Download What the Buddha Thought, by Richard Gombrich. London: Equinox

BSRV 30.1 (2013) 129–136
doi: 10.1558/bsrv.v30i1.129
Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (print) 0256-2897
Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (online) 1747-9681
Book Reviews
What the Buddha Thought, by Richard Gombrich. London: Equinox. 2009. Pp. xvi +
239. Hardback: £55.00/$95.00; paperback: £16.99/$27.95.
Reviewed by John Taber, Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico,
[email protected]
Keywords
Buddhism, Upaniṣads, karma, ethics, Buddhism and philosophy
What the Buddha Thought is a summary of the core teachings of early Buddhism —
the author would insist, of the Buddha himself — which both distills and extends
research conducted over decades. Based on Numata Lectures delivered at the
School of Oriental and African Studies in autumn, 2006, it presents aspects of the
Buddha’s thinking, both as regards content and method, in a broadly accessible
way. It is not a monograph intended for specialists, though specialists will find
much to ponder in it. This reviewer found it immensely stimulating and engaging. Despite any minor criticisms of it, explicit or implicit, in what follows there
can be little doubt that this book will be of great interest to a broad range of readers and, like the famous book which its title honors, Walpola Rahula’s What the
Buddha Taught, will be influential for years to come.
As Gombrich announces with his very first sentence, ‘This book argues that
the Buddha was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of all time’. But
of course he did not come up with a whole new understanding of the nature and
meaning of human existence in a vacuum. Much of the time he was reacting to,
or adapting, ideas already in circulation. In fact, as Gombrich convincingly shows,
the Buddha often employed terms already in use but gave them new meanings,
and he reinterpreted teachings or texts so that they became vehicles of his own
message. One of the main points Gombrich has to make — and I think he does so
most powerfully and persuasively — is that one cannot really understand what
the Buddha is saying unless one appreciates these aspects of it: the allusions, borrowings, and puns, and the fact that the Buddha is frequently responding, in a
remarkably clever or ‘skillful’ and sometimes even humorous way, to established
views. Even the commentators tended to overlook this.
The first four chapters are devoted to the Buddha’s view of karma and the
antecedents of that view in the Vedic and Jain traditions. According to Gombrich,
the idea that we are morally responsible for ourselves lies at the heart of the
Buddha’s message. Often we find him resisting the suggestion that what we do
doesn’t matter, either because our actions have no effects or because we cease
to exist when we die or because we are predestined to experience a certain fate,
and so forth. The Buddha’s main innovation was to internalize1 karma. That is,
1. My own term. Gombrich does not seem to have a name for it. Sometimes he mentions the
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he identified karma not with the overt performance of an action — that is essentially the Brahmin understanding of karma: it is virtually identical with ritual —
but with the intention behind it. But the Jains, too, were at first inclined to reject
the notion that one’s mental state when acting makes any difference. In early
Jainism, all action, because it inevitably involves injury to the living beings that
fill every square inch of space, is bad. For the Buddha, however, it is from intention that thought, speech, and bodily action derive their moral quality. Since
volition or intention is ‘not wholly determined’ though ‘partially conditioned’
(p. 13) — I shall return to this below — one is responsible for one’s actions. This
insight, combined with ‘the ethicization of rebirth’, that is, the theory that karma
determines rebirth according to one’s deserts, depicts saṃsāra as the journey of
the moral agent through different levels of existence over an infinite number
of lives, ending for some in Nirvāṇa. Indeed, this was what the Buddha reported
seeing in his final meditation, and it is encoded in the tradition, in the stories of
the Bodhisattva’s previous births.
