When we come to examine its history, we find that it has followed a line of development strikingly parallel to that of Christianity, and the parallels thus furnished by its antecedents and progress, and by the external and foreign influences which encountered and modified it, are those which have the most interest and instruction for the student of Religion. In order, however, to ascertain their significance, we must examine these alleged correspondences of story and of doctrine; for these have powerfully influenced a certain class of thinkers, as supplying confirmation of a charge brought against our religion in almost the beginning of its history, that after all there was nothing original in Christ, and nothing new in His teaching. That resemblances do exist, not only between the forms in which Buddhism confronts us in some quarters of the world and the ritual and organisation of a large section of the Christian Church, but between the contents of the Buddhist scriptures as we have them now, and those of the New Testament, all must admit. As we cast a hasty and general glance over them we see how natural and how pardonable was the old rough and ready method of accounting for them by the supposition of direct transference of the various lineaments from the one to the other. The early Jesuit missionaries did not hesitate to assert that the Buddhists, by assimilating and incorporating the rites and doctrines of the primitive missionaries, had succeeded in producing a caricature of Christianity. In like manner, when in Central America—till then as independent of Europe as if it had been separated not by untraversed oceans, but by the immensities that divide the planets—the Spaniards found to their amazement a most complex religion, with priests, and monasteries, and temples adorned with the cross and statues of a goddess with an infant in her arms, they could only explain the mystery by averring that it was a gigantic mimetic ruse of the devil to lead the unhappy nations astray. The suppositions in both cases are not likely to be seriously supported now. Indeed, it is far more likely, as the author of Ancient Christianity and Dr. Prinsep and others have attempted to show, that in the East we have to seek for the origin of several institutions and rites once considered the peculiar growth of Greek or Latin Christianity. There can be little doubt that as these religions spread they would come in contact with and react upon each other.[[23]] It is difficult in the present state of our knowledge to indicate their first conjunction, or to trace their various intercommunications, but that they have been mutually indebted to each other is sufficiently attested by their histories. In later Hinduism and Buddhism and Lamaism there are plain indications of the action of the Western upon the Eastern religions. Romanism, on the other hand, has set its official seal upon the relationship, by incorporating a legend of Buddha among its “Lives of the Saints,” by canonising the founder of this most antichristian of all religions, and by consecrating the 27th November as a day on which he may be invoked for intercession.[[24]]
Though as yet the field is only opening out, and its exploration is only beginning, there can be little doubt that it will be found that in their advanced stages Buddhism and Greek and Latin Christianity have contributed to each other’s resources; but it is quite another matter to assert that the existence of the one religion accounts for the origin of the other, and that Christianity, as the junior of the two, is simply “a product of India spoiled in its route to Palestine.”[[25]] Those who allege that the sources of Christianity may be discovered in Buddhism are bound not to assume but clearly to trace and demonstrate the medium of communication between the two. As yet the allegation, though frequently made, appears to be incapable of proof. Renan’s picture of “wandering Buddhist monks who overran the whole world, and converted on the banks of the Jordan, by their garb and manners, people who did not understand their language, like the Franciscan monks in later days,” is only a pious imagination.[[26]] And so are the theories elaborated by M. Emile Burnouf in the Science of Religions and by M. Ernest de Bunsen in his Angel Messiah of the Buddhists. Both these authors have explained to their own satisfaction the derivation of Christianity from old Indian or Aryan beliefs, which, transmitted through Parthia to the Babylonian Jews, by them communicated to the Essenes John Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, and from them again passed on to the Therapeut Stephen, were formulated in the plastic mind of Paul of Tarsus into the Christian dogmas which we now revere. The scheme is devised with thoroughly French precision, and the treatises in which it is elaborated, full as they are of indications of great ingenuity and laborious research, are interesting as any romance. For scientific purposes, however, they have hardly more historic worth than a romance. Based upon assumptions, they are constructed almost entirely of hypotheses: when a difficulty emerges, it is solved by a supposition which further on is confirmed by a “reasonable expectation” of something else, so that by and by the supposition meets us as an established result. They abound in analogies, some of which transgress as flagrantly the laws of time as the theory once advanced that the story of Christ is only a reflection of the legend of Krishna, seeing that belief in Krishna did not arise in India till centuries after Christianity had reached its shores. “The laws of language[[27]] are also violated as openly as they were by the discovery that the mysterious word ‘Om’ of the Upanishads is the equivalent of the ‘Amen’ in ancient Hebrew worship.” It may be as possible by this method to prove the connection between the Vedic and Levitical institutions, as it is possible to establish the conclusion that the old Aryan symbol of the fire sticks is the fontal idea of the Cross, or that the Vedic word “Agni” is equivalent to the Latin “Agnus Dei.” Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter[[28]] and Professor Kuenen[[29]] have most exhaustively and decisively exposed the vanity of such speculations, which, on the whole, may be regarded as a good confirmation of a saying uttered by Professor H. H. Wilson some thirty years ago, in reference to those who would derive Christianity from Indian sources, that “the disposition to draw impossible analogies is not yet wholly extinct.”
