18223	----	TEN CENT POCKET SERIES NO. 325 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius The Essence of Buddhism HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY GIRARD, KANSAS Copyright, 1922. Haldeman-Julius Company. PREFACE. I am glad to be permitted thus to say, in a few words of introduction to this well-meditated little volume, how pleasant and how profitable an idea it must be considered to have designed and compiled a Buddhist anthology. Selecting his cut and uncut jewels from very various Buddhistic sources, Mr. Bowden has here supplied those who buy and use the book with rubies and sapphires and emeralds of wisdom, compassion, and human brotherhood, any one of which, worn on the heart, would be sufficient to make the wearer rich beyond estimation for a day. The author disclaims any attempt to set forth a corpus of Buddhistic morality and doctrine, nor, indeed, would anything of the kind be possible within such narrow limits; but I rejoice to observe how well and faithfully his manifold extracts from the Sacred Books of India and the East exhibit that ever-pervading tenderness of the great Asiatic Teacher, which extended itself to all alike that live. This compassionateness of Gautama, if nothing else had been illustrated by the collection, would render it precious to possess and fruitful to employ; but many another lofty tenet of the "Light" of Asia finds illumination in some brief verse or maxim as day after day glides by; and he who should mark the passage of the months with these simple pages must become, I think, a better man at the year's end than at its beginning. I recommend this compilation without hesitation or reserve. EDWIN ARNOLD. COMPILER'S PROEM. E. M. BOWDEN. In this compilation no attempt has been made to present a general view of Buddhism as a religious or philosophical system. The aim has rather been to turn Buddhism to account as a moral force by bringing together a selection of its beautiful sentiments, and lofty maxims, and particularly including some of those which inculcate mercy to the lower animals. On this point a far higher stand is taken by Buddhism than by Christianity--or at any rate than by Christianity as understood and interpreted by those who ought to know. Not only is the whole question of our duties to the lower animals commonly ignored in Christian works as, for instance, in the famous Imitation of Christ, and scores of others; but, as if this were not enough, a reasoned attempt has actually been made, on the strength of Christian teaching, to explode the notion that animals have any right (e.g., in Moral Philosophy, by Father Joseph Rickaby). Very different in this respect is the tone of the average Buddhist treatise, with its earnest exhortations, recurring as a matter of course, to show mercy on every living thing; and this difference alone is an adequate reason for compiling a Buddhist anthology. In regard to the sources quoted from, considerable latitude seemed allowable. They do not all, by any means, possess canonical authority. But they are all distinctly Buddhist in character. The supposed dates of the originals range from at least the third century B. C. to medieval and later times. Hence, it is clear that, should any one think to make use of quotations from this work for controversial purposes, a certain degree of caution will be necessary. The context of the passage, and the date and the authorship of the original work, may all need to be taken into account; while it must also be borne in mind that the religious terms, such as "heaven" and "sin," which have to be employed in English, do not always correspond exactly to the Buddhist conception. Of the numerous Buddhist works which have now been translated from some eight or ten eastern languages, the greater number, when regarded purely as literature, occupy a very low level. At times they are so remarkably dull and silly that the reader is inclined to ask why they were ever translated. But the one redeeming feature in the voluminous compositions of Buddhist writers is the boundless compassion which they consistently inculcate. The insertion of a passage in these pages does not necessarily imply that the compiler accepts in its entirety the teaching it conveys. Concerning that oft-repeated injunction, not to kill any living creature whatsoever, we can hardly doubt that there are many cases in which to take life, provided it is taken painlessly, not only is not on the whole an unkindness, but is an act of beneficence. If we sometimes give to this injunction the sense of extending our sympathy to the lowest sentient being, and not causing pain to living creatures while they live, we shall perhaps not be doing violence to the spirit of mercy by which it was prompted. There are many passages in Buddhist works which advocate preference for the spirit over the letter, or the exercise of judgment in accepting what we are taught. A few passages, though not many, have been included more because they are striking or poetical than for the sake of their moral teaching. As the references given are mostly to the Oriental origins, it is only fair to insert here a list of the English and French translations which have been principally used in compiling this book. The following works comprise most of those which have proved directly of service for the purpose--"Sacred Books of the East," namely: Vol. 10. Dhammapada, by F. Max Muller; and Sutta-Nipata, by V. Fausboll. Vol. 11. Buddhist Suttas, by T. W. Rhys Davids. Vol. 13. Vinaya Texts, part 1, by T. W. Rhys Davids and H. Oldenberg. Vol. 17. Vinaya Texts, part 2, by T. W. Rhys Davids and H. Oldenberg. Vol. 19. Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, by Rev. S. Beal. Vol. 20. Vinaya Texts, part 3, by T. W. Rhys Davids and H. Oldenberg. Vol. 21. Saddharma-pundarika, by H. Kern. Vol. 35. Questions of King Milinda, part 1, by T. W. Rhys Davids. Vol. 36. Questions of King Milinda, part 2, by T. W. Rhys Davids. Vol. 49. Buddhist Mahayana Texts, by E. B. Cowell, F. Max Muller, and J. Takakusu. "Sacred Books of the Buddhists," namely: Vol. 1. Jatakamala, by J. S. Speyer. Vol. 2. Dialogues of the Buddha, by T. W. Rhys Davids. The Jataka, or Stories of the Buddha's Former Births, translated under the editorship of Professor E. B. Cowell. Buddhism of Tibet, by L. A. Waddell. Buddhism in Translations, by H. C. Warren. Travels of Fa-hien, by James Legge. Selected Essays, by F. Max Muller. Buddhist Birth Stories, or Jataka Tales, by T. W. Rhys Davids. Hibbert Lectures for 1881, by T. W. Rhys Davids. Buddhism, by T. W. Rhys Davids. Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese, by Rev. S. Beal. Abstract of Four Lectures on Buddhist Literature in China, by Rev. S. Beal. Romantic Legend of Sakya Buddha, by Rev. S. Beal. Texts from the Buddhist Canon known as Dhammapada, by Rev. S. Beal. Udanavarga, by W. W. Rockhill. Lalita Vistara, by Rajendralala Mitra. Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal, by Rajendralala Mitra. Mahavamsa, by L. C. Wijesinha. Attanagalu-vansa, by James D'Alwis. Archaeological Survey of Southern India (new series of reports), vol. 1, by James Burgess, with translations by Georg Buhler. Archaeological Survey of Western India, vol. 4, by James Burgess. Sutta-Nipata, by Sir M. Coomara Swamy. Katha Sarit Sagara, by C. H. Tawney. Grammar of the Tibetan Language, by A. Csoma de Koros. Nagananda: a Buddhist Drama, by Palmer Boyd. Buddhaghosa's Parables, by Capt. T. Rogers. Light of Asia, by Sir Edwin Arnold. Ancient Proverbs and Maxims from Burmese Sources, by James Gray. Jinalankara, or Embellishments of Buddha, by James Gray. We-than-da-ya: a Buddhist Legend, by L. Allan Goss. The English Governess at the Siamese Court, by Mrs. A. H. Leonowens. The Catechism of the Shamans, by C. F. Neumann. View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos, by Rev. W. Ward. Horace Sinicae: Translations from the Popular Literature of the Chinese, by Rev. Robert Morrison. Contemporary Review for February, 1876. Cornhill Magazine for August, 1876. The Buddhist, vol. 1. Journal of Pali Text Society for 1886. Journal of Buddhist Text Society of India, vols. 1, 3, 4 and 5. Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, new series, vol. 2; also vol. for 1894. Journal of Ceylon Branch of Royal Asiatic Society, No. 2. Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. 36. Transactions of Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. 22. Journal of American Oriental Society, vol. 4. Journal Asiatique, septieme serie, vols. 17, 19 and 20. Lalita Vistara, by P. E. Foucaux. La Guirlande Pricieuse des Demandes et des Responses, by P. E. Foucaux. Sept Suttas Palis, tires du Dighanikaya, by P. Grimblot. * * * * * THE ESSENCE OF BUDDHISM. All beings desire happiness; therefore to all extend your benevolence.--Mahavamsa. Because he has pity upon every living creature, therefore is a man called "holy."--Dhammapada. Like as a mother at the risk of her life watches over her only child, so also let every one cultivate towards all beings a boundless (friendly) mind.--Metta-sutta. Hurt not others with that which pains yourself.--Udanavarga. I cannot have pleasure while another grieves and I have power to help him.--Jatakamala. With pure thoughts and fulness of love, I will do towards others what I do for myself.--Lalita Vistara. If you desire to do something pleasing to me, then desist from hunting forever! The poor poor beasts of the forest, being ... dull of intellect, are worthy of pity for this very reason.--Jatakamala. You will generously follow the impulse of pity, I hope.--Jatakamala. For that they hated this poor slender boy, That ever frowned upon their barbarous sports, And loved the beasts they tortured in their play, And wept to see the wounded hare, or doe, Or trout that floundered on the angler's hook. --Lloyd "Nichiren." Good men melt with compassion even for one who has wrought them harm.--Kshemendra's Avadana Kalpalata. Though a man with a sharp sword should cut one's body bit by bit, let not an angry thought ... arise, let the mouth speak no ill word.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Them who became thy murderers, thou forgavest.--Lalita Vistara. Overcome evil by good.--Udanavarga. Conquer your foe by force, and you increase his enmity; conquer by love, and you reap no after-sorrow.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. This great principle of returning good for evil.--Sutra of Forty-two Sections. The member of Buddha's order ... should not intentionally destroy the life of any being, down even to a worm or an ant.--Mahavagga. Whether now any man kill with his own hand, or command any other to kill, or whether he only see with pleasure the act of killing--all is equally forbidden by this law.--Sha-mi-lu-i-yao-lio. My teaching is this, that the slightest act of charity, even in the lowest class of persons, such as saving the life of an insect out of pity, that this act ... shall bring to the doer of it consequent benefit.--T'sa-ho-hom-king. He came to remove the sorrows of all living things.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. "Now (said he) I will see a noble law, unlike the worldly methods known to men, ... and will fight against the chief wrought upon man by sickness, age, and death."--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. To a righteous man death must bring gladness. For no fear of mishap exists for him who is devoted to a holy life.--Jatakamala. He lives only to be a help to others.--Questions of King Milinda. Why should we cling to this perishable body? In the eye of the wise, the only thing it is good for is to benefit one's fellow-creatures.--Katha Sarit Sagara. Is not all I possess, even to my very body, kept for the benefit of others?--Nagananda. All men should cultivate a fixed and firm determination, and vow that what they once undertake they will never give up.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Rather will I fall headlong into hell ... than do a deed that is unworthy.--Jataka. May my body be ground to powder small as the mustard-seed if I ever desire to (break my vow)!--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Happy is he that is virtuous--Dhammapada. To make an end of selfishness is happiness.--Udanavarga. There is no happiness except in righteousness.--Attanagalu-vansa. Full of love for all things in the world, practicing virtue in order to benefit others--this man only is happy.--Fa-kheu-pi-u. He that loveth iniquity beckoneth to misfortune.--Jitsu-go-kiyo. Watch your thoughts.--Dhammapada. Control your tongue.--Dhammapada. Have a strict control over your passions.--Story of Sundari and Nanda. The higher life maketh he known, in all its purity and in all its perfectness.--Tevijja-sutta. So imbued were they with lovingkindness that all the birds and animals loved them and harmed them not.--Sama Jataka (Burmese version). Compassionate and kind to all creatures that have life.--Brahma-jala-sutta. The birds and beasts and creeping things--'tis writ-- Had sense of Buddha's vast embracing love, And took the promise of his piteous speech. --Sir Edwin Arnold. He cherished the feeling of affection for all beings as if they were his only son.--Lalita Vistara. Closely as cause and effect are bound together, So do two loving hearts entwine and live-- Such is the power of love to join in one. --Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. That thou mayst know-- What others will not--that I love thee most Because I loved so well all living souls. --Sir Edwin Arnold. Always give in charity to people of good conduct.--Jatakamala. With every desire to do good, the ignorant and foolish only succeed in doing harm.... 'Tis knowledge crowns endeavor with success.--Jataka. There is no sweet companion like pure charity.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Almsgiving, it is said, constitutes the value of riches.--Jatakamala. Good is restraint in all things.--Dhammapada. Unselfishness, true, and self-control.--Jataka. The religious mendicant, wisely reflecting, is patient under cold and heat, under hunger and thirst, ... under bodily sufferings, under pains however sharp.--Sabbasava-sutta. Though a man conquer a thousand thousand men in battle, a greater conqueror still is he who conquers himself.--Udanavarga. Root out the love of self.--Jataka. The man of honor should minister to his friends ... by liberality, courtesy, benevolence, and by doing to them as he would be done by.--Sigalovada-sutta. Practice the art of "giving up."--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Speak not harshly to anybody.--Dhammapada. May I speak kindly and softly to every one I chance to meet.--Inscription in Temple of Nakhon Vat. Offensive language is harsh even to the brutes.--Suttavaddhananiti. Courtesy is the best ornament. Beauty without courtesy is like a grove without flowers.--Buddha-charita. He knew not the art of hypocrisy.--Jatakamala. Let a man say that which is right, not that which is unrighteous, ... that which is pleasing, not that which is unpleasing, ... that which is true, not that which is false.--Subhasita-sutta. As he who loves life avoids poison, so let the sage avoid sinfulness.--Udanavarga. He sees danger in even the least of those things he should avoid.--Tevijja-sutta. Sin easily develops.--Rock Inscriptions of Asoka. May I never do, nor cause to be done, nor contemplate the doing of, even the most trivial sin!--Attanagalu-vansa (conclusion). Let not one who is asked for his pardon withhold it.--Mahavagga. 'T is wrong to conquer him who sues for mercy.--Lalita Vistara. Let none out of anger or resentment wish harm to another.--Metta-sutta. Let us then live happily, not hating those who hate us. In the midst of those who hate us, let us dwell free from hatred.--Dhammapada. For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love; this is an old rule.--Dhammapada. (To the) self-reliant there is strength and joy.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Let him not grieve for that which is lost.--Attadanda-sutta. Not from weeping or grieving will any obtain peace of mind.--Salla-sutta. At first my sorrowing heart was heavy; but now my sorrow has brought forth only profit.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Give to him that asketh, even though it be but a little.--Udanavarga. He delights in giving so far as he is able.--Questions of King Milinda. Your guileless heart loves to exercise its charity.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Always intent on bringing about the good and the happiness of others.--Jatakamala. Earnestly practice every good work.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. If they may cause by it the happiness of others, even pain is highly esteemed by the righteous, as if it were gain.--Jatakamala. When pure rules of conduct are observed, then there is true religion.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Wherein does religion consist? In (committing) the least possible harm, in (doing) abundance of good, in (the practice of) pity, love, truth, and likewise purity of life.--Pillar Inscriptions of Asoka. (Not superstitious rites, but) kindness to slaves and servants, reverence towards venerable persons, self-control with respect to living creatures, ... these and similar (virtuous actions are the rites which ought indeed to be performed.)--Rock Inscriptions of Asoka. The practice of religion involves as a first principle a loving, compassionate heart for all creatures.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Shall we in worshipping slay that which hath life? This is like those who practice wisdom, and the way of religious abstraction, but neglect the rules of moral conduct.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. How can a system requiring the infliction of misery on other beings be called a religious system?... To seek a good by doing an evil is surely no safe plan.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Unto the dumb lips of his flock he lent Sad pleading words, showing how man, who prays For mercy to the gods, is merciless. --Sir Edwin Arnold. I then will ask you, if a man, in worshipping ... sacrifices a sheep, and so does well, wherefore not his child, ... and so do better? Surely ... there is no merit in killing a sheep!--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Nor [shall one] lay Upon the brow of innocent bound beasts One hair's weight of that answer all must give For all things done amiss or wrongfully. --Sir Edwin Arnold. Doing no injury to any one, Dwell in the world full of love and kindness. --Questions of King Milinda. Ministering to the worthy, doing harm to none, Always ready to render reverence to whom it is due. Loving righteousness and righteous conversation, Ever willing to hear what may profit another. --Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Scrupulously avoiding all wicked actions; Reverently performing all virtuous ones; Purifying his intention from all selfish ends: This is the doctrine of all the Buddhas. --Siau-chi-kwan. Instruct yourself (more and more) in the highest morality.--Nagarjuna's "Friendly Epistle." Cultivate compassion.--Visuddhi-Magga. May my thoughts, now small and narrow, expand in the next existence, that I may understand the precepts ... thoroughly, and never break them or be guilty of trespasses.--Inscription in Temple of Nakhon Vat. Religion he looks upon as his best ornament.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. The sinner is never beautiful.--Lalita Vistara. Use no perfume but sweetness of thoughts.--Siamese Buddhist Maxim. Wealth and beauty, scented flowers and ornaments like these, are not to be compared for grace with moral rectitude!--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. He who ... cannot feel joy to see merit in others is stained with the darkness of sin.--Story of Pratiharyya. Ask not of (a person's) descent, but ask about his conduct--Sundarikabharadvaja-sutta. The young man Vasettha said: "When one is virtuous and full of (good) works, in this way he becomes a Brahman."--Vasettha-sutta. Not by birth does one become low caste, not by birth a Brahman; by his deeds he becomes low caste, by his deeds he becomes a Brahman.--Vasala-sutta. Whosoever strikes, or by words annoys, mother or father, brother or sister, ... let us know such as a "base-born."--Vasala-sutta. Causing destruction to living beings, killing and mutilating, ... stealing and speaking falsely, fraud and deception, ... these are (what defile a man).--Amagandha-sutta. Whosoever ... harms living beings, ... and in whom there is no compassion for them, let us know such as a "base-born."--Vasala-sutta. In whom there is truth and righteousness, he is blessed, he is a Brahman.--Dhammapada. Whoso hurts not (living) creatures, whether those that tremble or those that are strong, nor yet kills nor causes to be killed, him do I call a Brahman.--Vasettha-sutta. Whoso is (entirely) divested of sin, as is the heaven of mire and the moon of dust, him do I call a Brahman.--Udanavarga. Him I call indeed a Brahman who, though he be guilty of no offense, patiently endures reproaches, bonds, and stripes.--Dhammapada. We will patiently suffer threats and blows at the hands of foolish men.--Saddharma-pundarika. Who, though he be cursed by the world, yet cherishes no ill-will towards it.--Sammaparibbajaniya-sutta. Persecutions and revilings, murders and numberless imprisonments, these hast thou suffered in thousands from the world, verily delighting in long-suffering.--Lalita Vistara. At the end of life the soul goes forth alone; whereupon only our good deeds befriend us.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. The wrongdoer, devoid of rectitude, ... is full of anxiety when death arrives.--Mahaparinibbana-sutta. He who has done what is right is free from fear.--Udanavarga. No fear has any one of me; neither have I fear of any one: in my good-will to all I trust.--Introduction to the Jataka. Our deeds, whether good or evil, ... follow us as shadows.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. He who now gives in charity Shall surely reap where he has given; For whosoever piously bestows a little water Shall receive return like the great ocean. --Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. Covetous desire is the greatest (source of) sorrow. Appearing as a friend, in secret 'tis our enemy.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. That which is given in charity is rich in returns; therefore charity is a true friend; although it scatters it brings no remorse.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. He who stints the profit he has made, his wealth will soon be spent and lost.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. The (real) treasure is that laid up ... through charity and piety, temperance and self-control.... The treasure thus hid is secure, and passes not away. Though he leave the fleeting riches of the world, this a man carries with him--a treasure that no wrong of others, and no thief, can steal.--Nidhikanda-sutta. Think of all sentient beings as thy children.--Tenets of the Soto Sect. Though exalted, forget not the lowly.--Jitsu-go-kiyo. Be kind to all that lives.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Filled with compassion for all creatures.--Saddharma-pundarika. Of all possessions, contentedness is the best by far.--Nagarjuna's "Friendly Epistle." A contented mind is always joyful.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Let us then live happily, though we call nothing our own.--Dhammapada. Not the whole world, ... the ocean-girt earth, With all the seas and the hills that girdle it, Would I wish to possess with shame added thereto. --Questions of King Milinda. Let none be forgetful of his own duty for the sake of another's.--Dhammapada. The faults of others are easily seen; one's own faults are difficult to see.--Udanavarga. Self-examination is painful.--Pillar Inscriptions of Asoka. A man winnows his neighbor's faults like chaff: his own he hides, as a cheat the bad die from the gambler.--Dhammapada. She orders her household aright, she is hospitable to kinsmen and friends, a chaste wife, a thrifty housekeeper, skilful and diligent in all her duties.--Sigalovada-sutta. The wife ... should be cherished by her husband.--Sigalovada-sutta. Were I not ready to suffer adversity with my husband as well as to enjoy happiness with him, I should be no true wife.--Legend of We-than-da-ya. It is better to die in righteousness than to live in unrighteousness.--Loweda Sangrahaya. Better to fling away life than transgress our convictions of duty.--Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. Better for me to die battling (with the temper) than that I should live defeated.--Padhana-sutta. The loving Father of all that lives.--Tsing-tu-wan. Our loving Father, and Father of all that breathes.--Daily Manual of the Shaman. Even so of all things that have ... life, there is not one that (the Buddhist anchorite) passes over; ... he looks upon all with ... deep-felt love. This, verily, ... is the way to a state of union with God.--Tevijja-sutta. Doubts will exist as long as we live in the world. Yet, pursuing with joy the road of virtue, Like the man who observes the rugged path along the precipice, we ought Gladly and profitably to follow it. --Siau-chi-kwan. To feed a single good man is infinitely greater in point of merit, than attending to questions about heaven and earth, spirits and demons, such as occupy ordinary men.--Sutra of Forty-two Sections. What is goodness? First and foremost the agreement of the will with the conscience.--Sutra of Forty-two Sections. If you remove (from conduct) the purpose of the mind, the bodily act is but as rotten wood. Wherefore regulate the mind, and the body of itself will go right.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Keep watch over your hearts.--Mahaparinibbana-sutta. Let no evil desire whatever arise within you.--Cullavagga. So soon as there springs up within him an angry, malicious thought, some sinful, wrong disposition, ... he puts it away, removes it, destroys it, he makes it not to be.--Sabbasava-sutta. With not a thought of selfishness or covetous desire.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Covetousness and anger are as the serpent's poison.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. They who do evil go to hell; they who are righteous go to heaven.--Dhammapada. He who, doing what he ought, ... gives pleasure to others, shall find joy in the other world.--Udanavarga. The virtuous (when injured) grieve not so much for their own pain as for the loss of happiness incurred by their injurers.--Jatakamala. He truly must have a loving heart, For all things living place in him entire confidence. --Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. Ofttimes while he mused--as motionless As the fixed rock his seat--the squirrel leaped Upon his knee, the timid quail led forth Her brood between his feet, and blue doves pecked The rice-grains from the bowl beside his hand. --Sir Edwin Arnold. Those who search after truth should have a heart full of sympathy.--Story of Virudhaka. This (prince) feels for the welfare of the multitude.--Nalaka-sutta. The Royal Prince, perceiving the tired oxen, ... the men toiling beneath the midday sun, and the birds devouring the hapless insects, his heart was filled with grief, as a man would feel upon seeing his own household bound in fetters: thus was he touched with sorrow for the whole family of sentient creatures--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. This king felt the weal and the woe of his subjects as his own.--Jatakamala. What is a true gift? One for which nothing is expected in return.--Prasnottaramalika. There is a way of giving, seeking pleasure by it (or) coveting to get more; some also give to gain a name for charity, some to gain the happiness of heaven.... But yours, O friend, is a charity free from such thoughts, the highest and best degree of charity, free from self-interest or thought of getting more.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. 'Tis thus men generally think and speak, they have a reference in all they do to their own advantage. But with this one it is not so: 'tis the good of others and not his own that he seeks.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Above all things be not careless; for carelessness is the great foe to virtue.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. You say that while young a man should be gay, and when old then religious.... Death, however, as a robber, sword in hand, follows us all, desiring to capture his prey: how then should we wait for old age, ere we turn our minds to religion?--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. If you urge that I am young and tender, and that the time for seeking wisdom is not yet, then you should know that to seek true religion, there never is a time not fit.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Work out your own salvation with diligence.--Mahaparinibbana-sutta. No man can purify another.--Dhammapada. The good man's love ends in love; the bad man's love in hate.--Kshemendra's Kalpalata. He who holds up a torch to (lighten) mankind is always honored by me.--Rahula-sutta. Where there is uprightness, wisdom is there, and where there is wisdom, uprightness is there.--Sonadanda-sutta. Liberty, courtesy, benevolence, unselfishness, under all circumstances towards all people--these qualities are to the world what the linchpin is to the rolling chariot.--Sigalovada-sutta. Let us be knit together ... as friends.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Since even animals can live together in mutual reverence, confidence, and courtesy, much more should you, O Brethren, so let your light shine forth that you ... may be seen to dwell in like manner together.--Cullavagga. Trust is the best of relationships.--Dhammapada. Faithful and trustworthy, he injures not his fellow-man by deceit.--Tevijja-sutta. Worship consists in fulfilling the design (of the person honored), not in offerings of perfumes, garlands, and the like.--Jatakamala. Compassion for all creatures is the true religion.--Buddha-charita. The wise firmly believe that in Mercy the whole of Righteousness is contained. What virtue ... does there exist which is not the consequence of Mercy?--Jatakamala. Even if a man have done evil a hundred times, let him not do it again.--Udanavarga. He who, having been angered, gives way to anger no more, has achieved a mighty victory.--Udanavarga. Better than sovereignty over this earth, ... better than lordship over all worlds, is the recompense of the first step in holiness.--Dhammapada. Now many distinguished warriors thought: we who go (to war) and find our delight in fighting, do evil.... What shall we do that we may cease from evil and do good?--Mahavagga. Victory breeds hatred.--Dhammapada. Therefore has this pious inscription been carved here (on the rock), to the end that posterity may not suppose that any further conquest ought to be made by them. Let them not hold that conquest by the sword is worthy the name of conquest; let them see in it only confusion and violence. Let them reckon as true conquests none save the triumphs of religion.--Rock Inscriptions of Asoka. He walks not in religion in a quarrelsome spirit.--Questions of King Milinda. Nay, ... let not quarrel arise, nor strife, nor discord, nor dispute.--Mahavagga. Thus he lives as a binder together of those who are divided, an encourager of those who are friends, a peace-maker, a lover of peace, impassioned for peace, a speaker of words that make for peace.--Tevijja-sutta. It is not as a means of procuring my own happiness that I give in charity, but I love charity that I may do good to the world.--Jatakamala. Benevolence is the doing of righteous acts of help to living creatures whether of high or low degree; as when we help a tortoise in trouble, or a sick sparrow, without looking for any reward.--Tenets of the Soto Sect. 'Tis out of mercy, not with the desire of gain, that the virtuous take care of a person in distress, nor do they mind whether the other understands this or not.--Jatakamala. Let him that has a merciful character be my friend.--Bhakti Sataka. If a man thus walks in the ways of compassion, is it possible that he should hurt anything intentionally?--Sha-mi-lu-i-yao-lio. Living in the world, and doing no harm to aught that lives.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. As he said so he acted.--Vangisa-sutta. Those who have sin at heart, but are sweet of speech, are like a pitcher smeared with nectar, but full of poison.--Lalita Vistara. Like a ... flower that is rich in color, but has no scent, so are the fine ... words of him who does not act accordingly.--Dhammapada. The mind must be brought under perfect subjection.--Inscription on Votive Images. He whose mind is subdued and perfectly controlled is happy.--Udanavarga. If only the thoughts be directed to that which is right, then happiness must necessarily follow.--Fa-kheu-pi-u. Evil he overcame by righteousness.--Questions of King Milinda. He felt compassion towards those who tormented him.--Attanagalu-vansa. The bearer of ill-will towards them that bear ill-will can never become pure; but he who bears no ill-will pacifies them that hate.--Udanavarga. The man who foolishly does me wrong, I will return him the protection of my ungrudging love.--Sutra of Forty-two Sections. Whether of the higher class of beings, as ... a perfect man, ... or of the lower class of beings, as a grasshopper or the smallest insect--in one word, whatever hath life thou shalt not kill.--Sha-mi-lu-i-yao-lio. To whom even the life of a serpent is sacred.--Lalita Vistara. I love living things that have no feet, ... four-footed creatures, and things with many feet.... May all creatures, all things that live, all beings of whatever kind, may they all behold good fortune.--Cullavagga. You do not well enticing me to a sinful act. And what you say, that "nobody else will know of it"--will it be less sinful for this reason?--Jatakamala. There is no such thing as secrecy in wrongdoing.--Jataka. Even could she have kept it secret from men, ... could she have kept it secret from spirit, ... could she have kept it secret from the gods, yet she could not have escaped herself from the knowledge of her sin.--Questions of King Milinda. Clad in garments pure as the moonbeams, ... her ornaments modesty and virtuous conduct.--Ajanta Cave Inscriptions. If you speak ... to a woman, do it with pureness of heart.... Say to yourself: "Placed in this sinful world, let me be as the spotless lily, unsoiled by the mire in which it grows." Is she old? regard her as your mother. Is she honorable? as your sister. Is She of small account? as a younger sister. Is she a child? then treat her with reverence and politeness.--Sutra of Forty-two Sections. Gentle and true, simple and kind was she, Noble of mien, with gracious speech to all, And gladsome looks--a pearl of womanhood. --Sir Edwin Arnold. Do not have evil-doers for friends.... Take as your friends the best of men.--Dhammapada. Briefly I will tell you the marks of a friend-- When doing wrong, to warn; when doing well, to exhort to perseverance; When in difficulty or danger, to assist, relieve, and deliver. Such a man is indeed a true and illustrious friend. --Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. His friendship is prized by the gentle and the good.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Living ... without cruelty among the cruel.--Udanavarga. The Scripture said: "Be kind and benevolent to every being, and spread peace in the world.... If it happen that thou see anything to be killed, thy soul shall be moved with pity and compassion. Ah, how watchful should we be over ourselves!"--Sha-mi-lu-i-yao-lio. I desire to produce in myself a loving heart towards all living creatures.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Let us then practice good works, and inspect our thoughts that we do no evil.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Now, therefore, it behooves me to examine into my faults; and if I find anything wrong in me, to put it away, and practice virtue only.--Jataka. Therefore ... we would humble ourselves and repent us of our sins. Oh! that we may have strength to do so aright!--Liturgy of Kwan-yin. If we know that we have done wrong, and yet refuse to acknowledge it, we are guilty of prevarication.--Chinese Pratimoksha. From the very first, ... having no wish to benefit others, or to do good in the least degree, we have been adding sin unto sin; and even though our actual crimes have not been so great, yet a wicked heart has ruled us within. Day and night, without interval or hesitation, have we continually contrived how to do wrong.--Liturgy of Kwan-yin. Accept the confession I make of my sin in its sinfulness, to the end that in future I may restrain myself therefrom.--Cullavagga. He who offends an offenseless man, ... against such a fool the evil reverts, like fine dust thrown against the wind.--Kokaliya-sutta. May wisdom be with me always.--Inscription in Temple of Nakhon Vat. The fool who knows his foolishness is wise at any rate so far. But the fool who thinks himself wise, he is a fool indeed.--Dhammapada. He who holds back rising anger like a rolling chariot--him I call a real driver: other people are merely holding the reins.--Dhammapada. Anger, alas! how it changes the comely face! how it destroys the loveliness of beauty!--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. The fool who is angered, and thinks to triumph by the use of abusive language, is always vanquished by him whose words are patient.--Udanavarga. He who lives far from me yet walks righteously, is ever near me.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. He sought after the good of those dependent on him.--Questions of King Milinda. Who, though he be lord over others, is patient with those that are weak.--Udanavarga. Loving her maids and dependents even as herself.--Lalita Vistara. Loving all things which live even as themselves.--Sir Edwin Arnold. Hear ye all this moral maxim, and having heard it keep it well: Whatsoever is displeasing to yourselves never do to another.--Bstanhgyur. Then declared he unto them (the rule of doing to others what we ourselves like).--San-kiao-yuen-lieu. From henceforth ... put away evil and do good.--Jataka. At morning, noon, and night successively, store up good works.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Always doing good to those around you.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. In order to terminate all suffering, be earnest in performing good deeds.--Buddhaghosa's parables. Compassion alone sanctifies the good.--Kshemendra's Avadana Kalpalata. Religion means self-sacrifice.--Rukemavati. O Buddha, the worship of thee consists in doing good to the world.--Bhakti Sataka. Persist not in calling attention to a matter calculated to cause division.--Patimokkha. Dwell together in mutual love.--Brahmanadhammika-sutta. Let us now unite in the practice of what is good, cherishing a gentle and sympathizing heart, and carefully cultivating good faith and righteousness.--Travels of Fa-hien. May I obtain wealth, and ... may the wealth ... obtained by me be for the benefit of others.--Jinalankara. Feeling deep compassion for the poor, grudging nothing which he possessed.--Phu-yau-king. Humble in mind, but large in gracious deeds, abundant in charity to the poor and helpless.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Full of modesty and pity, ... kind and compassionate to all creatures that have life.--Tevijja-sutta. He who ... is tender to all that lives ... is protected by heaven and loved by men.--Fa-kheu-pi-u. Day and night the mind of Buddha's disciples always delights in compassion.--Dhammapada. Let him not think detractingly of others.--Sariputta-sutta. But offer loving thoughts and acts to all.--Sir Edwin Arnold. Never should he speak a disparaging word of anybody.--Saddharma-pundarika. Whatever I understand (to be right) ... I desire to practice.--Rock Inscriptions of Asoka. Lightly to laugh at and ridicule another is wrong.--Fa-kheu-pi-us. Virtuous deeds should be practiced today; for who can say but we may die tomorrow?--Temee Jatu. May I be thoroughly imbued with benevolence, and show always a charitable disposition, till such time as this heart shall cease to beat.--Inscription in Temple of Nakhon Vat. Born to give joy and bring peace to the world.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. The whole world of sentient creatures enjoyed ... universal tranquility.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Enmity and envy gave way to peace; contentment and rest prevailed everywhere; ... discord and variance were entirely appeased.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Creatures of every variety were moved one toward another lovingly; fear and terror altogether put away, none entertained a hateful thought; the Angels, foregoing their heavenly joys, sought rather to alleviate the sinner's sufferings.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. The virtuous retain in their mind the good done to them, whereas the evil they experience drops from their mind, like water from a lotus-petal.--Jatakamala. Vice, O king, is a mean thing, virtue is great and grand.--Questions of King Milinda. I deem ... unrighteous actions contemptible.--Mahavagga. Like food besmeared with poison, I abhor such happiness as is tainted with unrighteousness.--Jatakamala. As men sow, thus shall they reap.--Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. Actions have their reward, and our deeds have their result.--Mahavagga. Our deeds are not lost, they will surely come (back again).--Kokaliya-sutta. Reaping the fruit of right or evil doing, and sharing happiness or misery in consequence.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Your evil thoughts and evil words but hurt yourself.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Hell was not created by any one.... The fire of the angry mind produces the fire of hell, and consumes its possessor. When a person does evil, he lights the fire of hell, and burns with his own fire.--Mulamuli. People grieve from selfishness.--Jara-sutta. Doing good we reap good, just as a man who sows that which is sweet (enjoys the same).--Fa-kheu-pi-us. He who does wrong, O king, comes to feel remorse.... But he who does well feels no remorse, and feeling no remorse, gladness will spring up within him.--Questions of King Milinda. Morality brings happiness: ... at night one's rest is peaceful, and on waking one is still happy.--Udanavarga. If, then, you would please me, show pity to that poor wretch.--Nagananda. Oppressed with others' sufferings.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. A loving heart is the great requirement! ... not to oppress, not to destroy; ... not to exalt oneself by treading down others; but to comfort and befriend those in suffering.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. He cares for and cherishes his people more than one would a naked and perishing child.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. The acts and the practice of religion, to wit, sympathy, charity, truthfulness, purity, gentleness, kindness.--Pillar Inscriptions of Asoka. Go ye, O Brethren, and wander forth, for the gain of the many, the welfare of the many, in compassion for the world, for the good, for the gain, for the welfare of ... men.... Publish, O, Brethren, the doctrine glorious.... Preach ye a life of holiness ... perfect and pure.--Mahavagga. Go, then, through every country, convert those not converted.... Go, therefore, each one travelling alone; filled with compassion, go! rescue and receive.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Have you not heard what Buddha says in the Sutra (where he bids his followers), not to despise the little child?--Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. In this mode of salvation there are no distinctions of rich and poor, male and female, people and priests: all are equally able to arrive at the blissful state.--From a Chinese Buddhist Tract. Even the most unworthy who seeks for salvation is not to be forbidden.--Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. Look with friendship ... on the evil and on the good.--Introduction to Jataka Book. Should those who are not with us, O Brethren, speak in dispraise of me,[1] or of my doctrine, or of the church, that is no reason why you should give way to anger.--Brahma-jala-sutta. [Footnote 1: Buddha.] Why should there be such sorrowful contention? You honor what we honor, both alike: then we are brothers as concerns religion.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. No decrying of other sects, ... no depreciation (of others) without cause, but on the contrary, rendering of honor to other sects for whatever cause honor is due. By so doing, both one's sect will be helped forward, and other sects benefited; by acting otherwise, one's own sect will be destroyed in injuring others.--Rock Inscriptions of Asoka. But if others walk not righteously, we ought by righteous dealing to appease them: in this way, ... we cause religion everywhere to take deep hold and abide.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Who is a (true) spiritual teacher? He who, having grasped the essence of things, ever seeks to be of use to other beings. --Prasnottaramalika. Tell him ... I look for no recompense--not even to be born in heaven--but seek ... the benefit of men, to bring back those who have gone astray, to enlighten those living in dismal error, to put away all sources of sorrow and pain from the world.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. I consider the welfare of all people as something for which I must work.--Rock Inscriptions of Asoka. Then the man ... said to himself: "I will not keep all this treasure to myself; I will share it with others." Upon this he went to king Brahmadatta, and said: ... "Be it known to you I have discovered a treasure, and I wish it to be used for the good of the country."--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. The sorrow of others enters into the hearts of good men as water into the soil.--Story of Haritika. With no selfish or partial joy ... they rejoiced.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. If thou see others lamenting, join in their lamentations: if thou hear others rejoicing, join in their joy.--Jitsu-go-kiyo. My son, tell me thy sorrow, that it may become more endurable by participation.--Nagananda. Every variety of living creature I must ever defend from harm.--Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. To think no evil and do none: on the contrary, to benefit all creatures.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Let the wise man guard his thoughts, for they are ... very artful and rush wheresoever they list.--Dhammapada. When thou seest righteousness, quickly follow it: when thou seest iniquity, instantly flee.--Jitsu-go-kiyo. Like as the lotus is untarnished by the water, so is Nirvana by any evil dispositions.--Questions of King Milinda. May I never, even in a dream, be guilty of theft, adultery, drunkenness, life-slaughter, and untruthfulness.--Attanagalu-vansa. Spotless even as the moon, pure, serene, and undisturbed.--Vasettha-sutta. Practice the most perfect virtue.--Udanavarga. To attain perfection that he may profit others.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. The present is an imperfect existence: ... I pray for greater perfection in the next.--Inscription in Temple of Nakhon Vat. Fulfil the perfection of long-suffering; be thou patient under ... reproach.--Introduction to Jataka Book. My duty is to bear all the insults which the heretics launch against me.--Buddhaghosa's Parables. Silently shall I endure abuse, as the elephant in battle endures the arrow sent from the bow.--Dhammapada. Let not the member of Buddha's order tremble at blame, neither let him puff himself up when praised.--Tuvataka-sutta. The end of the pleasures of sense is as the lightning flash: ... what profit, then, in doing iniquity?--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Cultivate equanimity.--Nalaka-sutta. Abhor dissimulation!--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. He speaks truth unmixed with falsehood.--Samanna-phala-sutta. There is guilt (calling for repentance) in prevarication.--Patimokkha. He that praises him who should be blamed, or blames him who should be praised, gathers up sin thereby in his mouth.--Kokaliya-sutta. The member of Buddha's order should abstain from theft, even of a blade of grass.--Mahavagga. From bribery, cheating, fraud, and (all other) crooked ways he abstains.--Tevijja-sutta. The Scripture moveth us, therefore, rather to cut off the hand than to take anything which is not ours.--Sha-mi-lu-i-yao-lio. Let him not, even though irritated, speak harsh words.--Sariputta-sutta. From this day forth, ... although much be said against me, I will not feel spiteful, angry, enraged, or morose, nor manifest anger and hatred.--Anguttara-Nikaya. Upright, conscientious and of soft speech, gentle and not proud.--Metta-sutta. Even as the lily lives upon and loves the water, So Upatissa and Kolita likewise, Joined by closest bond of love, If by necessity compelled to live apart, Were overcome by grief and aching heart. --Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. (The true friend) forsakes you not in trouble; he will lay down his life for your sake.--Sigalovada-sutta. In grief as well as in joy we are united, In sorrow and in happiness alike. * * * * That which your heart rejoices in as good, That I also rejoice in and follow. It were better I should die with you, Than ... attempt to live where you are not. --Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. When first I undertook to obtain wisdom, Then also I took on me to defend (the weak). All living things of whatsoever sort Call forth my compassion and pity. --Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. Fault is not to be found unnecessarily--Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. Judge not thy neighbor.--Siamese Buddhist Maxim. What is it to you ... whether another is guilty or guiltless? Come, friend, atone for your own offense.--Mahavagga. Even a king may be full of trouble; but a common man, who is holy, has rest everlasting.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. This world is afflicted with death and decay; therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world.--Salla-sutta. Who that clings to Righteousness should be in fear of death?--Jatakamala. Ye, then, my followers, ... give not way ... to sorrow; ... aim to reach the home where separation cannot come.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Loving and merciful towards all.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Filled with universal benevolence.--Fa-kheu-pi-u. A friend to all creatures in the world.--Saddharma-pundarika. Bent on promoting the happiness of all created beings.--Lalita Vistara. Conquer thy greediness for sensual pleasures.--Jatukannimanavapuccha. Therefore should we encourage small desire, that we may have to give to him who needs.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Justly I seek for riches, and having sought for riches justly, I give of my ... justly acquired wealth to one, to two, to three, ... to a hundred.--Magha-sutta. They sought their daily gain righteously; no covetous, money-loving spirit prevailed; with pious intent they gave liberally; there was not a thought of any reward.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. There is in charity a proper time and a proper mode.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Better would it be to swallow a red-hot iron ball than that a bad, unrestrained fellow should live on the charity of the land.--Dhammapada. Our duty to do something, not only for our own benefit, but for the good of those who shall come after us.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Have respect for the aged as though they were thy father and mother; love the young as thy children or younger brethren.--Jitsu-go-kiyo. All the people were bound close in family love and friendship.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Happy ... is the man that honors his father: he also that honors his mother is happy.--Udanavarga. How should I be capable of leaving thee in thy calamity?... Whatever fate may be thine I am pleased with it.--Jatakamala. He is my husband. I love and revere him with all my heart, and therefore am determined to share his fate. Kill me first, ... and afterwards do to him as you list.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. A heart bound by affection does not mind imminent peril. Worse than death to such a one is the sorrow which the distress of a friend inflicts.--Jatakamala. This good man, moved by pity, gives up his life for another, as though it were but a straw.--Nagananda. Sprinkle water on the seeds of virtue.--Story of Pratiharyya. The fool thinks himself alone and commits sin. But I know of no lonely place at all.... Of a bad action my "Self" is a witness far more sharp-sighted than any other person.--Jatakamala. What has been designated "name" and "family" ... is but a term.--Vasettha-sutta. Reverence ... is due to righteous conduct.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. The wise man ... regards with reverence all who deserve reverence, without distinction of person.--Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. For if virtue flags and folly rules, what reverence can there be ... for a high name or boast of prowess, inherited from former generations?--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Fools of little understanding have themselves for their greatest enemies, for they do evil deeds which cannot but bear bitter fruit.--Dhammapada. There is not a spot upon earth, neither in the sky, neither in the sea, neither ... in the mountain-clefts, where an (evil) deed does not bring trouble (to the doer).--Udanavarga. Surely if living creatures saw the consequence of all their evil deeds, ... with hatred would they turn and leave them, fearing the ruin following.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Exercising love towards the infirm.--Fa-kheu-pi-us. Ever inspired by pity and love to men.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. He lived for the good of mankind.--Jatakamala. Whatsoever living beings there are, feeble or strong, small or large, seen or not seen, may all creatures be happy-minded.--Metta-sutta. Yield not (one moment) to the angry impulse.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Overcome anger by love.--Dhammapada. A wise man never resents with passion the abuse of the foolish--Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. In agreement with all men, and hurting nobody, ... he, as far as possible, does good to all.--Fo-pen-hing-tsih-king. Reverently practicing the four gracious acts-- Benevolence, charity, humanity, love; Doing all for the good of men, and that they in turn may benefit others. --Phu-yau-king. They also,[2] resigning the deathless bliss within their reach, Worked the welfare of mankind in various lands. What man is there who would be remiss in doing good to mankind? --Quoted by Max Muller. [Footnote 2: Buddhist missionaries.] He identified himself with all beings--Jatakamala. Because the dove fears the hawk, With fluttering pennons she comes to seek my protection. Though she cannot speak with her mouth, Yet through fear her eyes are moist. Now, therefore, I will extend (to this poor creature) My own protection and defense. --Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. How indifferent he was to his own welfare!... How intolerant of the suffering of others!--Jatakamala. In every condition, high or low, we find folly and ignorance (and men), carelessly following the dictates of ... passion.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Neither is it right to judge men's character by outward appearances.--Ta-chwang-yan-king-lun. The body may wear the ascetic's garb, the heart be immersed in worldly thoughts: ... the body may wear a worldly guise, the heart mount high to things celestial.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Full of truth and compassion and mercy and long-suffering.--Jataka. Uprightness is his delight.--Tevijja-sutta. Making ... virtue always his first aim.--Fa-kheu-pi-u. An example for all the earth.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. What he hears he repeats not there, to raise a quarrel against the people here.--Tevijja-sutta. He injures none by his conversation.--Samanna-phala-sutta. Walk in the path of duty, do good to your brethren, and work no evil towards them.--Avadana Sataka. Aiming to curb the tongue, ... aiming to benefit the world.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Intent upon benefiting your fellow-creatures.--Katha Sarit Sagara. Health is the greatest of gifts, contentment the best of riches.--Dhammapada. If thou be born in the poor man's hovel, yet have wisdom, then wilt thou be like the lotus-flower growing out of the mire.--Jitsu-go-kiyo. He that is rich but is not contented endures the pain of poverty.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. The words of Buddha, even when stern, yet ... as full of pity as the words of a father to his children.--Questions of King Milinda. Overcoming all enemies by the force (of his love).--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. How great his pity and his love toward those who opposed his claims, neither rejoicing in their defeat, nor yet exulting in his own success!--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. The Buddha has mercy even on the meanest thing.--Cullavagga. He that ... would wait upon me,[3] let him wait on the sick.--Mahavagga. [Footnote 3: Buddha.] The Buddha, O king, magnifies not the offering of gifts to himself, but rather to whosoever ... is deserving.--Questions of King Milinda. If you desire to honor Buddha, follow the example of his patience and long-suffering.--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. Radiant with heavenly pity, lost in care For those he knew not, save as fellow-lives. --Sir Edwin Arnold. Who that hears of him, but yearns with love?--Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king. * * * * * Other Titles in Pocket Series Drama 316 Prometheus Bound. Aeschylos. 90 The Mikado. Gilbert. 295 Master Builder. Ibsen. 308 She Stoops to Conquer. Oliver Goldsmith. 134 The Misanthrope. Moliere. 16 Ghosts. Henrik Ibsen. 80 Pillars of Society. Ibsen. 46 Salome. Oscar Wilde. 54 Importance of Being Earnest. O. Wilde. 8 Lady Windermere's Fan. Oscar Wilde. 131 Redemption. Tolstoi. 99 Tartuffe. Moliere 31 Pelleas and Melisande. Maeterlinck. 226 Prof. Bernhardi. Schnitzler. Shakespeare's Plays 240 The Tempest. 241 Merry Wives of Windsor. 242 As You Like It. 243 Twelfth Night. 244 Much Ado About Nothing. 245 Measure for Measure. 246 Hamlet. 247 Macbeth. 248 King Henry V. 251 Midsummer Night's Dream. 252 Othello, The Moor of Venice. 253 King Henry VIII. 254 The Taming of the Shrew. 255 King Lear. 256 Venus and Adonis. 257 King Henry IV. Part I. 258 King Henry IV. Part II. 249 Julius Caesar. 250 Romeo and Juliet. 259 King Henry VI. Part I. 260 King Henry VI. Part II. 261 King Henry VI. Part III. 262 Comedy of Errors. 263 King John. 264 King Richard III. 265 King Richard II. 267 Pericles. 268 Merchant of Venice. Fiction 143 In the Time of the Terror. Balzac. 280 Happy Prince and Other Tales. Wilde. 182 Daisy Miller. Henry James. 162 The Murders in The Rue Morgue and Other Tales. Edgar Allan Poe. 345 Clarimonde. Gautier. 292 Mademoiselle Fifi. De Maupassant. 199 The Tallow Ball. De Maupassant. 6 De Maupassant's Stories. 15 Balzac's Stories. 344 Don Juan and Other Stories. Balzac. 318 Christ in Flanders and Other Stories. Balzac. 230 The Fleece of Gold. Theophile Gautier. 178 One of Cleopatra's Nights. Gautier. 314 Short Stories. Daudet. 58 Boccaccio's Stories. 45 Tolstoi's Short Stories. 12 Poe's Tales of Mystery. 290 The Gold Bug. Edgar Allan Poe. 145 Great Ghost Stories. 21 Carmen. Merimee. 23 Great Stories of the Sea. 319 Comtesse de Saint-Gerane. Dumas. 38 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson. 279 Will o' the Mill; Markheim. Stevenson. 311 A Lodging for the Night. Stevenson. 27 Last Days of a Condemned Man. Hugo. 151 Man Who Would Be King. Kipling. 148 Strength of the Strong. London. 41 Christmas Carol. Dickens. 57 Rip Van Winkle. Irving. 100 Red Laugh. Andreyev. 105 Seven That Were Hanged. Andreyev. 102 Sherlock Holmes Tales. Conan Doyle. 161 Country of the Blind. H. G. Wells. 85 Attack on the Mill. Zola. 156 Andersen's Fairy Tales. 158 Alice in Wonderland. 37 Dream of John Ball. William Morris. 40 House and the Brain. Bulwer Lytton. 72 Color of Life. E. Haldeman-Julius. 198 Majesty of Justice. Anatole France. 215 The Miraculous Revenge. Bernard Shaw. 24 The Kiss and Other Stories. Chekhov. 285 Euphorian in Texas. George Moore. 219 The Human Tragedy. Anatole France. 296 The Marquise. George Sand. 239 Twenty-Six Men and a Girl. Gorki. 29 Dreams. Olive Schreiner. 232 The Three Strangers. Thomas Hardy. 277 The Man Without a Country. E. E. Hale. History, Biography 324 Life of Lincoln. Bowers. 312 Life and Works of Laurence Sterne. Gunn. 328 Addison and His Times. Finger. 323 The Life of Joan of Arc. 339 Thoreau--The Man Who Escaped from the Herd. Finger. 126 History of Rome. A. F. Giles. 128 Julius Caesar: Who He Was. 185 History of Printing. 149 Historic Crimes and Criminals. Finger. 175 Science of History. Froude. 104 Battle of Waterloo. Victor Hugo. 52 Voltaire. Victor Hugo. 125 War Speeches of Woodrow Wilson. 22 Tolstoy: His Life and Works. 142 Bismarck and the German Empire. 286 When the Puritans Were in Power. 343 Life of Columbus. 66 Crimes of the Borgias. Dumas. 287 Whistler: The Man and His Work. 51 Bruno: His Life and Martyrdom. 147 Cromwell and His Times. 236 State and Heart Affairs of Henry VIII. 50 Paine's Common Sense. 88 Vindication of Paine. Ingersoll. 33 Brann: Smasher of Shams. 163 Sex Life in Greece and Rome. 214 Speeches of Lincoln. 276 Speeches and Letters of Geo. Washington. 144 Was Poe Immoral? Whitman. 223 Essay on Swinburne. 227 Keats, The Man and His Work. 150 Lost Civilizations. Finger. 170 Constantine and the Beginnings of Christianity. 201 Satan and the Saints. 67 Church History. H. M. Tichenor. 169 Voices from the Past. 266 Life of Shakespeare and Analysis of His Plays. 123 Life of Madame Du Barry. 139 Life of Dante. 69 Life of Mary, Queen of Scots. Dumas. 5 Life of Samuel Johnson. Macaulay. 174 Trial of William Penn. Humor 291 Jumping Frog and Other Humorous Tales. Mark Twain. 18 Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. Jerome. 100 English as She Is Spoke. Mark Twain. 231 Eight Humorous Sketches. Mark Twain. 205 Artemus Ward. His Book. 187 Whistler's Humor. 216 Wit of Heinrich Heine. George Eliot. 20 Let's Laugh. Nasby. Literature 278 Friendship and Other Essays. Thoreau. 195 Thoughts on Nature. Thoreau. 194 Lord Chesterfield's Letters. 63 A Defense of Poetry. Shelley. 97 Love Letters of King Henry VIII. 3 Eighteen Essays. Voltaire. 28 Toleration. Voltaire. 89 Love Letters of Men and Women of Genius. 186 How I Wrote "The Raven." Poe. 87 Love, an Essay. Montaigne. 48 Bacon's Essays. 60 Emerson's Essays. 84 Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun. 26 On Going to Church. G. B. Shaw. 135 Socialism for Millionaires. G. B. Shaw. 61 Tolstoi's Essays. 176 Four Essays. Havelock Ellis. 160 Lecture on Shakespeare. Ingersoll. 75 Choice of Books. Carlyle. 288 Essays on Chesterfield and Rabelais. Sainte-Beuve. 76 The Prince of Peace. W. J. Bryan. 86 On Reading. Brandes. 95 Confessions of An Opium Eater. 213 Lecture on Lincoln. Ingersoll. 177 Subjection of Women. John Stuart Mill. 17 On Walking. Thoreau. 70 Charles Lamb's Essays. 235 Essays. Gilbert K. Chesterton. 7 A Liberal Education. Thomas Huxley. 233 Thoughts on Literature and Art. Goethe. 225 Condescension in Foreigners. Lowell. 221 Women, and Other Essays. Maeterlinck. 10 Shelley. Francis Thompson. 289 Pepys' Diary. 299 Prose Nature Notes. Walt Whitman. 315 Pen, Pencil and Poison. Oscar Wilde. 313 The Decay of Lying. Oscar Wilde. 36 Soul of Man Under Socialism. O. Wilde. 293 Francois Villon: Student, Poet and Housebreaker. R. L. Stevenson. Maxims and Epigrams 179 Gems from Emerson. 77 What Great Men Have Said About Women. 304 What Great Women Have Said About Men. 310 The Wisdom of Thackeray. 193 Wit and Wisdom of Charles Lamb. 56 Wisdom of Ingersoll. 106 Aphorisms. George Sand. 168 Epigrams. Oscar Wilde. 59 Epigrams of Wit and Wisdom. 35 Maxims. Rochefoucauld. 154 Epigrams of Ibsen. 197 Witticisms and Reflections. De Sevigne. 180 Epigrams of George Bernard Shaw. 155 Maxims. Napoleon. 181 Epigrams. Thoreau. 228 Aphorisms. Huxley. 113 Proverbs of England. 114 Proverbs of France. 115 Proverbs of Japan. 116 Proverbs of China. 117 Proverbs of Italy. 118 Proverbs of Russia. 119 Proverbs of Ireland. 120 Proverbs of Spain. 121 Proverbs of Arabia. Philosophy, Religion 159 A Guide to Plato. Durant. 322 The Buddhist Philosophy of Life. 347 A Guide to Stoicism. 124 Theory of Reincarnation Explained. 157 Plato's Republic. 62 Schopenhauer's Essays. 94 Trial and Death of Socrates. 65 Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. 64 Rudolf Eucken: His Life and Philosophy. 4 Age of Reason. Thomas Paine. 55 Herbert Spencer: His Life and Works. 44 Aesop's Fables. 165 Discovery of the Future. H. G. Wells. 98 Dialogues of Plato. 325 Essence of Buddhism. 103 Pocket Theology. Voltaire. 132 Foundations of Religion. 138 Studies in Pessimism. Schopenhauer. 211 Idea of God in Nature. John Stuart Mill. 212 Life and Character. Goethe. 200 Ignorant Philosopher. Voltaire. 101 Thoughts of Pascal. 210 The Stoic Philosophy. Prof. G. Murray. 224 God: Known and Unknown. Butler. 19 Nietzsche: Who He Was and What He Stood For. 204 Sun Worship and Later Beliefs. Tichenor. 207 Olympian Gods. H. M. Tichenor. 184 Primitive Beliefs. 153 Chinese Philosophy of Life. 30 What Life Means to Me. Jack London. Poetry 152 The Kasidah. Burton. 317 L'Allegro and Other Poems. Milton. 283 Courtship of Miles Standish. Longfellow. 282 Rime of Ancient Mariner. Coleridge. 297 Poems. Robert Southey. 329 Dante's Inferno, Volume I. 330 Dante's Inferno, Volume II. 306 A Shropshire Lad. Housman. 284 Poems of Robert Burns. 1 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 73 Walt Whitman's Poems. 2 Wilde's Ballad of Reading Jail. 32 Poe's Poems. 164 Michael Angelo's Sonnets. 71 Poems of Evolution. 146 Snow-Bound. Pied Piper. 9 Great English Poems. 79 Enoch Arden. Tennyson. 68 Shakespeare's Sonnets. 281 Lays of Ancient Rome. Macaulay. 173 Vision of Sir Launfal. Lowell. 222 The Vampire and Other Poems. Kipling. 237 Prose Poems. Baudelaire. Science 321 A History of Evolution. Fenton. 327 The Ice Age. Finger. 217 The Puzzle of Personality; a Study in Psycho-Analysis. Fielding. 190 Psycho-Analysis--The Key to Human Behavior. Fielding. 140 Biology and Spiritual Philosophy. 275 The Building of the Earth. C. L. Fenton. 49 Three Lectures on Evolution. Haeckel. 42 Origin of the Human Race. 238 Reflections on Modern Science. Huxley. 202 Survival of the Fittest. H. M. Tichenor. 191 Evolution vs. Religion. Balmforth. 333 Electricity Made Plain. 92 Hypnotism Made Plain. 93 Insects and Men: Instinct and Reason. 189 Eugenics. Havelock Ellis. Series of Debates 130 Controversy on Christianity. Ingersoll and Gladstone. 43 Marriage and Divorce. Horace Greeley and Robert Owen. 208 Debate on Birth Control. 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2017	----	THE DHAMMAPADA A Collection of Verses Being One of the Canonical Books of the Buddhists Translated from Pali by F. Max Muller From: The Sacred Books of the East Translated by Various Oriental Scholars Edited by F. Max Muller Volume X Part I [Note: The introduction, notes and index have been omitted.] Contents Chapter 1: The Twin Verses Chapter 2: On Earnestness Chapter 3: Thought Chapter 4: Flowers Chapter 5: The Fool Chapter 6: The Wise Man (Pandita) Chapter 7: The Venerable (Arhat) Chapter 8: The Thousands Chapter 9: Evil Chapter 10: Punishment Chapter 11: Old Age Chapter 12: Self Chapter 13: The World Chapter 14: The Buddha (the Awakened) Chapter 15: Happiness Chapter 16: Pleasure Chapter 17: Anger Chapter 18: Impurity Chapter 19: The Just Chapter 20: The Way Chapter 21: Miscellaneous Chapter 22: The Downward Course Chapter 23: The Elephant Chapter 24: Thirst Chapter 25: The Bhikshu (Mendicant) Chapter 26 The Brahmana (Arhat) DHAMMAPADA Chapter I. The Twin-Verses 1. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage. 2. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him. 3. "He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,"--in those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease. 4. "He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,"--in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease. 5. For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule. 6. The world does not know that we must all come to an end here;--but those who know it, their quarrels cease at once. 7. He who lives looking for pleasures only, his senses uncontrolled, immoderate in his food, idle, and weak, Mara (the tempter) will certainly overthrow him, as the wind throws down a weak tree. 8. He who lives without looking for pleasures, his senses well controlled, moderate in his food, faithful and strong, him Mara will certainly not overthrow, any more than the wind throws down a rocky mountain. 9. He who wishes to put on the yellow dress without having cleansed himself from sin, who disregards temperance and truth, is unworthy of the yellow dress. 10. But he who has cleansed himself from sin, is well grounded in all virtues, and regards also temperance and truth, he is indeed worthy of the yellow dress. 11. They who imagine truth in untruth, and see untruth in truth, never arrive at truth, but follow vain desires. 12. They who know truth in truth, and untruth in untruth, arrive at truth, and follow true desires. 13. As rain breaks through an ill-thatched house, passion will break through an unreflecting mind. 14. As rain does not break through a well-thatched house, passion will not break through a well-reflecting mind. 15. The evil-doer mourns in this world, and he mourns in the next; he mourns in both. He mourns and suffers when he sees the evil of his own work. 16. The virtuous man delights in this world, and he delights in the next; he delights in both. He delights and rejoices, when he sees the purity of his own work. 17. The evil-doer suffers in this world, and he suffers in the next; he suffers in both. He suffers when he thinks of the evil he has done; he suffers more when going on the evil path. 18. The virtuous man is happy in this world, and he is happy in the next; he is happy in both. He is happy when he thinks of the good he has done; he is still more happy when going on the good path. 19. The thoughtless man, even if he can recite a large portion (of the law), but is not a doer of it, has no share in the priesthood, but is like a cowherd counting the cows of others. 20. The follower of the law, even if he can recite only a small portion (of the law), but, having forsaken passion and hatred and foolishness, possesses true knowledge and serenity of mind, he, caring for nothing in this world or that to come, has indeed a share in the priesthood. Chapter II. On Earnestness 21. Earnestness is the path of immortality (Nirvana), thoughtlessness the path of death. Those who are in earnest do not die, those who are thoughtless are as if dead already. 22. Those who are advanced in earnestness, having understood this clearly, delight in earnestness, and rejoice in the knowledge of the Ariyas (the elect). 23. These wise people, meditative, steady, always possessed of strong powers, attain to Nirvana, the highest happiness. 24. If an earnest person has roused himself, if he is not forgetful, if his deeds are pure, if he acts with consideration, if he restrains himself, and lives according to law,--then his glory will increase. 25. By rousing himself, by earnestness, by restraint and control, the wise man may make for himself an island which no flood can overwhelm. 26. Fools follow after vanity, men of evil wisdom. The wise man keeps earnestness as his best jewel. 27. Follow not after vanity, nor after the enjoyment of love and lust! He who is earnest and meditative, obtains ample joy. 28. When the learned man drives away vanity by earnestness, he, the wise, climbing the terraced heights of wisdom, looks down upon the fools, serene he looks upon the toiling crowd, as one that stands on a mountain looks down upon them that stand upon the plain. 29. Earnest among the thoughtless, awake among the sleepers, the wise man advances like a racer, leaving behind the hack. 30. By earnestness did Maghavan (Indra) rise to the lordship of the gods. People praise earnestness; thoughtlessness is always blamed. 31. A Bhikshu (mendicant) who delights in earnestness, who looks with fear on thoughtlessness, moves about like fire, burning all his fetters, small or large. 32. A Bhikshu (mendicant) who delights in reflection, who looks with fear on thoughtlessness, cannot fall away (from his perfect state)--he is close upon Nirvana. Chapter III. Thought 33. As a fletcher makes straight his arrow, a wise man makes straight his trembling and unsteady thought, which is difficult to guard, difficult to hold back. 34. As a fish taken from his watery home and thrown on dry ground, our thought trembles all over in order to escape the dominion of Mara (the tempter). 35. It is good to tame the mind, which is difficult to hold in and flighty, rushing wherever it listeth; a tamed mind brings happiness. 36. Let the wise man guard his thoughts, for they are difficult to perceive, very artful, and they rush wherever they list: thoughts well guarded bring happiness. 37. Those who bridle their mind which travels far, moves about alone, is without a body, and hides in the chamber (of the heart), will be free from the bonds of Mara (the tempter). 38. If a man's thoughts are unsteady, if he does not know the true law, if his peace of mind is troubled, his knowledge will never be perfect. 39. If a man's thoughts are not dissipated, if his mind is not perplexed, if he has ceased to think of good or evil, then there is no fear for him while he is watchful. 40. Knowing that this body is (fragile) like a jar, and making this thought firm like a fortress, one should attack Mara (the tempter) with the weapon of knowledge, one should watch him when conquered, and should never rest. 41. Before long, alas! this body will lie on the earth, despised, without understanding, like a useless log. 42. Whatever a hater may do to a hater, or an enemy to an enemy, a wrongly-directed mind will do us greater mischief. 43. Not a mother, not a father will do so much, nor any other relative; a well-directed mind will do us greater service. Chapter IV. Flowers 44. Who shall overcome this earth, and the world of Yama (the lord of the departed), and the world of the gods? Who shall find out the plainly shown path of virtue, as a clever man finds out the (right) flower? 45. The disciple will overcome the earth, and the world of Yama, and the world of the gods. The disciple will find out the plainly shown path of virtue, as a clever man finds out the (right) flower. 46. He who knows that this body is like froth, and has learnt that it is as unsubstantial as a mirage, will break the flower-pointed arrow of Mara, and never see the king of death. 47. Death carries off a man who is gathering flowers and whose mind is distracted, as a flood carries off a sleeping village. 48. Death subdues a man who is gathering flowers, and whose mind is distracted, before he is satiated in his pleasures. 49. As the bee collects nectar and departs without injuring the flower, or its colour or scent, so let a sage dwell in his village. 50. Not the perversities of others, not their sins of commission or omission, but his own misdeeds and negligences should a sage take notice of. 51. Like a beautiful flower, full of colour, but without scent, are the fine but fruitless words of him who does not act accordingly. 52. But, like a beautiful flower, full of colour and full of scent, are the fine and fruitful words of him who acts accordingly. 53. As many kinds of wreaths can be made from a heap of flowers, so many good things may be achieved by a mortal when once he is born. 54. The scent of flowers does not travel against the wind, nor (that of) sandal-wood, or of Tagara and Mallika flowers; but the odour of good people travels even against the wind; a good man pervades every place. 55. Sandal-wood or Tagara, a lotus-flower, or a Vassiki, among these sorts of perfumes, the perfume of virtue is unsurpassed. 56. Mean is the scent that comes from Tagara and sandal-wood;--the perfume of those who possess virtue rises up to the gods as the highest. 57. Of the people who possess these virtues, who live without thoughtlessness, and who are emancipated through true knowledge, Mara, the tempter, never finds the way. 58, 59. As on a heap of rubbish cast upon the highway the lily will grow full of sweet perfume and delight, thus the disciple of the truly enlightened Buddha shines forth by his knowledge among those who are like rubbish, among the people that walk in darkness. Chapter V. The Fool 60. Long is the night to him who is awake; long is a mile to him who is tired; long is life to the foolish who do not know the true law. 61. If a traveller does not meet with one who is his better, or his equal, let him firmly keep to his solitary journey; there is no companionship with a fool. 62. "These sons belong to me, and this wealth belongs to me," with such thoughts a fool is tormented. He himself does not belong to himself; how much less sons and wealth? 63. The fool who knows his foolishness, is wise at least so far. But a fool who thinks himself wise, he is called a fool indeed. 64. If a fool be associated with a wise man even all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup. 65. If an intelligent man be associated for one minute only with a wise man, he will soon perceive the truth, as the tongue perceives the taste of soup. 66. Fools of little understanding have themselves for their greatest enemies, for they do evil deeds which must bear bitter fruits. 67. That deed is not well done of which a man must repent, and the reward of which he receives crying and with a tearful face. 68. No, that deed is well done of which a man does not repent, and the reward of which he receives gladly and cheerfully. 69. As long as the evil deed done does not bear fruit, the fool thinks it is like honey; but when it ripens, then the fool suffers grief. 70. Let a fool month after month eat his food (like an ascetic) with the tip of a blade of Kusa grass, yet he is not worth the sixteenth particle of those who have well weighed the law. 71. An evil deed, like newly-drawn milk, does not turn (suddenly); smouldering, like fire covered by ashes, it follows the fool. 72. And when the evil deed, after it has become known, brings sorrow to the fool, then it destroys his bright lot, nay, it cleaves his head. 73. Let the fool wish for a false reputation, for precedence among the Bhikshus, for lordship in the convents, for worship among other people! 74. "May both the layman and he who has left the world think that this is done by me; may they be subject to me in everything which is to be done or is not to be done," thus is the mind of the fool, and his desire and pride increase. 75. "One is the road that leads to wealth, another the road that leads to Nirvana;" if the Bhikshu, the disciple of Buddha, has learnt this, he will not yearn for honour, he will strive after separation from the world. Chapter VI. The Wise Man (Pandita) 76. If you see an intelligent man who tells you where true treasures are to be found, who shows what is to be avoided, and administers reproofs, follow that wise man; it will be better, not worse, for those who follow him. 77. Let him admonish, let him teach, let him forbid what is improper!--he will be beloved of the good, by the bad he will be hated. 78. Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men. 79. He who drinks in the law lives happily with a serene mind: the sage rejoices always in the law, as preached by the elect (Ariyas). 80. Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves. 81. As a solid rock is not shaken by the wind, wise people falter not amidst blame and praise. 82. Wise people, after they have listened to the laws, become serene, like a deep, smooth, and still lake. 83. Good people walk on whatever befall, the good do not prattle, longing for pleasure; whether touched by happiness or sorrow wise people never appear elated or depressed. 84. If, whether for his own sake, or for the sake of others, a man wishes neither for a son, nor for wealth, nor for lordship, and if he does not wish for his own success by unfair means, then he is good, wise, and virtuous. 85. Few are there among men who arrive at the other shore (become Arhats); the other people here run up and down the shore. 86. But those who, when the law has been well preached to them, follow the law, will pass across the dominion of death, however difficult to overcome. 87, 88. A wise man should leave the dark state (of ordinary life), and follow the bright state (of the Bhikshu). After going from his home to a homeless state, he should in his retirement look for enjoyment where there seemed to be no enjoyment. Leaving all pleasures behind, and calling nothing his own, the wise man should purge himself from all the troubles of the mind. 89. Those whose mind is well grounded in the (seven) elements of knowledge, who without clinging to anything, rejoice in freedom from attachment, whose appetites have been conquered, and who are full of light, are free (even) in this world. Chapter VII. The Venerable (Arhat). 90. There is no suffering for him who has finished his journey, and abandoned grief, who has freed himself on all sides, and thrown off all fetters. 91. They depart with their thoughts well-collected, they are not happy in their abode; like swans who have left their lake, they leave their house and home. 92. Men who have no riches, who live on recognised food, who have perceived void and unconditioned freedom (Nirvana), their path is difficult to understand, like that of birds in the air. 93. He whose appetites are stilled, who is not absorbed in enjoyment, who has perceived void and unconditioned freedom (Nirvana), his path is difficult to understand, like that of birds in the air. 94. The gods even envy him whose senses, like horses well broken in by the driver, have been subdued, who is free from pride, and free from appetites. 95. Such a one who does his duty is tolerant like the earth, like Indra's bolt; he is like a lake without mud; no new births are in store for him. 96. His thought is quiet, quiet are his word and deed, when he has obtained freedom by true knowledge, when he has thus become a quiet man. 97. The man who is free from credulity, but knows the uncreated, who has cut all ties, removed all temptations, renounced all desires, he is the greatest of men. 98. In a hamlet or in a forest, in the deep water or on the dry land, wherever venerable persons (Arhanta) dwell, that place is delightful. 99. Forests are delightful; where the world finds no delight, there the passionless will find delight, for they look not for pleasures. Chapter VIII. The Thousands 100. Even though a speech be a thousand (of words), but made up of senseless words, one word of sense is better, which if a man hears, he becomes quiet. 101. Even though a Gatha (poem) be a thousand (of words), but made up of senseless words, one word of a Gatha is better, which if a man hears, he becomes quiet. 102. Though a man recite a hundred Gathas made up of senseless words, one word of the law is better, which if a man hears, he becomes quiet. 103. If one man conquer in battle a thousand times thousand men, and if another conquer himself, he is the greatest of conquerors. 104, 105. One's own self conquered is better than all other people; not even a god, a Gandharva, not Mara with Brahman could change into defeat the victory of a man who has vanquished himself, and always lives under restraint. 106. If a man for a hundred years sacrifice month after month with a thousand, and if he but for one moment pay homage to a man whose soul is grounded (in true knowledge), better is that homage than sacrifice for a hundred years. 107. If a man for a hundred years worship Agni (fire) in the forest, and if he but for one moment pay homage to a man whose soul is grounded (in true knowledge), better is that homage than sacrifice for a hundred years. 108. Whatever a man sacrifice in this world as an offering or as an oblation for a whole year in order to gain merit, the whole of it is not worth a quarter (a farthing); reverence shown to the righteous is better. 109. He who always greets and constantly reveres the aged, four things will increase to him, viz. life, beauty, happiness, power. 110. But he who lives a hundred years, vicious and unrestrained, a life of one day is better if a man is virtuous and reflecting. 111. And he who lives a hundred years, ignorant and unrestrained, a life of one day is better if a man is wise and reflecting. 112. And he who lives a hundred years, idle and weak, a life of one day is better if a man has attained firm strength. 113. And he who lives a hundred years, not seeing beginning and end, a life of one day is better if a man sees beginning and end. 114. And he who lives a hundred years, not seeing the immortal place, a life of one day is better if a man sees the immortal place. 115. And he who lives a hundred years, not seeing the highest law, a life of one day is better if a man sees the highest law. Chapter IX. Evil 116. If a man would hasten towards the good, he should keep his thought away from evil; if a man does what is good slothfully, his mind delights in evil. 117. If a man commits a sin, let him not do it again; let him not delight in sin: pain is the outcome of evil. 118. If a man does what is good, let him do it again; let him delight in it: happiness is the outcome of good. 119. Even an evil-doer sees happiness as long as his evil deed has not ripened; but when his evil deed has ripened, then does the evil-doer see evil. 120. Even a good man sees evil days, as long as his good deed has not ripened; but when his good deed has ripened, then does the good man see happy days. 121. Let no man think lightly of evil, saying in his heart, It will not come nigh unto me. Even by the falling of water-drops a water-pot is filled; the fool becomes full of evil, even if he gather it little by little. 122. Let no man think lightly of good, saying in his heart, It will not come nigh unto me. Even by the falling of water-drops a water-pot is filled; the wise man becomes full of good, even if he gather it little by little. 123. Let a man avoid evil deeds, as a merchant, if he has few companions and carries much wealth, avoids a dangerous road; as a man who loves life avoids poison. 124. He who has no wound on his hand, may touch poison with his hand; poison does not affect one who has no wound; nor is there evil for one who does not commit evil. 125. If a man offend a harmless, pure, and innocent person, the evil falls back upon that fool, like light dust thrown up against the wind. 126. Some people are born again; evil-doers go to hell; righteous people go to heaven; those who are free from all worldly desires attain Nirvana. 127. Not in the sky, not in the midst of the sea, not if we enter into the clefts of the mountains, is there known a spot in the whole world where death could not overcome (the mortal). Chapter X. Punishment 129. All men tremble at punishment, all men fear death; remember that you are like unto them, and do not kill, nor cause slaughter. 130. All men tremble at punishment, all men love life; remember that thou art like unto them, and do not kill, nor cause slaughter. 131. He who seeking his own happiness punishes or kills beings who also long for happiness, will not find happiness after death. 132. He who seeking his own happiness does not punish or kill beings who also long for happiness, will find happiness after death. 133. Do not speak harshly to anybody; those who are spoken to will answer thee in the same way. Angry speech is painful, blows for blows will touch thee. 134. If, like a shattered metal plate (gong), thou utter not, then thou hast reached Nirvana; contention is not known to thee. 135. As a cowherd with his staff drives his cows into the stable, so do Age and Death drive the life of men. 136. A fool does not know when he commits his evil deeds: but the wicked man burns by his own deeds, as if burnt by fire. 137. He who inflicts pain on innocent and harmless persons, will soon come to one of these ten states: 138. He will have cruel suffering, loss, injury of the body, heavy affliction, or loss of mind, 139. Or a misfortune coming from the king, or a fearful accusation, or loss of relations, or destruction of treasures, 140. Or lightning-fire will burn his houses; and when his body is destroyed, the fool will go to hell. 141. Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting, or lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can purify a mortal who has not overcome desires. 142. He who, though dressed in fine apparel, exercises tranquillity, is quiet, subdued, restrained, chaste, and has ceased to find fault with all other beings, he indeed is a Brahmana, an ascetic (sramana), a friar (bhikshu). 143. Is there in this world any man so restrained by humility that he does not mind reproof, as a well-trained horse the whip? 144. Like a well-trained horse when touched by the whip, be ye active and lively, and by faith, by virtue, by energy, by meditation, by discernment of the law you will overcome this great pain (of reproof), perfect in knowledge and in behaviour, and never forgetful. 145. Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; good people fashion themselves. Chapter XI. Old Age 146. How is there laughter, how is there joy, as this world is always burning? Why do you not seek a light, ye who are surrounded by darkness? 147. Look at this dressed-up lump, covered with wounds, joined together, sickly, full of many thoughts, which has no strength, no hold! 148. This body is wasted, full of sickness, and frail; this heap of corruption breaks to pieces, life indeed ends in death. 149. Those white bones, like gourds thrown away in the autumn, what pleasure is there in looking at them? 150. After a stronghold has been made of the bones, it is covered with flesh and blood, and there dwell in it old age and death, pride and deceit. 151. The brilliant chariots of kings are destroyed, the body also approaches destruction, but the virtue of good people never approaches destruction,--thus do the good say to the good. 152. A man who has learnt little, grows old like an ox; his flesh grows, but his knowledge does not grow. 153, 154. Looking for the maker of this tabernacle, I shall have to run through a course of many births, so long as I do not find (him); and painful is birth again and again. But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen; thou shalt not make up this tabernacle again. All thy rafters are broken, thy ridge-pole is sundered; the mind, approaching the Eternal (visankhara, nirvana), has attained to the extinction of all desires. 155. Men who have not observed proper discipline, and have not gained treasure in their youth, perish like old herons in a lake without fish. 156. Men who have not observed proper discipline, and have not gained treasure in their youth, lie, like broken bows, sighing after the past. Chapter XII. Self 157. If a man hold himself dear, let him watch himself carefully; during one at least out of the three watches a wise man should be watchful. 158. Let each man direct himself first to what is proper, then let him teach others; thus a wise man will not suffer. 159. If a man make himself as he teaches others to be, then, being himself well subdued, he may subdue (others); one's own self is indeed difficult to subdue. 160. Self is the lord of self, who else could be the lord? With self well subdued, a man finds a lord such as few can find. 161. The evil done by oneself, self-begotten, self-bred, crushes the foolish, as a diamond breaks a precious stone. 162. He whose wickedness is very great brings himself down to that state where his enemy wishes him to be, as a creeper does with the tree which it surrounds. 163. Bad deeds, and deeds hurtful to ourselves, are easy to do; what is beneficial and good, that is very difficult to do. 164. The foolish man who scorns the rule of the venerable (Arahat), of the elect (Ariya), of the virtuous, and follows false doctrine, he bears fruit to his own destruction, like the fruits of the Katthaka reed. 165. By oneself the evil is done, by oneself one suffers; by oneself evil is left undone, by oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to oneself, no one can purify another. 166. Let no one forget his own duty for the sake of another's, however great; let a man, after he has discerned his own duty, be always attentive to his duty. Chapter XIII. The World 167. Do not follow the evil law! Do not live on in thoughtlessness! Do not follow false doctrine! Be not a friend of the world. 168. Rouse thyself! do not be idle! Follow the law of virtue! The virtuous rests in bliss in this world and in the next. 169. Follow the law of virtue; do not follow that of sin. The virtuous rests in bliss in this world and in the next. 170. Look upon the world as a bubble, look upon it as a mirage: the king of death does not see him who thus looks down upon the world. 171. Come, look at this glittering world, like unto a royal chariot; the foolish are immersed in it, but the wise do not touch it. 172. He who formerly was reckless and afterwards became sober, brightens up this world, like the moon when freed from clouds. 173. He whose evil deeds are covered by good deeds, brightens up this world, like the moon when freed from clouds. 174. This world is dark, few only can see here; a few only go to heaven, like birds escaped from the net. 175. The swans go on the path of the sun, they go through the ether by means of their miraculous power; the wise are led out of this world, when they have conquered Mara and his train. 176. If a man has transgressed one law, and speaks lies, and scoffs at another world, there is no evil he will not do. 177. The uncharitable do not go to the world of the gods; fools only do not praise liberality; a wise man rejoices in liberality, and through it becomes blessed in the other world. 178. Better than sovereignty over the earth, better than going to heaven, better than lordship over all worlds, is the reward of the first step in holiness. Chapter XIV. The Buddha (The Awakened) 179. He whose conquest is not conquered again, into whose conquest no one in this world enters, by what track can you lead him, the Awakened, the Omniscient, the trackless? 180. He whom no desire with its snares and poisons can lead astray, by what track can you lead him, the Awakened, the Omniscient, the trackless? 181. Even the gods envy those who are awakened and not forgetful, who are given to meditation, who are wise, and who delight in the repose of retirement (from the world). 182. Difficult (to obtain) is the conception of men, difficult is the life of mortals, difficult is the hearing of the True Law, difficult is the birth of the Awakened (the attainment of Buddhahood). 183. Not to commit any sin, to do good, and to purify one's mind, that is the teaching of (all) the Awakened. 184. The Awakened call patience the highest penance, long-suffering the highest Nirvana; for he is not an anchorite (pravragita) who strikes others, he is not an ascetic (sramana) who insults others. 185. Not to blame, not to strike, to live restrained under the law, to be moderate in eating, to sleep and sit alone, and to dwell on the highest thoughts,--this is the teaching of the Awakened. 186. There is no satisfying lusts, even by a shower of gold pieces; he who knows that lusts have a short taste and cause pain, he is wise; 187. Even in heavenly pleasures he finds no satisfaction, the disciple who is fully awakened delights only in the destruction of all desires. 188. Men, driven by fear, go to many a refuge, to mountains and forests, to groves and sacred trees. 189. But that is not a safe refuge, that is not the best refuge; a man is not delivered from all pains after having gone to that refuge. 190. He who takes refuge with Buddha, the Law, and the Church; he who, with clear understanding, sees the four holy truths:-- 191. Viz. pain, the origin of pain, the destruction of pain, and the eightfold holy way that leads to the quieting of pain;-- 192. That is the safe refuge, that is the best refuge; having gone to that refuge, a man is delivered from all pain. 193. A supernatural person (a Buddha) is not easily found, he is not born everywhere. Wherever such a sage is born, that race prospers. 