVIDSn . L I T T . j M .A .

President o f the P ali Text Society

T H E E P W O R T H P R E S S(EDGAR C. BARTON)

35-35 C I T Y R O A D , L O N D O N , E .C . i





T O

THE MAN WHO ‘TAUGHT MORE

T H A N T H A T 5

Hato uttari desayi*

P s a lm s o f tu b B r e t h r e n , 902

B o o k o f t h e G r a d u a l S a t d ig s ,iv. 160





C O N T E N T S

I n t r o d u c t o r y 9

1. T h e F o u n d e r a s I n s p ir e d . . z4

2. W o r d s N e e d e d a n d W o r d s M a k e s h i ft . 23

3. D e i t y , S o u l , S e l f , S p i r i t , i n I n d i a . 32

4.. D h a m m a a s M a n d a t o r 44

5. O v e r - e s tim a t e o f III; U n d e r -e s ti m a t e

o f D e sir e 52

6. T h e W a y i n t h e W o r l d s . . . 61

7. W h i c h w a s t h e Q u e s t ? . . 7 1

8 . T h e A i m ; t h e G o a l . . . . 77

9. JlIANA AS I SEE I t . . - 8 5

10. W a y s o f D i v i n e L i v i n g . . 92

1 1. G o t a m a o r B u d d h a ? . . . - 97

12. T h e M a s t e r ’ s S i l e n c e s . . . 1 0 6

13. Is M a n a M e r e C o m p le x ? . . . 1 1 1

14. S y m p a t h y ..................................................................

1 19

T5* J u d g e m e n t b y D e f a u l t . . . 1 2 2

1 6 . T h u s Fa r . . . . . - 1 2 5

A p p e n d i x - ‘ Ju d g e m e n t b y D e f a u l t ’ . 131

I n d e x . . . . . . 1 45

?



i

i



INTRODUCTORY

I n s o f a r as the group o f religious ideas called

‘Buddhism3 is conceded to hav e a history - and I

hav e seen this denied b y one or tw o ! - it is generally

held, that the earliest known stratum o f this group, born in India and thence transplanted to South

Asia , came to be known as H Ina-yana (the lower

‘vehicle1), otherwise called Theravada (opinion of

the elders). Further, that this developed, in Eastern

and South-eastern Asia, into what came to be known

as Maha-yana (the great ‘vehicle"), or further

teaching, revealed at first to a chosen few (and by

them handed on to a chosen few), coming to be

deemed fit for more general presentation in the

fullness o f time.

Now I am not denying that Mahayana presents

what m ay be termed a developed teaching. B ut I

deny that it is a developm ent o f H inayana. Thisin a w ay is too modest a claim. I hold that

Mahayana’s roots go deeper than that. Both it and

Hinayana arc, in their several deeply opposed ways,

developments. Each is a developm ent from an

older, an original teaching, given in the first instance

as a divine inspiration.There is in Hinayana tradition no esoteric teach

ing. In one context the Founder is shown earnestly

repudiating it.

9



10 I N T R O D U C T O R Y

M y belief is that M ahay ana began when, the

developm ent o f H inayana in India, then known as

the ‘ opinion o f the A nalysts', hav ing come into

power in the Buddhist provinces of North India, this

opinion was met by and protested against by

delegates from Vesall, the capital of the V&jjians,

These delegates maintained that the founder of

their faith had insisted on the reality o f the very

‘m an5, spirit, self or soul, which the Analysts had

come to deny. Gome to be in a minority, they wereexpelled from the ‘order1 (sangha j . It only remained

for them to go back to lay life, or, like the Nestoriatt

Christians later, expelled at the Council o f Ephesus,

to take themselves and their religious earnestness

eastward. I read that men, called by some equivalent

of ‘Buddhists1, first reached China (not as delegates

but as in dependent o f all save loyalty tn their

gospel) about 218 B . C . , not very many years after

the Patna expulsions. But the first invited ‘official’

deputation o f monks from India only arrived a .d. 6.

These will have brought the monastic ‘Hinayana5

Buddhism nearly two centuries after that earlier,

more original Buddhism ha d got a start. TheBuddhism taught by that deputation will have been

in many essentials opposed to, and was probably

absorbed by, the more original Buddhism for which

those earlier missionaries stood; that is, if my

hypothesis about them is historically correct.

Thu s I see the dual developm ent o f H inaya na and

Mahayana Buddhism to have been of this sort;Hinayana ‘developed5 in India away from its



i n t r o d u c t o r y

origins, all the quicker through the ‘purge’ from its

fold of the members who openly stood for the

original teaching. It was a development in what,for a religion, I see as a worse, not as he alth y grow th.

M ahayana ‘developed’ in C hin a (later, in Japan ,

&C.) on a healthier basis derived from a beginning

nearer to original Buddhism, but will have under

gone a Hinayanist infusion1 from missions from

India sent subsequently. B ut an infusion no t suffi

ciently strong, or sympathetic to the Chinese temperament to eradicate the healthier beginnings.

W hat then was that original Buddhism from which

both H in ayana and M ahayana Buddhism, but

especially the former, have largely turned aside?

M y object in this little m an ua l is to pu t on one side

both o f those varieties, together w ith all the legendarymatter wc associate with the life of Gotama called

the Buddha, and state here certain results o f m uch

and long weighing of evidence, results which seem

to me to be less of monastic accretions, and more

o f the original beginnings, such as the time and place

in which his teaching took birth made both possible

and plausible. In the developed monastic andpessimistic Hinayana we are, to quote Hermann

Oldcnbcrg, ‘in a different world5from the teaching

of Immanence accepted in Indian religious training

in the sixth century B.C. O ldcnberg put the beginnings

o f the teaching in th at different world, as other

pioneers hav e done. Here I believe w c arc now ina position to say they were wrong. W e must, to get

1 Not omitting the influence of older native cults.





INT RO DU C T O RY 13

as orthodo x in so-calicd ear ly Buddhism? A ll this

T have been trying to bring ou t for a decade; here

I have taken out for restatement that which is mostsalient in difference.

I f where I see differently could be put into a

phrase, it is that I see, in Gotama!s New Word, a

M ore than is contained in Buddhist manuals. These

estimate Buddhism as an atheist or antitlieistic

gospel o f self-saving, o f protest, o f m oral emphasis,

o f insight into the worlds as evil and life as best

ended, of universal compassion. I see it as a M ore

than this. This, as religion, is m ainly a Less. I am

reminded of the effect of that on a m an. An urud dh a,

who heard it from his cousin the Founder: he is

shown as saying, ‘When in me he saw the willing

mind he taught me More than this.’ Every religion w orthy o f the nam e teaches man a

More about himself, not a Less, not a Worse. There

once was in Buddhism this More in man, brought

as a N ew Word to men. This M ore can now be

learned, as never before, b y those o f w illing mind, in

scriptures made mure fully accessible. The scripture,

it is true, is fuller o f the Less than o f the More. But

the Mere is there for him who reads as he runs.

A nd for m e it shows, that Buddhism, at its birth,

was a gospel m eriting to take rank with its great

sisters. A t the present day, in Its South A sian form,

it does but hang on the fringes o f the world-religicns,

as being scarcely more than an atheistic system ofethics.



I

T H E F O U N D E R A S IN S PIR E D

H o w d i d w hat w c now call Buddhism start? W hat

arc wc told in scriptures about it? T h at w hich 13

so called was for centuries known in India as the

‘teaching’ or ‘saying’ (-vada, -viclya) o f the Sakyan

or Sakkan, a m an, that is, o f the clan (mainly in

Nepal) to which the founder, Siddhattha Gotama,

belonged. It is with him and w hat he is alleged to

have done and said, that scripture and manuals are

rightly concerned. A world-rcligion begins as thenew message brought by a man o f whom , before

he became messenger, the world, his world, had

not heard. We inquiring become intim ately con

cerned with this man. H e is. it m ay be, not a

super-man, not a saintly man, but in one way he

w ill be, as we say, outstanding; he will be pre

em inently a man o f will. W hy? Because to him, in

some way, there comes a message not for himself

alone, but for his fellows; and not for a few among

these, bu t for ‘men’ , for the M any. A nd to make

knotvn to these that message calls for no ordinary

exercise o f undaunted, persistent, devoted will. A nd

more: this message was vitally and intensely concerned with man’s will, more so than in the case of

other Helpers’ messages, For it wras a call to men

'■1



to up and come to be; it was a call to grow and to

will to grow, to choose, to seek salvation. It was o f

all gospels suprem ely dynam ic. In was not a call tohim to impose his will as guide and leader on other

m m ; it was a ca ll to his w ill to beget, to evoke w ill

in each man.

The will, that is, in the very man, the man-in-

m an; the religious will. This is not in aim the w ill to

greater bodily or mental efficiency; it is the will in

spiritual becom ing, with uttermost welfare o f spirit

as ultimate goal. N ow to get past bod y and m ind

to the very m an. to m an as source o f will, th e

messenger in religion will not utter words about

mind, about ideas; he will speak about life, about

living, since it is in living that spiritual becoming in

man can be furthered.Here it is already, that I part company with

Buddhists and manuals, yes, and with scripture

itse lf By these, in these, esp ecially in the last, the

messenger is shown as supcr-wisc, as the chooser,

and the ultim ate Aim lias been split up into a group

o f ideas as to how to win it. T h e m an of the M any

has been thrust aside by this dominating person

ality, and his becoming from actual imperfection

to his potential perfection has been obscured.

W e shall not get at this gospel i f w e take each

passage o f scripture at its face-value. W e have

to weigh one passage with another to see what

lies hencath that. W hat does this facc-value telius?

Buddhists and books represent him as moved at

T H E F O U N D E R A S I N S P I R E D 1 5



i 6 T H E F O U N D E R A S I N S P I R E D

hom e b y the facts o f disease, old age and dying to

‘ renounce the worldly life’, study the truths o f life

under teachers, and eventually (after six years) to begin to teach as missionary w ith fcllow-nissioners.

W hat he should teach is told as come at somehow by

him self during m uch m editation undeT a tree.

Here ‘enlightenment’, i.e. knowledge, traditionally

assumed to be all-knowledge, ‘arose1 in him. After

a week (or was it four weeks?) o f ‘happiness1, he

he s i t a t e d as to what it was worth while to teach.Om niscience here failed to help. T h e vision, to him

clairvoyant, clairaudient, o f a d eity (?) urged him

to teach ‘ dham m a5. 1 He decided to do so and

sought fellow-seekers, giving them in outline the

teac hing of man as able to choose a ‘middle wa v’ ,

this leading best to what, in his religious quesc, he

was seeking: attha\ ‘a im 5. This is spread ou t into

four terms: enlightenment, higher (i.c, psychic)

knowledge, calm, w aning ou t (nirvana). T h e

mission was forthwith begun.

It will be seen, that noth ing as to zthat, as

‘dham m a5, he was to teach is recorded as uttered by

the ‘d eity’ . A pp are ntly tha t business is assigned tothe tree-musing. Insight into the arising of, and

w ay o f rid dance from ‘i ll’ , already in terms o f

form ula, arc there accredited to him, In the hesita

tion he is shown, strangely, as tom in two between

two gospels, either o f which men were said to be

too hide-boun d to receive. Neither of these is made

1 In such a contc tj this ‘mudi-saying* word will have meant just ‘religion’, or ‘what was right*, what ought to be*



central in the outline fie drew up:1 neither an

austere ideal of renunciation, nor the taking; the

fact of causation as a guide. O n ly the latter o f thetwo is, without sequence, brough t im plicitly only,

into the outline, in a diagnosis o f ‘ill9 and o f its Cure;

nam ely, of its nature, cause, stoppage and means to

this.

So m uch for the face-value in the story. Every

man as wilier is lclt out. W orth in his spiritual

growth is left out. His wisdom is shown im plicitly

in following an all-wise wilier and wayfarer towards

the goal. M an’s will here is that of the sheep. We

fall hack frustrated.

Now I do not claim, th at any restatement of this

episode: enlightenment, hesitation, vision, decision

and utterance can make this ancient and obscurerecord a simple, uncom plicated matter. B ut I do

claim, that by the correction of what is for me a

faulty translation, we may supplement what appears

as a mere urge to teach by a positive mandate in

spiring the messenger. T h e correction m ay lend

consecutivcncss to the moment of decision, and

may, though indirectly, set up a connexion between

that mandate and the ‘first utterance’.

The deva is recurdcd as humbly saluting Gotama

and, in urging him to Leach, as pleading, that

whereas men are in a decline, bhavissanii dkammassa

amaidro. {In the acco m pan ying verse we get the

slight variant: desetu dhammam; anmtdro bhainssanti .)1Usually called The first sermon’, but in the legend, ‘ the turning

the Wheel of Dhamma’.

B b

T H E P O U N D E R AS I N S P I R E D



i8 T H E F O U N D E R A S I N S P I R E D

These words w e all, myself included, hav e

translated as ‘there w ill be they w ho w ill under

stand the teachin g’ , or, in the verse: teach theteaching! there w ill be they who understand.’ A nd

I had this subconsciousness, that the true which is

the new may not at once be received, but the day

w ill come, & c.

Then I came to see, that anmtdro meant, r_ot so

much nnderstanders, knowers, as learners, men

com ing to know, the verb d-md meaning connaitre, notsavoir, erkennen, not. misw.n. Th is, if it did not go far,

lent a less remote interest to the deity’s entreaty.

But it came to me further, that the verb bhavis-

santi might not merely mean the copula between

1careers and future existence (‘there will be ’ ). Was

it not rather the alternative opposite to ‘are in a

decline’, namely, Svill become’, i.e. ‘will grow’.

Often in die Buddhist records do we find this con

trast drawn: on (he one hand a worsening, on the

other a grow ing, when the Better is followed. The

verb ‘become’ alw ays steps out o f iLs w ay to mend the

defective verb ‘be ’ in the future tense. Bu t it is also

used in its fuller meaning: ‘w ill com e to b e’, w ill resultin, e.g. ‘Shall 1 become in the future, or not become?’1

A n d I thought, was there not here the inspiring of a

gospel, wherein the main thing tc be sought was, not

the contrast ‘ill’ and ‘end o f ill’ (o f the formula in the

outline), but man’s growth, man’s becoming, and so

man’s salvation? "Was there r.ot here an expansion

1 This is also an Upanishadic usage. Of. .To Become or not to Become

(‘937), PP-



o f the idea in the current religious teaching c f that

d a y :— ‘T h at art thou’ ? W as it not truer to say of

man, with all his imperfections heavy on him, Thatart thou becoming?

Th en I saw for the first time the context of the

lotuses in the pool seen at all stages o f growth as fit

sequel to the word o f inspiration. Even as they, so

was each man at a different stage o f grow th towards

full efflorescence. So too, as the man, full primed

with his rev/ word, m oved aw ay to fin d his friends

and co-mission ers, did the quaint one-worded re

sponse o f the ascetic in the w ay take nn new meaning -

the word huveyya {or hupeyya) usually rendered:

M aybe! This, more properly, meant m ay (or might,

or should, or ough t to) become; (Man) m ay become!

(Had the speaker wished to say ‘may he\ the word was at hand.) W e do not really know w hat Gotam a

said to him, when asked the cause o f his radiant mien.

The self-eulogy in the records we must rule out, work

of adoring after-men, but unfit as spoken by a man

too great to call him self great. Eut i f he told the

inquirer of what had come to him from the Beyond:

that man, as more rightly a becomer, than a being,

was as such bound to win to that Amdtd, that Immortal,

o f which the records speak, w hy then, the ascetic’s

response takes on meaning.

It m ay be said: ‘Does your restatement connect the

inspiring message (and follow ing decision) any better

with the outline o f teaching? W e do not see that itdoes.’

I might reply, that neither is there obvious

T H E F O U N D E R A S I N S P I R E D i g



20 THE- F O U N D E R A S I N S P I R E D

sequence between inspiring message and initial New

Word in the Jesus-gospel:— ‘This is my beloved

son . , ‘T he kingdom of the heavens is within you..’ Y et in cur case I venture to see something nearer a

connexion than in the usual translation. T h u s: the

oudine declares, tha t a man chooses the way whereby

he wills to attain his Aim (attha) in his spiritual

quest. In so doing he is in a state o f becoming.

There is nothing static about such an attitude, about

such conduct. Cru de fragment, with adulterated

opening,1 such as is all w c have left of that Outline,

it is unmistakably a call to the man not to remain

where he stands, hut to go forward, that is, to grow,

tha t is, to become. The blossoming of the relatively

static plant , the lotus, had in th at br ief interval come

to be felt as less fitting for the man than the moving fo rum d in wayfaring.

There is even so, I admit, not an obvious con

nexion between hesitation, message, decision and

outline o f teaching. But is the ve ry true always

obvious? Must we not, to see truth, often get below

the surface to the very' springs o f m an ’s nature, life

and destiny, and discern, as here, that as essentially

dynamic, he must fare forward or backward; that

to do the former he becomes what he was not; th at to

be so, he wills, thai is, he chooses?8

There is yet this to say: In that he needed urging

b y T h at Who sees where he at the time saw not, the

1 It has been twisted into an address to monks only.

8 I f il be objected; Then wh y does neither of tliusc words occur?let ;he reader wait for pp. go, 32.



T H E F O U N D E R A S I N S P I R E D 2 1

Helper is shown as not self-sufficient. H e gave, I

said, a call, but to him first a call came. Either the

episode was told by him - no witnesses are mentioned - or it is pure fiction. But it is not, as of him,

wholly unique. In reply to questions: H ow came

you to know this'/ he would say; ‘A deity (devata)

told ir.e’, with, it is true, the pious gloss: ‘and I

knew it o f myself5. (Were the latter clause genuine,

there had been no call to give the former.) And we

read, that he was psychically gifted and in frequent

communion with the unseen, finding ‘pure happiness’

in this. Adherents look upon him as attaining en

lightenment alone, as just the automatic fruition o f

his own resolves and efforts in countless past ‘lives’ .

Y et there has been left, in this m oving record, o f the

Hesitation, the inspiring message, giving the lie tothe ideas, that the messenger was all-wise, all

knowing, a self-dependent orphan in the universe.

Like other great Helpers he was instrument, m edium

o f a More than himself; wise he was b ut not all-wise.

It is a curious m yopia o f both sectarianism and

science or scientism, that in. the one there is shown

in a creed but one inspired Helper, all-sufficing,

absolute, in the other, prophets, founders in the past

as evolving creeds ou t o f some form o f illusion, some

thing vagu ely called animism: the dream, the ecstasy,

the hysterical vision, natural phenomena: any and

everything save the message brought by man in the

unseen to man in the seen.For me we have the truth about it in the first half

o f that verse in the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘God



2 2 T H E F O U N D E R A S I N S P I R E D

who at sundry times in divers manners hath spoken

. . d But to man. in all ages, ‘prim itive7 or relatively

cultured, not to one only, not to one class o f instru-ment only. The truth herein does not render in

valid the resolves, the efforts. T h e instrument is

therein being 'rough-hewn’ , or ‘gently led ’. Bu t

instrum ent he is all the time. A nd w hat lie first

utters as New Word will have been ‘that which is

given him to say’; he will not speak by formula, by

code. His lips have been touched with ‘burning

coal from the altar ’ . He had felt his ow n weakness

and hesitated. But from that mom ent he is read y:

‘Here am I; send me!’1

1 Isaiah vi. 8.





contrasting his much and most, his good and best, his

high and highest, has inserted his ‘more’, his

‘better’ , his ‘higher’ . Now the cultural teaching ofIndia had been saturated with a contemplation of

the positive term as being in a way identifiable with

the corresponding superlative term. But the re

formed teachings of the Jains and o f the Sakyans fas

Gotama’s followers were called) concentrated, not

on these extremes, but on the middle term, the com

parative. T h at is on the more, the better, each in

their different way.

For thoughtful believers there was a danger in too

lightly accepting identity o f the actual human wifh

the divine self. Between the two lay a great, a very

long process of ‘becoming’ before man could realize

w hat it was In his essential nature to come to be. I tcalled for a ‘training’ requiring not one little life

only but very m any lives. Th is becoming, if it was

not to be, as our poet has said, a ‘rough-h ew ing’ only,

imp lied in tha t training, the will, the choosing to

become, and the sustained outcome in. endeavour.

On this willed work in becoming the earlier

Buddhist Sayings, as collected in the Pali Canon,

show a teach ing tha t spent itself in utmost iteration

and insistence. A n d there is this too - true m otto of

the wayfarer - it is the step further thatis emphasized,

rather than the W ay’ s End. Th is was at first not

lost sight of in a ‘w aning o ut ’ (nip/ana), as cam e to

he the case. It was the Further, the Beyond tha t was stressed; the ‘w hat is there yet to he done?’

W hat is the next in the More? ‘As for me,’ a leader

2 4 W O R D S N E E D E D A N D



o f men. repeats in one Saying , T am for a More."

I shall, I repeat, return to the two opening terms

presently. Here I have a word to say on the han dicap which befell the new gospel: — not this gospel only

- one to w hich Buddhists and books do very scant

justice.

This concentration on the need in religion to

cultivate, to evoke man’s potency to transcend such

o f a ‘good’, a 'm uch5 that he had, to live for a

Between rather than (immediately) for a Beyond, was a New Thing in Indian culture. An d the New

m ay need new words. We feel this with every one

of to-day ’s wonderful inventions. Ind ia could not

speak o f ‘potential’ and ‘actu al’ , as w c o f Greek

tradition can. Nor could she wield so rad ically

strong a word as w e can in ‘ w ill’. Stro ng terms she

had had: they were degenerating, or obsolete.

Terms o f implicit will she ha d, but chiefly they

meant w ays of thought. A term o f super-will she

had —iddhi — but it m eant chiefly accomplishment o f

will: all this I have gone into at length elsewhere.

I h ave called Buddhism a gospel o f w ill, without a

fit word for will. A s in other primitive cultures,India ha d seen in man mainly an observer, a thinker,

a namer. In religion she was more preoccupied witli

self-control, tha n w ith free p lay of energy, with die

negative aspect, tha n with the positive. So she tied

down her Aryan root w a r . to express the former

aspect more than the latter. M ayb e she forgot the

lesson o f her long trek into a new hom e, as her

Western kin did not. Latin and Teuton developed

W O R D S M A K E S H I F T 2 5



W O R D S N K "R D R D A N D

the kindred root w a l into v o l o a n d w i l l e , w ith a.

preference for the positive, and in ac tion a m ark edly

different result. Y e t in things spiritual it was India who first saw

that man is by nature not a static still-stander, but

a dynamic bccomcr; that he is ever in a quest

seeking to become w hat he was not before. In her

need to express this message, inspired in a teacher

whom, in the Upanishads, we cannot identify, she

lit on her word e h u , to become, a richer word, notdefective like a s , to be. It is in this wcrd that the

Sakyan strove to make good what we can express

by ‘potential’ and ‘actual’ . T h a t unknown teachers

message is worded - whether originally so ot not -

as the bidding man to see and ‘know’, that God was

the very self of him. We could word this statement,irrational as it stands, as ‘Potentially you are That.

A ctnally you have’ - as the scriptures admit - to

‘become God’ ( Brakmam bhavati).

It was this long Between of Becoming that the

Sakyan missionera spent themselves in teaching,

‘Tell yourselves,’ wc arc ever reading, ‘this and that

will we become; thus must wc train ourselves in whatlies further!’ A n d to the ph iloso ph er’ s cues Lions:

Does a ll r eally exist, or docs it not? Is the doer the

very sam e-as th e exoeriencer o f result, or is he

another? came, as we read, the reply: ‘Neither’ , . .

and then: 'he is becom ing5, the answer, m uffe d ,

alas!in

a church-formula, yet in terms that showone thing as proceeding, from not ju st after, another.

A t first sight the question naturally arises: W hy







Then as to the makeshifts for ‘will’ . H ere is no

space to discuss the absence of a term for man’s

radiant energy considered as his active self-expression. In threshing out this m atter, I have tested the

want b y contrasting the powerfully terse saying o f

Jesus: ‘ I w ill! Be thou clean!’ Here is no subsequent

energy or effort o f efferencc in act. T h at followed.

But I know o f no eq ually revealing word o f pure

will, as such, in the Buddhist or preceding

literature. Jesus had it in Aram aic and used it

(savma!).

But as i f to make good, we find in the former

boo.is a marked increase in the use c f terms for

effort, endeavour, energy, striving: all words expres

sive of the putting will into action. A list o f such

terms in the catechetical Sayings is only surpassed inlength by the equivalents for the word ‘wisdom’,1

in India ever o f the highest importance. T h e com

poun d ‘w ith stirred up energy’ is o f frequent occur

rence in matters spiritual. A phrase ‘being or pro

ceeding under vusw : power or control, is also

idiom atic, though om itted from that list. A t the

best these are but terms, not for ‘w ill’, buL fur modes o j using will.

It is also noteworthy, that nowhere in this list is

there reference to the more affective or emotional

aspect o f w ill w hich we express b y desire, w ant, wish,

longing, crav ing and the like. O ne word for desire,

ckanda, stood on the borderline between will that

was la udable and w ill as m onastically reprehensible.

