FRANK WHALING

SAiqKARA AND BUDDHISM

The various facets of Safikara's relationship towards Buddhism have been a lively topic 9f debate from his own time until now. He is said to have been responsible for driving the Buddhists out of the land of their birth; and now that the Buddhist tradition is increasing at a much faster proportionate rate than any other tradition 1 in India, it may be timely to look again at 'Safikara and Buddhism'. Before starting our study proper, we will look at the many different views that have been given in relation to Safikara's attitude towards Buddhism. The first one has already been mentioned, namely that Safikara was responsible for the demise of Buddhism in India. Hindus of the Advaita Ved~mta persuasion (and others too) have seen in Safikara the one who restored the Hindu dharma against the attacks of the Buddhists (and Jains) and in the process helped to drive Buddhism out of India. According to this school of thought, Safikara was, as it were, the symbolic representative of 'Hinduism' against 'Buddhism' and it is largely due to him that the Buddhist tradition died out in India. Needless to say, not all schools of thought within the Hindu tradition would subscribe to this extreme view. But most of them would agree that the work of ~afikara along with that of KumSrila and others played some part in the withering away of that tradition in India. A second view of extreme significance is that Safikara was himself a cryptoBuddhist. Bh~skara caricatured Safikara's system as "this despicable, broken down mgtyd-vffda that has been chanted by the Mah~y~.na Buddhists ''2. In so doing, Bhiskara unknowingly began a line of thought that has continued from 800 A.D. to our own day. This has'taken many forms. For Bh~skara, Safikara was undermining Vedic orthodoxy with its stress on ritual duty and an ordered society as well as a right understanding of the Upanis.ads by his revolutionary innovations introduced as a result of his unfortunate dallying with Malfiy~na. For RSmTmuja and Madhva, Safikara was the underminer of bhaktt'; and they were reacting against the supposed Buddhist influence upon Sankara which had diverted VedSnta from its rightful development in the direction of bhakti. In modem times, Belvalkar, Dasgupta, Hiriyanna, Radhakrishnan and Thibaut Journal of Indian Philosophy 7 (1979) 1-42. 0022-1791/79/0071-0001504.20. Copyright 9 1979 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, U.S.A.

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w o ~ d follow Bhaskara and R~ananuja in describing Safikara's philosophy under the title ofm~ydvdda. Radhakrishnan would admit the tremendous power and sublety o f Saflkara's thought, but would also claim that he has included certain Buddhist elements in his system and that he has been deeply influenced by Buddhism. 3 Dasgupta would go even further and claim that Safikara's innovatory doctrines "were anticipated by the idealistic Buddhists, and looked at from this point of view, there would be very little which could be regarded as original in Safikara ''4. There is a deep implication here which is not fully spelled out by Dasgupta. He has to admit Safikara's "influence on Hindu thought and religion became so great that he was regarded in later times as being almost a divine person or an incarnation ''s. If this is so, Buddhism lost the battle in that it disappeared from India 6, but it gained the victory in that it won its way, through Saflkara, into the very heart of the Hindu faith. Suffice it to say, there is a very long tradition that Saflkara was influenced by Buddhism. A third view which I intend to introduce into this paper is that Saflkara consciously or unconsciously introduced the Buddhist systematic monastic organisation into the Hindu fold. Most exploration o f Buddhist influence upon Saflkara has been confined to the realm of ideas. It seems to me that we ought also to take more seriously Buddhist influence upon Saflkara's practice. A fourth view is that Saflkara just did not understand Buddhism. This charge is often advanced by Buddhists who are understandably hurt by comments such as that of Safikara on Vedanta Sfitra 2.2.32, From whatever new points of view the Buddha system is tested with reference to its probability, it gives way on all sides, like the walls of a well dug in sandy soil. It has, in fact, no foundation whatever to rest upon, and hence the attempts to use it as a guide in the practical concerns of life axe mere folly. 7 This charge is sometimes extended to that of wilful ignorance. According to this view, Safikara did understand but for his own purposes was not willing to admit that he understood. "His debt to Sfinyata doctrine was so great that he quietly passed over it ''s. A fifth view is that Safikara was not directly influenced by Buddhism at all. This is often the more traditional Advaita view, the logic appearing to be that if Safikara was the Hindu par excellence, how could he have been influenced by the utterly different Buddhist Weltanschauung? As Singh puts it, "His philosophy is an embodiment o f the cultural spirit of Hinduism and he appears before us as an exponent and guardian o f this cultural spirit ''9.

SAI~KARA AND BUDDHISM Sixthly, the problem has also been treated historically. According to this view, it is necessary to try to see what Safikara himself said rather than what Advaita VedSaata as a system says - to see Sankara as a historical figure dealing with concrete problems in his own day, rather than as a representative of one 'system' over against another 'system'. When this is done, according to Hacker it is possible to see development within Saflkara's thought itself o f his attitude towards Buddhist categories. When this is done, it is also possible to see Safikara as affected by the philosophical currents of his time which included Buddhist, quasi-Buddhist, and non-Buddhist elements. Seventhly, a combination of different views is of course possible. It has been said that the practical element o f the doctrine o f Safikara was opposed to Buddhism, but the idealistic and acosmic element was not. Murti claims that Safikara followed Mahay~aa in the form of his argument but not in the content. And many other combinations of the above alternatives are also possible. These, then, are some of the possibilities open to us, and some o f the different views that have been offered concerning Saflkara and Buddhism. What procedure will we adopt in order to create order out o f this welter o f interpretations? In the first place we will look at what Saflkara himself said about Buddhism and from that try to determine whether he understood it or not. Secondly, we will look at the historical development of pre-Safikara Ved~mta and Buddhism to determine the background against which Safikara wrote; we will examine the development within Safikara himself in relation to Buddhism; and we will place his attitude to Buddhism in historical context. Thirdly, we will examine the practical influence of Buddhism upon Saflkara's work with monasteries. Fourthly, we will look briefly at the basic differences and similarities o f the two 'traditions'. 9 Finally, we will determine to what extent if any Saflkara was responsible for the demise of Buddhism in India. Underlying our argument will be a continuing debate as to what we mean by 'Sankara' - was he just the man 'as he was' as determined largely by western scholarship or was he the Safikara who has come down to us from tradition? There will be a continuing debate also as to what we mean by 'Buddhism' was there such a thing as 'Buddhism' against which Saflkara was writing, or is the very concept Buddhism a reification of the modern western mind? What then did Safikara himself say about Buddhism? And here right at the very start we confront the problem o f the concrete Saflkara. For there are two aspects to this problem. Safikara is known to many present-day traditional

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Hindus not through his own writings but through V~caspati's 'Bh~rnati' on Safikara's commentary on the 'Vedanta S~tras'. In other words they are familiar not with Safikara himself, but with Safikara as seen through later Vedanta (Advaita) eyes. Also it is clear that in much of Safikara's writing he was following a Ved~mta tradition that was already in existence. Many of his ideas about Buddhism are not original: he is merely passing on the tradition which has come down to him. In this analysis, I will try to examine what was original in Safikara's criticism of the Buddhists, and also what was a 'repetition' of what had come down to him. It is possible to do this by following a method, which D . H . H . Ingalls followed, of comparing the commentaries of Safikara and Bh~skara on the 'Vedgnta SQtras' - where they agree they follow the older tradition of the V.rttik~ra and other commentators; where Bh~skara criticises Safdcara this means that Saflkara has departed from the older tradition and is original 9b. Safikara's main comments on Buddhism are to be found in his comments upon the 'Vedanta Sfitras' 2.2.18-32, and in some of his comments upon the 'Brhad~ra0. yaka Upani.sad' especially in chapter 4.3.7 on "Which is the Self?. " Safikara classifies the Buddhists into three main schools at the beginning of his comment on Sfitra 2.2.18.; SarvSstiv~dins, YogSc~rins and M~dhyamikas 1~ He deals, in Sfitras 2.2.18-27, with the Sarv~stiv~dins. His arguments against them coincide virtually with those of Bh~skara, and we may assume that they both drew their arguments from the same common source. The question is then not so much what ~afikara thought of the SarvEstiv]dins but what the whole tradition thought about them. Safikara and BhEskara employ basically five arguments against the SarvSstivadins. Against the Buddhist doctrine of aggregates, that all entities are collocations of atomic particles categorised in two or five aggregates, they argued that there was no conscious agent in this theory to effect a combination of the atoms into aggregates, and therefore no satisfactory explanation of causality. Moreover, if the basic elements did exist and act independently, then there was no reason why they should ever cease to do so, thus the conditions for cessation of activity in the sense ofnirvt~na would be jeopardised, l~ This was basically a theistic argument being used against a nontheistic one, and was used by the Vedantans with equal cogency against the S~uiakhya and early Vaigesika schools. They argued next against the Chain of Causation (pratftya-samutpdda) in which twelve links of causes and effects revolve ceaselessly like pots on a waterwheel and so explain sam.sffra~ This line of argument, they claimed, is only valid to explain how one preceding link is the cause of one succeeding link, but it

SA~qKARA AND BUDDHISM doesn't give the cause of the aggregates and chain as a whole. They next went on to refute the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness which used the analogy o f the flame of a lamp to show that particles which were momentary could yet form a continuum. They said that this train of thought was contradictory because the action of one particle would stop before the rise of the next one - there was nothing to relate cause to effect. After that, they went on to consider the Buddhist view ofasam,skr.ta dharmas as being non-momentary. These were three in number, namely space (dk~),cessation through intellectual power (pratisamkhy#-nirodha), and cessation through the absence of productive cause (aprati-samkhyanirodha). Safikara claims that the Buddhists see these three as "non-substantial, of a merely negative character, devoid of all positive characteristics ''n. He attacks this and points out that space is positive 'air' or 'ether' rather than negative absence of obstruction. "There is", he writes, "a self-contradiction in the Buddha statements regarding all the three kinds of negative entities, it being said, on the one hand, that they are not positively definable, and, on the other hand, that they are eternal ''12. Following the text, they both return to the doctrine of momentariness of the perceiver and claim that memory proves it to be impossible. Safikara's argument is original at this.point for he attacks the Buddhist argument from similarity. Not only, he argues, is the idea of one mind necessary to grasp two successive moments, one mind is also necessary to grasp two similar things involved in a statement such as 'this is that'. He thus strengthens his basic doctrine of the permanent reality of the self. Finally, Safikara and Bh~skara oppose the Buddhist idea that bhftva can come from abhftva, origin from destruction. Nothing, they argue, can come from nothing. "The whole Buddha doctrine of existence springing from non-existence has to be rejected ''13. Such, in brief, is a summary of the then Vedanta arguments against the Sarv~stivadins. Were they fair? Did Safikara understand Buddhism? Or perhaps we ought rather to ask, did the Vedantins understand Buddhism? And this brings us immediately to our second underlying problem, namely what is 'Buddhism'? What is 'Sarv~stivada Buddhism'? Safikara appears to have thought that the Buddha had personally taught Sarv~stivada, Yog~cSra and Madhyamika philosophy. Moreover, the Buddha by propounding the three mutually contradictory systems, teaching respectively the reality of the external world, the reality of ideas only, and general nothingness, has himself made it clear either that he was a man given to make incoherent assertions, or else that hatred of all beings induced him to propound absurd doctrines by accepting which men would become thoroughly confusedtL

