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A Series of Lessons on the Inner Teachings of the Philosophies and Religions of India1264
ritual and ceremony that the early Jesuit missionaries, finding the ritual and
forms bearing such a remarkable resemblance to some of the ceremonies
and ritual of their own church, reported that it was undoubtedly the work
of the Devil, who had invented Buddhism as a mockery of the True Church.
Northern India, and Thibet, is filled with hordes of mendicant Buddhist
monks, who subsist by begging from the people, living in monasteries
endowed by the faithful. Images of Buddha abound, and he is regarded as
a Deity, although the teachings expressly hold otherwise.
Is it not an irony of Fate, that Gautama, whose work was in the direction
of undoing the work of priests and established religions, and whose
teachings were directed toward aiding the race to escape vain forms, creeds,
and ceremonies, and to make them think and act for themselves—that his
teachings should have served as the basis for a “Church” and Creed, whose
followers rank second, if not first numerically, in the list of the Churches?
Like Jesus, Gautama came as a teacher without temples, organizations or
creeds—and like Him, he unwittingly became the founder of a great “Church,”
with creeds, dogmas, theologies, forms, ritual and ceremonies; priests and
ecclesiasticism. Wherever form and dogmas supplant the spirit of the Truth,
then churches crystallize and the living faith burns low. It ever has been so,
and ever will be so. In the East, so in the West.
But Gautama taught, as did the Krishna of the Hindus, that when the spirit
is almost extinguished, then comes a new Messenger of Spirit, to revive
the Truth. Gautama is held to be but one of a line of Buddhas, or great
Spiritual Teachers—Avatars of Divinity—who have come, and will come
to save the race from rank materialism and darkness of Avidya. Gautama
said: “Whenever the pure doctrine threatens to fall entirely into disuse, and
mankind again sinks into sensual desires and mental darkness—then a new
Buddha is born.” Krishna, in the “Bhagavad-Gita,” makes a similar promise.
While Christians regard Buddha as a “heathen” teacher, whose teachings
were amazingly akin to those of Jesus, and whose Moral Code “for pureness,
excellence, and wisdom, is second only to that of the Divine Lawgiver himself,”