Psychological Ethics,
FROM THE PALI
OF THE
DHAMMA-SANGANI
Translated by CAROLINE A. F. RHYS DAVIDS, M.A.
We are not told, for instance, where the mutual impact
takes place, nor ivith what a distant object impinges. And
if d h a m m a are conceived, as in the Manual, as actual
or potential states of consciousness, and rupam is con-
ceived as a species of d h a m m a, it follows that both the
rupam, which is *
external ' and comes into contact with
the rupam which is 'of the self,' and also this latter
rupam are regarded in the light of the two mental factors
necessary to constitute an act of sensory consciousness,
actual or potential.
Such may have been the psychological aspect adumbrated,
groped after—not to go further—in the Dhamma-sangani
itself. That the traditional interpretation of this impact-
theory grew psychological with the progress of culture in
the schools of Buddhism seems to be indicated by such a
comment in the Atthasalini as :
'
strikes (impinges) on form
is a term for the eye {i.e., the visual sense) being receptive
of the object of consciousness.'^ This seems to be a clear
attempt to resolve the old metaphor, or, it may be, the old
physical concept, into terms of subjective experience.
Again, when alluding to the simile of the cymbals and the
rams, we are told by Buddhaghosa to interpret '
eye ' by
* visual cognition,' and to take the '
concussion '
in the sense
of function.^ Once more, he tells us that when feeling
arises through contact, the real causal antecedent is mental,
though apparently external.^
Without pursuing this problem further, we cannot leave
the subject of sense and sensation without a word of com-
ment and comparison on the prominence given in the
Buddhist theory to the notion of '
contact ' and the sense
of touch. As with us, both terms are from the same stem.
But phasso (contact), on the one hand, is generalized to
include all receptive experience, sensory as well as idea-
1 Asl. 309. Cakkhum arammanam sampaticcha-
yamanam eva rupamhi patihannati nama.
2 Ibid. 108: 'kiccatthen' eva.
3 See below, p. 5, n. 2.
tional,^ and to represent the essential antecedent and con-
dition of all feeling (or sensation = ve dan a). On the
other hand, phusati, photthabbam (to touch, the
tangible) are specialized to express the activity of one of
the senses. Now, the functioning of the tactile sense
(termed body-sensibility or simply body, kayo, pp. 181,
182) is described in precisely the same terms as each of the
other four senses. Nevertheless, it is plain, from the sig-
nificant application of the term tangible, or object of touch,
alluded to already—let alone the use of '
contact ' in a wider
sense—that the Buddhists regarded Touch as giving us
knowledge of things *
without ' in a more fundamental way
than the other senses could. By the table of the contents
of rupam given above, we have seen that it is only
through Touch that a knowledge of the underived elements
of the world of sense could be obtained, the fluid or moist
element alone excepted. This interesting point in the
psychology of early Buddhism may possibly be formulated
somewhere in the Abhidhamma Pitaka. I should feel
more hopeful in this respect had the compilers been, in the
first instance, not ethical thinkers, but impelled by the
scientific curiosity of a Demokritus. The latter, as is well
known, regarded all sensation as either bare touch or
developments of touch—a view borne out to a great extent
by modern biological research. This was, perhaps a corol-
lary of his atomistic philosophy. Yet that Demokritus
was no mere deductive system-spinner, but an inductive
observer, is shown in the surviving quotation of his
dictum, that we should proceed, in our inferences, 'from
phenomena to that which is not manifest.' Now, as the
Buddhist view of rupam calls three of the four elements
'underived' and 'the tangible,' while it calls the senses
and all other sense-objects '
derived from that tangible '
and from fluid, one might almost claim that their position
with respect to Touch was in effect parallel to that of
Demokritus. The Commentary does not assist us to any
1 See below, p. 4, n. 2.
clear conclusion on this matter. But, in addition to the
remark quoted above, in which visual magnitudes are pro-
nounced to be really tactile sensations, it has one interest-
ing illustration of our proverb, '
Seeing is believing, but
Touch is the real thing.' It likens the four senses, exclud-
ing touch, to four balls of cotton-wool, intervening between
hammer and four anvils (i.e., U p a d a r u p a m, or derived
form, without and within) and deadening the impact. But
in Touch, hammer smites through wool, getting at the bare
anvil.^
Further considerations on the Buddhist theory of
sense, taking us beyond bare sensation to the working
up of such material into concrete acts of perception, I
propose to consider briefly in the following section. The
remaining heads of the rupa-skandha are very concisely
treated in the niddesa answers (pp. 190-197), and, save
in the significance of their selection, call for no special
treatment.
