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THE MEANING OF LIFE
IN
:a HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM
by
FLOYD H. ROSS
Prof mot of World Religions
St/tool of Religion, University of Southern California
ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD
Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane
' London
First published in 1952
by Routledge & ICegan Paul Ltd.
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TO FJ.R. AND J.F.R.
PREFACE
‘The West 1ms a good deal to learn from the East. . . . Almost
every religious revival comes from the fusion of two traditions,
as the Christian Church itself was, in Clement’s metaphor, the
confluence of two riven, the Hellenistic and the Jewish.’ — W. R.
Inoe.
What is the meaning of life?
How much sense of meaning does the average,
thoughtful Western person have today as he looks
out upon his own community and then upon the world?
How can modern man discover a meaningful sense of
direction before it is too late?
These arc some of the questions which Occidental man
faces. What some arc hailing as the dawn of a new day for
the Orient can become the twilight of an old day for the
Occident. Western man must open liis eyes in order to ex-
perience a spiritual renaissance or lie will play an increas-
ingly maladroit role in the world community that is strug-
gling to be born.
In a previous volume, Addressed to Christians: Isolationism
vs. World Community, the writer discussed critically the Chris-
tian concept of ‘special choscnncss*. This conviction of being
the ‘chosen people’ has led many Christians to engage in
practices and to inculcate attitudes which have emphasized
exclusiveness. The tragic exclusion from the Christian fellow-
ship of many of the keenest minds and spirits of Christendom
is a story that some would prefer to pass over in silence.
There is another aspect to the ‘rightness and tightness* of
Christian orthodoxy in practice which has been equally
costly to Christendom. No sustained attempts have been made by
vii
PREFACE
Christian leaders to arrive at sympathetic understanding of the great
religious traditions of the Orient. Christendom by and large has
locked itself up in its own household and has sought to live
by the Graeco-Roman tradition alone. The Very Reverend
W. R. Inge has well said: ‘It is a reproach to us that with
our unique opportunities of entering into sympathetic rela-
tions with Indian thought, wc have made few attempts to
do so. ... I am not suggesting that wc should become
Buddhists or Hindus, but I believe that wc have almost as
much to learn from them as they from us.’ 1
The Christian churches have sent out missionaries to many
distant lands and peoples. The ‘Far East’ lias undoubtedly
gained in many ways through this contact, but not always
in the ways suspected by the missionary groups. In many
cases the Eastern peoples contacted were quickened to look
deeper into their own heritages. Only a few actually changed
their basic religious loyalties. But the patience of the Orient
in receiving the emissaries from Christendom has not helped
the peoples of the West to come to a realization of their own
smugness, parochialism and spiritual shallowness.
Of recent years the East has become more articulate as
it has watched the symptoms of a complete breakdown in
the European civilization, accented by a protracted series of
wars. Thoughtful men like Ananda K. Coomaraswamy have
stepped forward to protest the ‘proselytizing fury’ of the
Occident.2 As the chairman of Lebanon’s delegation to the
United Nations General Assembly has said: ‘Asia is on the
threshold of a great dawn, one characterized at once by an
1 W. R. Inge, Mysticism in Religion (Senior Series, Hutchinson’s
University Library, London, n.d.), p. 0.
2 Cf. his Am I My Brother's Keeper? (John Day, N.Y., 1947). Other
men who have sought to mediate between the East and the West at the
more profound level arc Rene Guenon, Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley,
Alan Watts, Marco Pallis, D. T. Suzuki.
viii
PREFACE
awakening and a revolt: the awakening is to Asia's own
actualities and possibilities, the revolt is against the West,
at whose hands Asia has known such humiliation, division
and exploitation.’1
Christians must recognize the tremendous surge of the
life of the spirit in the Orient, even when that surge is care-
less of traditional Western forms or phrases. Two tasks need
to be undertaken simultaneously — the appreciative study of
the Oriental traditions at their best, and a much more pro-
found study of the ignored depths of Christianity at its best.
If Hod be God of all mankind, even groups using widely
differing idioms may discover they are grappling with the
same problems of ultimate meanings or values. Perhaps one
reason why the persons called ‘Quakers’ arc often much more
aware of the inwardness of the spiritual life is that they have
less to defend in the way of outward Christian forms. The
present writer must confess that he has learned more from
contacts with the Society of Friends than from any other
single group.
The following chapters attempt to present some of the
more significant insights of Hinduism and Buddhism to
Western readers. Hence this is no tourist view. The bizarre
and the exotic may make good material for die picture
magazines; they do not reveal much of the inner workings
of the spirit of man. The fundamental question tackled by
Hinduism and Buddhism is, Who Am I ? This is a question
wliich is receiving increased attention in psychological and
religious circles in the West. Along this route modern man
may come to a rediscovery of himself.
A word of appreciation to two great teachers remains to
be added. Dr. J. Frank Reed of Wolverton Village, Ontario,
1 Charles Malik, 1 America and the World Crisis,’ New Outlook,
Jan. 1951, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 14.
IX
PREFACE
opened many doors to an understanding of the convictions
held by men standing outside the Occidental-Christian Orbit.
As a teacher of comparative religion in a Christian seminary,
he combined scholarship, fair-mindedness and a concern for
truth all too scarce in some religious circles. If Christians
arc to become a constructive force along with non-Christians
making for what Professor Hocking has called world loyalty,
it will be in part because men of the spirit and calibre of
Reed refused to equate the religious quest with sectarian
apologetic. Dr. Robert J. Taylor, formerly Dean of the School
of Religion in the University of Southern California, stands
in this same tradition.
To my wife, Frances Jenny Ross, goes a large share of the
credit for making the present chapters a reality. She went
through all of the preparatory drafts of the manuscript and
assisted in clarifying many points. She played a secondary
role of importance in protecting the study from too frequent
invasion by David and Bruce. All those who combine the
householder stage with the student phase of life can appre-
ciate what is involved in this.
G. Ray Jordan, Jr., graduate student in comparative
religion, offered extensive assistance both in bibliography and
in criticism. To Dr. Tcresina Rowell Havens, Dean Earl
Cranston of the School of Religion, Alan Watts and Swami
Prabhavananda, thanks are due for the valuable suggestions
which came from their thoughtful scrutiny of the chapters.
School of Religion ]
University of Southern California
P. H. ROSS.
X
CONTENTS
PREFACE pagevii
CHAP.
I. THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAOE I
II. ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE 12
III. THE NATURE OF THE SELF 32
IV. THE ART OF YOOA 48
V. TEACHINGS OF TIIE BIIAGAVAD GITA 59
VI. TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM 78
VII. ON FINDING THE WAY 98
VIII. OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OK THE BUDIJHA 121
IX. TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP 1 45
OLOSSARY OF TERMS 1 58
BIBLIOGRAPHY iGl
INDEX 165
/
XI
CHAPTER ONE
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
‘He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will
proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity,
and end in loving himself better than all.’ — S. T. Coleridge.
WANTED : EXPLORATORY RELIGION
Religion lias had its name forged to so many bad
checks that its premises and promises no longer carry
weight with great numbers of people. The ability of
the Victorian to stand inside the cloistered walls of the tra-
ditional forms of Christianity is not present in many of his
grandchildren. The feeling of being at home in the tradition
is denied them. Most people would probably be unable to
explain just why they feel the way they do. Some try the
cults, others look to Rome, still others look to Moscow. Many
admit their lack of faith in all human institutions and try to
accept their situation more or less philosophically.
Modern man stands on the threshold; the shape of tilings
to come is unclear. When old faiths have died, new faiths
have always appeared. Yet it is impossible ahead of time to
predict in what form the new convictions will be articulated.
Man’s total organism is so built, however, that it never
accepts a state of deprivation or disequilibrium any longer
than it has to. It leans toward the future just as a tree natur-
ally reaches up toward the sun. Unlike the tree, man tries to
formulate some comprehensive theory that will help him
i
A
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
interpret to himself what is happening. The present is all
he knows or has. But to get beyond a ‘little patch of im-
mediacies’, man must find some general principles in whose
terms he may interpret his present.
Until recently Christianity fulfilled the role of supplying
the general frame of reference for man’s present tasks. Of
recent decades it has increasingly failed in that function for
European man and his American descendants. In part that
failure is traceable to the tendency of the Christian churches
to look too exclusively to the past. What happened ‘once for
all’ could hardly happen again. Personal loyalty to interpreta-
tions of the founder propounded by men who lived long ago
militated against loyalty to the universal insights which the
founder sought to reveal.
Another reason for the decline of the influence of Chris-
tianity in Europe is that the church prided itself on its
‘splendid isolation’ from the great religious currents of the
Orient. It insisted on drawing water only from its own well,
refusing to recognize that water under other labels might be
equally refreshing to the thirsty man. Whitehead has point-
edly stated in his Religion in the Making , ‘The decay of Christi-
anity and Buddhism, as determinative influences in modern
thought, is partly due to the fact that each religion has un-
duly sheltered itself from the other. The self-sufficient ped-
antry of learning and the confidence of ignorant zealots have
combined to shut up each religion in its own forms of
thought. Instead of looking to each other for deeper mean-
ings, they have remained self-satisfied and unfertilized.’ 1
What is needed is a change of attitude all down the line,
1 A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Macmillan, N.Y., 1926),
p. 146.
2
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
not just among a few Buddhists and a handful of Christian
scholars. If medieval Christianity could find it possible to
assimilate most of Aristotle to itself, modern Christianity — if
it has any essential vitality — can surely assimilate Gautama
Buddha and other non-Christian sages. The peoples of both
China and India have already shown a greater receptiveness
to the suggestive insights of the West than Christendom has
to the teachings of the East. If Christianity is to become a
genuine vehicle for helping persons realize their vocations,
it must be as ready to assimilate values from all sources as
from its Palestinian and Greek past. If truth be truth, it is
not tied exclusively to the soil of Judea and Attica.
Albcrtus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas applied themselves
to the study of Greek philosophy in the thirteenth century
when they noticed how many of the best young minds of
Europe were being won over to the Moslem educational
centres where Aristotle was an object of study. Albcrtus and
Thomas desired to hold these students for Christendom. They
went 'modernist’ with a vengeance and consequently brought
new life into the Christian body. They arc not to be blamed
for the fact that what for them was a tremendously explor-
atory impulse with indefinite possibilities for expansion, was
subsequently frozen by churchly decree into a yardstick for
doctrine.
At least since the time of Paul there has been a tendency
in the Christian tradition to define the true Christian in
terms of what he believed rather than in terms of how he ex-
plored. In an epistle to the Thcssalonians, Paul wrote of the
retribution which would be forthcoming in the last days
(which he himself believed to be near) when Jesus would
appear from heaven and ‘in flaming fire take vengeance on
3
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
them that know not God and that obey not the gospel of our
Lord Jesus Christ, who shall be punished with everlasting
destruction.’ 1 Such language as this, emphasizing the fear
of God more than the love of God, always lay near at hand
for those Christians who regarded themselves as definers of
orthodoxy. Yet the genius of Christianity at its best has not
been in defining the faith or defending the faith but in living
the faith by faith. That is the challenge which confronts it
today when Christendom is suffering loss of face and of
followers on a much wider scale than in the time of Thomas
Aquinas.
Some from within the Christian fold may object that such
a change is much too radical: Christianity can never make
it and survive! That is one possible contingency. Another
one — equally probable — is that if Christianity docs not make
the change, it will not survive. Even to talk about the sur-
vival of a religion, as though that were the end-all of living,
is to cherish the means more than the end. It is to put religion
ahead of truth or living persons; it is to claim that a vehicle
is more important than the destination to which the vehicle
is supposed to be conveying man. Just in this fashion religion
always tends to become an idol. It is an ecclesiastically
approved way of ‘taking the name of the Lord in vain’.
Change is the basic fact in all of life. It was true for thou-
sands of years before the coming of Buddha or Christ. There
is no evidence to indicate that it is any less true now. Man
has ever had to adapt himself as resourcefully as possible to
the conditions about him. Surrounded by water, he became
a fisher living primarily on the food of the sea. Surrounded
by luxuriant tropical growth, he became a fruit gatherer.
x 2 Thcssalonians i. 8-9.
4
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
Surrounded by ice, he built houses of ice blocks and lived
off the polar fauna.
Throughout all the changes, man has struggled not only
with hostile fellowmcn but with himself. He has tried to
understand himself as a part of a mysterious and frequently
terrifying world. Modern man no longer believes in the
objective existence of the demoniac powers and forces that
troubled earlier men. Yet the demoniac powers, the divisive
tendencies, have taken up their residence as neurotic com-
pulsions within the organism. Man must come to terms with
these various powers or needs, objectifying them and learn-
ing how to accept them as part of the total human picture.
The old religious symbols are no longer adequate. Their very
definiteness for earlier generations makes them most in-
adequate for today. Modern man’s problem must be re-
defined in the light of the dynamics of the inner life, not in
terms of beings residing ‘out there’. Spalding has commented
that in the religion of the Semites and the Latins everything
is ‘as vivid, as sharply defined, as the objects around them,
clear-cut in the light of the sub-tropical sun: God and Devil,
Heaven and Hell, angels and demons, saints and damned’.1
That very definiteness must now be sacrificed if man is to
take substantial strides in gaining a sense of orientation.
This is not particularly different from what has, to some
degree, always been the case. All of the eminent religious
teachers have said in one way or another that while many
may consider themselves called, few are actually chosen. Of
the many who have followed the pathway of traditional re-
ligious practices, only a few have found true centredness.
1 H. N. Spalding, Civilization in East and West (Oxford, London, 1939),
P- *47-
5
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
The risks have always been there; the razor’s edge has not
been easy to find.
RELIGIONS — A MIXED GOOD
All religions are a mixed good. They reflect the ambigu-
ities of the human situation in whatever culture they arc
found. Sometimes religions appear to have been the main
instrument of cultural development; at other times they have
been obstacles to man’s larger fulfilment. Religion which
expresses life creatively never binds man to itself. Religion
which compensates for life binds man to itself by demanding
unswerving orthodoxy, strict obedience, rigid conformity.
Man then becomes compulsively religious.
In the history of religion, men can be found worshipping
their tribal gods in wholehearted ways. They can be seen
cowering before their gods in abject fear and insecurity. They
can be seen praying to their own wants but with the names
of deities upon their lips: ‘Give us victory in battle. . . . Give
us sons Give us raiment.’ They can be seen accepting the
universe around them with dignity and joy. Some men walk
upright, others prostrate themselves before an idol made of
wood or words. Whether the gods be thought of as one or
many, the fundamental attitudes remain essentially the same.
The history of religion is thus not necessarily a record of
progress. Inner progress in the mind of the honest explorer is
difficult to measure. Outer progress is debatable. God con-
cepts and systems of thought proliferate like weeds. Some-
times it is hard to know which is a weed and which a flower.
In ever}' religious tradition there is someone cast in the role
of the priest, seeking to persuade his flock that the tribal
religion offers the answer to every problem. The priest who
6
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
is ‘set apart’ is always an interested party; his words must be
weighed. At times more wisdom is found on the lips of the
anti-clerical than on the altar of the priest. The Pharisee or
the Puritan may be an honourable man, but his critics must
also be heard.
Histories of the living religions have been written both by
friends of specific traditions and by religion’s cultured de-
spisers. In such cases the point which was to be proved fre-
quently illuminated only a small portion of the human scene.
When history is written only for the orthodox, items which
will not serve as props to a specific faith are usually screened
out. The end result is to ‘confirm’ those already in the faith
and to strengthen their feelings of superiority. If the history
is written only for the cultured despisers, the same process is
involved negatively — any constructive features of religion
will be toned down or omitted.
It should be possible to study the religions of the world
without trying to prove either the superiority of religion or
of irrcligion. If the human, psychological foundations for
both religion and irreligion arc closely interrelated, the im-
portant task is to inquire into the dynamics of belief (or of
unbelief, if that is the object of immediate interest). Since
large-scale unbelief is a relatively recent phenomenon, it
would seem pertinent to inquire into the roots of religious
beliefs first. The honest inquirer will take a position, not
treating it like a medieval castle behind whose walls he
retreats, but as a point of departure for further inquiry.
Albert Schweitzer has expressed this forcibly: ‘If thought is
to set out on its journey unhampered, it must be prepared for
anything, even for arrival at intellectual agnosticism. Rut
even if our will-to-action is destined to wrestle endlessly and
7
TIIE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
unavailingly with an agnostic view of the universe and of life,
still this painful disenchantment is better for it than per-
sistent refusal to think out its position at all. For this dis-
enchantment does, at any rate, mean that we arc clear as to
what we arc doing.’ 1 The capacity to set out confidently in
an exploratory way is one significant measure of the quality
of one’s faith.
The story of man’s religious pilgrimage need not be written
either for conformcrs or non-eon formers. It should be directed
to those who have not forgotten the joy of youth in searching,
in finding, and in setting forth to search again. Only by
accident docs the liistory of religion serve to bolster the morale
of any specific theological fraternity or anti-clcrical cult. The
proper study of mankind is man and his capacities for growth
and the realization of larger values. Both the religions and the
protests against them arc an important part of man’s coming
of age. If the gods die, it is when they have no real basis in
enlarging experience. If God be real, he needs no defence.
Western man has sought to live unto himself for too many
centuries. He has fed on his own past almost exclusively,
learning little from the Far East. His diet has proved some-
what deficient. The decay of Western civilization — most
evident in Europe in recent decades — is paralleled by the
decay of Christianity as a vital force. The wisdom of the East
may act as a catalytic agent in the West, where people arc
still too inclined to regard Europe or the Mediterranean
world as the sole Ml. Sinai of the human family.
If Western man is to reassess his place in history, he must
venture beyond his own bailiwick. No glassy-eyed stare to-
1 AJbert Schweitzer, Decay and Restoration of Civilization (Hlaek, I .ondon,
'947), P- 104.
8
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
ward the Orient will be of any value. One of the eminent
schools of depth psychology in the West consciously draws
upon the insights of the East.1 This is an encouraging sign.
The peoples of the Orient inquired into the conditions of
human happiness centuries before the West did. Staining
from within, they sought to understand the art of living.
European man has often neglected this art because of his
zeal for technology and manipulation of the physical en-
vironment. Now that he feels ‘hag-ridden by the future’, with
its threat of continuing wars, Western man may be ready to
attempt a more proper balance between the call of the outer
world and the needs of the inner man.
POSTSCRIPT ON ‘RELIGION’ AND ‘METAPHYSIC’
This is no place for adding to the already lengthy list of
definitions of religion. However, the reader needs to be aware
of the fact that such scholars on the Orient as Coomara-
swamy and Guenon differentiate between Western religion
and Oriental metaphysic. Religion has a great deal of what
they term the sentimental factor. God is described in terms
of human feelings and senses or desires and thus is portrayed
in positive terms. Religion also is interested in historical
factors such as 'the fulness of time’, or the authenticity of
certain alleged books and the historicity of eminent persons.
Metaphysic, on the other hand, is not primarily interested
in establishing historical facts but in arriving at universal
truths which have no necessary connection with the time-
track. The factor of sentiment is nil. Where religion seeks to
be positive and reassuring, metaphysic is completely dis-
* Cf. Carl G. Jung’s Foreword to D. T. Suzuki's An Introduction to %tn
Buddhism (Philosophical Library, N.Y., 1949), p. 26.
9
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
interested in the search for truth. To take an analogy from
the space-time world, the ‘law of gravity’ is not designed to
give comfort to anybody. It represents an effort to articulate
in disinterested fashion the operation of a universal principle.
Alan Watts has put the distinction quite concisely: ‘Both
Vedanta and Buddhism tend to describe the ultimate
Reality in terms of what it is not , and Christianity in terms
of what it is like' 1 2 Religion is thus quite pictorial and ‘.space-
bound’ in its attempts to describe God and immortality. It
tends to ‘locate’ God as well as Heaven, and almost inevitably
describes immortal life in terms of unending duration.
Mctaphysic is much more closely related to the purest
form of scientific inquiry where what is sought is the most
comprehensive meaning of all. It is also related to the arts
since they ‘re-present’ the deepest intuitions of life. In mcta-
physic what is called for is the extension of man’s area of
consciousness, not the merely technological extension of his
hands and brain. One docs not explain music to a deaf mute,
nor ask him to seek a cure through constructing finer musical
instruments. Rather one seeks to cure his deafness.
W. E. Hocking has said that religion contains the release
from all localism and from all historical accidents.3 However,
religion released from localism is no longer religion in the
ordinary meaning of the term. It is high religion, or what
1 Alan W. WutU, Thi Supreme Identity (Pantheon, N.Y., 1950), p. 59.
Watts points out that this distinction was niude by one of the early
Christian mystics, Dionysius the Arcopagite (so-called). Cf. C. E. Holt’s
translation of Dionysius on the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology (Mac-
millan, N.Y., 1940), p. 200. Cf. Rene Guenon, Introduction to the Study
of the Hindu Doctrines (Luzae, London, 1945), eh. 4, esp. pp. 103-6.
2 W. E. Hocking, Living Religions and a World Faith (Maemillan, N.Y.,
*94o), p. 35-
THE PERENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
Guenon means by the word metaphysic; for it has died to
itself in pointing on to a transcendent meaning or reality
that forever eludes definition or limitation.
Every person is a metaphysician who has not lost his
capacity for native wonder or sustained and intelligent search.
India developed a significant civilization long before Euro-
pean tribes emerged from semi-barbarism. Many of the most
penetrating questions which human beings have ever faced
were propounded there. To India we now turn our attention.
CHAPTER TWO
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
‘They call him many who is really One.’
‘Even as he seems, so lie becomes.* — Rig Veda.
India has often been described as a land of mystery. If this
is so, it is partly because Occidentals have not sought
sympathetically to enter into her life and thought. Not
many years before the end of his life, Coomaraswamy wrote
that ‘it would be hardly an exaggeration to say that a faith-
ful account of Hinduism might well be given in the form of
a categorical denial of most of the statements that have been
made about it, alike by European scholars and by Indians
trained in our modern sceptical and evolutionary modes of
thought.* 1
What Coomaraswamy is objecting to is the tendency on
the part of so many European scholars to over-emphasize the
purely relative and historical aspects of comparative religion,
and to assume that the latest is necessarily the most profound
expression of a basic truth or intuition. The usual Western
interpretation claims that monotheism arose late in the rcli-
1 A. K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (Philosophical Library,
N.Y., 1943), p. 8. Cf. Rene Guenon, East and West (Luzac, London,
*94*); Guenon, In trod, to the Study f the Hindu Doctrines; Man and His
Becoming According to the Vedanta (Luzac, London, 1945); A. K. Coomara-
swamy, A New Approach to the Study of the Vedas ; Coomaraswamy, Buddha
and the Gospel of Buddhism (Harrap, London, 1928); Coomaraswamy, Am
J My Brother's Keeper? (John Duy, N.Y., 1947); Alan W. Watts, The
Supreme Identity ; Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas (Knopf, N.Y., 1949).
12
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
gion of ancient India, growing out of an earlier polytheism.
The Eastern scholar can reply that there is more so-called
‘polytheism’ in the late Ve die hymns than in the early period,
a fact which hardly fits into the Western theory of progress or
‘evolution*.
Gradually the distorted picture of Indian philosophy and
metaphysic is being corrected. The West is coming to realize
that there were great ideas and civilizations before ‘the
golden age of Greece*. Many are ready to admit that Guenon
may not be far from the truth when he says that ‘the position
of the West in relation to the East is that of a branch growing
out of the trunk’.1
That India had what is commonly termed a ‘high’ civiliza-
tion three thousand years ago has long been known to the
West. India’s influence upon the West through the mediation
of the Greeks and the Arabs has been the subject of many
studies. More recently the archaeological discoveries at
Harappa and Mohcnjo-daro, in the north and north-west
of India, have made it clear that there was a highly developed
civilization in the Indus valley between 3000 and 2500 B.O.*
These cities were flourishing centres of trade a thousand
years before the Aryan-speaking people entered India. The
people who built them were in no sense semi-barbarous. In
the complete absence of any lengthy documents, it is impos-
sible to know what their literary productions were. Enough
has been learned, however, from the brief inscriptions on seals
and amulets to indicate that they exerted real influence on
the religious life of India centuries later.
* Guenon, Introd. to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, p. 31.
9 Cf. Ernest Muckay, The Indus Civilization (Dickson & Thompson,
Loudon, 1935), ch. 3.
«3
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
THE MORE EXTERNAL VIEW OF THE RIO VEDIC RELIGION
There is a more casual view of the religion of the Rig
Vcdic period which is commonly held in the West. It can be
stated very briefly for our purposes, largely to show the con-
trast between it and the much more provocative and pro-
found interpretation of the Eastern scholars.
The Rig Veda is a collection of 1028 hymns and is regarded
by Western scholars as the oldest and most important of the
sources for an understanding of Indian religion. It is usually
dated not earlier than 1300 b.c. From these hymns the
scholars have reconstructed a picture of the people who pro-
duced them. They were apparently healthy-minded activists
who invaded India from the north-west somewhere between
2500 and 1500 b.c. They migrated from an invigorating
climate down through the mountain passes into the sub-
continent of India. For them, as for many other peoples,
India became the end of the road. In successive waves the
tribes moved forward with domestic animals, agricultural
implements and war equipment. They brought with them
their ancient tribal myths and legends.1
The numerous hymns of the Rig Veda reveal that the in-
vaders were hard fighters and heavy drinkers. They sought
the physical goods of life with few inhibitions and uncritically
accepted them as a kind of heaven-bestowed bounty. There
was no marked tendency to inquire into those inner con-
ditions that might permit the highest development of man’s
capacities. Sons, wealth, victory in battle, long life — these
1 A. B. Keith, 7 he Religion and Philosophy qf the Veda and Upanishads
(Harvard Oriental Series, vol*. 31, 32, Cambridge, 1925), vol. 31, p. 1.
Keith can be tuken as fairly representative of Western scholarship. He
expresses his indebtedness to a dozen outstanding Western scholars.
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
were the goods they sought. In addition they desired ample
soma, a potent beverage made from a plant bearing that
name.
The cosmic powers they believed in were a reflection of
themselves in that they were mostly conceived in the form
of man. Most of them also had some direct connection with
natural phenomena— the earth, the atmosphere or the
heavenly bodies. Their gods functioned primarily to supply
man with the things he wanted. There were different levels
of divine powers. The ancestral spirits were on the lowest
level. On proper occasions they had to be honoured and fed.
Above them were the gods of nature with their depa rt mental
duties. In the background lurked the relatively impersonal
creator-gods like Prajapati (Lord of Creatures) and Brahmana-
spati (Lord of Prayer).
The personalized nature-gods — Varuna, India , Agni and
Soma — were the powers besought by the worshippers seeking
specific goods. In the earliest period of the Rig Veda, Varuna
seems to have been the pre-eminent god. lie was regarded
as the all-seeing eye and was symbolized by the sun with its
countless rays. It was Varuna who saw into the hearts of men
when they were devising some evil deed. If two men sat
together in secret, Varuna was always present as a third.
Varuna was regarded as the guardian of the Rita— the law
of nature, of the ceremonial sacrifice and the moral law as
well. The ethical overtones in the worship of Varuna were
pronounced.
In the period of the conquest of India the worship of
Varuna suffered. Indra, who was god of battles, bearer of
the thunderbolt, and champion soma drinker, gained the
ascendency. He was the favourite god of the warriors. Indra
x5
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIKE
is the subject of over 250 hymns in the Rig Veda. There are
several vivid descriptions of his appearance. He has arms,
hands and a head after the fashion of ordinary men, and a
belly as large as a lake. On one occasion he drinks thirty
lakes full of soma. He usually feeds on 100 to 300 buffaloes.
His greatest single deed is the slaying of a serpent lying on
the mountains holding back the waters of the streams.
Agni, god of the sacred fire, was also very prominent in the
religion of these invaders. In the eyes of the priesthood Agni
was second only to Indra. Whereas Indra was thought of as
delivering victory in battle, Agni was regarded as bearer of
prosperity and happiness to the home. Closely associated
with Agni was Soma, god of the potent oblation. An elaborate
mythology grew up around Soma. lie is pictured as the bull
who fertilizes the waters, his cows. He is the giver of potency
to men. His beverage is the elixir of immortality. When the
soma liquid was poured out on the altar in the ritual, it was
Agni, the chaplain of the gods, who took the oblation aloft.
In later years both Agni and Soma were to become the prin-
cipal objects of priestly interest.
Each household seems to have had its own priest in the
earlier Rig Vedic period. In many cases the father must have
filled this role. In the household of a tribal chieftain or king,
a chaplain was appointed to take care of those important
rites. The chaplain came to be known as a priest o l' Brahman.
Gradually the king’s chaplain acquired increasing status
and a priestly caste emerged. These priests (styled ‘Brah-
mans’) tended to become the kings’ advisers on many matters
in addition to the performance of the ritual. The details of
the many sacrifices offered to the gods were their chief
concern.
16
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
TOWARD PROFESSIONALISM IN RELIGION: THE BRAHMANAS
Shortly after 1000 b.c. the religion of these Indo-Europeans
who had settled down in India underwent a change. Some
interpreters stress the part that climate and diet may have
played in this. The climate was friendly, the land bountifully
productive, so that the conqueror had more time on his hands
than he could fill with his traditional activities native to
cooler climates. In any event changes began to appear in the
attitudes of the conquering people. Many of these changes
can be sensed in the later hymns of the Vttdic period as well
as in the ritual commentaries written by the priests between
iooo and 800 b.c., known as the Brahmanas. These com-
mentaries were the product of priestly speculation upon the
earlier collections of hymns and chants.
The natural healthy outgoingness of the earlier period had
apparently died away. In its place arose a preoccupation
witli the formal side of the religion, the ritual of the sacri-
fice. This seems to have been accompanied by a certain
clouding of reflective thought. The earlier theology faded,
but no dynamic or new theology arose to replace it. The
clear concepts of the Rig Vcdic gods began to become blurred
and indistinct as though the gods were no longer real, but
belonged to a distant country. One result of this was that
the priesthood gained increasing prominence. Were not the
priests the professional experts on the ceremonies? The names
of the gods tended to become mere counters in the grand
manipulative process of the sacrifice. Since the sacrifice was
always directed to the interests of specific individuals (not
as in China, where the sacrifices were for the benefit of the
people collectively), different sacrifices had to be performed
b • 17
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
many more times. An elaborate sacrifice might require the
services of many priests over a period of days or even
months.
The principal good sought by the worshipper through the
rite of the sacrifice was immortal life in some happy state
beyond the grave. Other-worldly religion in the form of a
postponed hedonism displaced the this-worldly religion of
the Rig Vedic period. Both the sacrifice and the priests became
indispensable. The priests who formerly had been function-
aries of the old gods now became more important than the
gods. Priestly religion was in the saddle, trying to supply
what the masses desired.
This concern with death and its aftermath is underscored
by a story in the Satapatha Brahmana. The gods themselves
at one time feared death, the mighty ‘Endcr’. ‘So with toil-
some rites they worshipped and performed religious acts till
they became immortal. Then the Endcr said to the gods,
“As ye have made yourselves imperishable, so will men en-
deavour to free themselves from me; what portion then shall
I possess in man?” The gods replied, “Henceforth no being
shall become immortal in his own body; this his mortal frame
shah thou still seize; this shall remain thy own. He who
through knowledge or religious works henceforth attains
to immortality shall first present liis body, Death, to
thee.” ’ 1
This concern about achieving a happy after-life played
directly into the hands of the priests. The priesthood tended
to exploit the situation at the expense of the masses. The
priestly apparatus became too expensive for the common
1 Translation by M. Monicr-Williarns, Indian Wisdom (Luzac, London,
»893)-
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
man to hire. Only the wealthy few could take it or leave it.