194. Happy is the arising of the awakened, happy is the teaching of the True Law, happy is peace in the church, happy is the devotion of those who are at peace. 195, 196. He who pays homage to those who deserve homage, whether the awakened (Buddha) or their disciples, those who have overcome the host (of evils), and crossed the flood of sorrow, he who pays homage to such as have found deliverance and know no fear, his merit can never be measured by anybody. Chapter XV. Happiness 197. Let us live happily then, not hating those who hate us! among men who hate us let us dwell free from hatred! 198. Let us live happily then, free from ailments among the ailing! among men who are ailing let us dwell free from ailments! 199. Let us live happily then, free from greed among the greedy! among men who are greedy let us dwell free from greed! 200. Let us live happily then, though we call nothing our own! We shall be like the bright gods, feeding on happiness! 201. Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy. He who has given up both victory and defeat, he, the contented, is happy. 202. There is no fire like passion; there is no losing throw like hatred; there is no pain like this body; there is no happiness higher than rest. 203. Hunger is the worst of diseases, the body the greatest of pains; if one knows this truly, that is Nirvana, the highest happiness. 204. Health is the greatest of gifts, contentedness the best riches; trust is the best of relationships, Nirvana the highest happiness. 205. He who has tasted the sweetness of solitude and tranquillity, is free from fear and free from sin, while he tastes the sweetness of drinking in the law. 206. The sight of the elect (Arya) is good, to live with them is always happiness; if a man does not see fools, he will be truly happy. 207. He who walks in the company of fools suffers a long way; company with fools, as with an enemy, is always painful; company with the wise is pleasure, like meeting with kinsfolk. 208. Therefore, one ought to follow the wise, the intelligent, the learned, the much enduring, the dutiful, the elect; one ought to follow a good and wise man, as the moon follows the path of the stars. Chapter XVI. Pleasure 209. He who gives himself to vanity, and does not give himself to meditation, forgetting the real aim (of life) and grasping at pleasure, will in time envy him who has exerted himself in meditation. 210. Let no man ever look for what is pleasant, or what is unpleasant. Not to see what is pleasant is pain, and it is pain to see what is unpleasant. 211. Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil. Those who love nothing and hate nothing, have no fetters. 212. From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear; he who is free from pleasure knows neither grief nor fear. 213. From affection comes grief, from affection comes fear; he who is free from affection knows neither grief nor fear. 214. From lust comes grief, from lust comes fear; he who is free from lust knows neither grief nor fear. 215. From love comes grief, from love comes fear; he who is free from love knows neither grief nor fear. 216. From greed comes grief, from greed comes fear; he who is free from greed knows neither grief nor fear. 217. He who possesses virtue and intelligence, who is just, speaks the truth, and does what is his own business, him the world will hold dear. 218. He in whom a desire for the Ineffable (Nirvana) has sprung up, who is satisfied in his mind, and whose thoughts are not bewildered by love, he is called urdhvamsrotas (carried upwards by the stream). 219. Kinsmen, friends, and lovers salute a man who has been long away, and returns safe from afar. 220. In like manner his good works receive him who has done good, and has gone from this world to the other;--as kinsmen receive a friend on his return. Chapter XVII. Anger 221. Let a man leave anger, let him forsake pride, let him overcome all bondage! No sufferings befall the man who is not attached to name and form, and who calls nothing his own. 222. He who holds back rising anger like a rolling chariot, him I call a real driver; other people are but holding the reins. 223. Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by good; let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth! 224. Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked for little; by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods. 225. The sages who injure nobody, and who always control their body, they will go to the unchangeable place (Nirvana), where, if they have gone, they will suffer no more. 226. Those who are ever watchful, who study day and night, and who strive after Nirvana, their passions will come to an end. 227. This is an old saying, O Atula, this is not only of to-day: `They blame him who sits silent, they blame him who speaks much, they also blame him who says little; there is no one on earth who is not blamed.' 228. There never was, there never will be, nor is there now, a man who is always blamed, or a man who is always praised. 229, 230. But he whom those who discriminate praise continually day after day, as without blemish, wise, rich in knowledge and virtue, who would dare to blame him, like a coin made of gold from the Gambu river? Even the gods praise him, he is praised even by Brahman. 231. Beware of bodily anger, and control thy body! Leave the sins of the body, and with thy body practise virtue! 232. Beware of the anger of the tongue, and control thy tongue! Leave the sins of the tongue, and practise virtue with thy tongue! 233. Beware of the anger of the mind, and control thy mind! Leave the sins of the mind, and practise virtue with thy mind! 234. The wise who control their body, who control their tongue, the wise who control their mind, are indeed well controlled. Chapter XVIII. Impurity 235. Thou art now like a sear leaf, the messengers of death (Yama) have come near to thee; thou standest at the door of thy departure, and thou hast no provision for thy journey. 236. Make thyself an island, work hard, be wise! When thy impurities are blown away, and thou art free from guilt, thou wilt enter into the heavenly world of the elect (Ariya). 237. Thy life has come to an end, thou art come near to death (Yama), there is no resting-place for thee on the road, and thou hast no provision for thy journey. 238. Make thyself an island, work hard, be wise! When thy impurities are blown away, and thou art free from guilt, thou wilt not enter again into birth and decay. 239. Let a wise man blow off the impurities of his self, as a smith blows off the impurities of silver one by one, little by little, and from time to time. 240. As the impurity which springs from the iron, when it springs from it, destroys it; thus do a transgressor's own works lead him to the evil path. 241. The taint of prayers is non-repetition; the taint of houses, non-repair; the taint of the body is sloth; the taint of a watchman, thoughtlessness. 242. Bad conduct is the taint of woman, greediness the taint of a benefactor; tainted are all evil ways in this world and in the next. 243. But there is a taint worse than all taints,--ignorance is the greatest taint. O mendicants! throw off that taint, and become taintless! 244. Life is easy to live for a man who is without shame, a crow hero, a mischief-maker, an insulting, bold, and wretched fellow. 245. But life is hard to live for a modest man, who always looks for what is pure, who is disinterested, quiet, spotless, and intelligent. 246. He who destroys life, who speaks untruth, who in this world takes what is not given him, who goes to another man's wife; 247. And the man who gives himself to drinking intoxicating liquors, he, even in this world, digs up his own root. 248. O man, know this, that the unrestrained are in a bad state; take care that greediness and vice do not bring thee to grief for a long time! 249. The world gives according to their faith or according to their pleasure: if a man frets about the food and the drink given to others, he will find no rest either by day or by night. 250. He in whom that feeling is destroyed, and taken out with the very root, finds rest by day and by night. 251. There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed. 252. The fault of others is easily perceived, but that of oneself is difficult to perceive; a man winnows his neighbour's faults like chaff, but his own fault he hides, as a cheat hides the bad die from the gambler. 253. If a man looks after the faults of others, and is always inclined to be offended, his own passions will grow, and he is far from the destruction of passions. 254. There is no path through the air, a man is not a Samana by outward acts. The world delights in vanity, the Tathagatas (the Buddhas) are free from vanity. 255. There is no path through the air, a man is not a Samana by outward acts. No creatures are eternal; but the awakened (Buddha) are never shaken. Chapter XIX. The Just 256, 257. A man is not just if he carries a matter by violence; no, he who distinguishes both right and wrong, who is learned and leads others, not by violence, but by law and equity, and who is guarded by the law and intelligent, he is called just. 258. A man is not learned because he talks much; he who is patient, free from hatred and fear, he is called learned. 259. A man is not a supporter of the law because he talks much; even if a man has learnt little, but sees the law bodily, he is a supporter of the law, a man who never neglects the law. 260. A man is not an elder because his head is grey; his age may be ripe, but he is called `Old-in-vain.' 261. He in whom there is truth, virtue, love, restraint, moderation, he who is free from impurity and is wise, he is called an elder. 262. An envious greedy, dishonest man does not become respectable by means of much talking only, or by the beauty of his complexion. 263. He in whom all this is destroyed, and taken out with the very root, he, when freed from hatred and wise, is called respectable. 264. Not by tonsure does an undisciplined man who speaks falsehood become a Samana; can a man be a Samana who is still held captive by desire and greediness? 265. He who always quiets the evil, whether small or large, he is called a Samana (a quiet man), because he has quieted all evil. 266. A man is not a mendicant (Bhikshu) simply because he asks others for alms; he who adopts the whole law is a Bhikshu, not he who only begs. 267. He who is above good and evil, who is chaste, who with knowledge passes through the world, he indeed is called a Bhikshu. 268, 269. A man is not a Muni because he observes silence (mona, i.e. mauna), if he is foolish and ignorant; but the wise who, taking the balance, chooses the good and avoids evil, he is a Muni, and is a Muni thereby; he who in this world weighs both sides is called a Muni. 270. A man is not an elect (Ariya) because he injures living creatures; because he has pity on all living creatures, therefore is a man called Ariya. 271, 272. Not only by discipline and vows, not only by much learning, not by entering into a trance, not by sleeping alone, do I earn the happiness of release which no worldling can know. Bhikshu, be not confident as long as thou hast not attained the extinction of desires. Chapter XX. The Way 273. The best of ways is the eightfold; the best of truths the four words; the best of virtues passionlessness; the best of men he who has eyes to see. 274. This is the way, there is no other that leads to the purifying of intelligence. Go on this way! Everything else is the deceit of Mara (the tempter). 275. If you go on this way, you will make an end of pain! The way was preached by me, when I had understood the removal of the thorns (in the flesh). 276. You yourself must make an effort. The Tathagatas (Buddhas) are only preachers. The thoughtful who enter the way are freed from the bondage of Mara. 277. `All created things perish,' he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way to purity. 278. `All created things are grief and pain,' he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way that leads to purity. 279. `All forms are unreal,' he who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way that leads to purity. 280. He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise, who, though young and strong, is full of sloth, whose will and thought are weak, that lazy and idle man will never find the way to knowledge. 281. Watching his speech, well restrained in mind, let a man never commit any wrong with his body! Let a man but keep these three roads of action clear, and he will achieve the way which is taught by the wise. 282. Through zeal knowledge is gotten, through lack of zeal knowledge is lost; let a man who knows this double path of gain and loss thus place himself that knowledge may grow. 283. Cut down the whole forest (of lust), not a tree only! Danger comes out of the forest (of lust). When you have cut down both the forest (of lust) and its undergrowth, then, Bhikshus, you will be rid of the forest and free! 284. So long as the love of man towards women, even the smallest, is not destroyed, so long is his mind in bondage, as the calf that drinks milk is to its mother. 285. Cut out the love of self, like an autumn lotus, with thy hand! Cherish the road of peace. Nirvana has been shown by Sugata (Buddha). 286. `Here I shall dwell in the rain, here in winter and summer,' thus the fool meditates, and does not think of his death. 287. Death comes and carries off that man, praised for his children and flocks, his mind distracted, as a flood carries off a sleeping village. 288. Sons are no help, nor a father, nor relations; there is no help from kinsfolk for one whom death has seized. 289. A wise and good man who knows the meaning of this, should quickly clear the way that leads to Nirvana. Chapter XXI. Miscellaneous 290. If by leaving a small pleasure one sees a great pleasure, let a wise man leave the small pleasure, and look to the great. 291. He who, by causing pain to others, wishes to obtain pleasure for himself, he, entangled in the bonds of hatred, will never be free from hatred. 292. What ought to be done is neglected, what ought not to be done is done; the desires of unruly, thoughtless people are always increasing. 293. But they whose whole watchfulness is always directed to their body, who do not follow what ought not to be done, and who steadfastly do what ought to be done, the desires of such watchful and wise people will come to an end. 294. A true Brahmana goes scatheless, though he have killed father and mother, and two valiant kings, though he has destroyed a kingdom with all its subjects. 295. A true Brahmana goes scatheless, though he have killed father and mother, and two holy kings, and an eminent man besides. 296. The disciples of Gotama (Buddha) are always well awake, and their thoughts day and night are always set on Buddha. 297. The disciples of Gotama are always well awake, and their thoughts day and night are always set on the law. 298. The disciples of Gotama are always well awake, and their thoughts day and night are always set on the church. 299. The disciples of Gotama are always well awake, and their thoughts day and night are always set on their body. 300. The disciples of Gotama are always well awake, and their mind day and night always delights in compassion. 301. The disciples of Gotama are always well awake, and their mind day and night always delights in meditation. 302. It is hard to leave the world (to become a friar), it is hard to enjoy the world; hard is the monastery, painful are the houses; painful it is to dwell with equals (to share everything in common) and the itinerant mendicant is beset with pain. Therefore let no man be an itinerant mendicant and he will not be beset with pain. 303. Whatever place a faithful, virtuous, celebrated, and wealthy man chooses, there he is respected. 304. Good people shine from afar, like the snowy mountains; bad people are not seen, like arrows shot by night. 305. He alone who, without ceasing, practises the duty of sitting alone and sleeping alone, he, subduing himself, will rejoice in the destruction of all desires alone, as if living in a forest. Chapter XXII. The Downward Course 306. He who says what is not, goes to hell; he also who, having done a thing, says I have not done it. After death both are equal, they are men with evil deeds in the next world. 307. Many men whose shoulders are covered with the yellow gown are ill-conditioned and unrestrained; such evil-doers by their evil deeds go to hell. 308. Better it would be to swallow a heated iron ball, like flaring fire, than that a bad unrestrained fellow should live on the charity of the land. 309. Four things does a wreckless man gain who covets his neighbour's wife,--a bad reputation, an uncomfortable bed, thirdly, punishment, and lastly, hell. 310. There is bad reputation, and the evil way (to hell), there is the short pleasure of the frightened in the arms of the frightened, and the king imposes heavy punishment; therefore let no man think of his neighbour's wife. 311. As a grass-blade, if badly grasped, cuts the arm, badly-practised asceticism leads to hell. 312. An act carelessly performed, a broken vow, and hesitating obedience to discipline, all this brings no great reward. 313. If anything is to be done, let a man do it, let him attack it vigorously! A careless pilgrim only scatters the dust of his passions more widely. 314. An evil deed is better left undone, for a man repents of it afterwards; a good deed is better done, for having done it, one does not repent. 315. Like a well-guarded frontier fort, with defences within and without, so let a man guard himself. Not a moment should escape, for they who allow the right moment to pass, suffer pain when they are in hell. 316. They who are ashamed of what they ought not to be ashamed of, and are not ashamed of what they ought to be ashamed of, such men, embracing false doctrines enter the evil path. 317. They who fear when they ought not to fear, and fear not when they ought to fear, such men, embracing false doctrines, enter the evil path. 318. They who forbid when there is nothing to be forbidden, and forbid not when there is something to be forbidden, such men, embracing false doctrines, enter the evil path. 319. They who know what is forbidden as forbidden, and what is not forbidden as not forbidden, such men, embracing the true doctrine, enter the good path. Chapter XXIII. The Elephant 320. Silently shall I endure abuse as the elephant in battle endures the arrow sent from the bow: for the world is ill-natured. 321. They lead a tamed elephant to battle, the king mounts a tamed elephant; the tamed is the best among men, he who silently endures abuse. 322. Mules are good, if tamed, and noble Sindhu horses, and elephants with large tusks; but he who tames himself is better still. 323. For with these animals does no man reach the untrodden country (Nirvana), where a tamed man goes on a tamed animal, viz. on his own well-tamed self. 324. The elephant called Dhanapalaka, his temples running with sap, and difficult to hold, does not eat a morsel when bound; the elephant longs for the elephant grove. 325. If a man becomes fat and a great eater, if he is sleepy and rolls himself about, that fool, like a hog fed on wash, is born again and again. 326. This mind of mine went formerly wandering about as it liked, as it listed, as it pleased; but I shall now hold it in thoroughly, as the rider who holds the hook holds in the furious elephant. 327. Be not thoughtless, watch your thoughts! Draw yourself out of the evil way, like an elephant sunk in mud. 328. If a man find a prudent companion who walks with him, is wise, and lives soberly, he may walk with him, overcoming all dangers, happy, but considerate. 329. If a man find no prudent companion who walks with him, is wise, and lives soberly, let him walk alone, like a king who has left his conquered country behind,--like an elephant in the forest. 330. It is better to live alone, there is no companionship with a fool; let a man walk alone, let him commit no sin, with few wishes, like an elephant in the forest. 331. If an occasion arises, friends are pleasant; enjoyment is pleasant, whatever be the cause; a good work is pleasant in the hour of death; the giving up of all grief is pleasant. 332. Pleasant in the world is the state of a mother, pleasant the state of a father, pleasant the state of a Samana, pleasant the state of a Brahmana. 333. Pleasant is virtue lasting to old age, pleasant is a faith firmly rooted; pleasant is attainment of intelligence, pleasant is avoiding of sins. Chapter XXIV. Thirst 334. The thirst of a thoughtless man grows like a creeper; he runs from life to life, like a monkey seeking fruit in the forest. 335. Whomsoever this fierce thirst overcomes, full of poison, in this world, his sufferings increase like the abounding Birana grass. 336. He who overcomes this fierce thirst, difficult to be conquered in this world, sufferings fall off from him, like water-drops from a lotus leaf. 337. This salutary word I tell you, `Do ye, as many as are here assembled, dig up the root of thirst, as he who wants the sweet-scented Usira root must dig up the Birana grass, that Mara (the tempter) may not crush you again and again, as the stream crushes the reeds.' 338. As a tree, even though it has been cut down, is firm so long as its root is safe, and grows again, thus, unless the feeders of thirst are destroyed, the pain (of life) will return again and again. 339. He whose thirst running towards pleasure is exceeding strong in the thirty-six channels, the waves will carry away that misguided man, viz. his desires which are set on passion. 340. The channels run everywhere, the creeper (of passion) stands sprouting; if you see the creeper springing up, cut its root by means of knowledge. 341. A creature's pleasures are extravagant and luxurious; sunk in lust and looking for pleasure, men undergo (again and again) birth and decay. 342. Men, driven on by thirst, run about like a snared hare; held in fetters and bonds, they undergo pain for a long time, again and again. 343. Men, driven on by thirst, run about like a snared hare; let therefore the mendicant drive out thirst, by striving after passionlessness for himself. 344. He who having got rid of the forest (of lust) (i.e. after having reached Nirvana) gives himself over to forest-life (i.e. to lust), and who, when removed from the forest (i.e. from lust), runs to the forest (i.e. to lust), look at that man! though free, he runs into bondage. 345. Wise people do not call that a strong fetter which is made of iron, wood, or hemp; far stronger is the care for precious stones and rings, for sons and a wife. 346. That fetter wise people call strong which drags down, yields, but is difficult to undo; after having cut this at last, people leave the world, free from cares, and leaving desires and pleasures behind. 347. Those who are slaves to passions, run down with the stream (of desires), as a spider runs down the web which he has made himself; when they have cut this, at last, wise people leave the world free from cares, leaving all affection behind. 348. Give up what is before, give up what is behind, give up what is in the middle, when thou goest to the other shore of existence; if thy mind is altogether free, thou wilt not again enter into birth and decay. 349. If a man is tossed about by doubts, full of strong passions, and yearning only for what is delightful, his thirst will grow more and more, and he will indeed make his fetters strong. 350. If a man delights in quieting doubts, and, always reflecting, dwells on what is not delightful (the impurity of the body, &c.), he certainly will remove, nay, he will cut the fetter of Mara. 351. He who has reached the consummation, who does not tremble, who is without thirst and without sin, he has broken all the thorns of life: this will be his last body. 352. He who is without thirst and without affection, who understands the words and their interpretation, who knows the order of letters (those which are before and which are after), he has received his last body, he is called the great sage, the great man. 353. `I have conquered all, I know all, in all conditions of life I am free from taint; I have left all, and through the destruction of thirst I am free; having learnt myself, whom shall I teach?' 354. The gift of the law exceeds all gifts; the sweetness of the law exceeds all sweetness; the delight in the law exceeds all delights; the extinction of thirst overcomes all pain. 355. Pleasures destroy the foolish, if they look not for the other shore; the foolish by his thirst for pleasures destroys himself, as if he were his own enemy. 356. The fields are damaged by weeds, mankind is damaged by passion: therefore a gift bestowed on the passionless brings great reward. 357. The fields are damaged by weeds, mankind is damaged by hatred: therefore a gift bestowed on those who do not hate brings great reward. 358. The fields are damaged by weeds, mankind is damaged by vanity: therefore a gift bestowed on those who are free from vanity brings great reward. 359. The fields are damaged by weeds, mankind is damaged by lust: therefore a gift bestowed on those who are free from lust brings great reward. Chapter XXV. The Bhikshu (Mendicant) 360. Restraint in the eye is good, good is restraint in the ear, in the nose restraint is good, good is restraint in the tongue. 361. In the body restraint is good, good is restraint in speech, in thought restraint is good, good is restraint in all things. A Bhikshu, restrained in all things, is freed from all pain. 362. He who controls his hand, he who controls his feet, he who controls his speech, he who is well controlled, he who delights inwardly, who is collected, who is solitary and content, him they call Bhikshu. 363. The Bhikshu who controls his mouth, who speaks wisely and calmly, who teaches the meaning and the law, his word is sweet. 364. He who dwells in the law, delights in the law, meditates on the law, follows the law, that Bhikshu will never fall away from the true law. 365. Let him not despise what he has received, nor ever envy others: a mendicant who envies others does not obtain peace of mind. 366. A Bhikshu who, though he receives little, does not despise what he has received, even the gods will praise him, if his life is pure, and if he is not slothful. 367. He who never identifies himself with name and form, and does not grieve over what is no more, he indeed is called a Bhikshu. 368. The Bhikshu who acts with kindness, who is calm in the doctrine of Buddha, will reach the quiet place (Nirvana), cessation of natural desires, and happiness. 369. O Bhikshu, empty this boat! if emptied, it will go quickly; having cut off passion and hatred thou wilt go to Nirvana. 370. Cut off the five (senses), leave the five, rise above the five. A Bhikshu, who has escaped from the five fetters, he is called Oghatinna, `saved from the flood.' 371. Meditate, O Bhikshu, and be not heedless! Do not direct thy thought to what gives pleasure that thou mayest not for thy heedlessness have to swallow the iron ball (in hell), and that thou mayest not cry out when burning, `This is pain.' 372. Without knowledge there is no meditation, without meditation there is no knowledge: he who has knowledge and meditation is near unto Nirvana. 373. A Bhikshu who has entered his empty house, and whose mind is tranquil, feels a more than human delight when he sees the law clearly. 374. As soon as he has considered the origin and destruction of the elements (khandha) of the body, he finds happiness and joy which belong to those who know the immortal (Nirvana). 375. And this is the beginning here for a wise Bhikshu: watchfulness over the senses, contentedness, restraint under the law; keep noble friends whose life is pure, and who are not slothful. 376. Let him live in charity, let him be perfect in his duties; then in the fulness of delight he will make an end of suffering. 377. As the Vassika plant sheds its withered flowers, men should shed passion and hatred, O ye Bhikshus! 378. The Bhikshu whose body and tongue and mind are quieted, who is collected, and has rejected the baits of the world, he is called quiet. 379. Rouse thyself by thyself, examine thyself by thyself, thus self-protected and attentive wilt thou live happily, O Bhikshu! 380. For self is the lord of self, self is the refuge of self; therefore curb thyself as the merchant curbs a good horse. 381. The Bhikshu, full of delight, who is calm in the doctrine of Buddha will reach the quiet place (Nirvana), cessation of natural desires, and happiness. 382. He who, even as a young Bhikshu, applies himself to the doctrine of Buddha, brightens up this world, like the moon when free from clouds. Chapter XXVI. The Brahmana (Arhat) 383. Stop the stream valiantly, drive away the desires, O Brahmana! When you have understood the destruction of all that was made, you will understand that which was not made. 384. If the Brahmana has reached the other shore in both laws (in restraint and contemplation), all bonds vanish from him who has obtained knowledge. 385. He for whom there is neither this nor that shore, nor both, him, the fearless and unshackled, I call indeed a Brahmana. 386. He who is thoughtful, blameless, settled, dutiful, without passions, and who has attained the highest end, him I call indeed a Brahmana. 387. The sun is bright by day, the moon shines by night, the warrior is bright in his armour, the Brahmana is bright in his meditation; but Buddha, the Awakened, is bright with splendour day and night. 388. Because a man is rid of evil, therefore he is called Brahmana; because he walks quietly, therefore he is called Samana; because he has sent away his own impurities, therefore he is called Pravragita (Pabbagita, a pilgrim). 389. No one should attack a Brahmana, but no Brahmana (if attacked) should let himself fly at his aggressor! Woe to him who strikes a Brahmana, more woe to him who flies at his aggressor! 390. It advantages a Brahmana not a little if he holds his mind back from the pleasures of life; when all wish to injure has vanished, pain will cease. 391. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who does not offend by body, word, or thought, and is controlled on these three points. 392. After a man has once understood the law as taught by the Well-awakened (Buddha), let him worship it carefully, as the Brahmana worships the sacrificial fire. 393. A man does not become a Brahmana by his platted hair, by his family, or by birth; in whom there is truth and righteousness, he is blessed, he is a Brahmana. 394. What is the use of platted hair, O fool! what of the raiment of goat-skins? Within thee there is ravening, but the outside thou makest clean. 395. The man who wears dirty raiments, who is emaciated and covered with veins, who lives alone in the forest, and meditates, him I call indeed a Brahmana. 396. I do not call a man a Brahmana because of his origin or of his mother. He is indeed arrogant, and he is wealthy: but the poor, who is free from all attachments, him I call indeed a Brahmana. 397. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who has cut all fetters, who never trembles, is independent and unshackled. 398. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who has cut the strap and the thong, the chain with all that pertains to it, who has burst the bar, and is awakened. 399. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who, though he has committed no offence, endures reproach, bonds, and stripes, who has endurance for his force, and strength for his army. 400. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who is free from anger, dutiful, virtuous, without appetite, who is subdued, and has received his last body. 401. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who does not cling to pleasures, like water on a lotus leaf, like a mustard seed on the point of a needle. 402. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who, even here, knows the end of his suffering, has put down his burden, and is unshackled. 403. Him I call indeed a Brahmana whose knowledge is deep, who possesses wisdom, who knows the right way and the wrong, and has attained the highest end. 404. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who keeps aloof both from laymen and from mendicants, who frequents no houses, and has but few desires. 405. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who finds no fault with other beings, whether feeble or strong, and does not kill nor cause slaughter. 406. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who is tolerant with the intolerant, mild with fault-finders, and free from passion among the passionate. 407. Him I call indeed a Brahmana from whom anger and hatred, pride and envy have dropt like a mustard seed from the point of a needle. 408. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who utters true speech, instructive and free from harshness, so that he offend no one. 409. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who takes nothing in the world that is not given him, be it long or short, small or large, good or bad. 410. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who fosters no desires for this world or for the next, has no inclinations, and is unshackled. 411. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who has no interests, and when he has understood (the truth), does not say How, how? and who has reached the depth of the Immortal. 412. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who in this world is above good and evil, above the bondage of both, free from grief from sin, and from impurity. 413. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who is bright like the moon, pure, serene, undisturbed, and in whom all gaiety is extinct. 414. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who has traversed this miry road, the impassable world and its vanity, who has gone through, and reached the other shore, is thoughtful, guileless, free from doubts, free from attachment, and content. 415. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who in this world, leaving all desires, travels about without a home, and in whom all concupiscence is extinct. 416. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who, leaving all longings, travels about without a home, and in whom all covetousness is extinct. 417. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who, after leaving all bondage to men, has risen above all bondage to the gods, and is free from all and every bondage. 418. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who has left what gives pleasure and what gives pain, who is cold, and free from all germs (of renewed life), the hero who has conquered all the worlds. 419. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who knows the destruction and the return of beings everywhere, who is free from bondage, welfaring (Sugata), and awakened (Buddha). 420. Him I call indeed a Brahmana whose path the gods do not know, nor spirits (Gandharvas), nor men, whose passions are extinct, and who is an Arhat (venerable). 421. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who calls nothing his own, whether it be before, behind, or between, who is poor, and free from the love of the world. 422. Him I call indeed a Brahmana, the manly, the noble, the hero, the great sage, the conqueror, the impassible, the accomplished, the awakened. 423. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who knows his former abodes, who sees heaven and hell, has reached the end of births, is perfect in knowledge, a sage, and whose perfections are all perfect. 
22782	----	Transcriber's Note: The spelling and accents of Sanskrit names is not consistent in the book. The Table of Contents is not part of the original book. THE BUDDHA A DRAMA IN FIVE ACTS AND FOUR INTERLUDES BY PAUL CARUS CHICAGO THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO. LONDON: 149 Strand 1913 * * * * * CONTENTS DIRECTIONS TO THE STAGE MANAGER. CAST OF CHARACTERS. GLOSSARY OF FOREIGN TERMS. ACT I. ACT II. ACT III. ACT IV. ACT V. * * * * * DIRECTIONS TO THE STAGE MANAGER. The scenery can be made very attractive by both historical accuracy and a display of Oriental luxury, but the drama may easily be performed with simple means at a small cost without losing its dramatic effect. Some of the changes, however, should be very rapid. The interludes can be replaced by lantern slide pictures, or may be omitted. If the interludes are retained there need not be any intermission in the whole drama. The music for the Buddha's Hymn of Victory, pages 5 and 39 (see _The Open Court_, XIX, 49); the dirge on page 19, (_Open Court_, XIX, 567); Yasodhara's Song, page 37 (_Open Court_, XVIII, 625); and the Doxology, page 63 and at the end (_Open Court_, XVIII, 627), may be found in a collection entitled _Buddhist Hymns_ (Chicago, Open Court Publishing Co., 1911). COPYRIGHT BY THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO. 1913 * * * * * CAST OF CHARACTERS. _All vowels to be pronounced as in Italian._ Siddháttha Gótama, Prince of the Sakyas, later on the Buddha _B_ Suddhodana, King of the Sakyas, father of Siddháttha _S_ Pajapati, Queen of the Sakyas, aunt and stepmother of Siddháttha _P_ Princess Yasodhara, Siddháttha's wife _Y_ Rahula, Yasodhara's son _R_ Devadatta, brother of Yasodhara _Dd_ Kala Udayin, a gardener's son _K_ Gopa, Yasodhara's maid _G_ Visakha, a Brahman, Prime Minister of Suddhodana _V_ Devala, a Sakya Captain _D_ Bimbisara, King of Magadha _Bb_ Ambapali, King Bimbisara's favorite _Ap_ Nagadeva, Prime Minister of Mágadha, leader of an embassy _N_ General Siha, in the service of King Bimbisara _GS_ Jeta, Prince of Northern Kosala _J_ Anatha Pindika, a wealthy man of Savattha _A_ Mara, the Evil One _M_ Channa, Prince Siddháttha's groom _Ch_ Master of Ceremonies at Magadha _Mc_ General Siha's Captain _C_ A Brahman Priest _Pr_ A Farmer _F_ Servant _St_ Ministers, Officers, Soldiers, Trumpeters, Villagers, A Shepherd. Singers: Mara's Daughters, Angels, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. * * * * * GLOSSARY OF FOREIGN TERMS. Buddha, the Enlightened One, the Saviour. Bodhi, enlightenment or wisdom. Bodhisatta, a seeker of the bodhi, one who endeavors to become a Buddha. Bodhi tree, the tree under which Buddha acquires enlightenment. Muni, thinker or sage. Sakyamuni, the Sage of the Sakyas, the Buddha. Tathagata, a title of Buddha, which probably means "The Perfect One," or "he who has reached completion." Nirvana (in Pali, "Nibbana") eternal bliss. Kapilavatthu, capital of the Sakyas. Kosala, an Indian state divided into Northern and Southern Kosala. Savátthi, capital of Northern Kosala. Jetavana, the pleasure garden of Prince Jeta at Savátthi. Mágadha, a large kingdom in the Ganges Valley. Rajagáha, capital of Magadha. Uruvela, a place near Benares. Arada and U'draka, two philosophers. Licchávi, a princely house of Vesali. Nirgrántha (lit. "liberated from bonds"), a name adopted by the adherents of the Jaina sect. Indra, in the time of Buddha worshiped by the people as the most powerful god. Issara, the Lord, a name of God Indra. Yama, the god of death. Káli, a Brahman goddess, called also Durga. * * * * * ACT I. FIRST SCENE. [A tropical garden in Kapilavatthu, in the background mountains, at a distance the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas. On the right near the front a marble bench surrounded with bushes. Further back the palace entrance of the Raja's residence. Above the entrance a balcony. On the left a fortified gate with a guard house; all built luxuriously in antique Indian style.] _Present_: SUDDHODANA, _the king_ (_S_); PAJAPATI, _the queen_ (_P_), _and the minister of state_ VISAKHA (_V_). _S._ My son Siddhattha truly loves his wife, And since their wedlock has been blessed by this Sweet, promising, this hale and healthy child, His melancholy will give way to joy, And we reclaim his noble energies To do good service for our race and state. New int'rests and new duties give new courage And thus this babe will prove his father's saviour For he will tie his soul to life again. _P._ I fear his grief lies deeper than you think. _S._ What sayest thou, my trusty counselor? _V._ This is the last hope which I have for him, I followed your advice and tried all means To cure Siddhattha of his pensive mood. I taught him all that will appeal to man: The sports of youth, the joy of poetry And art, the grandeur of our ancient lore, The pleasures e'en of wanton sense; but naught Would satisfy the yearnings of his heart. _S._ Yet for religion he shows interest: He ponders on the problems of the world. _V._ Indeed he ponders on life's meaning much, Investigates the origin of things But irreligious are his ways of thought. He shows no reverence for Issara, And Indra is to him a fairy tale. He grudgeth to the gods a sacrifice And sheddeth tears at immolated lambs. Oh no! he's not religious. If he were, His ills could easily be cured by faith, By confidence in Issara, the Lord. _S._ What then is your opinion of the case? _V._ Siddhattha is a youth of rarest worth, And he surpasseth men in every virtue Except in one.--He is too independent: He recognizeth no authority, Neither of men nor gods. He suffereth [_More and more impressively_] From the incurable disease of thought. _S._ Cure thought with thought, teach him philosophy, Show him the purpose of our holy writ. Instruct him in the meaning of the Vedas, Reveal to him their esoteric sense. _V._ My lord, I did, but he is critical, He makes objections and will not believe. He raises questions which I cannot answer, And his conclusions are most dangerous. _P._ It seems to me that you exaggerate; Siddhattha is not dangerous. He is As gentle as my sister was, his mother, And almost overkind to every one. _V._ I know, my gracious lady, but e'en kindness May harmful be, if it is out of place. _S._ I see no danger in his gentle nature. _V._ But he lacks strength, decision, warlike spirit. _S._ That cometh with maturer years. _V._ I doubt it: Your son, my Lord, not only hath no faith In holy writ, neither does he believe In caste-distinction, and he would upset The sanctioned order of our institutions. He would abolish sacrifice and holdeth The Brahman ritual in deep contempt. _S._ Your words alarm me. _V._ Rightly so; I fear That he will stir the people to rebellion; But since a child is born to him, his mind May turn from dreams to practical affairs. There are some men who care not for themselves, Who scorn high caste, position, wealth and honor, So far as they themselves may be concerned, But they are anxious for their children's fortune, And so Siddhattha soon may change his views. _S._ Let us be patient for a while yet longer. Keep everything unpleasant out of sight, Invite him merry company. Remove His gloomy cousin Devadatta. He tries To reach a state of bliss by fasts, His very play is penance and contrition. _P._ Ananda is a better boon companion, He is not so morose as Devadatta. _S._ Neither is he the right friend for my son. I grant he has a loving disposition, But he is pensive too. Surround Siddhattha With lads such as the gardner's jolly son, Kala Udayin. Like a lark he warbles! Would there were more like him. He jokes and laughs And never makes a sullen face. But tell me How is to-day Kala Udayin's father? _V._ His sickness turns from bad to worse. I fear He cannot live. _S._ [_with concern_] Have him removed from here; Siddhattha likes him much and if he knew Udayin's sorry fate, it might undo All good effects of joyful fatherhood. _V._ The best will be to move him in the night. _S._ Move him by night, and do it soon.--But hush, Yasodhara is coming with her babe. YASODHARA (_Y_) _and two attendant maids, one carries an umbrella, shading the Princess; the other,_ GOPA (_G_), _carries the infant_. _P._ [_meets her and kisses her._] Welcome, thou sweetest flower of our garden, Thou ray of sunshine in Siddhattha's life. _S._ My dearest daughter! how is Rahula? _Y._ My royal father, Rahula is growing, And he increases daily in his weight; To-day he smiled at me most cunningly. I'll lay him down, for he is fast asleep. _All enter the palace. The stage remains empty a moment. Soft, serious music (Buddha's "Hymn of Victory") is heard._ SECOND SCENE. SIDDHATTHA (_B_) _and_ KALA UDAYIN (_K_) _enter_. _K._ My sweet Prince, when you are king you must appoint me court jester. Will you, my good Lord? We two are good contrasts: You full of dignity upon a royal throne, a golden crown upon your head, the scepter in your hand, and I dressed in motley with cap and bells. Heigh ho! That will be jolly. And after all we are so much alike! _B._ A royal crown shall never grace my head. _K._ And why should it not, sweet Prince? _B._ I have a higher aim, a greater mission. What is a kingdom? What are wealth and power? What crown and scepter? They are transient things, I yearn for the Immortal state, Nirvana. _K._ Then wilt thou be a Buddha? Oh, even then will I follow thee. _He kneels down with clasped hands._ Wilt thou a holy Buddha be, O keep me in thy company Though I'm a jester. I'll be good. Let me attain beatitude. _B._ Rise Kala, rise, I am a mortal man, I'm not omniscient, nor have I yet Attained the goal of goals, enlightenment.-- Tell me, why dost thou think we are alike? _K._ My Lord, you have no ambition to be a king; you think the world is full of vanity, and you consider that life and its glory will pass away. That is exactly what I think. I agree with you. Only, you are of a serious disposition and take the matter to heart, while I think it is great fun. What is the use of thinking so much. We are all like bubbles: we float in the air, and then the bubble bursts and this life is over. I am now a poor boy. I fear no change. In a future incarnation I may be born as the son of a king, like you. And think of it, after a few million years, this whole world, this big bulky stupid institution, this home of so many villains, and a couple of good ones like us two among them, the theater of rascalities, of vanities, of follies, will be scattered to the winds, as if it had never existed. Be merry, my Prince, so long as the comedy lasts. DEVADATTA (_Dd._) _appears in the background. His cheeks are sunken and his face is gloomy. His eye has a fanatic expression._ _B._ Consider, it may prove a tragedy. _K._ Let it be what it may be. To me it will be what I think it is. It is a huge joke. _B._ But who will laugh at it, my friend? _K._ I will. _B._ Kala, the time will come when thou wilt weep. _K._ Well then? And if I weep I shall shed tears. Tears are a sweet relief In anguish pain and grief. I'll make the best of all, Whatever may befall. _B._ Thy prattle seemeth foolish, but it hideth A deep philosophy. _K._ Why then, good Lord, Why wilt thou not its merry lesson learn? _B._ Good Kala listen, and thou'lt understand: There is a difference between our aims: Thou clingest to this world of transiency, But I seek the Etern. Thou seest not The misery of life, for thou art happy-- Happy at least at present, though the next Moment may find thee writhing in lament. I seek a place of refuge whence I can Extend my hand to help those in distress. I will attain the state of Buddhahood To bring deliverance to all mankind. _Dd._ Why do you waste your time, Siddhattha, with this frivolous lad? What profit can there be in gossip such as you two carry on? _K._ You always scold, you hollow-eyed sour face! You always moralize. Even your good brother-in-law is too worldly for you. _Dd._ I did not speak to you, I addressed myself to Siddhattha. _B._ Udayin has a heart, a human heart, And all my sympathy goes out to him. _Dd._ If you intend to lead a religious life and go into homelessness, you had better devote yourself to fasts and contemplations. _K._ You do not talk to me, but I will talk to you, and I will tell you that in all your religious exercises you think of yourself, while Siddhattha thinks of others. I wish you would go into homelessness. Nobody would miss you here. _Addressing himself to_ SIDDHATTHA. But, good my Lord, you must not go into homelessness, because you will do more harm than good. _B._ How can that be, my good Kala Udayin? _K._ There comes your noble wife, Yasodhara. YASODHARA _comes, her maids with umbrellas keep at a respectful distance_. _Y._ Come see our boy, he is a lovely child; He just woke up. He maketh you forget, The sad thoughts of your heart on world and life, For he, the darling babe, is life himself. KALA _flirts with_ GOPA, _one of_ YASODHARA'S _maids_. _B._ I'll follow thee at once. _Y._ [_Addressing Devadatta_] And brother, will you come along? _Dd._ Not I. This child is but the beginning of new misery. It continues the old error in the eternal round on the wheel of life. _She goes into the house._ DEVADATTA _withdraws into the garden_. _B._ Now Kala speak. _K._ O Prince Siddhattha, do not go into homelessness, do not leave us. I cannot live without you. You are my comfort, my teacher, my guide. I do not follow your instructions, but I love to hear them. Oh I could not live without you. Do not go, sweet Prince. Think of your wife, your dear good lovely wife, it will break her heart. Think of your child. Do not go, noble Prince. Let somebody else become the saviour of the world. Somebody else can just as well become the deliverer and the Buddha. I am sure there are many who would like to fill that place, and somebody can do it who has a less comfortable home to leave, who has a less lovely wife, who is not heir to a kingdom, and who has not such a sweet promising little boy as you have. I cannot live without you. _B._ Wouldst thou go with me? _K._ [_kneels_] Yes my Lord, I would. Take me along and I will cheer you up. _B._ Wouldst thou go begging food from house to house? With bowl in hand, a homeless mendicant? _K._ No sir, that would not suit me. _B._ Wouldst thou by night sleep under forest trees? _K._ No sir, I would catch cold. That's not for me. [_Rises_] If you needs must go, sir, you had better go alone. That life is not for me. I will go and hear the nightingale. SIDDHATTHA _follows the Princess into the palace_. _K._ A Buddha's life Is not for every one. He has no wife No pleasure and no fun. He cannot laugh, He cannot cry; He cannot love He cannot sigh. He's always preaching, preaching. He's always teaching, teaching. He wonders at time's transiency And ponders on man's misery, And findeth his salvation In dreary resignation. That life I see Is not for me: 'Twould be ill spent; I would not find enlightenment. I lift not the world's woe And in my quest for truth would fail [_Muses a moment._] So I had better go And listen to the nightingale. _KALA UDAYIN exit._ [During the last scene twilight has gradually set in.] THIRD SCENE. [The scene changes by open curtain. A veil comes down, and when its goes up again we see the bed chamber of Siddhattha and Yasodhara dimly lit by tapers.] _YASODHARA (Y) on the bed with babe in arms, two maids in waiting. SIDDHATTHA (B) comes in. A halo of light (not too strong) surrounds his head. The princess rises, lays the babe down and advances toward her husband._ _Y._ O good my Lord, my Prince, my Husband! _A pause. She changes her voice as if ashamed of her show of feeling. With a matter-of-fact intonation._ Rahula fell asleep again. _B._ Why art thou sad, my good Yasodhara? I see a tear that glitters in thine eye. _Y._ An unspeakable melancholy steals over my soul when I hear you speak of your religious longings. _B._ Wouldest thou not rejoice if I fulfilled My mission; if I reached the highest goal? _Y._ Oh! Siddhattha! you do not love me. _B._ My heart embraces all the world--and thee. _Y._ If you loved me truly, there would not be much room for all the world. You think of the world all day long, and have not a minute's time for your wife. _B._ I have, my dear! _Y._ My noble Husband! _B._ Speak! _Y._ Scarcely do I dare to call you by that name. You are kind and gentle, but for a husband you are too lofty, too distant in your dignity. It may be wrong in me, it may be sinful, but I wish you were less lofty and more loving. _B._ My dearest "Wife," I call thee so on purpose-- My dearest "Wife," thou dost not understand: The misery and ills of all the world Weigh heavy on my heart. I'll find no peace Until at last a remedy be found. _Y._ Why dost thou trouble about others? Think of thy son, thy sweetest Rahula, and if thou lovest me a little only, think of me. _B._ I think of thee, my loving Wife, but when I think of thee I think of all--of all The loving wives, the happy trembling mothers All over in the world. Happy they are, But trembling for their babes. Oh! bear in mind, We all are in the net of sorrow caught. This world is full of pain, disease and death; And even death brings no relief. Because The wheel of life rolls on. The ills continue In births that constantly repeat themselves. _Y._ Oh! do not speak of it my Lord, it makes me sad. Why do you think of misery, while here we are surrounded by wealth and comfort, and even the prospects of our future are most auspicious. Why borrow trouble before it comes? _B._ My dear Yasodhara, change is the law Of being. Now we prosper, but the wheel Goes round and brings the high into the dust. _Y._ You suffer from bad dreams; _B._ Listen to me. _They sit down._ In this luxurious palace and these gardens, Surrounding it, was I brought up with care. I saw naught but the fair, the beautiful, The pleasant side of life. _Y._ I know, Siddhattha-- I know it very well. _B._ You know, my father Has kept me ignorant of evil things. I might have thought that such is life throughout, But I began to doubt and asked for leave To see the world outside these palace walls. Not without difficulty did I gain Permission, and with Channa in a chariot I drove away--when suddenly before me I saw a sight I'd never seen before. There was a man with wrinkled face, bleared eyes, And stooping gait, a sight most pitiable. _YASODHARA is much moved._ While I was horror-struck, Channa passed by Indifferent, for _he_ had seen such men. Too well he knew the common fate of all; But I, the first time in my life, did learn That, _if_ we but live long enough, we all Shall be such miserable wretched dotards. _Y._ Too sudden came this saddening truth to you. _B._ Channa sped on his horses out of town, But there again! what an ungainly sight! A man lay on the road-side, weak and helpless, With trembling frame and feverish cramps. I shut mine eyes to so much racking pain, Still I could hear his groaning and his moaning. "Oh, Channa," said I to the charioteer: "Why does this happen? How deserves this man The wretchedness of his great agonies?" "How do I know?" said Channa, "for we all Are subject to distemper and disease. Sometimes the best are stricken--and must die!" "Must die?" cried I, "What does that word portend?" For, you must know, I never heard of death. My father had forbidden, at his court To speak to me of anything unpleasant. "Yea, die!" said Channa, "Look around and see!" Along the road a funeral procession Moved slowly, solemnly and mournfully And on the bier a corpse, stark, stiff and cold. _Y._ Do not be troubled, death is still far off. _B._ Oh do not feel secure, for the three evils Surround us constantly and everywhere, And even now death hovers o'er our house. When I was born my mother went to heaven, Which means, she died when she gave life to me. _Y._ My Lord don't think of evils that are past. _B._ The world's impermanence is still the same, And all material things are conformations Subject to pain, decay and dissolution. Yet unconcerned in blessed carelessness Man hunteth after pleasure. Transiency Has set its mark on life, and there is none Who can escape its curse. There is no mortal Who's always happy. Misery surprises The luckiest with unexpected terror. Then, in addition, unseen powers breed Most heinous maladies and fever heat. E'en if we were exceptions, thou must grant That finally we too will meet our doom. The ghastly specter Death, the stern king Yama, Awaiteth all of us. Such is our fate! _Y._ O put away these gloomy thoughts, and think Of life and love, and of thy lovely child. _B._ Could we be truly happy while the world Is filled with misery? Mine eyes are opened; I see how death his gruesome revel holds. He owns the world and sways its destinies. One creature ruthlessly preys on the other, And man, the cleverest, preys on them all. Nor is he free, for man preys upon man! Nowhere is peace, and everywhere is war; Life's mighty problem must be solved at last.-- I have a mission to fulfil. _Y._ And me Wouldst sacrifice for a philosophy, For the idea of an idle quest! _B._ 'Tis not for me to ask whether my quest Be vain: for me 'tis to obey the call. _Y._ [_with passionate outburst_] Siddhattha, O my Lord, my husband, what wilt thou do? Dost thou forget the promise made me on our wedding day? _B_. Yasodhara, a higher duty calls. The time will come, and it is close at hand, When I shall wander into homelessness. I'll leave this palace and its splendid gardens I'll leave the pleasures of this world behind To go in quest of Truth, of saving Truth. _YASODHARA sinks on her knees before him and clasps his knees._ _Y._ And me, my Lord, thy quest will make a widow! Oh, stay, and build thee here a happy home. _B._ My dear Yasodhara, it cannot be. _The Prince stands lost in thought. Rahula is restless. YASODHARA rises and turns toward the child._ _Y_. He wakes again. I come, my babe, I come. [The veil comes down again, and when it rises it shows the garden before the palace as in the first scene, but it is night and all is wrapped in darkness.] FOURTH SCENE. _King SUDDHODANA (S) and his minister VISAKHA (V) come out of the entrance._ _Later on Captain DEVALA (D) and soldiers._ _S._ Unfortunate, most unfortunate, that Udayin died. Siddhattha will miss the gardener and will ask for him. _V._ The Prince loves flowers, and he knows them all by name; he loves trees and shrubs, and praises them for yielding fruit and grain for feeding us without the need of shedding blood. _S._ Have the body removed so long as it is dark. _V_. The moon is full to-day and must rise in a little while. _S._ Double the guards at the gate. I am afraid my son will flee. It would be a disgrace on my house to have him become a mendicant. The kings of Kosala, of Magadha, and all the others look with envy on our sturdy people; they dislike our free institutions and our warlike spirit. They would scoff at us if a Sakya prince had become a monk. But if Siddhattha does flee, I swear by Lord Indra that I shall disown him; I will no longer recognize him as my son. I will disinherit him and make Rahula my heir apparent. _VISAKHA looks at SUDDHODANA in amazement._ _S_. I am serious and I will do it. I swore an oath, and Issara will help me to keep it. Now go to the captain of the guards and do as I bid you. _Exit. The Minister alone._ _V._ Oh! What a chance for me! Siddhattha will flee, if he be not prevented; he will be disinherited. Rahula is a babe, and it will take twenty years before he grows up to manhood.--[_He muses._] I may proceed on different lines, and one of them must certainly lead to success. I may marry the Princess and become the stepfather of the heir apparent, his guardian, the man who has him in his power--Hm! Hm! I need not plan too far ahead. And if that plan did not work, the King of Magadha would make me raja of the Sakyas, if I would recognize him as my liege. _The full moon rises and the scene becomes gradually brighter. VISAKHA knocks at the gate._ Who is on guard? _Officer comes out._ _D._ I am, my Lord, 'tis Captain Devala. _V._ 'Tis well. King Suddhodana requests you to double your guard to-night, for he has reasons. Further he wants you to remove the corpse of Udayin, the gardener who died to-day of an infectious disease. Be on your guard, for where a dead body lies there are ghosts--and [_in a half whisper_] when you see demons or gods, keep yourselves, you and your men, locked up in the guard house, and the spook will pass without harm. _D._ Your order shall be punctiliously obeyed. _Pays his military salute and returns to the guard house._ _V._ That settles the guard, and should Siddhattha flee he will find no obstacle. _Two men come out of the guard house and enter the palace with a bier. KALA UDAYIN comes back from the garden. VISAKHA retires into the background._ _K._ The nightingale is a sweet bird, but I like the lark better. The nightingale is more artistic, but his song is melancholy, he is so sentimental! The lark has a mere twitter like my own song, I like the lark better. How beautiful is this summer night; How glorious is the moon; how fragrant are the roses in the garden! It is a most auspicious night, and all breathes happiness. _VISAKHA from his hiding place watches KALA._ _V._ He comes in time, his presence will prosper my plans. [Kala is lost in thought. Music, from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, somber and as if coming from a distance, is heard.] _K._ [_while the music plays_] What a strange presentiment is stealing over my soul. Perhaps I was too happy! What does Siddhattha say? "All conformations always are transient,[A] Harrassed by sorrow, lacking a self." [Footnote A: The quoted lines run in the same rhythm as the melody and should be pronounced accordingly. See _Buddhist Hymns_, p. 22.] _The men come with the corpse on the bier. KALA stops them._ _K._ What do you carry? Who is this? [_he shrieks_] My father! [_The carriers set the corpse down and Kala sinks down by the bier._] Oh, my father! my dearest father! How did you die? Why did you leave me? Oh, my father! [_he sobs_]. _The moon sinks behind a cloud._ _SIDDHATTHA comes._ _B._ What may the trouble be? I heard a shriek. _KALA raises himself half way up. The scene is bright again._ _K._ Oh, my Prince! See here! My father is dead! Now I know the truth as well as you. Now I feel the pain. The time has come for me to lament. I was so happy and I would not believe you.--Oh ye who are happy, think in the hour of happiness that all is subject to suffering, and the hour of suffering will come to you too. Nay more than that, the hour of death will come; it has come to my father, it will come to you and to me, and then my caroling will stop forever. Oh, my poor father! _B._ How rarely is thy advent welcome, Death, E'en this poor gardener who a servant was His livelong days, leaves in our hearts a gap. His son lamenteth him, and I not less; He was my loving friend; my educator, He had me on his knees so many a time, To tell me how the flowers will grow and blow, And how they prosper after rainy days. May gentle lilies from thy ashes spring, Decked with the purity of thine own heart, And with their fragrance give the same delight That in thy present life thou gavest us. _The carriers lift up the body and carry it out._ Oh, fare thee well, thou good and worthy friend, Oh, fare thee well, but thy departure is To me a token that my time has come. _Turning to KALA who all the while was lying prostrate weeping._ Weep not, companion of my childhood days, But bear in mind the courage of thy mirth. Remember all the virtues of thy father And let them live again in thine own heart. Thou must not yield to weakness and lamenting, Tend to life's duties: Go and call me Channa, Bid him to saddle Kanthaka, my steed, And let him ready be for a night's ride. _KALA exit. SIDDHATTHA alone._ The hour has come! and now my last farewell To thee my wife and Rahula my son. _SIDDHATTHA makes a few steps and halts._ This is the greatest sacrifice I bring: I leave behind a crown without regret; I leave the luxury of wealth and power; I care for them as though they were but ashes But I must also leave my wife and child: Here I must prove the courage of my heart. _Enters the house._ FIFTH SCENE. [The veil of clouds comes down, and when it rises we see Yasodhara's bedroom again.] _SIDDHATTHA (B) enters. YASODHARA (Y) sleeps with the babe in her arms._ _B._ Here lie the rarest treasures of this life, My noble wife, my dear boy Rahula. _SIDDHATTHA approaches the bed._ Your sleep is sweet in your sweet innocence, And I will not disturb your blissful rest. I will go out in search for saving Truth And shall not come again unless 't be found Farewell my wife and Rahula my son. Must I be gone? Is this, in sooth, my duty? _He goes toward the door. There he stops._ Perchance on their account I ought to stay. But no! my father can take care of them. It is my tender heart that makes me weak. This is the greatest sacrifice I bring. SIXTH SCENE [Change of scene, as rapid as before. The garden before the palace] _CHANNA (Ch.) enters with a horse._ _Channa._ My Prince, here is your steed! _MARA (M), a superhuman figure, gaudily dressed, hovering in the air, suddenly appears and addresses SIDDHATTHA (B)._ _M._ It is a shame to leave your wife and child. _B._ [_Addressing the vision in the air._] Mara, thou here? thou wicked one, thou tempter! _K._ Oh do not leave us Prince. Think of the wrong you do. You wrong your royal father, you wrong your wife, you wrong your child. _B._ What sayest thou? Thou sayest I do wrong? The same rebuke is echoed in my heart; It is so sweet, so loving, so alluring! And shall I listen to its tender voice? How pleasant would it be to stay at home, And to enjoy my wife's love and my child's! Is that my duty? Say, is that my duty? _K._ Surely my Lord, your duties lie at home. _SIDDHATTHA wavers as if in doubt. He stands pondering for a moment._ _B._ Who will instruct me where my duty lies? _M._ I will instruct thee, I will guide thee right. _K._ How can you doubt, my Prince? And can you not Search for the truth here in this pleasant garden? There're spots enough where you can think and ponder, And meditate among the fragrant flowers. _B._ Here I shall never reach my goal. _K._ Stay here. A kingdom is your sure inheritance, While Buddahood is but a doubtful prize. _B._ And shall the world wait for another Buddha? So many millions clamor for the truth! _With determination._ I hear the call and naught shall hold me back. I see my duty and I will obey. _M._ Wilt thou not stay, my noble Prince Siddhattha? The wheel of empire turns, and thee I shall Make king of kings to rule the whole broad earth. Think of the good which thou wilt do as king! And then as king of kings thy mighty power Will spread the good religion o'er the world. _B._ I know thee Mara, tempter, Evil One, Prince of this world, I know thy voice, thy meaning. The gifts thou offerest are transient treasures, And thy dominion is mere vanity. I go to found a kingdom in the realm Of the immortal state which lasts for aye. Thou hinderest and dost not help the truth. _K._ Thou speakest to the empty air, my Prince, For I see no one whom thou thus addressest. _CHANNA helps SIDDHATTHA to mount, and while the gate opens leads the horse out of the gate, and KALA enters into the palace. VISAKHA is coming to the front._ _V._ He is gone. He has made room for me. The time will come when this kingdom will be mine. _Y._ [_from the balcony_] Siddhattha! Siddhattha! Where are you? He is gone! He has departed into homelessness! [_She faints._] [CURTAIN] _FIRST INTERLUDE._ _Living pictures accompanied by appropriate music, as an introduction to Act II._ 1. BEGGING FOOD. A scene of the Prince's life as a mendicant friar. A Hindu village, Siddhattha stands bowl in hand before a hut; a woman dishes some rice from a kettle into his bowl; villagers, including children, stand around gazing at him,--a few with clasped hands. 2. THE KING GREETS THE MENDICANT. Tradition tells that King Bimbisara, hearing of the noble monk, went out to see him and offered him to take part in the government. This being refused, the King requested him to visit Rajagaha, the royal residence, as soon as Siddhattha had become a Buddha. Siddhattha is seated under a tree near a brook; the king stands before him, surrounded by his retinue. 3 PREACHING TO THE VILLAGERS. Under the tree in the market place of a Hindu village The Buddha is seated in the attitude of a preacher. The villagers stand or squat around intently listening. 4. SAVED FROM STARVATION In company with other monks, Siddhattha sought for a while enlightenment by self-mortification. Being exhausted by severe fasts, the mendicant faints, and Nanda, the shepherd's daughter, passing by, refreshes him with rice milk. His five disciples at a distance fear that he has given up his quest for truth. ACT II. FIRST SCENE [Seven years have elapsed since the first act. A room in the royal palace at Magadha] _Present: NAGADEVA (N), the prime minister, GENERAL SIHA (GS), commander-in-chief of the Magadha forces. Later on the MASTER OF CEREMONIES (MC), KING BIMBISARA (Bb.), a trumpeter and a small body guard._ _N._ It is a joy to serve this mighty king Whose power extendeth over many lands. In peace he ruleth wisely, and his subjects Obey him willingly for he is just. In war he swoops upon his enemies As doth a hawk upon a helpless chicken, Quick in attack, lucky in every fight. Indeed he earned his name deservedly, The warlike Bimbisara. _GS._ At his side I fought with him in many a doubtful battle With all the odds against us, but his daring, Joined to a rare instinctive foresight By which he could anticipate all dangers, Would win the day and ne'er was he defeated! In this our latest war he took great risks, Might have been taken by his foes, and would Have lost his liberty, his throne, his life; But venturing much he won, and by exposing His own high person in the brunt of battle He stirred the courage of his followers To do great deeds of valor. _MASTER OF CEREMONIES enters with a trumpeter._ _MC._ Noble lords, Mis majesty, our royal lord, is coming To meet you here in private council. _Trumpeter blows a signal._ _GS._ Hail the victorious, warlike Bimbisara! _Both kneel as the king enters preceded and followed by a small body guard._ _Bb._ Be greeted noble lords. _N._ We wish you joy and the continuance of your good fortune. _Bb._ I have a matter to bespeak with you, Far-reaching weighty plans of great importance. I wish to be alone with you. _Turning to the captain of his body guards._ Captain, have this room guarded by your soldiers. The gong shall call you when I need your service. _The soldiers march out of the room._ Be seated, my good lords. You helped me gain a wondrous victory Which proves I have the favor of the gods. I probed your skill, your courage and your faith And found you both most able and most trusty. Therefore you are to me much more than vassals And servants of the state; you are my helpers, Indeed my friends and nearest to my heart. A king needs friends who share his secret thoughts, Who stand by him in all vicissitudes, Who bear with him responsibilities, And above all, who frankly speak the truth. I ask you, will you be such friends to me? _GS._ I will with all my heart. _N._ And I not less. _Bb._ I, my dear friends, I promise you in turn That I shall not resent your words of truth If spoken in good faith with best intentions. I may not always follow your advice, But you are free to say whate'er you please, Whate'er you may deem best for me to know, Whate'er will benefit the empire and my people. Now listen what I have to say to you. I will reveal to you my inmost heart: This is an age of greatest expectations; Riches accumulate in our cities, Commerce and trade are flourishing, and Our caravans exchange our native goods For gold and precious produce from abroad. What India needs is unity of rule. The valley of the holy Ganges should Be governed by one king, a king of kings. There should no longer be a rivalry, A clash of interests between the states, And all the princes should obey the rule Of the one man who guides and guards the whole. This therefore is my plan: you Nagadeva Must gain the favor of our neighbor kings, So as to make them recognize our sway. If voluntarily they will submit, They shall be welcome as our worthy vassals. If they resist (_turning to Siha_) my gallant general You must reduce them to subjection. A treaty with the rajas in the east, In southern and in northern Kosala, Speedeth my plans, the Sakyas only Defy our sovereign will, and keep aloof. If they yield not, their power must be broken! There is a task for you and for my army. _N._ Permit, my noble king, that I advise you. I know the Sakya minister of state, And he is willing to betray his master. The Sakya prince, the only son and heir, Siddhattha Gotama he's called by name, Went into homelessness and has turned monk, Leaving behind his wife and a small son. The minister aspireth to the throne, And if we help him in his plans, he will Acknowledge you as sovereign over him. And that will save your army blood and trouble. _Bb._ What is his name. _N._ Visakha, noble King. _Bb._ I wish to see him. Let him visit you And as by accident I want to meet him. _GS._ Allow me, mighty King, a word of warning. _Bb._ Speak freely. _GS._ _With unconcealed indignation, almost entreatingly._ Do not listen to a traitor. Send me with all the army of the kingdom, Bid me lead captive all the Sakyas; do it In open fight but not by treachery. My King, avoid alliance with Visakha, His very breath contaminates. He lowers Ourselves to his low level. _Bb._ Thank you Siha. I will be slow. [_Pondering_] But it is too important! _Argues with himself._ May I not listen to a traitor's words, Nor hear him,--profit by his information? _GS._ Oh do it not! _Bb._ Siha, thou art a soldier. I honor thee, thou speakest like a soldier, But think how much diplomacy will help, How many lives and property it saves. Without the brutal means of war it will Better accomplish all our ends; it spares The enemy as well. A prosperous country Will serve me better than a city sacked And villages destroyed by fire. _GS._ Pardon, my liege, I do not trust a traitor. _Bb._ I will be on my guard, but I shall see him, 'T shall be by way of reconnoitering. You in the meantime keep the army ready, For one way or another I must conquer The Sakya king and make him do my bidding. _The King rises indicating that his two counselors are dismissed. They rise also._ The world is growing wider every day And our souls broaden with the general progress. A new era dawns upon us. Let us all Help to mature the fruitage of the times. SECOND SCENE [The garden before the palace of King SUDDHODANA as in Act I] _Presents YASODHARA (Y) with her maid GOPA (G) and RAHULA (R)._ _Y._ Repeat that verse once more and then we will stop our lesson. _R._ With goodness meet an evil deed, With loving kindness conquer wrath, With generosity quench greed, And lies by walking on truth's path. _Y._ Now you can run about in the garden or play with the Captain's son. _R._ Mother, I do not believe that goodness always works in this life. _Y._ Why do you think so? _R._ Because there are very bad boys, so bad that only a whipping will cure them. _Y._ Rahula! _R._ Truly, mother, truly. Even the gardener says so. _Y._ You must set the bad boys a good example. _R._ No use, mother; they remain bad. I have tried it. _Y._ You must have patience. _R._ No use, mother; and the gardener says, A viper remains a viper. _Y._ Even poisonous reptiles can be tamed. _R._ Yes, but the gardener first pulls their fangs. Would you like me to play with a viper? _Y._ No, my boy. _Excitement at the gate. KALA enters and soldiers of the guard surround him._ _R._ What is going on?--O Mother! Kala Udayin is back! _KALA UDAYIN (K) appears among the guards. RAHULA runs to the gate._ _R._ Kala! Welcome home! Shake hands! _K._ Be heartily greeted, my boy. _R._ Did you see father? _K._ I did, Rahula. _R._ Tell me all. _K._ I will tell mother. _R._ Come to mother. She has been expecting you for many days. _KALA kneels to the Princess._ _Y._ Gopa, take his bundle. [_The maid takes his bundle and carries it into the house._] What news do you bring of Prince Siddhattha? _K._ I followed the Prince from place to place and saw him last near Benares in the forest of Uruvela. _Y._ How is his health, and will he come back? _K._ His health is probably good, but he does not think of coming back--not yet. O my dear lady! If you could see him! he is as thin as a skeleton. I could count all his ribs. _R._ What is the trouble with father. _K._ He is fasting. He lives on a hempcorn a day; think of it, one little hempcorn a day! _Y._ Oh, he will die! My poor husband. I must follow him and attend to his wants. He needs his wife's loving care. I will leave my home and follow him. _K._ Could you help him, princess? He might not like it, and the monks abhor women. Moreover, I was told that he takes food again, every morning a cup of rice milk. The day I left he looked better. Still, he was pretty pale. _Y._ Tell me all you know of him. _K._ I went first to Rajagaha, and there I heard wondrous tales about the noble monk Gotama. All the people knew about him, they called him a "sage" or "muni" and the "Bodhisatta." _R._ What does that mean, Kala? _K._ Bodhisatta is the man who seeks the bodhi--and the bodhi is enlightenment or Buddhahood. _Y._ What did the people of Rajagaha say? _K._ When Prince Siddhattha came to Rajagaha, he created a great excitement in the city. Never had been seen a mendicant of such noble appearance, and crowds flocked to him. They thought he was a Buddha and greeted him as a Buddha; but he said to them "I am not a Buddha; I am a Bodhisatta, I seek Buddhahood, and I am determined to find it." _Y._ Did you meet people who saw him? _K._ Indeed, I did. They say he looked like a god. The news spread all over the capital, and King Bimbisara himself went out with his ministers to see the Bodhisatta. King Bimbisara came to the place where the stranger stayed--under a forest tree near a brook--and greeted him most respectfully saying, "Great monk, remain here with me in Rajagaha; I see that you are wise and worthy. Live with me at the royal palace. Be my adviser and counselor. You are not made for a mendicant. Your hands are fit to hold the reins of empire. Stay here, I beg you, and you shall not lack honor and rank." "Nay," replied Siddhattha, "let me go my way in quest of enlightenment. I am bent on solving the problem of existence, and I will become a Buddha." Said the King, "Hear then, great monk. Go in quest of enlightenment, and when you have found it come back to Rajagaha." _Y._ Is King Bimbisara so religious? _K._ King Bimbisara is ambitious. As is well known, he is a warrior and a conqueror; but that is not all. He wants to be the greatest monarch of all ages and he would have all the great events happen under his rule. This is what he said to the Bodhisatta: "When I was a youth I uttered five wishes, and they were these: I prayed, May I be crowned King. This wish has been fulfilled. Then I wished, May the holy Buddha, the Blessed One, appear on earth while I am King, and may he come to my kingdom. This was my second wish, and while I gaze upon you I know that it will be fulfilled. Further I wished, May I see the blessed Buddha and pay my respects to him. This was my third wish. My fourth wish was, May the Blessed One preach the doctrine to me, and my fifth and greatest wish was this, May I understand the doctrine. I beg you, therefore, great monk, when you have become a Buddha come back and preach the doctrine to me and accept me as your disciple." _Y._ And whither did Siddhattha go from Rajagaha? _K._ He visited the great philosophers Arada and Udraka, but he found no satisfaction in their theories. So he went on to Uruvela where the ascetics live. I followed the Bodhisatta and learned that he stayed with five disciples in the forest. I found shelter near by in the cottage of the chief shepherd, a good old man with a pretty daughter, Nanda. There I watched Siddhattha and his disciples from a distance. He was the youngest but the wisest of them, and they reverenced him as master. He outdid them all in fasting. One day Nanda, the shepherd's daughter, saw him faint, and he might have died from exhaustion right on the spot if Nanda had not given him rice milk to drink. _Y._ O good Kala, what shall I do? What shall I do? Here I sit at home, a poor, helpless woman, unable to assist him or to take care of him! O Kala, advise me, what can I do? _KING SUDDHODANA (S) and VISAKHA (V) come out of the palace. The Princess retires into the palace. GOPA hides behind the bushes._ _S._ I am glad to see you back. Have you seen my son? _K._ I have sire. _S._ Where did you find him? _K._ At Uruvela, the place of mortification where saints try to see visions and reach a state of bliss. _V._ And has Siddhattha succeeded? _K._ It does not seem so; he is starving himself to death. _V._ Is he dying? _K._ Not exactly, but I do not see how he can live--on that diet. _S._ Oh, Visakha, how have I been deprived of my son through a whim! _Both return into the palace. VISAKHA comes back._ _V._ It seems that Siddhattha is ruining himself. _K._ At the rate he is going now, he won't stand it long. He may not live another month. It is pitiable. You should have seen him. That beautiful young man looks like a consumptive in his last stage. I did not dare to tell what I thought. The Princess would not have borne the sad news. _V._ Too bad. It looks pretty hopeless. _K._ I do not see how the Prince can survive. _V._ What is the idea of these fasts? _K._ These pious recluses believe that the self is imprisoned in the body and that the senses are the prison gates. They want to liberate the soul, and many of them behold visions, but Siddhattha seems to doubt whether the saints of Uruvela proceed on the right track. Indeed he denies the very existence of the self. _V._ I know he does. His views should be branded as purely human wisdom. As the senses are finger touch, eye touch, ear touch, nose and tongue touch, so the mind is to him mere thought touch. He claimed that the mind originates through a co-operation of the senses. _K._ His disciples begin to break away from him. _V._ That is right. They ought to have done so long ago. I always said that Siddhattha is an unbeliever. He spurns faith and relies too much on his own observation and reasoning. He will never find enlightenment. He is too negative, too nihilistic, and his quest of Buddhahood will end in a lamentable failure. _K._ It would be a pity, sir. He is certainly in earnest to find the truth--the real truth, not what the priests say nor the Vedas declare, but the truth, provable truth. _V._ Yes that is his fault. When the king speaks with you tell him all, explain the hopelessness of his situation. The king ought to know the facts. _VISAKHA retires into the palace._ _K._ [_Calls in a low voice_] Gopa, Gopa! [_GOPA appears from behind the bush._] _K._ [_Aside_] I knew she would not be far. _G._ What do you want? _K._ I want to have a talk with you. _G._ Well? _K._ Let us set our marriage day. _G._ I do not care to marry you--just yet. _K._ I want a kiss, Gopa. _G._ You shan't have it! _K._ I will leave Kapilavatthu and go back to the Bodhisatta. _G._ He will tell you that a youth must not kiss a girl. _K._ That rule holds only for monks. _G._ Go and turn monk. Then it applies to you. _K._ The world would die out if everybody turned monk. _G._ First, you are not everybody, and secondly, would it not be a blessing if the whole world would try to be sanctified? _K._ Pshaw! Mankind consists of different castes and professions, of soldiers and merchants, of peasants and artisans and teachers. Mankind is like a body with various limbs, a head and hands, feet and chest and neck. A man who were head only could not live, and if mankind consisted of Buddhas only we would starve. We need a Buddha, but there must also be householders. Now quick give me a kiss. _She pouts._ _K._ If you do not kiss me I shall go back to the forest of Uruvela. Nanda, the shepherd's daughter, is a very pretty girl. She is as pretty as you are. She is,--well, her cheeks are rosier than yours. She is a little taller, and she is so graceful when she milks the kine. The shepherd needs a helper. I am sure he would like to have a son-in-law. _RAHULA enters._ _R._ Gopa! Mother wants you. _G._ [_Kisses K. quickly_] Here is a kiss, but you must forget Nanda. [_Runs away._] _K._ Stay a moment longer! _G._ I have no time. [_Exit._] _K._ I knew she would come around,--and she is much prettier than Nanda. Nanda is a buxom country lass, a pleasant girl, but Gopa is as proper as a princess. [_He continues with unction._] Bodhisatta longs for the blessed state of Nirvana, and when he has found it, he will be calm and without passion. He will walk on earth as a god among men. No emotion will disturb the peace of his mind, and the happiness of the great Brahma will be as nothing in comparison to the infinite bliss of his Buddhahood. [_With a lighter tone_]: I adore him, but I do not envy him. I do not long for the happiness of a god. I am a man with human faults and human yearnings. I am satisfied with the happiness and the sufferings of a man. Since I am assured of Gopa's love, I care not for Nirvana. I think that this world is good enough for me. _V._ [_Looks around like a spy._] How peaceful lies this palace, yet I see The war clouds lour upon its roofs. The storm will break with sudden vehemence upon These harmless unsuspecting people. Woe to them, Their doom is certain. Desperate resistance Succumbs before the overwhelming forces Of Bimbisara.--And what will become Of poor Yasodhara?--I like her well. I might still save her from her people's ruin. A princess, sweet and noble, and herself Descended from an ancient royal house. But I hate that little youngster Rahula. Whate'er betide, my deep-laid schemes will speed And I shall profit by my master's doom. [Music: Chopin's Nocturno. Opus 37, No. 2.] [CURTAIN] THIRD SCENE. [Darkness covers the scene. Distant thunder and lightning. Gradually it grows light again and the scene of YASODHARA'S bedroom becomes visible. All luxury has been removed; she sleeps on a mat on the floor, RAHULA in bed.] _R._ Mother! Mother! _Y._ Sleep my boy, it is almost midnight. _R._ Take me up, Mother. _YASODHARA picks RAHULA up._ _R._ Why do you sleep on the floor, Mother? _Y._ Because father does so. Let me lay you down on your couch, you must sleep. _R._ Tell me more of father. _Y._ I will to-morrow. _R._ Tell me now. Is father a king? _Y._ No, my son. But he is going to found a kingdom. _R._ Will he be king of it? _Y._ I do not know, my boy, but his kingdom will not be like other kingdoms. It will be the kingdom of truth--a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom of righteousness. _R._ Is father rich? _Y._ He scorns riches. _R._ Why does he? _Y._ He seeks other riches, the riches of religion, of the mind, of spirit. _R._ Did he find them? _Y._ I believe he did. _R._ He sends you news through Kala Udayin. _Y._ No, Rahula, I send Kala Udayin out to watch him and when Kala comes back he tells me what he saw and heard. Kala does not speak to father. _R._ Why does Kala not speak to father? _Y._ Grandfather forbade him. When we sent out Devadatta and Ananda, they became attached to the life of a hermit. They joined father and did not come back; but Kala will not turn monk. _R._ But this time he will speak to father. _Y._ How do you know? _R._ I heard grandfather bid him to. _Y._ What did he bid him? _R._ He bade Kala that he should tell father to visit us. _She can scarcely conceal her joy._ _Y._ You heard grandfather say so? _R._ I did, mother; grandfather said that he became old, and before he died he wanted to see his son again. _Y._ Why! did he really say so? _R._ He did. _Y._ Oh you darling son, then you will see him, too. _R._ People say that he will be a Buddha. _Y._ Yes, my son, some say he will be a Buddha and others doubt it. _R._ Mother, what is a Buddha? _Y._ A Buddha is a man who has found the truth. _R._ How does a man find the truth? _Y._ By enlightenment. He must find out the cause of evil. _R._ Why must he find out the cause of evil? _Y._ He teaches the people how to avoid evil. _R._ Has father found the cause of evil? _Y._ Kala Udayin says he has. _R._ What is the cause of evil? _Y._ Father says that selfishness is the cause of evil and selfishness comes from the belief in self. _R._ Self? _Y._ Yes, self! Man, as a rule, believes that he is a self. _R._ What? A self? _Y._ Yes, a being by himself, who lives only for himself, and the thought of self makes him selfish; and selfishness begets all evils. _R._ [_with a childlike serious conviction_] I believe it, mother. _Y_. Father says there is no self, that self is an illusion. _R._ What does that mean? _Y._ It means that we are not separate beings. I think a thought and speak it out and you hear it. I believe in that thought and so do you. Whose is it then, yours or mine? _R._ It belongs to both. _Y._ But where does the thought come from? If it is true it belongs to the truth, and it was true before I thought it. _R._ Yes, mother. _Y._ And if it was wrong, it is evil, and it was evil before we thought it. _R._ Yes, mother. _Y._ And so are all our thoughts, but almost everybody assumes that his self thinks these thoughts and invents them; and that is an illusion. _R._ I see. _Y._ [_to herself_] His eyes close. He is tired. [TO RAHULA] Now go to sleep again, Rahula, and dream of your father. I will sing you one of father's songs. _YASODHARA lays RAHULA down in the high bed and sings:_ By ourselves is evil done, By ourselves we pain endure. By ourselves we cease from wrong, By ourselves become we pure. No one saves us but ourselves, No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path, Buddhas merely teach the way. _The boy sleeps. Then YASODHARA herself lies down on the mat on the floor. Above her appears the vision of her dream. Under the Bodhi tree in a forest landscape SIDDHATTHA sits. He is surrounded by a halo of light. MARA approaches to tempt him._ _M._ Thou art ahungered, worthy Sakyamuni, Ahungered art thou from continued fasts, And thou wilt starve unless thou take and eat. I bring delicious food, take, eat and live. _B._ I shall not eat until my quest be done. Much better 'tis to die in glorious battle Than flee and lead a coward's life, defeated. I shall not eat, O Mara, take thee hence. _M._ Wilt thou not listen to my good advice? _B._ The tempter always calls his councils good, But pleasures which he promises are evil. _M._ I will not suffer thee to stay, Siddhattha, And shall disturb thy daring quest of truth. I'll split the Bodhi tree by lightning And frighten thee away with rumbling thunder. _All is wrapped in darkness, except SIDDHATTHA and the Bohdi tree. Thunder and lightning. After a while the noise abates. It grows light again. MARA'S daughters appear._ _M._ Go forth my daughters, tempt the holy man, And lure him from the seat of Buddahood. _Three graceful women, MARA'S daughters, sing in a low enticing voice._ [Melody: The Mermaids' Song from Weber's Oberon.] Sweetest on earth 'tis in pleasure to live, Love thou must ask for, and love thou must give. Pain we can soothe and assuage every smart, Yea, we will grant thee the wish of thy heart. Power bestow we, enjoyment and mirth, Health and wealth also, and all that has worth. Lo, of life's happiness naught shalt thou miss, Satisfied longings are greatest of bliss. _While they sing they circle around the Bodhi tree and pose in graceful attitudes._ [Siddhattha does not mind Mara's daughters. They withdraw, and grotesque monsters appear in threatening attitudes, exhibiting a savage war dance, always approaching the tree and turning their weapons against the Sakyamuni, but as soon as they approach the halo they droop, unable to hurt him. Lotus flowers rain down. Sakyamuni raises his right hand. A flash of lightning and a sudden clap of thunder. The spook vanishes in darkness while the Buddha under the Bodhi tree alone remains visible in a halo of light. The forest landscape reappears in full light as before.] _B._ The wheel of life turns round through birth and death, Its twelve-linked chain of causes takes its start In ignorance and ends in suffering. The truth is found, the fourfold noble truth; All life is sorrow, sorrow's cause is lust, But from our sorrow we can escape If we abandon lust and thought of self. The eightfold noble path of righteousness Delivers from all evil: it will bring Sweet peace of mind and leadeth to Nirvana. [With music accompaniment] Through many births I sought in vain The builder of this house of pain. Now, builder, thee I plainly see! This is the last abode for me. Thy gable's yoke, thy rafters broke, My heart has peace; all lust will cease. [The following words fit exactly the music of Haydn's Chorus with Soli No. 13[B] in The Creation, and the spirit of the composition is very appropriate for this scene] [Footnote B: Peters' Edition, pp 44-55 "Die Himmel erzahlen, etc." In a few places where the fugas set in, the words "The wicked Mara's host" should read "The wicked one's,--the wicked Mara's host," etc.] _Chorus of Angels._ Behold the great muni, His heart unmoved by hatred, The wicked Mara's host 'Gainst him did not prevail. _Trio of BRAHMA VISHNU SHIVA._ Victorious Buddha Thou art wise and pure, The darkness is gone And enlightenment gained. _Chorus of Angels as above._ Proclaim the truth To all the world. Truth will bring salvation. Glory to the truth! _Chorus of Angels as above._ [Lotus flowers rain down thicker and thicker, clouds cover the scene, but the Buddha under the Bodhi tree remains still dimly but sufficiently visible.] _YASODHARA wakes up. She rises and lights a candle from a rush lamp. She kneels with clasped hands before the vision of the BUDDHA._ _Y._ Oh Siddhattha, my Lord and Husband, no longer my Husband, but the Buddha. In thee I take my refuge. In thee and thy word, I believe. Thy doctrine shall guide me. Accept me as thy faithful disciple, a disciple of the Buddha, my Lord, the Tathagata, the great thinker, the Saviour of mankind. [CURTAIN.] _SECOND INTERLUDE_. _Living pictures accompanied by appropriate music to introduce the Third Act._ 1. THE FOUNDATION OF THE KINGDOM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. Buddha preaches to his five disciples the way of salvation, which speech, preserved in a special book, is frequently compared to Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Buddha stands with raised hand, while five monks stand or sit or squat around him in devout attitude. 2. ENTERING THE CAPITAL. When Buddha came to Rajagaha, the people met him on the way and accompanied him into the city in triumphal procession which is analogous to Christ's entry into Jerusalem. The Buddha with bowl in one hand and staff in the other is followed by yellow-robed monks. The people strew flowers, carry palm branches and wave kerchiefs. 3. THE COURTESAN. Ambapali, the Buddhist Mary Magdalen, came to Buddha, worshiping him and invited him to take his meal at her home. To the astonishment of several moralists, he accepted and honored the penitent sinner. A beautifully dressed woman with clasped hands kneels before Buddha, a maid in attendance behind her. Some well dressed people of high caste watch the scene with an expression of indignation. 4. THE PHILANTHROPIST. The wealthiest man of Savatthi invites the Buddha to his home and offers to build a resthouse for the Buddha and his brotherhood. Anatha Pindika kneels before the Buddha, holding in one hand the picture and plan of a building. Buddha indicates by his lowered hand acceptance of the gift. Buddha attended by two monks, Anatha Pindika accompanied by the architect. 