Astron Argon

Buddhism & Western Culture

Reprinted from the Buddhist Review, No. 11 (1921), pp. 49-60

OF all the manifold advantages which the science of the Western world (development as it is of scarcely more than a century's duration) has conferred upon mankind, few, if indeed any at all, can compare, in their power of enlightenment of humanity at large, with the effects of the marvellous extension of our methods of transport and of communication. Little by little it has broken down the barriers which time and space had imposed upon the multitudinous races of mankind; has opened out for all of us the vast treasury of the united wisdom of humanity. It shows to man of each and every nation how his fellow-man who lives upon the further side of our globe has caught, from another aspect, another facet of the one jewel of Truth, another ray of wisdom's light divine. Not without cause, we may be sure, did the world's Greatest Teacher choose as the very type and symbol of the interior evolution, the very means of the attainment of the full perfection of humanity, the concept of a Path whereon the aspirant is a traveller. In like spirit, in his smaller sphere of study, does the modern psychologist investigate and treat of the nature of those pathways of association and dependent causation whereby our minds all function; whereby our consciousness itself comes into being. To learn from one another, to syndicalize, as it were, the whole great mass of human wisdom; this is perhaps the highest of many wonderful gifts that applied science has endowed us with. We know of naught else so capable of obliterating the barriers between the diverse nations of mankind; of nothing more potent to efface alike the follies, self-importance, and intellectual pride, and all the walls that petty and parochial instincts have built up about our minds.

To an observing man, whether of the East or of the West, who has the good fortune to be able to avail himself in his own person of this priceless boon of travel, there is no single point of difference between the East and West which strikes him with such force as does the estimation in which religion (using the word in its best and widest sense) is held on these two faces of our globe, or the extent to which it enters and takes a part in the lives of these his fellow-men. To the Oriental visiting our shores, we seem as a race fundamentally lacking in religious thought. To the Occidental visiting the East, it seems as though he never had realized before what real religion means. You travel along the Rhine, to see every eminence crowned by a robber-baron's castle. You travel along the Irawaddy, and every summit is surmounted by a pagoda or other shrine. And the same contrast runs through everything. When the villagers gather in the evening cool, their day's work done, there in the East, it will be seldom but that some religious topic presently comes up, to be most earnestly discussed and weightily considered. When our western peasants meet under the same conditions, what, except local scandal and newspaper politics, will you hear? Little enough, I fear! That difference, that wide contrast, may be summed up in two short phrases; two questions which rise to the minds and lips of Eastern and of Western man, when any new thing is mooted. The Occidental asks, "What is the use of it?"­or, another aspect of that same query­"Will it pay?" Whilst the East asks only "Is it true?" The thought, the hope, the heart of the West lies for the most part in this short, single life on earth, in this material world. The East has its mental vision ever fixed upon the matters of the Realm Beyond; the mysteries of time and space; the depths of consciousness which lie beyond the manifested world.

Now in depicting this wide difference, in pointing out this contrast between East and West, I am very far from wishing to imply either that the East is right, or that the West is wrong, or vice versa. Both, indeed, perchance are right; both, indeed, perchance are wrong. For the true path of wisdom lies ever in the Middle Way, between the two extremes of thought to which the minds of men are apt to run. If, as I think, the modern West needs more of the true spirit of religion, not less does the East need to work harder in the conquest of that material world which, since Karma has cast our lines in it, is obviously the fit field for our present efforts. If indeed the universe is not a chaos; if indeed it is the expression of a purpose, tending towards something greater and nobler; if, in a word, life has any reason in it (as the mere fact of physical evolution alone would seem to indicate), then, what time we dwell herein, it is our part to study it, to strive to bend its powers to the purpose of our betterment, the betterment of all the life that animates it. We must learn, in short, the lessons that in every phenomenon which it manifests to our senses lie hidden truths for our minds and hearts to win.

If we of West and East alike are to make the best and truest use of this great faculty of intercommunication that Western thought has achieved for us, then even the old East (forgetting a little while its ancient glories) has to learn from the West somewhat of its energy, its clarity of thought about material things, its applications of the knowledge so won to the improvement of the conditions of life on earth, lest it should find itself left behind in the unceasing march of progress. And, whilst not, indeed, forgetting its religiousness, we should strive to bring that earnestness of aim and high-keyed aspiration more into contact with the affairs of this living, breathing, suffering, and yet so heart-moving and marvellous world. Whilst the West has to learn from the East, yet once again, this world is not all in life. The life we live, the purposes we pursue, are but the shadows of a greater and a nobler Life Beyond. There is a hidden, holier Purpose than that of mere material conquest. We have to find anew, each individual in his own heart, the secret fountain of the Amrita, the Water of Deathlessness; to learn that from, and out of, this very World of Matter wherein its recent achievements have been so wonderful, behind and beyond it, stretches the Path of Life's perfecting; the Path that leads to the true Goal of all life's striving and its sorrow; to that Peace which so dimly we, in the turmoil of our world, do yet conceive and long for.

It was just for the helping in this latter purpose­just for the presentation to our Western world of one, and, as we think, the greatest and truest, of the forms of Oriental Religion, that, fifteen years ago, this Society was founded. I, who was privileged to take some small part in its foundation, propose here to set forth, not so much the nature and detailed teachings of that form of eastern Religion which we of the West term Buddhism, as the reasons why the founders of this Society considered that it was competent to fill this great gap in the religious life of the West to-day, and so to take part in this great interchange of wisdom that has become possible between the East and the West.

Before, however, passing on to the consideration of these questions, there are two points which are best dealt with here. The first of these is : What, exactly, do we mean by Religion ? Here the actual derivation of the English word does not help us; for, like so many words in that language, it has come to imply a very diff erent set of ideas from those prevailing in those early times when English was in process of formation. The derivation, as we all know, is from the Latin re-ligare, to bind together. In early usage "a religion" meant in English a body of "religious"­of monks or nuns who were "bound together" by some definite set of ordinances. In modern usage, however, it has come to mean that body of ideas, beliefs, and emotions, whereby a man directs his life, his outlook, so to speak, upon the universe wherein he finds himself; even more distinctively and particularly, it refers to a class of interior experiences and attainments which come to those who strive to penetrate the mystery of the life we lead. Religion, in this its deeper sense, is pre-eminently a matter of (to use a very un-Buddhistic term) spiritual experience. It is an entering, as it were, into the world within; the world whereof the phenomena of the outer life are but a reflection, or a shadow, of the realm of those realities which lie beyond. A philosophy or view of life as a whole, views as to man's nature and relation to the world about him, on the one hand, and a system of ethics, of moral ordinances and inhibitions on the other, are both important. Indeed, they are essential portions of the fabric of every great religion. But the most characteristic and peculiar feature of every religion, properly so-called, lies in a gnosis, in a definite claim as to the existence of a Power that transcends the forces of the visible universe. It is a claim, in effect, as to the existence of a greater World Beyond, accompanied by the claim that by particular practices, as of prayer and meditation, we all may attain to existence in that interior realm.

The second preliminary question that needs to be settled lies in an objection which is very commonly raised in relation to any attempt at religious propaganda in any land, save that in which the religion involved took its rise or developed into its existent form. It is founded upon the view that religions, not less than modes of dress, or the manners and customs of the various races of mankind, are definite parts of the racial or national cultus; that they have in the past developed in accordance with the national spirit; and that they are therefore suited to the country of their origin or development, and to no other peoples at all. Now we must admit that there is very much to be said for this point of view. It is undoubtedly true in one sense; and that is exactly the sense in which most people regard religions in general. For, associated with the philosophy, the ethic, and the spiritual content of religions, we invariably find a number of features, customs, rites, and traditional or legendary teachings, whose development we can often trace as a matter of history; and which, even in what is nominally the same great religion, as it is found in diverse lands, differ very widely indeed from place to place.

If, in the foregoing definition of a religion as an ethic, as a philosophy, and a gnosis, all mention of this aspect of a cult has been omitted, the reason lies in the fact that this cult-aspect is essentially unimportant, extrinsic to the actual religion. In effect it is the mere outward garment, the trappings wherein the thing itself is bedecked. In the West, in Burma, Ceylon, and the several provinces of India, for example, the Arabic decimal notation is universally employed. But in each case a different character is used for the ten ciphers. Yet the arithmetical rules and processes do not vary. Arithmetic is the same throughout. In just the same way a religion is a very definite and real entity, quite apart from the mere externals of its outward cult or cults. It is the Buddhist religion, not this or that cult of it as obtaining in this or that country, that the founders of this Society considered capable of supplying the vast and ever-growing void manifest in the Western world.

