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

In the VI -Y century B. C., at the time immediately preceding the rise of Buddhism, India was seething with philosophic speculation. A great variety of views and systems were springing up and actively propagated among the different classes of its population . 1 Materialistic doctrines, deny¬ ing every survival of the individual after death and every retribution for his moral or immoral deeds were widely spread. The orthodox brahmanical community was also divided. A part of it stuck to the old sacrificial religion which promised to its votaries the reward of a blissfull existence in a celes¬ tial paradise. Another part of it favoured, from an early date, a monistic view of the universe, and interpreted the reward of supreme bliss as the dissolution of the personality in an impersonal all-embracing Absolute. Later on some brahmanical circles developed the idea of an eternal individual Soul 2 which after having been bound up in many existences would return to its genuine condition of a pure spirit as a reward for accumulated merit.

Between the Materialists who denied retribution and the Eternalists who imagined a return to a pure spiritual condition, Buddha took a middle course. From the Eternalists he borrowed the doctrine of a gradual accu¬ mulation of spiritual merit through a series of progressing existences, but he was averse to their doctrine of an eternal spiritual principle.

As far as we can understand his philosophic position, it seems that he was deeply impressed by the contradiction of assuming an eternal, pure, spiritual principle which, for incomprehensible reasons, must have been pol¬ luted by all the filth of mundane existence in order, later on, to revert to

1 This period coincides with a period of philosophic activity in China and in Greece, cf. P. Masson Oursel, La philosophic compare, p. 56.

2 Cp. H. Jacobi. Die Ind. Philosophic in Das Licht des Ostens, p. 150 f.

II. YOGA its original purity. He was thus led to a denial of every permanent prin¬ ciple. Matter and Mind appeared to him as split in an infinite process of evanescent elements ( dharmas ), the only ultimate realities, beside Space and Annihilation. The conception of an impersonal world-process was pro¬ bably prepared by the idea of an impersonal unique substance of the world, as developed in the Upanishads. The analysis of the world into its elements of Matter and Mind was probably, to a certain extent, prepared by the work of the Sankhya school. The originality of Buddha’s position consisted in denying substantiality altogether, and converting the world-process in a concerted appearance of discrete evanescent elements. Forsaking the Monism of the Upanishads and the Dualism of the Sankhyas, he established a sys¬ tem of the most radical Pluralism. That the essence and the starting point of Buddhism were speculative appears very clearly, if we give credit to the records about the other wandering teachers who were the contemporaries of Buddha and often engaged in controversies with him. The questions at issue between them were of a speculative nature. Ethical questions, the ex¬ planation of retribution, were predominant, but they always were narrowly linked together with some system of ontology and some doctrine of a Final Release . 1

If we make an effort wholly to realise the position of a philosopher to whom the Universe presented itself as an infinite process of separate ele¬ ments of Matter and Mind, appearing and disappearing, without any real personalities, nor any permanent substances, and if we bear in mind that this philosopher was eagerly seeking for a theoretical basis on which to establish morality, we must confess that, for our habits of thought, his position was not an easy one. Striving to escape the contradictions of Eternality, of Monism and of Materialism he was landed in what, from our stand¬ point, was a fresh contradiction, the contradiction of a moral law without a personality on whom this law would be binding, and of a Salvation without altogether the existence of somebody entitled to reach that goal which we, more or less generally, understand under Salvation.

We will better understand the Solution at which Buddha arrived, if we take into account a specific Indian habit of mind, its idea of Quiescence as the only real bliss which life can afford. The Buddhist Saint {drya) regards

1 Cp. the information about the wandering teachers collected by B. C. Law, Historical Gleanings, ch. II and III (Calcutta, 1922).

II. YOGA

NIRVANA

the life of the worldling as an unhappy existence of constant turmoil. His aim is to escape from the movement of phenomenal life into a state of absolute Quiescence, a condition in which all emotion and all concrete thought is stopped for ever. The means of attaining this Quiescence is pro¬ found meditation (yoga), the technique of which was developed in India at a very early date.