Part 10

Collision and antagonism between sects in India was neither so sharp nor so fierce as in Palestine, and Buddha ministered in conditions much more favourable to the propagation of his system than did Jesus Christ. The Sadducean opponents of Christ represented a powerful hierarchy, the Pharisees a popular democracy, and the Scribes an influential Sanhedrim, with power of inflicting a sentence of death. The Essenes never mingle in the scenes of the Gospel, and it is questionable if they are ever referred to in them. Over all and dominating all was a most jealous and vigilant Roman despotism, ever ready to turn even a religious quarrel to its own account, so that it was the most natural of things that an opposition thus represented should nip, as it were, Christianity in the very bud by crucifying its Founder. In Magadha, however, it was otherwise. The broad distinction was between Brahmans and Sramans,[130] the latter a general title covering many secessions from Brahmanism, and the popular favour was equally bestowed on both. The Brahmans, though dominant, had not the power, and to their credit do not seem to have had the will, to persecute. It was not from them, but from the scholastic and conceited Teviggi and from the ascetic sects that Buddha encountered most formidable opposition; and yet even in these cases opposition was not rigid. It was a war not of blows, but of words, in which an appeal to the secular arm or to force was out of the question. A new sect, therefore, especially one that had donned the yellow robes and alms-bowl of the mendicant, protesting against the debasing belief in the efficacy of Brahmanic rites, or the virtue gained by extravagant Yogi austerities, would obtain from the people at large more favour than resistance or disdain.

The intellectual movement in India appears thus to have been extensive and many-sided. In the multitude of sects there is a guarantee for freedom,[131] and competition in the proclamation of truth is better than monopoly; but in religion, as in trade, the competition of over-multiplying sects tends to increase adulteration. So in early Buddhist literature, while there is incontestable evidence of the existence of honest instructors, there is also unquestionable evidence of the abundance of quacks, who trifled with truth simply to make a gain of it, and of shallow but clever professionals, who dealt with gravest themes in the spirit of the mere debater.[132] So there, as in Palestine in the days of Coheleth, through over-discussion the old faith was rapidly evaporating. In the Brahmans, religion had degenerated into formalism; in the Teviggi, into traditionalism. In the philosophic Sramans it was in many instances passing into blank atheism; and among the ascetics, into despair. While this was the condition of the learned and of the few, the masses everywhere, like the Ammé Ha-árets in Palestine, were wandering—no man caring for them—further and further into the idolatries and sensualities of Hinduism. Morality was perishing, the writing on the heart was getting more indistinct, and conscience becoming more confused. Then, just as five centuries later, when faith was almost gone, Christ came to restore it by communicating new life, so when divine law was in danger of fading from the consciousness of men, there arose one to assert its eternal supremacy; preaching the creed of Coheleth without his fear of God, and enforcing the keeping of the commandments, not as expressed in Vedas or interpreted in Brahmanas, but as written in every fibre of the body and every faculty of the being, as the only way to safety.

Who was he? Like the Author of Christianity, he has had to contend, as it were, for the recognition of his personal existence. Even to-day it is maintained that neither Christ nor Buddha ever existed, that they were merely incarnations of popular conceptions, and that all the legends concerning them can be reduced to a combination of anterior mythological elements. These mythical theories, however, in regard to the origin of Christianity, may be considered among the curiosities of criticism;[133] and in regard to the origin of Buddhism, though more justified by the confessed uncertainty as to dates, they have been satisfactorily dispelled as another instance of refining overdone.[134] Brahmanism and the successive phases of Hinduism can be traced to no individual founder, but in investigating the origin of Buddhism we breathe a very different atmosphere. There is a human and moral character about it which the other Indian religions lack: something real as in Mosaism, and palpable as in Islam.[135] We may rest assured that Buddhism had for its founder a real person, and though our best authorities have had to search for their facts through a vast amount of fabulous materials, we may accept the dates which they have approximately fixed for his birth and death, and the outlines which they have sketched of his life and ministry.

