An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion

by F. B. Jevons

This continuation theory, the view that the dead continue in the next world as they left this, means that, to the people who entertain it, the dead are merely a memory. It is forbidden to think of them as doing anything, as affecting the living in any way. They are conceived as powerless to gratify the wishes of the living, or to thwart them. Where the Lord God is a jealous God, religion cannot tolerate the idea that any other spirit should be conceived as usurping His functions, still less that such spirits should receive the offerings and the prayers which are the due of Him alone. But though the dead are thus reduced to a mere memory, the memory itself does not and cannot die. Accordingly the dead, or rather those whose bodies are dead, continue to live. But, as they exercise no action in, or control over, the world of the living, their place of abode comes to be regarded as another world, to which they are confined. Speculation, therefore, where speculation is made, as to the case of the inhabitants of this other world, must take the direction of enquiring as to their fate. Where speculation is not made, the dead are conceived merely to continue to be as they are remembered to have been in this life. But, if there is to be room for any speculation at all, there must be assumed to be some diversity in their fate, and therefore some reason, intelligible to man, for that diversity. That is a conclusion to which tribes attain who have apparently gone through no period of ancestor worship,—indeed, ancestor worship only impedes or defers the attainment of that conclusion. The diversity of fate could only consist in the difference between being where you would be and being where you would not. But the reasons for that diversity may be very different amongst different peoples. First, where religion is at its lowest or is in its least developed form, the gods are not the cause of the diversity nor do they seem concerned in it. Such diversity as there is seems in its simplest form merely to be a continuance of the social distinctions which prevail among the living: the high chieftains rest in a calm, plenteous, sunny land in the sky; while "all Indians of low degree go deep down under the earth to the land of Chay-her, with its poor houses and no salmon and no deer, and blankets so small and thin, that when the dead are buried the friends often bury blankets with them" (Tylor, P. C., II, 85). Elsewhere, it is not social distinctions, but moral, that make the difference: "the rude Tupinambas of Brazil think the souls of such as had lived virtuously, that is to say who have well avenged themselves and eaten many of their enemies," (ib.) rejoin the souls of their fathers in the happy land, while the cowards go to the other place. Thus, though the distinctions in the next world do not seem originally to have sprung from or to have been connected with morality, and still less with religion, they are, or may be at a very early period, seized upon by the moral consciousness as containing truth or implying it, when rightly understood. Truth indeed of the highest import for morality is implied in the distinctions thus essayed to be drawn. But before the truth implicit could be made explicit, it was necessary that the distinctions should be recognised to have their basis in religion. And that was impossible where religion was at its lowest or in its least developed form.

From the fact that on the one hand the conception of a future life in another world, when it arose amongst people in a low stage of religious development, bore but little moral and no religious fruit; and on the other, where it did yield fruit, there had been a previous period when religion closed its eyes as far as possible to the condition of the dead in Hades or in Sheol,—we may draw the inference that the conception of the future state formed by such people, as "the rude Tupinambas of Brazil" had to be sterilised, so to speak,—to be purified from associations dangerous both to morality and religion. We may fairly say that as a matter of fact that was the consequence which actually happened, and that both in Greece and Judæa the prospect of a future life at one time became practically a tabula rasa on which might be written a fairer message of hope than had ever been given before. In Greece the message was written, indeed, and was received with hope by the thousands who joined in the celebration of the mysteries. But the characters in which it was written faded soon. The message was found to reveal nothing. It revealed nothing because it demanded nothing. It demanded neither a higher life nor a higher conception of the deity. It did not set forth a new and nobler morality; and it accommodated itself to the existing polytheism. What it did do was to familiarise the Hellenic world with the conviction that there was a life hereafter, better than this life; and that the condition of its attainment was communion with the true God, peradventure He could be found. It was by this conviction and this expectation that the ground was prepared, wherever Hellenism existed, for the message that was to come from Israel.

