Never under the Papacy, even in the times when its pretensions were most extravagant, and its power was most unchecked, has Christianity deteriorated so fearfully as Buddhism has done in Nepāl and Tibet. Not even in the Abyssinian—the most degraded of all the Churches that have worn the name of Christ, in respect of its incorporation of old Jewish rites and Egyptian superstitions—can we find the contrivance of the prayer-wheel, or the poles with their silken flags blazoned with the six sacred syllables, “om mani padme hum,”[[370]] fluttering their supposed incantations to the heavens. Buddhism’s ages of worship have been only a long sad history of degradation, of perpetual falling from bad to worse.[[371]] The higher the worship of Buddhists for the founder of their system has risen, the more have they fallen from his virtue; but in Christianity the ages of strongest devotion to Christ have ever been the periods of progress. The more intense man’s reverence for Christ has been, the loftier has been the standard of virtue attained. Worship and pursuit of holiness have gone hand in hand, and we cannot conceive of a life truly offered up in adoration of Christ ever proving immoral or impure.

The story of Buddhism in India, where without much resistance it yielded to the seductions of Vishnaism and Sivaism, the record of its conquests in the surrounding countries, and especially in those just referred to, present few and slight analogies to the history of Christianity; but the story of Buddhism in China as related by those most competent to testify of the changing forms which it assumed from the fourth century onwards, is significantly akin to that of Christianity after it became the religion of the Empire. China, unlike India, had before the Christian era a very ancient history, marked by distinct epochs. Its annals, even of the eighth century B.C., seem to reflect a civilisation similar to that of Europe in the thirteenth century A.D. Two thousand years B.C. the Chinese are said to have attained to an idea of Deity somewhat equivalent to the El Elion of Melchizedek.[[372]] Shangti, the highest of all spirits to whom the people sacrificed, was the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of the world, unapproachable by the sinner, but merciful to all penitents; and in this idea of God, and in the morality which sprang from it, we have the secret of that social and political progress whose arrestment and decay Confucius lamented. Living in a degenerate age, he laboured earnestly as a reformer of personal morality and social order; but, departing himself from the ancestral faith in a Supreme Ruler of nature and man, “respecting, but keeping aloof, as he said, from all spiritual beings,” expressively silent as to the future, and refusing to present motives of conduct drawn from consideration of it, his vigorous ministry, conducted for many years in many of the States, could only have the effect of preparing the way for a real regeneration of society. He had great faith in man, as born good, with an innate moral faculty which only contact with the world and the delusion of the senses prevent from making him virtuous. Man was made for society, and the five relations of which society consists—that of ruler and subject, husband and wife, parent and child, elder brother and younger, and friend and friend—were Divine ordinances. His standard of personal righteousness and social purity, his strong faith in the power of example, his golden rule, “What you would not like to have done to yourself, do not to any other,”[[373]] his demand, as urgent as was that of Isaiah or Socrates,[[374]] that language should be used ever with scrupulous care to express only the thing that is, have gone far to form, with beneficial ethical results, the ordinary Chinese character. His ignoring of personal Deity, only referred to under the vague term Heaven, and of the future of man, could not long arrest the degeneracy of society or purge out the secret vices burrowing beneath its surface. If Buddha is to be regarded in his bold metaphysical speculations as the first of Gnostics, Confucius in his pure secularism may be designated the first Agnostic, and the monotonous and stagnant type of humanity which his teaching has produced may be a warning of the kind of civilisation which the world may expect should ever philanthropic secularism supplant or supersede the religion of Christ.[[375]]

Contemporary with Confucius, though much older in years, was Lao-tsze the Venerable, the author of the celebrated Tâo-teh-King, in which not only Romish missionaries but scholars like Montucci of Berlin (1808) and Remusat[[376]] (1823) professed to find the mystery of the Holy Trinity and the name of Jehovah phonetically expressed. Twenty years later Stanislas Julien[[377]] dispelled these illusions, and showed that the treatise was as agnostic in its essential teachings as were the Analects of Confucius. A poet and a mystic, he gave his whole strength to enforce the virtue of Tao—the way[[378]] of man’s return to that spontaneity of action without motive which prevails in nature, and which will manifest itself in man, in humility, gentleness, refusal to take precedence in the world, in accounting the great as the small, the small as the great, and in recompensing injury with kindness.[[379]] He does not affirm the existence of God, but he does not deny it, and his language seems to imply it. Certainly there is not a word which savours of superstition, and yet he is the reputed founder of a most idolatrous religion, which is found in shape five centuries after his death. The works of his earliest followers are said to be full of the most grotesque and absurd beliefs. As early as 221 B.C. some of them were in search of the Eastern Hesperides, where grew the herb of immortality. In the first century A.D. another professor of Taoism invented a pill containing the elixir of life, and spells which could tame and destroy by the touch of a pencil millions of demons. All through its history it has been a conglomerate of superstitions so base, and so contrasted with the teaching of the Tâo-teh-King, that to make the author of that literary relic bear the obloquy of even the slightest connection with Taoism, appears to be one of the grossest wrongs of history.[[380]]

