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Studies in Indian Culture, Religion and Society Series - 3 BuddhainsIdmn dia J.B. Sharma S.P. Sharma ·1 999 SublPiumbel ications Jaipur India FirPsutb li1s9h9e9d : ISB:N8 1-85809-48-8 ©Author Pri:cR es5 .9 5 Publibsyh ed SublPiumbel ications 18J,a iBnh awan, OppN.. B.SCh.a,nN taig ar, Jaip-3u0r02 0 6 Tel0.1 4-12 20529201,4 56 Prinatte d TaruOnf fsPerti nters, NewD elhi Preface Indian history boasts of certain religions which had moved the hearts of uncountable peoples. Buddhism is one of them. It is a religion of kindness, humanity and equality. Its expansion and wide literature within India and abroad has hardly a parallel in the history of the world. One of the important factors for its appeal on a massive scale was its catholicity. · Buddhism may best be defined simply as the means to enlightenment. The more we study Buddhism the more we realize its greatness as a religion and philosophy. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore "Like the religion of the Upanishads, Buddhism also generated two different currents; the one imper sonal, preaching the self-abnegation of self through discipline, and the other personal sympathy for all creatures, and the other which is called the Mahayana, had its origin in the positive element contained in the Buddha's teachings, which is immeasurable love. It could never, by any logic, fi11d its reality in the emptiness of the truthless abyss." Buddhism with its religion, philosophy, literature and art is a tremendous storehouse of"knowledge. It played a predominant part not r,nly in the evolution of art in India but also in other countries where it had been a cepted as a way of life. Buddhist literature in its multifarious forms still constitutes the classics of many countries. 6 PREFACE However, Buddhism has become a civilisation of international importance. Historically, it was one of the most tremendous religious movement that the world ever saw, the most gigantic spiritual society. There is hardly any civilisation on which its effect has not been felt in some way or other. The present series consist of numerous speeches/writings of a galaxy of intellectuals. I express my sincere gratitude to all of them. EDITORS Contents Preface V 1.I NDIAAN DB UDDHISM 9 -HermaOn/nd enberg 2.I NDIAAN DB UDDHISM 22 -P.BV.a pat 3.T HEL ANDO FB UDDHA 29 -Fah-Hian 4.B UDDHIASNMDI NDIA 32 -KaiN/aatsKh a tju •5B.U DDHISIMN INDIIAN THE SEVENTH3 4 CENTUORFYT HEC HRISTEIRAAN -J. BarthSealienmty- Hilaire 6.I NT HES ACREPDL ACOEFSB UDDHISM 122 -RenGer ousset 7.S ITOEFSA SOKAE'DSI CTS 150 8.B ODH-GAFYRAO MB UDDHIPSOTI NOTFV IEW 155 -BenimaBdahrnaab 8 CONTENTS 9. THE GREAT SANCHI CONGREGATION 196 Rajamani -N. 10. INTRODUCTION OF BUDDHISM IN CHINA 202 -Phanindra Nath Bose 11. STUDIES IN CHINESE BUDDHISM 215 -Phanindra Nath Bose 12. BUDDHISM COMES TO TIBET 228 -Charles Bell 13. AN OUTLINE OF THE BUDDHISM OF TIBET 245 -Dalai Lama 14. BUDDHISM CAPTURES MONGOLIA 261 -Charles Bell 15. EXPANSION OF BUDI'HIST CULTURE IN 269 NORTH-EAST ASIA -Nalinaksha Dutt 16. BUDDHISM IN THE MODERN WORLD 280 -B. Sangharakshita 1 India and Buddhism -Hermann Oldenberg The history of the Buddhist faith begins with a band of mendicant monks who gathered round the person of Gotama, the Buddha, in the country bordering on the Ganges, about five hundred years before the commencement of the Christian era. What bound them together and gave a stamp to their simple and earnest world of thought, was the deeply felt and clearly and sternly expressed consciousness, that all earthly existence is full of sorrow, and that the only deliverance from sorrow is in renunciation of the world and eternal rest. An itinerant teacher and his itinerant followers, not unlike those bands, who in later times bore through Galilee the tidings: "the kingdom of heaven is at hand," went through the realms of India with the burden of sorrow and death, and the announcement: "open ye your ears; the deliverance from death is found." Vast gaps separate the historical circle, in the middle of which stands the form of Buddha, from the world on which we are wont next to fix our thoughts, when we speak of the history of the world. Those upheavals of nature which partitioned off India from the cooler lands of the west and north by a gigantic wall of vast mountains, allotted at the same time to the people, whosh ould first tread this highly favoured land, a role of detached isolation. The Indian nation, in a manner scarcely paralleled by any other nation 10 BUDDHISM AND INDIA m the civilized world, has developed its life out of itself and according to its own laws, far removed alike from the alien and the cognate peopks, who in the west, within the compas:, of closer mutual relations, have perfonned the parts to which history called them. India took no share in this work. For those circles of the Indian race, among whom Buddha preached his doctrine, the idea of non-Indian lands had hardly a more concrete signification than the conception of those other worlds, which, scattered through infinite space, combine with other suns, other moons and other hells, to form other universes. The day was yet to come, when an overpowering hand broke down the partition between India and the west-the hand of Alexander. But this contact of India and Greece belongs to a much later period than that which formed Buddhism: between the death of Buddha and Alexander's Indian expedition there elapsed perhaps about one hundred and sixty years. Who can conceive what might have been, if, at an earlier epoch, when the national life of the Indians might have opened itself more freshly and genially to the influences of a foreign life, such events