Buddhism and Western Philisophy in the World Part1

Buddhism and Western Philosophy

It is a commonplace today to say that the world is becoming smaller and smaller. What happens in one part of it is soon known and producing effects in nearly all parts of it, thanks to our modern inventions of wireless waves through the ether and thrce-hundred-miles-an-hour aeroplanes through the air. It is then only in line with all modern developments that we Buddhists should consider a little what connections may exist between the Teaching given us by our Master 2,500 years ago in the eastern part of the world and any similar teachings to be found in the western half. And when we do so, it is not that we may decry those western gropers after truth in favour of our own truth-giver, but rather to rejoice that the truths He found and proclaimed have been partly glimpsed, -shall we say, echoed ?-in other quarters of the globe by minds that were searching for truth in the realms of thought and life, and occasionally finding precious fragments of it.

Among these truth-seekers in other lands than ours was the ancient Greek thinker, Herakleitos, often called " The Obscure," his teaching was so new and difficult to make clear to those around him. For he lived in Ephesus, a city of Greece, of some renown, very nearly about the same time that, four thousand miles away in India, our Master was teaching and preaching. And the Greeks were very pronouncedly a this-world people. Their interests were lokika, belonging to the things of the sense world ; whereas the Buddha lived and moved among a people who had got over the child's delight in the things he can see and touch and handle, and had passed on to the deeper things of the mind, so that what He had to say found a ready soil in which to take root, and grew up into the stately tree that the world now calls Buddhism. So Herakleitos may have been obscure to those he talked


to in his native land of Greece ; but he would have found a ready understanding if he had come to India and spoken there at the same time.

Like the Buddha, Herakleitos was of good family, and occupied for a time some sort of position of a religious kind. However, he resigned, and retired into the life of a recluse, so as to be better able to follow up his thoughts and reflections. We do not know much directly about what he taught, for all that survives of his writings to-day-is a portion of one small treatise. But he must have made a considerable impression on the thinkers of his day, for in their writings he is frequently quoted ; and it is from these quotations that we learn something of what were his main teachings.

Of these, the most outstanding was enshrined in his famous, oft-repeated saying : " Panta Rhei," " Everything flows." In this teaching he maintained that nothing stands still for an instant, that everything is in constant motion, that the universe consists of motion ; a doctrine which comes startlingly near to the very latest pronouncement of the physical science of to-day, that the universe is a universe of radiations rather than of so-called material atoms. He was the originator of the famous statement that a man cannot step twice into the same stream. And he held the world of visible and invisible things to be nothing but such a constantly flowing stream, which is never the same for two consecutive moments. For the sake of convenience in common speech, he said, we talk about the world and the things in it as if they stayed still, but it is only for convenience sake that we do so. The world is never the same world from one moment to the next. And this change is of the very essence of its nature. It is never Being ; it is always Becoming. And what is true of the world, he said, is also true of all living creatures belonging to it, living in it, visible or invisible, even the very gods. Just like the Buddha, he was not much impressed by the assumed greatness and power of the super-terrestrial powers. He held that the)-, were as subject to change as any mortal creature. He even had the hardihood, the boldness, to compare Zeus, the chief of all the gods in the Greek pantheon, to a wayward boy in his caprices, not to say his escapades. Which opinion ol Herakleitos will remind you of the way in which the Buddha treated " Great Brahma in that masterpiece of humour, the Sutta in which are described the attempts of a perturbed Bhikkhu to get from the " Great Brahma " an answer to a question that had long puzzled him and the failure of the god to give it, so that at last he had to go to the Buddha for the satisfaction of mind he sought, the solution of the problem that it was beyond the power of the chief of the gods to provide.

In this view of Herakleitos concerning the flowing nature of the world, you see at once that he has caught what the Buddha was teaching at that same time 4,000 miles away from him. in His doctrine of universal Anicca, impcr-manence. " Everything flows," " Sabbe sankara anicca," these are just two ways of saying exactly the same thing.

Another belief of Herakleitos was that jire was the primary element from which all things arose. And jire he identified in living beings with craving. Hence, all living beings arose from or through craving. Such a remarkable resemblance to the Buddha's doctrine of Bhavatanha almost makes one think that he had heard of the Buddha's teaching, somehow or other. But that was impossible at that time. Later, indeed, it is highly probable that the Buddha's teachings became known in Greece, when some of those who followed Alexander's army into the East returned to their native land. But in Herakleitos' day it almost looks as though some lar-stretching telepathy conveyed to the Greek brain what that Scion of the Sakyas was teaching and preaching thousands of miles away from him at that time, and he gave it out as his own.
Herakleitos also had a strong sense of the inevitable and universal succession of cause and effect, so that he felt that a man's deeds made his nature, which in turn made his destiny, the gods having nothing to do with this latter. Here again he is in line with the Buddhist doctrine of Kamma, of action and its effects, in that each man's action decides each man's fate or destiny, no god or demon having anything decisive to do with it.

But it is in modern days in Europe that we find thinkers whose ideas most nearly approximate to those on which is founded Buddhism. Three of these thinkers come very near indeed in their thinking to the Buddhadhamma. Two of them were Germans, namely Arthur Schopenhauer and Edward Von Hartmann ; and one, a Frenchman of Jewish extraction, Henri Bergson. To these names, perhaps, we ought to add that of another German, the chemist Ostwald, who in the last century, with his teaching of what has been called " Energism ", asserted the ultimate insubstantiality of all so-called solid matter.

