Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/47

 INTRODUCTION. 17 a petty chief. For twenty-nine years he is represented as enjoying the pleasures, and following the occupations, usual to the men of his rank and position ; but at that age, becoming painfully impressed by the misery incident to human existence, he determined to devote the rest of his life to an attempt to alleviate it. For this purpose he forsook his parents and wife, abandoned friends and the advantages of his position, and, for the following fifty years, devoted himself steadily to the task he had set before himself. Years were spent in the meditation and mortification supposed to be necessary to fit him for his mission ; the rest of his long life was devoted to wandering from city to city, teaching and preaching, and doing everything that gentle means could effect to disseminate the doctrines which he believed were to regenerate the world, and take the sting out of human misery. He died, or, in the phraseology of his followers, entered Nirvana or Parinirvana was absorbed into nothingness at Kujinara, in the eightieth year of his age, about 480 years B.C. With the information that has accumulated around the subject, there seems no great difficulty in surmising why the mission of Sakyamuni was so successful as it proved to be. He was born in an age when the purity of the Aryan races, especially in eastern India, had become so deteriorated by intermixture with aborigines, and with less pure tribes coming from the north, that their power, and consequently their distinctive influence was fading away. At that time, too, the native and mixed races had acquired such a degree of civili- sation as led them to claim something like equality with their Aryan masters. In such a condition of things the preacher was sure of a willing audience who ignored caste, and taught that all men, of whatever nation or degree, had an equal chance of reaching happiness, and ultimately Nirvana, by the practice of virtue : in a word to be delivered from the wearisome bondage of ritual or caste observances and the depressing prospect of interminable transmigration. Aboriginal or Turanian Dasyus, perhaps even more readily than the mixed Aryans, would hail him as a deliverer, and by the former the new religion was specially adopted and propagated, whilst that of the Brahman Aryans was, for a time at least, overshadowed and obscured. It is by no means clear how far Buddha was successful in converting the multitude to his doctrines during his lifetime. At his death, the first synod or council was held at Rajagriha, and five hundred monks of a superior order, it is said, were VOL. i. B