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While it is true that the Buddhist schools themselves claimed that the Buddha had given to them their doctrines, this statement shows a complete unawareness on Safikara's part of the historical development of Buddhist thought. Perhaps it shows something more than this. He was anxious to defeat the Buddhists, as can be seen from the virulence of this statement, and in order to do so it was necessary for him to stress that his case was based upon revelation whereas his opponents' was not. He shared with the Buddhists their two sources of knowledge at that time concerning the external world, namely perception and inference; in regard to absolute knowledge, his authority was revelation theirs was the Dharma as mediated largely through the Buddha. If he could emphasize that the Buddha was a mere man and that his teachings were contradictory and that they were mere teachings, that is speculations, rather than a path to be followed, then the triumph of revelation over Dharma would be likely. Safikara's primary motivation was not to teach a philosophy but to guide men to moksa by the path of perfect knowledge. In his zeal to do this, he was understressing the fact that Buddhism too was a path not a philosophy. He gives the appearance of a man who has a reasonable grasp of the exterior of Buddhist thought, but who does not recognize it as a faith with its own inner symbol system. The whole of his attitude is coloured by this bias. He is treating Buddhism as a speculative philosophy rather than as a 'path' philosophy, and his own system as a 'path' philosophy rather than as a speculative philosophy. ~s He is applying rational criticism to a system whose epistemology and ontology are not reducible to rational and empirical grounds, and he is assuming that his own acceptance of the authority of the Upani.sadic texts is beyond rational criticism. If this is so, we can say that Safikara did reasonably understand the Buddhist philosophy but he did not really understand the Buddhist path. As we analyse his criticisms of Buddhist speculative philosophy, this deeper 'misunderstanding' reveals itself. What then of his criticisms of the Sarv~stiv~dins? In general, his argument is philosophically fair and cogent; but in certain places it is not. He is attacking a school that was no longer in his time a living force in India, and we are not sure what contemporary Sarv~tiv~dins taught. But Sankara does seem to be treating as one what were really two separate schools, namely the Sautr~-atikas and the Vaibha.sikas, and this is typical of his indifference to history. The earlier Sarv~stivSdins had denied the pudgala (transmigrating self) and asserted the doctrine of momentariness, but they qualified both these statements by a panrealism which by using the doctrine of possession, germs (bTja) and suffusion

SAI~KARA A N D B U D D H I S M (v~aru~), pointed to a kind of self and a kind of permanency. As Conze puts it, "'Possession' implies a support which is more than the momentary state from moment to moment, and in fact a kind of lasting personality, i.e. the stream as identical with itself, in a personal identity, which is here interpreted as continuity ''16. The Vaibh~.ikas had later modified this as being too realistic, but even they had a more positive notion of reality than Safikara gave them credit for. For them, the asa.msk.rta dharmas were not mere nothing or nonexistence as ~afikara claimed. They saw them as positive entities even though they could not be described in words, and they saw the pratisa.mkhy~nirodha as the goal of spiritual efforts. Safikara was therefore lumping different schools together under the heading of Sarv~stiwidins; he was making the unwarranted logical assumption that something that was 'undefinable' was therefore 'unreal'; and he was ignoring the soteriological purpose behind the theory. He also seems to have been unfair in imputing to the Buddha the idea that "an effect may arise even when there is no cause ''17. This was unwarrantable even in a philosophical 'game', for conditioned co-production (prat~tyasamutpdda) was one of the highest insights of Buddhist thought, and while the Buddhists may have denied permanent causes they would certainly not deny the causal relation between things. The central question-mark in Safikara's treatment of the Sarv~stivSdin position and of the Buddhist position in general is his use of the term nihilism. 17a He sums up all three Buddhist schools as being nihilism, not merely the M~dhyamikas. As he writes later, "We have thus refuted both nihilistic doctrines, viz. the doctrine which maintains the (momentary) reality of the external world, and the doctrine which asserts that ideas only exist ''~a. We will look at this more closely later. Suffice it to say at this stage that the central Buddhist thrust from the time of the Buddha onwards had been to stress the Middle Way between etemalism and nihilism, 'is' and 'is not'. Safikara was not examining Buddhist philosophy in the light of its own presuppositions; he was examining it in the light of the threat it posed to his own basic doctrine of the fftman as a permanent self. To this extent, he did not understand it even in a philosophical sense, and in this he was one with his VedSnta predecessors. What then of Safikara's view of the Yogacara system? He deals with it in his comments on Vedffnta S~tras 2.2.28-32. Bh~skara diverges from Safikara here and attacks him as being a follower of Dharmakirti. While Safikara is still concerned with the Buddhists, BhSskara is concerned with the Buddhists as well as with Safikara as a crypto-Buddhist. We may assume that these arguments of

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Safikara are therefore of unusual importance for our study.We note that Safikara is again indifferent to history in that he deals with the Yog~c~rins before the M~dhyamikas even though the latter appeared before the former. In this section Sankara attacks five arguments on the unreality of the world taken from Dharmakirti. According to Dharmakirti, as interpreted by Safikara, only consciousness is real. The usual distinctions of object, subject and the process of knowing are all aspects of the consciousness itself. There is no need to posit anything outside of consciousness for the witnessing subject and the particularised object are ideas in the mind rather than things in themselves. When we perceive something, the subject, object and knowledge of both all appear together and the reason is that they are identical. Safikara counters this reasonable presentation of the system in the following way. He says that we still need to posit an object, for if knowledge takes the form of an object from its containing it this would still not be possible if in fact there were no object. He goes on to say that the fact that an idea and an object occur together in perception proves nothing except the fact that they stand to each other in the relation of means and end; it certainly does not prove that they are identical. He also appeals to common sense and experience in claiming that we recognise something as it is; we see a real object; we do not say that A is like B, we say that A is B. He goes on to say that there must be something beyond cognition, namely a cognizer. There is the need for a witness in order to have cognition. Self-luminous cognition could not be reached without a witness nor could it have anyone to understand it without a witness. This does not mean that the witness, or grasper, then needs something else to grasp it; for the witness stands self-proved. If the Yogac~rin then goes on to say that the self-validity of the knower is his own theory, Safikara then denies this on the basis of the Buddhist claim that cognition is momentary and multiple and therefore there can be no self-validity of the knower. Dharmakirti had also claimed that the experience of dreaming proved his theory. In dreams and when we are awake we have the idea that there is a perceiver and the perceived. But dream ideas are seen to be false on waking, and therefore waking ideas must be false also. The dreaming state is the paradigrn for the waking state. Safikara counters this argument also with a common sense view which stresses that waking experience of objects is n o t negated in any other state of consciousness, and that waking ideas are acts of immediate consciousness rather than of dream recollection. The waking and the dream state, though comparable, are n o t identical.

SA/qKARA AND BUDDHISM Finally, Sahkara refutes the idea o f the aTaya-vijadna (reservoir consciousness). If you maintain that the so-caUed internal cognition (a-layavijadna)assumed by you may constitute the abode of the mental impressions, we deny that, because that cognition also being admittedly momentary, and hence non-permanent, cannot be the abode of impressions any more than the quasi-external cognitions. For unless there exists one continuous principle equally connected with the past, the present, and the future, or an absolutely unchangeable (Self) which cognises everything, we are unable to account for remembrance, recognition, and so on, which are subject to mental impressions dependent on place, time and cause. If, on the other hand, you declare your alayavijhdna to be something permanent, you thereby abandon your tenet that the dlayavijaana as well as everything else is momentary 19 In other words, Saflkara sees the concept o f the a-layavij~dna as an inadequate attempt to avoid the 'nihilism' inherent in the whole Buddhist system. To what extent was Safikara's criticism of the Yogac]rins fair? His description o f their system seems to be reasonably accurate. But we face some o f the same problems that we faced in evaluating his refutation o f the Sarv~stivSdins. He assumed that idealism was the real teaching o f the Buddha, and that his teaching o f realism as found in the Sarv~stivadin system was an accommodation to inferior minds. 2~ There is o f course no evidence for this. He also lumped together under the heading o f YogScara some very different strands o f Buddhist idealism. The idealism of the Lafikavat~ra Sfitra, and o f Asafiga and Vasubhandu who lived in the fifth century A.D., stressed the experience o f the Absolute as Consciousness, o f the ~layavija~na in which all our experiences are latently present, o f the continuous stream o f universal consciousness, and o f Suchness (Tathatd) as Absolute Reality transcending the dualities o f subject and object. But the later idealism o f Dignaga and Dharmakirti was different from that o f Vasubhandu on important matters such as the nature o f the real and the apparent, the nature and cause o f error, and other related matters. It was more interested in logical and epistemological questions, and placed less stress on the Buddhist scriptures. It was more interested in affirming the reality o f an ultimate goal and a liberated state than in the reality o f the soul. When Safikara claims to be refuting YogacSra, what he is really doing is attacking the later idealists and not the whole o f the Yogacara School. In fact, his own ideas were fairly close in some ways to some o f the ideas of the earlier idealists, and we will investigate this similarity later. Safikara does not give credit to the positive features in the Yog~c~ra system which could hardly be described as nihilism. These features were present even in the more logical approach o f the later idealists, and Safikara is either unfair or lacking in understanding to claim otherwise. He

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again appears to fall into the error of assuming that the idealists' scriptural authority was negligable whereas his was paramount; that their system could be judged by reason whereas his own could not. This seems to be suggested in his comment that "this apparent world, whose existence is guaranteed by all the means of knowledge, cannot be denied, unless someone should fred out some new truth (based on which he could impugn its existence)''21. The implication seems to be that he is free to deny the apparent world because he has the scriptures to warrant this, but the idealists do not have that scriptural authority and therefore they ought to accept the apparent world. ~ahkara misunderstood even the later idealist logicians in assuming that Buddhism could be summed up and refuted on logical and epistemological grounds alone. As Conze writes, "Dign~ga's 'PramS3.asamuccaya' admits that 'the Dharma is not an object of logical reasoning', and adds, 'he that leads to the absolute truth by way of logical reasoning will be very far from the teaching of the Buddha, and fail''22. We will return to the concerns of this section later in estimating the influence of Buddhism upon Safikara. We can say at this stage that while Safikara had a qualified understanding of Yogac5ra philosophy qua philosophy, he did not really understand it as a path. The third school of Buddhist philosophy reviewed by Safikara was that of the M~dhyamikas. His comments on this school were inhibitingly brief. "The third variety of Buddha doctrine, viz. that everything is empty (i.e. that absolutely nothing exists), is contradicted by all means of right knowledge, and therefore requires no special refutation ''23. This dismissal in one sentence of the mighty Sfinyat~ philosophy of the M~dhyamikas seems astounding, and appears to lend weight to those who would argue that Safikara did not understand Buddhism. Before we proceed to investigate the matter, we are led by the incredible nature of Safikara's statement to attempt to defend him. In the first place, we are not sure what kind of Madhyamikas, if any, Safikara himself actually knew. In other words we face the same difficulty as we saw earlier in regard to the Sarv~stiv~dins and Yogacarins. Did Safikara know and dispute with any members of these schools personally; if so, what kind of representatives were they? ; or was he engaging himself in a purely philosophical enterprise that had no counterpart in practice? It is difficult to imagine that Safikara would not have met with different varieties of actual Buddhists, but we have no means of knowing the real truth of the matter. If Safikara did meet MSdhyamikas they would have been different from N~g~rjuna himself. About 450 A.D., the Indian M5dhyamikas had split into two different schools.

