The thoughtful student, in scanning the religious history of the race, has one fact continually forced upon his notice, viz., that there is an invariable tendency to deify whomsoever shows himself superior to the weakness of our common humanity. Look where we will, we find the saint-like man exalted into a divine personage and worshipped for a god. Though perhaps misunderstood, reviled and even persecuted while living, the apotheosis is almost sure to come after death: and the victim of yesterday's mob, raised to the state of an Intercessor in Heaven, is besought with prayer and tears, and placatory penances, to mediate with God for the pardon of human sin. This is a mean and vile trait of human nature, the proof of ignorance, selfishness, brutal cowardice, and a superstitious materialism. It shows the base instinct to put down and destroy whatever or whoever makes men feel their own imperfections; with the alternative of ignoring and denying these very imperfections by turning into gods men who have merely spiritualised This process of euhemerisation, as it is called, or the making of men into gods and gods into men, sometimes, though more rarely, begins during the life of the hero, but usually after death. The true history of his life is gradually amplified and decorated with fanciful incidents, to fit it to the new character which has been posthumously given him. Omens and portents are now made to attend his earthly avaṭāra: his precocity is described as superhuman: as a babe or lisping child he silences the wisest logicians by his divine knowledge: miracles he produces as other boys do soap-bubbles: the terrible energies of nature are his playthings: the gods, angels, and demons are his habitual attendants: the sun, moon, and all the starry host wheel around his cradle in joyful measures, and the earth thrills with joy at having borne such a prodigy: and at his last hour of mortal life the whole universe shakes with conflicting emotions. Why need I use the few moments at my disposal to marshal before you the various personages of whom these fables have been written? Let it suffice to recall the interesting fact to your notice, and invite you to compare the respective biographies of the Brāhmaṇical Kṛṣhṇa, the Persian Zoroaster, the Egyptian Hermes, the Indian Gauṭama, and the canonical, especially the apocryphal, Jesus. Taking Kṛṣhṇa or Zoroaster, as you please, as the most ancient, and coming down the chronological line of descent, you will find them all But letting all this pass and looking only to what is contained in the present Canon, we see the same tendency to compel all nature to attest the divinity of the writer's hero. At the nativity a star leaves its orbit and leads the Persian astrologers to the divine child, and angels come and converse with shepherds, and a whole train of like celestial phenomena occurs at various stages of his earthly career, which closes amid earthquakes, a pall of darkness over the whole scene, a supernatural war of the elements, the opening of graves and the walking about of their tenants, and other appalling wonders. Now, if the candid Buḍḍhist concedes that the real history of Gauṭama is embellished by like absurd exaggerations, and if we can find their duplicates in the biographies of Zoroaster, Shaṅkarāchārya and other real personages of antiquity, have we not the right to conclude that the true history of the Founder of Christianity, if at this late date it were possible to write it, would be very different from the narratives that pass current? We must not forget that Jerusalem was at that time a Roman dependency, I have cited this example for the sole and simple purpose of bringing home to the non-Buḍḍhistic portion of my present audience the conviction that, in considering the life of Sākya Muni and the lessons it teaches, they must not make his followers of to-day responsible for any extravagant exuberances of past biographers. The doctrine of Buḍḍha and its effects are to be judged quite apart from the man, just as the doctrine ascribed to Jesus and its effects are to be considered quite irrespectively of his personal history. And—as I hope I have shown—the actual doings and sayings of every founder of a Faith or a school of philosophy must be sought for under a heap of tinsel and rubbish contributed by successive generations of followers. Approaching the question of the hour in this spirit of precaution, what do we find are the probabilities respecting the life of Sākya Muni? Who was he? When did he live? How did he live? What did he teach? A most careful comparison of authorities and analysis of evidence establishes, I think, the following data: 1. He was the son of a king. 2. He lived between six and seven centuries before Christ. 3. He resigned his royal state and went to live in the jungle, and among the lowest and most unhappy 4. What he taught may be summed up in a few words, as the perfume of many roses may be distilled into a few drops of attar: Everything in the world of Matter is unreal; the only reality is in the world of Spirit. Emancipate yourselves from the tyranny of the former; strive to attain the latter. The Rev. Samuel Beal, in his Catena of Buḍḍhist Scriptures from the Chinese puts it differently. "The idea underlying the Buddhist religious system is," he says, "simply this: 'all is vanity'. Earth is a show, and Heaven is a vain reward." Primitive Buḍḍhism was engrossed, absorbed, by one thought—the vanity of finite existence, the priceless value of the one condition of Eternal Rest. If I have the temerity to prefer my own definition of the spirit of Buḍḍha's doctrine, it is because I think that all the misconceptions of it have arisen from a failure to understand his idea of what is real and what is unreal, what worth longing and striving for and what not. From this misconception have come all the unfounded charges that Buḍḍhism is an "atheistical," that is to say, a grossly materialistic, a nihilistic, a negative, a vice-breeding religion. Buḍḍhism denies the existence of a personal God The history of Sākya Muni's life is the strongest bulwark of his religion. As long as the human heart is capable of being touched by tales of heroic self-sacrifice, accompanied by purity and celestial benevolence of motive, it will cherish his memory. Why should I go into the particulars of that noble life? You will remember that he was the son of the king of Kapilavasṭu—a mighty sovereign whose opulence enabled him to give the heir of his house every luxury that a voluptuous imagination could desire: and that the future Buḍḍha was not allowed even to know, much less observe, the miseries of ordinary