HmJ. : 
 
 BUDDHISM: 
 
 ITU 
 
 HISTORICAL, THEORETICAL AND POPULAR 
 
 ASPECTS. 
 
 
 THREE LECTURES. 
 
 BY 
 
 iST J. EITEL, M.A., rir.r>.. 
 
 OF THE LONDON MISSION.VBY SOCIF.TY. 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 HONGKONG: 
 
 NE, CEAWFOED Sc Co. 
 
 1873 . 
 
THREE LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 BUDDHISM. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
BUDDHISM : 
 
 ITS 
 
 HISTORICAL, THEORETICAL AND POPULAR 
 
 ASPECTS. 
 
 IN 
 
 THREE LECTURES. 
 
 BY 
 
 ERNEST J. EITEL, i>h u., 
 
 OF THE LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY. 
 
 second: editiox. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 I E U B N E K *Sc Co. 
 1878 . 
 
HONGKONG: 
 
 L A N E, C E -A. "W 3T O E D «Sc Co 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOXI) EDITIOX. 
 
 The rapidity with which the first edition of these Lectures 
 was exhausted and the favour with which the book was generally 
 received by the public press, especially in China, encouraged the 
 author to satisfy the continuing demand for it by a second edition. 
 
 A few corrections and alterations have been introduced here 
 and there, but the form and substance of the book remain un- 
 touched. 
 
 Hongkong, July , 1878. 
 
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 Two of the following essays on Buddhism formed part of a 
 series of popular lectures, delivered in Union Church in the course 
 of the winter 1870-71. To complete the plan laid down in the first 
 essay, it was necessary to add a third, and the whole is herewith 
 offered to the reader as a popular sketch of Buddhism, which is 
 here viewed under its different aspects, as an event in history, as 
 a system of doctrine, and as a popular religion. Considering the 
 character of the audience before which these lectures were deli- 
 vered, the author avoided as much as possible going into details, 
 and confined his remarks to the more prominent features of Bud- 
 dhism. Those who wish to make themselves further acquainted 
 with this important religion may refer to the author’s “ Hand- 
 book for the Student of Chinese Buddhism ; London, • Triibner & 
 Co., 1870,” to which more painstaking work the present pam- 
 phlet may serve as a general introduction. 
 
 Hongkong, March, 1871. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LECTURE TIIE FIRST. 
 
 BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 
 
 IT is with considerable hesitation, that I set out 
 on this inquiry into the subject of Buddhism. Not 
 as if I had given years of study to this particular 
 religion, and yet failed to make myself familiar with 
 its general characteristics and minute details. It is 
 the magnitude and importance of the subject that 
 appals me and in view of which I naturally feel 
 distrustful of my own power to deal with that subject 
 in a satisfactory and yet attractive manner. 
 
 Buddhism, I repeat, is a system of vast magnitude, 
 for it embraces all the various branches of science, 
 which our Western nations have been long accustomed 
 to divide for separate study. It embodies in one living 
 structure grand and peculiar views of physical science, 
 refined and subtle theorems on abstract metaphysics, 
 an edifice of fanciful mysticism, a most elaborate and 
 far-reaching system of practical morality, and finally 
 a church organisation as broad in its principles and 
 as finel}'' wrought in its most intricate network as 
 any in the world. 
 
 All this is moreover combined and worked up in 
 such a manner, that the essence and substance of the 
 
2 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 whole may be compressed into a few formulas and 
 symbols, plain and suggestive enough to be grasped 
 by tbe most simple-minded Asiatic, and yet so full 
 of philosophic depth, as to provide rich food for years 
 of meditation to the metaphysician, the poet, the 
 mystic, and pleasant pasturage for the most fiery 
 imagination of any poetical dreamer. 
 
 The magnitude of the subject, however, is but 
 equalled by its importance. A system which takes 
 its roots in the oldest code-book of Asiatic nations, 
 in the Veda, a theory which extracted and remodelled 
 all the best ideas that were ever laid hold of by 
 ancient Brahmanism, a religion which has not only 
 managed to subsist for 2400 years, but which has 
 succeeded to draw within the meshes of its own 
 peculiar church-organization and to bring more or 
 Jess under the influence of its own peculiar tenets 
 more than four hundred millions of people, fully one 
 third of the human race, — such a system, such a 
 religion ought to have importance enough in our eyes 
 to deserve something more than passing or passive 
 attention. 
 
 The history of Eastern Asia is the history of 
 Buddhism. But the conquests of Buddhism are not 
 confined to Asia. This grand system of philosophic 
 atheism, which discards from the universe the existence 
 of a creating and overruling Deity and in its place 
 deifies humanity, has, since the beginning of the pre- 
 sent century, entcrod upon a course of conquest in the 
 West, in Europe and America, 
 
 Atheistic philosophers, unconsciously attracted by 
 the natural affinity, which draws together Atheists 
 
BUDDIII9M, AN EVENT TN HISTORY. 
 
 3 
 
 of rill countries and ages, have during the last fifty 
 years almost instinctively gone on sipping at the 
 intoxicating cup of Buddhistic philosophy. The Ger- 
 mans Feuerbach and Schoppenhauer, the Frenchman 
 Comte, the Englishman Lewis, the American Emerson, 
 with hosts of others, have all drunk more or less of 
 this sweet poison and taken as kindly as any Asiatic 
 to this Buddhistic opium-pipe. But most of all that 
 latest product of modern philosophy, the so-called 
 system of positive religion, the school of Comte, with 
 its religion of humanity, is but Buddhism adapted to 
 modern civilisation, it is philosophic Buddhism in a 
 slight disguise. 
 
 I mention these facts only, to claim the attention 
 of my readers for the subject of these three lectures, 
 being aware of the prejudices which deter people from 
 a study so unpromising at first sight and uninviting 
 as that of Buddhism. But to guide them through the 
 vast labyrinth of Buddhistic literature and doctrines 
 with something like method, I would divide the subject 
 matter under discussion into three parts and treat 
 Buddhism first as an event in history, secondly as a 
 dogmatic system, and finally consider its aspects as a 
 popular religion. I propose therefore to treat Bud- 
 dhism in this first lecture as an event in the history 
 of the world, to search for the hidden roots of the 
 gigantic tree of knowledge under the boughs of which 
 one third of the human race has flocked together, 
 Let us watch its gradual growth through successive 
 centuries, let us count the large branches it has sent 
 forth in all directions and ascertain its present condi- 
 tion and extent. 
 
4 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 But here, at the outset, we meet with the usual 
 difficulty that obstructs the way of the historian who 
 wants to get at the roots of events: they are hidden 
 in complete darkness. There is such a network of 
 fiction, romance, legend and trutli lying around the 
 early history of Buddhism, that it is an exceedingly 
 difficult task to sift truth from fiction. 
 
 And yet these legends and myths ought not to 
 be despised by the historian, ought not to be thrown 
 aside as worthless rubbish. They are often very 
 significant, a very master-key to many specific char- 
 acteristics of after-developments, a rich ore of hidden 
 wealth to him who patiently works through them and 
 knows how to appreciate them with discerning caution. 
 
 I shall not ask my readers, however, to follow me 
 through the tedious process of sifting out the truth 
 from among the entangled mass of legends about the 
 first origin of Buddhism. I will give them but the 
 results of careful investigations and lightly sketch first 
 the few historic data that crop out of the chaos of 
 legend and fable, and then arrange the same according 
 to the received tradition of the Buddhist church. 
 
 One thing is absolutely certain as regards the 
 origin of Buddhism, and that is, that it first arose 
 in India. All Buddhists of all countries point to 
 India as the birthplace of their religion, and strange 
 to say all Buddhists, North and South, are equally 
 unanimous in singling out one and the same city, the 
 city of Benares, as the first headquarters of early 
 Buddhism. 
 
 Again, there is perfect unanimity as to the name 
 of the great founder of the present Buddhist church, 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 
 
 one Shakyarnuni Gautama Buddha. As to the time 
 when this man lived or died, great confusion prevails, 
 traditions of one and the same country often con- 
 tradicting each other. One Chinese account, for 
 instance, places it as early as 949 B.C., another, more 
 modest, names the year 688 B.C., whilst the Buddhists 
 of Ceylon fixed upon the year 543 B.C. As the latter 
 date is confirmed by the lately discovered chronicle 
 of Cashmere, and as other considerations, inscriptions 
 and coins for instance, point to the same century, it 
 is now generally agreed upon among European scholars 
 that the year 543 B.C. is most probably the year in 
 which Shakyarnuni Gautama Buddha died. 
 
 Regarding the private history of this truly great 
 man very little can be ascertained with perfect 
 certainty, — beyond the following facts: that he claimed 
 to be of royal descent, that, dissatisfied with Brah- 
 manism, he left house and home, tried first to find 
 peace in the most austere asceticism, but finally emerg- 
 ed, disentangling himself from the social trammels of 
 caste and all sectarian doctrines, teaching voluntary 
 poverty and celibacy, and erecting on the basis of all 
 existing religions a grand system, the chief character- . 
 istics of which were socially the complete insignificance 
 of caste and property, dogmatically thorough atheism 
 and deification of humanity, morally the dogma of the 
 vanity and unreality of all earthly good, transmigra- 
 tion of the soul in accordance with the laws of moral 
 retribution, and final absorption in Nirvana. 
 
 But in spite of his undoubted originality of 
 genius, it is more than probable, that he was not the 
 first Buddhist, that he was but a great reformer , the 
 
<G 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 Martin Luther* of a sect which existed perhaps for 
 •centuries before him, but which rose with him only 
 into historical significance, and which he inspired with 
 the courage to publicly compete with the national 
 religion of the Brahmans and the various sects attach* 
 cd to the latter, 
 
 * One other characteristic, imprinted Upoti Buddhism 
 by his master hand, is the spirit of thorough liberality 
 and absolute tolerance, which has marked the early 
 rise and progress of Buddhism and which enabled it 
 to adopt the most valuable ideas of all religions it 
 came in contact with, to enter into a compromise 
 with almost every form of popular superstition and 
 to found and maintain a church, for thousand of 
 years, without ever persecuting a single dissenter, 
 That Buddhism is to the present day a system of 
 unlimited eclecticism, is no doubt the work of the 
 •clever reformer Shakyainuni Buddha himself. 
 
 This is well nigh all concerning the origin of Bud- 
 dhism, that may be said to belong to history. But 
 now let us see what Buddhist tradition reports on this 
 same first epoch in the life of early Buddhism. 
 
 If we had the faith of an orthodox Buddhist, we 
 should say, that the history of Buddhism is, like the 
 history of the world, without a beginning. As from 
 eternity one world has succeeded the other, rising into 
 existence by a law of evolution, flourishing and 
 perishing again, only to be substituted by another, — 
 . thus, in all these countless numbers of worlds, which 
 have risen into existence and disappeared again, before 
 our present world came into being, there have been 
 Buddhas. And the religion of each of these former 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 
 
 7 
 
 Buddhas was subject to the same laws of rise, progress- 
 ami decay. 
 
 Now in our present world, there have appeared 
 already seven great Buddhas, the last and greatest of* 
 whom was, however, Sh&kyamuni Gautama Buddha. 
 But before Shakyamuni was born a Buddha , be had 
 appeared on this earth at least 550 times, descending - 
 perhaps first in a flash of lightning, then may be 
 vegetating as a humble plant, reborn again as a worm, 
 again perhaps reborn as a snake, then as a beast, a 
 bird and so forth. Thus in 550 successive stages of 
 transmigration he worked his way up from the 
 lowest forms of existence to the highest, through the 
 various kingdoms of nature, through the different 
 classes of sentient beings, then among the human 
 race from the lowest caste to the highest and through 
 all the various degrees of intellectual and religious 
 saintship, exhibiting all the time, in every particular 
 walk of life in which he appeared, the utmost 
 unselfishness, absolutely self-denying and self-for- 
 getting love and charity, constantly sacrificing his 
 life for the benefit of other creatures animate and 
 inanimate. 
 
 At last he was reborn in a certain heaven whence » 
 all Buddhas come down to earth. Knowing that 
 he was now to be reborn on earth as a Buddha, he 
 goes with the assistance of some other devas through 
 the whole court almanac of Indian princes and 
 princesses, and finally selects the King of Kapilavastu 
 and his young bride for his parents. In accordance 
 with this choice, this virgin bride, whose name, 
 Maya, bears a curious resemblance to that of the 
 
 v 1 
 
8 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 mother of our Saviour, gives birth to a sou, whilst a 
 host of heavenly beings hasten to the spot and flashes 
 of light announce to all the universe the birth of a 
 Buddha: peace on earth and good will toward men. 
 
 The newborn babe is forthwith baptized, and an 
 old saint, called Asita, appears like the Simeon of the 
 gospel, takes him in his arms and with tears in his 
 eyes he predicts the child’s future destinies. He does 
 so, however, by a phrenological examination of the 
 baby’s skull, on the top of which he remarks a curious 
 bump, the indisputable indication of future Buddha- 
 ship. In further confirmation of his assertions he 
 points out altogether 80 remarkable features of 
 beauty, and especially a complete network of delicate 
 tracery on the child’s skin, where he observes a series 
 of 32 ornamental symbolic designs most conspicuous 
 on the palms and soles of the baby. In fact this 
 wonderful child must have come into the world tattooed 
 like a North American Indian. 
 
 A few years afterwards the baby was presented 
 in a temple, when — lo and behold — all the statues 
 and idols there rise and prostrate themselves before 
 him. When seven years old, teachers are engaged for 
 him, but the teachers find to their astonishment, that 
 he knows more than they could teach him and retire 
 dumb-founded. As gymnastic exercises seem then to 
 have formed part of an Indian school education, he 
 was taught gymnastics and excelled all competitors 
 by strength of muscle. He threw a large elephant 
 to a considerable distance, and shot an arrow so deep 
 into the solid ground, that it laid bare a fountain 
 of water. 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 
 
 9 
 
 But he, the most beautiful, the most learned, the 
 most powerful of men, came to sad grief through 
 women. He got. married, and all Buddhistic traditions 
 agree in stating, that it was the experiences he made 
 with the ladies of his harem which disgusted him 
 with the whole world and put him into such a misan- 
 thropical mood, that when he once, on a solitary 
 walk, met with a miserable decrepid old man, a 
 young man writhing in the agonies of disease, a 
 dead corpse and — by way of striking contrast — a 
 jolly-looking friar, he suddenly ran away from house 
 and home and tied into the wilderness, and became 
 a friar too. 
 
 In vain he endeavoured to regain his peace of 
 mind by solitude, fasting and self-torturing asceticism. 
 He tried all the prescriptions of Brahminism and 
 Shivaism, — all in vain. When he was reduced by 
 fasting and hunger to the last stage of exhaustion, 
 Satan himself appeared to tempt him in various ways 
 to a career of ambition and self-glorification and finally 
 to a life of sensual pleasure; but by keeping his 
 mind fixed on the idea of the utter unreality of all 
 earthly things he conquers all such temptations. 
 
 Steeped in a sort of ecstatic meditation he remains 
 seated under a tree a whole night, when at last he 
 reaches the goal of absolute intelligence: he recognizes 
 clearly that misery is a necessary attribute of sentient 
 existence, that the accumulation of misery is caused by 
 the passions, that the extinction of passion is possible 
 through fixed meditation, and finally that the path 
 to this extreme meditation results in the absorption 
 of existence which would be a state of unlimited 
 
10 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 happiness. With the attaining of this fourfold truth 
 he has freed himself from the bondage of sense, per- 
 ception and self, he has broken with the material 
 world, he lives in eternity; in one word: he has 
 become a Buddha. 
 
 Forthwith he leaves the wilderness, when some 
 “wise men from the East” appear and make him 
 some offerings. He collects some disciples and begins 
 — what must have been a perfectly novel thing in 
 1) is time — a course of public open-air preaching. He 
 wanders about from place to place, preaches in season 
 and out of season, proclaiming everywhere that all 
 earthly things are vanity and vexation of spirit. 
 
 By the irresistible force of his soul-stirring 
 eloquence he gradually founds a new sect, a new 
 religion. For everywhere crowds of fanatic followers 
 gather round him, men of all ranks and all classes; 
 all take the vow of perpetual chastity and voluntary 
 poverty; all follow him about, clad in rags, begging 
 and preaching. 
 
 Women also flock to him, but for a long time 
 he refuses to admit them to the vows, for he is no 
 advocate of women’s rights and laid down the doctrine, 
 which has ever since been retained by Buddhism, 
 that a woman’s highest aspiration should be to be 
 reborn as a man. One of his favourite disciples, 
 who is to the present day adored as the principal 
 patron of female devotees, persuaded him however, 
 to found an order of sisters of charity, thus giving 
 women at least a chance of salvation. In this way 
 the foundation was laid for an ecclesiastical organiza- 
 tion, built up on the idea, that man and woman must, 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN IIISTORY. 
 
 11 
 
 in order to be saved, become first priests and nuns. 
 Extra ecclesiam nulla sal us. 
 
 Buddha is said to have wandered through the 
 length and breadth of India and through Cevlon, 
 preaching everywhere the doctrine of universal misery 
 and employing the terrors of transmigration and hell, 
 to induce rich and poor to lay aside all other pursuits, 
 and to devote themselves exclusively to the salvation 
 of their souls, to religious meditation, to enter the 
 church, to become priests and nuns. 
 
 To give weight to his authority he also worked • 
 miracles. But his miracles (as afterwards those of his 
 disciples) were more like tricks of jugglery. He did 
 not heal the sick, he did not recal the dead to life, 
 but he showed himself suddenly sitting cross-legged 
 in mid-air, divided his body into many portions, each 
 shedding forth luminous rays, or he transported him- 
 self through the air hither and thither, to show that 
 purely spiritual meditation can break through all the 
 chains of material laws, that the spirit is independent 
 of matter. 
 
 On the other hand, he, the son of a king, as- 
 sociated daily with the lowest and the outcast, went 
 about in rags, begging his food from door to door 
 and proclaiming everywhere in the face of that power- 
 ful caste-spirit of India that his religion was a religion 
 of mercy for all. As a teacher he displayed great 
 liberality and tolerance, adopting for instance all 
 those deities which were decidedly popular, though 
 he inded assigned them a signally inferior position in 
 his system, for the holy man, he used to say, is above 
 the gods. 
 
12 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 Those Brahmanic and Shivaitic sects however, 
 which were plainly immoral, he attacked and fought 
 against with all weapons at his command, conquering 
 generally more through superiority of magic power, 
 than through logical argumentations. 
 
 He remodelled almost every Brahmanic dogma, 
 so far as it was necessary, in order to destroy its 
 pantheistic aharacter, for which he substituted his 
 down-right atheism. But it is significant that he 
 placed every Brahmanic doctrine into a new light by 
 the preponderance of ethical treatment, which char- 
 acterized his teaching to the almost total exclusion 
 of pure metaphysics. 
 
 In this way he laboured for a series of years. 
 But not satisfied with spreading his religion on earth 
 he is also said to have ascended up into the heavens 
 and to have gone down to hell, to preach every- 
 where the way of salvation. 
 
 Towards the end of his life he is said to have 
 been glorified, or, as the Buddhist tradition literally 
 calls it, baptized with fire. He was on a mountain 
 in Ceylon, discoursing on religious subjects, when 
 suddenly a flame of light descended upon him, 
 and encircled the crown of his head with a halo of 
 light. 
 
 When lie felt his end drawing near, he turned 
 his way to Kushinagara, N.W. of Patna. Heaven and 
 earth began to tremble and loud voices were heard, 
 all living beings groaning together and bewailing his 
 departure. On passing through Kushinagara a poor 
 workman offered him his last meal, and though he 
 11 ad just refused the offerings of the highest and 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 
 
 13 
 
 richest, he accepted this offer, to show his humility, 
 as he said, “for the sake of humanity.” Immediately 
 afterwards he said to his disciples “stand up, let us 
 go, my time is come.” He went out to a spot, 
 where eight trees in groups of two were planted 
 together. Resting on his right side he gave his final 
 instructions to his disciples, reminded them of the 
 immortality of the spiritual body and then gave himself 
 up to contemplation. 
 
 Passing through the various degrees of medita- 
 tion which correspond to the various tiers of heaven, 
 he lost himself into Nirvana and thus his earthly 
 career was ended. His disciples put his remains into 
 a golden coffin which immediately grew so heavy, 
 that no power could move it. But suddenly his long 
 deceased mother Maya appeared from above, bewail- • 
 ing her son, when the coffin lifted itself up, the lid 
 sprang open, and Shakyamuni appeared with folded 
 hands, saluting his mother. 
 
 Afterwards, when his disciples wanted to perform 
 the ceremony of cremation, they discovered that his 
 body was incombustible by ordinary fire, but suddenly 
 a jet of flame burst out of the mystic character in- 
 scribed on Buddha’s breast and reduced his body to 
 ashes. The latter were eagerly collected and received 
 thenceforth almost divine worship, being carried to 
 all Buddhist countries, and for safe keeping deposited 
 in pagodas expressly built for this purpose. 
 
 Attentive readers will have noticed in this rough 
 sketch of Buddha’s life many details coinciding with 
 incidents of the life of our Saviour as reported by the 
 gospels. 
 
14 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 Shakyamuni Buddha — we are told — came from 
 heaven, was born of a virgin, welcomed by angels, 
 received by an old saint who was endowed with 
 prophetic vision, presented in a temple, baptized with 
 water and afterwards baptized with tire, he astonished 
 the most learned doctors “by his understanding and 
 answers,” he was led by the spirit into the wilder- 
 ness, and having been tempted by the devil, he went 
 about preaching and doing wonders. The friend of 
 publicans and sinners, he is transfigured on a mount, 
 descends to hell, ascends up to heaven, — in short, 
 with the single exception of Christ’s crucifixion, almost 
 every characteristic incident in Christ’s life is also to 
 be found narrated in the Buddhistic traditions of the 
 life of Shakyamuni Gautama Buddha. 
 
 And yet, this Buddha lived and died 543 years 
 before Christ! Are we to conclude then, that Christ 
 — as a certain sceptic would make us believe — went to 
 India, during the 18 years which intervened between 
 his youth and manhood, and returned, 30 years old, 
 to ape and reproduce the life and doings ot Shakya- 
 muni Buddha? Or are we, who believe in Christ’s 
 originality, driven to the miserable subterfuge of as- 
 suming — as some Jesuit fathers do — that the devil, 
 foreknowing the several details of the promised 
 Messiah’s life, anticipated him and all the details of his 
 life by his own caricature in Shakyamuni Buddha? 
 
