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

No such crisis of thought is patent in the literature of the Brahmins, though that literature extends over practically the whole era of Indian culture. Those Upanishads which are ranked as the oldest show a naif animism : those ranked later reveal thought attained to relative maturity l. But there is no evidence of a transition causing a mental upheaval. In the seventy-two stanzas of the Sankhya Karika, again, 25 per cent, contain some consciously generalized affirmation respecting cause and effect. The abstract causal concept shows as a well-matured instrument of metaphysical thought. Throughout the Yoga Sutra too we find allusions to causality as an abstract idea 2. It is only in the Buddhist Nikayas that we come up against the actual effort itself of the human mind to get at a more scientific view of world-order, — an effort which is marked with the freshness and vigour of a new fetch of intellectual expansion, and the importance and gravity of which is affirmed with the utmost emphasis, both in the earliest records and in the orthodox literature of ten centuries later.

The significance of the Pi/akas, as the vehicle of this evolutionary cry of travail and new birth, is not minimized by the objection, that a gospel promulgated by laymen (Khattiyas), and preached to the man in the street, would naturally regard, as truths new and wonderful, axioms which, to the more esoteric, philosophical schools of the day, were the commonplaces of dialectical metaphysic. For we have shown that, in the one case where such a school has preserved its ancient literature, we find books of pre-causational and post-causational thought, but nothing indicating that the conviction of a law of universal natural causation was taking birth. The aphorisms, constituting the oldest existing survivals of Yoga and Sankhya thought, reveal no inner evolution of philosophic progress, and no traces of early animistic culture such as appear in certain of the Upanishads. Most of the Jain literature still awaits it editor, but we have Dr. Jacobi's learned authority for it, that, in spite of an atomistic theory of some interest, its philosophy was crude, animistic and mere 'common

1 Cf. Aitareyya Up. ' The Atman deliberated : I will send forth worlds — he then formed the person ... he brooded over him, and

... a mouth burst forth like an egg' — with Cvetasvatara Up. ' Should time, or nature, or necessity, or chance, or the elements, or the Person be considered as the cause ? '

2 In one passage (IV, 1 1), the statement takes the /orm of the negative part of the Buddhist formula. ' As the sahkharas are collected by cause, effect, substratum, and support, therefore through the absence 0/ these, there t's a ft absence of the sankhdras.'

sense.' It is not likely therefore that the Angas which are still ineditcd will reveal any conception of causation possessing deep philosophical insight. Hence all early Indian literature, for which any such insight is claimed, except that of Buddhism, either shows both the child-like and the more adult stages of thought without the (supremely interesting) transitional stage, or else it has preserved only its more adult records, or else it never had any but adult records to show, i.e. it is later literature only.

Now in the history of philosophy, whether its concepts be sought in the cell and the academy of the originating seer, or in the reaction to his influence in thoughtful and earnest minds, nothing is more illuminating either for chronology or for interpretation, than to catch the intelligence in the act of ascending to a fresh vantage-point in its interpretation of the world —

. . . dhammamayam, Sumedha. pasadarh aruyha, Samantacakkhu . . . avekkhassu ! :

And since no auspicious day amid Egyptian or trans- Aegean ruins has brought back to us Leukippus or Demokritus, the Buddhist Pi/akas, by presenting this evolutionary moment, possess a unique interest for the historian of human ideas, not. only in India, but in the entire world of culture.