The History of Antiquity, Vol. 4 (of 6)

Of the son born to this prince in 623 B.C. the legend tells us that he received the name Sarvathasiddha (Siddhartha), i. e. perfect in all things, and that Asita, a penitent from the Himalayas, announced to the parents that a very high vocation lay before the boy. The young prince was brought up to succeed to the throne; he was instructed in the use of arms, and in all that it became one of his rank to know. After overcoming all the youths of the family of the Çakyas in the contest in his sixteenth year, his father chose Yaçodhara as his wife, and beside her he had two other wives and a number of concubines, with whom he lived in luxury and delight in his palaces. Thus he lived till his 29th year, when he saw, while on a journey to a pleasure-garden, an old man with bald head, bent body, and trembling limbs. On a second journey he met one incurably diseased, covered with leprosy and sores, shattered by fever, without any guide or assistance; on a third he saw by the wayside a corpse eaten by worms and decaying. He asked himself what was the value of pleasure, youth, and joy if they were subject to sickness, age, and death? He fell into reflection on the evils which fill the world, and resolved to abandon his palace, his wives, and the son who had just been born to him, and retire into solitude, that he might inquire into the cause of the evils which torment mankind, and meditate on their alleviation.

The legends tell us that Çuddhodana opposed this design; he would not allow his son, the Kshatriya and successor to his throne, to depart, and commanded festivals to be held to retain him. Siddhartha is surrounded by song, dance, and play, which are to enliven and change his mood. But in the night he mounted his horse and left the palace secretly, accompanied by one servant. After riding all night towards the east, he reached the land of the Mallas (on the spurs of the Himalayas, upon the Hiranyavati); there, in the neighbourhood of Kuçinagara, the metropolis of the Mallas (some 150 miles to the north-east of Patna), he gave in the morning his attire to his servant and sent him back with the horses. He retained only the yellow garment which he was wearing (yellow is the royal colour in India), and cut his hair short, in order to live henceforth as a mendicant. After concealing himself for seven days he passed on, begging his way to Vaiçali (to the south of Kuçinagara) and from Vaiçali down the Hiranyavati to the Ganges; beyond the Ganges he turned his course to the metropolis of Magadha, Rajagriha, near which were the settlements and schools of the most famous Brahmans.424 Here he quickly learned all that the chiefs of the schools, Arada Kalama, Rudraka, and others could teach him, and understood their doctrines; but they could not adequately explain to him the origin of the sorrows of men, nor give him any assistance.

Dissatisfied with their instruction and doctrines Siddhartha resolved to retire wholly from the world, and live in the forest without fire, in order to penetrate to the truth by the most severe penances, the most profound meditations. He now called himself Çakyamuni, i. e. anchorite of the family of the Çakyas, went to the southern Magadha, and there, near the village of Uruvilva on the Nairanjana (an affluent of the Phalgu) he devoted himself to the most severe exercises. Seated without motion he endures heat and cold, storm and rain, hunger and thirst; he eats each day no more than a grain of rice or sesame. For six years he continues these mortifications, and still the ultimate truths refuse to disclose themselves to his reflections; at length he seemed to himself to observe that hunger weakened the power of his mind, and resolved to take moderate nourishment, honey, milk, and rice, which were brought to him by the maidens of Uruvilva.425 Then he went to Gaya in the neighbourhood of Uruvilva, and there sank under a fig-tree into the deepest meditation. About the last watch in the night, when he had once more in spirit overcome all the temptations of the world, fear, and desire, when he had found that longing could never be laid to rest, only increased with satisfaction, as thirst that is quenched by drinking salt water – when he had called to mind his earlier births, and gathered up the whole world in one survey, revelation and complete illumination were vouchsafed to him.

