Then the Stone Buddha and I look down upon the college together; and as we gaze, the smile of the Buddha—perhaps because of a change in the light—seems to me to have changed its expression, to have become an ironical smile. Nevertheless he is contemplating the fortress of a more than formidable enemy. In all that teaching of four hundred youths by thirty-three teachers, there is no teaching of faith, but only teaching of fact,—only teaching of the definite results of the systematization of human experience. And I am absolutely certain that if I were to question, concerning the things of the Buddha, any of those thirty-three instructors (saving one dear old man of seventy, the Professor of Chinese), I should receive no reply. For they belong unto the new generation, holding that such topics are fit for the consideration of Men-in-Straw-Rain—coats only, and that in this twenty-sixth year of Meiji, the scholar should occupy himself only with the results of the systematization of human experience. Yet the systematization of human experience in no wise enlightens us as to the Whence, the Whither, or, worst of all!—the Why.
"The Laws of Existence which proceed from a cause,—the cause of these hath the Buddha explained, as also the destruction of the same. Even of such truths is the great Sramana the teacher."
And I ask myself, Must the teaching of Science in this land efface at last the memory of the teaching of the Buddha?
"As for that," makes answer Science, "the test of the right of a faith to live must be sought in its power to accept and to utilize my revelations. Science neither affirms what it cannot prove, nor denies that which it cannot rationally disprove. Theorizing about the Unknowable, it recognizes and pities as a necessity of the human mind. You and the Man-in-the-Straw-Rain-coat may harmlessly continue to theorize for such time as your theories advance in lines parallel with my facts, but no longer."
And seeking inspiration from the deep irony of Buddha's smile, I theorize in parallel lines.
VI
The whole tendency of modern knowledge, the whole tendency of scientific teaching, is toward the ultimate conviction that the Unknowable, even as the Brahma of ancient Indian thought, is inaccessible to prayer. Not a few of us can feel that Western Faith must finally pass away forever, leaving us to our own resources when our mental manhood shall have been attained, even as the fondest of mothers must leave her children at last. In that far day her work will all have been done; she will have fully developed our recognition of certain eternal spiritual laws; she will have fully ripened our profounder human sympathies; she will have fully prepared us by her parables and fairy tales, by her gentler falsehoods, for the terrible truth of existence;—prepared us for the knowledge that there is no divine love save the love of man for man; that we have no All-Father, no Saviour, no angel guardians; that we have no possible refuge but in ourselves.
Yet even in that strange day we shall only have stumbled to the threshold of the revelation given by the Buddha so many ages ago: "Be ye lamps unto yourselves; be ye a refuge unto yourselves. Betake yourselves to no other refuge. The Buddhas are only teachers. Hold ye fast to the truth as to a lamp. Hold fast as a refuge to the truth. Look not for refuge to any beside yourselves."
Does the utterance shock? Yet the prospect of such a void awakening from our long fair dream of celestial aid and celestial love would never be the darkest prospect possible for man. There is a darker, also foreshadowed by Eastern thought. Science may hold in reserve for us discoveries infinitely more appalling than the realization of Richter's dream,—the dream of the dead children seeking vainly their father Jesus. In the negation of the materialist even, there was a faith of consolation—self-assurance of individual cessation, of oblivion eternal. But for the existing thinker there is no such faith. It may remain for us to learn, after having vanquished all difficulties possible to meet upon this tiny sphere, that there await us obstacles to overcome beyond it,—obstacles vaster than any system of worlds,—obstacles weightier than the whole inconceivable Cosmos with its centuries of millions of systems; that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.