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The Pr~safigikas interpreted N~g~rjuna as having preached a universal scepticism which had the sole aim of refuting the position of the opponent. On the other hand, the Svatantrikas upheld the view that the purpose of argument was positive as well as negative and that the ganyat~doctrine was capable of establishing truth. Safikara may have been of the opinion that the Pr~safigikas were the M~dhyamikas, and if so his scathing view is more understandable. To be honest, it is also possible that Safikara may have had a wider contact with M~dhyamikas than he reveals. In the last 100 years scholarship has opened up a vast amount of Buddhist sources in non-Indian languages that have not yet been fully explored by students. On the face of it, we may then be in a better position than Sahkara to understand Buddhism. By the same token, it is also possible that there were numerous Buddhist Sanskrit sources available to Sankara (not to mention living Indian Buddhists) that are lost to us for ever due to the depradations of the Muslims and other causes. In addition to this possibility, it is also hkely that the differences Sahkara and the other Hindu thinkers impute to the Buddhist schools were by no means so clear cut and simple as they assert. An example of this is the existence of the so-called Yogacara-M~dhyamika school which combined both viewpoints; another is the suggestion that S~fitarak.sita and Kamalasqila "were attempting a synthesis of M~dhyamika, Yog~cara and Sautr~tika tenets ''24. It appears hkely, therefore, that Safikara was isolating a M~dhyamika viewpoint for refutation that no longer existed in its purity; and that he was equating that viewpoint with the universal scepticism of the PrEsafigikas. Secondly, in his defence, we may say that Sahkara was not primarily a speculative philosopher; he was mainly a 'path' philosopher. His main concern was not to show that moksa was possible, but rather to show how mok.sa was possible. He knew that it was possible - the point was to demonstrate how it was possible and what were the barriers to its attainment. For Safikara the way to its attainment was perfect knowledge, and one of the barriers to its attainment was Buddhist 'nihilism'. Thirdly, although Safikara may have contributed to the downfall of Buddhism in India, there are signs that this dechne was already begun by his time. If gahkara treated Buddhism as a philosophy rather than a way, it is likely that the Buddhist logicians often tended in the same direction of 'proving' Buddhism and 'disproving' their opponents by rational means alone. Along with this change of direction as we shall see later, there was the growth of Vajray~a and Tantric elements at the popular level with a growing tendency towards

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eroticism, magic and pseudo-mysticism. There was therefore some justification for Safikara to feel that Buddhist philosophy was speculative philosophy rather than the purveyor of a way. The flaw in this argument is that there were equally obvious popular 'corruptions' among the Hindu Tantras and the members of sects such as those of the P~gupatas and K~p~likas. Fourthly, there were hints of nihilism among the Buddhists and especially among the M~dhyamikas. This can be traced back to the basic Buddhist doetrine ofanfftman, not-self. There is dispute about the Buddha's own position. For Murti, the Buddha was knowingly revolting against the Upani.sadic doctrine of the fftman. For others, the Buddha was merely being silent about the self and not necessarily denying it. "The Buddha never taught that the self 'is not', but only that 'it cannot be apprehended '2s''. The same kind of ambiguity has remained in some Buddhist teaching ever since. Conze claims that there are two facets to the doctrine ofanfftman, "It is claimed that nothing in reality corresponds to such words or ideas as T , 'mine', 'belonging' etc. In other words, the self is not a fact. We are urged to consider that nothing in our empirical self is worthy of being regarded as the real self"'26. The latter statement implies that the nihilism that is promulgated in regard to the self is merely a means to assert and to gain an ultimate reality that is beyond this empirical world. If so, it is not nihilism. However, the starting-point for later Buddhists (whatever the Buddha himself may have believed) does seem to have been anfftman. We can see this most easily in the attempts of later schools to bring in a 'person' as opposed to the merely impersonal dharmas of the Abhidharmists. The PudgalavSdins did this in a thorough-going way by positing the pudgala, person, as a continuing entity who does deeds, receives fruits, and wanders in sa.msffra. Other Buddhist schools rejected the pudgala, but incorporated the idea of personal continuities in other ways. These included the idea of the unconscious and subliminal life-continuum of the later Theravadins, the very subtle consciousness of the Sautr~ntikas, the basic consciousness of the Mah~s~fighikas, the innate wholesome dharmas of the Yog~cSras, the ideas of Dharmahood, Suchness and the Dharmabody of the Buddha, still later the embryonic Tath~gata, and finally the store-consciousness of Asahga as a kind of Buddha-self. In other words, while the Buddhists rejected the word fftman, in other ways they retained something of the idea. But as far as Safikara was concerned, they had begun with nihilism and were trying to patch it up with these later ideas. What then was the Madhyamika position? Was it nihilism? According to Safikara, g~nyatdmeant complete non-existence and non-reality. What did it

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mean to the M~dhyamikas? Conze makes the important point that dffnyat~ from within the Buddhist Weltanschauung can only make real sense to a Buddhist from within the soteriological context. He describes five stages of insight within the soteriological framework corresponding to thirty two kinds of emptiness. According to this, one first understands what a dharma is and one takes the everyday world seriously; then by meditating upon the dharmas one sees them as empty and lacking in a true self, and one also sees one's own spiritual desire for eternity, bliss and omnipotence; next, having seen the conditioned dharmas as not worth having, one seeks for nirvff.na and the Path as opposed to the world; then, within the soteriological context, the stage of paradox is truly reached in which the distinction between the world and nirvff.na is undone, and they are now seen to be dialectically identical - the aim is now to transcend their identity and difference, and at this stage there is an identity of the w o r d and nirv~.na, yes and no; finally, these paradoxes remove all attachment to logical modes of thought which are now left behind - silence prevails, words fail, spiritual reality communicates directly with itself. 27 At each stage it is this soteriological context and motivation that ~afikara fails to comprehend. He sees it from without where it seems to indicate emptiness; had he seen it from within it would have also meant 'fullness'. For the M~dhyamikas, emptiness was more of a religious than a philosophical tenn. The key to life was the fact of suffering; the aim of life, to escape it; the cause of suffering was our clinging to various things as absolutes. Some of the Hinay~ma Buddhists had rejected the fftman but kept the theory of dharrnas as ultimate elements. The MSdhyamikas now rejected both absolute theories and absolute entities. All was empty, including dharmas, nirvCna, Buddahood and gfmyata itself. They do not exist in themselves and we cannot cling to them. However, even in their soteriological eagerness to do away with all clinging and attachment whatsoever, the M~dhyamikas were also careful to preserve the Middle Way between eternalism and nihilism. As the 'MQlam~dhyamikakSrik~s' 15.10 puts it, " ' I t is' is a notion of eternity. 'It is not' is a nihilistic view ''~a. Safikara ignores both the soteriological intent, and the consistent Buddhist stress on the middle way. Scholars are agreed that the M~dhyamika technique was mainly negative. The M~dhyamikas used logic to show the weakness in the theories of others. They doubted that words and concepts could be used to explain Absolute Reality. As N~ggrjuna puts it, " I f I would hold some proposition or other, then by that I would have a logical error; But I do not hold a proposition; there-

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fore I am not in error ''29. The real question is whether there was behind the negative element ofianyatd, a positive thirst for ultimate troth; a desire for a sense of beyond, a true freedom, a desire to see things as they really are. Did their stress upon the fact that we can construct no doctrine about reality mean that they felt there was no reality, or was it rather an attempt to save the transcendent nature o f Absolute Reality? On this question there is dispute among scholars. It has continued from the time of de La Vall6e Poussin who stressed the negative character, of nirvana and emptiness over against Stcherbatsky who stressed the desire to emphasise the inexpressible character o f Absolute Being. Mufti was influenced by Stcherbatsky in his attempt to indicate the positive intent of ganyatd (also by a Kantian concern with epistemology alone! ); recent scholars have also reverted to the negative idea that g~nyata IS absolute nothingness which is an absolute being without the connotation o f a static reality. 3~Streng expresses a variation upon this when he says that emptiness in N~g~rjuna has the negative function of destroying dependence upon logic and speech as means to Ultimate Troth, and the positive function o f using logical and discursive structures to probe and expand the scope of the meanings present in ideas and symbols. This dialectic, however, is not simply a destructive force which clears the gxound for a constructive formulation of truth, nor even a dissipation of the fog surrounding an essence of truth or reality. The dialectic itself provides a positive apprehension, not of a 'thing', but of the insight that there is no independent and absolute thing that exists eternally, nor a 'thing' which can be constructed. The dialectic itself is a means of knowing. 31 If this were so, Safikara would be right in supposing that for the M~dhyamikas not merely dtman, but Brahman also, is really andtman. K. V. Ramanan, basing his estimate upon the 'Mah~prajfi~p~ramit~stra' as well as the 'K~rik~s', sums up N~g~rjuna's work rather differently, "Negation is not an end in itself; its end is the revelation of tathat~ ... The way the M~dhyamika employs to reveal the true nature of things is negative; but the truth that is thus revealed is the nature o f things as they are ''32. It seems to me that by analysis even of the 'K~rik~s' a case can be made out for there being a more positive element in N~grtrjuna that could not be summarised as mere nihilism. On the one hand he stressed dependent co-origination, the idea that things are not real in themselves, but dependent, and can be seen to exist only in relation to other things. "The producer proceeds being dependent on the product, and the product proceeds being dependent on the producer. The cause for reahsation is seen in nothing else ''33. This doctrine gave the thrust to the Bodhisattva ideal with its stress on

