In my former Lectures I have spoken of two religions, very opposite in their character, which have exercised an influence over a large portion of the world—the Mahometan and the Hindoo. The former, we said, could only thrive when it was in action; the proper element of the other was rest. They were brought face to face in Hindostan. The Islamite triumphed, as might have been expected; but there was a passive strength in the Hindoo, which ultimately kept its ground, and enables him to say that his system has endured for 3000 years.
I hinted that it had had struggles with a very different kind of enemy from the Mahometan—with a doctrine in many of its essential peculiarities like its own. That doctrine is the Buddhist, the faith of Thibet, of Siam, of the Burmese Empire, of Cochin China, Japan, Ceylon; the popular, though not the state, faith of China. It is said to number above 300 millions of people among its disciples; to be, therefore, by far the most prevailing religion which does exist, or ever has existed, in the world. It is, surely then, deserving of earnest investigation; there must be something in it which has given it this wide diffusion. It must express some necessities of man’s heart, some necessities of our own.
I propose, in the present Lecture, to enquire what these are; to search for the main principle of Buddhism; to consider in what relation it stands to those religions of which we have spoken; lastly, how it is connected with two other systems which divide with it the Celestial Empire.
A faith which is spread over such a number of countries, many of them very different from each other in outward circumstances, perhaps even in race and early cultivation, must present great varieties, which may seem to make the use of a common name rather a convenient refuge for our ignorance, than a proof that they have really any connection. Undoubtedly our information respecting the different forms of Buddhism is still very imperfect, and we have not the same means of correcting and enlarging it, as in the case of countries which have fallen under our own dominion. Ceylon is, I believe, the only British possession in which pure Buddhism is professed. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the intelligent travellers and residents who have given us accounts of what they have seen or heard in the different countries I have enumerated, or of what they have read in the books which these countries account sacred, have not been mistaken in believing that the fundamental doctrine is the same in all. The opposition between different views of the system, great as it is, admits, I think, of a tolerably easy explanation; easy, at least, if we do not merely look to find a meaning in the dry records of other people’s notions or practices, but compare them with what we have felt and experienced in our own lives. The numerous phases, however, which the system assumes, make it very desirable that we should ascertain from what country it was derived, where we may seek for the first form of it. On this subject there is some, but, I think, now not much, difference of opinion. The external arguments which induced Sir William Jones, and some eminent scholars of the last century, to suppose that its native seat could not have been Hindostan, have given way to later and fuller information. There was a stronger internal argument, arising from a comparison of the Brahminical and Buddhist faith, which is also, it seems to me, untenable; but which is well worth considering, and which at once connects the present subject with that of the last Lecture.
We do not adequately describe the condition of Hindostan, by saying that the priests constitute its leading caste. The whole form of society has a sacerdotal stamp upon it; it has moulded itself in conformity with a religious idea; not, as some have fancied, with a professional or mercantile one. And yet, when we look into the meaning of this system it explains itself, by the doctrine that there is in man a capacity for beholding the Unseen Being, and that there is in man an animal nature which admits of no Divine converse. The Brahmin is the learned, divine, absorbed man, the end of whose existence is to become one with Brahm.
Brahm himself, I observed, was emphatically an Intelligence, a thinking, not a commanding being—One from whose thoughts all the universe has flowed out, not one by whose will it has been created. He is a higher priest, not in any sense a sovereign; herein standing in the most direct contrast to the object of Mahometan worship. Between, then, the god and the worshipper there is the most direct affinity, which may become identity. Intelligence is to be the characteristic of both. The hereditary caste is to preserve this Intelligence; its discipline to prevent it from being debased by mixture with people in whom the lower nature is predominant, or by contact with things which may make it predominant in themselves.
