$Unique_ID{bob00806} $Pretitle{} $Title{History Of Religions Chapter III: Part III} $Subtitle{} $Author{Foot Moore, George} $Affiliation{} $Subject{buddhism buddha mahayana religion salvation century religions absolute church council} $Date{1913} $Log{} Title: History Of Religions Book: Religions Of India Author: Foot Moore, George Date: 1913 Chapter III: Part III In the absence of any central regulative authority, differences early appeared in minor points of practice, such as the proper observance of the fortnightly confession, for the settlement of which appeal is made in the Vinaya books to a decision of Buddha in a particular case. More serious dissensions arose about the discipline for monks. There were some, even in Buddha's lifetime, who desired a stricter rule, more nearly conformed to that of other ascetic communities; others found the rule too strict, and wished especially to see the prohibition of receiving money relaxed. With the multiplication of collections of the traditional teachings of the master and the appearance in some of them of a sectarian tendency, the question of canonicity inevitably came up. Nor was it long before differences of opinion concerning the person of the Buddha emerged, foreshadowing the great philosophical and theological controversies that were later to rend the Buddhist church. The effort was made to settle these differences by councils. About these councils the northern and southern branches of the church give conflicting accounts, and the historical facts can hardly be determined from them. That a council held immediately after Buddha's death definitively fixed the doctrine and discipline as they are contained in the first two divisions of the triple canon is equally irreconcilable with the canon and the subsequent history. A century later a council was held at Vesali. Both traditions agree that ten points in which some monks departed from the discipline in the direction of an easier life were condemned as pernicious innovations. ^1 The consequence, according to the southern version, was that the dissatisfied monks seceded and held a "great council" of their own, thus starting the first real schism in the church. According to northern tradition, on the contrary, it was the "great council" that condemned the ten lax practices. All the accounts indicate, however, that the real divergence of the monks of the great council from the rest was not in points of discipline but of doctrine and of canon. Another council is said to have been convened by Acoka about 240 B. C., at Pataliputra (the modern Patna), where false doctrines were condemned and the true faith re-established. From the fact that this council is recognised only in the southern church it may be inferred that only the conservatives took part in it, the partisans of the great council and other progressives remaining aloof, or more probably not being summoned. ^1 On the other hand, the council held in the second century of our era, in the reign of Kanishka, at Jalandhara, is acknowledged only by the northern branch of the church. It is said to have endeavoured to put an end to long-standing dissensions by recognising all the eighteen sects as preserving the true doctrine, and to have completed and revised the canon of scripture. [Footnote 1: The first in the list is preserving in a receptacle of horn a remainder of salt to use at some future time when they happened not to have been given any salt.] [Footnote 1: More sceptical critics doubt whether the whole story is not a southern fiction.] The first great doctrinal controversy in Buddhism was about the nature of Buddha. The school of the great council (Mahasanghikas) maintained that Buddha's nature was transcendent, free from all the imperfections of corporeal existence, and his life absolutely spotless; his every word had a deep spiritual sense which each hearer interprets to his own edification, and all his teaching was perfect. The body of the Buddha is above all limitations, his power is unlimited; he needs no rest nor sleep; his knowledge is immediate and intuitive. The conservatives, while exalting Buddha above common humanity, would not admit that he was exempt from all the limitations of mankind. These were but the first steps in a path which led to a radical transformation of Buddhism, comparable to that which out of the religion of Jesus made Catholic Christianity. The Catholic Buddhism gave itself the name Mahayana, "the great vehicle," that is, the comprehensive scheme of salvation; with a derogatory comparison they called the old-fashioned religion Hinayana, "the little vehicle," a scheme of individual salvation. The most striking departure from primitive Buddhism is, in fact, indicated in these terms. The goal which Buddhism, like the other redemptive religions of India, proposed was strictly individualistic: each man for himself strove, by mastering the Four Certainties and by following the Eightfold Path, to put an end to rebirth by extinguishing its cause; one who has attained this end, and will at death pass finally into Nirvana, is an Arhat, a saint. The saint, or one who is on the way to saintship, may try to bring his fellow men