Spurious Parallels to Buddhist Philosophy

·期刊原文
Spurious Parallels to Buddhist Philosophy

EDWARD CONZE
Philosophy East and West 13, no. 2, January 1963.
(c) by The University Press of Hawaii.
p.105-115

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p.105

AFTER AN EXAMINATION of the genuine parallels
between European and Buddhist philosophy,* we shall
now consider a few of the more widely advocated
spurious parallels. They often originate from a wish
to find affinities with philosophers recognized and
admired by the exponents of current academic
philosophy, and intend to make Buddhist thinkers
interesting and respectable by current Western
standards. Since this approach is not only
objectively unsound,(1) but has also failed in its
purpose to interest Western philosophers in the
philosophies of the East, the time has now come to
abandon it. Modern academic philosophers normally
have no interest in what Buddhists care for, and vice
versa.
A philosophical doctrine can be viewed from at
least four points of view: [1] as the formulation of
certain propositions, [2] in terms of the motiva-
tion which induced their author to believe them to be
true, his motives connected with the purpose he had
in mind, [3] in terms of the argumentation through
which he tries to establish their truth--the reasons
which he adduces being rarely those which actually
impelled him, and [4] in terms of the context in
which the statements are made, a context which is
determined by the philosopher's predecessors and
contemporaries, and by his social, cultural, and
religious background. When we compare Buddhist and
European thought, it happens quite often that the
formulations agree, whereas considerations of their
context, of the motives behind them, and of the
conclusions drawn from them suggest wide
discrepancies. Verbal coincidences frequently mask
fundamental divergences in the concepts underlying
them. For pages upon pages Shintan Shonin and Martin
Luther in almost the same words expound the primacy
of "faith," and yet
_____________________________________________________

See "Buddhist Philosophy and Its European
Parallels, " Philosophy East and West, XIII, No. 1
(April, 1963), pp. 9-23. (Comment and Discussion
pieces on Dr. Conze's two articles will be
welcome.--Ed.)
(1) As explained in the first article of this
two-article series, ibid., pp. 14-15.

p.106

in fact their two systems disagree in almost every
other respect.(2) Berkeley' denial of matter seems to
re-state literally the absolute idealism of the
Yogaacaarins, (3) but, nevertheless, (a) his
immaterialism sets out to deny a conception of matter
derived from Locke, etc., and unknown in India; (b)
his idea of Mind agrees none too well with that of
the Vij~naanavaadins; (C) his uncritical acceptance
of sense-data conflicts with the dharma theory; and
(d) his idea of "God" would not commend itself to
Buddhists.
Far too often "soteriological" are confused with
"philosophical" concepts, and the Buddhist "Void"(4)
is thus regarded as being on the same level with the
Aristotelian or Plotinian idea of "matter," or with
the "pure potentiality", of the Timaeus, which is
empty of all distinctions and full of infinite possi
bilities. Not must it be forgotten that spiritual
sickness is apt to ape or counterfeit (prativar.nika,
pratiruupaka) the language of spiritual health. If
the words alone are considered, the emptiness
doctrine may be mistaken for one of the forms of
European post-Nietzschean nihilism,(5) and the self-
naughting of saints is to some extent mimicked by the
self-destructive tendencies of German Romantics, like
Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, and so on.(6) Likewise, we
could in recent years observe in the Anglo-Saxon
countries' certain of D. T. Suzuki's followers using
the Master's sayings to justify a way of life
diametrically opposed to the one envisaged by him.(7)
These examples might be multiplied almost
indefinitely. In this article I will confine myself
to three kinds of false parallels. [1] Some, like
Kant, are not "parallel" at all, but tangential. [2]
Others, such as Bergson and the existentialists, are
preliminary. [3] Others, again, like Hume, are
merely; deceptive.
_____________________________________________________
(2) See H. Butschkus, Luthers Religion and ibre
Entsprechung in japanischen AmidaBuddhismus
(Elmsdetten: Verlags-Anstalt Heinr. & L. Lechte,
n.d., probably 1950).
(3) See the quotation in my Buddhism (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 168.
(4) E. Conze, Buddhist Thought in India (London:
George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1962), pp. 242ff.
(5) In my Der Satz vom Widerspruch (Hamburg:
Selbstverlag, 1932) , I have, at no. 300,
collected a few characteristic statements of
Nieztsche, for example, "The only reason why we
imagine a world other than this one is that we
are motivated by an instinct which makes us
calumniate life, belittle and suspect it." "It is
not life which has created the other world, but
the having become weary of life." "It is of the
utmost importance that one should abolish the
true world. It is that which has made us doubt
the world in which we are, and has made us
diminish its value; it has so far been the most
dangerous assault on life." Whatever this "life"
may be, it is surely not the spiritual life.
(6) See Fritz Br乬gemann, Die Ironie als
entwicklungsgeschichtliches Moment (Jena: E.
Diederichs, 1909). Eckart von Sydow, Die Kultur
der Derkadenz (Dresden: Sibyllen Verlag, 1921).
(7) N. M. Jacobs, in The Times Literary Supplement,
May 3, 1963, p. 325, speaks appositely of "Miller
and those Beat writers who abandon practical
affairs for the inner life and selfrealization-or
destruction--by means of Zen, Sex or Drugs."