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compassion and helping others insofar as we are inextricably inter-related with them. However, it does not deny existence, it merely denies self-existence; and NSg5rjuna works this out in some detail. He even goes further than this in a positive direction. He seems to suggest that dependent co-origination does not apply to the ultimate reality. " ' N o t caused by something else', 'peaceful', 'not elaborated by discursive thought', 'Indeterminate', 'undifferentiated': such are the characteristics of true reality (tattva) ''34. "How, then will 'eternity', 'noneternity', and (the rest of) the tetralemma apply to bliss (s'ffnta)? ''3s. "Those who describe in detail the Buddha, who is unchanging and beyond all detailed description - Those, completely defeated by description, do not perceive the 'fully completed' (being) ''36. And in the final verse of the 'KS_rikgs' he writes, "To him, possessing compassion, who taught the real dharma for the destruction of all views - to him, Gautama, I humbly offer reverence ''37. And so, from N~g~rjuna's view point, Safikara did not understand that "He who perceives dependent co-origination also understands sorrow, origination, and destruction as well as the path (of release)"38; nor did he understand the M5dhyamika intention to 'save the Absolute'. Safikara did not understand Madhyamika philosophy, although we may perhaps excuse him insofar as many modern scholars have held widely divergent views of it as well. What is more remarkable in Safikara's inability to understand the deeper implications of Madhyamika is that it is based upon a theory of two levels of truth that he inherited indirectly. As N~g~rjuna writes in answer to those who accuse him of denying the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, "The teaching by the Buddhas of the dharma has recourse to two truths; the world-ensconsed truth and the truth that is in the highest sense. Those who do not know the distribution of the two kinds of truth do not know the profound 'point' in the teaching of the Buddha ''39. It is strange that Saflkara did not comment upon this point. In essence, Nagarjuna is positing the empirical world with its everyday, specific, distinct nature; then by the symbol of emptiness he is pointing out the nonultimate, relative, conditioned categories basic to that world; and finally, at the level of ultimate truth he is pointing out the emptiness of emptiness and attempting to see the universe from the viewpoint of the ultimate. This is certainly not nihilism, and it is not very different from what Sahkara himself did. To sum up this part of the discussion, we may say that Safikara did not understand Buddhism as a way, nor did he fully understand it as a philosophy. He was reasonably accurate in his summary of YogSc~ra; less so in the case of Sarv~stivada; and not at all so in the case of Madhyamika. We have given reasons

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why this may have been so. Safikara was refuting not the Buddha himself, nor the original Sarv~tiv~da, Yog~c~ra, or Madhyamika, but the versions be happened to know in his own day. The later Buddhist stress on logic aided and abetted Safikara's bias in treating it as a speculative philosophy rather than a way. The corruption of popular Buddhism that was becoming evident in his day, along with this increasing intellectualism, must have strengthened Safikara in his view that Buddhism was not a dynamic way but an effete philosophy. The stress by all three schools on the impermanence of the soul, however they might stress Reality or 'continuities', confirmed Safikara in his impression that they were implacably opposed to the ,4tman tradition of the Upani.sads and therefore nihilistic. The fact that Dharmakirti and DignSga understressed scripture and revelation (although they did not as he wrongly supposed abandon scripture altogether) again confirmed him in his bias that Buddhism was not a way but could be treated on rational grounds. Had not the Buddha already admitted that no one had 'revealed' his Enlightenment to him? "I have no teacher; none is like me; in the world of men and spirits none is my compeer. I am a saint in this world, a teacher unsurpassed; the sole supreme Buddha ...,,4o. Saflkara himself was more of a 'path' philosopher than a speculative philosopher and was concerned to refute the Buddhists not for argument's sake, but to safeguard mok.sa 4~ In spite of all these and other reasons that could be advanced to defend Safikara, we have explained in detail why it appears to us that Saflkara was deficient in his understanding of Buddhism. Let us pass on next to consider to what extent if at all, Safikara was influenced by Buddhism. This brings us back immediately to our definitions of 'Safikara' and 'Buddhism'. We have seen how Safikara was repeating in his criticisms of the Buddhist schools some of the thoughts passed on to him by his Advaita Vedanta predecessors. It is equally possible that he inherited from his Advaita Ved~mta predecessors some of the ideas that they may have borrowed from the Buddhists. If this were proved to be the case, it would still be tree to say that ~afikara was influenced, if only indirectly, by Buddhism. The problem is to determine to what extent pre-Saflkara V e d ~ t a was influenced by Buddhism; and also to what extent Safikara himself was influenced by Buddhism independently of the inheritance he received from his predecessors. Equally, it is tempting but wrong to read back into Safikara's situation the modem concepts of 'Buddhism' and 'Hinduism'. I have argued that Safikara under-rated the religious, or faith, elements in Buddhism, and that he treated it more as a philosophy than a way in fact that he did not take seriously enough the symbol systems and different

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emotional factors that constituted the Safigha as a religious community rather than a thinking community. However, it is possible to go to the other extreme and to posit that 'Buddhism' (which for Safikara meant mainly a form of Mah~y-ana Buddhism) was a system completely separate in India from another mental construct 'Hinduism'. In fact, of course, it was not so. So-called 'Buddhism' which included HTnayana, Mahfiyana and Tantra in their various schools, and so-called 'Hinduism' which included Ny~ya-Vaige.sika, the P(lrva MimSm.sa of Kum~rila and PrabhLkara, the remnants of SSm.khya-Yoga, and the various sects, were both part of the whole culture of India which was unified at this stage by a common language Sanskrit. There was far more historical interaction between the various systems as a matter of course than we can easily imagine. In different ways they were all influencing each other, and Safikara, as part of the historical situation, was involved in this interaction in an interesting way. The method of this enquiry, then, will be primarily historical. Safikara's three basic sources were the Upani.sads, the Git~, and the Vedanta Sfitras. But these 'in themselves' did not teach the Advaita Vedanta system which Safikara later taught. As his system was the last of the great systems to be formulated, he was influenced in one way or another by the systems of thought that preceded him - Ny~ya-Vaige.sika, Pfirva Mim~ms~, S~mkhyaYoga, Jainism and Mah~yana Buddhism. Obviously the main direct influence was that of the Vedanta teachers who preceded him, and we will begin our enquiry by looking at them. Four are especially worthy of mention, namely Bhart.rprapafica, Bhartrhari, Brahmadatta and Gau.dapada. Bhart.rprapafica is mentioned several times in Safikara's commentary on the B.rhad~ra.nyakopani.sad4~, and he appears to have been a forerunner of Bh~skara. He was like Bhaskara not an advaitin. He was a Bhedabhedin who advocated the view of identity-in-difference. While he recognised the distinction between the higher and lower Brahman, he said that they were both equally real, and that God, soul and matter were all real but not independently so. Like Bh~skara, he was a samuccayavadin, who advocated bothjhdna and karma for the achievement of release. This was obviously the traditional Vedanta view against which Safikara was reacting, and to which Bh~skara was heir. Bhart.rhari, the author of the V~kyapad~ya, was probably the first Advaitin known to history. He is famous as a grammarian but is important also as a forerunner of Safikara. He taught that ultimate reality is non-dual, and that the everyday world is a transformation of ultimate reality. It would be interesting (but unprofitable now) to pursue the question of whether there was Buddhist influence upon

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Bhartrhari; he is also different from Saflkara in his stress upon the soteriological function of grammar, his spho.tavdda, and his stress on Sabda-Brahman rather than nirguna-Brahman. Brahmadatta 42 believed in the essential identity of Atman and Brahman, and that the supposed distinction between them was the result of mffy~ However, he also believed that the soul is not eternal, and that release is not possible until the time of death and then only if meditation has been continued until the end. In other words, although Bhartrhari and Brahmadatta were advaitins, they were conceptually closer to Ma.n.dana Migra, the author of Brahma-siddhi, than to Sa~kara. The case is very different with Gau.dap~da, and he is crucial to an analysis of the influence of Buddhism upon Safikara. At this point we enter the realms of scholastic controversy, for the question of whether Safikara was influenced by Buddhism is partly contingent upon the question of whether Gau.dapada was influenced by Buddhism. Upon this matter there are two schools of thought represented by V. Bhattacarya and T. M. P. Mahadevan. Bhattacarya argues that there was considerable Buddhist influence upon Gau.dapada, and hence upon Safikara; Mahadevan argues that there was no Buddhist influence upon either. As Mahadevan puts it, Gau.dap~da "is to be regarded as a lineal descendant of sages like Yajfiavalkya, and not of Bauddha teachers like NSg~rjuna and Asaflga ''43. It seems to me that Mahadevan is conceding the gist of Bhattacarya's point when he writes, "the main aim of the teacher is to expound the philosophy of the Upanis.ads, and ... he does not deviate from his purpose even when he adopts the arguments of the Bauddha Idealists and dresses his thought in Buddhist terminology ''44. The essential question is not whether Gau.dapada and Safikara were Buddhists, but whether they were influenced by Buddhism; not whether they were lineal descendants of Nag~rjuna and Asafiga, but whether they were influenced by them in their reinterpretation of the Upani.sads. The polemical endeavours of Buddhist writers to prove that Advaita Vedanta is heavily influenced by Buddhism, and of Hindu Writers to prove that there is no influence at all, are unnecessary if we give full weight to the historical background of Gau.dapada and Safikara. As Carpenter admirably puts it, That Buddhists and Brahmans should be affected by the same tendencies of speculation can occasion no surprise. They constantly met each other in debate; converts passed from one school into another; they used the same language, if they did not always employ the same terms with precisely the same meaning4s. It is only fair to mention in passing that there has been considerable controversy about the Gau.dapfaJaK~rikds and about Safukara's commentary on them. The

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date, authorship authenticity, and composition of the 'K~rik~s' have all been disputed. Walleser doubted whether there was a Gau.dap~da, and thought that the 'M~m...d~kyaUpani.sad' itself was part of Gau.dapada. It has been argued that the fourth chapter of the K~rik~s was by a Buddhist; that Gau.dapada himself was a Buddhist; and that Safikara's commentary was not by Safikara. In order to save time, I intend to follow the general consensus that Gau.dap~da DID write the Karik~s, and that he wrote ALL of them, and that Safikara did write the commentary on Gau.dap~da. 4sa What then is the importance for our study of Gau.dapSda's KSrik~s on the M~3..dSkya Upani.sad? Safikara saluted Gau.dapada as the gum of his guru, the great teacher, the ultimate guru, the adored of the adored, the one who churned the ocean of the Veda. He claimed that it was Gau.dapada (rather than B~dar~ya.na the author of the Vedanta S0tras) who had recovered the meaning of the Upani.sads. He wrote a super-commentary upon the M~n.d~kya Upani.sad together with the Gau.dapada KSrik~s. He realised the magnitude of Gau.dapada's historical vision in reinterpreting the Upani.sads in the light of the thought of NagSrjuna and Vasubandhu (whether he knew the connection or not), and he built upon Gau.dap~da's vision the greater edifice of Advaita Vedanta. What then was the relationship of Gau.dapada to Buddhism? In the first place, his MfO..d0kya KS.rik5s were probably modelled, especially in the fourth chapter, upon the M5dhyamika Karik~s of N5g~rjuna; and show all the signs of having been written as a response to Nagarjuna and the later Vijfianav~da developments. He must have lived around the early fifth century A.D. after N~gSrjuna, ~,ryadeva and Asafiga, and he was probably a contemporary of Dign~ga. In the second place he uses Buddhist concepts and terms. In chapter one of the KSrik~s he introduces the idea of non-origination, that creation is only appearance, that it is rn~,ya "When the jiva sleeping on account of illusion which has no beginning is awakened, he realises (the state of Tfirya) which is unborn and in which there is neither sleep nor dream nor duality ''46. He admits that the idea of creation and the lower Brahman are useful as secondary and didactic devices to help the dull-witted who are not yet capable of arriving at the higher truth. But at the higher level of truth, "There is no disappearance, nor origination; no one in bondage, no one who works for success; no one who is desirous of emancipation, no one who is emancipated - This is the highest truth ''47. The idea ofrng,y~ and the two-truth theory are, as we have seen, present in Buddhism. In the second chapter on falsity, Gau.dap~da again seems to borrow from N~g~rjuna and VijfianavSda. He points out that the experience of duality is a