Gotama, a name still found among the Rajput chiefs of Nagara, was born in the north-eastern region of India, about a hundred miles from Benares, about the year B.C. 557. His father, a Sakya, a name unknown in any native Indian family, and said to indicate descent from a race of northern nomad immigrants, was rajah of Kapila, and his mother was a daughter of the family of Koli.[136] His principalities, of very limited extent, seem to have been eventually swallowed up by the greater Indian monarchies, for when Fa-Hian visited the country Kapila had become a vast solitude, and there for ages its very name has perished from the living speech of men. Even though his royal pedigree be an embellishment of the later legends, there seems no reason to doubt that his father was noble and rich according to the standard of the time, and sufficiently independent of Brahman domination to train his son in his own way. It seems not to have been in their studies, but in the exercises befitting a warrior prince, that Gotama was educated, though a disposition thoughtful and melancholy, and strongly sympathetic, appears to have disinclined him from such a mode of life. Even as a youth the darker sides of existence threw a shadow over him; the sufferings of mankind were among his earliest impressions, and he brooded over them till his mind, poisoned by the contemplation of them, threw its gloom over everything around him, and made the very air hang heavy with the weight of woe.

To one driven as he was to the conclusion that existence was a burden rather than a blessing, death, according to the belief in which he had been nurtured, could afford no relief; but hope seemed to dawn for him as he thought of the happy yellow-robed sages who, freed from his horror, were tranquil and dignified, abstracted alike from pleasure and pain. So after a period of irresolution and struggle, in the very prime of his manhood, he stole away from his wife and his new-born child, and cast in his lot with the forest recluses. Having lived some time with them, and having found that their ascetic discipline failed to satisfy his aspirations, he left them, and joined two philosophic Brahmans, who taught him the science of meditation in its lower and higher degrees. Though he had profited so much by their instruction and discipline that he rose in six years from being a disciple to a teacher, he confessed that he had not found by their methods the imperishable and permanent quietude which he coveted. So, abandoning all his disciples, he withdrew into solitude, and plunged into fasting so rigorous that he nearly destroyed himself; then, finding that the secret of deliverance was not thus to be obtained, he returned, amid the contempt of his former companions, to a more genial mode of life. Then, all alone in the jungle, its manifold discomforts, the memories of home, and the fruitlessness of all his endeavours, assailed him with the force of a temptation to desist from the quest; but rallying all his powers for one supreme effort, he eventually, under a banyan-tree at Bohimanda, triumphed—awoke as one before whom all illusion had vanished, and who by no divine illumination, but by his own personal energy, had attained to knowledge of the causes of all things, and had at last become the Buddha, the Enlightened One.

We need have no difficulty in accepting this outline of the man’s spiritual history as substantially correct; and assuming it to be so, we see at once that it is contrasted in every point with the early history of Jesus of Nazareth. In the Indian narrative, _e.g._, we have long and prolix details of the youth and manhood of Gotama; in the Christian Gospels very few incidents, one pregnant saying, two or three words of description, sum up the whole record of Christ’s biography till He appeared before the Baptist. This silence is surely suggestive, for it could not have been the result of ignorance or forgetfulness. “It is silence, where, to a moral certainty,” as is indicated alike by the apocryphal Gospels and the Buddhist legends, “men left to themselves would have used much speech.” In the Gospels the things which we are naturally curious to know are concealed from us, and there is disclosed only the spiritual reality in which Christianity consists. Where He was, how He looked, what He did during these long years of waiting and preparation, the Evangelists have not told us; but they have revealed enough to show what He was. Scenery and circumstances are as nothing, because the life that was revealing itself in them was everything; and of the unfolding of that life, the few and slight but most suggestive touches of the Gospels enable us to form clearer conceptions than we are ever likely to form of Gotama’s from the abundant incidents of the Buddhist story.

Thus while the son of the Indian rajah did not require to keep from himself anything that his heart desired, Jesus of Nazareth in the home of Galilee had to deny Himself, and to endure in the commonest kind of labour a hardness which the Indian youth, in the inertion of his class and race, regarded as part of the curse of existence. Still, Jesus had meat to eat which the other knew not of; He had bread enough and to spare, while the other was perishing of hunger. Rich in poverty, while Gotama was poor in his abundance, Jesus the carpenter appears highly exalted in what the other would have called humiliation. There, while Gotama, having everything which he could desire at his call, had discovered that human life was worse than vanity, Jesus, self-surrendered in faithful service of others, was learning how full of blessedness and how rich in power of blessing the life of any man might be. The angels of nature and providence, by the lilies of the field and the children in the market-place, instructed him in a wisdom which no Indian sage ever dreamed of; and though He saw the wretchedness of this evil world as Gotama never saw it, and felt for the misery of men as Gotama never could feel, He saw what even Buddha the Enlightened never could descry, the face of a Father in Heaven not frowning in wrath but yearning in pity over all. So, instead of repelling, the suffering and evil of the world drew Jesus closer to it, till, finding His grace, not as Gotama found His wisdom, in desire to be delivered from it, but in the depth of His longing to save it, He gave Himself to it and for it, as for a joy that was set before Him.

