India, Its Life and Thought Part 16

Out of 956 baptisms of the Church Missionary Society in the Amritsar District, 152 were Mohammedan converts. In the Punjab there are at least two congregations made up entirely of Mohammedans, while in Bengal there is a body of more than 6000 Christians composed almost entirely of Mohammedan converts and their descendants, a large number having come over _en ma.s.se_ some years ago. These last were converts in the first instance from Hinduism to Mohammedanism, and hence were not bound so strongly to Islam."

In South India, less attention has been paid to Mohammedans as a cla.s.s, and the results therefore have been very meagre. A few individuals, here and there, have accepted our faith, and that is practically all. This is not strange when we remember that out of the eleven hundred Protestant missionaries, male and female, in Southern India, perhaps not a dozen have any special training and apt.i.tude for work among Mohammedans, and hardly more than that number are giving themselves entirely to the work.

The difficulty of this work should appeal more than it does to the heroic element in missionaries and missionary societies alike. The above facts indicate that there is encouragement for one who gives himself heartily to this people. In no other land has missionary effort for the members of this religion achieved greater results than in India. If their numbers are few, they are more resolute and p.r.o.nounced in their Christian character than many others. In the roll of honour among the converts from Islam have been found the names of a number of distinguished pastors and able writers.

In the recent Conference of Missionaries, held in Cairo, a new purpose was manifested to take up with more discriminating and p.r.o.nounced zeal and better methods the work of reaching and converting the Mohammedans of the world.

In India, a better organized and a wider campaign for the conversion of Islam is needed. Men and women who are to take up work in their behalf must not only be well trained for this specific work by a thorough knowledge of both faiths; they must also be imbued with abundant sympathy for the people, and with a sympathetic appreciation of the vital truths which have thus far animated the Mohammedan faith.

The constructive, rather than the destructive, method of activity must increasingly animate all. The Mohammedans are peculiarly sensitive; and there is so much of contact between their faith and ours that through the pathway of the harmonies of the faiths men must be led to know and feel the supreme excellence and power of the faith of the Christ.

CHAPTER XII

THE CHRIST AND THE BUDDHA

The study of the life and the character of noted and n.o.ble men is the most helpful and inspiring of all studies. It not only ill.u.s.trates life at its best, it also fills men with an ambition to pursue the same n.o.ble purposes and to achieve the same lofty results in life. In presenting a brief glimpse of the two most powerful personalities that ever impressed themselves upon the world, I desire to place them side by side that we may appreciate the a.s.sonances and the dissonances of their wonderful lives and rise through the study into a true conception and love of the most perfect Life ever breathed upon earth.

I have no apology to offer, as a Christian, for comparing the life of our Lord with that of any human being; for, though Divine, He was also supremely human; and human glory and achievement appear in their fulness only when we gaze upon Him as one of the mighty human forces of history.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREATEST IMAGE OF BUDDHA (183 feet long)]

Christ and Buddha lived their brief lives upon earth many centuries ago; and yet never did they grip so many by the magic of their attraction as they do at present. Nearly two-thirds of the whole population of the world to-day acknowledges the lordship of the one or the other of these and loves to be called by their names. The influence of the one dominates all the life of the West, while that of the other is supreme in the East. And it is a curious and interesting fact that Buddha has not only been exalted as the ninth incarnation of Vishnu in the faith which he aimed to overthrow, he has also been adopted into the Roman Catholic Calendar and is worshipped on the 27th of November as a Christian saint under the t.i.tle "Saint Josaphat."

I am also convinced that the influence of the lives and teachings of Buddha and Christ will react upon each other with ever increasing power during the coming years. Indeed, we are now witnessing this very influence developing before our eyes.

I

Let us first observe the conditions under which these two lived their earthly lives.

One was born into royal prerogatives and splendour and was surrounded in youth with all the luxuries and blandishments of an Oriental court. The other, though of royal lineage, was born in poverty, cradled in a manger, earned a meagre subsistence as a carpenter, and was able to say at the end of His brief career that the foxes had holes and the birds of the air had nests, but that He had not where to lay His head.

Sidhartthan early married and became a father, but later renounced all the pleasures and responsibilities of a _grihastan life_. His great renunciation is one of the most striking and impressive acts in the history of mankind, and his subsequent asceticism was of the most thorough and rigid type.

Jesus of Nazareth avoided the entanglements of married life and had a supreme contempt for the wealth and the pomp of the world. Yet He was not an ascetic. So freely did He a.s.sociate with men, partic.i.p.ating even in their festivities, that His enemies falsely charged Him with being a "glutton and a winebibber." He never countenanced the idea that highest sainthood must come through asceticism.

He found His intimates not among the ascetic Essenes, but among householders and men of affairs.

