A BUDDHIST MANUAL
Psychological Ethics,
FROM THE PALI
OF THE
DHAMMA-SANGANI
Translated by CAROLINE A. F. RHYS DAVIDS, M.A.
VIII.
On the Buddhist Notions of ^
Good, Bad, and Indeterminate.'
By way of dhamma, rupam and cittani , by
way of Buddhist phenomenology and psychology, we come
at last to the ethical purport of the questions in the
Manual. Given a human being known to us by w^ay of
these phenomenal states, what is implied when we say that
some of them are good, some bad, others neither ?
The Dhamma-Sangani does not, to our loss be it said,
define any one of these concepts. All it does is to show
us the content of a number of *
thoughts ' known as one
or the other of these three species of dhamma. In a sub-
sequent passage (pp. 345-348) it uses the substantival form
of '
good ' (kusalata; another form is kosattam) in
the sense of skill or proficiency as applied to various kinds
of insight, theoretical or practical.
Now if we turn to the later expression of old tradition in the
Commentaries, we find, on the one hand, an analysis of the
meaning of 'good'; on the other, the rejection of precisely
that sense of skill, and of that alone out of four possible
meanings, with respect to '
good ' as used in Book I.
Kusalam, 'we read,1 may mean (a) wholesome,
(b) virtuous, (c) skilful, (d) felicific, or productive of happy
result. The illustrations make these clear statements
clearer. E.g. of (a), from the Dasaratha Jataka: *Is it good
for you, sir, is it wholesome ?'2 Of (b) *What, sir, is good
1 Asl. 38.
2 The two adjectives are kusalam, anamayam.
behaviour in act? Sire, it is conduct that is blameless
(anavajjo).' Of (c) *
You are good at knowing all about
the make of a chariot.'^ Again: 'The four girl-pupils
are good at singing and dancing.' Of {d) 'Good states,
brethren, are acquired through good karma having been
wrought and stored up.'
Of these four, (c) is alone ruled out as not applicable to
the eight types of good thoughts constituting dhamma
kusala . In so far, then, as we suffer the Buddhist
culture of the fifth century to interpret the canon for us,
'good,' in the earlier ethics, meant that which insures
soundness, physical and moral, as well as that which is
felicific.
The further question immediately suggests itself, whether
Buddhism held that these two attributes were at bottom
identical. Are certain *
states '
intrinsically good, i.e.,
virtuous and right, independently of their results ? Or is
*
good,' in the long-run at least, felicitous result, and only
on that account so called? Are Buddhists, in a word,
Intuitionists, or are they Utilitarians ? Or is not a
decidedly eclectic standpoint revealed in the comprehensive
interpretation given of kusalana?
These are, however, somewhat modern—I am tempted to
say, somewhat British—distinctions to seek in an ancient
theory of morals. They do not appear to have troubled
Buddhism, early or late. The Buddhist might possibly
have replied that he could not conceive of any thought,
word, or deed as being intrinsically good and yet bad in its
results, and that the distinction drawn by the Commentator
was simply one of aspects.
If pressed, however, we can almost imagine the Buddhist
well content with the relative or dependent good of Utili-
tarianism, so closely is his ethics bound up with cause
and effect. Good, for him, is good with respect to karma
—that is, to pleasurable effect or eudcemonia.
With respect to the supremely good effect, to arahatship
1 Cf. M. ii. 94.
or Nirvana, he might, it is true, have admitted a difference,
namely, that this state was absolutely good, and not good
because of its results. It was the supreme Eesult or Fruit,
and there was *
no beyond.' But then he did not rank
Nirvana exactly in the category of good, and precisely for
this reason, that in it moral causation culminated and
ceased. He spoke of it as Indeterminate, as without
result—as a Freedom, rather than as a Good.
He would not then have fallen in with Aristotle's
definition of Good in terms of aim, viz., as '
that at which
everything aims.' Good was rather the means hy and with
which ice aim.. But that at which we aim is, in all lower
quests, S u k h a m, in the one high quest, V i m u 1 1 i
(emancipation), or Nirvana.
