Part 20

At the close of the rainy season, when the brethren were making ready for their wanderings, another solemn conference for self-purgation was held. In this exercise of the Pâvârana or Invitation no one known to be under the burden of scandal could take part, but all who were consciously clean, from the oldest to the youngest, invited the brethren to name any offence which during their common retreat they might have noted in their conduct. “I invite, venerable ones, the Order; if ye have seen anything offensive on my part, or have heard anything, or have any suspicion about me, have pity upon me, and name it. If I see it, I will make amends.”[297] It may be asked whether such an institution as this could ever have flourished in Christendom, although the purest of our Churches might adopt it with profit. These Buddhist brethren could not pray the one for the other, but they could confess their faults one to another by a simpler and more effective method than has ever been attempted by the confessional. That institution in Christendom has tended more to corrupt and degrade than to purify and elevate society, for it has interfered with the divinely instituted and much more ancient confessional of home. In its secrecy, sealed by affection to father or mother, or brother or sister, can be told out the things that burn within; and no priest or ecclesiastic can usurp this parental or brotherly function without injuring what they must earnestly desire to protect. This confessional, however, of the one to the whole little brotherhood, making them watch for and consider one another, must have tended to mutual edification. It seems of all the observances of the Sangha to have most nearly realised one great purpose of the Church, that of being helpful to each other’s salvation. St. Paul and St. James would have felt at home in such a conference. They would probably have warned the brethren against judging one another, and they would have instructed them that only One whose knowledge is perfect, because His love is infinite, could try the lives of men; but they would have commended them for this honest endeavour to fulfil one of the precepts of the perfect law of liberty: “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye who are spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.”

The part played by woman in the early history of Buddhism was analogous to that assumed by woman in relation to primitive Christianity. Women were among the most zealous supporters of Buddha, ministering to him of their substance. Subsequently, as in the case of the Christian Church, the largest proportion of the wealth which was lavished in such marvellous munificence upon the Order came from female votaries. Evidently in those days in India the position of woman was not so degraded and helpless as it afterwards became. Women in old Indian literature are seen to be much more on an equality with men; they are not only represented as receiving scholastic instruction, but even to them as authoresses some of the Vedic hymns were ascribed.[298] At any rate, women appear in almost every Buddhist episode, and they move about with a freedom which contrasts strangely with the seclusion and restraint in which in India they have lived for ages. In the character of Buddha there seems to have been much that was peculiarly attractive to the best type of women, and at least one of these stands forth with very clearly marked individuality.[299] His mother is only a shadow in the legends, and we can only conjecture what the parent of so good and gentle a man must have been. But his wife confronts us with so much that is womanly in the picture that we feel she must have been drawn from life. Very pathetic and tender is the graphic account of her first interview with him, upon his return as the illustrious Buddha to his father’s house.[300] When all came to do him honour, Yasodhara did not come, for she said, “If I am of any value in his eyes, he will come himself, and I can welcome him better here.” Buddha, noting her absence, went attended by two of his disciples to the place where she was, and he warned his companions not to prevent her should she seek to embrace him, although no member of the Order could touch or be touched by a woman. And when she saw him, a mendicant in yellow robes, with shaven head and face—though she knew it would be so—she could not contain herself, but fell at his feet, which she held, passionately weeping. Then remembering the great and impassable gulf which he had fixed between them, she rose and stood at his side. His father sought to apologise for her, telling how in the greatness of her love she mourned and afflicted her soul for loss of him, and refused to be comforted. She became his disciple; and when afterwards, much against his inclination, he admitted women into a separate branch of the Order, the poor wife, whom he had not only widowed, but had bereft of her only child, “passed into the silent life,” as one of the first of Buddhist nuns.

