Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t4.4

c8.s1.t4.4

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.