The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana — Th. Stcherbatsky (1927)
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This school, as mentioned above, had quite different tendencies. They denied that the past and future elements really existed in the same sense as the present ones did. They took a much more natural view. The past is what did exist, and the future is what will exist after not having existed. They consequently rejected the double set of elements, the eternal essence and the manifestations, and admitted the reality of these manifestations alone. Nirvana was the absolute end of the manifestations, the end of passion and life ( klesa - janmanor ksayah ), without any positive counterpart. It is decidedly insisted upon the fact that nirvana means only the end of the process of life, without any lifeless substance {dharma) as the residue or the substratum in which life has been extinguished. Nirvana thus loses its materialistic character. The denial of the Sautrantikas is not a denial of Nirvana in general, not a denial of an idealistic absolute. There is no Buddhism possible without Nirvana, since without Nirvana means without a Buddha. But the Sautrantikas denied the materialistic Nirvana, just as all the Mahayanists did.
The original works of the SautrSntika school, as mentioned above, are not yet accessible. The school probably contained a great variety of philo¬ sophical constructions. The later Sautrantikas coalesced with the Maha-
1 Cp. O. Rosenberg, Problems, XVI.
2 All the references adduced by M. de la V. P. from Sanghabhadra and Ab. Kosa II, 55 only assert that nirvana, according to the Vaibhagikas, was a vastu , but not that it was living or spiritual.
3 Prof. M. Anesaki, Nichiren (Cambridge, 1916), p. 137 ff. evidently alludes to the Vaibhagikas when asserting that Buddhism includes a materialistic school, or a school which its opponents characterized as materialistic. As a curiosity it may be added that when the educa¬ tional authorities of the newly founded republic of Buriats in Transbaikalia started an antireligious propaganda, they first of all assailed the doctrine of transmigration in its popular form and insisted on the fact that modern science favours a materialistic view of the universe. The Buddhist monks, who are Mahayanists, retorted in a pamphlet in which they developed the view that mate¬ rialism is not unknown to them, since the Vaibhagikas maintained that after Nirvana every life ceases for ever.
NIRVANA
X. THE YOGACARAS w yanists and formed the hybrid schools of the Sautrantika - Yogacaras and Madhyamika - Sautrantikas. 1 This fact alone proves that in the vital que¬ stion of Nirvana and Buddha they closely adhered to later Buddhism and can be characterised as a transitional school. From Tibetan sources 2 we know that they admitted the doctrine of dharmakaya , i. e., of a divine Buddha, and this solves the question, because this dogma is the common characte¬ ristic of all the schools of the Mahayana. They differed from the latter in that they admitted the reality of the phenomenal world which with them included only sense data, consiousness and volition. The momentary flashes to which these entities were reduced were nevertheless conceived as real, not illusions, and their total extinction in Nirvana was maintained. They neither admitted the monistic spiritual principle (alaya-vijnana) of the idealistic Makayanists, nor the principle of relativity (sunya-vdda) of the Madhyamikas. What their line of argument was we know from the work of Yasumitra upon the early schools. 3 The author was himself a Sautrantika and closes his work with an enumeration of their principle tenets, such tenets that were shared by all the adherents of the school. We find here (under 3) their tenet that there are two kinds of elements ( skandha ). Besides those which are subject to total extinction at the time of Nirvana, there is a subtle consciousness which survives after Nirvana and of which the former are but a manifestation. 4 We have here the germ of the alaya-vijnana of the Yoga¬ caras. If later on the Sautrantikas objected to this tenet, they probably did it only because, in the Yogacara system, it involved the illusory character of the external world, whereas the Sautrantikas sticked to its reality. Most probably they were in this point only the continuators of the Mahasamghikas, i. e., they adhered to that tendency which at an early date mani¬ fested itself among the schools of the Hinayana and represented a protest against the treatment of Buddha as essentially human and against the theory of his total disappearance in a materialistic Nirvana. Since every school of the Mahayana interpreted Dharmakaya according to their own