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Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t4: Buddha's Opponents

Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t4

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Buddha's Opponents

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Now that we have made the acquaintance of disciples and friends, our next inquiry is about the enemies and about the battles in which the new gospel had to prove its strength. If we might believe the Buddhist texts on this subject, Buddha's career was nothing but one great uninterrupted victorious march. Wherever he comes, the masses, it is told us time after time, flock to him. The other teachers are deserted; they are silent if he "raises his lion voice in the assemblies." Whoever hears his discourse, is converted.

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This picture certainly does not wholly correspond with the truth, and we can, on some points at least, learn the actual facts tolerably well.

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Above all it must be borne in mind that Buddha did not find himself like other reformers face to face with a great, united power, capable of resistance, and determined to resist, in which was embodied the old which he attacked and desired to replace by the new.

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People are accustomed to speak of Buddhism as opposed to Brahmanism, somewhat in the way that it is allowable to speak of Lutheranism as an opponent of the papacy. But if they mean, as they might be inclined from this parallel to do, to picture to themselves a kind of Brahmanical Church, which is assailed by Buddha, which opposed its resistance to its operations like the resistance of the party in possession to an upstart, they are mistaken. Buddha did not find himself in the presence of a Brahmanical hierarchy, embracing the whole people, overshading the whole popular life. In the eastern districts religious movement, allowing itself free play, had ramified in many separate directions: sects upon sects exist side by side, at peace or at war as circumstances determined. The champions of the Veda, of Brahmanism, are really not more than one among many parties, and, indeed, to all appearance, by no means an especially powerful one. They wanted altogether compact organization; least of all did they, at any rate in the territories in which Buddha’s work was prosecuted, represent a state-Church or had they power to enforce their commands by the assistance of worldly power. Their personal prestige was by no means undisputed there. From the great Brahman, who as an officer of high rank oppressed the people in the king’s name and then deceived the king in turn, down to the small clerics, who, if invited to dine, made themselves disagreeably conspicuous by their behaviour at table, their personal appearance and manner of life provoked criticism, and men did not withhold that criticism. Long since a Samana (an ascetic) had come to be not a hair lighter in popular estimation than a Brahman. The Veda, the great patent of nobility of the Brahman class could not possibly give them a claim to power and popularity, such even as that the Pharisees had in the Mosaic law. Who among the people cared for the Veda, for the abstruse theories of sacrifice, the language of which no one understood, or for the ancient hymns, the language of which was still less understood, the hymns to forgotten deities, the heirlooms of grammarians and antiquaries? The propitiatory sacrifice with its plain external conception of guilt and purification, behind which the greedy exaction of a priestcraft lay concealed, must have kept alive in earnest and clear thinking natures, ill-will towards this priesthood.

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Thus Brahmanism was not to Buddha an enemy whose conquest he would have been unable to effect. He may often have found the local influence of respected Brahmans an obstacle in his path,[*] but against this a hundred other Brahmans stood by him as his disciples or had declared for him as lay members.* Here no struggle on a large scale has taken place. The Brahmans had not the weapons of the world without at their disposal in such a warfare, and where the arbitrament was of intellectual weapons, they were sure to lose.

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∗ The insignificant part which the western portions of Hindostan (the countries of the Kuru-Pancâlâ, and so forth) play in the narration of

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Buddha discredited the sacrificial system; he censured with bitter irony the knowledge of Vedic scribes as sheer folly, if not as shameless swindle; Brahmanical pride of caste was not more gently handled. He who repeats the lays and sayings of the poetic sages of antiquity and then fancies himself a sage, is like a plebeian or a slave, who should mount up to the place from which a king has addressed his retinue, and speak the same words and then fancy himself also a king.† The pupil believes what the teacher has believed, the teacher what he has received from the teachers before him. "Like a chain of blind men, I take it, is the discourse of the Brahmans: he who is in front sees nothing, he who is in the middle sees nothing, he who is behind sees nothing, what then? Is not, if this be so, the faith of the Brahmans vain?"‡

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† Sic Ambaṭṭasutta (Dîgha-Nikâya).

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‡ Cankîsuttanta (Majjhima N.).

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The classical expression of the views of the old Buddhist Buddha's wanderings arises not only from their remoteness, but also in a not less degrees from the more powerful position which the Brahmans occupied there, in the old home of the Vedic faith. When the law of Manu (9, 225) gives authority for expelling all heretical people from the state, there is in this a claim of Brahmanism which a code framed in the east could scarcely have dared to advance.

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∗ It is worthy of observation that the usage of the Buddhist texts in no way connects with the word "Brahman" the notion of an enemy to the cause of Buddha, in the way that in the New Testament Pharisees and Scribes appear as the standing enemies of Jesus.

