Buddhism and Christianity: A Parallel and a Contrast

by Archibald Scott

II.—Internal History

is very instructive, and we shall now proceed to consider a few of its most salient points.

Buddhism, in a quiet land and tranquil age, was launched upon the world as a new theory of life—a system so rounded off and completed that its disciples had no other duty than that of believing, obeying, and propagating it. Christianity, on the other hand, began its career amid the convulsions of political revolution, and for three centuries of conflict it had to fight every inch of its way. It was not, however, as a new system that it appeared in history, but as a new principle of life, round which all the moral, and spiritual, and intellectual energies which it found in mankind, and all which itself might awaken, might form and gather strength. It was impossible, therefore, that it ever could remain stationary. Its apostles were commissioned to carry on all that their Lord had “begun both to do and to teach.” He distinctly promised them increase of knowledge and power from on high, and all the changes which increase or growth implies. To-day His religion could no more be made to return to the form in which it was manifested eighteen centuries ago than man could be made to put on the clothes of his childhood. Its development, however, is that of its inherent life, manifesting all the continuity and identity of the sapling with the tree, of the boy with the man. Like all growing things, it has been subject to disease by contagion and infection, but it has always preserved life in sufficient volume to slough off its impurities and to pass onward through reformation to health. Now, the history of Buddhism, on the contrary, reveals only a long process of degradation, without having manifested any power as yet to recover and to reform itself according to its original and essential principles.[^[347]]

The offspring of Brahmanism, from which it differed more in degree than in substance, at no period of its history did it succeed in completely disentangling itself from it. Not only did the forms of the old religion cling to it; its very life was continued in the new. While Buddha rejected all the sacrificial rites and religious observances of Brahmanism, and preached a law subversive of all its faith in revelation, he accepted and continued its ascetism and its hope of deliverance by a process of meditation and of abstraction. It was by himself, therefore, and not by his cousin Dêvadatta,[^[348]] that the heretic leaven was introduced into the lump. Dêvadatta’s attempted changes were not innovations, but a return to the primitive rule, a logical deduction from a law which Gotama never wholly rejected. Just as to the patriarchs of the Greek, the Western or Romish Church “is the chief heresy of latter days,” just as the Pope was branded in their Encyclical of 1848 “as the first founder of German Rationalism,”[^[349]] so the successive advances and orthodox decisions of the Buddhist Councils were denounced as apostasies by men like Dêvadatta. Still these changes were due in great measure to the beliefs which Buddhism had inherited, for when in the inevitable rebound from its unnatural Nihilism the theistic movement set in, the spirit of Brahmanism, which had passed into it at the first, began to assert itself, and, interpenetrating it more and more, prepared it for that issue in which, blending with the popular forms in which Brahmanism was then expressing itself, Buddhism merged into the composite system of Hinduism which confronts us in India to-day.

In Christianity, as in nature, the grafting of the good stock upon the wild conquered the wild. Christ took nothing from Judaism but the universalism of its prophets, its faith in one living and true God, the Heavenly Father of multitudes whom Abraham was ignorant of, and Israel did not acknowledge. His apostles, judged by the literature which they have bequeathed, seem faithfully to have carried out His principles; but many of their converts were strict Jews, who insisted upon some visible connection with the old religion. Just as Dêvadatta, their prototype, held that a true Buddhist must first be a good Brahman in respect of asceticism, so they insisted that Christians were debtors to keep what of the old law was expressed in circumcision, and the observance of certain other commandments and ordinances. The danger of Christianity being reduced to the bondage of the old was serious, but the inspiration of St. Paul, the providential destruction of the nation, and the marvellous spread of the religion among the Gentiles, eventually overcame it. The spirit of Judaism, it is true, has never been wholly cast out from the Christian Church. All through its history it is traceable in one form or another of the ritualism and asceticism which, like Brahmanism, it may be held to represent. There have been times when it has attained to portentous and pernicious influence, and such times may happen again; but from the early days there has always been in Christianity vitality sufficient to detect and try and condemn it; and so though Judaism, and even Paganism, to some extent, still taint the theology and worship of the Church, we need have no fear that the genius of the old religion will ever gain, as it did in the case of Buddhism, permanent ascendency over the new.

The opposite of Ritualism and Asceticism, represented by Judaism and Brahmanism, is the Rationalism which such reforming religions may be said to beget of themselves; and if its spirit of inquiry be uncontrolled, it will certainly dissipate their energy. As early as St. Paul’s day we see Rationalism working upon the development of Christianity, and necessitating the rise of a theology, which, perhaps inevitably, has often been confounded with, and, in the estimation of many, has supplanted the Christian religion. The many sects which Rationalism produced in the first centuries do not so much indicate hostility to the new faith, as the mighty ferment through which the minds of men were passing in regard to it. Now though Buddhist scriptures manifest rationalistic movements in the Sanghas from the first, they seem to have proceeded in quite a different direction. Of conflict as to fundamentals of creed there appears to be very little trace, but there are abundant indications of considerable controversy as to practice. The first quarrel traceable in the Christian Church arose over the peculiar institution of community of goods; and though the Sanghas avoided that mistake, their earliest troubles were concerning the possession of property. The original rule enjoined upon the brethren absolute poverty, and the regulations in regard to food and shelter were equally stringent. Very soon after Buddha’s decease a reaction set in, and a feeling began to prevail that his standard of morality and his ideal of the Order were too lofty for all but exceptional men to realise. He may have succeeded as the fully Enlightened One, but common men could not hope to “wind themselves so high;” so out of consideration for human infirmity there commenced a constant and increasing relaxation in their interpretation of his precepts of perfection.[^[350]] The law of absolute poverty was modified to the extent that property might be held in common, and the laws regulating diet, dress, and even meditation, were soon subjected to the same treatment. The wealth which poured in upon them, and the consequent improvement of their position, was not followed by corresponding spiritual growth. The more they prospered, the more the fundamental principles of the Order were neglected, evaded, or explained away. The friendly conferences of the rainy season gave place to controversy, and controversy proved so fruitful of schism, that very early in its career Buddhism is said to have produced eighteen different sects, ranged in four great divisions. Yet in no one schism seemed there a great principle to be involved; they were but Pharisee quarrels at best, in which though they strained out the gnat they swallowed the camel.[^[351]]

