GOD AND THE KOSMOS.
"Differences veil a fundamental unity."--BRUNO.
Both Christianity and Buddhism can be set to the same music, the music
of the unconditioned. The definition of the Christian God as invisible
and eternal, and as that which has not parts, body, or passions, is
incontestably an attempt to convert our thoughts to a belief in, and
appreciation of, the unconditioned. The entire teaching of Jesus moves
in this direction; and this will be recognized at once if we permit
ourselves to interpret his symbolic utterances in the right and only
logical sense. To be saved--that is, to realize the unconditioned--we
must believe in Jesus; namely, in his teaching.
If humanity could assume this attitude of mind--if it could attune
its thoughts to what Christian symbolism really means, or ought to
mean--then all the magnificent ritual of the Holy Catholic Church,
the realistic hymnology, even the shibboleths of the Salvationist,
would no longer give rise to the supercilious contempt of the
so-called intellectual world, but would everywhere be recognized as
the expression of the most exalted philosophy, and consonant with the
latest results of psycho-physiological research. "The proud have held
me exceedingly in derision, yet have I not shrinked from thy law."
Everything that teaches us that the end of all things and the goal
of all men is a complete realization of the "unconditioned" is the
acceptable word of God.
Gotama, using a symbolism of his own, and by means of parables not
wholly dissimilar to those employed by Jesus, taught the self-same
truth. The flesh has to be crucified--that is, the idea of separateness
has to be eliminated--and then only will Heaven, Nirvana, at-oneness
with the unproduced (with God), be a reality.
It is legitimate to speak of Jesus as God, and Gotama is known as
Buddha. Here we have, then, Jesus-God and Gotama-Buddha. But God and
Buddha are but two different terms used for the expression of one
identical idea. The recognition of "Buddha" as an equivalent for "God"
has been very generally ignored by interpreters of Buddhism; hence the
confusion of thought which has existed in this connection. This in some
measure may also be due to the fact that Gotama, in preaching to the
Brahmins, made use of the word "Brahma" to denote God.
Jesus and Gotama were gnomic, or divinely wise--that is, they _knew_
of the "unconditioned." They both ardently desired to communicate this
knowledge to the world, and the way of escape from absolute bondage to
the conditioned to a realization of the unconditioned. If, knowing the
way, man still elects to continue in bondage to the conditioned state,
in a hell of misery or through a series of incarnations, he can do so
by disregarding the injunction, "Set not your affections on things on
earth."
Gotama pointed out the _straight_ path that leads to a union with
Brahma (God); but there was also a circuitous path indicated by him,
by which we can make "golden stairways of our weaknesses." To the
different symbolism employed by Gotama, and the meaning attached to
this symbolism by his exponents, may also be attributed the failure of
many acquainted only with the outlines of Buddhism to assimilate the
term "Buddha" with that of "God" in its universalist sense.
When we come to a careful and impartial study of the Gospel of Buddha,
it is astonishing what a close connection is to be found therein
between the God idea of the Christian community and the Buddha idea of
the Asiatic world. Gotama does not, as many suppose, exclude the notion
of God as that of all-pervading Love. "The whole wide world," he says,
"above, below, around, and everywhere, will continue to be filled with
Love, far-reaching, grown great and beyond measure." "Buddha is the
all-loving teacher, assuming the shape of the beings whom he teaches."
This is the second person of the Buddhist triad, the apparitional body
of Gotama.
The splendid symbolism of the holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity,
three persons and one God, common to both Christianity and Buddhism,
falls like the cloudy hangings of a gorgeous sunset between us and
the unconditioned. Many of the spectators are held spellbound and
enslaved by the beauty of the phenomena alone; a few see its meaning,
and realize the noumenon. The symbol is, as it were, a yearning of the
visible to suggest the invisible, the conditioned speaking to us of
the unconditioned. The small minority--the Blessed Ones, the Arhats
of Buddhism, the saints of Christendom--they are those who know the
Lord, who see God. Yet there remains for every being a sure hope of the
deathless life.
After many a weary round of births and deaths or long sojourns in
Purgatory, after many a climb up the dark ladder of life, every being
at last will reach the desired goal, and see the fulfilment of prophecy
when God will _be_ all and _in_ all.
A great Orientalist has pronounced Buddhism to be the most godless of
all heathen religions. If this assertion means that the god of the
heathens is anthropomorphic and that of the Buddhists is not so, then
the statement of this distinguished scholar, though a little staggering
at first sight, may be regarded as containing an element of truth, but
not the whole truth.
