and this complete absence of carefulness for others, this
insistent and fierce desire to save one’s own soul, regardless
of a brother’s, is in itself something that makes
foreign to one the best that Lamaism has to offer. Kim’s
lama may exist to-day ; that is, there may be and indeed
I have no hesitation in saying that there are, in Tibet at
the present moment members of this priestly caste of
whose sanctity and austere detachness from mundane
pleasures there is no doubt, men of kindly heart, unsullied
by the world, struggling so far as in them lies to reach
back to the great Example beneath the quivering leaves
of the pepul tree of Gaya. But apart from the fact that
these men are rare indeed, and were they commoner could
exert little or no influence upon others, it is to be-remem-
bered that there is only one way in which the pious
Buddhist can hope to help his fellow-man, and that
the very structure of Lamaism decides for him whether
or not he is destined to be one of these helpers before a
conscious thought moves through his baby brain.
The doctrine of the reincarnation of Bodisats is
perhaps a theory which in conception is not unworthy to
rank close behind even that great sacrifice upon which
Christianity is based. For the Bodisat has earned the
right to eternal rest ; for him, and he knows it well, there
need be no more “ whips and scorns of time ” ; everlasting
quietude, so peaceful that the soul does not know
even that it is at peace, the Paradise to which all Buddhism
stretches out and, as it may, creeps from point to
point, all this he has most fully and most fairly won.
But having reached the goal of all desire, the Bodisat
turns again, with deliberate purpose, to descend into the
arena of the world and the flesh, there to help onwards
along the thorny road some few of his fellow sinners.
S E L F ISH N E S S OF LAMA ISM Si
And this is not a single choice. He elects so to continue
in an eternal cycle, bound down by the cares and pleasures
of the flesh, generation after generation, in order
that some at least of his companions may have their
feet set straighter on the road that leads to the blissful
abyss.
But, as I have said, this is no goal for the ordinary
man. If he is not born one of the reincarnate saints of
Buddhism, he has no further interest in his fellow kind,
and even the best of them have no other incentive to
action or piety than that of saving themselves, bodily
as well as spiritually, from that life which to a Buddhist
is the truest eternal punishment. This is the underlying
flaw that vitiates the spiritual value of Buddhism, just
as it vitiates that of every other religion of the world,
except Christianity.*
It cuts at the root of human sympathy. It isolates
the individual in his life and in his death, and it says a
great deal for the innate beauty of the character we found
among the simple Tibetan peasants that they remain
kindly, hospitable and courteous in spite of the debasing
influences of the only religion they can know.
* If there is one result of this doctrine of reincarnation more unfortunate than another
it is the theoiy that a man who is physically deficient has deserved his punishment by
his behaviour in another world. Browning’s remark in “ Childe Roland,”
“ He must be wicked to deserve such pain,”
might have been written— and perhaps should only have been written— by a Buddhist of
Tibet.
VOL. II. 4*