The Buddha's Thought-(Gombrich)

In this brief introduction to the Buddha’s thought I hope to give it a context by showing how it was influenced by earlier ideas, whether by assimilating them or by reacting against them. I further hope to show that its power and coherence make it understandable that it had a great impact on human history. But I shall also try to expound it in terms which allow readers to see that that thought contains ambiguities, or possibilities of divergent interpretation, which explain how the later thinkers discussed in this volume could all claim, without palpable absurdity, to be following in the Buddha’s footsteps.
Historical Setting
The Buddha lived, probably for 80 years, in the fifth century B.C.. The hegemonic culture of his environment was that of the brahmins. According to their own theory of society, the brahmins constituted a hereditary class, the highest, and owed that position primarily to being the guardians of sacred knowledge.
This sacred knowledge was embodied in a large collection of Sanskrit texts, known as the Vedas. Veda means “knowledge”. Writing (if one ignores the evidence found about Indus script) was unknown in India at that time, so access to the Vedas was possible only through brahmins who knew the texts by heart. The brahmins, their rituals and ideology, provided the Buddha with his main point of reference and were a constant source of metaphor. He often reproached them with falling short of their own ethical ideals,
and even sometimes referred to himself as a brahmin, to indicate that it was he who really upheld those ideals.
The Buddha was born into a high-caste but non-brahmin family in north-east India, near the modern border between Bihar and Nepal. He thus came (walked) into brahmin society as something of an outsider. Moreover, he lived at a time of dramatic economic change. Agricultural prosperity was producing the first
cities (since the defunct Indus Valley civilisation), city states, and long distance trade. This trade created awareness of cultures outside India. The Buddha’s knowledge that some countries had no caste system and spoke languages unrelated to Sanskrit liberated his outlook.

Trade also created social mobility, and a new class who needed a religion that neither depended on the service of brahmin priests, nor was tied to local observances and ancient customs. The Buddha was not the first person to found such a religion. When he first preached, there were several preachers and movements
which rejected brahminism. Most, if not all, of them preached that the only road to salvation lay in leaving home and family and living as a wandering ascetic.
The most important of these movements was Jainism, which survives to this day, albeit in greatly altered form. A Jain leader, known to his followers as Mahāvīra, was a contemporary of the Buddha and at times they stayed in the same town, now called Rajgir. Mahāvīra did not found Jainism, and though he is credited
by Jains with having organised their monastic community, it almost certainly antedates him. It has sections for both monks and nuns. The Buddha must have founded his monastic community, the Saṅgha, on the Jain model, and then, in creating its rules (known collectively as the Vinaya), learnt from their mistakes.
An institution founded on trial and errorLearning from mistakes, or trial and error, was characteristic of the Buddha’s practice. In ancient times codes of law, whether ascribed to a god or a sage, were normally created fully fledged. The Vinayais remarkable as a legal system which is not based on a priori principles but gradually built up through case law. Every rule governing individual conduct is framed to meet a particular
situation that has arisen; and the first offender, the person who occasioned the creation of the rule, is not guilty, because the rule did not yet exist to be broken.
When a rule turns out to have undesirable consequences, the Buddha modifies it, or even rescinds it. The account of how minor rules came to be promulgated is often both stereotyped and implausible, so that it is unlikely that they were laid down by the Buddha himself. But later generations scrupulously followed the pattern the Buddha had established of laying down rules only when events had shown them to be necessary. The system is living proof that the Buddha, despite the protestations of followers, did not regard himself as omniscient.
Rebirth and karma
The oldest Vedic text, the Ṛg Veda, contains philosophical speculation, though the dense use of metaphor and metonymy makes it hard to decode. Until very recently, all scholars have agreed that the text shows no signs of a belief in rebirth. Basing themselves on the “Funeral Hymn”, RVX.16, scholars have thought that when people (though only men are explicitly referred to) died and were cremated, they went to join their ancestors, who were known as “fathers” and lived in the sky, or more precisely in the sun. Since no more was said about them, scholars presumed that they happily stayed there. By this agreed account, although the idea that ancestors may suffer a second death, which can be avoided by providing them with daily libations, is found in the Brāhmaṇas, a stratum of religious texts several centuries younger than the Ṛg Veda, the idea
of a cycle of rebirth first appears in the early Upaniṣads, texts which follow the Brāhmaṇas. The oldest Upaniṣads are tentatively dated to the seventh or sixth century BC. The word karma is first mentioned in connection with rebirth in two brief passages in theBṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad (BAU), one of the oldest,
if not the very oldest, of the Upaniṣads.
Professor Joanna Jurewicz has shown that the scholars have been wrong and that the funeral hymn in the Ṛg Veda does assume rebirth (Jurewicz 2004). The dead person goes to join his ancestors in the sun irrespective of his moral qualities. When he comes back to take a new body, he will rejoin his family (offspring). Jurewicz further shows that the form in which the dead person returns is the rain, which is “sown” and produces barley.
The word karma literally means “act” or “deed”. In brahminism, Jainism and Buddhism it is karma which can be right or wrong; but the three religions  understand karma differently. All agree, however, that one does a karma, and at some time in the future, in this life or later, one will experience a correspondingly positive or negative result. The underlying metaphor is agricultural: sow a seed, later receive a harvest. The Buddha’s use of the term has accustomed us to assume that karmaalways has moral value, positive or negative: good karma will produce good results, bad karmabad results for the agent.
