C>92 A few Gleanings in Buddhism. [Dec. 



This must, I should think, have been some heretical doctrine ; for it 

 can hardly be believed that a religion so based on morality as Bud- 

 dhism is, would at the threshold of its original temples, have tolerated 

 such a breach of it. I feel convinced, that the comparatively pure 

 Buddhism, which was carried from Ceylon to Cambodia by Buddha 

 Ghosa, and thence by others to Siam, perhaps through Laos, was 

 greatly adulterated, and assumed more of a polytheistic character than 

 its hitherto rather theomachistic dogmas had permitted ; about the 

 time when the brahmans had fully achieved the superiority in India 

 over the Buddhists, and had spread themselves as religionists to the 

 eastward ; and when the heretical Buddhist sects, let loose from all 

 restraint, disseminated their own doctrines far and wide. 



Much learning and ingenuity has been expended in the West in the 

 endeavour to trace Western Buddhism to the east, but perhaps the pre- 

 valent impression on the mind of the eastern orientalist is that it 

 originated in the west and was there the parent of Indian Buddhism, 

 if not indigenous to India. Hinduism too, under the form and impress 

 in which we now find it, must have been brought to India from western 

 regions, if it was really the religion of the brahmans as a tribe of 

 foreigners, and not in the main, as I cannot help considering it to be, 

 a particoloured pantheon, tenanted by deities possessing most incongruous 

 attributes, and jumbled up with monstrous and polluted imaginings, and 

 chimeras dire ; and thus laboriously and cunningly erected, by the brah- 

 mans, for the gratification of their lust for power, and of their hatred 

 of the Buddhists, on whom they had for centuries kept fixed their 

 basalisk eyes, and not with that expanded desire, which the Buddhists 

 seem to have entertained for the amelioration of the moral condition of 

 mankind. 



In admitting that Buddha had a precursor in the same path as 

 himself, we are by no means called upon at the same time to unreflect- 

 ingly adopt the predecessors of the latter, although there would be 

 nothing, morally, to prevent our even admitting them suppositively ; 

 for we should in this case have only to discard the lengthened periods, 

 astronomical or fanciful, which have been assigned to the three first 

 Brxdlias, and to bring them nearer to the bills of mortality, to render 

 them manageable. 



The Buddha of the present period, dating from his apotheosis ni 