It is not quite clear why senses and sense- objects should
be followed by three indriyas—by three only and just
these three. The senses themselves are often termed
indriyas, and not only in Buddhism. In the indriyas of
sex, however, and the phenomena of nutrition, the rupa -
skandha, in both the self and other selves, is certainly
catalogued under two aspects as general and as impressive
as that of sense. In fact, the whole organism as modi-
fiable by the 'sabbam rupam' without, may be said
to be summed up under these three aspects. They fit
fairly well into our division of the receptive side of the
organism, considered, psychophysically, as general and
special sensibility. From his ethical standpoint the learner
did well to take the life in which he shared into account
under its impressive aspects of sense, sex and nutrition.
And this not only in so far as he was receptive. The very
term indriyam, which is best paralleled by the Greek
Bvva/jiL(;, or faculty—i.e., *powers in us, and in all other
1 Asl. 263; below, p. 127, n. 1.
things, by which we do as we do '
^
—and which is inter-
preted to this effect by Buddhaghosa,^ points to the active,
self-expressive side of existence. Both as recipient, then,
and as agent, the learner of the Dharma had to acquire
and maintain a certain attitude with respect to these aspects
of the rupa-skandha.
The same considerations apply to the next two kinds of
r u p a m, with which we may bracket the next after them.
The two modes of *
intimation ' or self-expression exhaust
the active side of life as such, constituting, as one might
say, a world of sub-derivative or tertiary form, and calling
quite especially for modification by theory and practice
(dassanena ca bhavanaya ca). And the element
of space, strange as it looks, at first sight, to find it listed just
here, was of account for the Buddhist only as a necessary
datum or postulate for his sentient and active life. The
vacua of the body, as well as its plena, had to be reckoned
in with the rupa-skandha ; likewise the space without by
which bodies were delimitated, and which, yielding room
for movement, afforded us the three dimensions.^
The grounds for excluding space from the four elements
and for calling it derived remain in obscurity. In the
Maha Eahulovada-Sutta (cited below) it is ranked imme-
diately after, and apparently as co-ordinate with, the
other four. And it was so ranked, oftener than not, by
Indian thought generally. Yet in another Sutta of the
same Nikaya—the Maha Hatthipadopama- Sutta—Sariputta
1 Republic, v. 477. ^ AsL, p. 119 and jMssim.
2 See below, p. 194, n. 1 ; also M. i. 423. In the former
passage space is described as if external to the organism
;
in the latter Gotama admonishes his son respecting the
internal akaso.
On the interesting point put forward by Professor von
Schroeder of a connexion between akaca and the Pytha-
gorean oX/ctt?, see Professor Garbe in the Vienna Oriental
Journal, xiii., Nro. 4 (1899). The former scholar refers to
the ranking of space as a fifth element, as a schicankend
uberlieferte Bezeichnung. It was so for Buddhism.
describes four elements, leaving out a k a s o . Eliminated
for some reason from the Underived, when the Dhamma-
sangani was compiled, it was logically necessary to include
it under Derived Kupam. That it was so included because
it was held to be a mental construction, or a '
pure form of
intuition,' is scarcely tenable.
And yet the next seven items of derived form are
apparently to be accepted rather as concepts or aspects of
form than as objective properties or *
primary qualities'
of it. Be that as it may, all the seven are so many
common facts about r u p a m , both as *
s a b b a m ' and
as skandha. The Three Qualities^ indicated the ideal
efficiency for moral ends to which the rupa-skandha, or
any form serving such an end, should be brought. The
Three Phases in the organic evolution of form and the great
fact of Impermanence applied everywhere and always to
all form. And as such all had to be borne in mind, all
had to co-operate in shaping theory and practice.
