Kitabı oku: «Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 1», sayfa 34

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The elaboration of marvellous episodes is regarded in India as a legitimate form of literary art, no more blameable than dramatization, and in sacred writings it flourishes unchecked. In Hinduism, as in Buddhism, there is not wanting a feeling that the soul is weary of the crowd of deities who demand sacrifices and promise happiness, and on the serener heights of philosophy gods have little place. Still most forms of Hinduism cannot like Buddhism be detached from the gods, and no extravagance is too improbable to be included in the legends about them. The extravagance is the more startling because their exploits form part of quasi-historical narratives. Râma and Krishna seem to be idealized and deified portraits of ancient heroes, who came to be regarded as incarnations of the Almighty. This is understood by Indians to mean not that the Almighty submitted consistently to human limitations, but that he, though incarnate, exercised whenever it pleased him and often most capriciously his full divine force. With this idea before them and no historical scruples to restrain them, Indian writers tell how Krishna held up a mountain on his finger, Indian readers accept the statement, and crowds of pilgrims visit the scene of the exploit.

The later Buddhist writings are perhaps not less extravagant than the Puranas, but the Pitakas are relatively sober, though not quite consistent in their account of the Buddha's attitude to the miraculous. Thus he encourages Sâgata⁷¹⁵ to give a display of miracles, such as walking in the air, in order to prepare the mind of a congregation to whom he is going to preach, but in other narratives⁷¹⁶ which seem ancient and authentic, he expresses his disapproval of such performances (just as Christ refused to give signs), and says that they do not "conduce to the conversion of the unconverted or to the increase of the converted." Those who know India will easily call up a picture of how the Bhikkhus strove to impress the crowd by exhibitions not unlike a modern juggler's tricks and how the master stopped them. His motives are clear: these performances had nothing to do with the essence of his teaching. If it be true that he ever countenanced them, he soon saw his error. He did not want people to say that he was a conjurer who knew the Gândhâra charm or any other trick. And though we have no warrant for doubting that he believed in the reality of the powers known as iddhi, it is equally certain that he did not consider them essential or even important for religion.

Somewhat similar is the attitude of early Buddhism to the spirit world—the hosts of deities and demons who people this and other spheres. Their existence is assumed, but the truths of religion are not dependent on them, and attempts to use their influence by sacrifices and oracles are deprecated as vulgar practices similar to juggling. Later Buddhism became infected with mythology and the critical change occurs when deities, instead of being merely protectors of the church, take an active part in the work of salvation. When the Hindu gods developed into personalities who could appeal to religious and philosophic minds as cosmic forces, as revealers of the truth and guides to bliss, the example was too attractive to be neglected and a pantheon of Bodhisattvas arose. But it is clear that when the Buddha preached in Kosala and Magadha, the local deities had not attained any such position. The systems of philosophy then in vogue were mostly not theistic, and, strange as the words may sound, religion had little to do with the gods. If this be thought to rest on a mistranslation, it is certainly true that the dhamma had very little to do with devas. The example of Rome under the Empire or of modern China makes the position clearer. In neither would a serious enquirer turn to the ancient national gods for spiritual help.

Often as the Devas figure in early Buddhist stories, the significance of their appearance nearly always lies in their relations with the Buddha or his disciples. Of mere mythology, such as the dealings of Brahmâ and Indra with other gods, there is little. In fact the gods, though freely invoked as accessories, are not taken seriously⁷¹⁷, and there are some extremely curious passages in which Gotama seems to laugh at them, much as the sceptics of the eighteenth century laughed at Jehovah. Thus in the Kevaddha sutta⁷¹⁸ he relates how a monk who was puzzled by a metaphysical problem applied to various gods and finally accosted Brahmâ himself in the presence of all his retinue. After hearing the question, which was Where do the elements cease and leave no trace behind? Brahmâ replies, "I am the Great Brahmâ, the Supreme, the Mighty, the All-seeing, the Ruler, the Lord of all, the Controller, the Creator, the Chief of all, appointing to each his place, the Ancient of days, the Father of all that are and are to be." "But," said the monk, "I did not ask you, friend, whether you were indeed all you now say, but I ask you where the four elements cease and leave no trace." Then the Great Brahmâ took him by the arm and led him aside and said, "These gods think I know and understand everything. Therefore I gave no answer in their presence. But I do not know the answer to your question and you had better go and ask the Buddha." Even more curiously ironical is the account given of the origin of Brahmâ⁷¹⁹. There comes a time when this world system passes away and then certain beings are reborn in the World of Radiance and remain there a long time. Sooner or later, the world system begins to evolve again and the palace of Brahmâ appears, but it is empty. Then some being whose time is up falls from the World of Radiance and comes to life in the palace and remains there alone. At last he wishes for company, and it so happens that other beings whose time is up fall from the World of Radiance and join him. And the first being thinks that he is Great Brahmâ, the Creator, because when he felt lonely and wished for companions other beings appeared. And the other beings accept this view. And at last one of Brahmâ's retinue falls from that state and is born in the human world and, if he can remember his previous birth, he reflects that he is transitory but that Brahmâ still remains and from this he draws the erroneous conclusion that Brahmâ is eternal.

