t after
death: if so, is its existence conscious or unconscious: is it eternal
or does it cease to exist, not necessarily at the end of its present
life but after a certain number of lives: can it enjoy perfect bliss
here or elsewhere? Theories on these and other points are commonly
called vada or talk, and those who hold them vadins. Thus there is the
Kala-vada[229] which makes Time the origin and principle of the
universe, and the Svabhava-vada which teaches that things come into
being of their own accord. This seems crude when stated with archaic
frankness but becomes plausible if paraphrased in modern language as
"discontinuous variation and the spontaneous origin of definite
species." There were also the Niyati-vadins, or fatalists, who believed
that all that happens is the result of Niyati or fixed order, and the
Yadriccha-vadins who, on the contrary, ascribed everything to chance and
apparently denied causation, because the same result follows from
different antecedents. It is noticeable that none of these views imply
theism or pantheism but the Buddha directed so persistent a polemic
against the doctrine of the Atman that it must have been known in
Magadha. The fundamental principles of the Sankhya were also known,
though perhaps not by that name. It is probably correct to say not that
the Buddha borrowed from the Sankhya but that both he and the Sankhya
accepted and elaborated in different ways certain current views.

The Pali Suttas[230] mention six agnostic or materialist teachers and
give a brief but perhaps not very just compendium of their doctrines.
One of them was the founder of the Jains who, as a sect that has lasted
to the present day with a considerable record in art and literature,
merit a separate chapter. Of the remaining five, one, Sanjaya of the
Belattha clan, was an agnostic, similar to the people described
elsewhere[231] as eel-wrigglers, who in answer to such questions as, is
there a result of good and bad actions, decline to say either _(a)_
there is, _(b)_ there is not, _(c)_ there both is and is not, _(d)_
there neither is nor is not. This form of argument has been adopted by
Buddhism for some important questions but Sanjaya and his disciples
appear to have applied it indiscriminately and to have concluded that
positive assertion is impossible.

The other four were in many respects what we should call fatalists and
materialists[232], or in the language of their time Akriya-vadins,
denyin