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The 5th Epochal Revelation
-The Urantia Papers
PAPER 94
THE MELCHIZEDEK TEACHINGS IN THE ORIENT
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.
*
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