In the fifth chapter Gombrich takes up the doctrine of ‘No Soul’. This, too,
was crafted in conscious opposition to Brahmanical teachings. The rejection of
a permanent self is of a piece with the rejection of being — that which is and
does not change. For the Buddha, there is no being, only becoming. That all conditioned things are impermanent — which did not yet mean that everything is
momentary — is evident from our experience of the world and our own existence. Consciousness, moreover, is also constantly changing. Here, the Buddha
may have picked up on the Vedic idea of consciousness as a manifestation of
fire, though Gombrich’s evidence for this seemed a bit tenuous. Consciousness
for the Buddha is a process, always conditioned by a certain sense and its object
(which, analogous to fire, it can be said to consume; for the Buddha, consciousness is ‘appetitive’ in nature). Thus, the Buddha also rejects the Upaniṣadic notion
of consciousness as an eternal substance, a pure light shining without interruption. Since both Brahman and ātman in the Upaniṣads are equated with being and
consciousness, while being identified with each other, neither could find a place
in the Buddha’s scheme. He replaced the three predicates of Brahman-ātman —
sat, cit, ānanda — with his own Three Marks: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness,
and absence of self. This account of the teaching of ‘No Soul’ as a reaction to
Brahmanism is rather different from the more standard ones that suggest that
any concept of a self was unacceptable to the Buddha primarily because to take
anything as a substantial self is to make it an object of attachment, or that identify arguments in certain canonical passages against taking any of the khandhas
as a self (because, for instance, they are constantly changing, hence unsatisfactory and objects of potential aversion, whereas one would not be averse to one’s
own self).
Other chapters take up other themes: kindness and compassion as means of
liberation, Dependent Origination, fire as a metaphor in the Buddha’s thinking,
and Nirvāṇa. Gombrich, refreshingly, places less emphasis on the Four Noble
Truths and the topics that fall under them, suffering, desire, the Path, on which
Rahula based his exposition. Even then, his discussions of the ideas he selects
are too rich for me to attempt to do justice to them here. I shall confine myself
Buddha’s ‘ethicizing’ karma, but it is not clear if by that he means something different from
‘ethicizing’ rebirth.
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to kindness and compassion and Dependent Origination. Gombrich argues that
these themes, too, play off Vedic ideas and even specific Vedic texts, though he
shows this more convincingly in the case of the former than the latter.
One of Gombrich’s most important discoveries, in my opinion, is that the
Buddha saw the practice of love and compassion as a means of liberation, and that
he presented this teaching in conscious opposition to the Upaniṣadic notion that
enlightenment results strictly from gnosis, specifically, the realization of one’s
identity with Brahman — which is not to say, of course, that the Buddha eschewed
gnosis altogether. The Buddha, in other words, ‘ethicized’ the path to salvation
as well; the cultivation of the heart, if you will, is just as, if not more, important
than the cultivation of the intellect. The key text in this regard is the Tevijja Sutta,
where the Buddha explains to a couple of young Brahmins the way to ‘companionship with Brahma’. The word brahma in the text occurs in the masculine form,
in both the singular and plural, so that it seems that the creator god Brahmā, not
the metaphysical principle Brahman, is being talked about. Indeed, companionship with Brahmā/ās seems to be understood as attaining ‘the world of Brahmā/
ās’, that is, travelling to and residing in a certain realm after death. The Buddha
also teases the Brahmins at one point about whether any Brahmin really knows
the way to the sun or the moon, which strikes Gombrich as an allusion to the
Path of the Gods and the Path of the Fathers described in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
(henceforth BĀU) 6.2.15–16 and Chāndogya Upaniṣad 5.10.1–6. (In the BĀU passage
those who understand the Five Fires, who go by the Path of the Gods when they
die, pass into the flame, the day, the fortnight of the waxing moon, the world of
the gods, the sun, and so forth and eventually arrive at ‘the worlds of Brahmā/
an [brahmalokān]’; in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad passage, however, they are led to
Brahman [neut. sg.].) But the Buddha teaches them that the way to companionship with Brahmā/ās is not to know some secret about the sacrifice but rather to
become like Brahmā by pervading all directions with kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity — the practices that in other texts are referred to
as the ‘Brahma abidings’ (brahmavihāra). Although this admonition may seem to
be aimed at a ‘less sophisticated’ understanding of the salvation preached in the
Upaniṣads, Gombrich deftly draws attention to the fact that it could be targeting
the more abstruse metaphysical teaching as well. ‘Here, the Buddhist monk is pervading the universe with his consciousness, but it is an ethicized consciousness.
In enlarging his mind to be boundless (metaphorically, of course) he is emulating the brahmin gnostic who identifies with universal consciousness — or rather,
going one better, showing the brahmin what he really should be doing’ (p. 83).
