Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India : A Historical Comparison (9781108603157) by Seaford Richard

Author:Seaford, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr
Published: 2019-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Whereas Ajivikism and Jainism recommend non-action and recognise the existence of a self,103 Buddhism conversely neither recommends non-action nor recognises the existence of a self. To recognise a self and yet not recommend non-action would increase the danger of being drawn into the economic-metaphysical cycle, and none of the three sects do this. In other words, there is a sense in which the doctrines of non-action and no self render each other unnecessary.

From a broad historical perspective, the doctrine of anatta rejects in particular the atman, the unchanging inner self – an idea that can be seen developing in late Vedic texts: we have shown how the late Vedic atman is promoted by the monetisation, individualisation and interiorisation of the sacrificial process through which the individual obtains lokas in this world and the next. This being so, the doctrine of anatta coheres with the Buddhist rejection of the Vedas and of sacrifice and with the ban on Buddhist monks using money and owning anything individually beyond minimal property. At the same time the doctrine of anatta coheres with a doctrine of all-pervasive unceasing flux that is itself influenced by the newly all-pervasive circulation of money, as does Herakleitos’ new conception of the ever-changing psuchē (13§D). But there was no doctrine of no self in Greece (17§AB).

We have seen in Part C that the atman is central to Vedic doctrine: it came into being in the beginning; it must be known; all that is dear is dear because of it; it is identified with all; it is brahman. Thus atman and anatta seem to be diametrical opposites. But the atman is elusive: bigger than ‘all these worlds’ but smaller than a mustard seed, imperceptible, the abstract undefined something behind (or containing) the various inner faculties. Unlike the variously imagined Greek psuchē, it lacks both material existence and internal divisions. To deny its existence is not so big a step as it may seem.

Moreover, like the Greek psuchē, it supervenes on earlier texts (RV, Homer) in which there was no unified inner self, no comprehensive organ of consciousness – an absence to which the doctrine of anatta may, from a broad historical perspective, be said in a sense to revert. Of course, this comparison of anatta with the earlier absence of a unitary subject is in most respects superficial, because the doctrine of anatta is philosophical, and was produced in circumstances (including monetisation and the centrality of the atman) quite different from those of the Rigveda. But it is not the only feature of Buddhism that seems to perpetuate – albeit in a quite different form – a lost or disappearing past. Another such feature is the minimisation of the individual property of monks and the ban on their use of money: we can detect the historical development of individual property that in a Buddhist text is represented as decline (2§E). Because we claim that the emergence of the unitary inner self is influenced by the development of monetised individual property, it

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