Intellect and the Kbandba Doctrine
Davids, C.A.F. Rhys
Buddhist
Review
2:1
1910.01-03
pp.99-115
p.99
WE know that Buddhist doctrine, as revealed in
the Pali Canon, frequently analyses the human being,
in set terms, into a number of bodily and mental
constituents. The analysis recurring most frequently
is that known as the five Khandhas (Sanskrit:
Skandhas). And it is affirmed that this analysis is
exhaustive.
Again, in that Canon we find these five
constituents frequently decried and depreciated in
very strong terms of what we should call Puritan or
evangelical ethics.
Yet again, in the same Scriptures, we meet with
the paradox, that not only does acceptance of and
progress in true doctrine depend on an effort of the
human being so constituted, but that intelligence,
intellect, knowledge, whatever be its place among
those constituents, is appreciated and extolled
exceedingly. On these three points the following
slightly sketched considerations may be of interest.
The essential pre-occupation of early Buddhism
with the analysis of the human individual will be
readily granted. How fundamental for ethical
regeneration this was held to be I have tried to show
elsewhere.(2)
The whole content of individual experience, of
experience as referred to a "Me" or as "Mine," was
to be considered as disinterestedly as if it were a
cabinet of geological specimens, disintegrated,
classified, with the pragmatic intention of breaking
up the "ego-making," "mine-making" superstition of
egomania, and revealing
-----------------------
1 The following remarks are slightly enlarged from a
paper read before a section of the Oxford Congress
of the History of Religions, 1908, entitled "
Knowledge and Intuition in Buddhism." Re-cast and
compared with European thought, they formed a
paper read before the London and Liverpool
Buddhist Societies.
2 Buddhism (Rangoon), 1903, V01. I., Pt. 1, "The
Threshold of Buddhist Ethics. "
p.100
the transient congeries in which illusion had
seen a principle of permanent being. It appears to
have been in virtue of this preoccupation that
Buddhists were called, and called themselves
'Vibhajjavadins'--"of the Analytic School."
An interesting testimony to the deep-seated and
long- lived bent imparted to the doctrine by the
prominence given to analysis, may perhaps be
inferable from a passage in the itinerary of Yuan
Chwang, the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim. He therein
alludes to finding public debates being held in
'Peshawar', in Kashmir, on what the translator calls
"the nature of the sense-perceptions."(1)
The product of this scientific habit of mind with
which we are now most familiar is the doctrine of the
five Khandhas. It should not, however, be
concluded.that this resolution of the personal
complex into a logically distinguishable congeries of
five aggregates-aggregates of happenings rather than
static elements--held the field from first to last,
or exclusively at any time. Ten or twelve such
schemes of division may be collected from the
'Pitakas'; for instance, 'nama-rupa' or 'Kaya' and
citta (or 'vinnana')--divisions tantamount to our own
body and mind--again, 'rupa' and 'vedana'; 'kaya',
'vedana', citta, 'dhamma'; 'kaya', 'ayu', 'usma'
(life and heat) and vinnana. Again, there is the
concept of body as com-mental or savinnanako, or as
conscious and com-mental (sanni samanako), and so on.
With the exception, however, of the first of
these--'nama-rupa'--none of them attains to the
importance, as formula and as doctrine, of the
Khandhas. We do not know to what extent the fivefold
division was pre-Buddhistic, but it is introduced, as
a set of terms needing no introduction as such, into
the Buddha's second sermon to the Five Bhikkhus.(2)
And it is invested with extreme antiquity in the
'Digha Nikaya' (II., 35), in being appended to the
Bo-tree meditations of each of the seven Buddhas,
although it finds no place in the corresponding
Vinaya tradition (op. cit. 78).
--------------------------
1 On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India, A.D. 629--645.
By T. Watters. I., 212.
