For our knowledge of Buddhism, therefore, we have for centuries only oral traditions to rely upon. Of these traditions only a portion may be traced approximately to the times of Buddha, and of the fragments which can possibly be traced not one contains a narrative nor any historical reference to passing events. On the contrary, our knowledge of the origin of Christianity is derived not from fragments of oral tradition, but from a set of canonical writings, many of them traceable close to the generation that witnessed Christ’s death, in which the story of His ministry is set in historical relation to the age in which He appeared, and His peculiar doctrines are so fixed that any addition to them is at once recognised as spurious. Between the extremes of criticism as to the period covered by the life of Christ there is a difference of only half a dozen years; but there is a difference in Buddhist traditions of more than a thousand years as to the date of Buddha’s birth, and even European scholars, after carefully sifting traditions and writings, have only been able approximately to fix dates for his death ranging over a period of 175 years.[[73]]
For historical accuracy, therefore, the traditions are as worthless as they are for any photographic presentation of the various persons who figure in them. In truth we have in them neither chronology nor biography. Events and actors are equally indistinct; we have only a background without any perspective, and pasteboard puppets projected against it which might be designated by any name whatever. Even in respect of transmission of doctrine, oral tradition was found very early to have failed. The reason given in their chronicles for resorting to writing is confession sufficient that they considered that method of preserving the deposit of the faith a safer one.[[74]] So divergent had the renderings and so corrupt had the texts become—“for even the monks of the great council were blamed for turning the religion upside down, for distorting the sense and teaching of the five Nikayas, for casting aside that Sutta and Vinaya, and making imitations of them changing this to that[[75]]—that the profoundly wise priests, foreseeing the perdition of the people (from the perversion of the doctrines), and in order that the religion might endure for ages, wrote the same in books.”[[76]] Before this time the many schisms which had arisen were powerful illustrations of the evils which the “profoundly wise” transcribers deplored, and of that falling away from the original creed which this religion had already suffered for lack of a secured basis of faith.[[77]]
For the want of an authoritative standard told very severely against the early history of Buddhism. Its rapid and widespread extension was due, not so much to the natural development of its own principles as to its assimilation of the external and foreign influences with which it came in contact. Its advance was the result more of compromise than of conquest.[[78]] It welcomed or tolerated, at least it could not or did not defend itself against the introduction of many parasitical germs which were destined to arrest its growth and pass into its life. As the ivy covers and adorns the oak only to suck away with its million mouths its strength, so the popular beliefs which Buddhism incorporated from without, as well as the defections from the original teaching which took place within it, produced very soon upon it alterations so extensive that its founder would have disclaimed or would have been really unable to recognise it as his own.
No temptation happened to Buddhism, however, but such as is common to all the higher religions. As far as observation and experience go, the lower types of religion continue unchanged; but those that confront us upon a higher level are in a perpetual flux, in which change does not always indicate progress. Instead of tracing their path by the superstitions which they have outgrown, their course may be indicated by those which they have incorporated. Man, in his exodus of faith, is always tempted to go back to the condition from which he has emerged, or to fall away to the religions by which he is surrounded. Mosaism and Christianity had to pass through this trial, and certainly they did not pass through it unscathed. They suffered from the corruption of popular superstitions and of Pagan rites, all of which, as in the case of Buddhism, were defended by an appeal to tradition. Just as every Buddhist innovator was ready with some forgotten saying or Sutta alleged to have been delivered by the “Blessed One,” sometimes miraculously preserved through the ages till the necessity for the revelation arose, so the Popes and the Fathers of Christendom were never at a loss for authorities when, professing to develop and define, they in reality were adding to the faith and the worship and the claims of the Church.
