The Religion of the Samurai eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 299 pages of information about The Religion of the Samurai.

The Religion of the Samurai eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 299 pages of information about The Religion of the Samurai.

By nature man should be either good or bad; or he should be good as well as bad; or he should be neither good nor bad.  There can be no alternative possible besides these four propositions, none of which can be accepted as true.  Then there must be some misconception in the terms of which they consist.  It would seem to some that the error can be avoided by limiting the sense of the term ‘man,’ saying some persons are good-natured, some persons are bad-natured, some persons are good-natured and bad-natured as well, and some persons are neither good-natured nor bad-natured.  There is no contradiction in these modified propositions, but still they fail to explain the ethical state of man.  Supposing them all to be true, let us assume that there are the four classes of people:  (1) Those who are purely moral and have no immoral disposition; (2) those who are half moral and half immoral; (3) those who are neither moral nor immoral; (4) those who are purely immoral and have no moral disposition.  Orthodox Christians, believing in the sinlessness of Jesus, would say he belongs to the first class, while Mohammedans and Buddhists, who deify the founder of their respective faith, would in such case regard their founder as the purely moral personage.  But are your beliefs, we should ask, based on historical fact?  Can you say that such traditional and self-contradictory records as the four gospels are history in the strict sense of the term?  Can you assert that those traditions which deify Mohammed and Shakya are the statements of bare facts?  Is not Jesus an abstraction and an ideal, entirely different from a concrete carpenter’s son, who fed on the same kind of food, sheltered himself in the same kind of building, suffered from the same kind of pain, was fired by the same kind of anger, stung by the same kind of lust as our own?  Can you say the person who fought many a sanguinary battle, who got through many cunning negotiations with enemies and friends, who personally experienced the troubles of polygamy, was a person sinless and divine?  We might allow that these ancient sages are superhuman and divine, then our classification has no business with them, because they do not properly belong to mankind.  Now, then, who can point out any sinless person in the present world?  Is it not a fact that the more virtuous one grows the more sinful he feels himself?  If there be any mortal, in the past, the present, and the future, who declares himself to be pure and sinless, his very declaration proves that he is not highly moral.  Therefore the existence of the first class of people is open to question.

6.  There is no Mortal who is Non-Moral or Purely Immoral.

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The Religion of the Samurai from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.