Epochs in Buddhist history

Front matter

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Introduction

That Buddhism is a stream which has its source in the complex and elusive system of Brahmanism known today as Hinduism; that it is rightly called by the name of Gotama Buddha, the great moral reformer of the sixth century B.c. because he shaped its course and purified its waters; that as the stream flowed in an ever widening bed out over the Eastern World, tributaries poured into it from every side, swelling, coloring, and sometimes defiling it—all this is generally accepted. This book is an attempt to describe that remarkable process; and as in the case of the great sister-religion, Christianity, it 1s difficult to say anything which does not need qualification. The tributaries of both religions are many and diverse, and the streams are very complex. In Buddhism, in the first place, there are several philosophical systems, ranging from a naive realism to a subtle mystical pantheism, and all claiming to be derived from the words of Sakyamuni. The person of the Founder has, in the second place, played a widely different rdle in different schools, from that of an ethical teacher, “‘supernormal perhaps but not supernatural,” to that of supreme god among the gods. In the third place, the moral reform for which he is so justly famous has been variously interpreted, as different emphasis has been placed now upon one and now upon another part of his teachings, until the Buddhist world finds itself divided between the ideals of a self-centered, individualistic mind-culture, on the one hand, and a passionate, altruistic self-sacrifice, on the other.

Vill INTRODUCTION

Such is the destiny of great and complex teachers; and it is my purpose in this book to show how the noble qualities which he embodied have led almost inevitably to a polytheistic cult, as the stream has found its way into other lands, and first one then another was emphasized and embodied in a new “‘god,”’ and to trace its course and the tributaries which have entered it. To put all this into more Buddhistic imagery—the lotus of Buddhism has grown apace; its seeds have germinated and borne rich fruitage. But some have been pollinated from plants of another species, producing hybrids, and some have germinated in desert swamps, becoming weeds. In describing this process it is not my object to criticize or to discriminate between the true and false growths. That must be left to the Buddhist world. My task is merely that of a sympathetic chronicler; yet it is my sincere desire to help Christian and Buddhist scholars toward a friendly and frank discussion. I belonged for some time to a group representing many religions in India; and many were the delightful evenings we spent without heat or conscious propaganda, learning one another’s point of view and growing, as we all believed, in the process. I remember the great Buddhist scholar, Oldenberg, coming into our midst and saying: “I did not know such a thing was possible.” It is possible, and it ought to be done in every intellectual center in the world;’ indeed, the mutual respect and understanding of the nations cannot be based upon rock until numerous groups of this kind are meeting in an honest attempt to study the great streams which have made our civilizations what they are.

To scholars of the West and of the East I am deeply indebted, but it is to the East that I have naturally turned

* A very interesting group of this kind, numbering over a hundred, meets in Tokyo.

INTRODUCTION 1X for my information, and today there are Eastern scholars trained in the scientific methods of the West who yet see Buddhism from within as adherents. Among these I would mention with special gratitude my teacher in Ceylon the Pundit Wagiswara and my friend, Dr. M. Anesaki, whose name is justly revered wherever Buddhism is studied. And with them I would thank the courteous and genial monks of many a monastery from Ceylon to Japan, whose guest I have been. In these quiet haunts I have caught something of the spirit of the great and noble Order of the Yellow Robe, which, in spite of perversions, has shown an amazing power of recovery.

And of the thoughts which have come to me during twelve years’ study of the religion of Gotama Buddha, I will here set down by way of introduction these: (1) that the great keynotes of our modern scientific thinking, causality and the unity of the universe, even if Gotama did not first formulate them, were popularized by him; and that this is one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of human thought; (2) that the conviction which rings through his words of a moral purpose governing the universe, of the sure reward of good and evil, is even more sublime; (3) that his anticipation of modern psychological theories deserves close and respectful study; (4) that his “religion,” the influence of his words and deeds, is still very much alive, and still supplies a felt want in Asia; (5) that with all its accretions and corruptions it still has much to teach the Western World; (6) and that what men have made of it 1s eloquent of what they are made of: for its rationalism has needed to be reinforced by mysticism; its moral code has been driven to seek other sanctions than the enlightened common sense

INTRODUCTION he appealed to; and the devotion he strove to disentangle from his own person has clung tenaciously to it.