5. PRINCE JETA. It is told that the most beautiful spot in Savatthi was the royal park of Prince Jeta, which Anatha Pindika wanted to buy for the brotherhood of Buddha. The owner was unwilling to sell and made the exorbitant demand to have the whole ground covered with gold as its price. But Anatha Pindika had the gold carried to the garden and paid the price. The scene is laid in the garden. Anatha Pindika with bags of gold stands in commanding attitude. His servants spread the coins while Prince Jeta throws up his hands in astonishment. (Anatha Pindika is not the real name of the founder of the Jetavana. The name means, "[He who gives to] the indigent, alms.") ACT III. FIRST SCENE [A Brahman temple with a statue of Durga; before the idol an altar. In the background a landscape with farms and a sheep-fold.] _Enter from the right GENERAL SIHA (GS.) with a CAPTAIN (C) and some soldiers._ _GS._ Pitch the tents on the slope of yonder hill where that farmhouse stands. _C._ It shall be done, my general. _GS._ What crowd is gathered there with flags and flowers? _C._ It is the farmer's family led by the village priest, and neighbors flock around to swell their number. _GS._ The priest handles a big knife that flashes in the sun. I see his hands are stained with gore. They seem to celebrate a feast in honor of a god. _C._ The villagers inform me that the occasion of it is sad. One of the farmer's children died of late, and others being sick the father invokes the goddess Kali to preserve the rest of his family. They are arrayed for a procession and having offered a young sheep at the altar of the homestead they have started out. See how the crowd are wending their way hither to the temple. _GENERAL SIHA looks around and contemplates the scenery, then turns to the CAPTAIN._ _GS._ Now pitch the tents before the sun goes down. _In the meantime, the BUDDHA enters with two disciples. They sit down under a tree. The Captain bows to them reverently and leaves the stage._ _GS._ Greetings to you, holy monks. _B._ Peace be with thee, and may thy sword ne'er reek with blood. _GS._ I draw the sword for my king, for my country and for the restoration of order where enemies or rebels have disturbed it. _B._ Thou lookst courageous and thy very words Possess a ring of simple honesty. _GS._ I serve a mighty king who means to do the right. He prefers to establish his rule by treaty and spares an enemy who sues for peace. _B._ Thou speakst of Bimbisara, King of Magadha? _GS._ Indeed I speak of the great Bimbisara, and he is born to sway the world. My sympathy and my allegiance go with him. I am Siha, his general. _B._ Thy name is known throughout the Indian lands. _GS._ When I chose my profession I prayed to the gods that they would never let it be my lot to fight for any unjust cause. _B._ Let this thy prayer be a sacred vow Which thou wilt keep inviolate. Our fate, Or say the gods, create conditions; but thou Thyself must act. Thou art responsible, Thou shapest thine own life, and not the gods. _GS._ Thy words please me! What is thy doctrine, venerable monk? _B._ I teach the middle way between extremes. Neither mortifications of the body Nor self-indulgence should be practised. We must make up our minds and walk On the eightfold noble path of righteousness. _GS._ Who art thou, wondrous monk? Thy doctrine is so plain, and so convincing that I grant thou speakest truth. The people ought to know thee and accept thy creed. Who art thou? _B._ Born of the Sakya race, they call me Sakyamuni. _GS._ Blessed be this day on which I meet the greatest man of our age. I heard of thee from the Nirgranthas, thine own enemies, the rival sect of thy new order, and they say that thou deniest the soul, thou teachest extinction, thou leadest man to non-existence, and that Nirvana is with thee an empty naught--annihilation.--Is that true? _B._ I teach extinction, noble general, Of hatred, greed, and lust, but I insist On doing what is right and just and good; On doing resolutely what we do, On searching for the truth, on setting up Its lamp and following its holy light. Nirvana is attained when passions are Extinct and when the heart is blessed with peace. _GS._ Thou art more than a mortal, holy man. Auspicious is this day on which I've met thee. The people call thee Buddha, perhaps rightly so! A feeling of deep reverence comes over me and the truth dawns on me. Truly thou art the teacher of the world. If thy doctrine impressed the people a new era would begin, an era in which mankind would be wiser and nobler, happier and better. [Barbaric music is heard behind the stage, the drum being prominent.] _Voices behind the stage:_ Maha Kali! Kali Ma! _GS._ Behold how wretched are these people in their ignorance. _B._ They must be taught and they will learn the truth. [The procession enters. A small band of musicians comes with primitive instruments, among them drums. They are followed first by dancers, then by a priest (_Pr._) flourishing in his bloody hand a large knife. By his side walks a shepherd carrying a lamb. Behind them the farmer's (_F._) family and other people] _GS._ What horrible sounds! And the crowd behave like madmen. _Pr._ Maha Kali! _Crowd._ Kali Ma! _Pr._ Goddess of the black countenance! Great Black Mother! _Crowd._ Maha Kali! Kali Ma! Maha Kali! Kali Ma! Maha Kali! Kali Ma! [The priest steps to the altar; the crowd kneels in a large circle. At the priest's signal the farmer approaches the altar and kneels. His behavior betrays superstitious timidity and great awkwardness. The shepherd exhibits the lamb first to the priest and then to the dancers who in fantastic dancing step advance and retreat while the music plays. Finally the lamb is placed on the altar.] _Pr._ Have Mercy on us! Slay the demon of disease. Keep away Yama the horrible one, the god of Death. _Crowd._ Kali Ma, have mercy on us! _Pr._ Thou art Parvati, the wife of Siva. Thou hast conquered the giant Durga, the evil one, and now thyself art called the goddess Durga. Thou art Mahishamardini, the slayer of Mahisha. Thou art Kalaratri, Nightly Darkness, abyss of all mysteries. Thou art Jagaddhatri, mother of the world. Thou art Jagadgauri, renowned throughout the world. Thou art Katyayina, refulgent with a thousand suns. Thou art Singhavahini, seated on a lion thou wonest victory over Raktavija, leader of the giants' army. Great Mother of Life, accept our offering, the blood of this lamb. _Crowd._ Maha Kali, accept our offering! Kali Ma, accept our offering! Kali Durga, great Goddess, accept our offering! _The priest turns toward the lamb and raises his knife. BUDDHA steps to the altar and places his hand gently upon the priest's arm._ _B._ Hold! _Pr._ Meddler! _B._ Pause before thou sheddest blood. _Pr._ How dar'st thou rudely interfere, strange monk, With our most sacred sacrifice? This lamb Is offered to the goddess. Thou disturbest Our holy ritual. _He lifts his knife against BUDDHA, but SIHA draws his sword and knocks the knife out of the priest's hand._ _GS._ Keep peace, bold priest! _Pr._ The vengeance of the gods will be upon you. _B._ If there be gods they must be potent, noble, And great and holy; and if the gods are holy, They do not need the offering of a victim, They do not want the life of this poor trembling lamb. _Pr._ The gods are kind; they take the lamb in place of this poor stricken man. We must do penance for his sins, for the sins of his wife, for the sins of his children. _Farmer._ I crave forgiveness for the sins for which my dear good child has had to die. _Pr._ His sins are great and nothing can wash them away but blood. _B._ Herein thou errest, priest. Blood does not cleanse. It washes not away the stain of sin; The slaughter of a victim heaps but guilt On guilt, and does not right a wrong. Rise, Rise, my good friend. Take comfort! _The farmer rises._ Be a man. _The others rise gradually._ _F._ What shall I do, good master? _B._ Right all the wrongs thou didst and sin no more. _Pr._ This lamb was given to the goddess. It is mine. _GS._ Are you the steward of the goddess' property? _SIHA steps close to the priest who retires step by step and finally hurries off the stage._ Come, shepherd, take the frightened lambkin up And bear it to its mother in the fold. [The shepherd takes up the lamb and stands ready to carry it away. The musicians slink away. The lambbearers and the people walk off in procession, followed by the Buddha with his disciples. General Siha remains alone on the stage. A trumpet call at a short distance and another one close by.] _GS._ What does that signal mean? _An officer accompanied by a trumpeter enters. A third trumpet call on the stage. The officer delivers a letter._ _Officer._ A dispatch from his majesty Bimbisara to his faithful and most noble general, Siha. _GS._ _Breaks the seal and reads to himself._ "The Sakyas are a stubborn little nation. Their institutions are free; their laws differ from those of the other surrounding states. These people are a source of discontent and revolution, and are a sore in my eye. Therefore, the Sakyas must be crushed, even if they sue for peace. Keep the army near the border and be ready for a sudden attack." _With an expression of grief._ War is unavoidable and I am to be the means by which the Sakyas will be wiped off the earth. It is my duty, for the King commands it. A soldier should not argue, he obeys. _Draws his sword and looks at it._ This sword is consecrated to the service of my king. Never have I drawn it except in honest fight. _Lost in contemplation._ Is Sakyamuni the Buddha?--Is he truly the Buddha? Buddhas are wise; Buddhas are omniscient; Buddhas foresee the future.-- Is Sakyamuni truly the Buddha?--I believe he is. And if he is the Buddha, is it right to wage a war against his people?--What shall I do? Oh, ye gods, teach me my duty! Oh, ye gods, may it not be my lot to fight for an unrighteous cause! Cursed be the sword that sheds innocent blood. SECOND SCENE. [Bimbisara's court at Rajagaha] _Present: KING BIMBISARA (Bb.), VISAKHA (V), and NAGADEVA (N)._ _V._ The Sakyas will make a hard fight, great King, and the war will cost blood. These northern settlers are taller and stronger than other races and possess the courage of the inhabitants of their former frigid homes. It would be easier to take possession of their state if I married Princess Yasodhara and gradually assumed the government under your protection. Your mighty friendship would support me on the throne and you could rule through me. _Bb._ That sounds acceptable, but in the meantime, I prepare for war. _V._ Even in war I shall be of service to you. I can lead your army where it will not meet with resistance, and I know the names of those who are dissatisfied. Many could be induced to join your forces; and I can betray the very person of the raja into your hands. _Bb._ _Nodding kindly to VISAKHA, then turning to NAGADEVA._ Is our kingdom in readiness? _N._ Great King, it is. General Siha stands in the field with a strong force ready to strike. There are another fifty thousand within call to make a sudden dash upon any of our neighbors should they dare come to the aid of Sakya. Our treasury is well filled, and the people of Magadha are prosperous. We could stand even a protracted war far better than any other state in India. _Bb._ The time seems favorable; the risk is small, and the spoil will be great. Convene my generals in the assembly hall. _They bow low and pass out. AMBAPALI (Ap.) enters._ _Ap._ Are they gone, my Lord, and what did you decide? _Bb._ I propose to go to war. _Ap._ You are rightly called "the Warlike." _Bb._ I want to round off my kingdom and expand my power northward until it reaches the Himalayas. _Ap._ The gods will speed you and the blessings of the saints shall be upon your people. _Servant enters._ _St._ There is a holy man who wants to see your Highness. His name is Devadatta. _Bb._ Show him in. _Servant exit._ _Ap._ Is he not one of the disciples of the Buddha? _Bb._ I believe he is. _AMBAPALI retires._ _DEVADATTA enters._ _Dd._ Hail, great King! Protector of religion and victor of many battles! _Bb._ What brings you to my presence? I always rejoice to see holy men. Their coming is auspicious, and I am happy to be of service to them. _Dd._ Great King, I implore your assistance for the brotherhood which I have founded. We need your royal support and the holiness of our lives will surround you as a halo with heavenly protection. _Bb._ Are you not a disciple of Gotama, who is called the Buddha? _Dd._ No longer, mighty King, I was his disciple so long as I believed in him; but he is not holy. I have abandoned him. He is not austere; his disciples do not practise self-mortifications, and he speaks kindly and dines with sinners. My disciples do not dress in worldly garments; they would not accept the invitation of women; they would not touch animal food. He who calls himself the Buddha is unworthy of that high title; he is a pretender who has not reached the highest goal. My rules are much more strict than his, and my brotherhood alone is holy. _Bb._ Holiness is a mighty thing. _Dd._ Yea, and our vows will shield your government, your throne, your army and your people against any misfortune. _Bb._ I shall send my treasurer to investigate and will do what is right. _Dd._ Maharaja, be assured of my deepest gratitude. _Bows low, exit._ _Ap._ [_re-enters, excited_] My royal friend, do not trust that man [_pointing toward the door where DEVADATTA went out_]. He is false. He may be holy, but he is treacherous. He may be virtuous; he may shun joy and the blessings of life, he may practise all penances, he may torture and mortify his body. But there is no true goodwill in him. His holiness is egotistic, and his religion is hypocrisy. Support his brotherhood with money or gifts as you see fit, but do not believe what he says about the Buddha. _Bb._ [_With an inquiring look_] Why? _Ap._ I know what he meant when he scoffed at him. When the Buddha stayed at Vesali, I invited that noblest of all monks to take his meal with me. I am not holy; I am a worldly woman; I am not a saint; but I have a warm heart, I feel for others and I want to do what is right. When I heard that the Buddha stayed in the mango grove, I thought to myself, I will go and see him. If he is truly all-wise, he will judge my heart and he will judge me in mercy. He will know my needs and will not refuse me. I went to the mango grove and he looked upon me with compassion; he accepted my invitation in the presence of witnesses, openly, fearlessly, and in kindness. There were the proud Licchavi princes, and close to him stood the envious Devadatta. How they scowled; how they condemned the great and kindly saint! How they whispered, "Shame on him!" and I saw how they despised me--yet they did not dare to speak out or to censure him publicly. Then, my gracious King, I knew that he was truly the Lord Buddha, the Allwise. _Bb._ My dear friend, I accept every word you say as true. I know the goodness of your heart, I know your worth, your loving kindness, and if you were of royal birth you would be worthy to wear a crown. The Buddha did not demean himself when he honored you. _Ap._ Allow me one question. Did the Buddha ever beg you to support his brotherhood? _Bb._ No, he did not; but I will give him all the assistance he may need. _Ap._ Did he ever offer you the support of his vows, or did he ever praise the efficacy of his holiness? _Bb._ He never did. _Ap._ Neither does he stand in need of self-recommendation, for his very presence is a blessing, because he spreads goodwill and kindliness, and the people who hear him are ashamed of doing anything unrighteous. Devadatta extends to you the promise, if you but support his disciples, of an unconditional protection through his holiness. The Buddha's protection is not so cheaply earned. I heard him say that every one must protect himself by his own righteousness, and no prayer, no sacrifice, no religious devotion, nor even penance or fasts could protect a man from the wrongs which he does. _Bb._ The Buddha's presence would be more auspicious than ten Devadattas. _Ap._ Oh, most assuredly! And what a contempt I have for the virtuous indignation of men who, overmoral themselves, judge haughtily of others; yet, if you look into their souls you discover that they are heartless and self-seeking villains. _Bb._ Your judgment is well grounded. _Ap._ The Buddha alone possesses greatness, and the Buddha does not seek honor, but the people adore him. _Bb._ Rajagaha must become the center of India. I will send for the Buddha and invite him to visit me. His sojourn here will make the kingdom of Magadha more famous than conquests and victories. _The servant enters._ _St._ Mighty King, the prime minister Nagadeva. _Bb._ He is welcome. Fare thee well, sweet heart; affairs of state call me. _N._ Mighty King, the generals are assembled. They hail thee as their war lord, and are anxious for laurels, for glory, for booty! [TRUMPETS, CURTAIN.] _THIRD INTERLUDE._ _Living pictures accompanied by appropriate music._ 1. SENDING OUT THE DISCIPLES. The Buddha called his disciples together, and having ordained them, bade them spread the Gospel, with these words translated from the Buddhist Canon: "Go ye now, O disciples, and wander forth for the benefit of the many, for the welfare of mankind, out of compassion for the world. Preach the doctrine which is glorious in the beginning, glorious in the middle, and glorious in the end, in the spirit as well as in the letter. There are beings whose eyes are scarcely covered with dust, but if the doctrine is not preached to them they cannot attain salvation. Proclaim to them a life of holiness. They will understand the doctrine and accept it." The Pali expression _kalyamo dhamma_ is here translated "glorious doctrine." The dictionary defines the first word as "excellent, beautiful, glorious." This closely corresponds to the Christian term, which, as derived from the Greek, reads "evangel" and in its Saxon equivalent "gospel" or "good tidings." 2. THE RICH YOUTH. Yasa, the son of a wealthy nobleman of Benares, came by night to the Blessed One and exclaimed: "What misery!" But the Buddha answered, "There is no misery for him who has entered the Path." Yasa, richly dressed, with an expression of distress, before the Buddha who comforts him. The scene is framed in darkness, the two figures being lit up by a torch. 3. A CHILD'S OFFERING. Old frescoes in the Ajanta Caves show a mother sending a gift through her child. It looks as if they were Buddhist illustrations of Christ's injunction, "Suffer little children to come unto me." ACT IV. FIRST SCENE [A room in the Jetavana. The wheel of the law pictured on one side and the wheel of becoming on the other. Otherwise swastikas and lotus flowers serve as ornaments. A large opening exhibits a view into a garden with running water. On the right side there is a platform with low seats, on the other there is a low table with a divan, on which Anatha Pindika is seated, looking over palmleaf manuscripts.] _Present: ANATHA PINDIKA (A); Servant (St.); PRINCE JETA (J); later on KALA UDAYIN (K) and the BUDDHA (B)._ _A servant enters._ _St._ His Highness the Prince Jeta. _A._ Show him in. _JETA enters. A. rises to meet him with bows._ You are most welcome, my Prince. _J._ I have come from my brother, the King, to express to you his thanks for having bought my pleasure grounds for the noble and great purpose of affording a worthy resthouse to the Buddha and his brotherhood. _A._ Kindly tender my gratitude to your royal brother for his gracious message. _J._ I hear that King Bimbisara has sent an embassy to the Buddha to induce him to come back to Rajagaha. Has the Buddha received these men? _A._ Not yet. He will see them this morning. _J._ We ought to keep him here. He is a wonderful man, and I consider our city fortunate to have him reside with us. What astonishes me is his way of conquering the hearts of all men, even of his opponents, and he is so sensible. _A._ What do you mean? _J._ I am not a religious man; I am too worldly, but him I would follow. _A._ Why? _J._ He is perhaps the only religious reformer who does not go to extremes. He rejects on the one hand austerities, self-mortifications, penances, and severe fasts as useless, and on the other hand, he would not allow his followers to indulge in pleasures; but he insists most sensibly on keeping between the two extremes and proclaims the middle path of leading a righteous life. There is nothing absurd about him. Think of Devadatta. He insists that the monks should dress in rags picked up in cemeteries. The Buddha appeals to common sense, and therefore I say, he is a wonderful man. _A._ He is more than a man; he is enlightenment incarnate. A stream of blessings goes out from him. _J._ He has grown into an international power, and kings do well not to ignore his influence. _A._ I think so myself, and I am so glad that his influence is always for good, never for evil, and his ways are so marvelously gentle. _J._ Indeed that is a blessing. If he were not so absolutely indifferent to his own affairs he might become positively dangerous. His lay disciples count in thousands of thousands. The farmers in the country, the merchants in the towns, the lawyers, the artisans, and even the soldiers believe in him. Lately General Siha became a lay member of the Buddha's brotherhood, and many other prominent officers followed his example. _A._ He would never have gained this influence if he were not truly the Buddha. _J._ I want to tell you that a war is threatening, but please do not speak of it, it is a deep secret. A spy in the secret service of my royal brother has found out that King Bimbisara intends to fall upon the Sakyas and deprive them of their independence. The Brahman Visakha, minister of state, has turned traitor and promises to deliver his country into the hands of King Bimbisara on the condition that he be made Raja in Suddhodana's place. _A._ The country of the Sakyas is but small, and their independence will not last long; it is a mere question of time. _J._ But consider that the Buddha hails from Kapilavatthu. He is the son of Suddhodana, the Sakya raja. _A._ Indeed he is and may I be permitted to inform him of the danger that threatens his father's house? _J._ I give you full liberty, for he will use discretion and not betray his informant. I deem Bimbisara's plan dangerous to himself. A war with the Sakyas may cost Bimbisara his throne, for the people of Rajagaha believe in the Buddha, and I learn that even now the war rumors have made them restless. _Servant (St.) enters._ _St._ Here is a man with the name Kala Udayin, who has a message for the Blessed One. _A._ Show him in. _J._ I leave you now and hope that you will keep the Buddha as long as possible in Savatthi. _Exit._ _KALA UDAYIN enters and bows to ANATHA PINDIKA._ _A._ You want to see the Blessed One? I will call him. _ANATHA PINDIKA exit._ _K._ [_Alone_] This is the place where Prince Siddhattha lives! Indeed a most delightful spot and more pleasant than many a royal palace. And how the people speak of him! They call him the Blessed One, the Buddha, the Tathagata, the Sakyamuni, the great Sage. The wealthiest man of Kosala has bought these extensive and most beautiful grounds and presented them to the brotherhood of his disciples, so that the Buddha would stay here from time to time, and that the people of the city would have him for their guest. _BUDDHA accompanied by ANATHA PINDIKA comes in. He is followed by two disciples. The BUDDHA sits down on the seat on the platform, having on either hand one of his disciples. ANATHA PINDIKA stands below with clasped hands._ _KALA UDAYIN sinks to his knees with clasped hands._ _B._ My friend, what brings you here? _K._ A message from your royal father: He bade me tell you that he is growing old, and before he dies, he wants to see his son once more. Would you deign to accept his invitation? _B._ Tell me, my friend, how is my father? Is old age truly telling on him? _K._ Not yet so visibly, but he worries much. _B._ And how is Rahula? He is now seven years old and must be quite a boy. _K._ He is, my Lord; and how he talks of his father. He knows everything you are doing. _B._ Who tells him? _K._ His mother does. _B._ And tell me how the princess fares? _K._ She imposes upon herself the observances which the mendicant friars keep. She will have no preference over him who once was her husband. She sleeps on the floor, she does no longer use unguents or perfumes. She wears a simple yellow robe and observes the regulation of the brotherhood in taking food. _The BUDDHA nods and with a distant look sits a few moments in silence._ _B._ And she is a good mother? _K._ There could be no better. _St._ [_announces_] An embassy of the most potent King of Magadha, the great Bimbisara. _B._ [_Addressing himself to the servant_] Let them come in, [_turning to K._] Kala Udayin, bring my father greetings, and say that I shall come. _KALA UDAYIN exit._ _A number of men, the embassy of King BIMBISARA, led by NAGADEVA, most gorgeously dressed, file in. They let themselves down on one knee, clasp their hands and rise again._ _N._ Most gracious Lord, all-wise and blessed Buddha, Our noble sov'reign bids me tender you His most respectful greetings, and he hopes That you return and visit Rajagaha, For he is very anxious to be honored By your auspicious presence in his kingdom. _B._ My Lords, express to your most mighty King That the Tathagata can not accept This friendly invitation, for he will Start for his home, the country of the Sakyas, To see his aged father and his kin. If war or other ills befall his people, He wants to live, if need be, die with them. _N._ Lord Buddha, speak a word of truth to us, For I'm aware thou art omniscient. Our royal master wants to hear from thee. _B._ All bodily existence passeth by For it is compound and will be dissolved; But there is Law; it is the Uncreate, It is th' Etern, which is without beginning And without end. That must our refuge be. He who relies on the Impermanent, And, being strong, attempts to crush the weak, Will soon break down. This is the law of deeds, For as we sow, such will our harvest be. Rely on Truth, the Uncreate, th' Etern, Be guided by the rule of Righteousness. This is my message to the King, your Lord, And may he be advised to rule his country With love of peace, with goodness, and with wisdom. My blessing be on him and on his people. _They kneel, clasp their hands, circumambulate the BUDDHA and file out._ _JETA returns in excitement._ _J._ The war is on! King Bimbisara's army Is building bridges to attack the Sakyas. [CURTAIN. Trumpet signals, military music.] _FOURTH INTERLUDE._ _Living Pictures Accompanied by Appropriate Music._ 1. KING BIMBISARA ON THE ROYAL ELEPHANT. The king is seated under a canopy, together with his minister and field marshal. On the head of the elephant, the driver; and retinue on either side. 2. THE WANDERER. The Buddha was in the habit of wandering through the country from place to place. The picture shows him with a staff in his right hand and a bowl in his left in an Indian landscape. 3. KING BIMBISARA IN CAMP. Standing before the royal tent he addresses his generals. ACT V. FIRST SCENE. [Reception hall of the Raja Suddhodana; Indian pompous style; columns and beyond an outlook into a tropical palm-garden. Seats scattered through the room. On the left a compartment, open toward the audience, is separated from the main room by hanging carpets.] _Near the right side SUDDHODANA is seated with PAJAPATI and YASODHARA. RAHULA in the background (viz., in the garden) in the care of a nurse._ _S._ The time is troublesome, and it appears that war is imminent. _P._ Oh do not fret; Visakha is a cunning diplomat: I hope he'll be successful, and he will Persuade King Bimbisara to keep peace. _S._ I do hope too, but hope against conviction. _VISAKHA and DEVALA enter._ There come the Brahman and the gallant Captain. _V._ [Kneeling on one foot to the King] Hail Maharaja! _D._ Hail, my gracious King. _S._ Welcome my worthy messengers! _They kneel to PAJAPATI._ _P._ Be welcome. _S._ Tell me at once, how did your mission speed? _V._ There is a subtle influence against you At Bimbisara's court; there is a party Bound to have war, and they will have it too, Unless we meet them by diplomacy. Leave it to me, and I'll preserve the peace. _S._ Had not my son turned mendicant, how useful Could he at present be! I need a general, A trusty man of youthful strength and courage To take the helm and lead the ship of state Through storm and danger, for our foes are strong. _V._ Great Raja, I am privy to your grief, I know the hope you'd set upon Siddhattha. What brilliant gifts the boy inherited, From you, his royal father, and how he, Forgetful of his filial duty, left you, And his fair wife and child, to turn a beggar. _S._ All this is true, remind me not of it, 'Tis a disgrace to our most royal house, And all the Rajas in the Indian land, Will point to us and mock the Sakya tribe. _RAHULA comes in with childlike joy and brings his mother a rose._ _R._ Here, mother, is a rose. I picked it from the bush where the nightingale sings. I thought, if father had been here, he would have brought the rose to you. He loves the flowers and so do you. _Y._ My darling! _S._ [_with a touch of anger_] Yasodhara, I wish you would not speak to him too much of his father. _R._ Why should mother not mention father? I love him and I should know all about him. I want to join the Buddha's brotherhood. _S._ Do you love him more than your grandfather? _R._ I love my grandfather too, I love mother, and you, dear grandmother [_turning to PAJAPATI_]. You are always so kind to me. I love you all. But father I love in a different manner. I love him as Buddha. I clasp my hands to him as to a god; and so do you mother, do you not? _Y._ [_Puts her hand on Rahula's mouth_] Hush! I thank you for the rose, my child; now run away and bring another rose to grandfather, and one for your grandmother Pajapati. _R._ Yes mother, and one I keep for father when he comes. _Runs off._ _V._ Your grandson needs a father, Maha Raja! And let me tender you my humble service. I see Yasodhara, the noble princess, Pine patiently away and spend in mourning Her life's best years of youth and happiness. She has been cruelly deserted, has Been widowed by Siddhattha for a whim. Give her to me in marriage, and I'll prove A better father than that runaway, A better father to your little grandson, A better husband to his widowed wife. _S._ You are at liberty to ask my daughter. _V._ Fair Princess, cease to mourn, and grant my suit. Thou shalt see better days than heretofore. _Y._ I pledged my troth to Gotama Siddhattha, And I shall never break my faith to him. _V._ Siddhattha is no more, he has turned monk And you are free, you are Siddhattha's widow. _S._ My daughter, do not think that I oppose Visakha's suit, for on the contrary I do support it, and I wish you would Accept him as a husband, for I need Alliance with a brave and trusty man. _V._ Princess Yasodhara, here is my hand, Do not refuse me. _Y._ Brahman, spare your words. _V._ The time will come when you will sore regret. O King, compel her to obey; make use Of your good right as master of this house, For I alone can save the Sakya state. _P._ O worthy Brahman, do not threaten us. _V._ Decide, O Maharaja; thou art Lord! Thy bidding must be done. Shall women rule, Or art thou master still in thine own home? _S._ I am master here; but not a tyrant; Among our people master means a leader. The Sakya yeomen justly pride themselves On their free institutions. I'm the first Among them, not an autocrat nor despot; I serve them as adviser, guide and father; Shall I who never would infringe upon The right of any poorest peasant woman, Compel a princess of the royal house To marry 'gainst her will? No sir, not I. I wished the Princess to accept your suit, But I shall never say, She must be yours. _V._ King of the Sakyas, you forget yourself, I am a Brahman and of noble birth. I served you faithfully for many years, But now I quit your service, for I know That Bimbisara, King of Magadha, The mightiest of Indian rulers, Will welcome me as friend and counselor. _He bows to the KING and PAJAPATI, and leaves. For a moment they are all silent._ _S._ I fear me that means war. _D._ Indeed it does. If you remember, King, Visakha said There was a subtle influence against you At Bimbisara's court. It dawns on me That he, Visakha, is the cause of it. I saw him whisper with a courtier, then He spoke in secret with a general, And with the King too he was closeted. The hypocrite has thrown away his mask, And since he spoke out boldly, I know now That he has been intriguing all the time. _S._ He thinks I hate my son, but I do not. I'm only angry, I am disappointed, Because he did not heed my dearest wish. I love him still and I invited him To visit his old home and me, his father. I sent Udayin with a kindly greeting. Oh, I'd forgive him all, and e'en his flight, Had only he not turned a mendicant. It hurts my pride to see a Sakya prince, And mine own son, go round from house to house With bowl in hand to beg his daily food. _RAHULA comes in excited._ _R._ Grandfather, here is your rose, and grandma, here is yours. And oh! did you hear the news? _Y._ What is it, boy? Why are you so excited? _P._ Who told you any news? _R._ The guards at the gate. They say that my father has come. All the people rush out of their houses and greet him with clasped hands. They strew flowers on the road and hail him as the Buddha! _Y._ [_rises_] Why, is it possible? _Wants to retire._ _S._ Stay here. Kala Udayin comes. _KALA enter and kneels._ _K._ I bow in humble reverence before the King. And my respectful salutations to all the members of the royal house [_turning to GOPA_] and to you. _S._ Bring you good news, Udayin? _K._ Your noble son, my King, is coming. _S._ Where did you find him? _K._ At the Jetavana at Savatthi. _S._ What kind of a place is that? _K._ It is the most wonderful pleasure park I ever saw. O King, your garden here is a paltry affair in comparison with the Jetavana. _S._ There he lives in luxury? _K._ Oh no Sir. Not at all. He could live in luxury, if he wanted to, but he leads a simple life, as simple as the humblest servant in your home, and when he wanders through the country after the rainy season he lives like any mendicant friar. He overtook me on my way, and when he came hither to Kapilavatthu, his home, he did as usual. Last night he slept in the forest, and this morning he went from house to house with bowl in hand, begging his food, and he spoke a blessing wherever people greeted him kindly, or gave him to eat. _S._ Oh my son, my son! Why didst thou not go straight to the palace where thy father has food enough for thee and all thy disciples! _K._ He always follows the rule of the mendicants. _S._ Oh my son! Why dost thou shame thy father in his own home? _K._ The Blessed One deems it no shame to beg. He is as modest as a pauper and shows no pride, but wherever he comes, he is greeted like a king, nay like a king of kings, and the wealthiest and most powerful rulers come to do him reverence. _S._ And he is here, this wonderful man? And he is my son Siddhattha? _K._ Yes, he is here, and it is your son, but no longer Siddhattha, the Sakya prince, but Sakya muni, the sage of the Sakyas, the Buddha, the Blessed One. When I spoke to him and gave him your message, he inquired for you and the Queen Pajapati [_YASODHARA rises_] and for you, most honored Princess and for Rahula. Yes, he inquired for you and how Rahula had grown. _Y._ Did he speak kindly of us? _K._ He always speaks kindly, and he is always calm. [Music a song, Buddhist Doxology, at a distance] _K._ O listen to the music. Here he comes, the glorious Buddha. He must be at the gate. _Y._ [_rises again and withdraws._] I must be gone. _P._ O stay, Yasodhara. _Y._ No, I will hide me from his very sight; and if I am to him of any value, he will ask for me. _S._ Stay, Yasodhara. _Y._ He fled from me because I was a hindrance In his great quest, and he may shun me still. _S._ Stay none the less. _P._ Nay, let her withdraw; she is in tears and would break down. _YASODHARA and PAJAPATI withdraw to the partition behind the curtains._ _S._ You say, that my son is greeted even by kings with clasped hands? _K._ Yea, even kings kneel to him. _S._ I shall do nothing of the kind. He is my son, my disobedient son, and I am still his father. _PAJAPATI returns._ _The procession of the BUDDHA comes. Two monks precede and stand at either side of the BUDDHA. Accompanying monks and other public come into the garden, crowding up to the columns. They all kneel with clasped hands, except SUDDHODANA._ _B._ My blessing to this house, to you, O King, And also to the Queen Pajapati, My dear good aunt and loving foster mother. _S._ At last thou comest back, my wayward son, But why didst shame me? Why didst thou go begging Here in my capital? Thou art descended From ancestors who are a royal race. _B._ My ancestors are Buddhas of past ages, Their thinking has descended unto me, Their habits and their rules of life I follow, And not the regulations of a court. _The people rise to their feet again; KALA joins GOPA._ _S._ Tell me, what are the rules of former Buddhas? _B._ They greet you with a stanza in return For any food or hospitality. _S._ I shall be glad to hear what you will say. _B._ Awake from sleep, dispel the dream; Before the truth's bright ray Things truly are not what they seem But truth points out the way. Truth, truth alone will bring you bliss, In the next life and e'en in this. _RAHULA brings a rose to BUDDHA._ _R._ Here, father, is a rose I saved for you On the big bush where nests the nightingale. _B._ And this is Rahula! How you have grown! Where is your mother? _S._ Yasodhara was here, But would not stay. On hearing that you came She left the room and said that if at all You cared for her, you would not fail to ask. _B._ But I want to see her, lead me to the place. _BUDDHA hands his bowl to the King, PAJAPATI rises and leads the way. At a distance a flourish of trumpets._ _D._ What military signals do I hear? _S._ Go, Captain Devala, see what it means. _DEVALA exit. SUDDHODANA hands the bowl to one of the disciples._ _B._ Ye two disciples shall attend the meeting. Above all passion has the Buddha risen, But he will comfort her who loves him dearly. The Princess' heart is filled with deepest grief, And in no wise shall any one rebuke her In whatsoever way she greeteth him. _PAJAPATI opens the curtain leading to the apartment where YASODHARA sits. BUDDHA, PAJAPATI and SUDDHODANA enter. YASODHARA sinks down before him and holds his feet, weeping. The flourish of trumpets is repeated._ _S._ [_Grows restless, turns to PAJAPATI_] These warlike trumpets have a foreign sound And may forbode the enemy's attack. _He leaves the apartment where YASODHARA is and re-enters the hall, going toward the entrance in the background between the columns._ _B._ Yasodhara, I bring thee happy tidings, Deliverance is found, let go thy grief. _YASODHARA looking up to BUDDHA with deep emotion._ _Y._ Oh Lord, how did I long for your return, But in your eyes I have become as naught. _B._ My faithful helpmate and my former wife, Thou hast been dear to me, dear art thou still, But truth is dearer, and to truth I cling, While on my quest of truth in former lives, And also now in this existence, thou With voluntary sacrifice hast aided me, Imagine not that thou a hindrance art To me or to my work and holy mission. Next to my sainted mother thou art blessed Among the women of this world. Rejoice And let grief pass from thy suffering soul. _Y._ [_In a kneeling posture_] Grant me a boon, my Lord, a precious boon. _R._ Yea, father, grant the boon that mother wants. _B._ Speak, Princess, and I listen to thy word. I know thy heart, Yasodhara; I know That naught but worthy thoughts dwell in thy mind. _Y._ Grant me to help thee in thy noble mission. I want to join the band of thy disciples. _She pauses and the BUDDHA hesitates to answer._ I shall be happy if I do thy work. _B._ Dost thou not know this boon is but a burden? _Y._ The heavier it be, my Lord, the more I welcome it. _R._ Oh grant the boon! _B._ Not yet Yasodhara, have women been admitted; But I foresee the time will come. _Y._ My Lord The time is here if thou but grant the boon. _The BUDDHA places his right hand in blessing upon YASODHARA'S head._ _B._ So let it be, and so thy boon be granted; I may not hinder thee if thou insistest. _As PAJAPATI helps YASODHARA to rise, a third flourish of trumpets is heard, this time near by and loud. DEVALA returns in great excitement and addresses SUDDHODANA._ _D._ My noble liege, an embassy is coming From Bimbisara, King of Magadha. They are the kingdom's highest ministers, And sullen do they look and their retainers. _S._ 'Tis most unfortunate, but let them in. _D._ There's more to be announced. _S._ You look excited. _D._ It is but the beginning of the end: Our scouts are captured, one of them escaped. _He hesitates._ _S._ Well, Devala? _D._ He carries evil news. _S._ [_With great anxiety_] By Issara! Speak, man! Don't hesitate. _DEVALA covers his eyes with his hands and sobs._ _S._ Tell me the worst. Tell me the worst at once. _D._ O that I had no tongue to tell the tidings. _S._ I will be brave, speak freely! Be a man! _In the meantime the BUDDHA together with the others has entered the main hall._ _D._ Our cause is lost. We are surrounded, Three bridges have been built and General Siha Stands ready with an overwhelming army To crush us. _S._ Once I had a son! But he Alas! turned mendicant and fails me now! In him no drop of warrior blood is left, No spark of honor gloweth in his heart And our ancestral pride goes down in shame. _B._ Transient, my noble father, are all things. All kingdoms finally must pass away, But if thou tak'st thy refuge in the truth, Thou wilt be free from all vicissitudes. The kingdom of the truth alone endures. _S._ [_With indignation._] Siddhattha, spare thy monkish rant, Far better than thy cowardly submission, Far nobler and befitting it would be, To draw the sword and die a hero's death. _The embassy in solemn procession files in as before at the Jetavana. The BUDDHA withdraws and is not noticed by the embassy. Prime Minister NAGADEVA (N) addresses King SUDDHODANA._ _N._ Oh Maharaja, listen to our message! The ruler of the mighty Magadha, King Bimbisara, sends you kindly greetings. He wants you to entreat the Blessed One, The holy Buddha, who now stays with you, Who, as he learneth, is your noble son, To come to Rajagaha on a visit. There have been rumors of intended war, And armies are maneuvering nearby, But be assured, our noble King means peace. He would not draw the sword against your state, Nor wage a war against the Buddha's father. _SUDDHODANA'S eye searches for the BUDDHA who has been standing behind a column and now steps forward._ _S._ Oh noble son, oh blessed, highest Buddha, Thou art indeed a King of Kings on earth! _He kneels down. All members of the embassy do the same._ No crown thou wear'st, no scepter's in thy hand, Thou needest neither lance, nor sword nor shield, And yet thou rulest, with mere word and thought, Thou sway'st the destinies of all the world, I did not know thy power and thy great worth; But now I bow me down in humble faith, And I take refuge in the truth thou preachest. Henceforth I will devote myself to spread The kingdom of good will and righteousness. [Music Buddhist Doxology] [CURTAIN] * * * * * 
2500	----	SIDDHARTHA An Indian Tale by Hermann Hesse FIRST PART To Romain Rolland, my dear friend THE SON OF THE BRAHMAN In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman. The sun tanned his light shoulders by the banks of the river when bathing, performing the sacred ablutions, the sacred offerings. In the mango grove, shade poured into his black eyes, when playing as a boy, when his mother sang, when the sacred offerings were made, when his father, the scholar, taught him, when the wise men talked. For a long time, Siddhartha had been partaking in the discussions of the wise men, practising debate with Govinda, practising with Govinda the art of reflection, the service of meditation. He already knew how to speak the Om silently, the word of words, to speak it silently into himself while inhaling, to speak it silently out of himself while exhaling, with all the concentration of his soul, the forehead surrounded by the glow of the clear-thinking spirit. He already knew to feel Atman in the depths of his being, indestructible, one with the universe. Joy leapt in his father's heart for his son who was quick to learn, thirsty for knowledge; he saw him growing up to become great wise man and priest, a prince among the Brahmans. Bliss leapt in his mother's breast when she saw him, when she saw him walking, when she saw him sit down and get up, Siddhartha, strong, handsome, he who was walking on slender legs, greeting her with perfect respect. Love touched the hearts of the Brahmans' young daughters when Siddhartha walked through the lanes of the town with the luminous forehead, with the eye of a king, with his slim hips. But more than all the others he was loved by Govinda, his friend, the son of a Brahman. He loved Siddhartha's eye and sweet voice, he loved his walk and the perfect decency of his movements, he loved everything Siddhartha did and said and what he loved most was his spirit, his transcendent, fiery thoughts, his ardent will, his high calling. Govinda knew: he would not become a common Brahman, not a lazy official in charge of offerings; not a greedy merchant with magic spells; not a vain, vacuous speaker; not a mean, deceitful priest; and also not a decent, stupid sheep in the herd of the many. No, and he, Govinda, as well did not want to become one of those, not one of those tens of thousands of Brahmans. He wanted to follow Siddhartha, the beloved, the splendid. And in days to come, when Siddhartha would become a god, when he would join the glorious, then Govinda wanted to follow him as his friend, his companion, his servant, his spear-carrier, his shadow. Siddhartha was thus loved by everyone. He was a source of joy for everybody, he was a delight for them all. But he, Siddhartha, was not a source of joy for himself, he found no delight in himself. Walking the rosy paths of the fig tree garden, sitting in the bluish shade of the grove of contemplation, washing his limbs daily in the bath of repentance, sacrificing in the dim shade of the mango forest, his gestures of perfect decency, everyone's love and joy, he still lacked all joy in his heart. Dreams and restless thoughts came into his mind, flowing from the water of the river, sparkling from the stars of the night, melting from the beams of the sun, dreams came to him and a restlessness of the soul, fuming from the sacrifices, breathing forth from the verses of the Rig-Veda, being infused into him, drop by drop, from the teachings of the old Brahmans. Siddhartha had started to nurse discontent in himself, he had started to feel that the love of his father and the love of his mother, and also the love of his friend, Govinda, would not bring him joy for ever and ever, would not nurse him, feed him, satisfy him. He had started to suspect that his venerable father and his other teachers, that the wise Brahmans had already revealed to him the most and best of their wisdom, that they had already filled his expecting vessel with their richness, and the vessel was not full, the spirit was not content, the soul was not calm, the heart was not satisfied. The ablutions were good, but they were water, they did not wash off the sin, they did not heal the spirit's thirst, they did not relieve the fear in his heart. The sacrifices and the invocation of the gods were excellent--but was that all? Did the sacrifices give a happy fortune? And what about the gods? Was it really Prajapati who had created the world? Was it not the Atman, He, the only one, the singular one? Were the gods not creations, created like me and you, subject to time, mortal? Was it therefore good, was it right, was it meaningful and the highest occupation to make offerings to the gods? For whom else were offerings to be made, who else was to be worshipped but Him, the only one, the Atman? And where was Atman to be found, where did He reside, where did his eternal heart beat, where else but in one's own self, in its innermost part, in its indestructible part, which everyone had in himself? But where, where was this self, this innermost part, this ultimate part? It was not flesh and bone, it was neither thought nor consciousness, thus the wisest ones taught. So, where, where was it? To reach this place, the self, myself, the Atman, there was another way, which was worthwhile looking for? Alas, and nobody showed this way, nobody knew it, not the father, and not the teachers and wise men, not the holy sacrificial songs! They knew everything, the Brahmans and their holy books, they knew everything, they had taken care of everything and of more than everything, the creation of the world, the origin of speech, of food, of inhaling, of exhaling, the arrangement of the senses, the acts of the gods, they knew infinitely much--but was it valuable to know all of this, not knowing that one and only thing, the most important thing, the solely important thing? Surely, many verses of the holy books, particularly in the Upanishades of Samaveda, spoke of this innermost and ultimate thing, wonderful verses. "Your soul is the whole world", was written there, and it was written that man in his sleep, in his deep sleep, would meet with his innermost part and would reside in the Atman. Marvellous wisdom was in these verses, all knowledge of the wisest ones had been collected here in magic words, pure as honey collected by bees. No, not to be looked down upon was the tremendous amount of enlightenment which lay here collected and preserved by innumerable generations of wise Brahmans.-- But where were the Brahmans, where the priests, where the wise men or penitents, who had succeeded in not just knowing this deepest of all knowledge but also to live it? Where was the knowledgeable one who wove his spell to bring his familiarity with the Atman out of the sleep into the state of being awake, into the life, into every step of the way, into word and deed? Siddhartha knew many venerable Brahmans, chiefly his father, the pure one, the scholar, the most venerable one. His father was to be admired, quiet and noble were his manners, pure his life, wise his words, delicate and noble thoughts lived behind its brow --but even he, who knew so much, did he live in blissfulness, did he have peace, was he not also just a searching man, a thirsty man? Did he not, again and again, have to drink from holy sources, as a thirsty man, from the offerings, from the books, from the disputes of the Brahmans? Why did he, the irreproachable one, have to wash off sins every day, strive for a cleansing every day, over and over every day? Was not Atman in him, did not the pristine source spring from his heart? It had to be found, the pristine source in one's own self, it had to be possessed! Everything else was searching, was a detour, was getting lost. Thus were Siddhartha's thoughts, this was his thirst, this was his suffering. Often he spoke to himself from a Chandogya-Upanishad the words: "Truly, the name of the Brahman is satyam--verily, he who knows such a thing, will enter the heavenly world every day." Often, it seemed near, the heavenly world, but never he had reached it completely, never he had quenched the ultimate thirst. And among all the wise and wisest men, he knew and whose instructions he had received, among all of them there was no one, who had reached it completely, the heavenly world, who had quenched it completely, the eternal thirst. "Govinda," Siddhartha spoke to his friend, "Govinda, my dear, come with me under the Banyan tree, let's practise meditation." They went to the Banyan tree, they sat down, Siddhartha right here, Govinda twenty paces away. While putting himself down, ready to speak the Om, Siddhartha repeated murmuring the verse: Om is the bow, the arrow is soul, The Brahman is the arrow's target, That one should incessantly hit. After the usual time of the exercise in meditation had passed, Govinda rose. The evening had come, it was time to perform the evening's ablution. He called Siddhartha's name. Siddhartha did not answer. Siddhartha sat there lost in thought, his eyes were rigidly focused towards a very distant target, the tip of his tongue was protruding a little between the teeth, he seemed not to breathe. Thus sat he, wrapped up in contemplation, thinking Om, his soul sent after the Brahman as an arrow. Once, Samanas had travelled through Siddhartha's town, ascetics on a pilgrimage, three skinny, withered men, neither old nor young, with dusty and bloody shoulders, almost naked, scorched by the sun, surrounded by loneliness, strangers and enemies to the world, strangers and lank jackals in the realm of humans. Behind them blew a hot scent of quiet passion, of destructive service, of merciless self-denial. In the evening, after the hour of contemplation, Siddhartha spoke to Govinda: "Early tomorrow morning, my friend, Siddhartha will go to the Samanas. He will become a Samana." Govinda turned pale, when he heard these words and read the decision in the motionless face of his friend, unstoppable like the arrow shot from the bow. Soon and with the first glance, Govinda realized: Now it is beginning, now Siddhartha is taking his own way, now his fate is beginning to sprout, and with his, my own. And he turned pale like a dry banana-skin. "O Siddhartha," he exclaimed, "will your father permit you to do that?" Siddhartha looked over as if he was just waking up. Arrow-fast he read in Govinda's soul, read the fear, read the submission. "O Govinda," he spoke quietly, "let's not waste words. Tomorrow, at daybreak I will begin the life of the Samanas. Speak no more of it." Siddhartha entered the chamber, where his father was sitting on a mat of bast, and stepped behind his father and remained standing there, until his father felt that someone was standing behind him. Quoth the Brahman: "Is that you, Siddhartha? Then say what you came to say." Quoth Siddhartha: "With your permission, my father. I came to tell you that it is my longing to leave your house tomorrow and go to the ascetics. My desire is to become a Samana. May my father not oppose this." The Brahman fell silent, and remained silent for so long that the stars in the small window wandered and changed their relative positions, 'ere the silence was broken. Silent and motionless stood the son with his arms folded, silent and motionless sat the father on the mat, and the stars traced their paths in the sky. Then spoke the father: "Not proper it is for a Brahman to speak harsh and angry words. But indignation is in my heart. I wish not to hear this request for a second time from your mouth." Slowly, the Brahman rose; Siddhartha stood silently, his arms folded. "What are you waiting for?" asked the father. Quoth Siddhartha: "You know what." Indignant, the father left the chamber; indignant, he went to his bed and lay down. After an hour, since no sleep had come over his eyes, the Brahman stood up, paced to and fro, and left the house. Through the small window of the chamber he looked back inside, and there he saw Siddhartha standing, his arms folded, not moving from his spot. Pale shimmered his bright robe. With anxiety in his heart, the father returned to his bed. After another hour, since no sleep had come over his eyes, the Brahman stood up again, paced to and fro, walked out of the house and saw that the moon had risen. Through the window of the chamber he looked back inside; there stood Siddhartha, not moving from his spot, his arms folded, moonlight reflecting from his bare shins. With worry in his heart, the father went back to bed. And he came back after an hour, he came back after two hours, looked through the small window, saw Siddhartha standing, in the moon light, by the light of the stars, in the darkness. And he came back hour after hour, silently, he looked into the chamber, saw him standing in the same place, filled his heart with anger, filled his heart with unrest, filled his heart with anguish, filled it with sadness. And in the night's last hour, before the day began, he returned, stepped into the room, saw the young man standing there, who seemed tall and like a stranger to him. "Siddhartha," he spoke, "what are you waiting for?" "You know what." "Will you always stand that way and wait, until it'll becomes morning, noon, and evening?" "I will stand and wait. "You will become tired, Siddhartha." "I will become tired." "You will fall asleep, Siddhartha." "I will not fall asleep." "You will die, Siddhartha." "I will die." "And would you rather die, than obey your father?" "Siddhartha has always obeyed his father." "So will you abandon your plan?" "Siddhartha will do what his father will tell him to do." The first light of day shone into the room. The Brahman saw that Siddhartha was trembling softly in his knees. In Siddhartha's face he saw no trembling, his eyes were fixed on a distant spot. Then his father realized that even now Siddhartha no longer dwelt with him in his home, that he had already left him. The Father touched Siddhartha's shoulder. "You will," he spoke, "go into the forest and be a Samana. When you'll have found blissfulness in the forest, then come back and teach me to be blissful. If you'll find disappointment, then return and let us once again make offerings to the gods together. Go now and kiss your mother, tell her where you are going to. But for me it is time to go to the river and to perform the first ablution." He took his hand from the shoulder of his son and went outside. Siddhartha wavered to the side, as he tried to walk. He put his limbs back under control, bowed to his father, and went to his mother to do as his father had said. As he slowly left on stiff legs in the first light of day the still quiet town, a shadow rose near the last hut, who had crouched there, and joined the pilgrim--Govinda. "You have come," said Siddhartha and smiled. "I have come," said Govinda. WITH THE SAMANAS In the evening of this day they caught up with the ascetics, the skinny Samanas, and offered them their companionship and--obedience. They were accepted. Siddhartha gave his garments to a poor Brahman in the street. He wore nothing more than the loincloth and the earth-coloured, unsown cloak. He ate only once a day, and never something cooked. He fasted for fifteen days. He fasted for twenty-eight days. The flesh waned from his thighs and cheeks. Feverish dreams flickered from his enlarged eyes, long nails grew slowly on his parched fingers and a dry, shaggy beard grew on his chin. His glance turned to ice when he encountered women; his mouth twitched with contempt, when he walked through a city of nicely dressed people. He saw merchants trading, princes hunting, mourners wailing for their dead, whores offering themselves, physicians trying to help the sick, priests determining the most suitable day for seeding, lovers loving, mothers nursing their children--and all of this was not worthy of one look from his eye, it all lied, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all pretended to be meaningful and joyful and beautiful, and it all was just concealed putrefaction. The world tasted bitter. Life was torture. A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heart, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self, the great secret. Silently, Siddhartha exposed himself to burning rays of the sun directly above, glowing with pain, glowing with thirst, and stood there, until he neither felt any pain nor thirst any more. Silently, he stood there in the rainy season, from his hair the water was dripping over freezing shoulders, over freezing hips and legs, and the penitent stood there, until he could not feel the cold in his shoulders and legs any more, until they were silent, until they were quiet. Silently, he cowered in the thorny bushes, blood dripped from the burning skin, from festering wounds dripped pus, and Siddhartha stayed rigidly, stayed motionless, until no blood flowed any more, until nothing stung any more, until nothing burned any more. Siddhartha sat upright and learned to breathe sparingly, learned to get along with only few breathes, learned to stop breathing. He learned, beginning with the breath, to calm the beat of his heart, leaned to reduce the beats of his heart, until they were only a few and almost none. Instructed by the oldest of the Samanas, Siddhartha practised self-denial, practised meditation, according to a new Samana rules. A heron flew over the bamboo forest--and Siddhartha accepted the heron into his soul, flew over forest and mountains, was a heron, ate fish, felt the pangs of a heron's hunger, spoke the heron's croak, died a heron's death. A dead jackal was lying on the sandy bank, and Siddhartha's soul slipped inside the body, was the dead jackal, lay on the banks, got bloated, stank, decayed, was dismembered by hyaenas, was skinned by vultures, turned into a skeleton, turned to dust, was blown across the fields. And Siddhartha's soul returned, had died, had decayed, was scattered as dust, had tasted the gloomy intoxication of the cycle, awaited in new thirst like a hunter in the gap, where he could escape from the cycle, where the end of the causes, where an eternity without suffering began. He killed his senses, he killed his memory, he slipped out of his self into thousands of other forms, was an animal, was carrion, was stone, was wood, was water, and awoke every time to find his old self again, sun shone or moon, was his self again, turned round in the cycle, felt thirst, overcame the thirst, felt new thirst. Siddhartha learned a lot when he was with the Samanas, many ways leading away from the self he learned to go. He went the way of self-denial by means of pain, through voluntarily suffering and overcoming pain, hunger, thirst, tiredness. He went the way of self-denial by means of meditation, through imagining the mind to be void of all conceptions. These and other ways he learned to go, a thousand times he left his self, for hours and days he remained in the non-self. But though the ways led away from the self, their end nevertheless always led back to the self. Though Siddhartha fled from the self a thousand times, stayed in nothingness, stayed in the animal, in the stone, the return was inevitable, inescapable was the hour, when he found himself back in the sunshine or in the moonlight, in the shade or in the rain, and was once again his self and Siddhartha, and again felt the agony of the cycle which had been forced upon him. By his side lived Govinda, his shadow, walked the same paths, undertook the same efforts. They rarely spoke to one another, than the service and the exercises required. Occasionally the two of them went through the villages, to beg for food for themselves and their teachers. "How do you think, Govinda," Siddhartha spoke one day while begging this way, "how do you think did we progress? Did we reach any goals?" Govinda answered: "We have learned, and we'll continue learning. You'll be a great Samana, Siddhartha. Quickly, you've learned every exercise, often the old Samanas have admired you. One day, you'll be a holy man, oh Siddhartha." Quoth Siddhartha: "I can't help but feel that it is not like this, my friend. What I've learned, being among the Samanas, up to this day, this, oh Govinda, I could have learned more quickly and by simpler means. In every tavern of that part of a town where the whorehouses are, my friend, among carters and gamblers I could have learned it." Quoth Govinda: "Siddhartha is putting me on. How could you have learned meditation, holding your breath, insensitivity against hunger and pain there among these wretched people?" And Siddhartha said quietly, as if he was talking to himself: "What is meditation? What is leaving one's body? What is fasting? What is holding one's breath? It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice-wine or fermented coconut-milk. Then he won't feel his self any more, then he won't feel the pains of life any more, then he finds a short numbing of the senses. When he falls asleep over his bowl of rice-wine, he'll find the same what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape their bodies through long exercises, staying in the non-self. This is how it is, oh Govinda." Quoth Govinda: "You say so, oh friend, and yet you know that Siddhartha is no driver of an ox-cart and a Samana is no drunkard. It's true that a drinker numbs his senses, it's true that he briefly escapes and rests, but he'll return from the delusion, finds everything to be unchanged, has not become wiser, has gathered no enlightenment,--has not risen several steps." And Siddhartha spoke with a smile: "I do not know, I've never been a drunkard. But that I, Siddhartha, find only a short numbing of the senses in my exercises and meditations and that I am just as far removed from wisdom, from salvation, as a child in the mother's womb, this I know, oh Govinda, this I know." And once again, another time, when Siddhartha left the forest together with Govinda, to beg for some food in the village for their brothers and teachers, Siddhartha began to speak and said: "What now, oh Govinda, might we be on the right path? Might we get closer to enlightenment? Might we get closer to salvation? Or do we perhaps live in a circle-- we, who have thought we were escaping the cycle?" Quoth Govinda: "We have learned a lot, Siddhartha, there is still much to learn. We are not going around in circles, we are moving up, the circle is a spiral, we have already ascended many a level." Siddhartha answered: "How old, would you think, is our oldest Samana, our venerable teacher?" Quoth Govinda: "Our oldest one might be about sixty years of age." And Siddhartha: "He has lived for sixty years and has not reached the nirvana. He'll turn seventy and eighty, and you and me, we will grow just as old and will do our exercises, and will fast, and will meditate. But we will not reach the nirvana, he won't and we won't. Oh Govinda, I believe out of all the Samanas out there, perhaps not a single one, not a single one, will reach the nirvana. We find comfort, we find numbness, we learn feats, to deceive others. But the most important thing, the path of paths, we will not find." "If you only," spoke Govinda, "wouldn't speak such terrible words, Siddhartha! How could it be that among so many learned men, among so many Brahmans, among so many austere and venerable Samanas, among so many who are searching, so many who are eagerly trying, so many holy men, no one will find the path of paths?" But Siddhartha said in a voice which contained just as much sadness as mockery, with a quiet, a slightly sad, a slightly mocking voice: "Soon, Govinda, your friend will leave the path of the Samanas, he has walked along your side for so long. I'm suffering of thirst, oh Govinda, and on this long path of a Samana, my thirst has remained as strong as ever. I always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions. I have asked the Brahmans, year after year, and I have asked the holy Vedas, year after year, and I have asked the devote Samanas, year after year. Perhaps, oh Govinda, it had been just as well, had been just as smart and just as profitable, if I had asked the hornbill-bird or the chimpanzee. It took me a long time and am not finished learning this yet, oh Govinda: that there is nothing to be learned! There is indeed no such thing, so I believe, as what we refer to as `learning'. There is, oh my friend, just one knowledge, this is everywhere, this is Atman, this is within me and within you and within every creature. And so I'm starting to believe that this knowledge has no worser enemy than the desire to know it, than learning." At this, Govinda stopped on the path, rose his hands, and spoke: "If you, Siddhartha, only would not bother your friend with this kind of talk! Truly, you words stir up fear in my heart. And just consider: what would become of the sanctity of prayer, what of the venerability of the Brahmans' caste, what of the holiness of the Samanas, if it was as you say, if there was no learning?! What, oh Siddhartha, what would then become of all of this what is holy, what is precious, what is venerable on earth?!" And Govinda mumbled a verse to himself, a verse from an Upanishad: He who ponderingly, of a purified spirit, loses himself in the meditation of Atman, unexpressable by words is his blissfulness of his heart. But Siddhartha remained silent. He thought about the words which Govinda had said to him and thought the words through to their end. Yes, he thought, standing there with his head low, what would remain of all that which seemed to us to be holy? What remains? What can stand the test? And he shook his head. At one time, when the two young men had lived among the Samanas for about three years and had shared their exercises, some news, a rumour, a myth reached them after being retold many times: A man had appeared, Gotama by name, the exalted one, the Buddha, he had overcome the suffering of the world in himself and had halted the cycle of rebirths. He was said to wander through the land, teaching, surrounded by disciples, without possession, without home, without a wife, in the yellow cloak of an ascetic, but with a cheerful brow, a man of bliss, and Brahmans and princes would bow down before him and would become his students. This myth, this rumour, this legend resounded, its fragrants rose up, here and there; in the towns, the Brahmans spoke of it and in the forest, the Samanas; again and again, the name of Gotama, the Buddha reached the ears of the young men, with good and with bad talk, with praise and with defamation. It was as if the plague had broken out in a country and news had been spreading around that in one or another place there was a man, a wise man, a knowledgeable one, whose word and breath was enough to heal everyone who had been infected with the pestilence, and as such news would go through the land and everyone would talk about it, many would believe, many would doubt, but many would get on their way as soon as possible, to seek the wise man, the helper, just like this this myth ran through the land, that fragrant myth of Gotama, the Buddha, the wise man of the family of Sakya. He possessed, so the believers said, the highest enlightenment, he remembered his previous lives, he had reached the nirvana and never returned into the cycle, was never again submerged in the murky river of physical forms. Many wonderful and unbelievable things were reported of him, he had performed miracles, had overcome the devil, had spoken to the gods. But his enemies and disbelievers said, this Gotama was a vain seducer, he would spent his days in luxury, scorned the offerings, was without learning, and knew neither exercises nor self-castigation. The myth of Buddha sounded sweet. The scent of magic flowed from these reports. After all, the world was sick, life was hard to bear--and behold, here a source seemed to spring forth, here a messenger seemed to call out, comforting, mild, full of noble promises. Everywhere where the rumour of Buddha was heard, everywhere in the lands of India, the young men listened up, felt a longing, felt hope, and among the Brahmans' sons of the towns and villages every pilgrim and stranger was welcome, when he brought news of him, the exalted one, the Sakyamuni. The myth had also reached the Samanas in the forest, and also Siddhartha, and also Govinda, slowly, drop by drop, every drop laden with hope, every drop laden with doubt. They rarely talked about it, because the oldest one of the Samanas did not like this myth. He had heard that this alleged Buddha used to be an ascetic before and had lived in the forest, but had then turned back to luxury and worldly pleasures, and he had no high opinion of this Gotama. "Oh Siddhartha," Govinda spoke one day to his friend. "Today, I was in the village, and a Brahman invited me into his house, and in his house, there was the son of a Brahman from Magadha, who has seen the Buddha with his own eyes and has heard him teach. Verily, this made my chest ache when I breathed, and thought to myself: If only I would too, if only we both would too, Siddhartha and me, live to see the hour when we will hear the teachings from the mouth of this perfected man! Speak, friend, wouldn't we want to go there too and listen to the teachings from the Buddha's mouth?" Quoth Siddhartha: "Always, oh Govinda, I had thought, Govinda would stay with the Samanas, always I had believed his goal was to live to be sixty and seventy years of age and to keep on practising those feats and exercises, which are becoming a Samana. But behold, I had not known Govinda well enough, I knew little of his heart. So now you, my faithful friend, want to take a new path and go there, where the Buddha spreads his teachings." Quoth Govinda: "You're mocking me. Mock me if you like, Siddhartha! But have you not also developed a desire, an eagerness, to hear these teachings? And have you not at one time said to me, you would not walk the path of the Samanas for much longer?" At this, Siddhartha laughed in his very own manner, in which his voice assumed a touch of sadness and a touch of mockery, and said: "Well, Govinda, you've spoken well, you've remembered correctly. If you only remembered the other thing as well, you've heard from me, which is that I have grown distrustful and tired against teachings and learning, and that my faith in words, which are brought to us by teachers, is small. But let's do it, my dear, I am willing to listen to these teachings--though in my heart I believe that we've already tasted the best fruit of these teachings." Quoth Govinda: "Your willingness delights my heart. But tell me, how should this be possible? How should the Gotama's teachings, even before we have heard them, have already revealed their best fruit to us?" Quoth Siddhartha: "Let us eat this fruit and wait for the rest, oh Govinda! But this fruit, which we already now received thanks to the Gotama, consisted in him calling us away from the Samanas! Whether he has also other and better things to give us, oh friend, let us await with calm hearts." On this very same day, Siddhartha informed the oldest one of the Samanas of his decision, that he wanted to leave him. He informed the oldest one with all the courtesy and modesty becoming to a younger one and a student. But the Samana became angry, because the two young men wanted to leave him, and talked loudly and used crude swearwords. Govinda was startled and became embarrassed. But Siddhartha put his mouth close to Govinda's ear and whispered to him: "Now, I want to show the old man that I've learned something from him." Positioning himself closely in front of the Samana, with a concentrated soul, he captured the old man's glance with his glances, deprived him of his power, made him mute, took away his free will, subdued him under his own will, commanded him, to do silently, whatever he demanded him to do. The old man became mute, his eyes became motionless, his will was paralysed, his arms were hanging down; without power, he had fallen victim to Siddhartha's spell. But Siddhartha's thoughts brought the Samana under their control, he had to carry out, what they commanded. And thus, the old man made several bows, performed gestures of blessing, spoke stammeringly a godly wish for a good journey. And the young men returned the bows with thanks, returned the wish, went on their way with salutations. On the way, Govinda said: "Oh Siddhartha, you have learned more from the Samanas than I knew. It is hard, it is very hard to cast a spell on an old Samana. Truly, if you had stayed there, you would soon have learned to walk on water." "I do not seek to walk on water," said Siddhartha. "Let old Samanas be content with such feats!" GOTAMA In the town of Savathi, every child knew the name of the exalted Buddha, and every house was prepared to fill the alms-dish of Gotama's disciples, the silently begging ones. Near the town was Gotama's favourite place to stay, the grove of Jetavana, which the rich merchant Anathapindika, an obedient worshipper of the exalted one, had given him and his people for a gift. All tales and answers, which the two young ascetics had received in their search for Gotama's abode, had pointed them towards this area. And arriving at Savathi, in the very first house, before the door of which they stopped to beg, food has been offered to them, and they accepted the food, and Siddhartha asked the woman, who handed them the food: "We would like to know, oh charitable one, where the Buddha dwells, the most venerable one, for we are two Samanas from the forest and have come, to see him, the perfected one, and to hear the teachings from his mouth." Quoth the woman: "Here, you have truly come to the right place, you Samanas from the forest. You should know, in Jetavana, in the garden of Anathapindika is where the exalted one dwells. There you pilgrims shall spent the night, for there is enough space for the innumerable, who flock here, to hear the teachings from his mouth." This made Govinda happy, and full of joy he exclaimed: "Well so, thus we have reached our destination, and our path has come to an end! But tell us, oh mother of the pilgrims, do you know him, the Buddha, have you seen him with your own eyes?" Quoth the woman: "Many times I have seen him, the exalted one. On many days, I have seen him, walking through the alleys in silence, wearing his yellow cloak, presenting his alms-dish in silence at the doors of the houses, leaving with a filled dish." Delightedly, Govinda listened and wanted to ask and hear much more. But Siddhartha urged him to walk on. They thanked and left and hardly had to ask for directions, for rather many pilgrims and monks as well from Gotama's community were on their way to the Jetavana. And since they reached it at night, there were constant arrivals, shouts, and talk of those who sought shelter and got it. The two Samanas, accustomed to life in the forest, found quickly and without making any noise a place to stay and rested there until the morning. At sunrise, they saw with astonishment what a large crowd of believers and curious people had spent the night here. On all paths of the marvellous grove, monks walked in yellow robes, under the trees they sat here and there, in deep contemplation--or in a conversation about spiritual matters, the shady gardens looked like a city, full of people, bustling like bees. The majority of the monks went out with their alms-dish, to collect food in town for their lunch, the only meal of the day. The Buddha himself, the enlightened one, was also in the habit of taking this walk to beg in the morning. Siddhartha saw him, and he instantly recognised him, as if a god had pointed him out to him. He saw him, a simple man in a yellow robe, bearing the alms-dish in his hand, walking silently. "Look here!" Siddhartha said quietly to Govinda. "This one is the Buddha." Attentively, Govinda looked at the monk in the yellow robe, who seemed to be in no way different from the hundreds of other monks. And soon, Govinda also realized: This is the one. And they followed him and observed him. The Buddha went on his way, modestly and deep in his thoughts, his calm face was neither happy nor sad, it seemed to smile quietly and inwardly. With a hidden smile, quiet, calm, somewhat resembling a healthy child, the Buddha walked, wore the robe and placed his feet just as all of his monks did, according to a precise rule. But his face and his walk, his quietly lowered glance, his quietly dangling hand and even every finger of his quietly dangling hand expressed peace, expressed perfection, did not search, did not imitate, breathed softly in an unwhithering calm, in an unwhithering light, an untouchable peace. Thus Gotama walked towards the town, to collect alms, and the two Samanas recognised him solely by the perfection of his calm, by the quietness of his appearance, in which there was no searching, no desire, no imitation, no effort to be seen, only light and peace. "Today, we'll hear the teachings from his mouth." said Govinda. Siddhartha did not answer. He felt little curiosity for the teachings, he did not believe that they would teach him anything new, but he had, just as Govinda had, heard the contents of this Buddha's teachings again and again, though these reports only represented second- or third-hand information. But attentively he looked at Gotama's head, his shoulders, his feet, his quietly dangling hand, and it seemed to him as if every joint of every finger of this hand was of these teachings, spoke of, breathed of, exhaled the fragrant of, glistened of truth. This man, this Buddha was truthful down to the gesture of his last finger. This man was holy. Never before, Siddhartha had venerated a person so much, never before he had loved a person as much as this one. They both followed the Buddha until they reached the town and then returned in silence, for they themselves intended to abstain from on this day. They saw Gotama returning--what he ate could not even have satisfied a bird's appetite, and they saw him retiring into the shade of the mango-trees. But in the evening, when the heat cooled down and everyone in the camp started to bustle about and gathered around, they heard the Buddha teaching. They heard his voice, and it was also perfected, was of perfect calmness, was full of peace. Gotama taught the teachings of suffering, of the origin of suffering, of the way to relieve suffering. Calmly and clearly his quiet speech flowed on. Suffering was life, full of suffering was the world, but salvation from suffering had been found: salvation was obtained by him who would walk the path of the Buddha. With a soft, yet firm voice the exalted one spoke, taught the four main doctrines, taught the eightfold path, patiently he went the usual path of the teachings, of the examples, of the repetitions, brightly and quietly his voice hovered over the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky. When the Buddha--night had already fallen--ended his speech, many a pilgrim stepped forward and asked to accepted into the community, sought refuge in the teachings. And Gotama accepted them by speaking: "You have heard the teachings well, it has come to you well. Thus join us and walk in holiness, to put an end to all suffering." Behold, then Govinda, the shy one, also stepped forward and spoke: "I also take my refuge in the exalted one and his teachings," and he asked to accepted into the community of his disciples and was accepted. Right afterwards, when the Buddha had retired for the night, Govinda turned to Siddhartha and spoke eagerly: "Siddhartha, it is not my place to scold you. We have both heard the exalted one, we have both perceived the teachings. Govinda has heard the teachings, he has taken refuge in it. But you, my honoured friend, don't you also want to walk the path of salvation? Would you want to hesitate, do you want to wait any longer?" Siddhartha awakened as if he had been asleep, when he heard Govinda's words. For a long time, he looked into Govinda's face. Then he spoke quietly, in a voice without mockery: "Govinda, my friend, now you have taken this step, now you have chosen this path. Always, oh Govinda, you've been my friend, you've always walked one step behind me. Often I have thought: Won't Govinda for once also take a step by himself, without me, out of his own soul? Behold, now you've turned into a man and are choosing your path for yourself. I wish that you would go it up to its end, oh my friend, that you shall find salvation!" Govinda, not completely understanding it yet, repeated his question in an impatient tone: "Speak up, I beg you, my dear! Tell me, since it could not be any other way, that you also, my learned friend, will take your refuge with the exalted Buddha!" Siddhartha placed his hand on Govinda's shoulder: "You failed to hear my good wish for you, oh Govinda. I'm repeating it: I wish that you would go this path up to its end, that you shall find salvation!" In this moment, Govinda realized that his friend had left him, and he started to weep. "Siddhartha!" he exclaimed lamentingly. Siddhartha kindly spoke to him: "Don't forget, Govinda, that you are now one of the Samanas of the Buddha! You have renounced your home and your parents, renounced your birth and possessions, renounced your free will, renounced all friendship. This is what the teachings require, this is what the exalted one wants. This is what you wanted for yourself. Tomorrow, oh Govinda, I'll leave you." For a long time, the friends continued walking in the grove; for a long time, they lay there and found no sleep. And over and over again, Govinda urged his friend, he should tell him why he would not want to seek refuge in Gotama's teachings, what fault he would find in these teachings. But Siddhartha turned him away every time and said: "Be content, Govinda! Very good are the teachings of the exalted one, how could I find a fault in them?" Very early in the morning, a follower of Buddha, one of his oldest monks, went through the garden and called all those to him who had as novices taken their refuge in the teachings, to dress them up in the yellow robe and to instruct them in the first teachings and duties of their position. Then Govinda broke loose, embraced once again his childhood friend and left with the novices. But Siddhartha walked through the grove, lost in thought. Then he happened to meet Gotama, the exalted one, and when he greeted him with respect and the Buddha's glance was so full of kindness and calm, the young man summoned his courage and asked the venerable one for the permission to talk to him. Silently the exalted one nodded his approval. Quoth Siddhartha: "Yesterday, oh exalted one, I had been privileged to hear your wondrous teachings. Together with my friend, I had come from afar, to hear your teachings. And now my friend is going to stay with your people, he has taken his refuge with you. But I will again start on my pilgrimage." "As you please," the venerable one spoke politely. "Too bold is my speech," Siddhartha continued, "but I do not want to leave the exalted one without having honestly told him my thoughts. Does it please the venerable one to listen to me for one moment longer?" Silently, the Buddha nodded his approval. Quoth Siddhartha: "One thing, oh most venerable one, I have admired in your teachings most of all. Everything in your teachings is perfectly clear, is proven; you are presenting the world as a perfect chain, a chain which is never and nowhere broken, an eternal chain the links of which are causes and effects. Never before, this has been seen so clearly; never before, this has been presented so irrefutably; truly, the heart of every Brahman has to beat stronger with love, once he has seen the world through your teachings perfectly connected, without gaps, clear as a crystal, not depending on chance, not depending on gods. Whether it may be good or bad, whether living according to it would be suffering or joy, I do not wish to discuss, possibly this is not essential--but the uniformity of the world, that everything which happens is connected, that the great and the small things are all encompassed by the same forces of time, by the same law of causes, of coming into being and of dying, this is what shines brightly out of your exalted teachings, oh perfected one. But according to your very own teachings, this unity and necessary sequence of all things is nevertheless broken in one place, through a small gap, this world of unity is invaded by something alien, something new, something which had not been there before, and which cannot be demonstrated and cannot be proven: these are your teachings of overcoming the world, of salvation. But with this small gap, with this small breach, the entire eternal and uniform law of the world is breaking apart again and becomes void. Please forgive me for expressing this objection." Quietly, Gotama had listened to him, unmoved. Now he spoke, the perfected one, with his kind, with his polite and clear voice: "You've heard the teachings, oh son of a Brahman, and good for you that you've thought about it thus deeply. You've found a gap in it, an error. You should think about this further. But be warned, oh seeker of knowledge, of the thicket of opinions and of arguing about words. There is nothing to opinions, they may be beautiful or ugly, smart or foolish, everyone can support them or discard them. But the teachings, you've heard from me, are no opinion, and their goal is not to explain the world to those who seek knowledge. They have a different goal; their goal is salvation from suffering. This is what Gotama teaches, nothing else." "I wish that you, oh exalted one, would not be angry with me," said the young man. "I have not spoken to you like this to argue with you, to argue about words. You are truly right, there is little to opinions. But let me say this one more thing: I have not doubted in you for a single moment. I have not doubted for a single moment that you are Buddha, that you have reached the goal, the highest goal towards which so many thousands of Brahmans and sons of Brahmans are on their way. You have found salvation from death. It has come to you in the course of your own search, on your own path, through thoughts, through meditation, through realizations, through enlightenment. It has not come to you by means of teachings! And--thus is my thought, oh exalted one,--nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! You will not be able to convey and say to anybody, oh venerable one, in words and through teachings what has happened to you in the hour of enlightenment! The teachings of the enlightened Buddha contain much, it teaches many to live righteously, to avoid evil. But there is one thing which these so clear, these so venerable teachings do not contain: they do not contain the mystery of what the exalted one has experienced for himself, he alone among hundreds of thousands. This is what I have thought and realized, when I have heard the teachings. This is why I am continuing my travels--not to seek other, better teachings, for I know there are none, but to depart from all teachings and all teachers and to reach my goal by myself or to die. But often, I'll think of this day, oh exalted one, and of this hour, when my eyes beheld a holy man." The Buddha's eyes quietly looked to the ground; quietly, in perfect equanimity his inscrutable face was smiling. "I wish," the venerable one spoke slowly, "that your thoughts shall not be in error, that you shall reach the goal! But tell me: Have you seen the multitude of my Samanas, my many brothers, who have taken refuge in the teachings? And do you believe, oh stranger, oh Samana, do you believe that it would be better for them all the abandon the teachings and to return into the life the world and of desires?" "Far is such a thought from my mind," exclaimed Siddhartha. "I wish that they shall all stay with the teachings, that they shall reach their goal! It is not my place to judge another person's life. Only for myself, for myself alone, I must decide, I must chose, I must refuse. Salvation from the self is what we Samanas search for, oh exalted one. If I merely were one of your disciples, oh venerable one, I'd fear that it might happen to me that only seemingly, only deceptively my self would be calm and be redeemed, but that in truth it would live on and grow, for then I had replaced my self with the teachings, my duty to follow you, my love for you, and the community of the monks!" With half of a smile, with an unwavering openness and kindness, Gotama looked into the stranger's eyes and bid him to leave with a hardly noticeable gesture. "You are wise, oh Samana.", the venerable one spoke. "You know how to talk wisely, my friend. Be aware of too much wisdom!" The Buddha turned away, and his glance and half of a smile remained forever etched in Siddhartha's memory. I have never before seen a person glance and smile, sit and walk this way, he thought; truly, I wish to be able to glance and smile, sit and walk this way, too, thus free, thus venerable, thus concealed, thus open, thus child-like and mysterious. Truly, only a person who has succeeded in reaching the innermost part of his self would glance and walk this way. Well so, I also will seek to reach the innermost part of my self. I saw a man, Siddhartha thought, a single man, before whom I would have to lower my glance. I do not want to lower my glance before any other, not before any other. No teachings will entice me any more, since this man's teachings have not enticed me. I am deprived by the Buddha, thought Siddhartha, I am deprived, and even more he has given to me. He has deprived me of my friend, the one who had believed in me and now believes in him, who had been my shadow and is now Gotama's shadow. But he has given me Siddhartha, myself. AWAKENING When Siddhartha left the grove, where the Buddha, the perfected one, stayed behind, where Govinda stayed behind, then he felt that in this grove his past life also stayed behind and parted from him. He pondered about this sensation, which filled him completely, as he was slowly walking along. He pondered deeply, like diving into a deep water he let himself sink down to the ground of the sensation, down to the place where the causes lie, because to identify the causes, so it seemed to him, is the very essence of thinking, and by this alone sensations turn into realizations and are not lost, but become entities and start to emit like rays of light what is inside of them. Slowly walking along, Siddhartha pondered. He realized that he was no youth any more, but had turned into a man. He realized that one thing had left him, as a snake is left by its old skin, that one thing no longer existed in him, which had accompanied him throughout his youth and used to be a part of him: the wish to have teachers and to listen to teachings. He had also left the last teacher who had appeared on his path, even him, the highest and wisest teacher, the most holy one, Buddha, he had left him, had to part with him, was not able to accept his teachings. Slower, he walked along in his thoughts and asked himself: "But what is this, what you have sought to learn from teachings and from teachers, and what they, who have taught you much, were still unable to teach you?" And he found: "It was the self, the purpose and essence of which I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, no thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha! And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!" Having been pondering while slowly walking along, he now stopped as these thoughts caught hold of him, and right away another thought sprang forth from these, a new thought, which was: "That I know nothing about myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahman, I was willing to dissect my self and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process." Siddhartha opened his eyes and looked around, a smile filled his face and a feeling of awakening from long dreams flowed through him from his head down to his toes. And it was not long before he walked again, walked quickly like a man who knows what he has got to do. "Oh," he thought, taking a deep breath, "now I would not let Siddhartha escape from me again! No longer, I want to begin my thoughts and my life with Atman and with the suffering of the world. I do not want to kill and dissect myself any longer, to find a secret behind the ruins. Neither Yoga-Veda shall teach me any more, nor Atharva-Veda, nor the ascetics, nor any kind of teachings. I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha." He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colourful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself. All of this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, entered Siddhartha for the first time through the eyes, was no longer a spell of Mara, was no longer the veil of Maya, was no longer a pointless and coincidental diversity of mere appearances, despicable to the deeply thinking Brahman, who scorns diversity, who seeks unity. Blue was blue, river was river, and if also in the blue and the river, in Siddhartha, the singular and divine lived hidden, so it was still that very divinity's way and purpose, to be here yellow, here blue, there sky, there forest, and here Siddhartha. The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything. "How deaf and stupid have I been!" he thought, walking swiftly along. "When someone reads a text, wants to discover its meaning, he will not scorn the symbols and letters and call them deceptions, coincidence, and worthless hull, but he will read them, he will study and love them, letter by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I have, for the sake of a meaning I had anticipated before I read, scorned the symbols and letters, I called the visible world a deception, called my eyes and my tongue coincidental and worthless forms without substance. No, this is over, I have awakened, I have indeed awakened and have not been born before this very day." In thinking these thoughts, Siddhartha stopped once again, suddenly, as if there was a snake lying in front of him on the path. Because suddenly, he had also become aware of this: He, who was indeed like someone who had just woken up or like a new-born baby, he had to start his life anew and start again at the very beginning. When he had left in this very morning from the grove Jetavana, the grove of that exalted one, already awakening, already on the path towards himself, he had every intention, regarded as natural and took for granted, that he, after years as an ascetic, would return to his home and his father. But now, only in this moment, when he stopped as if a snake was lying on his path, he also awoke to this realization: "But I am no longer the one I was, I am no ascetic any more, I am not a priest any more, I am no Brahman any more. Whatever should I do at home and at my father's place? Study? Make offerings? Practise meditation? But all this is over, all of this is no longer alongside my path." Motionless, Siddhartha remained standing there, and for the time of one moment and breath, his heart felt cold, he felt a cold in his chest, as a small animal, a bird or a rabbit, would when seeing how alone he was. For many years, he had been without home and had felt nothing. Now, he felt it. Still, even in the deepest meditation, he had been his father's son, had been a Brahman, of a high caste, a cleric. Now, he was nothing but Siddhartha, the awoken one, nothing else was left. Deeply, he inhaled, and for a moment, he felt cold and shivered. Nobody was thus alone as he was. There was no nobleman who did not belong to the noblemen, no worker that did not belong to the workers, and found refuge with them, shared their life, spoke their language. No Brahman, who would not be regarded as Brahmans and lived with them, no ascetic who would not find his refuge in the caste of the Samanas, and even the most forlorn hermit in the forest was not just one and alone, he was also surrounded by a place he belonged to, he also belonged to a caste, in which he was at home. Govinda had become a monk, and a thousand monks were his brothers, wore the same robe as he, believed in his faith, spoke his language. But he, Siddhartha, where did he belong to? With whom would he share his life? Whose language would he speak? Out of this moment, when the world melted away all around him, when he stood alone like a star in the sky, out of this moment of a cold and despair, Siddhartha emerged, more a self than before, more firmly concentrated. He felt: This had been the last tremor of the awakening, the last struggle of this birth. And it was not long until he walked again in long strides, started to proceed swiftly and impatiently, heading no longer for home, no longer to his father, no longer back. SECOND PART Dedicated to Wilhelm Gundert, my cousin in Japan KAMALA Siddhartha learned something new on every step of his path, for the world was transformed, and his heart was enchanted. He saw the sun rising over the mountains with their forests and setting over the distant beach with its palm-trees. At night, he saw the stars in the sky in their fixed positions and the crescent of the moon floating like a boat in the blue. He saw trees, stars, animals, clouds, rainbows, rocks, herbs, flowers, stream and river, the glistening dew in the bushes in the morning, distant high mountains which were blue and pale, birds sang and bees, wind silverishly blew through the rice-field. All of this, a thousand-fold and colourful, had always been there, always the sun and the moon had shone, always rivers had roared and bees had buzzed, but in former times all of this had been nothing more to Siddhartha than a fleeting, deceptive veil before his eyes, looked upon in distrust, destined to be penetrated and destroyed by thought, since it was not the essential existence, since this essence lay beyond, on the other side of, the visible. But now, his liberated eyes stayed on this side, he saw and became aware of the visible, sought to be at home in this world, did not search for the true essence, did not aim at a world beyond. Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike. Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the gold-beetle, the flower and the butterfly. Beautiful and lovely it was, thus to walk through the world, thus childlike, thus awoken, thus open to what is near, thus without distrust. Differently the sun burnt the head, differently the shade of the forest cooled him down, differently the stream and the cistern, the pumpkin and the banana tasted. Short were the days, short the nights, every hour sped swiftly away like a sail on the sea, and under the sail was a ship full of treasures, full of joy. Siddhartha saw a group of apes moving through the high canopy of the forest, high in the branches, and heard their savage, greedy song. Siddhartha saw a male sheep following a female one and mating with her. In a lake of reeds, he saw the pike hungrily hunting for its dinner; propelling themselves away from it, in fear, wiggling and sparkling, the young fish jumped in droves out of the water; the scent of strength and passion came forcefully out of the hasty eddies of the water, which the pike stirred up, impetuously hunting. All of this had always existed, and he had not seen it; he had not been with it. Now he was with it, he was part of it. Light and shadow ran through his eyes, stars and moon ran through his heart. On the way, Siddhartha also remembered everything he had experienced in the Garden Jetavana, the teaching he had heard there, the divine Buddha, the farewell from Govinda, the conversation with the exalted one. Again he remembered his own words, he had spoken to the exalted one, every word, and with astonishment he became aware of the fact that there he had said things which he had not really known yet at this time. What he had said to Gotama: his, the Buddha's, treasure and secret was not the teachings, but the unexpressable and not teachable, which he had experienced in the hour of his enlightenment--it was nothing but this very thing which he had now gone to experience, what he now began to experience. Now, he had to experience his self. It is true that he had already known for a long time that his self was Atman, in its essence bearing the same eternal characteristics as Brahman. But never, he had really found this self, because he had wanted to capture it in the net of thought. With the body definitely not being the self, and not the spectacle of the senses, so it also was not the thought, not the rational mind, not the learned wisdom, not the learned ability to draw conclusions and to develop previous thoughts in to new ones. No, this world of thought was also still on this side, and nothing could be achieved by killing the random self of the senses, if the random self of thoughts and learned knowledge was fattened on the other hand. Both, the thoughts as well as the senses, were pretty things, the ultimate meaning was hidden behind both of them, both had to be listened to, both had to be played with, both neither had to be scorned nor overestimated, from both the secret voices of the innermost truth had to be attentively perceived. He wanted to strive for nothing, except for what the voice commanded him to strive for, dwell on nothing, except where the voice would advise him to do so. Why had Gotama, at that time, in the hour of all hours, sat down under the bo-tree, where the enlightenment hit him? He had heard a voice, a voice in his own heart, which had commanded him to seek rest under this tree, and he had neither preferred self-castigation, offerings, ablutions, nor prayer, neither food nor drink, neither sleep nor dream, he had obeyed the voice. To obey like this, not to an external command, only to the voice, to be ready like this, this was good, this was necessary, nothing else was necessary. In the night when he slept in the straw hut of a ferryman by the river, Siddhartha had a dream: Govinda was standing in front of him, dressed in the yellow robe of an ascetic. Sad was how Govinda looked like, sadly he asked: Why have you forsaken me? At this, he embraced Govinda, wrapped his arms around him, and as he was pulling him close to his chest and kissed him, it was not Govinda any more, but a woman, and a full breast popped out of the woman's dress, at which Siddhartha lay and drank, sweetly and strongly tasted the milk from this breast. It tasted of woman and man, of sun and forest, of animal and flower, of every fruit, of every joyful desire. It intoxicated him and rendered him unconscious.--When Siddhartha woke up, the pale river shimmered through the door of the hut, and in the forest, a dark call of an owl resounded deeply and pleasantly. When the day began, Siddhartha asked his host, the ferryman, to get him across the river. The ferryman got him across the river on his bamboo-raft, the wide water shimmered reddishly in the light of the morning. "This is a beautiful river," he said to his companion. "Yes," said the ferryman, "a very beautiful river, I love it more than anything. Often I have listened to it, often I have looked into its eyes, and always I have learned from it. Much can be learned from a river." "I thank you, my benefactor," spoke Siddhartha, disembarking on the other side of the river. "I have no gift I could give you for your hospitality, my dear, and also no payment for your work. I am a man without a home, a son of a Brahman and a Samana." "I did see it," spoke the ferryman, "and I haven't expected any payment from you and no gift which would be the custom for guests to bear. You will give me the gift another time." "Do you think so?" asked Siddhartha amusedly. "Surely. This too, I have learned from the river: everything is coming back! You too, Samana, will come back. Now farewell! Let your friendship be my reward. Commemorate me, when you'll make offerings to the gods." Smiling, they parted. Smiling, Siddhartha was happy about the friendship and the kindness of the ferryman. "He is like Govinda," he thought with a smile, "all I meet on my path are like Govinda. All are thankful, though they are the ones who would have a right to receive thanks. All are submissive, all would like to be friends, like to obey, think little. Like children are all people." At about noon, he came through a village. In front of the mud cottages, children were rolling about in the street, were playing with pumpkin-seeds and sea-shells, screamed and wrestled, but they all timidly fled from the unknown Samana. In the end of the village, the path led through a stream, and by the side of the stream, a young woman was kneeling and washing clothes. When Siddhartha greeted her, she lifted her head and looked up to him with a smile, so that he saw the white in her eyes glistening. He called out a blessing to her, as it is the custom among travellers, and asked how far he still had to go to reach the large city. Then she got up and came to him, beautifully her wet mouth was shimmering in her young face. She exchanged humorous banter with him, asked whether he had eaten already, and whether it was true that the Samanas slept alone in the forest at night and were not allowed to have any women with them. While talking, she put her left foot on his right one and made a movement as a woman does who would want to initiate that kind of sexual pleasure with a man, which the textbooks call "climbing a tree". Siddhartha felt his blood heating up, and since in this moment he had to think of his dream again, he bend slightly down to the woman and kissed with his lips the brown nipple of her breast. Looking up, he saw her face smiling full of lust and her eyes, with contracted pupils, begging with desire. Siddhartha also felt desire and felt the source of his sexuality moving; but since he had never touched a woman before, he hesitated for a moment, while his hands were already prepared to reach out for her. And in this moment he heard, shuddering with awe, the voice of his innermost self, and this voice said No. Then, all charms disappeared from the young woman's smiling face, he no longer saw anything else but the damp glance of a female animal in heat. Politely, he petted her cheek, turned away from her and disappeared away from the disappointed woman with light steps into the bamboo-wood. On this day, he reached the large city before the evening, and was happy, for he felt the need to be among people. For a long time, he had lived in the forests, and the straw hut of the ferryman, in which he had slept that night, had been the first roof for a long time he has had over his head. Before the city, in a beautifully fenced grove, the traveller came across a small group of servants, both male and female, carrying baskets. In their midst, carried by four servants in an ornamental sedan-chair, sat a woman, the mistress, on red pillows under a colourful canopy. Siddhartha stopped at the entrance to the pleasure-garden and watched the parade, saw the servants, the maids, the baskets, saw the sedan-chair and saw the lady in it. Under black hair, which made to tower high on her head, he saw a very fair, very delicate, very smart face, a brightly red mouth, like a freshly cracked fig, eyebrows which were well tended and painted in a high arch, smart and watchful dark eyes, a clear, tall neck rising from a green and golden garment, resting fair hands, long and thin, with wide golden bracelets over the wrists. Siddhartha saw how beautiful she was, and his heart rejoiced. He bowed deeply, when the sedan-chair came closer, and straightening up again, he looked at the fair, charming face, read for a moment in the smart eyes with the high arcs above, breathed in a slight fragrant, he did not know. With a smile, the beautiful women nodded for a moment and disappeared into the grove, and then the servant as well. Thus I am entering this city, Siddhartha thought, with a charming omen. He instantly felt drawn into the grove, but he thought about it, and only now he became aware of how the servants and maids had looked at him at the entrance, how despicable, how distrustful, how rejecting. I am still a Samana, he thought, I am still an ascetic and beggar. I must not remain like this, I will not be able to enter the grove like this. And he laughed. The next person who came along this path he asked about the grove and for the name of the woman, and was told that this was the grove of Kamala, the famous courtesan, and that, aside from the grove, she owned a house in the city. Then, he entered the city. Now he had a goal. Pursuing his goal, he allowed the city to suck him in, drifted through the flow of the streets, stood still on the squares, rested on the stairs of stone by the river. When the evening came, he made friends with barber's assistant, whom he had seen working in the shade of an arch in a building, whom he found again praying in a temple of Vishnu, whom he told about stories of Vishnu and the Lakshmi. Among the boats by the river, he slept this night, and early in the morning, before the first customers came into his shop, he had the barber's assistant shave his beard and cut his hair, comb his hair and anoint it with fine oil. Then he went to take his bath in the river. When late in the afternoon, beautiful Kamala approached her grove in her sedan-chair, Siddhartha was standing at the entrance, made a bow and received the courtesan's greeting. But that servant who walked at the very end of her train he motioned to him and asked him to inform his mistress that a young Brahman would wish to talk to her. After a while, the servant returned, asked him, who had been waiting, to follow him conducted him, who was following him, without a word into a pavilion, where Kamala was lying on a couch, and left him alone with her. "Weren't you already standing out there yesterday, greeting me?" asked Kamala. "It's true that I've already seen and greeted you yesterday." "But didn't you yesterday wear a beard, and long hair, and dust in your hair?" "You have observed well, you have seen everything. You have seen Siddhartha, the son of a Brahman, who has left his home to become a Samana, and who has been a Samana for three years. But now, I have left that path and came into this city, and the first one I met, even before I had entered the city, was you. To say this, I have come to you, oh Kamala! You are the first woman whom Siddhartha is not addressing with his eyes turned to the ground. Never again I want to turn my eyes to the ground, when I'm coming across a beautiful woman." Kamala smiled and played with her fan of peacocks' feathers. And asked: "And only to tell me this, Siddhartha has come to me?" "To tell you this and to thank you for being so beautiful. And if it doesn't displease you, Kamala, I would like to ask you to be my friend and teacher, for I know nothing yet of that art which you have mastered in the highest degree." At this, Kamala laughed aloud. "Never before this has happened to me, my friend, that a Samana from the forest came to me and wanted to learn from me! Never before this has happened to me, that a Samana came to me with long hair and an old, torn loin-cloth! Many young men come to me, and there are also sons of Brahmans among them, but they come in beautiful clothes, they come in fine shoes, they have perfume in their hair and money in their pouches. This is, oh Samana, how the young men are like who come to me." Quoth Siddhartha: "Already I am starting to learn from you. Even yesterday, I was already learning. I have already taken off my beard, have combed the hair, have oil in my hair. There is little which is still missing in me, oh excellent one: fine clothes, fine shoes, money in my pouch. You shall know, Siddhartha has set harder goals for himself than such trifles, and he has reached them. How shouldn't I reach that goal, which I have set for myself yesterday: to be your friend and to learn the joys of love from you! You'll see that I'll learn quickly, Kamala, I have already learned harder things than what you're supposed to teach me. And now let's get to it: You aren't satisfied with Siddhartha as he is, with oil in his hair, but without clothes, without shoes, without money?" Laughing, Kamala exclaimed: "No, my dear, he doesn't satisfy me yet. Clothes are what he must have, pretty clothes, and shoes, pretty shoes, and lots of money in his pouch, and gifts for Kamala. Do you know it now, Samana from the forest? Did you mark my words?" "Yes, I have marked your words," Siddhartha exclaimed. "How should I not mark words which are coming from such a mouth! Your mouth is like a freshly cracked fig, Kamala. My mouth is red and fresh as well, it will be a suitable match for yours, you'll see.--But tell me, beautiful Kamala, aren't you at all afraid of the Samana from the forest, who has come to learn how to make love?" "Whatever for should I be afraid of a Samana, a stupid Samana from the forest, who is coming from the jackals and doesn't even know yet what women are?" "Oh, he's strong, the Samana, and he isn't afraid of anything. He could force you, beautiful girl. He could kidnap you. He could hurt you." "No, Samana, I am not afraid of this. Did any Samana or Brahman ever fear, someone might come and grab him and steal his learning, and his religious devotion, and his depth of thought? No, for they are his very own, and he would only give away from those whatever he is willing to give and to whomever he is willing to give. Like this it is, precisely like this it is also with Kamala and with the pleasures of love. Beautiful and red is Kamala's mouth, but just try to kiss it against Kamala's will, and you will not obtain a single drop of sweetness from it, which knows how to give so many sweet things! You are learning easily, Siddhartha, thus you should also learn this: love can be obtained by begging, buying, receiving it as a gift, finding it in the street, but it cannot be stolen. In this, you have come up with the wrong path. No, it would be a pity, if a pretty young man like you would want to tackle it in such a wrong manner." Siddhartha bowed with a smile. "It would be a pity, Kamala, you are so right! It would be such a great pity. No, I shall not lose a single drop of sweetness from your mouth, nor you from mine! So it is settled: Siddhartha will return, once he'll have what he still lacks: clothes, shoes, money. But speak, lovely Kamala, couldn't you still give me one small advice?" "An advice? Why not? Who wouldn't like to give an advice to a poor, ignorant Samana, who is coming from the jackals of the forest?" "Dear Kamala, thus advise me where I should go to, that I'll find these three things most quickly?" "Friend, many would like to know this. You must do what you've learned and ask for money, clothes, and shoes in return. There is no other way for a poor man to obtain money. What might you be able to do?" "I can think. I can wait. I can fast." "Nothing else?" "Nothing. But yes, I can also write poetry. Would you like to give me a kiss for a poem?" "I would like to, if I'll like your poem. What would be its title?" Siddhartha spoke, after he had thought about it for a moment, these verses: Into her shady grove stepped the pretty Kamala, At the grove's entrance stood the brown Samana. Deeply, seeing the lotus's blossom, Bowed that man, and smiling Kamala thanked. More lovely, thought the young man, than offerings for gods, More lovely is offering to pretty Kamala. Kamala loudly clapped her hands, so that the golden bracelets clanged. "Beautiful are your verses, oh brown Samana, and truly, I'm losing nothing when I'm giving you a kiss for them." She beckoned him with her eyes, he tilted his head so that his face touched hers and placed his mouth on that mouth which was like a freshly cracked fig. For a long time, Kamala kissed him, and with a deep astonishment Siddhartha felt how she taught him, how wise she was, how she controlled him, rejected him, lured him, and how after this first one there was to be a long, a well ordered, well tested sequence of kisses, everyone different from the others, he was still to receive. Breathing deeply, he remained standing where he was, and was in this moment astonished like a child about the cornucopia of knowledge and things worth learning, which revealed itself before his eyes. "Very beautiful are your verses," exclaimed Kamala, "if I was rich, I would give you pieces of gold for them. But it will be difficult for you to earn thus much money with verses as you need. For you need a lot of money, if you want to be Kamala's friend." "The way you're able to kiss, Kamala!" stammered Siddhartha. "Yes, this I am able to do, therefore I do not lack clothes, shoes, bracelets, and all beautiful things. But what will become of you? Aren't you able to do anything else but thinking, fasting, making poetry?" "I also know the sacrificial songs," said Siddhartha, "but I do not want to sing them any more. I also know magic spells, but I do not want to speak them any more. I have read the scriptures--" "Stop," Kamala interrupted him. "You're able to read? And write?" "Certainly, I can do this. Many people can do this." "Most people can't. I also can't do it. It is very good that you're able to read and write, very good. You will also still find use for the magic spells." In this moment, a maid came running in and whispered a message into her mistress's ear. "There's a visitor for me," exclaimed Kamala. "Hurry and get yourself away, Siddhartha, nobody may see you in here, remember this! Tomorrow, I'll see you again." But to the maid she gave the order to give the pious Brahman white upper garments. Without fully understanding what was happening to him, Siddhartha found himself being dragged away by the maid, brought into a garden-house avoiding the direct path, being given upper garments as a gift, led into the bushes, and urgently admonished to get himself out of the grove as soon as possible without being seen. Contently, he did as he had been told. Being accustomed to the forest, he managed to get out of the grove and over the hedge without making a sound. Contently, he returned to the city, carrying the rolled up garments under his arm. At the inn, where travellers stay, he positioned himself by the door, without words he asked for food, without a word he accepted a piece of rice-cake. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow, he thought, I will ask no one for food any more. Suddenly, pride flared up in him. He was no Samana any more, it was no longer becoming to him to beg. He gave the rice-cake to a dog and remained without food. "Simple is the life which people lead in this world here," thought Siddhartha. "It presents no difficulties. Everything was difficult, toilsome, and ultimately hopeless, when I was still a Samana. Now, everything is easy, easy like that lessons in kissing, which Kamala is giving me. I need clothes and money, nothing else; this a small, near goals, they won't make a person lose any sleep." He had already discovered Kamala's house in the city long before, there he turned up the following day. "Things are working out well," she called out to him. "They are expecting you at Kamaswami's, he is the richest merchant of the city. If he'll like you, he'll accept you into his service. Be smart, brown Samana. I had others tell him about you. Be polite towards him, he is very powerful. But don't be too modest! I do not want you to become his servant, you shall become his equal, or else I won't be satisfied with you. Kamaswami is starting to get old and lazy. If he'll like you, he'll entrust you with a lot." Siddhartha thanked her and laughed, and when she found out that he had not eaten anything yesterday and today, she sent for bread and fruits and treated him to it. "You've been lucky," she said when they parted, "I'm opening one door after another for you. How come? Do you have a spell?" Siddhartha said: "Yesterday, I told you I knew how to think, to wait, and to fast, but you thought this was of no use. But it is useful for many things, Kamala, you'll see. You'll see that the stupid Samanas are learning and able to do many pretty things in the forest, which the likes of you aren't capable of. The day before yesterday, I was still a shaggy beggar, as soon as yesterday I have kissed Kamala, and soon I'll be a merchant and have money and all those things you insist upon." "Well yes," she admitted. "But where would you be without me? What would you be, if Kamala wasn't helping you?" "Dear Kamala," said Siddhartha and straightened up to his full height, "when I came to you into your grove, I did the first step. It was my resolution to learn love from this most beautiful woman. From that moment on when I had made this resolution, I also knew that I would carry it out. I knew that you would help me, at your first glance at the entrance of the grove I already knew it." "But what if I hadn't been willing?" "You were willing. Look, Kamala: When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn't let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. This is what Siddhartha has learned among the Samanas. This is what fools call magic and of which they think it would be effected by means of the daemons. Nothing is effected by daemons, there are no daemons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast." Kamala listened to him. She loved his voice, she loved the look from his eyes. "Perhaps it is so," she said quietly, "as you say, friend. But perhaps it is also like this: that Siddhartha is a handsome man, that his glance pleases the women, that therefore good fortune is coming towards him." With one kiss, Siddhartha bid his farewell. "I wish that it should be this way, my teacher; that my glance shall please you, that always good fortune shall come to me out of your direction!" WITH THE CHILDLIKE PEOPLE Siddhartha went to Kamaswami the merchant, he was directed into a rich house, servants led him between precious carpets into a chamber, where he awaited the master of the house. Kamaswami entered, a swiftly, smoothly moving man with very gray hair, with very intelligent, cautious eyes, with a greedy mouth. Politely, the host and the guest greeted one another. "I have been told," the merchant began, "that you were a Brahman, a learned man, but that you seek to be in the service of a merchant. Might you have become destitute, Brahman, so that you seek to serve?" "No," said Siddhartha, "I have not become destitute and have never been destitute. You should know that I'm coming from the Samanas, with whom I have lived for a long time." "If you're coming from the Samanas, how could you be anything but destitute? Aren't the Samanas entirely without possessions?" "I am without possessions," said Siddhartha, "if this is what you mean. Surely, I am without possessions. But I am so voluntarily, and therefore I am not destitute." "But what are you planning to live of, being without possessions?" "I haven't thought of this yet, sir. For more than three years, I have been without possessions, and have never thought about of what I should live." "So you've lived of the possessions of others." "Presumable this is how it is. After all, a merchant also lives of what other people own." "Well said. But he wouldn't take anything from another person for nothing; he would give his merchandise in return." "So it seems to be indeed. Everyone takes, everyone gives, such is life." "But if you don't mind me asking: being without possessions, what would you like to give?" "Everyone gives what he has. The warrior gives strength, the merchant gives merchandise, the teacher teachings, the farmer rice, the fisher fish." "Yes indeed. And what is it now what you've got to give? What is it that you've learned, what you're able to do?" "I can think. I can wait. I can fast." "That's everything?" "I believe, that's everything!" "And what's the use of that? For example, the fasting--what is it good for?" "It is very good, sir. When a person has nothing to eat, fasting is the smartest thing he could do. When, for example, Siddhartha hadn't learned to fast, he would have to accept any kind of service before this day is up, whether it may be with you or wherever, because hunger would force him to do so. But like this, Siddhartha can wait calmly, he knows no impatience, he knows no emergency, for a long time he can allow hunger to besiege him and can laugh about it. This, sir, is what fasting is good for." "You're right, Samana. Wait for a moment." Kamaswami left the room and returned with a scroll, which he handed to his guest while asking: "Can you read this?" Siddhartha looked at the scroll, on which a sales-contract had been written down, and began to read out its contents. "Excellent," said Kamaswami. "And would you write something for me on this piece of paper?" He handed him a piece of paper and a pen, and Siddhartha wrote and returned the paper. Kamaswami read: "Writing is good, thinking is better. Being smart is good, being patient is better." "It is excellent how you're able to write," the merchant praised him. "Many a thing we will still have to discuss with one another. For today, I'm asking you to be my guest and to live in this house." Siddhartha thanked and accepted, and lived in the dealers house from now on. Clothes were brought to him, and shoes, and every day, a servant prepared a bath for him. Twice a day, a plentiful meal was served, but Siddhartha only ate once a day, and ate neither meat nor did he drink wine. Kamaswami told him about his trade, showed him the merchandise and storage-rooms, showed him calculations. Siddhartha got to know many new things, he heard a lot and spoke little. And thinking of Kamala's words, he was never subservient to the merchant, forced him to treat him as an equal, yes even more than an equal. Kamaswami conducted his business with care and often with passion, but Siddhartha looked upon all of this as if it was a game, the rules of which he tried hard to learn precisely, but the contents of which did not touch his heart. He was not in Kamaswami's house for long, when he already took part in his landlords business. But daily, at the hour appointed by her, he visited beautiful Kamala, wearing pretty clothes, fine shoes, and soon he brought her gifts as well. Much he learned from her red, smart mouth. Much he learned from her tender, supple hand. Him, who was, regarding love, still a boy and had a tendency to plunge blindly and insatiably into lust like into a bottomless pit, him she taught, thoroughly starting with the basics, about that school of thought which teaches that pleasure cannot be taken without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every look, every spot of the body, however small it was, had its secret, which would bring happiness to those who know about it and unleash it. She taught him, that lovers must not part from one another after celebrating love, without one admiring the other, without being just as defeated as they have been victorious, so that with none of them should start feeling fed up or bored and get that evil feeling of having abused or having been abused. Wonderful hours he spent with the beautiful and smart artist, became her student, her lover, her friend. Here with Kamala was the worth and purpose of his present life, nt with the business of Kamaswami. The merchant passed to duties of writing important letters and contracts on to him and got into the habit of discussing all important affairs with him. He soon saw that Siddhartha knew little about rice and wool, shipping and trade, but that he acted in a fortunate manner, and that Siddhartha surpassed him, the merchant, in calmness and equanimity, and in the art of listening and deeply understanding previously unknown people. "This Brahman," he said to a friend, "is no proper merchant and will never be one, there is never any passion in his soul when he conducts our business. But he has that mysterious quality of those people to whom success comes all by itself, whether this may be a good star of his birth, magic, or something he has learned among Samanas. He always seems to be merely playing with out business-affairs, they never fully become a part of him, they never rule over him, he is never afraid of failure, he is never upset by a loss." The friend advised the merchant: "Give him from the business he conducts for you a third of the profits, but let him also be liable for the same amount of the losses, when there is a loss. Then, he'll become more zealous." Kamaswami followed the advice. But Siddhartha cared little about this. When he made a profit, he accepted it with equanimity; when he made losses, he laughed and said: "Well, look at this, so this one turned out badly!" It seemed indeed, as if he did not care about the business. At one time, he travelled to a village to buy a large harvest of rice there. But when he got there, the rice had already been sold to another merchant. Nevertheless, Siddhartha stayed for several days in that village, treated the farmers for a drink, gave copper-coins to their children, joined in the celebration of a wedding, and returned extremely satisfied from his trip. Kamaswami held against him that he had not turned back right away, that he had wasted time and money. Siddhartha answered: "Stop scolding, dear friend! Nothing was ever achieved by scolding. If a loss has occurred, let me bear that loss. I am very satisfied with this trip. I have gotten to know many kinds of people, a Brahman has become my friend, children have sat on my knees, farmers have shown me their fields, nobody knew that I was a merchant." "That's all very nice," exclaimed Kamaswami indignantly, "but in fact, you are a merchant after all, one ought to think! Or might you have only travelled for your amusement?" "Surely," Siddhartha laughed, "surely I have travelled for my amusement. For what else? I have gotten to know people and places, I have received kindness and trust, I have found friendship. Look, my dear, if I had been Kamaswami, I would have travelled back, being annoyed and in a hurry, as soon as I had seen that my purchase had been rendered impossible, and time and money would indeed have been lost. But like this, I've had a few good days, I've learned, had joy, I've neither harmed myself nor others by annoyance and hastiness. And if I'll ever return there again, perhaps to buy an upcoming harvest, or for whatever purpose it might be, friendly people will receive me in a friendly and happy manner, and I will praise myself for not showing any hurry and displeasure at that time. So, leave it as it is, my friend, and don't harm yourself by scolding! If the day will come, when you will see: this Siddhartha is harming me, then speak a word and Siddhartha will go on his own path. But until then, let's be satisfied with one another." Futile were also the merchant's attempts, to convince Siddhartha that he should eat his bread. Siddhartha ate his own bread, or rather they both ate other people's bread, all people's bread. Siddhartha never listened to Kamaswami's worries and Kamaswami had many worries. Whether there was a business-deal going on which was in danger of failing, or whether a shipment of merchandise seemed to have been lost, or a debtor seemed to be unable to pay, Kamaswami could never convince his partner that it would be useful to utter a few words of worry or anger, to have wrinkles on the forehead, to sleep badly. When, one day, Kamaswami held against him that he had learned everything he knew from him, he replied: "Would you please not kid me with such jokes! What I've learned from you is how much a basket of fish costs and how much interests may be charged on loaned money. These are your areas of expertise. I haven't learned to think from you, my dear Kamaswami, you ought to be the one seeking to learn from me." Indeed his soul was not with the trade. The business was good enough to provide him with the money for Kamala, and it earned him much more than he needed. Besides from this, Siddhartha's interest and curiosity was only concerned with the people, whose businesses, crafts, worries, pleasures, and acts of foolishness used to be as alien and distant to him as the moon. However easily he succeeded in talking to all of them, in living with all of them, in learning from all of them, he was still aware that there was something which separated him from them and this separating factor was him being a Samana. He saw mankind going through life in a childlike or animallike manner, which he loved and also despised at the same time. He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to entirely unworthy of this price, for money, for little pleasures, for being slightly honoured, he saw them scolding and insulting each other, he saw them complaining about pain at which a Samana would only smile, and suffering because of deprivations which a Samana would not feel. He was open to everything, these people brought his way. Welcome was the merchant who offered him linen for sale, welcome was the debtor who sought another loan, welcome was the beggar who told him for one hour the story of his poverty and who was not half as poor as any given Samana. He did not treat the rich foreign merchant any different than the servant who shaved him and the street-vendor whom he let cheat him out of some small change when buying bananas. When Kamaswami came to him, to complain about his worries or to reproach him concerning his business, he listened curiously and happily, was puzzled by him, tried to understand him, consented that he was a little bit right, only as much as he considered indispensable, and turned away from him, towards the next person who would ask for him. And there were many who came to him, many to do business with him, many to cheat him, many to draw some secret out of him, many to appeal to his sympathy, many to get his advice. He gave advice, he pitied, he made gifts, he let them cheat him a bit, and this entire game and the passion with which all people played this game occupied his thoughts just as much as the gods and Brahmans used to occupy them. At times he felt, deep in his chest, a dying, quiet voice, which admonished him quietly, lamented quietly; he hardly perceived it. And then, for an hour, he became aware of the strange life he was leading, of him doing lots of things which were only a game, of, though being happy and feeling joy at times, real life still passing him by and not touching him. As a ball-player plays with his balls, he played with his business-deals, with the people around him, watched them, found amusement in them; with his heart, with the source of his being, he was not with them. The source ran somewhere, far away from him, ran and ran invisibly, had nothing to do with his life any more. And at several times he suddenly became scared on account of such thoughts and wished that he would also be gifted with the ability to participate in all of this childlike-naive occupations of the daytime with passion and with his heart, really to live, really to act, really to enjoy and to live instead of just standing by as a spectator. But again and again, he came back to beautiful Kamala, learned the art of love, practised the cult of lust, in which more than in anything else giving and taking becomes one, chatted with her, learned from her, gave her advice, received advice. She understood him better than Govinda used to understand him, she was more similar to him. Once, he said to her: "You are like me, you are different from most people. You are Kamala, nothing else, and inside of you, there is a peace and refuge, to which you can go at every hour of the day and be at home at yourself, as I can also do. Few people have this, and yet all could have it." "Not all people are smart," said Kamala. "No," said Siddhartha, "that's not the reason why. Kamaswami is just as smart as I, and still has no refuge in himself. Others have it, who are small children with respect to their mind. Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which is blown and is turning around through the air, and wavers, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars, they go on a fixed course, no wind reaches them, in themselves they have their law and their course. Among all the learned men and Samanas, of which I knew many, there was one of this kind, a perfected one, I'll never be able to forget him. It is that Gotama, the exalted one, who is spreading that teachings. Thousands of followers are listening to his teachings every day, follow his instructions every hour, but they are all falling leaves, not in themselves they have teachings and a law." Kamala looked at him with a smile. "Again, you're talking about him," she said, "again, you're having a Samana's thoughts." Siddhartha said nothing, and they played the game of love, one of the thirty or forty different games Kamala knew. Her body was flexible like that of a jaguar and like the bow of a hunter; he who had learned from her how to make love, was knowledgeable of many forms of lust, many secrets. For a long time, she played with Siddhartha, enticed him, rejected him, forced him, embraced him: enjoyed his masterful skills, until he was defeated and rested exhausted by her side. The courtesan bent over him, took a long look at his face, at his eyes, which had grown tired. "You are the best lover," she said thoughtfully, "I ever saw. You're stronger than others, more supple, more willing. You've learned my art well, Siddhartha. At some time, when I'll be older, I'd want to bear your child. And yet, my dear, you've remained a Samana, and yet you do not love me, you love nobody. Isn't it so?" "It might very well be so," Siddhartha said tiredly. "I am like you. You also do not love--how else could you practise love as a craft? Perhaps, people of our kind can't love. The childlike people can; that's their secret." SANSARA For a long time, Siddhartha had lived the life of the world and of lust, though without being a part of it. His senses, which he had killed off in hot years as a Samana, had awoken again, he had tasted riches, had tasted lust, had tasted power; nevertheless he had still remained in his heart for a long time a Samana; Kamala, being smart, had realized this quite right. It was still the art of thinking, of waiting, of fasting, which guided his life; still the people of the world, the childlike people, had remained alien to him as he was alien to them. Years passed by; surrounded by the good life, Siddhartha hardly felt them fading away. He had become rich, for quite a while he possessed a house of his own and his own servants, and a garden before the city by the river. The people liked him, they came to him, whenever they needed money or advice, but there was nobody close to him, except Kamala. That high, bright state of being awake, which he had experienced that one time at the height of his youth, in those days after Gotama's sermon, after the separation from Govinda, that tense expectation, that proud state of standing alone without teachings and without teachers, that supple willingness to listen to the divine voice in his own heart, had slowly become a memory, had been fleeting; distant and quiet, the holy source murmured, which used to be near, which used to murmur within himself. Nevertheless, many things he had learned from the Samanas, he had learned from Gotama, he had learned from his father the Brahman, had remained within him for a long time afterwards: moderate living, joy of thinking, hours of meditation, secret knowledge of the self, of his eternal entity, which is neither body nor consciousness. Many a part of this he still had, but one part after another had been submerged and had gathered dust. Just as a potter's wheel, once it has been set in motion, will keep on turning for a long time and only slowly lose its vigour and come to a stop, thus Siddhartha's soul had kept on turning the wheel of asceticism, the wheel of thinking, the wheel of differentiation for a long time, still turning, but it turned slowly and hesitantly and was close to coming to a standstill. Slowly, like humidity entering the dying stem of a tree, filling it slowly and making it rot, the world and sloth had entered Siddhartha's soul, slowly it filled his soul, made it heavy, made it tired, put it to sleep. On the other hand, his senses had become alive, there was much they had learned, much they had experienced. Siddhartha had learned to trade, to use his power over people, to enjoy himself with a woman, he had learned to wear beautiful clothes, to give orders to servants, to bathe in perfumed waters. He had learned to eat tenderly and carefully prepared food, even fish, even meat and poultry, spices and sweets, and to drink wine, which causes sloth and forgetfulness. He had learned to play with dice and on a chess-board, to watch dancing girls, to have himself carried about in a sedan-chair, to sleep on a soft bed. But still he had felt different from and superior to the others; always he had watched them with some mockery, some mocking disdain, with the same disdain which a Samana constantly feels for the people of the world. When Kamaswami was ailing, when he was annoyed, when he felt insulted, when he was vexed by his worries as a merchant, Siddhartha had always watched it with mockery. Just slowly and imperceptibly, as the harvest seasons and rainy seasons passed by, his mockery had become more tired, his superiority had become more quiet. Just slowly, among his growing riches, Siddhartha had assumed something of the childlike people's ways for himself, something of their childlikeness and of their fearfulness. And yet, he envied them, envied them just the more, the more similar he became to them. He envied them for the one thing that was missing from him and that they had, the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the amount of passion in their joys and fears, the fearful but sweet happiness of being constantly in love. These people were all of the time in love with themselves, with women, with their children, with honours or money, with plans or hopes. But he did not learn this from them, this out of all things, this joy of a child and this foolishness of a child; he learned from them out of all things the unpleasant ones, which he himself despised. It happened more and more often that, in the morning after having had company the night before, he stayed in bed for a long time, felt unable to think and tired. It happened that he became angry and impatient, when Kamaswami bored him with his worries. It happened that he laughed just too loud, when he lost a game of dice. His face was still smarter and more spiritual than others, but it rarely laughed, and assumed, one after another, those features which are so often found in the faces of rich people, those features of discontent, of sickliness, of ill-humour, of sloth, of a lack of love. Slowly the disease of the soul, which rich people have, grabbed hold of him. Like a veil, like a thin mist, tiredness came over Siddhartha, slowly, getting a bit denser every day, a bit murkier every month, a bit heavier every year. As a new dress becomes old in time, loses its beautiful colour in time, gets stains, gets wrinkles, gets worn off at the seams, and starts to show threadbare spots here and there, thus Siddhartha's new life, which he had started after his separation from Govinda, had grown old, lost colour and splendour as the years passed by, was gathering wrinkles and stains, and hidden at bottom, already showing its ugliness here and there, disappointment and disgust were waiting. Siddhartha did not notice it. He only noticed that this bright and reliable voice inside of him, which had awoken in him at that time and had ever guided him in his best times, had become silent. He had been captured by the world, by lust, covetousness, sloth, and finally also by that vice which he had used to despise and mock the most as the most foolish one of all vices: greed. Property, possessions, and riches also had finally captured him; they were no longer a game and trifles to him, had become a shackle and a burden. In a strange and devious way, Siddhartha had gotten into this final and most base of all dependencies, by means of the game of dice. It was since that time, when he had stopped being a Samana in his heart, that Siddhartha began to play the game for money and precious things, which he at other times only joined with a smile and casually as a custom of the childlike people, with an increasing rage and passion. He was a feared gambler, few dared to take him on, so high and audacious were his stakes. He played the game due to a pain of his heart, losing and wasting his wretched money in the game brought him an angry joy, in no other way he could demonstrate his disdain for wealth, the merchants' false god, more clearly and more mockingly. Thus he gambled with high stakes and mercilessly, hating himself, mocking himself, won thousands, threw away thousands, lost money, lost jewelry, lost a house in the country, won again, lost again. That fear, that terrible and petrifying fear, which he felt while he was rolling the dice, while he was worried about losing high stakes, that fear he loved and sought to always renew it, always increase it, always get it to a slightly higher level, for in this feeling alone he still felt something like happiness, something like an intoxication, something like an elevated form of life in the midst of his saturated, lukewarm, dull life. And after each big loss, his mind was set on new riches, pursued the trade more zealously, forced his debtors more strictly to pay, because he wanted to continue gambling, he wanted to continue squandering, continue demonstrating his disdain of wealth. Siddhartha lost his calmness when losses occurred, lost his patience when he was not payed on time, lost his kindness towards beggars, lost his disposition for giving away and loaning money to those who petitioned him. He, who gambled away tens of thousands at one roll of the dice and laughed at it, became more strict and more petty in his business, occasionally dreaming at night about money! And whenever he woke up from this ugly spell, whenever he found his face in the mirror at the bedroom's wall to have aged and become more ugly, whenever embarrassment and disgust came over him, he continued fleeing, fleeing into a new game, fleeing into a numbing of his mind brought on by sex, by wine, and from there he fled back into the urge to pile up and obtain possessions. In this pointless cycle he ran, growing tired, growing old, growing ill. Then the time came when a dream warned him. He had spent the hours of the evening with Kamala, in her beautiful pleasure-garden. They had been sitting under the trees, talking, and Kamala had said thoughtful words, words behind which a sadness and tiredness lay hidden. She had asked him to tell her about Gotama, and could not hear enough of him, how clear his eyes, how still and beautiful his mouth, how kind his smile, how peaceful his walk had been. For a long time, he had to tell her about the exalted Buddha, and Kamala had sighed and had said: "One day, perhaps soon, I'll also follow that Buddha. I'll give him my pleasure-garden for a gift and take my refuge in his teachings." But after this, she had aroused him, and had tied him to her in the act of making love with painful fervour, biting and in tears, as if, once more, she wanted to squeeze the last sweet drop out of this vain, fleeting pleasure. Never before, it had become so strangely clear to Siddhartha, how closely lust was akin to death. Then he had lain by her side, and Kamala's face had been close to him, and under her eyes and next to the corners of her mouth he had, as clearly as never before, read a fearful inscription, an inscription of small lines, of slight grooves, an inscription reminiscent of autumn and old age, just as Siddhartha himself, who was only in his forties, had already noticed, here and there, gray hairs among his black ones. Tiredness was written on Kamala's beautiful face, tiredness from walking a long path, which has no happy destination, tiredness and the beginning of withering, and concealed, still unsaid, perhaps not even conscious anxiety: fear of old age, fear of the autumn, fear of having to die. With a sigh, he had bid his farewell to her, the soul full of reluctance, and full of concealed anxiety. Then, Siddhartha had spent the night in his house with dancing girls and wine, had acted as if he was superior to them towards the fellow-members of his caste, though this was no longer true, had drunk much wine and gone to bed a long time after midnight, being tired and yet excited, close to weeping and despair, and had for a long time sought to sleep in vain, his heart full of misery which he thought he could not bear any longer, full of a disgust which he felt penetrating his entire body like the lukewarm, repulsive taste of the wine, the just too sweet, dull music, the just too soft smile of the dancing girls, the just too sweet scent of their hair and breasts. But more than by anything else, he was disgusted by himself, by his perfumed hair, by the smell of wine from his mouth, by the flabby tiredness and listlessness of his skin. Like when someone, who has eaten and drunk far too much, vomits it back up again with agonising pain and is nevertheless glad about the relief, thus this sleepless man wished to free himself of these pleasures, these habits and all of this pointless life and himself, in an immense burst of disgust. Not until the light of the morning and the beginning of the first activities in the street before his city-house, he had slightly fallen asleep, had found for a few moments a half unconsciousness, a hint of sleep. In those moments, he had a dream: Kamala owned a small, rare singing bird in a golden cage. Of this bird, he dreamt. He dreamt: this bird had become mute, who at other times always used to sing in the morning, and since this arose his attention, he stepped in front of the cage and looked inside; there the small bird was dead and lay stiff on the ground. He took it out, weighed it for a moment in his hand, and then threw it away, out in the street, and in the same moment, he felt terribly shocked, and his heart hurt, as if he had thrown away from himself all value and everything good by throwing out this dead bird. Starting up from this dream, he felt encompassed by a deep sadness. Worthless, so it seemed to him, worthless and pointless was the way he had been going through life; nothing which was alive, nothing which was in some way delicious or worth keeping he had left in his hands. Alone he stood there and empty like a castaway on the shore. With a gloomy mind, Siddhartha went to the pleasure-garden he owned, locked the gate, sat down under a mango-tree, felt death in his heart and horror in his chest, sat and sensed how everything died in him, withered in him, came to an end in him. By and by, he gathered his thoughts, and in his mind, he once again went the entire path of his life, starting with the first days he could remember. When was there ever a time when he had experienced happiness, felt a true bliss? Oh yes, several times he had experienced such a thing. In his years as a boy, he has had a taste of it, when he had obtained praise from the Brahmans, he had felt it in his heart: "There is a path in front of the one who has distinguished himself in the recitation of the holy verses, in the dispute with the learned ones, as an assistant in the offerings." Then, he had felt it in his heart: "There is a path in front of you, you are destined for, the gods are awaiting you." And again, as a young man, when the ever rising, upward fleeing, goal of all thinking had ripped him out of and up from the multitude of those seeking the same goal, when he wrestled in pain for the purpose of Brahman, when every obtained knowledge only kindled new thirst in him, then again he had, in the midst of the thirst, in the midst of the pain felt this very same thing: "Go on! Go on! You are called upon!" He had heard this voice when he had left his home and had chosen the life of a Samana, and again when he had gone away from the Samanas to that perfected one, and also when he had gone away from him to the uncertain. For how long had he not heard this voice any more, for how long had he reached no height any more, how even and dull was the manner in which his path had passed through life, for many long years, without a high goal, without thirst, without elevation, content with small lustful pleasures and yet never satisfied! For all of these many years, without knowing it himself, he had tried hard and longed to become a man like those many, like those children, and in all this, his life had been much more miserable and poorer than theirs, and their goals were not his, nor their worries; after all, that entire world of the Kamaswami-people had only been a game to him, a dance he would watch, a comedy. Only Kamala had been dear, had been valuable to him--but was she still thus? Did he still need her, or she him? Did they not play a game without an ending? Was it necessary to live for this? No, it was not necessary! The name of this game was Sansara, a game for children, a game which was perhaps enjoyable to play once, twice, ten times--but for ever and ever over again? Then, Siddhartha knew that the game was over, that he could not play it any more. Shivers ran over his body, inside of him, so he felt, something had died. That entire day, he sat under the mango-tree, thinking of his father, thinking of Govinda, thinking of Gotama. Did he have to leave them to become a Kamaswami? He still sat there, when the night had fallen. When, looking up, he caught sight of the stars, he thought: "Here I'm sitting under my mango-tree, in my pleasure-garden." He smiled a little --was it really necessary, was it right, was it not as foolish game, that he owned a mango-tree, that he owned a garden? He also put an end to this, this also died in him. He rose, bid his farewell to the mango-tree, his farewell to the pleasure-garden. Since he had been without food this day, he felt strong hunger, and thought of his house in the city, of his chamber and bed, of the table with the meals on it. He smiled tiredly, shook himself, and bid his farewell to these things. In the same hour of the night, Siddhartha left his garden, left the city, and never came back. For a long time, Kamaswami had people look for him, thinking that he had fallen into the hands of robbers. Kamala had no one look for him. When she was told that Siddhartha had disappeared, she was not astonished. Did she not always expect it? Was he not a Samana, a man who was at home nowhere, a pilgrim? And most of all, she had felt this the last time they had been together, and she was happy, in spite of all the pain of the loss, that she had pulled him so affectionately to her heart for this last time, that she had felt one more time to be so completely possessed and penetrated by him. When she received the first news of Siddhartha's disappearance, she went to the window, where she held a rare singing bird captive in a golden cage. She opened the door of the cage, took the bird out and let it fly. For a long time, she gazed after it, the flying bird. From this day on, she received no more visitors and kept her house locked. But after some time, she became aware that she was pregnant from the last time she was together with Siddhartha. BY THE RIVER Siddhartha walked through the forest, was already far from the city, and knew nothing but that one thing, that there was no going back for him, that this life, as he had lived it for many years until now, was over and done away with, and that he had tasted all of it, sucked everything out of it until he was disgusted with it. Dead was the singing bird, he had dreamt of. Dead was the bird in his heart. Deeply, he had been entangled in Sansara, he had sucked up disgust and death from all sides into his body, like a sponge sucks up water until it is full. And full he was, full of the feeling of been sick of it, full of misery, full of death, there was nothing left in this world which could have attracted him, given him joy, given him comfort. Passionately he wished to know nothing about himself anymore, to have rest, to be dead. If there only was a lightning-bolt to strike him dead! If there only was a tiger to devour him! If there only was a wine, a poison which would numb his senses, bring him forgetfulness and sleep, and no awakening from that! Was there still any kind of filth, he had not soiled himself with, a sin or foolish act he had not committed, a dreariness of the soul he had not brought upon himself? Was it still at all possible to be alive? Was it possible, to breathe in again and again, to breathe out, to feel hunger, to eat again, to sleep again, to sleep with a woman again? Was this cycle not exhausted and brought to a conclusion for him? Siddhartha reached the large river in the forest, the same river over which a long time ago, when he had still been a young man and came from the town of Gotama, a ferryman had conducted him. By this river he stopped, hesitantly he stood at the bank. Tiredness and hunger had weakened him, and whatever for should he walk on, wherever to, to which goal? No, there were no more goals, there was nothing left but the deep, painful yearning to shake off this whole desolate dream, to spit out this stale wine, to put an end to this miserable and shameful life. A hang bent over the bank of the river, a coconut-tree; Siddhartha leaned against its trunk with his shoulder, embraced the trunk with one arm, and looked down into the green water, which ran and ran under him, looked down and found himself to be entirely filled with the wish to let go and to drown in these waters. A frightening emptiness was reflected back at him by the water, answering to the terrible emptiness in his soul. Yes, he had reached the end. There was nothing left for him, except to annihilate himself, except to smash the failure into which he had shaped his life, to throw it away, before the feet of mockingly laughing gods. This was the great vomiting he had longed for: death, the smashing to bits of the form he hated! Let him be food for fishes, this dog Siddhartha, this lunatic, this depraved and rotten body, this weakened and abused soul! Let him be food for fishes and crocodiles, let him be chopped to bits by the daemons! With a distorted face, he stared into the water, saw the reflection of his face and spit at it. In deep tiredness, he took his arm away from the trunk of the tree and turned a bit, in order to let himself fall straight down, in order to finally drown. With his eyes closed, he slipped towards death. Then, out of remote areas of his soul, out of past times of his now weary life, a sound stirred up. It was a word, a syllable, which he, without thinking, with a slurred voice, spoke to himself, the old word which is the beginning and the end of all prayers of the Brahmans, the holy "Om", which roughly means "that what is perfect" or "the completion". And in the moment when the sound of "Om" touched Siddhartha's ear, his dormant spirit suddenly woke up and realized the foolishness of his actions. Siddhartha was deeply shocked. So this was how things were with him, so doomed was he, so much he had lost his way and was forsaken by all knowledge, that he had been able to seek death, that this wish, this wish of a child, had been able to grow in him: to find rest by annihilating his body! What all agony of these recent times, all sobering realizations, all desperation had not brought about, this was brought on by this moment, when the Om entered his consciousness: he became aware of himself in his misery and in his error. Om! he spoke to himself: Om! and again he knew about Brahman, knew about the indestructibility of life, knew about all that is divine, which he had forgotten. But this was only a moment, flash. By the foot of the coconut-tree, Siddhartha collapsed, struck down by tiredness, mumbling Om, placed his head on the root of the tree and fell into a deep sleep. Deep was his sleep and without dreams, for a long time he had not known such a sleep any more. When he woke up after many hours, he felt as if ten years had passed, he heard the water quietly flowing, did not know where he was and who had brought him here, opened his eyes, saw with astonishment that there were trees and the sky above him, and he remembered where he was and how he got here. But it took him a long while for this, and the past seemed to him as if it had been covered by a veil, infinitely distant, infinitely far away, infinitely meaningless. He only knew that his previous life (in the first moment when he thought about it, this past life seemed to him like a very old, previous incarnation, like an early pre-birth of his present self)--that his previous life had been abandoned by him, that, full of disgust and wretchedness, he had even intended to throw his life away, but that by a river, under a coconut-tree, he has come to his senses, the holy word Om on his lips, that then he had fallen asleep and had now woken up and was looking at the world as a new man. Quietly, he spoke the word Om to himself, speaking which he had fallen asleep, and it seemed to him as if his entire long sleep had been nothing but a long meditative recitation of Om, a thinking of Om, a submergence and complete entering into Om, into the nameless, the perfected. What a wonderful sleep had this been! Never before by sleep, he had been thus refreshed, thus renewed, thus rejuvenated! Perhaps, he had really died, had drowned and was reborn in a new body? But no, he knew himself, he knew his hand and his feet, knew the place where he lay, knew this self in his chest, this Siddhartha, the eccentric, the weird one, but this Siddhartha was nevertheless transformed, was renewed, was strangely well rested, strangely awake, joyful and curious. Siddhartha straightened up, then he saw a person sitting opposite to him, an unknown man, a monk in a yellow robe with a shaven head, sitting in the position of pondering. He observed the man, who had neither hair on his head nor a beard, and he had not observed him for long when he recognised this monk as Govinda, the friend of his youth, Govinda who had taken his refuge with the exalted Buddha. Govinda had aged, he too, but still his face bore the same features, expressed zeal, faithfulness, searching, timidness. But when Govinda now, sensing his gaze, opened his eyes and looked at him, Siddhartha saw that Govinda did not recognise him. Govinda was happy to find him awake; apparently, he had been sitting here for a long time and been waiting for him to wake up, though he did not know him. "I have been sleeping," said Siddhartha. "However did you get here?" "You have been sleeping," answered Govinda. "It is not good to be sleeping in such places, where snakes often are and the animals of the forest have their paths. I, oh sir, am a follower of the exalted Gotama, the Buddha, the Sakyamuni, and have been on a pilgrimage together with several of us on this path, when I saw you lying and sleeping in a place where it is dangerous to sleep. Therefore, I sought to wake you up, oh sir, and since I saw that your sleep was very deep, I stayed behind from my group and sat with you. And then, so it seems, I have fallen asleep myself, I who wanted to guard your sleep. Badly, I have served you, tiredness has overwhelmed me. But now that you're awake, let me go to catch up with my brothers." "I thank you, Samana, for watching out over my sleep," spoke Siddhartha. "You're friendly, you followers of the exalted one. Now you may go then." "I'm going, sir. May you, sir, always be in good health." "I thank you, Samana." Govinda made the gesture of a salutation and said: "Farewell." "Farewell, Govinda," said Siddhartha. The monk stopped. "Permit me to ask, sir, from where do you know my name?" Now, Siddhartha smiled. "I know you, oh Govinda, from your father's hut, and from the school of the Brahmans, and from the offerings, and from our walk to the Samanas, and from that hour when you took your refuge with the exalted one in the grove Jetavana." "You're Siddhartha," Govinda exclaimed loudly. "Now, I'm recognising you, and don't comprehend any more how I couldn't recognise you right away. Be welcome, Siddhartha, my joy is great, to see you again." "It also gives me joy, to see you again. You've been the guard of my sleep, again I thank you for this, though I wouldn't have required any guard. Where are you going to, oh friend?" "I'm going nowhere. We monks are always travelling, whenever it is not the rainy season, we always move from one place to another, live according to the rules if the teachings passed on to us, accept alms, move on. It is always like this. But you, Siddhartha, where are you going to?" Quoth Siddhartha: "With me too, friend, it is as it is with you. I'm going nowhere. I'm just travelling. I'm on a pilgrimage." Govinda spoke: "You're saying: you're on a pilgrimage, and I believe in you. But, forgive me, oh Siddhartha, you do not look like a pilgrim. You're wearing a rich man's garments, you're wearing the shoes of a distinguished gentleman, and your hair, with the fragrance of perfume, is not a pilgrim's hair, not the hair of a Samana." "Right so, my dear, you have observed well, your keen eyes see everything. But I haven't said to you that I was a Samana. I said: I'm on a pilgrimage. And so it is: I'm on a pilgrimage." "You're on a pilgrimage," said Govinda. "But few would go on a pilgrimage in such clothes, few in such shoes, few with such hair. Never I have met such a pilgrim, being a pilgrim myself for many years." "I believe you, my dear Govinda. But now, today, you've met a pilgrim just like this, wearing such shoes, such a garment. Remember, my dear: Not eternal is the world of appearances, not eternal, anything but eternal are our garments and the style of our hair, and our hair and bodies themselves. I'm wearing a rich man's clothes, you've seen this quite right. I'm wearing them, because I have been a rich man, and I'm wearing my hair like the worldly and lustful people, for I have been one of them." "And now, Siddhartha, what are you now?" "I don't know it, I don't know it just like you. I'm travelling. I was a rich man and am no rich man any more, and what I'll be tomorrow, I don't know." "You've lost your riches?" "I've lost them or they me. They somehow happened to slip away from me. The wheel of physical manifestations is turning quickly, Govinda. Where is Siddhartha the Brahman? Where is Siddhartha the Samana? Where is Siddhartha the rich man? Non-eternal things change quickly, Govinda, you know it." Govinda looked at the friend of his youth for a long time, with doubt in his eyes. After that, he gave him the salutation which one would use on a gentleman and went on his way. With a smiling face, Siddhartha watched him leave, he loved him still, this faithful man, this fearful man. And how could he not have loved everybody and everything in this moment, in the glorious hour after his wonderful sleep, filled with Om! The enchantment, which had happened inside of him in his sleep and by means of the Om, was this very thing that he loved everything, that he was full of joyful love for everything he saw. And it was this very thing, so it seemed to him now, which had been his sickness before, that he was not able to love anybody or anything. With a smiling face, Siddhartha watched the leaving monk. The sleep had strengthened him much, but hunger gave him much pain, for by now he had not eaten for two days, and the times were long past when he had been tough against hunger. With sadness, and yet also with a smile, he thought of that time. In those days, so he remembered, he had boasted of three things to Kamala, had been able to do three noble and undefeatable feats: fasting--waiting--thinking. These had been his possession, his power and strength, his solid staff; in the busy, laborious years of his youth, he had learned these three feats, nothing else. And now, they had abandoned him, none of them was his any more, neither fasting, nor waiting, nor thinking. For the most wretched things, he had given them up, for what fades most quickly, for sensual lust, for the good life, for riches! His life had indeed been strange. And now, so it seemed, now he had really become a childlike person. Siddhartha thought about his situation. Thinking was hard on him, he did not really feel like it, but he forced himself. Now, he thought, since all these most easily perishing things have slipped from me again, now I'm standing here under the sun again just as I have been standing here a little child, nothing is mine, I have no abilities, there is nothing I could bring about, I have learned nothing. How wondrous is this! Now, that I'm no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I'm starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile. Yes, his fate had been strange! Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid. But he could not feed sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh about this strange, foolish world. "Things are going downhill with you!" he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all. He liked this well, kindly he smiled at the river. Was this not the river in which he had intended to drown himself, in past times, a hundred years ago, or had he dreamed this? Wondrous indeed was my life, so he thought, wondrous detours it has taken. As a boy, I had only to do with gods and offerings. As a youth, I had only to do with asceticism, with thinking and meditation, was searching for Brahman, worshipped the eternal in the Atman. But as a young man, I followed the penitents, lived in the forest, suffered of heat and frost, learned to hunger, taught my body to become dead. Wonderfully, soon afterwards, insight came towards me in the form of the great Buddha's teachings, I felt the knowledge of the oneness of the world circling in me like my own blood. But I also had to leave Buddha and the great knowledge. I went and learned the art of love with Kamala, learned trading with Kamaswami, piled up money, wasted money, learned to love my stomach, learned to please my senses. I had to spend many years losing my spirit, to unlearn thinking again, to forget the oneness. Isn't it just as if I had turned slowly and on a long detour from a man into a child, from a thinker into a childlike person? And yet, this path has been very good; and yet, the bird in my chest has not died. But what a path has this been! I had to pass through so much stupidity, through so much vices, through so many errors, through so much disgust and disappointments and woe, just to become a child again and to be able to start over. But it was right so, my heart says "Yes" to it, my eyes smile to it. I've had to experience despair, I've had to sink down to the most foolish one of all thoughts, to the thought of suicide, in order to be able to experience divine grace, to hear Om again, to be able to sleep properly and awake properly again. I had to become a fool, to find Atman in me again. I had to sin, to be able to live again. Where else might my path lead me to? It is foolish, this path, it moves in loops, perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go as it likes, I want to take it. Wonderfully, he felt joy rolling like waves in his chest. Wherever from, he asked his heart, where from did you get this happiness? Might it come from that long, good sleep, which has done me so good? Or from the word Om, which I said? Or from the fact that I have escaped, that I have completely fled, that I am finally free again and am standing like a child under the sky? Oh how good is it to have fled, to have become free! How clean and beautiful is the air here, how good to breathe! There, where I ran away from, there everything smelled of ointments, of spices, of wine, of excess, of sloth. How did I hate this world of the rich, of those who revel in fine food, of the gamblers! How did I hate myself for staying in this terrible world for so long! How did I hate myself, have deprive, poisoned, tortured myself, have made myself old and evil! No, never again I will, as I used to like doing so much, delude myself into thinking that Siddhartha was wise! But this one thing I have done well, this I like, this I must praise, that there is now an end to that hatred against myself, to that foolish and dreary life! I praise you, Siddhartha, after so many years of foolishness, you have once again had an idea, have done something, have heard the bird in your chest singing and have followed it! Thus he praised himself, found joy in himself, listened curiously to his stomach, which was rumbling with hunger. He had now, so he felt, in these recent times and days, completely tasted and spit out, devoured up to the point of desperation and death, a piece of suffering, a piece of misery. Like this, it was good. For much longer, he could have stayed with Kamaswami, made money, wasted money, filled his stomach, and let his soul die of thirst; for much longer he could have lived in this soft, well upholstered hell, if this had not happened: the moment of complete hopelessness and despair, that most extreme moment, when he hung over the rushing waters and was ready to destroy himself. That he had felt this despair, this deep disgust, and that he had not succumbed to it, that the bird, the joyful source and voice in him was still alive after all, this was why he felt joy, this was why he laughed, this was why his face was smiling brightly under his hair which had turned gray. "It is good," he thought, "to get a taste of everything for oneself, which one needs to know. That lust for the world and riches do not belong to the good things, I have already learned as a child. I have known it for a long time, but I have experienced only now. And now I know it, don't just know it in my memory, but in my eyes, in my heart, in my stomach. Good for me, to know this!" For a long time, he pondered his transformation, listened to the bird, as it sang for joy. Had not this bird died in him, had he not felt its death? No, something else from within him had died, something which already for a long time had yearned to die. Was it not this what he used to intend to kill in his ardent years as a penitent? Was this not his self, his small, frightened, and proud self, he had wrestled with for so many years, which had defeated him again and again, which was back again after every killing, prohibited joy, felt fear? Was it not this, which today had finally come to its death, here in the forest, by this lovely river? Was it not due to this death, that he was now like a child, so full of trust, so without fear, so full of joy? Now Siddhartha also got some idea of why he had fought this self in vain as a Brahman, as a penitent. Too much knowledge had held him back, too many holy verses, too many sacrificial rules, to much self-castigation, so much doing and striving for that goal! Full of arrogance, he had been, always the smartest, always working the most, always one step ahead of all others, always the knowing and spiritual one, always the priest or wise one. Into being a priest, into this arrogance, into this spirituality, his self had retreated, there it sat firmly and grew, while he thought he would kill it by fasting and penance. Now he saw it and saw that the secret voice had been right, that no teacher would ever have been able to bring about his salvation. Therefore, he had to go out into the world, lose himself to lust and power, to woman and money, had to become a merchant, a dice-gambler, a drinker, and a greedy person, until the priest and Samana in him was dead. Therefore, he had to continue bearing these ugly years, bearing the disgust, the teachings, the pointlessness of a dreary and wasted life up to the end, up to bitter despair, until Siddhartha the lustful, Siddhartha the greedy could also die. He had died, a new Siddhartha had woken up from the sleep. He would also grow old, he would also eventually have to die, mortal was Siddhartha, mortal was every physical form. But today he was young, was a child, the new Siddhartha, and was full of joy. He thought these thoughts, listened with a smile to his stomach, listened gratefully to a buzzing bee. Cheerfully, he looked into the rushing river, never before he had liked a water so well as this one, never before he had perceived the voice and the parable of the moving water thus strongly and beautifully. It seemed to him, as if the river had something special to tell him, something he did not know yet, which was still awaiting him. In this river, Siddhartha had intended to drown himself, in it the old, tired, desperate Siddhartha had drowned today. But the new Siddhartha felt a deep love for this rushing water, and decided for himself, not to leave it very soon. THE FERRYMAN By this river I want to stay, thought Siddhartha, it is the same which I have crossed a long time ago on my way to the childlike people, a friendly ferryman had guided me then, he is the one I want to go to, starting out from his hut, my path had led me at that time into a new life, which had now grown old and is dead--my present path, my present new life, shall also take its start there! Tenderly, he looked into the rushing water, into the transparent green, into the crystal lines of its drawing, so rich in secrets. Bright pearls he saw rising from the deep, quiet bubbles of air floating on the reflecting surface, the blue of the sky being depicted in it. With a thousand eyes, the river looked at him, with green ones, with white ones, with crystal ones, with sky-blue ones. How did he love this water, how did it delight him, how grateful was he to it! In his heart he heard the voice talking, which was newly awaking, and it told him: Love this water! Stay near it! Learn from it! Oh yes, he wanted to learn from it, he wanted to listen to it. He who would understand this water and its secrets, so it seemed to him, would also understand many other things, many secrets, all secrets. But out of all secrets of the river, he today only saw one, this one touched his soul. He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment! Great be he who would grasp this, understand this! He understood and grasped it not, only felt some idea of it stirring, a distant memory, divine voices. Siddhartha rose, the workings of hunger in his body became unbearable. In a daze he walked on, up the path by the bank, upriver, listened to the current, listened to the rumbling hunger in his body. When he reached the ferry, the boat was just ready, and the same ferryman who had once transported the young Samana across the river, stood in the boat, Siddhartha recognised him, he had also aged very much. "Would you like to ferry me over?" he asked. The ferryman, being astonished to see such an elegant man walking along and on foot, took him into his boat and pushed it off the bank. "It's a beautiful life you have chosen for yourself," the passenger spoke. "It must be beautiful to live by this water every day and to cruise on it." With a smile, the man at the oar moved from side to side: "It is beautiful, sir, it is as you say. But isn't every life, isn't every work beautiful?" "This may be true. But I envy you for yours." "Ah, you would soon stop enjoying it. This is nothing for people wearing fine clothes." Siddhartha laughed. "Once before, I have been looked upon today because of my clothes, I have been looked upon with distrust. Wouldn't you, ferryman, like to accept these clothes, which are a nuisance to me, from me? For you must know, I have no money to pay your fare." "You're joking, sir," the ferryman laughed. "I'm not joking, friend. Behold, once before you have ferried me across this water in your boat for the immaterial reward of a good deed. Thus, do it today as well, and accept my clothes for it." "And do you, sir, intent to continue travelling without clothes?" "Ah, most of all I wouldn't want to continue travelling at all. Most of all I would like you, ferryman, to give me an old loincloth and kept me with you as your assistant, or rather as your trainee, for I'll have to learn first how to handle the boat." For a long time, the ferryman looked at the stranger, searching. "Now I recognise you," he finally said. "At one time, you've slept in my hut, this was a long time ago, possibly more than twenty years ago, and you've been ferried across the river by me, and we parted like good friends. Haven't you've been a Samana? I can't think of your name any more." "My name is Siddhartha, and I was a Samana, when you've last seen me." "So be welcome, Siddhartha. My name is Vasudeva. You will, so I hope, be my guest today as well and sleep in my hut, and tell me, where you're coming from and why these beautiful clothes are such a nuisance to you." They had reached the middle of the river, and Vasudeva pushed the oar with more strength, in order to overcome the current. He worked calmly, his eyes fixed in on the front of the boat, with brawny arms. Siddhartha sat and watched him, and remembered, how once before, on that last day of his time as a Samana, love for this man had stirred in his heart. Gratefully, he accepted Vasudeva's invitation. When they had reached the bank, he helped him to tie the boat to the stakes; after this, the ferryman asked him to enter the hut, offered him bread and water, and Siddhartha ate with eager pleasure, and also ate with eager pleasure of the mango fruits, Vasudeva offered him. Afterwards, it was almost the time of the sunset, they sat on a log by the bank, and Siddhartha told the ferryman about where he originally came from and about his life, as he had seen it before his eyes today, in that hour of despair. Until late at night, lasted his tale. Vasudeva listened with great attention. Listening carefully, he let everything enter his mind, birthplace and childhood, all that learning, all that searching, all joy, all distress. This was among the ferryman's virtues one of the greatest: like only a few, he knew how to listen. Without him having spoken a word, the speaker sensed how Vasudeva let his words enter his mind, quiet, open, waiting, how he did not lose a single one, awaited not a single one with impatience, did not add his praise or rebuke, was just listening. Siddhartha felt, what a happy fortune it is, to confess to such a listener, to bury in his heart his own life, his own search, his own suffering. But in the end of Siddhartha's tale, when he spoke of the tree by the river, and of his deep fall, of the holy Om, and how he had felt such a love for the river after his slumber, the ferryman listened with twice the attention, entirely and completely absorbed by it, with his eyes closed. But when Siddhartha fell silent, and a long silence had occurred, then Vasudeva said: "It is as I thought. The river has spoken to you. It is your friend as well, it speaks to you as well. That is good, that is very good. Stay with me, Siddhartha, my friend. I used to have a wife, her bed was next to mine, but she has died a long time ago, for a long time, I have lived alone. Now, you shall live with me, there is space and food for both." "I thank you," said Siddhartha, "I thank you and accept. And I also thank you for this, Vasudeva, for listening to me so well! These people are rare who know how to listen. And I did not meet a single one who knew it as well as you did. I will also learn in this respect from you." "You will learn it," spoke Vasudeva, "but not from me. The river has taught me to listen, from it you will learn it as well. It knows everything, the river, everything can be learned from it. See, you've already learned this from the water too, that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek depth. The rich and elegant Siddhartha is becoming an oarsman's servant, the learned Brahman Siddhartha becomes a ferryman: this has also been told to you by the river. You'll learn that other thing from it as well." Quoth Siddhartha after a long pause: "What other thing, Vasudeva?" Vasudeva rose. "It is late," he said, "let's go to sleep. I can't tell you that other thing, oh friend. You'll learn it, or perhaps you know it already. See, I'm no learned man, I have no special skill in speaking, I also have no special skill in thinking. All I'm able to do is to listen and to be godly, I have learned nothing else. If I was able to say and teach it, I might be a wise man, but like this I am only a ferryman, and it is my task to ferry people across the river. I have transported many, thousands; and to all of them, my river has been nothing but an obstacle on their travels. They travelled to seek money and business, and for weddings, and on pilgrimages, and the river was obstructing their path, and the ferryman's job was to get them quickly across that obstacle. But for some among thousands, a few, four or five, the river has stopped being an obstacle, they have heard its voice, they have listened to it, and the river has become sacred to them, as it has become sacred to me. Let's rest now, Siddhartha." Siddhartha stayed with the ferryman and learned to operate the boat, and when there was nothing to do at the ferry, he worked with Vasudeva in the rice-field, gathered wood, plucked the fruit off the banana-trees. He learned to build an oar, and learned to mend the boat, and to weave baskets, and was joyful because of everything he learned, and the days and months passed quickly. But more than Vasudeva could teach him, he was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion. In a friendly manner, he lived side by side with Vasudeva, and occasionally they exchanged some words, few and at length thought about words. Vasudeva was no friend of words; rarely, Siddhartha succeeded in persuading him to speak. "Did you," so he asked him at one time, "did you too learn that secret from the river: that there is no time?" Vasudeva's face was filled with a bright smile. "Yes, Siddhartha," he spoke. "It is this what you mean, isn't it: that the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?" "This it is," said Siddhartha. "And when I had learned it, I looked at my life, and it was also a river, and the boy Siddhartha was only separated from the man Siddhartha and from the old man Siddhartha by a shadow, not by something real. Also, Siddhartha's previous births were no past, and his death and his return to Brahma was no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present." Siddhartha spoke with ecstasy; deeply, this enlightenment had delighted him. Oh, was not all suffering time, were not all forms of tormenting oneself and being afraid time, was not everything hard, everything hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as time would have been put out of existence by one's thoughts? In ecstatic delight, he had spoken, but Vasudeva smiled at him brightly and nodded in confirmation; silently he nodded, brushed his hand over Siddhartha's shoulder, turned back to his work. And once again, when the river had just increased its flow in the rainy season and made a powerful noise, then said Siddhartha: "Isn't it so, oh friend, the river has many voices, very many voices? Hasn't it the voice of a king, and of a warrior, and of a bull, and of a bird of the night, and of a woman giving birth, and of a sighing man, and a thousand other voices more?" "So it is," Vasudeva nodded, "all voices of the creatures are in its voice." "And do you know," Siddhartha continued, "what word it speaks, when you succeed in hearing all of its ten thousand voices at once?" Happily, Vasudeva's face was smiling, he bent over to Siddhartha and spoke the holy Om into his ear. And this had been the very thing which Siddhartha had also been hearing. And time after time, his smile became more similar to the ferryman's, became almost just as bright, almost just as throughly glowing with bliss, just as shining out of thousand small wrinkles, just as alike to a child's, just as alike to an old man's. Many travellers, seeing the two ferrymen, thought they were brothers. Often, they sat in the evening together by the bank on the log, said nothing and both listened to the water, which was no water to them, but the voice of life, the voice of what exists, of what is eternally taking shape. And it happened from time to time that both, when listening to the river, thought of the same things, of a conversation from the day before yesterday, of one of their travellers, the face and fate of whom had occupied their thoughts, of death, of their childhood, and that they both in the same moment, when the river had been saying something good to them, looked at each other, both thinking precisely the same thing, both delighted about the same answer to the same question. There was something about this ferry and the two ferrymen which was transmitted to others, which many of the travellers felt. It happened occasionally that a traveller, after having looked at the face of one of the ferrymen, started to tell the story of his life, told about pains, confessed evil things, asked for comfort and advice. It happened occasionally that someone asked for permission to stay for a night with them to listen to the river. It also happened that curious people came, who had been told that there were two wise men, or sorcerers, or holy men living by that ferry. The curious people asked many questions, but they got no answers, and they found neither sorcerers nor wise men, they only found two friendly little old men, who seemed to be mute and to have become a bit strange and gaga. And the curious people laughed and were discussing how foolishly and gullibly the common people were spreading such empty rumours. The years passed by, and nobody counted them. Then, at one time, monks came by on a pilgrimage, followers of Gotama, the Buddha, who were asking to be ferried across the river, and by them the ferrymen were told that they were most hurriedly walking back to their great teacher, for the news had spread the exalted one was deadly sick and would soon die his last human death, in order to become one with the salvation. It was not long, until a new flock of monks came along on their pilgrimage, and another one, and the monks as well as most of the other travellers and people walking through the land spoke of nothing else than of Gotama and his impending death. And as people are flocking from everywhere and from all sides, when they are going to war or to the coronation of a king, and are gathering like ants in droves, thus they flocked, like being drawn on by a magic spell, to where the great Buddha was awaiting his death, where the huge event was to take place and the great perfected one of an era was to become one with the glory. Often, Siddhartha thought in those days of the dying wise man, the great teacher, whose voice had admonished nations and had awoken hundreds of thousands, whose voice he had also once heard, whose holy face he had also once seen with respect. Kindly, he thought of him, saw his path to perfection before his eyes, and remembered with a smile those words which he had once, as a young man, said to him, the exalted one. They had been, so it seemed to him, proud and precocious words; with a smile, he remembered them. For a long time he knew that there was nothing standing between Gotama and him any more, though he was still unable to accept his teachings. No, there was no teaching a truly searching person, someone who truly wanted to find, could accept. But he who had found, he could approve of any teachings, every path, every goal, there was nothing standing between him and all the other thousand any more who lived in that what is eternal, who breathed what is divine. On one of these days, when so many went on a pilgrimage to the dying Buddha, Kamala also went to him, who used to be the most beautiful of the courtesans. A long time ago, she had retired from her previous life, had given her garden to the monks of Gotama as a gift, had taken her refuge in the teachings, was among the friends and benefactors of the pilgrims. Together with Siddhartha the boy, her son, she had gone on her way due to the news of the near death of Gotama, in simple clothes, on foot. With her little son, she was travelling by the river; but the boy had soon grown tired, desired to go back home, desired to rest, desired to eat, became disobedient and started whining. Kamala often had to take a rest with him, he was accustomed to having his way against her, she had to feed him, had to comfort him, had to scold him. He did not comprehend why he had to go on this exhausting and sad pilgrimage with his mother, to an unknown place, to a stranger, who was holy and about to die. So what if he died, how did this concern the boy? The pilgrims were getting close to Vasudeva's ferry, when little Siddhartha once again forced his mother to rest. She, Kamala herself, had also become tired, and while the boy was chewing a banana, she crouched down on the ground, closed her eyes a bit, and rested. But suddenly, she uttered a wailing scream, the boy looked at her in fear