Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/240

 L A M A I S M influence of these vain imaginations, the earnest moral teachings of Gotama became more and more hid from view. The imaginary saints grew and flourished. Each new creation, each new step in the theory, demanded another, until the whole sky was filled with forgeries of the brain, and the nobler and simpler lessons of the founder of the religion were hidden beneath the glittering stream of metaphysical subtleties. Still worse results followed on the change of the earlier point of view. The acute minds of the Buddhist pandits, no longer occupied with the practical lessons of Arahat- ship, turned their attention, as far as it was not engaged upon their hierarchy of mythological beings, to questions of philosophical speculation, which, in the earliest Buddhism, are not only discouraged but forbidden. We find long treatises on the nature of being, idealistic dreams which have as little to do with the Bodisatship that is concerned with the salvation of the world as with the Arahatship that is concerned with the perfect life. Only one lower step was possible, and that was not long in being taken. The animism common alike to the untaught Huns and to their Hindu conquerors, but condemned in early Bud dhism, was allowed to revive. As the stronger side of Gotama s teaching was neglected, the debasing belief in rites and ceremonies, and charms and incantations, which had bsea the especial object of his scorn, began to live again, and to grow vigorously, and to spread like the Blrana weed warmed by a tropical sun in marsh and muddy soil. As in India, after the expulsion of Buddhism, the degrading worship of Siva and his dusky bride had been incorporated into Brahmanism from the wild and savage devil worship of Aryan and of non-Aryan tribes, so, as pure Buddhism died away in the north, the Tantra system, a mixture of magic and witchcraft and sorcery, was incorporated into the corrupted Buddhism. The founder of this system seems to have been Asanga, an influential monk of Peshawar, in the Punjab, who lived and wrote the first text-book of the creed, the Yogdchchdra JjJulmi Sdstra, about the 6th century of our era. Hwen Tsang, who travelled in tli3 first half of the 7th, found the monastery where Asanga had lived in ruins, and says that he had lived one thousand years after the Buddha. 1 He managed with great dexterity to reconcile the two opposing systems by placing a number of Saivite gods or devils, both malo and female, in the inferior heavens of the then prevalent Buddhism, and by representing them as worshippers and supporters of the Buddha and of Avalokitesvara. He thus made it possible for the half- converted and rude tribes to remain Buddhists while they brought offerings, and even bloody offerings, to these more congenial shrines, and while their practical belief had no relation at all to the Truths or the Noble Eightfold Path, but busied itself almost wholly with obtaining magic powers (Siddhi), by means of magic phrases (Dhdrani), and magic circles (Mandala). Asanga s happy idea bore but too ample fruit. In his own country and Nepal the new wine, sweet and luscious to the taste of savages, com pletely disqualified them from enjoying any purer drink ; and now in both countries Saivism is supreme, and Buddhism is even nominally extinct, except in some outlying districts of Nepal. But this full effect has only been worked out in the lapse of ages ; the Tantra literature has also had its growth and its development, and some unhappy scholar of a future age may have to trace its loathsome history. The nauseous taste repelled even the self-sacrificing industry of Burnouf, when he found the later Tantra books to be as immoral as they are absurd. 1 Remusat s translation, Memoires sur les Contrtes Occidentals, p. 270 ; and La Vie d* Hivuen Thsang, p. 94. &quot;The pen,&quot; he says, &quot;refuses to transcribe doctrines as miserable in respect of form as they are odious and degrading in respect of meaning.&quot; 2 Such had been the decline and fall of Buddhism con sidered as an ethical system before its introduction inti&amp;gt; Tibet. The manner in which its order of mendicant re cluses, at first founded to afford better opportunities to those who wished to carry out that system in practical life, developed at last into a hierarchical monarchy will best be understood by a sketch of the history of Tibet. In Tibet as elsewhere the beginnings of the accounts found in the old historians are merely a recapitulation c;t legends in which popular tradition lias explained by miraculous and mythological fancies the origins of its civilization. Its real history commences with Srong Tsan Gampo, who was born a little after GOO A.D., and who is said in the Chinese chronicles to have entered, in 634 after Christ, into diplomatic relationship with Thai Tsung, one &amp;lt; 1 the emperors of the Thung dynasty. He was the founder of the present capital of Tibet, now known as Lhasa ; and in the year 622 (the same year as that in which Mohammed fled from Mecca) he began the formal introduction of Buddhism into Tibet. For this purpose he sent the minister Thumi Sambhota, afterwards looked upon as an incarnation of Maiiju-sri, to India, there to collect the sacred books, and to learn and translate them. Thumi Sambhota accordingly invented an alphabet for the Tibetan language on the model of the Indian alphabets then in use. And, aided by the king himself, who is represented to have been an industrious student and translator, he wrote the first books by which Buddhism became known in his native land. The most famous of all the works ascribed to him is the Mani Kambum, &quot; the Myriad of Precious Words,&quot; a. treatise chiefly on religion, but which also contains au account of the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, and of the closing part of the life of king Srong Tsan Gampo. He is also very probably the author of another very ancient standard work of Tibetan Buddhism, the Samatog, a short digest of Buddhist morality, on which the civil laws of Tibet have been founded. It is said in the Mani Kambum to have fallen down from heaven in a casket (Tibetan, samatoff), and, like the last-mentioned work, is unfortun ately only known to us in meagre abstract. King Srong Tsan Gampo s zeal for Buddhism was shared and supported by his two queens, the one named Bribsun, a princess from Nepal, the other named Wen Ching, a princess from China. They are related in the chronicles to have brought with them sacred relics, books, and pictures, for whose better preservation and honour two large mona steries were erected, and opened and dedicated with much ceremony. These are the cloisters of La Brang and II a Mochay, still, though much changed and enlarged, the most famous and sacred abbeys in Tibet, and the glory of Lhasa. In after times the two queens have become semi- divine personages, and are worshipped under the name of the two Ddrd-Eke, the &quot;glorious mothers,&quot; being regarded as incarnations of the wife of Siva, representing respectively two of the qualities which she personifies, divine vengeance and divine love. The former of the two is worshipped by the Mongolians as Okkin Tengri, &quot; the Virgin Goddess ; &quot; but in Tibet and China the role of the divine virgin is filled by Kivan Yin, a personification of Avalokitesvara as the heavenly word, who is often represented with a child in her arms, Srong Tsan Gampo has also become a saint, being looked upon as an incarnation of Avalokitesvara ; and the description in the ecclesiastical historians of the measures he took for the welfare of his subjects do great credit to their ideal of the perfect Buddhist king. He is 2 Introduction. &c., p. 558.