Chapter VI: Part 6

It is possible at least that changes so favourable to the fortunes of the new religion, and the social reforms which followed its extension, may have awakened in the pious the memories of old Vedic faith; and that the victories of Chandragupta may have suggested to the authors of the Suttas the idea of the invincible Buddha advancing through the ages, as the chariot-wheel of the sun disperses the clouds in the heavens. It is certain, however, that neither Buddha nor his earliest disciples ever dreamed of applying the title of Cakka-vatti to or of associating the promise of a better time with himself. To old Vedic faith as supporting his teaching or predicting his mission he never appealed; he ignored all previous teaching: and indeed in ancient Indian teaching, uninspired by either promise or hope, there is nothing prophetic. In the case of Christianity it is quite the contrary. The conception of the Messiah as the righteous and glorious King, under whose reign all the world would be blessed, was not suggested by political experience two centuries after the dawn of Christianity. It was formulated and predicted many centuries before the coming of Christ. The Hebrew, like the Aryan, never lost the memory of a happy past, but, unlike the Aryan, he placed his paradise not only in the past but in the future. With far richer materials at his command than the Aryan seems to have possessed for painting a vanished golden age, the Hebrew poets made very sparing use of them. A few paragraphs exhaust all they have to say as to the traditions of a paradise that had been lost, but their whole Bible is full of the hope of the good time which is coming to all the world. This hope, centred as it was in their Messiah, Christianity from the very first took up and promised to fulfil. The ministry of Jesus was scarcely begun before it was associated with Him. Among the first questions asked concerning Him was, “Is not this Messias?” Among the earliest declarations made was, “We have found the Messias.” Very soon in His career He confessed, “I that speak unto thee am He!” The Gospels and Epistles would be unintelligible without this perpetual reference to Messianic prediction; it is the golden thread which runs through all the Old Testament and unites it with the New. In its Messianic hope, Old Testament prophecy reached its highest and purest development, and the New Testament claims that in Christ it is finding its fulfilment. It may be alleged of course that the prophecy and the claim are alike delusions, but the prophecy at least was a fact, and its application to Christ was no legendary growth of a later generation, but the original and essential testimony of the earliest Christian teachers.

The other conception of Perfect Wisdom represented by Buddha the Awakened or Enlightened One is also confessedly an aftergrowth. The earliest traces which we have of Gotama after his death disclose him as a man who gained his knowledge by severe struggle, and who therefore, in the estimation of his followers, was a “Jina” or conqueror. As time went on, and his memory rose in the estimation of later generations, the faithful, guided by their belief in transmigration, projected this struggle for Buddhahood further and further into former stages of existence, till at last the idea was conceived that he was only one of a long series of Buddhas, of whom he was not to be the last. The development of this interesting speculation, with its distinctions into Buddhas who only save themselves—Paccekabuddhas—and the Sammâsambuddhas, who appear at very rare intervals, able and willing to save to the uttermost, need not here be traced. It is sufficient to note how unlike and contradictory is this belief to that which dominates in our religion. In Christ we have the _only_ Messiah, and He, having once come, we do not look for another. The hope of the Christian is fixed upon His coming again in glory; but it is the coming again of the _same_ Jesus. The unity of Deity colours and pervades all our thoughts of Divine communications with mankind; “there is one God, and one Mediator between God and man.” Consequently the doctrine of the Divine Word formulated in connection with Christ in St. John’s Gospel represents a very different set of ideas from the conception of Buddha as the Perfect Wisdom, to whom all worlds and all times were open. That conception of Buddha was probably an incorporation into the Buddhist creed from foreign sources, but the idea of Christ as the Son, “unto whom all things have been delivered by the Father,” so that “no one knoweth the Son save the Father, neither doth any know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him,” was a common one among the very earliest Christians of whom we have any trace. St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Paul, St. Luke all preach Christ, “unto whom has been committed all knowledge and judgment,” “who is before all things, and in whom all things consist,” “the image of the invisible God, in whom it pleased the Father that all fulness should dwell.”[176]

And so it is not in the latest Gospel but in the earliest Scriptures that we have the first indications of this doctrine as Christ the Word, though in the latest, as we might expect, it is more clearly formulated and more fully expounded. Written after the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the ancient Church, and the recognition of the Gentiles as fellow-heirs, by one who was quite conscious of the new intellectual position which Christianity occupied in relation to the speculations of Syria and Egypt, and of the dangers which thereby accrued to the faith, its author took up a term very current at the time in theosophic and metaphysical writings, and specially those of Philo, to set forth the truth of the Life whose manifestation he had witnessed. That St. John did not borrow the term from Philo is evident from the very different use which he has made of it, and the very different purpose which he had in view. By it Philo expressed the conception of Divine intelligence in the abstract, while St. John employed it to suggest the concrete idea of God’s personal action. Both found it in the Septuagint and the Hebrew traditional lore;[177] but while Philo gave it a Greek, St. John adhered to its Hebrew significance. The first chapter of St. John compared with a page of Philo[178] will reveal at once the difference between them, and convince us that the teaching of Philo concerning the Logos leads further and further away from the idea of the incarnation which is the foundation-truth of the teaching of St. John. His doctrine would be quite unintelligible as an application or continuation of the doctrine of Philo, but it is intelligible and consistent as the final co-ordination of truths concerning the Divine Being disclosed in the Old Testament viewed by a man whose antecedents and modes of thought were very different from those of the Alexandrian sage.[179]

The ideas suggested by the “Angel of the Presence” in the historic and prophetic books, by the “Word of the Lord” in the Psalms, and by “Wisdom” in the Books of Wisdom, indicate the rays which converge in St. John’s doctrine of the Christ. As one who tarried long after the first generation of Christians had gone to their rest, as one who had not only pondered longer, and in deeper silence, the Life he had seen manifested, but who had found its interpretation in such providences as the spreading of the Churches and the destruction of the State, he was abler to meet the necessities of a wider age, by setting the truth in rounder form and clearer light; but while he expands and expounds the teaching of the first generation, he adds and introduces not a single element. His testimony is identical with that proclaimed at the Resurrection, that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, and that Christ is the only begotten Son of God.

