Buddhas," as M. Foucaux renders it certain Buddha Kshetras. These Buddha Kshetras figure conspicuously in the literature of Nepâl, Tibet, and China. Also, they were plainly in Buddhism before the great separation, for they are alluded to in the "Suttapiṭako" of Ceylon as Buddhakkhettâni.1

"The Sthaviras (presbyters)," says the " White Lotus of Dharma," "have hopes one day to inhabit those homes which are called the Buddha Kshetras.” 2

The main rite of Buddhism to this day, even in Ceylon, is to offer food daily to these Buddhas of the Buddha umbrellas and to chant out

"I worship continually

The Buddhas of the ages that are past!"

If the founder of Buddhism instituted these rites by way of showing his non-belief in the existence of these Buddhas, his process seems a very strange one.

1 Journ. Beng. As. Soc., vol. vii. p. 691.

2 Lotus, p. 63.

CHAPTER V.

COSMOGONY.

To make Buddhist conceptions more clear about these ministering spirits that I have just described, I will now sketch their heavens and hells. I take the Cingalese version from Upham's "History of Buddhism." The Nepaulese hells and heavens will be found in Mr. Hodgson's book.1 For Chinese account, consult Beal.2

Bearing in mind our simile of the umbrella, the conception is easily explained. The umbrella-handle, as I have shown, is the stambha, the prop; and this prop, both in the Rig-Veda and Buddhism (and also with the early Christians), was the solar God-man. The earth was flat, at the centre of the hemisphere a vast plain, called in the Lalita Vistara "the three thousand great thousand worlds." It is the domain of appetite (Kâmaloca).

By a second simile, the Vedic Mârttânda, the elephant, was supposed to also "sustain" this world and the heavens above it. Below the prop was the serpent Sêsha, or the tortoise, or the Makara (leviathan), three symbols for the Supreme Father. The tortoise floated on the illimitable "waters," or uncreated matter. This was Aditi, the mother. The hells are below the earth in these waters.

This prop passing through the earth, and the heavens at the pole, indicated, as we have shown, by the a of Draco, became the "nail" of the old astronomers, the point round 2 Catena, pp. 35-125.

1 Languages, &c., of Tibet, p. 42.

D

which all nature revolved. Between earth and the celestial pole the prop idea was again brought forward as the central column of a huge conical mountain, Mount Meru, guarded at each cardinal point by a mighty king (Aquarius, Taurus, Leo, Aquila Jovis, as in the Apocalypse). The four dwarfs propping up some of the columns in the old Buddhist temples are evidently these four kings. Later on in Buddhism they became four of the five heavenly Buddhas. When the prop pierced the highest heaven, it was a spire called the " tee," and in Nepâl is confessedly in all the temples the symbol of Adi Buddha, the supreme, in his heavenly garden (Nandana grove). The hemispherical dome represents heaven. Some of the old topes were even built of three or four masonry hemispheres, the one within the other, to make the likeness more perfect. The same custom was servilely copied by the Norsemen in their haugs, and they, too, sometimes erected the tee at the summit. Religions are prone to conservatism as well as change, and this retention of emblems which stultify after ideas is a most valuable help to the student of old creeds. The tee (in China the Ts'ah) is still held to represent Buddha and his heavens in Buddhist countries,1 and, by an irony of fate, is hung up high above the heads of modern atheists and Sadducees, as a mute but eloquent witness against them.

In the Rig-Veda there are constant allusions to two groups of matter, jagatah, that which is movable, and tasthushah, that which is fixed. Matter at rest in Buddhism is called Nirvriti, and impermanent matter is called Pravriti. In Vedic days there were seven heavens; of these six were impermanent. At the end of each kalpa or dispensation, these were destroyed, or perhaps more correctly remodelled, by the spiritual power of the solar GodThe seventh and highest heaven was the abode of Brahma. It was like the invisible, uncreated, unchange1 Comp. Beal, Chinese Dhammapada, p. 91 note, with Hodgson, p. 42. 2 Colebrooke's Essays, vol. i. pp. 129, 130.

man.

able universe of Plato, the reality, the model, the idea. In the Vedas it is called the "house of gold," as distinguished from the "house of clay."

That these seven heavens of the Vedic Brahminism were accepted by early Buddhism can be shown. At present I content myself with the fact that some of the reliccaskets found at Sanchi represent six heavens and the tee.

But this cosmology was a standing evidence against agnostic Buddhism, and therefore it had to be altered; and it is in his clumsy attempts at alteration that we catch the agnostic in flagranti delicto. The first and most obvious step, of course, was to make the changeless heavens inhabited by changeless spirits the heaven not of Brahma, but of Amitâbha, the supreme Buddha. This was the course adopted in Nepâl, and this region is called Sukhavati.1 In Ceylon these heavens are called Nirvana-pura. This first step was prompted by the spirit of rivalry with the Brahmins. There is nothing agnostic about it. Nirvâna-pura is a place, and the word itself refutes agnostic Buddhism.

The modern heavens in Ceylon number twenty-six. The first six are called the Dewa-loca, the abodes of spirits that still return in new births to earth. From seven to nine are the Brahma-loca, or heavens of Brahma. From eight to seventeen are the Arûpa-loca. From eighteen to twenty-two are the heavens of the Jina or triumphing spirits; above these is Nirvâṇa-pura. At the end of every kalpa-and this is a crucial fact-only the four heavens of Nirvâņa-pura and the highest Jina heaven are exempt from destruction.2 In Nepal and China the numbers of the Brahma-loca, Rûpa-loca, &c., vary. The thirteen pyramidal layers at the top of every temple in Nepâl represent the thirteen unchangeable heavens of Amitâbha.3 In all this there is still no agnosticism, but the very reverse. Tusita, the highest abode to be reached by those who are still subject to 1 Hodgson, p. 19.

Upham, p. 74. 3 Hodgson, pp. 54, and 43.

rebirths, is below the Brahma-loca in all Buddhist cosmologies. Therefore, in the idea of Cingalese as well as Nepaulese Buddhism, at the date these cosmologies were framed, the Brahma-loca, Rupa-loca, and the Nirvâņa or Sukhavatî heavens were tenanted by spirits enfranchised from karma, or the causation of new births. It follows, then, that if we find, as we do undoubtedly find, both in Ceylon and Nepâl, an antagonistic doctrine proclaiming that annihilation is the lot of souls that have secured an enfranchisement from earthly returns, the cosmologists at the date of their labours knew of no such doctrine.

In

In the cosmology of Ceylon, the changes in the direction of agnosticism have been chiefly the limiting the changeless regions of changeless spirits to the last Jina heaven and the four heavens of Nirvâṇa-pura. Nepâl even the thirteen highest heavens are believed now to be tenanted by Bodhisatwas alone.1 This is a palpable absurdity, because Tusita, the heaven in which all the biographies place Buddha just before his last visit to earth, is expressly stated to be beneath even the Brahmaloca. And I shall show by and by that the two oldest books of Buddhism derived from Nepâl, the "Lalita Vistara" and the "White Lotus of Dharma," are brimful of Jinas, and accounts of their returns to earth as unseen guides of mortals.

We thus get the following instructive contradiction:In the cosmology of Ceylon, the Jinas (or Buddhas) are allowed to return to earth, but in the Southern literature they never avail themselves of the permission. In the Nepaulese cosmology they are forbidden to return, but in the literature they ignore this prohibition completely.

I now come to a pregnant passage which scatters to the winds the claims to prior antiquity of agnostic Buddhism, and I find it in the holy books of Ceylon. It is to be confessed that the actual biography of Sâkya Muni

1 Hodgson, p. 42.