1 Parjfia, parna.

W O R D S M A K E S H I F T 2 9



I t came to he made presentable by the prefix dhamma -

or salved by the equivalent: ‘wish to do’ (kattu-

kamyata), Bu t for the saint it was something done with, unwanted. It is not impossible that, had the

infant ‘Buddh ism 1 remained clear of monk-domin-

ance, either a worthy term for will might have been

found, or a term of affective consciousness been

raised to a more honourable position. But that

dom inance had the effect o f lowering all words

indicative of bare will, or of will with a co-efficient

o f emotion and idea. Iccha: want, wish, is very rare;

kdma, once strong as ‘will’, was degraded into sex-

desire; k.ratii was dropped. And words far ch oice,1

resolve, decision, &c.., are oddly absent, or come

later into use.

But at least the makeshift terms of effort remainedin honoured usage. Quiescence and calm also com ’

manded perhaos a growing appreciation, but the

Buddhist monks, for all the harm they wrought on

the earlier teaching, never, in their Sayings, lost

sight of their life as an active quest in developing

themselves - they called it ‘m aking becom e’, hncre-

bccom ing’ 2 - into w hat they optim istically conceived

was possible in earth-life: the man perfected; or

arahan (literally, ‘worthy one5).

To sum up: the New Word inspired in Gotama

needed such words as potential and actual; needed

such words as will and choice. In the carryin g on

1 Choose (LMtwii), e.g., can beshown as evaded by ‘take',and. 'don', where we w. ;; ’d have said 'choose' 'select' respectively.

a Bhiyyobhava,

30 W O R D S N E E D 3D A N D



v f o a n s m a k e s h i f t 3i

the increased use o f the wurd-gruup ‘becoming5, we

discern a fine a lternative to the former pa ir o f terms.

In the strenuous use made of terms for effort and

energy we discern a noteworthy, i f less effective

makeshift for the latter pair. I should rather have

said: ‘we may discern1. A ctually , I have noted so

far a failure on the p art o f Buddhists and books to

take note of the way in which the first teachers,

needing certain words for their new message, made

shift with words that were to hand. And until suchnote is taken, in and by a better knowledge o f the

Pali scriptures, there will not, I believe, arise a right

understanding o f w ha t that new message was.



3

D E I T Y , S O U L , S E L F, S P I R I T , IN I N D I A

L o n g a g o , when the utterances, recorded as the first

two spoken b y the founder of Buddhism, came into

my hands, I was puzzled, in the second, by the

curiously alien w ay in which for me, a European, the

soul or self i'atid) was discussed. I t said that, since

the body, since the mind was liable to limitations,

‘the self5could not say in either case: ‘Let me be thus

and thus.5 (Note here the reluctance in Indian

idiom to use the word ‘ choose’ : vuxtoii. We shouldhave said: I choose to be thus and thus.) It seemed

to my Western mind, that, unless I had an Arabian

genie coming out of a bottle an d granting m y every

wish, I could not, even with an unlimited ‘self’, be

or do as I chose, as were I God. I t was many years

later, and after I had come to know the Upanishadic

teaching, that I discerned, how in this passage the

word ‘self’ meant no mere human self, as we know

him, bu t a divinely omnipotent self or soul, blended

with, Inseparable from, the actual hum an self. O nce

I had got the true setting of the picture, the sense

becam e clear. The self in question was not that

merely hnman self; it was the human self who, inthe current, the accepted teaching, had undergone

a tremendous uplift, a transformation into immanent32



d e i t y , s o u l , s e l l , s p i r i t , i n i n d i a 33

Godhead, It was only as handicapped by hav ing

to express himself ‘here below’ through body and

mind, that diis divinely potent Man was unable to

work His w ill and be what or how H e chose.

With that true setting for the teaching, it then

became clear th at the object o f the utterance was

clearly to warn the new fellow-teachers never to

Identity the self, soul, very man, with his parts

or instruments, nam ely, body or ways of mind.

They were to see, tha t ‘this’ (body, mind) ‘is notof M e, tha t I am not it. tha t for Me it is not the

self’.1

But the Buddhist inference from it has for centuries

been the adding: this self being neither body nor

mind, there is no self.

Lo gically this is quite unwarranted. L e t us

examine arid weipdi it with other contexts, occur-O *

ing as often as it does. O ne is an elabo rated form ula

called the view of rnan-as-he-is (sa-kkqya', lit., being-

group). T h e self, it says, is never found identifiable

in any of several ways w ith bod y or mind. E.g.

neither bo dy, or m ind , is the self, nor has the self, nor

is in the self, nor is the self in either. Never, here crin our context, is U staled, ‘ therefore there is no self’ .

T h e same is true o f another oft-repeated argument,

that since bod y and mind arc impermanent, they are

‘ill’ or ‘o f sorrow’ , and hence cannot be identical with

soul or self, Who was conceived in India as ‘bliss’

1 This (SunUtyukirikS, § 6 4 ) is not u i b u i .i l u f the self’s existence; it is the rejection of any claim of matter to be considered as ‘the self1. Cf. Narayaua’s Conrmy.

C b



{unand). Now he re is the argu m ent clenched with the

inference: hence soul is not.

A scholar friend2 wrote to us years ago about this,

finding in it the opposite inference implied, namely,

that self or soul was, as compared with body or mind,

real. I hold now he was right. But I then rejoined:

W asn’t it an odd w ay o f teaching th at reality; to

imply, not to affirm? For this ignorant rem ark

I would now substitute the more intelligent one:

There was in these utterances no intention o f teach ing the truth o f soul’s existence. Nor was there any

need to do so, Th ere was in that day no more need

to teach that truth than there was for Jesus, in Ms

day and land, to assert the existence o f the D eity

he taught as Father,

It is true that, even in Gotama’s day, sophists

among Brahmin teachers loved to dwell on contra

dictory alternatives: is it? is it not? and the like.

W e saw such inquiries above. But In the positive

religious teaching of the Brahmin schools we are left

in no doubt, that the self, as Co d-in-m an, is. Th ere,

too, was also taught, in more positive terms, the

warnin g, not, in the using and product o f using, tolose sight of the user. Put aside, it was said, the

speech, the act, the feeling. Loo k to the speaker,

the doer, the fcdcr.

But to infer, as is done in so-called Southern

Buddhism, that this warning implies ‘he’ as persist

ing user, is not, is condemned as wrong in Buddhist

scripture itself. H ere are two pieces of, for me, cru cial

1 Sir Charles Eliot.

34 D E I T Y , S O U L , S E L F , S P I R I T , I N I N D I A



evidence, but overlooked by Buddhists, whose ignor

ance o f their C anon (only now in process o f transla

tion into South Asiatic vernaculars) must be met withto be realized. H ere they are. (M y own analogy

condemning their logic was, as if, when seeking

a ship’s captain, we rejected boatswain and purser

as not he whom we sought, we should infer, Then

there’ s no captain. E ut it is fitter, in the Indian

picture, to take an analogy put into the Founder’s

mouth:)

‘I understand, Sacchaka, you say that “ you” are

no other than body and mind, . . . I f yon are just

these, you arc like a king (who is ex ojficio judge),

considered as being no more than his subjects. As

such he cannot dispose c f their fate, their property.

But he does su dispose o f them . Th ere fore is he, asking-judge, mere than they.’ T h e Sutta, as I have

pointed c u t,1 is a most unhapp ily jum bled com pila

tion, suggesting either many var yin g para llel versions

for revisers to select from , or a felt n cec to ‘get round*

an awkw ard corner by revisers o f altered values, or

both o f these. B u t the simile for m e damns the belief

in cm-atla, the no-self.

So no less does the simile ascribed to Sariputta, in

the Second Collection.® G otam a’ s fellow-missioners

discuss hotv, for each, their religion adds a beauty to

the lovely m oonlit evening. Saripu tta’s choice is,

that the wise man is seen as able to dispose of his

mind-ways, no less than a wTell-dressed m an disposes

1 J .R .A S .j 1937, *An Overlooked Budd hist Simile5.2 Majjhimn, No. 32.

D E I T Y , S O U L , S E L F , S r i R I T , I N I N D I A 3 5



of his wardrobe, in selecting now this suit, now that.

H ere is no m erging o f the man into his instruments,

his clothes, no more than is the case in the iaterBhagavadg'ta, where the dying man ‘puts off worn

garments and gees to other, to new ones’.

Close also to the th ought o f his day and laud is

the first public utterance by the new teacher, when

ab rup tly accosted by m en o f his own class seeking

a pilferer: ‘Sir, have you seen a woman passing by?’

The reply as stated is: ‘What have you, gentlemen,

to do with a woman. , , , Were it not better that you

were hunting for the self?’ This is granted. ‘Then

sit down and I will teach you religion (dkamma).’

A nd alas! follows not a word about the self, hut

a little stock piece o f quasi-monastic homily.

The ‘for the self’ is, save by me, translated ‘for yourselves’ . The original is attdnam, the accusative

singular of aUd. And translators have sought to head

o ff the question into one o f Ch ristian sentiment. We

are here up against the difficulty of equating Indian

with European id iom. T h e form er uses no possessive

pronoun with the reflexive pronoun. ‘M y-seif’ and

the rest is never anything more than a d d - just that

- i n any ‘oblique3 case, genitive, &c. (The use of

self in the plural was only a later usage.) ‘Your

selves’ is then wrong. W e give it nowadays a ‘less’ in

meaning, in that we have come, in our world and

our day, to see in ‘self’ a less than we are or should

be, i.e. an egoistic person. But in early India thisless-in-self is unknown. Ign orant Buddhists to-day

uphold the ‘no-self’ doctrine, largely because they

3 6 D E I T Y , S O U L , S E L T , S P I R I T , I N I N D I A



see in self, ‘selfishness3. H istorically th ey are utterly

wrong.

H ow then are w e righ tly to render the injunction?Not surely as a sardonic gibe to seek what could not

be found. I do not hear a H elper o f men speaking

so. L e t us rather turn to the accepted religious

teaching o f his day. In an oldest Upanishad, like

wise in one possibly over a century later (or at least

this portion o f it), we read: ‘W hat is within this town

o f Brahm a’ (as if to say this G odsteac) . . . ‘th at is,the self . . . should be searched for, is what one

should desire to kn ow .’ ‘H im, t his self’ (a list o f

names o f conceptions o f D eity follows) ‘assuredly one

should desire to know. H e should be searched for.’

‘Were it not better that you hunted for the self?5

A rc wc not with a better setting here for our picture

than in smoothing down and out this word attdnam,

or hi dragging in a gospel o f other lands and other

times? L et me only add, th at m y ‘hunted for' is the

same word as the ‘searched for’, but with the prefix

‘cow-’ {gav-eyyes&tha). M en hunting for lost cattle

is a feature in Buddhist Suttas, and searching in

a jungle was keen enough to merit the word ‘hunt1.Bu t what a wonderful ‘left-iri it is by revisers! Le ft

in it was by men who were banishing monks from

the Ord er, i f they did not subscribe to the ‘An alysis’

o f man into a com plex c f his instruments! Y e t most

exponents of early Buddhism, refusing to read the

word attdnam: self, as they would read it, were they

translating it in the Upmishads, ignore the episode, or

trot out the European misreading.

D E I T Y , S O U L , S E L F , S P I R I T , I X I N D I A 3 7



This inconsistency in translating occurs again, and

unanimously, over a, this time no: Ignored, injunc

tion, ascribed to the Founder as among his last words,alb eit not spoken then only. ‘JLive ye1, he admonishes,

‘as they who have the self-as-Jamp, the self-as-rcfuge,

who have dhamma as lamp, dhamma as refuge, and

no other. Whoever, now or when I am gone, will

so Jive will becom e that Peak o f the immortal, so

he be fain to train.’

Here, had these compounds ‘self-as-lamp, self-as-

refuge (atta-dtpd, atta-mrand) been translated for us,

as they mostly are, when found in the Upanishad

teachings o f Imm anence, they would have been

rendered either as in this sentence, or as separate

phrases: ‘who have the Self (capital S) as your

lam p’, & c. Tak e, e.g., the well-known phrases: ‘self-loving , self-enjoying, self-sporting, self-raptured1 in

the Gh analogya : ail translations known to me render

these by such phrases as ‘who loves the Self, delights

in the Self, has intercourse with the Self, rejoices in

the Self', No idea is there to bring in so misplaced

a phrase as onr -word ‘yourselves1 for the Se lf would be. Y e t when precisely analogous compounds occur

in Buddhist Suttas, translators, English and Ger

man, agree in writing: ‘be ye lamps unto yourselves,

a retuge unto yourselves!1 A nd the reader Et-second-

hand-only lays down the book impressed with the

idea, that in Buddhism man has ta ‘look to himself’

for salvation and to nothing h igher than that - his

actual present self.

Far be it from me to suggest that, in the original

3 8 D E I T Y , S O U L , S E L F , S P I R I T , J N I N D I A



teaching, Upanishadic or Sakyan, man had to be

lifted, carried, dragged to salvation by a Greater

than he. From the beginning his co-operation inchoice of the better, in willing his ‘becoming’, is

demanded. Bu t that either teaching showed him

as to be ‘saved’ in any real sense without the

‘co-operation’ o f a Greater, a M ore than he, even

that Most in whom he has faith, is to leave one’s

bonk w ith a lie.

This More, this Most early Buddhism taught in this ivcy1. I t did not tell man, as did the Upanishads,

that he is the Most, is so in just knowing this. I t was

ever showing the m an as able to w ill him self into

becoming a More. The word ‘m ore-becom ing’ or

‘more-state’ (hhiyydbhava} is quite overlooked in the

manuals, T he man as self was no cut-and-dricd

concep t, bu t a composite picture ir. a scale o f values,

from the ‘average sensual m an’ - to quc-te the

French term - up to the highest conceivable, the

‘Peak o f the Imm ortal’ , amal’ agga. H ereby it is that

we get such a mixture o f sayings abuul the self, as

e.g. that who is to be trained, conquered, and who

yet is m an’s protector {ndihti) and man’s goal ordestiny (gad).

Maybe it is regrettable, that in our rendering of

the word atrna, altd, we have not consistently and

persistently used, not soul or self, but spirit. There

is, in both spirit and the Indian term the association

with ‘b reath ’. There is, in both Indian and N ew

Testament scripture the same apparent ambiguity,e.g. in such passages as ‘ God is spirit’ ; ‘he th at is

D E I T Y , S O U L , S E L F , S P I R I T , I N I N D I A 3 9



join ed to the Lord is one spirit'; ‘spirit also helpcth

. . . maketh intercession for us’; ‘the spirit whereby

we cry Lather’ , and m any more. The word ‘self’has been too debased, by our choice o f it for ‘worse

self’, to be rea lly an effective instrument for us to

realize the Indian, the early Buddhist outlook. Eut

in the worthier ambiguity of ‘spirit’, it becomes

easier for us to see at once spirit and holy spirit, as

did the Indian, in alma, see at once man as he is and

as he potentially is. W e m ight then not draw false

conclusions in such Buddhist phrases as ‘the self as

witness o f the self’, ‘the self as upbraid in g the self’ .

(Only once have I found the distinction, patently

drawn where in the same Sutta we have ‘great self’

and little self, a distinction not unknown in the

Upanishads; and there the distinction is not betweenman and D eity .1) W ith this rendering o f the Indian

term, there might never have been the deplorable

distortion of meaning involved in our use of ‘self’.

‘Seek the spirit’ and ‘spirit as lamp, as refuge’ would

have saved us much pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp.

O n e more proof from the Suttas, that early teach

ing never saw, in ‘self’, ‘spirif, a fiction of speech 1

must adduce. It is the Sutta of the Th ree M and ates,2

T he religious m an, anxious to get better results in

his self-training, is shown as helped by three man

dates: (i ) that c f the self: ‘ Stirrec up for me shall

unsluggish effort become; called up unmuddled

mindfulness; serene shall body he and one-pointed

the mind’ , . . and having m ade just the self his

1 Anguttara, i. 2.J.Q. 2 ibid., p. 14.7 f.

4 0 D E I T Y , S O U L , S E L F , S P I R I T , I N I N D I A



mandate he ‘perseveres in effort and cherishes a

pure self’ . Likewise in Llie oth er mandates (a) of the

worthy, on earth and in Lhe unseen, watchin g his

career, and (3) of dhamna, whereof more presently.

Is it not astonishing that a teaching with these say

ings in its scriptures should be said to deny God and

the soul?

W hy th en do Buddhists affirm that it does, calling

it, the denial, the centre of their religious teaching?

The one true w ay to get at the emergence o f thisnegative dogm a is the historical way. I w ill sketch

its grow th as tersely as possible. First, a possible

tendency, in the sixth century b.g. in North India,

to see the entity T , hum an and divinely immanent,

as body, as mind, shown by the warning ‘the Self

is neither’ . Secondly, the tendency to construe this

warning into m eanin g, that, body and m ind bein g

‘ill, changing, transient’, to call either ‘the Self’

(divinely immanent; was illogical. Th irdly, the

Leaching, th at ‘the m an’ , i.e. the ‘I ’, could only be

‘got at’ in terms o f bo dily an d m ental phenomena.

Fourthly, the more unqualified nihilism, that there

is no ‘se lf’ , without distinction, in anything whatever.Lastly, the pointing out, that such words as man,

being, self were but a conventional convenience to

nam e com bined existing entities (factors iff the

human comolcx) by a name for a non-existing

entity. We here range from the record o f the Second

Utterance down to the standard Pali manual com

piled in the eleventh century a .d .

The three main causes o f this g radually growing

d e i t y , S O U L , S E L F , S P I R I T , I N I N D I A 4.1



nihilism I find (i) in the vogue o f monastic life as

commendable for persons not only aged, but of any

age.1 In its pessimism the wa ning out o f ihe indi vidual entity was deemed desirable, not his per

sistence and grow th. (2) In the growing vogu e in

mental analysis, initiated in the lay movement

known as Sankhya, whereby preoccupation with

mind killed in Buddhism the lmmaner.ee taken over

in its first teaching. (3) In the gra du ally grow ing

rift between the reforming daughter and her mother,

as to matters o f ritual and birth-monopoly, sweep-

ing-in the m other’ s central religions teaching: a

schism wider even than that between Catholic

and Reformed Churches.

There is a very striking ‘left-in’ in the Fourth

Collection, called both ‘doing o f self’ or ‘doer ass e l f w h i c h for me should be more of a poser to the

upholder of the en-attd dogm a than any other. It

has so far been either ignorantly or wilfully over

looked. In it we have a man slating it as his opinion,

that 110 doing (or doer) can be called ‘self1. It would

be Lhuught, that i f Buddhists are right as to the

M aster’ s teaching, Go tama would have readily

endorsed this. Instead he is said to have replied, he

had never heard o f such a theory! An d he goes on:

Surely when you exercise initiative, in such a thing

as bo dily gesture, this is an act o f the self, o f you or

o f another self?

This testing o f the presence in action o f a doer,a wilier, by initiative was a notable word. I t

1 Th is was a no vel feature In N . India, much resented hy the laity.

42 n r . T T V , s o u l , s e l f , s p i r i t , i n i h d i a



recognized, that will (with a makeshift term), used in

its full sense as the whole inner act ivity o f the normal

man, is not merely a purposeful emergence in him

after he has thought and felt. These are, rightly

considered, the one a mode, the other a reverbera

tion o f will. T he start in the man, in this cr that, is

the expression in him, ever recurring, o f the M ore

that he enters upon, as the essential expression of his

nature. T h e start, initiative, it is that best shows him

as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’.H ow then is the self so od d ly denied, denied even

to-day, in orthodox Southern Buddhism? I have

heard it said there: it is not the conventional validity

in the term in everyday speech that we deny; it is

the unchanging permanent self surviving death,

emerging ir. rebirth, that we deny. O r again, it is

the moral obsession with personal interest—egoism

- that we condemn. O r y et again, the ‘ no-self’ is

taught by one or more leading ‘priests’ as meaning,

that in nature a mutual independence in things is

untrue and Impossible.

These are modern attempts in the monastic

teaching, to soften the crudity o f den ying th at the‘P, who write, who am criticizing, summing up, and

so forth is no real entity, but a serial set of pheno

mena. Bu t in the earliest Buddhism with w hich I

am concerned, there was at first no distinction

drawn between a permissible imperm anent T and

its contradictory; no ethical notions o f ‘no-soul’ being

non-egoism or altruism; no metaphysic as to

absolute independence.

d e i t y , s o u i , s e l f , s p i r i t , i n I n d i a 4 3



4

D I I A M M A AS M A N D A T O R

I HAVE REFERRED in the foregoing section to three

‘mandates’, dhamma being the third. T h e m an in

religious ‘training’ is made to say: 1dhamma, as of

present interest yet not a thing of earthly time only

. . . known to the wise as praiyatrna't i.e. in the very

soul. ‘N ow there is dw elling with me a fcllow-

student (sabnihmacan) w ho knows who sees. I f I, who

have . , . a dhamma-rulc so well proclaimed, should

live slothful, careless, this would be for me unlit.He reflects thus: stirred up for me shall energy

become. . . . H e, havin g m ade just dhamma his

mandate, cultivates the good . . . bears about the

purified self/

There then follow these remarkable lines:

Nought in. the world of the doer of evil lies hid.The self, O man, knows of thee what is true or false.

Ah sir, the lovely self, the witness, thou dost despise,

Who in the self hidest the self that is evil.1

The worthy in this world and that see the fool unevenly walking.

J

1Gf. the verse in the Svct&svatara XJpanishad, prohahly not far removed in date from this:

‘The one God hidden in all tilings, all-pervading, hidden soul of all, Overseer of deeds, in all abiding, witness . . . standirg In the self.’

44



D H A M M A A S M A N D A T O R 45

Hence let him mindful walk, having the self as master.Delicately let him walk, having the worlds as master.

According to dhamma let him -walk, Laving dhamma as

master.Neva- doth falter the wise in that which is real advancing,

(Two more lines, disconnected in subject and value

with.these, are I th ink a later insertion.)

Is it impossible to equate this third mandate, or

rath er mandator b y an English word? It is indeed

not easy, so ‘ much-saying5 is the term, so marked,in Buddhism, is the ch an gin g history ir_ its worth.

Readers will find the word carefully discussed in

more works than one, both the Vedic dharma, and

the Pali dhamma, the on ly historical study of the

idea common to both forms being Dr. G. MeeS'S

Dharma and Society ( 1935). F or purposes o f the present

study cnc feature in that history should not be over

looked. Nam ely, that whereas in Ind ian pre-

Buddhist literature dharma is rarely used, in the Pali

Suttas there is scarcely a page without reference to

it. W hat had taken place to bring about this change

in emphasis?

M eanin g basically fixed position, and so ‘support5,the word came to mean what had to be supported,

maintained, observed. In the (later) Fourth Veda,

the wish to commit suttee is for the newly-made

wid ow ‘an uphold in g o f the ancient dharma\ And

in one or two Buddhist Suttas dhamma is the

standard or norm, the noblesse oblige, o f the social

caste or class.In translating I clung to that word ‘norm’ as a



w ay out o f the difficulty in fin din g an adequate

equivalent. It was highly convenient m etrically,

and I disliked ‘la w ’, ‘ truth’ and ‘doctrine’ , the usualrenderings, as not litera lly accurate. Bur norm was

a bad fit when we compare such Suttas as the fore

going with another notable and also overlooked pair

and discern the position assigned to it probably by

the Founder Gotama himself.

I t will be rem em bered1 that, in the partingadm onition to live in the light and refuge o f the self,

dhamma is placed beside self as eq ua lly light and

refuge. These, and nothing else, are the twin fact by

w hich m an might attain the height o f the im mortal.

N ow in these two Suttas, the Fou nd er is said, before

beginning his mission, to have confessed that dhamma

was the object o f his adoration, or au least o f his

reverence. A nd here too dhamma is linked with the

self. His confession receives solemn endorsement by

a deity, who pronounces it, as true o f all the aw ak

ened (buddha) past and to come, that they also do

so no less:

AH dwelt (their) dhamma honouring;

Do dwell and shall dwell; ’tis their way.

So he to whom the self is dear,2

Who longetli for the great se lf- he

Should homage unto dhamma pay.

Here is no mere norm to be ‘upheld’, the standard

o f the average decent man. Here is religious aspira

tion o f the deepest kind to w in to the yet nnattained

1 P , 38. 2 One o f the two rearls 'thf* aim (attha) is dear’.

4 6 D H A M M A A S M A N D A T O R .



while traversing the M ore betw een I t and present

life. Here is not only in the term a sense o f duty to

a code or standard; here is a sense o f the ‘ ought’

w ithin us: here Is what we, w ith an inadequate

word, call ‘conscience’ - inadequate since in it we

have to express, not merely an ‘inwyt’, as we used

to say, an insight, as to what should he done or not

done, but also an urging W ill at work on us. As our

great playwright lias it; ‘Conscience! ay, that Deitie

within my bosom.’ And in the term I believe thatGo tam a saw an aspect o f the divine Self which

appealed to him as having a more dynamic, as hav

ing a less static meaning than the term ‘self’ could

yie ld . M an had not just to know; he had to wayfare,

to becom e in order to attain. H e had , in a word, to

live his religion.

