The Awakening of Faith: The Awakening of Faith: A. The Soul as Suchness
A. The Soul as Suchness.
What is meant by the soul as suchness (bhûtatathatâ), is the oneness of the totality of things (dharmadhâtu), 2 the great all-including whole, the quintessence
Therefore all things in their fundamental nature are not namable or explicable. They cannot be adequately expressed in any form of language. They are
While all words and expressions are nothing but representations and not realities, and their existence depends simply on our confused subjectivity, suchness has no attribute [of particularity] to speak of.
But the term suchness is all that can be expressed in language, and through this term all other terms may be disposed of.
In the essence of suchness, there is neither anything which has to be excluded, nor anything which has to be added. 2
By the so-called trueness as affirmation, we mean that [as soon as we understand] subjectivity is empty and unreal, we perceive the pure soul manifesting itself as eternal, permanent, immutable and completely comprising all things that are pure. On that account we call it affirmation [or reality, or nonemptiness, açûnyatâ]. Nevertheless, there is no trace of affirmation in it, because it is not the product of a confused subjectivity, because only by transcending subjectivity (smrti) can it be grasped.
Footnotes
55:2 S. Beal in his English translation of Açvaghosha's Buddha-carita (Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XIX., p. 324, footnote) considers dharmadhâtu to be "the mystic or ideal world of the Northern Buddhists" and says it means literally the "limit of dharma." The interpretation is evidently wrong, not only because dhâtu according to the Madhyanta-vibhâga-çastra by Vasubandhu 
in Chinese, is not used by the Northern Buddhists in the sense that Beal gives. It means on the other hand this actual world considered from the point of its forming the basis of the law; or, to use modern scientific terminology, it is existence in its organised totality. Açvaghosha uses the term here in this sense.
56:1 The term is usually rendered by recollection or memory, but Açvaghosha uses it apparently in a different sense. It must mean subjectivity, or the perception of particularity, or that mental activity which is not in accordance with the suchness of things; if otherwise, the whole drift of the present Discourse becomes totally unintelligible. Smrti is in some degree obviously synonymous with Avidya (ignorance) which is more general and more primordial than the former. Ignorance appears first and when it starts the world-process, "subjectivity" is evolved, which in its turn causes particularisation to take place. Particularisation does not annihilate suchness, but it overshadows the light of its perfect spiritual wisdom.
56:2 Schopenhauer who says, "no subject without object," seems to express a similar idea that without subjectivity, "the objective world," i.e., "the world as Vorstellung, as representation of objects" would vanish.
57:1 If I understand Açvaghosha correctly, he intends to say that to the sentient subject the world consists of a number of isolated objects. The nature of subjectivity is sense-apperception; and in sense-apperception the particular things are represented in the particularity only, not in their suchness as momentarily materialised universals. We must overcome subjectivity in order to discover suchness; but when suchness is recognised, it is at once understood to constitute the essence and only true reality of things.
57:2 The older translation has: "In the essence of suchness, there is nothing to be excluded, for all things are true; nor is there anything to be added, for all things are such as they are. Be it known therefore that as thus all things are undemonstrable and unrepresentable [by our confused understanding], they are called suchness."
58:1 The term çûnyatâ which means literally void or emptiness, has suffered a great deal of misunderstanding by those who are not well acquainted with Buddhist phraseology. If Mahâyânists used the term, as imagined by some critics, in the sense of absolute nothingness, denying the existence of everything conditional as well as unconditional, relative as well as independent, how could they speak about the highest truth (paramârthasatya) or the most excellent perfect enlightenment (anuttarasamyaksambodhi) which all conveys the sense of affirmation? What the Çûnyatâ doctrine positively insists on, is the denial of sensationalism, and the annihilation of the imagination that weaves a dualistic world-conception. If this could be called a nihilism, every intellectual attempt to reach a unitary view of the universe would be nihilistic, for it declares the untenability of a separate existence of matter and thought, me and not-me, etc. It is odd enough that such a self-evident truth should have escaped the keen observance of Christian critics. Açvaghosha here states that the bhûtatathatâ is at once çunya and açunya. It is çunya because it transcends all forms of separation and individuation; it is açunya because all possible things in the world emanate from it. Even Nâgârjuna
60:1 In the Kantian sense of ''things in themselves." The Mâdhyamika school would say they are all Atyanta-çûnyatâ, complete void, meaning that things are subject to transformation and have no absolute existence.