and saw her face having grown pale from horror; and from under her dress, a small, black snake fled, by which Kamala had been bitten. Hurriedly, they now both ran along the path, in order to reach people, and got near to the ferry, there Kamala collapsed, and was not able to go any further. But the boy started crying miserably, only interrupting it to kiss and hug his mother, and she also joined his loud screams for help, until the sound reached Vasudeva's ears, who stood at the ferry. Quickly, he came walking, took the woman on his arms, carried her into the boat, the boy ran along, and soon they all reached the hut, were Siddhartha stood by the stove and was just lighting the fire. He looked up and first saw the boy's face, which wondrously reminded him of something, like a warning to remember something he had forgotten. Then he saw Kamala, whom he instantly recognised, though she lay unconscious in the ferryman's arms, and now he knew that it was his own son, whose face had been such a warning reminder to him, and the heart stirred in his chest. Kamala's wound was washed, but had already turned black and her body was swollen, she was made to drink a healing potion. Her consciousness returned, she lay on Siddhartha's bed in the hut and bent over her stood Siddhartha, who used to love her so much. It seemed like a dream to her; with a smile, she looked at her friend's face; just slowly she, realized her situation, remembered the bite, called timidly for the boy. "He's with you, don't worry," said Siddhartha. Kamala looked into his eyes. She spoke with a heavy tongue, paralysed by the poison. "You've become old, my dear," she said, "you've become gray. But you are like the young Samana, who at one time came without clothes, with dusty feet, to me into the garden. You are much more like him, than you were like him at that time when you had left me and Kamaswami. In the eyes, you're like him, Siddhartha. Alas, I have also grown old, old--could you still recognise me?" Siddhartha smiled: "Instantly, I recognised you, Kamala, my dear." Kamala pointed to her boy and said: "Did you recognise him as well? He is your son." Her eyes became confused and fell shut. The boy wept, Siddhartha took him on his knees, let him weep, petted his hair, and at the sight of the child's face, a Brahman prayer came to his mind, which he had learned a long time ago, when he had been a little boy himself. Slowly, with a singing voice, he started to speak; from his past and childhood, the words came flowing to him. And with that singsong, the boy became calm, was only now and then uttering a sob and fell asleep. Siddhartha placed him on Vasudeva's bed. Vasudeva stood by the stove and cooked rice. Siddhartha gave him a look, which he returned with a smile. "She'll die," Siddhartha said quietly. Vasudeva nodded; over his friendly face ran the light of the stove's fire. Once again, Kamala returned to consciousness. Pain distorted her face, Siddhartha's eyes read the suffering on her mouth, on her pale cheeks. Quietly, he read it, attentively, waiting, his mind becoming one with her suffering. Kamala felt it, her gaze sought his eyes. Looking at him, she said: "Now I see that your eyes have changed as well. They've become completely different. By what do I still recognise that you're Siddhartha? It's you, and it's not you." Siddhartha said nothing, quietly his eyes looked at hers. "You have achieved it?" she asked. "You have found peace?" He smiled and placed his hand on hers. "I'm seeing it," she said, "I'm seeing it. I too will find peace." "You have found it," Siddhartha spoke in a whisper. Kamala never stopped looking into his eyes. She thought about her pilgrimage to Gotama, which she wanted to take, in order to see the face of the perfected one, to breathe his peace, and she thought that she had now found him in his place, and that it was good, just as good, as if she had seen the other one. She wanted to tell this to him, but the tongue no longer obeyed her will. Without speaking, she looked at him, and he saw the life fading from her eyes. When the final pain filled her eyes and made them grow dim, when the final shiver ran through her limbs, his finger closed her eyelids. For a long time, he sat and looked at her peacefully dead face. For a long time, he observed her mouth, her old, tired mouth, with those lips, which had become thin, and he remembered, that he used to, in the spring of his years, compare this mouth with a freshly cracked fig. For a long time, he sat, read in the pale face, in the tired wrinkles, filled himself with this sight, saw his own face lying in the same manner, just as white, just as quenched out, and saw at the same time his face and hers being young, with red lips, with fiery eyes, and the feeling of this both being present and at the same time real, the feeling of eternity, completely filled every aspect of his being. Deeply he felt, more deeply than ever before, in this hour, the indestructibility of every life, the eternity of every moment. When he rose, Vasudeva had prepared rice for him. But Siddhartha did not eat. In the stable, where their goat stood, the two old men prepared beds of straw for themselves, and Vasudeva lay himself down to sleep. But Siddhartha went outside and sat this night before the hut, listening to the river, surrounded by the past, touched and encircled by all times of his life at the same time. But occasionally, he rose, stepped to the door of the hut and listened, whether the boy was sleeping. Early in the morning, even before the sun could be seen, Vasudeva came out of the stable and walked over to his friend. "You haven't slept," he said. "No, Vasudeva. I sat here, I was listening to the river. A lot it has told me, deeply it has filled me with the healing thought, with the thought of oneness." "You've experienced suffering, Siddhartha, but I see: no sadness has entered your heart." "No, my dear, how should I be sad? I, who have been rich and happy, have become even richer and happier now. My son has been given to me." "Your son shall be welcome to me as well. But now, Siddhartha, let's get to work, there is much to be done. Kamala has died on the same bed, on which my wife had died a long time ago. Let us also build Kamala's funeral pile on the same hill on which I had then built my wife's funeral pile." While the boy was still asleep, they built the funeral pile. THE SON Timid and weeping, the boy had attended his mother's funeral; gloomy and shy, he had listened to Siddhartha, who greeted him as his son and welcomed him at his place in Vasudeva's hut. Pale, he sat for many days by the hill of the dead, did not want to eat, gave no open look, did not open his heart, met his fate with resistance and denial. Siddhartha spared him and let him do as he pleased, he honoured his mourning. Siddhartha understood that his son did not know him, that he could not love him like a father. Slowly, he also saw and understood that the eleven-year-old was a pampered boy, a mother's boy, and that he had grown up in the habits of rich people, accustomed to finer food, to a soft bed, accustomed to giving orders to servants. Siddhartha understood that the mourning, pampered child could not suddenly and willingly be content with a life among strangers and in poverty. He did not force him, he did many a chore for him, always picked the best piece of the meal for him. Slowly, he hoped to win him over, by friendly patience. Rich and happy, he had called himself, when the boy had come to him. Since time had passed on in the meantime, and the boy remained a stranger and in a gloomy disposition, since he displayed a proud and stubbornly disobedient heart, did not want to do any work, did not pay his respect to the old men, stole from Vasudeva's fruit-trees, then Siddhartha began to understand that his son had not brought him happiness and peace, but suffering and worry. But he loved him, and he preferred the suffering and worries of love over happiness and joy without the boy. Since young Siddhartha was in the hut, the old men had split the work. Vasudeva had again taken on the job of the ferryman all by himself, and Siddhartha, in order to be with his son, did the work in the hut and the field. For a long time, for long months, Siddhartha waited for his son to understand him, to accept his love, to perhaps reciprocate it. For long months, Vasudeva waited, watching, waited and said nothing. One day, when Siddhartha the younger had once again tormented his father very much with spite and an unsteadiness in his wishes and had broken both of his rice-bowls, Vasudeva took in the evening his friend aside and talked to him. "Pardon me." he said, "from a friendly heart, I'm talking to you. I'm seeing that you are tormenting yourself, I'm seeing that you're in grief. Your son, my dear, is worrying you, and he is also worrying me. That young bird is accustomed to a different life, to a different nest. He has not, like you, ran away from riches and the city, being disgusted and fed up with it; against his will, he had to leave all this behind. I asked the river, oh friend, many times I have asked it. But the river laughs, it laughs at me, it laughs at you and me, and is shaking with laughter at our foolishness. Water wants to join water, youth wants to join youth, your son is not in the place where he can prosper. You too should ask the river; you too should listen to it!" Troubled, Siddhartha looked into his friendly face, in the many wrinkles of which there was incessant cheerfulness. "How could I part with him?" he said quietly, ashamed. "Give me some more time, my dear! See, I'm fighting for him, I'm seeking to win his heart, with love and with friendly patience I intent to capture it. One day, the river shall also talk to him, he also is called upon." Vasudeva's smile flourished more warmly. "Oh yes, he too is called upon, he too is of the eternal life. But do we, you and me, know what he is called upon to do, what path to take, what actions to perform, what pain to endure? Not a small one, his pain will be; after all, his heart is proud and hard, people like this have to suffer a lot, err a lot, do much injustice, burden themselves with much sin. Tell me, my dear: you're not taking control of your son's upbringing? You don't force him? You don't beat him? You don't punish him?" "No, Vasudeva, I don't do anything of this." "I knew it. You don't force him, don't beat him, don't give him orders, because you know that 'soft' is stronger than 'hard', water stronger than rocks, love stronger than force. Very good, I praise you. But aren't you mistaken in thinking that you wouldn't force him, wouldn't punish him? Don't you shackle him with your love? Don't you make him feel inferior every day, and don't you make it even harder on him with your kindness and patience? Don't you force him, the arrogant and pampered boy, to live in a hut with two old banana-eaters, to whom even rice is a delicacy, whose thoughts can't be his, whose hearts are old and quiet and beats in a different pace than his? Isn't forced, isn't he punished by all this?" Troubled, Siddhartha looked to the ground. Quietly, he asked: "What do you think should I do?" Quoth Vasudeva: "Bring him into the city, bring him into his mother's house, there'll still be servants around, give him to them. And when there aren't any around any more, bring him to a teacher, not for the teachings' sake, but so that he shall be among other boys, and among girls, and in the world which is his own. Have you never thought of this?" "You're seeing into my heart," Siddhartha spoke sadly. "Often, I have thought of this. But look, how shall I put him, who had no tender heart anyhow, into this world? Won't he become exuberant, won't he lose himself to pleasure and power, won't he repeat all of his father's mistakes, won't he perhaps get entirely lost in Sansara?" Brightly, the ferryman's smile lit up; softly, he touched Siddhartha's arm and said: "Ask the river about it, my friend! Hear it laugh about it! Would you actually believe that you had committed your foolish acts in order to spare your son from committing them too? And could you in any way protect your son from Sansara? How could you? By means of teachings, prayer, admonition? My dear, have you entirely forgotten that story, that story containing so many lessons, that story about Siddhartha, a Brahman's son, which you once told me here on this very spot? Who has kept the Samana Siddhartha safe from Sansara, from sin, from greed, from foolishness? Were his father's religious devotion, his teachers warnings, his own knowledge, his own search able to keep him safe? Which father, which teacher had been able to protect him from living his life for himself, from soiling himself with life, from burdening himself with guilt, from drinking the bitter drink for himself, from finding his path for himself? Would you think, my dear, anybody might perhaps be spared from taking this path? That perhaps your little son would be spared, because you love him, because you would like to keep him from suffering and pain and disappointment? But even if you would die ten times for him, you would not be able to take the slightest part of his destiny upon yourself." Never before, Vasudeva had spoken so many words. Kindly, Siddhartha thanked him, went troubled into the hut, could not sleep for a long time. Vasudeva had told him nothing, he had not already thought and known for himself. But this was a knowledge he could not act upon, stronger than the knowledge was his love for the boy, stronger was his tenderness, his fear to lose him. Had he ever lost his heart so much to something, had he ever loved any person thus, thus blindly, thus sufferingly, thus unsuccessfully, and yet thus happily? Siddhartha could not heed his friend's advice, he could not give up the boy. He let the boy give him orders, he let him disregard him. He said nothing and waited; daily, he began the mute struggle of friendliness, the silent war of patience. Vasudeva also said nothing and waited, friendly, knowing, patient. They were both masters of patience. At one time, when the boy's face reminded him very much of Kamala, Siddhartha suddenly had to think of a line which Kamala a long time ago, in the days of their youth, had once said to him. "You cannot love," she had said to him, and he had agreed with her and had compared himself with a star, while comparing the childlike people with falling leaves, and nevertheless he had also sensed an accusation in that line. Indeed, he had never been able to lose or devote himself completely to another person, to forget himself, to commit foolish acts for the love of another person; never he had been able to do this, and this was, as it had seemed to him at that time, the great distinction which set him apart from the childlike people. But now, since his son was here, now he, Siddhartha, had also become completely a childlike person, suffering for the sake of another person, loving another person, lost to a love, having become a fool on account of love. Now he too felt, late, once in his lifetime, this strongest and strangest of all passions, suffered from it, suffered miserably, and was nevertheless in bliss, was nevertheless renewed in one respect, enriched by one thing. He did sense very well that this love, this blind love for his son, was a passion, something very human, that it was Sansara, a murky source, dark waters. Nevertheless, he felt at the same time, it was not worthless, it was necessary, came from the essence of his own being. This pleasure also had to be atoned for, this pain also had to be endured, these foolish acts also had to be committed. Through all this, the son let him commit his foolish acts, let him court for his affection, let him humiliate himself every day by giving in to his moods. This father had nothing which would have delighted him and nothing which he would have feared. He was a good man, this father, a good, kind, soft man, perhaps a very devout man, perhaps a saint, all these were no attributes which could win the boy over. He was bored by this father, who kept him prisoner here in this miserable hut of his, he was bored by him, and for him to answer every naughtiness with a smile, every insult with friendliness, every viciousness with kindness, this very thing was the hated trick of this old sneak. Much more the boy would have liked it if he had been threatened by him, if he had been abused by him. A day came, when what young Siddhartha had on his mind came bursting forth, and he openly turned against his father. The latter had given him a task, he had told him to gather brushwood. But the boy did not leave the hut, in stubborn disobedience and rage he stayed where he was, thumped on the ground with his feet, clenched his fists, and screamed in a powerful outburst his hatred and contempt into his father's face. "Get the brushwood for yourself!" he shouted foaming at the mouth, "I'm not your servant. I do know, that you won't hit me, you don't dare; I do know, that you constantly want to punish me and put me down with your religious devotion and your indulgence. You want me to become like you, just as devout, just as soft, just as wise! But I, listen up, just to make you suffer, I rather want to become a highway-robber and murderer, and go to hell, than to become like you! I hate you, you're not my father, and if you've ten times been my mother's fornicator!" Rage and grief boiled over in him, foamed at the father in a hundred savage and evil words. Then the boy ran away and only returned late at night. But the next morning, he had disappeared. What had also disappeared was a small basket, woven out of bast of two colours, in which the ferrymen kept those copper and silver coins which they received as a fare. The boat had also disappeared, Siddhartha saw it lying by the opposite bank. The boy had ran away. "I must follow him," said Siddhartha, who had been shivering with grief since those ranting speeches, the boy had made yesterday. "A child can't go through the forest all alone. He'll perish. We must build a raft, Vasudeva, to get over the water." "We will build a raft," said Vasudeva, "to get our boat back, which the boy has taken away. But him, you shall let run along, my friend, he is no child any more, he knows how to get around. He's looking for the path to the city, and he is right, don't forget that. He's doing what you've failed to do yourself. He's taking care of himself, he's taking his course. Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself." Siddhartha did not answer. He already held the axe in his hands and began to make a raft of bamboo, and Vasudeva helped him to tie the canes together with ropes of grass. Then they crossed over, drifted far off their course, pulled the raft upriver on the opposite bank. "Why did you take the axe along?" asked Siddhartha. Vasudeva said: "It might have been possible that the oar of our boat got lost." But Siddhartha knew what his friend was thinking. He thought, the boy would have thrown away or broken the oar in order to get even and in order to keep them from following him. And in fact, there was no oar left in the boat. Vasudeva pointed to the bottom of the boat and looked at his friend with a smile, as if he wanted to say: "Don't you see what your son is trying to tell you? Don't you see that he doesn't want to be followed?" But he did not say this in words. He started making a new oar. But Siddhartha bid his farewell, to look for the run-away. Vasudeva did not stop him. When Siddhartha had already been walking through the forest for a long time, the thought occurred to him that his search was useless. Either, so he thought, the boy was far ahead and had already reached the city, or, if he should still be on his way, he would conceal himself from him, the pursuer. As he continued thinking, he also found that he, on his part, was not worried for his son, that he knew deep inside that he had neither perished nor was in any danger in the forest. Nevertheless, he ran without stopping, no longer to save him, just to satisfy his desire, just to perhaps see him one more time. And he ran up to just outside of the city. When, near the city, he reached a wide road, he stopped, by the entrance of the beautiful pleasure-garden, which used to belong to Kamala, where he had seen her for the first time in her sedan-chair. The past rose up in his soul, again he saw himself standing there, young, a bearded, naked Samana, the hair full of dust. For a long time, Siddhartha stood there and looked through the open gate into the garden, seeing monks in yellow robes walking among the beautiful trees. For a long time, he stood there, pondering, seeing images, listening to the story of his life. For a long time, he stood there, looked at the monks, saw young Siddhartha in their place, saw young Kamala walking among the high trees. Clearly, he saw himself being served food and drink by Kamala, receiving his first kiss from her, looking proudly and disdainfully back on his Brahmanism, beginning proudly and full of desire his worldly life. He saw Kamaswami, saw the servants, the orgies, the gamblers with the dice, the musicians, saw Kamala's song-bird in the cage, lived through all this once again, breathed Sansara, was once again old and tired, felt once again disgust, felt once again the wish to annihilate himself, was once again healed by the holy Om. After having been standing by the gate of the garden for a long time, Siddhartha realised that his desire was foolish, which had made him go up to this place, that he could not help his son, that he was not allowed to cling him. Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine. That this wound did not blossom yet, did not shine yet, at this hour, made him sad. Instead of the desired goal, which had drawn him here following the runaway son, there was now emptiness. Sadly, he sat down, felt something dying in his heart, experienced emptiness, saw no joy any more, no goal. He sat lost in thought and waited. This he had learned by the river, this one thing: waiting, having patience, listening attentively. And he sat and listened, in the dust of the road, listened to his heart, beating tiredly and sadly, waited for a voice. Many an hour he crouched, listening, saw no images any more, fell into emptiness, let himself fall, without seeing a path. And when he felt the wound burning, he silently spoke the Om, filled himself with Om. The monks in the garden saw him, and since he crouched for many hours, and dust was gathering on his gray hair, one of them came to him and placed two bananas in front of him. The old man did not see him. From this petrified state, he was awoken by a hand touching his shoulder. Instantly, he recognised this touch, this tender, bashful touch, and regained his senses. He rose and greeted Vasudeva, who had followed him. And when he looked into Vasudeva's friendly face, into the small wrinkles, which were as if they were filled with nothing but his smile, into the happy eyes, then he smiled too. Now he saw the bananas lying in front of him, picked them up, gave one to the ferryman, ate the other one himself. After this, he silently went back into the forest with Vasudeva, returned home to the ferry. Neither one talked about what had happened today, neither one mentioned the boy's name, neither one spoke about him running away, neither one spoke about the wound. In the hut, Siddhartha lay down on his bed, and when after a while Vasudeva came to him, to offer him a bowl of coconut-milk, he already found him asleep. OM For a long time, the wound continued to burn. Many a traveller Siddhartha had to ferry across the river who was accompanied by a son or a daughter, and he saw none of them without envying him, without thinking: "So many, so many thousands possess this sweetest of good fortunes--why don't I? Even bad people, even thieves and robbers have children and love them, and are being loved by them, all except for me." Thus simply, thus without reason he now thought, thus similar to the childlike people he had become. Differently than before, he now looked upon people, less smart, less proud, but instead warmer, more curious, more involved. When he ferried travellers of the ordinary kind, childlike people, businessmen, warriors, women, these people did not seem alien to him as they used to: he understood them, he understood and shared their life, which was not guided by thoughts and insight, but solely by urges and wishes, he felt like them. Though he was near perfection and was bearing his final wound, it still seemed to him as if those childlike people were his brothers, their vanities, desires for possession, and ridiculous aspects were no longer ridiculous to him, became understandable, became lovable, even became worthy of veneration to him. The blind love of a mother for her child, the stupid, blind pride of a conceited father for his only son, the blind, wild desire of a young, vain woman for jewelry and admiring glances from men, all of these urges, all of this childish stuff, all of these simple, foolish, but immensely strong, strongly living, strongly prevailing urges and desires were now no childish notions for Siddhartha any more, he saw people living for their sake, saw them achieving infinitely much for their sake, travelling, conducting wars, suffering infinitely much, bearing infinitely much, and he could love them for it, he saw life, that what is alive, the indestructible, the Brahman in each of their passions, each of their acts. Worthy of love and admiration were these people in their blind loyalty, their blind strength and tenacity. They lacked nothing, there was nothing the knowledgeable one, the thinker, had to put him above them except for one little thing, a single, tiny, small thing: the consciousness, the conscious thought of the oneness of all life. And Siddhartha even doubted in many an hour, whether this knowledge, this thought was to be valued thus highly, whether it might not also perhaps be a childish idea of the thinking people, of the thinking and childlike people. In all other respects, the worldly people were of equal rank to the wise men, were often far superior to them, just as animals too can, after all, in some moments, seem to be superior to humans in their tough, unrelenting performance of what is necessary. Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. Slowly this blossomed in him, was shining back at him from Vasudeva's old, childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, smiling, oneness. But the wound still burned, longingly and bitterly Siddhartha thought of his son, nurtured his love and tenderness in his heart, allowed the pain to gnaw at him, committed all foolish acts of love. Not by itself, this flame would go out. And one day, when the wound burned violently, Siddhartha ferried across the river, driven by a yearning, got off the boat and was willing to go to the city and to look for his son. The river flowed softly and quietly, it was the dry season, but its voice sounded strange: it laughed! It laughed clearly. The river laughed, it laughed brightly and clearly at the old ferryman. Siddhartha stopped, he bent over the water, in order to hear even better, and he saw his face reflected in the quietly moving waters, and in this reflected face there was something, which reminded him, something he had forgotten, and as he thought about it, he found it: this face resembled another face, which he used to know and love and also fear. It resembled his father's face, the Brahman. And he remembered how he, a long time ago, as a young man, had forced his father to let him go to the penitents, how he had bid his farewell to him, how he had gone and had never come back. Had his father not also suffered the same pain for him, which he now suffered for his son? Had his father not long since died, alone, without having seen his son again? Did he not have to expect the same fate for himself? Was it not a comedy, a strange and stupid matter, this repetition, this running around in a fateful circle? The river laughed. Yes, so it was, everything came back, which had not been suffered and solved up to its end, the same pain was suffered over and over again. But Siddhartha want back into the boat and ferried back to the hut, thinking of his father, thinking of his son, laughed at by the river, at odds with himself, tending towards despair, and not less tending towards laughing along at himself and the entire world. Alas, the wound was not blossoming yet, his heart was still fighting his fate, cheerfulness and victory were not yet shining from his suffering. Nevertheless, he felt hope, and once he had returned to the hut, he felt an undefeatable desire to open up to Vasudeva, to show him everything, the master of listening, to say everything. Vasudeva was sitting in the hut and weaving a basket. He no longer used the ferry-boat, his eyes were starting to get weak, and not just his eyes; his arms and hands as well. Unchanged and flourishing was only the joy and the cheerful benevolence of his face. Siddhartha sat down next to the old man, slowly he started talking. What they had never talked about, he now told him of, of his walk to the city, at that time, of the burning wound, of his envy at the sight of happy fathers, of his knowledge of the foolishness of such wishes, of his futile fight against them. He reported everything, he was able to say everything, even the most embarrassing parts, everything could be said, everything shown, everything he could tell. He presented his wound, also told how he fled today, how he ferried across the water, a childish run-away, willing to walk to the city, how the river had laughed. While he spoke, spoke for a long time, while Vasudeva was listening with a quiet face, Vasudeva's listening gave Siddhartha a stronger sensation than ever before, he sensed how his pain, his fears flowed over to him, how his secret hope flowed over, came back at him from his counterpart. To show his wound to this listener was the same as bathing it in the river, until it had cooled and become one with the river. While he was still speaking, still admitting and confessing, Siddhartha felt more and more that this was no longer Vasudeva, no longer a human being, who was listening to him, that this motionless listener was absorbing his confession into himself like a tree the rain, that this motionless man was the river itself, that he was God himself, that he was the eternal itself. And while Siddhartha stopped thinking of himself and his wound, this realisation of Vasudeva's changed character took possession of him, and the more he felt it and entered into it, the less wondrous it became, the more he realised that everything was in order and natural, that Vasudeva had already been like this for a long time, almost forever, that only he had not quite recognised it, yes, that he himself had almost reached the same state. He felt, that he was now seeing old Vasudeva as the people see the gods, and that this could not last; in his heart, he started bidding his farewell to Vasudeva. Throughout all this, he talked incessantly. When he had finished talking, Vasudeva turned his friendly eyes, which had grown slightly weak, at him, said nothing, let his silent love and cheerfulness, understanding and knowledge, shine at him. He took Siddhartha's hand, led him to the seat by the bank, sat down with him, smiled at the river. "You've heard it laugh," he said. "But you haven't heard everything. Let's listen, you'll hear more." They listened. Softly sounded the river, singing in many voices. Siddhartha looked into the water, and images appeared to him in the moving water: his father appeared, lonely, mourning for his son; he himself appeared, lonely, he also being tied with the bondage of yearning to his distant son; his son appeared, lonely as well, the boy, greedily rushing along the burning course of his young wishes, each one heading for his goal, each one obsessed by the goal, each one suffering. The river sang with a voice of suffering, longingly it sang, longingly, it flowed towards its goal, lamentingly its voice sang. "Do you hear?" Vasudeva's mute gaze asked. Siddhartha nodded. "Listen better!" Vasudeva whispered. Siddhartha made an effort to listen better. The image of his father, his own image, the image of his son merged, Kamala's image also appeared and was dispersed, and the image of Govinda, and other images, and they merged with each other, turned all into the river, headed all, being the river, for the goal, longing, desiring, suffering, and the river's voice sounded full of yearning, full of burning woe, full of unsatisfiable desire. For the goal, the river was heading, Siddhartha saw it hurrying, the river, which consisted of him and his loved ones and of all people, he had ever seen, all of these waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, towards goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all goals were reached, and every goal was followed by a new one, and the water turned into vapour and rose to the sky, turned into rain and poured down from the sky, turned into a source, a stream, a river, headed forward once again, flowed on once again. But the longing voice had changed. It still resounded, full of suffering, searching, but other voices joined it, voices of joy and of suffering, good and bad voices, laughing and sad ones, a hundred voices, a thousand voices. Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection. "Do you hear," Vasudeva's gaze asked again. Brightly, Vasudeva's smile was shining, floating radiantly over all the wrinkles of his old face, as the Om was floating in the air over all the voices of the river. Brightly his smile was shining, when he looked at his friend, and brightly the same smile was now starting to shine on Siddhartha's face as well. His wound blossomed, his suffering was shining, his self had flown into the oneness. In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness. When Vasudeva rose from the seat by the bank, when he looked into Siddhartha's eyes and saw the cheerfulness of the knowledge shining in them, he softly touched his shoulder with his hand, in this careful and tender manner, and said: "I've been waiting for this hour, my dear. Now that it has come, let me leave. For a long time, I've been waiting for this hour; for a long time, I've been Vasudeva the ferryman. Now it's enough. Farewell, hut, farewell, river, farewell, Siddhartha!" Siddhartha made a deep bow before him who bid his farewell. "I've known it," he said quietly. "You'll go into the forests?" "I'm going into the forests, I'm going into the oneness," spoke Vasudeva with a bright smile. With a bright smile, he left; Siddhartha watched him leaving. With deep joy, with deep solemnity he watched him leave, saw his steps full of peace, saw his head full of lustre, saw his body full of light. GOVINDA Together with other monks, Govinda used to spend the time of rest between pilgrimages in the pleasure-grove, which the courtesan Kamala had given to the followers of Gotama for a gift. He heard talk of an old ferryman, who lived one day's journey away by the river, and who was regarded as a wise man by many. When Govinda went back on his way, he chose the path to the ferry, eager to see the ferryman. Because, though he had lived his entire life by the rules, though he was also looked upon with veneration by the younger monks on account of his age and his modesty, the restlessness and the searching still had not perished from his heart. He came to the river and asked the old man to ferry him over, and when they got off the boat on the other side, he said to the old man: "You're very good to us monks and pilgrims, you have already ferried many of us across the river. Aren't you too, ferryman, a searcher for the right path?" Quoth Siddhartha, smiling from his old eyes: "Do you call yourself a searcher, oh venerable one, though you are already of an old in years and are wearing the robe of Gotama's monks?" "It's true, I'm old," spoke Govinda, "but I haven't stopped searching. Never I'll stop searching, this seems to be my destiny. You too, so it seems to me, have been searching. Would you like to tell me something, oh honourable one?" Quoth Siddhartha: "What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?" "How come?" asked Govinda. "When someone is searching," said Siddhartha, "then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher, because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don't see, which are directly in front of your eyes." "I don't quite understand yet," asked Govinda, "what do you mean by this?" Quoth Siddhartha: "A long time ago, oh venerable one, many years ago, you've once before been at this river and have found a sleeping man by the river, and have sat down with him to guard his sleep. But, oh Govinda, you did not recognise the sleeping man." Astonished, as if he had been the object of a magic spell, the monk looked into the ferryman's eyes. "Are you Siddhartha?" he asked with a timid voice. "I wouldn't have recognised you this time as well! From my heart, I'm greeting you, Siddhartha; from my heart, I'm happy to see you once again! You've changed a lot, my friend.--And so you've now become a ferryman?" In a friendly manner, Siddhartha laughed. "A ferryman, yes. Many people, Govinda, have to change a lot, have to wear many a robe, I am one of those, my dear. Be welcome, Govinda, and spend the night in my hut." Govinda stayed the night in the hut and slept on the bed which used to be Vasudeva's bed. Many questions he posed to the friend of his youth, many things Siddhartha had to tell him from his life. When in the next morning the time had come to start the day's journey, Govinda said, not without hesitation, these words: "Before I'll continue on my path, Siddhartha, permit me to ask one more question. Do you have a teaching? Do you have a faith, or a knowledge, you follow, which helps you to live and to do right?" Quoth Siddhartha: "You know, my dear, that I already as a young man, in those days when we lived with the penitents in the forest, started to distrust teachers and teachings and to turn my back to them. I have stuck with this. Nevertheless, I have had many teachers since then. A beautiful courtesan has been my teacher for a long time, and a rich merchant was my teacher, and some gamblers with dice. Once, even a follower of Buddha, travelling on foot, has been my teacher; he sat with me when I had fallen asleep in the forest, on the pilgrimage. I've also learned from him, I'm also grateful to him, very grateful. But most of all, I have learned here from this river and from my predecessor, the ferryman Vasudeva. He was a very simple person, Vasudeva, he was no thinker, but he knew what is necessary just as well as Gotama, he was a perfect man, a saint." Govinda said: "Still, oh Siddhartha, you love a bit to mock people, as it seems to me. I believe in you and know that you haven't followed a teacher. But haven't you found something by yourself, though you've found no teachings, you still found certain thoughts, certain insights, which are your own and which help you to live? If you would like to tell me some of these, you would delight my heart." Quoth Siddhartha: "I've had thoughts, yes, and insight, again and again. Sometimes, for an hour or for an entire day, I have felt knowledge in me, as one would feel life in one's heart. There have been many thoughts, but it would be hard for me to convey them to you. Look, my dear Govinda, this is one of my thoughts, which I have found: wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness." "Are you kidding?" asked Govinda. "I'm not kidding. I'm telling you what I've found. Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught. This was what I, even as a young man, sometimes suspected, what has driven me away from the teachers. I have found a thought, Govinda, which you'll again regard as a joke or foolishness, but which is my best thought. It says: The opposite of every truth is just as true! That's like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it's all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness. When the exalted Gotama spoke in his teachings of the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into deception and truth, into suffering and salvation. It cannot be done differently, there is no other way for him who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception." "How come?" asked Govinda timidly. "Listen well, my dear, listen well! The sinner, which I am and which you are, is a sinner, but in times to come he will be Brahma again, he will reach the Nirvana, will be Buddha--and now see: these 'times to come' are a deception, are only a parable! The sinner is not on his way to become a Buddha, he is not in the process of developing, though our capacity for thinking does not know how else to picture these things. No, within the sinner is now and today already the future Buddha, his future is already all there, you have to worship in him, in you, in everyone the Buddha which is coming into being, the possible, the hidden Buddha. The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life. It is not possible for any person to see how far another one has already progressed on his path; in the robber and dice-gambler, the Buddha is waiting; in the Brahman, the robber is waiting. In deep meditation, there is the possibility to put time out of existence, to see all life which was, is, and will be as if it was simultaneous, and there everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, I see whatever exists as good, death is to me like life, sin like holiness, wisdom like foolishness, everything has to be as it is, everything only requires my consent, only my willingness, my loving agreement, to be good for me, to do nothing but work for my benefit, to be unable to ever harm me. I have experienced on my body and on my soul that I needed sin very much, I needed lust, the desire for possessions, vanity, and needed the most shameful despair, in order to learn how to give up all resistance, in order to learn how to love the world, in order to stop comparing it to some world I wished, I imagined, some kind of perfection I had made up, but to leave it as it is and to love it and to enjoy being a part of it.--These, oh Govinda, are some of the thoughts which have come into my mind." Siddhartha bent down, picked up a stone from the ground, and weighed it in his hand. "This here," he said playing with it, "is a stone, and will, after a certain time, perhaps turn into soil, and will turn from soil into a plant or animal or human being. In the past, I would have said: This stone is just a stone, it is worthless, it belongs to the world of the Maja; but because it might be able to become also a human being and a spirit in the cycle of transformations, therefore I also grant it importance. Thus, I would perhaps have thought in the past. But today I think: this stone is a stone, it is also animal, it is also god, it is also Buddha, I do not venerate and love it because it could turn into this or that, but rather because it is already and always everything-- and it is this very fact, that it is a stone, that it appears to me now and today as a stone, this is why I love it and see worth and purpose in each of its veins and cavities, in the yellow, in the gray, in the hardness, in the sound it makes when I knock at it, in the dryness or wetness of its surface. There are stones which feel like oil or soap, and others like leaves, others like sand, and every one is special and prays the Om in its own way, each one is Brahman, but simultaneously and just as much it is a stone, is oily or juicy, and this is this very fact which I like and regard as wonderful and worthy of worship.--But let me speak no more of this. The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly--yes, and this is also very good, and I like it a lot, I also very much agree with this, that this what is one man's treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person." Govinda listened silently. "Why have you told me this about the stone?" he asked hesitantly after a pause. "I did it without any specific intention. Or perhaps what I meant was, that love this very stone, and the river, and all these things we are looking at and from which we can learn. I can love a stone, Govinda, and also a tree or a piece of bark. This are things, and things can be loved. But I cannot love words. Therefore, teachings are no good for me, they have no hardness, no softness, no colours, no edges, no smell, no taste, they have nothing but words. Perhaps it are these which keep you from finding peace, perhaps it are the many words. Because salvation and virtue as well, Sansara and Nirvana as well, are mere words, Govinda. There is no thing which would be Nirvana; there is just the word Nirvana." Quoth Govinda: "Not just a word, my friend, is Nirvana. It is a thought." Siddhartha continued: "A thought, it might be so. I must confess to you, my dear: I don't differentiate much between thoughts and words. To be honest, I also have no high opinion of thoughts. I have a better opinion of things. Here on this ferry-boat, for instance, a man has been my predecessor and teacher, a holy man, who has for many years simply believed in the river, nothing else. He had noticed that the river's spoke to him, he learned from it, it educated and taught him, the river seemed to be a god to him, for many years he did not know that every wind, every cloud, every bird, every beetle was just as divine and knows just as much and can teach just as much as the worshipped river. But when this holy man went into the forests, he knew everything, knew more than you and me, without teachers, without books, only because he had believed in the river." Govinda said: "But is that what you call `things', actually something real, something which has existence? Isn't it just a deception of the Maja, just an image and illusion? Your stone, your tree, your river-- are they actually a reality?" "This too," spoke Siddhartha, "I do not care very much about. Let the things be illusions or not, after all I would then also be an illusion, and thus they are always like me. This is what makes them so dear and worthy of veneration for me: they are like me. Therefore, I can love them. And this is now a teaching you will laugh about: love, oh Govinda, seems to me to be the most important thing of all. To thoroughly understand the world, to explain it, to despise it, may be the thing great thinkers do. But I'm only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect." "This I understand," spoke Govinda. "But this very thing was discovered by the exalted one to be a deception. He commands benevolence, clemency, sympathy, tolerance, but not love; he forbade us to tie our heart in love to earthly things." "I know it," said Siddhartha; his smile shone golden. "I know it, Govinda. And behold, with this we are right in the middle of the thicket of opinions, in the dispute about words. For I cannot deny, my words of love are in a contradiction, a seeming contradiction with Gotama's words. For this very reason, I distrust in words so much, for I know, this contradiction is a deception. I know that I am in agreement with Gotama. How should he not know love, he, who has discovered all elements of human existence in their transitoriness, in their meaninglessness, and yet loved people thus much, to use a long, laborious life only to help them, to teach them! Even with him, even with your great teacher, I prefer the thing over the words, place more importance on his acts and life than on his speeches, more on the gestures of his hand than his opinions. Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life." For a long time, the two old men said nothing. Then spoke Govinda, while bowing for a farewell: "I thank you, Siddhartha, for telling me some of your thoughts. They are partially strange thoughts, not all have been instantly understandable to me. This being as it may, I thank you, and I wish you to have calm days." (But secretly he thought to himself: This Siddhartha is a bizarre person, he expresses bizarre thoughts, his teachings sound foolish. So differently sound the exalted one's pure teachings, clearer, purer, more comprehensible, nothing strange, foolish, or silly is contained in them. But different from his thoughts seemed to me Siddhartha's hands and feet, his eyes, his forehead, his breath, his smile, his greeting, his walk. Never again, after our exalted Gotama has become one with the Nirvana, never since then have I met a person of whom I felt: this is a holy man! Only him, this Siddhartha, I have found to be like this. May his teachings be strange, may his words sound foolish; out of his gaze and his hand, his skin and his hair, out of every part of him shines a purity, shines a calmness, shines a cheerfulness and mildness and holiness, which I have seen in no other person since the final death of our exalted teacher.) As Govinda thought like this, and there was a conflict in his heart, he once again bowed to Siddhartha, drawn by love. Deeply he bowed to him who was calmly sitting. "Siddhartha," he spoke, "we have become old men. It is unlikely for one of us to see the other again in this incarnation. I see, beloved, that you have found peace. I confess that I haven't found it. Tell me, oh honourable one, one more word, give me something on my way which I can grasp, which I can understand! Give me something to be with me on my path. It is often hard, my path, often dark, Siddhartha." Siddhartha said nothing and looked at him with the ever unchanged, quiet smile. Govinda stared at his face, with fear, with yearning, suffering, and the eternal search was visible in his look, eternal not-finding. Siddhartha saw it and smiled. "Bend down to me!" he whispered quietly in Govinda's ear. "Bend down to me! Like this, even closer! Very close! Kiss my forehead, Govinda!" But while Govinda with astonishment, and yet drawn by great love and expectation, obeyed his words, bent down closely to him and touched his forehead with his lips, something miraculous happened to him. While his thoughts were still dwelling on Siddhartha's wondrous words, while he was still struggling in vain and with reluctance to think away time, to imagine Nirvana and Sansara as one, while even a certain contempt for the words of his friend was fighting in him against an immense love and veneration, this happened to him: He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes--he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying--he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person--he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword--he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love--he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void-- he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds--he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni--he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face--and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling. Not knowing any more whether time existed, whether the vision had lasted a second or a hundred years, not knowing any more whether there existed a Siddhartha, a Gotama, a me and a you, feeling in his innermost self as if he had been wounded by a divine arrow, the injury of which tasted sweet, being enchanted and dissolved in his innermost self, Govinda still stood for a little while bent over Siddhartha's quiet face, which he had just kissed, which had just been the scene of all manifestations, all transformations, all existence. The face was unchanged, after under its surface the depth of the thousandfoldness had closed up again, he smiled silently, smiled quietly and softly, perhaps very benevolently, perhaps very mockingly, precisely as he used to smile, the exalted one. Deeply, Govinda bowed; tears he knew nothing of, ran down his old face; like a fire burnt the feeling of the most intimate love, the humblest veneration in his heart. Deeply, he bowed, touching the ground, before him who was sitting motionlessly, whose smile reminded him of everything he had ever loved in his life, what had ever been valuable and holy to him in his life. 
29288	----	THE UNKNOWN LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery by NICOLAS NOTOVITCH Translated by J. H. Connelly and L. Landsberg Printed in the United States of America New York: R.F. Fenno. 1890. Table of Contents _Preface_ vi _A Journey in Thibet_ 1 _Ladak_ 33 _A Festival in a Gonpa_ 45 _The Life of Saint Issa_ 61 _Resumé_ 89 _Explanatory Notes_ 117 Preface After the Turkish War (1877-1878) I made a series of travels in the Orient. From the little remarkable Balkan peninsula, I went across the Caucasus to Central Asia and Persia, and finally, in 1887, visited India, an admirable country which had attracted me from my earliest childhood. My purpose in this journey was to study and know, at home, the peoples who inhabit India and their customs, the grand and mysterious archæology, and the colossal and majestic nature of their country. Wandering about without fixed plans, from one place to another, I came to mountainous Afghanistan, whence I regained India by way of the picturesque passes of Bolan and Guernaï. Then, going up the Indus to Raval Pindi, I ran over the Pendjab--the land of the five rivers; visited the Golden Temple of Amritsa--the tomb of the King of Pendjab, Randjid Singh, near Lahore; and turned toward Kachmyr, "The Valley of Eternal Bliss." Thence I directed my peregrinations as my curiosity impelled me, until I arrived in Ladak, whence I intended returning to Russia by way of Karakoroum and Chinese Turkestan. One day, while visiting a Buddhist convent on my route, I learned from a chief lama, that there existed in the archives of Lhassa, very ancient memoirs relating to the life of Jesus Christ and the occidental nations, and that certain great monasteries possessed old copies and translations of those chronicles. As it was little probable that I should make another journey into this country, I resolved to put off my return to Europe until a later date, and, cost what it might, either find those copies in the great convents or go to Lhassa--a journey which is far from being so dangerous and difficult as is generally supposed, involving only such perils as I was already accustomed to, and which would not make me hesitate at attempting it. During my sojourn at Leh, capital of Ladak, I visited the great convent Himis, situated near the city, the chief lama of which informed me that their monastic library contained copies of the manuscripts in question. In order that I might not awaken the suspicions of the authorities concerning the object of my visit to the cloister, and to evade obstacles which might be opposed to me as a Russian, prosecuting further my journey in Thibet, I gave out upon my return to Leh that I would depart for India, and so left the capital of Ladak. An unfortunate fall, causing the breaking of a leg, furnished me with an absolutely unexpected pretext for returning to the monastery, where I received surgical attention. I took advantage of my short sojourn among the lamas to obtain the consent of their chief that they should bring to me, from their library, the manuscripts relating to Jesus Christ, and, assisted by my interpreter, who translated for me the Thibetan language, transferred carefully to my notebook what the lama read to me. Not doubting at all the authenticity of this chronicle, edited with great exactitude by the Brahminic, and more especially the Buddhistic historians of India and Nepaul, I desired, upon my return to Europe, to publish a translation of it. To this end, I addressed myself to several universally known ecclesiastics, asking them to revise my notes and tell me what they thought of them. Mgr. Platon, the celebrated metropolitan of Kiew, thought that my discovery was of great importance. Nevertheless, he sought to dissuade me from publishing the memoirs, believing that their publication could only hurt me. "Why?" This the venerable prelate refused to tell me more explicitly. Nevertheless, since our conversation took place in Russia, where the censor would have put his veto upon such a work, I made up my mind to wait. A year later, I found myself in Rome. I showed my manuscript to a cardinal very near to the Holy Father, who answered me literally in these words:--"What good will it do to print this? Nobody will attach to it any great importance and you will create a number of enemies. But, you are still very young! If it is a question of money which concerns you, I can ask for you a reward for your notes, a sum which will repay your expenditures and recompense you for your loss of time." Of course, I refused. In Paris I spoke of my project to Cardinal Rotelli, whose acquaintance I had made in Constantinople. He, too, was opposed to having my work printed, under the pretext that it would be premature. "The church," he added, "suffers already too much from the new current of atheistic ideas, and you will but give a new food to the calumniators and detractors of the evangelical doctrine. I tell you this in the interest of all the Christian churches." Then I went to see M. Jules Simon. He found my matter very interesting and advised me to ask the opinion of M. Renan, as to the best way of publishing these memoirs. The next day I was seated in the cabinet of the great philosopher. At the close of our conversation, M. Renan proposed that I should confide to him the memoirs in question, so that he might make to the Academy a report upon the discovery. This proposition, as may be easily understood, was very alluring and flattering to my _amour propre_. I, however, took away with me the manuscript, under the pretext of further revising it. I foresaw that if I accepted the proposed combination, I would only have the honor of having found the chronicles, while the illustrious author of the "Life of Jesus" would have the glory of the publication and the commenting upon it. I thought myself sufficiently prepared to publish the translation of the chronicles, accompanying them with my notes, and, therefore, did not accept the very gracious offer he made to me. But, that I might not wound the susceptibility of the great master, for whom I felt a profound respect, I made up my mind to delay publication until after his death, a fatality which could not be far off, if I might judge from the apparent general weakness of M. Renan. A short time after M. Renan's death, I wrote to M. Jules Simon again for his advice. He answered me, that it was my affair to judge of the opportunity for making the memoirs public. I therefore put my notes in order and now publish them, reserving the right to substantiate the authenticity of these chronicles. In my commentaries I proffer the arguments which must convince us of the sincerity and good faith of the Buddhist compilers. I wish to add that before criticising my communication, the societies of _savans_ can, without much expense, equip a scientific expedition having for its mission the study of those manuscripts in the place where I discovered them, and so may easily verify their historic value. --_Nicolas Notovitch_ The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ _A Journey in Thibet_ During my sojourn in India, I often had occasion to converse with the Buddhists, and the accounts they gave me of Thibet excited my curiosity to such an extent that I resolved to make a journey into that still almost unknown country. For this purpose I set out upon a route crossing Kachmyr (Cashmere), which I had long intended to visit. On the 14th of October, 1887, I entered a railway car crowded with soldiers, and went from Lahore to Raval-Pinidi, where I arrived the next day, near noon. After resting a little and inspecting the city, to which the permanent garrison gives the aspect of a military camp, I provided myself with the necessaries for a journey, where horses take the place of the railway cars. Assisted by my servant, a colored man of Pondichery, I packed all my baggage, hired a tonga (a two-wheeled vehicle which is drawn by two horses), stowed myself upon its back seat, and set out upon the picturesque road leading to Kachmyr, an excellent highway, upon which we travelled rapidly. We had to use no little skill in making our way through the ranks of a military caravan--its baggage carried upon camels--which was part of a detachment returning from a country camp to the city. Soon we arrived at the end of the valley of Pendjab, and climbing up a way with infinite windings, entered the passes of the Himalayas. The ascent became more and more steep. Behind us spread, like a beautiful panorama, the region we had just traversed, which seemed to sink farther and farther away from us. As the sun's last glances rested upon the tops of the mountains, our tonga came gaily out from the zigzags which the eye could still trace far down the forest-clad slope, and halted at the little city of Muré; where the families of the English functionaries came to seek shade and refreshment. Ordinarily, one can go in a tonga from Muré to Srinagar; but at the approach of the winter season, when all Europeans desert Kachmyr, the tonga service is suspended. I undertook my journey precisely at the time when the summer life begins to wane, and the Englishmen whom I met upon the road, returning to India, were much astonished to see me, and made vain efforts to divine the purpose of my travel to Kachmyr. Abandoning the tonga, I hired saddle horses--not without considerable difficulty--and evening had arrived when we started to descend from Muré, which is at an altitude of 5,000 feet. This stage of our journey had nothing playful in it. The road was torn in deep ruts by the late rains, darkness came upon us and our horses rather guessed than saw their way. When night had completely set in, a tempestuous rain surprised us in the open country, and, owing to the thick foliage of the centenarian oaks which stood on the sides of our road, we were plunged in profound darkness. That we might not lose each other, we had to continue exchanging calls from time to time. In this impenetrable obscurity we divined huge masses of rock almost above our heads, and were conscious of, on our left, a roaring torrent, the water of which formed a cascade we could not see. During two hours we waded in the mud and the icy rain had chilled my very marrow, when we perceived in the distance a little fire, the sight of which revived our energies. But how deceitful are lights in the mountains! You believe you see the fire burning quite near to you and at once it disappears, to reappear again, to the right, to the left, above, below you, as if it took pleasure in playing tricks upon the harassed traveller. All the time the road makes a thousand turns, and winds here and there, and the fire--which is immovable--seems to be in continual motion, the obscurity preventing you realizing that you yourself modify your direction every instant. I had quite given up all hope of approaching this much-wished-for fire, when it appeared again, and this time so near that our horses stopped before it. I have here to express my sincere thanks to the Englishmen for the foresight of which they gave proof in building by the roadsides the little bengalows--one-story houses for the shelter of travellers. It is true, one must not demand comfort in this kind of hotel; but this is a matter in which the traveller, broken down by fatigue, is not exacting, and he is at the summit of happiness when he finds at his disposal a clean and dry room. The Hindus, no doubt, did not expect to see a traveller arrive at so late an hour of the night and in this season, for they had taken away the keys of the bengalow, so we had to force an entrance. I threw myself upon a bed prepared for me, composed of a pillow and blanket saturated with water, and almost at once fell asleep. At daybreak, after taking tea and some conserves, we took up our march again, now bathed in the burning rays of the sun. From time to time, we passed villages; the first in a superb narrow pass, then along the road meandering in the bosom of the mountain. We descended eventually to the river Djeloum (Jhelum), the waters of which flow gracefully, amid the rocks by which its course is obstructed, between rocky walls whose tops in many places seem almost to reach the azure skies of the Himalayas, a heaven which here shows itself remarkably pure and serene. Toward noon we arrived at the hamlet called Tongue--situated on the bank of the river--which presents an unique array of huts that give the effect of boxes, the openings of which form a façade. Here are sold comestibles and all kinds of merchandise. The place swarms with Hindus, who bear on their foreheads the variously colored marks of their respective castes. Here, too, you see the beautiful people of Kachmyr, dressed in their long white shirts and snowy turbans. I hired here, at a good price, a Hindu cabriolet, from a Kachmyrian. This vehicle is so constructed that in order to keep one's seat in it, one must cross his legs in the Turkish fashion. The seat is so small that it will hold, at most, only two persons. The absence of any support for the back makes this mode of transportation very dangerous; nevertheless, I accepted this kind of circular table mounted on two wheels and drawn by a horse, as I was anxious to reach, as soon as possible, the end of my journey. Hardly, however, had I gone five hundred yards on it, when I seriously regretted the horse I had forsaken, so much fatigue had I to endure keeping my legs crossed and maintaining my equilibrium. Unfortunately, it was already too late. Evening was falling when I approached the village of Hori. Exhausted by fatigue; racked by the incessant jolting; my legs feeling as if invaded by millions of ants, I had been completely incapable of enjoying the picturesque landscape spread before us as we journeyed along the Djeloum, the banks of which are bordered on one side by steep rocks and on the other by the heavily wooded slopes of the mountains. In Hori I encountered a caravan of pilgrims returning from Mecca. Thinking I was a physician and learning my haste to reach Ladak, they invited me to join them, which I promised I would at Srinagar. I spent an ill night, sitting up in my bed, with a lighted torch in my hand, without closing my eyes, in constant fear of the stings and bites of the scorpions and centipedes which swarm in the bengalows. I was sometimes ashamed of the fear with which those vermin inspired me; nevertheless, I could not fall asleep among them. Where, truly, in man, is the line that separates courage from cowardice? I will not boast of my bravery, but I am not a coward, yet the insurmountable fear with which those malevolent little creatures thrilled me, drove sleep from my eyelids, in spite of my extreme fatigue. Our horses carried us into a flat valley, encircled by high mountains. Bathed as I was in the rays of the sun, it did not take me long to fall asleep in the saddle. A sudden sense of freshness penetrated and awoke me. I saw that we had already begun climbing a mountain path, in the midst of a dense forest, rifts in which occasionally opened to our admiring gaze ravishing vistas, impetuous torrents; distant mountains; cloudless heavens; a landscape, far below, of wondrous beauty. All about us were the songs of numberless brilliantly plumaged birds. We came out of the forest toward noon, descended to a little hamlet on the bank of the river, and after refreshing ourselves with a light, cold collation, continued our journey. Before starting, I went to a bazaar and tried to buy there a glass of warm milk from a Hindu, who was sitting crouched before a large cauldron full of boiling milk. How great was my surprise when he proposed to me that I should take away the whole cauldron, with its contents, assuring me that I had polluted the milk it contained! "I only want a glass of milk and not a kettle of it," I said to him. "According to our laws," the merchant answered me, "if any one not belonging to our caste has fixed his eyes for a long time upon one of our cooking utensils, we have to wash that article thoroughly, and throw away the food it contains. You have polluted my milk and no one will drink any more of it, for not only were you not contented with fixing your eyes upon it, but you have even pointed to it with your finger." I had indeed a long time examined his merchandise, to make sure that it was really milk, and had pointed with my finger, to the merchant, from which side I wished the milk poured out. Full of respect for the laws and customs of foreign peoples, I paid, without dispute, a rupee, the price of all the milk, which was poured in the street, though I had taken only one glass of it. This was a lesson which taught me, from now on, not to fix my eyes upon the food of the Hindus. There is no religious belief more muddled by the numbers of ceremonious laws and commentaries prescribing its observances than the Brahminic. While each of the other principal religions has but one inspired book, one Bible, one Gospel, or one Koran--books from which the Hebrew, the Christian and the Musselman draw their creeds--the Brahminical Hindus possess such a great number of tomes and commentaries in folio that the wisest Brahmin has hardly had the time to peruse one-tenth of them. Leaving aside the four books of the Vedas; the Puranas--which are written in Sanscrit and composed of eighteen volumes--containing 400,000 strophes treating of law, rights, theogony, medicine, the creation and destruction of the world, etc.; the vast Shastras, which deal with mathematics, grammar, etc.; the Upa-Vedas, Upanishads, Upo-Puranas--which are explanatory of the Puranas;--and a number of other commentaries in several volumes; there still remain twelve vast books, containing the laws of Manu, the grandchild of Brahma--books dealing not only with civil and criminal law, but also the canonical rules--rules which impose upon the faithful such a considerable number of ceremonies that one is surprised into admiration of the illimitable patience the Hindus show in observance of the precepts inculcated by Saint Manu. Manu was incontestably a great legislator and a great thinker, but he has written so much that it has happened to him frequently to contradict himself in the course of a single page. The Brahmins do not take the trouble to notice that, and the poor Hindus, whose labor supports the Brahminic caste, obey servilely their clergy, whose prescriptions enjoin upon them never to touch a man who does not belong to their caste, and also absolutely prohibit a stranger from fixing his attention upon anything belonging to a Hindu. Keeping himself to the strict letter of this law, the Hindu imagines that his food is polluted when it receives a little protracted notice from the stranger. And yet, Brahminism has been, even at the beginning of its second birth, a purely monotheistic religion, recognizing only one infinite and indivisible God. As it came to pass in all times and in religions, the clergy took advantage of the privileged situation which places them above the ignorant multitude, and early manufactured various exterior forms of cult and certain laws, thinking they could better, in this way, influence and control the masses. Things changed soon, so far that the principle of monotheism, of which the Vedas have given such a clear conception, became confounded with, or, as it were, supplanted by an absurd and limitless series of gods and goddesses, half-gods, genii and devils, which were represented by idols, of infinite variety but all equally horrible looking. The people, once glorious as their religion was once great and pure, now slip by degrees into complete idiocy. Hardly does their day suffice for the accomplishment of all the prescriptions of their canons. It must be said positively that the Hindus only exist to support their principal caste, the Brahmins, who have taken into their hands the temporal power which once was possessed by independent sovereigns of the people. While governing India, the Englishman does not interfere with this phase of the public life, and so the Brahmins profit by maintaining the people's hope of a better future. The sun passed behind the summit of a mountain, and the darkness of night in one moment overspread the magnificent landscape we were traversing. Soon the narrow valley of the Djeloum fell asleep. Our road winding along ledges of steep rocks, was instantly hidden from our sight; mountains and trees were confounded together in one dark mass, and the stars glittered in the celestial vault. We had to dismount and feel our way along the mountain side, for fear of becoming the prey of the abyss which yawned at our feet. At a late hour of the night we traversed a bridge and ascended a steep elevation leading to the bengalow Ouri, which at this height seems to enjoy complete isolation. The next day we traversed a charming region, always going along the river--at a turn of which we saw the ruins of a Sikh fortress, that seemed to remember sadly its glorious past. In a little valley, nestled amid the mountains, we found a bengalow which seemed to welcome us. In its proximity were encamped a cavalry regiment of the Maharajah of Kachmyr. When the officers learned that I was a Russian, they invited me to share their repast. There I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Col. Brown, who was the first to compile a dictionary of the Afghan-pouchton language. As I was anxious to reach, as soon as possible, the city of Srinagar, I, with little delay, continued my journey through the picturesque region lying at the foot of the mountains, after having, for a long time, followed the course of the river. Here, before our eyes, weary of the monotonous desolation of the preceding landscapes, was unfolded a charming view of a well-peopled valley, with many two-story houses surrounded by gardens and cultivated fields. A little farther on begins the celebrated valley of Kachmyr, situated behind a range of high rocks which I crossed toward evening. What a superb panorama revealed itself before my eyes, when I found myself at the last rock which separates the valley of Kachmyr from the mountainous country I had traversed. A ravishing tableau truly enchanted my sight. This valley, the limits of which are lost in the horizon, and is throughout well populated, is enshrined amid the high Himalayan mountains. At the rising and the setting of the sun, the zone of eternal snows seems a silver ring, which like a girdle surrounds this rich and delightful plateau, furrowed by numerous rivers and traversed by excellent roads, gardens, hills, a lake, the islands in which are occupied by constructions of pretentious style, all these cause the traveller to feel as if he had entered another world. It seems to him as though he had to go but a little farther on and there must find the Paradise of which his governess had told him so often in his childhood. The veil of night slowly covered the valley, merging mountains, gardens and lake in one dark amplitude, pierced here and there by distant fires, resembling stars. I descended into the valley, directing myself toward the Djeloum, which has broken its way through a narrow gorge in the mountains, to unite itself with the waters of the river Ind. According to the legend, the valley was once an inland sea; a passage opened through the rocks environing it, and drained the waters away, leaving nothing more of its former character than the lake, the Djeloum and minor water-courses. The banks of the river are now lined with boat-houses, long and narrow, which the proprietors, with their families, inhabit the whole year. From here Srinagar can be reached in one day's travel on horseback; but with a boat the journey requires a day and a half. I chose the latter mode of conveyance, and having selected a boat and bargained with its proprietor for its hire, took my seat in the bow, upon a carpet, sheltered by a sort of penthouse roof. The boat left the shore at midnight, bearing us rapidly toward Srinagar. At the stern of the bark, a Hindu prepared my tea. I went to sleep, happy in knowing my voyage was to be accomplished. The hot caress of the sun's rays penetrating my little roof awakened me, and what I experienced delighted me beyond all expression. Entirely green banks; the distant outlines of mountain tops covered with snow; pretty villages which from time to time showed themselves at the mountain's foot; the crystalline sheet of water; pure and peculiarly agreeable air, which I breathed with exhilaration; the musical carols of an infinity of birds; a sky of extraordinary purity; behind me the plash of water stirred by the round-ended paddle which was wielded with ease by a superb woman (with marvellous eyes and a complexion browned by the sun), who wore an air of stately indifference: all these things together seemed to plunge me into an ecstasy, and I forgot entirely the reason for my presence on the river. In that moment I had not even a desire to reach the end of my voyage--and yet, how many privations remained for me to undergo, and dangers to encounter! I felt myself here so well content! The boat glided rapidly and the landscape continued to unfold new beauties before my eyes, losing itself in ever new combinations with the horizon, which merged into the mountains we were passing, to become one with them. Then a new panorama would display itself, seeming to expand and flow out from the sides of the mountains, becoming more and more grand.... The day was almost spent and I was not yet weary of contemplating this magnificent nature, the view of which reawakened the souvenirs of childhood and youth. How beautiful were those days forever gone! The more nearly one approaches Srinagar, the more numerous become the villages embowered in the verdure. At the approach of our boat, some of their inhabitants came running to see us; the men in their turbans, the women in their small bonnets, both alike dressed in white gowns reaching to the ground, the children in a state of nudity which reminded one of the costumes of our first parents. When entering the city one sees a range of barks and floating houses in which entire families reside. The tops of the far-off, snow-covered mountains were caressed by the last rays of the setting sun, when we glided between the wooden houses of Srinagar, which closely line both banks of the river. Life seems to cease here at sunset; the thousands of many colored open boats (dunga) and palanquin-covered barks (bangla) were fastened along the beach; men and women gathered near the river, in the primitive costumes of Adam and Eve, going through their evening ablutions without feeling any embarrassment or prudery before each other, since they performed a religious rite, the importance of which is greater for them than all human prejudices. On the 20^th of October I awoke in a neat room, from which I had a gay view upon the river that was now inundated with the rays of the sun of Kachmyr. As it is not my purpose to describe here my experiences in detail, I refrain from enumerating the lovely valleys, the paradise of lakes, the enchanting islands, those historic places, mysterious pagodas, and coquettish villages which seem lost in vast gardens; on all sides of which rise the majestic tops of the giants of the Himalaya, shrouded as far as the eye can see in eternal snow. I shall only note the preparations I made in view of my journey toward Thibet. I spent six days at Srinagar, making long excursions into the enchanting surroundings of the city, examining the numerous ruins which testify to the ancient prosperity of this region, and studying the strange customs of the country. * * * * * Kachmyr, as well as the other provinces attached to it, Baltistan, Ladak, etc., are vassals of England. They formerly formed part of the possessions of Randjid Sing, the Lion of the Pendjab. At his death, the English troops occupied Lahore, the capital of the Pendjab, separated Kachmyr from the rest of the empire and ceded it, under color of hereditary right, and for the sum of 160,000,000 francs, to Goulab-Sing, one of the familiars of the late sovereign, conferring on him besides the title of Maharadja. At the epoch of my journey, the actual Maharadja was Pertab-Sing, the grandchild of Goulab, whose residence is Jamoo, on the southern slope of the Himalaya. The celebrated "happy valley" of Kachmyr (eighty-five miles long by twenty-five miles wide) enjoyed glory and prosperity only under the Grand Mogul, whose court loved to taste here the sweetness of country life, in the still existent pavilions on the little island of the lake. Most of the Maharadjas of Hindustan used formerly to spend here the summer months, and to take part in the magnificent festivals given by the Grand Mogul; but times have greatly changed since, and the happy valley is today no more than a beggar retreat. Aquatic plants and scum have covered the clear waters of the lake; the wild juniper has smothered all the vegetation of the islands; the palaces and pavilions retain only the souvenir of their past grandeur; earth and grass cover the buildings which are now falling in ruins. The surrounding mountains and their eternally white tops seem to be absorbed in a sullen sadness, and to nourish the hope of a better time for the disclosure of their immortal beauties. The once spiritual, beautiful and cleanly inhabitants have grown animalistic and stupid; they have become dirty and lazy; and the whip now governs them, instead of the sword. The people of Kachmyr have so often been subject to invasions and pillages and have had so many masters, that they have now become indifferent to every thing. They pass their time near the banks of the rivers, gossiping about their neighbors; or are engaged in the painstaking work of making their celebrated shawls; or in the execution of filagree gold or silver work. The Kachmyr women are of a melancholy temperament, and an inconceivable sadness is spread upon their features. Everywhere reigns misery and uncleanness. The beautiful men and superb women of Kachmyr are dirty and in rags. The costume of the two sexes consists, winter and summer alike, of a long shirt, or gown, made of thick material and with puffed sleeves. They wear this shirt until it is completely worn out, and never is it washed, so that the white turban of the men looks like dazzling snow near their dirty shirts, which are covered all over with spittle and grease stains. The traveller feels himself permeated with sadness at seeing the contrast between the rich and opulent nature surrounding them, and this people dressed in rags. The capital of the country, Srinagar (City of the Sun), or, to call it by the name which is given to it here after the country, Kachmyr, is situated on the shore of the Djeloum, along which it stretches out toward the south to a distance of five kilometres and is not more than two kilometres in breadth. Its two-story houses, inhabited by a population of 100,000 inhabitants, are built of wood and border both river banks. Everybody lives on the river, the shores of which are united by ten bridges. Terraces lead from the houses to the Djeloum, where all day long people perform their ceremonial ablutions, bathe and wash their culinary utensils, which consist of a few copper pots. Part of the inhabitants practice the Musselman religion; two-thirds are Brahminic; and there are but few Buddhists to be found among them. It was time to make other preparations for travel before plunging into the unknown. Having purchased different kinds of conserves, wine and other things indispensable on a journey through a country so little peopled as is Thibet, I packed all my baggage in boxes; hired six carriers and an interpreter, bought a horse for my own use, and fixed my departure for the 27^th of October. To cheer up my journey, I took from a good Frenchman, M. Peicheau, the wine cultivator of the Maharadja, a big dog, Pamir, who had already traversed the road with my friends, Bonvallot, Capus and Pepin, the well-known explorers. As I wished to shorten my journey by two days, I ordered my carriers to leave at dawn from the other side of the lake, which I crossed in a boat, and joined them and my horse at the foot of the mountain chain which separates the valley of Srinagar from the Sind gorge. I shall never forget the tortures which we had to undergo in climbing almost on all fours to a mountain top, three thousand feet high. The carriers were out of breath; every moment I feared to see one tumble down the declivity with his burden, and I felt pained at seeing my poor dog, Pamir, panting and with his tongue hanging out, make two or three steps and fall to the ground exhausted. Forgetting my own fatigue, I caressed and encouraged the poor animal, who, as if understanding me, got up to make another two or three steps and fall anew to the ground. The night had come when we reached the crest; we threw ourselves greedily upon the snow to quench our thirst; and after a short rest, started to descend through a very thick pine forest, hastening to gain the village of Haïena, at the foot of the defile, fearing the attacks of beasts of prey in the darkness. A level and good road leads from Srinagar to Haïena, going straight northward over Ganderbal, where I repaired by a more direct route across a pass three thousand feet high, which shortened for me both time and distance. My first step in the unknown was marked by an incident which made all of us pass an ugly quarter of an hour. The defile of the Sind, sixty miles long, is especially noteworthy for the inhospitable hosts it contains. Among others it abounds in panthers, tigers, leopards, black bears, wolves and jackals. As though by a special misfortune, the snow had covered with its white carpet the heights of the chain, compelling those formidable, carnivorous beasts to descend a little lower for shelter in their dens. We descended in silence, amid the darkness, a narrow path that wound through the centennary firs and birches, and the calm of the night was only broken by the crackling sound of our steps. Suddenly, quite near to us, a terrible howling awoke the echoes of the woods. Our small troop stopped. "A panther!" exclaimed, in a low and frightened voice, my servant. The small caravan of a dozen men stood motionless, as though riveted to the spot. Then it occurred to me that at the moment of starting on our ascent, when already feeling fatigued, I had entrusted my revolver to one of the carriers, and my Winchester rifle to another. Now I felt bitter regret for having parted with my arms, and asked in a low voice where the man was to whom I had given the rifle. The howls became more and more violent, and filled the echoes of the woods, when suddenly a dull sound was heard, like the fall of some body. A minute later we heard the noise of a struggle and a cry of agony which mingled with the fierce roars of the starved animal. "Saaïb, take the gun," I heard some one near by. I seized feverishly the rifle, but, vain trouble, one could not see two steps before oneself. A new cry, followed by a smothered howling, indicated to me vaguely the place of the struggle, toward which I crawled, divided between the ardent desire to "kill a panther" and a horrible fear of being eaten alive. No one dared to move; only after five minutes it occurred to one of the carriers to light a match. I then remembered the fear which feline animals exhibit at the presence of fire, and ordered my men to gather two or three handfuls of brush, which I set on fire. We then saw, about ten steps from us, one of our carriers stretched out on the ground, with his limbs frightfully lacerated by the claws of a huge panther. The beast still lay upon him defiantly, holding a piece of flesh in its mouth. At its side, gaped a box of wine broken open by its fall when the carrier was torn down. Hardly did I make a movement to bring the rifle to my shoulder, when the panther raised itself, and turned toward us while dropping part of its horrible meal. One moment, it appeared about to spring upon me, then it suddenly wheeled, and rending the air with a howl, enough to freeze one's blood, jumped into the midst of the thicket and disappeared. My coolies, whom an odious fear had all the time kept prostrated on the ground, recovered little by little from their fright. Keeping in readiness a few packages of dry grass and matches, we hastened to reach the village Haïena, leaving behind the remains of the unfortunate Hindu, whose fate we feared sharing. An hour later we had left the forest and entered the plain. I ordered my tent erected under a very leafy plane tree, and had a great fire made before it, with a pile of wood, which was the only protection we could employ against the ferocious beasts whose howls continued to reach us from all directions. In the forest my dog had pressed himself against me, with his tail between his legs; but once under the tent, he suddenly recovered his watchfulness, and barked incessantly the whole night, being very careful, however, not to step outside. I spent a terrible night, rifle in hand, listening to the concert of those diabolical howlings, the echoes of which seemed to shake the defile. Some panthers approached our bivouac to answer the barking of Pamir, but dared not attack us. I had left Srinagar at the head of eleven carriers, four of whom had to carry so many boxes of wine, four others bore my travelling effects; one my weapons, another various utensils, and finally a last, who went errands or on reconnaissance. His name was "Chicari," which means "he who accompanies the hunter and gathers the prey." I discharged him in the morning on account of his cowardice and his profound ignorance of the country, and only retained four carriers. It was but slowly that I advanced toward the village of Gounde. How beautiful is nature in the Sind pass, and how much is it beloved by the hunters! Besides the great fallow deer, you meet there the hind, the stag, the mountain sheep and an immense variety of birds, among which I want to mention above all the golden pheasant, and others of red or snow-white plumage, very large partridges and immense eagles. The villages situated along the Sind do not shine by their dimensions. They contain, for the greatest part, not more than ten to twenty huts of an extremely miserable appearance. Their inhabitants are clad in rags. Their cattle belongs to a very small race. I crossed the river at Sambal, and stopped near the village Gounde, where I procured relay horses. In some villages they refused to hire horses to me; I then threatened them with my whip, which at once inspired respect and obedience; my money accomplished the same end; it inspired a servile obedience--not willingness--to obey my least orders. Stick and gold are the true sovereigns in the Orient; without them the Very Grand Mogul would not have had any preponderance. Night began to descend, and I was in a hurry to cross the defile which separates the villages Gogangan and Sonamarg. The road is in very bad condition, and the mountains are infested by beasts of prey which in the night descend into the very villages to seek their prey. The country is delightful and very fertile; nevertheless, but few colonists venture to settle here, on account of the neighborhood of the panthers, which come to the dooryards to seize domestic animals. At the very exit of the defile, near the village of Tchokodar, or Thajwas, the half obscurity prevailing only permitted me to distinguish two dark masses crossing the road. They were two big bears followed by a young one. I was alone with my servant (the caravan having loitered behind), so I did not like to attack them with only one rifle; but the long excursions which I had made on the mountain had strongly developed in me the sense of the hunter. To jump from my horse, shoot, and, without even verifying the result, change quickly the cartridge, was the affair of a second. One bear was about to jump on me, a second shot made it run away and disappear. Holding in my hand my loaded gun, I approached with circumspection, the one at which I had aimed, and found it laying on its flank, dead, with the little cub beside it. Another shot killed the little one, after which I went to work to take off the two superb jet-black skins. This incident made us lose two hours, and night had completely set in when I erected my tent near Tchokodar, which I left at sunrise to gain Baltal, by following the course of the Sind river. At this place the ravishing landscape of the "golden prairie" terminates abruptly with a village of the same name (Sona, gold, and Marg, prairie). The abrupt acclivity of Zodgi-La, which we next surmounted, attains an elevation of 11,500 feet, on the other side of which the whole country assumes a severe and inhospitable character. My hunting adventures closed before reaching Baltal. From there I met on the road only wild goats. In order to hunt, I would have had to leave the grand route and to penetrate into the heart of the mountains full of mysteries. I had neither the inclination nor the time to do so, and, therefore, continued quietly my journey toward Ladak. * * * * * How violent the contrast I felt when passing from the laughing nature and beautiful population of Kachmyr to the arid and forbidding rocks and the beardless and ugly inhabitants of Ladak! The country into which I penetrated is situated at an altitude of 11,000 to 12,000 feet. Only at Karghil the level descends to 8,000 feet. The acclivity of Zodgi-La is very rough; one must climb up an almost perpendicular rocky wall. In certain places the road winds along upon rock ledges of only a metre in width, below which the sight drops into unfathomable abysses. May the Lord preserve the traveller from a fall! At one place, the way is upon long beams introduced into holes made in the rock, like a bridge, and covered up with earth. Brr!