But Christianity from the very earliest possessed what Buddhism for a long period lacked. In its canonical writings it conserved not only a check upon this apostasy, but a security for reformation. Mechanical though it seems, there was a providence in the early committal to writing of such books as compose our Bibles. In the fact that their successive disclosures of truth were thus registered there is more significance than at first appears. It is admitted by all that man’s progress depends in no small degree on his ability to secure and hand down the treasures of his wisdom and experience. The art of writing is thus recognised to be one of the most moving powers in the world. The nations that have depended upon it for the transmission of knowledge inherited or acquired, have certainly made more progress in religion and civilisation than those that have neglected or despised it. It is significant that the writers of the Bible have all recognised this condition of human progress, and that many of them have represented themselves as instructed by the Divine authority, from whom they profess to have received their communications, to make them permanent in popular language and in plain written form.[[79]]
In the history of the Hebrews there is not a single recorded instance of religious reformation in which the law and the testimony, or the scrolls of the prophets, did not play an important part. In like manner the New Testament, which embodies the ideals and perpetuates the standard which is to regulate its course, not only saved Christianity from the perils which threatened its earliest spread, but has often rescued it from the degradation into which it has fallen. Canonical books may only give, as it has been said, “the reflected image of the real doctrines of the founder of a religion, an image always blurred and distorted by the medium through which it has to pass”;[[80]] but in the case of the New Testament the Church has never developed, or thought it possible to develop, a purer reflection. Advance as it may, the Church never can outgrow the ideals of its youth, and change what it pleases, it never can improve them. Whenever the Church assumed supremacy over its law, and whenever tradition superseded its testimony, it yielded to the disintegrating influences of heathenism. It was rapidly lapsing into polytheism when Mohammed rose with a spurious and mutilated version of the Scriptures to recall it to the witness of true Scriptures to the unity and sovereignty of God. Later on, when sinking through formalism into superstition and sorcery almost as degrading as any Indian, Luther, by the re-discovery of the Greek Testament, brought about a reformation which not only saved Europe, but has created a new Western and Southern world. In every revival and every advance which has taken place since then there may be traced, directly or indirectly, the regenerative influences of the Christian originals. On its human side the Christian Church will always be in danger of losing its pure conceptions and noble aims in grosser forms of belief and in lower ambitions; but high over all its degradation towers in its early Scriptures the majesty and spirituality of its Divine authority, and we have only to look up to be first convicted, then attracted and redeemed. The purest sections of the Christian Church, the surest and the first to outgrow all unworthy expressions of Christianity, are those which adhere most closely to the original rule of faith and worship. It is quite possible that we “may be only too apt to make a fetich of our sacred books”;[[81]] but somehow the Christian communities that most revere their sacred books show that they are least likely to fall into this danger. The more we obey the Scriptures, the less likely are we to idolise them. The New Testament, so far from attaching any mystical or talismanic value to its contents, tells us that the letter killeth, and the spirit alone giveth life. It is otherwise with the Buddhist Tripitaka. Its authors claim meritorious efficacy not only for the repetition of its sentences, but for the very sound of its words, “as if they were capable of elevating every one who hears them to heavenly abodes in future existence.” Sir Monier Williams has illustrated this by a legend long current, not in northern Buddhist countries, but in Ceylon, where a purer Buddhism prevails. According to it, two monks were heard by five hundred bats reciting in a cave the law of Buddha, and they by merely hearing gained such merit that in death they were re-born as men, and ultimately through successive re-births were raised to the fellowship of the gods.[[82]] Of course this is simply a legend, a thing of hay or straw that has got mixed with the purer primitive faith; but it indicates that the course of the current flows in quite an opposite direction from the faith which allows itself to be dominated and guided by the canon of Holy Scriptures.
The quality of the contents of the two sets of writings is not under discussion, but we cannot help remarking one characteristic of the Christian Scriptures which is not likely to emerge in our longest acquaintance with the Buddhist books. No one ever expects that the genuineness of the contents of the Tripitaka will ever be discussed with anything like the intensity and acerbity with which we have discussed the genuineness of the books of the Bible. The long and fierce contendings that have been waged over each portion of the Gospels will never take place over any of the Suttas. We have been working for five centuries to secure a proper English translation of the Holy Bible, and we are not satisfied with it yet: does any one expect a similar expenditure of labour to secure a proper version of the Tripitaka? It is possible that scholarship will by and by exhaust this particular field of Oriental research, and “having catalogued its discoveries will put them aside and proceed to more interesting studies”; but though men have quarrelled about and questioned the Holy Scriptures for eighteen centuries they are not likely to come to a term of their hostility or curiosity. The ceaseless endeavour to disprove, refute, shows that we cannot get rid of them. There must be something either in the history of their production or the quality of their contents, or the range of their influence, which separates them from all sacred books of the type of the Buddhist Tripitaka. Certainly we cannot conceive it possible that any of these so-called Bibles of other religions will ever among any civilised people supplant the Christian Bible. “One chapter of Isaiah,” says Quinet,[[83]] “has more in it than a whole Republic of Plato.” One Psalm of David will outweigh all the religious lore of the Vedas. One sentence of Moses, “The Lord our God is one Lord: I the Lord am holy,” is worth all the speculations of the devout and learned authors of the Upanishads. Not that the Republic, the Vedas, the Upanishads are to be despised. On the contrary, the more they are studied the more likely is the Bible to be revered, for the truth that is in them is only prophetic of truth which could not then be revealed and received. We may outlive and outgrow the teaching of these wise ancients, but we have not yet transcended the originals of Christianity, and it is not at all likely that we ever shall. There is an end to the perfection of all other systems, but here is “a commandment exceeding broad,” “whose line has gone through all the earth, and its word to the end of the world.”
From this slight notice of the literature which Buddhism has produced let us proceed to glance at the literature which it inherited, with the view of catching a glimpse of the conditions out of which it arose. As with man’s language, so is it with his other distinctive birthright: we can only understand a religion when we have ascertained its antecedents. Christianity emerged from a previous religion of which it professed to be the complement. Our Lord appeared among a people whose spiritual history extended over several thousand years. They had a sacred canon, professing to register the successive Divine revelations made to their ancestors, which was fixed as we have it now at least two, and perhaps more, centuries before He came. Instead of breaking with the past He acknowledged and appropriated it; instead of abrogating their law, He fulfilled it; instead of disowning their prophets He claimed them as His witnesses. In prosecuting His mission He brought upon Himself the fierce antagonism of the existing Church, whose leaders in less than three years succeeded in having Him crucified; but His constant appeal was to their ever-venerated Scriptures. His apostles again record and expound the incidents of His ministry and His death as realising the pre-intimations of their ancient rites, and as fulfilling all their prophecies; and all along faith in the Divine origin of Christianity is never supposed to be weakened but to be greatly confirmed by an appeal to the religion which it annulled and supplanted.
Now Buddhism grew out of Brahmanism, but however divergent their relations eventually became, it was originally accepted as a natural consequence of it. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, there was for long no trace of serious antagonism between the Brahmans and many generations of the successors of Buddha. Brahmans formed a considerable portion of his followers, and in regard to his teaching, his doctrines, where not identical, were not likely to offend them. St. Paul scandalised the Pharisees by preaching that outward Jewish connection marked by the seal of circumcision profited nothing, but long before Buddha’s time Brahman teachers had declared, as he did, to that most exclusive of the Indian elect, that the true Brahman was not a person born within the sacred caste, but only the thoughtful and self-controlled man:[[84]] that a bad mind and wicked deeds are what defile a man, and that no outward observances can purify him.[[85]] Buddha has been designated as the best and wisest and greatest of Hindus; “a reformer of Hinduism who ignored its superstitions and follies, and sought to elevate and refine its dogmas.”[[86]] It is now considered very questionable whether the difference between the two systems ever grew into hostility involving persecution of the new religion by the old. The two streams of Hindu belief seem for long in their course in India to have flowed peaceably side by side, and if Buddhism eventually disappeared from India as a separate and distinct system, it was not altogether because it was crushed by persecution, but because it returned to enrich and modify the religion from which it originally parted.[[87]]
Buddhism was thus an offspring of Brahmanism, but Brahmanism was itself the product of a religion older still. Behind Buddhism lies a great and undefined past, a past with no history in the proper sense of the word, and absolutely without chronology; but out of this vast and nebulous era there has been extracted a rich traditional literature, and Oriental scholars working on principles similar to those by which geologic periods are determined,[[88]] are endeavouring by an examination of the various civilisations reflected in that literature to establish the leading stages in the growth of prehistoric Indian thought. The sacred books of India disclose sufficiently in outline the social and religious progress of the people from a period of great antiquity. No one can tell when the oldest fragments of them were originally composed, but some of them are said to have been in circulation among the Aryans when one immigrant contingent of them had arrived at the confluence of Jumna with the Ganges,[[89]] and if so, they image for us the life and beliefs of a people who must have been contemporaries with Moses some fifteen centuries at latest before the coming of Christ.