Chapter VI (3)

In this language, as in the Buddhist texts, the negative is treated as essential existence. _Annihilation_ comes under a similar exegesis. The positive state, is essential being but no manifestation as such. When the spirit, in Buddhistic parlance, entered _nirvana_, it lost objective existence but retained subjective. To objective minds this is becoming absolute nothing; to subjective, NO-thing, nothing to be displayed to sense.

These rather lengthy quotations are necessary for our purpose. Better than anything else, they show the agreement between the oldest “Pagan” philosophies--not “assisted by the light of divine revelation,” to use the curious expression of Laboulaye in relation to Buddha--and the early Christianity of some Fathers. Both Pagan philosophy and Christianity, however, owe their elevated ideas on the soul and spirit of man and the unknown Deity to Buddhism and the Hindu Manu. No wonder that the Manicheans maintained that Jesus was a permutation of Gautama; that Buddha, Christ, and Mani were one and the same person,[592] for the teachings of the former two were identical. It was the doctrine of old India that Jesus held to when preaching the complete renunciation of the world and its vanities in order to reach the kingdom of Heaven, Nirvana, where “men neither marry nor are given in marriage, but live like the angels.”

It is the philosophy of Siddhârtha-Buddha again that Pythagoras expounded, when asserting that the _ego_ (νοῦς) was eternal with God, and that the soul only passed through various stages (Hindu _Rupa-locas_) to arrive at the divine excellence; meanwhile the _thumos_ returned to the earth, and even the _phren_ was eliminated. Thus the _metempsychosis_ was only a succession of disciplines through refuge-heavens (called by the Buddhists _Zion_),[593] to work off the exterior mind, to rid the _nous_ of the _phren_, or soul, the Buddhist “Winyanaskandaya,” _that principle that lives_ from _Karma_ and the Skandhas (groups). It is the latter, the metaphysical personations of the “deeds” of man, whether good or bad, which, after the death of his body, incarnate themselves, so to say, and form their many invisible but never-dying compounds into a new body, or rather into an ethereal being, the _double_ of what man was _morally_. It is the astral body of the kabalist and the “incarnated deeds” which form the new sentient self as his _Ahancara_ (the ego, self-consciousness), given to him by the sovereign Master (the breath of God) can never perish, for it is immortal _per se_ as a spirit; hence the sufferings of the newly-born _self_ till he rids himself of every earthly thought, desire, and passion.

We now see that the “four mysteries” of the Buddhist doctrine have been as little understood and appreciated as the “wisdom” hinted at by Paul, and spoken “among them that are _perfect_” (initiated), the “mystery-wisdom” which “none of the _Archons_ of this world knew.”[594] The fourth degree of the Buddhist Dhyâna, the fruit of Samâdhi, which leads to the utmost perfection, to _Viconddham_, a term correctly rendered by Burnouf in the verb “_perfected_,”[595] is wholly misunderstood by others, as well as in himself. Defining the condition of Dhyâna, St. Hilaire argues thus:

“Finally, having attained the fourth degree, the ascetic possesses no more this feeling of beatitude, however obscure it may be ... he has also lost all memory ... he has reached impassibility, as near a neighbor of Nirvana as can be.... However, this absolute impassibility does not hinder the ascetic from acquiring, at this very moment, _omniscience and the magical power; a flagrant contradiction, about which the Buddhists_ no more disturb themselves than about so many others.”[596]

And why should they, when these contradictions are, in fact, no contradictions at all? It ill behooves us to speak of contradictions in other peoples’ religions, when those of our own have bred, besides the three great conflicting bodies of Romanism, Protestantism, and the Eastern Church, a thousand and one most curious smaller sects. However it may be, we have here a term applied to one and the same thing by the Buddhist holy “mendicants” and Paul, the Apostle. When the latter says: “If so be that I might attain the _resurrection_ from among the dead [the Nirvana], not as though I had already attained, or were already _perfect_” (initiated),[597] he uses an expression common among the initiated Buddhists. When a Buddhist ascetic has reached the “fourth degree,” he is considered a rahat. He produces every kind of phenomena by the sole power of his freed spirit. A _rahat_, say the Buddhists, is one who has acquired the power of flying in the air, becoming invisible, commanding the elements, and working all manner of wonders, commonly, and as erroneously, called _meipo_ (miracles). He is a _perfect_ man, a demi-god. A god he will become when he reaches Nirvana; for, like the initiates of both Testaments, the worshippers of Buddha know that they “are gods.”

“Genuine Buddhism, overleaping the barrier between finite and infinite mind, urges its followers to aspire, _by their own efforts_, to that divine perfectibility of which it teaches that man is capable, and by attaining which man becomes _a god_,” says Brian Houghton Hodgson.[598]

Dreary and sad were the ways, and blood-covered the tortuous paths by which the world of the Christians was driven to embrace the Irenæan and Eusebian Christianity. And yet, unless we accept the views of the ancient Pagans, what claim has our generation to having solved any of the mysteries of the “kingdom of heaven?” What more does the most pious and learned of Christians know of the future destiny and progress of our immortal spirits than the heathen philosopher of old, or the modern “Pagan” beyond the Himalaya? Can he even boast that he knows as much, although he works in the full blaze of “divine” revelation? We have seen a Buddhist holding to the religion of his fathers, both in theory and practice; and, however blind may be his faith, however absurd his notions on some particular doctrinal points, later engraftings of an ambitious clergy, yet in practical works his Buddhism is far more Christ-like in deed and spirit than the average life of our Christian priests and ministers. The fact alone that his religion commands him to “honor his own faith, but never slander that of other people,”[599] is sufficient. It places the Buddhist lama immeasurably higher than any priest or clergyman who deems it his sacred duty to curse the “heathen” to his face, and sentence him and his religion to “eternal damnation.” Christianity becomes every day more a religion of pure emotionalism. The doctrine of Buddha is entirely based on practical works. A general love of all beings, human and animal, is its nucleus. A man who knows that unless he toils for himself he has to starve, and understands that he has no scapegoat to carry the burden of his iniquities for him, is ten times as likely to become a better man than one who is taught that murder, theft, and profligacy can be washed in one instant as white as snow, if he but believes in a God who, to borrow an expression of Volney, “once took food upon earth, and is now himself the food of his people.”