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this also it agrees with Christianity, which teaches that "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap"; that he who turns his pound into five will be set over five cities, he who turns it into ten, over ten cities.

A third point of contact with Christianity, however singular it may at first appear to say so, is the doctrine of Nirvana. Nirvana, to the Buddhist, means the absolute, eternal world, beyond time and space; that which is nothing to us now, but will be everything hereafter. Incapable of cognizing both time and eternity, it makes them absolute negations of each other.

The peculiarity of Plato, according to Mr. Emerson and other Platonists was, that he was able to grasp and hold intellectually both conceptions, of God and man, the infinite and finite, the eternal and the temporal. The merit of Christianity is, in like manner, that it is able to take up and keep, not primarily as dogma, but as life, both these antagonistic ideas. Christianity recognizes God as the infinite and eternal, but recognizes also the world of time and space as real. Man exists as well as God: we love God, we must love man too. Brahmanism loves God, but not man; it has piety, but not humanity. Buddhism loves man, but not God; it has humanity, but not piety; or if it has piety, it is by a beautiful want of logic, its heart being wiser than its head. That which seems an impossibility in these Eastern systems is a fact of daily life to the Christian child, to the ignorant and simple Christian man or woman, who, amid daily duty and trial, find joy in both heavenly and earthly love.

There is a reason for this in the inmost nature of Christianity as compared with Buddhism. Why is it that Buddhism is a religion without God? Sakya-muni did not ignore God. The object of his life was to attain Nirvana, that is, to attain a union with God, the Infinite Being. He became Buddha by this divine experience. Why, then, is not this religious experience a constituent element in Buddhism, as it is in Christianity? Because in Buddhism man struggles upward to find God, while in Christianity God comes down to find man. To speak in the language of technical theology, Buddhism is a doctrine

of works, and Christianity of grace. That which God gives all men may receive, and be united by this community of grace in one fellowship. But the results

attained by effort alone, divide men; because some do more and receive more than others. The saint attained Buddha, but that was because of his superhuman efforts and sacrifices; it does not encourage others to hope for the same result.

We see, then, that here, as elsewhere, the superiority of Christianity is to be found in its quantity, in its fulness of life. It touches Buddhism at all its good points, in all its truths. It accepts the Buddhistic doctrine of rewards and punishments, of law, progress, selfdenial, self-control, humanity, charity, equality of man with man, and pity for human sorrow; but to all this it adds how much more! It fills up the dreary void of Buddhism with a living God; with a life of God in man's soul, a heaven here as well as hereafter. It gives us, in addition to the struggle of the soul to find God, a God coming down to find the soul. It gives a divine as real as the human, an infinite as solid as the finite. And this it does, not by a system of thought, but by a fountain and stream of life. If all Christian works, the New Testament included, were destroyed, we should lose a vast deal no doubt; but we should not lose Christianity; for that is not a book, but a life. Out of that stream of life would be again developed the conception of Christianity, as a thought and a belief. We should be like the people living on the banks of the Nile, ignorant for five thousand years of its sources; not knowing whence its beneficent inundations were derived; not knowing by what miracle its great stream could flow on and on amid the intense heats, where no rain falls, and fed during a course of twelve hundred miles by no single affluent, yet not absorbed in the sand, nor evaporated by the ever-burning sun. But though ignorant of its source, they know it has a source, and can enjoy all its benefits and blessings. So Christianity is a full river of life, containing truths apparently the most antagonistic, filling the soul and heart of man and the social state of nations with its impulses

and its ideas. We should lose much in losing our positive knowledge of its history; but if all the books were gone, the tablets of the human heart would remain, and on these would be written the everlasting Gospel of Jesus, in living letters which no years could efface and no changes conceal.

CHAPTER V.

ZOROASTER AND THE ZEND AVESTA.

§ 1. Ruins of the Palace of Xerxes at Persepolis. § 2. Greek Accounts of Zoroaster. Plutarch's Description of his Religion. § 3. Anquetil du Perron and his Discovery of the Zend Avesta. § 4. Epoch of Zoroaster. What do we know of him? §5. Spirit of Zoroaster and of his Religion. § 6. Character of the Zend Avesta. § 7. Later Development of the System in the Bundehesch. § 8. Relation of the Religion of the Zend Avesta to that of the Vedas. § 9. Is Monotheism or pure Dualism the Doctrine taught in the Zend Avesta? § 10. Relation of this System to Christianity. The Kingdom of Heaven.

§ 1. Ruins of the Palace of Xerxes at Persepolis.

N the southwestern part of Persia is the lovely valley of Schiraz, in the province of Farsistan, which is the ancient Persis. Through the long spring and summer the plains are covered with flowers, the air is laden with perfume, and the melody of birds, winds, and waters fills the ear. The fields are covered with grain, which ripens in May; the grapes, apricots, and peaches are finer than those of Europe. The nightingale (or bulbul) sings more sweetly than elsewhere, and the rose-bush, the national emblem of Persia, grows to the size of a tree, and is weighed down by its luxuriant blossoms. The beauty of this region, and the loveliness of the women of Schiraz awakened the genius of Hafiz and of Saadi, the two great lyric poets of the East, both of whom resided here.

At one extremity of this valley, in the hollow of a crescent formed by rocky hills, thirty miles northwest of Schiraz, stands an immense platform, fifty feet high above the plain, hewn partly out of the mountain itself, and partly built up with gray marble blocks from twenty to sixty feet long, so nicely fitted together that the joints can scarcely be detected. This platform is about fourteen.

There

hundred feet long by nine hundred broad, and its faces front the four quarters of the heavens. You rise from the plain by flights of marble steps, so broad and easy that a procession on horseback could ascend them. By these you reach a landing, where stand as sentinels two colossal figures sculptured from great blocks of marble. The one horn in the forehead seems to Heeren to indicate the Unicorn; the mighty limbs, whose muscles are carved with the precision of the Grecian chisel, induced Sir Robert Porter to believe that they represented the sacred bulls of the Magian religion; while the solemn, halfhuman repose of the features suggests some symbolic and supernatural meaning. Passing these sentinels, who have kept their solitary watch for centuries, you ascend by other flights of steps to the top of the terrace. stand, lonely and beautiful, a few gigantic columns, whose lofty fluted shafts and elegantly carved capitals belong to an unknown order of architecture. Fifty or sixty feet. high, twelve or fifteen feet in circumference, they, with a multitude of others, once supported the roof of cedar, now fallen, whose beams stretched from capital to capital, and which protected the assembled multitudes from the hot sun of Southern Asia. Along the noble upper stairway are carved rows of figures, which seem to be ascending by your side. They represent warriors, courtiers, captives, men of every nation, among whom may be easily distinguished the negro from the centre of Africa. Inscriptions abound, in that strange arrow-headed or wedge-shaped character, one of the most ancient and difficult of all, which, after long baffling the learning of Europe, has at last begun yielded to the science and acuteness of the present century. One of the inscriptions copied from these walls was read by Grotefend as follows :

"Darius the King, King of Kings, son of Hystaspes, successor of the Ruler of the World, Djemchid."

Another :

"Xerxes the King, King of Kings, son of Darius the King, successor of the Ruler of the World."

More recently, other inscriptions have been deciphered,

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