Buddhism and Ethics.
Rhys Davids, C. A. F.
The Buddhist Review
1:1
1909:01
p.13
Buddhism and Ethics.*
BUDDHISTS, and sympathetic writers on Buddhism,
claim for the Dhamma of the Buddha that it is in line
with the modern scientific standpoint. Its adherents,
they say, need never fear that their faith having its
basis in dogma, science its basis in hypothesis, they
will ever find themselves called upon to choose
between their religious faith and their scientific
belief. Buddhism, they aver, would never have, with
the Roman Church to impose, or, with other sections
of the Christian world, to recommend, an Index
Expurgatorius of books, in which science is shown to
clash with revelation and established creed. It is
even claimed that Buddhism is "the only religion
which is a priori not in contradiction with the
discoveries of science."+
Let us inquire into the justice of this claim,
staying but a moment to lift out of the path two
objections. "Just," the claim may well be, it might
be said, if the name "religion" be denied to Buddhism
as it is to science. Buddhism is only a body of moral
doctrine. But it really makes no difference to the
validity of the claim if one or more of the
fundamental features in all other so-called religions
be not found in the Dhamma. It should not be
forgotten that, after all--to quote a Japanese
Buddhist++-- " when a system or teaching becomes the
principle or guidance of life to a person, that
system or teaching is the one and only religion to
him." And Buddhism has long been this to millions. We
need not argue about words in the face of facts.
Again, the justice of the claim is not wiped out
by all the
-----------------------
* An address delivered to the Buddhist Society of
Great Britain and Ireland, London, March 11th,
1908, condensed for this journal.
+ P. Dahlke, Buddhist Essays; Narasu, Essence of
Buddhism; Nietzsche, Antichrist; W. S. Lilly, The
Message of Buddhism in Many Mansions.
++ Rev. K. Uchida, What is Religion? 'Buddhism a
Religion?
p.14
myth and fairylore interpenetrating and bedraping the
records of the founding and diffusion of Buddhism.In
Fielding Hall's words: " If every supernatural
occurrence were wiped out of the chronicles of the
faith, Buddhism would...remain exactly where it is."*
The essential tenets would intact. And the myths were
never imposed by authority as dogmas.
Calling Buddhism, then, what we will, and
discounting the trappings in which love and
superstition ever deck out the profoundly impressive
things of life, we must still find that the claim
advanced as to Buddhism and Science is very bold and
far-reaching. Here is a doctrine that takes us back
as far as the days of the very beginnings of Hellenic
Science. For this doctrine it is claimed that it
might have served, not to check or to ignore the
discoveries of Copernicus and Bruno, Galileo and
Newton, Darwin and Spencer, but to stimulate and
inspire them. Not a guide that they might have
adhered to from convention only, or appealed to now
and again to reconcile the lay world with their dis-
coveries and conclusions, but an oracle that would
have spurred them on in their quest of Truth, saying:
"Toil on! Think and fear not! Seek and proclaim! You
are building my palace of Truth; my benison is on
you! "
Well, it is one thing to talk about achievements
of modern science and advance of modern thought, and
another thing to claim for this age in general that
it is imbued with the scientific spirit, or that the
views and conduct of the average man or woman are
governed thereby. This state of things is but in its
infancy. But it is born, and is growing.. Hence any
movement of thought will have, more and more, to cope
with the scientific spirit, and will stand or fall
largely by its sanction. And hence all who call
themselves Buddhists, or who are interested in
spreading a knowledge of Buddhist doctrine or, at
least, of the spirit of that doctrine, should look
into this claim that is made for it. Those, again,
whose interest lies in tracing the growth of human
ideas, can in no wise feel indifferent to the real
extent to which the ancient mind of India anticipated
a standpoint
--------------------
* Tbe Soul of a People.
p.15
slowly and painfully won to by the intellect of
Europe. In this inquiry there is one point of
comparison to which I should like to direct your
attention to-day.
If we look at what is commonly called science in
a superficial way, heeding more the matter than the
method, we seem, except in one respect, to be landed
at the Antipodes of Buddhist thought. Like Socrates
as compared with the Pre-Socratic thinkers, Buddhism
views the universe through man, studying external
nature only in so far as his ethical purpose and
ideal were thereby advanced, and not as in itself of
profound interest and ultimate utility. Even the
remarkable efforts of Buddhism in psychological
analysis were apparently made solely for an ethical
purpose.
