The History of Antiquity, Vol. 4 (of 6)

by Max Duncker

THE RELIGION OF THE BUDDHISTS.

In the century and a half which passed between the date of Kalaçoka of Magadha, the council of the Sthaviras at Vaiçali, and the reign of Vindusara, the doctrine of the Enlightened had continued to extend, and had gained so many adherents that Megasthenes could speak of the Buddhist mendicants as a sect of the Brahmans. The rulers of Magadha who followed Kalaçoka, the house of the Nandas, which deposed his son, and the succeeding princes of that house, Indradatta and Dhanananda, were not favourable to Buddhism, as we conjectured above. If the Buddhist tradition quoted extols and consecrates the descent and usurpation of Chandragupta, this must be rather due to the services his grandson rendered the believers in Buddha than to any merits of his own in that respect. The accounts of the Greeks about the religious services of the Indians towards the end of the fourth century B.C., the description given by Megasthenes of the Indian philosophers and their doctrines, as well as his express statement that the Brahmans were the more highly honoured among the Indian sages, leave no doubt that the Brahmans maintained their supremacy under the reign of Chandragupta. Of Vindusara the Buddhists tell us that he daily fed 600,000 Brahmans.

In the doctrine of Buddha the philosophy of the Indians had made the boldest step. It had broken with the results of the history of the Arians on the Indus and the Ganges, with the development of a thousand years. It had declared internecine war against the ancient religion, and called in question the consecrated order of society. The philosophy capable of such audacity was a scepticism which denied everything except the thinking Ego, which emptied heaven and declared nature to be worthless. Armed with the results of an unorthodox speculation, and pushing them still further, Buddha had drawn a cancelling line through the entire religious past of the Indian nation. The world-soul of the Brahmans existed no longer; heaven was rendered desolate; its inhabitants and all the myths attaching to them were set aside. No reading, no exposition of the Veda was required; no inquiry about the ancient hymns and customs. The contention of the schools about this or that rite might slumber, and no sacrifice could be offered to gods who did not exist. Dogmatism was banished in all its positions and doctrines; the endless laws about purity and food, the torturing penances and expiations, the entire ceremonial was without value and superfluous. The peculiar sanctity of the Brahmans, the mediatory position which they occupied in the worship between the gods and the nation, were valueless, and the advantages of the upper castes fell to the ground. And this doctrine, which annihilated the entire ancient religion and the basis of existing society, and put in their place nothing but a new speculation and a new morality, had come into the world without divine revelation, and was without a supreme deity, or indeed any deity whatever. Its authority rested solely on the dicta of a man, who declared that he had discovered truth by his own power, and maintained that every man could find it. That such a doctrine found adherence and ever increasing adherence is a fact without a parallel in history. The success of it would indeed be inconceivable, if the Brahmans had not themselves long prepared the way for Buddha, if the harsh contrast in which Buddha placed himself to the Brahmans had not been in some degree a consequence of Brahmanism.