It is not as one who has acquired truth by long struggle, not as one who has fought or forced His way to light, that Christ presents Himself in the Gospels, but as one who can say: “I am the way, the truth, the life,” “the light of the world.” Yet along with this stupendous demand upon the faith of humanity there is a humility and simplicity undiscoverable in the Buddha of the Pitakas. Self-consciousness, self-reliance, self-culture—these are the phrases most suggestive of the system and of the life of the great Indian sage, while not self-abasement, but self-oblivion, characterises the teaching and life of Jesus of Nazareth. Identity with the Highest, manifested by absolute surrender to Him, is the essence of the Revelation of Christ. Always is the Father confessed to be the source of all grace and truth, and if the Son asks to be glorified, it is that the Father may be glorified in Him. We are certainly not contemplating similarities when we look at the Buddha of the Suttas and the Christ of the Gospels, but contrasts more widely separated than the soul is from the body. In Buddha we have a historical personage, who can be thoroughly accounted for as the product and outgrowth of his past, and of his environment; in Christ we have one whom no philosophy of history has ever explained. Alone and unapproachable, He meets us as one who is really human, because He has become man, one who has arisen among men to save them, but because He has come through and to them. He is not just one of the many, a son of men, the product of a divinely-trained humanity, but the Son of Man, who as Son of God, incarnated in the nature of all men, has become the Head and Creator of a new humanity. Correct, improve, embellish as we may, the portrait left us of the gentle teacher of Magadha, we never can lift him up to that level which would justify his being worshipped or being addressed, as Jesus of Nazareth has been by the consensus of all the Christian ages, “Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ. Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.”

Footnote 120:

_E.g._ Sinai = Hagar (Gal. iv. 24-31); also Claudius = ὁ κατέχων (2
Thess. ii. 6, 7); Hausrath, _Life and Times of Jesus_, vol. i. p. 77.

Footnote 121:

Derenbourg, _Hist. de la Palestine d’après les Talmuds_, pp. 159, 202.

Footnote 122:

Wellhausen, _The Pharisees and Sadducees_, pp. 8, 26-43; Greifswald,
1874.

Footnote 123:

Jos. _Antiq._ xiii. 5. 9, xv. 10. 4, 5; _Bell. Jud._ ii. 8. 2, 14.

Footnote 124:

Keim, _Jesus of Nazara_, vol. i. p. 392.

Footnote 125:

Delitzsch, _Jesus and Hillel_, pp. 31 _seq._; Pirké Abôth, Cambridge,
1877, _passim_.

Footnote 126:

Jos. _Antiq._ xvii. 4.

Footnote 127:

Philo, _Quod omnis Probus Liber_, p. 12.

Footnote 128:

Bühler, _Ind. Ant._ vol. vii. p. 143; Jacobi, “Mahâvira and his
Predecessors,” _Ind. Ant._ vol. viii. pp. 311-314; Kern, _History of
Buddhism in India_, vol. i. p. 143; Colebrooke’s _Essays_, vol. i. p.
380.

Footnote 129:

See “Jainism,” by Dr. Shoolbred—Report of the Missionary Conference,
1888, vol. i. p. 41; Wilson’s _Essays_, vol. i. p. 427 _seq._

Footnote 130:

“Sramana,” in Brahman speech, was a man who performed hard penances,
from _sram_, to work hard. There is another Sanscrit root, _sam_, to
quiet, and from it afterwards the popular etymology derived the word.
See Professor Max Müller’s translation of the Dhammapada in _Sacred
Books of the East_, vol. x. p. 65 _note_.

Footnote 131:

There seems to have been four great divisions of Sramanas, with as
many as sixty-three philosophical systems represented by them. The
Brahmanas were also similarly divided. See Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books
of the East_, vol. xi. Part ii. pp. 15, 16, 88, 93.

Footnote 132:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 71.

Footnote 133:

See _Year-Book of Protestant Theology_ for 1883 for an account of the
views of Professor Loman of Amsterdam.

Footnote 134:

M. Senart, _Legend of Buddha_, Paris, 1875; Kern, _History of Buddhism
in India_: Schoebel. _Buddh. Actes de la Soc. Philol._; Paris, 1874,
vol iv. pp. 160 _seq._

Footnote 135:

Annual Report of the Asiatic Society; Paris, July 1875.

Footnote 136:

Cunningham, _Ancient Geog. of India_, vol. i. p. 147; Oldenberg,
_Buddha, etc._, p. 95; Beal, _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 67.

Footnote 137:

“Mâra eat le démon de l’amour, du péché et de la mort,” says Burnouf
in his _Introduction to the Study of Indian Buddism_, p. 76; see also
Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part ii. p. 159, for
the popular conception of Buddha’s temptation; the arrows of Mâra are
“flower-pointed,” like Kama’s, the Hindu god of love. See Dhammapada,
_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part i. p. 17.

