Charles Eliot
Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 1
9. European Influence and Modern Hinduism
The small effect of European religion on Hinduism is remarkable. Islam, though aggressively hostile, yet fused with it in some sects, for instance the Sikhs, but such fusions of Indian religion and Christianity as have been noted29 are microscopic curiosities. European free thought and Deism have not fared better, for the Brahmo Samaj which was founded under their inspiration has only 5504 adherents30. In social life there has been some change: caste restrictions, though not abolished, are evaded by ingenious subterfuges and there is a growing feeling against child-marriage. Yet were the laws against sati and human sacrifice repealed, there are many districts in which such practices would not be forbidden by popular sentiment.
It is easy to explain the insensibility of Hinduism to European contact: even Islam had little effect on its stubborn vitality, though Islam brought with it settlers and resident rulers, ready to make converts by force. But the British have shown perfect toleration and are merely sojourners in the land who spend their youth and age elsewhere. European exclusiveness and Indian ideas about caste alike made it natural to regard them as an isolated class charged with the business of Government but divorced from the intellectual and religious life of other classes. Previous experience of Moslims and other invaders disposed the Brahmans to accept foreigners as rulers without admitting that their creeds and customs were in the least worthy of imitation. European methods of organization and advertisement have not however been disdained.
The last half century has witnessed a remarkable revival of Hinduism. In the previous decades the most conspicuous force in India, although numerically weak, was the already mentioned Brahmo Samaj, founded by Ram Mohun Roy in 1828. But it was colourless and wanting in constructive power. Educated opinion, at least in Bengal, seemed to be tending towards agnosticism and social revolution. This tendency was checked by a conservative and nationalist movement, which in all its varied phases gave support to Indian religion and was intolerant of European ideas. It had a political side but there was nothing disloyal in its main idea, namely, that in the intellectual and religious sphere, where Indian life is most intense, Indian ideas must not decay. No one who has known India during the last thirty years can have failed to notice how many new temples have been built and how many old ones repaired. Almost all the principal sects have founded associations to protect and extend their interests by such means as financial and administrative organization, the publication of periodicals and other literature, annual conferences, lectures and the foundation of religious houses or quasi-monastic orders. Several societies have been founded not restricted to any particular sect but with the avowed object of defending and promoting strict Hinduism. Among such the most important are, first the Bharat Dharma Mahamandala, under the distinguished presidency of the Maharaja of Darbhanga: secondly the movement started by Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda and adorned by the beautiful life and writings of Sister Nivedita (Miss Noble) and thirdly the Theosophical Society under the leadership of Mrs Besant. It is remarkable that Europeans, both men and women, have played a considerable part in this revival. All these organizations are influential: the two latter have done great service in defending and encouraging Hinduism, but I am less sure of their success in mingling Eastern and Western ideas or in popularizing Hinduism among Europeans.
Somewhat different, but described by the Census of 1911 as "the greatest religious movement in India of the past half century" is the Arya Samaj, founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand. Whereas the movements mentioned above support Sanâtana Dharma or Orthodox Hinduism in all its shapes, the Arya Samaj aims at reform. Its original programme was a revival of the ancient Vedic religion but it has since been perceptibly modified and tends towards conciliating contemporary orthodoxy, for it now prohibits the slaughter of cattle, accords a partial recognition to caste, affirms its belief in karma and apparently approves a form of the Yoga philosophy. Though it is not yet accepted as a form of orthodox Hinduism, it seems probable that concessions on both sides will produce this result before long. It numbers at present only about a quarter of a million but is said to be rapidly increasing, especially in the United Provinces and Panjab, and to be remarkable for the completeness and efficiency of its organization. It maintains missionary colleges, orphanages and schools. Affiliated to it is a society for the purification (shuddhi) of Mohammedans, Christians and outcasts, that is for turning them into Hindus and giving them some kind of caste. It would appear that those who undergo this purification do not always become members of the Ṡamaj but are merged in the ordinary Hindu community where they are accepted without opposition if also without enthusiasm.
