(Reprinted from the Buddhist
Review, No. 2, pp. 11-30.)
THERE are few
circumstances more surprising to the student of comparative religion than the
fact that, in the pure Buddhism of the Theravada, which constitutes the National
Faith of Burma, he finds exhibited, both in the scriptural sources of the
Religion, and in the lives of the people who follow it, an all-pervading spirit
of intense devotiona spirit of loving adoration, directed to the
Buddha, His Teaching and His Brotherhood of Monks, such as is hardly to be
equalled, and certainly not to be excelled, in any of the world's Theistic
creeds.
To one, especially, who has been brought up in the modern Western
environment, this earnest devotion, this spirit of adoration, seems almost the
last feature he would expect to find in a Religion so intellectually and so
logically sound as this, our Buddhist Faith. He has been so accustomed to regard
this deep emotion of adoration, as the peculiar prerogative of the Godhead of
whatever forms of Religion he has studied; that to find it in so marked a
degree, in so predominant a measure, in a Creed from which all concept of an
animistic Deity is absent, appears as well-nigh the most remarkable, as it was
the most unexpected feature, of the many strange and novel characteristics of
this altogether unique form of religious teaching. That trusting worship, that
self-abnegating spirit of devotion in which, in the rest of the great
world-religions, the devotee loses himself in thought of the glory, power, and
love of the Supreme Being, of whom they teach so far from being absent here,
whence all thought of such a Being is banished, he finds exists in a most
superlative degree; lavished, indeed, on no hypothesis, on no Being whom none
has ever known or seen, but on the thought of a man, not altogether different
from ourselves, who once lived without a doubt on this our earth, and on the
Truth He taught, the Brotherhood He founded, for the continuance of that Dhamma,
and for the finding of that Peace whereto He showed the way.
Wherever else
you will find that spirit of devotion, it is always associated with blind Faith;
with that trusting mental attitude which is characteristic of the earlier stages
of our mind's development, the unquestioning faith and love a little child
exhibits towards those elders who constitute his small restricted world. To the
dawning infantile intelligence, the chief feature of the life in which it so far
can scarcely distinguish betwixt Self and Not-self, is its own absolute
dependence on mother or nurse for the food that constitutes almost its sole
desire; and to that central all-bestowing figure of its narrow horizon it looks
for everything; deems nurse or mother the omnipotent dispenser of all human
blessings, so far as it can come to aught approaching abstract generalised
thought. Then, later, as the ever recurring marvel of the growth of Mind out of
this mere mass of sentiency is enacted, as these early days pass on to
childhood, and thouoht, marshalled to the tune of speech, commences to raise the
budding life above the purely animal horizon, the same depending, trusting,
all-relying attitude supervenes, directed now to all those elders who form the
environment of the dawning mental life. Does the Moon seem a bright and glorious
plaything, the child will ask it for his own, never doubting but that the
omnipotent elder could grant the boon if he or she were so disposed. All the
child learns is thus assimilated by Faith and Faith alone; and that indeed is
well for us seeing that without that blind dependence we at that age, lacking
the power of spontaneous thinking, could assimilate no thought at all.
This
Faith or blind devotion, then, constitutes an essential feature of the
Mind-growth; by it, and not by reasoning, by judgment, or discernment, are our
earlier concepts moulded; by it do we acquire ill our earlier ideas of life, of
right and wrong action, of the nature of the world in which we live; by it alone
we lay the foundation-stones of the future structure of our mental life, a
structure, indeed, which is likely to become either a temple, a great and
glorious palace, or a sordid hovel, the abode and haunt of ignorance and crime,
according as these faith-moulded corner-stones accord the more with truth and
understanding, or with false views and the dictates of our elders' ignorance. In
that early stage, all that comes must be accepted without thought of
questioning; and the mere attestation of an elder suffices to assure the
childish mind of the truth of any folly or superstition, great howsoever it may
be.
