A BUDDHIST MANUAL
Psychological Ethics,
FROM THE PALI
OF THE
DHAMMA-SANGANI
Translated by CAROLINE A. F. RHYS DAVIDS, M.A.
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
The Manual and the History of Psychology.
If the tombs of Egypt or the ruins of Greece itself were
to give up, among their dead that are now and again being
restored to us, a copy of some manual with which the
young Socrates was put through the mill of current
academic doctrine, the discovery would be hailed, especially
by scholars of historical insight, as a contribution of
peculiar interest. The contents would no doubt yield no
new matter of philosophic tradition. But they would
certainly teach something respecting such points as pre-
Aristotelian logical methods, and the procedure followed
in one or more schools for rendering students conversant
with the concepts in psychology," ethics and metaphysic
accepted or debated by the culture of the age.
Eeaders whose sympathies are not confined to the shores
of the Mediterranean and ^gean seas will feel a stir of
interest, similar in kind if fainter in degree, on becoming
more closely acquainted with the Buddhist text -book
entitled Dhamma-Sangani. The English edition of the
Pali text, prepared for the Pali Text Society by Professor
Dr. Ed. Miiller, and published fifteen years ago, has so
far failed to elicit any critical discussion among Pali
scholars. A cursory inspection may have revealed little
but what seemed dry, prolix and sterile. Such was, at
least, the verdict of a younger worker, now, alas ! no more.^
Closer study of the work will, I believe, prove less un-
grateful, more especially if the conception of it as a
student's manual be kept well in view. The method of
the book is explicative, deductive; its object was, not to add
to the Dhamma, but to unfold the orthodox import of
terms in use among the body of the faithful, and, by
organizing and systematizing the aggregate of doctrinal
concepts, to render the learner's intellect both clear and
efficient.
Even a superficial inspection of the Manual should yield
great promise to anyone interested in the history of
psychology. When upwards of six years ago my attention
was first drawn to it, and the desirability of a translation
pointed out by Professor Ehys Davids, I was at once
attracted by the amount of psychological material embedded
in its pages. Buddhist philosophy is ethical first and last.
This is beyond dispute. But among ethical systems there is
a world of difference in the degree of importance attached to
the psychological prolegomena of ethics. In ethical problems
we are on a basis of psychology, depending for our material
largely upon the psychology of conation or will,^ with its
co-efficients of feeling and intelligence. And in the
history of human ideas, in so far as it clusters about those
problems, we find this dependence either made prominent
or slurred over. Treated superficially, if suggestively and
picturesquely, in Plato, the nature and functions of that
faculty in man, whereby he is constituted an ethical and
political '
animal,' are by Aristotle analyzed at length.
But the Buddhists were, in a way, more advanced in the
1 H. C. Warren, 'Buddhism in Translations,' xviii. Cf.
Kern, 'Indian Buddhism,' p. 3.
2
Cf. G. C.Robertson, *Elements of General Philosophy,'
pp. 191, 197 ;
*Philosophical Remains,' p. 3 ; A. Bain,
'Moral Science'—'The Psychological Data of Ethics.'
'Every ethical system involves a psychology of conduct,
and depends for its development upon its idea of what
conduct actually is ' (C. Douglas, 'The Philosophy of
J. S. Mill,' p. 251).
psychology of their ethics than Aristotle—in a way, that
is, which would now be called scientific. Eejecting the
assumption of a psyche and of its higher manifestations
or nous, they were content to resolve the consciousness of
the Ethical Man, as they found it, into a complex continuum
of subjective phenomena. They analyzed this continuum,
as we might, exposing it, as it were, by transverse section.
