There is yet another direction in which Berkeley's philosophy, I will
not say agrees with Gautama's, but at any rate helps to make a
fundamental dogma of Buddhism intelligible.
"I find I can excite ideas in my mind at pleasure, and vary and shift
the scene as often as I think fit. It is no more than willing, and
straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy: and by the same
power [101] it is obliterated, and makes way for another. This making
and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active.
This much is certain and grounded on experience. . ." (Principles,
xxviii.)
A good many of us, I fancy, have reason to think that experience tells
them very much the contrary; and are painfully familiar with the
obsession of the mind by ideas which cannot be obliterated by any
effort of the will and steadily refuse to make way for others. But
what I desire to point out is that if Gautama was equally confident
that he could "make and unmake" ideas--then, since he had resolved
self into a group of ideal phantoms--the possibility of abolishing
self by volition naturally followed.
Note 9 (P. 68).
According to Buddhism, the relation of one life to the next is merely
that borne by the flame of one lamp to the flame of another lamp which
is set alight by it. To the "Arahat" or adept "no outward form, no
compound thing, no creature, no creator, no existence of any kind,
must appear to be other than a temporary collocation of its component
parts, fated inevitably to be dissolved.
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