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ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.--A Review.
By Lucius H. Buckingham, Ph.D.
Those who have read Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism will probably agree on
one point, namely: that, whether the statements of the book be true or
false, the book, as a whole, is a great stimulant of thought. The
European world has looked upon Indian philosophy as mere dreams, idle
speculations, built only on a foundation of metaphysical subtleties.
Here comes a book which, going down to the root of the whole matter,
claims that, instead of resting on mere imaginations, this whole
structure of Buddhistic philosophy has, as its cornerstone, certain
facts which have been preserved from the wrecks of a time earlier than
that which our grandfathers ascribe to the creation of the world, and
handed down without interruption from eras of civilization of which the
earth at present does not retain even the ruins. Such a claim of
antiquity rouses an interest in our minds, were it only for its
stupendous contempt of common belief.
There is one direction in which the book so harmonizes with one's
speculations that it makes upon us a very peculiar impression. It
carries out the theory of human development, physical and metaphysical.
Darwin's idea of the origin of the human animal, in connection with the
doctrine of the survival of the fittest, might, if one had the time to
make it all out, be shown to be the sufficient basis for a belief in,
and a logical ground for anticipating, the progress of man toward moral
and spiritual perfection. A healthy man is an optimist. Pessimism is the
product of dyspepsia; and all the intermediate phases of philosophy come
from some want of normal brain-action. Following out the Darwinian
theory,--supported as it seems to be by the facts,--one must believe
that the human race as a whole is improving in bodily development; that
the results of what we call civilization are, increase of symmetry in
the growth of the human body, diminution of disease, greater perfection
in the power of the senses, in short, a gradual progress toward a
healthy body. Now, a healthy body brings with it a healthy mind. The two
cannot be separated. Whatever brings the one will bring the other;
whatever impairs the one will impair the other. A sound mind must bring,
in time, a sound moral nature; and all, together, will tend toward the
perfection of humanity in the development of his spiritual affinities.
Such has been, roughly sketched, my belief regarding the progress of
man. It has left all the men of the past ages, all of the present time,
all of many generations yet to come, in a condition, which, compared
with that which I try to foresee, must be called very immature. This has
never been a stumbling-block to me; for I hold that the Lord understands
his own work, the end from the beginning; and that, if "order is
heaven's first law," there is a place for every soul that is in it,
and a possible satisfaction of the desires of every one. Dr. Clarke
expresses the thought that, however much any being may have gone astray,
the soul reconciled at last to God, though it can never undo the past,
or be at that point it might have reached, will yet be perfectly content
with its place in the universe, and as much blessed as the archangels.
That consideration has satisfied my mind when I contemplated humanity,
seeming to stop so far short of its perfection. My regrets--if I can use
such a term--came, as I believed, out of my ignorance.
Now comes a book which claims to give us the key of the whole problem of
human destiny--a book containing some assertions regarding occult
science, belief in which must remain suspended in our minds, and some
points in cosmogony which conflict with our Christian convictions--yet a
book making statements about human history which, though in the highest
degree startling, are not contradicted by anything we know of the past,
but are rather an explanation of some of its dark passages--a book
developing a system of human growth which cannot be disproved and which
makes plain some of the riddles of destiny.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the book is its tremendous
assumption. "All that have hitherto written on this subject have been
only half-taught. They have not been admitted to the real inner
doctrine. Here is the first putting-forth, to the world, of the real
teaching, as the Buddhists present it to those who have been initiated
into occult science." Such is, in substance, the author's claim. We may
believe just as much of this as we can. I, for my part, knowing nothing
about the matter, choose, just now, and for our purpose, to assume that
the doctrines of Esoteric Buddhism are what Sinnett says they are,
because they suggest to my mind so many attractive avenues for my
imagination to wander in.
There are two main points in this book which give it its chief interest:
(1) "The past history of the human race as now living on this planet;"
and (2) "The manner in which, and the circumstances under which, any
individual man works out his own salvation." But before entering upon
these, we should say a word about the Buddhist statements regarding the
nature of man.