But their treatment was genetic. The distinguishable
groups of dhamma—of states or mental psychoses
—
* arise ' in every case in consciousness, in obedience to certain
laws of causation, physical and moral ^
—that is, ultimately,
as the outcome of antecedent states of consciousness. There
is no exact equivalent in Pali, any more than there is in
Aristotle, for the relatively modern term '
consciousness,'
yet is the psychological standpoint of the Buddhist philo-
sophy virtually. as thoroughgoing in its perceptual basis
as that of Berkeley. It was not solipsism any more than
Berkeley's immaterialism was solipsistic. It postulated
other percipients^ as Berkeley did, together with, not a
Divine cause or source of percepts, but the implicit Monism
of early thought veiled by a deliberate Agnosticism. And just
as Berkeley, approaching philosophical questions through
psychology, '
was the first man to begin a perfectly
scientific doctrine of sense-perception as a psychologist,'^
so Buddhism, from a quite early stage of its development,
set itself to analyze and classify mental processes with
remarkable insight and sagacity. And on the results of
that psychological analysis it sought to base the whole
rationale of its practical doctrine and discipline. From
studying the processes of attention, and the nature of
sensation, the range and depth of feeling and the plasticity
of the will in desire and in control, it organized its system
of personal self-culture.
1 Utu and kamma.
2
Cf. e.g. below, p. 272 [1045].
3 G. C. Robertson, op. cit., p. 154.
Germany has already a history of psychology half com-
pleted on the old lines of the assumed monopoly of ancient
thought by a small area of the inhabited world. England
has not yet got so far. Is it too much to hope that, when
such a work is put forth, the greater labour of a wider and
juster initiative will have been undertaken, and the develop-
ment of early psychological thought in the East have been
assigned its due place in this branch of historical research ?
II.
The Date of the Manual.
We can fortunately fix the date of the Dhamma-San-
gani within a limit that, for an Indian book, may be
considered narrow. Its aim is to systematize or formulate
certain doctrines, or at least to enumerate and define a
number of scattered terms or categories of terms, occurring
in the great books of dialogues and sundry discourse
entitled the Nikayas of the Sutta Pitaka. The whole
point of view, psychological and philosophical, adopted in
them is, in our Manual, taken for granted. The technical
terms used in them are used in it as if its hearers, subse-
quently its readers, would at once recognise them. No one
acquainted with those books, and with the Dhamma-
Sangani, will hesitate in placing the latter, in point of
time, after the Nikayas.
On the other hand, the kind of questions raised in our
Manual are on a different plane altogether from those
raised in the third book in the Abhidhamma Pitaka, viz.,
the Katha Vatthu, which we know to have been composed
by Tissa at Patna, in the middle of the third century b.c.^
The Dhamma-Sangani does not attempt to deal with any
such advanced opinions and highly-elaborated points of
doctrine as are put forward by those supposed opponents of
the orthodox philosophy who are the interlocutors in the
Katha Vatthu. It remains altogether, or almost alto-
gether, at the old standpoint of the Nikayas as regards
1 Atthasalini, p. 3 ; Maha Bodhi Vansa, p. 110.
doctrine, differing only in method of treatment. The
Katha Yatthu raises new questions belonging to a later
stage in the development of the faith.
The Dhamma-Sangani is therefore younger than the
Nikayas, and older than the Katha Yatthu. If we date
it half-way between the two, that is, during the first third
of the fourth century b.c. (contemporary, therefore, with
the childhood of Aristotle, h. 384), we shall be on the safe
side. But I am disposed to think that the interval between
the completion of the Nikayas and the compilation of the
Dhamma-Sangani is less than that between the latter
work and the Katha Vatthu ; and that our manual should
therefore be dated rather at the middle than at the end of
the fourth century b.c, or even earlier. However that
may be, it is important for the historian of psychology to
remember that the ideas it systematizes are, of course,
older. Practically all of them go back to the time of the
Buddha himself. Some of them are older still.
The history of the text of our Manual belongs to that of
the canonical texts taken collectively. There are, however,
two interesting references to it, apart from the general
narrative, in the Maha Vansa, which show, at least, that
the Dhamma-Sangani was by no means laid on the shelf
among later Buddhists. King Kassapa V. of Ceylon (a.d.
