BRAHMANIC AND BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
IN the Hindu views of the fate of the human soul, metaphysical
subtlety and imaginative vastness, intellect and fancy, slavish
tradition and audacious speculation, besotted ritualism and
heaven storming spirituality, are mingled together on a scale of
grandeur and intensity wholly without a parallel elsewhere in the
literature or faith of the world. Brahmanism, with its hundred
million adherents holding sway over India, and Buddhism, with
its four hundred million disciples scattered over a dozen
nations, from Java to Japan, and from the Ceylonese to the
Samoyedes, practically considered, in reference to their actually
received dogmas and aims pertaining to a future life, agree
sufficiently to warrant us in giving them a general examination
together. The chief difference between them will be explained in
the sequel.
The most ancient Hindu doctrine of the future fate of man, as
given in the Vedas, was simple, rude, and very unlike the forms in
which it has since prevailed. Professor Wilson says, in the
introduction to his translation of the Rig Veda, that the
references to this subject in the primeval Sanscrit scriptures are
sparse and incomplete. But no one has so thoroughly elucidated
this obscure question as Roth of Tubingen, in his masterly paper
on the Morality of the Vedas, of which there is a translation, by
Professor Whitney, in the Journal of the American Oriental
Society.1 The results of his researches may be stated in few
words.
When a man dies, the earth is invoked to wrap his body up, as a
mother wraps her child in her garment, and to lie lightly on him.
He himself is addressed thus: "Go forth, go forth on the ancient
paths which our fathers in old times have trodden: the two rulers
in bliss, Yama and Varuna, shalt thou behold." Varuna judges all.
He thrusts the wicked down into darkness; and not a hint or clew
further of their doom is furnished. They were supposed either to
be annihilated, as Professor Roth thinks the Vedas imply, or else
to live as demons, in sin, blackness, and woe. The good go up to
heaven and are glorified with a shining spiritual body like that
of the gods. Yama, the first man, originator of the human race on
earth, is the beginner and head of renewed humanity in another
world, and is termed the Assembler of Men. It is a poetic and
grand conception that the first one who died, leading the way,
should be the patriarch and monarch of all who follow. The old
Vedic hymns imply that the departed good are in a state of exalted
felicity, but scarcely picture forth any particulars. The
following passage, versified with strict fidelity to the original,
is as full and explicit as any:
Where glory never fading is, where is the world of heavenly light,
The world of immortality, the everlasting, set me there!
Where Yama reigns, Vivasvat's son, in the inmost sphere of heaven
bright.
Where those abounding waters flow, oh, make me but immortal there!
Where there is freedom unrestrain'd, where the triple vault of
heaven's in sight,
Where worlds of brightest glory are, oh, make me but immortal
there!
Where pleasures and enjoyments are, where bliss and raptures ne'er
take flight,
Where all desires are satisfied, oh, make me but immortal there!
1 Vol iii. pp. 342-346.
But this form of doctrine long ago passed from the Hindu
remembrance, lost in the multiplying developments and
specifications of a mystical philosophy, and a teeming
superstition nourished by an unbounded imagination.
Both Brahmans and Buddhists conceive of the creation on the most
enormous scale. Mount Meru rises from the centre of the earth to
the height of about two millions of miles. On its summit is the
city of Brahma, covering a space of fourteen thousand leagues, and
surrounded by the stately cities of the regents of the spheres.
Between Meru and the wall of stone forming the extreme
circumference of the earth are seven concentric circles of rocks.
Between these rocky bracelets are continents and seas. In some of
the seas wallow single fishes thousands of miles in every
dimension. The celestial spaces are occupied by a large number of
heavens, called "dewa lokas," increasing in the glory and bliss of
their prerogatives. The worlds below the earth are hells, called
"naraka." The description of twenty eight of these, given in the
Vishnu Purana,2 makes the reader "sup full of horrors." The
Buddhist "Books of Ceylon" 3 tell of twenty six heavens placed in
regular order above one another in the sky, crowded with all
imaginable delights. They also depict, in the abyss underneath the
earth, eight great hells, each containing sixteen smaller ones,
the whole one hundred and thirty six composing one gigantic hell.
The eight chief hells are situated over one another, each
partially enclosing and overlapping that next beneath; and the
sufferings inflicted on their unfortunate occupants are of the
most terrific character. But these poor hints at the local
apparatus of reward and punishment afford no conception whatever
of the extent of their mythological scheme of the universe.
They call each complete solar system a sakwala, and say that, if a
wall were erected around the space occupied by a million millions
of sakwalas, reaching to the highest heaven, and the entire space
were filled with mustard seeds, a god might take these seeds, and,
looking towards any one of the cardinal points, throw a single
seed towards each sakwala until all the seeds were gone, and still
there would be more sakwalas, in the same direction, to which no
seed had been thrown, without considering those in the other three
quarters of the heavens. In comparison with this Eastern vision of
the infinitude of worlds, the wildest Western dreamer over the
vistas opened by the telescope may hide his diminished head! Their
other conceptions are of the same crushing magnitude, Thus, when
the demons, on a certain occasion, assailed the gods, Siva using
the Himalaya range for his bow, Vasuke for the string, Vishnu for
his arrow, the earth for his chariot with the sun and moon for its
wheels and the Vedas for its horses, the starry canopy for his
banner with the tree of Paradise for its staff, Brahma for his
charioteer, and the mysterious monosyllable Om for his whip
reduced them all to ashes.4
The five hundred million Brahmanic and Buddhist believers hold
that all the gods, men, demons, and various grades of animal life
occupying this immeasurable array of worlds compose one cosmic
family. The totality of animated beings, from a detestable gnat to
2 Wilson's trans. pp. 207-209.
3 Upham's trans. vol. iii. pp. 8, 66, 159.
4 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, p. 429.
thundering Indra, from the meanest worm to the supreme Buddha,
constitute one fraternal race, by the unavoidable effects of the
law of retribution constantly interchanging their residences in a
succession of rising and sinking existences, ranging through all
the earths, heavens, and hells of the universe, bound by the
terrible links of merit and demerit in the phantasmagoric dungeon
of births and deaths. The Vishnu Purana declares, "The universe,
this whole egg of Brahma, is everywhere swarming with living
creatures, all of whom are captives in the chains of acts." 5
The one prime postulate of these Oriental faiths the ground
principle, never to be questioned any more than the central and
stationary position of the earth in the Ptolemaic system is that
all beings below the Infinite One are confined in the circle of
existence, the whirl of births and deaths, by the consequences of
their virtues and vices. When a man dies, if he has an excess of
good desert, he is born, as a superior being, in one of the
heavens. According to the nature and degree of his merit, his
heavenly existence is prolonged, or perhaps repeated many times in
succession; or, if his next birth occurs on earth, it is under
happy circumstances, as a sage or a king. But when he expires,
should there, on the other hand, be an overbalance of ill desert,
he is born as a demon in one of the hells, or may in repeated
lives run the circuit of the hells; or, if he at once returns to
the earth, it is as a beggar, a leprous outcast, a wretched
cripple, or in the guise of a rat, a snake, or a louse.
"The illustrious souls of great and virtuous men
In godlike beings shall revive again;
But base and vicious spirits wind their way
In scorpions, vultures, sharks, and beasts of prey.