Of the three features which have been detailed as characterizing a religion, it is naturally its philosophy, its view of life, by which alone its value in this or that set of conditions can be rightly judged. For the gnosis of any religion is essentially soliptic, a matter of individual experience in the spiritual world; whilst we find the ethical content of all the great religions to be closely similar, if not indeed identical. Only one feature, in fact, of the Buddhist ethic need here be considered in relation to this question of the value of Buddhism to the Western world. I refer to what may be termed its sanction. The sanction for the ethics of the various forms of religion prevalent in the West lies in the ordinance of the Supreme Being whose existence those religions teach. Buddhism does not admit of the existence of a Supreme Being, as we shall later see; and so has to look in another direction for its ethical sanction. It finds it in that which is its most fundamental teachings teaching which constitutes the very object of its existence. "Two things only do I declare unto you, 0 Brothers !" said the Great Teacher, "Suffering and the Cessation ol Suffering"; and in those words there lies at once the whole raison d'être of Buddhism as a religion, and incidentally the sanction for its ethical side. An evil action, from the Buddhist point of view, consists in in action which, whether immediately, or in conformity with the Law of Causation (of which more anon) ultimately, adds to the suffering of life at large; a good action is one which results in the diminution of suffering. That is all. And I think that in the simplicity and humanity of this, its ethical sanction alone, Buddhism is well able to compare favourably with the views current in the West; as also to find no half-hearted response here, in view of the increasing humanitarianism of the more thoughtful of our age.

Before any clear understanding of our problem can be arrived at, it is further indispensable correctly to diagnose the factors that have co-operated in bringing about the seeming indifference to religion of the Western world in these our latter days. I say here "seeming" of set purpose. For if, as is undoubtedly the case, the more advanced thinkers of our race and time are, almost without exception, to be found outside the membership of our religious bodies; if it is a matter of common comment that the several ministries are mainly recruited by men of second- or third-rate intellect and culture; if, as we all know to be the case the Churches have altogether lost their once-all-powerful hold on the hearts and services of the community (to such extent that such. questions as "Is Christianity a failure?" are common subjects of discussion in our public prints); if, in short, we see on every hand such manifest evidence that our people are no longer swayed by the religious beliefs of their forefathers that it is the first phenomenon to come home to the Oriental visitor to our shores.­If all this be so, I yet am very fully convinced that fundamentally, in its heart of hearts, the Western branch of the Aryan race has by no means lost that instinct for, and genius in, the field of religion, properly understood, which still so notably characterizes its Eastern offshoot. It may seem paradoxical, but I would emphasize that it is not because the West is less, but because it is more religious that our churches are empty and our ministries the refuge of the intellectually incapable. For the first demand that a thoughtful man has to make of any religious doctrine he may adhere to is that it should be, according to his best lights, the Truth; that its central tenets should endorse what he knows as true from other departments of human knowledge; that, setting aside mere minor matters, the main theses of his religion should not require to be constantly trimmed and adjusted, and twisted in order to preserve sone sort of fae in view of the ever-widening mental horizons which the wonderful developments of physical science have brought, and still are bringing about. For the indispensable feature of any religion is, as has been said, its gnosis. Unless revelation, unless the doctrines and statements about life and the universe contain such truth that no new discoveries of the human intellect can subvert them, then we can only assume that the religion which puts them forward has, for our age at least, no genuine revelation, no real gnosis to offer us.

This is what the clear and lucid Aryan mind of Europe has, with its straightforward grasp of fact, and its detestation of paltering with the Truth, almost too clearly seen. Our Western civilization is founded upon the great achievements of its finest intellects, operating in the ever-extending fields of scientific research. We all know how, time after time, its great deductions have been first anathematized, then decried, then deprecated, from the pulpits of our chapels and churches. Then, a little later, as science went its calm unheeding way, and piled up Pelion of certitude upon Ossa of demonstration, suddenly the opposing voices of our so-called spiritual leaders have become silent. A little later, and the hard-won truths of science have by some unimaginable volte-face become an integral part of Protestant Christian teaching! If, like the Catholic Church, with its proud assertion, "Siet Crux dum volvitur orbis," a man denies the validity of your reason to judge in matters of what he calls revelation; when, in face of scientific demonstration of our old earth's millennial age, he calmly continues to maintain the world was created some poor seven thousand years ago; if, in face of the doctrine of evolution, he still maintains the genesis doctrine of special creation; even if, as against all visible evidence, he still maintains the truth (it is but fair to add, in a special sense of his own) of his daily-renewed miracle of transubstantiation: then one can at least respect, one can even in a sense adrnire, the sturdiness of his determined mind. But we should consider that that determination were better expended on a worthier cause. This is not a Catholic country, but all of us who have been brought up in Christian households know only too well the mental agony we suffered in our youth as, one after another, the cherished teachings of our childhood's days were reft from us because we dared not palter with the truth as we came to know it; whilst those who stood in the high places of our Churches were first denonucing the new knowledge, and then announcing it as part of Christian truth!

