Part 17

Footnote 188:

Dr. Westcott, _Social Aspects of Christianity_, p. 12; Aristotle, _Ethic._, i. 1; iv. 3.

Footnote 189:

“The Modern Buddhist,” Alabaster, _Wheel of the Law_, p. 73; Spence Hardy, _Eastern Monachism_, pp. 5, 339; Gogerly’s translation of the Brahmajala Sutta in Digha Nikâya, _Journal of Ceylon Asiatic Society_, 1846.

Footnote 190:

Preface to Müller’s Dhammapada, p. xxx, old ed.

Footnote 191:

Note at pp. 31, 32 of Dhammapada in vol. x. of _Sacred Books of the East_. Frankfurter, App. _Bamp. Lect._ 1881, p. 349.

Footnote 192:

Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 95; Spence Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 388; Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, quoting Bhikkuni Samyutta, p. 258; Colebrooke’s _Essays_, vol. i. p. 417, Cowell’s edition; Sabbasava Sutta, 10, 11, 12: _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi.

Footnote 193:

_Life of Gaudama_, first ed., p. 321 note; Rangoon, 1866.

Footnote 194:

Max Müller, introd. to Buddagosha’s Parables, p. xxx, ed. 1870.

Footnote 195:

The first traces of this belief are found, it is said, in the Upanishads, Brihadáranyaka, iii. 2. 1, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xv. p. 126; Dhammapada, v. 1. 127, _ibid._ vol. x. Part i. 3. 35.

Footnote 196:

Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, p. 94; also his _Manual of Buddhism_, pp. 100, 106.

Footnote 197:

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought (or polluted mind), suffering follows him as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the wain” (Dhammapada, 1). “Not in the sky, not in the midst of the sea, not if we enter the cleft of the mountains, is there known a spot in the whole world where a man might be freed from an evil deed” (Dhammapada, 127; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x.).

Footnote 198:

“L’athéisme devenu religion et recouvert du manteau des vertus chrétiennes.”—Wassilief, _Buddhism_, introd. by E. Laboulaye, p. viii.

Footnote 199:

Professor Dods, _Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ_, p. 171.

Footnote 200:

Nagasēna’s figure used in controverting the idea of the separate existence of the soul.—Milindapanha, p. 25, quoted by Oldenberg, _Buddha_, p. 254; Hardy, _Manual_, p. 425; Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 96.

Footnote 201:

Oldenberg, _op. cit._, 221.

Footnote 202:

_Phaedo_, Jowett’s Introd., i. 407, ed. 1875.

Footnote 203:

Preface to English translation of the Lalita Vistara; Calcutta.

Footnote 204:

Sutta Nipâta; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. pp. 33, 80.

Footnote 205:

_Buddha, etc._, pp. 274-284; Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, pp. 111-123.

Footnote 206:

Childers, _Pali Dictionary_, Art. NIRVANA.

Footnote 207:

Dr. Kellogg, in his _Light of Asia and Light of the World_, pp. 223, 252, protests very forcibly against the use by translators of the word “immortality” as the equivalent of Nirvana. It meant, as he reminds us, “the end of death indeed, but not because life had triumphed, but because, life having ceased, death had nothing to feed on.” Immortality, endless bliss, and kindred phrases, applied to it, are only justifiable by the popular but really un-Buddhistic use of the word Nirvana.

Footnote 208:

Isaiah xxxii. 11; James iii. 18.

Footnote 209:

Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, pp. 97, 223.

Footnote 210:

“Not to know suffering, not to know the cause of suffering, not to know the path that leads to the cessation of suffering—this is called Ignorance.” Consequently knowledge of these things is saving knowledge.—Mahavagga, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xiii. p. 75, note 2.

Footnote 211:

This threefold division or “doorway” (Hardy, _Manual_, p. 491), once considered by Weber to be peculiar to Buddhism, has been proved to be common to Brahmans, Persians, Jews, and Greeks, as well as Christians. See interesting note at pp. 28, 29, of vol. x. of _Sacred Books of the East_, Part i.

