Buddhist philosophy, Indian
Hayes Richard
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Buddhism was an important ingredient in the philosophical melange of the
Indian subcontinent for over a millennium. From an inconspicuous beginning
a few centuries before Christ, Buddhist scholasticism gained in strength
until it reached a peak of influence and originality in the latter half of
the first millennium. Beginning in the eleventh century, Buddhism
gradually declined and eventually disappeared from northern India.
Although different individual thinkers placed emphasis on different
issues, the tendency was for most writers to offer an integrated
philosophical system that incorporated ethics, epistemology and
metaphysics. Most of the issues addressed by Buddhist philosophers in
India stem directly from the teachings attributed to Siddhārtha Gautama,
known better through his honorific title, the Buddha.
The central concern of the Buddha was the elimination of unnecessary
discontent. His principal insight into this problem was that all
dissatisfaction arises because people (and other forms of life as well)
foster desires and aversions, which are in turn the consequence of certain
misunderstandings about their identity. Discontent can be understood as
frustration, or a failure to achieve what one wishes; if one’s wishes are
generally unrealistic and therefore unattainable, then one will naturally
be generally dissatisfied. Since the Buddha saw human frustration as an
effect of misunderstandings concerning human nature, it was natural for
Buddhist philosophers to attend to questions concerning the true nature of
a human being. Since the Buddha himself was held as the paradigm of moral
excellence, it was also left to later philosophers to determine what kind
of being the Buddha had been. A typical question was whether his example
was one that ordinary people could hope to follow, or whether his role was
in some way more than that of a teacher who showed other people how to
improve themselves.
The Buddha offered criticisms of many views on human nature and virtue and
duty held by the teachers of his age. Several of the views that he opposed
were based, at least indirectly, on notions incorporated in the Veda, a
body of liturgical literature used by the Brahmans in the performance of
rituals. Later generations of Buddhists spent much energy in criticizing
Brahmanical claims of the supremacy of the Veda; at the same time,
Buddhists tended to place their confidence in a combination of experience
and reason. The interest in arriving at correct understanding through
correct methods of reasoning led to a preoccupation with questions of
logic and epistemology, which tended to overshadow all other philosophical
concerns during the last five centuries during which Buddhism was an
important factor in Indian philosophy.
Since the Buddha saw human frustration as an
effect that could be eliminated if its cause were eliminated, it was
natural for Buddhist philosophers to focus their attention on a variety of
questions concerning causality. How many kinds of cause are there? Can a
multiplicity of effects have a single cause? Can a single thing have a
multiplicity of causes? How is a potentiality triggered into an actuality?
Questions concerning simplicity and complexity, or unity and plurality,
figured prominently in Buddhist discussions of what kinds of things in the
world are ultimately real. In a tradition that emphasized the principle
that all unnecessary human pain and conflict can ultimately be traced to a
failure to understand what things in the world are real, it was natural to
seek criteria by which one discerns real things from fictions.
1 Human nature
A key tenet of Buddhist doctrine is that discontent is an outcome of
desires grounded in false beliefs. The most important of these false
beliefs are that (1) one’s own individual existence is more important than
those of other individuals, and that (2) fulfilment can be achieved by
acquiring and owning property. If these misunderstandings can be replaced
by an accurate view of human nature, suggested the Buddha, then
unrealistic craving and ambition will cease, and so will frustration.
Happiness, in other words, can be achieved by learning to recognize that
(1) no one is more important than anyone else, since all beings ultimately
have the same nature, and that (2) the very idea of ownership is at the
root of all conflicts among living beings. The methods by which one
achieves contentment, according to the Buddha, are both intellectual and
practical. One can gradually become free of the kinds of beliefs that
cause unnecessary pain to oneself and others by carefully observing one’s
own feelings and thoughts, and how one’s own words and actions affect
others. To counter the view that one’s own individual existence is more
important than the existence of other beings, Buddhist philosophers
adopted the radical strategy of trying to show that in fact human beings
do not have selves or individual identities. That is, an attempt was made
to show that there is nothing about a person that remains fixed throughout
a lifetime, and also that there is nothing over which one ultimately has
real control. Failure to accept the instability, fragmentation and
uncontrollability of one’s body and mind is seen as a key cause of
frustration of the sort that one could avoid by accepting things as they
really are. On the other hand, realizing that all beings of all kinds are
liable to change and ultimately to die enables one to see that all beings
have the same fundamental destiny. This, combined with the recognition
that all living beings strive for happiness and wellbeing, is an important
stage on the way to realizing that no individual’s needs, including one’s
own, are more worthy of consideration than any other’s.
