Buddhism & science

As aid towards a better understanding of that personality of the greatest significance for the mental life of mankind, there follow here some remarks upon him and the age in which he lived.

Buddhism is the teaching of the Buddha, or as one may equally well say—of the Buddhas. For “Buddha” is no private name, but the title of one endowed with certain mental capacities. The word, therefore, ought always to be accompanied by the article. It signifies, The Awakened.

According to the teaching the number of the Buddhas is endless. He whom we know by this name, for the time being the last of this beginningless series, is the Buddha Gotama. His family name was Siddhattha. He came of the ancient race of the Sakyas, well known for their pride, and as such belonged to the warrior caste. He is, therefore, often alluded to under the name of “Sakyaputta,” scion of the Sakyas, or as “Samaṇa Gotama,” ascetic Gotama.

He was born in Kapilavatthu, the capital city of a small state in Northern India, on the borders of present-day Nepal. His grave was discovered in the year 1898 near Pipravā, in the jungle-covered foothills of the Himalayas called the Terai.

The years of his birth and of his death cannot be exactly determined. Meanwhile one does not go far wrong if one places the period of his activity in the neighbourhood of the year 500 before the Christian era. This would make him the elder contemporary of Heraklitus of Ephesus and somewhat younger than Lao Tse in China.

He died at the advanced age of eighty years (if one does not choose to regard the recurring statements in the texts as to age, on the part of the most different personalities, as merely an indication of old age in general), after almost fifty years of active life spent in travelling about, preaching.

The precepts, discourses, and explanations—all that which makes up the Buddhist canon—are gathered together into what is called the Tipitaka, or Three Baskets. The language of the canon is Pāḷi. Whether this was the Buddha’s own mother tongue or only related to it, is a question upon which there exist differences of opinion between native and European scholars.

The mental atmosphere in which the Buddha arose may be briefly characterized as follows: A feeling of life as suffering, fermenting throughout the entire Indian people; a firm belief in the transmigration of the soul and the endless prolongation of this suffering conditioned thereby; the conviction that asceticism purifies, after the effected purification from old guilt, heaps up merit, assures re-birth in heaven, and finally procures deliverance from Samsāra, this terrible, ceaseless wandering from existence to existence. Once more, the fundamental theme in this Indian symphony of destiny, recurring in unending variations, was this, Life is Suffering, or to say the least of it, a somewhat doubtful blessing. But this statement of life as suffering was not in ancient India the hollow phrase that it is with us to-day; neither was it that cold play of thought found in many philosophical systems. It was a grim reality which men sought to escape with an energy of self-immolation, a determination, a recklessness, an ardour of which we lukewarm creatures of to-day can form no conception.

India in the days of the Buddha was full of companies of monks and schools of ascetics, all of them wrestlers with the riddle of life. But one only wrestles with life when one feels it as suffering.

The sons of noble families left their homes to search for truth either out there in the frightful solitudes of the Indian forest, or in the cloister of the monk. As in later days men went forth in search of El Dorado, so in those days did men go forth upon the search for truth. But what gives to the search for truth in ancient India a character entirely its own is this, that all search here is turned towards the I itself; that the fight for truth did not as in ancient Greece exhaust itself in elegant rhetorical disputations and exercises in dialectic, but in full unmitigated rigour was lived out in one’s own I, without a single thought as to whether the outward form would support the heat of the friction within or not.

Amid this swarm of searchers for truth the young Siddhattha also made his appearance. “Black-haired, in the bloom of manhood,” in spite of weeping and wailing parents, in spite of a loved and loving wife, in spite of a dear young son, he left his father’s halls where he had led a life of rarest pomp and pleasure to enter shaven of head and garbed in yellow, upon the inclement life-path of the penitent. It was the force of thought that drove him forth. He gazed face to face on the transiency of all that lives, and troubled, tormented by this irresistible, unseizable flood of appearances, he turned his mental eye inwards, resolved to find there in the depths of his own I that hold and stay which the outer world everywhere denied to him, the weary. Truthfulness toward oneself, seriousness of search regardless of consequences, an unfailing sense of reality, that was the foundation upon which that most banal of all phrases, adapted as is no other to coquetting with itself—the phrase, “All is transient,”—became for him that unique teaching of which he himself could say with ample right, “It is the teaching which is founded upon itself.”

