What was the discovery that rewarded Gotama’s long travail and conflict under the Bo-tree at Bohimanda, and gained for him the title of Buddha, the Awakened or Enlightened One? and what was the message of “glad tidings” which since then has made so many millions of the human race regard him as their Deliverer? We shall never obtain the answer to these questions if we follow the legends and the later scriptures, although they profess to give all the steps of the process by which he wrought out his deliverance. These all date from a time when the seeds which he had sown among the thorns of uncleansed superstitions, had grown up into as gigantic and tangled a jungle of speculation as the world has ever seen. Had he confronted his day and generation proclaiming as the result of his laborious and painful inquiries the complicated metaphysical system formulated in these books, he would have made few converts. He might have become the head of another sect, the founder of another school, but he never would have established a religion so extensive as that which for so many centuries, and among so many peoples, has been known by his name.
Following the Southern scriptures, and guided by the eminent Oriental scholars who have made them available by translations, we may be able to trace, in the wild growth of fancy which has grown up around them, the leading lines of the original teaching. The real doctrine of Buddha did not profess to be a philosophy inquiring into the ultimate ground of things. He is represented as having despised philosophisings, and as having inveighed against profitless questionings as earnestly as did St. Paul against vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called.[181] His object was avowedly practical, and he kept silent when asked concerning themes whose discussion did not tend to “illumination and quiet.” Notwithstanding this, there must have been from the first, even in the earliest forms of his teaching, ideas and thoughts beyond the comprehension of the simple. For a while he hesitated, as we have seen, to proclaim his discovery, because “the way” was too hidden for men to know, and too hard, even when known, for them to follow. Like the Jewish Scribe, he conceived that to the wise alone, and not to the ignorant, belonged the law, and to the wise alone was reserved the hope of final deliverance. To children, and to the uninstructed struggling classes, the preaching was not made fully known, as really beyond them. Unlike Christ, whose preaching was for all without exception, whose gospel, though full of mystery, confers illumination even on babes, the law of Buddha was in its entirety for the sages only, and instead of conferring knowledge on those who obeyed it, it made knowledge a condition of obtaining deliverance. Nevertheless, though the deductions were within the grasp only of the few, his popularity proves that his fundamental and principal dogmas must have been such as all could understand, and they seem to have been published, as Saint-Hilaire observes, in a language so “simple and vernacular” as to induce even the children and the ignorant to enter the paths that lead to deliverance.[182]
He entered upon his travail, in order to find a way of escape from the endless cycles of unsatisfying change, and he believed that he had discovered it. Leavening every part of his system is his impression of the universality of suffering; and suffering, its origin, its extinction, and the path or method that leads to its extinction, are the so-called “four noble truths” which constitute in Buddhism the “Law of the Wheel.” In Buddhism the wheel is the dominant symbol, corresponding to the cross in Christianity, and he who would preach or roll onward the wheel must present to the affectionate consideration of the hearers these “four sacred verities”—the verity of suffering, the verity that concupiscence is the cause of suffering, the verity that concupiscence can be quenched in Nirvana, and the verity that the way that leads to Nirvana is the sublime eightfold path of Buddha’s law. From his first public discourse at Benares—corresponding to our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount—on to his last words on the night on which he died, this, with manifold amplifications, but ever as the one pathetic refrain, is the substance of his teaching, “through not understanding and grasping which, O monks, we have had to run and wander so long in weary paths, both you and I.”[183]
The primitive creed of Buddhism was different from, though not wholly antagonistic to, the popular creed or theory of life of Brahmanism. Weighed by Brahmanism, existence was found wanting, as only illusion, a specious something which truly was a mere nothing, and identity of the personal with the universal self was the only reality. By Buddhism existence was condemned, not as an illusion, but as wholly and solely suffering.[184] “What think ye, O disciples: whether is more, the water that is in the four great oceans, or the tears which have flown from you, and have been shed by you, while ye strayed and wandered in this long pilgrimage, and sorrowed and wept, because that which ye abhorred was your portion, and that which ye loved was not your portion?”[185] It was not “vanity of vanities!” but “misery of miseries! all is misery!” Life was misery, because governed by the immeasurable and wretched past; death was misery, because opening up an equally immeasurable and wretched future. As long as man exists he must be miserable, unable to “cease his wanderings,” and “still from one sorrow to another thrown.” The only deliverance conceivable from this interminable evil would be to break the bands of existence altogether. “Surely ’twere better not to be.” And how “not to be” seems to have been the problem which Buddha professed to solve.
May we not conclude with Saint-Hilaire that this, “his first dogma, was his first fatal error”?[186] With all his intellectual ability he never sought to emancipate himself from the superstition and nightmare of transmigration. Though he had cast off all faith in the government of a divine power, he never questioned the belief with which the lower aboriginal races had infected the thought of his ancestors, that life was governed by this law. It is averred that he found it necessary to solve the conflict between his ideas of justice and the actual order of things, which has exercised the human mind always and everywhere. A modern Buddhist, fortunate in having Mr. Alabaster to introduce him to the notice of an English-reading public, so propounds this belief, and, purged from some of its errors, tries to vindicate it. “For the law of perfect justice,” he says, “demands that human conditions should be equalised, and that good and bad luck should be balanced sometime and somewhere. If a good man be poor and wretched now, he must be reaping the fruits of what he had sown in a previous stage of existence.”[187] Yet surely this is a very superficial theory for an Oriental professing Western culture to formulate. It is judging of life as children and savages judge of it, by the evidence of the senses, and according to a very inferior and inaccurate standard of good and evil. Poverty and suffering, though confessedly painful, may not be regarded by a good man as wholly evil in this world. Circumstances which the savage and the child would covet as realising their dreams of paradise may be the reverse of desirable to the mature and thoughtful man. The believers in transmigration make no distinction between what is evil and what is simply painful. Evil is not that which pains, but that which defiles and degrades and destroys, and good is not just that which pleases, but that which elevates and ennobles and purifies. The law of absolute justice does not require, as the modern Buddhist demands, that human conditions should be equalised, and that all men should be treated alike; for no two human beings all the world over are absolutely alike; but it demands that each should receive the treatment most conducive to his healthy growth as a moral being, and what appears to sense as the harder lot may commend itself to reason as the better portion of the man to whom it has been assigned, because most suited to his need.
