Footnote 174:

Sutta Nipâta, translated by Fausböll in vol. x. p. 102; parallel

suggested to John xviii. 37.

Footnote 175:

Hibbert Lectures, pp. 144-147.

Footnote 176:

Dorner, _Doctrine of the Person of Christ_, Introd. pp. 56-60, 64-70;

Liddon, Bampton Lectures, 1866, pp. 364-380; Lange, _Life of Christ_,

vol. i. pp. 121-124.

Footnote 177:

_E.g._ the Targums.

Footnote 178:

_E.g._ _De Opific. Mund._ i. 4; _De Mundi incor._ § 16, 17.

Footnote 179:

Sears, _Fourth Gospel_, pp. 220 _seq._; Westcott, _Introduction to St.

John_, pp. xvi, xvii; Dorner, _op. cit._ vol. i. pp. 327-332.

LECTURE IV.

THE DHARMA OF BUDDHA:[180] THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST.

What was the discovery that rewarded Gotama’s long travail and conflict

under the Bo-tree at Bohimanda, and gained for him the title of Buddha,

the Awakened or Enlightened One? and what was the message of “glad

tidings” which since then has made so many millions of the human race

regard him as their Deliverer? We shall never obtain the answer to these

questions if we follow the legends and the later scriptures, although

they profess to give all the steps of the process by which he wrought

out his deliverance. These all date from a time when the seeds which he

had sown among the thorns of uncleansed superstitions, had grown up into

as gigantic and tangled a jungle of speculation as the world has ever

seen. Had he confronted his day and generation proclaiming as the result

of his laborious and painful inquiries the complicated metaphysical

system formulated in these books, he would have made few converts. He

might have become the head of another sect, the founder of another

school, but he never would have established a religion so extensive as

that which for so many centuries, and among so many peoples, has been

known by his name.

Following the Southern scriptures, and guided by the eminent Oriental

scholars who have made them available by translations, we may be able to

trace, in the wild growth of fancy which has grown up around them, the

leading lines of the original teaching. The real doctrine of Buddha did

not profess to be a philosophy inquiring into the ultimate ground of

things. He is represented as having despised philosophisings, and as

having inveighed against profitless questionings as earnestly as did St.

Paul against vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so

called.[181] His object was avowedly practical, and he kept silent when

asked concerning themes whose discussion did not tend to “illumination

and quiet.” Notwithstanding this, there must have been from the first,

even in the earliest forms of his teaching, ideas and thoughts beyond

the comprehension of the simple. For a while he hesitated, as we have

seen, to proclaim his discovery, because “the way” was too hidden for

men to know, and too hard, even when known, for them to follow. Like the

Jewish Scribe, he conceived that to the wise alone, and not to the

ignorant, belonged the law, and to the wise alone was reserved the hope

of final deliverance. To children, and to the uninstructed struggling

classes, the preaching was not made fully known, as really beyond them.

Unlike Christ, whose preaching was for all without exception, whose

gospel, though full of mystery, confers illumination even on babes, the

law of Buddha was in its entirety for the sages only, and instead of

conferring knowledge on those who obeyed it, it made knowledge a

condition of obtaining deliverance. Nevertheless, though the deductions

were within the grasp only of the few, his popularity proves that his

fundamental and principal dogmas must have been such as all could

understand, and they seem to have been published, as Saint-Hilaire

observes, in a language so “simple and vernacular” as to induce even the

children and the ignorant to enter the paths that lead to

deliverance.[182]

He entered upon his travail, in order to find a way of escape from the

endless cycles of unsatisfying change, and he believed that he had

discovered it. Leavening every part of his system is his impression of

the universality of suffering; and suffering, its origin, its

extinction, and the path or method that leads to its extinction, are the

so-called “four noble truths” which constitute in Buddhism the “Law of

the Wheel.” In Buddhism the wheel is the dominant symbol, corresponding

to the cross in Christianity, and he who would preach or roll onward the

wheel must present to the affectionate consideration of the hearers

these “four sacred verities”—the verity of suffering, the verity that

concupiscence is the cause of suffering, the verity that concupiscence

can be quenched in Nirvana, and the verity that the way that leads to

Nirvana is the sublime eightfold path of Buddha’s law. From his first

public discourse at Benares—corresponding to our Lord’s Sermon on the

Mount—on to his last words on the night on which he died, this, with

manifold amplifications, but ever as the one pathetic refrain, is the

substance of his teaching, “through not understanding and grasping

which, O monks, we have had to run and wander so long in weary paths,

both you and I.”[183]

The primitive creed of Buddhism was different from, though not wholly

antagonistic to, the popular creed or theory of life of Brahmanism.

Weighed by Brahmanism, existence was found wanting, as only illusion, a

specious something which truly was a mere nothing, and identity of the

personal with the universal self was the only reality. By Buddhism

existence was condemned, not as an illusion, but as wholly and solely

suffering.[184] “What think ye, O disciples: whether is more, the water

that is in the four great oceans, or the tears which have flown from

you, and have been shed by you, while ye strayed and wandered in this

long pilgrimage, and sorrowed and wept, because that which ye abhorred

was your portion, and that which ye loved was not your portion?”[185] It

was not “vanity of vanities!” but “misery of miseries! all is misery!”

Life was misery, because governed by the immeasurable and wretched past;

death was misery, because opening up an equally immeasurable and

wretched future. As long as man exists he must be miserable, unable to

“cease his wanderings,” and “still from one sorrow to another thrown.”

The only deliverance conceivable from this interminable evil would be to

break the bands of existence altogether. “Surely ’twere better not to

be.” And how “not to be” seems to have been the problem which Buddha

professed to solve.

May we not conclude with Saint-Hilaire that this, “his first dogma, was

his first fatal error”?[186] With all his intellectual ability he never

sought to emancipate himself from the superstition and nightmare of

transmigration. Though he had cast off all faith in the government of a

divine power, he never questioned the belief with which the lower

aboriginal races had infected the thought of his ancestors, that life

was governed by this law. It is averred that he found it necessary to

solve the conflict between his ideas of justice and the actual order of

things, which has exercised the human mind always and everywhere. A

modern Buddhist, fortunate in having Mr. Alabaster to introduce him to

the notice of an English-reading public, so propounds this belief, and,

purged from some of its errors, tries to vindicate it. “For the law of

perfect justice,” he says, “demands that human conditions should be

equalised, and that good and bad luck should be balanced sometime and

somewhere. If a good man be poor and wretched now, he must be reaping

the fruits of what he had sown in a previous stage of existence.”[187]

Yet surely this is a very superficial theory for an Oriental professing

Western culture to formulate. It is judging of life as children and

savages judge of it, by the evidence of the senses, and according to a

very inferior and inaccurate standard of good and evil. Poverty and

suffering, though confessedly painful, may not be regarded by a good man

as wholly evil in this world. Circumstances which the savage and the

child would covet as realising their dreams of paradise may be the

reverse of desirable to the mature and thoughtful man. The believers in

transmigration make no distinction between what is evil and what is

simply painful. Evil is not that which pains, but that which defiles and

degrades and destroys, and good is not just that which pleases, but that

which elevates and ennobles and purifies. The law of absolute justice

does not require, as the modern Buddhist demands, that human conditions

should be equalised, and that all men should be treated alike; for no

two human beings all the world over are absolutely alike; but it demands

that each should receive the treatment most conducive to his healthy

growth as a moral being, and what appears to sense as the harder lot may

commend itself to reason as the better portion of the man to whom it has

been assigned, because most suited to his need.

The dogma of transmigration is said to occupy in the Buddhist system a

position analogous to that of the Fall in our Christian theology; but in

reality the two are diametrically opposed, both in their essential ideas

and the consequences which flow from them. They are analogous only in

respect that they each profess to account for the conflict between man’s

ideal of himself and his actual condition. The existence of evil is

admitted by both, but the Buddhist believes that evil belongs to the

very essence of man, and therefore he can find no prospect of relief

from it, here or hereafter. For as long as the stream of existence

continues it will always fall below its source, and evil, according to

the inexorable rule of nature, will propagate only evil. The Hebrew,

however, did not conceive of it as essential to or as always in the

nature of man. His ancestral beliefs carry him beyond the Fall; his

pedigree starts with the most sublime of all theories of human origin

that has ever been formulated in human speech: “Let us make man in our

image and after our likeness, and let him have dominion over” the

creature. Dominion over nature man has not, for he is too much under its

dominion, and to this subjection much of his suffering is directly

traceable. The Hebrew professed to have the origin of this condition

revealed to him in a breach between man and his Maker, consequent upon

man’s self-assertion and selfish withdrawal of his life from the source

of life, which must involve suffering and death. So through all the

weary generations there is the same invariable sequence of sin entering

the world, and death by sin. And yet at his very worst the Hebrew

believed that it was once far better with the human race, and on this

belief he dared to rear the structure of his magnificent hope, that

mankind shall be restored to the original close relationship with God,

and therefore to a grander dominion over nature, and to a happier and

even more prosperous life than that of which his ancestors had dreamed

as their primeval state.

Whatever may be said of the doctrine of the Fall, belief in it is indeed

“a condition of hope,”[188] and the belief and the hope both spring from

their faith in God as Creator and Governor of the race, which

characterised the Hebrew prophets. Wherever that faith is lively, it not

only sustains man amid the sufferings of life, but it nerves him to

struggle with physical and moral evil to vanquish it. The purer the

faith the more resolute is the struggle; the holier the Deity becomes to

the thought of man the stronger becomes his conviction that life is a

blessing, and that all its struggles may conduce to peace. There is an

instinct which seems to suggest that there are worse things than

troubles, and that they may be blessings of no mean quality after all.

Christianity has made the startling revelation that suffering is not

peculiar to man, as the consequence of his perversity in traversing the

Divine order; for not only is Christ presented to us as the greatest

sufferer, but in Him God the highest and the holiest is disclosed as

involved in it, and as taking upon Himself the responsibilities and the

sufferings which our sin and need entail. But if in Christ there is

revealed the greatest sufferer, it is as one whose suffering is not in

vain. By suffering He conquers that which has produced it; by enduring

suffering He ends it; and He reigns and finds His blessedness in making

us partakers of His victory over it. So again Christianity, unlike other

religions which promise salvation _from_ suffering, offers salvation

_through_ suffering. It alone asserts the utility of suffering; others

regard it as evil, Christianity as evil overruled for good. Others

reckon it as a mere loss or waste, Christianity as something that may be

turned to profit as the condition and preparation for joy. Joy in the

Christian conception is not the reward of suffering, nor compensation

for suffering, but the fruit and issue of suffering which leads to it,

as travail leads to birth. So instead of evading or ignoring it, Christ

would have us recognise and acquiesce in it, and even be thankful for

it, as necessary not for our personal profit, but for the gain of

mankind. By His sufferings we are healed, and through our sufferings we

fill up what remains of His for the redemption of the world. Only

through “the long travail of ages yet to be” will there be born in the

evolution of God’s redemptive purpose that better race from which all

suffering shall have passed away, because disobedience will have had an

end. Fellowship in Christ’s sufferings has thus transfigured the

afflictions of all who believe in Him. Unlike the Indian, tortured by

endless change, without any evolution from low to higher, from evil or

imperfect to what is good and perfect, the Christian can endure

suffering not only patiently but also cheerfully, knowing that he is

suffering not just for his own sake, but that in ways mysterious he is

lightening the load of many, and helping to bring to an end the long

anguish of the whole creation.

But of this consolation which comes from faith in God the Creator, and

therefore the Redeemer of man from destruction, Buddha had deprived

himself. Unlike the Brahman who sought escape from the evils of

transmigration by a process of subsidence into the universal Self, he

professed to find no trace of this Absolute Self. The Brahman postulated

the Infinite and reasoned from it, but Buddha started from quite the

opposite pole. He professed to deal with life as he found it, and so

reasoning from man outward, he asserted that the necessity for

transmigration was involved, not in the illusion of Brahma, but in man’s

own character. Instead of being a natural or divine necessity, it was a

moral necessity created by man, which having its cause in his own action

could also by him be destroyed.

And so Pantheistic speculation, in this instance at least, ripened into

its proper fruit. The passage from conceiving Deity as characterless

passionless self, to discarding Deity altogether from human thought, is

a sure and generally a very rapid one. When we come to think of Deity as

of being diffused and dispersed, we will soon omit the thought

altogether in the recognition only of physical force. Brahmanic

speculation had resolved the deities of the ancient books into

abstractions, and Buddha recognised no such abstractions in the

government of human life. His creed was fundamentally atheistic, as

directly contradicting belief in a supreme ruler of the universe.[189]

Not that he denied the existence of the gods believed in by his

countrymen. On the contrary, he allowed them to continue in the popular

thought and speech, and even encouraged disciples who had not yet

reached the highest knowledge to try to acquire merit by virtue, so as

to secure after death a re-birth into their society. Similarly he

admitted the existence of devils or demons, and their influence for evil

upon man. All through his career he was beset by Mara, the sensual king

of all who submit to him; but Buddha was superior not only to Mara, but

to all the gods in the popular pantheon, for they, alike with the lowest

and the weakest of things, were subject to the law of transmigration.

Man might rise to a higher heaven than what they occupied; they might

fall to the lowest hell. “Their worlds must perish like that of man, and

if ever they attained to final salvation, it could only be by the same

way in which a worm might hope to reach it.”[190] Throwing his “plummet

down the broad deep universe,” he cried, “Gods many,” but no god able to

save. All alike with men were bound in fetters, because ignorant of the

truth he knew. Naturally, therefore, they are represented in the legends

as profiting by his preaching and as seeking unto him for instruction,

while those of them who refused, or could not walk in his ways, came to

be regarded with pity.[191]

In like manner his creed was as essentially materialistic. Man was no

spiritual being, but a bundle of Sankharas—a term, it is said, very

difficult to translate, but implying that person meant a mass of “forms”

or material qualities so changing as to be never the same for two

consecutive moments. Belief in a soul he regarded as a heresy, which he

distinctly classed with sensuality and belief in the efficacy of

sacrificial rites.[192] To the heart as the sixth sense he ascribed the

power of conceiving ideas without form, as the eye had the power of

perceiving objects; but this disappeared in dissolution as completely as

did the others, and what was re-born was not the soul but the quality,

the merit or demerit acquired. This startling assertion of Bishop

Bigandet’s[193] has been confirmed and amplified by others, specially by

Rhys Davids, and so the question at once suggests itself, now that the

governing ideas of Deity and the separate existence of the soul were

expelled from the human mind,—What was there left to give vitality and

coherence to his system as a religion? A kind of religion is conceivable

when something eternal and self-dependent is recognised, if not without

and above a man, at least within him; but here is a religion vast and

comprehensive springing from the determination to annihilate all

religion, asserting not simply that man is independent of all superior

beings, but that as the sum-total of groups of sensations, abstract

ideas, tendencies, and potentialities, nothing of his personality can

survive dissolution, and how are we to account for it?[194]

The answer is to be sought for in the working of that great moral

instinct which is at the root of the belief in transmigration. Though

there was no person, no soul to emigrate from the body, though the man

perished, there was something which he called the Karma—a word coined by

old Brahman sages long before him, though used by them in a different

sense—that survived.[195] The aggregate of the good and evil in the life

that had come to an end formed the seed of another existence, so that

each new individual and generation became the exact and inevitable

results of those that had preceded them. It was evidently a theory of

continuity as unscientific as it was unphilosophic. It could not be

called an evolution in any sense of the word, seeing it meant the

appearance in a new individual of the mental and physical acts of

another who had ceased to be. The assertion, again, that though there

was no “continuing consciousness,” no transience of soul in any sense

from one person to the other, the two persons are one, has been very

properly stigmatised as a “psychological absurdity.”[196] From the

first, though one of their stablest dogmas, this one was a difficulty to

the Buddhists themselves. Their learned men never professed to justify

it to reason, but accepted it as a mystery, in open contradiction to

their principle that everything was to be rejected which could not be

comprehended or explained. The common people again simply ignored it,

and adhered to the belief of their fathers in continuity of life and

personal identity for man in the future. The sages might refine, but the

moral sense of the masses could not escape from the conviction that the

evil which they had done must follow them, and the good which they would

do could not be interred with their bones. Even the speculation of the

sages was a telling confirmation of the truth that man cannot get rid of

himself. He may make a mock at God, may demand, If a man die can he live

again? or how differs the life of a man from the life of a beast? but he

cannot refine away his moral sense and the instinct of retribution which

is inwoven in his inmost being. Buddha acknowledged no moral government

of Deity, discarded the old belief that the same soul must receive the

reward of the deeds done in the body; he denied even to the soul a

separate existence from the perishable body; but he was haunted by the

ghost of personal identity. He felt absolutely certain that there was a

real connection of cause and effect between past and present and future,

and that each act of the soul must work out its full effect to the

bitter end.[197] So it was only by profession that God was mocked; men

were witnesses to themselves of a Sovereign Power forcing Himself upon

them, even when they tried to forsake Him, compelling them to receive

His thoughts when they would not think for themselves. So in primitive

Buddhism we have the strange paradox that out of Atheism there arose a

religion, with a demand upon conscience almost Christian, and asserting

as Christianity does the eternal necessity of righteousness and

truth.[198]

The analogy which has been suggested between the Buddhist dogma of Karma

and the Christian doctrine of heredity is a very interesting one. It is

strange that the law of heredity, so clearly indicated in the Bible,

should be proclaimed in our age as a modern discovery. Infidelity

formerly denounced the Bible for teaching that sin and its penalty were

transmitted from generation to generation, forgetting that but for

transgression the law of heredity could only and always entail good.

Laws are to be judged by their intention, and this one, designed to

secure and transmit the increment of good in each generation, is

manifestly perverted by conditions for which it is not responsible. The

law, however, which asserts itself in humanity by entailing on the

generations the blessing of good as well as the curse of evil, is now

being proclaimed and interpreted, not by divines, but by men of science

and philosophy. The twin truth of the unity of humanity, elemental in

the Hebrew and Christian religions, though formerly strangely forgotten

or denounced by infidelity, is also adopted as a professed discovery of

our century. We are all agreed that humanity is one, that each life is

part of a larger life, and so the injury of the part is the injury of

the whole. Sin could not enter humanity without dragging it down, and

holiness could not enter and conquer without lifting it up. If one could

appear in humanity without sin, not a link in the diseased chain, but

perfectly free from all taint of disease, is the supposition incredible

that he would have the effect upon humanity of a new creation? His

coming would imply the reversal of the drift toward evil and the

weakening of the inherited and accumulated tendency to depravity. It

would be a bringing under Divine influence of this mysterious principle

of heredity, with results for good which no human intellect can measure,

and establish a once greatly derided assertion, that as in one Adam,

that is, one kind of humanity, all die, even so in Christ shall all be

made alive.

Buddha had a clear apprehension of the truth of heredity, but he had not

the faintest conception of the unity of humanity. His theory of life was

essentially atomic. Humanity was not to him one whole, but a congeries

of individuals, each one an end to himself, and living just to himself.

The injury done to self by wrong-doing was always present to a

Buddhist’s thought, but the suffering thus caused to others was never

taken into account. He had no idea of the whole suffering in the one,

and consequently no sense of duty to mankind. Though believing in the

propagative power of good and evil, he did not work for the good of

coming generations, but solely for the rescue of the individual from the

whirlpool of suffering existence. It has been charitably suggested that

his aim finds its analogue in the offset to personal extinction so

winningly presented by “George Eliot” and Mr. John Morley, whereby

though dead and gone for ever in ourselves, we may “live again in minds

made better by our presence,” and “in pulses stirred to

generosity.”[199] Buddhism had no such hope; the age, the system itself,

were alike incapable of conceiving it. The time for that kind of

Positivism had not come. The human mind had to undergo long centuries of

Christian culture before it was possible for the nineteenth-century

agnostic poetess and philosopher thus to expound their creed, for modern

Positivism has been powerfully though indirectly influenced by the faith

which it contradicts, and, like many of the assailants of Christianity,

it owes to it the most of its strength and the best of its weapons.

Christianity, starting from the conception of man as no outgrowth of

nature, but a new creation in it, a being within and distinct from his

body as the driver is from the chariot,[200] has a theory of human

destiny contrasted utterly with that of Buddhism. Man’s teeth have been

set on edge because his fathers have eaten a sour grape, but the brand

of pain upon past transgressions helps him to conquer the taint

transmitted in the blood. Though he finds heavy temptation in inherited

tendencies, he finds in every temptation a way of escape in a call to

yield to other tendencies which are ever drawing his soul to goodness.

Sharing a confessedly sinful humanity, he may be partaker of a sinless

one, and thus, if evil reigns over him unto death, the law of the spirit

of life in Christ Jesus can free him from it.

Buddhism had no such hope and goal for man; indeed, we may well wonder

that a pessimism more thorough than that of Brahmanism did not deprive

it of all hope and sink it into fatalism. Left alone to fight his way

through the universe, struggling in a maelstrom of forces with no help

for him in man, no hope of sympathy in God, a Buddhist would surely

despair. On the contrary, unlike the Moslem cowering under the thought

of relentless will, he accepted the situation with Christian

determination to improve it.[201] He could hope for deliverance, for

suffering had an origin, and if the cause could be removed then

suffering would end. The coils of misery could be unwound, the curse of

humanity could be abolished, if only man could procure for himself

emancipation from the necessity of Karma. Now this the true Buddhist

believed he could gain by the extinction of all desire. Plato adopting

the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration, taught that the future

organism of the soul would depend upon the cravings which it had

fostered here.[202] Somewhat similarly Christians believe that the

future of the man will depend upon his most dominant present habits, and

that, disembodied, the spirit will gravitate unerringly to the society

which it has made of its kind. Buddhism, believing in no soul,

maintained that in the dying creature a particular thirst or cleaving to

existence caused the birth of another creature; and so he who would

escape from the chain of existence must endeavour, by vigorous

prosecution of the eightfold way, and the four paths or degrees of

perfection to which it led, to attain a state in which all craving for

continuity had ceased. Karma then would have no terror to him; he would

have reached a point whence he could look onwards without anxiety,

because he would be treading a path from which he never would stray. He

might still be a man, liable to suffering and subject to death, but one

purified and emancipated from all inheritance of evil, and fully assured

of Nirvana.

And what was Nirvana, the final refuge of the emancipated Buddhist? Ever

since the religion was known in Europe great diversity of opinion has

prevailed as to the meaning of this word. It was employed by the

Brahmans many centuries before Buddha’s day, and used by them and by

himself and his disciples in so great a variety of senses that even the

learned Rajendralala Mitra, in enumerating the sects into which orthodox

Buddhists are divided in regard to it, confessed some years ago that he

had given up in despair the attempt to ascertain its meaning.[203] The

researches and discoveries of later years have enabled the translators

of the texts to write with less hesitation as to its significance, and

we are entitled to accept as solid the results of their patient

investigations. To begin with, they tell us that it means the peace

which ensues when all passion has been subdued, and all selfish craving

has been extinguished. Though practically no Buddhist hopes to attain to

it here, but only to enter the paths leading to it, it may be reached,

not in anticipation only, but in fruition.[204] Buddha may be said to

have been in Nirvana forty years, for he entered it, not in the moment

of dying, but when he attained perfection. This first conception of it,

therefore, seems a marvellous anticipation of the faith of the

Christian, who finds his heaven and enters into his rest when he is

delivered from the φρόνημα τῆς σάρκος, from all selfish clutching at the

means of existence. In both religions, taken at their highest, the goal

of aspiration was not extinction of sorrow, but extinction of self-love:

in Buddhism the quenching of _trishna_, or _upádána_, “thirst,” in

Christianity the quenching of ἐπιθυμία, “lust,” “inordinate desire.” In

both religions the goal meant finality, a state in which there was an

end of death; and in both, moreover, it meant a change which no language

could define, and to which no known standard could apply. The Christian

believer tells us that he is passing from the visible to the invisible,

from the temporal to the eternal, and in like manner the Buddhist Arahat

would only be able to allude to the great change by negations, and as

the very opposite of all we know or at present conceive. The Christian

believes in the perseverance of the saints, and the Buddhist who has

really entered the path must sooner or later reach his prize.

But there the analogies end, while the contrasts between the two beliefs

are as irreconcilable as are their postulates. The postulates of

Christianity are the spiritual nature of man, and that his present evil

condition is not his normal one. Sin has gone extensively and deeply

into his being, for it is no mere superficial excrescence, a fault which

can be corrected, a smirch that can be washed away, but a leprosy in the

blood, which is the life. Cleansing is required and provided, but it is

the cleansing out of the whole corrupt nature by the transfusion into

the soul of a Divine life so pure, and so strong because of purity, that

it could not be holden of death. Life is the essential idea of Christian

salvation; it is the Divine gift bestowed by Christ, who came that we

might have life, and have it more abundantly. So while in the body we

groan, being burdened by a suffering flesh, it is not that we may be

unclothed, but clothed upon; not that the gift of life may be recalled,

but that it may be secured in its completeness. It is “more life and

fuller that we want.” Sanctification in the Christian conception means a

process of healing, and salvation means perfect health—the condition of

a creature freed from all inordinate desire, or desire for anything

forbidden, which is the root of all sin, and rejoicing in the untainted

bliss of being. Deathless, sinless life, the life of eternal

incorruption, “the perfect life of love, the rest of immortality,” that

is the Christian Nirvana.

Buddhism, on the contrary, postulating the material nature of all

existence controlled by the universal law of transmigration, had no such

conception of final blessedness. Nirvana in its thought meant, indeed,

extinction in the first instance of all fleshly and selfish

dispositions; but the thirst, the “cleaving” (_tanhā_) which was to be

quenched, was not lust in the Christian sense, but the natural innocent

love of life, and Nirvana involved the extinction of that love, and of

life as the going out of a flame which had nothing else to feed upon.

Deliverance from this instinctive thirst for life is a specific germ of

which annihilation is the outcome. That Buddha so expounded it was long

questioned, and by many denied, but Dr. Oldenberg has sufficiently made

clear his attitude toward this dogma. He seems to have contented himself

with its first significance, to have evaded the necessity of deciding

the many discussions which were waged concerning the second as

profitless, and not tending to quietude and wisdom, and to have exhorted

his disciples to strive rather to enter the paths.[205] By the time,

however, the canonical books were produced, his disciples had not shrunk

from pushing his fundamental principles to their only logical

conclusion. The most ancient expositions of his doctrine disclose one

long theory of Nihilism as its only legitimate inference. If misery was

inseparable from existence, it followed that non-existence was a

blessing, and consequently man’s chief end was to aspire and strive to

reach that state in which the “very seed of existence has withered, the

lamp of life has burnt out for ever, and man can no more be born

again.”[206]

While this was the doctrine of the philosophers, the overwhelming

majority of Buddhists in every age and country have put a very different

meaning upon the word. Just as human nature has proved too strong in

them to accept their atheistic creed, so in popular estimation from the

first, Nirvana has meant not annihilation of existence, but extinction

of suffering. They did not comprehend its metaphysical significance, but

they longed, as all men do, for release from sorrow, and a happier life

when this is over, and they took refuge in Buddha, because his law

promised to convey them over the troubles of life into a blessed

hereafter. There might be higher things for the wise to gain, but the

simple were contented with this inferior portion, and indeed they chose

the better part. For surely the conception of deliverance from

suffering, involving extinction of the being that suffers, was as

childish as that of getting rid of a toothache by cutting off the

head.[207] Rightly were they led by the infallible instincts of our

moral being to believe that the end of righteousness must be rest, but

they wandered fearfully in conceiving of rest as nothingness, for the

“end of righteousness is peace, and the fruit of peace, quietness and

assurance for ever.”[208]

The great question with Buddha and his immediate disciples was not how

Nirvana, the goal of human aspiration, was to be defined, but how it was

to be attained. It was for him sufficiently expressed as the final

extinction of all the roots of sorrow, and he taught that this

consummation could only be reached by knowledge. Ignorance was the

ultimate ground of all suffering existence, but, as in Christianity, men

could know the truth, and the truth would set them free. According to

both religions, this knowledge could neither be transmitted by tradition

nor learned by a simple intellectual process. It implied a moral and

spiritual training, and was the fruit of obedience; but there again the

analogy ends, for the Buddhist’s idea of knowledge is as widely

contrasted with the Christian idea as is its idea of the Truth to be

known. In Christianity knowledge means Divine illumination or

revelation, the result of trustful surrender to Christ, the revealer of

the Father, and Himself the Truth. In Buddhism it meant a knowledge

gained by man himself, through a process of moral culture and

self-control.[209] In Christianity it was a grace that came through

obedience to a better Will; in Buddhism it meant simply obedience to a

Law. That law, moreover, had no commanding power to enforce it, and

involved no moral obligation in the Christian sense to obey it. It was

not a law like the law of Moses or the law of Christ, for it implied no

Lawgiver to make it binding. It was simply a rule, a method, discovered

by man, and followed because he found it expedient to follow it.

Adopting this method, observing this rule, persevering in this course, a

man would attain to knowledge of the truth of things, but this supposed

truth is the very contradiction of the truth as it is in Jesus, the

truth by which we are sanctified, and made wise unto salvation.[210]

This should be borne in mind when in translations of Buddhist books we

find such words as “holiness,” “saints,” “paths or degrees of

sanctification,” “righteousness,” and such like. The original words

represent conceptions different from and antagonistic to those suggested

by these words to us. But keeping this in view, we may well admire and

be thankful for the high purpose and clear moral insight which enabled

Buddha to discover and set forth his way to Nirvana. The strength and

glory of Buddhism, the secret of its original attractiveness, and of its

long continuance, is its ethical system. Its metaphysical creed may

represent a very puerile philosophy, its discipline of artificial

restraint may have been the reverse of emancipation, but its moral code,

in its simple and direct and powerful appeal to the conscience, is a far

nearer approach to the Gospel than that of Gentile Stoics or of Jewish

Scribes. Avoiding sensuality on the one hand as degrading, and

asceticism on the other as unprofitable, it mapped out a _via media_

that led far above that projected by any ancient school. It entered into

every domain of life, of thought and word and deed;[211] laid its

control, as Christianity does, on feeling and motive, and proclaimed

that the way to perfect peace was a way which no unrighteous man could

enter and no unclean man could tread.