Side by side with this relaxation of the law advanced the growth of the legends concerning him who first preached it. The further they removed from his decease, the higher, as was natural, he rose in their esteem. As one by one the fathers fell asleep, and the early enthusiasm died, and the law was felt to be more and more burdensome, the less he seemed to be a man of like passions with themselves, till eventually they came to regard him as “omniscient and absolutely sinless.”[^[352]] He had taken away their gods, and disowned their religious cravings. He professed to find no proper divine being to whom any instinct should attach itself—yea, in his dissection and analysis of human nature he found no religious faculty to be relied upon; but he could not unmake his fellow-men, whose religious instinct education can neither originate nor eradicate; and so, defrauded of its natural gratification, it inevitably turned to illegitimate methods of appeasing itself. In the first instance, it found the objects of its reverence in the relics which survived him, the law which he preached, and the Order which he founded. Originally it could not be called worship; it was more an expression of affectionate homage.[^[353]] But so strong is man’s impulse to worship, that very early they expressed it in images of Buddha everywhere, though the images of the Law and of the Order have only been found in the lands where the Northern Buddhism reigns.

This earliest triad of personalities, called “triratna,” the three gems or three holies, seems to have been suggested by, and certainly corresponds with, the primitive triad of deities in the old Indian Pantheon.[^[354]] It was the first indication of the bankruptcy of Buddhism, of its failure out of its own resources to meet the religious wants of its disciples, and it marked only the beginning of a revolt, which was to issue in complete disavowal of every doctrine essential to original Buddhism. The religious conscience and common sense which rebelled against its unnatural atheism, would not long be satisfied with the worship of the memory of a completely vanished Buddha, or of the idea of an impersonal Law, or of a miscellaneous Order. So pious Buddhists turned readily to a doctrine said to be taught by the Master, and formulated before the settlement of the Southern canon in its present form, according to which Buddha is not a distinctive name of just one person, but a title descriptive of a long series of Enlightened Ones, who, leaving, as he was supposed to have done, the estate of a Bôdhisatva[^[355]] in the Tushita heavens, appeared at distant intervals to proclaim the same truth for the deliverance of men and gods. The names of twenty-four of these Buddhas who preceded Gotama have been handed down, and the name of his successor, to whom, upon the attainment of Buddhahood, he transferred his Bôdhisatvaship, and who is to appear after five thousand years for the rediscovery of the truth, was announced as Mâitrêya. To this coming one, the Buddha of “kindness and mercy”—thought to be a personification by some imaginative poet of the gentle spirit of Buddhism—the thoughts and the hopes of the disciples turned, and out of this hope arose a doctrinal system, which, expanding and enlarging by manifold additions as the time went on, showed that however atheistic the original creed might be, the religion itself had become polytheistic.[^[356]] To Mâitrêya, in his glorious heavens, the deliverer of distant generations, prayers ascended, and worship was rendered by all Buddhists everywhere alike; and out of this cult by far the largest section of them began to evolve deity after deity, till the heavens, in which Buddha could find no superior to himself, were crowded with objects of idolatrous regard.

In this polytheistic development a very great distinction emerged between the Northern or Mahāyāna and the Southern or Hināyāna system of Buddhism. How the divergence originated has not been clearly ascertained, but about the beginning of the Christian era it seems to have been very manifest, and at that time, when sectarian controversy and philosophical speculation threatened to rend the system into fragments, Nâgârdjuna,[^[357]] a monk of Nâlanda, is said to have done for Northern Buddhism what Gregory and Benedict did for the Western Church. Under him, and certainly after him, Northern Buddhism, both in respect of expansive power and of dogmatic and ritualistic development, left Southern Buddhism far behind it. The Hināyāna, or the “little way” of deliverance, is believed to have been applied by the Northern, not without contempt for the Southern school’s arrestment. They did not profess to contradict the Southern faith: they simply included it, and advanced in their “great way” beyond it. To the Southern the summum bonum of life meant Arhatship, for that once attained there would be no more re-birth. They acknowledged and worshipped only one Bôdhisatva, the coming Mâitrêya; but the doctors of the North, properly conceiving the estate of the Bôdhisatva to be nobler than that of Arhat, propounded it as the goal of aspiration. Arhatship would indeed secure one’s own deliverance; but Bôdhisatvahood would enable them, as possible coming Buddhas, to confer the blessings of deliverance upon countless multitudes. Along with Mâitrêya they discovered many persons who, like Buddha’s great disciples and their successors, had through merit, acquired in a long series of lives, taken his Tushita heavens by violence; but who, unlike him, were under no obligation to quit their celestial abodes, and proceed through Buddhahood to Nirvana. They might enjoy their blessedness to the full, and sit beside their nectar without concern, for they fulfilled every function expected of them in being objects of worship, to whom mortals could appeal for comfort in sorrow and help in time of need.