 Unfortunately for the sceptic who would delight 
 in proving Christ to have been the ape of Buddha, it 
 can be proved, that almost every single tint of this 
 Christian colouring, which Buddhist tradition gives 
 to the life of Buddha, is of comparatively modern 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 
 
 15 
 
 origin. There is not a single Buddhist manuscript in 
 existence which could vie, in antiquity and undoubted 
 authenticity, with the oldest codices of the gospels. 
 Besides, the most ancient Buddhistic classics contain 
 scarcely any details of Buddha’s life, and none what- 
 ever of those above mentioned peculiarly Christian 
 characteristics. Nearly all the above given legends,* 
 which claim to refer to events that happened many 
 centuries before Christ, cannot be proved to have been 
 in circulation earlier than the fifth or sixth centuries 
 after Christ. Moreover I shall presently have an 
 opportunity to point out the precise source from which 
 those apparently Christian elements flowed into and 
 mingled with Buddhistic traditions concerning the life 
 of Buddha. 
 
 I have entered thus fully into the detailed history 
 of the founder of Buddhism, because it is, in my 
 opinion, an indispensable key to the understanding 
 of Buddhism as a whole, for every single Buddhist 
 dogma is believed to have been evolved from the 
 intuitive consciousness or inward experience of this one 
 man. To the present day, any dogma, even of the latest 
 growth, will be received by the most orthodox Bud- 
 dhist, if it can be made to fit into the inner history of 
 the great Shakyamuni Buddha, as reported by tradition. 
 
 After his death a general assembly of the faithful 
 was called, and the legends assert that then and there 
 the sayings and teachings of Buddha were collected, 
 sifted and fixed in a triple canon, by the three 
 principal disciples of Shakj^amuni. But for centuries 
 after, we have no proof whatever of the existence of 
 a written canon. 
 
16 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 On the contrary, the doctrines of Buddha appear 
 to have been handed down from generation to gen- 
 eration orally. One of Buddha’s disciples distinguished 
 himself above his fellows and was soon looked upon 
 as the successor of Shakyamuni. He appointed his 
 successor, handing over to him his almsbowl and his 
 mantle, together with some pithy sayings, embodying 
 the essence and substance of Buddhist doctrine. This 
 one again appointed his successor in the same way, 
 and thus we have a series of patriarchs, as they 
 were called, who in turn were looked upon each as 
 the temporary head of the church of his time, and 
 who transmitted from generation to generation the 
 reputed teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha. 
 
 Of course the Buddhist dogma underwent con- 
 siderable alterations in thus passing from mouth to 
 mouth. Naturally also heresies sprang up here and 
 there, for the putting down of which again and 
 again oecumenic councils were held, to re-establish 
 the orthodox doctrines in opposition to heretical 
 adulterations. 
 
 About the beginning of the Christian era many 
 books also seem to have been in circulation, claiming 
 to be authentic expositions of the orthodox faith. 
 A number of them would appear to have received 
 public approval at the oecumenic council, held in 
 Cashmere under Kanichka, who reigned from 15 B.C. 
 to 45 A. I)., and to have been gathered in three 
 divisions to form the standard canon of the Buddhist 
 Church. 
 
 But no reliable information exists as to the 
 extent and character of the Buddhist scriptures said 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 
 
 17 
 
 to have been finally revised by that council. The 
 very earliest compilation of the modern Buddhist 
 canon, that history can point out, is that of Ceylon. 
 But the canon of Ceylon was handed down orally 
 from generation to generation. Part of it was reduced 
 to writing about 93 B.C. [under the reign of Wat- 
 tagamini, 104-76 B.C.]. The whole canon, however, 
 was first compiled and fixed in writing between the 
 years 412 and 432 of our present Christian era. 
 
 Burmese and Siamese Buddhists received their 
 sacred scriptures from Ceylon. But the canon of 
 Northern Buddhists, that is to say that of Cashmere, 
 Nepaul, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Corea and Japan, 
 this Northern canon, which claims to have been 
 formed earlier, by the above-mentioned fourth council, 
 coincides with the Buddhist scriptures of Ceylon, 
 though the Northern Buddhists have apparently en- 
 larged the original canon to a great extent. 
 
 So much about the bible of the Buddhist Church. 
 As to this church itself, it was left at the death 
 of Shakyamuni Buddha with the mere rudiments of 
 an ecclesiastical organization. But his followers ent- 
 husiastically and consistently went on completing 
 the edifice. They continued to preach and to teach 
 much in the same way as Shakyamuni himself had 
 done. 
 
 Soon, however, they found it necessary to mod- 
 erate their demands. It was for instance practically 
 impossible that every one should become a priest. 
 Thus lay-brethren and lay-sisters were admitted into 
 the church with a relaxation of the vows. Then in 
 the various monasteries and nunneries, which sprang 
 
18 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 up everywhere, discipline had to be maintained, dif- 
 ferent occupations and different age produced a differ- 
 ence of rank, and thus slowly but steadily a complete 
 machinery of ecclesiastical and monastic organization 
 was formed, with an elaborate code-book of discipline 
 and ceremonial. 
 
 Whilst the Buddhist church was thus internally 
 occupied, consolidating itself and gaining in stability 
 and strength, it could not be expected to spread to 
 any great distance, especially as India was then 
 politically divided into innumerable petty kingdoms, 
 in most of which the Brahmans exercised paramount 
 influence. 
 
 * Consequently we find, that during the first two 
 centuries after the death of Buddha, from 543 to 
 325 B.C., the influence of the new religion was 
 confined to the countries bordering on the Canges 
 and had scarcely reached the Punjab. 
 
 At the end of this period Alexander the Great 
 invaded India. But strange to say, of this glorious 
 campaign of the Greek armies, which for the first 
 time brought India into close contact with Hellenic 
 civilisation and culture, no traces remain, except on 
 the part of India a few coins and inscriptions, and 
 on the part of the Greeks a few mysterious legends, 
 as for instance that of the Indian Hercules and a 
 few scanty notes as to the existence of Buddhists in 
 India. 
 
 But out of the political anarchy into which the 
 whole conglomeration of Indian Kingdoms was thrown 
 by the invasion of Alexander, arose an empire which 
 soon swallowed up all the others. 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 19 
 
 It was founded by an adventurer of low birth 
 called Tchandragupta by the Buddhists, and Sandra-* 
 eottos by the Greek historians. Despised on account 
 of his low birth by the Brahmans, he hated them 
 in return and began to patronize the rising Buddhist 
 church. His grandson Ashbka, whose cognomen 
 Piyadasi has been handed down to the present day 
 by innumerable stone inscriptions scattered all over 
 India, united nearly the whole of India under his 
 sceptre. Embracing the Buddhist faith, in which he 
 saw the safeguard of his dynasty, he strengthened 
 and extended the Buddhist church with all the means 
 at his command, and became the Constantine of 
 Indian Buddhism. 
 
 Ashoka formally acknowledged to hold his power * 
 and possessions only as a fief from the church, he 
 convoked an oecumenic council for the establishing 
 of orthodox teaching, tightened the reigns of church 
 discipline by the introduction of quinquennial as- 
 semblies to be held in each diocese, erected pagodas 
 and endowed monasteries with great profusion in all 
 parts of India. 
 
 But the greatest work he did was the establi- 
 shing of a board for foreign Missions (Dharma- • 
 Mahamatra), which sent forth to all surrounding 
 countries enthusiastic preachers who went out in 
 self-chosen poverty, clad in rags, with the almsbowl 
 in their hands, but supported by the whole weight 
 of Ashoka’s political and diplomatic influence. His 
 own son Mahendra went out as a missionary to 
 Ceylon, and the whole island forthwith embraced 
 the faith of Buddha. 
 
20 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 At the same time Cabulistan, Gandhara, Cashmere 
 and Nepaul were brought under the influence of 
 Buddhism, and thenceforth every caravan of traders, 
 that left India for Central Asia, was accompanied by 
 Buddhist missionaries. 
 
 In this way it happened, that as early as 250 
 B.C. a number of 18 Buddhistic emissaries reached 
 China, where they are held in remembrance to the 
 present day, their images occupying a conspicuous 
 place in every larger temple. 
 
 So then we observe with regard to these earliest 
 Buddhist missionaries three things which may perhaps 
 contain a hint fo the solution of the modern question 
 of missionary difficulties in China. These Buddhist 
 missionaries went out, in the first instance, with 
 even greater self-abnegation than Roman Catholic 
 priests, as mendicant monks; secondly, they followed 
 in the wake of trade; and thirdly, they were backed 
 by the “inevitable gunboat” of imperial influence 
 and diplomacy. 
 
 But soon after • Ash oka’s death his empire fell 
 to pieces, the Brahmans lifted their heads up again, 
 and a reaction took place which resulted in a severe 
 persecution of all Buddhists then living in India. 
 
 In the course of this dark period, which reach- 
 ed its height under Pushpamitra in 178 B.C., most 
 of the monasteries and pagodas were laid in ashes, 
 nearly all the sacred books were destroyed, and the 
 whole Buddhist church in India received a shock 
 from which it never afterwards recovered. But this 
 very persecution gave a renewed impetus to the 
 foreign missions of the Buddhists, who now pushed 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 21 
 
 their way through the whole of Central Asia and 
 gained a lasting foothold among the various Tartar 
 tribes which were just then in great commotion. 
 
 A branch of the great tribe of the Huns, pushed 
 to the West by the advances of the Chinese in - 
 Central Asia, fell over the Greek provinces West of 
 the Hindukush, overran Trans-oxania, destroyed the 
 Bactrian kingdom and finally conquered the Punjab, 
 Cashmere and the greater part of India. 
 
 Their greatest king Ivanishka, a contemporary * 
 of Christ, patronized Buddhism as liberally as Ashoka 
 had done. During his reign the last oecumenical 
 council, which revised the canon, was held in Cash- 
 mere, but it was not recognized by the Buddhist 
 church of Ceylon, and thus a split took place, cor- 
 responding to the division of the Roman and Greek 
 churches in the ecclesiastical history of the West. 
 
 . The Buddhist church of Ceylon, with its depend- 
 encies in Burmah and Siam, maintained with great 
 tenacity the original teaching of early Buddhism in 
 comparative purity, whilst the Northern Buddhists, 
 that is to say those of Northern India, Cashmere, 
 Nepaul and afterwards those of China, Tibet and 
 Mongolia, went on constantly adding to and expand- 
 ing the common stock of doctrines and traditions, 
 and entering into compromises with any form of 
 popular superstition they found too deep-rooted and 
 too popular to overcome. 
 
 About this time it was that Buddhism was 
 officially recognized in China. I have remarked 
 above, that as early as 250 B.C. Buddhist missionaries * 
 peregrinated through China. They found there a 
 
22 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 popular religion, the chief characteristics of which 
 were serpent and tree-worship, the grand moral 
 system of Confucianism and the system of Tauism, 
 which had already descended from its sublime height 
 of philosophic mysticism to an alliance with popular 
 forms of superstition, sorcery and witchcraft. The 
 Buddhists at once arrayed themselves on the side of 
 popular superstition and Tauism, in opposition to 
 Confucianism. But for fully 300 years, from 250 
 B.C. to 62 A.D. the labours of Buddhists in China 
 met with little success; in fact, statistic enquirers 
 into the missionary problem would have called it a 
 decided failure. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, Chinese armies had been 
 fighting a series of campaigns in Central Asia and 
 had repeatedly come into contact with Buddhism 
 established there. Repeatedly it happened that Chi- 
 nese generals, engaged in that war, had occasion to 
 refer in their reports to the throne to the influence 
 of Buddhism, and in the second year before Christ 
 an ambassador of the Tochari Tartars (probably sent 
 by Kanishka) presented the emperor of China with 
 a number of the sacred books of Buddhism. 
 
 More than a hundred years before that time, in 
 the year 121 B.C., a gigantic golden statue of 
 Buddha forming part of the spoils of those campaigns 
 had been brought to the Chinese court. 
 
 If we keep these facts in mind, there is no 
 apparent reason why we should discredit the story 
 of the famous dream of the Emperor Ming-ti. It is 
 V reported in Chinese history, that in the year 61 A.D. 
 the Emperor Ming-ti saw in a vision of the night 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 23 
 
 an image of gigantic dimensions, resplendent as gold, 
 its head surrounded by a halo as bright as the sun, 
 approach his palace and enter it. At a loss how to 
 explain this dream, the Emperor appealed to his 
 younger brother, the prince of Thsu, who had been 
 known for years as the most zealous protector of the 
 Tauists and who probably favoured Buddhism too. 
 At any rate, this prince at once suggested, that the 
 golden image which the Emperor saw referred to the 
 statue of Buddha, and that it seemed to be Heaven’s 
 command, that Buddhism should be introduced at 
 court and adopted by the Imperial Government. 
 
 Thereupon the Emperor despatched an embassy, 
 which passed through Central Asia, to Cashmere 
 and India, and returned in 75 A.D. accompanied by 
 a Hindoo priest, with a statue of Buddha, carved in 
 sandalwood, and one sacred book. The latter was 
 forthwith translated and published by Imperial auth- 
 ority, and therewith Buddhism was firmly established 
 in China, 
 
 Soon other Hindoos arrived in China with more 
 books, which were likewise translated by order of 
 succeeding Emperors. In fact, Chinese Buddhists 
 appear to have been most anxious to obtain and 
 translate as many Buddhist manuscripts as they could 
 lay hold of. Several Chinese Emperors interested 
 themselves in this work. And yet, more than 300 
 years after Ming-ti had sent his embassy to India to 
 collect the sacred books of Buddhism, the emperor 
 Yau-Ling in 397-415 A.D. had to send an expedition 
 to Central Asia, to obtain more books, and about 
 the same time the famous traveller Fahien started 
 
24 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 for India on account of the absence of books treating 
 on ecclesiastical discipline. Again in 518 A.D. the 
 Queen of the Wei country sent ambassadors to India 
 for Buddhistic books, and in 629 the celebrated Hiuen- 
 tsang set out on his travels through Central Asia and 
 India, with the same object in view. 
 
 In 860 A.D. the Emperor I-tsung of the Tang 
 dynasty applied himself to the study of Sanskrit and 
 gave a new impetus to the collection of Buddhistic 
 literature, which was now only approaching comple- 
 tion. The Emperor Jin-tsung opened a college for 
 Sanskrit studies in 1035 A.D. and appointed fifty 
 youths to study that language. 
 
 And yet, in spite of all these strenuous efforts, 
 continued for more than a thousand years, it was not 
 l until the year 1410 A.D. that the Chinese procured 
 a complete edition of the Buddhist canon, and the 
 modern edition of it, known as the Northern col- 
 lection, is of still later date, having been completed 
 between the years 1573-1619 A.D. 
 
 What becomes then of the assertion that the 
 Buddhist canon was closed at the time of the fourth 
 oecumenic council under Kanislika? Ivanishka died 
 in 45 A.D. Scarcely 25 years afterwards Ming-ti’s 
 embassy arrived in the very place, where that 
 council had been assembled, and having searched all 
 through India for Buddhistic books returned to China 
 with a tiny little volume. 
 
 It is clear therefore that history bears me out 
 in what I said above that the earliest edition of the 
 Buddhist scriptures is that of Ceylon, which accord- 
 ing to the unanimous testimony of Singhalese Bud- 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 25 
 
 dhists did not exist before the years 410-432 A.D. • 
 Next comes the Chinese canon collected under the 
 Tang dynasty (about 860 A.D.) and completed in 
 1410 A.D. 
 
 We see therefore how favourably our Christian 
 Bible compares with the canon of the Buddhists. 
 Our Bible has been assailed by sceptics and infidels, 
 has been historically and critically examined under 
 the microscope of prejudiced antiquarians, and yet 
 the fact remains uncontested that the canon of the 
 Old Testament was completed in Esra’s time about 
 450 B.C. and that no farther additions were made 
 to the canonical books of the New Testament after 
 the close of the second century of our era. Besides, we 
 still possess ancient manuscripts of the New Testa- 
 ment, one of which, the Codex Vaticanus, was written 
 in the course of the fourth century, one hundred 
 years before the first edition of the Buddhist scriptures 
 was undertaken, of which not a single ancient manu- 
 script has withstood the ravages of time, and which 
 has never yet been examined critically by either friend 
 or foe. 
 
 But to return to our subject, we have seen that 
 Buddhism split about the beginning of the Christian 
 era into two divisions, which are now-a-days known 
 under the names of Southern and Northern Buddhism. 
 
 Southern Buddhism, i.e., the Buddhists of India, 
 Ceylon, Burmah and Siam, soon lost considerable 
 ground. New persecutions broke out again and 
 again at the instigation of the Brahmans, especially 
 in India, where the last remnants of Buddhism were 
 exposed to the most sanguinary persecution in the 
 
26 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 course of the sixtli and seventh centuries. But no 
 detailed records of this struggle remain. Certain 
 however is it that these persecutions, followed up by 
 the invasion of the Mahomedans, put an end to the 
 reign of Buddhism in India, and at the present day 
 there are in India but scanty traces of its former 
 existence, in the shape of ruins, rock temples and 
 the sect of Djains, whose connection with Buddhism 
 is now scarcely recognizable. 
 
 In Ceylon, in Burmah and Siam, Buddhism is 
 still flourishing. Its doctrines are popularly believed 
 in, and practically obeyed, though the priests them- 
 selves are generally despised, unless they are objects 
 of awe on account of supposed magic powers. The 
 temples and monasteries are in possession of large 
 revenues, and yet the sacred buildings are every- 
 where allowed to fall into ruins, scarcely an effort 
 being made to prevent their destruction by the 
 elements of nature. The number of priests now 
 living' in Ceylon does not average more than one in 
 400 of the whole population. This would give for 
 the island about 2,500 priests. The proportion is 
 much less than in Burmah, where again priests are 
 fewer than in Siam, though the temples are more 
 numerous. 
 
 But whilst Southern Buddhism lost the greater 
 part of its ancient territory, Northern Buddhism has 
 since the beginning of our Christian era run a 
 course of almost unchecked conquests. 
 
 It retained its foothold in Cashmere and Ne- 
 paul, and though it lost most of its influence in the 
 Western half of Central Asia, through the influx of 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN niSTORY. 
 
 27 
 
 Mahomedanism, it conquered new territories, vastly 
 superior in extent and importance. 
 
 We have seen how it spread to China, where it 
 was officially adopted in the year G1 A.D., and though * 
 the Confucianists in successive centuries persecuted 
 Buddhism with fire and sword and put forth their best 
 literary efforts to nullify its influence, they not only 
 failed to stop the progress of Buddhism, but got 
 themselves so imbued with Buddhistic ideas, and so 
 impressed with its pretences of magic power, that to 
 the present day the most thorough-paced Confucianist 
 goes without any scruple through Buddhistic cere- 
 monies, on the occasion of weddings or funerals, or in 
 cases of illness, epidemic or drought. It was only the 
 other day, that a Chinese gentleman, a Confucianist 
 to the backbone, expressed in a conversation with me 
 his utmost contempt for Buddhism, but at the same 
 time, when I happened to show him a certain Bud- 
 dhistic Sutra, he acknowledged to have learned it by 
 heart. When I asked him how he came to study a 
 Buddhistic book, he assured me with the greatest 
 seriousness that it was universally known, and proved 
 by his own experience, that the reading of this 
 volume was a never-failing panacea for stomach- 
 ache. 
 
 It is certainly wrong to say, that the Chinese are 
 all Buddhists. The priests are not very numerous 
 in China; they are recruited from the lowest classes, 
 generally the most Avretched specimens of humanity, 
 more devoted to opium smoking than any other 
 class in China. They have no intellectual tastes, 
 they have ages ago ceased to cultivate the study of 
 
28 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 Sanskrit, they know next to nothing about the his- 
 tory of their own religion, living together in idleness 
 and occasionally going out to earn some money by 
 reading litanies for the dead or acting as exorcists 
 and sorcerers or quack doctors. No community of 
 interest, no ties of social life, no object of generous 
 ambition, beyond the satisfying of those wants which 
 bind them to the cloister, diversify the monotonous 
 current of their daily life. 
 
 And yet the whole of the Chinese people is in- 
 fluenced to a certain extent by the doctrines of 
 Buddhism. Tauism is but Buddhism in native dress. 
 The doctrines of transmigration, of hell and a future 
 paradise in heaven, have penetrated far and wide 
 among the mass of the people. 
 
 Where then is the much-talked-of exclusiveness 
 of China? Buddhism is a foreign religion, introduced 
 by foreign priests, of whom there were at the begin- 
 ning of the sixth century upwards of 3,000 living in 
 China. To the present day two-thirds of the whole 
 Chinese Buddhistic literature are translations of fo- 
 reign works. Every popular Buddhist book is full of 
 Sanskrit phrases. The litanies which the priests read, 
 the prayers which the common people recite, are 
 Sanskrit! 
 
 Why then should we despair of bringing the 
 Christian truth home to the hearts of this people? 
 Christianity is more universal in its character and 
 more adapted to the peculiarities of all nations than 
 Buddhism. Christianity can be introduced in China 
 without the study of a language as difficult as 
 Sanskrit. The Chinese Christian Bible, as we already 
 
BUDDHISM, AH EVENT IN HISTORY. 29 
 
 have it, is more intelligible to the common people, 
 than any of the sacred books ol the Buddhists. 
 And truth must prevail in the end. 
 
 Let us remember, also, that it took Buddhism 
 300 years before it obtained official recognition, and 
 many centuries more, before the mass of the people 
 was influenced by it; and who will then speak of 
 the failure of Protestant missions, which during the 
 fii’st 25 years of their operations in China gathered 
 5,000 natives under the banner of the gospel? 
 
 So much about China. From China Buddhism 
 spread to Corea in 372 A.D. and thence to Japan, 
 where it was first introduced in the year 552 A.D. 
 But in both of these countries Buddhism has obtain- 
 ed but partial success, and suffered considerable adul- 
 teration by the influence of native religions. 
 
 The most complete triumph, however, that Bud- 
 dhism ever achieved was accomplished in Tibet. 
 
 Buddhism was first introduced there during the 
 reign of Lha-Lho-Lhori in 407 A.D., but it does not 
 seem to have found many followers at first, and was 
 already losing ground, though a great grandson of 
 that king, called Srong-dsan-Gambo, favoured Bud- 
 dhism and introduced Sanskrit studies and a Sanskrit 
 alphabet in 629 A.D. But towards the end of the 
 seventh century the inroads of the Mahomedans, 
 putting an end to the Buddhist churches of Trans- 
 oxania and Cabulistan, produced a new influx of 
 Buddhist priests into Tibet. 
 
 King This-rong-de-tsan, who reigned 740-786 A.D., 
 was the son of a Chinese princess and had inherit- 
 ed from his mother strong prejudices in favour of 
 
30 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 Buddhism. During his minority the Tibetan nobles 
 did their best to extinguish Buddhism. But the 
 moment This-rong-de-tsan ascended the throne, all 
 was reversed. Buddhism was officially adopted, 
 learned priests were sent for from India, monasteries 
 were built and endowed, and a beginning made with 
 the translation of the Buddhist scriptures into 
 Tibetan. 
 
