Part 10

In its subtle and irresistible operation it may be compared to stored-up chemical or electric energy. It is a force which continually creates and re-creates the whole man, and perpetuates his personal identity through separate forms, whether it compels him to ascend or descend in the scale of being.

Yet to say that personality is transmitted, when there is no consciousness of any continuity of identity, amounts, after all, to denial of continuous existence.

Be it observed, too, that the scale of existence is limited in Buddhism to six classes of beings—gods, men, demons, animals, ghosts, and dwellers in hell (p. 121). Transmigration is not extended, as in the Brāhmanical system, to plants, stocks, and stones; though a man could be born as a tree-god (p. 112).

Gautama Buddha himself was merely the last link in a long chain of corporeal forms, and he had been preceded by twenty-four Buddhas, who were to previous ages of the world what he was to the present. Every one of these Buddhas was gifted with the faculty of recollecting his previous personalities, and Gautama often gave an account of his own former existences. The stories of about five hundred and fifty of his births (Jātakas) are even now daily repeated to eager listeners in every Buddhist country, and are believed to convey important lessons, though full of puerilities.

The interchange of ideas between Brāhmanism and Buddhism is well exemplified not only by the twenty-five Buddhas, who correspond to the fourteen Manus, or representative men, in each world-period (Antara), but also by the birth-stories, many of which are mere modifications of old fables long current in India, while others have been imported from Buddhism into Sanskṛit literature. They constantly remind one of similar stories in the Pañća-tantra, Hitopadeṡa, Rāmāyaṇa, and Mahā-bhārata. The noteworthy point about the repeated births of Gautama Buddha is, that there appears to have been no Darwinian rise from lower to higher forms; but a mere jumble of metamorphoses. Thus we find him born four times as Mahā-brahmā, twenty times as Indra, once as a hare, eighty-three times as an ascetic, fifty-eight as a king, twenty-four as a Brāhman, once as a gamester, eighteen times as a monkey, six as an elephant, eleven as a deer, once as a dog, four times as a serpent, six as a snipe, once as a frog, twice as a fish, forty-three times as a tree-god, twice as a pig, ten times as a lion, four as a cock, twice as a thief, once as a devil-dancer, and so on. He was never born as a woman, nor as an insect, nor as a Preta, nor an inhabitant of hell (p. 119), and in all his births he was a Bodhi-sattva (pp. 98, 135). And in all he suffered and sacrificed himself for the good of the world.

Here is the substance of an account of Gautama’s birth as a hare, given by himself (Ćariyā-Piṭaka I. 10, translated by Dr. Oldenberg):—

‘In one of my lives I was a hare living in a forest. I ate grass and did no one any harm. An ape, a jackal, and an otter dwelt with me. I used to teach them their duties and tell them to abstain from evil and give alms on the four fast-days in every month. They did as I told them, and gave beans, corn, and rice. Then I said to myself:—Suppose a worthy object of charity passes by, what can I give him? I live on grass only; I cannot offer a starving man grass; I must give him myself. Thereupon the god Ṡakra, wishing to test my sincerity, came in a Brāhman’s form and asked me for food. When I saw him I said joyfully:—“A noble gift will I give thee, O Brāhman; thou observest the precepts; thou painest no creature; thou wilt not kill me for food. But go, collect wood, place it in a heap, and kindle a fire. Then I will roast myself, and thou may’st eat me.”

‘He said:—“So be it,” and went and gathered wood and kindled a fire.

‘When the wood began to send forth flame, I leaped into the midst of the blazing fire.

‘As water quenches heat, so the flames quelled all the sufferings of life. Cuticle and skin, flesh and sinews, bones, ligaments, and heart—my whole body with all its limbs—I gave to the Brāhman.’

