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.