Footnote 138:

Geikie, _Life of Christ_, vol. i. p. 449.

Footnote 139:

Mahavagga, i. 5. 2; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xvii.

Footnote 140:

This is not the place to discuss the substance of their respective
teachings. Their aims seemed to be similar, for both proclaimed
freedom to be gained by the Truth, or saving knowledge, but their
conceptions of the knowledge that saves are as widely contrasted as
are their ideas of salvation. If we put the Sermon on the Mount side
by side with Buddha’s first sermon (translated in vol. xi. p. 146 of
_Sacred Books of the East_) we find contradiction in almost every
sentence. “Blessed are the poor in spirit” is an utterance not only
foreign to but in direct antithesis to the preaching of Buddha. He has
no sympathy with the “poor in spirit,” if we take the phrase in the
light of the old Hebrew concept of it. His benediction is reserved for
the self-conscious and self-reliant, who are bent upon self-culture
and self-development. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, etc., and thy neighbour as thyself.” Buddha found no higher to
adore, and no other than self to consider. The moral precepts in his
law are based on no appeal to conscience, and are inspired by no sense
of duty. Others were regarded as the occasion for winning merit, and
kindness done to them was not done for their sake, but with the view
of securing the safety of the doer.

Footnote 141:

Dr. Oldenberg (_Buddha, etc._, p. 148) very properly remarks that
Ambapali the courtesan was no Mary Magdalene, and that she was not
regarded by Buddha as the woman that was a sinner was regarded by
Christ. Buddha had not Christ’s horror of sin, and therefore felt none
of His boundless pity for the frailty of its victims; of hatred of sin
in the Christian sense Buddhism knows nothing. Its highest virtue is
imperturbability, a serenity that is apathetic in regard to the most
outrageous wrong or the most heinous wickedness. Cariya Pitaka, iii.
15; also _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part ii. p. 151.

Footnote 142:

Bishop Bigandet, _Life of Gaudama_, p. 287; Professor H. Wilson,
_Essays_, vol. ii. p. 243; Wheeler, _History of India_, vol. iii. p.
139; Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 148; Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, in
_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. pp. 71, 72.

Footnote 143:

Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, vi. 10, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. p.
114. Dr. Edkins, in _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 57, gives a version of an
appearance of Buddha after cremation to his mother, Máya, who came
down from heaven to see his coffin. Professor Childers finds no trace
in any Pali earliest literature of any belief in Buddha’s existence
after death (_Dictionary of Pali Language_, p. 472, note 1).

Footnote 144:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, pp. 322, 323; Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, p.
264.

Footnote 145:

In the Bhagavadgitá loving devotion for Krishna is demanded as the
only means of salvation; but Krishna-worship began very considerably
later than the origin of Christianity. Professor Müller admits
(Gifford Lectures, p. 99) that Christian influences were possible
then, but says that there is no necessity for admitting them. He cites
the passage from Bhagavad. ix. 29 (_Sacred Books of the East_, vol.
viii. p. 34), “They who worship me with devotion or love, they are in
me, and I in them,” as an interesting parallel to John vi. 7 and xvii.
23, but we must remember that St. John’s words were circulating all
over the world for generations before these were penned.

Footnote 146:

Mahavagga, v. 1. 18.

Footnote 147:

The Lalita Vistara, of which there are many versions, is the chief
authority for the legends. In the _Buddhist Birth-Stories_, translated
by T. W. Rhys Davids, in Bigandet’s _Life of Gaudama_, and Spence
Hardy’s Manual (_Legends of the Buddhists_), in the _Romantic Legend_
of Sakya Buddha, translated by Professor S. Beal, will be found a
large and interesting miscellany of the prodigies connected with the
coming of Buddha.

Footnote 148:

A wife, not a virgin; _Romantic Legend_, pp. 32, 36, 37, 41.

Footnote 149:

Lalita Vistara, p. 63, Calcutta edition; _Buddhist Birth-Stories_, pp.
62, 68.

Footnote 150:

Nalaka Sutta, Sutta Nipâta, xi. 1. 20, 21; _Sacred Books of the East_,
vol. x. Asita, the aged ascetic, is said to have ascended to heaven
after his daily repast, and upon finding the gods in joyful commotion
he at length returned to see the new-born wonder (_Birth-Stories_, p.
69).

Footnote 151:

Title given by the translator of the Dhanima-Kakka-ppavatana Sutta, in
vol. xi. of _Sacred Books of the East_.

Footnote 152:

Spence Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 187, quoting the Pujáwaliya,
said to be later than the thirteenth century A.D.

Footnote 153:

Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part ii. p. 17.

Footnote 154:

_Ibid._ vol. x. Part ii. pp. 31, 45.

Footnote 155:

Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, iv. 49, 50, _ibid._ vol. xi. p. 81.

Footnote 156:

Bigandet, _op. cit._ p. 323; Spence Hardy, _Manual_, p. 347;
Mahâparinibhâna Sutta, vi. 11-16.

Footnote 157:

_Das Evangelium von Jesu in seinen Verhältnissen zur Buddha-Sage und
Buddha-Lehre_; Leipzig, 1882.

