on the "Outlines of Christianity" in a school for Buddhist priests. At
the close of our thirty-minute addresses, a young man arose and spoke
for fifty minutes, outlining the Buddhist system of thought; his
address consisted of an exposition of the law of cause and effect; he
also stated some of the reasons why the Christian conception of God
and the universe seemed to him utterly unsatisfactory; the objections
raised were those now current in Japan--such, for example, as that if
God really were the creator of the universe, why are some men rich and
some poor, some high-born and some low-born. He also asked the
question who made God? In a two-minute reply I stated that his
objections showed that he did not understand the Christian's position;
and I asked in turn what was the origin of the law of cause and
effect. The following day the chief priest, the head of the school and
its most highly educated instructor, dined with us. We of course
talked of the various aspects of Christian and Buddhist doctrine.
Finally he asked me how I would answer the question as to who created
God, and as to the origin of the law of cause and effect. I explained
as clearly as I could the Christian view of God, in his personality
and as being the original and only source of all existence, whether of
physical or of human nature. He seemed to drink it all in and
expressed his satisfaction at the close in the words, "Taihen ni man
zoku shimashita," "That is exceedingly satisfactory"; these words he
repeated several times. This is not my first personal proof of the
fact that the idea of personality is not alien or incomprehensible to
the Orient, nor even to a Buddhist priest, steeped in Buddhist
speculation, provided the idea is clearly stated.
Before bringing to a close this discussion of the problem of
personality in Japan, it would seem desirable to trace the history of
the development of Japanese personality. In view of all that has now
been said, and not forgetting what was said as to the principles of
National Evolution,[DA] this may be done in a paragraph.
The amalgamation of tribes, the development of large clans, and
finally the establishment of the nation, with world-wide relations,
has reacted on the individual members of the people, giving them
larger and richer lives. This constitutes one important element of
personal development. The subordination of individual will to that of
the group, the desire and effort to live for the advantage, not of the
individual self, but of the group, whether family, tribe, clan,
nation, or the world, is not a limitation of personality. On the
contrary, it is its expansion and development. Shinto and Japonicized
Confucianism contributed powerful motives to this subordination, and
thus to this personal development. These were attended, however, by
serious limitations in that they confined their attention to the upper
and ruling classes. The development of personality was thus extremely
limited. Buddhism contributed to the development of Japanese
personality in so far as it taught Japanese the marvels revealed by
introspection and self-victory. Its contribution, however, was
seriously hampered by defects already sufficiently emphasized. Japan
has developed personality to a high degree in a few and to a
relatively low degree in the many. The problem confronting New Japan
is the development of a high degree of personality among the masses.
This is to be accomplished by the introduction of an individualistic
social order.
One further topic demands our attention in closing. What is the nature
of personal heredity? Is it biological and inherent, or, like all the
characteristics of the Japanese people thus far studied, is
personality transmitted by social heredity? Distinguishing between
intrinsic or inherent personality,[DB] which constitutes the original
endowment differentiating man from animal, and extrinsic or acquired
personality, which consists of the various forms in which the inherent
personality has manifested itself in the different races of men and
the different ages of "history, it is safe to say that the latter is
transmitted according to the laws of association or social heredity.
Intrinsic personality can be inherited only by lineal offspring,
passing from father to son. Extrinsic personality may fail to be
inherited by lineal descendants and may be inherited by others than
lineal descendants. It is transmitted and determined by social
inheritance. Yet it is through personality that the individual may
break away from the dominant currents of the social order, and become
thus the means for the transformation of that order. The secret of
social progress lies in personality. In proportion as the social order
is fitted, accordingly, widely to develop high-grade personality,[DC]
is its own progress rapid and safe.
Does acquired personality react on intrinsic personality? This is the
problem of "the inheritance of acquired characteristics." Into this
problem I do not enter further than to note that in so far as newly
developed personal traits produce transformations of body and brain
transmittable from parent to offspring by the bare fact of parentage,
in that degree does acquired pass over into intrinsic personality and
thereby become intrinsic. In regard to the degree in which acquired
has passed over into intrinsic personality, thus differentiating the
leading races of mankind, we contend that it is practically
non-existent. The phenomena of personality characterizing the chief
races of men are due, not to intrinsic, but to acquired personality;
in other words they are the products of the respective social orders
and are transmitted from generation to generation by social rather
than by biological heredity.
XXXIV
THE BUDDHIST WORLD-VIEW
Fully to comprehend the genius and history of Japan and her social
order, we need to gain a still more thorough insight into the various
conceptions of the universe that have influenced the people. What have
been their views as to the nature of the ultimate reality lying behind
all phenomena? What as to the relation of mankind to that Ultimate
Reality? And what has been the relation of these world-views to the
social order? To prepare the way for our final answer to these
questions, we confine ourselves in this chapter to a study of the
inner nature of the Buddhist world-view.
