Part 2

Were this computation correct, Buddhism would have to be accounted by far the most widely accepted of all the religions of mankind. It has however been seriously challenged by those whose experience and candour are beyond question. According to their enumeration, Buddhism must rank only fourth in the scale of numerical comparison among the great faiths of the world, for instead of there being five hundred millions of adherents, as we were previously led to believe, probably not more than one hundred millions of professing Buddhists can be found in all the world.[8] The question in dispute after all is one of only secondary importance, for we can hardly conceive of any one other than some democratic fanatic who would propose to settle the truth of a religion by a reckoning of the suffrages which it could command. Numerical statistics of religious adherence furnish only an indirect test even of influence. It is impossible to indicate even geographically the range of a religion. We are very properly reminded that “the influence of Buddhism in India may be immense, though not a single Buddhist temple exists in it, while its influence in China and Ceylon may be vastly over-stated in figures, for many Chinese Buddhists may be called Confucianists and Taoists, and many Singhalese worshippers at Buddha’s shrines are far from being only or altogether Buddhists.”[9] Indeed everywhere, though chiefly in Thibet, Nepaul, and Mongolia, the religion which is called Buddhism is no more Buddhist than the survivals of Pagan worship and belief which are found in some extreme forms of Romanism can be called Christian.

The rapidity with which and the extent to which a religion has spread is no certain indication of its capability to meet and satisfy the real spiritual necessities of mankind. A religion may rapidly gain, and retain for long, an ascendency over many men, without possessing any of the qualities essential to its being recognised as the one religion of all men. The catholicity of a faith is indicated not by the extent of the supremacy which it has acquired, but by the quality of its contents. Universal truths are not necessarily the truths which have won the consent of the greatest numbers. The test of _quod ubique, semper, et ab omnibus_, if thoroughly applied, would have established the truth of many a degrading superstition in former times. “It is not that which is common to barbarism and civilisation which is most truly human, but precisely that in which civilisation differs from barbarism.”[10] The divinity of a religion, instead of being attested by the readiness with which it is accepted, may be indicated by the antagonism which it at first evokes. Truth at no time depends upon majorities, at least in this world, for here truth of any kind, when first proclaimed, instead of meeting a generally friendly reception, has to win its victory by conflict and lay in martyrdom the foundation of its throne.[11]

It is not on account of its adherents, however, nor of the superficial extent of its supremacy—though such facts have indeed a very pathetic significance—but it is in respect of the quality of its original faith, that Buddhism is considered worthy of comparison with Christianity. We must not be repelled by the childish superstitions and gross absurdities with which it is incrusted, for in a religion so ancient and extensive this is just what we might expect to find; nor should we be surprised at the marvellous and grotesque legends which profess to relate its origin and early history, for these, as Professor Müller has very properly reminded us, “are the clouds, not alway rosy, that gather round the sunrise of any religion.”[12] In the estimation of its severest critics, Buddhism must occupy a grand and exalted place in the general history of religions.[13] Among the various systems of the non-Christian world, ancient or modern, none can compare with it in respect of its ethical code, its spirit of toleration and gentleness, and its beneficent influence upon many wild populations that have embraced it. Neither Zeno nor Marcus Aurelius conceived a higher theory of morals, in which justice and temperance were infused by kindness, than that which the founder of Buddhism successfully reduced to practice. It was the most natural of all things therefore, that it had only to be introduced to the notice of Christendom to win for itself a degree of admiration accorded to no other heathen faith.

We would be understating its claims, however, if we referred to it as appealing only to our Christian consideration and sympathy. It has been brought into the lists of criticism as the rival of Christianity. Modern unbelief is forcing it upon our notice as a much truer philosophy of existence and a more satisfactory theory of the universe than that furnished by Christianity. We cannot let it alone, were it for no other reason that it will not let us alone. In the civilised and semi-civilised portions of the East its disciples have long ago ceased to propagate it, and as a form of belief it may be said that there not only has it reached the limits of its extension, but that its present condition is one of “increasing disintegration and decay.”[14] Even in the East, however, among the classes who have most come under the influence of Western culture, the spirit of Buddhism shows considerable vitality, and there its spirit is coming into constant and active collision with Christianity every day. The educated or intelligent Buddhist of Burmah or Siam tells us plainly that he will not give up his ancient faith for Christianity; for notwithstanding the manifold and manifest absurdities of his ancestral religion, he professes to find the same in the forms in which Christianity has been presented to him. By the light of our science we have helped him to weed out his old superstitions, and he will not accept from us any new ones. In language marvellously akin to that of the founder of Buddhism, he discards every religion as involving the worship of deity, and he professes to find in Suttas more ancient than our Gospels a morality as sublime, a charity as comprehensive, and a system of faith sufficient to bear the strain of all his necessities, whether present or future.[15] In short, Buddhism as professed by a modern Oriental with any pretension to culture, is almost identical with that paradoxical condition of thought or belief which maintains, and indeed professes to be spreading in Christendom as modern Agnosticism.

