172 THE EEV. E. COLLINS^ ON 



and, if lie can restore her speech I -will become a Qaivite, and if he 

 cannot do it I will remain firm in my old faith." I suppose so 

 much is historical. Then came the controversy. I do not mean 

 to sny that every word of it is historical ; but it shows pretty 

 exactly what the feeling' of the south was with regard to Buddhism, 

 and why it had lost its influence over them. In the controversy 

 Avhich was very fierce and prolonged, first of all the (^aivite disputant 

 says to them, '" You have no souls, you have no God, you have no 

 real Nirvana. How is that ? First of all you say that there are 

 five grades, or sheaths, the secret of all existence. There is then 

 no substi'atum of being. Certainly you teach that r.s long as we 

 live we have souls and consciousness, but consciousness itself is 

 only the fifth degi-ee of existence, and that is a sheath round the 

 supposed ego. The passing away of these sheaths, one by one, 

 leaves at death nothing, because there is nothing at the core of it, 

 no substratum of existence. The Buddhist system has no real 

 objective soul at all." The Buddhists were obliged to concede 

 this, that on the death of organisms all these sheaths were 

 stripped away from them, the last being consciousness, and when 

 consciousness was gone, where was the ego ? The next argument 

 was, " this being the case you have no deliverance from sin. The 

 only deliverance there can be is the destruction of consciousness 

 when you sink into nonentity ; and you have no God, because all 

 this apj)lies, in your books, to your Buddha. He himself, has only 

 an earthly body, which was the result of these five characteristics, 

 that passed away when he died, and conciousness is the last of 

 them. So your God exists not, you have neither God nor soi^l, 

 nor can you have deliverance." There seemed no way to g^nswer 

 this, and the whole mass of the people and the king, and all the 

 rest of the Buddhists that liad come in enibyaced the Qaiva 

 system, on the gi-ound that buddhism gave them no assurance of 

 the existence of the soul, or any conscious state of blessedness or 

 rest after this visible phenomenon of existence had passed away. 

 The consequence was that Buddhism died out in South India from 

 that very time. I do not say that this is an exactly fair view of 

 Buddhism, but it is the view t^ken of it by the southern part of 

 India, and it was the fact that Buddhism lost its influence in 

 consequence. 



Another thing I should like to mention cursorily is this. The 

 ^aiva people were challenged by the others in this way, " Well, 