Much of Gombrich’s discussion of Tevijja Sutta is taken over from his earlier book,
How Buddhism Began,2 but here it is enriched by considerably more background
on Brahmanism and Vedic religion, in particular by a discussion of the Five Fire
Wisdom in Chapter Three.
That all things apart from Nirvāṇa are caused and governed by causal laws may
have been considered the Buddha’s greatest discovery in his own day, though
certainly the notion that the universe is governed by some principle of order is
not missing from the Upaniṣads. The Buddha’s theory of causation of course came
2. See also Kindness and Compassion as Means to Nirvana (1997 Gonda Lecture) (Amsterdam: Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998). http://www.ocbs.org/lectures-a-articlesocbsmain-121/61-kindness-and-compassion-as-means-to-nirvana-in-early-buddhism
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to be codified in the Twelve-fold Chain of Dependent Origination, and Gombrich
believes that this construct provides some of the most detailed evidence that
‘the Buddha’s teachings are largely formulated as a response to earlier teachings’
(p. 133). In this case, it is the cosmogony of Ṛg Veda X.129, BĀU 1.2, and 1. 4 to
which the Buddha is chiefly responding. Here, Gombrich relies on an interpretation of the Twelve-fold Chain based on these and other Vedic texts worked out
by J. Jurewicz.3 Avijjā/ignorance correlates with ‘neither existence nor non-existence’ of RV X.129.1; for, as Gombrich argues, avijjā could have either an ontological or an epistemic meaning depending on which verbal root √ vid it is derived
from.4 Saṃkhāras refer just to the desire that is the motive for creation.5 Nāmarūpa
of course is explicitly mentioned at BĀU 1.4.7. One problem with this interpretation is that in the Veda these concepts figure in an account of how the world arose,
whereas the Buddha generally refrained from, and even condemned, theorizing
about such matters. 6 However, Gombrich maintains that that was precisely his
genius: he could take a (then oral) text about the origin of ‘the world’ in one sense
and use it to explain the origin of human existence, the world in another sense
— and in a way that would resonate with what Brahmin listeners were familiar
with. Later he joined this part of the Chain with the final part, beginning with
craving, which obviously concerns saṃsāric existence. Still, Jurewicz’s readings
of Vedic passages are selective and tend more toward the imaginative than the
scientific. More fundamentally, how likely is it that the Buddha could have made
use of an interpretation of Vedic texts that never occurred to any Vedic scholar
before J. Jurewicz? Nevertheless, neither-being-nor-nonbeing — in the Upaniṣads,
however, the consensus is that it all began with being, sat — desire, consciousness, and name and form are all established Vedic ideas that the Buddha surely
knew about and, practising a kind of bricolage,7 could easily have woven into his
formula to make it more appealing. It is as if he were saying, ‘Look, you Brahmins!
You, too, believe in a sequence of causes. Here is the only sequence that matters’.
A couple of chapters (Seven and Thirteen) are concerned with methodological issues. I won’t go into these. Although Gombrich presents his views about
methodology somewhat defensively, no doubt due to encountering resistance
from other Buddhologists over the years, I (naively or not) find them uncontro3. J. Jurewicz, ‘Playing with Fire: the pratītyasamutpāda from the Perspective of Vedic Thought’,
Journal of the Pāli Text Society 26 (2000): 77–103.
4. Jurewicz, ‘Playing with Fire’, p. 81, suggests that ‘neither being nor non-being’ can mean that
there was, in the beginning, knowledge of neither being nor non-being, that is to say, only
ignorance.
5. At least according to Gombrich, pp. 134–135. According to Jurewicz, p. 83, it refers to the
‘building up’ (abhi sam √kṛ) of a second self, though she understands this also as the wish of
the self to cognize itself.
6. Which policy the Buddha apparently deviated from when telling the story of the periodic
expansion and contraction of the world and the origin of the varṇas in the Aggañña Sutta.
Gombrich, however, maintains that the account is intended as a satire of Brahmanical cosmogonies (pp. 186-190). Recall, by the way, that Socrates too, in his trial, insisted that he
was not one of those who are interested in ‘things in the sky and below the earth’, but was
concerned exclusively with matters pertaining to how one should live.
