CHAPTER XI.
BUDDHISM IN BURMA.
The greater part of the inhabitants of Burma are Buddhists. The Burman race are so universally, except in the cases where Christianity has gained a few. It is in Burma that Buddhism is found with the least admixture of any other religion, and where it is followed with a more thoroughgoing devotion perhaps than anywhere else. Even the Burman, however, has never discarded in spirit, or even in form, the indigenous nat worship of his far-off ancestors. It may have little of outward appearance, but it remains side by side with Buddhism to the present day. In their numerous popular stories the nats play a prominent part, the wicked ones performing all manner of mischievous pranks, the good ones appearing at the opportune moment to succour the hero of the story, usually some “payaloung,” or incipient Buddha, for the moment in peril through the trials that have befallen him.
This hankering after the nats is a significant fact. There is no God in Buddhism, and yet a man must have a deity or deities of some kind. The elaborate philosophy of Buddhism may occupy the intellect, and dominate the religious life, but it cannot satisfy this natural craving in man for God. Hence the worship and the fear of the nats, and the many superstitious ceremonies to propitiate them. And hence, too, if we mistake not, the strong tendency to plunge deeply into the occult, and to claim intimacy with the world of spirits, which characterises those Europeans and Americans who have discarded Christianity, and have devised for themselves a system fashioned on the basis of Buddhism, for their light and guidance.
Buddhism has been well described as “A proud attempt to create a faith without a God, and to conceive a deliverance in which man delivers himself.” Gautama, the future Buddha, and the founder of the Buddhist religion, was born at Kapilavastu, a town about one hundred miles from Benares, about 500 B.C. His father was the ruler of the Sakya tribe. Gautama early showed a disposition for a retired, studious, ascetic, contemplative life. His father wished to see him fit himself for the career of a prince, and heaped upon him every luxury, but in vain. At length we find the young prince, after many struggles between family affection and his view of duty, secretly by night leaving his home of luxury, his wife and child, exchanging his dress for the garments of a mendicant, and commencing his long quest after truth. Six years he spent in fastings and acts of penance. Then perceiving that mere ritual could bring him to no new conceptions of truth, he changed his method, and set himself to devise that system of philosophy which to this day is associated with his name.
The ethics of Buddhism are grand, and for its noble conceptions of man’s duty it well deserves the title of the finest system of heathenism ever devised by man. But it fails altogether as a moral power. The account it gives of man’s nature, and the problem of life generally, though very elaborate, is erroneous and misleading. It knows nothing of a Divine Creator and Father, a Divine Saviour, or a Divine Regenerator. It proclaims no God, offers no Gospel of glad tidings, enjoins no prayer (in our sense of the word, as petition), sets forth no sacrifice for sin, holds out no hope of Divine help, no saving grace, no pardon, no renewal. Man must work out everything by his own endeavours.
For forty-five years Buddha lived to preach his doctrines, winning many converts, and he died at over eighty years of age greatly revered.
“IMAGES OF BUDDHA ARE EXTENSIVELY USED.”