LECTURE 8
Buddha and Christ
[ 55 ]
Berlin, 2nd December 1909
Ever since its
foundation, the spiritual-scientific movement has suffered from being
confused with all sorts of other tendencies and strivings of the present day.
Particularly it is accused of trying to transplant certain eastern spiritual
currents, especially that of Buddhism, into the culture of the West. Hence
our subject today has a special relevance for spiritual research: we are
going to consider the significance of the Buddhist religion on the one hand
and that of Christianity on the other, from the standpoint of Spiritual
Science. Those who have often attended my lectures here will know that we
intend a study in the scientific sense, ranging widely over world-events
from the point of view of spiritual life.
Anyone who has
thought at all seriously about Buddhism will know that its founder, Gautama
Buddha, always refused to answer questions concerning the evolution of the
world and the foundations of our human existence. He wished to speak only
about the means whereby a man could come to a way of existence that would be
satisfying in itself. This fact alone should be enough to distinguish
Buddhism from Spiritual Science, for Spiritual Science never refuses to speak
about world origins and the great facts of evolution. And if one particular
aspect of Spiritual Science is being more and more confused with Buddhism
— namely our treatment of repeated earth-lives and the working of
spiritual causes from earlier lives into later ones — it is strange
that Spiritual Science should be charged on this account with being a form of
Buddhism. By now people should surely have grasped that Spiritual Science is
not concerned with names but with ascertainable truth, independently of any
name that may be given to it. The fact that the doctrine of reincarnation or
repeated earth-lives is to be found among the ideas of Gautama Buddha, though
in a quite different form, has no more significance for Theosophy or
Spiritual Science than the fact that the elements of geometry are found in
Euclid. Just as it would be absurd to accuse a geometry teacher of practising
“Euclidism”, so is it absurd to bring a charge of Buddhism
against Spiritual Science because it has a doctrine of reincarnation and
similar ideas are to be found in the Buddha. At the same time we must make it
clear that Spiritual Science provides a means of testing the spiritual
sources of every religion — including Christianity, the basis of
European culture, on the one hand, and Buddhism on the other.
The notion that
Spiritual Science wants to be “Buddhism” is not confined to
persons who know nothing of Theosophy. Even the great Orientalist, Max
Muller,
[ 56 ]
who has done so much to make oriental religions better known in
Europe, cannot rid himself of it. In discussing it with another writer he
used the following analogy. If, he says, a man were to be seen somewhere with
a pig that was a good grunter, no-one would be surprised; but if a man could
mimic the grunting to perfection, people would gather round and look on it as
a miracle! By the grunting pig Max Muller means the real Buddhism, which by
then had become known in Europe. But its teaching, he continues, was
attracting no attention, while false Buddhism, or what he calls “Madame
Blavatsky's theosophical swindle”,
[ 57 ]
was gaining wide acceptance.
The analogy is
not very happy. Even apart from the fact that it is hardly polite to
represent the true Buddhist teaching, which came to birth with so much
travail, by the grunting of a pig, the analogy implies that Madame Blavatsky
succeeded extremely well in producing an exact imitation of Buddhism. Madame
Blavatsky deserves credit for having set the ball rolling, but nowadays very
few thoughtful theosophists believe that she was successful in reproducing
true, genuine Buddhism. Just as a teacher of geometry is not required to
produce a replica of Euclid, so a teacher of Theosophy is not required to
reproduce Buddhism.
If we wish to
immerse ourselves in the spirit of Buddhism in the sense of Spiritual
Science, so that we may then compare it with the spirit of Christianity, we
had better not proceed immediately to its deeper doctrines, which can readily
be interpreted in various ways. We will rather try to gain an impression of
its significance from its whole way of thinking and forming ideas. Our best
course is to start with a document that is very highly regarded in Buddhist
circles: the questions put by King Milinda to the Buddhist sage, Nagasena.
[ 58 ]
Here we find a conversation which brings out the inner character of the
Buddhist way of thinking. Milinda, the mighty and brilliant King who has
never been defeated by a sage, being always able to repulse any objections
brought against his own ideas, wants to converse with Nagasena about the
significance of the immortal, eternal element in human nature which passes
from one incarnation to the next.
Nagasena asks
the King: “How did you come here — on foot or in a
chariot?” “In a chariot”, the King replies.