In the brahminical tradition karma preserved its meaning of “action”, and referred primarily to ritual action: good karma was enjoined ritual, bad karma was something ritually prohibited. In this tradition karma was not ethicised before the BAU, a text which the Buddha can be proved to have known.
However, the first to ethicise karma were the Jains. They and the Buddhists denied any positive value to ritual. The greatest Jain objection to brahmin ritual seems to have been to the violence involved in animal sacrifice. Their own view of karma strikes us as bizarre.
They ethicised the cycle of rebirth. What was reborn was a soul or life monad, and such souls were found not merely in what we think of as sentient beings but in every particle of matter, no matter how small. Even by moving around therefore, one does physical harm to other beings. Therefore all acts, including ritual acts, must do some harm. Every act attracts something analogous to dust (asrava/influx) which clings to the soul and weighs it down. So to gain release from the cycle of rebirth (saṃsāra) one has to scrub off all the old dust and not let any new dust gather. The scrubbing involves physical austerities, and preventing new
dust gathering means total inaction, finally even fasting to death.
While the Buddha was influenced by Jainism, his thought was far more sophisticated: he altogether showed a capacity for abstraction which we may take for granted, but raised Indian thought onto a new plane. Karma for him was not physical – not even action in the normal sense. His single most significant statement was “By karma, I mean intention” (ANIII,415). A bold reversal of the use of words! We shall see that his capacity for abstraction took him far beyond the assumption that a theory of rebirth required that there be an entity
which is reborn.
The idea that a mere thought or state of mind could engender karma first appears, very briefly, in the BAU; but it took the brahmin tradition many centuries fully to disentangle ethics from ritual. Ritual rules are particularistic, applying to people of specific age, gender, marital status etc.and in particular situations.
When the Buddha declared that the value of karma lay solely in intention, he disengaged ethics from status and circumstance. He universalised ethical values, since intention, whoever has it, can only be moral or immoral. He made all living beings ethically equal, in that they had the same chances and responsibilities.
Since he too believed in rebirth, however, no one is born starting with a clean slate. We are all “heirs of our own deeds”, and moral habits formed in the past (over any number of lives) have given us propensities: it is harder for a drunkard to become sober than for someone who never drinks anyway. But, though the
effort needed is unequal, each of us has the chance to improve or decline
. Escape from rebirth by gnosis
This applies not just to all human beings, but to all living beings in the universe, including gods in heavens and devils in hells. As in agriculture, the finitude of the result matches the finitude of the cause. Great virtue will give one a long life as a divine being in heaven, but in the end one will die and be reborn; indeed, unless
one has replenished one’s stock of good karma, one will probably find oneself moved down to a far less comfortable berth. So along with the ethicisation of rebirth came the idea that an escape from the cycle must also be possible. Good karma would bring good results, which meant a stay in heaven; but that too was finite. On this brahmins and Buddhists broadly agreed, though brahmins believed that there were certain named gods who were immortal and outside the system.
In Jainism things were even worse, because the emphasis was negative: most karma was bad, and even comparatively good karma only resulted in the longer run in a return to this arena of suffering. Thus all the main religious traditions converged in agreeing that good karma was not enough and that the optimal
result could only be achieved by something else, which to virtue added gnosis.
The Upaniṣads posit that there is an eternal, unchanging essence to the world which is called brahman. In the same way, there is a permanent unchanging essence to each living individual, called ātman. This word also serves in Sanskrit as the reflexive pronoun; hence the problem that it can be translated into English as either “soul” or “self”. The salvific gnosis is to realise that one’s ātman is brahman. To realise this in life is to realise it in a further sense – to make it real – at death. When he dies, the person who has achieved this gnosis is not
reborn but merges into brahman, and thus is forever rid of all individuation or potential for a separate existence.
Being as against becoming
In this soteriological theory being and becoming are defined as polar opposites. Being(Sat in Sanskrit) is by definition changeless, becoming is change.Brahman, existence, is a plenum, as it was for Parmenides. Brahman is also bliss(ananda) (BAU3, 9, 28), for suffering and unhappiness are considered invariably to be due to a lack. The logic of this argument seems so frail that one is tempted to seek the origin of
the idea that brahman is bliss elsewhere. Maybe it originated in what we might call mystical experience: fully to realise one’s identity with brahman and hence one’s imperishability is presumably blissful.
The Buddha more or less accepted this dichotomy, or at least its negative corollary. For him, the world of our experience is full of change. Moreover, our satisfactions are all transient; death (both our own and of loved ones) is, alas, lurking in the background. Thus change involves suffering, frustration, or at least dissatisfaction. A basic formulation of the Buddha’s teaching is known as “the three hallmarks” (ti-lakkhaṇa), i.e., the hallmarks of phenomenal existence. These are impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, absence of self. The sequence betrays the Upaniṣadic reasoning. Things are impermanent, i.e., ever changing, and by that token they are not satisfactory, and by that token they cannot be the ātman

He further reasoned that if by definition the self/soul exists, and this means that it never changes, it can play no part in the processes that constitute our lives; we cannot even experience it. What we experience is activity, karma, and the results of that activity.
Thus those who think that this “no soul” doctrine denies personal continuity, and hence moral responsibility, have completely misunderstood. Our continuity consists in our karma. This is probably the strongest theory of personal continuity ever enunciated, for that continuity lasts over an infinite series of lives, which
can only be ended by attaining nirvana.
