Buddhism and Christianity: A Parallel and a Contrast

by Archibald Scott

LECTURE II.
THE HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY, AND THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF THEIR RESPECTIVE SCRIPTURES.

It should be an advantage to the study of Buddhism that even in its origin it confronts us as the religion of a people sufficiently advanced in civilisation to be able to formulate their metaphysical conceptions and present us with their religious beliefs organised in a system. Like Christianity it not only inherited but also produced a considerable and very miscellaneous literature, whose contents throw valuable light upon the past from which it emerged and upon the course which it followed, and like Christianity it has left its stamp on most of the institutions of the peoples among whom it was successfully propagated. When all these sources of information have been properly investigated, we may hope that the story of the rise and progress of Buddhism in the East will be revealed with something at least of the clearness with which the history of Christianity is disclosed by the literature and art of the West.

To trace, however, the dawn and spread of Buddhism with anything like historical accuracy for the first six or seven hundred years of its course, is a task as yet beyond the literary ability of the times. It is doubtful whether the materials for such a work have as yet been collected, and he would be a bold man who would claim for the task of sifting what has already been furnished more than an earnest beginning. Not even Saint-Hilaire would now repeat the assertion so confidently made thirty years ago,[^[62]] that “no new discoveries can change our conclusions regarding it”; for during the past generation the effect of fuller information has been not only to modify, but in several instances to revolutionise the theories formed concerning it. Discoveries are multiplying every year; and, though the knowledge thus acquired serves often more to reveal difficulties than to solve them, we may be thankful that the examination of them is engaging the attention of the highest order of scholarship, and hopeful, yea, even confident that since so many of the ablest and most patient minds are turned in this direction, the aggregate of progress will speedily be immense.

All that we know of Buddhism, and all that we are likely to know of it, is to be gathered from its own Scriptures; and a comparison of these with the Christian Scriptures reveals at the very outset a difference amounting to a vast contrast between them. The original Scriptures of Christianity have been before the tribunal of the world’s keenest and most hostile criticism for 1800 years; but we are only now beginning to make the acquaintance of the Scriptures of Buddhism, which have hardly been subjected to any cross-questioning worthy of the name. Those who have ventured to assail have only published their inability to understand them, and those most competent to criticise may be pardoned if they handle tenderly the fragments which they are collecting and translating for our use. The services which they are thus rendering to religion as well as to science are very great. Previously we had only anthologies extracted often without reference to date or authorship or connection to judge from, but now these learned pundits are furnishing us with books containing not only the wisdom and beauties of Eastern literature, but its follies and blemishes as well. Omitting only what is obscene and offensive to the moral sense,[^[63]] they are giving us specimens of several strata of Oriental thought and belief, vertically and thoroughly cut, from which a correct understanding of the essential features of this very peculiar religion may with considerable probability be ascertained.

Only a portion of the Buddhist Scriptures are as yet available, and these we are certainly not at liberty to place side by side as of equal evidential value with the contents of the New Testament. It is said that two thousand manuscripts of the New Testament, or of portions of it, have been discovered, several of which are of great antiquity, and notwithstanding the immense number of various readings on points of detail, the text of the oldest corresponds substantially with that of the books as we have them to-day. We are informed, however, on the best authority, that “all Indian manuscripts are comparatively modern, that no manuscript written one thousand years ago is now existent in India, and that it is almost impossible to find one written five hundred years ago; for most manuscripts which claim to be of that date are merely copies of old ones, the dates of which are repeated by the copyists.”[^[64]] It is admitted, moreover, that the literary honesty of these Indian translators and copyists is very questionable, that the books of the Buddhists have undergone wholesale textual alterations, that none of the Sanskrit works as yet known to us are unadulterated specimens of transmitted doctrines, that the oldest and most reliable authorities for the life of Buddha exaggerate greatly events which are said to have happened, and ascribe to him long discourses of which the writers themselves were the composers.[^[65]] In respect, therefore, of literary accuracy and faithfulness of purpose, these old compilers and re-editors of the Buddhist books are far below the standard which criticism has inexorably applied to the versionists of the Christian Scriptures.

The faithfulness of our English versions is vouched for by the names of the translators, and yet they admit that their translations are only approximations.[^[66]] From the very nature of the case they must be so. The East is very far distant from the West; its ways are not our ways; its thoughts are not our thoughts. Some one has said that “the Iliad is separated from the Rig Veda by an interval of several civilisations”; and if so, how vast must be the gulf separating Vedic and even Buddhist metaphysicians from the British philosopher of to-day! It is simply impossible for the most impartial translator to put himself in the place of the ancient Indian sage, and to prevent his own preconceptions from insinuating themselves among the data with which he has to deal. He has to express, as we have been reminded, “a lower order of ideas in a higher order of terms, and use words suggesting a wealth of analysis and association quite foreign to the thought to be reproduced. Translation from a lower to a higher language is thus a process of elevation.”[^[67]] In reading these translations and the books founded upon them, we have constantly to guard against giving to such terms as “sin,” “lust,” “salvation,” “law,” “church,” and many others, our Christian conceptions of them. We are often perplexed whether the phrases employed, and even the very titles of the treatises, be really the equivalents of the ancient texts and titles, or nineteenth century conceptions of what they may be made to mean. A European scholar inheriting the results of ages of Christian culture may be more likely to interpret the reach of an old Buddhist expression than the monk who first used it; but he is always in danger of confounding that reach with his own firm grasp of truth, and of expressing his conceptions by phraseology which, if it could be explained to the ancient, would be rejected by him as inconsistent with his original meaning.