Footnote 158:

Let any one compare the prediction of the so-called Indian Simeon, the
Nalaka Sutta, in vol. x. p. 125 of _Sacred Books of the East_, with
Luke ii. 25; the account of the Temptation by Mara, in the _Romantic
Legend_, pp. 204, 224, or in Hardy’s _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 183,
with Matt. iv. 1; the so-called Transfiguration in Mahâparinibhâna,
iv. 49, vol. xi. _Sacred Books of the East_, p. 81, with Matt. xvii.
1-8; the feast of the courtesan Ambopali, in Mahâparinibhâna Sutta,
ii. 16. 25, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. p. 30, with Christ’s
treatment of the Magdalene in Luke vii. 36, and he will see at once
how improbable and even absurd is the theory that the Evangelists
borrowed from the Buddhist compilers. That we are dealing with quite
an inferior order of facts is apparent when we compare one of the most
touching coincidences, Buddha’s last discourse to the Beloved Ananda
in Mahâparinibhâna Sutta, v. 34. 35, “Let not yourself be troubled,”
with John xiv. 1-6. In some of the miracles accompanying the birth and
temptations of Buddha, there are not only gross absurdities but
positive indecencies, which by the simplicity and modesty and
reticence of the Gospel narratives are powerfully condemned. See
_Lalita Vistara_, chaps. vi. and vii., and _Buddhist Birth-Stories_,
vol. i. pp. 58, 68.

Footnote 159:

This is a very great assumption indeed. Foucaux, its translator,
assigns it to the first century B.C., but T. W. Rhys Davids assigns it
to some Nepaulese poet “who lived between six hundred and a thousand
years after Buddha’s death” (Hibbert Lectures, pp. 197, 204). A
Chinese version is said to have been in existence about 70 A.D.
Rajendralal Mitra, its English translator, admits this in his
Introduction, p. 48, but whether that was a version, or another book
altogether, or how far it corresponded with the _Lalita Vistara_, no
scholar has been confident to say. Dr. Beal also mentions a life of
Buddha by Asvaghosha as probably in circulation about the middle of
the Christian era (_Chinese Buddhism_, p. 73).

Footnote 160:

Mahâparinibhâna Sutta, translated by T. W. Rhys Davids, _Sacred Books
of the East_, vol. xi.

Footnote 161:

The blessed Buddha rebuked Pindola Bhâradvâga (for having won a bowl
of sandalwood by performing a miracle), saying, “This is improper, not
according to rule, unsuitable, unworthy of a Samana, unbecoming, and
ought not to be done. How can you for the sake of a miserable wooden
pot display before the laity the superhuman quality of your miraculous
power of Iddhi?... This will not conduce either to the conversion of
the unconverted or to the increase of the converted” (Kullavagga, v.
8. 2). The danger of performing a miracle by power of Iddhi, for
self-glorification, is exemplified in the story of Devadatta in
Kullavagga, vii. 1. 2, 3. In the Mahavagga, Kullavagga, Sutta Nipâta,
and similar books, however, miracles are ascribed to Buddha, and
conversions attributed to their performance.

Footnote 162:

Luke i. 1.

Footnote 163:

T. W. Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, p. 128.

Footnote 164:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 190.

Footnote 165:

Matthew xi. 27; xxviii. 16-20.

Footnote 166:

Mark i. 7-11; ii. 10-28; viii. 38; xii. 35-37.

Footnote 167:

Pressensé, _Vie de Jésus_, p. 373.

Footnote 168:

Cox, _Commentary on Job_, p. 19.

Footnote 169:

See Mahavagga, i. pp. 15-20, for specimens of the “three thousand five
hundred” wonders of Buddha. “The marvellous in the Gospels is but
sober good sense compared with what we find in ... the Hindu European
mythologies” (Renan, _Études d’histoire Relig._ pp. 177, 203).

Footnote 170:

Godet, _Lectures in Defence of the Christian Faith_, pp. 118-161.

Footnote 171:

Dr. Dods, _Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ_, p. 201; Dr. Fairbairn,
_Studies in Religion as a Philosophy_, p. 36.

Footnote 172:

p. 58, one-vol. edition.

Footnote 173:

Trench, Hulsean Lectures, p. 150.

Footnote 174:

Sutta Nipâta, translated by Fausböll in vol. x. p. 102; parallel
suggested to John xviii. 37.

Footnote 175:

Hibbert Lectures, pp. 144-147.

Footnote 176:

Dorner, _Doctrine of the Person of Christ_, Introd. pp. 56-60, 64-70;
Liddon, Bampton Lectures, 1866, pp. 364-380; Lange, _Life of Christ_,
vol. i. pp. 121-124.

Footnote 177:

_E.g._ the Targums.

Footnote 178:

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

Footnote 179:

Sears, _Fourth Gospel_, pp. 220 _seq._; Westcott, _Introduction to St.
John_, pp. xvi, xvii; Dorner, _op. cit._ vol. i. pp. 327-332.

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

What was the discovery that rewarded Gotama’s long travail and conflict under the Bo-tree at Bohimanda, and gained for him the title of Buddha, the Awakened or Enlightened One? and what was the message of “glad tidings” which since then has made so many millions of the human race regard him as their Deliverer? We shall never obtain the answer to these questions if we follow the legends and the later scriptures, although they profess to give all the steps of the process by which he wrought out his deliverance. These all date from a time when the seeds which he had sown among the thorns of uncleansed superstitions, had grown up into as gigantic and tangled a jungle of speculation as the world has ever seen. Had he confronted his day and generation proclaiming as the result of his laborious and painful inquiries the complicated metaphysical system formulated in these books, he would have made few converts. He might have become the head of another sect, the founder of another school, but he never would have established a religion so extensive as that which for so many centuries, and among so many peoples, has been known by his name.

