Compiled From Ancient Records
by Paul Carus
Illustrated by O. Kopetzky
The Open Court Publishing Company
1915
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Paul Carus: Buddhism and Monist Mission
To the extent that the aim of the delegation was to gain respect from Western scholars and men of religion for the profundity of Mahayana thought, the representation of Eastern Buddhism at Chicago was a failure, at least in the short term... Eastern Buddhism did, however, make an impact on publisher and philosopher Paul Carus (1852-1919), who is now remembered less for his contribution to American philosophy than for the consequences of his contact with Buddhist delegates: his role in the transmission of Zen to the West and his book The Gospel of Buddha. The Gospel was an archetypical example of Orientalism, the appropriation of the Orient -- in this case Buddhism and the life of the Buddha -- to support a decidedly Western and Christian project...
The Gospel of Buddha was written to propagate Carus's post-Kantian Christian religion of science... He was particularly interested in Buddhism because he ... had no doubt that it was the only possible contender against Christianity for the role of the religion of the future. Comparison and competition with Buddhism in the minds of a Christian audience would force the evolution of Christianity to its inevitable and ultimate perfection...
Carus was the editor of two journals devoted to "earnest and thoroughgoing reformation of religion under the influence of science" through the publication of an eclectic mixture of articles on scientific developments, psychology, philosophy, archaeology, biblical research, and non-Christian religions, "all of which directly or indirectly throw light on the origin of our own religion today."...Carus believed his mission was the fulfillment of Kant's ideas...
It is not surprising that Carus's philosophy seemed to have so much in common with Eastern Buddhism as it was presented at the Parliament. The delegates had particularly focused on those areas of religion of interest to Carus: Buddhism's compatibility with science and philosophy -- especially philosophic idealism -- and their resolution with religion... Most important, the delegates had emphasized the life-affirming and social aspects of Buddhism...
His first article on Buddhism, "Karma and Nirvana," was published within months of the Parliament and covered most of the doctrinal information that formed his future publications...
The article opens with a statement of the negative assumptions of the nature of Buddhism as he had previously understood it. "Buddhism is generally characterized as a religion without a belief in God and the human soul, without hope of a future existence, pessimistic and desolate, looking upon life as an ocean of suffering, quietistic in its ethics, and finding comfort only in the final extinction into nothingness."... Quoting from major Orientalists, [the article] shows that Buddhism does have a concept of deity, does not deny the existence of the human soul, does teach of life after death, is not pessimistic, and is not quietistic but teaches active self-improvement...
The Japanese delegation's assurance that Eastern Buddhism offered not only a philosophical system but also a religion answered another of Carus's difficulties. He shared with more orthodox Christians an abhorrence for any conception of the world that denied notions of the soul or God. In his Parliament paper "Science a Religious Revelation," he had argued that while a conception of religion that rejects science is inevitably doomed, humanity must have a religion because belief in God was "the innermost conviction of man which regulates his conduct." The resolution as he saw it was that religion would undergo changes, would "free itself from paganism, evolve and grow" in keeping with scientific developments. A new conception of the soul such as he had described in The Soul of Man was fundamental to this transition. In 1890 he had written: "The new view is monistic: it regards the soul as identical with its activity; the human soul consists of man's feelings and thoughts, his fears and hopes, his wishes and ideals."... [T]the Buddhists "anticipated the modern conception of the soul as it is now taught by the most advanced scientists of Europe" ... "Buddhism is monistic. It claims that man's soul does not consist of two things, of an atman (self) and a manas (mind and thoughts), but that it is made up of thoughts alone. The thoughts of a man constitute his soul; they, if anything, are his self, and there is no atman, no additional and separate 'self' besides."...
[H]is vision was unquestionably Christian. He attempted to overcome this by arguing that Buddhism and Christianity were essentially the same religion. They were both allegorical expressions of the one universal truth, their apparent differences nothing more than culturally determined "modes of expression." Christianity had "assumed a less abstract and more concrete shape, so as to appeal to the energetic races of the North." The Christian conceptions of an anthropomorphic God, God the Creator, and of a personal, immortal ego-soul are allegorical vestiges of the religion suited to an earlier period...