As far as the history of Buddhism can be traced it presents no actual point of contact with either Syria or Egypt or Europe. Even after it became a missionary religion its progress was never westwards, and at no period did it reach further in this direction than the region now known as Afghanistan. The civilisation of the West offered no opportunity for its enthusiasm, and none of the great Western cities appear in its records. In the few scattered extracts which survive of the writings of those Greeks who visited India during or subsequent to the period of Alexander’s invasion, there is no indication of a knowledge of Buddhism, nor any allusion to Buddha by name. We have to come down to the times of Clement of Alexandria[[30]] and of Bardesanes the Syrian before we have any tangible evidence of the slightest acquaintance on the part of the West with Buddhism. The first writer mentions Buddha by name, the second distinguishes his monks from the Brahmans, and gives some details as to their customs, but it is impossible from their statements to conjecture how much they knew of the faith to which they alluded, and most absurd to infer from them that they were affected with the slightest admiration for it.[[31]]
If Christianity be the offspring of Buddhism, or even if Buddhism exercised any direct influence upon its earliest development, some indications of that influence should be traceable in the Jewish and Greek literature of that period. Yet in spite of the most searching examination none have as yet been found, and it is not at all likely that they ever will be found.[[32]] Our religion was well advanced in its course before we find in the works of its defenders any sign of acquaintance with the Buddhist legend, or any expression of suspicion, as on the part of Cyril and Ephraim of Jerusalem in the fourth century, that the taint of some of the heresies which had infected the Church might be traced to its contagion. Then, unfortunately for the ingeniously constructed theory that the doctrines were secretly transmitted by the channel already indicated till they reached St. Paul through Stephen the Therapeut, the only passage on which the existence of Therapeuts in Apostolic times could be founded has been recently proved to be a spurious interpolation in the writings of Philo of a treatise forged several centuries after his death.[[33]] Research can find no trace of Therapeuts in Alexandria nor anywhere else till Monachism had become the fashion in the Christian Church. Bishop Lightfoot has convincingly proved that the theory of the transmission of Christian doctrine from the Buddhists of India through the Babylonian Jews to the Essenes has not the slightest trace of evidence to support it, but that, on the contrary, the weight of evidence and probability is all against it.[[34]] Again, any one who compares the Gospel account of the life of the Baptist with the description given in Josephus[[35]] of the manners and tenets of the Essenes will find that just as the Essenes owed nothing to Buddha, so Christ, and even John Baptist, owed nothing to them. Though similar in a few external points, the Baptist’s preaching and manner of living were essentially antagonistic to those of the little Jewish sect which had severed itself not only from Jewish society but from Jewish hopes. The teaching of Christ, again, whose manner of life, notoriously in contrast to that of His herald, was throughout a powerful though silent contradiction to every doctrine which the Essenes held, and it would be extravagant to assert that He owed to it even an illustration of His own.[[36]] It may be safely asserted that the theory of the derivation of Christianity from Buddhism breaks down at every point at which it is tested. We may dismiss it in the words of Professor Kuenen, that the “so-called connection between Essenism and Christianity cannot bear serious inquiry for a moment,” and in those of the learned Bishop,[[37]] “that though the Essenes may have had some connection with Persia, their system was antagonistic to that of Buddhism in everything save the spirit of despair which called both into existence.”