Following the Southern scriptures, and guided by the eminent Oriental scholars who have made them available by translations, we may be able to trace, in the wild growth of fancy which has grown up around them, the leading lines of the original teaching. The real doctrine of Buddha did not profess to be a philosophy inquiring into the ultimate ground of things. He is represented as having despised philosophisings, and as having inveighed against profitless questionings as earnestly as did St. Paul against vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called.[181] His object was avowedly practical, and he kept silent when asked concerning themes whose discussion did not tend to “illumination and quiet.” Notwithstanding this, there must have been from the first, even in the earliest forms of his teaching, ideas and thoughts beyond the comprehension of the simple. For a while he hesitated, as we have seen, to proclaim his discovery, because “the way” was too hidden for men to know, and too hard, even when known, for them to follow. Like the Jewish Scribe, he conceived that to the wise alone, and not to the ignorant, belonged the law, and to the wise alone was reserved the hope of final deliverance. To children, and to the uninstructed struggling classes, the preaching was not made fully known, as really beyond them. Unlike Christ, whose preaching was for all without exception, whose gospel, though full of mystery, confers illumination even on babes, the law of Buddha was in its entirety for the sages only, and instead of conferring knowledge on those who obeyed it, it made knowledge a condition of obtaining deliverance. Nevertheless, though the deductions were within the grasp only of the few, his popularity proves that his fundamental and principal dogmas must have been such as all could understand, and they seem to have been published, as Saint-Hilaire observes, in a language so “simple and vernacular” as to induce even the children and the ignorant to enter the paths that lead to deliverance.[182]

He entered upon his travail, in order to find a way of escape from the endless cycles of unsatisfying change, and he believed that he had discovered it. Leavening every part of his system is his impression of the universality of suffering; and suffering, its origin, its extinction, and the path or method that leads to its extinction, are the so-called “four noble truths” which constitute in Buddhism the “Law of the Wheel.” In Buddhism the wheel is the dominant symbol, corresponding to the cross in Christianity, and he who would preach or roll onward the wheel must present to the affectionate consideration of the hearers these “four sacred verities”—the verity of suffering, the verity that concupiscence is the cause of suffering, the verity that concupiscence can be quenched in Nirvana, and the verity that the way that leads to Nirvana is the sublime eightfold path of Buddha’s law. From his first public discourse at Benares—corresponding to our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount—on to his last words on the night on which he died, this, with manifold amplifications, but ever as the one pathetic refrain, is the substance of his teaching, “through not understanding and grasping which, O monks, we have had to run and wander so long in weary paths, both you and I.”[183]

The primitive creed of Buddhism was different from, though not wholly antagonistic to, the popular creed or theory of life of Brahmanism. Weighed by Brahmanism, existence was found wanting, as only illusion, a specious something which truly was a mere nothing, and identity of the personal with the universal self was the only reality. By Buddhism existence was condemned, not as an illusion, but as wholly and solely suffering.[184] “What think ye, O disciples: whether is more, the water that is in the four great oceans, or the tears which have flown from you, and have been shed by you, while ye strayed and wandered in this long pilgrimage, and sorrowed and wept, because that which ye abhorred was your portion, and that which ye loved was not your portion?”[185] It was not “vanity of vanities!” but “misery of miseries! all is misery!” Life was misery, because governed by the immeasurable and wretched past; death was misery, because opening up an equally immeasurable and wretched future. As long as man exists he must be miserable, unable to “cease his wanderings,” and “still from one sorrow to another thrown.” The only deliverance conceivable from this interminable evil would be to break the bands of existence altogether. “Surely ’twere better not to be.” And how “not to be” seems to have been the problem which Buddha professed to solve.

May we not conclude with Saint-Hilaire that this, “his first dogma, was his first fatal error”?[186] With all his intellectual ability he never sought to emancipate himself from the superstition and nightmare of transmigration. Though he had cast off all faith in the government of a divine power, he never questioned the belief with which the lower aboriginal races had infected the thought of his ancestors, that life was governed by this law. It is averred that he found it necessary to solve the conflict between his ideas of justice and the actual order of things, which has exercised the human mind always and everywhere. A modern Buddhist, fortunate in having Mr. Alabaster to introduce him to the notice of an English-reading public, so propounds this belief, and, purged from some of its errors, tries to vindicate it. “For the law of perfect justice,” he says, “demands that human conditions should be equalised, and that good and bad luck should be balanced sometime and somewhere. If a good man be poor and wretched now, he must be reaping the fruits of what he had sown in a previous stage of existence.”[187] Yet surely this is a very superficial theory for an Oriental professing Western culture to formulate. It is judging of life as children and savages judge of it, by the evidence of the senses, and according to a very inferior and inaccurate standard of good and evil. Poverty and suffering, though confessedly painful, may not be regarded by a good man as wholly evil in this world. Circumstances which the savage and the child would covet as realising their dreams of paradise may be the reverse of desirable to the mature and thoughtful man. The believers in transmigration make no distinction between what is evil and what is simply painful. Evil is not that which pains, but that which defiles and degrades and destroys, and good is not just that which pleases, but that which elevates and ennobles and purifies. The law of absolute justice does not require, as the modern Buddhist demands, that human conditions should be equalised, and that all men should be treated alike; for no two human beings all the world over are absolutely alike; but it demands that each should receive the treatment most conducive to his healthy growth as a moral being, and what appears to sense as the harder lot may commend itself to reason as the better portion of the man to whom it has been assigned, because most suited to his need.

