The Buddhist spirit of toleration
As an efficient force in promoting a spirit of the broadest toleration, Buddhism holds a unique place among the great religious and ethical systems of the world.[293] An edict of the Buddhist Emperor Asoka, dating from the third century B.C., inculcates the practice of toleration in these words: “A man must not do reverence to his own sect by disparaging that of another man for trivial reasons. Depreciation should be for adequate reasons only, because the sects of other people deserve reverence for one reason or another.”
The spirit of this imperial edict has been obeyed wherever the word of the Buddha has prevailed. “There is no record known to me,” writes Rhys Davids, “in the whole long history of Buddhism, throughout the many centuries where its followers have been for such lengthened periods supreme, of any persecution by the Buddhists of the followers of any other faith.”[294]
Disesteem of the military life
Like Confucianism, Buddhism in its spirit and its ethical teachings is, as we have seen, absolutely opposed to the spirit of militarism in every form. Doubtless it has been a potent force in fostering among the peoples of eastern Asia an anti-military spirit and in creating a disesteem for the warlike qualities of character.[295] From one land—the Tartar land of Thibet—it has banished absolutely the war spirit and practically war itself.[296] “It has taken all the fierceness out of the Mongols,” and thus rendered useless the Great Wall built to check their raids into China.[297]
Softening effects on national character of Buddhist teachings
Buddhism has been well characterized as the incarnation of sympathy with suffering. Inculcating a morality of gentleness, instilling tenderness toward every living thing, it has exercised a softening influence upon the spirit and temper of every race that has received its teachings. We have in the preceding chapter noted its humanizing effects upon Japanese morality.[298] Even in India, where after a comparatively short period of supremacy it yielded sway again to Brahmanism, it left significant traces of its brief dominance in the deepened humanitarianism of the restored creed of the Brahmans, and in certain of those traits and dispositions of the native races which render truthfully descriptive the term “gentle Hindu.” “The land of meekness and gentleness,” were the words used by a native Hindu[299] at a recent Lake Mohonk Conference to express the ethical character of India.
Historical significance of the ethical unity created by Buddhism
There is deep significance for the moral evolution of the human race in this ethical propaganda of Buddhism. For just as Christianity has created an ethical unity among the nations of the Western world, so has Buddhism created a certain ethical unity among the races of the Eastern world. The historical importance of this lies in the fact that these two ethical systems, though differing in form and content, are in spirit essentially the same: both are moralities of universalism; both teach the brotherhood of man; both exalt the gentle[300] and self-denying virtues; both enjoin self-conquest; both inculcate the duty of universal benevolence.
Because of this moral kinship, the ethical conquests of Buddhism—and there is not a land in the Far East that has not felt its influence—are in a degree supplemental to those of Christianity in the West, and are thus an important step in the creation of the ethical unity of the world. India and Japan are both nearer to us ethically to-day than they would be, were it not for the modifying influence of Buddhist teachings upon the ethical spirit and temper of their peoples.[301]