The consequences of this attitude appear throughout the Buddha’s mature teaching. ‘Know not by hearsay, nor by tradition … nor by indulgence in speculation … nor because you honour [the word of] an ascetic; but know for yourselves’ (A I 189). The Buddha’s monks were not to speculate about the future or the past, or about such recondite questions as the beginning or end of the world. They were to limit their concern and efforts to one thing, the arising and cessation of suffering within ‘this fathom-long carcass’. There are many possible kinds of knowledge, asserted the Buddha, but only those touching this immediate experience were of relevance to his disciples in their search for liberation.
In the Buddha’s own search this attitude of circumscribed pragmatism was however not merely a matter of clinging blindly to meditative practices alone. It also led him to reject outright the sort of theories which must have accompanied his yogic teachers’ practices. This is not surprising, for, after all, meditative practices must be carried out in the light of some theory of their purpose, of the human constitution and its spiritual environment, and if the techniques fail then doubt must be cast on the theories themselves. We do not of course know just what his teachers’ theories were, but we may be fairly certain that they fell within the range of yogic/Upanishadic thought. Moreover, it is clear from those discourses in which the Buddha assails such theories that they shared, from his point of view, certain common characteristics. They were all theories of the Self (Sanskrit ātman), though the term used for that indwelling personal principle might have differed from system to system.
Knowledge of the self
At issue was the peculiarly yogic conception of knowledge. For the knowledge of the Self promulgated in such systems was radically different from other sorts of knowledge. From the yogic point of view the knower (the Self) is identical with the known (the Self), and these in turn are identical with the knower’s frame of mind.
To get the measure of this let us begin with a contrasting example of ordinary knowledge, that of a skilled goldsmith. (Such examples were frequently used by the Buddha himself, since they already have stamped on them his peculiarly pragmatic turn of mind.) In this case there can be no doubt that the knower, the goldsmith, is inherently different from what he knows. As a craftsman and as a knowing subject he is clearly to be distinguished from his knowledge of the gold, of its properties and uses, and of the skills by which gold may be manipulated. Though we might admit that he would not be much of a goldsmith without the knowledge, we would never in the ordinary course of things be tempted to say that he was identical with his knowledge. The man is one thing, the knowledge another.
Nor would we be tempted to say that a goldsmith’s frame of mind was identical with the goldsmith himself. A goldsmith might be angry and upset, or tranquil and alert, and he would still be a goldsmith. Nor, again, would we confuse his frame of mind with his knowledge. Whether angry or tranquil he would still have the knowledge of goldsmithing. In the case of the goldsmith the knower, the known, and the frame of mind are clearly separate things even if associated in one goldsmith.
But the introspective yogic knowledge of the Self is quite another matter. For, in the first place, in this yogic knowledge the knower is the same as the known: the Self with a capital ‘S’, that which is to be known, is the same as the knowing self with a small ‘s’: indeed the Upanishadic texts which proclaim this do not differentiate between the two senses of ‘self’. To ‘know’ oneself in this yogic sense is also to ‘attain’ or ‘become’ one’s Self. The power of the Upanishadic vision lies precisely here, in that the witness, the subject of knowledge, reaches a condition in which it witnesses only itself. It is a vision of radical simplification, of the perfect self-identity of the Self. ‘There is in it [the Self] no diversity’ (B IV 4 19). To realize this Self the yogi has only to turn inward upon himself.
This radical simplification has other consequences as well. Since there is no duality of perceived and perceiver, there are also no perceivable or analysable qualities in the Self (B IV 4 13). If, for example, what is to be realized in meditation is the Self as (meditative) Bliss – one Upanishadic formulation – then the Self is, from the point of view of the meditator, identical with Bliss. The Bliss cannot be separated out, distinguished, from the Self. Or again, if the Self to be realized is the ‘Self without qualities’ (perhaps in what Buddhists would call a Meditative Plane), then there is no frame of mind ‘without qualities’ separate from the Self; for in the Self there is ‘no diversity’. One can see the plausibility of this from the yogi’s point of view, for in accomplished states of meditation he may feel precisely this sense of becoming an object of meditation, of total simplification of his experience.
Moreover, such an experience of radical simplification also implies the immutability of the Self: for, since the Self is so perfectly unified, it cannot be thought of as changing, as losing old qualities and taking on new ones. Indeed the ‘Self without qualities’ could never, by its very definition, be shown to change. And to say immutable is to say eternal. The Buddha’s answer to this was that, precisely because such meditative states stop sometime, they cannot be eternal: but for a meditator bolstered by the conviction that what he sought was eternal, the very experience of stability and simplification in meditation would confirm the conviction of eternity. It would confirm as well the conviction that this eternal, immutable, radically simple Self was beyond the world of cause and effect, uncreated, ‘unborn’ (B IV 4 20). It could not be analysed, broken down into constituent parts (B IV 4 13). It would for him be the all-embracing and undifferentiated ‘ground of the universe’ (Brahman).
