Buddhism & science / by Paul Dahlke; translated from the German by the Bhikkhu Sīlācāra.

  • Paul Dahlke
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Buddhism & science / by Paul Dahlke; translated from the German by the Bhikkhu Sīlācāra. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    144/280 (page 128)
    Here in their every movement the entire existence of living beings becomes a laying hold of the external world—a gross laying hold with hands and teeth as well as that subtle mental laying hold which we generally denominate “comprehension.” As the whole existence of a flame is a laying hold of the external world, as it subsists solely by reason of this prehensile activity, even so is it with the /-process. Buddhist psychology distinguishes between four varieties of aliment. First, there is aliment in the common, vulgar sense of the word, be it in gross growth-promoting form as solid or liquid food, be it in fine growth-promoting form as respiration. Second, contact, as the mutual encounter of the senses and their corresponding objects. Third, mental apprehension; and fourth, consciousness ; these two latter being the working up, the assimilat- ing of what issues from contact. From the commanding height of the position which Buddhist thinking takes up towards the process of life, it cannot possibly encounter that “ problem ” with which scientific physiology finds itself forced to wrestle. Briefly stated, that problem runs as follows :— “ How can it ever be possible for a living being to appropriate something to itself, assimilate some- thing, take up something into itself, whether this ‘something’ be of the gross growth-promoting variety—nourishment in the vulgar sense of the word—or of the intellectual sort, as sense im- pressions and the content of consciousness ? ” There was a time in the history of natural science, more particularly in the history of the