is very instructive, and we shall now proceed to consider a few of its
most salient points.
Buddhism, in a quiet land and tranquil age, was launched upon the world
as a new theory of life—a system so rounded off and completed that its
disciples had no other duty than that of believing, obeying, and
propagating it. Christianity, on the other hand, began its career amid
the convulsions of political revolution, and for three centuries of
conflict it had to fight every inch of its way. It was not, however, as
a new system that it appeared in history, but as a new principle of
life, round which all the moral, and spiritual, and intellectual
energies which it found in mankind, and all which itself might awaken,
might form and gather strength. It was impossible, therefore, that it
ever could remain stationary. Its apostles were commissioned to carry on
all that their Lord had “begun both to do and to teach.” He distinctly
promised them increase of knowledge and power from on high, and all the
changes which increase or growth implies. To-day His religion could no
more be made to return to the form in which it was manifested eighteen
centuries ago than man could be made to put on the clothes of his
childhood. Its development, however, is that of its inherent life,
manifesting all the continuity and identity of the sapling with the
tree, of the boy with the man. Like all growing things, it has been
subject to disease by contagion and infection, but it has always
preserved life in sufficient volume to slough off its impurities and to
pass onward through reformation to health. Now, the history of Buddhism,
on the contrary, reveals only a long process of degradation, without
having manifested any power as yet to recover and to reform itself
according to its original and essential principles.[347]
The offspring of Brahmanism, from which it differed more in degree than
in substance, at no period of its history did it succeed in completely
disentangling itself from it. Not only did the forms of the old religion
cling to it; its very life was continued in the new. While Buddha
rejected all the sacrificial rites and religious observances of
Brahmanism, and preached a law subversive of all its faith in
revelation, he accepted and continued its ascetism and its hope of
deliverance by a process of meditation and of abstraction. It was by
himself, therefore, and not by his cousin Dêvadatta,[348] that the
heretic leaven was introduced into the lump. Dêvadatta’s attempted
changes were not innovations, but a return to the primitive rule, a
logical deduction from a law which Gotama never wholly rejected. Just as
to the patriarchs of the Greek, the Western or Romish Church “is the
chief heresy of latter days,” just as the Pope was branded in their
Encyclical of 1848 “as the first founder of German Rationalism,”[349] so
the successive advances and orthodox decisions of the Buddhist Councils
were denounced as apostasies by men like Dêvadatta. Still these changes
were due in great measure to the beliefs which Buddhism had inherited,
for when in the inevitable rebound from its unnatural Nihilism the
theistic movement set in, the spirit of Brahmanism, which had passed
into it at the first, began to assert itself, and, interpenetrating it
more and more, prepared it for that issue in which, blending with the
popular forms in which Brahmanism was then expressing itself, Buddhism
merged into the composite system of Hinduism which confronts us in India
to-day.
In Christianity, as in nature, the grafting of the good stock upon the
wild conquered the wild. Christ took nothing from Judaism but the
universalism of its prophets, its faith in one living and true God, the
Heavenly Father of multitudes whom Abraham was ignorant of, and Israel
did not acknowledge. His apostles, judged by the literature which they
have bequeathed, seem faithfully to have carried out His principles; but
many of their converts were strict Jews, who insisted upon some visible
connection with the old religion. Just as Dêvadatta, their prototype,
held that a true Buddhist must first be a good Brahman in respect of
asceticism, so they insisted that Christians were debtors to keep what
of the old law was expressed in circumcision, and the observance of
certain other commandments and ordinances. The danger of Christianity
being reduced to the bondage of the old was serious, but the inspiration
of St. Paul, the providential destruction of the nation, and the
marvellous spread of the religion among the Gentiles, eventually
overcame it. The spirit of Judaism, it is true, has never been wholly
cast out from the Christian Church. All through its history it is
traceable in one form or another of the ritualism and asceticism which,
like Brahmanism, it may be held to represent. There have been times when
it has attained to portentous and pernicious influence, and such times
may happen again; but from the early days there has always been in
Christianity vitality sufficient to detect and try and condemn it; and
so though Judaism, and even Paganism, to some extent, still taint the
theology and worship of the Church, we need have no fear that the genius
of the old religion will ever gain, as it did in the case of Buddhism,
permanent ascendency over the new.
The opposite of Ritualism and Asceticism, represented by Judaism and
Brahmanism, is the Rationalism which such reforming religions may be
said to beget of themselves; and if its spirit of inquiry be
uncontrolled, it will certainly dissipate their energy. As early as St.
Paul’s day we see Rationalism working upon the development of
Christianity, and necessitating the rise of a theology, which, perhaps
inevitably, has often been confounded with, and, in the estimation of
many, has supplanted the Christian religion. The many sects which
Rationalism produced in the first centuries do not so much indicate
hostility to the new faith, as the mighty ferment through which the
minds of men were passing in regard to it. Now though Buddhist
scriptures manifest rationalistic movements in the Sanghas from the
first, they seem to have proceeded in quite a different direction. Of
conflict as to fundamentals of creed there appears to be very little
trace, but there are abundant indications of considerable controversy as
to practice. The first quarrel traceable in the Christian Church arose
over the peculiar institution of community of goods; and though the
Sanghas avoided that mistake, their earliest troubles were concerning
the possession of property. The original rule enjoined upon the brethren
absolute poverty, and the regulations in regard to food and shelter were
equally stringent. Very soon after Buddha’s decease a reaction set in,
and a feeling began to prevail that his standard of morality and his
ideal of the Order were too lofty for all but exceptional men to
realise. He may have succeeded as the fully Enlightened One, but common
men could not hope to “wind themselves so high;” so out of consideration
for human infirmity there commenced a constant and increasing relaxation
in their interpretation of his precepts of perfection.[350] The law of
absolute poverty was modified to the extent that property might be held
in common, and the laws regulating diet, dress, and even meditation,
were soon subjected to the same treatment. The wealth which poured in
upon them, and the consequent improvement of their position, was not
followed by corresponding spiritual growth. The more they prospered, the
more the fundamental principles of the Order were neglected, evaded, or
explained away. The friendly conferences of the rainy season gave place
to controversy, and controversy proved so fruitful of schism, that very
early in its career Buddhism is said to have produced eighteen different
sects, ranged in four great divisions. Yet in no one schism seemed there
a great principle to be involved; they were but Pharisee quarrels at
best, in which though they strained out the gnat they swallowed the
camel.[351]
Side by side with this relaxation of the law advanced the growth of the
legends concerning him who first preached it. The further they removed
from his decease, the higher, as was natural, he rose in their esteem.