It is just in respect of these great cardinal facts about life and the universe, these newly-discovered truths of science, that we Buddhists find the closest parallelism. This is a circumstance astonishing enough (since there were no laboratories in the Buddha's time) if we deny the possibility of there being other modes of arriving at truth than the painstaking study of nature through the avenues of the senses. But it is natural enough, and certainly to be expected, ff you admit the validity of the Buddhist gnosis, if, with the Buddhist, you hold that there exists another means of attaining knowledge. That is to say, by entering, through intense concentration of mind, into that interior mental (or, as we say in the West, spiritual) realm which stands in causal relationship to the outer life whose effects the senses present to us. This realm, in respect of its immensely wider and deeper extensions of consciousness, in its incomparably more vivid and more lucent comprehension, transcends our present waking life just as much as our waking life transcends a dream. Because, to an altogether unparalleled extent the Great Teacher of India possessed that faculty, and not less the equally important power to bring down into this dimmer life the results of his investigations in that state, we term him the Buddha, "The Awakened One." And the Buddhist gnosis stands or falls by the extent to which its teachings substantiate that claim; therefore, by the extent to which those teachings can be proved to coincide with whatsoever demonstrable truth may be ascertained in any other manner; such, for example, as that which modem science has in the last two centuries attained. This, I would emphasize, is not our test for the certitude of Buddhist truth; it is the very rule which the Great Teacher himself laid down­that we should accept nothing as true merely because it was asserted by this or that person, including himself; but only when, after comparison with all we know of truth from other sources, we find it agrees in all respects.

That test, that high standard of perfect conformity with all that can be ascertained as true, is also the standard and the test of modem scientific method; and one of the greatest scientists of the last generation justly put forward this rigid standard of truth and its application to the facts of life and the phenomena of nature as the highest function whereof the human mind was capable. Who, in face of such a view, can assert that Religion, in the best and truest sense of the word, has died out amongst us, when, though our churches are empty, our laboratories are filled with men inspired by this same ideal ?

It is the groundwork of the whole Buddhist philosophy that there is no such thing as a sporadic phenomenon; that, in short, in every phenomenon of nature, in every fact of life the Law of Causation reigns supreme: just as it is the groundwork of the whole great fabric of modem science. So much is this emphasized in our Buddhist scriptures that a celebrated stanza, attributed to one of the Buddha's chief disciples, and which sets forth this principle, has come to be termed "The Buddhist Creed" by several western authors. We of the West have lately, thanks to our science, attained the knowledge of this fact so far as every phenomenon of nature we have investigated is concerned; though, so far, we can only assume its truth in relation to the realm of life and mind. The Buddha, dealing rather with this latter realm, dealt with it more particularly in that relationship, whilst still maintaining, as I have said, its general application. The Law of Karma, of "Action," whereby our lives are what they are, whereby our world is what it is and will to-morrow be something different, is simply the Law of Causation applied to the living, conscious world. And, if in one aspect it appears practically as a moral law bringing suffering in train of evil, happiness in train of good thoughts and words and acts, that is due to the fact that the Buddha's insight enabled him to trace the causal sequences to their deeper dwellings in the interior mental sphere. That terrible concept of original sin which has devastated so many Western minds, and has been responsible for so much human suffering and madness is, happily and necessarily, totally absent from the Buddhist view of life. It is, as the Great Teacher showed us, "by not knowing and not understanding" that we come to suffer, and from suffering to learn. Wrong acts, as has been said, are those which add to the pain of life. The original word is Akusala, which means unskilful, ignorant. So, when the Buddhist encounters suffering, there is no belief in a divine wrath, or a natural perversion, to stand between the awakening of his pity for its object; no thought of a just retribution for real or imaginary "sins." Life suffers because of its ignorance only, from not understanding the true nature of its deeds. So wisdom grows, life wins wider horizons, nobler and humaner thoughts and deeds replace the old, sad, not-understanding ones; till at the last, grown very wise and understanding, the perfected being wins to beyond all suffering. That is our thought of life and of its Goal.

All sentient life, we learn, has three great characteristics. With the review of these, and the consideration of their accordance with what we otherwise know of truth, we will close this brief study of the parallelism of Buddhist and of modern Western thought. First of the three comes Anicca,Transitoriness. In all the universe, the Buddha taught, there is no single thing that endures. Here at once we come to a conflict between what our hearts dictate and the crude scrutiny of the senses manifests, and the teachings of Buddhism and of modern science alike. It is of the very nature of the human mind to imagine things as stable, as eternally enduring. We talk of the eternal stars, the everlasting hills, even of our petty monuments as "building to etemity." It is like a child building card-castles. Ever and again, the mind of man, driven from one so stable-seeming object, sets up some new supposedly eternal object of its idolatry. And lo! the chill blast of time, or yet again the gentler breeze of new-discovered truth, undoes his labour. The card-castle falls, to rise as such no more. Even the scientific world, until the very beginning of this century, had its etemal, ever-enduring idol before.which it worshipped. It had learned, indeed, how the once-etemal stars were born as fire-mist in the abyss of space; how they grew great, and later old, and at the last died out to flame no more. It knew how the enduring hills were thrust up from below, and, through the ages are ground to fine dust by ice and by that softest-seeming of material things, water. Wherever it was able to investigate it found the truth of this old Buddhist doctrine of Impermanence, till it devised its longed-for idol of stability as the atom, the chemical atom whereof all material things are built. Voicing the general view, one of the foremost of Victorian scientists declared that an atom of hydrogen had been an atom of hydrogen from all eternity, and would so evermore remain. They laughed at the old alchemists as ignorant dreamers, because these had deemed the transmutation of one element, and hence one atom, into another was possible. Now with the discovery of radio-activity, that last eternal idol of Western thought has been thrown overboard. We know that certain of the elements are, like all else, constantly in process of degenerative change. We see in the laboratory new elements continually coming into being; and we infer that, since some, therefore all are liable to change.

The second Great Characteristic is Dukkha, Suffering, Here again the human heart revolts from the teaching of the Buddha. All individualized existence, he taught, is liable to suffering. It is only by ceasing to be a unit of life separate from all other lives that we can win to Suffering's cessation. But the Western mind is apt to imagine that even individualized existence can transcend all suffering, is prone, indeed, to minimize the suffering even now existing all about it; for there be none so blind as those that wish they did not see. On the latter point I can only say that they forget that they are human beings: that by man's intelligence he has very greatly reduced the amount of suffering to which his kind are subject; that by his communal civilization he has enormously reduced the danger of life; until the modem city-bred man hardly knows of that most fertile cause of suffering, fear. All our knowledge of natural history goes to teach us otherwise. Beyond the outposts of man's kingdom fear reigns supreme in life. And, even fundamentally, science can mstruct him better, if he will but understand the meaning of the phenomena it studies. For it finds, in the lowliest of organized beings, what it very aptly terms "irritability." It finds how, for example, the amoeba, a mere mass of living jelly, ever goaded on by the ceaseless metabolism or constant change of its internal structure, is "irritated," so to speak, to move about, to stretch forth portions of its substance in search of food wherewith to relieve its dim sense of craving. This is the apologue of all our sentient life.

The third Great Characteristic of life, as presented by Buddhism, is Anatta, Unreality. Here we reach waters so deep that in one aspect only does modern knowledge contact the subject at all. It is the Buddhist teaching that there dwells within us no one eternal principle or soul; rather that every momentary mental state might be regarded as the unit of being. So that, if we must use the term at all, a human being would consist of numbers of " souls" past all computation. That much of Buddhist psychology, in this respect, the modem psychological investigation has proved true; much work having been done in the investigation of those fascinating complexes known to modem thought as, multiple personalities.

And so, in respect of these its most fundamental doctrines, I think we may admit the claim that Buddhism does not contradict aught that by other avenues of knowledge we know to be the truth. To my brothers of the West I would say: Read, study for yourselves; seeking, as the Buddha taught us, the Truth as your Guide, looking to the Truth as your Refuge, not looking for any other refuge than the Truth, and you will find that here, in this old-time Eastern religion, that very light exists which you have vainly sought in local creeds. The gap in our lives that lack of a religion leaves can be filled to overflowing by this ancient Truth.

To my Brothers of the East I would say: Do not, because you find our churches empty, our hearts turned away from the religions our forefathers held, believe that we are without the instinct of religion in its highest sense. It is love of truth, because we will not palter with that highest refuge of humanity, that empties these churches, and that empties so many of our lives. Rather should you, in whose hands is this great heritage of the Dhamma, rejoice that your good destiny has saved you from the suffering we must needs endure in casting aside the beliefs of our childhood's days. Rather, still more earnestly, should you rejoice at the opportunity this condition offers you. If, as you and I think, our glorious Religion is the highest Truth yet known to man; if, as the Great Teacher taught, the Gift of that Truth excels all other gifts, then send us help that we may make the truth of it appear; even as the Greatest of Mankind declared it for the benefit of all!