LECTUREV.THE BUDDHIST SANGHA[244]: THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.
The designation “Church,” never wholly applicable to Buddhism in the sense in which Christians employ it, was totally inapplicable to the primitive Buddhist communities. The institution of the Church is peculiar to Christianity, for though we speak of the worship of Krishna, or the religion of Baal, we never speak of the church of the one or the other. Christianity is the only religion which has created a society which no political revolution can destroy, and no civilisation, however advanced, can outlive. It may change its form, or express itself in several co-existent forms; but it is so adapted to the nature and necessities of man that it is properly described, in its relation to his present condition, as divine and everlasting.
Though the Church is the creation of Christ and the fruit of His mission, the idea of it had been suggested to the world long ages before Hecame. “Ecclesia” is peculiarly a New Testament word, but there are found in the Old Testament Scriptures plain foreshadowings of the reality represented by it. In Abraham, “called” out from his country and kindred, that he might be separated unto the worship of Jehovah, we have the first pre-intimation of the Church. In relation to other nations, his descendants were the “peculiar people” and Ecclesia of Jehovah, and when as a nation they failed to embody and express the universal truths, which it is the Church’s function to communicate for the blessing of all the world, there was called out from them, or rather there was formed within them, “the remnant,” so often referred to by Isaiah and the subsequent prophets; and in this spiritual community and fellowship, dissociated from the national religion,[245]were conserved and perpetuated the truths and ideals from which they had fallen away. After the Captivity, in the rise of the synagogue system of worship, there was provided an organisation, whose essential details Christ and His apostles in instituting the Church could either adopt or copy; and there can be no question that from out this synagogue system the Christian Church emerged, and that even to-day it reflects some of its peculiar features.
The Church was the fruit of Christianity, butthe Sangha was the root out of which Buddhism sprang. In a Sangha its founder lived and learned and taught, till as Buddha he founded his own; but just as he gave a new significance to the doctrines in which he had been instructed, so he gave the Sangha an application which accounts for, though it does not justify, the designation often accorded to it of a church. As an order without worship, a brotherhood without any recognition of the uniting Fatherhood in heaven, a confraternity in which seniority was assigned only to age,[246]and whose leaders never pretended to hold any priestly office or to exercise any hierarchical authority, the Sangha at first and for long was not a church; yet when we examine its constitution and aims we need not wonder that the religious instincts of Buddhists, proving stronger than their creed, should have developed their Sangha into something like a church, with a cult which, at first consisting only of veneration for his images and relics, for long has been almost second to none in the world for solemnity and dignity and pomp.[247]
We have seen that philosophic schools and religious sects originating in secessions from the national religion abounded in India long before Buddha’s day. In the Gangetic valley, as inGreece, the new sages attracted their disciples by the fame of their teaching, but there, not as in Greece, the disciples lived with their masters apart, and distinguished from the world by peculiar dress and manners. Of Monachism, an early outgrowth of Hindu religion, and indeed its essential adjunct, as being the state which marked the maturity and completion of a good man’s earthly life, there were already many forms, all held in high respect by the people. Celibacy and mendicancy were common to all Sanghas, but in regard to vows of silence, and fasting, and self-torture, they differed greatly from one another. The majority of them were Brahman in their constitution and in their recognition of caste: but long before the rise of Buddhism the Sraman fraternities, founded on the non-recognition of caste, were quite equal to the purest Brahman ones in public esteem. Now in organising the Sakya-putta-Samanas, the designation by which his disciples were first known by the people, Buddha adopted many features and details of discipline common to all these fraternities, while yet the peculiarity of his doctrines gave to the community of his own disciples a character quite distinctive.
The Brahman Orders believed that Brahmans only could be finally saved, and Brahman reformers could only encourage inferior castes that came to them for enlightenment by the hope of possiblysecuring a higher birth in a future state. Buddha, however, considered all men alike in respect of need, so, knowing of only one way of deliverance, he proclaimed it without distinction, and, like the Sramans, he opened his Sangha to all who were willing to submit to his discipline. Unlike many of the Sraman fraternities, he discouraged the life of solitude, and prohibited the practice of self-torture and severe austerities. In opposition to the hated Nigganthas, who, aiming at perfection, went about with only the light and air for their clothing, he insisted that his disciples should be decently clad.[248]In respect that he required obedience from disciples only as long as they continued to be so, and would not permit irrevocable vows—indeed, exacted from them no vow at all—his Sangha was more like some Anglican guild than any monastic institution with which we are acquainted.
