A Story of Conversion

THE Reverend John Portall dwelt upon a hill beside the sacred river of the Andhras. He was the manager of a kind of Protestant seminary, where young converts from the casteless underworld of Hinduism were trained as teachers, before being sent out into the many schools maintained by his mission throughout the district. A considerable village lay between the river and this institution on the hill; the plain white mission church, a last forlorn mumble of the Gothic formula, stood upon the hither outskirts of the village; and far out across the sand of the river itself, built upon heaped rocks that had withstood the floods of centuries, a Shaiva temple of much fame, an object far more grateful to the genius of the landscape, rose among a little cluster of priests’ houses.

Devakonda was an ordinary village of South Indian cultivators. It was built mainly of earth and palm thatch

— tiles were a symbol of social altitude

— and painted gayly with old earthen pigments, white and red. In Portall’s eyes it was a heathen village. Idolatry was enthroned there, and caste ruled supreme. Its folk respected Portall as a dora, a gentleman; they liked him as a man, for he had very amiable qualities; they even went to him sometimes for medicines, of which he kept a store for the use of his proselytes; but with all his personal and secular influence he remained, as he expressed it himself, an ambassador of Christ in an alien country, whose spiritual allegiance was owed and paid from of old to Nataraja, the Dancing Shiva, who dwelt in the temple on the island, and in a more immediate sense to his interpreter, the famous Swami Shivayya Shastri, the chief priest of the same shrine.

For, like Ephesus of old, Devakonda derived, not only spiritual comfort, but profit also and fame, from the fame of the temple and its priest; chiefly realized, of course, at the great bathing festival in the spring, when the whole district made holiday and went down into the river; but not without effect at other times as well. The Shastri, of whom we have spoken, was no ordinary temple priest. He was famous far and wide for his learning, his eloquence in prayer, his austerities, and the timeless ecstasy into which he would often fall in the course of his contemplation of his idol. The piety of the priest attracted almost as many and quite as earnest pilgrims as the reputation of the god.

But if the Shastri was no ordinary pujari, or temple priest, neither was Portall an ordinary missionary; and the meeting of these two eminent spirits was bound, sooner or later, to have notable effects. They took shape, however, gradually. The first encounter was commonplace, a mere deadlock of counter assertions; the mutual and barren imputation of counterfeit authority, fantastic fables, degrading ritual, and pernicious doctrine. Portall, in those days, was full of youthful confidence; still nursed, in fact, the hope of capturing singlehanded, like Jonathan, that stronghold of the heathen —a hope that was to seem less convincing as he labored after it, and finally bade fair, like the pale blue slips of mirage which the heat of the sun perpetually raised upon the long sand horizons of the river bed, to vanish altogether upon a near approach.

The deadlock thus established continued for several years. The impetus of the missionary’s first assault spent itself without apparent effect either upon the prophet of Nataraja or upon his populous following. I have said that Portall was no ordinary missionary; but at the time of which I am now writing his distinction was rather potential than obvious, and most of the methods of his first assault were of a strictly conventional, not to say obsolete, order. One of his siege engines, for instance, was a placard set up before the mission church with the following inscription in the vernacular tongue;

ETERNITY IS COMING WHERE WILL YOU SPEND IT?

Devakonda returned no answer, nor apparently realized the implication of its silence. Portall made friends, won golden opinions, but no souls beyond the usual steady tribute which Christianity in India receives from the outcast population; and he began, like many of his brethren, to find his chief consolation in the routine of mission administration, in the improvement, especially, of dispensaries and schools.

This procedure, without his intention, was to carry him further than the other toward his original aim; and old hopes were suddenly revived when the Shastri came to him, like Nicodemus, by night, and said, ‘Show me your God.’ Portall read to him the Sermon on the Mount, and other sayings of the Son of Man out of the Gospels. The Shastri listened intent, and sometimes nodded and said, ‘This was a great Rishi,’ or again, ‘Your Christ was an Advaiti,’ or Monist, a name by which, as Portall afterward found, he styled his own philosophy. But when our new Apostle of the Gentiles spoke of the Resurrection of the Body, of the Atonement, and other points of doctrine, the philosopher shook his head and cried; —

‘But you denounce us because we countenance the worship of idols, and now I see that you too worship them’; and then, in answer to the other’s protest, ‘These are idols, though not of brass or stone, yet of speech and thought; and you are right, for we also maintain that without idols is no popular religion possible.’ And he departed grave, as who should say with the Athenians, ‘We will hear thee again of this matter.’

