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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter III: Part I}
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$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{buddha
right
order
way
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salvation
suffering
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buddhism}
$Date{1913}
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Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of India
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter III: Part I

The Great Heresies

     Ascetic Orders - The Origin of the Jains - The Way of Salvation - The
Order - Buddhism - The Life of Buddha - The Saving Truths - The Mendicant
Brotherhood - Buddha's Last Days - Primitive Buddhist Doctrine - Rebirth Not
Transmigration - The Eightfold Path - The Goal, Nirvana - The Order and Its
Rule - History of Buddhism in India - Councils and Schisms - The Higher Goal
of the Mahayana - Metaphysics - Influence of Popular Religions - Decadence and
Extinction in India - Buddhism in Other Lands.

     In the sixth century there were great numbers of men who, leaving their
homes and sundering all social ties, lived as hermits or mendicants, devoting
themselves to the quest of salvation in various ways.  It was universally
assumed that sacrifices to the gods, moral integrity, goodness to fellowmen,
did not lead to the goal; for good works were still works, and all voluntary
deeds entailed their appropriate consequences in another life, keeping the
doer thus bound fast in the endless chain.  Only the sovereign knowledge which
enabled a man to say, "This is not my deed, this is not I," brought
liberation.

     The seekers of salvation were perhaps at the beginning solitary ascetics,
as many have been in more modern times; but in the sixth century we find them
gathering in companies about men whose teaching and example gave promise that
by following them others might reach the goal, and more or less loosely
organised in orders or brotherhoods having their own rule, professing and
propagating a specific doctrine or method, superior to all others, if not the
only way of deliverance.  Though our first evidence about these orders or
sects comes from Buddhist and Jain sources, there is good reason to think that
the movement began a century, perhaps even two centuries, earlier.

     Two of these sects attained historical importance, the Jains and the
Buddhists.  The former still survives in India, beyond whose bounds it never
spread, numbering, by the most recent census, about 1,300,000 adherents;
Buddhism, long since extinct in the peninsula of India, was carried by
missionary effort to the countries beyond, and remains the religion not only
of Farther India, but of a great part of eastern Asia.

     The historical Jain sect, by their original name, the Nirgranthas
(Nigganthas), those who are loosed from bonds, "the emancipated," was founded
in the latter part of the sixth century B. C. by Vardhamana, an older
contemporary of Buddha.  According to the Jain books, ^1 however, this was not
the beginning of the religion, but a revival or restoration; and many European
scholars are inclined to regard Parcva, the next preceding Jina in the series
of twenty-four, who is said to have lived two hundred and fifty years earlier,
as a historical person.

[Footnote 1: The Jain scriptures consist of forty-five Agamas, of which the
eleven Angas are the oldest, and appear to contain in substance the teaching
of Mahavira.  Translations by H. Jacobi, "Jaina Sutras," in Sacred Books of
the East, XXII and XLV.]

     Vardhamana, ^2 more commonly called Mahavira, "the great hero," and Jina,
"the victorious" (whence his followers have the name Jainas), was the son of
petty prince or baron in Magadha.  When he was thirty years old, he left his
home and became an ascetic.  After twelve years of self-mortification, he
achieved the end of his quest.  Thereupon he began to proclaim the truths
which Parcva and the Jinas before him had taught, and gained many converts,
who in part became members of the mendicant order, in part continued to live
in the world under a rule for laymen.  The resemblance of this account to the
story of Buddha is sufficiently explained by the fact that the two sects arose
in the same age and region and under identical conditions, without supposing
that one has served as a pattern for the other.

[Footnote 2: In Buddhist books usually called by his family name, Nataputta.]

     Jainism is anti-Brahmanic, rejecting the Vedas and the authority of the
priests.  It is an atheistic, dualistic system, but differs radically from the
Sankhya philosophy in lodging activity, not in the primary world-substance,
but in the individual souls.  These souls by their activity produce works
(karman, the deed with its entail, good or bad), and are thereby enthralled in
bodiliness and pass from existence to existence in the round of retributive
rebirths, sinking by evil deeds to lower forms of life or rising by good to
the state of the gods, but not even so escaping their fate.  There is no
deliverance but in making an end of karman once for all and altogether.