Still more widely did it differ, not only from many, but from all the existing fraternities in the purpose for which he instituted it. Hitherto India had never witnessed a religious sect that could be called propagandist. Brahmanism was essentially exclusive, for no man could become a Brahman by conversion. The Sraman sages again, left themasses to ripen in evil ways for worse lives in more degraded spheres of future existence, in order to deliver themselves by ascetic practices and meditation. At best they taught those who resorted to them, and were prepared to consort with them. Buddha, however, by laying upon the brethren the obligation of extending the knowledge of the law, inaugurated a revolution in the monastic system which anticipated that of the great Mendicant Orders of Christendom. Just asSt.Francis emptied the monasteries and sent forth their inmates to find their own in seeking the salvation of others, so Buddha broke down the barriers between the Indian recluses and the world, by ordaining the members of his Sangha to teach their fellow-men the way to liberty. “Therefore, O brethren, to whom the truths which I have perceived have been made known by me, having thoroughly mastered them, meditate upon them, practise them, spread them abroad, in order that the pure Dhamma may last long and be perpetuated, in order that it may continue to be for the good and happiness of the great multitude, out of pity for the world, to the good, and gain, and weal of gods and men.”[249]
This was the original element[250]in his conception, and while one of its effects was to save the membersof the Sangha from some of the evils besetting the life of the recluse by balancing the duty of contemplation by that of active itineration, its chief and immediate result was to give Buddhism an expansive power marvellous to Indians. Religious fraternities depended upon the presence of their teachers, and consequently the members were few, but Buddha commanded the brethren to go forth. “Let not two of you go the same way” was the original instruction, and preach the doctrine “which is glorious in the beginning, glorious in the middle, glorious in the end, in the spirit and in the letter, for the pure and perfect life, for the complete cessation of sorrow.”[251]By and by these missionaries were authorised to receive those who desired admission into the Sangha, and after a due novitiate to ordain them;[252]and so we need not wonder that this itineracy, which in the earliest days was the very essence of a good Buddhist’s duty, should have had the effect of spreading the doctrines and gathering converts so rapidly that in some of the earliest extant scriptures the Sangha was known as “the Brotherhood of the Four Quarters”[253]of what to Indian thought was the world.
Thus far the Sangha was different from theinstitutions that preceded it, but, unlike the Christian Church, which finally emerged from Judaism as the one holy Church of all nations and of both sexes, and of all classes of men, the Buddhist Sangha bore with it, and never lost, several marks of its Hindu origin. One relic of its extraction it most zealously conserved as essential to the moral restraint which it encouraged; for though later on it attracted associates whom it recognised as in the ways of deliverance, it was from the very first an exclusively monastic order. Indeed, Monachism, or the life of retirement, privation, and chastity, had in Buddhism a place quite different from that which it occupied in Brahmanism.[254]The meditative Brahman anchorite was not considered the only man who was in the way to deliverance, for every believer in Brahman ascendency was free to choose one of three ways of securing salvation,[255]but in Buddhism renunciation of the world represented the highest form of religion, and the indispensable condition of reaching Nirvana. So, though in opening the Sangha to all classes, andproclaiming, in opposition to Brahmanism, that every man was capable of the highest enlightenment, Buddha sapped the foundation of caste, it was only to replace it in another form.[256]The mendicant monk, as has been truly observed, took the Brahman’s place, and for him alone Nirvana was reserved. So sharply defined were the lines which divided the Sangha from the rest of mankind, that no one who had not come out from the world was regarded as in it and of it.
This was quite in keeping with the Buddhist conception of deliverance. The Sangha simply was an attempt to realise the idea and purpose of the creed. Salvation according to Christ meant rescue from the power of evil, but not withdrawal from the world as so incurably evil that the sooner man got out of it the better. Instead of making His Church an asylum and refuge from the world, He organised it for the redemption of the world. Instead of attempting to destroy civil society, He aimed at its purification by the leavening influence of the new society which He was creating. The Church was to be Christ’s witness when He was no longer visible, the instrument by which His own power would bear upon the wants of mankind. The slavery and the degradation of society, the destruction of the world, was never meant to be the condition ofthe existence or of the liberty and dignity of the Church. It was but a means to an end, a means so essential that without it the end could not be reached, but, once the end has been reached, the Church will be superseded, or rather will be merged in the kingdom of God. So the very symbol of it is not found in the apocalyptic visions of the new heaven and the new earth. In the civitas of the new JerusalemSt.John saw families and nations and kingdoms, but he could see no temple therein, for the instrumentality of which the temple was the symbol had done its work in the emancipation and education of the human race, and had vanished into the more glorious and eternal realities of the throne of God and of the Lamb.
In Buddhism we find a set of ideas quite contradictory to all these. The Sangha was the vehicle of rescue from out the world, not the bringer of salvation to it; it worked not for the regeneration of society, but for its disintegration and destruction. It considered the world to be so hopelessly incurable, and even existence to be so weighted with misery, that wisdom would move men to abandon the one to its fate, and goodness impel them to strive to bring the other to an end. The monastery, therefore, was naturally its loftiest conception of the Civitas Dei, and into that it endeavoured totransform as large a section of humanity as was inclined to accept its law.
