Footfalls of Indian History/The Relation between Buddhism and Hinduism
THE RELATION BETWEEN BUDDHISM AND HINDUISM
Buddhism in India never consisted of a church but only of a religious order. Doctrinally it meant the scattering of that wisdom which had hitherto been peculiar to Brahman and Kshatriya amongst the democracy. Nationally it meant the first social unification of the Indian people. Historically it brought about the birth of Hinduism. In all these respects Buddhism created a heritage which is living to the present day. Amongst the forces which have gone to the making of India, none has been so potent as that great wave of redeeming love for the common people which broke and spread on the shores of Humanity in the personality of Buddha. By preaching the common spiritual right of all men whatever their birth, He created a nationality in India which leapt into spontaneous and overwhelming expression so soon as his message touched the heart of Asoka, the People's King. This fact constitutes a supreme instance of the way in which the mightiest political forces in history are brought into being by those who stand outside politics. The great Chandra Gupta, founding an Empire 300 B.C., could not make a nationality in India. He could only establish that political unity and centralisation in whose soil an Indian nationality might grow and come to recognise itself. Little did he dream that the germ of that Indian solidarity which was to establish his throne on adamantine foundations lay, not with himself, but with those yellow-clad beggars who came and went about his dominions, and threaded their way through the gates and streets of Pataliputra itself. Yet time and the hour were with him. He builded better than he knew. From the day of the accession of this Chandra Gupta, India was potentially mature. With the conversion of Asoka she becomes aware of her own maturity. Nothing appears more clearly in the mind of the great Asoka than his consciousness of the geographical extent and unity of his territory, and his sense of the human and democratic value of the populated centres. We find these tAings in the truly imperial distribution of his decrees; in the deep social value of his public works—roads, wells, hospitals, and the rest; and, above all, in the fact that he published decrees at all. Here was no throne-proud autocrat, governing by means of secret orders, but a sovereign, publishing to his people his notion of that highest law which bound him and them alike. Never did monarch live who so called his subjects into his councils. Never was there a father who more deeply gave his confidence to his children. Yet without the work done by Chandra Gupta the grandfather and completed by Asoka himself in his earlier years, in the long-repented conquest of Kalinga, or Orissa, this blossoming time of true nationality, when all races and classes of Indian folk were drawn together by one loving and beloved sovereign, would not have been possible. Asoka owed as much to the political unity of India as to the wondrous vision which he had received from Buddha of all that it means to be a man, a human being, high born or low born, Aryan or non-Aryan.
But the question, Of what spiritual confraternity did Asoka hold himself a member?—becomes here of considerable importance. To belong to a new sect does not often have the effect of opening a man's heart to all about him in this fashion. Sects as a rule unite us to the few but separate us from the many. And here lies the meaning of the fact that Buddhism in India was no sect. It was a worship of a great personality. It was a monastic order. But it was not a sect. Asoka felt himself to be a monk, and the child of the monkhood, though seated on a throne, with his People as his church.
Similarly to this day there may at any time rise within Hinduism a great Sannyasin, whose fully-enrolled disciples are monks and nuns, while yet he is honoured and recognised as the teacher or guru by numberless householders. The position of the memory of Buddéha as a Hindu teacher, in the third century before Christ, was not in these respects different from that of Sri Ramakrishna today, or that of Ramdas of Maharashtra in the seventeenth century. In the two last-named cases, however, the citizen-disciples, Grihastha-bhaktas, have a well-defined background in which they inhere. Hinduism is long ago a virtual unity—though that fact may not yet have been realised and defined—with its choice of religious systems to meet the needs of various types of character, and the great monastic guru stands outside all as a quickening and spiritualising force, whose influence is felt in each alike. The citizen-bhakta of Ramdas or Ramakrishna remains a Hindu,
In the days of Asoka, however, Hinduism was not yet a single united whole. The thing we now know by that name was then probably referred to as the religion of the Brahmans. Its theology was of the Upanishads. Its superstitions had been transmitted from the Vedic period. And there was as yet no idea that it should be made an inclusive faith. It co-existed with beliefs about snakes and springs and earth-worship, in a loose federation which was undoubtedly true to certain original differences of race.