Now the growth of all mankind, of races and of nations, only repeats, on
the wider platform of the human, racial or national life, the microcosmic play
of the individual development. Rather, perhaps, the truth might better be
approximated by exactly the inversion of this statement, that the individual
life follows the universal, since our Dhamma teaches us that in reality all life
is one, and therefore the true prototype, the real unit, lies not in the
individual, but the whole of life at large. However that maybe, certain it is
that individual and racial life both pass through stages so similar as to be
obviously in some way connected; and, just as some human children are more
backward than others, and thus much later pass out of this early era of
faith-founded knowledge, so is it also with the nations and races of mankind.
The further you go back in the history of human civilisation, the more clearly
do you see on every hand how, in those days, what we now term reasoned knowledge
was simply unknown, undreamed-of by the great masses of mankind; achieved only
by such few individuals as were wiser and far more developed than their fellows.
It is as though our forefathers never passed at all out of this early age of
simple-hearted Faith, knew naught of questionings, comparisons, decisions, as to
right and wrong, truth or falsehood, save what they learned by national and
racial tradition; for them, that is, blind Faith took that position which now,
for us, grown nearer to human adolescence, is occupied by Wisdom, Knowledge,
Understanding, the fruit and heritage of years of questioning search and of
earnest investigation of the facts of life.
For that, of course, is the
special feature of the next stage of mental growth which follows mental
childhood, the period of adolescence, when, if we rightly win to its attainment,
all those earlier faith-laid corner-stones of our mental fabric are subjected to
keenest scrutiny, to most careful testing of their soundness and their strength.
Still the great mass of our humanity, of course, never reaches even to this,
which is but the second stage of mental growth: most men are still content to
take life as they find it, its philosophies and faiths just as their fathers
held. But, in our modern age, our new civilisation of but a hundred years,
swiftly indeed those old conditions vanish; year after year more and more men
pass from the ranks of human childhood, of the Age of Faith, into those of human
adolescence, of the Acre of Investigation; whilst some few, perhaps, already,
are passing yet beyond this limit, here and there; in this or that department of
our mental life are drawing nearer to full Understanding; to that goal of full
mental development, which our Buddhism sets before us as the ultimate ideal of
life.
This, then, is the reason why the Occidental student in particular, one
born and bred at the very heart of this new era of transition which even in
Burma is already so swiftly chancing all the old sanctions and the ways of life,
finds with surprise this strong element of devotion in the Buddhist teaching;
finds it, still more vivid and manifest in Burma's daily life. For him, at first
sight, it seems almost a token of degeneration, an instance of atavism, of
throwing backwards to an earlier stage of religious development than that most
modern, most advanced position to which it is so clearly, so uniquely entitled,
by virtue of the logical, the reasoned basis of all its prominent and
fundamental teachings.
For, if the student has really gained a grasp of the
true significance, in human thought and development, as also in its place in
human history, he will understand that here in very truth exists a body of
religious teaching, suited, not like the theistic creeds, only to the Age of
Faith, the era of human mental childhood, but also to this new age of
questioning, of investigation, of mental adolescence, into which at the present
the more cultured members of the modern civilisation are already entering and
have entered. Studyingas, to gain a right perspective and a correct
appreciation of the significance of Buddhism, he must needs have studied-the
conditions amidst which Buddhism had its birth in India twenty-five centuries
ago, he will have grasped the fact that Buddhism, alike in its internal evidence
and structure, and in the history of its origin, takes a place amongst the great
world-religions, only comparable to that which is held by the whole body of
modern science as compared with the logomachies of the Middle Ages in Europe.
Historically it takes this unique position, inasmuch as we find in it the
admitted ultimate of Aryan religious thought; for that Eastern branch of the
great Aryan Race which gave it birth, had reached, even before the days of the
Buddha, to heights of religious experience, to depths of religious philosophy
and world-view, such as even now is far from being attained by any race amongst
the several nations into which the Western Branch has differentiated. And for
this fact the reason is not far to seek, for true Religion, and most of all the
deeper, subtler levels of religious philosophy, is the fruit and outcome only of
a life set free from worldly cares; it can only arrive at such great heights as
it had then attained in India, under conditions in which great opportunity for
protracted thought and meditation is present; in brief, like all true science,
it is rather the offspring of human leisure than of a life of human toil. The
climatic environment in which the Eastern Aryans found themselves, once they had
fairly established their colonies in the fair and fertile plains of middle
India, offered opportunities for leisured thought, such as were utterly denied
to their Northand Westwardtending kinsmen of the European branch, in
their harsher climate and wolf-haunted forests; and this circumstance, combined
doubtless with the fact that the Eastern Aryans, in their genial climate, grew
far quicklier to maturity in the mental sphere, even as they earlier attained to
physical fulness of growth, had already, even before the Buddha's time, resulted
in a stage of religious development such as far transcended aught that any
Western race as yet can show. In matters of material development, indeed, the
Indian Aryans were little more advanced than are their descendants now; but in
the deeper things of life, which go together to make up Religion, they had
travelled further than any race of which our human history tells.
