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THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO. 324 Dearborn Street CHICAGO, ILL. London: Paternoster House, Charing Cross Road. Buddha. Bodliisattva Saiiiaiita Bliadia, J^odhisattva Manjnfri, Representing the principle Representing; tlie i)riiiciple ot partictilai ity or of universality or love. wisdom. Ananda. Mahaka^yapa. A TN I'KAL RKPRESENTAIIOX OK iHK MaHAV.AXA FAITH, AgVAGHOSHA'S DISCOURSE ON THE AWAKENING OF FAITH IN THK MAHAYANA ±mi^iB^^ TRANSLATED FOR THE FIRST TIME FROM THE CHINESE VERSION BY TEITARO SUZUKI CHICAGO THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY LONDON AGENTS Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd. 1900 b 1 PUBLISHER'S PREFACE. is the philosopher of Bud- ACVAGHOSHAdhism. His treatise on The Awaken- ing of Faith is recognised by all Northern schools and sects as orthodox and used even to-day in Chinese translations as a text-book for the instruction of Buddhist priests. The original Sanskrit text has not been found as yet, and if it should not be discovered somewhere in India or in one of the numerous libraries of the Buddhist viharas, it would be a loss for then our of great ; knowledge A^va- ghosha's philosophy would remain limited to its Chinese translation. Agvaghosha's treatise on The Awakening of Faith is a small booklet, a monograph of the usual size of Chinese fascicles, comprising in its Chinese dress no more than about 10,800 characters, and may be read through in a few hours. But the importance of this monograph stands in no relation to its brev- iv publisher's preface. ity, and it is very strange tliat no translation of it has appeared as yet in any European lan- guage. I was therefore exceedingly glad that Mr. Teitaro Suzuki, a Japanese Buddhist and a disciple of the Rev. Shaku Soyen, the dis- tinguished Abbot of Kamakura, who was one of the delegates of the Parliament of Reli- gions at Chicago in 1893, undertook the work of rendering A9vaghosha's monograph into English form. I watched the progress of his translation and my interest in the work in- creased the more I became familiar with the thoughts of the great philosopher of Bud- dhism. Not only is my own interpretation of Buddhism, as stated in the Gospel of Bud- dha and elsewhere, here fully justified, but there are striking similarities between the very terms of A9vaghosha's system and ex- pressions which I have used in my own phil- osophical writings. The main coincidence is the idea of Suchness, which is pure form, or the purely formal aspect of things, deter- mining their nature according to mathemat- ical and mechanical laws.^ ^ This coincidence of some salient points need of course not exclude disagreements in other important matters. publisher's preface. V SucHness, according to Agvaghoslia, is the of tHe world cosmic order or Gesetzniassigkeit ; it is tHe sum total of all those factors which shape the universe and determine the desti- nies of its creatures. It is the norm of exist- ence and is compared to a womb in which all things take shape and from which they are born. It is Plato's realm of ideas and Goethe's '^ Mothers" of the second part of Fatist, Suchness which in its absolute sense means the total system of the abstractly formal laws, including the moral order of the universe, is contrasted with the realm of Birth and Death. This realm of Birth and Death, is the material world of concrete objects. While Suchness is the domain of the universal, the realm of Birth and Death is the domain of the particular; and it is characteristic of the Mahayana school that the bodily, the particular, the concrete is not rejected as a state of sin, but only char- acterised as impure or defiled, imperfect, and implicated with sorrow and pain, on account of its limitedness and the illusions which na- turally attach to it. Suchness and the realm of Birth and Death vi publisher's preface. are not two hostile empires but two names of the same thing. There is but one world with two aspects describing two opposed phases of one and the same existence. These two as- pects form a contrast, not a contradiction. Suchness (or the good law, the normative fac- tor) dominates the realm of Birth and Death, which latter therefore, in a certain sense, be- longs to Suchness throughout in its entirety as well as in its details. But sentient beings are apt to overlook the significance of the universal, for the senses depict only the particular. Thus to a superfi- cial consideration of sensual beings, the world presents itself as a conglomeration of isolated objects and beings, and the unity that consists in the oneness of law which dominates all, is lost sight of. It is the mind (or spiritual in- sight into the nature of things) which traces the unity of being and learns to appreciate the significance of the universal. Universals, i. e., those factors which con- stitute the suchness of things are not sub- stances, not entities, but relations, pure forms, or determinants, i. e., general laws. Thus publisher's preface. vii are not but ideas they things, ; and the most important one among them, the suchness of man or his soul, is not a concrete self, an at- man, but ^'name and form.'' It is well known what an important role the denial of the existence of the atman plays in the Abhidharma, and we need not repeat here that it is the least understood and most misrepresented doctrine of Buddhism. Thus the essential feature of existence, of that which presents itself to the senses, is not the material, but the formal; not that which makes it concrete and particular, but that which constitutes its nature and applies gen- not that which to be so erally ; happens here, that it is this, but that which makes it to be thus; not its Thisness, but its Suchness. Particularity is not denounced as evil, but it is set forth as limited and ; we might add (an idea which is not expressed in the Maha- yana, but implied) that the universal would be unmeaning if it were not realised in the particular. Absolute Suchness] without ref- erence to the world of concrete Particularity is like a Pratyekabuddha, and the Pratyeka- viii publisher's preface. buddha, a sage whose wisdom does not go out into tlie world to seek and to save, is regarded as inferior to the Bodhisattvas, who with in- ferior knowledge combine a greater love and do practical work that is of help to their fellow beings. How highly Particularity is considered ap- pears from the Mahayana picture in which it stands contrasted to Universality on perfectly equal terms.' The world-process starts in ignorance, perhaps through ignorance or at least through some commotion void of enlightenment, but from the start it is enveloped by the good law of cosmic order. Suchness, the norm of being, guides its steps. It is shaped in the womb of the Tathagata and is in the progress of evolu- tion more and more tinged, or, as Agvaghosha says, perfumed, with the cognition of Such- ness. Thus life will necessarily march onward to Buddhahood, actualising in the course of its development the eternal in the transient, the omnipresent in the special, the universal in the concrete and particular, and unchange- ^ See the frontispiece. publisher's preface. ix able perfection in tHe imperfect hapHazards of the kaleidoscopic world of changes, in which things originate by being compounded, and perish according to the law that all compounds are doomed to dissolution. Hence it becomes apparent that the realm of Birth and Death is the realisation only of that which in itself is immortal; it is the appearance in time and space, the actualisation, the materialisation, the incarnation, of that which is everlasting and permanent in the absolute sense.