Perhaps the best and most often recited Jātaka is the last birth but one, in which he was born as prince Vessantara (Vaiṡyāntara). This is called the Mahā-jātaka, ‘great birth.’ It may be summarized thus:—

‘Vessantara (afterwards Buddha) was so liberal that he gave to every one who asked. Among his possessions was a white elephant, which had the power of bringing down rain whenever it was needed. At last he gave away this also to a neighbouring country suffering from drought. This so incensed his own people that they persuaded the king his father to banish him with his wife and two children to the forest. They set out in a chariot drawn by horses. First he gave away the horses and next the chariot to Brāhmans who begged for them. Then when another Brāhman asked for the children, Vessantara gave them up too, saying: “May I for this act become a Buddha!” In short his sufferings and theirs in banishment, and his generosity to every one, led to his recall with great rejoicings. When he died he was born again in the Tushita heaven, whence he descended as a white elephant into the womb of Māyā, and was born as Gautama’ (p. 23).

Another wise man of the East, who lived long before Gautama, spoke of ‘the path of the just shining more and more unto the perfect day.’ Of this kind of progressive advance towards higher planes of perfection, the Indian sage knew nothing. Nor to the Buddha, of course, would the Christian idea of ‘original sin,’ or of imputed Perfection have conveyed any meaning whatever. With Gautama, righteousness and unrighteousness, holiness and sin, were the product of a man’s own acts. They were produced by no one but himself, and they were merely troublesome forces (see p. 124) causing, in the one case, a man’s re-birth either in one of the heavens or in higher earthly corporeal forms, and, in the other, his re-birth in one of the hells or in lower corporeal forms. ‘Not in the heavens,’ says the Dhamma-pada (127), ‘not in the midst of the sea, not if thou hidest thyself in the clefts of the mountains, wilt thou find a place where thou canst escape the force resulting from thy evil actions.’

Here also is the substance of a passage in the Deva-dūta-sutta (translated by Dr. Oldenberg):—

‘Do not relatives and friends welcome a man who has been long travelling, when he returns safely to his home? Even so, a righteous man, when he passes from this world to another, is welcomed by his good works, as by friends.

‘Through the six states of transmigration does the power of our actions lead us. A life in the heavens awaits the good. The wardens of hell drag the wicked before the king of hell, Yama, who says to them:—“Did you not, when on earth, see the five divine messengers, sent to warn you—the child, the old man, the sick, the criminal suffering punishment, and the dead corpse?”

‘And the wicked man answers:—“I did see them.”

‘And didst thou not think within thyself:—“I also am subject to birth, old age, death. Let me be careful to do good works?”

‘And the wicked man answers:—“I did not, sire; I neglected in my folly to think of these things.”

‘Then king Yama pronounces his doom:—“These thy evil deeds are not the work of thy mother, father, relations, friends, advisers. Thou alone hast done them all; thou alone must gather the fruit.” And the warders of hell drag him to the place of torment, rivet him to red-hot iron, plunge him in glowing seas of blood, torture him on heaps of burning coal; and he dies not, till the last residue of his guilt has been expiated.’

And this Buddhist theory of every man’s destiny being dependent on his own acts is quite in keeping with Brāhmanical ideas. ‘In that (new body) he is united with the knowledge gained in the former body, and then again goes on working for perfection; for even against his will he is forced on (from one body to another) by his former works’ (Bhagavad-gītā VI. 43, 44). And again:—‘The act committed in a former birth (pūrva-janma-kṛitaṃ karma), that is called one’s destiny;’ and again, ‘As from a lump of clay a workman makes what he pleases, even so a man obtains whatever destiny he has wrought out for himself’ (Hitopadeṡa, Introduction). In Brāhmanism the influence of Karma or ‘act’ in determining every being’s form at the time of his own re-birth is universal.

Thus also the Nyāya of Gautama (III. 132) affirms that the new body (after death) is produced through the irresistible force of actions done in the previous body (pūrva-kṛita-phalānubandhāt tad-utpattiḥ). The cosmogony of the same philosophy (Vaiṡeshika branch), taught that the concurrence of eternal atoms to form the world was the result of Adṛishṭa or the ‘unseen force’ derived from the acts of a previous world.

We are reminded, too, of our poet’s own sentiment: ‘Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are;’ and of Don Quixote’s saying, ‘Every man is the son of his own works;’ and of Wordsworth’s, ‘The child is father of the man;’ and of Longfellow’s, ‘Lives of great men all remind us, we can make ourselves sublime.’

