Introduction to the Buddhist Patika Suttanta
This Suttanta is concerned really with only two topics, firstly that of mystic wonders, and secondly that of the origin of things.
The former has been dealt with much better and more fully in the Kevaddha.
The latter, here treated quite curtly and by way of appendix only, is fully discussed below in the Aggahha.
The treatment here is clumsy.
It is no doubt intended to be both humorous and edifying.
But the humour is far removed from the delicate irony of the Kevaddha and the Aggahha.
The fun is of the pantomime variety; loud, and rather stupid.
It is funny perhaps to hear how a corpse gets slapped on the back, wakes up just long enough to let the cat out of the bag, and then falls back dead again.
Or how an incompetent medicine-man gets stuck fast to his seat, and wriggles about in his vain endeavours to rise.
But this sort of fun would appeal more strongly to a music-hall audience, or to schoolboys out for a holiday, than to those who are likely to read it in this volume.
And the supposed edification is of the same order.
As an argumentum ad hominem, as propounded for the enlightenment of the very foolish Sunakkhatta (and this is just, after all, what it purports to be), it may pass muster.
Whether it can have appealed to (or was even meant to appeal to) wiser folk is very questionable.
One gets rather bored with the unwearied patience with which the Tathagata is here represented as suffering fools gladly.
And it is difficult to bear with an author who tells stories so foolish merely to prove that the Tathagata is as good a magician as the best, and who has the bad taste to put them into the mouth of the Tathagata himself.
Not only in style and taste does this Suttanta differ from the others.
In doctrine also it is opposed to them.
The wonders in which the peoples of India, in the sixth century B.C., believed were not very different from those so easily, at the same period, believed in Europe.
The mental attitude regarding them was, I venture to think, not at all the same.
In the West, though the other view was also found, the prevailing belief was that such wonders were the result of the interference of some deity suspending, or changing, the general law, the sequence of things that generally happened.
In India, though this view was sometimes held by some, the prevailing belief was that such wonders (whether worked by humans, gods, or animals) were in accordance with law.
In a word, they were not miracles.
There is a tendency to make little of this distinction, but it is really of vital importance.
It is the difference between Animism and what I have ventured to call Normalism, the exact contrary of Animism.
The early Buddhists did not deny the occurrence of such marvels; on the contrary, they accepted them in the Normalistic sense held by most of their more cultured compatriots.
But they held them in low esteem.
The Kevaddha makes the Master say:
It is because I see danger in the practice of such mystic wonders that I loathe, and abhor, and am ashamed thereof.
And he is there represented as maintaining that the real wonder, the one he advocates, is the wonder of education—a thesis then set out in detail, and set out, in all probability, for the first time in the history of the world.
So at Dīgha III, 112, 113 (translated below), a distinction is made between such wonders as are ignoble and those that are noble (Ariyan).
The former are all the wonders worked by the unconverted, or the worldly.
The latter is the wonder of self-mastery.
Then again there is a special rule in the canon law:
You are not, O Bhikkhus, to display before the laity the wonders of Iddhi, surpassing the power of ordinary men.
Whosoever does so shall be guilty of a wrong act (dukkata).
Yet in this Suttanta we have the Master, who is said in the Vinaya to have laid down this rule, represented as doing the very thing he denounces in the Rule as a wrong act.
We have before us then a case, not only of divergence in doctrine, but of complete contradiction.
What does it mean?
It is partly a question of time, partly a question of individual eccentricity, and partly a question of toleration.
Our Suttanta can scarcely have grown up in the community after the period in which the Rule just quoted became acknowledged in the community as valid.
Now the occurrence in the Rule of the technical term dukkata (wrong act), a term not found in the Patimokkha, shows (for the reasons given by Oldenberg in the Introduction to his edition of the text) that the Rule in question belongs to the third and latest stage in the evolution of the Canon Law.
We must allow, at least, two or three generations after the death of the Buddha for this evolution.
During that interval different individuals in the community held different views as to the powers of magic.
No one believed in miracles in the European sense of that word.
But there were a number of individuals who thought it edifying to ascribe the power of magic, and to ascribe it in ever increasing degree, to the Buddha and his most famous disciples.
The view of the more intelligent; the view that ultimately, in great measure, prevailed; and so far as we can judge, the view of the Buddha himself, was the view put forward in the Kevaddha and allied passages.
But the other view was also held by weaker vessels.
And when the anthology called the Dīgha was put together, its editor, or editors, included not only both old and new, but also stories, legends or paragraphs embodying views divergent and even opposed.
We are not entitled on these facts to suppose that the Pātika Suttanta was either later or earlier than the Kevaddha.