Portall was at first quite confounded by this attitude of his questioner, but the other continued to come and to question at intervals month after month. Colloquy took the form, sometimes of debate, sometimes of exposition, the latter not always on the part, of Portall. The missionary learned much, as well as taught, during this period. He took pains to understand the Advaita position, which declines to admit any ultimate or abiding difference between soul and soul. ‘That which is eternal,’ the Shastri said, ‘can have no abiding limits, which are the marks of difference.’ The same faith similarly finds the Eternal manifest in the individual soul, and says roundly to the inquirer after God, ‘ Tat tuam asi (Thou art That)’ — a sentence which appeared as frankly blasphemous to the Christian missionary as to the Jews of old that not dissimilar saying of his Master, ‘ Before Abraham was, I am.’

The Shastri, on the other hand, scented a corresponding blasphemy in the doctrine of Original Sin. He spoke, however, of Karma, of the inheritance of good and evil, and of the doctrine of the Transmigration of Souls, which he declared to be an image, an ‘idol,’ invented to impress upon unphilosophic minds the fact of the individual’s interest in the generations before and after him. Portall also heard in a new sense of the ideality of things; he learned, we might almost say, philosophy, for in that field of inquiry he had hitherto received no instruction, and of a sudden felt it curiously alluring to his mind; and so began to wander in it, and ‘found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.’ But he withdrew the placard by the church, realizing that Eternity cannot be ‘coming,’ and cannot be ‘spent.’

At one time the suspicion occurred to him that the object of this Brahmin, who came ostensibly to seek, and yet so often managed to impart knowledge, was the subversion of his own faith; but pride, as well as the sense of duty, and a belief that Hinduism does not proselytize, prevented him from bringing their converse to an end. Indeed, whatever his object, the influence of the Shastri gradually effected a fundamental change in the missionary’s outlook. The Brahmin was a man of powerful intellect, curious and skeptical as well as fervent. He had attained, in the course of untold wanderings and multifarious conversation, a shrewd insight into the state of the modern mind and world, and he probed the foundations of the other’s more dogmatic beliefs with burning questions, whose constant passage soon began, if not to loosen, at least to sublimate and alter them. Yet his attitude remained always impartial, interrogative, mysterious; and as often as not, when the missionary was at a loss for an answer, the Shastri would supply it. If at times he feared, Portall for the most part could not help but like him for his candor, his detachment, his power, and his humility.

This stage of their intercourse lasted some two years, until at last it was the turn of the missionary, with what precise intention he would not have been able at the time to say himself, to go to the Shastri by night and to say, ‘Show me your God.’ It was a night of the full moon in early spring, and Portall, crossing the wide white frith of sand that separated the temple from the shore, found the priest sitting in the moonlight upon one of the rocks that formed the foundation of the sacred island. He rose from his seat as the other approached, and asked, ‘What would you, brother?’ The missionary answered as aforesaid.

‘Have I not endeavored to show Him to you nightly all these months?’ the Shastri asked.

‘Yes, but I would see Him as you worship Him, as the people see Him. I would see the Lord of the Dance in His Temple.’

‘Brother, you know you cannot see Him so.’

The missionary suddenly remembered that all foreigners, or mlechchas, are numbered with the outcasts by the strict Hindu, and as such are never admitted to the inner sanctuary.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said; ‘I ought not to have asked you to transgress the rule of your religion.’

‘That is not my meaning,’ said the other quickly. ‘ With God there is no race or caste, and the Lord Shiva can dispense with such observance; but even if I should take you into His shrine you could not see Him, for to you He is merely an idol of bronze, molten in the fire, and cleaned with tamarind juice.’

‘Have you seen Him yourself then? Is He more than this to you?’

‘Not so often, not so clearly as before,’ said the Shastri a little sadly; ‘yet He still breathes and lives for me, a clear symbol of the Spirit that informs the worlds!’

‘Then, if your conscience allows, let me also at least look at Him.’

The Shastri considered a moment, then his glance swept the vast moonlit sands of the river bed, and passed up the rocks to the pontifical spire that crowned them. He listened, and found silence vast as the empty river.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘You are a great Swami; you are the disciple of a great Rishi. You too shall look upon the Dancer in His shrine. Wait here, and I will see that all is prepared.’

He went lightly up the rock, and after an interval returned.

‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘Make no noise, for we are breaking a custom, and this must not be known.’

And without more thought of the scandal and the danger these two unworldly seekers climbed the path between the rocks and entered the courtyard of the temple by the gate that looked outward to the open river.

