The Urantia Book
PAPER 94
THE MELCHIZEDEK TEACHINGS IN THE
ORIENT
Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
94:0.1 THE early teachers of the Salem
religion penetrated to the remotest tribes of Africa and
Eurasia, ever preaching Machiventa's gospel of man's faith and
trust in the one universal God as the only price of obtaining
divine favor. Melchizedek's covenant with Abraham was the
pattern for all the early propaganda that went out from Salem
and other centers. Urantia has never had more enthusiastic and
aggressive missionaries of any religion than these noble men and
women who carried the teachings of Melchizedek over the entire
Eastern Hemisphere. These missionaries were recruited from many
peoples and races, and they largely spread their teachings
through the medium of native converts. They established training
centers in different parts of the world where they taught the
natives the Salem religion and then commissioned these pupils to
function as teachers among their own people.
1. THE SALEM TEACHINGS IN VEDIC INDIA
94:1.1 In the days of Melchizedek, India was a
cosmopolitan country which had recently come under the political
and religious dominance of the Aryan-Andite invaders from the
north and west. At this time only the northern and western
portions of the peninsula had been extensively permeated by the
Aryans. These Vedic newcomers had brought along with them their
many tribal deities. Their religious forms of worship followed
closely the ceremonial practices of their earlier Andite
forebears in that the father still functioned as a priest and
the mother as a priestess, and the family hearth was still
utilized as an altar.
94:1.2 The Vedic cult was then in process of
growth and metamorphosis under the direction of the Brahman
caste of teacher-priests, who were gradually assuming control
over the expanding ritual of worship. The amalgamation of the
onetime thirty-three Aryan deities was well under way when the
Salem missionaries penetrated the north of India.
94:1.3 The polytheism of these Aryans
represented a degeneration of their earlier monotheism
occasioned by their separation into tribal units, each tribe
having its venerated god. This devolution of the original
monotheism and trinitarianism of Andite Mesopotamia was in
process of resynthesis in the early centuries of the second
millennium before Christ. The many gods were organized into a
pantheon under the triune leadership of Dyaus pitar, the lord of
heaven; Indra, the tempestuous lord of the atmosphere; and Agni,
the three-headed fire god, lord of the earth and the vestigial
symbol of an earlier Trinity concept.
94:1.4 Definite henotheistic developments were
paving the way for an evolved monotheism. Agni, the most ancient
deity, was often exalted as the father-head of the entire
pantheon. The deity-father principle, sometimes called
Prajapati, sometimes termed Brahma, was submerged in the
theologic battle which the Brahman priests later fought with the
Salem teachers. The Brahman was conceived as the
energy-divinity principle activating the entire Vedic pantheon.
94:1.5 The Salem missionaries preached the one
God of Melchizedek, the Most High of heaven. This portrayal was
not altogether disharmonious with the emerging concept of the
Father-Brahma as the source of all gods, but the Salem doctrine
was nonritualistic and hence ran directly counter to the dogmas,
traditions, and teachings of the Brahman priesthood. Never would
the Brahman priests accept the Salem teaching of salvation
through faith, favor with God apart from ritualistic observances
and sacrificial ceremonials.
94:1.6 The rejection of the Melchizedek gospel
of trust in God and salvation through faith marked a vital
turning point for India. The Salem missionaries had contributed
much to the loss of faith in all the ancient Vedic gods, but the
leaders, the priests of Vedism, refused to accept the
Melchizedek teaching of one God and one simple faith.
94:1.7 The Brahmans culled the sacred writings
of their day in an effort to combat the Salem teachers, and this
compilation, as later revised, has come on down to modern times
as the Rig-Veda, one of the most ancient of sacred books. The
second, third, and fourth Vedas followed as the Brahmans sought
to crystallize, formalize, and fix their rituals of worship and
sacrifice upon the peoples of those days. Taken at their best,
these writings are the equal of any other body of similar
character in beauty of concept and truth of discernment. But as
this superior religion became contaminated with the thousands
upon thousands of superstitions, cults, and rituals of southern
India, it progressively metamorphosed into the most variegated
system of theology ever developed by mortal man. An examination
of the Vedas will disclose some of the highest and some of the
most debased concepts of Deity ever to be conceived.
2. BRAHMANISM
94:2.1 As the Salem missionaries penetrated
southward into the Dravidian Deccan, they encountered an
increasing caste system, the scheme of the Aryans to prevent
loss of racial identity in the face of a rising tide of the
secondary Sangik peoples. Since the Brahman priest caste was the
very essence of this system, this social order greatly retarded
the progress of the Salem teachers. This caste system failed to
save the Aryan race, but it did succeed in perpetuating the
Brahmans, who, in turn, have maintained their religious hegemony
in India to the present time.
94:2.2 And now, with the weakening of Vedism
through the rejection of higher truth, the cult of the Aryans
became subject to increasing inroads from the Deccan. In a
desperate effort to stem the tide of racial extinction and
religious obliteration, the Brahman caste sought to exalt
themselves above all else. They taught that the sacrifice to
deity in itself was all-efficacious, that it was all-compelling
in its potency. They proclaimed that, of the two essential
divine principles of the universe, one was Brahman the deity,
and the other was the Brahman priesthood. Among no other Urantia
peoples did the priests presume to exalt themselves above even
their gods, to relegate to themselves the honors due their gods.
But they went so absurdly far with these presumptuous claims
that the whole precarious system collapsed before the debasing
cults which poured in from the surrounding and less advanced
civilizations. The vast Vedic priesthood itself floundered and
sank beneath the black flood of inertia and pessimism which
their own selfish and unwise presumption had brought upon all
India.
94:2.3 The undue concentration on self led
certainly to a fear of the nonevolutionary perpetuation of self
in an endless round of successive incarnations as man, beast, or
weeds. And of all the contaminating beliefs which could have
become fastened upon what may have been an emerging monotheism,
none was so stultifying as this belief in transmigration -- the
doctrine of the reincarnation of souls -- which came from the
Dravidian Deccan. This belief in the weary and monotonous round
of repeated transmigrations robbed struggling mortals of their
long-cherished hope of finding that deliverance and spiritual
advancement in death which had been a part of the earlier Vedic
faith.
94:2.4 This philosophically debilitating
teaching was soon followed by the invention of the doctrine of
the eternal escape from self by submergence in the universal
rest and peace of absolute union with Brahman, the oversoul of
all creation. Mortal desire and human ambition were effectually
ravished and virtually destroyed. For more than two thousand
years the better minds of India have sought to escape from all
desire, and thus was opened wide the door for the entrance of
those later cults and teachings which have virtually shackled
the souls of many Hindu peoples in the chains of spiritual
hopelessness. Of all civilizations, the Vedic-Aryan paid the
most terrible price for its rejection of the Salem gospel.
94:2.5 Caste alone could not perpetuate the
Aryan religio-cultural system, and as the inferior religions of
the Deccan permeated the north, there developed an age of
despair and hopelessness. It was during these dark days that the
cult of taking no life arose, and it has ever since persisted.
Many of the new cults were frankly atheistic, claiming that such
salvation as was attainable could come only by man's own unaided
efforts. But throughout a great deal of all this unfortunate
philosophy, distorted remnants of the Melchizedek and even the
Adamic teachings can be traced.
94:2.6 These were the times of the compilation
of the later scriptures of the Hindu faith, the Brahmanas and
the Upanishads. Having rejected the teachings of personal
religion through the personal faith experience with the one God,
and having become contaminated with the flood of debasing and
debilitating cults and creeds from the Deccan, with their
anthropomorphisms and reincarnations, the Brahmanic priesthood
experienced a violent reaction against these vitiating beliefs;
there was a definite effort to seek and to find true reality.
The Brahmans set out to deanthropomorphize the Indian concept of
deity, but in so doing they stumbled into the grievous error of
depersonalizing the concept of God, and they emerged, not with a
lofty and spiritual ideal of the Paradise Father, but with a
distant and metaphysical idea of an all-encompassing Absolute.
94:2.7 In their efforts at self-preservation
the Brahmans had rejected the one God of Melchizedek, and now
they found themselves with the hypothesis of Brahman, that
indefinite and illusive philosophic self, that impersonal and
impotent it which has left the spiritual life of India
helpless and prostrate from that unfortunate day to the
twentieth century.
94:2.8 It was during the times of the writing
of the Upanishads that Buddhism arose in India. But despite its
successes of a thousand years, it could not compete with later
Hinduism; despite a higher morality, its early portrayal of God
was even less well-defined than was that of Hinduism, which
provided for lesser and personal deities. Buddhism finally gave
way in northern India before the onslaught of a militant Islam
with its clear-cut concept of Allah as the supreme God of the
universe.
3. BRAHMANIC PHILOSOPHY
94:3.1 While the highest phase of Brahmanism
was hardly a religion, it was truly one of the most noble
reaches of the mortal mind into the domains of philosophy and
metaphysics. Having started out to discover final reality, the
Indian mind did not stop until it had speculated about almost
every phase of theology excepting the essential dual concept of
religion: the existence of the Universal Father of all universe
creatures and the fact of the ascending experience in the
universe of these very creatures as they seek to attain the
eternal Father, who has commanded them to be perfect, even as he
is perfect.
94:3.2 In the concept of Brahman the minds of
those days truly grasped at the idea of some all-pervading
Absolute, for this postulate was at one and the same time
identified as creative energy and cosmic reaction. Brahman was
conceived to be beyond all definition, capable of being
comprehended only by the successive negation of all finite
qualities. It was definitely a belief in an absolute, even an
infinite, being, but this concept was largely devoid of
personality attributes and was therefore not experiencible by
individual religionists.
94:3.3 Brahman-Narayana was conceived as the
Absolute, the infinite IT IS, the primordial creative potency of
the potential cosmos, the Universal Self existing static and
potential throughout all eternity. Had the philosophers of those
days been able to make the next advance in deity conception, had
they been able to conceive of the Brahman as associative and
creative, as a personality approachable by created and evolving
beings, then might such a teaching have become the most advanced
portraiture of Deity on Urantia since it would have encompassed
the first five levels of total deity function and might possibly
have envisioned the remaining two.
94:3.4 In certain phases the concept of the
One Universal Oversoul as the totality of the summation of all
creature existence led the Indian philosophers very close to the
truth of the Supreme Being, but this truth availed them naught
because they failed to evolve any reasonable or rational
personal approach to the attainment of their theoretic
monotheistic goal of Brahman-Narayana.
94:3.5 The karma principle of causality
continuity is, again, very close to the truth of the
repercussional synthesis of all time-space actions in the Deity
presence of the Supreme; but this postulate never provided for
the co-ordinate personal attainment of Deity by the individual
religionist, only for the ultimate engulfment of all personality
by the Universal Oversoul.