 His successors also patronized the Buddhists 
 and assisted them in the formation of a complete 
 hierarchy, giving them spiritual jurisdiction, grants 
 of land and various other privileges. This increase 
 in church property and church influence, which of 
 course enraged the nobility and impoverished the 
 lower classes, produced a revolution, and a persecution 
 broke out which endangered the very existence of 
 Buddhism. But their persecutor King Lang-Darma 
 having been assassinated by a priest, the persecution 
 ceased. 
 
 Cautiously but speedily the Buddhists regained 
 their former influence, and were soon stronger than 
 ever, establishing an hereditary priesthood which 
 thenceforth dominated over king and people. 
 
 This however led to general political anarchy, 
 and to maintain his political influence, the spiritual 
 metropolitan of Tibet found himself compelled to ask 
 for the support of the Chinese Government, by means 
 of which he and his successors, the so-called Grand 
 Lamas, succeeded in appropriating to the church the 
 political sovereignty over Tibet. High favour was 
 manifested towards this influential body of ecclesias- 
 tics, who held in their hand the government of 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN niSTORY. 
 
 31 
 
 Tibet, by the Mongol conquerors of China, and by 
 means of their support it came to pass, that the heirs 
 of the throne of Gengis Khan succeeded in reducing 
 that kingdom to a feudal dependency of their own. 
 
 As to the inner history of the Tibetan church, 
 Buddhism had there from the first entered into an 
 alliance with the native religion, a form of Sham- 
 an ism. Moreover, Buddhism was introduced into 
 Tibet from Caferistan and Cashmere, where Shivaism 
 and Brahmanism had been for a loim time saturating 
 Buddhism to the almost total oblivion of many of 
 its original characteristics. 
 
 Thus it happened, that Buddhism reached Tibet 
 in an adulterated form, and entering there into an 
 amalgamation with Shamanism and especially with the 
 necromantic superstitions which were indigenous in 
 Tibet, departed still farther from the original form of 
 Indian Buddhism. But when the study of Sanskrit 
 was introduced in Tibet, and the canon collected and 
 translated, a party arose which demanded a reform. 
 
 For a long time it struggled in vain. Meanwhile 
 Nestorian missionaries had reached Central Asia, and 
 some of that sect of reformers became acquainted with 
 the story of Christ’s life and the ceremonial of the 
 Catholic church. True to the eclectic instinct of Bud- 
 dhism they adopted many Christian ideas, traditions 
 and ceremonies, and when their party afterwards ob- 
 tained the mastery in Tibet, they reorganized the Tibet- 
 an church, amalgamating with it as many Christian 
 forms as were compatible with Buddhistic orthodoxy. 
 
 Here we have then the explanation of the above- 
 mentioned coincidences in the traditions concerning 
 
 D 
 
32 
 
 LECTURE THE FIRST. 
 
 the life of Buddha with the gospel narratives of 
 Christ’s life. And it is not a matter of surprise 
 therefore, if we are told, that the Buddhist church 
 of Tibet has its pope, cardinals, bishops, priests and 
 nuns; that the Buddhists in Tibet have their infant 
 baptism, their confirmation, their mass for the dead, 
 rosaries, chaplets, candles and holy water, their 
 processions, saints’ days, fast days, and so forth. 
 Many of these Christian ceremonies and traditions 
 found their way into the Buddhist Church of China 
 and its literature, though never to the extent practised 
 in Tibet. 
 
 From Tibet Buddhism spread to Mongolia and 
 Manchuria, where it prospered exceedingly. Every 
 third person one meets in Mongolia is a priest, and 
 many of their monasteries are as large as a good- 
 sized town. To the Kalmyks on the Wolga, and the 
 Burjads on the Baikal sea, Buddhism has been carried 
 at a comparatively recent period. 
 
 In conclusion, I will only say, that Buddhism, 
 considered merely as an event in history, seems to 
 me to have been more of a blessing than a curse. 
 
 I sincerely believe, that Buddhism has fulfilled a 
 great mission which it was appointed to fulfil, by 
 the providence of God. Nations, which were living 
 in a state of utter savageness, were brought into a 
 state of semi-civilisation, which is the more apparent, 
 if we consider in what a savage state all those 
 tribes remained which rejected Buddhism. 
 
 What the Mongols were before they became Bud- 
 dhists, is written with blood on the pages of Asiatic 
 history. Those very countries and peoples, which 
 
BUDDHISM, AN EVENT IN HISTORY. 
 
 33 
 
 were shut out from the centres of civilisation by 
 mountains and deserts, were visited and brought 
 under the influence of morality by those indefatigable 
 Buddhist zealots, for whom no mountain was too 
 high, no desert too dreary. In countries like China 
 and Japan, where Buddhism found a sort of civilisa- 
 tion existing, it acted like a dissolving acid, under- 
 mining the existing religious systems, and thus 
 preparing the way for a new religion to enter, — for 
 Christianity, if we had but half the enthusiasm that 
 inspired those disciples of Buddha. 
 
LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 In the preceding lecture on the subject of Bud- 
 dhism I treated this grand system of religion merely 
 as an event in history, and endeavoured to give to 
 my readers an outline of its origin, rise and progress, 
 combined with a brief sketch of its present condition 
 and extent. If I have not altogether failed in my 
 attempt to define the place which Buddhism occupies 
 in the history of the world, and to assist the reader 
 in forming a correct estimate of the manner in which 
 it fulfilled its great mission to one third of the hu- 
 man race, he must have felt with me, that Buddhism 
 is but “a voice that crieth in the wilderness.” 
 
 The religion of Buddhism arose from a natural 
 reaction and protest against the abnormal features, 
 religious and social, of Brahmanism. It was fostered 
 and sustained by the instinctive cry of the better 
 part in human nature for release from the misery 
 and hollowness of this present evil world ; and thus 
 it succeeded in spreading more or less throughout 
 Eastern Asia a lively yearning for an invisible better 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 35 
 
 world, for a paradise of peace and happiness beyond 
 the range of mortal ken. 
 
 But it remains now to show what it was that 
 voice proclaimed, what means it employed to rouse 
 the dormant conscience, what food it offered to 
 hungry and thirsty souls, what discipline it enforced 
 to regulate man’s conduct, what elements of truth 
 it conveyed to the seekers of it. In one word, 
 having viewed Buddhism as an event in history, I 
 now proceed to consider Buddhism as a religious sys- 
 tem, from a doctrinal point of view. 
 
 No religion on earth has ever remained stationary 
 for any length of time. The Christianity of to-day 
 is not and cannot be made to return to what it was 
 eighteen hundred years ago. The Buddhist religion 
 has undergone still more changes in the course of 
 time, through the absence of a written canon at its 
 first starting, through the influence of oral propagation 
 and tradition, through contact with different reli- 
 gions and forms of superstition, and — last but not 
 least — through the reaction of different nationalities 
 which it more or less fully conquered. 
 
 Naturally therefore I feel tempted to again 
 treat our subject historically. I might start with a 
 sketch of the Buddhist dogma in its primitive form, 
 as it first came out of the hands of him who gave 
 to it the characteristics and general shape which 
 no after revolution has been able to efface. It was 
 then a system, diametrically opposed to Brahmanism 
 whence it had arisen, and yet still possessing many 
 marks of resemblance ; a conglomeration of ideas, 
 partly original, partly borrowed from Brahmanism 
 
86 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 and early Shivaism, but now clothed in the new 
 garb of Buddhism, hastily thrown over and as yet 
 as ill fitting as Saul’s armour upon David. 
 
 I might then note the first attempt made to 
 reduce the chaos of new and borrowed ideas into 
 systematic order, the first phase of the development 
 through which the Buddhist dogma passed. It is now 
 known under the name of the Hinayana system, or 
 the school of the small conveyance, a name referring 
 to the various means by which consecutive forms of 
 Buddhism offered to “convey” the believer across 
 the ocean of misery, to the shores of salvation, into 
 the haven of Nirvana. 
 
 This first period in the development of the 
 Buddhist dogma is called the small conveyance, be- 
 cause the forms of doctrine and of worship were 
 limited, plain, and simple then, compared with the 
 elaborate systems of after times. Buddhism was then 
 a system of exclusively moral asceticism, teaching 
 certain commandments, rigorously enforcing an ascetic 
 life of the strictest morality, temperance, and active, 
 self-denying and self-sacrificing charity. 
 
 But soon after the beginning of our Christian 
 era, when Buddhism had overcome its first difficul- 
 ties and had leisure to enjoy the first taste of 
 triumph, having spread from India to Ceylon, and 
 northwards, through the Punjab, into Central Asia 
 and across the Himalaya as far as China, — the 
 energetic, practical asceticism of the Hinayana school 
 was replaced by a new phase of doctrine, called the 
 Mah&yana system, or the school of the great con- 
 veyance. The characteristics of this system arc an 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 37 
 
 excess of transcendental speculation, which soon drifted 
 into listless quietism or abstract nihilism, and sub- 
 stituted fanciful degrees of contemplation and ecstatic 
 meditation for plain practical morality. 
 
 It was the former school, the system of the 
 small conveyance, that produced the men who actu- 
 ally resigned their all, and with irresistible energy and 
 enthusiasm spread Buddhism far and wide all over 
 Eastern Asia — the men, who for their faith in Bud- 
 dha scaled the snowy mountains of the Himalaya 
 and crossed the sandy deserts of Central Asia. But 
 now this Mahayana system — this school of the great 
 conveyance, with its refined philosophy and abstruse 
 metaphysics, with its elaborate ritual and idolatrous 
 symbolism — produced an entirely different type of 
 heroes; men, who would glory in public disputations, 
 who would let the most subtle dialectician come 
 forth and split a hair, — they would split it over and 
 over again; men, who would retire into the stillness 
 of deserts or the solitude of mountain dens, or shut 
 themselves up in the monotony of cloister life, to 
 muse, brood and dream, like Tennyson's lotos-eaters; 
 men, who like the first Chinese patriarch would sit 
 twelve years gazing at a wall without moving, -with- 
 out speaking, without thinking. 
 
 The Hinayana school however remained, though 
 overpowered, yet still exerting some influence, and 
 an attempt was made in the so-called Madhyimayana 
 school, or the system of the medium conveyance, to 
 combine the above mentioned two schools, to find 
 the golden mean between practical asceticism and 
 quietistic transcendentalism, but — like all compromises 
 
38 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 — it never gained much influence and found but few 
 followers. 
 
 For a new system soon arose, more powerful, 
 more fascinating than any of its predecessors. It is 
 known by the name of the Tantra school. The her- 
 mits of the mountains had become acquainted with 
 the medicinal properties of many herbs and professed 
 to possess the elixir of immortality (which — I suspect 
 — was but opium from India). The monks in the 
 cloisters had become adepts in the black art, and be- 
 came mantists, sorcerers and exorcists, who would 
 banish drought, famine, pestilence, disease and devils 
 by magic incantations. Thus practically useful, and 
 fortified by alliance with the various forms of popu- 
 lar superstition, the Tantra school extracted moreover 
 from the Mah&yana system all that was congenial 
 with its own tendencies, and thus produced a new 
 system of practical philosophic mysticism, sorcery 
 and witchcraft, and overlaid the ritual of the Bud- 
 dhist church with fantastic ceremonies and mystic 
 liturgies. 
 
 It was this school that turned out the priests, 
 who, as rain-makers, geomancers, or astrologers, duped 
 emperors and peoples, and who exercise to the pre- 
 sent day in the whole of Eastern Asia the strongest 
 influence over the lower classes, as sorcerers, exorcists, 
 physicians. They chant the litanies for the dead; 
 they save souls from hell. But while the Tantra 
 school thus gained the day with the multitude, 
 through its practical usefulness and politic accom- 
 modation to the superstitious element in human 
 nature, the Mahay ana school continued to exert a 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYTTEM . 39 
 
 powerful influence in the province of literature, 
 among the educated and the learned, and produced 
 many different schools of philosophy, of which not 
 less than eighteen are known by name. 
 
 Moreover the ancient Hinayana school also re- 
 tained its foothold to some extent, or was revived 
 here and there, in different countries by certain sects. 
 In fact, every one of the above-mentioned forms of 
 development, through which the Buddhist dogma 
 passed in the course of centuries, has left its deposit 
 behind, in the form of sects, or schools, or parties, 
 still existing in modern Buddhism. But these are 
 not separated by prominent landmarks from each 
 other, they run into and intermingle with each 
 other, more or less, in almost every country. 
 
 Now under these circumstances it seems to me, 
 that, at least for a popular lecture like this, an his- 
 torical synthetic treatment of the rise, progress, and 
 development of the Buddhist dogma would become 
 an exceedingly complicated task, necessitating many 
 reiterations, multifarious distinctions and limitations. 
 And after all, if treated with the necessary minute- 
 ness and detailed accuracy, it would fail to produce a 
 complete and at the same time intelligible picture. 
 It would be more like a drama, not wanting indeed 
 in progress of action, rich in striking incidents, dif- 
 ference of characters and varied beauty of pageantry, 
 but too complicated to be perspicuous and too full 
 of promiscuous details to bring home to the spectator 
 the hidden unity of the whole. 
 
 I prefer therefore to adopt a different course. 
 Instead of building up before the eyes of my readers 
 
40 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 the whole edifice of Buddhistic doctrines from the 
 very foundations, instead of showing to them how 
 one stone was laid upon the other, how one tier was 
 raised upon the other, how one gallery intercom- 
 municates with or crosses the other, I will give but 
 a general sketch of the completed structure, a bird's- 
 eye view of the whole. 
 
 For vast, intricate, and puzzling as the system 
 of Buddhism appears to any one that enters its sacred 
 halls, wanders from shrine to shrine, through its tem- 
 ples and cloisters, gazes at its pagodas and images, 
 or searches through its libraries, rich in ancient and 
 modern lore, — the whole labyrinth becomes plain and 
 intelligible, when looked at from a distance, when one 
 sees the very ground plan on which it has been con- 
 structed, when no bewildering details obstruct the view 
 of the grand, simple and natural outlines of the whole. 
 
 For one plan, clear and distinct, underlies the 
 whole network of Buddhistic doctrines. One conti- 
 nuous thread runs straight through the whole tangled 
 woof of seeming dogmatic confusion. In spite of the 
 changes which time, difference of nationalities, dif- 
 ferent schools and inodes of thinking have wrought, 
 there is still discernible a group of fundamental 
 doctrines which remained through all ages, in all 
 countries, the common property of all Buddhists. 
 And these very doctrines will be found to contain 
 the essence and substance of the whole system. 
 
 I propose therefore to treat my subject analyti- 
 cally. I will first of all take hold of those general 
 characteristics, arrange them systematically, and ex- 
 amine them more or less minutely. Then I may go 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 41 
 
 on to the disputed points, to the points of difference, 
 and see how Buddhism varies in different countries. 
 This latter subject will however be reserved for the 
 third lecture. 
 
 But one remark more is necessary, before I can 
 begin with this task. The materials for a systematic 
 exposition of the Buddhist dogma, in an intelligible 
 and scientific form, are not ready to hand, and especi- 
 ally do not easily fit into our way of expressing 
 thoughts and connecting ideas. 
 
 Again, there is nowhere in Buddhistic literature 
 a Huttenis redivivus , a short but complete compen- 
 dium of the whole range of dogmas; there is no 
 catechism that would give you the whole system in 
 a condensed, popular and intelligible form. One has 
 to search through all the mines of Buddhistic litera- 
 ture, hunt up a stone here and there, quarry it, 
 dress it, before you can handle it with the finer 
 tools of European logic and fit it into the systematic 
 classifications of Western thought. 
 
 Asiatic diction loves to clothe naked truths in 
 the gaudy glittering apparel of symbolic, typical and 
 allegorical language. As Asiatic architecture is cha- 
 racterized by richness of decoration, thus the grand 
 structure of Buddhist doginatology is so encumbered 
 and overlaid with fantastic ornament, most of its 
 truths so disguised in the form of myths, fables, 
 parables or smybols, that many mistake the outer 
 form for the substance, the shell for the kernel, and 
 the result is, that a very master thought of vast 
 speculative depth becomes ridiculous nonsense in the 
 hand of a superficial expositor. 
 
42 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 I will give but one example. It is said, for in- 
 stance, in all Buddhistic works treating on cosmogony, 
 that every universe comes into existence in the fol- 
 lowing manner: out of the chaos of waters rises a 
 lotos flower, out of this flower rises the universe 
 unfolding successively its various spheres, heavenly 
 and terrestrial. Now, this same idea one may see 
 repeated in popular Buddhistic literature, illustrated 
 by wood-cuts which represent the chaos of water, with 
 a thousand flowers floating on it, each lotos flower 
 supporting a whole universe. And European exposi- 
 tors of Buddhism, repeating this gross representation 
 of a speculative truth, treat it as a piece of absurdity, 
 fancying that it is the belief of Buddhists that every 
 universe sprouts out of an actual lotos flower of 
 gigantic dimensions ! But in reality the whole is a 
 mere simile, and the idea conveyed in this flowery 
 language of Buddhism is of highly poetic and truly 
 speculative import, amounting to this : that, as a 
 lotos floAver, groAving out of a hidden germ beneath 
 the Avater, rises up, sloAAdy, mysteriously, until it sud- 
 denly appears aboA^e the surface and unfolds its bud, 
 leaves and pistils, in marvellous richness of colour 
 and chastest beauty of form; thus also, in the system 
 of Avorlds, each single uniA r erse rises into being, groAV- 
 ing up out of a germ, the first origin of Avhich is 
 veiled in mystery, and finally emerges out of the 
 chaos, gradually unfolding itself, one kingdom of na- 
 ture succeeding the other, all forming one compact 
 whole, pervaded by one breath, but varied in beauty 
 and form. Truly an idea, so far removed from 
 nonsense, that it might be taken for an utterance of 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 43 
 
 Darwin himself. It reminds one, in fact, ol that un- 
 pretending little poem ol Tennyson’s : 
 
 Flower in the crannied wall, 
 
 I pluck you out of the craunies; — 
 
 Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 
 Little flower — but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 
 I should know what God and man is. 
 
 In the same way many other doctrines of Buddhism, 
 handed down from antiquity in language borrowed 
 from types in vegetable or animal life, in allegories 
 or by the use of symbols and mystic emblems, have 
 been misunderstood and superciliously classed among 
 antiquated notions and infantile babblings. 
 
 But considering that Buddhism was started when 
 humanity was in its infancy, and that Buddhism 
 addressed itself to the primary work of educating 
 savage tribes, it was not only natural, but education- 
 ally wise, when it chose a crude, imperfect, infantile 
 mode of expressing its thoughts, when it spoke to 
 those rude tribes of Asia, children as they were, in 
 the language of children. 
 
 I do not deny that, in many cases, and especial- 
 ly in all references to cosmology, astronomy, geogra- 
 phy, and all other branches of natural science, it 
 is not only the form of expression, but the ideas 
 themselves, which are childish. The Buddhist scrip-' 
 tures have not observed the wise reticence with 
 regard to natural science by which our Christian 
 Bible is marked. They abound therefore with state- 
 ments of extreme absurdity. They tell us, for instance, 
 with the utmost gravity and with the authority of 
 inspiration, that in the centre of every universe there 
 
44 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 is a high mountain, the lofty peak of which supports 
 the heavenly mansions, whilst at the roots of this 
 same mountain, far beneath the earth, there are grou- 
 ped the innumerable chambers of hell; they tell us 
 that in the centre of the Himalaya mountains there 
 is one large sea, from which all the large rivers of 
 the world take their origin, the Hoangho, the Ganges, 
 the Indus and the Oxus; they inform us that the 
 sea water contains salt, because the dragon-god of 
 the Ocean, whenever one of his temporary fits of 
 rage comes over him, throws up with his gigantic 
 tail volumes of water which inundate even the hea- 
 venly mansions above, and it is this water, which 
 flowing back carries with it all the filth accumulated 
 in the drains and sewers of heaven, and thus, we 
 are told, the sea water gets its nasty taste. 
 
 I allude to these things, because I believe it 
 would be unjust to pick out all the queer and child- 
 ish sayings with which the Buddhist scriptures and 
 especially popular Buddhistic books abound, and lead 
 people to imagine that Buddhism is little better than 
 a string of nonsense. 
 
 The Buddhists never cared to preserve their sa- 
 cred scriptures in their original integrity. Unlike 
 our bible, the Buddhist canon iras undergone whole- 
 sale textual alterations; it has been edited and re- 
 edited a great many times, and every editor introduced 
 into the text the favourite ideas of his time and his 
 school. . 
 
 As to the popular literature of Buddhism and 
 its absurdities, we might as well collect those little 
 pamphlets on dreams, on sorcery, on lucky and un- 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 45 
 
 lucky clays, on the lives and miracles of saints, which 
 circulate among Roman Catholic peasants, — but would 
 that give us a true picture of Roman Catholicism? 
 Thus it is with Buddhism. 
 
 Those crude, childish and absurd notions concern- 
 ing the universe and physical science do not constitute 
 Buddhism. This great religion, imperfect and false as 
 it is to a great extent, does not stand or fall with such 
 absurdities. They are merely accidental, unimportant 
 outworks, which may fall by the advance of know- 
 ledge, which may be rased to the ground by the 
 progress of civilisation, and yet the Buddhist fortress 
 may remain as strong, as impregnable, as before. 
 A Buddhist may adopt all the results of modern 
 science, he may become a follower of Newton, a dis- 
 ciple of Darwin, and yet remain a Buddhist. 
 
 The strong point of Buddhism lies in its mora-^ 
 lity, and this morality is equal to the non-christian 
 morality of our civilised world. It is not civilisation 
 therefore, but Christianity alone, that has a chance 
 against Buddhism, because Christianity alone teaches 
 a morality loftier, stronger, holier than that of Bud- 
 dhism, because Christianity alone can touch, can 
 convert the heart, for there — in the heart of the 
 natural man — it is where the roots of Buddhism lie. 
 
 I remarked above, that there is a train of ideas 
 which form the foundation of the whole system of 
 Buddhism and have been retained through all ages 
 and in all countries as the common property of all 
 Buddhists. To place these fundamental doctrines be- 
 fore my readers in a connected systematic form I will 
 begin with the Buddhist views of physical nature. 
 
4G 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 Before Buddhism arose, the thinking minds of 
 India had been taught to look upon the visible uni- 
 verse “as one stupendous whole, whose body nature 
 is and God the soul.” But this God, or Brahma, was 
 viewed only in a pantheistic sense, as an impersonal 
 substance, as the one uncreated, self-existent, immu- 
 table entity, from which the whole universe emanated, 
 which pervades all forms of existence as the principle 
 of life pervades the body, and into which all will 
 ultimately be re-absorbed. 
 
 Buddhism took a different view of the universe. 
 Buddhism knows no creative prime agent, no supra- 
 mundane or ante-mundane principle, no pre-existing 
 spirit, no primitive matter. The very idea of exis- 
 tence has no room in the Buddhist system. For all 
 and everything is in a constant flux, rising into ex- 
 istence, ebbing away again, perpetually changing 
 and reproducing itself in an eternal circle, without 
 beginning, without end. 
 