For forty-nine or fifty days, as the legends assure us, Siddartha considered in his own mind whether he should publish this revelation, since it was difficult to understand, and men were in the bonds of ignorance and sin. At last he determined to proclaim to the world the law of salvation. When he had explained it to two merchants, travelling with their caravans through the forest of Gaya, he took his way first to Varanasi (Benares) on the Ganges (588 B.C.). In the deer-park near this city he preached for the first time, and though several of the hearers were astonished and said, "The king's son has lost his reason," he won over the first five disciples for his doctrine.426 From this time the 'Enlightened' (Buddha), as the legends call him after the complete revelation was vouchsafed to him,427 wandered as a mendicant, with a jar in his hand for collecting alms, through the districts of India, from Ujjayini (Ozene) at the foot of the Western Vindhyas428 as far as Champa on the Ganges, the metropolis of the Angas, in order to proclaim everywhere the truth and the law of salvation. "Many," so Buddha preached, "impelled by distress, seek refuge in the mountains and forests, in settlements and under sacred trees. This is not the refuge which liberates from pain. He that comes to me for refuge will learn the four highest truths: pain, the origin of pain, the annihilation of pain, and the way that leads to the annihilation of pain. Whoever knows these truths is in possession of the highest refuge."429

Twelve years had elapsed since Buddha left his paternal city Kapilavastu, when at his father's invitation he returned thither; and his father, his kindred, the whole family of the Çakyas and many of his countrymen became converts to his doctrine. Surrounded by the most eager of his disciples, he proceeded onward, and was among them, as the legends say, "like the bull among the cows, like the elephant among his young ones, like the moon in the lunar houses, the physician among his patients."430 Varanasi in the land of the Kaçis, Mithila in the land of the Videhas, Çravasti (to the north of Ayodhya) in the land of the Koçalas, Mathura in the land of the Çurasenas, Kauçambi in the land of the Bharatas, were the chief scenes of his activity.

Buddha was deeply penetrated by the conviction that the earth was a vale of misery, and the world nothing but a "mass of pain."431 The sorrows which torture mankind excited his deepest compassion; he would fain help men in their distress. Above all he was oppressed with the thought that sorrows do not end with this life; that man is ever born again to new misery, driven without rest through an eternal alternation of birth and death, in order to find new sorrows without end, but no repose. He was tortured by this "restless revolution of the wheel of the world," by the torments of resurrection from another womb to new and greater pains; more eagerly than any other, Buddha sought repose, peace, and death without any resurrection. With the utmost eagerness he plunged into the Brahmanic theory and speculation; it did not satisfy him; in it, and by it, he found no alleviation, no end of the evil; he submitted to the severest asceticism of the Brahmans; it crushed his spirit without giving him rest. He therefore turned from the orthodox systems to the heterodox doctrine of Kapila. Even that failed to satisfy him; but he followed still further the path which it pointed out, in order to discover the liberation from evil which he sought so earnestly. At last he believed himself to be possessed of the delivering truth.

With the adherents of the Sankhya doctrine Buddha believed himself to have ascertained that neither the gods nor a supreme all-pervading world-soul exists. He also, in opposition to the orthodox doctrine, makes the individual soul his starting-point, and the multitude of individual spirits, which alone have true existence and reality. But if the doctrine of Kapila found the liberation from nature and the body in the fact that the soul attains the consciousness of her independent existence in opposition to nature, discovers her own absolute position as opposed to the body, and merely contemplates the latter, Buddha struck out a far more radical way for the liberation from evil and the freedom of the soul.

Buddha first establishes the fact that evil exists; then he inquires why it exists and must always exist; he attempts to prove that it can and ought to be annihilated, and finally he occupies himself with the means of this annihilation.432 He who will ascertain truth and acquire freedom from evil, has first to convince himself that evil exists. Evil is birth, sickness, the weakness of age, the restlessness and torment of our projects and efforts, the inability to attain what we strive for, the separation from that which we love, the contact with that which we do not love. In this world of existence all is vanity. Happiness is followed by misfortune; even the happiness and power of kings flows away more rapidly than running water.433 Mutability is the last and worst evil; it is the fire which consumes the three worlds.434 Birth is changeable and worthless, for it leads to death; youth, for it becomes age; health, for it is subject to sickness. All that exists, passes away. This ceaseless change is bound up with pain and sorrow. Childhood suffers the pain of weakness; youth is impelled by desires which cannot be fulfilled, and which cause pain if unfulfilled. Age suffers the pain of decay and sickness, and of death; with death begins a new life through regeneration to the same or even greater torments. To this evil of mutability, and consequently to pain, all living creatures without exception are subject. Evil and pain are universal; men are destined to lose what is dearest to them; and animals are destined to be eaten by each other. From the knowledge that evil exists, that all living creatures are subject to evil, follows the truth that men must strive to liberate themselves from evil.

