Buddhism, in Its Connexion with Brahmanism and Hinduism, and in Its Contrast with Christianity

by Sir Monier Monier-Williams

I grant this—I grant that expressions of reverence for the Buddha, the Law, and the Monkhood, developed into expressions of wants and needs, and that these expressions, gradually led on to the offering of actual prayers to deified Buddhas and Bodhi-sattvas.

I admit that we ought to judge of Buddhism as a whole. We ought to give full consideration to its later developments, and the gradual sliding of its atheism and agnosticism into theism and polytheism. We are bound to acknowledge that Buddhism, as it extended to other countries, did acquire the character of a theistic religious system, which, though false, had in it some points of contact with Christianity.

Nevertheless, admitting all this, and taking into account all that can be said in favour of Buddhism as a religious system, it will be easy to show how impossible it is to bridge over the yawning chasm which separates it from the true religion.

It is, indeed, one of the strange phenomena of the present day, that even educated people who call themselves Christians, are apt to fall into raptures over the precepts of Buddhism[279], attracted by the bright gems which its admirers delight in culling out of its moral code, and in displaying ostentatiously, while keeping out of sight all its dark spots, all its trivialities and senseless repetitions[280]; not to speak of all those evidences of deep corruption beneath a whited surface, all those significant precepts and prohibitions in its books of discipline, which indeed no Christian could soil his lips by uttering[281].

It has even been asserted that much of the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, and in other parts of the Gospel narratives, is based on previously current moral teaching, which Buddhism was the first to introduce to the world, 500 years before Christ[282]. But this is not all. The admirers of Buddhism maintain that the Buddha was not a mere teacher of the truths of morality, but of many other sublime truths. He has been justly called, say they, ‘the Light of Asia,’ though they condescendingly admit that Christianity as a later development is more adapted to become the religion of the world.

Let us then inquire, for a moment, what claim Gautama Buddha has to this title—‘the Light of Asia?’

Now, in the first place those who give him this name forget that his doctrines only spread over Eastern Asia, and that either Confucius, or Zoroaster, or Muhammad might equally be called ‘the Light of Asia.’

But was the Buddha, in any true sense, a Light to any part of the world?

It is certainly true that the main idea implied by Buddhism is intellectual enlightenment. Buddhism, before all things, means enlightenment of mind, resulting from intense self-concentration and introspection, from intense abstract meditation, combined with the exercise of a man’s own reasoning faculties and intuitions.

Of what nature, then, was the so-called Light of Knowledge that radiated from the Buddha? Was it the knowledge of his own utter weakness, of his original depravity of heart, or of the origin of sin? No; the Buddha’s light was in these respects profound darkness. He confessed himself, in regard to such momentous questions, a downright Agnostic. The primary origin of evil—the first evil act—was to him an inexplicable mystery.