The question whether the true Buddhism of Gotama recognized a
god in any sense of the expression still exercises the minds of
controversialists. At the very outset of our inquiry into the
Buddhistic conception of a god or no-god, we are confronted by directly
conflicting conclusions arrived at by two eminent authorities.
Professor Rhys Davids regards the true Buddhism of Gotama to be nothing
but blank Atheism, whereas Mr. Arthur Lillie unflinchingly pronounces
it to be Theism _pur et simple_.
In my judgment, all the controversy that rages around the Hinayâna[O]
and the Mahayâna, which represent respectively the Southern and
Northern schools of thought, only confuses the issue; and the opinions
of sectarian Buddhists, or even the edicts of Asoka, cannot, I think,
be accepted in themselves as directly supporting any hard-and-fast
theory regarding the Theistic or Atheistic tendencies in the teaching
of Gotama.
[O] The Hinayâna, or Small Vehicle of Salvation, was the abstract
and philosophical presentment of Buddhism as first conceived. It was
more adapted to the sage than to the masses who required a symbolic
presentation, such as is afforded by the Mahayâna, or Great Vehicle
of Salvation. We see the same kind of development holding a place in
the history of Christianity. Upon the enigmatical utterances of Jesus
and the mystical sophisms of St. Paul there has been raised a splendid
fabric of dogmatic ecclesiasticism; and under the shadow of its
symbolism the poor in spirit, the ignorant and the weak, have found
consolations which would not have been theirs if no such development
of the abstract principles of the faith had taken place.
With reference to the evidence of the edicts, it must not be overlooked
that Asoka figured as a good Theist while Viceroy at Ujain, and for
some years subsequent to his becoming Emperor of India--a fact which
several of his edicts, I believe, confirm.
A God, one Person (yet three Persons in One), without body (yet
walks), without parts (yet seen), without passions (yet with
compassion), a spirit, an indefinable, an illocatable, incomprehensible
substance in which we live and move and have our being, that cannot be
known, yet can be found (those that seek after me shall find me), which
some people have beautifully symbolized as a loving Father and others
have debased into a jealous and vindictive tyrant--of such a God only,
as an eternally conditionless mystery, it can surely be established,
from a review of Buddhistic evidence, that it is not, and has not been,
totally ignored.
It is difficult to see the force of denoting God as super-personal or
super-anything. He or It is personal, and everything else as masked
by materialities, and in the sense of all things being his contents.
Particles of matter are the contents of form. Form cannot be manifest
without matter. God is pure or shapeless form, as well as the formative
power of form.
Dr. Paul Carus, in referring to the God idea of the Buddhists, says:
"No religion can exist without belief in the existence of an ultimate
authority of conduct; but in this sense Buddhism, too, teaches a
belief in God. The Abhidharma, or Buddhist philosophy, distinctly
rejects the idea of a creation by an Ishvara--_i.e._, a personal
creator; but it recognizes that all deeds, be they good or evil, will
bear fruit according to their nature, and they teach that this law,
which is ultimately identical with the law of cause and effect, is
an irreversible reality; that there are no exceptions or deviations
from it. Thus law takes, to some extent, the place of the God idea,
and Buddhists gain a personal attitude to it, similarly as Christians
do when speaking of God, in quite a peculiar way. The doctrine of
the Trikâya, or the three bodies, teaches us that Buddha has three
personalities. The first one is the Dharma-Kâya, or the body of the
law; it corresponds to the Holy Ghost in the Christian dogmatology. The
second personality is the Nirmâna-Kâya, or the body of transformations;
it is transient in its various forms, and its most important and
latest appearance has been Gotama Siddhârta. This corresponds to the
second person of the Christian Trinity, to God the Son, or Christ....
The third personality of Buddha is called Sambhoga-Kâya, or the body
of bliss. It is the Christian idea of God the Father. Buddha, in his
capacity as Sambhoga-Kâya, is described as eternal, omnipresent, and
omnipotent. He is the life of all that lives, and the reality of all
that exists. Thus he is the All in All, in whom we live and move and
have our being."[P]
[P] _Buddhism and its Christian Critics_, by Paul Carus.
General Forlong, in his _Short Studies in the Science of Comparative
Religion_, informs us that "the first great Hindu Creating Father was a
real Prajā-pati, 'Lord of Creations'--a true Hermaik Brahmā; and, being
depicted as a potent masculine Zeus, like to Yahvê, Chemosh, Amon,
etc., he in time naturally became distasteful to cultured and pious
philosophic minds searching after a _great ideal_, and no magnified
man, solar or royal governor. As did Vedantists, so have others
developed a _great neuter Brahm_; even pious Christian philosophers
have sought, and some few dared to own, a Brahm, despite the direct
anthropomorphic teaching of the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. Thus
the Rev. Principal Caird, D.D. (Glasgow University), boldly says, in
his Gifford Lectures, 1895-6, that in his view 'Christianity knows
no such thing as a First Cause, or an Omnipotent Creator and moral
governor of the world, a being framed after the image of man, an
anthropomorphic potentate seated on a celestial throne and dispensing
rewards after the manner of an earthly sovereign or magistrate.'"
It is remarkable to find a parallel conception of Law, as associated
by Buddhists with the idea of divinity prevailing among the Egyptians,
who "recognized a divinity in those cases only when they perceived
the presence of a fixed Law, either of permanence or of change. This
_regularity_, which is the constitutive character of the Egyptian
divinity, was called Maāt. Maāt is, in fact, the Law and Order by which
the universe exists. Truth and Justice are but forms of Maāt as applied
to human action."[Q]
[Q] _Vide Book of the Dead_ (British Museum).
In Mr. Arthur Lillie's book, _The Influence of Buddhism on Primitive
Christianity_, there is struck a note of playfulness which almost leads
one to suppose that the writer does not intend that he should be taken
seriously everywhere in his fascinating pages. This is apparent even
in his treatment of the Jewish conception of an Almighty ruler, when
he takes for his text (Judges i. 19): "The Lord was with Judah, and He
drove out the inhabitants of the mountains, but _could not_ drive out
the inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots of iron." In
a similar spirit in this connection he would probably handle rather
roughly the notion of omniscience.
Mr. Lillie, further on in his book, quotes a conversation that is said
to have taken place between Gotama and some Brahmins on the subject
of ultimate union with the Eternal Brahma. Gotama points out that all
their talk about union is foolish talk, because they know nothing about
him. But this does not necessarily imply, as one would gather from the
commentary, that Gotama knew nothing of a Brahma, or quality of the
kosmos or Buddha, which was indefinable, and could only be adumbrated
in language, and no more. His sole intention, it seems to me, was to
impress on his audience that this Brahma could not be approached by
a factitious asceticism, and that all speculations as to his nature
and origin would be mere waste of time and energy. Subsequently,
on p. 83, Gotama is made to refer to this Brahma as a non-Theistic
"It"--evidently the neuter Brahm--the absolute, or the great "I am" of
the Christian Bible.
Here I would refer _en passant_ to the following passage which occurs
on p. 84: "There are two schools of Buddhism, and they are quite agreed
in this, that Buddhism is the quickening of the spiritual vision."
This, Buddhistically understood, is true enough, but there is a danger
of the Christian reader associating with the expression "spiritual" the
idea of the existence of a spirit in man as an ego-entity. Interpreted
in this sense, the expression would be wholly inapplicable to any
possible phase of Buddhistic thought or doctrine. Gotama knew of no
independent spirit-entity in man, so there could be no such thing as
animistic vision in Buddhism.
In the New Testament it is evident from the context that Jesus,
when negatively describing a spirit as that which hath not flesh
and bones, was not alluding to spirit in the sense given to it by
modern psychologists as "ideas," or as applied to the Sankhâras by
the translator of Professor Oldenberg's book on Buddhism, but had in
view those presentations of matter of human shape, without flesh and
bone development, the appearance of which from time to time has been
confirmed by not a few rational and reliable people.
With reference to Mr. Lillie's comments on the Jewish conception of an
Almighty Ruler, it may be remarked here that _executive_ omnipotence
and omniscience convey the notion of qualities that cannot be
philosophically applied to the absolute as conceived by Brahmins. This
is very clearly enunciated in the philosophy of the Upanishads.
Mr. A. E. Gough, in his book on this subject, writes: "The Self
(Brahma, or Reality) is said to be omniscient, but the reader must
not be misled; this only means that it is self-conscious.... The
omniscience of the Reality is its irradiation of all things."
It (Reality) knows but knows nothing, it sees but sees nothing, it
loves but loves nothing; because "It" is knowledge, sight, love,
etc. It transcends the relation of subject and object. In the New
Testament we meet with the expression, "God is love"--that is, a
quality with no objective application. It is the unseen and eternal in
contradistinction to the seen and temporal.
"Brahma is Beatitude. But we must be cautious. Brahma is not Beatitude
in the ordinary sense of the term. It is a bliss beyond the distinction
of subject and object.... The Indian philosophers everywhere affirm
that Brahma is knowledge, not that Brahma has knowledge."[R]
[R] _The Philosophy of the Upanishads_, by A. E. Gough.
