CHAPTER XI MONASTICISM IN CHINA Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum. LUCRETIUS: De Rerum Natura, Lib. i. 101. In a previous chapter I have said something about Buddhism in Korea, where it is the discredited but not wholly disavowed survival of a once dominant creed. I Chinese propose in this chapter to deal with Buddhism Buddhism. in China, where, though decadent, it is still dominant, and where the explanation of its influence provides a clue to many of the dark riddles of the national character. Buddhism in China is indeed a curious mixture of perishing rites and popular superstitions. There is probably no country where there are fewer evidences of faith or devotion, or where, on the other hand, an apparently doomed system dies so hard. From the squalid and dilapidated condition of the temples, from the indifference and irreverence with which the worshippers enact their artificial parts, and from the miserable status of the priesthood, it might be inferred that the days of Buddhism were numbered, and that a rival system was driving it from dishonoured shrines. Such, however, would be a most superficial view of the case. This mysterious religion, which has survived the varied competition of Rationalism, Confucianism, and Ceremonialism, and which has an antiquity not far short of two thousand years in China, is yet the favourite creed of a community numbering 350,000,000; and despised and de generate though it be, it will still lift its head and smile its serene Buddha-smile long after its purer and prouder and more splendid counterpart in Japan has crumbled into the dust. Its superstitious sanction. The explanation of this strange anomaly is that the popular faith has with rare discretion intertwined itself with the popular superstitions. Partly creating and partly accommodating itself to them, Buddhism, involved in the sacred ties of Ancestor-Worship, and claiming to dispense the portions of another life, has wrapped itself in a covering of triple brass, and can afford to laugh at its enemies. It has found the key to the inner being of this inscrutable people, and, in secure command of the lock, takes good care that none other shall tamper with the wards. It may safely be contended that, were it not for the uneasy anxieties of the Chinese about their souls, and the universal and cherished cult of the Family Tree, and for the part played in relation to both by the Buddhist priesthood, Chinese Buddhism would long ere now have languished and disappeared.1 Dogmas, tenets, ritual, and liturgy in themselves are of small import to the Celestials. The stately ceremonial of the official creed, the intellectual axioms of Confucius, the painted imageworship of the Buddhist temple, the mysticism of the Rationalists, or sect of Lao-tzu, produce little permanent 1 In an interesting letter, the late Sir T. Wade, formerly British Minister in Peking, wrote to me on this subject as follows:-The original capture of the lettered classes of China by the apostles of Buddhism was largely due to the fact that the period of their greatest activity as writers or translators (viz. the Tang Dynasty, A.D. 600-900) was at the same time eminently remarkable for the elegance of its prose and its poetry. It was, as we should say, the Augustan age of Chinese composition. It has also been due to the support which it received with tolerable steadiness from the Central Government, notably under the two last dynasties. And yet, almost universal as is the thraldom of its puerile superstitions, it has never supplanted Confucianism as the national code of ethics, nor has its literature ever been able to maintain a footing in the national education.' effect upon their stolid imaginations. The beautiful teaching enshrined in the sacred writings as they came from India, the precepts that made white lives and brought tearless deaths, that almost Christianised idolatry and might have redeemed a world, have long ago died down into frigid calculations, tabulating in opposite columns with mathematical nicety the credit and debit accounts of the orthodox disciple. Thus, on the one hand, the people are plunged in gloomy dread of a hereafter, determined by the exact laws of moral retribution; on the other, deeply embedded in the springs of their nature, is a fanatical attachment to their Lares and Penates, and to the worship of the dead; and hence it comes about that the religion which, whatever its shortcomings and disqualifications, ministers to their requirements in both these respects, is simultaneously derided and advocated, neglected and espoused. Contra dictory opinion of monks. No better illustration of this anomalous state of affairs can be given than the condition and public estimation of the Buddhist monks. A stranger will at first be puzzled by the opposite verdicts which he hears passed upon this class of men. He will hear them denounced as contemptible outcasts, as pariahs from society, who have forfeited all the sympathies of humanity by cutting themselves adrift from all human ties. And this is a sentence which to some extent finds its corroboration in their forlorn and decrepit appearance, in their cheerless mode of life, and in their divorce from the haunts and homes of men. On the other hand, he will find these despised exiles supported by popular contributions, recruited by voluntary adherents, and engaged in the discharge of essential rites at the most solemn moments of life and death, and in the service to the dead. A grosser seeming contradiction can scarcely be imagined. Its explanation. And yet it is an identical feeling which is partly responsible for both attitudes, and which prepares for these unhappy creatures this opposite mixture of toleration and contempt. The peculiar sanctity of the family relations is one cause both of their ostracism and of their employment. They are needed to discharge on behalf of others the very obligations which they have renounced themselves. Expelled from the world because they have ignored the family, they are brought back into it to testify that the family is the first of all earthly ties. Can anything more strange be conceived? It is a creed whose apostates are enlisted as its prophets, and whose perverts become its priests. When Sakyamuni first instituted the monastic order, like St. Anthony he did not contemplate the creation of a priestly office, or the rise of a hierarchy. The Original clerical profession had no special connection in conception of monas- his mind with monkish life. The first Buddhist ticism. monks, like those of Egypt, were pious men who, in pursuit of their master's teaching that worldly and carnal ties were the source of all evil, and the main obstacle to that serene altitude of contemplation by which absorption into the higher life at length became possible, severed themselves from their fellow-creatures, and sought remote and unfriended retreats for purposes of spiritual exercise and self-mortification. They were primarily recluses and secondarily preachers, but in no resort priests. It was only in later times, as the first pattern was forgotten, and accretions developed by other countries and circumstances grew up, that the manifold accessories of sacerdotalism, particularly among the peoples of the north, environed and obscured the original ideal. The logical carrying out of Buddha's precepts, however, Its inver sion. brought the anchorite into early collision with the most idolised beliefs of Chinese life. The essence of monasticism, viz. the repudiation of all earthly connections, the lifelong abandonment of father, mother, brothers, and sisters, the surrender of the covenant of wedlock and the hopes of paternity—above all, the utter severance of the limb from the ancestral trunk, is the very antipodes of the highest conception of duty that a Chinese can entertain. Hence arose the dishonour in which the monkish order has long been held, and from which it has only rescued its existence by abandoning its traditions. The monastery has, in fact, become the very converse of what Buddha ever intended that it should be. The secular has put on the religious, and the monk has saved himself by turning priest. up the A spiritual insurance. We have seen how indispensable are his ministrations in the worship of the dead, and in expediting the happy transmigration of the departed soul. There the mummeries of the temple are enlisted to fill incomplete credentials of the deceased, and to visé his passport, so to speak, to another world. To the more pious or superstitious (there is no distinction between the two classes in China) they are not less obligatory as a policy of spiritual insurance, to be taken out with precautionary object during lifetime. The Chinaman is a firm believer in the doctrine of justification by works; he expects a return in the next life exactly proportionate to the labour and money he has spent or caused to be spent in deserving it in this. Every mumbled prayer, every tap of the drum or clash of the cymbal by the paid hierophant whom he has engaged, will be rewarded by so much tangible gain in the next stage of existence. Metempsychosis may bring him a worse or a better lot; he may groan in poverty or loll in |