From Egypt to Japan

by Henry M. Field

But however puerile it may be in its forms of worship, yet as a religion Buddhism is an immeasurable advance on Brahminism. In leaving India we have left behind Hindooism, and are grateful for the change, for Buddhism is altogether a more respectable religion. It has no bloody rites like those of the goddess Kali. It does not outrage decency nor morality. It has no obscene images nor obscene worship. It has no caste, with its bondage and its degradation. Indeed, the scholar who makes a study of different religions, will rank Buddhism among the best of those which are uninspired; if he does not find in its origin and in the life of its founder much that looks even like inspiration. There is no doubt that Buddha, or Gaudama, if such a man ever lived (of which there is perhaps no more reason to doubt than of any of the great characters of antiquity), began his career of a religious teacher, as a reformer of Brahminism, with the honest and noble purpose of elevating the faith, and purifying the lives of mankind. Mason, as a Christian missionary, certainly did not desire to exaggerate the virtues of another religion, and yet he writes of the origin of Buddhism:

"Three hundred years before Alexandria was founded; about the time that Thales, the most ancient philosopher of Europe, was teaching in Greece that water is the origin of all things, the soul of the world; and Zoroaster, in Media or Persia, was systematizing the fire-worship of the Magi; and Confucius in China was calling on the teeming multitudes around him to offer to guardian spirits and the names of their ancestors; and Nebuchadnezzar set up his golden image in the plains of Dura, and Daniel was laboring in Babylon to establish the worship of the true God; a reverend sage, with his staff and scrip, who had left a throne for philosophy, was travelling from Gaya to Benares, and from Benares to Kanouj, exhorting the people against theft, falsehood, adultery, killing and intemperance. No temperance lecturer advocates teetotalism now more strongly than did this sage Gaudama twenty-three centuries ago. Nor did he confine his instructions to external vices. Pride, anger, lust, envy and covetousness were condemned by him in as strong terms as are ever heard from the Christian pulpit. Love, mercy, patience, self-denial, alms-giving, truth, and the cultivation of wisdom, he required of all. Good actions, good words, and good thoughts were the frequent subjects of his sermons, and he was unceasing in his cautions to keep the mind free from the turmoils of passion, and the cares of life. Immediately after the death of this venerable peripatetic, his disciples scattered themselves abroad to propagate the doctrines of their master, and tradition says, one party entered the principal mouth of the Irrawaddy, where they traced its banks to where the first rocks lift themselves abruptly above the flats around. Here, on the summit of this laterite ledge, one hundred and sixty feet above the river, they erected the standard of Buddhism, which now lifts its spire to the heavens higher than the dome of St. Paul's."

In its practical effects Buddhism is favorable to virtue; and its adherents, so far as they follow it, are a quiet and inoffensive people. They are a kind of Quakers, who follow an inward light, and whose whole philosophy of life is one of repression of natural desires. Their creed is a mixture of mysticism and stoicism, which by gentle meditation subdues the mind to "a calm and heavenly frame," a placid indifference to good or ill, to joy or sorrow, to pleasure and pain. It teaches that by subduing the desires—pride, envy, and ambition—one brings himself into a state of tranquillity, in which there is neither hope nor fear. It is easy to see where such a creed is defective; that it does not bring out the heroic virtues, as shown in active devotion to others' good. This active philanthropy is born of Christianity. There is a spiritual selfishness in dreaming life away in this idle meditation. But so far as others are concerned, it bids no man wrong his neighbor.

Buddha's table of the law may be compared with that of Moses. Instead of Ten Commandments, it has only Five, which correspond very nearly to the latter half of the Decalogue. Indeed three of them are precisely the same, viz.: Do not kill; Do not steal; and Do not commit adultery; and the fourth, Do not lie, includes, as a broader statement, the Mosaic command not to bear false witness against one's neighbor; but the last one of all, instead of being "not to covet," is, Do not become intoxicated. These commands are all prohibitions, and enforce only the negative side of virtue. They forbid injury to property and life and reputation, and thus every injury to one's neighbor, and the last of all forbids injury to one's self, while they do not urge active benevolence to man nor piety towards God.

