CHAPTER V: BUDDHISM—543 B.C. TO 1000 A.D.
Rise of Buddhism, 543 B.C.
The Bráhmans had firmly established their power 600 years before Christ. But after that date a new religion arose in India, called Buddhism, from the name of its founder, Gautama Buddha. This new religion was a rival to Bráhmanism during more than a thousand years. About the ninth century A.D. Buddhism was driven out of India. But it is still professed by 500 millions of people in Asia, and has more followers than any other religion in the world.
The Legend of Buddha: his Early Life
Gautama, afterwards named Buddha, ‘The Enlightened,’ was the only son of Suddhodana, King of Kapilavastu. This prince ruled over the Sakya people, about 100 miles north of Benares, and within sight of the snow-topped Himálayas. The king wished to see his son grow up into a warrior like himself. But the young prince shunned the sports of his playmates, and spent his time alone in nooks of the palace garden. When he reached manhood, however, he showed himself brave and skilful with his weapons. He won his wife by a contest at arms over all rival chiefs. For a time he forgot the religious thoughts of his boyhood in the enjoyment of the world. But in his drives through the city he was struck by the sights of old age, disease, and death which met his eye; and he envied the calm of a holy man, who seemed to have raised his soul above the changes and sorrows of this life. After ten years, his wife bore to him an only son; and Gautama, fearing lest this new tie should bind him too closely to the things of earth, retired about the age of thirty to a cave in the jungles. The story is told how he turned away from the door of his wife’s lamp-lit chamber, denying himself even a parting caress of his new-born babe, lest he should wake the sleeping mother, and galloped off into the darkness. After a gloomy night ride, he sent back his one companion, the faithful charioteer, with his horse and jewels to his father. Having cut off his long warrior hair, and exchanged his princely raiment for the rags of a poor passer-by, he went on alone a homeless beggar. This giving up of princely pomp, and of loved wife and new-born son, is the Great Renunciation which forms a favourite theme of the Buddhist Scriptures.
Legend of Buddha’s Forest Life, set. 30 to 36
For a time Gautama studied under two Bráhman hermits, in Patná District. They taught him that the peace of the soul was to be reached only by mortifying the body. He then buried himself deeper in the jungles near Gayá, and during six years wasted himself by austerities in company with five disciples. The temple of Buddha-Gayá marks the site of his long penance. But instead of earning peace of mind by fasting and self-torture, he sank into a religious despair, during which the Buddhist Scriptures affirm that the enemy of mankind, Mara, wrestled with him in bodily shape. Torn with doubts as to whether all his penance availed anything, the haggard hermit fell senseless to the earth. When he recovered, the mental agony had passed. He felt that the path to salvation lay not in self-torture in mountain-jungles or caves, but in preaching a higher life to his fellow-men. He gave up penance. His five disciples, shocked by this, forsook him; and he was left alone in the forest. The Buddhist Scriptures depict him as sitting serene under a fig-tree, while demons whirled round him with flaming weapons. From this temptation in the wilderness he came forth with his doubts for ever laid at rest, seeing his way clear, and henceforth to be known as Buddha, literally ‘The Enlightened.’
Public Teaching of Buddha, set. 36 to 80
Buddha began his public teaching in the Deer-Forest, near the great city of Benares. Unlike the Brahmans, he preached, not to one or two disciples of the sacred caste, but to the people. His first converts were common men, and among the earliest were women. After three months he had gathered around him sixty disciples, whom he sent forth to the neighbouring countries with these words: ‘Go ye now, and preach the most excellent law.’ Two-thirds of each year he spent as a wandering preacher. The remaining four months, or the rainy season, he abode at some fixed place, teaching the people who flocked around his little dwelling in the bamboo grove. His five old disciples, who had forsaken him in the time of his sore temptation in the wilderness, now came back to their master. Princes, merchants, artisans, Bráhmans and hermits, husbandmen and serfs, noble ladies and repentant women who had sinned, were added to those who believed. Buddha preached throughout Behar, Oudh, and the adjacent districts in the North-Western Provinces. He had ridden forth from his father’s palace as a brilliant young prince. He now returned to it as a wandering preacher, in dingy yellow robes, with shaven head and the begging bowl in his hand. The old king heard him with reverence. The son, whom Buddha had left as a new-born babe, was converted to the faith; and his beloved wife, from the threshold of whose chamber he had ridden away into the darkness, became one of the first of Buddhist nuns.