Footnote 212:

Dr. Fairbairn, _Studies in Religion and Philosophy_, p. 161.

Footnote 213:

Dhamma. Sutta, 2-4; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. pp. 146, 147; Mahavagga, i. 6. 17-20; _ibid._ vol. xiii. pp. 94, 95.

Footnote 214:

Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, p. 124.

Footnote 215:

Frankfurter, App. to Wordsworth’s Bampton Lectures on _The One Religion_, p. 348; Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. p. 69.

Footnote 216:

_Pensées_, vol. ii. p. 34; vol. i. p. 205; ed. Faugère.

Footnote 217:

Spence Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 506.

Footnote 218:

Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. pp. 33, 46, 67; Dhammapada, 284.

Footnote 219:

_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. pp. 60, 61.

Footnote 220:

Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, cap. iv. 4; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi.

Footnote 221:

Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha, etc._, pp. 149, 153, 161.

Footnote 222:

Wordsworth, Bampton Lectures on _The One Religion_, p. 91.

Footnote 223:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 289.

Footnote 224:

Meta Sutta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. p. 25.

Footnote 225:

See the story given in Mahavagga, x. 2. 3-20; also the story of Kunala, Asoka’s son—this latter said by Burnouf, in his Introduction, to be of modern origin. Quoted by Oldenberg, p. 290.

Footnote 226:

So Dr. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 126. Fausböll translates, “Not cultivating the society of,” etc. (Sutta Nipâta, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. pp. 43, 44.)

Footnote 227:

Dr. Edkins, _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 204.

Footnote 228:

Dhammapada, 157-8-9, 379-80; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i.

Footnote 229:

T. W. Rhys Davids, in the Introduction to his translation of the Keto Khila Sutta (Barrenness and Bondage), _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. p. 222, says that in reading it he was irresistibly reminded of 2 Peter i. 5-9. The barrenness referred to in the Sutta is lack of successful effort to be free from “the Ten Fetters” which bind man to existence, chief of which is hankering after immortality in any form, or without form. How contrasted is this to St. Peter’s thought! “Give diligence to provide in your faith earnestness,” that it may be an overcoming faith; but as faith without knowledge is superstition, and earnestness misdirected will do harm, provide in earnestness “knowledge”; and as knowledge ungoverned will degenerate into conceit, provide in it “temperance”; but temperance must be inspired with “patience,” bent on God’s glory, not personal gain; “godliness” thus attained, “brotherly kindness” will manifest itself, and then “charity” toward every creature—that is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the _summum bonum_, the knowledge in which we are neither to be barren nor unfruitful. No more forcible illustration of the utter contradiction between the two religions could be found than this verbal analogy of “barrenness and bondage.”

Footnote 230:

Compare St. Paul, Phil. iv. 8: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are gracious; if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things.”

Footnote 231:

Dhamma-Kakka-ppavattana Sutta, 6, note; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. p. 148.

Footnote 232:

Dhammapada, 239; _ibid._ vol. x. p. 1.

Footnote 233:

Akankheya Sutta; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi. p. 210.

Footnote 234:

If the legends are to be followed, he believed in the miraculous power which resulted from it (see Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, i. 33, and iii. 22; also Mahavagga, i. 20. 24), but he condemned the exercise of that power for self-glorification or for paltry gain (Kullavagga, v. 8. 2; also vii. 1, 2, 3; _Sacred Books of the East_, vols. xi. xii. xiii.).

Footnote 235:

See Gough, _Philosophy of the Upanishads_, pp. 267, 268.

Footnote 236:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, p. 314.

Footnote 237:

Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, p. 35.

Footnote 238:

Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha, etc._, p. 162.

Footnote 239:

Mr. Alabaster, _Wheel of the Law_, preface, p. xvi.

Footnote 240:

Eitel, _Lectures on Buddhism_, pp. 59-70; Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha_, p. 156.

