Part 6

But Christianity from the very earliest possessed what Buddhism for a long period lacked. In its canonical writings it conserved not only a check upon this apostasy, but a security for reformation. Mechanical though it seems, there was a providence in the early committal to writing of such books as compose our Bibles. In the fact that their successive disclosures of truth were thus registered there is more significance than at first appears. It is admitted by all that man’s progress depends in no small degree on his ability to secure and hand down the treasures of his wisdom and experience. The art of writing is thus recognised to be one of the most moving powers in the world. The nations that have depended upon it for the transmission of knowledge inherited or acquired, have certainly made more progress in religion and civilisation than those that have neglected or despised it. It is significant that the writers of the Bible have all recognised this condition of human progress, and that many of them have represented themselves as instructed by the Divine authority, from whom they profess to have received their communications, to make them permanent in popular language and in plain written form.[79]

In the history of the Hebrews there is not a single recorded instance of religious reformation in which the law and the testimony, or the scrolls of the prophets, did not play an important part. In like manner the New Testament, which embodies the ideals and perpetuates the standard which is to regulate its course, not only saved Christianity from the perils which threatened its earliest spread, but has often rescued it from the degradation into which it has fallen. Canonical books may only give, as it has been said, “the reflected image of the real doctrines of the founder of a religion, an image always blurred and distorted by the medium through which it has to pass”;[80] but in the case of the New Testament the Church has never developed, or thought it possible to develop, a purer reflection. Advance as it may, the Church never can outgrow the ideals of its youth, and change what it pleases, it never can improve them. Whenever the Church assumed supremacy over its law, and whenever tradition superseded its testimony, it yielded to the disintegrating influences of heathenism. It was rapidly lapsing into polytheism when Mohammed rose with a spurious and mutilated version of the Scriptures to recall it to the witness of true Scriptures to the unity and sovereignty of God. Later on, when sinking through formalism into superstition and sorcery almost as degrading as any Indian, Luther, by the re-discovery of the Greek Testament, brought about a reformation which not only saved Europe, but has created a new Western and Southern world. In every revival and every advance which has taken place since then there may be traced, directly or indirectly, the regenerative influences of the Christian originals. On its human side the Christian Church will always be in danger of losing its pure conceptions and noble aims in grosser forms of belief and in lower ambitions; but high over all its degradation towers in its early Scriptures the majesty and spirituality of its Divine authority, and we have only to look up to be first convicted, then attracted and redeemed. The purest sections of the Christian Church, the surest and the first to outgrow all unworthy expressions of Christianity, are those which adhere most closely to the original rule of faith and worship. It is quite possible that we “may be only too apt to make a fetich of our sacred books”;[81] but somehow the Christian communities that most revere their sacred books show that they are least likely to fall into this danger. The more we obey the Scriptures, the less likely are we to idolise them. The New Testament, so far from attaching any mystical or talismanic value to its contents, tells us that the letter killeth, and the spirit alone giveth life. It is otherwise with the Buddhist Tripitaka. Its authors claim meritorious efficacy not only for the repetition of its sentences, but for the very sound of its words, “as if they were capable of elevating every one who hears them to heavenly abodes in future existence.” Sir Monier Williams has illustrated this by a legend long current, not in northern Buddhist countries, but in Ceylon, where a purer Buddhism prevails. According to it, two monks were heard by five hundred bats reciting in a cave the law of Buddha, and they by merely hearing gained such merit that in death they were re-born as men, and ultimately through successive re-births were raised to the fellowship of the gods.[82] Of course this is simply a legend, a thing of hay or straw that has got mixed with the purer primitive faith; but it indicates that the course of the current flows in quite an opposite direction from the faith which allows itself to be dominated and guided by the canon of Holy Scriptures.

