Bab Bab 38 · Concerning Buddha And Confucius

The discoveries of the Portuguese and the Spaniards had brought the

Christians of western Europe into close contact with the people of

India and of China. They knew of course that Christianity was not

the only religion on this earth. There were the Mohammedans and the

heathenish tribes of northern Africa who worshipped sticks and stones

and dead trees. But in India and in China the Christian conquerors

found new millions who had never heard of Christ and who did not want

to hear of Him, because they thought their own religion, which was

thousands of years old, much better than that of the West. As this is a

story of mankind and not an exclusive history of the people of Europe

and our western hemisphere, you ought to know something of two men

whose teaching and whose example continue to influence the actions and

the thoughts of the majority of our fellow-travellers on this earth.

In India, Buddha was recognised as the great religious teacher. His

history is an interesting one. He was born in the Sixth Century before

the birth of Christ, within sight of the mighty Himalaya Mountains,

where four hundred years before Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), the first

of the great leaders of the Aryan race (the name which the Eastern

branch of the Indo-European race had given to itself), had taught his

people to regard life as a continuous struggle between Ahriman, and

Ormuzd, the Gods of Evil and Good. Buddha’s father was Suddhodana, a

mighty chief among the tribe of the Sakiyas. His mother, Maha Maya, was

the daughter of a neighbouring king. She had been married when she was

a very young girl. But many moons had passed beyond the distant ridge

of hills and still her husband was without an heir who should rule his

lands after him. At last, when she was fifty years old, her day came

and she went forth that she might be among her own people when her baby

should come into this world.

It was a long trip to the land of the Koliyans, where Maha Maya had

spent her earliest years. One night she was resting among the cool

trees of the garden of Lumbini. There her son was born. He was given

the name of Siddhartha, but we know him as Buddha, which means the

Enlightened One.

In due time, Siddhartha grew up to be a handsome young prince and when

he was nineteen years old, he was married to his cousin Yasodhara.

During the next ten years he lived far away from all pain and all

suffering, behind the protecting walls of the royal palace, awaiting

the day when he should succeed his father as King of the Sakiyas.

But it happened that when he was thirty years old, he drove outside of

the palace gates and saw a man who was old and worn out with labour

and whose weak limbs could hardly carry the burden of life. Siddhartha

pointed him out to his coachman, Channa, but Channa answered that

there were lots of poor people in this world and that one more or

less did not matter. The young prince was very sad but he did not say

anything and went back to live with his wife and his father and his

mother and tried to be happy. A little while later he left the palace

a second time. His carriage met a man who suffered from a terrible

disease. Siddhartha asked Channa what had been the cause of this man’s

suffering, but the coachman answered that there were many sick people

in this world and that such things could not be helped and did not

matter very much. The young prince was very sad when he heard this but

again he returned to his people.

[Illustration: THE THREE GREAT RELIGIONS]

A few weeks passed. One evening Siddhartha ordered his carriage in

order to go to the river and bathe. Suddenly his horses were frightened

by the sight of a dead man whose rotting body lay sprawling in the

ditch beside the road. The young prince, who had never been allowed to

see such things, was frightened, but Channa told him not to mind such

trifles. The world was full of dead people. It was the rule of life

that all things must come to an end. Nothing was eternal. The grave

awaited us all and there was no escape.

That evening, when Siddhartha returned to his home, he was received

with music. While he was away his wife had given birth to a son. The

people were delighted because now they knew that there was an heir to

the throne and they celebrated the event by the beating of many drums.

Siddhartha, however, did not share their joy. The curtain of life had

been lifted and he had learned the horror of man’s existence. The sight

of death and suffering followed him like a terrible dream.

That night the moon was shining brightly. Siddhartha woke up and began

to think of many things. Never again could he be happy until he should

have found a solution to the riddle of existence. He decided to find

it far away from all those whom he loved. Softly he went into the room

where Yasodhara was sleeping with her baby. Then he called for his

faithful Channa and told him to follow.

Together the two men went into the darkness of the night, one to find

rest for his soul, the other to be a faithful servant unto a beloved

master.

The people of India among whom Siddhartha wandered for many years were

just then in a state of change. Their ancestors, the native Indians,

had been conquered without great difficulty by the war-like Aryans (our

distant cousins) and thereafter the Aryans had been the rulers and

masters of tens of millions of docile little brown men. To maintain

themselves in the seat of the mighty, they had divided the population

into different classes and gradually a system of “caste” of the most

rigid sort had been enforced upon the natives. The descendants of the

Indo-European conquerors belonged to the highest “caste,” the class

of warriors and nobles. Next came the caste of the priests. Below

these followed the peasants and the business men. The ancient natives,

however, who were called Pariahs, formed a class of despised and

miserable slaves and never could hope to be anything else.

Even the religion of the people was a matter of caste. The old

Indo-Europeans, during their thousands of years of wandering, had met

with many strange adventures. These had been collected in a book called

the Veda. The language of this book was called Sanskrit, and it was

closely related to the different languages of the European continent,

to Greek and Latin and Russian and German and two-score others. The

three highest castes were allowed to read these holy scriptures. The

Pariah, however, the despised member of the lowest caste, was not

permitted to know its contents. Woe to the man of noble or priestly

caste who should teach a Pariah to study the sacred volume!

The majority of the Indian people, therefore, lived in misery. Since

this planet offered them very little joy, salvation from suffering must

be found elsewhere. They tried to derive a little consolation from

meditation upon the bliss of their future existence.

Brahma, the all-creator who was regarded by the Indian people as the

supreme ruler of life and death, was worshipped as the highest ideal

of perfection. To become like Brahma, to lose all desires for riches

and power, was recognised as the most exalted purpose of existence.

Holy thoughts were regarded as more important than holy deeds, and many

people went into the desert and lived upon the leaves of trees and

starved their bodies that they might feed their souls with the glorious

contemplation of the splendours of Brahma, the Wise, the Good and the

Merciful.

Siddhartha, who had often observed these solitary wanderers who were

seeking the truth far away from the turmoil of the cities and the

villages, decided to follow their example. He cut his hair. He took his

pearls and his rubies and sent them back to his family with a message

of farewell, which the ever faithful Channa carried. Without a single

follower, the young prince then moved into the wilderness.

Soon the fame of his holy conduct spread among the mountains. Five

young men came to him and asked that they might be allowed to listen

to his words of wisdom. He agreed to be their master if they would

follow him. They consented, and he took them into the hills and for

six years he taught them all he knew amidst the lonely peaks of the

Vindhya Mountains. But at the end of this period of study, he felt that

he was still far from perfection. The world that he had left continued

to tempt him. He now asked that his pupils leave him and then he fasted

for forty-nine days and nights, sitting upon the roots of an old tree.

At last he received his reward. In the dusk of the fiftieth evening,

Brahma revealed himself to his faithful servant. From that moment on,

Siddhartha was called Buddha and he was revered as the Enlightened One

who had come to save men from their unhappy mortal fate.

The last forty-five years of his life, Buddha spent within the valley

of the Ganges River, teaching his simple lesson of submission and

meekness unto all men. In the year 488 before our era, he died, full

of years and beloved by millions of people. He had not preached his

doctrines for the benefit of a single class. Even the lowest Pariah

might call himself his disciple.

This, however, did not please the nobles and the priests and the

merchants who did their best to destroy a creed which recognised the

equality of all living creatures and offered men the hope of a second

life (a reincarnation) under happier circumstances. As soon as they

could, they encouraged the people of India to return to the ancient

doctrines of the Brahmin creed with its fasting and its tortures of the

sinful body. But Buddhism could not be destroyed. Slowly the disciples

of the Enlightened One wandered across the valleys of the Himalayas,

and moved into China. They crossed the Yellow Sea and preached the

wisdom of their master unto the people of Japan, and they faithfully

obeyed the will of their great master, who had forbidden them to use

force. To-day more people recognise Buddha as their teacher than ever

before and their number surpasses that of the combined followers of

Christ and Mohammed.

[Illustration: BUDDHA GOES INTO THE MOUNTAINS]

As for Confucius, the wise old man of the Chinese, his story is a

simple one. He was born in the year 550 B.C. He led a quiet, dignified

and uneventful life at a time when China was without a strong central

government and when the Chinese people were at the mercy of bandits and

robber-barons who went from city to city, pillaging and stealing and

murdering and turning the busy plains of northern and central China

into a wilderness of starving people.

