religious revolution now 247the or ga ni za tion of the believers. Th e weaker the bond between religion
and people, the more important it becomes that the believers be or ga-
nized. Th e identifi cation of religion and people has never been so spon-
taneous and complete that they have required no or ga ni za tion of a
community of belief.
Th e three conditions have represented, for the historical religions,
the price of worldly success. When this price goes unpaid, the religion—
even when it satisfi es the standards distinguishing it, however rela-
tively, from philosophy, art, and politics— remains a deliquescent
artifact: a series of ideas, which, even if embodied in exemplary action,
lacks staying power. To the extent that its ideas remain identifi ed with a
single teacher, they acquire no in de pen dent life. To the extent that they
are taken up and reinvented by others, they loose fi xed contours. Th e
clarity of their contrast to other religions and philosophies is lost or
obscured.
Th e philosophy of Schopenhauer resembled in many respects the
teaching of the Buddha. Nevertheless, it was not, and could not be-
come, a religion. Schopenhauer developed and presented his philoso-
phy as an exercise of the intellect, which claimed to have solved the
enigma of existence without leaving any gap between the way of living
that it required or recommended and the understandings of the world
that it off ered. His teaching, however, satisfi ed none of the three condi-
tions that have been crucial to the worldly success of a religion.
Whether the triple price of this success is too high depends on the
message. Th e Confucian message was adopted to the social and eco-
nomic as well as the po liti cal realities of an imperial order. Th at order
could appropriate a principle of meritocracy, narrowly understood,
without endangering established po liti cal, economic, or social power.
Th e message of Buddhism, devaluing as it did the phenomenal and
the historical world, while affi rming, on the basis of that devaluation,
an imperative of universal altruism, lent itself to alternative ways of
reckoning with worldly authority: renunciation of worldly power by
those who wore the chains of an established scheme of social division
and reality that they were unwilling or unable to challenge; embodi-
ment in monastic organizations that assumed a largely passive role
within an order largely controlled by other interests and beliefs; or