35 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



he must not only bathe twice a day, but expose his body to every 

 shower of the rainy season (Weber, " Indische Literatur-Geschichte," 



p. 395). 



Yet this regimen was merely a palliative, prescribed to all refugees 

 from the temptations of this world, and positive sinners had to expiate 

 their guilt by quite different penances. In this higher art of self- 

 torture Buddhism unquestionably bears off the palm of insanity. 

 Under the influence of its dogmas Sannyassism became an elaborate 

 system for weaning the human mind not from the errors of life, but 

 from life itself, a systematic mortification of all natural instincts and 

 desires, a negative method of suicide. The " renouncer " had first to 

 ascertain his dearest wishes and deliberately thwart them ; abandon 

 his friends, relinquish his worldly ambitions, and forego all gratifica- 

 tions of the senses. He next had to avoid whatever could compensate 

 such sacrifices : emulation, fame, and even the pleasures of self -appro- 

 bation. The candidate of Nirvana had to subsist on insipid food 

 millet-seed, for instance, or even cresses (" Asiatic Researches," vol. 

 xvii, p. 238). He had to clothe himself in rags, and renounce all 

 worldly possessions, all earthly sympathies ; Buddha Ghoska, the 

 South Indian apostle of the great Nepaulese, goes so far as to warn 

 his disciples against sleeping more than once under the same tree, lest 

 their souls should be contaminated with an undue affection for any 

 worldly object (Schopenhauer's " Parerga," vol. i, p. 317). The civil 

 war of contending dogmas filled India with rival hordes of self-tortur- 

 ing fanatics. Brahmans and Buddhists vied in the invention of new 

 torments. Voluntary affliction became the chief criterion of mei'it. 

 The Buddhistic monasteries practiced the most approved methods for 

 making life hateful and death desirable ; among their ghastly peni- 

 tents all the monsters of La Trappe could have found their prototypes. 

 Troops of Brahmanic flagellants wandered from town to town ; the 

 Sannyassis had regular rendezvous, where their novices could profit by 

 the experience of the accomplished lunatics : 



" So gathered they, a grievous company : 

 Some day and night had stood with lifted arms, 

 Till, drained of blood and withered hy disease, 

 Their slowly-wasting joints and stiffened limbs 

 Jutted from sapless shoulders, like dead forks 

 From forest trunks. Others had clinched their hands 

 So long and with so fierce a fortitude, 

 The claw-like nails grew through the festered palm. 

 Certain who cried five hundred times a day 

 The names of Shiva, wound with darting snakes 

 About their sun-tanned necks and hollow flanks . . . 

 Here crouched one in the dust, who, noon by noon, 

 Meted a thousand grains of millet out, ' 

 Ate it with famished patience, seed by seed, 

 And so starved on ; there one who bruised his pulse 



