IN no other country is religion so powerful, or so important, as in India. If the Hindus have permitted alien governments to be set over them again and again it is partly because they did not care much who ruled or exploited them—natives or foreigners; the crucial matter was religion, not politics; the soul, not the body; endless later lives rather than this passing one. When Ashoka became a saint, and Akbar almost adopted Hinduism, the power of religion was revealed over even the strongest men. In our century it is a saint, rather than a statesman, who for the first time in history has unified all India.
I. THE LATER HISTORY OF BUDDHISM
The Zenith of Buddhism—The Two Vehicles—“Mahayana”—Buddhism, Stoicism and Christianity—The decay of Buddhism—Its migrations: Ceylon, Burma, Turkestan, Tibet, Cambodia, China, Japan
Two hundred years after Ashoka’s death Buddhism reached the peak of its curve in India. The period of Buddhist growth from Ashoka to Harsha was in many ways the climax of Indian religion, education and art. But the Buddhism that prevailed was not that of Buddha; we might better describe it as that of his rebellious disciple Subhadda, who, on hearing of the Master’s death, said to the monks: “Enough, sirs! Weep not, neither lament! We are well rid of the great Samana . We used to be annoyed by being told, “This beseems you, this beseems you not.’ But now we shall be able to do whatever we like; and what we do not like, that we shall not have to do!”1
The first thing they did with their freedom was to split into sects. Within two centuries of Buddha’s death eighteen varieties of Buddhistic doctrine had divided the Master’s heritage. The Buddhists of south India and Ceylon held fast for a time to the simpler and purer creed of the Founder, which came to be called Hinayana, or the “Lesser Vehicle”: they worshiped Buddha as a great teacher, but not as a god, and their Scriptures were the Pali texts of the more ancient faith. But throughout northern India, Tibet, Mongolia, China and Japan the Buddhism that prevailed was theMahayana, or the “Greater Vehicle,” defined and propagated by Kanishka’s Council; these (politically) inspired theologians announced the divinity of Buddha, surrounded him with angels and saints, adopted the Yoga asceticism of Patanjali, and issued in Sanskrit a new set of Holy Writ which, though it lent itself readily to metaphysical and scholastic refinements, proclaimed and certified a more popular religion than the austere pessimism of Shakya-muni.
The Mahayana was Buddhism softened with Brahmanical deities, practices and myths, and adapted to the needs of the Kushan Tatars and the Mongols of Tibet, over whom Kanishka had extended his rule. A heaven was conceived in which there were many Buddhas, of whom Amida Buddha, the Redeemer, came to be the best beloved by the people; this heaven and a corresponding hell were to be the reward or punishment of good or evil done on earth, and would thereby liberate some of the King’s militia for other services. The greatest of the saints, in this new theology, were the Bodhisattwas, or future Buddhas, who voluntarily refrained from achieving the Nirvana (here freedom from rebirth) that was within their merit and power, in order to be reborn into life after life, and to help others on earth to find the Way.* As in Mediterranean Christianity, these saints became so popular that they almost crowded out the head of the pantheon in worship and art. The veneration of relics, the use of holy water, candles, incense, the rosary, clerical vestments, a liturgical dead language, monks and nuns, monastic tonsure and celibacy, confession, fast days, the canonization of saints, purgatory and masses for the dead flourished in Buddhism as in medieval Christianity, and seem to have appeared in Buddhism first.† Mahayana became to Hinayana or primitive Buddhism what Catholicism was to Stoicism and primitive Christianity. Buddha, like Luther, had made the mistake of supposing that the drama of religious ritual could be replaced with sermons and morality; and the victory of a Buddhism rich in myths, miracles, ceremonies and intermediating saints corresponds to the ancient and current triumph of a colorful and dramatic Catholicism over the austere simplicity of early Christianity and modern Protestantism.
That same popular preference for polytheism, miracles and myths which destroyed Buddha’s Buddhism finally destroyed, in India, the Buddhism of the Greater Vehicle itself. For—to speak with the hindsight wisdom of the historian—if Buddhism was to take over so much of Hinduism, so many of its legends, its rites and its gods, soon very little would remain to distinguish the two religions; and the one with the deeper roots, the more popular appeal, and the richer economic resources and political support would gradually absorb the other. Rapidly superstition, which seems to be the very lifeblood of our race, poured over from the older faith to the younger one, until even the phallic enthusiasms of the Shakti sects found place in the ritual of Buddhism. Slowly the patient and tenacious Brahmans recaptured influence and imperial patronage; and the success of the youthful philosopher Shankara in restoring the authority of the Vedas as the basis of Hindu thought put an end to the intellectual leadership of the Buddhists in India.
The final blow came from without, and was in a sense invited by Buddhism itself. The prestige of the Sangha, or Buddhist Order, had, after Ashoka, drawn the best blood of Magadha into a celibate and pacific clergy; even in Buddha’s time some patriots had complained that “the monk Gautama causes fathers to beget no sons, and families to become extinct.”5 The growth of Buddhism and monasticism in the first year of our era sapped the manhood of India, and conspired with political division to leave India open to easy conquest. When the Arabs came, pledged to spread a simple and stoic monotheism, they looked with scorn upon the lazy, venal, miracle-mongering Buddhist monks; they smashed the monasteries, killed thousands of monks, and made monasticism unpopular with the cautious. The survivors were re-absorbed into the Hinduism that had begotten them; the ancient orthodoxy received the penitent heresy, and “Brahmanism killed Buddhism by a fraternal embrace.”6 Brahmanism had always been tolerant; in all the history of the rise and fall of Buddhism and a hundred other sects we find much disputation, but no instance of persecution. On the contrary Brahmanism eased the return of the prodigal by proclaiming Buddha a god (as an avatar of Vishnu), ending animal sacrifice, and accepting into orthodox practice the Buddhist doctrine of the sanctity of all animal life. Quietly and peacefully, after half a thousand years of gradual decay, Buddhism disappeared from India.*
Meanwhile it was winning nearly all the remainder of the Asiatic world. Its ideas, its literature and its art spread to Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula in the south, to Tibet and Turkestan in the north, to Burma, Siam, Cambodia, China, Korea and Japan in the east; in this way all of these regions except the Far East received as much civilization as they could digest, precisely as western Europe and Russia received civilization from Roman and Byzantine monks in the Middle Ages. The cultural zenith of most of these nations came from the stimulus of Buddhism. From the time of Ashoka to its decay in the ninth century, Anuradhapura, in Ceylon, was one of the major cities of the Oriental world; the Bo-tree there has been worshiped for two thousand years, and the temple on the heights of Kandy is one of the Meccas of the 150,000,000 Buddhists of Asia.† The Buddhism of Burma is probably the purest now extant, and its monks often approach the ideal of Buddha; under their ministrations the 13,000,000 inhabitants of Burma have reached a standard of living considerably higher than that of India.7 Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and Pelliot have unearthed from the sands of Turkestan hundreds of Buddhist manuscripts, and other evidences of a culture which flourished there from the time of Kanishka to the thirteenth century A.D. In the seventh century of our era the enlightened warrior, Srong-tsan Gampo, established an able government in Tibet, annexed Nepal, built Lhasa as his capital, and made it rich as a halfway house in Chinese-Indian trade. Having invited Buddhist monks to come from India and spread Buddhism and education among his people, he retired from rule for four years in order to learn how to read and write, and inaugurated the Golden Age of Tibet. Thousands of monasteries were built in the mountains and on the great plateau; and a voluminous Tibetan canon of Buddhist books was published, in three hundred and thirty-three volumes, which preserved for modern scholarship many works whose Hindu originals have long been lost.8 Here, eremitically sealed from the rest of the world, Buddhism developed into a maze of superstitions, monasticism and ecclesiasticism rivaled only by early medieval Europe; and the Dalai Lama (or “All-Embracing Priest”), hidden away in the great Potala monastery that overlooks the city of Lhasa, is still believed by the good people of Tibet to be the living incarnation of the Bodhisattwa Avalokiteshvafa.9 In Cambodia, or Indo-China, Buddhism conspired with Hinduism to provide the religious framework for one of the richest ages in the history of Oriental art. Buddhism, like Christianity, won its greatest triumphs outside the land of its birth; and it won them without shedding a drop of blood.