The wildly-luxuriant and confused imagination of the Brahmans had produced a moderation, a rationalistic reaction in faith, worship, and morality no less than in social life. The speculative conception of Brahman had never become familiar to the people. The ceaseless increase in the number of gods and spirits, their endless multitude, had lessened the value of the individual forms and the reverence felt for them. The acts of the great saints of the Brahmans went far beyond the power and creative force of the gods. The saints made the gods their playthings. Could it excite any great shock when these playthings were set aside? The Brahmans dethroned the gods, and themselves fell in this dethronement. They allowed that sacrifice and ritual, and the pious fulfilment of duties and expiations, the entire sanctification by works, was not the highest aim that men could and ought to attain; that asceticism, penance, and meditation ensured something higher, and could alone lead back to Brahman; was it not a simple consequence of this view that Buddha should set aside the whole service of sacrifice and form of worship? The Brahmans granted that the distinction of caste could be removed, at any rate in the three higher orders, by the work of inward sanctification; was it not logical that Buddha should declare the distinction of castes altogether to be unessential? According to the Brahmans nothing but deep and earnest meditation on Brahman could raise man to the highest point, to reabsorption into Brahman, and therefore the Sankhya doctrine could consistently maintain that meditation free from all tradition was the highest aim, that only by unfettered knowledge could liberation from nature be attained; while Buddha was enabled to find ready credence to his position that neither asceticism nor penance, neither sacrifice nor works, but the knowledge of the true connection of things guided men to salvation. From all antiquity the Indians had allowed human devotion to have a certain influence on the gods; in the oldest poems of the Veda we find the belief that the correct invocation brings down the deities and exercises compulsion over them. Following out this view, the Brahmans had developed the compulsion exercised upon the gods to such a degree that fervour of asceticism and holiness conferred divine power—power over nature; they held that man could attain the highest point by penance and meditation; that he could draw into himself and concentrate there the divine power and essence. Was it not an easy step further in the same path when Buddha taught that the highest, the only divine result, which he admitted, the knowledge of truth, could be attained by man's own power; that his adherents and followers, when the rishis of the Brahmans had been gifted with so many mighty, divine, and super-divine powers, had not the least difficulty in believing that the Enlightened had found absolute truth; that by his own power he had attained the highest wisdom and truth? If the man who had duly sanctified himself, attained, according to the Brahmanic doctrine, divine power and wisdom, Buddha on his part required no revelation from above. By his own nature and his own power, by sanctification, man could work his way upwards to divine absolute liberty and wisdom.

To religious tradition and the Veda Buddha opposed individual knowledge; to revelation of the gods the truth discovered by men, to the dogmatism of the Brahmanic schools the doctrine of duties; to sacrifice and expiation the practice of morality; to the claims of the castes personal merit; to lonely asceticism common training; to the caste of the priests a spiritual brotherhood formed by free choice and independent impulse. But two essential points in the Brahmanic view of the world, that the body and the Ego are the fetters of the soul, that the soul must migrate without rest, he not only allowed to stand, but even insisted on them more sharply to the conclusion that existence is the greatest evil and annihilation the greatest blessing for men, inasmuch as freedom from evil can only be attained by freedom from existence, and freedom from existence only by annihilation of self. Salvation is the negation of existence. But not only the bodily life of the individual must be annihilated, the spiritual root of his existence must be torn up and utterly destroyed. "What wilt thou with the knot of hair, or with the apron (i. e. with the Brahmanic asceticism); thou art touching merely the outside; the gulf is within thee?"[663]

The Sankhya doctrine had announced that Brahman and the gods did not exist, but only nature and the soul. Buddha in reality struck out nature also. According to his doctrine there was neither creation nor creator. The existence of the world is merely an illusion; there is nothing but a restless change of generation and decay, an eternal revolution (sansara). Hence the world is no more than a total of things past and perishable, in which there is but one reality, one active agency. This is the souls of men and animals, breathing creatures. These have been existent from the first, and remain in existence till they find the means of their annihilation and accomplish it. They have created the corporeal world, by clothing themselves with matter, and this robe they change again and again. The Brahmans had taught that "the desire which is in the world-soul is the creative seed of the world" (p. 132). Buddha, transferring this to the individual souls, taught that the desire and yearning for existence, by which individual creatures were impelled, produced existence. Existences are the fruit of the inalienable impulse inherent in the soul; this brings the evil of existence upon the soul, and causes it in spite of itself to cleave thereto; "it is the chain of being" in which the soul is fettered. This desire (kama) is a mistake; it rests on an inability to perceive the true connection between the nature of existence and the world; it is not only a mistake but a sin, nay, sin itself, from which all other sins arise; desire is the great, original sin, hereditary sin (kleça).[664]

