The possibility of Oriental influence: in Humes philosophy

·期刊原文
The possibility of Oriental influence: in Hume's philosophy
Nolan Pliny Jacobson
(Professor Jacobson is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and Chairman, Asian Area Studies Program, Winthrop College, South Carolina.)
Philosophy East and West
Vol.19 No.1 (1969)
pp.17-37
Copyright by University of Hawaii Press

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It might be easier for Asia and the West to understand their different religious and social philosophies if they knew how deeply these philosophies had affected one another in the past. European thought from 1600 to 1789 is especially important in this connection, for these are the years when the Orient contributed most to Western thought, and they are the years when the very foundations of modern philosophy in the West were being laid.

The conceptual links between the Buddha and David Hume have been observed by numerous scholars East and West, such as Murti and Whitehead, to mention only two who may be nearest to our time. Writing fifty years ago, La Vall`ee Poussin may have been the first to express surprise that "the yellow-garbed monks of yore" propounded essentially the same theory of the self "found in Hume or Taine and many scientists."[l]

As far as I know, however, no one has ever investigated the other side of the problem, the possibility that Buddhist thought may have played a major role in the initial formulation of Hume's Treatise. If the venture seems slightly absurd, it may be worth remembering that almost any result from such a venture, even the most negligible, could have more than ordinary significance, considering the fact that it is the founder of modern philosophy of science, on the one hand, and a major philosophic tradition of Asia, on the other hand, with which we have to do.

SIMILARITIES IN HUME AND THE BUDDHA

In depriving the concepts of substance and causality of all rational justification, by showing that they rest upon the fictitious Substitution of ideas that arise in the mind rather than from "matters of fact and existence," David Hume attacked the fundamental conceptions around which seventeenth century metaphysics had largely revolved. Locke's "unknown substratum," Berkeley's spiritual substances, and the res cogitans which rescued Descartes in his sea of doubt--all are called in question as the mere customary conjunction of ideas upon the stage of experience, a stage which itself is only a "bundle of perceptions."

As Murti observes in his recent study of the Maadhyamika, "Denial of substance is the foundation of Buddhism down the ages."[2] We have before us here a very strange agreement between Hume and Gotama Buddha. "The whole history of Buddhist philosophy," Stcherbatsky says, "can be described as a series of attempts to penetrate more deeply into this original intuition of

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[1] L. de la Vall`ee Poussin, The Way to Nirvana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), pp. 38-39.
[2]T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 196o), pp. 26-27.

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Buddha, what he himself believed to be his great discovery."[3] The Belgian Buddhist scholar whose writings were being read and published at Cambridge fifty years ago puts it this way:

According to the Buddhists, no Self, that is, no unitary, permanent feeling or thinking entity, comes into the field of inquiry. We know only the body, which is visibly a composite, growing and decaying thing, and a number of phenomena, feelings, perceptions, wishes or wills, cognitions--in philosophic language, a number of states of consciousness. That these states of consciousness depend upon a Self, are the product of a Self or arise in a Self, is only a surmise, since there is no consciousness of a Self outside these states of consciousness .... 'There are perceptions, but we do not know a perceiver.'[4]

There is no thinker but the thoughts, no perceiver but the perceptions, no craver but the cravings. The conclusion was explicitly drawn by the Buddha that there is suffering but none who suffers.

The similarity here with Hume is striking. "There are some philosophers," Hume says,

who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity....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 anything but the perception.... I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.[5]

For Hume, too, the only thinker is the thought, the only perceiver the perception, the only craver the craving.

There are Buddhist scholars, such as Nyanatiloka of Ceylon, who contend that the Buddhist concept of self "has been clearly and unreservedly taught only by the Buddha."[6] This, however, is not true. Both Hume and the Buddha insist that it is wrong-headed to call some enduring, ever-identical self more real than our changing states. Both insist that the experiences themselves are spread upon no substance and upon no substantial self but constitute a process

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[3]T. I. Stcherbatsky, "The Soul Theory of the Buddhists," Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R. (1919), pp. 824-825.
[4] La Vall`ee Poussin, op. cit., pp. 35-39.
[5]David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), II. ii. 5 (363).
[6]Nyanatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary (Colombo: Frewin & Co., Ltd., 1956), pp. 11-12. "'Non-Ego, Not-Self' (anattaa), i.e. the fact that neither within these bodily and mental phenomena of existence, nor outside of them, can be found anything that in the ultimate sense could be regarded as a self-reliant real Ego-entity, personality, or any other abiding substance....All the remaining Buddhist doctrine may, more or less, be found in other philosophic systems and religions, but the Anattaa-Doctrine has been clearly and unreservedly taught only by the Buddha."