Now that any set of men should arise in a society, constituted like that of Hindostan, to deny the existence of a special caste of priests, might not seem surprising; for one might conjecture that there would be popular re-actions against so very strict and exclusive a system. We saw that there had been such popular re-actions in Hindostan. They took this form. They demanded a being less abstract than Brahm; not a mere thinking being, but one who should exercise actual influence over the arrangements of Nature and the world one to whom its good or its evil might be ascribed one who should not merely cultivate intercourse with an absorbed devotee, but should enter into fellowship with human creatures in their ordinary condition. To such strong workings of popular feeling, to such cries of the popular heart, we traced the Vishnu and Sheeva worship, which the priests had been compelled to incorporate with that older principle it seemed striving to subvert. It is evident that in these cases the priestly caste, whatever rude shocks it may have sustained, nevertheless kept its ground, even in the hearts of the people who assailed it. In fact, nothing proves more clearly than such changes, how much the reverence for a priestly order has been bound up with the sympathies and character of this nation. Neither the awakening of impulses which the priests could not control, nor conquest by such an utterly unsacerdotal people as the Mahometans, have availed to weaken this reverence. The priests have adapted themselves to feelings which they could not subdue: their authority has waxed stronger by a doctrine which threatened to crush it and the popular faith together.
But the Buddhist doctrine cannot in any wise be identified with this kind of movement. The word Buddha, it seems to be admitted on all hands, means Intelligence. That men ought to worship pure Intelligence, must have been the first proclamation of the original Buddhists. The deduction from this must have been, that no caste of priests was necessary for such worship. Could this doctrine have originated on the soil of Hindostan?
I do not wonder that thoughtful persons, especially those whose experience made them aware of the facts I have just alluded to, should have said that it could not: that a theory so contrary to the tendencies of Hindoos from generation to generation, must have come from some other region, and been rudely forced for a time upon this. But, plausible as such an hypothesis may seem, I think I have given you sufficient reason for distrusting it. The sacerdotal principle has indeed struck its roots very deep into the Indian soil, probably from as early a time as any to which we can possibly look back. It has shewn itself to be, in some form or other, inseparable from that soil. But it has grown up side by side with another principle, from which, at times, it is hardly distinguishable; the reverence for human intelligence; the disposition to make this the great Brahminical characteristic. It is quite conceivable, then, that from a very early time two sets of men may have coexisted in Hindostan; one composing an hereditary order of priests, the other a mere order of sages or devotees. They co-exist in India to the present day, on terms not probably of sympathy, but also not of absolute opposition or repulsion. The Greek writers allude to two classes seen by the soldiers of Alexander, between whom it has been reasonably enough supposed that a relation similar to this may have subsisted.
Both will alike have aimed at converse with the pure Intelligence, absorption into him. Both therefore will have been far removed from any wish to substitute for this object of worship one of a more visible and earthly character. But different circumstances may have operated to draw each of them into closer connection with that which is visible. The hereditary priest will have maintained his position by taking part in civil employments will gradually have exhibited less of the higher and more abstracted character. The devotee will have been reverenced by the people for retaining and carrying out this character. Thus he will have been brought into greater sympathy with them; will have been induced to symbolize the object of his worship, that it might be more apparent to ordinary men. In this way, perhaps, we may account for the appearance of temples, possessing the characteristics of Buddhism, which must have existed in Hindostan from a very early period. Gradually the distinction between these classes will have become more marked and definite. Sages will have appeared calling upon men to adore Buddha in purity and simplicity, denouncing the hereditary caste, denouncing the books upon which they rested their pretensions, acknowledging a modified sympathy with the worship of the people, as opposed to that of the Brahmins. In what light these sages were regarded we shall consider hereafter; now it is only necessary to observe that there are the widest differences of opinion among Buddhists respecting the time in which the original sage, the first Buddhist teacher, flourished.
That one Sakya Muni appeared in the sixth century before Christ, who produced an effect upon the inhabitants of India of the kind I have just described, and that he left a series of successors, seems to be ascertained. But he was in all probability only the rekindler of feelings, which had been existing previously; only the person who formally set them in opposition to the Brahminical tendencies with which they had been hitherto, though by somewhat loose and fragile links, associated. Although, then, I would by no means support a paradox which has had some countenance from learned men, but not from the most learned or those who have examined the subject most, that Buddhism was the original doctrine, of which Brahminism was a depravation—though such an opinion has to struggle with the greatest opposition of outward facts, and is, I think, also quite inconsistent with the respective character of the two systems; yet I imagine we must look upon Hindostan as the place from which both have started, must assume that they were branches from the same root, and that their separation, however decided at last, was a slow and gradual work. Ultimately the systems did come into direct collision, and it became evident that they could not dwell together on the same soil. The Brahminical succeeded in expelling its rival from Hindostan, and it went forth to seek and to find an asylum first in one, then in another of those numerous Asiatic countries which it now claims as its own.
