The comparative study of other religions, so far from being prejudicial to the claims of Christianity, will be helpful in establishing its sublime pre-eminence among them, and in enabling us to discharge to their adherents the duty which its Founder has imposed upon us. It may modify considerably our theology, but it will strengthen our fundamental beliefs. As a general rule, we may assert that the strength of a man’s faith will be found to be in direct proportion to his knowledge of the everlasting and unchangeable laws by which the universe is governed. It is our theology alone that is assailed, and we are learning that theology, as a system of reasoning upon materials furnished not only by religion itself, but also by some other “ologies,” must be based on other and higher authority than that of an infallible Council, or that of a chapter whose significance was supposed to be unalterably fixed two or three thousand years ago. The religion which revolted against the assumption of the Scribe in our Lord’s day, and which disallowed the claim of the Pope some three centuries ago to be the sole interpreters of revelation, is not only testing the authenticity of the texts to which the appeal was then made, but is inquiring into their actual significance by collating them with the truths of another revelation as divine. It is not that men want to get rid of dogma, for dogma of some kind there must ever be. There will always be a vast deal which we must believe, because there is much that can only thus be known; but a satisfactory dogmatic foundation must henceforth be sought in facts anterior to any scriptures, or to any church that would interpret them, viz., in the elemental necessities and aspirations of our common human nature. It has been wisely said that “the theology which fails to meet the demands of the whole man is simply doomed.”[[6]] What is wanted therefore for theology is some broad and solid basis, to be laid by analysing, comparing, and co-ordinating all religious beliefs within our reach. In each of them we may hope to find some truth—it may be very feebly and very partially expressed—of no more value by itself than a flake of gold found in an immense drift of sand or mass of quartz, but yet of immense value as indicating the source from which it came and the substance to which it claims affinity. All separate and imperfect truths point towards some higher truth which will unite and fulfil and interpret them. And so every religion, however erroneous it may be, is prophetic—because found in a humanity that is essentially one—of a universal religion, a faith which is not just one of the faiths of the nations, but is the divine answer, unchanged and inexhaustible, to all the aspirations of mankind. The study of other religions therefore, even of those of the most degraded peoples, and of those most contradictory of our own, is as binding upon us as is the study of our Bibles. For us “history” has been truly said “to stand in the place of prophecy,”[[7]] and it is only by gathering up and considering its testimony that we can appreciate the worth of the treasure which has been given to us, that we may communicate it to all the world.
Prominent among the religions that challenge our consideration is the one which, following authorities acknowledged to be the best, we will endeavour briefly to sketch and to expound. It is not an obsolete system, appealing only to the poetic sentiment from a vanished past, like the religion of Greece, but one which confronts us with vitality sufficient to overshadow a considerable portion of the populous East. Two thousand four hundred years have passed since it was first proclaimed, and though it disappeared long ago from the land of its birth, it still reigns in many kingdoms, and continues to spread its influence in several directions in Central and Northern Asia. To tell its story completely would be to write the history of nearly the whole of China, India, and the countries that lie around or between them. Till very recently it was generally computed that quite one-third of the human family, though widely separated geographically and otherwise, professed to find in Buddhism consolation sufficient to strengthen them to do the work and endure the sufferings of life, and to confront with calmness the necessity of death.
Were this computation correct, Buddhism would have to be accounted by far the most widely accepted of all the religions of mankind. It has however been seriously challenged by those whose experience and candour are beyond question. According to their enumeration, Buddhism must rank only fourth in the scale of numerical comparison among the great faiths of the world, for instead of there being five hundred millions of adherents, as we were previously led to believe, probably not more than one hundred millions of professing Buddhists can be found in all the world.[[8]] The question in dispute after all is one of only secondary importance, for we can hardly conceive of any one other than some democratic fanatic who would propose to settle the truth of a religion by a reckoning of the suffrages which it could command. Numerical statistics of religious adherence furnish only an indirect test even of influence. It is impossible to indicate even geographically the range of a religion. We are very properly reminded that “the influence of Buddhism in India may be immense, though not a single Buddhist temple exists in it, while its influence in China and Ceylon may be vastly over-stated in figures, for many Chinese Buddhists may be called Confucianists and Taoists, and many Singhalese worshippers at Buddha’s shrines are far from being only or altogether Buddhists.”[[9]] Indeed everywhere, though chiefly in Thibet, Nepaul, and Mongolia, the religion which is called Buddhism is no more Buddhist than the survivals of Pagan worship and belief which are found in some extreme forms of Romanism can be called Christian.