All candid readers of the early Buddhist scriptures will admit that Buddha must not only have been gentle in disposition but pure in character. From male and female disciples alike he demanded chastity, in the Christian conception of the virtue. In the reported discourses of Buddha there is the same absence of direct denunciation of the vices that corrupt society which is observable in the Gospels; but the impression made by the reading of both narratives, is that of characters so far removed from such vices, that people in their presence or under their influence could not even think of them. In both narratives we have presentations of “women who were sinners” in relation to Buddha and Christ, but it will be confessed that the effect produced upon us is very different in each case. The Indian episodes lack the stirrings of the depths of spiritual feeling, the creative word of command exorcising the lust, and unsealing the long congealed fountains of penitence, which confront us so prominently in the scenes of the gospel. Buddha was a pure man, demanding purity from all who would be saved, but demanding it only as moralists have demanded it all along. There did not radiate from him that blending of horror of sin and of pity for sinners which makes the influence of Christ upon the wickedness and infirmities of men to be unique in its regenerative power. Had Christ insisted upon purity just as Buddha did, the world would have profited little by the teaching. Unquestionably the mission of Buddha, though intended to make for chastity, has not purified Eastern Asia from the gross and unnatural vices to which all along it has been prone.

For Buddha’s conception and estimate of woman was very inferior to that of Christ.[301] She was regarded by him through the medium of the traditional prejudice of her inferiority to man in every respect. To him, as to Plato, women, of all snares which the tempter spreads for man, were the most dangerous. Not only was the very smallest love for them to be destroyed, but they were to be avoided, not to be spoken to, not looked upon,[302] not to be helped even when in distress. Of their future as women in the life hereafter he had no hope,[303] and the only reward which he could hold out to them for obedience or benevolent service, the very highest object of aspiration which he could present, was that they might be re-born as men in another stage of existence. His disciple Ananda did good service when he wrung from him permission to form the order of Nuns,[304] for a nun might hope for salvation; but alas for woman and for the progress of society if she had no other gospel to trust in than that which Buddha preached!

His ideal of purity was from the first vitiated by his celibate views of life, and from these views human nature has always revolted in proportion to the honesty with which men have striven to realise them. Celibacy, when dominant or prevalent, has only produced a more vicious and unnatural condition of society than that from which it attempted to escape. The Son of Man represented nobler traditions, and taught far sublimer doctrine. Woman, though different from, and in some respects weaker, is in others higher and purer than man, and altogether his consort. The pure love of the man for the woman was recognised by Christ as one of the most sanctifying influences in life; and marriage, the most sacred of all Divine institutions, as the bond which more than any other keeps society together, obtained His special benediction, and was committed by Him to His Church to guard as the palladium of social freedom and dignity. Notwithstanding its many defections, the Church has never been permitted to lose sight of the Lord’s ideal. Even in the days of corrupted faith, when its laudation of virginity was most extravagant, its unmistakable tendency was to acknowledge the true dignity of the wife.[305] A recent writer professes to be unable “to see that Christianity has had any favourable effect on the position of women—on the contrary, it tended rather to lower their character and contract the range of their activities.”[306] It is noticeable that his facts or quotations are drawn from a period when asceticism had deeply tainted the Church, and that they cannot be held to represent the tendency of the teaching of Christ. The unmistakable influence of His religion has been to ennoble family relations, and to secure woman in her true position as the companion and helpmeet of man. It has been stated by one who cannot be regarded as a special pleader, that what most differentiates the European from the Hindu branch of the Aryan race, is that the first has steadily carried forward, for the elevation of woman, the series of reforms[307] from which the other, though going a little way, recoiled. No one need fear to assert that the chief factor in these reforms, sometimes carried against the resistance and opposition of the Church, was the spirit of Christianity. In proportion as the example of Christ has been honoured, and His teaching has been accepted and obeyed, the emancipation of woman and the recognition of her real rights have been secured. In any case it is certain that the religion of Buddha, though probably not intended to perpetuate the inferior position characteristic of woman in the East, has succeeded neither in lifting her out of it, nor in preventing her from lapsing more deeply into it.

