Theosophy - The Life of Buddha and its lessons by H.S.Olcott- Adyar Pamphlet No. 15
Adyar
Pamphlets No 15 (Reprinted May 1912)
The Life of Buddha and
Its Lessons
by H S. Olcott
The Theosophist Office Adyar, Chennai (Madras) India
THE thoughtful
student, in scanning the religious history of the race has one fact continually
forced upon his notice, viz., that there is an invariable tendency to deify whomsoever shows himself superior
to the weakness of our common humanity. Look where we will, we find the saint
like man exalted into a divine personage and worshiped for a god. Though perhaps
misunderstood, reviled and even persecuted while living, the apotheosis is
almost sure to come after death: and the victim of yesterday’s mob, raised to the stage of an Intercessor in Heaven, is besought with prayer
and tears, and placatory penances to mediate with God for the pardon of human
sin. This is a mean and vile trait of human nature, the proof of ignorance,
selfishness, brutal cowardice, and a superstitious materialism. It shows the
base instinct to put down and destroy whatever or whoever makes men feel their
own imperfections; with the alternative of ignoring and denying these very
imperfections by turning into gods men who have merely spiritualized their
natures, so that it may be supposed that they were heavenly incarnations and
not mortal like other men.
This process of enhemerisation,
as it is called, or the making of men into gods and gods into men, sometimes,
though more rarely, begins during the life of the hero, but usually after death.
The true history of his life is gradually amplified and decorated with fanciful
incidents, to fit it to the new character which has been posthumously given
him. Omens
and portents are now made to attend his earthly avatâra: his precocity is described as superhuman: as a babe or lisping child he silences
the wisest logicians by his divine knowledge: miracles he produces as other boys
do soap-bubbles: the terrible energies of nature are his playthings: the gods,
angels, and demons are his habitual attendants: the sun, moon, and all the starry
host wheel around his cradle in joyful measures, and the earth thrills with joy
at having borne such a prodigy: and at his last hour of mortal life the whole
universe shakes with conflicting emotions.
Why need I use
the few moments at my disposal to marshal before you the various personages
of whom these fables have been written? Let it suffice to recall the interesting
fact to your notice, and invite you to compare the respective biographies of
the
Brâhmanical Krshna, the Persian Zoroaster, the Egyptian Hermes, the Indian Gautama,
and the canonical, especially the apocryphal, Jesus. Taking Krshna or Zoroaster,
as you please, as the most ancient, and coming down the chronological line of
descent, you will find them made after the same pattern. The real personage is
all covered up and concealed under the embroidered veils of the romancer and
the enthusiastic historiographer. What is surprising to me is that this tendency
to exaggeration and hyperbole is not more commonly allowed for by those who in
our days attempt to discuss and compare religions. We are constantly and painfully
reminded that the prejudice of inimical critics, on the one hand, and the furious
bigotry of devotees, on the other, blind men to fact and probability, and lead
to gross injustice. Let me take as an example the mythical biographies of Jesus.
At the time when the Council of Nicea was convened for settling the quarrels
of certain bishops and for the purpose of examining into the canonicity of the hundred more or less apocryphal gospels, that were being read in
the Christian churches as inspired writings, the history of the life of Christ
has reached the height of absurd myth. We may see some specimens in the extant
books of the apocryphal New Testament, but most of them are now lost. What have
been retained in the present canon may doubtless be regarded as the least objectionable.
And yet, we must not hastily adopt even this conclusion, for you know that Sabina,
Bishop of Heracha, himself speaking of the
Council of Nicea affirms that “except Constantine and Sabinus, Bishop of Pamphilus, these bishops were a set
of illiterate, simple creatures, that understood nothing;” which is as
though he had said they were a pack of fools. And Pappus, in his Synodicon to that Council of Nicea, lets us into the secret that the canon was not decided
by a careful
comparison of several gospels before them, but by a lottery. Having, he tells us, “promiscuously put all the ‘books that were referred to the Council for determination under a Communion table
in a church, they (the bishops) besought the Lord that the inspired writings
might get up on the table, while the spurious writings remained underneath, and it happened accordingly’. But letting all this pass and looking only to what is contained in the present
canon, we see the same tendency to compel all nature to attest the divinity of
the writer’s hero. At the nativity a star leaves its orbit and leads the Persian astrologers
to the divine and angels come and converse with shepherds, and a whole train
of like celestial phenomena occurs at various stages of his earthly career, which
closes amid earthquakes, a pall of darkness over the whole scene, a supernatural
war of the elements, the opening of graves and walking about of their tenants
and other appalling wonders. Now, if the candid Buddhist concedes that the real
history of Gautama is embellished by like absurd exaggerations, and if we can
find their duplicates in the biographies of
Zoroaster, Shankarâchâya and the other real personages of antiquity, have we not the right to conclude
that the true history of the Founder of Christianity, if at this late date it
were possible to write it, would be very different from the narratives that pass
current? We must not forget that Jerusalem was at that time a Roman dependency,
just as Ceylon is now a British, and that the silence of contemporary Roman historians
about any such violent
disturbances of the equilibrium of nature is deeply significant.