The dogma of transmigration is said to occupy in the Buddhist system a position analogous to that of the Fall in our Christian theology; but in reality the two are diametrically opposed, both in their essential ideas and the consequences which flow from them. They are analogous only in respect that they each profess to account for the conflict between man’s ideal of himself and his actual condition. The existence of evil is admitted by both, but the Buddhist believes that evil belongs to the very essence of man, and therefore he can find no prospect of relief from it, here or hereafter. For as long as the stream of existence continues it will always fall below its source, and evil, according to the inexorable rule of nature, will propagate only evil. The Hebrew, however, did not conceive of it as essential to or as always in the nature of man. His ancestral beliefs carry him beyond the Fall; his pedigree starts with the most sublime of all theories of human origin that has ever been formulated in human speech: “Let us make man in our image and after our likeness, and let him have dominion over” the creature. Dominion over nature man has not, for he is too much under its dominion, and to this subjection much of his suffering is directly traceable. The Hebrew professed to have the origin of this condition revealed to him in a breach between man and his Maker, consequent upon man’s self-assertion and selfish withdrawal of his life from the source of life, which must involve suffering and death. So through all the weary generations there is the same invariable sequence of sin entering the world, and death by sin. And yet at his very worst the Hebrew believed that it was once far better with the human race, and on this belief he dared to rear the structure of his magnificent hope, that mankind shall be restored to the original close relationship with God, and therefore to a grander dominion over nature, and to a happier and even more prosperous life than that of which his ancestors had dreamed as their primeval state.

Whatever may be said of the doctrine of the Fall, belief in it is indeed “a condition of hope,”[188] and the belief and the hope both spring from their faith in God as Creator and Governor of the race, which characterised the Hebrew prophets. Wherever that faith is lively, it not only sustains man amid the sufferings of life, but it nerves him to struggle with physical and moral evil to vanquish it. The purer the faith the more resolute is the struggle; the holier the Deity becomes to the thought of man the stronger becomes his conviction that life is a blessing, and that all its struggles may conduce to peace. There is an instinct which seems to suggest that there are worse things than troubles, and that they may be blessings of no mean quality after all. Christianity has made the startling revelation that suffering is not peculiar to man, as the consequence of his perversity in traversing the Divine order; for not only is Christ presented to us as the greatest sufferer, but in Him God the highest and the holiest is disclosed as involved in it, and as taking upon Himself the responsibilities and the sufferings which our sin and need entail. But if in Christ there is revealed the greatest sufferer, it is as one whose suffering is not in vain. By suffering He conquers that which has produced it; by enduring suffering He ends it; and He reigns and finds His blessedness in making us partakers of His victory over it. So again Christianity, unlike other religions which promise salvation _from_ suffering, offers salvation _through_ suffering. It alone asserts the utility of suffering; others regard it as evil, Christianity as evil overruled for good. Others reckon it as a mere loss or waste, Christianity as something that may be turned to profit as the condition and preparation for joy. Joy in the Christian conception is not the reward of suffering, nor compensation for suffering, but the fruit and issue of suffering which leads to it, as travail leads to birth. So instead of evading or ignoring it, Christ would have us recognise and acquiesce in it, and even be thankful for it, as necessary not for our personal profit, but for the gain of mankind. By His sufferings we are healed, and through our sufferings we fill up what remains of His for the redemption of the world. Only through “the long travail of ages yet to be” will there be born in the evolution of God’s redemptive purpose that better race from which all suffering shall have passed away, because disobedience will have had an end. Fellowship in Christ’s sufferings has thus transfigured the afflictions of all who believe in Him. Unlike the Indian, tortured by endless change, without any evolution from low to higher, from evil or imperfect to what is good and perfect, the Christian can endure suffering not only patiently but also cheerfully, knowing that he is suffering not just for his own sake, but that in ways mysterious he is lightening the load of many, and helping to bring to an end the long anguish of the whole creation.

But of this consolation which comes from faith in God the Creator, and therefore the Redeemer of man from destruction, Buddha had deprived himself. Unlike the Brahman who sought escape from the evils of transmigration by a process of subsidence into the universal Self, he professed to find no trace of this Absolute Self. The Brahman postulated the Infinite and reasoned from it, but Buddha started from quite the opposite pole. He professed to deal with life as he found it, and so reasoning from man outward, he asserted that the necessity for transmigration was involved, not in the illusion of Brahma, but in man’s own character. Instead of being a natural or divine necessity, it was a moral necessity created by man, which having its cause in his own action could also by him be destroyed.

And so Pantheistic speculation, in this instance at least, ripened into its proper fruit. The passage from conceiving Deity as characterless passionless self, to discarding Deity altogether from human thought, is a sure and generally a very rapid one. When we come to think of Deity as of being diffused and dispersed, we will soon omit the thought altogether in the recognition only of physical force. Brahmanic speculation had resolved the deities of the ancient books into abstractions, and Buddha recognised no such abstractions in the government of human life. His creed was fundamentally atheistic, as directly contradicting belief in a supreme ruler of the universe.[189] Not that he denied the existence of the gods believed in by his countrymen. On the contrary, he allowed them to continue in the popular thought and speech, and even encouraged disciples who had not yet reached the highest knowledge to try to acquire merit by virtue, so as to secure after death a re-birth into their society. Similarly he admitted the existence of devils or demons, and their influence for evil upon man. All through his career he was beset by Mara, the sensual king of all who submit to him; but Buddha was superior not only to Mara, but to all the gods in the popular pantheon, for they, alike with the lowest and the weakest of things, were subject to the law of transmigration. Man might rise to a higher heaven than what they occupied; they might fall to the lowest hell. “Their worlds must perish like that of man, and if ever they attained to final salvation, it could only be by the same way in which a worm might hope to reach it.”[190] Throwing his “plummet down the broad deep universe,” he cried, “Gods many,” but no god able to save. All alike with men were bound in fetters, because ignorant of the truth he knew. Naturally, therefore, they are represented in the legends as profiting by his preaching and as seeking unto him for instruction, while those of them who refused, or could not walk in his ways, came to be regarded with pity.[191]