 But Buddhism does not say that our world is 
 without beginning or without end. For the universe, 
 in which we live, is but one of an endless number 
 of world systems. Every one of these innumerable 
 co-existing worlds has a beginning and comes to an 
 end, but only to be reconstructed again, in order to 
 be destroyed again in endless succession. What is 
 eternal therefore and absolutely without beginning is 
 not any individual world or universe, but the mere 
 law of revolution, the mere idea of constant rotation 
 through formation, destruction and re-construction. 
 
 To the question, how the very first universe was 
 originally brought into existence, and whence that 
 
13UDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 47 
 
 eternal law of ceaseless reproduction came, Buddhism 
 honestly confesses to have no reply. When this very 
 query was put before Buddha, he remained silent, 
 and after some pressure explained, that none but a 
 Buddha might comprehend this problem, that the 
 solution of it was absolutely beyond the understand- 
 ing of a finite mind. 
 
 This acknowledgment of the limits of religious 
 thought, honest and praiseworthy as it is, reveals to 
 us the weakness of this system of Atheism. It ac- 
 knowledged a design in nature, it recognized immu- 
 table laws underlying the endless modifications of 
 organic and inorganic life, and attained, even so long 
 as two thousand years ago, to that grand “Darwinian” 
 idea of a pre-existing spontaneous tendency to varia- 
 tion as the real prime agent of the origin of species, 
 but — like Darwin and his school — it stopped short of 
 pointing out Him, who originated the first commen- 
 cement of that so-called spontaneous tendency, and 
 who laid into nature the law which regulates the 
 whole process of natural selection, God, the creator 
 and sustainer of the universe. 
 
 Regarding the way in which each world system 
 rises into being out of the germ of a previous uni- 
 verse, the Buddhist scriptures speak in a rather 
 obscure phraseology. Out of the chaos, produced by 
 the destruction of a former universe, rises a cloud 
 which sends down fructifying rain. Thereupon num- 
 berless buds of new worlds sprout up like lotos 
 flowers, floating on the water, each world developing 
 first its sublimest heavenly portion and then its 
 terrestrial parts. In the latter also the lower regions 
 
48 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 and forms of existence are developed out of the 
 nobler ones, the lower classes of sentient beings out 
 of the higher ones. The earth itself is formed out 
 of a mould that resembles the honey distilled in the 
 cup of the lotos. The whole surface of the earth is 
 of a golden colour, emitting a delightful fragrance, 
 whilst a liquid is exuded that forms the first ambro- 
 sian food of sentient beings. 
 
 This whole process of formation is supported by • 
 four winds, a moist wind, a dry wind, a strengthen- 
 ing wind, and a beautifying wind ; also by five clouds 
 or atmospheric influences, one that destroys all heat, 
 one that saturates all with moisture, one that dries 
 up all moisture, one that produces the minerals, and 
 one that keeps the different worlds asunder and 
 produces a chasm between heaven and earth. This 
 is called the period (Ivalpa) of formation^ 
 
 Then comes the stationary period, a time of con- 
 tinued -formation, at the opening of which in each 
 world a sun and a moon rise out of the water, where- 
 upon — in consequence of the coarser food of which 
 sentient beings begin to partake — arises the difference 
 of sex, before not existing; soon after, heroes disting- 
 uish themselves above their fellows, and next, with the 
 distinction of the four castes, society is established, and 
 monarchs arise, followed in due course by Buddhas. 
 
 I his period of continued formation is succeeded 
 by a time of gradual destruction through the elements 
 ot water, lire and wind, the work of destruction be- 
 ginning in every universe at the lowest forms and 
 reaching to the highest, leaving however a germ for 
 luture re-construction untouched. 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 49 
 
 The period of destruction is supplemented by a 
 period of continued destruction, working on the same 
 principles and resulting finally in a total chaos, called 
 the period of emptiness, which in turn again is fol* 
 lowed by periods of formation, continued formation, 
 destruction, continued destruction, emptiness and so 
 on in endless succession. 
 
 But in spite of these alternate destructions and 
 renovations of every universe, each successive world 
 is homogeneous in its constituent parts, having the 
 same continents of the same size, the same divisions 
 of mountains, river-systems, nationalities, countries 
 and even cities though under different names. Again, 
 every world in all the infinite systems of the cosmos 
 is floating in empty space, each earth having nothing 
 beneath it but the circumambient air, whilst the in- 
 terior of each earth is incandescent. 
 
 The structure also of each earth is the same in 
 every universe. Four continents lie around a gigantic 
 central mountain, about which sun, moon, planets 
 and stars revolve. But the four continents are se- 
 parated from each other by the sea and from the 
 central mountain (which in fact represents the axis 
 of the world) by seven concentric circles of rocks, 
 each separated from the other by an ocean, an idea 
 suggested probably by the orbit of the seven planets. 
 
 Above that central mountain are ranged the 
 various tiers of heavens, inhabited like our earth by 
 sentient beings, called devas, who take a constant 
 interest in the spread of the Buddhist religion on 
 
 earth. These heavens are however very different 
 
 •/ 
 
 ' from the Christian idea of a heavenly paradise, for 
 
50 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 they represent but different stages of moral and in- 
 tellectual life, and though the inhabitants of these 
 heavens enjoy comparatively greater happiness and 
 length of life than any being on earth, they live in 
 the flesh and are subject to the same evils that flesh 
 is heir to, though in a minor degree, in proportion 
 to their moral and intellectual advancement. 
 
 At the foot of that central mountain are ranged 
 the various tiers of hell, and as the heavens increase 
 in ascending gradation in purity and happiness of 
 life, so these hells increase downwards in horror and 
 duration of torture, the lowest hell being the worst 
 gehenna. Strange to say, though the Buddhists 
 f know a devil, whom they call Mara, and ascribe to 
 him the power of assuming any shape he pleases, 
 especially that of woman, in order to tempt men 
 from the path of virtue, the abode of this Satan is 
 not in hell, he rules in the air like the Christian or 
 rather Anti-Christian “prince of the power of the 
 / air.” The Buddhist hells are ruled by Yama, who 
 himself is suffering torture here, being among the 
 hosts of criminals but primus inter pares. 
 
 Now those heavens above and all the heavenly 
 bodies, the hells below with their innumerable cham- 
 bers, the earth and even the air that surrounds the 
 earth, all these localities are peopled with sentient 
 beings, divided indeed into different classes, but all 
 form one community of living beings, all pervaded 
 by the desire to live, all doomed to die, Neither 
 the pains of hell nor the joys of heaven arc endless. 
 Everywhere there is death. And death is everywhere 
 followed, so long as the desire of existence lias not 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 51 
 
 been overcome, by re-birth either into one of the. 
 hells or heavens, or on earth or in the air, in some 
 form of sentient existence or other, the particular 
 condition of each individual being determined by the 
 accumulated merit or demerit of his or her previous 
 existencej 
 
 There we have the doctrine of transmigration. 
 It is not an invention of Buddhism, though it fits 
 marvellously well into its conception of the universe 
 with its rotation of formation and renovation. Long 
 before Buddha arose, metempsychosis was taught by 
 Brahmanism. In fact, the fountain source of this 
 
 doctrine may be traced back to the oldest code book 
 of Asiatic nations, to the Veda itself, which plainly 
 taught the immortality of the soul and accustomed 
 the Hindoo mind to consider death as but a second 
 birth, thus paving the way for the development 
 which the dogma of metempsychosis soon after re- 
 ceived by succeeding generations. 
 
 It was the system of Brahmanism that first 
 promulgated in India the idea of transmigration. Of 
 Brahma it is said in the Upanishads and in the 
 code of Manu, that the whole universe emanated 
 from it, by evolution, not by creation. But as 
 everything emanates from Brahma, so everything re- 
 turns to it. Brahma is the alpha and omega, it is 
 both the fountain from which the stream of life 
 breaks forth and the ocean into which it hastens to 
 lose itself. 
 
 Thus the human soul emanates from Brahma, 
 descends to a contact with matter, defiles itself and 
 has therefore to pass through all the different grada- 
 
52 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 tions of animate nature, from the lowest form of ex- 
 istence to the highest and noblest, before it is purifi- 
 ed enough to be fit for a final return into the pure 
 shoreless ocean of Brahma. All nature is animate to 
 the Pantheist, and the circle of transmigration is 
 therefore of immense width. The soul may after the 
 dissolution of the body ascend to the moon, to be 
 clothed in a watery form, and returning pass succes- 
 sively through ether, air, vapour, mist and cloud in- 
 to rain, and thus find its way into a vegetating 
 plant and thence through the medium of nourishment 
 into an animal embryo. 
 
 Only those who have succeeded in destroying 
 all selfish thoughts and feelings by means of mental 
 abstraction, the saints only, will rest after death by 
 being freed from all distinctions of form or name; 
 they will be dissolved into Brahma, with which they 
 commingle and in which they lose themselves like a 
 river in the ocean. Those however, who during 
 their life-time indulged in selfishness, lust and pas- 
 sions, will be subject to innumerable births accord- 
 ing to their moral condition. Every breathing being 
 will after death be reborn in accordance with the 
 general tendency of its inner life. Those who were 
 moved by noble instincts or motives will be reborn 
 as men of a high caste. To those who were inflamed 
 by low desires and passions a lower caste will be 
 allotted in their next birth, whilst those who degrad- 
 ed their souls by beastly desires will be reborn as 
 beasts, say as rats or pigs or tigers. Their souls 
 may even descend to a still lower circle of transmi- 
 gration and, in the way above mentioned, be finally 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 53 
 
 reborn as plants, whence they will have to work 
 their way up again through the class of beasts and 
 the various classes of human society, until they at 
 last reach the goal of Buddha by continued self- 
 purification. 
 
 Such are the main outlines of this grand popu- 
 lar system. It starts with the idea handed down 
 from primitive antiquity by the Veda, that the soul 
 is indestructible and immortal because it is of divine 
 origin. It proceeds then to work out the general 
 principle, that every soul must be materially what 
 it is spiritually, that is to say, it must be clothed in 
 a body the nature of which corresponds to the in- 
 most bent of the mind ; a beastly man must be 
 reborn a beast, a godly man must be united with 
 God. Dividing the empire of nature according 'to 
 the different castes of Hindoo society, it lays down 
 the rule that the soul as it gradually purifies itself 
 from contact with matter may have to pass through 
 some or all of the different classes of nature until it 
 is finally united with the deity. For only in abso- 
 lute union and absorption in the deity can be found 
 peace, rest and happiness. 
 
 Buddha adopted this pantheistic dogma of me- 
 tempsychosis, though not without remoulding and re- 
 casting it so as to fit into his own atheistic system. 
 
 Buddha first of all stripped this Brahmanic idea 
 of the soul’s transmigration of the metaphysical garb 
 in which his contemporaries had received it through 
 the Vedanta philosophy. In vain we search Bud- 
 dhistic literature for a metaphysical treatment of 
 this deeply interesting problem. In vain we search 
 
54 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 for a distinct notion of the origin of each individual 
 soul, which tho Vedanta philosophy placed in Brah- 
 ma. 
 
 Buddha gave the dogma of the soul’s transmi- 
 gration an exclusively moral basis. In the place of 
 Brahma, the fountain source and goal of Brahmanic 
 metempsychosis, he substituted the idea of Karma, 
 "i.e. merit and demerit. Whilst the- Brahman believed 
 each human soul to originate in and to be part and 
 parcel of Brahma, Buddha taught, that about the 
 primitive origin of each human soul nothing further 
 could be said but this : that each living soul, after 
 the dissolution of its previous embodiment, comes 
 again into being and is endowed with a new body, 
 in accordance with its moral merit or demerit ac- 
 cumulated in a previous form of existence. In other 
 words, each sentient being is the product of its own 
 moral worth, each living soul is born out of the 
 germ of -its moral actions. 
 
 Again, the Brahmans looked upon the stream of 
 transmigration as flowing on by its own innate force, 
 each soul being driven on by its own tendency, 
 gravitating towards its original source, Brahma. Con- 
 sequently transmigration was but a natural process, 
 ruled by the laws of nature. But Buddha remodell- 
 ed this doctrine into a moral process guided by the 
 will and ruled by the moral or immoral actions of 
 each individual soul. Man, he said, is doomed to 
 pilgrimage through the whole creation only as far 
 lie himself will have it. He is the maker of his own 
 fate. Happiness and misery lie in his own hands. 
 As his present condition has been determined by his 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 55 
 
 previous appearance in human existence, so will his 
 future position be dependent on his actions in his 
 present life. Cruelty, covetousness, falsehood, lust, 
 drunkenness and other vices will heap up a stock of 
 demerit producing re-birth in one of the hells or at 
 least in some wretched condition of life upon earth, 
 according to the amount of demerit in store. The 
 practice of the opposite virtues will insure re-birth 
 in one of the heavens or in some desirable condition 
 upon earth according to the store of accumulated 
 merit. But all such rewards or punishments awarded 
 during the pilgrimage of the soul through manifold 
 repetitions of sentient existence will continue only 
 for a limited period and are not eternal. 
 
 Transmigration therefore, and its bitterest sting, 
 hell, with all its horrors of torture, is but chastise- 
 ment not aimless punishment, is but intended to 
 purify, to wean the soul from its cleaving to exis- 
 tence, to expiate the sinful guilty being, not to 
 extinguish it. 
 
 Another difference observable between the Brah- 
 manic and Buddhistic conceptions of the doctrine of 
 metempsychosis is this. tha,t Buddhism narrowed the 
 circle of transmigration. Whilst according to the 
 Upanishads the path of transmigration passes even 
 through inanimate nature, through the mineral and 
 vegetable kingdoms, Buddha limited it to the sphere 
 of animal organic life. No doubt, he did so, because 
 he looked upon transmigration altogether as a moral 
 process. 
 
 Of course this dogma of the soul’s pilgrimage 
 through nature is a mighty weapon in the hands of 
 
56 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 an eloquent preacher. There is nothing so very 
 frightful to us descendants of Western nations in 
 the idea of transmigration. There ipay be rather 
 something attractive in it for many. For life is to 
 us the highest blessing and death we hate. Many 
 
 would therefore submit to a thousand deaths if thev 
 
 %! 
 
 were to live again a thousand times, and they would 
 not care much how their lives might be, for life is 
 precious to us in itself. But a different thing alto- 
 gether it is with the sons of hot climates, with the 
 lazy indolent Hindoo, with the sedentary Chinaman. 
 To him life itself has no particular fascination. He 
 counts death — if he may rest after that — a blessing. 
 To suffer, to suffer even the fiercest tortures of hell, 
 to suffer even for millions of years, is not half as 
 frightful an idea to him as to be forced to act, to 
 labour, to work for jeons, being subject to death in- 
 deed, but with no welcome rest after death, being 
 condemned to die, only to be immediately reborn 
 again, perhaps as a hard worked animal or an un- 
 clean cur. This is it which makes the hearts of 
 Oriental nations tremble with terror, and this is the 
 weapon with which crafty Buddhistic priests subdued 
 the stubborn hearts of Eastern Asia. 
 
 The clever founder of Buddhism, Shakyatnuni 
 himself, knew thi^ well, and therefore he made this 
 dogma of the soul’s transmigration the very centre 
 of his system, and daily he preached it, and daily 
 his fanatic followers spread this doctrine farther and 
 farther. 
 
 They did not handle it, however, as a tenet of 
 speculative philosophy, they did not treat it as a 
 
13UDDIIISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 57 
 
 sort of esoteric mystery, only to be revealed to the 
 initiated, but directly appealing to man’s moral con- 
 science they proffered this doctrine to all as the only 
 satisfactory explanation of the unequal distribution 
 of rewards and punishments for good and evil in 
 this present world. Thus practically dealing with 
 the doctrine of metempsychosis they passed over in 
 silence all purely metaphysical questions which Brah- 
 manism had been so busy with. 
 
 The consequence of these tactics was, that Bud- 
 dhism succeeded in bringing home this doctrine to 
 every heart in all its practical bearings, so that at 
 the present day every class of people in Buddhistic 
 countries, educated and uneducated, young and old, 
 man and woman, among half-civilized and among no- 
 madical communities, think and speak and act in perfect 
 accordance with this dogma. It is to them exactly 
 what hell and damnation is to Christian peoples. 
 
 Naturally therefore the question arises, what 
 escape is there from this dizzy round of birth and 
 death, what ultimate goal is there beyond the circle 
 of transmigration ? The answer is, there is indeed an 
 escape. The means of it lie in morality and medita- 
 tion, and the haven of final deliverance is Nirvana. 
 
 This answer, echoed with perfect unanimity by 
 all Buddhistic schools, though they differ from each 
 other as to the relative merits of morality and medi- 
 tation and as to the nature of Nirvana, makes it 
 necessary for a complete sketch of the Buddhist 
 dogma to discuss these further points, the system of 
 morality, speculative philosophy and the doctrine of 
 Nirvana. I will do so as briefly as possible. 
 
58 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 The Buddhist system of morality is based on 
 the example of Buddha’s life. Imitate Buddha, con- 
 form yourself as much as possible to this type of 
 perfection, such is the supreme precept of the reli- 
 gion. Now Buddha distinguished himself first of 
 all during his 550 previous births by self-forgetting, 
 self-sacrificing charity. To get rid of self, therefore, 
 is the primary condition of a holy life. He who is 
 without desire, dead to himself, he alone truly lives. 
 This may be considered the elementary principle of 
 Buddhist morality. 
 
 But as Buddha in his last birth renounced not 
 only his own self, but the world and all worldly 
 good and pleasure, as he left society, retired into 
 solitude, observed the strictest chastity and tem- 
 perance, Buddhist morality makes correspondingly 
 further demands upon the self-denial of its adherents. 
 The first five commandments of the Buddhist reli- 
 gion run as follows : thou shalt not kill that which 
 has life, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit 
 any unchaste act, thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not 
 drink any intoxicating liquor. 
 
 Here we have no doubt the form and extent of 
 the system of Buddhistic morality as it was origin- 
 ally promulgated. We observe that the starting 
 point of this code of morality is the idea of absolute 
 selfrenunciation. Human life appeared to Buddha 
 as full of misery because of its being full of selfish 
 desire, whence he inferred, that the path of deli- 
 verance lies in the entire renunciation of all selfish 
 desire, in the complete exstirpation even of the desire 
 of existence itself. 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 59 
 
 Here lies the moral strength of Buddhism. It 
 is a religion of unselfishness. But here also lies 
 the radieal defect of Buddhism. For this idea of 
 utter self-abnegation sprang in Buddha but from a 
 lively conviction of the impermanency and unreality 
 of the world of sense, not from that aspiration after 
 communing with a being of perfectly unselfish good- 
 ness, which kindled the genius of Plato and forms 
 the deep root of Christian morality. 
 
 Buddhist morality is a morality without a God 
 and without a conscience. There appears in Bud- 
 dhism an utter want of an active principle of good- 
 ness. Buddhist morality does not endeavour to 
 produce in man a conviction of sin, it does not 
 appeal to his own inner sense of moral goodness. 
 Buddhism does not attempt to purify the affections, 
 to govern desire, to control passion, to renovate the 
 heart, to regenerate, to sanctify the whole being. 
 Its virtue is essentially negative. It enjoins men to 
 cease from doing evil, it demands the total extinc- 
 tion of all desire, of all passion, but stops short of 
 urging men to do good and has no assistance to 
 offer by way of strengthening humanity in its strug- 
 gle with the powers of evil. 
 
 This very absence of an active principle of 
 goodness, the denial of God and the disregard of 
 the human conscience, gave to Buddhist morality 
 that spirit of melancholy despair which it breathes. 
 When Shakyamuni became a Buddha through recog- 
 nising that everything earthly is impermanent and 
 unreal, that human existence is necessarily and inse- 
 parably welded with misery, he was simply in a 
 
CO 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 state of moral and intellectual despair. He threw 
 overboard all faith in God and moral consciousness; 
 he abandoned all hope for the actual world which, 
 appeared to him radically and irremediably bad; lie 
 saw no way of escape but that of the extinction of' 
 existence itself. The greatest happiness, he said, is 
 not to be born, the next greatest is for those who 
 have been born to die soon. 
 
 It was however but a consistent development of 
 Buddha’s own ethical principles when his followers, 
 feeling the want of a positive code of morality, con- 
 structed a moral system, the chief characteristics of 
 which are comprehended in a formula that was ever 
 after the rudimentary confession of faith of all Bud- 
 dhist neophytes, the so-called formula of refuge : I 
 
 take my refuge in Buddha, i.e. I will imitate him 
 and all his doing; I take my refuge in Dharma, i.e. I 
 accept all his ideas of the impermanency of all earth- 
 ly things and the necessity of absolute self-renuncia- 
 tion ; I take my refuge in Samgha, i.e. I renounce 
 society, property, matrimonial and family life and 
 see no salvation outside the pale of the church. 
 
 In short, Buddhist morality developed itself in- 
 to a code of monasticism which condescendingly 
 allowed or rather connived at the existence of lay- 
 brethren and lay-sisters, but which held out hope of 
 salvation to none but those who renounced the world 
 and entered the church as mendicant priests and 
 nuns. 
 
 This system produced the most elaborate rules 
 for the guidance of the priesthood, regulating their 
 dress, their diet, their occupation, and prescribing 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 61 
 
 the very manner of standing up and sitting down 
 with the most pains-taking and pedantic minuteness. 
 It enjoined public confession of faults, which led to 
 a complete code-book of casuistry. It produced a 
 code of criminal law for the maintenance of discip- 
 line. It developed ecclesiastical rank, grades of 
 saintship, an elaborate ritual, a complete religious 
 calendar and so forth. 
 
 Now this system of morality viewed as a whole 
 was not without its good effects. It was admirably 
 adapted to the preservation of religious and moral 
 life in times of immorality and political anarchy, 
 and especially to the primary work of taming sav- 
 age tribes whom it weaned from habits of cruelty, 
 blood-thirstiness and bestiality, whose intemperate 
 habits were successfully checked by enjoining com- 
 plete abstinence, and who were taught to obey the 
 law and to submit to the rules of morality, and thus 
 prepared for civilisation. 
 
 Again, this system of monasticism, which offer- 
 ed a welcome to people of all classes and all nations, 
 formed an excellent substitute for the narrow-minded 
 exclusiveness of caste in India. In countries "where 
 Buddhism failed to extirpate caste, as for instance 
 in Ceylon, this monastic and ecclesiastical system mo- 
 dified. the pretensions of caste and counterbalanced 
 its evils. In other countries, where warfare, despo- 
 tism and feudal systems lacerated the peace of Asiatic 
 peoples, producing even greater evils than caste in 
 India ever did, there this Buddhist system of mo- 
 nasticism came in most suitably, teaching the equality 
 of all nations and establishing a common brotherhood, 
 
02 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 a grand international league of morality, fraternity 
 and abstinence. 
 
 On the other hand, every system of monasticism 
 is morally bad and leads to cramp the intellect. I 
 say it is morally to be condemned because the self- 
 abnegation originally involved in giving up a world- 
 ly life is soon for consistency’s sake supplemented by 
 a life of selfish or cowardly seclusion. Monasticism 
 is also detrimental to a healthy development of the 
 intellectual faculties, as history and experience abun- 
 dantly prove. 
 
 In the case of Buddhism I need only point to 
 the fact, that it produced no literature worthy to be 
 compared with even that of China, let alone that of 
 European nations; that it never encouraged art or 
 science; that it failed to comprehend the importance 
 of any of the problems of political and social life, 
 and that Buddhist priests are now-a-days generally 
 rioted for their ignorance and indolence. Moreover 
 this grand system of Buddhist monachism inherited 
 the inevitable tendency of every system of minutely 
 regulated observances, to degenerate into an external 
 formalism. When the first burst of enthusiasm has 
 passed, the religion that overleaps all earthly piety 
 soon collapses into a religion of forms, into a system 
 of Phariseeism equally irrational and immoral. This 
 has actually happened in the case of Buddhism. 
 
 But the best test for the value of any system of 
 morality is the position it assigns to woman. Here 
 Buddhist morality is found signally wanting. The 
 system of Buddhism leaves woman where it found 
 her 2,000 years ago. Instead of educating and eleva- 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 63 
 
 ting her, instead of breaking those chains of slavery 
 in which women were held all over Asia, instead of 
 giving woman a position in society worthy of her 
 innate purity, Buddhism grudgingly allowed women 
 a place in the hierarchy as nuns, but with the 
 distinct understanding that there was no hope of 
 salvation for them unless through being reborn as 
 men. 
 
 This idea of re-birth brings us to the last and 
 most important defect of Buddhist morality. The 
 idea of transmigration pervades the whole system of 
 Buddhist ethics like a deadly poison. For the theory 
 of a man’s destiny being determined by the stock of 
 merits and demerits accumulated in previous forms 
 of existence, constitutes Buddhism a system of fata- 
 lism ; whilst the idea of improving one’s future pro- 
 spect by works of super-erogation, converts morality 
 into a vast scheme of profit and loss. 
 
 Hence the Chinese Buddhist actually keeps a 
 debtor and creditor account with himself of the acts 
 of each day, and at the end of the year he winds 
 it up. If the balance is in his favour, it is carried 
 on to the account of the next year, but if against 
 him, something extra must be done to make up the 
 deficiency. 
 
 Thus it happens, that this grand moral system 
 of Buddhism, starting with the idea of the entire 
 renunciation of self, ends in that downright selfish- 
 ness, which abhors crime, not because of its sinful- 
 ness, but because it is a personal injury, which sees 
 no moral pollution in sin, but merely a calamity to 
 be deprecated, or a misfortune to be shunned. 
 
64 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 Morality however is not in itself sufficient to 
 break through the circle of transmigration, to carry 
 men across the ocean of misery, to save them from 
 the evils of existence. The object of morality is to 
 practically extinguish the passions, to root out de- 
 sire. But the deepest root, the first cause of desire, 
 lies in theoretical ignorance, misconception, delusion. 
 
 To eradicate this delusion, therefore, to remove 
 this ignorance and misconception regarding the outer 
 and inner world, would be the final means of deli- 
 verance, would rid the self of all the trammels of 
 existence, would actually lift the individual practically 
 and theoretically out of the circle of transmigration 
 and land him on the shores of Nirvana. In one 
 word, whilst morality practically extinguishes the de- 
 sire of existence, abstract meditation or speculative 
 philosophy extinguishes existence itself. 
 
 Morality and philosophy therefore are indispen- 
 sable to 'each other, whatever their relative impor- 
 tance may be. As Christianity requires both, good 
 works and faith, thus also Buddhism bases the idea 
 of salvation on a combination of the two factors, 
 moral action and abstract thought or intelligence. 
 
 As Buddhist morality requires men to imitate 
 the doings of Buddha, thus also Buddhist philosophy 
 invites men to conform to and to follow up the very 
 idea of P ' a, for the word Buddha means literally 
 “one wh iows,” i.e. one who knows the unreality 
 
 of all plr ena, which knowledge is looked upon as 
 
 the resit abstract meditation. The way in which 
 Buddl rted from this world, by the mental pro- 
 
 ally realising the total impcrmanency and 
 
 cess " 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 G5 
 
 nothingness of all earthly forms of existence, of over- 
 coming not only the desire of existence, but destroy- 
 ing existence itself by a purely intellectual logical 
 process-^— this is the object of Buddhist philosophy, 
 this is the final path to Nirvana. 
 
 Unfortunately however Buddha’s followers differ- 
 ed from each other in no other detail of doctrine so 
 much as in the manner in which they built up their 
 systems of philosophy. They seemed to take a de- 
 light in contradicting each other, and the consequence 
 was, that Buddhism split into a great number of dif- 
 ferent philosophical schools, each starting from the 
 same circle of ideas, as given above, and each coming 
 to pretty nearly the same result, to the idea of Nir- 
 vana. Buddhism developed nominalistic and realistic 
 schools, divided itself into schools- of Idealism and 
 Materialism, produced systems of Positivism and Nihil- 
 ism. And there is very little they have in common 
 with each other beyond the following propositions, 
 which form the fundamental ideas of the philosophic 
 systems of all shades and all ages in the sphere of 
 Buddhist orthodoxy. 
 
 All start from the so-called four truths (Arjnnisa- 
 tyani) or the idea that misery is a necessary attribute 
 of-sentient existence, that the accumulation of misery is 
 caused by desire, that the extinction of desire is possible 
 and that there is a path that leads to that extinction. 
 
 Another leading proposition, common to all schools 
 is this, that individual existence (personality) is made 
 up by the following five constituents (Skandhas), the 
 organized body, sensation, perception, discrimination 
 and consciousness. 
 
66 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 Again, there is tolerable unanimity as to a cer- 
 tain concatenation of cause and effect, which is con- 
 sidered to form the real explanation of the riddle of 
 existence. There are twelve links (Nidanas) in this 
 endless chain of cause and effect. Existence, it is said, 
 is caused by 1, ignorance or delusion; ignorance pro- 
 duced 2, action; from action arises 3, consciousness, 
 thence 4, substantiality, thence 5, the six organs of 
 perception (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind); 
 from the action of these organs arises 6, sensation, 
 thence comes 7, perception; thence 8, desire or lust; 
 from this desire springs 9, the cleaving to existence, 
 which produces 10, individual existence; the latter* 
 finds its expression in 11, birth, but birth invariably 
 produces 12, decrepitude and death, and death, though 
 it breaks up the above-mentioned five constituents 
 (Skandhas) of individual life, leaves behind the re- 
 productive power, a germ as it were, which has to 
 run the same round again through ignorance, action, 
 consciousness and so forth. 
 
 Here we have then again, in philosophy also, the 
 same circle, which we observed before in the system 
 of the physical universe and — in the form of trans- 
 migration — in the moral order of the world. 
 
 We see therefore, how fitly Buddhism at the 
 very outset adopted the emblem of a wheel in order 
 to typify the leading characteristics of its faith. What 
 the cross is to the Christian Church, emblematically 
 pointing to the central truth of theoretical and prac- 
 tical Christianity, the same as regards fulness of 
 significance is to the Buddhist his Dharma Tchakra, 
 the so-called “wheel of doctrine.” As the Christian 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 67 
 
 speaks of preaching the cross, so the Buddhist speaks 
 of “turning: the wheel of doctrine.'’ For the idea of 
 -.ceaseless rotation running through the whole system, 
 branch and root, has made of Buddhism altogether a 
 system of wheels within wheels. Ecce signum. 
 
 I have been turning this wheel before the eyes 
 of my readers, and it is time now to stop it by way 
 of pointing out what the final escape from this weary 
 dizzy round is, which Buddhism offers by means of 
 mental abstraction. What is Nirvana? 
 
 There has been much dispute in the learned 
 World among Buddhists and among European scholars, 
 whether Nirvana means absolute annihilation or not. 
 I would humbly suggest, that if the learned writers 
 on the subject, instead of presuming Buddhism to 
 have been one and the same thing everywhere, and 
 in all ages, instead of overlooking; that Buddhism is 
 one thing as a scientific system and another as a 
 popular practical religion, had taken into considera- 
 tion that there are as many different Buddhistic de- 
 nominations, schools and parties, as there are Christian 
 sects, it would have saved much useless disputation. 
 
 The doctrine of Nirvana, like all other Buddhist 
 doctrines, has been differently handled in different 
 ages, by different schools, writers and preachers. I 
 have given much thought to the subject, and the 
 conclusions 1 arrive at are these. 
 
 In the absence of ancient manuscripts and by 
 reason of the repeated textual alterations which the 
 Buddhist canon suffered before it was fixed in the 
 form in which we now have it, it is practically 
 impossible to determine what Shakyamuni Buddha 
 
68 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 himself taught on the subject. He may have looked 
 upon Nirvana as a state of personal immortality of 
 the spirit, exempt from the eddies of transmigration 
 and revelling in the enjoyment of unlimited happiness 
 through the annihilation of all desire. He may have 
 viewed Nirvana as a stale of absolute annihilation of 
 personality and individual existence. It is impossible 
 to decide which of the two views he actually held. 
 But I am inclined to think he most probably left 
 the question undecided in his own mind. 
 
 After Buddha’s death, his followers may likewise 
 have left the problem untouched for some time. 
 But the most ancient Sutras which we possess coin- 
 cide with the popular literature of modern Buddhism, 
 in describing Nirvana as a state of exemption from 
 birth and death, as a condition of peace and felicity, 
 implyiug not only the continuation of consciousness 
 and personality, but an active interest in the pro- 
 gress of religion on earth, which occasionally prompts 
 individuals, after having entered Nirvana, to reappear 
 on earth in order to interfere on behalf of the 
 faithful. 
 
 On the other hand, both ancient and modern 
 philosophical schools of Buddhism have always had 
 a leaning to and in most instances have actually de- 
 fined Nirvana as a state of absolute annihilation, 
 where there is neither consciousness nor personality, 
 nor existence of any kind. And I do believe that a 
 consistent development of the principles of Buddhism 
 must always lead to the same nagative result, that 
 existence is but a curse and that therefore the aim 
 of human effort should be the total annihilation 
 
BUDDHISM, A THEORETICAL SYSTEM. 69 
 
 of the personality and existence of each individual 
 sonl. 
 
 Modern philosophical schools of Buddhism are 
 all more or less influenced by a spirit of sophistic 
 nihilism. They deal with Nirvana as they deal with 
 every other dogma, with heaven and hell : they deny 
 its objective reality, placing it altogether in the ab- 
 stract. They dissolve every proposition into a thesis 
 and its anti-thesis and deny both. Thus they say 
 Nirvana is not annihilation, but they also deny its 
 positive odjective reality. According to them the 
 soul enjoys in Nirvana neither existence nor non- 
 existence, it is neither eternal nor non-eternal, neither 
 annihilated nor non-annihilated. Nirvana is to them 
 a state of which nothing can be said, to which no 
 attributes can be given; it is altogether an abstract, 
 devoid alike of all positive and all negative qualities. 
 
 What shall we say of such empty useless specu- 
 lations, such sickly, dead words, whose fruitless 
 sophistry offers to that natural yearning of the hu- 
 man heart after an eternal rest nothing better than — 
 a philosophical myth ? It is but natural that a reli- 
 gion which started with moral and intellectual bank- 
 ruptcy should end in moral and intellectual suicide. 
 
 But sad, pitiably sad it is to see a religion that 
 contains so many true ideas to produce results so 
 barren, so deadly. Bunsen was right in his estimate 
 of the value of this purposeless religion. Buddhism, 
 he said, may be regarded as a sort of repose of hu- 
 manity after its deliverance from the heavy yoke of 
 Brahmanism and the wild orgies of nature worship. 
 But this repose is that of a weary wanderer, who is 
 
70 
 
 LECTURE THE SECOND. 
 
 withheld from the prosecution of God’s work on this 
 earth by his utter despair of the triumph of justice 
 and truth in actual life. In the plan of the world’s 
 order it seems even now to be producing the effect 
 of a mild dose of opium on the raving or despairing 
 tribes of weary-hearted Asia. 
 
 The sleep lasts long, but it is a gentle one, and who 
 knows how near may be the dawn of the resur- 
 rection morning? 
 
LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 In the preceding lecture I exhibited Buddhism 
 from a doctrinal point of view. I endeavoured to do 
 so with due impartiality, taking for my basis the 
 more ancient scriptures of the Buddhists and confin- 
 ing my remarks to those features of doctrine, which 
 are the common property of all the Buddhistic schools 
 and sects. What is then the value of Buddhism as 
 a system of doctrine? 
 
 No doubt Buddhism has brought to light many 
 valuable and true ideas, and being free from any 
 trammels of nationality it was peculiarly adapted to 
 impress these truths upon all the peoples of Eastern 
 Asia, among whom it obtained a footing. I have 
 shown with what broad and enlarged views the Bud- 
 dhists expounded that mysterious book of revelation, 
 Nature, anticipating, centuries before Ptolemy, the 
 latter’s system of cycle and epicycle, orb in orb. 
 
 Though no Buddhist ever attained to the clearer 
 insight and mathematical analysis of a Copernicus, 
 Newton, Laplace or Herschel, it must be acknowledged 
 that Buddhism fore-stalled in several instances the 
 most splendid discoveries of modern astronomy. Teach- 
 
72 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 r 
 
 c 
 
 ing the origin of each world to have taken place 
 out of a cloud, the Buddhists anticipated 2.000 years 
 ago Herschel’s nebular hypothesis. And when those 
 very patches of cloudy light or diffused nebulosities 
 which Herschel supposed to be “diffused matter has- 
 tening to a world birth” dissolved themselves before 
 the monster telescope of Lord Rosse into as many 
 assemblages of suns, into thousands of other world- 
 systems dispersed through the wilds of boundless 
 space, modern astronomy was but verifying the more 
 ancient Buddhistic dogma of a plurality of worlds, 
 of the co-existence of thousands of ehiliocosmoi in- 
 habited by multitudes of living beings. 
 
 Again, the Buddhist idea of each world being 
 
 r 
 
 subject to destruction by fire, in order to be re-con- 
 structed again in a similar form, cannot be repugnant 
 to modern astronomers, who witnessed the disappear- 
 ance of stars through blazing conflagrations and who 
 believe in the existence of a resisting medium in 
 space, which retarding every year the movement of 
 every planet and every sun finally results in the 
 dissolution of every globe, to give way — as Buddhism 
 teaches us — to a new heaven and a new earth. 
 
 Even some of the results of modern geology 
 may be said to have been intuitively divined by 
 Buddhism. For the Buddhists knew the interior of 
 our earth to be in an incandescent state, they spoke 
 of the formation of each earth as having occupied 
 successive periods of incalculable duration, they strong- 
 ly intimated that we are walking on the catacombs 
 of dead generations, that we subsist on a world 
 resting on worlds vanished. 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 73 
 
 Another spark of divine light which the Bud- 
 dhists possessed is discernible in their recognizing 
 and constantly teaching the most intimate connection 
 between the visible and invisible world. They knew 
 that “things seen are not the only realities.” They 
 looked upon the planets as inhabited by multitudes, 
 all eagerly listening to Buddha's preaching. They 
 peopled the air with spirits, the firmament with 
 legions of human beings, superior to ourselves in 
 purity and happiness, but constantly inter-communi- 
 cating with us pigmies. They saw heaven open to 
 each aspiring soul and mansions prepared there for 
 those of a pure and tranquil heart. They understood ; 
 that an immense crowd of spectators is watching 
 us unseen with intense interest, a crowd of devils 
 grinning with delight at the progress of evil, and 
 hosts of angelic beings rejoicing over the spread of 
 truth on earth. 
 
 The Buddhist system of morality also possesses, 
 in spite of the many defects which I pointed out in 
 the preceding lecture, many praiseworthy features, 
 
 It started with the recognition of sin and evil as the 
 heir-loom of mortal man. It pointed out in the 
 strongest terms the impermanency and hollowness of 
 everything earthly. It exhorted its devotees to extend 
 love and charity to man and beast. It marked selfish- 
 ness, lust and passion as the chief enemies of human 
 happiness. It pointed out the superiority of the in- 
 ward life over outward existence. It taught its ad- 
 herents to look away from earthly sensual objects to 
 regions invisible and inspired them — at least to a 
 certain extent — with hopes of immortality. 
 
LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 7i 
 
 On the other hand Buddhism is disfigured by 
 some most important radical defects, which will in 
 the estimation of an impartial critic far outweigh 
 all the above mentioned points of advantage, and 
 which in fact neutralize most of its beneficial elem- 
 ents. Whether we look upon Buddhism as a system 
 of religion, morality or philosophy, we observe every- 
 where fundamental errors directly antagonistic to a 
 healthly development of either the intellectual or 
 moral faculties of mankind. But instead of repeating 
 here all the detailed fallacies with which the Bud- 
 dhist dogma is saturated and which T pointed out en 
 passant in the preceding two lectures, it will suffice 
 to give prominence to the most striking features, 
 which mar the otherwise undeniable beauty of this 
 grand system of natural religion. 
 
 Buddhism is intellectually defective. It arose 
 from a feeling of spiritual bankruptcy and never after 
 recovered its mental equilibrium. It is therefore 
 essentially a religion of sullen despair, based on the 
 total obliteration of a healthly faith in the actual 
 constitution of things, penetrated by a spirit of 
 morose abandon , mental and moral, and resulting in 
 a barren sophistic nihilism which fails to recognize 
 in nature, in history, in human affairs the will of 
 God, and never thought of interpreting that will by 
 the dictates of human conscience. Buddhism is in 
 fact a system of religion without hope and strictly 
 speaking even without God, a system of morality 
 without a conscience, a system of philosophy which 
 wears cither the mask of transcendental mysticism or 
 of nihilistic cynicism. 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 75 
 
 Again, Buddhism is further intellectually weak, 
 because of its prodigious fondess for the miraculous, 
 because it comes into collision with the results of 
 experimental investigation and especially also because 
 it gives such undue preference to the transcendental 
 and the future, that it is utterly incapable of com- 
 prehending or appreciating the claims of reality and 
 the demands of the present. 
 
 Morally also Buddhism is found sadly wanting. 
 Though professing to destroy Self, its system of "1 
 morality is pervaded by a spirit of calculating selfish- 
 ness, its social virtues are essentially negative and 
 strikingly unfruitful in good works. 
 
 Am I overstating my case and shooting beyond 
 the mark? Is it that I prove too much and thus 
 expose myself to the charge of having proved too 
 little? Should not common sense tell me, that a re- 
 ligion so defective, so unnatural, so worthless, could 
 not possibly have attained such wide-spread accepta- 
 tion, could not have become the avowed creed of 
 several hundred millions of reasoning creatures? 
 
 Certainly, if I had asserted that Buddhism re- 
 mained anywhere or for any length of time a mere 
 system of doctrine and consistently developed itself 
 in practical life, as it was developed by thinking 
 minds in the solitude of the cloister or in the study 
 of the philosopher, I would have to demur to these 
 charges. But the fact is, I have constantly kept in 
 mind that Buddhism is one thing as a dogmatic theo- 
 retic system and another tiling as a living practical 
 religion, that Buddhism developed itself in one form 
 under the crucible of logical thought and was moulded 
 
7G 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 into another shape under the sober practical in- 
 fluences of daily life, in the struggle for existence. 
 
 Whilst the Buddhist philosopher or moralist in 
 his study, in his pulpit, in li is writings correctly un- 
 folded Buddhism as a system of cold atheism and 
 barren nihilism, the common people in all Buddhistic 
 countries instinctively drifted into a form of worship 
 essentially polytheistic and rose in some instances 
 even to avowed Monotheism. Whilst the Buddhist 
 philosophic canon (Abidharma) describes Nirvana, 
 the highest good of mankind, as a state of utter 
 annihilation, the religious instincts of the people 
 substituted for it hopes of more tangible positive 
 beatitude. Whilst Buddhism as a system of doctrine 
 leaves no room for the idea of atonement, the prac- 
 tical religious conscience asserted its divine rights 
 and engrafted upon the ceremonial of the church a 
 service of prayer and sacrifice especially intended to 
 expiate the guilty conscience and to remove the 
 consequences of sin and the sting of death and hell. 
 
 These are but instances, sufficient however to 
 show that Goethe’s famous saying 
 
 “ Ein guter Mensch in seinera dunkeln Drange 
 1st sich des reehten Weges wohl bewusst,” 
 
 so true and yet so simple, that it refuses to be 
 translated, is as true in Asia as anywhere else. 
 
 We must allow therefore that unnatural and 
 monstrous as Buddhism appears when viewed merely 
 as a dogmatic system, many of its abnormities have 
 been toned down, amended or rectified in the arena 
 of practical life, under the influence of the religious 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 77 
 
 conscience and common sense. It would be unjust 
 then if I were to stop with the exposition of Bud- 
 dhism on the basis of its canonical literature. It 
 will be but fair to the reputation of Buddhism and 
 necessary to the completion of this sketch of its reli- 
 gion, if I proceed to consider Buddhism as a practi- 
 cal religion, drawing my information from actual 
 observation of modern Buddhistic worship as well as 
 from the popular literature which circulates among 
 the middle and lower classes of Buddhistic countries. 
 
 But to avoid useless repetitions I shall confine 
 myself to those forms of religious belief and practice 
 among modern Buddhists which deviate from the theo- 
 retical system of their own church. 
 
 It is a remnant of the ancient tree-worship, that 
 almost every religious sect of Asia has a sacred tree 
 of its own. The Brahmans revered the Ficus Indica, 
 for which Buddhism originally aubstituted the Ficus 
 Religiosa. But in course of time the Buddhists either 
 reverted to the former tree or confounded the two. 
 They were probably led to do so by the intuitive ap- 
 prehension that Buddhism, as it grew and spread, 
 singularly followed the mode of growth which is a 
 distinctive mark of the sacred tree of the Brahmans, 
 the Ficus Indica. It is a peculiarity of the latter 
 that it extends itself by letting its branches droop 
 and take root, planting nurseries of its own and so 
 multiplying itself by that means, that a single tree 
 forms a curiously arched grove. 
 
 This is precisely the way in which Buddhism 
 propagated itself. It germinated in India, but sent 
 out branches South and North, each taking root, and 
 
78 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 each perpetuating itself by further off-shoots, whilst 
 the parent stock was gradually withering and finally 
 decayed. Buddhism left but few traces behind in 
 India, but it still lives in Ceylon and in the off- 
 shoots of the Singhalese church in Burmah, Siam and 
 Pegu. When Buddhism became almost totally extinct 
 in India, the whole force of its vitality seemed to 
 throw itself northwards and it spread with renewed 
 vigour and widening shade over Cashmere, and Nepaul 
 to China and Tibet. Chinese Buddhism threw forth 
 new branches, northwards into Corea and Japan, and 
 southwards over Cochin-China, Cambodia and Lagos, . 
 whilst Tibetan Buddhism pushed its branches into 
 Mongolia, Manchuria and the greater part of Central 
 Asia. 
 