     This was the universal belief of the time; what is distinctive is the way
by which the karma is to be got rid of.  To this three things are necessary,
namely, right faith, right knowledge, right living - the so-called Three
Jewels.  The right faith is that the Jina (Victor) has overcome the world, has
found the way of salvation, and is a refuge to believers; the right knowledge
is the knowledge of the metaphysics and psychology of the religion as taught
by the founder - what the world is, and what the soul, and how the soul can
emerge victorious from the struggle; right living means living, according to
the precepts of the founder, in such a way as to stop the production of karma
by suppressing its cause.  This cause, in the Jain analysis, is the activity
of the soul; the remedy, accordingly, is to check the impulses to action by
control of the senses.  The effect of deeds done in former existences or in
the present life before conversion must be annulled by self-mortification.  As
death approaches, a Jain may extinguish the last remains of karma by starving
himself.  In the value which it puts on asceticism, Jainism is in the main
current of the times, and stands much closer to Brahmanism than does Buddhism.

     The goal of these endeavours is Nirvana, a state of the soul in which it
is free from the entail of deeds (karma) and from bodiliness.  The soul itself
is indestructible, and the great deliverance does not, apparently, imply a
cessation of consciousness.

     The Jain community consists of ascetics (monks and nuns), and the laity
(men and women), who take the fundamental vows in a mitigated interpretation,
but - in contrast to the Buddhist "adherents" - are reckoned as members of the
church.  This peculiarity of organisation is probably one of the reasons why
the Jains have maintained themselves while other sects which were nothing but
ascetic brotherhoods disappeared.

     The primitive atheism of the sect did not satisfy the religious needs of
the masses, and the veneration of the founder grew in the course of time into
a worship.  Temples - perhaps the earliest temples built in India - were
erected to him, with images, festivals, offerings of flowers and incense - a
complete cultus.  The earlier Jinas took their place by his side, and along
with them in later times Casanadevis, female powers who execute the will of
the Jinas like the Caktis of Hinduism.

     A split in the church occurred about the third century B. C., and divided
the Jain ascetics into two branches, the Digambaras, or "sky-clad," with whom
nakedness is essential to holiness, and the Cvetambaras, or "white-robed," who
entertained the milder opinion that garments, provided they are sufficiently
simple, are not an obstacle to salvation.  Other issues, concerning, for
instance, the canonicity of parts of the scriptures, as well as dogmatic
differences, also divide the two parties.

     The Jain ascetics early ceased to be homeless beggars and took up their
abode in monasteries.  In later centuries philology and science - especially
astronomy - as well as literature, were cultivated in these monasteries; in
the development of Indian architecture and sculpture the Jains took a leading
part.

     Injury to anything that has life, that is, anything in which there is a
soul, is naturally a grave sin in a religion which takes transmigration
seriously, but none of the Indian sects have carried precautions against this
offence as far as the Jains.  They cannot till the soil on account of
earthworms; they cannot even walk abroad in the rainy season without a broom
of twigs, gently sweeping the path before them to remove insects; they must
drink water through a cloth strainer, and many like things.

     Jainism was and remained distinctively, even exaggeratedly, Indian. By
its side, in the same age and on the same soil, Buddhism arose, the first of
the universal religions, a gospel of salvation, which, propagated by
missionary effort, by the preaching of the Great Truths, transcended the
bounds of language and race, and spread to remote lands and peoples.

     The founder of this religion, Siddhartha - to call him by his personal
name - was born, according to the most probable computation, about 560 B. C.,
and died about 480.  His father was a noble landed proprietor of the Cakya
clan, which occupied a district, a few thousand square miles in area, between
the Nepalese foot-hills of the Himalayas and the middle course of the river
Rapti, with the Rohini as its eastern limit - territory now mainly belonging
to Nepal, but extending across the border into British India.  His bringing-up
was probably like that of young men of his class, his education more in manly
sports and the arts of the chase and war than in what the priests or the
wandering sophists of the age could teach.  He married, and had one son,
Rahula, who became in due time a member of the order.