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in and for themselves. Both affirm that whatever self is conceived will be less concrete than the experiences themselves. Both see in other concepts of the self the propensity, widespread in the human community, for attributing ultimacy to the wrong things.

The Buddhist position is that there is no self-identical self, only "the perpetual flux and movement," the abiding flow, but that each of us is "a numerically new actuality every moment," as Hartshorne has put it. Hartshorne presents what he calls "the Buddhist-Whiteheadian doctrine" as a "radical pluralism" that takes its stand with our "successive experiences" or "successive actualities," arguing that these are "the primary units of the plurality" constituted by "the momentary experiences or selves." Hartshorne applauds both Hume and the Buddha for returning us to an honest empiricism in which "the concrete subjects are the momentary actualities."[7] Existence is momentary in the Buddha's thought; at no two moments is a thing identical; thus things are different every moment.[8] This is the way Murti puts it.

This radical pluralism is offered by Hartshorne as a far more acceptable account of "matters of fact and existence" than two other views of the self or soul, the superficial and unclear conventional pluralism which has been "standard in most Western thought for over two thousand years," and the doctrine of Hindu monism that holds plurality of selves to be only appearance relative to the primary reality of Brahman, which is beyond all numerical diversity. He credits India with first producing the genius required "to make us aware of the limitations" of these two non-Buddhist views, and he blames Western philosophy and religion prior to Hume, "and in large part since Hume," for having "failed to grasp these limitations."[9]

Professor David Richardson of Utah State University was moved to explore the remarkable similarities between Western philosophy and Buddhist thought in its Indian background by Babbitt's study of Rousseau and Romanticism, which compares the Romantic movement to Taoism in China. Following this trail through Taoism backward into Buddhism, Richardson concludes that the doctrine of momentary actualities out of which all things are made, a doctrine involved in the Occasionalism of Malebranche, points to Hindu and Buddhist

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[7]Charles Hartshorne, "The Buddhist-Whiteheadian View of the Self and the Religious Traditions," Proceedings of the 9th International Congress for the History of Religions (Tokyo, 1960), pp. 298-302.
[8]Murti, op. cit., pp. 174-178, 121-123. "All theories of causation are conceptual devices and make-shifts."
[9] Hartshorne, op. cit., p. 301. This radical pluralism, as Masson-Oursel writes in Comparative Philosophy (London: Kegan Paul, 1936), received its earliest expression in Indian Buddhism, whence it passed naturally into Chinese Buddhism beginning with the first century A.D., Viz., "the antisubstantialism of Hume ... is only equalled by the antisubstantialism of the Buddhists which likewise only acknowledges phenomena linked together by causality, and which exorcises the phantom of the object as object and teaches a phenomenology including a psychology 'without a psyche' " (p. 159).

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origins. The ancient Buddhist theory of causation, like that of Leibniz, Richardson observes, is a theory of "the functional dependency of all point-instants on their preceding points." A thing is not a cause "producing" something; rather, "the whole universe of point-instants immediately brings about the result in a functional dependence." The same relation of causality is stated as follows: "a thing is truly defined by its relations to all the other things of the entire universe." Thus it is, Richardson writes, for early Buddhist philosophy, for Leibniz, and for Hegel [and the writer would add, for Whitehead and Hartshorne as well, with fewer reservations for these two than with respect, perhaps, to early Buddhism]. The literature and ideas encountered by Leibniz, Richardson concludes, must have included Buddhist and Indian modes of thought, and he is persuaded that even the metaphor of the monad mirroring the entire universe of monads from its own concreteness is a metaphor that made its way into Western Europe from Buddhist and Indian origins.[l0]