The more thoughtful persons began to withdraw to meditate
anew upon the ancient themes.
The first attempts to escape the rigors of the costly priestly
system took the form of substituting meditation upon the
sacrifice for the sacrifice itself. The elaborate horse sacrifice
normally took months to perform and a large retinue of
priests. This was now cast into a subjective mould. The
sacrifice was performed meditatively with the whole uni-
verse, in various aspects, being the horse, the altar and
the priest. In other words, the sacrificial system was
spiritualized.
Out of this interiorization process eventually came what
is frequently termed in the West as the ‘ Upanishadic re-
formation’. The literary by-products are known as the
Upanishads and are usually dated between 800 and 600 b.c.
In them the religion of the Indo-Europeans is supposed to
have reached the peak of its ‘development’. The Indian
sages now applied themselves to the problem of immortality
and promulgated the teaching on the identity of the Atman
(the real Self in man) with Brahman (the Cosmic Reality).
Other teachings and practices, including the various forms
of yoga, arc supposed to have developed in the centuries
following the Upanishads A
THE TRADITIONAL EASTERN VIEW
When all of the above has been said, the profounder part
of the Indian position has scarcely been plumbed. Such
Western terms as ‘pantheism’, ‘nature worship* and ‘poly-
1 See chapter 4.
19
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
theism’ have been thrown around freely. What is overlooked
is the underlying theme of unity:
They call him many who is really One.
Even as he seems, so he becomes. 1
That is, the Supreme Reality is One, but the needs of the
various worshippers lead to the multiplication of names and
concepts. Ancient India brought forth life bountifully; like-
wise the people continued to apply new-found names in
great diversity to the one underlying principle. This seems
to have been accompanied by u tendency on the part of many
to conceive of the names as applying to independent powers
or divine beings.
The seers, however, were always conscious of the One, not
the many. This insight they regarded as timeless in origin,
unaffected by the human need for diversity of expressions.
For them Veda meant literally traditional knowledge of im-
memorial antiquity. When Eastern writers refer to 'the
timclcssness of the Veda\ they arc not referring to the literary
documents upon which historical critics work. No written
or spoken statement or interpretation can be definitive. They
mean the traditional wisdom which has always been available to
all men of awareness at all limes . It is an inwardly appropriated
wisdom which in principle has nothing to do with time and
place. In practice, time, place and circumstance have very
much to do in shaping the expression of the insights.
Hence, where Western scholars are inclined to talk about
‘development of doctrine’, Eastern students sec only change
in expression ol the doctrine. The language of the Vedas is
more archaic than the language of the Upanishads, yet the
1 Rig Veda X.114.5; <*• IIX.5.4; V.3.1; V.44.6.
20
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
ideas of the Upaniskads are to be found in the Vedas.1 Indian
scholars do not take purely documentary considerations too
seriously, for back of the literary sources lies a period of oral
transmission of indeterminate length. In ancient India all
instruction in the more important matters was given only in
face-to-face situations. This ties in with the traditional inter-
pretation of the word * UpanishatT as meaning secret doctrine
or mystery. The student received it personally from a sage.
For centuries Western scholars on the whole have tended
to be more interested in how a doctrine comes to be articu-
lated than in what the doctrine means. This is somewhat
analogous to the child taking a clock to pieces in great
joy but totally unconcerned with the meaning of time or
duration.
CENTRAL AFFIRMATION OF INDIAN METAPHYSIC
What is the central affirmation of Indian mctaphysic? It
is the affirmation of the supreme identity of man , in the real depths of
his Selfhood , with the highest transcendental Reality. This identity
can be ‘known’ intuitively in the highest reaches of con-
sciousness. Such ‘knowledge’ is self-authenticating, just as
one ‘knows’ water satisfies thirst by drinking of it, not
theorizing about it. Hence, in India to ‘know God* does not
mean that T (the subject) know ‘God’ (the object); for the
highest ‘knowledge’ involves the realization that subject and
object are one in a deeper sense than any physical analogy
could make clear.
This thought of unity, or of the ‘knowledge’ that authenti-
cates itself in an intuitive awareness, dominates the traditional
1 Coomanuwamy, A New Approach to the Study of the Vedas , p. 54. He
cites Rig Veda VI. 16.35 and V.46.1.
21
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
doctrine of India. The unity has been conceived in many
different ways— mythologically, ritually, philosophically.
The diversity of interpretations has completely misled
Western scholars who arc conditioned to regard some doc-
trine as definitive and all others as false. Christian dogmatic
theology, crystallized and promulgated by the adminis-
tratively successful, set the pattern in the European environ-
ment. All views out of line with the officially approved
‘definition’ were anathematized. The latter-day progeny of
Theology, ‘the Queen of the Sciences’, have followed the
royal administrative pattern in being equally autocratic in
the secular frame of reference: often in the sciences (physical
or social) a view is not regarded as a ‘point of view’ but as
an exclusive dogma ruling out other ways of viewing ex-
perience.
Guenon reminds Western students of philosophy that ‘the
diverse metaphysical and cosmological conceptions of India
are not, strictly speaking, different doctrines, but only de-
velopments of a single doctrine according to different points
of view and in various, but by no means incompatible,
directions.’ 1 Such plurality of viewpoints is inevitable since
people differ in temperament. Furthermore, whenever
they look at any object — a mountain for example— they
necessarily stand in different places and have different
perspectives.2
All the points of view begin and end with the problem of
unity or non-duality. As the unchanging Reality behind the
universe, this unity is called Brahman. As the indestructible
1 Guenon, Man and His Becoming, p. 14.
* The Sanskrit word darskana, ‘point of view’, comes from a root which
means seeing. Often it has been translated as ‘school’.
22
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
Spirit or Self in man, it is called Atman.1 In no case is the
unity to be defined in terms of this thing or that tiling, this
concept or that concept. One can only approach the realiza-
tion of it by negating all particular experiences or ideas. It
is ‘not this, not this’ (ncti, tied).
This point of view is difficult for Westerners to grasp,
largely because of the Occidental tendency to ‘reify’ and
then ‘deify’ the highest goals, goods or concepts of individual
or social experience. This is to make pseudo-absolutes out
of very relative efforts, as though a child were to treat his
castles in the sand as if they were real dwellings. He who has
been conditioned to regard as meaningful only that which
can be touched, tasted or analysed finds it hard to realize
that there may be areas of reality that elude his sense-organs
and his logic. Such a person may be reminded that the
human car can record only a small proportion of the vibra-
tions that arc actually presented to it; but if he is quite
satisfied with what he docs hear, he brushes aside as either
irrelevant or non-existent that which he has not acquired
the sensitivity for hearing.
Just how or when this conventionalized wall-of-non-
awareness (or tone-deafness) can be breached is not pre-
dictable. Yet if the effort is honestly made, it may turn out
to be rewarding. Let us turn to a condensed version of the
Indian Myth regarding this unity, to see what light may be
thrown upon the subject. After an examination of the Myth,
x Atman, from root an, to breathe, is Spirit in its primary meaning; it
has taken on the secondary sense of ‘self, where it can stand for the bodily
self, the psychic self, or the spiritual self. Coomaraswamy translates it by
'Self* rather than Spirit, and uses a small initial letter when he is referring
to the empirical (or psychophysical) self. I have followed his practice
in this regard (Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 31)*
23
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
the Upanishadic analysis of the same problem will be dealt
with, followed by the Gita’s treatment of the perennial theme.
THE MYTH
As indicated earlier, the affirmation of the supreme
identity of the Self (Atman) with ultimate Reality ( Brahman )
has been presented in a variety of ways in India. The very
profuscncss of the poet’s mythological expressions has been
one of the stumbling-blocks in the path of the Western
students who have sought to understand the Vedas. The
major obstacle, however, has been the Occidental’s lack of
appreciation for myth and poetry as avenues of insight. This
warning must in all fairness be given to that person who
approaches the Indian Myth for the first time, lest he be
dismayed when he fails to catch all of the subtle nuances.1
The Myth deals with an eternal ‘in the beginning*. It does
not presume to give a ‘scientific’ account of the origin of
species, of the Earth, or of the solar system. The validity of
the Myth is not tied up with the questions of dates or ‘when
did it happen?’ (Analogously, when a small child asks 'Who
made the stars?’, liis question arises far more out of wonder
and awe than out of a desire for a cut-and-dricd answer,
with blueprints and production details supplied.) The
language of the Myth is thus quite incidental, for it is de-
signed to point the wondering person on from finite or
temporal data to timeless meanings or values. Hence the
Myth can be told in many ways and varying idioms so long
as the words used arc not tied down to purely surface usages.
1 Cf. H. Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilisation (Pan-
theon, N.Y., 1947; Thames and Hudson, London, 1950).
24
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
The first three verses of the Hymn of Creation (Rig Veda
X.129) provide the point of departure.
Existence was not, nor its opposite,
Nor earth , nor heaven's blue vault, nor aught beyond.
The subtle elements that are the veil
Of this so insubstantial world , where then
Might they find out a place? by whom be known?
The deep abyss of waters — where was that?
Death was not yet, nor deathlessness; the day
Was night, night day, for neither day nor night
Had come to birth. Then that, the primal fount
Of light— immobile — rest and action joined —
Brooded in silent bliss. Itself beside,
In the wide universe there nothing was.
In the beginning gloom— gloom hidden in gloom!
From its cause undistinguished stood the world:
But lo, thereafter, from its darkling state
( Yet undistinguished from its cause), it rose,
By the pure will of that made manifest .l
In the eternal beginning there is only the supreme identity
of THAT ONE, the undifferentiated ‘all’, beyond both exist-
ence and non-existence. Western thought, with its pragmatic-
utilitarian bent, hesitates to go this far back in its statement
of first principles. Yet even the astronomer who tries to ex-
plain the origin of this planetary system or this particular
galaxy, assumes some such undifferentiated whole, even
1 Translation by Swami Prahhavananda and F. Manchester in Voice
of India, vol. 3, no. 1, Jan. 1940, pp. 1-2. Cf. Coomaraswarny, A New
Approach to the Study of the Veda, pp. 54-5.
25
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
though on the physical plane exclusively. The psychologist,
though he may not venture to speak about anything more
than the relation between a ‘psyche* and a ‘soma* as in
psychosomatic medicine, assumes a larger state of unity or
wholeness in the person he is trying to help. Perhaps it is a
certain timidity, akin to adolescent awkwardness, which
restrains Western man from going back to a metaphysical
unity as die starting-point, for all fundamental discussion.
In practically all worldly discussions of diversities, there
seems to be some assumption of a prior unity— prior in the
metaphysical sense though not necessarily prior in the
temporal sequence.
‘That One’, according to the Indian Myth, is the uni-
versally Real which can ‘objectify* itself in finite worlds or
creatures but can never be an object of knowledge since it is
no ‘object* or ‘no-thing*. It is the Eternal Subject or the
Great Self (Para Brahman or Paratman). The finite world is
made possible only when That One* submits to a dismem-
berment. Tliis is pictured as a Sacrifice. By this passion or
Sacrifice, the Supreme Self creates the world of men; by
entering into their bodies and opening up the apertures of
the senses and the mind, he awakens them to consciousness.
As such he is die ‘Eye in the World’, symbolized by the
sun in the outer world and by fire (Agni, ‘inner light’) in the
inner world of man’s heart.1
The Supreme Self as the ‘Inner Man’ has been swallowed
by the ‘Outer Man’, by die sense of individuality or egoism.
Each human being is bound to be at war with himself until
he finds out Who lie really is. Day after day the ‘Outer Man’
i Cf. Maitrayana Brahmana Up. 0.6; TaiUiriya Samhila II.9.3; II.3.8.1-2 ;
II.5.8.2.; Rig Veda X.104.4; X.90.6-8; X.31.7; X.81.4; I.32.
26
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
goes on dismembering the ‘Inner Man’, the real Self. An
expiation for this condition is provided for in the Sacrifice,
specifically the Burnt-offering. This is simply a symbolic
imitation of the Sacrifice ‘in the beginning’. In this ritual
the sacred libation of Soma is poured into the sacred fire as
into God’s mouth.1 * * * The person doing the sacrificing builds
up again the dismembered deity through surrendering his
egoism or dividedness.
Looked at in this perspective, the tenth book of the Sato-
patha Bralmana takes on real meaning for any student of
depth psychology. This chapter deals in detail with the con-
struction of the great Fire Altar. The altar represents not
only the structure of the universe but also the Supreme
Self, the creator and primal victim. When the sacred
libation is poured into the sacred fire and the entire
ceremony completed, the unity of creation is restored and
the dismembered body of the Supreme Self is brought back
to life.8
The Sacrifice is thus an eternal process, something to be
‘lived through’ by every person. The physical elements — the
fire on the altar and the libation — are only symbols. Ignorant
persons may go through the outer forms completely unaware
of what they arc really doing. But the Rig Veda makes clear
that what the aware person understands by Soma is ‘con-
sumed in the heart’.®
The enlightened person is not engaging in some form of
crude magic. He is making a Burnt-offering of his ‘Outer
Self’. In thus slaying his own ‘Dragon’, his illusion of separ-
1 Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 22.
* Satapatho Btahmana X.
* Rig Veda X.8.34; I.168.3; 1.179.5.
27
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
atcncss, he gains his rebirth. The inner war is now over for
one lias found his cosmic reintegration. For him who per-
forms the outer Sacrifice ‘knowing not this interior Burnt-
offering, it is as if lie pushed aside the brands and made
oblation in the ashes’.1 But for the illumined person, par-
ticipation in the Sacrifice is not the perfect, meticulous cele-
bration of external rites. Rather, the perfect fulfilling of one’s
vocation is itself the celebration of the rite.
The Western student is almost bound to interpret the
Myth, at least initially, in subjective-psychological terms.
This is not a bad approach so long as one remains aware of
the profound cosmic implications in the Myth as viewed by
the Indian. What is sought through the ritual is Self-know-
ledge. (The Sanskrit terms for this are Alma-jnana.) The person
who becomes aware of a sense of inner alienation raises the
question, ‘Who am I?’ From there it is a natural step to
distinguish between the ‘Outer Man’ (which the Western
psychologist is dealing with as the psychophysical self) and
the ‘Inner Man’ (the real Self from which one feels alienated
while retaining intimations of It). Each person desires
autonomy or ‘self-control’. Out of his sense of dividedness and
his consciousness of an T and a ‘mine’ over against a ‘thou’
and a ‘thine’, he seeks to move in the direction of a unifying
consciousness. ‘As one embraced by a darling bride knows
naught of “I” and “thou”, so self embraced by the fore-
knowing (solar) Self knows naught of a “myself” within or a
“thyself” without.’ Or again, ‘As all spokes arc contained in
the axle and in the felly of a wheel, all beings and all those
1 Sankhyana Aranyaka X. Cf. Satapatha Brahmana II. 2. 4. 7; III. 8. 1.2;
Taittiriya Samhita II.5.4.5; Coonmraswauiy, Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 23.
28
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
selves arc contained in that Self.’ 1 One’s sense of alienation
is overcome through the enlarging of one’s consciousness, not
through adjustment to fragmentary demands of the social
or physical order.
BY WAY OF TRANSITION
So much for a condensation of the mythological statement
of the Indian tradition. The following chapters will amplify
portions of these in the language of the Upanishads and the
Bhagavad Gita. The Upanishads constitute what is known as
the Vedanta or ‘end of the Veda'. They form the last portion
of the Vedic texts and their teachings reflect the traditional
insights in their entirety.
The Upanishads are concerned with knowledge of God and
knowledge of Self.2 These two reduce to one fundamental
knowledge or awareness, as even a Christian writer, Mcistcr
Eckhart, has expressed it: ‘No one can know God who has
not first known himself. . . . Since we find God in oneness,
that oneness must be in him who is to find God.’ 3
Basic to the Indian outlook on life is the desire of the indi-
vidual to be identified with that which is not transient. If
the reader bears this fact in mind, he will understand better
some of the precise distinctions made by the Upanishadic
sages. They distinguished, for example, between the indi-
vidual ego or ‘soul’ [jivalma) and the Self [Atman). The former
is the empirical ego of most modern psychology which can
be an object of study since it is an aggregate of sensations,
1 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3.21 (following Coomaraswamy’s trans-
lation, which is freer than Muller's); 2.5.15.
* God knowledge -Brahmar.-oidya. Self knowledge -dfmOT-jViflnfl.
a R. Blakncy, Master Eckhart : A Modern Translation (Harper, N.Y.,
1941), Fragment 37; The Aristocrat, p. 80.
29
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
Feelings, and so on. The Self \ however, is the knowing subject
which is never an object . It is pure consciousness or awareness.
It is implied in all knowing but is not known.
Another Fundamental distinction in terms is that between
Brahman, die unmaniFcstcd Supreme Principle, and Brahma,
God manifested as personal deity.1 Indian literature uses
many names and attributes to characterize Brahma. Yet it is
recognized that behind the ‘named’ there is the Namc-lcss,
the living Reality which can never be conceptualized —
Brahman. In die words oF Nikhilananda: 'Brahman docs not
exist as an empirical object — for instance, like a pot or a tree
— but as Absolute Existence, without which material objects
would not be perceived to exist. Just as a mirage cannot be
seen without the desert, which is its unrelated substratum,
so also the universe cannot exist without Brahman .* 2
In the following pages, technical terms will be held to a
minimum. Those who wish to use the more precise terms will
find a Glossary at the end of the book. Where dynamic psy-
chological concepts from Western thought have been drawn
upon, one is not to infer that the traditional teachings
have only a psychological dimension. This is untrue, for a
1 There is no typographically convenient way of distinguishing in
English between the Sanskrit neuter form and the masculine form, nor
is there agreement among the scholars on the matter of transliteration.
For convenience in the following treatment, the term Brahman is to be
understood as applying to the Absolute or Supreme Principle, which can
only be described negatively. Brahma will be used when God-as-personal
is meant. When only priests of Brahman are referred to, the context will
make it dear, thus obviating the use of a third term ‘Brahmin’ (cf. A. K.
Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel qf Buddhism, p. 352; Guenon,
Man and His Becoming, p. 25; Nikhilananda, op. cit., pp. 25 ft').
2 Swami Nikhilananda, The Upanithads (Harper, N.Y., 1949), vol. 1,
P- 37-
30
ANCIENT INDIA LOOKS AT LIFE
cosmic frame of reference is always implied in the Indian
writings.
We shall be walking in an area dealing with questions
which have both proximate and ultimate meanings. How-
ever, if a journey is to be undertaken and a river is to be
crossed, the important thing is to start from the near side.
3i
CHAPTER THREE
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
‘The knower and the known arc one. Simple people imagine
that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here.
This is not so. God and 1, we arc one in knowledge. — Mbistbr
Eckiiart.
‘who AM I?’
Two interrelated questions arc dealt with in the Ufmni-
r hads: Who am I? and What is ultimately Real?
These are the questions which thoughtful men
everywhere ask when they have learned for themselves the
drawbacks to a fragmentary living of life.
In one of the Upaniskads a dialogue is reported between a
young man, Nachikctas, and Death. The latter says to the
youth: ‘Take sons and grandsons, cattle and horses, ele-
phants and gold, take a great kingdom . . . wealth, long life
. . . pleasures . . . women.’
The young man replies: ‘Destroyer of man ! These tilings
pass. . . . Wealth cannot satisfy a man. . . . What man, subject
to death and decay, getting the chance of undccaying life,
would still enjoy mere long life?’ So Nachikctas chooses
knowledge of Brahman instead of worldly success.
This story also illustrates the fundamental purpose of all
the Upanishadic texts. They arc designed to loosen man from
his bondage to the transitory by pointing out the avenue to
supreme knowledge. The petition of the earnest seeker is
‘Lead me from the unreal to the real, lead me from darkness
32
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
to light, lead me from death to immortality.’1 Immortality
here has a distinctly qualitative dimension. It is not to be
equated with hope for continued personal existence in some
state beyond the grave. For that state, too, according to the
Indian teaching, is transitory. Immortality means knowing
the Self which is unborn and undying. It is ignorance of the
Self which constitutes spiritual death.
Thoughtful men everywhere have expressed something of
the ambiguity of man’s situation when he begins to become
aware of his alienation from the Real. In the European tradi-
tion, man’s spiritual dilemma has been described under the
figure of the island which is apparently cut off from the main-
land, though in reality the island and the mainland are one.
The dominant trend in Western Christian thinking has been
to develop the idea of a primordial rebellion against God.
Augustine’s statement of this view is the classical one. The
created rational angels turned away from God, the Ground
of their being, and presumed to have status in their own right.
This was the sin of pride and it had its aftermath in the
Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve likewise fell.
The Upanishads also have a story of a ‘Fall’. At one time
the gods had fought the demons and had obtained a victory
over the latter which elated them considerably. Because of
the gods’ blindness they failed to recognize that it was
1 Brihadaranyaka Up. 1.3.27 (F. Mux Muller’s translation, Sacred Book
of the East, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1884, vo1- T5)* In the case of the
Kal/ta, Kena, Mundaka and Isa Upanishads, preference ha* been given to
the translation by Nikhilananda. A beautiful translation (partially para-
phrased), without comments or verse divisions, is that by Prabhavananda
and Manchester, The Upanishads, Breath of the Eternal (Vedanta Press,
Hollywood, 1947). Cf. Teresina Rowell Havens, Standards of Success
(Pendle Hill Pamphlet No. 43, 1948), pp. 10-11.
c 33
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
Brahman who had given them the victory, they themselves
being mere instruments. So they bragged, ‘Verily, this
victory is ours; verily, this glory is ours also.’ Whereupon
Brahman appeared before them and confounded them until
Indra through the grace of Brahman learned that it was only
by the power of Brahman that the gods had won the
victory.1
It is significant that the Upanishads, unlike Augustine, do
not stress the note of rebellion and its dreadful consequences.
Indeed, in the above talc the ‘Fall* or blindness of the divine
beings is not stressed so much as their subsequent illumina-
tion. In a thcistic point of view (such as that of Augustine
and Christendom generally), when the problem of man’s
alienation from the ground of his being is approached, em-
phasis tends to fall on the category of will and the virtue of
obedience. lie who disobeys the will of the priest disobeys the
will of God. God’s will must be made effective through legis-
lation or coercion in one degree or another. Rebellion against
the will becomes the cardinal sin. Higher authority has been
flouted, the culprit must be punished. This may be sound
moralism or good legalism, but it arises out of a superficial
understanding of spiritual dynamics. By contrast, the Upani-
shads do not talk in moralistic or authoritarian terms, for
thcistic concepts are not regarded as ultimate. There is no
mention of man rebelling against the gods. Man is not a
‘sinner’ who has turned against the gods; he has, rather, lost
sight ofiiis true good and suffers from avidya (unawareness).
What man needs is not ‘pardon’ but vidya (awareness).
Why does man ignore his real nature? The predicament is
1 Kina Up. 3.1-IS; 4.1.
34
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
traceable to mqya. Maya is strictly untranslatable although
‘illusion’ is the term most commonly used by Western
students. This is definitely misleading. Maya is inscrutable;
it comes into being and it passes away. It is the world of
appearances rather than the world of reality; or, to state it
in a slightly different way, the world of reality as seen from
a finite point of view. Coomaraswamy points out that the
doctrine of maya does not assert the insignificance of the
world but stresses that as we see the world, ‘extended in the
order of space, time and causality, it has no static existence
as a thing in itself: our partial vision is false in so far,
and only in so far, as it is partial’.1 The world has as much
significance as the degree of a man’s enlightenment allows
him to discover in it. If man becomes unduly bewitched by
the world, he will not gain Self-knowledge.
THE RAZOR’S EDOE
The way to Self-knowledge is as narrow as the sharp edge
of a razor, hard to tread and difficult to cross. The desired
insight cannot be gained through knowledge of the physical
world nor through intellectual analysis. Beyond a certain
stage in the search, the analytical mind must be stopped
completely.2 However, the preliminary stages call for con-
trol of the senses and a discriminating mind.
If the senses are not checked by a discriminating mind, the
individual becomes bound ever more closely to an unsatisfy-
ing, transient round of existence. The world of maya can
also be described as the realm of samsara. Samara means
1 Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism , pp. aio-i i.
a Cf. Kalha Up. 1.3.13-14.
35
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
‘stream’, i.c. stream of existences.1 Actually samara is the
realm of flux and becoming — the realm where man lives.
It is the only place where man has an opportunity to find
the meaningoflife. Any other existences which man may trans-
migrate into aflcr death arc only temporary. Each must stay
in the ‘stream’ until he has found the further shore — namely
union with the highest Reality.2
The doctrine of samsara has frequently been interpreted
as a doctrine of despair by Western students. Actually it is
a doctrine of hope when contrasted with the Christian teach-
ing on the eternal torment of the damned. This Christian
teaching is an unequivocal doctrine of pessimism. It implies
that the majority of the human race arc not teachable,
meriting torment of an ‘infinite’ duration for a finite period
of sinning. Augustine, in one of his speculative moods, sug-
gested that God would save only enough souls to even up
the ranks of the angels depleted when the angels had origin-
ally rebelled against God under the leadership of Satan. The
Protestant reformer Calvin taught that God gave just
enough light to the heathen to insure their damnation. Over
against this ‘one life — one chance’ theory of salvation, the
Hindu doctrine of samsara stresses the many chances which
each being has to achieve its desired goal. This feeling of the
1 '. . . The constitution of worlds nnd of individuals is compared to a
wheel ... the “wheel of becoming, or birth”. , . . The collective motion
of all the wheels within wheels . . . that arc these worlds and individuals
is called the Confluence (samsara), and it is in this “storm of the world’s
flow" that our "elemental self” is fatally involved.’ Coomaraswamy,
Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 16.
3 Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy (Macmillan, N.Y., 1929), vol. 1,
p. 250. For early passages on transmigration idea, see Chandogya Up.
5.3.10; Brihadaranyaka Up. 6.2. Cf. article ‘Transmigration’ (Huddhist),
by M. Ancsaki in Hasting’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 12.
36
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
oneness of all life is just as much a part of the Indian tradi-
tion as the desire to escape the realm of transiency and
becoming.
The concept of samara is closely related to the law of karma
in Upanis/iadic thought. All actions arc included in the
operation of this karmic law. Whatever is sown must be
reaped, sometime and somewhere. Every action produces
its effects. As the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says, ‘A man
becomes good by good deeds and bad by bad deeds.’ Each
person is responsible for producing the desired change in his
karma. According to what a man wills today, so will he be
tomorrow.1 What each person is today is die result of past
actions and attitudes, plus any modifications introduced
through his own will. Unfortunately the average person,
caught in the toils of his karma , dragged under in the ‘stream’,
looks at life in terms of its opposites. The most misleading
pair of opposites (misleading because it is highly undepend-
able as a safe guide beyond a certain minimal stage) is that
of pleasure versus pain.2
PLEASURE VERSUS PAIN
Any person who is primarily aware of his own confusion
or frustration finds it hard to concentrate on die question
of the larger good. When one is sick, he simply wants to be
well. He may forget that when he was well, he was still dis-
satisfied and restless. Man is frequently much more aware
of what he wants to be free from dian what he wants to be
freed for. Part of this inability to comprehend what the
1 Brihadaranyaka Up. 3.2.13; Chandogya Up. 3.14.1.
a The concept of karma receives a more detailed treatment in the
chapter on the Bhagavad Gila and the chapters dealing with Buddhism.
37
TIIE NATURE OF THE SELF
larger good may bo arises from the fact that man tends to
think and respond to life in terms of the opposites, pleasure
and pain.
The child is a naive hedonist for a long time. He seeks to
avoid painful states or conditions and clamours for certain
pleasurable satisfactions. He has no philosophy about it
whatsoever. But there comes a time when the child discovers
he must choose between competing pleasures or pains. This
involves hard choice, a weighing of present pleasure against
postponed pleasure. The child is father to the man and the
man frequently tries to work out a ‘hedonic calculus’. In the
attempt to devise a graded chart of competing pleasure-
claims and pain-claims, man gets hopelessly involved. His
pleasure-yardstick just will not operate satisfactorily. Too
many factors arc at work over which he has no control.
Furthermore, one day’s pleasure may be the next day’s
displeasure.
In this predicament a man may decide to make the best
of a poor bargain. Admitting the inadequacy of his own
‘controls’, he more or less resentfully puts up with the painful
facts of existence. On the other hand, a person may decide to
forgo some of his present pleasures, which arc being denied
to him in any event, in return for expected rewards in Heaven.
This is the pathway followed by many people in all of the
world religions.
The Upanishads arc very critical of this postponing of
pleasures to the ‘Great Hereafter’. Hedonism is still hedon-
ism even though sensuous or material pleasures have been
rebaptized and called heavenly pleasures. To postpone today’s
pleasures because they are unattainable (cither because of
outer circumstances or inner confusion) in the expectation
38
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
of having them tomorrow, may be evidence of consummate
skill or cool worldly strategy that pays off in small amounts.
It is not evidence of significant spiritual growth.
The Katha Upanishad states that even the highest heaven
( Brahmaloka ) must be renounced by the man who desires
genuine Self-knowledge.1 For the pleasant and the good are
two dissimilar yardsticks. The pleasant serves one set of
needs at a certain level; its opposite, pain, is always lurking
in the background. Pursuit of the pleasant binds a man to
specific duties, to studied disciplines and institutional prac-
tices, to rigidities in conduct and attitude. The person con-
tinues to believe that by persisting in such disciplines he
will be able to achieve the anticipated pleasures. Yet the
harder he strives, the more tense he becomes and the less
capable of reaching his goal.
This lies back of such Upanishadic statements that Self-
realization cannot be obtained by the study of the Vedas, or
by intelligence, or by much hearing of sacred books. Nor can
it be obtained through ‘religious works’. Frail indeed arc the
sacrificial rafts which arc supposed to carry one from the
shore of ignorance to the shore of Self-knowledge. World
desires are a barrier whether one desires the pleasant things
of this world or of some world hereafter. The supreme good
is one thing, the pleasant another.0
Whence this confusion between the good and the pleasant?
Why docs pursuit of the fragmentary objects of the senses or
of the intellect in its analytical processes condemn man to a
life of restlessness, dissatisfaction and bondage to the realm
1 Katha Up. 1.2.9-10, with commentary.
2 Ibid. 1.2.1, 23; Mundaka Up. 1.2. 7. Cf. Katha Up. i.a.io ff, where
there is implied a succession of steps in the life of desire.
39
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
of samsara? Augustine’s analysis of man’s dilemma is some-
what more familiar to Occidentals. At one point it is very
close to the analysis of the Upanis/iads. According to Augus-
tine, man is doomed to perpetual dissatisfaction because lie
is trying to satisfy an infinite need with finite sops. Man is
made for union with God, but because of his 'fallen’ condi-
tion, he pursues the objects of sense in ways that arc fore-
doomed to be self-frustrating. This inability to achieve
genuine satisfactions through following the senses Augustine
termed lust.
The Upanishadic description of man’s predicament is very
similar. Man, designed for knowledge of the Supreme, lives
a life of distractedness. He is caught in a net of bewilderment.
Having intimations of an entire grove of trees before him to
explore, still he clings tenaciously to a small shrub. ‘Intoxi-
cated by the wine of illusion . . ., rushing about like one pos-
sessed by an evil spirit; bitten by the world like one bitten by
a great serpent; darkened by passion like the night’, he stays
under the sway of maya.1
Man’s spiritual problem is resolved neither by ‘religion’
nor by social service. For so long as man’s actions arc done
in Self-ignorance, the rewards arc purely temporary and the
results arc quite mixed.2 People who follow these paths arc
like children, immersed in ignorance and flattering them-
selves, saying, ‘We have accomplished life’s purpose.’ Such
people may be happy in a superficial way, yet part of the
price of their blindness is the unexpected ending of their
1 Cf. Maitrayam Up. 7.8; 4.2.
3 Tgnorunl fools, regarding sacrifices and humanitarian work* as the
highest, do not know any higher good. Having enjoyed their reward on
the height* of heaven, gained by good works, they enter again this world
or a lower one.’ Mrndaka Up. i.a.10.
