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 BUDDHISM

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BUDDHISM

rounded by a band of enthusiastic disciples, in whose company lie went from place to place, making con- \ erl 6 by his preaching. These soon became very numerous and were formed into a great brotherhood of monks. Such was the work to which Buddha gave himself with unsparing zeal for over forty years. At length, worn out by his long life of activity, he fell sick after a meal of dried boar's flesh, and died in the eightieth year of his age. The approximate date of his death is ISO b. C. It is noteworthy, that Buddha was a contemporary of two other famous religious philosophers, Pythagoras and Confucius.

In the sacred books of later times Buddha is de- picted as a character without flaw, adorned with every grace of mind and heart. There may be some hesitation in taking the highly coloured portrait of Buddhist tradition as the exact representation of the original, but Buddha may be credited with the qualities of a great and good man. The records de- pict him moving about from place to place, regard- less of personal comfort, calm and fearless, mild and compassionate, considerate towards poor and rich alike, absorbed with the one idea of freeing all men from the bonds of misery, and irresistible in his man- ner of setting forth the way of deliverance. In his mildness, his readiness to overlook insults, his zeal, chastity, and simplicity of life, he reminds one not a little of St. Francis of Assisi. lii all pagan antiquity no character has been depicted as so noble and at- tract ive.

II. Buddhist Texts. — The chief sources for early Buddhism are the sacred books comprised in the first two divisions of the Ti-pitaka ('triple-basket), the threefold Bible of the Southern School of Buddhists. In India, to-day. the Buddhists are found only in the North, in Nepal, and in the extreme South, in the island of Ceylon. They represent two different Schools of thought. the Northern worshipping Buddha as supreme personal deity, though at the same time adopting most of the degrading superstitions of Hinduism, the Southern adhering in great measure to the original teachings of Buddha. Each school has a canon of sacred looks. The Northern canon is in Sanskrit, the Southern in Pah, a softer tongue, into which Sanskrit was transformed by the people of the South. The Southern canon. Tv-piiaka, which reflects more faithfully the teachings of Buddha and his early disciples, embraces (It the Vvnayoi-pitaka, a collection of books on the disciplinary rules of the order; (2) the Sutta-pitaka, didactic tracts con- sisting in part of alleged discourses of Buddha; and (3) the Abhidhamma-pitaka, comprising more de- tailed treatises on doctrinal subjects. Mosl of the Yinayas and some of the Suttas have been made ible to English readers in the "Sacred Books

of the East ". The Ti-pitaka seems to date back to

the second and third centuries B.C., but a few ad- ditions were made even after it was committed to writing in the early part of the first century of the Christian Era. While there may be doctrinal and disciplinary parts from the time of Buddha, none of the twenty-nine books comprised in the Ti-pitaka can be proved to be older than 300 n. c. These liooks, Stripped of their tiresome repetitions, would be about equal in size to the Bible, though on the whole they are vastly inferior to the Sacred Scripture in spirit- uality, depth of thought, variety of subject, and xpression. There are also a few extra- canonical books, likewise in Pali, on which the Southern Buddhists set great value, the Dijvivansa and Mahavansa, winch give an uncritical history of Buddhism down to about \. i>. 300, the "Com- mentaries of Buddhagosa", and the Milinda Panha,

flhly translated by Whys Davids under the title "The Questions of King Milinda". These works belong to the fourth and following centuries of our era. In the Tri-pitaka of the Northern School

are included the well-known Saddhnrma-pundarika (Lotus of the True Law), and the legendary biogra- phies of Buddha, the Buddha Charita, and the Lalita Vistara (Book of Exploits), which are generally as- signed to the last quarter of the first century a. d. Besides the Tri-pitaka, the Northern Buddhists reckon as canonical several writings of more recent times adapted from the abominable Hindu Tantras,

III. Primitive Buddhism. — Buddhism was by no means entirely original. It had much in common with the pantheistic Vedanta teaching, from which it sprang — belief in karma, whereby the character of the present life is the net product of the good and evil acts of a previous existence; belief in a constant series of rebirths for all who set their heart on pre- serving their individual existence; the pessimistic view that life at its best is misery and not worth living. And so the great end for which Buddha toiled was the very one which gave colour to the pantheistic scheme of salvation propounded by the Brahmin ascetics, namely, the liberation of men from misery by setting them free from attachment to conscious existence. It was in their conception of the final state of the saved, and of the method by which it was to be attained that they differed. The pantheistic Brahmin said: "Recognize your identity with the great impersonal god, Brahma, and you thereby cease to be a creature of desires; you are no longer held fast in the chain of rebirths; at death you lose your individuality, your conscious existence, to become absorbed in the all-god Brahma." In Buddha's system, the all-god Brahma was entirely ignored. Buddha put abstruse speculation in the background, and, while not ignoring the value of right knowledge, insisted on the saving act of the will as the one thing needful. To obtain deliverance from rebirth, all forms of desire must be absolutely quenched, not simply every wicked craving, but also the desire of such pleasures and comforts as are deemed innocent and lawful, the desire even to pre- serve one's conscious existence. It was through this extinction of every desire that cessation of misery was to be obtained. This state of absence of desire and pain was known as Xirrana (Xihbana). The word was not coined by Buddha, but in his teaching, it assumed a new shade of meaning. Nirvana means primarily a "blowing out ", and hence the extinction of the fire of desire, ill-will, delusion, of all, in short, that binds the individual to rebirth and misery. It was in the living Buddhist saint a state of calm repose, of indifference to life ami death, to pleasure and pain, a state of imperturbable tranquillity, where the sense of freedom from the bonds of rebirth caused the discomforts as well as the joys of life to sink into insignificance. But it was not till after death that Nirvana was realized in its completeness. In its full import, it meant eternal, unconscious repose. Was this repose identical with annihilation'.' Some scholars have so thought. And. indeed, if the psycho- logical speculations found in the sacred books are part of Buddha's personal teaching, it is hard to see how he could have held aught else as the final end of man. But logical consistency is not to be looked for in an Indian mystic. If we may trust the sacred books, he expressly refused on several occasions to pronounce cither on the existence or the non-existence of those who had entered into Nirvana, on the ground that it was irrelevant, not conducive to peace and enlightenment. His intimate disciples held the same view. A monk who inter- preted Nirvana to men, annihilation was taken to task by an older monk, and convinced that he had no right to hold such an opinion, since the subject was wrapped in impenetrable mystery. The learned

nun Khcma gave a similar answer to the King of Kosala, who asked if the deceased Buddha was still in existence. Whether the Perfect One exists after