Buddhism

THE UNIVERSAL LAW

The Law according to the Buddha.

“The whole knowable universe forms one undivided whole.”

♦ The Causal Law ♦ It is composed of “a vast aggregate of original elements which are perpetually working out their fresh re-distribution in accordance with their own inherent energies.” These elements never become more nor less; but under the Law which governs them, they are in constant motion; they form, distribute, change, re-form; each fresh combination being the effect of Causes, or groups of Causes which precede it.

The all-governing Law which keeps the universe in motion is the Law of Evolution, the Law of Cause and Effect.

This Law is absolute in its working, it provides for no exceptions. Harvest-time follows seed-time; effects follow causes: and as the harvest provides the seed for all future seed-times and harvests, so, in every sphere, effects in their turn become causes of all future causes and effects. There is no possible deviation from this universal, fundamental law.

There is, nevertheless, infinite variety in the universe. For, Causes continually combine to produce ever new Effects; and the universe in its endless progression, is an ever-varying, harmonious, reposeful Unity. There can be no conflict under the governance of the one glorious unalterable Law.

The Law according to the Christ.

♦ The Causal Law ♦ Christ has many things to say which reveal His constant consciousness of the Harvest Law, as it may be called. To Him also it was the deepest, the fundamental thought; and He illustrates His teaching continually by reference to it. The Causes already in the field—the ground as well as the seed—determine the harvest of the sower. As surely as tares are sown amongst the good seed, so surely shall there be a mingled harvest of tares and good grain. The kind of harvest will be according to the kind of seed. The tree is known by its fruit. “Men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles.”

There is no evasion of the Causal Law; and in the fair universe there is no desire to evade it. For the Causal Law is the Law of Life. “The earth beareth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear”—the farmer knoweth not how—but “when the fruit is ripe, straightway he putteth forth the sickle, because the harvest is come.”

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♦ The First Cause ♦ Buddha ♦ How the universe came into existence, who enacted the Law, the Buddha did not inquire, and forbade men to inquire. It was enough for them that they found themselves a part of the endless chain of causation; duty lay for them in the practical task of finding their place in the chain, and of adjusting themselves within it.

♦ Christ ♦ The Christ, on the other hand, assumed a Builder of the universe, and a Purpose in the Law; and He summed the graciousness and the harmony of nature in the only human phrase which conveyed His own conception of its wonderfulness. “My Father worketh.” “Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father.” “Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field...?”

“It has been remarked by one of the most distinguished physical philosophers of our day that no atmospheric vibration ever becomes extinct; that the pulses of speech, when they have done their work, and become to our ears inaudible, pass in waves away, but wander still, hither and thither through the regions of the air, eternally. He conceives that as the atmosphere comprises still within itself the distinct traces of any sound impressed on any portion of it, as there the record indestructively exists, we have only to suffer a change of position, or receive the endowment of an acuter sense, to hear again every idle word that we have spoken, and every sigh that we have caused. The truth is, that already, and within the limits of our mental nature there is a power which will effect all this. It is fully within the scope of our natural faculties of association and memory. It may be doubted whether any idea once in the mind is ever lost and past recall: it may drop indeed into the gulf of forgotten things, and the waves of successive thoughts roll over it; but there are in our nature possible and even inevitable convulsions, which may displace the waters, heave up the deep, and disentomb whatever may be fair or hideous there.... It is remarkable how slight a suggestion is occasionally sufficient to bring back vast trains of emotion. There are cases in which some particular function of the memory acquires most exquisite sensibility, and usually, as if God would warn us what must happen when our moral nature is divorced from the physical, it is the memory of conscience that maintains this preternatural watch.... And if thus the past be truly indestructible, if thus its fragments may be regathered, if its details of evil thought and act may be thus brought together and fused into one big agony,—why, it may be left to fools to make a mock at sin.”

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth unto his own flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption.”

“The lust when it hath conceived, beareth sin; and the sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death. Be not deceived, my beloved brethren.”

The Law according to the Buddha.

I

♦ The Sacred Truth of Suffering ♦ But conflict has appeared, and associates itself with the creatures which seem to have an existence apart from the mother universe. There ought to be no Self, no life apart, all such Selves or lives are abnormal. Conflict, suffering, is the inevitable result.

♦ The Self-Life ♦ How the universe became thus maimed, and creatures born to the misery of separation came into being, the Buddha did not inquire, even as he did not inquire into the problem of a First Cause which set the chain of causation in the universe in motion. He took the situation as he found it, and applied himself to it. If separation from the universe, that is, a separate existence or being, be the evil, clearly the only possible remedy must be to end the separation.

The Buddha broke away from previous Indian teaching on one point; to the Brahman, Soul in the universe and soul in man are the central fact; Soul, either in the Brahman sense, or in the sense in which we understand it, Buddhist teaching denies. The being of man is composed of certain elements in addition to the body or material part. These are:—Sensations, Ideas, Tendencies, and Powers; and it is these which make up the consciousness of existence—the Self. As soon as a Self is born, that is, a being apart from the only true Centre, it becomes its own centre. It has no knowledge, but it sees that which is outside of itself, and supposes that there must be joy in drawing towards itself, in possession.

♦ Desire ♦ It therefore begins to feel outward from itself, to desire; and then to attempt to grasp that which it desires. Whatever be the result of that grasping, whether success or failure to attain the desire, sorrow, suffering, and loss are the inevitable end.

“This, O recluses, is the noble Truth concerning suffering. Birth is painful, and so is old age; disease is painful, and so is death; union with the unpleasant is painful, painful is separation from the pleasant; and any craving that is unsatisfied, that too is painful.”

The Effect of that Cause—a Self apart from its true Centre—is, as it ought to be, —misery.

II

♦ The Sacred Truth of the Cause of Suffering ♦ “Now this, O recluses, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering. Verily it originates in that craving thirst which causes the renewal of becomings, is accompanied by sensual delight, and seeks satisfaction, now here, now there; that is to say, the craving for the gratification of the passions, or the craving for a future life, or the craving for success in this present life.”

♦ The Self-life the Cause: Misery the Effect ♦ The self-life, then, is the cause of suffering.

The Self attains its desire only to lose it again, or in the very attainment to find disappointment, and so suffering.

The Self fails of its desire, and again it suffers.

In either case, so surely as a Self desires, and grasps at that which it desires, so surely will that Self have misery. For although each Self imagines itself to be free, to be responsible to none save Self, there is, even in separate existence, no such thing as freedom. The Causal Law, which acts so graciously in the universe of perfect mercifulness and truth, has the Self-life in its grip, and avenges the universe for the wrong done to it.

Every desire, every forth-going for Self, every action, good or bad, is a seed sown and will have its appropriate harvest; by so much increasing the sum of the Self-life; and at the dissolution of the body it will live on, taking to itself another body, and becoming the seed of harvests to come.

It will be noted that this is not a doctrine of heredity, effects are not transmitted with the physical being by parents. The true parent is the selfish Self, which transmits through its actions—Karma, as the Buddhist calls them—certain good or bad qualities, ideas, characteristics, which take to themselves new and appropriate form at the dissolution of the being which produced them.

Thus, a being and a character, the effect of certain previous causes, sows, in desire and action, seeds which another must reap to-morrow. As I now sow, another at my dissolution and the re-incarnation of my Karma (the sum of my Self-graspings), will reap. “The Buddha himself cannot contradict this law, which is the Buddha of Buddha.” “Neither man nor God can prevent the results.”

The Law according to the Christ.

I

♦ Christ The Self-life the Cause of Suffering ♦ That Suffering, or conflict, is the Effect of which separation from God and the self-centred life is the Cause, is an element of the teaching of the Christ apt to be forgotten by students of His life.