For Hume, however, unlike Leibniz, there can be no thought of events being related to all the other things of the entire universe. The more primitive teaching of the Buddha is closer to Hume in the Whiteheadian sense indicated by Hartshorne above, accepting events and objects in their momentariness. This is what we find in the early Paali texts.[11] Only the momentary event itself, co-present with others, is what we perceive. Events contiguous in time and place, Hume observed, can be and are considered in terms of cause and effect, but this is chiefly a way of thinking, a manner of speaking, a cultural habit which leads us to look at one event as cause, the other as effect, and the bond between them as the "supposititious cause." When we really analyze our experience, all we find is the momentariness of events and the cultural habit or "propensity to feign" supposititious causes, which habit or propensity deadens our sensitivity to the sheer momentariness and co-arising (dependent origination) of the events.

Buddhist meditation and analysis is a process of heightening awareness of the momentariness of events, wherein all conditions are combined in a simultaneous correlation, as Govinda puts it; it is precisely because of this living juxtaposition and succession of the events in their momentariness that "the possibility of becoming free is conceivable."[12] "Life knows no absolute units but only centres of relation, continuous processes of unification, because reality cannot be broken up into bits; therefore each of its phases is related to the others, thus excluding the extremes of complete identity or non-identity."[l3]

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[10]D. B. Richardson, "The Leibnizian Reason of 'Matter-of-fact,"' Scientia: Revue Internationale de synthese scientifique [Come, Italie], 6th ser. (1965), pp. 11 and 13.
[11]E. R. Sarathchandra, Buddhist Psychology of Perception (Colombo: Ceylon University Press, 1958), p. 42.
[12]Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy (London: Rider & Co., 1961), p. 56. [13]Ibid., p. 57.

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Murti formulates the Abhidhamma's position as follows: "The Buddhist view ... reduces change to a series of entities emerging and perishing; each entity however rises and perishes in entirety; it does not become another. Movement for the Buddhist is not the passage of an entity from one point to another; it is the emergence, at appropriate intervals, of a series of entities, like the individual pictures of a 'movie' show; it is a series of full-stops."[14]

Buddhist schools of philosophy wrestled for centuries with these questions, and the results by 1700 were as much a part of Chinese as of Indian thought. Our inability to find anything more substantial than a "supposititious cause drives us "logically," according to Murti, into occasionalism,[15] which is what Richardson has in mind in linking these Buddhist reflections with Malebranche. Since we are interested here in relations between Hume and the Buddha, we will want to reserve judgment for the time being on the comparison with Malebranche, and especially on Murti's conviction that the Maadhyamika moves the Buddhist denial of substance closer to Kant than to Hume. There are many alternatives, the present one between viewing the conceptual link between cause and effect in the framework of a transcendental psychology, as in Kant, and viewing it more simply as a mere social convention, as in Hume.

As with the substantial self and with causality, so likewise with substance in the broadest philosophical sense. Whitehead used to say that most modern forms of immorality are traceable to the Christian-Aristotelian concept of substance. The issue, therefore, is hardly insignificant. Just as "we have no idea of external substance, distinct from the ideas of particular qualities," so likewise "we have no notion of it [the mind or self], distinct from the particular perceptions."[16] The unauthorized roving of thought beyond its proper territory, as in the case of the quail in the Buddhist parable,[17] results in the misuse of the mind, populating it with diversionary entities which mislead the human adventure. In actuality, we do not and cannot go behind the phenomena of matters of fact and existence. "Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple and individual, or did the mind perceive some real connexion among them, there would be no difficulty in the case."[18]

Infer an entity behind an individual man, and you will logically infer it behind every individual thing; and so the mishandling of sensory experience creates the supposititious ghost-world of metaphysical entities beyond our own. Plate accepts both worlds and tries unsuccessfully to account for their participation. Buddha and Hume reject both, seeing everywhere only those functional unities that spring into being and pass away, arising and ceasing. "The mind," Hume says, "is a kind of theater, where several perceptions

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[14] Murti, op. cit., p. 75. Cf. PP* 121, 175, 177.
[15] Ibid., p. 175.
[16] Hume, op. cit., p. 635.
[17]Samyutta Nikaaya, V. 146 (PTS V. 125-126).
[18] Hume, op. cit., p. 636.