The whole supposition of Burnouf and De Bunsen, and writers of the school to which they belong, is based upon a most exaggerated and indeed fictitious estimate of the Indian contribution to the sum of human knowledge. It assumes that India was the cradle of all wisdom, and that from that favoured land of primeval light went forth from time to time the apostles of religion and the expounders of all philosophy. Yet history reveals not the slightest trace of any such propaganda westward before the coming of Christ, and though centuries after we have slight notices of Indian travellers to the West, we do not find a missionary among them. We have historic evidence, however, of the Western races reaching India certainly before the coming of Christ, and probably long before the birth of the founder of Buddhism, and we can hardly suppose that races with enterprise and intelligence sufficient to discover and conquer the Hindus would appear only before them as beggars to receive their alms. We forget that the wave of Aryan humanity that poured downward into India really deflected from the path of progress, and that under climatic and other unfavourable conditions, and through intermixture with inferior races, it stagnated, while that which proceeded westward improved the more the farther it advanced. We have a tolerably clear idea of the civilisation of Western Asia in the time of Solomon, whose navy is supposed to have traded with India. It comprehended capitals with magnificent buildings, public works, and well-guarded highways; commerce protected and encouraged; law administered; religion observed, and learning cultivated. What Indian civilisation meant at the same period we can only conjecturally infer from the literature that is extant, but we have clearer glimpses of it five centuries later as the home of a mixed race, geographically severed from the rest of the world, living in village settlements, which only here and there were large enough to be called towns, divided into clans whose wealth consisted chiefly in pasture and tillage lands, and flocks and herds.[[38]] A kingdom in the sense in which Solomon would have used the word did not exist. In respect of civilisation Palestine was far ahead of India, and in respect of religious development, its theology, though greatly tainted with heathen superstitions, was sufficiently pure and strong to save the Hebrew from requiring instruction at the wattle huts of a race that confounded God with His works. If Ophir be the name of an Indian port, then Solomon’s navy brought back from it gold, and ivory, and curious things indicated by Sanskrit words for which the Hebrew chronicler could find no equivalent. The sailors may have picked up a few fables and riddles and proverbs, but surely in regard to religion and philosophy, the superior and stronger race would be more likely to impart of their abundance to the lower and weaker than to enrich themselves out of their poverty.
When we come to the Greek invasion we move on more solid ground, and we can handle events which have left permanent and very traceable effects; but in the historic notices that remain, we have no trace of Hindu influence upon Greek civilisation. Instead of Greek religion and philosophy being enriched by the Indian, the opposite is more likely to have been the case. The invasion of Alexander must have originated a host of new thoughts in India, which may yet be traced in the works of the prolific Buddhist scholars, who are said to have lived in the Punjab during the period of the Greek domination.[[39]] It is alleged with fair show of reason to have given rise to some new products, such as the art of writing, a currency in coin, stone sculpture, none of which have as yet been traced in India in any previous period.[[40]] The appearance in India of the drama, the epic, of new views of mathematics, astronomy, physics, are all said to be subsequent to and consequences of the Greek invasion. And this is what we might expect, for all through the historical ages the Hindu, instead of enriching Western nations, has been a needy borrower from them. He has always been more ready to absorb than impart, ever greedy of foreign ideas, and ever ready to be modified by external culture. The beneficent influence of India is indeed traceable in China, whose science it undoubtedly improved, and whose literature it has greatly enriched; but with the exception of the cipher so useful in our arithmetical notation, it is questionable whether India has contributed to the stock of Western wisdom one single religious or philosophic or scientific truth.[[41]]
The wealthy are more likely to lend to than to borrow from the poor; the wise more likely to teach, though they do sometimes learn from the less instructed. The strong may be infected by the diseases of the feeble, but generally the contagion of health radiates from the more robust to the weaker vitalities. The “power” which the touch of the East has “made to go forth from us”[[42]] no doubt flows back in quickened life upon ourselves. As these Oriental studies proceed, the tables will perhaps be turned upon the school that would derive all our philosophy and religion from old Indian sources. We have seen that two successive waves of Western life flowed eastwards upon the shores of India. Another rich stream of Semitic thought in pre-Buddhistic times, represented by such religious teachers as the second Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, reached the Tigris, and we may ask, Was the Indus unknown to them? We do not assert that they knew it, but surely it was just as easy for a Jew to reach India as for Burnouf or de Bunsen’s Buddhists to reach Babylon. It was just as probable that a Jewish pedlar found his way eastward through Parthia to India, with other and more precious goods in his possession than the Babylonian wares in his pack, as it was that Renan’s wandering Buddhist monk found his way to the Jordan. Later on there is a tradition—and though it is only a tradition, what a find to Messieurs Renan, Burnouf, and de Bunsen would one similar Buddhist tradition be!