It is alleged that in Pali literature the word for meditation (samadhi), by which alone inner purity can be attained, bears to the word for “uprightness” the same relation as that which faith in the New Testament bears to works.[[229]] By uprightness, delusion is cleared away, and by pondering constantly the five principal kinds of meditations—Love, Pity, Joy, the Impurity of the Body, and the state of Serene Indifference to what men think bad or good—the man was supposed to be redeemed from all attachment.[[230]] It is very pathetic to note this approach toward and yet rebound from the Christian conception of the function of faith: for faith is the victory that overcometh the world, with its lust of the flesh, its lust of the eye, and its pride of life. It is that too which, because it looks to the unseen and eternal, quenches all sordid or inordinate cleaving to life, which is the root of so much evil and the cause of so much suffering. The apostles, instructed of Christ, have taught us that God’s precious gift of life is ours to use: that to keep it, to will to save and to find it, as if it were an end and not a means, is to miss and to lose it; while to use it, be willing to lose it for some higher good, is to keep it unto life eternal. Now Buddha had a glimpse of this truth, that lust of existence was the root of bitterness in humanity. He condemned as heresies the worldly lust which says, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” and the lust of other-worldliness which dreams that the life beyond will yield as good, or better pleasures than this one;[[231]] but the two last of his five principal meditations show how far apart and far short of the victory of faith was his idea of the victory of samadhi. The apostles’ aim was to get rid of lust; but his aim was to get rid of life. The apostles mortified the members which are upon the earth, anger, wrath, malice, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, just that the higher life, the life hid with Christ in God, might grow and brighten; but Buddha, in “cleansing himself from all impurity, little by little, moment by moment, piece by piece,”[[232]] sought to escape from the last shadow of personal existence into the blessedness of absolute unconsciousness, if not of utter extinction.
For this seems clearly revealed in the last or highest stage to which the paths of uprightness and meditation were supposed to conduct, that of enlightenment (panna) or spiritual abstraction, alleged to be equivalent to prayer in other religions. The highest Christian conception of prayer is that of communion with God; the highest Buddhist conception of panna is of a state of clairvoyance or ecstatic insight in which “men hear with clear and heavenly ear, surpassing that of men,” and “comprehend by their own hearts the hearts of other men,” and “recall their own various states in former existences,” and “see with pure and heavenly vision the procession of other beings as they pass from life to life.”[[233]] Buddha evidently was believed by his disciples to have possessed this power, and probably his own long fasting and severe austerities, practised in the beginning of his career, acting upon a highly nervous system, made him a believer in the reality of this perfect insight and ecstasy of contemplation, and that it might be acquired by all who were sufficiently persevering in pursuit of Arhatship.[[234]] It must be observed, however, that he does not appear to have regarded this as an experience to be enjoyed by the Arhat in perpetuity; on the contrary, it was the condition preceding final and eternal deliverance, and so it may be taken as the Buddhist conception of Euthanasia.
The Christian in the highest and supreme moment of life aspires, if conscious, after the beatific vision. It is no Brahmanic absorption into the absolute that he desires, but likeness to and communion with God. The consciousness of personality was never more intense, the conviction was never stronger that he has been divinely created and trained as a separate character. By long and prayerful use of the means of grace he has sought to bring, and to keep himself under the control of the Holy Spirit; and he hopes that the next change will completely free him from every trace of “sensuality, delusion, and ignorance,” and purge away from the soul the last taint of selfishness. By long and sore experiences he has learned that selfishness is the evil root whence spring all the suffering and sorrow that poison life. He can therefore understand and sympathise with the Buddhist anathema upon “individuality,” if by that is meant the endeavour to abstract our life from the solidarity of humanity, to use it for our own ends, and to grudge what of it God uses for the rest of His family. This is the Christian conception of the cause of death and all its woe, and from this a Christian saint ever prays and struggles to be free; but it is not from “individuality” in this sense that the Buddhist Arhat seeks deliverance. He is bent upon the very thing from which the Christian is anxious to escape. He wants to isolate and withdraw his portion of life from the sum of humanity, to abstract himself from the mass, to save his own soul; and now that he nears the goal, his whole energies are directed, not to purify and strengthen and ennoble the personal self for better service, by minding what is pure and lovely, and by striving unceasingly after what is right and true, but by crushing out every feeling into apathy, every thought into vacuity, so as to get rid of personality, identity, and the very faintest germ of life.[[235]]
And this is the goal of a race that has extended not only over the whole range of the present, but over that of many existences; this is the victory which crowns a fight that has continued throughout untold ages. Truly there is something very pathetic in the conception of a struggle after sainthood so prolonged, by one who, now a god, now an animal, now a man, has never lost sight of his mark, and has ever pressed onwards to it.[[236]] Probably we may have something to learn from it, by way of correcting the idea that true moral and spiritual excellence, perfection, saintliness, is the growth of a single life; but when the goal is understood in its bare reality, as implying not destruction of selfishness, but extinction of being, surely the reproachful question is justified, “To what purpose is this waste?” After millennia of transformation the nebula has formed into a star, and just at the point when it can illumine an immensity, it disappears for ever from the firmament. Unreckonable energy and thought have been expended upon the production of a man, and just when he has reached the highest point of perfection, and is most serviceable to the universe, he becomes of less value than a vapour that vanishes away. Truly
“the crown of our life as it closes
Is darkness; the fruit thereof dust,”
and man walketh in a vain show, he disquieteth himself in vain, if Buddha’s way be the only path of deliverance from evil, and Nirvana his only goal.
And so while we ought to be profoundly thankful for the intellectual culture and moral earnestness that made Buddha, in spite of himself, the reformer of Eastern Asia, it is manifest that even his best doctrines represent very partial and one-sided truths, “dwelt upon with morbid intensity, to the exclusion of every fact which might have modified them.”[[237]] His fundamental error was his wild attempt to explain the life of man independently of Divine control, and to guide man safely through the perils and temptations of existence by an ethical system founded on no appeal to an eternal principle of goodness without, but solely to self-interest. The result, which has been to identify the nature of man with that of the animals,[[238]] surely shows conclusively that religion and morality can never be dissociated without damage to both. A religion without morality must degrade. A system of morality apart from religion will never upraise. Religion is for man simply indispensable. Deity is a necessity to him, and deity he must have, though he finds his god in a tree or makes it out of a stone. Man lives by faith, faith in his higher self, faith in a higher than himself, who alone can explain the conflict between his actual condition and the ideals which he conceives. The modern Buddhist assumes that “religion is the science of man, not the revelation of God, and he considers that comprehensions of deity are of far less consequence than just ideas of a man’s own self,”[[239]] but how can a man have a just idea of himself apart from some idea of God? According to his idea of God will be his estimate of himself. Buddhism, by ignoring God and preaching morality, has certainly failed to make its adherents moral, and it has imparted to what is noble in their morality the melancholy of despair.[[240]]
Ignoring God, it could only form, or could not emancipate itself from, a false conception of man, as part of a material system of things; but man, though considerably involved in a material system, never can be interpreted by it. On the contrary, nature can only be interpreted or properly understood in man as the lower in the higher. Man is an antagonist of nature; he is for ever condemning its ways, coming into collision with its laws, refusing to live its life. Out of this collision emerges his religion, while his morality originates in the conflict between his own sense of duty and its life of animal instinct.[[241]] To conform to nature, he must become a brute, but he has in him ideals and capacities transcending it, and by exercising these capacities in pursuit of his ideals he finds his life. Buddha confessed to an ideal, and wrought hard to realise it, but alas for humanity when it finds no higher than self to reverence! Buddha’s theories of self-culture and self-deliverance reduced to practice have proved most miserable failures. It could not be otherwise; no man is likely to move the ship in which he sits by puffing away at the sails, or to lift himself out of the mire by simply pulling away at his boots; and no philosophy of self-culture, self-control, or self-rescue, can succeed, which ignores or refuses to acknowledge man’s instinct of worship. What he most needs is not law, not a system of morality, not even an example or model to copy, but inspiration. He knows already enough to condemn himself, and he has examples which, though far from perfect, quite suffice to confound him. The command to be perfect mocks him as truly as a command to see would mock a man stone-blind. What he does want is a powerful moral energy within him, for lack of which he has to confess that he cannot do the good he would, but is ever doing the evil which he would not. His real wretchedness is not his suffering and death, not even his ignorance, as Buddha thought, but the continual and seemingly ineffectual struggle between the animal and the man, the flesh and the spirit. And Buddhism was powerless to help him here. It lacked the steady support of the sense of duty to the highest and best, the inspiration that comes from the faith that the highest and best is for us, and is with us, and in us. Belief in God, as Bacon reminds us, is “essential to the consciousness of our nobility and dignity, for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body, and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.” So Buddhism in unduly exalting man to the level of deity has in reality degraded him. It has indeed lifted wild races out of barbarism, but it has failed to civilise them. It has certainly not destroyed ignorance, and the worship of intelligence has not tended to its development and diffusion among the peoples whom it has swayed. Judged even by an ordinary standard, the monks of either Southern or Northern Buddhism are rarely found to be enlightened men, while the vast portion of the peoples among whom these monks are found are about the most ignorant of all. And just as certainly has it failed to make men free; for religion is the guarantee of freedom. “Where there is no place left in human thought for deity, there will soon be none found for human liberty.”[[242]] The basis of individual right is the recognition of a divine and purely moral government of man. If there be no higher than the highest man regarding us, we have only the right to live under the power of the strongest, and the reign of terror must succeed to that of order and law. The history of Buddhism and the miserable governments associated with it are telling comments upon and confirmation of the truth that belief in God is necessary to secure the rights of man.[[243]]
The progress of the human race will ever be in proportion to the strength of its conviction that it is governed and considered and sustained by a Power of infinite goodness ever making for righteousness. Such a conviction means inspiration, stimulating endurance and hope, and resolute struggle with evil in all its forms. In it is implied the assurance that resistance can never be in vain, that failure at the very worst is only partial success, and that all things work together for good. The time for this gospel had not come when Buddha called upon the people of India to “save themselves from this condition of wretchedness,” and the result of his mighty and benevolent efforts shows convincingly how urgent in human nature is the demand for a Faith which will not only enlighten but enliven, which, recognising fully not only the sufferings but the whole necessities of man, and creating strong discontent with the world as we find it, and even disgust of human life as it is, will quicken in us persevering and deathless efforts to reform the one and to improve the other. Such a faith it is our privilege and awful responsibility to communicate. Our religion is higher than our grasp, for it is always above us. Alas! in too many cases it is higher than our aim, for we are too inclined to let it slip, and drift on the tides of things as they are; but mankind will never be satisfied with a lower. “Après l’invention du blé ils ne veulent pas encore vivre du gland.” “We needs must love the highest when we see it,” and we needs must strive to become like the highest when we love it. The gospel preaches consolation and hope to a suffering world, and promises grace upon grace to every endeavour to heal and amend its condition. Christ purifies and improves the life which we have by destroying only what is evil, and by preserving and training and ennobling all that is truly natural. Inexorably He demands the extinction of selfishness in all its forms, and He will not even permit us in our prayers to think and ask for ourselves. He reminds us that God is our Father in heaven, and what He gives is for all His family. Sternly He denounces as sinful the attempt to secure our own happiness here or in a better world hereafter; but He offers the heaven and Nirvana which He found in assuming the burdens of others, and in bearing their cross. So He assures us that it is worth our while to live, even in a world groaning and travailing with suffering, and that it will be worth our while, even in agony if we must, to die. It is indeed a very evil world, but as long as we draw our inspiration from Him we can live in it not only without damage but with great profit. When we offer ourselves in His strength for its salvation we will be saved from its sins. In the times of our deepest distress we will have the peace which He left us, and when most severely beset and cast down with sorrow because of what seems baffled endeavours, we have only to think of that hope of ultimate victory which made Him to endure to the end, to rise into