Legend of Buddha’s Death and Last Words
Buddha’s Great Renunciation took place in his thirtieth year. After long self-preparation, his public teaching began when he was about thirty-six, and during forty-four years he preached to the people. In foretelling his death, he said to his followers: ‘Be earnest, be thoughtful, be holy, Keep steadfast watch over your own hearts. He who holds fast to the law and discipline, and faints not, he shall cross the ocean of life and make an end of sorrow.’ ‘The world is fast bound in fetters,’ he added; ‘I now give it deliverance, as a physician who brings heavenly medicine. Keep your mind on my teaching: all other things change, this changes not. No more shall I speak to you. I desire to depart. I desire the eternal rest (Nirvana)!’ He spent the night in preaching, and in comforting a weeping disciple. His latest words, according to one account, were, ‘Work out your salvation with diligence.’ He died calmly, at the age of eighty, under the shadow of a fig-tree, according to the commonly received tradition in 543 B.C.; or according to later criticism in 478 B.C.
The Law of Karma
The secret of Buddha’s success was that he brought spiritual deliverance to the people. He preached that salvation was equally open to all men, and that it must be earned, not by propitiating imaginary deities, but by our own conduct. He thus did away with sacrifices, and with the priestly claims of the Bráhmans as mediators between God and man. He taught that the state of a man in this life, in all previous and in all future lives, is the result of his own acts (Karma). What a man sows, that he must reap. As no evil remains without punishment, and no good deed without reward, it follows that neither priest nor God can prevent each act from bringing about its own consequences. Misery or happiness in this life is the unavoidable result of our conduct in a past life; and our actions here will determine our happiness or misery in the life to come. When any creature dies, he is born again in some higher or lower state of existence, according to his merit or demerit. His merit or demerit consists of the sum total of his actions in all previous lives. A system like this, in which our whole well-being—past, present, and to come—depends on ourselves, leaves little room for a personal God.
The Liberation of the Soul
Life, according to Buddha, must always be more or less painful; and the object of every good man is to get rid of the evils of existence by merging his individual soul into the universal soul. This is Nirvana, literally ‘cessation.’ Some scholars explain it to mean that the soul is blown out like the flame of a lamp. Others hold that it is the extinction of the sins, sorrows, and selfishness of a man’s individual life—the final rest of the soul. The pious Buddhist strives to reach a state of holy meditation in this world, and he looks forward to an eternal calm in a world to come. Buddha taught that this end could only be reached by leading a good life. Instead of the Bráhman sacrifices, he laid down three great duties, namely, control over self, kindness to other men, and reverence for the life of all living creatures.
Missionary Aspects of Buddhism
He urged on his disciples that they must not only follow the true path themselves, but that they should preach it to all mankind. Buddhism has from the first been a missionary religion. One of the earliest acts of Buddha’s public ministry was to send forth the Sixty Disciples. He also formed a religious order, whose duty it was to go forth unpaid and preach to all nations. While, therefore, the Bráhmans kept their ritual for the Twice-born Aryan castes, Buddhism addressed itself not only to those castes and to the lower mass of the people, but to all the non-Aryan races throughout India, and eventually to the whole Asiatic world.
The First and Second Councils
On the death of Buddha in 543 B.C., five hundred of his disciples met in a vast cave near Patná, to gather together his sayings. This was the first Council. They chanted the lessons of their master in three great divisions,—the words of Buddha to his disciples; his code of discipline; and his system of doctrine. These became the Three Collections of Buddha’s teaching; and the word for a Buddhist Council means literally ‘a singing together.’ A century afterwards, a Second Council, of seven hundred, was held in 443 B.C., to settle disputes between the more and the less strict followers of Buddhism.