10. Change and Permanence in Buddhism
Thus we have a record of Indian thought for about 3000 years. It has directly affected such distant points as Balkh, Java and Japan and it is still living and active. But life and action mean change and such wide extension in time and space implies variety. We talk of converting foreign countries but the religion which is transplanted also undergoes conversion or else it cannot enter new brains and hearts. Buddhism in Ceylon and Japan, Christianity in Scotland and Russia are not the same, although professing to reverence the same teachers. It is easy to argue the other way, but it can only be done by setting aside as non-essential differences of great practical importance. Europeans are ready enough to admit that Buddhism is changeable and easily corrupted but it is not singular in that respect31. I doubt if Lhasa and Tantrism are further from the teaching of Gotama than the Papacy, the Inquisition, and the religion of the German Emperor, from the teaching of Christ.
A religion is the expression of the thought of a particular age and cannot really be permanent in other ages which have other thoughts. The apparent permanence of Christianity is due first to the suppression of much original teaching, such as Christ's turning the cheek to the smiter and Paul's belief in the coming end of the world, and secondly to the adoption of new social ideals which have no place in the New Testament, such as the abolition of slavery and the improved status of women.
Buddhism arising out of Brahmanism suggests a comparison with Christianity arising out of Judaism, but the comparison breaks down in most points of detail. But there is one real resemblance, namely that Buddhism and Christianity have both won their greatest triumphs outside the land of their birth. The flowers of the mind, if they can be transplanted at all, often flourish with special vigour on alien soil. Witness the triumphs of Islam in the hands of the Turks and Mughals, the progress of Nestorianism in Central Asia, and the spread of Manichaeism in both the East and West outside the limits of Persia. Even so Lamaism in Tibet and Amidism in Japan, though scholars may regard them as singular perversions, have more vitality than any branch of Buddhism which has existed in India since the seventh century. But even here the parallel with Christian sects is imperfect. It would be more complete if Palestine had been the centre from which different phases of Christianity radiated during some twelve centuries, for this is the relation between Indian and foreign Buddhism. Lamaism is not the teaching of the Buddha travestied by Tibetans but a late form of Indian Buddhism exported to Tibet and modified there in some external features (such as ecclesiastical organization and art) but not differing greatly in doctrine from Bengali Buddhism of the eleventh century. And even Amidism appears to have originated not in the Far East but in Gandhara and the adjacent lands. Thus the many varieties of Buddhism now existing are due partly to local colour but even more to the workings of the restless Hindu mind which during many centuries after the Christian era continued to invent for it novelties in metaphysics and mythology.
The preservation of a very ancient form of Buddhism in Ceylon32 is truly remarkable, for if in many countries Buddhism has shown itself fluid and protean, it here manifests a stability which can hardly be paralleled except in Judaism. The Sinhalese, unlike the Hindus, had no native propensity to speculation. They were content to classify, summarize and expound the teaching of the Pitakas without restating it in the light of their own imagination. Whereas the most stable form of Christianity is the Church of Rome, which began by making considerable additions to the doctrine of the New Testament, the most stable form of Buddhism is neither a transformation of the old nor a protest against innovation but simply the continuation of a very ancient sect in strange lands33. This ancient Buddhism, like Islam which is also simple and stable, is somewhat open to the charge of engaging in disputes about trivial details34, but alike in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, it has not only shown remarkable persistence but has become a truly national religion, the glory and comfort of those who profess it.
11. Rebirth and the Nature of the Soul
The most characteristic doctrine of Indian religion—rarely absent in India and imported by Buddhism into all the countries which it influenced—is that called metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul or reincarnation. The last of these terms best expresses Indian, especially Buddhist, ideas but still the usual Sanskrit equivalent, Saṃsâra, means migration. The body breaks up at death but something passes on and migrates to another equally transitory tenement. Neither Brahmans nor Buddhists seem to contemplate the possibility that the human soul may be a temporary manifestation of the Eternal Spirit which comes to an end at death—a leaf on a tree or a momentary ripple on the water. It is always regarded as passing through many births, a wave traversing the ocean.
