"Let us fill ourselves with costly wine, and ointments; and
let not the flower of the time pass by us.
"Let us crown ourselves with roses before they be withered;
let no meadow escape our riot.
"Let none of us go without his part in luxury: let us everywhere leave tokens of joy: for this is our portion, and this our lot."
Although the book was accepted as canonical by generations of Hebrew teachers and was quoted as such by men like Gamaliel, there was always a strong orthodox party among the Jews opposed to its teachings and apprehensive of its influence;[140] nor was it until the year 118 A.D. that the protracted dispute on the subject was at last definitely settled at the Synod which admitted Koheleth into the Canon. It was natural enough that Hebrew theologians should have hesitated to stamp with the seal of orthodoxy a book which the poet Heine calls the Canticles of Scepticism and in which every unbiassed reader will recognise a powerful solvent of the bases of theism; and the only surprising thing about their attitude is that they should have ever allowed themselves to be persuaded to abandon it.
For Koheleth's pessimistic theory, which has its roots in Secularism, is utterly incompatible with the spirit of Judaism, whichever of its historical phases we may select for comparison. It is grounded upon the rejection of the Messianic expectations and absolute disbelief in the solemn promises of Jahveh Himself. Koheleth cherishes no hope for the individual, his nation, or the human race. The thing that hath been is the same that shall be, and what befell is the same that shall come to pass, and there is no new thing under the sun….[141] "I surveyed all the works that are wrought under the sun, and behold all was vanity and the grasping of wind."[142] Persians had succeeded Chaldeans; Cyrus, the Anointed of Jahveh, had come and gone; Greeks had wrested the hegemony of the East from Persians, but no change had brought surcease of sorrow to the Jews. They were even worse off now than ever before. Jahveh, like Baal of old, was become deaf to His worshippers, many of whom turned away from Him in despair, exclaiming, "It is vain to serve God, and what profit is it that we have kept His ordinance?"[143] Koheleth, like Job, never once mentions Jahveh's name, but always alludes to the Eternal Will, which alone is real and unknowable, under the colourless name of Elohim. To say that he believed in a personal God in any sense in which a personal God is essential to a revealed religion, is to misunderstand ideas or to play with words.[144] And Koheleth was a type of a class. Literary men of his day having mockingly asked for the name of the Creator,[145] Koheleth answers that He is inaccessible to men, and that prayer to Him is fruitless.[146] The Jewish aristocracy of his day, desirous of embodying these views in a practical form, sought to abolish once for all the national religion, as a body of belief and practices that had been weighed in the balances and found wanting; while the party that still remained faithful to the law was composed mainly of narrow-minded fanatics, whose wild speculations, long-winded prayers and frequent vows, Koheleth considers deserving objects of derision. He himself held aloof from either camp. He took his stand outside the circle of both, surveying life from the angle of vision of the philosophical citizen of the world. But it would be idle to deny that he had far more in common with the "impious" than with the orthodox.
Thus he scornfully rejects the old doctrine of retribution, and he is never tired of affirming premisses from which the obvious and indeed only conclusion is that the popular conception of a deity who spontaneously created the universe and vigilantly watches over the Hebrew nation, is erroneous, incredible, inconceivable. The Jahveh of olden times, with His grand human passions and petty Jewish prejudices, he simply ignores. He naturally rejects the immortality of the soul—a tenet or theory which was then for the first time beginning to gain ground and to be relied upon as the only means of ultimately righting the wrongs of existence. The fact is that he had no belief in a soul as we understand it. Modern theology regards the indestructible part of man as essentially intelligent, while admitting the fact that intellect is indissolubly associated with the brain, partaking of its vicissitudes during life and vanishing with it apparently for ever at death. Job, Koheleth, and many other writers of the Old Testament hold that if anything of the man persists after the death of the individual, it is unconscious. "The living know at least that they shall die, whereas the dead know not anything at all."[147] In a word, no other philosopher, poet, or proverb-writer of the Old Testament is less orthodox in his beliefs or less Jewish in his sentiments—and Agur alone is more aggressive in his scepticism—than Koheleth.