     Immediately after the birth of this son, at the age of twenty-nine,
Siddhartha abandoned his home, wife, and child, and wandered forth, like
thousands of others in his day, in search of salvation.  Legend has surrounded
the great renunciation with a halo of poetry - not without its own
psychological verisimilitude - the ominous sights of old age, disease, and
death, and of an ascetic, the last look at his sleeping wife and child, the
night ride with his faithful charioteer, the steed that dies of a broken heart
at the loss of his master.  He first put himself under the guidance of two
adepts in the art of cultivating trance states, but, becoming convinced that
this was not the way, turned to self-mortification with such zeal that five
other ascetics followed him about in expectation of his immediate
enlightenment; he pushed his fasting at length to such extremes that he
brought himself to the verge of death, but without result. This way also
having proved to lead nowhither, he desisted from such austerities, whereupon
his companions lost faith in him and left him.

     At last, seven years after he began his quest, as he was seated in
meditation beneath a tree, the hour of illumination came, and he saw through
the causes of the world-misery; in that moment he became the Buddha, the
Enlightened.  Mara (Death), who saw his empire threatened and had already
tried to frighten him from his purpose, now endeavoured, by the aid of his
three daughters, Desire, Discontent, and Lust, to seduce the Buddha; but their
allurements were wasted on one who had done away with love, hate, and
illusion.  A greater temptation was the thought that the truth was too
profound for the common apprehension; it would be lost labour to preach it to
men who could not understand and would not accept it; was it not better to
enter forthwith into Nirvana, carrying the secret with him?  This suggestion,
too, he resolutely put aside, and set about proclaiming his good tidings.  The
two Yoga teachers were dead, but he sought out the five mendicants who had
been the witnesses of his austerities in the forests of Uruvela.  They met him
with prejudice as one who had turned back from the hardships of the "great
effort," but when he set forth his discovery they gladly embraced the saving
doctrine.

     The discourse the Buddha held with the five ascetics, sometimes called
the Sermon at Benares, contains the fundamentals of the faith: The seeker of
salvation should be warned equally against the two extremes of self-indulgence
and self-mortification; both are unworthy and unprofitable. There is a middle
way, following which man arrives at peace of mind, knowledge, enlightenment,
Nirvana.  This way, the so-called Eightfold Path, comprises right belief,
right resolution, right speech, right conduct, right means of subsistence,
right effort, right meditation, right absorption. ^1

[Footnote 1: For the definition of these terms, see below, p. 295.]

     This is the sovereign remedy for the misery of existence.  Buddha, as a
healer of the soul, habitually sums up his doctrine under four heads
corresponding to the formula in which the task of the physician is defined by
Indian medical authorities (the nature of the disease, its aetiology, the
removal of the cause, the remedy).  These are the "four great certainties,"
the universality of suffering, the universal cause of suffering, the removal
of the cause, the means by which this may be achieved, namely, the Buddhist
regimen as prescribed in the Eightfold Path. The first step in this path,
right belief, is the conviction that Buddha has traced misery to its cause and
found the infallible remedy.

     The first of the four certainties, the universality of suffering, was the
self-evident truth which set men to seeking salvation in manifold ways. To the
mendicants it needed no demonstration: "Birth is suffering, age is suffering,
illness is suffering, death is suffering; contact with what we dislike is
suffering, separation from what we like is suffering, failure to attain what
we crave is suffering - in brief, all that makes bodily existence is
suffering."

     The question of the cause of this universal human ailment, and
particularly the cause of its continuance from existence to existence, had
long exercised Indian thinkers.  Buddha finds it in the craving (literally,
"thirst") which leads from rebirth to rebirth, accompanied by sensuous
pleasure and desire, plucking pleasures here and there - the craving of lust,
the craving for being, the craving for well-being.  The solution is not new:
in passages of the Upanishads, some of which have already been quoted,
"desire" is the root from which springs the deed with its dire entail, freedom
from desire puts an end to it all; but Buddha was the first to make it a
corner-stone.  The aetiology of the disease being thus understood, it is
self-evident that a radical cure can only be wrought by the extirpation of the
cause, the extinction of this fatal craving, through the wholesome regimen of
the Eightfold Path.

     The news that Buddha had discovered the sure way of deliverance drew to
him inquirers, and converts rapidly multiplied.  Many of these were men of his
own social class or of the well-to-do middle class, but there were some
Brahmans among them.  Indian asceticism, in its Brahmanic forms as well as in
the heretical sects, has always been beyond caste distinctions, and in like
manner Buddha's way of salvation was for all mankind.  It is, however, a
complete misunderstanding to conceive that Buddhism was a revolt against the
system of caste, which, indeed, was in that age and region only in an
undeveloped stage.  Buddha's attack on the Brahmans is directed against the
false conceit that Vedic learning and ritual observances could save a man - a
delusion which not only kept them out of the kingdom, but made them oppose his
work as the Pharisees opposed Jesus.  On the other hand, very few of the
lowest classes are found in the following of Buddha. It is a common
observation that it is not the people whose life seems to us most intolerable
that are most discontented with life; despair is a child of the imagination,
and pessimism has always been a disease of the well-to-do or at least the
comfortably-off, and peculiarly virulent when it attacks youth.  So it
evidently was in India in Buddha's time.