The Self, in short, is an eternal, seamless whole, self-identical, beyond phenomenal appearances and unanalysable, yet to be achieved and known through yogic meditation. This yogic vision was a powerful and persuasive one, perhaps precisely because it cut through all the diversity and potential confusion of ordinary experience and offered at a stroke a decisively simple view of the ultimate reality. Any one feature of the vision – the experience of deep meditation, the question of what lies beyond the painful world of appearances, or the nature of Self-knowledge – leads inexorably towards each of its other features. It is no wonder that, despite the Buddha’s best efforts, its career continued and expanded in Hindu India.
But, on the other hand, once one bit of it begins to unravel, the rest follows swiftly. We can reconstruct how the Buddha’s pragmatic reasoning about meditation led him to reject the Self theories through a discourse in which the Buddha replies to the questions of the ascetic Poṭṭhapāda (D I 185 ff.). If – to pick up the thread at the experience of deep meditation – the meditator is able to witness the Self directly and thereby attain knowledge of it, it could be asked, and was asked by Poṭṭhapāda, whether the frame of mind of deep meditation arises first, and only afterwards the knowledge of the Self appropriate to that frame of mind, or whether the knowledge of the Self comes first, and then the frame of mind, or whether they are simultaneous. That is, could Poṭṭhapāda expect to reach some meditative state and then cast about for the Self, or would the attainment of the state automatically entail the attainment of the Self?
To this the Buddha quite plausibly answered that a particular consciousness or frame of mind arises first, and then the knowledge which accompanies that consciousness. This is the Buddha’s meditative pragmatism speaking. For the skilled meditator, having trained to achieve that consciousness, ‘knows that it is from such-and-such conditions that such a consciousness has arisen in me’. The meditator’s practical skill is in manipulating the causes and conditions in himself which give rise to progressively more refined states of consciousness. It is upon that achievement, and upon the practical knowledge of introspective psychology that goes with it, that his eventual knowledge of the Self rests.
One can see how even the yogic teachers might have given away this much, for after all there is a good deal of training and skill, and of practical advice to go with it, in any
meditative system. But once this is admitted the whole yogic system begins to crumble. For from this radically practical point of view the meditative state, caused and conditioned by the yogi’s training, cannot be equivalent to an uncaused, unborn, unanalysable Self: the state itself is quite analysable and clearly caused by something.
In the discourse the Buddha continues to spin out the implications of this pragmatism. Poṭṭhapāda asks another question: ‘is the consciousness or frame of mind the same as the Self, or are the Self and the consciousness different?’ To this the Buddha posed the counter-question, ‘but what is the Self you profess to believe in?’ The sense of this question lies in the fact that, though the basic form of Self-theories was the same from the Buddha’s point of view, there were evidently many variants in the theory. Different theories might place their version of the Self in rather different spiritual landscapes, or one theory might contain a teaching of several increasingly refined Selves leading up to the ultimate one. So Poṭṭhapāda first offered this: ‘I profess a material Self, having a specific form, made of the four elements and nourished by solid food.’ The Buddha then replied that ‘if there were such a material Self, then the frame of mind and the Self would be different; … for even granting such a Self, still some frames of mind would come into being, and others would pass away’. When Poṭṭhapāda then changed tack, and proposed first a Self made not of material, but of mind-stuff, and then one of consciousness alone, the Buddha reiterated his argument; the Self so constituted must be one thing, the frame of mind or state of consciousness quite another. And the reason for this is quite clear: by a yogic definition the Self, whether it is material, immaterial, or made of consciousness, must be eternal, unchanging, and independent of the causes and conditions of this world. But it is a fact of meditative experience that states of consciousness come and go, for reasons that the meditator himself can understand and, to some limited extent, control. So whatever might be eternal, it is not the states of consciousness, and they must therefore be different from the eternal Self.
The Buddha was aided in this judgement by the use of a word which he took into his vocabulary and made his own. The root meaning of the word (saṃkhata) is something like ‘prepared’ or ‘composed’. It covers a rather wider field than ‘prepared’, however, and in fact it has two meanings which are relevant here: it means ‘willed’ or ‘intended’ and it also means ‘caused’ or ‘conditioned’. Meditative states are saṃkhata. They are attained by the will or intention of the meditator, and this also means that they are caused and conditioned. They are attributable to certain preceding causes and dependent on certain contemporaneous conditions being fulfilled. As such they are not at all ‘unborn’, nor are they independent of circumstances.