929-939) had a copy of it engraved on gold plates studded
with jewels, and took it in procession with great honour to
a vihara he had built, and there offered flowers to it.^
Another King of Ceylon, Vijaya Bahu I. (a.d. 1065-1120),
shut himself up every morning for a time against his
people in the beautiful Hall of Exhortation, and there made
a translation of the Dhamma-Sangani, no doubt from Pali
into Sinhalese.^
I can testify to the seriousness of the task, and feel a
keen sympathy with my royal predecessor, and envy withal
for his proximity in time and place to the seat of orthodox
tradition. Nothing, unfortunately, is now known, so far
1 Mah., ch. 1., vers. 50, 51, 56. 2 Ibid., ch. lxx., ver. 17.
as I have been able to ascertain, of this work, in which
the translator was very likely aided by the best scholarship
of the day, and which might have saved me from many a
doubt and difficulty.
III.
On the Commentaries and the Importance of the
Atthasalini.
It will be seen from Appendix I. that the last part of the
text of our Manual is a supplement added to it by way of
commentary, or rather of interpretation and digest. It is,
perhaps, not surprising that so much of this kind of
material has survived within the four corners of the
Pitakas. We have the Old Commentary embedded in the
Vinaya, and the Parivara added as a sort of supple-
mentary examination paper to it. Then there is the
Niddesa, a whole book of commentary, on texts now
included in the Sutta Nipata, and there are passages
clearly of a commentarial nature scattered through the
Nikayas. Lastly, there is the interesting fragment of
commentary tacked on to the Dhamma-Sangani itself
(below, p. 357). As these older incorporated commentaries
are varied both in form and in method, it is evident that
commentary of different kinds had a very early beginning.
And the probability is very great that the tradition is not
so far wrong, when it tells us that commentaries on all the
principal canonical books were handed down in schools of
the Order along with the texts themselves.
This is not to maintain that all of the Commentaries
were so handed down in all the schools, nor that each of
them was exactly the same in each of the schools where it
was taught. But wherever Commentaries were so handed
down, tradition tells us that they were compiled, and subse-
quently written, in the dialect of the district where the
school was situated. From two places, one in India and
the other in Ceylon, we have works purporting to give in
Pali the substance of such ancient traditional comment as
had been handed down in the local vernacular. One of
these is the Atthasalini, Buddhaghosa's reconstruction, in
Pali, of the Commentary on our present work, as handed
down in Sinhalese at the school of the Great Monastery,
the Maha Vihara at Anuradhapura in Ceylon.
The Maha Vansa, indeed, says (p. 251) that he wrote
this work at Gaya, in North India, before he came to
Anuradhapura. This, however, must be a mistake, if it
refers to the work as we have it. For in that work he
frequently quotes from and refers to another work which
he certainly wrote after his arrival in Ceylon, namely, the
Visuddhi Magga, and once or twice he refers to the
Samanta Pasadika, which he also wrote in Ceylon.
The Sadhamma Sangaha^ has two apparently incon-
sistent statements which suggest a solution. The first is
that he wrote, at the Vihara at Gaya, a work called the
'
Uprising of Knowledge ' (S'anodaya), and a Commentary
on the Dhamma-Sangani, called the Atthasalini, and began
to write one on the Parittas. Then it was that he was urged
to go, and actually did go, to Ceylon to obtain better materials
for his work. The second is that, after he had arrived
there and had written seven other works, he then wrote the
Atthasalini. When the same author makes two such state-
ments as these, and in close conjunction, he may well mean
to say that a work already written in the one place was
revised or rewritten in the other.
Dhamma Kitti, the author of the Sadhamma Sangaha,
adds the interesting fact that, in revising his Atthasalini,
Buddhaghosa relied, not on the Maha Atthakatha in
Sinhalese, but on another Commentary in that language
called the Maha Paccari.
We know, namely, that at the time when Buddhaghosa
wrote—that is, in the early part of the fifth century a.d.—
the Commentaries handed down in the schools had been, at
various times and places, already put together into treatises
and written books in the native dialects. And we know
the names of several of those then existing. These are :
1 Journal of the Pali Text Society, 1888, pp. 53, 56.
1. The Commentary of the dwellers in the '
North
Minster '
—the Uttara Vihara—at Anuradhapura.^
2. The Mula-, or Maha-Atthakatha, or simply '
The
Atthakatha,' of the dwellers in the 'Great Minster'—the
Maha Vihara—also at Anuradhapura.^
3. The Andha-Atthakatha, handed down at Kaiicipura
(Congevaram), in South India.
4. The Maha Paccari, or Great Eaft, said to be so called
from its having been composed on a raft somewhere in
Ceylon. ^
5. The Kurunda Atthakatha, so called because it was
composed at the Kurundavelu Vihara in Ceylon.*
6. The Sankhepa Atthakatha or Short Commentary,
which, as being mentioned together with the Andha Com-
mentary,^ may possibly be also South Indian.
Buddhaghosa himself says in the introductory verses to
the Atthasalini :^
'
1 will set forth, rejoicing in what I reveal, the explana-
tion of the meaning of that Abhidhamma as it was chanted
forth by Maha Kassapa and the rest (at the first Council),
and re-chanted later (at the second Council) by the Arahats,
and by Mahinda brought to this wondrous isle and turned
into the language of the dwellers therein. Eejecting now
the tongue of the men of Tambapanni^ and turning it into
that pure tongue which harmonizes with the texts [I will
set it forth] showing the opinion of the dwellers in the
Great Minster, undefiled by and unmixed with the views of
1 J. P. T. S., 1882, pp. 115, 116. English in Tumour's
Maha Vansa, pp. xxxvii, xxxviii.
2 Sum." 180, 182 ; Sadhamma Sangaha, 55 ; M. B. V.
134-136.
3 Papanca Sudani on M. ii. 13 ; Sadhamma Sangaha, 55.
4 Sadhamma Sangaha, 55.
5 Vijesinha in the J. R. A. S., 1870 (vol. v., New Series),
p. 298.
6 AsL, p. 1, ver. 13 et seq.
7 Taprobane = Ceylon.
the sects, and adducing also what ought to be adduced from
the Nikayas and the Commentaries.'^
It would be most interesting if the book as we have it
had been written at Gaya in North India, or even if we
could discriminate between the portion there written and
the additions or alterations made in Ceylon. But this we
can no longer hope to do. The numerous stories of Ceylon
Theras occurring in the book are almost certainly due to
the author's residence in Ceylon. And we cannot be certain
that these and the reference to his own book, written in
Ceylon, are the only additions. We cannot, therefore, take
the opinions expressed in the book as evidence of Buddhist
opinion as held in Gaya. That may, in great part, be so.
But we cannot tell in which part.
In the course of his work Buddhaghosa quotes often
from the Nikayas without mentioning the source of his
quotations ; and also from the Yibhanga^ and the Maha
Pakarana^ (that is, the Patthana), giving their names.
Besides these Pitaka texts, he quotes or refers to the follow-
ing authorities
:
1. His own Samanta Pasadika, e.g., pp. 97, 98.
2. His own Yisuddhi Magga, pp. 168, 183, 186, 187
(twice), 190, 198.4
3. The Maha Atthakatha, pp. 80, 86, 107.
4. The Atthakathacariya, pp. 85, 123, 217.
5. The Atthakatha, pp. 108, 113, 188, 267, 313.
6. The Atthakatha's, pp. 99, 188.
7. The Agamatthakatha's, p. 86.^
1 Agamatthakathasu, perhaps 'from the commen-
taries on the Nikayas.' See note 5 below.
2 For instance, pp. 165-170, 176, 178.
3 For instance, pp. 7, 9, 87, 212, 409.
* The apparent references at pp. 195, 196 are not to the
book.
^ The reading in the printed text is agamanatthaka-
thasu. But this is not intelligible. And as we have
agamatthakathasu at p. 2, ver. 17, it is probable we
must so' read also here, where the meaning clearly is ' m
the commentaries on the Nikayas.'
