In the Aṅguttara (II. iv. 2) it is said that no adequate return can be made by children to parents ‘even by menial service.’ With Gautama, to honour father and mother was better than to worship the gods of heaven.
Many other examples might be given. Not only was a man forbidden to kill, he was never to injure.
Then in the Rājovāda Jātaka we have the story of the one king ‘who overcomes the strong by strength, the soft by softness, the good by goodness, and the wicked by wickedness;’ and of the other king ‘who conquers anger by calmness, the wicked by goodness, the stingy by gifts, the liar (alika-vādinam) by truth.’
Other precepts require a man to exercise charity and respect towards all aged persons, teachers, servants, and animals. He was to set an example of self-sacrifice.
It is recorded of Gautama Buddha that on one occasion he plucked out his own eyes, and that on another he cut off his own head, and that on a third he cut his own body to pieces to redeem a dove from a hawk.
Yet we repeat that with all this apparently sublime morality no true idea of sin, as displeasing to a Holy God, was connected with the infraction of the moral code. Nor did a Buddhist always avoid harming others from any true reverence for life. He was to cherish the life of others, but his chief motive was the fear that by not doing so he would entail the misery of continuous life on himself; and his chief motive for avoiding anger was that it was incompatible with that equanimity, which ought to characterize every wise man who aimed at the extinction of his own personality.
The ease with which charitable acts might be performed is amusingly illustrated by a story told in Huc’s travels in Tibet. A certain zealous fellow-traveller (who considered that it was quite possible to be at the same time a good Buddhist and a good Christian) invited the French missionaries to co-operate with him in performing charitable acts to commemorate the termination of a fatiguing journey, especially by providing worn-out travellers, like themselves, with horses. The missionaries pleaded their own poverty, but to their surprise were told that they were only required to draw horses on paper, which were taken to the edge of a precipice, thrown up into the air, and, certain formularies being recited, were carried away by the wind and changed into real horses by the power of Buddha.
Let us by no means, however, shut our eyes to the praiseworthy feature of the Buddhist system mentioned at page [125]—its recognition of the need of inner purity and sanctification—an inner Buddhism of the heart, without which even a monk was no true Buddhist. Of course the Law could be observed superficially without any real heart-belief or heart-purity.
When the inner heart-condition of a Buddhist is described, he is said to be walking on one of four paths (ćattāro Maggā), and is then called Ariyo (= Ārya), ‘worthy of reverence’ (distinguished from Pṛithag-jana, ‘an ordinary professing Buddhist’). To avoid confounding these paths with the eightfold path ([p. 44]) it would be better to speak of them as four stages of inner sanctification. Dhyāna, ‘meditation,’ of four kinds, is the chief means of entering and passing through these stages ([p. 32]), which once entered can never be abandoned.
The first stage is that of the man—be he monk or layman—who is just converted, by an inner awakening, to true heart-Buddhism. This man has freed himself from the first three fetters—namely, delusion of self, doubts about the Buddha’s doctrine, and dependence on external rites ([p. 127]). He is called Sotāpanno, ‘one who has entered the stream’ (Srota-āpanna), inevitably carrying him onwards—though not necessarily in the same body—to the calm ocean of Nirvāṇa, and his state is called Sotāpatti. He can only be re-born as a god or man, but not in the four lower births ([p. 121]).