HISTORY OF BUDDHISM 

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The history of Buddhism in India may be divided, and is divided by the Buddhists themselves, into three periods. During all of them Buddhism remains faithful to its central conception of a dynamic impersonal flow of existence. But twice in its history — in the 1st and in the Vth centuries A.D.— the interpretation of that principle was radically changed, so that every period has its own new central conception.

As a consequence, it is appropriate to talk about the two last periods first, and to end with what is considered to be the genuine message of primeval Buddhism. In other words, to start with what Buddhism was not in the first place.

 

SECOND PERIOD OF BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY.
Sarva-dharma-sunyata

MONISM

At the verge of the fifth century of its history a radical change supervened in Buddhism, in its philosophy and in its character as a religion.
- It forsook the ideal of a human Buddha who disappears completely in a lifeless Nirvana and replaced it by the ideal of a divine Buddha enthroned in a Nirvana full of life.
- It forsook the egoistic ideal of a personal Salvation, and replaced it by the Universal Salvation of every life.
- It changed at the same time its philosophy from a radical Pluralism into a radical Monism.

This change seems to have been contemporaneous with a development in the brahmanic religions of India where at the same epoch the great national Gods, Shiva and Vishnu, began to be worshipped and established on the background of a monistic philosophy.

The fundamental philosophic conception with which this new Buddhism of the second period started, was the idea of a real, genuine, ultimate existence, ultimate reality, a reality shorn of all relations, reality in itself, independent, unrelated reality.
Since all the physical and mental elements established by the pluralism of early Buddhism were admittedly interrelated elements, or cooperating forces, none of them could be viewed as ultimately real.
They were interrelated, dependent and therefore unreal. Nothing short of the whole of these elements, the whole of the wholes, the Universe itself viewed as a Unity, as the unique real Substance, could be admitted as ultimately real.
This whole assemblage of elements, this Elementness as a Unity, was then identified with Buddha's Cosmical Body, with his aspect as the unique substance of the Universe.

The elements established in the previous period, their classifications into five groups (skandha), twelve bases of our cognition (dyatana) and eighteen component parts of individual lives (dhatu) were not totally repudiated, but allowed only a shadowy existence as elements not real in themselves, elements «devoid» of any ultimate reality.

This is the first outstanding feature of the new Buddhism, it denies the ultimate reality of the elements accepted as real in early Buddhism.



Next, the doctrine of Causality, causality as functional interdependence of every element upon all the others, not as production of something out of other things; this doctrine so characteristic of Buddhism from its beginning, is not only retained in the new Buddhism, but it is declared to be the foundation-stone of the whole edifice.
However, its meaning was slightly changed.
In primitive Buddhism all elements are interdependent and real, in the new Buddhism, in accordance with the new definition of reality, they are unreal because interdependent.

Of the principle of "Interdependent Origination" the first part is emphasized, the second is dropped altogether.
From the point of view of ultimate reality the universe is one motionless whole where nothing originates and nothing disappears. The elements do not flash into existence for a moment only as the early Buddhists think. There is no origination altogether.

This is the second feature of the new Buddhism, it repudiates real causality altogether by merging reality in one motionless Whole.

However, the new Buddhism did not repudiate the reality of the empirical world absolutely, it only maintained that the empirical reality was not the ultimate one. There were thus two realities, one on the surface, the other under the surface. One is the illusive aspect of reality, the other is reality as it ultimately is. These two realities or «two truths» superseded in the new Buddhism the «four truths» of the early doctrine.



A further feature of the new Buddhism was the doctrine of complete equipollency (logical equivalence ) between the empirical world and the Absolute; between Samsara and Nirvana. All elements which were in early Buddhism dormant only in Nirvana, but active energies in ordinary life, were declared to be eternally dormant; their activities only an illusion.
Since the empirical world is thus only an illusory appearance under which the Absolute manifests itself to the limited comprehension of ordinary men, there is at the bottom no substantial difference between them. The absolute, or Nirvana is nothing but the world viewed "sub specie aeternitatis".
Nor can this aspect of the absolutely Real be cognized through the ordinary means of empirical condition. The methods and results of discursive thought are therefore condemned as quite useless for the cognition of the absolute.
Therefore all logic as well as all constructions of early Buddhism, its Buddhology, its Nirvana, its four truths etc. are unflichingly condemnned as spurious and contradictory constructions. The only true knowledge is the mystic intuition of the Saint and the revelation of the new Buddhist Scriptures, in which the monistic view of the universe is the unique subject.
As for its forms of worship it made borrowings in the current, thaumaturgic, so called «tantristic» rites.

