In Taoism, a religion of China of earlier date than Hinduism or Zoroastrianism, there exists a fragment of ancient scripture called the Classic of Purity, wherein man is regarded as a trinity, viz. spirit, mind, body. To quote from Mr. Legge’s translation: “Now the spirit of man loves purity, but his mind disturbs it. The mind of man loves stillness, but his desires draw it away. If he could always send his desires away, his mind would of itself become still. Let his mind be made clean, and his spirit will of itself become pure.” (Here we have the idea, expressed in all religions, of the conflict between the higher and lower nature in man and the necessity for spirit to dominate mind and body. Refer to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, vii. 15, 21, 22 and 23.)
Again, Buddhism has absorbed the attention of modern Oriental scholars through the fascination of the Buddha’s purity and elevation of thought. There are two divisions of this faith, viz., the Mahayana, that of the Northern Church, found in Tibet, Nepaul, China, Corea, and Japan, and the Hinayana, that of the Southern Church, found in Ceylon, Burmah, Siam, etc. The Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) is closely allied to Hinduism in its teachings regarding the spiritual world, the continuing ego of individual man, the life after death, the rites and ceremonies of worship, and the mystic side of personal religion. In the Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) of the Southern Church, much of this mystic teaching has been dropped, nevertheless it retains a wonderful system of ethics, with appeals made to human reason, and a constant attempt to justify and render intelligible the foundations on which the morals are built. Buddhism is clearly the daughter of the more ancient Hinduism. Its scriptures are the echo of the Hindu scriptures, and the general teachings, while thrown into a less metaphysical form, are penetrated with the Hindu spirit. Causation is in both an unbroken law. In the Dhammapada, for instance, it is written: “If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage. He who has done what is evil cannot free himself of it, he may have done it long ago or afar off, he may have done it in solitude, but he cannot cast it off.”
Buddha taught that evil is overcome only by its opposite, i.e. good: “Let every man overcome anger by love, let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth,” etc., etc. And here the religion is closely in touch with Christian ethics: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,” etc. “Love is the fulfilling of the Law.” With regard to man’s destiny, Buddha’s teachings build on his hearers’ acceptance of the Hindu doctrine of re-incarnation.
(In the Pali Canon occur these words: “The Bhikshee [the disciple] sees, with eye divine, beings dropping away and reappearing, he knows them reaping according to their several karma, degraded and ennobled, beautiful and ugly, well-placed and ill-placed.” From this and many other passages of the Pali Canon “it is clear and evident and beyond a shadow of doubt,” says J. C. Chatterji, “that the Buddha taught the identity of the re-incarnating ego, though he did not give it that name. He called it Consciousness or Vignana.”—Theosophical Review, Jan., 1898, p. 415.) Without that his system falls to the ground. The path of salvation he points to implies a persistent course of personal effort, and he who would tread that path must open his mind to discriminate between things that are transitory and those that are real and permanent. To the former belong all the pleasures of sense, every earthly desire and ambition, and every selfish thought.
Deep within man’s nature, however, there lies hid a germ or seed of the permanent. This will persist throughout all the ages amid the fleeting phantasmagoria of many lives, and this he must cherish, nourish, develop. He must resist and renounce the corrupting influences of the flesh. He must master his passions, steady his mind, and control, enlighten and elevate his thoughts. Further, he must purify his emotions and actions, pervading the world with a “heart of love, far-reaching, grown great and beyond measure.” (The Tevijja Sutta.) Finally, the individual consciousness will expand, until, able to function in subtler vehicles than those of physical matter, the man passes out of the chrysalis state of formal existence to emerge upon higher levels of life and reach at length the Buddhist Nirvana—that supreme crown of immortality and acme of conscious bliss.
This pilgrimage of the soul through many births and deaths, with its steadfast struggles and gradual liberation from all earthly debasing entanglements, forms a striking contrast to certain teachings of the modern Christian Churches. Dogma there presents to us an undeveloped helpless soul, as playing—within a circumscribed area of earth’s surface—its one little game of experimental life. The fate of the soul for all eternity hangs in the balance, all its chances for weal or woe depending on a single throw of the dice. And what are the terms of the game? Conditions of life so adverse, in millions of cases, that defeat is a foregone conclusion. No wonder civilized men with a seedling of justice in the soul, reject the whole scheme of nature allied with this dogma, and frankly disavow religious faith.