In one of the Buddhist monk’s chants there occurs the phrase, “One single thing—he thinks it out!” This, in few words, is what the Buddha did. He thought out to an end, one thought—the thought of transiency. I will not call his teaching the grandest or the deepest of all teachings. Grand, likewise, is Heraklitus’s teaching of the All-becoming; deep, likewise, is the Vedanta teaching of the All-one in Brahman; but the teaching of the Buddha is more than this—it is actual. Through this it obtains that really compelling character such as is possessed by actuality alone. For there is only one thing that is compelling—truth; and there is only one thing that is true—actuality.

Through this its truthfulness, his teaching has conquered half a world; not by fire and sword but even as truth conquers, by demonstration, by teaching. And so it now stands, old by two thousand years, before the portals of western culture, and claims entrance not into the cloudy domain of a vague mysticism or a crude pantheism, but into the realm of clear, clean thinking, as fulfilment of that which never can be attained by the means at the disposal of science. Comprehension, a world-conception, this goal of all mental life, made impossible by science in its false apprehension of the task—this the Buddha resolves in the limitation that reveals the genius.

Whoso, if only from afar, has scented the import of the Buddha and his teaching, must feel that here he has to do with something wholly unique. One can place on one side not only all the religions of the world but also all the philosophical and scientific systems, and upon the other Buddhism will take its place alone. Yet not as their antithesis. Buddhism is the teaching of actuality, and actuality has no antitheses, because itself the union of antitheses. The Buddha laid hold of actuality there where alone it can be laid hold of—in one’s own I. Here he found the secret law, the sacred riddle that the chorus outside there mockingly sings us, like to some oracle of Delphi at one and the same time revealing and concealing.

All religions founded upon revelation are of a decidedly revolutionary nature. Buddhism is a pure evolution, a process of mental development in which thought, so to speak, passes a culminating point and works on with reversed signs. This reversal of all life-values has set in with a new point of view, from which the struggle for no more existence, so unintelligible for us, follows as a logical necessity. Henceforth truth is no more the servitor of life, but life of truth. As a candle manifests itself through itself, by consuming itself in burning, so does the I manifest itself through itself in expending itself in thinking. In this teaching he is not great who loves most, but he who thinks most.

The full scope of this can only be understood later; for the moment it may serve the reader as preparation for what is to follow. Let him know then, at the very outset, that here he enters the realm of a man who seeks not life but truth—a man for whom life has no value in itself but only as an instrument of truth. Him I call a sorry seeker for truth who in his investigation of the riddle of life, sets life itself as sacrosanct in a place of security, making that which is to be measured into the measure itself.

To unite in passion, to contrive clever arrangements that insure the success of the business of propagation and the rearing of the young generation, these the animals also can do; their arrangements for living together in herds are by far more ingenious than those of men; but the capacity to doubt, to question, to seek—of these even the most highly developed animals possess only faint suggestions.

To doubt is the duty of man, and the Buddha is the representative type of humanity, because the doubter. We common men, we do indeed doubt of this and of that, and pique ourselves in no small measure upon our powers of judgment; but we none of us get any further than the symptoms. He alone seized at one grasp the entire, ever-changing host of doubts and questions by the root, with the daring of genius demanding to know the right to exist of life itself. This the reader ought well to bear in mind, otherwise for him the Buddha-thought must always retain something strange and forbidding, even as for the honest townsman we all know, a man who dares go up to High Authority Itself—whether established in heaven or on earth—and ask for its identification papers, ever remains in some sort a fear-inspiring figure.

I now pass on to a point more external, but one, none the less, that has its own importance in an introduction to the thought-world of the Buddha.

Buddhism is not only the oldest of the three world-religions, but also the only one of the three that is of Aryan origin.

The significance of this fact lies for me not in the racial question, but in the matter of language. The tongue in which the Buddha preached, taught, and thought, whether it was the Pāḷi itself or some dialect related to it, belongs to the Indo-Germanic stem. The root-words, the grammatical constructions, are akin to those found in European languages. Without any more said, we see how deep is the tie that binds us to the Buddha. Mental life can mix and blend with mental life only through the medium of language. If no congruity exists between one language and another, neither can there be any congruity of thought. We know what enormous difficulties block the way of any European scholar who would force an entrance into the thought-world of the Chinese. So much so, that even at this late day it is still possible to argue the point as to whether the Chinese have any conception of deity at all. To this day it remains open to every translator to interpret Lao Tse, for example, either as a “god-inspired man”—to quote a good Christian translator—or as a free-lance in the fields of thought.