“Now”, says Nagasena, “let us inquire into this question of
the chariot — what is it? Is the axle the chariot? No. Is it the wheel?
No. Is it the yoke? No. And so”, says Nagasena, “we may go
through all the parts of the chariot; none of them is the chariot. Yet the
chariot we have before us is made up entirely of these separate parts.
‘Chariot’ is only a name for the sum total of these parts. If we
set aside the parts, we have nothing left but the name.”
Nagasena's aim
in all this is to lead the eye away from the physical world. He wants to show
that the composite form designated by a “name” does not actually
exist as such in the physical world, so that he may thus bring out the
worthlessness and meaninglessness of the physical sense-perceptible as the
sum of its parts.
In order to make
the point of this parable quite clear, Nagasena says: “Thus it is also
with the composite form that is man, which passes from one earth-life
to another. Is it the hands and head and legs that pass from one earth-life
to another? No. Is it what you are doing today or will do
tomorrow? No. What then is it that constitutes a human being? The name and
the form. But just as with the chariot, when we look on the sum of the parts
we only have a name. We have nothing more than the parts!”
We can bring out
the argument even more clearly by turning to another parable that Nagasena
sets before King Milinda. The King speaks: “You say, O wise Nagasena,
that what passes from one incarnation to another are the name and form of the
human being. When they appear again on earth in a new incarnation, are they
the name and form of the same being?” Nagasena answers: “Behold,
your mango-tree is bearing fruit. Then a thief comes and steals the fruit.
The owner of the mango-tree cries: ‘You have stolen my
fruit!’ ‘It is not your fruit’, the thief replies.
‘Your fruit was the one you buried in the ground, where it dissolved.
The fruit now growing on the tree has the same name, but it is not your
fruit.’” Nagasena then continued: “Yes, it is true —
the fruit has the same name and form, but it is not the same fruit. Yet the
thief can still be punished for his theft. So it is with what re-appears in
an earthly life compared with what appeared in previous lives. It is only
because the owner of the mango-tree planted a fruit in the earth that fruit
now grows on the tree. Hence we must regard the fruit as his property. It is
similar with the deeds and destiny of a man's new life on earth: we must look
on them as the effects, the fruit, of his previous life. But what appears is
something new, as is the fruit on the mango-tree.”
In this way
Nagasena sought to dissolve everything that makes up an earth-life,
in order to show how only its effects pass over into the next life on
earth.
This approach
can give us a much better idea of the whole spirit of Buddhist teaching than
we could gain from its general principles, for these — as I said
— can be interpreted in various ways. If we allow the spirit of
Nagasena's parables to work upon us, we can see clearly enough how the
Buddhist teacher wishes to draw his disciples away from everything that
stands here before us as a separate human Ego, a definite personality; how he
wishes to direct attention above all to the idea that, although what appears
in a new incarnation is indeed an effect of the previous personality, we have
no right to speak in any true sense of a coherent Ego which passes on from
one earth-life to the next.
If now we turn
from Buddhism to Christianity, we could — though it has never been done
— rewrite Nagasena's examples in a Christian sense, somewhat as
follows. Let us suppose that King Milinda has arisen from death as a
Christian and that the ensuing conversation is permeated, with the spirit of
Christianity. Nagasena would then have to say: “Look at your hand! Is
the hand a man? No — the hand alone does not make a man. But if you cut
off the hand from the man, it will decay, and in two or three weeks it will
no longer be a hand. What then is it makes the hand a hand? It is the man who
makes the hand a hand! Is the heart a man? No! Is the heart something
self-sufficient? No, for if we separate the heart from the man, it will soon
cease to be heart — and the man will soon cease to be a man. Hence it
is the man who makes the heart a heart and the heart that makes the man a
man. The man is a man living on earth only because he has the heart as an
instrument. Thus in the living human organism we have parts which in
themselves are nothing; they exist only in relation to our entire make-up.
And if we reflect on how it is that the separate parts cannot exist on their
own, we find that we must look beyond them to some invisible agency which
rules over them, holds them together and uses them as instruments to serve
its needs.”
Nagasena could
then return to his parable of the chariot and might say, speaking now in a
Christian sense: “True, the axle is not the chariot, for with the axle
alone you cannot drive. True, the wheels are not the chariot, for with the
wheels alone you cannot drive. True, the yoke is not the chariot, for with
the yoke alone you cannot drive. True, the seat is not the chariot, for with
the seat alone you cannot drive. And although the chariot is only a name for
the assembly of parts, you do not drive with the parts but with something
that is not the parts. So the ‘name’ does stand for something
specific! It leads us to something that is not in any of the
parts.”