In like manner his creed was as essentially materialistic. Man was no spiritual being, but a bundle of Sankharas—a term, it is said, very difficult to translate, but implying that person meant a mass of “forms” or material qualities so changing as to be never the same for two consecutive moments. Belief in a soul he regarded as a heresy, which he distinctly classed with sensuality and belief in the efficacy of sacrificial rites.[192] To the heart as the sixth sense he ascribed the power of conceiving ideas without form, as the eye had the power of perceiving objects; but this disappeared in dissolution as completely as did the others, and what was re-born was not the soul but the quality, the merit or demerit acquired. This startling assertion of Bishop Bigandet’s[193] has been confirmed and amplified by others, specially by Rhys Davids, and so the question at once suggests itself, now that the governing ideas of Deity and the separate existence of the soul were expelled from the human mind,—What was there left to give vitality and coherence to his system as a religion? A kind of religion is conceivable when something eternal and self-dependent is recognised, if not without and above a man, at least within him; but here is a religion vast and comprehensive springing from the determination to annihilate all religion, asserting not simply that man is independent of all superior beings, but that as the sum-total of groups of sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies, and potentialities, nothing of his personality can survive dissolution, and how are we to account for it?[194]

The answer is to be sought for in the working of that great moral instinct which is at the root of the belief in transmigration. Though there was no person, no soul to emigrate from the body, though the man perished, there was something which he called the Karma—a word coined by old Brahman sages long before him, though used by them in a different sense—that survived.[195] The aggregate of the good and evil in the life that had come to an end formed the seed of another existence, so that each new individual and generation became the exact and inevitable results of those that had preceded them. It was evidently a theory of continuity as unscientific as it was unphilosophic. It could not be called an evolution in any sense of the word, seeing it meant the appearance in a new individual of the mental and physical acts of another who had ceased to be. The assertion, again, that though there was no “continuing consciousness,” no transience of soul in any sense from one person to the other, the two persons are one, has been very properly stigmatised as a “psychological absurdity.”[196] From the first, though one of their stablest dogmas, this one was a difficulty to the Buddhists themselves. Their learned men never professed to justify it to reason, but accepted it as a mystery, in open contradiction to their principle that everything was to be rejected which could not be comprehended or explained. The common people again simply ignored it, and adhered to the belief of their fathers in continuity of life and personal identity for man in the future. The sages might refine, but the moral sense of the masses could not escape from the conviction that the evil which they had done must follow them, and the good which they would do could not be interred with their bones. Even the speculation of the sages was a telling confirmation of the truth that man cannot get rid of himself. He may make a mock at God, may demand, If a man die can he live again? or how differs the life of a man from the life of a beast? but he cannot refine away his moral sense and the instinct of retribution which is inwoven in his inmost being. Buddha acknowledged no moral government of Deity, discarded the old belief that the same soul must receive the reward of the deeds done in the body; he denied even to the soul a separate existence from the perishable body; but he was haunted by the ghost of personal identity. He felt absolutely certain that there was a real connection of cause and effect between past and present and future, and that each act of the soul must work out its full effect to the bitter end.[197] So it was only by profession that God was mocked; men were witnesses to themselves of a Sovereign Power forcing Himself upon them, even when they tried to forsake Him, compelling them to receive His thoughts when they would not think for themselves. So in primitive Buddhism we have the strange paradox that out of Atheism there arose a religion, with a demand upon conscience almost Christian, and asserting as Christianity does the eternal necessity of righteousness and truth.[198]

The analogy which has been suggested between the Buddhist dogma of Karma and the Christian doctrine of heredity is a very interesting one. It is strange that the law of heredity, so clearly indicated in the Bible, should be proclaimed in our age as a modern discovery. Infidelity formerly denounced the Bible for teaching that sin and its penalty were transmitted from generation to generation, forgetting that but for transgression the law of heredity could only and always entail good. Laws are to be judged by their intention, and this one, designed to secure and transmit the increment of good in each generation, is manifestly perverted by conditions for which it is not responsible. The law, however, which asserts itself in humanity by entailing on the generations the blessing of good as well as the curse of evil, is now being proclaimed and interpreted, not by divines, but by men of science and philosophy. The twin truth of the unity of humanity, elemental in the Hebrew and Christian religions, though formerly strangely forgotten or denounced by infidelity, is also adopted as a professed discovery of our century. We are all agreed that humanity is one, that each life is part of a larger life, and so the injury of the part is the injury of the whole. Sin could not enter humanity without dragging it down, and holiness could not enter and conquer without lifting it up. If one could appear in humanity without sin, not a link in the diseased chain, but perfectly free from all taint of disease, is the supposition incredible that he would have the effect upon humanity of a new creation? His coming would imply the reversal of the drift toward evil and the weakening of the inherited and accumulated tendency to depravity. It would be a bringing under Divine influence of this mysterious principle of heredity, with results for good which no human intellect can measure, and establish a once greatly derided assertion, that as in one Adam, that is, one kind of humanity, all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