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false experience. He gives the paradigm of the dream as giving a vivid but false experience of something out there. Similarly the external world is objective but not real. The fact that we see it does not justify its existence metaphysically. Likewise, the fftman deludes itself by its own mffy# into imagining itself to be something that it is not. In a verse very reminiscent of N~gSrjuna, he points out that the world is a construct of the imagination, "As dream and illusion are seen, and as is the town o f Gandharvas, so is seen all this universe by those who are well-versed in the Vedantas ''48. The whole argument in this chapter which is based upon the dream analogy and the idea o f mental construction through m~y~has similarities to the Vijfirmavada mode of thought. The idea of vikalpa, was one o f the great achievements of the Buddhists; and it is now introduced by Gau.dapSda into Advaita. In the third chapter, Gau.dap5da introduces the idea which would be developed by Safikara that certain passages o f scripture are basic, others are secondary. Some passages which suggest creation are valid at their own level of truth but are secondary to the ultimate truth of non-duality. "The creation which is urged in different manners with the illustrations of earth, metal, sparks, etc., is only a means for an introduction (to the truth). There is in no way any distinction (between Atman and Jlva) ''49. This idea was already present in NSg~rjuna. In the next KS.rik~, Gau.dapada points out that there are different spiritual stages, and one should apply the teaching which is relevant for the particular stage. "There are three spiritual stages, viz., of lower vision, of middle vision, and of higher vision; and this updsand 'worship' is laid down for them out of kindness "s~ As we have seen this also was already present in Mfidhyamika. The fourth chapter is modelled on Nag~rjuna's Madhyamika Karika and seems almost to be a parody. Gau.dapada uses the same sort o f destructive dialectic, and the mode o f argument seems to be taken from NfigSrjuna and the content from Vijfianavada. He refers to three kinds of knowledge such as are discussed in Yogacara texts, That which consists of the two, the object and (its) perception, is regarded as mundane; one without the object, but with the perception is regarded as pure mundane; while one without the object and the perception is said to be supra-mundane - This is to be understood to be the knowledge and the knowable as is always declared by the Buddhas s~. He refers also to the image of the fire-brand as illustrating the idea that subject and object are manifestations o f mind, "As a firebrand being moved appears to be straight, or crooked, and so on, even so the mind when it moves appears as the perceived (i.e. subject) and the perceptible (i.e. object) ''s2 Many o f the

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k~ik~s of this chapter are taken up with a justification of the doctrine of

ajdti, non-origination, on the lines already followed by Nag~rjuna. Gau.dap~da refers to the three levels of reality, empirical, imagined and perfect, such as were found in Buddhism, "One (held) to be unborn is so in empirical truth which is imagined, but in absolute truth it is even not unborn; for that which is dependent comes into being in empirical truth, the cause of appearance ''s3. There is also use of the term aspargayoga, non-touchyoga, such as is associated with the last of the nine Buddhist meditations. In this fourth chapter, Gau.dapada often mentions the Buddha and the Buddhists in an approving manner and in the first verse he offers what appears to be a salutation to the Buddha himself. However, it is important to realise that Gau.dapada does not accept the conclusions of the Buddhists in this chapter even though he accepts their terminology and modes of argument. The opening salutation could equally well be directed to NhraYa0a or Vi.s.nu. Having used the arguments of the idealists against the realists he then proceeds to destroy the argument of the idealists by stressing the dtman over against Vijfiana momentariness, and Absolute Being over against Emptiness. And so Bhattacarya is right in asserting that Gau.dapada "has quoted almost fully, partially or substantially from works of some celebrated Buddhist teachers who flourished between 200 A.D. and 400 A.D. ''s4 But this does not mean that he has become a Buddhist or that he has forsaken VedSnta. He merely reinterpreted the message of the Upanisads in the language and thought forms of his day, and in so doing he paved the way for Safikara to carry on his work in a more systematic way. What exactly was the nature of the revolution that Gau.dapSda had accomplished within Vedanta thought? We can see it most clearly by comparing Gaudapada's Vedanta with what had gone before. His predecessors had taught the sole reality of Brahman, but they had also allowed the possibility of modifications in Brahman, and even of parts to Brahman. They had taken the Upani.sadic creation texts literally, and seen the ]Fva and the world as parts of Brahman. Gaudap~da insisted that duality was unreal and that advaita was ultimate, "this duality is mere illusion, in absolute truth there is non-duality"Ss; "the supreme reality is non-duality ''s6. He also insisted that there was no creation or parcelling out of Brahman, and that the accounts of creation were secondary devices. His predecessors had taught that Brahman had qualities and aspects, and that within Brahman there was both unity and diversity. While not admitting difference in kind within Brahman they did admit internal diversity and even individual

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distinctions according to the philosophy o f bheda-bheda (identity and difference). Gau.dap~tda denied this, and stressed that any form o f duality or difference was illusory. His predecessors gave due weight to meditation (updsand) and works or ritual (karma) as well as knowledge in the obtaining o f release, and they suggested that in muktt" (release) there was not complete identity between the jTva and Brahman but only similarity. Gau.dapSda stressed the way of knowledge through yoga and rejected other methods to release, "When by the knowledge o f the truth ofdtman it (the mind) ceases from imagining it goes to the state o f non-mind being non-cognizant in the absence of the things to be cognized ''sT. He also stressed the identity of the j~va and Brahman, and insisted that their difference was only apparent. His predecessors had seen Vedanta as a sequel to the earlier portion o f the Vedas, and having a close affinity to them. Gau.dapSda begins the process o f rejecting the earlier Vedas as authority, and he also begins the distinction between lower and higher texts within the Upanis.ads that Safikara would pursue. Gau.dap~da's predecessors had been vague in their notion ofavidyd. They had admitted the function o f Brahman to become many, and they had admitted that there was a real transformation of Brahman into the world and the world into Brahman. They had no doctrine o f appearance. Gau.dap5da used the analogies o f the dream and the rope-snake to show that a thing can appear and be taken as real when in fact it is not. His notion of appearance and rndydwere very important. And so Gau.dapgda effected a revolution within Vedanta and, as Murti puts it, "ajativ~da, vivartav~da and m~yav~da are all established as the true import o f the Vedanta ''s8. While it is theoretically possible that this could have been an internal revolution effected by an inner dynamic within Vedanta itself, and that there may have been a school o f Vedanta that had influenced M~dhyamika and Vijfianav5da and which now became dominant due to Gau.dap~da, there is no evidence for this. By far the most reasonable explanation for this transformation within Vedanta is the obvious one that Gau.dap~da was influenced consciously or unconsciously by Buddhism. It does not matter too much whether Gau.dap~da's purpose was apologetic and missionary, as Mahadevan claims, Gau.dapada lived and taught in an age when the Mahay~na was having a great hold on the minds of the people. The task of a teacher of Ved~lnta at such a time would naturally be twofold - to convince the followers of the Upanisads that their path was sound, and to spread the knowledge of the Vedanta among the Bauddhas themselves. To secure this twnfold objective, it would seem, Gau.dapada adopted the logical method of (argumentation ha) expounding the Vedfintaand the Bauddha modes of expression and argumentation, s~

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or whether he was consciously borrowing directly from Vijfi~mav-adaand M~dhyamika, as Bhattacarya claims. It is a matter of historical fact that the Advaita Vedanta set forth by Gau.dap~da was different from the Vedanta that had gone before, and much of that difference can be explained by reference to his conscious or unconscious debt to Mah~y~na Buddhism. The important point for our purposes is that Safikara regarded Gau.dapada (traditionally the guru of Govinda, his own guru) as the one who gave him the key to unlock the door of the Upanisads, and that key had as its elements some of the facets that Gau.dap~da had incorporated in his system through his 'dialogue' with the Buddhists - the idea o f m d y d ; the two truth theory; the higher and lower Brahman; creation as a secondary didactic device; primary and secondary classes of scripture; three classes of knowledge, and spiritual stages, and levels of reality; and so on. To the extent that Gau.dap~da was influenced by Mah~y~na, Saflkara also was influenced by Mah~yima. Indeed, in spite of Mahadevan it seems true to say that Gau.dap~da was more influenced by Buddhism than Safikara, and while he was not unaffected by Buddhists who lived later than Gau.dap~da such as Dignaga and Dharmakirti, part of the story of Saflkara's own development is his own reaction against the undue Buddhist influence he felt he had received from Gau.dap~da. Mahadevan not altogether accurate when he claims, "Doctrinally, there is no difference 'atsoever between what is taught by Gau.dap~da in the K~rik~ and what is ,unded by Safikara in his extensive works ''6~ This statement ignores three ~ant facts. In the first place, Safikara lived later than Gau.dap~da 6~. In the 'e, Mahay~na had begun to decline, Dharmakirti and Dign~ga had lived, " - " . . . . . . ~,d his own powerful attack upon Buddhism, the entire ad been built up, the historical conditions were very nd place, Safikara commented on not merely the M~...dfikya Gau.dapada's Karik~s, but also the other major Upanisads, nd the Git~. While Saflkara applied Gau.dap~da's key to le very fact that his canvas was so much wider, and his qt that he could not follow Gau.dapada in every detail. oration of the G~t~ as one of the three authorities of h wrestling with a theistic text, and as Otto and "stic element in Saflkara is more than mere veneer 62. is assuming (along with most other Indian comte was no development within Saflkara's own th. In other words, for such commentators,