Thus the spirit
of Buddhist teaching aims at diverting attention from the visible in order to
get beyond it, and it denies the significance of anything visible. The
Christian approach sees the parts of a chariot, or of any other object, in
such a way that the mind is directed towards the whole. From this contrast we
can see that both the Christian and the Buddhist approach to the outer world
have definite consequences. And if now we follow the Buddhist approach to its
logical conclusion, its consequences will be plain to see.
A man, a
Buddhist, stands before us. He plays his part in the world and performs
various actions. His Buddhist teaching tells him that everything around him
is worthless. The nothingness and non-existence of everything visible is
impressed upon him. Then he is told that he ought to free himself from
dependence on this nothingness in order to reach a real, higher state of
being. With this aim in mind he should avert his gaze from the sense-world
and from everything he could learn about it through his human faculties. Turn
away from the sense-world! For if we reduce to name and form everything
offered by the sense-world, its nothingness is revealed. No truth is to be
found in the sense-world displayed before us!
What does the
Christian way of thinking make of all this? It regards any single part of the
human organism not as a separate unit, but as embraced by a real, unified
whole. The hand, for example, is a hand only because man uses it as a hand.
Here the thing we see points directly to something behind it. This way of
thinking thus leads to findings very different from those that derive from
the Buddhist way. Hence we can say: A man stands before us. He exists as a
man only because behind him stands a spiritual man who activates his
constituent parts and is the directing source of whatever he does or
accomplishes. That which animates the parts of his organism and lives in them
has poured itself into the visible being, where it experiences the fruits of
action. From thus experiencing the sense-world it extracts something we may
call a “result”, and this is carried over into the next
incarnation, the next life on earth. Behind the external man there is this
active man, this doer, who does not reject the outer world but handles it in
such a way that its fruits are garnered and carried over to the next
life.
If we look at
this question of repeated earth-lives from the standpoint of Spiritual
Science, we must say: For Buddhism, the principle that holds a man together
during life does not endure; only his actions work on into his next
earth-life. For Christianity, the principle that holds a man together is a
complete Ego; and this Ego endures. It carries over into the next earth-life
all the fruits of the preceding one.
Hence we see
that what keeps these two world-outlooks decisively apart is the quite
definite difference between their respective ways of thinking, and this
counts for much more than theories or principles. If in our time people were
not so wedded to theories about everything, they would find it easier to
recognise the character of a spiritual movement from its typical
concepts.
All this is
connected with a final difference between the Christian and Buddhist
outlooks. The core of Buddhist doctrine has been set forth in immensely
significant words by the founder of Buddhism himself. Now this lecture is
truly not being given in order to promote opposition to the great originator
of Buddhist teaching. My intention is to describe the Buddhist world-outlook
quite objectively. It is precisely Spiritual Science that is the right
instrument for penetrating without sympathy or antipathy into the heart of
the various spiritual movements in the world.
The Buddha-legend
brings out clearly enough, even if in a pictorial form, what
the founder of Buddhism was aiming at. We are told that Gautama Buddha, the
son of King Suddhodana, was brought up in a royal palace, where everything
around him was designed to enhance the quality of life. Throughout his youth
he knew nothing of human suffering or sorrow; he was surrounded by nothing
but happiness, pleasure and diversions. One day he left the palace, and for
the first time the pains and sorrows, all the shadow-side of human
life, met him face to face. He saw an old man withering away; he saw a man
stricken with disease; above all, he saw a corpse. Hence it came to him that
life must be very different from what he had seen of it in the royal palace.
He saw now that human life is bound up with pain and suffering.
It weighed
heavily on the Buddha's great soul that human life entails suffering and
death, as he had seen them in the sick man, the aged man and the corpse. For
he said to himself: “What is life worth if old age, sickness and death
are inescapably part of it?”
These
reflections gave rise to the Buddha's monumental doctrine of suffering, which
he summarised in the words: Birth is suffering, old age is suffering, illness
is suffering, death is suffering. All existence is filled with suffering.