Footnote 241:

Jackson’s Bampton Lectures, _The Doctrine of Retribution_, p. 284; Caird’s _Philosophy of Religion_, Croall Lectures, pp. 259 _seq._

Footnote 242:

Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha_, p. xxiii; Hardy’s _Eastern Monachism_, p. 312.

Footnote 243:

“Prefix the name of God to this Declaration” (of the Rights of Man), said Abbé Grégoire to the National Assembly in 1789, “or you leave it without foundation, and make right the equivalent of force.” The Assembly refused, but events soon confirmed his judgment.—Baring Gould, _Development of Belief_, vol. ii. p. 88.

LECTURE V. THE BUDDHIST SANGHA[244]: THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

The designation “Church,” never wholly applicable to Buddhism in the sense in which Christians employ it, was totally inapplicable to the primitive Buddhist communities. The institution of the Church is peculiar to Christianity, for though we speak of the worship of Krishna, or the religion of Baal, we never speak of the church of the one or the other. Christianity is the only religion which has created a society which no political revolution can destroy, and no civilisation, however advanced, can outlive. It may change its form, or express itself in several co-existent forms; but it is so adapted to the nature and necessities of man that it is properly described, in its relation to his present condition, as divine and everlasting.

Though the Church is the creation of Christ and the fruit of His mission, the idea of it had been suggested to the world long ages before He came. “Ecclesia” is peculiarly a New Testament word, but there are found in the Old Testament Scriptures plain foreshadowings of the reality represented by it. In Abraham, “called” out from his country and kindred, that he might be separated unto the worship of Jehovah, we have the first pre-intimation of the Church. In relation to other nations, his descendants were the “peculiar people” and Ecclesia of Jehovah, and when as a nation they failed to embody and express the universal truths, which it is the Church’s function to communicate for the blessing of all the world, there was called out from them, or rather there was formed within them, “the remnant,” so often referred to by Isaiah and the subsequent prophets; and in this spiritual community and fellowship, dissociated from the national religion,[245] were conserved and perpetuated the truths and ideals from which they had fallen away. After the Captivity, in the rise of the synagogue system of worship, there was provided an organisation, whose essential details Christ and His apostles in instituting the Church could either adopt or copy; and there can be no question that from out this synagogue system the Christian Church emerged, and that even to-day it reflects some of its peculiar features.

The Church was the fruit of Christianity, but the Sangha was the root out of which Buddhism sprang. In a Sangha its founder lived and learned and taught, till as Buddha he founded his own; but just as he gave a new significance to the doctrines in which he had been instructed, so he gave the Sangha an application which accounts for, though it does not justify, the designation often accorded to it of a church. As an order without worship, a brotherhood without any recognition of the uniting Fatherhood in heaven, a confraternity in which seniority was assigned only to age,[246] and whose leaders never pretended to hold any priestly office or to exercise any hierarchical authority, the Sangha at first and for long was not a church; yet when we examine its constitution and aims we need not wonder that the religious instincts of Buddhists, proving stronger than their creed, should have developed their Sangha into something like a church, with a cult which, at first consisting only of veneration for his images and relics, for long has been almost second to none in the world for solemnity and dignity and pomp.[247]

We have seen that philosophic schools and religious sects originating in secessions from the national religion abounded in India long before Buddha’s day. In the Gangetic valley, as in Greece, the new sages attracted their disciples by the fame of their teaching, but there, not as in Greece, the disciples lived with their masters apart, and distinguished from the world by peculiar dress and manners. Of Monachism, an early outgrowth of Hindu religion, and indeed its essential adjunct, as being the state which marked the maturity and completion of a good man’s earthly life, there were already many forms, all held in high respect by the people. Celibacy and mendicancy were common to all Sanghas, but in regard to vows of silence, and fasting, and self-torture, they differed greatly from one another. The majority of them were Brahman in their constitution and in their recognition of caste: but long before the rise of Buddhism the Sraman fraternities, founded on the non-recognition of caste, were quite equal to the purest Brahman ones in public esteem. Now in organising the Sakya-putta-Samanas, the designation by which his disciples were first known by the people, Buddha adopted many features and details of discipline common to all these fraternities, while yet the peculiarity of his doctrines gave to the community of his own disciples a character quite distinctive.

The Brahman Orders believed that Brahmans only could be finally saved, and Brahman reformers could only encourage inferior castes that came to them for enlightenment by the hope of possibly securing a higher birth in a future state. Buddha, however, considered all men alike in respect of need, so, knowing of only one way of deliverance, he proclaimed it without distinction, and, like the Sramans, he opened his Sangha to all who were willing to submit to his discipline. Unlike many of the Sraman fraternities, he discouraged the life of solitude, and prohibited the practice of self-torture and severe austerities. In opposition to the hated Nigganthas, who, aiming at perfection, went about with only the light and air for their clothing, he insisted that his disciples should be decently clad.[248] In respect that he required obedience from disciples only as long as they continued to be so, and would not permit irrevocable vows—indeed, exacted from them no vow at all—his Sangha was more like some Anglican guild than any monastic institution with which we are acquainted.

Still more widely did it differ, not only from many, but from all the existing fraternities in the purpose for which he instituted it. Hitherto India had never witnessed a religious sect that could be called propagandist. Brahmanism was essentially exclusive, for no man could become a Brahman by conversion. The Sraman sages again, left the masses to ripen in evil ways for worse lives in more degraded spheres of future existence, in order to deliver themselves by ascetic practices and meditation. At best they taught those who resorted to them, and were prepared to consort with them. Buddha, however, by laying upon the brethren the obligation of extending the knowledge of the law, inaugurated a revolution in the monastic system which anticipated that of the great Mendicant Orders of Christendom. Just as St. Francis emptied the monasteries and sent forth their inmates to find their own in seeking the salvation of others, so Buddha broke down the barriers between the Indian recluses and the world, by ordaining the members of his Sangha to teach their fellow-men the way to liberty. “Therefore, O brethren, to whom the truths which I have perceived have been made known by me, having thoroughly mastered them, meditate upon them, practise them, spread them abroad, in order that the pure Dhamma may last long and be perpetuated, in order that it may continue to be for the good and happiness of the great multitude, out of pity for the world, to the good, and gain, and weal of gods and men.”[249]

This was the original element[250] in his conception, and while one of its effects was to save the members of the Sangha from some of the evils besetting the life of the recluse by balancing the duty of contemplation by that of active itineration, its chief and immediate result was to give Buddhism an expansive power marvellous to Indians. Religious fraternities depended upon the presence of their teachers, and consequently the members were few, but Buddha commanded the brethren to go forth. “Let not two of you go the same way” was the original instruction, and preach the doctrine “which is glorious in the beginning, glorious in the middle, glorious in the end, in the spirit and in the letter, for the pure and perfect life, for the complete cessation of sorrow.”[251] By and by these missionaries were authorised to receive those who desired admission into the Sangha, and after a due novitiate to ordain them;[252] and so we need not wonder that this itineracy, which in the earliest days was the very essence of a good Buddhist’s duty, should have had the effect of spreading the doctrines and gathering converts so rapidly that in some of the earliest extant scriptures the Sangha was known as “the Brotherhood of the Four Quarters”[253] of what to Indian thought was the world.

