The Other Side of the World
THERE used to be a “missionary box” in my Sunday-school, and into this box we dropped our pennies to send a missionary to the heathen.
The heathen, we were told, were people who lived on the other side of the world and worshiped idols.
There was the heathen “Chinee,” the heathen “Japanee,” and the heathen Indian.
These heathen Indians were not our American Indians. They lived in a country called India on the other side of the world. India looks on the map like the little thing that hangs down in the back of your mouth when the doctor says: “Stick out your tongue. Say ’Ah.’” Our Indians are red, but the Indians from India are white. The white Indians belong to the Aryan family, the same family that Cyrus belonged to.
Two thousand years before the time of Cyrus, an Aryan family had moved away from the other Aryan families in Persia until they had come to this country we now call India.
In the course of time there came to be four chief classes of people in India, four chief classes of society—high society, low society, and two classes of society in between. These classes were called castes, and no one in one caste would have anything to do with one in another caste. A boy or girl in one caste would never play with a boy or girl in another caste. A man from one caste would never marry a woman in another. No one from one caste would eat with one in another caste, even though he were starving. Men in different castes were even afraid of touching each other in passing on the street. It was almost as if they were afraid of catching some horrible disease.
The highest caste of all were the Fighters and Rulers. The Rulers were the Fighters, and the Fighters were the Rulers, for they had to be fighters in order to keep their rule.
In the next caste were the Priests; and, as in the case of the Egyptian priests, these men were not what we think of as priests nowadays. They were what we should call professional men—doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.
Next came the farmers and tradespeople—the butcher, the baker, and candlestick maker.
Fourth and last were the common laborers. These were the men who knew nothing and could do nothing but dig or chop wood or carry water.
Below these four castes were still other people so low and mean that they were called outcastes or Pariahs. We now call any person who has done something so disgraceful that no one, not even the lowest, will have anything to do with him a “pariah.”
The people in India believed in a god whom they called Brahma, and so we call their religion Brahmanism. The Brahmanists believed that when a person died his soul was born again in the body of another person or perhaps of an animal. If he had been good while alive they thought his soul went into the body of a higher caste man when he died—as if he were promoted from one grade to the next. If, however, he had led a bad life they thought his soul went into the body of a lower caste man or even of an animal.
When a man died, his body was not buried, it was burned. If he were a married man, his wife was obliged to throw herself alive upon the burning flames. She was not allowed to live after her husband was dead. If the wife died, that was another matter; the man simply got another wife. In the Brahman temples were hideous idols, which the people worshiped as gods. These idols had several heads apiece or many arms, or many legs, or they had tusks sticking out of their mouths—or they had horns coming out of their heads.
About the year 500 B.C. there was born a prince in India by the name of Gautama. Gautama saw so much suffering and trouble in the world that he felt it was not right that he himself, just because he by chance had been born rich, should be happy while others were miserable and unhappy. So he gave up the life to which he had been born and brought up, a life of ease and luxury with all its good things, and spent his entire time trying to make things better for his people.
Gautama taught the people to be good; he taught them to be honest; and he taught them to help the poor and unfortunate. After a while people began to call him Buddha, and he was so holy and pure that at last they thought he must be god himself, and so they worshiped him as god.
These people who believed in Buddha were called Buddhists, and many, many Brahmanists left their hideous idols and became Buddhists. You see there was no such thing as a Christian religion as yet, for this was still five hundred years before Christ was born, and Buddhism seemed so much better than Brahmanism that we do not wonder that great numbers of people became Buddhists.
Buddhists thought their religion was so good that they wanted everyone to become Buddhists; so they sent missionaries across country and sea to the island of Japan just as we send Christian missionaries now, and this new religion spread far and wide.
Perhaps you have never met nor seen nor even heard of a Buddhist, and yet to-day there are many more Buddhists on the other side of the world than there are Christians!
About the same time that Gautama was starting Buddhism in India, a man in China, a teacher by the name of Confucius, was teaching the people of China what they ought to do and what they ought not to do. His teachings filled several books and formed what came to be a religion for the Chinese.
Confucius taught his people to obey their parents and teachers and to honor their ancestors. This sounds something like one of the Ten Commandments: “Honor thy father and thy mother.”
Confucius also taught the golden rule, the same golden rule you are taught to-day, only instead of saying, “Do unto others as you would be done by,” he said, “Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you.”
In China there are still as many people who follow the teachings of Confucius as there are Christians in all the rest of the world. So here are two religions each as large or larger than the Christian religion.
China was highly civilized, even at this time, 500 B.C., and many inventions were known and used in that country long before the rest of the world ever heard of them. Yet we know little of China’s history until a great deal later.