{"collection":"Buddhism","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/bud/ipc/ipc09.htm","path":"bud/ipc/ipc09.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/bud/ipc/ipc09.htm","text":"India in Primitive Christianity, by Arthur Lille, [1909]\nNew gods\u2014All of them S\u2019iva\u2014A Mask of Buddhism on some of them\u2014Dhy\u00e2ni or Heavenly Buddhas\u2014Dhy\u00e2ni Bodhisatwas\u2014Conversion of the Relic Cairn of Early Buddhism into S\u2019iva's Lingam Disguised as a Chaitya\u2014Chaitya Worship at Mathura\u2014S\u2019iva Buddhism a Worship of S\u2019iva with \"Left-handed\" T\u00e2ntrika Rites\u2014It is to be found in all Buddhist Kingdoms\u2014Rapid survey.\nThe Mah\u00e2y\u00e2na movement introduced many new gods.\nAs a test question let us inquire who, according to the Mah\u00e2y\u00e2na made the world?\nThe first answer is\u2014\"\u00ceshwara or \u00c2di Buddha,\"\u2014the \"Cause of all existence.\" \"From his Dhy\u00e2na the universe was produced by him!\" *\nI copy this from Mr. Hodgson's extracts of the old Sanskrit literature rescued in Nepal when Buddhism was driven from India.\nAnother name is mentioned by him\u2014\"Tath\u00e2gata.\" He also made the world, for he is the same being as Adi Buddha. *\nBut the matter does not stop here:\u2014\n\u00ceshwara being the Absolute, and being imaged as residing in Nirvritti, the awful and untravelled haunts of divine repose, deputed five Dhy\u00e2ni or heavenly Buddhas to make the World.\nTheir names are:\u2014\n(1) Vairochana.\n(2) Akshobhya.\n(3) Ratna Sambhava.\n(4) Amit\u00e2bha.\n(5) Amoghasiddha.\nBut these seem to have passed on the work to five \"Heavenly Bodhisatwas.\" *\n(1) Samantabhadra.\n(2) Vajra P\u00e2ni.\n(3) Ratna P\u00e2ni.\n(4) Padma P\u00e2ni.\n(5) Viswa P\u00e2ni.\nStill, the number of divine beings credited with making the earth is by no means exhausted:\u2014\n\"I salute that Dharma (Durg\u00e2) who is Prajn\u00e2 P\u00e2ramit\u00e2 (the Wisdom of the Other Bank), pointing out the way of perfect tranquility to all mortals, and leading them in the paths of perfect Wisdom; who by the testimony of all the sages produced and created all things.\" \u2020\nBut even that does not exhaust the whole list.\n\"For the sake of obtaining Nirvritti I devote myself to the feet of 'Sa\u00f1gha,' who having assumed the three gunas created the three worlds.\" \u2021\nBut again the list is still unexhausted, for it appears that Sangha in the work of creation is mixed up with Amit\u00e2bha.\nBut the creation of the world even after all this elucidation is still a puzzle, for we learn that Sangha is another name for Padmap\u00e2ni, one of the \"Bodhisatwas,\" and that Padmap\u00e2ni is \"Avalokitishwara,\" and \"Maitreya,\" the coming Buddha. \u00a7\n \n \nClick to enlarge\nPLATE 6.\n THE CHAITYA LINGAM.\nS\u2019iva has got a thousand names, and if we concede that the Mah\u00e2y\u00e2na was his Pantheism we might pass over this absurd and contradictory catalogue of mythological phantoms without much comment. But literal minds, when they discourse about Buddhism, treat all these phantoms as real beings, and make the contradictions doubly contradictory. Resolved into their ultimate these gods are two\u2014S\u00eeva, and Maitreya Buddha or S\u00eeva wearing the mask of S\u00e2kya Muni.\nWhat was S\u2019ivism viewed from the outside? \"His worshippers,\" says Professor Hayman Wilson, \"contented themselves with flinging 'water, oil and faded flowers\u2019 on his emblem the Lingam.\"\nWhat was early Buddhism viewed from the outside? Offerings to the relics of S\u00e2kya Muni, placed under a Tope or St\u00fbpa? (heap).\nNow S\u2019iva Buddhism to harmonise these two ideas converted the relic-mound or Chaitya from the curve taken by a heap of stones thrown at random one upon the other to a dome like the lingam.\nA rough sketch (Pl. 6) shows how this was done. Above (Fig. 1) is an early cairn, like the Sanchi Tope. Then (Fig. 2) I give the early Lingam, which was a large block of bed-rock, left when excavating a cave-temple. Fig. 3 is a miniature dome-chaitya, the old relic-mound made into S\u2019iva's emblem. In Fig. 4 we get the \"Jew's harp,\" as it is called, the Lingam to be seen in every bazaar.