This view of the origin of Buddhism may be a great help, I think, in reconciling the very opposite reports of it which we obtain from those who have seen it in different, or even in the same localities. The extreme Polytheism of India we found was not so incompatible with what was said of its original Monotheism, as it appeared at first. But what are we to say of a doctrine which is sometimes represented as one of almost perfect Theism; sometimes as direct Atheism; sometimes as having the closest analogy to what in a Greek philosopher, or in a modern philosopher, would be called Pantheism; sometimes as the worship of human saints or heroes; sometimes as altogether symbolical; sometimes as full of the highest abstract speculation; sometimes as vulgar idolatry? Strange as it may seem, the same doctrine is, I believe, capable of assuming all these different phases; no one of them can be thoroughly understood without reference to the other. Each is very imperfectly denoted by the names which I have used; for the feelings, good and evil, which work in the hearts of human beings, can never be satisfactorily expressed by mere labels describing a notion or theory.
I. Thus, to begin with the first supposition. Buddhism is, as we have seen, an attempt at the highest, least material idea of divinity. Buddha is clear light, perfect wisdom. You must not try to conceive of him as doing anything. Rest is not so much his attribute, as his very essence. He is One, the One; and it is only with the inward eye, purged from sensual corruptions, and steadily fixed on the contemplation of unity, that he can in any wise be apprehended. For the natural eye of the ordinary man views a multiplicity of things, each thing divided and separate from the other. The natural eye takes account only of appearances; it requires the severest discipline for a man to behold the Reality. This is surely Theism in its highest form and conception. It is something much more than we are wont to mean by that word, for by a Deist or Theist we often describe a person who does not deny the existence of God; who admits it as a sort of ultimate fact, as the Hercules’ pillar of the universe. But to the Buddhist, the belief in God is the most awful, and at the same time the most real of all thoughts; one not thrust back into the corner of a mind which is occupied by everything else, but which he thinks demands the highest and most refined exercise of all the faculty that he has. It is something which is to make a change in himself, which is at once to destroy him and to perfect him. And the effect is a practical one. Buddha is ever at rest. Can his worshippers be turbulent? Can he admit any rude or violent passions into his heart? He must cultivate gentleness, evenness, all serene and peaceful qualities, reverence and tenderness to all creatures, or he is not in his rightful state. He is not tempted, or obliged, as the Brahmin is, to look upon any human creature as merely animal, as excluded even from the highest privileges. He denies the natural difference of the Sudra; the poorest men of the vilest race may become one with Buddha. Hence, though he belongs to no priestly family, all his functions are more essentially those of a priest than the Brahmin’s can be. He claims no civil distinction; he is to be reverenced simply as offering up prayers for the peace and prosperity of all other people. He must abstain from much speech. In silence he may best hope to know the Unseen Intelligence. This is one aspect of the doctrine, and surely a very interesting one.
II. But if the Buddhist sage asks himself, What is it that I am contemplating: I cannot see it, or hear it, or handle it; I dare not conceive it; it is altogether inconceivable, and yet I know of it only by this mind of mine: he is likely to find himself in a strange perplexity. Or, if he put the case thus to himself: The end I propose to myself is to become nothing. Can it be Something which is to work this result? Can it be Something I am contemplating? He must say at length, No, it is Nothing. Nothing must be the ground of my life, of my being—of the being of all the things I see! Here is Atheism; a deep, hopeless void, yet touching on the borders of that doctrine which implied real belief in a living Divinity.
The transition to such Atheism is, no doubt, possible in the Brahminical doctrine; but here it is much easier. For the existence of a continuous caste preserves the tradition of a Divinity, invests it with a reality in some sense independent of the mind of the beholder. Here all rests upon that mind. The light seems to be projected from the eye; now it may be a bright sun in the heaven; now it may shrink into a speck; now it may vanish altogether. Yet we should draw a wrong inference from the incapacity of the Buddhist in this state of mind to give any form to his belief, if we said that it is wanting. He may even declare in honesty, ’I see nothing, and the words being the utterance of despair, not of triumph or satisfaction, may themselves contain a sure witness, even to himself, that there is that which no words or thoughts of his can comprehend; an eternal absolute ground of all words and thoughts.
