Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
The Buddhistic temples of Java, coming midway between the oldest Buddhistic temples of India and the modern shrines in Burmah, Ceylon, and Nepaul, the present seats of the cult, supply an interesting lacuna in the antiquities of Buddhism. The Javan form of this religion is especially allied to that of Nepaul.
The religion of the Tartars was either Lamaism a corrupted form of Buddhistic belief and worship, or Mohammedanism. In China and Mongolia they were Lamaists: elsewhere they generally adopted the faith of Islam. Their original religion was Shamaism, a worship of spirits, akin to fetichism. The later Mongol sovereigns, especially Kublai Khan, were ready to promote peaceful intercourse with Europe.
He lived in a thoroughly ordered world of specified experience which is typified in his predilection for the superiority of Chinese notions of beauty over the more sentimental rhythms of the Greeks. He had found the proper shade of intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality that gave him more than the platonic.
Certainly, the faith of India touches and feeds the imagination far more than does that of China. Certainly also, the animating spirit of most of the popular literature is due to Buddhistic culture. The Shin sect, which permits the marriage of the priests and preaches the salvation of woman, probably leads all others in according honor to her as well as in elevating her social position.
Confucius purposely declined to teach anything on this point, and, in part, for this reason, it has been maintained that Confucianism cannot properly be called a religion. Buddhism brought to Japan an elaborate system of eschatological ideas, and so far as the common people of Japan have any conception of the future life, it may be attributed to Buddhistic teachings.
On the contrary, the new lights of Buddhism who came as missionaries into China, protested against this expenditure of so much mental and physical energy. Hence, instead of the noble eight-fold path of primitive Buddhism, or of the complicated system of the later Buddhistic Phariseeism of India, he substituted for the difficult road to Nirvana, a simple faith in the all-saving power of Amida.
In the Buddhistic conception God is an abstract vacuity; in the Greek, a static intellect; in the Christian, a dynamic will. As is the conception of God, so is the conception and character of man. The two are so intimately interdependent that it is useless at this time to discuss which is the cause and which the result. They are doubtless the two aspects of the same movement of thought.
Of such men more or less consciously recognizing this law, there are in our time, not in the Christian world alone, but in the Buddhistic, Mahomedan, Confucian, and Brahminic world, not only thousands but millions.
In the Christian plan salvation is for all, for all are sons of God, in fact, and may through Christ become so in consciousness. In the Buddhistic plan the hopeless masses resort to magic and keep on with their idolatry and countless gross superstitions. In the Greek plan the hopeless resort to the "mysteries" for the attainment of salvation.
To my surprise, he said that while Christianity was far ahead of Buddhism in its practical parts and in its power to mold character, it was deficient in philosophical insight and interest. This led to a prolonged conversation on Buddhistic philosophy, in which he explained the doctrines of the "Ku-ge-chu," and the "Usa and Musa."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking