Philosophies of India

SR No.: 007309
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Publication Year: 1953
Total Pages: 709
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 34 MB

Page 286

THE DOCTRINE OF MASKARIN GOSALA
the cold of winter or the heat of summer.90 That is to say, the garment (the doctrine) is simply useless. The Buddha's reference, specifically, is to the determinism of Gosāla's principal tenet, which allowed no place for voluntary human effort.
For the Ājivika doctrine that no amount of moral or ascetic exertion would shorten the series of rebirths offered no hope for a speedy release from the fields of ignorance through saintly exercises. On the contrary, a vast and comprehensive review of all the kingdoms and departments of nature let it appear that each life-monad was w pass, in a series of precisely eighty-four thousand birthis, through the whole gamut of the varieties of being, starting among the elemental atoms of ether, air, fire, water, and earth, progressing through the graduated spheres of the various geological, botanical, and zoological forms of existence, and coming finally into the kingdom of man, each birth being linked to the others in conformity to a precise and minutely graduated order of evolution. All the life-monads in the universe were passing laboriously along this one inevitable way.
The living body of the atom, according to this system, is the most primitive organism in the cosmos, being provided with but one sense-faculty, that of touch, i.e., the sensation of weight and pressure. This is the state in which cach life-monad (jiva) takes its start. As it then progresses, bodies come to it endowed with more sense-faculties and with higher powers of intellect and feeling. Rising naturally and of itself, it passes through the long slow course of transmigrations into the various conditions of the vegetables, the lower and then the higher stages of animal life, and the numerous levels of the human sphere. When the time at last arrives, and the final term of the series of eighty-four thousand existences has been attained, release simply happens, just as everything else has happened-of itself.
80 Anguttara Nikāya i. 286. (Translated by T. W. Rhys Davids, The Gradual Dialogues of the Buddha, Pāli Text Society, Translation Series no. 22, London, 1992, p. 265.)
265