III. And soon the Buddhist discovers an escape from this void of nothingness. He began with looking upon the One Intelligence as alone real; all outward nature he discarded, as merely apparent. But the visible world claims its rights; he cannot disown it; he must, in some way or other, take it into his system. The Intelligence therefore, the pure Buddha, must have a partner of his throne. It is Dharma; the principle of Matter; that out of which all things are formed. But these two powers, Intelligence and Matter, seem essentially opposite: if they are co-workers how can they be reconciled? There must be another power, Sanga, the mediating influence, which binds the informing mind to the dead formless thing upon which it works. This is nearly the explanation which a Buddhist priest gave to the English resident at Nepaul of a subject which has occasioned much controversy. It is borne out by the symbols in the Buddhist temples. They seem contrived to express the idea of some active, productive power; of some passive, merely receptive power; again, of something which is the joint result of both. If we compare the Buddhist Triad with the Hindoo Triad of Brahma, Vishnu, and Sheeva, the Creator, Preserver, Destroyer, we are struck rather by their difference than their resemblance. The powers of preservation and destruction are militant powers; each is continually invading the kingdom of the other: Brahma is looked upon as the common origin of both. Here the Intelligent Power is considered as balancing, or sustaining, the Passive, Material Power; and a third as necessary to their fellowship. The latter idea is, I think, by far the deeper, and more suggestive; but then it is abstract, rather than personal; more of a philosophical speculation, less of a practical belief. And it leads very directly to the next side of Buddhism—what is called its Pantheistic side.
IV. Beginning with the notion that the Intelligence is entirely separated from the world; that He is One, and it multiform; the Buddhist may arrive, by a series of easy steps, at a conclusion which would seem most opposed to this, that the Intelligence is essentially one with the world: in fact, that it can only be considered as the informing life or soul of the world. As in the case of Brahminism, it may be rightly said that this doctrine was latent in the Buddhist from the first: in other words, that the moment he began to think upon Nature with no other data than the belief which he possessed, he must inevitably terminate in this scheme. But it should be said, at the same time, that he has struggled earnestly, even heroically, with this tendency; that his effort to contemplate the pure Essence indicates a genuine desire to see something above the world, not merely dwelling in it, and actuating it. However true then it may be that Buddhism often becomes a mere notion of a God diffused through all things, I cannot believe that this is its characteristic principle. To ascertain what that is, we must examine the next allegation respecting it, that it is especially the deification of human saints or heroes.
V. We can scarcely speak of this as a phase of Buddhism. Everywhere you will find certain human beings called Buddhas. You will find Europeans asking such questions as these, When was Buddha born? How many Buddhas are there? And those who are asked seem not astonished at the inconsistency of the two enquiries, or of either with that idea of a pure essential Intelligence, sometimes the fixed only reality, sometimes so divested of all qualities as to become nothing, sometimes diffused through all things. If you consider the starting point of the doctrine, you will see that the departure from it, which is involved in this notion of human Buddhas, is far less than it seems. The abstracted man was to become one with the Divinity. In the mind of the Hindoo a whole caste is marked out for that glory. But a whole caste evidently does not attain it; there must be immeasurable differences of taste, earnestness, wisdom, in the priests of one generation, still more in those of successive generations. So it comes to pass, that there is more feeling of a Divine character diffused through a great many; less belief of actual divinity in particular individuals. Here, on the contrary, there is no check to the conviction that a man has risen to the state of Godhead—may be a God. In proportion as the Infinite Object fades into obscurity, or waxes fearful, the vision is more cherished of his appearance in one man, or a series of men, who in this or that period confer blessings on some particular country, traverse different countries; now mount into the region where Indra the Lord of the Elements dwells; now descend to earth, like Vishnu; (for these powers have passed from the Hindoo into the Buddhist legends;) and leave here and there, in some mountain or valley, footmarks which may be noted, and become the symbols of his continual presence. For as he has moved through space, passing rapidly from one portion of the globe to another, so does he live through different periods of time, the same principle inhabiting various forms; the same Buddha, though there may have been a number of Buddhas—though they may appear even now.
VI. And now we can understand how idolatry, the worship of different outward natural things may be attributed to this Theistic, Atheistic, Pantheistic, human doctrine. Through all nature, above and beneath, Buddha has journeyed; everywhere he has left his footmarks; everywhere we may find tokens of him. Sun, moon, and stars, all things on this earth, may speak of him. Or we may think of him as the fixed Immoveable Past, as the Actual Present, as the dim Future of fears and hopes. But these sensible objects are too distant and vague; these Past, and Present, and Future, too abstract. And we want to feel that we are not contemplating them in themselves, or for their own sakes, but the living, quickening Intelligence, which has stamped its form upon them. They must be changed into symbols; in that character we must approach them and revere them. They must assume shapes which are given to them by the kindred Intelligence in ourselves.
Oftentimes these shapes will be animal; for how ought we to think of the creatures around us, with those half human faculties and affections which we discover in them; with the ferocity and cunning which are surely not peculiar to them? Must not they be inhabited by a human spirit in some degraded, fallen condition? Are they not wandering about as signs to us of what we may become; of that state to which, by cultivating the lower and baser qualities of our nature, we may reduce ourselves? So reasons the Buddhist; he reveres and fears the animals as meaner forms of that Intellect, of which he sees the highest form in the glorified man, the Buddha.
VII. I have not yet spoken of Buddhism as a social system. I described its ministers as forming an order of devotees, as distinguished from a caste of priests. It is necessary to speak thus of them, for we must not suppose because they have no hereditary vocation, that they take their office at hazard, or that they have no communion with each other. We have a very accurate description of the ceremonies which are observed in some countries, at their consecration, of the questions which are asked to ascertain that they have no bodily or mental disqualification for the task. Such ceremonies, though they may vary in their forms, exist wherever Buddhism exists. In Thibet, which must be regarded as the centre and proper home of the religion, the priests are called Lamas; it is they who decide who the Lama, the true high priest of the universe, at any given time is. I say they decide who he is; for they could never allow that the faculty of choosing the chief Lama resides in them. In some person or other the spirit of Buddha dwells; he is meant to be the head of the universe; to him all owe homage. This Lama, therefore, never dies; he is lost sight of in one form, reappears in another. The body of some old man who has had this honour loses its breath, is laid in the tomb. The Lama has passed into some infant, who is brought up in a convent with special care, preserved from sensual influences, taught from the cradle to look upon himself as the shrine of the Divinity, and to receive the homage of rajahs, nations, even of the Celestial Empire; nay, even of European monarchs. Some of you may remember to have read of a solemn embassy sent by the English government at Calcutta in the days of Warren Hastings to the court of the Lama. A very affecting letter had been addressed by him to the English authorities in India, asking their help in checking quarrels between certain native sovereigns, an object, he said, which he sought diligently in prayers by day and night. An old man was the author of this letter; before Mr. Turner, the English envoy arrived, he had left the world; and a child of eighteen months was acknowledged as his successor. It reigned by no hereditary right; but the other Lamas presented him with unquestioning faith as the representative of the Perfect Intelligence through whom it would most surely utter itself.
If we now try to sum up the evidence which we have gathered from different indications respecting Buddhism, I do not know that we can do it better than in the words of Mr. Hodgson, the resident at Nepaul, to whom I have already referred. “The one infallible diagnostic of Buddhism,” he says, with an emphasis and decision which were the result of patient enquiries, conducted during many years, “is a belief in the infinite capacity of the human intellect.” This is the conclusion to which all our enquiries into the system have conducted us. The idea of an Adi Buddha, or Absolute Eternal Intelligence is there, but it is hidden; it gradually evaporates. The possibility of utter Atheism is there; but the heart flies in dismay from it. The vision of a Unity resulting from the reconciliation of opposites is there; but it either passes into a mere theory, or seeks for images to express it, which make it material. The conception of an intelligent soul in nature is there; but it quickly resolves itself into a recognition of all Nature, as symbolising human deeds and attributes. Lastly, the idea of deified men is there; but this loses itself in another, that there is in man, in humanity, a certain Divine Intelligence, which at different times and in different places, manifests itself more or less completely, and which must have some one central manifestation. The Human Intellect is first felt to be the perfect organ of worship; finally its one object. This is Buddhism; this is the conviction which, with more or less of confusion, is working in the hearts of 300 millions of people on this globe of ours.
I greatly desire to ask this doctrine, what testimony it bears for or against that hypothesis which it is the purpose of these Lectures to examine; the hypothesis, I mean, that the Divine portion of the faith of different nations signifies nothing; that it is only an attempt to explain the phenomena of the universe; that there is no need of a Revelation to man, because in himself, in his own heart there is a sufficient revelation of all the truths he wants to know; that we may safely leave this to work itself out as it can in the different religious systems, without pretending to inculcate notions of our own, which, perhaps, are only a little better than those we should displace. But I believe we shall be in a fairer condition to meet these questions, when we have considered the circumstances of a country in which Buddhism does not exist alone; in which it is counteracted, and yet, I think, also illustrated, by the presence of systems older, in that country at least, than itself.
Numerous as are the puzzles which the history and actual condition of China may present to European enquirers—even to those few who are acquainted with its language, and have had opportunities of closely observing it, I do not think that there is much difference of opinion respecting its main and distinguishing characteristic. Its learned men, we are told by the most respectable authorities, say, without exception, “a principle of order is that which we discover and reverence in the world:” and every act of their lives, the construction of society, their art, their most minute ceremonies, bear out the assertion. If you hear their choicest phrases reported to you, or look at the works they have produced, or remember the duration of their empire, or think how many shocks from without it has withstood, or even read one of their singular state papers, you can scarcely avoid saying within yourself; here is a people which, successfully or unsuccessfully, is striving to be orderly, which for generations has been carrying on this struggle, which hates everything that interferes with its success, would gladly obtain it by any sacrifice. Hence the preservation of historical records, in their driest form has been as important a purpose in their eyes as it has been an indifferent or impossible one to the Hindoo. Hence, from first to last, we discover among them precisely the opposite view of social life to that which we have noticed in the conception of the Buddhist Lama. The Chinese does not first ask where Spiritual Intelligence dwells, and then confess that to this he must submit. But he starts with the belief in government and society; and then demands that all study and intelligence should be applied to the preservation of it. The emperor is the datum or postulate from which the speculations of philosophers, as well as the arrangements of society, begin. He is put into the position which he holds, that he may be the spring and soul of order to the commonwealth. How he may be so he is to enquire very diligently. All the functionaries of government are to be chosen according to their fitness to preserve that order, according to their knowledge of the maxims upon which it rests. To prevent any infractions of it by themselves, or those over whom they rule, is to be their incessant study. Instruction therefore, it would seem, has been from the earliest period a primary condition of all civil duties and employments. The Chinese have not anticipated the West more in other machinery than in that of education, and in the importance which they have attached to it. Schools, great and little, especially for the instruction of those who shall have any offices in the state, were the great distinction of those dynasties, which we should call in the history of any other people—here the name would be strikingly inapplicable—the heroic period of the Empire. Because they fell into decay, and the fabric of social order with them, it was necessary that a Reformer should appear.
Confucius appeared, not to introduce new maxims, but to revive the old—to explain what he saw to be the conditions and first principles of Chinese government, to embody them in books, which have been for 2000 years the school-books of China, the maxims of society and practical conduct, possessing an authority higher than any decrees, because explaining that which is to make decrees stable, and to procure obedience to them. The education of Confucius was one in state affairs. He was strictly a government functionary. He was disgusted with the confusion and disorder which he found in all departments of the state, and he retired to meditate in secret the grounds upon which a reformation must be undertaken. He did not trust solely to his own reflection, or to Chinese antiquity. There was an old man, Laoutsee, who spoke much of the Divine Reason which dwelt within each man, of its being the first object of every man to cultivate this, and to bring all his faculties of body and mind under its rule. This he seems to have set up as the maxim of life, in opposition to the political notions of it, which prevailed among his countrymen generally. To his words Confucius listened respectfully; though far from admitting his doctrine, he turned it to account by subordinating it to his own. He taught also that a man must cultivate this reason in himself—must try to arrive at self-government, even at perfect self-government; but all for social ends and purposes, all that he might be better able to contribute towards the rational administration of the state; towards the preservation of public order. But where lay the root of this order? Its first ground Confucius, still professing only to be an interpreter of old and admitted doctrines, said, must lie in actual relationships; the family must sustain the state. The authority of the father must be the root of all other authority. The emperor must be regarded, must regard himself, as the common father. He was set to keep his people in order, and upon this principle he must order himself. These were not mere words. They do actually express that which has been the strength, the binding principle of Chinese society, from generation to generation. Jesuit missionaries, Protestant missionaries, English travellers, French philosophical admirers of Confucius, have all alike confessed it. The maxims of Confucius are faithful results of the observations of a man honestly desirous to make use of the experience that is given him for a moral purpose; they may generally be read with interest, often with admiration, as hints for conduct—even as helps to internal self-discipline. But they would be feeble and unmeaning, and could scarcely have exercised any great influence on the mind of a nation, if they had not rested upon the recognition of a real and eternal principle of order, lying far deeper than all Chinese formalities, or than the formalities in the mind of Confucius himself. Fatherly authority was his ultimate principle. Practically, he went not a step beyond it. What he heard of divine, unseen, mysterious powers above man, or above nature, or even in man and in nature; of some thing or person above the earthly emperor, or the earthly father, he by no means denied. Whatever faith his countrymen had respecting the invisible world, he would have wished to confirm. But he did not see his way in such enquiries: he could not trace the actual connexion between them and practical life. And the sincerity of his mind revolted against the notion of merely using them as artifices to keep up respect for human institutions. On this ground he has, I think, been too hastily condemned as an atheistical philosopher. I cannot feel any desire to make good such a charge. It is a pleasanter, and also a truer course, to admit that his confession of ignorance may have been a genuine one; and may even have implied that he had deeper thoughts than he knew how to express. We may be sure that what there was weak and maimed in his scheme will discover itself in the course of history, and that this discovery will be far more valuable than any rash conclusions of ours respecting it.
Not many centuries after this reform, a Chinese emperor became aware that there was some blank in the doctrine of Confucius; a blank which was not filled up by turning him into a god, and raising temples to him. Side by side with the Confucian, or State-worship, dwelt the Taou sect, the disciples of that old philosopher with whom Confucius had conversed, men who still maintained that the Reason was something divine and mysterious in each person, and would lead him into inward contemplation, not make him the handy instrument in a State machinery. But these people had little faith, except in themselves. The effect of their mysterious knowledge upon others seemed chiefly exhibited in charms, and incantations and magic arts, which interfered with the good order of the State, rather than promoted it. Something else was wanted. The emperor heard of a great teacher and prophet somewhere in India. In spite of the remonstrances of wise men, who shewed him how grievously he was departing from Chinese maxims, in preferring foreign to native culture, the Buddhist faith was imported into the empire. A religion resting upon communion with the unseen world, in all its outward, and many of its inward characteristics, the direct opposite of the Confucian system gained footing on the soil which that system ruled. The result was what might have been expected. The new faith took hold of popular sympathy, and has retained that sympathy to the present day. It was, and is despised, by the great mandarins, by the functionaries of government, by the adorers of social order. But it is more than tolerated by the government as such; it is recognized as deserving of respect, even of homage. Though the emperor cannot allow the Lama to interfere with his own supreme rule, and has procured the appointment of a deputy Lama who shall be really the head of the Buddhist society in his dominions, and his subject, he yet sends embassies to the high priest in Thibet, and asks his intercessions for China. Evidently Buddhism is felt, even by the disciples of Confucius, to be an element of society in China, which cannot be dispensed with, and for which their own system, much as they may prefer it, offers no substitute.
I have said, that in most of its inward, as well as outward characteristics, the Buddhist and the Confucian doctrine are opposed. I used this language, because it is evident that in one respect they are not opposed. Different as are the functions which are assigned to the intellect of man in the three Chinese systems, that intellect is still an object of profound veneration to all. Wisdom is viewed as wholly social and experimental in one, internal and mystical in the second, strangely mixed with the idea of what is super-human and eternal in the third. Had it been otherwise, had there been nothing common in these faiths, it is scarcely possible to conceive of them dwelling together in such an empire; or to suppose that one should at all supply the gaps in the other.