Seven is the sacred number in the Buddhist system. As there are seven
worlds in the planetary chain, seven kingdoms in Nature, seven
root-races of men, in like manner man is a sevenfold being, continuing,
through untold millions of years, his existence as an individual, yet
changing, one knows not how many times, many of his component elements.
As the Buddhist sees the mortal body to be dissolved into its molecules,
and these molecules to be transferred with their inherent vitality to
other organisms, so some of his higher elements, among them his "astral
body," his impulses and desires, under the name, as our author gives it,
of _animal soul_, may separate from the more enduring parts of his
composition, and become lost to him in Nature's great store of material
substance. As there is an _animal soul_, the seat of those
faculties which we possess in common with the lower beings about us, so
there is a _human soul_, the seat of intelligence; and, higher
still, a _spiritual soul_, possessing powers of which as yet we
know but little, yet destined to give us, when it shall be more fully
developed, new powers of sense, new avenues for the entrance of
knowledge, by which we shall be able to communicate directly with
Nature, and become as much greater than the present race of men, as
_that_ is greater than the lowest brutes. Above all these elements
of man, controlling all, and preserving its individuality throughout, is
"spirit." Yet even this, when absorbed into Nirvana, is lost in that
great whole which includes all things and is Nature herself. Lost, do I
say?--yes, lost for inconceivable ages upon ages, yet destined to come
forth again at some moment in eternity, and to begin its round through
the everlasting cycle of evolution.
Here, you will say, is materialism. As the intelligent man of early ages
looked out upon the world, he felt the wind he could not see, he smelt
the odor that he could not feel, and he reasoned with himself, I think,
as follows; "There is somewhat too subtile for these bodily senses to
grasp it. Something of which I cannot directly take cognizance brings
to me the light of sun and stars." These somethings were, in his
conception, forms of matter. He saw the intelligence and the moral worth
of his friend, and then he saw that friend a lifeless body stretched
upon the ground, and he said some _thing_ is gone. This thing was
again to him only another and more subtile form of matter. We, with all
the aids of modern knowledge and thought, are absolutely unable to say
what distinction there is between matter and spirit. The old philosopher
was logical. He could find no point at which to draw his line. Therefore
he drew no line. He recognized only different manifestations of one
substance. In terms of our language, he was a materialist. So is the
modern scientist; yet I cannot help thinking that the Buddhist stands
much nearer to truth than the materialist of to-day. The various
faculties of human sense and human intellect are so many molecules
forming, by their accretion, the animal and the human soul. As, at
death, the molecules of the body separate and are, by-and-by, absorbed
with their inherent vitality into new agglomerations, and become part of
new living forms, so the elements of the human soul may be torn apart,
and some of them, being no longer man, but following the fortunes of the
lower principles, may be lost to us, while other elements, clinging to
the spiritual soul, follow its destiny in the after-life. I know a
thinking man who believes in nothing but matter and motion; add time and
space, and we have the all in all, the Nature, of Buddhism. Yet the
Buddhist believes in a state of being beyond this earthly life: a state
whose conditions are determined absolutely by the use which the human
soul has made of its opportunities in the life that now is, and my
friend says he does not. Truly, Buddhism is better than the materialism
of to-day.
Let me now turn to the history of humanity as revealed to us in our
book. Every monad, or spirit-element, beginning its course by becoming
separated from what I conceive as the great central reservoir of Nature,
must, before returning thither, make a certain fixed round through an
individual existence. If it belongs to the planetary chain, of which our
earth is the fourth and lowest link, it must pass seven times through
each of the kingdoms of Nature on each one of the seven planets. Of
these seven planets, Mars, our Earth, and Mercury, are three. The other
four are too tenuous to be cognizable by our present senses. Of the
seven kingdoms of Nature, three are likewise beyond our ken or
conception; the highest four are the mineral, the vegetable, the animal,
and man. Our immortal part has therefore passed already through six of
the kingdoms of its destiny, and is, in fact, now near the middle of its
fourth round of human existence upon the earth. One life on earth is,
however, not sufficient for the development of our powers. Every human
being must pass through each of the seven branch races of each of the
sub-races of each of the root-races of humanity; and must, in short,
live, or, as our author expresses the idea, be incarnated about eight
hundred times--some more and some less--upon this planet, before the
hour will come when it will be permitted to him, by a path as easy of
passage for him then, as is that followed by the rays of light, to visit
the planet Mercury, for his next two million years of existence.
