preach that Christianity which once conquered the world--the genuine
and unshackled Gospel of Christ and the Apostles. Let them respect
native prejudices, and be tolerant with regard to all that can be
tolerated in a Christian community. Let them consider that
Christianity is not a gift to be pressed on unwilling minds, but the
highest of all privileges which natives can receive at the hands of
their present rulers. Natives of independent and honest character
cannot afford at present to join the ranks of converts without losing
that true caste which no man ought to lose--namely, self-respect. They
are driven to prop up their tottering religions, rather than profess a
faith which seems dictated to them by their conquerors. Such feelings
ought to be respected. Finally, let missionaries study the sacred
writings on which the faith of the Parsis is professedly founded. Let
them examine the bulwarks which they mean to overthrow. They will find
them less formidable from within than from without. But they will also
discover that they rest on a foundation which ought never to be
touched--a faith in one God, the Creator, the Ruler, and the Judge of
the world.
_August, 1862._
IX.
BUDDHISM.[52]
If the command of St. Paul, 'Prove all things, hold fast that which is
good,' may be supposed to refer to spiritual things, and, more
especially, to religious doctrines, it must be confessed that few
only, whether theologians or laymen, have ever taken to heart the
apostle's command. How many candidates for holy orders are there who
could give a straightforward answer if asked to enumerate the
principal religions of the world, or to state the names of their
founders, and the titles of the works which are still considered by
millions of human beings as the sacred authorities for their religious
belief? To study such books as the Koran of the Mohammedans, the
Zend-Avesta of the Parsis, the King's of the Confucians, the
Tao-te-King of the Taoists, the Vedas of the Brahmans, the Tripi_t_aka
of the Buddhists, the Sutras of the Jains, or the Granth of the Sikhs,
would be considered by many mere waste of time. Yet St. Paul's command
is very clear and simple; and to maintain that it referred to the
heresies of his own time only, or to the philosophical systems of the
Greeks and Romans, would be to narrow the horizon of the apostle's
mind, and to destroy the general applicability of his teaching to all
times and to all countries. Many will ask what possible good could be
derived from the works of men who must have been either deceived or
deceivers, nor would it be difficult to quote some passages in order
to show the utter absurdity and worthlessness of the religious books
of the Hindus and Chinese. But this was not the spirit in which the
apostle of the Gentiles addressed himself to the Epicureans and
Stoics, nor is this the feeling with which a thoughtful Christian and
a sincere believer in the divine government of the world is likely to
rise from a perusal of any of the books which he knows to be or to
have been the only source of spiritual light and comfort to thousands
and thousands among the dwellers on earth.
[Footnote 52: 'Le Bouddha et sa Religion.' Par J. Barthelemy
Saint-Hilaire, Membre de l'Institut. Paris, 1860.]
Many are the advantages to be derived from a careful study of other
religions, but the greatest of all is that it teaches us to appreciate
more truly what we possess in our own. When do we feel the blessings
of our own country more warmly and truly than when we return from
abroad? It is the same with regard to religion. Let us see what other
nations have had and still have in the place of religion; let us
examine the prayers, the worship, the theology even of the most highly
civilised races,--the Greeks, the Romans, the Hindus, the
Persians,--and we shall then understand more thoroughly what blessings
are vouchsafed to us in being allowed to breathe from the first breath
of life the pure air of a land of Christian light and knowledge. We
are too apt to take the greatest blessings as matters of course, and
even religion forms no exception. We have done so little to gain our
religion, we have suffered so little in the cause of truth, that
however highly we prize our own Christianity, we never prize it highly
enough until we have compared it with the religions of the rest of the
world.
This, however, is not the only advantage; and we think that M.
Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire has formed too low an estimate of the
benefits to be derived from a thoughtful study of the religions of
mankind when he writes of Buddhism: 'Le seul, mais immense service que
le Bouddhisme puisse nous rendre, c'est par son triste contraste de
nous faire apprecier mieux encore la valeur inestimable de nos
croyances, en nous montrant tout ce qu'il en coute a l'humanite qui ne
les partage point.' This is not all. If a knowledge of other countries
and a study of the manners and customs of foreign nations teach us to
appreciate what we have at home, they likewise form the best cure of
that national conceit and want of sympathy with which we are too apt
to look on all that is strange and foreign. The feeling which led the
Hellenic races to divide the whole world into Greeks and Barbarians is
so deeply engrained in human nature that not even Christianity has
been able altogether to remove it. Thus when we cast our first glance
into the labyrinth of the religions of the world, all seems to us
darkness, self-deceit, and vanity. It sounds like a degradation of the
very name of religion to apply it to the wild ravings of Hindu Yogins
or the blank blasphemies of Chinese Buddhists. But as we slowly and
patiently wend our way through the dreary prisons, our own eyes seem
to expand, and we perceive a glimmer of light where all was darkness
at first. We learn to understand the saying of one who more than
anybody had a right to speak with authority on this subject, that
'there is no religion which does not contain a spark of truth.' Those
who would limit the riches of God's goodness and forbearance and long
suffering, and would hand over the largest portion of the human race
to inevitable perdition, have never adduced a tittle of evidence from
the Gospel or from any other trustworthy source in support of so
unhallowed a belief. They have generally appealed to the devilries and
orgies of heathen worship; they have quoted the blasphemies of
Oriental Sufis and the immoralities sanctioned by the successors of
Mohammed; but they have seldom, if ever, endeavoured to discover the
true and original character of the strange forms of faith and worship
which they call the work of the devil. If the Indians had formed their
notions of Christianity from the soldiers of Cortez and Pizarro, or if
the Hindus had studied the principles of Christian morality in the
lives of Clive and Warren Hastings; or, to take a less extreme case,
if a Mohammedan, settled in England, were to test the practical
working of Christian charity by the spirit displayed in the journals
of our religious parties, their notions of Christianity would be about
as correct as the ideas which thousands of educated Christians
entertain of the diabolical character of heathen religion. Even
Christianity has been depraved into Jesuitism and Mormonism, and if
we, as Protestants, claim the right to appeal to the Gospel as the
only test by which our faith is to be judged, we must grant a similar
privilege to Mohammedans and Buddhists, and to all who possess a
written, and, as they believe, revealed authority for the articles of
their faith.
But though no one is likely to deny the necessity of studying each
religion in its most ancient form and from its original documents,
before we venture to pronounce our verdict, the difficulties of this
task are such that in them more than in anything else, must be sought
the cause why so few of our best thinkers and writers have devoted
themselves to a critical and historical study of the religions of the
world. All important religions have sprung up in the East. Their
sacred books are written in Eastern tongues, and some of them are of
such ancient date that those even who profess to believe in them,
admit that they are unable to understand them without the help of
translations and commentaries. Until very lately the sacred books of
three of the most important religions, those of the Brahmans, the
Buddhists, and the Parsis, were totally unknown in Europe. It was one
of the most important results of the study of Sanskrit, or the ancient
language of India, that through it the key, not only to the sacred
books of the Brahmans, the Vedas, but likewise to those of the
Buddhists and Zoroastrians, was recovered. And nothing shows more
strikingly the rapid progress of Sanskrit scholarship than that even
Sir William Jones, whose name has still, with many, a more familiar
sound than the names of Colebrooke, Burnouf, and Lassen, should have
known nothing of the Vedas; that he should never have read a line of
the canonical books of the Buddhists, and that he actually expressed
his belief that Buddha was the same as the Teutonic deity Wodan or
Odin, and _S_akya, another name of Buddha, the same as Shishac, king
of Egypt. The same distinguished scholar never perceived the intimate
relationship between the language of the Zend-Avesta and Sanskrit, and
he declared the whole of the Zoroastrian writings to be modern
forgeries.
Even at present we are not yet in possession of a complete edition,
much less of any trustworthy translation, of the Vedas; we only
possess the originals of a few books of the Buddhist canon; and though
the text of the Zend-Avesta has been edited in its entirety, its
interpretation is beset with greater difficulties than that of the
Vedas or the Tripi_t_aka. A study of the ancient religions of China,
those of Confucius and Lao-tse, presupposes an acquaintance with
Chinese, a language which it takes a life to learn thoroughly; and
even the religion of Mohammed, though more accessible than any other
Eastern religion, cannot be fully examined except by a master of
Arabic. It is less surprising, therefore, than it might at first
appear, that a comprehensive and scholarlike treatment of the
religions of the world should still be a desideratum. Scholars who
have gained a knowledge of the language, and thereby free access to
original documents, find so much work at hand which none but
themselves can do, that they grudge the time for collecting and
arranging, for the benefit of the public at large, the results which
they have obtained. Nor need we wonder that critical historians should
rather abstain from the study of the religions of antiquity than trust
to mere translations and second-hand authorities.
Under these circumstances we feel all the more thankful if we meet
with a writer like M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, who has acquired a
knowledge of Eastern languages sufficient to enable him to consult
original texts and to control the researches of other scholars, and
who at the same time commands that wide view of the history of human
thought which enables him to assign to each system its proper place,
to perceive its most salient features, and to distinguish between what
is really important and what is not, in the lengthy lucubrations of
ancient poets and prophets. M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire is one of the
most accomplished scholars of France; and his reputation as the
translator of Aristotle has made us almost forget that the Professor
of Greek Philosophy at the College de France[53] is the same as the
active writer in the 'Globe' of 1827, and the 'National' of 1830; the
same who signed the protest against the July ordinances, and who in
1848 was Chief Secretary of the Provisional Government. If such a man
takes the trouble to acquire a knowledge of Sanskrit, and to attend in
the same College where he was professor, the lectures of his own
colleague, the late Eugene Burnouf, his publications on Hindu
philosophy and religion will naturally attract a large amount of
public interest. The Sanskrit scholar by profession works and
publishes chiefly for the benefit of other Sanskrit scholars. He is
satisfied with bringing to light the ore which he has extracted by
patient labour from among the dusty MSS. of the East-India House. He
seldom takes the trouble to separate the metal from the ore, to purify
or to strike it into current coin. He is but too often apt to forget
that no lasting addition is ever made to the treasury of human
knowledge unless the results of special research are translated into
the universal language of science, and rendered available to every
person of intellect and education. A division of labour seems most
conducive to this end. We want a class of interpreters, men such as M.
Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, who are fully competent to follow and to
control the researches of professional students, and who at the same
time have not forgotten the language of the world.
[Footnote 53: M. de St. Hilaire resigned the chair of Greek literature
at the College de France after the _coup d'etat_ of 1851, declining to
take the oath of allegiance to the existing government.]
In his work on Buddhism, of which a second edition has just appeared,
M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire has undertaken to give to the world at
large the really trustworthy and important results which have been
obtained by the laborious researches of Oriental scholars, from the
original documents of that interesting and still mysterious religion.
It was a task of no ordinary difficulty, for although these researches
are of very recent date, and belong to a period of Sanskrit
scholarship posterior to Sir W. Jones and Colebrooke, yet such is the
amount of evidence brought together by the combined industry of
Hodgson, Turnour, Csoma de Koeroes, Stanislas Julien, Foucaux, Fausboell,
Spence Hardy, but above all, of the late Eugene Burnouf, that it
required no common patience and discrimination in order to compose
from such materials so accurate, and at the same time so lucid and
readable a book on Buddhism as that which we owe to M. Barthelemy
Saint-Hilaire. The greater part of it appeared originally in the
'Journal des Savants,' the time-honoured organ of the French Academy,
which counts on its staff the names of Cousin, Flourens, Villemain,
Biot, Mignet, Littre, &c, and admits as contributors sixteen only of
the most illustrious members of that illustrious body, _la creme de la
creme_.
Though much had been said and written about Buddhism,--enough to
frighten priests by seeing themselves anticipated in auricular
confession, beads, and tonsure by the Lamas of Tibet,[54] and to
disconcert philosophers by finding themselves outbid in positivism and
nihilism by the inmates of Chinese monasteries,--the real beginning of
an historical and critical study of the doctrines of Buddha dates from
the year 1824. In that year Mr. Hodgson announced the fact that the
original documents of the Buddhist canon had been preserved in
Sanskrit in the monasteries of Nepal. Before that time our information
on Buddhism had been derived at random from China, Japan, Burmah,
Tibet, Mongolia, and Tartary; and though it was known that the
Buddhist literature in all these countries professed itself to be
derived, directly or indirectly, from India, and that the technical
terms of that religion, not excepting the very name of Buddha, had
their etymology in Sanskrit only, no hope was entertained that the
originals of these various translations could ever be recovered. Mr.