The Immaculate Wisdom of the Saint became, under the name of the Climax of Wisdom, identified with one aspect of Buddha's Cosmical Body, (his other aspect being the world sub specie aeternitatis). Buddha ceased to be human. Under the name of his "Body of Highest Bliss," he became a real God (but not the creator of the world).
He was still subject to the law of causation or, according to the new interpretation, to illusion. Only the Cosmical Body, in its twofold aspect was beyond illusion and causation. Buddhism in this period becomes a religion, a High Church.

This is an outstanding feature of the new Buddhism; its merciless condemnation of all logic, and the predominance given to mysticism and revelation.

 

 

THIRD PERIOD OF BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY
Bahya-artha-sunyata
Gupta era (roughly 4th - 5th century CE)
Chandragupta II "Vikramaditya"

IDEALISM

 

During the golden age of Indian civilization, when a great part of India was united under the prosperous rule of the national dynasty of the Guptas, the Buddhists took a prominent part in the revival of this era. A new direction was given to Buddhist philosophy. In accordance with the spirit of the new age, the condemnation of all logic, which characterized the preceding period, was forsaken, and Buddhists began to take a very keen interest in logical problems; which towards the end of the period becomes overwhelming and supersedes all the former theoretical part of Buddhism.
The starting point of the new departure seems to have been something in the kind of an Indian "Cogito, ergo sum".
«We cannot deny the validity of Introspection, the Buddhists now declared, as against the school of total Illusionism, because, if we deny introspection, we must deny consciousness itself, the whole universe will then be reduced to the condition of absolute cecity».
The problem of Introspection afterwards divided all India as well as the Buddhists into two camps.

A further feature, a feature which gave its stamp to the whole period, consisted in the fact that the skepticism of the preceding period was fully maintained, regarding the existence of an external world.

Buddhism became idealistic.

It maintained that all existence is necessarily mental and that our ideas have no support in a corresponding external reality.
Ideas were divided in absolutely fanciful, relatively real and absolutely real. The second and the third category were considered as real. Two realities were admitted, the relatively and the absolutely real, whereas, in the preceding period, all ideas were declared to be unreal, because they were relative.
This is the third feature of the last phase of Buddhist philosophy; it became a system of Idealism.


Finally, a prominent feature of the last phase of the new Buddhism is also its theory of a «store-house consciousness», a theory which is predominant in the first half of the period and dropped towards its end.

There being no external world and no cognition apprehending it, but only a cognition which is introspective, which apprehends, so to say, its own self, the Universe, the real world, was assumed to consist of an infinity of possible ideas which lay dormant in a «storehouse» of consciousness.
Reality becomes then cogitability, and the Universe is only the maximum of compossible reality. A Biotic Force was assumed as a necessary complement to the stored consciousness, a force which pushes into efficient existence the series of facts constituting actual reality. Just as the rationalists in Europe assumed that an infinity of possible things are included in God's Intellect and that he chooses and gives reality to those of them which together constitute the maximum of compossible reality, just so was it in Buddhism, with that difference that God's Intellect was replaced by a «store-house consciousness» and his will by a Biotic Force.
This is the last outstanding feature of the concluding phase of Buddhist philosophy.

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If we consider the last two periods of Bhuddist philosophy as an excursus; as a deflection from the original message of the Buddha; then we must summarize again the proper message that was given in the beginning.
But before that, we should replace early Budhhism in the context of the spirit of the age.

Buddhism did encounter the Indian Materialists (Carvaka-Barhaspatya,) the Jains with their doctrine of universal animation, the evolutionism of Samkhya, as well as Yoga.

The Materialists admitted no other source of knowledge than sense-perception, no a priori, no binding and no eternal moral law (only the penal code (the Law) was of any interest. They denied every established order in the universe, other than haphazard order. In other words, they denied the law of Karma. They denied also Nirvana. The idea of any kind of sacrifice for a higher aim seemed ridiculous to them. Materialism was mostly found in the political sphere.

 

The ontology of the Jains contained many traits of similarity with Buddhism. The starting point of both systems is the same, it consists in a decisive opposition to the monism of the Aranyakas and the Upanishads; where real Being is assumed as one eternal substance without beginning, change, or end.
The Jains answered, just as the Buddhists, that Being is joined to production, continuation and destruction (birth, life and death).

 

In its classical form the Samkhya system assumed the existence of a plurality of individual pervasive Selves on the one side, and of a unique, distinct and substantial Matter on the other. This Matter is supposed to begin by an undifferentiated condition of equipoise and rest. Then an evolutionary process is started. Matter is then never at rest, always changing, changing every minute, but finally it again reverts to a condition of rest and equipoise. This Matter embraces not only the human body, but all our mental states as well, they are given a materialistic origin and essence.

