English
Buddhist doctrine has fared but little better than Buddhist gospel narrative in the hands of the dis- tinguished scholars who have rendered the Western world the service of ¢vanslating a good many of the writings in which it is enshrined, without conferring on us the additional benefit of elucidating the spiritual science which that doctrine cautiously sets forth. Indeed, the plain fact of the matter is that two leading ideas concerning Buddhist doctrine have been presented to the world by the principal writers on the subject, and that both these ideas are on a level with the roast pork theory. These ideas are that Buddhism does not recognise any future conscious life of the individual man beyond the grave, and that in exhorting us to tread the path which leads to Nirvana, it proceeds on the ultra-pessimistic view that all conscious life must be misery; so that the only wise course for us to pursue 76 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. is to court its extinction in profound and dreamless slumber, in utter oblivion of all things, in that Nirvana which we are told to regard as identical with absolute annihilation. Spence Hardy, Max Miuiller, Rhys David, Alabaster, Bigandet, Bournouf, and others, might be shown by reference to unequivocal passages to entertain this idea, perhaps most grotesquely emphasised by an American caricaturist of Buddhist doctrine, Dr. S. H. Kellogg. The German commentator on Buddhism, Dr. Oldenberg, is honourably distinguished by com- bating the theory that the Buddhist Nirvana is equiva- lent to annihilation ; but though he argues the question in an elaborate and painstaking way, he does not put his finger on available passages in Buddhist scrip- tures that would settle the matter decisively. Barth, also, in his “ Religions of India,” “takes leave to doubt’ whether the intention of Buddhism was to preach that there is no survival of the individual con- sciousness from one incarnate existence to another, but even he thinks that “this vaguely apprehended and feebly postulated ego’’ cannot be compared with the “simple and imperishable soul of the Sankhya philosophy.’’ And as a whole, European Buddhistic exegesis may be held to rest chiefly on the two ideas above referred to—no future life, and annihilation in Nirvana. Now, the reconciliation of these two commanding misapprehensions has given critics of Buddhism no little trouble. For, on the face of things, if man’s consciousness is merely a matter of this life, he need not go through the self denial and privations of the RE-INCARNATION. a7 candidate for Nirvana to accomplish the annihilation that must await him anyhow. And again, Buddhist teaching is saturated with references to Karma, which, as the sum total of merit and demerit that determines the conditions of a man’s next rebirth, seems to pre- suppose the persistence of the soul-consciousness which those conditions are apparently designed either to reward or punish. But the embarrassment 1s got over by help of the theory—for the ingenuity of which Dr. Rhys David appears to deserve the credit—that Karma does not follow an individual soul from one incarnation to the other, but causes the birth of an entirely new individuality, which becomes the inde- pendent heir, for good or evil, of its predecessor. The motive which each person thus has for making a sacrifice of himself to achieve Nirvana, 1s altogether altruistic. His Karma being extinguished in the total annihilation of Nirvana, no other being is born along that line of influence to suffer the pain and sorrow of existence. The inventor of this idea admits that the motive does not seem a strong one, as a fundamental rule of human conduct; but its insufficiency does not present itself to his mind as a ground for distrusting the former conclusions out of which it grows. All this misdirection of thought appears to have been started by forgetfulness on the part of the first interpreters of Buddhism to the modern West— Bournouf and Spence Hardy especially—of the broad fact that Buddha was a religious reformer rather than a person who made any profession of re-codifying the 78 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. whole body of religious truth from A to Z. Roughly speaking he takes the entire block of Hindu faith, or Brahminical philosophy, for granted, and builds upon that, the higher teaching he has to offer from his store of “dried boar’s flesh ’’—of esoteric wisdom, adapted to the understanding of the multitude. ‘“‘ The simple and imperishable soul of Sankhya philosophy’ is the property of the Buddhist, just as fully as of the earlier Brahmin or later Hindu. Current religious instruction before Buddha took up his task had familiarised the people with the idea that good men went to Heaven and bad men to hell. But Buddha did not put that fundamental idea in the forefront of his teaching. It