These Five Commandments are the rule of life for all men. But to those who aspire to a more purely religious life, there are other and stricter rules. They are required to renounce the world, to live apart, and practice rigid austerities, in order to bring the body into subjection. Every day is to be one of abstinence and self-denial. To them are given five other commands, in addition to those prescribed to mankind generally. They must take no solid food after noon (a fast not only Friday, but every day of the week); they must not visit dances, singing or theatrical representations; must use no ornaments or perfumery in dress; must not sleep in luxurious beds, and while living by alms, accept neither gold nor silver. By this rigid self-discipline, they are expected to be able to subdue their appetites and passions and overcome the world.

This monastic system is one point of resemblance between Buddhism and Romanism. Both have orders of monks and nuns, who take vows of celibacy and poverty, and live in convents and monasteries. There is also a close resemblance in their forms of worship. Both have their holy shrines, and use images and altars, before which flowers are placed, and lamps are always burning. Both chant and pray in an unknown tongue.[10]

This resemblance of the Buddhist creed and worship to their own, the Jesuit missionaries have been quick to see, and with their usual artfulness have tried to use it as an argument to smooth the way for the conversion of the Asiatics by representing the change as a slight one. But the Buddhist, not to be outdone in quickness, answers that the difference is so slight that it is not worth making the change. The only difference, they say, is "we worship a man and you worship a woman!"

But Christianity has had other representatives in Burmah than the Jesuits. At an early day American missionaries, as if they could not go far enough away from home, in their zeal to carry the Gospel where it had not been preached before, sought a field of labor in Southeastern Asia. More than sixty years ago they landed on these shores. They planted no colonies, waged no wars, raised no flag, and made no annexation. The only flag they carried over them was that of the Gospel of peace. And yet in the work they wrought they have left a memorial which will long preserve their sainted and heroic names. While in Rangoon I took up again "The Life of Judson" by Dr. Wayland, and read it with new interest on the very spot which had been the scene of his labors. Nothing in the whole history of missions is more thrilling than the story of his imprisonment. It was during the second Burmese war. He was at that time at Ava, the capital of Burmah, where he had been in favor till now, when the king, enraged at the English, seized all that he could lay hands upon, and threw them into prison. He could not distinguish an American, who had the same features and spoke the same language, and so Judson shared the fate of the rest. One day his house was entered by an officer and eight or ten men, one of whom he recognized by his hideous tattooed face as the executioner, who seized him in the midst of his family, threw him on the floor, drew out the instrument of torture, the small cord, with which he bound him, and hurried him to the death prison, where he was chained, as were the other foreigners, each with three pairs of fetters to a pole. He expected nothing but death, but the imprisonment dragged on for months, varied with every device of horror and of cruelty. Often he was chained to the vilest malefactors. Sometimes he was cast into an inner prison, which was like the Black Hole of Calcutta, where his limbs were confined with five pairs of fetters. So loathsome was his prison, that he counted it the greatest favor and indulgence, when, after a fever, he was allowed to sleep in the cage of a dead lion! This lasted nearly two years. Several times his keepers had orders (as they confessed afterward) to assassinate him, but, restrained perhaps by pity for his wife, they withheld their hand, thinking that disease would soon do the work for them.

During all that long and dreadful time his wife watched over him with never-failing devotion. She could not sleep in the prison, but every day she dragged herself two miles through the crowded city, carrying food for her husband and the other English prisoners. During that period a child was born, whose first sight of its father was within prison walls. Some time after even his heathen jailors took pity on him, and allowed him to take a little air in the street outside of the prison gate. And history does not present a more touching scene than that of this man, when his wife was ill, carrying his babe through the streets from door to door, asking Burman mothers, in the sacred name of maternity, of that instinct of motherhood which is universal throughout the world, to give nourishment to this poor, emaciated, and dying child.