LECTURE VIII - RISE OF THEISTIC AND POLYTHEISTIC BUDDHISM

Summary

In the preceding Lecture we have endeavoured to show generally how Buddhism was evolved out of Brāhmanism, how it flourished side by side with Brāhmanism, and how after a chequered career and protracted senility in the land of its birth—lasting for at least fifteen centuries—it ultimately merged its individuality in Vaishṇavism and Ṡaivism, or, in other words, disappeared and became lost in a composite system called Hindūism.

We have now to trace more closely the gradual sliding of a simple agnostic and atheistic creed, into a variety of theistic and polytheistic conceptions.

We have already seen how the expansion of the Hīnayāna into the Mahā-yāna became an inevitable result of the Buddha's own teaching—in other words, how a rebound from atheism to theism was as unavoidable as the return swing of a heavy pendulum. We need only repeat here that it could not have been otherwise, when a teacher, who never claimed to be more than a man, attempted to indoctrinate his human followers with principles opposed to the inextinguishable instincts and eternal intuitions of humanity.

In fact the teachers of the Mahā-yāna school were not slow to perceive that, if Buddhism was to gain any hold over the masses, it was essential that it should adapt itself to their human needs. It became imperatively necessary, as a simple preservative measure, to convert a cold philosophical creed, based on an ultra-pessimistic theory of existence, into some sort of belief in the value of human life as worth living.