The quality of the contents of the two sets of writings is not under discussion, but we cannot help remarking one characteristic of the Christian Scriptures which is not likely to emerge in our longest acquaintance with the Buddhist books. No one ever expects that the genuineness of the contents of the Tripitaka will ever be discussed with anything like the intensity and acerbity with which we have discussed the genuineness of the books of the Bible. The long and fierce contendings that have been waged over each portion of the Gospels will never take place over any of the Suttas. We have been working for five centuries to secure a proper English translation of the Holy Bible, and we are not satisfied with it yet: does any one expect a similar expenditure of labour to secure a proper version of the Tripitaka? It is possible that scholarship will by and by exhaust this particular field of Oriental research, and “having catalogued its discoveries will put them aside and proceed to more interesting studies”; but though men have quarrelled about and questioned the Holy Scriptures for eighteen centuries they are not likely to come to a term of their hostility or curiosity. The ceaseless endeavour to disprove, refute, shows that we cannot get rid of them. There must be something either in the history of their production or the quality of their contents, or the range of their influence, which separates them from all sacred books of the type of the Buddhist Tripitaka. Certainly we cannot conceive it possible that any of these so-called Bibles of other religions will ever among any civilised people supplant the Christian Bible. “One chapter of Isaiah,” says Quinet,[83] “has more in it than a whole Republic of Plato.” One Psalm of David will outweigh all the religious lore of the Vedas. One sentence of Moses, “The Lord our God is one Lord: I the Lord am holy,” is worth all the speculations of the devout and learned authors of the Upanishads. Not that the Republic, the Vedas, the Upanishads are to be despised. On the contrary, the more they are studied the more likely is the Bible to be revered, for the truth that is in them is only prophetic of truth which could not then be revealed and received. We may outlive and outgrow the teaching of these wise ancients, but we have not yet transcended the originals of Christianity, and it is not at all likely that we ever shall. There is an end to the perfection of all other systems, but here is “a commandment exceeding broad,” “whose line has gone through all the earth, and its word to the end of the world.”

From this slight notice of the literature which Buddhism has produced let us proceed to glance at the literature which it inherited, with the view of catching a glimpse of the conditions out of which it arose. As with man’s language, so is it with his other distinctive birthright: we can only understand a religion when we have ascertained its antecedents. Christianity emerged from a previous religion of which it professed to be the complement. Our Lord appeared among a people whose spiritual history extended over several thousand years. They had a sacred canon, professing to register the successive Divine revelations made to their ancestors, which was fixed as we have it now at least two, and perhaps more, centuries before He came. Instead of breaking with the past He acknowledged and appropriated it; instead of abrogating their law, He fulfilled it; instead of disowning their prophets He claimed them as His witnesses. In prosecuting His mission He brought upon Himself the fierce antagonism of the existing Church, whose leaders in less than three years succeeded in having Him crucified; but His constant appeal was to their ever-venerated Scriptures. His apostles again record and expound the incidents of His ministry and His death as realising the pre-intimations of their ancient rites, and as fulfilling all their prophecies; and all along faith in the Divine origin of Christianity is never supposed to be weakened but to be greatly confirmed by an appeal to the religion which it annulled and supplanted.

Now Buddhism grew out of Brahmanism, but however divergent their relations eventually became, it was originally accepted as a natural consequence of it. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, there was for long no trace of serious antagonism between the Brahmans and many generations of the successors of Buddha. Brahmans formed a considerable portion of his followers, and in regard to his teaching, his doctrines, where not identical, were not likely to offend them. St. Paul scandalised the Pharisees by preaching that outward Jewish connection marked by the seal of circumcision profited nothing, but long before Buddha’s time Brahman teachers had declared, as he did, to that most exclusive of the Indian elect, that the true Brahman was not a person born within the sacred caste, but only the thoughtful and self-controlled man:[84] that a bad mind and wicked deeds are what defile a man, and that no outward observances can purify him.[85] Buddha has been designated as the best and wisest and greatest of Hindus; “a reformer of Hinduism who ignored its superstitions and follies, and sought to elevate and refine its dogmas.”[86] It is now considered very questionable whether the difference between the two systems ever grew into hostility involving persecution of the new religion by the old. The two streams of Hindu belief seem for long in their course in India to have flowed peaceably side by side, and if Buddhism eventually disappeared from India as a separate and distinct system, it was not altogether because it was crushed by persecution, but because it returned to enrich and modify the religion from which it originally parted.[87]

Buddhism was thus an offspring of Brahmanism, but Brahmanism was itself the product of a religion older still. Behind Buddhism lies a great and undefined past, a past with no history in the proper sense of the word, and absolutely without chronology; but out of this vast and nebulous era there has been extracted a rich traditional literature, and Oriental scholars working on principles similar to those by which geologic periods are determined,[88] are endeavouring by an examination of the various civilisations reflected in that literature to establish the leading stages in the growth of prehistoric Indian thought. The sacred books of India disclose sufficiently in outline the social and religious progress of the people from a period of great antiquity. No one can tell when the oldest fragments of them were originally composed, but some of them are said to have been in circulation among the Aryans when one immigrant contingent of them had arrived at the confluence of Jumna with the Ganges,[89] and if so, they image for us the life and beliefs of a people who must have been contemporaries with Moses some fifteen centuries at latest before the coming of Christ.