Nor must the substitution of these two last terms for
that well-being, that well-ness, * to ev ^tjv,' which is the
etymological equivalent of s u k h a m,^ be taken as in-
dicating the limit of the consistent Hedonism or Eudse-
monism of the Buddhist. For he did not scruple to speak
of these two also (Emancipation and Nirvana) in terms
of pleasurable feeling. Gotama attaining his supreme
enlightenment beneath the Bo-tree is said to have
'
experienced Emancipation-bliss '
(vimutti-sukha-
patisamvedi).^ And to King Milinda the Sage
emphatically declares Nirvana to be * absolute (or entire)
happiness' (ekanta-sukham).^ And we know, too,
that Buddhism defined all right conduct and the sufficient
motive for it in terms of escape from ill (dukkham, the
antithesis of sukham) or suffering. Here then again
their psychological proclivity is manifested. They analyzed
feeling, or subjective experience, into three modes :
sukham, dukkham, adukkham-asukham. And
in Good and Bad they saw, not ends or positions of attain-
ment, but the vehicles or agencies, or, to speak less in
abstractions, the characteristic mark of those kinds of
1
Cf. p. 12, n. 3. 2 Vin. i. 2, 3, quoted Jat. i. 77.
3 Mil. 313.
conduct, by which well-being or ill-being might re-
spectively be entailed.
The Buddhist, then, was a Hedonist, and hence, whether
he himself would have admitted it or not, his morality was
dependent, or, in the phrase of British ethics, utilitarian,
and not intuitionist. Hedonist, let us say, rather than
eudsemonistic, because of the more subjective (psycho-
logical) import of the former term. And he found the
word s u k h a m good enough to cover the whole ground of
desirability, from satisfaction in connexion with sense
—
compare Buddhaghosa's traveller refreshed obtaining both
joy and ease^—up to the ineffable '
Content ' of Nirvana.^
He did not find in it the inadequacy that some moral
philosophers have found in our '
Pleasure.' His ethical
system was so emphatically a study of consequences—of
karma and v i p a k a (effect of karma)—of seeing in every
phenomenon a reaping of some previous sowing—that the
notion of good became for him inevitably bound up with
result. As my late master used to say (ex cathedra) :
If you bring forward consequences—how acts by way of
result affect self and others—you must come to feeling.
Thence pleasure becomes prominent. And did not folk
suffer loose, lower associations to affect their judgment,
there would be no objection to Hedonism. For pleasures
are of all ranks, up to that of a good conscience.'
A reflection may here suggest itself to readers in this
country who have, at the feet of Spencer, Bain, and Leslie
Stephen, learnt to see, behind Nature's device of Pleasur-
able Feeling, the conservation of the species—' quantity
of life, measured in breadth as well as in length '
—as the
more fundamental determinant of that which, in the long-
run, becomes the end of conduct. Namely, that there
seems a strange contradiction in a philosophic position
which is content to find, in the avoidance of pain and
the quest of pleasurable feeling, its fundamental spring of
1 Below, p. 12, n. 3.
2 Santutthi. See p. 358, n. 2.
moral action while, at the same time, it says of life—apart
from which it admits no feeling to be possible—that the
attainment of its last phase is the one supremely happy
event,^ Pleasurable feeling, from the evolutionist's stand-
point, means, and is in order to, the increase, '
intensive
and extensive,' of life. Yet to the Hedonistic Buddhist,
the dissolution of the conditions of renewed existence is a
happy event, i.e., an event that causes pleasurable feeling
in the thoughtful spectator.
