THE REFLEX EFFECT OF ASIATIC IDEAS.
IT is a quarter of a century ago since the present writer ob- served in the Spectator, when commenting on some fresh triumph of the mail service, that the increase of communication between Europe and Asia might produce unexpected results. We all think of it as increasing the intellectual grip of Europe on Asia, but it must also facilitate the reflex action of Asiatic ideas on Europe. They poured back on us in a flood during the Crusades ; and why should they not pour again, to affect us once more, either, as Christianity did, by conversion, or, as Mahommedanism did, by recoil ? The prophecy has not hitherto been accomplished. The dividing barrier between the thoughts of the East and the West has proved tenacious, and though, to the surprise of mankind, Oriental art has made a capture of the European mind, so that Asiatic colouring and Asiatic decoration have permanently affected all Western eyes, the special thoughts of the East have made little visible impression. We fancy, however, that the barrier is cracking. By far the most startling fact in the biography of Laurence Oliphant was the proof it afforded that Western minds— for Oliphant was not alone—could accept and act on a leading Asiatic idea, that if a man could utterly dominate self, and make the body a completely passive agent of the will, he would wrest from Heaven, or Fate, or the Universum, whichever it was, powers transcending those known from experience to be possessed by human beings. The possessor of those powers could convert the world without the slow methods of persuasion, perhaps enter into relation with beings before whose wisdom that of men is ignorant foolish- ness. That was the governing hope which impelled Laurence Oliphant to his strange life, with its victory, as he thought, over the flesh ; and it will, byand-by, probably impel much stronger natures than his. The prize is so enormous, so entirely transcending any usual reward for effort, that the minds which can accept its possibility will be strongly moved to the attempt, and will waste years in an experiment which, though so often made, and sometimes made successfully—for there are faqueers and sunyasees and Buddhist devotees who have conquered the body—has never yet produced a spark of result in supernormal power. Fortunately, those who try it will be few, for the Western mind, unlike the Eastern, can never be quite dominated by an idea, and always applies to it some test which, in the case of a theory like self-suppression, is sure, sooner or later, to be fatal. We shall see, however, a few trials, witness the rise of some strange sects, and probably see a large diffusion of that Eastern idea, the presence of the all-pervading universal spirit in all things, good, evil, and indifferent, which, if Mr. J. A. Symonds is a sound critic, is the governing thought, indeed the sole thought, of Walt Whitman, and which his critic also believes to be of the essence of democracy. It will liquefy morals if it comes, and drive back civilisation, so far as civilisation is dependent on a discipline of restraints ; but come it will in places, with its correlative, that all material things, bad, good, and indifferent, if placed in an intense light, are essentially evil. You see both ideas filling Russian literature even now, and the thought of the Slav, which differs from all other thought in Europe by instantly producing act, as thought does in children, has a great part yet to play in moulding the West.
So has Buddhist thought. All that stuff about Mahatmas is rubbish, unsupported by a trace of evidence, a merely stupid expression of the desire of so many minds for guidance either incapable of error, or less capable than the guidance of ordinary beings ; but the Mahatma notion is a mere excrescence on a creed which has a big thought embedded in it. We were surprised to perceive that both the French Buddhists, and the English as represented by Mrs. Besant,
avowed a belief in the doctrine of transmigration, or, as the latter prefers to call it, of reincarnations. To most Englishmen, that idea, which in one way or another dominates the whole of non-Mussnlman Asia, even that comparatively small section of the Chinese which is capable. of rising above pure secularism, has a slightly comic effect, derived, we fancy, chiefly from an impression that to become an animal—which could only be a result of con- tinuous degradation—would be an absurdity. The doctrine, however, as really held in Asia, has an astonishing charm for some subtle minds, and especially for those which are never content to await future solutions to the great perplexities of the world. It does explain the inexplicable, and reconcile man, not indeed to his destiny, but to his position in the world The whole notion of an injustice inherent in the scheme of the universe, disappears at once, and all that endless problem why some, perhaps innocent, suffer, and some, perhaps guilty, enjoy. There is no injustice if this life is but a link in a long chain of past as well as future lives, and the millionaire is being rewarded for his past careers, and the pauper punished for his. Suffering, under that theory, is but expiation for your own forgotten crimes, and will be fully repaid by the cleanli- ness in which you will enter on the next stage, while enjoy- ment is but reward, moderated by its concomitant, the temptation to let the flesh win again, and so recommence the round. Nor is equality possible, or inequality unjust, when grade is a sign of the favour won from the All, and the Prince is reaping reward, and the night-soilman paying the penalty for the deeds of previous existence. There is not a particle of evidence for the hypothesis, which has against it, in a philosophic sense, the want of purpose in the total of existence ; but it does explain the visible phenomena, and that in so modern a way that nothing would surprise ne less than to see it adopted by great crowds who, in their passion of pity, accuse God of oppression because he suffers unearned pain to exist among mankind. Why should a child which has done nothing have epilepsy ? That is the perpetual half-formulated query of modern philanthropy ; and Buddhism, which leaves the greatest problems unsolved—for instance, the use of the universe, which under its theory, is an ever-revolving circle of inutilities springing from the All and reabsorbed into it —does resolve the problem which for a moment, when the imagination of men has, as it were, become raw, presses sharply upon the excoriation. The theory rebuilds content with the universe, and gets rid of puzzledom ; and but for something in the average white mind which rejects it, because, we fancy, it suggests such inconceivable waste, a whole universe gyrating like a dancing dervish to no end, it might become one of the prevalent creeds of Europe. It is consistent with the effort to be good, yet explains suffering and imposes perfect resignation,—a great comfort to the majority who suffer. It will have its career, too, if faith in a personal God dies out, for humanity will always explore the whence and whither ; and if the ultimate cause is either universal and eternal matter, or intangible and undesigning spirit, the central thought of Buddhism is as good an explanation as man is likely to forge. There will come a time, too, when the great experiment of democracy has failed, as it probably will fail with unexpected rapidity ; when men will ask the reason of the failure, and many of them will find it in the contradiction between the idea cd equality and the instinctive sense of justice which at least assigns a superior reward to the good. Buddhism does do that.
