“that last large joy of all,
Trust in the goodness and the love of Him
Who, making so much well, will end all well.”
LECTURE V.
THE BUDDHIST SANGHA[[244]]: THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.
The designation “Church,” never wholly applicable to Buddhism in the sense in which Christians employ it, was totally inapplicable to the primitive Buddhist communities. The institution of the Church is peculiar to Christianity, for though we speak of the worship of Krishna, or the religion of Baal, we never speak of the church of the one or the other. Christianity is the only religion which has created a society which no political revolution can destroy, and no civilisation, however advanced, can outlive. It may change its form, or express itself in several co-existent forms; but it is so adapted to the nature and necessities of man that it is properly described, in its relation to his present condition, as divine and everlasting.
Though the Church is the creation of Christ and the fruit of His mission, the idea of it had been suggested to the world long ages before He came. “Ecclesia” is peculiarly a New Testament word, but there are found in the Old Testament Scriptures plain foreshadowings of the reality represented by it. In Abraham, “called” out from his country and kindred, that he might be separated unto the worship of Jehovah, we have the first pre-intimation of the Church. In relation to other nations, his descendants were the “peculiar people” and Ecclesia of Jehovah, and when as a nation they failed to embody and express the universal truths, which it is the Church’s function to communicate for the blessing of all the world, there was called out from them, or rather there was formed within them, “the remnant,” so often referred to by Isaiah and the subsequent prophets; and in this spiritual community and fellowship, dissociated from the national religion,[[245]] were conserved and perpetuated the truths and ideals from which they had fallen away. After the Captivity, in the rise of the synagogue system of worship, there was provided an organisation, whose essential details Christ and His apostles in instituting the Church could either adopt or copy; and there can be no question that from out this synagogue system the Christian Church emerged, and that even to-day it reflects some of its peculiar features.
The Church was the fruit of Christianity, but the Sangha was the root out of which Buddhism sprang. In a Sangha its founder lived and learned and taught, till as Buddha he founded his own; but just as he gave a new significance to the doctrines in which he had been instructed, so he gave the Sangha an application which accounts for, though it does not justify, the designation often accorded to it of a church. As an order without worship, a brotherhood without any recognition of the uniting Fatherhood in heaven, a confraternity in which seniority was assigned only to age,[[246]] and whose leaders never pretended to hold any priestly office or to exercise any hierarchical authority, the Sangha at first and for long was not a church; yet when we examine its constitution and aims we need not wonder that the religious instincts of Buddhists, proving stronger than their creed, should have developed their Sangha into something like a church, with a cult which, at first consisting only of veneration for his images and relics, for long has been almost second to none in the world for solemnity and dignity and pomp.[[247]]
We have seen that philosophic schools and religious sects originating in secessions from the national religion abounded in India long before Buddha’s day. In the Gangetic valley, as in Greece, the new sages attracted their disciples by the fame of their teaching, but there, not as in Greece, the disciples lived with their masters apart, and distinguished from the world by peculiar dress and manners. Of Monachism, an early outgrowth of Hindu religion, and indeed its essential adjunct, as being the state which marked the maturity and completion of a good man’s earthly life, there were already many forms, all held in high respect by the people. Celibacy and mendicancy were common to all Sanghas, but in regard to vows of silence, and fasting, and self-torture, they differed greatly from one another. The majority of them were Brahman in their constitution and in their recognition of caste: but long before the rise of Buddhism the Sraman fraternities, founded on the non-recognition of caste, were quite equal to the purest Brahman ones in public esteem. Now in organising the Sakya-putta-Samanas, the designation by which his disciples were first known by the people, Buddha adopted many features and details of discipline common to all these fraternities, while yet the peculiarity of his doctrines gave to the community of his own disciples a character quite distinctive.
The Brahman Orders believed that Brahmans only could be finally saved, and Brahman reformers could only encourage inferior castes that came to them for enlightenment by the hope of possibly securing a higher birth in a future state. Buddha, however, considered all men alike in respect of need, so, knowing of only one way of deliverance, he proclaimed it without distinction, and, like the Sramans, he opened his Sangha to all who were willing to submit to his discipline. Unlike many of the Sraman fraternities, he discouraged the life of solitude, and prohibited the practice of self-torture and severe austerities. In opposition to the hated Nigganthas, who, aiming at perfection, went about with only the light and air for their clothing, he insisted that his disciples should be decently clad.[[248]] In respect that he required obedience from disciples only as long as they continued to be so, and would not permit irrevocable vows—indeed, exacted from them no vow at all—his Sangha was more like some Anglican guild than any monastic institution with which we are acquainted.
Still more widely did it differ, not only from many, but from all the existing fraternities in the purpose for which he instituted it. Hitherto India had never witnessed a religious sect that could be called propagandist. Brahmanism was essentially exclusive, for no man could become a Brahman by conversion. The Sraman sages again, left the masses to ripen in evil ways for worse lives in more degraded spheres of future existence, in order to deliver themselves by ascetic practices and meditation. At best they taught those who resorted to them, and were prepared to consort with them. Buddha, however, by laying upon the brethren the obligation of extending the knowledge of the law, inaugurated a revolution in the monastic system which anticipated that of the great Mendicant Orders of Christendom. Just as St. Francis emptied the monasteries and sent forth their inmates to find their own in seeking the salvation of others, so Buddha broke down the barriers between the Indian recluses and the world, by ordaining the members of his Sangha to teach their fellow-men the way to liberty. “Therefore, O brethren, to whom the truths which I have perceived have been made known by me, having thoroughly mastered them, meditate upon them, practise them, spread them abroad, in order that the pure Dhamma may last long and be perpetuated, in order that it may continue to be for the good and happiness of the great multitude, out of pity for the world, to the good, and gain, and weal of gods and men.”[[249]]