In short, we are the outcome of ourselves. Nor can ceremonies avail aught, nor can devotion to personal gods avail aught, nor can anything whatever possess the slightest efficacy to save a man from his own acts.

It is said that Buddhism leaves the will unfettered; but surely fatalism is taught when the force of one’s own deeds in previous births is held to be irresistible.

The only creator, then, recognized by true Buddhists is Act-force. ‘My action is the womb that bears me,’ says the Aṅguttara Nikāya. It is this Act-force that creates worlds. It is this Act-force, in conjunction with Upādāna (p. 109), that creates all beings in any of the six classes into which they are divided—gods, men, demons, animals, ghosts, and the dwellers in hell. We often talk of the force of a dead man’s acts—of his being dead and yet speaking. It is this force which in Buddhism resists death; for no force can ever be lost.

And what does the modern Positivist philosopher assert? He maintains that both body and mind are resolved into their elements at death. The only immortal part of us consists in the good deeds, words, thoughts, and influences we leave behind us, to be made use of by our descendants and improved on for the elevation of humanity. And the aggregate of these, combined with the force of will, constitute, according to the Buddhist, a power strong enough to re-create not only human beings but the whole material world.

It was thus that the force of Gautama’s own acts had constantly re-created him through a long chain of successive personalities, terminating in the perfect Buddha, who has no further births to undergo.

Turn we now to that division of the Buddhist system which concerns itself with the external universe, and seeks to explain its constitution, form, and the various divisions of which it consists.

And here we must be careful to note the peculiar views of Buddhism, notwithstanding the large admixture of Brāhmanical ideas.

For Buddhism has no cosmogony like the Sāṅkhya, Vedānta, and Vaiṡeshika. Nor does it explain the creation of the universe, in our sense. It only concerns itself with cosmology, and it dissents from Brāhmanical cosmology in declining to admit the eternity of anything whatever, except change or revolution or a succession of revolutions. Buddhism has no Creator, no creation, no original germ of all things, no soul of the world, no personal, no impersonal, no supramundane, no antemundane principle.

It might indeed have been supposed that since Gautama denied the eternal existence of either a personal God or of Spirit, he would at least have given eternal existence to matter.

But no; the only eternal things are the Causality of Act-force and the succession of cause and effect—the eternity of ‘Becoming,’ not of ‘Being.’

The Universe around us, with all its visible phenomena, must be recognized as an existing entity, for we see before our eyes evidence of its actual existence. But it is an entity produced out of nonentity, and destined to lapse again into nonentity when its time is fulfilled.

For out of nothingness it came, and into nothingness must it return—to re-appear again, it is true, but as a new Universe brought into being by the accumulated force of its predecessor’s acts, and not evolved out of any eternally existing spiritual or material germ of any kind.

It is thus that Universe after Universe is like a succession of countless bubbles for ever forming, expanding, drifting onwards, bursting and re-forming, each bubble owing its re-formation to the force generated by its vanished predecessor. The poet Shelley might have been called a Buddhist when he wrote:

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay; Like the bubbles on a river, Sparkling, bursting, borne away. (Hellas.)

Or like lotuses, for ever unfolding and then decaying, each decay containing the germ of a new plant; or like an interminable succession of wheels for ever coming into view, for ever rolling onwards, disappearing and reappearing; for ever passing from being to non-being, and again from non-being to being. It was this ceaseless rotation that led to the wheel being adopted as the favourite symbol in Buddhism (p. 122).

Christianity recognizes in a very different way this ‘law of circularity’ in the physical world, as the Rev. Hugh Macmillan has ably pointed out.

As to the question from whom? or whence? or how? came the original force or impetus that started the first movement, the Buddha hazarded no opinion. He held this to be an inexplicable mystery—an insoluble riddle. He confessed himself to be a thorough Agnostic. He saw nothing but countless cycles of causes and effects, and never undertook to explain the first cause which set the first wheel in motion. It was not, then, without a deep significance that Gautama placed Ignorance first in his chain of Causation (p. 102. Note, however, the explanation given at p. 99).

After all, these Buddhistic speculations amount to little else than Brāhmanism stripped of some of its transcendental mysticism. We know, for example, that the true Vedānta philosophy makes the Universe proceed out of an eternal Illusion, or Ignorance associated with the impersonal Spirit Brahman, into which it is again absorbed.