I believe that the modern ethics of evolution would have
profoundly interested the early Buddhists, who after their
sort and their age were themselves evolutionists. And I
believe, too, that they would have arisen from a discussion
with our thinkers on this subject as stanch Buddhists and
as stanch Hedonists as they had sat down. I admit that
with respect to the desirableness of life taken quantitatively,
and in two dimensions, they were frankly pessimistic. As
I have already suggested,^ and have put forward elsewhere,^
to prize mere quantity of living stood by Gotama con-
demned as ignoble, as stupid, as a mortal bondage, as one
of the four Asavas or Intoxicants.* The weary, heart-
rending tragedies immanent in the life of the world he
recognised and accepted as honestly and fully as the
deepest pessimist. The complexities, the distractions, the
burdens, the dogging sorrow, the haunting fear of its
approaching tread, inevitable for life lived in participation
of all that the human organism naturally calls for, and
human society puts forward as desirable—all this he judged
too heavy to be borne, not, indeed, by lay followers, but by
those who should devote themselves to the higher life. To
these he looked to exemplify and propagate and transmit
1 Cf., e.g., M. P. S. 62 ; Maha Sudassana-sutta, S. B. E.
xi. 240, 289.
2 See above, pp. Ixix, Ixx.
3 In an article *
On the Will in Buddhism,' J. E. A. S.,
January, 1898.
* Cf. below, p. 290 et seq.
his doctrine. Theirs it was to Hft the world to higher
standpoints and nobler issues. Life in its fulness they at
least could not afford to cultivate.
But if we take life of a certain quality where selective
economy, making for a certain object, cuts off some lines
of growth but forces others on—then Buddhism, so far
from '
negating the will to live '
that kind of life, pro-
nounced it fair and lovely beyond all non-being, beyond all
after-being. If final death, as it believed, followed inevit-
ably on the fullest fruition of it, it was not this that made
such life desirable. Final dissolution was accepted as
welcome, not for its own sake, but as a corollary, so to
speak, of the solved problem of emancipation. It merely
signified that unhealthy moral conditions had wholly passed
away.
Keeping in view, then, the notion of Good in thought,
word and deed, as a means entailing various kinds of
felicific result, we may see in Book I. of our Manual, first,
the kind of conscious experience arising apart from syste-
matic effort to obtain any such specific result, but which
was bound, none the less, to lead to hedonistic consequences,
pleasant or unpleasant (pp. 1-42). Next, we see a certain
felicific result deliberately aimed at through self-cultivation
in modes of consciousness called Good (pp. 43-97). And,
incidentally, we learn something of the procedure adopted
in that systematic culture.
The Commentary leaves us no room to doubt whether or
not the phase rupupapattiya maggam bhaveti
('that he may attain to the heavens of Form he cultivates
the way thereto ') refers to a flight of imaginative power
merely. '
Form = the rupa-bhavo,' or mode of existence
so called. *Attainment = nibbatti, jati, sanjati'—
all being terms for birth and re-birth.1 So for the attaining
to the Formless heavens. Through the mighty engine of
*good states,' induced and sustained, directed and developed
1 Asl. 162. See below, pp. 43 et seq., 71 et seq.
by intelligence and self-control, it was held that the student
might modify his own destiny beyond this life, and insure,
or at least promote, his chances of a happy future. The
special culture or exercise required in either case was that
called Jhana, or rapt contemplation, the psychology of
which, when adequately investigated, will one day evoke
considerable interest. There was first intense attention by
way of *
an exclusive sensation,'^ to be entered upon only
when all other activity was relaxed to the utmost, short of
checking in any way the higher mental functions. After a
time the sensation practically ceases. The wearied sense
gives out. Change, indispensable to consciousness, has
been eliminated ; and we have realized, at all events since
Hobbes wrote, how idem semper sentire et non sentire ad
idem recidunt. Then comes the play of the '
after-image,'
and then the emergence of the mental image, of purely
ideational or representative construction. This will be, not
of the sense-object first considered, but some attenuated
abstraction of one of its qualities. And this serves as a
background and a barrier against all further invasion of
sense-impressions for the time being. To him thus purged
and prepared there comes, through subconscious persist-
ence, a reinstatement of some concept, associated with feeling
and conation {i.e., with desire or aspiration), which he had
selected for preliminary meditation. And this conception
he now proceeds by a sort of psychical involution to raise
to a higher power, realizing it more fully, deepening its
import, expanding its application.