Another strong contrast between the two sets of scriptures emerges when we attempt to fix the dates at which the earliest Buddhist works were produced. The New Testament is admitted by authorities who cannot be accused of prejudice in favour of Christianity and even by antichristian critics, to contain the actual writings of some of the original disciples of Jesus. The very latest of the books which compose it was in circulation within a century after His death, while the great bulk of them were accepted before half a century had passed as the testimonies of those who were eye-witnesses of the rise of our religion.[^[68]] M. Renan admits that the three Synoptical Gospels are the “tender remembrances and simple narratives of the first and second generations of Christians, written in substantially their present form by the men whose names they bear.”[^[69]] The epistle of St. James and several of the epistles of St. Paul are almost now unanimously accepted as the products of the first generation. Mons. E. Burnouf therefore may safely aver that “the history of Christian doctrine and worship bears the crown over all others in respect that its records are complete.”[^[70]] What of these records are comprised in the New Testament, though tried by the severest of tests, continues to-day as they were eighteen centuries ago delivered to the Church. Though the various readings in the mss. are said to be counted by 200,000, hardly one of them can be said to affect a fundamental doctrinal or historical statement; and so outstanding and distinct is their canonical character that it requires no external authority, but only comparison with them, to disclose what of early Christian literature is to be regarded as apocryphal.

The evidence on which Orientalists have to rely in fixing the date of the Buddhist scriptures is confessedly such “that we must not be surprised if those who are accustomed to test historical and chronological evidence in reference to Greece and Rome declined to be convinced by it.”[^[71]] For centuries after the death of Buddha his followers assure us that they had no written books constituting their rules of faith and manners. The earliest written collection of which in their own records we have any historical trace is that of Ceylon, and all that can be said of it is “that there is nothing improbable” that part of it may have been reduced to writing about the first century B.C., but the whole was only fixed about 420 A.D. The Nepaulese collection is said to date only from the first Christian century; but it is not alleged that the whole of the works now in it were even then in existence. According to their own tradition, they had no written biography of Buddha till about the first century of our era, and no one who has examined that narrative or read the opinions expressed by Orientalists as to the date when it was produced—opinions so divergent as to indicate a difference of several centuries—would ever dream of employing it as evidence of what is alleged in it to have happened. It is simply impossible, therefore, to regard the Buddhist’s Pitakas as if they were of similar authoritative value with the New Testament, for, in fact, in respect of canonical worth they do not deserve to be ranked with much of our later patristic literature.

A very high antiquity, however, is claimed by Buddhists for these collections. According to the Dipavanso, their earliest available chronicle, dating only from the fifth century A.D., the doctrines orally communicated by Buddha to his disciples were by them immediately after his death revised and classified under the three divisions of Vinaya, Abhidharma, and Sutta, in which they have always since then been preserved. This collection having passed through the crucible of a council held at Vaisali a hundred years later, was fixed as canonical at another held in the reign of Asoka about 242 B.C. It is urged that a canon, to be authoritative, does not require to be written, and that Indians claim for one orally transmitted higher authority than for one transcribed. The art of writing was probably unknown in India in Buddha’s time, and so, thrown back upon their resources, memory was by the Indians cultivated to an extent which enabled them to dispense with methods deemed by nearly all other peoples to be essential to accuracy. Eminent Orientalists therefore, while regarding the account of the first council as apocryphal, are yet inclined to admit—from the identity of the threefold division in all the schools that have been tested, from the similarity of the titles of the contents of all the various collections, and especially from the quality of the writings themselves—that the tradition recorded in the Dipavanso is well founded, and that considerable portions of the Vinaya and Sutta literature may date from a hundred years after the death of Buddha.

In assuming so much, however, these scholars by no means believe that they have found in these texts the actual teaching of Buddha in an unadulterated condition. While not thinking it possible to impugn the substantial accuracy of the Vinaya texts, though given in Pali translations of the lost dialect in which they were originally preached, they tell us that the oldest of the Sutta texts are “not his teachings nor the teachings of his immediate disciples, who could not have spoken of him in the manner in which he is there described. They are only founded on his teachings, and record existing beliefs as to the doctrines which he actually taught.”[^[72]] For “the fundamental and original doctrines they may be accepted as fairly trustworthy authorities,” but for the facts of his life they are even at the best very questionable guides. Nearer to the origin of Buddhism and of the person of its founder we are not likely to get than in the book entitled by its translator the Sutta of the Great Decease; but he confesses that even in it we are standing on anything but solid ground, and that we are only able to catch a distant and most uncertain glimpse of the figure of the great Teacher as he comes out at rare intervals from the mist of legends which, designed to adorn and magnify, have in reality diminished and obscured his real personality.