CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



stated assemblies of the people held for that 

 purpose. They have also everywhere, except 



in China, a monopoly of education ; and in 

 Buddhist countries, education, whatever may 

 be its quality, is very generally diffused. In 

 some countries, the monks are exceedingly num- 

 erous ; around Lhassa, in Tibet, for instance, 

 they are said to be one-third of the population. 

 They live in viharas, or monasteries, and subsist 

 partly by endowments, but mostly by charity. 

 Except in Tibet, they are not allowed to engage 

 in any secular occupation. The vow is not irrev- 

 ocable. The incubus of monachism constitutes 

 the great weakness of Buddhism in its social 

 aspect. The adoration of the statues of the 

 Buddha and of his relics, is the chief external 

 ceremony of the religion. This, with prayer and 

 the repetition of sacred formulas, constitutes the 

 ritual. The centres of the worship are the 

 temples containing statues, and the topes or 

 tumuli erected over the relics of the Buddha, or 

 of his distinguished apostles, or on spots conse- 

 crated as the scenes of the Buddha's acts. The 

 central object in a Buddhist temple, correspond- 

 ing 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 \ trasted 

 made with singing of hymns. Of the relics of the 

 Buddha, the most famous are the teeth that are 

 preserved with intense veneration in various 

 places. Hiouen-Thsang saw more than a dozen 

 of them in different parts of India ; and the great 

 monarch Ciladitya was on the eve of making war 

 on the king of Cashmere for the possession of one, 

 which, although by no means the largest, was yet 

 an inch and a half long. The tooth of the Buddha 

 preserved in Ceylon, a piece of ivory about the 

 size of the little-finger, is exhibited very rarely, 

 and then only with permission of the English 

 government so great is the concourse and so 

 intense the excitement. 



It is not quite easy to reconcile the seeming 

 worship of the Buddha with the theory that he 

 no longer exists ; but inconsistency between 

 theory and practice is not unfamiliar. In theory, 

 the Buddha is not in existence, and certainly he is 

 not a god. And he is only the Buddha of the 

 present cycle, the man who discovered for the 

 world that now is the secret of deliverance from 

 being and its misery. Former cycles have had, 

 future cycles will have, each a Buddha of its own. 

 But he has been the supreme benefactor of man- 

 kind, and is the ideal of what men should be. 

 As such, his memory is venerated, remembered 

 with commemorative rites ; and the line between 

 this and worship is a fine one, and easily passed. 

 What is most surprising is that prayers should be 

 addressed to a being whose greatness is believed 

 to consist in his having shewn to others how to 

 procure, and having procured for himself extinc- 

 tion, or at any rate, immunity from all the interests 

 of life. But among Easterns the power attributed 

 to prayer is very much that of a charm, or in- 

 cantation, and this view of prayer is more con- 



433 



sistent with the Buddhist philosophy than with 

 that of any other religion. It is indeed perfectly 

 consistent with it to consider that prayer is 

 operative as by a natural law ; and the praying- 

 wheels, with texts inscribed on them, worked by 

 hand, or even by horse-power, which Buddhist 

 monks use in their devotions, that they may easily 

 multiply their petitions, may be taken as shewing 

 that this is really the Buddhist theory of prayer. 

 In theory, then, the address to the Buddha may 

 be merely commemorative. But that the Buddha 

 is actually worshipped by the more ignorant 

 among those who hold his creed, it is impossible 

 to doubt. And, as if the faith were too hard for 

 uncultured natures, it is certain that many Buddh- 

 ist peoples unite their faith in Buddhism with 

 the worship of demons, and other superstitions to 

 which Buddhism gives no countenance, though 

 perhaps it does not exclude them. It could 

 not be otherwise. Even Christianity has failed 

 thoroughly to imbue the masses of any community 

 with its beliefs, and to extirpate all practices de- 

 scended from older and lower religions. 



The element in Buddhism which, more than 

 any other, has led to its surprising extension, has 

 no doubt been the spirit of universal charity and 

 sympathy that it breathes. In India, this con- 

 with the exclusiveness of caste. Budd- 

 hism held much the same relation to Brah- 

 manism that Christianity did to Judaism. It was,, 

 in fact, a reaction against the exclusiveness and 

 formalism of Brahmanism an attempt to render 

 it more catholic, and to throw off its intolerable 

 burden of ceremonies. Buddhism did not expressly 

 abolish caste, but only declared that all followers 

 of the Buddha who embraced the religious life 

 were thereby released from its restrictions. In the 

 bosom of a community who had all equally re- 

 nounced the world, high and low, the twice-born 

 Brahman and the outcast were brethren. It was- 

 just in this way that Christianity dealt with the 

 slavery of the ancient world. The opening of its 

 ranks to all classes and to both sexes for women 

 were admitted to equal hopes and privileges with 

 men, and one of Gautama's early female disciples 

 is to be the supreme Buddha of a future cycle 

 no doubt gave Buddhism a great advantage over 

 Brahmanism. But its teaching went far beyond 

 this. It preached a charity based on a doctrine 

 wider even than that of the brotherhood of man- 

 kind the doctrine of the brotherhood, if we may 

 so call it, of all animated beings. And appealing 

 to what is best in man, it has mastered the 

 greater part of the Eastern world. Its philosophy 

 alone might have repelled mankind. Its morality,, 

 admirable as it is, would not of itself have con- 

 verted them, and, indeed, without some force to- 

 put it in motion, it must have remained in the 

 barren region of ideals. The motive force for it 

 was found in the brotherhood which Buddhism- 

 preached, and the sense of duty which grew out 

 of it ; and the consequent results upon humaa 

 conduct are perhaps the best explanation that can 

 be given of the wonderful success of an atheistic 

 philosophy. 



