RELIGION, EDUCATION, FINE ARTS. 



503 



near Tivoli, or at the Portico of Octavia, in 

 Rome, in the seventeenth century. After re- 

 maining for some time in the Medici Palace 

 in Rome (whence its name) it was carried to 

 Florence by Cosmo III., about 1680, where it 

 is now preserved in the Uffizi Gallery. From 

 the exquisite grace and symmetry of the fig- 

 ure it has become a sort of standard of excel- 

 lence for the female form. The beautiful 

 Venus de Milo is so called because it was found 

 on the Island of Milo, or Melos, in the Grecian 

 Archipelago. It is now in the Louvre, at 

 Paris. Of modern statues, that by Canova is 

 the most famous. 



Buddhism. The religion known as Bud- 

 dhism is one of the oldest existing religions, and 

 traces its origin back to Siddhartha or Buddha, 

 a Hindoo prince. In Hindustan, the land of 

 its birth, it has now little hold, except among 

 the Nepaulese and some other northern tribes, 

 but it bears full sway in Ceylon and over the 

 whole eastern peninsula. It divides the ad- 

 herence of the Chinese with the system of Con- 

 fucius. It prevails also in Japan and north of 

 the Himalayas. It is the religion of Thibet, 

 and of the Mongolian population of Central 

 Asia. Its adherents are estimated at 340,000,- 

 000. According to the Buddhist belief, when 

 i man dies he is immediately born again, or 

 appears in a new shape ; and that shape may, 

 According to his merit or demerit, be any of 

 the innumerable orders of being composing the 

 Buddhist universe, from a clod to a divinity. 

 If his demerit would not be sufficiently pun- 

 ished by a degraded earthly existence in the 

 lorm, for instance, of a woman or a slave, of 

 A persecuted or a disgusting animal, of a plant, 

 or even of a piece of inorganic matter he will 

 be born in some one of the one hundred and 

 thirty-six Buddhist hells situated in the interior 

 of the earth. These places of punishment 

 have a regular gradation in the intensity of the 

 suffering and in the length of time the sufferers 

 live, the least term of life being 10,000,000 

 years, the longest term being almost beyond the 

 powers of even Indian notation to express. A 

 meritorious life, on the other hand, secures the 

 next birth either in an exalted and happy posi- 

 tion on earth or as a blessed spirit, or even 

 divinity, in one of the many heavens in which 

 the least duration of life is about 10,000,000,- 

 000 years. But however long the life, whether 

 of miseiy or bliss, it has an end, and at its 

 close the individual must be born again, and 

 may again be either happy or miserable. The 

 Buddha himself is said to have gone through 

 every conceivable form of existence on the earth, 

 in the air and in the water, in hell and in 

 heaven, and to have filled every condition in 

 human life ; and a great part of the Buddhist 



legendary literature is taken up in narrating his 

 exploits when he lived as an elephant, as a bird, 

 as a stag, and so on. A second Buddhist doc- 

 trine is embodied in the " Four Sublime Ver- 

 J ities." The first asserts that pain exists ; the 

 second that the cause of pain is desire or at- 

 tachment ; the third that pain can be ended by 

 Nirvana ; and the fourth shows the way that 

 leads to Nirvana, from simple faith to complete 

 regeneration. Theoretically this religion has 

 no priests, nor clergy, nor public religious rites. 

 Every man is his own priest and confessor, and 

 the monks are ascetics only for their own ad- 

 vancement in holy living ; but in fact Buddhist 

 countries swarm with priests or religious teach- 

 ers, so reputed. The central object in a 

 Buddhist temple, corresponding to the altar in 

 a Roman Catholic church, is an image of the 

 Buddha, or a dagoba or shrine containing his 

 relics. Here flowers, fruit, and incense are 

 daily offered, and processions are made, with 

 singing of hymns. Of the relics of the Buddha, 

 the most famous are the teeth, that are pre- 

 served with intense veneration in various places. 

 The quantities of flowers used as offerings are 

 prodigious. A royal devotee in Ceylon, in the 

 fifteenth century, offered on one occasion 

 6,480,320 flowers at the shrine of the tooth, 

 and at one temple it was provided that there 

 sho.uld be offered " every day 100,000 flowers, 

 and each day a different flower." 



Eden, Garden of. The question of the 

 locality of the Garden of Eden, or of the exact 

 sense in which the Mosaic narrative is to be 

 understood, is involved in inexplicable mys- 

 tery. Josephus and several of the Fathers 

 conceived that Eden was a term denoting the 

 entire region between the Ganges and the Nile. 

 Calvin, Huet, Bochart, and Wells have, with 

 slight differences of detail, concluded in favor 

 of Kornah, in Babylonia, not far from the 

 Persian Gulf ; while Armenia, near the sources 

 of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the region 

 near Damascus, have been selected by other 

 celebrated scholars. The modern German 

 school of Biblical critics, convinced that the 

 Hebrew account is traditional, and, in its 

 present form, of very late composition, and 

 impressed, beside, with the vast antiquity of 

 the far East, have, almost without exception, 

 sought the cradle of the human race in Bactria 

 or Cashmere, or the region lying to the north 

 of it, a part of which is to this day called 

 Audyana, the Garden. The Mohammedans, 

 it may also be mentioned, believe Eden to have 

 been in one of the seven heavens some say 

 the moon and that the expulsion from Para- 

 dise consisted in Adam being cast down upon 

 the earth after the fall. The endeavor to pos- 

 itively identify the river system of Eden with 