And which, then, of these three faiths, shall we say can be described by that comprehensive formula, ‘a mere attempt to explain the phenomena of the universe?’ All three do attempt that, doubtless,—Buddhism, especially. But, does the faith of the Buddhist consist in this? Is it this which in his inmost heart he wants to know? Every enquiry we have made has led us to the opposite conclusion. He is obliged to question the universe, because he does not know what else he should question. He has questioned it, and to every problem which disturbs him it has returned a more confused answer. He has asked, what that is within him which is higher than it, what that is which seeks a knowledge which it cannot give? He is sure that he is above the world—that it was never meant to be his master—that the spirit in him must have its ground elsewhere. But where? What is this ground? Is it anything? Is it nothing? Who will tell him? That which has asked the question cannot give the answer. With deepest solicitude, he cries, “Do Thou, of whom I see the footmarks in natural things, but most of all in human beings, in those who have thoughts, and reasons, and wills—in those who feel that these are not meant to be the servants of their senses, or of the things with which their senses deal,—do Thou tell me who Thou art, and how I may draw nigh to Thee. Tell me what Thou hast to do with man, for something Thou must have. Tell me if there be a man, and where he is, in whom I may behold Thee; One who is not here to-day, and gone to-morrow; but who, amidst all changes of times, the disappearance of generations, lives on. Tell me if there be indeed a King and High Priest of the universe—a man actually Divine. And this, too, I need to know: What that Light is which dwells in me; whether it is self-derived, or, as my inward heart tells me, derived from Thee. Whether there be any Spirit coming forth from Thee to dwell in men, and bind them together—to make them gentle, and gracious, and wise—to be the common life of all, and still the life of each. And if these things be so, tell me how these things can be reconciled, as my reason has whispered that it can be, though as yet I see not how, with that Unity—the essential condition of Thy Being—that which divides Thee from all the multitude of things and persons with whom in this world we converse.” I say that Buddhism, rightly interpreted, is a prayer of this kind—an earnest prayer, consciously or unconsciously uttered by 300 millions of people. And yet we are told that it is honouring the faith of these people, shewing tenderness and respect for them, to believe that there is not any Revelation, save that which man procures for himself. In other words, that this prayer never has, never can be, answered. Only if we have really brought ourselves to this contempt for the faith of so many human beings, can we patiently think of this faith working out, as the phrase is, its own results. It has been working out its results for all these thousands of years—and what have they been? The worship of the intellect has not caused the intellect to grow—not even to grow to an ordinary human or earthly stature; I say nothing of that Divine stature which it feels that it may reach. The priest of Buddha, of the Intelligence, is rarely an intelligent man. That mighty portion of the globe over which Buddhism rules is nearly the most ignorant portion of it. And yet in it lie the seeds of all highest, noblest culture, if only we can really address ourselves to that which is within the hearts of those who hold this faith, if we can only tell them that which they crave to know. That it is a vain and cruel thing merely to carry our own notions among them—our notions upon any subject, divine, human, earthly, I admit readily. If we do not know that which will solve their riddle—if we cannot tell them—Here is that which will turn doubt and confusion into clearness; here is that which is not our notion, but which has come from God to confound our notions, to confound our pride; and which is meant, not for us, but for mankind: for mercy’s sake, let us be silent; the Buddhists are better as they are.
So also of the Confucian scheme. That cannot be charged with want of practical results. Yet that something is wanting, China itself has confessed. Can it be supplied from within? When we fancy it I think we commit a great injustice. Mr. Medhurst, the author of an interesting book on China, the result of his own observations, expresses his wonder, and even indignation, that Confucius, having dwelt so beautifully on the rights and duties of a father, should not have carried up his thoughts to the Great Father of all. I confess that I feel quite unable to adopt this language. It seems to me evidence of Confucius being a sincere man, that he did not allow himself to use mere figures of rhetoric upon this subject, for such in his lips they would have been. If having spoken of one holding an actual relation under the name of Father, he had afterwards used that word as a synonym for a Creator or for an unknown Being, the pleasure which such expressions might have caused us would have been dearly purchased by the loss of reality in the mind of him who resorted to them. If you can tell the Chinese that this is an actual relation, that it has been proved to be so, that our human relation is the image of it, that the reality of one gives reality to the other, that the honour paid to relationships is not incompatible with that seemingly abstract, unsocial, unreal view of the Reason of which the Taou sect has been the champion; and that the Buddhist spiritualism is not an element of new confusion, but of reconciliation you will indeed discover to him that deepest foundation of order which he is looking for—you will shew him that way from the visible to the Invisible which he has never yet discovered. But any teaching short of this, that hard and formal and yet withal practical and serious, mind of his, will repel. You will find that you have not learnt the spell which can break the heavy yoke of custom from off his neck, and change him from the most perfect of living machines into a living Man.