The time for discovering the worth of woman had not come in Buddha’s age, and we must remember his antecedents and surroundings before we condemn his estimate of or his relations to her. If the tradition be reliable, he prophesied, upon yielding to Ananda’s intercession, that because of women holy living would not long be preserved. They would prove in the fair field of his Order what “the disease of mildew proved to be in a field of rice.”[308] So though he admitted them to a separate branch of the Order, he placed them under very stringent regulations, and thoroughly under the tutelage of the monks. “A nun, though admitted a nun a hundred years ago, must bow reverentially before a monk, though only admitted to-day.” She must not pass the rainy season in a district in which monks were not residing; she must report herself twice a month to the Sangha for confession and instruction; she must give the Pavâranâ invitation, and she must, if guilty of offence, atone for it before both monks and nuns. She could only be admitted after a two years’ novitiate; under no circumstances must she revile or rebuke a monk; yea, on no occasion whatever must she charge him with any offence.[309] Between them and the superior sex the strictest separation was maintained from the first. The brother who was to teach and exhort them was never allowed to enter their nunnery, unless a sister was very ill. For a monk to journey alone with a nun, to cross a river in the same boat with one, to sit alone with a nun, with or without witnesses, was a very grave offence.[310] In short, in the Buddhist Sangha women were only tolerated at the best, and they were very severely guarded and restrained, as creatures not at all calculated to influence any one for good, and who could only be prevented or tamed from doing mischief or harm.[311]

The Sangha, as a brotherhood and sisterhood leading a celibate life, coupled with abstinence from labour and from active services of charity, was simply vicious in its tendency, and it proved one of the most obstinate hindrances to the realisation of Buddha’s best ideas, and one of the most powerful factors in the degradation of his religion. Human nature was too strong to submit to such artificial restrictions; so very early there gathered around him and his monks many who would not abandon their families and their callings, though they took refuge in Buddha, and proved the reality of their devotion by faithful service of the Order and practice of the Law. These were the votaries, “upasaka” (masc.), “upasika” (fem.), corresponding with the lay associates of the great Mendicant Orders of Christendom. Converted to the observance of the precepts, they could only, as long as they continued in the world, be sustained by a very faint and far-off hope of deliverance. Theoretically they might attain to sainthood, and from “this shore” of common life, in most exceptional cases they might “pass across the dominion of death,” and reach to the other shore.[312] The father of Buddha is said to have done so on his deathbed, and another is recorded in the legends as having gained Nirvana.[313] As a rule, however, it was reckoned impossible for them to gain what was considered as so barely possible for the Order of Mendicants, that only one or two even of them did actually gain it here. Pious votaries, however, could hope for a happy re-birth, and for strength of merit to be acquired; in some hereafter sufficient to enable them eventually to pluck the fruit of Nirvana. For such lay associates no ceremony of initiation was required; only in presence of a monk the candidates made profession that they took refuge in Buddha and Dharma and Sangha. They had to observe certain precepts and prohibitions; had to renounce any trade involving the making or selling of arms, or the killing of animals; they had to abstain from all traffic in and use of intoxicating drinks, and to put far away from them all falsehood, and theft, and unchastity. To seal this, however, no formal vow was demanded of the votary, and to maintain them in their obedience no pastoral supervision was accorded. When they transgressed, even in the matter of scandalous living, there was neither censure nor discipline, and when they offended by injuring the Order or insulting one of its members, the only penalty inflicted was the refusal of their invitations to dine, and the withdrawal from them of the alms-bowl.[314] Into the Uposatha assemblies they dared not intrude, and from the very slightest share of the business of the Order they were strictly excluded.[315] They could only listen to the preaching of the monks, whom they could feed, and lodge, and endow with houses and lands; and all the reward they could hope for, was the prospect of acquiring in some future life merit sufficient to enable them to renounce the world and become mendicants like them. For the present they were not inside, but only about, the circle of the Sakkya-putta-Samanas; he was not a member of the family, but only a servitor and a slave.[316] The elect, the disciples in deed and in truth, the heirs of salvation, were exclusively the monks; and the Upâsaka at the best was one for whom it was good “continuously to dispense rice milk, and honey lumps, if he had a longing for joy, whether he desired heavenly joy or coveted only human prosperity,”[317] His merit was most likely to be acquired by being useful to the good, who served him by accepting his offerings,[318] and taught him—though to a purpose undreamed of by St. Paul when he quoted his Saviour’s saying—that in his case, at least, it was “more blessed to give than to receive.”