\nWhen Mr. Brian Hodgson went as British Minister to Nepal he was astonished to find an abundance of these lingams. The Chaitya, or relic-mound, had been \"metamorphosed into a lingam\"; and, as he tells us \"its worship may now be seen in numerous instances in Nepal, e.g., at K\u00e2l\u00ee's temple, on the roadside near Tundi Khel.\" * He applied to his teacher, Amirta Nanda Bandhya, who assured him that the\nborrowing had been on the other way, the Hindus had taken the Buddhist Chaitya and broken off the Ch\u00fbla mani, or spire, from each, and called it a S\u2019iva lingam, but that is a gloss that we cannot accept.\nTo build a sepulchral cairn to a dead saint or Buddha, and to honour his relics with offerings and rotatory peregrinations is a conceivable act, especially if, as with the Abb\u00e9 Paris, strange cures can be effected at his tomb. But to build a sepulchral Tope to a saint who is not yet dead, nor even yet born, is a wild idea. Its object was to banish S\u00e2kya Muni to a Nirv\u00e2na of Nothingness, and to change the worship of him and his relic-mounds to a worship of relic-domes despoiled of relics but tenanted by Maitreya, and other Bodhisatwas (monks of high spiritual progress that will one day be Buddhas).\nThe invaluable Chinese traveller, Hiouen Thsiang, describes in his \"history\" * the relic-mound worship at Mathur\u00e2 when he visited the city. The early Buddhists, the disciples of the Little Vehicle, paid homage to the relics of \u015a\u00e2riputra, Maudgaly\u00e2yana, \u00c2nanda, and other great Buddhist saints, who had each one a handsome st\u00fbpa in that city, but the disciples of the Great Vehicle \"worshipped the Bodhisattwas\" in their topes. Fa Hian bears a similar testimony. \u2020\nThat traveller was nearly lost at sea, but he prayed to \"Bodhisatwa Avalokitiswara,\" and the storm abated. Hiouen Thsiang, on the other hand, was caught by pirates on the Ganges, who proposed to sacrifice him to Durg\u00e2. He prayed to Maitreya Bodhisatwa, the coming Buddha, and likewise escaped.\nNow, the forcible intrusion of S\u2019iva and his lingam\u2014and also his left-handed or T\u00e2ntrika rites is what I call S\u2019iva-Buddhism. Let us make a hasty examination\nof the chief Buddhist kingdoms, one by one, to see if the change was at all general.\nThe Tibetans have Tantric rites and human sacrifices, and many writers maintain that these are only outside relics of the earlier, or Bon, religion; but that is against all evidence. The Dalai L\u00e2ma claims to be the head of the Buddhist movement. Avalokitishwara (S\u2019iva in person) is said to have brought Buddhism to Tibet. * He is incarnate always in the Dalai L\u00e2ma. He is represented like S\u2019iva, with four arms. His wife Avalokit\u00ee, as the \"White T\u00e2r\u00e2,\" is compared by Surgeon-Major Waddell to the Madonna, as regards her benign influence in the community; but she transcends all that has been hitherto imagined of cruel malignity and devilry as \"Lha-mo,\" the \"great Maharani.\" \"She is credited with letting loose the demons of disease, and her name is scarcely ever mentioned, and only then with bated breath.\" \u2020\nTibet is also furnished with an army of fiends, the demons of the terrible K\u00e2la-Chakra, as soberly organised as the army of gods and Buddhas. Indeed, they may be described as that army daubed over with Indian ink. Every god of the Brahmans has his counterpart presentment in hell.\nThese are clothed for the most part in the richest China silks and crapes, and wear pantomime masks, and upon their stomachs human skulls, skulls richly embroidered. And the celestial Buddhas figure as \"demoniacal Buddhas,\" K\u00e2la-Chakra, Heruka, Achala, Vajra-vairabha, etc. The \"celestial Bodhisatwas\" are also \"ferocious and bloodthirsty, and only to be conciliated by constant worship of themselves and their female energies, with offerings and sacrifices,\nmagic circles, special mantras, charms.\" * The \"energies\" of these demoniacal Bodhisatwas are the \"Dakkini fiendesses.