 Now in each of these countries Buddhism estab- 
 lished separate churches, each having its own locally 
 diversified life, its own saplings, its own fruits and 
 yet all these many branches with their endless rami- 
 fications form one grove, one compact whole, pervad- 
 ed by the same sap, conuected with each other and 
 with the old withered parent stock in India by a net 
 of intertwining roots. 
 
 It is quite beyond the limits of this lecture to 
 go into all these national peculiarities and local var- 
 ieties of Buddhism, interesting as they are to the 
 student of comparative anthropology. I must confine 
 myself to the more prominent general characteristics. 
 And here we observe one grand distinction standing 
 out in bold relief, a distinction which is now gener- 
 ally recognized by Buddhist scholars when they speak 
 of Southern and Northern Buddhism. 
 
13UDDH1SM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 70 
 
 Southern Buddhism, or the church of Ceylon 
 with her offspring, being locally in close proximity 
 to the parent stock and by natural circumstances in a 
 comparatively isolated position, retained the strongest 
 resemblance to the original Buddhism of India, and 
 seemed sympathetically as it were to suffer under 
 every blow struck at its parent stock. At first indeed 
 Singhalese Buddhism displayed a vigorous healthy 
 life: it spread to Burmah and Siam, and sent forth 
 fresh shoots towards Sumatra, Java and Borneo. But 
 the latter were nipped in the bud by the inroad of 
 Mohammedanism which almost completely isolated the 
 mother church in Ceylon and paralyzed her efforts. 
 When Buddhism in India also received its death-blow 
 the Singhalese church was still more affected by it. 
 Its vigour and growth remained stunted ever after. 
 
 The consequence was that the Buddhist dogma 
 was left in Ceylon, Burmah and Siam in statu quo 
 up to the present day. There was too little life re- 
 maining for independent dogmatic and ecclesiastical 
 development. There was little temptation from with- 
 out to engraft foreign ideas and superstitions upon 
 the traditional stock of doctrines and institutions. 
 Shivaism and Shamanism, which saturated and leaven- 
 ed the Buddhist churches of the North to a very 
 considerable extent, never influenced the minds of 
 Southern Buddhists. They clung to the old traditions, 
 retained the ancient dogma, preserved their primitive 
 monastic and ecclesiatical forms in languid torpor, 
 but with tolerable fidelity. 
 
 Still even here, Buddhism in getting popularized 
 could not avoid altogether the modifying influences 
 
80 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 of the religious and moral instincts of the common 
 people- What I said in the preceding lecture about 
 Buddhism in general, substantially coincides with the 
 theoretical teaching of modern Buddhists in Ceylon. 
 But the common people there have instinctively toned 
 down many of the unnatural products of Buddhistic 
 scholasticism. 
 
 Cold, lifeless, abstract Atheism was too repulsive 
 to the warm religious instincts and affections of the 
 people who instinctively substituted for it idolatrous 
 deification of humanity. They worship the seven 
 ancient Buddhas, and Shakyamuni Gautama in par- 
 ticular, they accord divine honours to his principal 
 disciples or Bodhisattvas, they prostrate themselves 
 before the images of these worthies, bring them of 
 ferings, address them in prayer, revere their relics 
 with superstitious awe. But they do all this without 
 making any logical distinction between the image 
 and the heroe represented by it, without realising to 
 themseves when they worship in the temples whether 
 it is the mere act of worshipping that will avert 
 calamity or procure happiness for them, or whether 
 the invisible Buddha or Bodhisattva actually has the 
 power to influence their fortunes. 
 
 The educated Buddhist will always deny being 
 guilty of idolatry. He merely remembers those an- 
 cient spiritual heroes by means of statuary represent- 
 ations, he merely vows in the presence of those idols 
 to follow their example and practise morality and 
 holiness. But the common people incapable of draw- 
 ing such fine distinctions mechanically worship those 
 heroes of their church, hoping thereby to derive 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 81 
 
 temporal and eternal advantages. Theirs is therefore 
 not an atheistic religion bnt a worship of the genius, 
 a deification of humanity. And this is what Buddhism 
 amounts to everywhere in the minds of the common 
 people. 
 
 As the consciousness of God, this divine legacy 
 inherited by every human soul, recoiled from the 
 godless atheism of the metaphysician, thus also the 
 sound common sense of the untutored multitude as- 
 serted itself in opposition to the refined teachings of 
 the schools regarding the future state (Nirvana). 
 The literature of Southern Buddhism renounces the 
 very idea of individuality, denies the existence of a 
 separate ego, a self, and consistently therefore sees 
 the highest boon of mankind in total annihilation of 
 all forms of existence. Nirvana is to this over-wise 
 school-philosophy neither a state of consciousness nor 
 unconsciousness, nor is it a state that is neither con* 
 scious nor unconscious: it is simply a non-entity, 
 and the being that enters this state must become non- 
 existent. This is what the Buddhist priest teaches to 
 the present day; this is the food he offers to human 
 souls hungering and thirsting for a future of hap- 
 piness and bliss. Surely it is giving a stone to 
 children crying for bread. And though it be the 
 philosopher’s stone, it is not to be wondered at if 
 the common people turn away from it unsatisfied. 
 
 The fact is, this annihilation theory has nowhere 
 in any Buddhistic country met with popular accep- 
 tation. Though Southern Buddhists did not proceed 
 to substitute any definite conceptions of a real para- 
 dise of personal conscious immortality for this ab- 
 
82 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 stract metaphysical nihilism, they comforted themselves 
 with the idea, that — whatever Nirvana might actual- 
 ly be — there would be there no more of the horrors 
 of transmigration, no more of the misery of life and 
 death, no more of the torments of hell. Thus the 
 common people accustomed •themselves to think and 
 speak of Nirvana negatively. They understand it to 
 be final cessation of the weary round of birth and 
 death, a state absolutely exempt from all sorrows and 
 troubles. 
 
 With the exception of these two points, Atheism 
 and Nihilism, the practical religion of Southern Bud- 
 dhists has adopted the whole range of Buddhist 
 dogmas as exhibited in the preceding lecture. If we 
 are to apply the historical distinction of Hinayana 
 and Malulyana we might therefore consider Singhalese 
 Buddhists to be followers of the Hinayana system. 
 When a learned Chinese Buddhist (Hiuentsang) who 
 visited Ceylon in 640-45 A.D. classed the Buddhists 
 of Ceylon among the adherents of the Mahayana 
 school, he had most probably before his mind those 
 very points, the negation of Atheism and Nihilism, 
 in which the practical religion of Southern Buddhists 
 following the natural bent of the religious instincts 
 and common sense assimilated itself, though uninten- 
 tionally and independently, with their Northern con- 
 temporaries, among whom the Mahayana school was 
 then flourishing. 
 
 There are indeed a few other points of resem- 
 blance, instances of expansion given to original Bud- 
 dhism by Buddhists of the North, types of which 
 might be noticed in the popular Buddhism of Ccy- 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 83 
 
 Ion. If, for example, the common people of Ceylon 
 — perhaps more or less unconsciously — bring their 
 offerings to Buddhas and saints as if it were an 
 atoning sacrifice, this might be looked upon as an 
 expansion of the original Buddhism of India which 
 indeed leaves no room for any atonement whatsoever, 
 and as the germ from which the more elaborated 
 ritual of propitiation and atonement now common 
 among Northern Buddhists sprang. Minute investiga- 
 tion would also discover among modern Singhalese 
 Buddhists slight traces of the Mysticism of the North. 
 
 These are, however, but minor points of resem- 
 blance, originating most likely not in any historical 
 connection with the Mahayana school of the North, 
 but in the constitution and natural bent of the reli- 
 gious mind which is the same all the world over. 
 The leading, ruling ideas in the practical religion of 
 Singhalese Buddhism are not those of the Mahayana 
 school. 
 
 Taking all in all, therefore, I believe I am 
 justified in saying that the Buddhism of Ceylon, 
 even considered as a practical religion, has preserved 
 more of the characteristics of primitive Buddhism 
 than any other branch of the same church, and is 
 on the whole a tolerably faithful exponent of that 
 phase in the development of the Buddhist religion 
 which is known under the name of the Hin&yana 
 system. 
 
 The same might be said with some limitation of 
 the Buddhist churches of Burmah and Siam, Avhich 
 are closely allied to the mother church of Ceylon 
 and essentially belong to the same Hinayana system. 
 
84 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 though they have used still more liberty in popular- 
 izing the traditional creed than the Singhalese ever 
 ventured to do. Burmese and Siamese Buddhists were 
 besides more than Singhalese Buddhists under the 
 influence of Brahmanism and went even so far as to 
 amalgamate with the Buddhist religion notions derived 
 from the primitive tree and serpent worship which was 
 a form of religion not only prior to Buddhism but 
 indigenous in Burmah and Siam. The consequence is, 
 that practical Buddhist worship there is marked by 
 the prevalence of Brahmanic mythology. 
 
 As in Ceylon, so here also the scholastic system 
 of nihilistic atheism has been converted into a po- 
 pular form of polytheism, a worship of Buddhas and 
 Bodhisattvas, Nagas and demons. There are more- 
 over in Burmah and Siam many traces of the pecu- 
 liar teachings and rites of the Mahayana and even 
 of the Tantra school, so that the popular Buddhism 
 of these, two countries may be considered to be the 
 connecting link between the Buddhism of the South 
 (Ceylon) and the Buddhists of the North (China, 
 Tibet, &c.). 
 
 The religious systems of Northern Buddhism as 
 carried out in practical life by the Buddhists of Cash- 
 mere, Nepaul, and all countries North and North- 
 East of the Himalaya, will strike any observer at first 
 sight as a most heterogeneous mixture of foreign, 
 especially Indian, and native elements, embodying the 
 mythological deities of almost any religion that ever 
 existed in Eastern Asia. 
 
 Let us in imagination visit a Buddhist temple 
 connected with a monastery, say the largest that is 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 85 
 
 to be found in any of the above named regions, but 
 which is only a magnified specimen of what you may 
 find en miniature or in detached portions in every 
 city within the sphere of Northern Buddhism. Let 
 us also suppose that we have for our guide an intel- 
 ligent and well-read Buddhist priest, a rara avis in- 
 deed, but still, let us charitably hope, to be found 
 someAvhere, one that is able to explain the mytholo- 
 gical origin and meaning of all the objects of worship. 
 
 Start with him on your expedition, and he will 
 point out to you a large tree marking from afar, as 
 you approach, the locality of the sacred edifice, the 
 gables of which are likewise remarkable from a distance 
 by their peculiar shape and the dragon figures which 
 surmount them. When your eye catches the splendid 
 tree in front of the building, your guide will tell 
 you that this tree is a specimen of the sacred Bodhi- 
 tree (Ficus religiosa), that an embassy expressly sent 
 for this purpose to Buddha-gaya in India brought a 
 shoot from the veritable tree under which Shakyamu- 
 ni sat when he attained to Buddhaship. You may 
 remark that the tree before you is by no means a 
 Ficus religiosa, but a Ficus indica, or it may happen 
 that it is neither of the two, but a palm-tree (most 
 probably then the Borassus flabelliformis) ; but the 
 priest will tell you nevertheless with a bland smile 
 that it is a Ficus religiosa, and that only ignorant 
 and wantonly sceptical persons can have any doubt 
 on the subject. Is there not a plate erected at the 
 foot of the tree, stating that this tree grew out of 
 a shoot brought directly from the holy land, cut off 
 the very Bodhi tree at Gftya ? 
 
86 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 As you turn towards the principal entrance of 
 the building, you remark, a yard or two in advance 
 of the flight of steps leading up to it, figures of 
 crouching lions carved in stone and resting on pedes- 
 tals, placed on either side. You will be told that 
 these are emblems of Shakyamuni whose cognomen 
 Shakyasimha (lit. Shaky a, the lion) indicates that 
 he is by his moral excellence the king of men, as 
 the lion by his strength is the king of the beasts. 
 Perhaps your guide will even quote a passage from 
 his sacred scriptures “as a lion’s howl makes all 
 animals tremble, subdues elephants, arrests birds in 
 their flight and fish in the water, thus Buddha’s ut- 
 terances upset all other religions, subdue all devils, 
 conquer all heretics and arrest all the misery of 
 life.” 
 
 If it is a sunny day you will find gathered on 
 the entrance steps a motley assembly ; priests and 
 beggars, lying lazily in the sun, or engaged in onto- 
 logical pursuits, mending their clothes, cobbling their 
 shoes, cleaning their opium pipes t smoking, gambling 
 and so forth, and your appearance will be the signal 
 for a general clamour for an alms offering in the 
 shape of a foreign cent, or they will offer their ser- 
 vices as guides. But if it should happen to be a 
 feast day the steps and the whole open space in 
 front, with the courtyards inside, will be crowded to 
 excess by a busy multitude, men, women and child- 
 ren, who have come to worship or to consult the 
 oracle, hawkers of fruit and other edibles, booths 
 with fancy articles of all kinds, stalls opened by 
 druggists, wandering doctors, fortune tellers, tents 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 87 
 
 r the purpose of gambling, in short a complete 
 ,ir which pushes its lumber and its clamour close 
 o the very altars of the divinities worshipped inside 
 he central temple. 
 
 As you enter the front-door, a martial figure 
 with defying mien, armed to the teeth and sword 
 in hand, confronts you. It is the image of Veda, 
 the patron and protector of monasteries. Inside the 
 door there are to the right and left niches for the 
 spirits of the door-way who are supposed to keep 
 out all evil influences, and for the Naga (dragon) 
 spirits ■who are looked upon as the tutelary deities 
 of the ground on which the sacred buildings are 
 erected. 
 
 Having passed the first courtyard you are led 
 through a second gateway, when your eye is arrest- 
 ed by four gigantic images, two being placed on 
 either side of the gateway, guarding as it were with 
 flaming eyes the entrance to the sanctuary beyond. 
 Your guide will inform you that they are the demon- 
 kings of the four regions (Tehatur Maharadjas) who 
 guard the world against the attack of evil spirits 
 (Asuras), that each of them is posted on a different 
 side of the central mountain (Meru) engaged in guard- 
 ing and defending with the assistance of large armies 
 under their command the corresponding quarter of 
 the heavens. You will find incense lighted at the 
 feet of these giants, and the images themselves al- 
 most covered with slips of paper containing either a 
 record of vows to be performed in case of prayer 
 answered by these heroes, or a record of thanks for 
 favours already bestowed. For you will be told or 
 
88 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 may witness it perhaps with your own eyes, that 
 these demon-kings are daily worshipped by the corn- 
 mon people, who ascribe to them the power of heal- 
 ing all those diseases and of preventing or averting 
 all those calamities which are supposed to be the 
 work of evil spirits. 
 
 After crossing a second courtyard you reach the 
 principal temple by ascending a small flight of steps. 
 On entering this building you see before you five 
 little altars placed in a row with a small image on 
 each, and if it is the hour of prayer you may find 
 a number of priests in full canonicals resembling so 
 many Roman Catholic priests, chanting their mo- 
 notonous litanies and responses to the sound of bell 
 and a sort of wooden drum. The images before 
 whom the priests every now and then prostrate 
 themselves represent, as it may happen, either the 
 five Celestial Buddhas (Vairochana, Akchobhya, Aini- 
 tabha, Ratna Sambhava and Amoghasiddha) or their 
 spiritual sons the so-called five celestial Bbdhisattvas 
 (Sainantabhadra, Vadjrapani, Ratnapani, Padmapani 
 i.e.y Avalokiteshvara or Kwanyin and Vishvapani). 
 Your guide will explain to you that every historic 
 Buddha may be viewed as possessing a triple form 
 of existence, living or having lived among men on 
 earth (Marmchi Buddha), existing metaphysically in 
 Nirvana (Dhyani Buddha), and finally as a reflex of 
 himself in a spiritual son generated in the world of 
 forms for the purpose of propagating the religion 
 established by him during his earthly career. lie 
 will further tell you by way of example that the 
 famous founder of the present Buddhist Church was 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 yy 
 
 as Manuehi Buddha known under the name Shakya- 
 mnni, as Dhyani Buddha however he is called Am- 
 itabha, whilst his reflex in the world of forms or, so 
 to speak, his spiritual son is Padmapani (Avalokite- 
 shvara). The five images therefore, before which 
 you see the priests kneeling and prostrating them- 
 selves, all the while chanting their prayers, are the 
 celestial types or the spiritual sons of those five an- 
 cient Buddhas who . according to the general doctrine 
 of Buddhism have already appeared in this present 
 period (Ivalpa). 
 
 Step nearer. You need not fear to give offence 
 or to disturb the devotion of men, who, whilst me- 
 chanically continuing their monotonous litany and 
 chanting their responses, will stretch out a hand to 
 examine the texture of your clothes, to receive an 
 aims, or offer to light your cigar or criticise in whis- 
 pers the shape and size of your nose. Glance over 
 the shoulder of one of those priests and examine his 
 “manual of daily prayer.” It is neatly printed in 
 large-sized full-bodied native type and in the native 
 character, but totally unintelligible to him, for it is 
 Sanskrit, pure grammatical Sanskrit, systematically 
 transliterated syllable by syllable. Listen to him, as 
 he chants rythmically indeed but in drowsy monoto- 
 nous voice: sarva tathagata schamam samavasantu 
 buddhya buddhya siddhya siddhya bodhaya bodhaya 
 vibodhaya vibodhaya mochaya vimochaya vimochaya 
 sodhaya sodhaya visodhaya visodhaya samantam mo- 
 chaya samanta, &c., &c. Poor fellow, he has not 
 the slightest idea of the meaning of these words, 
 though he may have been chanting these Sanskrit 
 
90 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD, 
 
 prayers clay after clay for ever so many years. But 
 he has a notion that these strange sounds have some 
 magic effect beneficial for himself and for the salva- 
 tion of his soul. There is however tolerably good sense 
 in the words of his prayer which reads, when translat- 
 ed, as follows : may all the Tathagatas (i.e. Buddhas) 
 take up their abode in me! ever teach, ever instruct, 
 ever deliver with all knowledge! with all knowledge 
 deliver, deliver, completely deliver! purify, purify, 
 purify, completely purify ! deliver, oh deliver all 
 living creatures! etc., &e. 
 
 Pass on from these poor deluded souls that grope 
 in the darkness for the light of a Saviour whom they 
 know not. On the walls to the right and left you 
 see ranged the life-sized statues of eighteen priests, 
 Lohans or Arhans or Lamas your guide calls them. 
 They also receive homage and worship by the priests 
 who look upon them as the first apostles of Northern 
 Buddhism. 
 
 But what clo we see there in the background, 
 partly screened by a large altar covered with censers 
 and vases and plates of offering? Three colossal 
 images, perhaps over thirty feet high, placed in sit- 
 ting posture, carefully executed and richly gilt, their 
 countenances bearing an expression of placid tranquil- 
 ity. Do not rashly jump at the conclusion that this 
 must be a representation of the famous trinity of 
 Northern Buddhists. Perhaps it is so, perhaps not. 
 Appeal to your guide. If you are in a temple dedi- 
 cated to the worship of Amitabha Buddha, the triad 
 of gigantic figures is Amitabha in the centre, Avalo- 
 kiteshvara (his spiritual son) at his left, and Malms- 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 01 
 
 tamaprapta, a famous disciple of Buddha, at his 
 right hand. Otherwise you may have before your 
 eyes what are popularly — though not quite correctly 
 — called the Buddhas of the past, present and future, 
 that is to say, Shakyamuni the historic founder of 
 ancient Buddhism, Avalokiteshvara (Kwanyin) the 
 head of the present Buddhist hierarchy, who is how- 
 ever strictly speaking not a Buddha but a Bodhisat- 
 tva, and Maitreya the Buddha that is to appear in 
 the future and is looked upon as the coming Messiah 
 of Buddhism. 
 
 But suppose you have really before you the re- 
 presentation of the trinity, you will at once recog- 
 nize the statue of Shakyamuni Buddha by the cur- 
 led hair and the curious bump on the top of his 
 head. The second statue is conspicuous by four 
 arms, two of which are folded in prayer whilst the 
 third holds a rosary and the fourth a book: for this 
 is the second person in the trinity, called Dlianna 
 (i.e. the law or religion). The third constituent of 
 the trinity called Samgha (i.e. the church or clergy) 
 is represented by a statue with two arms, of which 
 the one rests on the knee, whilst the other holds a 
 lotos-flower. 
 
 Well, you exclaim astonished, when your guide 
 tells you that “ these three are one,” where has this 
 dogma of a trinity come from ? There is no trace 
 of it in ancient or so to speak classic Buddhism. 
 Southern Buddhists even to the present day know 
 nothing of it. Where has it come from ? Is it the 
 Brahminical Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, 
 or is it perhaps an imitation of the Christian trinity 
 
92 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 of God the Father, the Son and the Hoi)’ Ghost? 
 Neither of the two. The Brahminical Trimurti is in 
 all probability of later growth than this Buddhistic 
 Triratna. Besides there are no points of similarity 
 in the offices ascribed to the individual constituents 
 of the Buddhistic Triratna and the Brahminical 
 Trimurti or the Christian trinity. The origin of this 
 Buddhistic trinity is to be explained in this way. 
 
 It was natural that Shakyamuni Gautama Bud- 
 dha, the great founder of Buddhism, should become 
 an object of worship after his death. It was likewise 
 natural, that when he was gone who had before 
 been to his disciples the only criterion and judge of 
 the truth, the followers of Buddhism should, in the 
 absence of any standard work written by Shakyamuni 
 himself and in the absence of any fixed creed, feel the 
 want of some comprehensive formula, some simple 
 articles of faith, which might be to them what the Con- 
 fessio Apostolica afterwards was to the early Christians. 
 
 In looking for such a short but comprehensive 
 condensation of the faith established by Shakyamuni, 
 they naturally remembered first those of his sayings, 
 which he had enunciated shortly before his death 
 with the expressed intention of giving his disciples 
 some guidance for the future. “ Ananda,’ said he, 
 “when I am gone, you must not think that there is 
 no Buddha; the discourses I have delivered and the 
 precepts I have enjoined must be my successors or 
 representatives and be to you as Buddha.’ ell, 
 there they had Buddha’s discourses and precepts (i.e. 
 Dharma) placed in the same rank with Buddha him- 
 self whom they already worshipped. 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 93 
 
 Again, among those “seven imperishable pre- 
 cepts” which Shakyamuni gave to his disciples short- 
 ly before his death, the first in order is “to keep 
 assemblies or convocations (Samgha) regularly from 
 time to time.” W hat can he more natural now, 
 than that the first preachers of Buddhism after the 
 removal of their great master used those three 
 constituents Buddha, Dharma and Samgha as a 
 standing theme for all their sermons, as the test 
 of faith for those who wished to enter the Buddhist 
 church? 
 
 At any rate it is an undisputed fact, that im- 
 mediately after the death of Shakyamuni the formula 
 “ I take my refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Samgha”^- 
 was practically in use as the formula fidei for lay- 
 members of the Buddhist church, and likewise that 
 this very formula was commonly called the formula 
 of “the three refuges” (Trisharana). 
 
 This then was apparently the starting point and 
 the first stage in the process of development through 
 which this Buddhist doctrine of a trinity passed. 
 Had it stopped here — and Southern Buddhism never 
 went farther — we could not speak of a trinity, but 
 simply of a triple dogma, of a triad of articles of 
 faith, of which the first inculcated the divine charac- 
 ter of the founder of Buddhism as a person, whilst 
 the second referred to the abstract unity of the 
 Buddhist dogma, and the third to the collective 
 unity of the clergy. All three were considered as 
 worthy of reverence and divine worship, but they 
 were not viewed as three persons nor as three per- 
 sons in one, ihev formed no trinity. 
 
 7 •/ «/ 
 
94 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 In the course of time however this doctrine un- 
 derwent some modification and received further de- 
 velopment in the hands of Northern Buddhists and 
 especially through the influence of the Mahayana 
 school. In this second period of the history of the 
 Buddhist Triratna, the Brahminical Trimurti of Brah- 
 ma, Vishnu and Shiva, may have influenced the 
 \ speculative minds of Buddhist teachers. But even 
 without assuming this to be the case, one may easily 
 understand, how Buddhists of a speculative turn of 
 mind might, without much impulse from without, by 
 the mere impetus of speculative reasoning come to 
 unite those three constituents or heads of doctrine 
 and consider them as a threefold manifestation of one 
 historical person (Shakyamuni). They would then 
 look upon Buddha as the personified intelligence, 
 view his doctrine i.e. Dharma as the incarnate Logos 
 and call Samgha (the Buddhist church or communion 
 of saints) the collective unison of both. This at any 
 rate is the form in which the idea of a Triratna was 
 cast by the dogmatists of this period. 
 
 With the rise of the Tantra school ideas bor- 
 rowed from Shivaism and mixed with Brahminical 
 theories began to be freely transplanted upon the 
 fruitful soil of Northern Buddhism. Shivaism, which 
 ascribes to Shiva a threefold body, and Brahminism 
 with its corresponding Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu 
 and Shiva gave now a fresh impetus to the develop- 
 ment of the Buddhistic trinitarian dogma. 
 
 In Nepaul a threefold form of existence was as- 
 cribed to every Buddha, and the distinction, to which 
 I alluded above, was made of a terrestrial Buddha 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 95 
 
 (Maruichi Buddha), of a celestial Buddha (Dhyani 
 Buddha) and of a reflex of the latter (Dhyani B6- 
 dhisattva). 
 
 In China and Tibet a similar distinction was 
 made with regard to the nature of every Buddha. 
 Intelligence (Bodhi) being the fundamental charac- 
 teristic of a Buddha, Northern Buddhists now distin- 
 guished (1) essence, (tf) reflex, (3) practical application 
 of his intelligence. Shakyainuni was therefore con- 
 sidered to be personified intelligence, i.e. Buddha ; 
 his law or the religion established bv him, his reflex, 
 as it were, left behind when the man entered Nir- 
 vana, was called Dharma; whilst the practical issue 
 of both was said to be the church or rather the 
 priesthood, which alone forms the church, and desig- 
 nated Samgha. 
 
 Noav each of these three manifestations of one 
 historical person received further the attributes of 
 personality, and therefore to each a separate name 
 was given. Buddha as a person retained of course 
 his name Shakyainuni ; Dharma personified was called 
 Vairotchana ; and Samgha received the cognomen 
 Lochana. But these three persons were asserted to 
 be essentially and substantially one. 
 
 Still the atheistic element in Buddhist speculation 
 was too strong aud a reaction took place. Dharma 
 was now placed in the first rank — to do away with 
 the preponderance of the personal element, — and ex- 
 plained as the unconditioned underived entity, combin- 
 ing in itself the spiritual and material principles of the 
 universe. From Dharma, it was taught, proceeded 
 Buddha by emanation as the creative energy, and 
 
96 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 produced in conjunction with Dharma the third cons- 
 tituent of the trinity, viz. Saingha, which was viewed 
 as the comprehensive sum of all actual life or exist- 
 ence. Having thus destroyed the personal character of 
 the first, person (Dharma) in this trinity, Dharma was 
 further identified with Pradjna, the highest virtue 
 according to the Buddhist system of morality and 
 the principal means for attaining to Nirvana, imply- 
 ing especially a voluntary secession from the versatile 
 phenomenal world into that ot abstraction. Naturally 
 then Dharma was viewed as an abstract first princi- 
 ple, Buddha became a mere phenomenon and Samgha 
 an idea and nothing more. This is the form under 
 which the so called Buddhist trinity is now-a-days 
 promulgated among Northern Buddhists from Nepaul 
 to Corea, even in popular literature. And this is, 
 therefore, the meaning of the three colossal images, 
 the sight pf which has led us away into this lengthy 
 digression. But, be it understood, this is the esoteric 
 view of the Triratna. 
 
 The common people know little or nothing of 
 such speculations. They see before them three se- 
 parate deities, they speak of and worship not a triune 
 god but a triad of idols, which they regard as three 
 different divinities, totally ignoring their unity and 
 unaware that the three “precious ones" they wor- 
 ship are after all but logical abstractions, a purely 
 philosophical fiction. 
 
 But to return to realities, suppose you visit some 
 of the smaller building, you will probably see in one 
 of them a fine marble pagoda reaching to the very 
 rafters of the roof. It is built in strict Indian style. 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 97 
 
 tastefully decorated, and forms the receptacle of some 
 sacred relic. There may be in it perhaps a hair of 
 Buddha, or a tooth, or a particle of his robe, or some 
 relic of one of his disciples. There also prayers are 
 offered and sacrificial offerings of flowers, candles and 
 incense presented by the people, who true to the feti- 
 chistic habits of their forefathers ascribe miraculous 
 healing powers to such relics. 
 
 You pass on to another row of buildings con- 
 taining several shrines. Conspicuous among them is 
 the shrine of Amitabha Buddha. A large crowd of 
 people, chiefly men, are going through the usual forms 
 of worship there, testifying to the great popularity 
 of this deity. You notice on the breast of the idol 
 a strange cross (the Svastika). It is exactly the same 
 diagram as that which you may have seen engraved on 
 ancient church-bells in England and which learned an- 
 tiquarians unanimously declare to be the hammer of 
 Thor (the Scandinavian god of thunder). Perhaps also 
 you remember to have heard that among the German 
 peasantry and in Iceland the same figure is used as a 
 magical charm to dispel thunder. Well, you turn to 
 your guide. What is the meaning of this emblem? 
 He informs you that it is the mystic shibboleth of 
 the believers in the Western Paradise “ an accumu- 
 lation of lucky signs possessing ten thousand effica- 
 cies.” But what about the Western Paradise? 
 
 The dogma of this paradise in the West, the 
 Nirvana of the common people, was (the tradition 
 asserts) transmitted by Shariputtra, one of the great- 
 est disciples of Shakyamuni. It is said that Buddha 
 first told him of the existence of a land of extreme 
 
98 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 happiness (Sukhavati), of a perfect paradise in the 
 Far West, and gave in answer to Shariputtra’s ques- 
 tions the following particulars, which to the present 
 day are generally helievecl in as gospel truth hy 
 Northern Buddhists. 
 
 In that paradise in the West, it is said, with its 
 millions of Buddhas distributed over the country ac- 
 cording to the eight points of the compass, there is 
 one there discoursing on religion. His name is Am- 
 itabha. He is so called because he is substantially 
 light, boundless light, illuminating every part of his 
 dominions. He is also of boundless age, immortal, 
 and all his people are likewise enjoying immortality. 
 
 Now this paradise of the West, situated beyond 
 the confines of our visible world, contains four pre- 
 cious things or wonders. In the first instance it is 
 a kingdom of extreme happiness, there is there ful- 
 ness of life, and no pain nor sorrow mixed with it, 
 no need of being born again, no Nirvana even. In 
 the second instance there is there a seven-fold row 
 of railings or balustrades, thirdly a seven-fold ro\^ of 
 silken nets and lastly a seven-fold row of trees hedg- 
 ing in the whole country. In the midst of it there 
 are seven precious ponds, the water of which posses- 
 ses all the eight qualities which the best water can 
 have, viz., it is still, it is pure and cold, it is sweet 
 and agreeable, it is light and soft, it is fresh and 
 rich, it tranquillizes, it removes hunger and thirst 
 and finally it nourishes all roots. The bottom of 
 these ponds is covered with gold sand, and round 
 about there are pavements . constructed of precious 
 stones and metals, and many two-storied pavilions 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 S9 
 
 built of richly-coloured transparent jewels. On the 
 surface of the water there are beautiful lotos-flowers 
 floating, each as large as a carriage wheel, display- 
 ing the most dazzling colours, and dispersing the 
 most fragrant aroma. There are also beautiful birds 
 there which make delicious, enchanting music, and at 
 every breath of wind the very trees on which those 
 birds are resting join in the chorus, shaking their 
 leaves in trembling accords of sweetest harmony, 
 lliose silken nets also which environ the whole para- 
 dise chime in. This music is like Liecler ohne Worte ; 
 its melodies speak to the heart; but they discourse 
 on Buddha, Dha rma and Samglia, and wake an echo 
 in every breast, so that all the immortals that live 
 in this happy land instinctively join in hymns of 
 praise, devoutly invoking Buddha, Dharina and Sam- 
 gha. But it is all the doing of the miraculous pow- 
 er of Amitabha, who transforms himself into those 
 birds, and produces those unearthly strains of heaven- 
 ly music. 
 
 In this way the story goes on transplanting to 
 this paradise in the West everything that an Asiatic 
 considers beautiful and charming. 
 
 But it is remarkable what a pure moral atmos- 
 phere all the descriptions of this “pure land,’’ as it 
 is called, are breathing, for it is mentioned as one 
 of the chief characteristics of this paradise, that no 
 sin enters therein, no evil thought, no wickedness. 
 All the inhabitants of it are pure and holy men. I 
 say men, because there is no difference of sex there, 
 but every woman, when born into the Western land, 
 is at once transformed into a man. Another remark- 
 
100 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD 
 
 able point in this dogma is, that the way by which 
 one may obtain entrance into this paradise is exceed- 
 ingly easy. For it is by no means absolutely neces- 
 sary to renounce 'the world and to submit to ascetic 
 austerities, celibacy and monastic rides, or to go 
 through all the stages of abstract meditation and con- 
 templation. What is absolutely required is merely 
 'an assiduous and devout worship of Amitabha. “The 
 very name of this Buddha, says a sacred text, if pro- 
 nounced by a devout heart 1000 times or 5000 times, 
 will effectually dispel all harassing thoughts, all fight- 
 ings within and fears without. A continued sincere 
 worship of Amitabha will release men from the rest- 
 less unceasing eddies of transmigration and bring them 
 to the enjoyment of eternal peace and rest in the 
 pure land of the Western heaven. And if once there, 
 there will be no danger of being reborn again into 
 the world of trouble and misery, or of having again 
 to suffer the pangs of dying.” 
 
 It is needless to remark, that this whole dogma, 
 beautiful as it is in its conception, and a true res- 
 ponse to the natural yearning of the human heart 
 for an eternal Sabbath in heaven, is a flat contradic- 
 tion to all the leading doctrines of Buddhism, grant- 
 ing as it does such an easy egress out of the Sansara 
 and substituting immortality for the utter annihilation 
 of the Nirvana theory. But this leads us to the ques- 
 tion, from what source did Northern Buddhists de- 
 rive this strange medley? For it is another remark- 
 able feature about this doctrine that the very name 
 of Amitabha and his paradise arc perfectly unknown 
 to the Buddhists of Ceylon, Burundi and Siam. 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 101 
 
 Strange to say, the dogma of Amitabha made its 
 first appearance in the literature of Northern Budd- 
 hism as early as 147 A.D., when a book under the 
 name of Amitabhasutra was brought from the head- 
 quarters of the Tochari Tartars (Cashmere) to China 
 by a Cashmerian priest called Chi-lu-kia-ch’an. The 
 next appearance of Amitabha is in a list of 1000 
 Buddhas got up by the Mahayana school. But it 
 was not earlier than the fifth century that the wor- 
 ship of Amitabha and the dogma of a paradise in 
 the West began to spread largely. 
 
 The great Chinese traveller Fahien wandered (A. 
 
 D. 400) all over India, but though he alludes to 
 having noticed the worship of Avalokiteshvara and 
 Mandjushri, who are closely associated with the wor- 
 ship of Amitabha, he never mentions the latter, and 
 does not appear to have met in his travels with any 
 trace of a worship addressed to Amitabha. His 
 countryman Hiuentsang, who (A.D. 629-45) passed 
 through Central Asia and India, and published his 
 observations in a verv extensive and accurate form, 
 is likewise silent on the subject. 
 
 Taking these circumstances together with the to- 
 tal absence of the dogma of Amitabha, for which 
 the Buddhist canon of Ceylon, Burrnah and Siam is 
 conspicuous, it seems evident, that India was not the 
 birthplace of the worship of Amitabha. 
 
 And now we may go a step farther. There is 
 another circumstance which makes it probable that 
 the dogma in question originated in Cashmere. It \ 
 reached China in connection with that distinction of 
 Dhyani Buddhas and Dhyani Bodhisattvas and in 
 
102 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 connection with that before-mentioned list of 1000 
 Buddhas, both doctrines being a product of the 
 Mahayana school which was first got up in Cashmere 
 and Nepaul. 
 
 Considering then that Amitabha was originally 
 conceived as impersonal, as the ideal representation 
 of “boundless light,” — a significantly Gnostic idea, — 
 remembering also that his name is mentioned in a 
 list of 1000 Buddhas which naturally reminds us of 
 the 1000 Zarathustras of the Persians, and taking 
 finally into account that the whole doctrine of Ami- 
 tabha and his paradise in the “ West ” is not only 
 unknown to Southern Buddhists, but diametrically 
 opposed to the first principles of Buddhism, it seems 
 most natural to seek the origin of this dogma in 
 Gnostic or Persian ideas influencing the Buddhism 
 of Cashmere and Nepaul. 
 
 Close to the shrine of Amitabha you will find 
 / that of Avalokiteshvara. As the former is especially 
 worshipped by men whose spiritual watchword is 
 “ Westward-Ho,” thus women throng round the altar 
 of the latter in search of a guide to the promised 
 Eldorado in the West. Examine the idol before you. 
 It has the appearance of a female, with three faces 
 joined to one head and a large number of arms, each 
 grasping some symbol of doctrine or some weapon of 
 defence. 
 
 May be, your guide informs you with the ut- 
 most gravity, that this idol has not been made by 
 human hands but fell directly down from the clouds. 
 There might be some sense in this statement if he 
 referred to the dogma connected with the divinity 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 103 
 
 
 which this idol represents. For, like the doctrine of 
 Amitabha, it does not seem to have come from the 
 workshops of either Vedic or Brahamanic mythology, 
 nor does Southern Buddhism know of its origin. 
 
 And yet this Avalokiteshvara — whose name is 
 evidently Sanskrit — seems to have been largely wor- 
 shipped in Northern and Central India a few cen- 
 turies after the beginning of our era, and is at the 
 present day the most popular deity of Northern 
 Buddhists. Various names, titles and offices are 
 given to this god — or goddess, for she is most com- 
 monly now represented as a woman. In China she 
 is called Kwanyin (a literal translation of her San- 
 skrit name), in Japan she is known as K wan non (a 
 corruption of Kwanyin), whilst the Tibetans call her 
 Cenresi and the Mongols Ergetu Khomsin. But all 
 these names and all the legends connected with this 
 deity express one and the same circle of ideas: that 
 this divinity is the god or goddess “that has a 
 thousand arms and a thousand eyes and a merciful 
 heart,” that she listens with compassion to the pray- 
 ers of all who are in any distress of body or mind, 
 especially hov r ever extending a saving hand to those 
 who are in danger on the sea ; that she is now the 
 invisible head and ruler of the present Buddhist 
 church, appearing now and then in the form of man 
 or woman, to interfere on behalf of the faithful, to 
 establish the doctrine of the paradise in the West, 
 to save souls from hell, to assist in the propagation 
 of Buddhism and so forth. 
 
 Many are the legends connected with this popular 
 apostle of mercy. Avalokiteshvara is first heard of 
 
 ) 
 
104 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 as having resided at Potala, a port at the mouth of 
 the Indus, the reputed home of Shakyamuni's ances- 
 tors. Another Potala, likewise the scene of manifest- 
 ations of Avalokitesh vera’s miraculous saving powers, 
 is placed by the legend in “the South of India, East 
 of the Malaya mountains in Malakuta,” in other words 
 somewhere on the coast of Malabar. When Sirnhala, 
 an Indian Buddhist, was shipwrecked on the coast 
 of Ceylon and ensnared by savage Sirens (Rakchasis), 
 Avalokitesh vara appeared in the shape of a horse and 
 carried him across the sea to India, whence he return- 
 ed with an army, slew the Sirens and founded the 
 kingdom of Ceylon, thenceforth the headquarters of 
 Southern Buddhism. 
 
 In China, Avalokiteshvara appeared as a woman, 
 born under the name Kwanyin, as the third daughter 
 of a (fabulous) king called Shubhavyuha (lit. Chwang- 
 yen-wang), who — as the tradition, which identifies 
 him with Chwang-wang of the Chow dynasty, boldly 
 asserts, — lived about G96 B.C. Her father was an 
 unbeliever and finding himself unable to overrule her 
 objections against marriage, he allowed her to go into 
 a convent, but by his orders she was there made to 
 perform the most degrading offices for the other nuns. 
 Celestial spirits (Riehis) however came invisibly to do 
 all the menial work for her. When her father found 
 it out, he got so enraged that he set fire to the con- 
 vent. But a rain fell and extinguished the fire and 
 it appeared that no harm had been done to any of 
 the 500 inmates. Thereupon the king ordered his 
 daughter, Kwanyin, to be arrested and brought into 
 court, but he secretly told her mother to coax the 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 105 
 
 girl into submission. Kwanyin however remained 
 stedfast : she would rather die than be married. The 
 king then sent for the executioner and ordered him 
 to cut off her head. 15 ut as often as the sword 
 touched her neck, the blade split into a thousand 
 pieces, without injuring her. The king now ordered 
 her to be stifled with a red cloth. It was done, but 
 a white tiger suddenly appeared and carried her 
 body off to a dark forest. There her soul, being in 
 a state of torpor, perceived a youth who waved a 
 banner in his hands and ordered her to follow him 
 into the presence of Yaina (the ruler of Hades). 
 She followed him, but whilst passing through the 
 various chambers of torture in hell she kept her 
 hands folded, continually invoking Amitabha Buddha. 
 Thereupon a rain of flowers fell from heaven, the 
 earth produced golden lotos-flowers, and all the in- 
 struments of torture used in hell were smashed. 
 When she appeared before Yaina, the latter, seeing 
 that hell changed under her footsteps into paradise, 
 exclaimed in righteous indignation : how can the 
 world be made better if we are to have no hell? 
 So he ordered Kwanyin to be sent back to the dark 
 forest whence she came. There she suddenly found 
 herself awake as if from a dream. “ I was in hea- 
 ven,” she exclaimed, “and yet here I find myself 
 again on earth! Whither shall I go to dwell?” 
 Whilst saying this she found herself confronted by a 
 Buddhistic hermit, who invited her with many bland 
 speeches to share his hermitage with him. Indig- 
 nantly she refused this offer, reminding the hermit 
 of Buddha's injunction that nuns and monks should 
 
10G 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 live apart. But he replied, “ I am Buddha himself 
 and only came to test your virtue.” He forthwith 
 called a Naga (dragon) spirit, who produced a large 
 lotos-flower, invited her to sit on it, and thus con- 
 veyed her to the island of Potala on the China 
 Coast (now called P‘ootoo). There Kwanyin lived 
 for nine years, saving many mariners from imminent 
 peril and shipwreck, and healing the diseases of in- 
 numerable beings. Hearing that her father was dan- 
 gerously ill, she cut all the flesh off her own arms, 
 and made it into a medicine which restored him to 
 health. To show his gratitude he ordered a statue 
 of Kwanyin to be erected “with arms and eyes com- 
 plete,” but as the word “complete” has in Chinese 
 -the same sound (ts‘ien) as the word Tor “thousand” 
 (ts‘ien), the two terms differing only in tone, the 
 sculptor misunderstood the king’s order. Thus it 
 happened that a statue with “a thousand eyes and 
 a thousand arms” perpetuated her memory. 
 
 The island of P’ootoo, where Kwanyin resided 
 till her death, was in after times relieved from all 
 taxes, handed over to the priesthood, and as the 
 worship of Kwanyin spread over the whole of China 
 and the neighbouring countries, this island continued 
 to be and still is the object of veneration to which 
 pious pilgrims resort from the farthest regions. 
 
 In Tibet also this deity manifested her glory. 
 Avalokiteshvara (as a male deity) is believed to be 
 the ancestor of the Tibetan people. It is said that 
 in ancient times he transformed himself into a mon- 
 key (Brasrinpo), and cohabiting with a demon, who 
 for that purpose assumed the form of a female mon- 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 107 
 
 key (Brasrinmo or Khagroma), he became the father 
 of three sons and three daughters. His children 
 then peopled the previously uninhabited country of 
 Tibet, and thus it has come to pass that the Tibet- 
 ans, like true Darwinians, glory in their supposed 
 descent from a monkey. Avalokiteshvara afterwards 
 exerted himself in various ways to spread the doc- 
 trines of Buddhism in Tibet, and it soon became an 
 established custom there, to accord supreme spiritual 
 and ecclesiastical jurisdiction to those only, who were 
 considered to be incarnations of Avalokiteshvara. 
 Like the Chinese, the Tibetans also have their Potala, 
 a mountain in Lhassa, on the top of which towers 
 the residence of the Dalai Lama in whom and whose 
 successors Avalokiteshvara is supposed to be con- 
 stantly incarnate. 
 
 Japan also has its “thousand-handed Kwannon,” 
 and the same is the case with all the other countries 
 within the pale of Northern Buddhism, the legends 
 there differing only through a slight local colouring 
 from those current in China and elsewhere. One 
 example will suffice. A Japanese tradition relates, 
 that during the civil wars of the middle ages a po- 
 litical refugee, called Morihisa, hid himself in the 
 temple of the thousand-handed Kwannon at Kiyom- 
 idzu in Kioto, and implored this deity with ceaseless 
 prayers for a thousand days. His enemies, however, 
 discovered his retreat and dragged him out to the 
 seashore for execution. But the executioner found 
 all his efforts foiled by the God Kwannon, for at 
 every stroke he essayed, the sword blade split into 
 a thousand pieces without injuring Morihisa. His 
 
108 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRIX 
 
 enemy, who had previously slain all the other mem- 
 bers of Morihisa’s clan, received also a warning 
 through his own wife, to whom Kwannon had ap- 
 peared in a dream interceding on behalf of Morihisa. 
 The latter was therefore set at liberty and being the 
 acknowledged protege of Kwannon he rose to the 
 highest power in the state. 
 