was unnecessary to do so. Indian theology was already stocked to over-flowing with ideas concerning the life after death in the numerous heavens and hells which its doctrines recognised. And it was also fully possessed with the conviction that in each case, after the appropriate period of spiritual enjoyment or suffer- ing, the soul would return to earthly incarnation. Buddha’s reform started from these assumptions. The fact is acknowledged by modern writers, but not its force. Professor Sir Monier Williams, in his treatise on Hinduism for the S. P. C. K., says: ‘“‘ About five centuries before our era, the reformer Buddha appeared, and about contemporaneously with him _ various Brahmin sages, stimulated by his example and perhaps by that of others who preceded him, thought out what are called the orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy.”’ What did such thought amount to? Sir Monier Williams sums it up as including these articles of faith, RE-INCARNATION. 79 amongst others: The eternity of the soul, prospectively and retrospectively; the periodical removal of the soul to places of reward or punishment ; the subsequent return of the soul to corporeal existence. Buddha, from the standpoint of these conceptions, addressed himself especially to the task of showing men that, beyond spiritual conditions and rebirth, there lay possibilities of human evolution which, in their trans- cendent excellence, rendered the familiar alternations of corporeal and ethereal existence relatively unworthy of acceptance. A state of blessedness which would come to a definite end was, for his exalted perception, no state of blessedness at all. Human life on earth, though such as men might esteem as happy, was subject to manifold perils and to decay. It was a state for the wise man to avoid by making the stupendous effort that would emancipate his desires from all the objects of sense, and thus cut off the attractions that would otherwise inevitably bring him back again, after a period of heavenly existence, to physical incarnation. Buddha’s sermons and lessons became thus almost altogether concerned with the contemplation of that transcendent spiritual condition described by the term Nirvana, but never defined with any degree of precision, simply because its attributes were by the hypothesis insusceptible of exact definition in terms of the physical intellect. That which men in the flesh can imagine as attractive must necessarily be tainted with the limitations and sense of separateness inherent in the incarnate imagination. Nirvana could 80 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. only be described by negatives which ruled it off from any state of being which individual aspirations for happiness would be capable of picturing in the mind. And while the attempt would have been fruitless, it was, at the same time, unnecessary for Buddha to define Nirvana, because the idea to be dealt with was no novelty for Hindu audiences. Referring again to Sir Monier Williams’ epitome of Hindu faith, we find that system of thought, quite independently of Buddha’s teaching, to recognise that the supreme state of bliss involved an escape from ali sense of individual personality — complete absorption into the Supreme and only existing Being who is wholly unfettered by action, without qualities of any kind— pure life, pure thought, pure joy. No one, from the physical plane of existence, can under- stand such a condition; but this impossibility does not justify us in the absurdity of pretending on that account to understand it as equivalent to annihila- tion. We are not even called upon, for the purposes of the present argument, to consider whether or not, Buddha himself understood it. It is enough to realise that undeniably Buddha treated it as a state of being which was supremely desirable by reason of its exaltation in the scale of Nature above all other states of being, and that in doing this he had no antagonistic opinion on that point to combat. Brah- minism already recognised Nirvana, under various names—the ultimate absorption into the Supreme— as the most glorious goal to which humanity could turn. The failure of modern Western thinkers to RE-INCARNATION. 8r recognise the splendour of such an ideal is plainly due to our deeper immersion in material habits of thought, in which the sense of separateness that Oriental philosophy, at all events, already perceived to be a defect of the incarnate imagination, has been elevated into the sine quad non of all conditions to be desired. We may be able to conceive a high degree of spiritualisation in consciousness. We may contem- plate an existence as free from all lower passions, and yet attractive; but we find it hard to realise that ultimate exemption from the fetters of Self, which finds its most glorious fulfilment in complete identification with the universal consciousness.