With reference to the evidence of the edicts, it must not be overlooked that Asoka figured as a good Theist while Viceroy at Ujain, and for some years subsequent to his becoming Emperor of India—a fact which several of his edicts, I believe, confirm.
A God, one Person (yet three Persons in One), without body (yet walks), without parts (yet seen), without passions (yet with compassion), a spirit, an indefinable, an illocatable, incomprehensible substance in which we live and move and have our being, that cannot be known, yet can be found (those that seek after me shall find me), which some people have beautifully symbolized as a loving Father and others have debased into a jealous and vindictive tyrant—of such a God only, as an eternally conditionless mystery, it can surely be established, from a review of Buddhistic evidence, that it is not, and has not been, totally ignored.
It is difficult to see the force of denoting God as super-personal or super-anything. He or It is personal, and everything else as masked by materialities, and in the sense of all things being his contents. Particles of matter are the contents of form. Form cannot be manifest without matter. God is pure or shapeless form, as well as the formative power of form.
Dr. Paul Carus, in referring to the God idea of the Buddhists, says: "No religion can exist without belief in the existence of an ultimate authority of conduct; but in this sense Buddhism, too, teaches a belief in God. The Abhidharma, or Buddhist philosophy, distinctly rejects the idea of a creation by an Ishvara—i.e., a personal creator; but it recognizes that all deeds, be they good or evil, will bear fruit according to their nature, and they teach that this law, which is ultimately identical with the law of cause and effect, is an irreversible reality; that there are no exceptions or deviations from it. Thus law takes, to some extent, the place of the God idea, and Buddhists gain a personal attitude to it, similarly as Christians do when speaking of God, in quite a peculiar way. The doctrine of the Trikâya, or the three bodies, teaches us that Buddha has three personalities. The first one is the Dharma-Kâya, or the body of the law; it corresponds to the Holy Ghost in the Christian dogmatology. The second personality is the Nirmâna-Kâya, or the body of transformations; it is transient in its various forms, and its most important and latest appearance has been Gotama Siddhârta. This corresponds to the second person of the Christian Trinity, to God the Son, or Christ.... The third personality of Buddha is called Sambhoga-Kâya, or the body of bliss. It is the Christian idea of God the Father. Buddha, in his capacity as Sambhoga-Kâya, is described as eternal, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He is the life of all that lives, and the reality of all that exists. Thus he is the All in All, in whom we live and move and have our being."[P]
General Forlong, in his Short Studies in the Science of Comparative Religion, informs us that "the first great Hindu Creating Father was a real Prajā-pati, 'Lord of Creations'—a true Hermaik Brahmā; and, being depicted as a potent masculine Zeus, like to Yahvê, Chemosh, Amon, etc., he in time naturally became distasteful to cultured and pious philosophic minds searching after a great ideal, and no magnified man, solar or royal governor. As did Vedantists, so have others developed a great neuter Brahm; even pious Christian philosophers have sought, and some few dared to own, a Brahm, despite the direct anthropomorphic teaching of the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. Thus the Rev. Principal Caird, D.D. (Glasgow University), boldly says, in his Gifford Lectures, 1895-6, that in his view 'Christianity knows no such thing as a First Cause, or an Omnipotent Creator and moral governor of the world, a being framed after the image of man, an anthropomorphic potentate seated on a celestial throne and dispensing rewards after the manner of an earthly sovereign or magistrate.'"
It is remarkable to find a parallel conception of Law, as associated by Buddhists with the idea of divinity prevailing among the Egyptians, who "recognized a divinity in those cases only when they perceived the presence of a fixed Law, either of permanence or of change. This regularity, which is the constitutive character of the Egyptian divinity, was called Maāt. Maāt is, in fact, the Law and Order by which the universe exists. Truth and Justice are but forms of Maāt as applied to human action."[Q]
In Mr. Arthur Lillie's book, The Influence of Buddhism on Primitive Christianity, there is struck a note of playfulness which almost leads one to suppose that the writer does not intend that he should be taken seriously everywhere in his fascinating pages. This is apparent even in his treatment of the Jewish conception of an Almighty ruler, when he takes for his text (Judges i. 19): "The Lord was with Judah, and He drove out the inhabitants of the mountains, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots of iron." In a similar spirit in this connection he would probably handle rather roughly the notion of omniscience.
Mr. Lillie, further on in his book, quotes a conversation that is said to have taken place between Gotama and some Brahmins on the subject of ultimate union with the Eternal Brahma. Gotama points out that all their talk about union is foolish talk, because they know nothing about him. But this does not necessarily imply, as one would gather from the commentary, that Gotama knew nothing of a Brahma, or quality of the kosmos or Buddha, which was indefinable, and could only be adumbrated in language, and no more. His sole intention, it seems to me, was to impress on his audience that this Brahma could not be approached by a factitious asceticism, and that all speculations as to his nature and origin would be mere waste of time and energy. Subsequently, on p. 83, Gotama is made to refer to this Brahma as a non-Theistic "It"—evidently the neuter Brahm—the absolute, or the great "I am" of the Christian Bible.
Here I would refer en passant to the following passage which occurs on p. 84: "There are two schools of Buddhism, and they are quite agreed in this, that Buddhism is the quickening of the spiritual vision."