That we cannot always be united with that which we love — this is how
Buddha himself later developed his teaching — is suffering. That we
have to be united with that which we do not love, is suffering. That we
cannot attain in every sphere of life what we want and desire, is suffering.
Thus there is suffering wherever we look. Even though the word
“suffering”, as used by the Buddha, does not have quite the
meaning it has for us today, it did mean that everywhere man is exposed to
things that come against him from outside and against which he can muster no
effective strength. Life is suffering, and therefore, said the Buddha, we
must ask what the cause of suffering is.
Then there came
before his soul the phenomenon he called “thirst for existence”.
If there is suffering everywhere in the world then man is bound to encounter
suffering as soon as he enters this world of suffering. Why does he have to
suffer in this way? The reason is that he has an urge, a thirst, for
incarnation in this world. The passionate desire to pass from the spiritual
world into a physical-corporeal existence and to perceive the
physical world — therein lies the basic cause of human existence. Hence
there is only one way to gain release from suffering: to fight against the
thirst for existence. And this can be done if we learn to follow the
eight-fold path, in accordance with the teaching of the great Buddha. This
is usually taken to embrace correct views, correct aims, correct speech,
correct actions, correct living, correct endeavour, correct thoughts, and
correct meditation. This taking hold of life in the correct way and relating
oneself correctly to life, will gradually enable a man to kill off the desire
for existence, and will finally lead him so far that he no longer needs to
descend into a physical incarnation and so is released from existence and the
suffering that pervades it. Thus the four noble truths, as the Buddha called
them, are:
-
Knowledge of suffering
-
Knowledge of the causes of suffering
-
Knowledge of the need to end suffering
-
Knowledge of the means to end suffering
These are the
four holy truths that were proclaimed by the Buddha in his great sermon at
Benares in the fifth or sixth century,
B.C.after his illumination under the
Bodhi tree.
Release from the
sufferings of existence — that is what Buddhism puts in the foreground,
above all else. And that is why it can be called a religion of redemption, in
the most eminent sense of the word, a religion of release from the sufferings
of existence, and therefore — since all existence is bound up with
suffering — of release from the cycle of repeated lives on earth.
This is quite in
keeping with the conceptions described in the first part of this lecture. For
if a thought directed to the outer world finds only nothingness, if that
which holds together the parts of anything is only name and form, and if
nothing carries over the effects of one incarnation into the next, then we
can say that “true existence” can be achieved only if a man
passes beyond everything he encounters in the outer sense-world.
It would
obviously not be right to call Christianity a “religion of
redemption” in the same sense as Buddhism. If we wish to put
Christianity in its right relationship to Buddhism from this standpoint, we
could call it a “religion of rebirth”. For Christianity starts
from a recognition that everything in an individual life bears fruits which
are of importance and value for the innermost being of man and are carried
over into a new life, where they are lived out on a higher level of
fulfillment. All that we extract from a single life becomes more and more
nearly perfect, until at last it appears in a spiritual form. Even the least
significant elements in our existence, if they are taken up by the spiritual
and given new life on an ever more perfect level, can be woven into the
spiritual. Nothing in human existence is null and void, for it goes through a
resurrection when the spirit has transformed it in the right way.
It is as a
religion of rebirth, of the resurrection of the best that we have
experienced, that we should look on Christianity — a religion for which
nothing we encounter is worthless, but is rather a building-stone for the
great edifice that is to arise by a bringing together of everything spiritual
in the sense-world around us. Buddhism is a religion of release from
existence, while Christianity is a religion of rebirth on a spiritual level.
This is evident in their ways of thinking about things great and small and in
their final principles.
If we look for
the causes of this contrast, we shall find them in the quite opposite
characteristics of Western and Eastern culture. The fundamental difference
between them can be put quite simply. All genuine Eastern culture which has
not yet been fertilised by the West is non-historical, whereas all Western
culture is historical. And that is ultimately the difference between the
Christian and the Buddhist outlooks. The Christian outlook is historical: it
recognises not only that repeated earth-lives occur but that they form an
historical sequence, so that what is first experienced on an imperfect level
can rise in the course of further incarnations to ever higher and more nearly
perfect levels. While Buddhism sees release from earth-existence in terms of
rising to Nirvana, Christianity sees its aim as a continuing process of
development, whereby all the products and achievements of single lives shine
forth in ever-higher stages of perfection, until, permeated by the spirit,
they experience resurrection at the end of earth-existence.