The notion that one does not have an enduring self has two aspects, one
personal and the other social. At the personal level, the person is
portrayed in Buddhist philosophy as a complex of many dozens of physical
and mental events, rather than as a single feature of some kind that
remains constant while all peripheral features undergo change. Since these
constituent events are incessantly undergoing change, it follows that the
whole that is made up of these constituents is always taking on at least
some difference in nature. Whereas people might tend to see themselves as
having fixed personalities and characters, the Buddha argued it is always
possible for people either to improve their character through mindful
striving, or to let it worsen through negligence and obliviousness.
Looking at the social aspects of personal identity, the Buddha maintained,
in contrast to other views prevalent in his day, that a person’s station
in human society need not be determined by birth. According to the view
prevalent in ancient and classical Indian society, a person’s duties,
responsibilities and social rank were determined by levels of ritual
purity; these were in turn influenced by pedigree and gender and various
other factors that remained constant throughout a person’s lifetime. In
criticizing this view, Buddhist philosophers redefined the notions of
purity and nobility, replacing the concept of purity by birth with that of
purity by action (karma) (see Karma and rebirth,
Indian conceptions of §5). Thus the truly noble person, according
to Buddhist standards, was not one who had a pure and revered ancestry,
but rather one who habitually performed pure and benevolent actions.
Given these basic ideas of human nature as a starting point, later
generations of Buddhist thinkers were left with the task of explaining the
mechanisms by which all the components of a person work together; this
also involved trying to explain how human beings can gradually change
their character. While there was general agreement on the principle that
the intentions behind one’s actions led eventually to resultant mental
states, that benevolent actions resulted in a sense of wellbeing, while
malevolent actions resulted in uneasiness and vexation, the precise
details of how karmic causality took place were a matter of much dispute.
Especially difficult was the question of how actions committed in one
lifetime could influence the character of a person in a different
lifetime, for Buddhists accepted the notion of rebirth that was common in
Indian systems of thought. Discussions of how people could improve their
character presuppose that the people in question have not become
irreversibly depraved. One controversy that arose among Buddhist thinkers
was whether there are beings who become so habitually perverse that they
can no longer even aspire to improve their character; if so, then such
beings would apparently be heir to an unending cycle of rebirths.
The view of the person as a set of interconnected modules, the precise
contents of which were always changing, was characterized by Buddhists as
avoiding the untenability of two other hypotheses that one might form
about human nature. One hypothesis is that a person has some essential
core that remains unchanged through all circumstances. This core survives
the death of the physical body and goes on to acquire a new body through a
process of reincarnation. According to this view, the unchanging essential
part of a person is eternal. The second hypothesis is that a person takes
on an identity at birth and carries it through life but loses the identity
altogether at death. The Buddhist view, characterized as a middle way
between these two extremes, is that a person’s character is always in
flux, and that the factors that determine the particular changes in a
person’s mentality continue to operate even after the body housing that
mentality dies. So Buddhists tended to claim that what goes from one
living body to another is not an unchanging essence, but rather a set of
tendencies to behave in certain ways.
2 Ethics
The strongest motivation for accepting the doctrine of rebirth was to
support the notion that people are accountable for their actions to the
very end of their lives; the doctrine thus plays a central role in
Buddhist ethical theory. It was noted in the preceding section that the
Buddhist view of the person was described as a middle path between two
equally untenable extremes. In the realm of conduct also, the Buddhists
described theirs as a middle path or a moderate position that avoided
extreme views of human conduct. In order to understand the various
positions against which the Buddhists defined their views on appropriate
conduct, it should be borne in mind that the central question being asked
by the Buddha and his contemporaries was how to achieve contentment. The
strategies recommended by different thinkers were closely related to their
views of life after death. Those who held that a person has only one life
tended to argue that one’s life should be spent in the pursuit of as much
pleasure as is possible without bringing pain and injury to oneself.
Restraint in the pursuit of pleasure was seen as necessary only to the
extent that excessive indulgence might shorten one’s life and decrease
one’s opportunities for future pleasure seeking.