--At the thought that a little stone might get loose and roll down the slope of the mountain, or that a too strong oscillation of the beams could precipitate the whole structure into the abyss, and with it him who had ventured upon the perilous path, one feels like fainting more than once during this hazardous passage. After crossing the glaciers we stopped in a valley and prepared to spend the night near a hut, a dismal place surrounded by eternal ice and snow. From Baltal the distances are determined by means of daks, _i.e._, postal stations for mail service. They are low huts, about seven kilometres distant from each other. A man is permanently established in each of these huts. The postal service between Kachmyr and Thibet is yet carried on in a very primitive form. The letters are enclosed in a leather bag, which is handed to the care of a carrier. The latter runs rapidly over the seven kilometres assigned to him, carrying on his back a basket which holds several of these bags, which he delivers to another carrier, who, in his turn, accomplishes his task in an identical manner. Neither rain nor snow can arrest these carriers. In this way the mail service is carried on between Kachmyr and Thibet, and _vice versa_ once a week. For each course the letter carrier is paid six annas (twenty cents); the same wages as is paid to the carriers of merchandise. This sum I also paid to every one of my servants for carrying a ten times heavier load. It makes one's heart ache to see the pale and tired-looking figures of these carriers; but what is to be done? It is the custom of the country. The tea is brought from China by a similar system of transportation, which is rapid and inexpensive. In the village of Montaiyan, I found again the Yarkandien caravan of pilgrims, whom I had promised to accompany on their journey. They recognized me from a distance, and asked me to examine one of their men, who had fallen sick. I found him writhing in the agonies of an intense fever. Shaking my hands as a sign of despair, I pointed to the heavens and gave them to understand that human will and science were now useless, and that God alone could save him. These people journeyed by small stages only; I, therefore, left them and arrived in the evening at Drass, situated at the bottom of a valley near a river of the same name. Near Drass, a little fort of ancient construction, but freshly painted, stands aloof, under the guard of three Sikhs of the Maharadja's army. At Drass, my domicile was the post-house, which is a station--and the only one--of an unique telegraph line from Srinagar to the interior of the Himalayas. From that time on, I no more had my tent put up each evening, but stopped in the caravansarais; places which, though made repulsive by their dirt, are kept warm by the enormous piles of wood burned in their fireplaces. From Drass to Karghil the landscape is unpleasing and monotonous, if one excepts the marvellous effects of the rising and setting sun and the beautiful moonlight. Apart from these the road is wearisome and abounding with dangers. Karghil is the principal place of the district, where the governor of the country resides. Its site is quite picturesque. Two water courses, the Souron and the Wakkha, roll their noisy and turbulent waters among rocks and sunken snags of uprooted trees, escaping from their respective defiles in the rocks, to join in forming here the river Souron, upon the banks of which stands Karghil. A little fort, garrisoned by two or three Sikhs, shows its outlines at the junction of the streams. Provided with a horse, I continued my journey at break of day, entering now the province of Ladak, or Little Thibet. I traversed a ricketty bridge, composed--like all the bridges of Kachmyr--of two long beams, the ends of which were supported upon the banks and the floor made of a layer of fagots and sticks, which imparted to the traveller, at least the illusion of a suspension bridge. Soon afterward I climbed slowly up on a little plateau, which crosses the way at a distance of two kilometres, to descend into the narrow valley of Wakkha. Here there are several villages, among which, on the left shore, is the very picturesque one called Paskium. Here my feet trod Buddhist ground. The inhabitants are of a very simple and mild disposition, seemingly ignorant of "quarreling." Women are very rare among them. Those of them whom I encountered were distinguished from the women I had hitherto seen in India or Kachmyr, by the air of gaiety and prosperity apparent in their countenances. How could it be otherwise, since each woman in this country has, on an average, three to five husbands, and possesses them in the most legitimate way in the world. Polyandry flourishes here. However large a family may be, there is but one woman in it. If the family does not contain already more than two husbands, a bachelor may share its advantages, for a consideration. The days sacred to each one of those husbands are determined in advance, and all acquit themselves of their respective duties and respect each others' rights. The men generally seem feeble, with bent backs, and do not live to old age. During my travels in Ladak, I only encountered one man so old that his hair was white. From Karghil to the centre of Ladak, the road had a more cheerful aspect than that I had traversed before reaching Karghil, its prospect being brightened by a number of little hamlets, but trees and verdure were, unfortunately, rare. Twenty miles from Karghil, at the end of the defile formed by the rapid current of the Wakkha, is a little village called Chargol, in the centre of which stand three chapels, decorated with lively colors (_t'horthenes_, to give them the name they bear in Thibet). Below, near the river, are masses of rocks, in the form of long and large walls, upon which are thrown, in apparent disorder, flat stones of different colors and sizes. Upon these stones are engraved all sorts of prayers, in Ourd, Sanscrit and Thibetan, and one can even find among them inscriptions in Arabic characters. Without the knowledge of my carriers, I succeeded in taking away a few of these stones, which are now in the palace of the Trocadero. Along the way, from Chargol, one finds frequently oblong mounds, artificial constructions. After sunrise, with fresh horses, I resumed my journey and stopped near the _gonpa_ (monastery) of Moulbek, which seems glued on the flank of an isolated rock. Below is the hamlet of Wakkha, and not far from there is to be seen another rock, of very strange form, which seems to have been placed where it stands by human hands. In one side of it is cut a Buddha several metres in height. Upon it are several cylinders, the turning of which serves for prayers. They are a sort of wooden barrel, draped with yellow or white fabrics, and are attached to vertically planted stakes. It requires only the least wind to make them turn. The person who puts up one of these cylinders no longer feels it obligatory upon him to say his prayers, for all that devout believers can ask of God is written upon the cylinders. Seen from a distance this white painted monastery, standing sharply out from the gray background of the rocks, with all these whirling, petticoated wheels, produce a strange effect in this dead country. I left my horses in the hamlet of Wakkha, and, followed by my servant, walked toward the convent, which is reached by a narrow stairway cut in the rock. At the top, I was received by a very fat lama, with a scanty, straggling beard under his chin--a common characteristic of the Thibetan people--who was very ugly, but very cordial. His costume consisted of a yellow robe and a sort of big nightcap, with projecting flaps above the ears, of the same color. He held in his hand a copper prayer-machine which, from time to time, he shook with his left hand, without at all permitting that exercise to interfere with his conversation. It was his eternal prayer, which he thus communicated to the wind, so that by this element it should be borne to Heaven. We traversed a suite of low chambers, upon the walls of which were images of Buddha, of all sizes and made of all kinds of materials, all alike covered by a thick layer of dust. Finally we reached an open terrace, from which the eyes, taking in the surrounding region, rested upon an inhospitable country, strewn with grayish rocks and traversed by only a single road, which on both sides lost itself in the horizon. When we were seated, they brought us beer, made with hops, called here _Tchang_ and brewed in the cloister. It has a tendency to rapidly produce _embonpoint_ upon the monks, which is regarded as a sign of the particular favor of Heaven. They spoke here the Thibetan language. The origin of this language is full of obscurity. One thing is certain, that a king of Thibet, a contemporary of Mohammed, undertook the creation of an universal language for all the disciples of Buddha. To this end he had simplified the Sanscrit grammar, composed an alphabet containing an infinite number of signs, and thus laid the foundations of a language the pronunciation of which is one of the easiest and the writing the most complicated. Indeed, in order to represent a sound one must employ not less than eight characters. All the modern literature of Thibet is written in this language. The pure Thibetan is only spoken in Ladak and Oriental Thibet. In all other parts of the country are employed dialects formed by the mixture of this mother language with different idioms taken from the neighboring peoples of the various regions round about. In the ordinary life of the Thibetan, there exists always two languages, one of which is absolutely incomprehensible to the women, while the other is spoken by the entire nation; but only in the convents can be found the Thibetan language in all its purity and integrity. The lamas much prefer the visits of Europeans to those of Musselmen, and when I asked the one who received me why this was so, he answered me: "Musselmen have no point of contact at all with our religion. Only comparatively recently, in their victorious campaign, they have converted, by force, part of the Buddhists to Islam. It requires of us great efforts to bring back those Musselmen, descendants of Buddhists, into the path of the true God. As regards the Europeans, it is quite a different affair. Not only do they profess the essential principles of monotheism, but they are, in a sense, adorers of Buddha, with almost the same rites as the lamas who inhabit Thibet. The only fault of the Christians is that after having adopted the great doctrines of Buddha, they have completely separated themselves from him, and have created for themselves a different Dalai-Lama. Our Dalai-Lama is the only one who has received the divine gift of seeing, face to face, the majesty of Buddha, and is empowered to serve as an intermediary between earth and heaven." "Which Dalai-Lama of the Christians do you refer to?" I asked him; "we have one, the Son of God, to whom we address directly our fervent prayers, and to him alone we recur to intercede with our One and Indivisible God." "It is not him of whom it is a question, Sahib," he replied. "We, too, respect him, whom we reverence as son of the One and Indivisible God, but we do not see in him the Only Son, but the excellent being who was chosen among all. Buddha, indeed, has incarnated himself, with his divine nature, in the person of the sacred Issa, who, without employing fire or iron, has gone forth to propagate our true and great religion among all the world. Him whom I meant was your terrestrial Dalai-Lama; he to whom you have given the title of 'Father of the Church.' That is a great sin. May he be brought back, with the flock, who are now in a bad road," piously added the lama, giving another twirl to his prayer-machine. I understood now that he alluded to the Pope. "You have told me that a son of Buddha, Issa, the elect among all, had spread your religion on the Earth. Who is he?" I asked. At this question the lama's eyes opened wide; he looked at me with astonishment and pronounced some words I could not catch, murmuring in an unintelligible way. "Issa," he finally replied, "is a great prophet, one of the first after the twenty-two Buddhas. He is greater than any one of all the Dalai-Lamas, for he constitutes part of the spirituality of our Lord. It is he who has instructed you; he who brought back into the bosom of God the frivolous and wicked souls; he who made you worthy of the beneficence of the Creator, who has ordained that each being should know good and evil. His name and his acts have been chronicled in our sacred writings, and when reading how his great life passed away in the midst of an erring people, we weep for the horrible sin of the heathen who murdered him, after subjecting him to torture." I was struck by this recital of the lama. The prophet Issa--his tortures and death--our Christian Dalai-Lama--the Buddhist recognizing Christianity--all these made me think more and more of Jesus Christ. I asked my interpreter not to lose a single word of what the lama told me. "Where can those writings be found, and who compiled them?" I asked the monk. "The principal scrolls--which were written in India and Nepaul, at different epochs, as the events happened--are in Lhassa; several thousands in number. In some great convents are to be found copies, which the lamas, during their sojourn in Lhassa, have made, at various times, and have then given to their cloisters as souvenirs of the period they spent with the Dalai-Lama." "But you, yourselves; do you not possess copies of the scrolls bearing upon the prophet Issa?" "We have not. Our convent is insignificant, and since its foundation our successive lamas have had only a few hundred manuscripts in their library. The great cloisters have several thousands of them; but they are sacred things which will not, anywhere, be shown to you." We spoke together a few minutes longer, after which I went home, all the while thinking of the lama's statements. Issa, a prophet of the Buddhists! But, how could this be? Of Jewish origin, he lived in Palestine and in Egypt; and the Gospels do not contain one word, not even the least allusion, to the part which Buddhism should have played in the education of Jesus. I made up my mind to visit all the convents of Thibet, in the hope of gathering fuller information upon the prophet Issa, and perhaps copies of the chronicles bearing upon this subject. * * * * * We traversed the Namykala Pass, at 30,000 feet of altitude, whence we descended into the valley of the River Salinoumah. Turning southward, we gained Karbou, leaving behind us, on the opposite bank, numerous villages, among other, Chagdoom, which is at the top of a rock, an extremely imposing sight. Its houses are white and have a sort of festive look, with their two and three stories. This, by the way, is a common peculiarity of all the villages of Ladak. The eye of the European, travelling in Kachmyr, would soon lose sight of all architecture to which he had been accustomed. In Ladak, on the contrary, he would be agreeably surprised at seeing the little two and three-story houses, reminders to him of those in European provinces. Near the city of Karbou, upon two perpendicular rocks, one sees the ruins of a little town or village. A tempest and an earthquake are said to have shaken down its walls, the solidity of which seems to have been exceptional. The next day I traversed the Fotu-La Pass, at an altitude of 13,500 feet. At its summit stands a little _t'horthene_ (chapel). Thence, following the dry bed of a stream, I descended to the hamlet of Lamayure, the sudden appearance of which is a surprise to the traveller. A convent, which seems grafted on the side of the rock, or held there in some miraculous way, dominates the village. Stairs are unknown in this cloister. In order to pass from one story of it to another, ropes are used. Communication with the world outside is through a labyrinth of passages in the rock. Under the windows of the convent--which make one think of birds' nests on the face of a cliff---is a little inn, the rooms of which are little inviting. Hardly had I stretched myself on the carpet in one of them, when the monks, dressed in their yellow robes, filled the apartment, bothered me with questions as to whence I came, the purpose of my coming, where I was going, and so on, finally inviting me to come and see them. In spite of my fatigue I accepted their invitation and set out with them, to climb up the excavated passages in the rock, which were encumbered with an infinity of prayer cylinders and wheels, which I could not but touch and set turning as I brushed past them. They are placed there that they may be so turned, saving to the passers-by the time they might otherwise lose in saying their prayers--as if their affairs were so absorbing, and their time so precious, that they could not find leisure to pray. Many pious Buddhists use for this purpose an apparatus arranged to be turned by the current of a stream. I have seen a long row of cylinders, provided with their prayer formulas, placed along a river bank, in such a way that the water kept them constantly in motion, this ingenious device freeing the proprietors from any further obligation to say prayers themselves. I sat down on a bench in the hall, where semi-obscurity reigned. The walls were garnished with little statues of Buddha, books and prayer-wheels. The loquacious lamas began explaining to me the significance of each object. "And those books?" I asked them; "they, no doubt, have reference to religion." "Yes, sir. These are a few religious volumes which deal with the primary and principal rites of the life common to all. We possess several parts of the words of Buddha consecrated to the Great and Indivisible Divine Being, and to all that issue from his hands." "Is there not, among those books, some account of the prophet Issa?" "No, sir," answered the monk. "We only possess a few principal treatises relating to the observance of the religious rites. As for the biographies of our saints, they are collected in Lhassa. There are even great cloisters which have not had the time to procure them. Before coming to this gonpa, I was for several years in a great convent on the other side of Ladak, and have seen there thousands of books, and scrolls copied out of various books by the lamas of the monastery." By some further interrogation I learned that the convent in question was near Leh, but my persistent inquiries had the effect of exciting the suspicions of the lamas. They showed me the way out with evident pleasure, and regaining my room, I fell asleep--after a light lunch--leaving orders with my Hindu to inform himself in a skillful way, from some of the younger lamas of the convent, about the monastery in which their chief had lived before coming to Lamayure. In the morning, when we set forth on our journey, the Hindu told me that he could get nothing from the lamas, who were very reticent. I will not stop to describe the life of the monks in those convents, for it is the same in all the cloisters of Ladak. I have seen the celebrated monastery of Leh--of which I shall have to speak later on--and learned there the strange existences the monks and religious people lead, which is everywhere the same. In Lamayure commences a declivity which, through a steep, narrow and sombre gorge, extends toward India. Without having the least idea of the dangers which the descent presented, I sent my carriers in advance and started on a route, rather pleasant at the outset, which passes between the brown clay hills, but soon it produced upon me the most depressing effect, as though I was traversing a gloomy subterranean passage. Then the road came out on the flank of the mountain, above a terrible abyss. If a rider had met me, we could not possibly have passed each other, the way was so narrow. All description would fail to convey a sense of the grandeur and wild beauty of this cañon, the summit of the walls of which seemed to reach the sky. At some points it became so narrow that from my saddle I could, with my cane, touch the opposite rock. At other places, death might be fancied looking up expectantly, from the abyss, at the traveller. It was too late to dismount. In entering alone this gorge, I had not the faintest idea that I would have occasion to regret my foolish imprudence. I had not realized its character. It was simply an enormous crevasse, rent by some Titanic throe of nature, some tremendous earthquake, which had split the granite mountain. In its bottom I could just distinguish a hardly perceptible white thread, an impetuous torrent, the dull roar of which filled the defile with mysterious and impressive sounds. Far overhead extended, narrow and sinuously, a blue ribbon, the only glimpse of the celestial world that the frowning granite walls permitted to be seen. It was a thrilling pleasure, this majestic view of nature. At the same time, its rugged severity, the vastness of its proportions, the deathly silence only invaded by the ominous murmur from the depths beneath, all together filled me with an unconquerable depression. I had about eight miles in which to experience these sensations, at once sweet and painful. Then, turning to the right, our little caravan reached a small valley, almost surrounded by precipitous granite rocks, which mirrored themselves in the Indus. On the bank of the river stands the little fortress Khalsi, a celebrated fortification dating from the epoch of the Musselman invasion, by which runs the wild road from Kachmyr to Thibet. We crossed the Indus on an almost suspended bridge which led directly to the door of the fortress, thus impossible of evasion. Rapidly we traversed the valley, then the village of Khalsi, for I was anxious to spend the night in the hamlet of Snowely, which is placed upon terraces descending to the Indus. The two following days I travelled tranquilly and without any difficulties to overcome, along the shore of the Indus, in a picturesque country--which brought me to Leh, the capital of Ladak. While traversing the little valley of Saspoula, at a distance of several kilometres from the village of the same name, I found "_t'horthenes_" and two cloisters, above one of which floated the French flag. Later on, I learned that a French engineer had presented the flag to the monks, who displayed it simply as a decoration of their building. I passed the night at Saspoula and certainly did not forget to visit the cloisters, seeing there for the tenth time the omnipresent dust-covered images of Buddha; the flags and banners heaped in a corner; ugly masks on the floor; books and papyrus rolls heaped together without order or care, and the inevitable abundance of prayer-wheels. The lamas demonstrated a particular pleasure in exhibiting these things, doing it with the air of shopmen displaying their goods, with very little care for the degree of interest the traveller may take in them. "We must show everything, in the hope that the sight alone of these sacred objects will force the traveller to believe in the divine grandeur of the human soul." Respecting the prophet Issa, they gave me the same account I already had, and I learned, what I had known before, that the books which could instruct me about him were at Lhassa, and that only the great monasteries possessed some copies. I did not think any more of passing Kara-koroum, but only of finding the history of the prophet Issa, which would, perhaps, bring to light the entire life of the best of men, and complete the rather vague information which the Gospels afford us about him. Not far from Leh, and at the entrance of the valley of the same name, our road passed near an isolated rock, on the top of which were constructed a fort--with two towers and without garrison--and a little convent named Pitak. A mountain, 10,500 feet high, protects the entrance to Thibet. There the road makes a sudden turn toward the north, in the direction of Leh, six miles from Pitak and a thousand feet higher. Immense granite mountains tower above Leh, to a height of 18,000 or 19,000 feet, their crests covered with eternal snow. The city itself, surrounded by a girdle of stunted aspen trees, rises upon successive terraces, which are dominated by an old fort and the palaces of the ancient sovereigns of Ladak. Toward evening I made my entrance into Leh, and stopped at a bengalow constructed especially for Europeans, whom the road from India brings here in the hunting season. Ladak Ladak formerly was part of Great Thibet. The powerful invading forces from the north which traversed the country to conquer Kachmyr, and the wars of which Ladak was the theatre, not only reduced it to misery, but eventually subtracted it from the political domination of Lhassa, and made it the prey of one conqueror after another. The Musselmen, who seized Kachmyr and Ladak at a remote epoch, converted by force the poor inhabitants of old Thibet to the faith of Islam. The political existence of Ladak ended with the annexation of this country to Kachmyr by the sëiks, which, however, permitted the Ladakians to return to their ancient beliefs. Two-thirds of the inhabitants took advantage of this opportunity to rebuild their gonpas and take up their past life anew. Only the Baltistans remained Musselman schüttes--a sect to which the conquerors of the country had belonged. They, however, have only conserved a vague shadow of Islamism, the character of which manifests itself in their ceremonials and in the polygamy which they practice. Some lamas affirmed to me that they did not despair of one day bringing them back to the faith of their ancestors. From the religious point of view Ladak is a dependency of Lhassa, the capital of Thibet and the place of residence of the Dalai-Lama. In Lhassa are located the principal Khoutoukhtes, or Supreme Lamas, and the Chogzots, or administrators. Politically, it is under the authority of the Maharadja of Kachmyr, who is represented there by a governor. The inhabitants of Ladak belong to the Chinese-Touranian race, and are divided into Ladakians and Tchampas. The former lead a sedentary existence, building villages of two-story houses along the narrow valleys, are cleanly in their habits, and cultivators of the soil. They are excessively ugly; thin, with stooping figures and small heads set deep between their shoulders; their cheek bones salient, foreheads narrow, eyes black and brilliant, as are those of all the Mongol race; noses flat, mouths large and thin-lipped; and from their small chins, very thinly garnished by a few hairs, deep wrinkles extend upward furrowing their hollow cheeks. To all this, add a close-shaven head with only a little bristling fringe of hair, and you will have the general type, not alone of Ladak, but of entire Thibet. The women are also of small stature, and have exceedingly prominent cheek bones, but seem to be of much more robust constitution. A healthy red tinges their cheeks and sympathetic smiles linger upon their lips. They have good dispositions, joyous inclinations, and are fond of laughing. The severity of the climate and rudeness of the country, do not permit to the Ladakians much latitude in quality and colors of costume. They wear gowns of simple gray linen and coarse dull-hued clothing of their own manufacture. The pantaloons of the men only descend to their knees. People in good circumstances wear, in addition to the ordinary dress, the "choga," a sort of overcoat which is draped on the back when not wrapped around the figure. In winter they wear fur caps, with big ear flaps, and in summer cover their heads with a sort of cloth hood, the top of which dangles on one side, like a Phrygian cap. Their shoes are made of felt and covered with leather. A whole arsenal of little things hangs down from their belts, among which you will find a needle case, a knife, a pen and inkstand, a tobacco pouch, a pipe, and a diminutive specimen of the omnipresent prayer-cylinder. The Thibetan men are generally so lazy, that if a braid of hair happens to become loose, it is not tressed up again for three months, and when once a shirt is put on the body, it is not again taken off until it falls to pieces. Their overcoats are always unclean, and, on the back, one may contemplate a long oily stripe imprinted by the braid of hair, which is carefully greased every day. They wash themselves once a year, but even then do not do so voluntarily, but because compelled by law. They emit such a terrible stench that one avoids, as much as possible, being near them. The Thibetan women, on the contrary, are very fond of cleanliness and order. They wash themselves daily and as often as may be needful. Short and clean chemises hide their dazzling white necks. The Thibetan woman throws on her round shoulders a red jacket, the flaps of which are covered by tight pantaloons of green or red cloth, made in such a manner as to puff up and so protect the legs against the cold. She wears embroidered red half boots, trimmed and lined with fur. A large cloth petticoat with numerous folds completes her home toilet. Her hair is arranged in thin braids, to which, by means of pins, a large piece of floating cloth is attached,--which reminds one of the headdress so common in Italy. Underneath this sort of veil are suspended a variety of various colored pebbles, coins and pieces of metal. The ears are covered by flaps made of cloth or fur. A furred sheepskin covers the back, poor women contenting themselves with a simple plain skin of the animal, while wealthy ladies wear veritable cloaks, lined with red cloth and adorned with gold fringes. The Ladak woman, whether walking in the streets or visiting her neighbors, always carries upon her back a conical basket, the smaller end of which is toward the ground. They fill it with the dung of horses or cows, which constitute the combustible of the country. Every woman has money of her own, and spends it for jewelry. Generally she purchases, at a small expense, large pieces of turquoise, which are added to the _bizarre_ ornaments of her headdress. I have seen pieces so worn which weighed nearly five pounds. The Ladak woman occupies a social position for which she is envied by all women of the Orient. She is free and respected. With the exception of some rural work, she passes the greatest part of her time in visiting. It must, however, be added that women's gossip is here a perfectly unknown thing. The settled population of Ladak is engaged in agriculture, but they own so little land (the share of each may amount to about eight acres) that the revenue drawn from it is insufficient to provide them with the barest necessities and does not permit them to pay taxes. Manual occupations are generally despised. Artisans and musicians form the lowest class of society. The name by which they are designated is Bem, and people are very careful not to contract any alliance with them. The hours of leisure left by rural work are spent in hunting the wild sheep of Thibet, the skins of which are highly valued in India. The poorest, _i.e._, those who have not the means to purchase arms for hunting, hire themselves as coolies. This is also an occupation of women, who are very capable of enduring arduous toil. They are healthier than their husbands, whose laziness goes so far that, careless of cold or heat, they are capable of spending a whole night in the open air on a bed of stones rather than take the trouble to go to bed. Polyandry (which I shall treat later more fully) causes the formation of very large families, who, in common, cultivate their jointly possessed lands, with the assistance of yaks, zos and zomos (oxen and cows). A member of a family cannot detach himself from it, and when he dies, his share reverts to the survivors in common. They sow but little wheat and the grain is very small, owing to the severity of the climate. They also harvest barley, which they pulverize before selling. When work in the field is ended, all male inhabitants go to gather on the mountain a wild herb called "enoriota," and large thorn bushes or "dama," which are used as fuel, since combustibles are scarce in Ladak. You see there neither trees nor gardens, and only exceptionally thin clumps of willows and poplars grow on the shores of the rivers. Near the villages are also found some aspen trees; but, on account of the unfertility of the ground, arboriculture is unknown and gardening is little successful. The absence of wood is especially noticeable in the buildings, which are made of sun-dried bricks, or, more frequently, of stones of medium size which are agglomerated with a kind of mortar composed of clay and chopped straw. The houses of the settled inhabitants are two stories high, their fronts whitewashed, and their window-sashes painted with lively colors. The flat roof forms a terrace which is decorated with wild flowers, and here, during good weather, the inhabitants spend much of their time contemplating nature, or turning their prayer-wheels. Every dwelling-house is composed of many rooms; among them always one of superior size, the walls of which are decorated with superb fur-skins, and which is reserved for visitors. In the other rooms are beds and other furniture. Rich people possess, moreover, a special room filled with all kinds of idols, and set apart as a place of worship. Life here is very regular. They eat anything attainable, without much choice; the principal nourishment of the Ladak people, however, being exceedingly simple. Their breakfast consists of a piece of rye bread. At dinner, they serve on the table a bowl with meal into which lukewarm water is stirred with little rods until the mixture assumes the consistency of thick paste. From this, small portions are scooped out and eaten with milk. In the evening, bread and tea are served. Meat is a superfluous luxury. Only the hunters introduce some variety in their alimentation, by eating the meat of wild sheep, eagles or pheasants, which are very common in this country. During the day, on every excuse and opportunity, they drink "tchang," a kind of pale, unfermented beer. If it happens that a Ladakian, mounted on a pony (such privileged people are very rare), goes to seek work in the surrounding country, he provides himself with a small stock of meal; when dinner time comes, he descends to a river or spring, mixes with water, in a wooden cup that he always has with him, some of the meal, swallows the simple refreshment and washes it down with water. The Tchampas, or nomads, who constitute the other part of Ladak's population, are rougher, and much poorer than the settled population. They are, for the most part, hunters, who completely neglect agriculture. Although they profess the Buddhistic religion, they never frequent the cloisters unless in want of meal, which they obtain in exchange for their venison. They mostly camp in tents on the summits of the mountains, where the cold is very great. While the properly called Ladakians are peaceable, very desirous of learning, of an incarnated laziness, and are never known to tell untruth; the Tchampas, on the contrary, are very irascible, extremely lively, great liars and profess a great disdain for the convents. Among them lives the small population of Khombas, wanderers from the vicinity of Lhassa, who lead the miserable existence of a troupe of begging gipsies on the highways. Incapable of any work whatever, speaking a language not spoken in the country where they beg for their subsistence, they are the objects of general contempt, and are only tolerated out of pity for their deplorable condition, when hunger drives their mendicant bands to seek alms in the villages. * * * * * Polyandry, which is universally prevalent here, of course interested my curiosity. This institution is, by the way, not the outcome of Buddha's doctrines. Polyandry existed long before the advent of Buddha. It assumed considerable proportions in India, where it constituted one of the most effective means for checking the growth of a population which tends to constant increase, an economic danger which is even yet combatted by the abominable custom of killing newborn female children, which causes terrible ravages in the child-life of India. The efforts made by the English in their enactments against the suppression of the future mothers have proved futile and fruitless. Manu himself established polyandry as a law, and Buddhist preachers, who had renounced Brahminism and preached the use of opium, imported this custom into Ceylon, Thibet, Corea, and the country of the Moguls. For a long time suppressed in China, polyandry, which flourishes in Thibet and Ceylon, is also met with among the Kalmonks, between Todas in Southern India, and Nairs on the coast of Malabar. Traces of this strange constitution of the family are also to be found with the Tasmanians and the Irquois Indians in North America. Polyandry, by the way, has even flourished in Europe, if we may believe Cæsar, who, in his _De Bello Gallico_, book V., page 17, writes: "_Uxores habent deni duodenique inter se communes, et maxime fratres cum fratribus et parentes cum liberis._" In view of all this it is impossible to hold any religion responsible for the existence of the institution of polyandry. In Thibet it can be explained by motives of an economical nature; the small quantity of arable land falling to the share of each inhabitant. In order to support the 1,500,000 inhabitants distributed in Thibet, upon a surface of 1,200,000 square kilometres, the Buddhists were forced to adopt polyandry. Moreover, each family is bound to enter one of its members in a religious order. The firstborn is consecrated to a gonpa, which is inevitably found upon an elevation, at the entrance of every village. As soon as the child attains the age of eighteen years, he is entrusted to the caravans which pass Lhassa, where he remains from eight to fifteen years as a novice, in one of the gonpas which are near the city. There he learns to read and write, is taught the religious rites and studies the sacred parchments written in the Pali language--which formerly used to be the language of the country of Maguada, where, according to tradition, Buddha was born. The oldest brother remaining in a family chooses a wife, who becomes common to his brothers. The choice of the bride and the nuptial ceremonies are most rudimentary. When a wife and her husband have decided upon the marriage of a son, the brother who possesses the right of choice, pays a visit to a neighboring family in which there is a marriageable daughter. The first and second visits are spent in more or less indifferent conversations, blended with frequent libations of tchang, and on the third visit only does the young man declare his intention to take a wife. Upon this the girl is formally introduced to him. She is generally not unknown to the wooer, as, in Ladak, women never veil their faces. A girl cannot be married without her consent. When the young man is accepted, he takes his bride to his house, and she becomes his wife and also the wife of all his brothers. A family which has an only son sends him to a woman who has no more than two or three husbands, and he offers himself to her as a fourth husband. Such an offer is seldom declined, and the young man settles in the new family. The newly married remain with the parents of the husbands, until the young wife bears her first child. The day after that event, the grandparents of the infant make over the bulk of their fortune to the new family, and, abandoning the old home to them, seek other shelter. Sometimes marriages are contracted between youth who have not reached a marriageable age, but in such event, the married couple are made to live apart, until they have attained and even passed the age required. An unmarried girl who becomes _enceinte_, far from being exposed to the scorn of every one, is shown the highest respect; for she is demonstrated fruitful, and men eagerly seek her in marriage. A wife has the unquestioned right of having an unlimited number of husbands and lovers. If she likes a young man, she takes him home, announces that he has been chosen by her as a "jingtuh" (a lover), and endows him with all the personal rights of a husband, which situation is accepted by her temporarily supplanted husbands with a certain philosophic pleasure, which is the more pronounced if their wife has proved sterile during the three first years of her marriage. They certainly have here not even a vague idea of jealousy. The Thibetan's blood is too cold to know love, which, for him, would be almost an anachronism; if indeed he were not conscious that the sentiment of the entire community would be against him, as a flagrant violator of popular usage and established rights, in restraining the freedom of the women. The selfish enjoyment of love would be, in their eyes, an unjustifiable luxury. In case of a husband's absence, his place may be offered to a bachelor or a widower. The latter are here in the minority, since the wife generally survives her feeble husbands. Sometimes a Buddhist traveller, whom his affairs bring to the village, is chosen for this office. A husband who travels, or seeks for work in the neighboring country, at every stop takes advantage of his co-religionists' hospitality, who offer him their own wives. The husbands of a sterile woman exert themselves to find opportunities for hospitality, which may happily eventuate in a change in her condition, that they may be made happy fathers. The wife enjoys the general esteem, is ever of a cheerful disposition, takes part in everything that is going on, goes and comes without any restriction, anywhere and everywhere she pleases, with the exception of the principal prayer-room of the monastery, entrance into which is formally prohibited to her. Children know only their mother, and do not feel the least affection for their fathers, for the simple reason that they have so many. Without approving polyandry, I could not well blame Thibet for this institution, since without it, the population would prodigiously increase. Famine and misery would fall upon the whole nation, with all the sinister _sequellæ_ of murder and theft, crimes so far absolutely unknown in the whole country. _A Festival in a Gonpa_ Leh, the capital of Ladak, is a little town of 5,000 inhabitants, who live in white, two-story houses, upon two or three streets, principally. In its centre is the square of the bazaar, where the merchants of India, China, Turkestan, Kachmyr and Thibet, come to exchange their products for the Thibetan gold. Here the natives provide themselves with cloths for themselves and their monks, and various objects of real necessity. An old uninhabited palace rises upon a hill which dominates the town. Fronting the central square is a vast building, two stories in height, the residence of the governor of Ladak, the Vizier Souradjbal--a very amiable and universally popular Pendjaban, who has received in London the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. To entertain me, during my sojourn in Leh, the governor arranged, on the bazaar square, a game of polo--the national sport of the Thibetans, which the English have adopted and introduced into Europe. In the evening, after the game, the people executed dances and played games before the governor's residence. Large bonfires illuminated the scene, lighting up the throng of inhabitants, who formed a great circle about the performers. The latter, in considerable numbers, disguised as animals, devils and sorcerers, jumped and contorted themselves in rhythmic dances timed to the measure of the monotonous and unpleasing music made by two long trumpets and a drum. The infernal racket and shouting of the crowd wearied me. The performance ended with some graceful dances by Thibetan women, who spun upon their heels, swaying to and fro, and, in passing before the spectators in the windows of the residence, greeted us by the clashing together of the copper and ivory bracelets on their crossed wrists. The next day, at an early hour, I repaired to the great Himis convent, which, a little distance from Leh, is elevated upon the top of a great rock, on a picturesque site, commanding the valley of the Indies. It is one of the principal monasteries of the country, and is maintained by the gifts of the people and the subsidies it receives from Lhassa. On the road leading to it, beyond the bridge crossing the Indus, and in the vicinity of the villages lining the way, one finds heaps of stones bearing engraved inscriptions, such as have already been described, and _t'horthenes_. At these places, our guides were very careful to turn to the right. I wished to turn my horse to the left, but the Ladakians made him go back and led him by his halter to the right, explaining to me that such was their established usage. I found it impossible to learn the origin or reason of this custom. Above the gonpa rises a battlemented tower, visible from a great distance. We climbed, on foot, to the level on which the edifice stands and found ourselves confronted by a large door, painted in brilliant colors, the portal of a vast two-story building enclosing a court paved with little pebbles. To the right, in one of the angles of the court, is another huge painted door, adorned with big copper rings. It is the entrance to the principal temple, which is decorated with paintings of the principal gods, and contains a great statue of Buddha and a multitude of sacred statuettes. To the left, upon a verandah, was placed an immense prayer-cylinder. All the lamas of the convent, with their chief, stood about it, when we entered the court. Below the verandah were musicians, holding long trumpets and drums. At the right of the court were a number of doors, leading to the rooms of the lamas; all decorated with sacred paintings and provided with little prayer-barrels fancifully surmounted by black and white tridents, from the points of which floated ribbons bearing inscriptions--doubtless prayers. In the centre of the court were raised two tall masts, from the tops of which dangled tails of yaks, and long paper streamers floated, covered with religious inscriptions. All along the walls were numerous prayer-barrels, adorned with ribbons. A profound silence reigned among the many spectators present. All awaited anxiously the commencement of a religious "mystery," which was about to be presented. We took up a position near the verandah. Almost immediately, the musicians drew from their long trumpets soft and monotonous tones, marking the time by measured beats upon an odd-looking drum, broad and shallow, upreared upon a stick planted in the ground. At the first sounds of the strange music, in which joined the voices of the lamas in a melancholy chant, the doors along the wall opened simultaneously, giving entrance to about twenty masked persons, disguised as animals, birds, devils and imaginary monsters. On their breasts they bore representations of fantastic dragons, demons and skulls, embroidered with Chinese silk of various colors. From the conical hats they wore, depended to their breasts long multicolored ribbons, covered with inscriptions. Their masks were white death's-heads. Slowly they marched about the masts, stretching out their arms from time to time and flourishing with their left hands spoon-shaped objects, the bowl portions of which were said to be fragments of human crania, with ribbons attached, having affixed to their ends human hair, which, I was assured, had been taken from scalped enemies. Their promenade, in gradually narrowing circles about the masts, soon became merely a confused jostling of each other; when the rolling of the drum grew more accentuated, the performers for an instant stopped, then started again, swinging above their heads yellow sticks, ribbon-decked, which with their right hands they brandished in menacing attitudes. After making a salute to the chief lama, they approached the door leading to the temple, which at this instant opened, and from it another band came forth, whose heads were covered by copper masks. Their dresses were of rich materials, embroidered in various bright colors. In one hand each of them carried a small tambourine and with the other he agitated a little bell. From the rim of each tambourine depended a metallic ball, so placed that the least movement of the hand brought it in contact with the resonant tympanum, which caused a strange, continuous undercurrent of pulsating sound. There new performers circled several times about the court, marking the time of their dancing steps by measured thumpings of the tambourines. At the completion of each turn, they made a deafening noise with their instruments. Finally, they ran to the temple door and ranged themselves upon the steps before it. For a moment, there was silence. Then we saw emerge from the temple a third band of performers. Their enormous masks represented different deities, and each bore upon its forehead "the third eye." At their head marched Thlogan-Poudma-Jungnas (literally "he who was born in the lotus flower"). Another richly dressed mask marched beside him, carrying a yellow parasol covered with symbolic designs. His suite was composed of gods, in magnificent costumes; Dorje-Trolong and Sangspa-Kourpo (_i.e._, Brahma himself), and others. These masks, as a lama sitting near me explained to us, represented six classes of beings subject to the metamorphoses; the gods, the demigods, men, animals, spirits and demons. On each side of these personages, who advanced gravely, marched other masks, costumed in silks of brilliant hues and wearing on their heads golden crowns, fashioned with six lotus-like flowers on each, surmounted by a tall dart in the centre. Each of these masks carried a drum. These disguises made three turns about the masts, to the sound of a noisy and incoherent music, and then seated themselves on the ground, around Thlogan-Pondma-Jungnas, a god with three eyes, who gravely introduced two fingers into his mouth and emitted a shrill whistle. At this signal, young men dressed in warrior costumes--with ribbon-decked bells dangling about their legs--came with measured steps from the temple. Their heads were covered by enormous green masks, from which floated triangular red flags, and they, too, carried tambourines. Making a diabolical din, they whirled and danced about the gods seated on the ground. Two big fellows accompanying them, who were dressed in tight clown costumes, executed all kinds of grotesque contortions and acrobatic feats, by which they won plaudits and shouts of laughter from the spectators. Another group of disguises--of which the principal features were red mitres and yellow pantaloons--came out of the temple, with bells and tambourines in their hands, and seated themselves opposite the gods, as representatives of the highest powers next to divinity. Lastly there entered upon the scene a lot of red and brown masks, with a "third eye" painted on their breasts. With those who had preceded them, they formed two long lines of dancers, who to the thrumming of their many tambourines, the measured music of the trumpets and drums, and the jingling of a myriad of bells, performed a dance, approaching and receding from each other, whirling in circles, forming by twos in a column and breaking from that formation to make new combinations, pausing occasionally to make reverent obeisance before the gods. After a time this spectacular excitement--the noisy monotony of which began to weary me--calmed down a little; gods, demigods, kings, men and spirits got up, and followed by all the other maskers, directed themselves toward the temple door, whence issued at once, meeting them, a lot of men admirably disguised as skeletons. All those sorties were calculated and prearranged, and every one of them had its particular significance. The _cortège_ of dancers gave way to the skeletons, who advanced with measured steps, in silence, to the masts, where they stopped and made a concerted clicking with pieces of wood hanging at their sides, simulating perfectly the rattling of dry bones and gnashing of teeth. Twice they went in a circle around the masts, marching in time to low taps on the drums, and then joined in a lugubrious religious chant. Having once more made the concerted rattling of their artificial bones and jaws, they executed some contortions painful to witness and together stopped. Then they seized upon an image of the Enemy of Man--made of some sort of brittle paste--which had been placed at the foot of one of the masts. This they broke in pieces and scattered, and the oldest men among the spectators, rising from their places, picked up the fragments which they handed to the skeletons--an action supposed to signify that they would soon be ready to join the bony crew in the cemetery. * * * * * The chief lama, approaching me, tendered an invitation to accompany him to the principal terrace and partake of the festal "tchang"; which I accepted with pleasure, for my head was dizzy from the long spectacle. We crossed the court and climbed a staircase--obstructed with prayer-wheels, as usual--passed two rooms where there were many images of gods, and came out upon the terrace, where I seated myself upon a bench opposite the venerable lama, whose eyes sparkled with spirit. Three lamas brought pitchers of tchang, which they poured into small copper cups, that were offered first to the chief lama, then to me and my servants. "Did you enjoy our little festival?" the lama asked me. "I found it very enjoyable and am still impressed by the spectacle I have witnessed. But, to tell the truth, I never suspected for a moment that Buddhism, in these religious ceremonies, could display such a visible, not to say noisy, exterior form." "There is no religion, the ceremonies of which are not surrounded with more theatrical forms," the lama answered. "This is a ritualistic phase which does not by any means violate the fundamental principles of Buddhism. It is a practical means for maintaining in the ignorant mass obedience to and love for the one Creator, just as a child is beguiled by toys to do the will of its parents. The ignorant mass is the child of The Father." "But what is the meaning," I said to him, "of all those masks, costumes, bells, dances, and, generally, of this entire performance, which seems to be executed after a prescribed programme?" "We have many similar festivals in the year," answered the lama, "and we arrange particular ones to represent 'mysteries,' susceptible of pantomimic presentation, in which each actor is allowed considerable latitude of action, in the movements and jests he likes, conforming, nevertheless, to the circumstances and to the leading idea. Our mysteries are simply pantomimes calculated to show the veneration offered to the gods, which veneration sustains and cheers the soul of man, who is prone to anxious contemplation of inevitable death and the life to come. The actors receive the dresses from the cloister and they play according to general indications, which leave them much liberty of individual action. The general effect produced is, no doubt, very beautiful, but it is a matter for the spectators themselves to divine the signification of one or another action. You, too, have recourse sometimes to similar devices, which, however, do not in the least violate the principle of monotheism." "Pardon me," I remarked, "but this multitude of idols with which your gonpas abound, is a flagrant violation of that principle." "As I have told you," replied the lama to my interruption, "man will always be in childhood. He sees and feels the grandeur of nature and understands everything presented to his senses, but he neither sees nor divines the Great Soul which created and animates all things. Man has always sought for tangible things. It was not possible for him to believe long in that which escaped his material senses. He has racked his brain for any means for contemplating the Creator; has endeavored to enter into direct relations with him who has done him so much good, and also, as he erroneously believes, so much evil. For this reason he began to adore every phase of nature from which he received benefits. We see a striking example of this in the ancient Egyptians, who adored animals, trees, stones, the winds and the rain. Other peoples, who were more sunk in ignorance, seeing that the results of the wind were not always beneficent, and that the rain did not inevitably bring good harvests, and that the animals were not willingly subservient to man, began to seek for direct intermediaries between themselves and the great mysterious and unfathomable power of the Creator. Therefore they made for themselves idols, which they regarded as indifferent to things concerning them, but to whose interposition in their behalf, they might always recur. From remotest antiquity to our own days, man was ever inclined only to tangible realities. "While seeking a route to lead their feet to the Creator, the Assyrians turned their eyes toward the stars, which they contemplated without the power of attaining them. The Guebers have conserved the same belief to our days. In their nullity and spiritual blindness, men are incapable of conceiving the invisible spiritual bond which unites them to the great Divinity, and this explains why they have always sought for palpable things, which were in the domain of the senses, and by doing which they minimized the divine principle. Nevertheless, they have dared to attribute to their visible and man-made images a divine and eternal existence. We can see the same fact in Brahminism, where man, given to his inclination for exterior forms, has created, little by little, and not all at once, an army of gods and demigods. The Israelites may be said to have demonstrated, in the most flagrant way, the love of man for everything which is concrete. In spite of a series of striking miracles accomplished by the great Creator, who is the same for all the peoples, the Jewish people could not help making a god of metal in the very minute when their prophet Mossa spoke to them of the Creator! Buddhism has passed through the same modifications. Our great reformer, Sakya-Muni, inspired by the Supreme Judge, understood truly the one and indivisible Brahma, and forbade his disciples attempting to manufacture images in imaginary semblance of him. He had openly broken from the polytheistic Brahmins, and appreciated the purity, oneness and immortality of Brahma. The success he achieved by his teachings in making disciples among the people, brought upon him persecution by the Brahmins, who, in the creation of new gods, had found a source of personal revenue, and who, contrary to the law of God, treated the people in a despotic manner. Our first sacred teachers, to whom we give the name of buddhas--which means, learned men or saints--because the great Creator has incarnated in them, settled in different countries of the globe. As their teachings attacked especially the tyranny of the Brahmins and the misuse they made of the idea of God--of which they indeed made a veritable business--almost all the Buddhistic converts, they who followed the doctrines of those great teachers, were among the common people of China and India. Among those teachers, particular reverence is felt for the Buddha, Sakya-Muni, known in China also under the name of Fô, who lived three thousand years ago, and whose teachings brought all China back into the path of the true God; and the Buddha, Gautama, who lived two thousand five hundred years ago, and converted almost half the Hindus to the knowledge of the impersonal, indivisible and only God, besides whom there is none. "Buddhism is divided into many sects which, by the way, differ only in certain religious ceremonies, the basis of the doctrine being everywhere the same. The Thibetan Buddhists, who are called 'lamaists,' separated themselves from the Fô-ists fifteen hundred years ago. Until that time we had formed part of the worshippers of the Buddha, Fô-Sakya-Muni, who was the first to collect all the laws compiled by the various buddhas preceding him, when the great schism took place in the bosom of Brahmanism. Later on, a Khoutoukhte-Mongol translated into Chinese the books of the great Buddha, for which the Emperor of China rewarded him by bestowing upon him the title of 'Go-Chi--'Preceptor of the King!' After his death, this title was given to the Dalai-Lama of Thibet. Since that epoch, all the titularies of this position have borne the title of Go-Chi. Our religion is called the Lamaic one--from the word 'lama,' superior. It admits of two classes of monks, the red and the yellow. The former may marry, and they recognize the authority of the Bantsine, who resides in Techow Loumba, and is chief of the civil administration in Thibet. We, the yellow lamas, have taken the vow of celibacy, and our direct chief is the Dalai-Lama. This is the difference which separates the two religious orders, the respective rituals of which are identical." "Do all perform mysteries similar to that which I have just witnessed?" "Yes; with a few exceptions. Formerly these festivals were celebrated with very solemn pomp, but since the conquest of Ladak our convents have been, more than once, pillaged and our wealth taken away. Now we content ourselves with simple garments and bronze utensils, while in Thibet you see but golden robes and gold utensils." "In a visit which I recently made to a gonpa, one of the lamas told me of a prophet, or, as you call him, a buddha, by the name of Issa. Could you not tell me anything about him?" I asked my interlocutor, seizing this favorable moment to start the subject which interested me so greatly. "The name Issa is very much respected among the Buddhists," he replied, "but he is only known by the chief lamas, who have read the scrolls relating to his life. There have existed an infinite number of buddhas like Issa, and the 84,000 scrolls existing are filled brim full of details concerning each one of them. But very few persons have read the one-hundredth part of those memoirs. In conformity with established custom, every disciple or lama who visits Lhassa makes a gift of one or several copies, from the scrolls there, to the convent to which he belongs. Our gonpa, among others, possesses already a great number, which I read in my leisure hours. Among them are the memoirs of the life and acts of the Buddha Issa, who preached the same doctrine in India and among the sons of Israel, and who was put to death by the Pagans, whose descendants, later on, adopted the beliefs he spread,--and those beliefs are yours. "The great Buddha, the soul of the Universe, is the incarnation of Brahma. He, almost always, remains immobile, containing in himself all things, being in himself the origin of all and his breath vivifying the world. He has left man to the control of his own forces, but, at certain epochs, lays aside his inaction and puts on a human form that he may, as their teacher and guide, rescue his creatures from impending destruction. In the course of his terrestrial existence in the similitude of man, Buddha creates a new world in the hearts of erring men; then he leaves the earth, to become once more an invisible being and resume his condition of perfect bliss. Three thousand years ago, Buddha incarnated in the celebrated Prince Sakya-Muni, reaffirming and propagating the doctrines taught by him in his twenty preceding incarnations. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Great Soul of the World incarnated anew in Gautama, laying the foundation of a new world in Burmah, Siam and different islands. Soon afterward, Buddhism began to penetrate China, through the persevering efforts of the sages, who devoted themselves to the propagation of the sacred doctrine, and under Ming-Ti, of the Honi dynasty, nearly 2,050 years ago, the teachings of Sakya-Muni were adopted by the people of that country. Simultaneously with the appearance of Buddhism in China, the same doctrines began to spread among the Israelites. It is about 2,000 years ago that the perfect Being, awaking once more for a short time from his inaction, incarnated in the newborn child of a poor family. It was his will that this little child should enlighten the unhappy upon the life of the world to come and bring erring men back into the path of truth; showing to them, by his own example, the way they could best return to the primitive morality and purity of our race. When this sacred child attained a certain age, he was brought to India, where, until he attained to manhood, he studied the laws of the great Buddha, who dwells eternally in heaven." "In what language are written the principal scrolls bearing upon the life of Issa?" I asked, rising from my seat, for I saw that my interesting interlocutor evidenced fatigue, and had just given a twirl to his prayer-wheel, as if to hint the closing of the conversation. "The original scrolls brought from India to Nepaul, and from Nepaul to Thibet, relating to the life of Issa, are written in the Pali language and are actually in Lhassa; but a copy in our language--I mean the Thibetan--is in this convent." "How is Issa looked upon in Thibet? Has he the repute of a saint?" "The people are not even aware that he ever existed. Only the principal lamas, who know of him through having studied the scrolls in which his life is related, are familiar with his name; but, as his doctrine does not constitute a canonical part of Buddhism, and the worshippers of Issa do not recognize the authority of the Dalai-Lama, the prophet Issa--with many others like him--is not recognized in Thibet as one of the principal saints." "Would you commit a sin in reciting your copy of the life of Issa to a stranger?" I asked him. "That which belongs to God," he answered me, "belongs also to man. Our duty requires us to cheerfully devote ourselves to the propagation of His doctrine. Only, I do not, at present, know where that manuscript is. If you ever visit our gonpa again, I shall take pleasure in showing it to you." At this moment two monks entered, and uttered to the chief lama a few words unintelligible to me. "I am called to the sacrifices. Will you kindly excuse me?" said he to me, and with a salute, turned to the door and disappeared. I could do no better than withdraw and lie down in the chamber which was assigned to me and where I spent the night. * * * * * In the evening of the next day I was again in Leh--thinking of how to get back to the convent. Two days later I sent, by a messenger, to the chief lama, as presents, a watch, an alarm clock, and a thermometer. At the same time I sent the message that before leaving Ladak I would probably return to the convent, in the hope that he would permit me to see the manuscript which had been the subject of our conversation. It was now my purpose to gain Kachmyr and return from there, some time later, to Himis. But fate made a different decision for me. In passing a mountain, on a height of which is perched the gonpa of Piatak, my horse made a false step, throwing me to the ground so violently that my right leg was broken below the knee. It was impossible to continue my journey, I was not inclined to return to Leh; and seeking the hospitality of the gonpa of Piatak was not, from the appearance of the cloister, an enticing prospect. My best recourse would be to return to Himis, then only about half a day's journey distant, and I ordered my servants to transport me there. They bandaged my broken leg--an operation which caused me great pain--and lifted me into the saddle. One carrier walked by my side, supporting the weight of the injured member, while another led my horse. At a late hour of the evening we reached the door of the convent of Himis. When informed of my accident, the kind monks came out to receive me and, with a wealth of extraordinary precautions of tenderness, I was carried inside, and, in one of their best rooms, installed upon an improvised bed, consisting of a mountain of soft fabrics, with the naturally-to-be-expected prayer-cylinder beside me. All this was done for me under the personal supervision of their chief lama, who, with affectionate sympathy, pressed the hand I gave him in expression of my thanks for his kindness. In the morning, I myself bound around the injured limb little oblong pieces of wood, held by cords, to serve as splints. Then I remained perfectly quiescent and nature was not slow in her reparative work. Within two days my condition was so far improved that I could, had it been necessary, have left the gonpa and directed myself slowly toward India in search of a surgeon to complete my cure. While a boy kept in motion the prayer-barrel near my bed, the venerable lama who ruled the convent entertained me with many interesting stories. Frequently he took from their box the alarm clock and the watch, that I might illustrate to him the process of winding them and explain to him their uses. At length, yielding to my ardent insistence, he brought me two big books, the large leaves of which were of paper yellow with age, and from them read to me the biography of Issa, which I carefully transcribed in my travelling notebook according to the translation made by the interpreter. This curious document is compiled under the form of isolated verses, which, as placed, very often had no apparent connection with, or relation to each other. On the third day, my condition was so far improved as to permit the prosecution of my journey. Having bound up my leg as well as possible, I returned, across Kachmyr, to India; a slow journey, of twenty days, filled with intolerable pain. Thanks, however, to a litter, which a French gentleman, M. Peicheau, had kindly sent to me (my gratitude for which I take this occasion to express), and to an ukase of the Grand Vizier of the Maharajah of Kachmyr, ordering the local authorities to provide me with carriers, I reached Srinagar, and left almost immediately, being anxious to gain India before the first snows fell. In Muré I encountered another Frenchman, Count André de Saint Phall, who was making a journey of recreation across Hindostan. During the whole course, which we made together, to Bombay, the young count demonstrated a touching solicitude for me, and sympathy for the excruciating pain I suffered from my broken leg and the fever induced by its torture. I cherish for him sincere gratitude, and shall never forget the friendly care which I received upon my arrival in Bombay from the Marquis de Morés, the Vicomte de Breteul, M. Monod, of the Comptoir d'Escompte, M. Moët, acting consul, and all the members of the very sympathetic French colony there. During a long time I revolved in my mind the purpose of publishing the memoirs of the life of Jesus Christ found by me in Himis, of which I have spoken, but other interests absorbed my attention and delayed it. Only now, after having passed long nights of wakefulness in the coordination of my notes and grouping the verses conformably to the march of the recital, imparting to the work, as a whole, a character of unity, I resolve to let this curious chronicle see the light. _The Life of Saint Issa_ "Best of the Sons of Men." I. 1. The earth trembled and the heavens wept, because of the great crime committed in the land of Israel. 2. For there was tortured and murdered the great and just Issa, in whom was manifest the soul of the Universe; 3. Which had incarnated in a simple mortal, to benefit men and destroy the evil spirit in them; 4. To lead back to peace, love and happiness, man, degraded by his sins, and recall him to the one and indivisible Creator whose mercy is infinite. 5. The merchants coming from Israel have given the following account of what has occurred: II. 1. The people of Israel--who inhabit a fertile country producing two harvests a year and affording pasture for large herds of cattle--by their sins brought down upon themselves the anger of the Lord; 2. Who inflicted upon them terrible chastisements, taking from them their land, their cattle and their wealth. They were carried away into slavery by the rich and mighty Pharaohs who then ruled the land of Egypt. 3. The Israelites were, by the Pharaohs, treated worse than beasts, condemned to hard labor and put in irons; their bodies were covered with wounds and sores; they were not permitted to live under a roof, and were starved to death; 4. That they might be maintained in a state of continual terror and deprived of all human resemblance; 5. And in this great calamity, the Israelites, remembering their Celestial Protector, implored his forgiveness and mercy. 6. At that period reigned in Egypt an illustrious Pharaoh, who was renowned for his many victories, immense riches, and the gigantic palaces he had erected by the labor of his slaves. 7. This Pharaoh had two sons, the younger of whom, named Mossa, had acquired much knowledge from the sages of Israel. 8. And Mossa was beloved by all in Egypt for his kindness of heart and the pity he showed to all sufferers. 9. When Mossa saw that the Israelites, in spite of their many sufferings, had not forsaken their God, and refused to worship the gods of Egypt, created by the hands of man. 10. He also put his faith in their invisible God, who did not suffer them to betray Him, despite their ever growing weakness. 11. And the teachers among Israel animated Mossa in his zeal, and prayed of him that he would intercede with his father, Pharaoh, in favor of their co-religionists. 12. Prince Mossa went before his father, begging him to lighten the burden of the unhappy people; Pharaoh, however, became incensed with rage, and ordered that they should be tormented more than before. 13. And it came to pass that Egypt was visited by a great calamity. The plague decimated young and old, the healthy and the sick; and Pharaoh beheld in this the resentment of his own gods against him. 14. But Prince Mossa said to his father that it was the God of his slaves who thus interposed on behalf of his wretched people, and avenged them upon the Egyptians. 15. Thereupon, Pharaoh commanded Mossa, his son, to gather all the Israelite slaves, and lead them away, and found, at a great distance from the capital, another city where he should rule over them. 16. Then Mossa made known to the Hebrew slaves that he had obtained their freedom in the name of his and their God, the God of Israel; and with them he left the city and departed from the land of Egypt. 17. He led them back to the land which, because of their many sins, had been taken from them. There he gave them laws and admonished them to pray always to God, the indivisible Creator, whose kindness is infinite. 18. After Prince Mossa's death, the Israelites observed rigorously his laws; and God rewarded them for the ills to which they had been subjected in Egypt. 19. Their kingdom became one of the most powerful on earth; their kings made themselves renowned for their treasures, and peace reigned in Israel. III. 1. The glory of Israel's wealth spread over the whole earth, and the surrounding nations became envious. 2. But the Most High himself led the victorious arms of the Hebrews, and the Pagans did not dare to attack them. 3. Unfortunately, man is prone to err, and the fidelity of the Israelites to their God was not of long duration. 4. Little by little they forgot the favors he had bestowed upon them; rarely invoked his name, and sought rather protection by the magicians and sorcerers. 5. The kings and the chiefs among the people substituted their own laws for those given by Mossa; the temple of God and the observances of their ancient faith were neglected; the people addicted themselves to sensual gratifications and lost their original purity. 6. Many centuries had elapsed since their exodus from Egypt, when God bethought himself of again inflicting chastisement upon them. 7. Strangers invaded Israel, devastated the land, destroyed the villages, and carried their inhabitants away into captivity. 8. At last came the Pagans from over the sea, from the land of Romeles. These made themselves masters of the Hebrews, and placed over them their army chiefs, who governed in the name of Cæsar. 9. They defiled the temples, forced the inhabitants to cease the worship of the indivisible God, and compelled them to sacrifice to the heathen gods. 10. They made common soldiers of those who had been men of rank; the women became their prey, and the common people, reduced to slavery, were carried away by thousands over the sea. 11. The children were slain, and soon, in the whole land, there was naught heard but weeping and lamentation. 12. In this extreme distress, the Israelites once more remembered their great God, implored his mercy and prayed for his forgiveness. Our Father, in his inexhaustible clemency, heard their prayer. IV. 1. At that time the moment had come for the compassionate Judge to reincarnate in a human form; 2. And the eternal Spirit, resting in a state of complete inaction and supreme bliss, awakened and separated from the eternal Being, for an undetermined period, 3. So that, in human form, He might teach man to identify himself with the Divinity and attain to eternal felicity; 4. And to show, by His example, how man can attain moral purity and free his soul from the domination of the physical senses, so that it may achieve the perfection necessary for it to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, which is immutable and where bliss eternal reigns. 5. Soon after, a marvellous child was born in the land of Israel. God himself spoke, through the mouth of this child, of the miseries of the body and the grandeur of the soul. 6. The parents of the infant were poor people, who belonged to a family noted for great piety; who forgot the greatness of their ancestors in celebrating the name of the Creator and giving thanks to Him for the trials which He had sent upon them. 7. To reward them for adhering to the path of truth, God blessed the firstborn of this family; chose him for His elect, and sent him to sustain the fallen and comfort the afflicted. 8. The divine child, to whom the name Issa was given, commenced in his tender years to talk of the only and indivisible God, exhorting the strayed souls to repent and purify themselves from the sins of which they had become guilty. 9. People came from all parts to hear him, and marvelled at the discourses which came from his infantile mouth; and all Israel agreed that the Spirit of the Eternal dwelt in this child. 10. When Issa was thirteen years old, the age at which an Israelite is expected to marry, 11. The modest house of his industrious parents became a meeting place of the rich and illustrious, who were anxious to have as a son-in-law the young Issa, who was already celebrated for the edifying discourses he made in the name of the All-Powerful. 12. Then Issa secretly absented himself from his father's house; left Jerusalem, and, in a train of merchants, journeyed toward the Sindh, 13. With the object of perfecting himself in the knowledge of the word of God and the study of the laws of the great Buddhas. V. 1. In his fourteenth year, young Issa, the Blessed One, came this side of the Sindh and settled among the Aryas, in the country beloved by God. 2. Fame spread the name of the marvellous youth along the northern Sindh, and when he came through the country of the five streams and Radjipoutan, the devotees of the god Djaïne asked him to stay among them. 3. But he left the deluded worshippers of Djaïne and went to Djagguernat, in the country of Orsis, where repose the mortal remains of Vyassa-Krishna, and where the white priests of Brahma welcomed him joyfully. 4. They taught him to read and to understand the Vedas, to cure physical ills by means of prayers, to teach and to expound the sacred Scriptures, to drive out evil desires from man and make him again in the likeness of God. 5. He spent six years in Djagguernat, in Radjagriha, in Benares, and in other holy cities. The common people loved Issa, for he lived in peace with the Vaisyas and the Sudras, to whom he taught the Holy Scriptures. 6. But the Brahmins and the Kshatnyas told him that they were forbidden by the great Para-Brahma to come near to those who were created from his belly and his feet;[1] 7. That the Vaisyas might only hear the recital of the Vedas, and this only on the festal days, and 8. That the Sudras were not only forbidden to attend the reading of the Vedas, but even to look on them; for they were condemned to perpetual servitude, as slaves of the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas and even the Vaisyas. 9. "Death alone can enfranchise them from their servitude," has said Para-Brahma. "Leave them, therefore, and come to adore with us the gods, whom you will make angry if you disobey them." 10. But Issa, disregarding their words, remained with the Sudras, preaching against the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. 11. He declaimed strongly against man's arrogating to himself the authority to deprive his fellow-beings of their human and spiritual rights. "Verily," he said, "God has made no difference between his children, who are all alike dear to Him." 12. Issa denied the divine inspiration of the Vedas and the Puranas, for, as he taught his followers,--"One law has been given to man to guide him in his actions: 13. "Fear the Lord, thy God; bend thy knees only before Him and bring to Him only the offerings which come from thy earnings." 14. Issa denied the Trimurti and the incarnation of Para-Brahma in Vishnu, Siva, and other gods; "for," said he: 15. "The eternal Judge, the eternal Spirit, constitutes the only and indivisible soul of the universe, and it is this soul alone which creates, contains and vivifies all. 16. "He alone has willed and created. He alone has existed from eternity, and His existence will be without end; there is no one like unto Him either in the heavens or on the earth. 17. "The great Creator has divided His power with no other being; far less with inanimate objects, as you have been taught to believe, for He alone is omnipotent and all-sufficient. 18. "He willed, and the world was. By one divine thought, He reunited the waters and separated them from the dry land of the globe. He is the cause of the mysterious life of man, into whom He has breathed part of His divine Being. 19. "And He has put under subjection to man, the lands, the waters, the beasts and everything which He created, and which He himself preserves in immutable order, allotting to each its proper duration. 20. "The anger of God will soon break forth upon man; for he has forgotten his Creator; he has filled His temples with abominations; and he adores a multitude of creatures which God has subordinated to him; 21. "And to gain favor with images of stone and metal, he sacrifices human beings in whom dwells part of the Spirit of the Most High; 22. "And he humiliates those who work in the sweat of their brows, to gain favor in the eyes of the idler who sitteth at a sumptuous table. 23. "Those who deprive their brothers of divine happiness will themselves be deprived of it; and the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas shall become the Sudras of the Sudras, with whom the Eternal will stay forever. 24. "In the day of judgment the Sudras and the Vaisyas will be forgiven for that they knew not the light, while God will let loose his wrath upon those who arrogated his authority." 25. The Vaisyas and the Sudras were filled with great admiration, and asked Issa how they should pray, in order not to lose their hold upon eternal life. 26. "Pray not to idols, for they cannot hear you; hearken not to the Vedas where the truth is altered; be humble and humiliate not your fellow man. 27. "Help the poor, support the weak, do evil to none; covet not that which ye have not and which belongs to others." VI. 1. The white priests and the warriors,[2] who had learned of Issa's discourse to the Sudras, resolved upon his death, and sent their servants to find the young teacher and slay him. 2. But Issa, warned by the Sudras of his danger, left by night Djagguernat, gained the mountain, and settled in the country of the Gautamides, where the great Buddha Sakya-Muni came to the world, among a people who worshipped the only and sublime Brahma. 3. When the just Issa had acquired the Pali language, he applied himself to the study of the sacred scrolls of the Sutras. 4. After six years of study, Issa, whom the Buddha had elected to spread his holy word, could perfectly expound the sacred scrolls. 5. He then left Nepaul and the Himalaya mountains, descended into the valley of Radjipoutan and directed his steps toward the West, everywhere preaching to the people the supreme perfection attainable by man; 6. And the good he must do to his fellow men, which is the sure means of speedy union with the eternal Spirit. "He who has recovered his primitive purity," said Issa, "shall die with his transgressions forgiven and have the right to contemplate the majesty of God." 7. When the divine Issa traversed the territories of the Pagans, he taught that the adoration of visible gods was contrary to natural law. 8. "For to man," said he, "it has not been given to see the image of God, and it behooves him not to make for himself a multitude of divinities in the imagined likeness of the Eternal. 9. "Moreover, it is against human conscience to have less regard for the greatness of divine purity, than for animals or works of stone or metal made by the hands of man. 10. "The eternal Lawgiver is One; there are no other Gods than He; He has parted the world with none, nor had He any counsellor. 11. "Even as a father shows kindness toward his children, so will God judge men after death, in conformity with His merciful laws. He will never humiliate his child by casting his soul for chastisement into the body of a beast. 12. "The heavenly laws," said the Creator, through the mouth of Issa, "are opposed to the immolation of human sacrifices to a statue or an animal; for I, the God, have sacrificed to man all the animals and all that the world contains. 13. "Everything has been sacrificed to man, who is directly and intimately united to me, his Father; therefore, shall the man be severely judged and punished, by my law, who causes the sacrifice of my children. 14. "Man is naught before the eternal Judge; as the animal is before man. 15. "Therefore, I say unto you, leave your idols and perform not ceremonies which separate you from your Father and bind you to the priests, from whom heaven has turned away. 16. "For it is they who have led you away from the true God, and by superstitions and cruelty perverted the spirit and made you blind to the knowledge of the truth." VII. 1. The words of Issa spread among the Pagans, through whose country he passed, and the inhabitants abandoned their idols. 2. Seeing which, the priests demanded of him who thus glorified the name of the true God, that he should, in the presence of the people, prove the charges he made against them, and demonstrate the vanity of their idols. 3. And Issa answered them: "If your idols, or the animals you worship, really possess the supernatural powers you claim, let them strike me with a thunderbolt before you!" 4. "Why dost not thou perform a miracle," replied the priests, "and let thy God confound ours, if He is greater than they?" 5. But Issa said: "The miracles of our God have been wrought from the first day when the universe was created; and are performed every day and every moment; whoso sees them not is deprived of one of the most beautiful gifts of life. 6. "And it is not on inanimate objects of stone, metal or wood that He will let His anger fall, but on the men who worship them, and who, therefore, for their salvation, must destroy the idols they have made. 7. "Even as a stone and a grain of sand, which are naught before man, await patiently their use by Him. 8. "In like manner, man, who is naught before God, must await in resignation His pleasure for a manifestation of His favor. 9. "But woe to you! ye adversaries of men, if it is not the favor you await, but rather the wrath of the Most High; woe to you, if you demand that He attest His power by a miracle! 10. "For it is not the idols which He will destroy in His wrath, but those by whom they were created; their hearts will be the prey of an eternal fire and their flesh shall be given to the beasts of prey. 11. "God will drive away the contaminated animals from His flocks; but will take to Himself those who strayed because they knew not the heavenly part within them." 12. When the Pagans saw that the power of their priests was naught, they put faith in the words of Issa. Fearing the anger of the true God, they broke their idols to pieces and caused their priests to flee from among them. 13. Issa furthermore taught the Pagans that they should not endeavor to see the eternal Spirit with their eyes; but to perceive Him with their hearts, and make themselves worthy of His favors by the purity of their souls. 14. "Not only," he said to them, "must ye refrain from offering human sacrifices, but ye may not lay on the altar any creature to which life has been given, for all things created are for man. 15. "Withhold not from your neighbor his just due, for this would be like stealing from him what he had earned in the sweat of his brow. 16. "Deceive none, that ye may not yourselves be deceived; seek to justify yourselves before the last judgment, for then it will be too late. 17. "Be not given to debauchery, for it is a violation of the law of God. 18. "That you may attain to supreme bliss ye must not only purify yourselves, but must also guide others into the path that will enable them to regain their primitive innocence." VIII. 1. The countries round about were filled with the renown of Issa's preachings, and when he came unto Persia, the priests grew afraid and forbade the people hearing him; 2. Nevertheless, the villages received him with joy, and the people hearkened intently to his words, which, being seen by the priests, caused them to order that he should be arrested and brought before their High Priest, who asked him: 3. "Of what new God dost thou speak? Knowest thou not, unfortunate man that thou art! that Saint Zoroaster is the only Just One, to whom alone was vouchsafed the honor of receiving revelations from the Most High; 4. "By whose command the angels compiled His Word in laws for the governance of His people, which were given to Zoroaster in Paradise? 5. "Who, then, art thou, who darest to utter blasphemies against our God and sow doubt in the hearts of believers?" 6. And Issa said to them: "I preach no new God, but our celestial Father, who has existed before the beginning and will exist until after the end. 7. "Of Him I have spoken to the people, who--even as innocent children--are incapable of comprehending God by their own intelligence, or fathoming the sublimity of the divine Spirit; 8. "But, as the newborn child in the night recognizes the mother's breast, so your people, held in the darkness of error by your pernicious doctrines and religious ceremonies, have recognized instinctively their Father, in the Father whose prophet I am. 9. "The eternal Being says to your people, by my mouth, 'Ye shall not adore the sun, for it is but a part of the universe which I have created for man; 10. "It rises to warm you during your work; it sets to accord to you the rest that I have ordained. 11. "To me only ye owe all that ye possess, all that surrounds you and that is above and below you.'" 12. "But," said the priests, "how could the people live according to your rules if they had no teachers?" 13. Whereupon Issa answered: "So long as they had no priests, they were governed by the natural law and conserved the simplicity of their souls; 14. "Their souls were in God and to commune with the Father they had not to have recourse to the intermediation of idols, or animals, or fire, as taught by you. 15. "Ye pretend that man must adore the sun, and the Genii of Good and Evil. But I say unto you that your doctrine is pernicious. The sun does not act spontaneously, but by the will of the invisible Creator, who has given to it being." 16. "Who, then, has caused that this star lights the day, warms man at his work and vivifies the seeds sown in the ground?" 17. "The eternal Spirit is the soul of everything animate, and you commit a great sin in dividing Him into the Spirit of Evil and the Spirit of Good, for there is no God other than the God of Good. 18. "And He, like to the father of a family, does only good to His children, to whom He forgives their transgressions if they repent of them. 19. "And the Spirit of Evil dwells upon earth, in the hearts of those who turn the children of God away from the right path. 20. "Therefore, I say unto you; Fear the day of judgment, for God will inflict a terrible chastisement upon all those who have led His children astray and beguiled them with superstitions and errors; 21. "Upon those who have blinded them who saw; who have brought contagion to the well; who have taught the worship of those things which God made to be subject to man, or to aid him in his works. 22. "Your doctrine is the fruit of your error in seeking to bring near to you the God of Truth, by creating for yourselves false gods." 23. When the Magi heard these words, they feared to themselves do him harm, but at night, when the whole city slept, they brought him outside the walls and left him on the highway, in the hope that he would not fail to become the prey of wild beasts. 24. But, protected by the Lord our God, Saint Issa continued on his way, without accident. IX. 1. Issa--whom the Creator had selected to recall to the worship of the true God, men sunk in sin--was twenty-nine years old when he arrived in the land of Israel. 2. Since the departure therefrom of Issa, the Pagans had caused the Israelites to endure more atrocious sufferings than before, and they were filled with despair. 3. Many among them had begun to neglect the laws of their God and those of Mossa, in the hope of winning the favor of their brutal conquerors. 4. But Issa, notwithstanding their unhappy condition, exhorted his countrymen not to despair, because the day of their redemption from the yoke of sin was near, and he himself, by his example, confirmed their faith in the God of their fathers. 5. "Children, yield not yourselves to despair," said the celestial Father to them, through the mouth of Issa, "for I have heard your lamentations, and your cries have reached my ears. 6. "Weep not, oh, my beloved sons! for your griefs have touched the heart of your Father and He has forgiven you, as He forgave your ancestors. 7. "Forsake not your families to plunge into debauchery; stain not the nobility of your souls; adore not idols which cannot but remain deaf to your supplications. 8. "Fill my temple with your hope and your patience, and do not adjure the religion of your forefathers, for I have guided them and bestowed upon them of my beneficence. 9. "Lift up those who are fallen; feed the hungry and help the sick, that ye may be altogether pure and just in the day of the last judgment which I prepare for you." 10. The Israelites came in multitudes to listen to Issa's words; and they asked him where they should thank their Heavenly Father, since their enemies had demolished their temples and robbed them of their sacred vessels. 11. Issa told them that God cared not for temples erected by human hands, but that human hearts were the true temples of God. 12. "Enter into your temple, into your heart; illuminate it with good thoughts, with patience and the unshakeable faith which you owe to your Father. 13. "And your sacred vessels! they are your hands and your eyes. Look to do that which is agreeable to God, for in doing good to your fellow men, you perform a ceremony that embellishes the temple wherein abideth Him who has created you. 14. "For God has created you in His own image, innocent, with pure souls, and hearts filled with kindness and not made for the planning of evil, but to be the sanctuaries of love and justice. 15. "Therefore, I say unto you, soil not your hearts with evil, for in them the eternal Being abides. 16. "When ye do works of devotion and love, let them be with full hearts, and see that the motives of your actions be not hopes of gain or self-interest; 17. "For actions, so impelled, will not bring you nearer to salvation, but lead to a state of moral degradation wherein theft, lying and murder pass for generous deeds." X. 1. Issa went from one city to another, strengthening by the word of God the courage of the Israelites, who were near to succumbing under their weight of woe, and thousands of the people followed him to hear his teachings. 2. But the chiefs of the cities were afraid of him and they informed the principal governor, residing in Jerusalem, that a man called Issa had arrived in the country, who by his sermons had arrayed the people against the authorities, and that multitudes, listening assiduously to him, neglected their labor; and, they added, he said that in a short time they would be free of their invader rulers. 3. Then Pilate, the Governor of Jerusalem, gave orders that they should lay hold of the preacher Issa and bring him before the judges. In order, however, not to excite the anger of the populace, Pilate directed that he should be judged by the priests and scribes, the Hebrew elders, in their temple. 4. Meanwhile, Issa, continuing his preaching, arrived at Jerusalem, and the people, who already knew his fame, having learned of his coming, went out to meet him. 5. They greeted him respectfully and opened to him the doors of their temple, to hear from his mouth what he had said in other cities of Israel. 6. And Issa said to them: "The human race perishes, because of the lack of faith; for the darkness and the tempest have caused the flock to go astray and they have lost their shepherds. 7. "But the tempests do not rage forever and the darkness will not hide the light eternally; soon the sky will become serene, the celestial light will again overspread the earth, and the strayed flock will reunite around their shepherd. 8. "Wander not in the darkness, seeking the way, lest ye fall into the ditch; but gather together, sustain one another, put your faith in your God and wait for the first glimmer of light to reappear. 9. "He who sustains his neighbor, sustains himself; and he who protects his family, protects all his people and his country. 10. "For, be assured that the day is near when you will be delivered from the darkness; you will be reunited into one family and your enemy will tremble with fear, he who is ignorant of the favor of the great God." 11. The priests and the elders who heard him, filled with admiration for his language, asked him if it was true that he had sought to raise the people against the authorities of the country, as had been reported to the governor Pilate. 12. "Can one raise against estrayed men, to whom darkness has hidden their road and their door?" answered Issa. "I have but forewarned the unhappy, as I do here in this temple, that they should no longer advance on the dark road, for an abyss opens before their feet. 13. "The power of this earth is not of long duration and is subject to numberless changes. It would be of no avail for a man to rise in revolution against it, for one phase of it always succeeds another, and it is thus that it will go on until the extinction of human life. 14. "But do you not see that the powerful, and the rich, sow among the children of Israel a spirit of rebellion against the eternal power of Heaven?" 15. Then the elders asked him: "Who art thou, and from what country hast thou come to us? We have not formerly heard thee spoken of and do not even know thy name!" 16. "I am an Israelite," answered Issa; "and on the day of my birth have seen the walls of Jerusalem, and have heard the sobs of my brothers reduced to slavery, and the lamentations of my sisters carried away by the Pagans; 17. "And my soul was afflicted when I saw that my brethren had forgotten the true God. When a child I left my father's house to go and settle among other people. 18. "But, having heard it said that my brethren suffered even greater miseries now, I have come back to the land of my fathers, to recall my brethren to the faith of their ancestors, which teaches us patience upon earth in order to attain the perfect and supreme bliss above." 