The fair, the gay, the witty, and the brave,
The fool, the coward, courtier, tyrant, slave,
Each one in a congenial form, shall find
A proper dwelling for his wandering mind."
A specific evil is never cancelled by being counterbalanced by a
greater good. The fruit of that evil must be experienced, and also
of that greater good, by appropriate births in the hells and
heavens, or in the higher and lower grades of earthly existence.
The two courses of action must be run through independently. This
is what is meant by the phrases, so often met with in Oriental
works, "eating the fruits of former acts," "bound in the chains of
deeds." Merit or demerit can be balanced or neutralized only by
the full fruition of its own natural and necessary consequences.6
The law of merit and of demerit is fate. It works irresistibly,
through all changes and recurrences, from the beginning to the
end. The cessation of virtue or of vice does not put an end to its
effects until its full force is exhausted; as an arrow continues
in flight until all its imparted power is spent. A man faultlessly
and scrupulously good through his present life may be guilty of
some foul crime committed a hundred lives before and not yet
expiated. Accordingly, he may now suffer for it, or his next birth
may take place in a hell. On the contrary, he may be credited with
some great merit acquired thousands of
5 P. 286.
6 Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. iv. p. 87.
generations ago, whose fruit he has not eaten, and which may bring
him good fortune in spite of present sins, or on the rolling and
many colored wheel of metempsychosis may secure for him next a
celestial birthplace. In short periods, it will be seen, there is
moral confusion, but, in the long run, exact compensation.
The exuberant prodigiousness of the Hindu imagination is
strikingly manifest in its descriptions of the rewards of virtue
in the heavens and of the punishments of sin in the hells. Visions
pass before us of beautiful groves full of fragrance and music,
abounding in delicious fruits, and birds of gorgeous plumage,
crystal streams embedded with pearls, unruffled lakes where the
lotus blooms, palaces of gems, crowds of friends and lovers,
endless revelations of truth, boundless graspings of power, all
that can stir and enchant intellect, will, fancy, and heart. In
some of the heavens the residents have no bodily form, but enjoy
purely spiritual pleasures. In others they are self resplendent,
and traverse the ether. They are many miles in height, one being
described whose crown was four miles high and who wore on his
person sixty wagon loads of jewels. The ordinary lifetime of the
inhabitants of the dewa loka named Wasawartti equals nine billions
two hundred and sixteen millions of our years. They breathe only
once in sixteen hours.
The reverse of this picture is still more vigorously drawn, highly
colored, and diversified in contents. The walls of the Hindu hell
are over a hundred miles thick; and so dazzling is their
brightness that it bursts the eyes which look at them anywhere
within a distance of four hundred leagues.7 The poor creatures
here, wrapped in shrouds of fire, writhe and yell in frenzy of
pain. The very revelry and ecstasy of terror and anguish fill the
whole region. The skins of some wretches are taken off from head
to foot, and then scalding vinegar is poured over them. A glutton
is punished thus: experiencing an insatiable hunger in a body as
large as three mountains, he is tantalized with a mouth no larger
than the eye of a needle.8 The infernal tormentors, throwing their
victims down, take a flexible flame in each hand, and with these
lash them alternately right and left. One demon, Rahu, is seventy
six thousand eight hundred miles tall: the palm of his hand
measures fifty thousand acres; and when he is enraged he rushes up
the sky and swallows the sun or the moon, thus causing an eclipse!
In the Asiatic Journal for 1840 is an article on "The Chinese
Judges of the Dead," which describes a series of twenty four
paintings of hell found in a Buddhist temple. Devils in human
shapes are depicted pulling out the tongues of slanderers with
redhot wires, pouring molten lead down the throats of liars, with
burning prongs tossing souls upon mountains planted with hooks of
iron reeking with the blood of those who have gone before,
screwing the damned between planks, pounding them in husking
mortars, grinding them in rice mills, while other fiends, in the
shape of dogs, lap up their oozing gore. But the hardest
sensibility must by this time cry, Hold!
With the turmoil and pain of entanglement in the vortex of births,
and all the repulsive exposures of finite life, the Hindus
contrast the idea of an infinite rest and bliss, an endless
7 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 26.
8 Coleman, Mythology of the Hindus, p. 198.
exemption from evil and struggle, an immense receptivity of
reposing power and quietistic contemplation. In consequence of
their endlessly varied, constantly recurring, intensely earnest
speculations and musings over this contrast of finite restlessness
and pain with infinite peace and blessedness, a contrast which
constitutes the preaching of their priests, saturates their sacred
books, fills their thoughts, and broods over all their life, the
Orientals are pervaded with a profound horror of individual
existence, and with a profound desire for absorption into the
Infinite Being. A few quotations from their own authors will
illustrate this:
"A sentient being in the repetition of birth and death is like a
worm in the midst of a nest of ants, like a lizard in the hollow
of a bamboo that is burning at both ends."9 "Emancipation from all
existence is the fulness of felicity."10 "The being who is still
subject to birth may now sport in the beautiful gardens of heaven,
now be cut to pieces in hell; now be Maha Brahma, now a degraded
outcast; now sip nectar, now drink blood; now repose on a couch
with gods, now be dragged through a thicket of thorns; now reside
in a mansion of gold, now be exposed on a mountain of lava; now
sit on the throne of the gods, now be impaled amidst hungry dogs;
now be a king glittering with countless gems, now a mendicant
taking a skull from door to door to beg alms; now eat ambrosia as
the monarch of a dewa loka, now writhe and die as a bat in the
shrivelling flame."11 "The Supreme Soul and the human soul do not
differ, and pleasure or pain ascribable to the latter arises from
its imprisonment in the body. The water of the Ganges is the same
whether it run in the river's bed or be shut up in a decanter; but
a drop of wine added to the water in the decanter imparts its
flavor to the whole, whereas it would be lost in the river. The
Supreme Soul, therefore, is beyond accident; but the human soul is
afflicted by sense and passion. Happiness is only obtained in
reunion with the Supreme Soul, when the dispersed individualities
combine again with it, as the drops of water with the parent
stream. Hence the slave should remember that he is separated from
God by the body alone, and exclaim, perpetually, 'Blessed be the
moment when I shall lift the veil from off that face! the veil of
the face of my Beloved is the dust of my body.'"12 "A pious man
was once born on earth, who, in his various transmigrations, had
met eight hundred and twenty five thousand Buddhas. He remembered
his former states, but could not enumerate how many times he had
been a king, a beggar, a beast, an occupant of hell. He uttered
these words: 'A hundred thousand years of the highest happiness on
earth are not equal to the happiness of one day in the dewa lokas;
and a hundred thousand years of the deepest misery on earth are
not equal to the misery of one day in hell; but the misery of hell
is reckoned by millions of centuries. Oh, how shall I escape, and
obtain eternal bliss?'" 13
9 Eastern Monachism, p. 247.
10 Vishnu Purana, p. 568.
11 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 454.
12 Asiatic Researches, vol. xvii. p. 298.
13 Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. iv. p. 114.