to salvation by proclaiming to them the truth as Buddha taught it and leading them to enter on the path, but this missionary effort is the sum of his contribution to their deliverance. The end which the Mahayana sets before its adherents is a loftier one - not to become a saint and enter upon Nirvana, but to become in some future existence a universal Buddha, a saviour of all beings. Sakyamuni was not the first Buddha; from age to age in the past, when the truths of salvation had been forgotten among men, a Buddha appeared to set the wheel of the law revolving again; in the future, too, the good religion would fall into decadence, and another Buddha would come to restore it. The name of this next Buddha was known; he will be called Maitreya. There were many stories of Buddha's former existences, as man or beast, illustrating chiefly his self-sacrificing disposition. In all these lives through thousands of years he had been cultivating in himself the perfect virtues which a Buddha must possess; namely, generosity, morality, renunciation, wisdom, perseverance, long suffering, truthfulness, firmness of purpose, charity, and equanimity, as well as the other high qualities which are conditions of attainment. Those who embrace the higher Buddhism of the Mahayana propose to themselves to imitate their great exemplar in this, and endeavour to become not an Arhat, or saint, but a Bodhisattva (literally, "one whose essence is intelligence"), ^1 that is, one who has qualified himself to be a Buddha. The salient characteristic of a Bodhisattva is compassion, an active sympathy with suffering beings in distinction from the saint's ideal of dispassionateness. The best evidence of this compassion is that he will not enter into Nirvana as he might, but voluntarily remains in the round of birth and death till the age comes when he shall appear as a saviour. [Footnote 1: The Pali satta is the phonetic reflex not only of Sanskrit sakta, "attached to," but also of sattva, "essence." The original meaning of bodhi-satta was probably "one set on (the attainment of the transcendent) illumination." But the other interpretation, "one of whom the essence is illumination," is so apt and so obvious that it naturally became the accepted one. [C. R. L.]] This shifting of the religious ideal from the salvation of the individual to the salvation of the world is not, however, the only radical departure of Mahayana Buddhism from the primitive type. Buddha steadfastly declined to be drawn into philosophy: whether the world be finite or infinite, eternal or non-eternal, whether one who has attained Nirvana exists after death or does not exist - however such questions may be answered, or whether they be left unanswered, the necessity of salvation remains the same and the way the same. But agnosticism, though it cloak itself with the mantle of religious earnestness, is not a permanent resting-place for thoughtful minds. The defenders of Buddhism, in controversy with rival religions and religious philosophies, were constrained to face problems which the founder blinked; men of philosophic training came over to Buddhism, bringing their habits of thought and their metaphysical impedimenta with them. The result was the same as in Christianity: when it converted philosophers they converted it into a philosophy. The analogy might be carried farther, for the metaphysical principles in the two cases have a notable similarity, and the problem how to fit an historical person into the rigid frame of an absolutist system is the same in Mahayana Buddhism and in Catholic theology. The outstanding names which Buddhist tradition connects with this development are Acvaghosha, Nagarjuna, and the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu. If the author of the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana be the same Acvaghosha who composed the Buddhacarita - in view of the frequency of the name, a doubtful assumption - he was a contemporary of Kanishka in the second century after Christ; Nagarjuna probably lived in the second or third, Asanga in the fifth. The Madhyamika school, of which Nagarjuna is the recognised founder, are metaphysical nihilists in the literal sense. There is no death, no birth, no destruction, no persistence, no oneness, no manyness, no coming, no departing. These denials are not limited to phenomena; the very dilemma, existence or non-existence - for Buddhist logic a tetralemma; existence or non-existence, or both existence and non-existence or neither existence nor non-existence - is false. The transcendental truth is beyond even the category of being: it is the void, the silence which is neither affirmation nor negation. "The truth," says another author of the school, "does not lie in the domain of intelligence, for intelligence moves in the order of the relative and of error." Quite logically, the radical Madhyamika disclaims having any theory of its own to sustain; it occupies itself in a reductio ad absurdum of all conceivable theories. Yet if from the critical point of view appearance has no relation to reality, from an empirical point of view appearance is real, it exists and evolves under immutable