The rapidity with which and the extent to which a religion has spread is no certain indication of its capability to meet and satisfy the real spiritual necessities of mankind. A religion may rapidly gain, and retain for long, an ascendency over many men, without possessing any of the qualities essential to its being recognised as the one religion of all men. The catholicity of a faith is indicated not by the extent of the supremacy which it has acquired, but by the quality of its contents. Universal truths are not necessarily the truths which have won the consent of the greatest numbers. The test of quod ubique, semper, et ab omnibus, if thoroughly applied, would have established the truth of many a degrading superstition in former times. “It is not that which is common to barbarism and civilisation which is most truly human, but precisely that in which civilisation differs from barbarism.”[[10]] The divinity of a religion, instead of being attested by the readiness with which it is accepted, may be indicated by the antagonism which it at first evokes. Truth at no time depends upon majorities, at least in this world, for here truth of any kind, when first proclaimed, instead of meeting a generally friendly reception, has to win its victory by conflict and lay in martyrdom the foundation of its throne.[[11]]
It is not on account of its adherents, however, nor of the superficial extent of its supremacy—though such facts have indeed a very pathetic significance—but it is in respect of the quality of its original faith, that Buddhism is considered worthy of comparison with Christianity. We must not be repelled by the childish superstitions and gross absurdities with which it is incrusted, for in a religion so ancient and extensive this is just what we might expect to find; nor should we be surprised at the marvellous and grotesque legends which profess to relate its origin and early history, for these, as Professor Müller has very properly reminded us, “are the clouds, not alway rosy, that gather round the sunrise of any religion.”[[12]] In the estimation of its severest critics, Buddhism must occupy a grand and exalted place in the general history of religions.[[13]] Among the various systems of the non-Christian world, ancient or modern, none can compare with it in respect of its ethical code, its spirit of toleration and gentleness, and its beneficent influence upon many wild populations that have embraced it. Neither Zeno nor Marcus Aurelius conceived a higher theory of morals, in which justice and temperance were infused by kindness, than that which the founder of Buddhism successfully reduced to practice. It was the most natural of all things therefore, that it had only to be introduced to the notice of Christendom to win for itself a degree of admiration accorded to no other heathen faith.
We would be understating its claims, however, if we referred to it as appealing only to our Christian consideration and sympathy. It has been brought into the lists of criticism as the rival of Christianity. Modern unbelief is forcing it upon our notice as a much truer philosophy of existence and a more satisfactory theory of the universe than that furnished by Christianity. We cannot let it alone, were it for no other reason that it will not let us alone. In the civilised and semi-civilised portions of the East its disciples have long ago ceased to propagate it, and as a form of belief it may be said that there not only has it reached the limits of its extension, but that its present condition is one of “increasing disintegration and decay.”[[14]] Even in the East, however, among the classes who have most come under the influence of Western culture, the spirit of Buddhism shows considerable vitality, and there its spirit is coming into constant and active collision with Christianity every day. The educated or intelligent Buddhist of Burmah or Siam tells us plainly that he will not give up his ancient faith for Christianity; for notwithstanding the manifold and manifest absurdities of his ancestral religion, he professes to find the same in the forms in which Christianity has been presented to him. By the light of our science we have helped him to weed out his old superstitions, and he will not accept from us any new ones. In language marvellously akin to that of the founder of Buddhism, he discards every religion as involving the worship of deity, and he professes to find in Suttas more ancient than our Gospels a morality as sublime, a charity as comprehensive, and a system of faith sufficient to bear the strain of all his necessities, whether present or future.[[15]] In short, Buddhism as professed by a modern Oriental with any pretension to culture, is almost identical with that paradoxical condition of thought or belief which maintains, and indeed professes to be spreading in Christendom as modern Agnosticism.
But it is not in an attitude of resistance only that Buddhism confronts Christianity even in the East. In Ceylon, if we are to trust the Times of India,[[16]] it numbers among its typical gains “a young highly educated European lady and a clergyman of the English Church,” and these, it is averred, “are not the first, and are not likely to be the last of its direct converts from the Christian churches.” In Europe and America also, not among the lower and less educated, but among the higher ranks of society, among people affecting culture and new light, are to be found not a few professing admirers, if not practical followers, of Buddha and his law. The admiration of many of these dilettanti may sometimes be found to be in exact proportion to their ignorance of Buddhism. Their information is drawn almost exclusively from such sources as are supplied by the romance of Sir Edwin Arnold and works like those produced by Mr. Sinnett and Colonel Olcott;[[17]] but even when we discount all these, we must own that here and there we find some thoughtful and earnest people who profess to have come out from bondage to the beggarly elements of the Church’s faith to gentle Buddha’s better gospel of liberty. Mr. Alabaster’s Modern Buddhist finds a co-religionist not only in the disciples of Feuerbach and Von Hartmann, but in every “fervent atheist” who, acknowledging nothing in the universe save man, and a system of unbending law in which he is involved, and with which he is sometimes confounded, has been compelled to deify humanity and to demand for its idol a service worthy of a divine object of faith.