In India, as early as Fa-Hian’s time, and probably earlier in China,[^[358]] out of these happy gods a new triad was formulated, receiving such worship as Hindus would render to their later triad of deities, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva. The title of one of these, Mandjus-ri, was said to have been the name of the monk who, two hundred and fifty years after Buddha, introduced the religion into Nepaul, and founded the system which Nâgârdjuna consolidated.[^[359]] He in this connection is believed to be the personification of that “wisdom” or “spiritual insight” which the Northern school valued so highly. Another deity, Avalôkitês’vara, “the lord who sees from on high,” is supposed to be the mythical term for that “kindly providence” which watched over the whole Buddhist world. And Vajra-dhara, “the thunderer,” represented the power which protected the faithful from the malice of demons. How such a worship, so contradictory to the doctrines of primitive Buddhism, came to be introduced and recognised, is a puzzle to all our scholars. Rhys Davids and Sir Monier Williams are inclined to regard it as suggested by the second Hindu triad of deities already referred to. Professor Max Müller[^[360]] considers it to be a graft from the superstitions of some northern Scythian or Turanian race, while Dr. Beal advances the theory that it was in all probability introduced from a western monotheistic religion, either landward through Persia, or by sea from Arabia. However it came, from this date and onwards, all over the wide extent of territory covered by it, Buddhism rapidly deteriorated. While the Southern system was everywhere yielding to the influence of the popular mythology, and that so unmistakably that it became, wherever it reached, “the unconscious propagator of Hindu doctrine,” the Northern became a heterogeneous mixture of all the superstitions which it met. From this second triad of deities it went on discovering or inventing its five triads of Dhyâni-Buddhas, among whom Gotama was the emanation of Avalôkitês’vara, who again was the æon of Amitâbha, “immeasurable light.” Behind all these again, they professed to find the Adi-Buddha, the primordial Buddha, who, out of himself, by the exercise of five meditations, evolved the Five Dhyâni.[^[361]] Each of these again by “insight” evolved their corresponding æons, who in their turn from out of their immaterial essence produced a material world. It is as if the Gnosticism which had broken out in the West long before this time had also invaded the distant East,[^[362]] and as if its dreams, more restrained by Western sobriety, were in the East free to produce a phantasmagoria more confused still. Certainly it is a convincing proof that, notwithstanding its rich ethical sources, the essential principles of Buddhism had no inherent propagative power. For just as it had to return from its atheism to the deities which it had discarded, so it had to substitute for its Nihilism the Western Paradise, where, beyond the confines of the world, the pious Buddhist at last hopes to join the one Supreme Amitâbha, and millions of blessed Buddhas discoursing upon all things good, in a state in which there is no sorrow, and, “strangest to say, no Nirvana.”[^[363]]

The more these imaginary deities increased, the more must the earnest moral teachings of Buddha have been obscured. The discovery of the Bôdhisatvas opened the way to a rapid declension from primitive self-culture to a system of “voluntary humility.” Discipleship became easier in proportion as the worship of these shadowy creations extended. It is much easier to idolise than obey, to say, “Lord, Lord,” than to do the thing which he commands. This falling away from the high Buddhist rule of self-control, proceeding step by step with the growth of the legends, is just an illustration of the tendency in every religion to allow the ethical and metaphysical elements so to drift asunder, that instead of being one in holy wedlock they become thoroughly and irreconcilably opposed.

It was inevitable in Buddhism that morality, considered essential to self-rescue, should be supplanted by that debasing belief in the efficacy of rites which the system was launched to destroy. Its founder went to the unnatural extreme of ignoring man’s craving for reconciliation. He had no faith in Divine forgiveness, or in the grace of repentance, and he never wearied of pouring contempt upon sacrifice and prayer. No Hebrew prophet could be more severe in his scorn of useless rites; but then the Hebrew believed in the efficacy of one sacrifice, a “heart broken by sorrow,” for sin not as a misfortune or a folly, but as an offence to a Holy Being who was ready to forgive, and to be pleased with the worship of a will surrendered in gratitude and in love. Very early in his history man has indicated his sense of alienation from God in his endeavours to discover an atonement. The instinctive sense of wrong relations to the powers that govern life has been liable to fearful perversion, but Buddha, with all his denunciation, could not destroy it, nor reason men out of it. He could induce some to withdraw their imploring cries and glances from the gods, but he could not sweep the heavens clean of them. Belief in the existence[^[364]] of gods, and demons, and fairies, and charms against ill-luck, was strong in his disciples from the first; and when an object of worship was recognised and allowed, an elaborate ritual of worship, and latterly of propitiation, was rapidly developed. In Northern Buddhism this recoil was most extreme, for there, especially in Nepāl and Tibet, belief in the efficacy of rites deteriorated into belief in spells and incantations, till it issued in the Tantra system—a mixture of magic and sorcery whose abominable doctrines, Burnouf, out of very loathing, refused to translate to us.[^[365]] Christianity has had many corrupters, who have never scrupled to propose or to accept any compromise with heathenism at all calculated to strengthen the power of the priesthood, but it never had its Âsanga,[^[366]] who cleverly succeeded in reconciling the demonolatry of the people of Nepāl and Tibet with the acceptance of the Buddhist system. This he did by placing their male and female devils in the inferior heavens as worshippers of Buddha and Avalôkitês’vara, and by thus making it possible for the half-savage tribes to bring their sacrifices, even of blood, to their congenial shrines, and under cover of allegiance to the priests of the new to continue the old hideous idolatry.

This discovery of Âsanga’s is said to have secured the rapid extension of the Buddhist hierarchy in these half-barbarous regions; but the hierarchy itself indicated a complete reversal of the primitive constitution of the Order. Buddha endeavoured to emancipate his fellow-men from faith in the efficacy of a priesthood to mediate between men and Deity, or to secure deliverance. He never dreamed that either temple or priest would arise in his system; but the temple grew naturally out of the dagoba and the relics which it enshrined, and the priesthood as naturally was evolved from the Sthavira or senior Bikkhu. In Southern Buddhism the priest is more like a Protestant minister of religion than like a priest in the Romish sense of the word; but in Northern Buddhism, and especially in that form of it dominant in Tibet, the people from the seventh century have been completely under the power of the Lamas who alone can work out their salvation. With the exception of a short interval of neglect and persecution, a hierarchy marvellously similar to, and no doubt in some respects suggested by, that of Romish Christianity, has completely controlled all the relations of life,[^[367]] with the terrible result that cruelty and immorality most abhorrent to the good and gentle Buddha have been permitted to assert themselves unopposed, though a devotee who slaughters his fellow-men in cold blood will shudder with horror if by accident he should tread upon a worm or crush an over-irritating flea.[^[368]]

