Cook: Heredity Denied by Buddhists 



477 



tute alike of all active feelings of pleas- 

 ure and pain."- 



Thus the Buddhist ideal is utterly 

 remote, at the opposite pole of thought 

 from the eugenic ideal voiced by 

 Goethe: "To live that nobler souls 

 come after, highest aim that man has 

 sought." 



BELIEF IN REINCARNATION A DENIAL OF 

 PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY 



No doubt it becomes easier to apply 

 the Buddhist doctrine of suppressing 

 family instincts, for those who can 

 persuade themselves that heredity is 

 "but a name." Ties of birth and blood 

 can have no such meaning as for us, 

 among those who look upon their chil- 

 dren as products of "reincarnation," 

 with no transmission of parental quali- 

 ties. It is difficult to see how any sense 

 of eugenic responsibility could develop 

 under the Buddhist belief that defec- 

 tive or diseased children are suffering 

 necessary penalties of misdeeds in for- 

 mer lives. 



The family ties have held, of course, 

 with the masses of the population, not- 

 withstanding the intellectual suprem- 

 acy of Buddhism, and its persistent 

 influence, leading thousands of the 

 more capable members of each genera- 

 tion to seek "salvation" through self- 

 elimination. Though Buddhists re- 

 volted at first against the idea of caste, 

 it is easy to understand that the 

 doctrine of transmigration, denial of 

 family relationships and withdrawal 

 from human interests, as accepted and 

 enjoined by Buddhists, might intensify 

 the spirit of aloofness, and thus con- 

 tribute to the extreme development of 

 caste among the Hindoos. 



"We doubt if any European ever 

 fully realizes how great the mental 

 effect of the segrativeness, the separa- 

 tion into atoms, of Indian society, con- 

 tinued, as it has been, for three 

 thousand unbroken years, has actually 

 been. We speak of that society as 

 'divided into castes,' but it is, and has 

 always been, divided into far more 

 minute divisions or crystals, each in a 

 way complete, but each absolutely 



separated from its neighbor by rules, 

 laws, prejudices, traditions, and prin- 

 ciples of ceremonial purity, which in the 

 aggregate, form impassable lines of 

 demarcation. It is not the European 

 to whom the Indian will not reveal 

 himself, but mankind, outside of a cir- 

 cle usually wonderfully small, and 

 often a single family, from whom he 

 mentally retreats. His first preoccu- 

 pation in life is to keep his 'caste,' his 

 separateness, his ceremonial purity, 

 from any contact with any other 

 equally separate crystal; and in that 

 preoccupation, permanent and all- 

 absorbing for thousands of years, he 

 has learned to shroud his inner mind, 

 till in revealing it he feels as if he were 

 revealing some shrine which it is 

 blasphemy to open, as if he had earned 

 from Heaven the misfortune he thinks 

 sure to follow."^ 



Some writers have interpreted the 

 Hindoo religiosity as a great national 

 virtue, and others as a racial defect or 

 limitation, that kept the Oriental phil- 

 osophers wandering in the desert of 

 speculation, away from the field of 

 science. Max Mliller would set the 

 Hindoos on a high pinnacle of con- 

 templative virtue, while others see the 

 Hindoo mind as self-imprisoned in a 

 structure of elaborate but futile ideas, 

 dreaming, at once fantastic and futile. 



"The southern Aryans were absorbed 

 in the struggles of thought: their past 

 is the problem of creation, their future 

 the problem of existence, and the 

 present, which ought to be the solution 

 of both, seems never to have attracted 

 their attention, or called forth their en- 

 ergies. There never was a nation 

 believing so firmly in another world, 

 and so little concerned about this. Their 

 condition on earth was to them a 

 problem; their real and eternal life a 

 simple fact. ... * * * The only 

 sphere in which the Indian mind finds 

 itself at liberty to act, to create, and to 

 worship is the sphere of religion and 

 philosophy, and nowhere have religious 

 and metaphysical ideas struck root so 

 deeply in the mind of a nation as in 

 India. History supplies no second 



^ Bigandet, P., 191 1. The Life or Legend of Gaudama, 1:127, 

 ^Meredith Townsend, "Asia and Europe," 1901, p. 153. 