This is very like Schelling's idea as portrayed in his account of the
ultimate goal of the finite ego: "The ultimate goal of the finite ego
is enlargement of its sphere till the attainment of identity with the
infinite ego. But the infinite ego knows no object, and possesses,
therefore, no consciousness or unity of consciousness, such as we mean
by personality. Consequently, the ultimate goal of all endeavour may
also be represented as enlargement of the personality to infinity--that
is to say, as its annihilation. The ultimate goal of the finite ego,
and not only of it, but also of the non-ego--the final goal, therefore,
of the world--is its annihilation as a world."[S]
[S] _Vom ich als Princip der Philosophie._
Mr. Gough, in the book already referred to, remarks "that Buddhism is
the philosophy of the Upanishads with Brahma left out; that in Buddhism
Brahma, or the inner light, is replaced by zero, or a vacuum; that
there is no light of lights beyond the darkness of the world-fiction;
that the highest end and final hope of man is a return into this
vacuum, or aboriginal nothingness of things. This is Nirvana, the
extinction of the soul; the path to it is the path of inertion, apathy,
and vacuity."
Buddhism expounded in this fashion is likely to produce a very
erroneous conception of what it really proves to be.
In the first place, such expressions as "vacuum," "emptiness,"
"voidness," must not be interpreted solely in a negative sense; there
is a positive sense also to be taken into account. The positive
aspect of such expressions has been very clearly set forth by the
great Chinese philosopher, Lau-toze, in the following manner: "The
thirty spokes unite in the one nave, but it is on the empty space (for
the axle) that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into
vessels, but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends.
The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment,
but it is on the empty space (within) that its use depends. Therefore,
what has a (positive) existence serves for positive adaptation, and
what has not that for (actual) usefulness."[T]
[T] Taken from _Buddhism and its Christian Critics_, by Paul Carus.
Secondly, although Gotama preached a kind of quietism, it was not the
quietism of inertion and apathy. He exhorted his followers to vigorous
activity in the acquisition of knowledge: "He who does not rouse
himself when it is time to rise, who, though young and strong, is full
of sloth, whose will and thought are weak, that lazy and idle man will
never find the way to knowledge (enlightenment). If anything is to be
done, let a man do it; let him attack it vigorously."[U]
[U] _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xvii., pp. 68 and 75.
Mr. Gough says that to gain this extinction the sage must loose himself
from every tie and turn his back upon the world.
This is very much akin to the way in which a Christian must act,
according to the teaching of the New Testament, if he would gain
heaven, union with God, with Love, with a quality. But it would be
doing injustice to the spirit of Christianity and Buddhism to describe
their ultimate goals as annihilation, aboriginal nothingness, and
extinction, and the path to it as one of inertion, apathy, and vacuity,
in the ordinary sense of these terms.
The expression "annihilation" has much to answer for. It has been
flaunted scornfully in the face of Buddhism by Vedantists of bygone
ages and by Christians of this century; it has been hurled from pulpits
with tremendous vehemence into the ears of bewildered congregations,
and it has formed a text for delighted and triumphant denunciation
in innumerable articles--in fact, with annihilation inscribed on its
banners, the whole host of Buddha's army has been depicted as marching
inevitably to utter and irretrievable ruin.
At this juncture let us turn to a later authority, Mr. Lafcadio Hearn,
who, in answer to the question, What remains to rise above all forms
and the total disintegration of body and final dissolution of the
mind? sets forth the Buddhist conception in the following manner:
"Unconsciously dwelling behind the false consciousness of imperfect
man--beyond sensation, perception, thought--wrapped in the envelope of
what we call soul (which, in truth, is only a thickly-woven veil of
illusion), is the eternal and divine, the absolute Reality; not a soul,
not a personality, but the All-self without selfishness--the _Muga no
Taiga_--the Buddha enwombed in Karma. Within every phantom-self dwells
this divine; yet the innumerable are but one. Within every creature
incarnate sleeps the Infinite Intelligence, unevolved, hidden, unfelt,
unknown, yet destined from all the eternities to waken at last, to rend
away the ghostly web of sensuous mind, to break for ever its chrysalis
of flesh, and pass to the supreme conquest of Space and Time."[V]
[V] Lafcadio Hearn's _Gleanings in Buddha Fields_.
There is no doubt, as General Forlong informs us in his _Short Studies
in the Science of Comparative Religions_, that Buddha's followers
"finally revered him as a god, mixing up the first high and pure
teaching of his faith with all the varied old and new doctrines, rites,
and follies peculiar to each race and land which developed it. Every
religion has to submit to this ordeal."
