What is Meant by Svabhava: Chattopadhyaya and Needham

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s Science and Society in Ancient India (1977)
impressed Joseph Needham very much as had his Lokayata (1959). But there was
one point on which Needham had some reservations. A series
of letters relating to the doctrine of svabhava (lit. own being) and further
discussions in person (when Chattoapdhyaya visited Needham
in Cambridge)
are of seminal importance to the student of Indian philosophy and more
particularly of the philosophy of science.

Chattopadhyaya (1977) has made much of the doctrine of svabhava in relation to
the CS, although he does not associate it specifically with the Carvaka, but
with materialism of another sort. He knew that, unlike the Carvakas, the CS
(1.26.10) speaks of five elements instead of four, and the
physician-philosophers’ views concerning the rise of consciousness are quite
different from the Carvakas’ (Chattopadhyaya 1992, 41-43). Chattopadhyaya
proceeds from the notion: svabhavavada = “the laws of nature” = causality, and
then equates causality with materialism which is = scientific temper or science
consciousness. It is difficult to accept this series of equations in view of
the basic complexity around the word, svabhava. What does it really mean:
causality or accident?

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (left) and Joseph Needham

Svabhava is said to be one of the rival claimants for the title of the first
cause (Jagatkarana) along with kala (time), yadriccha (chance or accident),
niyati (detiny) etc. in the SvUp 1.2 (c. sixth century BCE). Here the
distinction between svabhava and yadriccha is clearly made. However, in course
of time, we find svabhava becoming a synonym for yadricch in Asvaghosha’s BC
(9.58-62) and Sau (16.17). At the same time svabhavavada came to entail inactivism,
akriyavada and total denial of the efficacy of human endeavour. The typical
example of what svabhava means was the sharpness of the thought. In the
Nyayasutra (4.1.22-24), this very idea is set to imply animittata (absence of
any efficient cause). It is in this very sense that svabhava is used in the
Mbh, Mokshadharma Parvadhyaya, Santiparvan (12.172.10-11, 12.224.50, 12.230.4).
So it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that svabhava could mean both hetu
and ahetu, causality and accident. In any case the implication of svabhava is
more problematic than it appears at first glance. It is quite impossible to
employ a single word or even a single phrase to convey the complexity inhering
in the world.

In a personal communication to Chattopadhyaya (dt. 15. 12. 1978, as yet
unpublished) Joseph Needham emphasized the relation between svabhava and the
Chinese concept of Tao, and mildly objected to the phrase “laws of nature” in
translating svabhava:

“On the other hand, I am not at all sure that the translation of
“laws” of Nature for svabhava will meet the case. I suspect that one
should not go beyond some expression like “innate thus-ness” or the
“essential nature of things”. As you will remember, in Volume 2 of
“Science and Civilisation in China”, we made a rather
thorough investigation of the question of whether the conception of laws of
Nature had ever arisen in Chinese civilisation, and we decided in the negative.
This was on pp. 518 ff. Later we revised the presentation somewhat for a
lecture at the Hatfield College of Technology in 1961… I now suspect that the
rather silly metaphor of “Laws of Nature” could have arisen only in the
monotheistic civilisation of the “People of the Book”, i.e. the
Hebrews, Christians and Moslems. We also suspect that it may have had
considerable heuristic value at the time of the scientific revolution, but we
doubt whether it played more than a minor part in that context. For us, the
over-riding factors which gave rise to the scientific revolution in Europe and
not in the Asian civilisations, were the concrete social and economic
conditions and structures of these respective societies; and not so much
intellectual factors – though we would never want to deny the importance of
these. I haven’t consulted any Sanskritists here about the best translation of
svabhava but I can’t help wondering whether it did not imply something like the
Tao in Chinese thinking, i.e. the indwelling naturalness which makes things to
be as they really are. At one time I thought that this might have something to
do with Indian Rita, a word which I don’t find in your index.”

Chattopadhyaya himself in his Lokayata (1959) had often spoken of the Vedic
concept of rita and the Chinese concept of Tao (See the general index of
Lokayata). In his study of the philosophical background of the ancient Indian
medical texts (1977) he, for reasons best known to him, omitted all references
to both rita and Tao, and concentrated wholly on svabhava as “laws of nature”. Needham was of the
opinion that such a concept could only develop in monotheistic civilisations.
Chattopadhyaya, however, was reluctant to admit this view (Chattopadhyaya 1987,
144-45).

Referring again to Chattopadhyaya’s work (1977) Needham later (1980) writes:

“A key word in the ancient Indian literature is svabhava, which could be
translated “inherent nature”, “innate thus-ness”, or “the essential nature of
things”. It must have had close relations with rita and even dharma in some
senses, meaning “the Order of Nature” or the way in which Nature works – all
recalling Tao in Chinese. The physicians were seeking the pattern-principles in
Nature, the ultimate reasons (ultimately of course inscrutable) why things are
as they are and behave as they do” (Needham 1980, 25)

.
Needham in this
context makes another significant observation regarding the Chinese rendering
of svabhava:

“It is interesting to see how these Sanskrit words came out when the Buddhists
philosophers needed to translate them into Chinese. Svabhava was rendered as
hsing, and defined as embodied cause, the unchanging, independent,
self-dependent, fundamental “nature” behind the manifestation or expression of
anything. Sometimes this was amplified as tzu hsing, “the primary germ [verb.
sap.] out of which all material appearances are evolved, the first source of
the material world of phenomena….” Other more curious locutions were
ssu-pho-pho and tzu-thi-thi, “own state”, essential or inherent property,
innate or peculiar disposition, natural state or constitution…”(Needham 1980,
25).