This unnatural theory of life indicates the essential weakness of Buddhism, and makes its history very instructive to Christians. In the Church, perhaps, room may be accorded to the monastery and convent, as long as they are sanctified by the Christian idea of self-abnegation in the service of others, but the attempt to transform the Church into a monastery, dominated by the Buddhist idea of abnegation of the world for the sake of self, can only create unmitigated evil. The effect of it in primitive Buddhism was not only to withdraw good men from the world at the very time when its diseased condition most required the help of their preserving salt, but the salt itself, not being used for its natural and proper purpose, soon lost its savour. The substitution of an artificial for a natural standard of excellence inevitably tends to destroy even virtue. Very soon in the Sanghas active itineracy and devout contemplation gave way to listless indolence and enervating reverie, and there emerged a mode of life from which the great mass of healthy men will ever revolt, as sanctioning the idea that the more useless we become in this world the more fitted for a better we may safely consider ourselves to be.
The Buddhist Sangha, therefore, though in nosense resembling the Christian Church, does resemble some of its after-growths. These, however, must be regarded as parasitical in their nature, for though fed by its life, they do not spring from its root. In Christianity, Monachism represents a tendency of human nature incidental to its development rather than the essential fruit of Christian principle; but the Buddhist idea of a true society is one essentially and completely monastic. This one fact is sufficient to show that the similarities discoverable between the Buddhist and Christian institutions are more apparent than real, while the contrasts between them are found to be deeper and more substantial the more they are examined.
The monachism of Christianity originated, it is said, in the endeavour to reproduce the ideal of excellence represented in the life of Jesus. In the life of Jesus there was nothing monastic. Though He appeared in the land of the Essenes, though heralded by a solitary ascetic, though the age was one of universal defection, when because of its corruption it seemed impossible to live a man’s life in society, Jesus lived freely in the world as He found it, and laid His blessing on all of it that was natural, and on all of it that was necessary. He did not refuse to enjoy any of the good gifts of God; He warned us against despising orthrowing them away, though He asked us to be ready, when love calls, to let them go, or relinquish them for the good of others. He gave Himself wholly to His mission, and He took no thought for the morrow. If He called His apostles from their secular callings, it was not because such callings hindered their own salvation, but because, withdrawn from them for love of God and man, they would be freer to serve the world. We have interpreted the Apostolate as expressing His desire that in the Church there will always be an order devoted specially to the service of religion, but this form of service was never meant to be regarded as the only religious service. If one calling is consecrated, it is as one day is consecrated, that all may be sanctified thereby. The world was never renounced by the apostles that they might work out their own salvation; and if they “exercised” themselves it was because self-control fitted them to render more valuable service for man’s redemption. The missionary zeal which drove the members of the Primitive Church all over the world to sow the seeds of truth and love made them take no thought of what they should eat or what they should drink; and missionary zeal all through the Christian ages has manifested the same indifference to the Βιωτικά of existence; but those who have been most inspired by it, and whohave found nothing impracticable in following the manner of life which our Lord Himself led, have never deemed it the only way, or even the highest way, of Christian service. It was that to which they felt inwardly moved and called by the Holy Ghost, and, like the apostles, they exhorted all others to abide in the callings wherein they were called.
Primitive Christianity, like any other religion, was susceptible to morbid affections, and the germs of disease with which the atmosphere around it was charged found early a lodgment within it, and soon matured into portentous fertility. The persecutions of the Church, the terrible corruption of the world, the troubles and temptations consequent on the first junction of Christianity with the Imperial Power, the mistaken idea that the world which the Church had manifestly failed to transform, or even preserve, was doomed, and that Christ was speedily coming in His glory to judge it, strengthened the ascetic tendency to come out and be separate from it.[257]By the end of the third century the deserts of Egypt and Arabia, and the mountains of Asia Minor, were so peopled with recluses that in one spot alone there were ten thousand men and twenty thousand women. Atthe close of another century Monachism had a home in every province of the Oriental Church, and monks and nuns formed “a nation,” as distinct from the clergy as the clergy were from the common believers, and in many instances they were hated and persecuted by clergy and laity alike.[258]
The original purpose of the founders of the new institution, however, was not to shelter mystics and visionaries, but to train soldiers and martyrs. Solitude was not intended to be an asylum for the weak, or an infirmary for the diseased, but an arena for the training and testing of athletes. “Come,” says Chrysostom,[259]“and see the tents of the soldiers of Christ. Come, behold their order of battle.” Augustine also refers to them as “milites Christi,” even as later on they were designated as “the chivalry of the Church” and “the paladins of God.” Though not of the world, and being above its ways, they were yet in it and for it. So these retreats were not only technical schools, representing the industries essential to the well-being of man; they were also academies for sacred studies, from which went forth champions like Athanasius to defend the faith against the heretic, and like Basil to defend the Church against theEmpire. They were also brotherhoods of charity, in which in self-imposed austerities men grew tender in respect for the miseries of others, and anticipated in much more unfavourable times the hospitals for “sick children” and “lepers” and “incurables,” which we are inclined to regard as the peculiar products of the latest Christian centuries.[260]Of course, early Christian Monachism had its ridiculous extravagances, in types like the Stylites and Browsers; and of course even its soberer types soon degenerated through over cultivation, till it became a greater hindrance to the spread of Christianity than all external opposition and persecution. The spirit of piety which it originated was speedily poisoned by superstition; theological discussion supplanted the love of earnest study; the spirit of obedience and loyalty was superseded by that of intrigue and revolt. So though it spread, it was not as a contagion of health, but as an infectious disease, whose evil effects are traceable in the decrepitude which the Oriental Church has never been able to throw off.