It is to the lasting honour of Buddha that he converted the Sangha into a propaganda for preaching to all his way of salvation. He did not, for he could not, conceive of that better society which our Lord has created in the Holy Catholic Church. It is true, alas! that the actual or visible Church has often caricatured, and has never yet properly represented, its Lord’s ideal; but it has never been permitted wholly to lose sight of that Kingdom whose citizenship is free to all who believe and repent, and of that royal priesthood of which all are members who trust in the one sacrifice and prevailing intercession of the Great High Priest of our profession. If the visible Church has failed to convert, or even to attract, the members of the Buddhist Sanghas, it is because of something wrong in its methods, or false in its presentation; for notwithstanding its failure, it possesses in the great gospel of the Divine Fatherhood intrusted to its keeping, potentialities for gathering all mankind into the only brotherhood which will satisfy their heaven-born aspirations. The manifestation of it may still be a far-off Divine event, and to bring it about God may employ many agencies other than those which the Church as at present organised may be willing to recognise or to use; but once that holy brotherhood is manifested, He alone will be found at the head of it, who on His way to His agony, and to the cross on which He was to reveal to the uttermost the love of the Creator for the human race, paused by the brook Kedron, and made this supplication mingle with the ripple of its waters and the whispers of the olives of Gethsemane, “I pray ... that they all may be one, even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us.”

Footnote 244:

_Sangha_, originally an assembly (of disciples gathered around a Hindu sage). In Buddhism, the entire fraternity (like the Order of Francis or Dominic).—Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, p. 176.

Footnote 245:

Robertson Smith, _Prophets of Israel_, p. 275.

Footnote 246:

Kullavagga, vi. 2, 3, 4; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xx..

Footnote 247:

Weber, _Indian Literature_, p. 306.

Footnote 248:

Dhammapadda, 141; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part i.; Pâtimokkha Sekhiyá Dhammâ, 1, 2, 3, 4; _ibid._ vol. xiii. p. 59.

Footnote 249:

Mahâparanibhâna Sutta, iii. 65; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xi.

Footnote 250:

Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, p. 279.

Footnote 251:

Mahavagga, i. 11; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xiii.

Footnote 252:

_Ibid._ i. 12; _ibid._ vol. xiii.

Footnote 253:

_Ibid._ viii. 27. 5; _ibid._ vol. xvii.; Kullavagga, vi. 1. 3; _ibid._ vi. 9. 2; _ibid._ vol. xx.

Footnote 254:

Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 251 _seq._ The doctrine that it bore nobler fruit is expressly contradicted by some. See Âpastamba, pres. ii. pat. ix. khan. 23; also pres. ii. pat. ix. k. 24. 15; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. ii. pp. 156, 159.

Footnote 255:

The way of “Works”—ceremonial and sacrificial religion; the way of “Faith”—devotion (heart) to the deities without works; the way of “Knowledge,” or true enlightenment.—Sir Monier Williams, _Buddhism_, p. 95.

Footnote 256:

Saint-Hilaire, _Le Bouddha, etc._, p. 152.

Footnote 257:

Not without protest, however, by fathers and doctors of the Church. See Hermas, _Simil._ v.; Clem. _Strom._ iii.; Tertullian, _De Jejunio_, p. 123 _seq._; _De Pallio_, p. 181 _seq._

Footnote 258:

Gieseler, _Eccles. Hist._ vol. i. pp. 289 _seq._; Neander’s _Church Hist._ vol. iii. pp. 305 _seq._

Footnote 259:

Hom. on St. Matth. 69, 70.

Footnote 260:

Montalembert, _Monks of the West_, vol. i. p. 319; Neander’s _Church History_, vol. iii. pp. 338, 339.

Footnote 261:

Cassian, _Collationes_, ii. 5-8; _De Instit. Monachi_, x.; _De capitalibus vitiis_, quoted by Farrar, _Lives of the Fathers_, vol. ii. p. 224; Burton, _Anatomy of Melancholy_, ii. 510.

Footnote 262:

_Monks of the West_, vol. i. p. 27.

