Part 22

It thus appears that Buddhism in the second period of its history, and after it had succeeded in winning the support of powerful kings, reached its furthest extension and achieved its grandest conquests. Christianity, on the other hand, was more rapidly diffused in the primitive than in the subsequent ages. Tested by its intensive hold upon the nations, it had only nominally converted the Roman Empire by the end of the fourth century. Gibbon’s estimate of the number of Christians within it, is acknowledged by friendly authorities,[340] like Bishop Lightfoot, to err if at all on the side of excess. During the reign of Constantine, probably not a twentieth of the whole population of the Empire were Christians, even by profession. After this period, no doubt, the proportion must have greatly increased, for the barbarous hordes that poured downwards in successive deluges over the South were converted so suddenly and so silently that “scarce a legend remains to tell the tale.” In regard, however, to the conversion of heathen Europe, it is a mistake to suppose that the missionaries had only to come, and see, and conquer. The conversion of England by the Roman monks, and of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales by Oriental and, it is said, Arian missionaries, cannot be said to have been accomplished before the close of the seventh century. Afterwards, the conversion of Central and Northern Germany occupied the Celtic and British missionaries for two centuries. The conversion of the Scandinavians, beginning in the ninth, could not be said to have been effected till the middle of the eleventh century, while that of Slavonia, undertaken in the tenth, did not terminate, if indeed even then, before the sixteenth century. The conquest of Europe was the result of a prolonged and often desultory warfare, in which, while the advance was slow, Christianity sometimes failed to hold the ground which it had gained. The powerful Churches in Asia, the seats of its great Councils and the capitals of its rule, either died or were swept away; Antioch and Constantinople, once its citadels, became the strongholds of an alien and hostile faith; the mighty Churches of Egypt and Abyssinia dwindled into a condition of immedicable disease, and the flourishing Church of Africa, with its more than six hundred bishoprics, was simply, because ripe for destruction, obliterated by the forces of Islam. Toward the latter half of the tenth century it seemed as if Christianity in Europe was surely following the fate of Buddhism before its disappearance from India. On all sides it was pressed in the deadly grip of Pagan and Moslem alike, while its bishops, and priests, and nobles, oblivious of the danger, were living in sinful self-indulgence. It seemed as if Christendom was being surely blotted out from the geography of the world; and yet as by a miracle it survived, or was preserved, till came the Renaissance, and that marvellous emergence of missionary zeal, which sent Christianity, Reformed and Unreformed, to the very ends of the earth, and which, increasing in every generation since then, was never more abundant nor more fervent than now.[341]

Christianity, unlike Buddhism, came very early into collision with the most advanced civilisation and highest culture of the world, while Buddhism for centuries encountered only the religions of inferior peoples. The only equal or superior civilisation which it met was that of China, and there, though tolerated and even patronised from the first, it seems for centuries to have been regarded as an exotic. Natives of India, like the Jews in the Roman Empire, were allowed to build Buddhist temples, but only in the fourth century A.D. did Chinese people begin extensively to be converted to the Buddhist religion. As it rose into favour its conflicts with the Confucianists began, and the issue of its varied fortunes has been, that though indirectly it has greatly influenced, it has only subdued a section of the Chinese people.[342] While other inferior races came quickly under its influence, the most civilised of Eastern peoples resisted it, and have at most only been leavened by it.[343] Christianity had also its easy conquests, as when some northern tribes were converted in a day by the baptism of their chiefs; but its principal struggle with the historic Paganism of aristocratic Rome was fierce and obdurate. There the position, as in the case of Hinduism to-day, was not carried by assault, but by slow and almost imperceptible approaches. The Church at Rome for two centuries was more a Greek than a Latin one. The names of its bishops were Greek, and the Catacomb inscriptions sufficiently indicate that Greek was the language of its members. Slowly and indirectly, however, it gained the hold upon ancient thought and custom, operating like an alterative in the system, supplanting what was good, by simply taking possession of it and inspiring it with a new life, while that which was decaying and waxing old gradually vanished away.

