Vicar of St. Silas, Leeds; Late Principal of Trinity College, Kandy; Author of "Missionary Enterprise in the East," &c. T has often been remarked that the sixth century before the Christian era was characterised by abnormal energy and activity in the world of thought. Unwonted enterprise, speculation, and reform were prominent features of the period. Greece was beginning to teach the world new lessons in song, art, and patriotism; the merchants of Corinth and Ægina were bringing, as they had never done before, the wealth both of the East and the West under the shadow of the Acropolis; Italy was responding to the new ethical teaching of Pythagoras; the Orphic brotherhoods were arousing far and wide the religious sentiment; the doctrines of Zoroaster were revolutionising the religion of Persia; those of Confucius the social life and political economy of China; while Gautama Buddha by his new philosophy was turning upside down the ancient faiths of India. This was the age, too, of Daniel the Prophet, when from the royal court of Babylon, under his instrumentality, both Nebuchadnezzar and Darius the Mede had issued decrees to their heathen subjects in favour of the worship of Jehovah, to "every people, nation, and language" in their kingdom. It is impossible to trace, because we have no authorities to guide us, the various influences that were brought to bear on such men as Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Confucius, and Gautama Buddha, who left their marks for ever on the world's history. Are we reading in their doctrines. merely the cipher of individual human intuition? Or are they the several exponents of some world-wide influence of which we cannot now discern the tout-ensemble? Were the teachings of these men eclectic? It is claimed for Pythagoras in some traditions that he travelled to Egypt, Asia, and even India, and acquainted himself with the science of the Chaldæans, the Magi, and the Gymnosophists. Of Confucius also it is said that he travelled at least through the kingdoms of China. And perhaps travel was then far more possible and common than we are wont to suppose. Did they, by the force of a commanding intellect, merely sift out of current human opinion, that was about them, what seemed to them the good, and so give it expression? Was that good the scattered rays of a divine light that had never died out among the Tt races of mankind? Or was it some new-born influence-beginning, perchance, with Solomon's intercourse with the nations, and culminating in the Hebrew schools of thought in the heart of the Babylonian Empire? Though we cannot certainly trace the influence, the one remarkable fact, however it is to be accounted for, is, that these master-minds all seem to have been seeking their way, whether by theory, precept, or practice, to the same goal-the emancipation of the human race from moral evil. Men, even the most original, usually work from some standpoint which they find ready to hand. And that from which all these men seem to have started was a common aspiration after a better way both for this life and the hereafter. * Thus of Pythagoras we learn from Aristotle's Great Ethics that he was looked upon as the first Moral Philosopher; and his ethical. teaching was little less than sublime. To be like the deity was to be truly virtuous; to have the body and the passions under absolute restraint to a well-ordered mind was the one mark of true nobility in man; sincerity and purity of heart were to be the condition of divine worship. And though Pythagoras embraced the remarkable doctrine of metempsychosis, we must not allow that to blind our eyes to the fact of the immense import of his moral precepts. The Orphic theologers, again, had the same object in view. Müller says "they hoped to find satisfaction for an ardent longing after the soothing and elevating influences of religion;" "they had hopes of the purification and ultimate immortality of the soul;" "they aimed at an ascetic purity of life and manners." ‡ The founder of Zoroastrianism, though dealing more with theory than practice, is yet seen to be ever engaged in working out the same problem of emancipation from evil, in his dualistic theology as to the "holy-minded" Ormazd and the "evil-minded" Ahriman; and, to quote Archdeacon Hardwick, "Excellence," in the Avesta, "is confined no longer to descendants of a priestly class. . . nor to the possessor of recondite knowledge . . . not even to the ardent devotee recoiling from the din and business of the world, and seeking in the silence of the jungles a sure refuge from its perils and seductions. Purity is there made possible for all; in all it is connected with incessant warfare, and in all dependent on exact conformity to the Ormazdreligion, in thought, word, and deed. Deflection from its precepts is the only cause of permanent disaster. Servants of Ormazd, unfortified by prayer and sacrifice, may yield to the temptations of the Evil One, and, as the fruit of their misdeeds, may undergo a lengthened term of penance. The body also must in every case eventually succumb beneath the iron yoke of death, the ruthless minister of Ahriman, and then communicate a portion of its own 'impurity' to all who come in contact with it. Still, so long as any man was held to have continued in the number of the 'pure,' it was believed that saving efficacy issued *Eth. Magn. i. 1. + See Ritter's History of Ancient Philosophy, i. 327, 420. 