T believe that, could it be possible for us to receivea true message from the ever-living Founder, it

w ould be, that he tried to make men see in dkamma

tha t Peak, tha t H eight o f the imm ortal (amafagga),

rather than in the word o f his day: the Self. R ev iew

ing the Suttas, we may say, that in them the word

atid, put forward at the outset as the Aim, is for the

sayings a survival, but that dhamma is an emergence

quick with new emphasis. Dharma may be said

always to have meant ‘duly’, or what ought to be,

o r be done, regulative or norm ative ‘function’ . But

in these lines o f earliest Buddhism, i t is given the

force, not only o f duty, but o f Mandator o f duty.

Just as the word ‘thing’ or ‘things’: the what is done,or may be done or brought to pass, is transcended in

dhahka as maxdator 47



43 D H A M M A A S M A X D A T O R

the Ting, the Scandinavian parliament, in that it

means a body of mm considering the ‘what may be

done5, so, in that first Buddhism, we have dhamma asmeaning not only the ‘ought’, but the Monitor

inspiring it.

This m ay to most seem forced. L et this then be

borne in mind; the object o f worship in that day of

disdeihed external gods, was still a Person, a M an -

‘Brahm a (neuter) worshipped as the S elf (masculine)’

- and not one or more ideas or abstractions o f the

Man, like our ‘Good, True and Beautiful’ and the

like. And let the follow ing lines be noted as suggest

ing a quasi-personal element in the worship of

dhamma, in the little poem of ‘Warding’ ascribed to a

monk called Dh am mika. Beginning;

'Well doth dhamma protect him in sooth who dhamma doth follow,’

he ends with;

Hence let a man put forward desire as to dhamma, Delighting in finding in That so good a Wayfarer.

Persisting in dhamma, disciple of best of wayJarers, Venturing, comes to the best and the highest of refuges.

With this compare the Mandates Sutta above;

‘there is dwelling with me a fellow-student who

knows who sees’ , . , noting that the following versc-s

make both self and dhamma an inwardly witnessing

‘m aster’ to be obeyed. A nd that final injunctioncited above, coupling both as guiding fight and

refuge.



d h a m m a a s m a n d a t o r 49

B u t t h e r e w a s a f u r th e r e m e r g en c e in t h e h is to r y o f

dhamma', I w o u l d c a l l i t t h r e ef o ld ; ( i ) s e c u la r la w ,

(2) n a t u r a l la w - o r a s is no w fa shi o na ble ‘co sm i c ’

l a w - a n d (3} c o d e o r b o d y o f d o c t rin e . T h e first h a s,

i f I e r r no t , r e su lt e d in a ( Bu d d h is t) pr e fe r e nce to

translate dhamma b y ‘ law * w i th a c a p i ta l L . T h e

s ec o n d m a y p o s s ib ly h a v e w o r k e d i n f o rm in g th e

c o n c e p t u n d e r w h i c h M a l ia y a n a B u d d h is m p la ce s

its su pr e m e a spe ct o f B u d d h a a s G o d . I t is t he t h i r d

w h ic h , a lr e a d y in F Ita k a c o m p ila tio n , defin esdhamma, a l is t na m e ly o f t he l it e r a r y , a n d la t e r

s c r ip t u r a l fo rm s i n w h i c h ‘d h a m m a ’ w a s h a n d e d

d o w n .

In i t t ha t m o st inw a r d o f a l l r e li g io u s e xpe r i e nce :

th e f a c t a n d p r o m p t i n g o f ‘ c o n s c ie n c e ’, h a s b e co m e

e x t e r n a l iz e d . T h e I n n e r I n s p ir e r h as b e c o m e th e

o u t w a r d c o d e . T o t h e q u e s tio n p u t t o p u p i ls o f

C e y l o n . ‘W h a t fo r y o u i s dhamma? t h e a n s w e r g i v e n

m e w a s ‘ T h e S u t t a P i ta k a ’ . H e n c e t h e t ra n s l at o r

g i ve s E u r o p e a n r e a d e rs t he w o r d ‘ d o ct r ine ’ ( ca pi ta ;

D 1. O th e r s c h o os e t h e w c r d ‘ T r u t h ’ . T h e o n e is to o

ob ject ive , the othe r loses s ight o f the r ig h t subject ive

m e a n i n g . ( T h e r e w e r e se v e ra l P a l i w o r d s f or t ru t h

t o h a n d , h a d t h a t b ee n th e m e a n in g o f dhamma.)

T r u t h is ‘ w h a t is’ ; dhamma is ‘w h a t o u g h t to b e ’ .

I t Is pe r ha ps i n t he Aso ka n Ed i ct s , r o ck- ca r vcn,

Lhat w e m ay see this t ransi tion em erging. In them

dhamma is d e fine d no t as a u n i ta r y bo d y {khumlha) ,

m uch less as a force; i t is a com posite teach ing. T h e

question is; not W h at is dhamma? m u ch less W ho isdhamma! b u t h o w m a n y {kali) is i t? and the reply is

D b





c o l le c t io n o f t e a c h i n g as h e w i ll w e ll h a v e k n o w n w as

m ore or less in the hand s, n o t o f the faithfu l few' at

V c s a li , b u t o f the N e w M e n , I t m a y b e , i t p r o b a b lyis , t r ie that , w av ing as ide a l l h is con tem porar ies , such

a s t h e a g e d a s c e t i c K a s s a p a , a n d a l l y o u n g e r d i s

c ip l e s , a s t e n din g t o w a r ds t he S a n khy a n ca n ke r o f

r e s o lv in g the m a n in t o a m e r e co m p l e x , he n a m e d n o

h u m a n s uc ce ss or. B u t i n e a c h m a n t he re w a s T h a t

W h o c o u ld suffice fo r relig iou s g u id a n c e , th e In n e r

M o n i t o r . I f t h e n a m i n g o f a su c ce ss or h a d b e e n al e ge n d in v e n t e d h y t he a f te r m e n , i t w o ul d h a v e b e e n

t h re e fo ld , th e t r in i ty o f B u d d h a , D h a m m a , S a n g h a .

T h a t h e e ve r th o u g h t o f dhamma as ju st an extern al

co de o f do ctr in e s is f o r m e a n o t he r m a t t e r a b o u t

w h ic h I go n o t w ith B u d d h ists o r b co k s.

U H A M 1 I A A S . M A N D A T O R 5 1



5

O V E R - E S T I M A T E O F I L L ; U N D E R

E S T I M A T E O F D E S I R E

T h e legends agree i n s h o w i n g t h e y o u n g l a i r d

G o t a m a a t h o m e m u c h w o r rie d o v e r th in g s a b o u t

w h ic h m a n k in d m a y w o r ry , b u t w h ic h it m a in ly

takes in i t s s tr ide res ignedly ; th ings which be long to

l ife as know n and to be exp ected; th ings f rom w hich

as they come i t Seeks no specia l miraculous exemp

tion . I m ean o f course, disease, old age., de ath. N o

m en t ion in those ta les is m ad e abo ut less pred ictable ,i f m o r e f o r m i d a b l e ills : e a r t h q u a k e , f a m in e , f lo o d ,

w a r . T h e s e w e re fre q u e n t en o u g h in a n c ie n t In d ia ,

an d yet a bo u t these the say ings show l it tle w orry .

I t i s those three , and those a lone , about which the

leg en d show's G o ta m a w or ryin g, ev en as i t Is those

t h r e e w h i c h i n o n e S u i t a a r e c a l l e d t h e me s s e n ge r s

o f d e v a ’ s.

B u t b e i t n o te d - a n d w h o so fa r h as n o t e d it? -

t h a t w h e n i n a n g u i sh G o t a m a is m a d e to c r y o u t in

distress ov er the w orld ’ s t rag ed y , the three h av e been

in one respect a l tered: ‘W o e is m e at the w orld ’ s ev il

p a s s i n births, ageings and dyings-, is there then no way-

o u t ? ’ H e r e is s u r ely th e h a n d o f t h e e d i ti n g m o n k!

F o r h im , n o t m a r r in g a n d e n d in g o f l if e w a s th e w h o l e

o f t h e t r o u b l e ; w o e f u l w a s a ls o t h e b e g i n n i n g o f it.

52





athirst for * w isdom ’ , for the cu lture o f his d ay, in tha t

r e m o t e h o m e in t h e h ills . T h e v i e w o f life a s n e e d i n g

a ‘ w a y o u t 1 w a s c h a r a c t e r i s t ic a l l y m o n ki sh , b u t it w a sn ot h is w ay , H e h im sel f d id n ot f ind li fe ‘ i l l ’ ; he is

s h o w n c a l l in g h i m s e lf t h e h a p p ie s t o f m e n , a nd

ju d g in g , th a t b e in g obsessed b y ‘i l l ’ w as to h e in c a p

a b l e o f f o r m in g a r i g h t e s tim a te o f it.

I t is t r u e t h a t , i n a s o li ta r y c o n t e x t , G o t a m a is

m ad e to speak as i f h is teac hin g d id la y gre at s tress on

‘ i ll ’ a n d th e w a y o a t fr o m t h a t . I a m i n c l in e d t o

t h in k i t w as m y c i ti n g it in a m u c h r e a d m a n u a l

t w e n t y -s ix y ea r s a g o t h a t t a u g h t m a n y ( la y ) B u d

dh ists th er e w as such a co n te xt , Tt. run s: ‘J u st this do

I teach : i ll and the s topp ing o f i l l . ’ I d id not , a t a l l

events , so m isread the P al i as to rend er i t , as Bu d

dhists do : ‘T i l ls on ly do I teach . . T h e pa rt ic le em

in o lder Pal i does no t e lim inate the o ppos i te ; i t on ly

e m p h a siz es t h e a u b j e c t o f d is co u rs e. A b e t t e r r e n d e r -

in g w ere : T h is ver i ly do I teach. , , . T o sa y , he only

t a u gh t th a t is to e l im i n a te m u c h t h a t B u d d h is ts

them selves m ain tain he did Leach.

B u t I c a n n o t fo r a m o m e n t c o n c e d e h e d id te a c he v e n t h e q u a l if ie d s a y i n g . A m a n , w h o s et o u t

t e a c l iin g th e W a y t o attka: ‘ th e w a y g o in g to j o y ’

w'e fin d it c a lle d ; a m a n , o f w h o se d iscip les a k in g is

r e p o r t e d t o h a v e s a i d : W h y i s i t t h a t y o u r d i s c i p l e s

a r c so j o y o u s as c o m p a r e d w i th o t h e r r e lig io u s

b o d ies? - this m a n w ill n e v e r h a v e so c o n c e n tra te d on

‘ i l l ’ as to cal l i t the t h i n g t h a t h e t a u g h t , w h a t e v er

else he had to say.

W ith th e g ro w th o f m o n asticism its e lf I h a v e here

54 O V E R - E S T I M A T E O F I L L



no space to deal , nor with the decline o f this obsession

w h e n th e m o n k b e c a m e p e rm a n e n tly estab lish ed in

B u d d h i st la n d s . 1M y restatem en t h ere a b ou t ‘‘i l l ’ consists m ain ly in

this : th at the facts o f o ld age , d isease an d dea th are

b y n o m ea n s w o r th y to b e o r lik e ly to h a v e b e en , th e

m o v i n g i d e a i n a g r e a t w o r ld - g o s p e l. I t is n o t

e n o u g h t o o b j e c t , t h a t B u d d h i s m o n l y ‘ b e c a m e ’ t h a t

i n t im e . I a m co n vi nc e d , t ha t i n su ch a go spe l, the

i nspi r a t i o n g i ve n t o i t s fo u nd e r wi l l ha ve be e n f r o m

t he f ir s t a m a n d a t e f it t o be o n e n e e d e d j u s t t he r e

and th en b y m a n , a m a n d a t e w h i c h w a s a n e w w o r d

a b o u t t h e n a t u r e , n o t o f m a n ’ s b o d y a n d m in d , b u t o f

t h e v e r y m a n , th e self, s c u l . s p i rit , t h e ‘ m a n - i n - m a n ’ .

B u d d hi s t scr ipt u r e ha s so m u ch ha r pe d o n i ll a nd

o n e s c a p e fr o m i t — n o t as a b e c o m in g s u p r e m e l y

w e ll, b u t as e n d in g o f i l l - th a t this m o n kish o u tlo o k

ha s b l ind e d o u r e ye s to t he ve r y m u ch m o r e t ha t w a s

its real N ew W ord . T h er e is such a thin g as d istress

o r ‘ d u kk h a : a b o u t o ne ’ s spiritual w e ll- b e in g . W c s a w

i t in t h e p r e c e d i n g s e ctio n o n t h e t h r e e m a n d a t e s .2

T h e earnest seeker is d istressed, n ot uver b o d i ly or

m e nt a l ‘ il l’ , bu t a t h is la ck o f sp i ri tu a l gr o w t h. A n d yet, even h ere , h e cloth es his w o r ry in term s o f those

three forms o f b od i ly ‘ i l l ’ ; i t is the y th at co nt inu e to

p r e o c c u p y h im . T h e r e is n o t h in g p o s it iv e o f w e l fa r e

i n a ny fo r w a r d v i e w i n h is a spi r a ti o n; m e r e ly the

n eg at ive ‘en d o f i l l ’ . I t is, I h av e sa id , as i f the

G r e e k s old ie rs o f X e n o p h o n h a d c a l le d o n t , n o t , as

t h e y d i d , ‘ T h e s e a l t h e s e a !’ , b u t ‘ N o m o r e la n d ! n o

1 Of, The MUinia Questions, p. at) f. 2 See pp. 40 f.

i n d e e - e s t i m a t e o r d e s i r e 5 5



m o r e l a n d f I t is, a s th e m o n k s a w i t, a g o s p e l, n o t

o f th e m o r n in g , b u t o f th e n ig h t . N o w th e f o u n d e r o f

B ud d h is m , h i m s e l f ir. a g r e a t B e co m i n g , w i ll n o t

h a v e h i d e d b e n d in g o v e r c r u t c h , sic k -b e d a n d g r a v e .

H e w a y fa r ed fu r th e r .

I t i s poss ible that the word dukkha w a s n e v e r us e d

fo r a n y ills be y o n d th o se o f m in d a n d b o d y , e s p e c i a l ly

b o d y . T h e C o n co r d a n c e o f th e P itak a s th a t is b e in g

p r e p a r e d w i l l fo r h i t ur e r e s e a r ch ma k e t h i s e a s y t od e c id e . Y e t w e h a v e b e fo r e u s a l r e a d y m o r e t h a n o n e

c o n t e s t d e fin i n g ‘ d u k k h a ’ , n o t a b l y t h e ‘ F ir s t U t t e r

an ce ’ . H ere w e get , f irs t, b i r th , d isease , o ld age ,

d y i n g - a ll fo u r th is tim e - t h e n th e m a i n l y m e n t a l

w o e o f u n io n w ith th e undesire.d , a b se n c e frn m th e

des ired. A n d that , as w e say , is the lot . H ere is

n o t h i n g t h a t ca n be ca l l e d d i s t i n ct i v e l y s p i r i t ua l i l l .

A n d th e o n ly on es ‘h a rp e d u p o n ’ ad nauseam a r e a

t r in i ty o f o l d a g e a n d d y i n g , w i t h b i r t h a n d d i se a se

as a l ternat ive third:

Like forest fires behold them drawing nigh:

Disease, decay and death, dread trinity,

o r t h e f ir st t w o : ‘ o ld a g e a n d d e a t h co m e r o l l in g in

u p o n y o n ; w h a t is th e r e t h a t y o u c an d o ? ’ o r b ir th ,

t h a t h r e b i rt h , a l o n e , as i n t h e f o r m u l a o f t h e aruhan:

‘ W a n e d o u t is b i r th ; t h e g o d - li fe is li v e d ; w h a t w a s

to be do n e is do ne . . I suspect th at ‘b i r th ’ he re

h a s r e p l a ce d t h e p r o ba bl y e a r l i e r s a y i n g i n s o meS ut t a s : ‘ W a n e d o u t fo r m e is h e l l (nirdya) . . T o

m a k e o f th is la s t t h e m a i n fa c t o r o f ‘ i l l ’ tr a n s cen d s

t h e l e g e n d a r y tr in i ty . T h e h o p e w h i c h lies in a ll

5 6 O V E R - E S T I M A T E O F I L L



r e lig io n s a ve th e B u d d h i s m o f th e uwiik, the fa i th

w h ic h looks to b ir th as a G o d -g iv e n o p p o r tu n ity fo r

s p i ri tu a l g r o w t h a n d , w h e r e r e i n c a r n a t io n is t a u g h t

a r e c u r r e n t o p p o r t u n i t y f o r f u r t h e r g r o w t h , i s

r e p l a c e d b y t h e o u t lo o k o n r e b i r th 1 a s m e r e ly

r e n e w a l o f th e s p rin g s o f m is e ry .

H e r e in t h e y re s e m b l e t he i r C hr is t ia n succes so rs

o n l y in a co m m o n ‘ le a v i n g o f th e w o r l d ’ . A s

E r n e st o B u o n a i u t i h a s r e m i n d e d m e , th e C h r is t ia n

m o n k s s o u g h t , w i t h h o p e a n d d e s i r e , f o r w h a t t h e yde c l a r e d t o b e p l a in l y , ‘ a b e t te r c o u n t r y , t h a t i s, a n

h e a v e n l y ’ , 2 a nd s o d o i n g , u o h e l d i n t h e C h u r c h th e

s p ir it ua l s t a te o f w e ll -b e in g , n o t o f b o dy o r m in d,

b u t o f soul. F o r m a n ’s w e ll-d c in g h ere th e B u d d h ist

m o n k d id a d m it a h a p p i e r w o r ld h e r e a ft e r, b u t

a tem pora l wo r ld no less th an this , a t ten d ed no less

b y ‘d e c a y a n d d y in g '. T h e o n ly f in a l g o a l — b u tmore o f t ha t la t e r.

A r e lig io n , h a v in g as its m o v in g id e a th e r id d a n c e

o f b o d i l y a n d m e n t a l ills , is g o o d g o s p e l fo r th e w o r k

o f do ct o r o r so c ia l re fo r m e r , b u t a s r e lig io n , a s m o s t

o f us u n d e r s t a n d r e l ig i o n , n a m e ly , t h e q u e s t o f a n

u l tim a t e G o a l b e y o n d t he w o r lds , i t ha 3 n o f it b a sis .

T h a i rid d a n c e , h o w e v e r m u c h , la r g e ly in t erm s o f

f o rm u l a , i t is h a r p e d u p o n i n B u d d h i s t p r o se a n d

ve rse (esp e c ia lly in th e a n th o lo g ie s o f m o n k a n d

n u n ) , w a s n o t t h e l e v e r a n d f u l c r u m i n o r i g i n a l

B u d d h i s m .

1 An elaborated versionof Jie three deva-mcsscngers (v. p. 5 2 ); old

age, disease, dying, makes them five, adding a law-court and a btihy 12 Hebrews xi. 13-16.

under- estim ate of d e siR.E 57





u s d e k - e s t i h a t f , o f d e s i r e 59

t h ir s t o f m a n i fo ld b e c o m i n g . ’ T h i r s t h a s , f o r th e

C hr is t ia n t r a di t io n , b e e n m a de g lo r io us in a s p ir a tio n

b y th e H e b r e w p salm ist. B y th e B u d d h is t e d ito r i t

i s us e d t o s ho w t he sole indmer o f t h e ‘i l l ’ . T h e

m o n k h a d f o rs w o r n so m u c h i n life w h e r e i n d e sir e,

w h e r e ‘ th irst’ is th e le v e r o f m a n ’s e ffo rts , th a t h e

f o rs w o r e a ls o de s ir e . T h e r e a de r m a y s a y : B u t i t is

o n l y t h i r s t s p e c i f i ca l l y q ua l i f ie d t ha t i s co n de m n e d.

I re p ly : I fear i t is not so. T h e tvord for thirst

( n o w he r e us e d f o r b o di l y t h i r s t in t he s e s cr ip t ur e s )is n e v e r a p p l ie d to a n y f o r m o f d e s ir e p r o n o u n c e d

g o o d . T h e t w o g r e a t b o g ie s th e m o n k h e l d i n fe a r

w e re th e f in d in g sense g r a tif ica tio n lo v e ly a n d th e

p e r p e t ua t io n o f p e r s o n a l li fe in t h is o r a n y w o r l d .

I t is tr u e t h a t , i n t h e f o u r t h ‘ t r u t h ’ : t h e ‘ m e a n s ’,

t h a t is , t he ‘w a y ’ o f t he d ia gn o sis, t he f e a t ur e : ‘ r igh t

pu rp ose ’ or ‘inte n t ’ f ind s inclu sion , bu t in so far asi t i s v o l i t io n a l , i t co m e s un de r co n de m n a t io n a s

‘ thirst5. A n d for the rest , i t is bu r ied in a ca tego ry

o f e ig h t , w h e n i t s h o u ld h a v e b e e n p u t f o r w a r d 1 as

t h e v e r y c h i e f t h i n g in t h e W a y : t h e d e sir e, t h e w ill

t o b e co m e w e l l !

‘ T o b e co m e w e ll! ’ - ( I w o u l d w e c o u l d s ay w ith

o u r n e i gh b o u r s ‘ t o se ek “ th e W e l l” ! ’ ) - w h e n w ill

m a n a d m it t h is a s the go a l o f h is r e lig io us q u e s t?

T h e r e w a s a g r e a t c h a n c e fo r it t o b e r e a l iz e d in

e a r l i e s t B u d d h i s m , b u t t h e m o n k a r o s e , i n h i s h a n d

I n d ia ’ s p r o n en e s s lo r n e ga t iv e e x p r es s io n . A n d b y

h i m t h e f in e p o s itiv e s in G o t a m a ’ s t e a c h i n g : atmd as

dhamma, th e W a y , a n d t h e A i m w e r e c r o w d e d o u t,

1Cf. p. 68.



6 o O V E R - E S T I M A T E O F I L L

s h if te d o r s h r iv e lle d . T h e w o r t h i n t h e n e g a t i v e

a p p e a l e d to t h e m o n k , w h o h a d , to so m u c h in lite ,

ut tered h is ‘N o, N o ’ {neti, neti), a n d h e d r e w h isg r e a t c re e d d o w n to h is o w n n a r r o w e d o u t lo o k .

A s to th e d escrip tio n o f th e W a y in those ‘ fo u r

t r u t h s ’ I c a n n o t a c c e p t i t a s t h e o r i g i n a l w o r d i n g .

Let us com e to th is .





g r o w t h . W e m e e t h i m im m e d i a te ly ( ? ) th e r e a ft er ,

e x p l a in i n g h is n e w j o y t o a p a s se r -b y , a n d t h e n ,

f inding h is f r iends , draf t ing with or to them a charto f t e a c h i n g , i n w h i c h t h e s ee ker i n r e l ig i o n is sh o w n ,

not as growing Into b lossom l ike a p lant , but as

a w a y f a r e r c h o o s i n g t h e b e t t e r w a y .

I h a v e s a id ‘i m m e d i a t e l y t h e r e a f te r ’ . H a d w e , in

t h e V i n a y a r e c o r d s w h e r e w e r e a d t h i s , a c o m p l e t e

acc ou nt , and no t m ere ly m ore or less ser ia l sketches

o f t h e s ket ch ie s t k i n d , w e s h o u l d p r o b a b l y f in d , t h a t

t h e d e c is io n a n d th e go i n g f o r th t o fr a m e a n d b eg in ,

the work were rmt so c lose in succession as they

a p p e a r . I t is t e m p t in g n o d o u b t to li n k th e ' r a d i a n t

m i e n 5 w it h th e in s p i r in g v is io n , a n d w i th t h e e n d i t

b r o u g h t to a n g u ish e d d o u b t. Y e t it is sc a r c e ly to

fo r c e a j u d g e m e n t i f w e h o ld , t h a t t h e s u b stitu t io n

o f th e w a y - fi g u r e f o r t h a t o f t h e s ta tio n a r y -fo o t ed

p l a n ts i n v o l v e d a fu r t h e r p a u s e fo r th o u g h t , a n d w i ll

h a v e b r o u g h t u u less th e j u y o f I n i ti at iv e , w h e n t h e

b u rd en o f th e v is io n h a d b een p o n d e re d o v e r . T h e r e

w ill h a v e b een la b o u r-p a in s in h im o v e r th e n eed

t o s h o w m e n , t h a t m a n w a s n o s ta t ic e n t i ty , a n e v e r -c h a n g i n g in d iv i d u a l , b u t a n e v e r - b e c o m e r - th is t h e

plants suff iced to show . B ut further , there w i ll ha ve

b een a y e a rn in g to sh o w m en , th a t m a n ’s life w a s

a b i g g e r t h i n g t h a n j u s t o n e sp a n h e i e fo llo w e d b y

w h a t u tte r ly v a g u e surm ise a d d e d in su p p lem en t;

t h a t i t w a s a r a n g i n g as m a n o f n o t o n e w o r l d o n l y ,

b u t o f m a n y w o rld s m a n y tim es in a lon g, lo n g q u est

fo r th e u l t im a t e W a y ’s E n d .