40
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
momentary state of joy. For they are still in bondage to the
transient and have not sought the larger good. ‘Dwelling in
darkness, but wise in their own conceit and puffed up with
vain scholarship’, they wander about ‘being alTIicted by
many ills, like blind men led by the blind’.1
The roots of this blindness he within. Each man must take
the appropriate steps for himself. This blindness is akin to
that which leads a man to mistake a shadow lurking in the
darkness for a wild animal about to attack, when in reality
it is a tree stump; or to mistake a mirage in the desert for a
pool of cooling water. So long as one ignorantly identifies
the real self with fragmented desires, one remains as it were
in ‘the jaws of death’. However, man need not despair, for
all life moves towards its Self-actualization: ‘All go towards
the tree intended for their abode, so all this goes to the
Supreme Self.’ a
If one is to realize his highest potential, he must learn how
to exercise discrimination. For one thing, the senses must not
be allowed to lead one into further involvement or distrac-
tions by roaming around uncontrolled 'like the vicious horses
of a charioteer’. The body is a vehicle which must be kept
in proper condition and under proper guidance. In the figure
of the Katha Upanishad, the body is the chariot, the horses
arc the senses, the charioteer is the discriminative faculty,
the mind is the reins, and the master of the chariot is the Self
( Atman ).3 The man of discrimination docs not allow the
horses to run away with the chariot. Unless one learns how
to control the senses, he will not be able to go on to the next
1 Mundaka Up. 1.2.9; >-2.8.; cf. Katha Up. 1.2. 12.
2 Katha Up. 1.3. 15; Prosna Up. 4.7.
3 Katha Up. 1.3, 5*9-
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
step which is that of controlling the wandering mind and the
analytical intellect.1 Since controlling the senses is not an end
in itself, it is necessary to push a little further our inquiry into
what is meant by the Upanishadic saying that the true seeker
after Self-knowledge must be ‘free from all desires’.
‘free from all desires’
The teaching on desirclcssncss cannot be taken literally by
the novice. The Chandogya Upanishad makes a distinction be-
tween 'true desires’ and ‘false desires’: ‘These true desires,
however, arc hidden by what is false; though the desires be
true, they have a covering which is false.’ Another writing
states, ‘Desire is never satisfied by the enjoyment of the
objects of desire; it grows more and more as does the fire
to which fuel is added.’2 In this case craving, or blind desire,
is being described. Blind (or false) desires arc both compulsive
and compensatory. They arc compulsive in that the person
has no real control over their overt expression. They arc
compensatory in that they arc masquerading for some other
need of the human organism. They do not lead the person on
toward Self-knowledge because they fixate the person’s atten-
tion unduly upon the world at a superficial level.
The spiritually alert person desires ‘nothing but what he
ought to desire’. This is because boLh the senses and the
mind have been tranquillized or stilled. The threat to Self-
knowledge is not the external world but the tendency to
dwell on worldly objects or long for specific pleasures cither
here or hereafter. Serene persons, says the Katha Upanishad,
* This latter step is very important, and is dealt with in more detail
in chapters 4 and 7.
2 Chandogya Up. 8.3.1.; cf. 8. 2. 5-6. 1 aw of Manu, 2.94.
42
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
‘<lo not covet any uncertain thing in the world’. Coveting
arises from non- awareness; it is the result of misusing the
external world. Self-knowledge and craving are thus at
opposite poles.
This Self-knowledge is not inconsistent with life in the
world, but one must not be of the world. An Upanishadic pas-
sage cited frequently by Indians, especially those in the
householder stage, states: ‘It is not for the sake of the husband,
my dear, that the husband is loved, but for the sake of the
Self that he is loved.’ 1 All tilings and all relationships should
be regarded as instruments of Self-realization. This does not
mean that other persons are to be used as means in a purely
utilitarian sense. That would be to exploit another. But all
persons and all relationships are significant means to an all-
inclusive end. Through right discrimination, each person is
helped on in his search for release from fragmentarincsx—
that is, moksha.
LIBERATION OR FREEDOM
Moksha means very simply release — release from finitude,
fragmentariness and unawareness. The concept has often
been caricatured in the West. This is partly because of the
use of the misleading word ‘absorption’ with reference to it.
Absorption has primarily physical connotations to physically
minded moderns.
While moksha means release from the round of birth
and death, this is only the negative way of stating a
positive good — release from bondage into freedom. The
release is from something finite and thwarting into a
condition of joy.
1 Brihadaranyaka Up. 2.4.5.
43
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
The Indian tradition makes it quite clear that such an
experience of release can be obtained here and now. The
Upanishads describe the freed person as one who traverses
these worlds eating whatever food he likes, taking whatever
forms he likes, joyously singing songs. The expansion of
spirit is definitely exhilarating. lA man who is free from desire
beholds the majesty of the Self through tranquillity of the
senses and the mind and becomes free from grief’, says the
Kat/ia Upanishad. Such a person is no longer bothered by
hunger, thirst, sorrow or confusion. He does not worry about
old age and death. He experiences 'the delight, of lire and
mind, the fullness of peace and eternity’.1 The Indians
describe die person who has achieved such a state as
blessed.
It is taught that each man has the capacity for achieving this
condition. It is hidden in the heart of all living creatures.
Each must come to this intuitive Self-knowledge by himself,
through certain disciplines. No one else can do it for him,
but one should have a tutor or guide. The ideal tutor (or
guru) is the person who is himself liberated.3 The guru un-
doubtedly served in many eases as a personalized object of
devotion. Students served their teacher as devout servants
serve their lord. The student helped to supply the minimal
physical needs of the teacher. Tliis included gathering wood
for the guru's fire. The teacher became the nucleus for those
seeking a similar goal. His home became a fellowship of
like-minded seekers.
Important as the teacher was as a tutor and guide, each
person had to travel his own inner path to Self-knowledge.
1 Katha Up. 1.2.20; 2.3.14-15; Taittiriyaka Up. 3.10.8.
* Katha Up. 1.2.20, 21; 1.2. 7-8.
44
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
Whenever such insight was achieved, it was described as ‘a
flash of lightning’ or ‘a wink of the eye’. He who reached it
might be able to help others in the preliminary stages, but
he left no path. As one commentator puts it, ‘The knower of
Brahman leaves behind no footprint by which he can be
traced. “As a bird flies in the air, as a fish moves in the water,
without leaving any trace, so likewise the illumined soul
leaves behind no footprint.’”1 The man who learns how
to swim may be able to assist another, but he cannot swim
for him.
WORSIIir IN TIIF. HIGHER SENSE
The sense of wholeness which Indians describe as the union
of Atman with Brahman can be realized in the present. It is
not discovered in patches or in fragments, but is known in
every state of mind. It is an all-pervasive kind of experience.
Worship for such a person is no longer primarily something
done on a visible altar. Every act of the illumined person is
an act of worship. So-called objective worship (the worship
of a divine object or entity) has disappeared from the
picture.
This emphasis is underscored in various parts of the
Upanishads. The Briluidaranyaka says, ‘If a man worships
another divinity with the idea that he and the God are
different, he docs not know.’ 2 If a man claims to know
Brahman as an object of knowledge, he docs not know Brah-
man, but some idea or construct about it. Brahman is never
‘Object’ yet is involved in every search for meaning or cos-
mic reintegration. In die words of the Kena Upanishad, 'That
1 Kena Up. 4.4. Cf. Nikhilananda, op. cit., p. 307.
fi Cf. Mundaka Up. 2.1.10; 3.2.6.; Kena Up. 2.4.
45
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
which cannot be expressed by speech, but by which speech
is expressed— That alone know as Brahman, and not that
which people here worship.’ 1
There are places where the Upanishads make concessions
to the common man’s forms of worship, where Brahman is
regarded as having ‘form’.9 Such worship, however, is de-
scribed as representing the lower path. Or, changing the
figure, frail indeed arc the boats which such worshippers use
in trying to cross samsara , the stream of ordinary life. For
altar, icon or creed become relatively unimportant to the
man who has come ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ to Sell-
knowledge. In some incommunicable sense altar, worshipper
and worshipped become unified: ‘That art Thou.’
To try to describe in traditional Western theological terms
what is involved hero is impossible. For most of those terms
are dualistic — nature versus supernature, man versus God,
flesh versus spirit, law versus grace, faith versus works. If one
is to understand even in part what the Upanishads arc saying,
one must come out of the cloister dedicated to theological
dualism. The dynamic terms of Western psychology can be
a very partial aid. But one must go to the seers and poets,
to the giants of the mystical tradition of the West, to de-
velop real feeling lor the Eastern viewpoint. As Mcislcr
Eckhart has said regarding the search for the supreme
identity, ‘To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must
first get into the core of himself at his least, for no one can
1 Ktna Up. 1.5; 1.7-9. Cf. A. W. Watts, The Supreme Identity, pp. 52, 78,
87.
2 The Taittiriyaka Upanishad says, 'Let him worship Ilrahman as sup-
port and he becomes supported. Let him worship Brahman as mind,
he becomes endowed with mind. And let him worship Brahman as
Brahman, and he becomes possessed of Brahman' Taittiriyaka Up. 3.10.
THE NATURE OF THE SELF
know God who has not first known himself. Go to the depths
of the soul ... to the root, to the heights; for all that God can
do is focused there.’ 1
He who undertakes such an exploration with all the intelli-
gence and will he can muster may begin to understand wor-
ship in its higher sense. Like the Upanishadic sage he may
discover that altars, icons and creeds arc only pointers on the
path leading to Self-realization.
1 R. Dlakiury, Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation, p. 246.
47
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ART OF YOGA
'The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working
farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and
accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into
Ccar trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God seed into God.’ —
Ieister Eckiiart.
Every man at times has intimations of a larger aware-
ness than he has yet realized. Not every person finds it
possible to discover the specific techniques suited to
him which will lead to that actualization. Most people would
readily agree that a house divided against itself cannot stand
securely for long. The tensions can become unendurable;
one either takes drugs or his life.
The acute question is: How can the inner split be over-
come in such a way as to lead to renewed life and an enlarged
awareness of meaning or purpose? Many people do actually
settle for some kind of temporary relief from the painful
symptoms which bother them, instead of trying to extend
their area of awareness. Since in Indian circles it was
assumed that only in this world could man achieve his final freedom,
a great deal of thought was given to the refining of those
tools or disciplines which would assure one of realizing liber-
ation or moksha.1
1 Cf. Mrndaka Up. 1.2.10. For an excellent critique of the assumption
that this ‘middle world’ is the only place where, genuine spiritual de-
velopment can proceed, see Gerald Heard, Preface to Prayer (Harper,
N.Y., 1944), section on ‘The Universal and the Topical in Brahmanie-
Buddhistic Cosmology’.
48
THE ART OF YOGA
YOGA — THE REINTEGRATION OF THE SELF
It is fruitless to discuss the historical question as to when
yoga was first introduced into Indian life. Excavations at
Mohenjo-daro have unearthed a seal (dated around 3000 b.c.)
which shows a four-faced figure seated with legs folded in
yogi-like posture, the posture traditionally associated with the
state of contemplation. Around the seated figure arc four
beasts — the bull, elephant, buffalo and rliinoceros. This sug-
gests the conclusion that the god later known as Siva, the
Great Yogi (Maha-yogin), was worshipped by the pre-Aryan
people of Mohenjo-daro in die aspect of Pasupati, Lord of
Beasts.1 Contrary to the claims of many Western inter-
preters, this suggests that yoga disciplines are much older than
the written Vedas and Upanishads.
The literal meaning of die word yoga is ‘to yoke’. The
reference in the last chapter to the horses being held in check
by the charioteer is of prime importance here. The horses
(man's sensidve powers) must be yoked lest they draw man
away from his ulumatc goal, which is spiritual union. Thus
die word has a two-fold meaning: it stands for the ulumatc
realization of the union (yoga) of Atman and Brahman. It also
stands for the methods or disciplines preparatory to that
union. While die union between Atman and Brahman exists
potentially or virtually in every man, each individual has
to become conscious of that which truly is from all eternity.
1 Dorothy Mackay, Mo/unjo-daio and the Ancient Civilization of the India
Valley (Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 193a), p. 433.
See Plate M, 9, in Ernest Mackay, The Indus Civilization, after p. uou. Sir
John Marshall claims that the seated figure is Siva ( Mohenjo-daro and the
Indus Civilization, Probsthain, London, 1935, 3 vols.).
D 49
THE ART OF YOGA
Each man must ‘yoke himself like an understanding
horse'.1 This has reference both to man’s mental and
physical powers.
Toga methods arc a characteristic feature of Indian re-
ligion.2 To some extent every Hindu is a practitioner of yoga,
as the chapter on The Teachings of the Gita will make clearer.
But when it comes to the more intensive forms of contem-
plation, as Coomaraswamy lias pointed out, a good many
special exercises are involved, and at any given time probably
only a small minority of people arc engaged in them. The
preparatory phases for this intensive activity involve moral
preparation, physical exercises, complete control of the
breathing process. All of these arc necessary before one pro-
ceeds far with the purely mental exercises.
The charge is sometimes made that yoga is nothing more
than a pathological variety of asceticism or an escape from
the complexity of life. Some of those who make this criticism
speak as though almost any form of self-restraint is un-
healthy. This may be traceable in part to a post-Victorian
reaction against unhealthy forms of ‘Puritanism’ which sought
to repress certain drives or tendencies instead of understand-
ing or transcending them. In any event, in some circles over-
indulgence has come to be the acceptable virtue in place of
conventionalized (and frequently dishonest) restraint. The
devotees of the cult of indulgence arc slow to recognize that
it too is a form of self-torture, no more emancipating in the
1 Guenon, Man and His Becoming, p. 38; Rig Veda V.4G. 1 ; Coomara-
swamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 40.
9 Occidentals need to remember that public demonstrators of so-
cullcd yogic powers arc regarded as misguided pilgrims by serious
Indians. At worst, such persons are charlatans catering to the curiosity-
seekers.
50
35~o
THE ART OF YOGA
long run than Victorian prudishness. It produces its own
plentiful supply of hair-sliirts with no transcendent goal
offered to make the wearing of the shirt less painful. The
self-indulgent man lies down to sleep, but not to rest. The
self-restraints practised by the yogin at least aim at tran-
quillity rather than further agitation, concentration rather
than distractcdncss. His restraint has a higher end in view
than restraint; whereas indulgence has no higher end than
further indulgence.
At the present time die Occident is in a position where it
may be able to reassess the meaning and value oi yoga
methods. Western interest in the subject of psychology and
psychoanalysis can possibly be diverted into an exploration
of the deeper ranges of Eastern rnctaphysic.1 To Freud goes
much of die credit for making contemporary Western man
psychologically self-conscious. The resemblance between
psychoanalysis and the preliminary phases of yoga has been
aptly commented on by Alan W. Watts. ‘The first phase of
yoga consists in distinguishing die Seer from die seen, the
via negativa of realizing that the Self is not any known object.
Likewise, psychoanalysis aims to know the unconscious
objectively. It makes us aware that what we project is
actually within ourselves, but the moment we recognize any-
thing within ourselves, wc have distinguished it from the
knowing Self. The practical function of psychoanalysis is to
heal the soul — that is, to get the whole psyche into conscious-
ness. For while some part of the psyche is unconscious, that
is, identified with the Self, it causes confused and unob-
jective reactions to life. For example, when we are un-
1 Cf. Geraldine Cosier, Yoga and Western Psychology (Oxford Univ. Press,
London, 1945).
51
THE ART OF YOGA
conscious of our own hostility, we project hostile motives
upon others, and so fail to establish rapport with
them.’ 1
The major drawback to the usual psychoanalytic treat-
ment is that it ‘docs not plumb the unconscious deeply enough
to reveal the Self and get it fully distinguished from the ego’;
thus ‘it docs not proceed, vnlhyoga, to understand the identity
of the Self with the infinite’. It is too concerned with a finite
operation, a specific terminus such as 'adjusting' the person
to a particular environment as though that were the highest
good.2
THE YOGA SUTRA OF PATANJALI
The basic assumption of Indian yoga is that there is a
wider world about us than we normally apprehend. This
wider world docs not include only that region termed the
sub-conscious in the West, but also a level of consciousness
extending beyond the normal waking states. The Indian
experimenters sought to chart something of die padiway to
that level of superconsciousness.3
The oldest literary source describings^ methods in some
1 A. W. Watts, The Supreme Identity , pp. 89-90.
1 American books on how to sleep, how to extend one’s memory,
how to relax, etc., are a form of pscudo-jc>£a. They tend to be based on
the assumption that the end of life is in terms of charm, money-making,
or ‘personality’. The goods and goals of a commercial society arc taken
quite seriously. This emphasis on a via affirmatioa of an advertiser’s para-
dise is hardly adequate preparation for the via negativa wherein one
learns to deny himself and, if need be, his particular society, in order to
discover the values that are eternal.
3 For an introduction to Hindu psychology and yoga, see Swami
Akhilananda, Hindu Psychology (Harper, N.Y., 1946).
52
THE ART OF YOGA
detail is the Toga Sutra of Patanjali.1 With Patanjali, yoga
stands lor the path of strenuous endeavour by which one
restrains the senses and the mind. The main emphasis is on
die methodical steps in die discipline. The Sutra represents
the crystallizadon of many ideas and pracdccs. Patanjali
specifies three stages in the discipline. All rest back on die
close connection between the mind and the body in Indian
thought. The embodied self is made up of three strands
( gunas ). One strand or component (the saliva guna) expresses
itself as tranquillity of mind, calmness of spirit, purity of
desire. The second component (die rajas guna) expresses itself
as aggressive activity, restlessness, passion. The third factor
(the tamos guna ) manifests itself as laziness, inertia and
stupidity. In varying degrees these three elements arc present
in each person. Each must seek to rise from the level of
tamas, through the life of action to die level of saliva, where
one is attached only to the pursuit of wisdom and inner
tranquillization.
It is the aim of yoga discipline, first, to overcome tamas by
rajas and then to overcome rajas through saliva. If the super-
ficial layers of consciousness are to be cut open so that the
inner Self may be realized, there must be ethical prepara-
tion. This is the first stage in the discipline. One must abstain
from injuring any living creature, from lying, theft, incontin-
ence and avarice. Non-injury means one must refrain not
only from overt violence but also from hatred.2 Those who
1 It has been dated all the way from the second century u.c. to the
third century a.d. Cf. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, vol. 2, pp. 341-
342, on the critical question. See Introduction by J. If. Woods to
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (Harvard Oriental Scries, vol. 17, Cambridge,
1927).
5 Toga Sulra II.20, 31, 34.
53
THE ART OF YOGA
commit themselves seriously to the path of yoga must also
practise five observances: purification, contentment, auster-
ity, study and devotion to Isvara (God-as-personal).1 These
ethical preparations are required regardless of time or place
or race.
The second stage involves bodily aids — posture, breath-
control, withdrawal of the senses from the objects — designed
to prepare the mind for single-mindedness. The body must
be in a convenient posture before meditation can begin.
Breathing exercises have been emphasized by the devotees
of Hatha yoga , though Patanjali mentions it as an optional
matter.2 {Hatha yoga tends to concentrate on the cultivation
of special psychophysical powers, sometimes to the neglect
of the larger spiritual goal.)
Withdrawal of the senses from the objective world is a
most important indirect aid to contemplation. To hold the
wandering mind, even for a matter of seconds, is very diffi-
cult, as simple experimentation shows. That complete mastery
of the ‘mind-stuff’ was not simple even for Indians is indi-
cated by the four kinds of incomplete mastery listed by the
commentators on Yoga Sutra II.55. There were apparently
some who assumed they had achieved complete mastery
simply when there was an absence of desire for various things.
Others held that attachment to things not specifically for-
bidden by the sacred writings was no hindrance to complete
mastery. A third group claimed that one could legitimately
enjoy any of the objects of sense so long as one was not
dependent upon them. Still others asserted that the senses
were properly ‘withdrawn’ or subjugated when one could
1 Yoga Sutra 11.3a; I.53.
* Ibid. I.33-34. Cf. Akhilananda, op. cit.y pp. 186-7, on Hatha poga.
54
THE ART OF YOGA
ihink about passion or aversion without pleasure or pain.
All of these masteries of the wandering senses as reflected in
the mind arc incomplete, for they are still in contact with
objects-of-sense. As such they arc dangerous. ‘Even a man
who knows the lore of poisons and who is a perfect master
of serpents docs not take a serpent on his lap and quietly
go to sleep.’ 1 The only complete mastery is when there is
singlcncss-of-intcnt, following upon the closing of the door
of the mind to all sense impressions.
All of these preparations arc a prelude to the third stage
which begins with fixed-attention and goes on to contempla-
tion or samadhi (frequently translated supcrconsciousncss: it
is the state of union, that is, yoga). The Self has now completely
realized its oneness with ultimate Reality, Brahmin. No de-
scription of this highest state can be given; one must ex-
perience it for himself.
By yoga, yoga must be known ,
Yoga increase th yoga’s store,
lie who for yoga care hath shown
In yoga rests for evermore .*
However, the Chandogya Upanishad suggests a clue to the
meaning of this unitivc state. India and Virokana are repre-
sented as coming to Prajapati for instruction concerning the
Self. They desire to know the Self that is free from sin, old
age, death, grief, hunger and thirst; the Self ‘which desires
nothing but what it ought to desire’.3 Prajapati first tells them
» Toga Sutra II.55, with Vyasn’s comment and the explanation by
Vachaspati-Mishra.
2 Toga lihashya III.G.
5 Chandogya Up. 8.7.1.
55
THE ART OF YOGA
to look at their reflections in the water, to see whether they
can see the Self. They understand him to mean that the real
Self is the body which is reflected in the water. Indra returns
dissatisfied, pointing out that the body is not fearless, free
from hunger, old age, or death. Prajapati then proceeds to
give die second lesson about the Self. ‘He who moves about
happy in dreams’, says Prajapati, ‘he is the Self; this is the
immortal, the fearless; this is Brahman: Indra meditates on
this, mindful of the fact that in the dream state the person
moves about with a great deal of freedom from restricting
conditions. Then he remembers that one can be quite con-
scious of pain, tears and struggle in a dream. ‘I see no
good in this’, he comments, and returns for his third
instruction.
Prajapati then proceeds to give Indra the lesson for which
he is now ready. ‘When a man falls asleep, reposing, and at
perfect rest, secs no dreams, that is the Self; this is the im-
mortal, the fearless; this is Brahman: This tcaclting implies
to Indra that the Self has ‘gone to utter annihilation’. Praja-
pati then explains to him the significance of the simile of deep
sleep: In deep sleep there is no duality; the distinction of
subject and object fails away; there is no sense of struggle nor
of pleasure and pain. Hence die state of dreamless sleep
provides a clue to the meaning of samadhi, or superconscious-
ness.1 In this state there is a complete suspension of all
ordinary faculties. Alter one has emerged from it there
remains the intuidon of a state of consciousness which eludes
all description, even as one who sleeps without dreams can-
not describe what has happened in die interval.2
1 Chandoga Up. 8.7.1-12; 6.8. 1-2.
* Cf. Watts, op. cit.y p. 152 n.
56
THE ART OF YOGA
YOGAS FOR DIFFERENT TEMPERAMENTS
Patanjali’s interpretation of yoga was out of the reach of
the average man — the farmer, the hewer of wood, the drawer
of water. It was a 'royal path’ (Raja yoga). The members of
the mercantile and peasant castes could rarely spare the
time for the prolonged periods of meditation possible to an
upper-caste person. The masses of India were to follow a
much broader path — bhakti yoga combined with karma yoga.
Iihakti yoga usually is described as the pathway of faith or
loving devotion.1 It is a path familiar to many in the tradi-
tion of evangelical Christianity and popular Catholicism:
one finds salvation through devotion to Jesus as personal
lord and saviour. The cardinal feature of bhakti yoga is that
Reality is thought of in highly concrete, personal, even erotic
terms. The worshipper gives himself in loving devotion to
his Beloved.
Patanjali had introduced the idea of a personal God
(Isoara) in the first section of his Toga Sutras .2 It was not indis-
pensable to the rest of his system. Yet many Indians were to
use just such a concept to aid them in overcoming the
obstacles to spiritual realization. For those living in families
and earning a living in the market-places, devotion to a
personal God came to be the most commonly travelled way.
During the earlier period of the priestly commentaries,
the Brahmanas, karma yoga had stood for die way of ‘ritual’
works. Before the production of the Bhagavad Gita, it had
come to stand for the way of right action. In the Gita, karma
yoga is combined with bhakti yoga: every action is to be done
1 Bhakti, derived from the root bhaj, to serve.
a Toga Sutra I.23 ft‘.
57
THE ART OF YOGA
with devotion. The continuing popularity of the Gita indi-
cates that the high ideal of spirituality set forth in the tradi-
tional Indian teaching is meaningful to the common man,
who must, however, find his Self-realization in the midst
of his work. This world is not the Real world, yet it is the
finite arena within which one can find the Self that tran-
scends the world.
58
CHAPTER FIVE
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
‘The world is a bridge. Pass over it but do not build upon it.’ —
From the Persian.
Truth is not something which can be captured ‘once
and for all’ as rain water is caught in a vessel. Nor
is it something which can be passed on externally by
way of indoctrination. That is to substitute a husk for the
reality. Each person must go to experience to find the truth
of life. Whatever tradition or culture has nourished a person,
it has done its educational job well only if it has evoked from
him potentialities that were waiting to be quickened into
expression. Radhakrishnan has well said that ‘a tradition is
authentic when it evokes an adequate response to the reality
represented by it. It is valid when our minds thrill and
vibrate to it. When it fails to achieve this end, new teachers
arise to rekindle it.’ Coomaraswamy adds that ‘there cannot
be an absolute truth which is not accessible to direct
experience \x
Interpretations of highest truth will change as generations
1 S. Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavad Gita (Harper, N.Y., 1948), p. *S*j
Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, p. 237, n. 1. Radha-
krUhnan’s translation includes the Sanskrit text of the Gila in Romanized
letters, and is divided into verses. Hence it has certain advantages for
the new student. However, its notes may sometimes be conflising. The
translation by Swami Prabhavanandu and Christopher Isherwood
( Bhagavad-Cila , Marcel Rodd, Hollywood, 1944) can be highly recom-
mended as a parallel study; it can be read much more cusily than cither
Radhakrishnan's or Nikhilananda's. See Bibliography at end.
59
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
come and go. This means that tradition is always being
transcended as the timeless truth is being realized. Growth
in insight is an ongoing process, dynamic in its nature. The
Bhagaoad Gita 1 was die result of the appearance of new
teachers who sought to state man’s spiritual nature and
destiny in fresh terms appropriate to the age. The Gita is
called the most important single work ever produced in
India. It is a compendium of the whole Vcdic doctrine. In
eighteen chapters a dialogue is carried on between Arjuna,
a member of die warrior caste of ancient India, and Lord
Krishna, a personal incarnation of deity. The dialogue is
contained within the great Indian epic known as the Maha-
bharaUi .3 Many Indian commentators have pointed out that
it is not a specific chapter in one man’s history that is being
described here. Radier is it the history of every man.8
TO ACT OR NOT TO ACT?
The story opens with Arjuna hesitant and despondent on
the field of battle. A fratricidal war is about to begin in
1 'The Divine Song’, or 'Song of the Lord’.
* On the basis of it* archaic constructions and internal references,
Rudhakrislunm assigns the Gila to the fifth century n.c., hut he admits
the text may have received many alterations in subsequent centuries
(ofi. cit ., p. 14; cf. hi* Indian Philosophy, vo!. 1, pp. 522-5). For u critical
discussion of the original Gita, relation of the Gita to the Mahabharata,
to the Upanishads, etc., sec S. C. Roy, Thu Bhaganad-Gita and Modern
Scholarship (Luzac, London, 1941); Rudolf Otto, The Original Gita (Allen
& Unwin, London, 1939).
* In the Vaishnava scriptures the worshipper of Krishna is instructed
that the story of Krishna is not a history hut a process continuously
unfolded in the heart of man. (Coomaraswamy says that the pseudo-
historical Krishna and Arjuna arc to be identified with the mythical
Agni and Indra. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism , p. 5; cf. Buddha
and the Gospel of Buddhism, p. 236.)
60
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
which brother will be slaying brother. Before (he actual
outbreak of the lighting, Aijuna, who has stationed his
chariot between the two armies in order to have a compre-
hensive view, suddenly loses heart. He turns to Krishna, his
charioteer, and confesses that he cannot go through with it.
‘My mind is reeling Nor do I foresee any good by slaying
my own people in the fight. I do not long for victory, O
Krishna, nor kingdom nor pleasure.’ 1 His limbs fail him,
his mouth goes dry, his bow slips from his hand. Arjuna is
ready to toss in the sponge.
The dilemma of Arjuna is the dilemma of every man, the
commentators point out. Realizing in a moment of clarity
the ambiguous situation in which he is enmeshed, he secs
the contradictory impulses which have ruled him to the
present. Caught in the rip-tide of outer circumstances and
emerging insights, he loses his native assurance. What he has
been accustomed to doing now seems for the first time to be
impossible. Seeing routine actions and duties in a new light,
he loses his nerve. Confronted with the realization that he
has missed life’s real goal, his initial reaction is a desire for
flight, withdrawal for time for reflection.
After the statement of the problem in the first chapter,
the remaining seventeen chapters of the Gita arc devoted to
the line of reasoning which Lord Krishna is represented as
using to persuade Arjuna that there is no escape through
withdrawal.
THE PREDICAMENT ANALYSED
Since the conflict is an inner one, one cannot flee the field
of battle. One must accept the conflict and seek to win
* 1.30-32.
61
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
through to illumination. Each person is a battleground where
opposite forces meet. In experience nothing is wholly good
or wholly evil. In each man there is the godlike mind and
die demoniac mind. The endowments of the godlike mind
are steadfastness in knowledge, charity, self-control, forgive-
ness, freedom from malice and related tendencies. The
demoniac mind, on the other hand, is expressed in arrogance,
excessive pride, anger, avarice. These latter tendencies all
make for increasing bondage; the former point in the direc-
tion of deliverance.1 Only when one comes to see for himself
that die demoniac mind is the result of identification of the
real Self with what is partial and fragmentary is there genuine
deliverance. The real Self must become single-minded. ‘The
resolute understanding is single; but die thoughts of the
irresolute are many-branchcd and endless.' a This distractcd-
ness is the symptom of one’s having wandered away from
home.
The Gita follows the Upanishadic teaching that the real
Self, or Atman, is not to be equated widi the embodied or
fragmented self. Commentators on the Gita's concept of the
Self frequently paraphrase Jesus: In order to find one’s real
Self, one must give up his lesser selves. Why is there this
fight between the fragmented selves and die real Sell? It is
because of the law of karma, the law of cause and effect.
The law of kama expresses itself both through heredity and
through personal choice. The latter kind of karma is known
as acquired karma. Heredity conditions the setting for one’s
actions. The acquired habit-patterns of childhood and youth
condition the choices of maturity. To die extent that one’s
actions are strictly thought-less, or habitual, the person loses
* XVI. 1-5. * II.4i.
