[105] Monier-Williams, Brāhmanism and Hindūism, pp. 231, 427. Oldenberg, Buddha, p. 302.
[106] Réville, La religion Chinoise, p. 221.
[107] Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1008 sqq. Schmidt, Die Ethik der alten Griechen, i. 82.
Self-mortification is also sometimes resorted to not so much to appease the anger of a god as rather to excite his compassion. In some of the Jewish fasts, as we have seen before, these two objects are closely interwoven.[108] The Jewish custom of fasting in the case of a drought is in a way parallel to the Moorish practice of tying holy men and throwing them into a pond in order that their pitiful condition may induce God to send rain. Mr. Williams tells us of a Fijian priest who, “after supplicating his god for rain in the usual way without success, slept for several successive nights exposed on the top of a rock, without mat or pillow, hoping thus to move the obdurate deity to send a shower.”[109]
[109] Williams and Calvert, Fiji, p. 196.
Not only is suffering voluntarily sought as a means of wiping off sins committed, but it is also endured with a view to preventing the commission of sin. This is the second or, in importance, the first great idea upon which Christian asceticism rests. The gratification of every worldly desire is sinful, the flesh should be the abject slave of the spirit intent upon unearthly things. Man was created for a life in spiritual communion with God, but he yielded to the seduction of evil demons, who availed themselves of the sensuous side of his nature to draw him away from the contemplation of the divine and lead him to the earthly. Moral goodness, therefore, consists in renouncing all sensuous pleasures, in separating from the world, in living solely after the spirit, in imitating the perfection and purity of God. The contrast between good and evil is the contrast between God and the world, and the conception of the world includes not only the objects of bodily appetites but all human institutions, as well as science and art.[110] And still more than any theoretical doctrine, the personal example of Christ led to the glorification of spiritual joy and bodily suffering.
[110] Harnack, op. cit. ii. 214 sqq., iii. 258 sqq. von Eicken, Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, p. 313 sqq.
The antithesis of spirit and body was not peculiar to Christianity. It was an old Platonic conception, which was regarded by the Fathers of the Church as the contrast between that which was precious and that which was to be mortified. The doctrine that bodily enjoyments are low and degrading was taught by many pagan philosophers; even a man like Cicero says that all corporeal pleasure is opposed to virtue and ought to be rejected.[111] And in the Neo-Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean schools of Alexandria an ascetic ideal of life was the natural outcome of their theory that God alone is pure and good, and matter impure and evil. Renunciation of the world was taught and practised by the Jewish sects of the Essenes and Therapeutæ. In India, Professor Kern observes, “climate, institutions, the contemplative bent of the native mind, all tended to facilitate the growth of a persuasion that the highest aims of human life and real felicity cannot be obtained but by the seclusion from the busy world, by undisturbed pious exercises, and by a certain amount of mortification.”[112] We read in the Hitopadesa, “Subjection to the senses has been called the road to ruin, and their subjugation the path to fortune.”[113] The Jain regards pleasure in itself as sinful:—“What is discontent, and what is pleasure? One should live subject to neither. Giving up all gaiety, circumspect, restrained, one should lead a religious life.”[114] According to Buddhism, there are two causes of the misery with which life is inseparably bound up—lust and ignorance; and so there are two cures—the suppression of lust and desire and the removal of ignorance.[115] It is said in the Dhammapada, “There is no satisfying lusts, even by a shower of gold pieces; he who knows that lusts have a short taste and cause pain, he is wise.”[116] Penances, as they were practised among the ascetics of India, were discarded by Buddha as vexatious, unworthy, unprofitable. “Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting, or lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can purify a mortal who has not overcome desires.”[117] Where all contact with the earthly ceases, there, and there only, are deliverance and freedom.
[111] Cicero, De officiis, i. 30; iii. 33.