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THE REV. W. ST. CLAIR TISDALL, D.D., ON 



selected animals a careful training that will enable them to be 

 born as human beings* in the next life. It is remarkable, how- 

 ever, if we may credit those who speak from many years' 

 personal acquaintance with Chinese Buddhism, that such tender 

 care for the religious interests of the lower animals does not 

 prevent these monks from showing callousness and indifference 

 towards the sufferings of their own countrymen. It is much 

 the same with Mahayanisin in Japan. A writer who has spent 

 many years in the country says " Because of his faith in the 

 doctrine of the Transmigration of souls, the toiling labourer 

 will keep his wheels or his feet from harming the cat or dog or 

 chicken in the road, even though it be at risk and trouble and 

 with added labour to himself. The pious will buy the live birds 

 or eels from the old woman who sits on the bridge, in order to. 

 give them life and liberty again in air or water .... Yet, 

 while all this care is lavished on animals, the human being 

 suffers. Buddhism is kind to the brute and cruel to manf ." In 

 Ceylon, too, where the Hinayana school of Buddhism is dominant, 

 the belief in Metempsychosis has notoriously had the effect of 

 rendering human life hardly more sacred in the people's eyes 

 than the life of an animal. Hence the number of murders which 

 occur there is greater in proportion to the population than in 

 any other place known to us. 



Much importance has recently been attached to what Maha- 

 yanisin teaches about Buddha under the title of Tathdgata, or 

 in Chinese Ju Lai. The term has had the wildest and most 

 fanciful meanings attached to it recently by the author of that 

 astounding work of an ill-balanced judgment and untrammelled 

 imagination, The New Testament of Higher Buddhism. This 

 writer in different parts of his book renders the term, now by 

 Messiah, The Moelel Come, The True Model become Incarnate, now 

 by Manifested Model, Incarncde Model, and again by the titles 

 " God Incarnate" " Incarnate Lord." It is difficult to find 

 language severe enough to condemn such a pretended translation 

 of the term. It means nothing even remotely similar to what 

 these words express to a Christian. The Chinese Ju Lai is 

 merely a translation of the original Sanskrit word Tatlidgata. 

 Now Tathagata means literally " He who has come thus "j 



* See a prayer for this in De Groot's Le Code du Mahaydne en Chine, 

 p. 125 ; see also op. cit., p. 53. 



t Dr. Griffis, The Religions of Japan, pp. 315, 316. 



X Cf., the similarly formed word Yathdgata in Lalita-vistara, p. 162, 

 where it means " (the girls) just as they came." 