From the beginning, or let us say in the lowest forms in which religion manifests itself, religion is the bond in which the worshippers are united with one another and with their God. The community which is thus united is at first the earliest form of society, whatever that form may have been, in which men dwell together for their common purposes. It is the fact that its members have common purposes and common interests which constitute them a community; and amongst the common interests without which there could be no community is that of common worship: knowledge of the sacra, being confined to the members of the community, is the test by which members are known, outsiders excluded, and the existence of the community as a community secured. At this stage, in a large number of societies—negro, Malayo-Polynesian, North American Indians, Eskimo, Australians—the belief in reincarnation takes a form in which the presence of souls of the departed is recognised as necessary to the very conception of the community. Thus in Alaska, among the Unalits of St. Michael's Bay, a festival of the dead is observed, the equivalent of which appears to be found amongst all the Eskimo. M. Mauss (L'Année Sociologique, IX, 99) thus describes it: "It comprises two essential parts. It begins with praying the souls of the dead graciously to consent to reincarnate themselves for the moment in the namesake which each deceased person has; for the custom is that in each station the child last born always takes the name of the last person who has died. Then these living representatives of the deceased receive presents, and having received them the souls are dismissed from the abodes of the living to return to the land of the dead. Thus at this festival not only does the group regain its unity, but the rite reconstitutes the ideal group which consists of all the generations which have succeeded one another from the earliest times. Mythical and historic ancestors as well as later ones thus mingle with the living, and communion between them is conducted by means of the exchange of presents." Amongst people other than the Eskimo, a new-born child not only takes the name of the last member of the family or clan who has died, but is regarded as the reincarnation of the deceased. "Thus the number of individuals, of names, of souls, of social functions in the clan is limited; and the life of the clan consists in the death and rebirth of individuals who are always identically the same" (l.c. 267).

The line of evolution thus followed by the belief in reincarnation results in the total separation of the belief from morality and from religion, and results in rendering it infertile alike for morality, religion, and progress in civilisation generally. Where the belief in reincarnation takes the form of belief in the transmigration of the soul into some animal form, it may be utilised for moral purposes, provided that the people amongst whom the belief obtains have otherwise advanced so far as to see that the punishments and rewards which are essential to the development of morality are by no means always realised in this life. When that conviction has established itself, the reincarnation theory will provide machinery by which the belief in future punishments and rewards can be conceived as operative: rebirth in animal form, if the belief in it already exists, may be held out as a deterrent to wrongdoing. That is, as a matter of fact, the use to which the belief has been put by Buddhism. The form and station in which the deceased will be reborn is no longer, as amongst the peoples just mentioned, conceived to be determined automatically, so to speak, but is supposed to depend on the moral qualities exhibited during life. If this view of the future life has struck deeper root and has spread over a greater surface than the doctrine taught in the Greek mysteries ever did, the reason may probably be found in the fact that the Greek mysteries had no higher morality to teach than was already recognised, whilst the moral teaching of the Buddha was far more exalted and far more profoundly true than anything that had been preached in India before. If a moral system by itself, on its own merits, were capable of affording a sure foundation for religion, Buddhism would be built upon a rock. To the spiritual community by which man may be united to his fellow-man and to his God, morality is essential and indispensable. But the moral life derives its value solely from the fact that on it depends, and by means of it is realised, that communion of man with God after which man has from the beginning striven. If then that communion and the very possibility of that communion is denied, the denial must prove fatal alike to religion and to morality. Now, that is the denial which Buddhism makes. But the fact of the denial is obscured to those who believe, and to those who would like to believe, in Buddhism, by the way in which it is made. It is made in such a way that it appears and is believed to be an affirmation instead of a denial. Communion with God is declared to be the final end to which the transmigration of souls conducts. But the communion to which it leads is so intimate that the human soul, the individual, ceases to be. Obviously, therefore, if it ceases to be, the communion also must cease; there is no real communion subsisting between two spirits, the human and the divine, for two spirits do not exist, but only one. If this way of stating the case be looked upon with suspicion as possibly not doing justice to the teaching of Buddhism, or as pressing unduly far the union between the human and the divine which is the ultimate goal of the transmigration of souls, the reply is that in truth the case against Buddhism is stronger than appears from this mode of stating it. To say that from the Buddhist point of view the human soul, the individual, eventually ceases to be, is indeed an incorrect way of putting the matter. It implies that the human soul, the individual, now is; and hereafter ceases to be. But so far from admitting that the individual now is, the Buddhist doctrine is that the existence of the soul, now, is mere illusion, mâyâ. It is therefore logical enough, and at any rate self-consistent, to say that hereafter, when the series of transmigrations is complete, the individual will not indeed cease to be, for he never was, but the illusion that he existed will be dissipated. Logically again, it follows from this that if the existence of the individual soul is an illusion from the beginning, then there can strictly speaking be no transmigration of souls, for there is no soul to transmigrate. But with perfect self-consistency Buddhism accepts this position: what is transmitted from one being to the next in the chain of existences is not the individuality or the soul, but the character. Professor Rhys Davids says (Hibbert Lectures, pp. 91, 92): "I have no hesitation in maintaining that Gotama did not teach the transmigration of souls. What he did teach would be better summarized, if we wish to retain the word transmigration, as the transmigration of character. But it would be more accurate to drop the word transmigration altogether when speaking of Buddhism, and to call its doctrine the doctrine of karma. Gotama held that after the death of any being, whether human or not, there survived nothing at all but that being's 'karma,' the result, that is, of its mental and bodily actions." "He discarded the theory of the presence, within each human body, of a soul which could have a separate and eternal existence. He therefore established a new identity between the individuals in the chain of existence, which he, like his forerunners, acknowledged, by the new assertion that that which made two beings to be the same being was—not soul, but—karma" (ib., pp. 93, 94). Thus once more it appears that there can be no eventual communion between the human soul, at the end of its chain of existence, and the divine, for the reason, not that the human soul ultimately ceases to be, but that it never is or was, and therefore neither transmigrates from one body to another, nor is eventually absorbed in the âtmân.

