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LEFT BUDDHISM 221 BUDDHISM Guadama. The Chinese call him Fo, which is the name Buddha softened in the pronunciation. The Aryan invaders of India looked down with contempt upon the Turanian inhabitants of that land, and, to keep their blood uncon- taminated, developed the system of caste. Buddha, whose human sympathy was wide-reaching, broke through this old restraint, and, though he was himself an Aryan, preached the equality of races, a doctrine which the oppressed Turanians eagerly embraced. By the common ac- count he was born in 622 B. C. attained to Buddhahood in 580, and died in 543, or, in the opinion of some, in 477 B. c. and other years than these, such as 400 B. c, or even lower, have been contended for. Buddha became deified by his ad- miring followers. Those images of an Oriental god made of white marble, so frequently seen in museums and in pri- vate houses, are representations of Buddha. BUDDHISM, the system of faith in- troduced or reformed by Buddha. In its origin Buddhism was a reaction against the caste pretensions of the Brahmins and other Aryan invaders of India, and was, therefore, eminently fitted to become, as it for long was, the religion of the vanquished Turanians. As might have been anticipated, the equality of all castes was, and is, one of its most fundamental tenets. Another tenet is the deification of men, who, when raised to Buddhahood, are called Buddhas. Professors of the faith enu- merate about 100 of these personages, but practically confine their reference to about seven. Pre-eminent among these stands Buddha himself. Personally, he never claimed divine honors. It was his disciples who first entitled him Sakhya Muni, i. e., Saint Sakhya. As Gautama, though adored as superhuman, is, after all, confessedly only a deified hero, it has been disputed whether his followers can be said to admit a Supreme Intelli- gence, Governor of this and all worlds. In philosophy, they believe the universe to be a maya, an illusion or phantom. The later Brahminists do the same; but in the opinion of Krishna Mohun, Ban- ergea, and others, these latter seem to have borrowed the tenet from the Bud- dhists rather than the Buddhists from them. Of the six schools of Hindu phi- losophy, those which Buddhism most closely approaches are the Sakhya phi- losophy of Kapila and the Yoga philoso- phy of Patanjali. Buddhism enjoins great tenderness to animal life. The felicity at which its professoi's aim in the future world is called Nirvana, or, more accurately, Nibbanam. It has 15— Vol. been disputed whether this means an- nihilation or blissful repose. Robert Caesar Childers, in his dictionary of the Pali language, uses strong arguments in favor of the former view. Buddhism was attended by an enormous develop- ment of monasticism. The language in which Gautama or Buddha taught was the Magadhi or Pali, the language of Magadha, now called Bahar or Behar. It was a Prakrit or Aryan vernacular of a province, but has now been raised to the dignity of the Buddhist sacred tongue throughout the world. Gautama's followers believe that his sayings were noted down in the Tripitaka, or "Three Treasuries of Dis- cipline, Doctrine and Metaphysics," which cor, stitute the Buddhist scriptures. What their real age is has been a matter of dispute; the discovery by Gener?/ Cunningham, in 1874, of allusions to them in the "Bharhut Sculptures," which are of date 3d century B. c, is in favor of their genuineness and antiquity. This work is in Pali; the Sanskrit Buddhist books discovered by Brian Hodgson in Nepaul are much more modern, and present a corrupt form of Buddhism. The first general council of the Bud- hist Church was held at Rajagriha, the capital of the Magadha kingdom, in 543 B. C; the second at Vesal (Allahabad [?], or a place near Patna) about 443 B. c. or 377 (?), and a third at Patalipu- tra (Greek, Palibothra=modern Patna), on the Ganges, in 307 B. c. or 250. This last one was called by Asoka, an em- peror ruling over a great part of India, who had been converted to Buddhism, and is sometimes called the Constantine of that faith, having established it as the state religion of his wide realm. He sent missionaries into western, central and southern India, and also to Ceylon and to Pegu. Buddhism was dominant in India for about 1,000 years after its establishment by Asoka. Then, having become corrupt and its vitality having decayed, reviving Brahminism prevailed over it, and all but extinguished it on the Indian continent, though a modifi- cation of it, Jainism, still exists in Marwad and many other parts. It has all along held its own, however, in Ceylon. On losing Continental India, its missionaries transferred their efforts to China, which they converted, and which still remains Buddhist. The re- ligion of Gautama flourishes also in Tibet, Burma, and Japan, and is the great Turanian faith of the modern as of the ancient world. It is estimated that there are about 138,000,000 followers of Buddhism, practically all of whom live in Asia. There has sprung up, since II— Cyc