What Buddhism has become is to Christians a vindication also of many of the teachings of Jesus—the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the harmonizing of the individual and corporate life in a divine Kingdom on earth: and, even more remarkable, it is a vindication also of some of the less simple and more controversial of the dogmas of Christianity, such as the Logos doctrine, the triune nature of the Godhead, and the Atonement.

The Buddhist, on the other hand, may see in some of the more philosophical and mystical expressions of Christianity a Buddhist element;’ and this is true—that there are in Christianity elements which are not much understood or used by the Christian church, but which are the very breath of life to the devout Buddhist; such, for instance, as the doctrine of the unity of all life and the practice of communion with it. The followers of the two Ways have every reason to associate in friendship and to unite in social service. They are both faced with immensely difficult problems of social and international relations. I hope this book? may in some measure be a bridge between them. “They who have lived with the eternal Word are Christians—even though we call them atheists.” And the spirit of Christ can only pass between us who call ourselves by his august Name and our Buddhist friends, if we are trying to understand and to respect one another. Kaas.

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA Easter, 1922 * Cf. Dr. Anesaki in Hibdert Fournal, IV, 9.

2 Much of the contents of this book was given as Haskell Lectures in the University of Chicago in 1921. Chapter vi has appeared in the Yournal of Religion and Appendix I in the International Review of Missions.

3 Justin Martyr.

Contents

II. PATati-puTRA; THE SPREAD OF THE DHAmMa AND Its SATEGUABR DING Wie ei mentitn ie ul nds ty titra aH names KG

III, GanpHARA AND PurusApurA; THE BirtTHOF MAHAYANA 47 IV. NALANDA; THE EARLY SCHOOLMEN OF THE MAHAYANA 70

V. MininTALe, ARIMADDANA, AND SUKHOTHAI; FASTNESSES OF THE THERAVADA IN CEYLON, BuRMA, AND SIAM . 105

Chapter I

RAJAGAHA; THE MIDDLE PATH The Differentia of the Buddhist Reform (ca. 525 B.C.)

“He that seeth the Dhamma seeth me.” ‘That there is effective action, resultant action, and power within to do thts or that, I, even I, proclaim.” “As the ocean has but one flavour so my teaching has but one essence— deliverance.” “Engineers control the stream: the wise controlleth himself.” “Of all that springs from causes the Tathagata has explained the cause.” —SAKYAMUNI.

The country of Magadha is famous in Indian literature for its beauty and fertility. On the east side of its ancient capital, Rajagaha, the King’s House, is a natural rampart of five wooded hills, to which from time immemorial have gathered the religious teachers of India; and thither they still come, followed by eager pilgrim crowds, wistfully seeking peace and comfort. To these hills with their wooded slopes and bare cliffs, honeycombed with hermitages, came the young Siddhartha about the middle of the sixth century B.c., seeking guidance, and here some nine years later he began his work as a reformer of the religion of India, and as her greatest moral teacher.

It is not difficult to picture the young reformer whose story has been so often told:* lonely at first, subject to periods of depression at the stupidity and inertia of those about him, repelled as he ate the first meal of scraps thrown into his begging-bowl, but gathering courage and inspiration as disciples began to attach themselves to him, and to help him formulate the rules of a new religious order. We may think of them during the rains in peacetI have tried to retell it in a biographical sketch, Gotama Buddha. New York: Association Press, 1921; London: Oxford Press, 1923.

I

A ful retreat upon these hills, gazing down upon the fertile plains of the Ganges Valley, or gathered about him on the bare Peak of the Vulture that rose clear above the wooded slopes, and pouring out in that serene air a paean of thanksgiving and joy in their new-found liberty of mind and peace of soul.

As swans who soar in tracks of sunlit air,

As sorcerers in realms of space are free;

So does the sage win through to mastery

Of Mara, and the transient world’s despair.

In order to give them this liberty, however, the new teacher first convinced them of the universality of law. Before they could be free in the universe they must realize that it is lawful to the core. This was a truth already accepted in theory,’ but men were ignoring it in practice. Among the first of the converts were two Brahmins, Moggallana and Sariputta, and from the story of their conversion we gather how large a part the mind played in the new Way, and how central in it was the doctrine of causality, which has been well called its keynote.? These men had been companions and fellow-seekers in the religious life. Like their fellow-Hindus they must have been familiar with such teaching; accepting the axiom that life is evil and that Karma brings rebirth they were seeking Moksha, freedom from the whole process. Meeting a Buddhist monk and struck by his calm and radiant bearing, Sariputta learned the essentials of the truth in these simple words:

Of all things springing from a cause The Buddha hath the causes told:

Of how they all shall cease to be, This, too, our Teacher doth unfold.

tE.g.,in the Samkhya-Yoga; cf. Keith’s Samkhya and Philosophy. Oxford Press, 1921. 2M. Anesaki, Nichiren, p. 138. 3 Mahdvagga i. 23. 4, 5; B.T., pp. 87-91.

It is difficult to believe at first sight that this doctrine became to so many a real gospel. Even if they had not heard it from their own religious teachers, was it a truth sO emancipating ! ? The answer seems to be twofold: first, that it is one thing to know a doctrine, another to be gripped by it, and to meet men who are radiant with it; and second, that this is what Sakyamuni achieved. Eigen today men orphaned in the world of faith find in it, as he popularized it, a gospel of salvation; there are groups of European Buddhist monks, for instance, to whom it has given a new meaning in life. Familiar with it as science, in him they find it as religion! And to men haunted by the idea of capricious deities, on the one hand, and beset, on the other, by determinist teachings of a monistic philosophy, here was a great new conviction that the universe is orderly, and that man is free to shape his own destiny. Here is a practical and vital truth: “Put aside these questions of the beginning and the end. This is the Dhamma—that being present this must follow; from the rising of that this arises. That being absent this does not come into being. From the cessation of that this too ceases.”* Here is reality speaking. Gotama has been called atheist, even by many of his own later followers. However this may be, he made here a notable contribution to an ethical theism; his serene faith in righteousness and in the reality of unseen, intangible values may be called religious; and we may well believe that knowing his people and their genius for religion he believed that he might safely leave them to work out a religious interpretation of this law of causality. What was wrong with most of them was that they were in the bondage of superstition; before they could become truly religious they

1 Majjhima Nikaya 79.

must learn to think of the world as a cosmos of ordered sequences, and not a chaos at the mercy of capricious demons or demigods. Until they were free from such vague fears, on the one hand, and from the fatalism of determinist theories and a vague pantheism, on the other, there could be no true morality or religion; and to give them a sound basis for faith he bent all the energies of his great mind and heart. Thus we find him welcoming all who were ready to accept the doctrine of causality, for example, the Jatilas,t and dealing severely alike with determinist teachers who failed to moralize it, and with those who sought by self-mutilation or foolish asceticism to placate the powers of the unseen world.”

Let us picture this courageous son of fact with his disciples grouped about him on the Vulture Peak, or some similar height. For twenty-five centuries Buddhists have sought the mountain tops, and these are still the fastnesses of the Dhamma. Master and disciples sit calmly meditating, and after the Indian manner they wait for him to speak. At last a smile lights up his face, and he points to where a peasant is carrying his burden of fagots down from the hillside: “Listen, O monks.” ‘“‘Speak, lord.” “T will teach you the parable of the burden and its bearer, _ of the taking of it up, and the laying of it down.” He then proceeds to show that the burden is bodily existence, that the bearer is the individual consciousness, that the taking-up of the burden is Tanha, that craving to be and to have which brings man to rebirth, and that the layingdown of the burden is the putting aside of such craving.

* Mahavagga i. 21; B.T., p. 351. They were fire-worshipers of a very intelligent kind.

2In Majj. Nik. 71, Gotama is made to say: “In ninety-one cycles of rebirth I can remember only one naked ascetic having attained toa heaven. And He held the doctrine of the fruits of actions.”

And then that they may the better remember it, he sings them a little gatha or hymn: This body is of Khandhas made, "Tis man this burden bears.

Oh! with what joy aside ’tis laid, Tis taken up with tears."

And all the company, having already experienced something of the joy of laying aside this burden,’ rejoice with the teacher who has shown them the way. So did Pilgrim rejoice when the load fell from his shoulders. And if it be objected that here was a poor materialistic “gospel,” the Buddhist replies: ‘‘It is not materialistic: for of the five Khandhas four are not material: Vedana, feeling; Safina, perception; Vififana, consciousness in general; and Samkhara, a complex including will, attention, faith, and other conative groups.”

We may imagine another typical scene. The master and his disciples are seated calm and collected on Gaya Head, a hillside near the spot where he attained enlightenment, when a fire breaks out in the jungle below; they watch it blaze, and then he begins once more to improve the occasion: “All, O monks, is aflame: eye, ear, nose— all the organs of sense. All nature is aflame. What is the cause of this universal conflagration? It is Tanha.’ Hate, lust, infatuation—these are the flames. Then, in order that he may help them in their task of teaching a world to extinguish the blaze that is destroying it, he t Samyutta Nikaya, B.T., pp. 159-60. ‘This little parable was not unnaturally misunderstood in later days, the Sammitiya school interpreting it to mean that man is something more than the Khandhas which make up his “burden.” (See Poussin, E.R.E., Vol. X1, Sammitiyas, and note his indorsement of this review as “a good and truly Buddhist one.”)

? Though still carrying this burden of bodily existence they had got rid of the intolerable obsession of rebirth and of Tanha.

gives them a new and different chant, a dirge that still resounds mournfully in a thousand monasteries:

Sabba dukkha, Sabba anatta, Sabba anicca.

Sorrow is everywhere,

In man is no abiding entity,

In things is no abiding reality.

The conflagration, in a word, is to be extinguished by the waters of logic. Face life as it is, sorrowful, transient, and you will no longer crave for it. If the doctrine of causality is the keynote of the Buddhist metaphysic, the doctrine of anatta is the unique thing in its psychology. And both doctrines are applied with an ethical purpose. Like Hume, two thousand years later, Gotama with remorseless logic analyzes the “self” into its component parts. He seeks to get rid of the “ego” of animism in order that he may get rid of the “ego” of egoism. The “self” is unreal because it is compound. Analyze it, and see that it is a stream of consciousness made up of elements of sensation, of cognition, of volition, and you will realize that there is no “soul” in the ordinary sense of a separate entity or “substance,” such as that which only a century ago men of science in the West were trying to weigh and to locate. Nor is there even a “substratum” in which qualities inhere. Much less is there an atman, such as some Hindus conceived in almost physical terms, an indwelling microcosm identical with the macrocosm or Brahman. To believe that is to sacrifice moral freedom; and Gotama knew that this is more vital than even intellectual consistency. The self is real enough, because it is a manifestation of Kamma, energy or action, and it is t Buddhaghosa, the great commentator, says authoritatively that the Buddha analyzed man into the five Khandhas “to afford no foothold for animism.”

free, in spite of the past, to direct its energies aright in the present. “Self,” says the Dhammapada, “‘is custodian of self;

Out of the seeming pessimism of this philosophy of transiency emerges a sane optimism, as is beginning to be recognized by Western writers. Buddhism insists on Dukkham, sorrow, in order that it may show men the way to Sukham, happiness: “One thing only do I teach, O monks—sorrow, and the uprooting of sorrow.” Over against the world of birth and death, of Samsara, it sets the unchanging calm of Nibbana, beyond joy and sorrow, yet often known as the Supreme Bliss. All religions, as William James has pointed out, are alike in having as their basis an uneasiness and its solution. Gotama has his own solution to offer. “He is a physician; if medicine is pessimistic then he is a pessimist”; says the Buddhist, “having diagnosed the disease he goes on to prescribe its cure.”