But if we turn from the objects, or
subject-matter of science, and regard it as a method,
and the scientific spirit as an attitude, we see we
are at once brought up against the working of the
mind, and, in the history of that working, may
possibly find a bond, and a justification for the
claim set forth above.
Now science, whether occupied with analysis or
history, is reasoned, systematised knowledge; and
things reasoned about or systematised, are, so far,
things explained. Scientific explanation, to quote
our text hooks, consists in so harmonising fact with
fact, or fact with law, or law with law, that we may
see both to be cases of one uniform law of Causation.
Science is explaining in terms of causation. In other
words, every thing, every observed unit of expenence,
every phenomenon is, in science, regarded as
classified or classifiable, with reference to some
other thing, unit or phenomenon, or group of
phenomena, not identical with it, but essential to
its presence. Calling the former thing, unit, or
phenomenon, Y, and the latter, X, science says that
(1) every Y has its X, and that (2) when to a Y is
assigned its X, Y is causally, i.e. properly,
explained.
In reminding you of this, I would also ask you to
recollect that the foregoing scientific position is
the modern, possibly not the final, stage in the
evolution of the history of the
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causal idea. It is not only a modern scientific
dictum that the Causal Law covers the whole of
experience-that every Y has its X. It belongs also to
modern thought, to the last two centuries, that all
idea of the Cause being, in itself and as such, a
generative Power, a Maker, an irruptive Agent, is
abandoned, and the Cause is reduced to an invariable,
necessary, phenomenal antecedent, or group of
antecedents. This is hardly yet recognised by
the popular mind, and language will for long, perhaps
always, perpetuate the older view, even in the case
of impersonal forces, let alone that of personal
agency. I mean that we shall go on saying the earth
attracts the falling apple, as if the earth were
honey and the apple a bee. Much more shall we
continue to see generative power in house-building,
child-bearing, and book-writing. Nevertheless, even
as the Indian belief saw in the throes of parturition
the blasts of the winds of Karma, so will the popular
mind come to discern, in the personal cause, that
seems so intrinsically generative and self-directing,
the effect and outcome of a long stream of antecedent
causes, governed by a universal law. For science
anyway, at this time of day, all happening of any
sort whatever, comes under the law of Causation: that
every event is the result or sequel of some previous
event or events, without which it could not have
taken place, and which, being present, it must take
place.
Now, I am not here concerned to compare this
modern statement with such definitions of Causal Law
as Europe inherited from the teaching of Aristotle.
My task is to compare it with a doctrine that
anticipated by some two hundred years anything that
"the Master of those who know" could have himself
enunciated. And it cannot but startle the
self-complacency of the Occidental mind to see in the
following formula, repeatedly put in the mouth of the
Buddha by the compilers of the older parts of the
Canon, so striking an anticipation of the Causal
Law:--"That being thus, this comes-to-be. From the
coming-to-be of that, this arises. That being absent,
this does not come to be. From the cessation of that,
this ceases. Such, bhikkhus, is, the doctrine of
happening by way of cause, and to this
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the well-taught Aryan student thoroughly attends.
"-- (Majjhima, ii. 32; Samyutta ii. 64, 65, etc.)
In this naif, jejune schema of cause and effect
there is no reading of our own consciousness of power
or will to produce, to effect, into the antecedent.
There is only the invariable necessary sequence given
in our modern formula of causation, coupled with a
converse statement well known to our modern logic of
Induction. And this extraordinary prototype of the
scientific method of our day does not occur as a
momentary flash of insight in Buddhist doctrine; nor
is it a hole-and-corner tenet. The view of causation
which it sums up, permeates the whole of the Dhamma,
as something that is grasped and felt as the central
Truth. To see by way of the Causal Law is called the
supreme condition of seeing aright--of, "by right
insight, seeing things as they really have become."