It cannot be too often reiterated that a personal moral ruler of the
universe, "a gigantic shadow thrown upon the void of space by the
imagination," or a sublimated edition of man located in the sky, is
entirely foreign to true Buddhism; and, although Gotama deprecated
as futile all speculations into the ultimate origin of things, he,
in his "Buddha" capacity, was aware of the theory of an uncaused
cause, whether called "Akâsa" or "Dzyu," or anything else, from which
everything has issued in obedience to a law of motion inherent in
it.[W] This uncaused cause has its counterpart in the incomprehensible
Uncreate of the Athanasian Creed. It is the God without and the kingdom
of heaven within. A Buddha and It are one.
[W] _Vide_ _Buddhistic Catechism_, by Colonel Olcott.
In the "White Lotus of Dharma" Gotama is made to declare that, though
in the form of a Buddha, he is in reality the Self-existent.[X] On the
other hand, from a purely phenomenal point of view, "a Buddha is simply
a very wise man, and means 'The Awakened.'"
[X] _Vide_ Lillie's _Buddhism_.
"Buddha, as a Buddha, knew all about the ultimate origin of the Kosmos.
The personal Buddha, however, abstained from any such speculations,
holding that, for the purposes of practical ethics, the wise man not
only may, but must, avoid the distraction of speculation as to any
ultimate cause" (Rev. Spence Hardy). "Self-conquest and universal
charity, these are the foundation thoughts, the web and woof of
Buddhism, the melodies on the variations of which its enticing harmony
is built up" (Professor Rhys Davids). Such, too, according to the
Christian Scriptures, is religion, pure and undefiled, before God and
the Father.
The Rev. A. Sherring points out how the success of Gotama in
overcoming the forces opposed to him "is unparalleled in human
history.... That a solitary man, prince and ascetic, after pondering
for five years over all the great doctrines of religions, priestcraft,
falsities, the immoralities, shams, and confusions of those times,
and the groans and miseries of his countrymen, that he should devise
an entirely new system, think it out, and put it in order to meet
objectors and overcome their arguments, and then go forth to the
gradual conquest of India, and send forth missionaries who have
converted 500 millions of people--that all this was the ultimate
result of that one man's energy, sagacity, and resoluteness of will is
assuredly one of the most astounding events in the annals of the world.
He was a simple philosopher, reasoner, and calm disputant, employing
no physical force whatever; while the morality which he enforced was
the purest the world ever saw." General Forlong, in quoting this
passage, says: "Such, divested of a few professional words, is the
deliberate opinion of one of the best, the most learned and experienced
missionaries."
Professor Rhys Davids seems to level a shaft at the typical Christian
when he says that the Buddhist saint does not mar the purity of his
self-denial by lusting after a positive happiness in a world to come;
nor, it might be added, does the essential Christian who realizes the
kingdom of heaven within.
If we take the word "God" in a restricted anthropomorphic sense, and
the word "soul" to mean an entity that survives the body, it will
appear strange to many, as Professor Rhys David says, that a religion
which ignores the existence of such a God, and denies the existence
of such a soul, should be the very religion which has found most
acceptance among men. The same authority remarks that of any immaterial
existence Buddhism knows nothing. This is true if "immaterial" or
"spiritual" is taken to mean something altogether divorced from matter.
The universe, according to Buddhism, is not merely an arrangement
of matter into forms and substances, but it consists also of the
qualities of matter, and the relationship of the different particles
and qualities to each other. The philosophy of Buddhism, in this
connection, is Monism, which is described by its exponents as "a
unitary world-conception, but not a one-substance theory. It does not
imply that the world consists either of matter alone or of spirit
alone, or that all its phenomena are motions only; but that our
concepts of spiritual, material, mechanical, and other processes are
abstractions, representing special features of reality; reality itself
being one inseparable and indivisible entirety."
The phenomenal is a mode of the noumenal, as heat is a mode of motion.
"_Ex_-istence" is a mode of "istence." There is no "beyond," no "behind
the veil"; it is all one. If we take, as a provisional analogy, the
flower of a tree to be the noumenal, and the root the phenomenal, they
are both--as belonging to the tree--the same, and yet not the same. The
soul might be likened to the blossom at the apex, at a point farthest
away from the earth. The more perfect this soul-blossom becomes, the
nearer it approaches the possibility of entering upon the unconditioned
as immortal beauty--
"Like to the flower
That fades into itself at evening hour,"
and becoming thereby identical with truth.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Many people assign to music a power, exceeding that of all other arts,
of sublimating the emotions of the human heart. Altering somewhat the
form of the definition of Poetry as given by Theodore Watts, in his
article on the subject in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, one might
say that absolute music is the _non_-concrete and artistic expression
of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical sounds. The state of
the mind under the influence of music has been compared to a "sea of
emotion--uncurdled by thoughts." This mental condition may also be
super-induced, I think, by means of sculpture, painting, and poetry.