So another prediction of Schopenhauer’s, uttered in the beginning of the century, seems to be repeated in many publications at its close. “In India,” he affirmed, “our religion will never strike root; the primitive wisdom of the human race will never be pushed aside by any incidents in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom will flow back upon Europe, and produce a thorough change in our knowing and thinking.”[[18]] He certainly laboured hard to bring about the fulfilment of his prophecy, preaching Nirvana as the goal of moral effort, though confessing that his own animal propensities allowed him no hope of attaining it. In his lifetime his strenuous endeavours were unsuccessful, and he died in 1860 in comparative neglect. Since then, and especially since the publication of his book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, the doctrine painfully planted, has taken root in the congenial soil prepared for it by Comte and his disciples. Spiritualism again—which, though originating only in 1848, in circumstances almost ludicrous, has spread so rapidly and extensively that it now claims to count its converts by millions all over the world—has obviously contributed to the dissemination and growth of pseudo-Buddhist ideas. With a literature of over five hundred psychological works—many of them voluminous and very costly—and with forty-six periodicals regularly published in Europe and America, it not only assails Christianity, but supports the doctrine that “the Reign of Law has supplanted the Reign of God; that just as we have ceased to embody the conception of the State in a person, it is time we should cease similarly to embody the conception of the universe, for loyalty to a personal ruler is an anachronism in the nineteenth century, and will some day become extinct.”[[19]] Its apostles profess to find in the Christian faith many signs of disintegration, and they look “to the bloodless and innocent record of Buddhism for the reconstruction of true religious faith upon a permanent basis.”[[20]] This they expound in a so-called theosophy in phraseology largely borrowed from the New Testament, but descriptive of a curious amalgam of later Buddhist and Hindu doctrines utterly contradictory to the essential teaching of Christianity.
Occultism, Esoteric Buddhism, which professes to supplant the religion of Jesus, and to prepare the way of the twelfth of the Messiahs, whose mission is to harmonise the perverted teaching of his predecessors,[[21]] and thus establish the universal religion of humanity, is not likely to occasion serious concern. It is just another of those instances in which the diseases of a lower civilisation are communicated to one superior and more robust. Just as plagues originating in the ruined or degraded populations of the East have repeatedly desolated large portions of Europe, where they found physical conditions favourable to their spread, so there are mental and moral epidemics which, generated among inferior religions, propagate themselves in the very highest, for reasons almost similar. There are modern conditions which present very close affinities to those out of which Buddhism arose. It has been truly called the religion of despair, and it seems suited to that intellectual ennui in which many profess to live who find themselves confronted by problems which they are unable to solve. The enervating agnosticism and sentimental pessimism of our generation furnish the very soil in which the germs of Buddhism are most likely to mature; but the spiritual life of Christendom is too robust to succumb to its heresy of inertion and moral defeat. The system of Buddha, even as laid out by himself, is not at all likely to entrap any considerable number of Western nineteenth-century thinkers; and this mongrel system of Neo-Buddhism, though professing to be founded on that ancient creed, will only find adherents among peculiar people. There is always a tendency in the most advanced civilisation, on the part of some who are freed from the necessity of industry, so essential to man’s mental and moral as well as to his physical health, to revert to beliefs and customs peculiar to earlier and inferior stages of culture. It is a curious and significant fact,[[22]] that not among the working and professional classes, but among the upper and fashionable ranks of modern society, such survivals of ancient superstition as intercourse with spirits and palmistry are chiefly now to be found. For such unstable souls as have been or may be tempted to be drawn into these practices by an appeal to the authority of the beautiful character limned for our generation in the Light of Asia, I know no better restorative than a plain exposition of primitive Buddhism. It will be seen then that this modern fungus is a growth almost as foreign in its nature to real Buddhism as it is to true Christianity. The degenerate Buddhism from which it borrows its largest stock of ideas bears the same relation to the actual teaching of Buddha that the Cabbala bear to the prophecies of the Old Testament, and the doctrines which it counts upon as most popular and attractive are precisely those which Buddha would have treated with his most withering scorn.
There is yet another characteristic of this religion which has commended it more to the unbelief than the belief of our age. Many agreements are alleged to subsist between the contents of the New Testament and those of the sacred books which profess to record the life and express the teaching of Buddha. Its ancient Pitakas are said to be filled with stories resembling the narratives of the Evangelists, with sayings which recall the parables, and miracles reflecting the signs and wonders which signalised the ministry of Jesus. It is averred that with the single exception of the Crucifixion—and how immense is the significance of that exception I shall endeavour in a subsequent lecture to show,—it would be easy to find in them a parallel to almost every incident related in the Gospel. Most startling of all are said to be the resemblances between the central figures in both sets of scriptures. For Buddhism, as truly as Christianity, has its ideal of a perfect human life, illustrated in one who, like unto the Son of Man, went about doing good, and enforcing by his example the pure morality which he preached, but who, most unlike the Son of Man, without any sustaining belief in deity, or hope of sympathy or help from any divine being, professed to have made good his own salvation, and to teach all whom he could reach the way to work out theirs.