Again, the enlightenment of Gotama was the result of a painful struggle, first between inclination and duty, and then with great perplexities of duty, but in Christ it was painless and natural, like the growing of the dawn into the day. His pure and at first joyous life unfolded itself like a beautiful morning under the animating impulse of love to God and to all His creatures. As He grew in consciousness of the heaven within, He became more conscious of the disorder without, and more sensible of His isolation in regard to it. As year by year the sense not of the world’s misery but of its guilt increased within Him, there would also increase the longing that it should be taken away. Very early the conviction took possession of Him, that He was not here to win His own way to deliverance, but to be about His Father’s business. Gradually the Father’s business was revealed to Him, and when the preaching of the Baptist had made it clear, without any wrestle like Gotama’s, Christ, ever close to His Father, and ever clear in His duty, set Himself at once to fulfil it.

It is often alleged that the temptation in the wilderness, which marked the close of our Lord’s long period of silent preparation, is an exact parallel to the fasting and temptation which preceded Gotama’s enlightenment at Bohimanda. There is doubtless an external similarity sufficient to arrest our attention, but the internal contrasts disclose experiences of quite different characters. In the light of their respective histories, these occurrences, though often referred to as miraculous, were in reality most natural. They represent experiences of which there could be no witnesses, and which, indescribable in plain words, could only be suggested by a kind of parable. The temptations are recorded not as they were presented to the persons tried, but in the character which they assumed when their drift was discovered and their aim was detected. Both were assailed by suggestions, raising in them a tumult of emotion, which, if unresisted or yielded to, would in Gotama’s case have been equivalent to abandonment of his quest for deliverance for the sake of sensual indulgence offered by Mâra and his daughters, and in the case of Christ, to refusal to live by obedience, to tempting the Holy One of Israel, and to worshipping the splendid majesty of wrong. The temptations were real, assailing the will, seeking to paralyse or to change it; and their force in each case would be in proportion to the depth and purity of the natures assailed. Gotama, though unmistakably a man of high spiritual aspiration, was attacked by sensual visions,[137] which could not possibly have been a temptation to a nature like Christ’s. He had “to repel as evil what to other men would have appeared as ideals of good, and had to turn away from what the noblest of men would have cherished as innocent dreams or splendid chances,”[138] because to His pure eyes they were Satanic temptations. He suffered, being tempted, but His trouble and suffering were caused neither by irresolution, nor vanity, nor fear, but by His own lowly humility and to the sense of the exceeding greatness of His mission.

Gotama, sorely concerned about himself, went apart to fast and meditate and wrestle for his own deliverance, but Christ went apart not to fast—fasting was an unheeded incident in and not the aim of His retirement, and in no perplexity about His own salvation, for that was assured and made the basis of assault,—but that in quiet meditation He might see more clearly the way by which the salvation of God could be brought to mankind. Christ was forced to acknowledge that absolute surrender to His Father’s will in His mission meant absolute antagonism to the world, and He was tried by suggestions as to the mode of prosecuting His mission, all the more seductive that they were confessed to be natural. Might He not, as the Beloved of Heaven, to carry the world along with Him, and to save multitudes from suffering, swerve just a little from His high ideal, and accommodate His ways to suit their prejudices? These temptations in the beginning continued His temptations to the very close of His ministry. Not once, but all His life, as He hungered for the sympathy and trust of those whom He sought to save, was He tempted, as in Capernaum, when many fell away from Him, to “change the stones into bread.” Not once only did He stand on “the battlements of the temple,” nor once only was He offered “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” Again and again was He in peril when He stood high in the opinion of the crowds, and heard them in their Hosanna entreating Him, through His very sympathy with and love for them, to gratify their wishes; yet in every case the temptation was rejected without the slightest wavering the moment it was understood. “Get thee behind me, Satan.” “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” “The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?”