Much has been written about the sources from which this writer may and even must have drawn his peculiar mixture of pessimism and "Epicureanism," and considerable stress has been laid upon the profound influence which Greek culture is supposed to have exerted upon Jewish thinkers towards the second century B.C., when the moral atmosphere was choked with "the baleful dust of systems and of creeds." The "Epicureanism" of the man who said: "Better is sorrow than laughter," "the heart of the wise is in the mourning house,"[148] hardly needs the hypothesis of a Greek origin to explain it. My own view of the matter, which I put forward with all due diffidence, differs considerably from those which have been heretofore expressed on the subject. I cannot divest myself of the notion that Koheleth was acquainted, and to some extent imbued, with the doctrines of Gautama Buddha, which must have been pretty widely diffused in the civilised world towards the year 205 B.C., when the present treatise was most probably composed.[149]
Buddhism, the only one of the world-religions which, springing from an abstruse system of metaphysics, brought forth such practical fruits as truthfulness, honesty, loving-kindness and universal pity, spread with extraordinary rapidity not only throughout the Indian continent but over the entire civilised world. Its apostles[150] visited foreign countries, touching and converting by their example the hearts and minds of those who were incapable of weighing their arguments, or unwilling to listen to their exhortations. They introduced a mild, tolerant, humane spirit whithersoever they went, preaching entire equality, practising perfect toleration, founding houses for meditation, erecting hospitals and dispensaries for sick men and beasts, cultivating useful plants and trees, gently suppressing cruelty to animals under any pretext,[151] and generally sowing seeds of sympathy and brotherly love of which history has noticed and described but the final fruits. From the earliest recorded period Indian culture manifested a natural tendency to expand, which was intensified at various times by the comparatively low ebb of civilisation in the adjoining countries. One can readily conceive, therefore, the effects of the strenuous and persevering efforts of one of the most powerful Indian monarchs, Açoka Piyadassi,[152] king of Magadha, to propagate that aspect of his country's civilisation which is indissolubly bound up with the doctrines of the Buddha.
Açoka, grandson of the great king Tshandragupta, was the first monarch who openly accepted the tenets and conscientiously practised the precepts of the profoundest religious teacher ever born of woman; and no more eloquent testimony could well be offered to the sincerity of the royal convert than the well-nigh miraculous self-restraint with which he forebore to cajole or coerce those of his subjects whom his arguments failed to convince. Satisfied with the progress of the new religion in his native place, he despatched his son, Mahindo, to introduce it into Ceylon; and so successful were the young prince's missionary efforts that that island became and remains the chief seat of Buddhism to this day. Açoka next turned his attention to foreign countries, in which traders, travellers, emigrants and others had already sparsely sown the seeds of the new faith, and making political power and prestige subservient to zeal for truth and pity for suffering humanity, he induced his allies and their vassals to purchase his friendship by seconding his endeavours to inculcate the philosophic doctrines and engraft the humane practices of Buddhism on their respective subjects. The results he obtained are recorded in his famous inscriptions composed in various Indian dialects and engraven upon rocks all over the continent, from Cabul in the West to Orissa in the East; and among the monarchs whom he there enumerates as having co-operated with him in his apostolic labours, are Antiochus,[153] Turamaya,[154] Alexander, Magas[155] and Antigenes;[156] into whose hospitable dominions he despatched zealous Buddhist missionaries, empowered to found monasteries, to open dispensaries and hospitals, at his expense, and to preach the saving word to all who cared to hear.
The following literal translation of one of Açoka's inscriptions[157] will help to convey an idea of the nature of his activity as the royal apostle of Buddhism, the Constantine of India: "All over the realms of the god-favoured king, Priyadarsin, and (the realms of those) who (are) his neighbours, such as the Codas, Pandyas, the Prince of the Sâtiyas,[158] the Prince of the Keralas, Tamraparnî, the King of the Javanas, Antiochus, and (among the) others who (are) vassals of the said King Antiochus, everywhere the god-beloved, king, Priyadarsin, caused two kinds of hospitals to be erected: hospitals for men and likewise hospitals for animals.[159] Wherever there were no herbs beneficial to men or animals, he everywhere gave orders that they should be procured or planted. In like manner, where there were no health-giving roots and fruits, he everywhere commanded that they should be procured or planted. And on the highways he had trees put down and wells dug for the behoof of men and beasts."[160]