\" All the Buddhist L\u00e2mas crowd to the festival of the \"She-devil Dev\u00ee,\" who is worshipped for seven days like Dev\u00ee, in India, to gain security from disease for the coming year. \u2020\nOf the vast literature of orthodox Buddhist sorcery I will speak in the next section.\nI have already dealt with S\u2019iva worship in Nepal in treating of the Chaitya. Mr. Hodgson found this worship of the Chaitya, or lingam as he supposed it, everywhere. He also was astonished to find the statue of S\u2019iva in every temple, \"even in the penetralia.\"\nThe Buddhist Dharma, the Sophia of the Gnostics, has for one name \"S\u2019iva Sakti,\" the wife or female energy of S\u2019iva. One of the holy books is called Trikand Sesh (the three-throated Serpent\u2014Sesh, S\u2019iva's emblem). The initiation, or baptism, is given by Mr. Hodgson:\u2014\nSeveral names of S\u2019iva are used in this ritual, Avalokitisvara, Visva Karma, Vajra P\u00e2ni, and the postulant vows to devote himself to the worship of the Chaitya. \"When the purely Buddhist ritual is exhausted,\" says Mr. Hodgson, \"the Tantric esoteric comes on,\u2014which consists of the worship of the Balis. Flesh, blood and spirits are put into a conch shell. The celebrant wears a mask of Bhairava, and holds his terrible pas\u00e1 or noose. N\u00e2gas, Yakshas, R\u00e2khsasas, devatas, have all their Balis. Many names are given including the Bali of Mah\u00e2 K\u00e2la himself\u2014(S\u2019iva as \"great Time\").\nIf the foulest Tantrik rites form the chief part of the initiation of a Buddhist postulant, it seems quite\n \n \nClick to enlarge\nPLATE 7.\n CHAITYA-LINGAM WORSHIP. From Amar\u00e2vat\u00ee.\n \n \nClick to enlarge\nPLATE 8.\n SAMANA DEVA RAJAH.\nplain that they cannot be called mere barnacles on the outside of the ship.\nWhen the Buddhist hierarchy was driven northward from their monastery at Nalanda near Buddha Gaya, Nepal received for safety a large portion of the esoteric Sanskrit literature. A great number of these rituals are called T\u00e2ntras, or treatises setting forth the worship of the \"left-handed\" gods. No less than seventy-four of these T\u00e2ntras are catalogued by Brian Hodgson, including the terrible K\u00e2la Chakra. Great secrecy is maintained concerning these books.\nThe Rev. Samuel Beal has told us that the divine being \"Quan Yin,\" was there sometimes worshipped as a female and sometimes worshipped as a male. He has told us, too, that Quan Yin in Chinese is the same as the Sanskrit word Avalokitisvara, or \"S\u2019iva looking down.\" Quan Yin dominates the rituals.\nAnd China, too, has the K\u00e2la Chakra and all the T\u00e2ntras or esoteric works; and practises all the sorceries. These superstitions are put down to local \"Dragon worship\" and \"Taoism\"; but a great religion like Buddhism of old, which has an imposing ecclesiastical centre, and many branch churches which have each in its most secret penetralia some seventy-four cherished spell books and grimoires, expounding secret esoteric rites to, let us say, seventy-four different yakshas\u2014such a church cannot be called a mere prey to paltry local superstitions.\nA god with a white elephant at his feet is a popular print in Ceylon. There are several in Mr. Upham's book. He tells us that this god is Samana Deva R\u00e2jah, so called from Samane Galle (Adam's Peak), \"where he is now living with his deities with power\nover Ceylon.\" The white elephant is Buddha in a Nirv\u00e2\u1e47a of uselessness. I give a rough sketch of one of these from my sketch book. A strange, spoon-shaped aureole or cadre surmounts all the principal gods and demons in Ceylon prints, and each stands on a stone,\u2014aureole, god and stone making up the outline of a columnar Lingam. Buddha is reported to have handed over this stone, the Minne Phalange, or Stone of Supremacy, at the date of his death to Samane Deva R\u00e2jah.\nSagittarius in the Indian Zodiac is called the Bow of S\u2019iva.