Even when he wielded the knife it was to cut out the roots of sorrow, and man learned to kiss that strong yet kindly hand. The early Sangha was therefore a happy company; there was “something vernal in the air,” and at times a contagion of joy can be seen to pass from these monks and nuns to the people about them. They were in the presence of a beloved leader; they had attained to a vision of the unity and lawfulness of the universe so that they were no more afraid; they believed that they were seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, and they had a ' purpose great enough to claim their whole energies—to lead the world out of confusion and superstition and fear into a serene peace; out of the transient flux and confusion of becoming to the ordered calm of being. Above all they believed that they would not be reborn to sorrow, and the old obsession was gone forever. Let the student ponder the Psalms of the Early Buddhists* and he will find himself responding to their joy. This is another hallmark of the originality of early Buddhism. Much in it was ordinary Hinduism; its spirit was all its own.

During his lifetime it is clear that Gotama encouraged them to put their faith in the Dhamma, or teaching. Like most of the terms he used this was one familiar to his countrymen, but as was his wont he redefinedit. Hitherto it had meant the abiding social order, norm, or standard; divorcing it from its connection with social sanction he proclaimed it as the truth of individual existence. Believing that his own enlightenment was a discovery of universal law or order, that all life is a unity, that a moral purpose is at work in it, he saw his task as that of a teacher of these truths. In this lay one of the great secrets of his success; while others seemed to be dealing with vague, intangible things, here was a positivist who insisted upon facing life as individual men and women have to live it, and in whose words there rang the sturdy conviction which comes from personal experience. Men began to say of him, “He knows knowing, sees seeing; he is the eye of the world; he has become knowledge . . . . has become truth .... it 1s he who teaches us, who reveals the hidden truth, who pours out good and gives immortality; he is the lord of Dhamma.””

He hath discerned all this life 0’ the world, In all the world the how and thus of things, From all detached and leaning upon naught, Who all hath mastered, from all bonds is loosed: Touched is for him high peace and blessed calm Where no fear cometh more.3 *C, A. F. Rhys Davids, Translation of Theratherigatha,2 vols, London: P.T.S., 190g, 1913. 2In Samyutta, P.T.S. Ed. xiv. 94 f. it is also stated that he is “son of Light, of Wisdom, of Brahma. .... ‘s 3 Mrs. Rhys Davids’ rendering of dung. Nik. ii. 24.

What, in other words, makes him Buddha is that he has found the Dhamma, and having been true to it and identified himself with it proclaims it to the world. In this identification lies the seed for the Buddhology of later ages. The Tathagata, “he who has reached reality,” gives place to the Tathata, reality itself.

Meantime it is clear that for the first generation of . disciples he was primarily an ethical teacher, and that he aimed at showing men a middle path of splendid sanity. This is the central thing in his ethics. If they differ from those of orthodox Hinduism it is in their moderation. While the body must be kept in subjection, it is both vain and painful to torture it, as he and countless others in India had done. On the other hand, family life, and life in the world in general, is a life of confused issues, and though it is not impossible to master one’s self while living in the world," it is far easier and safer once and for all to cut out these roots, and to join the monastic order. Yet he provided for a “third order” of lay-people, and there are a score of these upasikas mentioned in the early books, who are said to have won Arhatship; of them it is claimed that they had destroyed Tanha, had cut the bonds of rebirth, and realized in this world and in the midst of it an other-worldly peace and joy.” In the midst of Samsara they had been in Nibbana. Like Brother Lawrence they could practice, while immersed in mundane occupations, an other-worldly peace. And this was to them the guaranty that they would not be reborn. They found themselves masters of the universe, not its slaves.

What did this doctrine of rebirth mean to the Buddhist ? All the world is now familiar with the Hindu * Hundreds of householders are said to have attained to one of the heavens.

2 See “Arhat,” E.R.E., Vol. I.

ike EPOCHS IN BUDDHIST HISTORY doctrines of Karma and transmigration, already established in the time of Gotama Buddha:

Our actions still pursue us from afar And what we have been makes us what we are.