In this respect, therefore, there is a significant difference between the two religions. Christianity, with all the world against it, and in spite of three centuries of unparalleled persecutions, succeeded in vanquishing the highest, while yet approving itself as a gospel to the lowest civilisation. Buddhism, with the greatest powers of the Eastern world in its favour, and never, perhaps, save in China, called to bear the shock of a single persecution, has only succeeded in being accepted by inferior branches of the human race. The Hindu Aryans, assimilating what of it they approved, rejected what of it was peculiar and distinctive. The Semitic followers of Islam simply crushed it under foot, and it never rose high enough even to touch the Western Aryans.[344] Very early it withdrew itself entirely within the circles of the Turanian peoples; and if to-day in Mongolia, Manchuria, among the Kalmucs on the Wolga, and the Bunjads on the shores of the Baikal Sea, it may be said to be advancing, the most competent authorities assure us that everywhere else its progress is arrested, and that, even where it is most upheld by local governments, in the regions of its most dominant supremacy, it yields manifest signs of decay.[345]

Another and even more significant contrast is found in the fact that the advance of Christianity has ever been farthest and most rapid when its faith was purely taught and most consistently illustrated. It never sought peace with other religions without being defeated, and never allied itself with superstition without bringing shame and disaster on all concerned. It has had its periods of deterioration and defection, but somehow it has always survived them. Indeed, its vitality is as truly indicated by the corruptions which it has outlived, as by the external opposition which it has vanquished. Its real conquests are due to the expansive power of its inherent and original principles. The very opposite is the case with Buddhism. Its fundamental principles being unnatural and repugnant to the essential instincts of mankind, it was from the very first a morbid growth, having in it the seeds of decay. It never could have lived in the strength of its own principles, and so the story of its advance is one of perpetual compromise with every popular superstition that it met. The more it assimilated itself to them, the more it seemed to grow; but as foreign influences took possession of it, its own life oozed out of it, till very early it represented a system so perverted that its founder would have repudiated and abhorred it. The Church has often travestied Christianity, but it never fell from the faith so fearfully as Buddhism has everywhere fallen from the original doctrine of Buddha. Religion, worship, even the purest, he intended by his system to supersede, and now his name is employed to support the grossest of all superstitions,[346] a religion with more idols in it than that of the most idolatrous of peoples, a worship founded on the efficacy of magical incantations, and of prayers rendered by machines. Just for this very reason its

II.—Internal History

is very instructive, and we shall now proceed to consider a few of its most salient points.

Buddhism, in a quiet land and tranquil age, was launched upon the world as a new theory of life—a system so rounded off and completed that its disciples had no other duty than that of believing, obeying, and propagating it. Christianity, on the other hand, began its career amid the convulsions of political revolution, and for three centuries of conflict it had to fight every inch of its way. It was not, however, as a new system that it appeared in history, but as a new principle of life, round which all the moral, and spiritual, and intellectual energies which it found in mankind, and all which itself might awaken, might form and gather strength. It was impossible, therefore, that it ever could remain stationary. Its apostles were commissioned to carry on all that their Lord had “begun both to do and to teach.” He distinctly promised them increase of knowledge and power from on high, and all the changes which increase or growth implies. To-day His religion could no more be made to return to the form in which it was manifested eighteen centuries ago than man could be made to put on the clothes of his childhood. Its development, however, is that of its inherent life, manifesting all the continuity and identity of the sapling with the tree, of the boy with the man. Like all growing things, it has been subject to disease by contagion and infection, but it has always preserved life in sufficient volume to slough off its impurities and to pass onward through reformation to health. Now, the history of Buddhism, on the contrary, reveals only a long process of degradation, without having manifested any power as yet to recover and to reform itself according to its original and essential principles.[347]

The offspring of Brahmanism, from which it differed more in degree than in substance, at no period of its history did it succeed in completely disentangling itself from it. Not only did the forms of the old religion cling to it; its very life was continued in the new. While Buddha rejected all the sacrificial rites and religious observances of Brahmanism, and preached a law subversive of all its faith in revelation, he accepted and continued its ascetism and its hope of deliverance by a process of meditation and of abstraction. It was by himself, therefore, and not by his cousin Dêvadatta,[348] that the heretic leaven was introduced into the lump. Dêvadatta’s attempted changes were not innovations, but a return to the primitive rule, a logical deduction from a law which Gotama never wholly rejected. Just as to the patriarchs of the Greek, the Western or Romish Church “is the chief heresy of latter days,” just as the Pope was branded in their Encyclical of 1848 “as the first founder of German Rationalism,”[349] so the successive advances and orthodox decisions of the Buddhist Councils were denounced as apostasies by men like Dêvadatta. Still these changes were due in great measure to the beliefs which Buddhism had inherited, for when in the inevitable rebound from its unnatural Nihilism the theistic movement set in, the spirit of Brahmanism, which had passed into it at the first, began to assert itself, and, interpenetrating it more and more, prepared it for that issue in which, blending with the popular forms in which Brahmanism was then expressing itself, Buddhism merged into the composite system of Hinduism which confronts us in India to-day.