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Safikara was not so much a person as a structure or a system of thought. He WAS Advaita VedS_nta, as indeed on a minor level was Gau.dap~da. Perhaps there is now enough evidence to analyse Safikara historically as well as structurally. We will attempt to see where he differed from Gau.dap~da, and how his own development was in some ways a development away from Gau.dapSda and Buddhism. An attempt to analyse Safikara historically bristles with difficulties of interpretation and yet it is very worthwhile in this study and in other future studies of Safikara. Professor Ingalls some years ago put forward this idea, It seems to me likely that Sankara was brought up in the Bhed~bheda tradition and that he later turned away from it under the influence of a much more phenomenalistic school that is now represented only by the Gau.dap~da K~rik~s. But Safikara never went so far in the direction of phenomenalism as Gau.dap~da63. He bases this surmise upon the innovations introduced by Safikara into previously handed down commentaries on the Vedanta Sfitras which were technically bheddbheda in framework. However, it does not seem necessary to deduce that because Safikara was reacting against bheddbheda (which he certainly was) that he must himself have formally been a follower of bheddbheda. In view of the close resemblances between him and Gau.dap~da, it seems more reasonable to suppose that he began as a close follower of Gau.dapada, and then began to react against him. Paul Hacker has analysed this development within Safikara's thought in an ingenious and impressive way. Before pursuing this, we will examine the ways in which Gau.dapada seems more Buddhistic than the Safikara of the Ved~nta Sfitras. In the first place, Gau.dapada openly approved certain aspects of Buddhist th the fourth chapter of the K~rik~s; Safikara did not do this, commentary on the M~..dfikya Karikas he plays down the ' in Gau.dapada. In the Sfitras, he verges on the abusive. In th Gau.dap~da equates the dreaming and the waking experienc declared of the things in waking on account of the fact thai for, as there (i.e. in waking) so in a dream the state of bein~ differ ''64. Safikara, as we saw earlier, insists that there is a g, between dream impressions and waking ones; and in his ref Yog~c~rins he is also (in effect) refuting Gau.dap~da. Thirdl close to sharing the subjectivism o f the Vijfi~nav~da, "The J touch (i.e. relate itself to) an object, nor does its appearanc is unreal and its appearance is not different from it '65. AgaJ

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refutes Gau.dapSda in his anxiety to escape from Vijfi~na subjectivism. Fourthly, Gau.dapada uses the concept of mdydin different ways: to indicate the inexplicability of the relation between the dtman and the world, to show the power of/gvara, and to suggest the apparent dreamlike character o f the world. Safikara also uses it in different ways, but his stress is more upon the first, whereas Gau.dap~da stresses more the third (M~dhyamika) concept. Fifthly, Gau.dap~da encourages the path of yoga; in the commentary on the Vedanta S~tras, Safikara writes, "thereby the yoga is refuted ''66. Sixthly, Gau.dapSda uses the Buddhist language o f images, vikalpa, and non-origination; in the commentary on the SOtras, Safikara repudiates such a stand. Seventhly, Gau.dapada appears to employ a genuine illusionism in his use of the idea ofavidy~ which would include the later Buddhist idea that release involves not merely cessation o f rebirth but also cessation of the world; Safikara agrees that rebirth is removed by knowledge of the identity ofdtman and Brahman, but he does not agree that the world is removed. Hacker has shown by literary analysis, that the early Safikara was close to these concepts of Gau.dapada mentioned above that he later repudiated, and that he was therefore in his early days much closer to Buddhism than he was later when he wrote the commentary on the VedSnta S~tras. This is an important insight because it helps to explain why Safikara refuted Buddhist concepts which he himself seemed to hold. If Hacker is right the fact is that Safikara HAD held them, but he did not hold them at the time when he was writing the later commentary. Hacker writes, Let us assume tentatively that in order to learn this new doctrine of OM and this new Yoga, Safikara went to school with an Advaita master, who instructed him in the M~p.dfikya KS.rik~s and introduced him to the Advaita system, that as a result he became a monist and was finally given the task of writing a commentary on Gau.dap~da's work by his teacher. This assumption enables us to order certain facts in a quite meaningful way67. This assumption, which Hacker proceeds to justify, is of course a large one. Like Ingalls, Hacker assumes that Safikara was not at first a follower of Gau.dapada. He was rather a yogin who was attracted to Gau.dap~da by his desire to wrestle with the mysticism of the Om sound and by Gau.dap~da's asparga yoga. Without agreeing with this part of Hacker's thesis, one can still accept what Hacker says in relation to the development o f Safikara's thought from Iris Buddhist Gau.dap~da phase to his later reaction against it. This early phase of his thought is found in his commentaries on the M~.n.d~kya Upani.sad

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and K~rik~s, his commentary on the Taittiriya Upani.sad, and parts of the UpadegasShasri, and also possibly his commentary on Vy~sa's commentary on the Yoga SGtras. At this stage, Sahkara followed Gau.dap~da's interest in aspargayoga and Vijfi~nav~da Buddhism. He used the same sort of language and synthesis as Gau.dap~da had done in his combining of Vedanta, VijfiS.nav,~da and Yoga. This was natural in that he was commenting upon Gau.dap~da, but the very fact that he chose to comment upon Gau.dap~da, and that he chose him as his guru of gurus was significant in itself. At this stage, the Om symbol which lay at the centre of the M~..dOkya Upani.sad was for him a central expression of God, and a symbol for ultimate reality, and aspargayoga was the path towards obtaining the ultimate reality. For him as for Gau.dap~da it was a way of transforming mind into no-mind. In his comment on K~rik5 3.31 he explains that this annihilation of the inner sense occurs either in deep sleep or "through the practice of intuiting distinction and through the shedding of passions ''6a. Later as we have seen he rejects yoga as a means to liberation and thereby departs from Gau.dap~da. At this stage, he makes frequent use of Buddhist language such as vikalpa to denote the unreality of the world (UpadegasdhasrF 19, etc.), vairdgya to denote the shedding of passions, nonorigination, and so on. Later this language virtually disappears from his writing, and therefore in this also he departs from Gau.dapada. At this stage, he appears to share the VijfiS.na leanings of Gau.dap~da. Upadegasdhasrf verse 9 says, "for, there is no evidence for an object distinct from knowing" and verse 10, "Or (one may also say): the fiction is equally duality-less; for it is not bound up with a thing. That is like a swinging torch ''69 The swinging torch allusion was a favourite one of the Buddhists and of Gau.dap~da; and Saflkara refers here to the VijfiLnav~da view that subject, object and process of knowing are an illusion simulated by the inner sense the very view that he was later to refute in the commentary on the SGtras! In his comment on the M~n.dGkya 4.99 he accepts the Buddhist doctrine of a consciousness which seemingly divides into subject and object but in reality remains pure; later he repudiates it. In his introduction to the Yogasfttrabh~syavivara.na, he divides the contents of yoga into four sections which are very similar to the four noble truths of Buddhism, namely disease; cause of disease; treatment of disease; and liberation from disease; later he repudiated any connection with either Buddhism oryoga. At the earlier stage, he seems to be on the side of the Buddhist idealists who deny the external world as being an illusion, and who assert with Gau.dap~da that as a result of the ending of avidy~ there is the cessation of both rebirth and the world. In the sGtras, as

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we have seen, he argues for a commonsense view of the external world, and splits avidyd into two separate senses denoting the cause of rebirth and the cause of the world. And so we see that the differences between Gau.dap~da and Safikara are essentially the differences between the early Safikara and the later Sahkara. There is a development within Safikara from his early Buddhist-Yoga-Gau.dap~da stage to his later mature Vedanta stage. This deserves fuller treatment than we have time to give it, but it goes far to explaining why Safikara's seeming hypocrisy in his refutation of the Buddhists was not what it seemed to be, for he was also refuting to a lesser extent Gau.dap~da and his earlier self. Safikara, then, was influenced by Mah~y~'aa Buddhism through Gau.dap~da, and even when he departed from Gau.dap~da and Buddhism in the ways we have mentioned, he still used the key given to him by Gau.dap~da in the working out of his whole system. If there had been no Buddhism it is very doubtful whether there would have been any Advaita Vedanta as taught by Gau.dap~da and Safikara. In order to explore more fully the inter-relationship between Safikara and Buddhism, we must look a little bit more closely at the historical period in which Safikara lived. It was an incredibly complex age; it was also an age of giants. Dharmakirti, following on the work of Dign~ga, improved Buddhist logic and dialectics; Kum~rila inaugurated one of the two great schools of Pfirva M~m~m.sa and refuted the Buddhists in terms possibly more comprehensive than those of Safikara himself; Bh~skara continued the tradition of Bheda-bheda shortly afterwards. Safikara was involved in controversy with all these three schools. He used Mah~ygna Buddhism in order to transform Bhed~bheda into Advaita Ved~'ata; he used Kum~rila in order to refute the Buddhists; and he used Buddhist thought and practice in order to oppose Mim~3a.sL Insofar as Mahaygna was entering into decline, and insofar as this period was witnessing "a great rise of ritualism, materialism and elaborate temple worship" 70, it is probably true to say that his more significant work was done in relation to Bheda-bheda and Kum~rila rather than in relation to Buddhism. At any rate, all this was inextricably interrelated, and Safikara was very much a man of his time. Safikara's relationship to the work of Kum~rila is especially important in connection with his interaction with Buddhism. In two long chapters of his great work, the Slokavftrttika, Kum~rila refuted Vijfi~nav~da and M~dhyamika Buddhism. His motives were different from those of Safikara for he was con-

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cemed to defend the infallibility of the Veda and the eternality of Sabda (the word of revelation). In so doing he attacked the Buddhist doctrines of the omniscience of the Buddha, the no-soul idea, momentariness, the idea of the 'unique particular', and the theory of external reality. Safikara was influenced by Kum~rila's writings, and it is likely that one of the reasons for his retreat from his early Vijfi~nav~da leanings was his contact with the work of Kum~rila. He was especially influenced by Kum~rila's stress upon the reality of the external world against the Buddhists. Kum~rila stressed that the specific and normative character of our waking consciousness is much more valid than anything we know through dreams, and that we really see things rather than our own perception of things. In other words, he held a common sense view point which stressed that there was no higher experience empirically than our experience of the waking and external word. After his early Vijfi~nav~da phase, Safikara reformulated his view of the external world upon common sense lines, although he still kept his central view ofavidyd that he had received from Gau.dapSda. In the sOtras he writes, "it is impossible to formulate the inference that waking consCiousness is false because it is mere consciousness, such as dreaming consciousness; for we certainly cannot allow would-be philosophers to deny the truth of what is directly evident to themselves ''71. His two original arguments for identity and for witness are based upon common sense. In fact, a major part of Safikara's argument against the Buddhists is reminiscent of Kum~rila. The logic is that we cannot argue away the empirical world when taken on its own terms. On its own level it is undisputed reality through common sense. If we start with human experience we cannot go beyond the world to reach the transcendent because the world c~mnot show its own unreality. Safikara and Kum~rila saw the Buddhists as trying to do just this - to understand the world, to get beyond it, to see it as unreal from within their own experience. Their enlightenment was not from without but from within. But for Safikara and Kum~rila transcendental truth could not be arrived at immanently. If the Buddhists countered by saying that the Buddha was omniscient, Kum~rila would reply how can a human being be omniscient? Even if the Buddha claimed to know the central truth about everything, whence did that principle of truth come? Where was its transcendental origin? For Sahkara and Kumgrila, transcendental truth could only come from without - from gruti, revelation. The revelations of grut/are trans-empirical. Experience cannot confirm or falsify; reason cannot supply the criteria for truth outside of its own sphere; only gruff can awaken to transcendental truth. The world cannot be denied from within,

