cally simplifies intellectual space to well within the bounds of the law of small
numbers.
Buddhism’s content was shaped by the overcrowding of intellectual factions
at its time of foundation. Across world history, periods in which the law of
small numbers is violated tend to give rise, somewhere among the factions, to
a position which declares that truth is impossible. Citing the plethora of
opposing positions and the endless debates, one gains a certain meta-promi-
nence in the field by espousing a philosophy of skepticism. In India the person
who created such a position explicitly was Sañjaya (18 in Figure 5.1). He was
close to the Buddha in the network, and some of his most prominent followers
converted and became leading Buddhists. Early Buddhism appropriated a
strong streak of skepticism. The Buddha cautions his followers to stay aloof
from intellectual disputes, since they are fruitless and distract from the practices
leading to enlightenment.
Yet it is impossible to avoid all intellectual activity once one enters the field.
Gautama Shakyamuni became elevated as the Buddha by formulating a doc-
trine which negated the major claims of the rival positions while building upon
them at a new philosophical and religious level. Using the skeptics, he asserted
the non-existence of the ego, thereby combatting those Upanishadic sages who
sought the ultimate self. Creating a new position by opposition, Shakyamuni
held that attachment to a permanent self in this world of change is the cause
of suffering and the main obstacle to liberation. The same skeptical weapons
negate the existence of Brahma or any high god or spiritual reality, delegiti-
mating both traditional and iconoclastic religious methods for reaching a
transcendent reality.^20 Shakyamuni broke new ground by going on to explain
the source of the apparent ego: it is merely the result of the aggregates (skandas)
which make up experience. Here the Buddha was heir to the element philoso-
phies, while eliminating mythological rhetoric and systematizing world com-
ponents into five groups (corporeality, feeling, perception, mental dispositions,
and consciousness).^21 By coordinating material components with psychological
ones, it became possible to formulate (perhaps not by Shakyamuni himself but
soon after) a model of how the entire world of experience is built up, a
twelve-fold chain of causality beginning with ignorance and leading through
volition, consciousness, material form, the senses, impressions, feeling, craving,
attachment, and becoming, to birth, old age, and death. By understanding and
reversing this chain in meditation, one is able to return to the origin and achieve
liberation. Although the Buddha denies the transcendent world of the religious
sages as yet another reification, he is able to incorporate a more subtle sense
of transcending the world of name and form.
The conception that the world is governed by a chain of causation arose
among Shakyamuni’s immediate predecessors and rivals in the concepts of
202 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths