Chapter II: Part 2

The wealthy are more likely to lend to than to borrow from the poor; the wise more likely to teach, though they do sometimes learn from the less instructed. The strong may be infected by the diseases of the feeble, but generally the contagion of health radiates from the more robust to the weaker vitalities. The “power” which the touch of the East has “made to go forth from us”[42] no doubt flows back in quickened life upon ourselves. As these Oriental studies proceed, the tables will perhaps be turned upon the school that would derive all our philosophy and religion from old Indian sources. We have seen that two successive waves of Western life flowed eastwards upon the shores of India. Another rich stream of Semitic thought in pre-Buddhistic times, represented by such religious teachers as the second Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, reached the Tigris, and we may ask, Was the Indus unknown to them? We do not assert that they knew it, but surely it was just as easy for a Jew to reach India as for Burnouf or de Bunsen’s Buddhists to reach Babylon. It was just as probable that a Jewish pedlar found his way eastward through Parthia to India, with other and more precious goods in his possession than the Babylonian wares in his pack, as it was that Renan’s wandering Buddhist monk found his way to the Jordan. Later on there is a tradition—and though it is only a tradition, what a find to Messieurs Renan, Burnouf, and de Bunsen would one similar Buddhist tradition be!—that one of the original twelve apostles of Jesus evangelised a portion of the western shores of India. So, founding on all these data, only assuming—as we are entitled to assume—that the East was well connected with the West by the sea routes from Arabia and by the land route through Persia, and remembering that there is nothing so volatile and permeating as thought, is the speculation so very extravagant that old Indian philosophy and religion, though following their own course, may have been modified and purified by contact with the thoughts of the West? What if the conjecture be hazarded that from the West a thousand years B.C. was communicated the theistic impulse which produced what is best in the Upanishads—the truth, viz., of the unity which is behind and above all variety, the One Absolute into which all thought and all being is resolved?[43] What if it be some day asserted that the teaching of the Hebrew prophets before the Diaspora, as to the worthlessness of sacrifice to put away sin and to promote communion with God, may have insinuated itself into the reveries of Indian ascetics in their forest retreats, and made the teaching of reformers like Buddha possible? And what if to St. Thomas may be indirectly traced that influence which made later Buddhism differ so materially from the primitive, and approach in the similarities of its legends so close to the Gospel narratives? Dr. Kellogg already proclaims that “it may be affirmed with certainty that no man can show that the legend of Buddha, in a form containing any coincidence which could be held to argue a borrowing from it by Christians, was in existence before the Christian era”; “that all the various versions of the legend in any language date from a time later than the Christian era”; “that the chief Sanskrit authority for it cannot be proved in the judgment of the most competent critics to have existed in its present form nearly as far back as the Christian era”; and though he does not allege any actual transference from the Gospel to the Buddha legend, he avers with justifiable confidence that the opportunity for “such a transference before the Sanskrit version assumed its present form is an indubitable fact.”[44]

These suggestions, though just as worthy of consideration and support as the theory that Christianity is either an offshoot of Vedic Brahminism or a direct product of Buddhist speculation, need not be discussed at present. We may content ourselves with the conclusions formed by our most reliable authorities, that Buddhism and Christianity in their origin and earliest development were perfectly independent of each other. The births of their founders were separated by centuries, and the spheres of their ministry by almost the whole extent of Asia. While thus sundered by the conditions of both time and space, they were still more so by their intellectual peculiarities and antecedents. The Indian differed very widely from the Jew in his way of looking at and reasoning about things. He would be very differently impressed by the same or similar phenomena, and he would communicate his impressions by a very different method. Geographically India was shut up from the rest of the world, and the Aryans who went down into it were left in a manner hardly paralleled by other peoples to develop their own life out of itself, and according to its own laws. In far less favourable circumstances, and far removed from the educational stimulus of contact with alien or cognate nations, they came to stand alone as a people scarcely intelligible by others. The Jews, on the other hand, were early brought into the stream of human movement. Mingled with many peoples, sent from land to land, they became in spite of their passionate love for their own country the cosmopolitans of the world. Consequently when the two races came in contact, the circles of thought and feeling in which they moved could hardly be said to touch. Solomon’s sailors, as regards religious or philosophical treasures, could neither give nor take away. They had almost nothing in common with the strange people whom they met. The Sanskrit words which they took home to designate the peculiar products obtained in Ophir indicated how helpless they would have been to understand the metaphysics of India even had they inquired about them. The natives of Western India a thousand years before Christ were as helpless to understand the Jew. You have only to compare a prophecy of Israel of the eighth century B.C. with the earliest of the Upanishads to find how widely separated at that date was the Semite from the Aryan of India. Even when their own kinsmen visited them, when the descendants of sires who had occupied the same cradle and had heard the same stories told over them in the one primeval home, met for deadly strife in the wars of Alexander on the plains of the Punjab, they were aliens in almost everything. Later on, when Christian missionaries, anxious to teach them better ways, succeeded in influencing their religious conceptions, the Hindus always modified what of our faith they adopted. The question how far the early proclamation of the Gospel in India influenced the development of Hinduism is by the best of judges considered not yet settled,[45] but even those who affirm the reality of this influence admit that Hinduism did not so much incorporate the doctrines as assimilate the ideas of Christianity. The ultimate decision of this question, however, does not in any way affect the one before us. We may be almost certain that the great mass of Indian speculation on man and his relations to the infinite, for many centuries before our era, was developed originally from the resources of the Indian mind quite apart from foreign influences. The same assertion will hold good as to the rise of Greek philosophy and of the Christian religion. Not one of the three can be understood without careful reference to their particular antecedents, but they can never be accounted for by any theory of derivation of the one from the other.

It is the fact of this complete independence of each other in origin, coupled with their analogous development, and the many supposed agreements in their systems, which makes the study of Buddhism so interesting. What does this signify? What important law in providence does it indicate or illustrate? Our best guides content themselves with calling attention to the analogies, and they are chary as yet of drawing inferences from them. The wisdom of such caution is apparent when we find that the supposed coincidences require to be examined and discussed. Most of them have been found to be superficial and accidental, and, when probed, very essential and fundamental contrasts are discovered beneath them. Now to judge correctly concerning these religions we must try not their analogies but their contradictions. The analogies may be only seeming, and the contrasts may be very real and profound. On every point that is truly characteristic the two religions may be separated as widely as the zenith is from the nadir. All religions are parallel in their tendencies, and every approach to truth must inevitably produce resemblances in religious belief. The resemblances may indicate the aspirations of a moral and religious nature common to all men; and in what is peculiar to Christianity, what it possesses in contrast, may be found the divine answer to these aspirations. The two religions may proceed in parallel lines, but on very different planes, and from quite opposite directions. Thus the morality of Buddhism so deservedly admired is in no sense peculiar to Buddhism, for much of it was taught in India before Buddha appeared, and in China before his law was proclaimed in it. It is the natural outgrowth of the moral sense of mankind where circumstances are favourable to its development. But high as the law of Buddha is, it only “approaches, swings toward,” as Oldenberg tells us, but never reaches or touches the law of Christ.[46] There is in the Christian Gospel something which the Buddhist system plainly lacks, and which Buddhism out of any evolution of its own inherent energy could never produce. Christianity seems to be superior to it, not in the sense that the infant is superior to the embryo, but as man is superior to the animal, which yet may be said of very necessity to precede him. The lower organism in creation, though not accounting for the higher, may reach out after and indicate the necessity for it, and the higher by fulfilling the lower will interpret it. Just as the mineral, vegetable, and animal world all point to some higher creative fact, which in man is to sum up and perfect them, so the many lower religions of the human race all point to a higher, which is to annul and fulfil them. No theory of evolution has yet accounted for man. He appears in the universe as a new creature while part of a very old system of creation, and related to all its inferior forms. So Christianity, in one sense as old as human history, and related to every form of religion by which man has tried to satisfy his spiritual cravings, may not be elaborated out of any of them as their products, but confronts us as a new fact of history to satisfy and complete them.

This conclusion is one which many students of the science of religion are not prepared to accept. To them Christianity is simply one of the natural religions, and at best their highest but necessary outgrowth. Just as they allege that the origin of man is to be found in the lowest type of the savage, so they seek for the genesis of his religious consciousness in his lowest animal wants and fears, and they profess to trace the development of that consciousness from its first almost shapeless forms, through the monstrosities of Fetichism, then of Animism, Polytheism, Monotheism, till it finds its ultimate culmination in Christ. Now Christianity is indeed a natural religion; were it otherwise, it would cease to be divine. It supplies all man’s natural wants, and it satisfies and educates all man’s natural aspirations. While, however, there is nothing _un_natural in it, we aver that there is something supranatural in its ideal, fitting it to answer the necessities of a being who has in him all that nature has, and a great deal more. Man is a being akin on one side of his nature to both the ape and the worm, but he is also what they are not. “The pressure of the infinite on his senses” awakens feelings, and originates a train of thought in which he soon becomes conscious of relations to a higher than nature his inferior, and to other than men his equals. There is that in him which once it is aroused refuses to believe that what he sees or handles or tastes is all, and that there can be no higher being than himself. If his own most perfect machine does not express all his intelligence, he cannot believe that all possible intelligence is comprehended and expressed in the world of nature. Behind and beyond all these physical arrangements of the world, which seem fully to meet the lower wants of his being, he feels that there must be higher arrangements corresponding to his peculiar wants. Just because he finds every appetite has its corresponding object, and every organ implies an element for which it is fitted,—so that if there be an eye there must be light, and if lungs there must be air,—so this feeling or instinct which impels him to seek the unknown Power, “for whose sake he feels constrained to do what he does not like to do, or to abstain from what he would like to do,”[47] is the pledge not only that He exists, but that he has already and always been found by Him, as One who understands perfectly his thoughts and wants, and is freely communicating with him.

It is not in the anthropoid ape that we may hope to find the origin of man, and it is not in the terror of the savage cowering before the majesty and mystery of nature that we are likely to find the genesis of his religion. Even if anthropology succeeded in proving that savagery was the first type in which humanity was expressed, and that its bestial rites inspired by terror was the first form of human religion, it would not then have accounted for their origin. The gulf between the religious savage and the non-religious speechless ape would remain as vast as ever. The first manifested beginning of a work may be rude enough, “as is the rough block which receives the first stroke of the sculptor who has designed to produce a statue; but the real beginning,” as we have been eloquently reminded, “is in the plan of the artist, and to perceive his ideal we have to wait for the final result.”[48] It is in the end therefore that we may be said to find and understand the author. So the origin of man, and the genesis of his religion, is more likely to be indicated by that divine fiat which one of the ancient authors of Genesis has dared to formulate, “Let us make man in our image, and after our likeness.” According to that conception, man is a creature, neither equal with, nor perfect as the Being who conceived him, but having affinity with his Creator, and from the very first manifesting capacity and potentiality of indefinite progress to be gained by the divine education to which he is everlastingly subjected.

It is not in the plan of our lecture to discuss these momentous questions, or to enter the lists against the representatives of the sciences of Anthropology or Religion. Anthropology is not sufficiently advanced to scatter the mystery that surrounds the cradle of the human race: and it would be rash for the apostles of the other science to maintain that they have succeeded in tracing the lines of that process, out of which Christianity or even Buddhism is alleged to have evolved from the shapeless superstitions of the primitive savage, before they confront us as facts in the history of human thought. Observation and experience alike seem to counsel greater caution in making our deductions and drawing our inferences. Indeed there seems to be almost as much evidence in favour of the theory of degradation as there is in favour of that of evolution. There is no inherent tendency in human society to pass ever on and ever up to something better and nobler. No race, by its own inherent strength, seems to have raised itself from barbarism into anything that can be called true civilisation; but we have abundant proof in the Aztecs of former generations, and the negroes of the Black Republic in the present day, that races can terribly decline. A state of civilisation is very difficult to keep, as well as difficult to gain.[49] And so far as observation goes, savage life and religion appear to be “not the dawning of a society about to rise, but the fading remains of one sinking in storms, overthrown and shattered by overwhelming catastrophes.” Humboldt and Niebuhr, quoted by Whately in his lecture on the Origin of Civilisation, both protest as strongly as he did himself against those who profess to find in the wreck of the civilised and religious man his original representative,[50] and our best authority in the science of religion assures us that Fetichism, far from being the initial of an upward course, marks the very last stage in the downward course of religion.[51] It should content us, in the present state of our knowledge, to find that humanity is capable both of development and degradation. Savagery and civilisation are not separated from each other by impassable barriers: savagery is at least a possibility to a civilised race;[52] civilisation is not beyond the reach of the savage. On the surface of the very highest civilisation many things appear which are also to be seen in the lowest: and just as in the lowest organisms certain rudimentary traces are found of members which are perfected in organisms above them, so the very lowest savagery seems to exhibit an upward tendency. In the same way the very purest religions have clinging to them traces of the lowest superstitions. Not in Buddhism only, but even in Christianity, we find forms of Animism and Fetichism; but the question whether both religions first manifested themselves in these lower forms, with which they are still partly incrusted, must not be held to be settled in the affirmative because these traces of them exist. Instead of being survivals which they have not yet sloughed off or outgrown, they may be parasitical growths indicating degradation and disease.

Though the researches hitherto prosecuted have not resulted in the discovery of a law regulating the development of religion,[53] they all point to a common religious faculty peculiar to man, and indicate that the religious instinct is co-extensive with the human race. Nothing, it is true, in the nature of things forbids the discovery of tribes absolutely without religion; but as matter of fact, no such have been found. And as Tylor remarks, “those who assert the contrary disprove their theories by the facts which they allege in support of them.”[54] Now, if we find in all sections of humanity, even far apart from each other, the same groping after an Author and Governor of our being, and the same forecasting of our destiny, though in most contradictory, and, alas! often fearfully perverted ways, we may safely infer as a fundamental truth that humanity, though broken up into many fragments, is really an organic unity, and that the Christian dogma simply expresses a scientific fact, “that God hath made of one all nations on the face of the earth.”

If the organic unity of humanity be granted, the organic unity of language and of religion too would seem to be deducible from it as simple corollaries. But we must be careful in defining wherein this organic unity consists. We may assume that in regard to language it does not consist in a perfect primitive speech, broken up at later times into numberless forms to be used richly and copiously by some civilised, but scantily by barbarous peoples.[55] In regard to religion it does not mean a complete compendium of truth supernaturally given to the fathers of the human race, from which, while all men have erred more or less, some have fearfully fallen away. Such a view, though held generally once, would be condemned by Christian theologians now as irreligious in principle, for it would seek for the roots of religion not in the nature of man, but in some external enactment, and would make religion, which is essentially spontaneous, to be something mechanical or compulsory in action.[56] The unity of language does not consist in a common vocabulary, but in a common faculty which all men have of expressing their feelings and their thoughts; and the unity of religion does not consist in a number of fundamental beliefs which all men have in common; but in the universal instinct to believe in, and reverence and obey, a power higher and better than ourselves. The faculty, the instinct in each case is one; yet it has been developed, if we are to use that word, in very different degrees. In some tribes the faculty of reckoning is so weak, that they have numerals only to five, and their vocabulary is so poor as to express only objects around them or their own sensuous wants. In the same way in some peoples the religious faculty is so stunted as almost to be amorphous. It exists as it were in embryo; in other peoples it perplexes us by the monstrosities in which it is expressed, but the monstrosity, as we are reminded,[57] may mark a further growth which also points onward to something more complete, and may be in itself a type of things not seen as yet. Observation therefore seems to detect a religious tendency in process of evolution, and if so, the only question is as to whether that tendency develops by its own inherent power, or by a process of education intelligently conducted; in other words, whether man grows into his religion, or whether he is instructed in it by the revelation of a mind higher than his own.

The New Testament writers, while proclaiming the organic unity of humanity, proclaim as clearly that the organic development of religion proceeds under Divine control. The phrase “organic development of religion” may only be a modern way of designating that long continuous process by which God reveals His mind and will for the education of the human race, which culminated when He “who at sundry times and in divers manners,” in various ways and in different measures, “spake unto the fathers by the prophets,” spoke unto us by His Son. Holy Scripture from first to last is consistent in its teaching as to this. It tells of a Divine Spirit not operative only in one race or in one part of the world during a few centuries of its history, but striving with human souls always and everywhere. It tells us that God never left the world without a witness of Himself; it reminds us of prophets—certainly not all of the one nation—who, trained to grasp and to proclaim moral and spiritual truths, were sent to lead among their fellow-men lives so pure and unselfish as profoundly to affect the moral progress of the whole human race. In a word, it reveals Deity not as apart from man and uninterested in him, but as an everlasting agent in human history,—working out an eternal purpose hid as a mystery from all ages, but now manifested in the last times to us; the purpose of gathering together not only the scattered and alienated nations, but “all things which are in heaven and which are on earth in One,” even in Christ.

The proclamation of this universality of the Divine purpose is one of the chief distinctive characteristics of Christianity. Its canonical Scriptures from beginning to end contradict the Jewish heresy, that God, though He has made of one all nations, has only taken one or two under His protection, and has no care for the rest. They tell us that God cares for the sparrow that flits over the heads of the most degraded of the human race, and for the worm that crawls under their feet; and by implication they warn us that to assert that He who has provided for the wants of the reptile and the bird has made no provision for the spiritual wants of those whom He is said to have made in His image, is blasphemy more heinous than ever heathen or atheist has uttered. “The same Lord over all is rich in mercy unto all,” and “He is not far from any one” of them. He has left none “without a witness.” Though He has given some more than others, He has left no one without something. The religious instinct in some He has specially trained and illuminated, not because He regards them as favourites—for He is no respecter of persons—but because through them He would work out His beneficent plan for all. A few are indeed chosen, but that many may be called, and when one individual or one people is selected and peculiarised, it is that through them all nations may be blessed.

St. Paul, quoting to the Athenians from one of their own poets, reminded them that “we are all His offspring,” and as such we are all divinely cared for. It is true that He does not deal with all after the same fashion, and His dealings will always be perplexing if we apply to them only the standard of man and the measures of time; but if we remember that “He is God, and not man,” that “His years are throughout all generations,” and that we “can see only a portion of His ways,” we may trust that by-and-by He will show that He has wasted neither His own patience nor His creatures’ strength. For though He may not be dealing with us after the same fashion, He is dealing with all toward the same blessed end, the end which He has revealed in Christ, through whom, and by whom, and in whom, all men and things are to be reconciled.

We can only judge of His purpose by what of it has been disclosed. Humanity, essentially and fundamentally one, exhibits most manifold variety. While the unity of the race secures its sympathy with all its members, in its variety there is secured its indefinite expansion and progress. No family could always keep together in one spot: the differences of disposition and character among its members demand their separation as the condition of harmony. The family of man is a scattered one, not merely to prevent jealousy and hostility between its members, but to promote their education. The training of the race seems to proceed on principles somewhat analogous to those which we ourselves have adopted in the education of our children. We never could hope to educate a large number of children of various ages and mental capacities, by keeping them all in one class; so we break them up, and isolate, and grade them, and train some of them specially for the sake of all, that they may be their leaders and teachers. Even so, we find nations widely separated by natural barriers, that the characteristic energies of each may be developed, till the time comes when one or other of them is needed for the elevation or reformation of the rest. That the division of nations and the separate training of nations entered deeply into the counsels of Providence, may be learned by a glance at the configuration of the world, and the influences which are exercised by soil and climate and circumstance upon any single nation. The blessed effect of this division may be seen by the slightest survey of history in the corrective, educative, redemptive influence which they have exercised upon each other.[58] And yet a survey of the history of the last eighteen centuries will just as plainly indicate a Divine purpose of drawing the nations toward unity. Babel may mark the Divine purpose of the primeval economy, and Pentecost may be the sign of the present. The wonder in the plain of Shinar was, that through diversity of speech men were ceasing to understand each other. The wonder in Jerusalem was, that men of the most widely separate nationalities heard, each in their own tongue, Christian evangelists proclaim the marvellous works of God. Religion, which up till the coming of Christ, had proved a repellent and divisive force, began at that time to prove an attractive, harmonising, and transforming power. A new spring-tide dawned upon man’s religious conceptions, and truths after which all had been groping, but which none had attained to, emerged grandly into prominence. The Fatherhood of the One living and eternal God, the Divine Son, in whom all men are brethren, and the Holy Spirit, dealing with every man, working upon him and in him to conform him to the likeness of the highest and best, began to be revealed; and the more that revelation is accepted the more the reconciliation of the race advances.

It is not our interest, therefore, to sever Christianity from all connection with the manifold forms in which the religious instinct and faculty of man has found expression. If it could be proved that our religion stands in no relation to anything which men in other religions thought or believed, it would be discovered defective, and we would have to abandon the claim that it is the universal religion of humanity. To assert that all previous religious ideas must be expunged as erroneous or false, so that an entirely new message might be written, is to contradict the evangelical doctrine as to the nature of Christ and the purpose of His mission to the world. The New Testament writers assert that Christ is the source of all the truth that was ever uttered, the inspirer of all the goodness that was ever seen, and that He is the stimulator and educator of man’s every reaching out after God. The noblest thinkers, it is true, failed to comprehend the truth, and their highest religion failed to satisfy them; but we must not think of them as divinely permitted to fail to teach us the glory of Christ as the ultimate revelation of God. Here, as in all similar cases, failure was rather a partial success; for by the effort to reach it the mind was trained to receive and grasp the reality when it was disclosed. Some one has said that all pre-Christian religions are just Christ partially—very very partially—realised. Certainly they all point to Him, and but for Him they would have been abortive. They all suggest Him, in respect that they each claim something to satisfy and unite them. Christianity thus proves itself Divine, not in being absolutely different from, nor even in being vastly superior to, but in the fact that it harmonises and completes them. Instead, therefore, of being scared by the resemblances to Christianity which we meet in other religions, we should be thankful for their discovery. The early Apologists were not frightened when Celsus,[59] in the second century, submitted his alleged parallels to Christian doctrine and ethics, in order to prove that what Christians called revelation had already been attained by the unassisted efforts of heathen minds. Anticipating the language of the eighteenth century Deists, he proclaimed that “Christianity was as old as creation.” His parallels were often found to be defective, and many of them had only to be looked at to show the immense superiority of the Christian quotations. Augustine turned them against himself, when he showed that to claim entire originality for Christianity, to deny the existence of any light before Christ came, and the possibility of any silent universal revelation through reason and conscience, was to contradict His Messiahship. To ignore what God had done before, would have cut Him off from God and man. We would expect the Son of Man to confirm the deepest convictions of the human race. We would expect the Son of God to claim and utilise all the truth God’s Spirit had spoken in ages past. “Siquis vera loquitur, prior est quam ipse veritas? O Homo, attende Christum, non quando ad te venerit, sed quando te fecerit.”[60]

The more of Christian doctrine and ethics we find in other religions, the more Divine will Christianity appear. There is not a truth which has verified and sustained any other religion which is not found in Christianity, in fuller amount and in clearer form. Christianity differs from all other religions, not because it is a purer system of moral truth, but because it is the manifestation of a Divine life, and because in that life it reveals the _power_ which alone can reconcile the knowing with the doing of duty. It professes only to have one original, one distinctive element; but how much is involved in that profession? for this original is Christ Himself, and all its doctrines and precepts are vital only because of their connection with Christ. Whole libraries of moral and doctrinal anthologies would not make up for the obliteration of His likeness from the religious consciousness of the world: “It would be like consoling ourselves for the loss of the sun by the kindling of ten thousand artificial lamps.”[61] He confronts the ages, as the One to whom all religions point, of whom all true prophets of the human race have unconsciously testified. They, like the Founder of this great religion, whose alleged resemblances will be found, as we examine them, to be rather point-blank contradictions and contrasts to the Christian doctrines and story, may have indeed been burning and shining lights, and men were willing for a season to rejoice in their light. They were “not that Light,” but as voices crying in the night for its arising they came to “bear witness of it”: the Light not of Asia only, nor yet only of Europe, but the “Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

Footnote 1:

_Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, Pref. xiii.

Footnote 2:

Professor Max Müller, Gifford Lectures for 1888, on _Natural
Religion_, p. 11.

Footnote 3:

T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, 1881, “On the Origin and Growth
of Religion as illustrated by some points in the History of Indian
Buddhism,” p. 10.

Footnote 4:

Max Müller, _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, p. 38.

Footnote 5:

John v. 39.

Footnote 6:

Baring Gould, _Origin and Development of Religious Belief_, vol. i. p.
121.

Footnote 7:

Westcott, _Victory of the Cross_, pp. 3, 6.

Footnote 8:

T. W. Rhys Davids estimates the number at five hundred millions
(_Handbook of Buddhism_, p. 6). The previous general estimate was
about four hundred millions; but Dr. A. J. Happer, missionary at
Canton for forty-five years, reduces this number to seventy-three
millions. Sir Monier Williams, in his recent book on Buddhism, quoting
Professor Legge’s introduction to _Travels of Fa-Hian_, calculates the
number at one hundred millions, and claims for Christianity, with its
four hundred and thirty millions of adherents, the numerical
preponderance over all others.

Footnote 9:

T. W. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, pp. 4, 7; Sir Monier Williams,
_Buddhism_, p. 171.

Footnote 10:

Dr. Caird, _Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, Croall
Lectures, 1878-9, pp. 82 _seq._; T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures,
1881, _On the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by
Buddhism_, p. 7.

Footnote 11:

To draw proper inferences from statistics of the spread and supremacy
of a religion, we must first investigate the circumstances in which it
was propagated, and the intellectual and moral conditions of the
peoples whom it has converted. If it has gained only the belief of
_one_ section of the human race, it is evidently not entitled to rank
with another which proves itself influential among _all_ sections. A
religion dominant only over _inferior_ races is manifestly of less
value than another which, while satisfying the wants of the lowest and
most degraded peoples, is yet fulfilling the spiritual aspirations of
the _highest_. The first, if in any way related to the second, can
only be so as preparatory and prophetic of the mission which the
second alone can accomplish.

Footnote 12:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i. Introd.

Footnote 13:

Köppen, _Die Religion des Buddha_, s. 231; J. Barthelemy
Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha_, etc., pp. 78, 144, 181; Spence Hardy,
_Manual of Buddhism_, p. 358.

Footnote 14:

Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, p. xv, Introd.