In fact, I would maintain that the success of an artist, whether he be
musician, poet, or painter, must always be measurable by his power of
suggesting the unconditioned, or of bringing the human mind as near as
possible to a _thoughtless_ state of emotion, and, finally, to that of
non-emotion.
In the gospel according to Buddha it is written:
"There lurks in transient form immortal bliss."
The true artist can cause this immortal bliss to be felt, in all its
Nirvanic beauty, by those naturally susceptible to such influences, as
well as by those who, by a course of training, have rendered themselves
capable of receiving them.
There is no line of demarcation between the noumenal and phenomenal.
The one fades into the other, as all forms and outlines would disappear
into the surrounding atoms or cosmic dust under a sufficiently
powerful magnifying glass. "Appearance (the world of phenomena) is
the real, as confusedly and partially understood.... The real is
the apparent completely understood, and seen in the light of the
whole.... Appearance is the appearance of reality.... If we know 'only
phenomena,' we must thereby know _something_ of that of which they are
phenomena."[Y]
[Y] _Vide Mind_, October, 1898; "The One and the Many," by D. G.
Ritchie.
According to Buddhistic teaching, there are two worlds, so to
speak--the one ruled by the law of causality, the other over which
the law of causality has no power. A Buddhist would say that "the man
who applies to the strictly unconditioned predicates such as being
and non-being, which are used properly enough of the finite, the
conditioned, resembles one who attempts to count the sands of the
Ganges or the drops of the ocean."
With much the same sort of reasoning Jesus referred to the mysteries of
the kingdom of heaven when addressing those who had eyes and did not
see, and ears and did not hear.
In view of the apparent fact that the human body has reached its
utmost limits of development, as a physical organism, there seems to
be a thinkable probability that it will eventually, by a devolutionary
process and by the atrophy of its present clumsy and imperfect organs,
return, step by step, during the gradual cooling of this planet, to the
condition of the psychic life of a simple cellule, and ultimately to
the unconditioned; back, as Huxley puts it, to the indefinable latency
from which we arose; or, as Carlyle expresses it, "pass stormfully
across the astonished earth from God and to God."
Starting from the simple cellule, we see, in a way, how "Tanha," or the
desire to extend the scope of activities, has persistently striven in
this direction until the ultimate possibilities of the development of
physical organism have been reached in man.
This highly-differentiated organism has become more and more sensitive
to pain, more and more dissatisfied with its limitations; and man,
recognizing these limitations, desires to abandon them altogether.
Consequently, he seeks refuge in the hope of a future life, where
limitations will no longer curb and embarrass him, and where he will
cease to be subject to pain, passion, and sorrow.
Jesus and Gotama have indicated how by the suppression of this "Tanha,"
how by detachment from the things of the world, we can approach that
simple cellular life-stage which is on the road to Heaven, Nirvana, and
the Unconditioned. It is easy to realize how much pleasanter it would
have been for us all if the simple cellule from which we spring had
not been so persistently ambitious in the direction of activities. Its
relatively prescribed functions suggest a most desirable condition of
peace compared to that "unrest which men miscall delight."
Human life is but a drop in the ocean of organic existences on this
planet--about 1,500 millions only among countless myriads of beings.
It cannot, then, be accounted strange in a world containing so great
a variety of organisms, with their varying tastes and needs, that man
should find much that is distasteful and unsuitable to him which is
pleasant and acceptable to other beings. The vulture feasts on carrion
loathsome to man. Man partakes of food at which a rhinoceros would
shudder.
Morality, as a law and corollary of organized life, being confined to
humanity, it follows that immorality, as subversive of this law, would
be of necessity abhorrent to those who appreciate a law without which
social life would become intolerable, and not worth living. But, when
we come to consider why it should be that the exquisite process of the
decomposition of flesh should be less pleasing to the senses than the
formation and fading of a sunset, we are forced to the conclusion that
the world was not made for man, but man for the world.
The "part" working indiscriminately with and for the "whole" is an
ethical law observable throughout the universe. All individuals are,
unconsciously for the most part, carrying into effect the will of God
by the will of God. We speak about individual effort to attain this
perfection or avoid that evil, because we cannot divest ourselves of
the feeling of free-will. To speak and act under a sense of free-will
is forced upon us by the delusion of separateness.