p.107

(1) Professor T. R. V. Murti(8) has found between
Kant and the Maadhyamikas close similarities, which
Jacques May(9) has rejected as "perfide, " or
treacherous." In judging this issue, we must first of
all bear in mind that it is the whole purpose of
Kant's philosophy to show that morality and religion,
as understood by the German Protestantism of East
Prussia, can survive, even though Newtonian physics
be true and Hume's skepticism significant. So great
had the pressure of natural science become by his
time that he is a man divided against himself. On the
one hand, he longs to preserve the decencies of the
perennial philosophy. It seemed vital to him to
confine the intellect, conceived as the progenitor of
natural science and therefore the foe of all human
values, to the phenomenal world. In consequence, he
resembles the perennial philosophers insofar as he
maintains that true reality cannot be known though
sense-data or concepts, but must be contacted by a
pure spiritual intent--in his case, a completely
disinterested act of the will. On the other hand, he
takes the assertions of natural science very
seriously, and is concerned as much to find reasons
for their universal validity as to define their
limits.(10)
Kant's great specific contribution to philosophy
stems from his insight into the problems posed by the
tension between traditional values and the
implications natural science, and in his having found
a solution acceptable to many for a long time. This
tension was quite unknown in India. Since he answers
a question no pre-Macaulayan Indian could ever ask,
his answer can have no real correspondences in Indian
thought, which never underwent the onslaught of the
"mechanical" method. Therefore, all those modern
thinkers who either accept the ideal of "mechanical"
knowledge or give it great weight cannot have much
affinity with Buddhist thought. Kant's
_____________________________________________________
(8) The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (Hereafter,
CPB) (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1955),
pp. 294-301, though with serious reservations.
Stcherbatsky, on the other hand, had seen Kant as
closely similar to the later Buddhist logicians,
and had likened the Maadhyamikas to Hegel and
Bradley. See Conze, Buddhist Thought in India,
pp. 264-269.
(9) (1) "Kant et les Maadhyamika, " Indo-lranian
Journal, III (1959), 102-111. (2) "La philosophie
bouddhique de la vacuit?" Studia Philosophica,
XVIII (1958), 131-134. Some valuable comments by
J. W. de Jong are in Indo-lranian Journal, V
(1961), 161-163.
(10) This is one reason why the Kantian "phenomena"
cannot be simply equated with the Buddhist
"sa^msaara." From the point of view of the
Absolute, both Kantian empirical and Buddhist
conventional knowledge are non-valid. But Kant
never questioned the value of empirical
knowledge. In Buddhism, however, the
sa^mv.rtisatya (conventional truth) is a mere
error due to nescience (a-vidyaa, a-j~aana), and
conventional knowledge represents no more than a
deplorable estrangement from our true destiny.
In its uncompromising monastic form, Buddhism
maintains that the empirical world is not worth
exploring, that all one has to know about it is
its worthlessness and inanity; its scientific
exploration, as irrelevant to the escape from
the terrors of sa^msaara, is deemed unworthy
attention. A second reason why the Kantian
phenomena/noumena cannot be equated with the
Maadhyamika sa^msaara/Nirvaa.na that the latter
are identical, whereas the first clearly are
not. The one dichotomy, in any case, is defined
by its relation to science, the other by its
relation to salvation.