Buddhism is
non-historical, quite in the sense of the cultural background out of which it
grew. It turns its gaze to earlier and later incarnations of man and sees him
in opposition to the external world. It never asks whether in earlier times
man may have stood in a different relationship to the external world or
whether in the future this relationship may again be different — though
these are questions that Christianity does ask. So Buddhism comes to the view
that man's relationship to the world in which he incarnates is always the
same. Driven into incarnation by his thirst for existence, he enters a world
of suffering; it matters not whether the world called forth this same thirst
in him in the past or will do so in the future. Suffering, and again
suffering, is what he is bound always to experience during life on earth. So
earth-lives are repeated, and Buddhism never truly connects them with
any idea of historical development. That is why Buddhism can see its Nirvana,
its state of bliss, as attainable only by withdrawing from the ever-repeated
cycle of lives on earth, and why it has to regard the world itself
as the source of human suffering. For it says that if we ever enter the
physical world, we are bound to suffer: the sense-world cannot but bring us
suffering.
That is not
Christian, for the Christian outlook is historical through and through. It
recognises that man, in being born again and again, faces an external world;
but if these encounters bring him suffering, or leave him unsatisfied,
deprived of an inwardly harmonious existence, this is not because earthly
life is always such that man must suffer, but because he has related himself
wrongly to the external world.
Christianity and
the Old Testament both point to a definite event, as a result of which man
has developed his inner life in such a way that he can make his existence in
the world around him a source of suffering. Suffering is not inflicted on us
by the world we perceive through our eyes and ears, the world in which we are
incarnated; humanity once developed something within itself which placed it
in a wrong relation to the world. And as this is inherited from generation to
generation, it is still the cause of human suffering today. In the Christian
sense we can say that from the beginning of the earth-existence human
beings have not had a right relation to the outer world.
This comparison
can be extended to the fundamental doctrines of the two religions. Buddhism
emphasises again and again that the outer world is Maya, illusion.
Christianity, on the contrary, says: Man may indeed believe that what he sees
of the outer world is an illusion, but that is because his organs are so
constituted that he cannot see through the external veil to the spiritual
world. The outer world is not an illusion; the illusion has its source in the
limitations of human seeing. Buddhism says: Look at the rocks around you;
look where the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls — it is all
Maya, the great illusion. Christian thinking would reply that it is wrong to
call the outer world an illusion. No, it is man who has not yet found the way
to open the spiritual senses — his spirit-eyes and spirit-ears, in
Goethe's words — which could show him how the outer world is to be seen
in its true form. Christianity, accordingly, looks for a pre-historical event
which has prevented the human heart from forming a true picture of the outer
world. And human development through a series of incarnations must be seen as
a means whereby man can regain, in a Christian sense, his spirit-eyes and
spirit-ears in order to see the external world as it really is. Repeated
earth-lives are therefore not meaningless: they are the path which will
enable man to look at the outer world — from which Buddhism wishes to
liberate him — and to see it irradiated by the spirit. To overcome the
physical appearance of the world by acquiring the spiritual vision that man
does not yet possess, and to dispel the human error whereby the outer world
can seem to be only Maya — that is the innermost impulse of
Christianity.
In Christianity,
therefore, we do not find a great teacher who, as in Buddhism, tells us that
the world is a source of suffering and that we must get away from it into
another world, the quite different world of Nirvana. Christianity presents a
powerful impulse to lead the world forward: the Christ, who has given us the
strongest indication of the forces that man can develop out of his inner
life-forces that will enable him to make use of every incarnation in such a
way that its fruits will be carried into every succeeding incarnation through
his own powers. The incarnations are not to cease in order to open the way to
Nirvana; but all that we can acquire in them is to be used and developed in
order that it may experience resurrection in the spiritual sense.
Herein lies the
deepest distinction between the non-historical philosophy of Buddhism and the
historical outlook of Christianity. Christianity looks back to a
Fall
of man as the source of pain and suffering and onward to a
Resurrection
for their healing. We cannot
gain freedom from pain and suffering by renouncing existence, but only by
making good the error which has placed man in a false relationship with the
surrounding world. If we correct this error, we shall indeed see that the
sense-perceptible world dissolves like a cloud before the sun, and also that
all our actions and experiences within it can be resurrected on the spiritual
plane.