Only once in that region has it experienced any attempt at reform. In the fourteenth century, when the policy of the Ming dynasty in reducing the predominance of any one sect had prepared the way for him, Tsong-Kapa, “the Tibetan Luther,” endeavoured to effect a revival of the primitive rules of the Order, and succeeded in restoring something of the ancient simplicity in dress, the celibacy of the priests, the fortnightly confession, the season of yearly retreat, and the invitation ceremony at its close. He set his face also against the Shamanism of the Tantra system, adhered to the purer forms of the earlier Mahāyāna school, and succeeded in creating a new sect, whose leaders in the fifteenth century were by the Chinese Emperor recognised as titular lords over the Church and tributary rulers over the State, under the titles of Dalai Lāma and Pantshen Lāma. The dream of Hildebrand or Leo for the Papacy was for centuries more than realised in the Lāmaism of Tibet, for the Lamas are more than Popes, being re-incarnations of Avalôkitês’vara and of his father Amitabha, who never die, but at the act of dying transfer themselves into another body, born at that very moment, to be found in it in due time through a procedure, according to lot, never yet known to fail. When discovered, he has, however, to be accepted after the Erastian fashion by the Chinese Government or its representative, who, with the Desi or Regent, must also be present when the final lot is drawn.[^[369]]

Never under the Papacy, even in the times when its pretensions were most extravagant, and its power was most unchecked, has Christianity deteriorated so fearfully as Buddhism has done in Nepāl and Tibet. Not even in the Abyssinian—the most degraded of all the Churches that have worn the name of Christ, in respect of its incorporation of old Jewish rites and Egyptian superstitions—can we find the contrivance of the prayer-wheel, or the poles with their silken flags blazoned with the six sacred syllables, “om mani padme hum,”[^[370]] fluttering their supposed incantations to the heavens. Buddhism’s ages of worship have been only a long sad history of degradation, of perpetual falling from bad to worse.[^[371]] The higher the worship of Buddhists for the founder of their system has risen, the more have they fallen from his virtue; but in Christianity the ages of strongest devotion to Christ have ever been the periods of progress. The more intense man’s reverence for Christ has been, the loftier has been the standard of virtue attained. Worship and pursuit of holiness have gone hand in hand, and we cannot conceive of a life truly offered up in adoration of Christ ever proving immoral or impure.

The story of Buddhism in India, where without much resistance it yielded to the seductions of Vishnaism and Sivaism, the record of its conquests in the surrounding countries, and especially in those just referred to, present few and slight analogies to the history of Christianity; but the story of Buddhism in China as related by those most competent to testify of the changing forms which it assumed from the fourth century onwards, is significantly akin to that of Christianity after it became the religion of the Empire. China, unlike India, had before the Christian era a very ancient history, marked by distinct epochs. Its annals, even of the eighth century B.C., seem to reflect a civilisation similar to that of Europe in the thirteenth century A.D. Two thousand years B.C. the Chinese are said to have attained to an idea of Deity somewhat equivalent to the El Elion of Melchizedek.[^[372]] Shangti, the highest of all spirits to whom the people sacrificed, was the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of the world, unapproachable by the sinner, but merciful to all penitents; and in this idea of God, and in the morality which sprang from it, we have the secret of that social and political progress whose arrestment and decay Confucius lamented. Living in a degenerate age, he laboured earnestly as a reformer of personal morality and social order; but, departing himself from the ancestral faith in a Supreme Ruler of nature and man, “respecting, but keeping aloof, as he said, from all spiritual beings,” expressively silent as to the future, and refusing to present motives of conduct drawn from consideration of it, his vigorous ministry, conducted for many years in many of the States, could only have the effect of preparing the way for a real regeneration of society. He had great faith in man, as born good, with an innate moral faculty which only contact with the world and the delusion of the senses prevent from making him virtuous. Man was made for society, and the five relations of which society consists—that of ruler and subject, husband and wife, parent and child, elder brother and younger, and friend and friend—were Divine ordinances. His standard of personal righteousness and social purity, his strong faith in the power of example, his golden rule, “What you would not like to have done to yourself, do not to any other,”[^[373]] his demand, as urgent as was that of Isaiah or Socrates,[^[374]] that language should be used ever with scrupulous care to express only the thing that is, have gone far to form, with beneficial ethical results, the ordinary Chinese character. His ignoring of personal Deity, only referred to under the vague term Heaven, and of the future of man, could not long arrest the degeneracy of society or purge out the secret vices burrowing beneath its surface. If Buddha is to be regarded in his bold metaphysical speculations as the first of Gnostics, Confucius in his pure secularism may be designated the first Agnostic, and the monotonous and stagnant type of humanity which his teaching has produced may be a warning of the kind of civilisation which the world may expect should ever philanthropic secularism supplant or supersede the religion of Christ.[^[375]]

Contemporary with Confucius, though much older in years, was Lao-tsze the Venerable, the author of the celebrated Tâo-teh-King, in which not only Romish missionaries but scholars like Montucci of Berlin (1808) and Remusat[^[376]] (1823) professed to find the mystery of the Holy Trinity and the name of Jehovah phonetically expressed. Twenty years later Stanislas Julien[^[377]] dispelled these illusions, and showed that the treatise was as agnostic in its essential teachings as were the Analects of Confucius. A poet and a mystic, he gave his whole strength to enforce the virtue of Tao—the way[^[378]] of man’s return to that spontaneity of action without motive which prevails in nature, and which will manifest itself in man, in humility, gentleness, refusal to take precedence in the world, in accounting the great as the small, the small as the great, and in recompensing injury with kindness.[^[379]] He does not affirm the existence of God, but he does not deny it, and his language seems to imply it. Certainly there is not a word which savours of superstition, and yet he is the reputed founder of a most idolatrous religion, which is found in shape five centuries after his death. The works of his earliest followers are said to be full of the most grotesque and absurd beliefs. As early as 221 B.C. some of them were in search of the Eastern Hesperides, where grew the herb of immortality. In the first century A.D. another professor of Taoism invented a pill containing the elixir of life, and spells which could tame and destroy by the touch of a pencil millions of demons. All through its history it has been a conglomerate of superstitions so base, and so contrasted with the teaching of the Tâo-teh-King, that to make the author of that literary relic bear the obloquy of even the slightest connection with Taoism, appears to be one of the grossest wrongs of history.[^[380]]