After setting forth his problem in this formal and minutely systematic manner, Buddha goes still further. If man will free himself from pain, pain must be annihilated. In order to attain this end the cause of it must be discovered. This cause is desire (trishna). Desire is the passion which man feels to attain content and satisfaction, the ever-renewed impulse to have pleasant sensations and avoid the unpleasant, which is sometimes satisfied, but more frequently the reverse.435 If pain is to be annihilated, desire must be annihilated. The cause of desire is sensation, and if we inquire into sensation we find on reflection that it is something transitory. When we have the sensation of what is pleasant, the sensation of what is unpleasant does not exist any longer, and vice versâ; sensation therefore is subject to annihilation, and in consequence is not permanent, nor has it any real existence. Sensation is, as the Buddhists say, "empty and without substance."436 It does not belong to the nature of the soul. As soon as we can say of sensation or of any other object, "I am not this, this is not my soul," we are free from it; and when we have attained this knowledge, no sensation whatever, nor conception, nor perception, exercises any charm over man.437 If this knowledge is acquired, man is in a position to "unbind" himself from sensation, and as soon as he has unbound himself from sensation he has liberated himself from it; he feels neither inclination nor disinclination; neither restlessness nor pain, nor despair;438 his heart no longer clings to the "causes of content, which were at the same time the causes of discontent, more closely than drops of rain to the leaf of the lotus."439 If we go further in this direction and instruct ourselves by meditation that even the senses, eyes, ears, etc., are perishable,440 that the body is subject to birth and death, and consequently that it is something transitory and without permanence, we are freed from the body and henceforth merely contemplate it. From this point of view we perceive that the body of a man is his executioner; and in the senses we recognise desolated villages, in the things of the external world, the enemies and plunderers which perpetually attack men, disquiet and ravage them.441 Whatever a man has hitherto felt of dependence and inclination, of care and submissiveness to the body; whatever content and satisfaction he has felt through the body in the body, – is now annihilated by the knowledge that the body is nothing real, that it is not the soul. When we have reached this point, pain is removed, because the cause of it is removed; man is no longer dazzled by desire, and therefore no longer distressed; he is now lord of his senses and lord of himself. Freed from all bonds, from all inclinations to, and dependence on, the world, he feels the happiness and joy of repose.442

Thus far Buddha has agreed with the doctrine of Kapila that the soul must be separated and set free from the body, in his results, if the mode of development be different; he now proceeds in his speculations far beyond the Sankhya system. He was not content to have discovered the path of liberation from the torments of sensuality, of the body, and the external world; he asked further, How can man be raised above the necessity of perpetually renewing this process of the liberation of the soul from the body after new regenerations? If the Sankhya doctrine established nature and matter as an eternal potency beside the plurality of individual souls, and derived all existence from the creative power of matter, Buddha rather saw the creative power, the basis of all existence, in the individual souls, in the "breathing beings," and from this view arrived at a different, more thorough means of liberation.