Concerning, lastly, the a h a r o, or support, of the rupa-
skandha, the hygiene and ethics of diet are held worthy of
rational discussion in the Sutta Pitaka.^
We have now gone with more or less details into the
divisions of rupam in the *
sensuous universe,' with a
view of seeing how far it coincided with any general
philosophical concept in use among ourselves. For me it
does not fit well with any, and the vague term *form,'
implicated as it is, like ruparn, with 'things we see,' is
perhaps the most serviceable. Its inclusion of faculties
and abstract notions as integral factors prevent its
coinciding with 'matter,' or 'the Extended,' or 'the
External World.' If we turn to the list of attributes given
in Chapter I. of Book II., rupam appears as pre-
eminently the unmoral (as to both cause and effect) and
the non-mental. It was '
favourable ' to immoral states, as
the chief constituent of a world that had to be mastered
1 Lightness, plasticity, wieldiness, pp. 194, 195.
2 Cf., e.g., M. i., Suttas 54, 55, 65, 66, 70.
and transcended by moral culture, but the immoral
states exploiting it were of the other four skandhas. It
included the phenomena of sense, but rather on their
physical pre-mental side than as full-fledged facts of con-
sciousness. And it was sharply distinguished, as a con-
stituent 'collocation' or 'aggregate' (skandha, rasi), in
the total aggregate of the individual organism from the
three collocations called c e t a s i k a (feelings, perceptions,
syntheses), and from that called citt a (intellect, thought,
cognition) . The attabhavo, or personality, minus all
mental and moral characteristics, is r u p a m
.
As such it is one with all r u p a m not of its own com-
position. It is '
in touch '
with the general impersonal
r u p a m, as well as with the mental and moral con-
stituents of other personalities by way of their r ii p a m
.
That this intercommunication was held to be possible on
the basis, and in virtue of, this common structure was
probably as implicit in the Buddhist doctrine as it was
explicit in many of the early Greek philosophers. It is
not impossible that some open allusions to 'like being
known by like ' may be discovered in the Pitakas as a
consciously held and deliberately stated principle or ground
of the impressibility of the sentient organism. No such
statement occurs in our Manual. But the phrase, recurring
in the case of each of the special senses, 'derived from
the four Great Phenomena,' may not have been inserted
without this implication. Without further evidence, how-
ever, I should not be inclined to attach philosophical signi-
ficance in this direction to it. But on the one hand we
have an interesting hint in the Commentary that such a
principle teas held by early Buddhists. '
"Where there is
difference of kind (or creature), we read,1 there is no
sensory stimulus. According to the Ancients, "Sensory
stimulus is of similar kinds, not of different kinds." '
1 Asl. 313. Bhuta visese hi sati pasado va na uppajjati.
'Samananam bhutanam hi pasado, na visamananan ti'
Porana.
And again :
' The solid, both within and without, becomes
the condition of the sense of touch in the laying hold of the
object of perception—in discerning the tangible.'^ It is
true that Buddhaghosa is discoursing, not on this question,
but on what would now be called the specific energy, or
specialized functioning, of nerve. Nevertheless, it seems
inferable from the quotations that the principle was estab-
lished. And we know also how widely accepted (and also
contested)^ this same principle
—
'H yvco(Ti<^ tou ojjloIqv tcG
6fjuoi(p—was in Greece, from Empedokles to Plato and to
Plotinus,^ thinkers, all of them, who were affected, through
Pythagorism or elsewise, by the East. The vivid description
by Buddhaghosa {cf. below, pp. 173-174) of the presence in
the seat of vision of the four elements is very suggestive of
Plato's account of sight in the *
Timseus,' where the prin-
ciple is admitted.
Whether as a principle, or merely as an empirical fact,
the oneness of man's rupaskandha with the sabbam rupam
without was thoroughly admitted, and carefully taught as
orthodox doctrine. And with regard to this kinship, I
repeat, a certain philosophical attitude, both theoretical
and practical, was inculcated as generally binding. That
attitude is, in one of the Majjhima discourses,^ led up to
and defined as follows : All good states (dhamma) what-
ever are included in the Four Noble Truths concerning Ill.^
Now the First Noble Truth unfolds the nature of Ill : that
it lies in using the five skandhas for Grasping.6 And the
1 Ibid., 315. Ajjhattika-bahira pathavi etassa kaya-
pasadassa arammanagahane . . . photthabbajanane pac-
cayo hoti.
2
Cf. Aristotle's discussion, De An., i. 2, 5.
3 Cf. the passage, Enn. i. 6, 9, reproduced by Gothe
:
ov yap av ircoiroTe elBev 6(f)6a\/jLOy6
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