In Christianity, as in nature, the grafting of the good stock upon the wild conquered the wild. Christ took nothing from Judaism but the universalism of its prophets, its faith in one living and true God, the Heavenly Father of multitudes whom Abraham was ignorant of, and Israel did not acknowledge. His apostles, judged by the literature which they have bequeathed, seem faithfully to have carried out His principles; but many of their converts were strict Jews, who insisted upon some visible connection with the old religion. Just as Dêvadatta, their prototype, held that a true Buddhist must first be a good Brahman in respect of asceticism, so they insisted that Christians were debtors to keep what of the old law was expressed in circumcision, and the observance of certain other commandments and ordinances. The danger of Christianity being reduced to the bondage of the old was serious, but the inspiration of St. Paul, the providential destruction of the nation, and the marvellous spread of the religion among the Gentiles, eventually overcame it. The spirit of Judaism, it is true, has never been wholly cast out from the Christian Church. All through its history it is traceable in one form or another of the ritualism and asceticism which, like Brahmanism, it may be held to represent. There have been times when it has attained to portentous and pernicious influence, and such times may happen again; but from the early days there has always been in Christianity vitality sufficient to detect and try and condemn it; and so though Judaism, and even Paganism, to some extent, still taint the theology and worship of the Church, we need have no fear that the genius of the old religion will ever gain, as it did in the case of Buddhism, permanent ascendency over the new.

The opposite of Ritualism and Asceticism, represented by Judaism and Brahmanism, is the Rationalism which such reforming religions may be said to beget of themselves; and if its spirit of inquiry be uncontrolled, it will certainly dissipate their energy. As early as St. Paul’s day we see Rationalism working upon the development of Christianity, and necessitating the rise of a theology, which, perhaps inevitably, has often been confounded with, and, in the estimation of many, has supplanted the Christian religion. The many sects which Rationalism produced in the first centuries do not so much indicate hostility to the new faith, as the mighty ferment through which the minds of men were passing in regard to it. Now though Buddhist scriptures manifest rationalistic movements in the Sanghas from the first, they seem to have proceeded in quite a different direction. Of conflict as to fundamentals of creed there appears to be very little trace, but there are abundant indications of considerable controversy as to practice. The first quarrel traceable in the Christian Church arose over the peculiar institution of community of goods; and though the Sanghas avoided that mistake, their earliest troubles were concerning the possession of property. The original rule enjoined upon the brethren absolute poverty, and the regulations in regard to food and shelter were equally stringent. Very soon after Buddha’s decease a reaction set in, and a feeling began to prevail that his standard of morality and his ideal of the Order were too lofty for all but exceptional men to realise. He may have succeeded as the fully Enlightened One, but common men could not hope to “wind themselves so high;” so out of consideration for human infirmity there commenced a constant and increasing relaxation in their interpretation of his precepts of perfection.[350] The law of absolute poverty was modified to the extent that property might be held in common, and the laws regulating diet, dress, and even meditation, were soon subjected to the same treatment. The wealth which poured in upon them, and the consequent improvement of their position, was not followed by corresponding spiritual growth. The more they prospered, the more the fundamental principles of the Order were neglected, evaded, or explained away. The friendly conferences of the rainy season gave place to controversy, and controversy proved so fruitful of schism, that very early in its career Buddhism is said to have produced eighteen different sects, ranged in four great divisions. Yet in no one schism seemed there a great principle to be involved; they were but Pharisee quarrels at best, in which though they strained out the gnat they swallowed the camel.[351]

Side by side with this relaxation of the law advanced the growth of the legends concerning him who first preached it. The further they removed from his decease, the higher, as was natural, he rose in their esteem. As one by one the fathers fell asleep, and the early enthusiasm died, and the law was felt to be more and more burdensome, the less he seemed to be a man of like passions with themselves, till eventually they came to regard him as “omniscient and absolutely sinless.”[352] He had taken away their gods, and disowned their religious cravings. He professed to find no proper divine being to whom any instinct should attach itself—yea, in his dissection and analysis of human nature he found no religious faculty to be relied upon; but he could not unmake his fellow-men, whose religious instinct education can neither originate nor eradicate; and so, defrauded of its natural gratification, it inevitably turned to illegitimate methods of appeasing itself. In the first instance, it found the objects of its reverence in the relics which survived him, the law which he preached, and the Order which he founded. Originally it could not be called worship; it was more an expression of affectionate homage.[353] But so strong is man’s impulse to worship, that very early they expressed it in images of Buddha everywhere, though the images of the Law and of the Order have only been found in the lands where the Northern Buddhism reigns.

