Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/473

Rh hood. Buddha has not escaped the fate which has befallen the founders of other religions ; and as late as the year 1854 the late Professor Wilson of Oxford read a paper before the Royal Asiatic Society of London in which he maintained that the supposed life of Buddha was a myth, and &quot;Buddha himself merely an imaginary being.&quot; No one, however, would now support this view; and it is admitted that, under the mass of miraculous tales which have been handed down regarding him, there is a basis of truth already sufficiently clear to render possible an intelligible history, which will become clearer and clearer as older and better authorities are made accessible. {{ti|1em|The chief sources of our at present available information regarding the life of Buddha are 1, The Manual of Buddhism, published in 1860 by the Rev. R, Spence Hardy, compiled from various Sinhalese sources; 2, The transla tion into English (published by Bishop Bigandet in Rangoon in 1858 under the title Legend of the Burmese Buddha) of the translation into Burmese of a Pali work called by Bigandet MaWdingara-Wouttoo, of unknown author and date ; 3, The original Pali text of the Jataka commentary, written in Ceylon in the 5th century A.D., edited in 1875 by Mr Fausboll of Copenhagen (this is our best authority); 4, Mr Beal s recently published translation into English (under the title The Romantic Legend of Sakya Buddha} of a translation into Chinese, made in the 6th century A.D., of Si Sanskrit work, called A bhin ishkramana Sutra; 5, A Sanskrit work called the Lalita Vistara, undoubtedly very old, but of unknown author or date, the text of which has appeared in the Bibliotheca Indica in Calcutta, and a translation through the Tibetan into French by M. Foucaux in Paris (1848). The first three books represent the views of the southern Buddhists, whose sacred books are in Pali, and last the two those of the northern Bud dhists, whose sacred books are in Sanskrit. The former are much the more reliable and complete, the latter being inflated to a great length by absurd and miraculous legends, the kernel of fact at the centre of which agrees in the main with the account found in the former. These have their miraculous incidents too, the relation of the Sanskrit sources to the Pali resembling in many respects that of the apocryphal gospels to the New Testament.}} As there has been little or no intercommunication be tween the two churches since the 3d century B.C., great reliance may reasonably be placed on those statements in which they agree ; not indeed as a proof of the actual facts of the Buddha s biography, but as giving us the belief of the early Buddhists concerning it. It is to be regretted that the books we have to compare are, as yet, of so comparatively modern a date ; but, after the respective canons had once been fixed, it is not likely that translators would deviate very materially from the text of the bio graphies, so sacred to them, with which they had to deal. The southern canon usually called the Tripitaka or three collections was finally determined about 250 B.C., at the Council of Pataliputra on the Ganges, held under the auspices of the Emperor Asoka the Great; and the northern about the commencement of our era at the Council of J aland hara, in Kashmir, held under Kanishka, a powerful Indo-Scythian monarch. To the former belongs the Bud- dhavansa, or History of the Buddhas, on which, together with its commentary, our three southern accounts are chiefly based ; to the latter belongs the Lalita Vistara, the last of the authorities mentioned above. At the end of this article will be found a description of those parts of the canon as yet published; for what is known of the contents of the unpublished parts the student is referred, for the northern, to B. H. Hodgson s Essays, pp. 17 ct seq. and 36 et seq.; to Csoma Korbsi in the Asiatic Researches, vol. xx. ; Burnouf, Intr., 34-68 ; and Koppen, ii. 279 ; for the southern to Hardy s Eastern Monachism (1850), p. 166 et seq., and to M. Barthelemy St-Hilaire s papers in the Journal des Savants for Feb. and March 1866.

At the end of the 6th century B.C. the Aryan tribes from the Panjab had long been settled on the banks of the Ganges ; the pride of race had put an impassable barrier between them and the conquered aborigines ; the pride of birth had built up another between the chiefs or nobles and the mass of the Aryan people; and the super stitious fears of all yielded to the priesthood an unques tioned and profitable supremacy ; while the exigencies of occupation and the ties of family had further separated each class into smaller communities, until the whole nation had became gradually bound by an iron system of caste. The old child-like jay in life so manifest in the Vedas had died away ; the worship of nature had developed or degene rated into the worship of new and less pure divinities ; and the Vedic songs themselves, whose freedom was little compatible with the spirit of the age, had faded into an obscurity which did not lessen their value to the priests. The country was politically split up into little principalities, each governed by some petty despot, whose interests were not often the same as those of the community. A con venient belief in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls satisfied the unfortunate that their woes were the natural result of their own deeds in a former birth, and though unavoidable now, might be escaped in a future state of existence by present liberality to the priests. While hoping for a better fate in their next birth, the oppressed people turned for succour and advice in this to the aid of astrology and witchcraft- a belief in which seems to underlie all religions, and is only just dying out among ourselves. The philosophy of the day no longer hoped for an immor tality of the soul, but looked for a release from the misery which it found inseparable from life, in a complete extinction of individual existence. The inspiriting wars against the enemies of the Aryan people, the infidel deniers of the Aryan gods, had given place to a succession of internecine feuds between the chiefs of neighbouring clans ; and in literature an age of poets had long since made way for an age of commentators and grammarians, who thought that the old poems must have been the work of gods. But the darkest period was succeeded by the dawn of a reforma tion ; travelling logicians were willing to maintain theses against all the world ; whilst here and there ascetics strove to raise themselves above the gods, and hermits earnestly sought for some satisfactory solution of the mysteries of life. These were the teachers whom the people chiefly delighted to honour : and though the ranks of the priest hood were for ever firmly closed against intruders, a man of low r er caste, a Kshatriya or Vaisya, whose mind revolted against the orthodox creed, and whose heart was stirred by mingled zeal and ambition, might find through these irregu lar orders an entrance to the career of a religious teacher and reformer. The population was most thickly scattered within 150 miles of Benares, which was already celebrated as a seat of piety and learning ; and it was at Kapilavastu, a few days journey north of Benares, that in the 5th century B.C. a raja Suddhodana ruled over a tribe who were called the 