The Melchizedek Teachings in the Orient

94:11.1Bud­dhism 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.

94:11.2While 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.

94:11.3Some 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.

94:11.4The 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.

94:11.5This 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.

94:11.6But 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.

94:11.7But 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.

94:11.8The 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:

94:11.91. 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.

94:11.102. 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.

94:11.113. 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.

94:11.12While 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.

94:11.13At 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.