Hodgson, who settled in Nepal in 1821, as political resident of the
East-India Company, and whose eyes were always open, not only to the
natural history of that little-explored country, but likewise to its
antiquities, its languages, and traditions, was not long before he
discovered that his friends, the priests of Nepal, possessed a
complete literature of their own. That literature was not written in
the spoken dialects of the country, but in Sanskrit. Mr. Hodgson
procured a catalogue of all the works, still in existence, which
formed the Buddhist canon. He afterwards succeeded in procuring copies
of these works, and he was able in 1824 to send about sixty volumes to
the Asiatic Society of Bengal. As no member of that society seemed
inclined to devote himself to the study of these MSS., Mr. Hodgson
sent two complete collections of the same MSS. to the Asiatic Society
of London and the Societe Asiatique of Paris. Before alluding to the
brilliant results which the last-named collection produced in the
hands of Eugene Burnouf, we must mention the labours of other
students, which preceded the publication of Burnouf's researches.
[Footnote 54: The late Abbe Huc pointed out the similarities between
the Buddhist and Roman Catholic ceremonials with such _naivete_, that,
to his surprise, he found his delightful 'Travels in Tibet' placed on
the 'Index.' 'On ne peut s'empecher d'etre frappe,' he writes, 'de
leur rapport avec le Catholicisme. La crosse, la mitre, la dalmatique,
la chape ou pluvial, que les grands Lamas portent en voyage, ou
lorsqu'ils font quelque ceremonie hors du temple; l'office a deux
choeurs, la psalmodie, les exorcismes, l'encensoir soutenu par cinq
chaines, et pouvant s'ouvrir et se fermer a volonte; les benedictions
donnees par les Lamas en etendant la main droite sur la tete des
fideles; le chapelet, le celibat ecclesiastique, les retraites
spirituelles, le culte des saints, les jeunes, les processions, les
litanies, l'eau benite; voila autant de rapports que les Bouddhistes
ont avec nous.' He might have added tonsure, relics, and the
confessional.]
Mr. Hodgson himself gave to the world a number of valuable essays written
on the spot, and afterwards collected under the title of 'Illustrations of
the Literature and Religion of the Buddhists,' Serampore, 1841. He
established the important fact, in accordance with the traditions of the
priests of Nepal, that some of the Sanskrit documents which he recovered
had existed in the monasteries of Nepal ever since the second century of
our era, and that the whole of that collection had, five or six hundred
years later, when Buddhism became definitely established in Tibet, been
translated into the language of that country. As the art of printing had
been introduced from China into Tibet, there was less difficulty in
procuring complete copies of the Tibetan translation of the Buddhist canon.
The real difficulty was to find a person acquainted with the language. By a
fortunate concurrence of circumstances, however, it so happened that about
the same time when Mr. Hodgson's discoveries began to attract the attention
of Oriental scholars at Calcutta, a Hungarian, of the name of Alexander
Csoma de Koeroes, arrived there. He had made his way from Hungary to Tibet on
foot, without any means of his own, and with the sole object of discovering
somewhere in Central Asia the native home of the Hungarians. Arrived in
Tibet, his enthusiasm found a new vent in acquiring a language which no
European before his time had mastered, and in exploring the vast collection
of the canonical books of the Buddhists, preserved in that language. Though
he arrived at Calcutta almost without a penny, he met with a hearty welcome
from the members of the Asiatic Society, and was enabled with their
assistance to publish the results of his extraordinary researches. People
have complained of the length of the sacred books of other nations, but
there are none that approach in bulk to the sacred canon of the Tibetans.
