The Story of Paesi (Paesi-kahanayam): Soul and Body in Ancient India: A Dialogue on Materialism; Text, Translation, Notes and Glossary.

• Author: Cort, John E.
• Position: Book Review

The Story of Paesi (Paesi-kahanayam): Soul and Body in Ancient India: A Dialogue on Materialism; Text, Translation, Notes and Glossary. By WILLEM BOLLEE. Beitrage zur Kenntnis sudasiatischer Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. 8. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2002. Pp. ix + 368. [euro]49.

Many American students of a believing Christian or Jewish background find the Buddhist doctrine of anatta or absence of a permanent soul to be one of the most challenging concepts to deal with in their initial studies of Buddhism. Inevitably, however, there are other students in the same class who are either agnostics or convinced materialists, and for whom the initial exposure to the doctrine comes as a refreshing revelation. Reading the dialogue between King Milinda and the Buddhist monk Nagasena in the Milindapanha engenders lively in-class discussions that often continue beyond the end of the class session. Students with a background in ancient Indian thought observe that many of the same issues concerning the existence of a soul dominate a number of the Upanisads, and that each side advances similar arguments both to advocate and critique the concept of a soul. Philosophical debates in ancient India did not result in a conclusive victory for either side, as the question of whether or not souls exist cannot be solved by logic. Nor can it be answered by scientific experiment. In her 2003 best-seller Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach records the experiments conducted in 1907 by an American physician, Dr. Duncan Macdougall. He weighed six humans as they died, and concluded that the soul which exited a body at the moment of death weighed three-fourths of an ounce. Similar experiments on fifteen dying dogs confirmed the Abrahamic doctrine that animals lack a soul. But Macdougall's experiments did not succeed in convincing any skeptics or scientists that the soul exists.

The debates concerning the existence of a soul in Buddhist and Upanisadic circles are well known to students of ancient India. Far less known is the similar contemporary debate between the materialist King Paesi of Seyaviya (Savatthi, Sravasti) and the Jain monk Kesi recorded in the Svetambara Rayapaseniya Sutta, even though the arguments of Paesi (there spelled Payasi) are also recorded in his dialogue with Kumara Kassapa in the Payasi Suttanta contained in the Buddhist Dighanikaya. The issue in the Jain context is not the existence of the soul; rather, Paesi argues that...