It is now asserted that this Aryan immigration had been preceded from the same quarter by an earlier one, in a past so very remote that the Indians had lost completely the memory of it, and that by the time this second wave had reached the north-west Gangetic tracts, the first had pushed its way as far east as the delta, where first vanquishing it finally amalgamated with the aboriginal tribes. It is supposed that from out of this earliest section arose the natural ancestors of Buddha, while in the second and intellectually superior section we must look for the religious teachers from whom his spiritual lineage is to be traced.[90] For with them were introduced the Vedas, revealing the earliest forms of civilisation and religion in that great section of the human family to which we ourselves belong. We see pictured in the Rig-Veda a people who, in complexion, manner, and rites, were at first as distinct from the native Indian races as were the Israelites from those of Canaan. Patriarchal in their institutions, pastoral or agricultural in their pursuits, they confront us as a primitive but certainly not a barbarous folk. Nurtured by the invigorating climate and magnificent scenery of an ancestral home “on the very roof of the world,” they had reached a social condition in which, in a language fitly called “polished,” or “carefully made” (Sanskrita), they were as fitly called “Aryan” or “noble.” They practised the arts of Jabal and Jubal, venerated their sages and poets, and called their wives and daughters by names of beauty and grace like that of Naamah. Their religion, though polytheistic, was not inspired by dread of evil spirits or awe of ancestral shades, but by wonder of the world around them and their own awakening instincts. Man in these ancient fragments, as in the first pages of our Bible, is evidently a creature transcending the savage, and made in a diviner image than the type from which it is maintained he must have sprung. Instead of consorting with or worshipping the animals, he exercises dominion over them; he questions himself and the heavens and the earth concerning their origin and author, and with some divine authentic instinct which he has never lost, he seems to be growing into the feeling that not only the trinity of supernatural powers which he worshipped, but his very self, are the children of some primordial and eternal Dyaus, the father of all.

While the earliest light that falls upon our ancestors reveals them as a religious people, whose worship, simple and rudimentary as it was, indicated a sense of inferiority, and also, as one who ought to know informs us, “some sense of flaw in the relationship, some concept of sin and guilt,”[91] to the deities worshipped, it is to be noted that gods and men were felt to be too much akin to allow of spiritual aspiration, or of high moral significance in man’s religious acts. The ethical or rather spiritual elements so vital to the Biblical conceptions of religion may not be quite foreign to the earliest Veda, but they are scantily, if at all, represented in it. No prayer can be said to have ever been directed to obtain forgiveness, or growth in goodness, in the Bible sense. The sinner was for the most part only a defaulter in respect of offerings, and his guilt was that of a person who refused to render homage. That the gods might be able to watch over and enrich mankind, they had to be fed and sustained. The worshipper was thus in a certain degree necessary to the worshipped. The sense of submissive gratitude to the Deity which meets us in the earliest fragments of the Bible is not expressed, for religion was conceived of as a kind of exchange in which men purchased a right to divine help by service rendered, and “each man satisfied his higher instinct according to his own conception of the character of the being on whose favour his welfare was thought to depend.”[92]

Centuries later, in another strata of sacred literature, composed in prose, dogmatic and liturgic in character, and designated Brahmanas,[93] we behold the same branch of the Aryan family in a further stage of their history. Their patriarchal age has vanished, and their heroic seems passing into the aristocratic and hierarchic. Caste has appeared as the invariable attendant upon conquest, when the victor is separated from the vanquished by language, complexion, and religion. It is not so much caste, however, in the ordinary sense of the word, as class, sternly prohibiting marriage not only with the aboriginal tribes, but between persons of unequal rank, and anticipating the organisation of European society in the middle ages. In the nobles, who were subordinate only to the Church, the burghers or merchants socially distinct from and inferior to the nobles, and in the villeins or serfs of the conquered territories, we have an exact parallel to the old Indian system, in which Sudra, Vaisya, Kshatrya, all formed steps in a social pyramid, on the top of which the Brahman was throned.[94]