8. Acariyanam samanatthakatha, p. 90.
9. Porana, pp. 84, 111, 291, 299, 813.
10. The Thera (that is Nagasena), pp. 112, 121, 122.
11. Nagasenatthera, p. 114.
12. Ayasma Nagasena, p. 119.
13. Ayasma Nagasenatthera, p. 142.
14. Thera Nagasena, p. 120.
15. Digha-bhanaka, pp. 151, 399 {cf. p. 407).
16. Majjhima-bhanaka, p. 420.
17. Yitanda-vadI, pp. 3, 90, 92, 241.
18. Petaka, possibly Petakopadesa, p. 165.
I do not claim to have exhausted the passages in the
Atthasalini quoted from these authorities, or to be able to
define precisely each work—what, for instance, is the dis-
tinction between 5 and 6, and whether 4 was not identical
with either. Nor is it clear who were the Porana or
Ancients, though it seems likely, from the passages quoted,
that they were Buddhist thinkers of an earlier age, but of a
later date than that of our Manual, inasmuch as one of the
citations shows that the '
Door-theory '
of cognition was
already developed (see below, p. Ixviii., etc.). From the
distinct references to 3 and to 7, it seems possible that the
so-called '
Great Commentary ' (3) dealt not so much with
any particular book, or group of books, as with the doctrines
of the Pitakas in general.
The foregoing notes may prove useful when the times
are ready for a full inquiry into the history of the Buddhist
Commentaries.1 With respect to the extent to which the
Atthasalini itself has been quoted in the following pages, it
may be judged that the scholastic teaching of eight centuries
later is a very fallacious guide in the interpretation of
original doctrines, and that we should but darken counsel
1 I may add that a Tika, or sub-commentary on the
Atthasalini, written by a Siamese scholar, Nanakitti, of
unknown date, was edited in Sinhalese characters by Kocla-
goda Pannasekhara of Kalutara, in Ceylon, and published
there in 1890.
if we sought light on Aristotle from mediaeval exegesis of
the age of Duns Scotus.
Without admitting that the course of Buddhist and that
of Western culture coincide sufficiently to warrant such a
parallel, it may readily be granted that Buddhaghosa must
not be accepted en bloc. The distance between the con-
structive genius of Gotama and his apostles as compared
with the succeeding ages of epigoni needs no depreciatory
criticism on the labours of the exegesists to make itself felt
forcibly enough. Buddhaghosa's philology is doubtless
crude, and he is apt to leave cruces unexplained, concern-
ing which an Occidental is most in the dark.^ Nevertheless,
to me his work is not only highly suggestive, but also a mine
of historic interest. To put it aside is to lose the historical
perspective of the course of Buddhist philosophy. It is to
regard the age of Gotama and of his early Church as consti-
tuting a wondrous '
freak '
in the evolution of human ideas,
instead of watching to see how the philosophical tradition
implanted in that Church (itself based on earlier culture)
had in the lapse of centuries been carefully handed down by
the schools of Theras, the while the folklore that did duty
for natural science had more or less fossilized, and the study
of the conscious processes of the mind had been elaborated.
This is, however, a point of view that demands a fuller
examination than can here be given it. I will now only
maintain that it is even more suggestive to have at hand
the best tradition of the Buddhist schools at the fulness of
their maturity for the understanding of a work like the
Dhamma-Sangani than for the study of the Dialogues.
Our manual is itself a book of reference to earlier books,
and presents us with many terms and formulae taken out of
that setting of occasion and of discourse enshrined in which
we meet them in the Nikayas. The great scholar who
comments on them had those Nikayas, both as to letter and
spirit, well pigeon-holed in memory, and cherished both
1 Cf. Dr. Neumann in *Die Reden Gotamo Buddhos,'
p. XV et seq.
with the most reverent loyalty. That this is so, as well as
the fact that we are bred on a culture so different in mould
and methods (let alone the circumstances of its develop-
ment) from that inherited by him, must lend his interpreta-
tions an importance and a suggestiveness far greater than
that which the writings of any Christian commentator on
the Greek philosophy can possess for us.
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