It is the Causal Law that gives its central
importance to the doctrine of the Chain, or Twelve
(sometimes ten, or fewer) Bases, of Dependent
Genesis. It is inquiry by way of causation that is
set out in the central doctrine called the Four Aryan
Truths. It is insight into a Causal Order, obtaining
in the moral universe as surely as among the
phenomena of the external world, that sweeps away the
mists from the vision of the prevailing Bodhisat, and
gains for him the supreme enlightenment of a Buddha.
Gone for him are the great superhuman powers and
agencies and providences, intervening at will in
human destinies to bring joy or sorrow, success or
failure, like Pallas and Hera before Troy. Ill, Pain,
Sorrow in the world is simply the inevitable effect
of natural causes. And Man himself, through knowledge
and elimination of those causes can himself make Ill
and Sorrow cease to be!
The fact that early Buddhism and modern Science
express belief in a universal law of Causation in
terms so similar, leads inevitably to the further
inquiry, as to how far there is historical evidence
that the evolution of this belief among early
Buddhists was parallel to the corresponding evolution
in Europe. The lack of continuity and of
chronological certainty in the literatures of ancient
India greatly hinder and complicate such an inquiry.
But there
p.18
does survive a body of Brahmanical literature, an
accretion of various dates, known as the Sixty
Upanishads of the Veda, in which a form of Pantheism
called Atmanism or Vedantism is set forth, with
mainly archaic views on what we term First, Final,
and Occasional Cause. And we have the Pali Canon of
the Buddhists, coinciding, it is thought, in date,
with the middle period of these sixty books, and
repudiating this Atmanism, whether macrocosmically or
microcosmically conceived.
To what extent Buddhism, as a lay, anti-Brahmanic
antisacerdotal movement, originated the rejection of
Atmanism, or carried on a wider and older tradition
of rejection, it is not possible to say. But the fact
that the founders of Buddhism did, in leaving the
world for the religious life, take up this Protestant
position on the one hand, and on the other make a law
of natural causation their chief doctrine, suggests
at all events a profound psychological crisis. That
it did not become a political crisis would be due to
the absence, in India, of political and
ecclesiastical sanctions of belief.
If we look into the older Upanishads, we find not
only no curiosity with respect to natural law or
causation, but also no grip of the great omnipresent
fact of Pain, or Ill, at all. The very words for
"Ill" hardly ever occur. So that they made herein no
appeal to minds on whom.the inexorableness of Law and
the heritage of Suffering were pressing with heavy
hand. And when there is any question of origin, or
cause, it is the Atman, or World-Soul, pre- siding or
immanent, who creates Man, who feels, thinks, speaks,
works in, for and by Man, and who is "Bliss,
Unalterable, Immortal World-Guardian, World-Lord--
This that is My Atman!"
There could be nothing very tragic in such an
outlook on life, basking in the sunshine of so
splendid an optimism. Picture then one brought face
to face with the opposed view of things, with the
cruelty and misery and ignorance also omnipresent,
with the relentlessness of fate and the Dark behind
and before. "Lapsed Christians," to quote Mr. Lilly's
term, know what it is to feel the world one "vast
p.19
orphanage." They have grown up in a tradition
based on the passionate Godism of Hebrew psalmists,
fed by the poetry of universal Fatherhood uttered by
later Greek and Stoic aspiration, and quickened into
a vital function of religious life by Jesus. In part,
too, they have known, though not in its full power,
the more natural, more tender and, in truth, more
venerable religion, of The Mother. And then, some day
they have awaked to find themselves in a Father-
less, a Motherless world; and for them " there was
darkness over all the earth till the ninth hour"!
But in the case of such Buddhists as may have
been lapsed Atmanists, the crisis must have been even
worse. In a Paternal Theism, the Father is not only
not identified with the creature or child, but is a
Being so remote as to need divine or human
intermediaries to bring him within touch of his
children. The Pan-Theist after the Indian sort loses,
with his faith, his Oversoul, his own Soul, his All;
First Cause, Final Cause, Occasional Cause. To
uphold, in the presence of such a ruin, an
invariable, necessary, causal sequence as the natural
order of things, and on this to maintain spiritual
balance and serenity, and to vibrate the while with a
mother's yearning for the salvation of his fellowmen,
was a notable attainment. I can give you no one
instance of the passage of a Buddhist's mind
rejecting Atmanism. In the Buddha legend itself, it
was the mystery of life and death behind the careless
masque of worldly pleasures that drove the great Sage
out into solitude. But, I repeat, we have the two
literatures with their contrasted religious
standpoints, one of them sternly rejecting the other,
and thus betraying at least a partial consciousness
of all that the opposed view held out to its
adherents.* So that we cannot be wholly in the dark
as to the philosophical or religious environment in
which this ancient belief in a natural law of
causation was evolved.
