The Soul-Theory in Buddhism
By C.A.F. Rhys Davids
The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
1903, pp. 587-591
p. 587
I should like to be permitted to comment on the
essay in the Journal Asiatique, Sept.-Oct., 1902, by
Professor de la Vallee Poussin on "Dogmatique
bouddhiste." The article, which is of extraordinary
interest, is the fruit of untiring labour in
untrodden fields, and marks a new departure in the
exegesis of Buddhist literature. It is an inquiry
whether and how far certain tenets, of cardinal
importance according to the Pali Pitakas, appear as
elaborated, modified, or otherwise evolved in the
Sanskrit sources of Buddhism.
The tenets in question are the negation of atman
(Pali, atta) or soul, and the acquiescence in the
current belief in karmaphala, or moral retribution in
the after-life. To Western minds the nihilism of the
one tenet and the persistent individuality implied in
the other form an antinomy or paralogism which
implies either muddle-headedness, or sophistry, or
esotericism, or all three in early Buddhism. The
difficulty of reconciliation was not unnoticed even
by original adherents.(1) And Professor Poussin's
inquiry turns, as might have been expected, on the
nature and function assigned, in both Pali and
Sanskrit sources, to that constituent of the Buddhist
moi biologique (I thank the author for that word!)
which might replace the more obviously transcendental
atman--to wit, vijnana (Pali vinnana). The inquiry is
of necessity lengthy and discursive, but the
erudition of the author has brought together a
considerable mass of citations in text(2) and
footnotes. These, together with the author's lucid
presentments of ideas, should make the essay a
guidepost which no one can afford to neglect, but
which will, on the contrary, be gratefully consulted.
Professor de la Vallee Poussin finds a very
positive evolution of vijnana-theory in certain
Sanskrit-Buddhist
___________________
1 M. III, 19; cf. I, 8, 258; S. III, 103. See the
present writer on Majjhima Nikaya, J.R.A.S., 1902, p.
480.
2 On p. 287, for XXVII of Samyutta, read XXII.
p. 588
texts. The term samtana is joined to or substituted
for it--a term which seems to approximate to our own
neopsychological concept of mind as a 'continuum' or
flux. And he infers from certain contexts that this
vijnana-samtana was regarded, not as one permanent,
unchanging, transmigrating entity, as the soul was
in the atman-theory, but as an "essential series of
individual and momentary consciousnesses," forming a
"procession vivace et autonome." By autonomous he
means independent of physical processes. According to
this view the upspringing of a new vijnana at
conception, as the effect of the preceding last
vijnana of some expiring person, represents no change
in kind, but only, to put it so, of degree. The
vijnana is but a recurring series, not a transferred
entity or principle. Hence it is more correct, if
less convenient, to speak, not of vijnana, but of the
samtana of pravrtti-vijnanani.
This notion, he holds, gives us a continuous `I,'
yet susceptible of interruptions. And hereby the
extremes of negation and affirmation in the early
tradition are bridged over; and we get a coherent
system, vindicating for Buddhism the claim of its
founders to teach a Mean Doctrine (majjhena dhammam)
between the Eternalism of sabbam atthi and the
Nihilism of sabbam natthi.(1) He concludes that since
in place of Soul the Buddhists substituted a
protagonist who played the part of soul so uncommonly
well, we must put into the background all their
reiterated rejection of the Atta.
Now I venture to think that in breaking up the
notion of an abstract vijnana - entity into a series
of intellectual processes or force-moments, Professor
Poussin shows true insight into Buddhist thought
Dimly and crudely without scientific language or
instrument, the early Buddhists were groping, under
the crust of words, after that view of phenomena
which we are tending to make fundamental in our
science of to-day. They were feeling out after a
dynamic conception of things--after a world-order of
becoming, movement, process, sequence, force.
______________________
1. S.II, 17, 20, 23, 61, 76; III, 135: cf. II, 49,
bhutam idan ti Sariputta passasi?
p. 589
Heracleitus, with his flux of becoming, had
preceded them in a rudimentary fashion. Aristotle,
with an inherited tradition of soul as a kind of
motion, and with his own theory of soul as informing
energy, actualizing the potential, was groping with
them. Hume resolved a soul-being, for us, into
'particular' processes. Wundt has done much the same
for the "fine old crusted" Seele of Germany. Matter
itself is melting away as substance.
For the relatively static and material notion of
an indivisible soul-monad dwelling in one concrete
perishable cage after another, Gotama substituted the
idea of a series of wholly transient compounds
(sambhavo), organisms, personal nexus, living beings.