existence. How beautifully Edwin Arnold has painted for us in The Light of Asia the luxury and languor of that Indian Court, "where love was gaoler and delights its bars". We are told that: The king commanded that within those walls No mention should be made of age or death Sorrow or pain, or sickness ... And every dawn the dying rose was plucked, The dead leaves hid, all evil sights removed: For said the king, "If he shall pass his youth Far from such things as move to wistfulness And brooding on the empty eggs of thought, The shadow of this fate, too vast for man, May fade, belike, and I shall see him grow To that great stature of fair sovereignty, When he shall rule all lands—if he will rule— The king of kings and glory of his time." You know how vain were all the precautions taken by the father to prevent the fulfilment of the prophecy that his beloved son would be the coming Buḍḍha. Though all suggestions of death were banished from the royal palace, though the city was bedecked with flowers and gay flags, and every painful object removed from sight when the young Prince Siḍḍārtha visited it, yet the decrees of destiny were not to be baffled, the "voices of the spirits," the "wandering winds" and the ḍevas, whispered the truth of human sorrows into his listening ear, and when the appointed hour arrived, the Suḍḍha Ḍevas threw the spell of slumber over the household, steeped in profound lethargy the sentinels (as we are told was done by an angel to the gaolers of Peter's prison), rolled back the triple gates of bronze, strewed the sweet moghra-flowers thickly beneath his horse's feet to muffle every sound, and he was free. Free? Yes—to resign every earthly comfort, every sensuous enjoyment, the sweets of royal power, the homage of a Court, the delights of domestic life: gems, the glitter of gold: rich stuffs, rich food, soft beds: the songs of trained musicians, and of birds kept prisoners in gay cages, the murmur of perfumed waters plashing in marble basins, the delicious shade of trees in gardens where art had contrived to make nature even lovelier than herself. He leaps from his saddle when at a safe distance from the palace, flings the jewelled rein to his faithful groom, Channa, cuts off his flowing locks, gives his rich costume to a hunter in exchange for his own, plunges into the jungle, and is free: To tread its paths with patient, stainless feet, Making its dusty bed, its loneliest wastes My dwelling, and its meanest things my mates: Clad in no prouder garb than outcasts wear, Fed with no meals save what the charitable Give of their will, sheltered by no more pomp, Than the dim cave lends or the jungle-bush. This will I do because the woeful cry Of life and all flesh living cometh up Into my ears, and all my soul is full Of pity for the sickness of this world: Which I will heal, if healing may be found By uttermost renouncing and strong strife. Thus masterfully does Sir Edwin Arnold depict the sentiment which provoked this Great Renunciator. The testimony of thousands of millions who, during the last twenty-five centuries, have professed the Buḍḍhistic religion, proves that the secret of human misery was at last solved by this divine self-sacrifice, and the true path to Nirvāṇa opened. The joy that he brought to the hearts of others, Buḍḍha first tasted himself. He found that the pleasures of the eye, the ear, the taste, touch and smell are fleeting and deceptive: he who gives value to them brings only disappointment and bitter sorrow upon himself. The social differences between men he found were equally arbitrary and illusive; caste bred hatred and selfishness; riches strife, envy and malice. So in founding his Faith he laid the bottom of its foundation-stones upon all this worldly dirt, and its dome in the clear serene of the world of Spirit. He who can mount to a clear conception of Nirvāṇa will find his thought far away above the common What are the lessons to be derived from the life and teachings of this heroic prince of Kapilavasṭu? Lessons of gratitude and benevolence. Lessons of tolerance for the clashing opinions of men who live, move and have their being, think and aspire, only in the material world. The lesson of a common tie of brotherhood among all men. Lessons of manly self-reliance, of equanimity in breasting whatsoever of good or ill may happen. Lessons of the meanness of the rewards, the pettiness of the misfortunes of a shifting world of illusions. Lessons of the necessity for avoiding every species of evil thought and word, and for doing, speaking and thinking everything that is good, and for the bringing of the mind into subjection so that these may be accomplished without Well might St. Hilaire burst into the panegyric that Buḍḍha "is the perfect model of all the virtues he preaches ... his life has not a stain upon it". Well might the sober critic Max MÜller pronounce his moral code "one of the most perfect which the world has ever known". No wonder that in contemplating that gentle life Edwin Arnold should have found his personality "the highest, gentlest, holiest and most beneficent ... in the history of thought," and been moved to write his splendid verses. It is twenty-five hundred years since humanity put forth such a flower: who knows when it did before? Gauṭama Buḍḍha, Sākya Muni, has ennobled the whole human race. His fame is our common inheritance. His Law is the law of Justice, providing for every good thought, word and deed its fair reward, for every evil one its proper punishment. His law is in harmony with the voices of Nature, and the evident equilibrium of the universe. It yields nothing to importunities or threats, can be neither coaxed nor bribed by offerings to abate or alter one jot or tittle of its inexorable course. Am I told that Buḍḍhist laymen display vanity in their worship and ostentation in their almsgiving; that they are fostering sects as bitterly as Hinḍūs? So much the worse for the laymen: there is the example of Buḍḍha and his Law. Am I told that And what shall we say to those of another caste of character—the humble-minded, charitable, tolerant, religiously aspiring hearts among the laity, and the unselfish, pure and learned of the priests who know the Precepts and keep them? The Law will find them out also; and when the book of each life is written up and the balance struck, every good thought or deed will be found entered in its proper place. Not one blessing that ever followed them from grateful lips throughout their earthly pilgrimage will be found to have been lost; but each will help to ease their way as they move from stage to stage of Being Unto Nirvāṇa where the Silence Lives. |