[ p. 32 ]
Turning to this chart it will be seen that in the column on the extreme left the seven extant great religions are listed according to the racial and linguistic bases of classification referred to on page 26. The second column includes the names of the founders of these religions, so far as known. In the case of Hinduism, which harks back to Vedism, or the religion of the Vedas, as its earliest form, we know not the name of the founder. We know only that this religion originated with the hymns composed by the “Rishis” or poetpriests, in part preserved for us in the RigVeda. The founder of Buddhism is commonly known by his family name, Gautama, but in the Pitakas he is called “Bhagavat,” the [ p. 33 ] Blessed One; “Siddhartha,” like his predecessors; “Tathagata,” one in whom wishes are fulfilled; “Cakya-Muni,” monk of the Cakya tribe. “Zarathushtra” is the proper substitute for the popular but incorrect “Zoroaster” while Confucius is the Latinized form of Kung-Fu-Tze, the master Kung.
It may be that Abraham should have been set down as the founder of Israel’s religion, rather than Moses, but the Genesis record of the patriarch’s life is so wrapped in legendary lore as to forbid our ascribing to him any other function of leadership than that of heading the caravan from Ur in Chaldea and laying the foundations of a new nation in the West. As for the later stages in the development of the religion of Israel, we are not unmindful of the part played by the prophets and by Ezra—yet of all the names identified with the beginnings of this religion, that of Moses would seem to be the most warranted. From the New Testament book of the Acts and from the Epistles it is plain that the immediate founder of Christianity was the [ p. 34 ] apostle Paul. Yet it is equally plain that without Jesus there could not have been an apostle Paul. Moreover, all the while that he was engaged in missionary work, forces of a moral and spiritual nature were operative that emanated not from Paul but from Jesus. Hence Paul and Jesus must be regarded as joint founders of Christianity. [1]
With regard to the dates when these Founders were at the zenith of their influence it should be noted that in the case of the Rishis who wrote the Rig-Veda their compositions are at least as old as 2000 b. c.
Gautama was born in 550 B.C., and from the Pitakas we learn that he was about fifty years old when his success as a religious reformer was fully assured.
Professor A. V. Williams Jackson, the foremost living American authority on Zoroastrianism, favors 600 B.C. as the approximate date for Zarathushtra’s efflorescence, though the date of his birth has been set by other scholars [ p. 35 ] as far back at 1000 B.C. and as far forward as 300 B.C.
Confucius, it will be observed, was a contemporary of the Buddha, even as was Heraclitus in Greece and Nehemiah in Palestine.
If the date of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt was 1320 B.C., as the late Professor Toy and other authorities incline to believe, we are warranted in fixing 1300 B.C. as the time at which Moses reached the zenith of his power.
The apostle Paul outlived .Tesus some thirty years and 4 B.C. is now generally regarded as the j r ear in which Jesus was born.
The Mohammedan Hegira, 622 a.d. —the flight of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina —marked the beginning of the Islamic calendar and three years later he was at the apex of his reformatory career.
The fourth column presents the names of the various sacred books or Bibles of the great religions.
In every instance, excepting only the Pitakas of Buddhism and the Koran of Mohammedanism, [ p. 36 ] these Bibles represent a growth covering centuries. Only the chief constituent parts of the Hindu Bible are here given, the sacred literature in its entirety being the work of twenty centuries or more. The Pitakas (baskets) of Buddhism are (1) the Vinaya, containing the rules for the monastic order; (2) the Dhamma, or ethical teachings of the Master; (3) the Abhiddamma, or metaphysical basis on which the ethical system is built. The Avesta, too, has its divisions metaphysical, ethical, ceremonial. Four of the five “Kings” (Web) of the Confucian sacred literature antedate the founder by centuries; the four “Books,” the Analects, or Table-Talk of Confucius, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Great Learning, and Mencius date from the death of the Sage. Fifteen distinct types of literature are included in the Bible of Judaism and its evolution covered nearly fifteen centuries. The fourfold division of the New Testament is familiar and need not detain us. From its earliest book, the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, to its latest, the Second Epistle pp37 of Peter, a century and a half is covered. Of the Koran it should be said that the principles and methods of the higher criticism have already been applied to it, enabling us to read in chronological sequence its 114 suras and thus to trace the development of Mohammed’s life and work.
What the seven great religions have to say regarding theism as summed up in the names of the deities is indicated in the fifth column of the chart.