\nCeylon took a very prominent part in the present strange revival of interest in the West of the Buddhist movement. Great credit is due to the missionaries, who studied the language for their own purposes. And in the records of the island they found it asserted that the Buddhism of Ceylon was the earliest and genuine Buddhism. But since the travels of the Chinese pilgrim Hiouen Tsiang have been disinterred, that idea is no longer tenable. * The great revolution called the Mah\u00e2y\u00e2na (Great Vehicle) included Ceylon in its vortex. Indeed, one prominent Oriental scholar, Horace Hayman Wilson, thought that the fusion of strict Buddhism with the Indian religions came from Ceylon. \u2020\nSamana Deva R\u00e2jah, as his name implies, is Deva or S\u2019iva, and the Kappooism, or devil-dancing in Ceylon, is pretty well known. The amount of devils to be conciliated is large, if according to Mr. Moncure Conway, eighty-four thousand charms are required for the purpose. It is urged that this sorcery is a reminiscence of the Naga worship that prevailed\nin the island before it was converted to Buddhism. Again we have the defence set up that these devils are mere barnacles on the outside of the ship.\nMuch has been made of the fact that the names of some of the Mah\u00e2y\u00e2na gods mentioned at the beginning of this chapter are not known in Ceylon. From this it is argued that Ceylon knows nothing of the Mah\u00e2y\u00e2na movement, but the names Tath\u00e2gatha, Sa\u00f1gha as a god, Purus\u00e1, Maitreya, are in all the rituals and holy hooks, and these are Mah\u00e2y\u00e2na gods. The test name is \"Maitreya,\" who according to Professor Rhys Davids under the name of N\u00e2th has his statue in almost all the Wiharas. * In the Mah\u00e2wanso it is announced that the Cingalese King Dhatuseno, built a fine temple to Bodhisatto Mett\u00eayyo and \"invested his image with every regal ornament.\" \u2020 Guards to the distance of one yogana specially protected this temple. Was this Mett\u00eayyo an ordinary Bodhisattwa, i.e., a yokel ignorant as yet of all spiritual illumination? If so, how did Dhatuseno know that he was to be the next Buddha, and that his name was \"N\u00e2th.\" If, on the other hand, this Maitreya was the clumsy subterfuge by the aid of which the Mah\u00e2y\u00e2na sought to depose the worship of \u015a\u00e2kya Muni, it is plain that King Dhatuseno was not altogether ignorant of Mah\u00e2y\u00e2na teachings.\nIf a Burmese is knocked down suddenly in the street, he cries out, \"Phra Kaiba\" (\"God help me\"), but he does not believe in any God at all. This is what we learn from Bishop Bigandet, \u2021 who goes on to say that the \"God\" thus involuntarily invoked cannot be Buddha, for folks there openly maintain\nthat Buddha never interferes in human affairs. For Tantrik rites, the Burmese are well furnished with spirits called \"Nats.\" Major Waddell believes that this word is the Sanskrit \"N\u00e2th\" (Lord), also applied to the Spirits of the left-handed T\u00e2ntrika. Major Phaire combats this, and says it is an old local word for local demons. The Burmese priests advise the laity to have recourse to the devil dancers when they get ill. A wigwam is built up for the offerings, then the dancer commences to dance softly, working up bit by bit to corybantic frenzy. When she (for a woman is preferred) falls down exhausted and half dead, she is consulted by the sorcerer about the malady, and the Nat that is causing it.\nThis theory of a Buddha still intelligent, but no longer interested in the cares of humanity, is plainly a version of the teaching of the Se\u015bvara Sankhya, which says the same thing of S\u2019iva.\nI had many opportunities of conversing with Captain Pfoundes, a gentleman who spent more than eight years of his life in a Japanese temple. He tells me that the statue of Amit\u00e2bha is everywhere in Japan, under the title of Amida Butz, and that this is quite distinct from Shaky Muni, and much more reverenced by them. Under the title Niorai, a loftier and more abstract divinity, still is known to the Japanese. Here we get Ishwara, also his five activities for Amit\u00e2bha is one of the five Dhy\u00e2ni Buddhas. And the Tantrik rites can, of course, be credited to the Shinto exorcists.