“Notwithstanding the impossibility for Christian missionaries to understand clearly the spirit of a religion wholly based on that doctrine of emanation, which is so inimical to their own theology, the reasoning powers of some simple Buddhistical preachers are so high, that we see a scholar like Gutzlaff, utterly silenced and put to great straits by Buddhists.
Judson, the famous Baptist missionary in Burmah, confesses, in his Journal, the difficulties to which he was often driven by them. Speaking of a certain Ooyan, he remarks that his strong mind was capable of grasping the most difficult subjects. “His words”, he remarks, “are as smooth as oil, as sweet as honey, and as sharp as razors; his mode of reasoning is soft, insinuating and acute; and so adroitly does he act his part, that I with the strength of truth, was scarcely able to keep him down.” It appears though, that at a later period of his mission, Mr. Judson found that he had utterly mistaken the doctrine. “I begin to find”, he says, “that the semi-atheism, which I had sometimes mentioned, is nothing but a refined Buddhism, having its foundation in the Buddhistic Scriptures.”
Thus, he discovered at last that while there is in Buddhism “a generic term of most exalted perfection actually applied to numerous individuals, a Buddha superior to the whole host of subordinate deities”, there are also lurking in the system “the glimmerings of an anima mundi, anterior to, and even superior to Buddha.” This is a happy discovery, indeed!
Even the so-slandered Chinese believe in One Highest God, “The Supreme Ruler of Heavens”. Yuh-Hwang-Shang-ti, has his name inscribed only on the golden tablet before the altar of heaven at the great temple at Pekin, T’lantan. “This worship”, says Colonel Yule, “is mentioned by the Mahometan narrator of Shah Rukh’s embassy (A.D. 1421): ‘Every year there are some days on which the emperor eats no animal food. …He spends his time in an apartment which contains no idol and says that he is worshipping the God of Heaven.’”
Speaking of Shahrastani, the great Arabian scholar, Chwolsohn says that for him Sabaeism was not astrolatry, as many are inclined to think. He thought “that God is too sublime and too great to occupy Himself with the immediate management of this world; that He has, therefore, transferred the government thereof to the gods, and retained only the most important affairs for Himself; that further, man is too weak to be able to apply immediately to the Highest; that he must, therefore, address his prayers and sacrifices to the intermediate divinities, to whom the management of the world has been entrusted by the Highest.” Chwolsohn argues that this idea is as old as the world, and that “in the heathen world this view was universally shared by the cultivated.”
Father Boori, a Portuguese missionary, who was sent to convert the “poor heathen” of Cochin-China, as early as the sixteenth century, “protests in despair, in his narrative, that there is not a dress, office, or ceremony in the Church of Rome, to which the Devil has not here provided some counterpart. Even when the Father began inveighing against the idols, he was answered that these were the images of departed great men, whom they worshipped exactly on the same principle, and in the same manner, as the Catholics did the images of the apostles and martyrs. Moreover, these idols have importance but in the eyes of the ignorant multitudes.
The philosophy of Buddhism ignores images and fetishes. Its strongest vitality lies in its psychological conceptions of man’s inner self. The road to the supreme state of felicity, called the Ford of Nirvana, winds its invisible paths through the spiritual, not physical life of a person while on this earth. The sacred Buddhistical literature points the way by stimulating man to follow practically the example of Gautama. Therefore, the Buddhistical writings lay a particular stress on the spiritual privileges of man, advising him to cultivate his powers for the production of Meipo (phenomena) during life, and for the attainment of Nirvana, in the hereafter.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 