laws. The effect is as illusory as the cause, and the nexus as illusory as both, but so long as we are in the bondage of illusion, they exist for us. When they are recognised for what they are, and illusion is dispelled, there remains - the void. The Yogacara of Asanga is usually defined as a dogmatic idealism, which denies the reality of the external world but affirms the reality of thought. The very illusion that the phenomenal world is, supposes the reality of the thought in which the illusion exists. A different opinion has been recently expressed by Anesaki, according to whom Asanga admitted both the reality of the external world and of individual personality, resembling in this the Sankhya philosophy. ^1 [Footnote 1: See the article, "Asanga," in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.] The ontology of the Mahayana posits an absolute, which transcends knowing and being. ^2 Nothing can be affirmed of it, not even that it is; for existence and non-existence are relative terms, one of which supposes the other. No significant name can be given to it, but since some term is necessary it is called "the empty," i.e., void of definable content, as we speak of "the absolute," i.e., free from all relations; another term is Bhutatathata, "that which is such as it is," i.e., cannot be compared to anything else. The phenomenal world is a manifestation of the absolute in seeming finiteness, manifoldness, and changefulness. This seeming arises from ignorance, and the ignorance is not subjective merely - the inborn realism of the human mind - but is potentially in the absolute; being a pure negation, it is held to be not incompatible with the monistic premises. ^3 The absolute in itself is above consciousness, which implies individuation (personality); the principle of individuation is ignorance. Confronted with the question how the unconscious absolute through ignorance comes to consciousness, the unconditioned becomes the conditioned, there is nothing for it but to say, "spontaneously," that is, not with reason and purpose. Corresponding to these two aspects of the absolute are two forms of knowledge, transcendental and relative, the knowledge of the unconditioned and of the conditioned. ^4 So long as we remain in ignorance, the world as it is for us, and we ourselves with our self-consciousness, have a relative reality; when once ignorance is overcome the illusory reality vanishes, and there remains only the absolute that is what it is. [Footnote 2: In attempting to present the general features of Mahayana doctrine I have principally followed Suzuki, "Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism," 1907. It is not perhaps superfluous to say that the Mahayana has far too many faces to be a good subject for a composite photograph.] [Footnote 3: For southern Buddhism, on the contrary, avidya is subjective, and Buddhaghosa is at pains to prove that it is positive.] [Footnote 4: The same distinction is made in the Vedanta philosophy, to which, indeed, the whole system is closely related.] As the Vedanta has not only its transcendent Brahman without attributes, but its Brahman with attributes, personal god and object of religious devotion, ^1 so Mahayana Buddhism has beside its ontological absolute the conception of a supreme being endowed with all perfections. Intelligence, will, and, above all, love, are not mere attributes but the essence of this being. The commonest, and apparently the oldest, name for this being is Dharmakaya, often translated "Body of the Law" (i.e., religion). The protean senses of Dharma make every interpretation uncertain; or rather make it certain that those who used the name found in it different meanings. Suzuki renders, "System of Reality," which has a very modern philosophical sound. Dharmakaya, the ground of being, the one true reality, is not somewhere, but everywhere in the universe; the finite and fragmentary consciousness of individuals is a partial manifestation of the universal intelligence. Man may say: "The Dharmakaya is incorporate in me" - in a pantheistic sense, however, rather than in the consciousness of absolute identity as in the pure Vedanta. [Footnote 1: See below, pp. 317 f.] In an eminent sense the Buddhas are manifestations or incarnations of the Dharmakaya; ^2 in a later time even the word avatara is used, as of the incarnations of Vishnu, and doubtless under the influence of Vishnuite notions. The motive of the incarnation is love: the compassion which fills the heart of the Bodhisattva for the suffering of beings who in their ignorance think thoughts, cherish desires, do deeds, whose consequences they must suffer from existence to existence, is in God an infinite compassion, and moves him to seek the salvation of all. Sakyamuni, whom we call the historical Buddha, was such a manifestation of the Dharmakaya. After his entrance into Nirvana he did not cease to be Buddha; the love and devotion of those who through him had found salvation has its transcendental expression in an eternal Buddhahood. Even in his earthly life, his "transformation body" (nirmanakaya, a magical docetic body), he was above the limitations of humanity; after he