The Swami carefully locked the gate and directed Portall to put off his shoes. He then led his visitor up the steps of the temple into a dark hall of columns, whose delicate carving was faintly lit by the reflection of a shaft of moonlight laid slant across the pavement near the entrance, and of a redder counter-shaft of lamplight thrown from the door of the inner sanctuary at the far end. Again inviting the missionary to follow him, the Shastri led the way into the sacred cell.

A brazen lamp with several wicks, and shaped like a tall candlestick, stood a little aside, and illumined clearly the impassive, abstract features of a fantastic idol of old bronze, about three feet high, which stood on a pedestal at the back of the cell. The figure was poised upon one leg in a vigorous but rhythmical dance posture, the verisimilitude of which was enhanced by the various and responsive spread of its four arms, and by a splendid scrollwork of lifted hair that sprang from either side of the head as far as the great ring of bronze, adorned with graven tongues of flame, by which, as with an immense halo, the whole figure was surrounded; so that the monstrous shadow that loomed and flickered upon the wall above and beyond it might well seem to dance indeed. It was a work that would have quickened the pulse of a connoisseur, a relic, perhaps, of the Chola dominion of the eleventh century in those parts; though the harmony of its proportions, the exactitude of the poise, the sensitive modeling of the extremities, and the beauty and delicacy of the decoration, had no conscious effect upon the missionary’s mind, while for the Swami, apart from the endearment of custom, it was enough that the posture and attributes were, in the most obvious sense, ‘according to the Shastra.’

With a mixture of horror against which his reason fought, of curiosity, and of a thrilling sense of adventure, the Protestant clergyman regarded the graven image.

‘Does He say nothing to you?’ cried the Brahmin, looking into the missionary’s eyes. ‘Do you not behold there the dance of all the worlds that is the sport of God? Look, He carries the moon upon His head, the Ganges springs from His hair; in one hand He holds the fire of renunciation; in another the drum that calls men from the world; another motions fear away from His people; another points to His foot as their sure refuge. I worship the Lord of the Dance,’ and he turned and sang to his idol the words of a Sanskrit hymn with passionate devotion.

The sublime imagery of the conception thus expounded, the solemn strangeness of the place and occasion, the enthusiasm of his companion, and the trend of his own thought, drove the last vestiges of native repugnance out of the heart of the missionary, and he stood before the image filled with a sense of reverent inquiry, as of one who has been near to exaltation.

‘The sport of God!’ He thought of that other picture which he had been taught to worship from his childhood, the picture of God Suffering. Was not this a theme as great as that? Had not men, perhaps, as much need of this as that? Aye, said his conscience, it might be beautiful, helpful even, but was it true? And the impious materialism which dogs the European even to the horns of the altar of his religion answered, No.

Portall found that the Brahmin had left him alone in the sanctuary. Very reverently he withdrew, and joined him in the moonlit court. Secretly, as they had come, they opened the door and descended to the sand, neither saying a word. Then, with a spontaneous exchange of that salutation of joined hands as in prayer which the Hindus use among themselves, they parted.

Such candor as this of Portall’s, however, is not to be indulged with impunity by mortal men. Having learned to look beyond the fortifications of his native dogmatism, and to inhale the sweeter air of pantheistic speculation, he presently began to remove those fortifications, stone by stone, as unnecessary and insalubrious; until finally the question occurred to him, why he should continue to occupy that isolated site at all. The difference which he had always been taught to maintain between his own and alien faiths lay almost entirely in the validity of its teaching as an account of quasihistorical events in time. When he discovered (as in the course of so searching an inquiry as that upon which he was now embarked he could not but discover) how uncertain, how difficult, these claims were to maintain in the face of science on the one hand (for the Christianity of his particular sect had not even been accommodated to modern science) and of impartial philosophy on the other, he was inevitably led to undervalue even what was left. It speaks much for the spiritual nobility of the man that he could thus see crumble about him all that he had been taught to regard as the reality of his faith, and still keep fast hold of its essentials. The material catastrophe was long in coming, but it came at last; and after a year more of reading, meditation, inquiry, the conversation of the Shastri, and the influence of that visionary and ancient land in the service of which his own middle years were also passing, Portall conceived a wish to renounce the strict profession of his Western creed, and to adopt the calling of such a seeker in spiritual things as is known among Hindus as a Sanyassin.