Logically consistent though this train of argument be, it leaves unanswered the simple question, How can the result of my actions have any interest for me—not hereafter, but at the present moment—if I not only shall not exist hereafter but do not exist at the present moment? It is not impossible for a man who believes that his existence will absolutely cease at death to take some interest in and labour for the good of others who will come after him; but it is impossible for a man who does not exist now to believe in anything whatever. And it is on that fundamental absurdity that Buddhism is built: it is directed to the conversion of those who do not exist to be converted, and it is directed to the object of relieving from existence those who have no existence from which to be relieved.

Where then lies the strength of Buddhism, if as a logical structure it is rent from top to bottom by glaring inconsistency? It lies in its appeal to the spirit of self-sacrifice. What it denounces, from beginning to end, is the will to live. The reason why it denounces the will to live is that that will manifests itself exclusively in the desires of the individual; and it is to the desires of man that all the misery in the world are directly due. Destroy those desires by annihilating the will to live—and in no other way can they be destroyed—and the misery of the world will cease. The only termination to the misery of the world which Buddhism can imagine is the voluntary cessation of life which will ultimately ensue on the cessation of the will to live. And the means by which that is to be brought about is the uprooting and destruction of the self-regarding desires by means of the higher morality of self-sacrifice. What the Buddhist overlooks is that the uprooting and destruction of the self-regarding desires results, not in the annihilation, but in the purification and enhanced vitality, of the self that uproots them. The outcome of the unselfish and self-sacrificing life is not the destruction of individuality, but its highest realisation. Now, it is only in society and by living for others that this unselfishness and self-sacrifice can be carried out; man can only exist and unselfishness can only operate in society, and society means the communion of man with his fellows. It is true that only in society can selfishness exist; but it is recognized from the beginning as that which is destructive of society, and it is therefore condemned alike by the morality and the religion of the society. The communion of man with his fellows and his God is hindered, impeded, and blocked wholly and solely by his self-regarding desires; it is furthered and realised solely by his unselfish desires. But his unselfish desires involve and imply his existence—I was going to say, just as much, I mean—far more than his selfish desires, for they imply, and are only possible on, the assumption of the existence of his fellow-man, and of his communion with him. Nay! more, by the testimony of Buddhism itself as well as of the religious experience of mankind at large, the unselfish desires, the spirit of self-sacrifice, require both for their logical and their emotional justification, still more for their practical operation, the faith that by means of them the will of God is carried out, and that in them man shows likest God. It is in them and by them that the communion of man with his fellow-man and with his God is realised. It is the faith that such communion, though it may be interrupted, can never be entirely broken which manifests itself in the belief in immortality. That belief may take shape in the idea that the souls of the departed revisit this earth temporarily in ghostly form, or more permanently as reincarnated in the new-born members of the tribe; it may body forth another world of bliss or woe, and if it is to subserve the purposes of morality, it must so do; nay! more, if it is to subserve the purposes of morality, it is into the presence of the Lord that the soul must go. But in any and whatever shape the belief takes, the soul is conceived or implied to be in communion with other spirits. There is no other way in which it is possible to conceive the existence of a soul; just as any particle of matter, to be comprehended in its full reality, implies not only every other particle of matter but the universe which comprehends them, so the existence of any spirit logically implies not only the existence of every other but also of Him without whom no one of them could be.

It is in this belief in the communion of spirits wherever he may find it—and where will he not?—that the missionary may obtain a leverage for his work. It is a sure basis for his operations because the desire for communion is universal; and Christianity alone, of the religions of the world, teaches that self-sacrifice is the way to life eternal.