On the other side of the dichotomy, the Buddha made a great intellectual advance. For the Upaniṣads, only existence is the true and the real – two categories that they failed to differentiate. Becoming is a mixture of being and not being, and so (they argue) what changes is less real than what doesn’t. The philosophical tradition of Vedānta, which derives from the Upaniṣads, split over what degree of reality – if any! – could be ascribed to our normal experience.
The Buddha held that the view that there is a category “existence” is a major moral and intellectual impediment. His stricture was later taken to apply merely to the view that the ātmanexists; but that is wrong: positing the existence of the ātman was merely a paradigm case of the mistake. The Buddha’s stricture
amounts to a condemnation of essentialism (Gombrich 2003).
The Buddha took a very different line: “Let’s start with suffering: that at least is real!” Our problems are urgent, and irrelevant theorising is as silly as refusing to receive treatment for an arrow wound until you know the name of the man who shot the arrow (CūlamālunkyāSutta, MN sutta63). In the text which passes as his first sermon (Vin I,10), he briefly enunciates what he calls the four Noble Truths. The first is suffering. The second is its cause: desire. This both recalls the Upaniṣadic view that suffering is due to a lack, and stands in a long tradition that mainly ascribes our sufferings to our emotions and appetites. The third follows logically: the way to end suffering is to stop desiring. The fourth describes that way in practical and ethical terms. It has eight stages, and leads from “right view”, which mainly refers to accepting the teaching of karma, via
ethical conduct, to the mental training which will enable one to achieve the salvific gnosis

Apophasis
So what is that gnosis? In metaphorical terms it is very often described as the going out of the fires of passion, hatred and confusion. When not using such metaphors, the Buddha would agree with the Upaniṣads only in their apophatic formulation: that the salvific truth can only be described as “Not thus, not thus.”
To talk about the category “being” (and hence “reality”) he regards as a major impediment to spiritual progress. Moreover, there is a serious ambiguity about brahman. In all the brahminical cosmogonies, brahman initially is a neuter principle; but then through some unexplained development that principle, while
remaining immanent in all phenomena, also becomes personified, a masculine Creator. If it/he is also the Creator, he cannot but be involved with change and becoming; the purity of his “being” is compromised. In other words, we encounter the paradox of what in the Christian tradition is called “the unmoved
mover”. In fact, this paradox endures throughout the Hindu theistic tradition:
God has to be both beyond the world, transcendent and changeless, and immanent in the world he has created and sustains.
Moreover, if the highest truth is that brahman and ātman are one, then the soul too becomes an unmoved mover, a contradiction in terms.
These reasons convinced the Buddha that to convey what he meant by nirvana it was best to keep to negative language.
Pragmatism or practicality?
Since the problem, suffering, was that of each individual person, and its solution likewise lay with the individual, the Buddha saw no need to bring “God” into it at all. We need not bother with such theoretical questions as who, if anyone, was or is responsible for the universe; all that matters is to understand that we
are responsible for ourselves. Karma again.Here, at the heart of his teaching, the Buddha took a severely practical attitude.
He described himself as the surgeon who removes the arrow of craving (MNII, 260). He also said that just as the ocean has only one flavour, that of salt, his teaching had only one flavour, that of liberation (ANIV, 203). When it came to administering the Sangha, he was no less strictly pragmatic. Whenever the
Vinaya text shows the Buddha disapproving of something, it has him say that it is not conducive to increasing the number of believers. He then pronounces a rule, for which he gives a stock list of ten reasons (VinIII, 21 etc.). They can be summarised as the protection and convenience of the Sangha, the moral purity of
its members, increase in the number of believers and the good of non-believers
The Buddha was a pragmatist as we use the term idiomatically, but not in the modern technically philosophical sense. As Paul Williams has written, “There is no suggestion that [the teaching] is only ‘pragmatically true’, i.e., [that] it is only a question of it being beneficial in the context of the spiritual path….The teachings of the Buddha are held by the Buddhist tradition to work because they are factually true(not true because they work).” Further: “The ‘ought’ (pragmatic benefit) is never cut adrift from the ‘is’ (cognitive factual truth). Otherwise it would follow that the Buddha might be able to benefit beings (and thus bring them to enlightenment) even without seeing things the way they really are at
all. And that is not Buddhism” (Williams 2000: 40)
In one text (SN II, 138) Buddha says that he does not dispute with the world, it is the world that disputes
with him. There is, moreover, a set of poems in the Canon in which he several times claims to have no views himself, and evidently wishes to avoid disputing the views of others. This is not typical of the prose texts; but it merely carries to an extreme the Buddha’s general strategy of exposition. That is to get an interlocutor to state his own view, and then to correct it, sometimes radically, without making this too obvious. One may summarise this as “Yes, but…”
Skill in Means
This technique has been admirably described by the great pioneer Pali scholar T.W. Rhys Davids: “Gotama puts himself as far as possible in the mental position of the questioner. He attacks none of his cherished convictions. He accepts as the starting-point of his own exposition the desirability of the act or condition
prized by his opponent … He even adopts the very phraseology of his questioner. And then, partly by putting a new and (from the Buddhist point of view)a higher meaning into the words; partly by an appeal to such ethical conceptions as are common ground between them; he gradually leads his opponent up to his
conclusion” (Rhys Davids: 206). In later Buddhist tradition, this is known as the Buddha’s “skill in means” and is accorded enormous importance. A historian of ideas does well to bear this in mind, for it shows how it comes about that the Buddha makes such startling innovations in the use of words; of this his using karma, literally “act”, to refer to intention is just one example.