He placed the scheme, in a purely impersonal form, before the Swami; and when the latter asked him why a man should abandon, for want of a material sign, his own religion for another which had itself nothing more credible of the kind to offer, he remarked that esoteric Hinduism at least did not ground its claims on the validity of such signs. Hinduism nominally does not proselytize; but teachers of many different races have done their share in the development of Indian religion, and Portall believed that he would in time be able to gather, out of the great storehouse of Indian spiritual wisdom, truths of vital import to the world at large.

His resolution, for such in time his wish became, was inevitably not without its tragic side. For the scandal, the thought of which long held him back, the opprobrious terms like ‘renegade,’ ‘apostate,’ that he would earn,— ‘insults,’ as he described them, ‘of an impotent bigotry,’ — he now cared nothing. ‘The scandal,’ he declared, ‘will do them good.’ But exile in any form, and all wandering from the ways and world in which we were brought up and in which our fathers trod before us, are always bitter, at least to the unreasonable soul that makes so large a part of us all; and spiritual exile, even when it can be hidden, not the least bitter. Hardest of all it was, when the time came, to leave the administrative work of the mission, which had flourished exceedingly in his hands; and his schools especially had become a matter of great pride to him, and a source of much good, he knew, to the people at large. But he had not the type or habit of mind that could approve even of the good that was done on what he considered, with whatever justice, to be false pretenses.

On another night of another February, in the same quarter of the moon, but two years after the adventure already related, he turned his back upon the little whitewashed hostel and homestead on the hill and set his face toward the tiara tower that glittered upon the rocky island in the river.

He had not gone far upon the frith of sand before a cry of river birds from the direction of the island heralded the appearance of another wanderer; and in the very centre of the channel he hailed and met the Swami himself. There was a look of steadfast purpose in the eyes of the Swami also. Portall asked him whither he was going.

‘My errand was to you, brother,’ he replied. ‘I was about to come to you on a matter of great moment to me.’

‘What was it, brother?’

‘I was going to ask you to give me the Christian baptism. I have come to the conclusion that your religion is better than mine.’

For some moments the vast silence of the river bed prevailed. Then the missionary broke it.

‘Thus,’ he cried, ‘does God with one hand grant us our prayer and with the other take away the heart that prompted it. Three years ago, and with what a transport would I have heard you speak those words!’

‘Yet grant my request, and do not you seek to change the heart that makes it,’ said the other with a tranquil smile.

‘Why do you desire this thing?’

‘Have I not said? The truth is single, but I think your religion is better than ours. I have watched its working, and you also I have watched. Your idols are better than ours. Ours give only consolation to the wise and barren trance, but this Christ that you have imagined, this worker of compassionate miracles, this divine victim slain for the sins of the people, still walks across the world, a teacher and a healer. He has come among us, and I would enroll myself among His followers, and share the merit that is acquired in His name.’

‘Would you forsake the truth?’

‘What is truth,’ said the Brahmin, ‘when men are unable to understand it? The truth I can keep, but it must be shown to the world in intelligible shape, such as will command right affection, and bring forth good fruit, like this of yours, the work of your beautiful, invisible idols.’

The missionary considered long. He looked back at the shore; he looked at the temple on the sand-steeped island; he looked at the moonlight glittering like a rod of silver far out upon the living water of the actual river. Then his resolution was taken.

‘Our idols are indeed beautiful,’ he said, ‘but they were made according to old rules long ago; they no longer have the aspect, nor speak the language, of reality. Already in Europe their altars are forsaken; nor can this good work of theirs continue long here unless they be somehow themselves refashioned. No, brother, the world to-day wants new gods, or at least a thorough regeneration of the old. Let us go together into the forest, you and I, and there converse and meditate, and consider what forms and aspects of the truth, as we have known it, may now most clearly and profitably be shown to the world. You shall speak of man that is the Avatar of God, and I of the Son of Man that was the Christ; you of God’s dancing, and I of His dying; you of the Transmigration of Souls, and I of the Resurrection of the Body; and we will decide whether to speak the language of this or that old faith refashioned, or of a new one that shall embrace and harmonize the truth, and reject the error of all.’

And the Brahmin said, ‘Let it be so.’

So there and then they set out together across the sand, leaving their worldly affairs without a thought, as Jesus required of His disciples of old.

They left the village and the mission buildings far behind; they left unvisited the temple on the rock; and as far again beyond they came to the margin of the actual water of the sacred river. Here were spread nets and a bivouac of the fishermen, upon whose wide-eyed astonishment they at length prevailed to give them a passage that very night into the hills that bound the northern horizon, the hills of the great forest country where the Rishis used to dwell.

