(Scripture Reading Exercise.)

ANCIENT CONCEPTIONS OF GOD.—(Continued.)

SPECIAL TEXT: "All the gods of the nations are idols; but the Lord made the heavens. Honor and majesty are before Him; strength and beauty are in His sanctuary." Ps. xcvi:5.

NOTES.

1. Brahminism: General View: "Brahminism grew out of what is called the Vedic religion. Before Abraham's day, the people living in Central Asia, being a simple race, addressed their prayers to the powers of nature, as, for example, to the storms, the clouds and the sun, seeing the Deity in each of these. Hymns were written to these gods, and this forms the earliest of all sacred books, only excepting those from which Moses wrote his account of the early history of the world in Genesis. This people moved south into India. The priesthood arose, and the other Vedic books of ceremonies, sacrifices and liturgical forms were prepared. Great commentaries were written on these books, and all were declared to be inspired.

"The priests quarreled with the civil chiefs, but their sacred character was increased by the conflict, and caste is the result. The priests are the highest caste (or class); next come the warriors, then the merchant, the farmer, etc; last of all the tanners, buriers of the dead, etc. These classes never intermarry or intermingle in any way; it is contaminating to sit together even. About this time idols appear, and Gods multiply until they reach the number of 330,000,000. Men groaned under this stupendous system of oppressive idolatry. Buddha tried in the seventh century before Christ, to reform it, but he failed, though he succeeded in establishing a new faith which has numbered its converts by the hundreds of millions. But Brahminism continues to be the religion of India, even until today. Starting from the Veda, Hinduism has ended in embracing something from all religions, and in presenting phases suited to all minds. It is all-tolerant, all-compliant, all-comprehensive, all-absorbing. It has its spiritual and its material aspect, its esoteric and exoteric, its subjective and objective, its rational and irrational, its pure and impure. It has one side for the practical, another for the severely moral, another for the devotional and imaginative, another for the sensuous and sensual, and another for the philosophical and speculative. Those who rest in ceremonial observances find it all-sufficient; those who deny the efficacy of works and make faith the one requisite, need not wander from its pale; those who are addicted to sensuality may have their tastes fully gratified; those whose delight is in meditating upon the nature of God and of man, or the relations of matter and of spirit, the mystery of separate existence, or upon the origin of evil, may here indulge their love of speculation. And this capacity for almost limitless expansion causes almost numberless sectarian divisions even among the followers of any given particular line of doctrine. Yet there remains much of the old nature-worship, or more correctly speaking, of the old devil-worship, among the Hindus even at this late day." (Dobbins' "World's Worship," pp. 211-213).

2. Buddha: "The Enlightened," the title of Siddhartha, or Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. "He was born between 562 and 552 B. C. The Buddhist narratives of his life are overgrown with legend and myth. Senart seeks to trace in them the history of the sun-hero. Oldenberg finds in the most ancient traditions—those of Ceylon—at least definite historical outlines. Siddhartha, as Buddha was called before entering upon his great mission, was born in the country and tribe of Sakhyas, at the foot of the Nepalese Himalayas. His father, Suddhodana, was rather a great and wealthy land owner than a king. He passed his youth in opulence at Kapilavastu, the Sakhya capital. He was married and had a son Rahula, who became a member of his order. At the age of twenty-nine he left parents, wife, and only son, for the spiritual struggle of a recluse. After seven years he believed himself possessed of perfect truth, and assumed the title of Buddha, 'the enlightened.' He is represented as having received a sudden illumination as he sat under the Botree, or 'tree of knowledge,' at Bodhgaya or Buddha-Gaya. For twenty-eight or, as later narratives give it, forty-nine days, he was variously tempted by Mara. One of his doubts was whether to keep for himself the knowledge won, or to share it. Love triumphed, and he began to preach, at first at Benares. For forty-four years he preached in the region of Benares and Behar. Primitive Buddhism is only to be gathered by inference from the literature of a later time. Buddha did not array himself against the old religion. The doctrines were rather the outgrowth of those of certain Brahmanical schools. His especial concern was salvation from sorrow, and so from existence. There are 'four noble truths': (1) existence is suffering; (2) the cause of pain is desire; (3) cessation of pain is possible through the suppression of desire; (4) the way to this is the knowledge and observance of the 'good law' of Buddha. The end is Nirvana, the cessation of existence. Buddhism was preached in the vulgar tongue, and had a popular literature and an elaborately organized monastic and missionary system. It made its way into Afghanistan, Bactriana, Tibet, and China. It passed away in India not from Brahman persecution, but rather from internal causes, such as its too abstract nature, too morbid view of life, relaxed discipline, and overgrowth of monasticism, and also because Shivaism and Vishnuism employed many of its own weapons more effectively. The system has been variously modified in dogma and rites in the many countries to which it has spread. It is supposed to number about 350,000,000 of adherents, who are principally in Ceylon, Tibet, China, and Japan." (Century Dictionary, Art. Buddha).

3. The Original Elements in Buddhism: "What was original and new in Buddha was his changing a philosophical system into a practical doctrine; his taking the wisdom of the few, and coining as much of it as he thought genuine for the benefit of the many; his breaking with the traditional formalities of the past, and proclaiming for the first time, in spite of caste and creeds, the equality of the rich and the poor, the foolish and the wise, the 'twice-born' and the outcast. Buddhism, as a religion and as a political fact, was a reaction against Brahmanism, though it retained much of that more primitive form of faith and worship. Buddhism, in its historical growth, presupposes Brahmanism, and, however hostile the mutual relation of these two religions may have been at different periods of Indian history, it can be shown, without much difficulty, that the latter was but a natural consequence of the former." "Chips from a German Workshop" (Muller), Vol. I, p. 234.

4. Absence of God in Buddhism: "Buddhism has no God; it has not even the confused and vague notion of a Universal Spirit in which the human soul, according to the orthodox doctrine of Brahmanism, and the Sankhya philosophy, may be absorbed. Nor does it admit nature, in the proper sense of the word, and it ignores that profound division between spirit and matter which forms the system and glory of Kapila. It confounds man with all that surrounds him, all the while preaching to him the laws of virtue. Buddhism, therefore cannot unite the human soul, which it does not even mention, with a God, whom it ignores; nor with nature, which it does not know better. Nothing remained but to annihilate the soul; and in order to be quite sure that the soul may not reappear under some new form in this world, which has been cursed as the abode of illusion and misery, Buddhism destroys its elements, and never gets tired of glorying in this achievement. What more is wanted? If this is not the absolute nothing, what is Nirvana?

"Such religion, we should say, was made for a madhouse. But Buddhism was an advance, if compared with Brahmanism; it has stood its ground for centuries, and if truth could be decided by majorities, the show of hands, even at the present day, would be in favor of Buddha. The metaphysics of Buddhism, like the metaphysics of most religions, not excluding our own Gnosticism and Mysticism, were beyond the reach of all except a few hardened philosophers or ecstatic dreamers. Human nature could not be changed. Out of the very 'nothing' it made a new paradise; and he who had left no place in the whole universe for a Divine Being, was deified himself by the multitudes who wanted a person whom they could worship, a king whose help they might invoke, a friend before whom they could pour out their most secret griefs. And there remained the code of a pure morality, proclaimed by Buddha. There remained the spirit of charity, kindness, and universal pity with which he had inspired his disciples. There remained the simplicity of the ceremonial he had taught, the equality of all men which he had declared, the religious toleration which he had preached from the beginning. There remained much, therefore, to account for the rapid strides which his doctrine made from the mountain peaks of Ceylon to the Tundras of the Samoyedes." (Ibid, pp. 250-1).