Part 13

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.