THE discoveries of the Portuguese and the Spaniards had brought the
Christians of western Europe into close contact with the people of India
and of China. They knew of course that Christianity was not the only
religion on this earth. There were the Mohammedans and the heathenish
tribes of northern Africa who worshipped sticks and stones and dead
trees. But in India and in China the Christian conquerors found new
millions who had never heard of Christ and who did not want to hear of
Him, because they thought their own religion, which was thousands of
years old, much better than that of the West. As this is a story of
mankind and not an exclusive history of the people of Europe and
our western hemisphere, you ought to know something of two men whose
teaching and whose example continue to influence the actions and the
thoughts of the majority of our fellow-travellers on this earth.
In India, Buddha was recognised as the great religious teacher. His
history is an interesting one. He was born in the Sixth Century before
the birth of Christ, within sight of the mighty Himalaya Mountains,
where four hundred years before Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), the first of
the great leaders of the Aryan race (the name which the Eastern branch
of the Indo-European race had given to itself), had taught his people
to regard life as a continuous struggle between Ahriman, and Ormuzd, the
Gods of Evil and Good. Buddha's father was Suddhodana, a mighty chief
among the tribe of the Sakiyas. His mother, Maha Maya, was the daughter
of a neighbouring king. She had been married when she was a very young
girl. But many moons had passed beyond the distant ridge of hills and
still her husband was without an heir who should rule his lands after
him. At last, when she was fifty years old, her day came and she went
forth that she might be among her own people when her baby should come
into this world.
It was a long trip to the land of the Koliyans, where Maha Maya had
spent her earliest years. One night she was resting among the cool trees
of the garden of Lumbini. There her son was born. He was given the name
of Siddhartha, but we know him as Buddha, which means the Enlightened
One.
In due time, Siddhartha grew up to be a handsome young prince and when
he was nineteen years old, he was married to his cousin Yasodhara.
During the next ten years he lived far away from all pain and all
suffering, behind the protecting walls of the royal palace, awaiting the
day when he should succeed his father as King of the Sakiyas.
But it happened that when he was thirty years old, he drove outside of
the palace gates and saw a man who was old and worn out with labour
and whose weak limbs could hardly carry the burden of life. Siddhartha
pointed him out to his coachman, Channa, but Channa answered that there
were lots of poor people in this world and that one more or less did not
matter. The young prince was very sad but he did not say anything and
went back to live with his wife and his father and his mother and tried
to be happy. A little while later he left the palace a second time.
His carriage met a man who suffered from a terrible disease. Siddhartha
asked Channa what had been the cause of this man's suffering, but the
coachman answered that there were many sick people in this world and
that such things could not be helped and did not matter very much. The
young prince was very sad when he heard this but again he returned to
his people.
A few weeks passed. One evening Siddhartha ordered his carriage in order
to go to the river and bathe. Suddenly his horses were frightened by the
sight of a dead man whose rotting body lay sprawling in the ditch beside
the road. The young prince, who had never been allowed to see such
things, was frightened, but Channa told him not to mind such trifles.
The world was full of dead people. It was the rule of life that all
things must come to an end. Nothing was eternal. The grave awaited us
all and there was no escape.
That evening, when Siddhartha returned to his home, he was received with
music. While he was away his wife had given birth to a son. The people
were delighted because now they knew that there was an heir to the
throne and they celebrated the event by the beating of many drums.
Siddhartha, however, did not share their joy. The curtain of life had
been lifted and he had learned the horror of man's existence. The sight
of death and suffering followed him like a terrible dream.
That night the moon was shining brightly. Siddhartha woke up and began
to think of many things. Never again could he be happy until he should
have found a solution to the riddle of existence. He decided to find
it far away from all those whom he loved. Softly he went into the room
where Yasodhara was sleeping with her baby. Then he called for his
faithful Channa and told him to follow.
Together the two men went into the darkness of the night, one to find
rest for his soul, the other to be a faithful servant unto a beloved
master.
