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PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM.

(Concluded from page 266.)

Ir has been somewhat too glibly assumed that because the Brahmanic conception of a God is represented as having been ridiculed by Sakya, and because he nowhere ascribes individuality to a Supreme Being, his system is an atheistic one. It is true that there is an avoidance of allusion to a personal deity, but it seems to be his reverence for his ideal of the universality of law that compels him to exclude any notion of personality. sonality, as the word is understood by the generality, would in his view imply a defect in that supreme ideal, a reduction to those lower elements wherein are limitations and impermanency.

Per

If we trace the history of the word person, it would appear that we are more apt to employ it now to signify an integral entity than is warranted by its original use. The Latin word persona, from which we draw it, represents the very opposite of such a sense; it means a mask, a temporary manifestation, a mere appearance, an external show. The corresponding Greek word signifying person springs also from the same dramatic root. To personify an abstract conception is to bring forward a thought into dialogue and dramatic form. The word means essentially outward appearance rather than inward verity. In Judæo-Greek thought, a respecter of persons is literally an acceptor of faces, one who can penetrate no deeper than the outward show.

To the Buddhist, in whose vision the supremely reverenced Law was that alone which is ultimate and eternal, it would have seemed profane to invest it with any of the selfish attributes of personality whose constant clash makes up the seething drama of terrestrial existence, and whose conquest is the way into heavenly emancipation.

A limited Pantheism - if so paradoxical an expression be allowable-would perhaps best represent the Buddhist conception of divine perfection. The soul released from its low conditions enters into a life that is one with the unconditioned Infinite; while the soul that dwells still in the weary whirl of selfish pursuit and repeated transmigration, is outside that Pleroma, which is too vast for man's heart to embrace, too inconceivable for the conditioned mind to define or explain.

The conception of a Love which by its very nature can, as it were, humble itself to sympathise even with the backslidings, impatience, and feebly renewed efforts of a stumbling soul, is the element lacking in the Buddhist theology, which, so far only as that negation extends, may be regarded as atheistic.

With a conception of deity so exceedingly abstract as that of Buddha, it is little wonder that in minds tending to rigid intellectuality the doctrine should run on into negation or a kind of atheism. Similarly, as the idea of the eternal

unchangeable condition of life was, intellectually speaking, and apart from its appeal to the feelings, arrived at mainly by the remotion of all the attributes of every-day life, it is natural that with many followers of Buddha the doctrine of Nirvana should lead to a blank prospect of utter annihilation. With another school, on the contrary, the idea became that of "restoration to the true condition of being," which is akin to the ancient doctrine of the Parsis, and in more or less sympathy with an element which is to be found deep in the heart of most religious faiths.

Buddha himself was probably content to leave something of mystery in his exposition of that unexplored land of rest. It was enough for him that he saw the way out of the inherent falsities of corporeal existence to be by the vanquishment of the personal ambitions and fretful fevers of the untamed mind. A teacher, whose eyes were opened, might well have faith enough to leave undefined the undefinable, and yet hold it to be truth that inconceivable existence, when actually entered, might be positive, and not negative, life. But the logicians of the metaphysical schools could not be content with this. If the intellect by itself be raised to the throne, it ousts faith, hope, and finally charity. Whatever is not mathematically clear must be abandoned; the worship of the definite excludes the entertainment, even for a moment, of unrealisable dreams and of the glimmer of impossible stars.

What it is that the contemplative devotee reaches is a difficult matter to solve. To the undeveloped soul that enters meditative life when the practical were the easier and more suitable school, the result may well be something apparently not far removed from imbecility; but what

is it that the dreamer of the joyful countenance has found?

can

But

Warren Hastings, who neither be regarded as an unpractical man nor as without opportunities of observation, thus wrote in 1784 upon the meditative faculty which was still an attribute of the Indian ascetic: "To those who have never been accustomed to this separation of the mind from the notices of the senses, it may not be easy to conceive by what means such a power is to be attained, since even the most studious men of our hemisphere will find it difficult so to restrain their attention but that it will wander to some object of present sense or recollection; and even the buzzing of a fly will sometimes have the power to disturb it. if we are told that there have been men who were successively, for ages past, in the daily habit of abstracted contemplation, begun in the earliest period of youth, and continued in many to the maturity of age, each adding some portion of knowledge to the store accumulated by his predecessors, it is not assuming too much to conclude that, as the mind ever gathers strength, like the body, by exercise, so in such an exercise it may in each have acquired the faculty to which they aspired, and that their collective studies may have led them to the discovery of new tracks and combinations of sentiment, totally different from the doctrines with which the learned of other nations are acquainted: doctrines which, however speculative and subtle, still, as they possess the advantage of being derived from a source so free from every adventitious mixture, may be equally founded in truth with the most simple of our own."