Only opposite Buddhism has it been necessary to insert an interrogation mark, for while the Buddha believed in the Hindu pantheon, he thought its gods were, like human beings, subject to the law of Karma. Above these was a supreme place, but this Gautama left vacant because for him there was no OverSoul, no permanent ultimate source of all that is, only ‘‘a continuous flux.” In this sense the Buddha was an atheist.
Zoroastrianism holds that coeval with Ahura-Mazda, though not coeternal with him, is Angro-Mainyus. Eventually the former, [ p. 38 ] the Good Principle, will triumph over the latter, the Evil Principle. Hence, while temporarily dualistic, Zoroastrianism is essentially monotheistic, anticipating the ultimate reign of Ahura-Mazda alone.
Confucius preferred the impersonal term “Tien,” meaning “Heaven,” to the personal, anthropomorphic “Shang-Ti,” “Heavenly Lord,” a preference quite in keeping with his agnostic attitude to supramundane matters.
The Hebrew “Yahweh,” formerly misnamed “Jehovah,” represents a theistic conception that underwent a prolonged evolutionary process, the stages of which can be clearly traced in the Old Testament books when chronologically arranged.
Christianity adopted the generic name “God,” which the postexilian Jews had substituted for the provincial name “Yahweh.” When the postexilian prophets had reached the conviction that Yahweh was God of all the world and not of Israel alone, they renounced the restricting appellation “Yahweh” and [ p. 39 ] adopted the universal term “Elohim” (“God”).
Passing to the column that epitomizes the different conceptions of life after death we note the reappearance of an interrogation mark, but this time opposite Confucianism. For here it was that the agnosticism of the founder took on its most explicit manifestation. Again and again in the Confucian scriptures he is represented as confronted by disciples with questions concerning death and what comes after death. Invariably he made answer by pointing to the unfulfilled duties of the present life: “While you do not know life how can you know about death or the hereafter?”
Opposite Hinduism we read “reunion with Brahma.” But this belief was reached only late in the development of this religion. The primitive Vedism taught a doctrine of heaven and hell and only after many centuries did a Hindu, speculating on the possibility of dying a second time in Heaven, arrive at the theory of successive reincarnations with ultimate reunion [ p. 40 ] of the individual atman (soul) with the universal Atman, Brahma, whence all souls originally came.
Buddhism held out to its devotees the hope of reaching Nirvana, but it was never defined by the Buddha in positive terms. Whenever in his sermons or elsewhere, Gautama referred to Nirvana it was always as that blessed state in which reincarnation has forever ceased. Of the state itself he preferred not to speak; it was beyond human ken.
The Zoroastrian Avesta furnishes us a graphic account of “the four Paradises” and “the four Hells” in the twenty-second Yast.
Of the Hebrew conception of the hereafter as found in the Old Testament we have to say that, in the main, it does not rise above the belief in Sheol, the underworld to which the good and bad alike departed after death. Only in a few isolated passages do we find a gleam of hope that something other than the colorless shadow existence of Sheol awaits the children of men. Not till the second century before our era and in the Apocryphal [ p. 41 ] Wisdom of Solomon do we meet with the first explicit statement of a doctrine of personal immortality—conscious, active, joyous life beyond the grave . [2]
Every careful reader of the New Testament will have observed the oneness of Jesus and Paul in their anticipation of a new order of society, a Kingdom of Heaven on earth, to be miraculously established by divine agency.[3]
In no other religion do the ideas of heaven and hell take on more realistic and fantastic forms than in the Mohammedan. And yet the Koran makes it clear that there are spiritual as well as physical delights to be anticipated by those who “do the will of Allah.”
Conditional upon the attainment of postmortem felicity is the practice of a prescribed order of thought and action. Conceiving salvation as synonymous with such future wellbeing these religions have their respective answers to the question, What shall I do to be saved? Hinduism, in its most highly developed form, bids the believer meditate upon the [ p. 42 ] relation of the individual atman to the World-Atman. Let each come to a realization of his oneness with the soul of the universe and when, at last, he reaches the point where that sense of oneness is complete and absolute, he is saved; that is, rebirth into the human terrestrial world for him has ceased. When a mortal has recognized Brahma, feeling, “He is myself,” all further desire to cling to terrestrial life has ceased. The culminating thought of both Veda and Upanishads is summarized in the solemn expression tat team asi, “Thou are That.” In other words, the essence of man is itself Brahma. When once the wise man has seen That (tad apapyat) he becomes That (tad abliavat) because in truth he always was and is That (tad asit). Hence the final attainment of man is this knowledge, this realization; it is the “works” of the Jew, and the “faith” of the Christian; salvation by the complete ascendancy of the divine in one’s self.
