Gods In Early Buddhism

Study of Hinayana Buddhist mythology as depicted in Pali literature.

Buddhism (reprint London 1908 edn.)

Throughout the centuries, moral philosophers, both Eastern and Western, considered a permanent and eternal law a necessary requirement for the formulation of a moral principle. If such a law was not empirically given, it had to be determined through reason. In contrast, early Buddhism presented a radical theory of impermanence. Interpreters of early Buddhism have been unable to abandon the presupposition of permanence, however, and hence have persisted in viewing nirvana or freedom as a permanent and eternal state to be contrasted with the impermanent world of sensory experience and bondage. Ethics in Early Buddhism is David J. Kalupahana's balanced and brilliantly concise attempt to place the early Buddhist descriptions of the world of experience, the state of freedom, and the moral principle leading to such freedom within the framework of impermanence.

Demonstrates that Buddhists appropriated the practice, vocabulary, and ideology of sacrifice from Vedic religion, and discusses the relationship of this sacrificial discourse to ideas of karma in the Pali canon and in early Buddhism.

Chapter I of this study, which discusses the older Upanisads, viz., the Brhad Aranyaka Upanisad and the Chandogya Upanisad, describes at the outset how the idea of the Supreme Being, the unique mystic power, was conceived in the words Brahman and Atman and how these two entities merged with each other and became identical. It then discusses the doctrine of metempsychosis as evolved from the relation between the Supreme Being and the world of plurality. In this period, the magician-priest begins to become a philosopher. Chapter II deals with later Upanisads like Kathaka Upanisad, Maitrayana Upanisad and Svetasvatara Upanisad. This period clearly reveals beginnings of the formulation of a system in the form of Samkhya Doctrine and the Yoga. Here the ultimate goal of human yearning, the salvation from suffering, becomes visible. In short, we perceive the development of thought of the Indian Philosophy from an impersonal god (of impersonal powers) to a personal god. But interestingly, a system strongly enforcing the elements of Yoga decisively rejected theism and adhered to the pessimistic thought of Indian mysticism: the Doctrine of Buddhism. This is described in Chapter III.