The literary products of the Eastern mind wonderfully abound with
painful descriptions of the compromises, uncleannesses, and
afflictions inseparably connected with existence. Volumes would be
required to furnish an adequate representation of the vivid and
inexhaustible amplification with which they set forth the direful
disgusts and loathsome terrors associated with the series of ideas
expressed by the words conception, birth, life, death, hell, and
regeneration. The fifth chapter in the sixth book of the Vishnu
Purana affords a good specimen of these details; but, to
appreciate them fully, one must peruse dispersed passages in a
hundred miscellaneous works:
"As long as man lives, he is immersed in afflictions, like the
seed of the cotton amidst the down. . . . Where could man,
scorched by the fires of the sun of this world, look for felicity,
were it not for the shade afforded by the tree of emancipation? .
. . Travelling the path of the world for many thousands of births,
man attains only the weariness of bewilderment, and is smothered
by the dust of imagination. When that dust is washed away by the
bland water of real knowledge, then the weariness is removed. Then
the internal man is at peace, and obtains supreme felicity."14
The result of these views is the awakening of an unquenchable
desire to "break from the fetters of existence," to be "delivered
from the whirlpool of transmigration." Both Brahmanism and
Buddhism are in essence nothing else than methods of securing
release from the chain of incarnated lives, and attaining to
identification with the Infinite. There is a text in the
Apocalypse which may be strikingly applied to this exemption from
further metempsychosis: "Him that overcometh I will make a pillar
in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out forever." The
testimony of all who have investigated the subject agrees with the
following assertion by Professor Wilson: "The common end of every
system studied by the Hindus is the ascertainment of the means by
which perpetual exemption from the necessity of repeated births
may be won."15 In comparison with this aim, every thing else is
utterly insignificant. Prahlada, on being offered by Vishnu any
boon he might ask, exclaimed, "Wealth, virtue, love, are as
nothing; for even liberation is in his reach whose faith is firm
in thee." And Vishnu replied, "Thou shalt, therefore, obtain
freedom from existence."16 All true Orientals, however favored or
persecuted by earthly fortune, still cry night and day upwards
into the infinite, with outstretched arms and yearning voice,
"O Lord, our separate lives destroy! Merge in thy gold our souls'
alloy: Pain is our own, and Thou art Joy!"
According to the system of Brahmanism, the creation is regularly
called into being and again destroyed at the beginning and end of
certain stupendous epochs called kalpas. Four thousand three
hundred and twenty million years make a day of Brahma. At the end
of this day the lower worlds are consumed by fire; and Brahma
sleeps on the abyss for a night as long
14 Vishnu Parana, p. 650.
15 Sankhya Karika, preface, p. 3.
16 Vishnu Purana, p. 144.
as his day. During this night the saints, who in high Jana loka
have survived the dissolution of the lower portions of the
universe, contemplate the slumbering deity until he wakes and
restores the mutilated creation. Three hundred and sixty of these
days and nights compose a year of Brahma; a hundred such years
measure his whole life. Then a complete destruction of all things
takes place, every thing merging into the Absolute One, until he
shall rouse himself renewedly to manifest his energies.17 Although
created beings who have not obtained emancipation are destroyed in
their individual forms at the periods of the general dissolution,
yet, being affected by the good or evil acts of former existence,
they are never exempted from their consequences, and when Brahma
creates the world anew they are the progeny of his will, in the
fourfold condition of gods, men, animals, and inanimate things.18
And Buddhism embodies virtually the same doctrine, declaring "the
whole universe of sakwalas to be subject alternately to
destruction and renovation, in a series of revolutions to which
neither beginning nor end can be discovered."
What is the Brahmanic method of salvation, or secret of
emancipation? Rightly apprehended in the depth and purity of the
real doctrine, it is this. There is in reality but ONE SOUL: every
thing else is error, illusion, misery. Whoever acquires the
knowledge of this truth by personal perception is thereby
liberated. He has won the absolute perfection of the unlimited
Godhead, and shall never be born again. "Whosoever views the
Supreme Soul as manifold, dies death after death." God is
formless, but seems to assume form; as moonlight, impinging upon
various objects, appears crooked or straight.19 Bharata says to
the king of Sauriva, "The great end of all is not union of self
with the Supreme Soul, because one substance cannot become
another. The true wisdom, the genuine aim of all, is to know that
Soul is one, uniform, perfect, exempt from birth, omnipresent,
undecaying, made of true knowledge, dissociated with
unrealities."20 "It is ignorance alone which enables Maya to
impress the mind with a sense of individuality; for as soon as
that is dispelled it is known that severalty exists not, and that
there is nothing but one undivided Whole." 21 The Brahmanic
scriptures say, "The Eternal Deity consists of true knowledge."
"Brahma that is Supreme is produced of reflection."22 The logic
runs thus. There is only One Soul, the absolute God. All beside is
empty deception. That One Soul consists of true knowledge. Whoever
attains to true knowledge, therefore, is absolute God, forever
freed from the sphere of semblances.
The foregoing exposition is philosophical and scriptural
Brahmanism. But there are numerous schismatic sects which hold
opinions diverging from it in regard to the nature and destiny of
the human soul. They may be considered in two classes. First,
there are some who defend the idea of the personal immortality of
the soul. The Siva Gnana Potham "establishes the doctrine of the
soul's eternal existence as an individual being." 23 The Saiva
school
17 Vishnu Purana, p. 25. Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 33, note.
18 Vishnu Parana, pp. 39, 116.
19 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 359.
20 Vishnu Purana, p. 252.
21 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, p. 201.
22 Vishnu Purana, pp. 546, 642.
23 Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. ii. p. 141.
teach that when, at the close of every great period, all other
developed existences are rendered back to their primordial state,
souls are excepted. These, once developed and delivered from the
thraldom of their merit and demerit, will ever remain intimately
united with Deity and clothed in the resplendent wisdom.24
Secondly, there are others and probably at the present time they
include a large majority of the Brahmans who believe in the real
being both of the Supreme Soul and of separate finite souls,
conceiving the latter to be individualized parts of the former and
their true destiny to consist in securing absorption into it. The
relation of the soul to God, they maintain, is not that of ruled
and ruler, but that of part and whole. "As gold is one substance
still, however diversified as bracelets, tiaras, ear rings, or
other things, so Vishnu is one and the same, although modified in
the forms of gods, animals, and men. As the drops of water raised
from the earth by the wind sink into the earth again when the wind
subsides, so the variety of gods, men, and animals, which have
been detached by the agitation of the qualities, are reunited,
when the disturbance ceases, with the Eternal." 25 "The whole
obtains its destruction in God, like bubbles in water." The
Madhava sect believe that there is a personal All Soul distinct
from the human soul. Their proofs are detailed in one of the Maha
Upanishads.26 These two groups of sects, however, agree perfectly
with the ancient orthodox Brahmans in accepting the fundamental
dogma of a judicial metempsychosis, wherein each one is fastened
by his acts and compelled to experience the uttermost consequences
of his merit or demerit. They all coincide in one common
aspiration as regards the highest end, namely, emancipation from
the necessity of repeated births. The difference between the three
is, that the one class of dissenters expect the fruition of that
deliverance to be a finite personal immortality in heaven; the
other interpret it as an unwalled absorption in the Over Soul,
like a breath in the air; while the more orthodox believers regard
it as the entire identity of the soul with the Infinite One.