Something similar, if in somewhat less positive terms, may be advanced concerning the Semitic stem. Who can say whether the Indo-German has ever rightly understood Semitism as the deserts of Judea and Arabia have hatched it out. The absurdities and confusions of thought in which Indo-German peoples find themselves entangled the moment they make the attempt to understand and think it out leave it fairly open to doubt. It may be, that pure Semitism, that is to say, that flat contradiction to sound sense, a personal god, can only be perfectly digested with the help of the Semitic root language. The thinking of the Indo-Germanic peoples, or rather of the Indo-Germanic root language, has set itself against this bald crudity from the very beginning. At the idea of predestination, over which the Semite Paul balances his way with considerable natural agility, the half-Aryan Augustine only comes to grief. For the brutality with which the latter champions this dogma is nothing else but the expression of the brutality with which he forcibly squeezed his own mind beneath its yoke. For us the Aryan speaking and thinking, a religion that in its natural logical consequences conducts to such an anomaly as predestination, is either at bottom a moral monstrosity, and so incapable of becoming religion, or else it is a thing misunderstood.

On the other hand, I should refer the intellectual derailment which the Buddha-thought has undergone in Tibet, China, and Japan, in no small measure to the lack of congruity that exists between the Indo-German and the Mongolian languages. The tongue of the Mongol is simply incapable of rendering exactly the content of the Pāḷi syllables.

Buddhism is the teaching of actuality, and its language also—the Pāḷi—as regards content of actuality, takes a leading place among languages.

As upon one hand one may look upon the phenomena of life as processes, actualities, things alive, and upon the other as things rounded off in themselves, rigid, strictly defined, realities, according as, following mental disposition, here the one there the other mode of comprehension predominates, so in one language does the thrust of the actual predominate, and in the other the thrust of the real, the objective. In the one the dynamic predominates, in the other the static.

A language of an eminently static character is the Latin; whence the impossibility of finding another equally good to take its place in a well-ordered corpus juris, with which latter capacity for definition counts above everything. What jurisprudence requires is the complete, the bounded (objectively as well as conceptually) realities. It lops away everything actual, which at all times and places is a processive motion, a species of status nascens, until comprehended it can be grasped, pretty much as out of the actual surface of the earth in a state of constant transformation the land-surveyor cuts out a piece, settles it as something real and seizable, so that as such its owner at will can exchange it, till the time when the millenium hand on the horologe of the world indicates an advance and renders necessary a new settlement, a new definition. This method is quite sufficient where it is only a question of arriving at definite ends. It corresponds to that which in another place was styled the re-actual comprehension of things, and the Latin word res, considered etymologically, points directly to this “re-actual” feature.

In complete opposition to Latin the Pāḷi is a language of an eminently actual character. The seeming offences against logic, that with more or less good nature have been laid to the charge of the Buddha by western scholars, have their rise in this content of actuality that distinguishes the language on one hand and its thinking on the other. In actuality there is nothing defined or definable to be found—nothing but a relentless processive movement. Every definition is a compromise with actuality, and is always to be held, as such, by every genuine thinker.

It is owing to this content of actuality in Buddhism and its language that so many expressions are found in it for which a fitting translation is scarcely or not at all to be found. In language, also, a gradual stiffening process is taking place amongst us which renders us ever more capable in definition, and ever more incapable in the comprehension of actuality. Here quite evidently we are caught in a vicious circle. We are proud of this our ability in defining, and imagine we have comprehended the thing itself when we have succeeded in decorating it with a definition. In such cases, however, all we have really done is to fling bridges of thought, as it were, high up over things, which permit us to hop from one conceptual “place” to another without once wetting even our toes in actuality. On the Rhine near Bonn there stands hewn in stone these words: “Caesar primus flumini pontem imposuit.” There are not a few minds associated with the lecture-room and laboratory who take themselves for Cæsars when they “impose” new definitions upon things, upon actuality. The riddles of life in this wise are neatly and perfectly resolved in definitions; which, after all, is nothing very much to wonder at with riddles of life that for the most part only exist in the form of definitions.

All things in the world are so constituted that with them concept and object are separable: the concept admits of being “manipulated” apart from the object. And all mental life in a certain sense just amounts to the attempt to get concept and object to coincide—an attempt that eternally fails, because eternally losing itself in unending series. One thing only in all the world is so constituted that in regard to it no separation of concept and object is found—I myself! For that which I conceive myself as, that even I myself am; and every attempt to form a concept is just a form of myself. Here the concept of myself is experience, actuality itself. I myself am the unique, to me accessible, pure actuality of the world. Buddhism is the teaching of actuality. It starts out with the only pure actuality of the world, and from this point proceeds to suck the entire play of world-events without exception into the whirlpool of its thinking. And with this we find ourselves in the presence of the Buddha-thought itself.