T h a t t h e o t h e r , t h e m o r e s t a t i o n a r y f i g u r e o f

6 a , T H E W A Y I N T H E W O R L D S



T H E W A Y I N T H E W O R L D ? 63

growth d id not b ecom e b anished f rom his sub sequent

teach ing is a ttested b y the S ay ings . For instance ,

t h e r e is t h e S u t ta ‘B e c o m i n g ’ , in w h i c h , r e p l y in g t o

his co lim its quest ion as to ju st w h at w as m ean t b y

‘ B e c o m i n g ’ [bhaud), G o t a m a s p ea k s o f m a n , h is

act ions an d his gro w th in the w orlds, as ‘a seed,

h a vin g a ct ion as its he ld, rain or mo isture as w i l l or

des ire, and ren ew al in one o f the three wor lds as

resul t o f grotvt li’ . N o w ord o f po s i tiv e dep rec iat ion

is ad ded , y et the m onk-edi tors hav e con tr iv ed tog i v e th e te rm s us ed a n i m p l ic i t d e p r e c ia t in g . T r a n s

lators by using, for vinmna, i .e . the man-as-surviving,

the later term ‘consciousness ’ or the l ike , have helped

t o o b sc u re . T h e m o n k - c d i to r h a s c a l le d w i ll o r

d e s ir e b y th e b a d n a m e o f t h ir st o r c r a v i n g . A n d

so this li t tle discourse, a cam eo o f a gosp el o f hope,

is tw isted into one o f suggested w ay s f or s topp ing

f u r t h e r ‘ b e c o m i n g 3. T h u s : ‘ I f t h e r e w e r e n o w o r ld

o f d e sir e a n d n o m a t u r i n g a c t io n , w o u l d th e r e

b e a co rre sp o n d in g b e co m in g ? 3 ‘ S u re ly n o t, s ir ,3

r e p lie s t h e c o m p l ia n t A n a n d a . V e r i l y it w e r e w o r th

alm ost al l the P itaka s pu t toge ther , could, w e in

ex cha ng e learn the or ig ina l ly spo ken term s o f th isd i a l o g u e ! 1

C annot Buddhists and m anual-wr i ters b eg in to see

here , as tl iey ne ve r yet ha ve seen, w h at a contrast

there is b etw een th is ta lk in g o f the s topping o f

gro w th, o f b eco m ing , a nd the hope , t lie fa iL li in

g r o w t h , in b e c o m in g t h a t w e s a w t h e F o u n d e r h a d

in h im at the v is ion o f the lotuses?

1 AnguHara, i. 223.



R e a d in g w it h c a re a n d i m a g in a t iv e s y m p a th y w e

m a y see t h e F o u n d e r , as b y n a t u r e a m a n o f t h e r o a d ,

a l o v e r o f t r a v e l , o u t fo r a d v e n t u r e , s ee k in g w h a the m ight win . b r ing ing this feature into h is message

f o r h is fe llo w s . F r o m m e r c h a n t -a d v e n t u r e r s , c o m in g

t o r e m o t e K a p i l a v a t t h u h e w i l l h a v e h e a r d t e l l o f

o t h e r r eg io n s . T w o c o m e i n t o t h e le g e n d h e lp i n g

h im w h e n h e to o w as a fo ot. A n d tr a d itio n n a m e d

him an d h elpers like him, yes , an d disciples too ,

‘ le a d e r s o f t h e c a r a v a n ’ . 1 B u d d h i s ts m i gh t la t e r

h a v e d o n e j u s t i c e t o th i s t r a i t in t h e i r le a d e r , h a d

t h e y n o t h a d it o b s c u re d f o r th e m , b y m o n k is h e d it

in g ; h a d t h e y n o t s ee n in h is a d v e n t u r e i n s e a r c h o f

‘prof i t ’ (attha) a ‘ g r e a t r e n u n c i a ti o n o f t h e w o r l d ’ ;

h a d t h e y n o t s u p e r i mp o s e d o n t h i s l i v e w i r e o f

h u m a n i ty t h e ir m o n k is h id e a l o f a c a l m e d q u i e s ce n ts i t ter , so too wel l known in the la ter s i t t ing Buddha-

n i p a .

H is o w n i d io s y n c r a s y , his c o n c e p t io n o f m a n a s a

s ee ke r, a n d i n s e e k in g c h o o s in g - h e r e w a s e n o u g h

t o m a ke h i m s u b s tit u te , f o r t h e r e l a t i v e l y s t a ti o n a r y

p l a n t - c v o l u t i o n , a b e t t e r figu r e , A n d a f igu r e t h a t

less s u gge st ed th e i n v o l u n t a r y . H is w a y f a r e r w a s

e v i d e n d y n o t a m e r e d r if te r , o n e in a h e r d o f s h ee p

o r k in e , o r in a m a r sh a lle d b a n d o f m e ii u n d e r

o rd e rs . H e w a s o u t t o g e t so m e w h e r e b y his o w n

c h o ic e o f w h a t w a s f o r h i m a b e t te r . A n d b e it r e

m e m b e r e d , th is c h o i c e in m a t te r s o f r e lig i o u s r e f e r

e n c e w a s , in t h a t d a y a n d c u l tu r e , li tt le l e ft to t h e m a n

a m o n g m e n . H e w a s a t e v e r y t u r n p r e sc r ib e d fo r.

1 Dlgha, Li. 39; Apadana, 80, &c.

6 4 T H E W A Y I N T H E W O R L D S



W a v 01* r o a d w a 3 n o t a n e w f ig u r e f o r m a n ’ s

trav e l l i n g i n re l i g i ous teac h i n g , n or a n ew be l i e f .

B u t in t h e Y e d i c p 't m c a n d t h e U p a n i s li a d i c panlha,

w e d o n o t g e l su g gestion o f th is ch o ice , th is w ill, p u t

in to ac t i on , n or y e t th at this v o lun tar is m was m an ’ s

es sen t ia l n atu re . A n d m ore: th ere w as i n th em n o

resp ec t p a i d to th e a s p ec t o f t rav e l as a w ay far i n g o f

m a n w it h m e n . N o r m a l life is n o t a m a t t e r o f s o lita r y

p e n e t r a tin g t h r o u g h a j u n g l e , a f a c t w h i c h m a k es

tran s l at ion b y ‘p a th ’ 50 m uc h l ess ap t th an word ss uc h as w ay an d road . H ere , n o t th e m on k -c d i tor ,

b u t th e tra n s la to r is to b la m e. Magga, Sansk.: marga,

i s n o f o o t p a t h ; i t i s t h e R o a d . A n d i n a r o a d t h e

f e ll o w - w a y f a r e r , a s w e w e l l k n o w , is a m a t t e r o f

c o n c er n fo r e a c h m a n . I n s p ite o f t h e m o n k a n d o f

t h e j u n g l e p a t h (fr om w h i c h in I n d i a liis k i n d m a y

be said to h a v e sp ru n g ), m a n ’ s r e la t io n to th e oth er

m a n w a s g iv e n , in e a r l y B u d d h is m , a m o v e f o rw a r d

in s ig n i fic a n c e , e v e n t h o u g h m a n k i n d h a d t o w a i t

an oth er f iv e h un d red y ears for th e g rea ter urg e h ere i n ,

th at is, in w h a t w e m a y ca l l road -s en s e , th at c am e

t h r o u g h J es us .

W h ere th e m o n k -ed ito r d id o ffend h erein , is

t h a t, a l th o u g h t h e d o c tr in e o f th e R o a d c a m e

d o w n t h r o u g h B u d d h is m as magga, i t w a s h e l d

for some reason good, in the Utterance, to use the

n a r r o w e r t e r m fiatipa.de, a w ord m ore s ug g es tiv e

o f s tep -by -s '.ep t ra i n i n g , th a n th e w ay far i n g

stride.

M a i n l y , I j u d g e , w e s h o u l d b e a r In m in d , o v e r t h e w a y -fig u re , first, th a t it sym b o lize s m a n as in a M o re ,

Eb

t h e w a y i n t e e w o r l d s 6 5




a ge t t in g on a n d on ; se con dly , th a t i t is a far in g f rom

w o r ld to w o r ld , an d th ir d ly , th a t as w a y fa re r , lit; has

b e fo re h im a W a y ’s E n d . W a y , r o a d : th e se m ea n

w ill a t w ork, m ean progress, g r o w in g fitness a n d at

l a s t G o a l .

W h y th e n th e ‘ e ig h tfo ld ’ ep ith et? V e n e r a b le

d ocu m e n t as th e F irs t U tte ra n ce is. re ve re d as i t

n om in a l ly is , th e re is pe rh aps n o o i lie r an cie n t

saying in the scripture so edited as this le ts appear.

H a n d e d d o w n as i t w i ll h a v e b e e n a t ev e r - in c r e a s in g

n e w ' s e t t l e m e n t s ’ , t h r o u g h d i f f e r e n t m i n d s a n d

m o u t h s ( o r a l o n l y ) , t h e r e w i l l i n e v i t a b l y h a v e c o m e

in a c h a n g e h e re , a n a d d i ti o n t h e r e , a n e w t e rm

som e w h e re e lse. T h e w ork o f ge n e ra l re v is ion ( s ti ll

m a i n l y o r a l ), s u c h as is r e c o r d e d to h a v e t a k e n p l a c e

a t P a t n a s o m e t h r ee h u n d r e d y e a r s l a te r , m u s t h a v e

c a l le d fo r a g r e a t s if ti n g a m o n g t h e v a r y i n g r e p e a tin g s

com e in from those settlem ents , a s i f ting carried n ot

b y m en w h o se v a lu e s in th e ir r e lig io n h a d u n d e rg o n e

m u c h c h a n g e , c h a n g e r e s u lt in g fr o m c o m p le te

s e v e r a n c e f r o m B r a h m i n t e a c h i n g , f r o m g r o w t h o f

m o n a s t i c i d ea ls , f r o m t h e p s y c h o l o g i c a l i n flu e n c e o f

e a r l y S a n k h y a o r A n a l y si s o f m in d .

T h e se re v ise rs wi l l h ave foun d, in th e var ious

ve rs io n s, term s th e y h a d c o m e to use in ( :) a c h a n g e d

w a y , or (2) w ith lo w e r e d va lu e. N o ta b le a m o n g

th ese w ould be th e te rm on ce use d for a im or prof i t:

attha, b u t la t e r u se d fo r ‘ m e a n i n g ’ ; a n d a n o t h e r

w o rd : bhava o r b e c o m in g . O f t h e fo rm e r m o re

pre se n t ly . A s to th e la t te r : i t is un l ike ly th a t th e

F ou n de r , so soon a fter be in g in spire d to h e lp m an to



T H E W A Y r w T H E W O R L D S 67

‘ be co m e ’ , a s o ppo se d to ‘dec l ine ’ , should om it a l l

m e n t i o n o f b e c o m in g in his chart o f Leaclung. I

b e lie ve mention was there.T h e r e w a s i n I n d i a a n o l d a n d f i t s y m b o l f o r p r o

gress: the wheel (chakka). T h e k i n g ’ s c h a r io t -w h e e l

w en t fo rth to c o n q u e r . S o , i t w a s ta u g h t, the h e lp e r

o f m e n s et a - r o ll in g t h e w h e e l o f dhamma, o f the

I d e a l , t h e O u g h t to b e , o r (a s w e m ig h t s ay ) o f r e l i

g io n . I n l at er B u d d h i s m w e fin d th e c o m p o u n d

bhava-chakka: w h e e l o f b e c o m in g . I t m ig h t e q u a ll y w ell h a v e b ee n bhava-magga, since magga a s s y m b o l

r a n k e d t h e n e v e n h i g h e r t h a n ehakkc. B u t , t h r o u g h

the gr o w t h o f m o n a st ic pe ssim ism a bo u t li fe , the fa ct

o f life as a co m i ng t o he , wa s g r e a t ly d isva lu e d . N o

‘w a y ’ t h a t in v o l v e d this c o u l d b e h o n o u r e d . A n d , as I

h a v e s a i d , t h e w o r d hkava wa s u se d fo r co ncr e t e

b eco m in g s: lives , w o rld s . H e n c e , i f , in th e o r ig in a l

F i rs t U t te r a n c e , a n d s u r v i v i n g in s om e v e rs io n s o f i t ,

th e W a y w a s c a l le d , n o t ‘w h e e l o f b e c o m in g ’ , b u t

‘ r o a d o f b e c o m in g ’ , i t m a y w e ll b e t h a t th e e c cle

s ia s tic a l c e n t r e a t P a t n a j u d g e d w e l l to d r o p , f r o m

l li c ir R e v i s e d V e r s i o n , th e e p i t h e t hhiva- ( b e c o m

i ng) Ir o m magga.B u t to m a i n t a in t h e t r a d i t io n a l f or m , i t w o u l d b e

necessary to insert another epi thet .

I t is p o s sib le t h a t t h e m a t te r w a s f o r a t im e in

suspe nse . T h e r e w e r e t he n se ve r a l nu m be r e d l is ts o f

d e s ir a b l e t h in g s f o r l e a r n i n g a n d p r a c t is in g . A m o n g

th e m w a s o n e o f e ig h t g o c d w a y s o f d e e d, w o r d a n d

thought , known as the e ight r ightnesses or f i tnesses

(sammatta). A n d w e h a v e t h e g ro u p o f S u tta s ca lle d




‘ th e T h r e e C o u r s e s , ’ 1 s h o w in g e a c h o n e o f th o s e

lists being, as it were, tried on to ex press the Third, or

M i d d l e W a y . I n t h e e n d th e lis t o f e ig h t w o n , p e r haps as ’l i t ’ tor bo th la i ty and m on k. Su ch is m y

r e a s o n e d c o n v i c ti o n a b o u t th is g r e a t f ig u r e , n o w

h a v i n g p r e f ix e d t o it , n o t w h a t i t m o s t e s s e n tia lly

s to o d fo r - m a n as b e c o m in g , e v e r w a y f a r in g in

t h e w o r ld s - b u t th e so rt o f c o n d u c t t h a t b e co m in g a

M o r e w o u l d c e r ta in l y im p l y.

T h e e ight are , as qu al it ies o f the good li fe , i r re

p r o a c h a b l e i f in a d e q u a t e . T h e y a rc r ig h t (o r fit)

v ie w s, p u rp o se, e n d e a v o u r , sp eech , a c t io n , liv e li

h o o d , m in d f u ln e s s a n d c o n c e n t ra t io n . I n t h a t t w o

n f th e m b r in g fo r w a rd m o d es o f w i ll t h e y w o r t h ily

r e p r e s e n t t h e o ld t e a c h i n g . I n fa c t , M r . A . J .

E d m u n d s h a s c o m e a c r o s s C h i n e s e r e f e r e n c e t o t h e W a y , in w h ic h th is is re ferred to as ju s t th e W a y o f

Pu rpose , w i tdiout the other seven. I am ign or an t of

t h e p r e c i s e C h i n e s e w o r d , h u t w e h a v e i t t r a n s l a t e d ,

I am to ld , into S ansk r it as samkalpa'. p u rp o se . T h a t

ne i ther ‘w isdom ’ n or ‘a m ity ’ should ra ise the

n um ber to te a is cur ious; w hen the nu m ber is so

raised, as is the case in the Ten s o f the F ou rth C o l

l e ct io n (th e W a y fin d s n o m e n t io n u n d e r t h e

E i g h t s ), t h e a d d e d tw o a r e ‘k n o w l e d g e ’ a n d

‘ d e l i v e r a n c e ’ .

W h e re th e e ig h t p ro p erties h a v e d o n e serio us h a rm

to the re l ig ious va lue in Bu dd hism is, tha t in b e ing

d r a g g e d in , th e y a s a L e ss h a v e b lo c k e d o u t s o m e t h in g g re a t e r. T h e y h a v e se r ve d as a r e d h e r r in g

1 Patipadd; see above, p. 65. Anguttara, 1, p.



t h e w , \ y [ N t h e W O R L D S 6 9

d i ve r t i ng a t t e nt i o n f r o m t he t r u e sy m bo l i sm o : t he

R o a d a n d th e R o a d m a n . T h e R o a d w a s c ho se n as

p o in t in g m a n to a jo u r n e y , n o t o f th e g o o d life h e r eo n l y, b u t c f life o f th e m a n , e a c h m a n , s ee n w h o l e,

im m e n s e ly m o r e t h a n j u s t th is s h o rt s p an . A n d

st u d y o f t he ‘ pa r t s ’ ha s d i s tr a ct e d a t te nt io n f ro m t he

W a y fa r e r , so m u c h so, th a t w c fin d in la te r exegesis

c o m p l a c e n t l i n e s d e c l a r i n g t h e r e i s a R o a d b u t n o

G o e r . 1

H o w d i ffe r e nt is t h is pr e o ccu p a t i o n w i th t he e ight

pa r ts fr o m su ch a c le a r ly o ld e r Su t t a as tha t wh i ch

shows t he R o a d as li ft ing f r o m m o t h e r o r fr o m so n

t he fea r , t ha t o ld a ge , i llne ss , d e a t h m a y pa r t t he m

o ne f ro m t he o the r . C e r t a i n ly t h e go o d life d e ta i le d

in the e i gh t pa r t s w o u ld co nd u ce to ne a rne ss h e r e

and hereafter . B u t i t is the fa ct an d order o f l ife

as w a y a n d w a y f a r in g , n o t h e r e o n l y, t h a t is h e r e

th e b as e o f f a it h a n d h o p e i n m e e t in g a g a i n . I n t h e

S u t t a the o d d l it tle s lip o f t he inse r t i ng e d i to r : n o t

the usual ‘J u st this e ight fo ld w a y . b u t J u s t this

w a y , e ig h tfo ld w a y . . cries o u t to u s to n o te w h a t

i n t he pa st ha s b e e n d o n e t o i t. *

O n c e a g r e a t s y m b o l o f m a n ’ s lif e t h r o u g h th e w o rld s , a n d n o t ju s t th e e th ic a l ru n e as w h ic h it is

u s u a l ly v a l u e d , t h e W a y h a s n o w lu st f ur B u d d h is ts

a n d t o r u s its t ru e m e a n in g . I f w e c u t o u t th e s h a c k

l i ng ‘ e i ght pa r t s ’ , a nd l i s t e n t o scr i pt u r a l t e s t i m o ny

to i t as so freed, how' does i t n o t shine in n ew l igh t !

I t w a s th e W a y , n o t as e ig h t fo ld , b u t j u s t ‘ W a y ’ ,

w h ic h A n a n d a , his le a d e r g o n e , d e c la re s as th a t

1 Visuddhi-Magga, ch. xvi. ® Anguttara, i, p, r 78 f.



w h ic h h e h a d b e q u e a th e d to his fo llow ers, a som e

w h a t not b efo re re v e a le d . I t w as th e W a y , n o t as

e igh t fo l d , b u t as ‘l e a d i n g t o j o y ’ , w h e r e o f t h e p o e t o f

t h e G o i n g- B e y o n d S e c t i o n i n t h e o l d a n t h o l o gy

sang:

He who would practise as the Teacher taught,

’Tis lie may go from hence to the Beyond,

Y ea, hence to the Beyond !tls he may go,

Making the Way Incomparable to become;

The Way this is for leading to Beyond,

And therefore is it Yonder-faring called;

a n d t h e p o e t M i ga j a l a to o (w h e n f o r ge t ti n g to c a l l i t

e igh t fo l d , o r n o t kn o w i n g it as s u c h ) :

Yea, to the mighty Haven doth it wend,

(Holy) the faring, well (far thee) the End.

I t is j u s t W a y (magga) t h a t is t h e t id e o f t h e gr e a t

s e c tio n i n th e t h i r d N i ka y a , n o t ‘ e igh t fo l d w a y ’ .

A n d in this p a tc h w o rk lite r a tu re it is s ig n ifica n t,

t h a t o n l y in a C o m m e n t a r y d o w e m e e t w it h th e

c o m p o u n d ‘ c o urs e o f g r o w t h ’ , a g o o d e q u i v a le n t fo r

‘ w a y o f b e co m in g ’ . 1

1 Majjldmii Commentary: imdtlhamka-pafpada.




W H I C H W A S T H E Q U E S T ?

T h e next d if fi c u lt y , in the oM records-patch work,

for which I have sought a solution lay in another

episode, also in the V inay a sketches o f the start o f

the Gotama-mission, I refer to the com ing in of thetwo men, both Brahmin students of high promise,

destined to he held in veneration as the ch ief pair

{agga-yttga) of disciples: Sariputta and M oggallan a.

In approaching the Founder as pupils seeking a

teacher th ey are said to have had a quest. In re

sponse to what they seek, the answer they are stated

to have got does not refer in the least to that quest,

but to something totally different. A nd this has

forced me to conclude that we have here two dif

ferent quests, two different teachers, and that the

ancient memoirs of what actually happened have

become intermingled. I do not find that the misfit

in inquiry and response has led either Buddhists orscholars to such a conclusion. It does no: appear to

have raised the thought, that were we to find such

a misfit in a similar interview to-day, we should

conclude at once that some reporter, some witness,

had got his notes confused. But the result of the

confusion has been, that while the reported quest

has been stifled, the reported answer has been givena relatively undeserved immortality.

n



S i m p l y p u t , t h e in q u i r y w i ll h a v e b e e n w h e t h e r

G o t a m a c o u l d t e ac h th e tw o B r a h m i n s w h a t he

t h o u g h t a b o u t th e B r ah m in te a c h in g o f amrita. Pali,

amala: l iter a l ly "the not de ad 1, i .e. im m or tality.

A c tu a l ly th e y find A ssaji, on e o f th e first d isciples,

ra d ian t in mien, and ask the cause . A ssaj i answers ,

t h a t h e h as a t e a c h e r w h o h as a r e li g io n o f e x p la i n i n g

th ing s c au s a lly . T he r e u p o n ins ig ht c ome s to S ar i-

p u t ta as to w h a t (in r e ligion) the s top p ing o f thecause co uld b r ing ab ou t; he fe tches his f r iend and

th e y b e c om e G ota .m a ’ s de v o te d adhe r ents.

‘ T h e i m m o r t a l ’, o r m a n ’s c o n d i ti o n h e r e a ft e r is a

re l ig ious matter which places us at once in the t imes

w h e n th e e a r ly U p a n is h a d ic te ach in g s w e re to th e

f or e . W e h av e b u t to op e n the i r p ag e s , nor look l ong ;

‘ m an , a t d is s o lu t ion o f the b od y p as se s in to b r e a th

. . . into the w in d w h ich is spac e . . . goes w he re arc

the s e d e v as; r e ac h ing tha t he b e com e s im m or ta l as

are they . . . A n d so on, ver ily a vag ue an d w indy

t e a c h in g . T o g e t c le a re r k n o w le d g e m e n w e re

c o n s u l ti n g s u ch as h a d p s y c h i c gift s; M o g g a ll a n a

h a d m u c h in t h a t n a t u re to d e v e l o p ; G o t a m a w as(at least later) known to have such; there is for me

e v e r y p r o b a b i li ty t h a t th o s e tw o B r a h m in s s o u g h t h im

f or s u c h k now l e dg e .

B u t w h a t o f A s s a j i’s a n sw e r to m e n b e n t o n s uc h a

quest?

T h is w as ab ou t , n ot a w e ll e s tab lis he d, i f v a g u e l yf or m u l ate d te ac hing , b u t a r e la t iv e l y ne w s u b j e ct

the n m u c h dn the a i r ’ : the c au s a l u ni for m it ie s not ,

I b e li e ve , in ‘N a t u r e ’ , b u t i n t h e in n e r w o r l d o f m in d .

7 2 W H I C H W A S T H E £>U E 3T ?



T h a t th is m e n t a l w o r l d p r o c e e d e d n o less u n i fo r m l y

tha n b o d i ly processes: th is was a n ecessary feature

in th e n e w a n d r is in g s tu d y o f t re a t in g m in d a n a l y t ic a l ly , la t e r t o b e c a lle d S a n k h y a , o r c o m p u t a t io n , a

w c r d s e rv in g fo r an alysis in g e n e ra l and fo r th e n e w

‘ p s y c h o l o g y ’ i n p a r t i c u l a r . W c s a w , in G o t a m a ’ s

h es ita ti on , h ow' h e h ad been d raw n to m ak e a g os p e l

out o f th is n ew p reo c c up at i on wbth (m en ta l) c aus e

an d e f fec t . W e s aw h ow th e d ev a o f h is v is ion p as sed

i t by , as w el l as the m ona st ic ide a l tha t h ad no lesssuggested i tse l f : a lso a new thing ‘ in the air ’ .

