The Melchizedek Teachings in the Orient

94:7.1Con­tem­po­rary 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.

94:7.2Gau­tama 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.

94:7.3Amid 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.

94:7.4Gau­tama 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.

94:7.5At 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.”

94:7.6Gau­tama’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.”

94:7.7When 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.

94:7.8Sid­dhartha 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.