The All-India celebrations of the twenty-fifth centenary of the Great Saint Gautama Buddha have served to rouse our consciousness as to the grandeur and excellence of our cultural heritage as also as our ancient cultural link with the eastern countries of Asia. The contributions of Buddhism to Indian culture are varied in the domains of language and literature, art and architecture, and moral and social ideals.
Gautama Buddha lived in an age of iron-cased beliefs and traditions, and he had to overcome an almost insurmountable opposition offered by the deep-rooted orthodoxy of a large section of the people with their long-established rituals and ceremonies. His teachings, however, appealed both to the intellectuals and the masses realizing for the first time that the path of salvation could not be the monopoly of the few. His emphasis on self-reliance and his exposition of the law of causality were notable contributions to Indian thought and religion.
PHILOSOPHY: Gautama Buddha was brought up in the Indian traditional faith and doctrines but he dared to challenge their efficacy and usefulness in reducing and ultimately eliminating human suffering. In pre-Buddha days, many thinkers applied their minds to the quest for the Truth, but their thoughts and beliefs have not come down to us except those found in the Upanisads and the Jaina literature. In the former, the findings about the Truth and its nature were varied, and it is the monistic conception that found prominence. The highest Truth, according to this view, is transcendental, and so it can be referred to by negations only of known concepts, Gautama Buddha subscribed to this view but he adhered strictly to negative terms and criticized all attempts at forming any positive concept about the ultimate Truth. It has been expressed in these words by Nagarjuna:
एतत् तल्लोकनाथानां बुद्धानां शासनामृतम् ॥
[It connotes neither one nor many; it is neither annihilation nor eternality-this is the immortal teaching of Buddhas, the leaders of the world.]
His thoroughgoing view in this respect is due to his firm conviction that the Absolute is perfectly absolute and has no relation whatsoever with the composite universe. It is the Asankhata or the reconstituted, and hence uncaused and unconditioned, unoriginated and undecaying, attributeless, the same, and it has nothing to do with Samkhata, the constituted. He would not admit, even that 'it is', or 'it is not' or it is both 'is and is not', or it is not both is and is not'. In the very first Sutta of the Dighanikaya acknowledged as the Buddhavacana by all sects of Buddhism, he warned his disciples against any attempt to speculate about the Ultimates, which he said, could only be realized by the Perfect within one's self (pancetta veritable viññahi). He instructed them to apply their minds to the origin and decay of the constituted world which lacks substantiality and is subject to impermanence and painfulness. It is for this reason that his disciples went to the utmost lengths to analyze the physical and mental constituents of a being in the Abhidhamma texts. "Buddha's appeal was to logic, reason, and experience, his emphasis was on ethics, and his method was one of psychological analysis," says Nehru in his "Discovery of India" (1956), P. 109. In the course of his analysis of the phenomenal world, Buddha visualized the law of causality or the law of momentary sequence of the dynamic states of worldly beings and objects, and it is by this law that he establishes the non-existence of the eternal soul. Of notable importance is his ks anikavada, which implies that a cause has no duration, and it ceases as soon as the effect is produced; there is not even an infinitesimal interval between the cause and its effect. There is no static cause in a dynamic world and it is by inference only that we say that the cause produces an effect. Bertrand Russell in his "Mysticism and Logic" (p. 192)) says that cause and effect are mere sequences, and there is no law of causality but mere causal sequences, "the earlier event is the cause and the later event the effect", as "night is the cause of day". This interpretation has some affinity with the Buddhist law of causation. A being, according to the Buddhists, is a ceaseless stream of mental and physical constituents (nama-rupa), which disintegrate and re-integrate almost simultaneously. Such disintegration and re-integration are invariable sequences and not exactly cause and effect, as there is no substance to maintain the relation of cause and effect, nor is there any interval for the cause to produce an effect.
