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$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.