2 The " Anatta-lakkhana-sutta." Vin. Texts, I., 100.
p.101
This importance and pervasiveness of the Khandha
division in early Buddhism is due to the association
of the fivefold formula with the central tenet of
'anatta' or non-soul. With the later advance in
Buddhist psychology on Abhidhamma(1) lines, the more
archaic Khandha division was practically superseded
by the division of 'rupa', citta, and cetasika, or
elaboration of the traditional content of
'nama-rupa'. But in the Sutta-Pitaka the Khandhas are
nearly always mentioned in this special connection,
namely, the negation of 'atta', or (Sanskrit)
'atman', as permanent, super-phenomenal entity, co-
inhering, somehow, with the individual, and re-indi-
vidualised after each individual decease. The
individual's components could, all five of them, be
shown to be essentially such that the 'Atman' could
not be any one of them. They were by nature creatures
of growth and decay; they involved suffering; they
were subject to natural laws, and limited by them.
The Atman was, as absolute, unitary, noumenal, above
change, decay and suffering. It was "super
grammaticam." Else it was not 'Atman'.
The further question: why the Khandha-summary of
the individual was chosen to serve in negating Atman,
in place of any of the other summaries given above,
is not altogether easy of solution. If we are not
satisfied with the reply that it was the
classification most in vogue at the time, or that the
founders of Buddhism deliberately chose it as, on the
whole, presenting a more excellent conspectus than
its rivals, we may find some ground for its service-
ableness in the many-tentacled tenaciousness of the
doctrine they so earnestly repudiated.
For the Khandha division does not, on the
surface, commend itself to our logic. The first,
'rupa', lit. visible form or object, but extended, as
Khandha, to mean material qualities, answers well
enough to our "body." But it is difficult to endorse
the division of the rest of the intelligent
individual into feeling ('vedana'), perception
---------------------
1 This is evident in the classic manual,
'Abhidhammattha-sangaha', a translation of which
by Mr. Shwe Z. Aung will be shortly published by the
Pali Text Society.
p.102
('sanna'), concomitant mental factors ('sankhara')
and cogniton or consciousness (vinnana). From the
point of view of the mutually exclusive species of
our Hellenic logic, there is here a chaotic
overlapping, and no effectual resolution of the
compound into the simple or elemental. Three of the
four terms are expressions for awareness, or
recipient and reacting intelligence; the other
representing the co-ordinated factors in its
expression. All except 'vedana' are used with varying
scope and implication in the 'Pitakas'. But then we
must not forget that to describe, define, and
classify, in the ancient methods revealed in the Pali
Canon, is to cover the entire range of a field of
thought (e.g., " intelligent individual ") by means
of mutually overlapping names.(1)
Perhaps, however, as I have already hinted, the
real object in opposing to 'rupa', not one
mind-Khandha, or at most two, viz., mind-receptive
and mind-reactive, cognition and volition, but four
mental Khandhas, was the result of a solicitude not
to omit any current term for mind that might serve as
a nest and refuge for the insidious heresy of soul.
The favourite method of setting forth this heresy is
to represent a fivefold delusion of supposing that
one Khandha or the other is the soul, or its bearer.
And the repudiation is effected by a thorough
elimination of soul from one and all of them.
This was at any rate the reason for the adoption
of the fivefold division that commended itself as
both orthodox and sufficient to the worthy
Buddhaghosa. Why, he asks in his Visuddhi Magga,(2)
did the Blessed One say there were five Khandhas, no
less and no more? Because these sum up all classes of
compound things, because these chiefly afford a
foothold for soul and the animistic
('attattaniya-gaha-vattnu'), and because they are a
depository for others.(3)
-----------------------
1 This has been discussed in my Buddhist
Psychological Ethics, XXIX., and my edition of the
'Vibhanga', xvii., and n. 2 The passage is given
in Warren's Buddhism in
Translations, 156.
3 'Annesan ca avarodhato', i.e., either other
divisions or other footholds. I have tried to
render this quotation more literally than Warren
has done, although his freer rendering seems
correct enough.
p.103
Now if the Khandhas were held to cover all the
component energies or modes of energy of the normal
individual, and if they included no 'Atman', then it
follows that any spiritual process or faculty
mentioned by the founders of Buddhism must, for them,
have been classified, or held classifiable, under the
five Khandhas. The Buddhist could not say, in the
words of the Aitareyya Upanishad, "mind, cogitation,
understanding, insight, decision, intention, memory..
