Original Buddhism and Amrta

·期刊原文
Original Buddhism and Amrta

Rhys Davids, Caroline A.F.
Melanges chinois et bouddhiques
vol. 1938-1939
Juillet 1939
P.371-382

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P.371

In the words he uses for that More which he wills
life to bring him, man expresses this as what he may
become, may come to be. It is then for him a vision
of highest worth. It is a New that he is seeking.
When it is a Less that he seeks, he will word the
More as what he may come to have. Now this is the
story of Am.rta. It is that of a Becoming in the
New, reduced to a coming-to-have.
Religions, at various periods, with varying fre-
quency and with varying fervour, have made vocal
man's yearning for a world which he need never leave
just because he has to "die." In or of such a world,
he feels he is not only, and no longer in, a More;
he will have attained, that is, he will have become,
the Most, Highest, Best. And by this he means he
will be ever Man-in-the-New, because he has no
longer about him, or of him anything that is, or can
be, worn out, old, unfit, to be discarded.
This feature is not a monopoly of later scripture.
Nowhere for me does it find utterance with such zest
and eloquence as in the Vedic hymns. Does any of you
know those lines to the sacred juice Soma ўw divine
milkpunch, as Bloomfield with quaint scurrility
calls it ўw in the IXth. book of the Rigveda, where
Soma is addressed as Pavamaana, the Winnowing One,
or Purifying Motor?(I quote Griffith's translation.)
O Pavamaana, place me in that deathless undecaying
world
wherein the light of heaven is set, and everlasting
lustre shines!

P.372

Make me immortal in that realm...where is heaven's
secret shrine,
where are those waters young and fresh!
Make me immortal where men move even as they
list,
In inmost heaven's third sphere,where lucid worlds
are full of light!
Make me immortal in that realm of eager wish and
strong desire!
Make me immortal in that realm where happiness and
bliss,
Joy and felicity combine, and longing wishes are
fulfilled!

Here is no mere realm of added conditions of rest
and peace ўw heaven of the old and weary; here is
the ever-surging life of eternal adolescence, the
winning, the ever creating the New ! With language
fitted almost exclusively for the needs and concepts
of life in the actual, life in the More, we think
and think rightly, of the Most as ineffable. We can
only rightly name that which we know. As the
Buddhist poem words it, with a reticence that is
characteristic, but in no way sceptical:

There is no measuring a man gone hence;
that whereby to word him, that for him is not;
in matters that to end are brought, the ways
to tell to end are brought, yea, everyone!(1)

The youthful courage of the Veda hymn is not so
reticent, yet does this vision of fervent aspiration
appeal to me as does no tombstone-vista of rest and
peace.
There is perhaps only one thing in the lovely lines
wherein they are for me defective, and that is the
irrationality of the prayer: "make me immortal!"(2)
The man who is praying is immortal here and now. But
he has about him the mortal. And he is praying for a
becoming, wherein and whereby he may be rid for ever
of his mortal appanage, his mortal instruments
necessary to him for life in this or that world,
i.e. a body and mind-ways of using body. But in
Vedic India man was held to be only conditionally
immortal. Survival of the dying of his last body was
held to depend upon fit sacrifice, fit prayer
ўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўw
1 Sutta-Nipaata, ver. 1076.
2 Maam am.rta.m k.r.dhi.

P.373

by son, by priest. And the early Upani.sads, though
they reveal a great religious advance, still contain
such a prayer as

May I,O God,become bearer of the immortal !(1)