With the age of Buddhism all this was changed. The time had now come when men could no longer accept their beliefs on authority. Religion must for all equally be a matter of the personal experience, and there is no reason to doubt the claim made by the Jainas, that Buddha was the disciple of the same guru as Mahavira. We know the age of a heresy by the tenets it contradicts, and in repudiating the authority of the Vedas, Jainism proves itself the oldest form of nonconformity in India. And in the same way, by its relative return upon Vedic thought, we may find in Buddhism an element of reaction against Jainism. Only by accepting the Jaina tradition, moreover, as to the influence which their gurus had upon Buddha, are we able to account satisfactorily for the road taken by him from Kapila- vastu to Bodh-Gaya through Rajgir. He made his way first of all to the region of the famous Jaina teachers. If, again, there should be any shred of truth in Sir Edwin Arnold's story (presumably from the Lalita-Vistara) that it was at Rajgir that He interceded for the goats, the incident would seem under the circumstances the more natural. He passed through the city on his way to some solitude where He could find realisation, with his heart full of that pity for animals and that shrinking from the thought of sacrifice, which was the characteristic thought of the age, one of the great preoccupations, it may be, of the Jaina circles He had just left. And with his heart thus full. He met the sacrificial herd, marched with them to the portals of Bimbisara's palace, and pleaded with the king for their lives, offering his own in their place. Whether this was actually so or not, it is certain that one of the great impulses of the day lay in the rebellion against the necessity of the Vedic sacrifice, one of its finest sincerities in that exaltation of the personal experience which made it seem natural to found on it a religion. That a man's religious convictions must be the result of his own private realisation of truth is an idea so old in India as to lie behind the Upanishads themselves. But that such a realisation had a right to be socialised, to be made the basis of a religious sect, is a principle which was first perhaps grasped by the Jainas. It is this decision, thus definitely arrived at and clearly held, that accounts for the strength and certainty of Indian thought to this hour. For the doctrine that direct perception is the only certain mode of proof, and that all belief therefore rests on the direct perception of competent persons, is here unshakable; and it is easy to understand how such an attitude, on the part of a whole nation, exalts the individual thinker and the mind of genius.
The world is now so familiar with the spectacle of the religious leader going out from amongst his fellows and followed by all who think with him, to found some sect which is to be even as a new city of the human spirit, that it can hardly think itself back to the time when this was a thing unknown. In the age of the Vedas and Upanishads, however, the spectacle had not yet been seen in India. The religious teacher of those days lived retired in the forest clearings and gathered round him, not a sect, but a school, in the form of a few disciples. Jainism, with its sudden intense revolt against the sacrificial idea, and its sudden determination to make its pity effective for the protection of dumb animals, was the first religious doctrine to call social forces to its aid in India; in other words, it was the first organised sect or church, and by forming itself it invented the idea of sects, and the non-Jainas began to hold themselves in some sort of unity round the Aryan priesthood. Buddha in his turn accepted from Jainism its fearless pity, but not contented with the protection of the dumb creature, added to the number of those to be redeemed man himself, wandering in ignorance from birth to birth, and sacrificing himself at every step to his own transient desires. He realised to the full the career of the religious teacher as Jainism had made it possible, yet the doctrine which he preached as the result of his personal experience was in all essential respects identical with that which had already been elaborated in the forest-ashramas of the Upanishads, as the "religion of the Brahmans." It was in fact the spiritual culture of that period brought into being and slowly ripened in those ashramas of peaceful thought and lofty contemplation that pressed forward now to make the strength behind Buddha as a preacher. He declared that which the people already dimly knew. Thus, by the debt which he owes to both, this Great Sannyasin, calling all men to enter on the highest path, forms the bridge between the religion of the Aryans, tracing itself back to the Vedas, and the religion of the Jainas, holding itself to be defiant of the Vedas. Such was the relation of Buddha to his immediate past, which he himself, however, overtopped and hid by his gigantic personaHty. We have next to look dt the changes made by him in the religious ideas of succeeding generations. Taking Buddha as the founder, not of a sect, but of a monastic order, it is easy to see that his social organisation could never be cumulative. There must in fact come a time when it would die out. No new members could be born into his fold. His sons were those only on whom his idea had shone, those who had personally and voluntarily accepted his thought. Yet he must have had many lovers and admirers who could not become monastics. What was the place of the citizen-bhaktas, the grihastha-devotees of Buddha? We obtain glimpses of many such in the course of his own life. They loved him. They could not fail to be influenced and indeed dominated by' him, in all their living and thinking thereafter. Yet they could not go out into the life of the wanderer, leaving the duties of their station. He was their sovereign, as it were, monarch of their souls. But he was not their general, for they were not members of the army. That place belonged only to monks and nuns, and these were neither.
Whatever was the place of the ciiizen-bhakta, it is clear that he would express in that place the full influence of the personal idea that Buddha represented. Not Indra of the Thousand Eyes, delighting in sacrifice, could ever again be the dream of the soul that had once loved Gautama. Calmness of meditation, light and stillness, detachment and knowledge, are now seen to be the highest powers of man. And this new realisation constantly reinforced by new admirers, will do its great work, not within the Buddhist order, but outside it, in the eventual modification of some other system. The conscious aim of the order as such will be to maintain its first condition of purity, truth, and ardour. The unconscious aim of the world without will be to assimilate more and more of the overflow of idealism that comes from within it, more and more of the personal impress left by One in whom all men's aspirations have been fulfilled. From this point we can see that the Order itself must some day die out in India, from sheer philosophical inanition and the want of a new Buddha. But its influence on the faiths outside it will echo and re-echo, ever deepening and intensifying.
Those faiths were, as we have seen, three in number—(i) Jaina; (2) Arya-Vedic; and (3) popular unorganised beliefs. It would appear, therefore, that the citigen-bhakta would necessarily belong to one or other of the groups. Alreadly Jainism must have been a force acting, as we have seen, to unify the Arya-Vedic and the popular unorganised beliefs, giving its first impetus, in fact, to the evolution of what would afterwards be Hinduism, and this process Buddhism, with its immense aggressiveness for the redemption of man, would greatly intensify. Yet the period would be considerable before this influence of the Buddhist idea would be sufficient to make itself perceptible in Hinduism, and its emergence, when that period was completed, might be expected to be abrupt.
My own opinion is that this influence makes itself visible in the sudden advent of the idea of Shiva or Mahadeva to a dominant position in the national life. In tracing out the evolution of the Shiva-image, we are compelled, I think, to assume its origin in the stupa. And similarly, in the gradual concretising of the Vedic Rudra into the modern Mahadeva, the impress made by Buddha on the national imagination is extraordinarily evident. Stirless meditation, unshadowed knowledge, fathomless pity, are now the highest that man can imagine of the soul. And why? For no reason, save that Buddha had gone to and fro for forty years after the attainment of Nirvana, and the print of his feet could by no means die out in India! The caves of Elephanta in the Bay of Bombay are a cathedral of Shiva-worship. They contain, moreover, not only an emblem of Shiva which may be more or less modern, but also a great many carvings. And none of these has a greater interest and importance than that on the left side of the entrance, a bas-relief of Shiva, wearing beads and tiger-skin, and seated in meditation. It is Shiva : it is not Buddha. But it is the Shiva of the Transition, and as such it is most significant. For hundreds of years, then, before this emergence of Shiva as the main Hindu conception of God (which for a time he was), devout souls had loved Buddha and hastened with a special devotion to give alms to sadhus, without on that account suspecting for a moment that they were of any but the accepted Arya-Vedic household of faith. Less dependence on the great powers that dwelt beneath the mountain springs ; less sense of the mystery of serpent and forest ; an ever-deepening reverence for the free soul for the sadhu, for the idea of renunciation, this was all of which anyone was conscious. And yet in this subtle change of centres, history was being made ; a new period was coming to the birth. Verily, those were great days in India between 500 B.C. and A.D. 200 or thereabouts. For the national genius had things all its own way, and in every home in the land the little was daily growmg less, and the real and the universal were coming more and more prominently into view. Those were probably the days of Gitas made in imitation of the Buddhist Suttas. And this fact alone, if it be true, will give us some hint as to the preoccupation of the period with great thought.
" Thou that art knowledge itself,
Pure, free, ever the witness, Beyond all thought and beyond all qualities, To thee the only true Guru
My Salutation : Shiva Guru ! Shiva Guru ! Shiva Guru ! " These words may be taken as the keynote of this first period in the making of Hinduism. The national faith will form itself henceforth like a great white SANKHA (conch-shell) coiled in broadening spirals about the Vedic pillar. The theological Iswara believed in by the Brahmans is referred to vaguely but conveniently by themselves and others at this time as Brahma. He is the God to whom the sacrifices are made. But in the presence of Buddha and the memory of Buddha a new and higher conception begins to prevail, and as time goes on this higher conception takes name and form as Shiva or Mahadeva. Hinduism is thus born, not as a system, but as a process of thought, capable of registering in its progressive development the character of each age through which it passes.
It follows, then, that the heirs of Buddha-bhakti, so to speak, in India, might be on the one hand Jainas, or on the other Saivite Hindus. These were the two churches whose children might be born as if in the shadow of Buddha. And it is in accordance with this that we find Saivism and Jainism subsequently dividing between them such places of Buddhist history as Benares and Rajgir.