But the question arises, how does it happen that Christianity, with an ethic fundamentally the same as that of every other great religion of the world, diverges so completely here? Is it conceivable that Christianity, while of Divine origin, has become in process of time dwarfed and deformed to the extent even of losing some essential features? It holds, as sectarian pulpits represent it, no doctrine of re-incarnation, and appears to have no clear basis of metaphysical or philosophic thought. Moreover, it has elements impossible to reconcile with the mental and emotional developments of a scientific and intellectual age. The anthropomorphic conception of Deity, the almost literal interpretation of the Jewish allegory of creation, the personalization of the metaphysical and mystic Trinity; the approval of the barbarous sacrifices and vengeful Deity of the Old Testament; the anti-evolutional doctrine of the vicarious Atonement in the New Testament; the crude ideas concerning the soul, heaven and hell; and the absence of any evolutional theory applied to human destiny—all these, and above all the ignorance and pride that claim for this particular form of religion a unique position in the world’s history, and assume that it alone and no other religion is the revelation of God to man, show an ample justification for the fact that the most intelligent men and women of Western civilization stand outside the Christian Churches to-day, or are in them from motives that have nothing to do with devout religious feeling.
If, however, we turn to the history of the Church and search its ancient records, or if unable ourselves to grapple with the problem, we place confidence in the evidence of students who have done so, we find that an entirely new light is thrown on Christianity and its real position. In the writings of the Christian Fathers, there is a constant reference made to grades of members and teaching within the early Church. First, the general members, and from those the pure in life went into a second grade. The latter formed the “few chosen” from the many called. But beyond these were the “chosen of the chosen,” who, “with perfect knowledge lived in perfection of righteousness according to the law.” Clement of Alexandria, one of the greatest of the Fathers of the Church, wrote: “It is not to be wished that all things should be exposed indiscriminately to all and sundry, or the benefits of wisdom communicated to those who have not, even in a dream, been purified in soul ... nor are the mysteries of the word to be expounded to the profane.” Origen tells us that Jesus conversed with His disciples in private, and especially in their most secret retreats, concerning the Gospel of God; but the words He uttered have not been preserved. And when Celsus assailed Christianity as a secret system, Origen replied such a notion was absurd, “but that there should be certain doctrines not made known to the multitude and which are revealed after the exoteric doctrines have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone, but also of philosophic systems, in which certain truths are exoteric and others esoteric.” Elsewhere he explains that Scripture is threefold in meaning, that it is the “flesh” for simple men, the “soul” for the more instructed, the “spirit” for the “perfect,” and in corroboration he quotes from Scripture the words of St. Paul, “We speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom,” and “we speak wisdom amongst them that are perfect.”
We have here, then, more than a trace of some deeper teaching than appears on the surface of Christianity, some mine of hidden truth too sacred and profound for open display to the undiscerning multitude. Is it not evident that Christianity contains at its centre, known only to the few, the same transcendental and spiritual conceptions, the same supra-physical and mystical philosophy as the ancient religions contain? But if this be so, how came the most precious truths of religion to be apparently lost?
They were lost through the uncomprehending ignorance of the early followers of the Master, Christ, and the sectarian bigotry of ecclesiastics who cut themselves apart from the holders of the inner teaching and, becoming a majority, overcame the learned few, stamping as heretics the last remnants known as Christian Gnostics, Manicheans, Pelasgians, and Arians, all of whom, counted schismatics, were eventually crushed out through cruel persecution by the victorious orthodox Latin and Greek Churches. Nevertheless, some fragments of the hidden wisdom of the early teaching have survived in the uncomprehended symbols of the creeds and ceremonies of the Churches. (I refer my reader to Mr. C. W. Leadbeater’s work, The Christian Creed.)