Confucius, who loved his people, tried to save them. He did not have

much faith in the use of violence. He was a very peaceful person. He

did not think that he could make people over by giving them a lot of

new laws. He knew that the only possible salvation would come from a

change of heart, and he set out upon the seemingly hopeless task of

changing the character of his millions of fellow men who inhabited the

wide plains of eastern Asia. The Chinese had never been much interested

in religion as we understand that word. They believed in devils and

spooks as most primitive people do. But they had no prophets and

recognised no “revealed truth.” Confucius is almost the only one among

the great moral leaders who did not see visions, who did not proclaim

himself as the messenger of a divine power; who did not, at some time

or another, claim that he was inspired by voices from above.

He was just a very sensible and kindly man, rather given to lonely

wanderings and melancholy tunes upon his faithful flute. He asked

for no recognition. He did not demand that any one should follow him

or worship him. He reminds us of the ancient Greek philosophers,

especially those of the Stoic School, men who believed in right living

and righteous thinking without the hope of a reward but simply for the

peace of the soul that comes with a good conscience.

Confucius was a very tolerant man. He went out of his way to visit

Lao-Tse, the other great Chinese leader and the founder of a

philosophic system called “Taoism,” which was merely an early Chinese

version of the Golden Rule.

Confucius bore no hatred to any one. He taught the virtue of supreme

self-possession. A person of real worth, according to the teaching of

Confucius, did not allow himself to be ruffled by anger and suffered

whatever fate brought him with the resignation of those sages who

understand that everything which happens, in one way or another, is

meant for the best.

At first he had only a few students. Gradually the number increased.

Before his death, in the year 478 B.C., several of the kings and the

princes of China confessed themselves his disciples. When Christ was

born in Bethlehem, the philosophy of Confucius had already become

a part of the mental make-up of most Chinamen. It has continued to

influence their lives ever since. Not however in its pure, original

form. Most religions change as time goes on. Christ preached humility

and meekness and absence from worldly ambitions, but fifteen centuries

after Golgotha, the head of the Christian church was spending millions

upon the erection of a building that bore little relation to the lonely

stable of Bethlehem.

Lao-Tse taught the Golden Rule, and in less than three centuries the

ignorant masses had made him into a real and very cruel God and had

buried his wise commandments under a rubbish-heap of superstition which

made the lives of the average Chinese one long series of frights and

fears and horrors.

Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honouring their Father

and their Mother. They soon began to be more interested in the memory

of their departed parents than in the happiness of their children

and their grandchildren. Deliberately they turned their backs upon

the future and tried to peer into the vast darkness of the past. The

worship of the ancestors became a positive religious system. Rather

than disturb a cemetery situated upon the sunny and fertile side of

a mountain, they would plant their rice and wheat upon the barren

rocks of the other slope where nothing could possibly grow. And they

preferred hunger and famine to the desecration of the ancestral grave.

[Illustration: THE GREAT MORAL LEADERS]

At the same time the wise words of Confucius never quite lost their

hold upon the increasing millions of eastern Asia. Confucianism,

with its profound sayings and shrewd observations, added a touch of

common-sense philosophy to the soul of every Chinaman and influenced

his entire life, whether he was a simple laundryman in a steaming

basement or the ruler of vast provinces who dwelt behind the high walls

of a secluded palace.

In the sixteenth century the enthusiastic but rather uncivilised

Christians of the western world came face to face with the older

creeds of the East. The early Spaniards and Portuguese looked upon the

peaceful statues of Buddha and contemplated the venerable pictures of

Confucius and did not in the least know what to make of those worthy

prophets with their far-away smile. They came to the easy conclusion

that these strange divinities were just plain devils who represented

something idolatrous and heretical and did not deserve the respect of

the true sons of the Church. Whenever the spirit of Buddha or Confucius

seemed to interfere with the trade in spices and silks, the Europeans

attacked the “evil influence” with bullets and grapeshot. That system

had certain very definite disadvantages. It has left us an unpleasant

heritage of ill-will which promises little good for the immediate

future.