62
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
some of lu's margin of freedom. The causc-and-cftcct realm
submerges the real Self. The person becomes less able to
respond creatively to new situations that emerge. He becomes
less aware. Kama thus binds man to a fragment of himself,
or to a shadow-self. Habits once allowed a hold tend to
maintain their hold. The not-sclf or the forces of instinct
take over and dominate die real Self. In the figure of the
Katha Upanishad , the horses (the senses) get the reins (the
mind) in their teeth and run away with the chariot (the
psychophysical organism), and ignore the charioteer. The
problem is, how docs the charioteer get back into control?
If one’s energies arc dissipated in the pursuit of prostituted
values, how docs one become unified?
One of the first reactions which a person has when he secs
that lie has been living thoughtlessly has already been re-
ferred to— he tries to pull out of the struggle. Hut there is no
exit in that direction. Lord Krishna says to Arjuna, ‘If in-
dulging in self-conceit, thou thinkest “I will not fight”, vain
is this thy resolve. Nature will compel dice.* 1 Man may refuse
to accept the ambiguity of his predicament, but he is not
thereby released from his ambiguity. Like Pilate, one may
try to reject the problem of choosing, yet one’s total being
is choosing.
As a matter of fact, the person’s dilemma is worsened by
the refusal to meet the enemy on open ground. The forces
which a man refuses to meet at the level of open-eyed con-
sciousness burrow underground, becoming subterranean
compulsions driving him to further distractedness. In the
words of Krishna to Arjuna, ‘That which through delusion
thou wishest not to do . . . that thou shalt do even against
‘ XVIir.59.
63
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
thy will, fettered by thy own acts bom of thy nature.’ 1 To
refuse to achieve genuine Self-knowledge is actually to choose
further involvement.
The real Self must choose to know itself. To ‘choose’ flight
is not a choice but a blind compulsion which, like a para-
sitical growth, derives whatever force it has from the real
Seif which it is trying to ignore. Before choosing one must
reflect; only then can Krishna, the charioteer and the real
Self, take over. ‘Fixing thy thoughts on Me’, says Krishna,
‘thou shalt, by My grace, cross over all difficulties; but if,
from self-conceit, thou wilt not listen [to Me], thou shalt
perish. . . . Reflect on it fully and do as thou chooscst.* s
True choices arc made only when the person’s inner eye
is open. Reflection helps to open the eye of the understand-
ing. In this way the real Self gains the victory over the
shadow selves.
Indian thought has steadily avoided any attempt to ex-
plain die actuality of emotional or moral confusion in terms
of a personal Devil or a cosmic principle of evil. It has steered
clear of metaphysical dualism — the splitting of the universe
at its very core into two opposing principles, one of light
and the other of darkness. Its traditional interpretation of
spiritual and moral blindness, found in the Gila and else-
where, is today finding some parallel in Western psycho-
logical analysis.
According to the Gila, that which is evil in the personality is
itself derivative from die good or the result of a distortion
of the good. ‘What is man’s will and how shall he use it? Let
him put forth its power to uncover the Atman, not hide the
Atman. Man’s will is the only friend of the Atman. His will
1 XVIII.60. 3 XVIII.58, 63.
64
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
is also the Atman's enemy.’ 1 The lower self is not to be de-
stroyed but controlled by the will held steady in knowledge
of Brahman.
In other words, the talents, energies and potentialities of
any person can be utilized either in Self-fulfilling or in Self-
frustrating ways. A highly gifted neurotic uses his energies
and gifts to remove himself progressively further from his
true nature. The sharper his intellect, die greater his capacity
lor rationalization and self-deception. His very gills become
his inner enemy, keeping him from Self-knowledge. In Ori-
ental terms, until such a person becomes sick of his sickness,
die real Self cannot assert itself cffecdvely or become a real
friend. However, the suffering associated with die spiritual
sickness is a friend in disguise, a warning signal.
A person's confusion is also illustrated by his inability to
seek the right kind of happiness. According to the Gita ,
happiness is of three kinds. The lowest quality of happiness
is of die nature of the tamos guna (die strand in man’s nature
making for dullness and inertia). Tliis kind of happiness
deludes the person bodi at the beginning and at the end.
Above diat is the happiness afforded by the life of action (the
rajas guna)y arising from the contact of the senses with dicir
objects. These sense pleasures arc ‘like nectar at first but like
poison at the end’ and ultimately prove disappointing to the
maturing person. The third kind of happiness is of the nature
of t,lc sattva guna. This tranquil happiness arises from some
genuine knowledge of die real Self, and while it is like poison
at first, it is like nectar at the end.2
Each person must discover the qualitative differences be-
1 VI.5-6 (Prabhavanandn and Ishcrwood, of>. cit., pp. 80-1).
* XVIII.37-9.
E 65
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
tween, the different levels. The life of action is superior to the
life of inaction; so is the kind of happiness associated with it.
But both should be transcended by the higher kind of happi-
ness which is the by-product of Self-knowledge. Each indi-
vidual has his own particular temperament (the result of
the initial blending of the three gunas). Hence each person
must follow his own nature and earn his own insight. ‘Even
the man of knowledge acts in accordance with his own
nature. Beings follow their nature. What can repression
accomplish?* 1 The effects of past actions and of one’s funda-
mental nature must work themselves out. One should not
ignore them nor repress them, but understand them. Freedom
is conditioned by heredity and environment and by accumu-
lated habit-patterns. Motives may be mixed and clouded;
so arc all motives. ‘One should not give up work suited to
one’s nature . . . though it may be defective, for all enter-
prises are clouded by defects as fire by smoke.’ There is no
virtue in trying to be someone else. ‘Better is one’s own law
though imperfectly carried out than the law of another
carried out perfectly.’ a Each man can only be himself.
Why is it so difficult for a person to discover what it means
to be himself? The Gita follows the Upanishads in saying that
it is because of auidya, lack of awareness. This lack of insight
expresses itself in the symptoms of egocentrism. One is
attached to ‘the I, the me, and the mine*. The Gita describes
such confused persons as people obsessed with innumerable
cares. ‘Bound by hundreds of ties of desires, given over to
lust and anger, they strive to amass hoards of wealth, by
unjust means, for the gratification of their desires.’ They are
very attached to themselves and claim to be self-made. ‘This
» III.33. J XVIII.48; III.35.
66
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
today has been gained by me: this desire I shall attain; this
is mine and this wealth also shall be mine in future. ... I am
the lord, I am successful, mighty and happy.’ 1
Looked at more objectively, the condition of such people
is one of bewilderment and entanglement leading to a foul
hell. The gateway to tills hell is described by the Gita as
threefold— lust, anger and greed.2 These all arise from
attempts to dominate the not-self. In seeking to dominate,
man becomes a slave to that which he mistakenly seeks and
is doomed to perpetual dissatisfaction. The source of the
dissatisfaction lies less in the inadequacy of the objects than
in the confused expectations of the subject. Man seeks to
satisfy the basic need for Self-knowledge with objects that
have no lasting value.
More specifically, that which keeps a person from ‘being
himself’ is desire. Chapter III, verse 39, refers to the ‘in-
satiable fire of desire’. It is pointed out that such craving
has its roots in the mind as well as in the senses. It keeps a
man from wisdom or insight. It restrains him from achieving
victory over the strife of opposites. Peace is declared to be
possible only to the man who acts free from longing without
any sense of mincncss or egotism. It is not possible for tire
man who hugs his desires to achieve such peace. He who
allows his mind to run after the roving senses has his under-
standing carried away ‘even as a wind carries away a ship
on the waters’.3 Through following distorted desires man
cannot come to any genuine Self-knowledge. The anonymous
Christian saying—' ‘Nothing burns in hell save self-will’—
might be appropriately phrased, ‘Nothing burns in hell save
displaced desires.’
1 XVI.7-18; II.71. * XVI.21. * III.39, 4°; VI.5; II.70, 67.
67
TEACHINGS OF THE BIIAGAVAD CITA
Thus the Gita closes off a second blind alley down which
man tries to go when the battle seems unbearable. The flight
from life is ruled out since inaction is impossible to man:
‘No man can remain even for a moment without doing work
(karma).* 1 The lust for life is ruled out since it is a distortion
of man’s real needs. Where, then, is the middle path?
A CALI. TO DISINTERESTED ACTION
With both inaction and attached action ruled out, Arjuna
has only one alternative left— to act with detachment, or
disinterest. Only in non-egocentric action is there Self-
fulfilment. In the complete union of inner life and outer
calling man finds liis true nature. The key passage in the
Gita on disinterested action states, To action alone hast thou
a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action
be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment
to action Pitiful are those who seek for the fruits (of their
action).’ 2
To action alone hast thou a right. There are two distinct perils
in concentrating upon the anticipated results of action. The
first peril is a relatively external one: no finite creature can
long ignore the operation of the factor of contingency, chance
or fate. In Western terms there is no way to insure against
the future so far as individuals are concerned. Insurance
statistics may tell no lies, but neither do they tell any sig-
nificant truths. Man proposes, the future disposes— such is
life in a realm of contingency.
The second peril is even more acute. No man who post-
pones the search for meaning today in the expectation of
buying it tomorrow is really living. Nor is he truly teachable.
1 III-5- “ H-47, 49-
68
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
Tomorrow never comes. Man lives only in the now-moment,
never in the future-moment. Meanings can emerge only in
the lived- through experiences of the present. Meanings un-
appropriated today can never be brought back tomorrow —
by material rewards, the ministrations of religion or by other
devices.
Fixation on the anticipated results of one’s actions thus
tends to separate the doer from the deed. On the other hand,
when a person is able to give himself wholly to the action
engaged in, the whole self is fulfilled. Compensatory activ-
ities are unnecessary, since the action is integral. When
integral meanings arc not found, distorted meanings arc
sought as a substitute, but they have no continuity. At best
they case pain. At worst they prevent a person from finding
more of his real Self. In place of continuity of meaning, the
individual settles for atomistic experiences that haunt with
their unsatisfactorincss. It is like trying to string beads with-
out thread.
DEVELOPING ‘SKILL IN ACTION’
How does a person learn to act without egocentric attach-
ment? In answering this question the Gita redefines yoga as
‘skill in action’ or art in living. Men who would identify
spirituality with strict austerities or self-torture arc severely
censured by the Gita. Of such people Krishna comments,
‘Those men, vain and conceited and impelled by the force
of lust and passion, who perform violent austerities which arc
not ordained by the scriptures, being foolish, oppress the
group of elements in their body and Me also dwelling in the
body. Know these to be demoniac in their resolves.’
The extreme ascetic is not an artist. The Gita is quite
69
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
aware of the self-delusion from which the ascetic frequently
suffers. ‘He who restrains his organs of sense but continues
in his mind to brood over the objects of sense ... is said to
be a hypocrite.’ Such a person rejects the objects of sense
while his taste for them remains. One should neither fight
the senses nor the taste for the objects, for this is to bind
oneself to them. The man of disciplined mind can move
among the objects of sense free from attraction as well jus
aversion. Only he attains purity of spirit.1
The Gita is highly selective in what it draws from Patan-
jali's Yoga Sutra. One is advised to seek a quiet place where
he can be free of anxieties. He does not necessarily leave the
householder state. Wherever he is, his prime duty is to prac-
tise moderation in all tilings. 'Yoga is not for him who cats
too much or abstains too much from eating . . . who sleeps
too much or keeps awake too much.’ Skill in action means
developing a discriminating mind.2
The Gita's ‘science of the Self’ is thus an exploratory pro-
cess of discovering meanings that authenticate themselves.
All other arts and sciences are to be subordinated to the
search for worthful integration having a cosmic base. A
skeptic may deny the validity of such experiences until he
has explored for himself. Just as the experience of healthy
digestion is qualitatively and indisputably different from
the experience of indigestion, so is the experience of reinte-
gration at die opposite pole from a split personality. He who
learns how to free his actions from inner constrictions knows
intuitively the meaning of Self-realization.
Such a person, according to the Gita, gains a great sense
of freedom. He is no longer bothered with cravings, he is
x XVII.5-6; III. 6; II.59, 70, 64. 8 VI.16, 10, 19, 23.
70
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
poised in the midst of sorrow; he does not long after happi-
ness, he is free from fear and rage. Just as a tortoise instantly
draws in its limbs when threatened, the enlightened man
withdraws his attention from objects or attitudes that tend
to enslave him.1 Actions which previously combined healthy
motivation with egocentric striving now become spontaneous
and free. One is at case within himself. The sense organs do
their appropriate work, and the mind docs its work. The
resulting peace of spirit is not disturbed by passing moods of
defection. Outwardly active, such a person is inwardly calm.
He is Self-possessed in a way that the distracted person can
never be. Others begin to emulate his character.2
Everything the enlightened person docs is an act of wor-
ship, for worship is a matter of non-egocentrism. ‘He who
does work for Me, he who looks upon Me as his goal, he who
worships Me, free from attachment, who is free from enmity
to all creatures, he goes to Me.’ ‘Whatever thou docst, what-
ever thou eatest, whatever thou ofTcrcst, whatever thou
givest away, whatever austerities thou dost practise— do that
as an offering to Me.’ 3
The capacity for this kind of worship is in every man.
This liberated state (sometimes described also as Brahmanir-
vana — the beatitude of God) can be achieved here and now.
He who enters into it receives a sensitized spirit and con-
science. He works with a new sense of the interconnectedness
of all society. The old prejudices fall away — whether of race,
class or creed. ‘The wise sec the same in all — whether it be
a brahmin endowed with learning and humility, or a cow
• IX. 28; II.55, 56; VI. 19; II.57.
a III.20, 21; V.31; I II. 42; XIV.22, 23; IV.20, 22, 41.
3 XI.55; IX.27.
7*
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
or a dog or an elephant or an outcastc.’ Compassion be-
comes all-inclusive. ‘He who secs with equality everything,
in the image of his own self, whether in pleasure or in pain,
he is considered a perfect yogi.’ 1 The test of spirituality is
the quality of one’s relationship to everyone, both friend and
foe. This is worship in its highest sense, according to the
Gita. Personal devotion to Lord Krishna, the incarnation of
God, is the vehicle offered to those who travel the path of
dedicated work ( karma and b ink li yoga).
KRISHNA’S INCARNATIONS
The Gila teaches that there have been many incarnations
(aoatarana, literally ‘descents’) of the divine in human form.
The concept is related to several aspects of the earlier tradi-
tion of the Myth. The Supreme Self or Supreme Light (the
Solar Deity of the mythology) ‘descends’ to be a light to
those in darkness. Or again, as in the Btahmanas, after the
sacrificcr has emptied himself out in the burnt-offering
and has thus discovered ‘Who’ he is, he returns to the
world.2
The descent of Krishna into the finite world is closer to
the mythological figure than to the ritualistic figure just
mentioned. Krishna descends into the world not because of
any need on his part, but because of the need of mankind.
It is man, cut off temporarily from awareness of his real
Selfhood, who needs to rediscover ‘Who’ he is. Krishna thus
descends not because of any compulsion or external ncccs-
* V.24; III.Qo; V.18; VI.29; V.25, 18; VI.32; XIV.25.
* Satapatha Brahmana III.3.3.10; Tailliriya Samhita 1. 7.6.6, VII. 3.10.4;
Pancavimsa Brahmana XVIII. 10. 10; Aitartya Brahmana IV.21. Cf. Cooma-
raswainy, Hinduism and Buddhismf pp. 23, 31.
72
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
sity, but in sport or ‘play’.1 The Upanishads teach that the
relation of man’s true Self to this transient world is ‘like
the dewdrop on the lotus leaf’, touching it but not adhering
to it.2 The Self has ‘descended’ into the body or impinges
upon it, but is not to be equated with it.
The Krishna of the Gila says, ‘Whenever there is a decline
of dhamui (righteousness) and a rise of adharma (unrighteous-
ness), I incarnate Myself.’ s This incarnation takes place in
an inscrutable way through maya.
An analogy drawn from Western psychology may be
partially helpful here to the novice. The term autocorreclivism
is used to describe the innate tendency of the human organ-
ism to correct out-of-balance tendencies. Painful neurotic
symptoms, for example, seem to be evidence of nature’s
attempt to restore equilibrium in the psychophysical organ-
ism. This inbuilt gyroscope is not of man’s construction or
willing. Yet when adharma (dis-cquilibrium) has proceeded
too far, dliarma (equilibrium) seeks to re-establish itself. . . .
In the Gila this is projected on a cosmic scale. Dharma is basic
to the structure of the entire cosmic process at its higher level.
Adharma is its temporary deviation at the level of mayay where
the world is understood only fragmentarily.
It is possible that the category of maya may not seem so
baffling, at least at the psychological point of view, if this
analogy is pushed further. When a distracted or emotionally
sick person comes to a critical turning-point in his relation-
ship, he is cither precipitated into complete mental illness
1 Krida, lila. The life of this finite world is a kind of divine ‘play’, in
the sense that sunlight 'plays' on die waves of a lake. The concept of the
‘sport’ of Krishna is a popular part of Indian religious life, recorded in
song and legend.
2 Chandogya Up. 4.14.3; cf. Mundaka Up. 3.8.
73
8 IV.7.
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
(where he cannot assume any responsibilities effectively),
or he suddenly achieves new insight into his problem.
Whence this new insight? What arc its dynamic roots? Why
does it lead the previously distraught person on into creative
areas of experience hitherto unexplored or unrealized?
Modern psychologists would like to know the answers to
questions like these. However, the mystery of the relation-
ship between a fragmented or shadow self and the real Self
has not yet been resolved or understood clearly. In Hindu
thought, among other meanings, maya stands for the in-
scrutable process whence the redemptive forces spring. Those
who desire to ‘know’ the process truly must give themselves
to the experimental process with all their resources. It is
not to be grasped from a spectator point of view, of that the
Indian sages are quite sure.
The Gita makes clear, in any event, that the theology of
incarnations can only be understood from within. The in-
carnation is not a mystery to be accepted ‘on faith* , or least
of all ‘on authority*. It is something to be discovered or
uncovered. An incarnation that happened only ‘once for
all* would have no real value, from the Hindu standpoint.
The incarnation stands for an eternally operating principle
and is not dependent upon a local izablc event in past history.
This point of view, developed consistently, frees man from
undue servitude to historical facts interpreted in a fixed
way or by an institution claiming to preserve the ‘correct*
interpretation of those ‘facts*.
• ALL PATHS LEAD TO THE SUMMIT
The West has commonly been inclined to regard its reli-
gion as ‘the only way’ to salvation. All other pathways have
74
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
been regarded cither as false or as inferior ways to the sum-
mit. The Gita reflects die much deeper understanding of
the Indian mind with reference to the unity of truth and the
diversity of pathways. The Gita rejects die chosen people
complex forthrightly. ‘I am alike to aU beings,’ Krishna says
to Arjuna. ‘None is hateful nor dear to Me. But those who
worship Me with devotion arc in Me and I also in them.’
The resources for release ( moksha ) arc available to all without
favouritism. Not all may use the cosmic resources equally,
yet they arc there to be appropriated.1
There is diversity of pathways, however, since each
person is unique by virtue of heredity and environment.
Each must find and follow his own path. Though the path-
ways vary indefinitely in detail, all of diem lead to a com-
mon summit. ‘In whatsoever way men approach Me,’ states
Krishna, ‘even so do I reward them; for it is My padi that
men follow in all things.’ 3 Here is the note of complete
catholicity. The honest believer does not cling to map,
symbols or creeds, for he knows dial each is relative to his
own place on the path.
If all padiways lead to the summit, even popular religion
of the unrcflcctivc sort seems to receive a kind of blessing.
Should there not be a premium upon discernment? Hindu-
ism has been quite tolerant of popular religious practices,
as many Western interpreters have stressed. The Gila is not
intolerant regarding the forms of popular faith which inter-
mingle with credulity; but it does not teach that such forms
are to be preferred to higher forms. ‘Man is of the nature
of his faith: what his faith is, that, verily, he is.’ ‘Whatever
form any devotee with faidi wishes to worship, I make that
1 IX.29,32. » IV.11.
75
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
faith of his steady.’ This passage might be taken as an
example of overlooking die fact that a person’s faith can
be attached to the wrong kind of object, thus involving him
in further emotional confusion. But the immediately follow-
ing verse points out that the fruits of such worship arc quite
temporary. The worshippers of lesser forms of good may
cling to their symbols, concepts, or objects of devotion; but
they thus miss the supreme good for which they arc designed.1
Those who rejoice in the letter of the Vcdic scriptures, who
arc intent on heaven and concerned with the details of reli-
gious rites, arc undiscerning persons. ‘As is the use of a pond
in a place flooded with water everywhere, so is that of all
the Vedas for the Brahmin who understands.’ The popular
forms of religion lead to confusion. ‘When thy intelligence,
which is bewildered by the Vcdic texts, shall stand unshaken
and stable in spirit, then shalt thou attain to insight (yoga).* 2
The illumined person, however, must be quite under-
standing in his approach to the devotees of the popular cult,
‘lie should engage them in action, himself performing it with
devotion.’ The example carries its weight by contagion, not
by coercion. Helping others to find flic way to freedom is
the highest form of service. ‘There is none among men who
does dearer service to Me than he,’ says Krishna.3
The Gita is theistic in that Lord Krishna is thought of as
a personal form of deity. But its theism is a pedagogical
device or a pointer. He who does not need theistic language
can move ahead without being criticized. Through lack of
understanding, a person mistakes the form for the reality
or the signpost for the objective. In popular forms of rcli-
1 XVII.3; VII. ai, 23. 5 II.42-3, 46, 52, 53.
J III.26; XVIII.67-9.
76
TEACHINGS OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA
ijious devotion God or die gods tend to be thought of as
being ‘out there’; they become objects in a world of objects.
This is picture-thinking, necessary at certain levels of human
development. All of life is a school, however. Everything in it
—including pictorial concepts— are of value to the extent
that they help each person find his true Self. To this end all
non-egocentric action contributes.
These arc some of the suggestive insights of the Hindu
tradition as focused in the Gita. The best-known modern
Indian examplar of die way of life indicated by die Gita —
Mahatma Gandhi — died on January 30, 1948, at the hands
of an assassin. Non-violence (ahimsa) for Gandhi included the
practice of outgoing love. His own interpretadon of the Gita
stressed the fact that the battlefield, described in the opening
chapter of the Gita, lay in die heart of each man. One must
work for good ends, even fight for diem in non-violent ways,
but with no attachment to the expected results. Shortly
before his death he said to an American interviewer, ‘Re-
nunciation of die fruits of acdon does not mean that there
can be no fruits. Fruits are not forbidden. But no action
must be undertaken for the sake of its fruits. This is what the
Gita means.’ 1
As few leaders of the masses of men have done, Gandhi
laboured selflessly to improve the lot of die common people
while reminding them, by precept and example, that the
life of the spirit was of more transcendent importance than
the life of the body. His own career was an extended com-
mentary on the Bhagavad Gita.
1 Vinrent Shewn, Uad , Kindly Light (Random House, N.Y., 1949),
p. 185.
77
CHAPTER SIX
TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
‘Happiness he who seeks may win if he practise the seeking.’
‘The burdened earth is sprinkled by the rain,
The winds blow cool, the lightnings roam on high.
Eased and allayed the obsessions of the mind,
And in iny heart the spirit’s mastery.’
Psalms of the Buddhist Brethren.
RRAHMANISM AND BUDDHISM
There is an uninterrupted continuity of traditional
teaching running through Brahmanical and Buddhist
thought. This has frequently been obscured by
Western interpreters, who have lifted certain elements out of
their context and dealt with them in such a way as to show
their own European predilections. It has been said that ‘the
more superficially one studies Buddhism, the more it seems
to differ from the Brahmanism in which it originated; the
more profound our study, the more difficult it becomes to
distinguish Buddhism from Brahmanism, or to say in what
respects, if any, Buddhism is really unorthodox.’ In the
earliest period, there is no evidence of fundamental doctrinal
opposition between Brahmanism and Buddhism.1 The
Buddha himself is reported to have said, ‘I have seen the
1 Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 45; Buddha and the Gospel
qf Buddhism, p. 198. Cf. Mrs. Rhys Davids, 'Relations Between Early
Buddhism and Brahmanism’, Indian Historical Quarterly, X, 1934, p.
282.
78
TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
ancient Way, the Old Road that was taken by the formerly
All-Awakened, and that is the path I follow.’ 1
One source of the apparent doctrinal opposition between
Buddhism and Brahmanism arises from the fact that Bud-
dhism was opposed to ‘the Brahmans of the court’ — men
preoccupied with the outward show of the ritual, thriving
on comfortable fees from their royal protectors, proud of the
fact that they were ‘Brahmans by birth’. The Buddha’s low
estimate of the hereditary Brahmans was not out of step with
the Upanishadic criticism of the false priests who were not
‘k no wei-s of Brahman' (Brahmauit). The Upanishadic attitude
toward the worldly-minded priests is expressed in a satirical
passage of the Chandogya. A group of dogs come together for
a meeting, under the leadership of a white dog. The dogs
request food from a person who has withdrawn to a quiet,
spot in order to meditate. The white dog asks the other dogs
to return in the morning. The following morning back comes
a procession of dogs. Each dog clutches the tail of the pre-
ceding dog in his mouth, imitating one of the stately cere-
monies wherein each priest held on to the gown of the priest
preceding him in the processional. In unison the dogs recite
the sacred word ‘Om, OmI Let us eat. Om! Bring us food.
Lord of food, bring hither food, bring it. Om!’ 3 Apparently
for many the priesthood had become a racket, properly sub-
ject to this kind of satire.
That masses of the people had been left uninstructcd by
the Brahman class is indicated by a passage from another
writing. ‘While at Uruvela Sakya [Gautama] called to mind
1 Samyutta Nikaya II.106.
* Chandogya Up. 1.12. 1-5. Cf. Brihadaranyaka Up. 2.4.6.; Chardogya Up.
5.3.10; Kalha Up. 2.23; Mundaka Up. 1. 2.4-7.
79
TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
all the different forms of penances which people in his time
were in the habit of submitting to and which they thought
raised the mind above all carnality. “Here”, he thought,
“am I bom among people who have no prospect of intel-
lectual redemption, crowded by revealers of the truth, with
diverse wishes, and at a time when their faculties arc wrigg-
ling in the grasp of the crocodile of their carnal wants. Stupid
men seek to purify their persons by diverse modes of austerity
and penance, and inculcate the same. Some of them cannot
make out their mantras [scriptural formulas]; some lick their
hands; some are uncleanly; some have no mantras ; some
wander after different sources; some adore cows, deer,
horses, hogs, monkeys or elephants. Seated at one place in
silence with their legs bent under them, some attempt great-
ness. Some attempt to accomplish their penance by inhaling
smoke or fire, by gazing at the sun, by performing the five
fires, resting on one foot or with an arm perpetually uplifted
or moving about on knees.’ 1 It was a time of confused people
and confusing religious practices.
Buddhism has sometimes been contrasted with Brahman-
ism because of the former’s alleged atheism. This epithet
derives both from Western liking for short-hand labels and
from woeful ignorance of what Gautama was trying to say.
‘In reality, Buddhism is no more “atheistical” than it is
“thcistic” or “pantheistic”; ... it docs not place itself at the
point of view where these various terms have any meaning.’ 2
‘ Lalitaviitara , quoted in Radhakruhnan, Indian Philosophy, vol. I,
pp. 355-6, footnote (slightly abbreviated). Cf. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism
and Buddhism, p. 46.
1 Rene Guenon as quoted in Marco Pallia, Peaks and Lamas (Knopf,
N.Y., 1940), p. 177.
80
TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
What is involved in this statement will become clearer in
subsequent paragraphs. Buddhism is no more of a deviation
from the traditional Indian doctrine on all fundamental
matters than the Upanishads. If both movements have been
called ‘Reformations’, it is only in the sense that the ‘estab-
lished church* had lost its savour. No new doctrines were
formulated.
What is known about early Buddhism is derived primarily
from the literature of the Pali canon known as the Tripitaka,
or three collections. Pali is a literary dialect closely related
to Sanskrit. Western students of Buddhism became ac-
quainted with the Pali sources of the tradition before the
Sanskrit and Chinese sources. Hence a certain bias arose in
academic circles in favour of the interpretation of Buddhism
found in the Pali texts.1 The Pali Tripitaka consists of the
Vinaya Pitaka, which deals with the monastic regimen, the
Sulla Pitaka or the teaching collection, and the Abhidhamtna
Pitaka , which present* the more abstract side of the doctrine.
In this chapter and the following one we shall be dealing
with the teachings of the Pali canon. Many of the more
involved questions of interpretation cannot be dealt with
in detail here. Even so, the path is not always easy to follow.
None oilier than the Buddha is reported to have said that
the doctrine is ‘hard to be understood by you who arc of
different views, another tolerance, other tastes, other alle-
giance and other training.’ 2 Contemporary Westerners tend
1 The Buddhism of the Pali scriptures is also known by its later name
Hinoyana, meaning the Narrow Way or Little Vehicle. This term seems
to have been supplied by adherents of the Broad Wuy or Great Vehicle,
Mahayona.
2 Dif>ha Nikaya 1 1 1. 40.
F
81
TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
to be very much involved in the Life of the city, the market-
place, and the amusement hall. The Buddha, on the other
hand, teaches that man must leave the market-place in
order to understand the world for what it truly is.
oautama’s awakening
It is a mistake to try to understand Buddhism through a
study of ‘the historical Gautama’, for Buddhist leaching
negates personality as ordinarily understood. Yet many
Western students have written to praise him or to censure
him.1 The significant events, spiritually speaking, in Gau-
tama’s early life were the ‘Four Signs’ — an old man, a sick
man, a corpse and a monk. An over-protective father who
wanted his son to become a great earthly ruler (for Gautama
was of the royal caste) had kept the young man from contact
with old age, sickness and death. Tradition says that it was
the gods (devas) who assumed the four forms to acquaint the
Prince with tlte true facts about life. Thereupon Guatama
announced his intention of leaving the householder state,
and in spite of obstacles put in his path by his parent, lie
made his escape from the world of the palace.
For several years Gautama studied with Brahman teachers;
the tradition says he became as proficient as they were, but lie
was still unsatisfied. One of these teachers was a man named
Alara. Had Alara been a more capable exponent of the
traditional teaching of Brahmanism, it is possible that Gau-
1 One Christian scholar, desirous of showing the superiority of Jesus
to the Buddha, says that while Jesus died a young man on the Cross
because men refused to accept his teaching on love, Gautama died an
old man because of overeating. R. E. Hume, The World's Living Religions
(Scribners, N.Y., 1931), p. 81.
8a
TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
tama and also his followers would not have opposed so
vigorously what they understood to be false Brahmanical
doctrines. Coomaraswamy comments that the parting of
Gautama and Alara was one of the greatest tragedies re-
corded in religious liistory.1
Gautama also practised extreme asceticism or penance
(tapax — a Sanskrit word meaning heat, glow or torture).
Such extreme asceticism seems to have been commonly
regarded then as indispensable to achieving liberation.
Gautama was so thorough that he carried it to the point of
death. Perceiving die foolishness of it, Gautama decided to
take food and ever afterward taught a moderate form of
tapes* a teaching not at all out of harmony widi die Upani-
shads , which insisted that through knowledge alone could
moksha be realized.2
The tradition relates that after badting in a river near by,
.Gautama ate some milk-rice offered to him by a young
maiden, threw the golden bowl into die river and watched
it float upstream — an omen of his imminent enlightenment.
Five fellow-pilgrims who had been with him during the
period of extreme fasting meantime left him because he had
taken food. Gautama then sat down under a tree, deter-
mined not to rise until he had attained knowledge of the
causation and cure of evil, suffering and mortality. This tree
became famous as the ‘Bo-tree*— ‘Tree of Awakening’.3
Before die night was over Gautama had become a Buddha,
an ‘awakened one*, knowing the cycle of becoming for what
1 Coomaraswamy, Buddha and I he Gospel of Buddhism, pp. 19O-9.
* Ibid., p. 214.