We have
seen, in the incomparable achievements of Western science and its applications
during the past hundred years, what marvellous heights can be attained by the
Aryan mind, when once it emerges from the Age of Faith, of mental childhood, and
grows to mental youth in an era of Investigation. In all our records there is
nothing like it, the achievement in so short a period of a body of knowledge and
a power so great; and what that wonderful instrument of the keen, clear Aryan
mind, thus lately grown to stature of its manhood in the West, has of late years
accomplished in the sphere of the material sciences, all that, and more indeed,
had its kinsmen of the Gangetic Valley accomplished in the vaster, wider empire
of religious experience and life.
To all that long era of immense religious
activity, to all the long glorious line of Indian Sage and Saint, the Buddha
came as the crown and greatest olory; His Teaching, as the final, ultimate
achievement of Aryan religious thought and life. And thus it happened, as has
been said above, that the student of Buddhist origins finds how the very
historical circumstances of the birth of Buddhism mark it at once as the one
Religion, so far known on earth, which is the offspring, not of the Age of
Faith, but of the Age of Understanding; the sole Religion known so far, which is
stated in the terminology of mental and intellectual, rather than emotional
life. What this external evidence of history teaches us concerning it, that also
is no less manifest from the internal witness of the Teachings set forth in its
sacred sources, the wonderful philosophy, so true and obvious when once we know
it, which we find the Master's word expounds. Here is no teaching of blind
Faith, no shutting of our eyes to the pain, the cruelty, the changefulness of
Life; no setting aside of the great problem of suffering as a mystery into which
we must not seek to penetrate; no fond and fair belief that all of it is somehow
for the best, in that it all was made and still is guided by some great mystic
Being none has ever known or seen. In place of all that fare for human mental
infancy, we have the harder and yet strength-building food of adult man; the
problem of evil nobly faced and met, with the one wisdom that can avail to end
it. Sorrow exists, is very shadow to all life enselfed; its Cause lies in
Not-Understanding; whence springs Desire; its Cure lies in the undermining of
Desire, in letting go the love of Self for the nobler, greater love of All. What
made it? That is in the darkness; we do not know, we cannot understand. Why is
it so? That question must be met by noble silence only. We do not know, we
cannot understand; and when men try to put in words that which transcends our
human knowledge, such words are in reality all meaningless, they have no help to
bring us; over such mere Views men ever are at war. What then avails ? To
realise the Truth; to see how Sorrow reigns, in that our hearts are slave to
Self; to put an end to all this suffering; to seek the Peace which reigns where
Sorrow cannot come. How can this be? How, bound in Self-wrought pain, in the
transition and illusion of our life, can we, in Ignorance enmeshed, hope to find
Peace Beyond? Because Causation reigns supreme in Life, is what we know as Life
in fact; and so, by ceasing to do evil, to inflict pain on life; by doing good,
helping to relieve Life's pain; by purifying heart and life, learning the great
lesson of its One-ness and our part in it, so surely must we presently find
Peace, find Sorrow's End even in this sad world, so surely, since Causation
reigns.
That is this Truth the Master taught us: so simple and yet so
profound; so cutting at the very roots of pain, and wrath, and ignorance; so
clear when we have learned it, yet so hidden from the searching thought of all
the world's great Holy Ones save One. Because Causation reigns; because the
Sequence is inevitable; because Good grows to Better, the good seed to further
golden crop; because Causation reigns, so must there be that Way of Peace within
our very hearts; sure as Causation's self shines this clear Lamp of Hope through
Ignorance's Night.
