A/ Khái niệm:
Khái niệm về ngã/linh hồn là khái
niệm gây tranh cải nhất, là khó khăn nhất, ít nhất là về mặt triết học, nhưng lại
chiếm vị trí cao nhất trong các vấn đề của nó.
‘ātman/atta’
Nguyên nhân là vì:
Some scholars held that the Buddha denies the existence of self,
Some hold that he does not deny,
Some think he neither denies nor affirms,
Still others hold that one point of
view he affirms it and from another point of view he denies it.
B/ Ngã hay linh hồn:
Con người tin rằng, trong con người
tồn tại một cái ngã hay linh hồn
Tuy nhiên nó lại không được tìm thấy
trong (luật nghiệp, sự chuyển dời, duyên khởi,
The Buddha gave a fair account
about what the self is not, though he does not give any clear account of what
it is.
Buddha`s statement that the self is
neither the same as nor entirely different from the skandhas.
It is not a simple composite of
mind and body, nor is it the heavenly substance.
However, the Buddha neither affirms
nor denies its existence.
Nagasena refutes the permanent
existence of the soul whereas; Nagarjuna affirms that the soul is empirically
real.
The Buddhist view of the soul can
be categorized in four different propositions:
1. The soul does not exist at all
Depend on the Five Nikayas and the
Milindapanha, it is held that the Buddha asserts the doctrine of impermanence.
Life is an unbroken series of
states; each of these states depends on the condition just preceding and gives
rise to the one just succeeding. On the question of how the Buddha explained
the continuity of life, the scholars cite the example of flame. The flame of
each moment is dependent on its own condition and different from that the other
moment which is depends on other conditions. Yet there is an unbroken
succession of the different flames. Again, as from one flame another may be
lighted, though the two are different, they are connected casually. The
conception of a soul is thus replaced here by that of an unbroken stream of
consciousness as in the philosophy of William James.
like chariot (Nagasena used this
metaphor to answer King Milinda)
Psychology currently has made the
expression psychology without a soul. Lange first used this term. He admitted
that, soul is only a label attached to the bundle of sensations, emotions and
sentiments.
Self, then, is a generic idea
standing for a collection of mental states.
2. The Buddha does not deny the existence of soul
From a psychological point of view,
man, is analysable also into an aggregate of body (rupa), and four kinds of mental processes, feeling (vedana), perception (samjna), disposition (samskara), including will (cetana), and self-consciousness (vijna).
soul is an aggregate of these five
skandhas
3. The Buddha affirms the existence of soul but does not accept its
permanence
The Buddha nowhere denies the
existence of soul. He denies the permanent nature of soul.
Radhakrishnan says that the Buddha
clearly tells us what the soul is not, though he does not give any clear
account of what it is. It is however; wrong to think that there is no soul at
all according to the Buddha. These scholars hold that according to the Buddha
the soul is impermanent. It is an aggregate. It is the mind-body complex. It is
a series of successive mental and bodily processes, which are impermanent.
Therefore, there is no permanent soul.
Nagasena recognizes the distinction
between thoughts and things. In every individual he admits there is body (rupa)
and mind (nama).Only mind is not a permanent self any more than the body.
Buddhaghosa emphatically denies the existence of permanent soul. All things,
the Buddha repeatedly teaches, are subject to change and decay.
The Buddha, therefore, says, 'knows
that whatever exists arises from causes and conditions and is in every respect
impermanent’. As a result, we can surely say that the Buddha didn’t accept the
permanence of the soul.
4. The soul is empirically real and transcendentally unreal
Nagarjuna holds that according to
the Buddha the soul is both existent and non-existent. He explains this in his
commentary on the prajnaparamitasutra. He says that the Tathagata (the Buddha)
sometimes taught that the atman exists and at other times he taught that the
atman does not exist. When he preached that the atman exists and is the receiver
of misery and happiness in the successive lives as the reward of his own karma,
his object was to save men from falling into the heresy of nihilism
(ucchedavade). When he taught that there is no atman in the sense of a creator
or perceiver or an absolutely free agent, apart from the conventional name
given to the aggregate of five skandhas, his object was to save men from
falling into the opposite heresy of eternalism (sasvatavada).
T.R.V. Murti supports Nagarjun’s
position. He says that the Buddha distinguished between lower or empirical soul
and the higher or transcendental soul. The former is real and the latter is
unreal. That means, the soul is empirically real and transcendentally unreal.
This view seems to be more plausible than any other views stated above.
C/ What we can and can’t accept:
1) As the skandhas which constitute the soul exists, it can’t
be said that the soul does not exists. The self is neither the same as nor
entirely different from the skandhas.
2) It is an extreme view, which the Buddha always discarded.
The second view which affirms the existence of a permanent soul does not also
seem to be acceptable, for the Buddha did not believe in permanence at all.
3) The third view is better than the first and second view but
its only fault is that it does not explain how the two opposite views are
synthesized by the Buddha. Moreover, Nagasena rightly says that he does not
know the self substance, that in which the qualities inhere according to Descartes.
Nevertheless, we have no idea of it, and we cannot presume to give any
intelligible account of its relation to the body which it is supposed to
support.
Now the fourth one is more acceptable, for it is devoid of all
the drawbacks of the first three views. It affirms the existence of the soul
and thereby removes the problems of non-existence of the soul. It denies the
permanent nature of the soul. Thereby it maintains the Buddha’s original point
that all things are transitory. It makes a content synthesis of existence and
non-existence, reality and unreality, in terms of the empirical and the
transcendental.
The problem of the nature of the
soul is the most celebrated till today and even with a rigorous
anti-meta-physical rational mind the Buddha had to deal with it. However, he
remained silent on these issues. Despite of that fact, the later Buddhist
philosophers like Nagasena, Buddhagosha, and Nagarjuna took interest in this
problem. The anti-meta-physical approach was not proven worthy enough to restrain
these thinkers to indulge themselves in issues like soul.
TVN.
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