Dialogues of the Buddha, Part II — trans. T. W. and C. A. F. Rhys Davids (1910)

If we persist in viewing either Dukkha or its causes as the ' secret ' of the doctrine, we might omit the formula altogether, since the nature and cause and effect of each nidana is fully taught in each Nikaya. Nor is the order of sequence the main tenet. Frequent liberties are taken in the Canon with both order and number of nidanas1. Nor finally could the arrangement of antecedents and consequences in an iterated rigmarole (convenient for oral transmission) appeal with the runic force of a Shibboleth to a movement of thought like that of Buddhism, any more than would the similarly arranged fragment of formula contained in the Sankhya Karika have appealed, as such, to the followers of that school. No reformers who so carefully purged their literature of all the ' eulalic ' reiterations of Om ! Hari ! and the rest, that so throng the pages of the Upanishads, would care a brass farthing for any ' accumulative jingle' accounting for things after the fashion of the widely spread pre-historic folk-rune, ' The cat began to kill the rat, the rat began to gnaw the rope,' &c. . . . ' and so the old woman got home that night.' Evam etassa, &c.

It was not the fact of Dukkha, nor the fairly obvious conditions of birth and so on, leading up to it, that come as a revelation to each Buddha, beneath his Bo-tree. It was the process of samudaya and nirodha as a natural and universal law. ' Coming to pass ! Coming to pass ! At that thought there arose in me a Vision into things not called before to mind, and knowledge arose, insight, wisdom, light arose2.' Not uncaused and casually, nor by the flat of Icvara — Indra, Soma, Varuwa, Brahma 3 — did events happen, painful or otherwise ; not as Job and the Psalmist taught — ' God distributeth sorrows in his anger.' For ' God is a righteous judge, and God is angry every day4.' Events came impelled by preceding conditions, causes that man could by intelligence and good will, study and govern, suspend or intensify5.

1 e. g. this Suttanta omits the first two. In ' Dialogues,' I, p. 53 (Brahmajala S.), the first five are omitted, so also in S. II, 92. S. II, 101, instead of the usual order of the twelve nidanas, gives 3, 4, 2, n, 12 only, and in this order. In M. I, 191, a different group of antecedents are said to have dukkha as their consequence — desire, attachment, indulgence, lusting after.

2 See above, p. 26. s See ' Dialogues,' I, p. 310.

4 Job xxi. 17, Ps. vii. 2.

5 Cf. herewith Prof. Oltramare's ' La Formule bouddhique des douze

Thus Buddhaghosa, in explaining the name Pa/icca-samuppada1, points out that it excludes all theories of absolutism, nihilism, chance, irregular causation 2, and indeterminism 3. And of such theories, it is concerning the implied rejection of the first two that he is most explicit. Namely, that there is no persistent ego reaping results in one life sown as causes in a previous life, and that it is not a different, an alien ego either, which reaps. The latter person (attabhava) is the resultant, the creature, the ' evolute ' of the former. Thus faithfully was the tradition of the Pi/akas preserved, wherein the view of vinnawa as a persistent ego was categorically contradicted in the words anekapariyayena pa/iccasamuppanna (causally evolved in various ways). M. I, 256.

Let it be remembered that the ' immanent ' absolutism opposed by Buddhism was chiefly the Brahmanic theosophy. According to this, the atman of the individual was not so much an efflux of the World-Atman, as was the latter immanent in, and identified with, each man-soul. ' In the beginning this world was only Soul, in the shape of a man . . . world-guardian, world-lord, this that is My Soul 5.' ' My Soul ' was therefore, in that theosophy, the personal First