He who dared to represent Brahmâ (for which name we might substitute Allah or Jehovah) as a pompous deluded individual worried by the difficulty of keeping up his position had more than the usual share of scepticism and irony. The compilers of such discourses regarded the gods as mere embellishments, as gargoyles and quaint figures in the cathedral porch, not as saints above the altar. The mythology and cosmology associated with early Buddhism are really extraneous. The Buddha's teaching is simply the four truths and some kindred ethical and psychological matter. It grew up in an atmosphere of animism which peopled the trees and streams and mountains with spirits. It accepted and played with the idea, just as it might have accepted and played with the idea of radio-activity. But such notions do not affect the essence of the Dharma and it might be preached in severe isolation. Yet in Asia it hardly ever has been so isolated. It is true that Indian mythology has not always accompanied the spread of Buddhism. There is much of it in Tibet and Mongolia but less in China and Japan and still less in Burma. But probably in every part of Asia the Buddhist missionaries found existing a worship of nature spirits and accepted it, sometimes even augmenting and modifying it. In every age the elect may have risen superior to all ideas of gods and heavens and hells, but for any just historical perspective, for any sympathetic understanding of the faith as it exists as a living force to-day, it is essential to remember this background and frame of fantastic but graceful mythology.

Many later Mahayanist books are full of dhâraṇîs or spells. Dhâraṇîs are not essentially different from mantras, especially tantric mantras containing magical syllables, but whereas mantras are more or less connected with worship, dhâraṇîs are rather for personal use, spells to ward off evil and bring good luck. The Chinese pilgrim Hsüan Chuang⁷²⁰ states that the sect of the Mahâsanghikas, which in his opinion arose in connection with the first council, compiled a Pitaka of dhâraṇîs. The tradition cannot be dismissed as incredible for even the Dîgha-Nikâya relates how a host of spirits visited the Buddha in order to impart a formula which would keep his disciples safe from harm. Buddhist and Brahmanic mythology represent two methods of working up popular legends. The Mahâbhârata and Puranas introduce us to a moderately harmonious if miscellaneous society of supernatural personages decently affiliated to one another and to Brahmanic teaching. The same personages reappear in Buddhism but are analogous to Christian angels or to fairies rather than to minor deities. They are not so much the heroes of legends, as protectors: they are interesting not for their past exploits but for their readiness to help believers or to testify to the true doctrine. Still there was a great body of Buddhist and Jain legend in ancient India which handled the same stories as Brahmanic legend—e.g. the tale of Krishna—but in a slightly different manner. The characteristic form of Buddhist legend is the Jâtaka, or birth story. Folk-lore and sagas, ancient jokes and tragedies, the whole stock in trade of rhapsodists and minstrels are made an edifying and interesting branch of scripture by simply identifying the principal characters with the Buddha, his friends and his enemies in their previous births⁷²¹. But in Hinayanist Buddhism legend and mythology are ornamental, and edifying, nothing more. Spirits may set a good example or send good luck: they have nothing to do with emancipation or nirvana. The same distinction of spheres is not wholly lost in Hinduism, for though the great philosophic works treat of God under various names they mostly ignore minor deities, and though the language of the Bhagavad-gîtâ is exuberant and mythological, yet only Krishna is God: all other spirits are part of him.

