Buddhism in India

The Dhamma 59

sacrifice and the world order, the ultimate being of the universe

and in the end identified all of these as one. Jainism, though seeing

selves as multiple and separate from the universe of matter, identi-

fied the ‘self’ with an eternally existing jivathat had to be freed

from matter and thus from karma. Samkhya dualism, with its

consciousness–matter dichotomy, symbolised aspurushaand prakriti,

tended in a different way to derive the concrete self from the evolving

material world. Both materialism and idealism are in this sense

deterministic and objectivistic, seeing the subjective individual self

as derived from a larger being, whether spiritual or material.

The Buddha’s teaching was different. He radically refused to

express his thoughts about the origin of the world, embodied most

famously in the metaphor of the arrow: if a man is wounded, we

don’t bother asking about the origin of the arrow, who made it, etc.;

our goal is to heal the wound. This assumed a radical dichotomy

between the human self and the universe beyond. It was not seen

as necessary to ‘know’ any ultimate ‘reality’ in order to understand

suffering and finding a way for liberating the human self. The focus

is on this human self, on psychology in the broadest sense. This

meant that while humans were seen as part of and coming out of

the world of nature, the emergence of consciousness and will was

something unique.

As is well known, the ‘three characteristics’ of the world described

by the Buddha are anicca(impermanence), anatta(non-soul), and

dukkha(sorrow). The world is transitory; there are no essences in

it and in particular no essential ‘soul’ within the existing individual

that is a subject of rebirth; and because it is transitory it is full of

sorrow in the sense that even joys turn into sorrow as they vanish.

These characteristics can be taken as the opposite of the Upanishadic

‘sat-chit-ananda’. The Buddha clearly denied the central theme of

Upanishadic theory, the atman, and described the individual person-

ality as an aggregate of five khandas: physical form, feelings, apper-

ceptions, volition and consciousness. But the aggregate was not

meaningless. The discourses show a very lively sense of the concrete

individual—and of the fact that that individual existed as a social

being, in relation to others.

The Buddha’s comment on the ‘self’ in every person can be seen

in a story that is a parallel to the Upanishadic story quoted earlier of

Yajnavalkya and his wife Maitreyi. In the Buddhist story the king

Pasenadi asks his queen, ‘To you is there anyone dearer than self?’

and to the literalistic, non-psychological, materialistic morality of
the Jains.
So, when the Buddha is accused by Mahavir, through his disciple
Siha, of teaching ‘non-action’, he replies,

I teach...the non-doing of such actions as are unrighteous, either by

deed, or by word, or by thought; I teach the not bringing about of the

manifold conditions (of heart) which are evil and not good....I

teach...the doing of such actions as are righteous...I proclaim...the

annihilation of lust, of ill-will, of delusion; I proclaim the annihilation

of the manifold conditions (of heart) which are evil and not good....I

teach...that all the conditions (of heart) which are evil and not good,

unrighteous actions by deed, by word, and by thought must be burned

away. He who has freed himself, Siha, from all conditions (of heart)

which are evil and not good, which ought to be burned away, who has

rooted them out, and has done away with them as a palm tree is rooted

out, so that they are destroyed and cannot grow up again – such a person

do I call accomplished in Tapas (KullavaggaVI, 31, 1–9).

This is an ethicisation and a psychological interpretation. Righteous-
ness and conquest of passion are the goals towards which the samana
strives. This gives support to Ambedkar’s interpretation, where he
gives the words of the five former companions on hearing the
Buddha’s first sermon, that ‘the goal of happiness can be attained
by man in this life and on this earth by righteousness born out of
his own efforts.’

The Self and the Cosmos

Ethical action implies a subject of action, a self capable of agency
in a world of similar selves. ‘Agency’ implies some degree of freedom
of action. Human action may be conditioned by psychological and
material factors, but not in a fully deterministic way that leaves no
scope for ‘free will’. The concrete, human self is the focus of the
Buddha’s teaching; and most of the life of a samana, including rules
for daily living as well as prescriptions about meditation and control
of mind, is directed to the ‘training’ or cultivation of a self that can
act righteously with dispassion and compassion.
Other teachings of the time tended to identify the self and the
cosmos. Upanishadic idealism searched for such things as the real
‘being’ behind the individual self, the ‘meaning’ of the link between

58 Buddhism in India