Christianity is
thus a doctrine of reincarnation, of resurrection, and only in that light may
we place it beside Buddhism. This, however, involves contrasting the two
faiths in the sense of Spiritual Science and entering into the deepest
impulses of both.
All that I have
said in general terms can be substantiated down to the smallest details. For
example, we can find in Buddhism something like the Sermon on the Mount in
the Matthew Gospel:
He that hears the
law — that is, the law imparted by the Buddha — is blessed. He who
raises himself above the passions is blessed. He who can live in loneliness
is blessed. He who can live with the creatures of the world and do them no
harm is blessed. And so on.
Thus we could
regard the Buddhist beatitudes as a counterpart of the beatitudes in the
Sermon on the Mount. We have only to understand them in the right way. Let us
compare them with the text of the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount in
St. Matthew's Gospel.
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There we hear at the beginning the powerful words:
“Blessed are they who are beggars for the spirit, for they will find
within themselves the kingdom of heaven.” It is not said only
“Blessed are they who hear the law”; there is an addition. We are
told: Blessed are the poor in spirit so that they have to beg for it, for
“theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” What does that mean? We can
understand such a saying only if we keep before our souls the whole
historical character of the Christian outlook.
First of all, we
must remember that all the faculties of the human soul have a history; they
have evolved. Spiritual Science takes this word “evolved” very
seriously, as meaning that what is there today has not been there always. It
tells us that what we call our intellect, our scientific way of thinking, did
not exist in primitive times; in place of it there was something we might
call a dim, hazy clairvoyance. The way in which we now achieve knowledge of
the world was unknown to these early people. But there dwelt in them a kind
of primitive wisdom which went far beyond anything we have been able to
establish today. Anyone who understands history knows that such a primitive
wisdom did exist. In those early times human beings did not know how to build
machines or railway engines, or how to dominate their environment with the
aid of natural forces, but their vision of the divine-spiritual foundations
of the world went far beyond our present knowledge.
This vision did
not come from thinking things out. Men could not then proceed as modern
science does. They were given inspirations, revelations, which arose dimly in
their souls. They were not wholly conscious of them, but they could recognise
them as true reflections of the spiritual world and of the ancient wisdom.
But as in the course of evolution man passed from life to life, he was
destined to lose the old hazy clairvoyance and the ancient wisdom and to
learn to grasp things with his intellect. In the future he will unite the two
faculties: he will be able to look clairvoyantly into the spiritual world
while retaining the forms of modern knowledge. Today we are living in a
transition stage. The old clairvoyance has been lost, and what we now are has
developed in the course of time. How has man reached the point of being able,
as a self-conscious being, to get to know the world through his intellect? In
particular, when did self-consciousness first come to man?
It was at the
time — though world-evolution is not usually interpreted so exactly
— when Christ Jesus appeared on earth. Men were at a turning-point
given for what has produced the finest achievements of our own time. The
coming of the Christ into human evolution marked the transition from the old
to the new. When John the Baptist proclaimed “The Kingdom of Heaven is
at hand”,
[ 60 ]
he was simply using a technical expression for the
experience that would come to men when they began to gain knowledge of the
world through their own self-consciousness and no longer through
inspirations. The Baptist's call means that knowledge of the world in terms
of concepts and ideas is near at hand. Men are no longer dependent on the old
clairvoyance, but can now investigate the world for themselves. And the most
powerful impulse for this new way of knowledge was given by Christ
Jesus.
Hence there is a
deep meaning in the very first words of the Sermon on the Mount. They might
be interpreted: Men are now at the stage where they are beggars for the
spirit. In the past they had clairvoyant vision and could look into the
spiritual world. That time is over. But a time will come when man, through
the inner force of his Ego, will be able to find a substitute for the old
clairvoyance through the Word which will reveal itself within him. Blessed,
accordingly, are not only those who in ancient times gained the spirit
through twilight inspirations, but also those who no longer have clairvoyance
because evolution has brought them to that stage. They are indeed not
unblest, those who are beggars for the spirit because they have lost the
spirit. Blessed are they, for theirs is that which reveals itself through the
Ego and can be achieved through their own self-consciousness.