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as the Buddhists claimed, and Safikara did not begin by denying the world he was forced into it to explain the unchanging Brahman of the grut/. He began with the reality of Brahman through gruti; the Buddhists began by questioning the reality of the world. And so Safikara was greatly helped by the arguments of Kum~xila. But the same objections that we raised earlier still apply to this new perspective. Safikara's argument is reminiscent of that of Kraemer in modem times who argues that revelation is God's downward coming to seek out man as found in Christianity, whereas religion is man's upward groping to seek out God, found in the other religions. According to this, one judges others in the light of one's own standard of revelation so that one's own perspective is transcendental whereas the perspective of the others is human. This is unwarranted special pleading; it ignores the possibility that the revelation of others may be real although set up differently from one's own; it ignores the human factors in one's ow system of revelation and the transcendental factors in the system of others. 7~a Equally important for our purposes is the help which Safikara received from Buddhism in his 'struggle' with the followers of Kum~rila, and Bhed~bheda. At the level of reason, he utilised the later Buddhist stress upon logical and epistemological enquiries, and upon the pramd.nas. At the level of doctrine, he utilised Gau.dapada's key taken from the Mahay~nists to transform the old realist Vedanta. At the level of authority, he finally followed the original Buddhist intuition which rejected the stress of the Vedas on rituals, (although of course he kept the Upanisads and accepted them as constituting the essence of the Veda). At the level of practice, we see "his intransigent stand against the necessity of ritual and social duty, his insistence upon complete sathnydsa, on giving up all marks of caste or distinction, this despite the fact that he was a brahmin by birth and his pupils were brahmins" 72. Especially significant in this respect were the reforms that Saflkara introduced into the Hindu monastic system which for the first time gave it what might be called its own saflgha. This aspect of Safikara's work has not been commented on as being of significance and yet its far-reaching importance probably rivals the importance of Safikara's thought. Indian asceticism dates back to before the time of Mah~v~ra and the Buddha. Even then there were ascetics who spent the fourth ds'rama (period) of their life in the prescribed search for Brahman in isolation; and there were also nai.s.thika brahmacdr?s, lifelong celibates, who had heard the call to an ascetic life in their early years. But the Buddha transformed this situation by his establishment of the Saflgha, and his raising it to such an important position that it became one of the three refuges. He committed the monks to preaching,

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and during the rainy season to study and contemplation. The monastic organisation became therefore an arbiter in matters of doctrine; a place of congregational living for at any rate part of the year; and an institution of learning. During the long years up to the time of Safikara, there were developments within the life of non-Buddhist asceticism but none of equal importance. In his time, Indian ascetics belonged to the Jain or Buddhist communities; or they were solitary life-long ascetics or fourth dgrama ascetics; or they belonged to the P~gupatas or K~p~likas who were corrupt Saivite sects. The Buddhist orders were entering into decline; there were no worthy non-Buddhist orders to take their place. Sankara transformed this situation, and incorporated into Hindu asceticism some of the distinctive features of the Buddhist safigha. It would not seem that Ingalls is completely accurate when he claims that Sa/akara insisted upon complete sa~nnydsa for in effect, as Ghurye puts it, he "carved out a working compromise between renouncing this world and carrying on its routine duties ''73. However, he did stress lifelong celibacy and gave a new lease of life to those who felt this call but had been inhibited by the Mim~ipsa and Bheda-bheda emphasis upon dutifully living through the four prescribed stages in the daily life of the world. He also set up four centres in the four corners of India in order to consolidate and spread his ideas. Dw~rak~, Purl', Badriand S.rfigeriperhaps represented symbolic sacred space in Safikara's mind for the eventual establishment of true monasticism throughout India. These centres were given responsibility for the religio-philosophical affairs of their regions. As a result of Sa/akara's organisational activity, temple-colleges began to spring up, and monasteries became recognised as having an educational function. Traditionally, Saflkara is said to have organised the ascetics into ten orders with the names; Aranya; ,~grama; Bh~rati; Giri; Parvata; Purl; Sarasvat~; S~gara; Tirtha and Vana. Each centre had its own special deity, sacred water, Veda, etc. They became centres for the spread of Advaita Ved~.nta in India, and for the spiritual welfare of the four corners of India that were assigned to them. Other centres were later set up and many of them still exist in India today. In other words, Sa/akara introduced Buddhist principles of organisation and lifelong asceticism into Hindu monastic life, and provided for the first time some sort of guiding authority to lay down and preach right principles of philosophy and religion. This was not only useful in his amending the work of Kumffrila and the realist Ved~ntins; it provided the stimulus for the growth of Indian monastic life from that time onwards. Safakara took his principles from the Buddhist monastic organisation and applied them creatively in his own situation,

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Although this reform of Safikara's was of far-reaching importance, one should not stretch it as far as Professor Ingalls has done in the comment quoted above 74. Safikara was not overthrowing the work of Kum~rila who had himself said in the Slokav~rttika that he was looking for others to apply the implications of his work beyond the sphere of dharma, and who was "a veritable link between Prabh~kara and Safikara, between the Pfirva and Uttara M]m~rp.s~s''75. Safikara granted the general efficacy of Kum~rila's work in the empirical sphere of dharma; but he did not agree that it applied to the sphere ofmok.sa. It is in this sphere that his reform of monasticism applied. In one respect he was following the Buddha who had revolutionised the life of the 'extraordinary norm' stage of life without meddling too much in the affairs of the 'ordinary norm'. However, one would have to say that the Safigha as conceived and achieved by the Buddha was of deeper importance than the monasticism conceived and achieved by Saflkara because the Buddha gave less stress to the 'ordinary norm' than did Sankara - at its own level. In another sense, gafikara was following N~garjuna and the two-truth theory which stressed the radical discontinuity of the realms of dharma and mok.sa, the empirical and the absolute. Nag~rjuna had directed his dialectic against "the laws of pre-mok.sa thought ''76, but he had not inveighed against the pre-mok.sa morality directly but rather strengthened it though the thrust he gave to the Bodhisattva ideal. Safikara, having stressed with Kum~rila the morality and works of the world of dharma at its own level, then points out the radical discontinuity between the world of Brahman and this world (which seen from the perspective of the partless, universal Brahman and from the perspective of the immediate knowledge of the ,~tman which is Brahman - is unreal). At this higher level, both the pre-mok.sa thoughts and the pre-mok.sa actions no longer apply. In other words, he was more thoroughgoing than N~garjuna in accepting the world of commonsense at its own level; more thoroughgoing also in stressing the discrepancies between the two realms at the level of action. He followed the Buddha in his monastic reforms organisationally; he followed N~g~rjuna philosophically (without necessarily being conscious of it). And so Saflkara used the work of Kum~rila in his arguments against the Buddhists, and he used the monastic ideal of the Buddhists to extend the work of Kum~rila and to correct its defects. It was part of the genius of Safikara to be able to criticise the tenets of other systems while incorporating the merits of these systems into his own. If there were time, we could investigate his criticisms of the Siriakhya, Jaina, Ny~ya-Vaige.sika, and Bhed~bheda systems -

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to assimilate Hindu gods, image-worship, ritualism and litany, they also courted antinomianism by making the world of the senses the true medium of spiritual progress. Their latent hedonism and superstition diverted a number of Buddhists away from the healthier Buddhist concern for morality, reason and intuition. Although claimed as the proclamation of the Buddha, the Buddhist Tantras were very similar to the Hindu ones - and Vajray~na not only contributed to Buddhist internal decline but also helped on the process of the 'assimilation' of Buddhism into Hinduism. And so, internal moral and spiritual weakness, internal rivalry, and the abuses of Vajrayana were part of the reason for Buddhist decline at the time of Safikara. Another set of reasons for this decline were external. In the first place, the attitude of the Indian kings towards Buddhism had changed. Up to the time of Har.savardhana, there had been a number of Indian kings who had regarded it as their privilege to support Buddhism from the side of the state. From that time onwards, when royal support was offered to Buddhists at times during the Pala dynasty it was offered equally to Hindus. More than this, the sources give examples of occasional persecution of monks or damage to property on the part of the kings. No doubt the sources, being Buddhist themselves, exaggerated this aspect of persecution, and yet the general point is still valid. As Joshi puts it, "No king came forward to protect the Buddhists of Sindh when they were attacked by the Arabs; no Indian army came forward to protect N~and~ when it was sacked by the soldiers of Bakhtyar Khalji" 78. The Buddhists could no longer count on royal support or help. Even where they received equal patronage along with Hindus, this tended to promote the process of assimilation which gradually absorbed aspects of Buddhist life into Hinduism. Sattkara was not directly involved in the process suggested hitherto concerning the decline of Buddhism. However, there are three other external reasons for the decline of Buddhism in which he was involved, namely philosophical attacks upon the Buddhists; the growing strength of the Hindus; and the assimilation of Buddhist elements into Hinduism. We have examined closely Safikara's refutation of the Buddhists and had occasion to disagree with some of it on different grounds. However, there is little doubt that it was not unimportant in helping on the decline of Buddhism. The PurS_0.as had already attacked the Buddha at a more popular level by painting the Buddha (in the Vi.s.nu Pur~.na especially) as the one who deluded the people by trying to steal the Veda from them and by teaching the doctrines ofahimsd and nirvg.na. Safikara himself added his authority as we have seen to

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the idea of the Buddha as a deluder of the people. Kum~rila had mounted his own attack upon Dignaga and prepared the way for Saflkara's later work. He helped in four ways - by responding to Dign~ga's and Dharmakfrti's work against the Ny~yas and Mimar9.sas with a counter-refutation which began a round of philosophical struggle which would 'exhaust' the Buddhists and leave Saflkara to emerge supreme; by the sheer merit of his arguments, especially those against the Buddha's omniscience and for the reality of the external world; by providing a theological backing for the revival of Vedic authority, householder religion, the Brahmin priesthood and ritualism; and by the actual foundation he gave to Safikara's own arguments. Sa/tkara built upon all this, and the authority he built up by his reform of monasticism, the merit of his own attacks on Buddhism, his strengthening of Hinduism, and his incorporating of some good features of Buddhism into his own system, gave to his philosophical arguments greater weight than perhaps they intrinsically had. This was especially so when Vacaspati's commentary on Safikara established his system, including his attack on the Buddhists, as a leading force in the intellectual life of India. Traditionally Safikara is thought to have led an expedition against the Buddhists which drove them out of India from the Himalayas to the sea. This was an allegorical way of saying that his philosophical attack, although not necessarily fully fair or cogent, had played its part in the demise of Buddhism in India. Secondly, Saflkara not merely refuted the Buddhists negatively, he also played played his part in the Hindu renaissance which was loosening the popular hold of Buddhists over the people. There were different aspects to this point. The growth of the Puranas; the rise of bhakti cults such as the Bhagavatas; the new stress upon the caste system and the four dgramas of Kum~rila and others; the popularisation of Hinduism by the new stress upon temple-worship, festivals and the songs of the Tamil saints - all this played its part. There are different theories about Safikara's part in all these facts. Bh~skara 79 thought Safikara had undermined Vedic orthodoxy by his denial of ritual and householder religion at the mok.sa level, and R~manuja thought he had undermined bhakti. One could equally claim that Safikara, by elevating the G~t~ to a place of authority with the Upani.sads and Ved~ata Sfitras and by means of his hymns (if composed by him), gave intellectual undergirding to bhakti; that he restored the Hindu dharma, by his stress with Kum~rila on dharma at that level; and that he saved Hinduism from the worst excesses of Tantra by objecting to animal sacrifices, the morality of the left-handed Tantras, and the ritual

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b e i n g b o r n again. Its r e b i r t h will n e c e s s i t a t e t h e r e - e w l u a t i o n o f m a n y q u e s t i o n s w h i c h b y d e f a u l t have b e e n seen t h r o u g h largely B r a h m i n i c a l perspectives. T h e o l d B u d d h i s t m o n k s fled f r o m I n d i a i n t o the vastnesses o f T i b e t , b u t n o w t h e y have fled b a c k again p r o d d e d o n b y a n e w h o s t i l e s i t u a t i o n to rediscover t h e l a n d o f t h e i r origin.

N e w College, Edinburgh University NOTES i Since Indian Independence, Buddhism has increased proportionately (although not of course numerically) at a much greater rate than the other religions. This has been partly due to the influx of 'outcastes' under Dr. Ambedkar. It has ~!so been due to the influx of Tibetan emigr6s. But it has also been due to a revival of interest in Buddhism as an Indian religious tradition, and part of the Indian heritage. One wonders to what extent Dr. Radhakrishnan's view of Buddhist influence upon Advaita Vedanta has influenced or unconsciously been influenced by his desire to reappropriate Buddhism as part of the Indian heritage. 2 Bh~iskara's comment on Vedanta Satra 1.4.25 quoted by Ingalls 'Bh~kara the Vedantin' p. 65 Philosophy East and West (PEW) XVII Nos. 1-4. 3 Many examples could be quoted from Dr. Radhakrishnan's Indian Philosophy. See for example II p. 471,472. London 1927. 4 Dasgupta lndian Idealism p. 195. Cambridge U.S.A. 1962. s Dasgupta History oflndian Philosophy I p. 437. Cambridge 1957. 6 It has recently been claimed that it remained in India through the so-calied siddhas of Bengal. This is somewhat dubious and depends upon what we mean by 'Buddhist'. See G. W. Briggs. Gorakhnhth and the Kgmphata Yogis Delhi 1973, p. 150 7 Sa~akara Vedanta Sfitras (Thibaut) 2.2.32. I, pp. 4 2 7 - 4 2 8 , Oxford 1890. 8 L. Joshi Studies in the Buddhistic Uulture oflndia p. 297, Delhi 1967. 9 R. P. Singh The Ved~nta ofSahkara p. 11. Jaipur 1949. 9a This point would require a whole paper as a separate treatment and is covered not separately but during the course of dealing with other points. r See D. H. H. IngaUs 'Bh~skara the Vedantin', PEW XVII 1967, pp. 6 1 - 6 9 . 'S'afikara's Arguments Against the Buddhists', PEW III, 1954, pp. 291-306. 'The Study of Safikar~chftrya', Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Inst. XXXII1 1952 pp. 1-14. ~o Dr. Radhakrishnan claims (I p. 612) that Hindu thinkers cite 'four chief Buddhist schools', introducing the Vaibhasikas and Sautrantikas for Safikara's 'blanket term' Sarvastivadin. ~oa This is similar to Nagarjuna's argument against Sarvastivadin's 'realistic pluralism'. n Vedanta Slitras Thibaut I p. 410. 12 Vedanta Slltras Thibaut I p. 413. 13 Vedanta Stltras Thibaut I p. 417. Nagarjuna also pivots his thinking on the problem of the transition from bharva to abhava. ~4 Vedanta Slltras Thibaut I p. 428. is See Karl Potter's distinction between path philosophy and speculative philosophy in Presuppositions oflndia's Philosophies, Engtewood Cliffs. New Jersey, 1963.

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16 E. Conze Buddhist Thought in India, p. 141. University of Michigan, 1967. 17 Vedanta Slltras Thibaut I, p. 409. tTa 'Nihilism'. This is an ambiguous translation of nastika. Nihilism, I take it, has three meanings: the doctrine that there exists no God; the political doctrine that there should be no government; the metaphysical doctrine that the objects of our perception are not real. N~stika has also different meanings. A mrstika is first of all one who opposes the Veda (Mahabharata 12.162.7; 12.15.33 ; 12.12.4 ). Secondly, he denies the supremacy of the Brahmin caste. Finally, he denies the working out of karma (Mahabharata 12.146.18). He believes that there is no retribution or reward in the next world; accordingly he exerts himself to gain karma at the expense of dharma and artha (12.123.15). I have included only notes on ntrstika from Mah~lbharata 12, but much the same will appear from other texts. We will readily see that the Sarv~stivadins were generally nt~stikas but were not wholly nihilists. On the other hand, many of Sankara's followers (e.g. SrI Harsa) were partly nihilists, but they were not mtstikas. I retain the translation 'nihilist' for Safikara's use of the word n~stika, partly for want of a better word, but also because Sankara DID accuse the Buddhists of denying the existence of Brahman and atman, and he did question whether they believed that the objects of our perception are real. aa Vedanta Slatras Thibaut I, p. 427. ~9 Vedanta Sl~tras Thibaut I, p. 427. so Dutt Aspects of Mahfzyima Buddhism pp. 69-73. London, 1930. However this is Yog~cara doctrine. 2~ Vedanta Slatras Thibaut, I, p. 427. 52 E. Conze Buddhist Thought in lndia, p. 265. Vedanta SQtras Thibaut, 1, p. 427. 2, L. Joshi Studies in the Buddhistic Culture of lndia, p. 247. 2s E. Conze Buddhist Thought in India p. 39. 26 E. Conze Buddhism lts Essence and Development p. 19. New York, 1951. 27 See E. Conze Buddhist Thought in India, pp. 244-249. F. Streng's translation of 'MQlamltdhyamikakarikas Fundamentals of the Middle Way'. Appendix A, 15.10. Emptiness, A Study in Religious Meaning Nashville, 1967. Nag~juna 'Vigrahavy,'lvartani' in Streng Appendix B, verse 29. 3o See for example the argument of K. Nishida in 'Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays'. 3t F. Streng Emptiness p. 148. 32 Ramanan has been criticised for accepting at its face value Nagarjuna's full authorship of the 'Sastra'. Most critics (for example Hikato) would differentiate three layers: one by N~lgarjuna, the second by KumarajIva as an addition, the third questionable but possibly by Nag~trjuna. See Ramanan, K. V. N~gizrjuna's Philosophy Tokyo, 1966. Streng's translation of Nagarjuna's 'Mfilam~dhyamikakfirik~s' 8.12. 34 Streng's translation of Nagarjuna's 'M~lamw 18.9. 35 Streng's translation of Nagarjuna's 'M~lamfidhyamikakfirik~s' 22.12. 3~ Streng's translation of Nagarjuna's 'MOlamfidhyamikakfirik~s' 22.15. 37 Streng's translation of Nag~juna's 'M~lamfidhyamikak~rik~s' 27.30. Streng's translation of Nagarjuna's 'M~lam~dhyamikakfirikfis' 24.36. Streng's translation of Nagaquna's 'Mfilam~dhyamikakfirik~s' 24.8-9. ,o j. G. Jennings The Ved~ntic Buddhism of Buddha pp. 6 3 - 6 4 , London 1948.

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16. Hacker, P. 'Safikara the Yogin and Safikara the Advaitin, a Few Observations' translated by J. L. Mehta from 'Beitrage zur Geistesgeschichte Indiens' 1968 Leiden. 17. Hiriyanna, M. 'Bhart.rprapafica: An Old Veds 'Indian Antiquary' 1924 LIII, pp. 77-86. 18. Hiriyanna, M. 'Brahmadatta: An Old Ved~ntin' JORM 1928, pp. 1-9. 19. Hiriyanna, M. Outlines oflndian Philosophy London 1970 (first published 1932). 20. Ingalls, D. H. H. 'Sahkara's Arguments against the Buddhists' PEW III, 4, Jan. 1954 pp. 291-306. 21. Ingalls, D. H. H. 'Whose is Avidya?' PEW Ill, 1, April 1953, pp. 69-72. 22. Ingalls, D. H. H. 'The Study of Safikaracarya' Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Inst. NNXIII 1952 pp. 1-14. 23. IngaUs, D. H. H. 'Bhaskara the Ved~fntin' PEW NVII, 1-4. Jan.-Oct. 1967 pp. 61-69. 24. Ingalls, D. H. H. 'Dharma and Moksa' PEW VII, 1 & 2, April & July 1957, pp. 41-47. 25. Jennings, J. G. The Vedhntic Buddhism of Buddha London 1948. 26. Joshi, L. M. Studies in the Buddhistic Culture of India Delhi 1967. 27. Madhavananda, Swami. Translation of Safikara's commentary on B.thadaranyaka Upanisad Calcutta 1965. 28. Mahadevan, T. M. P. GaudapiMa: A Study in Early Vedanta Madras 1954. 29. Morgan, K. W. (Ed.) The Path of the Buddha New York 1956. 30. Mufti, T. R. V. The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, A Study o f the M~dhyamika System London 1955. 31. Potter, K. Presuppositions o f India's Philosophies Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1963. 32. Potter, K. 'A Fresh Classification of India's Philosophical Systems' JOAS XXlI, 4, 1961 pp. 25-33. 33. Otto, R. Mysticism East and West New York 1970 (first published 1932). 34. Radhakrishnan, S. Indian Philosophy (Two Volumes) London 1927. 35. Ramanan, K. V. Nflg~rjuna's Philosophy as Presented in the Mah~praj~p~ramit~stra Tokyo 1966. 36. Robinson, R. H. Early M~dhyamika in India and China Madison 1967. 37. Sarma, D. S. Hinduism Through the Ages Bombay 1961. 38. Sharma, C. Indian Philosophy Banaras 1952. 39. Singh, R. P. The Ved[mta of&ahkara Jaipur 1949. 40. Stcherbatsky, F. Th. The Conception of Buddhist Nirvhna London and Paris 1965. 41. Streng, F. J. Emptiness, A Study in Religious Meaning Nashville 1967. 42. Suzuki, D. T. The Lahkflvat~ra S[ttra London 1932. 43. Suzuki, D. T. On Indian Mah[tyfma Buddhism New York 1968. 44. Thibaut, G. Translation of Safikara's commentary on the Vedanta S~tras Vol. I 1890 Vol. II 1896 Oxford. 45. Thomas, E. J. The History of Buddhist Thought New York 1967.