Through each of these eight hundred mortal lives, man is purifying and
developing his nature. When, at the end of each, his body dies, his
higher principles leave the lower to gradual dissolution, while they
themselves remaining still bound in space to this planet, pass into
_Devachan_, the state of effects. Here, entirely unconscious of what
passes on earth, the soul remains, absorbed in its own subjectivity. For
a length of time, stated as never less than fifteen hundred years, and
shown by figures to average not less than eight thousand, the soul,
enjoying in its own contemplation those things it most desired in mortal
life, surrounded in its own imagination by the friends and the scenes it
has loved on earth, reaps the exact reward of its own deeds. When Nature
has thus paid the laborer his hire, when his power of enjoyment has
exhausted itself, the soul passes by a gradual process into oblivion of
all the past--an oblivion from which it returns only on its approach to
Nirvana--and waits the moment for reincarnation. Yet it comes not again
to conscious life, unaffected by the forgotten past. _Karma_,--the
resultant of its upward or downward tendencies,--which has been
accumulating through all the course of its existence, remains; and the
new-born man comes into visible being with good or evil propensities,
the balance of which is to be affected by the struggles of one more
mortal phase of existence. Thus we go on through one life after another,
each time a new person yet the same human soul, ignorant of our own past
lives, yet never free from their influence upon our character, exactly
as in mature life we have absolutely forgotten what happened to us in
our infancy, yet are never free from its influence. In Devachan, which
corresponds, says our author, to what in other religions is the final
and eternal heaven, we receive, from time to time, the reward of our
deeds done in the body, yet still pass on with all our upward or
downward tendencies until, many millions of years in the future, during
our next passage through life on this planet, we shall come to the
crisis in our existence which shall determine whether we are to become
gods or demons.
Let me now turn back the page of history. A little more than one million
years ago this earth was covered, as now, with vegetable forms, and was
the dwelling of animals, as numerous, perhaps, and as various as now;
but there was no humanity. The time was come when man, who had passed
already three times round the planetary chain, and was nearly half way
through his fourth round, should again make his appearance on the scene.
Nature works only in her own way, and that way is uniform. The first man
must be born of parents already living. As there are no human parents,
he must be born of lower animals, and of those lower animals most nearly
resembling the coming human animal. Darwin has told us what the animal
was, yet the new being was a man and not an ape, because, in addition to
its animal soul, it was possessed also of a human soul. We all know that
man is an animal. Those modern students of science, who affirm that that
is the whole truth of human nature, take a lower view of their own being
than the Indian philosophers. Man is an animal plus a human and a
spiritual soul.
Behold, now, the earth peopled by man. Through seven races must he pass,
each with its various branches. Yet these races are not contemporaneous;
for Nature is in no hurry. One race comes forward at a time, reaches
the height of its possibility, then passes away during great physical
transformations, and leaves but a wreck behind to live, and witness,
in some new part of earth, the coming of another race. These races
and branch races and sub-branch races are to be animated by the same
identical souls. Hence, one race at a time; at first, even, one sub-race
only, for the next is to be of a higher order. After each root-race has
run its course, the earth has always been prepared by a great geological
convulsion for the next. In this convulsion has perished all that makes
up what we call civilization, yet not all men then living. Since some
souls are slower than others, all are not ready to pass into the second
race, when the time for that race has come. Hence fragments of old races
survive, kept up for a time by the incarnation of the laggard souls
whose progress has been too slow. Thus, we are told, although the first
and second root-races have now entirely disappeared, there still remain
relics of the third and fourth. The proper seat of this third root-race
was that lost continent which Wallace told us, long ago, stood where now
roll the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, south and southwest of
Asia. Here we have, in the degraded Papuan and Australian, the remainder
of the third race. Degraded I call him, because his ancestors, though
inferior to the highest races of to-day, were far in advance of him. So
it must always be. Destroy the accumulations of the highest race of men
now living, and the next generation will be barbarians; the second,
savages.