     Some of the converts came over from other sects or from among the
solitary ascetics, but there were many also who had not previously assumed the
mendicant life.  According to the fashion of the time, Buddha gave to his
disciples a simple rule of life; the yellow robe, the shaven head, and the
begging bowl were probably from the beginning the badge of the monk. Ere long
the disciples were commissioned to receive new adherents upon the triple
confession: "I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Doctrine, I
take refuge in the Order." The instructions which Buddha is said to have given
to his apostles are an interesting testimony to the missionary spirit of
primitive Buddhism: "Go forth, disciples, and wander, to the salvation and joy
of much people, out of compassion for the world, to the blessing, salvation,
and joy of gods and men.  Go not two together on the same way.  Preach,
disciples, the doctrine which is salutary in its beginning, its course, and
its consummation, in the spirit and in the letter; proclaim the pure way of
holiness.  I am going to preach the truth in Uruvela."

     As the rainy season approached, the mendicants gathered in the vicinity
of a town, in groves or parks, often put at their disposal by rich patrons;
simple huts sheltered them from the weather, their single meal was got by
gathering alms from door to door.  The rest of the day was spent in listening
to the teaching of the Master or repeating his words on former occasions, in
conversation about the great lessons, or in solitary meditation.  Three months
each year, from the middle of June to the middle of September, passed thus,
and the formation of the fixed tradition which was eventually gathered up in
the sutras may be traced to this custom. When the rains were over, the
brethren dispersed in different directions, carrying with them everywhere the
message of suffering, its cause, the extirpation of the cause, the remedy.
Buddha himself, with a more or less numerous following, including the inner
circle of disciples whose names are more constantly associated with his own,
wandered from season to season in different parts of a somewhat extensive
district, in Kosala and Magadha (modern Oudh and Bihar).  In this fixed round
forty-five years went by with little to distinguish one year from another.
Tradition usually connects particular discourses and conversations or
institutions of Buddha with certain persons and occasions, often with places,
but only at the beginning and end of his ministry is there anything like an
order of time.

     Besides the members of the order, who alone belong in the proper sense to
the religious community, Buddha had many friends and supporters among the
laity, both men and women, who listened gladly to his teaching and observed
the first five commandments of the Buddhist decalogue.  They daily filled the
monks' alms-bowls, and often invited numbers of the brethren to a meal.
Wealthier patrons bestowed on the order for their retreat groves and parks,
such as the garden at Jetavana presented by a rich merchant, Anathapindika, or
the mango grove at Vesali, the gift of the courtesan Ambapali; the simple huts
in which the brethren lodged were later replaced by more permanent
monasteries.  The order boasted princely patrons in King Bimbisara of Magadha
and King Pasenadi of Kosala.  Such adherents, or "reverers" (of Buddha) as
they are called, living in the world, could not expect to attain saintship in
this life, but might hope, in virtue of their faith and good deeds, to be
reborn with a predisposition thereto.

     The new doctrine encountered opposition from various sides.  In the eyes
of the Brahmans it was a heresy, because it rejected the Vedas and the Vedic
sacrifices, the Vedanta and the Yoga; but the Brahmans had no ecclesiastical
organisation and no secular arm at their command; their influence with the
classes to which Buddha appealed seems to have been small.  In the
controversies with them the Buddhists are almost always the aggressors.  A
much more serious hindrance was the rivalry of other heretical sects.
Buddhist tradition preserves the name of six such bodies, the most vigorous of
which were the Ajivikas, the followers of Gosala, ^1 and the Nigganthas
(Jains) with their head Nataputta.  Each of them professed to possess the
saving truth and the rule of life which alone led to deliverance, and disputes
about doctrine and practice inevitably followed when the contentious
representatives of the different salvations crossed one another's paths on
their beggars' errand.