Philosophers who accepted the doctrine of rebirth, on the other hand,
tended to argue that the only kind of happiness worth pursuing was lasting
freedom from the pains and turmoil of life; this could be won only by
bringing rebirth to an end. After death, they said, all living beings are
eventually reborn in a form of life determined by the accumulated effects
of deeds done in previous lives. Although some forms of life might be very
pleasant and offer a temporary reward for previous good actions, every
form of life involves some amount of pain and suffering, even if it is
only an anxiety that one’s present peace and happiness will eventually
come to an end and be replaced by more direct forms of physical and mental
pain. Therefore, the only hope of any lasting freedom from the pains of
existence is to remove oneself from the cycle of birth and death
altogether. Exactly how this was to be achieved was a matter of much
controversy, but some drastic methods involved undergoing extreme forms of
austerity and even self-inflicted pain. The Buddhist middle path,
therefore, was one that avoided two extremes: one extreme was the
self-indulgence of those who denied life after death altogether, and the
other was the self-torture recommended by some ascetics as the only way to
gain freedom.
Buddhist philosophers tended to agree that a person’s mentality at any
given moment is either virtuous, vicious or neutral. This means that all
of one’s mental characteristics in a given moment have the same
orientation, which is either towards a state of happiness, the natural
consequence of virtue, or towards a state of discontent, the natural
consequence of vice. The principal virtues that were said to cooperate in
a healthy mentality were correct understanding, which manifested itself as
a sense of shame, and a sense of decency, usually interpreted as respect
for oneself and respect for others. Thus if one has the virtue of having a
sense of shame, then while that sense of shame is functioning, one will
also have the virtues of being generous, free of malice and open-minded;
having these virtues makes one likely to behave in ways that conduce to
the health of oneself and others. If, on the other hand, one has the vice
of being shameless, then one will also have the vices of being deluded and
agitated and therefore prone to behave in ways likely to bring harm to
oneself and others. While virtuous and vicious mental qualities cannot be
present in the same mentality at the same moment, it could very well be
that a person vacillates between virtuous and vicious frames of mind.
Indeed, this is said to be the condition of the vast majority of living
beings (see Duty and virtue, Indian conceptions
of §3; Virtues and vices).
Despite a tendency to agree on these basic matters, Buddhist philosophers
disagreed with one another over several other questions. There was, for
example, controversy over whether people could arrive at stages of
attainment from which they could never backslide. Some argued that once
people gained certain insights into reality, then they could no longer be
deluded in the ways that result in acting on self-centred motivations.
Others argued that, even if backsliding might be unlikely for some people,
it is in principle always possible, and therefore a person can never
afford to be complacent. Another controversy arose over whether a vicious
person could be fully aware of a virtuous person’s virtues, some Buddhists
holding the view that only a virtuous person can recognize that another
person is also virtuous. Yet another matter of controversy had to do with
whether the merit of being virtuous could be transferred to others. Some
argued that each person is strictly accountable for their own actions and
that no one can escape the ill effects of their intentionally harmful
actions. Others claimed that merit can be transferred to others, enabling
them to experience levels of happiness that they could never have deserved
on the merit of their own actions. Closely tied to this controversy was
the question mentioned above, concerning whether some beings fall into
such states of depravity that they can no longer even aspire to be good.
Those philosophers who accepted that beings could become depraved to this
extent but denied that merit can be transferred had to conclude that some
beings would never attain nirvāṇa (see
Nirvāṇa). Other philosophers, for whom the prospect of eternal
suffering in the cycle of birth seemed unjust, favoured the doctrine that
merit could be transferred, thus enabling these thoroughly depraved beings
to undergo the change of mentality necessary to begin leading a life of
virtue.