Can it be affirmed, then, a Buddhist might say, that either this pure impersonal Spirit (or Ignorance) is virtually very different from pure nothingness?

What says the author of Ṛig-veda X. 120?—

In the beginning there was neither naught nor aught, Then there was neither sky nor atmosphere above. Then first came darkness hid in darkness, gloom in gloom; Next all was water, all a chaos indiscreet, In which the One lay void, shrouded in nothingness.

Then as to the vast periods called Kalpas or ages, during which (as in Brāhmanism) constant Universes are supposed to appear, disappear, and re-appear:—

Let it be supposed, say Buddhist writers, that a solid rock forming a vast cube sixteen miles high, and the same in length and breadth, were lightly rubbed once in a hundred years with a piece of the finest cloth, and by this slight friction reduced in countless ages to the size of a mango-seed; that would still give you no idea of the immense duration of a Buddhist Kalpa.

And what, in conclusion, is the existing Universe? Buddhist writers make it consist of an infinite number of Ćakkavālas (Ćakra-vālas) or vast circular planes, which for convenience may be called spheres. Each sphere has thirty-one Satta-lokas (Sattva-lokas) or dwelling-places of six classes of living beings, rising one above the other and distributed under three world-systems, built up in successive tiers through infinite space, below, upon, and above Mount Meru (or Sumeru)—the ideal central point of the whole. This gigantic mythical mountain forms the mighty base or pivot of the sphere.

First comes Hell with 136 divisions, to receive 136 varieties of offenders, all in tiers one above the other, and lying deep under the earth in the lower regions of the Ćakra-vāla. To be re-born in Hell (Naraka) is the worst of all the six kinds of existence, reserved for the worst evil-doers, and although the punishment is not eternal, its shortest duration is for five hundred years of Hell, each day equalling fifty years of Earth. In Brāhmanism there are twenty-one hells (Manu IV. 88-90). Buddhism originally had only eight. The most terrific (Avīći) is for revilers of Buddha and his Law.

Above the subdivisions of Hell come the other sensuous worlds (Kāma-lokas), thus:—(2) the world of animals; (3) that of Pretas or ghosts; (4) that of Asuras or demons; (5) the earth, or world of men, with concentric circles of seven seas.

Having distributed all possible places of habitation for migrating beings under the three heads of Hell, four lower worlds, and twenty-six heavens (described at p. 206), Buddhism holds that there are only six forms or ways (gati) of existence through which living beings can pass, and under which every thing that has life must be classed, and of these the first two ways are good, the last four bad, thus:—1. Gods; 2. Men; 3. Asuras, or demons, inhabiting spaces under the earth; 4. Animals; 5. Pretas, or ghosts, recently inhabitants of earth, and ever consumed with hunger and thirst; 6. Beings undergoing torment in the hells.

As to the gods, bear in mind that Buddhism recognized most of the deities of Hindūism. See p. 206.

Such gods existed in subtle corporeal forms, and, though not omnipotent, were capable of working benefit or harm. They were subject to the universal law of dissolution, and after death were succeeded by others, so that there was not one Brahmā or one Ṡakra, but many successive deities so named, and many classes of deities under them. They had no power of effecting any person’s salvation. On the contrary, they had to see to their own, and were inferior to the perfected man.

Moreover, to be born in the world of the gods seems not to have implied any vast accumulation of merit, for we read of a certain frog that from simply listening to the Buddha’s voice, while reciting the Law, was born as a god in the Trayastriṉṡa heaven (Hardy, p. 392).

In short, the constant revolving of the wheel of life in one eternal circle, according to fixed and immutable laws, is perhaps after all the sum and substance of the philosophy of Buddhism. And this eternal wheel or circle has, so to speak, six spokes representing six forms of existence.

When any one of the six classes of beings dies, he must be born again in some one of these same six classes, for there are no other possible ways (gati) of life, and he cannot pass into plants, stones, and inorganic matter, as in the Brāhmanical system (see p. 108). If he be born again in one of the hells he is not thereby debarred from seeking salvation, and even if he be born in heaven as a god, he must at some time or other leave it and seek after a higher state still—that of the perfect man who has gained Nirvāṇa and is soon to achieve the one consummation worth living for, the one crown worth striving for—extinction of personal existence in Pari-nirvāṇa (see pp. 138-142).

