This was the original element[[250]] in his conception, and while one of its effects was to save the members of the Sangha from some of the evils besetting the life of the recluse by balancing the duty of contemplation by that of active itineration, its chief and immediate result was to give Buddhism an expansive power marvellous to Indians. Religious fraternities depended upon the presence of their teachers, and consequently the members were few, but Buddha commanded the brethren to go forth. “Let not two of you go the same way” was the original instruction, and preach the doctrine “which is glorious in the beginning, glorious in the middle, glorious in the end, in the spirit and in the letter, for the pure and perfect life, for the complete cessation of sorrow.”[[251]] By and by these missionaries were authorised to receive those who desired admission into the Sangha, and after a due novitiate to ordain them;[[252]] and so we need not wonder that this itineracy, which in the earliest days was the very essence of a good Buddhist’s duty, should have had the effect of spreading the doctrines and gathering converts so rapidly that in some of the earliest extant scriptures the Sangha was known as “the Brotherhood of the Four Quarters”[[253]] of what to Indian thought was the world.
Thus far the Sangha was different from the institutions that preceded it, but, unlike the Christian Church, which finally emerged from Judaism as the one holy Church of all nations and of both sexes, and of all classes of men, the Buddhist Sangha bore with it, and never lost, several marks of its Hindu origin. One relic of its extraction it most zealously conserved as essential to the moral restraint which it encouraged; for though later on it attracted associates whom it recognised as in the ways of deliverance, it was from the very first an exclusively monastic order. Indeed, Monachism, or the life of retirement, privation, and chastity, had in Buddhism a place quite different from that which it occupied in Brahmanism.[[254]] The meditative Brahman anchorite was not considered the only man who was in the way to deliverance, for every believer in Brahman ascendency was free to choose one of three ways of securing salvation,[[255]] but in Buddhism renunciation of the world represented the highest form of religion, and the indispensable condition of reaching Nirvana. So, though in opening the Sangha to all classes, and proclaiming, in opposition to Brahmanism, that every man was capable of the highest enlightenment, Buddha sapped the foundation of caste, it was only to replace it in another form.[[256]] The mendicant monk, as has been truly observed, took the Brahman’s place, and for him alone Nirvana was reserved. So sharply defined were the lines which divided the Sangha from the rest of mankind, that no one who had not come out from the world was regarded as in it and of it.
This was quite in keeping with the Buddhist conception of deliverance. The Sangha simply was an attempt to realise the idea and purpose of the creed. Salvation according to Christ meant rescue from the power of evil, but not withdrawal from the world as so incurably evil that the sooner man got out of it the better. Instead of making His Church an asylum and refuge from the world, He organised it for the redemption of the world. Instead of attempting to destroy civil society, He aimed at its purification by the leavening influence of the new society which He was creating. The Church was to be Christ’s witness when He was no longer visible, the instrument by which His own power would bear upon the wants of mankind. The slavery and the degradation of society, the destruction of the world, was never meant to be the condition of the existence or of the liberty and dignity of the Church. It was but a means to an end, a means so essential that without it the end could not be reached, but, once the end has been reached, the Church will be superseded, or rather will be merged in the kingdom of God. So the very symbol of it is not found in the apocalyptic visions of the new heaven and the new earth. In the civitas of the new Jerusalem St. John saw families and nations and kingdoms, but he could see no temple therein, for the instrumentality of which the temple was the symbol had done its work in the emancipation and education of the human race, and had vanished into the more glorious and eternal realities of the throne of God and of the Lamb.
In Buddhism we find a set of ideas quite contradictory to all these. The Sangha was the vehicle of rescue from out the world, not the bringer of salvation to it; it worked not for the regeneration of society, but for its disintegration and destruction. It considered the world to be so hopelessly incurable, and even existence to be so weighted with misery, that wisdom would move men to abandon the one to its fate, and goodness impel them to strive to bring the other to an end. The monastery, therefore, was naturally its loftiest conception of the Civitas Dei, and into that it endeavoured to transform as large a section of humanity as was inclined to accept its law.
This unnatural theory of life indicates the essential weakness of Buddhism, and makes its history very instructive to Christians. In the Church, perhaps, room may be accorded to the monastery and convent, as long as they are sanctified by the Christian idea of self-abnegation in the service of others, but the attempt to transform the Church into a monastery, dominated by the Buddhist idea of abnegation of the world for the sake of self, can only create unmitigated evil. The effect of it in primitive Buddhism was not only to withdraw good men from the world at the very time when its diseased condition most required the help of their preserving salt, but the salt itself, not being used for its natural and proper purpose, soon lost its savour. The substitution of an artificial for a natural standard of excellence inevitably tends to destroy even virtue. Very soon in the Sanghas active itineracy and devout contemplation gave way to listless indolence and enervating reverie, and there emerged a mode of life from which the great mass of healthy men will ever revolt, as sanctioning the idea that the more useless we become in this world the more fitted for a better we may safely consider ourselves to be.
The Buddhist Sangha, therefore, though in no sense resembling the Christian Church, does resemble some of its after-growths. These, however, must be regarded as parasitical in their nature, for though fed by its life, they do not spring from its root. In Christianity, Monachism represents a tendency of human nature incidental to its development rather than the essential fruit of Christian principle; but the Buddhist idea of a true society is one essentially and completely monastic. This one fact is sufficient to show that the similarities discoverable between the Buddhist and Christian institutions are more apparent than real, while the contrasts between them are found to be deeper and more substantial the more they are examined.