Since the Buddhist conception of the Ultimate Reality and of the
universe is one of the three important types of world-views dominating
the human mind, a type too that is hardly known in Western lands, in
order to set it forth in terms intelligible to the Occidental and the
Christian, it will be necessary in expounding it to contrast it with
the two remaining types; namely, the Greek and the Christian. As
already pointed out, according to the Buddhistic conception, the
Ultimate is a thoroughgoing Abstraction. All the elements of
personality are denied. It is perfectly passionless, perfectly
thoughtless, and perfectly motionless. It has neither feeling, idea,
nor will. As a consequence, the phenomena of the universe are wholly
unrelated to it; all that is, is only illusion; it has no reality of
being. Human beings who think the world real, and who think even
themselves real, are under the spell. This illusion is the great
misery and source of pain. Salvation is the discovery of the illusion;
and this discovery is the victory over it; for no one fears the lion's
skin, however much he may fear the lion. This discovery secures the
dropping back from the little, limited, individual self-line, into
the infinite passionless, thoughtless, and motionless existence of the
absolute being, Nirvana.
The Ancient Greek and not a little modern thought, conceived of the
Ultimate as a thorough-going intellectualism. One aspect of
personality was perceived and emphasized. God was conceived as a
thinker, as one who contemplates the universe. He does not create
matter, nor force, nor does he rule them. They are eternal and real,
and subject to fate. God simply observes. He is absolute reason. The
Greek view is thus essentially dualistic. Sin, from the Greek point of
view, is merely ignorance, and salvation the attainment of knowledge.
In vital and vitalizing contrast to both the Buddhist and Greek
conceptions is the Judæo-Christian. To the Christian the Ultimate is a
thoroughgoing personality. To him the central element in God is will,
guided by reason and controlled by love and righteousness. God creates
and rules everything. There is nothing that is not wholly subject to
him. There is no dualism for the Christian, nor any illusion. Sin is
an act of human will, not an illusion nor a failure of intellect.
Salvation is the correction of the will, which comes about through a
"new birth."
The elemental difference, then, between these three conceptions of the
Ultimate is that in Buddhism the effort to rationalize and ethicize
the universe of experience is abandoned as a hopeless task; the world
entirely and completely resists the rational and ethical process. The
universe is pronounced completely irrational and non-moral. Change is
branded as illusion. There is no room for progress in philosophic,
thoroughgoing Buddhism.
In the Greek view the universe is subject in part to the rationalizing
process; but only in part. The effort at ethicization is entirely
futile. The Greek view, equally with the Buddhistic, is at a loss to
understand change. It does not brand it as unreal, but change produced
by man is branded as a departure from nature. Greeks and Hindus alike
have no philosophy of history. In the Christian view the universe is
completely subject to the rational and ethical process. God is creator
of all that is and it is necessarily good. God is an active will and
He is, therefore, still in the process of creating; hence change,
evolution, is justified and understood. History is rational and has a
philosophy. Evolution and revelation have their place at the very
heart of the universe. Hence it is that science, philosophy, and
history, in a word a high-grade civilization, finds its intellectual
justification, its foundation, its primary postulates, its
possibility, only in a land permeated with the Christian idea of God.
In the Buddhistic conception God is an abstract vacuity; in the Greek,
a static intellect; in the Christian, a dynamic will. As is the
conception of God, so is the conception and character of man. The two
are so intimately interdependent that it is useless at this time to
discuss which is the cause and which the result. They are doubtless
the two aspects of the same movement of thought. The following
differences are necessary characteristics of the three religions:
The Buddhist seeks salvation through the attainment of
vacuity--Nirvana--in order to escape from the world in which he says
there is no reason and no morality. The Greek seeks salvation through
the activity of the intellect; all that is needful to salvation is
knowledge of the truth. The Christian seeks salvation through the
activity of the will; this is secured through the new birth. The
Buddhist leaves each man to save himself from his illusion by the
discovery that it is an illusion. The Greek relies on intellectual
education, on philosophy--the Christian recreates the will. The
Buddhist and Greek gods make no effort to help the lost man. The
Christian God is dominated by love; He is therefore a missionary God,
sending even His only begotten Son to reconcile and win the world of
sinning, willful children back to Himself.
