“Heaven is treated by Laou-tsze much in the same way as by Confucius, but with far more reserve. In the utterances of both teachers we find the word used to designate the material heaven as well as a personified heaven. Just as Confucius speaks of the Sage as being the equal of heaven, Laou-tsze says that he is the associate of heaven, and that he is heaven itself.
“Heaven, also according to him, gives laws to the earth, just as it takes its laws from Taou. It has no special love, but regards all existing beings as grass-dogs made for sacrificial rites, i.e. for temporary purposes. It is as unselfish as it is impartial, and because it does not aim at life it lasts long. It is great and compassionate, and is ever ready to become the saviour of men. But it is also the material heaven, and maintains its existence by the ‘clearness’ which is imparted to it by its unity with Taou.”[[89]]
These religious systems are at the present time to a great extent superseded by Buddhism. This religion has many followers, and its tenets are known throughout the East, in Thibet, Central Asia, Siberia, and even as far west as Swedish Lapland.
The founder of Buddhism was born on the borders of Nepaul about B.C. 620, and was heir to the throne of Kapilavastu. Renouncing his claim, he made himself known to the world as the Buddha Gautama, whose advent was foretold by the Brahmans. It had been predicted that either he would live among men and become a Chacawati, or mighty ruler, whose sway all the human race would acknowledge; or, withdrawing from the world, he would become a recluse, and in that condition, after disentangling himself from the miseries of existence, would become a Buddha, and remove the veils of ignorance and sin from the world.
The tribe to which belonged the father of Gautama, whose name was Suddhódana, was called Sākya. His mother’s name was Mâya, “daughter of Supra-buddha, chief of the neighbouring and kindred tribe of Kolyans. Both tribes were of pure Aryan race, and branches of the Suryavansi, or line of the Sun.”[[90]]
All statues of Guatama represent him with short points of hair on the top of the head; in some the hair has a curled or woolly appearance. This, together with other circumstances, proves that the Sage descended from the Ethiopian Colonisers who entered India with Moses. Some of the precepts of the Buddha resemble those of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who preached six hundred years later, though there are some differences of doctrine. Gautama abolished sacrifices, and taught the law of Love and Charity, and the reward of obedience; also the liberation of the soul from self, with its absorption into the Infinite, or the Finite lost in the Infinite and the Mortal in the Immortal.
The invocation which he taught his disciples was addressed to the Spirit in the Lotus, a mystical reference to the preservation of the Founder of his tribe—the Hebrew infant cast on the bosom of the sacred Nile in a cradle of bulrushes. The Trinity of the Buddhists, also, is analogous to the Trinity of the Egyptians—the Osiris, Isis, and their son Horus, signifying Moses (rescued from the water) and his Ethiopian consort Tharbis, and their son (represented in paintings in Thebes).
About six hundred years after Gautama’s death Our Lord Jesus Christ entered the world. His coming was expected by the followers of the last Buddha, insomuch that the Brahmans came to Judea in search of the Infant, whose birth was made known to them by a bright, extraordinary star.
The mission of the Saviour was to fulfil the predictions of the Hebrew Scriptures, that, by His death, the world might be restored to the favour of God. And the reward of His Sacrifice of Himself on man’s behalf will be the restoration of God’s favour to His erring creatures, so that, in the fulness of time, the Lord God will again walk with man on earth, in the cool of the day, as He did in the days of Adam’s innocency in the Garden of Eden.
APPENDICES.