The fourth root-race inhabited the famous, but no longer fabulous,
Atlantis, now sunk, in greater part, beneath the waters of the Atlantic.
Fragments of this race were left in Northern Africa, though perhaps none
now remain there, and we are told that there is a remnant in the heart
of China. From the relics of the African branch of this root-race, the
old Egyptian priests had knowledge regarding the sunken continent,
knowledge which was no fable, but the traditionary lore and history of
the survivors of the lost Atlantis.
Such is, in brief, an outline of the nature, history, and destiny of
man, as the Buddhist relates it. How has he obtained his knowledge? By
means which, he says, are within the reach of any one. First, of the
history: it is said to be well authenticated tradition. Of the actual
knowledge of former races, the Egyptian priests were the repositories,
inheriting their information from the Atlantids. Of human nature and
destiny the Buddhist would say: Here are the facts, look about you and
see. From a theory of astronomy, or botany, or chemistry, we find an
explanation of facts, and these facts explained, confirm and establish
the theory. So, too, of man, here is the view, once a theory, but now as
firmly established as the law of gravitation. Besides, by study and
contemplation, the expert has developed, in advance of the age in which
he lives, his spiritual soul, and this opens to him sources of
information which place him on a higher level in point of knowledge than
the rest of mankind, just as the man with seeing eyes has possibilities
of information which are absolutely closed to one born blind.
Let me stop here to explain more fully what is the spiritual soul.
I should call it, using a term that seems to me more natural to our
vocabulary, the transcendental sense. In the reality of such a sense
I am a firm believer. It was once fashionable to ridicule whatever was
thought, or nicknamed, transcendental. Yet transcendentalism seems to
me the only complete bar to modern scepticism. Faith, in the highest
Christian sense, is transcendental. We know some things for which we can
bring no evidence, things the truth of which lies not in logic, nor even
in intellect. The intellect never gave man any firm conviction of God's
being. Paley's mode of reasoning never brought conviction to any man's
mind. At best, it only serves to confirm belief, to stifle doubt, to
silence logic misapplied. Faith is the action of the spiritual sense--or,
as the Buddhist says, the spiritual soul. It seems to me that it is a
fair statement, that every man who has a conviction of the being of God,
has that conviction from inspiration. Many people have it, or think they
have it, as a result of reasoning, or it has been, they say, grounded
and rooted in their minds by the earliest teaching. There are those,
perhaps, who have no other reason than this tradition, for their
supersensuous ideas. Such people, as soon as they come to reason
seriously on or about those ideas, begin to doubt and to lose their
hold. But others have a conviction regarding things unseen, that no
reasoning can shake, except for a moment; because their belief, though
it may have been originally the result of early teaching, is now
established on other foundations. One can no more tell how he knows some
things, than he can tell how he sees; yet he does know them, and all the
world cannot get the knowledge out of him. The source of this knowledge
is transcendental. It is a sixth sense. It is what the Buddhist calls an
activity of the spiritual, as distinct from the human, soul. By his
animal soul man has knowledge of the world around him; he sees, he
hears, he feels bodily pain or pleasure; by his human soul, he reasons,
he receives the conceptions of geometry or the higher mathematics;
by his spiritual soul, he comes to a conception of God and of his
attributes, and receives impressions whose source is unknown to him
because his spiritual soul, in this his fourth planetary round, is, as
yet, only imperfectly active. The reality of the spiritual soul, the
vehicle of inspiration, the source of faith, is the only earnest man has
for this trust in the Divine Father. It is not developed in us as it
will be in our next round through earthly life, when, by its awakening,
faith will become sight, and we shall know even as we are known. Yet
some there are, say the Buddhists, who have, by effort, already pushed
their development to the point that most men will reach millions of
years hence, when we shall return again, not to this life--that we shall
do perhaps in a few thousand years--but to this planet.
It will be seen that the Buddhist idea of spirituality is very unlike
our Christian idea. The thought of man's higher sense striving after the
Divine, the whole conception, in short, of what the word spirituality
suggests to modern thought, is impossible in a system of philosophy
which has no personal God. To apply the term religion to a scheme which
has no place for the dependence of man upon a conscious protector, is to
use the word in a sense entirely new to us. Buddhism--notwithstanding
its claims to revelation--is a philosophy, not a religion.