In Buddhism salvation is won only by the few and after ages of toil
and ceaseless re-births. In the Greek plan only the philosopher who
comes to full understanding can attain salvation. In the Christian
plan salvation is for all, for all are sons of God, in fact, and may
through Christ become so in consciousness. In the Buddhistic plan the
hopeless masses resort to magic and keep on with their idolatry and
countless gross superstitions. In the Greek plan the hopeless resort
to the "mysteries" for the attainment of salvation. In the Christian
plan there are no hopeless masses, for all may gain the regenerated
will and become conscious sons of God.
The Buddhist mind gave up all effort to grasp or even to understand
reality. The Greek mind thought it could arrive at reality through the
intellect. But two thousand years of philosophic study and evolution
drove philosophy into the absurd positions of absolute subjective
idealism on the one hand and sensationalism and absolute materialism
on the other. The Christian mind lays emphasis on the will and
accordingly is alone able to reach reality, a reality justifiable
alike to the reason and to the heart. For will is the creative faculty
in man as well as in God. As God through His will creates reality, so
man through his will first comes to know reality. Mere intellect can
never pass over from thought to being. Being can be known as a reality
only through the will.
In consequence of the above-stated methods of thought, the Buddhist
was of necessity a pessimist; the Greek only less so; while the Jew
and the Christian could alone be thoroughgoing optimists. The Buddhist
ever asserts the is-not; the Greek, the is; while the Jew and
Christian demand the ought-to be, as the supreme thing. Hence flows
the perennial life of the Christian civilization.
Those races and civilizations whose highest and deepest conception of
the ultimate is that of mere reason, no less than those races and
civilizations whose highest and deepest conception of reality is that
of an abstract emptiness, must be landed in an unreal world, must
arrive at irrational results, for they have not taken into account the
most vital element of thought and life. Such races and civilizations
cannot rise to the highest levels of which man is capable; they must
of necessity give way to those races and that civilization which build
on larger and more complete foundations, which worship Will, Human and
Divine, and seek for its larger development both in self and in all
mankind.
But I must not pause to trace the contrasts further. Enough has been
said to show the source of Occidental belief in the infinite worth of
man. In almost diametrical contrast to the Buddhist conception,
according to the Christian view, man is a real being, living in a real
world, involved in a real intellectual problem, fighting a real
battle, on whose issue hang momentous, nay, infinite results. So great
is man's value, not only to himself, but also to God, his Father, that
the Father himself suffers with him in his sin, and for him, to save
him from his sin. The question will be asked how widely the Buddhistic
interpretation of the universe has spread in Japan. The doctrine of
illusion became pretty general. We may doubt, however, whether the
rationale of the philosophy was very generally understood. One Sutra,
read by all Japanese sects, is taught to all who would become
acquainted with the essentials of Buddhist doctrine. It is so short
that I give it in full.[DD]
THE SMALLER-PRAGNA-PARAMITA-HRIDYA-SUTRA
"Adoration to the Omniscient. The venerable Bodhisattva
Avalokitesvara performing his study in the deep Pragna-paramita
[perfection of Wisdom] thought thus: There are the five Skandhas,
and these he considered as by their nature empty [phenomenal]. O
Sariputra, he said, form here is emptiness, and emptiness indeed is
form. Emptiness is not different from form, and form is not
different from emptiness. What is form that is emptiness, what is
emptiness that is form. The same applies to perception, name,
conception, and knowledge.
"Here, O Sariputra, all things have the character of emptiness;
they have no beginning, no end, they are faultless and not
faultless, they are not imperfect and not perfect. Therefore, O
Sariputra, in this emptiness there is no form, no perception, no
name, no concepts, no knowledge. No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body,
mind. No form, sound, smell, taste, touch, objects.... There is no
knowledge, no ignorance, no destruction of knowledge, no
destruction of ignorance, etc., there is no decay and death, no
destruction of decay and death; there are not the four truths,
viz., that there is pain, the origin of pain, stopping of pain, and
the path to it. There is no knowledge, no obtaining of Nirvana.
"A man who has approached the Pragna-paramita of the Bodhisattva
dwells enveloped in consciousness. But when the envelop of
consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all
fear, beyond the reach of change, enjoying final Nirvana. All
Buddhas of the past, present, and future, after approaching the
Pragna-paramita, have awakened to the highest perfect knowledge.
"Therefore one ought to know the great verse of the
Pragna-paramita, the verse of the great wisdom, the unsurpassed
verse, the peerless verse, which appeases all pain; it is truth
because it is not false; the verse proclaimed in the
Pragna-paramita: 'O wisdom, gone, gone, gone, to the other shore,
landed at the other shore, Shava.'
"Thus ends the heart of the Pragna-paramita."