We know that, in the course of centuries,
Buddhism fell from the great position it attained in
India, and gave place again to the Vedantism of the
Brahmins and the Theisms of other cults. The
terminology of causation became frequent
------------------------
* Atmanism was to some extent an esoteric phase of
Brahmanism.
p.20
in works of Indian metaphysics; but it was only
in Buddhism that the law of causation itself had been
exalted into a religious tenet. Amongst ourselves
Christianity, owing, it may be, largely to its
Paternal Theism as opposed to Atmanism, has been able
to exist side by side with that science which has so
often felt the persecuting hand of its ecclesiastical
organisations, and to be accepted, side by side with
the conclusions of science, in one and the same mind.
We have agreed with Hooker that " the wise and
learned, among the very heathen themselves, have all
acknowledged some First Cause...as an Agent
which...observeth, in working, a most exact order or
law." And so we acquiesce, on six days of the week,
as to our plans, our professional work, our legal
procedure, our physical remedies, our thinking, and
our play, in the great induction, that whatever
happens is the natural consequence of an invariable
necessary group of antecedents called cause. While on
the seventh day, our happiness and sorrow, our health
and ill, our success and failure are referred to the
great Personal Agent, and we say: "God distributeth
sorrows in his anger... For God is a righteous Judge
and God is angry every day."
This truce or reconciliation between the concepts
of science and religion would, in Buddhism, seem a
needless and anomalous compromise. Amongst ourselves
it is a source of alarm only to intolerant zeal and
officious orthodoxy. To the more tolerant it is a
ground for confidence and hope that, in the future, a
re-created "New Theology" and a spiritualised science
may embrace each other in widened and harmonious
concepts. But the truce has been won after long
struggles, and at a cost to human intellect and to
the discoveries by the intellect which we shall never
know. We cannot pet say that a creed, which in the
days of its despotic power, ruthlessly stemmed the
free advance of knowledge, will escape being haled
before the bar of humanity to render account for
doctrines that could be used to suppress that
advance. Does it not appear, anyway, a wondrous irony
of history when we see Science setting out, some
2,400 years ago, on her long upward climb
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equally well under, say, Demokritus in the West
and Buddha in the East, and reflect how in India,
where she had full freedom to advance, the creed that
would have mothered her in all affection, was
undermined by other creeds, and finally swept away in
blood and rapine, while in Europe, where the
barbarian was either repelled or absorbed, the creed
that survived should have long proved so cruel a
stepmother? Whither might not the Science of Europe
and America have by now attained, had the Doctors of
the Church seen eye to eye with Gotama the Buddha in
the great Law of Causation!
Such thoughts belong to the might-have-beens of
history's conjectures. It is with the May-Be's that
this young Society is concerned. And the particular
May-Be that we hope, if I judge rightly, to assist in
converting into a Will-Be, is that set forth just
ninety years ago by Schopenhauer: "I reckon that, in
this century, the influence of Sanskrit
literature"--he included Buddhist thought then known
only through Sanskrit--"will sink even deeper than
did that of the renascence of Greek literature in the
fifteenth century."* This conjecture was two
generations later expanded and emphasised by your
president,+ and the formation of this Society is one
symptom among others that that influence has begun to
work. If we took shape in response to a growing
demand for a better acquaintance with the ancient
Buddhist doctrine, we shall in time help to
strengthen that demand, and hasten forward that
crisis, or that gradual leavening of thought, wherein
Schopenhauer's surmise will have appeared to have
been a true prophecy. Great upheavals and
re-creations of religious and philosophic thought
come not with the mushroom growth of a night, but
from a slow insidious " fermenting in the same minds
" of "different and even antagonistic systems of
thought."++ And it is likely there will be no vital
renascence of religious thought until the very
essentials of Christian doctrine, in
----------------------
* World as Will and Idea, Preface.