A deeper vision would have prayed for a man's
becoming perfectly well. AArogya, not am.rta, should
have been the word. For the man who is perfectly
well, immortality follows as result; he has no
further need of instruments that wear out, needful
though these be for his long apprenticeship, his
long wayfaring in the worlds.
In leaving our Pavamaana prayer I would remind you
that it is not typical of Vedic aspiration. I have
found less than a dozen contexts in them on am.rta
and am.rtattva. Nor are there a greater number in
the Braahm.nas. But in the relatively short compass
of the 13 Upani.sads reckoned earliest, the words
immortal, immortality occur about 100 times. Only in
the short Maa.n.duukya is no mention of them. For
them, the other 12, am.rta is a keyword. Man's right
aspiration is declared to be towards a state, the
state of the worthy in other worlds, the deva which
is void of old age, illness and death. And since
death was the most serious of the three, the word
representing all three was "the deathless", the
imperishable. Am.rta was thus a term much in the
thoughts, on the lips of teachers in the years
preceding and accompanying the birth of Buddhism.
Nor was it yet reduced to a merely poetic term of
supramundane sentimentality. It had gained new force
new intensity. For in a teaching of Immanence, then
newly accepted in Indian culture, am.rta was now no
longer an attribute of the great Devas only, or of a
supreme world or heaven. In a dim way it was being
felt that the very self, the very man, as immanent
deity, potentially deity, is here and now immortal.
It was man himself who was the pura, the city of the
actual Immortal. And with the banishment of all that
makes the man or aatmaa mortal, with
ўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўw
1 Am.rtasya deva dhaaranii bhuuyaasa.m. Tait :
1,4,1.

P.374

the taking into the very man of Deity, fear was
banished. Thus we find no-fear(abhaya) a
co-attribute with the immortal. The Chaandogya calls
man "Brahman, immortal, fearless." The Ka.tha says:
"the self, undecaying, undying, immortal, fearless
(amaro am.rto abhayas) is Brahman". All devas were
called immortal: "as immortal deva he becomes
immortal". ўw so Kau.siitakii.
We can see that the term, though in form negative,
is as to its content positve. Undying, or not-dying
means actually "more-living". In Kau.siitakii Indra
is made to say: "I am praa.na (breath of life); I am
aatmaa (living spirit); as such, reverence me as
life-duration(aayus), as immortality, for so one
reaches fll term here, and in the next world one
obtains immortality, imperishableness (ak.siiti).
Our own traditional religious teaching is not free
from the teaching in that last clause: in the next
world.. We are told we awake to immortality at death
ўw a teaching for me as mistaken as to say: man is
mortal, but by rite, prayer or faith can be made
immortal. It is only when Buddhism lifts its earlier
voice, that we see clearer notions about the long
way of man, immortal but in mortal conditions. In
the Iti-vuttaka we have a Sutta, I believe unique,
on the dying in the next world of a deva, as a
phenomenon no less inevitable than it is here. The
deva on dying is expected to be returning to earth.
That he might be worthy to be reborn parentless in
the worthier Brahmaa-world is nowhere told; ўw it is
a curious lacuna. But the Sayer was only interested
in the dying deva's having possibly the luck to
catch a Buddha teaching on earth.
But it is clear that the deva would not attain
amata just by being deva. The attha or End which he
sought ўw this was the pre-Nirvaa.na summum bonum ўw
as not yet this. Attha, as we know, became
depreciated, to mean, in later Buddhism "meaning" or
literary "spirit" as against "letter"; in later
Sanskrit to mean " business, affairs." But not when
Buddhism began!

P.375

Had this depreciation not taken place, we should
have found the word amata linked, not as it came to
be, with nirvaa.na, but with attha. Usually the
linking with nirvaa.na is the explaining of amata by
nirvaa.na, showing that the term nirvaa.na as summum
bonum was later.(I say "usually", for I have found
amata in a list of 26 synonyms for nirvaa.na.)
Let us now come to the birth of Buddhism.This took
effect with the word amata as a very trumpet-call to
the New Word, or, to cite the Paali metaphor, as the
beating of the drum that brought news. It is odd how
we have overlooked this! Look at the accounts in the
Paali Canon of the hesitating man Gotama, being
inspired to teach and ўw if we translate rightly ўw
what to teach. The vision has come to him, to whom,
as very psychic, visions were no novelty. The man of
a worthier world is begging him to teach, and it is
in these terms: "Do thou now open the gate of the
immortal! Teach men now perishing, and they will not
perish; they will grow." There flashed upon Gotama,
as he watches the water-lilies, insight into man's
nature as a perpetual becoming, and he responds to
the vision : "Wide open is the gate of the immortal!
They who have ears to hear, let them send forth
faith to meet it!" And soon after, when accosted by
Upaka about his radiant mien, he ends with: "To
found the kingdom of the true... I will beat the
drum of the immortal in a world grown blind."
I see no reason to doubt, that in this ecstatic
language we have, not the enthusiasm of the
metre-making editor only, but that, in great
exaltation after weary doubt Gotama did utter words
like these. Had the editor (as was too often the
case) Had the fashioning of them, we should have
found, not the immortal, but nirvaa.na. But before
nirvaa.na came into the religious idiom of Buddhism,
as the summum bonum, we can see, that what the
earnest seeker had in mind as his quest was, not
nirvaa.na, but amata, the Buddhist seeker as well as
the Brahmin. The early Upani.sads, I repeat, show
this over and over again. Thus