—that one of the original twelve apostles of Jesus evangelised a portion of the western shores of India. So, founding on all these data, only assuming—as we are entitled to assume—that the East was well connected with the West by the sea routes from Arabia and by the land route through Persia, and remembering that there is nothing so volatile and permeating as thought, is the speculation so very extravagant that old Indian philosophy and religion, though following their own course, may have been modified and purified by contact with the thoughts of the West? What if the conjecture be hazarded that from the West a thousand years B.C. was communicated the theistic impulse which produced what is best in the Upanishads—the truth, viz., of the unity which is behind and above all variety, the One Absolute into which all thought and all being is resolved?[[43]] What if it be some day asserted that the teaching of the Hebrew prophets before the Diaspora, as to the worthlessness of sacrifice to put away sin and to promote communion with God, may have insinuated itself into the reveries of Indian ascetics in their forest retreats, and made the teaching of reformers like Buddha possible? And what if to St. Thomas may be indirectly traced that influence which made later Buddhism differ so materially from the primitive, and approach in the similarities of its legends so close to the Gospel narratives? Dr. Kellogg already proclaims that “it may be affirmed with certainty that no man can show that the legend of Buddha, in a form containing any coincidence which could be held to argue a borrowing from it by Christians, was in existence before the Christian era”; “that all the various versions of the legend in any language date from a time later than the Christian era”; “that the chief Sanskrit authority for it cannot be proved in the judgment of the most competent critics to have existed in its present form nearly as far back as the Christian era”; and though he does not allege any actual transference from the Gospel to the Buddha legend, he avers with justifiable confidence that the opportunity for “such a transference before the Sanskrit version assumed its present form is an indubitable fact.”[[44]]
These suggestions, though just as worthy of consideration and support as the theory that Christianity is either an offshoot of Vedic Brahminism or a direct product of Buddhist speculation, need not be discussed at present. We may content ourselves with the conclusions formed by our most reliable authorities, that Buddhism and Christianity in their origin and earliest development were perfectly independent of each other. The births of their founders were separated by centuries, and the spheres of their ministry by almost the whole extent of Asia. While thus sundered by the conditions of both time and space, they were still more so by their intellectual peculiarities and antecedents. The Indian differed very widely from the Jew in his way of looking at and reasoning about things. He would be very differently impressed by the same or similar phenomena, and he would communicate his impressions by a very different method. Geographically India was shut up from the rest of the world, and the Aryans who went down into it were left in a manner hardly paralleled by other peoples to develop their own life out of itself, and according to its own laws. In far less favourable circumstances, and far removed from the educational stimulus of contact with alien or cognate nations, they came to stand alone as a people scarcely intelligible by others. The Jews, on the other hand, were early brought into the stream of human movement. Mingled with many peoples, sent from land to land, they became in spite of their passionate love for their own country the cosmopolitans of the world. Consequently when the two races came in contact, the circles of thought and feeling in which they moved could hardly be said to touch. Solomon’s sailors, as regards religious or philosophical treasures, could neither give nor take away. They had almost nothing in common with the strange people whom they met. The Sanskrit words which they took home to designate the peculiar products obtained in Ophir indicated how helpless they would have been to understand the metaphysics of India even had they inquired about them. The natives of Western India a thousand years before Christ were as helpless to understand the Jew. You have only to compare a prophecy of Israel of the eighth century B.C. with the earliest of the Upanishads to find how widely separated at that date was the Semite from the Aryan of India. Even when their own kinsmen visited them, when the descendants of sires who had occupied the same cradle and had heard the same stories told over them in the one primeval home, met for deadly strife in the wars of Alexander on the plains of the Punjab, they were aliens in almost everything. Later on, when Christian missionaries, anxious to teach them better ways, succeeded in influencing their religious conceptions, the Hindus always modified what of our faith they adopted. The question how far the early proclamation of the Gospel in India influenced the development of Hinduism is by the best of judges considered not yet settled,[[45]] but even those who affirm the reality of this influence admit that Hinduism did not so much incorporate the doctrines as assimilate the ideas of Christianity. The ultimate decision of this question, however, does not in any way affect the one before us. We may be almost certain that the great mass of Indian speculation on man and his relations to the infinite, for many centuries before our era, was developed originally from the resources of the Indian mind quite apart from foreign influences. The same assertion will hold good as to the rise of Greek philosophy and of the Christian religion. Not one of the three can be understood without careful reference to their particular antecedents, but they can never be accounted for by any theory of derivation of the one from the other.
