Chapter 2

Through each of these eight hundred mortal lives, man is purifying and developing his nature. When, at the end of each, his body dies, his higher principles leave the lower to gradual dissolution, while they themselves remaining still bound in space to this planet, pass into _Devachan_, the state of effects. Here, entirely unconscious of what passes on earth, the soul remains, absorbed in its own subjectivity. For a length of time, stated as never less than fifteen hundred years, and shown by figures to average not less than eight thousand, the soul, enjoying in its own contemplation those things it most desired in mortal life, surrounded in its own imagination by the friends and the scenes it has loved on earth, reaps the exact reward of its own deeds. When Nature has thus paid the laborer his hire, when his power of enjoyment has exhausted itself, the soul passes by a gradual process into oblivion of all the past--an oblivion from which it returns only on its approach to Nirvana--and waits the moment for reincarnation. Yet it comes not again to conscious life, unaffected by the forgotten past. _Karma_,--the resultant of its upward or downward tendencies,--which has been accumulating through all the course of its existence, remains; and the new-born man comes into visible being with good or evil propensities, the balance of which is to be affected by the struggles of one more mortal phase of existence. Thus we go on through one life after another, each time a new person yet the same human soul, ignorant of our own past lives, yet never free from their influence upon our character, exactly as in mature life we have absolutely forgotten what happened to us in our infancy, yet are never free from its influence. In Devachan, which corresponds, says our author, to what in other religions is the final and eternal heaven, we receive, from time to time, the reward of our deeds done in the body, yet still pass on with all our upward or downward tendencies until, many millions of years in the future, during our next passage through life on this planet, we shall come to the crisis in our existence which shall determine whether we are to become gods or demons.

Let me now turn back the page of history. A little more than one million years ago this earth was covered, as now, with vegetable forms, and was the dwelling of animals, as numerous, perhaps, and as various as now; but there was no humanity. The time was come when man, who had passed already three times round the planetary chain, and was nearly half way through his fourth round, should again make his appearance on the scene. Nature works only in her own way, and that way is uniform. The first man must be born of parents already living. As there are no human parents, he must be born of lower animals, and of those lower animals most nearly resembling the coming human animal. Darwin has told us what the animal was, yet the new being was a man and not an ape, because, in addition to its animal soul, it was possessed also of a human soul. We all know that man is an animal. Those modern students of science, who affirm that that is the whole truth of human nature, take a lower view of their own being than the Indian philosophers. Man is an animal plus a human and a spiritual soul.

Behold, now, the earth peopled by man. Through seven races must he pass, each with its various branches. Yet these races are not contemporaneous; for Nature is in no hurry. One race comes forward at a time, reaches the height of its possibility, then passes away during great physical transformations, and leaves but a wreck behind to live, and witness, in some new part of earth, the coming of another race. These races and branch races and sub-branch races are to be animated by the same identical souls. Hence, one race at a time; at first, even, one sub-race only, for the next is to be of a higher order. After each root-race has run its course, the earth has always been prepared by a great geological convulsion for the next. In this convulsion has perished all that makes up what we call civilization, yet not all men then living. Since some souls are slower than others, all are not ready to pass into the second race, when the time for that race has come. Hence fragments of old races survive, kept up for a time by the incarnation of the laggard souls whose progress has been too slow. Thus, we are told, although the first and second root-races have now entirely disappeared, there still remain relics of the third and fourth. The proper seat of this third root-race was that lost continent which Wallace told us, long ago, stood where now roll the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, south and southwest of Asia. Here we have, in the degraded Papuan and Australian, the remainder of the third race. Degraded I call him, because his ancestors, though inferior to the highest races of to-day, were far in advance of him. So it must always be. Destroy the accumulations of the highest race of men now living, and the next generation will be barbarians; the second, savages.

The fourth root-race inhabited the famous, but no longer fabulous, Atlantis, now sunk, in greater part, beneath the waters of the Atlantic. Fragments of this race were left in Northern Africa, though perhaps none now remain there, and we are told that there is a remnant in the heart of China. From the relics of the African branch of this root-race, the old Egyptian priests had knowledge regarding the sunken continent, knowledge which was no fable, but the traditionary lore and history of the survivors of the lost Atlantis.

Such is, in brief, an outline of the nature, history, and destiny of man, as the Buddhist relates it. How has he obtained his knowledge? By means which, he says, are within the reach of any one. First, of the history: it is said to be well authenticated tradition. Of the actual knowledge of former races, the Egyptian priests were the repositories, inheriting their information from the Atlantids. Of human nature and destiny the Buddhist would say: Here are the facts, look about you and see. From a theory of astronomy, or botany, or chemistry, we find an explanation of facts, and these facts explained, confirm and establish the theory. So, too, of man, here is the view, once a theory, but now as firmly established as the law of gravitation. Besides, by study and contemplation, the expert has developed, in advance of the age in which he lives, his spiritual soul, and this opens to him sources of information which place him on a higher level in point of knowledge than the rest of mankind, just as the man with seeing eyes has possibilities of information which are absolutely closed to one born blind.

Let me stop here to explain more fully what is the spiritual soul. I should call it, using a term that seems to me more natural to our vocabulary, the transcendental sense. In the reality of such a sense I am a firm believer. It was once fashionable to ridicule whatever was thought, or nicknamed, transcendental. Yet transcendentalism seems to me the only complete bar to modern scepticism. Faith, in the highest Christian sense, is transcendental. We know some things for which we can bring no evidence, things the truth of which lies not in logic, nor even in intellect. The intellect never gave man any firm conviction of God's being. Paley's mode of reasoning never brought conviction to any man's mind. At best, it only serves to confirm belief, to stifle doubt, to silence logic misapplied. Faith is the action of the spiritual sense--or, as the Buddhist says, the spiritual soul. It seems to me that it is a fair statement, that every man who has a conviction of the being of God, has that conviction from inspiration. Many people have it, or think they have it, as a result of reasoning, or it has been, they say, grounded and rooted in their minds by the earliest teaching. There are those, perhaps, who have no other reason than this tradition, for their supersensuous ideas. Such people, as soon as they come to reason seriously on or about those ideas, begin to doubt and to lose their hold. But others have a conviction regarding things unseen, that no reasoning can shake, except for a moment; because their belief, though it may have been originally the result of early teaching, is now established on other foundations. One can no more tell how he knows some things, than he can tell how he sees; yet he does know them, and all the world cannot get the knowledge out of him. The source of this knowledge is transcendental. It is a sixth sense. It is what the Buddhist calls an activity of the spiritual, as distinct from the human, soul. By his animal soul man has knowledge of the world around him; he sees, he hears, he feels bodily pain or pleasure; by his human soul, he reasons, he receives the conceptions of geometry or the higher mathematics; by his spiritual soul, he comes to a conception of God and of his attributes, and receives impressions whose source is unknown to him because his spiritual soul, in this his fourth planetary round, is, as yet, only imperfectly active. The reality of the spiritual soul, the vehicle of inspiration, the source of faith, is the only earnest man has for this trust in the Divine Father. It is not developed in us as it will be in our next round through earthly life, when, by its awakening, faith will become sight, and we shall know even as we are known. Yet some there are, say the Buddhists, who have, by effort, already pushed their development to the point that most men will reach millions of years hence, when we shall return again, not to this life--that we shall do perhaps in a few thousand years--but to this planet.

It will be seen that the Buddhist idea of spirituality is very unlike our Christian idea. The thought of man's higher sense striving after the Divine, the whole conception, in short, of what the word spirituality suggests to modern thought, is impossible in a system of philosophy which has no personal God. To apply the term religion to a scheme which has no place for the dependence of man upon a conscious protector, is to use the word in a sense entirely new to us. Buddhism--notwithstanding its claims to revelation--is a philosophy, not a religion.

I have sketched, as well as I can in so short a time, what seem to me the main points in the book under review. There are many things unexplained. Of some of them, the author claims to have no knowledge. Others he does not make clear; but, "take it for all in all," the hook will probably give the reader a very great number of suggestions. I am heterodox enough to say that if the idea of a personal God, the Father of all, were superadded to the system (or perhaps I ought to say were substituted for the idea of absorption into Nirvana), there would be nothing in Buddhism contradictory of Christianity. What orthodox Christians of the present day and of this country believe with regard to eternal punishment is a question about which they do not altogether agree among themselves. Whether the so-called hell is a place of everlasting degradation, is a point on which those who cannot deny to each other the name of Christian are not in accord. Why, then, should it be thought heretical to maintain that the future world of _rewards_ is _also_ not eternal? I believe that the Christian Scriptures use the same words with reference to both conditions--

"[Greek: To pyr to aiônion:--eis xôên aiônion.]"

The Buddhist denial of the eternity of the condition next following the separation of soul and body cannot, I think, be pronounced a subversion of Christian doctrine by any one who will admit that the Greek word [Greek: aiônios] _may_ mean something less than endless.

Of the antiquity of Buddhistic philosophy, I have already spoken indirectly. Buddha came upon the earth only 643 B.C. But he was not the founder of the system. His purpose in reincarnating himself at that time was to reform the lives of men. Doubtless he made many explanations of doctrine, perhaps gave some new teaching; but the philosophy comes down to us from, at least, the times of the fourth root-race, the men of Atlantis.

However we may regard a claim to so great age, a little reflection will convince us that the Buddhistic view of what may fairly be called the natural history of the human soul is very old, for it seems to have been essentially the doctrine of Pythagoras, who was not its founder, but who may have got it either from Egypt or from India, since he visited and studied in both those countries. If, as Sinnett asserts, the true Chinese belong to the fourth root-race, as appears not improbable, did not the system come into India from China? Plato was a Buddhist, says our author. Quintilian, perhaps getting his idea from Cicero, says of Plato that he learned his philosophy from the Egyptian priests. It is much more probable that the latter received it from the Atlantids--if we are to believe in them--than that it came from India. Indeed, when we seem to trace the same teachings to the Indians, on the one side, and to the Egyptians on the other, putting the one, through Thibet,--the land, above all others, of occult science,--into communication with the true Chinese, and the other, through their tradition, with the lost race of the Atlantic, the asserted history of the fourth root-race of humanity assumes a very attractive degree of reasonableness.

That Cicero held to the Buddhist doctrines at points so important as to make it improbable that he did not have esoteric teaching in the system, any one will, I believe, admit, who will read the last chapter of the Somnium Scipionis. And Cicero's ideas must have been those of the students and scholars of his day. He puts them forward in a manner too commonplace, too much as if they were things of course, for us to suppose that there was anything unusual in them. On this subject of the wide extension of that philosophy which in India we call Buddhism, I will make only one other suggestion. It is the guess that it lay at the foundation of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries.

Let me now come back to the idea that the succession of human races upon this earth is, like that of animal races, a development. Sinnett tells us that what we recognize as language began with the third root-race. I imagine that the preceding races had, in progressive development, some vocal means of communication; for we find that even the lower animals have that, and the lowest man of the first race was superior to the highest possible animal, by the very fact that he had developed a human soul. Now, we are told that the home of the third race was on the continent "Lemuria," which stretched across the Indian Ocean. I imagine the Tasmanians, the Papuans, and the degraded races of that part of the world to be fragments of the third race. Query: Is the famous click of the Zulu a remainder of the gradual passage from animal noise to human articulation in speech?

Again, the true Chinese belong to the fourth root-race. They have reached the height of their possible intellectual advance. They have been stationary for untold centuries. Query: Does this account for their apparent inability to develop their language beyond the monosyllable?

There are, have been, or will be, seven branches to each of the seven great races. These branches must originate at long intervals of time, one after the other, though several may be running their course at the same moment. For instance, the second race could not come into the world, until some human souls had passed at least twice, as we are told, through "the world of effects." This would occupy at least sixteen thousand years, according to our author's calculation, though he does not claim to have on this point exact information. He says, only, that the initiated know exactly the periods of time: but they are withheld from him. Now, according to a French savant, geological investigation proves that the Aryan race--branch-race, I will call it--was preceded in Europe by at least three others, whose remains are found in the caves or strata that have been examined. Of these the first has entirely disappeared: no representatives of it are now to be found in any known part of the world. The second was driven, apparently, from the north, by the invasions of the ice, during the glacial period and spread as far, at least, as the Straits of Gibraltar. With the disappearance of the ice, they also traveled toward the pole, and are now existing in the northern regions of the earth, under the name of Esquimaux. Following them came a race, the fragments of which were powerful within historic days in the Iberian peninsula,--the Iberians of the Roman writers--the Basques of to-day. Then came from the east the Aryan race, hitherto the highest form of humanity. These races do not, of course, begin existence as new creations. They are developed from--their first members must be born from--the preceding race. Query: Is a fifth race now in the throes of nativity? Have the different sub-races of the Aryan branch sent their contingents to the New World, that from the mixture of their boldest and most vigorous blood the fifth sub-race might have its origin? "Westward the star of empire takes its way."