3 Buddha-nature
Even in the earliest strata of Buddhist literature that has survived to
the present, the Buddha is portrayed in a variety of ways. Some passages
depict him as a man who skilfully answers questions that have been put to
him, either by answering the questions or by showing why the question as
asked cannot be answered. The passages were clearly designed to portray
the Buddha as a paragon of wisdom, whose careful and analytic thinking
could be used as a model for those seeking to arrive at correct
understanding. The Buddha is also portrayed as a model of virtue, a man
who has mastered the art of living in the world without bringing harm to
other living beings and whose concern for the welfare of all living things
around him is unsurpassed. Interspersed with these passages that focus on
the Buddha as a remarkable man, there are other passages that portray the
Buddha as a superhuman miracle worker whose mastery of yogic technique has
given him the power to travel hundreds of kilometres in the blink of an
eye, transport himself and his followers through the air, know the precise
thoughts of other people, see into the past and future, heal serious
wounds merely by looking at them, and soothe wild and dangerous animals by
merely speaking gently to them. Some texts show him inviting his followers
to question everything he says and to accept nothing on his authority; in
other passages, he is portrayed as a man to whom even the wisest and most
knowledgeable gods come so that the profound mysteries of the universe can
be explained to them in clear words. Given the diversity of things said
about the Buddha in the texts that Buddhists regarded as authoritative, it
is no wonder that among the points about which there was considerable
controversy was the nature of the Buddha himself. Discussions about the
nature of the Buddha were as important to some Buddhist philosophers as
discussions about the nature of God were to the theologians of theistic
traditions (see Buddha).
The earliest extant record of controversies concerning the nature of the
Buddha is a work known as Kathāvatthu (Points of
Controversy), supposed to have been written around 246
bc by an elder monk known as Tissa
Moggalīputta. This treatise mentions over two hundred topics over which
there was controversy among Buddhists, of which several pertain to the
nature of the Buddha. According to this text, some Buddhists held to the
view that the Buddha pervades all regions of space at all times and has
the power to suspend all the laws of nature at will; others argued that
the Buddha exists only where his human body is located and that he is
bound by all the natural laws by which other living beings are bound.
Those who accepted the Buddha as a ubiquitous and eternal entity tended to
claim that the human Buddha was merely a manifestation in human form that
appeared for the sake of guiding human beings. This apparition, they
claimed, had no real need for food and shelter or other material
requirements of life, but it accepted such gifts from devotees so that
they might learn the benefits of generosity. Moreover, this apparition was
said to be wholly lacking any of the unpleasant physical or mental traits
of a human being and never had any thoughts that were not directed at
teaching people how to cultivate virtue and attain nirvāṇa. Other
Buddhists rejected this view of the Buddha altogether and argued that he
was a mortal just like all other mortals, except that among the limited
range of topics about which he had knowledge was the important matter of
how to achieve lasting peace and happiness. This issue was controverted
for over a millennium in India, with Dharmakīrti and some of his followers
taking up the view of the Buddha as an ordinary mortal, while some members
of the Yogācāra movement took up the position that the Buddha was more of
a cosmic principle; the eleventh-century Buddhist Ratnakīrti eventually
argued that all particular acts of individual awareness are merely parts
of a single, universal consciousness, which he identified as the mind of
the Buddha (see Buddhism, Yogācāra school of).
The position taken by Ratnakīrti may be the logical conclusion of an idea
first mentioned in the Kathāvatthu,
namely, that one becomes an Awakened One (buddha) by acquiring a
quality known as awakening (bodhi). Tissa Moggalīputta himself
rejected this idea, arguing that if awakening were something that one
could attain, it would also be something that one could lose, in which
case a buddha could cease to be a buddha; his view,
therefore, was that awakening is not a positive trait but merely the
absence of delusions. Dissenting from this view, other Buddhists (and
especially members of the Yogācāra school) argued that buddhas
become buddhas as a result of realizing an innate potential to
become awakened. This innate potential, called the embryo of the knower of
truth (tathāgata-garbha), was said by some to exist in all living
beings, thereby making all living beings buddhas, or at least
buddhas in the making. From this view that every sentient being has
the essential quality of a buddha, even if this essence is somehow
obscured from view by others, it was a short step to the view that all
sentient beings are identical in their essence and therefore not really
different from one another. Closely related to this controversy over the
nature of the Buddha’s
essence was the issue of whether there are degrees of buddhahood or
different ranks of buddhas. Tissa Moggalīputta had argued that
being a buddha is a matter of being free of delusion, and either
one is free or one is not; there can be no degrees of freedom. Other
thinkers took the view that although all beings are essentially buddhas
in their nature, they manifest their essences to a different extent, and
therefore one may speak of degrees of buddhahood.
4 Epistemology
Siddhārtha Gautama the Buddha is portrayed in Buddhist literature as
ridiculing the sacrificial rituals of the Brahmans and accusing the
priests of fabricating them for no better reason than to make money from
the wealthy and to manipulate the powerful. Attacking the sacrificial
practices of the Brahman priests in this way eventually led to challenging
the authority of the Vedic literature that the priests considered sacred.