Such seems to have been the Kasina method according
to the description in the Visuddhi Magga, chap, iv.,^ but
there were several methods, some of which, the method,
e.g., of respiration, are not given in our Manual. Of the
thoughts for meditation, only a few occur in the Dhamma-
1 See above, p. lxix.
2 Translated in Warren's 'Buddhism in Translations,'
p. 293 et seq. Cf. below. Book I., Part I., chap. ii. Cf. also
Rhys Davids* *Yogavacara's Manual,' Introduction.
Sangani, such as the * Sublime Abodes '
of thought—love,
pity, etc. But in the former work we find numerous lists
for exercise in the contemplative life, with or without the
rapt musing called Jhana.^
In the exercises calculated to bring out re-birth in the
world of Form, it was chiefly necessary to ponder on things
of this life in such a way as to get rid of all appetite and
impulse in connexion with them, and to cultivate an attitude
of the purest disinterestedness towards all worldly attrac-
tions. If the Formless sphere were the object of aspiration,
it was then necessary, by the severest fetches of abstraction,
to eliminate not only all sense-impression, but also all
sensory images whatever, and to endeavour to realize con-
ditions and relations other than those obtaining in actual
experience.^ Thus, in either method a foretaste of the
mode of re-becoming aspired after was attempted.
But besides and beyond the sort of moral consciousness
characterizing these exercises which were calculated to
promote a virtuous and happy existence in any one of the
three worlds, there were the special conditions of intellect
and emotion termed lok'uttaram citta m.^ Those
exercises were open to the lay pupil and the bhikkhu
alike. There was nothing especially *
holy,' nothing
esoteric, about the practice of Jhana. The diligent upa-
saka or upasika, pursuing a temporary course of such
religious and philosophic discipline as the rising schools of
^ J. P. T. S., 1891-1893. Synopsis of the Vis. Mag.,
Parts II. and III.
2 In translating the formula of the Third Aruppa or
meditation on Nothingness, I might have drawn attention
to Kant's development of the concept of None or Nothing,
in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (end of Div. i. of Transc.
Logic). Some great adepts were credited with the power of
actually partaking in other existences while yet in this,
notably Maha Moggallana {e.g., M. i.).
Gotama tells of another in the Kevaddha Sutta (D. i.
215), but tells it as a myth.
3 P. 82 et seq. Cf. n. 2 on p. 81.
Buddhism afforded, might be expected to avail himself or
herself of it more or less. But those *
good '
dhammas
alluded to were those which characterized the Four Paths,
or Four Stages of the way, to the full '
emancipation '
of
Nirvana. If I have rendered lokuttaram cittara by
'
thought engaged upon the higher ideal ' instead of select-
ing a term more literally accurate, it is because there is,
in a way, less of the *
supramundane ' or '
transcendent,'
as we usually understand these expressions, about this
cittam than about the aspiring moods described above.
For this sort of consciousness was that of the man or
woman who regarded not heaven nor re-birth, but one
thing only, as '
needful ' : the full and perfect efflorescence
of mind and character to be brought about, if it might be,
here and now.
The Dhamma-Sangani never quits its severely dry and
formal style to descant on the characteristics and methods
of that progress to the Ideal, every step in which is else-
where said to be loftier and sweeter than the last, with
a wealth of eulogy besides that might be quoted. Edifying
discourse it left to the Suttanta Books. But no rhetoric
could more effectively describe the separateness and un-
compromising other-ness of that higher quest than the one
word A-pariyapanna rn.—Unincluded—by which refer-
ence is made to it in Book III.
Yet for all this world of difference in the quo vadis of
aspiration, there is a great deal of common ground covered
by the moral consciousness in each case, as the respective
expositions show. That of the Arahat in spe differs only in
two sets of additional features conferring greater richness
of content, and in the loftier quality of other features not
in themselves additional.
This quality is due to the mental awakening or enlighten-
ment of sambodhi. And the added factors are three
constituents of the Noble Eightfold Path of conduct (which
are, more obviously, modes of overt activity than of con-
sciousness) and the progressive stages in the attainment of
the sublime knowledge or insight termed a fi n a.i Our
Western languages are scarcely rich enough to ring the
changes on the words signifying *
to know ' as those of
India did on j n a and v i d, d r s and pas. Our religious
ideals have tended to be emotional in excess of our intel-
lectual enthusiasm. ' Absence of dulness '
has not ranked
with us as a cardinal virtue or fundamental cause of good.