3 For traditionul details, see Introduction to thejataka I.68.5 in H. C.
Warren, Buddhism in Translations, Harvard Oriental Scries, vol. 3 (Cam-
bridge, 1922), pp. 71 ft'.
TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
it was. In the joy of his new-found insight, he uttered his
famous song of victory:
Seeking the builder of the house
I have run my course in the vortex
Of countless births , never escaping the hobble {of death);
III is repeated birth after birth!
Householder , art seen!
Neoer again shall thou build me a house ,
All of thy rigging is broken ,
The peak of the roof is shattered:
Its aggregation passed awayt
Mind has reached the destruction of cravings.1
The Buddha remained for some time in the vicinity of the
Tree of Awakening, conquering all temptations, including
his initial hesitation to teach others something of what he
had realized. Thereupon he set out for the deer park in
Benares, where he found his five former associates. To them he
preached his first sermon, usually called ‘The Turning of the
Wheel of the Law’. This sermon provides as apt an entrance
as any into an understanding of the Buddha’s doctrine.
THE BUDDHA’S TEAOIIINO ON DUHKHA
Looked at negatively, the Buddha’s teaching is concerned
with the nature and origin of suffering and disharmony.
Viewed positively, it is concerned with the path to the highest
wisdom, to Nirvana* Actually, the teaching must be viewed
as a whole. Otherwise a Western, interpreter is inclined to
claim that Buddhism is ‘pessimistic’, since life as ordinarily
1 Introduction to thejataka I.76.17, verses 278 and 279, in Warren,
op. cit. The above translation is that of Cooinaraswumy.
* For detailed treatment of the meaning of Nirvana, sec the following
chapter.
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
lived is not an end in itself. ‘Human life is of supreme value
to the Buddhist as the only condition from which the highest
good can be reached. . . . But we have to recognize that the
quality of life is very varied, and Buddhism is far from optim-
istic about any and every sort of life, the mere fact of exist-
ence. . . . The common life of the world, according to
Gautama, is not worth living. . . . But on the other hand he
puts forward a mode of life for higher men which he regards
as well worth living, and claims that by this life the highest
good is attainable, and in this conviction that “Paradise is
still upon earth” he is anything but pessimistic.’ 1 It has
been well said that such words as optimism and pessimism
have no meaning in an investigation of truth. ‘Truth does
not need to be comforting; if some have found it so, so much
the better for them.’ 3
Looking at life steadily, Gautama tried to sec it as it truly
was. ‘How is there laughter, how is there joy, as the world
is always burning? Why do ye not seek a light, ye who are
surrounded by darkness? This body is wasted, full of sick-
ness and frail; this heap of corruption breaks to pieces. Life
indeed ends in death.’ 3 ‘I only teach two things, O disciples:
suffering ( duhikfia ) and release from suffering.’ Gautama
sought to break down the problem of suffering into manage-
able form. The Four Noble Truths arc a statement of the
problem and its solution.
The First Noble Truth is that of the fact of suffering.
‘Birth is suffering; decay is suffering; illness . . . death . . .
presence of objects we hate . . . separation from objects we
1 Coomaranwamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, p. 176.
2 Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas, p. 156.
1 Dhammapada XI. 146, 148.
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
love . . . not to obtain what we desire is suffering. Briefly,
the five-fold dinging to existence is suffering.’ 1 (The five-
fold clinging refers to the conditions of individuality or the
components of the empirical personality: body, feeling, per-
ception, will and reason.)
Gautama was profoundly realistic in starting with the
fact of suffering. It was a given which none could think of
denying and it called for no act of faith or acquiescence in
a secondary authority. Each man’s experience could speak
for itself here. Gautama’s analysis of the nature of duhkla
deserves careful study, for the evidence from the Buddhist
scriptures indicates that he used general terms with great
precision. Unfortunately there arc numerous general terms
in Pali that have no exact equivalent in English or any other
Occidental language. Duhkha is one of those words.
Duhkha is derived from two words — khan and dull. Khan
means hole or aperture. Tn the Kalha IJpanishad it is used of
the 'apertures’ of the body, designating the sense-organs
which provide contact with the outer world.2 Duh means
bad , and when combined with kham means ‘bad hole’.
When applied to the chariot analogy of the Upanishads , it
throws real light on the psychological dimension. ‘If the
central hole of a chariot was not properly made, the spokes
could not be properly fitted, and in travelling, the chariot
caused a jolt or jar. The traveller naturally experienced
discomfort under the circumstances. So duhkha meaning a
bad hole was transferred to mental discomfort. . . . Duhkha
1 The Four Noble Truths arc expounded in the Digha Nikaya, die
Majjhima Nikaya and the AnguUara Nikaya of the Sulla Pilaka, as well as
in the Vinaya Pilaka.
* Kalha Up. 2.1.1; 2.2.1. See comment by Nikhilananda, The Upani-
shads, vol. 1, p. 169.
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
denotes a state in which the sense-organs are injured, or
contaminated or become unsound. . . . Where there is dis-
turbance of harmony there is duhkha .’ 1
Such an interpretation throws additional light on the
First Noble Truth. Duhkha , interpreted as commotion, dis-
harmony or unrest in general, is a characteristic of the entire
phenomenal world. The psychological counterpart of this
constant agitation or ‘chafing’ in the world of becoming is
dis-case, irritability, unrest and pain or suffering.
To the person who is all-too-conscious of his own painful
states, the Buddha offers both consolation and admonition.
The consolation has nothing to do with the promise of future
compensation for present suffering, but consists in asking the
individual to sec ‘his sorrow not as “his own” but as world
sorrow, inseparable from life itself’ — an inherent character-
istic of finite existence.2 The admonition is to learn to sec
things as they truly are, without the dubious benefit of sweet-
smelling perfume.
The Second Noble Truth proceeds to the diagnosis of the
problem. ‘Now this is the Noble Truth as to the origin of
duhkha (suffering, dis-case). Verily it is the craving thirst
(tanha) that causa the renewal of becomings, that is accom-
panied by sensual delights, and seeks satisfaction, now here,
now there— that is to say, the craving for the gratification of
the senses, or the craving for prosperity.* 3
1 Jaideva Singh, ‘The Concept of Duhkha in Indian Philosophy’,
reprinted from the Ganganalha Jha Research Institute Journal, vol. a, part 4,
Aug. 1945, pp. 357-68; a paper read at the Indian Philosophical Con-
gress, Lucknow, Dec. 1944.
2 Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism , p. 148.
3 Hid., p. 40 (Coomaraswamy’s translation).
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
Suffering, then, arises from craving or attachment. But
Gautama does not let the analysis stop there. Craving roots
back in ignorance or unawareness. Man is ignorant both
of the real nature of things and of himself. Ignoring his real
nature, man identifies himself with what he is not. The cause
of all ‘wanting’ or craving is ignorance ‘for we “ignore” that
the objects of our desire can never be possessed in any real
sense of the word, ignore that even when we have got what
we want, we still “want” to keep it and are “in want”’.1
This is a profound insight that involves two important
Buddhist concepts: (i) the doctrine of karma, or the leaching
on the relation between action and ignorance; (2) the other
is the famous anatta (non-soul) doctrine.2 The first problem
will be discussed in the following chapter in connection with
the Third Noble Truth. The second question — what Gau-
tama taught regarding the real Self-will be treated here.
WHAT IS TIIE SELF (ATMAN)?
Most Western interpreters have made the mistake of
claiming that the Buddha denied the reality of a real Self.
Here, it is asserted, is one very specific place where it is
impossible to trace continuity between Brahmanical and
Buddhist teaching. Eastern scholars have pointed out that
this lies in a confusion of translation and in the lack of
recognition on the part of Western students of the two
entirely different uses of the word Atman. Atman for the
Buddhist stood for the soul or ego, belonging to the order or
1 Coomnraswamy, Hindusim and Buddhism , p. fis.
2 Alta is the Pali for the Sanskrit term Atman. The latter term will be
used throughout the discussion of Buddhism us it was in the chapters on
Hinduism.
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
finite phenomenal things. For the Brahmanical philosopher,
Atman stood for that which was beyond all phenomenal
existence and which could only be described as ‘not so, not
so* (neti, neti).
Gautama and his successors apparently directed their
attacks only against a popular variety of Brahmanism.
Gautama may have taken exception to the Atman terminology
without really understanding its deeper significance. Coom-
araswamy says there is nothing to show ‘that the Buddhists
ever really understood the pure doctrine of the Atman. . . .
The attack which they led upon the idea of soul or self is
directed against the conception of the eternity in time of an
unchanging individuality; of the timeless spirit they do not
speak, and yet they claim to have disposed of the theory of
the Alman\ In reality both sides were in agreement that the
soul or ego ... is complex and phenomenal, while of that
which is “not so** we know nothing.* 1
Gautama’s approach to the problem of achieving insight
was essentially clinical or experimental. All suffering was
traceable to craving. From craving comes clinging. Because
man craves something, he clings to it either in idea or in
fact. Craving and clinging arc thus conjoined like Siamese
twins. Gautama noticed that most people were clinging to
the idea of the Atman instead of searching out the roots of
their own ignorance. But ‘all that is, when clung to, falls
1 The smne holds true of the Buddhist atluck upon the concept of
Brahman. It was the popular conception of Brahman to which the Buddha
took exception. Goomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel oj Buddhism,
p. 199. Of. Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, I, p. a 98: ‘The neuter
Brahman is, so far as I am aware, entirely unknown in the Nikayas, and
of course the Buddha's idea of Brahma, in the masculine, really differs
widely from that of the Upanishads.'
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
short’. Even a theory or concept of the supreme Real could
be a stumbling-block. ‘It is not the time to discuss about
fire for those who arc actually in burning fire’, Gautama
taught. ‘It is the time to escape from it.’ 1
The Buddha refused to speculate about the Self lest people
cling even more tenaciously to their own notions of tlu: Self.
He who is clinging to life or his ideas about it, identifies him-
self with his individuality, the T. The ego or personality is
only a temporary manifestation, a changing appearance.
One should negate the ego, not ‘express’ it. For such expres-
sion is thoughtless and leads to further distraction. The
Dhammapada says that ‘the thirst of a thoughtless man grows
like a creeper; he runs from life to life, like a monkey seeking
fruit in the tree. Whomsoever this fierce thirst overcomes,
full of poison, in this world his sufferings increase like the
abounding Birana grass.’ 2
There arc many passages in the Buddhist scriptures which
indicate that Gautama assumed the reality of a Self. ‘There
is an unborn, an unoriginated, an unmade, an uncom-
pounded; were there not, O mendicants, there would be no
escape from the world of the born, the originated, the made
and the compounded.’ There is a story of how the Buddha,
on the way from Benares, met a party of thirty young men
who had been picnicking with their wives. One of the group,
having no wife, had brought along a woman companion who
had seized an opportune moment to run off with all the
belongings of the others. The men were trying to locate the
feminine thief. ‘What now, young men, do you think?’ asked
the Buddha. ‘Which were the better for you, to go tracking
1 Majjhima Nikaya, I, p. ag. * Ibid., 3a; Dhammapada, 334, 335.
3 Udana VIII.3.
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
the woman or to go tracking the Self?’ 1 The men decided
that seeking the Self was more important and were converted.
Other passages distinguish between the ‘Great Self’ [mahat-
man) and the ‘little self’ (alpatman), and between the ‘Fair
Self’ and the ‘foul self’. The Dhammapada comments, ‘One’s
own self is indeed difficult to subdue. Self is the lord of self,
who else could he the lord? With self well subdued, a man
finds a lord such as lew can find.’ 3
There is a higher Self through which one conquers the
lower, fragmented self. Yet the Self cannot know ‘what’ it is,
because it is ‘no what’. All that one can safely say of anything
that passes as the real Self is, That is not my Self’. This
formula is used repeatedly when Gautama is analysing the
nature of the embodied self or personality. The ‘stream of
consciousness’ composed of its ‘grasping aggregates’ changes
ceaselessly: the body, feelings, ideas, volitions arc never fixed.
‘Just as the one word “chariot” is but a mode of expression
for axle, wheels, chariot-body, pole, and other constituent
members, placed in a certain relation to each other, in
exactly the same way the words “living entity” and “Ego”
are but a mode of expression’ for the joint activity of the
personality. No wise person will identify a portion of his
experience with himself and say, ‘This is mine; this am I;
this is my Self.' 3
The Buddha could rightly reply to criticisms that he was
‘unorthodox’ on this matter: ‘Naughtily, falsely and against
1 Vinaya I.23 (Maliavagga 1. 14). Cf. Coomnraswaray, Hinduism and
Buddhism , p. .*>5.
* Angullara Nikqya I.57, 58, 149, 349; V.88; Sulla Mpala 77O, 913;
Dhammapada 159, 160.
0 Visuddhi-Magga, eh. 28 (Warren, op. cit., pp. 133-4); Maha-Nidana
Sulla 258.21 of the Digha Nikaya (Warren, pp. 135 IT).
9'
TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
the Tacts am I charged with being a misleadcr and a teacher
of the cutting off, destruction and non-entity of what really
is.’ 1 A passage in the Digha Nikaya can conclude this dis-
cussion of the Self. In his last instructions to his followers
Gautama said, ‘Be such as have the Self (Atman) as your
lamp, Self as only refuge, the Law as lamp and only refuge.’ 2
To refuse to say of any passing experience, ‘This is my
Self’, is not to say, ‘There is no Self*. Man can learn from
his experiences, transient though they arc, for he can observe
how the contingent factors operate. It is not fruitful to raise
the question, ‘Whose consciousness is this?’ for the only
practical question is 'How did this state of consciousness
arise?’ 3 Man’s destiny is not to identify himself with partial
experiences or partial interpretations. Man needs only to
learn how to cross the turbulent stream of craving. Man
cannot do this if he remains on the bank of the stream
theorizing about the Self. Once in the stream he must swim,
not cling. A barnacle gives up swimming and settles down
for life; man is not made to be a barnacle.
cautama’s exploratory method
Gautama’s refusal to deal with the Self speculatively is
typical of his radical exploratory method. He is no modern
‘empiricist’ reducing everything to the measurable. Nor is
he a speculative philosopher seeking to solve problems in
terms of logical categories or neatly constructed theories.
Both the empiricist and the speculative philosopher call upon
1 Majjhima Nikaya 1. 137.
9 Unfortunutdy this passage is frequently mistranslated, 'Be ye lamps
unto yourselves . . .’ But the Pali has no plural. Digha Nikaya II. 101
(Coomaraswamy’s translation). Cf. Samyulta Nikaya 111.143: ‘Make the
Self your refuge.’ 3 Samyutla Nikaya II. 13, 61.
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
their followers to ‘believe’ either what they sec (that is,
measure) or say (ideas, concepts). Gautama is unfriendly to
both such approaches to life. Because of the period in which
he lived, he was especially opposed to those who had ‘views’
or closed systems of thought. He wanted each person to get
a {mint from which to view the human scene in its proper per-
spective. No one could get the right point of view while
clinging to views. Gautama’s call was to rigorous exploration
of the ‘Way’. His was an appeal for concentrated effort of
the will leading to actualization.
Honest exploration meant refusal to accept the neatly
catalogued answers of the past as definitive. The forests of
India at that time were apparently filled with persons lost
in the jungle of speculations divorced from the dynamic
roots of the life process. The Buddha sought to mark out a
Middle Path — a razor’s edge between rationalism gone
sterile and dogmatic denial of the place of reason in the
preliminary stages of exploration. For him, reason was to be
used as a sharp tool for cutting away the undergrowth in
one’s own thinking, not for hacking at opponents. Sixty-two
schools of philosophy were holding forth in Gautama’s part
of the world. He refused to be drawn into their bickerings.
Man’s true end was to achieve liberation from the bondage
of the finite world. That could not be realized if one sold
his soul for a mess of metaphysical pottage or namc-and-
famc in the schools. ‘Happiness he who seeks may win if ht
practise the seeking.1'
Gautama did not find it easy to keep each seeker in touch
with the concrete aspects of the problem. Not all of his asso-
ciates had an equally keen awareness of the dangers implicit
in dealing with a human problem primarily on the level of
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
abstract concepts. This is well illustrated by a story in the
Sulta-Nipata. One day a certain teacher came to Gautama to
instruct him in purity. True purity, Gautama was told,
comes only from philosophy. Gautama’s reply was typical —
inward peace comes neither from philosophy nor from the
absence of philosophical opinions. He who holds to a philo-
sophical position is concerned with defending it. This leads
to disputation with rival opinions which in turn leads to
pride, arrogance and conceit. Actually, one should get to the
place where he neither desires opinions nor their absence.
The genuine sage is the man who has shaken oil' all ‘systems’
of philosophy. Having no position to defend, he has no
special prejudice to plead.1
Furthermore, Gautama points out, thoughtfulness is not
to be confused with that kind of reasoning which is the
standard practice of the world of philosophers. The wise
person will practise thoughtfulness in the sense of becoming
aware. Awareness is not increased by speculation such as the
worldling engages in. Too many people make the mistake
of going from philosopher to philosopher, seeking final truths.
(Had not Gautama himself gone through this phase in his
pilgrimage?) Such people ‘following their desires, do not
break asunder their ties; they grasp, they let go like a monkey
letting go the branch just after having caught hold of it’.
Grasping one philosophical position after another, they
wander about in the world annoying people. In contrast to
the emotional and intellectual confusion of such people, the
Buddhist sage does not cling to anything — ‘to what is seen,
heard, or thought’. 2
1 Sutta Nipata IV.9.1-13; 8.1-11; 3.1-8; 5.1-8.
* Ibid. IV.4.4.; 9.13; 6.9; 12.1-7; 13.1-20; 14.5.
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
Gautama makes the same kind of comment when a cer-
tain person asks him whether the world is eternal or non-
eternal, finite or infinite. Such a question was considered
quite respectable in most of the best circles of that time.
Gautama’s reply cuts through to the core of the man’s prob-
lem: ‘The religious life docs not depend on the dogma that
the world is eternal; nor docs the religious life depend on the
dogma that the world is not eternal. Whether the dogma
obtain that the world is eternal, or that the world is not
eternal, there still remain birth, old age, death, sorrow,
lamentation, misery, grief and despair, for the extinction of
which in the present life I am prescribing.' Such theorizing
is ‘a jungle, a wilderness, a puppet-show, a writhing, and
a fetter’. It does not lead in the direction of supreme wisdom.
Hence Gautama refuses to spin out another theory for his
questioner.
Another kind of question seems to have occurred rather
frequently: Is the person who has achieved deliverance re-
born? Such a question was more mundane than questions
about the world’s finitude or infinity. Apparently Upani-
sha/Iic teaching on immortality had not shilled the ground
very much for the average person who was still talking about
deliverance in terms of the popular theories of rebirth and
the after-lives. Postdated hedonism still had its appeal, and
negatively the threat of postdated punishment in another
life.
To face such a naive question while recognizing the
honesty of the questioner required patience and skill. Gau-
tama points out that it is not correct to raise the question
in that form at all. He appeals to the analogy of fire. A fire
burns only so long as there is fuel. The fire becomes extinct
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
when the fuel has been used up. It is pointless to ask where
the lire has gone— cast, west, north or south. It is equally
pointless to ask where the saint has gone. The person who has
been released from the ordinary forms and entanglements
of sensory life is ‘deep, unmeasurable, unfathomable, like
the mighty ocean. To say that he is reborn would not fit the
ease. To say that he is both reborn and not reborn would not
fit the ease. To say that he is neither reborn nor not reborn
would not fit the ease.* 1
In other words, blessedness or true joy cannot be verbalized.
Cessation of craving is something that can only be exper-
ienced from within. It has no necessary connection with the
next moment, the next year, or the next life, being anxious
about the morrow docs not help to solve the problem
today.
One of Gautama’s chief criticisms of religion and the
priestly system lies right at this point. Most religion arises
out of fear; the priests exploit this fear, especially as people
approach old age. Such people, sensing that the end of life
is near, put more and more emphasis on the offering of
sacrifices. What they arc really seeking is a continuation of
their present selves. They tremble at the thought of their end.2
Man in his cgocentricity clings to his ego. Conventional
prayer and the entire priestly system thus minister to his
ego and his anxiety. Nirvana, or blessedness, comes, however,
only to those who are thoughtful or aware— who ‘have
nothing in view’ and no special ego interests to plead. Since
Nirvana can be achieved only through seeking to understand
the causes of craving, it is a dangerous habit to pray to the
1 Majjhima Nikaya , suttas 63, 72 (Warren, op. cit., pp. 121-4, 125).
* Sulla Pfipata V.4.1-6; 6.2; 7.2.
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TEACHINGS OF EARLY BUDDHISM
gods, to men, or to his teacher for a removal of the
symptoms.
We have seen how Guatama, in the First Noble Truth, has
stated the nature of existence in a world of becoming — an
existence characterized by duhkha , suffering or dis-harmony.
In the Second Noble Truth he points out that duhkha roots
in craving or tanha, which in turn springs from ignorance
(avidya). In the Third Noble Truth, Gautama points out that
the condition of ignorance is not incurable. ‘This is the Noble
Truth of the cessation of suffering: (it ceases with) the com-
plete cessation of this thirst (tanha) — a cessation which con-
sists in the absence of every passion, with the abandoning
of this thirst, with the doing away with it, with the deliver-
ance from it, with the destruction of desire.’ 1
This is the Buddha’s doctrine of hope, an affirmation that
man can do something about his predicament. To see clearly
the ramifications of this teaching, it is necessary to under-
stand clearly the Buddhist doctrine of karma and its relation
to what is usually called the 'Wheel of Existence'.
1 Version of Vinaya Pitaka. Cf. Samyulta Ntkaya 22.85.1-56.
G
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CHAPTER SEVEN
ON FINDING THE WAY
‘The fool is like a lmir-fillcd water-pot,
The wise is like a full pool.’
‘To every man that is born, an axe is born in his mouth, by which
the fool cuts himself, when speaking had language.’
Sutla-ffipata.
Tf a man has stumbled blindly into quicksand, it is not
enough that he should be made aware of his predica-
ment or instructed to take the matter philosophically.
Positive steps must be taken to effect his rescue from the
quagmire. This is analogous to the human pilgrimage. He
who refuses to do anything about his involvement in the world
of flux and becoming after having discovered the real nature
of the marshy ground on which he stands sinks even lower.
According to Gautama, man docs not need to remain a
slave to craving. He does not need to remain bound to the
‘Wheel of Existence’. It is up to him to see to the roots and
gain freedom.
THE WHEEL OF EXISTENCE 1
In analysing the nature of the relationship between suffer-
ing and craving and ignorance, Gautama used the figure of
the Wheel. The circle representing the wheel is said to have
1 Prabhavananda points out that the image of the Wheel as applied
to birth, death and rebirth appears for the first time in extant Hindu
literature in the Swetasoatara Upanishad {The Upanishads , Breath of the
Eternal, p. 188).
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ON FINDING THE WAY
been first drawn by him in rice grains on the ground, and
was one of his earliest lessons to his followers. The Wheel has
twelve factors, all of them operative in the experience of the
unenlightened person. This Wheel has sometimes been re-
ferred to by interpreters of Buddhism as ‘the causal chain’.
This is definitely misleading. For one thing, it implies that
Gautama was trying to get back to a First Cause; as a matter
of fact, Gautama taught that the Wheel was without known
beginning. Neither did he mean to imply that some causal
‘entity’ passed over into an ‘effect’. Gautama spoke of ‘de-
pendent origination’ and was concerned with making clear the
steps whereby a person tied up in the knots of egocentrism
and blindness could begin to see that the present phase of his
existence was not the whole chapter in the book of becoming.1
Bearing in mind Gautama’s non-spcculativc concern, let
us look at the Wheel more closely. While the twelve factors
are interdependent, Gautama and the Buddhists customarily
begin the exposition at Ignorance or Blindness (auidya)*
Blindness is the result of the crystallizations of past actions
performed in ignorance of the real nature of things. From
this Blindness comes more blind activity, the ‘urge to live*.
(Many forces arc at work here, prominent among them the
force of karma.) These two, Blindness and ‘urge to live’, arc
called the Two Causes of the Past. The first stage in the
present life is Subconscious Mind. On Subconscious Mind
depends Name-and-Form (the psychophysical organism). On
Namc-and-Form depend the six organs of sense (the five
senses of Western thought plus the mind). On the six organs
1 Cf. Visuddhi-Magga 17, in Warren, op. cit., pp. 168-70.
2 The following exposition is indebted to J. Takakusu’s Essmtials of
Buddhist Philosophy, ch. 3. The entire chapter is worth curcful study.
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ON FINDING THE WAY
of sense depends contact or touch. (In the life of the very
young child it is the sense of touch that predominates. The
child begins to come into contact with the outside world.)
On contact depends perception or sensation (vedana).
Up to this point in the developmental process, the indi-
vidual is being shaped almost entirely by the forces of the
past— forces beyond his immediate control. But in the remain-
ing stages, the individual begins to create causes on his own
responsibility. Thirst or craving (tanka) begins to assert itself
through the operation of sensation. Tan/ia produces attach-
ment or clinging; and on this depends Becoming or Forma-
tion of Being (bhava). What one ‘becomes’, in other words,
depends upon what one craves. Craving, clinging and becom-
ing are all intimately conjoined. Together these constitute
‘the Three Causes in the Present. While an individual is
enjoying the effects of the past, he is forming the causes for
the future. While the plum fruit is ripening on the tree, the
core in the fruit is being formed. By die time the fruit is ripe
and falls to the ground, the core too is ready to being forth
a new tree of its own to bear more fruits in the future.’ 1
That is, out of present Becoming, the individual plants
the seeds of future births and future deaths — with all the
sorrow, lamentation, misery and grief that naturally fall
between. Birth and Death — the last two factors in the Wheel
— can be regarded as an abbreviated description of the lot
of the person who is still caught, through Blindness, in the
realm of craving and becoming.
All twelve of these factors arc interdependent, but the
Wheel turns because of the action of kanna. An excellent
1 Cf. J. Tukakusu, Essential i of Buddhist Philosophy (Univ. of Hawaii,
Honolulu, 1949), p. 3°«
IOO
ON FINDING THE WAY
interpretation of karma as the agent which keeps the Wheel
turning is given by Marco Pallis, in his Peaks and Lamas.
As he points out in interpreting the Tibetan representation
of the Wheel, there is nothing but ebb and flow or continual
becoming. All beings — human, sub-human ancl super-
human— arc caught in that same flux. The realm of becom-
ing is not exhausted in this life. There is continual passage
from one state into the next, but no one of the participating
elements remains exempt from modification. ‘Man is but one
of an indefinite number of states of Being. His earthly life
is but one episode among many others.’ Pallis prefers to
substitute the term ‘Round of Existence’ for ‘Wheel’, since
it is the contents which remain perpetually in agitation, a
tangle of orbits entering at every moment into new permu-
tations. He suggests that a whirlpool is perhaps the best
simile of all. Every person is caught in the vortex, by virtue
of karma.1
He distinguishes four kinds of forma— (x) cosmic, (2) local-
ized, (3) racial and (4) personal. The first includes the sum
total of effects of all the actions that have occurred through-
out the universe. The second refers to the actions bound up
with the conditions prevailing in any subdivision of the
universe (on our Earth, for example). Racial karma refers to
the united causes and effects definable as heredity. Personal
karma refers to individual acts and thoughts. Each type of
karma can be discussed separately, but man usually starts
with the last-named since that is where he first begins to
become ‘awakened’.2
1 M. Pallis, Ptaks and Lamas, pp. 145-6.
a See the entire essay, 'The Round of Existence’, in Pallis, Peaks and
Lamas.
ON FINDING THE WAY
Western students of Buddhism have always found it diffi-
cult to conceive how karma can operate either in a continuous
line or a ‘cosmic field’ without involving the transmigration
of souls. Since the term samsara has usually been translated
as ‘transmigration’, the confusion has been increased. As
pointed out in an earlier chapter, samsara really means
stream or constant flow — and is descriptive of all conditioned
existence. It is only in popular thought, both Eastern and
Western, that samsara has been interpreted animistieally sis
involving the transmigration of individual souls.1
A little reflection reveals that a much deeper principle is
involved in samsara than this popular animism. ‘The ending
of one life and the beginning of another, indeed, hardly
differ in kind from the change that takes place when a boy
becomes a man— that is also a transmigration, a wandering,
a new becoming.’ 3 It is the influence that passes over; it is
the man’s character that goes on, not the man himself, for
‘he’ has no permanence.
The Buddha was not interested in the popular, animistic
idea of transmigration save as a symptom of the basic human
tendency to cling. He used many similes to show that no
thing or entity or ‘soul’ transmigrates from one life to an-
other. The favoured simile was that of the flame of a candle.
The unlit candle begins to burn when it is brought close
enough to the lighted candle, but the flame has not ‘passed
/
1 Coomaraswamy points out that the ambiguity introduced because
of the two levels of thought — one animistic, the other metaphysical —
was not entirely avoided in typical Brahmanical circles. It was Sankara,
the great Vedantist, who stressed the distinction between exoteric and
esoteric knowledge and thus paved die way for greater clarification on
the issue.
* Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, p. 106.
102
ON FINDING THE WAY
over’. Coomaraswamy suggests an even more pertinent
modern simile. A series of billiard balls lie in close contact
on a table. When another ball is rolled against the last
stationary ball, the moving ball stops dead and the foremost
stationary ball moves on. ‘Here precisely is Buddhist trans-
migration: the first moving ball docs not pass over, it re-
mains behind, it dies; but it is undeniably the movement of that
ball , its momentum, its karma, and not any newly created
movement, which is reborn in the foremost ball/ 1
When the doctrine of karma (or action-influence) is com-
bined with that of samsara (the stream of becoming), a
familiar truth of life is underscored: the history of the indi-
vidual docs not begin at birth; furthermore, the individual
is always in process of becoming. Western psychologists, soci-
ologists and anthropologists will admit this within a limited
frame of reference; yet, as Buddhists point out, there is
no empirical evidence against the wider grounding of this
theory of action-influence.
The Buddha distinguished between two kinds of personal
karma — fruitful karma and barren karma. The former binds
a man to his illusions of individuality, separateness and the
finality of the finite world of his experience. The latter re-
leases a man from his cgoccntricity and from his tendency to
regard this world as the last word in his experience. Fruitful
karma can be translated as compulsive or cgocentrcd action.
Barren karma is enlightened, non-egocentric or liberating
action.2
There are three conditions under which fruitful karma is
1 Ibid., pp. 106-7. Milindapanha 71.16.
1 Part of this distinction is conveyed in the Western distinction be-
tween compulsive action and released action.
IO3
ON FINDING THE WAY
produced — covetousness, hatred and infatuation.1 * Actions-
performed under such conditions inevitably ripen in some
future day or state. Such actions arise from ignorance of
one’s real nature. They arc controlled from the cellar regions
of consciousness and conditioned by the past. Of such a
person it is truly said that he has no ‘Self-awareness’. He is
controlled by drives, urges, tendencies which ‘he’ has
thoughtlessly allowed to accumulate. Such a person is not
free; he is bound to the past and to the eternal ‘round of
existence’. He may claim to possess ‘free will’, but lie is
driven by his cravings, which have been fed by his ignorance.
Resentful or covetous actions do not ‘transmigrate’ from
yesterday’s resentful act, nor do they pass over to tomorrow.