I have sketched, as well as I can in so short a time, what seem to
me the main points in the book under review. There are many things
unexplained. Of some of them, the author claims to have no knowledge.
Others he does not make clear; but, "take it for all in all," the hook
will probably give the reader a very great number of suggestions. I am
heterodox enough to say that if the idea of a personal God, the Father
of all, were superadded to the system (or perhaps I ought to say were
substituted for the idea of absorption into Nirvana), there would be
nothing in Buddhism contradictory of Christianity. What orthodox
Christians of the present day and of this country believe with regard to
eternal punishment is a question about which they do not altogether
agree among themselves. Whether the so-called hell is a place of
everlasting degradation, is a point on which those who cannot deny to
each other the name of Christian are not in accord. Why, then, should it
be thought heretical to maintain that the future world of _rewards_
is _also_ not eternal? I believe that the Christian Scriptures use
the same words with reference to both conditions--
"[Greek: To pyr to aiônion:--eis xôên aiônion.]"
The Buddhist denial of the eternity of the condition next following the
separation of soul and body cannot, I think, be pronounced a subversion
of Christian doctrine by any one who will admit that the Greek word
[Greek: aiônios] _may_ mean something less than endless.
Of the antiquity of Buddhistic philosophy, I have already spoken
indirectly. Buddha came upon the earth only 643 B.C. But he was not the
founder of the system. His purpose in reincarnating himself at that time
was to reform the lives of men. Doubtless he made many explanations of
doctrine, perhaps gave some new teaching; but the philosophy comes down
to us from, at least, the times of the fourth root-race, the men of
Atlantis.
However we may regard a claim to so great age, a little reflection will
convince us that the Buddhistic view of what may fairly be called the
natural history of the human soul is very old, for it seems to have been
essentially the doctrine of Pythagoras, who was not its founder, but who
may have got it either from Egypt or from India, since he visited and
studied in both those countries. If, as Sinnett asserts, the true
Chinese belong to the fourth root-race, as appears not improbable, did
not the system come into India from China? Plato was a Buddhist, says
our author. Quintilian, perhaps getting his idea from Cicero, says of
Plato that he learned his philosophy from the Egyptian priests. It is
much more probable that the latter received it from the Atlantids--if we
are to believe in them--than that it came from India. Indeed, when we
seem to trace the same teachings to the Indians, on the one side, and to
the Egyptians on the other, putting the one, through Thibet,--the land,
above all others, of occult science,--into communication with the true
Chinese, and the other, through their tradition, with the lost race of
the Atlantic, the asserted history of the fourth root-race of humanity
assumes a very attractive degree of reasonableness.
That Cicero held to the Buddhist doctrines at points so important as to
make it improbable that he did not have esoteric teaching in the system,
any one will, I believe, admit, who will read the last chapter of the
Somnium Scipionis. And Cicero's ideas must have been those of the
students and scholars of his day. He puts them forward in a manner too
commonplace, too much as if they were things of course, for us to
suppose that there was anything unusual in them. On this subject of the
wide extension of that philosophy which in India we call Buddhism, I
will make only one other suggestion. It is the guess that it lay at the
foundation of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries.
Let me now come back to the idea that the succession of human races upon
this earth is, like that of animal races, a development. Sinnett tells
us that what we recognize as language began with the third root-race. I
imagine that the preceding races had, in progressive development, some
vocal means of communication; for we find that even the lower animals
have that, and the lowest man of the first race was superior to the
highest possible animal, by the very fact that he had developed a human
soul. Now, we are told that the home of the third race was on the
continent "Lemuria," which stretched across the Indian Ocean. I imagine
the Tasmanians, the Papuans, and the degraded races of that part of the
world to be fragments of the third race. Query: Is the famous click of
the Zulu a remainder of the gradual passage from animal noise to human
articulation in speech?
Again, the true Chinese belong to the fourth root-race. They have
reached the height of their possible intellectual advance. They have
been stationary for untold centuries. Query: Does this account for their
apparent inability to develop their language beyond the monosyllable?