The deities most frequently mentioned in Buddhist works are Indra, generally under the name of Sakka (Śakra) and Brahmâ. The former is no longer the demon-slaying soma-drinking deity of the Vedas, but the heavenly counterpart of a pious Buddhist king. He frequently appears in the Jâtaka stories as the protector of true religion and virtue, and when a good man is in trouble, his throne grows hot and attracts his attention. His transformation is analogous to the process by which heathen deities, especially in the Eastern Church, have been accepted as Christian saints⁷²². Brahmâ rules in a much higher heaven than Sakka. His appearances on earth are rarer and more weighty, and sometimes he seems to be a personification of whatever intelligence and desire for good there is in the world⁷²³. But in no case do the Pitakas concede to him the position of supreme ruler of the Universe. In one singular narrative the Buddha tells his disciples how he once ascertained that Brahmâ Baka was under the delusion that his heaven was eternal and cured him of it⁷²⁴.

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All Indian religions have a passion for describing in bold imaginative outline the history and geography of the universe. Their ideas are juster than those of Europeans and Semites in so far as they imply a sense of the distribution of life throughout immensities of time and space. The Hindu perceived more clearly than the Jew and Greek that his own age and country were merely parts of a much longer series and of a far larger structure or growth. He wished to keep this whole continually before the mind, but in attempting to describe it he fell into that besetting intellectual sin of India, the systematizing of the imaginary. Ages, continents and worlds are described in detailed statements which bear no relation to facts. Thus, Brahmanic cosmogony usually deals with a period of time called Kalpa. This is a day in the life of Brahmâ, who lives one hundred years of such days, and it marks the duration of a world which comes into being at its commencement and is annihilated at its end. It consists of 4320 times a million years and is divided into fourteen smaller periods called manvantaras each presided over by a superhuman being called Manu⁷²⁵. A manvantara contains about seventy-one mahâyugas and each mahâyuga is what men call the four ages of the world⁷²⁶. Geography and astronomy show similar precision. The Earth is the lowest of seven spheres or worlds, and beneath it are a series of hells⁷²⁷. The three upper spheres last for a hundred Kalpas but are still material, though less gross than those below. The whole system of worlds is encompassed above and below by the shell of the egg of Brahmâ. Round this again are envelopes of water, fire, air, ether, mind and finally the infinite Pradhâna or cause of all existing things. The earth consists of seven land-masses, divided and surrounded by seven seas. In the centre of the central land-mass rises Mount Meru, nearly a million miles high and bearing on its peaks the cities of Brahmâ and other gods.

The cosmography of the Buddhists is even more luxuriant, for it regards the universe as consisting of innumerable spheres (cakkavâlas), each of which might seem to a narrower imagination a universe in itself, since it has its own earth, heavenly bodies, paradises and hells. A sphere is divided into three regions, the lowest of which is the region of desire. This consists of eleven divisions which, beginning from the lowest, are the hells, and the worlds of animals, Pretas (hungry ghosts), Asuras (Titans)⁷²⁸ and men. This last, which we inhabit, consists of a vast circular plain largely covered with water. In the centre of it is Mount Meru, and it is surrounded by a wall. Above it rise six devalokas, or heavens of the inferior gods. Above the realms of desire there follow sixteen worlds in which there is form but no desire. All are states of bliss one higher than the other and all are attained by the exercise of meditation. Above these again come four formless worlds, in which there is neither desire nor form. They correspond to the four stages of Arûpa trances and in them the gross and evil elements of existence are reduced to a minimum, but still they are not permanent and cannot be regarded as final salvation. We naturally think of this series of worlds as so many storeys rising one above the other and they are so depicted⁷²⁹ but it will be observed that the animal kingdom is placed between the hells and humanity, obviously not as having its local habitation there but as better off than the one, though inferior to the other, and perhaps if we pointed this out to the Hindu artist he would smile and say that his many storeyed picture must not be taken so literally: all states of being are merely states of mind, hellish, brutish, human and divine.

Grotesque as Hindu notions of the world may seem, they include two great ideas of modern science. The universe is infinite or at least immeasurable⁷³⁰. The vision of the astronomer who sees a solar system in every star of the milky way is not wider than the thought that devised these Cakkavâlas or spheres, each with a vista of heavens and a procession of Buddhas, to look after its salvation. Yet compared with the sum of being a sphere is an atom. Space is filled by aggregates of them, considered by some as groups of three, by others as clusters of a thousand. And secondly these world systems, with the living beings and plants in them, are regarded as growing and developing by natural processes, and, equally in virtue of natural processes, as decaying and disintegrating when the time comes. In the Aggañña-Sutta⁷³¹ we have a curious account of the evolution of man which, though not the same as Darwin's, shows the same idea of development or perhaps degeneration and differentiation. Human beings were originally immaterial, aerial and self-luminous, but as the world gradually assumed its present form they took to eating first of all a fragrant kind of earth and then plants with the result that their bodies became gross and differences of sex and colour were produced.