The identity of Buddhism and Christianity was essential to Carus's project. He rejected suggestions that the similarities between the two great religions might be explained in terms of cultural influence imposed on different bases. The identity had to be fundamental. Buddhism and Christianity had to be expressions of the same truth. His most radical declaration of their essential identity was his hypothesis that Christ was the Buddha Maitreya, a claim he "validated" by a rather dubious use of Buddhist texts. The entry for "Maitreya [sic]" in Eitel's Handbook of Chinese Buddhism mentioned a legend in which Sakyamuni appointed Maitreya to "issue thence as his successor after a lapse of 5,000 years." By slipping a zero, Carus quoted the text predicting Maitreya's appearance in the world five hundred years after the death of Sakyamuni, a date approximating the birth of Christ. Hence he could write that "Buddha prophesied that the next Buddha after him would be Maitreya, the Buddha of kindness, and without doing any violence to Buddha's words, this prophecy may be said to be fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus the Christians may be said to be Buddhists that worship Maitreya under the name of Christ."...
Perhaps the greatest doctrinal debt Carus owed to Eastern Buddhism was the Mahayana doctrine of the trikaya, the Three Bodies of the Buddha. Eliding this with the Christian Trinity provided him with an acceptable alternative to the Christian anthropomorphic conception of God. Carus argued that although they do not believe in a personal God, "Buddhists believe not only in the Sambhoga Kaya which is an equivalent of the Christian God-idea, but even in a Trinity of Sambhoga Kaya, Nirmana Kaya, and Dharma Kaya, bearing a close resemblance to the Christian conception of Father, Son and Holy Ghost."...
Carus's vision of the self constituted by the samskaras was a cohesive entity persisting beyond death. It was a soul...
The evolutionary struggle from which, Carus believed, the religion of the modern world would emerge, would have to take place at the level of the body of the Church. The ideas had to reach a wide general readership. This popularization was the function of The Gospel of Buddha, which appeared a year after the Parliament...
The title, The Gospel of Buddha, Compiled from Old Records, as Told by Paul Carus, presented the book as nothing more than a short version of the Buddhist canon. It was the truth of the life of the Buddha, the Gospel truth with all the colloquial connotations of the term, in the same way that the Christian Gospels, upon which the text was modeled, was the truth of the life of Christ. The religious nature of the work was signaled to his Christian audience by the familiar form of chapter and verse, and the King James style of language he purposefully adopted. Buddhism was a religion, if a philosophical one. The preface, like the title, attempted to efface the presence of the author, stressing the book's reliance on the canon, claiming that many passages, indeed the most important ones, were literally copied. It admitted to modifications such as trimming needless repetitions and adornments, but reassured the reader that there was nothing in the book for which prototypes could not be found in the traditions of Buddhism. For Carus, unlike his Orientalist contemporaries, this included the traditions of all Buddhist societies in all times, not just the Pali canon.
The claim that the book was merely a compilation, however, hardly does justice to what is in fact a most ingenious original composition. Carus's claim that the most important passages are copied is not exactly incorrect but is misleading. He used Buddhist texts in a number of ways. Some chapters he copied extensively from Buddhist sources, but often with a revised ending that attached a new lesson to a familiar story. He developed whole chapters from a short quotation -- typically a two-line verse from the Dhammapada -- but the lesson of the chapter was monist rather than Buddhist. In contrast, one very short chapter in the Gospel (ch. XXIV) carries the reference to a very long section of text, verses 1496-1521 of Asvaghosha's life of the Buddha. Following the example of all Orientalists of the time, he trimmed texts of "apocryphal adornment." Chapter 6, not an atypical example, gives an idea of how extensive this trimming could be. Verses 191 to 322 (131 verses) of the Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King were reduced to 23 verses in the Gospel. Elsewhere he strung together various passages from assorted Buddhist works, using them like words in a vocabulary to create totally new statements. He nevertheless succeeded in stitching together this incredible patchwork in a highly readable continuous narrative, creating a work in prose that deliberately rivaled Edwin Arnold's epic poem Light of Asia...