For again, Christ conquered because from the beginning to the closing agony He stood firm rooted in obedience and in submission to the will of a Higher than self; but the Buddhist writers want to impress the very opposite of this upon us in regard to Gotama’s victory. He is said to have conquered Mâra by the force of his own will, and won his way to light by his individual energy alone. After he became Buddha he hesitated whether he would preach the way of deliverance to men, not because, like Moses and the Hebrew prophets, he had no confidence in himself and required the assurance of a divine strength not his own. He had perfect assurance in himself, but he had no confidence at first in the ability of others to comprehend and to follow him in a way so difficult to find and so hard to tread.[139] He asked no deity to help him, for he was greater and wiser than all the gods. In the legends Brahma is said in intercession to have pressed him to preach the way, and moved eventually by no intercession, but simply by his own pity for men lost in the vortices of miserable existence, he went forth in no strength but his own to preach and to teach in a ministry, not of shame and humiliation and death, but one of great exaltation and honour.

This conception colours the narrative of his whole career. In the later scriptures he is designated the Tathâgata (He who has gone or arrived at Nirvana), the very reverse and point-blank contradiction of Christ the Messiah, He who was sent. There was no higher to send him, no wiser to teach. He came in his own name; but Jesus, as one sent by Him into the world, went forth in the name of His Father. Though He made demands upon the faith of the world compared with which the pretensions of Gotama are trivial—for at the highest he only claimed to be Buddha the Enlightened, while Christ spake of Himself as the “Light of the world,”—yet in Christ’s claim there was ever a sense of dependence expressed or implied, as of one who of His own self could do nothing, and who only taught what His Father had showed Him. Both spake with authority, and not as the scribes; both superseded the traditional domination of what was said by men of old times with the emphatic “I say unto you”; but there is a vast difference in the quality of this authority in the two cases. The authority of Buddha sprang from his acknowledged intellectual superiority, but the authority of Jesus sprang from spiritual insight. The deliverances of Buddha were given after the manner of a Socratic dialogue, and he won his converts and vanquished opponents by his dialectic skill.[140] But in all the encounters of Christ with His enemies there was no forcing of their reason to gain His end. His replies and counter questions were brief and direct and incisive; they were like the fiat of a king or the sentence of an unchallengeable judge, from which reason and conscience alike confessed that there could be no appeal.

Certainly in the two ministries was fulfilled a saying of Christ, “I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not; if another shall come in his own name, him will ye receive,” for after a very short period of imperfect success the public career of Gotama became a continuous victorious progress. Disciples, drawn mostly from the highest classes—the Brahmans, the nobles, and the wealthy merchants—flocked round him wherever he appeared. He journeyed followed by admiring crowds, he had only to show himself to impress, and he had only to preach to convince. The most stubborn resistance became fluid under his spell, and those who approached to confute were sure to succumb to his sweet reasonableness. He was supported by powerful rajahs, and those who did not show him proper reverence were punished according to their edicts. He was lodged in parks and gardens and palaces, several of which were gifted to him for the use of his Order. Accessible always to people of all castes, and of every condition, and of both sexes, he received the attention of the courtesan, and shared her feast and accepted her offering,[141] but he always maintained the nobility and purity of an irreproachable character, and wherever he was found it was as the prophet of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come. Rejoicing through his long and honourable ministry, sometimes loath to die, as foreseeing the troubles which would befall his Order after his decease, he at last, when over fourscore years, in a sickness alleged to have been induced by partaking too freely of some rich food, with the quiet dignity and composure of a saint, fell asleep, and was buried with the funeral obsequies which Indians then bestowed on the bodies of their greatest kings.[142]

It would be impossible, in every respect, to find a more absolute contrast to all this than the story of Jesus of Nazareth. If He was popular, it was only for a little, and then only with the masses. The aristocracy and the religious classes stood aloof, and soon entered into a conspiracy to get rid of Him. He had a few disciples among them, like Joseph of Arimathæa, and Nicodemus, and the family at Bethany, but the words of the prophet accurately sum up the narratives of the Gospel, that He was “despised and rejected of men.” To follow Him meant joining in no triumphal procession, but in a struggle against storm and tide which was sure to end in death. Suspected from the first, and speedily denounced, He was watched and tracked and driven from place to place, till at last the toils of the hunters closed successfully around Him, and at the age of thirty-three He was crucified as a malefactor between two robbers on Calvary.