The people of India among whom Siddhartha wandered for many years were
just then in a state of change. Their ancestors, the native Indians,
had been conquered without great difficulty by the war-like Aryans
(our distant cousins) and thereafter the Aryans had been the rulers
and masters of tens of millions of docile little brown men. To maintain
themselves in the seat of the mighty, they had divided the population
into different classes and gradually a system of "caste" of the most
rigid sort had been enforced upon the natives. The descendants of the
Indo-European conquerors belonged to the highest "caste," the class of
warriors and nobles. Next came the caste of the priests. Below these
followed the peasants and the business men. The ancient natives,
however, who were called Pariahs, formed a class of despised and
miserable slaves and never could hope to be anything else.
Even the religion of the people was a matter of caste. The old
Indo-Europeans, during their thousands of years of wandering, had met
with many strange adventures. These had been collected in a book called
the Veda. The language of this book was called Sanskrit, and it was
closely related to the different languages of the European continent, to
Greek and Latin and Russian and German and two-score others. The three
highest castes were allowed to read these holy scriptures. The Pariah,
however, the despised member of the lowest caste, was not permitted to
know its contents. Woe to the man of noble or priestly caste who should
teach a Pariah to study the sacred volume!
The majority of the Indian people, therefore, lived in misery. Since
this planet offered them very little joy, salvation from suffering
must be found elsewhere. They tried to derive a little consolation from
meditation upon the bliss of their future existence.
Brahma, the all-creator who was regarded by the Indian people as the
supreme ruler of life and death, was worshipped as the highest ideal of
perfection. To become like Brahma, to lose all desires for riches and
power, was recognised as the most exalted purpose of existence. Holy
thoughts were regarded as more important than holy deeds, and many
people went into the desert and lived upon the leaves of trees and
starved their bodies that they might feed their souls with the glorious
contemplation of the splendours of Brahma, the Wise, the Good and the
Merciful.
Siddhartha, who had often observed these solitary wanderers who were
seeking the truth far away from the turmoil of the cities and the
villages, decided to follow their example. He cut his hair. He took his
pearls and his rubies and sent them back to his family with a message
of farewell, which the ever faithful Channa carried. Without a single
follower, the young prince then moved into the wilderness.
Soon the fame of his holy conduct spread among the mountains. Five young
men came to him and asked that they might be allowed to listen to his
words of wisdom. He agreed to be their master if they would follow him.
They consented, and he took them into the hills and for six years
he taught them all he knew amidst the lonely peaks of the Vindhya
Mountains. But at the end of this period of study, he felt that he was
still far from perfection. The world that he had left continued to
tempt him. He now asked that his pupils leave him and then he fasted for
forty-nine days and nights, sitting upon the roots of an old tree. At
last he received his reward. In the dusk of the fiftieth evening,
Brahma revealed himself to his faithful servant. From that moment on,
Siddhartha was called Buddha and he was revered as the Enlightened One
who had come to save men from their unhappy mortal fate.
The last forty-five years of his life, Buddha spent within the valley of
the Ganges River, teaching his simple lesson of submission and meekness
unto all men. In the year 488 before our era, he died, full of years and
beloved by millions of people. He had not preached his doctrines for the
benefit of a single class. Even the lowest Pariah might call himself his
disciple.
This, however, did not please the nobles and the priests and the
merchants who did their best to destroy a creed which recognised the
equality of all living creatures and offered men the hope of a second
life (a reincarnation) under happier circumstances. As soon as they
could, they encouraged the people of India to return to the ancient
doctrines of the Brahmin creed with its fasting and its tortures of the
sinful body. But Buddhism could not be destroyed. Slowly the disciples
of the Enlightened One wandered across the valleys of the Himalayas, and
moved into China. They crossed the Yellow Sea and preached the wisdom
of their master unto the people of Japan, and they faithfully obeyed the
will of their great master, who had forbidden them to use force. To-day
more people recognise Buddha as their teacher than ever before and their
number surpasses that of the combined followers of Christ and Mohammed.
As for Confucius, the wise old man of the Chinese, his story is a simple
one. He was born in the year 550 B.C. He led a quiet, dignified and
uneventful life at a time when China was without a strong central
government and when the Chinese people were at the mercy of bandits and
robber-barons who went from city to city, pillaging and stealing and
murdering and turning the busy plains of northern and central China into
a wilderness of starving people.