1 See Müller's History of the Literature of Greece. to his spirit from the law of Ormazd; that law 'taking away all the evil thoughts, words, and actions of a pure man, as the strong fleet wind purifies the heaven.""* When we turn to China, we have the same spirit at work again. Confucius, indeed, exercised it in a more limited sphere; but the reformation of mankind was the maxim of his life, though he viewed the subject chiefly from a political aspect. He was emphatically a stern moralist, as well as a statesman; and the moral duties that he inculcated have held sway to this very hour. On the other hand, Lao-tse, the founder of Taoism, who was but fifty years Confucius' senior, would seem, from whatever influence, to have followed much the same principles as the Orphic brotherhoods; his disciple was called a "holy man;" he "shrank from luxury;" he "fought against passion;" he hoped to "advance to the rank of the immortals." "I possess three precious things," said Lao-tse himself; "these I hold and guard as I would guard a treasure. The first is called affection (tenderness for living creatures); the second is called economy (frugality and moderation); the third is called humility, which prevents me from wishing to become the first man of the empire." + When, lastly, we turn to the study of Gautama Buddha-or Gautama the Wise—as he is represented in the sacred books of the Buddhists, and try to divest their accounts of fable and accretions, we cannot fail to see, I think, that he too started from precisely the same standpoint, Emancipation from evil and final Nirvana are the message of his life. On the subject of Nirvana we shall enter presently. But first let us look at this question of Gautama Buddha's way of attaining it, the character of his moral teaching. Gautama Buddha was born of royal blood at Kapila-vastu, about a hundred miles from Benares, according to the Ceylonese authorities near to B.C. 623, according to some later authorities‡ about B.c. 492. We shall probably be warranted in regarding these figures as fixing the superior and inferior limits to the possible commencement of the Buddhist era. He is said to have reached the age of 80. During nearly fifty years of this long life he was the active apostle of his own new doctrines. I write the word "new" deliberately. I am not able to endorse Hardwick's opinion, that " from the school of Kapila to that of Buddha the transition is most obvious and direct; " that Gautama's system was but the "extension and practical embodiment" of the then predominant Sankhya philosophy; § nor that of Rhys Davids, that "a great deal of his morality could be matched from earlier Hindu books," and that "such originality as he possessed lay in the way in which he adopted, enlarged, ennobled, and systematised that which had already been well said by others; in the way in which he carried out to their logical conclusion principles of equity and justice already acknowledged by some of the most prominent Hindu thinkers." || On the contrary, * Vendidád iii. 149; Hardwick's Christ and other Masters, p. 541. + Hardwick's Christ and other Masters, p. 316. See T. W. Rhys Davids' Buddhism, p. 213. § Hardwick's Christ and other Masters, p. 153. Rhys Davids, p. 84. Gautama seems to stand out most markedly in contrast to Kapila especially, and not less to the whole system of Hinduism, in the character of his moral teaching, and, if I mistake not, in the object he had in view. It may well be that the interesting narrative of the turning-point of Gautama's life, so often quoted, and by him often, perhaps, related to his disciples, is authentic. It is intensely human and real. Fresh from his father's palace, and probably satiated with the luxurious indolence that reigned there, he is suddenly arrested by the sight of age, e," "disease," and "death." Driving one day, as it is related, in his chariot, he was saddened by the sight of a decrepit old man, with broken teeth, gray locks, and a form bending towards the ground, his trembling steps supported by a staff, as he slowly proceeded along the road." This sent him home to think. On another occasion he was startled by the sight of a "leper full of sores." On a third occasion it was the spectacle of a "dead body, green with putridity," that