That is our Truth. No dream of poet, no imaginary Power
that made this aching world of life and yet is merciful; no demand for Faith we
cannot have when once our minds are grown from infancy. Wisdom for
Faith our Dhamma offers us, the Knowledge of the Incomparable Surety of
Nibbana's Peace, if we can turn our hearts from love of Self to love for All.
That is our Dhamma, nobly facing all life's facts, and never hiding in a veil of
mystery transcendent; certain, sequent, stable, sure;surer Its truth than
our own life is, for we have dreamed before, and even this our life may be in
truth another dream. But that is true and sure, that Dhamma of our Master; truer
and surer the more rightly do we comprehend it; our Hope therein is sure,
seeing. Causation reigns.
Surer than Life It is, since Life is but a Seeming
and Becoming; surer than Death It is, for the seed, cabined in earth's close
darkness, dies but to live again in greater, sweeter life of leaf, and bud, and
bloom, unfolding in the wide, free air and glorious sunlight, and is the Life
that now is, thrilling in our hearts as this transcendent miracle of Thought,
the less of Life, that it should perish where that seed-spark of life endures?
Deeper and yet deeper, as our minds can attain to measure It, we find the surety
of It grows for us and in us; the deeper our understanding of It, still the
surer grows Its Very Truth; and, even then, when with our Thought crown
deepliest, we essay to plumb sheer to Its utter deeps, to learn the fulness of
It, to attain Its final Truth, even then ever open new gulfs of depth past all
our fathoming, past all our reach of It, so great is It, so deep, so
wide.
And so it is, because this Buddhism is first and above all else a
Gnosis, a Wisdom, a Religion of Understanding, showing the Way of Peace, the
Path of Liberation and Salvation, as lying through selfless Love and Knowledge,
twin aspects of the same great, final Truth of Life, that, at the first sight of
it, that attitude of Faith and of Devotion, which we have seen to be the
characteristic of the earlier stages of mental growth, seems to the student to
be out of place; and its undoubted presence, both in the Teaching of the Master
and in the modern practice, to approach at least to a reversion to the methods
and weaknesses of an earlier mental stage. He reads, perchance, the beautiful,
ancient Pali hymn:-
"To All the Buddhas of the ancient days, To All the Buddhas of all future
time; To all the Buddhas of the present age, I offer adoration evermore.
"For me there is no other Refuge; the Buddha is my Refuge-He, the Best! By
power of the Truth in these my words, may I attain the Glorious Victory!"
And
if, further, he has the priceless opportunity of prosecuting his studies of the
Dhamma, not in those Western lands where he can learn but from books alone, and
where, accordingly, its teachings seem far off, remote alike in space and time,
but in a Buddhist land like Burma, where it becomes, for one who has wit to
understand it, a living power, a supreme reality that sways the lives and ways
of multitudes of men; then once again, perhaps, the same feature stands out most
prominently, is manifested in the very life of the people before his eyes. He
sees how the religious life of the nation centres around the Monastery and round
such great religious shrines as your Shwè Dagon Pagoda; sees, at some great
Pagoda Festival, the worshipping crowds kneeling at the feet of the Master's
Image, offering their incense and lights, heaping great piles of tropic flowers
before His Shrine, and each and all prefacing every act of meditation and of
worship with the Formula of the Salutation:-Namo Tassa Bhagavato, Arahato,
Sammasambuddhassa! "Glory unto Him, The Exalted Lord, The Holy One, The Utterly
Awakened!"
"What, then," he asks himself, "is the meaning of this so
obviously fervent and true-hearted Buddhist devotion, whether as found in
Salutation or in hymn; or, more manifestly yet, in this adoring praise and
worship of what is without doubt the truest Buddhist nation in the world? Is it
indeed an instance of reversion to an earlier type of religious development, a
thing adopted bodily from earlier Indian religious thoughtadopted as it
stood without that changed significance the Buddha stamped on so many of the old
beliefs and thoughtsor is it, again, a recrudescent growth of later
introduction into Buddhism, an instance of that slow but sure decay of the
pristine purity of the Religion, such as we find so common in all the
longer-lived Religions, but from which, so far, the Theravada seems so
wonderfully to have escaped ?