voluntarily submitted (in seeming) to death, he continues to be Buddha in the "blissful body" (sambhogakaya). Thus three states are distinguished: Buddha as Dharmakaya, Buddha on earth as Sakyamuni, and the exalted Buddha. This doctrine of the three states or forms (literally, "bodies," trikaya) has a striking resemblance to the distinction of Christian theology - the eternal Logos, the Logos incarnate in Jesus, the exalted Christ. It has an even closer parallel in the Vishnuite doctrine of Avataras, especially as exemplified in the Krishna incarnation. There is no reason to think that there is a historical connection between the Christian and Indian conceptions; they are entirely explicable as independent - and indeed inevitable - solutions of an identical problem. [Footnote 2: Incarnation in a docetic sense.] There are several other systems at the head of which is a primitive or eternal Buddha from which all proceed; the most interesting of these is the theistic Buddhism of Nepal, with its Adibuddha (original Buddha); but limits forbid the discussion of them here. ^1 [Footnote 1: See the article, "Adibuddha," by de la Vallee Poussin, in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. On the system of Amitabha and the Western Paradise (Sukhavati), see above, pp. 131 ff.] In its religious aspects Mahayana Buddhism reflects the contemporary trend of religion in India, as on its metaphysical side it shows the influence of the great absolutist systems of Indian philosophy. The theistic current - always with a pantheistic tendency - can be followed from Vedic times down to modern Hinduism, and compels concessions even from the absolutists. Sects which found the essence of religion in devotion to a gracious god are at least as old as Buddhism itself, and in the centuries in which the Mahayana was taking shape the religions of Civa and of Vishnu-Krishna were rapidly gaining ground in India at the expense of Buddhism itself. The influence of Indian religion is manifest in less favourable ways. The old notion of a succession of Buddhas was enlarged to make room not only for innumerable Buddha aspirants (Bodhisattvas), but for many past manifestations of the eternal Buddha, and among these manifestations the gods of the Indian pantheon without difficulty found recognition, while others figure as champions and protectors of the faith. As Buddhism spread in northern lands, it made room in a similar way for the native deities, much as Christianity and Islam did under the names of angels or saints. The cultus underwent a corresponding transformation. Stately temples arose, adorned with many images, and elaborate forms of worship were developed, with a paraphernalia of vestments, bells, and incense, which seemed to a good Catholic traveller in the last century a travesty of Christian rites. The veneration of Buddha and the saints which prevails in the south is in the northern church replaced by adoration of transcendent Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, among whom Amitabha, Avalokitecvara, and Maitreya occupy the first place after the Triratna itself, that is, the Buddha, the Teaching, and the Order, personified. This worship is, in theory, for the masses, a religion for this world; while the monks train themselves for Bodhisathood by study and spiritual exercises. The fifth and sixth centuries after Christ were the most flourishing period in the history of Indian Buddhism. The Chinese pilgrim, Fah-hien, at the beginning of this period found monasteries at every stage of his long journey. The Mahayanists were numerous, though speaking generally in the minority; their stronghold was in the northwest, but there were many in the old holy land; only in the south they never seem to have had much success. By the time of Hiuen Tsang, in the seventh century, the proportion had changed; the Mahayana was plainly in the ascendant. So far as the statistics of the two travellers can be trusted, the number of monasteries had materially increased in the interval between Fah-hien's visit and that of his successor. In some regions the church had lost ground, in others it had gained; but, taking India over, there was little external indication that Buddhism was declining either in numbers or in influence. From the eighth century, however, the decadence was rapid, and by the thirteenth or fourteenth it was extinct in India proper from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, surviving only in Nepal on the north and in Ceylon on the south. The complete disappearance of Buddhism in the land of its origin, where for centuries its monks had been numbered by scores or hundreds of thousands, is something unexampled in the history of religions, and the causes of it are not at once obvious. Buddhism did not always enjoy the favour of rulers, and sometimes suffered from their active disfavour; but its persecutions - to give them a larger name than they deserve - were local and temporary. In general, the Indian kings, of whatever persuasion they might be personally, were tolerant, and often generous to other kinds of religion in their states. The Arab conquest of Sind in 711 was no doubt a severe blow, for