W e Hn n o t fin d , in th e first u ttera n ces, th a t

G o t a m a r eg r et te d h is j u d g e m e n t , t h a t m e n in

g e n e r a l w o u l d n o t b e b e n e f it ed b y a t e a c h i n g a s

gospel one or bo th o f these subjects. I w ou ld not

go so far as to say, he did not, in. his message of

m a n ’ s g r o w t h as w a y f a r in g fr o m th e ‘ as y o u a r e ’ to

t h e g o a l o f ‘ as y o u m a y b e c o m e ’ , a p p l y c au sa l

un i form ity as s trength en ing his teac hin g. I bel ieve

w e even fin d h im ‘ try in g o n ’ th e p r in c ip le o f c a u sa

t ion to an i n ter loc u tor . P u l a l l th at as id e , h e is

r e p o r t e d s a y in g , I w i ll t e a c h y o u r e l ig i o n :— G i v e n

this, tha t comes to be; i f th is happ ens , tha t w i ll

h a p p e n ; a n d th e sa m e n e g a t iv e l y p u t . B u t th e m a n

does not hear i t g ladly; says blunt ly , I don’t know

w h a t y o u ’ re ta lk in g a b o u t. I t h a d fo r h im n o a p p e a l.

Y e t w e h e a r B u d d h ists o c c a s io n a lly sa y in g , th e ir

creed is ‘b ased ’ on causat ion . H ad this be en so, w e

s h oul d s ure l y h a v e m et w i th i t i n th e firs t u t teran c es,

W e d o n o t. T h e fou r ‘ tru th s ’ ta k e ca u sa tio n forg r a n t e d ; so d o w c w h e n w e p o u r w a t e r on a b l a z e to

W H I C H W A S T H E £ >L ' E S T ? 73



e x t in g u i sh i t. T h e y d o n o t m a k e i t t h e sub je c t o f

t e a ch i n g , to b e by e a ch m a n a p p lie d i n se e kin g

salvat ion . N cr , in the t ree-Iegend , w here an appl ied

fo r m ul a o f ca us a t io n in te rm s o f t h e o r i g in o f ‘i l l ’

is m ad e to be the subject o f the F ou n d er ’s m using , is

t h e fa ct o f cau sat ion or i ts po ssible usefulness in

r e lig io us t e a ch i n g s h o w n as t h a t s ubje c t. T h e

fo r mul a i s , s o t o s p e a k , h un g l i k e a g a r l a n d r o un d

b is n e ck , nr lik e th e h ead s o f a rosa ry p assed th ro u g hhis fingers w ith m uttering s. It is dep icted as som e

t h i n g a l r e a d y m a d e . W h e n , s h o r t ly a fte r, h e is

shown hes i tat ing w heth er to m ak e a gospel o f it ,

ca us a l un i fo r mi t y i s w cr d e d mo r e g e n e r a l l y , mo r e

intel l igently .

I f th e n G o t a m a w a s r e a l ly a n p ro a c h e d a b o u t

im m o r t a li ty , b u t h a s h a d th e p r a is e o f a n o t h e r

m an ’s teach ing [hrus l into his d isc ip le ’s m ou th, w ho

w as th e o th er m an? T h is th ere is n o th in g d efin ite

in the scr ipture to tell us. H e is not the on ly m ou th

p i e c e o f a n e w m o v e m e n t w h o h a s f or p o s te r ity

r e m a i n e d n a me le ss . A s to th a t , w h a t m a n w a s it , o r

w h a t w o m a n w h o started M a d o n n a -w o rsh ip ? O r w h o

tu r n e d V c d i c t e a c h in g r o u n d t o b e c h a n g e d i n to

I m m a n e n c e ? I h a v e m a d e su rm i se els ew h e r e w h o it

m a y h a v e b e e n . I n e a r ly B u d d h i sm c a u s a tio n c am e

i n s o m e h o w , to s ta y . I t m ig h t h a v e be e n a le v e r o f

v a lu e in th e o r ig in a l te a c h in g o f ‘ b e co m in g ’ . T h e

w in n in g to a b e tte r in b e c o m in g gets en d o rsem en t w h e n sh o w n as a process o f e ffe ct fro m cause. In

t h e w o r k i n g o f t h e ca us e w e p ass f ro m a s o - mu ch to

a m ore. A s a fact it was n ot the useful factor i t

7 4 * W H I C H W A S T H E & U E 3T ?



m i g h t h av e been . P ess im is m o f m on k step p ed i n to

le n d c h i e f i m p o r t a n c e to t h e p r e v e n t i o n o f e f fe c t b y

arresting the cause. A n d the ef fect of the cause is ,in form ula, show n to be a ser ies o f links in the u p

r is ing, n ot o f the better, th e m ore, the higher , the

m o r e w e ll, b u t o f t h e w o r se , n a m e ly o f ‘i ll ’ . 1

W e h a v e o n ly to lo ok m ore clo sely in to th e h a lf

b u rie d p ic tu re o f th e N e w W o r d b ro u g h t in to th e

In d i an w or l d o f f iv e to s ix h u n d red y ears e . g . to

d is cern , th a t th e fa ith in , th e ou t loo k on im m orta l ity w as som ethin g- to m o v e m en as cau sa tio n w a s n ot.

I h a v e p o in t e d : o t h e c lo s in g u t te r a n c e o f t h a t N e w

W o rd as m esseng er in th e c h a rg e a b o u t ; b e co m in g

th e P e a k o f t h e I m m o r t a l’ . A n d i n th e o p e n in g

episodes it is a te l l in g , a seeking o: the Im m or tal

th at p eep s out i n th e p ag es .

T h e s e e k in g , th e f in d i n g , t h e b e c o m i n g th e

U n d y i n g i s, I h a v e s h o w n , in t h e e a r ly U p a n i s h a d s

a l m os t a c om m on p l ac e h i both p ros e an d v ers e .

A n d n o w in th e N e w G o sp e l i t is the Mary who are

cal led upon to share wi th the s tudent:

O pe n to them the doors o f the U nd ying1,

They hearing let them send out faith!

I go to turn the Dhamma-vchecl in Kasi’s city;

In w orld grown blind I ’ l l beat the drum o f the Imm ortal!

W h y is th e w o r ld o f th e B u d d h is t, a y , an d th e

w o rld o f us w h o re a d , w h o tra n s la te , g o n e so b lin d ? 8

1 On e Sutta on ly is a notable exception, See SamjyuUat li., p, 29 f„:

* Causal Association-*s In the first line the Eng lish translatur hits s u li United. N irva n a

for 6Undying1'I

W H I C H W A S T I I B Q U E S T ? 7 5



H a v e w e n o t h e re a f ig u r e a k in to t h a t o f t h e P s alm is t,

w h e n h e sa n g o f a c ity ’ s gates as ev erla stin g?

‘Lift up your heads ye everlasting gates and the king

o f g l o r y a lia !] c o m e i n ! ’

F o r t h e m a n a t t h e G o a l , e v e r l a s ti n g is un d y i n g ,

is i m m o r t a l. A n d th e w o r t h h e r e in sh o w s w h a t w as

m e an t b y W a y a nd W a y ’ s E n d . W h a t a tr a g e d y i t

is tha t the gre at w or d ‘ life’ should hav e com e to heso t ie d d o w n t o b o d y a n d m in d , t h a t its w o r t h a s ‘ th e

g o i n g o n t o w a r d s ’ s h o u ld in t h e w o r d m e a n i n g th is :

th e w o r d samsdra, h a v e b e e n h e l d n p i n h o r r o r , a n d

t h e w o r d o f m a k i n g to g o o n : ‘ c a u s e ’ , s h o u l d h a v e

c o m e to b e v a l u e d o n l y as a w a y o f m a k in g s o m e

t h i n g s t o p (nirodha)! W h e n s h a ll w e see B u d d h is mfa l l i n t o l i n e w i t h t h e g r e a t d r a ma t i s t :

7 6 W H I C H W A S T H E Q U E S T ?

‘Then, heaven, set ope thy everlasting gates’?



8

I do not f ind t ha t i t i s s uf f i c ie n t l y r e a l i ze d ho w

m u c h , in t h e U p a n i s h a d i c t u r n - o v e r o f t h e o u t lo o k

in r e l ig io n , t he co n ce p t o f m a n a s a s e eke r is n e w l y b ro u g h t fo rw a rd ; th a t in re lig io n m a n w a s o n a

q ue st, w a s lo o kin g f o r s o m e t hin g , w a s u r ge d t o lo o k

for i t as o f g r e a t i m p o r t a n c e , v i ta l, i n tim a t e i m p o r t

a n c e , a s o m e t h i n g o t h e r t h a n h i s e a r t h l y e v e r y d a y

quests . ‘T h is i t is th a t should be inqu ired af ter , th at

shou ld be searched after . . . te l l m e, spea k to m e

a b o u t T h a t ’ - su c h r efr ain s w e m e e t w i th in th e n e wr e ligio us t e a ch in g da t in g fr o m , I b e l ie v e , n o t m o re

than about 700 B.C., n o t th e r em o te r d a t e m a n y

prefer.

O f co a r s e th is a s p e ct o f r e l ig io n , t h is v e r y a n c ie n t

a sp e c t, d oe s n o t b e l o n g to I n d i a o n l y , T h e H e b r e w s

k n e w i t w e ll; ‘ O t h a t I k n e w w h e r e I m i g h t fin d

him , ihuL I m i g h t e v e n c o m e before his presence . . .

A s th e h a rt p a n te th after the w a le rb ro o k s, so p a n te th

m y sou ] a ft er th e e , O G o d ! ’ T h e C h r is t ia n a ls o :

‘T h o u h a s t m a d e u s f o r t h y s e l f a n d o u r h ea r ts h a v e

n o r e f t s a v e in t he e . ’ W ith t he w o n d e r fu l m e e t in g ,

t oo , c f W e s te r n a n d E a s t e r n a s p ira t io n t ha t is in t he

A p o c a ly p s e , w h e re th e see k in g is ta u g h t as m u tu a l,

and That who is to be sought is to be found, not by

77

THE AIM; THE GOAL



g o in g w it h o u t , b u t b y g o i n g w it h in ; ‘ B e h o ld ! I

s ta n d a t th e d o or a n d k n o ck . I f a n y m a n w ill h e a r

m y voice an d w i ll open unto m e, I w i ll com e in .1T h e S o u g h t is h e re . T h e m a n ha s t o o p e n th e d o o r .

N o , o u r p a i n t e r is r e p o r t e d to h a v e s a id , I p a in t e d

n o h a n d l e o n th e w e e d - o v c r g r o w n d o o r. O n l y t h e

m a n in s id e ca n o p e n i t. I t 's up t o h i m t o w i ll t o

le t i n T h a t W h o m h e is s ee kin g .

H e r e , w e m i g h t s a y , w e h a v e U p a n i s h a d i c a n do r i g i n a l B ud d h i s t t e a ch i n g co mbi n e d : t h e s e e k i n g

w h a t is to be fo u n d w ith in , on ce th e re b e the ch o ice ,

the w i ll , to go the r ight w a y to f ind. I ha ve show n

a bo v e a r e st a te m e n t o f t h e start, m a d e b y t h e S a k y a n

mis si oners o f the seeking, and w h a t w as to b e so ug ht;

how too the seeking was to be carr ied on as br idg ing

the interval between seeker and sought by ever

b e co m in g , b y ev er ‘m a k in g -b e co m e ’ , less u n lik e

th e p e rfe ct io n so ug h t . A s a n E n g l is h m a n w r o te n o t

lo n g a g o , n o t k n o w in g p e rh a p s h o w h e w a s e c h o i n g

the or ig inal Budduist a im; ‘ I t i s a l l - important that

w e sh o u ld rem em b e r, th a t o u r p e rfe c tio n lies in

d e v e l o p i n g w h a t w e a r e . ’ 1 W ith this m a tter o f th e q u est in th e g r e a t B e tw e en

ma d e fo r e mo s t , a good word became wanted for m an ’s

aim , m a n ’s go al . A n d those f irst m issioners l if ted

u p s u c h a w o r d to th is v e r y h i g h m e a n i n g . W h a t w a s

t h e w o r d ? M o s t B ud d h i sts a n d w r it er s w o ul d r e p l y :

N i r v a n a . D i d n o t th i s m e a n s om e s o rt o f e n d le ssun spea kab le bliss, w he n m an as m a n is f it , at his

last dea th, to go ou t l ike a can dle: n ot ne cessari ly as

1 danon Neivbolt; Priestly Blemishes* p, 153.

78 T H E a i m ; t h e g o a l



t h e a i m ; t h e g o a l 79

a nni hi la t e d , bu t no m o r e a s m a n t i e d u p i n t he

l im it at io n s o f b i r t h a n d d e a th ?

I h a v e v e n t u r e d to m a in t a i n th is w o r d n i r v a n a

w as n o t so used b y the f irst m issiouers. Su ch an ide a

w o u ld n o t h a v e at a ll a p p e a le d to th e E v e r y m a n th e y

set out to teach . B ut th ey h ad , for purposes o f d ai ly |

life , a w o r d m e a n i n g b o t h w h a t a m a n w a n t s a n d

a lso w ha t ho see ks. A n d t he y a pp e a r t o ha ve t a ke n .

o v e r th is w o r d i nto t he ir t e a c hi ng a s t he ch i e f t h i ng

in l ife , in re l ig ion , to be sought , ' f il l s w as the w ordartha, o r attha: t h i n g n e e d e d , t h in g so u g h t. I t m a y

b e ren d ered r ig h tly as fo u r o f o u r w o rd s: a im , g a i n , .

prof i t, goa l . I t is used as ju st object in an u n de r

tak ing , or process, e.g. o f the senses; or else as su bjec t

o r m a t te r o f d is c ou r se . W h e n , in th e S a k y a n

m ission, i t is used in the sense o f A im , the w ord

a p p e a r s to h a v e a c q u i r e d th e i m p o r t a n c e o f a r e li g

ious tech n ical term , as the sp ir itual ‘ga in ’ to be

sp i ri tu a l ly a i m e d a t. I t is fo u nd e it he r u n q u a l if ie d ,

o r w i th the e pi the t : samparajnka: ‘ b e lo ng i ng to t he

b e y o n d , o r to o th e r w o rld s ’ .

T h u s B im b is a ra k in g o f M a g a d h a , h a v i n g c o n

ferred with, v i l lage headmen on subjects [attha)

‘ co nce r ni ng t h is l ife ’ , 1 b id s t he m go t o l is te n to t he

‘Blessed O n e ’ on the sub ject o f the other worlds:

attha sampardyiko. Y o u n g c o n v e rts w h o h a v e a t ta i n e d

the true learning [anna) are said, in professing faith,

to declare ‘attha’, a nd no t t o br i ng i n lattd' - a s i f in

c l u m s y w o r d - p l a y .

I n t h e F i r s t U t t e r a n c e , t h e m i d d l e w a y , a n d n o t1 Lit,: ‘concerning the sccn-thing’ (the usual idiom).





In the ‘ rev ise d ’ , the ‘a u th en tic ’ version o f the First

U t te r a n c e , i t h a d e v i d e n t ly b e c o m e a d v is a b le , t o

e l im inate attha, at lea st in its p osit ive, i f no t in its

n eg at ive form , a nd to subst i tute som ething e lse:

som ething which had con v erse ly b ecom e, no t less ,

b u t m o re h ig h ly v a lu e d , a n d w as n o t a m b ig u o u s.

A co n v erse case is th e sp ir itu a l m ea n in g o f ‘ a w a k e n

in g ’ , no t as just the b o di ly aw akin g f rom s leep, w h ich

w e see e m e rg in g in th e ea r ly U p a n is lia d s , w h ile th e

a b s t r a c t f o r m bodhi, sambddhi appe ars on ly in la tern u m b e r s . T h i s : sambodhi , is the f irst o f the four

substitutes for attha.

T h e s e co n d o f th e fo u r is ‘ h i g h e r k n o w l e d g e ’ :

abki-hnd, the nam e g iv en , when, we know not , to

a g r o u p o f fo r m u l a s d e s c r i b i n g p s y c h i c gifts . T h e

t h i r d : ‘c a l m ’ (upasarad) is an ide a l ap pe al ing to

m onast ic ism . T h e f ourth and last is the to us m ore

fa m ilia r w o r d n ir v a n a (nibbana).

Jiibtidna, a w o r d o f d o u b t fu l d e r iv a t io n , b u t m e a n

ing , in its p rc -summum bonunt use , the bringing some

th in g to a n end, e . g . the p u t t ing ou t o f fire, the get

t ing o u t o f a b og or a j ang le , t lie get t ing past ine xp ert

s kill - a l l P i t a k a n u s a ge s - is f o u n d in t h e T h i rdC ol lec t ion de f in i te ly def ined, n ot as goal , b u t as

p r e p a r a t io n fo r a t ta i n i n g , n a m e ly , a s t h e w a n i n g

(ikhcya-) o f lust, hate an d m uddledness . E q u al ly is

it fou n d used as summum bonum. B u t it is fairly evid en t,

tha t the form er m ea nin g is the ear l ier w ording , s ince ,

once the wo rd cam e to b e used for the re lig ious go al ,

i t w ou ld n ot b e a n y lon ger used For an yth ing less .

S a v e o n ly p e rh a p s b y w a y o f d e r iv e d m e t a p h o r , as

F b

T H E A I 5f ; T H E G O A L 8 T



w h e n w e sa y ‘h e a v e n ly ’ fo r a n y su p rem e p le asu re o f

e arth . I t is in de e d h is tor ica lly fortun ate th at th is

de f in i t ion o f n irvan a h as be e n am on g our ‘ Icft- in s ’ .I c a n r e m e m b e r t h e m ild s en s a tio n c a u s e d f if ty y e a r s

a g o , w h e n th e c o n t e x t fir st b e c am e k n o w n , a n d w h e n

t h o u g h t f u l r ea d e rs w e r e m o r e in t er e st ed i n t h e

d is co v e ry o f B u d d h is m th a n t h e y a r e n o w .

T h o s e f o u r s u b stitu t es i n t h e F i rs t U t t e r a n c e f o r

atiha a r e n o t r e a l ly G o a l- te r m s ; t h e y a r c e a c h a w o r d

f o r t r a i n i n g i n making fo r a Goal. In t im e th e las t o f

t h e f o u r a t t a i n e d t h e v a l u e w h i c h f o r t h e f i r s t B u d

dh is ts lay ra th e r in th e te rm param’atlka: s u p r e m e

a i m :

Stirring up energy to win the goal supreme.1

L e t i t b e h e r e n e v e r f o rg o t te n , t h a t t h e m e ss ag e o fthe first Bu ddhists was, n ot for the m on k as such,

n or for th e aca de m ic soph is t; i t w as for th e ‘m an y -

folk’ (bahu-jana). N o w i n a fo lk - g o sp c l w e s h o u ld

expecL to f ind i ts quest som ething w hich w as ( i) the

m an se e kin g to a t ta in , an d f in a l ly a t ta in in g h is

w e lfa re as man; n ot a we l fare with out th e man ; th e

m an m ust b e in i t; (2) a que st wh ich is pos i t ive , n ot

n e gat ive ; ( 3) a que st wh ich is n ot some th in g as y e t

in c o n c e i v a b l e b y m a n ; s o m e t h in g h e c a n th in k o f a s

a t le a s t M o r e t h a n a n y t h i n g h e y e t k n o w s . B u t in

n irvan a w e h a ve n e i th e r ( 1 ) , n or {2) , n or ( 3). f t is

a n e n d w i t h o u t t h e m a n i n i t ; i t i s n e g a t i v e ; i t

p r e ju d g e s th e a s y e t i n c o n c e i v a b l e .L e t us se e h o w f a r th e o l d e r te r m aitha se rve d

1 Sstt&JSijata. p. 68.

8 2 t i i e a i m ; t h e c o / . l



b e tte r fo r a fo lk -go sp el. Attha is essent ial ly object

w ith m a n in i t an d o f it , o f atthiko, t h e s e ek e r. T h e

m a n is b o th s ee k er a n d v a l u e r o f w h a t h e s eeks. Atlha is posit ive; something to be sought , not some

th ing th a t is a JNot. A n d i t is som ething w hich - to

u s e a n o t h e r te rm f o r n i r v a n a - is n o t so V o i d ’ t h a t

i t ca n n o t b e v a l u e d a n d e v e r r e - va l u e d .

I f I h a v e u se d f o r i t th e w o r d ‘g o a l ’ , I h a v e n o t

a lw a y s a f in a l g o a l i n s ig h t. T h e gaule o r p o le in a

r a c e m a y s e r ve to p o i n t o u t , n o t th e e n d , b u t o n l y t h eend o f a lap in the course ; the run ne r ’ s n ex t ob jec t iv e .

A n d th is in d e ed is w h a t , w ith o u r h u m a n lim ita

tions, the end must actually man. T o sh if t the phrase ,

i t is ju st the Best, the M ost th at w e, in ou r B etter ,

o u r More a h e a d , c a n as y e t c o n c e iv e . H e r e in t h e

w isd o m , the r e tic e n c e o f th e f o u n d e r o f B u d d h is m

is a k i n t o t h e t h o u g h t o f J e su s : ‘ T o - d a y t h o u s h a l t

h e w i th m e — in p a r a d i s e .5 ‘ I n m y F a t h e r ’ s h o u s e a re

m a n y m a n sio n s ’ : monci , s top pin g-p laces : homes a s

it w e r e o f t h e s ch o o lb o y o f t o - d a y w h o k no w s h is

fa m ily m a y h a v e m o v e d to a n o th e r ‘h o m e ’ n e x t

h o l id a y s . H e r e is n o f in a l it y t a u g h t . A s i n th e C a n a

feast ‘ the b est is y e t to com e5. Y e s , to co m e, n o t fo r e v er ju s t th e M o re . M a n

d i d n o t a g r e e , in w o r d i n g his c o m p a r i n g v a l u e s , t h a t

the ‘m ore ’ w as a l l . H is sup er lat iv e ‘m ost’ has ev e r

b een for h im n o less tr u e , e v e n if , p e rh a p s , im p lie d

o n l y i n t h e m o r e .

W h a t th e n as a M o re o n ly , w ith M o st im p lic it ,

w as th e S a k y a n atthdt W e re a d o f a B ra h m in a sk in g

G o t a m a : ‘ I s t h e r e a n y o n e t h i n g w h i c h c o m p a s s e s

t h e a i m ; t h e on A t . 83



84 t h e a i m ; t h e g o a l

and establishes both kinds of attha'. that of this life

and that o f life hereafter?1 ‘There is? ‘W hat is it?’

‘Earnestness (lit,: the not being slack). M ak e this become, and you w ill get both attha’s In what did

this earnestness consist? So to live here as to becom e

more fit for the companionship,1 not yet of the

Highest, but of those who have gone to a worthier

world, the lap in the long w ay to consummation

they have yet attained.

1l)igka-Mkajas Sta. xiii.



9

'T h e e ar th is as if musing, the firmament, the sky,

water, the mountain , as it were, muses . . in this

w ay does the definition open, in the ancient U pani-

shads, when, the mental attitude called dhydna, Pali,

jkdna, is considered. W e have, in no European tongue,

known to me, a fit word for the Indian term. I f

I use ‘musing5, it 13 only because that is less a misfit

than such words conno ting intellectual activity as are

‘reflection5

or ‘ meditation5. T he German translationhas used shmcn in translations of these, but only to

throw it aside where it failed to fit.1 Nor is blame

conveyed herewith to the translator, since, as I have

elsewhere shown, the Indian use of the term is

indecisive. For me, w ith Pitak a evidence in view,

we have to get rid o f the Western notion, that the

still, silent m an , in wha t we like to call ‘meditation5,is turning over some object in intellectual activity.

Whether or not w e have, when alone with ‘N ature5,

seemed to sense a silent reserved expectancy in hill

and lake and drifting cloud, it is, for one not bound

in by formulas, true of the cult oijhdna, so prevalent

in the Suttas, that we arc, in it, up against, not

1Th e Bothlingk and Ro'.h D icio n ai y has Naikimr.sn, Vetliefmg, Ans'havung, Dr. HeiJer usud Versenkuxg.

85

JHANA AS I SEE IT



8 6 J H A K A A S 1 S E E [ T

introversive absorption, but rather an attitude of the

watcher who has made his mind a tabula rasa and is

waiting to ham. Th e m an-in~jhdna is better describedas a child Sam uel - ‘Speak, L ord , for thy servant

heareth’ - than as a ra pt yogi.

Now this is where I part company with the more

yoga-ish view o f the manuals. M y restatement is

based, p ard y on the jhdna formula itself, partly on

passages in Sutta. and exegesis, which leave me in

no doubt. T he formula, worded in four stages (split

later into live) directs that the sitting devotee

{a) divest the mind of all distraction through think

ing a bout this or that (vitakka), or pondering thereon;

(b) divest the mind o f anything affecting him emo

tionally; (r) divest the mind yet more thoroughly

hereof; (d) with die result that he will enter on a stateo f ‘ mindfulness’ or m en ial alertness (suli), and

indifference (upekkka). This serene alertness is all;

so far as the formula goes. The praether is no w in

no sort o f drugged or m uzzy state, o f trance, coma

or ecstasy, nor is he absorbed in ‘ thought’ . And

there we are left.But let the reader consider what, in several con

texts, supervenes. Most frequ ently there follow, with

no explicit indication o f induced effect, a list o f five

modes of ‘psychic’ consciousness {abhinnd). These

are called iddhi, or modes of achievement by super

will (levitation, & c.) , deva-hearing or cla iraudience,

thought-reading, memory of past lives, and deva-

sight or clairvoyance; to which a lauer non-psychic

sixth o f a religio-ethical kind was at some time



appended. It is to my judgem ent fairly clear, that

the preparation required by the formula was, as

motorists say, to ‘dip* the norm al light o f the presenta

tions o f e arth-ccns ci ou sne ss, and so permit access o f

the other, the psychic body’s presentations.