Hindu speculation has never passed through the materialistic phase, and the doctrine that the soul is annihilated at death is extremely rare in India. Even rarer perhaps is the doctrine that it usually enters on a permanent existence, happy or otherwise. The idea underlying the transmigration theory is that every state which we call existence must come to an end. If the soul can be isolated from all the accidents and accessories attaching to it, then there may be a state of permanence and peace but not a state comparable with human existence, however enlarged and glorified. But why does not this conviction of impermanence lead to the simpler conclusion that the end of physical life is the end of all life? Because the Hindus have an equally strong conviction of continuity: everything passes away and changes but it is not true to say of anything that it arises from nothing or passes into nothing. If human organisms (or any other organisms) are mere machines, if there is nothing more to be said about a corpse than about a smashed watch, then (the Hindu thinks) the universe is not continuous. Its continuity means for him that there is something which eternally manifests itself in perishable forms but does not perish with them any more than water when a pitcher is broken or fire that passes from the wood it has consumed to fresh fuel.
These metaphors suggest that the doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation does not promise what we call personal immortality. I confess that I cannot understand how there can be personality in the ordinary human sense without a body. When we think of a friend, we think of a body and a character, thoughts and feelings, all of them connected with that body and many of them conditioned by it. But the immortal soul is commonly esteemed to be something equally present in a new born babe, a youth and an old man. If so, it cannot be a personality in the ordinary sense, for no one could recognize the spirit of a departed friend, if it is something which was present in him the day he was born and different from all the characteristics which he acquired during life. The belief that we shall recognize our friends in another world assumes that these characteristics are immortal, but it is hard to understand how they can be so, especially as it is also assumed that there is nothing immortal in a dog, which possesses affection and intelligence, but that there is something immortal in a new born infant which cannot be said to possess either.
In one way metempsychosis raises insuperable difficulties to the survival of personality, for if you become someone else, especially an animal, you are no longer yourself according to any ordinary use of language. But one of the principal forms taken by the doctrine in India makes a modified survival intelligible. For it is held that a new born child brings with it as a result of actions done in previous lives certain predispositions and these after being developed and modified in the course of that child's life are transmitted to its next existence.
As to the method of transmission there are various theories, for in India the belief in reincarnation is not so much a dogma as an instinct innate in all and only occasionally justified by philosophers, not because it was disputed but because they felt bound to show that their own systems were compatible with it. One explanation is that given by the Vedânta philosophy, according to which the soul is accompanied in its migrations by the Sûkshmaśarîra or subtle body, a counterpart of the mortal body but transparent and invisible, though material. The truth of this theory, as of all theories respecting ghosts and spirits, seems to me a matter for experimental verification, but the Vedânta recognizes that in our experience a personal individual existence is always connected with a physical substratum.