Further we read:
“Blessed are they who suffer”, for although the outer sense-world
is a cause of suffering because of our relationship to it, the time has now
come when man, if he will grasp his self-consciousness
and unfold the forces which dwell in his Ego, will come to know the
remedy for his suffering. Within himself he will find the possibility of
consolation, for the time has come when any external consolation loses
significance, because the Ego is to have the strength to find within itself
the remedy for suffering. Blessed are they who can no longer find in the
outer world all that was once found there. That is also the highest meaning
of the beatitude, “Blessed are they who thirst after justice, for they
shall be filled.” Within the Ego itself will be found a source of
justice that will compensate for the injustice in the world.
So it is that
Christ Jesus points the way to the human Ego, to the divine element in man.
Take into your inner being that which lives in the Christ as a prefiguration;
then you will find the strength to carry over from one incarnation to another
the fruits of your lives on earth. It is important for life in the spiritual
world that you should master what can be experienced in earthly
existence.
Bearing on this
is an event which in the first instance is one of suffering for Christianity
— the death of Christ Jesus, the Mystery of Golgotha. This death is of
greater significance than ordinary death; Christ here establishes death as
the starting-point of an immortal, invincible life. This death is not
merely as though Christ wished to free himself from life; he suffers it
because from it works an ascending power, and because out of this death there
is to flow eternal life.
This was felt by
those who lived in the early centuries of Christianity, and it will be
recognised more and more widely when the Christ Impulse is better understood.
Then people will understand how it was that six centuries before Christ one
of the greatest of men left his palace, saw a dead body and formed the
judgment — death is suffering, release from death is salvation —
and resolved that he would have no more to do with anything that lay under
the dominion of death. Six centuries go by until the Christ comes, and after
six more centuries have passed a symbol is raised which will be understood
only in the future. What is this symbol?
It was not a
Buddha, not a chosen person, but simple folk who went and saw the symbol; saw
the cross raised and a dead body upon it. For them, death was not suffering,
nor did they turn away from it; they saw in the body a pledge of eternal
life, a sign of that which conquers death and points away from everything in
the sense-world.
The noble Buddha
saw a corpse; he turned away from the sense-world and decided that death is
suffering. The simple folk who looked upon the cross and the body did not
turn away from the sight: for them it was testimony that from this earthly
death there springs eternal life. So it was that six hundred years before the
founding of Christianity the Buddha stood before the corpse, and six hundred
years after the coming of Christ simple folk saw the symbol which expressed
for them what had come about through the founding of Christianity. At no
other time has there been such a turning-point in the evolution of mankind.
If we look at these things objectively, we come to see even more clearly
wherein lie the greatness and significance of Buddhism.
As we have said,
man was originally endowed with a primal wisdom, and in the course of
successive incarnations this wisdom was gradually lost. The appearance of the
great Buddha marks the end of an old epoch of evolution; it provides the
strongest historical evidence that men had lost the old wisdom, the old
knowledge, and this explains the turning away from life. The Christ is the
starting-point of a new evolution, which sees the sources of life eternal in
this earthly life.
In our time this
important fact concerning human evolution is still not clearly understood.
That is why it can happen today that men of fine and noble nature, unable to
gain from modern viewpoints what they need for their inner life, turn to
something different and find release in Buddhism. And Buddhism does show in a
certain sense how a man can be lifted up out of sense-existence and through a
certain unfolding of his inner forces can rise above himself. But this can
occur only because the greatest impulse and innermost source of Christianity
is still so little understood.
Spiritual
Science should be the instrument for penetrating ever more deeply into the
concepts and outlook of Christianity. And precisely the idea of evolution, to
which Spiritual Science does full justice, will be able to lead men to an
intimate grasp of Christianity. Spiritual Science can therefore cherish the
hope that a rightly understood Christianity will stand out ever more clearly
from all misinterpretations of it, without transplanting Buddhism into our
time. Any attempt to do this would indeed be shortsighted, for anyone who
understands the circumstances of spiritual life in Europe will know that even
those movements which are apparently opposed to Christianity have drawn their
whole armoury of weapons from Christianity itself. There could have been no
Darwin or Haeckel
[ 61 ]
— grotesque as this sounds — if a
Christian education had not made it possible for them to think as they
thought; if the forms of thought had not been ready for those who, after a
Christian education, use them to attack, so to speak, their own mother. What
these people say, and the tone of voice in which they say it, are often
apparently directed against Christianity, but it is Christian education that
enables them to think in this way. It would be unpromising, to say the least,
for anyone to try to graft something Oriental into our culture, for it would
contradict all the conditions of spiritual life in the West. All we need to
do is to get a clear grasp of the fundamental teachings of the two
religions.
