INTRODUCTORY.

FIVE hundred and sixty years before Christ a religious reformer appeared in Bengal-Buddha.

The following are some of the results due to the sojourn of this one man upon earth:

1. The most formidable priestly tyranny that the world had ever seen crumbled away before his attack, and the followers of Buddha were paramount in India for a thousand years.

2. The institution of caste was assailed and overturned. 3. Polygamy was for the first time pronounced immoral, and slavery condemned.

4. Woman, from being considered a chattel and a beast of burden, was for the first time considered man's equal, and allowed to develop her spiritual life.

5. All bloodshed, whether with the knife of the priest or the sword of the conqueror, was rigidly forbidden.

6. Also, for the first time in the religious history of mankind, the awakening of the spiritual life of the individual was substituted for religion by body corporate. It is also certain that Buddha was the first to proclaim that duty was to be sought in the eternal principles of morality and justice, and not in animal sacrifices and local formalities invented by the fancy of priests.

7. The principle of religious propagandism was for the

first time introduced, with its two great instruments, the missionary and the preacher.

8. By these China, Bactria, Japan, and, indeed, almost all Asia, were by and by converted to the religion of Buddha.

9. It is asserted by calm thinkers like Dean Mansel that within two generations of the time of Alexander the Great the missionaries of Buddha made their appearance at Alexandria. This theory is confirmed-in the East by the Asoka monuments-in the West by Philo. He expressly maintains the identity in creed of the higher Judaism and that of the Gymnosophists of India who abstained from the "sacrifice of living animals "—in a word, the Buddhists. It would follow from this that the priestly religions of Babylonia, Palestine, Egypt, and Greece were undermined by certain kindred mystical societies organised by Buddha's missionaries under the various names of Therapeuts, Essenes, Neo-Pythagoreans, Neo-Zoroastrians, &c. Thus Buddhism prepared the way for Christianity.

IO. I think I can show likewise that the missionaries of Buddha evangelised America in the fifth century A.D., and persuaded King Quatzal Coatl to abolish the sacrifice of blood. This shall be proved from the Chinese records and from the abundant Buddhist monuments and symbolsthe elephant, the cobra, the figure of Buddha, &c.—found amongst the antiquities of the New World.

II. Sir William Jones was of opinion that Woden and Buddha were philologically identical; and the similarity of the mounds, towers, and stone circles of the Indian Buddhists and those of the Norsemen, Angles, Goths, &c., has of late been repeatedly pointed out. The question whether Buddha was the early god of North Europe shall also be considered in these pages.

Thus from the thought of one man's brain a religion has arisen which may be said to have covered the globe with its rock temples, and statues, and pillars, and

mounds. This has been effected by moral means alone, for Buddhism is the one religion virgin of coercion. It is reckoned that one-third of humanity is still in its fold.

That such results should have been achieved is one of the greatest marvels of history; and when an inquirer consults some of the best-known writers to try and get an explanation of this unusual missionary success, the marvel increases.

"The religion of Buddha," says Professor Max Müller, was made for a madhouse." 1

"There is no trace of the idea of God in the whole of Buddhism, either at the beginning or at the end," says M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire.2

"Buddhism denies the existence of the soul," says Mr. Rhys Davids. Mr. Turnour calls Buddha a "wonderful impostor;" and Eugène Burnouf, and indeed all the prominent Sanskrit and Pâli scholars, hold that the highest reward in Buddhism after death, is the cessation of individual consciousness. I know of only two exceptions to this rule. Colebrooke denies that the Buddhist word Nirvâna implies cessation of individuality.5 M. Foucaux also maintains that in the presence of certain passages of the Buddhist work, the "White Lotus of Dharma," it is quite impossible to maintain that the Buddhist saints, after attaining Nirvâna, are non-existent. I will consider the important evidence of this work by and by.

But the perplexities of the inquirer will be still further increased if, like the author, he happens to come across Mr. Hodgson's "Essays on the Languages, Literature, and Religion of Nepal and Tibet." In Nepâl this gentleman made the acquaintance of a learned old Buddhist, Amirta

1 Chips from a German Workshop, p. 254.

2 Le Bouddha et sa Religion, p. iv.

3 Buddhism, Table of Contents.

4 Journ. Beng. As. Soc., vol. vii. p. 991.

5 Essays, vol. i. p. 402.

6 L'Enfant Égaré, preface, p. 19.

Nanda Bandhya. This individual, reticent at first, was at last persuaded to disclose to Mr. Hodgson the inner teaching of his religion. He revealed a creed so like the lofty gnosticism of Philo and Clemens Alexandrinus, that writers like Mr. Rhys Davids contend that Nepaulese Buddhism is Christianity imported from the West.

This brings me to the great issue that will be discussed in these pages. An agnostic school of Buddhism without doubt exists. It professes plain atheism, and holds that every mortal, when he escapes from rebirths, and the causation of Karma by the awakenment of the Bodhi or gnosis, will be annihilated. This Buddhism, by Eugène Burnouf, St. Hilaire, Max Müller, Csoma de Korös, and I believe almost every writer of note, is pronounced the original Buddhism, the Buddhism of the South. The gnostic school is called, on the other hand, the Buddhism of the North.

A nine years' study of Buddhism, however, has convinced me that the agnostic school of Buddhism is the later development. I may mention that I entered upon the study without bias, and that my conclusions have been gradual. But that this inquiry shall not be a mere battle of the books, I propose to adopt the following method :—

1. I shall briefly examine the Vedic Brahminism that existed before the date of Buddha, because when one creed breaks away from another, any points of similarity that are found between them may be credited to the time when the two creeds were tangential, and not to periods when they had become widely separated.

2. I shall examine the cosmology, the monuments, the symbols of Buddhism; and the ribs and backbone of its great allegorical account of the life of its founder. These are all points where an innovator's work would be the more easily detected.

3. I shall appeal to the most valuable testimony of

Asoka and probe his opinions on the subject of God and the immortality of the soul. Rock inscriptions constitute a literature that cannot be tampered with.

4. Finally, I shall examine the ritual of Buddhism, for ritual is always of the highest importance in judging the earlier form of a creed. If it can be shown that even in Southern Buddhism the saints or Buddhas of the past are fed and worshipped daily, and Buddha invoked to forgive sin, it may safely be inferred not only that the agnosticism is an innovation, but that the broad line sought to be drawn between Northern and Southern Buddhism is mostly illusory.

As it is everywhere asserted that gnostic Buddhism was derived from Christianity, it will be necessary to test this theory likewise. There was a higher Christianity and a higher Judaism both very like Buddhism, for transcendental wisdom must always be one. There was a lower Judaism, founded chiefly on the lower Parsism, and also a lower Christianity. And in spite of the fact that the chief rites of Christianity are those of the higher Judaism, and that the speeches of Christ in all the Gospels always allude to the lower Judaism in terms of unvarying condemnation, it is popularly supposed that the Founder of the Christian. religion favoured the lower form of creed. This seems to me quite impossible; but I must premise that the origin of Christianity is a subject too vast for the present inquiry. What innovations Christ introduced into the higher Judaism will probably be the great problem of Christology when Buddhism has been more thoroughly studied. It must be remembered that the Buddhism of the date of the Christian era was already a corrupt form of Buddhism. And when Buddhist influences are admitted, another prominent inquiry of Christology will lie in the direction of the dates and nature of these successive waves of Buddhist influence.

As this work is going through the press my attention has