Retrieving the Buddha’s meaning from the context
That the Buddha normally formulated his views with reference to those of predecessors or opponents means that they are easily misunderstood by those ignorant of that context. Such has indeed been his fate. Inevitably, many contexts must be lost to us, so that we must presume that we sometimes misunderstand
him, and cannot even be sure when. Yet certain meanings have been retrieved by research.
A striking example is his teaching on four states called “boundless” or “abiding with Brahman”; the four are love (as the term is used in theology), compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity. The Buddhist tradition has vaguely realised that the Buddha set the highest store by love and compassion, and has adored him accordingly, but failed to find textual authority for this in the early Canon. But it is there, in the Tevijja Sutta (= DN suttaxiii). It has been missed because when the text, originally addressed, by its own account, to two young brahmin converts, says that the monk who practises these states goes to stay with Brahman when he dies, the tradition has taken this literally: “Brahman” is taken to be a kind of super-god who presides over a heaven above the heavens of the normal gods, and the benign monk is simply thought to be reborn in that
heaven. However, it must be clear to anyone who examines the relevant texts that the Buddha is giving a metaphorical interpretation of a passage in the BAU.
That passage (6,2,15) describes how a person who has attained the salvific gnosis escapes rebirth by going at death beyond the highest heaven to join (merge into?) brahman. (Whether Brahman is the neuter principle or its personification is left ambiguous.) The Buddha is teaching the young brahmins that a spiritual
accomplishment is indeed the way to escape rebirth; but that that accomplishment is not the realisation of a metaphysical fact, their identity with brahman, but an ethical transformation by which they love all living beings boundlessly, i.e., equally and infinitely
At other times the Buddha goes so far as to parody and satirise Vedic texts. In the Aggañña Sutta(= DN suttaxxvii ) he purports to give an account of the origins of the world (at least, in our time cycle) and of society and kingship.
Tradition has taken this all literally, to such an extent that Buddhist royal houses have traced their lineage back to the first king as described in this text. But here too we can now see that the Buddha is being satirical, and that yet again the serious purpose behind the jokes (some of which depend on puns) is to show that
the caste system is man-made, not eternal or god-given, and that what counts about a person is not his birth but his moral quality.

The Buddha’s view of language as conventional
One thing that the Buddha satirises in the Aggañña Sutta is the way that the Vedic texts etymologise in order to reveal esoteric truths. In brahmin ideology, the Sanskrit language is a blueprint for reality; things and the words denoting them were created together. “When the gods utter the names of things, at the time
of the first sacrifice, these things come into existence (RV10, 71, 1; 10, 82,3).” (Brown: 27) Indeed, the word brahman seems originally to have denoted the Veda, the very words of which manifested reality. If the Sanskrit word for “cow” and really being a cow are inseparable, this leads into magic, since naming an
object can be seen as a form of control over it.
Here the Buddha’s awareness that in other societies Sanskrit (and languages evidently related to it) were not known must have been crucial. He recognised the conventional nature of language, just as he recognised the conventional nature of the caste system. Indeed, he is recorded as saying that monks could preach using
their own modes of expression,and one should use whatever dialect would be understood (MNIII, 234). He did, however, object to his words being chanted in the Vedic style (VinII, 108). Evidently he wanted it to be unmistakable that the force of his message lay in its meaning, not in the words used, and that words
had no magical power. While he used punning and word play to convey his new ideas, this was sometimes humorous. Perhaps one could even say that his tactic of accepting the opponents’ terms, such as karma, and then turning them round to mean something quite different, was part of the same game.
The role of Sanskrit in brahmin ideology is in fact so fundamental that for the Buddha to reject it was no less fundamental to his own ideology. The Buddha’s purpose was to convey meaning, and anything that might impede communication was to be discarded.
Turning former practices into mere metaphors
The Buddha’s formulations react not only to texts, but also to practices; karma is far from being the only example. For instance, there is a standard list of supernormal powers (iddhi), such as flying, walking on water, mind-reading, hearing over vast distances. It seems that in his day it was normal for holy men to show
such miraculous powers, which we might call shamanic, as testimony to their spiritual prowess. When someone suggests that his monks should make converts by displaying such miracles, the Buddha condemns them as cheap vulgarity, and says that the true miracle is religious instruction (DNI, 211-4). This is because,
unlike the other miracles, it benefits people; the reasoning is again ethical. Since he is explicit, the metaphor cannot be missed.
Fire as the central metaphor of the soteriology
But some of his metaphors have been only partially understood. The outstanding example is his use of fire as the central metaphor for our normal experience and how to reverse that normality so that we achieve enlightenment and escape rebirth. The Buddha’s third sermon (VinI, 34-5), known in English as the Fire
Sermon, begins: “Everything, O monks, is on fire.” The Buddha then explains what he means by “everything”. It is all our faculties – the five senses plus the mind – and their objects and operations and the feelings they give rise to. To paraphrase: “everything” refers to the totality of experience. All components
of our experience in this world, the Buddha declares, are on fire. They are on fire with passion, hatred and confusion.
