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BUDDHISM. 



obedience to his commands Would, ipso facto, bring a reward 

 superior to that of all other religions. 



With regard to these moral precepts it must also be borne 

 in mind, that they are not exclusively Grotamo Buddha's ; in 

 fact it may be doubted whether he even laid claim to originat- 

 ing any one of them. He himself declared that his Dhamma 

 (doctrine) was like that of the former Buddha's; which evidently 

 means that he learnt it from other religious teachers of his 

 time, especially the Brahmans ; and a very superficial glance 

 at the Yedas and other books of the early Brahmans will con- 

 vince any one that Grotamo, in addition to his inward monitor, 

 that judge of right and wrong, had ample materials around 

 him, to mould up into a religion, so far resembling Brahmanism 

 as not to make it unnecessarily distasteful to the populace, and 

 at the same time so different, that he might hope to break the 

 yoke of the Brahman priests, which was galling to the people, 

 but more especially to the kings. It would be interesting to 

 note how far the parallelism extends in the case of North 

 Indian kings favouring Buddhism in order to rid themselves 

 from the pretension of the Brahmans, and that of the monarchs 

 of Western Europe countenancing the Reformation in the 

 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so that they might deliver 

 themselves from the yoke of Rome ; but we must haste on to 

 the consideration of the matter now before us, and remind our 

 readers that as regards his Dhamma, — -the doctrines revealed in 

 the Sutta Pitaka, — Buddha claimed no authority except that of a 

 kind of temporary omniscience, possessed by him only at such 

 times as he wished, by means of which he declared the four 

 paths of virtue, with their fruition, and the summum bonum, 

 Niwan. 



But when we descend to the Winiya Pitaka, Buddha 

 appears to us in a new light. He is there the Primate and 



