Why Buddhas cant remember their previous lives

·期刊原文
Why Buddhas can't remember their previous lives

By Paul J. Griffiths
Philosophy East and West
Volume 39, no. 4
1989 October
P.449-451
(C) by University of Hawaii Press

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P.449

Most papers published by Western scholars of Indian
philosophy have, until now, been largely exegetical
in nature. This is for very good reasons. An
enormous amount of material has needed (and still
needs) to be made available to the scholarly
community by way of translation and commentary. But
perhaps there is also room, and need, for the
occasional feuilleton like this, an avowedly
polemical piece attempting to follow the
philosophical implications of a particular argument
or set of definitions to a conclusion that its
authors might not have wished to accept. There is,
after all, a long and honorable tradition of the
application of this method in Indian (especially
Buddhist) polemical literature: what else is the
prasa^nga? The positive results of such an approach
to Indian philosophy might be that the positions
argued for in the texts are taken with greater
philosophical seriousness than the exegetical
approach allows, and that some of their entailments
might be more clearly seen than is at present the
case. Such, in a particular small instance, are the
goals of the present piece. The argument given here
is presented not with the assurance that it is
either valid or sound (though naturally I think it
to be both), but rather with the hope that it might
lead to further discussion.

The standard Buddhist account of memory employs
two technical terms--sm.rti and pratyabhij~naana. In
this context, for reasons that will become apparent,
I shall translate the former as 're-presentation'
(in the sense of presenting again what has been
presented before), and the latter as 'recognition'.
The former will denote the reappearance in a given
mental continuum (cittasa.mtaana) of the complete
experiential content of a preceding moment or
moments of experience. Examples: I hear again music
I heard twenty years ago; I see again the buttons on
a coat my mother used to wear when I was a child; I
touch again my first lover's lips. In all cases the
re-presentation (sm.rti) is of the complete
experiential content of the original experience.
Recognition (pratyabhij~naana) denotes a conscious
acknowledgment on the part of the subject that an
experience she has just had was in fact an instance
of representation. So, for example, I acknowledge to
myself that the music I just heard with my mind's
ear was a re-presentation of the version of
Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that I heard in the
Roval Albert Hall when I was fifteen. And so forth.

Buddhist texts typically say that there are
three severally necessary and jointly sufficient
conditions that a given mental event must fulfill if
it is to be classified as an instance of
re-presentation, a smara.nacitta. First, it must
have as its object something previously experienced
(puurvaanubhuutaartha) and must

P.450

re-present that object in the sense given. Second,
it must be connected causally with that previously
experienced object. And third, the mental event in
which the original object was experienced and that
in which it is re-presented must be part of the same
mental continuum (ekasa.mtaanika).(1)

Recognition then follows from re-presentation by
way of a conceptualized (and perhaps even vocalized)
judgment that (iti) the experience in question was
an instance of sm.rti.(2) Here we approach close to
the heart of the argument: what kind of judgment is
at issue here? Typically, it is said to be a
judgment of the form I saw this. Buddhist metaphysics
requires that when and if Buddhas make judgments of
this kind, they do so only to speak with the vulgar.
They do not really mean it, or at least they do not
mean it in the sense in which a p.rthagjana would
mean it, for they know that the personal pronoun has
no referent, or, more precisely, that it refers only
to the aggregates (skandha). So Buddhas cannot have
recognition in the exact sense in which that term is
usually interpreted in the texts. They may, of
course, be able to make other sorts of
judgments--for example, the mental event thatjust
occurred was a re-presentation in the sense that it
occurred in the same continuum as did that event of
which it was a re-presentation--and so be able to
preserve their ability to have (a somewhat modified
kind of) recognition.

But there are deeper problems. A re-presentation
is supposed to re-present the full content of a
previous moment of experience and a recognition to
judge that this has indeed occurred. If we add the
straightforward (and pan-Buddhist) premise that
every instance of experience belonging to all
non-Buddhas is tainted with passions of various
sorts, especially egocentricity (asmimaana) and its
concomitants (raaga, dve.sa, moha) , then the
following argument is easy to construct:

(1) An instance of re-presentation (smara.nacitta)
represents to its subject the full experienced
content of a past moment of experience.

(2) An instance of recognition
(pratyabhij~naanacitta) is a judgment that an
immediately preceding mental event was a
re-presentation.

(3) All moments of experience belonging to
non-Buddhas have some passions as constituents.

(4) All moments of experience belonging to all
Buddhas are entirely free from passions.

(5) All Buddhas make only true judgments.

(6) No Buddha can experience an instance of
re-presentation that re-presents a moment of
experience belonging to a non-Buddha [from (1),
(3), and (4)].

(7) No Buddha can recognize that he has had
re-presented to him a moment of experience
belonging to a non-Buddha [from (2), (5), and
(6)].

To restate: Buddhas can neither experience a
re-presentation of any moment of experience in any
past life (when they were not Buddhas), nor can they
judge that they have so experienced. So:
buddhaanaa.m puurvanivaasaanusm.rti.h puurvanivaa-
sapratyabhij~naana.m ca na yujyete. Buddhas cannot
remember their previous lives. Quod erut demonstrandum,
or, if you prefer, siddham etat.

P.451

This argument can be challenged, I think. from
two perspectives. First, exegetically, it could be
claimed that I have misrepresented what Buddhists
have typically meant in such contexts as these by
sm.rti and pratyabhij~naana, and that premises (1)
and (2) are therefore false. Second,
philosophically, it could be claimed that the
argument as it stands is invalid, Either challenge,
fully explored and discussed, could prove fruitful
and productive of new knowledge.

Finally, a brief comment on what Buddhas can
have if they cannot have memory of their previous
lives. They can have propositional knowledge of the
truth of large (perhaps infinitely large) sets of
propositions of the form experiential event E1 is
causally related to experiential event E in such a
way that it is proper to say that E1 is a
re-presentation of E. But knowledge of propositions
is, phenomenologically, very far from sm.rti (and
memory).

NOTES

1. This is the burden of the account given by
Vasubandhu in the ninth chapter of the
Abhidharmako`sabhaa.sya: yadi tarhi sarvathaapi
naasty aatmaa katha.m k.sa.nike.su citte.su
ciraanubhuutasyaarthasya smara.na.m bhavati
pratyabhij~naana.m vaa/sm.rtivi.sayasa.mj~naanvayaac
cittavi`se.saat/kiidr`saac cittavi`se.saat yato
'nantara.m sm.rtir bhavati/ tadaabhogasad.r-
`sasambandhisa.mj~naadim ato `nupahataprabhaavaad
aa`srayavi`se.sa`sokavyaak.sepaadibhi.h/ taad.r`so
'pi hy atadanvaya`s cittavi`se.so na samarthas taa.m
sm.rti.m bhaavayitu.m tadanvayo 'pi caanyaad.r`so na
samarthas taa.m sm.rti.m bhaavayitum/ ubhayathaa tu
samartha ity eva.m sm.rtir bhavati anyasya
saamarthyaadar`sanaat (Abhidharmako`sa and Bhaa.sya
of AAcaarya Vasubandhu with Sphuutaarthaa Commentary
of AAcaarya Ya`somitra, ed. Dwaarikaadaas `Saastrii
(Varanasi: Bauddha Bharati, 1981), pp. 1215-1216).

2. Ya`somitra, in his commentary
(Abhidharmako`savyaakhyaa) on the rather unhelpful
smara.naad eva ca pratyabhij~naanam from the
Abhidharmako`sabhaa.sya, says: tad eveda.m yan mayaa
d.r.s.tam iti smara.naat (ed. cit., p. 1217).