In the Western Church, Monachism, though less brilliant in its beginnings than its Eastern precursor, has had a longer and healthier course. It is not within the scope of this lecture even tosketch it, or to analyse and tabulate its results. We live in an age which has certainly little sympathy with the ideal of Christianity which it sought to realise, but that is not sufficient reason that we should affect to despise it, or imagine that we have outgrown the necessity for it. The life of the recluse may be beyond our attainment, for we may be so afraid to be alone, and so unable to endure “conversation with ourselves,” that we have to take refuge in perpetual society. The “weakness” of the old asceticism many of us have not the strength to practise, for we are too much under the dominion of the flesh, which they at least could master, and we are far too inclined to treat with unnecessary tenderness what they chastised and immolated. The vows of poverty and obedience and chastity may be the very medicine we require, in a condition of public sentiment so unhealthy that a man’s standing, and worth, and even life, seems to consist in the abundance of his goods, and his freedom in licence to despise all authority and indulge all his likings. No doubt, in the West as in the East, Monachism eventually became an impediment to Christian civilisation, but not until it had considerably regenerated and uplifted it. It kept before the Church the dignity of manual labour, it wiped out the discredit attaching to honest poverty, it proclaimed the equalityof men by treating rich and poor alike, and it proved the defender of the oppressed, the mediator between the strong and the feeble. “We are the poor of Christ,” says Bernard, “and the friendship of the poor makes us the equals of kings.” Then just as unquestionably it was the pioneer of learning and of enterprise, the guardian of law and the fosterer of charity. There is hardly a city or populous centre in Europe which does not owe its churches, universities, hospitals, charitable institutions, either in their origin or growth, to the cœnobites and celibates of former ages; and whether we acknowledge or repudiate our debt to them, “its magnitude confronts us more imposingly the more we honestly consider it.”
But like all unnatural segregations of human beings from society, for which man was made, Monachism everywhere became eventually an excuse for indolence and misanthropy; a refuge for the melancholy, and for all who had become unfit to serve either the world or the Church. Its whole history in the Christian Church has justified the warning ofSt.Paul against artificial methods of attaining to saintliness. The vices which beset society never lost any of their power over the recluses of the desert or the inmates of the monastery, while many other vices were added to the host that assailed the solitary, undefendedby his fellows.[261]“Woe to him that is alone, for when he falls there is not another to raise him up! Woe to him that is alone, for there is no one to keep him from falling!” are the lessons of this long mistaken attempt to realise an undemanded standard of excellence; and yet, just because of the consistency of its ideal with one side of Christian service, modern Christendom, though in altered and modified forms, has not parted with Monachism yet.
“The ideal of the Christian monk,” says Montalembert, “is that of manhood in its purest and most energetic form—manhood intellectually and morally superior, devoting itself to efforts greater and more sustained than are exacted in a worldly career; and this not to make earthly service a stepping-stone to heaven, but of life a long series of victories for man.”[262]Surely this is the ideal of every Christian minister truly consecrated to the service of man; yea, the ideal of every brother or sister who, married or single, in business or society, is trying to reach forward to the mark of our high calling. There is no code of disabilities in the service of Christ, and the way to the highest honours is open to all who wish toenter it, of whatever condition or rank or mental capacity they may be. When this common ideal was fallen from in the monastic orders, it was being realised by many private members of the Church; when the professional Church had falsified it, it was being upheld by so-called “men of the world”; and therefore, as a natural consequence, when the monastic orders of Christendom became corrupt, society, true to its better instincts, rose up and reformed them or swept them away. There was always a large volume of life outside the particular channel which these orders filled, to purify it when it became foul, or to force it onward, when stagnant, into the life of the Church.
But it was not so in Buddhism. Its lay associates, however numerous, were but the fringes of religious communities essentially and wholly monastic. When, therefore, deterioration or degradation in the Order set in, reformation of it by the people was hopeless. In the Order this deterioration showed itself earlier that its dominant ideal was lower than the Christian. In early Christian Monachism, fortitude and devotion all sprang from the immolation of self for the universal good. In Buddha’s Sangha, however, though there was both devotion and fortitude displayed, the goal to be reached was simply self-rescue. Its course of beneficence therefore was not onlyshorter but shallower. Unintentionally it wrought out social reforms, and perhaps political revolution. It restrained luxury, and checked the unbounded sensuality to which Indians are prone; it rebuked the earthly-minded, and witnessed nobly of the higher interests of life to peoples that sorely needed the testimony. It not only propagated morality, but promoted learning, and a love of the beautiful in nature and art, but its force was eventually exhausted. Very early it sank into the stagnation in which it has existed for centuries, and any advance registered by the nations among whom the institution has existed has been due, for more than a thousand years, to the influx of Christian ideas and sentiments.
