Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/342

330 nun; but Chakia said, "There is not between a Brahmin and a person of any other caste the difference that there is between gold and a stone, between light and darkness. The Brahmin did not issue from the ether or the wind, nor did he cleave the earth and come forth like the fire from the Arani wood. The Brahmin was born of a woman, just like the Tchandala. Where then is the cause that should render one noble and another vile? The Brahmin himself, when he is dead, is abandoned like a vile and impure thing, as a man of any other caste is. Where then is the difference?"

The religious systems of Brahminism and Buddhism resemble each other, nevertheless, in many particulars; and the fierce persecutions the Buddhists have experienced are not so much to be attributed to the divergence of their opinions upon doctrinal points, as to their admission of all men, without distinction of caste, to the civil and sacerdotal functions, and to the rewards of a future state.

A reformer who proclaimed the equality of men in this world and the next, could not but excite the hostility of the adherents of a system depending so essentially as Brahminism does on a hierarchy of castes; and the persecutions of the Buddhists were long and violent. According to their own accounts, the number of victims who perished would be quite incalculable; but at length, towards the sixth century of our era, Brahminism obtained a decisive victory over the partisans of the new religion; and the latter being driven from Hindostan, and forced