P.376

Chaandogya: "This Brahman who is "in" the pura of
man's heart : this should be searched for; this
surely is what one should desire to know...this does
not grow old; it is ageless, deathless. (8,1,4.) And
Kena: "with knowledge one finds the immortal". And
B.rhadaara~nyaka: "Were the whole world mine, should
I be thereby immortal?" ўw a woman's question. And
so on.
Turn now to the Paali Monks' Anthology : we find
men described as seeking after amata, not after
nirvaa.na: Uttiya "left the life in the world on the
quest of amata" (1). And Ajjuna of Saavatthi "joined
the new Jain Order thinking among them to win to
amata"(2) (I cite the Commentary, which took final
shape much later, but the two citations are in the
story of the exegesis, and have all the appearance
at least of belonging to the traditional account
handed down about the two men.)
But the most noted cases of search for amata are
in the Canon itself, the Vinaya. These, as is known,
introduce us to two famous figures, leading men of
Gotama's disciples, Saariputta and Moggallaana, men
who would have exerted a marked influence on the
youth of the Order's history, had they not
predeceased the Founder. I linger a minute over
this, because it is a striking instance of the
blindness of us inquirers into Buddhism, and of
Buddhists, as well as an object-lesson of the way in
which a new teaching, quite other than amata, was
elbowing the quest for this out of the centre of the
young mission's teaching.
Saariputta and Moggallaana were the leading pupils
of the sceptical sophist Sa~njaya. And one day, as
the two were looking on at a big f Ўј te on the
hillside, one said to the other: "In less than a
hundred years not one of this crowd will be left on
earth! " Gravely impressed they consulted their
teacher about man's hereafter. He put them off with
his "may be," "may not be," and they decided his
teaching was a hollow thing, since for the wise man
this surely demanded a Yea or Nay. And they promised
ўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўw
1 Psalms of the Brethren, p.34, P.T.S. ed.
2 Ib. p. 83.

P.377

each other that whichever first found light on the
matter would let the other know. Saariputta meets
Assaji, one of the first of Gotama's new disciples,
and seeing him radiantly happy asks who was his
teacher and what had he taught? Assaji replies
nervously, as a beginner, Saariputta waxing a little
impatient, then he says: "the sama.na Gotama of the
Sakyans teaches the universality of causation." That
is, I should judge, not with respect to the material
world, but the new idea of proto-Saankhya, namely
the new analysis of mind, of man's inner world, as
no less subject to uniform procedure than were
outward visible things. And then we are told, not
that Saariputta asked whether the sama.na taught
anything about amata, but that he at once got
insight not into man as immortal, but into man as
able to bring things to an end, namely, by stopping
the cause. And more, he informs Moggallaana that he
"won to the immortal," and both join Gotama.
If we look critically at this odd story, we must
surely conclude it is so utterly inconsistent, so
irrationally so, that we are, in the documents, up
against what geologists call a "fault," that is,
e.g. when stratified rock is found broken into by
unstratified volcanic rock. The quest for the
immortal belonged to the age of the two Brahmin
students. It was like a freshly superposed stratum
of sand on sand strata. The finding a solution in
causation was like a mass of lava pouring over the
strata. If we had found Saariputta, a man of high
intelligence in the tradition, finding in causation
new light on his own quest, and discussing this with
Assaji or Gotama, this would have been of surpassing
interest. But we do not; and my solution, published
a decade ago, is that we have here a mix-up of the
teaching of two teachers: Gotama and another who has
remained nameless but who became known a exponent of
the new mental analysis.
My point to-day is, that we see here the outcrop of
a new vogue, winning later to the honour once given
to amata, thrust by subsequent editors like a
stopper into the earlier ideal: the query