But such actions arc fueled by the same dynamic factors
(the flame of tanha) which have not been rooted out through
thoughtful attention or a metaphysical insight that sees
through the physical or psychophysical.®
All blind or attached action thus produces fruitful karma—
influence or tendencies that will bind one even further. As
one flame is lit from another, so action-influence is trans-
mitted. The foolishness of claiming that it is consciousness
which is transmitted from one life to the next is illustrated
by the fact that consciousness docs not even remain the same
from one day to the next. What each individual remembers
is also highly selective.3
Barren karma, on the other hand, is action which is pro-
duced free from covetousness, hatred and infatuation. Such
action-influences arc ‘abandoned, uprooted, pulled out of
1 Angultara Nikaya IH-33- * •
* Vimddhi-Magga 17, in Warren, op. at., p. 239.
a Samyulla Nikaya II.95.
IO4
ON FINDING THE WAY
the ground like a palmyra-tree, and become non-existent
and not liable to spring up again in the future’. There are no
painful residues in character resulting from actions springing
out of non-hatred and non-covctousncss. Such persons do not
feel ‘like fish in a stream nearly dried up’. They have been
delivered from the dead baggage of the past and arc on
the road to freedom.1
Let us return for a moment to the figure of the Wheel or
Round of Existence. It has been pointed out that the Round
depends on karma. Karma is itself the product of craving
(tanha).2 Craving and clinging both depend upon ignorance
or blindness which leads to aimless activity, or the blind
desire to live. It cannot be cured by intensifying one’s
activity, or by redoubling his cravings. Such obstinate
attempts ‘are as futile as the babblings of those who would
make War to end War, or cast out devils in the name of
Beelzebub’.3 Blind action is like the agitation in the activity
of a whirlpool. So long as man does not realize knowledge
( vidya ) to overcome ignorance (avidya), he lives out his life
1 Sulla Mpata IV.2.6; Angultara Nikaya III.33.2.
- It may be noticed that I have avoided using the word desire as a
translation for tanha. This is largely because of the confusion that ensues
when one English word is used to describe the whole gamut of desires,
from uncontrolled desire at one extreme {tanha) to the eager desire for
truth {dhamma-chhanda) at the other. Mrs. Rhys Davids has pointed out
that both Muller and Fausboll, in rendering into English the anthologies
of the Dhammapada and Sulta-Nipata, translate ‘no fewer than sixteen
Pali words, which really mean sensuous, or vicious, or unregulated desire,
by the one unqualified word ‘‘desire’”. Mrs. Rhys Davids, Article
‘Desire’, in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 4, P- 6W5b- Cf- IrvinS
Babbitt, The Dhammapada (Oxford Press, N.Y., London, i936),pp.xi,74-
In the Anguttara Nikaya (I.229) the sincere student is encouraged to
pursue the truth with eager active desire ( tibbachhanda ).
3 Pallis, op. cit., p. 149; Takakusu, op. cit., p. 31.
*05
ON FINDING THE WAY
as a cork tossed about by the waves. Knowledge of his true
nature and of the nature of the world around him would
mean a new goal and a new method.
Thus in the Round of Existence everything depends on
ignorance or arises from it. ‘As I have told you, O priests, the
first beginning of ignorance cannot be discerned, nor can
one say, “Before a given point of time there was no ignorance,
it came into being afterwards.” . . . But there is an occasion
when ignorance may be said to be a primary cause . . . when
it is made the starting-point of a discourse concerning the
round of rebirth.’1 Ignorance of one's nature is real, but not
absolute; man can take the steps toward overcoming it.
THE CESSATION OF CRAVING
In one of his treatises Augustine wrote, ‘As a mother is
pregnant with unborn offspring, so is the world itself with
the causes of unborn things.’ 2 Gautama suggested that each
person victimized by cravings should penetrate into ‘the
causes of unborn things’. Gautama was quite sure that a
person could be delivered from his accumulated karma. He
was not a fatalist. ‘O priests, if anyone says that a man must
reap according to his deeds, in that ease there is no religious
life, nor is any opportunity afforded for the entire extinction
of misery. But if anyone says that the reward a man reaps
accords with his deeds, in that ease there is a religious life,
and opportunity is afforded for the entire extinction of
misery.3
As indicated earlier, the craving to which man is subject
1 Visuddhi-Magga 17, in Warren, op. cit., p. 17 1.
1 Augustine, De trin. III. 9.
4 Anguttaia fttkaya 1 1 1. 99.1.
106
ON FINDING THE WAY
because of his blindness expresses itself in his clinging tena-
ciously to his individuality and what he calls ‘his’. The man
who suffers from egoism boasts, ‘“These sons belong to me,
and this wealth belongs to me.”’ ‘With such thoughts a fool
is tormented. He himself docs not belong to himself; how
mucli less sons and wealth.’ 1 * Or man identifies his ‘conscious-
ness’ with the Real. Yet consciousness, like the raft on which
one crosses a river, is a means of functioning and is not to
be clung to when one has reached the farther shore.3
The blindness that leads to craving can only be overcome
through certain disciplines, to be described shortly, and a
persistent watchfulness. On happiness, for example, the
Digha Nilaya quotes the Buddha as saying, ‘Happiness T
declare to be twofold, according as it is to be followed after
or avoided. And the distinction I have affirmed in happiness
is drawn on these grounds: When in following after happi-
ness I have perceived that bad qualities developed and good
qualities were diminished, then that kind of happiness is to
be avoided. And when following ailcr happiness I have per-
ceived that bad qualities were diminished and good qualities
developed, then such happiness is to be followed.’ 3 To
achieve this persistent quality of thoughtfulness, the home-
less life is recommended in many portions of the early writ-
ings as being vastly more helpful. ‘Full of hindrances is the
household life, a path defiled by passion, free as air is the
path of him who has renounced all worldly things. How
difficult it is for the man who dwells at home to live the
1 Dhammapada V.6a. Cf. Radhakrishnan, op. cit., p. 415.
" Majjhima Mikaya I.261. Cf. Cooinuraswamy, Hinduism and Huddhism,
p. 8i,n. 249.
s Digha Nikaya XXI. 3.
107
ON FINDING THE WAY
higher life in all its fulness, in all its purity, in all its bright
perfection!’ 1
FOURTH NOBLE TRUTH: THE EIGHTFOLD PATH
The Fourth Truth describes the way to the overcoming of
duhklui and the realizing of true knowledge. The ‘Eightfold
Path’ is a middle way between extremes— severe asceticism
and self-indulgence. Both thoughtless asceticism and self-
indulgence cannot point the seeker to his true objective;
to covet pleasures or their absence is to invite pain, ‘even as
water pours into a broken ship’.2
I. RIGHT VIEW
The first step can be taken only by the person who stops
to take stock of himself and his viewpoint. He must learn to
see reality for what it is. He must not accept the Noble
Truths on the authority of the Buddha. He must look into
his own experience and sec the facts of suffering for what
they are. He must discover the correlation between his
misery and his cravings. He must seek to find his larger
frame of reference. Without this attitude — ‘right view’ — no
further spiritual progress in the path can be expected.
2. RIGHT ASPIRATION OR RESOLUTION
Right aspiration means ‘the resolve to renounce sensual
pleasures, the resolve to have malice toward none, and the
resolve to harm no living creature’. It includes the hope to
live in love with all.3 This emphasis upon will, or right effort,
in Buddhism is fundamental. It gives the lie to the popular
1 Tevijja Sutta (quoted in Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of
Buddhism , p. 131 n.). Cf. Majjhima Nxkaya , 87th dialogue.
* Sutta Nipata IV. 1.5. 5 Digha Nikaya XXII.
108
ON FINDING THE WAY
Western charge that the doctrine of the law of karma implies
a kind of mechanical predestination. Instead of eliminating
responsibility, the law of karma ‘merely asserts that the order
of nature is not interrupted by miracles I must lie on the
bed I have made. I cannot effect a miracle and abolish the
bed at one blow; I must reap as “I” have sown, and the
recognition of this fact I call karma." 1 Right effort will create
another kind of bed, or to use a more appropriate figure,
will point one down the path to ultimate release.
Right view and right resolution belong naturally together
on the ‘Path’. The pilgrim starts by analysing the nature
of his bondage: Why this over-investment in a world in flux?
One is fettered to the world through die operarion of the
senses and the mind, arising from ignorance. These fetters
must not be broken through extreme asceticism or a head-
long assault on the psychophysical organism. Rather, one
must learn to sec the world and the human predicament
for what it is; then as a consequence of right view, one
resolves to renounce the false values (intellectual or physical)
which lead to further bondage. ‘By cleaving to anything
. . . thus docs one come to be; by not cleaving to anydiing,
thus docs one not come to be. Not to seek for anything, O
priests, is to be free; to seek for anything is not to be free.’ 2
Right resolution includes relinquishing all anxiety about
bed and board. The aspirant practises taking all things
evenly. There is no place for posscssivcncss in him. ‘lie who
does not think, “this is mine” and “for others there is also
something”, he, not having egodsm, does not grieve at
having nothing.* If touched by illness, he docs not wish for
1 Coomaraswaray, Buddha and (he Gospel of Buddhism, p. 107.
1 Samyutla Nikaya XXII. 35.1 ft'.
109
ON FINDING THE WAY
existence elsewhere. The thoughtful person docs not grasp
after anything in all the world; to do so is to become stuck
fast in the realm of death. ‘What is before thee, lay that
aside; let there be nothing behind thee; if thou wilt not grasp
after what is in the middle, thou wilt wander calm.’ 1 Such
a person is free from anger, trembling or boasting. As he
gains increasing insight, hatred, arrogance, hypocrisy and
all other forms of clinging drop from him- like a mustard
seed dropping from the point of a needle.
Since the streams of thoughtlessness flow in every direction,
they can only be restrained by the dam of thoughtfulness.
Each person must come to an understanding of this in him-
self. Thus, long before Martin Luther, Gautama promul-
gated the principle of the priesthood of all believers. In his day,
many a Brahman priest boasted of his lineage as well as his
knowledge of the Vcdic laws. For Gautama, a Brahman was
any person who lived thoughtfully. ‘The thoughtless man,
even if he can recite a large portion of the law but is not a
doer of it, has no share in the priesthood but is like a cow-
herd counting the cows of others.’ 2 Not by birth does one
become a Brahman, but by deeds alone. The true priest has
nothing to do with ceremonialism, ritual or traditional prayer.
‘Neither abstinence, nor going naked, nor shaving the head,
nor a rough garment, neither offerings to priests, nor sacri-
fices to the gods will cleanse a man who is not free from
delusions.’ That the Buddha was not lacking in a sense of
humour on this point is illustrated when he says, ‘If the mere
wearing of the robe could banish greed, malice, etc., then,
1 Sulla Mpala II.14.17; III.11.34; IV.jG.iG; V.13.4; IV.15.15.
* Dhammapada 1. 19; Sulla Nipata III.9.38; IV.10.4, 9-1 1; IV.14.2.4;
III.2.12-14, 19; V.2.3-4.
1 10
ON FINDING THE WAY
. as soon as a child was born, his friends and kinsfolk would
make him wear the robe and would press him to wear it,
saying: Come, thou favoured of fortune! Come, wear the
robe; for by the mere wearing of it, the greedy will put from
them their greed, the malicious their malice. . . 1
3. RIGHT SPEECH, RIGHT BEHAVIOUR AND RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
He who has achieved right aspiration and has become a
genuine seeker is led on to the life of action. Steps three, four
and live in the Eightfold Path arc an exposition of what
constitutes right action. Right speech is defined simply as
abstaining from falsehood, backbiting, harsh language and
frivolous talk.2 Right behaviour means to abstain from de-
stroying life, taking what is not given, or slipping into any
form of immorality. This was later codified into the five
precepts: Not to kill, steal, lie, be unchaste, or drink
intoxicants.
On the positive side, right behaviour means the practice
of love or compassion. Gautama taught that ‘hatred docs
not ccasc by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this
is an old rule’. Even as a mother at the risk of her own life
watches over her child, so every one in the fellowship was
instructed to cultivate a friendly mind towards all beings.
The real test of compassion comes when the Buddhist brother
is attacked, with fists, stones, cudgels, or swords. Even under
these circumstances he is not to harbour enmity toward his
abusers.3
1 Further Dialogues of the Buddha , Part I, p. 200 (Humphrey Milford,
London, 1926). Transited by Lord Chalmers ( Sacred Books qf the
Buddhists, vol. 5). 2 Digha Nikaya, sutta 22.
2 Dhammapada 1. 5; Sutta Ni/>ata I.8.7; Further Dialogues of the Buddha,
Part I, p. 90.
1 1 1
ON FINDING THE WAY
Mutual helpfulness, generosity, works of mercy and taking
the good news to others arc all referred to many times in
the writings of early Buddhism. The great Buddhist king
Asoka, who reigned in the middle of the third century n.c.,
revealed the influence of this principle when he caused to
be carved in his Pillar Edicts: ‘Not superstitious rites, but
kindness to servants and underlings, respect to those de-
serving respect, self-control coupled with kindness in
dealing with living creatures, these and virtuous deeds of
like nature are verily the rites that arc everywhere to be
performed.’ 1
Right livelihood, the fifth step in the path, means that a
Buddhist must choose a caLling which will not force him to
do things injurious to other beings, human or subhuman,
or to his owm sp’ritual growth. Certain occupations are to be
avoided, such as those of the brewer, the butcher, the slave-
holder or slave-trader.
4. THE INNER DISCIPLINES
The last three steps of the path have to do primarily with
interior disciplines. Right effort involves many things — the
control of the passions, avoidance of evil thoughts, stimula-
tion of right states of mind. In this all-important discipline
there is apparently a ‘right velocity’ at which one should
travel. This fine point of balance between undue striving and
undue laxity might be symbolized by the tuning of a delicate
stringed instrument. Tonicity is achieved through the pro-
cess of first relaxing the string a trifle below the true vibration
till one becomes aware of the a-tonicity; then the string is
tightened just a trifle beyond the pure tone to make sure one
1 Pillar Edict vii.
1 12
ON FINDING THE WAY
has sensed both extremes; lastly, the string is relaxed just
that small amount necessary to produce a tone free of all
foreign vibrations or overtones. This ‘pure tone’ has to be
discovered (at the middle point or razor’s edge) by empirical
investigation. But by this process the car knows the true tone
without any doubt when it is reached.
Right mindfulness, or right thinking, means living thought-
fully. One must be observant of the body, of sensations and
of the mind, but not dominated by them. One must come to
sec all physical or mental states, cither pleasant or un-
pleasant, as transitory. Instead of viewing things through the
distorted spectacles of craving, one must learn to see things
as they are. This is the attitude of the disinterested scientist.
Illusory notions about life fall away only when man persists
in trying to see things as they are.1
Amusing talcs grew up in the Buddhist tradition to illus-
trate something of the nature of right mindfulness. ‘Reverend
Sir, have you seen a woman pass this way?’ a traveller is
said to have asked a Buddhist monk. The monk replied,
‘I cannot say whether it is a woman or a man that passed
this way. This I know, that a set of bones is travelling this
road.’ 2
Right mindfulness was to be practised throughout the
entire day by the thoughtful monk, no matter what his
duties. Right contemplation, the last step in the Eightfold
Path, was a much more specialized type of discipline.
Many of the specific techniques utilized by Buddhist
students were taken over directly from the prevailing yoga
disciplines.
The practiser of right contemplation starts at the rcason-
1 Digha Nikayay sutta 22. 4 Vuuddhi- Magga 1.
H 1 13
ON FINDING THE WAY
ing level and seeks to go beyond reasoning and reflection,
perception and non-perception, to a level characterized
by tranquilization and intentness of thought. This ‘silencing’
process is carried on through various stages of absorption,
with the intuitive element increasing as the emotional and
logical-analytical elements decrease. Gautama once said to
an intimate associate, ‘I have been alone in rapture of
thought ... till I rose above perception of the world without,
into an infinite space of cognition, and this again melted
into nothing. . . . Insight came, and I discerned with the
celestial vision the way of the world, the tendencies of
men, and their coming to be, past, present, and yet to
come.’
Since people are different in temperament, not all are
expected to meditate upon the same objects or concepts.
At least forty different modes of training the heart and the
mind are referred to in early Buddhist writings. Some of
these were meditations on ‘foul things’ and were prescribed
only for those who put too much emphasis on physical
beauty. To help them become aware of the fact that even
the most beautiful body is subject to decay, such persons
were asked to contemplate human bones or half-decayed
corpses.1
Other contemplations were prescribed for all of the
brothers as a part of the daily ‘work’. The first meditations
were of an ethical character and were known as the ‘Four
Illimitable Sublime Moods’ — loving-kindness, compassion,
sympathy, and impartiality. One was to practise daily
radiating compassion ( karuna ) in all directions, toward all
1 Ibid. 3 (cf. Warren, op. ciL, p. 292); Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the
Gospel of Buddhism, p. 144.
II4
ON FINDING THE WAY
creatures. Coomaraswamy illustrates karuna from Walt
Whitman:
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I
myself become, the wounded person ,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.1
The true purpose of the Four Sublime Moods is to over-
come any latent tendencies to ill-temper or resentment.
But it is emphasized that the overcoming of resentment
alone does not lead to Nirvana. To realize this one must have
moved beyond both bad and good states of mind.2
A more advanced group of meditations consists of the
Jhanas , which are disciplines of attention and abstraction
designed to deliver the seeker from self-thinking and to lead
him to know things as they are. This is literally dis-interested
contemplation, for one is no longer ‘interested’ in the T.
Buddhist literature seeks to describe to some degree the
nature of these various levels of contemplation, but they
make little or no sense to the spectator or novice. One must
pursue the path for himself, under skilled guidance, to dis-
cover their spiritual meaning. He who persists, realizes the
supreme good — Nirvana .3
NIRVANA
What moksha is to the adherent of Brahmanism, Nirvana is
to the Buddhist. The literal meaning of Nirvana is ‘dying
1 Coomuraswamy, op. cit., p. 143.
a While bad states of mind lead to rebirth under painful conditions,
Buddhist teaching emphasizes that good states of mind lead to rebirth
under favourable conditions (described us rebirth in the Brahma Heavens
of Form). But neither constitutes that kind of knowledge which gives
emancipation. Ibid., p. 145.
’ Cf. Warren, op. cit., c.h. 4, ‘Meditation and Nirvana’, for pussages
concerning these meditations.
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ON FINDING THE WAY
out’, or ‘extinction’ (as of a fire), ‘a blowing out* or ‘despira-
tion\ The term is older than Buddhism, being used in the
Upanishads for perfect Self-realization. As used by Gautama
it has its stricter etymological sense of ‘dying out’— the ex-
tinguishing of the fire of craving. Anuruddha interprets the
word as meaning ‘a “dc-parture” from that craving which
is called vana, lusting’.1 Gautama stressed that if a person
refused to feed the flame of tanha, the fire would go out for
want of fuel.
It is clear, however, that Nirvana has two dimensions— the
fust ethical and psychological, the second metaphysical.
Liberation from resentment, coveting, lusting constitutes the
ethical factor in Nirvana. Expressed psychologically, it in-
volves relinquishing all sense of the T. The metaphysical
dimension refers to the cessation of Becoming and of ignor-
ance. This cassation of Becoming is the supreme goal sought;
the extinction of craving is merely a stepping-stone to this.8
The Buddhist descriptions of the person who has gained
release from individuality and realized Nirvana emphasize
the sense of freedom and spontaneity, the feeling of coolness
after a fever has died down, release from a prison, clarity of
vision.3 There is joy in the escape from dulikha (dis-harmony)
and tanha (craving), from lust (vana) and Becoming (samara).
The poetical similes used by the Buddhist monks never sug-
gest any violent rapture or overmastering emotion. This
1 Compendium of Philosophy I V. 14 (Pali Text Society Translation Series,
vol. a); Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, pp. C3-4; Buddha and
the Gospel qf Buddhism, p. 1 17.
* Samyulta Nikaya II.i 15; Takakusu, op. cit., pp. 52 fT; Coomaraswamy,
Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 64 ; Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism , pp. vii,
117-18.
3 Further Dialogues of the Buddha, part 1 , pp. 1 94-7.
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ON FINDING THE WAY
sense of freedom does not mean an immediate release from
mortality. ‘As the bee collects nectar and departs without
injuring the flower or its colour or scent’, so does the en-
lightened one dwell in his village. Having sensed the delusion
of egoism and ambition, he lives without clinging — like
water on a lotus leaf, like the wind not caught in a net.1
Having given up all things, all things become his in a new
dimension. With appetites overcome, lie is free even in the
world. Gone is the old cramping sense of life; in its place is
life in the open air. Gone is the feeling of depression; in its
place is a feeling of tranquil joy. Whereas the careless pil-
grim only scatters the dust of his passions more widely, the
thoughtful pilgrim lives in complete possession of himself.
Having cut out the love of self like an autumn lotus, one now
travels the road of peace. Yet this road of peace is not the
road of inertia or inaction. Gautama admonishes his friends,
‘Like a well-trained hone when touched by the whip, he ye '
active and lively, and by faith, by virtue, by energy, by
meditation, by discernment of the law you will overcome
this great pain . . . perfect in knowledge and behaviour, and '
never forgetful.’ 8 Such statements underscore the distinc-
tion between the lust for life and love of truth.
The writings of the Buddhists indicate that Gautama and
others in the fellowship passed in and out of this highest
rapture, or state of supcrconsciousncss. This led to a dis-
tinction between Nirvana and Parinirvana (complete or final
dying out), the latter being coincident with physical death.
Gautama stood with the mystics of all traditions in emphasiz-
1 Sulla Nifata 1.3.22,37; II.13.4.1 1; 111.9.3a; Dhammapada XXVI. 401.
a Dhammapada IV.49; V.6a; VI.89; X.144; XV.197; XX.285J XXII.
3*3-
ON FINDING THE WAY
ing that Nirvana is accessible here and now; what lay beyond
death he strictly refused to discuss as such a ‘realization’ was
non-tliinkable. ‘ Nirvana is a final end and ... a matter about
which no further questions can be asked by those who arc
still on fire.’ 1
Since Nirvana has been so commonly misunderstood by
Western interpreters, an additional comment is in order.
Too often has it been rendered by the one word ‘extinction1.
Coomaraswamy is a much more competent guide in these
matters: 4 Nirvana he says, ‘is a kind of death, but like every
death a rebirth to something other than what had been.’
He points out that the Buddha uses the word chiefly ‘in
connection with the “quenching” of the fires of passion,
fault and delusion’.
This ethical psychological dimension of the term is easier
for the Western mind to grasp than the metaphysical. To
die to egocentrism and all of its disturbing symptoms is one
thing; for the human organism suddenly to die or expire is
something different. No person achieves deeper insights
without dying to outworn ones. Knowledge or awareness
always means death — death of all clinging to old forms, out-
moded perspectives and ideas. An old chapter is closed,
finished, ‘extinguished’ like a flame. To live at the highest
involves ‘practising dying daily’, as various mystics have
expressed it. The genuine scientist — like the true mystic —
always stands on a frontier, Many people hesitate to explore
near the frontiers of knowledge because of their liking for the
lure of the old, the taste for antiquated things which is a
kind of spiritual nostalgia. What is this but to become so-
1 Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism , p. 64; Majjhima Nikaya
I.304; Samyutla Nikaya II 1. 188.
Il8
ON FINDING THE WAY
journers on the land when men are called to be explorers
of the frontiers? ‘Promised Lands’ are always traps for the
thoughtless. He who has coveted milk and honey in his lean
years tends to settle for material security in his more pros-
perous years. The Buddha would remind every man that
this world is only an intermediate stage in the realm of
becoming.
Hence the ‘extinguishing’ for which Nirvana stands has a
metaphysical dimension as well as an ethical-psychological
one. What is a present psychological experience regarded
from the point of view of the temporal frame of reference
is also an eternal (i.c. timc-lcss) event involving liberation
from ignorance and from the whole realm of becoming (avidya
and samsara). Thus Nirvana must not be reduced to a state of
the mind or of the ‘psyche’, for one must be liberated even
from the ‘psyche’. In one passage the Buddha says, ‘I call
him a Brahman indeed who has passed beyond attachment
both to good and evil; one who is clean, to whom no dust
attaches, a-pathctic.’ 1 There must be a total ‘un-sclfncss’;
this combines the two ideas of ‘being perfected’ and ‘dying’.2
One is beyond good and evil, selfishness and unselfishness;
for such terms have real meaning only in the context of a
1 Dlammapadu 412 (Coomaraswamy’s translation).
» Coomaraswamy points out that the denotation is that of quenching
fire or passion, but the connotation is that of Greek Ulto and Itlculao—
to be perfected, to die. ‘AH these meanings can be resumed in the one
English word “finish”; the finished product is no longer in the making,
no longer bcioming what it ought to be; in the same way the finished
being, the perfected man, lias done with all becoming; the final dissolu-
tion of the body cannot affect him, however affecting it may be to others,
themselves imperfect, unfinished. Nirvana is u final end, and like Brahma ,
a matter about which no further questions can be asked by those who
arc still on fire.’ Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism , p. 64.
1 ‘9
ON FINDING THE WAY
life lived dualistically. Conscious of two contradictory im-
pulses within, man fights his ‘selfishness’ by marshalling
forces of ‘unselfishness’. However, he who has died to sclf-
ccntrcdness, has died to ‘others’ as well as to ‘self’. ‘. . . If
the “dead man” seems to be “unselfish”, this will not be
the result of altruistic motives, but accidentally, and because
he is literally un-self-ish.’ 1
Ethical disciplines and psychological insights arc. like the
raft by means of which one crosses a river. They arc means
to an end which cannot ho described in terms of the steps
one took in approaching that end. Hence Gautama wisely
refused to debate what ‘happened’ to the person who realized
Nirvana. Nirvana was not something to be debated but to be
realized by those willing to undertake the experiment in
following the prescribed techniques. No definition could help
the man who had not been delivered from his need to cling.
No interpretation would be necessary for the man who had
discovered it for himself. The serious pilgrim was promised
release from duhkha (dis-harmony) and avidya (un-awareness).
But the Buddha never encouraged anyone to eliminate the
suffering or dis-harmony; lie asked him to go to the roots.
To know to the roots is to get at the causes. To know lo the
roots brings freedom.
1 Coomaraswnmy, Hinduism and Buddhism , p. 17.
120
CHAPTER EIGHT
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF
THE BUDDHA
T would be a protector of the unprotected, a guide to wayfarers
... a bridge for them who seek the further Shore; a lamp for them
who need a lamp, a bed for them who need a bed, a slave for all
beings who need a slave.’ — Santideva.
Thf. divine powers that most people in their un re-
flective moments believe in are the creation of man’s
own needs. Popular religion, or the religion of the
masses, moves primarily on the level of petitional prayer.
For such people their wants arc their gods, as Mcistcr
Eckhart put it. They ‘want to see God with their eyes as they
see a cow and to love him as they love their cow — they love
their cow for the milk and cheese and profit it makes them’.1
This kind of ‘religion’ was widespread in India when
Gautama was teaching. He avoided the emotionally-
freighted symbols of such beliefs and practices as a snare and
a delusion. Any peace of mind earned in such a fashion he
regarded as both precarious and spurious. Each man must
go into the depths for himself anti explore. Each must be
unwilling to be bought off with the enticements of an earth-
bound religion which regards the gods as cows waiting to
be milked. To Gautama, popular religion was one symptom
1 R. Blakncy, Meisler Eckhart: A Modern Translation (Harper, N.Y.,
«940»P* «**•
• 121
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
indicating how sick man was. Hence he proposed no such
short-cut to Nirvana.
The kind of approach advocated by the Buddha put a
premium on the educational process and on actual experi-
mentation, including the various stages of contemplation.
The self-authenticating insights emerge in the exploration;
Nirvana must be inwardly appropriated. Teachers are helpful
only if they themselves have realized the higher stages of
consciousness.
Gautama’s emphasis on the importance of knowledge did
not rule out other values. One was to be un-worldly, not
attached to this finite realm of becoming; that one was not
supposed to be ‘other-worldly’, however, is indicated by the
stress he placed on compassion. Only if a person had dis-
covered the meaning of enlightenment was he capable of
being truly compassionate. This latter point deserves com-
ment, for many interpreters of the Buddha’s teaching insist
that there were two conflicting strands in his thought. The
disciple was first urged to become composed in mind, seeing
all things evenly or objectively. Then he was instructed
to display love and compassion for all fellow-creatures.
How the two attitudes could be cultivated in one and the
same person has been the problem for the interpreters.
‘To be “composed in mind” yet at the same time to be
“shaken with compassion” is a difficult performance’, Pratt
comments. He cites the first Jataka story, according to which
Gautama, in a previous birth, came across a starving tiger.
The talc records that Gautama, ‘though composed in mind,
was shaken with compassion by the sufferings of his fellow-
creatures as Mt. Mcru is by an earthquake’.1
» J. B. Pratt, Pilgrimage of Buddhism (Macmillan, N.Y.), p. 93.
122
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
Are composure and compassion irreconcilable? Gautama
taught that one was to cultivate composure of mind in order
to overcome craving. He who achieved release from his
addiction to the world of transitoriness gained a new sense
of freedom which expressed itself in terms of joy, sympathy,
love and compassion. The Buddha’s compassion, then, was
the product of genuine release from craving and ignorance.
Modern psychology suggests something which points in this
direction. He who is subject to neurotic attachments cannot
be truly compassionate. His sympathy or love proceeds from
distorted ego-needs. He loves possessively, not because or a
real concern for the object of his love. He may be generous
with ‘sympathy* only because he feels the need of it so
desperately himself. On the other hand, the mature person
gives sympathy objectively; he does not minister subtly to
his own distorted needs through the other person. A mother
who is objective about her own emotional needs loves her
child responsibly rather than possessively.
According to the Buddhist analysis, composure of mind is
only the prelude to the compassionate heart. Gautama’s
life was not lived on two levels— his theory pointing in the
direction of sclf-centrcdness and his practice in the direction
of altruism. Ilis theory served the basic purpose of clearing
the path for a more humane practice. His own life was
remarkably consistent and balanced, especially in a time
when spirituality was often confused with complete denial
of the life of desire. Spirituality, the Buddha discerned, was
not to be found in negation in and for itself. It was to be
found in terms of what one affirmed and how he affirmed
it. If many of Gautama’s followers became life-negating,
instead of ego- and world-negating, it was because of an
123
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
inability to follow through on the implications of his analysis
of the nature and roots of craving.
RISE OF DIVERGENT INTERPRETATIONS
In the century following upon the death of Gautama, all
of the religious movements of India displayed pronounced
popularizing tendencies. Ii was a period of religious revival,
but at a level adapted to the confused emotional life
of the masses. Men demanded idealized objects of devotion
— personal gods or saviours to whom they could turn,
or more vivid symbols to help them in their search for
release.
This widespread flight into the derivative forms of the
religious life influenced the Buddhist tradition also. Gautama
had put the emphasis on individual exploration. Within a
few years after his death, initiates into the order were reciting,
‘I take my refuge in the Buddha, I take my refuge in the
Dhamma, I take my refuge in the Sangha 1 Gautama had
asked his friends to take his words experimentally and not
uncritically.2 Many of his followers began to make a cult
of him and of his teachings. The Sang/ia originally was simply
the fellowship of seekers gathered around Gautama. It
became a church and a missionary society. The strong
personal loyalty felt by the early disciples was passed on to
succeeding generations of followers. Eventually Gautama
was transformed into a god.
During the early stages of this development, Buddhist
figures or statues were introduced into the monasteries. The
1 Dhamma, norm or teachings (in this particular context). Sangha , the
Order, or congregation.
2 Majjhima Nikaya XXXVIII.
I24
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
room in which they were placed was usually the great
meeting- room. Thus the room gradually became a temple.
From sucli simple beginnings as these came the later, elabor-
ate temples in which worshippers were to bow down before
life-size statues of the Buddha. The relies of Gautama were
also being reverenced shortly after his decease. Pilgrimages
came into vogue. The faithful journeyed to his birthplace,
to the site of his enlightenment, to the place where he
had preached his first sermon, and to the place of his
death.