The Buddhists in the idea of an eternal Matter which is never at rest, come very near to the Samkhyas, for they also were teaching that, whatsoever exists, is never at rest. Buddha had predominately been taught by samkhya philosophers, in the latter part of his instruction, before he became enlightened.
The major difference of the two schools reside in the fact that Bhudda considered that the Self (the Purusha of the Samkhya) could not become free from qualities as long as it is was not released from number and the rest; from all qualities.

 

The yoga practices of concentrated meditation were a very popular feature of religious life in ancient India and all systems of philosophy. Their moral teachings, the theory of karma, of the defiling and purifying moral forces are indeed in many points similar.
The old Yoga school, the Svayambhuva-yoga, admitted the existence of a permanent matter alongside with its impermanent but real qualities; it admitted the reality of a substance-to-quality relation and, evidently, all the consequences which this fundamental principle must have had for its ontology, psychology and theology. It enabled the different Yogas to be the champions of monotheism in ancient India. They believed in a personal, allmighty, omniscient and commiserative God. This feature alone separates them decidedly from not only the Buddhists, but equaly from the atheistic Samkhyas.
Its practical mysticism and its theory of karma constituted the common stock of the great majority of Indian systems; Bhuddism included in a sort of way.

 

 

FIRST PERIOD OF BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY.
Pudgala-sunyata

PLURALISM

 

So what was Buddhism at its beginning?

 As we have seen before:
- It was the ideal of a human Buddha who disappears completely in a lifeless Nirvana.
- An egoistic ideal of a personal Salvation.
- A radical Pluralism.
- The physical and mental elements established by this pluralism, being real interrelated elements, or cooperating forces.
- A classification of these elements into five groups (skandha), twelve bases of our cognition (dyatana) and eighteen component parts of individual lives (dhatu).
- An ultimate reality of these elements.
- And Causality as the functional interdependence of every element upon all the others; and not as the production of something out of other things.


At the time of Buddha, India was seething with philosophic speculation and thirsty of the ideal of Final Deliverance. Buddhism started with a very minute analysis of the human Personality, into the elements of which it is composed.
The leading idea of this analysis was a moral one. The elements of a personality were, first of all, divided into good and bad, purifying and defiling, propitious to salvation and averse to it. The whole doctrine was called a doctrine of defilement and purification.
Salvation was imagined and cherished as a state of absolute quiescence. Therefore life, ordinary life, was considered as a condition of degradation and misery. Thus the purifying elements were those moral features, or forces, that led to quiescence; the defiling ones, those that led to, and encouraged the turmoil of life.

Therefore, the so called personality, (body and mind, in relation with themselves and the external things - which form the Ego of the Samkhya) consists of a congeries, an aggregate of ever changing elements, of a flow of them, without any perdurable and stable element at all. The physical elements are just as changing, impermanent and flowing, as the mental is found to be.
Every element, although appearing for a moment, was a «dependency originating element». According to the formula «this being, that arises » it appeared in conformity with strict causal laws. The idea of moral causation, or retribution, the main interest of the system, was thus receiving a broad philosophic foundation in a general theory of Causality.
The mental elements were naturally moral, immoral or neutral forces. The elements of matter were imagined as something capable to appear as if it were matter, rather than matter in itself; but always real. Since the energies never worked in isolation, but always in mutual interdependence according to causal laws, they were called «synergies» or cooperators. Thus it is that the analysis of early Buddhism discovered a world consisting of a flow of innumerable particulars, consisting on the one side of what we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste and what we touch; and on the other side — of simple awareness accompanied by feelings, ideas, volitions, whether good volitions or bad ones.

The port of destination was Salvation in the sense of eternal Quiescence of every vestige of life; the absolutely inactive condition of the Universe, where all elements or all «synergies» will loose there force of energy and will become eternally quiescent. The ontological analysis had no other aim than to investigate the conditions of their activity, to devise a method of reducing and stopping that activity, and so to approach and enter into the state of absolute Quiescence, or Nirvana. It was carried in order to clear the ground for a theory of the Path towards Moral Perfection and Final Deliverance, to the perfection of the Saint and to the absolute condition of a Buddha.

The unsystematized speculation of the Upanishads (Brahmans) and the popular sects' mystic and magical practices of concentrated meditation, which confered upon the meditator extraordinary powers and converted him into a superman (Shramans,) was replaced by the systematized philosophy of the Samkhyans, and brought forth to the greatest possible degree by the Bhuddists; arranging the former and discarding the later.

The teaching of the Buddha was summarized in the formula of the so called four «truths» or four principles; namely:
1) life is a disquieting struggle,
2) its origin are evil passions,
3) eternal Quiescence is the final goal and
4) there is a Path where all the energies cooperating in the formation of life become gradually extinct and where freedom lies.