p.108

position in regard to Buddhist philosophy is the
exact reverse of Schopenhauer's. There the analogies
were essential, and the discrepancies fortuitous,
whereas here the similarities are incidental and the
differences vital.
To begin with, it is wrong to describe
Naagaarjuna's position as epistemological, since it
is clearly ontological.(11) For perennial
philosophers everywhere, philosophy is a way of life
based on an understanding of reality as reality, of
being as being. They all agree with Aristotle's
famous remark according to which "The question which
was raised long ago, is still and always will be, and
which always baffles us--'What is Being?'--is in
other words 'What is substance?'"(12) The whole theme
of Naagaarjuna's work is the search for the own-being
(svabhaava) of dharmas.(13) Epistemology, by
contrast, is a branch of "sciential" philosophy, and
became an object of inquiry only in modern times.
Following the hints of the nominalists, Descartes
tore apart thought and being, and then decided that
we are more immediately aware of our thoughts about
things than of the things themselves, that the data
of inner experience are more immediate and clear to
us than the experience of outward things.(14) Kant
succinctly expressed the shift from the ontological
to the epistemological approach in his famous remark
about the "Copernican Revolution," which Murti has
surely misunderstood.(15) Kant says(16) that
"hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge
must conform to objects," whereas he himself prefers
"to suppose that objects must conform to our
knowledge." This assertion of the primacy of the
subjective over the objective assumes a separation
between subject and object which is alien to Indian
thinking. In the Maadhyamika system, on the highest
level, i.e., on that of the fully realized perfect
wisdom, they are one and identical. On the lower
levels, they are occasionally distinguished, but
never with the rigidity of post-Cartesian philosophy.
The division between subjective and objective facts
is always incidental and never fundamental. Their
basic unity lies in their all being dharmic facts.
Just as truth (sat-ya) does not describe a particular
kind of knowledge, but a state of being, so all
cognitive acts are viewed as factors in the interplay
of objective facts (dharma) which bring
_____________________________________________________
(11) On this subject, see also the excellent remarks
of Jacques May (1) 104-108,(2) 135-138 (see note
9).
(12) Metaphysics, Z 1, 1028b. H. Tredennick, trans.
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1933), p.313.
(13) Conze, Buddhist Thought in India, pp. 239-241.
(14) This is not a Psychological but a philosophical
statement, because psychologically it is
manifestly untrue. The normal and untutored mind
is usually quite at ease among external objects,
and, unable to even understand this doctrine of
the "primacy of internal experience," is much
more immediately aware of a chair than of its
awareness of a chair.
(15) CPB, pp. 123-124, 274.
(16) Critique of Pure Reason, N. K. Smith, trans.
(London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1961), p. 22.

p.109

about, not just a false view of the world, but the
origination (samudaya) of a false world alienated
from true reality. There is no room here to show the
existential character of avidyaa (ignorance),
d.r.s.ti (false views), prapa~nca (idle
speculations), etc., but the reader should always
bear in mind that false views are not merely wrong
knowledge, but wrong. knowledge on the part of a
viewer who is in a false position and surrounded by
distorted objects.
All Maadhyamika reasoning has the one single
purpose of enabling transcendental wisdom to function
freely. In his remarks about "intellectual
intuition," Kant questions the possibility of such a
faculty, and, in addition, he could not possibly
formulate a spiritual discipline which could lead to
it,(17) because no man can be much wiser than his
age. The essence of Buddhism concerns the one true
reality (Dharma), which can be realized only in the
discipline of a traditional system of meditation, of
which the Christian counterparts vanished from sight
in Northern Europe soon after the Reformation.
There remains the apparent analogy between Kant's
antinomies and the Buddhist treatment of speculative
questions (avyaak.rtavastuuni). They agree in a few
details, i.e., in that they are both concerned with
whether the world is finite or infinite, etc., and in
that they are both left undecided. The difference,
however, is the following: The antinomies are
insoluble because one can argue convincingly on both
sides, and so no decision is possible. The deadlock
of reason indicates that it has overstepped its
boundaries. The argument concerning the
"indeterminate topics" is totally different. They are
not explained, set aside and ignored," because they
are not conducive to salvation. There are answers to
them, and the Tathaagata knows them, but he does not
reveal them because they are of no use to us.(18) In
the one case, these questions fall outside the scope
of scientific, in the other of salutary, experience.
The similarity is purely formal, and quite trivial
when the formulations are viewed in their respective
contexts.
(2) We now come to those who go but part of the
way. Bergson and the existentialists, among others,
agree with the Buddhists in their revulsion from the
nightmare of a sinister and useless world, but cannot
follow them into the transcendental world, just for
lack of expertise and because of their
_____________________________________________________
(17) Ibid., pp. 268, 270-271. Murti, CPB, p. 300. May
(1) 108: "La dialectique kantienne est le jeu de
l'impuissance de la raison.... Au contraire, la
dialectiqlle maadhyamika est v俽itablement
constitutive de la r俛lit? elle accomplit en
abolisrant." See note 9.
(18) This is perfectly clear from Majjhima Nikaaya,
No. 63, and the fuller account of Naagaarjuna,
恡ienne Lamotte, trans., Le trait?de la grands
vertu de sagesse (Louvain: Bureau du Mus俹n,
1944), Vol. I, pp. 154-158.