The Buddhist theory of rebirth is somewhat different, for Buddhism even in its later divagations rarely ceased to profess belief in Gotama's doctrine that there is no such thing as a soul—by which is meant no such thing as a permanent unchanging self or âtman. Buddhists are concerned to show that transmigration is not inconsistent with this denial of the âtman. The ordinary, and indeed inevitable translation of this word by soul leads to misunderstanding for we naturally interpret it as meaning that there is nothing which survives the death of the body and a fortiori nothing to transmigrate. But in reality the denial of the âtman applies to the living rather than to the dead. It means that in a living man there is no permanent, unchangeable entity but only a series of mental states, and since human beings, although they have no âtman, certainly exist in this present life, the absence of the âtman is not in itself an obstacle to belief in a similar life after death or before birth. Infancy, youth, age and the state immediately after death may form a series of which the last two are as intimately connected as any other two. The Buddhist teaching is that when men die in whom the desire for another life exists—as it exists in all except saints—then desire, which is really the creator of the world, fashions another being, conditioned by the character and merits of the being which has just come to an end. Life is like fire: its very nature is to burn its fuel. When one body dies, it is as if one piece of fuel were burnt: the vital process passes on and recommences in another and so long as there is desire of life, the provision of fuel fails not. Buddhist doctors have busied themselves with the question whether two successive lives are the same man or different men, and have illustrated the relationship by various analogies of things which seem to be the same and yet not the same, such as a child and an adult, milk and curds, or fire which spreads from a lamp and burns down a village, but, like the Brahmans, they do not discuss why the hypothesis of transmigration is necessary. They had the same feeling for the continuity of nature, and more than others they insisted on the principle that everything has a cause. They held that the sexual act creates the conditions in which a new life appears but is not an adequate cause for the new life itself. And unless we accept a materialist explanation of human nature, this argument is sound: unless we admit that mind is merely a function of matter, the birth of a mind is not explicable as a mere process of cell development: something pre-existent must act upon the cells.
Europeans in discussing such questions as the nature of the soul and immortality are prone to concentrate their attention on death and neglect the phenomena of birth, which surely are equally important. For if a soul survives the death of this complex of cells which is called the body, its origin and development must, according to all analogy, be different from those of the perishable body. Orthodox theology deals with the problem by saying that God creates a new soul every time a child is born35 but free discussion usually ignores it and taking an adult as he is, asks what are the chances that any part of him survives death. Yet the questions, what is destroyed at death and how and why, are closely connected with the questions what comes into existence at birth and how and why. This second series of questions is hard enough, but it has this advantage over the first that whereas death abruptly closes the road and we cannot follow the soul one inch on its journey beyond, the portals of birth are a less absolute frontier. We know that every child has passed through stages in which it could hardly be called a child. The earliest phase consists of two cells, which unite and then proceed to subdivide and grow. The mystery of the process by which they assume a human form is not explained by scientific or theological phrases. The complete individual is assuredly not contained in the first germ. The microscope cannot find it there and to say that it is there potentially, merely means that we know the germ will develop in a certain way. To say that a force is manifesting itself in the germ and assuming the shape which it chooses to take or must take is also merely a phrase and metaphor, but it seems to me to fit the facts36.
The doctrines of pre-existence and transmigration (but not, I think, of karma which is purely Indian) are common among savages in Africa and America, nor is their wide distribution strange. Savages commonly think that the soul wanders during sleep and that a dead man's soul goes somewhere: what more natural than to suppose that the soul of a new born infant comes from somewhere? But among civilized peoples such ideas are in most cases due to Indian influence. In India they seem indigenous to the soil and not imported by the Aryan invaders, for they are not clearly enunciated in the Rig Veda, nor formulated before the time of the Upanishads37. They were introduced by Buddhism to the Far East and their presence in Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, Sufiism and ultimately in the Jewish Kabbala seems a rivulet from the same source. Recent research discredits the theory that metempsychosis was an important feature in the earlier religion of Egypt or among the Druids38. But it played a prominent part in the philosophy of Pythagoras and in the Orphic mysteries, which had some connection with Thrace and possibly also with Crete. A few great European intellects39--notably Plato and Virgil—have given it undying expression, but Europeans as a whole have rejected it with that curiously crude contempt which they have shown until recently for Oriental art and literature.
Considering how fixed is the belief in immortality among Europeans, or at least the desire for it, the rarity of a belief in pre-existence or transmigration is remarkable. But most people's expectation of a future life is based on craving rather than on reasoned anticipation. I cannot myself understand how anything that comes into being can be immortal. Such immortality is unsupported by a single analogy nor can any instance be quoted of a thing which is known to have had an origin and yet is even apparently indestructible40. And is it possible to suppose that the universe is capable of indefinite increase by the continual addition of new and eternal souls? But these difficulties do not exist for theories which regard the soul as something existing before as well as after the body, truly immortal a parte ante as well as a parte post and manifesting itself in temporary homes of human or lower shape. Such theories become very various and fall into many obscurities when they try to define the nature of the soul and its relation to the body, but they avoid what seems to me the contradiction of the created but immortal soul.