Thus elsewhere we read, that here below one can

gain ’entire happiness’ when, in fourth jhdna, one

can beware o f the presence o f dev as, and dwell in

converse with. them. Aga in , that deva-access is

gained by jhdna. Again , that when, a man makes to become a w ay for access to the Brahma- (or super -

deva-) world, he practises jhdna. O nce more,

M oggallana, a chief disciple am ong the founders, is

said to enter jhdna, that he may get into touch with

the next world, and so be able to report what he

finds has been the happy fate o f individuals who were

worthy nn earth, for the encouragement of men here

below.

So far I have found writers nn jhdna. entirely ignor

ing this and other Pitakan evidence and, in conse

quence, passing over that habit of converse with

other worlds which in original Buddhism is so present

and so real here and now . O r else they see in jhdna that which man y w ould call ‘m ystic1 experi

ence. For me (I repeat) ea rly Buddhism may be

rated as ‘ m ystical’ or not.; ur it m ay be rated as a bin

to Y oga (of which it shows no awareness1) or not.

But its early ‘musing’ or ‘psychic cognizar.ee’ cannot

rightly be identified with the outlook in either.

J H A N A A S I S E E I T 8 7

1T h e two or three spo rad ic Snt.ias on breathing exercises d o not

ment icn Yoga,



Jhana was less obscure than that o f the mystic, and

was not the inw ard attitude o f the yogi. In. its

broadest, its most real, because for us its mostpractical meaning, mysticism is usually spoken of as

converse, usually solitary, with the unseen, or other

worldly. INow converse is a cce ss-is comm-union,

not union. In it attention is really turned outwards.

A nd when, if ever, the earth comes to accept this

hum bler, more practicable aspect o f mysticism,

instead o f using terms o f an as yet inconceivab le

union with an as yet inconceivable Highest, we may

then come to hold in wider worth a mysticism that is

not only attainable by a saintly aspirant now here,

now there, but one that is a way for the help of the

many, if on ly it he that they ‘are willing to learn’ .

European writers for the rr_ost part and Buddhistsshow but little interest in jhana, prominent feature

though it be in the Suttas and anthologies, save

when writers are forcing a false alliance betw een it

and Yo ga . T h ey fail to see it as the link between the

first Buddhists and the unseen worlds, o f the I lere-

ufLer, as o f the Before. They were or are pussiblythemselves too uninterested in the Unseen to care to

see how near those first Buddhists lived to it, calling

their leader a ‘ remover of the ve il ’ . W e shall never

get a true picture o f them so long as we take up this

alien unsympathetic attitude, an attitude that we in

our own case can so ill afford to maintain. I t is only

in part herein, in p art through ignorance o f their

scripture, that I can explain the acquiescence, in

Buddhist utterances, in their Founder as having been

8R J H A MA AS T RTT. R I T



a teacher in this life’s welfare only, and their ignoring

of his frequently recorded converse w ith men o f other

worlds. O r that I can uxolaln the curious theory

they have formed, that our actions (kamtu) here so

far supersede the do er o f them, t h a t 1karma' becomes

an entity autom atically resulting in a new creature or

complex, in a world of other such complexes, where

there exists apparently no intelligent communal

procedure assigning him w eal o r woe.

T h at their scripture, in two o f the Collections,definitely brings every man, just after leaving earth,

before a tribunal o f fdlow m en, the judges being

called Yam a ’s, no less clearly than does the old

Persian creed, or the Ch ristian an d Muslim scriptures

(with a less definite date) I have found, not only

unknown to professing Buddhists, but even ridiculed!

(I hasten to say that the ignorant mocker is an

English ’vert.) In their own scriptures there is tw ice

recorded w hat is at once a query on and a protest

against the irresponsibility of this dumm y man called

‘ kamma’ (or karma): T f deeds arc done without a

doer, that is, a self, who is it that experiences the

results uf diem?’ In other words, are we in thehereafter merely autom atic robots, or is it you and I

who will there find recompense? T he Founder - alas!

the sham e o f it - is mad e to reply to Lhb ‘ foolish* (?)

questioner merely in terms o f code, o f formula.

Had the catechism in which this irruption occurs

been of the genuine old rock, we should surely have

had the Founder referring the questioner to thepost mortem tribunal, alleged to have been his own




teaching. B ut in place of that we see the canker of

the not-self spreading already over the Suttas.

I 'hat the Foun der was him self psych ically advancedis so clear in the scripture, that when, i f ever,

Buddhists learn to know their Suttas, they can

hardly avoid testifying to the changed outlook it will

provoke. We read tha t men would flock to him to

learn o f the fate o f those gone before, and find in

him one who claim ed to know7. This knowledge

would now be vaguely set down to an omniscience,

w hich another Sutta makes him explicit ly repudiate.

But further, we have a valuable ‘Ieft-in’, testifying

to the Founder’s own estimate of such an outlook on

the unseen. W e find him, nam ely, asking disciples

o f his kith and kin, whether, in ever striving in the

go dly life for something even better than they h ad yet w on, they did not find joy in so doing? T h ey did , is

the reply. Now w hy, lie goes on, do you suppose I

have told you, as to this or that disciple whom death

has taken, what has been his fate ? ‘Did you think I

w anted Lu advertise my powers, or to impose upon

you, or talk you over ? I did not w ant that. But

there are young men who, believing, are uplifted in

knowledge and joy, and hearing this, concentrate

the mind on such a state. For them that makes long

for good and for happiness.’1

The Founder, helper o f men, was able and willing

to converse w ith friends beyend the veil. Th e friends

w ere equally able and willing to respond, yea, toseek him and in turn to question. A nd in him the

1 Majjkirr.a, ‘NsLakapana Sutta’.

t ) 0 J U A N A A S T S T . E T T



result was added vision into life as a whole, into

knowledge o f our next step, into man’s birthright of

ranging the worlds, li e m ight know as did lew, butthe ranging was for every man and woman. W hy

then in the name of heaven and o f hope should these

things be accounted superstition, to be swept aside,

as not of the things he held both near and dear?




W A Y S O F D IV IN E L IV IN G

I n o w c o m e to a teaching both, love ly and impressive,

about which I part company from Buddhists and books. It is held to be of the original gospel. I hold

that it was not. I see it as imported probably during

the life, the long life o f the Founder, and as a

persistently honoured guest. But always as guest. Its

omission fruiu lists of leading formulas stamps it

perhaps as that. Evidence o f its forming the cult o f aseparate body led by a Brahm in o f forgotten name, is

slight, but it is strongly contributive. This I have

shown elsewhere.

T he name of it, which I have rather freely

rendered ‘abidings’ and ‘moods’ , is literally ‘ dw ell

ings’ . W e should now use the word ‘ living ’, Ind ian

tongues were unable to say with us, as in Macbeth:

‘H ow wrill you live? A s birds co , m other.’ ‘D w ell’

would be used, yet is the emphasis, in the form ula,

not so much local, as vital, spiritual. Hence I

would now say, for vikaratka, ‘live ye as they who

have the se lf as lamp . . not ‘dwell ye ’ .

But in the m atter o f origin no one as yet seems to be o f m y w ay o f thinking. Some day others w ill go

through the evidence and see for themselves, how

early Buddhists, much as they valued the teaching



W A Y S O F D I V I N E L I V I N O 93

(possibly brought into their 'order’ by disciples

bereft of their Brahm in teacher), have adjusted it too

clumsily to their body of doctrine to leave doubt

about its exoteric origin.

Further restatement in this v e r y notable uplift in

ethics I have made in four ways:

(1) I have reminded readers that, whereas the

(later) institutional formula of the four ways of

divine living has been taken to mean just so many

modes o f benevolent sentiment in m editation, it was,as practised in a more genuine way, and told in detail

in the much later book Path of Purity, a telepathic set

o f efforts to transmit am ity, pity, sympathetic jo y ,

poise (taken separately) by a person to an unseen

person, found to be lacking- in one or the other.

Transm itted just as sincerely as i f the transmitter had

sent him a verbal message, or, in later days, a writtenletter. Th is has curiously got lost from the Pitakas.

I only find it hinted, in a context, where the trans

mitter, with a personal or multipersonal unit in

mind, is said to rise thence to the universal sweep

o f the form ula, em bracing the quarters o f the earth

(it m ay be. or it should he, o f the worlds).

(2) I ha ve preferred to call this noL telepathy, bu t

televolition. T he formula reveals the pitiful need o f

the Indian langu age for a word equal to our will. I t

uses the phrase ‘pervades with thought accompanied

by am ity’ , and the rest. It makes good laudably w ith

the vivid word ‘suffuses’ (or irradiates: pharati ).

(3) Exegesis only fails, when doing full justice tothe practice as a transfusion, by breaking down over



the fourth: ‘poise’ (upekkhd , or indifference, or equa

nimity), reserving this for the transmitter or wilier,

as if, after his orgy o f altruism or philanthropy, heneeded to suffuse himself with recovered balance!

(He wrote as a m onk for monks.) T h e contexts give

no ground for this reservation, and besides, die

unbalanced person is obviously in need of friendly

aid not less than is the person poor in amity or the

rest.(4) It is som ewhat strange to find these four ways,

so appreciated in the Suttas when reference is made

r.n diem, so neglected to all ap pearance as a religious

practice by leading teachers. T he only case know n

to me o f suffusing an indifferent man with amity,

so that he, responding to the pow er o f w ill becomes

a loving follower. Is that o f R oja o f K u sin ara.1

An and a the devoted attendant brought this about,

yet w c never read o f Ananda him self exercising the

divine ways. It is very possible that d ie silence o f

the two ch ief disciples about it is due to their decease

having taken place before the teaching became adopted.

Sariputta is found discussing its followers with hisleader, but this Sutta may have been fathered on

both of them unduly.

Bu t further, the monks and nuns o f the Anthologies

make no mention of the four ways of Brahm a-living.

T he monks speak o f being V oid o f enm ity’, which

takes us but a little w ay. N or do Re vat ah fine finesget beyon d praise of am ity as a sentiment, which he

‘makes becom e’ (an equivalent o f ‘suffuse’). A nd

1 Viuayt, M hv . vi . 36.

94 W A Y S O F D I V I N E L T V I K G



in the lists1 of what we may call prizc-men-and-

women in this or that virtue or gift, the nearest

approach to the four is to name one monk and one

lay wom an as 'best in living in unlimited un-enm ity’ .

The nuns to a great extent sing about their ‘emanci

pation’ (not always religions liberty), or about their

recovery from the miseries of bereavem ent. There

is scarcely a word, save in one woman-teacher and

comforter, showing they felt, they could best vindi

cate their breaking of narrower ties b y the broace rsisterhood and motherhood to be practised in the

‘ways of divine living’.

Tw o o f the canonical anthologies do refer to the

four, or ar least to the first o f them: the Sutta-

nipata and the Little Text. Ignorant it would seem

o f the occurrence in the former work, even Buddhists

know and often quote the concluding pcem o f thelatter:

As mother her own child HfeTong,

her only child would warding be,

so let him also make become

the mind immeasurable, Ay, amity for all the world , . .

For m yself I incline to the belief, that we have here

a metrical legacy of the disciples of that unknown

Brahmin teacher, the poem ending with the words:

Whether he stand, walk, sit, or lie,

let him this inner -wareness keep:

GOD have they here this living called.2

1 Artgullarc-Nikaya, i r 3 f-3 Khtiddakapdtha, ix; ‘Brahman etamvihimm dhu ’

w a y s o r d i v i n e i i v m r . 5 5





G O T A M A O R B U D D H A ?

W e o f t h i s t r a d i t io n are divided in theory and

vocal habit over the two names, ‘Jesus’ , and the (in

English only, harsh and strident) monosyllable‘ Christ’. Th ere is a parallel in Buddhism. To it I

shall come presently. In the V inay a records o f the

beginning of the Founder’s mission, we find that the

yet unknown teacher is accosted b y men o f his own

class, bJialrhas, not as kumara (as he in turn addresses

them), but as hhanie bhagavd, w hich is as i f an English

m an said ‘m y lord teacher’ . Anri more: even before

he has uttered to his friends the outline o f what he

intends to teach, he is recorded forbidding them any

longer to be calling him by his name, or ‘venerable’

(dmho, the w ay of monk to m onk ). Thenceforth he

was ‘w orthy one (or sain t), wayfarer {tathdgata), the

rightly enlightened one {samma-mmbuddha)'.G ot am a was a worthier man than one to use such

terms of himself, and pious editors have evidently

go t busy here. A nd yet, if I here speak truly, it is

curious, how little ‘busy’ they appear to have got

over those precious scraps o f history (they are nothing

more) - the records o f the First and Second Councils,

at Ra jaga ha and at Yesali. It is largely from these

two scraps that we can infer the growth o f the cultG b gr



93 G O T A M A O R B U D D H A ?

o f the Founder as "Buddha’ to be a later ph eno

menon. Butting aside the account in the Mahavam sa

o f Ce ylon, as adm ittedly a work o f about a .d , 600,and taking only the centuries-older Vinaya account,

wc read that this council appears (reasonably enough)

to have been held shortly after the death of the ven

erable Founder, and therefore when the sense of loss,

and it m ay w ell be, o f remorse, was yet keenly felt.

It is the more strange that we find no expression

pu blicly m ade o f an y feeling as to the tremendous,

if inevitab le loss the O rder h ad sustained; no

panegyric of its great father; and further, no

mention o f him as ‘Bud dh a’ is m ade from first to

last, nrnrli less o f ‘Sa.mbnridha’ . Floy, as tn that,

is he called either Tathag ata or Sugata , as is so often

the case in tlie Suttas. Y et farther: when thepresident, Kassapa, who had Ayllfully left his aged

l e a d e r j o live apart, questions tJpalT and then

A n an da for such evidence as they could best give,

as to the First U tterance of each rule and each

saying, there is not even allusion made to the man, who

cam e to be called the author o f every rule and of

nearly every saying! When, 111 the personal inq uisi

tion m ade of the much bullied Ananda, the Founder

is at last mentioned, it is just to be called Bhagavan,

a name for any Indian teacher used by the pupil.

The re are not even inciden tally any words o f adoring

reference. T he assembly is shown caring much more

about rule and saying, and about Ananda’s shortcomings, and even about the O rd er ’s petty economies

than about its common loss.



Things are not different at the Second Council

placed a century later. Here we should not expect

any more a keen sense of loss. But at tlie councilthere is again no mention o f the word Buddha; there

is only Bhagavan; Sugata once, and allusion to the

teacher or master: Salthar. O n ly in verses cited, by

w ay o f a ‘frill ’, from the Suttas, does the title

‘Buddha, kin o f the sun’ occur, and a general

reference to ‘Buddhas’ once in the accompanying

prose.I may possibly take too far a leap herefrom, but

this is for me evidential, that the Founder was not

referred to as ‘the B uddha1 till after the century

following his death. Tt is no pr oof to the contrary to

say, the term occurs in the Suttas. On the one hand,

it is there an epithet for any truly wise man, e.g. am an o f such, qualities — ‘‘buddha, in his last body , ve ry

wise great m an’ ;1 on the other, we m ay have the

busy insertions o f the editor.

But, it may be contested, docs he not, in the Sutta

following th e one just cited ,1 tell a man to consider

him as ‘buddha’?

This is a context, where I venture to read, notbuddha, but suddha. It is this latter word, meaning at

once purified, and our religious ‘saved’, which the

context demands; that, and not buddha. T he

Founder, asked by a Brahmin how he expects to

‘become’, i.e. be reborn, is made to reply: I shall

become not X , or Y , or Z , because, just as a lotus getsno smear from contact w ith water, so I get no smear

1 Anguttara-Mkaja, ii. 35.

Q O T A M A O R B U D D H A ? gQ



from contact with the world in which i live, and

therefore am i ‘ mddha\ A nd hence the concluding

sentence should say: ‘consider me as mddha1. Noclaim is here made for a monopoly; ar_y man or

woman could attain the same imm unity.

But a reverberation from the foregoing saying ma y

hav e affected, in compilation, this Sutta. A grow

ing Buddha-cult was going on between the fifth

and third centuries B.C., the century of the great

revision, and it is possible, that to convert mddha

into huddha, and make the Bounder ascribe this

quality to him self in a special w ay, m ay ha ve been

judged to he a more edifying mode of teaching, than

to observe careful congruity with the context, and

to be also a more up-to-date prediction. As to that

the compound suddha-huddki occurs in Sanskritliterature.1

W ith the Revision and the Th ird Council, we are

up against the epithet in its fuller form: sammu-sam-

buddha. T h e test o f orthodoxy was using it: ‘Was the

Samm a-sam buddba an A nalyst or not?’ T h at is,

did he analyse the man into the ‘five groups’ of

body and mind, into just dhammas, fleeting pheno

mena bodily and mental?

No one to my knowing has as yet made a careful

historical study into the growth of the B uddha-cult,

in which the ve ry human, very beloved son of the

Sakyas zoomed up as a superman, called, in India,

iem beyond dezas,2in East Asia, D eity Itself. It is one

I OO G O T A M A OR. B U D D H A ?

1 Art. in Bothlingk and ltoth Dictionary.2 Th Milindtt QuesliohS (1930), 109.



G O T A M A O R B U D D H A ? 1 0 1

of difficulty, partly for lack of serial documents

covering the period, partly because such old docu

ments as exist are more concerned to teli what is,and less with how it has come to be, or is tending to

become.

N or was it easy study to evoke when the single

catch-wcrd ‘ buddha , and the double catch-word

‘ iriiiaya-dkanimd’ , or its converse became a trinity:

Buddha, Dhamma Sangha, such as prevails to-day

in South Asia, Abo ut this I have here just this two

fold remark.

Tn the parting sayings ascribed to the Founder

two stand out as em phatic. His successor was not

twofold or threefold, but unitary: he was to be

dhamma-. the leader every man carried ‘in his bosom’,

did he but will to listen and obey. W ith dhamma,inner guide, was linked the current term for God:

‘the self’: ‘Live ye as they who have these two as

light, as refuge - and no other? In the teeth of this

admonition, we meet with Suttas like 'The Top of

the Banner’,1 recomm ending the fearful lonely m onk

to think on the three taken as alternatives, as refuge

and support. Ju st as the governor o f the next world

leading to battle would bid his soldiers look to this,

or to that o f the deities o f pop ular polytheism. (We

have here a way in which, as in other propagandist

creeds, it was sought to substitute a newer but

analogous teaching.)

But note that, in the Sutta, after the alternatives,it is the first alone who is held in him self to be

1 S crpy uii a , 1. a i 8 f.



10 2 G O T A M A O K B U D D H A ?

adequate as refuge and support. It is only in the last

o f the verses in wh ich the parable is metrically

taught, that we get repeated, not the first alternative, but all three. A nd this brings me to m y other word:

how what is needed to establish, not the twofold

injunction of the Master, bu t a trinity, can here and

there be traced.

In the two versions o f the worship o f dkamma

addured above,1 we have, in the one only, this, sba.ll

I say, appendix: not only does number ene revere

number two (Buddha, Dhamma), but ‘Moreover,

monks, since the order [sangha) has become possessed

of greatness, I hold the order also in reverence1.

The one instance must here suffice as pattern,

pattern o f the ingenious an d immense Industry, that

■will have for years occupied the devoted monks ator around the new metropolis of Patna, as they

strove, not with single-minded concern for the his

torically true, but with the desire to attune to new

values and impress therewith, the yet oral body

of sayings, brought in for standardizing to the

ecclesiastical centre.for me, the original teaching, buried in what we

have for less than two centuries called ‘Buddhism1,

was the work, by word, presence and life, o f the

N orth Indian ‘laird5 known as G o’ tama, son of

Suddho’dana and o f M aya. For me, during that

life and for many years after it, ‘buddh a1 meant jus t

no mere than it does in the Upanishads, the spiritu

ally wake or wise man. T o all he was jus t the

1 -See p. 46.



samana Gotama, N o; seldom in ihe verses by nuns

and monks he is referred to as Gotama:

, . . Laugh; me by Gotama the Wake . . .

Spread Gotama his robe and laid him down . . ,Beholding wondrous works by glorious Gotama ! . . .

doth not the mind affect

Immeasurable of our Gotama . . .’TVas he who taught me, even Gotama . ..

Oh! surely for the good of countless lives

Did sister Maya bring forth Gotama!

and Sutta-verses echo the same usage.

For the Buddhist, as in parallel usage far the

Episcopalian Christian, the personal name has

become almost tabu. Th e ways of institutional cults

are strange.

O n e episode the scriptures give us o f the Found er’s

life, the very last weeks o f it, where it is not impossible

to discern the truth about his common humanity,

the absence o f the superman, m ore tha n half-hidden

by what I have called the frills added by editor and

by artist. A nd it is here again that I part com pany

from Buddhists and books.There was much that will have tended to make

his old age unhappy. Secession from the established

Brahmin teaching had been slowly becoming more

marked. T h e Arah an theory o f the m an consum

mating here on earth was ejecting the man of

imm anent divinity. T h e over-against-the-world

standpoint of the growing monk-vogue w as contracting the long vista o f his central teaching - the W ay

G O T A M A O R R T V D D H A ? 103



IOA G O T A M A OK. B U D D H A ?

of the world s. T h e cult o f him as superman th at

blossomed later has blotted out this for us. B ut i f

we read w ith sym pathy and heedfulncss we shall seeenough, in the episode o f the Last Tou r, to divine

that, perhaps for these and perhaps for other reasons,

the old Lion was wrath and sore at heart. It was a

tour undertaken, not after the rains, the usual set

ting out time, but just before and after, as if in a rage

o f haste to accomplish before death overtook him,

he could not wait.

The record makes him accompanied ‘by a great

com pany o f monks’ , but the usual formula for this

is shortened. O n no other tour is he found inviting

one monk or the lot to move on to another liciting

place; here he is shown always inviting Ananda,

and him mly\ ‘An an da, let’s go now to X d Escortedfor some way he and Ananda may well have

been, as they wearily set out again next morn

ing. Entertained he m ay well have been by pious

if injudicious Chu nd a’s, giving him dishes of indi

gestible s sucl: as trmiles (‘pig-nuts ’) to eat, death-

dealing tu aged digestion, and partaken o f out o f

courtesy only. But the collapse under the ‘ twin sal

trees’ , the evident dismay o f unaided A na nd a

strongly suggest that no disciples eager to wait upon

him were at hand. To o late the friend who had re

fused to spend his old age with him, Kassapa, comes

hurrying up. And very absurd, in the wonderful

patchwork to which the long Sutta of the Passingamounts to, is the way in which Sariputta, who had

predeceased him, is dragged in, not to minister -



how wo uld h e not have done that! - bu t to be

rebuked for flattering him.

It is chiefly perhaps to ar t that we owe the cam ouflage which has hidden the unhonoured passing of

this great friend o f man. T h e artist depicts an ideal

materialized oftener than the true thing in an actual

happening. Bas-reliefs wc see showing, not jus t a

spread cloak, but a raised bier, with mourners

around; sculptures we see of a recumbent figure,

with now and then a deity superposed; this inM aha yan a art. A nd at the end o f the chronicle

emerges that which perhaps led to its elaborate pot

pourri construction - the new' relic-cult!

As I have said: it. was an awkward situation for

the monks where he had spent his old age, at Savatthi

whither Ananda is shown retu rnin g with his tragic

new s,1 to ha ve had their venerable leader cutting him

se lf loose from his living shrine, a nd slipping off to

tell, not the set piece pu t into his m outh, but his ve ry

message yet once more. (He died with the W ay on

his lips.) Measures had to be taken to dress up tha t

lonely resLing-place of tlie twin trees in the imperial

robes o f a S uperm an's passing. N ot less arc we to blame, who have so long read without listening to

what the sough o f th eir boughs could have told us!

1 In rhe Commentaries only.

G O T A M A O R B U D D H A ? 1 0 5



1 2

T h e Pa l i Su t t a s sometimes record, that when

questioned on this or that, by disciple or outsider,

G otam a returned no reply, even when pressed to

do so - a pressure indicated b y the formula o f the

question thrice repeated. Writers have not w holly

passed this by. I have not met with any curiosity on

the m atter by Buddhists. T h e officious commentator

is given to inventing some plausible reason, such, as a

deliberate testing of the questioner’s sincerity, in wishing, e.g., to learn from more than mere curiosity.

Once or twice the records make the teacher explain,

namely, that the question as su; was not about

matters he held he was there to reveal (vydkaroti ) .