It is rather surprising that Needham seems to have agreed later (1986) with
Chattopadhyaya’s view of svabhava as “laws of nature”, although the eminent
Sinologist preferred to use the phrase, “the Order of Nature” along with it
(see above). Referring to Chattopadhyaya’s treatment of rita in History of
Science and Technology in Ancient India (vol. 1), Needham writes in his Preface to this work:

“Again, all that has been written here about rita, that ancient Indian concept
of the Order of Nature, its pattern and organisation, self-originating and
underlying all that happens, is well worth reading. The concept is somewhat
analogous with what in Chinese we call the Tao, or li, also self-originating,
tzu-jan. Apparently it was not characteristic of the Indus Valley
civilisation but rather to be found in the Rigveda and such works. As a
recognition of the regularity and uniformity of Nature it was certainly wisdom,
but it had to be fleshed out with specific theories about natural phenomena,
and these to a large extent arose out of technological practice. Of course it
was the ancestor too of what today we call “laws of Nature”, those laws which
Westerners once thought of as due to the will of a transcendent creator deity,
but which are now regarded as descriptive rather than prescriptive” (Needham
1986, vii).

Chattopadhyaya was highly gratified to see that, after a long discussion with
him in Cambridge (when he visited Needham, as he says, to learn from him something about
history of science and technology), Needham
had “constructively reconsidered” his views (Chattopadhyaya 1987, 145-46).

Two points are to be noted here: (a) acting upon Needham’s comment in his
personal communication, Chattopadhyaya brought back rita to the interpretation
of svabhava in the second volume of his history of science and technology in
ancient India (1991) and (b) Needham, having heard from him the evidence of
Indian philosophical literature, modified his views on svabhava insofar as it
was a concept related to rita. Strangely enough, none of them refers to the
Buddhist idea of pratitya-samutpada in this connection.

In his later work (1991) Chattopadhyaya discusses in detail the place of
svabhava in Lokayata, Samkhya and Nyaya-Vaisesika, and comes to the following
conclusion:

“We have seen that it (sc. svabhava) formed an important feature of the new
intellectual climate ushered in the Second Urbanization and further,
notwithstanding differences among the modern and medieval scholars of looking
back at it, the concept itself at least foreshadowed what came to be known in
later times as the Laws of Nature” (Chattopadhyaya 1991, II:69-70) (Emphasis
added).

All these qualifications and modifications in the statement betray how tenuous
Chattopadhyaya’s conclusion is. Svabhava-as-accident is as much a part of
ancient classical Sanskrit works (such as the BC) as svabhava-as-causality. It
is no use blaming some modern and medieval scholars. For one thing, in Indian
literature two apparently unrelated ideas, one cosmological and the other
ethical, inhere in the changing concept of svabhava. If it stands for
causality, the ethical corollary would be activism; if, on the other hand, it
stands for accident or lawlessness, the corollary would be akriyavada,
inactivism. Svabhava has no room in the major epistemological and metaphysical
questions that form the greatest part of the philosophical debates in ancient
and medieval India.
Add to this the problem of relating svabhava (whether as chance or as
causality) to the Carvaka/Lokayata materialism, the confusion becomes worse
confounded. And if one cares to bring in the issue of svabhava vis-à-vis
Samkhya in this connection, the result will be a perfect mess (see Johnston
1937, 68-70; Chakravarti 1951, 43, 234; Bedekar 1957, 146-47).

Needham (1980,
25) tells us that svabhava in the Chinese tradition invariably stands for
causality alone, not ahetu. Yet right from the first century CE the word
svabhava in Sanskrit literature, both medical and non-medical, is used more
often than not as a synonym for accidentalism or something not subject to
cause-effect relations and hence leading to inactivism.

Apparently neither Chattopadhyaya nor Needham
noticed (or refused to consider) that outside the medical tradition (and even
inside it, cf. CS, 1.1.25), svabhava did have a meaning, not only different
from causality but diametrically opposite to it. Such a meaning is encountered
both earlier and later than the time of the compilation of the CS and the SS.
Chattopadhyaya summarily dismisses the evidence of so many writers speaking of
svabhava as synonymous with chance or accident: “There was a tendency in
medieval India to interpret svabhava-vada as simple denial of the causal law
and some of the modern scholars follow suit” (Chattopadhyaya 1991, 55-56. The
sources he mentions are Santarakshita, the Naiyayikas, Louis de La
Vallée-Poussin and Gopinath Kaviraj).

This view is palpably inadmissible. Even if we accept that that svabhava stands
for a naturalistic approach to disease and medicine (as Chattopadhyaya, I think
rightly, shows), the fact remains that both inside and outside the medical
literature very often it represents pure accidentalism, although atheistic and
pessimistic in intent (as for example, in CS,1.25.22-25). Daiva, adrishta,
karman, and niyati, it should not be overlooked, all have a strong basis in
causality: an as-you-sow-so-you-reap kind of inexorable and inevitable relation
between one’s action and its consequence. Yadriccha and hatha, pure accident or
chance (hatha is used to suggest accident in the Mbh and to denote
chance-finding or serendipity in both the Mbh and YTC), on the other hand,
should have no room in the list of jagatkaranas inasmuch as both of them imply
denial of any causal relation between two events, as both consider it
impossible to establish any such relation at all. Both in the cosmological and
the ethical domains, svabhava-as causality is, however, different from all other
“first causes” in one vital respect: it does not operate like an agency outside
the material world but inheres in every material object, sentient or
non-sentient, organic or inorganic. Kala, Time, on the other hand, operates
from outside in accordance with nothing but its own course.

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