Against the opinion that there is only one Soul for all bodies, as
one string supports all the gems of a necklace, some Hindu
philosophers argue that the plurality of souls is proved by the
consideration that, if there were but one soul, then when any one
was born, or died, or was lame, or deaf, or occupied, or idle, all
would at once be born, die, be lame, deaf, occupied, or idle. But
Professor Wilson says, "This doctrine of the multitudinous
existence or individual incorporation of Soul clearly contradicts
the Vedas. They affirm one only existent soul to be distributed in
all beings. It is beheld collectively or dispersedly, like the
reflection of the moon in still or troubled water. Soul, eternal,
omnipresent, undisturbed, pure, one, is multiplied by the power of
delusion, not of its own nature."27
All the Brahmanic sects unite in thinking that liberation from the
net of births is to be obtained and the goal of their wishes to be
reached by one means only; and that is knowledge, real wisdom, an
adequate sight of the truth. Without this knowledge there is no
possible emancipation; but there are three ways of seeking the
needed knowledge.
24 Ibid. vol. iv. p. 15.
25 Vishnu Purana, p. 287.
26 Weber, Akademische Vorlesungen uber Indische
Literaturgeschichte, s. 160.
27 Sankbya Karika, p. 70.
Some strive, by direct intellectual abstraction and effort, by
metaphysical speculation, to grasp the true principles of being.
Others try, by voluntary penance, self abnegation, and pain, to
accumulate such a degree of merit, or to bring the soul into such
a state of preparedness, as will compel the truth to reveal
itself. And still others devote themselves to the worship of some
chosen deity, by ritual acts and fervid contemplation, to obtain
by his favor the needed wisdom. A few quotations may serve to
illustrate the Brahmanic attempts at winning this one thing
needful, the knowledge which yields exemption from all incarnate
lives.
The Sankhya philosophy is a regular system of metaphysics, to be
studied as one would study algebra. It presents to its disciples
an exhaustive statement of the forms of being in twenty five
categories, and declares, "He who knows the twenty five
principles, whatever order of life he may have entered, and
whether he wear braided hair, a top knot only, or be shaven, he is
liberated." "This discriminative wisdom releases forever from
worldly bondage."28 "The virtuous is born again in heaven, the
wicked is born again in hell; the fool wanders in error, the wise
man is set free." "By ignorance is bondage, by knowledge is
deliverance." "When Nature finds that soul has discovered that it
is to her the distress of migration is owing, she is put to shame
by the detection, and will suffer herself to be seen no more."29
"Through knowledge the sage is absorbed into Supreme Spirit."30
"The Supreme Spirit attracts to itself him who meditates upon it,
as the loadstone attracts the iron."31 "He who seeks to obtain a
knowledge of the Soul is gifted with it, the Soul rendering itself
conspicuous to him." "Man, having known that Nature which is
without a beginning or an end, is delivered from the grasp of
death." "Souls are absorbed in the Supreme Soul as the reflection
of the sun in water returns to him on the removal of the water."32
The thought underlying the last statement is that there is only
one Soul, every individual consciousness being but an illusory
semblance, and that the knowledge of this fact constitutes the
all coveted emancipation. As one diffusive breath passing through
the perforations of a flute is distinguished as the several notes
of the scale, so the Supreme Spirit is single, though, in
consequence of acts, it seems manifold. As every placid lakelet
holds an unreal image of the one real moon sailing above, so each
human soul is but a deceptive reflection of the one veritable
Soul, or God. It may be worth while to observe that Plotinus, as
is well known, taught the doctrine of the absolute identity of
each soul with the entire and indistinguishable entity of God:
"Though God extends beyond creation's rim, Yet every being holds
the whole of him."
It belongs to an unextended substance, an immateriality, to be
everywhere by totality, not by portions. If God be omnipresent, he
cannot be so dividedly, a part of him here and a part
28 Ibid. pp. 1, 16.
29 Ibid. pp. 48, 142, 174.
30 Vishnu Purana, p. 57.
31 Ibid. p. 651.
32 Rammohun Roy, Translations from the Veda, 2d ed., London, 1832,
pp. 69, 39, 10.
of him there; but the whole of him must be in every particle of
matter, in every point of space, in all infinitude.
The Brahmanic religion is a philosophy; and it keeps an
incomparably strong hold on the minds of its devotees. Its most
vital and comprehensive principle is expressed in the following
sentence: "The soul itself is not susceptible of pain, or decay,
or death; the site of these things is nature; but nature is
unconscious; the consciousness that pain exists is restricted to
the soul, although the soul is not the actual seat of pain." This
is the reason why every Hindu yearns so deeply to be freed from
the meshes of nature, why he so anxiously follows the light of
faith and penance, or the clew of speculation, through all mazes
of mystery. It is that he may at last gaze on the central TRUTH,
and through that sight seize the fruition of the supreme and
eternal good of man in the unity of his selfhood with the
Infinite, and so be born no more and experience no more trouble.
It is very striking to contrast with this profound and gorgeous
dream of the East, whatever form it assumes, the more practical
and definite thought of the West, as expressed in these lines of
Tennyson's "In Memoriam:"
"That each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds, and, fusing all
The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul,
Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside,
And I shall know him when we meet."
But is it not still more significant to notice that, in the lines
which immediately succeed, the love inspired and deep musing
genius of the English thinker can find ultimate repose only by
recurring to the very faith of the Hindu theosophist?
"And we shall sit at endless feast,
Enjoying each the other's good:
What vaster dream can hit the mood
Of Love on earth! He seeks at least
Upon the last and sharpest height,
Before the spirits fade away,
Some landing place, to clasp and say,
Farewell! We lose ourselves in light!"
We turn now to the Buddhist doctrine of a future life as
distinguished from the Brahmanic. The "Four Sublime Truths" of
Buddhism, as they are called, are these: first, that there is
sorrow; secondly, that every living person necessarily feels it;
thirdly, that it is desirable to be freed from it; fourthly, that
the only deliverance from it is by that pure knowledge which
destroys all cleaving to existence. A Buddha is a being who, in
consequence of having reached the Buddhaship, which implies the
possession of infinite goodness, infinite power, and infinite
wisdom, is able to teach men that true knowledge which secures
emancipation.
The Buddhaship that is, the possession of Supreme Godhead is open
to every one, though few ever acquire it. Most wonderful and
tremendous is the process of its attainment. Upon a time, some
being, perhaps then incarnate as a mosquito alighting on a muddy
leaf in some swamp, pauses for a while to muse. Looking up through
infinite stellar systems, with hungry love and boundless ambition,
to the throne and sceptre of absolute immensity, he vows within
himself, "I will become a Buddha." The total influences of his
past, the forces of destiny, conspiring with his purpose,
omnipotence is in that resolution. Nothing shall ever turn him
aside from it. He might soon acquire for himself deliverance from
the dreadful vortex of births; but, determined to achieve the
power of delivering others from their miseries as sentient beings,
he voluntarily throws himself into the stream of successive
existences, and with divine patience and fortitude undergoes every
thing.
