Sacred Texts: Buddhism

Buddhism in Translations - Chapter II - Sentient Existenc...

Henry Clarke WarrenPali Canon TranslationsTheravada Buddhism

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This is an editorial introduction to a chapter on "Sentient Existence" from a Western scholarly anthology of translated Pāli Buddhist texts, written in the tradition of late 19th/early 20th-century comparative religion scholarship. The author explains the Buddha's refusal to answer ten classic metaphysical questions not as agnosticism but as a principled rejection: the questions presuppose an "Ego" or persistent self that Buddhist doctrine denies, making them unanswerable in their own terms — like asking whether you've stopped beating your mother. The core content lays out the Buddhist theory that a human being is a complex of five groups of transient, independent elements with no underlying substance, illustrating this with the example that sour cream is not transformed milk but an entirely new existence-complex. The author presents Dependent Origination as the doctrine accounting for how these groups perpetuate themselves without a First Cause, and speculatively argues the formula is a patchwork of earlier teachings to which the Buddha added the propositions about ignorance. A distinctive claim is the structural parallel drawn between Buddhist self-integration across rebirths and Darwinian evolutionary heredity, though the author notes Buddhists posit a man "inherits from himself" rather than from ancestors. The introduction also serves as a translator's note, defending specific English renderings of untranslatable Pāli terms like *dhamma*, *sankhāra*, and *attan*.

Buddhism in Translations - Chapter II - Sentient Existenc...

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