Hence it is difficult to reproduce the Pali so as to give im-
pressiveness to a term like a n ii a as compared with the mere
nana m,^ usually implying less advanced insight, with which
the '
first type of good thought ' is said to be associated.
But I must pass on. As a compilation dealing with
positive culture, undertaken for a positive end, it is only
consistent that the Manual should deal briefly with the
subject of bad states of consciousness. It is true that
akusalani, as a means leading to unhappy result, was
not conceived as negatively as its logical form might lead
us to suppose. Bad karma was a '
piling up,' no less than
its opposite. Nevertheless, to a great extent, the difference
between bad types of thought and good is described in
terms of the contradictories, of the factors in the one kind
and in the other. Nor are the negatives always on the
side of evil. The three cardinal sources of misery are
positive in form. And the five '
Path-factors ' go to
constitute what might have been called the Base Eightfold
Path.
We come, finally, to the third ethical category of
a-vyakatam, the Inexplicit or Indeterminate. The
subject is difficult if interesting, bringing us as it does
within closer range of the Buddhist view of moral causa-
tion. The hall-mark of Indeterminate thought is said to
be *absence of result'3—that is, of pleasant or painful
result. And there are said to be four species of such
1 Viz, : Anannat'annassamitindriyam, annin-
driyam, annatavindriyam. Pp. 86, 96, 97, 150. Cf,
Dh. K. 53.
2
Contra, cf, M. i., 184. 3 Asl. 39.
thought: (1) Vipako, or thought which is a result;
(2) K i r i y a , or consciousness leading to no result
;
(3) form, as outside moral causation ; (4) uncompounded
element (or, in later records. Nirvana), as above or beyond
the further efficacy of moral causation.
Of these four, the third has been dealt with already ; the
fourth I cannot discuss here and now.^ It is conceivable
that the earlier Buddhists considered their summun honum
a subject too ineffably sublime and mysterious for logical
and analytical discussion. Two instances, at least, occur
to me in the Nikayas,^ where the talk was cut short, in the
one case by Gotama himself, in the other by the woman-
apostle Dhammadinna, when the interlocutor brought up
Nirvana for discussion of this sort. This is possibly the
reason why, in a work like our Manual, the concept is pre-
sented—in all but the commentarial appendixes—under
the quasi-metaphysical term *
uncompounded element.' It
is classed here as a species of Indeterminate, because,
although it was the outcome of the utmost carrying power
of good karma, it could, as a state of mind and character,
itself work no good effect for that individual mind and
character. These represented pure effect. The Arahat
could afford to live wholly on withdrawn capital and to use
it up. His conduct, speech and thought are, of course,
necessarily '
good,' but good with no '
heaping - up
'
potency.
Of the other two Indeterminates, it is not easy to say
whether they represent aspects only of states considered
with respect to moral efficacy, or whether they represent
divisions in a more rigid and artificial view of moral causa-
tion than we should, at the present day, be prepared to
maintain. To explain : every thought, word and deed
(morally considered) is for us at once the effect of certain
antecedents, and the cause, or part of the cause, of sub-
sequent manifestations of character. It is a link, both
held and holding. But in vipako we have dhammas
1 See Appendix II. 2 S.v. 218 ; M. i. 304.
considered, with respect to cause, merely as effects; in
kiriya^ we have dhammas considered, with respect to
effect, as having none. And the fact that both are divided
off from Good and Bad—that is to say, from conduct or
consciousness considered as causally effective—and are
called Indeterminate, seems to point, not to aspects only,
but to that artificial view alluded to. Yet in this matter I
confess to the greater wisdom of imitating the angels,
rather than rushing in with the fools. Life presented
itself to the Buddhist much as the Surrey heath appeared
to the watchful eyes of a Darwin—as a teeming soil,
a khettam,^ where swarmed the seeds of previous
karmas waiting for *
room,' for opportunity to come to
effect. And in considering the seed as potential effect, they
were not, to that extent, concerned with that seed as
capable of producing, not only its own flower and fruit, but
other seed in its turn.