From that moment, no matter in what form he is successively born,
whether as a disgusting bug, a white elephant, a monarch, or a
god, he is a Bodhisat, that is, a candidate pressing towards the
Buddhaship. He at once begins practising the ten primary virtues,
called paramitas, necessary for the securing of his aim. The
period required for the full exercise of one of these virtues is a
bhumi. Its duration is thus illustrated. Were a Bodhisat once in a
thousand births to shed a single drop of blood, he would in the
space of a bhumi shed more blood than there is water in a thousand
oceans. On account of his merit he might always be born amidst the
pleasures of the heavens; but since he could there make no
progress towards his goal, he prefers being born in the world of
men. During his gradual advance, there is no good he does not
perform, no hardship he does not undertake, no evil he does not
willingly suffer; and all for the benefit of others, to obtain the
means of emancipating those whom he sees fastened by ignorance in
the afflictive circle of acts. Wherever born, acting, or
suffering, his eye is still turned towards that EMPTY THRONE, at
the apex of the universe, from which the last Buddha has vaulted
into Nirwana. The Buddhists have many scriptures, especially one,
called the "Book of the Five Hundred and Fifty Births," detailing
the marvellous adventures of the Bodhisat during his numerous
transmigrations, wherein he exhibits for each species of being to
which he belongs a model character and life.
At length the momentous day dawns when the unweariable Bodhisat
enters on his well earned Buddhaship. From that time, during the
rest of his life, he goes about preaching discourses, teaching
every prepared creature he meets the method of securing eternal
deliverance. Leaving behind in these discourses a body of wisdom
sufficient to guide to salvation all who will give attentive ear
and heart, the Buddha then his sublime work of disinterested love
being completed receives the fruition of his toil, the super
essential prize of the universe, the Infinite Good. In a word, he
dies, and enters Nirwana. There is no more evil of any sort for
him at all forever. The final fading echo of sorrow has ceased in
the silence of perfect blessedness; the last undulation of the
wave of change has rolled upon the shore of immutability.
The only historic Buddha is Sakya Muni, or Gotama, who was born at
Kapila about six centuries before Christ. His teachings contain
many principles in common with those of the Brahmans. But he
revolted against their insufferable conceit and cruelty. He
protested against their claim that no one could obtain
emancipation until after being born as a Brahman and passing
through the various rites and degrees of their order. In the
face of the most powerful and arrogant priesthood in the world,
he preached the perfect equality of all mankind, and the consequent
abolition of castes. Whoever acquires a total detachment of
affection from all existence is thereby released from birth and
misery; and the means of acquiring that detachment are freely
offered to all in his doctrine.
Thus did Gotama preach. He took the monopoly of religion out of the
hands of a caste, and proclaimed emancipation to every creature
that breathes. He established his system in the valley of the
Ganges near the middle of the sixth century before Christ. It soon
overran the whole country, and held sway until about eight hundred
years after Christ, when an awful persecution and slaughter on the
part of the uprising Brahmans drove it out of the land with sword
and fire. "The colossal figure which for fourteen centuries had
bestridden the Indian continent vanished suddenly, like a rainbow
at sunset."33
Gotama's philosophy, in its ontological profundity, is of a
subtlety and vastness that would rack the brain of a Fichte or a
Schelling; but, popularly stated, so far as our present purpose
demands, it is this. Existence is the one all inclusive evil;
cessation of existence, or Nirwana, is the infinite good. The
cause of existence is ignorance, which leads one to cleave to
existing objects; and this cleaving leads to reproduction. If one
would escape from the chain of existence, he must destroy the
cause of his confinement in it, that is, evil desire, or the
cleaving to existing objects. The method of salvation in Gotama's
system is to vanquish and annihilate all desire for existing
things. How is this to be done? By acquiring an intense perception
of the miseries of existence, on the one hand, and an intense
perception, on the other hand, of the contrasted desirableness of
the state of emancipation, or Nirwana. Accordingly, the discourses
of Gotama, and the sacred books of the Buddhists, are filled with
vivid accounts of every thing disgusting and horrible connected
with existence, and with vivid descriptions, consciously faltering
with inadequacy, of every thing supremely fascinating in
connection with Nirwana. "The three reflections on the impermanency,
suffering, and unreality of the body are three gates leading to
the city of Nirwana." The constant claim is, that whosoever by
adequate moral discipline and philosophical contemplation attains
to a certain degree of wisdom, a certain degree of intellectual
insight, instead of any longer cleaving to existence, will shudder
at the thought of it, and, instead of shrinking from death, will
be ravished with unfathomable ecstasy by the prospect of Nirwana.
Then, when he dies, he is free from all liability to a return.
When Gotama, early in life, had accidentally seen in succession a
wretchedly decrepit old man, a loathsomely diseased man, and a
decomposing dead man, then the three worlds of passion, matter,
and spirit seemed to him like a house on fire, and he longed to be
extricated from the dizzy whirl of existence, and to reach the
still haven of Nirwana. Finding ere long that he had now, as the
reward of his incalculable endurances through untold aons past,
become Buddha, he said to himself, "You have borne the misery of
the whole round of transmigrations, and have arrived at infinite
wisdom, which is the highway to Nirwana, the
33 Major Cunningham, Bbilsa Topes, or Buddhist Monuments of
Central India, p. 168.
city of peace. On that road you are the guide of all beings. Begin
your work and pursue it with fidelity." From that time until the
day of his death he preached "the three laws of mortality, misery,
and mutability." Every morning he looked through the world to see
who should be caught that day in the net of truth, and took his
measures accordingly to preach in the hearing of men the truths by
which alone they could climb into Nirwana. When he was expiring,
invisible gods, with huge and splendid bodies, came and stood, as
thick as they could be packed, for a hundred and twenty miles
around the banyan tree under which he awaited Nirwana, to gaze on
him who had broken the circle of transmigration.34
The system of Gotama distinguishes seven grades of being: six
subject to repeated death and birth; one the condition of the
rahats and the Buddhaship exempt therefrom. "Who wins this has
reached the shore of the stormy ocean of vicissitudes, and is in
safety forever." Baur says, "The aim of Buddhism is that all may
obtain unity with the original empty Space, so as to unpeople the
worlds."35 This end it seeks by purification from all modes of
cleaving to existing objects, and by contemplative discrimination,
but never by the fanatical and austere methods of Brahmanism.
Edward Upham, in his History of Buddhism, declares this earth to
be the only ford to Nirwana. Others also make the same
representation:
"For all that live and breathe have once been men, And in
succession will be such again."
But the Buddhist authors do not always adhere to this statement.
We sometimes read of men's entering the paths to Nirwana in some
of the heavens, likewise of their entering the final fruition
through a decease in a dewa loka. Still, it is the common view
that emancipation from all existence can be secured only by a
human being on earth. The last birth must be in that form. The
emblem of Buddha, engraved on most of his monuments, is a wheel,
denoting that he has finished and escaped from the circle of
existences. Henceforth he is named Tathagata, he who has gone.
Let us notice a little more minutely what the Buddhists say of
Nirwana; for herein to them hides all the power of their
philosophy and lies the absorbing charm of their religion.
"The state that is peaceful, free from body, from passion, and
from fear, where birth or death is not, that is Nirwana." "Nirwana
puts an end to coming and going, and there is no other happiness."
