When in the future the traveler comes to Burma and visits the pagoda, and when the resident passes through Rangoon’s streets, and is not pained with the vision of lepers begging at his feet, let them remember that for centuries these Buddhist lepers were spurned by their own race and countrymen, and that it was the Christian missionaries who gathered them into homelike asylums, there to receive loving Christian care. Let them reflect that this contrast is one of principle in the two faiths. The leper, agonizing in hopeless despair on the pagoda steps, was the perfected fruit of centuries of the teaching of the purest Buddhism to be found.
One more illustration of the practical teaching of Buddhism presents itself. At Kemmendine, near Rangoon, is a Buddhist burial-ground. There is a large pavilion near the entrance to the graveyard, on the ceiling of which there have been various pictorial representations of the teachings of Buddhism. Much of this is a portrayal of the many Buddhist hells. But there was for years a succession of pictures along one border representing the Buddhist priest in the process of crushing out all sentiment and sympathy with even the greatest human distress. The candidate for neikban must destroy all desire; the last desire to give way is that for existence. This pictorial representation was evidently made to show the process of this suppression in progress. The yellow-robed priest, who should represent the system, is seated in perfect composure looking on the distress of a sick man. There is none to attend the sick, and the priest, of course, gives no aid. The next picture shows the man approaching the crisis of death; in the next he is actually dying. Then follows a succession of pictures showing other stages of dissolution, until only the scattered bones remain. Through all the series of representations the priest sits with a face as expressionless as marble, and has not moved a muscle. Complete indifference to all experiences of human life is the virtue aimed at.
To show that this crushing out of all natural sensibility is a difficult process, the artist has made another picture with a little humor in it. The scattered bones suddenly become articulated, and the skeleton makes a wild leap upon the priest. This unexpected jump of the skeleton would be calculated to affright ordinary mortals to a degree; but not so the priest. He only slightly turns his head. He has nearly conquered all natural sentiment. The last picture shows a skull and crossbone, and the motionless priest sitting in perfect composure of features and of person. He has conquered all desire!
This is the picture on the pavilion; but now with the writer look on the living reality. On one occasion I attended a cremation in that burial-ground. Sometimes bodies are buried, and sometimes cremated if the person was rich or much respected in life. The funeral pyre was crudely made, and the burning presented a revolting sight that need not be given in detail. When the body was nearly consumed some of the people returned to the pavilion, and with them the widow, a grown son and daughter, and some smaller children of the deceased. Meantime five priests had come in from the monastery, and sat in a row upon a platform at one end of the structure. They had not been present at the place of burning. They had rendered no service of consolation at all, though they may have preached at the home the usual pronouncement of Buddhism, that all existence leads to misery, and therefore the way out of misery is to strive to get into neikban and cease to exist. More than this, the funeral is the occasion over all others in which costly presents far above the ability of the family are given to the poungyis, or priests. But real consoling service to the sorrowing they give none. There is nothing springing from sympathy, pity, or hope in this religion.
As these five well-fed priests sat on that platform, the broken-hearted widow, son, and daughters came forward, and bowed down and worshiped them. The bruised and broken human heart cried in anguish and must cry for help, and Buddhism offers only the worship of a yellow-robed priest! Buddhism has no God. It tries to crush all human pity. But where shall the broken-hearted find rest? Worship these yellow-robed priests! That is all. What about the priests? There they sat, and chewed betel-nut and tobacco, spitting lazily at the cracks in the platform, looking about idly and vacantly, utterly indifferent to the prostrate and broken-hearted family before them! Not a look of sympathy or pity, not even a glance of recognition cast in the direction of the prostrate forms! This is the very real illustration in the living priest, of the pictorial representation of the priest of the Buddhist religion given above! The Buddhist system is devoid of hope, pity, consolation, or even ordinary human sympathy. It is as heartless as its own stony or brazen images of Gautama so universally worshiped. Men become like their gods.
Festivities at a Poungyi’s Cremation
CHAPTER XII
Outline of Christian Missions in Burma
Christianity entered Burma with the incoming of traders and Governments from the West, as it did in the other portions of Southern Asia. Some of these traders and some of these representatives of nominally Christian Governments were unscrupulous adventurers. They were seldom men of strict moral integrity, much less spiritual Christians. They would not measure very high by present-day social standards, much less by the lofty standards of the gospel. They were Christians in name only. The Portuguese gained some footing in Burma, as in all this tropical world, in the sixteenth century, and continued with varying influence for nearly two hundred years. They gained a foothold in Burma, and built a city called Syrian, and still bearing that name, just across the Pegu River from the present site of Rangoon. Here, however, they met utter defeat and destruction at the hands of the great Alombra, the founder of the Burmese Dynasty, of which King Thebaw, deposed at Mandalay in 1886, was the last sovereign. This great king completely overthrew the Portuguese Government, and with it the only form of Christianity then known among them, that represented by the Roman Catholic Church of that day.
These venturesome Portuguese carried with them their religious observances, and their priests always were active missionary agents. They built a church at Syrian, the well-defined ruins of which still remain. They made converts among the Burmans. Whether their methods in converting the Burmese were as unscrupulous as the Portuguese traders’ methods were, we have no detailed account. But in this matter we are not left in much doubt, as their attempts to convert the Burmese could not have been much different from that employed in India at the same period, which unhappily we know only too well were in utter disregard of the true Christian spirit. But these missionaries of the Catholic Church counted their converts by possibly the hundred thousand.