It is very interesting to catch, behind all its superstitions and

idolatries, and crude and childish speculations, this glimpse of an

ideal like unto that of the Son of Man, calling and leading men to

righteousness, purity, and kindness, as their only refuge. To the old

Vedic religion, and to all the class of religions of which it is the

type, morality, as we have seen, was a stranger. It was the philosopher,

and not the priest, who in old times argued of righteousness,

temperance, and judgment to come. The Hebrew, as we have seen, was the

first and only ancient religion that demanded holiness of life as

indispensable to the worship of God, and Christianity, as was natural,

recognised this old law which men had from the beginning. But Buddhism

was the first system in which morality was substituted for religion. It

had neither priests, nor temples, nor prayers, but taught men to depend

for safety solely upon a life of virtue and wisdom and goodness. Though

it implied a change of heart amounting to conversion, this was due to

the operation of no regenerating spirit, but to perseverance in courses

within the reach of any one. Anticipating, therefore, theories of life

broached now-a-days as if they were new discoveries, its endeavour to

dissociate the human from the supernatural, and to substitute the

ethical for the religious, deserves very earnest study.

It meant man’s earnest resolve to work out his salvation with fear and

trembling, for there is no God within him working both to will and to do

of His good pleasure. It was an attempt to conceive of a morally

governed universe without a Governor. Professedly atheistic compared

with the religion out of which it arose, it has been properly described

to be “more theistic at its core than Brahmanism has ever been.”[212] It

did not trouble itself about the origin of man as an emanation from the

universal self, but it asserted the dignity of his nature as resting on

really a sounder basis. It refused to believe with the Hebrew that the

Creator had written the law on the tables of the heart, but it found the

law there written somehow, and read it almost as correctly. Like the

Christian apostle, its founder asserted that each man was a law unto

himself, the judge of his own action, and the arbiter of his fate. And

thus it came to pass that, without any conscious purpose of doing so, he

inaugurated a moral revolution which lasted for ages. It swept away an

enormous mass of superstitions from the Indian mind for centuries,

abolished many abuses, and modified more which it failed to overcome. It

has tended to civilise many barbarous races; and if among them Buddhism

has been able to bear the encumbrance of their hideous idolatries which

it assumed, it is because of the strong ethical foundation upon which it

rests. It is the ethical element in religion that is universal and

enduring, and there is a completeness and force and persuasiveness of

ethical teaching in Buddhism which all non-Christian religions lack;

there is a comprehensiveness of duty and gentleness which pre-intimate

clearly that universal Christian rule which makes it imperative that we

should not only duly consider all brethren who are human, but should say

to the worm, as within the scope of our benevolence, “Thou art my mother

and sister.”

Let us now examine more closely this way to Nirvana as expounded in the

Suttas of Buddha, and in relation to Christ’s way of salvation. The

Christian is very simple, but as it proceeds from a much deeper

conception of human need, its method of meeting it is very different. It

was not the suffering and misdirection of men that most deeply impressed

and most powerfully affected our Lord. He came to a race made in the

image of God, that had confessedly fallen from or had failed to realise

its ideal. It was lost, as sheep are lost, by inherent tendency to

wander; as coins are lost, by the neglect of others; as prodigals are

lost, by sensuality; and as Pharisees are lost, by self-righteousness.

It was diseased and perishing, struggling not in the coils of changeful

suffering, but in the clutch of an evil power which had taken possession

of it. Sorely needing, though not seeking redemption, unable to help

itself, He had come in the name of His Father, who willed not that any

should perish, to seek and save it. His formula of salvation was plain

enough for even babes to apprehend, for all He asked was that men should

turn to and believe in Him. They could not raise themselves, but they

could look toward Him, and find deliverance in the look, for by trust in

Him as the supreme object of love and worship, they would be lifted up

out of their evil state. The deepest tides of man’s being are those

which are swayed by his faith in and love of persons, and it was upon

faith, the commonest of all powers in our nature, that Christ relied for

the deliverance of mankind from the dominion of evil. He offered Himself

to man and for man, was lifted up for them on the cross in the beauty of

suffering holiness; and as love always attracts love, and as goodness

becomes a creative power in those who appreciate it, so all who believed

Him, trusted Him, clung to Him as the weak cling to the strong, were

uplifted, and changed, and transfigured. Love not only has a dominating

but an assimilating power. We become like those whom we fervently admire

and implicitly obey. Obedience in such a case is not an obligation, but

an inspiration; so though in Christianity we speak of the Law of Christ,

it is not as an external code to which we must conform, but as a power

communicated to and operative in us. It is a law of the _spirit of

life_, a grace and blessedness of disposition, which, springing from

gratitude, will manifest itself in holiness far exceeding the

righteousness of a law, because vivified by a charity and mercy as

boundless as that which it adores.

So when our Lord inaugurated His kingdom, He may be said to have

proclaimed in the Beatitudes His Law, for He then declared the

dispositions of those who would receive Him, and who as sons of men

trusting and following Him, would be saved and sanctified and glorified

by the Son of God. Now, though from his first sermon to the last Buddha

is represented as “instructing his disciples, inciting them, rousing

them, and gladdening them” by discoursing of blessedness, it was not of

blessedness in the gospel sense. It was the blessedness of the Old

Covenant, not of the New—the blessedness, not of them who love much

because they have been forgiven much, but of them who keep the law, and

tread “the path which opens the eyes, bestows understanding, leads to

peace of mind and full enlightenment”—the blessedness all who, walking

in the Noble Eightfold Way, must eventually reach Nirvana.[213]

It is almost impossible to explain all that is meant by the Noble

Eightfold Way, for translators differ very greatly as to the real

meaning of the terms employed, and even when they agree, they warn us

that the words, though similar to our own, do not suggest the same

realities. The word “righteousness” and even “morality” never can have

on the lips of a true Buddhist the same signification which they have on

ours; for righteousness, apart from the fear and love of God, is an

impossible conception to us, and so would unrighteousness, unless as a

sin or an offence against Him. Buddhism has no word for ‘sin’ in our

sense, and therefore no words for ‘holiness’ or ‘saint.’ “Sin is simply

pain, demerit, and a saint is one freed from what causes pain.” “A

righteous act is one accumulating merit, an unrighteous act one

producing suffering.”[214] The Eightfold Way, interpreted by the

legends, presents us with the Buddhist conception of the perfect man,

and were we to take its constituents as equivalents to the Christian

qualities suggested by the words, we should find outlined a character

which here or anywhere must be its own beatitude, but whose blessedness

is as completely beyond the reach of sinful man as flying is beyond the

power of a bird whose pinions are broken.

But Right Views or Belief, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Work,

Right Livelihood, Right Exercise, Right Mindfulness, and Right

Tranquillity, must be taken, not as we accept, but as Buddhists

understand, the phrases. By right belief they unquestionably meant

belief in Buddha and the Four Verities; right resolve included

abandonment of all domestic and social duties; right speech was the

recitation or publication of the dharma; right work was specially that

of a monk; right livelihood that of living on alms; right exercise

tended to the suppression of all individuality; right mindfulness was

habitual contemplation upon the impurity and impermanence of human

nature; and right tranquillity was ecstasy.[215] To have substituted

even this in the Hindu mind for a righteousness only ceremonial and

superstitious was indeed reformation; but as an idea of Perfection it is

manifestly not only different from, but greatly inferior to, the

Christian ideal. Perfection in the case of Buddhism meant extinction of

feeling and consciousness; in Christianity it meant harmonious and full

development of being and character. In Christianity perfection meant

conformity to an Exemplar outside and above it, the likeness of a child

to a Father in heaven; but Buddhism could conceive of no exemplar, and

the man who would be perfect must strive in entire self-dependence to be

so. In Buddhism the standard is purely human; in Christianity, while the

measure required is relative, the standard is divine. So in Buddhism the

Arhat is content, and we never hear from him the confession, “I count

not myself to have attained!” but in Christianity the more saintly the

life, the greater the discontent with it. The higher we rise the more

urgent is the desire to press on. Christianity therefore opens up the

avenue to perpetual improvement, and inspiring us with a motive to

progress which can never lose its power, it provides for the soul the

only rest that will satisfy it. “In life,” says Pascal, “we are ever

believing, we seek repose, but what we really crave is agitation.” “It

is the contest that pleases us, and not the victory; the pursuit and not

the possession.”[216] Absolute truth and goodness is the perfection of

divine blessedness; the never-ceasing pursuit of it is human

blessedness. The goal we can never reach, but the watchword, “Nearer, my

God, to Thee!” seems to solve for us the problem of human destiny, for

by directing us to the life of perpetual achievement, it assures us of a

never-ending blessedness.

The Buddhist goal of perfection and the law or way that led to it, was

by Buddha himself or his earliest disciples considered to be beyond the

power of many to attain to. His followers were soon ranged into classes

according to their ability to tread the paths which led to liberty. His

law, therefore, unlike the Ten Commandments of the Bible, which are

binding on all without distinction, was not a law for all men. Each one

was at liberty to take on him as many or as few obligations as he

pleased, according to his resolve to continue in the world, or to

abandon it, and having abandoned it according to his resolve to seek

after Arhatship and aspire to Nirvana.[217] Upon those who, conforming

outwardly, yet remained in their secular callings, was enjoined

abstinence from the five gross sins, of killing, theft, adultery,

falsehood, taking intoxicating drinks—already, with the exception of the

last, made binding on them by the Hindu religion. By refraining from

these, and by serving and maintaining the monks, even the laity could

win for themselves a happy re-birth into some world hereafter. Those

wiser ones, again,[218] who, convinced of the evil and danger of secular

life, had abandoned their homes, and entered the Order that by

meditation and abstraction they might further work out their

deliverance, bound themselves, in addition to observance of these five

commands, to eat only at stated times, to use neither perfume nor

ornament, to sleep only on mats on the ground, to abstain from dancing,

music, and worldly shows, to own and accept neither silver nor gold, and

to be perfectly chaste. For those wisest of all, who had not only

abandoned the world in order to lead the better life of the religious,

but who had strenuously resolved, in following the religious life, to

attain to Arhatship and Nirvana, there remained the much more severe

observance of what was called the “Seven Jewels of the Law,”[219] the

last and most important use to which the Noble Eightfold Way could be

put. For by earnestly struggling, meditating, mastering their precepts,

the “Ten Fetters” of Delusion, Doubt, Dependence on Ceremonial Rites,

Sensuality, Hatred, Love of life on Earth, Craving for life in Heaven,

Pride, Self-Righteousness, and Ignorance, would one by one be broken,

and long self-abnegation involved in the process would work out its full

reward.

It is to be observed that in all these classes or stages the practice of

virtue and the cultivation of purity were considered fundamental. In the

preaching ascribed to Buddha great stress is laid on Enlightenment, and

on Meditation, which leads to it; but at the base of all this system, as

the first indispensable factor in securing perfection, was Uprightness.

In the Suttas this formula constantly recurs: “Great is the advantage,

great the fruit of earnest contemplation when set round with upright

conduct. Great is the fruit, great the advantage of intelligence when

set round with earnest contemplation. The mind set round with

intelligence is free from the greatest evils, that is to say, from

sensuality, from individuality, from delusion, and from ignorance.“

Again, “Righteousness, earnest thought, wisdom and freedom sublime:

these are the truths realised by Gotama far-renowned.”[220] The

uprightness, or righteousness required, presents, as the Moral Law of

Scripture does, a much broader range of influence than the words would

indicate. In prohibiting lying, Buddha enjoined avoidance of all

offensive language, and of every word that could sever men. He also

instructed his disciples not only to avoid showing enmity to those who

hated them, but to overcome evil with good. Purity again in his regard

meant purity not of word and deed alone, but of thought and feeling. In

some respects his precepts go beyond the Moral Law. The command not to

kill included respect not for human beings only, but for every creature

that had life. He not only condemned drunkenness, but demanded total

abstinence as essential. The precept “Do not commit adultery” was

understood in our sense of it only by the laity; for the religious,

marriage was not an honourable estate, but one polluted and polluting.

Unlike the Moral Law, which recognises everything that is natural and

sanctifies it, the rule of Buddha in these respects was unnatural in its

restrictions. It pronounced common and unclean what God Himself has

cleansed; and, as always happens when men add to the commandments of God

in one direction, they are sure to take away from them in another. So

Buddha’s rule, though excellent in that it lays its control not on

conduct only, but on thought and feeling, is essentially negative and

defective. It does not cover man’s whole nature, nor provide for his

every possible relation. Ignoring God, it is therefore interpreted by no

positive and active principle of goodness. It is inspired by no sense of

duty, for it recognises in the universe no superior to whom anything is

due, and, unconscious of any benefit, it owns no gratitude. Consequently

unrighteousness, as an offence to or an outrage upon a better or kinder

being than self, is not in all its range of view. Unrighteousness is

only a calamity to be avoided or an imprudence not to be repeated.

Struggling to get out of the meshes of an evil net, the Buddhist might

bewail his mistake, his folly, or his feeble or ill-directed effort, but

he was totally unconscious of rebellion or ingratitude.[221]

Moreover, in a universe where Moi-même is the only god, and a man’s own

Nirvana his only goal, the primary motive of action can rise no higher

than fear or self-interest. Apparently strong, it is really essentially

weak in regard to the maintenance of proper relations to others demanded

by the second table of the Moral Law. The suffering caused to others

through his failure to fulfil the law, or by conscious transgression of

it, makes no impression on the Buddhist, except in as far as it

interferes with his pursuit of perfection. Others are regarded only as

occasions of acquiring merit. Instead of serving them as Christ enjoins

us to do, the Buddhist serves himself of them. It is a religion of every

man for himself. It has been likened to Positivism, but it falls far

short of it, as lacking the altruism which Positivism has borrowed from

Christianity.[222] Positivism refuses to do anything for the glory of

God, but it lays great stress upon the duty of living for humanity. It

makes the great mistake of supposing that the claims of God must be

distinct from or antagonistic to the interests of humanity. It does not

recognise that they are identical—that the more the life is reserved for

God, the more of it is communicated to our fellow-men, and that we must

love the Lord our God with all our hearts, before we can love our

neighbour as ourselves. The Positivist scheme of morals, however, is

vastly superior to that of Buddhism, for in it the goal is Nirvana,

without any reference to the good of any other, and the decided

advantage of any action consists wholly and solely in the consequences

to the actor himself.

Dr. Oldenberg has pointed out to us that the much-vaunted charity of

Buddhism, illustrated in the legends by the self-immolation of Buddha to

satisfy the hunger of a wild beast, though it “sways toward does not

even touch the law of Christian charity.”[223] Buddha’s Rule, though

benevolent to the extent that it would harm no one, and beneficent in

respect of doing good, knew nothing of Christianity’s enthusiastic

passionate desire to help and work for others.[224] It was the interest

of the true Buddhist to forgive his enemies and not to hate them,[225]

but he never considered himself bound to love them. It was good policy

for one pressing on to Arhatship to do good works, and he would go far

out of his way to do them; but he never went about doing good as one who

found his reward in the opportunity and power to do it. He was among men

not as one who ministers and gives his life to ransom others. His very

self-abnegation had egoism at its core. Between the Christian surrender

of self to God for the sake of others, and the Buddhist surrender to

others for the sake of self, there is a great gulf fixed. The first

springs from a sense of indebtedness, a consciousness of mercy

unmerited, but freely bestowed; but the other, having no sense of

forgiveness received, has no real mercy to show. The mercy of God is the

spring of all true human compassion, for he who truly receives it finds

it impossible to withhold it. It is, alas! bestowed upon many who are

too full of themselves to take it in, and in all such cases it is lost,

but in every heart that is conscious of it, it becomes a disposition to

show kindness that cannot be counted by acts, and that never will ask,

“How oft shall my brother offend me and I forgive him?” Buddhism was

friendly in its benevolence, but it never was actively charitable, in

taking upon it the infirmities and bearing the sicknesses of others. It

has no passionate desire to gather the wrecked and blighted of humanity

and to bind up their bleeding wounds and sores. On the contrary, in its

pursuit of Nirvana it passed by all such in the path of life, precisely

as the priest and Levite passed the wounded man on their way to Jericho.

It not only was selfish, but even cruel in this pursuit, for a woman in

difficulty or in distress was not to be helped by a passing monk. The

poor and the diseased and the lost were not to be considered, for they

were simply suffering the due reward of their deeds; but the

yellow-robed monks, healthy and shining-faced, were to be the recipients

of the bounty of the charitable and the proper objects of their

attention. One of its beatitudes runs thus: “Not to serve the foolish,

but to serve the wise; to honour those worthy of honour. This is the

greatest blessing.”[226] Almsgiving was indeed encouraged; but alms were

only to be bestowed upon the worthy—on the monk and Arhat—not on the

outcast and the leper, whose miserable condition indicated their

unworthiness. If the animal creation profited by their charity, which

they refused to their suffering fellow-men, it was from a selfish

motive: for the parent, or wife, or child, whom by Buddha’s rule they

were obliged to help, might be looking at them, for all they knew, out

of the eyes of the beast, and not to fulfil the precept would bring to

themselves both harm and loss.[227] Tested even socially, therefore, the

Rule of Buddha is defective, and this because it is not founded on

religion. The cause of God is eternally the cause of man. In the

Fatherhood of God is essentially involved the universal brotherhood of

man. Christ is before us as the representative of humanity, because He

is the representative of Deity. Refusal to acknowledge His supremacy

will disturb all human relationships and throw them into disorder. We

learn to do to others as Christ hath done to us; the sense of our

indebtedness will be the measure of our charity. For this end He has

chosen the poorest and the most wretched as His memorials, and He has

said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren,

ye have done it unto Me.”

To do justice to Buddha’s way, however, we must remember that the path

of uprightness (_sila_) was only the first part of it. Without external

rectitude, inward integrity would be impossible; but external rectitude,

without self-concentration, would be a foundation without a structure.

“A man must endeavour to keep constant watch over his thoughts, for our

whole existence depends upon our thinking,”[228] was one of the noble

maxims of Buddhism. It is to its credit as a religion that it recognised

that only a small part of our real life can be expressed in words and

deeds, that the true sphere of morality and human temptation was within,

and that it instructed men to keep the heart with all diligence, for out

of it are the issues of life. Buddha seems to have felt, and to have in

part at least expressed, the contrast and conflict between the seen and

the unseen in our life. He recognised, it is true, no soul, and the

warfare between the flesh and the spirit was not found in his

philosophy, but he had to account for the antagonism which every one

feels between our animality and our humanity, between what is pressing

or dragging us down, and what in us struggles to be free. The mental and

moral qualities were of far more value than the physical; the invisible

was of more consequence, because more real, than the visible. The

“mindful and thoughtful man” was the man who “looked within and not

without,” and so Buddha’s insistence upon the “noble earnestness of

meditation” as indispensable to deliverance is a grand testimony to the

truth, which no philosophy of materialism can falsify, that we are far

more concerned with what we think and feel and imagine than with what we

touch and we taste, and that our thoughts and feelings go far more into

the weaving of our character than do our words and works.

It is alleged that in Pali literature the word for meditation

(_samadhi_), by which alone inner purity can be attained, bears to the

word for “uprightness” the same relation as that which faith in the New

Testament bears to works.[229] By uprightness, delusion is cleared away,

and by pondering constantly the five principal kinds of

meditations—Love, Pity, Joy, the Impurity of the Body, and the state of

Serene Indifference to what men think bad or good—the man was supposed

to be redeemed from all attachment.[230] It is very pathetic to note

this approach toward and yet rebound from the Christian conception of

the function of faith: for faith is the victory that overcometh the

world, with its lust of the flesh, its lust of the eye, and its pride of

life. It is that too which, because it looks to the unseen and eternal,

quenches all sordid or inordinate cleaving to life, which is the root of

so much evil and the cause of so much suffering. The apostles,

instructed of Christ, have taught us that God’s precious gift of life is

ours to use: that to keep it, to will to save and to find it, as if it

were an end and not a means, is to miss and to lose it; while to use it,

be willing to lose it for some higher good, is to keep it unto life

eternal. Now Buddha had a glimpse of this truth, that lust of existence

was the root of bitterness in humanity. He condemned as heresies the

worldly lust which says, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,”

and the lust of other-worldliness which dreams that the life beyond will

yield as good, or better pleasures than this one;[231] but the two last

of his five principal meditations show how far apart and far short of

the victory of faith was his idea of the victory of samadhi. The

apostles’ aim was to get rid of lust; but his aim was to get rid of

life. The apostles mortified the members which are upon the earth,

anger, wrath, malice, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, just that

the higher life, the life hid with Christ in God, might grow and

brighten; but Buddha, in “cleansing himself from all impurity, little by

little, moment by moment, piece by piece,”[232] sought to escape from

the last shadow of personal existence into the blessedness of absolute

unconsciousness, if not of utter extinction.

For this seems clearly revealed in the last or highest stage to which

the paths of uprightness and meditation were supposed to conduct, that

of enlightenment (_panna_) or spiritual abstraction, alleged to be

equivalent to prayer in other religions. The highest Christian

conception of prayer is that of communion with God; the highest Buddhist

conception of _panna_ is of a state of clairvoyance or ecstatic insight

in which “men hear with clear and heavenly ear, surpassing that of men,”

and “comprehend by their own hearts the hearts of other men,” and

“recall their own various states in former existences,” and “see with

pure and heavenly vision the procession of other beings as they pass

from life to life.”[233] Buddha evidently was believed by his disciples

to have possessed this power, and probably his own long fasting and

severe austerities, practised in the beginning of his career, acting

upon a highly nervous system, made him a believer in the reality of this

perfect insight and ecstasy of contemplation, and that it might be

acquired by all who were sufficiently persevering in pursuit of

Arhatship.[234] It must be observed, however, that he does not appear to

have regarded this as an experience to be enjoyed by the Arhat in

perpetuity; on the contrary, it was the condition preceding final and

eternal deliverance, and so it may be taken as the Buddhist conception

of Euthanasia.

The Christian in the highest and supreme moment of life aspires, if

conscious, after the beatific vision. It is no Brahmanic absorption into

the absolute that he desires, but likeness to and communion with God.

The consciousness of personality was never more intense, the conviction

was never stronger that he has been divinely created and trained as a

separate character. By long and prayerful use of the means of grace he

has sought to bring, and to keep himself under the control of the Holy

Spirit; and he hopes that the next change will completely free him from

every trace of “sensuality, delusion, and ignorance,” and purge away

from the soul the last taint of selfishness. By long and sore

experiences he has learned that selfishness is the evil root whence

spring all the suffering and sorrow that poison life. He can therefore

understand and sympathise with the Buddhist anathema upon

“individuality,” if by that is meant the endeavour to abstract our life

from the solidarity of humanity, to use it for our own ends, and to

grudge what of it God uses for the rest of His family. This is the

Christian conception of the cause of death and all its woe, and from

this a Christian saint ever prays and struggles to be free; but it is

not from “individuality” in this sense that the Buddhist Arhat seeks

deliverance. He is bent upon the very thing from which the Christian is

anxious to escape. He wants to isolate and withdraw his portion of life

from the sum of humanity, to abstract himself from the mass, to save his

own soul; and now that he nears the goal, his whole energies are

directed, not to purify and strengthen and ennoble the personal self for

better service, by minding what is pure and lovely, and by striving

unceasingly after what is right and true, but by crushing out every

feeling into apathy, every thought into vacuity, so as to get rid of

personality, identity, and the very faintest germ of life.[235]

And this is the goal of a race that has extended not only over the whole

range of the present, but over that of many existences; this is the

victory which crowns a fight that has continued throughout untold ages.

Truly there is something very pathetic in the conception of a struggle

after sainthood so prolonged, by one who, now a god, now an animal, now

a man, has never lost sight of his mark, and has ever pressed onwards to

it.[236] Probably we may have something to learn from it, by way of

correcting the idea that true moral and spiritual excellence,

perfection, saintliness, is the growth of a single life; but when the

goal is understood in its bare reality, as implying not destruction of

selfishness, but extinction of being, surely the reproachful question is

justified, “To what purpose is this waste?” After millennia of

transformation the nebula has formed into a star, and just at the point

when it can illumine an immensity, it disappears for ever from the

firmament. Unreckonable energy and thought have been expended upon the

production of a man, and just when he has reached the highest point of

perfection, and is most serviceable to the universe, he becomes of less

value than a vapour that vanishes away. Truly

“the crown of our life as it closes

Is darkness; the fruit thereof dust,”

and man walketh in a vain show, he disquieteth himself in vain, if

Buddha’s way be the only path of deliverance from evil, and Nirvana his

only goal.

And so while we ought to be profoundly thankful for the intellectual

culture and moral earnestness that made Buddha, in spite of himself, the

reformer of Eastern Asia, it is manifest that even his best doctrines

represent very partial and one-sided truths, “dwelt upon with morbid

intensity, to the exclusion of every fact which might have modified

them.”[237] His fundamental error was his wild attempt to explain the

life of man independently of Divine control, and to guide man safely

through the perils and temptations of existence by an ethical system

founded on no appeal to an eternal principle of goodness without, but

solely to self-interest. The result, which has been to identify the

nature of man with that of the animals,[238] surely shows conclusively

that religion and morality can never be dissociated without damage to

both. A religion without morality must degrade. A system of morality

apart from religion will never upraise. Religion is for man simply

indispensable. Deity is a necessity to him, and deity he must have,

though he finds his god in a tree or makes it out of a stone. Man lives

by faith, faith in his higher self, faith in a higher than himself, who

alone can explain the conflict between his actual condition and the

ideals which he conceives. The modern Buddhist assumes that “religion is

the science of man, not the revelation of God, and he considers that

comprehensions of deity are of far less consequence than just ideas of a

man’s own self,”[239] but how can a man have a just idea of himself

apart from some idea of God? According to his idea of God will be his

estimate of himself. Buddhism, by ignoring God and preaching morality,

has certainly failed to make its adherents moral, and it has imparted to

what is noble in their morality the melancholy of despair.[240]

Ignoring God, it could only form, or could not emancipate itself from, a

false conception of man, as part of a material system of things; but

man, though considerably involved in a material system, never can be

interpreted by it. On the contrary, nature can only be interpreted or

properly understood in man as the lower in the higher. Man is an

antagonist of nature; he is for ever condemning its ways, coming into

collision with its laws, refusing to live its life. Out of this

collision emerges his religion, while his morality originates in the

conflict between his own sense of duty and its life of animal

instinct.[241] To conform to nature, he must become a brute, but he has

in him ideals and capacities transcending it, and by exercising these

capacities in pursuit of his ideals he finds his life. Buddha confessed

to an ideal, and wrought hard to realise it, but alas for humanity when

it finds no higher than self to reverence! Buddha’s theories of

self-culture and self-deliverance reduced to practice have proved most

miserable failures. It could not be otherwise; no man is likely to move

the ship in which he sits by puffing away at the sails, or to lift

himself out of the mire by simply pulling away at his boots; and no

philosophy of self-culture, self-control, or self-rescue, can succeed,

which ignores or refuses to acknowledge man’s instinct of worship. What

he most needs is not law, not a system of morality, not even an example

or model to copy, but inspiration. He knows already enough to condemn

himself, and he has examples which, though far from perfect, quite

suffice to confound him. The command to be perfect mocks him as truly as

a command to see would mock a man stone-blind. What he does want is a

powerful moral energy within him, for lack of which he has to confess

that he cannot do the good he would, but is ever doing the evil which he

would not. His real wretchedness is not his suffering and death, not

even his ignorance, as Buddha thought, but the continual and seemingly

ineffectual struggle between the animal and the man, the flesh and the

spirit. And Buddhism was powerless to help him here. It lacked the

steady support of the sense of duty to the highest and best, the

inspiration that comes from the faith that the highest and best is for

us, and is with us, and in us. Belief in God, as Bacon reminds us, is

“essential to the consciousness of our nobility and dignity, for

certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body, and if he be not of

kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.” So

Buddhism in unduly exalting man to the level of deity has in reality

degraded him. It has indeed lifted wild races out of barbarism, but it

has failed to civilise them. It has certainly not destroyed ignorance,

and the worship of intelligence has not tended to its development and

diffusion among the peoples whom it has swayed. Judged even by an

ordinary standard, the monks of either Southern or Northern Buddhism are

rarely found to be enlightened men, while the vast portion of the

peoples among whom these monks are found are about the most ignorant of

all. And just as certainly has it failed to make men free; for religion

is the guarantee of freedom. “Where there is no place left in human

thought for deity, there will soon be none found for human

liberty.”[242] The basis of individual right is the recognition of a

divine and purely moral government of man. If there be no higher than

the highest man regarding us, we have only the right to live under the

power of the strongest, and the reign of terror must succeed to that of

order and law. The history of Buddhism and the miserable governments

associated with it are telling comments upon and confirmation of the

truth that belief in God is necessary to secure the rights of man.[243]

The progress of the human race will ever be in proportion to the

strength of its conviction that it is governed and considered and

sustained by a Power of infinite goodness ever making for righteousness.

Such a conviction means inspiration, stimulating endurance and hope, and

resolute struggle with evil in all its forms. In it is implied the

assurance that resistance can never be in vain, that failure at the very

worst is only partial success, and that all things work together for

good. The time for this gospel had not come when Buddha called upon the

people of India to “save themselves from this condition of

wretchedness,” and the result of his mighty and benevolent efforts shows

convincingly how urgent in human nature is the demand for a Faith which

will not only enlighten but enliven, which, recognising fully not only

the sufferings but the whole necessities of man, and creating strong

discontent with the world as we find it, and even disgust of human life

as it is, will quicken in us persevering and deathless efforts to reform

the one and to improve the other. Such a faith it is our privilege and

awful responsibility to communicate. Our religion is higher than our

grasp, for it is always above us. Alas! in too many cases it is higher

than our aim, for we are too inclined to let it slip, and drift on the

tides of things as they are; but mankind will never be satisfied with a

lower. “Après l’invention du blé ils ne veulent pas encore vivre du

gland.” “We needs must love the highest when we see it,” and we needs

must strive to become like the highest when we love it. The gospel

preaches consolation and hope to a suffering world, and promises grace

upon grace to every endeavour to heal and amend its condition. Christ

purifies and improves the life which we have by destroying only what is

evil, and by preserving and training and ennobling all that is truly

natural. Inexorably He demands the extinction of selfishness in all its

forms, and He will not even permit us in our prayers to think and ask

for ourselves. He reminds us that God is our Father in heaven, and what

He gives is for all His family. Sternly He denounces as sinful the

attempt to secure our own happiness here or in a better world hereafter;

but He offers the heaven and Nirvana which He found in assuming the

burdens of others, and in bearing their cross. So He assures us that it

is worth our while to live, even in a world groaning and travailing with

suffering, and that it will be worth our while, even in agony if we

must, to die. It is indeed a very evil world, but as long as we draw our

inspiration from Him we can live in it not only without damage but with

great profit. When we offer ourselves in His strength for its salvation

we will be saved from its sins. In the times of our deepest distress we

will have the peace which He left us, and when most severely beset and

cast down with sorrow because of what seems baffled endeavours, we have

only to think of that hope of ultimate victory which made Him to endure

to the end, to rise into

“that last large joy of all,

Trust in the goodness and the love of Him

Who, making so much well, will end all well.”

Footnote 180:

_Dharma_, an ancient Brahman term, meaning law or order; what holds

things as they are, or ought to be. In later Sanskrit it also means

duty and virtue, _i.e._ law performed.—Gifford Lectures, _Natural

Religion_, pp. 94, 95. _Buddha_ is also an ancient Brahman term

applied to one who has attained a perfect knowledge of the

Self.—Satapatha-brahmana, xiv. 7. 2. 17. In Buddhism Dharma means

Buddha’s doctrines, “bodhi,” _i.e._ knowledge self-acquired, as

distinguished from “Veda,” _i.e._ revelation obtainable only through

the Brahmans.—Sir Monier Williams’ _Buddhism_, p. 97.

Footnote 181:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, pp. 205-208; Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p.

87; Spence Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 375. His relation to the

philosophical systems of his day is illustrated in several Suttas; see

Sutta Nipâta, in vol. x. Part ii. of _Sacred Books of the East_, pp.

148-152. Evidently he regarded them with aversion, and even contempt.

Footnote 182:

_Le Bouddha, etc._, p. 79. The legends indicate that his use of the

vernacular was matter of principle. Two Brahmans, “excelling in

speech, excelling in pronunciation,” complained that the monks

corrupted the word of the Buddhas by repeating it in their own

dialect, and asked permission to put it into classical or polished

verse. “How can you, O foolish ones, speak thus?... You are not, O

monks, to put the words of the Buddhas into polished (Sanskrit) verse.

Whosoever does so shall be guilty of a dukkata.”—Kullavagga, v. 33. 1;

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xx.

Footnote 183:

Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, ii. 1. 2; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi.;

Mahavagga, i. 6. 18, 27; _ibid._ vol. xiii.

Footnote 184:

Not as the Nothing, as Wuttke tries to show in _Geschichte des

Heidenthums_, ii. § 166. Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 212.

Footnote 185:

Samyutta-ka-Nikâya, quoted by Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 217.

Footnote 186:

_Bouddha et sa Religion_, p. iii, Introduction.

Footnote 187:

“The Modern Buddhist,” published in the volume called _The Wheel of

the Law: Buddhism illustrated from Siamese Sources_, by H. Alabaster;

London, 1876.

Footnote 188:

Dr. Westcott, _Social Aspects of Christianity_, p. 12; Aristotle,

_Ethic._, i. 1; iv. 3.

Footnote 189:

“The Modern Buddhist,” Alabaster, _Wheel of the Law_, p. 73; Spence

Hardy, _Eastern Monachism_, pp. 5, 339; Gogerly’s translation of the

Brahmajala Sutta in Digha Nikâya, _Journal of Ceylon Asiatic Society_,

1846.

Footnote 190:

Preface to Müller’s Dhammapada, p. xxx, old ed.

Footnote 191:

Note at pp. 31, 32 of Dhammapada in vol. x. of _Sacred Books of the

East_. Frankfurter, App. _Bamp. Lect._ 1881, p. 349.

Footnote 192:

Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 95; Spence Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, p.

388; Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, quoting Bhikkuni Samyutta, p. 258;

Colebrooke’s _Essays_, vol. i. p. 417, Cowell’s edition; Sabbasava

Sutta, 10, 11, 12: _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi.

Footnote 193:

_Life of Gaudama_, first ed., p. 321 note; Rangoon, 1866.

Footnote 194:

Max Müller, introd. to Buddagosha’s Parables, p. xxx, ed. 1870.

Footnote 195:

The first traces of this belief are found, it is said, in the

Upanishads, Brihadáranyaka, iii. 2. 1, _Sacred Books of the East_,

vol. xv. p. 126; Dhammapada, v. 1. 127, _ibid._ vol. x. Part i. 3. 35.

Footnote 196:

Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, p. 94; also his _Manual of Buddhism_,

pp. 100, 106.

Footnote 197:

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded

on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or

acts with an evil thought (or polluted mind), suffering follows him as

the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the wain” (Dhammapada,

1). “Not in the sky, not in the midst of the sea, not if we enter the

cleft of the mountains, is there known a spot in the whole world where

a man might be freed from an evil deed” (Dhammapada, 127; _Sacred

Books of the East_, vol. x.).

Footnote 198:

“L’athéisme devenu religion et recouvert du manteau des vertus

chrétiennes.”—Wassilief, _Buddhism_, introd. by E. Laboulaye, p. viii.

Footnote 199:

Professor Dods, _Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ_, p. 171.

Footnote 200:

Nagasēna’s figure used in controverting the idea of the separate

existence of the soul.—Milindapanha, p. 25, quoted by Oldenberg,

_Buddha_, p. 254; Hardy, _Manual_, p. 425; Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p.

96.

Footnote 201:

Oldenberg, _op. cit._, 221.

Footnote 202:

_Phaedo_, Jowett’s Introd., i. 407, ed. 1875.

Footnote 203:

Preface to English translation of the Lalita Vistara; Calcutta.

Footnote 204:

Sutta Nipâta; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. pp. 33, 80.

Footnote 205:

_Buddha, etc._, pp. 274-284; Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, pp. 111-123.

Footnote 206:

Childers, _Pali Dictionary_, Art. NIRVANA.

Footnote 207:

Dr. Kellogg, in his _Light of Asia and Light of the World_, pp. 223,

252, protests very forcibly against the use by translators of the word

“immortality” as the equivalent of Nirvana. It meant, as he reminds

us, “the end of death indeed, but not because life had triumphed, but

because, life having ceased, death had nothing to feed on.”

Immortality, endless bliss, and kindred phrases, applied to it, are

only justifiable by the popular but really un-Buddhistic use of the

word Nirvana.

Footnote 208:

Isaiah xxxii. 11; James iii. 18.

Footnote 209:

Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, pp. 97, 223.

Footnote 210:

“Not to know suffering, not to know the cause of suffering, not to

know the path that leads to the cessation of suffering—this is called

Ignorance.” Consequently knowledge of these things is saving

knowledge.—Mahavagga, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xiii. p. 75,

note 2.

Footnote 211:

This threefold division or “doorway” (Hardy, _Manual_, p. 491), once

considered by Weber to be peculiar to Buddhism, has been proved to be

common to Brahmans, Persians, Jews, and Greeks, as well as Christians.

See interesting note at pp. 28, 29, of vol. x. of _Sacred Books of the

East_, Part i.

Footnote 212:

Dr. Fairbairn, _Studies in Religion and Philosophy_, p. 161.

Footnote 213:

Dhamma. Sutta, 2-4; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. pp. 146, 147;

Mahavagga, i. 6. 17-20; _ibid._ vol. xiii. pp. 94, 95.

Footnote 214:

Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, p. 124.

Footnote 215:

Frankfurter, App. to Wordsworth’s Bampton Lectures on _The One

Religion_, p. 348; Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x.

p. 69.

Footnote 216:

_Pensées_, vol. ii. p. 34; vol. i. p. 205; ed. Faugère.

Footnote 217:

Spence Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 506.

Footnote 218:

Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. pp. 33, 46, 67;

Dhammapada, 284.

Footnote 219:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. pp. 60, 61.

Footnote 220:

Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, cap. iv. 4; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol.

xi.

Footnote 221:

Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha, etc._, pp. 149, 153, 161.

Footnote 222:

Wordsworth, Bampton Lectures on _The One Religion_, p. 91.

Footnote 223:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 289.

Footnote 224:

Meta Sutta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. p. 25.

Footnote 225:

See the story given in Mahavagga, x. 2. 3-20; also the story of

Kunala, Asoka’s son—this latter said by Burnouf, in his Introduction,

to be of modern origin. Quoted by Oldenberg, p. 290.

Footnote 226:

So Dr. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 126. Fausböll translates, “Not

cultivating the society of,” etc. (Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the

East_, vol. x. pp. 43, 44.)

Footnote 227:

Dr. Edkins, _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 204.

Footnote 228:

Dhammapada, 157-8-9, 379-80; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i.

Footnote 229:

T. W. Rhys Davids, in the Introduction to his translation of the Keto

Khila Sutta (Barrenness and Bondage), _Sacred Books of the East_, vol.

xi. p. 222, says that in reading it he was irresistibly reminded of 2

Peter i. 5-9. The barrenness referred to in the Sutta is lack of

successful effort to be free from “the Ten Fetters” which bind man to

existence, chief of which is hankering after immortality in any form,

or without form. How contrasted is this to St. Peter’s thought! “Give

diligence to provide in your faith earnestness,” that it may be an

overcoming faith; but as faith without knowledge is superstition, and

earnestness misdirected will do harm, provide in earnestness

“knowledge”; and as knowledge ungoverned will degenerate into conceit,

provide in it “temperance”; but temperance must be inspired with

“patience,” bent on God’s glory, not personal gain; “godliness” thus

attained, “brotherly kindness” will manifest itself, and then

“charity” toward every creature—that is the grace of our Lord Jesus

Christ, the _summum bonum_, the knowledge in which we are neither to

be barren nor unfruitful. No more forcible illustration of the utter

contradiction between the two religions could be found than this

verbal analogy of “barrenness and bondage.”

Footnote 230:

Compare St. Paul, Phil. iv. 8: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things

are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are

just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely,

whatsoever things are gracious; if there be any virtue, if there be

any praise, think on these things.”

Footnote 231:

Dhamma-Kakka-ppavattana Sutta, 6, note; _Sacred Books of the East_,

vol. xi. p. 148.

Footnote 232:

Dhammapada, 239; _ibid._ vol. x. p. 1.

Footnote 233:

Akankheya Sutta; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. p. 210.

Footnote 234:

If the legends are to be followed, he believed in the miraculous power

which resulted from it (see Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, i. 33, and iii. 22;

also Mahavagga, i. 20. 24), but he condemned the exercise of that

power for self-glorification or for paltry gain (Kullavagga, v. 8. 2;

also vii. 1, 2, 3; _Sacred Books of the East_, vols. xi. xii. xiii.).

Footnote 235:

See Gough, _Philosophy of the Upanishads_, pp. 267, 268.

Footnote 236:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 314.

Footnote 237:

Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, p. 35.

Footnote 238:

Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha, etc._, p. 162.

Footnote 239:

Mr. Alabaster, _Wheel of the Law_, preface, p. xvi.

Footnote 240:

Eitel, _Lectures on Buddhism_, pp. 59-70; Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha_,

p. 156.