"It is a calm wherein no wind blows." "There is no difference in
Nirwana." "It is the annihilation of all the principles of
existence." "Nirwana is the completion and opposite shore of
existence, free from decay, tranquil, knowing no restraint, and of
great blessedness." "Nirwana is unmixed satisfaction, entirely
free from sorrow." "The wind cannot be squeezed in the hand, nor
can its color be told. Yet the wind is. Even so Nirwana is, but
its properties cannot be told." "Nirwana, like space, is
causeless, does not live nor die, and has no locality. It is the
abode of those liberated from existence." "Nirwana is not, except
to the being who attains it."36
34 Life of Gotama in Journal of the American Oriental Society,
vol. iii.
35 Symbolik and Mythologie, th. ii. abth. 2, s. 407.
36 For these quotations, and others similar, see Hardy's valuable
work, "Eastern Monachism," chap. xxii., on "Nirwana, its Paths and
Fruition."
Some scholars maintain that the Buddhist Nirwana is nothing but
the atheistic Annihilation. The subject is confessedly a most
difficult one. But it seems to us that the opinion just stated is
the very antithesis of the true interpretation of Nirwana. In the
first place, it should be remembered that there are various sects
of Buddhists. Now, the word Nirwana may be used in different
senses by different schools.37 A few persons a small party,
represented perhaps by able writers may believe in annihilation in
our sense of the term, just as has happened in Christendom, while
the common doctrine of the people is the opposite of that. In the
second place, with the Oriental horror of individuated existence,
and a highly poetical style of writing, nothing could be more
natural, in depicting their ideas of the most desirable state of
being, than that they should carry their metaphors expressive of
repose, freedom from action and emotion, to a pitch conveying to
our cold and literal thought the conceptions of blank
unconsciousness and absolute nothingness.
Colebrooke says, "Nirwana is not annihilation, but unceasing
apathy. The notion of it as a happy state seems derived from the
experience of ecstasies; or else the pleasant, refreshed feeling
with which one wakes from profound repose is referred to the
period of actual sleep."38 A Buddhist author speculates thus:
"That the soul feels not during profound trance, is not for want
of sensibility, but for want of sensible objects." Wilson,
Hodgson, and Vans Kennedy three able thinkers, as well as
scholars, in this field agree that Nirwana is not annihilation as
we understand that word. Mr. Hodgson believes that the Buddhists
expect to be "conscious in Nirwana of the eternal bliss of rest,
as they are in this world of the ceaseless pain of activity."
Forbes also argues against the nihilistic explanation of the
Buddhist doctrine of futurity, and says he is compelled to
conclude that Nirwana denotes imperishable being in a blissful
quietude.39 Many additional authorities in favor of this view
might be adduced, enough to balance, at least, the names on the
other side. Koeppen, in his very fresh, vigorous, and lucid work,
just published, entitled "The Religion of Buddha, and its Origin,"
says, "Nirwana is the blessed Nothing. Buddhism is the Gospel of
Annihilation." But he forgets that the motto on the title page of
his volume is the following sentence quoted from Sakya Muni
himself: "To those who know the concatenation of causes and
effects, there is neither being nor nothing." To them Nirwana is.
Considering it, then, as an open question, unsettled by any
authoritative assertion, we will weigh the probabilities of the
case.
No definition of Nirwana is more frequent than the one given by
the Kalpa Sutra,40 namely, "cessation from action and freedom from
desire." But this, like many of the other representations, such,
for instance, as the exclusion of succession, very plainly is not
a denial of all being, but only of our present modes of
experience. The dying Gotama is said to have "passed through the
several states, one after another, until he arrived at the state
where there is no pain. He then continued to enter the other
higher states, and from the highest entered Nirwana." Can literal
annihilation, the naked emptiness of nonentity, be better than
37 Burnouf, Introduction a l'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien,
Appendice No. I., Du mot Nirvana.
38 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 353.
39 Eleven Years in Ceylon, vol. ii. chap. ix.
40 Tanslation by Dr. Stevenson, p. 23.
the highest state of being? It can be so only when we view Nothing
on the positive side as identical with All, make annihilating
deprivation equivalent to universal bestowment, regard negation as
affirmation, and, in the last synthesis of contradictions, see the
abysmal Vacuum as a Plenum of fruition. As Oken says, "The ideal
zero is absolute unity; not a singularity, as the number one, but
an indivisibility, a numberlessness, a homogeneity, a
translucency, a pure identity. It is neither great nor small,
quiescent nor moved; but it is, and it is not, all this."41
Furthermore, if some of the Buddhist representations would lead us
to believe that Nirwana is utter nothingness, others apparently
imply the opposite. "The discourses of Buddha are a charm to cure
the poison of evil desire; a succession of fruit bearing trees
placed here and there to enable the traveller to cross the desert
of existence; a power by which every sorrow may be appeased; a
door of entrance to the eternal city of Nirwana." "The mind of the
rahat" (one who has obtained assurance of emancipation and is only
waiting for it to arrive) "knows no disturbance, because it is
filled with the pleasure of Nirwana." "The sight of Nirwana
bestows perfect happiness." "The rahat is emancipated from
existence in Nirwana, as the lotus is separated from the mud out
of which it springs." "Fire may be produced by rubbing together
two sticks, though previously it had no locality: it is the same
with Nirawna." "Nirwana is free from danger, peaceful, refreshing,
happy. When a man who has been broiled before a huge fire is
released, and goes quickly into some open space, he feels the most
agreeable sensation. All the evils of existence are that fire, and
Nirwana is that open space." These passages indicate the cessation
in Nirwana of all sufferings, perhaps of all present modes of
existence, but not the total end of being. It may be said that
these are but figurative expressions. The reply is, so are the
contrasted statements metaphors, and it is probable that the
expressions which denote the survival of pure being in Nirwana are
closer approximations to the intent of their authors than those
which hint at an unconscious vacancy. If Nirwana in its original
meaning was an utter and infinite blank, then, "out of that very
Nothing," as Max Muller says, "human nature made a new paradise."
There is a scheme of doctrine held by some Buddhist philosophers
which may be thus stated. There are five constituent elements of
sentient existence. They are called khandas, and are as follows:
the organized body, sensation, perception, discrimination, and
consciousness. Death is the dissolution and entire destruction of
these khandas, and apart from them there is no synthetical unit,
soul, or personality. Yet in a certain sense death is not the
absolute annihilation of a human existence, because it leaves a
potentiality inherent in that existence. There is no identical ego
to survive and be born again; but karma that is, the sum of a
man's action, his entire merit and demerit produces at his death a
new being, and so on in continued series until Nirwana is
attained. Thus the succession of being is kept up with transmitted
responsibility, as a flame is transferred from one wick to
another. It is evident enough, as is justly claimed by Hardy and
others, that the limitation of existence to the five khandas,
excluding the idea of any independent individuality, makes death
41 Elements of Physiophilosophy, Tulk's trans. p. 9.
annihilation, and renders the very conception of a future life for
those now living an absurdity. But we are convinced that this view
is the speculative peculiarity of a sect, and by no means the
common belief of the Buddhist populace or the teaching of Gotama
himself. This appears at the outset from the fact that Gotama is
represented as having lived through millions of existences, in
different states and worlds, with preserved identity and memory.
The history of his concatenated advance towards the Buddhaship is
the supporting basis and the saturating spirit of documentary
Buddhism. And the same idea pervades the whole range of narratives
relating to the repeated births and deaths of the innumerable
Buddhist heroes and saints who, after so many residences on earth,
in the hells, in the dewalokas, have at last reached emancipation.
They recollect their adventures; they recount copious portions of
their experience stretching through many lives.
Again: the arguments cited from Buddha seem aimed to prove, not
that there is absolutely no self in man, but that the five khandas
are not the self, that the real self is something distinct from
all that is exposed to misery and change, something deep,
wondrous, divine, infinite. For instance, the report of a debate
on this subject between Buddha and Sachaka closes with these
words: "Thus was Sachaka forced to confess that the five khandas
are impermanent, connected with sorrow, unreal, not the self.42
These terms appear to imply the reality of a self, only that it is
not to be confounded with the apprehensible elements of existence.
Besides, the attainment of Nirwana is held up as a prize to be
laboriously sought by personal effort. To secure it is a positive
triumph quite distinct from the fated dissolution of the khandas
in death. Now, if there be in man no personal entity, what is it
that with so much joy attains Nirwana? The genuine Buddhist
notion, as seems most probable, is that the conscious essence of
the rahat, when the exterior elements of existence fall from
around him, passes by a transcendent climax and discrete leap
beyond the outermost limits of appreciable being, and becomes that
INFINITE which knows no changes and is susceptible of no
definitions. In the Ka gyur collection of Tibetan sacred books,
comprising a hundred volumes, and now belonging to the Cabinet of
Manuscripts in the Royal Library of Paris, there are two volumes
exclusively occupied by a treatise on Nirwana. It is a significant
fact that the title of these volumes is "Nirwana, or Deliverance
from Pain." If Nirwana be simply annihilation, why is it not so
stated? Why should recourse be had to a phrase partially
descriptive of one feature, instead of comprehensively announcing
or implying the whole case?
Still further: it deserves notice that, according to the unanimous
affirmation of Buddhist authors, if any Buddhist were offered the
alternative of an existence as king of a dewa loka, keeping his
personality for a hundred million years in the uninterrupted
enjoyment of perfect happiness, or of translation into Nirwana, he
would spurn the former as defilement, and would with unutterable
avidity choose the latter. We must therefore suppose that by
Nirwana he understands, not naked destruction, but some mysterious
good, too vast for logical comprehension, too obscure to
Occidental thought to find expression in Occidental language.
42 Hardy, Manual, p. 427.
At the moment when Gotama entered upon the Buddhaship, like
a vessel overflowing with honey, his mind overflowed with the
nectar of oral instruction, and he uttered these stanzas:
"Through many different births I have run, vainly seeking The
architect of the desire resembling house. Painful are repeated
births. O house builder! I have seen thee. Again a house thou
canst not build for me. I have broken thy rafters and ridge pole;
I have arrived at the extinction of evil desire; My mind is gone
to Nirwana."
Hardy, who stoutly maintains that the genuine doctrine of Buddha's
philosophy is that there is no transmigrating individuality in
man, but that the karma creates a new person on the dissolution of
the former one, confesses the difficulties of this dogma to be so
great that "it is almost universally repudiated." M. Obry
published at Paris, in 1856, a small volume entirely devoted to
this subject, under the title of "The Indian Nirwana, or the
Enfranchisement of the Soul after Death." His conclusion, after a
careful and candid discussion, is, that Nirwana had different
meanings to the minds of the ancient Aryan priests, the orthodox
Brahmans, the Sankhya Brahmans, and the Buddhists, but had not to
any of them, excepting possibly a few atheists, the sense of
strict annihilation. He thinks that Burnouf and Barthelemy Saint
Hilaire themselves would have accepted this view if they had paid
particular attention to the definite inquiry, instead of merely
touching upon it in the course of their more comprehensive
studies.
What Spinoza declares in the following sentence "God is one,
simple, infinite; his modes of being are diverse, complex,
finite" strongly resembles what the Buddhists say of Nirwana and
the contrasted vicissitudes of existence, and may perhaps throw
light on their meaning. The supposition of immaterial, unlimited,
absolutely unalterable being the scholastic ens sine qualitate
answers to the descriptions of it much more satisfactorily than
the idea of unqualified nothingness does. "Nirwana is real; all
else is phenomenal." The Sankhyas, who do not hold to the
nonentity nor to the annihilation of the soul, but to its eternal
identification with the Infinite One, use nevertheless nearly the
same phrases in describing it that the Buddhists do. For example,
they say, "The soul is neither a production nor productive,
neither matter nor form"43 The Vishnu Purana says, "The mundane
egg, containing the whole creation, was surrounded by seven
envelops, water, air, fire, ether, egotism, intelligence, and
finally the indiscrete principle"44 Is not this Indiscrete
Principle of the Brahmans the same as the Nirwana of the
Buddhists? The latter explicitly claim that "man is capable of
enlarging his faculties to infinity."
43 Sankhya Karika, pp. 16-18.
44 Vishnu Purana, p. 19.
Nagasena says to the king of Sagal, "Neither does Nirwana exist
previously to its reception, nor is that which was not, brought
into existence: still, to the being who attains it, there is
Nirwana." According to this statement, taken in connection with
the hundreds similar to it, Nirwana seems to be a simple mental
perception, most difficult of acquirement, and, when acquired,
assimilating the whole conscious being perfectly to itself. The
Asangkrata Sutra, as translated by Mr. Hardy, says, "From the
joyful exclamations of those who have seen Nirwana, its character
may be known by those who have not made the same attainment." The
superficial thinker, carelessly scanning the recorded sayings of
Gotama and his expositors in relation to Nirwana, is aware only of
a confused mass of metaphysical hieroglyphs and poetical
metaphors; but the Buddhist sages avow that whoso, by concentrated
study and training of his faculties, pursues the inquiry with
adequate perseverance, will at last elicit and behold the real
meaning of Nirwana, the achieved insight and revelation forming
the widest horizon of rapturous truth ever contemplated by the
human mind. The memorable remark of Sir William Hamilton, that
"capacity of thought is not to be constituted into the measure of
existence," should show the error of those who so unjustifiably
affirm that, since Nirwana is said to be neither corporeal nor
incorporeal, nor at all describable, it is therefore absolutely
nothing. A like remark is also to be addressed to those who draw
the same unwarrantable conclusion of the nothingness of Nirwana
from the fact that it has no locality, or from the fact that it is
sometimes said to exclude consciousness. Plato, in the Timaus,
stigmatizes as a vulgar error the notion that what is not in any
place is a nonentity. Many a weighty philosopher has followed him
in this opinion. The denial of place is by no means necessarily
the denial of being. So, too, with consciousness. It is
conceivable that there is a being superior to all the modes of
consciousness now known to us. We are, indeed, unable to define
this, yet it may be. The profoundest analysis shows that
consciousness consists of co ordinated changes.45 "Consciousness
is a succession of changes combined and arranged in special ways."
Now, in contrast to the Occidental thinker, who covets alternation
because in his cold climate action is the means of enjoyment, the
Hindu, in the languid East, where repose is the condition of
enjoyment, conceives the highest blessedness to consist in
exemption from every disturbance, in an unruffled unity excluding
all changes. Therefore, while in some of its forms his dream of
Nirwana admits not consciousness, still, it is not inconsistent
with a homogeneous state of being, which he, in his metaphysical
and theosophie soarings, apprehends as the grandest and most
ecstatic of all.