Most people know that the commonest Buddhist term for the solution to life’s problems, liberation from the cycle of rebirth, is nirvana, and that this term is connected to fire. But what exactly the metaphor means or refers to has often been misunderstood. The word comes from an intransitive verb meaning “cease to burn”, “go out” (like a flame). The noun nirvāṇa means “going out”, without implying any agent who causes that going out: it just happens. In the Fire Sermon the Buddha preaches that our experience is on fire with three fires, the fires of passion, hatred and confusion; our aim must be for all of them to go out. Sometimes in the Canon the first fire is called passion, sometimes greed, but this variation is of no importance: the reference is the same and the fires are always three. Why?
The brahmin householder had the duty to keep alight a set of three fires, which he tended daily. The Buddha thus took these fires to symbolise life as a family man. This is stated clearly enough in a Canonical text (ANIV, 41-6). Here the Buddha first juxtaposes the three sacrificial fires with the fires of passion, hatred and delusion; then, with the aid of puns, he metaphorically reinterprets the fires: the eastern fire he says stands for one’s parents; the western fire for one’s household and dependents; the southern for holy men (renunciates and brahmins) worthy to receive offerings. It is in this sense, he tells a fat brahmin, that a householder should tend the fires: by supporting people.
Suffering as burning
In the Buddha’s first sermon, as it has come down to us, dukkha is defined as the five upādāna-khandhā. This compound noun is a Buddhist technical term which must have required unpacking to be intelligible to its first audiences. In fact, the term conveys the same message as the Fire Sermon, using the same metaphor; but somehow this was soon lost sight of.
The word upādāna has both a concrete and an abstract meaning. In the abstract it means “attachment, grasping”; in this sense it is much used in Buddhist dogmatics. Concretely, it means that which fuels this process. The PED. s.v.: “(lit. that [material] substratum by means of which an active process is kept
alive and going), fuel, supply, provision”. So when the context deals with fire it simply means “fuel”.
The five khandha
In the Fire Sermon our experience is summed up in terms of our faculties (the senses plus the mind), their objects, operations and consequent feelings. In the Canon there is a perhaps even commoner way of referring to what makes up the experience of any living being. This is in terms of five khandha(whatever that
term may mean): materiality (the five senses and their objects), feelings (as of pleasure and pain), apperception (perceiving and identifying what is perceived), volitions (emotions, of which the will in its moral aspects is the most important), consciousness. Given that the Buddha denied that we could experience a
self, in the Upaniṣadic sense of an unchanging essence, the five khandha have been interpreted as a reductive account of the components of a living being.
But Sue Hamilton’s research has clearly demonstrated that this is inaccurate: they are the five components of all conscious experience (Hamilton 1996 and 2000). They are not what we are made of, but how we operate. Moreover, the difference between them is analytical; in practice they always operate together.
The term khandha has usually been rendered in English as “aggregates”, a term which I take to be meaningless. In my opinion it is clear that this word too was a part of the fire metaphor.
There is a short text (SNIII, 71) which states that the five khandha are ablaze so that one should stop caring for them. Pali has a common expression for a blazing fire or bonfire, aggi-kkhandha;aggi means “fire”. In the compound upādānakkhandha I believe aggi has been dropped,being felt to be redundant when the word for fuel is present. I therefore translate upādāna-kkhandha as “blazing masses of fuel”. In another short text (SNII, 84-5), our sufferings, dukkha, are called dukkha-kkhandha, “a blazing mass of suffering”, and compared to a bonfire which will only go out after one has stopped feeding it fuel.
Once one understands that the five processes that constitute our experiences are being compared to burning bundles of firewood to feed either the fire of our suffering or the fires of passion, hatred and confusion (it makes no difference which way you look at it), this also makes sense of the old terms for the two
kinds of nirvana: sa-upādi-sesaand an-upādi-sesa.
As the PED s.v. upādi tells us, upādi= upādāna. The attainment of nirvana during one’s life (the only time
when it is possible to attain it!) is called sa-upādi-sesa, but this does not mean that one still has a residue of grasping, like a little bit of vice! If we follow the metaphor, we understand that at the moment when we extinguish the fires of passion, hatred and confusion we still have the five khandha, that which experiences, so we still have a residue (sesa) of fuel (upādi); however, it is no longer burning. When the five khandha cease to exist, i.e., when we die Enlightened, we have no more potential for experience; we have run out of fuel.7
Fire as a model of reality
In this instance, the Buddha has used fire as a metaphor with entirely negative connotations: bliss is for the fire to go out. However, in another context he builds on more complex ideas about fire which go far back into Vedic thought.
Here fire is no mere metaphor, but the model which inspires his understanding of reality. For the Buddha derived from fire the inspiration that what appears to be a “thing” is in fact a process; that it is a process which acts without an agent; and that its operation is neither wholly determined nor wholly random.
Fire in Vedic thought
Vedic religion centred on worship of fire and sacrifices made into fire. The fire here on earth is equated with the fire in heaven, the sun, and we depend on both forms for light and warmth and hence for life itself. Like other forces of nature, Fire can be personified as a god, Agni. The very first verse of the Ṛg Veda begins, “I worship Fire, the purohita”. Purohita, which literally means “placed in front”, refers to an officiating priest, particularly one who officiates for a ruler; the name “placed in front” indicates that the priest, the brahmin, has
precedence even over the ruler, as the sacred takes precedence over the worldly. So the fire can be a symbol summarising all that is sacred.
Fire can also stand for consciousness, which in this context is seen as the very essence of life: to live is to be aware, or at least to have the potential for awareness. The Buddha, like Aristotle, clearly distinguished between the metaphorical and the literal (Lloyd: 20-21), but the Ṛg Veda did not. It thought of consciousness in terms of fire without drawing a boundary between what was to be taken literally and what was not. Joanna Jurewicz has shown in her discussion of many different passages in the Ṛg Veda that Agni can stand for
both the subject of cognition and its object, sometimes separately and sometimes together (Jurewicz 2001).
Jurewicz (2004) has also drawn attention to a Vedic myth (Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa2, 2, 4, 1ff.) in which not only is fire consciousness, but consciousness also has fire’s appetitive character ; in other words, consciousness seeks out its objects.
It was she who pointed out to me how close this comes to what the Buddha says in the MahāTaṇhā-Saṅkhaya Sutta, “The Major Text on the Destruction of Thirst” (MN sutta38). Here the Buddha compares consciousness to fire.
Consciousness, he says, is classified – indeed, one might say named – according to what has brought it about. If it arises on account of the eye and visible forms it counts as “eye consciousness”; similarly there arise ear consciousness, smell consciousness, tongue consciousness, body consciousness (from the sense of
touch) and mind consciousness, the last being due to the mind and ideas.
Just so, a fire is classified according to its cause, whether it be a stick fire, a splinter fire, a grass fire, a cowdung fire, a chaff fire or a rubbish fire. The Buddha is saying that consciousness is always consciousness of something. This is the opposite of the Upaniṣadic doctrine that consciousness is inherent in the world spirit, brahman, and hence in the individual soul, ātman, which is ultimately identical with brahman. The point is twofold: for the Upaniṣads consciousness is not consciousness of anything outside itself, but the pre-requisite for such consciousness; and it is inextricably bound up with true being, so that ontology and epistemology are merged. Whether or not we agree with the Buddha in considering that consciousness must always be consciousness of something, there is no doubt that in separating ontology from epistemology he is taking a point of view with which we feel at home.
In Vedic tradition, consciousness and its objects are thought of in terms of fire. The Buddha draws on this idea but is more analytical. He sees consciousness as being like fire in that it is an appetitive process, which cannot exist without having something to feed on. Moreover, the analogy with fire can provide a model of how a process can be dynamic and seek out its objects without being guided by a seeker. Similarly, when there is no more fuel the fire will go out, which does not mean that anyone has to extinguish it.
As a process, fire is inseparable from what burns. Just as there is no such thing as fire without a burning object, there is no such thing as consciousness without an object. This insight the Buddha then generalised: by saying that the subjective and objective presuppose each other and all experience requires both – is
an interaction of both. The thought that subject and object cannot be separated seems to accord with the Buddha’s statement that the world lies within this fathom-long body (SNI, 62). For us, “the world” is our experience of the world.
Ethicising consciousness
In the MahāTaṇhā-Saṅkhaya Suttathe Buddha goes on to distinguish consciousness from volition. Does this contradict the idea that consciousness is appetitive? No; for we must remember that the distinction is only analytical: the Buddha is not saying that consciousness may operate without volition. In that case, why make the distinction? Because ethicisation is basic to the Buddha’s programme. If consciousness is always driven by craving, it becomes ethically bad, so that if one is to attain moral perfection, consciousness must be stopped altogether.
This line of reasoning has problematic consequences for a gnostic soteriology.
But some teachers do seem to have reasoned in this way. The Buddhist tradition has it that when the future Buddha left home and studied meditation, his teachers led him along a path consisting of what we would call altered states of consciousness, a path which culminated in what Buddhists called “the cessation of apperception and feeling”. This kind of meditation remains prominent in the Pali Canon, but it was decided that its place was only to serve as a mental training: the cessation of apperception and feeling was only a temporary state, unlike attaining nirvana, which was irreversible; and indeed, since it was an unconscious state, it could not be equated with enlightenment.
That enlightenment was the breakthrough that the Buddha achieved when meditating under the Bo tree (the tree of Awakening). Accounts of what exactly it was that he realised on that occasion differ: according to some texts, it was three knowledges (to parallel the three Vedas), including the knowledge that he had no more moral defilements; by another account, it was the chain of Dependent Origination (see below). But all accounts agree that his Enlightenment had content, which he went on to explain to others. It was far from being unconsciousness!
The doctrine of karma requires a symmetry between good and bad motivation. So his analysis of how we operate requires that the moral element be accorded its own separate category; for it is this category which provides the dynamic driving us through life and on to worse and better rebirths.
We have seen that the Buddha realised that the subjective and the objective presuppose each other; that our world is composed of experience, which is constituted by both. He further deduced something that I think was never explicit either in Vedic thought or in its Hindu descendants: that what we can experience is only process. Our consciousness and its objects are like fire in that they are not things but processes, unceasing change. Something beyond this is perhaps conceivable, but the very nature of our apparatus for having experiences determines that if it does exist it must lie completely outside our experience.
If I state the matter so baldly, I am open to a challenge: where does the Buddha say that what we experience (short of attaining nirvana) is only process? True, he says it is impermanent, and on an extreme interpretation that can be taken to mean that it is forever changing (though see below); but is that process? Where is the word “process” in Pali?
While I agree that no one word precisely corresponds to “process”, I would argue that much the same ground is covered by the word saṃkhārā, which refers not only to the fourth khandha, where I have translated it as “volitions”, but also, far more broadly, to every element in our world of experience. I cannot here discuss its philological complexities, but I have suggested elsewhere (Gombrich 2008, chap.9) that saṃkhārā is one of the category of words like “construction’ which can refer both to a process and its results. This catches the Buddha’s insight that our experiences are both constructed and constructing. The application of this insight that most concerned him was the moral one: karma. What we do makes us what we are. That intention is the most important factor in the fourth khandhais no arbitrary accident.
That fire is a process which may help to explain both life and consciousness was an idea that the Buddha could find in Vedic texts. But his ethicisation of the idea gave it far greater precision. Creating the conditions in which the fires with which we are all burning would go out was an enterprise at the same time
ethical and intellectual, for the fires were both emotional (passion and hatred) and intellectual (confusion, stupidity). Egotism and belief in an unchanging ego were the fires’ essential fuel, so once they were got rid of, those fires would die.
I find here a striking analogy with the pre-Socratic philosophers. I noted above the similarity between Parmenides and the Vedāntic view of brahman.
In Ionia, Heraclitus argued that fire was the basic element, the stuff from which everything came and into which it returned. He shared the Buddha’s insight that our world is in constant flux; it is a world of processes. Heraclitus was probably responding to Parmenides just as the Buddha was responding to the Upaniṣads.I do not believe that Heraclitus can have influenced the Buddha, let alone viceversa, but in ancient Greece too, fire inspired someone to envision a world of perpetual change.
Cognition
Cognition, for the Buddha, begins with the exercise of the six faculties (indriya):the normal five senses, plus the mind. Each faculty has its specific category of objects; the objects of the mind are called dhamma, which in this context include all ideas, including abstractions. For a sense to function in cognition, there must be synergy between the sense organ, e.g. the eye, its objects, in this case visible phenomena, and the specific functioning of consciousness (viññāṇa) which applies to that sense organ. The same is true of the sixth organ,
the mind. This is a somewhat crude system: the differentiation between the mind and mental consciousness seems to us clumsy, whereas ranging the mind alongside the five senses rather than making it superordinate to them (as was done by Sāṃkhya and other later philosophical systems) seems simplistic.
The first Noble Truth is that our experience is unsatisfactory, so it is not surprising to find that the general attitude towards the senses is negative. It is contact between senses and their objects which, by occasioning pleasure or pain, causes desire, positive or negative, the root of all our troubles. The need to “guard the doors of the senses” may well be the theme which recurs most frequently in the Buddha’s sermons. In the Brahma-jāla Suttathe Buddha says:
“When, monks, a monk comprehends as they really are the arising and ceasing
of the six contact-spheres, their appeal and peril, and the escape from them, he
understands that which surpasses all these views.”

We have shown above that the khandhas analyse not what we are but how we work, and in particular how we cognise. Thus for cognition to take place requires a sense (in this context, one of the five) and its objects, which fall under the first khandha, rūpa; consciousness, viññāṇa, the fifth khandha: then sensation, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The fourth khandha, volitions, is inevitably involved because the Buddha held that the senses are appetitive: they seek out their objects. We have seen that viññāṇa likewise requires volition.
Though obviously the Buddha could know nothing of neurology, the similarity between some of his ideas and the picture painted by modern cognitive psychology is striking. Nowadays perception is regarded as an activity, a kind of doing. Moreover, “Perception is inherently selective” (Neisser: 55), which means that it cannot be dissociated from volition.
This leaves saññā, which I translate “apperception”. “Apperception” is identifying a perceived object by giving it a name. (In fact, “name” is the basic meaning of the equivalent word in Sanskrit, saṃjñā.) Though there is some confusion in the Pali Canon between saññā and viññāṇa ,the settled Buddhist position
becomes that viññāṇa just makes the perceiver aware that there is something there, while saññā then intervenes to identify what it is. Therefore saññā is the application of language to one’s experience. This is however where the Buddha saw a big problem.
Basic to the Buddha’s metaphysics is his view, described above, that language is conventional. If there are no unchanging entities but only processes, how can words have a fixed and determinate relationship to reality? All our apperceptions, he says, are empty (suñña) (MN sutta121, Cūla-suññatāSutta). This means that they are impermanent and unsatisfactory (dukkha), for we have seen that the qualities of being impermanent, unsatisfactory and devoid of an unchanging essence entail each other. In this context, the term “empty” denotes this lack of an unchanging essence, applying it to everything, not just the living individual: it is the generalisation to all phenomena of the “no soul” principle.
These qualities apply both to the act of apperception, the naming process, and to what is being apperceived: to what we conceptualise as being “out there”, and also to what is “out there”. On the other hand, it does not say that there is nothing “out there” at all!
(But we must remember one proviso. There is one thing – if “thing” is the right word for it! – to which none of this applies: that is nirvana. We are, after all, dealing not just with philosophy in our sense, but with a gnostic soteriology.)