According to the legends the way to this liberation was revealed to Buddha in the night under the fig-tree of Gaya, when in the deepest meditation he represented to himself the web of regenerations, how many and what dwellings he had inhabited previously, and how many had been the dwellings of other creatures; how he and the rest of the world lived through a hundred thousand millions of existences – when he called to mind the periods of destruction and the periods of regeneration. "There," he said, "was I, in that place; I bore this name; I was of this tribe and that family, and this caste; I lived so many years; I experienced this happiness and that misfortune.443 After my death I was born again; I lived through these fortunes, and here, at last, I have again come to the light. Is there then no means of escaping this world, which is born, changes, and dies, and again grows up? Are there no limits to this accumulation of sorrows?" At last, attaining to immobility in thought about the last watch, just before the break of day, he once more collected his powers and asked himself:444 What is the cause of age, death, and all pain? Birth. What is the cause of birth? Existence. What is the cause of existence? Attachment to existence. What is the cause of this attachment? Desire. What is the cause of desire? Sensation. Of sensation what is the cause? The contact of a man with things excites in him this or that sensation, sensation generally.445 What is the cause of contact? The senses. What is the cause of the senses? Name and shape, i. e. the individual existence. What is the cause of this? Consciousness. And of consciousness, what? The existing not-knowledge,446 i. e. the intellectual capacity; this is no other than the soul itself. In order to annihilate pain, birth must be annihilated; the annihilation of birth requires the annihilation of existence; this requires the destruction of attachment to existence; and to accomplish this destruction desire and sensation must be annihilated; and this again requires the annihilation of contact with the world. But as contact with the world rests on the receptivity of the senses, which in turn rests on the individual existence, this existence rests on consciousness, and consciousness on the not-knowledge, i. e. on the possibility of not-knowledge in the individual spirit, on the intellectual state; not-knowledge must in the end be annihilated. This takes place by the true knowledge, which shows that the sensations of men are only of a transitory nature, illusions, not belonging to his true being; thus it is that the individual is loosed from pain and the body, or merely contemplates it as it contemplates all existence; and thus dependence on existence and desire are softened or removed. The same result is also attained by the annihilation of not-knowledge as the basis of individual existence, by the quenching of the individual, by Nirvana, i. e. the extinction, the "blowing away" by which the individual "falls into the void," and cannot be born again. From the annihilation of the basis of existence follows the annihilation of existence; it cannot arise again when the basis is destroyed.

Though this series of causes and effects may first have received the form in which we have it in the schools of the adherents of Buddha, the nucleus belongs beyond a doubt to the founder of the doctrine. It shows sufficiently with what dialectical consistency – though proceeding like all the products of the Indian mind from fantastic hypotheses, and coloured with fantastic elements, so that sequence of time is often taken for the relation of cause and effect – Buddha attempted to penetrate to final causes and ultimate aims. Evil is existence generally. If evil is to be removed, existence must be removed, and not existence only but the roots of it. This proposition is the leading motive in his reasoning. He keeps steadily to the logical formula that all existence is the operation of a cause, and consequently existence can only be destroyed when the cause of it is destroyed. The nucleus of his argument is: Whence do men come? They arise out of their nature, which is the existing not-knowing, or, as we should say, the substratum of knowing, the intellectual capacity. Where do men go in death? This intellectual basis is compelled by its own nature to assume ever new forms, to put on a new robe from the material of nature or the elements. How can the soul, the intellectual capacity, be checked in this? By self-annihilation.