19. Then the wise old men put to him again this question: "We are told that thou disownest the laws of Mossa, and that thou teachest the people to forsake the temple of God?" 20. Whereupon Issa: "One does not demolish that which has been given by our Heavenly Father, and which has been destroyed by sinners. I have but enjoined the people to purify the heart of all stains, for it is the veritable temple of God. 21. "As regards the laws of Mossa, I have endeavored to reestablish them in the hearts of men; and I say unto you that ye ignore their true meaning, for it is not vengeance but pardon which they teach. Their sense has been perverted." XI. 1. When the priests and the elders heard Issa, they decided among themselves not to give judgment against him, for he had done no harm to any one, and, presenting themselves before Pilate--who was made Governor of Jerusalem by the Pagan king of the country of Romeles--they spake to him thus: 2. "We have seen the man whom thou chargest with inciting our people to revolt; we have heard his discourses and know that he is our countryman; 3. "But the chiefs of the cities have made to you false reports, for he is a just man, who teaches the people the word of God. After interrogating him, we have allowed him to go in peace." 4. The governor thereupon became very angry, and sent his disguised spies to keep watch upon Issa and report to the authorities the least word he addressed to the people. 5. In the meantime, the holy Issa continued to visit the neighboring cities and preach the true way of the Lord, enjoining the Hebrews' patience and promising them speedy deliverance. 6. And all the time great numbers of the people followed him wherever he went, and many did not leave him at all, but attached themselves to him and served him. 7. And Issa said: "Put not your faith in miracles performed by the hands of men, for He who rules nature is alone capable of doing supernatural things, while man is impotent to arrest the wrath of the winds or cause the rain to fall. 8. "One miracle, however, is within the power of man to accomplish. It is, when his heart is filled with sincere faith, he resolves to root out from his mind all evil promptings and desires, and when, in order to attain this end, he ceases to walk the path of iniquity. 9. "All the things done without God are only gross errors, illusions and seductions, serving but to show how much the heart of the doer is full of presumption, falsehood and impurity. 10. "Put not your faith in oracles. God alone knows the future. He who has recourse to the diviners soils the temple of his heart and shows his lack of faith in his Creator. 11. "Belief in the diviners and their miracles destroys the innate simplicity of man and his childlike purity. An infernal power takes hold of him who so errs, and forces him to commit various sins and give himself to the worship of idols. 12. "But the Lord our God, to whom none can be equalled, is one omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent; He alone possesses all wisdom and all light. 13. "To Him ye must address yourselves, to be comforted in your afflictions, aided in your works, healed in your sickness and whoso asks of Him, shall not ask in vain. 14. "The secrets of nature are in the hands of God, for the whole world, before it was made manifest, existed in the bosom of the divine thought, and has become material and visible by the will of the Most High. 15. "When ye pray to him, become again like little children, for ye know neither the past, nor the present, nor the future, and God is the Lord of Time." XII. 1. "Just man," said to him the disguised spies of the Governor of Jerusalem, "tell us if we must continue to do the will of Cæsar, or expect our near deliverance?" 2. And Issa, who recognized the questioners as the apostate spies sent to follow him, replied to them: "I have not told you that you would be delivered from Cæsar; it is the soul sunk in error which will gain its deliverance. 3. "There cannot be a family without a head, and there cannot be order in a people without a Cæsar, whom ye should implicitly obey, as he will be held to answer for his acts before the Supreme Tribunal." 4. "Does Cæsar possess a divine right?" the spies asked him again; "and is he the best of mortals?" 5. "There is no one 'the best' among human beings; but there are many bad, who--even as the sick need physicians--require the care of those chosen for that mission, in which must be used the means given by the sacred law of our Heavenly Father; 6. "Mercy and justice are the high prerogatives of Cæsar, and his name will be illustrious if he exercises them. 7. "But he who acts otherwise, who transcends the limits of power he has over those under his rule, and even goes so far as to put their lives in danger, offends the great Judge and derogates from his own dignity in the eyes of men." 8. Upon this, an old woman who had approached the group, to better hear Issa, was pushed aside by one of the disguised men, who placed himself before her. 9. Then said Issa: "It is not good for a son to push away his mother, that he may occupy the place which belongs to her. Whoso doth not respect his mother--the most sacred being after his God--is unworthy of the name of son. 10. "Hearken to what I say to you: Respect woman; for in her we see the mother of the universe, and all the truth of divine creation is to come through her. 11. "She is the fount of everything good and beautiful, as she is also the germ of life and death. Upon her man depends in all his existence, for she is his moral and natural support in his labors. 12. "In pain and suffering she brings you forth; in the sweat of her brow she watches over your growth, and until her death you cause her greatest anxieties. Bless her and adore her, for she is your only friend and support on earth. 13. "Respect her; defend her. In so doing you will gain for yourself her love; you will find favor before God, and for her sake many sins will be remitted to you. 14. "Love your wives and respect them, for they will be the mothers of tomorrow and later the grandmothers of a whole nation. 15. "Be submissive to the wife; her love ennobles man, softens his hardened heart, tames the wild beast in him and changes it to a lamb. 16. "Wife and mother are the priceless treasures which God has given to you. They are the most beautiful ornaments of the universe, and from them will be born all who will inhabit the world. 17. "Even as the Lord of Hosts separated the light from the darkness, and the dry land from the waters, so does woman possess the divine gift of calling forth out of man's evil nature all the good that is in him. 18. "Therefore I say unto you, after God, to woman must belong your best thoughts, for she is the divine temple where you will most easily obtain perfect happiness. 19. "Draw from this temple your moral force. There you will forget your sorrows and your failures, and recover the love necessary to aid your fellow men. 20. "Suffer her not to be humiliated, for by humiliating her you humiliate yourselves, and lose the sentiment of love, without which nothing can exist here on earth. 21. "Protect your wife, that she may protect you--you and all your household. All that you do for your mothers, your wives, for a widow, or for any other woman in distress, you will do for your God." XIII. 1. Thus Saint Issa taught the people of Israel for three years, in every city and every village, on the highways and in the fields, and all he said came to pass. 2. All this time the disguised spies of the governor Pilate observed him closely, but heard nothing to sustain the accusations formerly made against Issa by the chiefs of the cities. 3. But Saint Issa's growing popularity did not allow Pilate to rest. He feared that Issa would be instrumental in bringing about a revolution culminating in his elevation to the sovereignty, and, therefore, ordered the spies to make charges against him. 4. Then soldiers were sent to arrest him, and they cast him into a subterranean dungeon, where he was subjected to all kinds of tortures, to compel him to accuse himself, so that he might be put to death. 5. The Saint, thinking only of the perfect bliss of his brethren, endured all those torments with resignation to the will of the Creator. 6. The servants of Pilate continued to torture him, and he was reduced to a state of extreme weakness; but God was with him and did not permit him to die at their hands. 7. When the principal priests and wise elders learned of the sufferings which their Saint endured, they went to Pilate, begging him to liberate Issa, so that he might attend the great festival which was near at hand. 8. But this the governor refused. Then they asked him that Issa should be brought before the elders' council, so that he might be condemned, or acquitted, before the festival, and to this Pilate agreed. 9. On the following day the governor assembled the principal chiefs, priests, elders and judges, for the purpose of judging Issa. 10. The Saint was brought from his prison. They made him sit before the governor, between two robbers, who were to be judged at the same time with Issa, so as to show the people he was not the only one to be condemned. 11. And Pilate, addressing himself to Issa, said, "Is it true, Oh! Man; that thou incitest the populace against the authorities, with the purpose of thyself becoming King of Israel?" 12. Issa replied, "One does not become king by one's own purpose thereto. They have told you an untruth when you were informed that I was inciting the people to revolution. I have only preached of the King of Heaven, and it was Him whom I told the people to worship. 13. "For the sons of Israel have lost their original innocence and unless they return to worship the true God they will be sacrificed and their temple will fall in ruins. 14. "The worldly power upholds order in the land; I told them not to forget this. I said to them, 'Live in conformity with your situation and refrain from disturbing public order;' and, at the same time, I exhorted them to remember that disorder reigned in their own hearts and spirits. 15. "Therefore, the King of Heaven has punished them, and has destroyed their nationality and taken from them their national kings, 'but,' I added, 'if you will be resigned to your fate, as a reward the Kingdom of Heaven will be yours.'" 16. At this moment the witnesses were introduced; one of whom deposed thus: "Thou hast said to the people that in comparison with the power of the king who would soon liberate the Israelites from the yoke of the heathen, the worldly authorities amounted to nothing." 17. "Blessings upon thee!" said Issa. "For thou hast spoken the truth! The King of Heaven is greater and more powerful than the laws of man and His kingdom surpasses the kingdoms of this earth. 18. "And the time is not far off, when Israel, obedient to the will of God, will throw off its yoke of sin; for it has been written that a forerunner would appear to announce the deliverance of the people, and that he would reunite them in one family." 19. Thereupon the governor said to the judges: "Have you heard this? The Israelite Issa acknowledges the crime of which he is accused. Judge him, then, according to your laws and pass upon him condemnation to death." 20. "We cannot condemn him," replied the priests and the ancients. "As thou hast heard, he spoke of the King of Heaven, and he has preached nothing which constitutes insubordination against the law." 21. Thereupon the governor called a witness who had been bribed by his master, Pilate, to betray Issa, and this man said to Issa: "Is it not true that thou hast represented thyself as a King of Israel, when thou didst say that He who reigns in Heaven sent thee to prepare His people?" 22. But Issa blessed the man and answered: "Thou wilt find mercy, for what thou hast said did not come out from thine own heart." Then, turning to the governor he said: "Why dost thou lower thy dignity and teach thy inferiors to tell falsehood, when, without doing so, it is in thy power to condemn an innocent man?" 23. When Pilate heard his words, he became greatly enraged and ordered that Issa be condemned to death, and that the two robbers should be declared guiltless. 24. The judges, after consulting among themselves, said to Pilate: "We cannot consent to take this great sin upon us,--to condemn an innocent man and liberate malefactors. It would be against our laws. 25. "Act thyself, then, as thou seest fit." Thereupon the priests and elders walked out, and washed their hands in a sacred vessel, and said: "We are innocent of the blood of this righteous man." XIV. 1. By order of the governor, the soldiers seized Issa and the two robbers, and led them to the place of execution, where they were nailed upon the crosses erected for them. 2. All day long the bodies of Issa and the two robbers hung upon the crosses, bleeding, guarded by the soldiers. The people stood all around and the relatives of the executed prayed and wept. 3. When the sun went down, Issa's tortures ended. He lost consciousness and his soul disengaged itself from the body, to reunite with God. 4. Thus ended the terrestrial existence of the reflection of the eternal Spirit under the form of a man who had saved hardened sinners and comforted the afflicted. 5. Meanwhile, Pilate was afraid for what he had done, and ordered the body of the Saint to be given to his relatives, who put it in a tomb near to the place of execution. Great numbers of persons came to visit the tomb, and the air was filled with their wailings and lamentations. 6. Three days later, the governor sent his soldiers to remove Issa's body and bury it in some other place, for he feared a rebellion among the people. 7. The next day, when the people came to the tomb, they found it open and empty, the body of Issa being gone. Thereupon, the rumor spread that the Supreme Judge had sent His angels from Heaven, to remove the mortal remains of the saint in whom part of the divine Spirit had lived on earth. 8. When Pilate learned of this rumor, he grew angry and prohibited, under penalty of death, the naming of Issa, or praying for him to the Lord. 9. But the people, nevertheless, continued to weep over Issa's death and to glorify their master; wherefore, many were carried into captivity, subjected to torture and put to death. 10. And the disciples of Saint Issa departed from the land of Israel and went in all directions, to the heathen, preaching that they should abandon their gross errors, think of the salvation of their souls and earn the perfect bliss which awaits human beings in the immaterial world, full of glory, where the great Creator abides in all his immaculate and perfect majesty. 11. The heathen, their kings, and their warriors, listened to the preachers, abandoned their erroneous beliefs and forsook their priests and their idols, to celebrate the praises of the most wise Creator of the Universe, the King of Kings, whose heart is filled with infinite mercy. _Resumé_ In reading the account of the life of Issa (Jesus Christ), one is struck, on the one hand by the resemblance of certain principal passages to accounts in the Old and New Testaments; and, on the other, by the not less remarkable contradictions which occasionally occur between the Buddhistic version and Hebraic and Christian records. To explain this, it is necessary to remember the epochs when the facts were consigned to writing. We have been taught, from our childhood, that the Pentateuch was written by Moses himself, but the careful researches of modern scholars have demonstrated conclusively, that at the time of Moses, and even much later, there existed in the country bathed by the Mediterranean, no other writing than the hieroglyphics in Egypt and the cuniform inscriptions, found nowadays in the excavations of Babylon. We know, however, that the alphabet and parchment were known in China and India long before Moses. Let me cite a few proofs of this statement. We learn from the sacred books of "the religion of the wise" that the alphabet was invented in China in 2800 by Fou-si, who was the first emperor of China to embrace this religion, the ritual and exterior forms of which he himself arranged. Yao, the fourth of the Chinese emperors, who is said to have belonged to this faith, published moral and civil laws, and, in 2228, compiled a penal code. The fifth emperor, Soune, proclaimed in the year of his accession to the throne that "the religion of the wise" should thenceforth be the recognized religion of the State, and, in 2282, compiled new penal laws. His laws, modified by the Emperor Vou-vange,--founder of the dynasty of the Tcheou in 1122,--are those in existence today, and known under the name of "Changements." We also know that the doctrine of the Buddha Fô, whose true name was Sakya-Muni was written upon parchment. Fôism began to spread in China about 260 years before Jesus Christ. In 206, an emperor of the Tsine dynasty, who was anxious to learn Buddhism, sent to India for a Buddhist by the name of Silifan, and the Emperor Ming-Ti, of the Hagne dynasty, sent, a year before Christ's birth, to India for the sacred books written by the Buddha Sakya-Muni--the founder of the Buddhistic doctrine, who lived about 1200 before Christ. The doctrine of the Buddha Gauthama or Gothama, who lived 600 years before Jesus Christ, was written in the Pali language upon parchment. At that epoch there existed already in India about 84,000 Buddhistic manuscripts, the compilation of which required a considerable number of years. At the time when the Chinese and the Hindus possessed already a very rich written literature, the less fortunate or more ignorant peoples who had no alphabet, transmitted their histories from mouth to mouth, and from generation to generation. Owing to the unreliability of human memory, historical facts, embellished by Oriental imagination, soon degenerated into fabulous legends, which, in the course of time, were collected, and by the unknown compilers entitled "The Five Books of Moses." As these legends ascribe to the Hebrew legislator extraordinary divine powers which enabled him to perform miracles in the presence of Pharaoh, the claim that he was an Israelite may as well have been legendary rather than historical. The Hindu chroniclers, on the contrary, owing to their knowledge of an alphabet, were enabled to commit carefully to writing, not mere legends, but the recitals of recently occurred facts within their own knowledge, or the accounts brought to them by merchants who came from foreign countries. It must be remembered, in this connection, that--in antiquity as in our own days--the whole public life of the Orient was concentrated in the bazaars. There the news of foreign events was brought by the merchant-caravans and sought by the dervishes, who found, in their recitals in the temples and public places, a means of subsistence. When the merchants returned home from a journey, they generally related fully during the first days after their arrival, all they had seen or heard abroad. Such have been the customs of the Orient, from time immemorial, and are today. The commerce of India with Egypt and, later, with Europe, was carried on by way of Jerusalem, where, as far back as the time of King Solomon, the Hindu caravans brought precious metals and other materials for the construction of the temple. From Europe, merchandise was brought to Jerusalem by sea, and there unloaded in a port, which is now occupied by the city of Jaffa. The chronicles in question were compiled before, during and after the time of Jesus Christ. During his sojourn in India, in the quality of a simple student come to learn the Brahminical and Buddhistic laws, no special attention whatever was paid to his life. When, however, a little later, the first accounts of the events in Israel reached India, the chroniclers, after committing to writing that which they were told about the prophet, Issa,--_viz._, that he had for his following a whole people, weary of the yoke of their masters, and that he was crucified by order of Pilate, remembered that this same Issa had only recently sojourned in their midst, and that, an Israelite by birth, he had come to study among them, after which he had returned to his country. They conceived a lively interest for the man who had grown so rapidly under their eyes, and began to investigate his birth, his past and all the details concerning his existence. The two manuscripts, from which the lama of the convent Himis read to me all that had a bearing upon Jesus, are compilations from divers copies written in the Thibetan language, translations of scrolls belonging to the library of Lhassa and brought, about two hundred years after Christ, from India, Nepaul and Maghada, to a convent on Mount Marbour, near the city of Lhassa, now the residence of the Dalai-Lama. These scrolls were written in Pali, which certain lamas study even now, so as to be able to translate it into the Thibetan. The chroniclers were Buddhists belonging to the sect of the Buddha Gothama. The details concerning Jesus, given in the chronicles, are disconnected and mingled with accounts of other contemporaneous events to which they bear no relation. The manuscripts relate to us, first of all,--according to the accounts given by merchants arriving from Judea in the same year when the death of Jesus occurred--that a just man by the name of Issa, an Israelite, in spite of his being acquitted twice by the judges as being a man of God, was nevertheless put to death by the order of the Pagan governor, Pilate, who feared that he might take advantage of his great popularity to reestablish the kingdom of Israel and expel from the country its conquerors. Then follow rather incoherent communications regarding the preachings of Jesus among the Guebers and other heathens. They seem to have been written during the first years following the death of Jesus, in whose career a lively and growing interest is shown. One of these accounts, communicated by a merchant, refers to the origin of Jesus and his family; another tells of the expulsion of his partisans and the persecutions they had to suffer. Only at the end of the second volume is found the first categorical affirmation of the chronicler. He says there that Issa was a man blessed by God and the best of all; that it was he in whom the great Brahma had elected to incarnate when, at a period fixed by destiny, his spirit was required to, for a time, separate from the Supreme Being. After telling that Issa descended from poor Israelite parents, the chronicler makes a little digression, for the purpose of explaining, according to ancient accounts, who were those sons of Israel. I have arranged all the fragments concerning the life of Issa in chronological order and have taken pains to impress upon them the character of unity, in which they were absolutely lacking. I leave it to the _savans_, the philosophers and the theologians to search into the causes for the contradictions which may be found between the "Life of Issa" which I lay before the public and the accounts of the Gospels. But I trust that everybody will agree with me in assuming that the version which I present to the public, one compiled three or four years after the death of Jesus, from the accounts of eyewitnesses and contemporaries, has much more probability of being in conformity with truth than the accounts of the Gospels, the composition of which was effected at different epochs and at periods much posterior to the occurrence of the events. Before speaking of the life of Jesus, I must say a few words on the history of Moses, who, according to the so-far most accredited legend, was an Israelite. In this respect the legend is contradicted by the Buddhists. We learn from the outset that Moses was an Egyptian prince, the son of a Pharaoh, and that he only was taught by learned Israelites. I believe that if this important point is carefully examined, it must be admitted that the Buddhist author may be right. It is not my intent to argue against the Biblical legend concerning the origin of Moses, but I think everyone reading it must share my conviction that Moses could not have been a simple Israelite. His education was rather that of a king's son, and it is difficult to believe that a child introduced by chance into the palace should have been made an equal with the son of the sovereign. The rigor with which the Egyptians treated their slaves by no means attests the mildness of their character. A foundling certainly would not have been made the companion of the sons of a Pharaoh, but would be placed among his servants. Add to this the caste spirit so strictly observed in ancient Egypt, a most salient point, which is certainly calculated to raise doubts as to the truth of the Scriptural story. And it is difficult to suppose that Moses had not received a complete education. How otherwise could his great legislative work, his broad views, his high administrative qualities be satisfactorily explained? And now comes another question: Why should he, a prince, have attached himself to the Israelites? The answer seems to me very simple. It is known that in ancient, as well as in modern times, discussions were often raised as to which of two brothers should succeed to the father's throne. Why not admit this hypothesis, _viz._, that Mossa, or Moses, having an elder brother whose existence forbade him to think of occupying the throne of Egypt, contemplated founding a distinct kingdom. It might very well be that, in view of this end, he tried to attach himself to the Israelites, whose firmness of faith as well as physical strength he had occasion to admire. We know, indeed, that the Israelites of Egypt had no resemblance whatever to their descendants as regards physical constitution. The granite blocks which were handled by them in building the palaces and pyramids are still in place to testify to this fact. In the same way I explain to myself the history of the miracles which he is said to have performed before Pharaoh. Although there are no definite arguments for denying the miracles which Moses might have performed in the name of God before Pharaoh, I think it is not difficult to realize that the Buddhistic statement sounds more probable than the Scriptural gloss. The pestilence, the smallpox or the cholera must, indeed, have caused enormous ravages among the dense population of Egypt, at an epoch when there existed yet but very rudimentary ideas about hygiene and where, consequently, such diseases must have rapidly assumed frightful virulence. In view of Pharaoh's fright at the disasters which befell Egypt, Moses' keen wit might well have suggested to him to explain the strange and terrifying occurrences, to his father, by the intervention of the God of Israel in behalf of his chosen people. Moses was here afforded an excellent opportunity to deliver the Israelites from their slavery and have them pass under his own domination. In obedience to Pharaoh's will--according to the Buddhistic version--Moses led the Israelites outside the walls of the city; but, instead of building a new city within reach of the capital, as he was ordered, he left with them the Egyptian territory. Pharaoh's indignation on learning of this infringement of his commands by Moses, can easily be imagined. And so he gave the order to his soldiers to pursue the fugitives. The geographical disposition of the region suggests at once that Moses during his flight must have moved by the side of the mountains and entered Arabia by the way over the Isthmus which is now cut by the Suez Canal. Pharaoh, on the contrary, pursued, with his troops, a straight line to the Red Sea; then, in order to overtake the Israelites, who had already gained the opposite shore, he sought to take advantage of the ebb of the sea in the Gulf, which is formed by the coast and the Isthmus, and caused his soldiers to wade through the ford. But the length of the passage proved much greater than he had expected; so that the flood tide set in when the Egyptian host was halfway across, and, of the army thus overwhelmed by the returning waves, none escaped death. This fact, so simple in itself, has in the course of the centuries been transformed by the Israelites into a religious legend, they seeing in it a divine intervention in their behalf and a punishment which their God inflicted on their persecutors. There is, moreover, reason to believe that Moses himself saw the occurrence in this light. This, however, is a thesis which I shall try to develop in a forthcoming work. The Buddhistic chronicle then describes the grandeur and the downfall of the kingdom of Israel, and its conquest by the foreign nations who reduced the inhabitants to slavery. The calamities which befell the Israelites, and the afflictions that thenceforth embittered their days were, according to the chronicler, more than sufficient reasons that God, pitying his people and desirous of coming to their aid, should descend on earth in the person of a prophet, in order to lead them back to the path of righteousness. Thus the state of things in that epoch justified the belief that the coming of Jesus was signalized, imminent, necessary. This explains why the Buddhistic traditions could maintain that the eternal Spirit separated from the eternal Being and incarnated in the child of a pious and once illustrious family. Doubtless the Buddhists, in common with the Evangelists, meant to convey by this that the child belonged to the royal house of David; but the text in the Gospels, according to which "the child was born from the Holy Spirit," admits of two interpretations, while according to Buddha's doctrine, which is more in conformity with the laws of nature, the spirit has but incarnated in a child already born, whom God blessed and chose for the accomplishment of His mission on earth. The birth of Jesus is followed by a long gap in the traditions of the Evangelists, who either from ignorance or neglect, fail to tell us anything definite about his childhood, youth or education. They commence the history of Jesus with his first sermon, _i.e._, at the epoch, when thirty years of age, he returns to his country. All the Evangelists tell us concerning the infancy of Jesus is marked by the lack of precision: "And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon him," says one of the sacred authors (Luke 2, 40), and another: "And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel." (Luke 1, 80.) As the Evangelists compiled their writings a long time after the death of Jesus, it is presumable that they committed to writing only those accounts of the principal events in the life of Jesus which happened to come to their knowledge. The Buddhists, on the contrary, who compiled their chronicles soon after the Passion occurred, and were able to collect the surest information about everything that interested them, give us a complete and very detailed description of the life of Jesus. In those unhappy times, when the struggle for existence seems to have destroyed all thought of God, the people of Israel suffered the double oppression of the ambitious Herod and the despotic and avaricious Romans. Then, as now, the Hebrews put all their hopes in Providence, whom they expected, would send them an inspired man, who should deliver them from all their physical and moral afflictions. The time passed, however, and no one took the initiative in a revolt against the tyranny of the rulers. In that era of hope and despair, the people of Israel completely forgot that there lived among them a poor Israelite who was a direct descendant from their King David. This poor man married a young girl who gave birth to a miraculous child. The Hebrews, true to their traditions of devotion and respect for the race of their kings, upon learning of this event went in great numbers to congratulate the happy father and see the child. It is evident that Herod was informed of this occurrence. He feared that this infant, once grown to manhood, might avail himself of his prospective popularity to reconquer the throne of his ancestors. He sent out his men to seize the child, which the Israelites endeavored to hide from the wrath of the king, who then ordered the abominable massacre of the children, hoping that Jesus would perish in this vast human hecatomb. But Joseph's family had warning of the impending danger, and took refuge in Egypt. A short time afterward, they returned to their native country. The child had grown during those journeyings, in which his life was more than once exposed to danger. Formerly, as now, the Oriental Israelites commenced the instruction of their children at the age of five or six years. Compelled to constantly hide him from the murderous King Herod, the parents of Jesus could not allow their son to go out, and he, no doubt, spent all his time in studying the sacred Scriptures, so that his knowledge was sufficiently beyond what would naturally have been expected of a boy of his age to greatly astonish the elders of Israel. He had in his thirteenth year attained an age when, according to Jewish law, the boy becomes an adult, has the right to marry, and incurs obligations for the discharge of the religious duties of a man. There exists still, in our times, among the Israelites, an ancient religious custom that fixes the majority of a youth at the accomplished thirteenth year. From this epoch the youth becomes a member of the congregation and enjoys all the rights of an adult. Hence, his marriage at this age is regarded as having legal force, and is even required in the tropical countries. In Europe, however, owing to the influence of local laws and to nature, which does not contribute here so powerfully as in warm climates to the physical development, this custom is no more in force and has lost all its former importance. The royal lineage of Jesus, his rare intelligence and his learning, caused him to be looked upon as an excellent match, and the wealthiest and most respected Hebrews would fain have had him for a son-in-law, just as even nowadays the Israelites are very desirous of the honor of marrying their daughters to the sons of Rabbis or scholars. But the meditative youth, whose mind was far above anything corporeal, and possessed by the thirst for knowledge, stealthily left his home and joined the caravans going to India. It stands to reason that Jesus Christ should have thought, primarily, of going to India, first, because at that epoch Egypt formed part of the Roman possessions; secondly, and principally, because a very active commercial exchange with India had made common report in Judea of the majestic character and unsurpassed richness of the arts and sciences in this marvellous country, to which even now the aspirations of all civilized peoples are directed. Here the Evangelists once more lose the thread of the terrestrial life of Jesus. Luke says he "was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel" (Luke 1, 80), which clearly demonstrates that nobody knew where the holy youth was until his sudden reappearance sixteen years later. Arrived in India, this land of marvels, Jesus began to frequent the temples of the Djainites. There exists until today, on the peninsula of Hindustan, a sectarian cult under the name of Djainism. It forms a kind of connecting link between Buddhism and Brahminism, and preaches the destruction of all other beliefs, which, it declares, are corroded by falsehood. It dates from the seventh century before Jesus Christ and its name is derived from the word "djain" (conqueror), which was assumed by its founders as expressive of its destined triumph over its rivals. In sympathetic admiration for the spirit of the young man, the Djainites asked him to stay with them; but Jesus left them to settle in Djagguernat, where he devoted himself to the study of treatises on religion, philosophy, etc. Djagguernat is one of the chief sacred cities of Brahmins, and, at the time of Christ, was of great religious importance. According to tradition, the ashes of the illustrious Brahmin, Krishna, who lived in 1580 B.C., are preserved there, in the hollow of a tree, near a magnificent temple, to which thousands make pilgrimage every year. Krishna collected and put in order the Vedas, which he divided into four books--Richt, Jagour, Saman and Artafan;--in commemoration of which great work he received the name of Vyasa (he who collected and divided the Vedas), and he also compiled the Vedanta and eighteen Puranas, which contain 400,000 stanzas. In Djagguernat is also found a very precious library of Sanscrit books and religious manuscripts. Jesus spent there six years in studying the language of the country and the Sanscrit, which enabled him to absorb the religious doctrines, philosophy, medicine and mathematics. He found much to blame in Brahminical laws and usages, and publicly joined issue with the Brahmins, who in vain endeavored to convince him of the sacred character of their established customs. Jesus, among other things, deemed it extremely unjust that the laborer should be oppressed and despised, and that he should not only be robbed of hope of future happiness, but also be denied the right to hear the religious services. He, therefore, began preaching to the Sudras, the lowest caste of slaves, telling them that, according to their own laws, God is the Father of all men; that all which exists, exists only through Him; that, before Him, all men are equal, and that the Brahmins had obscured the great principle of monotheism by misinterpreting Brahma's own words, and laying excessive stress upon observance of the exterior ceremonials of the cult. Here are the words in which, according to the doctrine of the Brahmins, God Himself speaks to the angels: "I have been from eternity, and shall continue to be eternally. I am the first cause of everything that exists in the East and in the West, in the North and in the South, above and below, in heaven and in hell. I am older than all things. I am the Spirit and the Creation of the universe and also its Creator. I am all-powerful; I am the God of the Gods, the King of the Kings; I am Para-Brahma, the great soul of the universe." After the world appeared by the will of Para-Brahma, God created human beings, whom he divided into four classes, according to their colors: white (Brahmins), red (Kshatriyas), yellow (Vaisyas), and black (Sudras). Brahma drew the first from his own mouth, and gave them for their _appanage_ the government of the world, the care of teaching men the laws, of curing and judging them. Therefore do the Brahmins occupy only the offices of priests and preachers, are expounders of the Vedas, and must practice celibacy. The second caste of Kshatriyas issued from the hand of Brahma. He made of them warriors, entrusting them with the care of defending society. All the kings, princes, captains, governors and military men belong to this caste, which lives on the best terms with the Brahmins, since they cannot subsist without each other, and the peace of the country depends on the alliance of the lights and the sword, of Brahma's temple and the royal throne. The Vaisyas, who constitute the third caste, issued from Brahma's belly. They are destined to cultivate the ground, raise cattle, carry on commerce and practice all kinds of trades in order to feed the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. Only on holidays are they authorized to enter the temple and listen to the recital of the Vedas; at all other times they must attend to their business. The lowest caste, that of the black ones, or Sudras, issued from the feet of Brahma to be the humble servants and slaves of the three preceding castes. They are interdicted from attending the reading of the Vedas at any time; their touch contaminates a Brahmin, Kshatriya, or even a Vaisya who comes in contact with them. They are wretched creatures, deprived of all human rights; they cannot even look at the members of the other castes, nor defend themselves, nor, when sick, receive the attendance of a physician. Death alone can deliver the Sudra from a life of servitude; and even then, freedom can only be attained under the condition that, during his whole life, he shall have served diligently and without complaint some member of the privileged classes. Then only it is promised that the soul of the Sudra shall, after death, be raised to a superior caste. If a Sudra has been lacking in obedience to a member of the privileged classes, or has in any way brought their disfavor upon himself, he sinks to the rank of a pariah, who is banished from all cities and villages and is the object of general contempt, as an abject being who can only perform the lowest kind of work. The same punishment may also fall upon members of another caste; these, however, may, through repentance, fasting and other trials, rehabilitate themselves in their former caste; while the unfortunate Sudra, once expelled from his, has lost it forever. From what has been said above, it is easy to explain why the Vaisyas and Sudras were animated with adoration for Jesus, who, in spite of the threats of the Brahmins and Kshatriyas, never forsook those poor people. In his sermons Jesus not only censured the system by which man was robbed of his right to be considered as a human being, while an ape or a piece of marble or metal was paid divine worship, but he attacked the very life of Brahminism, its system of gods, its doctrine and its "trimurti" (trinity), the angular stone of this religion. Para-Brahma is represented with three faces on a single head. This is the "trimurti" (trinity), composed of Brahma (creator), Vishnu (conservator), and Siva (destroyer). Here is the origin of the trimurti:-- In the beginning, Para-Brahma created the waters and threw into them the seed of procreation, which transformed itself into a brilliant egg, wherein Brahma's image was reflected. Millions of years had passed when Brahma split the egg in two halves, of which the upper one became the heaven, the lower one, the earth. Then Brahma descended to the earth under the shape of a child, established himself upon a lotus flower, absorbed himself in his own contemplation and put to himself the question: "Who will attend to the conservation of what I have created?" "I," came the answer from his mouth under the appearance of a flame. And Brahma gave to this word the name, "Vishnu," that is to say, "he who preserves." Then Brahma divided his being into two halves, the one male, the other female, the active and the passive principles, the union of which produced Siva, "the destroyer." These are the attributes of the trimurti; Brahma, creative principle; Vishnu, preservative wisdom; Siva, destructive wrath of justice. Brahma is the substance from which everything was made; Vishnu, space wherein everything lives; and Siva, time that annihilates all things. Brahma is the face which vivifies all; Vishnu, the water which sustains the forces of the creatures; Siva, the fire which breaks the bond that unites all objects. Brahma is the past; Vishnu, the present; Siva, the future. Each part of the trimurti possesses, moreover, a wife. The wife of Brahma is Sarasvati, goddess of wisdom; that of Vishnu, Lakshmi, goddess of virtue, and Siva's spouse is Kali, goddess of death, the universal destroyer. Of this last union were born, Ganesa, the elephant-headed god of wisdom, and Indra, the god of the firmament, both chiefs of inferior divinities, the number of which, if all the objects of adoration of the Hindus be included, amounts to three hundred millions. Vishnu has descended eight times upon the earth, incarnating in a fish in order to save the Vedas from the deluge, in a tortoise, a dwarf, a wild boar, a lion, in Rama, a king's son, in Krishna and in Buddha. He will come a ninth time under the form of a rider mounted on a white horse in order to destroy death and sin. Jesus denied the existence of all these hierarchic absurdities of gods, which darken the great principle of monotheism. When the Brahmins saw that Jesus, who, instead of becoming one of their party, as they had hoped, turned out to be their adversary, and that the people began to embrace his doctrine, they resolved to kill him; but his servants, who were greatly attached to him, forewarned him of the threatening danger, and he took refuge in the mountains of Nepaul. At this epoch, Buddhism had taken deep root in this country. It was a kind of schism, remarkable by its moral principles and ideas on the nature of the divinity--ideas which brought men closer to nature and to one another. Sakya-Muni, the founder of this sect, was born fifteen hundred years before Jesus Christ, at Kapila, the capital of his father's kingdom, near Nepaul, in the Himalayas. He belonged to the race of the Gotamides, and to the ancient family of the Sakyas. From his infancy he evinced a lively interest in religion, and, contrary to his father's wishes, leaving his palace with all its luxury, began at once to preach against the Brahmins, for the purification of their doctrines. He died at Kouçinagara, surrounded by many faithful disciples. His body was burned, and his ashes, divided into several parts, were distributed between the cities, which, on account of his new doctrine, had renounced Brahminism. According to the Buddhistic doctrine, the Creator reposes normally in a state of perfect inaction, which is disturbed by nothing and which he only leaves at certain destiny-determined epochs, in order to create terrestrial buddhas. To this end the Spirit disengages itself from the sovereign Creator, incarnates in a buddha and stays for some time on the earth, where he creates Bodhisattvas (masters),[3] whose mission it is to preach the divine word and to found new churches of believers to whom they will give laws, and for whom they will institute a new religious order according to the traditions of Buddhism. A terrestrial buddha is, in a certain way, a reflection of the sovereign creative Buddha, with whom he unites after the termination of his terrestrial existence. In like manner do the Bodhisattvas, as a reward for their labors and the privations they undergo, receive eternal bliss and enjoy a rest which nothing can disturb. Jesus sojourned six years among the Buddhists, where he found the principle of monotheism still pure. Arrived at the age of twenty-six years, he remembered his fatherland, which was then oppressed by a foreign yoke. On his way homeward, he preached against idol worship, human sacrifice, and other errors of faith, admonishing the people to recognize and adore God, the Father of all beings, to whom all are alike dear, the master as well as the slave; for they all are his children, to whom he has given this beautiful universe for a common heritage. The sermons of Jesus often made a profound impression upon the peoples among whom he came, and he was exposed to all sorts of dangers provoked by the clergy, but was saved by the very idolators who, only the preceding day, had offered their children as sacrifices to their idols. While passing through Persia, Jesus almost caused a revolution among the adorers of Zoroaster's doctrine. Nevertheless, the priests refrained from killing him, out of fear of the people's vengeance. They resorted to artifice, and led him out of town at night, with the hope that he might be devoured by wild beasts. Jesus escaped this peril and arrived safe and sound in the country of Israel. It must be remarked here that the Orientals, amidst their sometimes so picturesque misery, and in the ocean of depravation in which they slumber, always have, under the influence of their priests and teachers, a pronounced inclination for learning and understand easily good common sense explications. It happened to me more than once that, by using simple words of truth, I appealed to the conscience of a thief or some otherwise intractable person. These people, moved by a sentiment of innate honesty,--which the clergy for personal reasons of their own, tried by all means to stifle--soon became again very honest and had only contempt for those who had abused their confidence. By the virtue of a mere word of truth, the whole of India, with its 300,000,000 of idols, could be made a vast Christian country; but ... this beautiful project would, no doubt, be antagonized by certain Christians who, similar to those priests of whom I have spoken before, speculate upon the ignorance of the people to make themselves rich. According to St. Luke, Jesus was about thirty years of age when he began preaching to the Israelites. According to the Buddhistic chroniclers, Jesus's teachings in Judea began in his twenty-ninth year. All his sermons which are not mentioned by the Evangelists, but have been preserved by the Buddhists, are remarkable for their character of divine grandeur. The fame of the new prophet spread rapidly in the country, and Jerusalem awaited with impatience his arrival. When he came near the holy city, its inhabitants went out to meet him, and led him in triumph to the temple; all of which is in agreement with Christian tradition. The chiefs and elders who heard him were filled with admiration for his sermons, and were happy to see the beneficent impression which his words exercised upon the populace. All these remarkable sermons of Jesus are full of sublime sentiments. Pilate, the governor of the country, however, did not look upon the matter in the same light. Eager agents notified him that Jesus announced the near coming of a new kingdom, the reestablishment of the throne of Israel, and that he suffered himself to be called the Son of God, sent to bring back courage in Israel, for he, the King of Judea, would soon ascend the throne of his ancestors. I do not purpose attributing to Jesus the _rôle_ of a revolutionary, but it seems to me very probable that Jesus wrought up the people with a view to reestablish the throne to which he had a just claim. Divinely inspired, and, at the same time, convinced of the legitimacy of his pretentions, Jesus preached the spiritual union of the people in order that a political union might result. Pilate, who felt alarmed over these rumors, called together the priests and the elders of the people and ordered them to interdict Jesus from preaching in public, and even to condemn him in the temple under the charge of apostasy. This was the best means for Pilate to rid himself of a dangerous man, whose royal origin he knew and whose popularity was constantly increasing. It must be said in this connection that the Israelites, far from persecuting Jesus, recognized in him the descendant of the illustrious dynasty of David, and made him the object of their secret hopes, a fact which is evident from the very Gospels which tell that Jesus preached freely in the temple, in the presence of the elders, who could have interdicted him not only the entrance to the temple, but also his preachings. Upon the order of Pilate the Sanhedrim met and cited Jesus to appear before its tribunal. As the result of the inquiry, the members of the Sanhedrim informed Pilate that his suspicions were without any foundation whatever; that Jesus preached a religious, and not a political, propaganda; that he was expounding the Divine word, and that he claimed to have come not to overthrow, but to reestablish the laws of Moses. The Buddhistic record does but confirm this sympathy, which unquestionably existed between the young preacher, Jesus, and the elders of the people of Israel; hence their answer: "We do not judge a just one." Pilate felt not at all assured, and continued seeking an occasion to hale Jesus before a new tribunal, as regular as the former. To this end he caused him to be followed by spies, and finally ordered his arrest. If we may believe the Evangelists, it was the Pharisees who sought the life of Jesus, while the Buddhistic record most positively declares that Pilate alone can be held responsible for his execution. This version is evidently much more probable than the account of the Evangelists. The conquerors of Judea could not long tolerate the presence of a man who announced to the people a speedy deliverance from their yoke. The popularity of Jesus having commenced to disturb Pilate's mind, it is to be supposed that he sent after the young preacher spies, with the order to take note of all his words and acts. Moreover, the servants of the Roman governor, as true "agents provocateurs," endeavored by means of artful questions put to Jesus, to draw from him some imprudent words under color of which Pilate might proceed against him. If the preachings of Jesus had been offensive to the Hebrew priests and scribes, all they needed to do was simply to command the people not to hear and follow him, and to forbid him entrance into the temple. But the Evangelists tell us that Jesus enjoyed great popularity among the Israelites and full liberty in the temples, where Pharisees and scribes discussed with him. In order to find a valid excuse for condemning him, Pilate had him tortured so as to extort from him a confession of high treason. But, contrary to the rule that the innocent, overcome by their pain, will confess anything to escape the unendurable agonies inflicted upon them, Jesus made no admission of guilt. Pilate, seeing that the usual tortures were powerless to accomplish the desired result, commanded the executioners to proceed to the last extreme of their diabolic cruelties, meaning to compass the death of Jesus by the complete exhaustion of his forces. Jesus, however, fortifying his endurance by the power of his will and zeal for his righteous cause--which was also that of his people and of God--was unconquerable by all the refinements of cruelty inflicted upon him by his executioners. The infliction of "the question" upon Jesus evoked much feeling among the elders, and they resolved to interfere in his behalf; formally demanding of Pilate that he should be liberated before the Passover. When their request was denied by Pilate they resolved to petition that Jesus should be brought to trial before the Sanhedrim, by whom they did not doubt his acquittal--which was ardently desired by the people--would be ordained. In the eyes of the priests, Jesus was a saint, belonging to the family of David; and his unjust detention, or--what was still more to be dreaded--his condemnation, would have saddened the celebration of the great national festival of the Israelites. They therefore prayed Pilate that the trial of Jesus should take place before the Passover, and to this he acceded. But he ordered that two thieves should be tried at the same time with Jesus, thinking to, in this way, minimize in the eyes of the people, the importance of the fact that the life of an innocent man was being put in jeopardy before the tribunal; and, by not allowing Jesus to be condemned alone, blind the populace to the unjust prearrangement of his condemnation. The accusation against Jesus was founded upon the depositions of the bribed witnesses. During the trial, Pilate availed himself of perversions of Jesus' words concerning the heavenly kingdom, to sustain the charges made against him. He counted, it seems, upon the effect produced by the answers of Jesus, as well as upon his own authority, to influence the members of the tribunal against examining too minutely the details of the case, and to procure from them the sentence of death for which he intimated his desire. Upon hearing the perfectly natural answer of the judges, that the meaning of the words of Jesus was diametrically opposed to the accusation, and that there was nothing in them to warrant his condemnation, Pilate employed his final resource for prejudicing the trial, viz., the deposition of a purchased traitorous informer. This miserable wretch--who was, no doubt, Judas--accused Jesus formally, of having incited the people to rebellion. Then followed a scene of unsurpassed sublimity. When Judas gave his testimony, Jesus, turning toward him, and giving him his blessing, says: "Thou wilt find mercy, for what thou has said did not come out from thine own heart!" Then, addressing himself to the governor: "Why dost thou lower thy dignity, and teach thy inferiors to tell falsehood, when without doing so it is in thy power to condemn an innocent man?" Words touching as sublime! Jesus Christ here manifests all the grandeur of his soul by pardoning his betrayer, and he reproaches Pilate with having resorted to such means, unworthy of his dignity, to attain his end. This keen reproach enraged the governor, and caused him to completely forget his position, and the prudent policy with which he had meant to evade personal responsibility for the crime he contemplated. He now imperiously demanded the conviction of Jesus, and, as though he intended to make a display of his power, to overawe the judges, ordered the acquittal of the two thieves. The judges, seeing the injustice of Pilate's demand, that they should acquit the malefactors and condemn the innocent Jesus, refused to commit this double crime against their consciences and their laws. But as they could not cope with one who possessed the authority of final judgment, and saw that he was firmly decided to rid himself, by whatever means, of a man who had fallen under the suspicions of the Roman authorities, they left him to himself pronounce the verdict for which he was so anxious. In order, however, that the people might not suspect them of sharing the responsibility for such unjust judgment, which would not readily have been forgiven, they, in leaving the court, performed the ceremony of washing their hands, symbolizing the affirmation that they were clean of the blood of the innocent Jesus, the beloved of the people. About ten years ago, I read in a German journal, the _Fremdenblatt_, an article on Judas, wherein the author endeavored to demonstrate that the informer had been the best friend of Jesus. According to him, it was out of love for his master that Judas betrayed him, for he put blind faith in the words of the Saviour, who said that his kingdom would arrive after his execution. But after seeing him on the cross, and having waited in vain for the resurrection of Jesus, which he expected to immediately take place, Judas, not able to bear the pain by which his heart was torn, committed suicide by hanging himself. It would be profitless to dwell upon this ingenious product of a fertile imagination. To take up again the accounts of the Gospels and the Buddhistic chronicle, it is very possible that the bribed informer was really Judas, although the Buddhistic version is silent on this point. As to the pangs of conscience which are said to have impelled the informer to suicide, I must say that I give no credence to them. A man capable of committing so vile and cowardly an action as that of making an infamously false accusation against his friend, and this, not out of a spirit of jealousy, or for revenge, but to gain a handful of shekels! such a man is, from the psychic point of view, of very little worth. He ignores honesty and conscience, and pangs of remorse are unknown to him. It is presumable that the governor treated him as is sometimes done in our days, when it is deemed desirable to effectually conceal state secrets known to men of his kind and presumably unsafe in their keeping. Judas probably was simply hanged, by Pilate's order, to prevent the possibility of his some day revealing that the plot of which Jesus was a victim had been inspired by the authorities. On the day of the execution, a numerous detachment of Roman soldiers was placed around the cross to guard against any attempt by the populace for the delivery of him who was the object of their veneration. In this occurrence Pilate gave proof of his extraordinary firmness and resolution. But though, owing to the precautions taken by the governor, the anticipated revolt did not occur, he could not prevent the people, after the execution, mourning the ruin of their hopes, which were destroyed, together with the last scion of the race of David. All the people went to worship at Jesus' grave. Although we have no precise information concerning the occurrences of the first few days following the Passion, we could, by some probable conjectures, reconstruct the scenes which must have taken place. It stands to reason that the Roman Cæsar's clever lieutenant, when he saw that Christ's grave became the centre of universal lamentations and the subject of national grief, and feared that the memory of the righteous victim might excite the discontent of the people and raise the whole country against the foreigners' rule, should have employed any effective means for the removal of this rallying-point, the mortal remains of Jesus. Pilate began by having the body buried. For three days the soldiers who were stationed on guard at the grave, were exposed to all kinds of insults and injuries on the part of the people who, defying the danger, came in multitudes to mourn the great martyr. Then Pilate ordered his soldiers to remove the body at night, and to bury it clandestinely in some other place, leaving the first grave open and the guard withdrawn from it, so that the people could see that Jesus had disappeared. But Pilate missed his end; for when, on the following morning, the Hebrews did not find the corpse of their master in the sepulchre, the superstitious and miracle-accepting among them thought that he had been resurrected. How did this legend take root? We cannot say. Possibly it existed for a long time in a latent state and, at the beginning, spread only among the common people; perhaps the ecclesiastic authorities of the Hebrews looked with indulgence upon this innocent belief, which gave to the oppressed a shadow of revenge on their oppressors. However it be, the day when the legend of the resurrection finally became known to all, there was no one to be found strong enough to demonstrate the impossibility of such an occurrence. Concerning this resurrection, it must be remarked that, according to the Buddhists, the soul of the just Issa was united with the eternal Being, while the Evangelists insist upon the ascension of the body. It seems to me, however, that the Evangelists and the Apostles have done very well to give the description of the resurrection which they have agreed upon, for if they had not done so, _i.e._, if the miracle had been given a less material character, their preaching would not have had, in the eyes of the nations to whom it was presented, that divine authority, that avowedly supernatural character, which has clothed Christianity, until our time, as the only religion capable of elevating the human race to a state of sublime enthusiasm, suppressing its savage instincts, and bringing it nearer to the grand and simple nature which God has bestowed, they say, upon that feeble dwarf called man. _Explanatory Notes_ _Chapter III._ _§§ 3, 4, 5, 7_ The histories of all peoples show that when a nation has reached the apogee of its military glory and its wealth, it begins at once to sink more or less rapidly on the declivity of moral degeneration and decay. The Israelites having, among the first, experienced this law of the evolution of nations, the neighboring peoples profited by the decadence of the then effeminate and debauched descendants of Jacob, to despoil them. _§ 8_ The country of Romeles, _i.e._, the fatherland of Romulus; in our days, Rome. _§§ 11, 12_ It must be admitted that the Israelites, in spite of their incontestable wit and intelligence, seem to have only had regard for the present. Like all other Oriental peoples, they only in their misfortunes remembered the faults of their past, which they each time had to expiate by centuries of slavery. _Chapter IV_ _§ 6_ As it is easy to divine, this verse refers to Joseph, who was a lineal descendant from King David. Side by side with this somewhat vague indication may be placed the following passages from the Gospels: --"The angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife" ... (Matt. i, 20.) --"And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the son of David" (Matt. xxi, 9.) --"To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David;" ... (Luke i, 27.) --"And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David;" ... (Luke i, 32.) --"And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli ... which was the son of Nathan, which was the son of David" (Luke iii, 23-31.) _§ 7_ Both the Old and the New Testaments teach that God promised David the rehabilitation of his throne and the elevation to it of one of his descendants. _§§ 8, 9_ --"And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him." --"And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions." --"And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers." --"And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" --"And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man" (Luke ii, 40, 46, 47, 49, 52.) _Chapter V_ _§ 1_ "Sind," a Sanscrit word, which has been modified by the Persians into Ind. "Arya," the name given in antiquity to the inhabitants of India; signified first "man who cultivates the ground" or "cultivator." Anciently it had a purely ethnographical signification; this appellation assumed later on a religious sense, notably that of "man who believes." _§ 2_ Luke says (i, 80): "And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel." The Evangelists say that Jesus was in the desert, the Buddhists explain this version of the Gospels by indicating where Jesus was during his absence from Judea. According to them he crossed the Sind, a name which, properly spoken, signifies "the river" (Indus). In connection with this word it is not amiss to note that many Sanscrit words in passing into the Persian language underwent the same transformation by changing the "s" into "h"; per example: _Sapta_ (in Sanscrit), signifying seven--_hafta_ (in Persian); _Sam_ (Sanscrit), signifying equal--_ham_ (Persian); _Mas_ (Sanscrit), meaning mouth--_mah_ (Persian); _Sur_ (Sanscrit), meaning sun--_hur_ (Persian); _Das_ (Sanscrit), meaning ten--_Dah_ (Persian); _Loco citato_--and those who believed in the god Djain. There exists, even yet, on the peninsula of Hindustan, a cult under the name of Djainism, which forms, as it were, a link of union between Buddhism and Brahminism, and its devotees teach the destruction of all other beliefs, which they declare contaminated with falsehood. It dates as far back as the seventh century, B.C. Its name is derived from Djain (conqueror), which it assumed as the symbol of its triumph over its rivals. _§ 4_ Each of the eighteen Puranas is divided into five parts, which, besides the canonical laws, the rites and the commentaries upon the creation, destruction and resurrection of the universe, deal with theogony, medicine, and even the trades and professions. _Chapter VI_ _§ 12_ Owing to the intervention of the British, the human sacrifices, which were principally offered to Kali, the goddess of death, have now entirely ceased. The goddess Kali is represented erect, with one foot upon the dead body of a man, whose head she holds in one of her innumerable hands, while with the other hand she brandishes a bloody dagger. Her eyes and mouth, which are wide open, express passion and cruelty. _Chapter VIII_ _§§ 3, 4_ Zoroaster lived 550 years before Jesus. He founded the doctrine of the struggle between light and darkness, a doctrine which is fully expounded in the Zend-Avesta (Word of God), which is written in the Zend language, and, according to tradition, was given to him by an angel from Paradise. According to Zoroaster we must worship Mithra (the sun), from whom descend Ormuzd, the god of good, and Ahriman, the god of evil. The world will end when Ormuzd has triumphed over his rival, Ahriman, who will then return to his original source, Mithra. _Chapter X_ _§ 16_ According to the Evangelists, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which the Buddhistic version confirms, for only from Bethlehem, situated at a distance of about seven kilometres from Jerusalem, could the walls of this latter city be seen. _Chapter XI_ _§ 15_ The doctrine of the Redemptor is, almost in its entirety, contained in the Gospels. As to the transformation of men into children, it is especially known from the conversation that took place between Jesus and Nicodemus. _Chapter XII_ _§ 1_ --"Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Cæsar, or not?" (Matt. xxii, 17.) _§ 3_ --"Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are God's." (Matt. xxii, 21; _et al._) _Chapter XIV_ _§ 3_ According to the Buddhistic belief, the terrestrial buddhas after death, lose consciousness of their independent existence and unite with the eternal Spirit. _§§ 10, 11_ Here, no doubt, reference is made to the activity of the Apostles among the neighboring peoples; an activity which could not have passed unnoticed at that epoch, because of the great results which followed the preaching of the new religious doctrine of love among nations whose religions were based upon the cruelty of their gods. * * * * * Without permitting myself indulgence in great dissertations, or too minute analysis upon each verse, I have thought it useful to accompany my work with these few little explanatory notes, leaving it to the reader to take like trouble with the rest. --_Finis_ [1] The Vaisyas and Sudras castes. [2] Brahmins and Kshatriyas. [3] _Sanscrit_:--"He whose essence (sattva) has become intelligence (bhodi)," those who need but one more incarnation to become perfect buddhas, _i.e._, to be entitled to Nirvâna. 
2124	----	A RECORD OF BUDDHISTIC KINGDOMS Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hsien of his Travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399-414) in Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline Translated and annotated with a Corean recension of the Chinese text BY JAMES LEGGE PREFACE Several times during my long residence in Hong Kong I endeavoured to read through the "Narrative of Fa-Hsien;" but though interested with the graphic details of much of the work, its columns bristled so constantly--now with his phonetic representations of Sanskrit words, and now with his substitution for them of their meanings in Chinese characters, and I was, moreover, so much occupied with my own special labours on the Confucian Classics, that my success was far from satisfactory. When Dr. Eitel's "Handbook for the Student of Chinese Buddhism" appeared in 1870, the difficulty occasioned by the Sanskrit words and names was removed, but the other difficulty remained; and I was not able to look into the book again for several years. Nor had I much inducement to do so in the two copies of it which I had been able to procure, on poor paper, and printed from blocks badly cut at first, and so worn with use as to yield books the reverse of attractive in their appearance to the student. In the meantime I kept studying the subject of Buddhism from various sources; and in 1878 began to lecture, here in Oxford, on the Travels with my Davis Chinese scholar, who was at the same time Boden Sanskrit scholar. As we went on, I wrote out a translation in English for my own satisfaction of nearly half the narrative. In the beginning of last year I made Fa-Hsien again the subject of lecture, wrote out a second translation, independent of the former, and pushed on till I had completed the whole. The want of a good and clear text had been supplied by my friend, Mr. Bunyiu Nanjio, who sent to me from Japan a copy, the text of which is appended to the translation and notes, and of the nature of which some account is given in the Introduction, and towards the end of this Preface. The present work consists of three parts: the Translation of Fa-Hsien's Narrative of his Travels; copious Notes; and the Chinese Text of my copy from Japan. It is for the Translation that I hold myself more especially responsible. Portions of it were written out three times, and the whole of it twice. While preparing my own version I made frequent reference to previous translations:--those of M. Abel Remusat, "Revu, complete, et augmente d'eclaircissements nouveaux par MM. Klaproth et Landress" (Paris, 1836); of the Rev. Samuel Beal (London, 1869), and his revision of it, prefixed to his "Buddhist Records of the Western World" (Trubner's Oriental Series, 1884); and of Mr. Herbert A. Giles, of H.M.'s Consular Service in China (1877). To these I have to add a series of articles on "Fa-hsien and his English Translators," by Mr. T. Watters, British Consul at I-Chang (China Review, 1879, 1880). Those articles are of the highest value, displaying accuracy of Chinese scholarship and an extensive knowledge of Buddhism. I have regretted that Mr. Watters, while reviewing others, did not himself write out and publish a version of the whole of Fa-Hsien's narrative. If he had done so, I should probably have thought that, on the whole, nothing more remained to be done for the distinguished Chinese pilgrim in the way of translation. Mr. Watters had to judge of the comparative merits of the versions of Beal and Giles, and pronounce on the many points of contention between them. I have endeavoured to eschew those matters, and have seldom made remarks of a critical nature in defence of renderings of my own. The Chinese narrative runs on without any break. It was Klaproth who divided Remusat's translation into forty chapters. The division is helpful to the reader, and I have followed it excepting in three or four instances. In the reprinted Chinese text the chapters are separated by a circle in the column. In transliterating the names of Chinese characters I have generally followed the spelling of Morrison rather than the Pekinese, which is now in vogue. We cannot tell exactly what the pronunciation of them was, about fifteen hundred years ago, in the time of Fa-Hsien; but the southern mandarin must be a shade nearer to it than that of Peking at the present day. In transliterating the Indian names I have for the most part followed Dr. Eitel, with such modification as seemed good and in harmony with growing usage. For the Notes I can do little more than claim the merit of selection and condensation. My first object in them was to explain what in the text required explanation to an English reader. All Chinese texts, and Buddhist texts especially, are new to foreign students. One has to do for them what many hundreds of the ablest scholars in Europe have done for the Greek and Latin Classics during several hundred years, and what the thousands of critics and commentators have been doing of our Sacred Scriptures for nearly eighteen centuries. There are few predecessors in the field of Chinese literature into whose labours translators of the present century can enter. This will be received, I hope, as a sufficient apology for the minuteness and length of some of the notes. A second object in them was to teach myself first, and then others, something of the history and doctrines of Buddhism. I have thought that they might be learned better in connexion with a lively narrative like that of Fa-Hsien than by reading didactic descriptions and argumentative books. Such has been my own experience. The books which I have consulted for these notes have been many, besides Chinese works. My principal help has been the full and masterly handbook of Eitel, mentioned already, and often referred to as E.H. Spence Hardy's "Eastern Monachism" (E.M.) and "Manual of Buddhism" (M.B.) have been constantly in hand, as well as Rhys Davids' Buddhism, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, his Hibbert Lectures, and his Buddhist Suttas in the Sacred Books of the East, and other writings. I need not mention other authorities, having endeavoured always to specify them where I make use of them. My proximity and access to the Bodleian Library and the Indian Institute have been of great advantage. I may be allowed to say that, so far as my own study of it has gone, I think there are many things in the vast field of Buddhist literature which still require to be carefully handled. How far, for instance, are we entitled to regard the present Sutras as genuine and sufficiently accurate copies of those which were accepted by the Councils before our Christian era? Can anything be done to trace the rise of the legends and marvels of Sakyamuni's history, which were current so early (as it seems to us) as the time of Fa-Hsien, and which startle us so frequently by similarities between them and narratives in our Gospels? Dr. Hermann Oldenberg, certainly a great authority on Buddhistic subjects, says that "a biography of Buddha has not come down to us from ancient times, from the age of the Pali texts; and, we can safely say, no such biography existed then" ("Buddha--His Life, His Doctrine, His Order," as translated by Hoey, p. 78). He has also (in the same work, pp. 99, 416, 417) come to the conclusion that the hitherto unchallenged tradition that the Buddha was "a king's son" must be given up. The name "king's son" (in Chinese {...}), always used of the Buddha, certainly requires to be understood in the highest sense. I am content myself to wait for further information on these and other points, as the result of prolonged and careful research. Dr. Rhys Davids has kindly read the proofs of the Translation and Notes, and I most certainly thank him for doing so, for his many valuable corrections in the Notes, and for other suggestions which I have received from him. I may not always think on various points exactly as he does, but I am not more forward than he is to say with Horace,-- "Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri." I have referred above, and also in the Introduction, to the Corean text of Fa-Hsien's narrative, which I received from Mr. Nanjio. It is on the whole so much superior to the better-known texts, that I determined to attempt to reproduce it at the end of the little volume, so far as our resources here in Oxford would permit. To do so has not been an easy task. The two fonts of Chinese types in the Clarendon Press were prepared primarily for printing the translation of our Sacred Scriptures, and then extended so as to be available for printing also the Confucian Classics; but the Buddhist work necessarily requires many types not found in them, while many other characters in the Corean recension are peculiar in their forms, and some are what Chinese dictionaries denominate "vulgar." That we have succeeded so well as we have done is owing chiefly to the intelligence, ingenuity, and untiring attention of Mr. J. C. Pembrey, the Oriental Reader. The pictures that have been introduced were taken from a superb edition of a History of Buddha, republished recently at Hang-chau in Cheh-kiang, and profusely illustrated in the best style of Chinese art. I am indebted for the use of it to the Rev. J. H. Sedgwick, University Chinese Scholar. James Legge. Oxford: June, 1886. [ Picture: Sketch Map Of Fa-Hien's Travels ] The accompanying Sketch-Map, taken in connexion with the notes on the different places in the Narrative, will give the reader a sufficiently accurate knowledge of Fa-Hsien's route. There is no difficulty in laying it down after he crossed the Indus from east to west into the Punjab, all the principal places, at which he touched or rested, having been determined by Cunningham and other Indian geographers and archaeologists. Most of the places from Ch'ang-an to Bannu have also been identified. Woo-e has been put down as near Kutcha, or Kuldja, in 43d 25s N., 81d 15s E. The country of K'ieh-ch'a was probably Ladak, but I am inclined to think that the place where the traveller crossed the Indus and entered it must have been further east than Skardo. A doubt is intimated on page 24 as to the identification of T'o-leih with Darada, but Greenough's "Physical and Geological Sketch-Map of British India" shows "Dardu Proper," all lying on the east of the Indus, exactly in the position where the Narrative would lead us to place it. The point at which Fa-Hsien recrossed the Indus into Udyana on the west of it is unknown. Takshasila, which he visited, was no doubt on the west of the river, and has been incorrectly accepted as the Taxila of Arrian in the Punjab. It should be written Takshasira, of which the Chinese phonetisation will allow;--see a note of Beal in his "Buddhist Records of the Western World," i. 138. We must suppose that Fa-Hsien went on from Nan-king to Ch'ang-an, but the Narrative does not record the fact of his doing so. INTRODUCTION Life of Fa-Hien; Genuineness and Integrity of the Text of his Narrative; Number of the Adherents of Buddhism. 1. Nothing of great importance is known about Fa-Hsien in addition to what may be gathered from his own record of his travels. I have read the accounts of him in the "Memoirs of Eminent Monks," compiled in A.D. 519, and a later work, the "Memoirs of Marvellous Monks," by the third emperor of the Ming dynasty (A.D. 1403-1424), which, however, is nearly all borrowed from the other; and all in them that has an appearance of verisimilitude can be brought within brief compass. His surname, they tell us, was Kung, and he was a native of Wu-yang in P'ing-Yang, which is still the name of a large department in Shan-hsi. He had three brothers older than himself; but when they all died before shedding their first teeth, his father devoted him to the service of the Buddhist society, and had him entered as a Sramanera, still keeping him at home in the family. The little fellow fell dangerously ill, and the father sent him to the monastery, where he soon got well and refused to return to his parents. When he was ten years old, his father died; and an uncle, considering the widowed solitariness and helplessness of the mother, urged him to renounce the monastic life, and return to her, but the boy replied, "I did not quit the family in compliance with my father's wishes, but because I wished to be far from the dust and vulgar ways of life. This is why I chose monkhood." The uncle approved of his words and gave over urging him. When his mother also died, it appeared how great had been the affection for her of his fine nature; but after her burial he returned to the monastery. On one occasion he was cutting rice with a score or two of his fellow-disciples, when some hungry thieves came upon them to take away their grain by force. The other Sramaneras all fled, but our young hero stood his ground, and said to the thieves, "If you must have the grain, take what you please. But, Sirs, it was your former neglect of charity which brought you to your present state of destitution; and now, again, you wish to rob others. I am afraid that in the coming ages you will have still greater poverty and distress;--I am sorry for you beforehand." With these words he followed his companions into the monastery, while the thieves left the grain and went away, all the monks, of whom there were several hundred, doing homage to his conduct and courage. When he had finished his noviciate and taken on him the obligations of the full Buddhist orders, his earnest courage, clear intelligence, and strict regulation of his demeanour were conspicuous; and soon after, he undertook his journey to India in search of complete copies of the Vinaya-pitaka. What follows this is merely an account of his travels in India and return to China by sea, condensed from his own narrative, with the addition of some marvellous incidents that happened to him, on his visit to the Vulture Peak near Rajagriha. It is said in the end that after his return to China, he went to the capital (evidently Nanking), and there, along with the Indian Sramana Buddha-bhadra, executed translations of some of the works which he had obtained in India; and that before he had done all that he wished to do in this way, he removed to King-chow (in the present Hoo-pih), and died in the monastery of Sin, at the age of eighty-eight, to the great sorrow of all who knew him. It is added that there is another larger work giving an account of his travels in various countries. Such is all the information given about our author, beyond what he himself has told us. Fa-Hsien was his clerical name, and means "Illustrious in the Law," or "Illustrious master of the Law." The Shih which often precedes it is an abbreviation of the name of Buddha as Sakyamuni, "the Sakya, mighty in Love, dwelling in Seclusion and Silence," and may be taken as equivalent to Buddhist. It is sometimes said to have belonged to "the eastern Tsin dynasty" (A.D. 317-419), and sometimes to "the Sung," that is, the Sung dynasty of the House of Liu (A.D. 420-478). If he became a full monk at the age of twenty, and went to India when he was twenty-five, his long life may have been divided pretty equally between the two dynasties. 2. If there were ever another and larger account of Fa-Hsien's travels than the narrative of which a translation is now given, it has long ceased to be in existence. In the Catalogue of the imperial library of the Suy dynasty (A.D. 589-618), the name Fa-Hsien occurs four times. Towards the end of the last section of it (page 22), after a reference to his travels, his labours in translation at Kin-ling (another name for Nanking), in conjunction with Buddha-bhadra, are described. In the second section, page 15, we find "A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms;"--with a note, saying that it was the work of the "Sramana, Fa-Hsien;" and again, on page 13, we have "Narrative of Fa-Hsien in two Books," and "Narrative of Fa-Hsien's Travels in one Book." But all these three entries may possibly belong to different copies of the same work, the first and the other two being in separate subdivisions of the Catalogue. In the two Chinese copies of the narrative in my possession the title is "Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms." In the Japanese or Corean recension subjoined to this translation, the title is twofold; first, "Narrative of the Distinguished Monk, Fa-Hsien;" and then, more at large, "Incidents of Travels in India, by the Sramana of the Eastern Tsin, Fa-Hsien, recorded by himself." There is still earlier attestation of the existence of our little work than the Suy Catalogue. The Catalogue Raisonne of the imperial library of the present dynasty (chap. 71) mentions two quotations from it by Le Tao-yuen, a geographical writer of the dynasty of the Northern Wei (A.D. 386-584), one of them containing 89 characters, and the other 276; both of them given as from the "Narrative of Fa-Hsien." In all catalogues subsequent to that of Suy our work appears. The evidence for its authenticity and genuineness is all that could be required. It is clear to myself that the "Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms" and the "Narrative of his Travels by Fa-Hsien" were designations of one and the same work, and that it is doubtful whether any larger work on the same subject was ever current. With regard to the text subjoined to my translation, it was published in Japan in 1779. The editor had before him four recensions of the narrative; those of the Sung and Ming dynasties, with appendixes on the names of certain characters in them; that of Japan; and that of Corea. He wisely adopted the Corean text, published in accordance with a royal rescript in 1726, so far as I can make out; but the different readings of the other texts are all given in top-notes, instead of foot-notes as with us, this being one of the points in which customs in the east and west go by contraries. Very occasionally, the editor indicates by a single character, equivalent to "right" or "wrong," which reading in his opinion is to be preferred. In the notes to the present republication of the Corean text, S stands for Sung, M for Ming, and J for Japanese; R for right, and W for wrong. I have taken the trouble to give all the various readings (amounting to more than 300), partly as a curiosity and to make my text complete, and partly to show how, in the transcription of writings in whatever language, such variations are sure to occur, "maculae, quas aut incuria fudit, Aut humana parum cavit nature," while on the whole they very slightly affect the meaning of the document. The editors of the Catalogue Raisonne intimate their doubts of the good taste and reliability of all Fa-Hsien's statements. It offends them that he should call central India the "Middle Kingdom," and China, which to them was the true and only Middle Kingdom, but "a Border land;"--it offends them as the vaunting language of a Buddhist writer, whereas the reader will see in the expressions only an instance of what Fa-Hsien calls his "simple straightforwardness." As an instance of his unreliability they refer to his account of the Buddhism of Khoten, whereas it is well known, they say, that the Khoteners from ancient times till now have been Mohammedans;--as if they could have been so 170 years before Mohammed was born, and 222 years before the year of the Hegira! And this is criticism in China. The Catalogue was ordered by the K'ien-lung emperor in 1722. Between three and four hundred of the "Great Scholars" of the empire were engaged on it in various departments, and thus egregiously ignorant did they show themselves of all beyond the limits of their own country, and even of the literature of that country itself. Much of what Fa-Hsien tells his readers of Buddhist miracles and legends is indeed unreliable and grotesque; but we have from him the truth as to what he saw and heard. 3. In concluding this introduction I wish to call attention to some estimates of the number of Buddhists in the world which have become current, believing, as I do, that the smallest of them is much above what is correct. i. In a note on the first page of his work on the Bhilsa Topes (1854), General Cunningham says: "The Christians number about 270 millions; the Buddhists about 222 millions, who are distributed as follows:--China 170 millions, Japan 25, Anam 14, Siam 3, Ava 8, Nepal 1, and Ceylon 1; total, 222 millions." ii. In his article on M. J. Barthelemy Saint Hilaire's "Le Bouddha et sa Religion," republished in his "Chips from a German Workshop," vol. i. (1868), Professor Max Muller (p. 215) says, "The young prince became the founder of a religion which, after more than two thousand years, is still professed by 455 millions of human beings," and he appends the following note: "Though truth is not settled by majorities, it would be interesting to know which religion counts at the present moment the largest numbers of believers. Berghaus, in his 'Physical Atlas,' gives the following division of the human race according to religion:--'Buddhists 31.2 per cent, Christians 30.7, Mohammedans 15.7, Brahmanists 13.4, Heathens 8.7, and Jews 0.3.' As Berghaus does not distinguish the Buddhists in China from the followers of Confucius and Laotse, the first place on the scale really belongs to Christianity. It is difficult to say to what religion a man belongs, as the same person may profess two or three. The emperor himself, after sacrificing according to the ritual of Confucius, visits a Tao-sse temple, and afterwards bows before an image of Fo in a Buddhist chapel. ('Melanges Asiatiques de St. Petersbourg,' vol. ii. p. 374.)" iii. Both these estimates are exceeded by Dr. T. W. Rhys Davids (intimating also the uncertainty of the statements, and that numbers are no evidence of truth) in the introduction to his "Manual of Buddhism." The Buddhists there appear as amounting in all to 500 millions:--30 millions of Southern Buddhists, in Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Anam, and India (Jains); and 470 millions of North Buddhists, of whom nearly 33 millions are assigned to Japan, and 414,686,974 to the eighteen provinces of China proper. According to him, Christians amount to about 26 per cent of mankind, Hindus to about 13, Mohammedans to about 12 1_2, Buddhists to about 40, and Jews to about 1_2. In regard to all these estimates, it will be observed that the immense numbers assigned to Buddhism are made out by the multitude of Chinese with which it is credited. Subtract Cunningham's 170 millions of Chinese from his total of 222, and there remains only 52 millions of Buddhists. Subtract Davids' (say) 414 1_2 millions of Chinese from his total of 500, and there remain only 85 1_2 millions for Buddhism. Of the numbers assigned to other countries, as well as of their whole populations, I am in considerable doubt, excepting in the cases of Ceylon and India; but the greatness of the estimates turns upon the immense multitudes said to be in China. I do not know what total population Cunningham allowed for that country, nor on what principal he allotted 170 millions of it to Buddhism;--perhaps he halved his estimate of the whole, whereas Berghaus and Davids allotted to it the highest estimates that have been given of the people. But we have no certain information of the population of China. At an interview with the former Chinese ambassador, Kwo Sung-tao, in Paris, in 1878, I begged him to write out for me the amount, with the authority for it, and he assured me that it could not be done. I have read probably almost everything that has been published on the subject, and endeavoured by methods of my own to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion;--without reaching a result which I can venture to lay before the public. My impression has been that 400 millions is hardly an exaggeration. But supposing that we had reliable returns of the whole population, how shall we proceed to apportion that among Confucianists, Taoists, and Buddhists? Confucianism is the orthodoxy of China. The common name for it is Ju Chiao, "the Doctrines held by the Learned Class," entrance into the circle of which is, with a few insignificant exceptions, open to all the people. The mass of them and the masses under their influence are preponderatingly Confucian; and in the observance of ancestral worship, the most remarkable feature of the religion proper of China from the earliest times, of which Confucius was not the author but the prophet, an overwhelming majority are regular and assiduous. Among "the strange principles" which the emperor of the K'ang-hsi period, in one of his famous Sixteen Precepts, exhorted his people to "discountenance and put away, in order to exalt the correct doctrine," Buddhism and Taoism were both included. If, as stated in the note quoted from Professor Muller, the emperor countenances both the Taoist worship and the Buddhist, he does so for reasons of state;--to please especially his Buddhist subjects in Thibet and Mongolia, and not to offend the many whose superstitious fancies incline to Taoism. When I went out and in as a missionary among the Chinese people for about thirty years, it sometimes occurred to me that only the inmates of their monasteries and the recluses of both systems should be enumerated as Buddhists and Taoists; but I was in the end constrained to widen that judgment, and to admit a considerable following of both among the people, who have neither received the tonsure nor assumed the yellow top. Dr. Eitel, in concluding his discussion of this point in his "Lecture on Buddhism, an Event in History," says: "It is not too much to say that most Chinese are theoretically Confucianists, but emotionally Buddhists or Taoists. But fairness requires us to add that, though the mass of the people are more or less influenced by Buddhist doctrines, yet the people, as a whole, have no respect for the Buddhist church, and habitually sneer at Buddhist priests." For the "most" in the former of these two sentences I would substitute "nearly all;" and between my friend's "but" and "emotionally" I would introduce "many are," and would not care to contest his conclusion farther. It does seem to me preposterous to credit Buddhism with the whole of the vast population of China, the great majority of whom are Confucianists. My own opinion is, that its adherents are not so many as those even of Mohammedanism, and that instead of being the most numerous of the religions (so called) of the world, it is only entitled to occupy the fifth place, ranking below Christianity, Confucianism, Brahmanism, and Mohammedanism, and followed, some distance off, by Taoism. To make a table of percentages of mankind, and assign to each system its proportion, is to seem to be wise where we are deplorably ignorant; and, moreover, if our means of information were much better than they are, our figures would merely show the outward adherence. A fractional per-centage might tell more for one system than a very large integral one for another. THE TRAVELS OF FA-HIEN or RECORD OF BUDDHISTIC KINGDOMS CHAPTER I FROM CH'ANG-GAN TO THE SANDY DESERT Fa-Hsien had been living in Ch'ang-gan.(1) Deploring the mutilated and imperfect state of the collection of the Books of Discipline, in the second year of the period Hwang-che, being the Ke-hae year of the cycle,(2) he entered into an engagement with Kwuy-king, Tao-ching, Hwuy-ying, and Hwuy-wei,(3) that they should go to India and seek for the Disciplinary Rules.(4) After starting from Ch'ang-gan, they passed through Lung,(5) and came to the kingdom of K'een-kwei,(6) where they stopped for the summer retreat.(7) When that was over, they went forward to the kingdom of Now-t'an,(8) crossed the mountain of Yang-low, and reached the emporium of Chang-yih.(9) There they found the country so much disturbed that travelling on the roads was impossible for them. Its king, however, was very attentive to them, kept them (in his capital), and acted the part of their danapati.