Carus's Gospel aimed at ... the academic validation that Arnold's work lacked -- hence his stress on the Gospel's reliance on the canon and the pseudoacademic trappings of a "table of reference," "where the reader can find the sources and the parallelisms of the Buddhistic doctrines with Christianity, a full glossary of names and terms, and an exhaustive index."...
The table of reference appended by Carus compensated for the absence of footnotes in the biblical format... But how many readers would have been sufficiently diligent in tracing the sources to discover, for example, that "E.A.," the reference for the first three chapters and for some of the most outstanding passages, stands not for a Buddhist text but for "Explanatory Addition," and designates Carus's own original contribution? "E.A." indicates material for which Carus could find no textual reference, and it is in these passages that he expounded his principal themes. One other imaginative passage carries the reference "E.H.," which decodes to Eitel's Handbook of Chinese Buddhism. Few readers would recognize that this is actually a dictionary and that consequently this reference -- the meaning of one term -- is used to suggest that a whole chapter of Carus's work has a canonical basis. Given the author's unidentified intrusions in most other chapters, the function of this attribution seems less to confess to his own creation than to conceal the absence of a Buddhist reference. The dubious nature of the source has been buried in the bibliography. The table of reference not only claimed academic legitimation, it concealed the author's considerable personal contribution to the work.
Not even the glossary is free of the author's presence. Amid the list of Sanskrit and Pali technical terms the entry "Mahase'tu" sits unobtrusively. This is not, however, a Buddhist term but a pseudo-Sanskritic neologism that confirms the author's commitment to Christian superiority: "Mahase'tu. The great bridge. A name invented by the author of the present book to designate the importance of Christianity compared to the Hinayana and Mahayana of Buddhism."
A survey of sources for chapter XCVI, "Maitreya" (Metteyya, in Pali, in later editions), illustrates Carus's control of texts. The function of this key chapter is to allow the Buddha to predict the advent of a Messiah to continue his teaching. It presents the basis of Carus's argument that Jesus is a Buddha, the Buddha Maitreya, and his conviction that Buddhism and Christianity are the same religion. Since the substance of Carus's chapter is a dialogue between the Buddha, Sakyamuni, and his principal disciple, Ananda, on the eve of the Buddha's parinirvana, the principal reference is Rhys Davids's translation of the Mahaparinibbana Suttanta. Carus opened the chapter by following the text very closely, exemplifying his claim that "[m]any passages, and indeed the most important ones, are literally copied from the translations of original texts." He made editorial changes to avoid repetitions, and substituted the more biblical "thou art" for "you are" in keeping with the style of the Christian Gospel. In this way, verses 1-3 of the Gospel correspond to verses 3-6 of the Mahaparinibbana Suttanta, though not to the more substantial fourteen-verse block indicated. Carus cut out the "apocryphal adornments," verses 7-14 of the sutra, which concern the presence of gods and spirits as witnesses to the Great Decease. The omission itself is characteristic of his rational approach, but why did he include these eleven rejected verses in his reference if not to make it seem more substantial?
Carus's text then leaps forward, beyond his reference, to verse 32 of the Mahaparinibbana Suttanta, which finds Ananda weeping at the thought of the Buddha's passing. After a brief reiteration of the real nature of the self in Carus's own words (since this is not indicated as an "Explanatory Addition," is it an example of the adaptation of the passage for modern readers?), Carus then has Ananda ask the question "Who shall teach us when thou art gone?" (96:12), which allows the Blessed One of Carus's Gospel to predict the coming of Carus's Buddhist Christ.