The etymological force of the word Nirwana is extinction, as when
the sun has set, a fire has burned out, or a lamp is extinguished.
The fair laws of interpretation do not compel us, in cases like
this, to receive the severest literal significance of a word as
conveying the meaning which a popular doctrine holds in the minds
of its believers. There is almost always looseness, vagueness,
metaphor, accommodation. But take the term before us in its
strictest sense, and mark the result. When a fire is extinguished,
it is obvious that, while the flame has disappeared, the substance
of the flame, whatever it was, has not ceased to be, has not been
45 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, ch. xxv.
actually annihilated. It has only ceased to be in a certain
visible form in which it existed before; but it still survives
under altered conditions. Now, to compare the putting out of a
lamp to the death of a man, extinction is not actual destruction,
but a transition of the flame into another state of being. That
other state, in the case of the soul, is Nirwana.
There is a final consideration, possibly of some worth in dealing
with this obscure theme. We will approach it through a preliminary
query and quotation. That nothing can extend beyond its limits is
an identical proposition. How vast, then, must be the soul of man
in form or in power!
"If souls be substances corporeal, Be they as big just as the body
is? Or shoot they out to the height ethereal? Doth it not seem the
impression of a seal Can be no larger than the wax? The soul with
that vast latitude must move Which measures the objects that it
doth descry. So must it be upstretch'd unto the sky And rub
against the stars."
Cousin asserts that man is conscious of infinity, that "the
unconditional, the absolute, the infinite, is immediately known in
consciousness by difference, plurality, and relation." Now, does
not the consciousness of infinity imply the infinity of
consciousness? If not, we are compelled into the contradiction
that a certain entity or force reaches outside of its outermost
boundary. The Buddhist ideal is not self annihilation, but self
universalization. It is not the absorption of a drop into the sea,
but the dilatation of a drop to the sea. Each drop swells to the
whole ocean, each soul becomes the Boundless One, each rahat is
identified with the total Nirwana. The rivers of emancipated men
neither disembogue into the ocean of spirit nor evaporate into the
abyss of nonentity, but are blended with infinitude as an
ontological integer. Nirwana is unexposed and illimitable space.
Buddhism is perfect disinterestedness, absolute self surrender. It
is the gospel of everlasting emancipation for all. It cannot be
that a deliberate suicide of soul is the ideal holding the deepest
desire of four hundred millions of people. Nirwana is not
negation, but a pure positive without alternation or foil.
Some light may be thrown on the subject by contemplating the
successive states through which the dying Gotama passed. Max
Muller describes them, after the Buddhist documents, thus: "He
enters into the first stage of meditation when he feels freedom
from sin, acquires a knowledge of the nature of all things, and
has no desire except that of Nirvana. But he still feels pleasure;
he even uses his reasoning and discriminating powers. The use of
these powers ceases in the second stage of meditation, when
nothing remains but a desire after Nirvana, and a general feeling
of satisfaction arising from his intellectual perfection. That
satisfaction, also, is extinguished in the third stage.
Indifference succeeds; yet there is still self consciousness, and
a certain amount of physical pleasure. In the fourth stage these
last remnants are destroyed; memory fades away, all pleasure and
pain are gone, and the doors of Nirvana now open before him. We
must soar still higher, and, though we may feel giddy
and disgusted,46 we must sit out the tragedy till the curtain
falls. After the four stages of meditation are passed, the Buddha
(and every being is to become a Buddha) enters first into the
infinity of space, then into the infinity of intelligence, and
thence he passes into the third region, the realm of nothing. But
even here there is no rest. There is still something left, the
idea of the nothing in which he rejoices. That also must be
destroyed; and it is destroyed in the fourth and last region,
where there is not even the idea of a nothing left, and where
there is complete rest, undisturbed by nothing, or what is not
nothing."47 Analyze away all particulars until you reach an
uncolored boundlessness of pure immateriality, free from every
predicament; and that is Nirwana. This is one possible way of
conceiving the fate of the soul; and the speculative mind must
conceive it in every possible way. However closely the result
resembles the vulgar notion of annihilation, the difference in
method of approach and the difference to the contemplator's
feeling are immense. The Buddhist apprehends Nirwana as infinitude
in absolute and eternal equilibrium: the atheist finds Nirwana in
a coffin. That is thought of with rapture, this, with horror.
It should be noticed, before we close this chapter, that some of
the Hindus give a spiritual interpretation to all the gross
physical details of their so highly colored and extravagant
mythology. One of their sacred books says, "Pleasure and pain are
states of the mind. Heaven is that which delights the mind, hell
is that which gives it pain. Hence vice is called hell, and virtue
is called heaven." Another author says, "The fire of the angry
mind produces the fire of hell, and consumes its possessor. A
wicked person causes his evil deeds to impinge upon himself, and
that is hell." The various sects of mystics, allied in faith and
feeling to the Sufis, which are quite numerous in the East, agree
in a deep metaphorical explanation of the vulgar notions
pertaining to Deity, judgment, heaven, and hell.
In conclusion, the most remarkable fact in this whole field of
inquiry is the contrast of the Eastern horror of individuality and
longing for absorption with the Western clinging to personality
and abhorrence of dissolution.48 The true Orientalist, whether
Brahman, Buddhist, or Sufi, is in love with death. Through this
gate he expects to quit his frail and pitiable consciousness,
losing himself, with all evil, to be born anew and find himself,
with all good, in God. All sense, passion, care, and grief shall
cease with deliverance from the spectral semblances of this false
life. All pure contemplation, perfect repose, unsullied and
unrippled joy shall begin with entrance upon the true life beyond.
Thus thinking, he feels that death is the avenue to infinite
expansion, freedom, peace, bliss; and he longs for it with an
intensity not dreamed of by more frigid natures. He often compares
himself, in this world aspiring towards another, to an enamored
moth drawn towards the fire, and he exclaims, with a sigh and a
thrill,
46 Not disgust, but wonder and awe, fathomless intellectual
emotion, at so unparalleled a phenomenon of our miraculous human
nature.
47 Buddhism and Buddhist Pilgrims, p. 19.
48 Burnouf, Le Bhagavata Purana, tome i. livre iii. ch. 28:
Acquisition de la Delivrance, ch. 31.
Marche de l'ame individuelle. "Highest nature wills the capture;
'Light to light!' the instinct cries; And in agonizing rapture
falls the moth, and bravely dies. Think not what thou art,
Believer; think but what thou mayst become For the World is thy
deceiver, and the Light thy only home." 49
The Western mind approaches the subject of death negatively,
stripping off the attributes of finite being; the Eastern mind,
positively, putting on the attributes of infinite being. Negative
acts, denying function, are antipathetic, and lower the sense of
life; positive acts, affirming function, are sympathetic, and
raise the sense of life. Therefore the end to which those look,
annihilation, is dreaded; that to which these look, Nirwana, is
desired. To become nothing, is measureless horror; to become all,
is boundless ecstasy.
49 Milnes, Palm Leaves.