Outlines of Indian Philosophy

SR No.: 007308
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: M Hiriyanna
Publisher: George Allen and Unwin Ltd
Publication Year: 1932
Total Pages: 419
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 40 MB

Page 139

EARLY BUDDHISM
1345 express the same in modern phraseology, he admitted only states of consciousness but not the mind. To him the sensations and the thoughts, together with the physical frame with which they are associated, were themselves the self. It is an aggregate or samghāta (literally, 'what is put together') of them; and Buddha declined to believe in anything apart from, or implicated in, it. In the expressive words of Mrs. Rhys Davids, there is in his view no 'King Ego holding a levée of presentations.': The aggregate is sometimes described as näma-rupa, utilizing an old Upanişadic phrase (p. 63), though its meaning is here very much modified. By the first term, nāma, is meant, not 'name' as in the Upanişads, but the psychical factors constituting the aggregate; and by the second, rupa, the physical body so that the compound signifies the psycho-physical organism and may be taken as roughly equivalent to 'mind and body.' That is, Buddha took as the reality--if we overlook for the moment the change in the meaning of nama-the very things that were explained away as not ultimate in the Upanişads and denied the substratum which alone according to them is truly real.3 There is another description of this aggregate based upon a closer analysis of the psychical factors constituting it. According to it the self is conceived as fivefold, the five factors or skandhas, as they are called, being rūpa, vijñāna, vedanā, sarjñā and samskära. Of these, the first, viz, rūpa-skandha, stands for the physical, and the rest for the psychical, elements in the self. There is a little uncertainty about the exact connotation of some of the latter, but we may for our purpose here take them respectively to represent 'self-consciousness,' 'feeling,' perception' and 'mental dispositions. This explanation of the
Buddhist Psychology, p. 98. • This expression seems to have retained at one stage in Buddha's teaching its original Upanişadic sense of 'name and form,' for nama-rūpa is reckoned separately from 'consciousness' in what is known as the 'chain of causation.' See later and cf. Oldenberg: op. cit., p. 228 n. 3 But there was agreement between the two teachings in so far as both conceived the aim of life as escape from năma-rūpa. Cf. Id., P. 446.