Buddha had a clear apprehension of the truth of heredity, but he had not the faintest conception of the unity of humanity. His theory of life was essentially atomic. Humanity was not to him one whole, but a congeries of individuals, each one an end to himself, and living just to himself. The injury done to self by wrong-doing was always present to a Buddhist’s thought, but the suffering thus caused to others was never taken into account. He had no idea of the whole suffering in the one, and consequently no sense of duty to mankind. Though believing in the propagative power of good and evil, he did not work for the good of coming generations, but solely for the rescue of the individual from the whirlpool of suffering existence. It has been charitably suggested that his aim finds its analogue in the offset to personal extinction so winningly presented by “George Eliot” and Mr. John Morley, whereby though dead and gone for ever in ourselves, we may “live again in minds made better by our presence,” and “in pulses stirred to generosity.”[199] Buddhism had no such hope; the age, the system itself, were alike incapable of conceiving it. The time for that kind of Positivism had not come. The human mind had to undergo long centuries of Christian culture before it was possible for the nineteenth-century agnostic poetess and philosopher thus to expound their creed, for modern Positivism has been powerfully though indirectly influenced by the faith which it contradicts, and, like many of the assailants of Christianity, it owes to it the most of its strength and the best of its weapons.

Christianity, starting from the conception of man as no outgrowth of nature, but a new creation in it, a being within and distinct from his body as the driver is from the chariot,[200] has a theory of human destiny contrasted utterly with that of Buddhism. Man’s teeth have been set on edge because his fathers have eaten a sour grape, but the brand of pain upon past transgressions helps him to conquer the taint transmitted in the blood. Though he finds heavy temptation in inherited tendencies, he finds in every temptation a way of escape in a call to yield to other tendencies which are ever drawing his soul to goodness. Sharing a confessedly sinful humanity, he may be partaker of a sinless one, and thus, if evil reigns over him unto death, the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus can free him from it.

Buddhism had no such hope and goal for man; indeed, we may well wonder that a pessimism more thorough than that of Brahmanism did not deprive it of all hope and sink it into fatalism. Left alone to fight his way through the universe, struggling in a maelstrom of forces with no help for him in man, no hope of sympathy in God, a Buddhist would surely despair. On the contrary, unlike the Moslem cowering under the thought of relentless will, he accepted the situation with Christian determination to improve it.[201] He could hope for deliverance, for suffering had an origin, and if the cause could be removed then suffering would end. The coils of misery could be unwound, the curse of humanity could be abolished, if only man could procure for himself emancipation from the necessity of Karma. Now this the true Buddhist believed he could gain by the extinction of all desire. Plato adopting the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration, taught that the future organism of the soul would depend upon the cravings which it had fostered here.[202] Somewhat similarly Christians believe that the future of the man will depend upon his most dominant present habits, and that, disembodied, the spirit will gravitate unerringly to the society which it has made of its kind. Buddhism, believing in no soul, maintained that in the dying creature a particular thirst or cleaving to existence caused the birth of another creature; and so he who would escape from the chain of existence must endeavour, by vigorous prosecution of the eightfold way, and the four paths or degrees of perfection to which it led, to attain a state in which all craving for continuity had ceased. Karma then would have no terror to him; he would have reached a point whence he could look onwards without anxiety, because he would be treading a path from which he never would stray. He might still be a man, liable to suffering and subject to death, but one purified and emancipated from all inheritance of evil, and fully assured of Nirvana.

And what was Nirvana, the final refuge of the emancipated Buddhist? Ever since the religion was known in Europe great diversity of opinion has prevailed as to the meaning of this word. It was employed by the Brahmans many centuries before Buddha’s day, and used by them and by himself and his disciples in so great a variety of senses that even the learned Rajendralala Mitra, in enumerating the sects into which orthodox Buddhists are divided in regard to it, confessed some years ago that he had given up in despair the attempt to ascertain its meaning.[203] The researches and discoveries of later years have enabled the translators of the texts to write with less hesitation as to its significance, and we are entitled to accept as solid the results of their patient investigations. To begin with, they tell us that it means the peace which ensues when all passion has been subdued, and all selfish craving has been extinguished. Though practically no Buddhist hopes to attain to it here, but only to enter the paths leading to it, it may be reached, not in anticipation only, but in fruition.[204] Buddha may be said to have been in Nirvana forty years, for he entered it, not in the moment of dying, but when he attained perfection. This first conception of it, therefore, seems a marvellous anticipation of the faith of the Christian, who finds his heaven and enters into his rest when he is delivered from the φρόνημα τῆς σάρκος, from all selfish clutching at the means of existence. In both religions, taken at their highest, the goal of aspiration was not extinction of sorrow, but extinction of self-love: in Buddhism the quenching of _trishna_, or _upádána_, “thirst,” in Christianity the quenching of ἐπιθυμία, “lust,” “inordinate desire.” In both religions the goal meant finality, a state in which there was an end of death; and in both, moreover, it meant a change which no language could define, and to which no known standard could apply. The Christian believer tells us that he is passing from the visible to the invisible, from the temporal to the eternal, and in like manner the Buddhist Arahat would only be able to allude to the great change by negations, and as the very opposite of all we know or at present conceive. The Christian believes in the perseverance of the saints, and the Buddhist who has really entered the path must sooner or later reach his prize.