Thomas Huxley on Buddhism

It seems to me the nexus point for any reflection on evolution, Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism such as I’ll be attempting this Sunday is Thomas Huxley. In my researches I stumbled upon a rather wonderful appreciation of Buddhism he wrote in what is an increasingly important document to me, his meditation Evolution and Ethics. It represents an idealized vision of Buddhism not uncommon among nineteenth century Western intellectuals. I don’t have time within the constraints of a sermon to explain the factual errors contained within this particular quote so cannot use it in my text. Nonetheless I thought it worthy, and as this blog is also a bit of a day book, I place it here for handy reference. For those who wish to investigate the matter more deeply, in addition to Huxley’s essay itself, I recommend Vijitha Rajapakse’s fascinating analysis, Buddhism in Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics.

But, first, to Huxley…

With just insight into human nature, Gautama declared extreme ascetic practices to be useless and indeed harmful. The appetites and the passions are not to be abolished by mere mortification of the body; they must, in addition, be attacked on their own ground and conquered by steady cultivation of the mental habits which oppose them; by universal benevolence; by the return of good for evil; by humility; by abstinence from evil thought; in short, by total renunciation of that self-assertion which is the essence of the cosmic process.

Doubtless, it is to these ethical qualities that Buddhism owes its marvelous success. A system which knows no God in the western sense; which denies a soul to man; which counts the belief in immortality a blunder and the hope of it a sin; which refuses any efficacy to prayer and sacrifice; which bids men look to nothing but their own efforts for salvation; which, in its original purity, knew nothing of vows of obedience, abhorred intolerance, and never sought the aid of the secular arm; yet spread over a considerable moiety of the Old World with marvelous rapidity, and is still, with whatever base admixture of foreign superstitions, the dominant creed of a large fraction of mankind.

Evolution and Ethics page 69