It consists of two collections, commonly called the Kanjur and Tanjur. The
proper spelling of their names is Bkah-hgyur, pronounced Kah-gyur, and
Bstan-hgyur, pronounced Tan-gyur. The Kanjur consists, in its different
editions, of 100, 102, or 108 volumes folio. It comprises 1083 distinct
works. The Tanjur consists of 225 volumes folio, each weighing from four to
five pounds in the edition of Peking. Editions of this colossal code were
printed at Peking, Lhassa, and other places. The edition of the Kanjur
published at Peking, by command of the Emperor Khian-Lung, sold for L600. A
copy of the Kanjur was bartered for 7000 oxen by the Buriates, and the same
tribe paid 1200 silver roubles for a complete copy of the Kanjur and Tanjur
together.[55] Such a jungle of religious literature--the most excellent
hiding-place, we should think, for Lamas and Dalai-Lamas--was too much even
for a man who could travel on foot from Hungary to Tibet. The Hungarian
enthusiast, however, though he did not translate the whole, gave a most
valuable analysis of this immense bible, in the twentieth volume of the
'Asiatic Researches,' sufficient to establish the fact that the principal
portion of it was a translation from the same Sanskrit originals which had
been discovered in Nepal by Mr. Hodgson. Csoma de Koeroes died soon after he
had given to the world the first fruits of his labours,--a victim to his
heroic devotion to the study of ancient languages and religions.
[Footnote 55: 'Die Religion des Buddha,' von Koeppen, vol. ii. p.
282.]
It was another fortunate coincidence that, contemporaneously with the
discoveries of Hodgson and Csoma de Koeroes, another scholar, Schmidt of
St. Petersburg, had so far advanced in the study of the Mongolian
language, as to be able to translate portions of the Mongolian version
of the Buddhist canon, and thus forward the elucidation of some of the
problems connected with the religion of Buddha.
It never rains but it pours. Whereas for years, nay, for centuries,
not a single original document of the Buddhist religion had been
accessible to the scholars of Europe, we witness, in the small space
of ten years, the recovery of four complete Buddhist literatures. In
addition to the discoveries of Hodgson in Nepal, of Csoma de Koeroes in
Tibet, and of Schmidt in Mongolia, the Honourable George Turnour
suddenly presented to the world the Buddhist literature of Ceylon,
composed in the sacred language of that island, the ancient Pali. The
existence of that literature had been known before. Since 1826 Sir
Alexander Johnston had been engaged in collecting authentic copies of
the Mahavansa, the Ra_g_avali, and the Ra_g_aratnakari. These copies
were translated at his suggestion from Pali into modern Singhalese and
thence into English. The publication was entrusted to Mr. Edward
Upham, and the work appeared in 1833, under the title of 'Sacred and
Historical Works of Ceylon,' dedicated to William IV. Unfortunately,
whether through fraud or through misunderstanding, the priests who
were to have procured an authentic copy of the Pali originals and
translated them into the vernacular language, appear to have formed a
compilation of their own from various sources. The official
translators by whom this mutilated Singhalese abridgment was to have
been rendered into English, took still greater liberties; and the
'Sacred and Historical Books of Ceylon' had hardly been published
before Burnouf, then a mere beginner in the study of Pali, was able to
prove the utter uselessness of that translation. Mr. Turnour, however,
soon made up for this disappointment. He set to work in a more
scholarlike spirit, and after acquiring himself a knowledge of the
Pali language, he published several important essays on the Buddhist
canon, as preserved in Ceylon. These were followed by an edition and
translation of the Mahavansa, or the history of Ceylon, written in the
fifth century after Christ, and giving an account of the island from
the earliest times to the beginning of the fourth century A.D. Several
continuations of that history are in existence, but Mr. Turnour was
prevented by an early death from continuing his edition beyond the
original portion of that chronicle. The exploration of the Ceylonese
literature has since been taken up again by the Rev. D. J. Gogerly
(Clough), whose essays are unfortunately scattered about in Singhalese
periodicals and little known in Europe; and by the Rev. Spence Hardy,
for twenty years Wesleyan Missionary in Ceylon. His two works,
'Eastern Monachism' and 'Manual of Buddhism,' are full of interesting
matter, but as they are chiefly derived from Singhalese, and even more
modern sources, they require to be used with caution.[56]
[Footnote 56: The same author has lately published another valuable
work, 'The Legends and Theories of the Buddhists.' London, 1866.]