But it is not in an attitude of resistance only that Buddhism confronts Christianity even in the East. In Ceylon, if we are to trust the _Times of India_,[16] it numbers among its typical gains “a young highly educated European lady and a clergyman of the English Church,” and these, it is averred, “are not the first, and are not likely to be the last of its direct converts from the Christian churches.” In Europe and America also, not among the lower and less educated, but among the higher ranks of society, among people affecting culture and new light, are to be found not a few professing admirers, if not practical followers, of Buddha and his law. The admiration of many of these dilettanti may sometimes be found to be in exact proportion to their ignorance of Buddhism. Their information is drawn almost exclusively from such sources as are supplied by the romance of Sir Edwin Arnold and works like those produced by Mr. Sinnett and Colonel Olcott;[17] but even when we discount all these, we must own that here and there we find some thoughtful and earnest people who profess to have come out from bondage to the beggarly elements of the Church’s faith to gentle Buddha’s better gospel of liberty. Mr. Alabaster’s _Modern Buddhist_ finds a co-religionist not only in the disciples of Feuerbach and Von Hartmann, but in every “fervent atheist” who, acknowledging nothing in the universe save man, and a system of unbending law in which he is involved, and with which he is sometimes confounded, has been compelled to deify humanity and to demand for its idol a service worthy of a divine object of faith.

So another prediction of Schopenhauer’s, uttered in the beginning of the century, seems to be repeated in many publications at its close. “In India,” he affirmed, “our religion will never strike root; the primitive wisdom of the human race will never be pushed aside by any incidents in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom will flow back upon Europe, and produce a thorough change in our knowing and thinking.”[18] He certainly laboured hard to bring about the fulfilment of his prophecy, preaching Nirvana as the goal of moral effort, though confessing that his own animal propensities allowed him no hope of attaining it. In his lifetime his strenuous endeavours were unsuccessful, and he died in 1860 in comparative neglect. Since then, and especially since the publication of his book _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, the doctrine painfully planted, has taken root in the congenial soil prepared for it by Comte and his disciples. Spiritualism again—which, though originating only in 1848, in circumstances almost ludicrous, has spread so rapidly and extensively that it now claims to count its converts by millions all over the world—has obviously contributed to the dissemination and growth of pseudo-Buddhist ideas. With a literature of over five hundred psychological works—many of them voluminous and very costly—and with forty-six periodicals regularly published in Europe and America, it not only assails Christianity, but supports the doctrine that “the Reign of Law has supplanted the Reign of God; that just as we have ceased to embody the conception of the State in a person, it is time we should cease similarly to embody the conception of the universe, for loyalty to a personal ruler is an anachronism in the nineteenth century, and will some day become extinct.”[19] Its apostles profess to find in the Christian faith many signs of disintegration, and they look “to the bloodless and innocent record of Buddhism for the reconstruction of true religious faith upon a permanent basis.”[20] This they expound in a so-called theosophy in phraseology largely borrowed from the New Testament, but descriptive of a curious amalgam of later Buddhist and Hindu doctrines utterly contradictory to the essential teaching of Christianity.

