– Dr. Shashibhushan Das Gupta
The metaphysical dialectics of the Shūnyavādin and the Vijñānavādin Buddhists prepared the ground for the monistic conception of the ultimate reality of the Vēdāntins. The task of destroying the older doctrines was undertaken and very ably done by the Buddhists. But the work of building up the edifice of a constructive system was left for the Vēdāntins to undertake. Nāgārjuna, as we have already seen, frankly confessed that he had no thesis to prove, his only business was to contradict others. The Vijnānavādins, however, were not uncompromising negativists, but their positive standpoint is also not very clear and firm; it was left for ācārya Shankara to draw the logical conclusions from the data supplied by the Buddhists. The exact position of Nāgārjuna is rather difficult to understand. His opponents, viz., the Vijnānavādins and the Vēdāntins have always criticized his Shūnyavāda as pure nihilism; but his Shūnyatā also admits the interpretation of an absolute transcendental reality always escaping the grasp of intellectual comprehension and verbal exposition, and in this way, it may be said to have assimilated the Brahman of the Upaniṣads and anticipated the Brahman of the Vēdāntins. The general attitude of Buddha and the Buddhists towards the ontological problem does not seem to be any clear-cut negation, but a policy of silence; and this attitude of silence towards the ontological problem is no freak in the evolution of Indian religious thought. The Upaniṣads and the Advaita Vēdanta of Shankara also took the same device of silence as to the nature of the realization of the Brahman. The same attitude has often been taken by the European Sceptics and the Agnostics. As Professor Stcherbatsky puts it, ‘In many systems, ancient and modern, eastern and western, the reality in itself, the pith of reality is declared to be something incognizable. It is, therefore, quite natural to find in the Sūtra literature, where the style of popular discourses is adopted, the device of impressing upon the audience the mystic character of the Absolute by silence. The Mahāyāna sūtras do not tarry in characterizing it as ” unspeakable”, “undefinable” etc.
In the chapter on the nature of Nirvāṇa in the Mādhyamika-vr̥tti of Nāgārjuna, we find the nature of things (dharmas) described as:
avācō’nakṣarāḥ sarva-śūnyāḥ śāntādinirmalāḥ |
All the dharmas are unspeakable, unchanging, all-void, quiescent, and pure. Nāgārjuna himself has elsewhere admitted that the reality is neither void nor non-void, but it is called void only with the purpose of indicating it somehow. It is not absolutely impossible to infer ‘something’ out of this ‘nothing’ of the Shūnyavādins. The Tathatāvāda of Aśvaghōṣa also admits the Tathatā-nature of things to be something substantial, permanent and unchanging, it is also something positive. The Yōgācāra school’s conception of the reality as the Abhūta-parikalpa or as pure consciousness (vijnapti-mātra) drives us very near to the Vēdāntic conception of the ultimate reality as the Nirguṇa (qualitiless) Brahman who transcends all knowledge, knower and the knowable. It has always been vehemently argued by the Vijnānavādins that Shūnyatā was never spoken of by the Buddha as pure nothing; while it is the negation of all duality, it implies at the same time the reality of the Abhūta-parikalpa, which is pure consciousness – unchanging, unthinkable, all-good, eternal, all bliss, the ultimate element of the nature of salvation. Again in the docetic conception of the Trikāya in the Mahāyāna system, the Dharmakāya or the body of the cosmic unity, or the organized totality of things, though not as a purely philosophical concept, but as an object of religious consciousness, seems to be just the same as that of the idea of the Nirguṇa Brahman of the Upaniṣads.
So it seems that as time was passing on, Buddhist philosophy began to come more and more in contact with the Upaniṣadic literature and through its influence began to be more and more positive regarding the ontological problem, and we are not quite sure if we shall be far off from the truth if we assert that the Advaita Vēdānta of Shankara with its colorless Brahman contradicting all the empirical realities is in its turn the culmination of the evolution of the Upaniṣadic Buddhistic thought. Professor Radhakrishnan has gone so far as to say that ‘Buddhism is only a later phase of the general movement of thought of which the Upaniṣads were the earlier.” He also quotes the authority of Professor Max Muller, who says that ‘Many of the doctrines of the Upaniṣads are no doubt pure Buddhism, or rather Buddhism is on many points the consistent carrying out of the principle laid down in the Upaniṣads.’ We may further add to it that the revival of the Brahminic thought again in its turn had its stand on the systems of Buddhistic thought. Gauḍapāda flourished after the advent of all the great exponents of Buddhism and ‘there is sufficient evidence in his kārikā for thinking that he was possibly himself a Buddhist, and he considered that the teachings of the Upaniṣads tallied with those of Buddha. It has also been justly pointed out that at the beginning of the fourth chapter of his kārikā on the Māṇḍūkyōpaniṣad, Gauḍapāda adores Buddha with much reverence.
Gauḍapāda has expounded all his views in a commentary on the Māṇḍūkyōpaniṣad. He admits the ultimate reality to be a soul-reality, but this soul-reality (ātman) in its last or the highest stage is neither the internal cognitive processes, nor the external knowledge, nor is it the knowledge of the both; neither is it awareness, nor the mere contentless consciousness; it is neither conscious nor unconscious. It is unseen, unrelationable, ungraspable, indefinable, unthinkable, unspeakable, the essence as oneness with the self, the extinction of all phenomenalization, the quiescent, the good, it is the one. The omniscient wise in the final stage knows neither himself nor others, he knows neither the real nor the unreal, he knows nothing at all. The phenomenal world is like a creation in a dream; it never existed in the beginning, it will never exist at the end, it cannot exist in the present. All the unreals are seeming to be real. The world of differences, the plurality of the selves – all are as much unreal as the imagination of the rope as a snake in the dark night. In the deepest intuition all the differences of forms and selves vanish and what remains is one Brahman.
From an impartial examination of these general views of Gauḍapāda, we may say that his metaphysical position is not something essentially different from the standpoint of the Yōgācārins.
What was outlined by Gauḍapāda in his kārikā attained its full development in the hand of his worthy successor ācārya Shankara. Although in the course of his commentary on the Brahmasūtras, he has often quarreled with the Buddhists, yet we may say that the net result achieved is but a rehabilitation of the Upaniṣadic spirit in and through the metaphysical arguments of the different schools of Buddhism.
The literature of this period breathes, in general, the same philosophical spirit as is found in the Vēdānta and the Yōgācāra Buddhism. In the Yōgāvāsiṣṭha we often find an echo of the Buddhist idealists in holding the external world of diversity to be merely a construction of mind. It has often been held, in unequivocal language that the notion of the ego is purely an illusion, and the illusion of the world is but an evolution of the consciousness (chid-vivarta), and the original cause of this illusion and evolution is ignorance (avidyā) and the cessation of it is the real liberation. Neither the ego (aham) nor the non-ego (anaham) is real, both of them are illusions based on our ignorance.