Footnote 15:

Alabaster, _Modern Buddhist; in the Wheel of the Law_, p. 73; Trübner
and Co., 1871.

Footnote 16:

5th April 1885. In the Madras _Times_ for October 29, 1886, a meeting
of the Society for the Propagation of True Religion is advertised, for
reading and exposition of the Bhagavad-Gita.

Footnote 17:

_The Light of Asia_; _The Occult World_; _Esoteric Buddhism_;
_Theosophy of Archaic Religions_.

Footnote 18:

_Parerga_, 3d ed. i. 59.

Footnote 19:

_Westminster Review_, New Series, vol. xlviii. p. 469.

Footnote 20:

Gerald Massey, _Light_, 16th June 1883.

Footnote 21:

Among these are reckoned Adam, Fohi, Laotze, Jesus, Mohammed, and
Jenghiz Khān.—Kinnealy, _Commentary on the Apocalypse_, p. 685.

Footnote 22:

Pember, _Earth’s Earlier Ages_, p. 326.

Footnote 23:

H. H. Wilson, _Essays_, vol. ii. p. 376; Huc and Gabet, _Travel in
Tartary and Thibet_; translated by Mrs. p. Sinnett and W. Hazlitt.

Footnote 24:

_Buddhist Birth Stories_, translated by T. W. Rhys Davids, vol. i
Introd. p. xli.

Footnote 25:

Foucher de Careil, _Hegel et Schopenhauer_, p. 306.

Footnote 26:

_Vie de Jésus_, p. 98, 4th ed.; Paris, 1863.

Footnote 27:

The Buddhists, as Professor Kuenen remarks, do not believe in angels,
and they have no _Messiah_. Tathagata, which Mr. de Bunsen translates
“The Coming One,” _i.e._ Messiah, means “One _who has gone_” or “has
arrived at” (Nirvana), like his predecessors. So Oldenberg, Rhys
Davids, Bigandet, Edkins, Rajendralal Mitra: see too Dr. Kellogg,
_Light of Asia and the Light of the World_, pp. 106, 107.

Footnote 28:

See for these and other curious instances his article on “The
Obligations of the New Testament to Buddhism,” _Nineteenth Century_,
Dec. 1880.

Footnote 29:

_Natural and Universal Religions_, Hibbert Lectures, 1882.

Footnote 30:

_Strom._ i. 15; Porphyry, _de Abstin._ iv. 17.

Footnote 31:

Schwanbeck, _Megasthenes Indica_, p. 20; Lassen, _Ind.
Alterthumskunde_, 209; H. H. Wilson, _Essays_, ii. p. 314 _seq._;
Reinaud, _Relations Politiques et Commerciales de l’Empire Romain avec
l’Asie Central_, Paris, 1863; Priaulx, _Travels of Apollonius and the
Indian Embassies to Rome_, Paris, 1873.

Footnote 32:

The question of the disciples in John ix. 2, concerning the man who
was born blind, “Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was
born blind?” is alleged by Professor Seydel (_Das Evangelium von Jesu
in seinen Verhältnissen zu Buddha-Sage und Buddha-Lehre_) to indicate
an idea introduced into the Gospel from a foreign source, as the
doctrine of the pre-existence of souls was then unknown among the
Jews. Meyer in his critical and exegetical Handbook to St. John’s
Gospel has shown that no one required to go outside the sphere of
Jewish thought for an explanation of this part of the disciples’
question. In addition to his quotations from the Rabbinical books
illustrating this Jewish belief, Kuenen in his brief criticism of
Seydel adduces another from the Wisdom of Solomon viii. 20, as also
rendering the Buddhist derivation of this “thought quite superfluous”
(Hibbert Lectures, 1882, Appendix). Many instances of agreement in
thought and phraseology with the Gospels in passages in Buddhist works
are adduced by Dr. Kellogg, _Light of Asia, etc._, p. 137 _seq._, and
are satisfactorily accounted for by the similarity of circumstances
under which Buddha and the Saviour taught and the condition of men
which they both perceived and described.

Footnote 33:

Lucius, _Die Therapeuten und ihre Stellung in der Geschichte der
Askese_, Strassburg, 1880; also _Der Essenismus in seinem Verhältniss
zum Judenthum_, Strassburg, 1881.

Footnote 34:

Dissertation in Commentary on _Colossians_, pp. 119, 157.

Footnote 35:

_Jewish Wars_, ii. 8. 2-13; _Antiq._ xiii. 5. 9; xv. 10. 4, 5; xviii.
1. 2-6.

Footnote 36:

Edersheim, _Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah_, vol. i. p. 325.

Footnote 37:

Hibbert Lectures, 1882, p. 203.

Footnote 38:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde_,
translated by W. Hoey, 1882, p. 6; Williams and Norgate.

Footnote 39:

Dr. Joseph Edkins, _Chinese Buddhism_, pp. 250, 343; Trübner, 1880.

Footnote 40:

Fergusson, _Tree and Serpent Worship_, Introduction, p. 77.

Footnote 41:

This must be read in the light of Professor Max Müller’s _What can
India teach us?_

Footnote 42:

Luke viii. 46.

Footnote 43:

Even Kuenen and Wellhausen assume as established that Monotheism shows
itself with unmistakable distinctness in Hebrew prophecies of the
eighth century B.C. (Hibbert Lectures, 1882, p. 119; _Theological
Review_, 1874, pp. 329, 336; _Encyc. Brit._, art. ISRAEL). Professor
H. Schultz maintains that Monotheism was established in Israel from
the time of Moses downward, among the leaders of thought at least.
(_Alttest. Theolog._, 2d ed., 1878, pp. 440, 457.)

Footnote 44:

_Light of Asia and Light of the World_, pp. 40, 102, 161.

Footnote 45:

Weber, _Indische Studien_, vol. i. p. 400; J. Muir, _Sanskrit Texts_,
p. xxxiv; Lorinser, _Bhagavadgitâ_, Appendix, translated by Muir in
_Ind. Antiq._ vol. ii. p. 283.

Footnote 46:

_Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde_, translated by Wm.
Hoey, 1882, p. 292.

Footnote 47:

Müller, Gifford Lectures, _Natural Religion_, p. 169.

Footnote 48:

Dr. Caird, _Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, p. 343 _seq._

Footnote 49:

Sir A. Mitchell, Rhind Lectures for 1876 and 1878, _The Past in the
Present_, pp. 207, 214; Edinburgh, Douglas, 1880.

Footnote 50:

Whately, _Political Economy_, p. 68.

Footnote 51:

Max Müller, Gifford Lectures, _Natural Religion_, p. 54.

Footnote 52:

The savagery of a great city is in some aspects more awful than that
of Africa.

Footnote 53:

T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, p. 10.

Footnote 54:

Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, vol. i. p. 380.

Footnote 55:

Müller, _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, p. 41; _Chips from
a German Workshop_, vol. ii. p. 254.

Footnote 56:

Fairbairn, _Studies in Religion and Philosophy_, p. 13.

Footnote 57:

Baring Gould, _Origin and Development of Religious Belief_, vol. i. p.
109.

Footnote 58:

“Nations,” says Professor Goldwin Smith, “redeem each other. They
preserve for each other principles, truths, and hopes, and aspirations
which, committed to the keeping of one, might become extinct for ever.
They thus not only raise each other again when fallen, but they
prevent each other from falling.”—_Lectures on the Study of History_,
delivered in Oxford 1859-61, p. 71.

Footnote 59:

Celsus, quoting our Lord’s saying, Matt. xix. 24, and the exhortation
to forgive our enemies, Matt. v. 43, 45, alleged they were transferred
and coarsely perverted from Plato, _de Legibus_, and _Crito_.—Origen,
_contra Celsum_, Book vi. chaps. 15, 16, and Book vii. chap. 61.

Footnote 60:

_Enarr. in Psalm._ cxl. 6. Clement of Alexandria regarded Greek
philosophy as a προπαιδεία or preparatory discipline for the reception
of Christian truth, _Strom._ vi. chap. 8, and as a step to something
higher, ὑποβάθραν οὖσαν τῆς κατὰ Χριστὸν φιλοσοφίας, _Strom._ vi.
chap. 17.

Footnote 61:

Trench, Hulsean Lectures for 1846, p. 153.

LECTURE II.
THE HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY, AND THE
EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF THEIR RESPECTIVE SCRIPTURES.

It should be an advantage to the study of Buddhism that even in its origin it confronts us as the religion of a people sufficiently advanced in civilisation to be able to formulate their metaphysical conceptions and present us with their religious beliefs organised in a system. Like Christianity it not only inherited but also produced a considerable and very miscellaneous literature, whose contents throw valuable light upon the past from which it emerged and upon the course which it followed, and like Christianity it has left its stamp on most of the institutions of the peoples among whom it was successfully propagated. When all these sources of information have been properly investigated, we may hope that the story of the rise and progress of Buddhism in the East will be revealed with something at least of the clearness with which the history of Christianity is disclosed by the literature and art of the West.

To trace, however, the dawn and spread of Buddhism with anything like historical accuracy for the first six or seven hundred years of its course, is a task as yet beyond the literary ability of the times. It is doubtful whether the materials for such a work have as yet been collected, and he would be a bold man who would claim for the task of sifting what has already been furnished more than an earnest beginning. Not even Saint-Hilaire would now repeat the assertion so confidently made thirty years ago,[62] that “no new discoveries can change our conclusions regarding it”; for during the past generation the effect of fuller information has been not only to modify, but in several instances to revolutionise the theories formed concerning it. Discoveries are multiplying every year; and, though the knowledge thus acquired serves often more to reveal difficulties than to solve them, we may be thankful that the examination of them is engaging the attention of the highest order of scholarship, and hopeful, yea, even confident that since so many of the ablest and most patient minds are turned in this direction, the aggregate of progress will speedily be immense.

All that we know of Buddhism, and all that we are likely to know of it, is to be gathered from its own Scriptures; and a comparison of these with the Christian Scriptures reveals at the very outset a difference amounting to a vast contrast between them. The original Scriptures of Christianity have been before the tribunal of the world’s keenest and most hostile criticism for 1800 years; but we are only now beginning to make the acquaintance of the Scriptures of Buddhism, which have hardly been subjected to any cross-questioning worthy of the name. Those who have ventured to assail have only published their inability to understand them, and those most competent to criticise may be pardoned if they handle tenderly the fragments which they are collecting and translating for our use. The services which they are thus rendering to religion as well as to science are very great. Previously we had only anthologies extracted often without reference to date or authorship or connection to judge from, but now these learned pundits are furnishing us with books containing not only the wisdom and beauties of Eastern literature, but its follies and blemishes as well. Omitting only what is obscene and offensive to the moral sense,[63] they are giving us specimens of several strata of Oriental thought and belief, vertically and thoroughly cut, from which a correct understanding of the essential features of this very peculiar religion may with considerable probability be ascertained.

