The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana — Th. Stcherbatsky (1927)

M. de la Vallee Poussin insists that in order to escape obscurity we must construct an outline («un schema d'ensemblev) of the history of Buddhism, that this outline must harmonize with the general conception we have about the history of ancient India, 1 and that questions of detail become at once settled, if they find their place in this historical outline (p. XX). This schema seems to be the following one. There was in the beginning a simple faith in Soul and immortality and a primitive teaching of an indefinite character, mainly of obscure magic. After that a mixed period supervened when this simple creed was contaminated with confused ideology, and this allows us to ask the question whether Buddhism at that period was not a gnosis. At last Buddhism received a superstructure of inane schola¬ sticism and we have a scholastic period in Buddhism, just as we had one in mediaeval Europe.

Primitive faith, a period of gnosticism and a period of scholasticism,— we at once see wherefrom the scheme is borrowed. It is an attempt to construct the history of Buddhism on parallel lines with the history of the Western Church.

What the primitive faith and the supposed agnosticism represent we have already seen.

Now what is scholasticism? It is either 1) philosophy in the service of religion or 2) excessive subtlety and artificiality in philosophical constru¬ ctions. Buddhism Early or Kanonic is contrasted with Buddhism later or scholastic (p. 46). 2 This leads to the supposition that the school, e. g., of the Vaibhasikas represented in its teaching something substantially different from the early kanonical schools. But, as a matter of fact, the Vaibhasikas are only the continuators of one of the oldest schools, the Sarvastivadins. They derive their name from the title of a huge commentary upon the kanonical works of this school and follow in philosophy generally the same lines as did

1 This general conception of the history of India is apparently mentioned as implying the opinion of the author about the social milieu (p. 10) in which nothing but obscure magic could possibly originate, an opinion fully shared by prof. B. Keith. It would be interesting to know the opinion of both these authors about the milieu in which the grammar of Panini, this one of the greatest productions of the human mind, originated!

2 But on p. 128 M. de la VallSe Poussin mentions the «nihilist scholasticisms as the scholasticism of the Kanon.

NIRVANA

VI. THE POSITION OF THE LATER SCHOOLS OF THE HINAYANA the original school. Quite different is the position of the second school, the Sautrantikas. It is really a new school, a precursor or contemporary of that momentuous change which splits the history of Buddhism into two quite distinct periods. It is therefore preferable to keep to the broad lines of the old division of Buddhism into early or Hlnayana, and later or Mahayana, and to admit the existence of a transitional school in the Sautrantikas. 1

We readily admit that there was a considerable growth of scholasticism in Early Buddhism, but it is scholasticism in the second sense. Since the simple faith in immortality never existed, it is impossible to speak of its being blurred or contaminated by scholasticism. Early Buddhism started from a sound philosophical idea of a pluralistic universe, it denied substance and established lists of ultimate realities ( dharmas ). Some of these elements are highly artificial constructions. Early Buddhists and their continuators the Vaibhasikas have paid a heavy tribute to that innate tendency of the human mind to infer difference of things from a difference of words. The Sautrantikas most decidedly opposed this tendency, they sharply distinguished nominal realities (prajnaptisat ) from ultimate data. They accordingly merci¬ lessly cut down the lists of elements adopted in the schools of Early Buddhism and by the Vaibhasikas. They thus reduced them exclusively to a list compri¬ sing seme - data and the primitive data of Mind. It is therefore quite wrong to throw them into the same bag with the Vaibhasikas. They are, if anything, antischolastic. Their role may be usefully compared with that of Occam’s Razor in European philosophy. They even can be more properly called a critical school, a name which their continuators, the Yogacara-Sautrantika school fully deserves. But these already belong to the Mahayana. If we roughly assign the beginning of Mahayana to the I century A. D. and the decline of Hlnayana in the North to the V century, we shall have about five hundred years when both these tendencies kept the field. The Sautrantikas apparently began by taking an intermediate position 2 3 between the extreme