Gotama, using a symbolism of his own, and by means of parables not wholly dissimilar to those employed by Jesus, taught the self-same truth. The flesh has to be crucified—that is, the idea of separateness has to be eliminated—and then only will Heaven, Nirvana, at-oneness with the unproduced (with God), be a reality.
It is legitimate to speak of Jesus as God, and Gotama is known as Buddha. Here we have, then, Jesus-God and Gotama-Buddha. But God and Buddha are but two different terms used for the expression of one identical idea. The recognition of "Buddha" as an equivalent for "God" has been very generally ignored by interpreters of Buddhism; hence the confusion of thought which has existed in this connection. This in some measure may also be due to the fact that Gotama, in preaching to the Brahmins, made use of the word "Brahma" to denote God.
Jesus and Gotama were gnomic, or divinely wise—that is, they knew of the "unconditioned." They both ardently desired to communicate this knowledge to the world, and the way of escape from absolute bondage to the conditioned to a realization of the unconditioned. If, knowing the way, man still elects to continue in bondage to the conditioned state, in a hell of misery or through a series of incarnations, he can do so by disregarding the injunction, "Set not your affections on things on earth."
Gotama pointed out the straight path that leads to a union with Brahma (God); but there was also a circuitous path indicated by him, by which we can make "golden stairways of our weaknesses." To the different symbolism employed by Gotama, and the meaning attached to this symbolism by his exponents, may also be attributed the failure of many acquainted only with the outlines of Buddhism to assimilate the term "Buddha" with that of "God" in its universalist sense.
When we come to a careful and impartial study of the Gospel of Buddha, it is astonishing what a close connection is to be found therein between the God idea of the Christian community and the Buddha idea of the Asiatic world. Gotama does not, as many suppose, exclude the notion of God as that of all-pervading Love. "The whole wide world," he says, "above, below, around, and everywhere, will continue to be filled with Love, far-reaching, grown great and beyond measure." "Buddha is the all-loving teacher, assuming the shape of the beings whom he teaches." This is the second person of the Buddhist triad, the apparitional body of Gotama.
The splendid symbolism of the holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, three persons and one God, common to both Christianity and Buddhism, falls like the cloudy hangings of a gorgeous sunset between us and the unconditioned. Many of the spectators are held spellbound and enslaved by the beauty of the phenomena alone; a few see its meaning, and realize the noumenon. The symbol is, as it were, a yearning of the visible to suggest the invisible, the conditioned speaking to us of the unconditioned. The small minority—the Blessed Ones, the Arhats of Buddhism, the saints of Christendom—they are those who know the Lord, who see God. Yet there remains for every being a sure hope of the deathless life.
After many a weary round of births and deaths or long sojourns in Purgatory, after many a climb up the dark ladder of life, every being at last will reach the desired goal, and see the fulfilment of prophecy when God will be all and in all.
A great Orientalist has pronounced Buddhism to be the most godless of all heathen religions. If this assertion means that the god of the heathens is anthropomorphic and that of the Buddhists is not so, then the statement of this distinguished scholar, though a little staggering at first sight, may be regarded as containing an element of truth, but not the whole truth.
The question whether the true Buddhism of Gotama recognized a god in any sense of the expression still exercises the minds of controversialists. At the very outset of our inquiry into the Buddhistic conception of a god or no-god, we are confronted by directly conflicting conclusions arrived at by two eminent authorities. Professor Rhys Davids regards the true Buddhism of Gotama to be nothing but blank Atheism, whereas Mr. Arthur Lillie unflinchingly pronounces it to be Theism pur et simple.
In my judgment, all the controversy that rages around the Hinayâna[O] and the Mahayâna, which represent respectively the Southern and Northern schools of thought, only confuses the issue; and the opinions of sectarian Buddhists, or even the edicts of Asoka, cannot, I think, be accepted in themselves as directly supporting any hard-and-fast theory regarding the Theistic or Atheistic tendencies in the teaching of Gotama.