Hence the existence of men is in itself the product of sin. The perpetual yearning for existence ever draws the soul after the death of the body into new existence, impels it into the corporeal world, and clothes it with a new body. "All garments are perishable, all are full of pain, and subject to another."[665] Each new bodily life of the soul is the fruit of former existences. The merit or the guilt which the soul has acquired in earlier existences, or brought upon itself, is rewarded or punished in later existences; here also Buddhism retains the doctrine of the Brahmans that the prosperity or misfortune of man is regulated according to the acts of a former existence. The total of merit and guilt accumulated in earlier existences determines the fortune of the individual; it forms the rule governing the kind of regeneration, the happy or unhappy life, the fate which rules each soul, the moral order of the world. If the merit is greater than the guilt, man is not born as an animal but as a man, and in better circumstances, with less trouble and sorrow to go through; and according as a man bears these, and practises virtue in this life, are the future existences defined. It is the duty of man to acquire a tolerable existence for himself by his merit, and also to remove the active guilt of earlier deeds, which are not always punished in the next but often in far later existences, and to destroy the yearning after existence in the soul. This is done by the knowledge which perceives that existence is evil, that all is worthless, and consequently lessens and removes the yearning after existence. This removal is rendered more complete by renunciation, the resolution to receive no conceptions or impressions, and hence to feel no desire for anything; by placing ourselves in a condition where we are incapable of feeling, and therefore incapable of desire. With this annihilation of desire the fetters of the soul are broken; man is separated from the revolution of the world, the alternation of births, because nothing more remains of that which makes up the soul, and thus there is no substratum left for a new existence.[666]

There were converted Brahmans who declared that a penance of twelve years did not confer so much repose as the truths which Buddha taught.[667] For the satisfaction of the interest in philosophic inquiry, to which earnest minds among the Brahmans were accustomed, the speculative foundation of Buddha's doctrine provided amply and with sufficient subtilty. Others might be attracted by the wish to be relieved from tormenting themselves any longer with the formulas of the schools and the commentaries on the Veda. And if the Brahmans objected to the disciples of Buddha that they punished themselves too little, there were without doubt members of the order who found the Buddhist asceticism more agreeable than the Brahmanic.

But the most efficient spring of the success of Buddha's doctrine did not lie in this. It lay in the practical consequences which he derived from his speculation or connected with it. The prospect of liberation from regeneration, of death without resurrection, the gospel of annihilation, was that which led the Indians to believe in Buddha. To the initiated he opened out the prospect that this life would be the last; to the laity he gave the hope of alleviation in the number and kind of regenerations. And as this doctrine proclaimed to all without exception an amelioration in their future fortunes, and declared that every one was capable of liberation, it was at the same time a gospel of social reform. Even among the Kshatriyas and Vaiçyas there were, no doubt, many who were quite agreed that the privilege of birth, which the Brahmans claimed in such an extravagant manner, ought to give way to personal merit. To all who were oppressed or pushed into the background the way was pointed out, to withdraw from the stress of the circumstances which confined and burdened them; every one found a way open for him to escape from the trammels of caste. The doctrine of the Brahmans excluded the Çudras entirely from good works and liberation. The doctrine of Buddha was addressed to all the castes, and destroyed the monopoly of the Brahmans even in regard to teaching. The natural and equal right of every man, whatever be his origin, to sanctification and liberation from evil was recognised; the Buddhist clergy were recruited from all the orders. The Çudra and even the Chandala received the initiation of the Bhikshu. The attraction of this universality was all the greater, especially for the lower orders, because Buddha, following the whole tendency of his doctrine, turned more especially to the most heavily laden; in his view wealth and rank were stronger fetters to bind men to the world than distress and misery. "It is hard," the Enlightened is declared to have said, "to be rich and to learn the way;" and in a Buddhist inscription of the third century B.C. we read, "It is difficult both for the ordinary and important person to attain to eternal salvation, but for the important person it is certainly most difficult."[668] Finally, the doctrine of Buddha was also a gospel of peaceful life, of mutual help and brotherly love. The quietistic morality of obedience, of silent endurance, which the disciples of Buddha preached, corresponded to the patient character which the Indians on the Ganges had gained under the training of the Brahmans and their despotic princes, and to the instinct of the nation at the time. As Buddha's doctrine justified and confirmed submission towards oppression, it also pointed out the way in which to alleviate an oppressed life for ourselves and for others. The gentleness and compassion which Buddha required towards men and animals, suited the prevailing tone of the people; men were prepared to avail themselves of them as the means of salvation; and this patient sympathetic life, without the torments of penances and expiations, without the burden of the laws of purification and food, without sacrifice and ceremonial, was enough to guide future regenerations into the "better" way.