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the woods, with no shelter but that of the trees; must never sleep in a recumbent posture; once a month they must visit a burning or burial ground, and there reflect on the vanity of all things.

Of course, the idea was that, the greater the austerity the more rapid the progress towards the stage of nirvana, extinction. Here, again, a marked feature of resemblance between Buddhism and Hinduism appears; in each case meditation and mortification were enjoined as the highway to emancipation. The Buddhist sought thereby to kill desire, and, desire gone, annihilation would ensue; the Hindu aimed at utter abstraction, forgetfulness of his personal identity, and, that attained, he would lapse into the all-pervading Brahmă. But a noteworthy difference also appears-the devout Hindu said, 'All action, good and bad, necessitates future births and defers absorption, therefore I must cease from good deeds as well as bad; I must do nothing, I must think nothing.' The devout Buddhist said, 'I must cease from all evil action, but I must exercise myself to the utmost in charity, benevolence, and virtue, and thus I shall be hastened onwards towards nirvana.'

This brings before us the one great feature in which Buddhism stands out in striking and beautiful contrast to its more ancient rival. Hinduism-the later Hinduism which was depicted in the preceding chapter, was essentially a selfish system, the development of caste made it such. However devout the Hindu might be, and however zealous in his religious exercises, his one thought centred upon self; his own sole emancipation was the thing he cared for. Buddhism, on the contrary, enjoined a world-wide benevolence; it enforced universal charity; it set forth the common brotherhood of all mankind, it breathed kindness to every living thing-not to man only but to the meanest animal. Passing strange that a system which ignored God could be so excellent!_wondrous that the fabric of morality could tower so high with no divine basis

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to rest upon! But, however we may admire and wonder at the structure, experience has proved it to be, what Godless morality must ever be, a veritable castle in the air.' Buddhism has utterly failed in making its followers virtuous, benevolent, and unselfish. The moral excellences enjoined by Buddha are nowhere more conspicuous by their absence than in those lands where his religion most abounds.

In speaking of the good points of Buddha's system we must not overlook two important considerations. It would be ungenerous to Hinduism to deny that the reformer had learnt much that was morally excellent and true from the religion which he forsook; indeed, he seems not to have professed that he evolved his moral code out of his inner consciousness. The other point to be borne in mind is the natural beauty and amiability of his character; he was just one of those men to whom the path of virtue is neither rugged nor steep, who are generous and benevolent, not because they have acquired such a disposition, but because it is natural to them. With Gautama active charity was less a duty than a pleasure, and from being a pleasure it grew by cultivation to an actual passion.

Throughout the painful ordeal of his search after light, he ever had the benefit of others before him; accordingly, no sooner had he attained his object than he commenced a life of active missionary labour. He returned to his home; he instructed his father and all the members of his family in the new faith; they became his earliest disciples; but he left them, to carry the glad tidings to others; he betook himself to his former Brahman friends and communicated to them his discovery. He was sorely grieved to find that some of those whom he had loved and honoured had, during the years of his seclusion, passed away strangers to the way of deliverance.

He knew no distinctions of persons; he proclaimed his doctrines to rich and poor, to the Sudra and the Brahman alike. Marvellous success rewarded his toil and diligence. It was but

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natural that the Brahmans should oppose his levelling theory; but the message of actual equality was sweet and grateful to their despised and down-trodden inferiors; no doubt, this was the grand secret of Buddha's triumph; moreover the very spectacle of the man-a king's son, traversing the country in a mendicant's garb, eschewing honours, wealth, and ease, meekly enduring reproach and contumely, consorting freely with the lowest of the low, denying himself to instruct and benefit all—must have deeply impressed his auditors and have aided their faith. The superior moral tone of his teaching must also have commended itself to the consciences of myriads to whom the learned disquisitions of Hindu philosophers were a meaningless puzzle.

But his success was not confined to the common people; a number of petty sovereigns were led to embrace and further his religion. At length, after forty-five years of unwearied toil, he passed away. The closing scene of his life was touching and remarkable; it is said that he, on a preaching tour, had walked a greater distance than he had strength for—he was eighty years of age; he had also partaken of some unwholesome food; the consequence was that he died of dysentery. He expired at Kusinagara, and his dying words were, 'All things are transient.'