In this chapter, Carus has used three verses of the Mahaparinibbana Suttanta (3-6) to establish the scene and its characters. The lesson of this chapter in the Buddhist sutras is, however, quite different, concerned not with future teachers but with the conduct of the brethren after the Buddha's death; the four places of pilgrimage (16-22); the correct deportment toward women (23); the correct forms of treating the remains of a Tathagata (24-31). There is no mention of Maitreya in this sutra, and these issues -- the substance of the reference -- are not mentioned in the Gospel.
Here we find the prediction that Maitreya will appear five hundred years after Sakyamuni's decease, once again inaccurately quoting Eitel's dictionary. Careless transcription seems highly unlikely as an explanation because Carus's other references for this section, Rhys Davids's Buddhism (pp. 180, 200), also confirm Eitel's prediction that Maitreya Buddha is expected to appear five thousand years after Sakyamuni.
This pivotal equation was enhanced by illustrations in the second edition (fig. 13). That the scene is the Buddha's parinirvana is signaled by the twin sala trees in bloom behind the figure and the grieving disciples before him. In Buddhist art the dying Buddha is more commonly depicted lying on one side and never with a beard. The garment, hand gestures, hairstyle, and small earlobes all owe more to depictions of Christ than to Buddhist iconography. Such artistic liberties would be inconsequential except that the book includes a five-page testimony by the illustrator, Olga Kopetzky, claiming years of research on Asian art and her assurance that "historical fidelity has been preserved in my work." The Buddha even looked like Christ.
Carus's use of texts in this chapter is typical of the work as a whole. The references provided are an unreliable guide to the extent of Carus's marshaling of the texts to his purpose. Some do indicate his sources, but rarely do the verses, or the lessons, actually match. Although it may well have functioned as a general indication of directions for further reading, "for those who wish to trace the Buddhism of this book to its fountainhead," the table of reference was in no way a substitute for the footnotes and references of academia. Its advantage, at least for the author, was that unless one actually attempted to use it, it did create the impression of textual scholarship. The Critic praised the table of reference for "showing at an eye glance the sources of his extracts and parallelisms in the Gospels." At a glance, if not on closer inspection, the reader could be reassured of the "authenticity" of the work...
In the preface Carus declared that his purpose was not to popularize Buddhism but to aid in the formation of the religion of the future and expressed the hope that the book would "bring out a nobler faith which aspires to the cosmic religion of truth." He was quite explicit that his intention was not to explain Buddhism but to stimulate the evolutionary development of religion. The Gospel concluded with a poem, "In Praise of All the Buddhas," composed by Carus himself but presented as a Buddhist hymn. It was a song of Carus's universal religion of truth: all the Buddhas are one in essence, all teach the same truth. Carus's Christ was a Buddha.
Carus used the form of the work to reinforce his message of the similarity between Buddhism and Christianity. The name, The Gospel of Buddha, immediately signaled to his Christian readership the essential comparison between the Buddha Sakyamuni and Jesus Christ. Dropping the article before the title "Buddha" personalized the voice with which the author purported to speak. The Christian Gospels, the source of information on the life of Christ, have become, in colloquial speech, a synonym for truth itself. Hence the title implied that this was a true account of the life of the Buddha and that this was the truth that Buddha, the historical man, taught. Because "gospel" means the glad tidings of the teaching, the title also signaled Carus's intention of reversing negative perceptions of Buddhism. "Rejoice at the glad tidings .... The Buddha our Lord has revealed the Truth" is the refrain and lesson of the opening chapter. The three opening chapters, referenced to "E.A.," were entitled "Rejoice," "Samsara and Nirvana," "Truth the Saviour."...
Just as the Gospel of Saint John apparently derived from a wider range of sources than the Synoptic Gospels, Carus's Gospel of Buddha included material from Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhist works. His constant reference for the narrative was, curiously, not the Pali material used by Oldenberg, the logical contender for the title "original contents of Buddhism" he claimed to have marshaled, but the fifth-century Chinese translation of Asvaghosha, a text from Northern Buddhism.