Both may have been already current in the community when the Dīgha was edited, and the editors may have been tolerant of whichever of the opposing views they did not share; or they may have thought the story should go in, as it clearly implied how very silly Sunakkhatta was, and how deplorably weak were the views he held.
The word Arahant is, in this Suttanta, applied by Sunakkhatta to three persons—religieux of the baser sort, devoid, in all that we are told about them, of the essential qualities of the Arahant as laid down in the Nikāyas.
He is simply not using the word in the Buddhist sense at all.
The expression is pre-Buddhistic.
It is used, for instance, in the Brāhmaṇa of the Hundred Paths of kings and priests, not apparently with any ethical connotation, but simply as people entitled to receive gifts and respect, and who are apt to be very angry if these be not forthcoming.
It is here an honorific title, used of worldly people of distinguished position.
It might be freely rendered Right Honourable, but really means worthy or entitled to receive gifts
In our Suttanta it is applied by Sunakkhatta, who rejects the new movement of reform, to ascetics as such merely on account of their self-mortification (tapas).
It might be rendered His Worship (that is, worth-ship) or His Reverence.
In this he has the devas on his side.
They are represented as saying of one become emaciated by voluntary starvation that he is like in appearance to an Arahant.
Now the dear devas were not considered as very bright, except in their outward form.
They were intellectually on a level with the chorus in a Greek play, or with the man in the street of the modern journalist, but they talk, no doubt, the language of men, and we may take it that at the time of the rise of Buddhism the word Arahant had come to be popularly applied, not only to priests and kings, but also to ascetics.
As in so many other cases, the leaders of the new movement adopted the current term, but poured, as it were, new wine into the old bottle by using it with a new connotation.
They tried the same plan also with the old term Brahmin, and then they failed; vested interests were too strong for them.
In this particular case they succeeded.
Seldom or never in later writings do we find the word in its old sense.
It has the reformed meaning only—viz., that of a man who has reached the end of the Ariyan Path and has the consequent knowledge and sense of emancipation.
And as a consequence of this we find alongside of the old derivation (from arahati, to be worthy of) all sorts of fanciful and purely exegetical explanations.
So at Majjhima I, 280 the word is connected with araka, distant, because all evil dispositions are far from the Arahant, and the Visuddhi Magga and the Abhidhana Padlpika Suci (s.v.) give a number of others of the same kind.
Arahant, in the new sense, thus differs from the ancient usage in connoting not worldly position or the outward signs of asceticism, but a radical change of heart, and an alertness of intellect so ingrained that it amounts, at times, to intuition.
There are many passages in the oldest texts giving the details of this ideal state.
The post-canonical history of the word is a striking testimony to the decline of the faith.
The later writers, whether in Pali or Sanskrit, do not know any contemporary Arahants.
For them Arahants, whether laymen or not, existed only in the good old times.
We have seen above how the Buddha, just before his death, in the talk with his last convert, gives utterance to the hope: May the brethren live the perfect life, that the world be not bereft of Arahants!
According to the view of Buddhist writers, the world has been bereft of Arahants for more than two thousand years.
But the Buddhist Messiah is to come and then there will be Arahants again.
There arises out of this a further question: Who, in the oldest period, could be an Arahant?
The answer is: Anyone—men or women, old or young, lay or religieux.
There is a statement in the Milinda (p. 264) that Whoever has attained, as a layman, to Arahantship, one of two courses is possible to him, and no other—either that very day he enters the Order, or he dies, for beyond that day he cannot last.
No confirmation of this has so far been found in the Nikayas.
But there is an adumbration to such a doctrine in the Katha Vatthu (IV. 1) when the objector has decidedly the best of the argument against the Thera-vadin.
The latter depends on a statement put into the Master’s mouth in the Majjhima:
‘There is no layman who, without putting away the bonds that bind laymen, obtains after death the end of ills.’
But this is a very different matter and is no answer, as pointed out by the objector, to the fact that examples are given of laymen who become Arahants.
When laymen had experienced the mental change called becoming an Arahant, the natural result, under the conditions prevailing in North India in the sixth or fifth centuries B.C., would be that he would become a religieux.
And this may have been sufficient reason for such opinions as those expressed in the Katha Vatthu and the Milinda having, in the course of centuries, grown up.
We talk now of the Buddha, and have scarcely begun to be familiar with the term Arahant.
In the old days these were so closely allied that they really gave expression to two facets of the same jewel.
Every Buddha (awakened one) was an Arahant.
Every Arahant was buddha (awakened). ~T. W. RHYS DAVIDS, Patika Suttanta, Page 1-3
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