Occultism, Esoteric Buddhism, which professes to supplant the religion of Jesus, and to prepare the way of the twelfth of the Messiahs, whose mission is to harmonise the perverted teaching of his predecessors,[21] and thus establish the universal religion of humanity, is not likely to occasion serious concern. It is just another of those instances in which the diseases of a lower civilisation are communicated to one superior and more robust. Just as plagues originating in the ruined or degraded populations of the East have repeatedly desolated large portions of Europe, where they found physical conditions favourable to their spread, so there are mental and moral epidemics which, generated among inferior religions, propagate themselves in the very highest, for reasons almost similar. There are modern conditions which present very close affinities to those out of which Buddhism arose. It has been truly called the religion of despair, and it seems suited to that intellectual _ennui_ in which many profess to live who find themselves confronted by problems which they are unable to solve. The enervating agnosticism and sentimental pessimism of our generation furnish the very soil in which the germs of Buddhism are most likely to mature; but the spiritual life of Christendom is too robust to succumb to its heresy of inertion and moral defeat. The system of Buddha, even as laid out by himself, is not at all likely to entrap any considerable number of Western nineteenth-century thinkers; and this mongrel system of Neo-Buddhism, though professing to be founded on that ancient creed, will only find adherents among peculiar people. There is always a tendency in the most advanced civilisation, on the part of some who are freed from the necessity of industry, so essential to man’s mental and moral as well as to his physical health, to revert to beliefs and customs peculiar to earlier and inferior stages of culture. It is a curious and significant fact,[22] that not among the working and professional classes, but among the upper and fashionable ranks of modern society, such survivals of ancient superstition as intercourse with spirits and palmistry are chiefly now to be found. For such unstable souls as have been or may be tempted to be drawn into these practices by an appeal to the authority of the beautiful character limned for our generation in the _Light of Asia_, I know no better restorative than a plain exposition of primitive Buddhism. It will be seen then that this modern fungus is a growth almost as foreign in its nature to real Buddhism as it is to true Christianity. The degenerate Buddhism from which it borrows its largest stock of ideas bears the same relation to the actual teaching of Buddha that the Cabbala bear to the prophecies of the Old Testament, and the doctrines which it counts upon as most popular and attractive are precisely those which Buddha would have treated with his most withering scorn.

There is yet another characteristic of this religion which has commended it more to the unbelief than the belief of our age. Many agreements are alleged to subsist between the contents of the New Testament and those of the sacred books which profess to record the life and express the teaching of Buddha. Its ancient Pitakas are said to be filled with stories resembling the narratives of the Evangelists, with sayings which recall the parables, and miracles reflecting the signs and wonders which signalised the ministry of Jesus. It is averred that with the single exception of the Crucifixion—and how immense is the significance of that exception I shall endeavour in a subsequent lecture to show,—it would be easy to find in them a parallel to almost every incident related in the Gospel. Most startling of all are said to be the resemblances between the central figures in both sets of scriptures. For Buddhism, as truly as Christianity, has its ideal of a perfect human life, illustrated in one who, like unto the Son of Man, went about doing good, and enforcing by his example the pure morality which he preached, but who, most unlike the Son of Man, without any sustaining belief in deity, or hope of sympathy or help from any divine being, professed to have made good his own salvation, and to teach all whom he could reach the way to work out theirs.

When we come to examine its history, we find that it has followed a line of development strikingly parallel to that of Christianity, and the parallels thus furnished by its antecedents and progress, and by the external and foreign influences which encountered and modified it, are those which have the most interest and instruction for the student of Religion. In order, however, to ascertain their significance, we must examine these alleged correspondences of story and of doctrine; for these have powerfully influenced a certain class of thinkers, as supplying confirmation of a charge brought against our religion in almost the beginning of its history, that after all there was nothing original in Christ, and nothing new in His teaching. That resemblances do exist, not only between the forms in which Buddhism confronts us in some quarters of the world and the ritual and organisation of a large section of the Christian Church, but between the contents of the Buddhist scriptures as we have them now, and those of the New Testament, all must admit. As we cast a hasty and general glance over them we see how natural and how pardonable was the old rough and ready method of accounting for them by the supposition of direct transference of the various lineaments from the one to the other. The early Jesuit missionaries did not hesitate to assert that the Buddhists, by assimilating and incorporating the rites and doctrines of the primitive missionaries, had succeeded in producing a caricature of Christianity. In like manner, when in Central America—till then as independent of Europe as if it had been separated not by untraversed oceans, but by the immensities that divide the planets—the Spaniards found to their amazement a most complex religion, with priests, and monasteries, and temples adorned with the cross and statues of a goddess with an infant in her arms, they could only explain the mystery by averring that it was a gigantic mimetic ruse of the devil to lead the unhappy nations astray. The suppositions in both cases are not likely to be seriously supported now. Indeed, it is far more likely, as the author of _Ancient Christianity_ and Dr. Prinsep and others have attempted to show, that in the East we have to seek for the origin of several institutions and rites once considered the peculiar growth of Greek or Latin Christianity. There can be little doubt that as these religions spread they would come in contact with and react upon each other.[23] It is difficult in the present state of our knowledge to indicate their first conjunction, or to trace their various intercommunications, but that they have been mutually indebted to each other is sufficiently attested by their histories. In later Hinduism and Buddhism and Lamaism there are plain indications of the action of the Western upon the Eastern religions. Romanism, on the other hand, has set its official seal upon the relationship, by incorporating a legend of Buddha among its “Lives of the Saints,” by canonising the founder of this most antichristian of all religions, and by consecrating the 27th November as a day on which he may be invoked for intercession.[24]

