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

one with the Vishnuites. Both tendencies represented old traditions, based on explicit, though contradictory, utterances of the Upanishads. That the Mahayana is indebted to some Aupanisada influence is most probable. That Gaudapada and Sankara have been, in their turn, influenced by the dialectic of Nagarjuna can hardly be denied. But it is at present impos¬ sible to elicit something definite about the strength of these influences, their time and their place. A Mahayanistic tendency seems to have mani¬ fested itself very early in the Buddhist schools. Part of the community was not satisfied to see in Buddha an essentially human nature, and felt restive before the idea of his total disparition in Nirvana. Some centuries later this tendency reaches full eclosion and a great man, Nagarjuna, gives lustre and popularity to a new Church. Its philosophy made volte-face from Pluralism to Monism.

XIX. European parallels

To assign to Nagarjuna his place among the great philosophers of hu¬ manity is not so much the task of the Indianist, as of the general historian of philosophy. But until the texts are made accessible in translations intelligible to him we cannot expect him to guide us . 1 The Indianist finds himself obliged tentatively to do it himself in comparing the ideas he comes across in India with what may be found similar in the vast field of European philosophy. In characterizing an Indian philosopher as «nihilistw, rationalist, pantheist or realist some comparison is already involved. If A. Barth, E. Senart and others have protested against premature and misleading comparisons it is only because they were inclined to find between the Indian philosopher and his European associate more points of divergence than of similarity, but to find divergence means already to compare. To characterise Nagarjuna as a «nihilist» means to make a misleading comparison, since his condemnation of logic is only one part, and not the principal one, of his philosophy. In order to understand a philosopher there is no better method than the one proposed and so brilliantly applied by H. Bergson, i.e., to dissect him in different parts which by themselves will not be the philo-

1 The two translations by prof. M. Walleser, DieMittlere Lehre,(Heihelberg 1911 and 1912) are extremely useful for the study of the texts, they would have been still more useful if comparative indices were added to them. But being litteral we doubt whether they could convey any definite impression in the mind of a philosopher.

4’

if 2

NIRVANA

XIX. EUROPEAN PARALLELS sopher in question, but which summarized will help us to understand him . 1

Upon the Indian side we must first of all point to the almost absolute identity with Vedanta, as a probable consequence of his indebtedness to Aupanishada tradition. If prof. B. Keith and prof. M. Walleser suppose that Nagarjuna stops at negation, or denies even the empirical reality of this world, it is only because his real aim, the positive counter¬ part of his negativism, the identity of dharmakaya and brahma , has escaped their attention. It follows from this identity that all the points of contact which prof. Deussen has really found, or imagined to have found, between Schopenhauer and Vedanta, will equally apply to Nagarjuna. This philosophy was most decidedly opposed to rationalism, to those systems, modern or ancient, Indian or European, which asserted the capacity of human reason to cognise things as they really are. He even presses this incapacity to the utmost and challenges the claims of logic with greater emphasis than any philosopher ever has done. Other remarkable parallelisms may be pointed out wich refer to the step taken by Nagarjuna from Pluralism to Monism. Whether the systems operated with the concep¬ tion of an independent substance and assumed the existence of separate, though harmonising, monads, or assumed a perpetual stream of passing events, the next step is to imagine one all-embracing indivisible substance. This, as we have seen, is the position of Mabayana versus Hinayana. It has been parallelled in Greece by the position of Parmenides versus Heraclitus. The step was repeated in modern German philosophy. Prof. H. Jacobi has already suggested 2 a comparison between Zeno of Eleia and Nagarjuna. ’We may add that the similarity was not limited to their dialectics. Zeno, as is now known, devised the celebrated «sophisms» in order to prove the impos¬ sibility of motion, and in support of Parmenides's conception of the world as one motionless whole . 3