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

The picture of the universe which suggested itself to the mental eye of the Buddha, represented thus an infinite number of separate evanescent entities in a state of beginningless commotion, but gradually steering to -Quiescence and to an absolute annihilation of all life, when all its elements have been, one after another, brought to a standstill. This ideal received a multitude of designations among whom the name of Nirvana was the most appropriate to express annihilation. The term was probably prebuddhistic and was formerly applied to the brahmanical ideal of the dissolution of the individual in the universal whole (brahma-nirvana)}

The rewmrd for a virtuous life and a strict observance of all religious duties consisted for the orthodox brahmin in a blissful survival in heaven. For the brahmanical Monist it consisted in being merged in the impersonal absolute. The Buddhist could promise nothing else thau Quiescence of life and its Final Annihilation, a result which, taken by itself, was not very remote from what was offered by simple materialism. The latter promised annihilation after every life. Buddha promised likewise annihilation but after a long series of efforts in virtue and concentrated meditation. This result could not but strike as strange, not European scholars alone. Although the denial of a Soul as a separate substance is quite familiar to them, but they were not prepared to find it clearly stated at so early a date, in so re¬ mote a country and not in a system of skepticism, but in a religion. Nume¬ rous were also the Indian voices which protested against such radical denial of personal identity.

In the Buddhist community itself it provoked opposition which grew ever stronger and resulted, 500 years after tjie demise of the Master, in what may be called a quite new religion, reposing on a quite different philosophic foundation.

1 Cp. the information collected by E. Senart in Album Kern, p. 104, and J. Dahlman, in Nirvana (Berlin, 1896) and in Die Samkhya-Philosophie (Berlin, 1902). Senart’a charac¬ teristic «un simple equivalent de brahma » is right, as will be seen, in regard of the Mahayanistic Nirvana only.

The apparent contradictions of Early Buddhism have been variously explained. It was assumed either that Buddha did not care for speculation or that he, like many other founders of religion, was incapable of clear logical thinking. We are now presented with an attempt to reconstruct a kind of Buddhism which had no speculative tendencies at all and to ascribe the philosophic part of it to a later date to which the final constitution of the Pali Kanon belongs.

It is thus assumed that there has been a primitive Buddhism, very much different, even, as it would seem, quite contrary, to what later on finds its expression in the Pali Kanon. Pessimism, nihilism, Soul-denial, psychology without a Soul, annihilation as ultimate end, all these features that mark out Buddhism among other religions, Indian as well as non-Indian, did not exist. 1 It was the Buddhism of Buddha himself which was so radically diffe¬ rent from anything that appeared later, in historical times, as Buddhism. The consequence of this hypothesis of a simple creed precedeing historical Buddhism, is an attempt to interpret the latter in the light of the former.

But if all, or almost all, the doctrines contained in our oldest docu¬ ments are later inventions, what is it then that Buddha has taught and what in the III—II century B. C. — for this is probably the date which is assigned to the Pali Kanon in its final form — was superseded by another, invented, Buddhism? We have a definite answer. It is Yoga (p. 11). This only partly solves the difficulty, because if we are asked what Yoga is, we are told that one feels uneasy when asked such a question, «rien de plus malaise !» (ibid.). Nevertheless, on the next page, we are informed that Yoga is nothing but vulgar magic and thaumaturgy coupled with hypnotic practices. This would mean that Buddha was not a follower of some philosophic system in the genre of Pataiijali’s where the psychology of trance plays a conspicuous part for the solution of definite problems, but that he was an ordinary magician who certainly did not think of denying the existence of a Soul, or of establishing a psychology without a Soul, or of being a pessimist. Not only is it asserted that yoga practices existed in India previously to the rise of Buddhism—this, of course, is very probable—but it looks as though the author were prepared to maintain that Buddhism itself, the genuine Buddhism of Buddha, nay that even the Pali Kanon, contains nothing but obscure i Op. cit., pp. 17. 27. 32—34, 46, 52, 115—116, 125, 129, 132 etc.

NIK VAN A

II. YOGA