+ Rhye Davids, Hibbert Lectures, 1881; also in
American Lectures, 1896.
++ Rhys Davids, American Lectures, VI.
p.22
its Catholic, Creek, and Protestant manifestations,
have been thrown into the mental crucible together
with some such tremendous difference in likeness,
some such contrast under similarity, as is offered by
the ancient Dhamma, in the nature and history of
which there is growing up so notable an interest.
In that growing interest what, think you, is the
future in Buddhist doctrine likely to act as the most
powerful solvent, in that crucible of thought and
feeling, of the religious accretions in the European
mind? Who can say? This Society can but do its best
in making the ancient doctrine and the history of it
fairly known with " an open nor seeking to substitute
hand, keeping nothing back,"* any old mythological
lamp for other old mythological lamps. The most
honest method of doing so is to concentrate our
energies in putting into the book market, not so much
the thought of modern Budahists on Buddhism, as
translations of those most ancient records of the
Dhamma, which were sanctioned by the organised
adherents of the Dhamma. Different tenets in that
doctrine must perforce appeal with varying force to
creative minds of to-day, and there is a danger that
the personal equation of an individual writer's
particular religious experience, may magnify here and
dwarf there, or indeed introduce alien matter--valuab
le it may be in itself--but violating historical
truth.
That prominent feature in ascetic teaching, so
strange and repellant to natural instincts-the
repudiation of the craving for physical life and the
joy in it--is involved in the Buddhist doctrines of
Dukkha and Anicca. And it is this feature which, in
one notable recent book, is put forward as the great
antithesis which shall join issue with the doctrine
of immortality, born of this hunger for life and the
joy of life, shared in by all other creeds. The book
written by a German Buddhist, and translated b y a
Scottish Buddhist --I refer to P. Dahlke's Essays,
translated by Bhikkhu Silacara, is written with power
and insight, and is bound to make an impression. And
the antithesis between the dogma of Immortality, as
supreme compensation, of
---------------------
* Cf. ;Buddhirt Surras, by Rhys Divids, "Sacred Books
of the East," XI., P. 36.
p.23
other religions, and the refusal of the Buddha to
discuss the question of existence behind the Veil in
terms of life as we know it here*---and we have no
other terms-- is no doubt the most unique feature of
ancient Buddhism. But this great dividing line is too
simple an idea to convey all the truth.
Depreciation of life, because life involves evil,
and therefore pain, is the starting-point of all
ascetic doctrines--of Christianity as of Buddhism. So
far, therefore, there is no impressive antithesis.
And no honest view of things can well avoid taking as
its starting-point, its pou sto, the bedrock of what
we may call the "orphanage" conviction, that " man is
born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward." The really
impressive antithesis comes in the next step; and it
lies not so much between Christianity and Buddhism,
as between merely ascetic doctrine and the greater
growth of the human mind. Life, on the one hand,
conceived as irremediably evil, but brief, and the
gateway to the Supreme Compensations; life, on the
other hand, conceived as holding possibilities of
melioration indefinitely great, realisable in
different degrees, by different individuals, at
different times, but at all times calling for, and
inspiring the finest, highest effort of human
capacity to forward that realisation. And the
question remains: What form of religion forwarrds or
hinders the one belief or the other? For as the Fates
stood weaving the Must-Be of natural law behind Zeus
or Wotan, so will the Time-spirit of the Now and the
near future stand over against the doctrines and the
formulas of all the creeds to which man has here and
there surrendered his own judgment, and will judge
between them.
Life as we know it is made better, less evil, by
knowledge and love, by science and justice. Through
their great common fraternal heart, Buddhism and
Christianity may walk " hand in hand" --may " look
into each other's eyes and not be afraid."+ What will
be the verdict of the human intelligence on the
attitude of each of them towards the concepts and the
task of science?
-------------------------
* I do not, of course, refer to re-birth, earthly,
heavenly, or infernal, which the Buddha accepted,
but to the Parinirvana of one who had conquered
re-birth.
+ Dreams, by O. Schreiner, p. 84.