Impermanence and change
Here I feel that a certain ambiguity does creep in. Let me use the example of impermanence. The impetus for the Buddha’s whole teaching comes from dukkha, of which the paradigm case is that life always ends in death. But impermanence is not the same as incessant change. Perhaps the Buddha’s observation that everything in life is impermanent, even such things as mountains, met the fate of being taken more literally than he intended. There is a short textin which he says that all compounded things (saṃkhata) have three hallmarks (lakkhaṇa): arising, passing away, and change of what is there (ṭhitassa aññathattaṃ). I would interpret this to mean that at a certain point each thing arises, later it comes to an end, and even in between it changes. However, the commentarial tradition took it to mean that things all pass through three distinct
phases: arising, endurance (ṭhiti) and passing away; and in due course this led to a sub-division of endurance, and then further sub-divisions and attempts to quantify them, producing a kind of atomism of time.
I am sure that this is a gross misunderstanding of the Buddha’s intention.On the other hand, if we experience nothing but process, maybe this does imply that, whether we are aware of it or not, we only experience perpetual change. Possibly the Buddha shifted during his lifetime from the weaker view, impermanence, to the stronger, perpetual change. On the other hand, I doubt that this discrepancy would have worried him, since it is irrelevant to his only purpose: to steer us towards nirvana.

Causation
The Buddhist tradition holds that the Buddha’s distinctive insight was that all phenomena are causally conditioned. In the Canon this insight this is given two formulations. The first is a short verse which can be translated: “The Tathāgata  has spoken of the cause and cessation of the dhammas which arise from causes;
such is the teaching of the great renunciate.” The term dhamma here means a constituent of reality according to the Buddha’s analysis. If we are correctly instructed and have internalised the Buddha’s teaching, also called the dhamma, we will analyse our own experience in terms of dhammas, potential or actual components of that experience. All but one of them have causes; this the Buddhist tradition often expresses by saying that they are not independent. The only dhamma which does not have a cause, and is therefore not a saṃkhāra, is nirvana.
The second formulation is the Chain of Dependent Origination. The Buddha says (SNII,17) that he preaches neither sabbaṃ atthi“everything exists” nor sabbaṃ natthi“nothing exists”. What he preaches is the middle way between these two extremes: Dependent Origination. In its full form (truncated ones also exist) this has twelve links: ignorance > volitions > consciousness > name and form > six sense bases > contact > feeling > thirst > clinging > becoming > birth > decay and death (+ grief, lamentation, sorrow and torment).
What do the arrows stand for? There are both positive and negative formulations. The positive one says that when there is xthere is y; the negative says that unless there is x, there is no y. The precise meaning of the whole (and its parts) has been debated ad nauseam; but the negative one is the initial key. The Buddha began at the end: contemplating decay and death, and all the suffering that goes with it, he asks what is their precondition. It is birth. So he repeats the question, and so drives back to a kind of beginning It emerges, therefore, that this is about necessary but not sufficient conditions.
Without each link the next one cannot arise, but its occurrence does not guarantee the next one. One may snap the chain by attaining nirvana. The doctrine primarily concerns the individual, rather than things in general. Since things in general are only of interest in so far as they are experienced by the individual,
this is not important to the Buddha. Nevertheless, one may comment that this is soteriology rather than philosophy: nothing interesting is being said about causality as such.
Philosophically, this serves as the paradigm case of how the world consists of processes, and these processes are not random, but neither are they rigidly determined: they fall within limits set by preconditions. The same is true of those preconditions themselves; but since nothing exists without a cause, we can never get back to a beginning of the process.

Summary: karma
I see the doctrine of karma as the pivotal point of the Buddha’s teaching, and the one to which almost all his thought relates.
Karma is about moral causation. First and foremost it is a teaching of responsibility and so has to be compatible with free will. But even the exercise of free will is by no means a random process. Dependent Origination illustrates how what we sow determines what we reap. It does not do so rigidly, for karma is not
the only cause of our pleasure and pain (SNIV, 230-1): our karma determines the general conditions such as where we are born, a framework within which more obvious kinds of cause, such as disease, take effect (Gombrich 1971: 150).
When it comes to new karma, we can choose, but only within limits, the most important of which we have ourselves established through our former choices.
Those choices are necessary but not sufficient conditions for our subsequent acts of choice. A proverb cited by Damien Keown (Keown: 40) puts it admirably:
“Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”
Putting karma at the centre of the person, the Buddha replaced a static and amoral hypothetical entity, the self, by a process, much of which we can observe and experience in action. This process is in constant interaction with the environment. Modern psychology holds that every action is an interaction with the world


and affects the actor.
The Buddha did not go so far when it came to discussing  perception and cognition, but he did develop this insight in the context of karma.
Moreover, while he identified our world with our experience, his preaching that each person was responsible for his own karma and could only reach nirvana by his own efforts was incompatible with idealism.
Again and again, the Buddha transformed earlier religious ideas and practices by saying that if properly understood they were about ethics. But he often did this with such subtlety that it is not surprising if his manoeuvres were not always understood by his followers.
At the heart of karma lies conscience. The moral rules laid down for the laity (which also apply a fortiorito the Sangha) are formulated as personal undertakings: “I undertake to abstain from taking life.” As a general rule, a monk or nun could not be disciplined for an offence they did not admit. When (ANI, 188-193) a group of villagers complained to the Buddha that various teachers came and preached different doctrines to them, and they were confused about which to follow, he replied that everyone has to make up their own mind on such matters. One should not take any teaching on trust or external authority, but test it on the touchstone of one’s own experience.
Yet even here he found a middle way, for the implication was that people would then find out for themselves that the Buddha was right