Buddha - Footnote 8
8. "Like the other teachers of his time, Buddha taught through conversations, lectures, and parables. Since it never occurred to him any more than to Socrates or Christ, to put his doctrine into writing, he summarized it in sutras (threads) designed to prompt the menory" (See Durant, p.428). The most complete edition available in english of Buddha's extant sutras (including the vast oral tradition which developed after his death) is Max Muller's multi-volumed Sacred Books Of The Buddhists which includes Rhys Davids now famous translations of Buddha's dialogues and sermons. Philosophers who posed such questions regarding infinity and the like are often referred to by Buddha as eel-wrigglers (literally hair splitters), because of their penchant for making the finest logical distinctions over questions that amounted to nothing. Belonging to one of the dozens of sects that emerged out of later Hinduism (from which interestingly enough Buddha was to draw many of his disciples) the sutras give abundant examples of such confrontations as mentioned above. Buddha usually dealt with such propositions in either one of two ways. In the first case he would employ the famous reducto ad-absurdum (literally reducing the proposition to its inherent absurdity by a fitting analogy) or he would use what came to be called the four cornered negation (denying that any determinate answer could be given to any conceivable form of the proposition hence inferring that the proposition itself was unanswerable although not necessarily meaningless). In his introduction to the Mahali Sutta from which the above example was taken, Davids lists the following questions which are unanswerable in Buddha's sense. (i) Whether the world was eternal or not? (ii) Whether the world was infinite or not? (iii) Whether the soul is the same as the body, or distinct from it? (iv) Whether a man who has attained to the truth exists, or not, and in any way after death? Buddha calls such questions "the jungle, the desert, the puppet-show, the writhing, the entanglement, of speculation" and at several points suggests that even the gods themselves, if they existed, could not answer them. (Durant, p. 431). See Dialogues Of The Buddha, translated from the Pali by T.W.Rhys Davids, Luzac & Company, LTD., London, 1956 in Sacred Books Of The Buddhists, translated by various oriental scholars and edited by F. Max Muller, volume II, Part I, Luzac & Company, LTD.,London, 1956, p. i86. For an excellent summary of Buddha's method of reasoning, see Ninian Smart, [Doctrine And Argument in Indian Philosophy, Muirhead Library of Philosophy, George Allen and Unwin, LTD., London, 1964, pgs 47-50. -written in blue ink in manuscript -ed.]