Ostwald, however, is a different kind of man from the other three just mentioned, in that he was not a thinker pure and simple who evolved his ideas out or the depths of his own inner consciousness, but a scientist whose particular study was the nature of matter, but who did some profound thinking about the actual facts which he encountered in the course of his strictly scientific work. The conclusions at which he arrived over sixty years ago have of late, say within the last twenty years or so, become almost commonplaces among the leading scientists of the western world. The views which now obtain most currency in scientific circles to-day all focus themselves on the point which Ostwald last century only broached as a simple theory, this namely, that what we find in the universe at all times is nothing but a play of forces or energies,—hence Ostwald's term " Energism.'' To creatures possessed of such sense-organs as ours these energies or forces reveal their presence as the various kinds of " matter " we know, of various degrees of tenuity, from gases and vapours through all degrees of density up to heavy forms of solid matter, so-called, as lead and gold and platinum and so on. In fact, modern scientists of the most advanced schools hardly bother to concern themselves with matter at all, that is matter conceived of as a definite entity. They give themselves almost entirely to the exploration of what they call ' fields of force,' and in this direction believe they are on the likeliest track to that explanation of the ultimate nature of the physical universe which they seek.

Modern science has entirely given up that dogma once held as a strict article of scientific faith, without belief in which no scientist could hope to see salvation—in the eyes of his own generation at least—the dogma, namely, that matter is conserved eternally, only changing its form from solid to fluid or gas, and then after long ages, back to solid again, and so on without any apparent end. They talk now only of the conservation of energy. Solid matter, what is called " solid matter," that is,—is now quite openly considered to be only a variety of energy. Supposed solid matter is always changing into comparatively un-solid, insubstantial radiation. The supposed material universe is reduced to a system of waves or undulations. The slower undulations are what we usually call matter, while the faster ones are those we call undulations proper. Thus the whole of the so-called material universe of modern science is resolved into waves of force. As one scientific writer picturesquely puts it : " These waves are of two kinds : bottled up waves which we call matter, and unbottled waves which we call radiation or light. The process of the annihilation of matter is merely that of unbottling imprisoned wave energy and setting free to travel through space. These concepts reduce the whole universe to a world of radiation, potential or existent, and it no longer seems surprising that the fundamental particles of which matter is built should exhibit many of the properties of waves."

Observe in this statement how a modern scientist speaks quite calmly and off-hand about " the annihilation of matter," as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. What a long way European science has travelled since the days of LaMettrie, Baron D'Holbach, Cabanis, and Moleschott with their perfect faith in the assured eternity of matter ! How far it has advanced beyond the crass materialism of a Buckner with his dogmatical ipse dixit: " An atom of oxygen has been an atom of oxygen from all eternity and will continue to be an atom of oxygen to all eternity." Still, to-day European science has made this advance. But only within the last twenty years, or may be a little further back, has it arrived at that Anicca view of the universe, the idea of the universe of matter as an entirely impermanent thing, which in Asia was promulgated by that incomparable master scientist of actuality, the Buddha, over 2,500 years ago.
For the teaching of Buddhism with regard to the physical universe runs as Follow? :•—

Everything in the universe is built up of just four things, namely in the Pali : Pathavi, Apo, Vayo and Tejo ; or in English : Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. But the earth, water, air, and fire here mentioned are not quite the same as the plain earth, water, air, and fire we have to do with in the world about us every day. These four names in Buddhist Abhidhamma teaching, that is in the deeper doctrines of Buddhism, stand for forces orenergies, forces, energies, which, however, manifest themselves, make their presence known to living creatures like us, with sensoria such as are ours, as the things we call by these names. Earth, for instance, in Buddhist philosophy does not mean the dust in the road outside there, but the quality, the property, of Extension, of extensibility ; that is, it means the power of oc cupying space. " Earth," speaking Buddhistically, is the correlate ul space. " Earth " is where there is not space. Space is where there is not " earth." Apo or Water, again, in Buddhist philosophy does not mean just the fluid in this jug and glass on the table before me. Speaking strictly Buddhistically, Apo or " Water" means the force of Cohesion wherever it may be found, in water and in everything that holds together and keeps its shape through the atoms composing it sticking to each other, more or less, and not flying off in all directions, as they might do but for the presence among them of this force of cohering which keeps them together in shape, somewhat as a drop of water holds together in the round shape of a small globular mass ol fluid on the leaf of a lotus flower. Vayo or Air represents the-force, Vibration, as found in the air, and for that matter, in .ill (lungs. And lastly, Tejo or Fire stands for radiation. Fire in all its forms and variants as latent heat and light and so on, is the most pronounced kind of radiation we have before our eyes, from the sun in the sky of our solar system, and the countless suns shining far out in space all about us, down to the least: little glow-worm in the grass or firefly in the air. Wherever radiation is found in our universe—and it is found everywhere : some, indeed, saying that the universe is nothing else but radiation—but wherever it manifests itself, there we have Fire .is that term is understood in Buddhist philosophy.

by. Dr. B. E. Fernando. F.R.C.E (Eng.)