And once only, after the questioner had left un

answered, they make him confess to a disciple, that

a reply giving a categorical Yes or No would not

for such a man have made things clearer.1

Fur the critical reader considering the Suttas in an

historical light, the silences may not, at least not all

o f them, be adequately explained by the two reasons

given. W e see too much, in the Suttas, o f the

‘orthodox’ compiler and editor to feel sure he maynot have had difficulties here to contend withal, not

1 Samjtilin-Nikdys, iv. 400.

106

THE MASTER’S SILENCES



visib le to us. There is, for instance, the case o f a

traditional reply, but handed down in such varying

versions at different centres o f teaching, that therevisors could not agree which was the true tra di

tion, and held it better to convert the discordancy

into a case of the Master’s silence. O r It m ay be,

that repeaters from one or more centres may have

given a reply, as handed down with the question,

differing so much from the teaching which the

revisor s’ age had come to hold as orthodox, that it was held to be corru pt and was ruled out, silence

being substituted. That such difficulties beset the

monks at the Patna revision appears clearly from

a perusal of the book of debates in the Canon,

translated by S. Z . A u n g and m yself as Points of

Controvtrsj (1915).

Neither are we sure, when he is shown explaining

his silence, that we are out of the editor’s clutches.

Th us, in one o f the M alunk ya Sul Las1 ho is made to

say, that what he ‘was there 10 reveal’ was the so-

called four truths about ‘ill’ discussed above. Now

it is Fairly evident, that i f here editors have got busy,

it is just the dogm as closest to the heart o f the monkthat will have been inserted into a perhaps varying,

or semi-forgotten tradition. And I repeat, that for

me no religion worthy o f the name, no religion,

having in it the potency to grow into a world-

religion, will have been based on such a fourfold

dogm a, a dogm a in which the chief subject ‘ill’ is not

taken in a really religious, th at is, a spiritual sense.

1 Mqjjkima, No. 63.

T H E M A S T E R ’ S S I L E N C E S 107



That there verily were silences is quite possible.

JNTot because lie liked at times to assume the mien o f

a m an o f mystery shrouding his knowledge fromquestioners. He was too genuinely an Everym an ’s

H elper for that. Bu t it is ve ry conceivable, that some

motives or choice of queries were best met by

silence. T h a t it w ill hav e cost him perhaps unshed

tears to have held out an empty hand is too much

forgotten. Y et m ay that one explanation o f hissilence to A n and a have been as full o f inaudible tears

as was the cry of Jesus over th e casting aside o f his

care for Jerusalem by the doomed city.

T.et me cud on a vocal picture about the matter.

A fellow disciple is speaking; ‘I remember how he

would be talk ing to us about m an as in the way in

the worlds, about the will in effort in the becoming

a more. His talking would m ove us deeply; it was

like hearing a voice speaking to the very soul, like

the voice o f D ham m a sneaking within us, A very

man-in-the-more he was for us. We would then ask

him questions. Sometimes he would reply, some

times not. W e would wonder at his silence, andperhaps -would ask him why he did not answer? He

would know well whether It was the true we were

seeking, or mere curiosity in us, and would reply or

not accordingly.

’When he was unwilling to reply, we could see that

it was painful for him. H e was all for openness in

man; he was never furtive. He was for us a ve ry

more in his candour. A n d if he did give w ay and

reply, he showed us a more in man. W e once heard

I08 T H E M A S T E R ’ S S I L E N C E S



he had not replied to the question b y one not o f us:

“ Is there spirit (atta), or not?” and was asked by one

o f us, wh y he gave no answer. H e replied, that thequestioner had very foolish ideas on the subject, and

was not to be made wiser by a direct answer. And

we were told he was very sad in so saying and had

even wept. We often noted the weariness he felt at

times over the bringing aid to men in the Way.*

I have not noticed, that the ‘feature of the

Buddha’s silences’ has received the attention itdeserves from Buddhists. Perhaps this again is due

to the fact, thai they who talk and write most know

least of their scriptures. But n f Germ an writers

Oidcnberg and Beckh gave due attention to it.

W here they fell short was in their wholesale accept

ance, th at w hat the F ounder is said to have said, he

did say; was in their failure to weigh the motives and

revising work o f the later editors, the compilers of

the masses of ‘sayings’ into sorted discourses.

Thus, the rumour about Gotama, introducing

some Suttas: ‘Hush! here he comes! he is a lover of

silen ce!’ m ay well have been a feature in the growing

cu lt of the superman. So w ill have been the parableo f the few leaves plucked from a tree comp ared in

number with tire whole foliage, to show, so he is

made to say, how little he revealed when he could

have revealed so much more. This was not the little

w ay o f this great man. H e is shown denying that

w hat he revealed of friends departed was to ‘shotv

off’ how much more he knew than others. And mere: there is another possible reason for his

T H E M A S T E R ’ S S I L E N C E S I O g



I 10 T I 1E M A S T E R ’ S S I L E N C E S

silences than occurred to these too uncritical writers.

M ay it not be, that the effect on educated religious

students o f his da y o f the acceptance o f Imm anence,taught as it was taught, was to encourage easy

prattling abou t the being and attributes o f T h at

W hom I have here referred to, not as God, Source,

Creator, but as Most, Highest, Best; as Agga, as

Attha, as Parani' attha, a; Beyond-that? T h a t ‘ar t’

Thou, they were taught, when once thou verily

knowest it, A heady and dangerous way ; not, on

the face o f it, a true one. There was so much more

in the ‘art’ than a mere copula in speech.

No one to my knowledge has shown up the wisdom

o f the Founder’ s silences as due to his sense o f

reticence in matters as yet inconceivable by man.

Y e t it was just a wise reticence hereon - J o b ’ s ‘ 1 willla y m y hand upon my m outh’ that his age made

an urgent need. W ill they who lightly talk about

‘the silence in Buddhism’ about this and that bear

this in mind?



1 3

IS M A N A M E R E C O M P L EX ?

Since I began, thirty-seven years ago, to publish

the results o f inquiry into w hat I found In Pali

literature, canonical, and other, on the man and his'make-up’, 1 have had time and opportunity to

learn things I then had not come to know. O f these

I add here yet one more: I have called it 'a new note

strenuously affirme.d’, in the last few years, out of

conviction of the sms o f you th, out of conviction that

I had come to see the thing more truly than before.

Th is is, that the resolution o f the whole man into five

groups (khandka's, or skandha's) is an editorial

increment quite out of date for, and unwcrtliy of,

the teaching of the first Sakyan missioncrs, as well

as being impossible in a message taken about

for Everym an, Ilere, I have said, I am charging

wind-m ills, but iu this ease I hold it an honourto be a D on Quixote. M y tilting has consisted in

this:

Buddhists, in placing the senses foremost in

studying man’s mind, long before we did, had

worsened the idea o f the man, as the subject, the self,

to whom sensations were, as we say, presented. T h ey

had made the mind, as a sort o f sense, generally

recipient, into a dummy-man, not seeing (we arei n



1 1 5 I S V A N A ME R F , C O M P I. F. X ?

little i f an y better) that ‘mind' is but a nam e for

ways o f w ie ld ing body, neural or m uscular or both.

A t some unknown period, their teachers came togroup the man as a com plex o f bo dy with four lamps*

o f mind-ways: a man-less quincunx. T h e four were

distinguished as affective aw'areness (veddnd , des

cribed in terms o f pleasure and pain), percipient

aw:areness (sanm), and perceptual activity, or the

putting items o f sense-awareness togeth er: sankhdra's) ;

finally y et another term of awareness, also associated

in definition with the senses, usually translated by

either ‘cognition’ or ‘consciousness’, namely vimana',

literally, discriminative (vi-) knowing \nmm).

H ad they but left the last to bear its older m eaning,

their grouping had been less confused and more

plausible. For virthdna was an alternative term forthe ‘man’, used when he was considered as surviving

death, and as not o f earth-life only. Thus, at a man ’s

deathbed, one, psychically gifted, might, as Gotama

is said to have done, seen clairvoyantly the deceased

in his other-world body, after he had left his ‘dis

carded clothes’ that lay prone, and had not yet gene

to the next wo rld.2 An d it is interesting to read, in

a Sulla,® where the message o f a new Lruth fur m en

is brought by messengers to the ‘city’, that in the

midst of this, receiving them, sits the M an, r.ot as

‘being’ or as ‘self’, but as vinfidna, the man as con

cerned with life not o f this world only. And in one

Sutta, we see this vimdna-factor retained as the man

1 Ri jaT: the Commentator*3- cwn word for khandha.2 SamyutiorNikdy i, igo , 3 Op , cit., iv. 193 f.



or self, called nut dmam hut ‘monk’, reviewing his

four components, named as they are just here.1

Had this Sutta been made measure and norm forthe orthodox teaching about what man is, psycho

logica lly considered, no condemnation o f the five

fold khandha-groujy as such would have come into

m y pages. W e should then have had the m an

analysed thus:

T he man — as nf the worlds

j (mhhdria)

I S M A N A M E R E C O M P L E X ? 1 1 3

as having as having body mind

{kdja, rupa) (chilta, nano)

as (a) sense- as (b) conceiving, as (c) purposeful,

experience,

As it is, this Sutta is more o f a ‘left-in ’ than as havin g

any doctrinal super-eminence.

Had I apace I could show more such betrayals of

a relatively late emergence o f this resolution of the

man and his instruments into a mere complex ofinstruments. The mere complex, if it came late —so

late that the book, giving lisis of five puints hi the

teaching omits this jive from the titles of such pentads,

and only inserts them in it in discourse - the 'mere

complex’ none the less took firm hold, in a culture,

where the ‘m an’ had been banished. A n d to-daya m onk will say, in letter or in print - I hav e both -

1 Anguttzra-Niktiya, ii. 217,H e



if the five ‘khandhas’ do not cover the m an, w ha t in

the world is there left over? One recent writer to

this effect had left England after a course of university studies, and almost 1 blush to think his alien

alma mater had not whipped any such foolish idea

out of him.1

T he five w ere said, b y the ch ief o f Buddhist

exegetists, to have been fixed upon by the Founder

because, taken together, they exclude all room for

the self, th at is for the man as user of the five. Th ere

is no warrant in the scriptures for this assumption,

but Buddhaghosa was given to puttin g his own frills

on to his great Founder. In that writer we do not

find a ny sense o f historic growth in culture, nor

should we expect to find it from his age or country.

But the scriptures betray unawares this growth.,grow th in a worse, actually coming about. In, the

Suttas we see a current teaching about man as

mmdnat confronted with the new worsening of the

term , and given the hallowing seal of the Master’s

fiat.1 YinMna, as ‘the persisting cxpcricnccr and

speaker’, is reduced to mere cognitive awareness,

follow ing un sensations. A nd this In terms un

equalled for sharpness o f reprim and and cugenl

catechising.

I f we keep in view , as few writers do, this earlier

meaning of vmMna as a term, not for mental faculty

but lor the man, we shall understand the zest with

which editors explicitly banned that earlier meaning1 The alma mater t too, o f James W aidi

3 Majjbima-Jsikdy(Lf No* 38.

11 , I S M A N A M E R E C O M P L E X ?



from one, and one on ly o f the five factors. We

nowhere find any of the other four taken to represent

a user o f the rest, the cap tain , so to speak, o f thecrew. Often in the Suttas recurs the formula not to

see ‘the seF’, that is, the superman, in any of the

five. But this is an elaboration of the Second Utter

ance1 where men are warned not to confuse the self

with the instruments, and does not amount to a

denial of the self’s existence. It implicitly affirms his

existence as a More than the instruments.2

Y et among ‘southern’ Buddhists nothing is so

strenuously maintained as the formula: ‘everything

is impermanent, ill, not-self’ . Now for me no great

helper o f men, founding a new teaching likely to

become a world-refiginn, will have taught to the

M an y such a negative gospel o f man-m-the-less asthis. Even as a recoil from the great uplift in the

concept of man as was the current teaching, it is

unthinkable. A new movement, if it be w orthy o f its

day, ‘fulfils’, that is, expands what it finds is ‘the

law’; it does not stamp on it.

The trinity of the ‘marks-of-cvcrything’ formula

can be historically explained, if I here repeat, asthe main causes, the three influences at work during

the centuries between the birth o f the movem ent and

the revision and standardizing milestone set up at

Patna in As oka’s day. These were (r) the growing

vogue o f monasticism; (2) the growing interest in

man’s inner world of ‘mind’ and its uniformities;(3) the widening rift between the movement and the

1 See p. 33. 2 See p. 35,

I S M A N A M E R E C O M P L E X ? I I 5



I S M A N A M E R E C O M P L E X ?

academic Brahminic teaching known to us by the

early Upanishads.

The first two marks (transience, iil) belong tothe pessimistic aspect o f life taken by the world-

forsaking monk; the third (not-self) is mainly the

work o f the new ‘psychology1 and the ‘r ift1. In this

last, the early protest of the new movement, against

the importance attached in popular observance to

the rite, the sacrifice, and to the monopoly o f distinc

tion claimed as his birthright by the Brahmin, gradu

ally extended to the centrtd, the more esoteric items

o f his religion: the imm anence o f the D eity in the

m an. Tram all three marks, the ‘m an ’ , once taught

as being a wonderful More in potency, came to be

looked upon as a pitiful Less; not exactly as with us, a

‘m iserable sinner5, but as a crum bling momentarycomplex, beset by ‘ill*, but capable of just a span o f

perfect manhood only by utter renunciation of all

that tended towards repetition (that is, by rebirth)

of himself as man.

A term indicative of the altered, worsened out

look that arose about ‘the man’ is seen in the use

of the word puggdld for the older purisa (Sanskrit,

purusha). This word is not, I believe, met with in

pre-d'ab literature, hiere we meet it, not in the

records o f the earliest episodes cited in these pages,

but often in the Suttas and post-Pitakan literatu re.

And that its meaning was depredatory is plain by

the fanciful exegetical definition. In this the firstsyllable, w hich means just ‘m ale’ , is evaded, and

the wmrd is paraphrased as ‘hell-swallower’ . W e



cannot render the term easily in translation; the

nearest would be our slang terms ‘bloke’, ‘blighter5,

‘bean’. But the innovation is an approa ch to oarown Puritanical ‘m iserable sinner’ , ‘ child o f Satan’ .

A nd in that translators have equated the word with

‘man’, showing no historical sense in the matter, no

awareness o f changed values, is ye t another bad

mark in their dossier, as tending to blind, to mislead

readers.

It has been a strange tragedy, the stranger because

in Tnrlian idiom the ‘man’ meant, not as with us

the visible person, suggesting by his acts a more than

bodily apparatus somehow ‘w ithin’, working the

body, but w hat we call the T , or the soul, or self, or

spirit, Herein for that idiom lay m an’s true reality.

W c have largely misused our terms for the unseen,immaterial ‘man’, using them in a less as imply

ing, in ‘self’, egoism, or, in ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ , a mere w raith

or appanage o f man. W e fall back on ‘person’, ‘indi

vidual’ , good as signifying unitary entity , yet poor in

derivation, meaning only ‘a pari assumed’ (the mask,

persona), or a bit o f just an ything.1 An d we lack the

better European terms: homo or Menseh, these inc luding both sexes.

It will only be when we have adjusted our cultural,

our religious balance, and have come to sec the man’s

true reality precisely in that o f him whom we do not

see, that we m ay ho pe to influence Buddhists - as

Western ideals have in much influenced them - and

point the w ay to release from the jun gle in which the

1 We hear wine-tasters assuming ‘individuality' in a wine.

I S M A N A M E R E C O M P L E X ? I I J



I 13 I E M A N A M E R E C O M P L E X ?

‘m an ’ lies ambushed. We shall not do this by any

shallow jud gin g, that the mail is, ultim ately con

sidered, a ‘product’ o f bodily and mental conditions: ver ily a cart-before-horse assumption. W ith

such a theory we cannot teach Buddhists that their

funny taking over, by their leading commentators, of

the simile o f the chariot to be a fit analogy for the

complete man does not hold water. T h e nun, who

is the accredited author - poor lass ! - was in sore

affliction, and insisted nothing was real but sorrow -

her sorrow of course! Compared w ith that, your

‘being’ , she wailed, is just pu t together o f parts that

will break up and no better than a n y cart, carriage.

I f we once have firmly grasped, that the ‘m an’ , the

homo is M ore than jus t that, that the m an is not just

the experience, the ways of mind, but cxpcrienccr, but mind-er, we shall then, and not till then, be

fit to ‘teach a More than that’.



i 4

S Y M P A T H Y

H e r e f i n a l l y I m ake restatement, not of a formula,

but only o f a term th at has become, as we now say, a

slogan. Th is is not to get restive with the Pali word:anukampai it is to regret that we all, I think, all, agree

in rendering it by ‘compassion’, when, as I now hold,

sympathy were the truer rendering,1 T h e Pali word

means Snbratingdn-accordance-w'ith1 (mu-, as in the

Greek prefix ana-). Knmfi- is used for any thrill, from

an earthquake dow nwards. M y regret is due to

this: that whereas, in compassion, there is ever a

‘telepathy’ as from a greater to a less, a better to a

worse, there is nothing o f the sort apparent in

anukampd. For instance, in the Smta-Nipdt.a (37), we

re ad :

Friends, comrades, with these sympathizing

(anukampamdno) he with mind bound to them his own weal ruins,

(and for this unworthy reason, he is held to do well to

become a recluse!}. A n d other such contexts might

be quoted, w here ‘compassion’ introduces a misfitting

note. But ‘sym pathy’ words nothing o f a More

1 Let readers of my Sak.ya (193 1), i f there be an y, consider (JiaLI would r.ow rc-adj as ’Crown o f the Nfcw Wr>rcT, sym pathy, notcompassion.

119



betiding over a Less, o f the pity o f a more fortunate

for one less so. St. fe te r bids disciples hav e the one

and the other for each other. We read not seldom ofthe compassion felt by Jesus, where the curious

association of the Greek term with visceral m ove

ment m ay have something in comm on w ith the origin

of the Pali (and Sanskrit) word. W e rea d also o f

Go tam a that he - it is a legen dary tale - g ave his

life to feed a hungry beast, a tradition found

surviving in India by Chinese ‘pilgrims’ centuries

later. But ‘compassion’ for the bodily needs is very

rarely found as told of him. His work was to save by

the word, an d possibly b y w hat we call the magnet

ism of his presence. A nd in his word o f the R oa d, he

seems to me to be getting past the warding of the

fellow-wayfarer’s body, and placing what we call hisethics in a sympathy between the man of the road

and the ‘other man5, also o f the road.

That men loved his memory for his help is less well

worded by calling it his compassion. Compassion is

not a N ew W ord, since there have ever been mothers.

It conies nearer to pity, for which there is also the

word karma, the second of those four ways of divine

livin g,1 A nd when once we get to sayings where

later piety has not brought in self-glorification, it is

sympathy that we can feel in the ways in which this

man of the Sakyas sought to draw and instruct his

fellows.

Welfare and sympathy are mine w h e n I a n o t h e r t e a c h : 2

120 S Y M P A T H Y

1 See p. q:;, 2 Sarnyjitla i, iii.



S Y M P A T H Y 1 2 1

here is a better translation than what I used twenty

years ago, and again

\Vhatc*er the apparent cause whereby men five

In fellowship, that is not true of me.

In mind I sympathize, and i f with mindThus satisfied I spend my lifeInstructing other men, I am thereby

In nowise bound as by a yoke' kindnessIt is that moveth me and sympathy.1

Here we have a man willing the welfare of the

fellow-man, not as de hmt en bas, not as a God-man

stooping to a less than he. H e wills that w elfare as

one who sees in the other the More, the potency that

is in himself. He wills, so seeing, as very man in

sympathy with very man; with one who is fellow-

wayfarer in the road towards the im m ortal, the

Ever-More in life.

1 ibid., p. 306.



*5

J U D G E M E N T B Y D E F A U L T

S o o u r l a w y e r s s a y , when in a case, defendant or

plain tiff fails to appear and judgem ent is given in his

absence. N ow the fact o f ‘default’, or failure to

appear in scripture, just where we should have- expected

to see something, is a feature I have only considered

with some thoroughness since m y works nf the pa st

ten years were published. No one had given me

here a lead . I only stumbled on this rem arkable and

plentiful default when, and as, the Pali Text Society was publishing Messrs. W oodward and H are’s

translation o f the Fourth Collection: the Angvitdra-

Niktiya. I ough t to have noticed the default years

earlier, when I was editing, to some extent only,

Mabel Hunt’s Index volume of that Collection,

that is, in 1910. Fur I Lhe:i added to this an index o f

all the titular subjects, grouped, as is known, under

numbers in arithmetical progression (thus, section of

Ones, Twos, &c., up to the Elevens). A n d I ought

to hav e noticed the curious absence of titles w hich,

did Buddhists think with historical truth about their

religion, they would look to have found mentioned

among the Numbers, doctrines by which they arctaug ht to-day. For example, the Four Tru ths

should have been entered under the Fours, the122



J U D G E M E N T B Y D E F A U L T 12 3

Eightfold ‘Path’ under the Eights, not, as is the case,

under the Threes. M ea culpa! I did not notice, In

that immature time I had not yet been invited to‘write abou t Buddhism ’ . I dealt with what I found

as I found it.

T h e translation o f the ‘Book o f the Gradu al

Sayings’, as we called the Fourth Xikaya, taught me

much, ar_d it was then I noticed this curious and so

far unnoticed, unexplained default. Dr. W intcrnitz,

who left us last year, drew attention in print to m y

brief comment, also in prin t, on the matter. A n d I

replied to his challenge for closer investigation with

an article1 I have here, by permission, reproduced.

But since for the general reader it may be technically

dull, I ha ve consigned it to an A ppendix.

It may further be better there than In thesechanters, because, in what it reveals, it is a negative

strengthening o f evidence, rather than any positive

survival of that which for me constitutes original

Buddhism. T hat certain due trines, nam ely, now

held to have been o f ‘ the old rock’ , to have been

‘there’ from the beginning: von jeher, as Dr. von

Glasenapp put it, may, by the testimony, the nega

tive testimony of the Anguttara, be summoned for

default—this is a serious charge not easily to be met

by believers in the ‘irom the beginning’ , when once

they will bring themselves to look carefully into

their scriptures. T h e question must arise: W hy were

these doctrines, called by the orthodox ‘central1 In the YUui-Bhtaati Quarterly, ‘An Inquiry into Buddhi3t Cata

loguing’,



134 J U D G E M E X T B Y D E F A U L T

from the first1, here le it out-’ N oth ing can satis

factorily be proved on negative evidence, ‘by

default’, alone; but such evidence may go far toconfirm grounds more positive, but where wliat is

contributive is slender in weight.



i 6

T H U S F A R

T h e q u e s t in these pages has been the gospel

brought to m ac, man. as he was in the Ganges valle y

of the sixth century e . g . , by the helper now called

the Buddha, if haply that gospel might, to some

extent, be found. T h e claim in these pages is made,

that to some extent at least that gospel may be

traced, and disentangled irom much superstructure.

W hat, by w ay of summary, has here been presented

as essentials in his teaching?It has been claimed, that the Helper was not

evolving a new teaching as the product o f his own

unaided meditations; he was a m an inspired. No

claim has been made, that inspiration came

imm ediately from the Highest. Concerning this the

wisest among1 ns is not in a posidon to affirm. We

are only able to say, that from what we may call theUnseen an urge came to him to teach, and to teach

by a given clue, Nov/ this episode is usually put down

to a superstitious legend, For me it is more true

than much we read in the scriptures.

It has been claimed, that the line of help to be

given to men was, that man is essentially, not a static

being but one in perpetual becoming, either becom

ing ‘better’, or becoming worse, and that he may be

325



T H U S F A R

helped to become better by being taught about the

M ore tnat lies in him to become. But that this

becom in g needs at every step the co-working o f his will. That this belongs to the centre o f original

Buddhism, and sprang from the teaching o f the

H elper ’s day Is overlooked. Words not to hand were

needed to put this teaching more dearly; the new

message has not always the fit word. And w here

there occurs often the word: ‘become’, translations

have done their obscuring best to prevent us from

realizing it.

It is often daimed, that the original message

ignored, i f it did not in so m any words deny, the

reality of the Highest in. religion’ s mandate. In

these pages it is claimed that the original ‘Buddhism5

both began and ended with a recognition o f thatreality, b ut that the teaching o f its da y had presented

that reality in the changed guise of Imm anence,

a presentment followed by the F ounder o f Buddhism.

The word ‘self’ had become transfigured as indwell

ing holy spirit. H ere again translations o f Buddhist

sayings have obscured this fact. It is further claimed,

that he substituted a new more dynamic immanent

theism in the word ‘dhamma’ for the word ‘self’.

It is claimed that the importance lcr_t to the idea

of ‘ill* is a monastic excrescence, bringing down the

original teaching to the level o f a ‘doctor-gospe l.

Religion is not primarily concerned with the healing

of such facts of bo dily life as birth, old age, disease,and dying.

