Influence Page
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spread, transformation, and ramification are one of the great themes in the
religious history of Asia. In the texts we breathe a unique atmosphere, never encountered elsewhere in the world, which was wafted deep into Asia. A new metaphysics and way of life became an element of Chinese and Japanese existence, brought a new gentleness to the peoples of Tibet, Siberia, Mongolia.... But a strange thing happened. In India, which produced Buddhism, it died out. Moved by an overpowering instinct, India remained Hindu, choosing to live in castes, with the old gods, in a philosophically conceived totality, and here Buddhism vanished. Conceived as a religion of humanity, it remained dominant for centuries in large parts of India, and a religion of humanity it remained when it died out without violence in the course of a thousand years. Throughout Asia it was a liberator of hitherto dormant depths in the souls of men, but it was everywhere combated and set aside when national strivings came to the fore (in China and Japan). In the centuries preceding and following the birth of Christ, Buddhism split into a northern and a southern movement, Mahayana (the Great Vehicle in which to cross the waters of samsara to the land of salvation) and Hinayana (the Little Vehicle). Hinayana is purer and closer to the origins; compared to it, Mahayana seems like a fall into the mechanical forms of religion. Yet it is worthy of note that Hinayana, which has endured down to our day in Ceylon and Indochina, has contributed nothing new. It has done little more than to carry the traditional material down through the centuries, whereas Mahayana has entered upon a period of living growth which not only satisfies the religious needs of the masses but has also supplied the basis for a new flowering of sublimated speculative philosophy. With its rigid adherence to a once acquired canon and its emphasis on the perfection of the individual, Hinayana may be regarded as a narrowing. Mahayana, on the other hand, is almost entirely open to new and foreign elements and is resolutely concerned with the redemption not only of the individual, but of all beings. Mahayana has developed certain of ideas that were neglected in Hinayana, above all, his decision to bring salvation to all beings, gods and men alike. And here too we find the seeds of the sublime ideas that were to be fully explored only much later, in the Mahayanic sects, by Nagarjuna (c. A.D. 200) and others. |