. are all names for intellect ('prajna'), " and
'Prajna'--the base, the guiding principle of all that
is--is the self ('Atman').(1) The Buddhist could not
say, with Plotinus, that intuition, intellect
('nous'), thought, memory, were all powers of the
psyche, and quasi-divine. The Buddhist could not say,
with the Christian Fathers--with, e.g., Gregory of
Nyssa,(2) that cognition is psyche detaching itself
from body, or with Augustine that the soul (psyche)
is the cognising subject, and that " when we know, it
is God knowing in us." For he rejected 'Atman' and
psyche as in or of the Khandhas. And he affirmed that
if 'Atman' was borne in or by any human constituent,
the bearer must be one of the Khandhas.(3)
More than this: he not only denuded the Khandhas
of the divine energising of an indwelling 'Atman',
but he substituted nothing to retrieve the face
value, ethical or religious, of the five Khandhas, so
called. The whole weight of the puritanical, austere,
anti-world, anti-flesh, anti-devil, anti-" pride of
life," monastic, ascetic side of Buddhist doctrine is
brought to bear with deprecatory emphasis on these
poor five factors, and on the mistaken sentiment of
complacency in them, either for themselves, or as
informed by anything so transcendently superhuman,
superphenomenal as the currently conceived 'Atman'.
We can only follow the Buddhist 'an-atta'
argument if
------------------------
1 " And that self is Brahman, is Indra, is
'Prajapati'." Ait. Up. 'Aranyaka', 2, 6. 2 Quoted
in Siebeck's Geschichte der Psychologie, II.,
379 ff.
3 " All recluses and Brahmins who consider the 'atta'
as borne in different ways ('anekavihitam'),
consider that it is borne by the five Khandhas, or by
one of them." 'Khandha-Samyutta' in 'Samyutta'
'Nikaya', III., 46.
p.104
we keep in view this " current conception,"
distinguishing between Eastern and Western pantheism.
With the puny things the West has called souls--the
poor fluttering sprites of Greek vases, the
melancholy shades of Vergil's underworld, the errant,
fallible, doubled self we meet with in mediaval
books sacred and secular, the
Animula vagula blandula
Pallidula rigida nudula
of Hadrian, the Buddha might have quarrelled; but
it would have been otherwise. Whether with one
Vedantist school we say that the Over-soul was My
soul, or with another that My soul was Over-soul,
Atman was not differently conceived in India as were
"souls" in the West.
And the Khandhas, thus denuded, stand exposed as
the vehicles of pain and misery, and as "a burden"
taken up ever again by craving ever-reborn--craving
of sense-desires, craving for rebirth. Thus exposed,
missiles from the rich stores of Indian similes are
aimed at them in the pages of the 'Pitakas', likening
them to diseases, to knives and javelins, to
murderers with uplifted swords, to serpents, to
bubbles of foam, to a mirage, to the conjurer's
trickwork. Things alien, evil, of the world: distaste
for them is to be cultivated, not mere
dispassionateness.
It might, and very likely would, be objected here
by a Buddhist, that the obloquy heaped upon the
Khandhas is intended not for them as such, but only
when and in so far as they are, in Warren's
rendering, "coupled with depravity and
attachment,"(l) that is, when the individual, in mind
and body, shows himself infected with the 'Asavas'
and the four kinds of "grasping." The Buddha is
represented as saying: " I will teach you, bhikkhus,
the five Khandhas and the five 'grasping
'-Khandhas,"(2) and then proceeding to enumerate the
five in the usual
----------------------
1 'Sasava upadaniya', Warren, op. cit. 155. The four
"graspings" are "after sense pleasures,
speculative opinions, rites and conventions, and
theories of soul." Sir Charles Eliot very kindly
reminded me of the distinction indicated above.
2 I.e., of grasping, 'upadanakkhandha'. My rendering
is not less uncouth than warren's ''
attachment-groups. "
p.105
phraseology of inclusive description. In the case
of the second five, the two words quoted below are
the only specific difference introduced.