The dogma of transmigration is said to occupy in the Buddhist system a position analogous to that of the Fall in our Christian theology; but in reality the two are diametrically opposed, both in their essential ideas and the consequences which flow from them. They are analogous only in respect that they each profess to account for the conflict between man’s ideal of himself and his actual condition. The existence of evil is admitted by both, but the Buddhist believes that evil belongs to the very essence of man, and therefore he can find no prospect of relief from it, here or hereafter. For as long as the stream of existence continues it will always fall below its source, and evil, according to the inexorable rule of nature, will propagate only evil. The Hebrew, however, did not conceive of it as essential to or as always in the nature of man. His ancestral beliefs carry him beyond the Fall; his pedigree starts with the most sublime of all theories of human origin that has ever been formulated in human speech: “Let us make man in our image and after our likeness, and let him have dominion over” the creature. Dominion over nature man has not, for he is too much under its dominion, and to this subjection much of his suffering is directly traceable. The Hebrew professed to have the origin of this condition revealed to him in a breach between man and his Maker, consequent upon man’s self-assertion and selfish withdrawal of his life from the source of life, which must involve suffering and death. So through all the weary generations there is the same invariable sequence of sin entering the world, and death by sin. And yet at his very worst the Hebrew believed that it was once far better with the human race, and on this belief he dared to rear the structure of his magnificent hope, that mankind shall be restored to the original close relationship with God, and therefore to a grander dominion over nature, and to a happier and even more prosperous life than that of which his ancestors had dreamed as their primeval state.
Whatever may be said of the doctrine of the Fall, belief in it is indeed “a condition of hope,”[188] and the belief and the hope both spring from their faith in God as Creator and Governor of the race, which characterised the Hebrew prophets. Wherever that faith is lively, it not only sustains man amid the sufferings of life, but it nerves him to struggle with physical and moral evil to vanquish it. The purer the faith the more resolute is the struggle; the holier the Deity becomes to the thought of man the stronger becomes his conviction that life is a blessing, and that all its struggles may conduce to peace. There is an instinct which seems to suggest that there are worse things than troubles, and that they may be blessings of no mean quality after all. Christianity has made the startling revelation that suffering is not peculiar to man, as the consequence of his perversity in traversing the Divine order; for not only is Christ presented to us as the greatest sufferer, but in Him God the highest and the holiest is disclosed as involved in it, and as taking upon Himself the responsibilities and the sufferings which our sin and need entail. But if in Christ there is revealed the greatest sufferer, it is as one whose suffering is not in vain. By suffering He conquers that which has produced it; by enduring suffering He ends it; and He reigns and finds His blessedness in making us partakers of His victory over it. So again Christianity, unlike other religions which promise salvation from suffering, offers salvation through suffering. It alone asserts the utility of suffering; others regard it as evil, Christianity as evil overruled for good. Others reckon it as a mere loss or waste, Christianity as something that may be turned to profit as the condition and preparation for joy. Joy in the Christian conception is not the reward of suffering, nor compensation for suffering, but the fruit and issue of suffering which leads to it, as travail leads to birth. So instead of evading or ignoring it, Christ would have us recognise and acquiesce in it, and even be thankful for it, as necessary not for our personal profit, but for the gain of mankind. By His sufferings we are healed, and through our sufferings we fill up what remains of His for the redemption of the world. Only through “the long travail of ages yet to be” will there be born in the evolution of God’s redemptive purpose that better race from which all suffering shall have passed away, because disobedience will have had an end. Fellowship in Christ’s sufferings has thus transfigured the afflictions of all who believe in Him. Unlike the Indian, tortured by endless change, without any evolution from low to higher, from evil or imperfect to what is good and perfect, the Christian can endure suffering not only patiently but also cheerfully, knowing that he is suffering not just for his own sake, but that in ways mysterious he is lightening the load of many, and helping to bring to an end the long anguish of the whole creation.
But of this consolation which comes from faith in God the Creator, and therefore the Redeemer of man from destruction, Buddha had deprived himself. Unlike the Brahman who sought escape from the evils of transmigration by a process of subsidence into the universal Self, he professed to find no trace of this Absolute Self. The Brahman postulated the Infinite and reasoned from it, but Buddha started from quite the opposite pole. He professed to deal with life as he found it, and so reasoning from man outward, he asserted that the necessity for transmigration was involved, not in the illusion of Brahma, but in man’s own character. Instead of being a natural or divine necessity, it was a moral necessity created by man, which having its cause in his own action could also by him be destroyed.
And so Pantheistic speculation, in this instance at least, ripened into its proper fruit. The passage from conceiving Deity as characterless passionless self, to discarding Deity altogether from human thought, is a sure and generally a very rapid one. When we come to think of Deity as of being diffused and dispersed, we will soon omit the thought altogether in the recognition only of physical force. Brahmanic speculation had resolved the deities of the ancient books into abstractions, and Buddha recognised no such abstractions in the government of human life. His creed was fundamentally atheistic, as directly contradicting belief in a supreme ruler of the universe.[189] Not that he denied the existence of the gods believed in by his countrymen. On the contrary, he allowed them to continue in the popular thought and speech, and even encouraged disciples who had not yet reached the highest knowledge to try to acquire merit by virtue, so as to secure after death a re-birth into their society. Similarly he admitted the existence of devils or demons, and their influence for evil upon man. All through his career he was beset by Mara, the sensual king of all who submit to him; but Buddha was superior not only to Mara, but to all the gods in the popular pantheon, for they, alike with the lowest and the weakest of things, were subject to the law of transmigration. Man might rise to a higher heaven than what they occupied; they might fall to the lowest hell. “Their worlds must perish like that of man, and if ever they attained to final salvation, it could only be by the same way in which a worm might hope to reach it.”[190] Throwing his “plummet down the broad deep universe,” he cried, “Gods many,” but no god able to save. All alike with men were bound in fetters, because ignorant of the truth he knew. Naturally, therefore, they are represented in the legends as profiting by his preaching and as seeking unto him for instruction, while those of them who refused, or could not walk in his ways, came to be regarded with pity.[191]