p.110

unfamiliarity with any definite spiritual
tradition--whereas Kant had still stood squarely in
the Protestant tradition, however impoverished that
may have been by his time.
(2a) Bergson, like Kant, strives hard to show
that spiritual values can co-exist with the findings
of science. He does this by contrasting the largely
false world of common sense and science (in which he,
nevertheless, takes a keen interest) with the true
world of intuition. He is perfectly lucid and even
superb so long as he demonstrates that both the
intellect and our practical preoccupations manifestly
distort the world view both of everyday experience
and of mechanical science. But, when he comes to the
way out, to his dur俥 r俥lle and his "intuition,"
vagueness envelops all and everything. His positive
views have therefore been rightly described as
"tantalising," for "as soon as one reaches out to
grasp his body of thought it seems to disappear
within a teasing ambiguity."(19) Mature and
accomplished spiritual knowledge can be had only
within a living tradition. But how could a Polish
Jew, transplanted to Paris, find such a tradition in
the corridors of the Coll奼e de France or in the
salons of the 16th arrondissement? It is the tragedy
of our time that so many of those who thirst for
spiritual wisdom are forced to think it out for
themselves--always in vain. There is no such thing as
a pure spirituality in the abstract. There are only
separate lineages handed down traditionally from the
past. If any proof were needed, Bergson, a
first-class intellect, would provide it. His views on
religion are a mixture of vague adumbrations and
jumbled reminiscences which catch some of the general
principles of spirituality but miss its concrete
manifestations. Tradition furnished at least two
worlds composed of objects of pure disinterested
contemplation--the Buddhist world of dharmas and the
Platonic ideas in their pagan, Christian, or Jewish
form. Here Bergson would have had an opportunity to
"go beyond intellectual analysis and to recapture by
an act of intuitive sympathy the being and the
existence in their original quality."(20) But for
various reasons he could not accept either of these
traditions. Like Schopenhauer, he regarded art as one
of the avenues to the truth,(21) but, otherwise, his
"intuition," this "ecstatic identification with the
object,"(22) this "spiritual sympathy by which one
places oneself within an object in order to coincide
with what is unique in it, and consequently
inexpressible, "(23) is never explained as a
disciplined faculty.
_____________________________________________________
(19) Th. Hanna, ed., The Bergsonian Heritage
(Hereafter, BH) (New York and London: Columbia
University Press, 1962),p. 1; also pp. 27, 53.
(20) BH, p. 40.
(21) "So art... has no other object than to brush
aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional
and socially accepted generalities, in short,
everything that veils reality from us, in order
to bring us face to face with reality itself."
Le Rire, quoted in BH, p. 88.
(22) Ibid., p. 158.
(23) Ibid., p. 87.