lay exposed on the way to the royal gardens. The question that seems to have been aroused in his mind was, Where is the cure for the evils of this state of existence? At length, in the midst of a night's revel in the palace, revolted by the miserable failure of the way in which the world seeks happiness, he determines upon renouncing it, and becoming a recluse for study and self-culture. We are forcibly reminded of another king, who awaking from the unsatisfying dreams of earthly hopes, but at a more advanced age, wrote from his experience the world's epitaph, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." There is no reason to doubt the purity of Gautama's motives; as we cannot doubt his firm determination, in the face of all obstacles, to work out some great problem of humanity, when we see him take his last glance at his sleeping wife and babe, and boldly cut every tie that would hold him to the past. Like Savonarola he could not endure to see "virtue extinct and ruined, and vice triumphant;" and like him he turned to face, if possible, a better life: the burden on both hearts was the same-" Heu, fuge crudeles terras; fuge litus avarum." The life of an ascetic was nothing new in those days, and Gautama seems first to have sought instruction from two Brahman recluses. In the caves near Rajagriha, the capital of Magadha, he is said to have found the society of the Brahmans Alara and Udraka; and afterwards to have spent six years with other Brahman companions near the Temple of Buddha-Gayâ, while he tested the popular system of penance and physical mortification. And here it is that the newness, and as against Hinduism revolutionary character, of his system of teaching first appears. His first discourse was delivered before his former companions, all of whom had become his opponents; and it was this, "There are two things that must be avoided by him who seeks to become a priest; evil desire, and the bodily austerities that are practised by the (Brahman) ascetics.” * No wonder that he should be ridiculed by the Brahmans: such is the first experience of all See Spence Hardy's Manual of Buddhism, p. 187. reformers. And he went to the very root of the matter at once: he inaugurated an entirely new era in religious thought in India by preaching a pure spiritual morality. Nothing could well be a greater contrast to the current systems of Hinduism. The Sánkhya philosophy of Kapila was built entirely on knowledge: the system proposed by a profound study of the body and its surroundings to raise the man. The very idea of moral goodness, either as to be acquired, or as instrumental to further acquirements, is absolutely foreign to it.* The same must be said of Hinduism as exhibited in the Laws of Manu: nothing is based on moral purity, everything on mere ritual. Thus pardon of a great offence is there promised to one who should a thousand times repeat the syllable Óm, and the Gayatri, the well-known verse that is still in the mouth of every Hindu, "Let us meditate on the adorable light of the divine sun; may it guide our intellects !" And if we go back to the Vedas themselves, we are struck with the want of a moral sense throughout. In nearly every hymn we have prayers for earthly prosperity, and physical advantage; for good harvests, plenty of cattle, fruitful showers, a teeming earth, vengeance on enemies, and prosperity at home; but there is scarcely an allusion in the 1017 mantras of the Rig Veda to moral purity. In short the moral sense of the Hindu seems to have been well-nigh lost under their early system of NatureWorship; and to have been still further diminished in what is often called the "heroic age," so that by Gautama's time it was all but, if not entirely, extinct and the Hindu yogin was engaged in mere aimless "meditation," and physical austerities. Against this state of things it was that Gautama protested. It has been said that the "self-mortification and asceticism of the Yoga connects it closely with Buddhism;"§ but the fact is, that the selfmortification of Gautama himself was a spiritual change, moral purity; while that of the yogin consisted in a forced abstraction of thought, aided by such austerities as fixing the eyes on the tip of the nose, learning to exist without inspiration and respiration, and sitting motionless with his back, head, and neck exactly erect. The spiritual * See Ballantyne's Lecture on the Sankhya Philosophy, and Wilson's Sánkhya Káriká. + See Laws of Manu (Jones' Trans.), ii. 79. The following is a fair sample: "Indra and Agni, whom the Soma-juice § See Monier Williams' Sanscrit Dictionary, p. 822, under Yoga. See Bhagavad-gítá, vi. 13, and Wilson's Vishnu Purāna, p. 652, &c. Though both these books are doubtless of much more recent date than the commencement of the Buddhist era, yet they describe the Hindu devotee as he had been for ages. |