Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/63

Rh with its modern connotation and justly applaud the liberality of his sentiments, another qualification is needed, and we must remember that in his days no really diverse religions existed in India. The creeds of Jesus, Zoroaster, and Muhammad were unknown. The only organized religion other than Buddhism or Jainism was Hinduism, and that complex phenomenon at all times is more accurately described as a social system than by the name of either a religion or a creed. When Asoka speaks of the toleration of other men's creeds, he is not thinking of exclusive, militant religions like Christianity and Islam, but of Hindu sects all connected by many links of common sentiment. The dominant theory of rebirth, for instance, was held by nearly all. Buddhism and Jainism both were originally mere sects of Hinduism—or rather schools of philosophy founded by Hindu reformers—which in course of time gathered an accretion of mythology around the original speculative nucleus, and developed into religions.

Asoka, therefore, was in a position which enabled him to realize the idea that all Indian denominations were fundamentally in agreement about what he, from the practical point of view, calls 'the essence of the matter,' all of them alike aiming at self—control and purity of life; and he thus felt fully justified in doing honour in various ways to Jains and Brahmanical Hindus as well as to Buddhists. While lavishing his treasure chiefly on Buddhist shrines and monasteries, he did not hesitate to spend large sums in hewing