Asoka
During the next two hundred years Buddhism spread over Northern India. About 267 B.C., Asoka, the King of Magadha or Behar, became a zealous convert to the faith. He was grandson of Chandra Gupta, whom we shall afterwards hear of in Alexander’s camp. Asoka is said to have supported 64,000 Buddhist priests; he founded many religious houses; and his kingdom is called the Land of the Monasteries (Vihára or Behar) to this day. Asoka did for Buddhism what the Emperor Constantine afterwards effected for Christianity—he made it a State religion. This he accomplished by five means,—(1) by a Council to settle the faith; (2) by Edicts setting forth its principles; (3) by a State Department to watch over its purity; (4) by Missionaries to spread its doctrines; and (5) by an Authoritative Revision or Canon of the Buddhist Scriptures.
The Work of Asoka
In 244 B.C., Asoka convened at Patná the Third Buddhist Council, of one thousand elders. Evil men, taking on them the yellow robe of the Buddhist order, had given forth their own opinions as the teaching of Buddha. Such heresies were now corrected; and the Buddhism of Southern Asia practically dates from Asoka’s Council. In a number of edicts, both before and after that Council, he published throughout his empire the grand principles of the faith. Forty of these royal sermons are still found graven upon pillars, caves, and rocks throughout India. Asoka also founded a State department, with a Minister of Justice and Religion at its head, to watch over the purity, and to direct the spread, of the faith. Wells were to be dug and trees planted along the roads for the wearied wayfarers. Hospitals were established for man and beast. Officers were appointed to watch over family life and the morals of the people, and to promote instruction among the women as well as the youth. Asoka thought it his duty to convert all mankind to Buddhism. His rock inscriptions record how he sent forth missionaries ’to the utmost limits of the barbarian countries,’ to ‘intermingle among all unbelievers’ for the spread of religion. They were to mix equally with soldiers, Brahmans, and beggars, with the dreaded and the despised, both within the kingdom ‘and in foreign countries, teaching better things.’ But conversion was to be effected by persuasion, not by the sword. Buddhism was at once the most intensely missionary religion in the world, and the most tolerant. Asoka, however, not only laboured to spread his religion—he also took steps to keep its doctrines pure. He collected the Buddhist sacred books into an authoritative version, in the Magadhi language of his central kingdom in Behar,—a version which for two thousand years has formed the Southern Canon of the Buddhist Scriptures.
Kanishka
The fourth and last of the great Buddhist Councils was held under the Scythian King Kanishka, who ruled in North-Western India about 40 A.D. He again revised the sacred books, and his version has supplied the Northern Canon to the Buddhists of Tibet, Tartary, and China. Meanwhile Buddhist missionaries were preaching all over Asia. About 244 B.C., Asoka’s son is said to have carried his father’s Southern Canon of the sacred books to Ceylon, whence it spread in later times to Burma and the Eastern Archipelago. The Northern Canon of Buddhism, as laid down at the Council of Kanishka, became one of the State religions of China in 65 A.D.; and it is still professed by the northern Buddhists from Tibet to Japan. The Buddhist ritual and doctrines also spread westwards, and exercised an influence upon early Christianity.
Buddhism as a National Religion
Buddhism was thus formed into a State religion by the Councils of Asoka and Kanishka. It did not abolish caste. On the contrary, reverence to Brahmans and to the spiritual guide ranked as one of the three great duties, along with obedience to parents and acts of kindness to all men and animals. Buddha, however, divided mankind not by their caste, but according to their religious merit. He told his hearers to live good lives, not to offer victims to the gods. The public worship in Buddhist countries consists, therefore, in doing honour to the relics of holy men who are dead, instead of sacrifices. Its sacred buildings were, originally, not temples to the gods, but monasteries for the monks and nuns, with their bells and rosaries; or memorial shrines, reared over a tooth or bone of the founder of the faith.