The answer to these questions, as further study
of the Dhamma teaches him, pursues, as is ever the case with Buddhist thought,
the Middle Way between the two extremes. Devotion has in very fact a definite
and indeed a prominent place in the Buddhist life; and it consists of two widely
different emotions, a lower and a higher, of which the latter alone may be
regarded as the exclusively and characteristically Buddhist type. The first, and
of necessity the most prevailing form of it, is just that same emotion of
dependence and reliance, as on an unseen Guide, of the heart that entertains it;
and it finds a place, a very humble one indeed, but still a certain and defined
position in the body of Buddhist Teaching as a whole. This is that same
unquestioning Faith in somewhat living, the blind belief in some great Power or
Person able to hear and aid, which, as we have seen, is typical of the dawning
intellectual growth of man. Seeing that this lower form of devotion constitutes,
not only a stage, but an essential stage in a man's mental development; and
seeing that the Dhamma was expounded, not only for the more advanced units of
humanity who have transcended mental childhood, but for mankind at large, for
every class of mind, this lower type of devotion is also to be found in it as
well as in all the other great Religions of the world. But in the Teaching of
the Buddha we find this sort of devotion, in place of taking the foremost place
amongst religious ideals and inculcated practices, instead of acting as the
cloak of mysteries manifold, as an excuse for the incompatibility of the facts
of life with others of the teachings of the Religion, holds only that position
to which it is entitled as an indispensable feature of the earlier stages of
human mental growth.
As such, we find it in the beautiful Story of
Mattakundali, the traditional exposition at length of the Teaching summarised in
brief in the second stanza of the Dhammapada. Recording the old traditional
exposition of this stanza, current in his days in the then centre of all
Buddhist learning, the monasteries of Ceylon, the great Commentator tells us how
the Master was accustomed, on each morning of His life, to search with inner
higher vision over the length and breadth of all the land, to see what human
hearts were nigh to grace or insight, so that they needed for their helping only
such aid as one who knows the Way can sometimes render to some humbler, lowlier,
fellow-man. And it thus befell that on a day, casting, as the Commentator with
Oriental imagery finely puts it, casting the Net of His Compassion over the
waters of Life's Ocean, He found therein poor Mattakundali, son of a wealthy but
miserly Brahman, nigh to the Gates of Death by reason of his Kamma, but, by that
same reason, in state to profit by a helping hand. The story we all well know,
and here we are concerned in but the point of it, how, to the dying child, the
Master made manifest a glorious apparitional image of Himself, and how the boy,
dying there in solitude, turned to this Form with wondering, with unquestioning
devotion, losing all sense of fear and suffering in the thought, that surely
this Holy One could aid him and bring him peace. With that assurance in his
heart, the potent life-determining dying thought grew calm, so that
Mattakundali, dying in the earth, came to re-birth amidst the heavenly
glories-was re-born in one of the bright Heavens of Form, although the immediate
cause of such high happiness was but a single act of adoration-only the child's
reliance on the Master's power to help.
This little story is an excellent
example of the place held by the lower, common form of devotion in Buddhism;
excellent as indicating at the same time both the power ascribed to this type of
devotion, and the close limitations Buddhist teaching sets on its power to help
us and to change our destinies. For, be it noted, that act of worship was, as it
were, only the determining, the immediate cause of that fortunate re-birth, in
that the overwhelming flood of adoring thought could calm the usually trembling
death-consciousness, and so, as it were, pave the immediate way for the
operation of past meritorious Doing, the latter being the remoter, and yet more
real Cause.
But, as we all know, the aim and goal that Buddhist Teaching lays
before us, is by no means the gaining of such Heavenly Birth as Mattakundali
attained. Such birth may be regarded, and in the case in hand the view applies,
as a nursery for the chod-intelligence; a life of peace and happiness, in the
midst of which the dawning mind grows to greater heights of spiritual strength
which enables it, in later lives on earth, better to face the pain and suffering
which are at once so characteristic of our human life, and as such, sure guides
or rather goads, to bring us to seek out the Path of Peace. But so rich in joy
those Heavenly mental realms are, and so great the length of life therein., that
few amongst their denizens ever can win the comprehension of the Sorrow, or yet
the Changefulness or Illusion dominant in Life; so that in them is little
opportunity for realising the truly Buddhist aim, the finding of the Path of
Selflessness, whereof the first step lies in abnegation of all personal desire,
such as the Heavenly Birth promotes.