Its own methods hastened its decay. Like all Eastern religious growths, it represented the piety of inertion. Manual labour of all kinds was placed under the ban, and beyond attending to the cleanliness of his person and of his lodging the Buddhist monk was not allowed to do anything save itinerate for his maintenance and the preaching of the law. He was instructed that every moment abstracted from meditation was serious loss. This was in direct contradiction to the very first rule of Christian solitary life, which even in the stifling heat of the desert demanded manual tasks, which fasting might be said to havedoubled, continued through the long day till vespers summoned the labourers to worship. The Buddhist monk knew neither the healthy life of physical exertion nor the spiritual refreshment of worship. He might vindicate his idleness against the reproaches of the industrious by the assertion that he too in his quiet life was also “ploughing and sowing” to much better purpose,[263]but then the effect of his ploughing and the fruit of his sowing were all confined to himself, who alone was freed by it from suffering. He could not answer, as the Nicæan monk and quondam courtier replied to Valens, when challenged as to whither he was going, “I go to pray for your empire.”[264]Augustine has indeed assured us that “the less a monk labours in anything but prayer the more serviceable he is to men”; but the prayer which he had in view was not selfish. On the contrary, the tears and penitential exercises of men who had become strangers to all personal desires “were mighty to drown sin and purify the world.”[265]As long as monks were truly prayerful, and nuns, like vestals, kept alive the sacred fire for every hearth, they represented that side of the Church’s mediation which is most important and effective;for no one can be really effective in the service of man who is not frequent in the service of waiting upon God. The heroes of the Christian Church, who have evangelised and civilised the wild waste places of the world, who, like the apostle, laid aside every encumbrance to run their race, were, like the apostle, men of much meditation and prayer. We have no such examples in Buddhism, for it lacked the provision which alone could nurture them. In the life of the Buddhist monk there was probably more, and more intense meditation than in that of the Christian, but there was a vast difference in their respective themes of meditation. The Christian could draw his inspiration from a source far higher and purer than himself, and in communion with the Father, Redeemer, Sanctifier of his spirit gather a strength which astonished the world; but what possible inspiration for endeavour could come to a poor Buddhist monk who was chiefly occupied in contemplating the impurity of his perishable body, and whose very highest theme of meditation was simply “nothing whatever”?[266]
Another essential distinction between the two modes of life is disclosed in their relation to charity. We have seen that Buddhism had no conception of charity in the Christian sense, and that practicalcharity in it was represented from a pole quite opposite to that of Christianity. As if conscious of its defects, later Buddhism originated faith in and hope of Maitreya, the Buddha who is next to come, and who, as the son of love, will realise its unconscious prophecies, fulfil its longings, and perfect all things; but notwithstanding this the Buddhist monk continued to be the receiver, not the dispenser, of charity. His whole merit consisted in taking what it was the merit of the layman to offer him:[267]and the taking was all for himself and for his Order. He had no conception of the life suggested in the saying, “As poor, yet making many rich,” and he never could have said of his monastery that it was“l’infirmière des pauvres.”To offer charity to others was the last conception which he could form of his duty: yea, to clothe the naked, take the leper from the dunghill, and help the outcast, was the very reverse of his duty. His creed as to misery in this being the fruit of evil done in a former existence, cut him off from that service of the lost and fallen which in Christendom has been accounted glorious, and for the rendering of which, several of its monastic institutions have been spared the penalty of their corruption.