In the two centuries subsequent to the death of the Buddha
a great many disputes arose between divergent Buddhist
sects, each of which tended to assume that it stood the closest
to the true doctrine. The Theravadins (or the ‘Elders’) used
texts written in Pali and they claimed to be the ‘original’
Buddhists. They emphasized the ideal of the monk who
‘wandered lone as the rhinoceros’. They stressed the strict
observance of the rules of the monastic order, leading in
some eases to a kind of monastic legalism.1 This development
subsequently came to be nicknamed the Hinayana (‘Little
Vehicle’) by adherents of another wing who appropriated
the term Mohayana (‘Great Vehicle’).
Starting in India, the Mahayana form of Buddhism spread
to China, Japan and Tibet, and proved remarkably adapted
to the temperament of the Far Eastern peoples. In place of
the Pali scriptures, Mahayana used Sanskrit texts which were
translated into Chinese and Japanese.2 It has been the stand-
1 Cf. Ryukan Kimura, A Historical Study of tht Terms Hinayana and
Mahayana and the Origin of Mahayana Buddhism (Univ. of Calcutta,
Calcutta, 1927).
a Ibid.
125
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
ing criticism of Hinqyana Buddhists against the Mahayanists
that the latter do not have the authentic teaching of the
Buddha. Many scholars, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist,
admit that the seeds of the developed Mahayana teachings
arc to be found in the earliest reported teachings of Gautama.
Mahayanists themselves admit that their scriptures did not
come into existence during the Buddha’s lifetime, but they
point out (and rightly) that the same is true of the Pali
canon ol' Hinqyana Buddhism.
The Buddhist doctrine very obviously underwent growth
in all of its schools. One of the fundamental teachings of
Buddha had been that of anicca (transiency). Interpretations
of the doctrine were bound to grow since they too were
subject to anicca. The Hinqyana schools stressed salvation
through knowledge and the monastic order. The Mahayana
schools were to stress salvation through knowledge expressing
itself in terms of faith and love. This meant much less em-
phasis on the monastery and more emphasis on dedicated
work in the world of suffering beings. The ideal of the
Thcravadins was definitely limited, designed only for those
who had left their spiritual childhood far behind, whereas
Mahayana was adapted to the varying needs of the ‘children
of the Buddha’.1
The greater catholicity of Mahayana is indicated in the
doctrine of upaya (expediency, or convenient means). Various
skilful means, stratagems, or expedient devices arc recom-
mended to help different people come to intuitive realiza-
tion. The goal — enlightenment — is one, but the ‘means’ to
that goal arc many. In Mahayana circles the doctrine of upaya
is practically synonymous with love. Any and all means that
‘ Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, pp. 22O-9.
126
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
relieve beings of blindness and misery, leading them to
enlightenment, are truly expedient.1 * 3 This brings us to what
Pallis lias called the presiding idea in Mahayana Buddhism —
Bodhisattvahood.
LOVF. AND THE IDEAL OF THE BODHISATTVA
The term Bodhisattva means one whose nature consists of
insight.'*4 Pallis describes the Bodhisattva as an awakened being
‘who, though under no further constraint by that Law of
Causality which he has transcended, yet freely continues to
espouse the vicissitudes of the Round of Existence by virtue
of his Self-identification with all the creatures still involved
in egocentric delusion and consequent suffering*.8 He docs
not do this out of any sentimental ‘altruism’, for having gone
beyond the sense of an T, he is also beyond the concept of
‘other’. For him all of the old dualisms— between good and
bad, bondage and deliverance (samara and Nirvana), T and
‘thou’ -have dissolved. Living in the world of becoming
with its correlated suffering, still he is aware of the change-
less joy or Nirvana. Having identified his ‘Self’ with the ‘Self
in all other beings, he lives a compassionate life.
The Bodhisattva ideal grew up around the example of
Gautama, who, after his enlightenment, spent the remainder
of his life teaching his friends how they might realize the
same kind of experience. Out of compassion the Buddha
chose to help others. What Gautama did was identical with
what all of the other Buddhas who had appeared in the past
1 Beatrice L. Suzuki, Mahayana Buddhism, A Brief Outlint (Marlowe,
London, 194H), p. 59-
* Bodhi-iatlna, wisdom-being.
3 M. Pallis, Peaks and l/im<u , second cd. (Knopf, N.Y., 1949), p. 303.
127
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
had done— they had dedicated themselves to the welfare of
others before consenting to become Buddhas.1
Of the many Buddhas revered in Chinese and Japanese
circles, Amitabha or Measureless Light {Amida in Japan) is
one of the most popular. His importance arises from the
tradition that he was once a monk who, infinite ages ago,
made forty-six vows out of love for his fellow beings. lie
desired to devote all of his wisdom or merits to the saving of
others. The eighteenth vow is the most important:
‘O Bhagavat, if those beings who have directed their
thought towards the highest perfect knowledge in other
worlds and who, having heard my name, when I have
attained Bodhi (knowledge), have meditated on me with
serene thoughts; if at the moment of their death, having
approached them, I should not stand before them ... so that
their thoughts should not be troubled, then may I not attain
the highest, perfect knowledge.’
Through the years Amitabha fulfilled these vows and built
up a tremendous Treasury of Merit. This merit is sometimes
referred to as ‘the Ship of the Vow’. It is comparable to the
teaching of some of the early Christian church fathers, that
the Church is ‘the Ark of Salvation’. ‘The Ship of the Vow'
can easily carry the sins of the unenlightened ones, though
otherwise these sins arc as heavy as stones and would sink
to the bottom of the ocean. Through his merits Amitabha
established a Pure Land or Western Paradise where he can
1 Even the scriptures of the. Hinayana schools did not teach that
Gaulamu was the only Buddha or Enlightened One. At least seven
Buddhas were recognized at an early period. As the Buddhist imagina-
tion continued to develop this idea, the number of Buddhas increased
till eventually hundreds or millions were recognized.
* B. L. Suzuki, op. cit.y pp. 54-5.
128
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
receive all those who place themselves on his ship, to be
borne across the ocean of samara (the world of suffering and
frustration). Amitabha is the embodiment of perfect mercy
and wisdom. Whoever meditates upon him with devotion
is assured of entering into Paradise through receiving a
portion of the Saviour’s superabundant merit.1
This paiivarla doctrine (the turning over of merit to the
advantage of others) underscores the Mahayana sense of the
interdependence of all life. Early Buddhism had emphasized
the separateness of lives in so far as the law of karma was
thought of as working in essentially singular (though parallel)
lines. Mahayana Buddhism teaches that the whole creation
shares a common karma (both racial and cosmic). In this
view the operation of the law of karma would have to be
symbolized by an intricately complex net or tangled skein.
Every individual contributes to this common karma for good
or for ill. In late Buddhism ‘whoever accomplishes a good
deed, such as a work of charity or a pilgrimage, adds the
prayer that the merit may be shared by all sentient beings’.2
The Bodhisatlva ideal has been beautifully expressed in the
writings of a seventh-century poet, Santideva.
In reward for all this righteousness that I have won
by my works, I would fain become a soother of all the
sorrows of all creatures.
May I be a balm to the sick, their healer and servitor,
until sickness come never again.
1 Sec story about him in vol. 49, part a, p. 7. Cf. Suzuki, op.
cit., pp. 48-51; James Troup's paper on the Shin sect, read to the Asiatic
Society of Japan, Oct. 1855, and quoted in B. H. Streeter, The Buddha
and the Christ (Macmillan, N.Y., 1933), pp. 90*1-
1 Ooomaraswainy, op. cit., p. 231.
I 129
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
j May I quench with rains of food and drink the anguish of
hunger and thirst. May I be, in the famine at the ages'
end, their drink and meat.
May I become an unfailing store for the poor , and serve
them with manifold things for their need.
My own being and my pleasures , all my righteousness in
the past , present or future I surrender indefinitely, that
all creatures may win to their end.
The Stillness lies in surrender of all things, and my
spirit is fain for the Stillness. If I must surrender
all, it is best to give it for fellow-creatures.
I yield myself to all living things to deal with me as
they list; they may smite or revile me for ever, bestrew
me with dust, play with my body, laugh and wanton; I have
given them my body, why shall I care?
May all who slander me, or do me hurt, or jeer at me, gain
a share in the Enlightenment.
I would be a protector of the unprotected, a guide to
wayfarers , a ship, a dyke, and a bridge for them who seek
the further Shore; a lamp for them who need a lamp, a bed
for them who need a bed, a slave for all beings who need
a slave.1
This Rodhisaltva principle of vicarious living is central to
Mahayana Buddhism. Each person should strive for Buddha-
1 Tht Path of Light, Rendered for the First Time into English from the
Bodhicharyavatara of Santi-deva, by L. D. Barnett (Wisdom of the East
series, Murray, London, 1909, 1947), pp. 44-5, 48-9.
130
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
realization. The path to that is the path of the Bodhisattva.
To the question, ‘What is the Buddha-mind?’ Pure Land
Buddhism replies, ‘It is no other than the great loving heart.’
He who achieves freedom from his blindness does not look
down from some monastic retreat upon the unenlightened
multitudes. He comes down and mingles with them. Both
suffering and goodness are vicarious, for all of crcadon is
bound together. The true saint is he who recognizes this
interrelatedness of all life.
If I fulfill not my vow by deeds , I shall be false
to all beings, and what a fate will be mine! ... If I
labour not this very day , down, down I fall.1
MAHAYANA TEACHING ON THE ‘ETERNAL BUDDHA’
Just as the historical Jesus was gradually displaced in
Christian teaching by the ‘glorified Christ’, Gautama Buddha
was regarded as being much more than a mere human being.
This process — accelerated in early Christianity by the Fourth
Gospel — was underscored in the Mahayana by the Saddhama
Fundarika. In each case the reverence felt for a master teacher
and great spirit led to the articuladon of a metaphysical
principle. The development of the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity over a time span of three centuries was analogous
to the process in Buddhism which produced the doctrine
of the Trikaya, or threefold body.
1 Ibid., pp. 48-9. Cf. Suzuki, op. cit., p. 57. The Bodhisattva concept
has been elaborated in many ways in the Mahayana schools. My own
treatment is considerably condensed. For more elaborate treatments
sec Har Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature
(Kcgan Paul, Trench, Trdbner & Co., London, 1932); B. L. Suzuki,
Impressions of Mahayana Buddhism (I.uzac, London, 1940).
!3I
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the Mahayana
doctrine of the Trikaya arose among people inclined in a
speculative or imaginative direction. Each represented an
attempt to interpret subtle areas of human experience, and
each interpretation was to prove difficult of comprehension
by the common man. Only advanced students of Buddhism
go very far into the doctrine of the Trikaya , just as the aver-
age lay Christian is not expected to understand the Greek
doctrine of the Trinity. (The Roman Catholic Church-
speaking for the practical Latin temperament— labelled the
latter doctrine a ‘Mystery’ and taught that one could accept
it without understanding it.) Since the Trikaya doctrine is
so important in Mahayana Buddhism, a brief word of inter-
pretation is called for even though the temptation may be
to follow the path marked out by Rome.
With Gautama, enlightenment was an immediately ex-
perienced reality, something which he ‘knew’ intuitively.
Mahayana Buddhism sought to give this a metaphysical base
in the concept of the Dharmakaya (Body of the Dianna , or
Law). The Dharmakaya is the unconditioned spiritual reality,
the essence of enlightenment and compassion. In Western
terms, it might be called the Absolute. More simply, it could
be termed Reality— that which must be realized by every
being for himself.1
The Sambhogakaya (Body of Bliss) is the Buddha ideal, or
the personification of wisdom. It is the Absolute taking on
individuation and working through a Buddha. The Sambho-
gakaya is the ‘eternal Buddha’ as distinct from the historical
Buddha, however. It has been compared to the ‘glorified
1 Detailed explanations differ among Mahayana schools. Cf. Suzuki,
Mahayana Buddhism , A Brit/ Outline, pp. 42-3.
132
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
Christ’, but Suzuki compares it to the personal God-concept
of Christianity.1
The Nirmanakaya (Body of Transformation) is the em-
bodied Buddha, the historical Gautama. It partakes of all
the characteristics of ordinary flesh, including mortality:
hence the name. Every Buddha who appears on earth par-
takes of the nature of all three kaya , yet the Buddha is not
three, but One. The Trikaya arc but aspects of the one
Reality.
The Mahqyana idea that there are many Buddhas who
appear on earth to help in the redemption of mankind
parallels the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita. In the language
of the Gita, Krishna says, ‘For the protection of the good, for
the destruction of the wicked and for the establishment of
righteousness, I come into being from age to age.’ In the
Buddhist Anguttara Nikaya is to be found the same essential
teaching: ‘The exalted one appears in the world for salva-
tion to many people, for joy to many people, out of compas-
sion for the world, as a blessing, a salvation, the joy of gods
and men.’ a Both traditions affirm that at the heart of reality
there is an outgoing goodness.
NIRVANA IN MAIIAYANA BUDDHISM
Nirvana has often been interpreted by Western students of
Buddhism as meaning the obliteration of the finite in the
infinite. That this is a distortion of the early Buddhist teach-
ing has been indicated in an earlier chapter. It is also to
miss the fundamental teaching of the Mahqyana. According
1 Ibid., p. 41. Cf. W. M. McGovern, An Introduction to Mahqyana
Buddhism (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubncr& Co., London, 1922), pp. 77 ff.
5 Cf. Bhagauad Gita IV.8 and Saddharma Pundarika, ch. 15.
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OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
to Mahay ana, life (or the realm of samsara) and Nirvana arc
really identical. In principle, man always is and always has
been in Nirvana. As the Awakening nf Faith states it, ‘All
things from their beginnings are in their nature Nirvana
itself.’ 1
This doctrine of the identity of samma and Nirvana , of the
finite and the infinite, appears quite paradoxical to those
accustomed to Western modc-s of thinking, or to the Jlinayana
frame of reference. Yet the doctrine is not as opaque as
sometimes made out. Both Alan Watts and Marco Pallia
have made definite contributions in the direction of clari-
fying the doctrine for serious students.
With respect to the comprehension of Reality, three levels
arc broadly distinguishable. First, life may be regarded from
the point of view of the ordinary man— the point or view of
avidya or unawarcncss. To this person life will present itself
as a multiplicity with polarity, competitiveness, separate-
ness predominating. The common man is interested in his
‘feelings’, he takes appearances as though they were the
whole story; hence he tends to be a romanticist or senti-
mentalist.
There is a second point of view which occurs when there is a
genuine awakening to the fallacy of regarding the appearances
as real. One secs the world as ‘illusory’— which docs not mean
unreal, but that the world ‘plays’ with our mind and our
senses, as it were. He who comes to see the world from this
perspective seeks to flee the ‘Round of Existence’ in order
to achieve Nirvana. His life is still motivated in terms of
polarity or the opposition of two forces. His path is cssenti-
1 A Mahayana book frequently attributed to Asvaghosha, who is sup-
posed to have lived around the second century a.d.
134
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
ally negative. Those in this state, according to the Mahayana ,
become Pratyeka Buddhas (private Buddhas), a term applied
by the Mahayanists to the adherents of the Hinayana school.
For them Nirvana remains the Non-Round, and the Round is
Non-Nirvana. The withdrawal of attention from the world
(initially necessary if one is to achieve any degree of en-
lightenment) tends to become a final term. As Pallis com-
ments, when the withdrawal of attention is taken as final,
it ‘can land one in an intellectual blind alley, bringing about
a kind of lolly self-imprisonment, a withdrawal into a blissful
supra-eonsciousncss which yet implies privation of the one
essential thing, since it stops short of the supreme non-
duality*.
The third point of view is that of the Bodhisatlva. The
Round of Existence and Nirvana arc seen to be identical. One
docs not have to try the impossible task of getting ‘out’ of
the finite into the infinite, for the infinite is qualitative, and the
finite is quantitative. ‘A realization of eternity docs not involve
any leaving of the finite behind, because from the eternal
standpoint all time is present.* Nirvana thus does not mean
'nothingness*, but devoid of limiting conditions.1
The Ijinkavatara Sutra, one of the important scriptures of
Mahayana, states the third viewpoint very concisely. ‘Those
who, afraid of the sufferings arising from the discriminations
of birth-and-dcath (samara), seek for Nirvana, do not know
that birth-and-dcath and Nirvana arc not to be separated
from one another; and, seeing that all things subject to dis-
* Cf. Alan W. Watts, The Supreme Identity , ch. i, ‘The Infinite nnd the
Finite’; M. Pallis, Peaks and Lanins, eh. 22, ‘The Presiding Idea’ (second
cd.), especially pp. 305 ft'; J. Takakusu, Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy,
p. 47-
135
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
crimination have no (absolute) reality, (they) imagine that
Nirvana consists in the future annihilation of the senses and
their fields.’ 1 * He who escapes from the dual horns of this
dilemma has achieved the supreme realization called the
Prqjna Paramila (Wisdom Transcendent). The Bodhisattva has
effectively realized it as indicated by his capacity to work
actively for the salvation of others in self-less way.
To what extent the articulation of this doctrine in Maha-
yana Buddhism can be traced to the profoundly ‘practical’
side of the Chinese temperament, and how much to the
unfolding of Gautama’s own teachings, is not a question that
needs to detain us.3 The intuitive element in the final realiza-
tion is stressed by all the principal writings such as the
Awakening of Faith , the Diamond Sutra and the Lankavatara
Sutra. The Buddha, we arc told, ‘only provisionally makes
use of words and definitions to lead all beings, while his real
object is to make them abandon symbolism and enter
directly into the real Reality’. ‘The differentiations of words
arc but false notions with no basis in reality. . . . But we use
words to get free from words until we reach the pure wordless
Essence.’ 3 Enlightenment comes not by fixed teachings but
by an intuitive process that is spontaneous and natural. The
Buddha did not lay down a system of teaching, for ‘“a
system of teaching” has no meaning, as Truth cannot be
cut up into pieces and arranged into a system’. Whoever
uses such a phrase in referring to the teachings of the Buddha
is using only a figure of speech.
1 Watts, The Supreme Identity, p.
* Cf. Havens, op. cit., p. 30.
3 Aivakening of Faith, p. ua. Cf. translation by Wai-tao in Dwight
Goddard, A Buddhist Bible (second cd., Thetford, Vt., 1938), p. 363-
136
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
All conceptions are arbitrary, whether they be about one’s
own selfhood, other selves, or a universal Self. These should
all be discarded as well as ‘all ideas about such conceptions
and all ideas about the non-existence of such conceptions’.
The teacher uses conceptions and ideas in his instruction,
but the student must remember that he uses them ‘in the
resemblance of a raft that is of use only to cross a river’.1
The validity of things is independent of the validity of words.
‘Disciples should be on their guard against the seductions of
words and sentences and their illusive meanings, for by them
the ignorant and the dull-witted become entangled and
helpless as an elephant floundering about in the deep mud.’
‘Highest Reality is an exalted state of bliss, it is not a state
of word-discrimination and it cannot be entered into by
mere statements concerning it.’ Whoever teaches a doctrine
that is dependent upon letters and words is a mere
prattler*
This intuitive realization of Nirvana is open to everyone,
according to the Mahayana. For every man’s mind is a
mirror of Reality. This latter teaching grew out of the doc-
trine of the Alaya-vijnana — the ‘repository consciousness’ or
the Cosmic Mind from which flow all other forms of con-
sciousness or awareness.3 To the extent that each person
> The Diamond Sutra (translated by Wai-tao in Goddard, op. cit.,
pp. 102, 104, I06).
a Lankauatara Sutra (translated by Suzuki and Goddard, in Goddard,
op. cit.y pp. 286, 287, 3x1).
3 The concept sccrns to have had its source as a term in individual
psychology, but was given an over-individual or cosmic significance
later. Hence Coomaraswamy renders it as ‘Cosmic Mind or Reason’.
For a brief history of the development of this doctrine, sec J. B. Pratt’s
Pilgrimage of Buddhism, pp. 244 IT.
>37
OTHERS SEEK THE WAV OF THE BUDDHA
wipes the mirror of his mind clean from stains, lie becomes
a mirror of Reality, of Buddhahood, of ‘pure awareness'.
Words, symbols, creeds — all arc transcended when one im-
mediately experiences the core of Reality. This development
reaches its classical expression in the philosophy of the Zen
School (known in China as Ch’an Buddhism).
ZKN BUDDHISM
‘Zen never explains; it only gives hints. . . . Trying; to
explain Zen is like trying to catch wind in a box; the moment
you shut the lid it ceases to be wind and in time becomes
stagnant air.’ This reminder of Alan Watts is a good preface
to any attempt to interpret Zen to the West.1
For Zen, experience and life arc primary. Theories, ritual,
concepts arc all secondary. Philosophical study as well as
ritual can lead one into a jungle from which he cannot extri-
cate himself. Ideas, books, words or forms can only be ‘a
finger pointing at the moon*. Most people tend to look at
the finger instead of the moon. The Zen student must find
the moon for himself— the experience of illumination.
Many tools have been devised to help the student achieve
this inner realization. Breath control is advised as well as
thought control. A more subtle method is that of ‘problem
solving’. The student is given a problem or koan such as:
What is the sound of one hand? The koan is not to be solved
logically. Concentration on the koan is to help one sever the
ties that bind him to stereotyped responses to life, and thus
lead one on to an intuitive awareness of the meaning of
living.
1 Alan W. Watts, Mtaning qf Happinesi (Harper, N.Y., 1940), p. 167.
138
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
Another type of method in Zen instruction is that of
giving an irrelevant reply to a learner’s question. The
shock method is also used. The teacher may hit the
student on the head with his fist, slam a door on his
foot, or violently twist his nose. In many such cases the
student has been precipitated into a sudden awareness or
illumination.
While this experience is sometimes known as Buddha-
rcalization, no student is encouraged to cling to Buddha.
‘Cleanse your mouth from the word “Buddha”’ is good Zen
teaching. No student is a follower of Buddha; he is rather a
co-cxplorcr. The basic idea is that Mirvana, or self-realization,
must be found in the immediate experience of life. One does
not seek union with some ‘Other’ — whether teacher, in-
carnation or God. He simply seeks to be himself in the most
fundamental sense. ‘There is nothing infinite apart from
things; if you seek something transcendental, that will cut
you ofT from this world of relativity, which is the same thing
as the annihilation of yourself.’ 1
A Chinese scholar, Kwaku- An, sought to sum up the mean-
ing of Zen in the twelfth century a.d. by compiling ten
poems, traditionally titled The Ten Oxherding Pictures. He
commented on each verse and made a separate painting for
each of the poems. The poems represent ten steps in the
realization of one’s true nature or selfhood. They are oblique
and suggestive and may serve as a fitting conclusion to the
study of Buddhism.2
1 D. T. Suzuki, Eastern Buddhist, vol. i, p. 25.
8 I am indebted to two trunslutions: Nyogen Scnzaki and Saladln
Reps, Ten Bulls (Los Angeles, 1935); and D. T. Suzuki, The Ten OxhtrdinR
Pictures (Sekai Scitcn Kanko Kyokai, Kyoto, 1948).
*39
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
I
Searching for the Ox
In the. pasture of this world , I endlessly push aside
the tall grasses in search of the Ox.
Following unnamed rivers , lost upon the interpenetrating
paths of distant mountains,
My strength is failing and my vitality exhausted. I
cannot find the Ox.
I only hear the locusts chirring through the forest
at night.
In reality it is not the Ox that is lost, but man. Far from
home, the man sees many crossroads, but lie is unable to
decide which way is the right one. Man is alienated from his
true nature; his inmost desires arc unfulfilled. All he can
hear are the locusts of the forests. ‘Desire for gain and fear
of loss burn like fire; ideas of right and wrong shoot up like
a phalanx.’ . . . Then he discovers the footprints.
II
Discovering the Footprints
Along the river-bank, under the trees, I discover footprints!
Even under the fragrant grass I see his prints.
Deep in remote mountains they are found.
These traces no more can be hidden than one's nose,
looking heavenward.
Man now gains the first hints of his true nature. He is a long
way from his destination, but he has discovered the path.
Having begun the search in earnest and harmonized his
senses, he perceives die Ox.
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OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
III
Perceiving the Ox
1 hear the song of the Nightingale.
The. sun is warm , the wind is mild, willows are
green along the shore ,
Here no Ox can hide!
What artist can draw that massive head and those
majestic horns!
Man now begins to sense a new unity in his experience. The
slightest thing is now seen as not apart from Self, Kwaku-An
comments. Everything begins to come into focus.
IV
Catching the Ox
I seize him with a terrific struggle.
His great will and power are inexhaustible.
He charges to the high plateau far above cloud-mists,
Or in an impenetrable ravine he stands.
To master the new insight calls for effort, since the mind is
stubborn and unbridled. It has been accustomed to wander-
ing wherever it pleased. The Ox longs for the old sweet-
scented fields. It must be brought within bounds.
V
Taming the Ox
The whip and rope are necessary ,
Else he might stray off down some dusty road. .
Being well trained, he becomes naturally gentle.
Then , unfettered, he obeys his master.
The mind must not be allowed to vacillate. When it wanders,
confusion prevails.
141
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY Ol- THE BUDDHA
VI
Riding the Ox Home
Mounting the Ox, slowly I return homeward.
The voice of my flute intones through the evening.
Measuring with hand-heats the pulsating harmony,
I direct the endless rhythm.
Whoever hears this melody will join me.
The struggle is over. Gain and loss have been assimilated.
Man is now self-possessed. His music is spontaneous and
harmonious.
The Ox Transcended
Astride the Ox I reach home.
I am serene. The Ox too can rest.
The dawn has come. In blissful repose
Within my thatched dwelling , / have abandoned
the whip and rope.
Duality is now transcended. ‘It is like the moon rising out of
the clouds.’ It is like waking from a dream in which one
found himself struggling in the water to keep from drowning.
On awaking, one discovers that there was no water. But
without the struggle there would have been no waking. In
the next stage both Bull and self arc transcended.
VIII
Both Ox and Self Transcended
Whip, rope, person and Ox, all merge in No-thing.
This heaven is so vast no message can stain it.
How may a snowflake exist in a raging fire?
Here are the footprints of the Patriarchs.
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OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
One no longer seeks even for enlightenment or Nirvana. One
has returned to the source of his true nature. (The eighth
poem is symbolized by an empty circle. A striking parallel
to this is Eckhart’s idea of ‘true spiritual poverty’.1)
IX
Reaching the Source
Too many steps have been taken in returning to the
root and the source.
/tetter to have been blind and deaf from the
beginning!
Dwelling in one's true abode, unconcerned with
that without —
The river flows tranquilly on and the flowers are red.
The former roots of action have been destroyed. One now
deals with things as they arc, without any self-assertion. In
place of confused activity, man can now engage in unified
activity in the world.
X
In the World
Barefooted and naked of breast I mingle with the
people of the world.
My clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am
ever blissful.
I use no magic to extend my life,
Now, before me, the dead trees become alive.
1 'For if on« wants to be truly poor, he must be as free from his
creature will as when he had not yet been bom. For, by the everlasting
truth, as long as you will to do God’s will, and yearn for eternity and
God, you arc not really poor; for he is poor who wills nothing, knows
nothing, and wants nothing’ (Sermon: ‘Blessed are the Poor’). R.
Blakney, op. cit., p. 228.
*43
OTHERS SEEK THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA
As an enlightened person one now lives in the world with a
sense of the oneness of all humanity. One no longer searches
around for the ‘footprints of Patriarchs’, for he knows his
way without further help from ancient sages. T go to the
market-place with my wine bottle and return home with my
staff. I visit the wineshop and the market and everyone I
look upon becomes enlightened.' 1
Tliis concludes the survey of some of the teachings of
Buddliism. In spile of apparent diversity, there is an under-
lying unity. Only if man comes to see things as they truly are.
can he achieve enlightenment. This intuitive wisdom com-
bined with compassion and true sclf-lcss-ncss characterize
the genuine Buddhist pilgrim. In one way or another,
Original Buddhism, Pure Land Buddhism and Zen Buddhism
all reveal these elements.
Gautama sought to avoid the jungle of unbridled specu-
lation and the swamp of sentimentalism. Zen Buddhism re-
presents that same spirit. The path so marked out is essen-
tially the razor’s edge of the Upanishadic philosophers. Each
group speaks its own idiom and expresses its own genius.
But it is not purely coincidental that in each of these tradi-
tions, Hinduism and Buddhism, the dominant concern is
that of helping the honest seeker find his true sense of
direction.
1 The wine bottle, or gourd, is the symbol of emptiness (sun^ta). The
staff is the symbol of his functional poverty; lie knows that the desire to
possess is die curse of finite existence.
144
CHAPTER NINE
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
'God never tied man’s salvation to any pattern. Whatever possi-
bilities inhere in any pattern of life inhere in all, because God
ha* Riven it so and denied it to none. One good way does not
conflict with another. ... for not all people may travel the same
road.’ — Mebter Eckiiart.
On a shrinking planet, it is important that each man
come to a better understanding of his neighbours
across the way. The physical fences are down, but
too many of the emotional and ideological barriers remain.
The preceding chapters have sought to throw light on some
aspects of the Hindu and Buddhist metaphysic. It is a teach-
ing of Quakerism that there is something of Truth or God
in every man. In Howard Brinton’s words, all human beings
have had some experience of truth whether they are aware
of its nature or not.1 In a spirit similar to that of liberal
Quakerism at its best, let us note in conclusion some of the
lessons as well as the problems involved in an appreciative
approach to religious traditions other than one’s own.
THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR BECOMING AWARE
One of the most important lessons that might be derived
from a thoughtful study of Hinduism and Buddhism is the
primacy of man’s vocation to become aware or awakened.
1 Howard Brinton, Quaker Education in Theory and Practice (Pendle Hill
Pamphlet No. 9, 1949).
K 145
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
Western Christians have frequently tried to sidestep the
rigorous task of thinking (especially with reference to first
principles) for the easier pastime of sentimentalism in reli-
gious living. If one could only ‘feel right’ with one’s Clod and
neighbour, it was too readily assumed that all was well.
That a Jeding of grace or of love is a poor substitute lor in-
sights of universal depth is illustrated by a Martin Luther
fulminating against ‘the thieving rabble of the peasants' or
advocating the burning of synagogues. Not all the sermons
preached on grace or love can make up for the lack of aware-
ness which leads persons dominated primarily by their feel-
ings into such distorted ‘Christian’ solutions.
The concern for truth or awareness must be man’s first
concern. Only as non-awareness is overcome is man freed for
compassionate action or intelligent loving. ‘Right love’ flows
from knowledge or a deepened consciousness, and reflects a
specific rightness in the nature of things. Love that derives
from true insight and right rclatcdncss is qualitatively differ-
ent from love which Hows only from the feelings. The latter
is, at best, a healthy by-product of sound psychophysical
functioning, and at worst a form of narcissism. The former
has distinctly metaphysical dimensions that arc drowned out
in the turmoil of the love arising from the feelings only.
Marco Pallis has rightly said that Hinduism and Buddhism
put much more stress on the duty of combating ‘Ignorance’
than Christians have. To be sure, Mcistcr Eckhart in speak-
ing of knowledge and love said, ‘Knowledge is better than
love, but the two together arc better than one of them, for
knowledge really contains love. Love may be fooled by
goodness, depending on it, so that when I love I hang on
the gate, but 1 do not get to God. Thus knowledge is better,
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
for it leads love. Love has to do with desire and purpose,
whereas knowledge is no particular thought, but rather it
peels off all coverings and is disinterested and runs naked
to God, until it touches him and grasps him.’ 1 But this is a
teaching which has never received too much emphasis in
Christian circles.