Thus we may define this lower species of
devotion, this mere blind faith in what is high and holy, as able, indeed, when
it finds support in Meritorious Doing (but not otherwise), to conduce to lives
of heavenly or earthly happiness, to afford, as it were, a period of rest and
leisure for the growing but still undeveloped Mind. Why this should be the case
we well can see, who understand the teaching of Causation, as that second stanza
of the Dhammapada calls to mind. In the devoted heart as in the mental
child-life, there is firm and never-wavering assurance of the power of that
devotion's object to give aid to us,to render grace and help. "All that we are,"
to quote our Dhammapada stanza, "All that we are is the result of what we have
thought; it is founded on our thought, made up of our thought:-If a man speaks
or acts with holy thought, then Joy shall follow him, sure as his shadow, never
leaving him." The world in which we find ourselves, our world, that is,
is but the wrought and moulded outcome of our thought in by-gone lives. Given
the moving power of Meritorious Act behind it, it will build for us lives filled
with joy and happiness, but shaped and moulded just as our thought dictated. The
dream, the ideal of Heaven creates for us the very Heaven whereof we dreamed, if
behind the thought there be sufficient Punna, the lifegiving Doing, the
Good Kamma, which alone can thrill the dream to vivid life.
Such is the
power, and such the limitation, of Devotion of this lower type. It can, in
brief, bring happiness if vitalised by Righteous Doing, but it is impotent to
help us to enter and walk upon the Way of Peace. And if, because the Dhamma was
enounced for benefit of all humanity, of whom the most are still in the
childhood of mental growth, if in its lower, earlier teaching we find this type
of it still holds a place, we still can see how even that very usage of it is
designed to pave the way for greater, nobler thought. Throughout the Master's
Teaching, we find everywhere the same idea presented; the idea, namely, that
only our own Right Act can serve to help us in the end; the constant attempt to
wean the growing mind from the dependence of that earlier stage of childhood, to
the realisation that our Hope, our Light, our Way, lies in reality within
ourself. We may hear, indeed, the words of the teaching of a very Buddha,
but they can avail us only to the extent to which we follow their advice. "Be ye
Lamps unto yourselves; look for Refuge to yourselves, seeking no other Refuge,"
and the thought that Refuge lies in Truth alone, that is the fundamental dictum
of the Master to whomsoever seeks to put an end to all this Cycle of Becoming
and of Suffering; to find the Way of Peace.
And thus we come to the second,
the higher and peculiarly Buddhist thought and attitude, to which the name
Devotion can be applied. As the child grows older, Thought begins to take the
place of Faith. No longer accepting with perfect trustfulness, all that the
elders or parents tell it, it begins to question things, to endeavour to
investigate; begins, in short, to think its own thoughts, rather than, as
heretofore, to take all its concepts ready-made. With the dawning comprehension
of life resulting from this changed attitude, it ceases to be naught but a
mental mirror wherein the thoughts of its environment are reflected; commencing
to think for itself, it passes into the period of mental adolescence; and with
this awakening of independent thought the old blind Faith soon disappears, at
least with those more progressed individuals who in past lives have passed
already through the childhood stage.
Here, for our present human development,
the parallelism which so far has obtained between the individual and the racial
development appears to cease; for there always exist some few rare minds already
far ahead of the general development. Such pass onwards, individually, from this
stage of mental youth, this Age of Questioning, to the final stage of full
maturity, the Age of Wisdom, of full Understanding; whilst as yet the mass of
even the most advanced of races can scarcely be said to have advanced even to
adolescence.
To that full stage of mental growth, in matters of worldly
knowledge, we may regard the greatest of mankind as having more or less
completely attained. In the world of literature a Shakespeare, in the sphere of
science a Newton, a Spencer, or a Maxwell, have reached so far in one or more of
the departments of the mental life. Of such are the master-minds of all
humanity, the leaders of civilisation; and in our present era of transition the
number of these greatly-thinking ones is being added to each day. Such progress
at the present is abnormal, is indeed far beyond the growth and the attainment
of the body of mankind, which, as we have seen, is lagging still, even in the
most progressed of races, on the verge of mental infancy, but slowly passing
frcm the Age of Faith. So, such attainments as a Newton or a Spencer have
reached can, in our present age, be won only by the hardest work and the
intensest application ; and, even then, such mental manhood, such maturity as
these may have reached are found, as has been said, only in one, or in a few
departments of the mental action.