The charity which the Buddhist monk practisedwas in his preaching and exposition of the law for the deliverance of the multitudes. And that this may be the very highest form in which benevolence can express itself all Christians must admit, for the greatest gift which any man can bestow is the truth which makes one free. Buddhist monk and Christian missionary alike proclaimed a gospel for the redemption of men; and as the gospel of Christ’s salvation brings ever many blessings in its train, so the preaching of the mendicant Buddhist was attended with material beneficial results to those who heard and believed it. The Buddhist, however, while expounding the law for the rescue of the individual, never laboured, like the Christian missionary, for his temporal and social improvement. His message had no promise for the life that now is, and consequently he never seems to have played the part so nobly sustained by many of the monks of Christendom—that of defending the oppressed and befriending the helpless. He never, so far as can be gathered from the texts, proclaimed the equality of men in the same way and for the same purpose as a Christian reformer would preach it. Theoretically, he maintained the right of all classes to be admitted to the brotherhood, but Dr. Oldenberg has asserted that “in the composition of the Order a marked leaning to the existing aristocracywas observable.”[268]Buddha never had occasion to confess with the Christian apostle “that not many noble, not many mighty, were called,” nor had his Order ever to bear the reproach of the Church, that its members were recruited from the lowest strata of society. The references to his disciples from the first all indicate people of rank and wealth and education. It is not implied that persons of humble origin would have been rejected had they come, only that “the scriptures afford no evidence that they did come”; and yet they yield unmistakable evidence that, as the Order prospered, all lepers, cripples, blind, or one-eyed persons, all who were deaf and dumb, all who were consumptive or subject to fits, were rejected.[269]The Order was for the reputable, the noble, and especially for the religious, for the Brahman votary, and Sraman seeker after truth. These again were all attracted to it; they were not sought out as by the Christian Church. Not for one moment would Christ allow the Church to become select. He not only welcomed all penitents—for all men needed salvation, and the poorest and the guiltiest were mostin need of it,—but He sent forth His apostles to seek and gather them, and in order to reason down all natural fears, based on the personal unworthiness of these outcasts of society, they were instructed to “compel them to come in.”[270]
Of propagandism in this sense the Buddhist Sangha knew nothing. It was moved by no enthusiasm of humanity; it felt nothing of that earnestness which from the days of the apostles has characterised the true propagators of the gospel. In no discourse that has come down to us is there any impassioned entreaty of men to repent and believe. There is no sorrow over the unbelieving who refuse their salvation, no burning indignation against those who despise or who scoff at the truth. In Buddha’s last view of the world there is no weeping as over Jerusalem, reprobate because of its wickedness, and in none of his successors do we find any trace of the apostle’s willingness to be anathema for the sake of his brethren.
This tolerant spirit of Buddhism, however, has been contrasted, as greatly in its favour, with that alleged intolerance which Christianity is supposed to have inherited from Judaism. We mustremember that Christianity must be judged as it is presented in Christ, and not by His professing followers, who have often misrepresented Him. Of hypocrisy, cruelty, deceit, Christ was indeed intolerant, but toward error and misbelief, because of ignorance, He was very compassionate. Christianity would make no compromise, again, with false systems of heathendom. It would have no peace save through victory; it would not accept a place in the Pantheon for its Lord, and it was content to be persecuted till He was allowed to rule from the throne of the world. The alleged intolerance of Christianity, therefore, is simply its conviction of the infinite importance and value to all men of the truth which compels it to be propagandist. Now if Buddhism tolerates everything, it is because it is not sure about anything, but, on the contrary, is in doubt about everything. It is essentially sceptical, “raising the rejection of every affirmation to the rank of a principle.”[271]Earnestness in a preacher of sceptical quietism was an impossibility. He had no heart touched with the feeling of heavenly love, wounded by sin, impelling him to proclaim forgiveness, and he had no such hearts to appeal to. The Christian missionary appeals to soul and conscience in name of a Saviour crucified for sin; the Buddhistmissionary only appealed through the intellect to self-interest. His preaching was purely didactic, expository, and advisory in character. He was at best a theologian or moral philosopher teaching the ignorant, and not a preacher aiming at the conviction of sinners, endeavouring, with his whole heart and strength and mind, to sway them to conversion.[272]He never experienced the almost consuming glow and fervour of inspiration which made the apostles agonise in their mission. “Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation.” “I pray you, in Christ’s stead, Be ye reconciled to God.” As might have been expected, the early enthusiasm of Buddhists for the enlightenment of others soon died out, and its missionary spirit, once spent, has never undergone a true revival. It can boast of many ecclesiastics and philosophers, but for hundreds of years it cannot point in its honour-roll to either a Xavier or a Livingstone. It has long ago ceased to be aggressive. At this day no Oriental Buddhist seriously contemplates becoming a missionary. Paris may add to its attractions and curiosities a real Buddhist temple,[273]but the priests who officiate in it, however devoted they may be to their cult, will certainly never dream of taking the trouble of preaching it in the streets.
In the Church of the middle ages, supposed to consist only of pope and bishops and clergy and monks and nuns, of which mediævalism a remnant survives in those who speak of “entering the Church,” not when as children they are baptized into its communion, but when they are to be ordained to service in it, we must look for any resemblance to the Buddhist Sangha. In ancient India, a church, meaning the fellowship of the faithful in its totality, was an impossibility. Brahmanism had no church, and never attempted a conversion, but Buddha in seeking to rescue others from evil, and in offering a place of escape which they were free to accept or reject, created not a church but a precursor of one.[274]Admission into his Brotherhood was at first open to all who requested it, but as disciples crowded around him, and parents complained that they were bereaved of their children, and masters that they were robbed of their slaves, and creditors that they were deprived of what was owing by their debtors, and even the judges that criminals escaped the prison; and when accusations grew frequent and loud that the new movement would ruin households, injure the State, and depopulate the country, restrictions were devised. Gradually conditions were imposed by which all who were diseased, orcriminals, or soldiers, or debtors, or slaves, or children under fifteen years of age, or youths under twenty who had not received their parents’ consent, were disqualified.[275]At first the disciple was admitted without any ceremony, beyond that of shaving the whole head, and putting on the yellow robes which distinguished the ascetic and the recluse, but eventually a rite of initiation was adopted, which in Ceylon has continued substantially unaltered to this day.