In defense of his use of Mahayana sources, Carus declared that his intention was not to present "Buddhism in its cradle" but "Buddhism up to date." This position not only allowed him to break away from adherence to the Buddhism of the Pali texts but to incorporate the modern views of Dharmapala and the Japanese Buddhists who stressed the compatibility of Buddhism with science and the modern world, the Buddhism presented at the World's Parliament of Religions...
Carus's Gospel, in common with all Western scholarship at the time, claimed to pursue the essence of Buddhism, "the universal in the particular," the "nonsectarian ... ideal position upon which all true Buddhists may stand as upon common ground," that is, a transnational and textual Buddhism, the "real" Buddhism compared with which each Asian practice was a distortion or aberration... As a result, Carus's Buddha was the archetypal nineteenth-century intellectual: "the first positivist, the first humanitarian, the first radical freethinker, the first iconoclast and the first prophet of the Religion of Science."...
The book naturally attracted criticism from less tolerant sections of the Christian community...
Carus was particularly offended by the charge that he was attempting to convert Christians to Buddhism and protested that this was definitely not his purpose. The preface to Gospel showed particular concern not to antagonize its targeted Christian audience, speaking of the advantages of Christianity over Buddhism, and concluding with a statement of the religious hierarchy as Carus understood it: "Above any Hinayana, Mahayana, and Mahase'tu is the Religion of Truth." Carus's image, which appropriated the Buddhist metaphor of the doctrine as a vehicle to transport followers to awakening, likened Christianity to a great bridge, "still more adapted to the needs of the multitude" than the large vessel of the Mahayana for crossing "the stream of self-hood and worldly vanity." "While the schools of Buddhism may be compared to ships that cross the stream, Christianity is a large and solid bridge. Christianity is a Mahase'tu. A child may walk over in perfect safety."...
The Gospel was not well received by scholars. Professor J. Estlin Carpenter, for example, wrote that it was "worthless stuff" because the compiler showed no concern for historical development, indiscriminately using texts from different countries and different periods; ignored the differences in "metaphysical and ontological speculation" among the sects; placed "side by side extracts from books separated by hundreds of years in date and by still wider intervals of philosophic thought as though they all alike represented the teachings of the founder of Buddhism." For Carpenter it was as unacceptable as "a Gospel of Christ compiled from writings of the first, fourth and thirteenth centuries." In all, the work was neither philological nor historical, the only academically acceptable approaches to Oriental religions. Of Carus's use of his sources, he wrote, "[H]is spirit is excellent, but his method is execrable."...
Under the title "Scholarmania" [Carus] dismissed the Orientalists who translated the ancient texts as the laborers, those who gathered the material for intellectuals such as himself to work with. He accused Carpenter, "the hodcarrier," of "hooting at the mason," and explained again that his purpose was different. He was not attempting to represent "Buddhism in its cradle, but ... BUDDHISM UP TO DATE, in its nobler possibilities." His final argument of the worth of the book, however, was that it had been translated into Japanese, and that a group of Japanese were undertaking to translate it into Chinese. There was "[n]o better evidence, that I have succeeded at least to some extent, in my aspiration" than that contemporary Asian Buddhists appeared to accept his book as representative of their religion.
-- Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition, by Judith Snodgrass
TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Preface
• Pronunciation
• INTRODUCTION.
• I. Rejoice
• II. Samsāra and Nirvāna
• III. Truth the Saviour
• PRINCE SIDDHATTHA BECOMES BUDDHA.
• IV. The Bodhisatta's Birth
• V. The Ties of Life
• VI. The Three Woes
• VII. The Bodhisatta's Renunciation
• VIII. King Bimbisāra
• IX. The Bodhisatta's Search
• X. Uruvelā, the Place of Mortification
• XI. Māra, the Evil One
• XII. Enlightenment
• XIII. The First Converts
• XIV. Brahmā's Request
• THE FOUNDATION OF THE KINGDOM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.
