Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/485

Rh the principles of the new creed were quite inconsistent with oppression and wrong of every kind; and the government of Asoka, as Buddhist emperor of India, was probably the most enlightened, and certainly the most philanthropic, which the natives of India have had.

It is not surprising that teaching so earnest and so high, so deep-reaching and so radical, should have met with eager acceptance among a people intensely religious, to whom the doctrines of the priests held out so little hope in exchange for the privileges it claimed from them on behalf of an oppressive caste. It is only to be regretted that the history of Buddhism in India lies under so thick a cloud that very little is known of it with certainty. Imme diately after the death of Gautama the first council of 500 was held at Rfijagriha, as related above, and the young church, in the vigour of its purity and fresh enthusiasm, spread very rapidly among the surrounding tribes. In less than 150 years after the death of its founder, the new religion had become the most powerful in Northern and Central India, and was the state religion of Magadha, whose kings claimed the superiority over the whole peninsula. It probably continued to gain in the number of its adherents till two or three centuries later, but soon after the com mencement of our era it began to decay ; though Fa Hian, a Chinese pilgrim, who visited India about 400 A.D., found it still nourishing over a large area, it was certainly not increasing, and scarcely maintaining its ground. Hiouen Thsang, another Chinese pilgrim, has left us an account of his journey made about two centuries later, and he found Buddhism in a much lower condition even than it had fallen to in the time of Fa Hian. In the 8th and 9th centuries a great persecution arose, and the Buddhists were so utterly exterminatsd that there is now not a Buddhist in all India ; although of course the effects of so great a movement could not pass away, and it left its mark for ever on the Hinduism which supplanted it. The full reasons for this revolution are not known: but so much is clear, that long before its expulsion Buddhism had become very cor rupt ; the order had become wealthy and idle ; and the laity, instead of following the precepts of the Teacher, had gone back to the old devil-worship, witchcraft, and astrology, which always underlay their nominal beliefs. From the great body of his followers the ethics and philo sophy of Guatama were concealed by the mass of legends and superstitions which had grown up around the story of his life ; and though the Buddhists no longer propitiated the favour of the gods by sacrifices of living beings, they rested their hopes more on their liberality to the monks than on the harder duties of self-control and charity, the latter word having thus become even more limited in its meaning than it has among ourselves. Their worship of the relics of the Buddha came very near to rank idolatry; their reverence for their ancestors came very near to worship, and was a dangerous source of emolument to the monks ; while the old Hindu gods were regarded much more highly than was at all consistent with the Buddhist Abhidharma. Buddhism had, however, been introduced into Ceylon, at a time when it was comparatively pure, by Mahendra and Sanghamitra, the son and daughter of the emperor Asoka. It became at once the state religion, and the only religion of the island, on which Brahminism had never gained much hold. Protected there by its isolated position, and by the patriotic spirit which identified it with the Sinhalese nation, whose hereditary enemies, the Tamils, were first Jains and afterwards Hindus, it has retained almost its pristine purity to modern times. From Ceylon it was introduced into Burma in the 5th century A.D., whence it penetrated into Arakan, Kambaya, and Pegu, and finally into Siam in the 7th century of our era. As already mentioned, it became, in a Jess pure form, the state religion of Kashmir about the time of Christ, and was thence carried to Nepal and to Tibet and China. It would be impossible within the limits of this article to trace its various fortunes in these countries, but the following remarks may not be out of place. It would be hazardous as yet to attempt to trace chronologically the growth of the Buddhist legends, but in one or other of the Buddhist books are found the following ideas, the growth of which was, under the circumstances, almost inevitable. Gautama himself became regarded as omni scient, and as absolutely sinless ; he was supposed to have descended of his own accord from heaven into his mother s womb, and to have had no earthly father ; angels were said to have assisted at his birth, immediately after which he walked three paces, and in a voice of thunder proclaimed his own greatness. On his formal presentation to his father, an aged saint is said to have worshipped him and pro phesied that he would become a Buddha, who would show the people the way of salvation. When the babe was five months old, he was left under a tree, where he meditated so deeply that he worked himself into a trance; and five wise men who were journeying northwards through the air, being miraculously stopped over the place where he was, came down and worshipped him, the hymn put into their mouths surprising us in the midst of so absurd a legend by its beauty ; in five stanzas they announce that the babe shall be the teacher of a law which shall be the water to extinguish all the fires of the sorrovrs of life, the light to enlighten the world, and the chariot to carry us through this wilderness to the promised land ; that he shall deliver men from the bonds and shackles of the world, and be the great physician to heal all their diseases, and do away with the miseries of life and death. The only other legend we have of his youth is one in which he is said to have surpassed all his contemporaries in feats of bodily and mental skill, and even to have taught his teachers, the later forms of this legend bearing a curious resemblance to some parts of the apocryphal &quot; Gospel of the Infancy.&quot; In the accounts of his father s home and of his marriage he is surrounded with all the state and wealth of the eldest eon and heir to a powerful monarch, whereas it is apparent from the geographical and other details that his father s power can only at most have extended a few miles from his home. It was a pious task to make his abnegation and condescension greater by the comparison between the splendour of the position he abandoned and the poverty in which he afterwards lived ; and in countries distant from Kapilavastu the inconsistencies between these glowing accounts and the very names they contain would pass unnoticed by credulous hearers. With the same object of magnifying the person of Buddha, he is related in the legends to have performed at various times a very large number of miracles, mostly mere manifestations of power of no direct advantage to any one, and only designed to impress those who beheld or might hear of them with a belief in his great superiority over other teachers. Of several of these legends we have different versions in authorities of different ages, and it is exceedingly interest ing and instructive to notice how the supernatural parts of the story gradually grow. Among the northern Buddhists of Kashmir, Tibet, Nepal, and China, these legends have assumed much larger dimensions than among the southern Buddhists in Burma, Siam, and Ceylon, the former having evolved a theory of the spirit of the Buddhas still working in the church, while the latter remain at the standpoint apparent in the canon as fixed by the council of Asoka. The amplification of Buddhism by its northern disciples will be described under the heading. It is 