In like manner his creed was as essentially materialistic. Man was no spiritual being, but a bundle of Sankharas—a term, it is said, very difficult to translate, but implying that person meant a mass of “forms” or material qualities so changing as to be never the same for two consecutive moments. Belief in a soul he regarded as a heresy, which he distinctly classed with sensuality and belief in the efficacy of sacrificial rites.[192] To the heart as the sixth sense he ascribed the power of conceiving ideas without form, as the eye had the power of perceiving objects; but this disappeared in dissolution as completely as did the others, and what was re-born was not the soul but the quality, the merit or demerit acquired. This startling assertion of Bishop Bigandet’s[193] has been confirmed and amplified by others, specially by Rhys Davids, and so the question at once suggests itself, now that the governing ideas of Deity and the separate existence of the soul were expelled from the human mind,—What was there left to give vitality and coherence to his system as a religion? A kind of religion is conceivable when something eternal and self-dependent is recognised, if not without and above a man, at least within him; but here is a religion vast and comprehensive springing from the determination to annihilate all religion, asserting not simply that man is independent of all superior beings, but that as the sum-total of groups of sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies, and potentialities, nothing of his personality can survive dissolution, and how are we to account for it?[194]
The answer is to be sought for in the working of that great moral instinct which is at the root of the belief in transmigration. Though there was no person, no soul to emigrate from the body, though the man perished, there was something which he called the Karma—a word coined by old Brahman sages long before him, though used by them in a different sense—that survived.[195] The aggregate of the good and evil in the life that had come to an end formed the seed of another existence, so that each new individual and generation became the exact and inevitable results of those that had preceded them. It was evidently a theory of continuity as unscientific as it was unphilosophic. It could not be called an evolution in any sense of the word, seeing it meant the appearance in a new individual of the mental and physical acts of another who had ceased to be. The assertion, again, that though there was no “continuing consciousness,” no transience of soul in any sense from one person to the other, the two persons are one, has been very properly stigmatised as a “psychological absurdity.”[196] From the first, though one of their stablest dogmas, this one was a difficulty to the Buddhists themselves. Their learned men never professed to justify it to reason, but accepted it as a mystery, in open contradiction to their principle that everything was to be rejected which could not be comprehended or explained. The common people again simply ignored it, and adhered to the belief of their fathers in continuity of life and personal identity for man in the future. The sages might refine, but the moral sense of the masses could not escape from the conviction that the evil which they had done must follow them, and the good which they would do could not be interred with their bones. Even the speculation of the sages was a telling confirmation of the truth that man cannot get rid of himself. He may make a mock at God, may demand, If a man die can he live again? or how differs the life of a man from the life of a beast? but he cannot refine away his moral sense and the instinct of retribution which is inwoven in his inmost being. Buddha acknowledged no moral government of Deity, discarded the old belief that the same soul must receive the reward of the deeds done in the body; he denied even to the soul a separate existence from the perishable body; but he was haunted by the ghost of personal identity. He felt absolutely certain that there was a real connection of cause and effect between past and present and future, and that each act of the soul must work out its full effect to the bitter end.[197] So it was only by profession that God was mocked; men were witnesses to themselves of a Sovereign Power forcing Himself upon them, even when they tried to forsake Him, compelling them to receive His thoughts when they would not think for themselves. So in primitive Buddhism we have the strange paradox that out of Atheism there arose a religion, with a demand upon conscience almost Christian, and asserting as Christianity does the eternal necessity of righteousness and truth.[198]
The analogy which has been suggested between the Buddhist dogma of Karma and the Christian doctrine of heredity is a very interesting one. It is strange that the law of heredity, so clearly indicated in the Bible, should be proclaimed in our age as a modern discovery. Infidelity formerly denounced the Bible for teaching that sin and its penalty were transmitted from generation to generation, forgetting that but for transgression the law of heredity could only and always entail good. Laws are to be judged by their intention, and this one, designed to secure and transmit the increment of good in each generation, is manifestly perverted by conditions for which it is not responsible. The law, however, which asserts itself in humanity by entailing on the generations the blessing of good as well as the curse of evil, is now being proclaimed and interpreted, not by divines, but by men of science and philosophy. The twin truth of the unity of humanity, elemental in the Hebrew and Christian religions, though formerly strangely forgotten or denounced by infidelity, is also adopted as a professed discovery of our century. We are all agreed that humanity is one, that each life is part of a larger life, and so the injury of the part is the injury of the whole. Sin could not enter humanity without dragging it down, and holiness could not enter and conquer without lifting it up. If one could appear in humanity without sin, not a link in the diseased chain, but perfectly free from all taint of disease, is the supposition incredible that he would have the effect upon humanity of a new creation? His coming would imply the reversal of the drift toward evil and the weakening of the inherited and accumulated tendency to depravity. It would be a bringing under Divine influence of this mysterious principle of heredity, with results for good which no human intellect can measure, and establish a once greatly derided assertion, that as in one Adam, that is, one kind of humanity, all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
Buddha had a clear apprehension of the truth of heredity, but he had not the faintest conception of the unity of humanity. His theory of life was essentially atomic. Humanity was not to him one whole, but a congeries of individuals, each one an end to himself, and living just to himself. The injury done to self by wrong-doing was always present to a Buddhist’s thought, but the suffering thus caused to others was never taken into account. He had no idea of the whole suffering in the one, and consequently no sense of duty to mankind. Though believing in the propagative power of good and evil, he did not work for the good of coming generations, but solely for the rescue of the individual from the whirlpool of suffering existence. It has been charitably suggested that his aim finds its analogue in the offset to personal extinction so winningly presented by “George Eliot” and Mr. John Morley, whereby though dead and gone for ever in ourselves, we may “live again in minds made better by our presence,” and “in pulses stirred to generosity.”[199] Buddhism had no such hope; the age, the system itself, were alike incapable of conceiving it. The time for that kind of Positivism had not come. The human mind had to undergo long centuries of Christian culture before it was possible for the nineteenth-century agnostic poetess and philosopher thus to expound their creed, for modern Positivism has been powerfully though indirectly influenced by the faith which it contradicts, and, like many of the assailants of Christianity, it owes to it the most of its strength and the best of its weapons.
Christianity, starting from the conception of man as no outgrowth of nature, but a new creation in it, a being within and distinct from his body as the driver is from the chariot,[200] has a theory of human destiny contrasted utterly with that of Buddhism. Man’s teeth have been set on edge because his fathers have eaten a sour grape, but the brand of pain upon past transgressions helps him to conquer the taint transmitted in the blood. Though he finds heavy temptation in inherited tendencies, he finds in every temptation a way of escape in a call to yield to other tendencies which are ever drawing his soul to goodness. Sharing a confessedly sinful humanity, he may be partaker of a sinless one, and thus, if evil reigns over him unto death, the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus can free him from it.
