etter leave alone because we are incapable of taking or expressing
a view sufficiently large to be correct, but that the Buddha has a more
than human knowledge which he does not impart because it is not
profitable and overstrains the faculties, just as it is no part of a
cure that the patient should make an exhaustive study of his disease.

With reference to the special question of the existence of the saint
after death, the story of Yamaka[513] is important. He maintained that a
monk in whom evil is destroyed (khinasavo) is annihilated when he dies,
and does not exist. This was considered a grave heresy and refuted by
Sariputta who argues that even in this life the nature of a saint passes
understanding because he is neither all the skandhas taken together nor
yet one or more of them.

Yet it would seem that according to the psychology of the Pitakas an
ordinary human being is an aggregate of the skandhas and nothing more.
When such a being dies and in popular language is born again, the
skandhas reconstitute themselves but it is expressly stated that when
the saint dies this does not happen. The Chain of Causation says that
consciousness and the sankharas are interdependent. If there is no
rebirth, it is because (as it would seem) there are in the dying saint
no sankharas. His nature cannot be formulated in the same terms as the
nature of an ordinary man. It may be noted that karma is not equivalent
to the effect produced on the world by a man's words and deeds, for if
that were so, no one would have died leaving more karma behind him than
the Buddha himself, yet according to Hindu doctrine, whether Buddhist or
Brahmanic, no karma attaches to the deeds of a saint. His acts may
affect others but there is nothing in them which tends to create a new
existence.

In another dialogue[514] the Buddha replies to a wandering monk called
Vaccha who questioned him about the undetermined problems and in answer
to every solution suggested says that he does not hold that view. Vaccha
asks what objection he has to these theories that he has not adopted any
of them?

"Vaccha, the theory that the saint exists (or does not exist and so on)
after death is a jungle, a desert, a puppet show, a writhing, an
entanglement and brings with it sorrow, anger, wrangling and agony. It
does not conduce to distaste for the world, to the absence of passion,
to the cessation of evil, to peace, to knowledge, to perfect
enlightenment, to nirvana. Pe