It is the fact of this complete independence of each other in origin, coupled with their analogous development, and the many supposed agreements in their systems, which makes the study of Buddhism so interesting. What does this signify? What important law in providence does it indicate or illustrate? Our best guides content themselves with calling attention to the analogies, and they are chary as yet of drawing inferences from them. The wisdom of such caution is apparent when we find that the supposed coincidences require to be examined and discussed. Most of them have been found to be superficial and accidental, and, when probed, very essential and fundamental contrasts are discovered beneath them. Now to judge correctly concerning these religions we must try not their analogies but their contradictions. The analogies may be only seeming, and the contrasts may be very real and profound. On every point that is truly characteristic the two religions may be separated as widely as the zenith is from the nadir. All religions are parallel in their tendencies, and every approach to truth must inevitably produce resemblances in religious belief. The resemblances may indicate the aspirations of a moral and religious nature common to all men; and in what is peculiar to Christianity, what it possesses in contrast, may be found the divine answer to these aspirations. The two religions may proceed in parallel lines, but on very different planes, and from quite opposite directions. Thus the morality of Buddhism so deservedly admired is in no sense peculiar to Buddhism, for much of it was taught in India before Buddha appeared, and in China before his law was proclaimed in it. It is the natural outgrowth of the moral sense of mankind where circumstances are favourable to its development. But high as the law of Buddha is, it only “approaches, swings toward,” as Oldenberg tells us, but never reaches or touches the law of Christ.[[46]] There is in the Christian Gospel something which the Buddhist system plainly lacks, and which Buddhism out of any evolution of its own inherent energy could never produce. Christianity seems to be superior to it, not in the sense that the infant is superior to the embryo, but as man is superior to the animal, which yet may be said of very necessity to precede him. The lower organism in creation, though not accounting for the higher, may reach out after and indicate the necessity for it, and the higher by fulfilling the lower will interpret it. Just as the mineral, vegetable, and animal world all point to some higher creative fact, which in man is to sum up and perfect them, so the many lower religions of the human race all point to a higher, which is to annul and fulfil them. No theory of evolution has yet accounted for man. He appears in the universe as a new creature while part of a very old system of creation, and related to all its inferior forms. So Christianity, in one sense as old as human history, and related to every form of religion by which man has tried to satisfy his spiritual cravings, may not be elaborated out of any of them as their products, but confronts us as a new fact of history to satisfy and complete them.
This conclusion is one which many students of the science of religion are not prepared to accept. To them Christianity is simply one of the natural religions, and at best their highest but necessary outgrowth. Just as they allege that the origin of man is to be found in the lowest type of the savage, so they seek for the genesis of his religious consciousness in his lowest animal wants and fears, and they profess to trace the development of that consciousness from its first almost shapeless forms, through the monstrosities of Fetichism, then of Animism, Polytheism, Monotheism, till it finds its ultimate culmination in Christ. Now Christianity is indeed a natural religion; were it otherwise, it would cease to be divine. It supplies all man’s natural wants, and it satisfies and educates all man’s natural aspirations. While, however, there is nothing unnatural in it, we aver that there is something supranatural in its ideal, fitting it to answer the necessities of a being who has in him all that nature has, and a great deal more. Man is a being akin on one side of his nature to both the ape and the worm, but he is also what they are not. “The pressure of the infinite on his senses” awakens feelings, and originates a train of thought in which he soon becomes conscious of relations to a higher than nature his inferior, and to other than men his equals. There is that in him which once it is aroused refuses to believe that what he sees or handles or tastes is all, and that there can be no higher being than himself. If his own most perfect machine does not express all his intelligence, he cannot believe that all possible intelligence is comprehended and expressed in the world of nature. Behind and beyond all these physical arrangements of the world, which seem fully to meet the lower wants of his being, he feels that there must be higher arrangements corresponding to his peculiar wants. Just because he finds every appetite has its corresponding object, and every organ implies an element for which it is fitted,—so that if there be an eye there must be light, and if lungs there must be air,—so this feeling or instinct which impels him to seek the unknown Power, “for whose sake he feels constrained to do what he does not like to do, or to abstain from what he would like to do,”[[47]] is the pledge not only that He exists, but that he has already and always been found by Him, as One who understands perfectly his thoughts and wants, and is freely communicating with him.