94:3.6 The philosophy of Brahmanism also came
very near to the realization of the indwelling of the Thought
Adjusters, only to become perverted through the misconception of
truth. The teaching that the soul is the indwelling of the
Brahman would have paved the way for an advanced religion had
not this concept been completely vitiated by the belief that
there is no human individuality apart from this indwelling of
the Universal One.
94:3.7 In the doctrine of the merging of the
self-soul with the Oversoul, the theologians of India failed to
provide for the survival of something human, something new and
unique, something born of the union of the will of man and the
will of God. The teaching of the soul's return to the Brahman is
closely parallel to the truth of the Adjuster's return to the
bosom of the Universal Father, but there is something distinct
from the Adjuster which also survives, the morontial counterpart
of mortal personality. And this vital concept was fatally absent
from Brahmanic philosophy.
94:3.8 Brahmanic philosophy has approximated
many of the facts of the universe and has approached numerous
cosmic truths, but it has all too often fallen victim to the
error of failing to differentiate between the several levels of
reality, such as absolute, transcendental, and finite. It has
failed to take into account that what may be finite-illusory on
the absolute level may be absolutely real on the finite level.
And it has also taken no cognizance of the essential personality
of the Universal Father, who is personally contactable on all
levels from the evolutionary creature's limited experience with
God on up to the limitless experience of the Eternal Son with
the Paradise Father.
4. THE HINDU RELIGION
94:4.1 With the passing of the centuries in
India, the populace returned in measure to the ancient rituals
of the Vedas as they had been modified by the teachings of the
Melchizedek missionaries and crystallized by the later Brahman
priesthood. This, the oldest and most cosmopolitan of the
world's religions, has undergone further changes in response to
Buddhism and Jainism and to the later appearing influences of
Mohammedanism and Christianity. But by the time the teachings of
Jesus arrived, they had already become so Occidentalized as to
be a "white man's religion," hence strange and foreign to the
Hindu mind.
94:4.2 Hindu theology, at present, depicts
four descending levels of deity and divinity:
94:4.3 1. The Brahman, the Absolute,
the Infinite One, the IT IS.
94:4.4 2. The Trimurti, the supreme
trinity of Hinduism. In this association Brahma, the first
member, is conceived as being self-created out of the Brahman --
infinity. Were it not for close identification with the
pantheistic Infinite One, Brahma could constitute the foundation
for a concept of the Universal Father. Brahma is also identified
with fate.
94:4.5 The worship of the second and third
members, Siva and Vishnu, arose in the first millennium after
Christ. Siva is lord of life and death, god of fertility,
and master of destruction. Vishnu is extremely popular
due to the belief that he periodically incarnates in human form.
In this way, Vishnu becomes real and living in the imaginations
of the Indians. Siva and Vishnu are each regarded by some as
supreme over all.
94:4.6 3. Vedic and post-Vedic deities.
Many of the ancient gods of the Aryans, such as Agni, Indra,
Soma, have persisted as secondary to the three members of the
Trimurti. Numerous additional gods have arisen since the early
days of Vedic India, and these have also been incorporated into
the Hindu pantheon.
94:4.7 4. The demigods: supermen,
semigods, heroes, demons, ghosts, evil spirits, sprites,
monsters, goblins, and saints of the later-day cults.
94:4.8 While Hinduism has long failed to
vivify the Indian people, at the same time it has usually been a
tolerant religion. Its great strength lies in the fact that it
has proved to be the most adaptive, amorphic religion to appear
on Urantia. It is capable of almost unlimited change and
possesses an unusual range of flexible adjustment from the high
and semimonotheistic speculations of the intellectual Brahman to
the arrant fetishism and primitive cult practices of the debased
and depressed classes of ignorant believers.
94:4.9 Hinduism has survived because it is
essentially an integral part of the basic social fabric of
India. It has no great hierarchy which can be disturbed or
destroyed; it is interwoven into the life pattern of the people.
It has an adaptability to changing conditions that excels all
other cults, and it displays a tolerant attitude of adoption
toward many other religions, Gautama Buddha and even Christ
himself being claimed as incarnations of Vishnu.
94:4.10 Today, in India, the great need is for
the portrayal of the Jesusonian gospel -- the Fatherhood of God
and the sonship and consequent brotherhood of all men, which is
personally realized in loving ministry and social service. In
India the philosophical framework is existent, the cult
structure is present; all that is needed is the vitalizing spark
of the dynamic love portrayed in the original gospel of the Son
of Man, divested of the Occidental dogmas and doctrines which
have tended to make Michael's life bestowal a white man's
religion.
5. THE STRUGGLE FOR TRUTH IN CHINA
94:5.1 As the Salem missionaries passed
through Asia, spreading the doctrine of the Most High God and
salvation through faith, they absorbed much of the philosophy
and religious thought of the various countries traversed. But
the teachers commissioned by Melchizedek and his successors did
not default in their trust; they did penetrate to all peoples of
the Eurasian continent, and it was in the middle of the second
millennium before Christ that they arrived in China. At See
Fuch, for more than one hundred years, the Salemites maintained
their headquarters, there training Chinese teachers who taught
throughout all the domains of the yellow race.
94:5.2 It was in direct consequence of this
teaching that the earliest form of Taoism arose in China, a
vastly different religion than the one which bears that name
today. Early or proto-Taoism was a compound of the following
factors:
94:5.3 1. The lingering teachings of
Singlangton, which persisted in the concept of Shang-ti, the God
of Heaven. In the times of Singlangton the Chinese people became
virtually monotheistic; they concentrated their worship on the
One Truth, later known as the Spirit of Heaven, the universe
ruler. And the yellow race never fully lost this early concept
of Deity, although in subsequent centuries many subordinate gods
and spirits insidiously crept into their religion.
94:5.4 2. The Salem religion of a Most High
Creator Deity who would bestow his favor upon mankind in
response to man's faith. But it is all too true that, by the
time the Melchizedek missionaries had penetrated to the lands of
the yellow race, their original message had become considerably
changed from the simple doctrines of Salem in the days of
Machiventa.
94:5.5 3. The Brahman-Absolute concept of the
Indian philosophers, coupled with the desire to escape all evil.
Perhaps the greatest extraneous influence in the eastward spread
of the Salem religion was exerted by the Indian teachers of the
Vedic faith, who injected their conception of the Brahman -- the
Absolute -- into the salvationistic thought of the Salemites.
94:5.6 This composite belief spread through
the lands of the yellow and brown races as an underlying
influence in religio-philosophic thought. In Japan this
proto-Taoism was known as Shinto, and in this country, far
distant from Salem of Palestine, the peoples learned of the
incarnation of Machiventa Melchizedek, who dwelt upon earth that
the name of God might not be forgotten by mankind.
94:5.7 In China all of these beliefs were
later confused and compounded with the ever-growing cult of
ancestor worship. But never since the time of Singlangton have
the Chinese fallen into helpless slavery to priestcraft. The
yellow race was the first to emerge from barbaric bondage into
orderly civilization because it was the first to achieve some
measure of freedom from the abject fear of the gods, not even
fearing the ghosts of the dead as other races feared them. China
met her defeat because she failed to progress beyond her early
emancipation from priests; she fell into an almost equally
calamitous error, the worship of ancestors.
94:5.8 But the Salemites did not labor in
vain. It was upon the foundations of their gospel that the great
philosophers of sixth-century China built their teachings. The
moral atmosphere and the spiritual sentiments of the times of
Lao-tse and Confucius grew up out of the teachings of the Salem
missionaries of an earlier age.
6. LAO-TSE AND CONFUCIUS
94:6.1 About six hundred years before the
arrival of Michael, it seemed to Melchizedek, long since
departed from the flesh, that the purity of his teaching on
earth was being unduly jeopardized by general absorption into
the older Urantia beliefs. It appeared for a time that his
mission as a forerunner of Michael might be in danger of
failing. And in the sixth century before Christ, through an
unusual co-ordination of spiritual agencies, not all of which
are understood even by the planetary supervisors, Urantia
witnessed a most unusual presentation of manifold religious
truth. Through the agency of several human teachers the Salem
gospel was restated and revitalized, and as it was then
presented, much has persisted to the times of this writing.
94:6.2 This unique century of spiritual
progress was characterized by great religious, moral, and
philosophic teachers all over the civilized world. In China, the
two outstanding teachers were Lao-tse and Confucius.
94:6.3 Lao-tse built directly upon the
concepts of the Salem traditions when he declared Tao to be the
One First Cause of all creation. Lao was a man of great
spiritual vision. He taught that "man's eternal destiny was
everlasting union with Tao, Supreme God and Universal King." His
comprehension of ultimate causation was most discerning, for he
wrote: "Unity arises out of the Absolute Tao, and from Unity
there appears cosmic Duality, and from such Duality, Trinity
springs forth into existence, and Trinity is the primal source
of all reality." "All reality is ever in balance between the
potentials and the actuals of the cosmos, and these are
eternally harmonized by the spirit of divinity."
94:6.4 Lao-tse also made one of the earliest
presentations of the doctrine of returning good for evil:
"Goodness begets goodness, but to the one who is truly good,
evil also begets goodness."
94:6.5 He taught the return of the creature to
the Creator and pictured life as the emergence of a personality
from the cosmic potentials, while death was like the returning
home of this creature personality. His concept of true faith was
unusual, and he too likened it to the "attitude of a little
child."
94:6.6 His understanding of the eternal
purpose of God was clear, for he said: "The Absolute Deity does
not strive but is always victorious; he does not coerce mankind
but always stands ready to respond to their true desires; the
will of God is eternal in patience and eternal in the
inevitability of its expression." And of the true religionist he
said, in expressing the truth that it is more blessed to give
than to receive: "The good man seeks not to retain truth for
himself but rather attempts to bestow these riches upon his
fellows, for that is the realization of truth. The will of the
Absolute God always benefits, never destroys; the purpose of the
true believer is always to act but never to coerce."
94:6.7 Lao's teaching of nonresistance and the
distinction which he made between action and coercion
became later perverted into the beliefs of "seeing, doing, and
thinking nothing." But Lao never taught such error, albeit his
presentation of nonresistance has been a factor in the further
development of the pacific predilections of the Chinese peoples.
94:6.8 But the popular Taoism of
twentieth-century Urantia has very little in common with the
lofty sentiments and the cosmic concepts of the old philosopher
who taught the truth as he perceived it, which was: That faith
in the Absolute God is the source of that divine energy which
will remake the world, and by which man ascends to spiritual
union with Tao, the Eternal Deity and Creator Absolute of the
universes.
94:6.9 Confucius (Kung Fu-tze) was a
younger contemporary of Lao in sixth-century China. Confucius
based his doctrines upon the better moral traditions of the long
history of the yellow race, and he was also somewhat influenced
by the lingering traditions of the Salem missionaries. His chief
work consisted in the compilation of the wise sayings of ancient
philosophers. He was a rejected teacher during his lifetime, but
his writings and teachings have ever since exerted a great
influence in China and Japan. Confucius set a new pace for the
shamans in that he put morality in the place of magic. But he
built too well; he made a new fetish out of order and
established a respect for ancestral conduct that is still
venerated by the Chinese at the time of this writing.
94:6.10 The Confucian preachment of morality
was predicated on the theory that the earthly way is the
distorted shadow of the heavenly way; that the true pattern of
temporal civilization is the mirror reflection of the eternal
order of heaven. The potential God concept in Confucianism was
almost completely subordinated to the emphasis placed upon the
Way of Heaven, the pattern of the cosmos.
94:6.11 The teachings of Lao have been lost to
all but a few in the Orient, but the writings of Confucius have
ever since constituted the basis of the moral fabric of the
culture of almost a third of Urantians. These Confucian
precepts, while perpetuating the best of the past, were somewhat
inimical to the very Chinese spirit of investigation that had
produced those achievements which were so venerated. The
influence of these doctrines was unsuccessfully combated both by
the imperial efforts of Ch'in Shih Huang Ti and by the teachings
of Mo Ti, who proclaimed a brotherhood founded not on ethical
duty but on the love of God. He sought to rekindle the ancient
quest for new truth, but his teachings failed before the
vigorous opposition of the disciples of Confucius.
94:6.12 Like many other spiritual and moral
teachers, both Confucius and Lao-tse were eventually deified by
their followers in those spiritually dark ages of China which
intervened between the decline and perversion of the Taoist
faith and the coming of the Buddhist missionaries from India.
During these spiritually decadent centuries the religion of the
yellow race degenerated into a pitiful theology wherein swarmed
devils, dragons, and evil spirits, all betokening the returning
fears of the unenlightened mortal mind. And China, once at the
head of human society because of an advanced religion, then fell
behind because of temporary failure to progress in the true path
of the development of that God-consciousness which is
indispensable to the true progress, not only of the individual
mortal, but also of the intricate and complex civilizations
which characterize the advance of culture and society on an
evolutionary planet of time and space.
7. GAUTAMA SIDDHARTHA
94:7.1 Contemporary with Lao-tse and Confucius
in China, another great teacher of truth arose in India. Gautama
Siddhartha was born in the sixth century before Christ in the
north Indian province of Nepal. His followers later made it
appear that he was the son of a fabulously wealthy ruler, but,
in truth, he was the heir apparent to the throne of a petty
chieftain who ruled by sufferance over a small and secluded
mountain valley in the southern Himalayas.
94:7.2 Gautama formulated those theories which
grew into the philosophy of Buddhism after six years of the
futile practice of Yoga. Siddhartha made a determined but
unavailing fight against the growing caste system. There was a
lofty sincerity and a unique unselfishness about this young
prophet prince that greatly appealed to the men of those days.
He detracted from the practice of seeking individual salvation
through physical affliction and personal pain. And he exhorted
his followers to carry his gospel to all the world.
94:7.3 Amid the confusion and extreme cult
practices of India, the saner and more moderate teachings of
Gautama came as a refreshing relief. He denounced gods, priests,
and their sacrifices, but he too failed to perceive the
personality of the One Universal. Not believing in the
existence of individual human souls, Gautama, of course, made a
valiant fight against the time-honored belief in transmigration
of the soul. He made a noble effort to deliver men from fear, to
make them feel at ease and at home in the great universe, but he
failed to show them the pathway to that real and supernal home
of ascending mortals -- Paradise -- and to the expanding service
of eternal existence.
94:7.4 Gautama was a real prophet, and had he
heeded the instruction of the hermit Godad, he might have
aroused all India by the inspiration of the revival of the Salem
gospel of salvation by faith. Godad was descended through a
family that had never lost the traditions of the Melchizedek
missionaries.
94:7.5 At Benares Gautama founded his school,
and it was during its second year that a pupil, Bautan, imparted
to his teacher the traditions of the Salem missionaries about
the Melchizedek covenant with Abraham; and while Siddhartha did
not have a very clear concept of the Universal Father, he took
an advanced stand on salvation through faith -- simple belief.
He so declared himself before his followers and began sending
his students out in groups of sixty to proclaim to the people of
India "the glad tidings of free salvation; that all men, high
and low, can attain bliss by faith in righteousness and
justice."
94:7.6 Gautama's wife believed her husband's
gospel and was the founder of an order of nuns. His son became
his successor and greatly extended the cult; he grasped the new
idea of salvation through faith but in his later years wavered
regarding the Salem gospel of divine favor through faith alone,
and in his old age his dying words were, "Work out your own
salvation."
94:7.7 When proclaimed at its best, Gautama's
gospel of universal salvation, free from sacrifice, torture,
ritual, and priests, was a revolutionary and amazing doctrine
for its time. And it came surprisingly near to being a revival
of the Salem gospel. It brought succor to millions of despairing
souls, and notwithstanding its grotesque perversion during later
centuries, it still persists as the hope of millions of human
beings.
94:7.8 Siddhartha taught far more truth than
has survived in the modern cults bearing his name. Modern
Buddhism is no more the teachings of Gautama Siddhartha than is
Christianity the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
8. THE BUDDHIST FAITH
94:8.1 To become a Buddhist, one merely made
public profession of the faith by reciting the Refuge: "I take
my refuge in the Buddha; I take my refuge in the Doctrine; I
take my refuge in the Brotherhood."
94:8.2 Buddhism took origin in a historic
person, not in a myth. Gautama's followers called him Sasta,
meaning master or teacher. While he made no superhuman claims
for either himself or his teachings, his disciples early began
to call him the enlightened one, the Buddha; later on,
Sakyamuni Buddha.
94:8.3 The original gospel of Gautama was
based on the four noble truths:
1. The noble truths of suffering.
2. The origins of suffering.
3. The destruction of suffering.
4. The way to the destruction of
suffering.
94:8.4 Closely linked to the doctrine of
suffering and the escape therefrom was the philosophy of the
Eightfold Path: right views, aspirations, speech, conduct,
livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and contemplation. It was not
Gautama's intention to attempt to destroy all effort, desire,
and affection in the escape from suffering; rather was his
teaching designed to picture to mortal man the futility of
pinning all hope and aspirations entirely on temporal goals and
material objectives. It was not so much that love of one's
fellows should be shunned as that the true believer should also
look beyond the associations of this material world to the
realities of the eternal future.
94:8.5 The moral commandments of Gautama's
preachment were five in number:
94:8.6 1. You shall not kill.
94:8.7 2. You shall not steal.
94:8.8 3. You shall not be unchaste.
94:8.9 4. You shall not lie.
94:8.10 5. You shall not drink intoxicating
liquors.
94:8.11 There were several additional or
secondary commandments, whose observance was optional with
believers.
94:8.12 Siddhartha hardly believed in the
immortality of the human personality; his philosophy only
provided for a sort of functional continuity. He never clearly
defined what he meant to include in the doctrine of Nirvana. The
fact that it could theoretically be experienced during mortal
existence would indicate that it was not viewed as a state of
complete annihilation. It implied a condition of supreme
enlightenment and supernal bliss wherein all fetters binding man
to the material world had been broken; there was freedom from
the desires of mortal life and deliverance from all danger of
ever again experiencing incarnation.
94:8.13 According to the original teachings of
Gautama, salvation is achieved by human effort, apart from
divine help; there is no place for saving faith or prayers to
superhuman powers. Gautama, in his attempt to minimize the
superstitions of India, endeavored to turn men away from the
blatant claims of magical salvation. And in making this effort,
he left the door wide open for his successors to misinterpret
his teaching and to proclaim that all human striving for
attainment is distasteful and painful. His followers overlooked
the fact that the highest happiness is linked with the
intelligent and enthusiastic pursuit of worthy goals, and that
such achievements constitute true progress in cosmic
self-realization.
94:8.14 The great truth of Siddhartha's
teaching was his proclamation of a universe of absolute justice.
He taught the best godless philosophy ever invented by mortal
man; it was the ideal humanism and most effectively removed all
grounds for superstition, magical rituals, and fear of ghosts or
demons.
94:8.15 The great weakness in the original
gospel of Buddhism was that it did not produce a religion of
unselfish social service. The Buddhistic brotherhood was, for a
long time, not a fraternity of believers but rather a community
of student teachers. Gautama forbade their receiving money and
thereby sought to prevent the growth of hierarchal tendencies.
Gautama himself was highly social; indeed, his life was much
greater than his preachment.
9. THE SPREAD OF BUDDHISM
94:9.1 Buddhism prospered because it offered
salvation through belief in the Buddha, the enlightened one. It
was more representative of the Melchizedek truths than any other
religious system to be found throughout eastern Asia. But
Buddhism did not become widespread as a religion until it was
espoused in self-protection by the low-caste monarch Asoka, who,
next to Ikhnaton in Egypt, was one of the most remarkable civil
rulers between Melchizedek and Michael. Asoka built a great
Indian empire through the propaganda of his Buddhist
missionaries. During a period of twenty-five years he trained
and sent forth more than seventeen thousand missionaries to the
farthest frontiers of all the known world. In one generation he
made Buddhism the dominant religion of one half the world. It
soon became established in Tibet, Kashmir, Ceylon, Burma, Java,
Siam, Korea, China, and Japan. And generally speaking, it was a
religion vastly superior to those which it supplanted or
upstepped.
94:9.2 The spread of Buddhism from its
homeland in India to all of Asia is one of the thrilling stories
of the spiritual devotion and missionary persistence of sincere
religionists. The teachers of Gautama's gospel not only braved
the perils of the overland caravan routes but faced the dangers
of the China Seas as they pursued their mission over the Asiatic
continent, bringing to all peoples the message of their faith.
But this Buddhism was no longer the simple doctrine of Gautama;
it was the miraculized gospel which made him a god. And the
farther Buddhism spread from its highland home in India, the
more unlike the teachings of Gautama it became, and the more
like the religions it supplanted, it grew to be.
94:9.3 Buddhism, later on, was much affected
by Taoism in China, Shinto in Japan, and Christianity in Tibet.
After a thousand years, in India Buddhism simply withered and
expired. It became Brahmanized and later abjectly surrendered to
Islam, while throughout much of the rest of the Orient it
degenerated into a ritual which Gautama Siddhartha would never
have recognized.
94:9.4 In the south the fundamentalist
stereotype of the teachings of Siddhartha persisted in Ceylon,
Burma, and the Indo-China peninsula. This is the Hinayana
division of Buddhism which clings to the early or asocial
doctrine.
94:9.5 But even before the collapse in India,
the Chinese and north Indian groups of Gautama's followers had
begun the development of the Mahayana teaching of the "Great
Road" to salvation in contrast with the purists of the south who
held to the Hinayana, or "Lesser Road." And these Mahayanists
cast loose from the social limitations inherent in the Buddhist
doctrine, and ever since has this northern division of Buddhism
continued to evolve in China and Japan.
94:9.6 Buddhism is a living, growing religion
today because it succeeds in conserving many of the highest
moral values of its adherents. It promotes calmness and
self-control, augments serenity and happiness, and does much to
prevent sorrow and mourning. Those who believe this philosophy
live better lives than many who do not.
10. RELIGION IN TIBET
94:10.1 In Tibet may be found the strangest
association of the Melchizedek teachings combined with Buddhism,
Hinduism, Taoism, and Christianity. When the Buddhist
missionaries entered Tibet, they encountered a state of
primitive savagery very similar to that which the early
Christian missionaries found among the northern tribes of
Europe.
94:10.2
These simple-minded Tibetans would not wholly give up their
ancient magic and charms. Examination of the religious
ceremonials of present-day Tibetan rituals reveals an overgrown
brotherhood of priests with shaven heads who practice an
elaborate ritual embracing bells, chants, incense,
processionals, rosaries, images, charms, pictures, holy water,
gorgeous vestments, and elaborate choirs. They have rigid dogmas
and crystallized creeds, mystic rites and special fasts. Their
hierarchy embraces monks, nuns, abbots, and the Grand Lama. They
pray to angels, saints, a Holy Mother, and the gods. They
practice confessions and believe in purgatory. Their monasteries
are extensive and their cathedrals magnificent. They keep up an
endless repetition of sacred rituals and believe that such
ceremonials bestow salvation. Prayers are fastened to a wheel,
and with its turning they believe the petitions become
efficacious. Among no other people of modern times can be found
the observance of so much from so many religions; and it is
inevitable that such a cumulative liturgy would become
inordinately cumbersome and intolerably burdensome.
94:10.3 The Tibetans have something of all the
leading world religions except the simple teachings of the
Jesusonian gospel: sonship with God, brotherhood with man, and
ever-ascending citizenship in the eternal universe.
11. BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY
94:11.1 Buddhism entered China in the first
millennium after Christ, and it fitted well into the religious
customs of the yellow race. In ancestor worship they had long
prayed to the dead; now they could also pray for them. Buddhism
soon amalgamated with the lingering ritualistic practices of
disintegrating Taoism. This new synthetic religion with its
temples of worship and definite religious ceremonial soon became
the generally accepted cult of the peoples of China, Korea, and
Japan.
94:11.2 While in some respects it is
unfortunate that Buddhism was not carried to the world until
after Gautama's followers had so perverted the traditions and
teachings of the cult as to make of him a divine being,
nonetheless this myth of his human life, embellished as it was
with a multitude of miracles, proved very appealing to the
auditors of the northern or Mahayana gospel of Buddhism.
94:11.3 Some of his later followers taught
that Sakyamuni Buddha's spirit returned periodically to earth as
a living Buddha, thus opening the way for an indefinite
perpetuation of Buddha images, temples, rituals, and impostor
"living Buddhas." Thus did the religion of the great Indian
protestant eventually find itself shackled with those very
ceremonial practices and ritualistic incantations against which
he had so fearlessly fought, and which he had so valiantly
denounced.
94:11.4 The great advance made in Buddhist
philosophy consisted in its comprehension of the relativity of
all truth. Through the mechanism of this hypothesis Buddhists
have been able to reconcile and correlate the divergencies
within their own religious scriptures as well as the differences
between their own and many others. It was taught that the small
truth was for little minds, the large truth for great minds.
94:11.5 This philosophy also held that the
Buddha (divine) nature resided in all men; that man, through his
own endeavors, could attain to the realization of this inner
divinity. And this teaching is one of the clearest presentations
of the truth of the indwelling Adjusters ever to be made by a
Urantian religion.
94:11.6 But a great limitation in the original
gospel of Siddhartha, as it was interpreted by his followers,
was that it attempted the complete liberation of the human self
from all the limitations of the mortal nature by the technique
of isolating the self from objective reality. True cosmic
self-realization results from identification with cosmic reality
and with the finite cosmos of energy, mind, and spirit, bounded
by space and conditioned by time.
94:11.7 But though the ceremonies and outward
observances of Buddhism became grossly contaminated with those
of the lands to which it traveled, this degeneration was not
altogether the case in the philosophical life of the great
thinkers who, from time to time, embraced this system of thought
and belief. Through more than two thousand years, many of the
best minds of Asia have concentrated upon the problem of
ascertaining absolute truth and the truth of the Absolute.
94:11.8 The evolution of a high concept of the
Absolute was achieved through many channels of thought and by
devious paths of reasoning. The upward ascent of this doctrine
of infinity was not so clearly defined as was the evolution of
the God concept in Hebrew theology. Nevertheless, there were
certain broad levels which the minds of the Buddhists reached,
tarried upon, and passed through on their way to the envisioning
of the Primal Source of universes:
94:11.9 1. The Gautama legend. At the
base of the concept was the historic fact of the life and
teachings of Siddhartha, the prophet prince of India. This
legend grew in myth as it traveled through the centuries and
across the broad lands of Asia until it surpassed the status of
the idea of Gautama as the enlightened one and began to take on
additional attributes.
94:11.10 2. The many Buddhas. It was
reasoned that, if Gautama had come to the peoples of India,
then, in the remote past and in the remote future, the races of
mankind must have been, and undoubtedly would be, blessed with
other teachers of truth. This gave rise to the teaching that
there were many Buddhas, an unlimited and infinite number, even
that anyone could aspire to become one -- to attain the divinity
of a Buddha.
94:11.11 3. The Absolute Buddha. By the
time the number of Buddhas was approaching infinity, it became
necessary for the minds of those days to reunify this unwieldy
concept. Accordingly it began to be taught that all Buddhas were
but the manifestation of some higher essence, some Eternal One
of infinite and unqualified existence, some Absolute Source of
all reality. From here on, the Deity concept of Buddhism, in its
highest form, becomes divorced from the human person of Gautama
Siddhartha and casts off from the anthropomorphic limitations
which have held it in leash. This final conception of the Buddha
Eternal can well be identified as the Absolute, sometimes even
as the infinite I AM.
94:11.12 While this idea of Absolute Deity
never found great popular favor with the peoples of Asia, it did
enable the intellectuals of these lands to unify their
philosophy and to harmonize their cosmology. The concept of the
Buddha Absolute is at times quasi-personal, at times wholly
impersonal -- even an infinite creative force. Such concepts,
though helpful to philosophy, are not vital to religious
development. Even an anthropomorphic Yahweh is of greater
religious value than an infinitely remote Absolute of Buddhism
or Brahmanism.
94:11.13 At times the Absolute was even
thought of as contained within the infinite I AM. But these
speculations were chill comfort to the hungry multitudes who
craved to hear words of promise, to hear the simple gospel of
Salem, that faith in God would assure divine favor and eternal
survival.
12. THE GOD CONCEPT OF BUDDHISM
94:12.1 The great weakness in the cosmology of
Buddhism was twofold: its contamination with many of the
superstitions of India and China and its sublimation of Gautama,
first as the enlightened one, and then as the Eternal Buddha.
Just as Christianity has suffered from the absorption of much
erroneous human philosophy, so does Buddhism bear its human
birthmark. But the teachings of Gautama have continued to evolve
during the past two and one-half millenniums. The concept of
Buddha, to an enlightened Buddhist, is no more the human
personality of Gautama than the concept of Jehovah is identical
with the spirit demon of Horeb to an enlightened Christian.
Paucity of terminology, together with the sentimental retention
of olden nomenclature, is often provocative of the failure to
understand the true significance of the evolution of religious
concepts.
94:12.2 Gradually the concept of God, as
contrasted with the Absolute, began to appear in Buddhism. Its
sources are back in the early days of this differentiation of
the followers of the Lesser Road and the Greater Road. It was
among the latter division of Buddhism that the dual conception
of God and the Absolute finally matured. Step by step, century
by century, the God concept has evolved until, with the
teachings of Ryonin, Honen Shonin, and Shinran in Japan, this
concept finally came to fruit in the belief in Amida Buddha.
94:12.3 Among these believers it is taught
that the soul, upon experiencing death, may elect to enjoy a
sojourn in Paradise prior to entering Nirvana, the ultimate of
existence. It is proclaimed that this new salvation is attained
by faith in the divine mercies and loving care of Amida, God of
the Paradise in the west. In their philosophy, the Amidists hold
to an Infinite Reality which is beyond all finite mortal
comprehension; in their religion, they cling to faith in the
all-merciful Amida, who so loves the world that he will not
suffer one mortal who calls on his name in true faith and with a
pure heart to fail in the attainment of the supernal happiness
of Paradise.
94:12.4 The great strength of Buddhism is that
its adherents are free to choose truth from all religions; such
freedom of choice has seldom characterized a Urantian faith. In
this respect the Shin sect of Japan has become one of the most
progressive religious groups in the world; it has revived the
ancient missionary spirit of Gautama's followers and has begun
to send teachers to other peoples. This willingness to
appropriate truth from any and all sources is indeed a
commendable tendency to appear among religious believers during
the first half of the twentieth century after Christ.
94:12.5 Buddhism itself is undergoing a
twentieth-century renaissance. Through contact with Christianity
the social aspects of Buddhism have been greatly enhanced. The
desire to learn has been rekindled in the hearts of the monk
priests of the brotherhood, and the spread of education
throughout this faith will be certainly provocative of new
advances in religious evolution.
94:12.6 At the time of this writing, much of
Asia rests its hope in Buddhism. Will this noble faith, that has
so valiantly carried on through the dark ages of the past, once
again receive the truth of expanded cosmic realities even as the
disciples of the great teacher in India once listened to his
proclamation of new truth? Will this ancient faith respond once
more to the invigorating stimulus of the presentation of new
concepts of God and the Absolute for which it has so long
searched?
94:12.7 All Urantia is waiting for the
proclamation of the ennobling message of Michael, unencumbered
by the accumulated doctrines and dogmas of nineteen centuries of
contact with the religions of evolutionary origin. The hour is
striking for presenting to Buddhism, to Christianity, to
Hinduism, even to the peoples of all faiths, not the gospel
about Jesus, but the living, spiritual reality of the gospel of
Jesus.
94:12.8
Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.
