The Sword of Song

THE SWORD OF SONG 50 97. While their Buddha I attack.30—Many Buddhists think I fill the bill with the following remarks on— PANSIL. Unwilling as I am to sap the foundations of the Buddhist religion by the introduction of Porphyry’s terrible catapult, Allegory, I am yet compelled by the more fearful ballista of Aristotle, D ilemma. This is the two-handed engine spoken of by the prophet Milton!* This is the horn of the prophet Zeruiah, and with this am I, though no Syrian, utterly pushed, till I find myself back against the dead wall of Dogma. Only now realising how dead a wall that is, do I turn and try the effect of a hair of the dog that bit me, till the orthodox “literary”† school of Buddhists, as grown at Rangoon, exclaim with Lear: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have an intellect!” How is this? Listen, and hear! I find myself confronted with the crux: that a Buddhist, convinced intellectually and philo- sophically of the truth of the teaching of Gotama; a man to whom Buddhism is the equivalent of scientific methods of Thought; an expert in dialectic whose logical faculty is bewildered, whose critical admiration is ex- torted by the subtle vigour of Buddhist reason- ing; I am yet forced to admit that, this being so, the Five Precepts‡ are mere nonsense. If the Buddha spoke scientifically, not popularly, not rhetorically, then his precepts are not his. We must reject them or w e must interpret them. We must inqure: Are they meant to be obeyed? Or—and this is my theory—are they sarcastic and biting criticisms on existence, illustrations of the First Noble Truth; reasons, as i t wer e, for the apotheosis of annihilation? I shall so that this is so. Let me consider them “precept upon precept,” if the introduction of the Hebrew visionary is not too strong meat for the Little Mary§ of a Buddhist audience. * Lycidas, line 130. † The school whose Buddhism is derived from the Canon, and who ignore the de gradation of the pro- fessors of the religion, as seen in practice. ‡ T he obvious c aveat w hich logic ians w ill e nter against the se re marks is tha t Pa nsil is the Five Virtues rather than Precepts. Et ymologically this is so. However, we m ay regard this as a cl ause on my side of the argument, not a gainst it; for in m y view these a re virtue s, a nd the im possibility of a ttaining them is the cancer of existence. Indeed, I support the etymology a s a gainst the futile bigotry of certain senile B uddhists of to-da y. A nd, sinc e it is the current inte rpretation of B uddhist thought that I attack, I but show myself the better Buddhist in the act.—A.C. § A catch wo rd f or t he s tomach, f rom J .M. Barrie’s play “Little Mary.” THE FIRST PRECEPT. This forbids the taking of life in any form.* What we have to note is the impossi- bility of performing this; if w e can prove it to be so, either Buddha was a fool, or his com- mand was rhetorical, like those of Yahweh to Job, or of Tannhäuser to himself— “ Go! seek the stars and count them and explore! Go! sift the sands beyond a starless sea!” Let us consider what the words can mean. The “taking of life” can only mean the re- duction of living protoplasm to dead matter: or, in a truer and more psychological sense, the destruction of personality. Now, in the chemical changes involved in Buddha’s speaking this command, living pro- toplasm w as changed into dead matter. Or, on the other horn, the fact (insisted upon most strongly by the Buddha himself, the central and cardinal point of his doctrine, the shrine of that Metaphysic which isolates it absolutely from all other religious metaphysic, which allies it with Agnostic Metaphysis) that the Buddha who had spoken this command was not the same as the Buddha before he had spoken it, lies the proof that the Buddha, by speaking this command, violated it. More, not only did he slay himself; he breathed in millions of living organisms and slew them. He could nor eat nor drink nor breathe without murder implicit in each act. Huxley cites the “pitiless microsco-pist” who showed a drop of water to the B rahmin w ho boasted himself “Ahimsa”—harmless. So among the “rights” of a Bhikkhu is medicine. He who takes quinine does so w ith the deliber-ate intention of destroying innumerable living beings; whether this is done by stimulating the phagocytes, or directly, is morally indifferent. How such a fiend incarnate, my dear brother Ananda Maitriya, can call him “cruel and cowardly” who only kills a tiger, is a study in the philosophy of the mote and the beam!† Far be it from me to sugest that this is a defence of breathing, eating and drinking. By no means; in all these ways we bring suffering and death to others, as to ourselves. But since these are inevitable acts, since suicide would be a still more cruel alternative (espe- cially in case something should subsist below mere Rupa), the command is not to achieve * Fielding, in “The Soul of a Pe ople,” ha s re - luctantly to confess that he can find no trace of this idea in B uddha’s own work, and called the supersti- tion the “echo of an older Faith.”—A.C. † The argument that the “animals are our brothers” is merely intended to mislead one who has never been in a Buddhist country. T he a verage B uddhist w ould, of course, kill his brothe r for five rupees, or less.— A. C.