These sages preceded Buddha by a century, whose religion, though it came into contact with China shortly after the reign of Asoka, did not seriously begin to influence it till about the fourth century A.D. The Buddhism of that period was the religion of the Northern school, well advanced in its second stage of degeneracy. Wherever it was encouraged, or allowed to maintain itself, it reared monasteries and nunneries, temples and shrines of idols and relics, and established the worship of saints and images, which sometimes, like winking Madonnas, opened their eyes and otherwise worked miracles. Its effect upon Taoism was simply to absorb it; for before then that religion had neither monasteries nor temples, nor any system of worship. All these it borrowed from Buddhism, whose Triratna and endless pantheon of deities it greedily accepted, with the effect that though Taoism has existed nominally distinct from Buddhism in China, it has simply been as Buddhism in a native dress, and thus far the Hindu mind can be truly said to have powerfully influenced Chinese thought.

By the Confucians the reception of Buddhism was very different. They might have laughed at its idolatrous system budding vigorously into life, but they could not endure its full-blown anti-social Monasticism. Its morality they could appreciate, though it seemed inferior to their own; for though its teaching as to future rewards commended itself to the moral instincts of the masses, the Confucians, more logical than Buddhists, averred that to avoid wrong-doing for fear of future punishment was not doing right for its own sake; while to labour for happiness hereafter led to neglect of the present, and promoted lazy inactivity. Such a scheme of religion was by them judged inimical to virtue, which was its own reward, and the manner of life by which it was illustrated was condemned as particularly immoral. The State, the Family, Society, were Divine institutions which ought to be maintained and perfected. Industry, public and private, was essential to their ideal of propriety; and Buddhism, with its religion of inaction, its celibate rule, and abandonment of all secular business, was simply odious to the instincts of a practical and kindly people. There could only be war between two such contradictory systems—a war not of words, but, on the Chinese side at least, of very hard blows. Their hostility manifested itself in repeated and prolonged persecutions. In one of these 250,000 monks and nuns were forced to return to social life, while their property was confiscated, and the copper of their images and bells was minted into coin. The Confucians have long ceased to persecute, but they have never withdrawn their first indictment against the Buddhists for teaching what to them is criminal because disloyal, and immoral[^[381]] because anti-social.

To the ethical system of China, as represented by Confucians, Mahāyāna Buddhism could not add much, if indeed anything, of value; but its speculative philosophy seems peculiarly to have fascinated them, and it produced remarkable and permanent changes in their thinking. The literature and the art of China reflect not Chinese but Indian scenes and manners. Its grammatical and arithmetical sciences owe much to Indian tutelage. An educated Chinaman, while avowing himself Confucian in respect of ethics, will in all metaphysical problems reason according to Buddhist methods and enunciate Buddhist ideas. To this extent, therefore, it affected the Confucians, but not with beneficial results. It aided Confucius in his evil work of shaking the faith of “the classes” in the personal Ruler of the Universe, while its effect upon “the masses” was even more injurious, for it dragged them down to a polytheism from which for centuries they had been free, and put in place of the impersonal principle with which Confucius had supplanted their ancestral faith, those shadowy crowds of Buddhas and Bôdhisatvas, to lead them still further away from the purer works and ways of more reverential ages.[^[382]]

The episodes in the history of Chinese Buddhism from the fourth century onward were marvellously similar to the scenes and incidents witnessed in Europe during the same period in connection with the Christian Church. Cardinal Newman has somewhere said that in “professing to write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon has reluctantly, but actually, written the Rise and Progress of Christianity.” The most zealous defender of the faith, however, must admit that the Christianity which maintained in Europe from the fourth century onward had grievously declined from that of the primitive ages. It is the fashion in some quarters to attribute this degradation to the alliance of the Church with the State, and to aver that had it kept apart from the embraces of the Emperors it would have preserved itself from corruption. Unquestionably Constantine was a “sair sanct” to the Church; a convert more from expedience than conviction, he and his successors endeavoured to utilise the Christian hierarchy to buttress their own throne. Unquestionably, too, the Church suffered more indignity and harm from the Christian Emperors who patronised it, than ever it did from the heathen Emperors who persecuted it. Candid inquiries will, however, convince most people that the alliance with the Empire was more an incident in than the cause of the Church’s degradation. The transfer of the seat of rule to the Bosporus left the Western Church free from the Imperial influence to regulate its own affairs, and yet it became not less but even more corrupt than its Oriental neighbour. The truth seems to be that the corruption of the Church was due more to its external or material prosperity than to anything else. To churches and to nations that is the real ordeal by fire. In the poverty and struggles they have higher hopes, but when difficulties are surmounted, and they dwell at ease, they mistake or forget their vocation. The adversity and terrible persecution of the Church, coincident with its primitive enthusiasm, did a very great deal to preserve its health and purity; and it was simply natural, and to be expected, that when it emerged into prosperity and popular favour, like Jeshurun in his fatness, it should have rebelled, and instead of serving as it was ordained to do, should have usurped the power to rule.

The iconography of early Christianity reflects even more clearly than its literature the various stages of its deterioration. As long as the world was against it, and it was compelled to use such places as the Catacombs for its shelter and worship, its faith was pure, and its life was full of exhilaration and brightness. Its symbolism was thoroughly ideal and spiritual, in sharp and instructive contrast with every Pagan specimen that has been discovered, and with its own subsequently paganised art. It was a symbolism, moreover, only of its hopes, and not of its one object of faith or of worship. It tolerated no symbol in worship save the water of Baptism and the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. It needed, as yet, no crucifix, not even a cross,[^[383]] and it would not allow any image to reveal to the imagination the present but invisible Christ, or to suggest the profound meaning of His atonement. But when it went forth, the admired of the world, into the sunshine, and began to rear the grand basilicas, and people them with the tombs of the martyrs and the enshrined relics of the saints, the very desire to rise led it to fight heathenism with its own weapons, and to copy its splendours.[^[384]] Even before this it was falling back from the simple service of the synagogue to that of the destroyed temple, but now it was found adopting the heathen festivals, or accommodating its own to their dates, and incorporating with its own the more imposing rites of still popular heathen fanes. To “offer the new law’s new oblation” it invented a new ritual and priesthood; and seeing a priesthood must have somewhat to offer, it discovered a new sacrifice in the very sacrament which was the Divine pledge and human thanksgiving for the abrogation of all external sacrifice.[^[385]] Then the government of the Empire became the model of its organisation, and soon it was crowned in a Papacy professing to dominate, as vicegerent for Christ, a world which confessedly it has not yet been able to convert.

It is not necessary to trace the sickening degradation of Christianity through all its encounters and compromises with heathenism, till in the gathering gloom its degenerate art reached a point where it dared to portray to the eye of sense the death-pangs of the Son of God, and its worship touched a depth of idolatry in which it symbolised the mystery of the Holy Trinity by a three-headed figure quite after the model of the Hindu Trimurti. It is sufficient to say that it appears to have proceeded on parallel lines, and at as rapid a pace as the degeneracy of Buddhism in the East. It too has its iconography as well as its literature, and it is interesting to trace its passage from its earliest graffiti—the stone edicts of Asoka, where we have the religion without even the name of the founder—through the carvings of the Sanchi gateway, where there is alteration, though to no considerable extent, on to those at Amravati, where we have the full-blown Buddhism to which China to a considerable extent succumbed.[^[386]] Through all this period everywhere in Chinese Buddhist temples were seen the idols of the saints, everywhere were found their worshipped relics. A bone, a tooth, a single hair, would be purchased by the revenue of a State and welcomed with imperial honours. The rationalists of the West might protest as loudly and as scoffingly as they pleased that there was as much wood of the true cross and as many veritable nails of it in Europe as would suffice to build a navy. The Confucian mandarins at the court of a relic-worshipping Emperor might indignantly denounce the desecration and pollution of the royal palace by the introduction of part of the carrion of a monk who had died long ago.[^[387]] With the father of Gideon, deriding the wonder-working powers of these relics, they might insist that they, and even Buddha himself, should plead, Baal-like, for themselves against their iconoclastic ire; but at that time neither law, nor persecution, nor common sense could prevail to cure this perverted disposition. Belief in the virtue of a fetich marks both the infancy and decay of most religions. In Chinese Buddhism to-day this belief is as vigorous as ever, and notwithstanding the influence of the Reformation, and the spread of scientific discovery, this belief marks an extreme of thought from which neither Romanism nor Protestantism as yet can be said to be free.

The Buddhism of the earliest traditions was concerned chiefly with morality as essential to deliverance, and the Christianity of the New Testament is a faith and hope and love, dominating and fusing and moulding life after a nobler type. In China, as elsewhere, the Buddhism of morality gave way to the Buddhism of mystic contemplation. Yielding to the same tendency which afterwards made so many Christians abandon the paths of obedience and practice of righteousness for the cultivation of the inner life, Buddhism as early as 520 A.D. was prepared to follow eagerly Bôdiharma,[^[388]] who came from Southern India to sweep away the alien growth of all book-instruction, and to establish the truth that “out of mind there is no Buddha, out of Buddha there is no mind; that virtue is not to be sought, and vice is not to be shunned; that nothing is to be looked upon as pure or polluted, for all that is needed is to avoid both good and evil, and he that can do this is a truly religious man.”[^[389]]

In proclaiming that ethical distinctions mark an inferior stage of discipleship, for a “good man, though never against, is always above them,” Bôdiharma, the nominal founder of Esoteric Buddhism, simply formulated more clearly the teaching of Nâgârdjuna, the reputed founder of the Mahāyāna system. It was only another expression of that indefinable phase of thought, found in all religions as mysticism, and which, though commonly identified only with its extravagant outbursts, is really of the very essence of religion. The dominating thought in a religious man is that of a Supreme One in whom we live and move and have our being, and there are times in his worship when the balance of consciousness is disturbed, and self is lost in consciousness of the Divine. Man without the aid of prayer or sacramental grace finds in himself the revelation, and alas! as his consciousness is always imperfect, and very often confused, the revelation is too often distorted and the reverse of Divine.[^[390]]

Mysticism, as was natural in a religion quickening both thought and emotion, appeared early in Christianity, and from the days of St. John it has never lacked a representative. In its manifold varieties and aberrations it presents many similarities to the mysticism of the East, but in reality it is as different from it in its nature as it is distant from it in its source. Eastern mysticism has always been more speculative than practical in character. Pantheistic in its origin, it assumes that all things are as divine as it is their nature to be, and aspires to get at the unity of being. Western mysticism, on the other hand, starts always from a sense of the disorder and alienation of things, and endeavours to get at man’s true life. The Eastern finds its object within, the Western generally without; the Eastern considers identity with Deity a natural state, the Western regards perfect fellowship with Deity as a goal of spiritual attainment. In Christianity mysticism has been occasional in its manifestations, and has always been regarded as an innovation; but in the East it is the normal deduction from Hindu Pantheism and Buddhist Nihilism.[^[391]] Nâgârdjuna and Bôdiharma were the natural outcome of Gotama’s teaching. In Christianity it has often shown itself to be marvellously practical, and generally in revolt from some stereotyped system of dogma or form of worship. Though associated in our thoughts more with the sentimental than the intellectual aspects of religion,[^[392]] it has manifested frequently a decidedly rationalistic tendency. Refusing to be dominated by authority or to be bound by antiquity, it has questioned fearlessly the dicta of Scripture, avowing that reason is not superseded, but divinely inspired and controlled as the organ of revelation. In Christianity its extravagances may be forgiven in consideration of the benefits which have flowed from it. It powerfully helped to bring about the Reformation, and since then, in the Churches, whether reformed or unreformed, it has tended to sweeten and intensify devotion. It has kept them mindful of their common lineage by insisting upon those essential and universal truths which are confessed to be vital in all religions, and especially by proclaiming the supremacy of the Holy Spirit as the fountain of all enlightenment and activity.