Footnote 263:

Sutta Nipâta, 75-81; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. p. ii.

Footnote 264:

Theod. _Eccles. Hist._ lib. iv. cap. 26.

Footnote 265:

“They prayed for the whole world.”—Chrysost. H. 78, _In Johannem_.

Footnote 266:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, pp. 317, 318.

Footnote 267:

Mahavagga, viii. 15; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xvii.

Footnote 268:

“I am not aware of any instances in which the pariah of the age is mentioned as a member of the Order.” “According to Buddhist dogmatics, a good Sudra or Vaisya could only hope to be re-born as a Kshatrya, and this clearly indicates that the distinctions of castes had by no means vanished or become worthless in Buddha’s consciousness” (_Buddha, etc._, p. 156).

Footnote 269:

Mahavagga, i. 39. 76; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xiii.

Footnote 270:

Christianity does not, as Goethe averred, “prefer what is despised and feeble,” but as in God’s eyes nothing is despised and abject, so, in fellowship with the Father, Christ cherished the maimed and lame and blind, though hated of the soul of the natural man, and this disposition will ever be a “mark” or “note” of the true Church of Christ.

Footnote 271:

Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, 1882, p. 284; Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lectures, 1881, p. 155.

Footnote 272:

Oldenberg, _Buddha, etc._, pp. 181, 182.

Footnote 273:

_The Scotsman_, August 17th, 1889.

Footnote 274:

E. Burnouf, _Science des Religions_, p. 94.

Footnote 275:

Mahavagga, i. 49. 6.

Footnote 276:

_Ibid._ i. 54. 5; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xiii.

Footnote 277:

Mahavagga, i. 7. 10-15; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xiii.

Footnote 278:

Mahavagga, i. 29.

Footnote 279:

_Ibid._ i. 76. 1-10.

Footnote 280:

_Buddhism_, p. 80; Dr. Rhys Davids states that a new or cloister name was given on admission, in exchange for the family one (Hibbert Lectures, p. 39), but Professor Oldenberg alleges that this is supported only by solitary cases (_Buddha, etc._, p. 353 note).

Footnote 281:

Mahavagga, i. 30. 1-4; also _ibid._ vi. 14. 6; and Kullavagga, vi. 1-2.

Footnote 282:

Mahavagga, i. 78. 1-5.

Footnote 283:

Mahavagga, i. 79. 1-3.

Footnote 284:

Mahavagga, i. 25. 1-24, for the duties of novice to his Upagghâya; _ibid._ i. 32, Kullavagga, viii. 13, 14, for his duties to his Âkariya. The duties to both are the same, but the Upagghâya seems to have been the more important of the two tutors.

Footnote 285:

Dr. Rhys Davids, _Handbook of Buddhism_, p. 169.

Footnote 286:

Dhammapada, 200; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part i.

Footnote 287:

Pâtimokkha; Pakittiyá Dhammâ, 10; said to be because he might kill or harm some living creature.

Footnote 288:

Sir Edwin Arnold, _Light of Asia_, p. 95.

Footnote 289:

Kullavagga, v. vi. viii. _passim_; Mahavagga, i. 25. 15.

Footnote 290:

Dhammapada, 141, 142; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. Part i.

Footnote 291:

Sir Edwin Arnold, _Light of Asia_, pp. 95, 96.

Footnote 292:

Mahavagga, i. 31. 4.

Footnote 293:

Introduction to Dhammapada, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. x. p. xliv: a long list quoted from the _Northern Scripture_ by Dr. Edkins in _Chinese Buddhism_.

Footnote 294:

The question was thrice put, “Are ye pure?” Mahavagga, ii. 1-36.

Footnote 295:

See for a specimen the Kullavaga, v. 21; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xx.

Footnote 296:

Bishop of Colombo, in _Nineteenth Century_, July 1888.

Footnote 297:

Mahavagga, iv. 1. 18; _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xiii.

Footnote 298:

Weber, _Indische Studien_, x. 118; Metrical translations by Dr. John Muir, p. 250, where Professor Eggeling is quoted.

Footnote 299: