Note 69 — Chapter VII · THE THEORY OF NON-ATMAN OR NON-EGO.

Buddhism finds the source of all evils and sufferings in the vulgar material conception of the ego-soul, and concentrates its entire ethical force upon the destruction of the ego-centric notions and desires. The Buddha seems, since the beginning of his wandering life, to have conceived the idea that the way of salvation must lie somehow in the removal of this egoistic prejudice, for so long as we are not liberated from its curse we are liable to become the prey of the three venomous passions: covetousness, infatuation, and anger, and to suffer the misery of birth and death and disease and old age. Thus, when he received his first instructions from the Sâmkhya philosopher, Arada, he was not satisfied, because he did not teach how to abandon this ego-soul itself. The Buddha argued: “I consider that the embodied ego-soul, though freed from the evolvent-evolutes,[69] is still subject to the condition of birth and has the condition of a seed. The seed may remain dormant so long as it is deprived of the opportunity of coming into contact with the requisite conditions of quickening and being quickened, but since its germinating power has not been destroyed, it will surely develop all its potentialities as soon as it is brought into that necessary contact. Even though the ego-soul free from entanglement [i.e. from the bondage of Prakṛti] is declared to be liberated, yet, so long as the ego-soul remains, there can be no absolute abandonment of it, there can be no real abandonment of egoism.”[70]