However that may have been, one thing is clear, and
for us suggestive. Moral experience as result pure and
simple was not in itself uninteresting to the Buddhists.
In dealing with good and bad dhammas, they show us a
field of the struggle for moral life, the sowing of potential
well-being or of ill. But in the Avyakatas we are either
outside the struggle and concerned with the unmoral
Rupam, or we walk among the sheaves of harvest.
From the Western standpoint the struggle covers the
whole field of temporal life. Good and bad *war in the
members 'even of its Arahats. The ideal of the Buddhist,
held as realizable under temporal conditions, was to walk
1 I am indebted to the Rev. Suriyagoda Sumangala, of
Ratmalane, Ceylon, for information very kindly given con-
cerning the term kiriya or kriya. He defines it as
'action ineffective as to result,' and kiriya-cittam as
'mind in relation to action ineffective as to result.' He
adds a full analysis of the various modes of kiriya
taught by Buddhists at the present day.
2 'Origin of Species,' p. 56. A. i. 223, 224. Cf. Asl. 360.
among his sheaves 'beyond the Good and the Bad.'i The
Good consisted in giving hostages to the future. His ideal
was to be releasing them, and, in a span of final, but
glorious existence, to be tasting of the finest fruit of living
—the peace of insight, the joy of emancipation. This was
life supremely worth living, for
'
leben heisst
In Freiheit leben und mit freiem Geist !'-
The Good, to take his own metaphor, was as a raft bearing
him across the stream of danger. After that he was to
leave it and go on. *And ye, brethren, learn by the
parable of the raft that ye must put away good conditions,
let alone bad.'^
It is not easy for us, who have learnt from Plato to call
our Absolute the Good and our Ideal a siunmun honum, to
sympathize really with this moral standpoint. Critics see
in it an aspiration towards moral stultification and self-
complacent egoism.
Yes, there is little fear but that in the long-run fuller
knowledge will bring deeper insight into what in Buddhism
is really worthy of admiration for all time. If it is now
accused of weakening the concept of individuality by reject-
ing soul, and, at the same time, of fostering egoistic morality,
it is just possible that criticism is here at fault. On the
ruins of the animistic view. Buddhism had to reconstruct a
new personality, wholly phenomenal, impermanent, law-
determined, yet none the less able, and alone able, by
indomitable faith and will, to work out a personal salva-
tion, a personal perfection. Bearing this in mind and
surveying the history of its altruistic missionary labours,
we cannot rashly cast egoistic morality at it to much effect.
Nor has it much to fear from charges of stultification,
quietism, pessimism and the like. We are misled to a
1 Nietzsche on Buddhism in *Der Antichrist.'
2 A. Pfungst, 'An Giordano Bruno.'
3 See the third quotation, p. vii.
certain extent herein by the very thoroughness of its
methods of getting at the moral life by way of psychical
training. We see, as in our Manual, and other canonical
records, elaborate systems for analyzing and cultivating the
intellectual faculties, the will and feeling, and we take
these as substitutes for overt moral activity, as ends when
they are but means. And if the Dhamma-Sangani seems
to some calculated to foster introspective thought to a
morbid extent, it must not be forgotten that it is not
Buddhist philosophy alone which teaches that, for all the
natural tendency to spend and be spent in efforts to cope,
by thought and achievement, with the world without, *
it is
in this little fathom-long mortal frame with its thinkings
and its notions that the world '^ itself and the whole problem
of its misery and of the victory over it lies hid.
If I have succeeded to any extent in connecting the
contents of this Manual with the rest of the Buddhist
Pitakas, it is because I had at my disposal the mass of
material accumulated in my husband's MS. Pali dictionary.
Besides this, the selection of material for Sections II. and
III. of my Introduction is his work. Besides this I owe
him a debt of gratitude indefinitely great for advice and
criticism generally.
1 See second quotation, p. vii
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