[Footnote 1: See the article, "Ajivikas," by Hoernle, in Encyclopaedia of
Religion and Ethics, I, 259-268.]

     Both Buddhists and Jains display a peculiar animosity toward Gosala, whom
they accuse of grounding a practical libertinism on a theoretical fatalism.
Charges of loose living are, however, favourite arguments in sectarian
controversy, and Buddhists and Jains exchange them, along with less concrete
polemics.  The Buddhist "middle way," with its rejection of
self-mortification, seemed to thorough-paced ascetics mere pampering of the
flesh, and is a favourite butt for Jain jibes.  In the temper of the times
this feature of Buddhism was to many unprejudiced by sectarian jealousy a
suspicious thing.

     In the Buddhist community itself voices were early raised in favour of a
stricter rule, more in accord with the reigning fashion; the first serious
dissension in the order is said to have been over such a proposal. Devadatta,
a cousin of Buddha, who cherished an ambition to succeed him, having failed to
persuade Buddha to resign the headship of the order to him, put certain monks
up to ask the master to prescribe a severer discipline for all members of the
congregation, and this also being refused, drew five hundred monks away with
him in an abortive schism, the forerunner of graver ones to come.

     The Suttas give a sufficiently clear notion of the method and form of
Buddha's teaching.  To men of the world who came to hear him he set forth
first the secular virtues, the great evils that follow ill-doing in this life
and beyond, the great blessings that reward well-doing. ^1 Only when he finds
by their response that there is in them an understanding or receptive mind
does he expound the higher lessons of suffering, its cause and cure, the
gospel of redemption.  In this there is no distinction of exoteric and
esoteric, but only the tact of a wise teacher who finds his hearers where they
are and leads them on to his ground as they are able to follow.  Buddha often
tries to clear the minds of inquirers of false notions and to bring them to
see the truth by skilfully directed questions, and refutes opponents by
entangling them in their own answers, in a fashion sometimes called Socratic.
But the reader of the Suttas who is led by this inapposite comparison to look
for something of the genius of Socrates, the freshness, the humour, the
unconventional in thought and expression, will be disappointed.  The clatter
of the dialectical machinery, the numerical schemes, the tedious repetitions
totidem verbis of the self-evident or the not-at-all-evident, make the
impression of a dreary scholasticism rather than of creative originality.
There is no doubt that much of this is only the clumsy mnemonic apparatus by
which the words of the master were preserved from generation to generation;
but that Buddha's own thinking and teaching ran in the scholastic mould
created by the Indian sophists before him is equally unquestionable - how else
should he have convinced his contemporaries?

[Footnote 1: See, e.g., Maha-parinibbana-Sutta, I, 23 f., Maha-vagga, V, 1.]

     The story of the last months of Buddha's life is more detailed than that
of any other period of his career; as the end approaches we can follow him
almost from day to day.  It is natural that the doings and sayings of these
days should have been indelibly impressed on the memory of his companions,
often repeated to others, and earliest crystallised in a fixed tradition.

     During the last rainy season he was seriously ill, and though he
recovered it was evident that the end could not be far off.  Ananda, the most
intimate of his disciples, expressed his anxiety lest the Blessed One should
pass away without leaving final instructions for the guidance of the order.
Buddha replied that he had nothing to add to what he had taught for so many
years.  As to the order, he had never regarded himself as its head, or the
order as dependent upon him.  Its members must be a light and a refuge to
themselves, seeking no refuge besides themselves, but holding fast to the
truth as lamp and refuge; ^1 such mendicants shall reach the highest goal -
but they must be anxious to learn!

[Footnote 1: The Pali word, dipa, means both 'lamp' and 'island.' The last
words of Buddha may therefore be translated:

     "Therefore, Ananda, with yourselves for islands [of safe retreat from the
overwhelming floods of desires and lusts] live ye, with yourselves for
refuges, with none else for refuges; with the Teachings for an island, with
the Teachings for a refuge, with naught else for a refuge." Such is the import
of the metaphor according to the greatest of all the commentators,
Buddhaghosa.  It amounts, says he, to this: "Stand on your own feet," that is,
"With all heedfulness (see next note, below), work out your own salvation, and
in reliance on no one but yourselves and naught else than the Teachings." (I
am indebted for this note, as well as for the following one, to the kindness
of my colleague, Professor Charles R. Lanman.)]