As manifested in St. Paul and St. John, mysticism is the recognition of the Holy Spirit as the Witness of Christ, and therefore the supreme lord over all man’s emotions and reasonings and purposes. Consequently the asceticism with which mysticism has always been associated has been in Christianity more kept under control. Occasionally it has lapsed into frightful excesses; indeed, the extravagances practised in the East to attain to insight have been equalled by the devices resorted to by many in the West to gain the vision of the Divine. In ingenious methods of self-torture the West certainly vied with the East, but at self-torture perverted Christianity stopped, while degenerate Buddhism went on to invent and put in practice most revolting methods of self-destruction as well. The law of Buddha prohibited this, and forbade even the mention of the advantages of death. It was an offence of the gravest kind, punished by the severest penalty which the Order could inflict,[^[393]] for a monk to procure a weapon for the purpose of taking away his life, or to teach how death may be procured. Still, in India before Fa-Hian’s time, self-murder was practised, and in China Imperial edicts against self-mutilation and self-immolation were required to prevent fanatics evading the primitive law by the quibble, that while prohibiting suicide, Buddha enjoined the destruction of anger and lust, and that it was against these alone that they raised their hand, in order to complete their deliverance.[^[394]]

Christianity demands that an ἄσκησις shall be practised by all who desire the illumination of the Spirit, for all that is vile must be purged out of life, and all that is animal in it must be subdued. The discipline, however, is always moral as well as religious, and it aims only at controlling, never, like Stoicism or Cynicism, at stifling or violating natural affection. Unlike Plato, who regarded matter as evil, Christ and His apostles recognised it as the creature of God, and taught us to seek the seat of evil, not in the body, but in the perverted will. In the spirit is the true fons et origo mali; but as the occasion of sin directly or indirectly often originates in some desire for bodily indulgence or some dread of bodily pain, temperance and fortitude demand that the body, if not inured to hardness, should be at least kept under control. So bodily exercise,[^[395]] though in itself profiting little, profiteth much as moral discipline, a means to a spiritual end. Consequently the fast in its literal sense has its place in the Christian system as an expedient generally most required in the times when we are inclined to despise it. The fanaticism which would destroy or injure what is natural is condemned by Christianity as severely as is the sensuality which would unduly strengthen it. What it demands is that the whole nature be educated and ennobled by loving surrender to the control of an infinitely holy Will. Enjoyment of the vision beatific, communion with the Divine Being, is the summum bonum of Christianity, and that is the portion only of the sanctified. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”

Bôdiharma’s mystic or esoteric Buddhism had no such influences to steady and sober it, and its aberrations were wilder than the fancies of our delirium. The supernatural pretensions of mysticism have always been disallowed or condemned in Christianity by overwhelming healthy-minded majorities, but the consequence of the practice of Esoteric Buddhism was believed by all to be supernatural power. An adept in it professed to see through all ages and worlds, and move through space by a sheer exercise of will. All the phenomena of modern spiritualism may have been witnessed in India and China two thousand years ago—yea, centuries perhaps before Buddha appeared. The first pretenders to these mysteries were the Indian Yogis and the medicine-men of savage and barbarous races.[^[396]] The “Neo-Buddhism” and “Theosophy” of to-day simply confront us in the cast-off yellow rags of these pitiful superstitions. Their disciples attempt to warm themselves and to walk in the light of the unhallowed flames which the deluded followers of Bôdiharma believed they could kindle. In whatever way the phenomena of spiritualism are to be explained—and one cannot say what phenomena may emerge when the human mind is abandoned to vacuity, and the human will to an ungoverned fancy—we may be certain that investigation of them will never disclose the reality of benign supernatural power. What capabilities may be dormant in humanity no one can tell. Christ who redeemed us is the prophecy of what He can make us. He had supernatural power because His being accorded perfectly with the Heavenly Father’s will; but supernatural power as manifested by Christ is very different indeed from the ludicrous exhibitions of the “spiritualists.” Christ’s supernatural power was not manifested just in their ways, and certainly not by their methods; will it ever be acquired?[^[397]]

It is not compatible with our space to trace the parallels between Esoteric Buddhism and some nineteenth-century forms of speculation in which the finite is again seen to be going back to the absolute, and the reality of everything but the self is denied. On the religious side, however, it is interesting to notice a later stage of it in a system which, originating not long after Bôdiharma, took some four centuries to establish itself. The T’ien-t’ai or Chi-Che school differed from Bôiharma’s theory of pure mental abstraction to be gained through complete withdrawal from all sensible surroundings, in that it sought to aid contemplation by sensuous exercises. Worship of gay idols, music of many persons chanting in unison, postures of kneeling and standing, exercises of continued and loud recitation, with intervals of profound silence and intense meditation, were supposed to produce the desired illumination. It seemed to be the first recognition of feeling in the Buddhist religion, and the first attempt to employ it to produce ecstasy. The same attempt has often been repeated in the history of Christianity, sometimes in very grotesque and extravagant forms. In every outburst of religious enthusiasm we may see rude examples of it, but it is also the principle on which æsthetic worship is generally defended. It is a reminder, therefore, to some very superior people, of our common human nature, and a warning that when left to itself, or indulged, even the æsthetic, like all other instincts, will just run the same round of extravagance in manifold and ever-recurring variety.

The tendency in human nature to pervert a religion is as strongly manifested in Christianity as in Buddhism; but there is this outstanding distinction between them, that while a survey of Buddhism shows that everywhere it has run its course, and has exhausted its intellectual and moral and spiritual resources, Christianity upon examination appears to be only in an early stage of development. In spite of the perversions of the Church, and its repeated resistance to Christian movements, Christianity has always produced what has condemned and corrected and vanquished them. It is the recuperative power of Christianity which most distinguishes it. There is nothing in the history of Buddhism which at all corresponds with the Reformation. To-day all over the world it is stereotyped and unprogressive, whereas everywhere in Christendom there is ferment of thought and stirring of life, plainly indicating that whatever power may claim the past, Christianity has the sure promise of the future.