Here Buddha found himself at the most difficult problem of Indian speculation, which failed to find an internal transition from not-being to being, from being to not-being, so that in it the principles always remain the same, and cause and effect are equally eternal. Hence in order to be consistent, he must seek the solution of his problem, the cessation of the regenerations, in the annihilation of the cause of these regenerations; and this cause was in his view the intellectual capacity. As the soul is first set free from sensation, and then from the body, so man must finally be set free from the soul, the self, the Ego, by destroying the basis and possibility of this; while the adherents of the Sankhya doctrine merely separated the soul from the body, merely looked on at the revolution of the wheel of nature; and the Brahmans would plunge the soul in Brahman. At a later time a great deal of controversy arose as to what Buddha meant by Nirvana, and persons of great eminence in the Buddhist church have had recourse to the explanation that he alone knows what Nirvana is who finds himself in that state. Yet from the process and tendency of Buddha's philosophy, as well as from the most ancient definitions, it is sufficiently clear what condition, what results, were meant to be attained by Nirvana. The most ancient explanations term it, "the cessation of thought, when its causes are suppressed: " they denote it as a condition, "in which nothing remains of that which constitutes existence."447 With the impossibility of feeling impressions, of knowing anything, and therefore of desiring anything, the being of the individual also ceases, according to Buddha's view, and it was the extinction of this at which he aimed. In Nirvana, according to the older legends, nothing remains but "emptiness;" it is frequently compared with "the exhaustion of a lamp when it goes out."448 But how this condition is brought about we are not told; we only know that all contact, external or internal, with the world must be removed.449 When every distinct conception, and even everything that may give rise to such a conception, had been avoided; when a man had put aside every thought, and every excitement of the spirit, he ought to succeed in destroying the thinking principle within him. The man of knowledge has discovered that all which is, is worthless; that nothing exists really and essentially; he has broken through the shells of deception and ignorance. He has diverted and liberated his feeling from these frivolities, and now passes into the condition in which he has nothing more to think of, nothing more to feel, and consequently nothing more to desire; that is, he has attained a state in which feeling and thoughts are extinguished, and continue extinguished. If any feeling or conception remains in this condition, the Ego in Nirvana would feel peace and joy at the thought that nothing any longer existed, that itself ceased to exist. Thus it becomes clear what was the object sought in Nirvana, and we cannot have any doubt that this attempt at annihilation, if made in earnest, must practically lead to the same results as the absorption of the Brahmans in Brahman – that it caused men to become dull, stupid, and brutalised.450

Buddha was of opinion that through this series of thoughts he had discovered the final causes, the absolute truth as well as absolute liberation. When he has arrived at the final ground of existence, the man of meditation can say to himself, according to the legends: "The dreadful night of error is taken from the soul, the sun of knowledge has risen,451 the gates of the false path which lead to existences filled with misery are closed.452 I am on the further shore; the pure way to heaven is opened; I have entered upon the way of Nirvana.453 On this way are dried up the ocean of blood and of tears, the mountains of human bones are broken through, and the army of death is annihilated, as an elephant throws down a hut of reeds.454 He who follows this path without faltering, escapes from pain, from mutability, from the changes of the world, and the wheel of revolution, the regenerations. He can boast: 'I have done my duty; I have annihilated existence for myself. I cannot be born again; I am free; I shall see no other existence after this.'"455 An old formula of faith, which is often found under pictures of Buddha, runs thus: "The beings which proceed from a cause, their cause he who pointed out the way (Tathagata) has explained, and what prevents their operation the great Çramana has also explained."456

Had Buddha contented himself with the results of his speculation, the only consequence of his doctrine would have been this; he would have added one more to the philosophical systems of the Indians; he would have founded a new philosophical system, a subdivision of the heterodox Sankhya doctrine. The question was really the same, whether the soul was destroyed when in the one case it was plunged in Brahman, and in the other annihilated by Nirvana; whether those who sought after liberation had to become masters of their senses like the Brahmans, or to release themselves from sensation and the body and existence like Buddha. For both methods the profoundest meditation was necessary as a means; the final manipulations and results were mystical on both sides; the only difference was that the logical consistency of Buddha was more simple and acute, the dialectics of the orthodox system more varied and fantastic; the penances of the Brahmans were severe and painful, while Buddha contented himself with a moderate asceticism. From his disciples who would attain the highest liberation he demanded nothing more than that they should renounce the world, i. e. should devote themselves to a life of chastity and poverty. Then like their master they must shave head and chin, while the Brahman penitents wore a tail of hair, put on a robe of yellow colour, such as Buddha wore, – a garment of sewn rags was best – take a jar in their hands for the collection of alms, and go round the country begging, after the example of Buddha, in order to point out to people the way of salvation. Only the rainy season might be spent in retirement, in common discussion on the highest truths, or in lonely meditation on the way of Nirvana.