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ATTITUDE OF BUDDHA AND EARLY BUDDHISM
TOWARDS METAPHYSICS
C. S. Prasad
Some called Buddha agnosiic or even nihilist, while some others recognized him as a man with ethical bias and not as a metaphysician. Countering these views it is held that he was well conversant with the metaphysical speculations of his time and was himself a metaphysician of no mean order. Contradictory opinions formed by scholars have had in the background Buddha's silence on certain questions of metaphysical nature. By maintaining silence, Buddha kept himself aloof from entering into the problems of transcendental beyond the empirical or metaphysical substratum underlying the phenomenon or thing-in-itself, although he did not fight shy of discussing such problems as the real nature of things or things as they are in their real nature, the principle regulating the process of becoming, the cessation of individual's process of becoming, the state of cessation (Nirvāņa) and so on. In course of its development, the Buddhist thought took a round about turn and a section of monks raised the problem of thing-in-itself or substratum behind the phenomenon, though not in the context of soul and body. They formed the school of Realists rightly known as the Sarvāstivāda after their doctrine of 'Sarvamasti—Everything always exists. The Realists were followed by the Vibhajyavādins (Relativists), the Pudgalavādins and later in Mahāyāna, by the Absolutists of Madhyamika and Vijñānavāda. In this paper we would confine ourselves to assess the attitude of Buddha and Early Buddhism towards metaphysical problems and the raison d'etre behind Buddha's attitude and behind the change in attitude in Early Buddhism.
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