p.111

Because of this disseverance from a concrete
spiritual practice, Bergson has now no disciples, and
his work belongs to the past. As Rai'ssa Maritain put
it so well, "Bergson travelled uncertainly towards
God, still far off, but the light of whom had already
reached him."(24) Unable, like Moses, to reach the
promised land, he, nevertheless, cleared the way for
the Catholic revival of the twentieth century, which
enabled many French intellectuals to regain contact
with at least one living spiritual tradition. At the
same time, he realized that the inanition of the
spiritual impulse slowly deprives life of its savor
among the more finely organized minds of Europe, and
he wrote in 1932, "Mankind lies groaning,
half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress.
Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is
in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining
first whether they want to go on living or
not(!)...."(25)
(2b) It is at this point of despondency that the
existentialists had, after world War I, arrived on
the scene. By that time the speculative vigor of
European philosophers had declined so much that they
got the worst of both worlds. As for the world of
science, they rejected its pretensions with a lordly
disdain. As for the world of the spirit, they did not
know where to find it.(26) Their beliefs reflect to
perfection the social position of the post-1918
intelligentsia on the European Continent. In the
provincial perspective of England both logical
positivism and existentialism are often explained as
reactions against German idealism. This is not the
case. Logical positivism is descended from the
philistinism of the English commercial middle
classes, (27) and, long before the days of Ayer,
Wittgenstein, and Wollheim, the "British school of
philosophy" had found its classical and superbly
brilliant expression in Macaulay's essay on Lord
Bacon.(28) As for existentialism, it is derived from
the hopeless anxieties of the more intelligent
European intellectuals. Their Sorge and
existentielle Angst spring, not from
_____________________________________________________
(24) Ibid., p. 92 (my italics, but not my translation
from the French).
(25) Ibid., p. 99. If this statement, which goes on
to speak of the "universe" as "a machine for the
making of gods," is collated with that which
Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz) made in 1924 in his
Confessions of Zeno (New York: G. P. Putnam's
Sons), pp. 411-412, it must become clear that we
do not owe our present plight merely to the
brilliant achievements of our able technicians.
The progressive decline of spiritual wisdom may
well have weakened the will to live and
correspondingly strengthened the death wish. On
this subject, refer to Erich Heller, The
Disinherited Mind (London: Penguin Books, 1961),
whose conclusions I take for granted throughout.
(26) I speak here only of the "secular"
existentialists. The "religious" existentialists
would require separate treatment.
(27) Matthew Arnold, after dividing the English
population of his time into "barbarians,
philistines, and populace," well defined the
philistine as "a strong, dogged unenlightened
opponent of the chosen people, of the children
of light," in A. C. Ward, Illustrated History
of English Literature (London: Longmans, Green &
Co., 1955), Vol. III, p. 227.
(28) July, 1837. Th. B. Macaulay, Literary Essays
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 364-410.

p.112

their reading of Pascal and Kierkegaard, but from
their own objective social situation. Russell was
certainly not under the influence of either Pascal or
Kierkegaard when he wrote in 1903 that "only on the
firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's
habitation henceforth[!] be safely built."(29) We
naturally ask ourselves what might have happened to
"henceforth" necessitate so much despair. By way of
reply we are told that "the world which Science
presents for our belief" is "purposeless" and "void
of meaning."(30) If Russell had realized that the
methods of Science, with a capital S, preclude it
from ever recognizing any objective purpose or
meaning even if there is one,. he might have saved
himself much unnecessary worry. Millions of people
like him take the conventions and hypotheses of
mechanical "Science" for "truths,"(31)and are plunged
into deep gloom forever after. Existentialism, like
logical positivism, arose primarily from social
conditions. Secondarily, of course, when these two
movements reached the universities, their followers
naturally rubbed themselves against the professors
who were entrenched there and who were then in the
habit of expounding the tenets of German idealism,
and they also added a few frills of their own, such
as Moore's characteristically Cambridge
"preciousness," etc.
The existentialist diagnosis of the plight of
human existence agrees with that of the Buddhists.
"So human life is nothing but a perpetual illusion.
Man is nothing but disguise, lie and hypocrisy, with
respect to himself and with respect to others,"(32)
and so on and so on. In terms of the Four Truths, the
existentialists have only the first, which teaches
that everything is ill. Of the second, which assigns
the origin of ill to craving, they have only a very
imperfect grasp. As for the third and fourth, they
are quite unheard of. They just do not believe that
"there is, O monks, an Unborn, an Unbecome, an
Unmade, an Unconditioned; for if there were not this
Unborn, Unbecome, Unmade, Unconditioned, no escape
from this born, become, made and conditioned would be
apparent."(33) Knowing no way out, they are
_____________________________________________________
(29) Mysticism and Logic (London: Penguin Books,
1951),p. 51. The whole essay (pp. 50-59) is
worth re-reading because now, sixty years later,
it shows clearly the grotesque irrationalities
of a "sciential" philosophy, which in nearly
every sentence blandly went beyond all
scientific observations made even up to the
present day. May I explain that my attitude
cannot be called "antiscientific, " because
nowhere have I said anything about "science" as
such, either for or against. My strictures
concern only extravagant philosophical
conclusions drawn from a few inconclusive
scientific data. Sir Isaac Newton, as is well
known, said at the close of his life, when all
his work was done, that he had only played with
pebbles on the sea shore, and that "the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
This is all I try to say, neither less nor more.
(30) Ibid., p. 51.
(31) Ibid., p. 51.
(32) Blaise Pascal, Pens俥s, no. 100. For a good
comparison in some detail see Constantin
Regamey, "Tendances et methodes de la
philosophie indienne compar俥s ?celles de la
philolsophie occidentale," Revue de th俹logie et
de philorophie, IV (1910), 258-259.
(33) Udaana, viii, 3: no...nissara.na.m pa~n~naayetha.