We wonder if the worst idea of Asia, that morality has no immutable basis, but is a fluctuating law dependent upon some inexplicable relation between the individual and the Creator, or the individual and the All, will ever come over here. The Indian holds that a line of conduct may be right for one man, or indeed imperative, but wrong for another, or indeed in- sufferable; that a world-wide law is unthinkable ; and that each man will be judged because of his obedience to some law external to himself, yet peculiar to his own personality. The King's obligation to the divine is not the peasant's ; the ordinary Brahmin must be monogamous, while the Koolin Brahmin may have• sixty wives ; the trader may cheat where the carrier must keep contract ; the usual Hindoo must spare life, while the Thug may take it and yet remain sinless. That opinion subverts the very foundations of morality and conduct ; yet there are subtle minds that hold it, and Europe once showed a curious tendency in the same direction. Different moral laws were held to bind different classes, a notion still surviving and active whenever the conduct of clergymen is called in question. We have never been able to trace the genesis of that notion, which has been, as it were, intercalated into Hindooism, and suspect it of not being a religions idea at all, but one born of convenience and allowed a religious sanction, because a non.religious idea, an idea which is useful and received, yet excepted from divine sanction, is impossible to the Hindoo mind. Nothing can be tolerable and yet outside that system. We have little fear of the idea in Europe, which recoils from it more and more, tending always towards equality, at least in fetters, be they for good or evil ; but we have some apprehen- sion of the last Asiatic idea, which we shall mention as likely to be imported. This is the notion of man's irresponsibility for anything but his individual conduct, for the general system of things as it exists around him. That, says and thinks the Asiatic, is the work of superior powers, and no more to be modified than the procession of the seasons ; and but that human nature is weak, he would no more resist it than a true Mussulman would, effect an insurance on his ship. The sub- missiveness of Asia to evils that could be remedied springs ultimately from that, and is because of that nearly incurable. The genuine Asiatic, uncorrupted by white teaching, con- siders that which is as the will of God, and leaves it to him to alter. Why put a lightning-conductor by the Mosque ? God, if he pleases, can take care of his own ; and if he does not please, of what use to try and thwart his will? The Mussul- man avowedly holds that theory, but there is not an Asiatic free of it, even the strong-willed Chinaman yielding to it almost, though not quite entirely. The combative energy of the European, who when roused to consciousness will put up with nothing, and who has the stimulus of living on a continent in which the powers of Nature are comparatively feeble, has kept him from this soporific belief ; but take away from him a little hope—and the resistless strength of democracy may take some away, as it is doing from Americans—or increase by a little his impression that "God has no need of human aid" —an impression of all the more rigid Calvinists and Quakers— and he would sink back, reluctantly but certainly, to the sub- missiveness of Asia, amid which it is felt to be wrong even to lament the flood when superior forces made the waters swell. We shall not see it in our time, for the energy of the white races, whose reign is comparatively new, is still unexhausted, and they have the spirit of the Titans, who thought even Olympus might be stormed; but there are times when ideas which soothe are readily received, and ideas which are readily received are terribly strong. The dream of the right of all men to everything they want, which is a mere thought unsupported by evidence, or rather, denied by the ever-present evidence that the earth yields food only in return for human sweat, and that every human being lives under sentence of capital punishment, is already shaking the very foundations of European society. Thought is stronger than armies, even when it is as baseless as the main thought of the Buddhist creed.
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