Only a portion of the Buddhist Scriptures are as yet available, and these we are certainly not at liberty to place side by side as of equal evidential value with the contents of the New Testament. It is said that two thousand manuscripts of the New Testament, or of portions of it, have been discovered, several of which are of great antiquity, and notwithstanding the immense number of various readings on points of detail, the text of the oldest corresponds substantially with that of the books as we have them to-day. We are informed, however, on the best authority, that “all Indian manuscripts are comparatively modern, that no manuscript written one thousand years ago is now existent in India, and that it is almost impossible to find one written five hundred years ago; for most manuscripts which claim to be of that date are merely copies of old ones, the dates of which are repeated by the copyists.”[64] It is admitted, moreover, that the literary honesty of these Indian translators and copyists is very questionable, that the books of the Buddhists have undergone wholesale textual alterations, that none of the Sanskrit works as yet known to us are unadulterated specimens of transmitted doctrines, that the oldest and most reliable authorities for the life of Buddha exaggerate greatly events which are said to have happened, and ascribe to him long discourses of which the writers themselves were the composers.[65] In respect, therefore, of literary accuracy and faithfulness of purpose, these old compilers and re-editors of the Buddhist books are far below the standard which criticism has inexorably applied to the versionists of the Christian Scriptures.

The faithfulness of our English versions is vouched for by the names of the translators, and yet they admit that their translations are only approximations.[66] From the very nature of the case they must be so. The East is very far distant from the West; its ways are not our ways; its thoughts are not our thoughts. Some one has said that “the _Iliad_ is separated from the _Rig Veda_ by an interval of several civilisations”; and if so, how vast must be the gulf separating Vedic and even Buddhist metaphysicians from the British philosopher of to-day! It is simply impossible for the most impartial translator to put himself in the place of the ancient Indian sage, and to prevent his own preconceptions from insinuating themselves among the data with which he has to deal. He has to express, as we have been reminded, “a lower order of ideas in a higher order of terms, and use words suggesting a wealth of analysis and association quite foreign to the thought to be reproduced. Translation from a lower to a higher language is thus a process of elevation.”[67] In reading these translations and the books founded upon them, we have constantly to guard against giving to such terms as “sin,” “lust,” “salvation,” “law,” “church,” and many others, our Christian conceptions of them. We are often perplexed whether the phrases employed, and even the very titles of the treatises, be really the equivalents of the ancient texts and titles, or nineteenth century conceptions of what they may be made to mean. A European scholar inheriting the results of ages of Christian culture may be more likely to interpret the reach of an old Buddhist expression than the monk who first used it; but he is always in danger of confounding that reach with his own firm grasp of truth, and of expressing his conceptions by phraseology which, if it could be explained to the ancient, would be rejected by him as inconsistent with his original meaning.

Another strong contrast between the two sets of scriptures emerges when we attempt to fix the dates at which the earliest Buddhist works were produced. The New Testament is admitted by authorities who cannot be accused of prejudice in favour of Christianity and even by antichristian critics, to contain the actual writings of some of the original disciples of Jesus. The very latest of the books which compose it was in circulation within a century after His death, while the great bulk of them were accepted before half a century had passed as the testimonies of those who were eye-witnesses of the rise of our religion.[68] M. Renan admits that the three Synoptical Gospels are the “tender remembrances and simple narratives of the first and second generations of Christians, written in substantially their present form by the men whose names they bear.”[69] The epistle of St. James and several of the epistles of St. Paul are almost now unanimously accepted as the products of the first generation. Mons. E. Burnouf therefore may safely aver that “the history of Christian doctrine and worship bears the crown over all others in respect that its records are complete.”[70] What of these records are comprised in the New Testament, though tried by the severest of tests, continues to-day as they were eighteen centuries ago delivered to the Church. Though the various readings in the mss. are said to be counted by 200,000, hardly one of them can be said to affect a fundamental doctrinal or historical statement; and so outstanding and distinct is their canonical character that it requires no external authority, but only comparison with them, to disclose what of early Christian literature is to be regarded as apocryphal.

The evidence on which Orientalists have to rely in fixing the date of the Buddhist scriptures is confessedly such “that we must not be surprised if those who are accustomed to test historical and chronological evidence in reference to Greece and Rome declined to be convinced by it.”[71] For centuries after the death of Buddha his followers assure us that they had no written books constituting their rules of faith and manners. The earliest written collection of which in their own records we have any historical trace is that of Ceylon, and all that can be said of it is “that there is nothing improbable” that part of it may have been reduced to writing about the first century B.C., but the whole was only fixed about 420 A.D. The Nepaulese collection is said to date only from the first Christian century; but it is not alleged that the whole of the works now in it were even then in existence. According to their own tradition, they had no written biography of Buddha till about the first century of our era, and no one who has examined that narrative or read the opinions expressed by Orientalists as to the date when it was produced—opinions so divergent as to indicate a difference of several centuries—would ever dream of employing it as evidence of what is alleged in it to have happened. It is simply impossible, therefore, to regard the Buddhist’s Pitakas as if they were of similar authoritative value with the New Testament, for, in fact, in respect of canonical worth they do not deserve to be ranked with much of our later patristic literature.