Studies in Literature and History
indigenous polytheism, and which still exercise a mighty influence
over the spiritual and moral condition of many millions.
We know what a tremendous power religion has been in the wars and
politics of the West. I submit that in Eastern Asia, beyond the pale
of Islam, the history of religion has been very different. Religious
wars--I mean wars caused by the conflict of militant faiths contending
for superiority--were, I believe, unknown on any great scale to the
ancient civilisations. It seems to me that until Islam invaded India
the great religious movements and changes in that region had seldom or
never been the consequence of, nor had been materially affected by,
wars, conquests, or political revolutions.
Throughout Europe and Mohammedan Asia the indigenous deities and their
temples have disappeared centuries ago; they have been swept away by
the forces of Church and State combined to exterminate them; they have
all yielded to the lofty overruling ideal of monotheism. But the tide
of Mohammedanism reached its limit in India; the people, though
conquered, were but partly converted, and eastward of India there have
been no important Mohammedan rulerships. On this side of Asia,
therefore, two great religions, Buddhism and Brahmanism, have held
their ground from times far anterior to Christianity; they have
retained the elastic comprehensive character of polytheism, purified
and elevated by higher conceptions, developed by the persistent
competition of diverse ideas and forms among the people, unrestrained
by attempts of superior organised faiths to obliterate the lower and
weaker species. In that region political despotism has prevailed
immemorially; religious despotism, in the sense of the legal
establishment of one faith or worship to the exclusion of all others,
of uniformity imposed by coercion, of proselytism by persecution, is
unknown to history: the governments have been absolute and personal;
the religions have been popular and democratic. They have never been
identified so closely with the ruling power as to share its fortunes,
or to be used for the consolidation of successful conquest. Nor, on
the other hand, has a ruler ever found it necessary, for the security
of his throne, to conform to the religion of his subjects, and to
abjure all others. The political maxim, that the sovereign and his
subjects should be of one and the same religion,[59] has never
prevailed in this part of the world. And although in India, the land
of their common origin, Buddhism widely displaced and overlaid
Brahmanism, while it was in its turn, after several centuries,
overcome and ejected by a Brahmanic revival, yet I believe that
history records no violent contests or collisions between them; nor do
we know that the armed force of the State played any decisive part in
these spiritual revolutions.
I do not maintain that Buddhism has owed nothing to State influence.
It represents certain doctrines of the ancient Indian theosophy,
incarnate, as one might say, in the figure of a spiritual Master, the
Indian prince, Sakya Gautama, who was the type and example of ascetic
quietism; it embodies the idea of salvation, or emancipation
attainable by man's own efforts, without aid from priests or
divinities. Buddhism is the earliest, by many centuries, of the faiths
that claim descent from a personal founder. It emerges into authentic
history with the empire of Asoka, who ruled over the greater part of
India some 250 years before Christ, and its propagation over his realm
and the countries adjacent is undoubtedly due to the influence,
example, and authority of that devout monarch. According to Mr.
Vincent Smith, from whose valuable work on the Early History of India
I take the description of Asoka's religious policy, the king,
renouncing after one necessary war all further military conquest, made
it the business of his life to employ his autocratic power in
directing the preaching and teaching of the Law of Piety, which he had
learnt from his Buddhist priesthood. All his high officers were
commanded to instruct the people in the way of salvation; he sent
missions to foreign countries; he issued edicts promulgating ethical
doctrines, and the rules of a devout life; he made pilgrimages to the
sacred places; and finally he assumed the yellow robe of a Buddhist
monk. Asoka elevated, so Mr. Smith has said, a sect of Hinduism to the
rank of a world-religion. Nevertheless, I think it may be affirmed
that the emperor consistently refrained from the forcible conversion
of his subjects, and indeed the use of compulsion would have
apparently been a breach of his own edicts, which insist on the
principle of toleration, and declare the propagation of the Law of
Piety to be his sole object. Asoka made no attempt to persecute
Brahmanism; and it seems clear that the extraordinary success of
Buddhism in India cannot be attributed to war or to conquest. To
imperial influence and example much must be ascribed, yet I think
Buddhism owed much more to its spiritual potency, to its superior
faculty of transmuting and assimilating, instead of abolishing, the
elementary instincts and worships, endowing them with a higher
significance, attracting and stimulating devotion by impressive rites
and ceremonies, impressing upon the people the dogma of the soul's
transmigration and its escape from the miseries of sentient existence
by the operation of merits. And of all great religions it is the least
political, for the practice of asceticism and quietism, of monastic
seclusion from the working world, is necessarily adverse to any active
connection with mundane affairs.
