According to Christianity:—Go and earn your own bread, support yourself and your family. Marriage, it says, is honourable and undefiled, and married life is a field on which holiness may grow and be developed. Nay, more—Christ Himself honoured a wedding with His presence, and took up little children in His arms and blessed them.
Buddhism, on the other hand, says:—Avoid married life; shun it as if it were ‘a burning pit of live coals’ ([p. 88]); or, having entered on it, abandon wife, children, and home, and go about as celibate monks, engaging in nothing but in meditation and recitation of the Buddha’s Law—that is to say—if you aim at the highest degree of sanctification.
And then comes the important contrast that in the one system we have a teaching gratifying to the pride of man, and flattering to his intellect; while in the other we have a teaching humbling to his pride, and distasteful to his intellect. For Christianity tells us that we must become as little children, and that when we have done all that we can, we are still unprofitable servants. Whereas Buddhism teaches that every man is saved by his own works and by his own merits only.
Fitly, indeed, do the rags worn by the monks of true Buddhism symbolize the miserable patchwork of its own self-righteousness.
Not that Christianity ignores the necessity for good works; on the contrary, no other system insists on a lofty morality so strongly; but never as the meritorious instrument of salvation[292]—only as a thank-offering, only as the outcome and evidence of faith.
Lastly, we must advert again to the most momentous—the most essential of all the distinctions which separate Christianity from Buddhism. Christianity regards personal life as the most sacred of all possessions. Life, it seems to say, is no dream, no illusion. ‘Life is real, life is earnest.’ Life is the most precious of all God’s gifts. Nay, it affirms of God Himself that He is the highest Example of intense Life—of intense personality, the great ‘I AM that I AM,’ and teaches us that we are to thirst for a continuance of personal life as a gift for Him; nay, more, that we are to thirst for the living God Himself and for conformity to His likeness; while Buddhism sets forth as the highest of all aims the utter extinction of the illusion of personal identity—the utter annihilation of the Ego—of all existence in any form whatever, and proclaims as the only true creed the ultimate resolution of everything into nothing, of every entity into pure nonentity.
What shall I do to inherit eternal life?—says the Christian. What shall I do to inherit eternal extinction of life?—says the Buddhist.
It seems a mere absurdity to have to ask in concluding these Lectures:—Whom shall we choose as our Guide, our Hope, our Salvation, ‘the Light of Asia,’ or ‘the Light of the World?’ the Buddha or the Christ? It seems a mere mockery to put this final question to rational and thoughtful men in the nineteenth century: Which Book shall we clasp to our hearts in our last hour—the Book that tells us of the dead, the extinct, the death-giving Buddha, or the Book that reveals to us the living, the eternal, the life-giving Christ?
POSTSCRIPT.
Since the printing of my concluding Lecture, it has occurred to me that I ought to make a few remarks in regard to a very prevalent error—the error that Buddhism still numbers more adherents than any other religion of the world. For these remarks the reader is referred to the Postscript at the end of the Preface ([p. xiv]).