Buddhism gives a peculiar explanation of the disappearance of inferior races. Since the object of the incarnation of the human soul is its progress toward the perfect and divine man; since every human soul must dwell on earth as a member of each one of the sub-races, the time must come when all shall have passed through a given stage. Then there can be no more births into that race. There is, at this moment, a finite number of human souls whose existence is limited to this planet, and no other planet in our chain is at present the abode of humanity. For the larger part of all these souls--at least nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand--are, at anyone instant, existing in "the world of effects," in Devachan. All will remain linked by their destiny to this planet, until the moment when all--a few rare, unfortunate, negligent laggards excepted--shall have passed through their last mortal probation, in the seventh root-race. Then will the tide of humanity overflow to the planet Mercury, and this earth, abandoned by conscious men, will for a million years fall back into desolation, gradually deprived of all life, even of all development. In that condition it will remain, sleeping, as it were, for ages--"not dead, but sleeping"; for the germs of mineral, vegetable, and animal life will await, quiescent, until the tide of human soul shall have passed around the chain, and is again approaching our globe. Then will earth awake from its sleep. In successive eons, the germs of life, mineral, vegetable, and animal, in their due order, will awake; the old miracle of creation will begin again, but on a higher plan than before, until, at last, the first human being--something vastly higher in body, mind, and spirituality than the former man--will make his appearance on the new earth. From this explanation of the doctrine that life moves not by a steady flow, but by what Sinnett calls gushes, it follows, of course, that there must come a time when each race, and each sub-race, must have finished its course, completed its destiny. There are no more human souls in Devachan to pass through that stage of progress. For a long time the number has been diminishing, and that race has been losing ground. Now it has come to its end. So, within a hundred years, has passed away the Tasmanian. So, to-day, are passing many races. The disappearance of a lower race is therefore no calamity; it is evidence of progress. It means that that long line of undeveloped humanity must go up higher. "That which thou sowest, is not quickened except it die." If there be "joy among the angels of God, over one sinner that repenteth," why not when the whole human race, to the last man, has passed successfully up into a higher class in the great school?

I am constantly turning back to a thought that I have passed by. Let me now return to the consideration of Buddhism as a religion. It is evident that, viewed on this side, Buddhism is one thing to the initiated, another to the masses. So was the religion of the Romans, so is Christianity. It is necessarily so. No two persons receive the formal creed of the same church in the same way. The man of higher grade, and the man of lower, cannot understand things in the same sense because they have not the same faculties for understanding. Hence the polytheism among those called Buddhists. There could be no such thing among the initiated. Religion, then, like everything else, is subject to growth. Such must be the Buddhist doctrine. If, then, Buddhism, or the philosophy which bears that name, originated with the fourth root-race of men, does it not occur to the initiated that the fifth race ought, by this same theory, to develop a higher form of truth? Looking at the matter merely on its intellectual side, ought not the higher development of the power of thought to bring truer conceptions of the highest things? Again, a query: Is the rise of the Brahmo-Somaj a step toward the practical extension of Christianity into the domain of Buddhism?

This brings to discussion the whole question of the work done by missionary effort among the lower races. I do not mean the question whether we should try to Christianize them, but what result is it reasonable to expect. And here I imagine that there is a strict limit, beyond which it is impossible for the members of a given race to be developed. On the Buddhist principle, given a certain human being, and we have a human soul passing through a definite stage of its progress. While it occupies its present body it is, except, our author always says, in very peculiar cases, incapable of more than a certain advance,--as incapable as a given species of animal, or tree, or even as the body of the man itself is incapable of more than a certain growth. I think that any one who has studied or observed the processes of ordinary school training, must have been sometimes convinced that he has in hand a boy whose ability to be further advanced has come to an end. Sometimes we find a boy who will come forward with the greatest promise; but, at a certain point, although goodwill is not lacking, the growth seems to be arrested. The biologist will explain this as due to the physical character of the brain. The Buddhist affirms, that when that human soul last came from the oblivion which closes the Devachanic state, it chose unconsciously, but by natural affinity, out of all the possible conditions and circumstances of mortal life, that embryonic human body, for which its spiritual condition rendered it fit.

Some years ago, in conversation with a missionary who had spent many years in China, I asked him, having this subject in my mind, whether he thought that his converts were capable of receiving Christianity in the sense in which he himself held the faith. His answer, which he illustrated by instances, was that the heathen conceptions and propensities could not be entirely eradicated; and that, under unfavorable circumstances, the most trusted converts would sometimes relapse into a condition as bad as ever they had known.

It is also a matter of common assertion that our American Indians, after years of training in the society of civilized life, are generally ready to fall back at once to their old ways. What we call civilization is to them but an easy-fitting garment.