The antecedent improbability of a great Teacher breaking away completely from the highest and deepest thought of his nation and his age, is very great. The great Teacher is always a reformer as well as an innovator; and to reform is to go back to an ideal which had been forgotten, or otherwise obscured. The chances are, then, that Buddha, who was unquestionably one of the greatest of all moral teachers, went back from what was corrupt and degenerate in the thought and the consequent practice of his age to what was pure and spiritual. This much we may say before we begin to study his scheme of life.

But when we study that scheme, and find, as we

certainly do, that it is the practical application and embodiment of the great ideas of Indian idealism--so much so, indeed, that we may actually deduce from those ideas (given a practical aim on the part of their votary) the leading features of the Buddhist "Law"--we cannot but feel that the probability of the Founder of Buddhism having been an idealist (in the truest sense of the word) at heart--at the heart of his own deep silence--is raised to a very high degree.

And when, having for argument's sake assumed the opposite of this, assumed that the teaching of Buddha was directly and fundamentally subversive of the ideas which found utterance in the Upanishads, we find that the whole system falls to pieces and the wisdom of it becomes unthinkable nonsense, then what has hitherto been probability of a very high degree seems to approach the level of certainty. At any rate, if we may not yet say that the creed which Buddha held but did not openly profess, was the spiritual idealism of ancient India, we may say that the counter-hypothesis--that Buddha's creed was the direct negation of that lofty faith--can easily be disproved. The efforts that are made to bring the teaching of Buddha into line with the negative dogmatism of the "religion of science" would be ludicrous if they were not, in a sense, pathetic. For, in truth, they prove nothing except the depth of the abyss that separates Eastern from Western thought.

Footnotes

^104:1 In all these extracts from Dr Rhys Davids' writings the italics are mine.

^105:1 By the "sense of self" I mean that sense of one's own intrinsic reality, indivisible unity, and identity through all changes, which is of the essence of self-consciousness.

^106:1 By "Christian," Dr Rhys Davids evidently means what belongs to the popular theology of Christendom, not what belongs to the inner creed of Christ.