 It is impossible to say where and by whom this 
 dogma of Avalokiteshvara was got up. Judging 
 from internal evidences it would appear that it was 
 first developed by the Mahayana school. This school 
 gave Avalokiteshvara even a place in the trinity, 
 uniting him (her) as the personification of love and 
 charity with another fictitious Bodhisattva, called 
 Mandjushri, the apotheosis of transcendental wisdom, 
 and with Vadjrapani, the Indra of the Vedas, now 
 looked upon as the god of thunder and the personi- 
 fication of power. Forming one of the constituents 
 of the trinity, Avalokiteshvara received the title Ish- 
 vara (Lord), and for the same reason it is that he 
 (she) is often represented with three faces or with 
 eleven faces arranged in three divisions. 
 
 Afterwards the Tantra school applied its idea of 
 Celestial Buddhas and Bodhisattvas upon this dogma 
 and Avalokiteshvara was then declared to be the 
 spiritual reflex or son of Amitabha Buddha. 
 
 Shivaism also had its influence upon the form- 
 ation of the dogma in question, and Avalokiteshvara 
 is consequently often represented with three eyes, 
 with a crown of skulls on her head or a necklace of 
 skulls or a rosary made of finger bones. Shivaism 
 especially promoted Avalokiteslivara’s being viewed 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 109 
 
 as a female deity endowed with great powers of sor- 
 cery and as the authoress of a most popular magic 
 formula, “ om mani padme hum”, which is used by 
 all Northern Buddhists as a favourite formula of 
 exorcism or inscribed on amulets, on houses, walls, 
 pillars, books, pill-boxes, coins and so forth, being 
 supposed to be the most effective charm against cal- 
 amities and noxious influences of all kinds. 
 
 1 have gone into all these legendary accounts 
 current among the people with reference to this 
 particular deity, because they form a fair specimen 
 of the popular hagiology of Northern Buddhists. 
 Similar stories are told about .many other minor dei- 
 ties, whose effigies you will find profusely scattered 
 over the many courts and chapels connected with 
 any large temple. Most of them bear names which 
 connect their origin and history with Brahmanic or 
 even Yedic mythology. Many however of these dii 
 minores are purely deifications of ancient native wor- 
 thies. Famous priests, physicians of great renown, 
 Avomen of extraordinary devotion, munificence and 
 piety, have been honoured Avith a place in the po- 
 pular pantheon, and are as devoutly Avorshipped in 
 their native countries as any of the ancient Buddhas 
 and Bodhisatt.vas. 
 
 But suppose you retrace your steps through the 
 various temples you have visited, you will find it 
 interesting to have a look at the apartments occupied 
 by the priests. They have most of them their OAvn 
 cells, but dine together in one large hall, Avhich, to 
 gether Avith the kitchen and its enormous rice-boilers, 
 are Avorthy a visit. The abbot has h’s private rooms 
 
110 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 apart from the cells of the priests. You may find 
 him willing to receive you, but you will be astonish- 
 ed if you enter his rooms, expecting to find there the 
 same primitive simplicity and economy, w r hich you 
 noticed when passing through the apartments allotted 
 to the use of the priests, and which reminded you so 
 strongly of the internal arrangements of a Roman 
 Catholic monastery. A modern abbot takes it gener- 
 ally very easy. If his monastery is not too far from 
 any centre of foreign commerce, he will show you 
 with pride a collection of articles de luxe. He has 
 watches and clocks of foreign manufacture, photo- 
 graphs of less than questionable decency, and he is 
 generally not only a confirmed opium smoker, but 
 considers himself a good judge of champagne, port and 
 sherry. His attendants are invariably laymen, rela- 
 tives of his own, who may have no intention whatever 
 to take the vows. But the same abbot may also have 
 a printing press with moveable types, likewise of for- 
 eign manufacture, and you may see it turning out 
 neat reprints of the most popular portions of the 
 Buddhist scriptures, or little tracts and pamphlets of 
 local reputation. 
 
 After a visit to the gardens, which are generally 
 well kept and abound in curious specimens of artifi- 
 cial training, after a passing glance at the place where 
 the bodies of deceased priests are burned and the 
 tomb which covers their ashes, you return through 
 the labyrinth of galleries and courts. In one of the 
 latter you may now notice a series of little chambers, 
 popularly called chambers of horrors, containing sta- 
 tuary representations of the various tortures supposed 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELTGTON. Ill 
 
 to be employed in the various compartments of hell. 
 For your guide will tell you, with a sly hit at your- 
 self, that all those, who do not believe in Buddhism 
 or violate its commandments, will after death be re- 
 born in hell. He will inform you that there are 
 underneath our earth eight large hells of extreme 
 heat, eight more of extreme cold, again eight hells 
 of utter darkness, and on the edge of each universe 
 ten cold hells, but as each of these hells has many 
 antechambers and smaller hells attached, all being 
 places of torture, there are in reality altogether over 
 a hundred thousand of such chambers of horrors. 
 A pleasant prospect to heretics like yourself, — your 
 priest will add. 
 
 Whilst Southern Buddhists knew only eight prin- 
 cipal hells of extreme heat and minor hells on the 
 extreme border of each universe, Northern Buddhists 
 added the above-mentioned cold hells and beside those 
 a special hell for females, called the placenta-tank, 
 which is believed to consist of an immense pool of 
 blood, and from this hell it is said no release is pos- 
 sible. Poor women, Buddhism does not seem to ap- 
 preciate the rights nor even the goodness of women. 
 All the other hells, with the exception of this female 
 apartment, are only purgatories, and release from 
 them can be procured through good works or through 
 the atoning masses performed by the priests on be- 
 half of the sufferers in hell. 
 
 On passing out through the gate, your eye may 
 perhaps be arrested by a crowd of people surround- 
 ing a number of pigs wallowing in the richest food 
 thrown before them. You will also notice in a con- 
 
112 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 spicuous position near these pigs a poor-box, into 
 which the people drop their offerings of money. 
 What is it all about? Look at the inscription affixed 
 to that box in large staring letters “save life!” 
 The greatest Buddhist commandment is that which 
 forbids the taking of life. All life, human as well as 
 animal life, 'is absolutely sacred in the eyes of the 
 Buddhist devotee. The killing of animals for the pur- 
 pose of food is a heinous offence. Still more so is 
 the love of cruelty which leads the strong to prey 
 upon the weak and enables the sportsman, the fox- 
 hunter, the deer-stalker, the pigeon-shooter in heathen 
 and Christian countries to derive a horrible enjoy- 
 ment from the piteous sufferings of poor dumb 
 animals. Those pigs are therefore exhibited by the 
 priests to remind the people of this greatest of all 
 Buddhist commandments. And the people drop their 
 mites into^ the box by way of atoning to some extent 
 for their own shortcomings in that respect. For 
 Northern Buddhists are — with the exception of the 
 priests — by no means vegetarians, and even priests 
 may be seen privately enjoying the good things of 
 this world in the shape of animal food. Still I 
 should think you will be inclined to bestow some 
 praise on these pious priests who charitably feed those 
 “ sacred pigs,” as European travellers have styled 
 them, for the mere respect of animal life, who inter- 
 pret the command “ thou shalt love thy neighbour 
 as thyself” in a wider sense even than Christian, and 
 see their neighburs not only in their fellowinen, but 
 also in every single member of the animal world, in 
 every wild beast and even in the despised pig that 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 113 
 
 Wallows in the mud. And certainly a public protest 
 against cruel sports and useless destruction of animal 
 life is a good and needful thing, for sports of a cruel 
 character do tend to blunt the feelings and develop 
 that terrible callousness of disposition which leads to 
 an utter disregard of the sanctity of human life. 
 But, on the other hand, it is ridiculous ■ to compare 
 this Buddhist commandment “ thou shalt not take 
 life” with the religion of Him who would not break 
 the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax, and to 
 give the palm — as some European admirers of Bud- 
 dhism have actually done — to this Buddhist ideal of 
 charity. Just ask your guide whether the Buddhist 
 church, which so laudably extends its charit}' even 
 to the brute creation and assiduously feeds sacred pigs 
 in its monasteries, exerts herself to ameliorate the 
 condition of poor suffering humanity? He will have 
 to acknowledge that no hospitals, no asylums for the 
 blind, the deformed, the destitute, have ever been 
 founded by a Buddhist community. Alms, indeed, 
 are encouraged, but they are to be bestowed on the 
 worthiest, on the priest, the cloister, the church, and 
 thus the current of charity is diverted from the des- 
 titude or outcasts of society whose very destitution 
 is according to the Buddhist scriptures a proof of 
 their unworthiness, to the worthiest on earth, to the 
 community of priests, who are bound to receive the 
 gifts bestowed, in order that the faithful may acquire 
 merit, though forbidden by the self-renouncing prin- 
 ciples of their creed to retain them for their private 
 advantage. Thus it was brought about that the Bud- 
 dhist priests take to feeding sacred pigs. A Buddhist 
 
114 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 Peabody, therefore, would be doing the correct thing 
 if he were to throw all his humanitarian efforts with 
 all his money — before the swine. 
 
 It is almost needless to remark after the above- 
 given explanations that those “sacred pigs” receive 
 nowhere in any Buddhistic country anything like 
 worship either by the people or by the priests. And 
 yet a member of the American Expedition to China 
 and Japan fell into this error and published it abroad 
 in the printed report of that expedition. After des- 
 cribing what he calls the sacred pigs in the sacred 
 styes in Canton, he exclaims in pitiful tone, “ It was 
 something of a curiosity though somewhat saddening 
 in the reflections it occasioned to behold the sancti- 
 fied pork and the reverence with which it is wor- 
 shipped.” 1 would not have mentioned this absurd 
 mistake had not a learned writer in the Fortnightly 
 Review (Feb., 1870, p. 215) based on this miscon- 
 ception a whole system of pig-worship and pages of 
 lucubrations about “the primitive mysterious boar’ 
 who “is worshipped in China and was worshipped 
 among the Celts,” and placed that supposed pig-wor- 
 ship of China into analogy with “ the existing worship 
 of Vishnu in his avatar as a boar.’’ There is no 
 people in the world fonder of pork than the Chinese 
 are, but there is not a trace of porcine-worship to 
 be found among them, unless the “ worship of the 
 pig ” consists in eating it. 
 
 Well, you have visited a fair specimen of the 
 popular pantheon of Northern Buddhism. What is 
 the result? You have seen multitudes of men and 
 women bowing down before idols of clay, offering 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 115 
 
 their gifts, addressing them in words of prayer and 
 praise and thanksgiving, consulting the oracle by 
 throwing lots in their presence and receiving a slip 
 of paper issued in the name of the individual deity 
 in the ambiguous terms of Delphi ; you have noticed 
 the reverence, the trust, the fervour with which — 
 not the priests indeed — but the common people ap- 
 peal to these legions of gods. 
 
 Is this the boasted Atheism of the Buddhist reli- 
 gion ? Surely many, even of the common people, 
 may be able to distinguish the idol from the divinity 
 it represents, but it is undeniable that even they 
 have before their minds during the act of worship 
 the idea of a personal being of great power, mighty 
 to save, to bless, to avert misfortune. From the 
 legends connected with the several deities worship- 
 ped by the people it appears that they all were ori- 
 ginally human beings. Though they now appear 
 clothed in supernatural garb, heavenly spirits, genii, 
 demons, they all are believed to have been human 
 beings, plain men or women, at some time or other. 
 And yet the very names Buddha, Bodhisattva, Arhat, 
 which once signified but moral fallible men more or 
 less advanced in the path to Nirvana, have in the 
 parlance of the multitude in Buddhistic communities 
 assumed a far higher significance. Buddha is to them 
 simply the highest God, the Deus optimus maximus. 
 Bodhisattvas (and Arhats) are demi-gods. The former 
 is God in esse, the latter are gods in posse. Both, 
 Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, are worshipped and relied 
 on as God by Northern Buddhists. The difference 
 lies in this, that Buddhas are looked upon as highest 
 
116 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 in rank, whilst Bodhisattvas are considered to be 
 nearest in sympathy. So then, as there are many 
 Buddhas and many Bodhisattvas, the religion of 
 Northern Buddhists is practically systematic deifica- 
 tion of humanity, displayed in a thoroughly poly- 
 theistic form of worship. 
 
 But in many instances these polytheistic prac- 
 tices have been developed into a form of religion 
 very much akin to Monotheism. Nepaul for instance 
 has one supreme Buddha, called Adi-Buddha. Several 
 European scholars (Hodgson, and after him Bunsen 
 and others) have taken hold of this fact and triump- 
 hantly proclaimed abroad, that Buddhism so far from 
 being a system of Atheism had led its devotees (in 
 Nepaul at least) to direct Monotheism. 
 
 This assertion however requires some modifica- 
 tion. If we examine the facts of the case, we find 
 that the term Adi-Buddha means simply “ an ancient 
 Buddha ” and that the Nepaulese like all other Budd- 
 hists know not less than seven ancient Buddhas. Still 
 it is true that Nepaulese Buddhists^like all North- 
 ern Buddhists who are under the influence of the 
 Mahayana school — show a decided preference for one 
 of these ancient worthies or rather for his celestial 
 form (Dhyani Buddha), and this celestial Buddha is 
 then styled Adi-Buddha 2 )ar excellence. Indeed they 
 address him and worship him very much as if he 
 were a supreme god, but theoretically speaking his 
 personality is lost in philosophical abstractions which 
 identify this Adi-Buddha with the highest moral virtue 
 (PradjnA), and convert him into a mere hyperbole, a 
 mere figure of speech expressing the existence of a 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 117 
 
 moral law in the universe. Strictly speaking they do 
 not look upon him as the personal creator and sustainer 
 of the universe. And yet it is undeniable that there is 
 at the bottom of this Adi-Buddha theory a strong ten- 
 dency towards Monotheism, which though counteract- 
 ed by philosophical scholasticism, shows itself in the 
 popularized form of this dogma of one Adi-Buddha. 
 
 The common people of Nepaid reverence and pray 
 to this Buddha in decided preference to all other 
 Buddhas. They rely upon him for protection and sal- 
 vation, treating him to all practical intents and pur- 
 poses as if he were the highest God, a personal being 
 of unlimited wisdom, goodness and power, the very 
 creator and sustainer of the world. What Adi Budd- i 
 ha is to the Nepaulese the same is the above-mention- 
 ed Amitabha Buddha, with his spiritual progeny (Ava- 
 lokiteshvara), to the majority of Northern Buddhists. 
 When they come to reason on the subject they in- 
 deed allow that he is not the first cause of the exis- 
 tence of the universe, tha the is but the regent of the 
 far-famed paradise in the West, and yet practically 
 they implore him, or his vice-gerent Avalokiteshvara, 
 as if he were Almighty God, creator and ruler of the 
 whole world, omniscient, omnipresent. Though scep- 
 tic philosophers may treat this dogma as a mere al- 
 legory, the common people stoutly maintain their be- 
 lief in Amitabha as the highest personal God, and 
 in the objective reality of his paradise. 
 
 We see therefore in this popular belief in an Adi- 
 Buddha or Amitabha the instinctive groping of the 
 religious conscience after the unknown God, a faint 
 glimmering of the truth which revelation alone can 
 
118 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 bring home to the human mind in full undimmed 
 clearness. The same is the case with that popular le- 
 gend of a paradise in the western regions : it is a 
 spark of divine light, a particle of the truth which 
 Christianity alone has unfolded in the revelation of 
 a heavenly Jerusalem, where there shall be no more 
 death, neither sorrow nor crying, for the former 
 things have passed away. 
 
 There is another point in which the religious 
 conscience of Northern Buddhists, unsatisfied by an- 
 cient Buddhism, added to the inherited traditional 
 stock of ideas. Ancient Buddhism knows of no sin- 
 atoning power ; it holds out to the troubled guilty 
 conscience no prospect ot mercy, no chance of obtain- 
 ing forgiveness, no possibility of justification, allowing 
 not even so much as extenuation of guilt under any 
 circumstances whatever. 
 
 A Buddha is not a Saviour. The only thing he 
 can do for others is to show them the way of doing 
 good and overcoming evil, to point out the path to 
 Nirvana by his example, and to encourage others by 
 means of teaching and exhortation and warning to 
 follow his footsteps. If any human being is to reach 
 Nirvana it must be done by independent action. 
 Do good and you will be saved, — this is the long 
 and short of the Buddhist religion. The sinner must 
 expiate his guilt by punishment and by redoubled 
 exertions in good works. There is indeed a ceremony 
 of confession of sins, — for the priest; but it only 
 serves to set him right again in his relation to the 
 community of priests; it does not influence his pros- 
 pects of future happiness. 
 
13UDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 119 
 
 Buddhism therefore is the hardest of all laws, 
 for it blesses indeed the righteous, but it curses and 
 condemns the sinner without extending a helping 
 hand, without promising any pardon to any repenting 
 contrite heart. There is a Nirvana for the virtuous 
 and innumerable hells are there for the wicked, and 
 nothing more. Every individual has to work out his 
 own salvation, unaided, unpitied, uncared for, placed 
 between heaven and hell, trembling under the unre- 
 lenting yoke of the moral law of his religion — natur- 
 ally a burden too heavy to be borne. 
 
 We have already seen how the common people 
 endeavour to propitiate the gods of their own mak- 
 ing by sacrificial offerings, supposing thereby to ob- 
 tain in spite of their own shortcomings the favour 
 of these deities. We have further seen how the same 
 power was attributed to prayer, to a mere invocation 
 of the names of certain deities or the mere recital of 
 short forms of prayer believed to have been invented 
 by them. These mystic formulae, invariably couched 
 in Sanskrit, were popularly trusted in, being suppos- 
 ed to possess magic sin-atoning and saving powers. 
 The very circumstance of their being constituted by 
 the unintelligible sounds of a foreign language in- 
 spired the people with so much more awe and confi- 
 dence. Omne ignotum pro mirabile est. Foremost 
 among these magic sounds ranks the triliteral mono- 
 syllable om (or aum), the symbol of the trinity, the 
 I am that I am, the alpha and omega of Northern 
 Buddhism. 
 
 Of course this state of things could not be en- 
 dured by a clergy fond of wielding uncontrolled 
 
120 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 power over the multitude. The priests had foresight 
 enough to understand that the power of prayer, if 
 freely accessible to all, would diminish their influence 
 upon the people. It was an encroachment upon their 
 privileges. As however the vox populism this case 
 something like vox Dei — was too strong to resist it 
 with any hope of success, they adopted the idea of 
 atonement through prayer, but took it into their own 
 keeping, establishing an elaborate ritual for the pur- 
 pose of expiating guilt, counteracting evil influences 
 of all sorts, alleviating the tortures of hell, procur- 
 ing release from hell and re-birth into one of the 
 heavens or into the Western Paradise. To engraft 
 this ritual upon the orthodox tradition, to prove that 
 it was in perfect accordance with the principles of 
 ancient Buddhism, they produced a most voluminous 
 literature (Yogatchara Sutras and Dharanis) on the 
 subject, ingeniously forging whole Sutras composed 
 in ancient' style and making Shakyamuni himself 
 therein enunciate those ideas of an atonement pro- 
 curable through the intercession of the priests. 
 
 Thus they established a ritual for the purpose 
 under the pretended authority of Shakyamuni. But 
 the ritual in question is so richly interlarded with 
 Sanskrit prayers, and the ceremonies prescribed in it 
 are so complicated and surrounded with so much 
 hocus-pocus, that it not only imposed upon the com- 
 mon people who were appalled by the assumed halo 
 of ancient authority and listened with superstitious 
 fear and reverence to the mystic jargon the very 
 obscurity of which made them consider it profound, 
 but it made the whole ceremonial a monopoly of the 
 
BUDDHISM, A POPULAR RELIGION. 
 
 121 
 
 priests. For they alone have the key to the under- 
 standing of the whole, they alone can teach its me- 
 chanical details. 
 
 Quite a number of magic paraphernalia, the 
 handling of which remains a mystery to the unini- 
 tiated, is necessary for the proper performance of 
 that ritual. There is the so-called sceptre of Indra 
 (Vadjra) used as a magic wand for the purpose of 
 mantic conjurations and exorcism, there are magic 
 circles and mystic diagrams to be drawn, holy water 
 to be consecrated and sprinkled about, rice and 
 flowers to be scattered to the rythmic recital of 
 magic incantations (in Sanskrit), whilst the officiating 
 priest goes through certain stages of ecstatic medita- 
 tion in order to identify himself with the particular 
 deity invoked in each case and accompanies the 
 prayers of the priests by mysterious manipulations 
 (Mudra). 
 
 To give an idea of the latter I will but quote a 
 passage or two from a commentary to one of those 
 rituals. “The officiating priest has in his heart, 
 pronounces with his mouth and imitates with his fin- 
 gers the mystic (Sanskrit) character hri, whereupon 
 from his heart, mouth and fingers proceed rays of 
 red-coloured light which destroy hell (s.c. for the 
 benefit of those individuals on behalf of whom the 
 ritual is gone through).” Again we read in the 
 same work, “the officiating priest, lifting up the 
 middle-finger of each hand and pressing both hands 
 close together forms the sign hri whereupon from 
 the points of his middle fingers a stream of mercy 
 goes out which takes away the sins and guilt of all 
 
122 
 
 LECTURE THE THIRD. 
 
 evil-doers.” It is needless to add that this ritual in- 
 tended especially for the benefit of the souls of 
 deceased persons and in that case accompanied by 
 the burning of many utensils and articles of luxury, 
 all made of paper, is only performed in return for a 
 ' certain sum of money paid to the priests, and that 
 the length and consequent efficacy of the ceremonial 
 gone through on behalf of any individual depends 
 upon the length of the latter’s purse. 
 
 * * * 
 
 This then is the practical religion of Northern 
 Buddhism, or rather, I should say, this is l wh at 
 classic Buddhism has come to in the hands of the 
 common people. 
 
 1 take leave of my subject, which I make bold 
 to say, I have endeavoured to elucidate honestly and 
 impartially. I have striven to do justice to every- 
 thing that is good and true in Buddhism. But in 
 the interest of truth I have to confess, and I trust 
 the above given facts will bear me out in the as- 
 sertion, that Buddhism is after all neither better nor 
 worse than any other religion built up by man : it 
 is a science without inspiration, a religion without 
 God, a body without a spirit, unable to regenerate, 
 cheerless, cold, dead and deplorably barren of results. 
 Can these dry bones live? 
 
 FINIS. 
 

 
 
 
 1