1845.] du Buddhism Indien, par E. Bumovf. 801 



number of his hearers, men who were rejected by the more elevated classes 

 of society ; it accounts for the success, with which his doctrine was pro- 

 pagated and his disciples multiplied ; lastly, it reveals the secret of the 

 radical modifications which the propagation of Buddhism must produce 

 in the Brahmanical constitutions, and of the persecutions which apprehen- 

 sion of changes necessarily brought down upon the Buddhists, when they 

 should become powerful enough to endanger a political system, principally 

 founded on the existence and perpetuity of castes. These facts are so 

 intimately connected with each other, that the presence of the first 

 (viz., the admission of the hitherto excluded classes) suffices to develop 

 gradually the others as a matter of course. But external circumstances 

 may have favoured this development ; the mind may have been more 

 or less well prepared ; the moral condition of India in one word may 

 have favoured the ardour of the people to hear the instruction of Sakya. 

 It is this, which one can learn alone from the Sutras. 



I have before observed, that the second means for conversion was the 

 splendor of his miracles. With this means always correspond the 

 sentiments of benevolence and of belief, which are awakened within the 

 hearers by the influence of his virtuous actions in his former existences. 

 It is therefore a favourite theme of the legendists ; and in fact, there 

 is not one conversion recorded, which had not been prepared by the 

 benevolence, felt by the hearer for the Buddha and his doctrine. This 

 virtue of the Buddha, or to name it more clearly, this kind of grace, was 

 the great motive for conversions, which would be otherwise perfectly inex- 

 plicable, it was the knot, by which Sakya connected the new religious light 

 introduced by his doctrine, with an unknown state of past existences 

 which he explains in favour of his preaching. It may be easily understood, 

 what influence such a means must have exercised upon the minds 

 of a people, among which the belief in the law of transmigration was 

 firmly established. In starting from this belief, upon which he founded 

 the authority of his mission, Sakya appeared rather to explain the 

 past than to change the present : and it cannot be doubted, that he 

 made use of it to justify the conversions, which the prejudices of the 

 higher castes, to which he belonged by birth, condemned. But this 

 motive of grace is entirely religious, and it is one of those, the employ- 

 ment of which the legendists have undoubtedly exaggerated, and must 

 have exaggerated, when Buddhism had afterwards acquired an import- 