A more exact
study of contemporary spiritual life will indeed bring out such a lack of
clarity within it, that men of the highest philosophical eminence are
impelled to reject life and are thus moved to sympathy with the thoughts of
Buddhism. We have an example of this in Schopenhauer:
[ 62 ]
the whole temper
of his life had something Buddhistic about it. For example, he says that the
highest type of man is he whom we may call a “saint”; a man who
in his life has overcome everything that the outer world can offer. He merely
exists in his body, deriving no ideals from the world around him; he has no
aim or purpose, but simply waits for the time when his body will be
destroyed, so that every trace of his connection with the sense-world will
have vanished. By turning away from the sense-world he nullifies his own
sense-life, so that nothing may remain of all that leads in life from fear to
suffering, from suffering to terror, from passion to pain.
This is a
projection of Buddhist feeling into the West, and we must recognise that it
comes about because the deepest impulse in Christianity is not clearly
understood. What have we gained through Christianity? From the purest form of
the Christian impulse we have gained precisely what separates Schopenhauer
decisively from one of the most significant personalities of recent times.
While Schopenhauer's ideal is a man who has overcome everything that external
life can give him by way of pleasure and pain, and waits only for the last
traces holding his body together to be dissolved, Goethe sets before us in
his Faust a striving character who passes from desire to satisfaction and
from satisfaction, to desire, until finally he has purified himself and
transformed his desires to such a degree that the holiest element that can
illuminate our life becomes his passion. He does not stand and wait until the
last traces of his earthly existence are extinguished, but speaks the great
words: “Not in aeons will the trace of my days on earth pass
away.”
[ 63 ]
The sense and
spirit of all this is presented by Goethe in his Faust just as in old age he
described it to his secretary, Eckermann:
[ 64 ]
“For the rest you will
admit, that the closing passage, when the redeemed soul is borne aloft, was
very difficult to manage. With such super-sensible, hardly imaginable things I
could easily have lost myself in vagueness if I had not made use of clearly
outlined figures and images from the Christian Church to give the requisite
form and substance to my poetic intentions.”
So it is that
Faust climbs the ladder of existence, represented in Christian symbols, from
mortal to immortal, from death to life.
We see in
Schopenhauer the unmistakeable projection of
Buddhist elements into our western way of
thinking, so that his ideal man waits to reach the state of perfection until
the last traces of his earth existence have been erased, together with his
body. And this vision, Schopenhauer believes, can interpret the figures
created by Raphael and Correggio in their paintings. Goethe wished to set
before us a man who strives towards a goal, well aware that whatever is
achieved in earthly life must be enduring, interwoven with eternity.
“Not in aeons will the trace of my days on earth pass
away.”
That is the
true, realistic Christian impulse, which leads to the reawakening of our
earthly deeds in a spiritualised form. That is the religion of resurrection.
It is also a realistic philosophy in the true sense, for it knows how to draw
down from spiritual heights the loftiest elements for our life in the world
of the senses. Thus we can see in Goethe, like a dawning glow, the
Christianity of the future, which has learnt to understand itself. This
Christianity will recognise all the greatness and significance of Buddhism,
but, by contrast with the Buddhist turning away from incarnations, it will
recognise the value of each existence from one incarnation to the next. Thus
Goethe, in a truly modern Christian sense, looks at a past which brought us
to birth out of a world, and at present in which whatever we achieve —
if only its fruits are rightly grasped — can never pass away. When,
therefore, he links man to the universal in the true spiritual-scientific
sense, he cannot but join him on the other side to the true content of
Christianity. Thus in his
Urworte-Orphisch
he says:
As on the day that lent thee earthly being,
The Sun took salutation from the planets,
So didst thou start thy course and so hast sped it,
According to the law of thy first sending.
So must thou be: thyself thou canst not flee from.
Thus have the Sibyls, thus the prophets, spoken.
Goethe could not
write in this way, describing the connection of man with the whole world,
without indicating that the human being, born out of the constellations of
existence, is in the world as something that can never pass away but must
celebrate its resurrection in spiritualised form. Hence to these lines he
added two more:
No time, no power, can bring to dissolution
The form once cast in living evolution.
And we can say:
No time and no power can destroy what is achieved in time and ripens as fruit
for eternity.
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