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POST-VEDIC PHILOSOPHY
33
this success to the originality of its ideas, for almost all its essential theories had their predecessors in the Vedic and epic periods. The fundamental idea of Buddhism, laid down in the four holy truths, is this--that we can extinguish the pains of existence only by extinguishing our thirst for existence. The same idea is put forth in the 12 Nidanas, which by a series of steps go back from the pains of life to the thirst for life and from this to ignorance as the ultimate cause of thirst and pain altogether. We see in these and many other Buddhistic ideas only a new form of what Yâjñavalkya teaches in the Brih.-Up. and if Buddhism in its opposition to the Brahmanical creed goes so far as to deny soul, this denial is only apparent, since Buddhism maintains the theory of transmigration effected by karman, the work of the preceding existence. This karman must have in every case an individual bearer and that is what the Upanishads call the âtman and what the Buddhists inconsistently deny. A common feature of Buddhism and Sârikhyam is that they both regard pain as the starting point of philosophical enquiry, thus clearly showing the secondary character of both. For philosophy has its root in the thirst for knowledge and it is a symptom of decadence in India as in Greece when it begins to be considered as a remedy for the pains of life.
The Later Sânkhya System
24. There are many other features in the Sankhya system which show clearly that it is not, as has been generally held up to the present, the original creation of an individual philosophical genius, but only the final result
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