Buddha’s personality denied
While, on the one hand, many miraculous stories have grown up around Buddha’s life and death, it has been denied, on the other hand, that such a person as Buddha ever existed. The date of his birth cannot be fixed with certainty; the dates which I have given for his life are those of the received Indian tradition. Some scholars hold that Buddhism is merely a religion based on the Bráhmanical or Sankhya philosophy of Kapila. They argue that Buddha’s birth is placed at a purely allegorical town, Kapila-Vastu, ’the abode of Kapila’; that his mother is called Maya-deví, in reference to the Máyá or ‘illusion’ doctrine of Kapila’s system; and that the very name of Buddha is not that of any real person, but merely means ‘The Enlightened.’ This theory is so far true, that Buddhism was not a sudden invention of any single mind, but was worked out from the Brahman philosophy and religion which preceded it. But such a view leaves out of sight the two great traditional features of Buddhism, namely, the preacher’s appeal to the people, and the undying influence of his own beautiful life.
Bráhmanism never crushed
Buddhism never drove Bráhmanism out of India. The two religions lived together during more than a thousand years, from before 250 B.C. to about 900 A.D. Modern Hinduism is the joint product of both. In certain kingdoms of India, and at certain periods, Buddhism prevailed. But Brahmanism was at no time crushed; and the Brahmans in the end claimed Buddha as the ninth incarnation of their own god, Vishnu. The Chinese Pilgrims to India in 400 and 630 A.D. found Buddhist monasteries and Brahman temples side by side.
Council of Siladitya, 634 A.D.
In Northern India, for example, a famous Buddhist king, Síladitya, ruled at the latter date. He seems to have been an Asoka of the seventh century A.D.; and he strictly carried out the two great Buddhist duties of charity and spreading the faith. He tried to extend Buddhism by means of a General Council in 634 A.D. Twenty-one tributary sovereigns attended, together with the most learned Buddhist monks and Brahmans of their kingdoms. But the object of the Council was not merely to assert the Buddhist faith. It dealt with the two religions of India at that time. First, a discussion took place between the Buddhists and the Bráhmans; second, a dispute between the two Buddhist sects who followed respectively the Northern Scriptures or Canon of Kanishka and the Southern Scriptures or Canon of Asoka. The rites of the populace were as mixed as the doctrines of their teachers. On the first day of the Council, a statue of Buddha was installed with great pomp; on the second, an image of the Bráhman Sun-god; on the third, an idol of the Hindu Siva.
Síláditya’s Charity
Síláditya held a solemn distribution of his royal treasures every five years. The Chinese Pilgrim Hiuen Tsiang describes how, on the plain where the Ganges and the Jumna unite their waters, near Allahabad, all the kings of the empire, and a multitude of people, were feasted for seventy-five days. Síláditya brought forth the stores of his palace, and gave them away to Bráhmans and Buddhists, monks and heretics, without distinction. At the end of the festival he stripped off his jewels and royal raiment, handed them to the bystanders, and, like Buddha of old, put on the rags of a beggar. By this ceremony the king commemorated the Great Renunciation of Buddha, and also practised the highest duty laid down by the Brahmans, namely, almsgiving.
Monastery of Nalanda
The vast Buddhist monastery of Nalanda, near Gayá, formed a seat of learning which recalls the Christian abbeys and universities of mediaeval Europe. Ten thousand monks and novices of the eighteen Buddhist schools here studied theology, philosophy, law, science, especially medicine, and practised their devotions. They lived in learned ease, fed by the royal bounty. But even this stronghold of Buddhism is a proof that Buddhism was only one of two hostile creeds in India. During one short period (about 640 A.D.) it was three times destroyed by the enemies of the Buddhist faith.
Victory of Brahmanism, 700 to 900 A.D.
Between 700 and 900 A.D. there arose various great reformers of the Bráhman faith. After 800 A.D. Brahmanism gradually became the ruling religion. Legends dimly tell of persecutions stirred up by Bráhman reformers. But although there were severe local persecutions of Buddhists, the downfall of Buddhism seems to have resulted partly from its own decay, and from new movements of religious thought, rather than from any general suppression by the sword. In the tenth century, only outlying states, such as Kashmir and Orissa, remained faithful; and before the Muhammadans fairly came upon the scene, Buddhism as a popular faith had almost disappeared from India.
Buddhism an Exiled Religion, 800 A.D.
During the last thousand years Buddhism has been a banished religion from its native Indian home. But it has won greater triumphs in its exile than it could have ever achieved in the land of its birth. It created a literature and a religion for nearly one-half of the human race; and it is supposed, by its influence on early Christianity, to have affected the beliefs of a large part of the other half. Five hundred millions of men, or forty per cent. of the inhabitants of the world, still follow the teaching of Buddha. Afghanistan, Nepal, Eastern Turkistan, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, China, Japan, the Eastern Archipelago, Siam, Burma, Ceylon, and India, at one time or another marked the magnificent circle of its conquests. Its shrines and monasteries stretched from what are now provinces of the Russian empire, to Japan and the islands of the Malay Sea. During twenty-four centuries, Buddhism has encountered and outlived a series of rival faiths. At this day it forms, with Christianity and Islam, one of the three great religions of the world; and the most numerously followed of the three.
The Jains
Even in India Buddhism did not altogether die. Many of its doctrines still live in Hinduism. It also left behind a special sect, the Jains, who number over 1½ millions in India. Like the Buddhists, they deny the authority of the Veda, except in so far as it agrees with their own tenets; disregard sacrifice; practise a strict morality; believe that their past and future states depend upon their own actions rather than on any external deity; and refuse to kill either man or beast. The Jains divide time into three eras; and adore twenty-four jinas, or just men made perfect, in the past age, twenty-four in the present, and twenty-four in the era to come. The colossal statues of this great company of saints stand in their temples. They choose wooded mountains and the most lovely retreats of nature for their places of pilgrimage, and cover them with exquisitely carved shrines in white marble or dazzling stucco. The Jains of India are usually merchants or bankers. Their charity is boundless; and they form the chief supporters of the beast hospitals, which the old Buddhistic tenderness for animals has left in many of the cities of India. They claim, not without evidence, that the Jain religion is even older than Buddhism; and that the teaching of Buddha was based on the Jain faith.
The Present Influence of Buddhism in India
Buddhism is still the religion of Burma, and has there over nine millions of followers, or nine-tenths of the population. The Buddhist monasteries have from ancient times been schools for the young as well as religious houses for the monks; and they now form the basis of the British system of Public Instruction throughout Burma. In all the rest of British India there are only about 227,000 pure Buddhists, chiefly in the Bengal Districts adjacent to Burma, and in the remote valleys of the Himalayan ranges. From time to time Buddhism seems to take a new start in Lower Bengal, and Buddhist journals are published in Calcutta and elsewhere. The Jain faith, an allied religion to Indian Buddhism, has been described in the last paragraph. But the noblest survivals of Buddhism in India are to be found not among any peculiar body, but in the religion of the whole Hindu people; in that principle of the brotherhood of man, with the re-assertion of which each new revival of Hinduism starts; in the asylum which the great Hindu sect of Vaishnavs affords to women who have fallen victims to caste rules, to the widow and the outcast; in that gentleness and charity to all men, which take the place of a poor-law in India, and give a high significance to the half-satirical epithet of the ‘mild’ Hindu.
Materials for Reference
The most convenient English summary of this subject will be found in Professor Rhys Davids’ Buddhism, his Buddhist Birth-Stories, and Hibbert Lectures. Among many other works may be mentioned Bishop Bigandet’s Life and Legend of Buddha (London edition, 1880); Spence Hardy’s Manual of Buddhism (modern), and his Eastern Monachism; Oldenberg’s Buddha, sein Leben (and English translation by Hoey, 1883, an admirable work); Rockhill’s Life of the Buddha (from Tibetan sources); Copleston’s Buddhism Primitive and Present in Magadha and in Ceylon; Senart’s Essai sur la Légende du Bouddha; Beale’s Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese; Edkin’s Chinese Buddhism; Childers’ Dictionary of the Páli Language (s. v. Buddho, &c.); General Maisey’s Sánchi and its remains; General Cunningham’s Ancient Geography of India, his Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, and his other archaeological writings, of which the latest is the Mahábodhi, or the Great Buddhist Temple at Buddha-Gaya (1892). An interesting Buddhist magazine, entitled The Journal of the Mahábodhi Society, is published monthly in Calcutta (1892).