In closing this chapter, let us ask what relation this great system sustains to Christianity.
The fundamental doctrine and central idea of Buddhism is personal salvation, or the salvation of the soul by personal acts of faith and obedience. This we maintain, notwithstanding the opinion that some schools of Buddhists teach that the soul itself is not a constant element or a special substance, but the mere result of past merit or demerit. For if there be no soul, there can be no transmigration. Now it is certain that the doctrine of transmigration is the very basis of Buddhism, the corner-stone of the system. Thus M. Saint-Hilaire says: "The chief and most immovable fact of Buddhist metaphysics is the doctrine of transmigration." Without a soul to migrate, there can be no migration. Moreover, the whole ethics of the system would fall with its metaphysics, on this theory; for why urge men to right conduct, in order to attain happiness, or Nirvana, hereafter, if they are not to exist hereafter. No, the soul's immortality is a radical doctrine in Buddhism, and this doctrine is one of its points of contact with Christianity.
Another point of contact is its doctrine of reward and punishment,—a doctrine incompatible with the supposition that the soul does not pass on from world to world. But this is the essence of all its ethics, the immutable, inevitable, unalterable consequences of good and evil. In this also it agrees with Christianity, which teaches that "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap"; that he who turns his pound into five will he set over five cities, he who turns it into ten, over ten cities.
A third point of contact with Christianity, however singular it may at first appear to say so, is the doctrine of Nirvana. Nirvana, to the Buddhist, means the absolute, eternal world, beyond time and space; that which is nothing to us now, but will be everything hereafter. Incapable of cognizing both time and eternity, it makes them absolute negations of each other.
The peculiarity of Plato, according to Mr. Emerson and other Platonists was, that he was able to grasp and hold intellectually both conceptions,—of God and man, the infinite and finite, the eternal and the temporal. The merit of Christianity is, in like manner, that it is able to take up and keep, not primarily as dogma, but as life, both these antagonistic ideas. Christianity recognizes God as the infinite and eternal, but recognizes also the world of time and space as real. Man exists as well as God: we love God, we must love man too. Brahmanism loves God, but not man; it has piety, but not humanity. Buddhism loves man, but not God; it has humanity, but not piety; or if it has piety, it is by a beautiful want of logic, its heart being wiser than its head. That which seems an impossibility in these Eastern systems is a fact of daily life to the Christian child, to the ignorant and simple Christian man or woman, who, amid daily duty and trial, find joy in both heavenly and earthly love.
There is a reason for this in the inmost nature of Christianity as compared with Buddhism. Why is it that Buddhism is a religion without God? Sakya-muni did not ignore God. The object of his life was to attain Nirvana, that is, to attain a union with God, the Infinite Being. He became Buddha by this divine experience. Why, then, is not this religious experience a constituent element in Buddhism, as it is in Christianity? Because in Buddhism man struggles upward to find God, while in Christianity God comes down to find man. To speak in the language of technical theology, Buddhism is a doctrine of works, and Christianity of grace. That which God gives all men may receive, and be united by this community of grace in one fellowship. But the results attained by effort alone, divide men; because some do more and receive more than others. The saint attained Buddha, but that was because of his superhuman efforts and sacrifices; it does not encourage others to hope for the same result.
We see, then, that here, as elsewhere, the superiority of Christianity is to be found in its quantity, in its fulness of life. It touches Buddhism at all its good points, in all its truths. It accepts the Buddhistic doctrine of rewards and punishments, of law, progress, self-denial, self-control, humanity, charity, equality of man with man, and pity for human sorrow; but to all this it adds—how much more! It fills up the dreary void of Buddhism with a living God; with a life of God in man's soul, a heaven here as well as hereafter. It gives us, in addition to the struggle of the soul to find God, a God coming down to find the soul. It gives a divine as real as the human, an infinite as solid as the finite. And this it does, not by a system of thought, but by a fountain and stream of life.
If all Christian works, the New Testament included, were destroyed, we should lose a vast deal no doubt; but we should not lose Christianity; for that is not a book, but a life. Out of that stream of life would be again developed the conception of Christianity, as a thought and a belief. We should be like the people living on the banks of the Nile, ignorant for five thousand years of its sources; not knowing whence its beneficent inundations were derived; not knowing by what miracle its great stream could flow on and on amid the intense heats, where no rain falls, and fed during a course of twelve hundred miles by no single affluent, yet not absorbed in the sand, nor evaporated by the ever-burning sun. But though ignorant of its source, they know it has a source, and can enjoy all its benefits and blessings. So Christianity is a full river of life, containing truths apparently the most antagonistic, filling the soul and heart of man and the social state of nations with its impulses and its ideas. We should lose much in losing our positive knowledge of its history; but if all the books were gone, the tablets of the human heart would remain, and on these would be written the everlasting Gospel of Jesus, in living letters which no years could efface and no changes conceal.