Perhaps a man well accustomed to worldly ways is nearer to an appreciation of that Nirvana

wherein the turmoil of selfish ambition is imagined to be stilled, than the merely intellectual critic can be. To the latter, Nirvana presents itself as a condition that must be defined with scientific exactitude; to the former it appeals without argument with the rude force of fact. Our own Bacon, who, like Buddha, had seen something of the world, wrote that "the long and solicitous dwelling in matter, experience and the uncertainty of particulars . . . fixeth the mind to earth, or rather sinketh it into an abyss of confusion and perturbation, at the same time driving and keeping it aloof from the serenity and tranquillity of a much diviner state; a state of abstract wisdom!"

Many of the followers of Buddha who rushed in to define what he with greater knowledge of the undefinable had left indefinite, were doubtless holy friars from youth, and ignorant of almost everything in the world but devotion and metaphysics. They would naturally fail to appreciate his broad and simple notion of Nirvana. Hence arises the paradox that, to become a Buddhist after the primitive pattern, the best way is not to study Buddhism but to be a man of the world.

And here we find the flaw of Buddhism as a system; it is like an exaggerated teetotalism. The young monk is withdrawn from the world before he knows what it is, and is kept by a rigid disciplinary system from the real teaching of causes and effects, which, slow though it may be, no religious leading strings can equal in efficacy.

The mills of God grind slowly,
But they grind exceeding small.

The aim of Buddhism, or indeed of any monastic system, is to remove the individual as far as pos

sible from this natural machinery of trial.

"Long is the night to him who is awake; long is a mile to him who is tired; long is life [transmigratory life, the constant revolution of birth and death] to the foolish who do not know the true law," says Buddha, according to the Pali Dhammapada; but so long as that kind of existence is not tedious to the individual immersed in it, the doctrine will take no hold on him. Better surely that he should be left to pass through the crucible of joys and pains than that he should become a monk before he knows what it is that he seeks to escape.

"Few there are among men who arrive at the other shore; the other people here run up and down the shore." Here is a recognition of the truth that many undeveloped souls prefer that running up and down the shore, that common uncertain life with its epochs of birth and death, to the most certain passage across to Nirvana.

How strong is the tendency to nominalism, which is worse than to have no religion at all, seems to have been a familiar thought with Buddha.

Here is his reply to a captious Brahman, in answer to the question, tion, "Who is the true disciple ?" "Not he who at stated times begs his food; not he who walks unrighteously, but hopes to be considered a disciple, desiring to establish a character (as a religious person), and that is all; but he who gives up every cause (karma) of guilt, and who lives continently and purely, who by wisdom is able to crush every evil (inclination)this man is the true friar."

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is all; but he whose heart is without preference (indifferent), whose inward life is pure and spiritual (empty), perfectly unmoved and dead to this or that (person or thing)-this man is called an inwardly enlightened man (Muni?)." "And who is a man of Bôdhi (an Ariya, or elected one') ?" "Not he who saves the life of all things [this must mean by formality, as of the man who, on principle, would not destroy vermin], but he who is filled with universal benevolence, who has no malice in his heart-he is a man of Bôdhi. And the man who observes the law is not he who talks much, but one who keeps his body (himself) in subjection to the law (religion), although he be a plain, untaught man, always guarding the way without any forgetfulness-this man is an observer of the law." This passage is from Mr. Beal's version of the Chinese text of the Dhammapada.

If it is hard to attain this condition, so also, says Buddha, is ordinary life hard:-"To aim at supreme wisdom and to give up sin is hard; but to live in the world as a worldly man is also hard. To dwell in a religious a religious community on terms of perfect equality as to worldly goods is difficult; but difficult beyond comparison is the possession of worldly goods. To beg one's food as a mendicant is hard; but what can a man do who does not restrain himself? By perseverance the duty becomes natural, and in the end there is no desire to have it otherwise."