Thus early in the history of the Indian people emerged that sacerdotal institution which was to exercise so powerful and eventually so sinister an influence upon their religious progress. In Vedic times the father of the family and the rajah of the clan were the celebrants of the religious rites, but as life became more complicated ceremonies became more laborious, and men who had preserved the knowledge of the old hymns, and the religious formularies which had died out from the common people, gradually took the rajah’s place. As thought widened, men refused to be satisfied with guardian deities that could be fed with rice and butter. The sense of human law reflected itself in the conception of divine rulers governing men, and penalties inflicted by man for wrong-doing suggested expiation for the infringed laws of deity. This idea of sacrifice, of which there is said to be no trace in the flesh feasts of earlier times, becomes prominent in the offerings of the period. “The shedding of blood, the burning of a limb of the victim in the fire, by some at least was believed to atone for transgression, and it is probable that at one time the religious instinct expressed itself in human sacrifice.[95]” In any case, the development of the idea of the great efficacy of sacrifice as a means of compelling the gods to do the will of the worshipper—yea, of elevating the worshipper to their privileges and rank,—must soon have had the effect of making a priesthood, at first only helpful, to be necessary as the sole agents between man and deity. By preserving the memory of what had faded from the vulgar, by transmitting to their families a lore which became the more sacred the more it was forgotten, the professional liturgists or sacrificers, at first satirised by the poets as was the Romish friar by the minstrel in the middle ages, imperceptibly grew into an order whose privileges were more exclusive and whose pretensions were higher than were ever asserted in Israel by the descendants of Aaron. Among the Hebrews the priesthood was never allowed to gain complete ascendency. Its representatives were subordinated to the king, who was the fountain of all law, and they were kept in check by the prophets as the ministers of Divine revelation; but the Brahmans came to be regarded as not only the guardians of religion, but the teachers of all knowledge and the source of all authority. They owned no superior, were subject to no law in the state: each one was a pope in himself, more independent of the crown and the commonwealth than a Christian pope ever pretended to be, and had a faith in his personal infallibility which no Christian pope affected to have. In India there resulted from the ascendency all the evils that were manifested in Judaism and in Latin Christianity; and in India far worse results were produced. For, left to themselves as superior beings apart from the actual world, who never could err, they gave their minds that licence which too often in the history of thought has been confounded with liberty, and, as always happens when self-restraint is disregarded, the result in this instance was the production, not of a system of philosophy, but a crude conglomerate of incongruous phantasies more resembling a chaos than a cosmos.[96]

Let us not suppose that the Brahmans were originally, or even eventually, the vain and greedy and self-seeking bigots which the name unfortunately suggests to a European. They gained the ascendency because they cultivated the power to rise; they represent what many are inclined to revere as the ideal aristocracy, that of Intellect. They were not ignorant priests, but learned philosophers, from whom sprung again and again the reformers who headed the revolt from an overdone ritual, and from a faith which expressed itself wholly in metaphysical speculations. By them were excogitated the Upanishads and the laws of Manu, two of the most wonderful literary productions of mankind. From there too came the great epic poems of the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, poems in some respects equal to the Homeric, and in cleverness of purpose, which is said to be that of arresting the progress of Buddhism, equalling anything which the Society of Jesus ever produced to counteract the Reformation. In its complexity and adaptability and many-sidedness Brahmanism is unrivalled by any human system, and the men who first gave it expression and directed its earliest movements must rank among the most original and daring of thinkers.

But they were Indians living in the period beginning about the tenth century B.C., in a land as completely cut off from the rest of the world as they were severed from the practical life of their countrymen. They had the same earnest and inquisitive mind which their westward-moving kinsmen had inherited with them from their trans-Himalayan ancestors, but in them it had to work out its advances in more adverse conditions. The tribes that went westward marched along the uplands, in zones of climate and through scenery and conditions stimulating effort, both mental and physical. Consequently they went on improving their beliefs, till they apprehended the truth which lies at the base of all true systems of faith, the immortality of the soul, and developed a philosophy which represents man’s most successful attempt to grasp that divine unity after which man in his polytheism is ever feeling. It was otherwise with the branch that went southwards. They had to live under physical conditions not conducive to energy, under burning skies which repressed, and on soils which rendered industry unnecessary. As they gained ascendency over the aborigines the vices of the vanquished race told fatally upon them. Their sensual worship, customs like polygamy and sutteeism, ascetic practices and sorcerous rites, took possession of them; and, most marked of all, a belief very widely spread among the lower tribes of mankind so terribly bewitched them that to this day the Indian mind has never been able to break away from its fascination.