These sages preceded Buddha by a century, whose religion, though it came into contact with China shortly after the reign of Asoka, did not seriously begin to influence it till about the fourth century A.D. The Buddhism of that period was the religion of the Northern school, well advanced in its second stage of degeneracy. Wherever it was encouraged, or allowed to maintain itself, it reared monasteries and nunneries, temples and shrines of idols and relics, and established the worship of saints and images, which sometimes, like winking Madonnas, opened their eyes and otherwise worked miracles. Its effect upon Taoism was simply to absorb it; for before then that religion had neither monasteries nor temples, nor any system of worship. All these it borrowed from Buddhism, whose Triratna and endless pantheon of deities it greedily accepted, with the effect that though Taoism has existed nominally distinct from Buddhism in China, it has simply been as Buddhism in a native dress, and thus far the Hindu mind can be truly said to have powerfully influenced Chinese thought.

By the Confucians the reception of Buddhism was very different. They might have laughed at its idolatrous system budding vigorously into life, but they could not endure its full-blown anti-social Monasticism. Its morality they could appreciate, though it seemed inferior to their own; for though its teaching as to future rewards commended itself to the moral instincts of the masses, the Confucians, more logical than Buddhists, averred that to avoid wrong-doing for fear of future punishment was not doing right for its own sake; while to labour for happiness hereafter led to neglect of the present, and promoted lazy inactivity. Such a scheme of religion was by them judged inimical to virtue, which was its own reward, and the manner of life by which it was illustrated was condemned as particularly immoral. The State, the Family, Society, were Divine institutions which ought to be maintained and perfected. Industry, public and private, was essential to their ideal of propriety; and Buddhism, with its religion of inaction, its celibate rule, and abandonment of all secular business, was simply odious to the instincts of a practical and kindly people. There could only be war between two such contradictory systems—a war not of words, but, on the Chinese side at least, of very hard blows. Their hostility manifested itself in repeated and prolonged persecutions. In one of these 250,000 monks and nuns were forced to return to social life, while their property was confiscated, and the copper of their images and bells was minted into coin. The Confucians have long ceased to persecute, but they have never withdrawn their first indictment against the Buddhists for teaching what to them is criminal because disloyal, and immoral[[381]] because anti-social.

To the ethical system of China, as represented by Confucians, Mahāyāna Buddhism could not add much, if indeed anything, of value; but its speculative philosophy seems peculiarly to have fascinated them, and it produced remarkable and permanent changes in their thinking. The literature and the art of China reflect not Chinese but Indian scenes and manners. Its grammatical and arithmetical sciences owe much to Indian tutelage. An educated Chinaman, while avowing himself Confucian in respect of ethics, will in all metaphysical problems reason according to Buddhist methods and enunciate Buddhist ideas. To this extent, therefore, it affected the Confucians, but not with beneficial results. It aided Confucius in his evil work of shaking the faith of “the classes” in the personal Ruler of the Universe, while its effect upon “the masses” was even more injurious, for it dragged them down to a polytheism from which for centuries they had been free, and put in place of the impersonal principle with which Confucius had supplanted their ancestral faith, those shadowy crowds of Buddhas and Bôdhisatvas, to lead them still further away from the purer works and ways of more reverential ages.[[382]]

The episodes in the history of Chinese Buddhism from the fourth century onward were marvellously similar to the scenes and incidents witnessed in Europe during the same period in connection with the Christian Church. Cardinal Newman has somewhere said that in “professing to write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon has reluctantly, but actually, written the Rise and Progress of Christianity.” The most zealous defender of the faith, however, must admit that the Christianity which maintained in Europe from the fourth century onward had grievously declined from that of the primitive ages. It is the fashion in some quarters to attribute this degradation to the alliance of the Church with the State, and to aver that had it kept apart from the embraces of the Emperors it would have preserved itself from corruption. Unquestionably Constantine was a “sair sanct” to the Church; a convert more from expedience than conviction, he and his successors endeavoured to utilise the Christian hierarchy to buttress their own throne. Unquestionably, too, the Church suffered more indignity and harm from the Christian Emperors who patronised it, than ever it did from the heathen Emperors who persecuted it. Candid inquiries will, however, convince most people that the alliance with the Empire was more an incident in than the cause of the Church’s degradation. The transfer of the seat of rule to the Bosporus left the Western Church free from the Imperial influence to regulate its own affairs, and yet it became not less but even more corrupt than its Oriental neighbour. The truth seems to be that the corruption of the Church was due more to its external or material prosperity than to anything else. To churches and to nations that is the real ordeal by fire. In the poverty and struggles they have higher hopes, but when difficulties are surmounted, and they dwell at ease, they mistake or forget their vocation. The adversity and terrible persecution of the Church, coincident with its primitive enthusiasm, did a very great deal to preserve its health and purity; and it was simply natural, and to be expected, that when it emerged into prosperity and popular favour, like Jeshurun in his fatness, it should have rebelled, and instead of serving as it was ordained to do, should have usurped the power to rule.