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successively make their appearance, pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different [times]."[19] We invent the links we seem to need to hold our world together--Self, Cause, Substance, God. None of these can be logically inferred from matters of fact found in our sense impressions. In this way Hume attacked the fundamental conceptions around which the formative centuries of modern philosophy revolved.

According to Ramanan, this is the full force of Naagaarjuna's philosophy as well, not to weave the tangled web of our experience into a unitary all-embracing view of the world, but to become mature in the realization that the world can be formulated in many different ways with unique value to each different perceiver, provided only the false sense of the real can be overcome and the error of misplaced absoluteness avoided.[20]

Malalasekera attributes the notion of a permanent self to the impurity of conventional language, an explanation also proposed by the Buddha, such that we are in the habit of saying that "it rains" and "I think" when we should say merely that "there is rain" and "there is thinking."[21] This is what Descartes would have said if he had had the analytic habit of mind found in Hume and the Buddha. The Buddha, indeed, anticipates by twenty-five centuries Wittgenstein's struggle to overcome the bewitchment of the intellect by language. In both there is the same meticulous handling of small items of consciousness, in themselves often of no apparent significance, until as a final cumulative impact of the analysis one is struck silent, as silent as the Buddha, instead of running out on all sides in fragments of discursive thought. Through analysis we penetrate each matrix of meaning, until clarification leaves nothing on which to cling.[22]

No one has ever exposed more relentlessly than Hume our illogical tendencies to leap from causal sequences to a First Cause, from history to super-history, from nature to supernature, from species of goodness to Perfect Being, from the inexplicable to a divine miracle-worker. Logic and science require us to stop where our evidence runs out; beyond this point the Buddha referred to what he called the "indeterminables." The Buddha stopped all these speculations because they leave us in the grip of our compulsive drives, which function in the Buddha's thinking as a sort of original sin tearing the

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[19] Ibid., I. iv. 6 (253).
[20]K. Venkata Ramanan, Naagaarjuna's Philosophy (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1966), pp. 320-321.
[21]G. P. Malalasekera, "Some Aspects of Reality as Taught by Theravaada Buddhism," Essays in East-West Philosophy, ed. C. A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), p. 185.
[22]Nolan Pliny Jacobson, Buddhism: The Religion of Analysis (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1966), chaps. 3 and 4.

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aboriginal harmony of existence asunder. In this way, Gotama Buddha discouraged belief in God without denying his existence; Hume did the same.

There are other similarities between Hume and the Buddha, such as their belief in the natural anthropocentric character of all knowledge, the belief that man's own nature is implicated in everything he knows, and the conviction held vigorously by both that reason is the slave of the passions,[23] that man's intellect but carries out what it is bidden by the sensitive side of our nature to do. This is what the Buddha calls ta.nhaa.[24] In reversing the role previously ascribed to the rational and the passionate sides of man's nature, both the Buddha and Hume shift mankind away from reliance upon established beliefs as a guide and directive for behavior. They are for this reason major turning points of history.

THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE RELIGIOUS LEADER OF MANKIND

The similarities mentioned above are more than remarkable when one remembers that Hume and the Buddha were separated by twenty-three hundred years and by different cultural traditions. There are reasons why Hume and the Buddha have been linked together more frequently than any other representatives of Eastern and Western thought. To avoid being entirely misleading, however, the major differences, at least, should be mentioned along with the emphasis that the differences certainly outweigh the similarities.[25]

The chief aim of the Buddha's thought is to distinguish sharply a path of salvation, a way of extricating the individual from the suffering which is the dominant feature of human living. The Buddha wishes to lead men to a supernormal type of vision and experience which can become the ballast and underpinning of man's life. In Hume there is nothing comparable to the concept of Nibbaana, and Hume is not trying to distinguish a path of salvation. He is not tortured with any fundamental wrongness in the way man fives; he is almost exclusively preoccupied with faulty reasoning and with certain steps which he believes may be taken to throw more light upon the sources of error in the way men use their minds. Although he was concerned with moral problems and with the grounds upon which men make judgments of value,[26] his chief aim was to analyze various ways of knowing and to discover principles which would stand up under critical examination. It is for this

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[23]Hume, op. cit., II. iii. 3 (415).
[24] Jacobson, op. cit., pp. 57 ff., 72 ff.
[25]Nolan Pliny Jacobson, "Gotama Buddha et David Hume," Revue Philosophique de la France et de l' Etranqer (1964), pp. 145-163.
[26]Hume, op. cit., I.iv.7 (271). Cf. Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1960), p. 12.