But, from our Buddhist point of view, we
may regard all these attainments, in respect of merely worldly art and science,
as being simply side-shows, specialised realms of knowledge only collaterally
connected with the real advancement, the true maturity; maturity, that is, of
general development; maturity in respect of those deeper things of life which we
sum up in the one word Religion.
True progress, basic to the whole field of
mental life, is what we Buddhists term attainment of the Paths; and this because
the worldlier knowledge, the specialised attainment in respect of some one, or
some few mental kingdoms only, dies with the death of the individual who has
attained to it, so far, at least, as he himself is concerned therewith. Truly,
its results, especially in this age when the general wisdom has so far advanced
that the wise publish their discoveries broadcast throughout the world, remain
for the benefit of mankind at large, this is the special virtue and the boon
such sort of mental achievement wins. None of us are Newtons, even in process of
becoming, of that we may be sure, at least so far as this life is concerned.
None of us, therefore, to touch but one department of the many that that
mastermind was master in, could of our own intelligence deduce from an apple's
fall the Law of Gravitation; but, since the actual Newton not only made that
great deduction and the consequent application, but published his discovery for
the benefit of all, the merest tyro amongst us can apply, can use the principle
he discovered; thus, if lost for Newton as a being, the knowledge still remains
to benefit mankind.
But of the deeper, the more spiritual attainment summed
up in the word Religion, the attainment of growth upon the holy Path leading to
Insight, Understanding, to the Peace, to Sorrow's End, or that Higher Wisdom,
since it is no mere side-show, but basic to the whole great field of Life
itself, of that no smallest gain is ever lost to the being that wins it, or, for
that matter, is ever lost to Life at large. Such growth is fundamental, basic,
it implies the fulfilment of the very Hope, the Meaning of our Life. In respect
of that deep wisdom, we to-day may fairly place ourselves as having passed out
of the Age of Faith; as standing, now somewhere within the limits of the Age of
Investigation; and our great hope now lies in being able a little to move
forwards in our present life; to attain, in the life that lies before us, a
little nearer to the full maturity of Life. We in the Buddhist term are Sekka,
students or learners, trying so to understand and to apply to our own lives the
greatest body of the deeper wisdom ever given to the world, that the Life of
which we form an integral part may come a little nearer to the Peace.
What,
then, is the manner of Devotion that, for us thus situated in respect of the
deeper growth, can serve to help us further on the Path? This is the
specifically Buddhist form of it. We have seen how the earlier form consists in
blind Faith only; we have seen how necessary that is to the undeveloped mind;
but, since to-day we are endeavouring to investigate, to think for ourselves and
to apply our thought to life, we obviously have passed beyond the age when mere
blind Faith could help us: such were for us, thus reached to adolescence, a
retrogression, not a gain.
We are here concerned with finding, with
progressing on, the Inward Path; and, as we all know, that sort of progress has
been well summed up as "making pure the Mind." How can Devotion help in
that direction; and, if not the old type, mere blind devoted Faith, what fashion
of it here can help us as we stand ?
To take the latter question first, the
Buddhist answer is: not Faith indeed, so far as Faith is blind, unreasoning,
based on no principle or fact in Life, but only on our hope and our desire; but
rather the maturer Love, the devotion that comes in the train of Understanding;
the true Heart's adoration that springs within us when we have gained a little
of self-mastery; when, this delusion of the Self seeming no longer all our hope
in being, we begin to understand the value of self-sacrifice, when we attain
some glimpse of the tremendous meaning of the Love that has for us resulted in
the knowledge of the Law we have.