The iconography of early Christianity reflects even more clearly than its literature the various stages of its deterioration. As long as the world was against it, and it was compelled to use such places as the Catacombs for its shelter and worship, its faith was pure, and its life was full of exhilaration and brightness. Its symbolism was thoroughly ideal and spiritual, in sharp and instructive contrast with every Pagan specimen that has been discovered, and with its own subsequently paganised art. It was a symbolism, moreover, only of its hopes, and not of its one object of faith or of worship. It tolerated no symbol in worship save the water of Baptism and the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. It needed, as yet, no crucifix, not even a cross,[[383]] and it would not allow any image to reveal to the imagination the present but invisible Christ, or to suggest the profound meaning of His atonement. But when it went forth, the admired of the world, into the sunshine, and began to rear the grand basilicas, and people them with the tombs of the martyrs and the enshrined relics of the saints, the very desire to rise led it to fight heathenism with its own weapons, and to copy its splendours.[[384]] Even before this it was falling back from the simple service of the synagogue to that of the destroyed temple, but now it was found adopting the heathen festivals, or accommodating its own to their dates, and incorporating with its own the more imposing rites of still popular heathen fanes. To “offer the new law’s new oblation” it invented a new ritual and priesthood; and seeing a priesthood must have somewhat to offer, it discovered a new sacrifice in the very sacrament which was the Divine pledge and human thanksgiving for the abrogation of all external sacrifice.[[385]] Then the government of the Empire became the model of its organisation, and soon it was crowned in a Papacy professing to dominate, as vicegerent for Christ, a world which confessedly it has not yet been able to convert.

It is not necessary to trace the sickening degradation of Christianity through all its encounters and compromises with heathenism, till in the gathering gloom its degenerate art reached a point where it dared to portray to the eye of sense the death-pangs of the Son of God, and its worship touched a depth of idolatry in which it symbolised the mystery of the Holy Trinity by a three-headed figure quite after the model of the Hindu Trimurti. It is sufficient to say that it appears to have proceeded on parallel lines, and at as rapid a pace as the degeneracy of Buddhism in the East. It too has its iconography as well as its literature, and it is interesting to trace its passage from its earliest graffiti—the stone edicts of Asoka, where we have the religion without even the name of the founder—through the carvings of the Sanchi gateway, where there is alteration, though to no considerable extent, on to those at Amravati, where we have the full-blown Buddhism to which China to a considerable extent succumbed.[[386]] Through all this period everywhere in Chinese Buddhist temples were seen the idols of the saints, everywhere were found their worshipped relics. A bone, a tooth, a single hair, would be purchased by the revenue of a State and welcomed with imperial honours. The rationalists of the West might protest as loudly and as scoffingly as they pleased that there was as much wood of the true cross and as many veritable nails of it in Europe as would suffice to build a navy. The Confucian mandarins at the court of a relic-worshipping Emperor might indignantly denounce the desecration and pollution of the royal palace by the introduction of part of the carrion of a monk who had died long ago.[[387]] With the father of Gideon, deriding the wonder-working powers of these relics, they might insist that they, and even Buddha himself, should plead, Baal-like, for themselves against their iconoclastic ire; but at that time neither law, nor persecution, nor common sense could prevail to cure this perverted disposition. Belief in the virtue of a fetich marks both the infancy and decay of most religions. In Chinese Buddhism to-day this belief is as vigorous as ever, and notwithstanding the influence of the Reformation, and the spread of scientific discovery, this belief marks an extreme of thought from which neither Romanism nor Protestantism as yet can be said to be free.

The Buddhism of the earliest traditions was concerned chiefly with morality as essential to deliverance, and the Christianity of the New Testament is a faith and hope and love, dominating and fusing and moulding life after a nobler type. In China, as elsewhere, the Buddhism of morality gave way to the Buddhism of mystic contemplation. Yielding to the same tendency which afterwards made so many Christians abandon the paths of obedience and practice of righteousness for the cultivation of the inner life, Buddhism as early as 520 A.D. was prepared to follow eagerly Bôdiharma,[[388]] who came from Southern India to sweep away the alien growth of all book-instruction, and to establish the truth that “out of mind there is no Buddha, out of Buddha there is no mind; that virtue is not to be sought, and vice is not to be shunned; that nothing is to be looked upon as pure or polluted, for all that is needed is to avoid both good and evil, and he that can do this is a truly religious man.”[[389]]