The world still awaits their return. Providence apparently finds no man indispensable, and it is given to few to carry out, on the scale and plan framed by their own conceit, the task they have set before themselves. Of these two curious and devoted wanderers it may at least be said that if the fame of their departure, which was much noised abroad, be the last news that the world will have of them, it formed in itself a message not unworthy of the hope that led them.

THE CHRIST AND THE BUDDHA¹

A CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

BY KENNETH J. SAUNDERS

I

HE is a bold man who will accept a challenge thrown down by L. Adams Beck and expect readers of the Atlantic Monthly to listen. But this I would do. I write in the beautiful city of Kyoto, for more than a thousand years a stronghold of Buddhism, where it can be studied in many attractive forms; and I have just been revisiting Hiei San and Koya San, two great mountain fastnesses where the Indian religion was carefully made over to suit the Japanese.

Here in Japan, in fact, it has largely become a religion of salvation through faith; and its chief objects of worship are the compassionate Amida and Kwannon. The historic Sakyamuni and his appeal to reason are alike largely forgotten. Little do his followers here think of the fundamental doctrine of Karma, the inherent law of cause and effect, which was taken over by the Founder from earlier Indian thought, and which the writer of the challenge accepts as the essential philosophy of Buddhism. For them religion is rather a matter of comfort in this life, especially at times of sickness and sorrow, and of a life hereafter in some Paradise of the Blest. Popular religion is, in fact, in this Eastern land, very much what L. Adams Beck truly says it is in the West. It has always been so, even in India. I have just been on a pilgrimage of study to the great Buddhist centres: Sarnath, Taxila, Sanchi, Ajanta, Anuradhapura, Borobudur. Here this great faith flourished for a time, evolved new and strange forms, and has left noble monuments to tell its story. Its great pictures in the Caves of Ajanta and its noble sculptures at such places as Sanchi confirm my impressions of it as a living religion in Japan — one that has always thriven, not primarily because of its Indian philosophy, but because it held up to needy men the beautiful legend of the life of Sakyamuni the Compassionate, and of his former lives as animal or man. The painters and sculptors delighted to depict again and again the charming tale of how, as King of the Monkeys, he formed a bridge for his tribe to pass across when, manlike, the King of Benares was shooting them; and they enforced this doctrine of sacrifice for others by another story of him as King of the Elephants, yielding up his tusks to the queen who in a former life had been his jealous mate. As the Prince Vessantara, giving away all that he had — even wife and children — to the needy, he is at last the Ideal Man, ready for Buddhahood. They interpret these old stories as embodying the essence of Buddhism; and the orthodox schoolman, Buddhaghosha of Ceylon, has summed up in a famous phrase this work of salvation: ‘More than the ocean has he shed of his blood; more than the stars has he given of his eyes.’ Soon the original view that he did this seeking his own salvation gave place to the doctrine that he did it ‘out of compassion for the world.’

Buddhism is in fact a religion rather than a philosophy, as it is commonly described by Western scholars. And after twenty years of careful study of it at its best in monastery and village, in literature and life, in art and in action, in southern countries like Ceylon and Burma, and in the Far East, I venture to accept the challenge thrown down in the May 1926 issue of the Atlantic.

That this article has much charm and truth in it goes without saying, and with a great deal of it Christians will be found to agree; but clearly they cannot admit its claim that Christ is challenged by Buddha as a guide to truth. Many of us to-day sit lightly to great parts of our Semitic heritage, while we cleave gratefully to the Prophets and Psalmists of Israel and to the belief that God guided that richly dowered people for the spiritual enrichment of us all. Few of us again will be found to argue that Christendom, as it now is, is an eloquent proof of Christianity; and we respond with sympathy to the bitter but just words quoted as from a Chinese writer — even if we suspect him to be an Englishman in disguise. Our record in Asia is dark enough. Yet we are not blind to signs of deepening spiritual life in Christendom and of an underlying idealism which is the fruit of the Christian faith — a discontent with things as they are, and an honest attempt to seek to apply the mind of Christ to our social and political life.

I am not sure that since the days of Asoka, in the third century before Christ, the Buddhist world has seriously attempted to apply the mind of its founder to social and political relations as Christians are to-day seeking to apply the mind of Christ; and it is very certain that here in Japan it is the little Christian Church, poor and small as it is, which is everywhere giving the lead in challenging the powers of militarism and imperialism, and is at work in what one of its leaders calls ‘ human architecture.’ Before the Dawn, the novel which describes his experiences in the slums of a great industrial city, has had a record sale; and the example set by such Christian leaders is being followed by Buddhists. Not the least significant expression of the Buddhist revival is a new interest in social service. On Koya San — a centre hitherto remote from the people — I found a monk whom I had met in America and England; he was studying the work of such social centres as Hull House and Toynbee Hall, that he might introduce social service into the sect most noted for its mystical beliefs and magical practices. And thoughtful Asiatics everywhere acknowledge with gratitude that Christians have shown the way, and that the West is full of such service.

