Buddhism and Christianity: A Parallel and a Contrast
9781465669155
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Early in this century Schopenhauer, fascinated by the contents of the Upanishads, which had been translated from the Persian into Latin by the illustrious discoverer of the Zend-Avesta, ventured to predict that the influence of the newly-found Sanskrit literature upon the philosophy of the future would not be less profound than was that of the revival of Greek upon the religion of the fourteenth century. That century was marked by the close of the mediæval age, and the beginning of the times of Reformation in which we are privileged to live. The Reformation was not an event, but the inauguration of a period. Its significance was far deeper than that of a revolt from ecclesiastical superstition and corruption. It meant a quickening of the human spirit, and a consequent awakening of the human intellect, to which many forces other than the leading religious ones, contributed; and its effects are visible not simply in the changes which it immediately produced, but in the revolution which is still actively progressing in all our social, political, and religious relations. The movement designated by the Reformation is manifestly far from having exhausted itself, and there can be no question that its course has been greatly accelerated by the studies to which Schopenhauer referred. The re-discovery of India, lost to Europe for centuries after the beginning of the Christian era, almost as completely as America was hidden from it, was a fact of even greater import than the resurrection of Greece. It was no wilderness of ruins which was thus disclosed, from which only the shards of a long-buried civilisation could be exhumed, but a living and cultured world, whose institutions were rooted in an antiquity more profound than Greece could claim, and whose language and manners and religion were separated from the West by far more than a hemisphere. So totally unlike to the Western world was it, that the labours and sacrifices of several generations of the finest intellects of Europe were required before a key could be found to interpret its significance. Since the days when Anquetil Duperron, after many adventures and hardships, succeeded in breaking through the tangled thicket which guarded its treasures, the scholars of all nations have pressed into it, each one announcing, as he emerged, the dawn or the progress of another Renaissance, whose meaning and direction and ultimate issues only the rash will venture to predict or pretend to foresee.
