Huxley's Discovery of Buddhism
An atheist religion, Buddhism doesn't accept the existence of God, an everlasting hereafter, Paradise, or Hell. It supposes that the human spirit is no different from that of an animal and believes in continual karmic returns to the natural world. According to Buddhists, a fish could come back as a mammal in a later life, and a human could come back as a worm. This idea of the "transmigration of souls" between species has important parallels with Darwin's theory of evolution.
One Buddhist researcher has described as follows the relation between Buddhism and evolution:
A caricature of Thomas H. Huxley
Buddhism. . . is quite happy with the theory of evolution. In fact, Buddhist philosophy actually requires evolution to take place-all things are seen as being transient, constantly becoming, existing for a while, and then fading. The idea of unchanging species would not be compatible with Buddhist ontology.6
For this reason, Darwinists have felt sympathetic toward Buddhism and promoted it ever since the 19th century.
The first to express Darwinist admiration for Buddhism was Thomas H. Huxley who, after Darwin himself proposed his theory, played the next most important role in the spread of Darwinism. Huxley appeared on the scene as Darwin's most passionate supporter and became known as "Darwin's bulldog." His debates with scientists and 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 religions like Judaism and Christianity, he regarded Buddhism as appropriate 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 includes 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 effortsfor 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 referred, in addition, to "many parallelisms of Stoicism and Buddhism.". . .8
David Hume
Rajapakse notes that some other 18th and 19th century atheists or agnostics were also great admirers of Buddhism. Parallels between Buddhism and the materialist Western philosophy of the time form part of the thought of David Hume, an 18th century Scottish philosopher and atheist with an antipathy towards religion. Rajapakse writes, "Interestingly enough, the parallelisms that exist between Buddhist and Humean standpoints on the question of a substantial soul were duly noted by certain early commentators on Buddhism" and continues:
Mrs. Rhys Davids [a pioneer translator of early Buddhist texts from Paali into English], for example, remarked that "with regard to the belief in an indwelling spirit or ego, permanent, unchanging, unsuffering, Buddhism took the standpoint two thousand, four hundred years ago of our own Hume of two centuries ago."9
As Rajapakse maintains in his article, Buddhism intrigued many thinkers in Victorian England because they found it in harmony with the ascendant philosophies of the 19th century-atheism and Darwinism. Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous German philosopher, looked with favor on Buddhism for the same reason.