Buddhism had no such hope and goal for man; indeed, we may well wonder that a pessimism more thorough than that of Brahmanism did not deprive it of all hope and sink it into fatalism. Left alone to fight his way through the universe, struggling in a maelstrom of forces with no help for him in man, no hope of sympathy in God, a Buddhist would surely despair. On the contrary, unlike the Moslem cowering under the thought of relentless will, he accepted the situation with Christian determination to improve it.[201] He could hope for deliverance, for suffering had an origin, and if the cause could be removed then suffering would end. The coils of misery could be unwound, the curse of humanity could be abolished, if only man could procure for himself emancipation from the necessity of Karma. Now this the true Buddhist believed he could gain by the extinction of all desire. Plato adopting the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration, taught that the future organism of the soul would depend upon the cravings which it had fostered here.[202] Somewhat similarly Christians believe that the future of the man will depend upon his most dominant present habits, and that, disembodied, the spirit will gravitate unerringly to the society which it has made of its kind. Buddhism, believing in no soul, maintained that in the dying creature a particular thirst or cleaving to existence caused the birth of another creature; and so he who would escape from the chain of existence must endeavour, by vigorous prosecution of the eightfold way, and the four paths or degrees of perfection to which it led, to attain a state in which all craving for continuity had ceased. Karma then would have no terror to him; he would have reached a point whence he could look onwards without anxiety, because he would be treading a path from which he never would stray. He might still be a man, liable to suffering and subject to death, but one purified and emancipated from all inheritance of evil, and fully assured of Nirvana.
And what was Nirvana, the final refuge of the emancipated Buddhist? Ever since the religion was known in Europe great diversity of opinion has prevailed as to the meaning of this word. It was employed by the Brahmans many centuries before Buddha’s day, and used by them and by himself and his disciples in so great a variety of senses that even the learned Rajendralala Mitra, in enumerating the sects into which orthodox Buddhists are divided in regard to it, confessed some years ago that he had given up in despair the attempt to ascertain its meaning.[203] The researches and discoveries of later years have enabled the translators of the texts to write with less hesitation as to its significance, and we are entitled to accept as solid the results of their patient investigations. To begin with, they tell us that it means the peace which ensues when all passion has been subdued, and all selfish craving has been extinguished. Though practically no Buddhist hopes to attain to it here, but only to enter the paths leading to it, it may be reached, not in anticipation only, but in fruition.[204] Buddha may be said to have been in Nirvana forty years, for he entered it, not in the moment of dying, but when he attained perfection. This first conception of it, therefore, seems a marvellous anticipation of the faith of the Christian, who finds his heaven and enters into his rest when he is delivered from the φρόνημα τῆς σάρκος, from all selfish clutching at the means of existence. In both religions, taken at their highest, the goal of aspiration was not extinction of sorrow, but extinction of self-love: in Buddhism the quenching of trishna, or upádána, “thirst,” in Christianity the quenching of ἐπιθυμία, “lust,” “inordinate desire.” In both religions the goal meant finality, a state in which there was an end of death; and in both, moreover, it meant a change which no language could define, and to which no known standard could apply. The Christian believer tells us that he is passing from the visible to the invisible, from the temporal to the eternal, and in like manner the Buddhist Arahat would only be able to allude to the great change by negations, and as the very opposite of all we know or at present conceive. The Christian believes in the perseverance of the saints, and the Buddhist who has really entered the path must sooner or later reach his prize.
But there the analogies end, while the contrasts between the two beliefs are as irreconcilable as are their postulates. The postulates of Christianity are the spiritual nature of man, and that his present evil condition is not his normal one. Sin has gone extensively and deeply into his being, for it is no mere superficial excrescence, a fault which can be corrected, a smirch that can be washed away, but a leprosy in the blood, which is the life. Cleansing is required and provided, but it is the cleansing out of the whole corrupt nature by the transfusion into the soul of a Divine life so pure, and so strong because of purity, that it could not be holden of death. Life is the essential idea of Christian salvation; it is the Divine gift bestowed by Christ, who came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. So while in the body we groan, being burdened by a suffering flesh, it is not that we may be unclothed, but clothed upon; not that the gift of life may be recalled, but that it may be secured in its completeness. It is “more life and fuller that we want.” Sanctification in the Christian conception means a process of healing, and salvation means perfect health—the condition of a creature freed from all inordinate desire, or desire for anything forbidden, which is the root of all sin, and rejoicing in the untainted bliss of being. Deathless, sinless life, the life of eternal incorruption, “the perfect life of love, the rest of immortality,” that is the Christian Nirvana.
Buddhism, on the contrary, postulating the material nature of all existence controlled by the universal law of transmigration, had no such conception of final blessedness. Nirvana in its thought meant, indeed, extinction in the first instance of all fleshly and selfish dispositions; but the thirst, the “cleaving” (tanhā) which was to be quenched, was not lust in the Christian sense, but the natural innocent love of life, and Nirvana involved the extinction of that love, and of life as the going out of a flame which had nothing else to feed upon. Deliverance from this instinctive thirst for life is a specific germ of which annihilation is the outcome. That Buddha so expounded it was long questioned, and by many denied, but Dr. Oldenberg has sufficiently made clear his attitude toward this dogma. He seems to have contented himself with its first significance, to have evaded the necessity of deciding the many discussions which were waged concerning the second as profitless, and not tending to quietude and wisdom, and to have exhorted his disciples to strive rather to enter the paths.[205] By the time, however, the canonical books were produced, his disciples had not shrunk from pushing his fundamental principles to their only logical conclusion. The most ancient expositions of his doctrine disclose one long theory of Nihilism as its only legitimate inference. If misery was inseparable from existence, it followed that non-existence was a blessing, and consequently man’s chief end was to aspire and strive to reach that state in which the “very seed of existence has withered, the lamp of life has burnt out for ever, and man can no more be born again.”[206]
While this was the doctrine of the philosophers, the overwhelming majority of Buddhists in every age and country have put a very different meaning upon the word. Just as human nature has proved too strong in them to accept their atheistic creed, so in popular estimation from the first, Nirvana has meant not annihilation of existence, but extinction of suffering. They did not comprehend its metaphysical significance, but they longed, as all men do, for release from sorrow, and a happier life when this is over, and they took refuge in Buddha, because his law promised to convey them over the troubles of life into a blessed hereafter. There might be higher things for the wise to gain, but the simple were contented with this inferior portion, and indeed they chose the better part. For surely the conception of deliverance from suffering, involving extinction of the being that suffers, was as childish as that of getting rid of a toothache by cutting off the head.[207] Rightly were they led by the infallible instincts of our moral being to believe that the end of righteousness must be rest, but they wandered fearfully in conceiving of rest as nothingness, for the “end of righteousness is peace, and the fruit of peace, quietness and assurance for ever.”[208]
