"The world is old, and all things old within it." We plod a trodden
path. No truth is new to-day, save only that one which as a mantle
covers the face of God, lest we be blinded by the unveiled glory. How
many of earth's departed great, buried out of remembrance, might have
lived to-day in the love of the wise and just, had theirs but been that
perfect quickening which is the breath of his Spirit upon the heart, the
gift that "passeth understanding!" The world's helpers must first become
borrowers of God. The world's teachers must first learn of him that only
wisdom, which cometh not of books nor jealous cloister cells, but out of
the heart of man as it opens yearningly to the cry of humanity,--the
Wisdom of Love. This alone may challenge a superior mind, prizing truths
not merely for their facts, but for their motives,--motives for which
individuals or great communities either act or suffer,--to explore with
a calm and kindly judgment the spirit of the religion of the Buddhists;
and not its spirit only, but its every look and tone and motion as well,
being so many complex expressions of the religious character in all its
peculiar thoughts and feelings.
"Who, of himself, can interpret the symbol expressed by the wings of the
air-sylph forming within the case of the caterpillar? Only he who feels
in his own soul the same instinct which impels the horned fly to leave
room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come." Such a man knows and
feels that the potential works in him even as the actual works on him.
As all the organs of sense are framed for a correspondent world of
sense, so all the organs of the spirit are framed for a correspondent
world of spirit; and though these latter be not equally developed in us
all, yet they surely exist in all; else how is it that even the
ignorant, the depraved, and the cruel will contemplate the man of
unselfish and exalted goodness with contradictory emotions of pity and
respect?
We are prone to ignore or to condemn that which we do not clearly
understand; and thus it is, and on no better ground, that we deny that
there are influences in the religions of the East to render their
followers wiser, nobler, purer. And yet no one of respectable
intelligence will question that there have been, in all ages, individual
pagans who, by the simplicity of their doctrine and the purity of their
practice, have approached very nearly to the perfection of the Christian
graces; and that they were, if not so much the better for the religion
they had, at least far, far better than if they had had no religion at
all.
It is not, however, in human nature to approve and admire any course of
life without inquiring into the spirit of the law that regulates it. Nor
may it suffice that the spirit is there, if not likewise the
letter,--that is to say, the practice. The best doctrine may become the
worst, if imperfectly understood, erroneously interpreted, or
superstitiously followed.
In Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and India, the metaphysical analysis of
Mind had attained its noontide splendor, while as yet experimental
research had hardly dawned. Those ancient mystics did much to promote
intellectual emancipation, by insisting that Thought should not be
imprisoned within the mere outlines of any single dogmatic system; and
they likewise availed, in no feeble measure, to keep alive the heart in
the head, by demanding an impartial reverence for every attribute of the
mind, till, by converting these into symbols to impress the ignorant and
stupid, they came at last to deify them. Thus, with the uninitiated,
their system degenerated into an ignoble pantheism.
The renascence of Buddhism sought to eliminate from the arrogant and
impious pantheisms of Egypt, India, and Greece a simple and pure
philosophy, upholding virtue as man's greatest good and highest reward.
It taught that the only object worthy of his noblest aspirations was to
render the soul (itself an emanation from God) fit to be absorbed back
again into the Divine essence from which it sprang. The single aim,
therefore, of pure Buddhism seems to have been to rouse men to an inward
contemplation of the divinity of their own nature; to fix their thoughts
on the spiritual life within as the only real and true life; to teach
them to disregard all earthly distinctions, conditions, privileges,
enjoyments, privations, sorrows, sufferings; and thus to incite them to
continual efforts in the direction of the highest ideals of patience,
purity, self-denial.
Buddhism cannot be clearly defined by its visible results today. There
are more things in that subtile, mystical enigma called in the Pali
_Nirwana_, in the Birmese _Niban_, in the Siamese _Niphan_, than are
dreamed of in our philosophy. With the idea of Niphan in his theology,
it were absurdly false to say the Buddhist has no God. His Decalogue
[FOOTNOTE: Translated from the Pali.] is as plain and imperative as the
Christian's :--
I. From the meanest insect up to man thou shalt kill no animal
whatsoever.