\nProfessor Knox tells us that Shaka Muny is completely obliterated by Amit\u00e2bha; also that the demons of the Islands fought a great battle with the demons of Buddhism on its arrival, but the magical powers of the latter were deemed superior. Then Shinto\nwas pacified on being told that their demons were incarnations of Buddha. *\nThe Siamese believe that there is no God, only causation (Karma), which word perhaps ought to be rendered \"Destiny.\"\nAn old scripture, the \"Traiphoom\" describes the making, and also the periodical destruction of worlds, and the conversion through long stretches of time of devils into angels, and of angels back again into devils. \u2020\nIn Crawford's \"Embassy to Siam\" is an account of a funeral procession in honour of a dead king. Sixty or seventy giants and masked figures, gods, Balis, and Yakshas. followed the corpse. The left-handed gods of Buddhism are said to be gigantic.\nMr. Crawford, treating of Java, declares that the fact most worthy of attention in respect to the images of Buddha is that they never appear in any of the great central temples as the primary object of worship, but in the smaller surrounding ones.\nHe instances the fact that the lingam is everywhere and also palpable images of S\u2019iva as the Yogi, or with Ganga in his topknot. His view is that \"genuine Buddhism was S\u2019ivism;\" and that in Java Buddha is not worshipped at all. It is through him that I can shortly give some valuable information about a head without a jaw, which betrays all the attempts of the Buddhists to appropriate S\u2019ivan temples. Mr. Crawford was before his time.\nAnd what was the philosophy of these Buddhist organisations?\nThe Buddhists of the S\u2019iva Buddha movement were divided broadly into two great schools,\u2014the Swabhavikas and the Aishwarikas.\nMr. Brian Hodgson thus speaks of these two sects:\u2014\n\"The Swabhavikas deny the existence of immateriality. They assert that matter is the sole substance, and they give it two modes called Pravritti and Nirvritti, or action and rest, concretion and abstraction. Matter itself, they say, is eternal (however infinitesimally attenuated in Nirvritti); and so are the powers of matter, which powers possess not only activity, but intelligence.\" *\nOn the other hand, as Hodgson tells us, the Aishwarika sect \"admits of immaterial essence, and of a supreme, infinite, self-existent Deity, Adi Buddha (or, as their name suggests, Ishwara S\u2019iva), but they deny that he interferes with the affairs of men.\" \u2020\nThese schools are plainly echoes of the two ancient Yoga treatises of S\u2019iva's ascetics, the Karika of Kapila, and the Yoga \u015a\u00e2stra of Patanjali.\nLaunched in the West by the Buddhist missionaries, these two tractates have strongly affected the Gnostics, the Christians, the Moslem, the secret societies of the Middle Ages. And now, thanks to Spinoza, it is their quaint destiny to be the Bibles of the great modern controversy.\nB\u00fcchner, the High Priest of the Scientists, has declared that the Sankhya's inert, unknowable Ishwara is the God of modern science, whereas, thanks to Spiritualists like Boehme, and to the Kabbala, S\u2019ivism has had immense influence with the secret mystical societies.\n107:* Hodgson, \"Religion of Nepal,\" p. 77.\n108:* Hodgson, \"Religion of Nepal.\"\n108:\u2020 Ibid, p. 142.\n108:\u2021 Ibid, p. 88.\n108:\u00a7 Hodgson, p. 142.\n109:* Hodgson, \"Religion of Nepal,\" p. 139.\n110:* Hiouen Thsiang, \"Histoire,\" p. 104.\n110:\u2020 Fa Hian, \"Pilgrimage,\" p. 101.\n111:* Schlagintweit, \"Buddhism in Tibet,\" p. 63.\n111:\u2020 Waddell, \"Buddhism of Tibet,\" p. 364.\n112:* Waddell, \"Buddhism of Tibet,\" p. 131.\n112:\u2020 Ibid. p, 365.\n114:* See Monier Williams, \"Buddhism,\" p. 162. Major Waddell, \"Buddhism in Tibet,\" p. 123. See also my \"Buddha and Early Buddhism\" which deals with the dishonesty of the Cingalese records.\n114:\u2020 See Emerson Tennant, \"Ceylon,\" Vol. L., p. 379.\n115:* Rhys Davids, \"Buddhism,\" p. 201.\n115:\u2020 Turnour, \"The Mah\u00e2wanso,\" p. 258.\n115:\u2021 Bigandef,\" 183.\n117:* Knox, \"Religion of Japan,\" p. 88.\n117:\u2020 Alabaster, \"The Modern Buddhist,\" p. 17.\n118:* Hodgson, \"Religion of Tibet,\" p. 23.\n118:\u2020 Hodgson, \"Religion of Nepal,\" p. 25.","title":"India in Primitive Christianity: Chapter VI. The Mah&acir...","type":"page"}