It is often the case that God is only recognized in the beautiful
aspects of nature. St. Paul says: "There are diversities of operations,
but it is the same God that worketh _all_ in _all_." We have to see
God, not only in the sweet waters, but also in the deadly swamp; in the
healthy child as well as in the fœtid diseases of the sick. "That art
thou," as the Buddhist truly says. The delicious and the disgusting are
equally necessary as factors in the scheme of the universe; there is
in both the same cosmic law fulfilling itself. "Dragons and all deeps:
fire and hail fulfilling his word." A difference only exists in the
appreciation of them.
This Monistic view of nature in no respect stands in the way of our
regarding God as the sublimated reality of an ideal existence. Dr. Paul
Carus, in his booklet on _The Idea of God_, says: "If the idea of God
is an empty dream which we must expel from our minds, why not expel all
ideas and all ideals? They are just as much and just as little real....
From this point of view a denial of the existence of God would, with
consistency, lead us also to a denial of an integral, or a logarithm,
or a differential. An integral is just as little a concrete object as
is God. And the idea of God is just as important in the real life of
human activity, human thought and emotion, as the idea of honesty is in
the mercantile world, that of courage among warriors, and that of faith
in science."
Buddha has taught that there are worlds more perfect and developed,
and others less so, than this earth; and that the inhabitants of each
world correspond in development with itself.[Z] Mr. Lafcadio Hearn
says: "The Buddhist denial of the reality of the apparitional world is
not a denial of the reality of phenomena as phenomena, nor a denial of
the forces producing phenomena objectively and subjectively.... The
true declaration is, that what we perceive is never reality in itself,
and that even the ego that perceives is an unstable plexus of feelings
which are themselves unstable, and in the nature of illusions. This
position is scientifically strong, perhaps impregnable."
[Z] _Vide Buddhist Catechism_, by Colonel Olcott.
Indian philosophers have attempted, with a fair measure of success, to
overcome the perplexity presented by the idea of diversity in unity.
They say that, "as an individual can conjure up visions of various
phenomena in his waking state without destroying his sense of unity as
an individual, so there may be a multiform creation in the One Absolute
without any suppression of its unitary nature. To the Unconscious
Absolute phenomena stand in the relation of dreams to the individual
who is conscious of dreams on awaking. But the Unconscious Absolute
does not awake; therefore 'It' remains unconscious of phenomena. The
variety of the world is like the variety of a dream."
In a commentary on the Essence of the Upanishads the fictitiousness of
emanations from unity is thus illustrated:--
"A belated wayfarer mistakes a piece of rope lying on the road for a
snake; the delusion disappears, but the rope remains the rope. So with
the apparitional world: the delusion passes, and unity remains.[AA]
[AA] _Cf._ "Illusions are sensations wrongly interpreted" (D. G.
Ritchie).
"All the figments of the world-fiction may be made to disappear in such
a way that pure thought, or the self, shall alone remain, in the same
manner as the fictitious serpent seen in a piece of rope may be made to
disappear, and the rope that underlies it may be made to remain. The
rope was only the rope all the time it falsely seemed to be a snake.
The fictitious world may be made to disappear as the fictitious snake
is made to disappear, and this is its sublation."[AB]
[AB] _Philosophy of the Upanishads_, by A. E. Gough.
Professor Seth, referring in his book, entitled _The Position of Man
in the Kosmos_, to Mr. Bradley's _Appearance and Reality_, remarks:
"Reality 'must own' and somehow include appearance." In another part of
his book he writes: "We are ourselves immersed in the process of the
universe. We can only live our own life, and see through our own eyes.
If we could do more, that would mean that we ourselves had vanished
from the universe; the place which had known us would know us no more;
and there would be, as it were, a gap created in the tissue of the
world."
Under "Mysticism," in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, we read: "Our
consciousness of self is the condition under which we possess a world
to know and to enjoy; but it likewise isolates us from all the world
beside. Reason is the revealer of nature and God; but, by its acts,
reason seems the thing reasoned about. Hence mysticism demands a
faculty above reason, by which the subject shall be placed in immediate
and complete union with the object of his desire--a union in which the
consciousness of self has disappeared, and in which, therefore, subject
and object are one."
The Great Self, or Immanent Power--expressions barely communicable
to the understanding by the rather restrictive sounding and abrupt
terminology of the word "God"--perhaps nearer in thought to the Will
in Nature of Schopenhauer--with which the Brahmins of India sought
communion, has been to them from time immemorial the Alpha and Omega
of their being. When religion steps in it is a frame of mind, not a
set of opinions. They cannot in truth be called superstitious; they
are, to coin a word, _substitious_. They sink, plummet-wise, into the
fathomless; the line is severed, and they are lost in the depths and
caverns of nescience. The concrete, with them, has always ranked lower
than the abstract.
Vamadéo Shastri, writing in the _Fortnightly Review_ of November, 1898,
on the theological situation in India, says:--
In Europe, as I understand, your churches have long ago closed the era
of unlimited metaphysical speculation, retaining only certain mysterious
dogmata that are authoritatively prescribed as facts--that are
not philosophical discoveries, but are declarations of revealed truth.
You have drawn up your creeds; you have settled finally all essential
beliefs in future rewards and punishments, in man's redemption from
sin and resurrection, and, above all, in a Divine Personality. You have
numbered and ended the list of your sacred books; you look for no
fresh revelation; you have regulated by ordinances the rites and
ceremonies which unite the worshippers and divide the Churches....
But I want you to understand that we are still wandering in the
metaphysic wilderness, and that Christianity, returning at last after an
interval of so many centuries, finds us still engaged on the same
problems as those which occupied the schools of Antioch and Alexandria
and the secret professors of the Jewish Kabbala.
We have never yet set limits, either by philosophic criticism or by
ecclesiastic ordinance, to the range of free inquiry or to the thinking
faculty. We cannot submit to the restrictions placed by faith
upon inquiry into mysteries; we are driven by our mental constitution
to overleap the bounds of sentient experience, and to construct, like
your ancient heretics, some intelligible theory of the unconditioned.
We are incapable of apprehending a Personality, except in the sense
of something that masks or represents an incomprehensible notion; and
dogmatic systems are to us no more than the formal envelopes of
spiritual truth.
* * * * *
Two cardinal ideas run through our deeper religious thought. One
is the Maya, or cosmic illusion, which cuts the knot of any difficulty
touching the relation between Spirit and Matter, and produces Unity
by exhibiting the visible universe as a shadow projected upon the
white radiance of eternity; the other is the notion of the soul's
deliverance by long travail from existence in any stage or shape.
* * * * *
In short, we have a religion, but no theology.
"By Plotinus 'The One' is explicitly exalted above the 'νοῦς' and the
'ideas'; it transcends existence altogether, and is not cognizable
by reason. Remaining itself in repose, it rays out, as it were, from
its fulness an image of itself, which is called 'νοῦς,' and which
constitutes the system of ideas, or the intelligible world. The soul is
in turn the image or product of the 'νοῦς' and the soul, by its motion,
begets corporeal matter. The soul thus faces two ways--towards the
'νοῦς,' from which it springs, and towards the material life, which is
its own product" (_vide Encyclopædia Britannica_).
A consideration of the theosophy of the "Sohar," or Book of Splendour,
does not afford a key to the solution of this problem. We meet there
with the same difficulty, the inconceivable transition point, where the
"inactive" mingles with the "active." Ensoph is the Absolute, the great
"I am," the endless, the boundless, the incomprehensible.
Mr. Bradley, in his book on _Appearance and Reality_, asks whether
we really have a positive idea of an absolute defined as "one
comprehensive sentience"; and he answers that, while we cannot fully
realize its existence, its main features are drawn from our own
experience, and we have also a suggestion there of the unity of a whole
embracing distinctions within itself. "Identity only exists through
differences, unity through multiplicity. Such is the constant thesis of
the Hegelian philosophy."[AC]
[AC] _Vide_ Professor Seth's _Position of Man in the Kosmos_.
The apparent connection between the Buddhist and Christian conceptions
of a God is very ably stated by Dr. Paul Carus, and with the following
extracts from his writings I may fitly close the subject of this
chapter:--
"Buddhism is commonly said to deny the existence of a God. This is
true, or not true, according to the definition of God.
"While Buddhists do not believe that God is an individual being like
ourselves, they recognize that the Christian God idea contains an
important truth, which, however, is differently expressed in Buddhism.
Buddhism teaches that Bôdhi, or Sambôdhi, or Amitabha--_i.e._,
that which gives enlightenment, or, in other words, those verities
the recognition of which is Nirvana (constituting Buddhahood)--is
omnipresent and eternal."
* * * * *
"Christianity possesses in the idea, and, indeed, in the very word
'God,' representing the authority of moral conduct in a most forcible
manner, a symbol of invaluable importance; it is an advantage which has
contributed not a little to make Christianity so powerful and popular,
so impressive and effective, as it has proved to be. In this little
word 'God' much has been condensed, and it contains an unfathomable
depth of religious comfort."