Buddhism, beginning with “the four noble truths” about suffering (the fact of suffering, its cause, its cure, the way to its cure), [ p. 43 ] finds the way out to be an ethical self-discipline called “the eightfold path” (explained in full detail in the great sermons of the Buddha). Whosoever takes that “path” arrives at salvation from rebirth—Nirvana. For Buddhism, like Hinduism, has ever looked on reincarnation as something to be escaped more than aught else.
To be saved, according to Zoroastrianism, means to share with Ahura-Mazda the ultimate victory over Angro-Mainyus in the cosmic battle of Right against Wrong, a battle in which every human being is called to be a soldier on’the side of the sovereign Lord.
Confucianism, agnostic on the subject of the hereafter, not denying its reality, but simply confessing utter ignorance of what comes after death, preferred to confine its attention to this world, to salvation from its discords and disorders, a goal to be attained by reproduction in all personal and social relations of the calm, unbroken order of the solar system.
The religion of the Old Testament, with its [ p. 44 ] sad, somber outlook toward Sheol, conceived salvation in terms of at-one-ment with God here on earth and made fulfillment of the “law of righteousness” the condition of that oneness.
Christianity as presented by the apostle Paul made salvation—from “the wrath to come”—consist in the practice of “faith,” a mystical self-assimilation with Christ, so that one could say with the apostle, “It is not I that act but Christ that dwelleth in me.”
Islam means submission in utter self-surrender to the will of the “omnipotent, merciful One,” merciful because omnipotent. In such submission Mohammedanism sees the way to salvation from the misery awaiting those who act contrary to that will.
No careful reading of the Bibles of the great religions can fail to take cognizance of the fact that dominant in each is a certain note serving to distinguish each religion from all the rest. Not only in the Vedas, with their reiteration of man’s dependence on the gods— the personified forces of Nature—but also and [ p. 45 ] more impressively in the Upanishads, the philosophic-religious prose-poems of the Hindu Bible, do we get the thought of the universe as thrilling, throbbing, pulsing with divine energy and divine meaning, so that this is irresistibly accepted as the dominant note of Hinduism.
Similarly in the Dhamma, with its one hundred and eighty-six sermons of the Buddha, the conviction is driven home, over and over again, that the one thing most needful in life is moral self-discipline in the manner laid down by Gautama. Hence, this is inevitably settled upon as the dominant note of Buddhism.
Without pausing to illustrate the parallels in the case of the other religions, obvious as they must be to every reader of the sacred books, let us look for a moment at the last of the series of columns in this synthesis of religions. Reliable statistics on matters pertaining to religion are most difficult of access, particularly in regard to the number of devotees claimed for each of the seven great religions. Hence, any statistical list that may be prepared [ p. 46 ] is certain to be adversely criticized in one or more particulars. What is here offered has been modestly put forward as merely approximating accuracy, subject to revision with every improvement in statistical study. Accepting, meanwhile, the data submitted in the ninth column of the chart, it is significant that only one-third of the world’s population is Christian. Out of a total of nearly a billion and a half, only 450 millions are Christians— a fact which has led many a thoughtful follower of Jesus and Paul to question the notion that God would consign two-thirds of the people on the earth to everlasting perdition because they accepted some other than the Christian scheme of salvation.
That there should be but a hundred thousand Zoroastrians is largely accounted for in terms of their exclusiveness, their religion forbidding intermarriage with members of another persuasion. Only some ten thousand reside in Persia, the remainder are descendants of those exiles who in 1648 refused to become Moslems and found in Bombay a hospitable [ p. 48 ] refuge from Islamic persecution. The controversy is still being waged as to the relative strength of Buddhism and Christianity. Adherents of the former are fully persuaded that there are more Buddhists than Christians in the world, while zealous Christian missionaries are quick to contend for the precedence of their religion over all others, not only in point of numbers but also of ethical sublimity and saving power. Till the controversy shall have been settled to the mutual satisfaction of the rival parties it were best to be content with assigning to each of these religions a like number of adherents, realizing, moreover, that in so doing we are approximately correct.