Now it is true that, in the many passages wherein
the ethical undesirableness of the Khandhas is
expounded, they are called not simply Khandhas, but
"grasping''- Khandhas, that is to say, in those cases
where the term "five Khandhas" is introduced. But
where it is not introduced-where the five are
depreciated severally and simply, as rupa and the
rest, there is no saving clause whatever qualifying
the condemnation. In judging of a creed or doctrine
as a whole, those which really count in the long run
as its main features, are those that are most
emphasised. One can find everything in any
scriptures. The test as to whether any feature found
is to rank as a tenet is: What emphasis is laid upon
its utterance, in repetition and impressive phrasing?
Judged by this, judged by the fact that, in the
discourse referred to, the distinction drawn is not
used to show to what sublime development the
Khandhas, purged of the 'asavas' and 'upadanas',
might attain, the distinction loses significance when
the trend of the doctrine is considered as a whole.
Bearing all this in mind, let us look at certain
powers imputed in the same books to the human mind,
and rated at the opposite extreme of the scale of
religious values. The Buddhists were by no means
second to the Greeks, or the heirs of the Greeks, in
the exalted estimate they formed of the possibilities
of "intellect." If the lofty function of Plato's "
intellect " ('nous') was, by exercising itself as
wisdom (sophia), to discern the supreme good, even as
the eye discerns the sun through light, so for the
Buddhist was it by 'panna' ('prajna') or 'nana' that
the highest fetches of intuition, the sublimest
ethical insight was attained. Buddhism and Platonism
have this in common, that our discernment of truth or
good, of things as they are, of things in their right
perspective, is described, not as dianoia or reasoned
understanding, but as an inner vision.
Now 'panna' (or 'vijja' or 'abhinna' or
'nanadassana') covers
p.106
a number of highly-ranked mental faculties or
processes, allusions to which, under more specific
names, run all through the Sutta 'Pitaka'. The
English reader may refer to, e.g., the 'Ambattha'
Suttanta, translated in Rhys Davids's Dialogues of
the Buddha (I., pp. 123--5). The Buddha having said
that righteousness ('sila') and 'panna' make the true
brahmin, not birth, is asked: " What is that 'panna'?"
The reply is that (involved inseparably with the
habit and state of virtue) 'panna' consists in cer-
tain forms of intellectual exercise, to wit, the
graduated stages of rapt absorption called 'Jhana',
insight into the nature of an individual as such
(here be it noted divided into body and mind
('vinnana') only), the power through creative will to
project a temporary double of one's self, other
supernormal powers classed as 'iddhi-vidha', (1) such
as what is termed among ourselves levitation, etc.,
celestial or super-normal hearing, intuitive
knowledge of another's subjective experience,
commonly known here as thought-reading,
thought-transference or telepathy, reminiscence of
one's own past lives, i.e., of more or less of them,
for they are infinite in number, celestial or super-
normal vision, and finally and, for the enlightened
Buddhist, infinitely greater than the rest, the
discernment and total eradication of the four mighty
tendencies involving rebirth which the Canon calls
'Asavas', i.e., drugs or poisons.(2)
In a little sketch there is no scope, even if
there were in the sketcher the competency, to enter
into each of these modes of exercising the faculties
in what India has conceived to be the highest levels
of potency. Judged by this bare catalogue, the
faculties engaged seem to make very light of both the
interests and the limitations of sense-experience.
And some may be inclined to say, " This is not bad as
a summary of the subjective experience
-----------------------
1 On this see Dialogues, loc cit. 88, n. 4, and
Introduction. The ten (not nine) modes ('vidha')
referred to by Buddhaghosa only, are now known to
occur in the Canon itself:-Palisanlbhid-magga,
II., 205 (ed. in 1907 by Dr.A. C. Taylor). But
there the preceding creative potency is ranked
under the ten as 'adhitthana-iddhi', i.e.,
fixation (of will). This work is obviously much
later than the 'Digha Nikaya'
2 That is, sense-desire, becoming or lust for living
as such), opinion, ignorance.
p.107
of an angel, or of one of Mr. H. G. Wells's Martians.
Anyway, it is very old, and therefore no doubt
entirely mythological." Or again: "There's not
overmuch of what we should call 'intellect' about
it." Now, I trust that no reader of The Buddhist
Review will consider this very ancient and venerable
list in an uncritical spirit, nor, on the other hand,
dismiss it with criticisms so hasty and superficial.
