Part 14

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.

But there the analogies end, while the contrasts between the two beliefs are as irreconcilable as are their postulates. The postulates of Christianity are the spiritual nature of man, and that his present evil condition is not his normal one. Sin has gone extensively and deeply into his being, for it is no mere superficial excrescence, a fault which can be corrected, a smirch that can be washed away, but a leprosy in the blood, which is the life. Cleansing is required and provided, but it is the cleansing out of the whole corrupt nature by the transfusion into the soul of a Divine life so pure, and so strong because of purity, that it could not be holden of death. Life is the essential idea of Christian salvation; it is the Divine gift bestowed by Christ, who came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. So while in the body we groan, being burdened by a suffering flesh, it is not that we may be unclothed, but clothed upon; not that the gift of life may be recalled, but that it may be secured in its completeness. It is “more life and fuller that we want.” Sanctification in the Christian conception means a process of healing, and salvation means perfect health—the condition of a creature freed from all inordinate desire, or desire for anything forbidden, which is the root of all sin, and rejoicing in the untainted bliss of being. Deathless, sinless life, the life of eternal incorruption, “the perfect life of love, the rest of immortality,” that is the Christian Nirvana.

Buddhism, on the contrary, postulating the material nature of all existence controlled by the universal law of transmigration, had no such conception of final blessedness. Nirvana in its thought meant, indeed, extinction in the first instance of all fleshly and selfish dispositions; but the thirst, the “cleaving” (_tanhā_) which was to be quenched, was not lust in the Christian sense, but the natural innocent love of life, and Nirvana involved the extinction of that love, and of life as the going out of a flame which had nothing else to feed upon. Deliverance from this instinctive thirst for life is a specific germ of which annihilation is the outcome. That Buddha so expounded it was long questioned, and by many denied, but Dr. Oldenberg has sufficiently made clear his attitude toward this dogma. He seems to have contented himself with its first significance, to have evaded the necessity of deciding the many discussions which were waged concerning the second as profitless, and not tending to quietude and wisdom, and to have exhorted his disciples to strive rather to enter the paths.[205] By the time, however, the canonical books were produced, his disciples had not shrunk from pushing his fundamental principles to their only logical conclusion. The most ancient expositions of his doctrine disclose one long theory of Nihilism as its only legitimate inference. If misery was inseparable from existence, it followed that non-existence was a blessing, and consequently man’s chief end was to aspire and strive to reach that state in which the “very seed of existence has withered, the lamp of life has burnt out for ever, and man can no more be born again.”[206]

While this was the doctrine of the philosophers, the overwhelming majority of Buddhists in every age and country have put a very different meaning upon the word. Just as human nature has proved too strong in them to accept their atheistic creed, so in popular estimation from the first, Nirvana has meant not annihilation of existence, but extinction of suffering. They did not comprehend its metaphysical significance, but they longed, as all men do, for release from sorrow, and a happier life when this is over, and they took refuge in Buddha, because his law promised to convey them over the troubles of life into a blessed hereafter. There might be higher things for the wise to gain, but the simple were contented with this inferior portion, and indeed they chose the better part. For surely the conception of deliverance from suffering, involving extinction of the being that suffers, was as childish as that of getting rid of a toothache by cutting off the head.[207] Rightly were they led by the infallible instincts of our moral being to believe that the end of righteousness must be rest, but they wandered fearfully in conceiving of rest as nothingness, for the “end of righteousness is peace, and the fruit of peace, quietness and assurance for ever.”[208]