Page 153 - Islam and Buddhism

Buddhism and Materialist Western Culture

clergy defending the idea of creation, and the passion of his writings

and speeches have made him the 19th century's most famous
Darwinist.
One little-known fact about Huxley was his keen interest in
Buddhism. Even while struggling with representatives of revealed re-
ligions like Judaism and Christianity, he regarded Buddhism as ap-
propriate to the kind of secular civilization that he wanted to see

established in the West. This is elaborated in the Philosophy East and
West article, "Buddhism in Huxley's Evolution and Ethics," which in-
cludes the following description of Buddhism from Huxley's book of
that name:
[Buddhism is] 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 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 . . . . yet [it] 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. 7

The only reason for Huxley's admiration of Buddhism is that it—
like Huxley and other Darwinists—did not believe in God.
According to Vijitha Rajapakse, a professor at Hawaii University
and the author of "Buddhism in Huxley's Evolution and Ethics,"
Huxley saw a parallel between Buddhism and the atheistic pagan
ideas of ancient Greece. This contributed to his admiration:

Huxley's evident tendency to link Buddhist thought with Western
ideas, which comes to the fore strikingly in his comments on the
concept of substance, was further exemplified at other levels of his
discussion as well. He found the nontheistic stance taken by the
early Buddhists to be analogous to the outlook of Heracleitus and

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