This is as the precept which Bacon cites, "Optimum elige, suave et facile illud faciet consuetudo"-Fix upon that which is best, custom will make it easy and delightful. But even in this apparently perfect plan there is lurking danger, as an old gnomic philosopher, Publius Syrus, once

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discovered: "Bonarum consuetudo pessima est". tomedness of good things is the very worst of things.

The Buddhist friar who had left all evil behind might as readily fall into spiritual dormancy in his good things as the worldly man in his worldliness, and end in a mechanical religion, removed from worldly activity not by being drawn into higher and nobler activities, but as exchanging fever for nothing better than hibernation.

The Brahmans were careful not to make saints of unripe souls, for they had a law which has more than one humorous aspect, that, if a man at sixty years of age had not reached wisdom, it was his duty to return to his home and marry a wife.

There is a curious story of some Indian nuns which will show that the devotee is not always the most devout. They had sent to Buddha for an instructor, and he had responded by despatching an old mendicant of poor faculties who knew only one stanza of the law, but had learned its meaning thoroughly and could expound it. The party of nuns, learning who was to instruct them, began to laugh together, and laid a plot that when the old man came they should all repeat the verse backwards, and so confuse and put him to shame. Their agreement was frustrated by some minor miracle, according to the account as we have it; but the story at least shows that the nun of the time, even as seen by her own people, cannot have been much better than her less sanctified sisters.

Buddha again and again hurls himself with his full force against nominality; the following saying of his, which was probably the corner-stone upon which the legend just quoted was constructed, is

one evidence out of many :— "Although a man can repeat a thousand stanzas, but understand not the meaning of the lines he repeats, this is not equal to the repetition of one sentence well understood, which is able when heard to control thought. repeat a thousand words without understanding, what profit is there in this? But to understand one truth, and hearing it to act accordingly, this is this is to find deliverance.'

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The following is Buddha's definition of the true Brahman, which ancient term he adopted, with all its accumulated prestige, as a designation of his truest followers: It is not by his clan, or his platted hair, that a man is called a Brahman, but he who walks truthfully and righteously, he is indeed rightly called a good man. What avails the platted hair, O fool! what good the garment of grass? Within there is no quittance of desire, then what advantage the outward denial of self? Put away lust, hatred, delusion, sloth, and all its evil consequences, as the snake puts off his skin, this is to be a Brahmachârin indeed."

This passage is from the Chinese version of the Dhammapada, and it may be interesting to compare it with the rendering from the Pali, from which it differs very little. Max Müller Englishes as follows: "A man does not become a Brahmana by his platted hair, by his family, or by both; in whom there is truth and righteousness he is blessed, he is a Brahmana. What

is the use of platted hair, O fool? What of the raiment of goatskins? Within thee there is ravening, but the outside thou makest clean." We may add, also, the late Professor Childers's translation of the last paragraph, since it expresses a thought so familiar to Christen

dom: "Thou fool, what dost thou with the matted hair, what dost thou with the raiment of skin? Thine inward parts are full of wickedness, the outside thou makest clean."

Many a disappointment and rebuff must Sakya have experienced from the incurable frivolity of the generality before he could utter such words as follow: "Perceiving that the ignorant herd can never attain true wisdom, the wise man prefers in solitude to guard himself in virtuous conduct, not associating with the foolish; rejoicing in the practice of moral duties, and pursuing such conduct as becomes this mode of life, there is no need of a companion or associate in such practice solitary in virtue without sorrow, a man rejoices as a wild elephant escaped from the herd."

A man of the present age, one who may almost be called prophet, has expressed the same truth of baffling as that uttered by Buddha and many other spiritual men, in verses that rise in parts to eloquence. They may help us to appreciate the young Indian prince who quitted the life of a palace for that of a vagrant preacher:

Reformers fail, because they change the letter,

And not the spirit, of the world's design;

Tyrant and slave create the scourge and

fetter,

As is the worshipper will be the shrine. The ideal fails, though perfect were the plan;

World harmony springs through the perfect man.

We burn out life in hot, impatient striving,

We dash ourselves upon the hostile

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