By the sixth century B.c. India accepted the doctrine that each atman is reborn into the state it has earned. But even highly qualified students of Buddhism seem to be greatly befogged as to how this doctrine can be reconciled with the Buddha’s cardinal doctrine of anatta. If there be no “‘soul”’ to transmigrate how can there be transmigration? Here is a dilemma indeed; and the solution lies of course in the definition of the terms. Transmigration is not what Gotama taught, but rather reindividualization or, better, a continuation of the ever changing stream of consciousness in a new channel.t A man is not the same as he was when a boy. Yet he is not different. After death he will be the same yet not the same, as a river whose content, ever changing, yet remains within the self-same river-bed. Asa kinema film which through many minute changes tells a connected story of many reels so are rebirths continuous yet not identical.

Sakyamuni was primarily a moral teacher, and yet he had a definite psychology and philosophy. He was neither a realist in the ordinary sense, naively accepting the current phraseology and ideas of the time, nor a nihilist as some of his followers have been. “‘Everything is; this is one extreme view. Everything is not; this is another.” He rejects them both. The “self,” he insists, is a part of the whole phenomenal world, and must be seen through scientific or analytic eyes. The old static ideas of it must give place to a dynamic conception. It is this individual

* This is the actual metaphor of scholastic Buddhism; cf. Compendium of Philosophy, P.T.S., p. 8.

“stream of consciousness” which changes from moment to moment, that is “reindividualized”’ when the body dies. The change may be more profound; it is only another change.

The best discussion of the whole question from the orthodox Buddhist standpoint is in the Questions of King Milinda,' a late work of fiction yet of great authority. The man who is reborn, teaches the sage Nagasena, is neither the same nor yet another. Nothing “substantial” has passed over any more than when one lamp is lit from another—only energy. There is a transference of energy between the two flames. One is responsible for the other. Ifaspark from my house sets fire to my neighbor’s thatch, am I not responsible? A man steals his neighbor’s mangoes, but he cannot fool the judge by proving that the mangoes he took are not the same mangoes as his neighbor planted; so by numerous similes and parables the lesson is enforced, and it seems logical enough: Kamma, action, is the energy which passes over from one phase of consciousness to the next. But there are difficulties. What, if nothing but energy passes across, is the thread of continuity? What are the links between one life and the next? They are the same as those between two consecutive moments of our conscious life here and now. Among the senses Buddhist psychology numbers Mano, which is at once a sixth sense, and the “resort, the partaker, the field, and range of them all,”’’—a sensus communis. It is certainly easier to conceive this link between two consecutive phases of the present stream of consciousness than to imagine it connect-

1J.e., Menander, an Indo-Scythian prince of about 100 B.c. See chap, iii.

2 Majj. Nik. i. 295; Sam. Nik. v. 218; quoted by Mrs. Rhys Davids in Buddhist Psychology, p. 69.

ing what seem like two different lives, and we are apt to be impatient with this part of Buddhist philosophy.

Perhaps it will help the western reader to tolerate the doctrines of Anatta and Samsara if he thinks of the unexplained, yet well-attested, fact of telepathy. If one mind can influence another through great spaces, why not imagine that the same mind may be influenced by its own past energies or phases of consciousness, and even kept in action by its own psychical momentum, even when the physical organ which it used has been dissolved into its elements? Reindividualization may begin at once.

All the habitual arguments by which we buttress our belief in a life after death can be equally well used to support the Buddhist doctrine of Samsara; and we have to pay our respects to the early psychologists of Buddhism. One of the qualities of consciousness on which they lay stress is Manasikara, or attention,’ and this is another link between present and past: we direct our stream of consciousness and determine its direction hereafter as we attend now to this or that range of interests. Another link is memory,” that deposit or undercurrent of the stream which may be out of sight and forgotten, but which yet exerts a potent influence. The past, however forgotten it may be, is wrought into the present, and operates in ways which surprise us only because of our forgetful memories. But the saint remembers everything! Near these very hills of Rajagaha the great disciple Moggallana was foully murdered. Calmly the aged teacher, who seems (perhaps half-humorously) to have claimed something very like omniscience, related the story of how untold centuries before Moggallana had been an impious son and a parri-