The great question with Buddha and his immediate disciples was not how Nirvana, the goal of human aspiration, was to be defined, but how it was to be attained. It was for him sufficiently expressed as the final extinction of all the roots of sorrow, and he taught that this consummation could only be reached by knowledge. Ignorance was the ultimate ground of all suffering existence, but, as in Christianity, men could know the truth, and the truth would set them free. According to both religions, this knowledge could neither be transmitted by tradition nor learned by a simple intellectual process. It implied a moral and spiritual training, and was the fruit of obedience; but there again the analogy ends, for the Buddhist’s idea of knowledge is as widely contrasted with the Christian idea as is its idea of the Truth to be known. In Christianity knowledge means Divine illumination or revelation, the result of trustful surrender to Christ, the revealer of the Father, and Himself the Truth. In Buddhism it meant a knowledge gained by man himself, through a process of moral culture and self-control.[209] In Christianity it was a grace that came through obedience to a better Will; in Buddhism it meant simply obedience to a Law. That law, moreover, had no commanding power to enforce it, and involved no moral obligation in the Christian sense to obey it. It was not a law like the law of Moses or the law of Christ, for it implied no Lawgiver to make it binding. It was simply a rule, a method, discovered by man, and followed because he found it expedient to follow it. Adopting this method, observing this rule, persevering in this course, a man would attain to knowledge of the truth of things, but this supposed truth is the very contradiction of the truth as it is in Jesus, the truth by which we are sanctified, and made wise unto salvation.[210]
This should be borne in mind when in translations of Buddhist books we find such words as “holiness,” “saints,” “paths or degrees of sanctification,” “righteousness,” and such like. The original words represent conceptions different from and antagonistic to those suggested by these words to us. But keeping this in view, we may well admire and be thankful for the high purpose and clear moral insight which enabled Buddha to discover and set forth his way to Nirvana. The strength and glory of Buddhism, the secret of its original attractiveness, and of its long continuance, is its ethical system. Its metaphysical creed may represent a very puerile philosophy, its discipline of artificial restraint may have been the reverse of emancipation, but its moral code, in its simple and direct and powerful appeal to the conscience, is a far nearer approach to the Gospel than that of Gentile Stoics or of Jewish Scribes. Avoiding sensuality on the one hand as degrading, and asceticism on the other as unprofitable, it mapped out a via media that led far above that projected by any ancient school. It entered into every domain of life, of thought and word and deed;[211] laid its control, as Christianity does, on feeling and motive, and proclaimed that the way to perfect peace was a way which no unrighteous man could enter and no unclean man could tread.
It is very interesting to catch, behind all its superstitions and idolatries, and crude and childish speculations, this glimpse of an ideal like unto that of the Son of Man, calling and leading men to righteousness, purity, and kindness, as their only refuge. To the old Vedic religion, and to all the class of religions of which it is the type, morality, as we have seen, was a stranger. It was the philosopher, and not the priest, who in old times argued of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come. The Hebrew, as we have seen, was the first and only ancient religion that demanded holiness of life as indispensable to the worship of God, and Christianity, as was natural, recognised this old law which men had from the beginning. But Buddhism was the first system in which morality was substituted for religion. It had neither priests, nor temples, nor prayers, but taught men to depend for safety solely upon a life of virtue and wisdom and goodness. Though it implied a change of heart amounting to conversion, this was due to the operation of no regenerating spirit, but to perseverance in courses within the reach of any one. Anticipating, therefore, theories of life broached now-a-days as if they were new discoveries, its endeavour to dissociate the human from the supernatural, and to substitute the ethical for the religious, deserves very earnest study.
It meant man’s earnest resolve to work out his salvation with fear and trembling, for there is no God within him working both to will and to do of His good pleasure. It was an attempt to conceive of a morally governed universe without a Governor. Professedly atheistic compared with the religion out of which it arose, it has been properly described to be “more theistic at its core than Brahmanism has ever been.”[212] It did not trouble itself about the origin of man as an emanation from the universal self, but it asserted the dignity of his nature as resting on really a sounder basis. It refused to believe with the Hebrew that the Creator had written the law on the tables of the heart, but it found the law there written somehow, and read it almost as correctly. Like the Christian apostle, its founder asserted that each man was a law unto himself, the judge of his own action, and the arbiter of his fate. And thus it came to pass that, without any conscious purpose of doing so, he inaugurated a moral revolution which lasted for ages. It swept away an enormous mass of superstitions from the Indian mind for centuries, abolished many abuses, and modified more which it failed to overcome. It has tended to civilise many barbarous races; and if among them Buddhism has been able to bear the encumbrance of their hideous idolatries which it assumed, it is because of the strong ethical foundation upon which it rests. It is the ethical element in religion that is universal and enduring, and there is a completeness and force and persuasiveness of ethical teaching in Buddhism which all non-Christian religions lack; there is a comprehensiveness of duty and gentleness which pre-intimate clearly that universal Christian rule which makes it imperative that we should not only duly consider all brethren who are human, but should say to the worm, as within the scope of our benevolence, “Thou art my mother and sister.”
Let us now examine more closely this way to Nirvana as expounded in the Suttas of Buddha, and in relation to Christ’s way of salvation. The Christian is very simple, but as it proceeds from a much deeper conception of human need, its method of meeting it is very different. It was not the suffering and misdirection of men that most deeply impressed and most powerfully affected our Lord. He came to a race made in the image of God, that had confessedly fallen from or had failed to realise its ideal. It was lost, as sheep are lost, by inherent tendency to wander; as coins are lost, by the neglect of others; as prodigals are lost, by sensuality; and as Pharisees are lost, by self-righteousness. It was diseased and perishing, struggling not in the coils of changeful suffering, but in the clutch of an evil power which had taken possession of it. Sorely needing, though not seeking redemption, unable to help itself, He had come in the name of His Father, who willed not that any should perish, to seek and save it. His formula of salvation was plain enough for even babes to apprehend, for all He asked was that men should turn to and believe in Him. They could not raise themselves, but they could look toward Him, and find deliverance in the look, for by trust in Him as the supreme object of love and worship, they would be lifted up out of their evil state. The deepest tides of man’s being are those which are swayed by his faith in and love of persons, and it was upon faith, the commonest of all powers in our nature, that Christ relied for the deliverance of mankind from the dominion of evil. He offered Himself to man and for man, was lifted up for them on the cross in the beauty of suffering holiness; and as love always attracts love, and as goodness becomes a creative power in those who appreciate it, so all who believed Him, trusted Him, clung to Him as the weak cling to the strong, were uplifted, and changed, and transfigured. Love not only has a dominating but an assimilating power. We become like those whom we fervently admire and implicitly obey. Obedience in such a case is not an obligation, but an inspiration; so though in Christianity we speak of the Law of Christ, it is not as an external code to which we must conform, but as a power communicated to and operative in us. It is a law of the spirit of life, a grace and blessedness of disposition, which, springing from gratitude, will manifest itself in holiness far exceeding the righteousness of a law, because vivified by a charity and mercy as boundless as that which it adores.