had overtaken it as this incursion of Macedonian weapons and Hellenic culture? For India Alexander came too late. When he appeared, the Indian people had long since come, in the depth of their loneliness, to stand alone among nations, ruled by forms of life and habits of thought, which differed wholly from the standards of the non-Indian world. Without a past living in their memory, without a present, which they might utilize in love and hate, without a future, for which men might hope and work, they dreamed morbid and proud dreams of that which is beyond all time, and of the peculiar government which is within these everlasting realms. On scarcely any of the creations of the exuberant culture of India, do we find the stamp of this Indian characteristic so sharply, and therefore, too, so enigmatically impressed, as on Buddhism. But the more completely do all external bonds between these distant regions and the world with which we are acquainted, as far as they consist of the intercourse of nations and the interchange of their intellectual wealth, seem to us to be served, so much the more clearly do we perceive another tie, which holds closely together INDIA AND BUDDHISM 11 internally what are outwardly far apart and apparently foreign: the bond of historical analogy between phenomena, which are called into being in different places by the working of the same law. Invariably, wherever a nation has been in a position to develop its intellectual life in purity and tranquillity through a long period of time, there recurs that phenomenon, specially observable in the domain of spiritual life, which we may venture to describe as a shifting of the centre of gravity of all supreme human interests from without to within: an old faith, which promised to men somehow or other by an offensive and defensive alliance with the Godhead, power, prosperity, victory and subjection of their enemies, will, sometimes by imperceptible degrees, and sometimes by great catastrophes, be supplanted by a new phase of thought, whose watchwords are no longer welfare, victory, dominion, but rest, peace, happiness, deliverance. The blood of the sacrificial victim no longer brings reconciliation to the dismayed and erring heart of man: new ways are sought and found, to overcome the enemy within the heart, anc1 to become whole, pure, and happy. This altered condition of the inner life gives rise externally to a new fonn of spiritual fellowship. In the old order of things nature associated religious unity with the family, the clan, and the nation jointly, and inside these unity of faith and worship existed of itself. Whoever belongs to a people has thereby the right to, and is bound to have a share in, the worship of the popular gods. Near this people are other people with other gods; for each individual it is detem1ined as a natural necessity by the circumstances of his birth, what gods shall be to him the true and for him the operative deities. A particular collective body, which may be denominated a church, there is not and there cannot be, for the circle of all worshippers of the popular gods is no narrower and no wider than the people themselves. The circumstances under which the later forms of religious life come to the surfate are different. They have not an antiquity co-eval with the people among whom they arise. When they come into existence they find a faith already rooted in the people and giving an imprint to popular institutions. They must begin to gather BUDDHISM AND INDIA 12 adherents to themselves from among the crowds of professors of another faith. It is no longer natural necessity, but the will of the individual, which determines whether he hopes to find his salvation on this side or on that. There arise the fonns of the school, the society, and the holy order. From the narrow social circle of teacher and disciples there may eventually grow a church, which, exceeding the limits of the nation, the limits of all seats of culture, may extend to distances the most remote. Were it allowable to borrow from one particular instance of those cases which illustrate this, a designation for this revolution of universal occurrence. which transfonns the religious life of nations internally as well as externally, we might describe it as the transition from the Old Testament dispensation to the New Testament dispensation. The honour of having given the most unique and most marked expression to this transition in fonns unequalled in history, belongs to the Semitic race. Somewhere about five hundred years earlier than in Palestine, analogous occurrences took place among the Indo-Germanic nations in two places, widely separated in locality, but approximate in time, Greece and in India. In the fonner case we find the most eccentric among the Athenians, the defining explorer of the bases of human action, who, in the market and over the wine-cup, to Alkibiades as well as to Plato, demonstrates that virtue can be taught and learned-in the latter case there steps out as the most prominent among the world's physicians, who then traversed India in monastic garb, the noble Gotama, who calls himself the Exalted, the holy, highly Illumi nated One, who has come into the world to show to gods and men the path out of the sorrowful prison of being into the freedom of everlasting rest. What can be more different than the relative proportions in which in these two spirits-and historical treatment will permit us to add as a third their great counterpart in his mysterious majestic form of suffering humanity-the elements of thought and feeling, of depth and clearness, were arranged and mixed? But even in the sharply-defined difference of that which was, and still is, Socratic,