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 546

HINAYANA AND MAHAYANA
"So it is, Subhūti," said the Blessed One, “so it is.” 69
The term sūnyatā, as applied to the metaphysical reality, insists on the fact that reason and language apply to only the finite world; nothing can be said of the insinite. But the term is applied also to all things of the phenomenal sphere-and here is the great stroke of the Sūnyavāda. “As applied to the world of experience," writcs Dr. Radhakrishnan, "Sūnyatā means the ever-changing state of the phenomenal world. In the dread waste of endlessness man loses all hope, but the moment he recognizes its unreality he transcends it and reaches after the abiding principle. He knows that the whole is a passing dream, where he may sit unconcerned with the issucs, certain of victory." 70
In other words, the concept of emptiness, the void, vacuity, has been employed in the Mādhyamika tcaching as a convenient and effective pedagogical instrument to bring the mind beyond that sense of duality which infects all systems in which the absolutc and the world of relativity are described in contrasting, or antagonistic terms. In the Vedānta Gītas, as we have seen, the nonduality of nirvāṇa and samsāra, release and bondage, is made known and celebrated in rhapsodic verscs; but in this Buddhist formula, one word, sūnyatā, bears the entire message, and simultaneously projects the mind beyond any attempt to conceive of a synthesis. Philosophically, as a metaphysical doctrine, the formula conduces to a thoroughgoing Docetism; the world, the Buddha, and nirvāṇa itself become no more than the figments of an absolutely empty dream. (This is the point that has becn attacked, always, in argument, and, of course, it is an easy point to make scem absurd if one takes absolutely the usual categories of reason.) But the circumstance to be borne in mind
69 Vajracchedikā 21-22. (Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XLIX, Part II. pp. 137-138).
70 Radhakrishnan, op. cit., p. 663. 71 Supra, pp. 447-455.
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