So when our Lord inaugurated His kingdom, He may be said to have proclaimed in the Beatitudes His Law, for He then declared the dispositions of those who would receive Him, and who as sons of men trusting and following Him, would be saved and sanctified and glorified by the Son of God. Now, though from his first sermon to the last Buddha is represented as “instructing his disciples, inciting them, rousing them, and gladdening them” by discoursing of blessedness, it was not of blessedness in the gospel sense. It was the blessedness of the Old Covenant, not of the New—the blessedness, not of them who love much because they have been forgiven much, but of them who keep the law, and tread “the path which opens the eyes, bestows understanding, leads to peace of mind and full enlightenment”—the blessedness all who, walking in the Noble Eightfold Way, must eventually reach Nirvana.[213]
It is almost impossible to explain all that is meant by the Noble Eightfold Way, for translators differ very greatly as to the real meaning of the terms employed, and even when they agree, they warn us that the words, though similar to our own, do not suggest the same realities. The word “righteousness” and even “morality” never can have on the lips of a true Buddhist the same signification which they have on ours; for righteousness, apart from the fear and love of God, is an impossible conception to us, and so would unrighteousness, unless as a sin or an offence against Him. Buddhism has no word for ‘sin’ in our sense, and therefore no words for ‘holiness’ or ‘saint.’ “Sin is simply pain, demerit, and a saint is one freed from what causes pain.” “A righteous act is one accumulating merit, an unrighteous act one producing suffering.”[214] The Eightfold Way, interpreted by the legends, presents us with the Buddhist conception of the perfect man, and were we to take its constituents as equivalents to the Christian qualities suggested by the words, we should find outlined a character which here or anywhere must be its own beatitude, but whose blessedness is as completely beyond the reach of sinful man as flying is beyond the power of a bird whose pinions are broken.
But Right Views or Belief, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Work, Right Livelihood, Right Exercise, Right Mindfulness, and Right Tranquillity, must be taken, not as we accept, but as Buddhists understand, the phrases. By right belief they unquestionably meant belief in Buddha and the Four Verities; right resolve included abandonment of all domestic and social duties; right speech was the recitation or publication of the dharma; right work was specially that of a monk; right livelihood that of living on alms; right exercise tended to the suppression of all individuality; right mindfulness was habitual contemplation upon the impurity and impermanence of human nature; and right tranquillity was ecstasy.[215] To have substituted even this in the Hindu mind for a righteousness only ceremonial and superstitious was indeed reformation; but as an idea of Perfection it is manifestly not only different from, but greatly inferior to, the Christian ideal. Perfection in the case of Buddhism meant extinction of feeling and consciousness; in Christianity it meant harmonious and full development of being and character. In Christianity perfection meant conformity to an Exemplar outside and above it, the likeness of a child to a Father in heaven; but Buddhism could conceive of no exemplar, and the man who would be perfect must strive in entire self-dependence to be so. In Buddhism the standard is purely human; in Christianity, while the measure required is relative, the standard is divine. So in Buddhism the Arhat is content, and we never hear from him the confession, “I count not myself to have attained!” but in Christianity the more saintly the life, the greater the discontent with it. The higher we rise the more urgent is the desire to press on. Christianity therefore opens up the avenue to perpetual improvement, and inspiring us with a motive to progress which can never lose its power, it provides for the soul the only rest that will satisfy it. “In life,” says Pascal, “we are ever believing, we seek repose, but what we really crave is agitation.” “It is the contest that pleases us, and not the victory; the pursuit and not the possession.”[216] Absolute truth and goodness is the perfection of divine blessedness; the never-ceasing pursuit of it is human blessedness. The goal we can never reach, but the watchword, “Nearer, my God, to Thee!” seems to solve for us the problem of human destiny, for by directing us to the life of perpetual achievement, it assures us of a never-ending blessedness.
The Buddhist goal of perfection and the law or way that led to it, was by Buddha himself or his earliest disciples considered to be beyond the power of many to attain to. His followers were soon ranged into classes according to their ability to tread the paths which led to liberty. His law, therefore, unlike the Ten Commandments of the Bible, which are binding on all without distinction, was not a law for all men. Each one was at liberty to take on him as many or as few obligations as he pleased, according to his resolve to continue in the world, or to abandon it, and having abandoned it according to his resolve to seek after Arhatship and aspire to Nirvana.[217] Upon those who, conforming outwardly, yet remained in their secular callings, was enjoined abstinence from the five gross sins, of killing, theft, adultery, falsehood, taking intoxicating drinks—already, with the exception of the last, made binding on them by the Hindu religion. By refraining from these, and by serving and maintaining the monks, even the laity could win for themselves a happy re-birth into some world hereafter. Those wiser ones, again,[218] who, convinced of the evil and danger of secular life, had abandoned their homes, and entered the Order that by meditation and abstraction they might further work out their deliverance, bound themselves, in addition to observance of these five commands, to eat only at stated times, to use neither perfume nor ornament, to sleep only on mats on the ground, to abstain from dancing, music, and worldly shows, to own and accept neither silver nor gold, and to be perfectly chaste. For those wisest of all, who had not only abandoned the world in order to lead the better life of the religious, but who had strenuously resolved, in following the religious life, to attain to Arhatship and Nirvana, there remained the much more severe observance of what was called the “Seven Jewels of the Law,”[219] the last and most important use to which the Noble Eightfold Way could be put. For by earnestly struggling, meditating, mastering their precepts, the “Ten Fetters” of Delusion, Doubt, Dependence on Ceremonial Rites, Sensuality, Hatred, Love of life on Earth, Craving for life in Heaven, Pride, Self-Righteousness, and Ignorance, would one by one be broken, and long self-abnegation involved in the process would work out its full reward.
It is to be observed that in all these classes or stages the practice of virtue and the cultivation of purity were considered fundamental. In the preaching ascribed to Buddha great stress is laid on Enlightenment, and on Meditation, which leads to it; but at the base of all this system, as the first indispensable factor in securing perfection, was Uprightness. In the Suttas this formula constantly recurs: “Great is the advantage, great the fruit of earnest contemplation when set round with upright conduct. Great is the fruit, great the advantage of intelligence when set round with earnest contemplation. The mind set round with intelligence is free from the greatest evils, that is to say, from sensuality, from individuality, from delusion, and from ignorance.“ Again, “Righteousness, earnest thought, wisdom and freedom sublime: these are the truths realised by Gotama far-renowned.”[220] The uprightness, or righteousness required, presents, as the Moral Law of Scripture does, a much broader range of influence than the words would indicate. In prohibiting lying, Buddha enjoined avoidance of all offensive language, and of every word that could sever men. He also instructed his disciples not only to avoid showing enmity to those who hated them, but to overcome evil with good. Purity again in his regard meant purity not of word and deed alone, but of thought and feeling. In some respects his precepts go beyond the Moral Law. The command not to kill included respect not for human beings only, but for every creature that had life. He not only condemned drunkenness, but demanded total abstinence as essential. The precept “Do not commit adultery” was understood in our sense of it only by the laity; for the religious, marriage was not an honourable estate, but one polluted and polluting. Unlike the Moral Law, which recognises everything that is natural and sanctifies it, the rule of Buddha in these respects was unnatural in its restrictions. It pronounced common and unclean what God Himself has cleansed; and, as always happens when men add to the commandments of God in one direction, they are sure to take away from them in another. So Buddha’s rule, though excellent in that it lays its control not on conduct only, but on thought and feeling, is essentially negative and defective. It does not cover man’s whole nature, nor provide for his every possible relation. Ignoring God, it is therefore interpreted by no positive and active principle of goodness. It is inspired by no sense of duty, for it recognises in the universe no superior to whom anything is due, and, unconscious of any benefit, it owns no gratitude. Consequently unrighteousness, as an offence to or an outrage upon a better or kinder being than self, is not in all its range of view. Unrighteousness is only a calamity to be avoided or an imprudence not to be repeated. Struggling to get out of the meshes of an evil net, the Buddhist might bewail his mistake, his folly, or his feeble or ill-directed effort, but he was totally unconscious of rebellion or ingratitude.[221]
Moreover, in a universe where Moi-même is the only god, and a man’s own Nirvana his only goal, the primary motive of action can rise no higher than fear or self-interest. Apparently strong, it is really essentially weak in regard to the maintenance of proper relations to others demanded by the second table of the Moral Law. The suffering caused to others through his failure to fulfil the law, or by conscious transgression of it, makes no impression on the Buddhist, except in as far as it interferes with his pursuit of perfection. Others are regarded only as occasions of acquiring merit. Instead of serving them as Christ enjoins us to do, the Buddhist serves himself of them. It is a religion of every man for himself. It has been likened to Positivism, but it falls far short of it, as lacking the altruism which Positivism has borrowed from Christianity.[222] Positivism refuses to do anything for the glory of God, but it lays great stress upon the duty of living for humanity. It makes the great mistake of supposing that the claims of God must be distinct from or antagonistic to the interests of humanity. It does not recognise that they are identical—that the more the life is reserved for God, the more of it is communicated to our fellow-men, and that we must love the Lord our God with all our hearts, before we can love our neighbour as ourselves. The Positivist scheme of morals, however, is vastly superior to that of Buddhism, for in it the goal is Nirvana, without any reference to the good of any other, and the decided advantage of any action consists wholly and solely in the consequences to the actor himself.
Dr. Oldenberg has pointed out to us that the much-vaunted charity of Buddhism, illustrated in the legends by the self-immolation of Buddha to satisfy the hunger of a wild beast, though it “sways toward does not even touch the law of Christian charity.”[223] Buddha’s Rule, though benevolent to the extent that it would harm no one, and beneficent in respect of doing good, knew nothing of Christianity’s enthusiastic passionate desire to help and work for others.[224] It was the interest of the true Buddhist to forgive his enemies and not to hate them,[225] but he never considered himself bound to love them. It was good policy for one pressing on to Arhatship to do good works, and he would go far out of his way to do them; but he never went about doing good as one who found his reward in the opportunity and power to do it. He was among men not as one who ministers and gives his life to ransom others. His very self-abnegation had egoism at its core. Between the Christian surrender of self to God for the sake of others, and the Buddhist surrender to others for the sake of self, there is a great gulf fixed. The first springs from a sense of indebtedness, a consciousness of mercy unmerited, but freely bestowed; but the other, having no sense of forgiveness received, has no real mercy to show. The mercy of God is the spring of all true human compassion, for he who truly receives it finds it impossible to withhold it. It is, alas! bestowed upon many who are too full of themselves to take it in, and in all such cases it is lost, but in every heart that is conscious of it, it becomes a disposition to show kindness that cannot be counted by acts, and that never will ask, “How oft shall my brother offend me and I forgive him?” Buddhism was friendly in its benevolence, but it never was actively charitable, in taking upon it the infirmities and bearing the sicknesses of others. It has no passionate desire to gather the wrecked and blighted of humanity and to bind up their bleeding wounds and sores. On the contrary, in its pursuit of Nirvana it passed by all such in the path of life, precisely as the priest and Levite passed the wounded man on their way to Jericho. It not only was selfish, but even cruel in this pursuit, for a woman in difficulty or in distress was not to be helped by a passing monk. The poor and the diseased and the lost were not to be considered, for they were simply suffering the due reward of their deeds; but the yellow-robed monks, healthy and shining-faced, were to be the recipients of the bounty of the charitable and the proper objects of their attention. One of its beatitudes runs thus: “Not to serve the foolish, but to serve the wise; to honour those worthy of honour. This is the greatest blessing.”[226] Almsgiving was indeed encouraged; but alms were only to be bestowed upon the worthy—on the monk and Arhat—not on the outcast and the leper, whose miserable condition indicated their unworthiness. If the animal creation profited by their charity, which they refused to their suffering fellow-men, it was from a selfish motive: for the parent, or wife, or child, whom by Buddha’s rule they were obliged to help, might be looking at them, for all they knew, out of the eyes of the beast, and not to fulfil the precept would bring to themselves both harm and loss.[227] Tested even socially, therefore, the Rule of Buddha is defective, and this because it is not founded on religion. The cause of God is eternally the cause of man. In the Fatherhood of God is essentially involved the universal brotherhood of man. Christ is before us as the representative of humanity, because He is the representative of Deity. Refusal to acknowledge His supremacy will disturb all human relationships and throw them into disorder. We learn to do to others as Christ hath done to us; the sense of our indebtedness will be the measure of our charity. For this end He has chosen the poorest and the most wretched as His memorials, and He has said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto Me.”
