Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c10.t1.2

c10.t1.2

The observance of the fast-day is the most prominent and almost the only observance of the ancient Buddhist cultus, if the word " cultus " can be at all applied to these most simple and plain external forms of mutual religious life. For a faith, which looks upon man's own heart as the sole place in which decisions between happiness and ruin can be carried into effect, what the lip utters and what the hand does, can have a value only in so far as it is a concomitant of, a symbol corresponding to, that internal process. And above all in the first age of the young Buddhist community must that very opposition to the old faith with its ceremoniousness, with its animal sacrifices and soma-offerings, with its hosts of singing and mumbling priests, have been especially keenly felt and led to the result, that so much the more earnest heed was taken to preserve the internal character of the individual faith free from every non-essential. We must keep before us the fact, that anything in the way of a mysterium, such as that from which the early Christian cultus drew its vitality, was foreign to Buddhism; the conception that the divine Head of the Church is not absent from his people, but that he dwells powerfully in their midst as their lord and king, so that all cultus is nothing else but the expression of this continuing living fellowship. Buddha, however, has entered into Nirvâna; if his believers desired to invoke him, he could not hear them. Therefore Buddhism is a religion without prayer. The preaching of Buddha’s doctrine, the practice of spiritual abstractions, in which they thought they possessed so powerful an aid to religious effort, permeated the whole life of the brethren, but they found no expression in the forms of a regularly organized cultus; for this last there was little room left in that universal sway, conceivable only in a monastic Order, of religious thought over every word which the believer utters, and over every step he takes.