that was a region in which Buddhism was especially strong; but it was not till nearly five hundred years later that the Moslems subdued the east of Hindustan. In the invasion of Magadha (ca. 1200 A. D.) monasteries are said to have been destroyed and many monks killed; others took refuge in the south or beyond the confines of India altogether. There is, however, no reason to think that the Moslems singled out the Buddhists for worse treatment than other Hindu religions. The accounts of an uprising of Brahman orthodoxy, inflamed by Cankara, and of an exterminating persecution in the eighth century, though repeated by Vedantins as well as Buddhists, deserve no credence. Cankara exhibits no particular animosity against Buddhism; he combats all departures from the Vedic authority with impartial strenuousness. External causes are thus insufficient to explain the extinction of Buddhism. Nor do the internal causes appear much more adequate. The long controversy between the great salvation and the little salvation cannot but have weakened the church; the order itself had doubtless lost much of its early zeal; its well-endowed monasteries may have sheltered multitudes of indolent and ignorant monks; it is certain that the contamination with Hindu - especially Civaite - superstitions was extensive; but neither corruption nor contention is ordinarily fatal. Unquestionably the chief cause of the decline of Buddhism was the rise of newer types of religion more attractive to the mass of men. It was an inherent weakness of Buddhism that it was a way of salvation for such only as, renouncing the world, gave themselves exclusively to the task; for others there was no more than the lame consolation that in another existence they too might become monks. In the age when it arose, its competitors, Brahmanic and heretical alike, were at one with it in this; indeed, no small part of the early success of Buddhism may be ascribed to the fact that its "middle way" was a more practicable way for many than the rigorous asceticism or the metaphysical subtleties of other schools. But in the intervening centuries religions had grown up which held out the promise of salvation to pious householders as well as beggar saints. They were religions whose essential features the common man could understand, while the philosopher could make them as profound as he needed. Their living and loving gods answered the longing of the soul for an object of devotion, and rewarded men's devotion not only with the good things of this life but with deliverance from the fear of after lives. These religions were, moreover, in the main line of Indian development; they made no radical break with the gods of the fathers and the rites with which all life was interwoven. In short, it was the growth of the religions which were comprehended under the name Hinduism that undid Buddhism by depriving the order of both recruits and supporters. The permanent conquests of Buddhism were on missionary ground. It was introduced into China in the first century of our era, was carried thence to Korea in the fourth, and reached Japan in the sixth; it had spread in Afghanistan and far into what we now call Turkestan in the first centuries after Christ; in later times it made great progress among the Mongols, contesting the field with Christianity and Islam. From large regions once possessed by it in central Asia it was ousted by the triumphs of Mohammedan arms and by the conversion to Islam of Mongol Khans. Buddhism spread to Burmah in the fifth century and to Siam in the seventh, and in these countries has continued to flourish to the present day. The Buddhism of the south, in Ceylon, Burmah, and Siam, has departed much less widely from the primitive type than that of the north. In becoming the religion of whole peoples - a church, rather than an order of mendicant friars - and of peoples on lower levels of civilisation, it has taken up much from the native religions which it superseded; it has its luxuriant Buddha legend and its arid scholasticism; it has had its share of sectarian controversies about dogma and discipline, and not only in its commentaries and systematic treatises but in the canon itself there is doubtless much that Buddha never dreamed of; but it has not adopted an absolutist metaphysics with a transcendental mysticism or gnosis, nor, on the other hand, has it been so deeply infected by Hindu polytheism and magic as the northern branches of the church. The discipline also has kept closer to the original model. In Tibet, where Buddhism was introduced about 650, there was developed in the ninth century, by a fusion of degraded Buddhism with native superstitions and magic, a religion, called from the title of its highest ecclesiastical dignitary, Lamaism. This patriarch, the Grand Lama, is the incarnation of a Bodhisattva. The Tibetans possess translations of many Buddhist works, besides a great many specifically Lamaist books, so that their canon is of enormous bulk. A reformation early in the fifteenth century divided the Lamaists into two sects, distinguished outwardly by the colour of their garments - red, the unreformed, and yellow, the reformed body.