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reason that Hume is everywhere viewed as the founder of the analytic movement in modern thought.

Hume is a philosopher pure and simple; the Buddha is a philosopher with few peers and also a religious leader of mankind. Hume considers honest skepticism a natural accompaniment of a good life, and to the very end viewed himself as an inquiet skeptic. Buddha's analysis of experience is undertaken to achieve a life centered in tranquility, like a flame in a windless place.

Even in their similar conclusions about the self, their differences stand out. The fact that the self as unitary and persisting is not found in the Buddha's analysis of experience comes as the solution of a problem and not as an enigma. Hume experiments with the possibility of explaining the self as a bundle of sensations held together with a sort of psychological gravity, after the manner of Newton's great discovery in the world of nature, while the Buddha finds man's freedom assured partly in the fact that this inner monitor which men everywhere accept as the governing principle of life turns out to be an illusion. Hume's rejection of the conventional view of the self follows upon his method of rejecting all concepts about the world which are not based in some sensory perception. For the Buddha, however, discovery of the illusory nature of the self represents a victory over the predicament of man.

The Buddha finds man's freedom also assured in the fact that the constituents of personality, like all other entities in nature, are a series of entities constantly emerging and perishing in the momentariness of anicca. His view of "dependent origination," therefore, is inseparable from his confidence in the extinction of suffering, since what has no independent existence loses its grip upon the individual who is oriented toward Nibbaana. Life is constituted by neither rigid necessity nor blind chance, but only by centers of relation. Any sequence of events and their possibilities can be removed. These views are bound together in the very heart of the dhamma. The tendency to cling to the relative as a substantial entity, and to the fragmentary, vanishes when their impermanence has been disclosed.[27]

Unlike Hume, the Buddha considered it possible to destroy the hold of unconscious motivations and the whole passional side of man's nature, "to transcend the experience of this conditioned world"; indeed, to achieve clarity of mind in what is called "supernormal perception."[28]

Hume, on the contrary, held the view that clarity of mind was at the sensory level and that ideas about the world (as distinct from mathematical concepts) grow increasingly confused the farther sense impressions are left behind. While he recognized with the Buddha that man "must strive against the current of nature"[29] if he is to loosen the shackles that bind him to an ignorant

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[27] Ramanan, op. cit., p. 48. Cf. Govinda, op. cit., pp. 56-59.
[28]Shwe Zan Aung, Compendium of Philosophy (London: Luzac & Co., Ltd., 1956), pp. 55 and 60.
[29]Hume, op. cit., I. iv. 7 (269).

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enactment of whatever uncriticized convention and personal bias dictate, Hume in no sense of the word Knows a reality beyond transitory sense data and their combinations. Most people have concluded that Hume defended the principle of continuity in human experience and inquiry, though the nature of this continuity remained in doubt. The Buddha, however, testified to a depth- dimension in experience that defies naming and conceptual thought, yet yields more certitude than either sense impression or theoretical construct. His analytic leads into this dimension by way of meditation.

What distinguishes Hume most sharply from the Buddha, particularly as he is interpreted in the Theravaada tradition, is the fact that their philosophies lead in opposite directions. Hume leads the individual, chastened and enlightened, back to the social interchange in which he believed the "ultimate propensities" of human nature to be rooted. The Buddha's thought leads to a loosening of the individual's social involvement, at least in the conventional sense, into a type of metalingual meditation which frees the individual from ego-centered and social drives, freeing from all coercions, so that the outline of a fundamentally more humane social order may arise spontaneously from the activity of the liberated man.