So long as Self alone seems of importance,
it appears to us of little value that another should have given all His life,
even the all of many lives, for the sake of helping Life at large to find the
Peace. Then, when Self rules supreme, it seems derogatory to its glory that we
should kneel in adoration of whatever greatest being has existed, whether on
earth or in the Heavens beyond. But, with the progress of our heart's cleansing,
understanding how in that thought of Self lies the root-cause of all the pain of
Life which now we seek to help to end, with that progression comes the
understanding of the utter worthlessness, nay, more, the very evil of the Self
thought; and yet, to each of us, how difficult the least poor act of
self-renunciation seems! Knowing that, and setting beside our knowledge of the
sacrifice which this discovery of the Path involved for One, the holiest and
greatest of our human kind, our paltry efforts in that same direction, we turn
with shame from the thought of it, so mean and poor do our greatest efforts seem
when so compared.
Thus the Devotion we should cultivate springs from no less
significant a thought than that of our own true place in Life's progression; as
compared with the heights of selflessness won by the Holy and the Great of old.
Seeing, by the clear logic of the Law, how Self is the Cause of all the pain of
Life; seeing how difficult for us is each poor feeblest act of sacrifice of
self, our hearts are filled with wonder and with love at the thought of one who
could give all that men hold dear, not in the sure knowledge of success, but
only in the Hope of finding a Way of Peace for all. That is the sort of Faith,
of Love, of Devotion, that can help us on: and why ? Because it means another
conquest over self-hood ; a further achievement of the deeper, vaster, universal
Love.
Without it, without this reasoned sure devotion to the Hope that now is
guiding our life's ship over the darkling waters of the Ocean of existence,
without it we can never win the fire, the power, the earnestness which alone can
forward our high aim. Brightly on our mental horizon, and brightlier yet, as one
by one the mists of self-hood roll aside, shines the Beacon-light upon the
Further Shore; the reasoned Understanding. " Once has One achieved, and still on
earth His Light is shining, to guide the lives of all that lift up eyes to see."
Athwart the darkling waters of Life's Ocean, marking the Path that each must
travel to the Peace, gleams the clear Way that Beacon-fire still shows. By
Understanding of the Truth He left to us, by comprehension of Causation's Law,
we may guide indeed our bark of life, straight and sure on the gleaming roadway
marked on the waves by that still distant Beacon-fire. But all the guidance of
our intellect applied, aided albeit by all our knowledge of that very Truth, the
Law the Master found for us, it all were useless, unless we can find the motive
power to drive our ship. That power, that fire within the furnace of our hearts,
is this Devotion we must cultivate. We know how, if we wish for bodily strength,
we must practise lifting heavy weights, or in some way using the set of muscles
that we wish to strengthen. Just so with Thought. It is not enough once to have
seen that, "Such-and-such thought is good, beneficent, tending to ease the
bitter agony of Life," and, having so seen, to set aside the potent thought, or
never think of it again. We must use it, practise thinking it, make, in
respect of it, sankharas more and more potent till it has become truly a living
fire within us, certain, all-overcoming, sure. Therefore it is not alone those
lowlier hearts who, yet in mental childhood, find in blind Faith new mental
strength, that need to kneel before the Master's shrine, to offer humble gifts
of light, and flower, and scent. We, too, need that, not less than those our
humbler human brethren, but vastly more; for the power of Self is still upon us,
and only a right grasp of our ideal can antidote its poison in our hearts. We,
too, need recitation of the Namaskara; but our adoration must be paid, not to a
Person, for in Truth all personality is but a dream, but to our Heart's Ideal.
We, too, can find ever new strength in kneeling at the Master's shrine; but we
must understand our worship rightly, and build a fitting Shrine in our own
lives, cleansing our hearts till they are worthy to bear that Image in their
inmost sanctuary of love. And, lastly, we also need to offer gifts upon that
altar daily; but gifts, not of these swiftly-waning lights, these dying flowers
of earth or evanescent incense-scents. Our gifts must be in deeds of love; of
sacrifice and self-surrender to those about us; our daily offerings in worship
of the Exalted Lord. Making His Life our pattern, our ideal, we must strive to
be His Followers not in name alone, but must so rule our hearts and lives that
men may understand the meaning of that noblest holiest life that ever human
being lived; how yet it has the power to call us and to conquer, until Love's
Empire shall have spread through all the world.
ANANDA METTEYYA.