be momentary, so neither cause nor effect can abide.  One is called the effect because its momentary existence has been determined by the destruction of its momentary antecedent called the cause.  There is no permanent reality which undergoes the change, but one change is determined by another and this determination is nothing more than “that happening, this happened.”  On the relation of parts to whole, Buddhism does not believe in the existence of wholes.  According to it, it is the parts which illusorily appear as the whole, the individual atoms rise into being and die the next moment and thus there is no such thing as “whole [Footnote ref 1].  The Buddhists hold again that there are no universals, for it is the individuals alone which come and go.  There are my five fingers as individuals but there is no such thing as fingerness (a@ngulitva) as the abstract universal of the fingers.  On the relation of attributes and substance we know that the Sautrantika Buddhists did not believe in the existence of any substance apart from its attributes; what we call a substance is but a unit capable of producing a unit of sensation.  In the external world there are as many individual simple units (atoms) as there are points of sensations.  Corresponding to each unit of sensation there is a separate simple unit in the objective world.  Our perception of a thing is thus the perception of the assemblage of these sensations.  In the objective world also there are no substances but atoms or reals, each representing a unit of sensation, force or attribute, rising into being and dying the next moment.  Buddhism thus denies the existence of any such relation as that of inherence (samavaya) in which relation the attributes are said to exist in the substance, for since there are no separate substances there is no necessity for admitting the relation of inherence.  Following the same logic Buddhism also does not

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believe in the existence of a power-possessor separate from the power.

Brief survey of the evolution of Buddhist Thought.

In the earliest period of Buddhism more attention was paid to the four noble truths than to systematic metaphysics.  What was sorrow, what was the cause of sorrow, what was the cessation of sorrow and what could lead to it?  The doctrine of pa@ticcasamuppada was offered only to explain how sorrow came in and not with a view to the solving of a metaphysical problem.  The discussion of ultimate metaphysical problems, such as whether the world was eternal or non-eternal, or whether a Tathagata existed after death or not, were considered as heresies in early Buddhism.  Great emphasis was laid on sila, samadhi and panna and the doctrine that there was no soul.  The Abhidhammas hardly give us any new philosophy which was not contained in the Suttas.  They only elaborated the materials of the suttas with enumerations and definitions.  With the evolution of Mahayana scriptures from some