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vol. title: vol. period: 1881 pages in vol.: 439 |
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Notes by the Way
The long, brave struggle with Death has ended; and President Garfield has entered on a wider sphere of activity than that which he adorned on earth. Never, perhaps, has more universal sympathy been shewn by civilised mankind than the world has extended to this last victim of dastardly assassination. He must be a cold-blooded creature who can read the account of the great American meeting in Exeter Hall without a quickened pulse. “The Queen’s wreath” laid on the coffin of the murdered President has eloquently shewn the true brotherly feeling that lies deep down at the heart of the great English-speaking peoples, and has evoked from the American nation a touching response. Those ringing cheers that greeted Bishop Simpson when he referred in graceful language to the Queen’s gracious act were a happy augury to those who look in faith and hope to a time when brotherly love shall prevail to the effacement of misunderstandings and the abolition of bloodshed. If Guiteau’s foul deed have hastened that day only appreciably, if it have made the dream one iota nearer to reality, then there is compensation even for an outrage on which humanity cries shame.
It is a striking fact that the President died on the anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga, in which he bore so brave a part. The correspondent of The Standard, the best informed of all the many who chronicled the story of the struggle with Death, adds that the day of death was the subject of a premonition which Mr. Garfield frequently mentioned to his friends, even before what seemed, at the time, to be likely to prove the fatal relapse of August 27th. If I am not mistaken, the correspondent is Mr. Joseph Hatton, author of the interesting “Today in America,” once noticed in these pages.
In his “Buddha and Early Buddhism,” which I recently noticed, Mr. Lillie gives us incidentally many glimpses of the Spiritualism of Buddhism. The central idea that pervades it is that, though the Spirit no longer dwells in the body, there is a certain magnetic force in the corpse which enables the disembodied Spirit to return and communicate with men when they are in the actual presence of the corpse. Hence the tomb-worship, relic-worship, image-worship of Brahminism and Buddhism. A saint, or Buddha, dies and is buried under a tree. Near at hand sits another holy man who is periodically obsessed by the dead saint, and exhibits the various marvels of mediumship. These were undoubtedly attributed to the departed Spirit; on no other theory can we account for the food offerings amongst the Brahmins, respecting which the belief was that the Spirits took the essence, or spiritual portion, and left the form, or material portion, for the priest.
Relic-worship is a plain development of the same idea; and the covering of Bengal with stately topes and shrines, each supposed to contain a minute fragment of a relic of the Buddha, was a fairly ingenious attempt to solve this problem. Admitting that the influence of a departed saint is strongest in the immediate vicinity of his body, how can the influence of Buddha be most completely utilised? The Buddhist temple to this day is the home of marvels; and in front of many of the statues of Buddha there is in China a table where communications are sought by an apparatus similar to Planchette.
The departed Spirit was further supposed to make actual appearances in the presence of its body, and especially was Buddha believed to present himself in embodied form—materialised—in his temples. Thus at Hidda, a defile five miles south of Jellala-bad, Hiowen Thsang, a Chinese pilgrim, records that he saw the schin lecca, luminous “shadow,” of the Buddha, “not a dark outline on a light background, but a luminous appearance in a dark cave.” The Chinese’s belief in the presence of the departed with him is very strong. The unseen world is held by him, as it is by us, to be a perfected copy of the seen. When a family sits down to a feast it believes that its departed members are in its midst. The departed must be protected, and then they in turn will become protectors. Accordingly a spot for the tomb it selected by a geomancer with elaborate care, and everything is done to guard the body from evil. Then it becomes a guardian of the family.
The preparation for Adeptship among the Eastern races is very curious. Six supernatural faculties must be developed before the postulant could claim the grade of Arhat, to which he aspired as a perfected Adept The “White Lotus of Dharma,” one of the oldest Buddhist books, details them. The postulant must rise into the air, rain down water and then fire; make his body expand, and then grow indefinitely small; lastly, he “must disappear in the heavens and return to earth and then rise once more aloft” Here we have the levitation, elongation and contraction, with the luminous appearances, and invisibility of the medium, which are so familiar to Spiritualists The explanation of the reasons for this training is singular. Man has a body, it is said, composed of the four elements It is nourished on rice and gruel, and may be truncated, crushed, destroyed. In this transitory body his intelligence is enchained. Thus confined, the aspirant represents to himself in thought another body created from this material body, standing in relation to it as the sword to the scabbard. This body is what will survive physical decay, and contain his intelligence when the outer body is done with. He tries to purify himself by various means so as to become independent of this prison-house. By degrees he acquires power over it. “He finds himself able to pass through material obstacles, walls, ramparts, &c.; he is able to throw his phantasmal appearance into many places at once; he is able to walk upon the surface of water without immersing himself; he can fly through the air; he can leave this world and reach even the heaven of Brahma himself.” A further development is added. He hears the sounds of the unseen world; “he reads the secret thoughts of others, and tells their characters; be becomes, that is, clairaudient, clairvoyant, and gains psychometric power; he discerns Spirits and triumphs over matter.” Messrs. Hue and Gabet (and many travellers confirm the hideous tale) “report that they saw a Bokte rip open his own stomach in the great court of the Lamaserai of Rache Tchurin in Tartary. The court was deluged with blood, but the Boktd remained unmoved, and healed the gaping wound with a single pass of his hand.”
Buddhism in this aspect is “plainly an elaborate apparatus to nullify the action of evil Spirits by the aid of good Spirits operating at their highest potentiality, through the instrumentality of the corpse, or a portion of the corpse, of the chief aiding Spirit” What are these Spirits? “Those who have not yet attained Bodhi or Spiritual awakenment cannot be good. They are still in the domains of Kama (Death, Cupid, Appetite). It can do no good thing; more than that, it must do evil things.” The good Spirits are those of departed saints, the Buddhas, the dead prophets, whose power on earth is in inverse proportion to the length of time they have left the body. “The Spirits that have recently departed are accredited with greater power than those who may perhaps have reached remote Arupalocas, when body becomes so etherealised that individuality seems to depart.” This is precisely in accordance with the experience of to-day. The more powerful manifestations of physical force are not produced by the progressed Spirits, whose hold on earth and earthly things is slight, but by those who have probably never been fully emancipated from its fetters, and <... continues on page 11-263 >
Editor's notes
Sources
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Light, v. 1, No. 39, October 1, 1881, p. 308