Can we but admire the goodness of the man, and the zeal of the missionary, with so little in his creed to foster virtue or inspire enthusiasm? May we not venture to add, with truth, that, to modern missionaries, he being dead yet speaketh'?

It does not appear that Buddha left any writings behind him. After his death a council was called by the King of Magadha and a collection was made of all the teachings and sayings of the reformer; these were arranged into three sets of books, which record the doctrines, moral maxims, and metaphysical utterances of Buddha. These constitute the sacred scriptures of the Buddhists.

The new religion in the meantime continued to spread, though its progress was, no doubt, retarded by divisions and dis

sensions which arose in the Buddhist community. Asoka (the grandson of Chandragupta who, after the invasion of Alexander the Great, became King of Hindustan proper) embraced Buddhism, and made it the religion of the State. This sovereign displayed the utmost zeal and devotion in furthering his adopted

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faith. In the eighteenth year of his reign (about 246 B.C.) he Council v summoned a general Council; its principal objects were the Patua improvement of religious discipline, the repression of sectarian tendencies, and a scheme for sending messengers to propagate the Buddhist creed in foreign lands.

Thus the missionary character which, by his teaching and example, the Founder of this religion had impressed upon it was developed into a scheme of foreign missionary enterprise; not only did Buddhism ignore caste distinctions in the land of his birth, it overleaped the limits of nationality, and sought to embrace the whole world. No other religion had till then appeared with cosmopolitan sympathies. Judaism had preceded Buddhism by eight centuries or more; it had lit its lamp at a heavenly source, and had embodied divine truths to which the latter system was a stranger, but surely it is one of the strange problems of the comparison, that Judaism was less liberal of its light than was Buddhism, and that, in expansive philanthropy and world-wide charity, the latter outstript the former. It is a deeply interesting fact that nearly three centuries before the divine commission was heard, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature' (Mark xvi. 15), Buddhism was sending forth its heralds to proclaim in strange lands its admirable morality, and its lifeless, godless creed.

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In this way, whilst this system, like a mighty Banian tree, flourished in its native soil, it shot forth its branches into Burmah, China, Thibet, and Ceylon; in those lands the descending tendrils rapidly took root, branch after branch again spread; root after root descended, until at length the vast populations of those regions sheltered themselves under its shade. Little did

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Asoka and his council-little did the zealous bands of missionaries sent forth, imagine that, the system which they were so anxious to propagate in foreign parts was doomed utterly to perish in the land of its birth; yet so it proved; rapidly as the parent stem had developed, its roots had never struck very deep into the mother soil, and so, when the storm arose, it yielded to the strain, and fell prostrate, never to rise again.

In accounting for the collapse of Buddhism in India and its triumph in other lands, various considerations must be weighed. Political changes in India helped towards the grand result. Fifty years after the death of Asoka the reins of power fell into the hands of a new dynasty inimical to the Reformer's faith. About the period of Christ's birth a Buddhist dynasty again encouraged and helped it forward. In the third century of the Christian era a Hindu dynasty rose to power; again the fortunes of Buddhism waned. In the meantime Brahmanism was marshalling its forces; for centuries had controversy raged between the two hostile systems; the Brahmans, with their usual adroitness, had tried cajolery and conciliation in the period of Buddhist predominance (Buddha, they said, was, after all, an incarnation of Vishnu); in the season of its depression they had assailed it with bitterness and spleen; they had fiercely attacked it in its most vulnerable aspect-its atheistic character. In order to popularise Hinduism they created a new literature in the Puranas, and multiplied commentaries on the Vedic ritual; they charmed the common people by the stories of Rama and Krishna. It is true the morality of Krishna and that of Buddha differed as widely as the poles; the popular conscience could not but admit that Buddha's rule was the best, but popular taste pronounced Krishna's the easiest, and most natural. Then stood out to fullest view the inherent weakness of Buddhismif there be no God, no eternal recompense, then where are the sanctions or encouragements for well-doing? Why exercise self-restraint and forego present enjoyment if nought but annihilation face us in the future?

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