Confucius, who loved his people, tried to save them. He did not have
much faith in the use of violence. He was a very peaceful person. He
did not think that he could make people over by giving them a lot of new
laws. He knew that the only possible salvation would come from a change
of heart, and he set out upon the seemingly hopeless task of changing
the character of his millions of fellow men who inhabited the wide
plains of eastern Asia. The Chinese had never been much interested in
religion as we understand that word. They believed in devils and spooks
as most primitive people do. But they had no prophets and recognised no
"revealed truth." Confucius is almost the only one among the great moral
leaders who did not see visions, who did not proclaim himself as the
messenger of a divine power; who did not, at some time or another, claim
that he was inspired by voices from above.
He was just a very sensible and kindly man, rather given to lonely
wanderings and melancholy tunes upon his faithful flute. He asked for no
recognition. He did not demand that any one should follow him or worship
him. He reminds us of the ancient Greek philosophers, especially those
of the Stoic School, men who believed in right living and righteous
thinking without the hope of a reward but simply for the peace of the
soul that comes with a good conscience.
Confucius was a very tolerant man. He went out of his way to visit
Lao-Tse, the other great Chinese leader and the founder of a philosophic
system called "Taoism," which was merely an early Chinese version of the
Golden Rule.
Confucius bore no hatred to any one. He taught the virtue of supreme
self-possession. A person of real worth, according to the teaching of
Confucius, did not allow himself to be ruffled by anger and suffered
whatever fate brought him with the resignation of those sages who
understand that everything which happens, in one way or another, is
meant for the best.
At first he had only a few students. Gradually the number increased.
Before his death, in the year 478 B.C., several of the kings and the
princes of China confessed themselves his disciples. When Christ was
born in Bethlehem, the philosophy of Confucius had already become a part
of the mental make-up of most Chinamen. It has continued to influence
their lives ever since. Not however in its pure, original form. Most
religions change as time goes on. Christ preached humility and meekness
and absence from worldly ambitions, but fifteen centuries after
Golgotha, the head of the Christian church was spending millions upon
the erection of a building that bore little relation to the lonely
stable of Bethlehem.
Lao-Tse taught the Golden Rule, and in less than three centuries the
ignorant masses had made him into a real and very cruel God and had
buried his wise commandments under a rubbish-heap of superstition which
made the lives of the average Chinese one long series of frights and
fears and horrors.
Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honouring their Father
and their Mother. They soon began to be more interested in the memory of
their departed parents than in the happiness of their children and their
grandchildren. Deliberately they turned their backs upon the future and
tried to peer into the vast darkness of the past. The worship of the
ancestors became a positive religious system. Rather than disturb a
cemetery situated upon the sunny and fertile side of a mountain, they
would plant their rice and wheat upon the barren rocks of the other
slope where nothing could possibly grow. And they preferred hunger and
famine to the desecration of the ancestral grave.
At the same time the wise words of Confucius never quite lost their hold
upon the increasing millions of eastern Asia. Confucianism, with its
profound sayings and shrewd observations, added a touch of common-sense
philosophy to the soul of every Chinaman and influenced his entire life,
whether he was a simple laundry man in a steaming basement or the ruler
of vast provinces who dwelt behind the high walls of a secluded palace.
In the sixteenth century the enthusiastic but rather uncivilised
Christians of the western world came face to face with the older creeds
of the East. The early Spaniards and Portuguese looked upon the peaceful
statues of Buddha and contemplated the venerable pictures of Confucius
and did not in the least know what to make of those worthy prophets
with their far-away smile. They came to the easy conclusion that these
strange divinities were just plain devils who represented something
idolatrous and heretical and did not deserve the respect of the true
sons of the Church. Whenever the spirit of Buddha or Confucius seemed to
interfere with the trade in spices and silks, the Europeans attacked the
"evil influence" with bullets and grape-shot. That system had certain
very definite disadvantages. It has left us an unpleasant heritage of
ill-will which promises little good for the immediate future.