Obviously the knowledge which is referred to by Eckhart
or the Indian sage has little to do with information, beliefs
or views. The kind of awareness that is sought is intuitive;
it transcends ordinary ‘knowing’ where the knower stands
over against the known. It is a non-dualistic type of know-
ledge or ‘seeing’ — a partial clue to which is found in the
sense of freedom experienced by the neurotic when he sud-
denly ‘knows’ that he has been delivered from his anxiety
or his compulsive phobias. To know in this very deep sense,
one must be willing to submit to the preparatory discipline.
The importance of submission to the disciplines is recognized
more fully in the area of the sciences than in the area of
religion. Precise preconditions must be met before the
scientist can know what he seeks to know. The best scientist
is the one most completely alert and most thoroughly dis-
ciplined; in short, there must be a synthesis of the live
imagination with true asetsu, i.c. training. Whenever the
house of religion becomes a refuge for marginal men, both
imagination and training will be absent.
The West has specialized in pursuing ‘utilitarian truths’.
It has developed a knack for technological magic and has
majored in manipulating the physical environment. Its atti-
tude toward the pursuit of universal Truth, or first principles,
has been fluctuating and lackadaisical. This has been re-
1 Ibid., p. 243. Cf. Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas, first ed., p. 157.
147
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
fleeted, among other places, in a foreshortened theory of
the nature of man. Christian ‘otherworldlincss ’ (which has
frequently been only a form of postponed hedonism) has
tended to assume that man’s real destiny lay in the ‘after-
life’.1 The emphasis has been neither upon man’s knowing
himself nor God, but upon ‘glorifying’ God. Tliis resulted
in a very natural stressing of the idea of overwhelming power
which found its institutional expressions in the authoritarian
church or authoritarian family. Whether one could really
‘glorify’ God in any meaningful sense before one had come
to any understanding of himself, was never properly thought
through.
Man is born into a society. His responsibility to society is
best met when he seeks to know himself and to discover his
vocation. Then he can safely enter the market-place and
incidentally assist others in finding themselves. However,
one docs not blunder into self-knowledge. ‘The pursuit of
Truth must not be left to chance. No number of charitable
actions can be a substitute for that primary need. So-called
altruistic actions, if uninformed, are not quite what they
purport to be. In so far as they arc founded on false premises,
they remain ignorant actions and bring forth some of the
fruits of ignorance. You cannot gather figs from thistles.’ a
Many a reformer has meddled around in the lives of others
when he might fruitfully have been clarifying his own per-
spective. Where others are awakened to their own potential-
ities by the work of a reformer, genuine good is accomplished,
it is true. One wonders how much more good might have
1 The very term ‘after-life’ reveals the primucy of the quantitative
yardstick.
* Pallis, op. cit.f p. 158.
148
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
been accomplished if the reformer had opened his own
windows first to let the light of knowledge into his own
consciousness.
The Christian religion periodically tends to water itself
down to a kind of pious sentimentalism. It becomes romanti-
cism in religious garb. Even ‘love of God’ has been presented
so exclusively under sentimental figures that the impression
is left that only man’s feelings are involved, not his entire
mind or being. Rarely has it been stressed with the clarity
of a Gandhi that God is Truth. To love God unlimitedly
means to commit oneself without reservations to the search
for Truth. The common temptation is to desire comfort or
consolation more than God or Truth. The average Christian’s
search for an ‘insured future’- has made the search for Truth
a childish search for a God who will see to it that the pain
of being born into this kind of world will be rewarded by a
heaven of ‘an unending stream of pleasures’ (to quote one
Christian hymn). European man’s potentialities for pro-
founder insights have been left slumbering. The perspective
of the kindergarten has dominated theology.1
THE RELATIVITY OF ALL CONCEPTS
Another lesson that Western man might learn from con-
tact with the East is the relativity of all concepts, including
the most ‘definitive’ concepts of God. Concepts are pointers
when used validly. They have a social function in die
narrower sense also in that they set up certain limits beyond
which the novice in any tribe or culture is not supposed to
» Cf. Gerald Heard, ‘Vedanta as the Scientific Approach to Religion’,
in Vedanta for the West, edited by Christopher Ishenvood (Allen & Unwin,
London, 1949)-
119
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
venture. Every person reaches plateaus periodically in his
own experience when he needs to pause briefly to take his
bearings. But the primary purpose of the concept is to direct
man on down the road yet remaining to be explored.
There is a specific lesson here that Christians need to
learn. Time-honoured Christian phrases no longer have the
inherent pulling-power for thousands of would-be believers
that they once had. One English religionist points out re-
garding the concept ‘Christ’, that ‘the way forward for faith
in the Christendom of this age is to realize that in speaking
of Christ men arc speaking of God, but that Christ is the
historic concept created by Christendom in order to realize and
speak of God’. Furthermore, ‘the reality of God in our day lives
beyond the concept Christ; the latter can no longer do the
work that millions of religious, seeking men demand of it.
It no longer sounds the bell of truth in their minds because
historic conditions have partly destroyed its validity. That
other men do believe, and arc (breed by experience to
believe, that Christ literally is God, is no answer to the dis-
ruption of Christendom. They arc bound to ask of them-
selves, at what point does my experience meet the experience
—or lack of it— of millions of others, the cast-out mass-men
of today?’ 1
A concept is an exploratory tool and is always relative to
an experimental situation or a praxis. Christians who insist
on clinging to their concepts as though absolute display their
own spiritual nakedness. Western man is an inveterate idol-
worshipper who thinks he has moved beyond idolatry. He
‘finds’ idolatry in the East in one of the more child-like forms
in which it is practised; he is unable to sec his own more
1 E. G. Lee, Mass Man and Religion (Hutchinson, London, n.d.), p. 146.
150
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
complex forms of idolatry. For idolatry can be avoided only
when man is aware of what he is doing when he uses symbols,
creeds or words in the exploratory process. 'I he most sacred
symbols of the past are relative. They are not substitutes for
the ongoing wrestling with the problem of meaning in the
present. Insights cannot be inherited, they have to be earned.
They cannot be caught, they have to be realized.
Christians have suffered from a seff-imposed ‘rightness
and tightness’ in this area of concepts. More than religious
seekers in the Orient, they have encased themselves in the
armour of unexamined assumptions and logic-tight com-
partments. Canon Streeter has aptly described the predica-
ment of such Christians. ‘To live by logic is like playing
billiards on board a channel steamer on a choppy day;
the better the aim the more certain a miss. The grandest of
all follies is to imagine that any words we use or any defini-
tion we can frame about God and His dealings with men
can have that kind of equivalence to the reality which alone
could make them premises for valid logical deduction.’ 1
Human life is a complex thing. Theologians with ‘views’ tend
to rush precipitately toward final conclusions.
DANGERS IMPLICIT IN TIIE CONCEPT ‘THE WILL OF GOD’
In the West, where dualism still prevails in orthodox
theological thought, ‘the will of God’ is often taken in
an authoritarian rather than exploratory way. This re-
flects the traditional Western stress on obedience or sub-
mission—& quality emphasizing power more than know-
ledge, outer authority more than inner light. In the psy-
* B. H. Streeter, The Buddha and the Christ (Macmillan, N.Y., 1933).
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
chology and mctaphysic of the East, the important thing is
to achieve knowledge : to know the Atman is to know Brahman.
This puts the emphasis— to use Western theological terms—
on the nature of God rather than the will of God. This lessens
the tendency to glorify non-rational power at the expense of
awareness.
Even regarded from the purely psychological angle, the
phrase ‘will of God’ suffers several drawbacks. For one thing,
it is subject to indefinite expansion or contraction at the will
of each person, whether the person happens to be emotion-
ally disturbed or spiritually alert. In the history of the
Christian Church the ‘will of God’ has been used profoundly.
It has also been debased to justify inhuman courses of action,
including brutal warfare against Moslems, Jews and heretics.
For a person or institution suffering from delusions of gran-
deur, the ‘will of God’ becomes simply a. screen or subterfuge.
Furthermore, while a mature person may safely pray, ‘Not
my will but Thine be done’, an immature person may gain
nothing by submitting his will to that of an ‘Other’. An
individual may think he has gained a corrected vision by
shutting one eye. Actually he has only eliminated his double
vision at the loss of perspective.
Every religion includes in its midst many persons aptly
styled as ‘primitive-minded moderns’. These arc the spiritu-
ally untutored folk who for a variety of reasons — many
beyond their own direct control — have been allowed to
remain on childish levels of religious development. For such
people emphasis on the ‘will of God’ perpetuates primitive
man's tendency to interpret reality in animistic terms,
according to which all objects have ‘wills’ and are treated as
though persons. Personal spirits, both friendly and un-
*52
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
friendly, are found almost everywhere. Anything which
arouses a strong emotional response is ‘personalized’ — mis-
shapen trees, high mountains, thundering cataracts, storms.
For people who live in this kind of world, religion becomes
a branch of diplomacy.1 The individual worshipper or the
tribe, through the duly ordained ‘holy man’, tries to cajole,
bribe, placate or coerce the various spirits or gods. One
inquires into the ‘will of God’ not in order to know it so much
as to use it in the market-place, in the harvest-fields or in
battle. Wishes which arc thoroughly egocentric are ‘sancti-
fied’ as prayers, and relics become a kind of talisman for
achieving wealth, health or happiness.2
Often the professional priesthood is willing to connive
with this strange mixture of reverence and superstition,
when it is for want of knowledge that people perish. Even in
our own day, as Canon Streeter has observed, it is held by
some that it is better for the common people to believe too
much than too little— even at the price of the encouragement
of superstition.3
As Confucius noted centuries before Jesus, most people
sought the ‘will of God’ (or Heaven) in ways that perpetuated
these unfortunate attitudes. Confucius preferred that people
explore the whole realm of experience, for, he held, ‘Heaven
> A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Macmillan, N.Y., 1926),
p. 41-
a In sixth-ccntury Christianity, ‘virtue’ (Latin virlus) stood for this
quasi-magical potency. Devout Christians sought ‘virtue’ for their own
purposes. Gregory, the eminent Bishop of Tours and author of a History
of the Franks, licked the dust from the rail around St. Martin’s tomb in
order to be cured of an ailment by the saint’s ‘virtue’. Gregory of Tours,
History of the Franks (Trans, by O. M. Dalton; Clarendon Press, Oxford,
3 B. H. Streeter, op. cit., p. 79-
*53
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
docs not speak, it operates .’ The same concern for an ‘opera-
tional’ or exploratory approach seems to underlie the think-
ing of some contemporary scientists and theologians. If man
can be led to explore honestly the nature of God , he may be
able to determine better ‘what the Lord requires of him’.
This shifts the emphasis from a theological category that
has too often been an open sesame to superstitions and arbi-
trary conceptions of God to a concern about dependable
factors. It is to become aware in modern language of what
Jesus sought to make clear when he said that God caused
his sun to shine on the unjust as well as the just. Whitehead
states the contrast between the two emphases under dis-
cussion in the following terms. ‘In a communal religion you
study the will of God in order that He may preserve you;
in a purified religion, rationalized under the influence of the
world-concept, you study his goodness in order to be like
him. It is the difference between the enemy whom you con-
ciliate and the companion whom you imitate.’ He who rises
to this outlook of world consciousness thereby transcends the
level of communal or tribal awareness. He thus rises above
the slippery concept of ‘will’ to the conception of ‘an essen-
tial rightness of things’.1
To be sure, there arc those who simply redefine ‘will of
God’ to mean that which is unchanging, everywhere the
same for all races and peoples. This avoids the connotation
of arbitrariness, but it is a tacit admission that in God so
defined there is a higher category which can be called Law,
the Divine Nature or Plato’s ‘Form of the Good’. This is
1 A. N. Whitehead, op. fit., p. 41. For another criticism of the idcu
of personal divine will, see Albert Einstein, Out of My loiter Tears (Phil.
Library, N.Y., 1950), pp. 27-g.
*54
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
another way of going beyond animistic principles of explana-
tion in religion.
BEYOND TOLERANCE TO UNDERSTANDING
Another insight that might be derived incidentally from
study of the Eastern tradition is that there arc as many ways
to the summit of the mountain as there arc types of tempera-
ment. Hence no religious teacher should ever say, ‘Compel
them to come in.’ Coercion is destructive of the life of the
spirit. It focuses upon speedy ‘results’. Neither Hindus nor
Buddhists are too worried about the time factor. No Inquisi-
tion ever made its appearance among them. Spirituality
cannot be forced any more than the delicate string of a
clavichord can stand undue tension. In place of compulsion
there must be impulsion, arising within the person as he
becomes aware of his vocation. No man ever is; he is always
in process of becoming. In just what sense ‘no man is an
island’ can be determined exponentially through the ex-
tension of each man’s area of awareness.
Tolerance is a negative concept which implies that the
diversity of means arc as significant as the end sought. What
that one end is, is something which can be most effectively
realized when one is not shadow-boxing with prejudices
rooted in fear and ignorance. No healthy child goes through
an emotional crisis when he discovers that the world is not
flat and that there is no absolute up or down. Similarly, no
healthy adult is disturbed by revolutionary changes in
religious terminology when events demand them. The past
holds man in its embrace even as water holds the swimmer.
Man docs himself an injustice in trying to hold it. When the
human body is functioning well, it docs not cling to its past.
*55
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
The old skin disappears, bones change and the person thinks
nothing of it. The fingers of the hand do their intricate
manoeuvres; millions of years went into the development of
that structure. The hand fashioned by a long past does not
cling to that past; it docs the work of the present. In the genes
and chromosomes countless ancestors survive in each man in
some sense. Since man’s ancestors live on in him, he docs not
need to concern himself too much about revering them. If the
lessons were properly learned and remain in keeping with en-
vironmental demands, man remains unaware of those lessons.
The religious teachings of the past should not be ensconced
in way-side shrines tempting man to tarry too long. The only
place where man can come to himself is in the present. The
growing person is dying to himself constantly; so arc reli-
gious systems that retain any vitality. On the world landscape
of religion, many people with differing cultural backgrounds
find their places. Each religion wears a garb peculiar to
itself. Each expresses some of the values of the past, but no
garb is sacred in an absolute sense.
As these religions become better acquainted with the best
in each tradition, including their own, a new spirit will
replace the older competitiveness. Underlying the richness
of diversity will be an ever-widening fellowship of honest
men. Differences will not disappear, but they will be seen in
a wider perspective. World community will not mean world
faith in the sense that one religion will displace all of the
others or synthesize them. It will involve, however, world-
mindedness and a respect for diversity even while all honest
inquirers are seeking to discover the more universal implica-
tions of their own starting-points.1
1 Cf. W. E. Hocking, Living Religions and a World Faith, clis. 3-4.
156
TOWARDS A LARGER FELLOWSHIP
Historical near-sightedness is an inheritance from the days
of isolated continents and peoples. Present planetary needs
demand world community. The unique quality of every
land and religion can be respected on a shrinking planet
wherever that uniqueness is held in such a way that it
imposes no barriers to the widening fellowship that man’s
nature demands.
World community on a purely quantitative basis is no
solution, however. Fellowship is a matter of the spirits of men.
The deeper the quality of the rclatedncss, the richer is the
experience of community. Man can only build community
in the present. He builds community in a profound sense only
when his efforts arc bent in the direction of extending his
area of awareness through total dedication to the knowledge
of Truth or God.
True community or fellowship is capable of indefinite
enrichment. The followers of the various religious teachers
of mankind can create this kind of community to the extent
that they cease being followers and become co-explorers. Jesus,
Gautama, Lao-tse, Socrates and the anonymous Upani-
shadic sages arc not really so far apart as their respective
followers have made them. Teachings of famous men can
at their best be only pointers, like road-signs at important
intersections in the highways of life. To cling to a road-sign
or to quibble over the meaning of its language is to forget
the journey.
Life is a journey which authenticates itself to those who
have the confidence to explore. Man’s calling is to the open
road. An invitation to the realization of Truth is not an
invitation to a debating society or to religious competitive-
ness. It is an invitation to live-and to live more abundantly.
>57
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
This glossary is intended only as a guide for the beginning
student.' Many terms which occur only once in the book arc not
included in this listing. Kxccpt where otherwise indicated, the
words arc Sanskrit.
Adharma.
In Hinduism, disequilibrium. Its ethical conno-
tation, unrighteousness.
Dharma.
In Hinduism, equilibrium, norm or law. Its
ethical dimension, righteousness or morality.
(In the Pali, dhamma. For a Buddhist meaning,
sec p. 124.)
Analta (Puli).
Non-i4/m<in or non-Self. Interpreted in early
Buddhism as meaning a denial of an enduring
soul or ego.
Anicca (Pali).
Impermanence, transience.
Atman.
In Hinduism, the absolute unconditioned Spirit,
the real Self; also the reflection of the Absolute
( Brahman ) in the individual.
Atman-jnana.
Self-knowledge ; knowledge of the Real.
Avidya.
Ignorance, spiritual blindness, unawareneffl.
Vidya.
Knowledge, awareness (from a root meaning ‘to
sec').
Bhakli-yoga.
The pathway of faith or loving devotion.
Bodhisattva.
Literally 'wisdom being’; one whose nature con-
sists of insight, dedicated to the salvation of
others.
Brahman.
The Absolute or Supreme Reality, from a root
meaning ‘power’. Also applied to the man of
power, the priest.
158
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Brahma. The Supreme Reality manifested as personal God
so-called, or God as creator.
Isvara. God-as-personal (in the general Christian sense);
Saguna Brahman (literally ‘Brahman-with-attri-
butes’).
Brahmanas. Ritual commentaries; one of the main sections of
the traditional wisdom ( Veda ).
Brahman-vidya Knowledge of Brahman,
(or Brahmavidya).
Buddha. An awakened one. Refers to Gautama after he
obtained enlightenment, or to others who have
reached the point of awakening.
Dharma. Sec above, Adharma.
Duhkha (Pali). Usually translated suffering, imperfection, pain.
More exactly, commotion, agitation, or dis-
harmony. Expressed psychologically as dix-casc
or suffering.
Cunas. The three ‘strands’, elements or forces forming the
twisted rope of nature. At the psychological
level, the three components of the empirical
self.
Guru.
Jiva (or
Jivatma).
Kama.
Karma yoga.
Koruna.
Maya.
Spiritual teacher or guide.
Individual ego or ‘soul’; the Supreme Reality
particularized in the individual.
Action or work; also action-influence (hence char-
acter).
The way of works. Sometimes interpreted as
meaning only ritualistic worship. In the Gita,
combined explicitly with the idea of humani-
tarian or disinterested action.
Compassion; the outstanding characteristic of the
Bodhisulloa in Mahayana Buddhism.
The phenomenal world; the world as it appears
to the ordinary person who is unaware, bee
A. K. Coomaraswamy's On Translation of Maya,
Dcva, Tapas (St. Catherine Press Ltd., Bruges,
Belgium, reprint, April 1933).
>59
Moksha.
Neti, neti,
Nirvana.
Parinimna.
Samadhi.
Samsara.
Tanha (Pali).
Tafias.
Trikaya.
Trifiitaka.
Upadana.
Ufiaya,
Vedanta.
Vidya.
Toga.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Release, freedom from fragmentarincss or the
realm of flux; liberation.
‘Not this, not this’; the path of negation to l>c
followed by the one desiring Self-knowledge or
knowledge of Brahman.
Literally ‘despiration’ or ‘a blowing out’ (as of a
flame); extinction. On the ethical level, the
dying out of lust, resentment, covetousness. On
the psychological level, extinction of indi-
viduality.
Complete Nirvana ; also simply dissolution.
Superconsciousness; highest state of contempla-
tion; the unitivc state.
Literally ‘stream’ or ‘confluence’; stream of be-
coming; eternal recurrence (‘transmigration’).
Thirst, craving, inordinant desire.
Literally ‘burning’ or ‘glow’; hence intension, toil
or austerity.
The ‘three bodies’ or modes of a Buddha; in
Mahayana doctrine.
‘Three baskets’ or collections. The Pali Buddhist
canon, consisting of Vinaya, Suita and Alhi-
dhamma.
Clinging; associated with tanha in Buddhist
analysis.
Accommodation, convenient means ; in Mahayana
doctrine.
‘End of the Veda.’
See above, Avidya.
Literally 'to yoke’. Used in two senses: (i) union
(of the Atman and Brahman)', (2) the pathway
to such union, or the discipline involved.
160
BIBLIOGRAPHY
For the person who wants to make a more detailed study or the
Oriental traditions dealt with in this volume, the following books
arc suggested.
For the earliest writings of Hinduism and Buddhism, in English
translations, the reader is referred to such collections as:
Sacred Books of the East.
Sacred Books of the Buddhists.
Pali Text Society Translation Series.
Harvard Oriental Series.
Many of the first translations made by Western scholars arc
quite misleading. They should be supplemented, where possible,
with the translations of Coomaraswamy, Prabhavananda, Nikhi-
lananda, D. T. Suzuki, Radhakrishnan.
The Upanishads in Translation
Swami Nikhilananda, The Upanishads (Harper, N.Y., 1949, vol. 1).
Swami Prabhavananda and F. Manchester, The Upanishads,
Breath of the Eternal (Vedanta Press, Hollywood, 1947).
R. E. Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Oxford Univ.
Press, 1921).
F. Max Muller, The Upanishads ( Sacred Books of the East, vol. 1, 15,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1879, 1884).
The Bhagavad Gita in Translation
Some of the earlier translations arc those by K. T. Telang (1882),
Edwin Arnold (1885), M. M. Chatterji (1887), A. M. Sastn
(1901), L. D. Barnett (1905), Sri Aurobindo (1928), W. D. P.
Hill (1928), B. G. Tilak (1935), D. S. Sarma (i937)«
Of the more recent translations, two include the Sanskrit text in
Romanized letters: Franklin Edgerton (1944) and S.
Radhakrishnan (1948).
L
161
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Two other excellent translations are those by Swami Prabha-
vananda and Christopher Isherwood (1945), and Swami
Nikhilananda (1944).
Books on Hinduism or Buddhism
Swami Akhilananda, Hindu Psychology, & Meaning for the West
(Kegan Paul, 1946). A popular introduction designed for
Western readers and drawing considerably from Western
thought to aid the interpretation.
Ananda K. Coomamswamy, Am I My /bother's Keeper ? (John Day.
N.Y., 1947). A series of essays which make an excellent intro-
duction to the important work done by this eminent scholar.
A Hew Approach to the Vedas (Luznc, London, 1933). In-
cludes portions of two Upanishads and three Vedie hymns.
An excellent essay in translation and exegesis, not for the
beginner.
Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism (Harrap, London, 1928).
A volume to be read with both pleasure and profit by the
beginner.
Hinduism and Buddhism (Philosophical Library, N.Y., 1943).
A compact, richly annotated interpretation of basic Hindu-
ism and Buddhism, going beyond his earlier work of 1928.
Unsurpassed, but not for the layman.
Religious Basis of the Forms of Indian Society (N.Y., 194G).
Paul Deussen, Philosophy of the Upanishads (Clark, Edinburgh,
• 1006, 1919). One of the best of the early studies. Its Western
philosophical terminology sometimes misleading.
The System of the Vedanta , According to Badarayuna's Brahma-
Sutras and Sankara's Commentary Thereon Set Forth as a Com-
pendium of the Dogmatics of Brahmanism from the Standpoint of
Sankara (Open Court, Chicago, 1912). Same qualification
applies.
Rene Guenon, East and West (Luzac, London, 1 94 1 ) . Basic differ-
ences between Occidental and Oriental frames of reference.
Good as an introduction to Guenon’s works.
The Crisis of the Modem World (Luzac, London, 1942).
162
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrine (Luzac, London,
1945). Excellent.
Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta (Luzac,
London, 1945). Excellent.
William McGovern, Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism (Kegan
Paul, London, 1922). General survey of the Mahayana.
Swami Prabhavananda, Vedic Religion and Philosophy (Sri Rama-
krishna Math, Mylaporc, Madras, India, 1943). Excellent
introduction for the thoughtful layman.
Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas (2nd edition, Knopf, N.Y., 1949).
Excellent chapters on ‘The Presiding Idea' and ‘The Round
of Existence’. Mahayana Buddhism.
James B. Pratt, The Pilgrimaqe of Buddhism (Macmillan, N.Y.,
1928). Covers the entire Aeld of Buddhism. Best one-volume
text available in English. Uneven in depth of interpretation;
appreciative.
S. Radhakrishnan, The Philosophy of the Upanishads (Allen & Unwin,
London, 1924). A good secondary study for the mature
beginner.
N. Scnzaki and S. Reps, Ten Bulls (Mentor garten, Los Angeles,
*935)-
Beatrice L. Suzuki, Impressions of Mahayana Buddhism (Luzac,
London, 1940).
Mahayana Buddhism, A Brief Outline (Marlowe, London,
1948). Excellent for beginner.
D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism , 3 vols. (Luzac, London,
1927, 1933; yoi« 3> Harper, N.Y., 1949)-
Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Philosophical Library, N.Y.,
,949). An excellent introduction by the outstanding Zen
scholar.
The Lankaoatara Sutra (London, 1932)- Transition of
one of the most important sources of Mahayana Buddhism.
For the advanced student.
Studies in the Lankaoatara Sutra (Routledgc, London, 1930).
The Z™ Doctrine of No- Mind (Rider, London, 1949).
163
BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. Takakusu, The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy (Univ. of Hawaii,
Honolulu, 1940)- First three chapters more general; the
remainder is a detailed study of different Mahayana schools.
A. W. Watts, The Spirit of ^cn (Murray, London, 1948).
Zen (Stanford, Palo Alto, 1948).
The Supreme Identity (Pantheon, N.Y., 1950). An excellent
essay on Oriental metaphysic and the Christian religion.
H. Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization
(Pantheon, N.Y., 194G).
INDEX
(See Glossary of Terms also)
Adharmu, 73
Agni, 15, 16, 2G
Ahimsn, 53, 77
Alara, 82-3
Alaya-vijnana, 137
Albertos Magnus, 3
Amitabha (Amidn), 128-9
Anatia, 88 ff
Anicca, 126
Aquinas, Thomas, 3
Arjuna, 60 ff
Ascesis, 147
Asceticism, 50, 69 ff, 80, 83, 109
Asoka, 1 12
Asvaghosha, 1340
Atheism, 80
Atma-jnana (Atman-jnunu), 28,
32 IT
Atinon, 19, 22 ff, 29, 43-6, 49, 62,
G4 ff, 88 If, 152
Augustine, 34, 36, 40
Autocorrcclivlsm, 73
Avalaruna, 72 ir, 133
Avidya, 34, 6G, 88, 97, 99, »°5 ff,
119.20, 134,
Awakening of Faith, 134, 136
Bhagavad Gita, 57, 59 ff, 133
Bhaktiyoga, 57, 71-2, 75-6
Bhava, 100
BodhUattva, 127 ff
Bo-tree, 83
Brahmaloka, 39
Brahman, 16, 19, 22 ff, 30, 32 ff,
Brahmanirvanu, 71
Brahma-vidya, 29 n
Brinton, Howard, 145
Buddha (Gautama), 3, 78 ff, 82 ff
Calvin, John, 36 _
Chariot analogy, 41, 49, 63, 86
Christ, 130
Coleridge, S. T., 1
Compassion (Karunu), in, 114,
122-3, ,27 ff> *4®
Confucius, 133
Coomaraswamy, A. K., viii, 9, 12,
35, «9> ,oan> ,03.
Dhammn, 124
Dharma, 73
Dairclcwncss, 42, 97
Diamond Sutra, 136-7
Dionysius the Arcopagitc, ion
Duhkha, 84 ff, 116, 120
Eckhart, Mcistcr, 29, 32, 4^-7, 48,
12 1, 143, *45, 146-7
Eightfold i’ath, 108 ff
Four Noble Truths, 85 ff
Four Signs, 82
Four Sublime Moods, 114-13
Freud, 51
Gandhi, 77, 149
Gregory of Tours, 153 n
Guenon, R., viii n, 9, 13, 22
Gunas, 53, 65
Guru, 44
45-6, 49, 55, 5b, 65, 79, ", 152
Brahmanas, 17 ff
Brahma nnspati, 15
INDEX
Huruppa, 13
Hatha yoga, 54
Heard, Gerald, viii n, 48 n
Hedonism, 38, 148
Hinayana, 81 n, 125-6* 128, 134,
135
Hocking, W. E., x, 10, 156
Huxley, Aldous, viii n
Indra, 13-16, 55-6
Inge, W. R., vii, viii
Isvara, 54, 57
J a taka, 84 n, 122
Jwus, 3, 57, 8a n, 13*. *53. >54.
’57
Jhanas, 115
Karma, Law of, 37, 62, 88, 99 ff,
109, 129
Karma yoga, 57, 68 IT
Kriihna, 60 IT, 133
Kwnku-An, 139 fT
Lankavatnra Sutra, 135, 136, 137
Lao-tse, 157
Lila, 73
Luther, Martin, no, 146
Mahabharata, 60
Mahayana, 81 n, 125 ff
Malik, Charles, viii-ix
Mantras, 80
Maya, 35, 40, 73*4
Mohenjo-daro, 13
Moksha, 43, 48, 75. 83, 1 »5
Neti, ncti, 23, 89
Nikhilananda, Swami, 30
Nirvana, 84, 96, 115 ff, 122, 127,
*33 n; 139, 143
Pali, 81, 86, 125
Pallis, Marco, viii n, 85, 101, 134,
146
Parinirvana, 1*7
Parivarta, 129
Pasupati, 49
Patanjali, 52 fT, 57, 70
Paul, 3
Pillar Edicts, 1 12
Prabhavnnanda, Swami, x, 25,
33 ». 59 n
Prajapati, 13,35-6
Prajna Paramila, 136
Pratt, J. 15., 137 n
Pratycka lluddhai, 133
Psychoanalysis, 51-2
Psychology, 9, a8, 30, 64 IT, 73-4,
87, 103, 1 16, 1 18, 123, 147
Pure Land, t28
Quakerism, 145
Rudhukmhnan, 59, 60
Ruju yogu, 57
Reed, J. Frunk, ix-x
Rhys Duvids, C. A. F., 105 n
Rig Vedu, 12 fT, 49
Rita, 13
Saddharma Pundarika, 131
Samadhi, 33, 56
Samsara, 33-7, 10a ff, 116, 119,
137, lag, 134
Sangha, 124
Sankara, 102 n
Sanskrit, 125
Santideva, 121, 129-30
Schweitzer, Albert, 7-B
Siva, 49
Society of Friends, ix
Socrates, 157
Soma, 15-16, 27
166
INDEX
Streeter, B. H., 151, 153
Sunyata, 144
Supcrconsciousncss, 52, 55, 56,
117
Suzuki, D. T., viii n
Takakusu, J., 99 ff
Tnnha, H7-8, 89, 92, gG, 97, 100,
104 (F, 116
Tapas, 83
Ten Oxherding l’lclurni, 139 fF
Tlirravndiiw, 125, 12G
Trikayn, 131 fF
Tripitaka, Hi
Upailana, 89,94,96, ion, 102, 117
Upunislmds, 19 fT, 29, 32 fT, 49
Upnya, 126
Vana, 1 16
Varuna, 15
Vedana, 100
Vedanta, 29
Vidya, 34, 105
Virokana, 55
Watts, Alan, viiin, 10, 51, 134,
138
Wheel (or Round) of Existence,
98 fF, 105-6, 127, 134-5
Whitehead, A. N., 2, 153, 154
Whitman, Walt, 115
Worship, 45, 71-2, 75 ff
Yoga, 19, 48 ff, 69 ff, 76, H3
Zen, 1 38 fF
Zimmer, H., 24
»
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