LECTURE VI. _The Morality of Buddhism and its chief aim—Arhatship or Nirvāṇa._

The first questions suggested by the subject of this lecture will probably be:—

How could a life of morality be inculcated by one who made all life proceed from ignorance, and even virtuous conduct in one sense a mistake, as leading to continuity of life, and therefore of suffering? How could the Buddha’s first commandment be, ‘Destroy not,’ when his ideal of perfection was destruction? How could he say, ‘be active,’ when his theory of Karma (pp. 110, 114) made action conduce to misery?

The inconsistency is evident, but it is no less true that, notwithstanding the doctrine that all existence entails misery, and that all action, good or bad, leads to future births, Gautama taught that the life of a man in higher bodily forms, or in one of the heavens, was better than a life in lower forms, or in one of the hells, and that neither a higher form of life nor the great aim of Nirvāṇa could be attained without righteous action, meditation, and true knowledge.

Buddhism, indeed, as we have seen, could not hold forth as an incentive to good behaviour any belief in a Creator rewarding and punishing his creatures according to their works, or pardoning their sins. It could not inculcate piety; for in true Buddhism piety was impossible; yet like Manu (II. 6) it made morality (ṡīla) the basis of Law (Dharma); it stimulated good conduct by its doctrine of repeated births, and by pictures of its numerous heavens, and it deterred men from unrighteous acts by its terrible places of torment.

Let it then be made clear from the first that Buddhism, in inculcating morality, used no word expressive of morality, as founded on the love and fear of God, or of sin as an offence against God.

In Buddhism the words kleṡa (kileso), ‘pain,’ and akuṡala, ‘demerit,’ take the place of ‘sin,’ and its perfect saint is said to be ‘free from pain’ (nishkleṡa) and from demerit, not from sin in our sense. By an unrighteous act it meant an act producing suffering and demerit of some kind (p. 113), and it bade every man act righteously in order to escape suffering and to accumulate merit (kuṡala), and thus work out his own perfection—that is to say, his own self-extinction.

Doubtless Buddhism deserves credit for laying stress on right belief, right words, right work, instead of on ceremonial rites; and on the worship of Hindū gods; but it had its own idea of right. It urged householders to abandon the world, or else to be diligent in serving its monks for the working out of their own salvation; and while making morality, meditation, and enlightenment its indispensable factors in securing perfection, it made perfection consist in freedom from the delusion that ‘I am;’ and in deliverance from an individual existence inseparably bound up with misery.

Mark, too, another contradiction. It inculcated entire self-dependence in working out this kind of perfection, and yet it set before its disciples three guides; namely, the Buddha’s own example, the Law (Dharma), and the example of the whole body of monks and perfected saints (Saṅgha).

We now turn to its fuller moral system, keeping this distinct from its philosophy and metaphysics, and freely admitting that there are in Buddhist morality many things, true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report.

It is fair to point out at the outset that Buddhist morality was not a purely external matter. It divided men into the outwardly correct and internally sincere. The mere outwardly correct Buddhists might include monks as well as laymen, though a higher standard of profession was expected of monks. The internally sincere were the really earnest seekers after perfection (monks and laymen), and were divided into four classes, representing four conditions of the inner life, lower, higher, still higher, and highest, culminating in perfect Saintship, Arhatship, and Nirvāṇa (p. 132).

At the same time there was not much hope of saintship except through celibacy and monkhood; for in true Buddhism the notion of holy family-life was almost a contradiction in terms.

Of course the Buddhist moral code soon passed beyond the eightfold path propounded by Gautama in his first sermon (see p. 44), and Dr. Oldenberg has shown that in the absence of a systematically arranged code, we may still trace out amid a confusion of precepts the three leading duties of external moral conduct (ṡīla), of internal mental concentration (samādhi), and of acquiring true wisdom (paññā = prajñā). Compare Dr. Wenzel’s ‘Friendly Epistle,’ 53.