No sect of Hinduism personifies the powers of evil in one figure corresponding to Satan, or the Ahriman of Persia. In proportion as a nation thinks pantheistically it is disinclined to regard the world as being mainly a contest between good and evil. It is true there are innumerable demons and innumerable good spirits who withstand them. But just as there is no finality in the exploits of Râma and Krishna, so Râvaṇa and other monsters do not attain to the dignity of the Devil. In a sense the destructive forces are evil, but when they destroy the world at the end of a Kalpa the result is not the triumph of evil. It is simply winter after autumn, leading to spring and another summer.

Buddhism having a stronger ethical bias than Hinduism was more conscious of the existence of a Tempter, or a power that makes men sin. This power is personified, but somewhat indistinctly, as Mâra, originally and etymologically a god of death. He is commonly called Mâra the Evil One⁷³², which corresponds to the Mrityuh pâpmâ of the Vedas, but as a personality he seems to have developed entirely within the Buddhist circle and to be unknown to general Indian mythology. In the thought of the Pitakas the connection between death and desire is clear. The great evils and great characteristics of the world are that everything in it decays and dies and that existence depends on desire. Therefore the ruler of the world may be represented as the god of desire and death. Buddha and his saints struggle with evil and overcome it by overcoming desire and this triumphant struggle is regarded as a duel with Mâra, who is driven off and defeated⁷³³.

Even in his most mythological aspects, Mâra is not a deity of Hell. He presides over desire and temptation, not over judgment and punishment. This is the function of Yama, the god of the dead, and one of the Brahmanic deities who have migrated to the Far East. He has been adopted by Buddhism, though no explanation is given of his status. But he is introduced as a vague but effective figure—and yet hardly more than a metaphor—whenever it is desired to personify the inflexible powers that summon the living to the other world and there make them undergo, with awful accuracy, the retribution due for their deeds. In a remarkable passage⁷³⁴ called Death's Messengers, it is related that when a sinner dies he is led before King Yama who asks him if he never saw the three messengers of the gods sent as warnings to mortals, namely an old man, a sick man and a corpse. The sinner under judgment admits that he saw but did not reflect and Yama sentences him to punishment, until suffering commensurate to his sins has been inflicted.

Buddhism tells of many hells, of which Avîci is the most terrible. They are of course all temporary and therefore purgatories rather than places of eternal punishment, and the beings who inhabit them have the power of struggling upwards and acquiring merit⁷³⁵, but the task is difficult and one may be born repeatedly in hell. The phraseology of Buddhism calls existences in heavens and hells new births. To us it seems more natural to say that certain people are born again as men and that others go to heaven or hell. But the three destinies are really parallel⁷³⁶.

The desire to accommodate influential ideas, though they might be incompatible with the strict teaching of the Buddha, is well seen in the position accorded to spirits of the dead. The Buddha was untiring in his denunciation of every idea which implied that some kind of soul or double escapes from the body at death and continues to exist. But the belief in the existence of departed ancestors and the presentation of offerings to them have always formed a part of Hindu domestic religion. To gratify this persistent belief, Buddhism recognized the world of Petas, that is ghosts or spirits. Many varieties of these are described in later literature. Some are as thin as withered leaves and suffer from continual hunger, for their mouths are so small that they can take no solid food. According to strict theology, the Petas are a category of beings just above animals and certain forms of bad conduct entail birth among them. But in popular estimation, they are merely the spirits of the dead who can receive nourishment and other benefits from the living. The veneration of the dead and the offering of sacrifices to or for them, which form a conspicuous feature in Far Eastern Buddhism, are often regarded as a perversion of the older faith, and so, indeed, they are. Yet in the Khuddaka-pâṭha⁷³⁷, which if not a very early work is still part of the Sutta Pitaka, are found some curious and pathetic verses describing how the spirits of the departed wait by walls and crossways and at the doors, hoping to receive offerings of food. When they receive it their hearts are gladdened and they wish their relatives prosperity. As many streams fill the ocean, so does what is given here help the dead. Above all, gifts given to monks will redound to the good of the dead for a long time. This last point is totally opposed to the spirit of Gotama's doctrine, but it contains the germ of the elaborate system of funeral masses which has assumed vast proportions in the Far East.