In China, two hundred and seventy years ago, originated a sect whose adherents, scattered through the villages of the Eastern Provinces, and belonging principally to the lower classes of society, may be called Protestant or Reformed Buddhists. They are described by Dr. Edkins[^[398]] as opposed to idolatry in all its forms, as having no temple, but only plain meeting-houses, signalised with only the common tablet to heaven, earth, king, parents, and teachers, as their symbol of reverence. Their worship consists not in ceremonies, but in quiet meditation, and inner adoration of the all-pervading Buddha. They are called the “Do-Nothing Sect,” not because they are idle, like the ignorant inmates of the monasteries—for they are really industrious and virtuous,—but because they hold that the highest virtue is never intentional, but wholly unconscious of self. Like M. Aurelius,[^[399]] they consider that to ask to be “paid for virtue is as if the eye demanded a recompence for seeing.” In thinking of them, the words of the Lord Jesus recur to us: “Do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again.” George Fox, and the quiet and charitable Society which he founded, and which still continues in formal garb his protest against all formalism in worshipping God, not by clamouring to Him, but in silently waiting till He speaks, seems to be the realisation of what these good Wu-wei-Kiau aspire to in their religion. They have not been able to free themselves from Buddhism or Taoism. Buddha, though not worshipped, is believed in by them, and they have found an object of adoration in Kîn-mu, the Golden Mother of the soul, who can protect and deliver from calamity, and even save those that have died from misery. They have four principal festivals, two of which celebrate the birth and death of Lo-tsu, their founder. On these occasions three small cups of tea and nine tiny loaves of bread are placed on the tables, according to the appointment of Lo-tsu himself. On this account they are nicknamed “the Tea and Bread Sect.” They are strict vegetarians, but in no other sense ascetics, honouring marriage and family life, and having no monastic institute among them. They aver that one of their leaders during a persecution was crucified, and their great hope is that the world will soon come to an end, and that the Golden Mother will appear, to take all her children—all who believe in her as they do—home to her beautiful heaven.

This can hardly be called a reformation of Buddhism according either to its original form or its fundamental principles. It is a departure from, and an immense improvement upon it, which is manifestly due to foreign and probably Christian influence. The Nestorians entered China in the seventh, and the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, while Reformed Christianity only came in contact with China in the present generation. If it be denied that Christianity helped to produce the Do-Nothing Sect, it will be difficult to disprove the claim that, directly or indirectly, it has done much to produce the latest forms in which, in China and Japan, Buddhism is now presented to the world. In both countries Reformed Buddhists are found differing in much from one another, but generally agreeing in rejecting polytheism for the worship of one divinity: in China, Kwan-yin, who for long has changed sexes, and is now the goddess of mercy; in Japan, Buddha, whose attribute is Amita, the infinite. One sect, called the “Salvation without Works Sect,” has progressed greatly in Japan, under the title of Shin-Shin, “the true religion.” The worshipper renounces all merit, and trusts for salvation in nothing but the mercy of Amita.[^[400]] The soul is brought into a state of salvation by an act of faith, and though sure of salvation, the faithful must not abandon the struggle with evil, for holiness is not the beginning, but the result of salvation. In Kioti, a Buddhist sect has a college quite Western in its curriculum and arrangements. There too the Japanese newspapers not only record the successes of able Buddhist preachers in spreading their doctrine, and in founding schools, they advertise a Buddhist propaganda for the conversion of Europe and America. Its only organ as yet is a little magazine called the Bijou of Asia, but it is printed in English for the enlightenment of all who believe in the moribund creeds of the West, and for the rescue especially of souls from the snare of that Christian superstition which “happily all over the world is rapidly declining in power”!

If this be not impure Christianity, no one will dare to call it pure Buddhism. Surely it is a hopeful indication for the future of Japan, as being evidently a movement somewhat similar to that inaugurated in India by Rammohun Roy, and greatly furthered in our days by Chunder Sen. The first professed to trace his reform to the Upanishads rediscovered, and expounded, and applied; and the second to the Vedas as the primitive fountains of the faith. Both reformers and their work would have been impossible two thousand years ago; yea, they would have been equally impossible to-day, had not the West given of its thoughts to the East, and Christendom communicated to it something of its better life. It is one thing to read the Vedas and Upanishads, as the Rishis recited or the Brahmans expounded them long ago, and quite another to have them interpreted by natives of India, around whose forefathers for several generations all the influences of Christian civilisation have been playing. So is it with the reforming Buddhists of China and Japan, who have enterprise to send their sons to study at our British Universities. They are reading their old literature—even when rejecting our systems of belief—with minds unconsciously saturated with Christian intelligence, and no doubt they often find there what the Gospel has put in themselves.

We may rest assured that the reform of the Oriental religions will only be effected by the infusion into them of the spirit of Christianity. A higher religion meeting them as Christianity does, may not supplant or destroy them, but it will revive and transform them. It will destroy much that is false, correct much that is wrong, supply all they lack, and so in the end annul them. The product will not likely be a facsimile of any of the Churches of Christendom. It may be a religion in which Buddha and the great teachers of his system will be lifted to their places among the prophets who, “since the world began,” unconsciously testified, by their errors as well as by their truths, by their failures as well as by their successes, to the Mystery to be revealed. The fact that in Buddhism the object of worship is not the Buddha that was, but Mâitrêya who is to be, is a pathetic confession that its Messiah has yet to come. Though Buddha did not proclaim His coming, the result of his mission bears witness to the need of Him. So he was a lawgiver preparing the way for Moses, even as Moses prepared the way for the Baptist, and as the Baptist heralded the Christ of God. Could his voice reach down to-day from “the quiet shore” to the millions who have taken hold of him in hope of finding deliverance from the miseries and perplexities of this sinful world, it would be to repeat a testimony once heard on Jordan’s banks from him than whom no one born of woman was greater: “There standeth One among you whom ye know not, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.”