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Church, and, we may say, of Buddha, regarding the value of the Vedic sacrificial cult, is contained in a conversation of Buddha with a Brahman of position, who had asked Buddha about the essentials of a proper sacrifice.*

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Buddha then narrates the story of a powerful and successful king of bygone days, who, after splendid victories and the conquest of the whole earth, formed the resolution of making a great offering to the gods. He summoned his family priest and asked his instructions, as to how he should set about his project. The priest admonishes him before offering a sacrifice, to establish first of all peace, prosperity, and security in his kingdom. Not until all injustices in the land are repaired, does he proceed to sacrifice. And at his sacrifice no life of sentient creature is taken; no cattle and sheep are killed; no trees are hewn down; no grass is cut. The servants of the king perform their work in connection with the sacrifice, not under pressure and in tears, in fear of the overseer's verge; each works willingly, as his own inclination prompts him. Libations of milk, oil, and honey are offered, and thus the king's sacrifice is performed. But there is, Buddha goes on to say, yet another offering, easier to perform than that, and yet higher and more blessed: where men make gifts to pious monks, where men build dwelling-places for Buddha and his order. And there is yet a higher offering: where a man with believing heart takes his refuge with Buddha, with the Doctrine, with the Order, when a man robs no being of its life, when a man puts far from him lying and deceit. And there is yet a higher offering: where a man separates as a monk from joy and sorrow and sinks himself in holy repose. But the highest offering, which a man can bring, and the highest blessing of which he can be made participator, is, when he obtains deliverance and gains this knowledge : I shall not again return to this world. This is the highest perfection of all offering.

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∗ Kûṭadantasutta of the Dîgha-Nikâya.

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Thus speaks Buddha; the Brahman hears his discourse believingly, and says : "I take my refuge with Buddha, with the Doctrine and with the Order." He had himself intended to perform a great sacrifice, and had hundreds of animals ready for it. "I let them loose and set them free," he says, "let them enjoy green grass, let them drink cool water, let the cool wind fan them."

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The expressions which we here find need no commentary to clearly elicit from them the attitude of the Buddhists towards the ancient cult. We do not hear how the Brahmans on their part fortified their position, what procedure they adopted against the new faith; but, if we possessed Brahmanical sketches of Buddha's appearance, our conviction would hardly be thereby destroyed, that from the very beginning the intrinsic superiority as well as the external advantage in this struggle was on the side of Buddha's disciples.

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Buddha found in the rival ascetic leaders and their monastic orders more subtle and dangerous opponents than in the champions of the ancient faith. The spirit which animated many of these communities was allied to the spirit on which Buddha's own work was based. If we read the sacred books of the Jainas, it seems as if we heard Buddhists speaking.

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We have no quite reliable opinion as to the terms upon which the monks of the rival communities mixed with each other. Openly expressed enmity appears to have not always prevailed; it was not unusual for members to visit each other in their hermitages, to exchange civilities, to speak to each other coolly and temperately on dogmatic subjects. That there was notwithstanding an incessant play of intrigue in progress will be obvious; where the object in view was to deprive each other of the protection of influential personages no trouble was spared. King Asoka found occasion in his edicts to point out to the spiritual brotherhoods, that he is only doing an injury to his own faith who thinks to set it in a clear light by abusing the adherents of another faith. But whether Buddha himself and the disciples immediately round him descended from the heights of holy meekness, on which the orthodox tradition enthrones them, to this religious scramble, is a point on which we are forbidden to hazard a conjecture.

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What more than anything else distinguished Buddha from the most of his rivals was his dissentient attitude towards the self-mortifications, in which they saw the path to deliverance.* We saw how, according to tradition, Buddha himself in the period of search through which he passed when a young man, had endured self-mortifications in their most rigorous severity, and had found out their fruitlessness in his own case. What drives earthly thoughts out of the soul is not fasting and bodily agony, but self-culture, above all the struggle for knowledge, and for this struggle man derives the power only from an external life, which is far removed alike from luxury and from privation, and still more from self-inflicted pain. In

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[^ *]: I take the following passages from one of the sacred texts of the Niggantha- or Jaina-sect, founded by Buddha's contemporary Nâta-putta: "By day motionless as a statue, the countenance turned to the sun, permitting himself to burn on a place exposed to the sun's rays, by night cowering, unclothed . . . by this conspicuous, great, intense, prominent, precious, efficacious, rich, promising, noble, exalted, high, supreme, conspicuous, very potent exercise of penance he appeared very debilitated . . . with penance richly covered, but impoverished in flesh and blood like a fire covered over with heaps of ashes, shining brilliantly through penance, through radiance, in nobleness of the radiance of penance, there he stands."

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the sermon at Benares, in which tradition has undertaken to draw up something like a programme of Buddha's operations,* polemic directed against those errors of gloomy ascetics is not absent; the way which leads to deliverance keeps itself as far from all self-mortification as it steers clear on the other side of earthly pleasure; the one as well as the other is there termed unworthy and vain. The true spiritual life is once compared to a lute, the strings of which must not be too loose nor stretched too tensely, if it is to give a correct sound. The balance of the faculties, the internal harmony, is that which Buddha commands his followers to aim at securing.

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So far as moral living can maintain a healthy development on the ground and within the limits to which Indian monasticism is once for all by its nature confined, so far we must claim for Buddha's work the merit of such inherent soundness. He has seen through the enveloping husks which conceal the kernel of the ethical more clearly than his contemporaries, and has bequeathed to the community of his followers this knowledge of the subject, the clear rejection of everything which is foreign thereto. It may be chance that has given his doctrine the victory over the doctrines of his rival contemporaries centuries after the deaths of all; but possibly the more the darkness which covers these centuries for us is dissipated, this game of chance may the more resemble the operation of a law of necessity.

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