Buddhism and the Self

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

> >  When one considers all the three advaitic interpretations, ie. those
> >  of the upanishads, the Brahma suutra, and the Giitaa, it becomes amply clear
> >  that advaita and Budhhism are different.
> >
>
> No one said they are the same in every respect, only that it is argued by
> some distinguished Buddhist scholars that Buddhism does *not* deny the Self
> or "substratum" as was so vehemently claimed by some Advaitin `experts' on
> Buddhism. Of course there *are* differences between the two religions, for
> instance, as you point out...

As far as any school of Buddhism is concerned, there is a world of
difference between not denying a thing and affirming it. To affirm X is to
make a positive statement about it, and to deny X is to make a negative
statement about it. From the Buddha downwards, the Buddhist teachers
emphasize that theirs is a middle path that avoids both these viewpoints.

What they do is this. Not to deny X is to avoid making a negative
statement about it. And not to affirm X is to avoid making a positive
statement about it. So they neither affirm nor deny. It is solely for this
reason that the Buddhist logicians developed the very sophisticated logic
of the four-fold negation (catushkoTi), which takes the form - given X
and Y, we can say - X is not Y, X is not not-Y, X is neither Y nor not-Y,
X is not both Y and not-Y. Note that "not-Y" and "not Y" are two verbal
constructions that need not mean the same thing. In fact, this four-fold
scheme works much better than the standard binary logic that most of us
are used to, and variations of this framework were incorporated into Jaina
thought, and into the nyAya school of logic, in which the negation was
de-emphasized and recast in various forms.

Thus, "cow" is not "horse", "cow" is not "not-horse", "cow" is neither
"horse" nor "not-horse", and "cow" cannot be both "horse" and "not-horse".
This is a simplistic example, however. As will be obvious in working out
the implications of the four-fold negation, it is intimately connected to
the problem of continuity and change/ being and becoming/ motion and
immoveablity, ..... gauDapAda draws attention to this catushkoTi in his
third book, where he maintains that the vedAntic brahman is not affected
by the four-fold negation. "This X here is not brahman" is unacceptable to
vedAnta, for everything is brahman. However, so long as the X is seen here
as X, then one has not seen brahman, and once brahman is known, there is
no consciousness of a separate X. Obviously, the catushkoTi cannot
describe this.

The difference of opinion about whether Buddhism does or does not deny a
substratum could have various other genuine historical and
philosophical reasons also.

1. There is no one philosophical stand taken by all schools of Buddhism.
The theravAda buddhism that is spread all over Sri Lanka, Burma and
Thailand had followers all over India and southeast Asia. All variants of
the theravAda schools emphasize anattA (lack of an abiding self), but they
refuse to substitute the (individual) self with the (universal) Self.
According to them, affirming such a Self is the extreme of absolutism
that the middle path avoids. On the other hand, if you deny the Self, then
you deny that anything exists. This is the other extreme of nihilism,
which is also avoided. Some of the theravAda schools then opt for a way
out of absolutism/nihilism, by saying that there is no ultimate reality
beyond the five skandhas/dharmas (these are the terms used in buddhist
texts for the five elements), while others emphasize that everything is
momentary and relative.

2. Only some of the mahAyAna schools may lend themselves to an
interpretation that accepts a Self. Even here, to interpret one key
author, nAgArjuna, as affirming an absolute is to misinterpret him. He
explicitly insists that SUnyatA is not an absolute, for if he were to say
that it is, then he would be advancing a thesis of his own. However,
nAgArjuna's goal is precisely *not* to advance any thesis, and to demolish
every thesis as being faulty in one or the other respect. This is further
confirmed by the fact that nAgArjuna does not put nirvANa (paramArtha) at
a higher level of reality than samvrti, whereas all advaita vedAnta puts
moksha (paramArtha) at a higher level than vyavahAra. Therefore, for the
so-called SUnyavAda, nirvANa lies in viewing all objects as being
*intrinsically* empty. For advaita vedAnta, moksha consists in viewing all
objects as being *intrinsically* brahman, the Self, so that their
perception as objects separate from the self/Self is faulty/illusion.
Thus, while both deny the (indivi)duality, the buddhist does not affirm a
higher reality, whereas the advaitin affirms one. However, true to the
middle path, nAgArjuna does not deny the reality either. He does this by
equating nirvANa with the conventional samvrti.

In fact, this is the only criticism that Sankara draws against the
SUnyavAdin. In my opinion, Sankara has acutely grasped the dialectic of
nAgArjuna. The non-affirmation of a *higher* reality is obviously just not
acceptable to his vedAnta line of thinking, but he is not accusing the
buddhist of nihilism, notwithstanding what modern scholars say. One must
remember that Sankara writes in Sanskrit, and the word 'nihilism' is used
not by him, but by his translators. In later times, of course, when
Buddhism died out in India, the subtlety of its dialectic was lost, and
the word SUnyavAda tends to get used as an equivalent of nihilism, but
there is no evidence that Sankara himself uses the word in that sense.
Moreover, advaitins like SrIharsha credit nAgArjuna when they use a
similar dialectic, but they point out that whereas the buddhist does not
affirm an entity equivalent to brahman, the advaitin does so. As always,
that the buddhist does not deny such an entity is not the same as his
affirming it. It might seem like a semantic difference, but this issue of
denial/affirmation defines all schools of Buddhism, in some sense. And all
the Brahminical schools, from the philosophical thinking of the vedAnta to
the popular religion of the purANas, make it a point to first affirm
brahman. For example, the vishNu purANa takes care to say that although
nothing can really be said of vishNu/brahman, the one thing that can be
said is that "It Exists." The Buddhist's refusal/hesitance in affirming
such an Existence (with a capital E) marks him apart from the "orthodox"
Brahmin.

3. Only those schools of mahAyAna buddhism which place a great deal of
emphasis on the tathAgata-garbha/bodhisattva doctrine may be thought of as
affirming an Omniscient Being, who may be thought of as an absolute. It
turns out that nAgArjuna also talks of tathatA and the tathAgata, but the
word tathAgata-garbha is noticeably absent, for the word garbha
(womb/seed) carries a certain absolutist ontological meaning with it. Even
among the mahAyAna schools, some teachers vigorously deny that they affirm
an entity such as the Atman. This issue was evidently a hot topic of
dispute in the 6th-7th centuries. Two commentators on nAgArjuna, named
bhAvaviveka (also called bhavya) and candrakIrti, discuss it in great
detail. candrakIrti's thought is supposed to have ultimately shaped
Tibet's vajrAyana buddhism. Read any book written by or containing
quotations from the Dalai Lama, to see how Tibetan Buddhism handles this.

4. Of all the contemporary schools of Buddhism, only Zen sems to have no
problem in accepting a substratum-like entity. But then, the history of
its development (from dhyAna of yogAcAra through chan in China and
finally Zen in Japan) needs to be taken into account.

So, all in all, the only difference between affirming a Self (advaita) and
not denying a Self (some mahAyAna schools) may seem to be merely verbal to
our thinking. advaita has been described as buddhism in disguise
(pracanna-bauddham) by other post-Sankaran vedAnta schools, while a
pre-Sankaran buddhist author (bhavya) has already addressed an internal
criticism that his school of mahAyAna was vedAnta in disguise. However,
the difference between an "affirmation" and a "not-denial" goes to the
very root of the two systems of thought. More than being a matter of
detail in religious observance, it is a thoroughly philosophical dispute
about the nature of reality. In fact, religious observances/rituals can be
remarkably similar, but the philosophies are based on completely
different logical premises.

Vidyasankar