• XV. Upaka
• XVI. The Sermon at Benares
• XVII. The Sangha
• XVIII. Yasa, the Youth of Benares
• XIX. Kassapa
• XX. The Sermon at Rājagaha
• XXI. The King's Gift
• XXII. Sāriputta and Moggallāna
• XXIII. Anāthapindika
• XXIV. The Sermon on Charity
• XXV. Jetavana
• XXVI. The Three Characteristics and the Uncreate
• XXVII. The Buddha's Father
• XXVIII. Yasodharā
• XXIX. Rāhula
• CONSOLIDATION OF THE BUDDHA'S RELIGION.
• XXX. Jīvaka, the Physician
• XXXI. The Buddha's Parents Attain Nirvāna
• XXXII. Women Admitted to the Sangha
• XXXIII. The Bhikkhus' Conduct Toward Women
• XXXIV. Visākhā
• XXXV. The Uposatha and Pātimokkha
• XXXVI. The Schism
• XXXVII. The Re-establishment of Concord
• XXXVIII. The Bhikkhus Rebuked
• XXXIX. Devadatta
• XL. Name and Form
• XLI. The Goal
• XLII. Miracles Forbidden
• XLIII. The Vanity of Worldliness
• XLIV. Secrecy and Publicity
• XLV. The Annihilation of Suffering
• XLVI. Avoiding the Ten Evils
• XLVII. The Preacher's Mission
• THE TEACHER.
• XLVIII. The Dhammapada
• XLIX. The Two Brahmans
• L. Guard the Six Quarters
• LI. Simha's Question Concerning Annihilation
• LII. All Existence is Spiritual
• LIII. Identity and Non-Identity
• LIV. The Buddha Omnipresent
• LV. One Essence, One Law, One Aim
• LVI. The Lesson Given to Rāhula
• LVII. The Sermon on Abuse
• LVIII. The Buddha Replies to the Deva
• LIX. Words of Instruction
• LX. Amitābha
• LXI. The Teacher Unknown
• PARABLES AND STORIES.
• LXII. Parables
• LXIII. The Widow's Two Mites and the Parable of the Three Merchants
• LXIV. The Man Born Blind
• LXV. The Lost Son
• LXVI. The Giddy Fish
• LXVII. The Cruel Crane Outwitted
• LXVIII. Four Kinds of Merit
• LXIX. The Light of the World
• LXX. Luxurious Living
• LXXI. The Communication of Bliss
• LXXII. The Listless Fool
• LXXIII. Rescue in the Desert
• LXXIV. The Sower
• LXXV. The Outcast
• LXXVI. The Woman at the Well
• LXXVII. The Peacemaker
• LXXVIII. The Hungry Dog
• LXXIX. The Despot
• LXXX. Vāsavadattā
• LXXXI. The Marriage-Feast in Jambūnada
• LXXXII. A Party in Search of a Thief
• LXXXIII. In the Realm of Yamarāja
• LXXXIV. The Mustard Seed
• LXXXV. Following the Master Over the Stream
• LXXXVI. The Sick Bhikkhu
• LXXXVII. The Patient Elephant
• THE LAST DAYS.
• LXXXVIII. The Conditions of Welfare
• LXXXIX. Sāriputta's Faith
• XC. Pātaliputta
• XCI. The Mirror of Truth
• XCII. Ambapālī
• XCIII. The Buddha's Farewell Address
• XCIV. The Buddha Announces His Death
• XCV. Chunda, the Smith
• XCVI. Metteyya
• XCVII. The Buddha's Final Entering Into Nirvāna
• CONCLUSION.
• XCVIII. The Three Personalities of the Buddha
• XCIX. The Purpose of Being
• C. The Praise of All the Buddhas
• Table of Reference
• Abbreviations in the Table of Reference
• Glossary of Names and Terms
• Index
• Remarks on the illustrations of the Gospel of Buddha