As one by one the fathers fell asleep, and the early enthusiasm died,
and the law was felt to be more and more burdensome, the less he seemed
to be a man of like passions with themselves, till eventually they came
to regard him as “omniscient and absolutely sinless.”[352] He had taken
away their gods, and disowned their religious cravings. He professed to
find no proper divine being to whom any instinct should attach
itself—yea, in his dissection and analysis of human nature he found no
religious faculty to be relied upon; but he could not unmake his
fellow-men, whose religious instinct education can neither originate nor
eradicate; and so, defrauded of its natural gratification, it inevitably
turned to illegitimate methods of appeasing itself. In the first
instance, it found the objects of its reverence in the relics which
survived him, the law which he preached, and the Order which he founded.
Originally it could not be called worship; it was more an expression of
affectionate homage.[353] But so strong is man’s impulse to worship,
that very early they expressed it in images of Buddha everywhere, though
the images of the Law and of the Order have only been found in the lands
where the Northern Buddhism reigns.
This earliest triad of personalities, called “triratna,” the three gems
or three holies, seems to have been suggested by, and certainly
corresponds with, the primitive triad of deities in the old Indian
Pantheon.[354] It was the first indication of the bankruptcy of
Buddhism, of its failure out of its own resources to meet the religious
wants of its disciples, and it marked only the beginning of a revolt,
which was to issue in complete disavowal of every doctrine essential to
original Buddhism. The religious conscience and common sense which
rebelled against its unnatural atheism, would not long be satisfied with
the worship of the memory of a completely vanished Buddha, or of the
idea of an impersonal Law, or of a miscellaneous Order. So pious
Buddhists turned readily to a doctrine said to be taught by the Master,
and formulated before the settlement of the Southern canon in its
present form, according to which Buddha is not a distinctive name of
just one person, but a title descriptive of a long series of Enlightened
Ones, who, leaving, as he was supposed to have done, the estate of a
Bôdhisatva[355] in the Tushita heavens, appeared at distant intervals to
proclaim the same truth for the deliverance of men and gods. The names
of twenty-four of these Buddhas who preceded Gotama have been handed
down, and the name of his successor, to whom, upon the attainment of
Buddhahood, he transferred his Bôdhisatvaship, and who is to appear
after five thousand years for the rediscovery of the truth, was
announced as Mâitrêya. To this coming one, the Buddha of “kindness and
mercy”—thought to be a personification by some imaginative poet of the
gentle spirit of Buddhism—the thoughts and the hopes of the disciples
turned, and out of this hope arose a doctrinal system, which, expanding
and enlarging by manifold additions as the time went on, showed that
however atheistic the original creed might be, the religion itself had
become polytheistic.[356] To Mâitrêya, in his glorious heavens, the
deliverer of distant generations, prayers ascended, and worship was
rendered by all Buddhists everywhere alike; and out of this cult by far
the largest section of them began to evolve deity after deity, till the
heavens, in which Buddha could find no superior to himself, were crowded
with objects of idolatrous regard.
In this polytheistic development a very great distinction emerged
between the Northern or Mahāyāna and the Southern or Hināyāna system of
Buddhism. How the divergence originated has not been clearly
ascertained, but about the beginning of the Christian era it seems to
have been very manifest, and at that time, when sectarian controversy
and philosophical speculation threatened to rend the system into
fragments, Nâgârdjuna,[357] a monk of Nâlanda, is said to have done for
Northern Buddhism what Gregory and Benedict did for the Western Church.
Under him, and certainly after him, Northern Buddhism, both in respect
of expansive power and of dogmatic and ritualistic development, left
Southern Buddhism far behind it. The Hināyāna, or the “little way” of
deliverance, is believed to have been applied by the Northern, not
without contempt for the Southern school’s arrestment. They did not
profess to contradict the Southern faith: they simply included it, and
advanced in their “great way” beyond it. To the Southern the _summum
bonum_ of life meant Arhatship, for that once attained there would be no
more re-birth. They acknowledged and worshipped only one Bôdhisatva, the
coming Mâitrêya; but the doctors of the North, properly conceiving the
estate of the Bôdhisatva to be nobler than that of Arhat, propounded it
as the goal of aspiration. Arhatship would indeed secure one’s own
deliverance; but Bôdhisatvahood would enable them, as possible coming
Buddhas, to confer the blessings of deliverance upon countless
multitudes. Along with Mâitrêya they discovered many persons who, like
Buddha’s great disciples and their successors, had through merit,
acquired in a long series of lives, taken his Tushita heavens by
violence; but who, unlike him, were under no obligation to quit their
celestial abodes, and proceed through Buddhahood to Nirvana. They might
enjoy their blessedness to the full, and sit beside their nectar without
concern, for they fulfilled every function expected of them in being
objects of worship, to whom mortals could appeal for comfort in sorrow
and help in time of need.
In India, as early as Fa-Hian’s time, and probably earlier in
China,[358] out of these happy gods a new triad was formulated,
receiving such worship as Hindus would render to their later triad of
deities, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva. The title of one of these, Mandjus-ri,
was said to have been the name of the monk who, two hundred and fifty
years after Buddha, introduced the religion into Nepaul, and founded the
system which Nâgârdjuna consolidated.[359] He in this connection is
believed to be the personification of that “wisdom” or “spiritual
insight” which the Northern school valued so highly. Another deity,
Avalôkitês’vara, “the lord who sees from on high,” is supposed to be the
mythical term for that “kindly providence” which watched over the whole
Buddhist world. And Vajra-dhara, “the thunderer,” represented the power
which protected the faithful from the malice of demons. How such a
worship, so contradictory to the doctrines of primitive Buddhism, came
to be introduced and recognised, is a puzzle to all our scholars. Rhys
Davids and Sir Monier Williams are inclined to regard it as suggested by
the second Hindu triad of deities already referred to. Professor Max
Müller[360] considers it to be a graft from the superstitions of some
northern Scythian or Turanian race, while Dr. Beal advances the theory
that it was in all probability introduced from a western monotheistic
religion, either landward through Persia, or by sea from Arabia. However
it came, from this date and onwards, all over the wide extent of
territory covered by it, Buddhism rapidly deteriorated. While the
Southern system was everywhere yielding to the influence of the popular
mythology, and that so unmistakably that it became, wherever it reached,
“the unconscious propagator of Hindu doctrine,” the Northern became a
heterogeneous mixture of all the superstitions which it met. From this
second triad of deities it went on discovering or inventing its five
triads of Dhyâni-Buddhas, among whom Gotama was the emanation of
Avalôkitês’vara, who again was the æon of Amitâbha, “immeasurable
light.” Behind all these again, they professed to find the Adi-Buddha,
the primordial Buddha, who, out of himself, by the exercise of five
meditations, evolved the Five Dhyâni.[361] Each of these again by
“insight” evolved their corresponding æons, who in their turn from out
of their immaterial essence produced a material world. It is as if the
Gnosticism which had broken out in the West long before this time had
also invaded the distant East,[362] and as if its dreams, more
restrained by Western sobriety, were in the East free to produce a
phantasmagoria more confused still. Certainly it is a convincing proof
that, notwithstanding its rich ethical sources, the essential principles
of Buddhism had no inherent propagative power. For just as it had to
return from its atheism to the deities which it had discarded, so it had
to substitute for its Nihilism the Western Paradise, where, beyond the
confines of the world, the pious Buddhist at last hopes to join the one
Supreme Amitâbha, and millions of blessed Buddhas discoursing upon all
things good, in a state in which there is no sorrow, and, “strangest to
say, no Nirvana.”[363]
The more these imaginary deities increased, the more must the earnest
moral teachings of Buddha have been obscured. The discovery of the
Bôdhisatvas opened the way to a rapid declension from primitive
self-culture to a system of “voluntary humility.” Discipleship became
easier in proportion as the worship of these shadowy creations extended.
It is much easier to idolise than obey, to say, “Lord, Lord,” than to do
the thing which he commands. This falling away from the high Buddhist
rule of self-control, proceeding step by step with the growth of the
legends, is just an illustration of the tendency in every religion to
allow the ethical and metaphysical elements so to drift asunder, that
instead of being one in holy wedlock they become thoroughly and
irreconcilably opposed.
It was inevitable in Buddhism that morality, considered essential to
self-rescue, should be supplanted by that debasing belief in the
efficacy of rites which the system was launched to destroy. Its founder
went to the unnatural extreme of ignoring man’s craving for
reconciliation. He had no faith in Divine forgiveness, or in the grace
of repentance, and he never wearied of pouring contempt upon sacrifice
and prayer. No Hebrew prophet could be more severe in his scorn of
useless rites; but then the Hebrew believed in the efficacy of one
sacrifice, a “heart broken by sorrow,” for sin not as a misfortune or a
folly, but as an offence to a Holy Being who was ready to forgive, and
to be pleased with the worship of a will surrendered in gratitude and in
love. Very early in his history man has indicated his sense of
alienation from God in his endeavours to discover an atonement. The
instinctive sense of wrong relations to the powers that govern life has
been liable to fearful perversion, but Buddha, with all his
denunciation, could not destroy it, nor reason men out of it. He could
induce some to withdraw their imploring cries and glances from the gods,
but he could not sweep the heavens clean of them. Belief in the
existence[364] of gods, and demons, and fairies, and charms against
ill-luck, was strong in his disciples from the first; and when an object
of worship was recognised and allowed, an elaborate ritual of worship,
and latterly of propitiation, was rapidly developed. In Northern
Buddhism this recoil was most extreme, for there, especially in Nepāl
and Tibet, belief in the efficacy of rites deteriorated into belief in
spells and incantations, till it issued in the Tantra system—a mixture
of magic and sorcery whose abominable doctrines, Burnouf, out of very
loathing, refused to translate to us.[365] Christianity has had many
corrupters, who have never scrupled to propose or to accept any
compromise with heathenism at all calculated to strengthen the power of
the priesthood, but it never had its Âsanga,[366] who cleverly succeeded
in reconciling the demonolatry of the people of Nepāl and Tibet with the
acceptance of the Buddhist system. This he did by placing their male and
female devils in the inferior heavens as worshippers of Buddha and
Avalôkitês’vara, and by thus making it possible for the half-savage
tribes to bring their sacrifices, even of blood, to their congenial
shrines, and under cover of allegiance to the priests of the new to
continue the old hideous idolatry.
This discovery of Âsanga’s is said to have secured the rapid extension
of the Buddhist hierarchy in these half-barbarous regions; but the
hierarchy itself indicated a complete reversal of the primitive
constitution of the Order. Buddha endeavoured to emancipate his
fellow-men from faith in the efficacy of a priesthood to mediate between
men and Deity, or to secure deliverance. He never dreamed that either
temple or priest would arise in his system; but the temple grew
naturally out of the dagoba and the relics which it enshrined, and the
priesthood as naturally was evolved from the Sthavira or senior Bikkhu.
In Southern Buddhism the priest is more like a Protestant minister of
religion than like a priest in the Romish sense of the word; but in
Northern Buddhism, and especially in that form of it dominant in Tibet,
the people from the seventh century have been completely under the power
of the Lamas who alone can work out their salvation. With the exception
of a short interval of neglect and persecution, a hierarchy marvellously
similar to, and no doubt in some respects suggested by, that of Romish
Christianity, has completely controlled all the relations of life,[367]
with the terrible result that cruelty and immorality most abhorrent to
the good and gentle Buddha have been permitted to assert themselves
unopposed, though a devotee who slaughters his fellow-men in cold blood
will shudder with horror if by accident he should tread upon a worm or
crush an over-irritating flea.[368]
Only once in that region has it experienced any attempt at reform. In
the fourteenth century, when the policy of the Ming dynasty in reducing
the predominance of any one sect had prepared the way for him,
Tsong-Kapa, “the Tibetan Luther,” endeavoured to effect a revival of the
primitive rules of the Order, and succeeded in restoring something of
the ancient simplicity in dress, the celibacy of the priests, the
fortnightly confession, the season of yearly retreat, and the invitation
ceremony at its close. He set his face also against the Shamanism of the
Tantra system, adhered to the purer forms of the earlier Mahāyāna
school, and succeeded in creating a new sect, whose leaders in the
fifteenth century were by the Chinese Emperor recognised as titular
lords over the Church and tributary rulers over the State, under the
titles of Dalai Lāma and Pantshen Lāma. The dream of Hildebrand or Leo
for the Papacy was for centuries more than realised in the Lāmaism of
Tibet, for the Lamas are more than Popes, being re-incarnations of
Avalôkitês’vara and of his father Amitabha, who never die, but at the
act of dying transfer themselves into another body, born at that very
moment, to be found in it in due time through a procedure, according to
lot, never yet known to fail. When discovered, he has, however, to be
accepted after the Erastian fashion by the Chinese Government or its
representative, who, with the Desi or Regent, must also be present when
the final lot is drawn.[369]
Never under the Papacy, even in the times when its pretensions were most
extravagant, and its power was most unchecked, has Christianity
deteriorated so fearfully as Buddhism has done in Nepāl and Tibet. Not
even in the Abyssinian—the most degraded of all the Churches that have
worn the name of Christ, in respect of its incorporation of old Jewish
rites and Egyptian superstitions—can we find the contrivance of the
prayer-wheel, or the poles with their silken flags blazoned with the six
sacred syllables, “om mani padme hum,”[370] fluttering their supposed
incantations to the heavens. Buddhism’s ages of worship have been only a
long sad history of degradation, of perpetual falling from bad to
worse.[371] The higher the worship of Buddhists for the founder of their
system has risen, the more have they fallen from his virtue; but in
Christianity the ages of strongest devotion to Christ have ever been the
periods of progress. The more intense man’s reverence for Christ has
been, the loftier has been the standard of virtue attained. Worship and
pursuit of holiness have gone hand in hand, and we cannot conceive of a
life truly offered up in adoration of Christ ever proving immoral or
impure.
The story of Buddhism in India, where without much resistance it yielded
to the seductions of Vishnaism and Sivaism, the record of its conquests
in the surrounding countries, and especially in those just referred to,
present few and slight analogies to the history of Christianity; but the
story of Buddhism in China as related by those most competent to testify
of the changing forms which it assumed from the fourth century onwards,
is significantly akin to that of Christianity after it became the
religion of the Empire. China, unlike India, had before the Christian
era a very ancient history, marked by distinct epochs. Its annals, even
of the eighth century B.C., seem to reflect a civilisation similar to
that of Europe in the thirteenth century A.D. Two thousand years B.C.
the Chinese are said to have attained to an idea of Deity somewhat
equivalent to the El Elion of Melchizedek.[372] Shangti, the highest of
all spirits to whom the people sacrificed, was the Creator, Preserver,
and Governor of the world, unapproachable by the sinner, but merciful to
all penitents; and in this idea of God, and in the morality which sprang
from it, we have the secret of that social and political progress whose
arrestment and decay Confucius lamented. Living in a degenerate age, he
laboured earnestly as a reformer of personal morality and social order;
but, departing himself from the ancestral faith in a Supreme Ruler of
nature and man, “respecting, but keeping aloof, as he said, from all
spiritual beings,” expressively silent as to the future, and refusing to
present motives of conduct drawn from consideration of it, his vigorous
ministry, conducted for many years in many of the States, could only
have the effect of preparing the way for a real regeneration of society.
He had great faith in man, as born good, with an innate moral faculty
which only contact with the world and the delusion of the senses prevent
from making him virtuous. Man was made for society, and the five
relations of which society consists—that of ruler and subject, husband
and wife, parent and child, elder brother and younger, and friend and
friend—were Divine ordinances. His standard of personal righteousness
and social purity, his strong faith in the power of example, his golden
rule, “_What you would not like to have done to yourself, do not to any
other_,”[373] his demand, as urgent as was that of Isaiah or
Socrates,[374] that language should be used ever with scrupulous care to
express only the thing that is, have gone far to form, with beneficial
ethical results, the ordinary Chinese character. His ignoring of
personal Deity, only referred to under the vague term Heaven, and of the
future of man, could not long arrest the degeneracy of society or purge
out the secret vices burrowing beneath its surface. If Buddha is to be
regarded in his bold metaphysical speculations as the first of Gnostics,
Confucius in his pure secularism may be designated the first Agnostic,
and the monotonous and stagnant type of humanity which his teaching has
produced may be a warning of the kind of civilisation which the world
may expect should ever philanthropic secularism supplant or supersede
the religion of Christ.[375]
Contemporary with Confucius, though much older in years, was Lao-tsze
the Venerable, the author of the celebrated Tâo-teh-King, in which not
only Romish missionaries but scholars like Montucci of Berlin (1808) and
Remusat[376] (1823) professed to find the mystery of the Holy Trinity
and the name of Jehovah phonetically expressed. Twenty years later
Stanislas Julien[377] dispelled these illusions, and showed that the
treatise was as agnostic in its essential teachings as were the Analects
of Confucius. A poet and a mystic, he gave his whole strength to enforce
the virtue of Tao—the _way_[378] of man’s return to that spontaneity of
action without motive which prevails in nature, and which will manifest
itself in man, in humility, gentleness, refusal to take precedence in
the world, in accounting the great as the small, the small as the great,
and _in recompensing injury with kindness_.[379] He does not affirm the
existence of God, but he does not deny it, and his language seems to
imply it. Certainly there is not a word which savours of superstition,
and yet he is the reputed founder of a most idolatrous religion, which
is found in shape five centuries after his death. The works of his
earliest followers are said to be full of the most grotesque and absurd
beliefs. As early as 221 B.C. some of them were in search of the Eastern
Hesperides, where grew the herb of immortality. In the first century
A.D. another professor of Taoism invented a pill containing the elixir
of life, and spells which could tame and destroy by the touch of a
pencil millions of demons. All through its history it has been a
conglomerate of superstitions so base, and so contrasted with the
teaching of the Tâo-teh-King, that to make the author of that literary
relic bear the obloquy of even the slightest connection with Taoism,
appears to be one of the grossest wrongs of history.[380]
These sages preceded Buddha by a century, whose religion, though it came
into contact with China shortly after the reign of Asoka, did not
seriously begin to influence it till about the fourth century A.D. The
Buddhism of that period was the religion of the Northern school, well
advanced in its second stage of degeneracy. Wherever it was encouraged,
or allowed to maintain itself, it reared monasteries and nunneries,
temples and shrines of idols and relics, and established the worship of
saints and images, which sometimes, like winking Madonnas, opened their
eyes and otherwise worked miracles. Its effect upon Taoism was simply to
absorb it; for before then that religion had neither monasteries nor
temples, nor any system of worship. All these it borrowed from Buddhism,
whose Triratna and endless pantheon of deities it greedily accepted,
with the effect that though Taoism has existed nominally distinct from
Buddhism in China, it has simply been as Buddhism in a native dress, and
thus far the Hindu mind can be truly said to have powerfully influenced
Chinese thought.
By the Confucians the reception of Buddhism was very different. They
might have laughed at its idolatrous system budding vigorously into
life, but they could not endure its full-blown anti-social Monasticism.
Its morality they could appreciate, though it seemed inferior to their
own; for though its teaching as to future rewards commended itself to
the moral instincts of the masses, the Confucians, more logical than
Buddhists, averred that to avoid wrong-doing for fear of future
punishment was not doing right for its own sake; while to labour for
happiness hereafter led to neglect of the present, and promoted lazy
inactivity. Such a scheme of religion was by them judged inimical to
virtue, which was its own reward, and the manner of life by which it was
illustrated was condemned as particularly immoral. The State, the
Family, Society, were Divine institutions which ought to be maintained
and perfected. Industry, public and private, was essential to their
ideal of propriety; and Buddhism, with its religion of inaction, its
celibate rule, and abandonment of all secular business, was simply
odious to the instincts of a practical and kindly people. There could
only be war between two such contradictory systems—a war not of words,
but, on the Chinese side at least, of very hard blows. Their hostility
manifested itself in repeated and prolonged persecutions. In one of
these 250,000 monks and nuns were forced to return to social life, while
their property was confiscated, and the copper of their images and bells
was minted into coin. The Confucians have long ceased to persecute, but
they have never withdrawn their first indictment against the Buddhists
for teaching what to them is criminal because disloyal, and immoral[381]
because anti-social.
To the ethical system of China, as represented by Confucians, Mahāyāna
Buddhism could not add much, if indeed anything, of value; but its
speculative philosophy seems peculiarly to have fascinated them, and it
produced remarkable and permanent changes in their thinking. The
literature and the art of China reflect not Chinese but Indian scenes
and manners. Its grammatical and arithmetical sciences owe much to
Indian tutelage. An educated Chinaman, while avowing himself Confucian
in respect of ethics, will in all metaphysical problems reason according
to Buddhist methods and enunciate Buddhist ideas. To this extent,
therefore, it affected the Confucians, but not with beneficial results.
It aided Confucius in his evil work of shaking the faith of “the
classes” in the personal Ruler of the Universe, while its effect upon
“the masses” was even more injurious, for it dragged them down to a
polytheism from which for centuries they had been free, and put in place
of the impersonal principle with which Confucius had supplanted their
ancestral faith, those shadowy crowds of Buddhas and Bôdhisatvas, to
lead them still further away from the purer works and ways of more
reverential ages.[382]
The episodes in the history of Chinese Buddhism from the fourth century
onward were marvellously similar to the scenes and incidents witnessed
in Europe during the same period in connection with the Christian
Church. Cardinal Newman has somewhere said that in “professing to write
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon has reluctantly, but
actually, written the Rise and Progress of Christianity.” The most
zealous defender of the faith, however, must admit that the Christianity
which maintained in Europe from the fourth century onward had grievously
declined from that of the primitive ages. It is the fashion in some
quarters to attribute this degradation to the alliance of the Church
with the State, and to aver that had it kept apart from the embraces of
the Emperors it would have preserved itself from corruption.
Unquestionably Constantine was a “sair sanct” to the Church; a convert
more from expedience than conviction, he and his successors endeavoured
to utilise the Christian hierarchy to buttress their own throne.
Unquestionably, too, the Church suffered more indignity and harm from
the Christian Emperors who patronised it, than ever it did from the
heathen Emperors who persecuted it. Candid inquiries will, however,
convince most people that the alliance with the Empire was more an
incident in than the cause of the Church’s degradation. The transfer of
the seat of rule to the Bosporus left the Western Church free from the
Imperial influence to regulate its own affairs, and yet it became not
less but even more corrupt than its Oriental neighbour. The truth seems
to be that the corruption of the Church was due more to its external or
material prosperity than to anything else. To churches and to nations
that is the real ordeal by fire. In the poverty and struggles they have
higher hopes, but when difficulties are surmounted, and they dwell at
ease, they mistake or forget their vocation. The adversity and terrible
persecution of the Church, coincident with its primitive enthusiasm, did
a very great deal to preserve its health and purity; and it was simply
natural, and to be expected, that when it emerged into prosperity and
popular favour, like Jeshurun in his fatness, it should have rebelled,
and instead of serving as it was ordained to do, should have usurped the
power to rule.
The iconography of early Christianity reflects even more clearly than
its literature the various stages of its deterioration. As long as the
world was against it, and it was compelled to use such places as the
Catacombs for its shelter and worship, its faith was pure, and its life
was full of exhilaration and brightness. Its symbolism was thoroughly
ideal and spiritual, in sharp and instructive contrast with every Pagan
specimen that has been discovered, and with its own subsequently
paganised art. It was a symbolism, moreover, only of its hopes, and not
of its one object of faith or of worship. It tolerated no symbol in
worship save the water of Baptism and the bread and the wine of the
Eucharist. It needed, as yet, no crucifix, not even a cross,[383] and it
would not allow any image to reveal to the imagination the present but
invisible Christ, or to suggest the profound meaning of His atonement.
But when it went forth, the admired of the world, into the sunshine, and
began to rear the grand basilicas, and people them with the tombs of the
martyrs and the enshrined relics of the saints, the very desire to rise
led it to fight heathenism with its own weapons, and to copy its
splendours.[384] Even before this it was falling back from the simple
service of the synagogue to that of the destroyed temple, but now it was
found adopting the heathen festivals, or accommodating its own to their
dates, and incorporating with its own the more imposing rites of still
popular heathen fanes. To “offer the new law’s new oblation” it invented
a new ritual and priesthood; and seeing a priesthood must have somewhat
to offer, it discovered a new sacrifice in the very sacrament which was
the Divine pledge and human thanksgiving for the abrogation of all
external sacrifice.[385] Then the government of the Empire became the
model of its organisation, and soon it was crowned in a Papacy
professing to dominate, as vicegerent for Christ, a world which
confessedly it has not yet been able to convert.
It is not necessary to trace the sickening degradation of Christianity
through all its encounters and compromises with heathenism, till in the
gathering gloom its degenerate art reached a point where it dared to
portray to the eye of sense the death-pangs of the Son of God, and its
worship touched a depth of idolatry in which it symbolised the mystery
of the Holy Trinity by a three-headed figure quite after the model of
the Hindu Trimurti. It is sufficient to say that it appears to have
proceeded on parallel lines, and at as rapid a pace as the degeneracy of
Buddhism in the East. It too has its iconography as well as its
literature, and it is interesting to trace its passage from its earliest
graffiti—the stone edicts of Asoka, where we have the religion without
even the name of the founder—through the carvings of the Sanchi gateway,
where there is alteration, though to no considerable extent, on to those
at Amravati, where we have the full-blown Buddhism to which China to a
considerable extent succumbed.[386] Through all this period everywhere
in Chinese Buddhist temples were seen the idols of the saints,
everywhere were found their worshipped relics. A bone, a tooth, a single
hair, would be purchased by the revenue of a State and welcomed with
imperial honours. The rationalists of the West might protest as loudly
and as scoffingly as they pleased that there was as much wood of the
true cross and as many veritable nails of it in Europe as would suffice
to build a navy. The Confucian mandarins at the court of a
relic-worshipping Emperor might indignantly denounce the desecration and
pollution of the royal palace by the introduction of part of the carrion
of a monk who had died long ago.[387] With the father of Gideon,
deriding the wonder-working powers of these relics, they might insist
that they, and even Buddha himself, should plead, Baal-like, for
themselves against their iconoclastic ire; but at that time neither law,
nor persecution, nor common sense could prevail to cure this perverted
disposition. Belief in the virtue of a fetich marks both the infancy and
decay of most religions. In Chinese Buddhism to-day this belief is as
vigorous as ever, and notwithstanding the influence of the Reformation,
and the spread of scientific discovery, this belief marks an extreme of
thought from which neither Romanism nor Protestantism as yet can be said
to be free.
The Buddhism of the earliest traditions was concerned chiefly with
morality as essential to deliverance, and the Christianity of the New
Testament is a faith and hope and love, dominating and fusing and
moulding life after a nobler type. In China, as elsewhere, the Buddhism
of morality gave way to the Buddhism of mystic contemplation. Yielding
to the same tendency which afterwards made so many Christians abandon
the paths of obedience and practice of righteousness for the cultivation
of the inner life, Buddhism as early as 520 A.D. was prepared to follow
eagerly Bôdiharma,[388] who came from Southern India to sweep away the
alien growth of all book-instruction, and to establish the truth that
“out of mind there is no Buddha, out of Buddha there is no mind; that
virtue is not to be sought, and vice is not to be shunned; that nothing
is to be looked upon as pure or polluted, for all that is needed is to
avoid both good and evil, and he that can do this is a truly religious
man.”[389]
In proclaiming that ethical distinctions mark an inferior stage of
discipleship, for a “good man, though never against, is always above
them,” Bôdiharma, the nominal founder of Esoteric Buddhism, simply
formulated more clearly the teaching of Nâgârdjuna, the reputed founder
of the Mahāyāna system. It was only another expression of that
indefinable phase of thought, found in all religions as mysticism, and
which, though commonly identified only with its extravagant outbursts,
is really of the very essence of religion. The dominating thought in a
religious man is that of a Supreme One in whom we live and move and have
our being, and there are times in his worship when the balance of
consciousness is disturbed, and self is lost in consciousness of the
Divine. Man without the aid of prayer or sacramental grace finds in
himself the revelation, and alas! as his consciousness is always
imperfect, and very often confused, the revelation is too often
distorted and the reverse of Divine.[390]
Mysticism, as was natural in a religion quickening both thought and
emotion, appeared early in Christianity, and from the days of St. John
it has never lacked a representative. In its manifold varieties and
aberrations it presents many similarities to the mysticism of the East,
but in reality it is as different from it in its nature as it is distant
from it in its source. Eastern mysticism has always been more
speculative than practical in character. Pantheistic in its origin, it
assumes that all things are as divine as it is their nature to be, and
aspires to get at the unity of being. Western mysticism, on the other
hand, starts always from a sense of the disorder and alienation of
things, and endeavours to get at man’s true life. The Eastern finds its
object within, the Western generally without; the Eastern considers
identity with Deity a natural state, the Western regards perfect
fellowship with Deity as a goal of spiritual attainment. In Christianity
mysticism has been occasional in its manifestations, and has always been
regarded as an innovation; but in the East it is the normal deduction
from Hindu Pantheism and Buddhist Nihilism.[391] Nâgârdjuna and
Bôdiharma were the natural outcome of Gotama’s teaching. In Christianity
it has often shown itself to be marvellously practical, and generally in
revolt from some stereotyped system of dogma or form of worship. Though
associated in our thoughts more with the sentimental than the
intellectual aspects of religion,[392] it has manifested frequently a
decidedly rationalistic tendency. Refusing to be dominated by authority
or to be bound by antiquity, it has questioned fearlessly the dicta of
Scripture, avowing that reason is not superseded, but divinely inspired
and controlled as the organ of revelation. In Christianity its
extravagances may be forgiven in consideration of the benefits which
have flowed from it. It powerfully helped to bring about the
Reformation, and since then, in the Churches, whether reformed or
unreformed, it has tended to sweeten and intensify devotion. It has kept
them mindful of their common lineage by insisting upon those essential
and universal truths which are confessed to be vital in all religions,
and especially by proclaiming the supremacy of the Holy Spirit as the
fountain of all enlightenment and activity.
As manifested in St. Paul and St. John, mysticism is the recognition of
the Holy Spirit as the Witness of Christ, and therefore the supreme lord
over all man’s emotions and reasonings and purposes. Consequently the
asceticism with which mysticism has always been associated has been in
Christianity more kept under control. Occasionally it has lapsed into
frightful excesses; indeed, the extravagances practised in the East to
attain to insight have been equalled by the devices resorted to by many
in the West to gain the vision of the Divine. In ingenious methods of
self-torture the West certainly vied with the East, but at self-torture
perverted Christianity stopped, while degenerate Buddhism went on to
invent and put in practice most revolting methods of self-destruction as
well. The law of Buddha prohibited this, and forbade even the mention of
the advantages of death. It was an offence of the gravest kind, punished
by the severest penalty which the Order could inflict,[393] for a monk
to procure a weapon for the purpose of taking away his life, or to teach
how death may be procured. Still, in India before Fa-Hian’s time,
self-murder was practised, and in China Imperial edicts against
self-mutilation and self-immolation were required to prevent fanatics
evading the primitive law by the quibble, that while prohibiting
suicide, Buddha enjoined the destruction of anger and lust, and that it
was against these alone that they raised their hand, in order to
complete their deliverance.[394]
Christianity demands that an ἄσκησις shall be practised by all who
desire the illumination of the Spirit, for all that is vile must be
purged out of life, and all that is animal in it must be subdued. The
discipline, however, is always moral as well as religious, and it aims
only at controlling, never, like Stoicism or Cynicism, at stifling or
violating natural affection. Unlike Plato, who regarded matter as evil,
Christ and His apostles recognised it as the creature of God, and taught
us to seek the seat of evil, not in the body, but in the perverted will.
In the spirit is the true _fons et origo mali_; but as the occasion of
sin directly or indirectly often originates in some desire for bodily
indulgence or some dread of bodily pain, temperance and fortitude demand
that the body, if not inured to hardness, should be at least kept under
control. So bodily exercise,[395] though in itself profiting little,
profiteth much as moral discipline, a means to a spiritual end.
Consequently the fast in its literal sense has its place in the
Christian system as an expedient generally most required in the times
when we are inclined to despise it. The fanaticism which would destroy
or injure what is natural is condemned by Christianity as severely as is
the sensuality which would unduly strengthen it. What it demands is that
the whole nature be educated and ennobled by loving surrender to the
control of an infinitely holy Will. Enjoyment of the vision beatific,
communion with the Divine Being, is the _summum bonum_ of Christianity,
and that is the portion only of the sanctified. “Blessed are the pure in
heart: for they shall see God.”
Bôdiharma’s mystic or esoteric Buddhism had no such influences to steady
and sober it, and its aberrations were wilder than the fancies of our
delirium. The supernatural pretensions of mysticism have always been
disallowed or condemned in Christianity by overwhelming healthy-minded
majorities, but the consequence of the practice of Esoteric Buddhism was
believed by all to be supernatural power. An adept in it professed to
see through all ages and worlds, and move through space by a sheer
exercise of will. All the phenomena of modern spiritualism may have been
witnessed in India and China two thousand years ago—yea, centuries
perhaps before Buddha appeared. The first pretenders to these mysteries
were the Indian Yogis and the medicine-men of savage and barbarous
races.[396] The “Neo-Buddhism” and “Theosophy” of to-day simply confront
us in the cast-off yellow rags of these pitiful superstitions. Their
disciples attempt to warm themselves and to walk in the light of the
unhallowed flames which the deluded followers of Bôdiharma believed they
could kindle. In whatever way the phenomena of spiritualism are to be
explained—and one cannot say what phenomena may emerge when the human
mind is abandoned to vacuity, and the human will to an ungoverned
fancy—we may be certain that investigation of them will never disclose
the reality of benign supernatural power. What capabilities may be
dormant in humanity no one can tell. Christ who redeemed us is the
prophecy of what He can make us. He had supernatural power because His
being accorded perfectly with the Heavenly Father’s will; but
supernatural power as manifested by Christ is very different indeed from
the ludicrous exhibitions of the “spiritualists.” Christ’s supernatural
power was not manifested just in their ways, and certainly not by their
methods; will it ever be acquired?[397]
It is not compatible with our space to trace the parallels between
Esoteric Buddhism and some nineteenth-century forms of speculation in
which the finite is again seen to be going back to the absolute, and the
reality of everything but the self is denied. On the religious side,
however, it is interesting to notice a later stage of it in a system
which, originating not long after Bôdiharma, took some four centuries to
establish itself. The T’ien-t’ai or Chi-Che school differed from
Bôiharma’s theory of pure mental abstraction to be gained through
complete withdrawal from all sensible surroundings, in that it sought to
aid contemplation by sensuous exercises. Worship of gay idols, music of
many persons chanting in unison, postures of kneeling and standing,
exercises of continued and loud recitation, with intervals of profound
silence and intense meditation, were supposed to produce the desired
illumination. It seemed to be the first recognition of feeling in the
Buddhist religion, and the first attempt to employ it to produce
ecstasy. The same attempt has often been repeated in the history of
Christianity, sometimes in very grotesque and extravagant forms. In
every outburst of religious enthusiasm we may see rude examples of it,
but it is also the principle on which æsthetic worship is generally
defended. It is a reminder, therefore, to some very superior people, of
our common human nature, and a warning that when left to itself, or
indulged, even the æsthetic, like all other instincts, will just run the
same round of extravagance in manifold and ever-recurring variety.
The tendency in human nature to pervert a religion is as strongly
manifested in Christianity as in Buddhism; but there is this outstanding
distinction between them, that while a survey of Buddhism shows that
everywhere it has run its course, and has exhausted its intellectual and
moral and spiritual resources, Christianity upon examination appears to
be only in an early stage of development. In spite of the perversions of
the Church, and its repeated resistance to Christian movements,
Christianity has always produced what has condemned and corrected and
vanquished them. It is the recuperative power of Christianity which most
distinguishes it. There is nothing in the history of Buddhism which at
all corresponds with the Reformation. To-day all over the world it is
stereotyped and unprogressive, whereas everywhere in Christendom there
is ferment of thought and stirring of life, plainly indicating that
whatever power may claim the past, Christianity has the sure promise of
the future.
In China, two hundred and seventy years ago, originated a sect whose
adherents, scattered through the villages of the Eastern Provinces, and
belonging principally to the lower classes of society, may be called
Protestant or Reformed Buddhists. They are described by Dr. Edkins[398]
as opposed to idolatry in all its forms, as having no temple, but only
plain meeting-houses, signalised with only the common tablet to heaven,
earth, king, parents, and teachers, as their symbol of reverence. Their
worship consists not in ceremonies, but in quiet meditation, and inner
adoration of the all-pervading Buddha. They are called the “Do-Nothing
Sect,” not because they are idle, like the ignorant inmates of the
monasteries—for they are really industrious and virtuous,—but because
they hold that the highest virtue is never intentional, but wholly
unconscious of self. Like M. Aurelius,[399] they consider that to ask to
be “paid for virtue is as if the eye demanded a recompence for seeing.”
In thinking of them, the words of the Lord Jesus recur to us: “Do good,
and lend, hoping for nothing again.” George Fox, and the quiet and
charitable Society which he founded, and which still continues in formal
garb his protest against all formalism in worshipping God, not by
clamouring to Him, but in silently waiting till He speaks, seems to be
the realisation of what these good Wu-wei-Kiau aspire to in their
religion. They have not been able to free themselves from Buddhism or
Taoism. Buddha, though not worshipped, is believed in by them, and they
have found an object of adoration in Kîn-mu, the Golden Mother of the
soul, who can protect and deliver from calamity, and even save those
that have died from misery. They have four principal festivals, two of
which celebrate the birth and death of Lo-tsu, their founder. On these
occasions three small cups of tea and nine tiny loaves of bread are
placed on the tables, according to the appointment of Lo-tsu himself. On
this account they are nicknamed “the Tea and Bread Sect.” They are
strict vegetarians, but in no other sense ascetics, honouring marriage
and family life, and having no monastic institute among them. They aver
that one of their leaders during a persecution was crucified, and their
great hope is that the world will soon come to an end, and that the
Golden Mother will appear, to take all her children—all who believe in
her as they do—home to her beautiful heaven.
This can hardly be called a reformation of Buddhism according either to
its original form or its fundamental principles. It is a departure from,
and an immense improvement upon it, which is manifestly due to foreign
and probably Christian influence. The Nestorians entered China in the
seventh, and the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, while Reformed
Christianity only came in contact with China in the present generation.
If it be denied that Christianity helped to produce the Do-Nothing Sect,
it will be difficult to disprove the claim that, directly or indirectly,
it has done much to produce the latest forms in which, in China and
Japan, Buddhism is now presented to the world. In both countries
Reformed Buddhists are found differing in much from one another, but
generally agreeing in rejecting polytheism for the worship of one
divinity: in China, Kwan-yin, who for long has changed sexes, and is now
the goddess of mercy; in Japan, Buddha, whose attribute is Amita, the
infinite. One sect, called the “Salvation without Works Sect,” has
progressed greatly in Japan, under the title of Shin-Shin, “the true
religion.” The worshipper renounces all merit, and trusts for salvation
in nothing but the mercy of Amita.[400] The soul is brought into a state
of salvation by an act of faith, and though sure of salvation, the
faithful must not abandon the struggle with evil, for holiness is not
the beginning, but the result of salvation. In Kioti, a Buddhist sect
has a college quite Western in its curriculum and arrangements. There
too the Japanese newspapers not only record the successes of able
Buddhist preachers in spreading their doctrine, and in founding schools,
they advertise a Buddhist propaganda for the conversion of Europe and
America. Its only organ as yet is a little magazine called the _Bijou of
Asia_, but it is printed in English for the enlightenment of all who
believe in the moribund creeds of the West, and for the rescue
especially of souls from the snare of that Christian superstition which
“happily all over the world is rapidly declining in power”!
If this be not impure Christianity, no one will dare to call it pure
Buddhism. Surely it is a hopeful indication for the future of Japan, as
being evidently a movement somewhat similar to that inaugurated in India
by Rammohun Roy, and greatly furthered in our days by Chunder Sen. The
first professed to trace his reform to the Upanishads rediscovered, and
expounded, and applied; and the second to the Vedas as the primitive
fountains of the faith. Both reformers and their work would have been
impossible two thousand years ago; yea, they would have been equally
impossible to-day, had not the West given of its thoughts to the East,
and Christendom communicated to it something of its better life. It is
one thing to read the Vedas and Upanishads, as the Rishis recited or the
Brahmans expounded them long ago, and quite another to have them
interpreted by natives of India, around whose forefathers for several
generations all the influences of Christian civilisation have been
playing. So is it with the reforming Buddhists of China and Japan, who
have enterprise to send their sons to study at our British Universities.
They are reading their old literature—even when rejecting our systems of
belief—with minds unconsciously saturated with Christian intelligence,
and no doubt they often find there what the Gospel has put in
themselves.
We may rest assured that the reform of the Oriental religions will only
be effected by the infusion into them of the spirit of Christianity. A
higher religion meeting them as Christianity does, may not supplant or
destroy them, but it will revive and transform them. It will destroy
much that is false, correct much that is wrong, supply all they lack,
and so in the end annul them. The product will not likely be a facsimile
of any of the Churches of Christendom. It may be a religion in which
Buddha and the great teachers of his system will be lifted to their
places among the prophets who, “since the world began,” unconsciously
testified, by their errors as well as by their truths, by their failures
as well as by their successes, to the Mystery to be revealed. The fact
that in Buddhism the object of worship is not the Buddha that was, but
Mâitrêya who is to be, is a pathetic confession that its Messiah has yet
to come. Though Buddha did not proclaim His coming, the result of his
mission bears witness to the need of Him. So he was a lawgiver preparing
the way for Moses, even as Moses prepared the way for the Baptist, and
as the Baptist heralded the Christ of God. Could his voice reach down
to-day from “the quiet shore” to the millions who have taken hold of him
in hope of finding deliverance from the miseries and perplexities of
this sinful world, it would be to repeat a testimony once heard on
Jordan’s banks from him than whom no one born of woman was greater:
“There standeth One among you whom ye know not, the latchet of whose
shoes I am not worthy to unloose.”
Footnote 319:
Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, ii. 33. 35.
Footnote 320: