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

In the system of Dignaga the old Abbidharma is forsaken altogether and replaced by logic and epistemology. Dignaga started with the reform of the Brahmanical logic (nyaya) and adapted it to Buddhist ideas. His analysis of cognition resulted in the conception of an extreme concrete and individual (svalaksana), the root, or, so to say, the differential of cognition, a point-instant (ksana) in which existence and cognition, object and subject, coalesce. 2 The conception of this idealistic school regarding Nirvana may be gathered from the closing words of Dharmakirti in his ((Examination of Solipsism». 3 The question is asked how is the omniscience of Buddhas to be understood, of the Buddhas which are the personification of pure consciousness undifferentia¬ ted into subject and object, and it is answered that «the penetration of the Buddhas into every existing object is something inconceivable, it is in every respect beyond what we may express in speach or cognise in concepts)).

XI. The Madhyamikas

This system of philosophy and dialectics is the foundation of the Ma¬ hayana religion. Although other systems — the realism of the Sarvastivadins and the idealism of the Yogacaras — are also studied in the monastic schools of the countries where this religion flourishes, nevertheless the Madhyamika system is generally regarded as the true background of the religious feelings

1 CL Mahayana-sutralaipkara, ed. Sylvain Levi (Paris, 1907), XI, 51, trsl. ibid. (Paris, 1911)—«ils (les dharmas) sont originellement en Paix et en 6tat de Pari-Nirvana». Cf. St. Schayer, Die ErlOsungslehren der Yogacaras nach dem Sutralamkara des Asanga, Z. far Indologie, II, 1, p.99 ff.Tbe idea that all elements are originally quiescent ($anta=nivrtta) sc. eternally extinct, an idea leading to the theory of everything being real sub specie aeternitalis is likewise expressed by Nagarjuna, Madhy. s.,VII. 16— pratitya yad yad bhavaii tat tac chantam svabhavatah.

2 A very interesting and rather subtle discussion between Candrakirti and Dignaga about the point-instant in which existence and cognition are supposed to coalesce is found in M. vr., p. 59 ff., transl. in the Appendix. Cp. my Buddhist Logic and Epistemology, cb. VII.

3 Samtanantarasiddhi, edited by me in the B. B, and translated into Russian in the Series IlaMHTHHKH HHAHHCKOH <PHJI0C0<t>HH. I.

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XI. THE MADHYAMIKAS of its votaries. For it must be allowed that the Mahayana is a truly new religion, so radically different from Early Buddhism that it exhibits as many points of contact with later Brahmanical religions as with ts own predecessor. Prof. 0. Rosenberg calls it a separate«church» and compares its position with Roman Catholicism versus Protestantism. 1 The difference is even more radi¬ cal, since the new religion was obliged to produce a new Kanon of Scriptures.

It never has been fully realised what a radical revolution had trans¬ formed the Buddhist church when the new spirit which however was for a long time lurking in it arrived at full eclosion in the first centuries A. D. When we see an atheistic, soul-denying philosophic teaching of a path to personal Final Deliverance, consisting in an absolute extinction of life, and a simple worship of the memory of its human founder, —- when we see it superseded by a magnificent High Church with a Supreme God, surrounded by a numerous pantheon and a host of Saints, a religion highly devotional, highly ceremonious and clerical, with an ideal of Universal Salvation of all living creatures, a Salvation by the divine grace of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, a Salvation not in annihilation, but in eternal life, — we are fully justified in maintaining that the history of religious has scarcely witnessed such a break between new and old 2 within the pale of what nevertheless continues to claim common descent from the same religious founder. 3

1 0. Rosenberg, Probleme der B. Philosophie, XIX.

2 Very characteristic is also the fact that Buddhist art of the ancient period represented Buddha by an empty place or a symbol which later on is replaced by a divine figure of the Apollo type. Notwithstanding prof. A. Griinwedel’s contrary view (Buddhistische Kunst, 1 st ed., p. 68) the only explanation seems to be that the total disappearance of Buddha in Nirvana was thus given pictorial expression.