To do justice to Buddha’s way, however, we must remember that the path of uprightness (sila) was only the first part of it. Without external rectitude, inward integrity would be impossible; but external rectitude, without self-concentration, would be a foundation without a structure. “A man must endeavour to keep constant watch over his thoughts, for our whole existence depends upon our thinking,”[228] was one of the noble maxims of Buddhism. It is to its credit as a religion that it recognised that only a small part of our real life can be expressed in words and deeds, that the true sphere of morality and human temptation was within, and that it instructed men to keep the heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. Buddha seems to have felt, and to have in part at least expressed, the contrast and conflict between the seen and the unseen in our life. He recognised, it is true, no soul, and the warfare between the flesh and the spirit was not found in his philosophy, but he had to account for the antagonism which every one feels between our animality and our humanity, between what is pressing or dragging us down, and what in us struggles to be free. The mental and moral qualities were of far more value than the physical; the invisible was of more consequence, because more real, than the visible. The “mindful and thoughtful man” was the man who “looked within and not without,” and so Buddha’s insistence upon the “noble earnestness of meditation” as indispensable to deliverance is a grand testimony to the truth, which no philosophy of materialism can falsify, that we are far more concerned with what we think and feel and imagine than with what we touch and we taste, and that our thoughts and feelings go far more into the weaving of our character than do our words and works.
It is alleged that in Pali literature the word for meditation (samadhi), by which alone inner purity can be attained, bears to the word for “uprightness” the same relation as that which faith in the New Testament bears to works.[229] By uprightness, delusion is cleared away, and by pondering constantly the five principal kinds of meditations—Love, Pity, Joy, the Impurity of the Body, and the state of Serene Indifference to what men think bad or good—the man was supposed to be redeemed from all attachment.[230] It is very pathetic to note this approach toward and yet rebound from the Christian conception of the function of faith: for faith is the victory that overcometh the world, with its lust of the flesh, its lust of the eye, and its pride of life. It is that too which, because it looks to the unseen and eternal, quenches all sordid or inordinate cleaving to life, which is the root of so much evil and the cause of so much suffering. The apostles, instructed of Christ, have taught us that God’s precious gift of life is ours to use: that to keep it, to will to save and to find it, as if it were an end and not a means, is to miss and to lose it; while to use it, be willing to lose it for some higher good, is to keep it unto life eternal. Now Buddha had a glimpse of this truth, that lust of existence was the root of bitterness in humanity. He condemned as heresies the worldly lust which says, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” and the lust of other-worldliness which dreams that the life beyond will yield as good, or better pleasures than this one;[231] but the two last of his five principal meditations show how far apart and far short of the victory of faith was his idea of the victory of samadhi. The apostles’ aim was to get rid of lust; but his aim was to get rid of life. The apostles mortified the members which are upon the earth, anger, wrath, malice, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, just that the higher life, the life hid with Christ in God, might grow and brighten; but Buddha, in “cleansing himself from all impurity, little by little, moment by moment, piece by piece,”[232] sought to escape from the last shadow of personal existence into the blessedness of absolute unconsciousness, if not of utter extinction.
For this seems clearly revealed in the last or highest stage to which the paths of uprightness and meditation were supposed to conduct, that of enlightenment (panna) or spiritual abstraction, alleged to be equivalent to prayer in other religions. The highest Christian conception of prayer is that of communion with God; the highest Buddhist conception of panna is of a state of clairvoyance or ecstatic insight in which “men hear with clear and heavenly ear, surpassing that of men,” and “comprehend by their own hearts the hearts of other men,” and “recall their own various states in former existences,” and “see with pure and heavenly vision the procession of other beings as they pass from life to life.”[233] Buddha evidently was believed by his disciples to have possessed this power, and probably his own long fasting and severe austerities, practised in the beginning of his career, acting upon a highly nervous system, made him a believer in the reality of this perfect insight and ecstasy of contemplation, and that it might be acquired by all who were sufficiently persevering in pursuit of Arhatship.[234] It must be observed, however, that he does not appear to have regarded this as an experience to be enjoyed by the Arhat in perpetuity; on the contrary, it was the condition preceding final and eternal deliverance, and so it may be taken as the Buddhist conception of Euthanasia.
The Christian in the highest and supreme moment of life aspires, if conscious, after the beatific vision. It is no Brahmanic absorption into the absolute that he desires, but likeness to and communion with God. The consciousness of personality was never more intense, the conviction was never stronger that he has been divinely created and trained as a separate character. By long and prayerful use of the means of grace he has sought to bring, and to keep himself under the control of the Holy Spirit; and he hopes that the next change will completely free him from every trace of “sensuality, delusion, and ignorance,” and purge away from the soul the last taint of selfishness. By long and sore experiences he has learned that selfishness is the evil root whence spring all the suffering and sorrow that poison life. He can therefore understand and sympathise with the Buddhist anathema upon “individuality,” if by that is meant the endeavour to abstract our life from the solidarity of humanity, to use it for our own ends, and to grudge what of it God uses for the rest of His family. This is the Christian conception of the cause of death and all its woe, and from this a Christian saint ever prays and struggles to be free; but it is not from “individuality” in this sense that the Buddhist Arhat seeks deliverance. He is bent upon the very thing from which the Christian is anxious to escape. He wants to isolate and withdraw his portion of life from the sum of humanity, to abstract himself from the mass, to save his own soul; and now that he nears the goal, his whole energies are directed, not to purify and strengthen and ennoble the personal self for better service, by minding what is pure and lovely, and by striving unceasingly after what is right and true, but by crushing out every feeling into apathy, every thought into vacuity, so as to get rid of personality, identity, and the very faintest germ of life.[235]
And this is the goal of a race that has extended not only over the whole range of the present, but over that of many existences; this is the victory which crowns a fight that has continued throughout untold ages. Truly there is something very pathetic in the conception of a struggle after sainthood so prolonged, by one who, now a god, now an animal, now a man, has never lost sight of his mark, and has ever pressed onwards to it.[236] Probably we may have something to learn from it, by way of correcting the idea that true moral and spiritual excellence, perfection, saintliness, is the growth of a single life; but when the goal is understood in its bare reality, as implying not destruction of selfishness, but extinction of being, surely the reproachful question is justified, “To what purpose is this waste?” After millennia of transformation the nebula has formed into a star, and just at the point when it can illumine an immensity, it disappears for ever from the firmament. Unreckonable energy and thought have been expended upon the production of a man, and just when he has reached the highest point of perfection, and is most serviceable to the universe, he becomes of less value than a vapour that vanishes away. Truly