Let me say here that Buddhism, at least in Further
India, has never yet relegated this ancient con-
spectus to the cupboard for ideas outgrown and
obsolete. It has been taught as a series of states
and powers attainable, not by angel, fairy, wizard,
or Martian, but by man; from the days of Asoka and
centuries later, from Buddhaghosa down to the actual
present. The phrase of Semitic belief: "And God said,
Let us make man in Our image," has often been
inverted by modern criticism and anthropology. But it
would seem as if the Indian, who centuries ago made
that inversion for himself, was convinced that, if
man had made gods in his own image, it was a god-like
mind and will that made them. His were, given the
right conditions and development, the powers that had
been projected into deities.
In reply to the second remark, I would point out
that, in the Western traditions, we have so long
divorced intellectual energy from action, that we
lose sight of the relative identity, from the Indian
standpoint, of thought with thought transference, of
synthesis with synnergy. We recognise in speech, it
is true, a fusion of thought and action, or a
translation of the one into the other. But for us
intellect is receptive and ratiocinative. It receives
but it only reacts as thought, or in informing what
we are pleased to call "will." But for the Indian
mind, thought can translate itself into material
energy not less than material energy can, by way of
sense, translate itself into consciousness. For that
mind the problem of afferent consciousness that
puzzles us is matched by the corresponding
mystery--and fact--of efferent translation. We, on
the other hand, relegate action to hands, limbs and
voice, and in all other effects produced where these
p.108
agencies are apparently inoperative, see only the
maya of the conjurer, and the illusions of the
credulous.
The theory of mental reaction to sense-stimuli
expounded in the Pitakas is more soberly scientific
than the analyses of the pre-Aristotelian Greeks. The
theory of association and of memory in the later
Questions of King Milinda are no less sober and
scientific so far as they go. So is the still later
and more subtle analysis of the process of cognition
in Buddhaghosa's works,(1) an analysis that is still
taught in Buddhist Further India. So far we may find,
in early Buddhist psychology, an anticipation of our
own current theories at least as interesting as the
investigations of Aristotle, on which our own
analyses are mainly based. But we cannot rightly
conclude therefrom that Buddhists would be satisfied
with being termed Sensationalists, or those who
derive all knowledge from sense. It is true that
there is no word in their literature accounting for
transcendent powers of mind, save by the two great
factors of the effect of past Karma on the one hand,
and the effect of special and strenuous training on
the other. Nevertheless, it was reckoned as erroneous
theory to hold that the supernormal faculty of the
so-called " celestial eye " was abnormal
intensification of physical sight."(2) This view is
refuted by a quotation from the Buddha's word,(3)
that there were three distinct sorts of vision: the
physical, the celestial, and the eye of insight
(panna), by which I think must be meant that which is
elsewhere called " the
-------------------------
1 'Atthasalini, Visuddhi-magga', and
'Sammoha-vinodani'.
2 This is in the 'Katha-vatthu' of the Abhidhamma
Pitaka. Had the heretical notion become orthodox,
we should have 'panna', in one of its modes at
least, classed under the 'rupakhandha' or bodily,
physical factor of the individual! The heresy is
suggested by the description, contained in an
orthodox work of the Canon, the
'Patisambhidamagga', of how the Celestial Hearing
and Eye might be evolved by practice:--the latter,
by so fixing the consciousness on light, or some
radiant surface, that, in time, discrimination
between light and dark is suspended, and a vision
arises transcending the environment of
sense-impression and attaining a purview of the
passing and pageant of human lives (I., p. 112,
J.R.A.S., 1906, 242). Of course the "fleshly eye"
is here really numbed by sustained stimulus, while
the intent contemplative tension of the mind is
maintained, and imagination, or, if you will,
intuitive insight, is given the better play.
3 ltivuttaka, translated by Dr. J. H. Moore, New
York, 1908, p. 72. I do not hold with the
translator's interpolated " (Is)."
p.109
Dhamma-eye, " i.e., understanding of the Dhamma.
Buddhaghosa, however, in the 'Atthasalini' (306),
follows the 'Digha', in adopting a twofold division
only: natural sight and 'panna'-sight.
An eloquent illustration of the scope of this
other or " second " sight occurs in another suttanta
of the 'Digha Nikaya',(1) which incorporates an old
Indian tale. 'Payasi', a noble, sceptic and agnostic
as to the existence of all other worlds, and of
rebirth other than human, is debating with the
venerable apostle 'Kumara-Kassapa', and goes on to
say: "But who lets Master Kassapa know all these
things: that there are Three-and-Thirty Gods, or that
the Three-and-Thirty Gods live so many years? We do
not believe him when he says these things."
"That, Prince, is just as if there were a man
born blind who could not see objects as dark or
bright, as blue, yellow, red or brown; who could not
see things as smooth or rough, nor the stars, nor
moon, nor sun. And he were to say: 'There are none of
these things, nor any one capable of seeing them. I
don't know them, I don't see them; therefore they
don't exist.' Would one so speaking, speak rightly,
Prince?"
"Not so, Master Kassapa. The visual objects of
which you speak do exist, and so does the faculty of
seeing them. To say 'I don't know them, I don't see
them; therefore they don't exist': that would not be
speaking rightly."
" But even so, methinks, do you, Prince, talk
like the blind man in my parable when you say: 'But
who lets Master Kassapa know that there are Three
and-Thirty Gods, or that the Three-and-Thirty Gods
live so many years? We do not believe him when he
says these things.' For, Prince, the other world is
not, as you imagine, to be regarded with this fleshly
eye. Those 'Samanas' and Brahmans who haunt the
lonely and remote recesses of the forest, where
noise, where sound there hardly is, they there
abiding strenuous, ardent, aloof,
--------------------------
1 A translation of this is in Dialogues of the
Buddha, Vol. II., "The 'Payasi' Suttanta."
p.110
purify the eye divine; they by that purified eye
divine, passing the vision of men, see both this
world and that other world, and beings reborn not of
parents. In this way, Prince, is the other world to
be seen, and not, even as you imagine, by this
fleshly eye. Let this be a proof to you that there is
another world, that there are beings reborn not of
parents, that there is fruit and result of deeds well
done and ill done.''
The two visions are also illustrated in another
book of the Canon by the simile of a man standing
where he can see into the doors of two houses.'(1)
"Even so doth a bhikkhu by the celestial eye,
purified, transcending the human eye, see beings
dying and being reborn, going to weal or woe even
according to their deeds (Karma)."
We may put aside these transcendent powers, and
take a definition of intellect, understanding or
insight more on all fours with our own more grey and
sober outlook; that, for instance, describing equally
'pannindriyam' (faculty of 'panna'), sampajannam'
(conscious understanding) 'vipassana' (insight) and
'sammaditthi' (right or perfect view): --
"Understanding, search, research, searching the truth
(dhamma), discernment, discrimination, differentia-
tion, sagacity, proficiency, subtlety, criticism;
reflection, analysis, breadth, grasp, intuition,
self-introspection,'' and the metaphors applied to
these: "a guide, a spur or goad, a sword, a lofty
platform, light, radiance, splendour, a jewel."(2)
Thus does the Abhidhamma group all the cognate terms
used in the Sutta 'Pitaka' to describe human
intelligence. And there is, in all its definitions,
none indicative of any higher appreciation than that
which is here ascribed to the intellect of the five
Khandha'd individual.
Calling both the foregoing categories for
convenience' sake 'panna' (I refer to the list quoted
from the 'Digha Nikaya' and that taken from the
Abhidhamma book), we may ask whether 'panna' is
anywhere classed under one
------------------------
1 'Majjhima Nikaya', I., 279; II., 21; III., 178. The
passages are simply assertions of the fact of the
intuitive faculty, as in the Digha N. reference;
not arguments as to the difference between the two
kinds of " eye."
2 See pp. 17--25 of my Buddhist Psychological Ethics.
I do not pretend to have given more than an
approximate rendering of the abstract terms.
p.111
of the Khandhas? If it is, why are the Khandhas
so hardly spoken of, seeing that in them lies the
capacity of developing the saintly supernormal
intellect?
