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

4. The philosophical doctrine of the old church stuck to the central conception of separate elements of Matter, Mind and Forces, composed lists of them with a view to investigate the method of their gradual extinction in the Absolute.

5. Among the early schools the Mahasamghikas, Vatsiputriyas and others already assumed a kind of consciousness surviving in Nirvana.

6. They were followed by a school with critical tendencies, the Sau¬ trantikas, which cut down the list of artificially constructed elements, cut down Nirvana itself as a separate entity and transferred the Absolute into the living world, thus constituting a transition to Mahayana.

7. The philosophy of the new religion is an adaptation of the Vedanta system. It forsook the pluralistic principle altogether and became emphati¬ cally monistic.

8. It then took a double course. It either assumed the existence of a store-consciousness of which all phenomenal life was but a manifestation. This school in the sequel cultivated logic. The other school denied the possi¬ bility of cognising the Absolute by logical methods, it declared all plurality to be an illusion, and nothing short of the whole to be the Reality directly cognised in mystic intuition.

9. The transitional school of the Sautrantikas coalesced in the V century A. D. with the idealistic school of the Mahayana and produced India’s greatest philosophers Dignaga and Dharmakirti. With regard to Nirvana it assumed the existence of a pure spiritual principle, in which object and subject coalesced, and, along with it, a force of transcendental illusion ( vasana) producing the phenomenal world.

NIRVANA

10. Contemporaneously with this highest development of Buddhist philosophy, in the VII century A. D., the relativist school of early Mahayana received a fresh impulse and a revival of popularity. This led to the formation of new hybrid schools.

11. The very high perfection to which philosophy was brought by both the idealistic and relativistic schools of Buddhism could not but influence all philosophical circles of India, and we see in the next period the old Vedanta remodelled and equipped with fresh arguments by an adaptation to it of the methods elaborated in the Vijhanavada and Sunyavada schools of Buddhism.

APPENDIX

A TREATISE ON RELATIVITY
BY NAGARJUNA

CHAPTERS I AND XXV
TRANSLATED

A TREATISE ON RELATIVITY

by

NAGARJONA

PREFATORY '

Nagarjuna is the author of three different works upon the Buddhist Theory of Relativity ( sunyata ), a fundamental (muh), complete work, Madhyamika- Sastra, and two short summaries — Yukti-sastika and Sunyata-saptati.

The complete work contains about 400 aphorisms divided into 27 chapters. The first chapter is devoted to a critique of the conception of Causality. It reduces our every-day conception of it and all realistic theories ad absurdum and thus indirectly establishes Monism ( advaita ). The rest of the work is filled with the application of this result to every separate item of the Hlnayanist philosophical system } Nagarjuna is also the author of two short tracts dealing with the method of negative dialectics adopted by him. One of them «The Refutation of Contests» (vigraha-vyavartani) fs very often quoted.

Whether he is the author of numerous other works which go under his name, and whether he is the same personality as the celebrated metallurgist,

1 The following is the list of subjects treated, ch. I On Causality, II On Motion, III on the sense-faculties ( indriya ), IY On the elements of existence ( skandha), V On the component ele¬ ments (dhatu) of an individual, YI On passions (rdga), YII On momentariness (samskrta—trilaksan I), VIII On Agent and Action ( karma-karaka ), IX On the unreality of the preceding moment (purva), X On the relation of fire and fuel, XI On the Infinite (purvdparakoti), XII On the un¬ reality of the phenomenal world (duhkha = paflcopaddnaskandha), XIII On the unreality of all the forces (samskdra) of life, XIV On the unreality of relations ( samsarga ), XY On the notion of Essentia (svabhava), XVI On Bondage and Deliverance, XVII On Karma and its result, XVIII On the doctrine of a Soul ( atman ), XIX On Time, XX On the notion of a Totality of causes (satnagrl), XXI On the notions of origin and end (sambhava-tibhava), XXII On the reality of Buddha, XXIII On logical incongruity ( viparayasa ), XXIV On the «Four Truths#, XXV On Nir¬ vana, XXVI On the Twelve Stages ( nidana ) in the development of an individual life, XXVII On false dogma ( drsti).

NIRVANA

chemist and alchemist Nagarjuna is very doubtful. 1 His pupil and successor Aryadeva, a Ceylonese by birth, has composed an independent treatise about the same subject, also in 400 aphorisms, but following another, more systematic, arrangement.

About the date of both these authors there is till now no absolute certainty, but the II century A. D. is generally accepted as most probable. Although both were born in the South, the scene of their activity is Northern India, during the best time of the Kushan empire.