7. Gombrich does not mention the work of Lévi-Strauss in his book, but it seems that what he
describes the Buddha doing is akin to what Lévi-Strauss describes as the nature of mythological thinking in La Pensée Sauvage.
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versial. Of course it is legitimate to attempt to sort out the original ideas and even
words of the historical Buddha, and to understand him as a thinker of the order
of Socrates, Heraclitus, or Zhuangzi. Of course we should take the Pāli Canon, ‘as
a working hypothesis’, to be ‘telling us the truth’ about what the Buddha did and
said; for it is indeed plausible to hold that the core of it goes back to the First
Council. And of course we should not be afraid to make bold conjectures which
may be later overturned, lest the field of Buddhist Studies should never advance.
Gombrich says many insightful things about the Buddha’s intellectual style,
especially his pragmatism. A pragmatic approach seems to govern his reflection
on ethical matters. The vinaya contains what amounts to a legal-ethical system
for the Saṅgha. What is striking about its formation is that it seems to have been
almost completely ad hoc. The Buddha lays down a rule when a ‘situation’ arises,
and then he is often concerned about how monks appear in the eyes of the lay
community and what is or is not conducive to increasing the number of believers. It has no single underlying ethical principle, or at least none that the Buddha
ever articulated.8 ‘The vinaya is remarkable as a legal system which is not based
on a priori principles but gradually built up through case law’ (p. 173). It seems a
bit odd, however, as Gombrich himself points out, that the Buddha felt no need
for reflection on ethical theory. ‘Very rarely does the Buddha seem to envisage
that a conflict of values could create a real problem, and I know of no case in the
Canon of an unresolved ethical dilemma’ (p. 170). And yet the Buddha basically
trashed the dominant ethical system of his day, the varṇa-āśrama system and the
cult of Vedic sacrifice. Did he see no conflict in that? In fact, we may have yet
another case where the Buddha simply gave a new meaning to a Brahmanical
concept, namely purity or purification. When it comes to individual morality he
appears, in his own way, just as obsessed with purity as the Brahmins were, but
now in the form of inner purity. The Path is designed to remove ‘defilements’
(kilesa) and impure ‘influxes’ (āsava). ‘[A] bad person’s mind is said to be dirty’
(p. 44). Thus, not only was morally relevant action internalized by the Buddha as
intention (cetanā). Its result was, in part, too.9
Virtually every page of What the Buddha Thought provokes further reflection
on the system of ideas propounded, explicitly or implicitly, by the Buddha. One
mystery that Gombrich does not attempt to solve is precisely how the Buddha
thought that freedom of will is compatible with universal causation (at least as
regards things other than Nirvana); for surely he does accept freedom of will.
Not only does he evidently set aside the strict fatalism10 of Makkhali Gosāla in
the Sāmaññaphala Sutta, but moral responsibility, which he clearly insists on,
is usually taken to imply that some actions must be able to be seen as voluntary. If intention, cetanā, is not strictly determined by the mental and physical
events that precede it, how are we to understand this? That the self, outside
the nexus of causal explanation, causes it, as some modern advocates of free
8. Though in non-vinaya texts it is made clear that the roots of unwholesome actions are greed,
hatred and delusion, and of wholesome ones the opposite mental states. Thanks to Prof. Harvey for this qualification.
9. And yet one must ask, if śīla/sīla has chiefly to do just with purification, whether it is to be
considered a truly moral system at all.
10. Which is not, however, the same as determinism. Basham in his famous study of the Ājīvikas
confuses the two.
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will have proposed,11 was not an option open to the Buddha. Did he believe that
cetanā is only partially determined by preceding conditions? That seems to be
what Gombrich thinks.12 In that case, however, one must ask, what other factor
or factors explain its occurrence; otherwise, it remains an unpredictable event
outside one’s control — so that one could not be held responsible for it. Or did he
believe in a version of ‘soft determinism’ or compatibilism, according to which
certain events, even though causally determined, can still be viewed as voluntary, for instance if they are caused from within, not externally? Unfortunately,
the Buddha offers no explanation of his position that I know of. This may again
reflect his anti-metaphysical bias, but it is also possible that, as great a thinker as
the Buddha was, this is something he did not completely think through.