Living revealed itself as a congeries of
manifestations (patubhavo, uppado) of becomings and
extinctions. Part of the compound was relatively
stable, to wit, the body (rupa, kaya); but the
rest--and this, pace the four other skandhas,
virtually amounted to affective reaction or vedana,
and intellectual reaction, or mano, citta, or
vinnana--was in a state of constant flux, "by day one
thing as it arises, another as it wanes." To call
this by the name of a substance, conceived as
permanent and unchanging, were the last absurdity
(S.II, 94-5). And with respect to its destiny, the
faithful are forbidden to hold any view "about the
coming, going, transmigration, rebirth, growth,
development of vinnana apart from what is hereon
taught respecting the other skandhas" (S.III, 53
foll.).
In the Abhidhamma, e.g. the Dhamma-Sangani, there
appears already a tendency to substitute the plural
vinnanani for the term groups of vinnana (cha
vinnanakaya) of the Sutta Pitaka. But if the early
Buddhists did not find fitting terms for the view
they were seeking to realize so ready to hand as
Aristotle did, it should be remembered that they had
not a body of scientific tradition and terminology,
however imperfect, to draw upon as he had.
It is true that they did not guard their position
as well as they might have done, had they fully
realized its great issues. They used now and again
the traditional
p. 590
animistic expressions as to the 'descent'(1) of
vinnana or namarupa into the womb at conception (D.
II, 63; S. II, 91, 101); as to laying down this body
and taking another (S. IV, 60, 400), and so on. And
they incorporated into their canon, with so much
other mythical lore, the Marchen about Mara seeking
the vinnana of the suicides Godhika and Vakkali (S.
I, 122; III, 119-124)--a fanciful, almost humorous
legend which even M. Poussin, with all his sense for
'ironie subtile,' takes as seriously as other
Paliists have done. Again, they use the conventional
phraseology of transmigration in making a person
speak of his past births and his future destiny. But
the great mass of sober argument and positive
exposition in the Pitakas goes to show both that the
Buddhists resolved soul-entity into psychological
process, and also that a future personal complex or
self like unto, and the effect of, yet not identical
with the present self, would reap the Karma harvest
sown here.
When, however, M. Poussin defines what he thinks
is meant by the samtana of pravrtti-vijnanas, it
seems to me that he draws, from the later sources he
quotes, implications very heavy for them to bear. He
finds the psychology of the Nikayas superseded by a
metaphysical hypothesis of Sanskrit commentators. He
will not admit that this flux of vijnanas is "the
sequence of states of mind caused by the casual
impact of sense and object "(the Nikaya doctrine).
No, it is an autonomous continuum of vijnana-moments:
"leur serie essentielle, leur procession vivace et
autonome." These are his own words. But the
quotations he supplies hardly bear him out in this
metaphysical elaboration of vinnana-psychology. He
does not claim that this hypothesis exists in the
Nikayas. They indeed affirm of vinnana the merely
phenomenal nature which he transcends. Far from being
autonomous, vinnana, for them, is not, does not arise
(uppajati), unless there is contact by way of sense
or
_____________
1 This term is used in Samy. III, 46, to mean simply
the 'arising' in consciousness of certain feelings
or of ideas about them:--pancannam indriyanam
avakkanti hoti.
p. 591
image (see e.g. M.I., 258-9). And I have not yet
traced the samtana-hypothesis in the traditions of
the southern scholasticism, although pavatta for
psychological process is a favourite term with
Buddhaghosa.
It is easy to call vijnana a protagonist of the
atman when it has been elaborated into a hypothetical
quasi-noumenal continuum of self-induced flashpoints
of consciousness. I am not denying that this
heterodox elaboration came to pass. On such a dynamic
ego further light will be most welcome. But, however
strongly its place in Indian thought becomes
substantiated, it cannot dwarf the significance, as
M. Poussin suggests it can, of Gotama's original
position with respect to soul.
The rejection of atta, was based, it is true, on
a logical interpretation of individual experience and
consistency of terms. But its import was, in face,
profoundly ethical and social. Gotama was making a
stand against priests and gods and sacrificial
ritual. And where soul was believed in, there
Oversouls and the claims of the soul's `medicineman'
could not be kept out. That belief he undermined by
breaking up the notion of the person as consisting of
two distinct homogeneous substances, and by resolving
him into a number of impermanent elements and
activities-- activities that were only potential till
called into temporary actuality by natural
law-governed antecedent causes. path he hewed was
inevitably rough and ill guarded. was the work of a
great pioneer.