P.378

namely of the early Upani.sads: kvaayam tadaa
puru.so bhavati? "Where does then ўw at death ўw the
man come to be"? (B.rh., 3,2,13.)
The editors of the Paali Canon have so shaped their
materials as to show, that its teaching was from the
first much interested in the idea of causation. But
not because it may be shown to be a sheet-anchor of
hope in life, namely, that you cannot initiate
something new, something better without a
corresponding result inevitably following. Their
idea is to show that by causation you can know, that
if you want to stop anything, you have only to stop
the cause of it. And, as we know, a formula which
became famous was drawn up ўw when we do not know ўw
giving only this one-sided application of causation.
Now we may see, in what is a very precious source
of reference: ўw the personal poems of monks and
nuns in the Anthologies ўw how for a time the older
interest in amata as a religious ideal was
maintained side by side with interest in causation
as, if not an ideal, yet a basis in religious
attitude. Of the 264 men-poets, only two or three
refer at all to causation.
E.g. Migajaala :

Showing a vision by the light of truth
Of things as come to be by way of cause.(v.422.)

and Adhimutta :

To him who seeth as it really is,
The pure and simple causal rise of things,
The pure and simple sequel of our acts,
To such an one can come no fear, O chief.(v.716).

In the 73 nuns' poems I find four references to
causation.
E.g. Sakulaa :

Act speech and thought I saw as not myself,
Children of cause, fleeting, impermanent.(v. 101.)

Pajaapatii :

Now have I understood the cause of ill,
And thirst,the cause in me, is dried up.(v.158.)

P.379

and Selaa :

Neither self-made the human puppet is,
nor by another is it fashioned;
By reason of a cause it came to be,
By reason of a cause it dies away. ( Sa.my. I,
134,P.T.S. ed.)
and Sumedhaa: ўw here the reference to cause is just
an editorial comment at the end of this long,
remarkable and I think written poem:

Endurance in the truth the Master taught.
This was the cause, the source, the root,
This the first link in the long causal line.
(v.521.)

But we can imagine how Sumedhaa would have sent her
stylus swiftly scratching many lines about
causation, if it had appealed to her as integral to
her faith, so much has she to say about that faith.
Her very moving peroration is on the contrary all
about amata. Listen!

Since Amata exists, what are for thee the bitter
draughts of sense ?
Since Amata exists, what are for thee the fevers
of desire ?

Amatamhi vijjamaane :ўwHow does she not reach back
across the centuries, ўw perhaps four of them, ўw to
the day of the "wide open gate" of amata? she goes
on:

This that doth ne'er grow old, that dieth not,
This never ageing, never dying Way,
No sorrow cometh there, no enemies,
Nor is there any crowd, none faint or fail,
No fear cometh, nor aught that doth torment,
This the immortal by full many hath been won,
And e'en to-day by many may be gained,
So there be full surrender; he who striveth not
He cannot. (v.v.506, 512-13.)

Surely no one has ever got more rapture out of the
negative than this Buddhist nun! If we compare her
lines with those on the Soma Am.rta, you will be
struck with the positive, and therefore the stronger
force in the Veda lines. Yet the cloud of the
negative is more in the words than in the meaning.

P.380

I cannot here and now stay over the other antho-
logies. But you may remember in Dhammapada, that
interesting collection of the very old and the
later, the line

Appamaado amatapada.m, (v.21).

a saying echoed in a Sutta wherein, in reply to the
brahmin's question: how to make the best of this
world and the hereafter, the Founder is said to have
prescribed appamaado: earnestness (1). Less likely
perhaps are you to know the interesting eloquent
lines:

When now, when then he grasps the rise and fall
of many thing, rapture and joy he wins
with them who can discern the deathless That.
(v.374.)

I found myself alone in connecting this amata.m ta.m
vijaanata.m with the idiom of the early Upani.sads,
but compare Aitareyya:

So he knowing That became immortal.

And Kau.siitakii :

He who knows this having reached That became
immortal.

And Kena :

Knowing That, the wise become immortal.

And B.rhadaara~nyaka :

That is the Immortal veiled by being.

For the Anthologies the real rival concept is not
so much causation as nirvaa.na, emerging gradually
as not merely a cathartic discipline, but as summum
bonum. The monks use it, roughly, as often as amata;
the nuns use it far oftener. The case is the same in
Dhammapada and Sutta-nipaata.
When we look at the prose Suttas, we find the word
amata, amatapada.m, tending to be used as a poetical
notion. The majjhima calls the Buddha giver of the
immortal (amatassa daataa)(2). The Sa.myutta speaks
of
ўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўw
1 Anguttara, iii, 364.
2 i, iii; 195, 224 (P.T.S. ed.).

P.381

The people when they seek to cross the stream
Ask for the land of immortality....(1).

and so on. The word is still a name to conjure by.
But there had come in, possibly from the Vedic
association of am.rta with Soma-juice, the fanciful
metaphor of amata as a divine liquid, not as of
nectar, of ambrosia, to be drunk or eaten, by such
as no longer lived by either the one or the other,
but as sprinkled, as anointed by wise teaching on a
hearer. Thus the aged ailing man Nakulapitar, after
listening to the Master, tells a disciple, " the
Blessed One by his religious talk has sprinkled me
with amata(2)."
When finally we come to the Commentaries and scho-
lastic books, we see the word amata either stolidly
identified with nirvaa.na or else passed by.
Further, and this is important, if we look through
the latter books, e.g. Buddhaghosa's and
Buddhadatta's, we, to go by the ample indexes, find
the word almost or quite ignored. It is clear that,
for these monks, and their world, the word, the old
concept of amata has faded out. Not for them were
their pulses quickened by the throbbing of the
Founder's drum of the immortal.
The mere losing of a venerable term for the relig-
ious ideal and substitution of another were less
significant, had those monks clear vision about, not
the deathless, but death; did they see, in this
every time, an opened gate, an apaaruta dvaara to a
finer living beyond, or, if already in a world
beyond, to an advance in the discipline of
opportunity afforded by life again on earth. But for
them there is little of this; there is manifest a
fear of death ўw have you ever read Buddhaghosa's
description of it? They seem to have been lacking in
what the men of beyond could have told them, had
they maintained the right use of Jhaana: ўw that
death is for all a gentle friend, ridding the dying
man ўw I mean of course spirit ўw of the ailing body
well before his last
ўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўwўw
1 Vol i, p.123.
2 Sa.myutta III, I. Cf.Psalms of the Sisters,p.41.

P.382

breath in a painless waiting, or if suddenly, also
with no pain at all. Fear of death and dread of life
beyond death because it meant more bodily life: ўw
such was the return Buddhism got for letting go its
vision of life as a whole.
And even in such vision ascribed to its teachers
of the next world, where the good deed here found
reward there, we only meet with a low picture of
physical pleasures and comfort. We find no evidence
of good life here finding reward in a higher
standard of spiritual values there. You have only to
read the Vimaanavatthu anthology, shortly I hope to
be published, to see this.
How much nearer akin is the resounding drum of the
Founder's outburst to the triumphant song of the
Hebrews: "Lift up your heads, ye doors, and be ye
lift up, ye everlasting gates, and the Man of glory
shall come in!"
Or even to our own dramatist echoing those words :

"Then heaven! set ope thine everlasting gates!"