Another question that frequently comes up when reading this volume is
exactly what was the nature of the Buddha’s acquaintance with the Vedic tradition? Here and there Gombrich says that the Buddha knew or was familiar with
a certain text of the Ṛg Veda or the Upaniṣads (e.g., p. 63). But what could ‘was
familiar with’ mean here? Certainly, the Buddha did not formally study the Veda,
for he was not a Brahmin; he was not qualified. Had he heard the Veda recited?
Did he know Sanskrit? Perhaps he heard sermons based on Vedic texts given
by other religious teachers, perhaps indeed the teachers he studied Yoga under
shortly after his renunciation (though other Brahmin teachers are mentioned in
the canon). It seems likely, in other words, that the Buddha learned what he knew
about the Veda and Upaniṣads second or third hand and, especially in light of the
fact that the teachings he alludes to are more like parodies of Vedic teachings,
that it was simplified and watered down for popular consumption. Even though
he rejects, here and there, a view we can recognize as Upaniṣadic, for instance
that the self is the world (Alagaddūpama Sutta) or that salvation consists in union
with Brahman (Tevijja Sutta), he seems not to have an appreciation of the most
profound, most abstract teachings of the Upaniṣads, as contained for instance the
dialogues of Yājñavalkya.13 Did the Buddha ‘know’, in the sense of having been
taught by someone who really understood them, any of the following texts?:
This self of yours who is present within but is different from the earth [from the
waters, fire … breath, speech, sight, hearing, the mind, etc.], whom the earth does
not know, who controls the earth from within — he is the inner controller, the
immortal ... He sees, but he cannot be seen; he hears, but he cannot be heard; he
thinks, but he cannot be thought of ... Besides him there is no one who sees, no one
who hears, no one who thinks, no one who perceives. (BĀU 3.7.3–23)
About this self, one can only say ‘not –––, not –––’. He is ungraspable, for he cannot be grasped. (3.9.26)
It is by the light of the self that a person sits down, goes about, does his work, and
returns. (4.3.6, Janaka and Yājñavalkya)
11. For a classic statement of this position see R. Taylor, Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 33–53.
12. See p. 13: ‘[Volition] is far from random, and is partially conditioned by preceding volitions;
but it is not wholly determined’.
13. Note Gombrich’s remark, p. 59, that although the Buddha had a capacity for abstraction
greater than the Jains, ‘the Buddhist handling of abstraction was sometimes crude’.
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[T]his Immense Being has no limit or boundary and is a single mass of perception.
It arises out of and together with these beings and disappears after them — so I say,
after death, there is no awareness ... For when there is duality of some kind, then
the one can smell the other, taste the other, see the other ... When, however, the
Whole has become one’s very self, then who is there to smell and by what means;
who is there to taste and by what means ... ? By what means can one perceive him
by means of whom one perceives the whole world?
(2.4.13–14, Yājñavalkya and Maitreyī)14
From Gombrich’s accounting of how the Buddha reacted to Upaniṣadic and
Vedic teachings, one receives the impression that the answer to this question is,
no.15 And that raises a further question: If the Buddha had really been initiated
into these more difficult, more sophisticated teachings, how might that have
influenced his thinking? One could even put the question this way, horrifying
as it may sound: What would the Buddha have thought and taught had he been
born — and properly educated as — a Brahmin? I would maintain that, just as
much as the Buddha’s thinking, and the attitude he had in engaging with other
intellectuals, was determined by his familiarity with the Vedic tradition, it was
determined by the fact that he was at the same time excluded from it.
Gombrich is careful not to claim that the Buddha was a philosopher, which
would go against various statements the Buddha made to the effect that he was
not interested in metaphysical speculations and had abandoned soteriologically
pointless views. Nevertheless, Gombrich wants to suggest, and he seems right in
doing so, that the Buddha had a philosophically coherent doctrine. So as not to
miss the nuance of what he writes on this, I quote him here at length.
I have discussed the Buddha’s attitude to philosophy, i.e., to theorizing, at the
beginning of Chapter 2 of How Buddhism Began, and so shall not repeat what is there.
But on one important matter I have changed my opinion. I opened my discussion
by writing: ‘One thing about which I feel rather uncertain is how interested the
Buddha himself was in presenting a philosophically coherent doctrine. ... [A]re we
misrepresenting him if we attribute to him an impressive edifice of argument?’
After some more work and some more thought ... I no longer feel uncertain. On the
one hand, I do not think the Buddha was interested in presenting a philosophically
coherent doctrine: the evidence that his concern was pragmatic, to guide his audience’s actions, is overwhelming. On the other hand, I have also concluded that the
evidence that he had evolved such a structure of thought and that it underpinned
his pragmatic advice is no less compelling. (p. 164)
But even if the claim is just that what the Buddha thought amounts to a coherent
system of ideas, a system that purports to depict reality and human existence
as they really are, we are still invited to examine those ideas on that basis, that
is, to ask of the Buddha’s teachings the same questions we would pose about the
theories of other philosophers: Are they true? And, are they adequately proven?
14. Translations from P. Olivelle, Upaniṣads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
15. On pp. 150–151 Gombrich does suggest that Buddha may have been influenced by Upaniṣadic
sayings such as Yājñavalkya’s neti neti in his cataphatic treatment of Nirvāṇa, but we need
more evidence before we can draw any conclusion about this.
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At the end of Chapter Eight, ‘Everything is Burning’, Gombrich mentions the
Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus, one of whose fragments reads, ‘Everything
flows’, as another ancient figure who advocated a theory of constant flux; moreover, Heraclitus identified fire as the element out of which everything arises and to
which everything returns. Yet Heraclitus also talked about the logos, which guides
all change and harmonizes opposites. Opposites are somehow united in his vision:
‘The way up is the way down’; ‘The track of writing is straight and crooked’;
‘Changing, it rests’. A picture of the world as unity-in-difference emerges from
his fragments, and an appreciation of an underlying principle of order in the
cosmos: ‘Listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that all things are
one’. It is this logos/ratio that is the beginning of a thread that runs through the
thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and extends all the way into modern
rationalism. These philosophers explored the invisible, intelligible natures or
essences of things as that which things truly are, their being (ousia). (Plato: being
is; it does not change. And knowledge pertains to what a thing is.) Indeed, everything seems impermanent as long as you confine yourself to sense perception
(as Plato argues in his Theaetetus). But as soon as Socrates asked questions like,
‘Is impiety the same thing in all actions that are impious?’, philosophers began
to wonder if there are not permanent essences of the things in this world that
do not present themselves to the senses. One has to look harder for this idea in
Indian philosophy, but it is there, too.
To suggest that the Buddha had ‘a philosophically coherent doctrine’ is to
invite not only a philosophical analysis of it but eventually a philosophical critique, perhaps along the lines I have just suggested. Scholars of Buddhism and
Religious Studies may be dismayed that this opens a whole new can of worms.
But philosophers, I believe, will be inclined to think that the opening of this particular can of worms has long been overdue.
As a characterization of the essential elements of the Buddha’s view of reality and human existence, as well as his style and method, by a scholar of insight
and imagination who has devoted many years to the study of the Pāli scriptures,
What the Buddha Thought is an invaluable contribution. Although scholars will not
agree with all of his findings, Gombrich has shown (as others have suggested, e.g.,
H. Oldenberg) at the very least that Vedic and Jain materials shed a great deal
of light on early Buddhist texts, and that we must continue to read the former
along with the latter. In fact, lucidly and engagingly written, the book is one of
the most accessible examples of historical-philological scholarship I know of. It
would be the first thing I would recommend to an undergraduate or a layperson
interested in Buddhism who wanted to know what it is that Buddhologists do.16
Note that a second edition of What the Buddha Thought is soon to appear, with
various corrections in it, some based on points made in the review of it by Peter
Harvey in the online journal DISKUS The Journal of the British Association for the Study
of Religions 12 (2011): 38-48: http://www.basr.ac.uk/diskus/diskus12/Harvey.pdf
16. Many thanks to Professor Peter Harvey for correcting some misconceptions in an earlier
version of this review.
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