A study of this condensed and widely read Buddhist Sutra will convince
anyone that the ultimate conceptions of the universe and of the final
reality, are as described above. However popular Buddhism might differ
from this, it would be the belief of the thoughtless masses, to whom
the rational and ethical problems are of no significance or concern,
and who contribute nothing to the development of thought or of the
social order. Those nobler and more earnestly inquiring souls whose
energy and spiritual longing might have been used for the benefit of
the masses, were shunted off on a side track that led only into the
desert of atomistic individualism, abandonment of society, ecstatic
contemplation, and absolute pessimism. The Buddhist theory of the
universe and method of thought denied all intelligible reality, and
necessitated the conclusion that the universe of experience is neither
rational nor ethical. The common beliefs of the unreflective and
uninitiated masses in the ultimate rationality and morality of the
universe were felt to have no foundation either in religion or
philosophy and were accordingly pronounced mere illusions.
XXXV
COMMUNAL AND INDIVIDUAL ELEMENTS IN THE EVOLUTION OF JAPANESE
RELIGIOUS LIFE
Our study of Japanese religion and religious life thus far has been
almost, if not exclusively, from the individualistic standpoint. An
adequate statement, however, cannot be made from this standpoint
alone, for religion through its mighty sanctions exerts a powerful
influence on the entire communal life. Indeed, the leading
characteristic of primitive religions is their communal nature. The
science of religion shows how late in human history is the rise of
individualistic religions.
In the present chapter we propose to study Japanese religious history
from the communal standpoint. This will lead us to study her present
religious problem and the nature of the religion required to solve it.
The real nature of the religious life of Japan has been and still is
predominantly communal. Individualism has had a place, but, as we have
repeatedly seen, only a minor place in forming the nation. From the
communo-individualistic standpoint, in the study of Japan's religious
and social evolution, not only can we see clearly that the three
religions of Japan are real religions, but we can also understand the
nature of the relations of these three religions to each other and the
reasons why they have had such relations. Japanese religious history
and its main phenomena become luminous in the light of
communo-individualistic social principles.
Shinto, the primitive religion of Japan, corresponded well with the
needs of primitive times, when the development of strong communal life
was the prime problem and necessity. It furnished the religious
sanctions for the social order in its customs of worshiping not only
the gods, but also the Emperor and ancestors. It gave the highest
possible justification of the national social order in its deification
of the supreme ruler. Shinto was so completely communal in its nature
that the individual aspect of religion was utterly ignored. It
developed no specific moral code, no eschatological and soteriological
systems, no comprehensive view of nature or of the gods. These
deficiencies, however, are no proofs that it was not a religion in the
proper sense of the term. The real question is, did it furnish any
supra-mundane, supra-legal, supra-communal sanctions both for the
conduct of the individual in his social relations and for the fact and
the right of the social order. Of this there can be no doubt. Those
who deny it the name of a religion do so because they judge religion
only from the point of view of a highly developed individualistic
religion.
In view of this undoubted fact, it is a strange commentary on the
failure of Shinto leaders to realize the real function of the faith
they profess that they have sought and obtained from the government
the right to be considered and classified no longer as a religion, but
only as a society for preserving the memories and shrines of the
ancestors of the race. Thus has modern Shinto, so far as it is
organized and has a mouth with which to speak, following the
abdicating proclivities of the ancient social order, excommunicated
itself from its religious heritage, aspiring to be nothing more than a
gate-keeper of cemeteries.
The sources of the power of the Shinto sanctions lies in the nature of
its conception of the universe. Although it attempted no
interpretation of the universe as a whole, it conceived of the origin
of the country and people of Japan as due to the direct creative
energy of the gods. Japan was accordingly conceived as a divine land
and the people a divine people. The Emperor was thought to have
descended in direct line from the gods and thus to be a visible
representative of the gods to the people, and to possess divine power
and authority with which to rule the people. Whenever Japanese came
into contact with foreign peoples, it was natural to consider them
outside of the divine providence, aliens, whose presence in the
divine land was more or less of a pollution. This world-view was well
calculated to develop a spirit of submissive obedience and loyal
adherence to the hereditary rulers of the land, and of fierce
antagonism to foreigners. This view constituted the moral foundation
for the social order, the intellectual framework within which the
state developed. Paternal feudalism was the natural, if not the
necessary, accompaniment of this world-view. Even to this day the
scholars of the land see no other ground on which to found Imperial
authority, no other basis for ethics and religion, than the divine
descent of the Emperor.[DE]
The Shinto world-view, conceiving of men as direct offspring of the
gods, has in it potentially the doctrine of the divine nature of all
men, and their consequent infinite worth. Shinto never developed this
truth, however. It did not discover the momentous implications of its
view. Failing to discover them, it failed to introduce into the social
order that moral inspiration, that social leaven which would have
gradually produced the individualistic social order.