Though as yet the field is only opening out, and its exploration is only beginning, there can be little doubt that it will be found that in their advanced stages Buddhism and Greek and Latin Christianity have contributed to each other’s resources; but it is quite another matter to assert that the existence of the one religion accounts for the origin of the other, and that Christianity, as the junior of the two, is simply “a product of India spoiled in its route to Palestine.”[25] Those who allege that the sources of Christianity may be discovered in Buddhism are bound not to assume but clearly to trace and demonstrate the medium of communication between the two. As yet the allegation, though frequently made, appears to be incapable of proof. Renan’s picture of “wandering Buddhist monks who overran the whole world, and converted on the banks of the Jordan, by their garb and manners, people who did not understand their language, like the Franciscan monks in later days,” is only a pious imagination.[26] And so are the theories elaborated by M. Emile Burnouf in the _Science of Religions_ and by M. Ernest de Bunsen in his _Angel Messiah of the Buddhists_. Both these authors have explained to their own satisfaction the derivation of Christianity from old Indian or Aryan beliefs, which, transmitted through Parthia to the Babylonian Jews, by them communicated to the Essenes John Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, and from them again passed on to the Therapeut Stephen, were formulated in the plastic mind of Paul of Tarsus into the Christian dogmas which we now revere. The scheme is devised with thoroughly French precision, and the treatises in which it is elaborated, full as they are of indications of great ingenuity and laborious research, are interesting as any romance. For scientific purposes, however, they have hardly more historic worth than a romance. Based upon assumptions, they are constructed almost entirely of hypotheses: when a difficulty emerges, it is solved by a supposition which further on is confirmed by a “reasonable expectation” of something else, so that by and by the supposition meets us as an established result. They abound in analogies, some of which transgress as flagrantly the laws of time as the theory once advanced that the story of Christ is only a reflection of the legend of Krishna, seeing that belief in Krishna did not arise in India till centuries after Christianity had reached its shores. “The laws of language[27] are also violated as openly as they were by the discovery that the mysterious word ‘Om’ of the Upanishads is the equivalent of the ‘Amen’ in ancient Hebrew worship.” It may be as possible by this method to prove the connection between the Vedic and Levitical institutions, as it is possible to establish the conclusion that the old Aryan symbol of the fire sticks is the fontal idea of the Cross, or that the Vedic word “Agni” is equivalent to the Latin “Agnus Dei.” Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter[28] and Professor Kuenen[29] have most exhaustively and decisively exposed the vanity of such speculations, which, on the whole, may be regarded as a good confirmation of a saying uttered by Professor H. H. Wilson some thirty years ago, in reference to those who would derive Christianity from Indian sources, that “the disposition to draw impossible analogies is not yet wholly extinct.”

As far as the history of Buddhism can be traced it presents no actual point of contact with either Syria or Egypt or Europe. Even after it became a missionary religion its progress was never westwards, and at no period did it reach further in this direction than the region now known as Afghanistan. The civilisation of the West offered no opportunity for its enthusiasm, and none of the great Western cities appear in its records. In the few scattered extracts which survive of the writings of those Greeks who visited India during or subsequent to the period of Alexander’s invasion, there is no indication of a knowledge of Buddhism, nor any allusion to Buddha by name. We have to come down to the times of Clement of Alexandria[30] and of Bardesanes the Syrian before we have any tangible evidence of the slightest acquaintance on the part of the West with Buddhism. The first writer mentions Buddha by name, the second distinguishes his monks from the Brahmans, and gives some details as to their customs, but it is impossible from their statements to conjecture how much they knew of the faith to which they alluded, and most absurd to infer from them that they were affected with the slightest admiration for it.[31]