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The Mission of Buddhism
BUDDHISM came as a blaze of lightning across the sky of India's tradition; it was almost a fiery writing on the wall, bearing the doom of a world. Buddhism opposed and denied some of the very fundamental principles upon which the old world rested. It was perhaps the greatest iconoclastic movement ever thrown up by the human consciousness. First of all, it denied the tradition itself; it did not recognise the authority and sanctity of the purve pitarah, the ancient fathers, nor their revealed knowledge, the Veda. Buddhism enjoined the priority and supremacy of the individual's own consciousness, own effort and own realisation. Be thou thy own light. Work out thy own salvation. That was the injunction given. Not to take anything for granted - not even God or Brahman - but to judge and see for yourself where and what is the truth. It was the first protestant reaction recorded in human history. Buddhism has sometimes been called the rebel child of Hinduism. The word need not be a term of abuse. A rebel is not always a mere destroyer, a pure negator. A negation can be only a form of stating something positive, an affirmation of a truth and reality. Not unoften a rebel means a call back to a truth that has been neglected, inadequately treated or completely omitted and by-passed; it is an urgent demand that that which has been forgotten and left behind, uncared for and undeveloped, must now be taken up again and brought forward, made a full-grown and mature element in a greater and more perfect organisation of human consciousness.
Buddhism cried halt because of two omissions: it turned
man's mind to two new directions. In our eagerness to reach the
spiritual and the supra-sensual, we gave scant recognition to the
mental and the rational; and yet mind and reason should
Page - 280 be the very basis of the life spiritual. And in the pursuit of God and the gods and the things divine, we became blind to human problems, things concerning man in the human way. The earlier vision gives us a happy picture of humanity. The world moves, it was said, from delight to delight, it was born in delight and it consummates in delight. One sang of immortality, of the solar light, of men being children of Heaven and Beatitude. That this material structure on which man leads his precarious existence is a texture of age and disease and death, that misery and undelight is of the very substance of human life was a hard fact that did not get due recognition. Perhaps it was an earlier, that is to say, a younger humanity
A simple Child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death ?¹
Yes, it was the age, almost a golden age, when man lived with his sense married to the Dawn, spontaneous in his reflexes, prime-sautier, intuitive and imaginative, full of a natural, unspoilt, unsophisticated happiness and hopefulness. But the Age of Reason had to come, and man's maturer nature, perhaps some "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought". Such an age of Reason and Ratiocination and pure brain power was ushered in by Buddha in India, and almost contemporaneously by Socrates in Greece and Confucius in China. The rational, that is to say, the scientific or analytical attitude to things appeared in the human consciousness for the first time in its fullness and almost exclusive sway. Neither the Vedas nor the Upanishads knew of logic as an instrument-a necessary instrument-for knowledge and expression. The old-world method was, as I said, intuitive, experiential, empirical, dogmatic. Also the atmosphere of that world, the stress of the consciousness was theocratic; what the new world brought in was what is called humanistic. We say then that it was a necessity: it was a necessity that the rational, logical, ratiocinative, analytic mentality should be brought out and given its play and place. It is perhaps an inferior power of the mind or consciousness, but it is a strong
¹ Wordsworth, "We
Are Seven".
Page - 281 power and has its use and utility. It is the power that gives the form and pattern for the display of consciousness and intelligence in outward expression and external living; it is a firm weapon that gives control over these inferior ranges of consciousness. The leap from the sense-consciousness or the elements of consciousness, from a mental growth just adequate and not too specialised, straight into the supra-sensuous and the transcendent had been an inevitable necessity, so that the human consciousness might get the first taste of its supreme status and value: a similar necessity brought to the fore this element of the mind, the mind's own power - of judgement and will-so that there might be a greater and wider integration of human nature and also that the higher realities may be captured in our normal consciousness. Even for the withdrawal of the mind from the outer objects to the inner sources, the mind itself can be used with much effect. And Buddha showed it magnificently. And of course, Shankara too who followed in his footsteps. To abrogate the matter of fact, rational view of life in order to view it spiritually, to regard it wholly as an expression or embodiment or vibration of consciousness-delight was possible to the Vedic discipline which saw and adored the Immanent Godhead. It was not possible to Buddha and Buddhistic consciousness; for the Immanent Divine was ignored in the Buddhistic scheme. Philosophically, in regard to ultimate principles, Buddhism was another name for nihilism, creation being merely an assemblage of particles of consciousness that is desire; the particles scattered and dissolved, remains only the supreme incomparable Nirvana. But pragmatically Buddhism was supremely humanistic.
As it took man as a rational animal, at least as a
starting-point, even so it gave a sober human value to things human.
A rationalist's eye made him see and
recognise the normal misery of mankind; and
the great compassion goaded him to find the way out of the misery. It
was not a dispassionate quest into the ultimate truth and reality nor
an all-consuming zeal to meet the Divine that set Buddha on the Path;
it was the everyday problem of the ordinary man which troubled his
mind, and for which he sought a solution, a permanent radical
solution. The Vedanist saw only delight and ecstasy and beatitude;
for
Page - 282 him the dark shadow did not exist at all or did not matter; it was the product of illusion or wrong view of things; one was asked to ignore or turn away from this and look towards That. Such was not the Buddha's procedure. These are the two primary truths - arya sarya-which Buddha's illumination meant and for which he has become one of the great divine leaders of humanity. First, he has discovered man's rationality, and second, he has discovered man's humanity. Since his advent two thousand and five hundred years ago till the present day, in this what may pertinently be called the Buddhist age of humanity, the entire growth, development and preoccupation of mankind was centred upon the twofold truth. Science and religion today are the highest expressions of that achievement. They speak of the coming of a new Buddha (Maitreya) with the close of the cycle now, ushering another cycle of new growth and achievement. It is said also that humanity has reached its apex, a great change-over is inevitable: seers and savants have declared that man will have to surpass himself and become superman in order to fulfil what was expected of him since his advent upon earth. If we say that the preparation for such a consummation was taken up at the last stage by the Buddha and Buddhism, and the Buddhistic inspiration, we will not be wrong. It was a cycle of ascending tapasya for the human vehicle: it was a seeking for the pure spirit which meant a clearance of the many ignorances that shrouded it. It was also an urge of the spirit to encompass in its fold a larger and larger circle of humanity: it meant that the spiritual consciousness is no more an aristocratic or hermetic virtue, but a need in which the people, the large mass, have also their share, maybe in varying degrees.
A new humanity broad-based to encompass the whole earth,
expressing and embodying the light and power and joy of spiritual
heights, forming a happy world state, may very well announce in the
new age the descent of a supreme truth and principle of existence
here below. Page - 283
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