I have cited this
example for the sole and simple purpose of bringing home to the non-Buddhistic
portion of my present audience the conviction that, in considering the life
of Sâkya Muni and the lessons it teaches, they must not make his followers of today
responsible for any extravagant exuberances of past’ biographers. The doctrine of Buddha and its effects are to be judged quite apart
from the man, just as the doctrine ascribed to Jesus and its effects are to
be considered quite irrespectively from his personal history. And— as I hope I have shown the actual doings and sayings of every founder of a faith
or a school of philosophy, must be sought for under a heap of tinsel and rubbish
contributed by successive generations of followers.
Approaching the
question of the hour in this spirit of precaution, what do we find are the
probabilities respecting the life of Sâkya Muni? Who was he? When did he live? How did he live? What did he teach? A
most careful comparison of authorities and analysis of evidence establishes,
I think, the following data:
1. He was the
son of a King
2. He lived between six and seven centuries before Christ
3. He resigned
his royal state and went to live in the jungle, and among the lowest and most
unhappy classes, so as to learn the secret of human pain and
misery by personal experience: tested every known austerity of the Hindû ascetics and excelled them all in his power of endurance: sounded every depth
of woe in search of the means to alleviate it: and at last came out victorious,
and showed the world the way to salvation.
4. What he taught may be summed up in a few words, as the perfume of many roses
may
be distilled into a few drops of attar: Everything in the world of matter is unreal; the only reality is the world
of Spirit. Emancipate yourselves from the tyranny of the former; strive to attain
the latter. The Rev. Samuel Beal, in his Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the
Chinese puts it differently. “The idea underlying the Buddhist religious system is,” he says, “simply this ‘all is vanity’. Earth is a show, and Heaven is a vain reward.” Primitive Buddhism was engrossed , absorbed by one thought, the vanity of finite
existence, the
priceless value of the one condition of Eternal Rest.
If I have the
temerity to prefer my own definition of the spirit of Buddha’s doctrine it is because I think that all the misconceptions of it have arisen
from a failure to understand his idea of what is real and what is unreal, what
worth longing and striving for and what not. From this misconception have come
all the unfounded charges that Buddhism is an ‘atheistical,’ that is to say, a grossly materialistic, a nihilistic, a negative, a vice-breeding
religion. Buddhism denies the existence of a personal God — true; therefore — well, therefore, and notwithstanding all this, its teaching is neither what
may be called properly atheistical, nihilistic, negative nor provocative of
vice. I will try to make my meaning clear, and the advancement of modern scientific
research helps in this direction. Science divides the universe for us into
two elements — matter and force; accounting for their phenomena by their combinations, and
making both eternal and obedient to eternal and immutable law. The speculations
of men of science have carried them to the outermost verge of the physical
universe. Behind them lie not only a thousand brilliant triumphs by which a
part of Nature’s secrets have been wrung from her, but also more thousands of failures to fathom
her deep mysteries. They have proved thought material, since it is the evolution
of the gray tissue of the brain, and a recent German experimentalist, Professor
Dr Jäger, claims to have proved that man’s soul is “a volatile odoriferous principle, capable of solution in glycerine”. Psychogen is the name he gives to it, and his experiments show that it is present
not merely in the body as a whole, but in every individual cell, in the ovum,
and even in the ultimate elements of protoplasm. I need hardly say to so intelligent
an audience as this that these highly interesting experiments of Dr Jäger are corroborated by many facts, both physiological and psychological that
have been always noticed among all nations; facts which are woven into popular
proverbs, legends, folk-lore fables, mythologies and theologies, the world
over. Now, if thought is matter and soul is matter, then Buddha in recognizing
the impermanence of sensual enjoyment or experience of any kind, and the instability
of every material form, the human soul included, uttered a profound and scientific
truth. And since the very idea of gratification or suffering is inseparable
from that of material being — absolute SPIRIT alone being regarded by common consent as perfect, changeless and Eternal — therefore, in teaching the doctrine, that conquest of the material self, with
all its lusts, desires, loves, hopes, ambitions and hates, frees one from pain,
and leads to Nirvâna, the state of Perfect Rest, he preached the rest of an untinged, untainted
existence in the Spirit. Though the soul be composed of the finest conceivable
substance, yet if substance at all — as Dr Jäger seems able to prove, and ages of human intercourse with the weird phantoms
of the shadow world imply — it must in time perish. What remains is that changeless part of man, which most
philosophers call Spirit, and Nirvâna is its necessary condition of existence. The only dispute between Buddhist
authorities is whether this Nirvânic existence is attended with individual consciousness, or whether the individual
is merged in the whole, as the extinguished flame is lost in the air. But there
are those who say that the flame has not been annihiliated by the blowing out.
It has only passed out of the visible world of matter into the invisible world
of Spirit, where it still exists and will ever exist, as a bright reality.
Such thinkers can understand Buddha’s doctrine and, while agreeing with him that soul is not immortal, would spurn
the charge of materialistic nihilism if brought against either that sublime
teacher or themselves.
The
history of Sâkya Muni’s life is the strongest bulwark of his religion. As long as the human heart is
capable of being touched by tales of heroic self-sacrifice, accompanied by
purity and celestial benevolence of motive, it will cherish his memory. Why
should I go into the particulars of that noble life? You will remember that
he was the son of the king of Kapilavastu — a mighty sovereign whose opulence enabled him to give the heir of the house
every luxury that a voluptuous imagination could desire: and that the future
Buddha was not allowed to even know, much less observe, the miseries of ordinary
existence. How beautifully Edwin Arnold has painted for us in The Light of Asia the luxury and languor of that Indian Court, “where love was gaoler and delights its bars.” We are told that:
The king commanded
that within those walls
No mention should be made of age or death,
Sorrow or pain, or sickness . . . . . .
And every dawn the dying rose was plucked,
The dead leaves hid, all evil sights removed;
For said the king, “If he shall pass his youth
Far from such things as move to wistfulness
And brooding on the empty eggs of thought,
The shadow of this fate, too vast for man,
May fade, belike, and I shall see him grow
To that great stature of fair sovereignty,
When he shall rule all lands — if he will rule —
The king of kings and glory of his time’
You know how vain
were all the precautions taken by the father to prevent the fulfilment of the
prophecy that his beloved son would be the coming Buddha. Though all suggestions
of death were banished from the royal palace, though the city was bedecked
in flowers and gay flags, and every painful object removed from sight when
the young Prince Siddartha visited the city, yet the decrees of destiny were
not to be baffled, the “voices of the spirits,” the “wandering winds,” and the devas whispered the truth of human sorrows into his listening ear, and
when the appointed hour arrived, the Suddha Devas threw the spell of slumber
over the household, steeped in profound lethargy the sentinels (as we are told
was done by an angel to the gaoler's of Peter’s prison). rolled back the triple gates of bronze, strewed the sweet moghra flowers
thickly beneath his horse’s feet to muffle every sound, and he was free, free? Yes — to resign every earthly comfort, every sensuous enjoyment, the sweets of royal
power, the homage of a court, the delights of domestic life: gems, the glitter
of gold: rich stuffs, rich food, soft beds: the songs of trained musicians,
and of birds kept prisoners in gay cages, the murmur of perfumed waters plashing
in marble basins, the delicious shade of trees in gardens where art had contrived
to make nature even lovelier than herself. He leaps from his saddle when at
a safe distance from the palace, flings the jeweled rein to his faithful groom,
Channa, cuts off his flowing locks, gives his rich costume to a hunter in exchange
for his own, plunges into the jungle, and is free:
To tread its
paths with patient, stainless feet,
Making its dusty bed, its loneliest wastes
My dwelling, and its meanest things my mates;
Clad in no prouder garb than outcasts wear,
Fed with no meals save what the charitable
Give of their will, sheltered by no more pomp,
Than the dim cave lends or the jungle-bush.
This will I do because the woeful cry
Of life and all flesh living cometh up
Into my ears, and all my soul is full
Of pity for the sickness of this world:
Which I will heal, if healing may be found
By uttermost renouncing and strong strife.
