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Page 6
Such is, in brief, an outline of the nature, history, and destiny of
man, as the Buddhist relates it. How has he obtained his knowledge? By
means which, he says, are within the reach of any one. First, of the
history: it is said to be well authenticated tradition. Of the actual
knowledge of former races, the Egyptian priests were the repositories,
inheriting their information from the Atlantids. Of human nature and
destiny the Buddhist would say: Here are the facts, look about you and
see. From a theory of astronomy, or botany, or chemistry, we find an
explanation of facts, and these facts explained, confirm and establish
the theory. So, too, of man, here is the view, once a theory, but now as
firmly established as the law of gravitation. Besides, by study and
contemplation, the expert has developed, in advance of the age in which
he lives, his spiritual soul, and this opens to him sources of
information which place him on a higher level in point of knowledge than
the rest of mankind, just as the man with seeing eyes has possibilities
of information which are absolutely closed to one born blind.
Let me stop here to explain more fully what is the spiritual soul.
I should call it, using a term that seems to me more natural to our
vocabulary, the transcendental sense. In the reality of such a sense
I am a firm believer. It was once fashionable to ridicule whatever was
thought, or nicknamed, transcendental. Yet transcendentalism seems to
me the only complete bar to modern scepticism. Faith, in the highest
Christian sense, is transcendental. We know some things for which we can
bring no evidence, things the truth of which lies not in logic, nor even
in intellect. The intellect never gave man any firm conviction of God's
being. Paley's mode of reasoning never brought conviction to any man's
mind. At best, it only serves to confirm belief, to stifle doubt, to
silence logic misapplied. Faith is the action of the spiritual sense--or,
as the Buddhist says, the spiritual soul. It seems to me that it is a
fair statement, that every man who has a conviction of the being of God,
has that conviction from inspiration. Many people have it, or think they
have it, as a result of reasoning, or it has been, they say, grounded
and rooted in their minds by the earliest teaching. There are those,
perhaps, who have no other reason than this tradition, for their
supersensuous ideas. Such people, as soon as they come to reason
seriously on or about those ideas, begin to doubt and to lose their
hold. But others have a conviction regarding things unseen, that no
reasoning can shake, except for a moment; because their belief, though
it may have been originally the result of early teaching, is now
established on other foundations. One can no more tell how he knows some
things, than he can tell how he sees; yet he does know them, and all the
world cannot get the knowledge out of him. The source of this knowledge
is transcendental. It is a sixth sense. It is what the Buddhist calls an
activity of the spiritual, as distinct from the human, soul. By his
animal soul man has knowledge of the world around him; he sees, he
hears, he feels bodily pain or pleasure; by his human soul, he reasons,
he receives the conceptions of geometry or the higher mathematics;
by his spiritual soul, he comes to a conception of God and of his
attributes, and receives impressions whose source is unknown to him
because his spiritual soul, in this his fourth planetary round, is, as
yet, only imperfectly active. The reality of the spiritual soul, the
vehicle of inspiration, the source of faith, is the only earnest man has
for this trust in the Divine Father. It is not developed in us as it
will be in our next round through earthly life, when, by its awakening,
faith will become sight, and we shall know even as we are known. Yet
some there are, say the Buddhists, who have, by effort, already pushed
their development to the point that most men will reach millions of
years hence, when we shall return again, not to this life--that we shall
do perhaps in a few thousand years--but to this planet.
It will be seen that the Buddhist idea of spirituality is very unlike
our Christian idea. The thought of man's higher sense striving after the
Divine, the whole conception, in short, of what the word spirituality
suggests to modern thought, is impossible in a system of philosophy
which has no personal God. To apply the term religion to a scheme which
has no place for the dependence of man upon a conscious protector, is to
use the word in a sense entirely new to us. Buddhism--notwithstanding
its claims to revelation--is a philosophy, not a religion.
I have sketched, as well as I can in so short a time, what seem to
me the main points in the book under review. There are many things
unexplained. Of some of them, the author claims to have no knowledge.
Others he does not make clear; but, "take it for all in all," the hook
will probably give the reader a very great number of suggestions. I am
heterodox enough to say that if the idea of a personal God, the Father
of all, were superadded to the system (or perhaps I ought to say were
substituted for the idea of absorption into Nirvana), there would be
nothing in Buddhism contradictory of Christianity. What orthodox
Christians of the present day and of this country believe with regard to
eternal punishment is a question about which they do not altogether
agree among themselves. Whether the so-called hell is a place of
everlasting degradation, is a point on which those who cannot deny to
each other the name of Christian are not in accord. Why, then, should it
be thought heretical to maintain that the future world of _rewards_
is _also_ not eternal? I believe that the Christian Scriptures use
the same words with reference to both conditions--
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