The doctrine of metempsychosis is also interesting as affecting the relations of men and animals. The popular European conception of "the beasts which perish" weakens the arguments for human immortality. For if the mind of a dog or chimpanzee contains no element which is immortal, the part of the human mind on which the claim to immortality can be based must be parlously small, since ex hypothesi sensation, volition, desire and the simpler forms of intelligence are not immortal. But in India where men have more charity and more philosophy this distinction is not drawn. The animating principle of men, animals and plants is regarded as one or at least similar, and even matter which we consider inanimate, such as water, is often considered to possess a soul. But though there is ample warrant in both Brahmanic and Buddhist literature for the idea that the soul may sink from a human to an animal form or vice versâ rise, and though one sometimes meets this belief in modern life41, yet it is not the most prominent aspect of metempsychosis in India and the beautiful precept of ahimsâ or not injuring living things is not, as Europeans imagine, founded on the fear of eating one's grandparents but rather on the humane and enlightened feeling that all life is one and that men who devour beasts are not much above the level of the beasts who devour one another. The feeling has grown stronger with time. In the Vedas animal sacrifices are prescribed and they are even now used in the worship of some deities. In the Epics the eating of meat is mentioned. But the doctrine that it is wrong to take animal life was definitely adopted by Buddhism and gained strength with its diffusion.
One obvious objection to all theories of rebirth is that we do not remember our previous existences and that, if they are connected by no thread of memory, they are for all practical purposes the existences of different people. But this want of memory affects not only past existences but the early phases of this existence. Does any one deny his existence as an infant or embryo because he cannot remember it42? And if a wrong could be done to an infant the effects of which would not be felt for twenty years, could it be said to be no concern of the infant because the person who will suffer in twenty years time will have no recollection that he was that infant? And common opinion in Eastern Asia, not without occasional confirmation from Europe, denies the proposition that we cannot remember our former lives and asserts that those who take any pains to sharpen their spiritual faculties can remember them. The evidence for such recollection seems to me better than the evidence for most spiritualistic phenomena43.
Another objection comes from the facts of heredity. On the whole we resemble our parents and ancestors in mind as well as in body. A child often seems to be an obvious product of its parents and not a being come from outside and from another life. This objection of course applies equally to the creation theory. If the soul is created by an act of God, there seems to be no reason why it should be like the parents, or, if he causes it to be like them, he is made responsible for sending children into the world with vicious natures. On the other hand if parents literally make a child, mind as well as body, there seems to be no reason why children should ever be unlike their parents, or brothers and sisters unlike one another, as they undoubtedly sometimes are. An Indian would say that a soul44 seeking rebirth carries with it certain potentialities of good and evil and can obtain embodiment only in a family offering the necessary conditions. Hence to some extent it is natural that the child should be like its parents. But the soul seeking rebirth is not completely fixed in form and stiff: it is hampered and limited by the results of its previous life, but in many respects it may be flexible and free, ready to vary in response to its new environment.
But there is a psychological and temperamental objection to the doctrine of rebirth, which goes to the root of the matter. Love of life and the desire to find a field of activity are so strong in most Europeans that it might be supposed that a theory offering an endless vista of new activities and new chances would be acceptable. But as a rule Europeans who discuss the question say that they do not relish this prospect. They may be willing to struggle until death, but they wish for repose—conscious repose of course—afterwards. The idea that one just dead has not entered into his rest, but is beginning another life with similar struggles and fleeting successes, similar sorrows and disappointments, is not satisfying and is almost shocking45. We do not like it, and not to like any particular view about the destinies of the soul is generally, but most illogically, considered a reason for rejecting it46.