Thus masterfully
does Sir Edwin Arnold depict the sentiment which provoked this Great Renunciator.
The testimony of thousands of millions who, during the last twenty-five centuries
have professed the Buddhistic religion, proves that the secret of human misery
was at least solved by this divine self-sacrifice,
and the true path to Nirvâna opened.
The joy that he
brought to the hearts of others, Buddha first tasted himself. He found that
the pleasures of the eye, the ear, the taste, touch and smell are fleeting
and deceptive: he who gives value to them brings only disappointment and bitter
sorrow upon himself. The social differences between men he found were equally
arbitrary and illusive; caste bred hatred and selfishness; riches strife, envy
and malice. So in founding his faith he laid the bottom of its foundation-stones
upon all this worldly dirt, and its dome in the clear serene of the world of
Spirit. He who can mount to a clear conception of Nirvâna will find his thought far away above the common joys and sorrows of petty
men. As to one who ascends to the top of Chimborazo or the Himâlayan crags, and sees men on the earth’s surface crawling to and fro like ants, so equally small do bigots and sectarians
appear to him. The mountain climber has under his feet the very clouds from
whose sun-painted shapes the poet has figured to himself the golden streets
and glittering domes of the materialistic Heaven of a personal God. Below him
are all the various objects out of which the world’s pantheons have been manufactured: around, above — Immensity. And so also, far down the ascending plane of thought that leads from
the earth towards the Infinite, the philosophic Buddhist describes at different
plateaux the heavens and hells, the gods and demons of the materialistic creed-builders.
What are the lessons
to be derived from the life and teachings of this heroic prince of Kapilavastu?
Lessons of gratitude and benevolence. Lessons of tolerance for the clashing
opinions of men who live, move and have their being, think and aspire only
in the material world. The lesson of a common tie of brotherhood among all
men. Lessons of manly self-reliance, of equanimity in breasting whatsoever
of good or ill may happen. Lessons of the meanness of the rewards, the pettiness
of the misfortunes of a shifting world of illusions. Lessons of the necessity
for avoiding every species of evil thought and word, and for doing, speaking
and thinking everything that is good, and for the bringing of the mind into
subjection so that these may be accomplished, without selfish motive or vanity.
Lessons of self-purification and communion by which the illusiveness of externals
and the value of
internals are understood.
Well might St.
Hilaire burst into the panegyric that Buddha “is the prefect model of all the virtues he preaches . . . . his life has not
a stain upon it”. Well might the sober critic Max
Müller pronounce his moral code ‘one of the most perfect which the world has ever known”. No wonder that in contemplating that gentle life Edwin Arnold should have found
his
personality “the highest, gentlest, holiest and most beneficent . . . . in the history of
thought,” and been moved to write his splendid verses. It is twenty-five hundred years
since
humanity put forth such a flower: who knows when it did before?
Gautama Buddha
Sâkya Muni, has ennobled the whole human race. His fame is our common inheritance.
His Law is the law of Justice providing for every good thought, word and deed
its fair reward, for every evil one its proper punishment. His law is in harmony
with the voices of nature, and the evident equilibrium of the universe. It
yields nothing to importunities or threats, can be neither coaxed nor bribed
by offerings to abate or alter one jot or title of its inexorable course. Am
I told that Buddhist laymen display vanity in their worship and ostentation
in their alms-giving: that they are fostering sects as bitterly as Hindûs. So much the worse for the laymen: there is the example of Buddha and his law.
Am I told that Buddhist priests are ignorant, idle fosterers of superstitions
grafted on their religion by foreign kings? So much the worse for the priests;
the life of their Divine Master shames them and shows their unworthiness to
wear his yellow robe or carry his beggar-bowl. There is the Law — immutable — menacing; it will find them out and punish.
And what shall
we say to those of another caste of character — the humble-minded, charitable, tolerant, religiously aspiring hearts among the
laity, and the unselfish, pure and learned of the priest who know the Precepts
and keep them? The Law will find them out also; and when the book of each
life is written up and the balance struck, every good thought or deed will
be found
entered in its proper place. Not one blessing that ever followed them from
grateful lips throughout their earthly pilgrimage will be found to have been
lost; but each will help to ease their way as they move from stage to stage
of Being.
“UNTO
NIRVÂNA WHERE THE SILENCE LIVES”.
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