Footnote 241:

Jackson’s Bampton Lectures, _The Doctrine of Retribution_, p. 284;

Caird’s _Philosophy of Religion_, Croall Lectures, pp. 259 _seq._

Footnote 242:

Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha_, p. xxiii; Hardy’s _Eastern Monachism_, p.

312.

Footnote 243:

“Prefix the name of God to this Declaration” (of the Rights of Man),

said Abbé Grégoire to the National Assembly in 1789, “or you leave it

without foundation, and make right the equivalent of force.” The

Assembly refused, but events soon confirmed his judgment.—Baring

Gould, _Development of Belief_, vol. ii. p. 88.

LECTURE V.

THE BUDDHIST SANGHA[244]: THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

The designation “Church,” never wholly applicable to Buddhism in the

sense in which Christians employ it, was totally inapplicable to the

primitive Buddhist communities. The institution of the Church is

peculiar to Christianity, for though we speak of the worship of Krishna,

or the religion of Baal, we never speak of the church of the one or the

other. Christianity is the only religion which has created a society

which no political revolution can destroy, and no civilisation, however

advanced, can outlive. It may change its form, or express itself in

several co-existent forms; but it is so adapted to the nature and

necessities of man that it is properly described, in its relation to his

present condition, as divine and everlasting.

Though the Church is the creation of Christ and the fruit of His

mission, the idea of it had been suggested to the world long ages before

He came. “Ecclesia” is peculiarly a New Testament word, but there are

found in the Old Testament Scriptures plain foreshadowings of the

reality represented by it. In Abraham, “called” out from his country and

kindred, that he might be separated unto the worship of Jehovah, we have

the first pre-intimation of the Church. In relation to other nations,

his descendants were the “peculiar people” and Ecclesia of Jehovah, and

when as a nation they failed to embody and express the universal truths,

which it is the Church’s function to communicate for the blessing of all

the world, there was called out from them, or rather there was formed

within them, “the remnant,” so often referred to by Isaiah and the

subsequent prophets; and in this spiritual community and fellowship,

dissociated from the national religion,[245] were conserved and

perpetuated the truths and ideals from which they had fallen away. After

the Captivity, in the rise of the synagogue system of worship, there was

provided an organisation, whose essential details Christ and His

apostles in instituting the Church could either adopt or copy; and there

can be no question that from out this synagogue system the Christian

Church emerged, and that even to-day it reflects some of its peculiar

features.

The Church was the fruit of Christianity, but the Sangha was the root

out of which Buddhism sprang. In a Sangha its founder lived and learned

and taught, till as Buddha he founded his own; but just as he gave a new

significance to the doctrines in which he had been instructed, so he

gave the Sangha an application which accounts for, though it does not

justify, the designation often accorded to it of a church. As an order

without worship, a brotherhood without any recognition of the uniting

Fatherhood in heaven, a confraternity in which seniority was assigned

only to age,[246] and whose leaders never pretended to hold any priestly

office or to exercise any hierarchical authority, the Sangha at first

and for long was not a church; yet when we examine its constitution and

aims we need not wonder that the religious instincts of Buddhists,

proving stronger than their creed, should have developed their Sangha

into something like a church, with a cult which, at first consisting

only of veneration for his images and relics, for long has been almost

second to none in the world for solemnity and dignity and pomp.[247]

We have seen that philosophic schools and religious sects originating

in secessions from the national religion abounded in India long before

Buddha’s day. In the Gangetic valley, as in Greece, the new sages

attracted their disciples by the fame of their teaching, but there,

not as in Greece, the disciples lived with their masters apart, and

distinguished from the world by peculiar dress and manners. Of

Monachism, an early outgrowth of Hindu religion, and indeed its

essential adjunct, as being the state which marked the maturity and

completion of a good man’s earthly life, there were already many

forms, all held in high respect by the people. Celibacy and mendicancy

were common to all Sanghas, but in regard to vows of silence, and

fasting, and self-torture, they differed greatly from one another. The

majority of them were Brahman in their constitution and in their

recognition of caste: but long before the rise of Buddhism the Sraman

fraternities, founded on the non-recognition of caste, were quite

equal to the purest Brahman ones in public esteem. Now in organising

the Sakya-putta-Samanas, the designation by which his disciples were

first known by the people, Buddha adopted many features and details of

discipline common to all these fraternities, while yet the peculiarity

of his doctrines gave to the community of his own disciples a

character quite distinctive.

The Brahman Orders believed that Brahmans only could be finally saved,

and Brahman reformers could only encourage inferior castes that came to

them for enlightenment by the hope of possibly securing a higher birth

in a future state. Buddha, however, considered all men alike in respect

of need, so, knowing of only one way of deliverance, he proclaimed it

without distinction, and, like the Sramans, he opened his Sangha to all

who were willing to submit to his discipline. Unlike many of the Sraman

fraternities, he discouraged the life of solitude, and prohibited the

practice of self-torture and severe austerities. In opposition to the

hated Nigganthas, who, aiming at perfection, went about with only the

light and air for their clothing, he insisted that his disciples should

be decently clad.[248] In respect that he required obedience from

disciples only as long as they continued to be so, and would not permit

irrevocable vows—indeed, exacted from them no vow at all—his Sangha was

more like some Anglican guild than any monastic institution with which

we are acquainted.

Still more widely did it differ, not only from many, but from all the

existing fraternities in the purpose for which he instituted it.

Hitherto India had never witnessed a religious sect that could be called

propagandist. Brahmanism was essentially exclusive, for no man could

become a Brahman by conversion. The Sraman sages again, left the masses

to ripen in evil ways for worse lives in more degraded spheres of future

existence, in order to deliver themselves by ascetic practices and

meditation. At best they taught those who resorted to them, and were

prepared to consort with them. Buddha, however, by laying upon the

brethren the obligation of extending the knowledge of the law,

inaugurated a revolution in the monastic system which anticipated that

of the great Mendicant Orders of Christendom. Just as St. Francis

emptied the monasteries and sent forth their inmates to find their own

in seeking the salvation of others, so Buddha broke down the barriers

between the Indian recluses and the world, by ordaining the members of

his Sangha to teach their fellow-men the way to liberty. “Therefore, O

brethren, to whom the truths which I have perceived have been made known

by me, having thoroughly mastered them, meditate upon them, practise

them, spread them abroad, in order that the pure Dhamma may last long

and be perpetuated, in order that it may continue to be for the good and

happiness of the great multitude, out of pity for the world, to the

good, and gain, and weal of gods and men.”[249]

This was the original element[250] in his conception, and while one of

its effects was to save the members of the Sangha from some of the evils

besetting the life of the recluse by balancing the duty of contemplation

by that of active itineration, its chief and immediate result was to

give Buddhism an expansive power marvellous to Indians. Religious

fraternities depended upon the presence of their teachers, and

consequently the members were few, but Buddha commanded the brethren to

go forth. “Let not two of you go the same way” was the original

instruction, and preach the doctrine “which is glorious in the

beginning, glorious in the middle, glorious in the end, in the spirit

and in the letter, for the pure and perfect life, for the complete

cessation of sorrow.”[251] By and by these missionaries were authorised

to receive those who desired admission into the Sangha, and after a due

novitiate to ordain them;[252] and so we need not wonder that this

itineracy, which in the earliest days was the very essence of a good

Buddhist’s duty, should have had the effect of spreading the doctrines

and gathering converts so rapidly that in some of the earliest extant

scriptures the Sangha was known as “the Brotherhood of the Four

Quarters”[253] of what to Indian thought was the world.

Thus far the Sangha was different from the institutions that preceded

it, but, unlike the Christian Church, which finally emerged from Judaism

as the one holy Church of all nations and of both sexes, and of all

classes of men, the Buddhist Sangha bore with it, and never lost,

several marks of its Hindu origin. One relic of its extraction it most

zealously conserved as essential to the moral restraint which it

encouraged; for though later on it attracted associates whom it

recognised as in the ways of deliverance, it was from the very first an

exclusively monastic order. Indeed, Monachism, or the life of

retirement, privation, and chastity, had in Buddhism a place quite

different from that which it occupied in Brahmanism.[254] The meditative

Brahman anchorite was not considered the only man who was in the way to

deliverance, for every believer in Brahman ascendency was free to choose

one of three ways of securing salvation,[255] but in Buddhism

renunciation of the world represented the highest form of religion, and

the indispensable condition of reaching Nirvana. So, though in opening

the Sangha to all classes, and proclaiming, in opposition to Brahmanism,

that every man was capable of the highest enlightenment, Buddha sapped

the foundation of caste, it was only to replace it in another form.[256]

The mendicant monk, as has been truly observed, took the Brahman’s

place, and for him alone Nirvana was reserved. So sharply defined were

the lines which divided the Sangha from the rest of mankind, that no one

who had not come out from the world was regarded as in it and of it.

This was quite in keeping with the Buddhist conception of deliverance.

The Sangha simply was an attempt to realise the idea and purpose of the

creed. Salvation according to Christ meant rescue from the power of

evil, but not withdrawal from the world as so incurably evil that the

sooner man got out of it the better. Instead of making His Church an

asylum and refuge from the world, He organised it for the redemption of

the world. Instead of attempting to destroy civil society, He aimed at

its purification by the leavening influence of the new society which He

was creating. The Church was to be Christ’s witness when He was no

longer visible, the instrument by which His own power would bear upon

the wants of mankind. The slavery and the degradation of society, the

destruction of the world, was never meant to be the condition of the

existence or of the liberty and dignity of the Church. It was but a

means to an end, a means so essential that without it the end could not

be reached, but, once the end has been reached, the Church will be

superseded, or rather will be merged in the kingdom of God. So the very

symbol of it is not found in the apocalyptic visions of the new heaven

and the new earth. In the civitas of the new Jerusalem St. John saw

families and nations and kingdoms, but he could see no temple therein,

for the instrumentality of which the temple was the symbol had done its

work in the emancipation and education of the human race, and had

vanished into the more glorious and eternal realities of the throne of

God and of the Lamb.

In Buddhism we find a set of ideas quite contradictory to all these. The

Sangha was the vehicle of rescue from out the world, not the bringer of

salvation to it; it worked not for the regeneration of society, but for

its disintegration and destruction. It considered the world to be so

hopelessly incurable, and even existence to be so weighted with misery,

that wisdom would move men to abandon the one to its fate, and goodness

impel them to strive to bring the other to an end. The monastery,

therefore, was naturally its loftiest conception of the Civitas Dei, and

into that it endeavoured to transform as large a section of humanity as

was inclined to accept its law.