Buddha sees into the solitariness of man, into the inexpressible and unshareable dimensions where one must walk alone; Hume sees man as a social being from first to last. This is a side of Hume's philosophy which has been neglected and distorted by English philosophers beginning with Moore, who misconstrued the role of sympathy and saw only the epistemology in Hume. We shall have occasion to wonder how much he drank at the well of Mencius' concept of universal sympathy, and how deeply it may have affected both Hume and Adam Smith. The capacity of man to project himself into the experiences of his fellow man was one of the world's marvels to David Hume.

Both Hume and the Buddha underwent a conversion and "enlightment" in which they were redirected in their basic commitments. The Buddha's analysis led him to the basic problem of man in society, which is not why he has the habits he has but why he refuses to change them even when it is transparently clear to everyone else that continuance in his present style of life may wreck his entire civilization. For the answer to this problem we are directed to Nibbaana. Hume's conversion led him into a deep appreciation of bio-social interchange as the natural element of human living.

Both Hume and Buddha sought to lead men away from egotism and from rule by logic and doctrine. "What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?"[30] In a world which both Buddha and Hume view as transient, man seeks to hold on to the tangibles which sooner or later slip away

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[30] David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. H. D. Aiken (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1951), p. 22.

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like sand between his fingers. The usual reaction to this is to make everything center in and around the self. Both Hume and Buddha contend that the self is a false center around which to organize life. Buddha offers Nibbaana, which is not a social experience in any sense of the term. Hume offers as the alternative a kind of natural, sub-verbal communication, a sub-rational matrix in which the sources of mentality and meaning lie hidden. Just because of this, Hume is able to burrow beneath reason, loosening the shackles of concepts and language, not unlike the Buddhist analytic here, to arrive, not in Nibbaana, but in the sympathetic communication which is the fundamental bonding agent of human society and in which Hume found "the ultimate propensities of human nature." As I have attempted elsewhere to show, "spiritual, non-verbal communication of this sort is possible, and according to Hume constitutes the reality 'beyond which we cannot hope to find any principle more general' or more basic. It is the ultimate and irreducible fact. To stand upon this ground, in Hume's own words, is 'to stand With security.' "[31] This is what sympathy means in Hume, not a feeling or a "moral sense," but fellow-feeling; not an emotion or intuition, but the non-verbal matrix of interpersonal relations to which Hume fled whenever he became "afrighted" at the solvent power of his philosophy.

HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR THE SIMILARITY?

The differences between the teachings of the Buddha and the philosophy of David Hume will surprise no one, for they are what anyone would expect in the light of different cultural traditions and periods in history. But what about the similarities? How can the remarkable similarities be explained? In their rejection of traditional concepts of substance and causality, and in their view of the self, they are in closer agreement with one another than with people antecedent to them in their own tradition.

There are three possible explanations. First, the amazing convergence may be one of those rare parallel discoveries, like that of the zero in the subcontinent of India and in the Central American culture of the Mayas at approximately the same time, without any discoverable cultural influence (unless the Kon-Tiki expedition provides a clue). Second, there may be cultural diffusion at work from East to West, providing Hume and the entire eighteenth century in Western Europe with an intellectual environment unimaginably rich in Oriental ideas, whose influence upon Western philosophy has not yet been acknowledged by authors who write our histories of philosophy. Third, it could be a case of sheer historical miracle, so that there were no historical circumstances functioning in the elaborating of either of the philosophies, Hume's

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[31]Nolan Pliny Jacobson, "The Uses of Reason in Religion: A Note on David Hume," Journal of Religion, XXXIX (Apr., 1959), p. 104.

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or the Buddha's. We might even follow Hume's famous criterion of a miracle here, holding that falsification of the case in favor of the miracle would itself be more miraculous than the miracle itself.

