MAHAY AN A BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 



265 



annihilating the passions, led to wv wei, or to that nothingness 

 of action which the Universe itself displays. The two systems 

 perfectly coalesced, they met harmoniously. Buddhism might 

 consider its road into China to have been paved by Taoism. It 

 adopted the word Tao, which means 'Way,' to denote its own 

 Way to salvation ; and on the other hand, Taoism held that 

 Buddhism was preached in India by Lao-tsze himself, who 

 journeyed for this purpose to the West, and never returned. 

 The fusion was greatly furthered by the universalistic and syn- 

 cretic spirit of the Mahayana, which, while imperatively insist- 

 ing on effort for the salvation of all beings, and the increase of 

 means leading to that great end, allotted, with almost perfect 

 tolerance, a place in its system to the Tao of the Taoists." 



We see, therefore, that Mahay anism, instead of being in any 

 way identical with any form of Christianity, has a very close 

 relationship with Chinese Taoism. Neither system has any 

 real place for a personal God. Both are purely human in origin, 

 and both endeavour to show that men can, by their own unaided 

 efforts, find a way of escape, not from sin, but from any real or 

 imagined existence apart from the chain of causation. Between 

 the Mahayana and the Christian meaning of Salvation there is 

 as great a difference as between the DharmaK&ya and the God 

 in whom we believe and whom we know through Christ. 



Mahay anism accepts, at least in theory, the distinguishing 

 Buddhist doctrine of Karma*, about which therefore it is not 

 necessary to say much in this paperf, the subject having often 

 been dealt with by able writers. Metempsychosis or Trans- 

 migration of souls, though it is doubtless inconsistent with the 

 teaching that man has no true Ego or soul, is believed in by 

 Mahayanists generally as fully as by members of the Hinayana 

 school. In fact this doctrine, originally belonging to Hinduism, 

 has immense influence in China and Japan to day, as well as in 

 Ceylon. The form which the doctrine has now assumed in 

 popular belief in China is that the lower animals have true but 

 elementary souls, and that these may, if favourably situated for 

 so doing, rise higher in the scale and be born into the world as 

 men. In accordance with this idea, in not a few Buddhist 

 monasteries in China the monks undertake to p;ive certain 



* With this and other leading tenets of original Buddhism I have 

 dealt at length in The Noble Eightfold Path, Elliott Stock (C.M.S. 

 House). 



t I may be permitted to refer to my The Noble Eightfold Path, 

 pp. 75, 87, etc. 