p.113

manufacturers of their own woes. As distinct from
their world weariness, that of the Buddhists is
cheered by the hope of ultimate release and lightened
by multifarious meditational experiences which ease
the burden of life. Denied inspiration from the
spiritual world, existentialists are apt to seek it
from authoritarian social groups (Nazis, Communists,
the Roman Catholic hierarchy). They are prone to
ascribe their disbelief in a spiritual world to their
own "unblinking love of truth." I myself was brought
up among them, and they were clearly the bedraggled
victims of a society which had become oppressive to
them through the triple effect of Science,
technology, and social decomposition, and in which no
authoritative spiritual teaching could any longer be
encountered, except in some obscure nooks and corners
inaccessible to the metropolitan intelligentsia.
(3) By "deceptive" comparisons I mean those which
concern statements that are negative in either form
or content. A negative proposition derives its true
meaning from what it is directed against, and its
message entirely depends, therefore, on its context.
In different contexts two identical negative
statements may, therefore, have nothing in common.
One single example must suffice.
Hume's denial of a "self" seems literally to
agree with the anattaa doctrine. Buddhists are
certainly at one with him when he rejects the notion
of a permament self-identical substance in favor of a
succession of impermanent states and events.(34)
Furthermore, his assertion that out mind is "nothing
but a bundle or collection of different
perceptions, (35) united together by certain
relations" would win at least their qualified
approval. The unity of the personality is a fairly
loose one for Hume, just as for Democritus and the
Epicureans it was a mere assemblage (concilium) of
subtle moving atoms, and all that Hume did was to
substitute "perceptions" for the "atoms" of the
ancient materialists. He understood our personality
after the image of inanimate objects,(36) which also
have no "self," or true inwardness, of any kind. In
addition, those inanimate objects, as well as the
human personality, were subjected to the mechanical
method, which discarded Aristotle's "substantial
forms" and "intelligible substances," and which, in
accordance with the "law of inertia," allows for no
center of inward initiative. For Hume, only a stream
_____________________________________________________
(34) So, Murti, CPB, p. 130.
(35) For my part, when I enter most intimately into
what I call myself, I always stumble on some
particular perception or other, of heat or cold,
light or shade, love or hatred, pain or
pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time
without a perception, and never can observe any
thing but the perceptions." David Hume, A
Treatise on Human Nature, T.H. Green, ed.
(London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1874), Vol. I,
p. 534. When I first saw this sentence forty
years ago, I thought it unanswerable. What now
strikes me is the immense vagueness of the word
"perception."
(36) Ibid., pp. 537-540.