As indicated in the title of this essay, it is the second alternative that seems the most plausible when all the known facts are taken into consideration. This becomes increasingly clear when we consider the relevant features of Oriental influence which come directly to bear upon Hume's favorite authors, his closest friends, and his most provocative themes. Since Hume mentions no Asian materials of any kind in his writing, while many of those closest to him do, we are forced to build our case upon evidence wholly circumstantial in nature. However, two considerations support us at this point: (1) Circumstantial evidence is sometimes even more compelling than direct evidence in a court of law. As a precedent here, Carter's history of early European typography may be mentioned, in which the case for Asian models for early European playing cards and religious drawings is said to rest "on such strong circumstantial evidence as to be accepted with a reasonable degree of certainty."[32] (2) A very special circumstance giving powerful support to the case for Oriental influence is provided in the fact that Hume and the intellectuals of his time felt themselves under no obligation whatsoever to document the source of their ideas, and the evidence for this is boundless. The philosophical fraternity today follows such strict practices in this respect that it is easy to forget how largely if not exclusively this is a twentieth-century custom.

One of the major sources of Oriental thought for Hume is Pierre Bayle, as we shall indicate in some detail below; yet Hume mentions him only once by name in the Treatise (I. iv. 5 [243 n.]), and only once in the Enquiries (I. 12 [155 n.]). Kemp Smith and Richard Popkin have given us lengthy discourses on the uses Hume made of Bayle's treatment of identity and substance. Bayle's essay on Spinoza was a major influence upon Hume in many respects such as these, and Hume follows Bayle almost slavishly in discussions of these subjects, simply repeating Bayle's arguments in many places as though they were his own. Yet no credit is given. "The fact that Hume does not mention Bayle by name, and gives no reference to the Zeno article," Smith says in one connection, "and follows him with almost verbal consistency, is but one illustration of how different from our own was the practice in this regard at the time when Hume was writing."[33] "All too often," Popkin says, "the presentation of the problems, the terminology, and the ideas at issue derive directly from Bayle."[34]

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[32]T. F. Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925).
[33] Kemp Smith, op. cit., pp. 43 n., 284 n., 514-515.
[34]Richard H. Popkin, "Bayle and Hume," Communicaciones Libres (Memorias del XIII Congreso Internacional de Filosofia, Mexico, 1963), IX, 318.

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In the light of these facts, Hume's failure to say anything about Oriental sources in both Bayle's and his own philosophy is worth nothing whatsoever, and we are left with circumstantial evidence developed from the massive Oriental influence in the intellectual climate of the time and from the remarkable similarity of some of these ideas with Hume's. We have already indicated the striking similarity between the central concepts of Hume and the Buddha. It remains for us to see how this Oriental influence is a major feature of the total intellectual climate of Western Europe at the time, and a philosophical influence Hume could not escape. In some ways, as we shall see, and especially in the areas of ethics, political thought, and philosophy of science, Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was more interested in Oriental ideas than in its own classical background.

ASIAN INFLUENCE IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EUROPE

By the time Hume arrived in France to begin writing the Treatise, Europe had been in the orbit of Oriental influence for two centuries and more, and in his own century was experiencing what has been called a "craze" for everything Chinese.

China by this time had become a repository for all the major ideas of the entire continent of Asia, and far too much coalescence of Hindu, Buddhist, and Chinese philosophy had occurred over the centuries to permit any dissociation for our purposes here between the influence of Chinese thought, on the one hand, and the influence of Buddhist and other Indian ideas, on the other.

Buddhism had made its way into China during the first century A.D. The Maadhyamika was introduced to the Chinese by Kumaarajiiva shortly after 400 A.D. It is also unnecessary for our purposes to decide the precise nature of the influence these Buddhist inroads each had had in China.[35] From the first to the fifth centuries a general homogenizing of Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist concepts had occurred. Between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries this coalescence had been carried much further, so that among Chinese intellectual historians today this condition is taken for granted. This is not to deny that certain types or schools of Buddhism confined themselves rather successfully to Indian traditions and, while in China, managed to keep the original Indian tradition intact. Fung Yu-lan calls this "Buddhism in China" to distinguish it from the "Chinese Buddhism" which made contact with Chinese thought and had far-reaching influence on Chinese philosophy, literature, and art. Buddhist

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[35]Richard H. Robinson, Early Maadhyamika in India and China (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967),chaps. 3-7. This is a study of the interpretation of the Maadhyamika by Kumaarajiiva and three of his Chinese contemporaries, Hui-yan, Seng-jui, and Seng-chao.