There are, have been, or will be, seven branches to each of the seven
great races. These branches must originate at long intervals of time,
one after the other, though several may be running their course at the
same moment. For instance, the second race could not come into the
world, until some human souls had passed at least twice, as we are told,
through "the world of effects." This would occupy at least sixteen
thousand years, according to our author's calculation, though he does
not claim to have on this point exact information. He says, only, that
the initiated know exactly the periods of time: but they are withheld
from him. Now, according to a French savant, geological investigation
proves that the Aryan race--branch-race, I will call it--was preceded in
Europe by at least three others, whose remains are found in the caves
or strata that have been examined. Of these the first has entirely
disappeared: no representatives of it are now to be found in any known
part of the world. The second was driven, apparently, from the north, by
the invasions of the ice, during the glacial period and spread as far,
at least, as the Straits of Gibraltar. With the disappearance of the
ice, they also traveled toward the pole, and are now existing in the
northern regions of the earth, under the name of Esquimaux. Following
them came a race, the fragments of which were powerful within historic
days in the Iberian peninsula,--the Iberians of the Roman writers--the
Basques of to-day. Then came from the east the Aryan race, hitherto the
highest form of humanity. These races do not, of course, begin existence
as new creations. They are developed from--their first members must be
born from--the preceding race. Query: Is a fifth race now in the throes
of nativity? Have the different sub-races of the Aryan branch sent their
contingents to the New World, that from the mixture of their boldest and
most vigorous blood the fifth sub-race might have its origin? "Westward
the star of empire takes its way."
Buddhism gives a peculiar explanation of the disappearance of inferior
races. Since the object of the incarnation of the human soul is its
progress toward the perfect and divine man; since every human soul must
dwell on earth as a member of each one of the sub-races, the time must
come when all shall have passed through a given stage. Then there can be
no more births into that race. There is, at this moment, a finite number
of human souls whose existence is limited to this planet, and no other
planet in our chain is at present the abode of humanity. For the larger
part of all these souls--at least nine hundred and ninety-nine in a
thousand--are, at anyone instant, existing in "the world of effects," in
Devachan. All will remain linked by their destiny to this planet, until
the moment when all--a few rare, unfortunate, negligent laggards
excepted--shall have passed through their last mortal probation, in the
seventh root-race. Then will the tide of humanity overflow to the planet
Mercury, and this earth, abandoned by conscious men, will for a million
years fall back into desolation, gradually deprived of all life, even of
all development. In that condition it will remain, sleeping, as it were,
for ages--"not dead, but sleeping"; for the germs of mineral, vegetable,
and animal life will await, quiescent, until the tide of human soul
shall have passed around the chain, and is again approaching our globe.
Then will earth awake from its sleep. In successive eons, the germs of
life, mineral, vegetable, and animal, in their due order, will awake;
the old miracle of creation will begin again, but on a higher plan than
before, until, at last, the first human being--something vastly higher
in body, mind, and spirituality than the former man--will make his
appearance on the new earth. From this explanation of the doctrine that
life moves not by a steady flow, but by what Sinnett calls gushes, it
follows, of course, that there must come a time when each race, and each
sub-race, must have finished its course, completed its destiny. There
are no more human souls in Devachan to pass through that stage of
progress. For a long time the number has been diminishing, and that race
has been losing ground. Now it has come to its end. So, within a hundred
years, has passed away the Tasmanian. So, to-day, are passing many
races. The disappearance of a lower race is therefore no calamity; it
is evidence of progress. It means that that long line of undeveloped
humanity must go up higher. "That which thou sowest, is not quickened
except it die." If there be "joy among the angels of God, over one
sinner that repenteth," why not when the whole human race, to the last
man, has passed successfully up into a higher class in the great school?
I am constantly turning back to a thought that I have passed by. Let me
now return to the consideration of Buddhism as a religion. It is evident
that, viewed on this side, Buddhism is one thing to the initiated,
another to the masses. So was the religion of the Romans, so is
Christianity. It is necessarily so. No two persons receive the formal
creed of the same church in the same way. The man of higher grade, and
the man of lower, cannot understand things in the same sense because
they have not the same faculties for understanding. Hence the polytheism
among those called Buddhists. There could be no such thing among the
initiated. Religion, then, like everything else, is subject to growth.