Thus far the Sangha was different from the institutions that preceded it, but, unlike the Christian Church, which finally emerged from Judaism as the one holy Church of all nations and of both sexes, and of all classes of men, the Buddhist Sangha bore with it, and never lost, several marks of its Hindu origin. One relic of its extraction it most zealously conserved as essential to the moral restraint which it encouraged; for though later on it attracted associates whom it recognised as in the ways of deliverance, it was from the very first an exclusively monastic order. Indeed, Monachism, or the life of retirement, privation, and chastity, had in Buddhism a place quite different from that which it occupied in Brahmanism.[254] The meditative Brahman anchorite was not considered the only man who was in the way to deliverance, for every believer in Brahman ascendency was free to choose one of three ways of securing salvation,[255] but in Buddhism renunciation of the world represented the highest form of religion, and the indispensable condition of reaching Nirvana. So, though in opening the Sangha to all classes, and proclaiming, in opposition to Brahmanism, that every man was capable of the highest enlightenment, Buddha sapped the foundation of caste, it was only to replace it in another form.[256] The mendicant monk, as has been truly observed, took the Brahman’s place, and for him alone Nirvana was reserved. So sharply defined were the lines which divided the Sangha from the rest of mankind, that no one who had not come out from the world was regarded as in it and of it.

This was quite in keeping with the Buddhist conception of deliverance. The Sangha simply was an attempt to realise the idea and purpose of the creed. Salvation according to Christ meant rescue from the power of evil, but not withdrawal from the world as so incurably evil that the sooner man got out of it the better. Instead of making His Church an asylum and refuge from the world, He organised it for the redemption of the world. Instead of attempting to destroy civil society, He aimed at its purification by the leavening influence of the new society which He was creating. The Church was to be Christ’s witness when He was no longer visible, the instrument by which His own power would bear upon the wants of mankind. The slavery and the degradation of society, the destruction of the world, was never meant to be the condition of the existence or of the liberty and dignity of the Church. It was but a means to an end, a means so essential that without it the end could not be reached, but, once the end has been reached, the Church will be superseded, or rather will be merged in the kingdom of God. So the very symbol of it is not found in the apocalyptic visions of the new heaven and the new earth. In the civitas of the new Jerusalem St. John saw families and nations and kingdoms, but he could see no temple therein, for the instrumentality of which the temple was the symbol had done its work in the emancipation and education of the human race, and had vanished into the more glorious and eternal realities of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

In Buddhism we find a set of ideas quite contradictory to all these. The Sangha was the vehicle of rescue from out the world, not the bringer of salvation to it; it worked not for the regeneration of society, but for its disintegration and destruction. It considered the world to be so hopelessly incurable, and even existence to be so weighted with misery, that wisdom would move men to abandon the one to its fate, and goodness impel them to strive to bring the other to an end. The monastery, therefore, was naturally its loftiest conception of the Civitas Dei, and into that it endeavoured to transform as large a section of humanity as was inclined to accept its law.

This unnatural theory of life indicates the essential weakness of Buddhism, and makes its history very instructive to Christians. In the Church, perhaps, room may be accorded to the monastery and convent, as long as they are sanctified by the Christian idea of self-abnegation in the service of others, but the attempt to transform the Church into a monastery, dominated by the Buddhist idea of abnegation of the world for the sake of self, can only create unmitigated evil. The effect of it in primitive Buddhism was not only to withdraw good men from the world at the very time when its diseased condition most required the help of their preserving salt, but the salt itself, not being used for its natural and proper purpose, soon lost its savour. The substitution of an artificial for a natural standard of excellence inevitably tends to destroy even virtue. Very soon in the Sanghas active itineracy and devout contemplation gave way to listless indolence and enervating reverie, and there emerged a mode of life from which the great mass of healthy men will ever revolt, as sanctioning the idea that the more useless we become in this world the more fitted for a better we may safely consider ourselves to be.

The Buddhist Sangha, therefore, though in no sense resembling the Christian Church, does resemble some of its after-growths. These, however, must be regarded as parasitical in their nature, for though fed by its life, they do not spring from its root. In Christianity, Monachism represents a tendency of human nature incidental to its development rather than the essential fruit of Christian principle; but the Buddhist idea of a true society is one essentially and completely monastic. This one fact is sufficient to show that the similarities discoverable between the Buddhist and Christian institutions are more apparent than real, while the contrasts between them are found to be deeper and more substantial the more they are examined.