p.114

of successive ideas exists, and there is no permanent
self within, nor is any subject of experience needed
to hold the ideas together, or to guide them. The
mind, a mere stage for its contents and for their
relations and interactions, is reduced to the
drifting passage of an aimless temporality.
All this corresponds well to the picture of Paali
Buddhism which British civil servants gave about
eighty years ago. It takes no account, however, of
the context of Hume's statements. When applied to the
human personality, the Aristotelian synthesis used
the term "substance" to indicate that some features
of man are more essential to him than others, closer
to his true being.(37) For Hume, on the other hand,
all mental contents are of equal value, and for him
it makes no sense to speak of "surface" or "depth,"
of inwardness" or "alienation." In consequence, from
his point of view, there can be no sense in the
spiritual approach of which Augustine has so well
said, "In te ipszlm redi, in interiore homine habitat
veritas.(38) Although Aristotle's theory of substance
may have been a rather clumsy way of providing an
ontological basis for the spiritual life, its
rejection by Hume meant that he dropped all quest for
the transcendental, and, appalled by his own
nihilism, turned away from philosophy and occupied
himself with re-writing the history of England in the
interest of the Tory Party.
Whereas Hume reduced selfhood to the level of the
sub-personal, the Buddhist doctrine of anattaa
invites us to search for the super-personal. Its
whole point lies in that, since everything in this
empirical self is impermanent, unsatisfactory,
etc., therefore it constitutes a false self, and none
of it can be mine, me, or myself. In consequence, I
must look beyond the skandhas (heaps) to find my true
and abiding transcendental self (which is the
Tathaagata).(39) The Dhammapada says that, if the
egolessness of all dharmns is seen with the eye of
wisdom, it will then lead to a turning away from all
ill.(40) Suzuki, commenting on this verse, defines
the praj~naa-eye as
_____________________________________________________
(37) For Aristotle, intelligence (diano妕ikon) was a
man's true self (E.N., 1116a8) , and, for
Porphyry (de abst., I. 29), the Nous is his
ont晄 auton. The Nous is man's sovereign
(kyriotaton) and his better part (ameinon)
(E.N., 1178a2). The connection between man's
ousia (essence) and his proper objective purpose
is made particularly clear in Aristotle's
Protreptikos. For the quotations, see E. Conze,
Der Satz vom Widerspruch (Hamburg: Selbstverlag,
1932), no. 141.
(38) Approximately: "Enter into yourself, for the
truth dwells in the inmost heart of man."
Likewise, in the Far East, Ch'an taught that "a
man could be a Buddha by immediately taking hold
of his inmost nature." D. T. Sutuki, The
Essentials of Zen Buddhism, Bernard Phillips,
ed., (London: Rider & Co., 1963), p. 175. Also
George Grimm, The Doctrirte of the Buddha
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958),p. 175: "We must
retire from the world back into ourselves, to
the 'centre of our vital birth, ' and by
persistent introspection seek to find out how we
have come into all this Becoming in which we
find ourselves enmeshed."
(39) This side of the anattaa doctrine has been
explained with great subtlety and acumen by
Grimm, op. cit., pp. 115-116, 140, 147, 149,
175, 369-372. For my own views, see Buddhist
Thought in india, pp. 36-39, 42, 122-134,
208-209.
(40) Dhammapada, V. 279: yadaa pa~n~naaya passati,
atha nibbindatii dukkhe.

p.115

"a special kind of intuition enabling us to penetrate
right into the bedrock of Reality itself."(41) To
Hume, such a penetration would not have been a
particularly meaningful undertaking, and he would
have been still more displeased by Suzuki's sequel,
when he says: "The problem of' the ego must be
carried on to the field of metaphysics, To really
understand what Buddha meant by saying that there is
no aatman, we must leave psychology behind." Those
who equate Hume and Buddhism on the subject of the
"self" overlook the fact that no passage in the
Buddhist scriptures teaches that there is no self,
although the self is often called inconceivable" and
inaccessible to verbalized knowledge, that the whole
subject of the existence and nonexistence of a Self
is relegated to the class of the fruitless
"indeterminate topics, "(42) and that the fixed
conviction that "there is not for me a self" is
expressly condemned as a false view.(43)
These comparisons with European philosophers
could be continued for many more pages, but enough
has been said to clarify the general principles which
in my view a comparative study of Buddhist and
European philosophy must observe.
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(41) Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist (London:
George Alien & Unwin Ltd., 1957),p. 39.
(42) Grimm, op. cit., p.140n.
(43) The Majjhima Nikaaya, I, p. 8. Edited by V.
Trenckner. (London: Pali Text Society, 1888).