Such must be the Buddhist doctrine. If, then, Buddhism, or the
philosophy which bears that name, originated with the fourth root-race
of men, does it not occur to the initiated that the fifth race ought, by
this same theory, to develop a higher form of truth? Looking at the
matter merely on its intellectual side, ought not the higher development
of the power of thought to bring truer conceptions of the highest
things? Again, a query: Is the rise of the Brahmo-Somaj a step toward
the practical extension of Christianity into the domain of Buddhism?
This brings to discussion the whole question of the work done by
missionary effort among the lower races. I do not mean the question
whether we should try to Christianize them, but what result is it
reasonable to expect. And here I imagine that there is a strict limit,
beyond which it is impossible for the members of a given race to be
developed. On the Buddhist principle, given a certain human being, and
we have a human soul passing through a definite stage of its progress.
While it occupies its present body it is, except, our author always
says, in very peculiar cases, incapable of more than a certain
advance,--as incapable as a given species of animal, or tree, or even as
the body of the man itself is incapable of more than a certain growth. I
think that any one who has studied or observed the processes of ordinary
school training, must have been sometimes convinced that he has in hand
a boy whose ability to be further advanced has come to an end. Sometimes
we find a boy who will come forward with the greatest promise; but,
at a certain point, although goodwill is not lacking, the growth seems
to be arrested. The biologist will explain this as due to the physical
character of the brain. The Buddhist affirms, that when that human soul
last came from the oblivion which closes the Devachanic state, it chose
unconsciously, but by natural affinity, out of all the possible
conditions and circumstances of mortal life, that embryonic human body,
for which its spiritual condition rendered it fit.
Some years ago, in conversation with a missionary who had spent many
years in China, I asked him, having this subject in my mind, whether he
thought that his converts were capable of receiving Christianity in the
sense in which he himself held the faith. His answer, which he
illustrated by instances, was that the heathen conceptions and
propensities could not be entirely eradicated; and that, under
unfavorable circumstances, the most trusted converts would sometimes
relapse into a condition as bad as ever they had known.
It is also a matter of common assertion that our American Indians, after
years of training in the society of civilized life, are generally ready
to fall back at once to their old ways. What we call civilization is to
them but an easy-fitting garment.
I do not know what is the belief of scholars regarding the comparative
age of the different minor divisions--sub-branches, as Sinnett calls
them--of the Aryan race. I imagine, however, that of the European
sub-branches, the Celtic is practically the oldest. The Italic or
Hellenic may have broken off from the parent stem earlier than the
Celtic, but they have not wandered so far away, and have not been so
isolated from the influence of later migrations. The Celtic race has
mingled its blood with the Iberian in Spain and with many elements in
Gaul and Italy; but in the northwest of Europe, on its own peculiar
isle, it seems to have remained, if not purer than elsewhere, at least
less affected by mixture with later, that is, higher, races.
What is the practical use of all this study? Ever since I first read
Esoteric Buddhism, my attention has been turned to the confirmation of
its theory of human development. As I ride in the horse-car, as I walk
on the street, still more constantly as I stand before one class after
another in the school-room, I am struck with the thought that here,
behind the face I am looking into, is a human soul whose capacities are
limited--a soul that _cannot_ grasp the thought which catches like
a spark upon the mind of its next neighbor. Yet that half-awakened soul
is destined to work its way through all the phases of human possibility,
and reach at last the harbor of peace. This thought should make one
ashamed to be impatient or negligent. Why should one lose patience with
this boy's inability to learn, more than at the inanimate obstacle in
one's pathway? How can one be unfaithful in one's effort, when it may be
the means of lessening the number of times that that poor soul must pass
through earthly life?
Do I believe in the teachings of this book? I do not know. So far as the
doctrine of repeated incarnation goes, I hold it to be not inconsistent
with Christianity; but rather an explanation of Christ's coming upon
earth at the precise time when he did. I still hold the subject of
Buddhistic philosophy as a matter for very serious and edifying
reflection.
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