The current facile distinction between East and West so common on Indian lips and among admirers of India’s great heritage, — of whom I am one, — that the East is spiritual and the West materialist, is surely based on a misconception of two different ideals of the spiritual. I have recently had occasion to challenge Indian audiences with the question whether the League of Nations, the work of tired and harassed men of the West, is not after all a greater spiritual achievement than the Noncoöperation movement. In the West we judge of a spiritual movement by asking what service it renders to humanity; and this practical test is not the least of the gifts which the West has to make to the East. That the West has much also to learn I am convinced.

I fully sympathize with the challenger in her resentment against the patronage of some of our Christian hymns; yet those who believe that they have from Christ a trust must hand it on, and this is at bottom the justification of the missionary movement.

‘The Challenge,’ while it scarcely mentions either the Buddha or the Christ, is in fact a plea for the Indian philosophy and the Indian ideal as against that which the West has accepted ‘from a small Oriental nation in its decadence.’ But the West has taken its ideal not only from the Jews, but much more from such Christians as Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, and from their Master; and its rich heritage comes also from Greece and Rome. Each nation has in fact contributed to it, and each age has shaped it until today it is very difficult to analyze our ways of thought. Modern science has profoundly modified the ordinary Christian’s view of the world he lives in and of God’s relation to it. Not many of us believe in a ‘Deity who sits above Law and continually interferes with and breaks it.’ The view of most of us is that God is immanent in His world, and that He yet transcends it. It comes from Him and moves on to realize His purposes. We tend, in fact, to hold together the two views which ‘The Challenge’ contrasts.

Those who are not theologians may make this contrast vivid to themselves if they will compare the first part of the striking film play, ‘The Ten Commandments,’ with the second part. In the first half we have the Semitic view of Jehovah revealing His laws in the thunders of Sinai; in the second half the same laws are shown to be still operative, but in ways more congenial to the modern mind. They are represented as working themselves out in the law of cause and effect. The dishonest contractor builds a shoddy cathedral; it falls in ruins and kills his own mother, and so on. Melodrama, no doubt; but truer to our ways of thought than the splendid drama on Sinai. Yet, as Heine said, ‘Jehovah knew his public!’ And the public changes from age to age.

Each age has its own modes of thought and its own revelation of God, and ours is in some ways more Indian than Semitic. We think of these laws not as a divine fiat so much as an expression of the divine nature. But we have not got this characteristic modern attitude from India so much as from modern science; and it is perhaps true to say that such Indian thinkers as Sakyamuni anticipated in their religious and ethical thought the great scientific discoveries of our times. They certainly applied the law of cause and effect with splendid and ruthless logic. Are we sure that Jesus had so different a view of His Heavenly Father? When we turn to the Gospels and reëxamine them we shall ask ourselves whether such words as ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father’ imply an omniscient mind aloof from the world, or a mind that works in the world. The Fourth Gospel, with its lessons of a Father continually at work, has, as we have seen, approximated to the latter view. And in some of the fragments lately discovered and attributed to Jesus we have such splendid words as ‘Lift the stone and I am there. Hew the wood and I am there.’ The Kingdom of God was certainly for Jesus a present Reality working in men and things and ultimately to be fulfilled in God’s complete triumph. It is ‘within’ man; it is also already ‘in their midst.’

L. Adams Beck represents Christ as accepting the Indian view — transmigration and all — and finds in Him an Authentic Word which, alas! the doctors and theologians straightway neglected, and fatally misinterpreted. Some of them deserve this censure — yet the greatest of them, Saint Paul and his disciple, the Fourth Evangelist, can be seen at work, in those of their writings which have come down to us, at the great task of a cosmic interpretation of Jesus, which in many ways approximates to the Indian view of Reality. He is the indwelling Logos, through whom and in whom and unto whom are all things; the light that lightens all men blazes forth in Him; He is life, and all who are one with Him are sharers in that life. So far, however, as transmigration goes, it is never mentioned except once, in this Fourth Gospel, and here we see Jesus rejecting it as an explanation of the tragedy of the man born blind.

It is true that this Johannine doctrine of the Logos, or Immanent Reason, is at variance with much Semitic thought; yet Saint Paul and Saint John were both Hebrews by birth, and almost every word of the prologue of the Fourth Gospel can be found in the writings of Philo, the Alexandrian Jew. Tempting as it may be to some to vent their dislike of the Hebrews of to-day, — personally I think that America owes a very great deal of her best culture to them, — yet we must in fairness own that there is even in our Semitic heritage a view of God which is not unlike that of the best Indian thought.

There is the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, for example, to which we owe very much; and there is everywhere the sense that God is just and not arbitrary. To say that ‘ the Jehovah of the Jews is a variant of the Allah of the Mohammedans ’ is an anachronism; and even the Mohammedan has his Sufis, mystics who find Allah in His universe — not outside it.

It is this view which culminates in the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit; and the Fourth Evangelist sets this forth in words which have become classical in the Christian Church. A well-known Buddhist author has called the Johannine writings the ‘Buddhism in the New Testament/ At a recent Buddhist conference, when a missionary of great sympathy and insight had expounded the prologue as the essence of what Christians believe about God and the world, the great leader of the Buddhist revival in China, Fassu, arose and with a smile exclaimed: ‘Now we realize that your Christ is the true Tao (Logos); but,’ he went on, with true Chinese humor and logic, ‘what is more important is that we incarnate Him in our lives.’

This is the point which the Sermon on the Mount and the Epistles of Saint John kept pressing upon the early Church, and it is this which Christians are more and more realizing to-day. If God is love indwelling in the universe, He is most present where men live together in love. As Shinran, the Japanese Buddhist Wesley, sang in the Middle Ages: ‘Thy mind is perfected in us when we shed Thy love upon our fellow men.’

II

Buddhism and Christianity have come to agree in so many things that it is one of the tasks of our time to make it clear in what they differ. The first task of scholarship is necessarily to rediscover the historic Founders. The quest of the historic Jesus has concerned Western scholars for more than a century, and the quest of the historic Sakyamuni is beginning. Perhaps the first step is after all a very simple one. It is to realize that when the early Church acclaimed Jesus as Christ it made the great claim for Him that He was the fulfillment of the Messianic hopes of Israel. It hailed Him as God’s Anointed. In the same way, when Gautama is called Buddha it is the acknowledgment by his followers that he is the Awakened — that he is in line with the great seers of the Upanishads. This is an elementary step, but it must be taken before we can get very far in this understanding of the two great figures. The next step is to realize that each great Founder acknowledged the title in his own sense. So revolutionary was the interpretation put upon His Messiahship that His contemporaries killed Him for it. So different was the Buddha’s conception of the ultimate Reality to which he had awaked from that of his contemporaries that his teachings soon formed the basis for a new and heretical sect. Buddhism, like Christianity, became a new religion. And both showed in their missionary zeal their sense of this newness. Each was a New Evangel.

Thus the challenge of the Buddha to the Christ is by no means the same as that of orthodox Indian to orthodox Hebrew philosophy. It is rather the challenge of one great ‘son of fact’ to another. It is the challenge of one type of religious experience to another type. These two Himalayan figures tower above our understanding of them. And yet, by making it clear that the one is in the line of the great Hebrew prophets, the other in the line of the great Indian yogis, their outlines become clearer, even though their summits are still obscured by mist. For Sakyamuni is more than an Indian yogi, and Jesus much more than a Hebrew prophet.

And so the controversy goes on among scholars. The laity can only follow it afar off. Is the Buddha to be reckoned as rationalist or as divinity? This is one great issue lately joined by Dr. Keith of Edinburgh, who finds in him one who deliberately challenged the great gods of India and set himself up as their rival. Or, to turn to the artists, is he the solitary yogi of the great Anuradhapura statue, seated with hands folded and eyes shut in ecstatic contemplation, or is he the Socratic Teacher of other artists, who, with a quizzical smile on his lips and finger and thumb joined in exposition, is driving some unseen disciple to choose the Middle Path? Is he, in fact, the Great Teacher of a middle path between skepticism on the one hand and credulity on the other, as he is between the life of the senses and the life of asceticism? He is no doubt all of these. Like Jesus, he towers above our categories.

And of Jesus what shall we say ? Is He the great Ethical Reformer of the Hebrews, or is He the Apocalyptic Teacher? The Church is to-day splitting on the question whether it is to read His strange apocalyptic sayings literally or not; and indeed it has always been splitting on the question of what is poetry and what is prose in this simple yet enigmatic Teacher. The fact remains that His ethic was so revolutionary that it maddened the orthodox. Imagine what they felt at the story of the Good Samaritan. And His apocalyptic teaching was so different from that of His contemporaries that the New Testament itself is divided as to its interpretation. Saint Paul in his earlier epistles takes one viewy and another in his later writings; the Fourth Evangelist gets rid of it almost altogether. A great man condemns the world to the task of understanding him; and it is not difficult to sympathize with both Fundamentalist and Modernist Christians; nor with the Buddhists of Ceylon, who find in the Buddha the loving elder brother of mankind and yet accept the view of the Neo-Buddhists that he was the prince of rationalists, who set up reason where faith had been enthroned. Both views are found in the orthodox Pali Canon.

It is also easy to sympathize with those masses of Buddhists who find this rich and complex figure so divine that they are content to call him ‘God above the gods.’ He has in fact been for great masses a compassionate savior; and if to-day the Christian missionary is right in seeking to replace him by the Christ, what arguments is he to use? He will clearly want to rid himself of that race superiority which the author of ‘The Challenge’ rightly resents and repudiates. It is utterly unchristian. But he will none the less maintain that the Person of Jesus, with its more distinct outlines, its more passionate love of humanity, its readiness to suffer to the end rather than to compromise with evil, is a wholesome substitute for the beautiful yet vague figures of the Buddhas. The historic Founder is to-day hard to find in most Buddhist lands, and Buddhists, like Hindus, are arrested and attracted by the Christ.

As to the essential nature of its Founder, the Buddhist Church is almost hopelessly divided as to whether he was after all so much the compassionate one as the unpassionate one; one part of it sets up as the moral ideal the arhat, — aloof and cold, — while the other acclaims the bodhisattva, who refuses Buddhahood ‘out of compassion for the world.’

III

A religion must be tested ultimately by its ethical ideals; and while there is very much in the gentleness and courtesy of Buddhism which we may well admire and imitate, yet we miss in it that passionate hatred of evil and that shepherdlike care for the needy which is of the essence of Christianity. The Buddhist is bidden in his most orthodox books to stand aloof from a suffering world. The great mass are ‘fools,’ and he had better not mingle with them.

The Indian ideal of sainthood is an ideal of detachment, as a recent writer in these columns showed very clearly in his wonderful picture of the Saint of Benares: ‘Souls are entangled as much by good deeds as by evil deeds/ and the pure one is to be ‘like the lotus leaf, from which the drops of water pass lightly away.’

It is no accident that the symbol of Christianity is the cross, with its emphasis upon the suffering love of God, and that the symbol of Buddhism is the lotus unsullied in the midst of slime, or the wheel of the victorious conqueror. Here in the symbolism of the two religions it will become clear, even more than in the titles of the Founders, that they have at bottom two complementary views of the world and two ideals of conduct, but that these views and ideals must ultimately conflict. The Christ accepts the challenge of the Buddha. He claims to fulfill all that is good in the past of His own people, and especially those wonderful ideals of the Suffering Servant, and of the spiritual Messiah who comes to lift up all that are downtrodden, and to open the Kingdom of Heaven to the poor and needy.

And the Fourth Gospel sets Him forth as the Logos, as the light which has been coming continually in all men now fully ablaze. It is the confident claim of the Church that its Lord fulfills Greek and Roman ideals also; and when He is challenged by the Indian concept of an indwelling Reason it becomes clear, as we have seen, that He had such a view. But Jesus refused to allow this view to overcome that other view of His people, that God is greater than His world and transcends it. The ethical teacher cannot forget that a purely immanent view cuts at the root of human personality, just as it destroys that of the divine personality. We are bidden to be perfect, as God is perfect, and this means to realize the ideal perfection of character. We are to think of God as even more sublime and wonderful than the myriad worlds which He has made, and as only adequately expressed in the perfection of human life. He is personal, and we are struggling toward personality. Here, then, is a corrective to any pantheistic world-view; and not the least of its great contributions to human thought is the Semitic emphasis upon personality, which is indeed one of the keynotes of our modern thinking.

If, then, Indian thought reënforces our scientific thinking and affirms the truth of the Logos doctrine, we in turn are helping India to see in the Person of Jesus and in His Gospel of the Kingdom a new world of Reality. He is becoming to Asia, as He became to Greece and Rome, the Touchstone of Truth. To accept One who became the Lord of Greek philosophers and of Roman men of affairs India and Japan may well be proud. The Gospel which won ancient Europe will not be rejected by Asia.