Both these great souls were similarly oppressed by the prevalence and the tyranny of an exclusive ceremonialism. In the one case, it was the innumerable b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifices and the all-embracing and crushing ritual of the Brahmans which roused the anger and opposition of Gautama; while, on the other hand, the myriad rites, the childish ceremonies, and the hollow religious hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees filled Jesus with hatred and led Him to a denunciation of that whole cla.s.s. "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees," was the oft-repeated expression of wrath which He heaped upon them.

Thus the religions which both established were, in part, reactions from the religious excesses and errors of the days in which they lived.

It is strange that neither Christ nor Buddha left any writings behind them, even though writing was a known art in their times. Their mighty influence was through oral teaching and example. This was different from the method of other such world-leaders as Moses, Mohammed, and Confucius. It proves that whenever any one has truths of saving power to commit to the world, there are many who, as his messengers, are ready to convey them. Better indeed than to convey one's thoughts by printed page is it to impart them through the living voice to disciples who will thrill the world by the message coloured by their own mind and transfigured by their own enthusiasm. This was the method of Christ and Buddha.

Both were surrounded by an Oriental environment. Their antecedents and their prepossessions were of the East, eastern; and at their births they were introduced to scenes and began to breathe the atmosphere of the Orient. All the great founders of the World Religions were men of the East. This was doubtless because the East kept more closely than the West in touch with deepest religious thought and was animated with highest religious emotions and heavenly aspirations. Certainly the world owes more to ancient Asia for its religious life and spiritual attainments than to all the other continents put together. And Asia is to be thanked, above all, because she gave to mankind the Christ and the Buddha. For the eastern flavour of their messages and the Oriental tints of their life we are deeply grateful. To those of the West, these have always brought quiet restraint and a hallowed, peaceful repose to counteract the hurry and worry of life to which they are so much exposed and which are a part of their very being.

II

_The Common Principles which controlled their Lives_

Both were men of deepest sincerity. All sham and hypocrisy were foreign to their nature; they held insincerity in any one to be the meanest and most deadly sin. To this intense loyalty to the truth, Jesus bore emphatic testimony by an early martyrdom; while Gautama gave the same unwavering witness by a long and holy life. They both stood in the midst of communities which were rotten with hypocrisy and which were using religion as a sacred garb of duplicity and were raising temples of dishonesty to enraged deity. They stood like prophets in the wilderness and p.r.o.nounced woe upon all hypocrites.

Moreover, both Christ and Buddha were profoundly ethical in their teaching. They found that humanity was not only rotten with insincerity, it was also deceiving itself with the vain delusion that moral integrity and ethical n.o.bility can be bartered for a mult.i.tudinous ceremonial. Men have always been p.r.o.ne to exalt ritual in proportion as they have neglected the eternal demands of conscience and the ethical foundation of character. The myriad-tongued ceremonial of the Brahmans of twenty-five centuries ago was the old evasion of righteousness in human life. Gautama saw this, and his n.o.ble soul rebelled against a faith which proclaimed that salvation was a thing of outward religious forms and not of the heart within.

"To cease from all sin, To get virtue, To cleanse our own heart, This is the religion of the Buddhas."

These were the words with which he enunciated his new principles and carried forward his campaign of reaction against the faith of his fathers. Nothing less than, or apart from, purity of the soul within satisfied his requirement.

Indeed, he exalted so much the more highly this banner of heart purity and holiness, the less he had to say of the spiritual claims upon the soul. He had tried elaborate ceremonial and had found it wanting; he had practised the most severe religious austerities, but they had availed him little. In the quiet light which had dawned upon him under the sacred Boh tree he found that nothing wrought so mightily and beneficently as _Dharma_, or righteousness.

"The real treasure is that laid by man or woman, Through charity or piety, temperance and self-control.

The treasure thus hid is secure, and pa.s.ses not away; ... this a man takes with him."

"Let no man think lightly of sin, saying in his heart, 'It cannot overtake me.'"

These are only a few of the many n.o.ble ethical deliverances of this great man's creed.

And during all his life, subsequent to the great renunciation, he embodied in himself the ethical beauty of all that he had taught.

And what shall I say of Jesus, the Christ? In the n.o.ble integrity of His heart, in the sublime ethical ideals which He ever exalted, in the moral rect.i.tude which He practised and enjoined upon all His followers, who was like unto Him? In His day, also, men had forgotten the true foundation of character; and the religious leaders of the people were placing supreme emphasis upon human traditions and upon man-made rites as the way of salvation.

They "t.i.thed the mint and the c.u.mmin" and forgot the weightier matters of the law. To eat with unwashed hands, to consort with a Samaritan, to carry a load or raise a sheep from the ditch on the Sabbath,--this was a sin which, to the Pharisees, would weigh a man down to h.e.l.l itself; while to lie or to use other foul language, or to trample under foot the whole decalogue was, by comparison, a venial offence.