The monachism of Christianity originated, it is said, in the endeavour to reproduce the ideal of excellence represented in the life of Jesus. In the life of Jesus there was nothing monastic. Though He appeared in the land of the Essenes, though heralded by a solitary ascetic, though the age was one of universal defection, when because of its corruption it seemed impossible to live a man’s life in society, Jesus lived freely in the world as He found it, and laid His blessing on all of it that was natural, and on all of it that was necessary. He did not refuse to enjoy any of the good gifts of God; He warned us against despising or throwing them away, though He asked us to be ready, when love calls, to let them go, or relinquish them for the good of others. He gave Himself wholly to His mission, and He took no thought for the morrow. If He called His apostles from their secular callings, it was not because such callings hindered their own salvation, but because, withdrawn from them for love of God and man, they would be freer to serve the world. We have interpreted the Apostolate as expressing His desire that in the Church there will always be an order devoted specially to the service of religion, but this form of service was never meant to be regarded as the only religious service. If one calling is consecrated, it is as one day is consecrated, that all may be sanctified thereby. The world was never renounced by the apostles that they might work out their own salvation; and if they “exercised” themselves it was because self-control fitted them to render more valuable service for man’s redemption. The missionary zeal which drove the members of the Primitive Church all over the world to sow the seeds of truth and love made them take no thought of what they should eat or what they should drink; and missionary zeal all through the Christian ages has manifested the same indifference to the Βιωτικά of existence; but those who have been most inspired by it, and who have found nothing impracticable in following the manner of life which our Lord Himself led, have never deemed it the only way, or even the highest way, of Christian service. It was that to which they felt inwardly moved and called by the Holy Ghost, and, like the apostles, they exhorted all others to abide in the callings wherein they were called.
Primitive Christianity, like any other religion, was susceptible to morbid affections, and the germs of disease with which the atmosphere around it was charged found early a lodgment within it, and soon matured into portentous fertility. The persecutions of the Church, the terrible corruption of the world, the troubles and temptations consequent on the first junction of Christianity with the Imperial Power, the mistaken idea that the world which the Church had manifestly failed to transform, or even preserve, was doomed, and that Christ was speedily coming in His glory to judge it, strengthened the ascetic tendency to come out and be separate from it.[[257]] By the end of the third century the deserts of Egypt and Arabia, and the mountains of Asia Minor, were so peopled with recluses that in one spot alone there were ten thousand men and twenty thousand women. At the close of another century Monachism had a home in every province of the Oriental Church, and monks and nuns formed “a nation,” as distinct from the clergy as the clergy were from the common believers, and in many instances they were hated and persecuted by clergy and laity alike.[[258]]
The original purpose of the founders of the new institution, however, was not to shelter mystics and visionaries, but to train soldiers and martyrs. Solitude was not intended to be an asylum for the weak, or an infirmary for the diseased, but an arena for the training and testing of athletes. “Come,” says Chrysostom,[[259]] “and see the tents of the soldiers of Christ. Come, behold their order of battle.” Augustine also refers to them as “milites Christi,” even as later on they were designated as “the chivalry of the Church” and “the paladins of God.” Though not of the world, and being above its ways, they were yet in it and for it. So these retreats were not only technical schools, representing the industries essential to the well-being of man; they were also academies for sacred studies, from which went forth champions like Athanasius to defend the faith against the heretic, and like Basil to defend the Church against the Empire. They were also brotherhoods of charity, in which in self-imposed austerities men grew tender in respect for the miseries of others, and anticipated in much more unfavourable times the hospitals for “sick children” and “lepers” and “incurables,” which we are inclined to regard as the peculiar products of the latest Christian centuries.[[260]] Of course, early Christian Monachism had its ridiculous extravagances, in types like the Stylites and Browsers; and of course even its soberer types soon degenerated through over cultivation, till it became a greater hindrance to the spread of Christianity than all external opposition and persecution. The spirit of piety which it originated was speedily poisoned by superstition; theological discussion supplanted the love of earnest study; the spirit of obedience and loyalty was superseded by that of intrigue and revolt. So though it spread, it was not as a contagion of health, but as an infectious disease, whose evil effects are traceable in the decrepitude which the Oriental Church has never been able to throw off.
In the Western Church, Monachism, though less brilliant in its beginnings than its Eastern precursor, has had a longer and healthier course. It is not within the scope of this lecture even to sketch it, or to analyse and tabulate its results. We live in an age which has certainly little sympathy with the ideal of Christianity which it sought to realise, but that is not sufficient reason that we should affect to despise it, or imagine that we have outgrown the necessity for it. The life of the recluse may be beyond our attainment, for we may be so afraid to be alone, and so unable to endure “conversation with ourselves,” that we have to take refuge in perpetual society. The “weakness” of the old asceticism many of us have not the strength to practise, for we are too much under the dominion of the flesh, which they at least could master, and we are far too inclined to treat with unnecessary tenderness what they chastised and immolated. The vows of poverty and obedience and chastity may be the very medicine we require, in a condition of public sentiment so unhealthy that a man’s standing, and worth, and even life, seems to consist in the abundance of his goods, and his freedom in licence to despise all authority and indulge all his likings. No doubt, in the West as in the East, Monachism eventually became an impediment to Christian civilisation, but not until it had considerably regenerated and uplifted it. It kept before the Church the dignity of manual labour, it wiped out the discredit attaching to honest poverty, it proclaimed the equality of men by treating rich and poor alike, and it proved the defender of the oppressed, the mediator between the strong and the feeble. “We are the poor of Christ,” says Bernard, “and the friendship of the poor makes us the equals of kings.” Then just as unquestionably it was the pioneer of learning and of enterprise, the guardian of law and the fosterer of charity. There is hardly a city or populous centre in Europe which does not owe its churches, universities, hospitals, charitable institutions, either in their origin or growth, to the cœnobites and celibates of former ages; and whether we acknowledge or repudiate our debt to them, “its magnitude confronts us more imposingly the more we honestly consider it.”