An early Buddhist philosopher who challenged the authority of sacred texts
was
Nāgārjuna, whose arguments called
into question the very possibility of justified belief. In a text called
Vigrahavyāvartanī(Averting Disputes),
Nāgārjuna argued that all opinions are warranted by an appeal to
experience, or to various forms of reasoning, or to the authority of
tradition. Now among the opinions that one may hold, said Nāgārjuna, is
the opinion that all opinions are warranted in one of those ways. Nothing,
however, seems to warrant that opinion. If one should claim that that
opinion is self-warranting, then why not grant that all other opinions are
also self-warranting? On the other hand, if that opinion requires
substantiation, the result will be an infinite regress. Therefore,
concluded Nāgārjuna, no opinion can be grounded. Realizing that one can
never arrive at certainty thus becomes for Nāgārjuna the most reliable way
of freeing oneself from the various delusions that cause unhappiness in
the world. Dispelling delusions is therefore not a matter of discovering
truth, but a matter of realizing that all opinions that pass as knowledge
are not really knowledge at all.
Although Nāgārjuna’s
scepticism managed to capture the spirit of some passages of Buddhist
literature that depict the Buddha as questioning the authoritarianism of
other teachers, it did not leave adequate room for distinguishing truth
from error. Most Buddhist philosophers who came after Nāgārjuna,
therefore, placed an emphasis on both eliminating error and securing
positive knowledge.
Dignāga, modifying theories of
knowledge that Brahmanical thinkers had developed, argued that there are
just two types of knowledge, each having a distinct subject matter
unavailable to the other: through the senses one gains knowledge of
particulars that are physically present, while the intellect enables one
to form concepts that take past and future experiences into consideration.
In an important work called Ālambanaparīkṣa
(Examining the Support of Awareness) Dignāga developed an
argument that his predecessor Vasubandhu
had made. Here Dignāga argued that a cognition is accurate only if the
subject matter of the cognition is identical to that which causes the
awareness to arise. So, for example, if one sees a dead tree in the dark
and takes it to be a man, then the subject matter of the cognition is a
man, which is not identical to the dead tree that is causing the
cognition; the cognition is therefore inaccurate. Given this principle,
said Dignāga, it follows that none of our sensory cognitions is accurate,
because each of them is really caused by atoms massed together;
nevertheless, we are never aware of anything as a mass of atoms. Instead,
what we are aware of is such things as human beings, elephants and trees.
These notions of things as human beings or elephants, however, are purely
conceptual in nature and are not in accord with the realities that exist
in the external world. Therefore, he concluded, the only objects of our
awareness are concepts; we are never directly aware of realities as they
occur outside the mind.
Dignāga’s
essays rekindled an interest in epistemological questions among Buddhist
philosophers that lasted for several centuries. As influential as his
theories in logic and the sources of knowledge were, there was little in
them that explicitly referred to previous Buddhist doctrine. It was left
to the systematic philosopher Dharmakīrti
to draw out the implications that questions of logic and epistemology had
for people interested in the traditional Buddhist preoccupation with
eliminating delusions concerning the nature of the self in order to win
freedom from discontent.
Dharmakīrti’s
system of epistemology was centred around his criticism of the Brahmanical
doctrine of the special authority of the Veda, which the Brahmans supposed
had been revealed to humanity by God. He combined this criticism with a
defence of the doctrine that the Buddha was a source of knowledge. The
Brahmanical claim of authority for their scriptures is based upon the
notion that God is omniscient and compassionate; this idea, said
Dharmakīrti, is extravagant and laughable. The Buddhist claim for the
authority of the Buddha, on the other hand, is based on the modest claim
that the Buddha was an ordinary man who could see the root cause of
discontent, knew how to eliminate the cause, and took time to teach other
human beings what he had discovered. Moreover, argued Dharmakīrti, the
Buddha taught nothing but principles that every human being could confirm.
Full confirmation of the Buddha’s
teachings was said to be impossible for a person whose vision was still
clouded by delusions. On the other hand, to a person who had learned to
listen to wise counsel, reflect on it and then put it into practice, all
the teachings of the Buddha on the question of winning nirvāṇa
would be confirmed.
The form of reflection that Dharmakīrti recommended was based upon a
systematic study of the principles of legitimate inference; most
delusions, he contended, stem from forming hasty generalizations from
limited experience. Most doctrinal matters about which philosophers
dispute, he said, cannot be decided with certainty. In this respect,
Dharmakīrti adopted the cautious attitude of the Buddha and Nāgārjuna
towards unwarranted opinions and assumptions. At the same time, he tried
to show that the extreme scepticism that had characterized the work of
such thinkers as Nāgārjuna was also unwarranted. This epistemological
’middle path’, consisting of modest claims about the extent of the Buddha’s
knowledge and yet insisting that the Buddha’s
doctrines were true and distinguishable from falsehoods, set the tone for
most of the Buddhist philosophy that evolved in India until the time that
Buddhism stopped being an important factor in the philosophical milieu of
the Indian subcontinent. The focus on epistemological issues enabled
Buddhists to set aside the sometimes bitter disputes over the question of
which Buddhist scriptures were authentic (see
Epistemology, Indian schools of §1).
5 Metaphysics
Given the emphasis in Buddhist teachings on the role of erroneous belief
as a cause of unhappiness, it was natural that Buddhist philosophers
should focus on questions of ontology and the theory of causation.
Ontology was important, since a kind of intellectual error that was
supposed to lead to unhappiness was being mistaken about what exists. The
theory of causation was important, since the eradication of the cause of
unhappiness was supposed to result in the removal of unhappiness itself.
The earliest attempts to systematize the teachings of Buddhism were in the
genre of literature known as ‘Abhidharma’, in which all the factors of
human experience were classified according to a variety of schemata (see
Buddhism, Ābhidharmika schools of). The
study of the relationships among these classes of factors eventually
evolved into a detailed theory of causality, in which several types of
causal relationship were enumerated. There were many schools of
Abhidharma, and each had its own set of schemata for the classification
and enumeration of the factors of experience. Indeed, each had its own
interpretation of what the very word ‘Abhidharma’ means; among the
possible interpretations of the word, a common one is that it means a
higher or more advanced doctrine, or a doctrine that leads to a higher
form of wisdom. The variety of approaches taken in Abhidharma literature
makes it difficult to discuss this literature in any but the most general
way. Among most schools of Abhidharma, there was a commitment to the idea
that the best strategy for coming to an understanding of any complex being
is to analyse that being into its ultimate parts. An ultimate part is that
which cannot be analysed into anything more simple. Most Buddhist
systematists held to the principle that the ultimately simple building
blocks out of which things are made are ultimately real, while complex
things that are made up of more simple parts are not ultimately real; they
are held to be real only through the consensus of a community. As was seen
above in the section on human nature (§1), for example, there was a strong
tendency for Buddhists to accept that a person’s character is the product
of many components; these components were held to be real, but the person
was held to be ultimately unreal. The idea of a person may be a fiction,
but it is one that makes the running of society more manageable, and
therefore it can be regarded as a consensual reality, in contrast to an
ultimate reality.
The philosopher Nāgārjuna questioned the whole attempt to make a
distinction between consensual and ultimate truths. One interpretation of
his philosophical writings is that he was trying to show that every
attempt to understand the world can only be an approximation on which
there may be some degree of consensus; there is, however, no understanding
that can claim to have arrived at an adequate description of things as
they really are. Along with this radical criticism of the very enterprise
of trying to discern ultimate from consensual realities, Nāgārjuna
criticized the doctrine that the simple constituents that serve as causes
of more complex beings are more real than the complex beings themselves.
This principle had rested on the assumption that the more simple a being
is, the closer it is to being independent. In fact, he argued, the
apparently simple constituents are no less dependent than their apparently
complex effects. To this fact of being dependent upon other things,
Nāgārjuna gave the name emptiness; since all beings are dependent for
their existence on other beings, he said, all beings are empty.
Later Buddhist philosophers, beginning especially with Dharmakīrti,
devoted their energy increasingly to refuting the claims, advanced by some
Brahmanical thinkers, that the whole universe can be traced back to a
single cause. Dharmakīrti argued that if all things in the history of the
world had a single cause, such as God or some type of primordial matter,
then there would be no way to account for all the formal variety in the
world at any given time, nor would it be possible to account for the fact
that events unfold in sequences. If all the formal and temporal diversity
are already inherent in the cause, he argued, then the cause is not a
single thing after all. One might argue that the diversity exists in the
single cause only as a potential of some kind; this, however, only raises
the problem of explaining how that potential is actualized. If the
potential is activated by something outside the cause that possesses it,
then the outside agency must be counted among the causal factors along
with the primary cause, in which case there is no longer a single cause.