This earliest triad of personalities, called “triratna,” the three gems or three holies, seems to have been suggested by, and certainly corresponds with, the primitive triad of deities in the old Indian Pantheon.[354] It was the first indication of the bankruptcy of Buddhism, of its failure out of its own resources to meet the religious wants of its disciples, and it marked only the beginning of a revolt, which was to issue in complete disavowal of every doctrine essential to original Buddhism. The religious conscience and common sense which rebelled against its unnatural atheism, would not long be satisfied with the worship of the memory of a completely vanished Buddha, or of the idea of an impersonal Law, or of a miscellaneous Order. So pious Buddhists turned readily to a doctrine said to be taught by the Master, and formulated before the settlement of the Southern canon in its present form, according to which Buddha is not a distinctive name of just one person, but a title descriptive of a long series of Enlightened Ones, who, leaving, as he was supposed to have done, the estate of a Bôdhisatva[355] in the Tushita heavens, appeared at distant intervals to proclaim the same truth for the deliverance of men and gods. The names of twenty-four of these Buddhas who preceded Gotama have been handed down, and the name of his successor, to whom, upon the attainment of Buddhahood, he transferred his Bôdhisatvaship, and who is to appear after five thousand years for the rediscovery of the truth, was announced as Mâitrêya. To this coming one, the Buddha of “kindness and mercy”—thought to be a personification by some imaginative poet of the gentle spirit of Buddhism—the thoughts and the hopes of the disciples turned, and out of this hope arose a doctrinal system, which, expanding and enlarging by manifold additions as the time went on, showed that however atheistic the original creed might be, the religion itself had become polytheistic.[356] To Mâitrêya, in his glorious heavens, the deliverer of distant generations, prayers ascended, and worship was rendered by all Buddhists everywhere alike; and out of this cult by far the largest section of them began to evolve deity after deity, till the heavens, in which Buddha could find no superior to himself, were crowded with objects of idolatrous regard.

In this polytheistic development a very great distinction emerged between the Northern or Mahāyāna and the Southern or Hināyāna system of Buddhism. How the divergence originated has not been clearly ascertained, but about the beginning of the Christian era it seems to have been very manifest, and at that time, when sectarian controversy and philosophical speculation threatened to rend the system into fragments, Nâgârdjuna,[357] a monk of Nâlanda, is said to have done for Northern Buddhism what Gregory and Benedict did for the Western Church. Under him, and certainly after him, Northern Buddhism, both in respect of expansive power and of dogmatic and ritualistic development, left Southern Buddhism far behind it. The Hināyāna, or the “little way” of deliverance, is believed to have been applied by the Northern, not without contempt for the Southern school’s arrestment. They did not profess to contradict the Southern faith: they simply included it, and advanced in their “great way” beyond it. To the Southern the _summum bonum_ of life meant Arhatship, for that once attained there would be no more re-birth. They acknowledged and worshipped only one Bôdhisatva, the coming Mâitrêya; but the doctors of the North, properly conceiving the estate of the Bôdhisatva to be nobler than that of Arhat, propounded it as the goal of aspiration. Arhatship would indeed secure one’s own deliverance; but Bôdhisatvahood would enable them, as possible coming Buddhas, to confer the blessings of deliverance upon countless multitudes. Along with Mâitrêya they discovered many persons who, like Buddha’s great disciples and their successors, had through merit, acquired in a long series of lives, taken his Tushita heavens by violence; but who, unlike him, were under no obligation to quit their celestial abodes, and proceed through Buddhahood to Nirvana. They might enjoy their blessedness to the full, and sit beside their nectar without concern, for they fulfilled every function expected of them in being objects of worship, to whom mortals could appeal for comfort in sorrow and help in time of need.