Buddhism

I am currently reading Indian Philosophy Volume I by Shri S. Radhakrishnan – honorable president of India and one of the greatest philosophers of 20th century India. I intend to post the important points from Radhakrishnan ji’s historical commentary followed by his philosophical commentary.

The Italics are directly from the book. I have given the page number after Italic letters, so that it’s easier for anyone to cross check the information in these posts. Also, the thoughts that are mine, I am starting them by clearly saying “I think”. Some of these thinking lines can be wrong but rest of the material is inferred from the book itself.

The intention of these posts is to give basic outline about Buddhism as a special school of thought in Hinduism. In the book there are further two chapters on Buddhism and I will go over them too and will post them in different thread.

Literature -:
For the earliest accounts of Buddhism we refer to Pitakas or the basket of Law. (343) These laws weren’t transmitted when Buddha was alive but they are closest to the Buddha’s life span.
(Radhakrishnan states that these Pitakas were written possibly in 214 B.C. but I don’t agree with them. Recent archeological evidences takes the time line of Indian history further into the past. Such evidences were not available to Radhakrishnan and hence, he sticks to the Aryan invasion around 1500 B.C. and constructs the following historical events accordingly.)

Right after Buddha’s death, there was a dispute among his disciples about Buddha’s actual teachings. To solve this dispute there was council meeting among the most learned Buddhist Bhikkus which includes Upali,(343) the oldest disciple of Buddha, took place near Magadha. Various bhikkus read the actual teachings and it seems that they solved the dispute. (Though, Radhakrishnan doesn’t make this clear.)

The teachings of Buddha were written down only around 80 B.C. Before that the teachings were orally transmitted. The Pali (344)canon has three divisions
I) Sutta or tales -.
II) Vinaya or discipline -
III) Abidhamma or doctrine.

There are further divisions in each of the above three main categories. But I didn’t go into the details.

The basic outline of Buddha’s life - :

He was born to King Shuddhodhan and his wife Maya. His birth name was Sidhartha. The meaning of the word Sidhartha is “he who have accomplished his aim.” (347) All though, Radhakrishnan gives the birth year of Buddha as 567 B.C., I think he was born way before that for the reasons stated at the beginning of this project.

The meaning of the Buddha is the knower or the enlightened one. Sidhartha was heir to to Sakya dynasty. His mother died when he was just seven days old. He was brought up by Shuddhan’s second wife Mahayapati.

Sidhartha was married to his cousin Yashodhara and they had son named Rahul. As most of the people know that Prince Sidhartha was disturbed by the pain and suffering of the human beings. Though he was a prince and hence, enjoying all the benefits and luxuries of life, he failed to understand the transience and uncertainty of life.(347).

“Impressed by the emptiness of the things of sense” (349) Sidhartha decided to follow the old tradition of ascetic lifestyle and left his family and life of luxuries for good. After years of prayers and meditation, he found the truth and became Buddha. After realizing the truth he “felt charged with the mission to announce to the doomed multitudes the way to everlasting felicity”. (349). He gave first sermon Dharmachakrapravartan to the five of his ascetic friends who became his first disciples. The movement grew from there as more and more people joined this sect which talks more about ethical way to lead the life rather than bulky metaphysical philosophy.

He is said to have attained the Mahaparinirvan at the age of 80.

Prevailing conditions -:

According to Radhakrishnan it is imperative for us to learn the prevailing conditions during the rise of Buddhism in India. It helps us to understands the way certain aspects of Buddhism developed.

According to him, Veda’s had gained the mystic sense of respect in the society. The six major schools of thoughts in Hinduism weren’t developed but they seems to be under construction. He says that moral life was suffering in the society as people were more concerned about the metaphysical world rather than reality. I guess, he means that the violence and ritualism was at it’s peak and people were missing out on the real purpose of their existence. “Buddha was stuck by the clashing enthusiasms, the discordant systems, the ebb and flow of belief, and drew from it all his own lesson of the futility of metaphysical thinking”. (353)

From the little history I know about that period, I think, there was rampant wars between all the petty kings in order to expand their empire. With so much violence, morality and ethics of working properly were questioned. And, common people couldn’t find answers to their moral conundrum from the religious authorities. Hence, Buddhism picked up quickly because “Buddhism is essentially psychology, logic and ethics, and not metaphysics”. (353)

But did Buddha wanted to form different religion at all? Personally, I don’t think so. The basic nature of Buddhism does not point towards prosylitization as it’s objective. It is more about .”.resembles positivism in its attempt to shift the centre from the worship of God to the service of Man. Buddha was not so keen about founding a new schee of the universe as about teaching a new sense of duty”. (357) Further, Radhakrishnan suggests that Buddha didn’t set out to start something radical and didn’t intend to completely destroy the old way of life. He saw his contemporary society as exerting more on rituals and not-so-useful metaphysics rather than figuring out the truth. He had positive attitude towards changing the situation rather than grudge towards the old traditions. His main concern was societies dependence on supernatural power rather than rationality.

I think Buddha was telling people to stick to the Karma and figure out the actions and reactions from the Karma point of view rather than thinking in terms of God’s boon or curse. He was rationalist “Buddha had so firm a grip of the connectedness of things that he would not tolerate miraculous interferences of the cosmic order or magical disturbances of mental life.” (359)

Buddha and the Upanishad –
Radhakrishnan constantly refers to Rhys Davids when it comes to referring Buddha’s life. So, I am beginning this topic with rather reassuring quote from Rhys Davids. He says “Gautama was born and brought up and lived and died a Hindu” (361)

Radhakrishnan says that Buddha’s philosophy wasn’t aberration or “it’s not freak in the evolution of Indian thought” (360).

As I said earlier, Buddha was restructuring the concepts of Karma for his contemporary society. He was a rebel not in a sense of iconoclast but rather in a sense of rejuvenator and reformer. “To develop his theory Buddha had only to rid the Upanishad of their inconsistent compromises with Vedic polytheism and religion set aside the transcendental aspect as being indemonstrable to thought and unnecessary to morals, and emphasize the ethical universalism of the Upanishad.” (360-61) According to Radhakrishnan the unnecessary importance towards rituals can be seen in Upanishad too. Furthering this thought, I think Buddha tried to imbibe in the common man the possibility of attaining moksha through pure Karma-yog. Radhakrishnan says that Buddha “classed the Brahmins along with the Buddhist mendicants, and used the word as one of honor in reference to the Buddhist arhats and saints” (361)

This part is bound to be controversial. But we have to realize that Radhakrishnan clearly states that Brahmins in later period, realizing their mistakes, accepted Buddha as the 9th incarnation of Vishnu. So, when Radhakrishnan says that Buddhism is a off-shoot of Hinduism and Buddha never intend to form something radically different by destroying the existing (i.e. Hindu) structure, he can’t be accused of being biased here.

Radhakrishnan dealt Buddhism as a religion (i.e. more political in nature) in later chapters and I will go over it in coming days.

Suffering –
Now we are starting our journey towards the core of the Buddha’s philosophy. And, it wouldn’t be overstatement to say that Buddha was obsessed with the nature of the sufferings in the world. He started his journey in the quest of figuring out the essence of sufferings. According to Radhakrishnan, “In the whole history of the thought no one has painted the misery of human existence in blacker colors and with more feeling than Buddha” (362)
According to Buddha there are four noble truths:
1) Suffering i.e. Dukha
2) It’s cause i.e. Samudaya
3) That it can be suppressed i.e. Nirodha
4) That there is a way to accomplish this i.e. Marga

Talking more about suffering, Buddha believes that “death is painful, decay is painful, disease is painful, death is painful, union with the unpleasant is painful; painful is the separation from the pleasant, and any craving that is unsatisfied, that too is painful. (362)

In order to not to be besieged by the grief, Buddha believes that soul has to escape from this cycle and attain Nirvana. According to Radhakrishnan Buddha emphasized so much on sorrow and grief “ to make people long for escape from this world, its blackness is little overdrawn” (362)

Radhakrishnan himself believed that life is not only sorrow and grief. It’s much more than that. He refuses the assumption that pain dominates over the pleasure. But Buddha wasn’t the first one to take such a dark view of life, Upanishad talks similar to this too. Though, Buddha takes a sort of pessimism a step further. In Katha Upanishad, Nachiket asks Yama “Keep thou thy houses, keep dance and songs for thyself. Shall we be happy with these things, seeing thee?”

But in spite of Buddha’s decidedly negative view of life, Radhakrishnan says that earlier Buddhism can not be defined as pessimistic in nature. Some of the sects that developed in later Buddhism are definitely pessimistic but Buddha himself sought people to discern world of maya from the reality and then realize the true path of Nirvana. Early Buddhism believes in “liberating power of ethical discipline and the perfectibility of human nature” and (Buddha) “ asks us to revolt against the evil and attain a life of a finer quality, an arhata state” (365)