Besides general arguments directed against the view that all things could
have any single cause, Dharmakīrti also gave arguments against the
existence of a creator God in particular. The universe, he observed, shows
no signs of having been designed by anyone intelligent. Even if it were
conceded for the sake of argument that the world might have been made by
some intelligent being, there is still no sign that this being had any
concern for any living beings. Later generations of Buddhist philosophers
expanded upon Dharmakīrti’s
arguments against the existence of a single intelligent creator, but most
of these expansions took the form of replying to the objections of
opponents rather than formulating new arguments (see
Causation, Indian theories of
§6).
During the last five hundred years that Buddhism was an important factor
in Indian philosophy (600–1100), criticism of Buddhist doctrines by
Brahmanical and Jaina religious philosophers, as well as from
anti-religious materialists, forced Buddhist thinkers to refine some of
their arguments and even to abandon some of their doctrinal positions.
Arguments among Buddhists became much less a feature of Buddhist
philosophy than arguments against non-Buddhist opponents. Within Buddhism
itself, there was a tendency to try to reconcile differences that in
earlier centuries had divided Buddhists against each other, at least
doctrinally. This new spirit of overcoming sectarianism resulted in
several ingenious attempts to fuse the old Abhidharma schools, the
Mādhyamika schools, the Yogācāra schools and the Buddhist epistemologists.
Few new issues were raised in this last five-hundred-year period, and not
many new arguments were discovered to defend old positions. Careful
scholarship tended to replace philosophical innovation as the principal
preoccupation of later Buddhist intellectuals, such as Śāntarakṣita,
Kamalaśīla, Jñānaśrīmitra and Ratnakīrti. It was during this period of the
decline of Buddhism in India that Buddhist philosophy was introduced into
Tibet. Once established there, it received a new impetus from a range of
Tibetan intellectuals who were able to study many of these doctrines with
a fresh perspective.
Bibliography
References and further
reading
Conze, E.
(1967) Buddhist Thought in India, Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (A good
survey of the issues and the schools of Indian Buddhism.)
Frauwallner, E.
(trans.) (1956) Die Philosophie des Buddhismus,
ed. W. Ruben, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 3rd revised edn, 1969.
(A collection of important Indian Buddhist
philosophical texts translated into German.)
Griffiths, P.J.
(1994) On Being Buddha, Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press. (The first two
chapters present a cogent general account of the place of doctrine and
philosophy within Indian Buddhism.)
Kalupahana, D.J.
(1976) Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis,
Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.
(Informative, though biased to a view of Buddhism as ‘empirical’
and ‘anti-metaphysical’.)
Mookerjee, S.
(1980) The Buddhist Philosophy of Universal Flux,
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (Excellent account of the
doctrines held and arguments advanced in the later scholastic period.)
Nāgārjuna
(c. ad 150–200)
Vigrahavyāvartanī(Averting Disputes),
trans. K. Bhattacharya, ‘The Dialectical Method
of Nāgārjuna’, Journal of Indian Philosophy 1: 217–61, 1971.
(A superb study, including a translation from the
original Sanskrit with introduction and notes; see §4.)
Tissa Moggalīputta
(c.246 bc)
Kathāvatthu (Points of Controversy), trans. Shwe Zan Aung
and C.A.F. Rhys Davids, London: The Pali Text Society, 1979.
(The standard English translation of the earliest
collection of points disputed by Buddhists during the first two centuries
after the Buddha’s career, part of the
abhidhamma section of the Pāli canon; see §3.)
Warder, A.K.
(1970) Indian Buddhism, Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass. (This thorough study of the history of
Buddhism in India contains several chapters on the history and principal
schools of its philosophy.)
Williams, P.
(1989) Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal
Foundations, London: Routledge. (The first
six chapters of this excellent and readable study deal mostly with
Buddhist philosophy in India. Also contains discussions of Tibetan and
Chinese developments.)
________________________
Source: HAYES, RICHARD P. (1998). Buddhist philosophy, Indian. In
E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved
June 09, 2003, from
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/F001SECT5
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Update: 01-07-2003