It consisted of two stages;[276]the first that of the novitiate into which a candidate could be received by any fully accredited monk. The ceremony was called the Pabbagga, or “outgoing,” a word used from old time to describe the last act of a pious Brahman, when, warned by approaching age, he gave up his possessions to his family, and left them to enter upon the hermit life of meditation. The Buddhists naturally adopted it to mark the first step by which a layman at any age exchanged the secular for the religious life. It was a confession that he desired to be done with the world, to put off the old man with his deeds and to put on the new. So with head and face completely shaven, and holding three lengths of yellow cotton cloth, first torn to render them valueless, and thensewed together, he presented his petition three times, that “the reverend monks would take pity on him, and invest him with the robes, that, like them, he might escape sorrow.” The presiding monk then tied the clothes around his neck, repeating sentences regarding the perishable nature of the body, and the petitioner retired. When he reappeared he had laid aside the loin-cloth, generally the only article of raiment in tropical lands, and had assumed the new investiture of the two under-garments and the loose robe, which covered the whole body, except the right shoulder, of a Buddhist mendicant. Three times, thus clothed, in “robes of humility and religion,” in reverential salaam to the monk or monks present, he made public confession that he took refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and receiving instructions as to conduct and duty, he became a Sramanera, a bachelor as it were, a monk of lower degree.
When the novice who had thus “gone forth” from the world, or from the membership of another fraternity, had “seen the truth, mastered the truth, understood the truth, penetrated the truth; when he had overcome uncertainty, dispelled all doubts, was dependent on nobody else for his knowledge of the doctrines of the Teacher,”[277]he presented himself before the Order, of whom ten membersat least had to be in session, and reverentially cowering on the ground with his hands clasped on his forehead, he three times entreated them “to take pity upon him and draw him out of the evil world by granting him Upasampada” or the “arrival” initiation rite.[278]Then followed his examination as to whether he was qualified[279]in his person, his health, his social and civil relations, whether he had provided an alms-bowl and the yellow robes, what was his own name, and that of the teacher with whom he was to consort, and whom he was to serve during a course of five years’ instruction in the whole doctrine and discipline of the system. If the answers to all these questions were satisfactory, the resolution to receive him was formally put by the presiding monk, and thrice repeated: “Whosoever of the venerable is for granting Upasampada to this novice, with brother So-and-so for his teacher, let him be silent.” When no dissent was intimated the resolution was passed. “The Sangha is in favour of it, therefore it is silent—thus I understand,” said the president, and the novice became a Samana, a fully accredited member of the Order of Bikkhus.
There was certainly nothing of the Church in all this ceremony, and Sir Monier Williams very properly guards us from applying to it the sacredword of ordination.[280]Any one who cares to read the texts in which the proceedings are described will be inclined to think that the questions put to the novice, in their childishness and absurdity, seem diabolically framed to caricature the solemn and soul-searching questions addressed to candidates for the Holy Ministry. Yet in the instruction given to the newly admitted member, concerning the “four chief forbidden acts” from which he must abstain, and “the four resources”[281]in which he was to trust, there was a touch of the solemnity which belongs to the charge which follows Christian ordination. The monk was reminded that in regard to what was pleasant and permissible to other men he had subjected himself to self-denial and a yoke. He might receive from the pious, without offence, offerings of food and clothing, and medicine and shelter, but he must be prepared for the hard life of one whose food might only be scraps and refuse put into his bowl, whose clothing might have to be made of cast-off rags, whose shelter might often be the tree in the jungle or the cave in the rock, and whose medicinemight be only the foul deposit of the cattle-pen. He was warned that any breach of the four cardinal precepts—against unchastity, which to him meant what to others was the lawful estate of marriage, against theft, even of a blade of grass, against murder, even to the crushing of a flea, against assumption of virtues not really possessed,—would necessitate expulsion from the Order. “For even as a man whose head is cut off cannot live with the trunk; ... as a dry leaf separate from the stalk can never again become green; ... as a stone split in two cannot be made into one; ... as a palm whose top is destroyed cannot again grow, so the monk who breaks the least of these laws is no longer a Samana, no longer a follower of the Sakya-putta.”[282]
To the credit of Buddha, however, it must be observed, that a monk who had entered the Order was at any time free to withdraw from it. If he had a hankering after home, or the pleasures of the old life which he had forsaken, he was exhorted to confess his weakness and renounce a vocation which he had found too high for him. He had simply to declare before a witness that he renounced Buddha, Dharma, Sangha—yea, he could go forth without making any declaration at all. Freely as he had joined, as freely could heabandon the brethren; no anger was expressed or even felt; no discredit attached to him, for the working out of his deliverance was his own concern. Yea, if at any time he repented of his action, and desired to renew with the companions of wiser days the relation of votary or novice, he was not subjected to any discipline, such as a lapsed member of the Church might be expected to undergo when seeking re-communion. He was treated upon his confession as though his past had not been remembered, and as if his folly or fault had never been committed.[283]Such facility of withdrawal and readmission seemed to tend to laxity, and may have occasioned very great abuses, but on the very face of it, it appears calculated to preserve monastic life in India in a much healthier condition than has always prevailed in the recluse institutions of Christendom. In how many cases has the monastery become worse than a prison, and the convent become a very chamber of tortures, because occupied by reluctant tenants, who have been cruelly immured in them against their will, or have thoughtlessly devoted themselves to a vocation for which they were totally unfit. The Eastern sage may even have shown greater wisdom than the Western bishops and presbyters, who have bound over for life thoseadmitted to a sacred profession, so that freedom from it can only be got by ignominious expulsion, and by degradation for a fault or a crime.
The Sangha from the first was an order of Cœnobites, not Solitaries, and it was an exception for a mendicant to be alone; for with his practical insight Buddha seems to have discovered that the life of solitude has more disadvantages and dangers than that of fellowship. So he ordained that the newly admitted monk must attach himself for five years to a tutor and teacher,[284]one of whom must have been ten years in the Order, rendering to them such personal offices as Elisha rendered to Elijah, and receiving such parental instruction asSt.Paul bestowed upon his son in the faith. No vow of obedience, so essential to the monastic rule of Christendom, unless in regard to the laws of the Order, was exacted. No man could be called Rabbi among them, for the knowledge which brought deliverance could be and must be acquired by each man for himself.[285]A monk was expected to reverence his superior in age and knowledge, but his obedience was to be rendered not to his brother, who was simplyhis equal in respect of need and capability of deliverance, but only toThe Lawwhich alone could secure it.
While obedience to a superior was not exacted, the law of poverty and chastity was as obligatory upon the Buddhist monk as on the members of the Christian Orders. Francis of Assisi could not more highly have eulogised poverty as “the way to salvation, the nurse of humility, the root of perfection,” than did the Indian monks who compiled the Buddhist scriptures. “In supreme felicity live we, though we call nothing our own. Feeding on happiness, we are like the gods in the regions of light.”[286]Food a monk could receive, but not ask for, and of what he so received he could only have one meal a day. Gold or silver he could on no account accept, though he might accept its equivalents in food or medicine. If like Achan’s wedge it was found to have been secreted by any covetous member, one of the brethren had to hide it away in the jungle, in a place which could not again be recognised. Bitter controversies regarding this prohibition seem to have exercised the primitive Sanghas, and though it was successfully maintained for long, concessions in relation to it were eventually agreed upon. These however proved as fatal to the prosperity of the Buddhist, assimilar concessions proved to that of the Western monastic establishments. They were seeds of evil which speedily grew up into thickets of trouble. The individual member professed to observe the original law and maintain the principle that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of his goods,” but the several fraternities came speedily to abound in lands and property of every kind, so that in the East as in the West it may be said the monasteries fell, because crushed with their weight of wealth.
Even while the primitive rule was observed the mendicants could easily procure what of the necessaries of food and shelter and clothing they required; the jungle gave them all the shelter they needed, though it exposed them to frequent perils of being poisoned by snake-bites, and devoured by beasts. The rains put an end periodically to their peregrinations, and gathered the twos and threes who had been associating together into common retreat in the viharas. These originally were intended to be only temporary shelters from the annual floods, but as by degrees the system extended into distant regions, they became permanent institutions, each one a centre of influence in its own territory, like the abbeys in the original dioceses of mediæval Europe.
Life in a Buddhist vihara two thousand yearsago must however have been very different from life in a monastic establishment in the middle ages. Labour, as we have seen, of no kind was allowed, either among them or for them. “A monk who digs the earth or causes it to be dug is liable to punishment.”[287]Scant time was allowed for sleep, and when there were no books to read or transcribe, the studies or literary occupations of the West were out of the question. All the intellectual energies were claimed for the repetition of such sacred works as they knew, and for the committing to memory of others which they had only acquired. Examination of self, meditation on the five principal themes which occupied the place of prayer or devotion in their system, was expected to absorb the most of the day. Notwithstanding its intervals of instruction and discussion, it must have been a very vacant life indeed, lacking entirely the worship, and most of the duties, which rendered monastic life in Christendom, if not always profitable, at least supportable.
Two outstanding features of it, however, compare very favourably with some forms of the ascetic life both in India and Europe. In the Buddhist Sanghas would be witnessed neither the slovenliness nor the dirtiness which has often beenassociated with the life of those who have renounced the world and have professed to despise its pleasant things. Around them,