The whole moral code was rendered impotent by them, while ceremonial cleansing was the be-all and end-all of their system. Christ was daily thrown into conflict with these "blind leaders of the blind"; His soul abhorred their whole religious system. He characterized them as "whited sepulchres." He showed that it is the heart which defiles a man, "for out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies." "Blessed," says He, "are the pure in heart, for they shall see G.o.d." "It was said to them of old thou shalt not kill;" but Christ equally prohibited anger, the cause of murder. He not only denounced adultery, but the l.u.s.tful look which is the source of adultery.

To His followers He said "unless your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." He prayed the Father that He would sanctify His own, and added that for their sakes He sanctified Himself. Holiness was a pa.s.sion with Him, and at the basis of His teaching He enjoined moral cleanness and ethical integrity. And His life in this, as in other things, was a perfect exhibition of the virtues which He taught.

And from that day to this His precept and example have mutually supported each other. In Him were wedded faith and conscience, piety and character. So that, where Christ is best known and most loyally followed to-day, there do we find a perfect sense of human relations and a supreme desire after ethical perfection.

Furthermore, these two great souls were consumed with a broad and universal charity. Their environment was perhaps the most averse to general benevolence that the world could then show. In India, there had already grown to great power the caste system with its multiplying ramifications. Then, as now, it narrowed the sympathies of men, it arrayed one cla.s.s against another, it cultivated pride and fostered mutual distrust and dissension.

When Sakya Muni came upon the scene, he saw the terribly divisive system sending down its root like the banyan tree on all sides and absorbing the life and thought of the people. It repelled him, and, with all his mighty intellectual and moral energy, he attacked it. He proclaimed all men brothers and worthy of human sympathy, love, and respect. He opened the door of his faith to all cla.s.ses on equal terms. He vehemently opposed every effort to divide men except upon the ground of character. He enjoined upon his disciples not only love and kindness to all men, he also insisted upon a similar att.i.tude toward all forms of lower life.

The fact that Buddhism is to-day one of the three great Missionary Faiths of the world, seeking all men that are in darkness, is the best proof that the founder of that faith had a heart which embraced the whole realm of life in its love. He felt that no man, however humble or however far removed in ties of race and kinship, should be deprived of the blessings of his love and sympathy. It is an interesting fact that nearly all past religious reformers in India--both those inside and outside the pale of Brahmanism--were anti-caste in their sympathies and teaching. But it is only Buddha who consistently maintained the broad foundation of a universal brotherhood and incorporated it into his faith as a cardinal principle.

In like manner, Jesus of Nazareth lived His earthly life at a time of narrow sympathies, and with people who were among the most exclusive that ever lived on earth. The Jews believed themselves to be the specially favoured sons of Heaven. And, what was more, they thought that they were exalted because they were _worthy_, because they excelled all other people. Hence, they stood aloof from other nationalities and despised them as their inferiors, a social and physical contact with whom would be pollution. There is in many respects a strange correspondence between the Jewish social code of twenty centuries ago and that of Hinduism to-day--the same haughty mien and abjectness of spirit--the aloofness of pride and the cringing meanness of social bondage--representing the two extremes of society.

Christ also turned His face like a flint against this mean artificial cla.s.sification of men. He had a burning contempt for the proud Pharisee who lived upon the husks of his own contempt of others, and who trampled under foot men that were infinitely superior to himself, so far as character was concerned. But He consorted often with the outcast Publican who revealed an aspiration after better things. And He even chose men who were thus socially ostracized to enter His own inner circle of disciples and to be the standard-bearers of His cause upon earth. He taught that the most abject and socially submerged man upon earth is a son of G.o.d, and that at his moral and spiritual renovation there would be joy among the denizens of heaven. And it was while thinking of this same cla.s.s that He said unto His own, in describing the judgment scene at the last great day, "Come, ye blessed of my father, inasmuch as ye have treated kindly and lovingly one of the least of my brethren ye have done it unto me, enter ye into the joy of your Lord." Though He was born a Jew, He opened wide the portals of His religion and invited all men of all conditions. "Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He sent forth His followers into all lands to disciple and bring to the truth all nations. And in all lands His method of procedure has been to reach first the lowest among the people and then gradually to rise to the highest, until He has taken possession of the whole land. His universal heart of love took in all men of all social strata. All that He asked was that men should come to Him with purpose sincere and with a longing for light and truth.

III

_The Principles and Teachings which differentiate and separate Christ and Buddha_

Thus far we have seen these two great leaders of men standing side by side and revealing the same traits and principles.