It is claimed that the central figure o f life as a way



T H U S F A T ?

or road was originally applied to progress in the

worlds, as the true perspective o f m an’s effort in his

quest towards the ultima te goal, and not to an ethicalcod e of eight parts applied to this life on ly. T h at it

was the ‘ W ay o f Becom ing5, the set of eight being

a later insertion.

It is claimed that the current idea for the Highest:

‘the undying5or immortal, was taught hy the original

gospel, bu t was blotted out thus:— the Founder of

‘Buddhism’ has been, in the tradition, confused w ith an unnamed teacher o f th e current vogue for

seeing causal uniformities in the new teaching of

m ental analysis, the dominance o f wh ich did so much

to deflect original Buddhism from its primary aim.

It is claimed, that ‘the A im ’, not ‘n irvan a’ was the

original w uy in which original Buddhism worded the

ultimate goal. O th er terms were ‘supreme aim ’

{paramattkd) and ‘peak of the imm ortal’ iamalagga).

It is claimed, that the original teaching brought

the Unseen, as being the greater part of the Wav of

Life, into the foreground of religion, and that the

Foun der and his friends, a few of them very ‘psychic’,

enjoined strongly what was called ‘jkana’ (musing)as a preparation, for psychic experience.

It is claimed, that the teaching o f moral tclcvoli-

tion known as the Four Divine States was the gospel

of a contemporary Brahmin, and was adopted by

original Buddhism, bu t was no t o f its essence.

It is claimed, that the term ‘Buddha’ became

applied exclusively to Gotama (and certain pre

decessors) more than a century after his death, when



I 28 T H U S F A R

the cult o f him as superhuman, o f Church and

o f codified teaching, was growing.

It is claimed, that for the occasional refusals toreply on the Founder’s part more than one reason

is possible; that in his day reticence on highest things

was especially called for; that silence m ay have cost

him much.

It is claimed, that the seeing the ‘man’ as a five

fold complex is a late invasion o f the new psychology,

and at first comprised body, the mind as threefold,

the ‘m an ’ com ing to be taught as bo dy and a fourfold

mind.

I t is claimed, that the idea of ‘compassion5, often

ranked as the central teaching, is more truly rendered

as ‘sym pathy5.



A P P E N D I X





APPENDIX

‘J U D G E M E N T B Y D E F A U L T 5

I n a recent article on ‘Problems o f Buddhism’,1 Dr.

Winternitz had the following footnote (p. 47): ‘Theabsence of the four truths and the eightfold path as items

in the Four-section ar.d Eight-section of the An gut tar aNikaya (see Mrs.Rhys Davids in Journal of the R. A. S.,

1935, pp. 721 IT.) is indeed striking. But a closer investi

gation of the Anguttara will be necessary to find out

on what principle items have been included in thisNikaya (and in the Sanglti and Dasut.ta.ra of the Digha), before we car draw conclusions from this omission.’

A reasonable demurring. Let me here begin a closer

investigation.In view of (a) the wide sweeping-in of doctrines shown

in these three catalogues, (b) the fairly safe conclusion,

that it takes some time in the history of a ‘Church’ for

a formula to emerge, and (c) the fact, that the history

of any religion is a history of changing values, I j ridged,concerning the ‘absences’ referred to, that they were due

lu this or that portion of the catalogue, which omitted,having been framed before certain numerical formulas

had been, drafted as orthodox, tenets of prime importance.

But the question then arises: Did the catalogues in

question profess to include everything that was orthodox

doctrine? Or at least, if no profession to this effectaccompanies these scriptural lists, is it perhaps possible,

that the lists include only such topics as arc, for some

1Viha-Bbarati Quarterly (New Series), II. 1.131



132 ‘ j u d g e m e n t b y d e f a u l t ’

reason, r.ot ‘duly’ emphasized in the residual scripture,and are hence sets of so many postscripts to the other

Suttas? riven if this can account for the omissions, then we should not expect to find among the included items

any tenet c f acknowledged leading importance, sincethese tenets would rank as snch in virtue of the fact thatthey did receive due emphasis elsewhere, and hence didnot require to be swept-in after such a qua si-apologeticfashion. But n;e do find such included.

Or were the specified formulas-cf-number omitted,

because, albeit they had been drafted when the Lists were compiled, they were not then held in sufficient

esteem, they had not yet won suffrages enough, to

warrant their being included? O f the ‘left wing1 onlyperhans? JNot then such as could be ‘chanted together

by all, not disputed about’?1Or were they indeed, as I suggested, emergences in the

Sangha’s changing values, more or less alien to the earlier teaching?

There may possibly be other reasons discoverable forthe omissions. So far I can thinlc of no other, and it is

to be regretted that, in recognizing my overdue dis

covery as being ‘remarkable’, the learned and lamentedDoctor should not have helped us with his own specula

tions in the matter. If Buddhists and writers on Buddhismhad not for years harped on certain tenets as ‘central’

and ‘basic’ in Buddhism: the four truths, the way aseightfold, the three marks in everything (anicca, dukkha,

anatta), release (vimuiti), the three refuges (buddha, dhamma, sanghti), the Qve khandhas, the goal as, not‘atfhai’ (cttka samparayika), but nirvana, or nirvana plus

three other things (sambodhi, abhinnd, upasamd, mbbd.na'1—

these omissions would not seem so strange and unaccountable. But as it is, they hold up a glaring red-light

i ftangii-T Snttan fa. 2 T i e First Utterance.



' j u d g e m e n t b y d e f a u l t ’ 133

o f ‘stop!’ to such harping, until and unless a satisiactoryreason is forthcoming for the ‘ absence’ o f such so-called

cardinal items in lists, which have the appearance atleast of being very comprehensive.

Gan we then point to any context in text or com

mentary declaring, in any of the three cataloguings, aprinciple of in-, or n f ox-rhisfon? fn the commentaries

on Digha and Angnttara I have so far found none. ButI gladly admit, that a more searching study may tell us

something. If so, the telling will be of the tradition as

worded in Buddhaghosa’s Pali recasting of the Sinhalesecommentaries which he found in Ceylon and recast inPali. That is, we shall have Buidliaghosah own view

about what he found in MSS. handed down (with an

indefinite amount of mating el’ fresh copies) during thefour or five hundred years since the first written recen

sions (as stated in the Dipavamsa) were made (c, 80 B . C . ) .

And in this, his ‘own view’, he will either faithfully haverepeated what he found in Sinhalese MSS., or he will

have stated his personal opinion. I do not hold him

incapable of doing the latter. We see Mm, e.g., veryprobably doing it in imputing to the Pounder a reason

for introducing a fivefold skandha-doctrine, for which ir.

the Pitakas there is no justification,1 A good opening was given him in the introduction to

the Sanglti Suttanta. It is a rarely vivid picture: theMallas of Pava, having built a new municipal hall,

invite Lhe aged Gotama on his tour to honour it by opening it, as wc say. The scene is described, albeit the

Founder’s address is totally forgotten. Verily the ‘new

men’, o f whom Ananda wailed ‘ They please me not at

all’, 2 no longer paid heed to their Chief’s words! Then

comes possibly the Appendix, viz. the Catalogue,Gotama is weary, after the laity depart, and Sariputta

1 See p. 114. 2 Theragatka.



r 34 ‘ j u d g e m e n t b y d e f a u l t 1

(who had predeceased him!) is resurrected to go on andaddress only the quiet-sitting, patient monks. He is

represented as anxious to forestall schisms, such as weresaid to he proceeding in the Jaina Sangha after thedecease of its Founder. He calls on his assembly, seeingthey had a well-imparted teaching {dhai'vna) i to institute‘a chanting together in concord without wrangling, for

the long survival o f the Brahma-living’ . Then abruptlyfollows the list, Horn one ‘single doctrine5 (eko dhammo)

to the following nine more sub-sections of doctrines.

But to all this Buddhaghosa makes no inquiry as toselection, and we are left with the inference, that the

‘recital’ was to include every doctrine about which there was complete agreement as to its orthodoxy, The List

as follows:

One 1 Sixes . 22

Twos ■ 33 Sevens . ■ 14

Threes , bo Eights . IIFours ■ 5° Wines . 6

Fives . 26 Tens G

1 70 _59;sag in all.

In the Das tit tar a List which has only fifty-five items

we can rightly speak of a principle of selection determining its contents. We start with ten reasons why certainteachings should be considered in certain ways. Clearlya carefully selected list; hence it should better reflect the

orthodoxy o f its date o f compilation. The thingsrecommended for study arc such as ‘help much, are to

be made-to-be come, to be understood, to be put away,

belong to decline, lead to distinction (or eminence), arehard to penetrate, are tn he brought to pass, to be

thoroughly learnt (abftimteyya) t to be realized’.



We may here find Food for historical weighing. Thus,among the ten reasons, the early injunction to seek

(gawsati) has vanished, and with it that early word forthe Goal of seeking; attha. Dropped already from the

First Utterance (only the negative is retained), it willhave come to mean (only ‘meaning’ or ‘cause’1). Here

are already two reasons for seeing in the Dasuttara an

outlook very far removed from really ‘primitive’Buddhism. As Goal Nibbana has come in and sits

firmly enthroned.

Finally, :he Anyuttara. Its lists total 9,557 - so theCommentary. They present not a few parallel but

variant versions, i.e. where the ‘text’ of the Sutta isidentical, hut the exposition different —a very natural

result where repeaters have come in from different

centres to a Council o f Revision, and the judge, or judgeshave decided that the two or more versions are equally

orthodox. But as to any principle of selection in theseor in the Dasuttara, Buddhagliosa, so far as I see, offers

no comment.

It is not within the scope of this little book to give in

detail the subject-matter of these three great Lists. All

that I can possibly do here is to cite (as I have partly

done elsewhere) the numbered formulas which constitute, for Hinayana Buddhists and for most writers on

Buddhism, the original teaching, and examine to whatextent they find a place in the Lists. But first I trust Imay be allowed space for stating in brief outline the

nature of the titles under which the various subjects havefound admission. If these reveal any p r i n c i p l e of selec

tion, so much the better, but I .am dubious.

In Mabel Hunt’s Index volume to the Anguttara

(P.T.S., 1910), I made a complete alphabetical table ofthese titles. From this we may compile a synopsis of

1 Hetujdnuti. Ang. Comm., hi, 283, on the termattkafwu.

‘ j u d g e m e n t b y d e f a u l t ' 135



13° ‘ j u d g e m e n t b y d e f a u l t ’

them, thus: Many items are presented as so many things

or dhamma,-. here the Dlgha Snttantas adopt this term

throughout in introducing each subsection: Kalamo eko dhcmmo? Eat&me dve (dhamma. or Katamo eko dhamtno)bahukdro . . . pariMeyyo, &c. In the AnguLlara manyothers ate presented as anga's, as paccaya’s, a; thana s, dhdtu's, as ay aland s, vatihdsp &c. O f these, only the first

and the last three appear in the Dasuttara. Wc have then, in the Anguttara, many items con-

rerning the man, mainly in the term that had come in

with the worsened concept of the man: puypala, there being relatively few survivals ir. which the more honourable purisa is retained. The Dlgha show's a relativelyslight interest in the man. It was in ‘ideas about5 theman, that the scholastic monk-wo rid had come to be

mainly interested, when, these two Suttantas werecompiled.

We have n e x L a number of objective matters in man’slife: such as the bourns in his life (gait’s), sick men

{gildnd's)j gifts, greetings, & c. Then there is a much

greater number o f subjective matters in values: agsds

(highest things), aif.kd.s (aims), dpattis, dnisanisti's

(attainments, profits), growths (vuddhi’s), & c. And there is the long list of morally bad items and

their opposites: cankers (dsava’s j, fetters (sajnyojand s)

. . . I'ijja’s), calm ( passaddhds), the first much outdistancing the others. These are all fairly equally representedin both Anguttara and Sangiti, There are finally things

to which man is likened, or the training cf him, such as

the horse (I do not find the elephant here), mangoes, jars, clouds, &c.; these in Anguttara only.

For an adequate 3tudy, here impossible, o f the subject,

it would be necessary to enlarge this synopsis from the

1 Technical terms tor conditions, occasions, elements or data,spheres, bases.



‘ j u d g e m e n t b y d e f a u l t 5 137

A., and compare it witli the D, lists. One feature in thegrouping, occurring only in the A. List, may net he

without historic importance. It is this. From the Sixes,there 13 a beginning of making the requisite number out

of [wo groups of three each: either of opposites: e.g.

conditions pleasing to the Bhagava, or displeasing (341 f.)

or of things somehow associated, e.g. 3 ianka's and 3

mdna’s (445)- 1° the Severn this is continued (43; 82).

Similarly in the Eights. But 111 the Nines this device is

oftener resorted to, and with this difference, that the

complementary lists - usually of 5 and 4 - have sometimes no visible bond o ' connexion. Usually one is

doctrinally much more prominent than the other, e.g.5 cetokhila's and 4 sattppatthdnas. And the latter is

invariably put after ike former. 1 shall return to this.I could have made these notes ampler, but without

throwing any further light on any Leitmotif of guiding

principle in selection. So far as I have any knowledgeof the Suttas, I seem to find here expressed a desire to

catalogue, not this or that, hut everything that there is in

them mhich. served in teaching doctrine. I am open to correc

tion, but I cannot as yet find any such things in the

Suttas which do not here find echo.I come then to those subjects which in such doctrinal

cataloguing we should ell expect to find. And these are:

In the Ones: (a) Nirvana; (b) release (liberty, deliver

ance) : iimutti;

In the Threes: the Three Refuges (Buddha, Dhamma,

Sangha, or with the sometimes appended fourth

item of saintly virtues),

In the Threes, the Three Marks in everything: transi

ence, ill, r.ot-self,

In the Threes the Three Roots (lobha, dosa, mo ha) ;

In the Fours: the Four Truths,



‘ j U D G S M E K T B Y D E F A U L T 5

In the Fours: the Four Divine States;

In the Fives: the Five Khandhas of hody and mind;

In the Eights: the Eightfold Way, usually called Path.

Last, but not leasts but not usually so insisted upon as

original; the List railed later Parts or Wings of Enlighten

ment (hodni-pakkhija )3said to have been a special dyingcharge of the Founder to his Order, which they ‘shouldpractise, meditate upon and spread abroad’ :1

Three Fours, the Stations of Mindfulness {ialippaft-

hana), the Right Efforts {.ram.mappadhanani), the

Steps to Psychic Power (iddhipada).

Two Fives, the Faculties of spiritual sense (indriydm),

the Strengths (bdldni).

The Seven, the Parts o f Enlightenment (bojjhaagd).

The Fight, the Eightfold Way.

I am not unreasonable in claiming, that in any comprehensive Catalogue, evidently of doctrinal importance,the foregoing Lists, or numbered formulas would have been given right of entry, and be found, not merely as

referred to, or, also, applied, in exposition of any item,

but as titular items.

What wc actually find is, that as titular items they are

largely, though not wholly, absent! Thus in the titlesof subjects:

O f the Or.es, Nirvana is absent in the Catalogues ofall the three works, appearing only in the Nines

(A.) as Ninefold Nibbana (pp. 453 IF,),

O f tlic Ones, Vimutti is equally so, appearing only in

the Fives (A.) as five spheres of release (p. s i ) , and

five things, the fruit of mental release (p, 84), and asfive ideas maturing release (p. 2^.3), &c.

1 D . i f jao,



‘ j u d g e m e n t b y d e f a u l t ’

OF the Threes, 1do not Find the T hree Retuges.

O f the Threes, the Three marks (no: yet so-called)

occur only in the Sangiti in the Fives, as modes of‘conceiving the maturing of liberty'.

Of the Fours, the Truths do not appear in A. saveincidentally (p. 902); net in Sangiti; only in Da.,

where they appear with the usual adjective ariya,

and ‘should be well learnt’ . The Divine Slatesappear, not iri A., but only in Sangiti as the Four

Infinites [appamanniyo. p. 223), not in Dasuttara.O f the Fives, the khandha’s do not appear in A. But

the first fm r appear' in the Fours, in the Sutta

‘Sokliummarii’, the Subtle things, the fifth, vihnanz,

being still reserved for ‘the man’ who has thekhandha’s.1 But they are placed, first in the Sangiti

Fives, and. in Da. they are also placed as ‘to be

understood’.

O f the Eights, the Eightfold Way is neither in A., nor

in Sangiti, only m Da., where it is, as usual, ‘to be

made-to-become’. But the Way occurs in A. titlesin the, Tens, in the Threes, and while in Sangiti we

have the ‘eightfold’ without reference to a Way, viz. as

the eight fitnesses or rightnesses (samm&Ud ), opposed by eight wrongnesses (michatta) .

Tire entries of the ‘Part3 o f Enlightenment’ are equallyerratic. Take the Fours: To the Satippatthmas, Sam-

viappadhanas and Iddhipadas is given place of honour in

Sangiti, hut in Da. only the first is admitted. In A. not

one of the three Fours appears till the Nines, and then, asif to make good, the first appears nine times, the second

once, the third twice, coupled with a Five-category:five bondages, thus making up the nine.

!See p. 115 £



1 4 0 ‘ j u d g e m e n t b y d e f a u l t ’

O f the Fives, the indrivas appear in Sangrti and Da., but not in A., save as Four, without ‘faith1 {mddha). TheBala’s appear in all llntx, and in A., also as Four,‘faith’ omitted (pp. 141 f., 25a).

O f the Sevens, the Bojjhanga’s appear duly in all three.

"With the Way I have dealt. And I would remind

readers, that its older form as being zmihout the ‘ eightfold ’is suggested by the fact, that, in the Iasi, the Great

Section o: the Samyutta-Nika.ya, not the last, but the

first section is given to the Way. And whereas in the

Suttas the Way has been edited into its eightfold andariyan frills, the Section is entitled just ‘W ay’: Magga-

vagga.

The question at onCe arises: why then is ‘Way’ absent,in all three Catalogues, from the Ones! Why indeed?

Way and choice of it stands at the head of the Charter

of the Teaching (miscalled ‘sermon’}; the whole rationaleof the Sahyans’ gospel is that by Wayfaring, i.e. by tire

life, the man can become That Who he Innately is,

.Salvation is represented as ‘a way going to end of ill’. Whence then the silence here?

Decline in way-teaching there certainly was. In only

two Satlas, out of the hundreds put into the mouth ofthe Founder, is he shown making the Way a matter of

live teaching.1 Fitted to be a gospel for Everyman, we find the Way here and there reserved as for the cul

minating step in the progress of the monk.2 I am inclined to think, that when the eight ‘fitnesses’ were

inserted before the word Way (as I believe they were,

I repeat, to replace some such word which had become

discredited as hhava\ - cf. bhcva-ckakkd), 2 attention be-

1 Majjhisna, N o. 1C7; Samyultu, iii, ‘Tissa?

2 e.g. Sa’nyutta, i i. 38, iv .‘ i 33 , 1 7 7 , 2 3 2 , 2 5 1 ; M ajjh, No. 143.

3 VisuddM-mtiggii, 577.



‘ j u d g e m e n t e y d e f a u l t ’ 141

cams diverted, from the wayfaring as such, to the mentaland moral qualities enjoined in the ‘ eight5.

One answer is that wc do find a titular Way, but it iscalled, not magga, but patipada (cf. above, p. 65), and itis placed, nut at the beginning, but at the very end ofthe T h rees:-th e course of worldly impulse, that of

asceticism and the ‘middle’ course; this being describedin a variety of ways (cf. above, p. 68)!

But there is another possible reason, and that is the

way taught as Fourfold. Does Way appear under any

of the Fours in this light? Yes and No. Sangiti definitelyhas ‘way’ as Fourfold under both Fours and Eights,

But emphasis is laid on the several ‘fruits’ (phala), which were technically distinguished front the wayfaringtowards them ( patipanna) ir, the Fourfold Way, This was because the main thing in monk-life had become, not

so much die nearing a positive goal as the increasing

remoteness from living over again. As I have saidabove, the disbanded Greek soldiers were become moreintent 011 saying ‘No more land!’ than on shouting ‘The

sea ! The seal’ Wayfarer’s progress is merged in Way

farer’s looking back over Ms shoulder. Neither Da. nor

A. .gives in this connexion either a Four or an Eight.

But both A, and Sangiti, in the Fours, note four qualities

in the First stage-and-fruit: that of the 'Streamwinner’(sotaparma); this is all. In no way is it a worthy recognition. of the great figure of the Road,

Well! Gan w&, with thus much of inadequate inspec

tion, come to any provisional conclusions about thesethree Catalogues?

I would suggest in the first place, that to speak acre cf

a guiding principle of selection were, a mistake. It would

not be so (a) if we were considering a choosing beingmade from a finished mass of material; (b) if we were

considering the ‘church’-selectors as an unchanging



‘ j u d g e m e n t b y d e f a u l t ’

measure of values. In both cases the fact was otherwise.

Placing ourselves in North India of the fifth to the third

century B . C . , we can see, that the amassing thosethousands of Suttas will have been a very Jong business,however it was done. I . was a bookless, trainlcss, car-less

world. It is more likely, that any and every saying,

reported at a centre where ‘repeating’ was carefullyhanded on, will have been ‘included’ in the Stock of

such, and only tested as to orthodoxy on occasion of a

revising standardizing Council.

It is here that we come to a possible ‘principle ofselection’ being to some extent found necessary. Where

several Suttas gave differing expositions of a common

text, all may have been let stand; the A. has plenty of

such. But in some cases repeaters will have recited

sayings at variance from the changed, changing ortho

doxy of the day. And it is there that certain sayings may

have been ‘turned down1. But again, there may have been sayings, found little if at nil in provincial versions, which had come to be drafted as approved by the revisingmetropolitan centre. These will have certainly ‘gone

into’ the Catalogues, often into a special place of distinc

tion. Cf. the five khandha’s in Sangiti: ‘Fives1, i and ii,

with their ‘titular’ absence in the A. Fives. There is of

course nothing unique in this proceeding as an historical

fact in the life of churches. I am old enough to rememberhearing as a young girl reverberations of the impressionsproduced by the Decree of Infallibility of 1870, and even

those of die Bull ‘Intjfabilii' on Immaculate Conception

of 1854. When we can. bring ourselves frankly to admit, that

the ‘church1 and its editorial standards had undergone

profound changes (largely in religious worsening), whenachieving the compiling of the Clarion nr Tipi taka, we

may then begin to weigh truly the procedure in these



‘ j T T I l G F MF . N T B V n F . F A . D L T ’ J43

Catalogues. They certainly present three degrees of

in-, or ex-clusiveness in selection. The sweepir:g-in isfairly manifest as dominant in the Anguttara. Thechanging values in the (? revising) sweepers are moremanifest in. the other two, I am not pretending, that, in

A., the sections were, so to speak, kept open for each

new contribution to be docketed orally as it was reported.

We note that numbered formulas are used in expositionbefore their number is, as section, begun. The Bojjharga’sfor instance appear in A, i. 14, but not as numbered;

in the Sixes they appear as ‘seven1; they come as titularinto the Sevens none the less.

But this is not to deny, in the sweepers who revised,

not collected, action that looks suspiciously like ‘making

good’, when a certain section, say the Fours, had been

‘closed1, and certain numbered doctrines had thereafter

become of titular merit. We have only to refer to the way

in which the Satippatthana’s get no titular insertion inthe Fours, but get it nine times in the Mints, when coupled

uitk a title of five other things, making the number up to

nine. Attention has never yet, I believe, been called to

this. (Mine was too immature when I was compiling

that Index of Subjects.) Or is there any other explanation?

How immature is not as yet all Pitakan study! Shall we ever see any corporate effort in the historical excavation of the Pali Canon? The Pali Text Society i3 withina very few years of the completion of the task set it by itsFounder: is there any hope, that our successors will

rally to organize such a work?



I N D E X

Aim, 15, 16. 1% 54, 77 ff. Am ity, c j f. A ■1:111-' , to, t

Anim ism, 21 Antitheistic, original Buddhism

™ t, T3: 23 A ra h a n ,103 Asokan Edicts, a8, 49 f.

Becoming, 17 ft, a 6 f.,6 2 f., 1 24L

and Way, “omcre-becoming, 30, 39

wheel o-f, 67Brahinavihara, 93 fF.

Caravan, 64Causation, 72 ff.Chinese Buddhism, ia f.Choose, 30Compassion, r 19 f.

D e s i r e , a g , 5 8 f.

Dhamma, t6, 41, 44 ff.as conscience, 471 ‘v; duty, 47;

as successor, 51, i o t

E a r n e s t n e s s 8 4

Immortal, the, ig f ,, 39, 47 72,74 f., 127

Ini native , 4a f.

J u a n a , 1 3 7 . See MusingJoy to come, go

K h a m d h a s , 3 33 ff.

L a s t t o u r , 304

M a h a y a n a , 0 f ,} 2 3 , 4 9

Man, the ’Teal,* 117Marks, three, 115 f. MonasLicitin, growing vogues,

1 o.passinjMost and More, 23 f., 35, 39, 65,

82 f., 1 1UMusing, 8 j £F.

NiRVANA, 7 8 ,8 1 , 137Nor m, 45 f .

Omniscience, ibP a l i , 12

Pitakas, JiPotential, 35, 30

R e fuge s, io i f.

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