♦ Reasons for forgetfulness of this teaching ♦ There are two chief reasons for this:—First, His pitifulness towards all sufferers, and indignant repudiation of the idea current in His time that individual suffering was necessarily the effect of individual sin. Second, His peculiar doctrine of Suffering, which belongs to a later stage of this study.

But if His life meant anything at all, it meant that in His view the Self-centred life, the life of Desire, is the true and original Cause of human misery. The sheep which had become separated from the shepherd, the coin lost from its place upon the wedding chain, the son who chose a life of which his own pleasure was the motive power; each of these represents vividly His thought, that separation and isolation are abnormal, a pain to God, ruin and misery to man.

II

♦ The Harvest of the Self-life ♦ The harvest of the self-centred life is the subject of some of His most solemn words. “One thing thou lackest yet,” He said to one of warm enthusiasm and blameless life. “Free yourself from the self life. Come out into the open.” But the great renunciation seemed too costly. “How hardly shall such enter the Kingdom,” was the sorrowful after-word.

Again,—and note the first personal pronoun in this story:—

“The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: and he reasoned within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, because I have not where to bestow my fruits?’ And he said, ‘This will I do: I will pull down my barns and build greater; and there will I bestow all my corn and my goods. And I will say to my soul (life), Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.’”

“But God said unto him, ‘Thou foolish one, this night is thy soul required of thee; and the things which thou hast prepared, whose shall they be?’”

“So is he that layeth up treasure for HIMSELF and is not rich toward God.”

The Remedy.

♦ The Sacred Truth of the Cessation of Suffering ♦ The third sacred truth points the direction in which man must look for the only possible remedy. He has broken away from his only true Home, and finds himself a sufferer under the rigour of the very law which should be his life and joy. The self-life, with its desires and forthgoings, is the seed of separation. The self-life must therefore be subdued.

Self must cease to sow the seed of evil deeds, however pleasant; for every such seed sown is adding to the harvest of evil.

Not only so, but Self must cease to sow the seed of any deeds good or evil, of which self-desire is the motive. Self must be rigorously disciplined and denied.

Deeds of mercy and love, having no selfish end, are indeed good; these hasten the at-one-ment of the broken universe; for the universe, in its unity, is pure truth and pure mercifulness.

“Now this, O recluses, is the noble truth concerning the destruction of suffering. Verily, it is the destruction, in which no craving remains over, of this very thirst; the laying aside of, the becoming free from, the harbouring no longer of, this thirst.”

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♦ Christ ♦ Read in the light of the third sacred truth, the words of Christ:—

“If thy right eye causeth thee to stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from thee.”

“If thy right hand causeth thee to stumble, cut it off, and cast it from thee.”

“If any man cometh unto Me, and hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

“Whosoever he be of you that renounceth not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple.”

“If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all that thou hast ... and come, follow Me.”

“Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.”

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“It is only with renunciation that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.”

“All turning to self is so far turning from God; and so much as we have of self-love, so much we have of the hellish earthly weight that must be taken off.... Self is not only the seat and habitation, but the very life of sin; the works of the devil are all wrought in self, it is his peculiar workshop, and therefore Christ is not come as a Saviour from sin, as a Destroyer of the works of the devil in any of us, but as far as self is overcome and beaten down in us.”—Law.

“God will have us surrender without terms, and until then we are fast prisoners, and not children in His universe.”—Martineau.

“Christ’s love is firm, and can be severe. It never pares down His requirements to make discipleship easy; rather it attracts by heightening them, and insisting most strenuously upon the most difficult surrender.”—McLaren.

“For all followers of Christ, whoever and wherever they may be, the one essential and inestimable law is that of self-surrender. This was the very essence and substance of Christ’s teaching, again and again declared in language of almost awful sternness. This is Christ’s claim, just because He is our God and owns us; possible, because He is our kinsman, and understands us; blessed, because it enables Him to give us tenfold more, even now; merciful, for it is the way of our salvation.”—Thorold.