BARON VON STAEL-HOLSTEIN DESCRIBES WIDE DIVERGENCY OF BUDDHIST SECTS

The following article on the religion founded by Buddha and the numerous sects that have grown out of it was written by Baron von Stael-Holstein, visiting lecturer at the University. Baron von Stael-Holstein who occupies the post of professor of Sanscrit at the National University of Peking is one of the lecturers who are at Harvard this year in connection with the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

Shakyamuni Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, was an Indian prince who lived in the sixth century B. C. At an early age his meditations led him to the conclusion that a life of renunciation and high thought was preferable to the delights of home and love. He regarded the charm of wealth and power as nothing but illusions, and left his father's palace in order to become a wandering ascetic. After many years of reclusion and concentrated thinking he began teaching his system of salvation which would deliver all living beings from sin and suffering. He taught that men should save themselves by meditation and by the practice of a high code of morality, and that they should not rely upon any divinities. He condemned the worship of idols as severely as the offering of sacrifices, but after his death those practices crept into the order he himself founded. Present day Buddhists are practically all idol worshippers. Some of them adore representations of Shapyamuni alone, but the great majority do homage to a considerable number of saints and divinities.

Another saint whose representations far outnumber the images of Shakyamuni is Avalokiteshvara. He has developed into one of the most important divinities among northern Buddhists and is regarded as the god (or goddess) of mercy, seafarers, as the bestower of children, etc., by many millions of believing Tibetans, Chinese and Japanese.

The personages mentioned above are all purely Buddhist in origin, but pre-Buddhist divinities are also well represented in the Buddhist sanctuaries of the present day. The very gods whose worship was denounced as useless or reprehensible by Shakyamuni Buddha occupy important positions in a great number of temples. Brahma, the creator, a purely Indian divinity, is worshipped by many present day Buddhists.

The Indian Buddhist missionaries who went to preach their doctrine in foreign lands could not always overcome the love of their converts for certain native, non-Indian, divinities. The new members of the Buddhist community could not forget some of the gods worshipped by their ancestors for many generations, and means had to be found to reconcile the new faith with such deep-rooted sympathies.

In many instances the missionaries resorted to a compromise; they declared the most beloved native gods as nothing but incarnations of certain accepted members of the Indian Buddhist pantheon. This method was most successfully carried through in Japan where the first Buddhist missionaries arrived in the sixth century A. D. They were confronted by a firmly established native pantheon in that country and succeeded in identifying almost all Japanese gods with their own, imported divinities. As a result of that procedure, Shintoism, the national religion of Japan, was all but absorbed by the new faith, and most Shinto temples were administered by the Buddhist clergy. That state of things lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century when a number of temples were restored to purely Shintoist ownership, but very many traces of the amalgamation may still be observed in present-day Japan. The modern Japanese Buddhist pantheon is quite an international assembly containing as it does Indian, Chinese and purely Japanese personages The Tibetan and Chinese pantheons are less international, but their composite character does nevertheless present serious problems to the student of mythology. Most of those problems still await a solution, and the histories of many divinities must be written before a complete Buddhist mythology can be composed. As a matter of fact Buddhist mythology presents a maze complicated by the different way in which the Indian names are treated by the Buddhist of Tibet, China, and Japan Some of those names are translated, others are transcribed by the non-Indian Buddhists and still others represent a mixture of the two methods. Tracing those names back to their original Indian forms is not always an easy task.

The iconographic collection recently presented to Harvard contains a good deal of material hitherto entirely unknown in the West, and we hope that it will be used to good advantage by those members of this University who are interested in the civilization of Eastern Asia.