One might speculate that this is as far as he took his investigation of meditation and the Self at the time of his encounter with the yoga teachers, but in his mature teaching the Buddha unravels their theory of the Self a great deal further; so far, in fact, that he was to reject it entirely and propose in its place the characteristic Buddhist doctrine of non-self, anatta, the absence of an eternal, independent Self, whether in ordinary consciousness, in meditative states, or anywhere else. This teaching was well integrated with his other thought on both ethics and psychology. In his mature view this eternal Self could not be witnessed at all, and those who believe in it are likened to a man who says that he is in love with the most beautiful woman in the land, but is unable to specify her name, her family, or her appearance (D I 193).
This eternal Self is, in other words, a product of speculation, of falsely understood meditative experience, or of hearsay. The Buddha was willing to admit the existence of a self – and here the lower-case ‘s’ is very appropriate – but that self was merely ‘an agreed term, a common form of words, a worldly usage, a practical designation’ (D I 202). One could reasonably say ‘discipline yourself’ or ‘know yourself’, but in so saying one would not be assuming the existence of an eternal entity. The Buddha drew an analogy with milk. Milk can become curds, then butter, and then ghee, but there would be no point in speaking of an abiding entity (milkness?) which would persist through these changes: milk is just milk, butter just butter. The British scholar T. W. Rhys Davids put it in these terms:
when the change (in the composition of the personality) has reached a certain point, it is convenient to change the designation, the name, by which the personality is known – just as in the products of the cow. But the abstract term is only a convenient form of expression. There never was any personality, as a separate entity, all the time.
So when we say, ‘I feel as if I am a different person today’, we are in fact alluding to an important truth about human nature. This is a difficult doctrine, and a courageous one, in that it led into waters uncharted by the meditators of the Buddha’s time. One difficulty is that of purely intellectual understanding. When the Buddha went on to develop a new method of meditation it was aimed at analysing in detail the self (small ‘s’) of the meditator. By this method one could see how this self was in fact ‘composed’, made up from previous causes and subsisting on contemporaneous conditions. The doctrine in detail is one of formidable complexity, but its basic principle is simple. Just as milk progressively changes, so the self which we experience changes continually for specifiable reasons.
The real difficulty is not, however, one of intellectual understanding, but of emotional plausibility. Anyone might ask with alarm: how can I, with my well-developed sense of myself, be expected to accept that I have no self? The intellectual answer is that one has a self, but no eternal Self. But it is the emotional answer which is important. Since anyone attempting to attain or witness an eternal unchanging Self was, in the Buddha’s view, bound to failure, the doctrine of the Self was an invitation to further suffering: ‘such [a doctrine of the eternal Self] is merely a sensation, a writhing in discomfort, of those venerable ascetics and Brahmans who neither know nor see, and who have fallen victim to desire [for such a Self]’ (D I 40–1). So to give up such a doctrine was to give up a potent source of frustration. The emotional tone of the teaching of non-self was that of a calm and relieved detachment. It was a liberation which transcended the frustrated strivings of those who revolve around a Self ‘like a dog tied to a post’ (M II 232–3).
Release from bondage through self-mortification
But let us return for the moment to that point at which the Buddha realized that these yogic systems of meditation in their very nature led to mutable states of consciousness quite different from their avowed object, the eternal Self. From such a conclusion two further consequences might follow. One is that there is indeed no eternal Self, and that is the path the Buddha eventually took. The other is that the Self exists, but is not to be obtained by yogic methods. Another discipline, however, might lead to its achievement, and there was such a discipline at hand: the method of self-mortification and extreme asceticism which we know best through Jainism. On such a view the eternal principle in the individual, called the jīva, the ‘life’ or ‘soul’, is held in the world of suffering by the effects of transgressions committed in earlier lives, and these effects adhere to the soul like dirt. By avoiding further transgressions one obviates further bondage in the world of suffering, and by self-mortification and voluntary penances one burns away the effects of former transgressions from the soul, so that it rises to bliss and eternal freedom from pain. Here there is no necessity for meditation, nor for the application of introspective knowledge, though the theory probably did hold, as Jainism does, that knowledge, indeed omniscience, would miraculously result from the successful prosecution of such asceticism.
So after leaving Uddaka Rāmaputta, the yogic teacher, the Buddha turned to self-mortification, and the canonical discourses leave no doubt about the sincerity of his efforts in this direction. He stopped breathing completely, so that ‘violent winds racked my head … and violent winds carved up my belly, as a skilled butcher … carves up an ox’s belly with a sh
arp knife’ (M I 244). Passing deities thought he was dead. Then he gave up eating more than a handful of food daily, so that ‘my spine stood out like a corded rope, my ribs projected like the jutting rafters of an old roofless cowshed, and the light of my eyes sunk down in their sockets looked like the gleam of water sunk in a deep well’ (M I 245). Passers-by thought him a black man, so much had his austerities affected his clear complexion. By the extremity of these exertions the Buddha came to the conclusion that ‘in the past, present, or future, whatever ascetic or Brahman might experience such painful, racking, and piercing feelings, he will not exceed this’ (M I 246).
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