I do not know that the mysterious disappearance of Buddhism from India
can be accounted for by any great political revolution, like that
which brought Islam into India. It seems to have vanished before the
Mohammedans had gained any footing in the country. Meanwhile Buddhism
is said to have penetrated into the Chinese empire by the first
century of the Christian era. Before that time the doctrines of
Confucius and Laotze were the dominant philosophies; rather moral than
religious, though ancestral worship and the propitiation of spirits
were not disallowed, and were to a certain extent enjoined. Laotze,
the apostle of Taoism, appears to have preached a kind of
Stoicism--the observance of the order of Nature in searching for the
right way of salvation, the abhorrence of vicious sensuality--and the
cultivation of humility, self-sacrifice, and simplicity of life. He
condemned altogether the use of force in the sphere of religion or
morality; though he admitted that it might be necessary for the
purposes of civil government. The system of Confucius inculcated
justice, benevolence, self-control, obedience and loyalty to the
sovereign--all the civic virtues; it was a moral code without a
metaphysical background; the popular worships were tolerated,
reverence for ancestors conduced to edification; the gods were to be
honoured, though it was well to keep aloof from them; he disliked
religious fervour, and of things beyond experience he had nothing to
say.
Buddhism, with its contempt for temporal affairs, treating life as a
mere burden, and the soul's liberation from existence as the end and
object of meditative devotion, must have imported a new and disturbing
element into the utilitarian philosophies of ancient China. For many
centuries Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are said to have
contended for the patronage and recognition of the Chinese emperors.
Buddhism was alternately persecuted and protected, expelled and
restored by imperial decree. Priesthoods and monastic orders are
institutions of which governments are naturally jealous; the
monasteries were destroyed or rebuilt, sacerdotal orders and celibacy
suppressed or encouraged by imperial decrees, according to the views
and prepossessions of successive dynasties or emperors. Nevertheless
the general policy of Chinese rulers and ministers seems not to have
varied essentially. Their administrative principle was that religion
must be prevented from interfering with affairs of State, that abuses
and superstitious extravagances are not so much offences against
orthodoxy as matters for the police, and as such must be put down by
the secular arm.
Upon this policy successive dynasties appear to have acted
continuously up to the present day in China, where the relations of
the State to religions are, I think, without parallel elsewhere in the
modern world. One may find some resemblance to the attitude of the
Roman emperors towards rites and worships among the population, in the
Chinese emperor's reverent observance and regulation of the rites and
ceremonies performed by him as the religious chief and representative
before Heaven of the great national interests. The deification of
deceased emperors is a solemn rite ordained by proclamation. As the
_Ius sacrum_, the body of rights and duties in the matter of religion,
was regarded in Rome as a department of the _Ius publicum_, belonging
to the fundamental constitution of the State, so in China the ritual
code was incorporated into the statute books, and promulgated with
imperial sanction. Now we know that in Rome the established ritual was
legally prescribed, though otherwise strange deities and their
worships were admitted indiscriminately. But the Chinese Government
goes much further. It appears to regard all novel superstitions, and
especially foreign worships, as the hotbed of sedition and disloyalty.
Unlicensed deities and sects are put down by the police; magicians and
sorcerers are arrested; and the peculiar Chinese practice of
canonising deceased officials and paying sacrificial honours to local
celebrities after death is strictly reserved by the Board of
Ceremonies for imperial consideration and approval. The Censor, to
whom any proposal of this kind must be entrusted, is admonished that
he must satisfy himself by inquiry of its validity. An official who
performs sacred rites in honour of a spirit or holy personage not
recognised by the Ritual Code, was liable, under laws that may be
still in force, to corporal punishment; and the adoration by private
families of spirits whose worship is reserved for public ceremonial
was a heinous offence. No such rigorous control over the
multiplication of rites and deities has been instituted elsewhere. On
the other hand, while in other countries the State has recognised no
more than one established religion, the Chinese Government formally
recognises three denominations. Buddhism has been sanctioned by
various edicts and endowments, yet the State divinities belong to the
Taoist pantheon, and their worship is regulated by public ordinances;
while Confucianism represents official orthodoxy, and its precepts
embody the latitudinarian spirit of the intellectual classes. We know
that the Chinese people make use, so to speak, of all three religions
indiscriminately, according to their individual whims, needs, or
experience of results. So also a politic administration countenances
these divisions and probably finds some interest in maintaining them.
The morality of the people requires some religious sanction; and it is
this element with which the State professes its chief concern. We are
told on good authority that one of the functions of high officials is
to deliver public lectures freely criticising and discouraging
indolent monasticism and idolatry from the standpoint of rational
ethics, as follies that are reluctantly tolerated. Yet the Government
has never been able to keep down the fanatics, mystics, and heretical
sects that are incessantly springing up in China, as elsewhere in
Asia; though they are treated as pestilent rebels and law-breakers,
to be exterminated by massacre and cruel punishments; and bloody