佛陀の沈默とその中觀的意義

Abstract

In the Gautama Buddha's Biographies we find an episode that Buddha, directly after his Great Enlightenment, became unwilling to preach his doctrine to his fellow-peoples and wished to remain in silence. It was because the Truth he realized was too deep and subtle to be transmitted into human expression. This episode informs us of a Buddhist conviction of that time that the Buddha's missionary lectures were not addressed naively without any hesitation. The unreliability of all human concepts and logic seems to be a serious factor for the Buddha's silence. Under the heading of the silence of the Buddha, however, the so-called 'fourteen questions unanswered' had been discussed in connection with metaphysical characters of Buddhism by many scholars, among whom Dr. T. W. Organ was the recent one. Dr. Organ assumes that, Buddha remained utterly undistracted from his main purpose, the salvation of human beings, therefore his silence was' a pragmatic reply' to these metaphysical questions, such as about existence after death. For the philosophical investigations were merely useless exertions to Buddha, who was a religious teacher, and not a philosopher. This conclusion of Organ is, accordingly, the one which mainly follows his predecessors ; but he seems to have failed to pay sufficient attention to Dr. Watsuji's interpretation, which claims that the Buddha's rejection to answer indicates his philosophical and epistemological standpoint in search after the ultimate Truth. The silence or the loneliness or the quietism of Buddha seems to have afforded an important character to later development of thoughts through the history of Buddhism. When we compare the above-mentioned two instances of his silence, we are inclined to admit the Buddha's philosophical character along with the religious one. And it will be natural to assume that Buddha's silence set an example later for the Madhyamic philosophy. The Madhyamic śunyatā, i. e., the vacuity, represents the Buddhaic stand of silence, or the Buddha's existence itself, which is absolute, superworldly, and surpassing the antinomy by his non-utterance. Contrary to the violation of the Buddha's commandment of not to miss one's way in philosophy, Nāgārjuna thus actually developed the very core of the Buddha's silence by the name of śunyata. The śunyata (vacuity) or the tathatā (suchness) takes up its abode 'outside of words' as well as 'within reach of words'. For the sake of such a circumstance, however, the logical dialectics and philosophical systems of Nāgārjuna, and of later Buddhism as well, should be looked at as the' Great Compassion ', which in turn is called the 'Skilful Device' of Buddha. The device is not at all the ultimate Truth of śunyata, but the latter always needs the means of the former for its revelation. The vacuity changes into and is identified with the logic of Love ; and this is the generally accepted stand by all Buddhist philosophies.