For all their denunciatory zeal as religious
reformers, the founders of Buddhism(1) were too
sincere in their psychology and their logic, to
exclude panna from their classifications. They do
find a place for it, if not always under the same
Khandha.
In the Sutta 'Pitaka', and in one of its leading
"gospels,'' the 'Majjhima Nikaya, panna' is classed
with the 'vinnanak-khandha'. The bond and the
difference between the two is discussed by two
leading bhikkhus, 'Maha Kotthita' and 'Sariputta'.
"What is it to have 'panna'? " " To discern
('pajanati') the Four Truths." "What is 'vinnana'? "
" To be conscious of happiness, of sorrow, of neutral
feeling." "Are the two connected or distinct? "
"Connected: what we discern, of that we are
conscious; what we are conscious of, that we
discern." '' Is there no difference? " "Yes, 'panna'
is to be cultivated; 'vinnana' is to be thoroughly
understood. That is the difference.''
Thus, every ordinary person has 'vinnana',
intelligence or cognition, which reacts to sensory
stimuli, and imagines and co-ordinates his
sense-derived experience. This instrument, with all
its exposure to evil, needs to be well studied and
its function understood. But when applied to and
trained in the objects and methods of higher life and
thought, it may become, raised to a higher power, the
instrument of intuitive insight, widened
reminiscence, intensified perception, moral
self-mastery, and so forth, called 'panna'. Such is
the view we find centuries later developed in the
Visuddhi Magga. To Buddhaghosa, somewhat in
accordance with the psychical theory of Aristotle,
'sanna, vinnana and panna' all formed one
evolutionary concept of mind at a lower, higher, and
highest power of involution, so to speak.(2)
-----------------------
1 I have here no definitely-named individuals in
mind, but those unknown recorders who, in
compiling the pali 'Pitakas', founded for us the
Buddhism that, so far as we at present know, is
the nearest to the original teaching. 2 See my
Bud. Eth. Psyhology, pp. 7, 8, n. 2.
p.112
in the 'Dhamma-Sangani', however, of the Abhidhamma,
where concrete states of mind are resolved into a
number of factors, and the attempt is made, with no
very helpful result, to bring in the Khandha
classificltion, 'panna' is included, as both
'indriya' and 'bala' (faculty and force or power),
under the varying content of the 'Sankharakkhandha'.
As such, it figures, not as the receptive, reacting
consciousness itself, but as a factor in concrete
mental syntheses or synnergies. When Buddhaghosa,
however, discusses the 'sankharakkhandha' in his
'Visuddhi Magga', he omits 'panna', but reserves all
the last third of the book for it in all its modes,
defining it as " insight and knowledge
('vipassana-nanam'), associated with moral
consciousness.''
We have seen that the early Buddhists, in
rejecting an indwelling 'Atman' identical in substance
with the world-soul, and the organ or seat of all
higher insight and inspiration, conceded to the five
Khandhas(1) they decried, the power of developing,
given the right disposition and proper training, into
instruments of supreme knowledge and volition. Are
they, then, wholly inconsistent in heaping contumely
as preachers on the Khandhas, while magnifying the
functions of 'panna'?
Judged by the consistency we should demand from a
system of psychological religion,(2) elaborated by
one academic mind for chosen followers, the teaching
of early Buddhism may seem inconsistent. But in a
pioneer movement for ethical and intellectual reform
we do not expect to find thoroughgoing consistency,
not at least when the movement has grown vast and
unwieldy. Think what it means to be one's self the
outcome of certain traditions and environment, and
yet be trying to alter the traditions the better to
suit one's environing society, to alter society by
altering its traditions. The clinging grip of usage,
the mortmain--the dead hand--of tradition
------------------------
1 'Rupa' need not be omitted as the one clog to the
flights of the mental Khandhas. The phrase, "
touching with the body" ('kayena phassitva'), is a
Pali idiom, however meant, used to describe an
ecstatic attainment of mind. It should interest
students of Neo-platonism.
2 I borrow the late Max 'Muller' term.
p.113
is not so easily thrown off. The reformer is
himself not out of their clutches.
It was no new thing for Buddhists, any more than
it was, later, for Christians, to be denouncing both
" this vile body" and the mind or heart "out of which
proceed evil thoughts." It was part of the
business--if one may say so--it was in part the
'metier', of those intensely earnest religious
upheavals, those great protests against the twin
tyranny of formalism, and the vice which that
formalism suffered to prevail, to denounce whole-
heartedly the whole organism of the sinner; and
besides this, judging by the Buddhist and other
religious literatures of India, Buddhism did not
originate anti-ritualism, anti-sacerdotalism and
evangelistic ethics in that country. It handed on the
torch of a very ancient Protestant tradition,
kindling therewith, as it did so, certain possibly
quite original intellectual fires.
As revivalists they were bound to denounce. As
reformers in mental science, ethics and education,
they considered man under another aspect: not as a
sinner to be plucked from the burning, but as plastic
material, as force running to waste, which, under
proper training, was fraught with the highest
promise. So they flagellated the bundle of fivefold
modes of sense-reaction in a world of sensuous
experience, while they found no pedestal too high for
the new mental organism, evolvable from those
Khandhas as butterfly from caterpillar, as diamond
from carbon. As the Christian became a "new man "
when he had, as Paul said, " put on the Lord Jesus
Christ,"-- (" the mind that was in Christ Jesus," so
what we might call " the higher psychology of the
Buddhist" discerns in the sekha, working to become
asekha (the student who would become adept) a quasi
new set of faculties and processes. These, summed up,
came to be called the 'Bodhi-pakkhiya Dhamma', or
conditions appertaining to enlightenment. But they
are no longer spoken of under the atomic or static
simile of khandha, i.e., heap, mass, aggregate. They
are all dynamically conceived, as process, potency,
ways of progress. For the five indriyas
p.114
of sense -- the five senses-- we have substituted the
five indriyas of moral sense: --faith, energy,
mindfulness, concentration, insight (or 'panna').
Other processes or faculties were the four Inceptions
[Institutes or Applications] of Mindfulness, the four
Bases or Preliminaries to Potency (iddhi), the four
right struggles, the seven Factors of Enlightenment,
the Aryan Eightfold Way. The man or woman who had so
glorified the body of Khandhas by evolving out of
them, by developing them into, this wondenful new
consciousness of other interests and contrasted
ideals, was no longer a mere vehicle or compound of
sense-determined Khandhas.
And it is because of this evolution of mind and
character and ideals that the Buddhists no doubt were
" not careful to answer " critics in this matter, not
more careful to class the higher regenerate
intelligence under one Khandha or another. We need
not trouble ourselves either to apologise for their
logic or their want of it. "Illogical" is often
applied to what is only a greater logic, i.e., a
reasoning with other and expanded data.
Khandhas and the whole machinery of experience by
way of sense might serve well enough in analysing the
average sensual man or woman, with only such
activities and interests as belonged to that world of
sense-experience. But once you substitute the new
interests and ideals, the rising above worldly aims,
then the whole training and machinery of the
individual is practically covered by what I have for
want, for sad want, of a good word called
Intellect--'panna, vijja, abhinna'-synonyms almost
all of them, of vipassana which corresponds exactly
to our insight and which, in later Buddhist works,
came largely to be substituted for the two latter
terms. Emotional enthusiasm came into the training
and so did strenuous sustained energy, desire,
purpose--the--fullest expression of will. But the
central aim was ever intellectual--intellectual
grasp, and the wider and deeper view. And this each
one had to attain for himself and herself.
It may seem wise not to hurl out of sight the
ladder
p.115
whereby a higher standpoint has been reached. It
was by the poor body and mind of this indisputable
senseexperience that Indian seers and saints had
climbed. Traditional standpoints of religious
revivalism on the one hand, and the traditional view
of the difference, not in degree but in kind, between
mundane knowledge and supramundane intuition and
will, affected their judgment and their methods. But
at all events the Buddha did not compromise as
Aristotle did, who cut the knot of the problem of
intellect by declaring that "it alone enters from
without and is alone divine."(1) As for ourselves, we
can afford at this time of day to look without fear
and with hope and admiration at the brave upward way
of man, evolving his finer instrument of panna out of
the homely and everyday tools of the Khandhas.
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1 De Gen. Animalium, II., 3.