(10) Here they met with Che-yen, Hwuy-keen, Sang-shao, Pao-yun, and Sang-king;(11) and in pleasant association with them, as bound on the same journey with themselves, they passed the summer retreat (of that year)(12) together, resuming after it their travelling, and going on to T'un-hwang,(13) (the chief town) in the frontier territory of defence extending for about 80 le from east to west, and about 40 from north to south. Their company, increased as it had been, halted there for some days more than a month, after which Fa-Hsien and his four friends started first in the suite of an envoy,(14) having separated (for a time) from Pao-yun and his associates. Le Hao,(15) the prefect of T'un-hwang, had supplied them with the means of crossing the desert (before them), in which there are many evil demons and hot winds. (Travellers) who encounter them perish all to a man. There is not a bird to be seen in the air above, nor an animal on the ground below. Though you look all round most earnestly to find where you can cross, you know not where to make your choice, the only mark and indication being the dry bones of the dead (left upon the sand).(16) NOTES (1) Ch'ang-gan is still the name of the principal district (and its city) in the department of Se-gan, Shen-se. It had been the capital of the first empire of Han (B.C. 202-A.D. 24), as it subsequently was that of Suy (A.D. 589-618). The empire of the eastern Tsin, towards the close of which Fa-Hsien lived, had its capital at or near Nan-king, and Ch'ang-gan was the capital of the principal of the three Ts'in kingdoms, which, with many other minor ones, maintained a semi-independence of Tsin, their rulers sometimes even assuming the title of emperor. (2) The period Hwang-che embraced from A.D. 399 to 414, being the greater portion of the reign of Yao Hing of the After Ts'in, a powerful prince. He adopted Hwang-che for the style of his reign in 399, and the cyclical name of that year was Kang-tsze. It is not possible at this distance of time to explain, if it could be explained, how Fa-Hsien came to say that Ke-hae was the second year of the period. It seems most reasonable to suppose that he set out on his pilgrimage in A.D. 399, the cycle name of which was Ke-hae, as {.}, the second year, instead of {.}, the first, might easily creep into the text. In the "Memoirs of Eminent Monks" it is said that our author started in the third year of the period Lung-gan of the eastern Tsin, which was A.D. 399. (3) These, like Fa-Hsien itself, are all what we might call "clerical" names, appellations given to the parties as monks or sramanas. (4) The Buddhist tripitaka or canon consists of three collections, containing, according to Eitel (p. 150), "doctrinal aphorisms (or statements, purporting to be from Buddha himself); works on discipline; and works on metaphysics:"--called sutra, vinaya, and abhidharma; in Chinese, king {.}, leuh {.}, and lun {.}, or texts, laws or rules, and discussions. Dr. Rhys Davids objects to the designation of "metaphysics" as used of the abhidharma works, saying that "they bear much more the relation to 'dharma' which 'by-law' bears to 'law' than that which 'metaphysics' bears to 'physics'" (Hibbert Lectures, p. 49). However this be, it was about the vinaya works that Fa-Hsien was chiefly concerned. He wanted a good code of the rules for the government of "the Order" in all its internal and external relations. (5) Lung embraced the western part of Shen-se and the eastern part of Kan-suh. The name remains in Lung Chow, in the extreme west of Shen-se. (6) K'een-kwei was the second king of "the Western Ts'in." His family was of northern or barbarous origin, from the tribe of the Seen-pe, with the surname of K'eih-fuh. The first king was Kwo-kin, and received his appointment from the sovereign of the chief Ts'in kingdom in 385. He was succeeded in 388 by his brother, the K'een-kwei of the text, who was very prosperous in 398, and took the title of king of Ts'in. Fa-Hsien would find him at his capital, somewhere in the present department of Lan-chow, Kan-suh. (7) Under varshas or vashavasana (Pali, vassa; Spence Hardy, vass), Eitel (p. 163) says:--"One of the most ancient institutions of Buddhist discipline, requiring all ecclesiastics to spend the rainy season in a monastery in devotional exercises. Chinese Buddhists naturally substituted the hot season for the rainy (from the 16th day of the 5th to the 15th of the 9th Chinese month)." (8) During the troubled period of the Tsin dynasty, there were five (usurping) Leang sovereignties in the western part of the empire ({.} {.}). The name Leang remains in the department of Leang-chow in the northern part of Kan-suh. The "southern Leang" arose in 397 under a Tuh-fah Wu-ku, who was succeeded in 399 by a brother, Le-luh-koo; and he again by his brother, the Now-t'an of the text, in 402, who was not yet king therefore when Fa-Hsien and his friends reached his capital. How he is represented as being so may be accounted for in various ways, of which it is not necessary to write. (9) Chang-yih is still the name of a district in Kan-chow department, Kan-suh. It is a long way north and west from Lan-chow, and not far from the Great Wall. Its king at this time was, probably, Twan-yeh of "the northern Leang." (10) Dana is the name for religious charity, the first of the six paramitas, or means of attaining to nirvana; and a danapati is "one who practises dana and thereby crosses {.} the sea of misery." It is given as "a title of honour to all who support the cause of Buddhism by acts of charity, especially to founders and patrons of monasteries;"--see Eitel, p. 29. (11) Of these pilgrims with their clerical names, the most distinguished was Pao-yun, who translated various Sanskrit works on his return from India, of which only one seems to be now existing. He died in 449. See Nanjio's Catalogue of the Tripitaka, col. 417. (12) This was the second summer since the pilgrims left Ch'ang-gan. We are now therefore, probably, in A.D. 400. (13) T'un-hwang (lat. 39d 40s N.; lon. 94d 50s E.) is still the name of one of the two districts constituting the department of Gan-se, the most western of the prefectures of Kan-suh; beyond the termination of the Great Wall. (14) Who this envoy was, and where he was going, we do not know. The text will not admit of any other translation. (15) Le Hao was a native of Lung-se, a man of learning, able and kindly in his government. He was appointed governor or prefect of T'un-hwang by the king of "the northern Leang," in 400; and there he sustained himself, becoming by and by "duke of western Leang," till he died in 417. (16) "The river of sand;" the great desert of Kobi or Gobi; having various other names. It was a great task which the pilgrims had now before them,--to cross this desert. The name of "river" in the Chinese misleads the reader, and he thinks of crossing it as of crossing a stream; but they had to traverse it from east to west. In his "Vocabulary of Proper Names," p. 23, Dr. Porter Smith says:--"It extends from the eastern frontier of Mongolia, south-westward to the further frontier of Turkestan, to within six miles of Ilchi, the chief town of Khoten. It thus comprises some twenty-three degrees of longitude in length, and from three to ten degrees of latitude in breadth, being about 2,100 miles in its greatest length. In some places it is arable. Some idea may be formed of the terror with which this 'Sea of Sand,' with its vast billows of shifting sands, is regarded, from the legend that in one of the storms 360 cities were all buried within the space of twenty-four hours." So also Gilmour's "Among the Mongols," chap. 5. CHAPTER II ON TO SHEN-SHEN AND THENCE TO KHOTEN After travelling for seventeen days, a distance we may calculate of about 1500 le, (the pilgrims) reached the kingdom of Shen-shen,(1) a country rugged and hilly, with a thin and barren soil. The clothes of the common people are coarse, and like those worn in our land of Han,(2) some wearing felt and others coarse serge or cloth of hair;--this was the only difference seen among them. The king professed (our) Law, and there might be in the country more than four thousand monks,(3) who were all students of the hinayana.(4) The common people of this and other kingdoms (in that region), as well as the sramans,(5) all practise the rules of India,(6) only that the latter do so more exactly, and the former more loosely. So (the travellers) found it in all the kingdoms through which they went on their way from this to the west, only that each had its own peculiar barbarous speech.(7) (The monks), however, who had (given up the worldly life) and quitted their families, were all students of Indian books and the Indian language. Here they stayed for about a month, and then proceeded on their journey, fifteen days walking to the north-west bringing them to the country of Woo-e.(8) In this also there were more than four thousand monks, all students of the hinayana. They were very strict in their rules, so that sramans from the territory of Ts'in(9) were all unprepared for their regulations. Fa-Hsien, through the management of Foo Kung-sun, _maitre d'hotellerie_,(10) was able to remain (with his company in the monastery where they were received) for more than two months, and here they were rejoined by Pao-yun and his friends.(11) (At the end of that time) the people of Woo-e neglected the duties of propriety and righteousness, and treated the strangers in so niggardly a manner that Che-yen, Hwuy-keen, and Hwuy-wei went back towards Kao-ch'ang,(12) hoping to obtain there the means of continuing their journey. Fa-Hsien and the rest, however, through the liberality of Foo Kung-sun, managed to go straight forward in a south-west direction. They found the country uninhabited as they went along. The difficulties which they encountered in crossing the streams and on their route, and the sufferings which they endured, were unparalleled in human experience, but in the course of a month and five days they succeeded in reaching Yu-teen.(13) NOTES (1) An account is given of the kingdom of Shen-shen in the 96th of the Books of the first Han dynasty, down to its becoming a dependency of China, about B.C. 80. The greater portion of that is now accessible to the English reader in a translation by Mr. Wylie in the "Journal of the Anthropological Institute," August, 1880. Mr. Wylie says:--"Although we may not be able to identify Shen-shen with certainty, yet we have sufficient indications to give an appropriate idea of its position, as being south of and not far from lake Lob." He then goes into an exhibition of those indications, which I need not transcribe. It is sufficient for us to know that the capital city was not far from Lob or Lop Nor, into which in lon. 38d E. the Tarim flows. Fa-Hsien estimated its distance to be 1500 le from T'un-hwang. He and his companions must have gone more than twenty-five miles a day to accomplish the journey in seventeen days. (2) This is the name which Fa-Hsien always uses when he would speak of China, his native country, as a whole, calling it from the great dynasty which had ruled it, first and last, for between four and five centuries. Occasionally, as we shall immediately see, he speaks of "the territory of Ts'in or Ch'in," but intending thereby only the kingdom or Ts'in, having its capital, as described in the first note on the last chapter, in Ch'ang-gan. (3) So I prefer to translate the character {.} (sang) rather than by "priests." Even in Christianity, beyond the priestly privilege which belongs to all believers, I object to the ministers of any denomination or church calling themselves or being called "priests;" and much more is the name inapplicable to the sramanas or bhikshus of Buddhism which acknowledges no God in the universe, no soul in man, and has no services of sacrifice or prayer in its worship. The only difficulty in the use of "monks" is caused by the members of the sect in Japan which, since the middle of the fifteenth century, has abolished the prohibition against marrying on the part of its ministers, and other prohibitions in diet and dress. Sang and sang-kea represent the Sanskrit sangha, constituted by at least four members, and empowered to hear confession, to grant absolution, to admit persons to holy orders, &c.; secondly, the third constituent of the Buddhistic Trinity, a deification of the _communio sanctorum_, or the Buddhist order. The name is used by our author of the monks collectively or individually as belonging to the class, and may be considered as synonymous with the name sramana, which will immediately claim our attention. (4) Meaning the "small vehicle, or conveyance." There are in Buddhism the triyana, or "three different means of salvation, i.e. of conveyance across the samsara, or sea of transmigration, to the shores of nirvana. Afterwards the term was used to designate the different phases of development through which the Buddhist dogma passed, known as the mahayana, hinayana, and madhyamayana." "The hinayana is the simplest vehicle of salvation, corresponding to the first of the three degrees of saintship. Characteristics of it are the preponderance of active moral asceticism, and the absence of speculative mysticism and quietism." E. H., pp. 151-2, 45, and 117. (5) The name for India is here the same as in the former chapter and throughout the book,--T'een-chuh ({.} {.}), the chuh being pronounced, probably, in Fa-Hsien's time as tuk. How the earliest name for India, Shin-tuk or duk=Scinde, came to be changed into Thien-tuk, it would take too much space to explain. I believe it was done by the Buddhists, wishing to give a good auspicious name to the fatherland of their Law, and calling it "the Heavenly Tuk," just as the Mohammedans call Arabia "the Heavenly region" ({.} {.}), and the court of China itself is called "the Celestial" ({.} {.}). (6) Sraman may in English take the place of Sramana (Pali, Samana; in Chinese, Sha-man), the name for Buddhist monks, as those who have separated themselves from (left) their families, and quieted their hearts from all intrusion of desire and lust. "It is employed, first, as a general name for ascetics of all denominations, and, secondly, as a general designation of Buddhistic monks." E. H., pp. 130, 131. (7) Tartar or Mongolian. (8) Woo-e has not been identified. Watters ("China Review," viii. 115) says:--"We cannot be far wrong if we place it in Kharaschar, or between that and Kutscha." It must have been a country of considerable size to have so many monks in it. (9) This means in one sense China, but Fa-Hsien, in his use of the name, was only thinking of the three Ts'in states of which I have spoken in a previous note; perhaps only of that from the capital of which he had himself set out. (10) This sentence altogether is difficult to construe, and Mr. Watters, in the "China Review," was the first to disentangle more than one knot in it. I am obliged to adopt the reading of {.} {.} in the Chinese editions, instead of the {.} {.} in the Corean text. It seems clear that only one person is spoken of as assisting the travellers, and his name, as appears a few sentences farther on, was Foo Kung-sun. The {.} {.} which immediately follows the surname Foo {.}, must be taken as the name of his office, corresponding, as the {.} shows, to that of _le maitre d'hotellerie_ in a Roman Catholic abbey. I was once indebted myself to the kind help of such an officer at a monastery in Canton province. The Buddhistic name for him is uddesika=overseer. The Kung-sun that follows his surname indicates that he was descended from some feudal lord in the old times of the Chow dynasty. We know indeed of no ruling house which had the surname of Foo, but its adoption by the grandson of a ruler can be satisfactorily accounted for; and his posterity continued to call themselves Kung-sun, duke or lord's grandson, and so retain the memory of the rank of their ancestor. (11) Whom they had left behind them at T'un-hwang. (12) The country of the Ouighurs, the district around the modern Turfan or Tangut. (13) Yu-teen is better known as Khoten. Dr. P. Smith gives (p. 11) the following description of it:--"A large district on the south-west of the desert of Gobi, embracing all the country south of Oksu and Yarkand, along the northern base of the Kwun-lun mountains, for more than 300 miles from east to west. The town of the same name, now called Ilchi, is in an extensive plain on the Khoten river, in lat. 37d N., and lon. 80d 35s E. After the Tungani insurrection against Chinese rule in 1862, the Mufti Haji Habeeboolla was made governor of Khoten, and held the office till he was murdered by Yakoob Beg, who became for a time the conqueror of all Chinese Turkestan. Khoten produces fine linen and cotton stuffs, jade ornaments, copper, grain, and fruits." The name in Sanskrit is Kustana. (E. H., p. 60). CHAPTER III KHOTEN. PROCESSIONS OF IMAGES. THE KING'S NEW MONASTERY. Yu-teen is a pleasant and prosperous kingdom, with a numerous and flourishing population. The inhabitants all profess our Law, and join together in its religious music for their enjoyment.(1) The monks amount to several myriads, most of whom are students of the mahayana.(2) They all receive their food from the common store.(3) Throughout the country the houses of the people stand apart like (separate) stars, and each family has a small tope(4) reared in front of its door. The smallest of these may be twenty cubits high, or rather more.(5) They make (in the monasteries) rooms for monks from all quarters,(5) the use of which is given to travelling monks who may arrive, and who are provided with whatever else they require. The lord of the country lodged Fa-Hsien and the others comfortably, and supplied their wants, in a monastery(6) called Gomati,(6) of the mahayana school. Attached to it there are three thousand monks, who are called to their meals by the sound of a bell. When they enter the refectory, their demeanour is marked by a reverent gravity, and they take their seats in regular order, all maintaining a perfect silence. No sound is heard from their alms-bowls and other utensils. When any of these pure men(7) require food, they are not allowed to call out (to the attendants) for it, but only make signs with their hands. Hwuy-king, Tao-ching, and Hwuy-tah set out in advance towards the country of K'eeh-ch'a;(8) but Fa-Hsien and the others, wishing to see the procession of images, remained behind for three months. There are in this country four(9) great monasteries, not counting the smaller ones. Beginning on the first day of the fourth month, they sweep and water the streets inside the city, making a grand display in the lanes and byways. Over the city gate they pitch a large tent, grandly adorned in all possible ways, in which the king and queen, with their ladies brilliantly arrayed,(10) take up their residence (for the time). The monks of the Gomati monastery, being mahayana students, and held in great reverence by the king, took precedence of all others in the procession. At a distance of three or four le from the city, they made a four-wheeled image car, more than thirty cubits high, which looked like the great hall (of a monastery) moving along. The seven precious substances(11) were grandly displayed about it, with silken streamers and canopies hanging all around. The (chief) image(12) stood in the middle of the car, with two Bodhisattvas(13) in attendance upon it, while devas(14) were made to follow in waiting, all brilliantly carved in gold and silver, and hanging in the air. When (the car) was a hundred paces from the gate, the king put off his crown of state, changed his dress for a fresh suit, and with bare feet, carrying in his hands flowers and incense, and with two rows of attending followers, went out at the gate to meet the image; and, with his head and face (bowed to the ground), he did homage at its feet, and then scattered the flowers and burnt the incense. When the image was entering the gate, the queen and the brilliant ladies with her in the gallery above scattered far and wide all kinds of flowers, which floated about and fell promiscuously to the ground. In this way everything was done to promote the dignity of the occasion. The carriages of the monasteries were all different, and each one had its own day for the procession. (The ceremony) began on the first day of the fourth month, and ended on the fourteenth, after which the king and queen returned to the palace. Seven or eight le to the west of the city there is what is called the King's New Monastery, the building of which took eighty years, and extended over three reigns. It may be 250 cubits in height, rich in elegant carving and inlaid work, covered above with gold and silver, and finished throughout with a combination of all the precious substances. Behind the tope there has been built a Hall of Buddha,(15) of the utmost magnificence and beauty, the beams, pillars, venetianed doors, and windows being all overlaid with gold-leaf. Besides this, the apartments for the monks are imposingly and elegantly decorated, beyond the power of words to express. Of whatever things of highest value and preciousness the kings in the six countries on the east of the (Ts'ung) range of mountains(16) are possessed, they contribute the greater portion (to this monastery), using but a small portion of them themselves.(17) NOTES (1) This fondness for music among the Khoteners is mentioned by Hsuan and Ch'wang and others. (2) Mahayana. It is a later form of the Buddhist doctrine, the second phase of its development corresponding to the state of a Bodhisattva, who, being able to transport himself and all mankind to nirvana, may be compared to a huge vehicle. See Davids on the "Key-note of the 'Great Vehicle,'" Hibbert Lectures, p. 254. (3) Fa-Hsien supplies sufficient information of how the common store or funds of the monasteries were provided, farther on in chapters xvi and xxxix, as well as in other passages. As the point is important, I will give here, from Davids' fifth Hibbert Lecture (p. 178), some of the words of the dying Buddha, taken from "The Book of the Great Decease," as illustrating the statement in this text:--"So long as the brethren shall persevere in kindness of action, speech, and thought among the saints, both in public and private; so long as they shall divide without partiality, and share in common with the upright and holy, all such things as they receive in accordance with the just provisions of the order, down even to the mere contents of a begging bowl; . . . so long may the brethren be expected not to decline, but to prosper." (4) The Chinese {.} (t'ah; in Cantonese, t'ap), as used by Fa-Hsien, is, no doubt, a phonetisation of the Sanskrit stupa or Pali thupa; and it is well in translating to use for the structures described by him the name of topes,--made familiar by Cunningham and other Indian antiquarians. In the thirteenth chapter there is an account of one built under the superintendence of Buddha himself, "as a model for all topes in future." They were usually in the form of bell-shaped domes, and were solid, surmounted by a long tapering pinnacle formed with a series of rings, varying in number. But their form, I suppose, was often varied; just as we have in China pagodas of different shapes. There are several topes now in the Indian Institute at Oxford, brought from Buddha Gaya, but the largest of them is much smaller than "the smallest" of those of Khoten. They were intended chiefly to contain the relics of Buddha and famous masters of his Law; but what relics could there be in the Tiratna topes of chapter xvi? (5) The meaning here is much disputed. The author does not mean to say that the monk's apartments were made "square," but that the monasteries were made with many guest-chambers or spare rooms. (6) The Sanskrit term for a monastery is used here,--Sangharama, "gardens of the assembly," originally denoting only "the surrounding park, but afterwards transferred to the whole of the premises" (E. H., p. 118). Gomati, the name of this monastery, means "rich in cows." (7) A denomination for the monks as vimala, "undefiled" or "pure." Giles makes it "the menials that attend on the monks," but I have not met with it in that application. (8) K'eeh-ch'a has not been clearly identified. Remusat made it Cashmere; Klaproth, Iskardu; Beal makes it Kartchou; and Eitel, Khas'a, "an ancient tribe on the Paropamisus, the Kasioi of Ptolemy." I think it was Ladak, or some well-known place in it. Hwuy-tah, unless that name be an alias, appears here for the first time. (9) Instead of "four," the Chinese copies of the text have "fourteen;" but the Corean reading is, probably, more correct. (10) There may have been, as Giles says, "maids of honour;" but the character does not say so. (11) The Sapta-ratna, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, rock crystal, rubies, diamonds or emeralds, and agate. See Sacred Books of the East (Davids' Buddhist Suttas), vol. xi., p. 249. (12) No doubt that of Sakyamuni himself. (13) A Bodhisattva is one whose essence has become intelligence; a Being who will in some future birth as a man (not necessarily or usually the next) attain to Buddhahood. The name does not include those Buddhas who have not yet attained to pari-nirvana. The symbol of the state is an elephant fording a river. Popularly, its abbreviated form P'u-sa is used in China for any idol or image; here the name has its proper signification. (14) {.} {.}, "all the thien," or simply "the thien" taken as plural. But in Chinese the character called thien {.} denotes heaven, or Heaven, and is interchanged with Ti and Shang Ti, meaning God. With the Buddhists it denotes the devas or Brahmanic gods, or all the inhabitants of the six devalokas. The usage shows the antagonism between Buddhism and Brahmanism, and still more that between it and Confucianism. (15) Giles and Williams call this "the oratory of Buddha." But "oratory" gives the idea of a small apartment, whereas the name here leads the mind to think of a large "hall." I once accompanied the monks of a large monastery from their refectory to the Hall of Buddha, which was a lofty and spacious apartment splendidly fitted up. (16) The Ts'ung, or "Onion" range, called also the Belurtagh mountains, including the Karakorum, and forming together the connecting links between the more northern T'een-shan and the Kwun-lun mountains on the north of Thibet. It would be difficult to name the six countries which Fa-Hsien had in mind. (17) This seems to be the meaning here. My first impression of it was that the author meant to say that the contributions which they received were spent by the monks mainly on the buildings, and only to a small extent for themselves; and I still hesitate between that view and the one in the version. There occurs here the binomial phrase kung-yang {.} {.}, which is one of the most common throughout the narrative, and is used not only of support in the way of substantial contributions given to monks, monasteries, and Buddhism, but generally of all Buddhistic worship, if I may use that term in the connexion. Let me here quote two or three sentences from Davids' Manual (pp. 168-170):--"The members of the order are secured from want. There is no place in the Buddhist scheme for churches; the offering of flowers before the sacred tree or image of the Buddha takes the place of worship. Buddhism does not acknowledge the efficacy of prayers; and in the warm countries where Buddhists live, the occasional reading of the law, or preaching of the word, in public, can take place best in the open air, by moonlight, under a simple roof of trees or palms. There are five principal kinds of meditation, which in Buddhism takes the place of prayer." CHAPTER IV THROUGH THE TS'UNG OR "ONION" MOUNTAINS TO K'EEH-CH'A;--PROBABLY SKARDO, OR SOME CITY MORE TO THE EAST IN LADAK When the processions of images in the fourth month were over, Sang-shao, by himself alone, followed a Tartar who was an earnest follower of the Law,(1) and proceeded towards Kophene.(2) Fa-Hsien and the others went forward to the kingdom of Tsze-hoh, which it took them twenty-five days to reach.(3) Its king was a strenuous follower of our Law,(4) and had (around him) more than a thousand monks, mostly students of the mahayana. Here (the travellers) abode fifteen days, and then went south for four days, when they found themselves among the Ts'ung-ling mountains, and reached the country of Yu-hwuy,(5) where they halted and kept their retreat.(6) When this was over, they went on among the hills(7) for twenty-five days, and got to K'eeh-ch'a,(8) there rejoining Hwuy-king(9) and his two companions. NOTES (1) This Tartar is called a {.} {.}, "a man of the Tao," or faith of Buddha. It occurs several times in the sequel, and denotes the man who is not a Buddhist outwardly only, but inwardly as well, whose faith is always making itself manifest in his ways. The name may be used of followers of other systems of faith besides Buddhism. (2) See the account of the kingdom of Kophene, in the 96th Book of the first Han Records, p. 78, where its capital is said to be 12,200 le from Ch'ang-gan. It was the whole or part of the present Cabulistan. The name of Cophene is connected with the river Kophes, supposed to be the same as the present Cabul river, which falls into the Indus, from the west, at Attock, after passing Peshawar. The city of Cabul, the capital of Afghanistan, may be the Kophene of the text; but we do not know that Sang-shao and his guide got so far west. The text only says that they set out from Khoten "towards it." (3) Tsze-hoh has not been identified. Beal thinks it was Yarkand, which, however, was north-west from Khoten. Watters ("China Review," p. 135) rather approves the suggestion of "Tashkurgan in Sirikul" for it. As it took Fa-Hsien twenty-five days to reach it, it must have been at least 150 miles from Khoten. (4) The king is described here by a Buddhistic phrase, denoting the possession of viryabala, "the power of energy; persevering exertion--one of the five moral powers" (E. H., p. 170). (5) Nor has Yu-hwuy been clearly identified. Evidently it was directly south from Tsze-hoh, and among the "Onion" mountains. Watters hazards the conjecture that it was the Aktasch of our present maps. (6) This was the retreat already twice mentioned as kept by the pilgrims in the summer, the different phraseology, "quiet rest," without any mention of the season, indicating their approach to India, E. H., p. 168. Two, if not three, years had elapsed since they left Ch'ang-gan. Are we now with them in 402? (7) This is the Corean reading {.}, much preferable to the {.} of the Chinese editions. (8) Watters approves of Klaproth's determination of K'eeh-ch'a to be Iskardu or Skardo. There are difficulties in connexion with the view, but it has the advantage, to my mind very great, of bringing the pilgrims across the Indus. The passage might be accomplished with ease at this point of the river's course, and therefore is not particularly mentioned. (9) Who had preceded them from Khoten. CHAPTER V GREAT QUINQUENNIAL ASSEMBLY OF MONKS. RELICS OF BUDDHA. PRODUCTIONS OF THE COUNTRY. It happened that the king of the country was then holding the pancha parishad, that is, in Chinese, the great quinquennial assembly.(1) When this is to be held, the king requests the presence of the Sramans from all quarters (of his kingdom). They come (as if) in clouds; and when they are all assembled, their place of session is grandly decorated. Silken streamers and canopies are hung out in, and water-lilies in gold and silver are made and fixed up behind the places where (the chief of them) are to sit. When clean mats have been spread, and they are all seated, the king and his ministers present their offerings according to rule and law. (The assembly takes place), in the first, second, or third month, for the most part in the spring. After the king has held the assembly, he further exhorts the ministers to make other and special offerings. The doing of this extends over one, two, three, five, or even seven days; and when all is finished, he takes his own riding-horse, saddles, bridles, and waits on him himself,(2) while he makes the noblest and most important minister of the kingdom mount him. Then, taking fine white woollen cloth, all sorts of precious things, and articles which the Sramans require, he distributes them among them, uttering vows at the same time along with all his ministers; and when this distribution has taken place, he again redeems (whatever he wishes) from the monks.(3) The country, being among the hills and cold, does not produce the other cereals, and only the wheat gets ripe. After the monks have received their annual (portion of this), the mornings suddenly show the hoar-frost, and on this account the king always begs the monks to make the wheat ripen(4) before they receive their portion. There is in the country a spitoon which belonged to Buddha, made of stone, and in colour like his alms-bowl. There is also a tooth of Buddha, for which the people have reared a tope, connected with which there are more than a thousand monks and their disciples,(5) all students of the hinayana. To the east of these hills the dress of the common people is of coarse materials, as in our country of Ts'in, but here also(6) there were among them the differences of fine woollen cloth and of serge or haircloth. The rules observed by the Sramans are remarkable, and too numerous to be mentioned in detail. The country is in the midst of the Onion range. As you go forward from these mountains, the plants, trees, and fruits are all different from those of the land of Han, excepting only the bamboo, pomegranate,(7) and sugar-cane. NOTES (1) See Eitel, p. 89. He describes the assembly as "an ecclesiastical conference, first instituted by king Asoka for general confession of sins and inculcation of morality." (2) The text of this sentence is perplexing; and all translators, including myself, have been puzzled by it. (3) See what we are told of king Asoka's grant of all the Jambudvipa to the monks in chapter xxvii. There are several other instances of similar gifts in the Mahavansa. (4) Watters calls attention to this as showing that the monks of K'eeh-ch'a had the credit of possessing weather-controlling powers. (5) The text here has {.} {.}, not {.} alone. I often found in monasteries boys and lads who looked up to certain of the monks as their preceptors. (6) Compare what is said in chapter ii of the dress of the people of Shen-shen. (7) Giles thinks the fruit here was the guava, because the ordinary name for "pomegranate" is preceded by gan {.}; but the pomegranate was called at first Gan Shih-lau, as having been introduced into China from Gan-seih by Chang-k'een, who is referred to in chapter vii. CHAPTER VI ON TOWARDS NORTH INDIA. DARADA. IMAGE OF MAITREYA BODHISATTVA. From this (the travellers) went westwards towards North India, and after being on the way for a month, they succeeded in getting across and through the range of the Onion mountains. The snow rests on them both winter and summer. There are also among them venomous dragons, which, when provoked, spit forth poisonous winds, and cause showers of snow and storms of sand and gravel. Not one in ten thousand of those who encounter these dangers escapes with his life. The people of the country call the range by the name of "The Snow mountains." When (the travellers) had got through them, they were in North India, and immediately on entering its borders, found themselves in a small kingdom called T'o-leih,(1) where also there were many monks, all students of the hinayana. In this kingdom there was formerly an Arhan,(2) who by his supernatural power(3) took a clever artificer up to the Tushita heaven, to see the height, complexion, and appearance of Maitreya Bodhisattva,(4) and then return and make an image of him in wood. First and last, this was done three times, and then the image was completed, eighty cubits in height, and eight cubits at the base from knee to knee of the crossed legs. On fast-days it emits an effulgent light. The kings of the (surrounding) countries vie with one another in presenting offerings to it. Here it is,--to be seen now as of old.(5) NOTES (1) Eitel and others identify this with Darada, the country of the ancient Dardae, the region near Dardus; lat. 30d 11s N., lon. 73d 54s E. See E. H. p. 30. I am myself in more than doubt on the point. Cunningham ("Ancient Geography of India," p. 82) says "Darel is a valley on the right or western bank of the Indus, now occupied by Dardus or Dards, from whom it received its name." But as I read our narrative, Fa-Hsien is here on the eastern bank of the Indus, and only crosses to the western bank as described in the next chapter. (2) Lo-han, Arhat, Arahat, are all designations of the perfected Arya, the disciple who has passed the different stages of the Noble Path, or eightfold excellent way, who has conquered all passions, and is not to be reborn again. Arhatship implies possession of certain supernatural powers, and is not to be succeeded by Buddhaship, but implies the fact of the saint having already attained nirvana. Popularly, the Chinese designate by this name the wider circle of Buddha's disciples, as well as the smaller ones of 500 and 18. No temple in Canton is better worth a visit than that of the 500 Lo-han. (3) Riddhi-sakshatkriya, "the power of supernatural footsteps,"="a body flexible at pleasure," or unlimited power over the body. E. H., p. 104. (4) Tushita is the fourth Devaloka, where all Bodhisattvas are reborn before finally appearing on earth as Buddha. Life lasts in Tushita 4000 years, but twenty-four hours there are equal to 400 years on earth. E. H., p. 152. (5) Maitreya (Spence Hardy, Maitri), often styled Ajita, "the Invincible," was a Bodhisattva, the principal one, indeed, of Sakyamuni's retinue, but is not counted among the ordinary (historical) disciples, nor is anything told of his antecedents. It was in the Tushita heaven that Sakyamuni met him and appointed him as his successor, to appear as Buddha after the lapse of 5000 years. Maitreya is therefore the expected Messiah of the Buddhists, residing at present in Tushita, and, according to the account of him in Eitel (H., p. 70), "already controlling the propagation of the Buddhistic faith." The name means "gentleness" or "kindness;" and this will be the character of his dispensation. (6) The combination of {.} {.} in the text of this concluding sentence, and so frequently occurring throughout the narrative, has occasioned no little dispute among previous translators. In the imperial thesaurus of phraseology (P'ei-wan Yun-foo), under {.}, an example of it is given from Chwang-tsze, and a note subjoined that {.} {.} is equivalent to {.} {.}, "anciently and now." CHAPTER VII CROSSING OF THE INDUS. WHEN BUDDHISM FIRST CROSSED THE RIVER FOR THE EAST The travellers went on to the south-west for fifteen days (at the foot of the mountains, and) following the course of their range. The way was difficult and rugged, (running along) a bank exceedingly precipitous, which rose up there, a hill-like wall of rock, 10,000 cubits from the base. When one approaches the edge of it, his eyes become unsteady; and if he wished to go forward in the same direction, there was no place on which he could place his foot; and beneath where the waters of the river called the Indus.(1) In former times men had chiselled paths along the rocks, and distributed ladders on the face of them, to the number altogether of 700, at the bottom of which there was a suspension bridge of ropes, by which the river was crossed, its banks being there eighty paces apart.(2) The (place and arrangements) are to be found in the Records of the Nine Interpreters,(3) but neither Chang K'een(4) nor Kan Ying(5) had reached the spot. The monks(6) asked Fa-Hsien if it could be known when the Law of Buddha first went to the east. He replied, "When I asked the people of those countries about it, they all said that it had been handed down by their fathers from of old that, after the setting up of the image of Maitreya Bodhisattva, there were Sramans of India who crossed this river, carrying with them Sutras and Books of Discipline. Now the image was set up rather more than 300 years after the nirvana(7) of Buddha, which may be referred to the reign of king P'ing of the Chow dynasty.(8) According to this account we may say that the diffusion of our great doctrines (in the east) began from (the setting up of) this image. If it had not been through that Maitreya,(9) the great spiritual master(10) (who is to be) the successor of the Sakya, who could have caused the 'Three Precious Ones'(11) to be proclaimed so far, and the people of those border lands to know our Law? We know of a truth that the opening of (the way for such) a mysterious propagation is not the work of man; and so the dream of the emperor Ming of Han(12) had its proper cause." NOTES (1) The Sindhu. We saw in a former note that the earliest name in China for India was Shin-tuh. So, here, the river Indus is called by a name approaching that in sound. (2) Both Beal and Watters quote from Cunningham (Ladak, pp. 88, 89) the following description of the course of the Indus in these parts, in striking accordance with our author's account:--"From Skardo to Rongdo, and from Rongdo to Makpou-i-shang-rong, for upwards of 100 miles, the Indus sweeps sullen and dark through a mighty gorge in the mountains, which for wild sublimity is perhaps unequalled. Rongdo means the country of defiles. . . . Between these points the Indus raves from side to side of the gloomy chasm, foaming and chafing with ungovernable fury. Yet even in these inaccessible places has daring and ingenious man triumphed over opposing nature. The yawning abyss is spanned by frail rope bridges, and the narrow ledges of rocks are connected by ladders to form a giddy pathway overhanging the seething cauldron below." (3) The Japanese edition has a different reading here from the Chinese copies,--one which Remusat (with true critical instinct) conjectured should take the place of the more difficult text with which alone he was acquainted. The "Nine Interpreters" would be a general name for the official interpreters attached to the invading armies of Han in their attempts to penetrate and subdue the regions of the west. The phrase occurs in the memoir of Chang K'een, referred to in the next note. (4) Chang K'een, a minister of the emperor Woo of Han (B.C. 140-87), is celebrated as the first Chinese who "pierced the void," and penetrated to "the regions of the west," corresponding very much to the present Turkestan. Through him, by B.C. 115, a regular intercourse was established between China and the thirty-six kingdoms or states of that quarter;--see Mayers' Chinese Reader's Manual, p. 5. The memoir of Chang K'een, translated by Mr. Wylie from the Books of the first Han dynasty, appears in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, referred to already. (5) Less is known of Kan Ying than of Chang K'een. Being sent in A.D. 88 by his patron Pan Chao on an embassy to the Roman empire, he only got as far as the Caspian sea, and returned to China. He extended, however, the knowledge of his countrymen with regard to the western regions;--see the memoir of Pan Chao in the Books of the second Han, and Mayers' Manual, pp. 167, 168. (6) Where and when? Probably at his first resting-place after crossing the Indus. (7) This may refer to Sakyamuni's becoming Buddha on attaining to nirvana, or more probably to his pari-nirvana and death. (8) As king P'ing's reign lasted from B.C. 750 to 719, this would place the death of Buddha in the eleventh century B.C., whereas recent inquirers place it between B.C. 480 and 470, a year or two, or a few years, after that of Confucius, so that the two great "Masters" of the east were really contemporaries. But if Rhys Davids be correct, as I think he is, in fixing the date of Buddha's death within a few years of 412 B.C. (see Manual, p. 213), not to speak of Westergaard's still lower date, then the Buddha was very considerably the junior of Confucius. (9) This confirms the words of Eitel, that Maitreya is already controlling the propagation of the faith. (10) The Chinese characters for this simply mean "the great scholar or officer;" but see Eitel's Handbook, p. 99, on the term purusha. (11) "The precious Buddha," "the precious Law," and "the precious Monkhood;" Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha; the whole being equivalent to Buddhism. (12) Fa-Hsien thus endorses the view that Buddhism was introduced into China in this reign, A.D. 58-75. The emperor had his dream in A.D. 61. CHAPTER VIII WOO-CHANG, OR UDYANA. MONASTERIES, AND THEIR WAYS. TRACES OF BUDDHA. After crossing the river, (the travellers) immediately came to the kingdom of Woo-chang,(1) which is indeed (a part) of North India. The people all use the language of Central India, "Central India" being what we should call the "Middle Kingdom." The food and clothes of the common people are the same as in that Central Kingdom. The Law of Buddha is very (flourishing in Woo-chang). They call the places where the monks stay (for a time) or reside permanently Sangharamas; and of these there are in all 500, the monks being all students of the hinayana. When stranger bhikshus(2) arrive at one of them, their wants are supplied for three days, after which they are told to find a resting-place for themselves. There is a tradition that when Buddha came to North India, he came at once to this country, and that here he left a print of his foot, which is long or short according to the ideas of the beholder (on the subject). It exists, and the same thing is true about it, at the present day. Here also are still to be seen the rock on which he dried his clothes, and the place where he converted the wicked dragon.(3) The rock is fourteen cubits high, and more than twenty broad, with one side of it smooth. Hwuy-king, Hwuy-tah, and Tao-ching went on ahead towards (the place of) Buddha's shadow in the country of Nagara;(4) but Fa-Hsien and the others remained in Woo-chang, and kept the summer retreat.(5) That over, they descended south, and arrived in the country of Soo-ho-to.(6) NOTES (1) Udyana, meaning "the Park;" just north of the Punjab, the country along the Subhavastu, now called the Swat; noted for its forests, flowers, and fruits (E. H., p. 153). (2) Bhikshu is the name for a monk as "living by alms," a mendicant. All bhikshus call themselves Sramans. Sometimes the two names are used together by our author. (3) Naga is the Sanskrit name for the Chinese lung or dragon; often meaning a snake, especially the boa. "Chinese Buddhists," says Eitel, p. 79, "when speaking of nagas as boa spirits, always represent them as enemies of mankind, but when viewing them as deities of rivers, lakes, or oceans, they describe them as piously inclined." The dragon, however, is in China the symbol of the Sovereign and Sage, a use of it unknown in Buddhism, according to which all nagas need to be converted in order to obtain a higher phase of being. The use of the character too {.}, as here, in the sense of "to convert," is entirely Buddhistic. The six paramitas are the six virtues which carry men across {.} the great sea of life and death, as the sphere of transmigration to nirvana. With regard to the particular conversion here, Eitel (p. 11) says the Naga's name was Apatala, the guardian deity of the Subhavastu river, and that he was converted by Sakyamuni shortly before the death of the latter. (4) In Chinese Na-k'eeh, an ancient kingdom and city on the southern bank of the Cabul river, about thirty miles west of Jellalabad. (5) We would seem now to be in 403. (6) Soo-ho-to has not been clearly identified. Beal says that later Buddhist writers include it in Udyana. It must have been between the Indus and the Swat. I suppose it was what we now call Swastene. CHAPTER IX SOO-HO-TO. LEGEND OF BUDDHA. In that country also Buddhism(1) is flourishing. There is in it the place where Sakra,(2) Ruler of Devas, in a former age,(3) tried the Bodhisattva, by producing(4) a hawk (in pursuit of a) dove, when (the Bodhisattva) cut off a piece of his own flesh, and (with it) ransomed the dove. After Buddha had attained to perfect wisdom,(5) and in travelling about with his disciples (arrived at this spot), he informed them that this was the place where he ransomed the dove with a piece of his own flesh. In this way the people of the country became aware of the fact, and on the spot reared a tope, adorned with layers(6) of gold and silver plates. NOTES (1) Buddhism stands for the two Chinese characters {.} {.}, "the Law of Buddha," and to that rendering of the phrase, which is of frequent occurrence, I will in general adhere. Buddhism is not an adequate rendering of them any more than Christianity would be of {to euaggelion Xristou}. The Fa or Law is the equivalent of dharma comprehending all in the first Basket of the Buddhist teaching,--as Dr. Davids says (Hibbert Lectures, p. 44), "its ethics and philosophy, and its system of self-culture;" with the theory of karma, it seems to me, especially underlying it. It has been pointed out (Cunningham's "Bhilsa Topes," p. 102) that dharma is the keystone of all king Priyadarsi or Asoka's edicts. The whole of them are dedicated to the attainment of one object, "the advancement of dharma, or of the Law of Buddha." His native Chinese afforded no better character than {.} or Law, by which our author could express concisely his idea of the Buddhistic system, as "a law of life," a directory or system of Rules, by which men could attain to the consummation of their being. (2) Sakra is a common name for the Brahmanic Indra, adopted by Buddhism into the circle of its own great adherents;--it has been said, "because of his popularity." He is generally styled, as here, T'een Ti, "God or Ruler of Devas." He is now the representative of the secular power, the valiant protector of the Buddhist body, but is looked upon as inferior to Sakyamuni, and every Buddhist saint. He appears several times in Fa-Hsien's narrative. E. H., pp. 108 and 46. (3) The Chinese character is {.}, "formerly," and is often, as in the first sentence of the narrative, simply equivalent to that adverb. At other times it means, as here, "in a former age," some pre-existent state in the time of a former birth. The incident related is "a Jataka story." (4) It occurs at once to the translator to render the characters {.} {.} by "changed himself to." Such is often their meaning in the sequel, but their use in chapter xxiv may be considered as a crucial test of the meaning which I have given them here. (5) That is, had become Buddha, or completed his course {.} {.}. (6) This seems to be the contribution of {.} (or {.}), to the force of the binomial {.} {.}, which is continually occurring. CHAPTER X GANDHARA. LEGENDS OF BUDDHA. The travellers, going downwards from this towards the east, in five days came to the country of Gandhara,(1) the place where Dharma-vivardhana,(2) the son of Asoka,(3) ruled. When Buddha was a Bodhisattva, he gave his eyes also for another man here;(4) and at the spot they have also reared a large tope, adorned with layers of gold and silver plates. The people of the country were mostly students of the hinayana. NOTES (1) Eitel says "an ancient kingdom, corresponding to the region about Dheri and Banjour." But see note 5. (2) Dharma-vivardhana is the name in Sanskrit, represented by the Fa Yi {.} {.} of the text. (3) Asoka is here mentioned for the first time;--the Constantine of the Buddhist society, and famous for the number of viharas and topes which he erected. He was the grandson of Chandragupta (i.q. Sandracottus), a rude adventurer, who at one time was a refugee in the camp of Alexander the Great; and within about twenty years afterwards drove the Greeks out of India, having defeated Seleucus, the Greek ruler of the Indus provinces. He had by that time made himself king of Magadha. His grandson was converted to Buddhism by the bold and patient demeanour of an Arhat whom he had ordered to be buried alive, and became a most zealous supporter of the new faith. Dr. Rhys Davids (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xi, p. xlvi) says that "Asoka's coronation can be fixed with absolute certainty within a year or two either way of 267 B.C." (4) This also is a Jataka story; but Eitel thinks it may be a myth, constructed from the story of the blinding of Dharma-vivardhana. CHAPTER XI TAKSHASILA. LEGENDS. THE FOUR GREAT TOPES. Seven days' journey from this to the east brought the travellers to the kingdom of Takshasila,(1) which means "the severed head" in the language of China. Here, when Buddha was a Bodhisattva, he gave away his head to a man;(2) and from this circumstance the kingdom got its name. Going on further for two days to the east, they came to the place where the Bodhisattva threw down his body to feed a starving tigress.(2) In these two places also large topes have been built, both adorned with layers of all the precious substances. The kings, ministers, and peoples of the kingdoms around vie with one another in making offerings at them. The trains of those who come to scatter flowers and light lamps at them never cease. The nations of those quarters all those (and the other two mentioned before) "the four great topes." NOTES (1) See Julien's "Methode pour dechiffrer et transcrire les Nomes Sanscrits," p. 206. Eitel says, "The Taxila of the Greeks, the region near Hoosun Abdaul in lat. 35d 48s N., lon. 72d 44s E." But this identification, I am satisfied, is wrong. Cunningham, indeed, takes credit ("Ancient Geography of India," pp. 108, 109) for determining this to be the site of Arrian's Taxila,--in the upper Punjab, still existing in the ruins of Shahdheri, between the Indus and Hydaspes (the modern Jhelum). So far he may be correct; but the Takshasila of Fa-Hsien was on the other, or western side of the Indus; and between the river and Gandhara. It took him, indeed, seven days travelling eastwards to reach it; but we do not know what stoppages he may have made on the way. We must be wary in reckoning distances from his specifications of days. (2) Two Jataka stories. See the account of the latter in Spence Hardy's "Manual of Buddhism," pp. 91, 92. It took place when Buddha had been born as a Brahman in the village of Daliddi; and from the merit of the act, he was next born in a devaloka. CHAPTER XII PURUSHAPURA, OR PESHAWUR. PROPHECY ABOUT KING KANISHKA AND HIS TOPE. BUDDHA'S ALMS-BOWL. DEATH OF HWUY-YING. Going southwards from Gandhara, (the travellers) in four days arrived at the kingdom of Purushapura.(1) Formerly, when Buddha was travelling in this country with his disciples, he said to Ananda,(2) "After my pari-nirvana,(3) there will be a king named Kanishka,(4) who shall on this spot build a tope." This Kanishka was afterwards born into the world; and (once), when he had gone forth to look about him, Sakra, Ruler of Devas, wishing to excite the idea in his mind, assumed the appearance of a little herd-boy, and was making a tope right in the way (of the king), who asked what sort of thing he was making. The boy said, "I am making a tope for Buddha." The king said, "Very good;" and immediately, right over the boy's tope, he (proceeded to) rear another, which was more than four hundred cubits high, and adorned with layers of all the precious substances. Of all the topes and temples which (the travellers) saw in their journeyings, there was not one comparable to this in solemn beauty and majestic grandeur. There is a current saying that this is the finest tope in Jambudvipa.(5) When the king's tope was completed, the little tope (of the boy) came out from its side on the south, rather more than three cubits in height. Buddha's alms-bowl is in this country. Formerly, a king of Yueh-she(6) raised a large force and invaded this country, wishing to carry the bowl away. Having subdued the kingdom, as he and his captains were sincere believers in the Law of Buddha, and wished to carry off the bowl, they proceeded to present their offerings on a great scale. When they had done so to the Three Precious Ones, he made a large elephant be grandly caparisoned, and placed the bowl upon it. But the elephant knelt down on the ground, and was unable to go forward. Again he caused a four-wheeled waggon to be prepared in which the bowl was put to be conveyed away. Eight elephants were then yoked to it, and dragged it with their united strength; but neither were they able to go forward. The king knew that the time for an association between himself and the bowl had not yet arrived,(7) and was sad and deeply ashamed of himself. Forthwith he built a tope at the place and a monastery, and left a guard to watch (the bowl), making all sorts of contributions. There may be there more than seven hundred monks. When it is near midday, they bring out the bowl, and, along with the common people,(8) make their various offerings to it, after which they take their midday meal. In the evening, at the time of incense, they bring the bowl out again.(9) It may contain rather more than two pecks, and is of various colours, black predominating, with the seams that show its fourfold composition distinctly marked.(10) Its thickness is about the fifth of an inch, and it has a bright and glossy lustre. When poor people throw into it a few flowers, it becomes immediately full, while some very rich people, wishing to make offering of many flowers, might not stop till they had thrown in hundreds, thousands, and myriads of bushels, and yet would not be able to fill it.(11) Pao-yun and Sang-king here merely made their offerings to the alms-bowl, and (then resolved to) go back. Hwuy-king, Hwuy-tah, and Tao-ching had gone on before the rest to Negara,(12) to make their offerings at (the places of) Buddha's shadow, tooth, and the flat-bone of his skull. (There) Hwuy-king fell ill, and Tao-ching remained to look after him, while Hwuy-tah came alone to Purushapura, and saw the others, and (then) he with Pao-yun and Sang-king took their way back to the land of Ts'in. Hwuy-king(13) came to his end(14) in the monastery of Buddha's alms-bowl, and on this Fa-Hsien went forward alone towards the place of the flat-bone of Buddha's skull. NOTES (1) The modern Peshawur, lat. 34d 8s N., lon. 71d 30s E. (2) A first cousin of Sakyamuni, and born at the moment when he attained to Buddhaship. Under Buddha's teaching, Ananda became an Arhat, and is famous for his strong and accurate memory; and he played an important part at the first council for the formation of the Buddhist canon. The friendship between Sakyamuni and Ananda was very close and tender; and it is impossible to read much of what the dying Buddha said to him and of him, as related in the Maha-pari-nirvana Sutra, without being moved almost to tears. Ananda is to reappear on earth as Buddha in another Kalpa. See E. H., p. 9, and the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xi. (3) On his attaining to nirvana, Sakyamuni became the Buddha, and had no longer to mourn his being within the circle of transmigration, and could rejoice in an absolute freedom from passion, and a perfect purity. Still he continued to live on for forty-five years, till he attained to pari-nirvana, and had done with all the life of sense and society, and had no more exercise of thought. He died; but whether he absolutely and entirely _ceased_ to be, in any sense of the word _being_, it would be difficult to say. Probably he himself would not and could not have spoken definitely on the point. So far as our use of language is concerned, apart from any assured faith in and hope of immortality, his pari-nirvana was his death. (4) Kanishka appeared, and began to reign, early in our first century, about A.D. 10. He was the last of three brothers, whose original seat was in Yueh-she, immediately mentioned, or Tukhara. Converted by the sudden appearance of a saint, he became a zealous Buddhist, and patronised the system as liberally as Asoka had done. The finest topes in the north-west of India are ascribed to him; he was certainly a great man and a magnificent sovereign. (5) Jambudvipa is one of the four great continents of the universe, representing the inhabited world as fancied by the Buddhists, and so called because it resembles in shape the leaves of the jambu tree. It is south of mount Meru, and divided among four fabulous kings (E. H., p. 36). It is often used, as here perhaps, merely as the Buddhist name for India. (6) This king was perhaps Kanishka himself, Fa-Hsien mixing up, in an inartistic way, different legends about him. Eitel suggests that a relic of the old name of the country may still exist in that of the Jats or Juts of the present day. A more common name for it is Tukhara, and he observes that the people were the Indo-Scythians of the Greeks, and the Tartars of Chinese writers, who, driven on by the Huns (180 B.C.), conquered Transoxiana, destroyed the Bactrian kingdom (126 B.C.), and finally conquered the Punjab, Cashmere, and great part of India, their greatest king being Kanishak (E. H., p. 152). (7) Watters, clearly understanding the thought of the author in this sentence, renders--"his destiny did not extend to a connexion with the bowl;" but the term "destiny" suggests a controlling or directing power without. The king thought that his virtue in the past was not yet sufficient to give him possession of the bowl. (8) The text is simply "those in white clothes." This may mean "the laity," or the "upasakas;" but it is better to take the characters in their common Chinese acceptation, as meaning "commoners," "men who have no rank." See in Williams' Dictionary under {.}. (9) I do not wonder that Remusat should give for this--"et s'en retournent apres." But Fa-Hsien's use of {.} in the sense of "in the same way" is uniform throughout the narrative. (10) Hardy's M. B., p. 183, says:--"The alms-bowl, given by Mahabrahma, having vanished (about the time that Gotama became Buddha), each of the four guardian deities brought him an alms-bowl of emerald, but he did not accept them. They then brought four bowls made of stone, of the colour of the mung fruit; and when each entreated that his own bowl might be accepted, Buddha caused them to appear as if formed into a single bowl, appearing at the upper rim as if placed one within the other." See the account more correctly given in the "Buddhist Birth Stories," p. 110. (11) Compare the narrative in Luke's Gospel, xxi. 1-4. (12) See chapter viii. (13) This, no doubt, should be Hwuy-ying. King was at this time ill in Nagara, and indeed afterwards he dies in crossing the Little Snowy Mountains; but all the texts make him die twice. The confounding of the two names has been pointed out by Chinese critics. (14) "Came to his end;" i.e., according to the text, "proved the impermanence and uncertainty," namely, of human life. See Williams' Dictionary under {.}. The phraseology is wholly Buddhistic. CHAPTER XIII NAGARA. FESTIVAL OF BUDDHA'S SKULL-BONE. OTHER RELICS, AND HIS SHADOW. Going west for sixteen yojanas,(1) he came to the city He-lo(2) in the borders of the country of Nagara, where there is the flat-bone of Buddha's skull, deposited in a vihara(3) adorned all over with gold-leaf and the seven sacred substances. The king of the country, revering and honouring the bone, and anxious lest it should be stolen away, has selected eight individuals, representing the great families in the kingdom, and committing to each a seal, with which he should seal (its shrine) and guard (the relic). At early dawn these eight men come, and after each has inspected his seal, they open the door. This done, they wash their hands with scented water and bring out the bone, which they place outside the vihara, on a lofty platform, where it is supported on a round pedestal of the seven precious substances, and covered with a bell of _lapis lazuli_, both adorned with rows of pearls. Its colour is of a yellowish white, and it forms an imperfect circle twelve inches round,(4) curving upwards to the centre. Every day, after it has been brought forth, the keepers of the vihara ascend a high gallery, where they beat great drums, blow conchs, and clash their copper cymbals. When the king hears them, he goes to the vihara, and makes his offerings of flowers and incense. When he has done this, he (and his attendants) in order, one after another, (raise the bone), place it (for a moment) on the top of their heads,(5) and then depart, going out by the door on the west as they entered by that on the east. The king every morning makes his offerings and performs his worship, and afterwards gives audience on the business of his government. The chiefs of the Vaisyas(6) also make their offerings before they attend to their family affairs. Every day it is so, and there is no remissness in the observance of the custom. When all the offerings are over, they replace the bone in the vihara, where there is a vimoksha tope,(7) of the seven precious substances, and rather more than five cubits high, sometimes open, sometimes shut, to contain it. In front of the door of the vihara, there are parties who every morning sell flowers and incense,(8) and those who wish to make offerings buy some of all kinds. The kings of various countries are also constantly sending messengers with offerings. The vihara stands in a square of thirty paces, and though heaven should shake and earth be rent, this place would not move. Going on, north from this, for a yojana, (Fa-Hsien) arrived at the capital of Nagara, the place where the Bodhisattva once purchased with money five stalks of flowers, as an offering to the Dipankara Buddha.(9) In the midst of the city there is also the tope of Buddha's tooth, where offerings are made in the same way as to the flat-bone of his skull. A yojana to the north-east of the city brought him to the mouth of a valley, where there is Buddha's pewter staff;(10) and a vihara also has been built at which offerings are made. The staff is made of Gosirsha Chandana, and is quite sixteen or seventeen cubits long. It is contained in a wooden tube, and though a hundred or a thousand men ere to (try to) lift it, they could not move it. Entering the mouth of the valley, and going west, he found Buddha's Sanghali,(11) where also there is reared a vihara, and offerings are made. It is a custom of the country when there is a great drought, for the people to collect in crowds, bring out the robe, pay worship to it, and make offerings, on which there is immediately a great rain from the sky. South of the city, half a yojana, there is a rock-cavern, in a great hill fronting the south-west; and here it was that Buddha left his shadow. Looking at it from a distance of more than ten paces, you seem to see Buddha's real form, with his complexion of gold, and his characteristic marks(12) in their nicety clearly and brightly displayed. The nearer you approach, however, the fainter it becomes, as if it were only in your fancy. When the kings from the regions all around have sent skilful artists to take a copy, none of them have been able to do so. Among the people of the country there is a saying current that "the thousand Buddhas(13) must all leave their shadows here." Rather more than four hundred paces west from the shadow, when Buddha was at the spot, he shaved his hair and clipt his nails, and proceeded, along with his disciples, to build a tope seventy or eighty cubits high, to be a model for all future topes; and it is still existing. By the side of it there is a monastery, with more than seven hundred monks in it. At this place there are as many as a thousand topes(14) of Arhans and Pratyeka Buddhas.(15) NOTES (1) Now in India, Fa-Hsien used the Indian measure of distance; but it is not possible to determine exactly what its length then was. The estimates of it are very different, and vary from four and a half or five miles to seven, and sometimes more. See the subject exhaustively treated in Davids' "Ceylon Coins and Measures," pp. 15-17. (2) The present Hilda, west of Peshawur, and five miles south of Jellalabad. (3) "The vihara," says Hardy, "is the residence of a recluse or priest;" and so Davids:--"the clean little hut where the mendicant lives." Our author, however, does not use the Indian name here, but the Chinese characters which express its meaning--tsing shay, "a pure dwelling." He uses the term occasionally, and evidently, in this sense; more frequently it occurs in his narrative in connexion with the Buddhist relic worship; and at first I translated it by "shrine" and "shrine-house;" but I came to the conclusion, at last, to employ always the Indian name. The first time I saw a shrine-house was, I think, in a monastery near Foo-chow;--a small pyramidical structure, about ten feet high, glittering as if with the precious substances, but all, it seemed to me, of tinsel. It was in a large apartment of the building, having many images in it. The monks said it was the most precious thing in their possession, and that if they opened it, as I begged them to do, there would be a convulsion that would destroy the whole establishment. See E. H., p. 166. The name of the province of Behar was given to it in consequence of its many viharas. (4) According to the characters, "square, round, four inches." Hsuan-chwang says it was twelve inches round. (5) In Williams' Dictionary, under {.}, the characters, used here, are employed in the phrase for "to degrade an officer," that is, "to remove the token of his rank worn on the crown of his head;" but to place a thing on the crown is a Buddhistic form of religious homage. (6) The Vaisyas, or bourgeois caste of Hindu society, are described here as "resident scholars." (7) See Eitel's Handbook under the name vimoksha, which is explained as "the act of self-liberation," and "the dwelling or state of liberty." There are eight acts of liberating one's self from all subjective and objective trammels, and as many states of liberty (vimukti) resulting therefrom. They are eight degrees of self-inanition, and apparently eight stages on the way to nirvana. The tope in the text would be emblematic in some way of the general idea of the mental progress conducting to the Buddhistic consummation of existence. (8) This incense would be in long "sticks," small and large, such as are sold to-day throughout China, as you enter the temples. (9) "The illuminating Buddha," the twenty-fourth predecessor of Sakyamuni, and who, so long before, gave him the assurance that he would by-and-by be Buddha. See Jataka Tales, p. 23. (10) The staff was, as immediately appears, of Gosirsha Chandana, or "sandal-wood from the Cow's-head mountain," a species of copper-brown sandal-wood, said to be produced most abundantly on a mountain of (the fabulous continent) Ullarakuru, north of mount Meru, which resembles in shape the head of a cow (E. H., pp. 42, 43). It is called a "pewter staff" from having on it a head and rings and pewter. See Watters, "China Review," viii, pp. 227, 228, and Williams' Dictionary, under {.}. (11) Or Sanghati, the double or composite robe, part of a monk's attire, reaching from the shoulders to the knees, and fastened round the waist (E. H., p. 118). (12) These were the "marks and beauties" on the person of a supreme Buddha. The rishi Kala Devala saw them on the body of the infant Sakya prince to the number of 328, those on the teeth, which had not yet come out, being visible to his spirit-like eyes (M. B., pp. 148, 149). (13) Probably="all Buddhas." (14) The number may appear too great. But see what is said on the size of topes in chapter iii, note 4. (15) In Singhalese, Pase Buddhas; called also Nidana Buddhas, and Pratyeka Jinas, and explained by "individually intelligent," "completely intelligent," "intelligent as regards the nidanas." This, says Eitel (pp. 96, 97), is "a degree of saintship unknown to primitive Buddhism, denoting automats in ascetic life who attain to Buddhaship 'individually,' that is, without a teacher, and without being able to save others. As the ideal hermit, the Pratyeka Buddha is compared with the rhinoceros khadga that lives lonely in the wilderness. He is also called Nidana Buddha, as having mastered the twelve nidanas (the twelve links in the everlasting chain of cause and effect in the whole range of existence, the understanding of which solves the riddle of life, revealing the inanity of all forms of existence, and preparing the mind for nirvana). He is also compared to a horse, which, crossing a river, almost buries its body under the water, without, however, touching the bottom of the river. Thus in crossing samsara he 'suppresses the errors of life and thought, and the effects of habit and passion, without attaining to absolute perfection.'" Whether these Buddhas were unknown, as Eitel says, to primitive Buddhism, may be doubted. See Davids' Hibbert Lectures, p. 146. CHAPTER XIV DEATH OF HWUY-KING IN THE LITTLE SNOWY MOUNTAINS. LO-E. POHNA. CROSSING THE INDUS TO THE EAST. Having stayed there till the third month of winter, Fa-Hsien and the two others,(1) proceeding southwards, crossed the Little Snowy mountains.(2) On them the snow lies accumulated both winter and summer. On the north (side) of the mountains, in the shade, they suddenly encountered a cold wind which made them shiver and become unable to speak. Hwuy-king could not go any farther. A white froth came from his mouth, and he said to Fa-Hsien, "I cannot live any longer. Do you immediately go away, that we do not all die here;" and with these words he died.(3) Fa-Hsien stroked the corpse, and cried out piteously, "Our original plan has failed;--it is fate.(4) What can we do?" He then again exerted himself, and they succeeded in crossing to the south of the range, and arrived in the kingdom of Lo-e,(5) where there were nearly three thousand monks, students of both the mahayana and hinayana. Here they stayed for the summer retreat,(6) and when that was over, they went on to the south, and ten days' journey brought them to the kingdom of Poh-na,(7) where there are also more than three thousand monks, all students of the hinayana. Proceeding from this place for three days, they again crossed the Indus, where the country on each side was low and level.(8) NOTES (1) These must have been Tao-ching and Hwuy-king. (2) Probably the Safeid Koh, and on the way to the Kohat pass. (3) All the texts have Kwuy-king. See chapter xii, note 13. (4) A very natural exclamation, but out of place and inconsistent from the lips of Fa-Hsien. The Chinese character {.}, which he employed, may be rendered rightly by "fate" or "destiny;" but the fate is not unintelligent. The term implies a factor, or fa-tor, and supposes the ordination of Heaven or God. A Confucian idea for the moment overcame his Buddhism. (5) Lo-e, or Rohi, is a name for Afghanistan; but only a portion of it can be here intended. (6) We are now therefore in 404. (7) No doubt the present district of Bannu, in the Lieutenant-Governorship of the Punjab, between 32d 10s and 33d 15s N. lat., and 70d 26s and 72d E. lon. See Hunter's Gazetteer of India, i, p. 393. (8) They had then crossed the Indus before. They had done so, indeed, twice; first, from north to south, at Skardo or east of it; and second, as described in chapter vii. CHAPTER XV BHIDA. SYMPATHY OF MONKS WITH THE PILGRIMS. After they had crossed the river, there was a country named Pe-t'oo,(1) where Buddhism was very flourishing, and (the monks) studied both the mahayana and hinayana. When they saw their fellow-disciples from Ts'in passing along, they were moved with great pity and sympathy, and expressed themselves thus: "How is it that these men from a border-land should have learned to become monks,(2) and come for the sake of our doctrines from such a distance in search of the Law of Buddha?" They supplied them with what they needed, and treated them in accordance with the rules of the Law. NOTES (1) Bhida. Eitel says, "The present Punjab;" i.e. it was a portion of that. (2) "To come forth from their families;" that is, to become celibates, and adopt the tonsure. CHAPTER XVI ON TO MATHURA OR MUTTRA. CONDITION AND CUSTOMS OF CENTRAL INDIA; OF THE MONKS, VIHARAS, AND MONASTERIES. From this place they travelled south-east, passing by a succession of very many monasteries, with a multitude of monks, who might be counted by myriads. After passing all these places, they came to a country named Ma-t'aou-lo.(1) They still followed the course of the P'oo-na(2) river, on the banks of which, left and right, there were twenty monasteries, which might contain three thousand monks; and (here) the Law of Buddha was still more flourishing. Everywhere, from the Sandy Desert, in all the countries of India, the kings had been firm believers in that Law. When they make their offerings to a community of monks, they take off their royal caps, and along with their relatives and ministers, supply them with food with their own hands. That done, (the king) has a carpet spread for himself on the ground, and sits down in front of the chairman;--they dare not presume to sit on couches in front of the community. The laws and ways, according to which the kings presented their offerings when Buddha was in the world, have been handed down to the present day. All south from this is named the Middle Kingdom.(3) In it the cold and heat are finely tempered, and there is neither hoarfrost nor snow. The people are numerous and happy; they have not to register their households, or attend to any magistrates and their rules; only those who cultivate the royal land have to pay (a portion of) the grain from it. If they want to go, they go; if they want to stay on, they stay. The king governs without decapitation or (other) corporal punishments. Criminals are simply fined, lightly or heavily, according to the circumstances (of each case). Even in cases of repeated attempts at wicked rebellion, they only have their right hands cut off. The king's body-guards and attendants all have salaries. Throughout the whole country the people do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor, nor eat onions or garlic. The only exception is that of the Chandalas.(4) That is the name for those who are (held to be) wicked men, and live apart from others. When they enter the gate of a city or a market-place, they strike a piece of wood to make themselves known, so that men know and avoid them, and do not come into contact with them. In that country they do not keep pigs and fowls, and do not sell live cattle; in the markets there are no butchers' shops and no dealers in intoxicating drink. In buying and selling commodities they use cowries.(5) Only the Chandalas are fishermen and hunters, and sell flesh meat. After Buddha attained to pari-nirvana,(6) the kings of the various countries and the heads of the Vaisyas(7) built viharas for the priests, and endowed them with fields, houses, gardens, and orchards, along with the resident populations and their cattle, the grants being engraved on plates of metal,(8) so that afterwards they were handed down from king to king, without any daring to annul them, and they remain even to the present time. The regular business of the monks is to perform acts of meritorious virtue, and to recite their Sutras and sit wrapt in meditation. When stranger monks arrive (at any monastery), the old residents meet and receive them, carry for them their clothes and alms-bowl, give them water to wash their feet, oil with which to anoint them, and the liquid food permitted out of the regular hours.(9) When (the stranger) has enjoyed a very brief rest, they further ask the number of years that he has been a monk, after which he receives a sleeping apartment with its appurtenances, according to his regular order, and everything is done for him which the rules prescribe.(10) Where a community of monks resides, they erect topes to Sariputtra,(11) to Maha-maudgalyayana,(12) and to Ananda,(13) and also topes (in honour) of the Abhidharma, the Vinaya, and the Sutras. A month after the (annual season of) rest, the families which are looking out for blessing stimulate one another(14) to make offerings to the monks, and send round to them the liquid food which may be taken out of the ordinary hours. All the monks come together in a great assembly, and preach the Law;(15) after which offerings are presented at the tope of Sariputtra, with all kinds of flowers and incense. All through the night lamps are kept burning, and skilful musicians are employed to perform.(16) When Sariputtra was a great Brahman, he went to Buddha, and begged (to be permitted) to quit his family (and become a monk). The great Mugalan and the great Kasyapa(17) also did the same. The bhikshunis(18) for the most part make their offerings at the tope of Ananda, because it was he who requested the World-honoured one to allow females to quit their families (and become nuns). The Sramaneras(19) mostly make their offerings to Rahula.(20) The professors of the Abhidharma make their offerings to it; those of the Vinaya to it. Every year there is one such offering, and each class has its own day for it. Students of the mahayana present offerings to the Prajna-paramita,(21) to Manjusri,(22) and to Kwan-she-yin.(23) When the monks have done receiving their annual tribute (from the harvests),(24) the Heads of the Vaisyas and all the Brahmans bring clothes and other such articles as the monks require for use, and distribute among them. The monks, having received them, also proceed to give portions to one another. From the nirvana of Buddha,(25) the forms of ceremony, laws, and rules, practised by the sacred communities, have been handed down from one generation to another without interruption. From the place where (the travellers) crossed the Indus to Southern India, and on to the Southern Sea, a distance of forty or fifty thousand le, all is level plain. There are no large hills with streams (among them); there are simply the waters of the rivers. NOTES (1) Muttra, "the peacock city;" lat. 27d 30s N., lon. 77d 43s E. (Hunter); the birthplace of Krishna, whose emblem is the peacock. (2) This must be the Jumna, or Yamuna. Why it is called, as here, the P'oo-na has yet to be explained. (3) In Pali, Majjhima-desa, "the Middle Country." See Davids' "Buddhist Birth Stories," page 61, note. (4) Eitel (pp. 145, 6) says, "The name Chandalas is explained by 'butchers,' 'wicked men,' and those who carry 'the awful flag,' to warn off their betters;--the lowest and most despised caste of India, members of which, however, when converted, were admitted even into the ranks of the priesthood." (5) "Cowries;" {.} {.}, not "shells and ivory," as one might suppose; but cowries alone, the second term entering into the name from the marks inside the edge of the shell, resembling "the teeth of fishes." (6) See chapter xii, note 3, Buddha's pari-nirvana is equivalent to Buddha's death. (7) See chapter xiii, note 6. The order of the characters is different here, but with the same meaning. (8) See the preparation of such a deed of grant in a special case, as related in chapter xxxix. No doubt in Fa-Hsien's time, and long before and after it, it was the custom to engrave such deeds on plates of metal. (9) "No monk can eat solid food except between sunrise and noon," and total abstinence from intoxicating drinks is obligatory (Davids' Manual, p. 163). Food eaten at any other part of the day is called vikala, and forbidden; but a weary traveller might receive unseasonable refreshment, consisting, as Watters has shown (Ch. Rev. viii. 282), of honey, butter, treacle, and sesamum oil. (10) The expression here is somewhat perplexing; but it occurs again in chapter xxxviii; and the meaning is clear. See Watters, Ch. Rev. viii. 282, 3. The rules are given at length in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xx, p. 272 and foll., and p. 279 and foll. (11) Sariputtra (Singh. Seriyut) was one of the principal disciples of Buddha, and indeed the most learned and ingenious of them all, so that he obtained the title of {.} {.}, "knowledge and wisdom." He is also called Buddha's "right-hand attendant." His name is derived from that of his mother Sarika, the wife of Tishya, a native of Nalanda. In Spence Hardy, he often appears under the name of Upatissa (Upa-tishya), derived from his father. Several Sastras are ascribed to him, and indeed the followers of the Abhidharma look on him as their founder. He died before Sakyamuni; but is to reappear as a future Buddha. Eitel, pp. 123, 124. (12) Mugalan, the Singhalese name of this disciple, is more pronounceable. He also was one of the principal disciples, called Buddha's "left-hand attendant." He was distinguished for his power of vision, and his magical powers. The name in the text is derived from the former attribute, and it was by the latter that he took up an artist to Tushita to get a view of Sakyamuni, and so make a statue of him. (Compare the similar story in chap. vi.) He went to hell, and released his mother. He also died before Sakyamuni, and is to reappear as Buddha. Eitel, p. 65. (13) See chapter xii, note 2. (14) A passage rather difficult to construe. The "families" would be those more devout than their neighbours. (15) One rarely hears this preaching in China. It struck me most as I once heard it at Osaka in Japan. There was a pulpit in a large hall of the temple, and the audience sat around on the matted floor. One priest took the pulpit after another; and the hearers nodded their heads occasionally, and indicated their sympathy now and then by an audible "h'm," which reminded me of Carlyle's description of meetings of "The Ironsides" of Cromwell. (16) This last statement is wanting in the Chinese editions. (17) There was a Kasyapa Buddha, anterior to Sakyamuni. But this Maha-kasyapa was a Brahman of Magadha, who was converted by Buddha, and became one of his disciples. He took the lead after Sakyamuni's death, convoked and directed the first synod, from which his title of Arya-sthavira is derived. As the first compiler of the Canon, he is considered the fountain of Chinese orthodoxy, and counted as the first patriarch. He also is to be reborn as Buddha. Eitel, p. 64. (18) The bhikshunis are the female monks or nuns, subject to the same rules as the bhikshus, and also to special ordinances of restraint. See Hardy's E. M., chap. 17. See also Sacred Books of the East, vol. xx, p. 321. (19) The Sramaneras are the novices, male or female, who have vowed to observe the Shikshapada, or ten commandments. Fa-Hsien was himself one of them from his childhood. Having heard the Trisharana, or threefold formula of Refuge,--"I take refuge in Buddha; the Law; the Church,--the novice undertakes to observe the ten precepts that forbid--(1) destroying life; (2) stealing; (3) impurity; (4) lying; (5) intoxicating drinks; (6) eating after midday; (7) dancing, singing, music, and stage-plays; (8) garlands, scents, unguents, and ornaments; (9) high or broad couches; (10) receiving gold or silver." Davids' Manual, p. 160; Hardy's E. M., pp. 23, 24. (20) The eldest son of Sakyamuni by Yasodhara. Converted to Buddhism, he followed his father as an attendant; and after Buddha's death became the founder of a philosophical realistic school (vaibhashika). He is now revered as the patron saint of all novices, and is to be reborn as the eldest son of every future Buddha. Eitel, p. 101. His mother also is to be reborn as Buddha. (21) There are six (sometimes increased to ten) paramitas, "means of passing to nirvana:--Charity; morality; patience; energy; tranquil contemplation; wisdom (prajna); made up to ten by use of the proper means; science; pious vows; and force of purpose. But it is only prajna which carries men across the samsara to the shores of nirvana." Eitel, p. 90. (22) According to Eitel (pp. 71, 72), A famous Bodhisattva, now specially worshipped in Shan-se, whose antecedents are a hopeless jumble of history and fable. Fa-Hsien found him here worshipped by followers of the mahayana school; but Hsuan-chwang connects his worship with the yogachara or tantra-magic school. The mahayana school regard him as the apotheosis of perfect wisdom. His most common titles are Mahamati, "Great wisdom," and Kumara-raja, "King of teaching, with a thousand arms and a hundred alms-bowls." (23) Kwan-she-yin and the dogmas about him or her are as great a mystery as Manjusri. The Chinese name is a mistranslation of the Sanskrit name Avalokitesvra, "On-looking Sovereign," or even "On-looking Self-Existent," and means "Regarding or Looking on the sounds of the world,"="Hearer of Prayer." Originally, and still in Thibet, Avalokitesvara had only male attributes, but in China and Japan (Kwannon), this deity (such popularly she is) is represented as a woman, "Kwan-yin, the greatly gentle, with a thousand arms and a thousand eyes;" and has her principal seat in the island of P'oo-t'oo, on the China coast, which is a regular place of pilgrimage. To the worshippers of whom Fa-Hsien speaks, Kwan-she-yin would only be Avalokitesvara. How he was converted into the "goddess of mercy," and her worship took the place which it now has in China, is a difficult inquiry, which would take much time and space, and not be brought after all, so far as I see, to a satisfactory conclusion. See Eitel's Handbook, pp. 18-20, and his Three Lectures on Buddhism (third edition), pp. 124-131. I was talking on the subject once with an intelligent Chinese gentleman, when he remarked, "Have you not much the same thing in Europe in the worship of Mary?" (24) Compare what is said in chap. v. (25) This nirvana of Buddha must be--not his death, but his attaining to Buddhaship. CHAPTER XVII SANKASYA. BUDDHA'S ASCENT TO AND DESCENT FROM THE TRAYASTRIMSAS HEAVEN, AND OTHER LEGENDS. From this they proceeded south-east for eighteen yojanas, and found themselves in a kingdom called Sankasya,(1) at the place where Buddha came down, after ascending to the Trayastrimsas heaven,(2) and there preaching for three months his Law for the benefit of his mother.(3) Buddha had gone up to this heaven by his supernatural power,(4) without letting his disciples know; but seven days before the completion (of the three months) he laid aside his invisibility,(4) and Anuruddha,(5) with his heavenly eyes,(5) saw the World-honoured one, and immediately said to the honoured one, the great Mugalan, "Do you go and salute the World-honoured one." Mugalan forthwith went, and with head and face did homage at (Buddha's) feet. They then saluted and questioned each other, and when this was over, Buddha said to Mugalan, "Seven days after this I will go down to Jambudvipa;" and thereupon Mugalan returned. At this time the great kings of eight countries with their ministers and people, not having seen Buddha for a long time, were all thirstily looking up for him, and had collected in clouds in this kingdom to wait for the World-honoured one. Then the bhikshuni Utpala(6) thought in her heart, "To-day the kings, with their ministers and people, will all be meeting (and welcoming) Buddha. I am (but) a woman; how shall I succeed in being the first to see him?"(7) Buddha immediately, by his spirit-like power, changed her into the appearance of a holy Chakravartti(8) king, and she was the foremost of all in doing reverence to him. As Buddha descended from his position aloft in the Trayastrimsas heaven, when he was coming down, there were made to appear three flights of precious steps. Buddha was on the middle flight, the steps of which were composed of the seven precious substances. The king of Brahma-loka(9) also made a flight of silver steps appear on the right side, (where he was seen) attending with a white chowry in his hand. Sakra, Ruler of Devas, made (a flight of) steps of purple gold on the left side, (where he was seen) attending and holding an umbrella of the seven precious substances. An innumerable multitude of the devas followed Buddha in his descent. When he was come down, the three flights all disappeared in the ground, excepting seven steps, which continued to be visible. Afterwards king Asoka, wishing to know where their ends rested, sent men to dig and see. They went down to the yellow springs(10) without reaching the bottom of the steps, and from this the king received an increase to his reverence and faith, and built a vihara over the steps, with a standing image, sixteen cubits in height, right over the middle flight. Behind the vihara he erected a stone pillar, about fifty cubits high,(11) with a lion on the top of it.(12) Let into the pillar, on each of its four sides,(13) there is an image of Buddha, inside and out(14) shining and transparent, and pure as it were of _lapis lazuli_. Some teachers of another doctrine(15) once disputed with the Sramanas about (the right to) this as a place of residence, and the latter were having the worst of the argument, when they took an oath on both sides on the condition that, if the place did indeed belong to the Sramanas, there should be some marvellous attestation of it. When these words had been spoken, the lion on the top gave a great roar, thus giving the proof; on which their opponents were frightened, bowed to the decision, and withdrew. Through Buddha having for three months partaken of the food of heaven, his body emitted a heavenly fragrance, unlike that of an ordinary man. He went immediately and bathed; and afterwards, at the spot where he did so, a bathing-house was built, which is still existing. At the place where the bhikshuni Utpala was the first to do reverence to Buddha, a tope has now been built. At the places where Buddha, when he was in the world, cut his hair and nails, topes are erected; and where the three Buddhas(16) that preceded Sakyamuni Buddha and he himself sat; where they walked,(17) and where images of their persons were made. At all these places topes were made, and are still existing. At the place where Sakra, Ruler of the Devas, and the king of the Brahma-loka followed Buddha down (from the Trayastrimsas heaven) they have also raised a tope. At this place the monks and nuns may be a thousand, who all receive their food from the common store, and pursue their studies, some of the mahayana and some of the hinayana. Where they live, there is a white-eared dragon, which acts the part of danapati to the community of these monks, causing abundant harvests in the country, and the enriching rains to come in season, without the occurrence of any calamities, so that the monks enjoy their repose and ease. In gratitude for its kindness, they have made for it a dragon-house, with a carpet for it to sit on, and appointed for it a diet of blessing, which they present for its nourishment. Every day they set apart three of their number to go to its house, and eat there. Whenever the summer retreat is ended, the dragon straightway changes its form, and appears as a small snake,(18) with white spots at the side of its ears. As soon as the monks recognise it, they fill a copper vessel with cream, into which they put the creature, and then carry it round from the one who has the highest seat (at their tables) to him who has the lowest, when it appears as if saluting them. When it has been taken round, immediately it disappeared; and every year it thus comes forth once. The country is very productive, and the people are prosperous, and happy beyond comparison. When people of other countries come to it, they are exceedingly attentive to them all, and supply them with what they need. Fifty yojanas north-west from the monastery there is another, called "The Great Heap."(19) Great Heap was the name of a wicked demon, who was converted by Buddha, and men subsequently at this place reared a vihara. When it was being made over to an Arhat by pouring water on his hands,(20) some drops fell on the ground. They are still on the spot, and however they may be brushed away and removed, they continue to be visible, and cannot be made to disappear. At this place there is also a tope to Buddha, where a good spirit constantly keeps (all about it) swept and watered, without any labour of man being required. A king of corrupt views once said, "Since you are able to do this, I will lead a multitude of troops and reside there till the dirt and filth has increased and accumulated, and (see) whether you can cleanse it away or not." The spirit thereupon raised a great wind, which blew (the filth away), and made the place pure. At this place there are a hundred small topes, at which a man may keep counting a whole day without being able to know (their exact number). If he be firmly bent on knowing it, he will place a man by the side of each tope. When this is done, proceeding to count the number of men, whether they be many or few, he will not get to know (the number).(21) There is a monastery, containing perhaps 600 or 700 monks, in which there is a place where a Pratyeka Buddha used to take his food. The nirvana ground (where he was burned(22) after death) is as large as a carriage wheel; and while grass grows all around, on this spot there is none. The ground also where he dried his clothes produces no grass, but the impression of them, where they lay on it, continues to the present day. NOTES (1) The name is still remaining in Samkassam, a village forty-five miles northwest of Canouge, lat. 27d 3s N., lon. 79d 50s E. (2) The heaven of Indra or Sakya, meaning "the heaven of thirty-three classes," a name which has been explained both historically and mythologically. "The description of it," says Eitel, p. 148, "tallies in all respects with the Svarga of Brahmanic mythology. It is situated between the four peaks of the Meru, and consists of thirty-two cities of devas, eight one each of the four corners of the mountain. Indra's capital of Bellevue is in the centre. There he is enthroned, with a thousand heads and a thousand eyes, and four arms grasping the vajra, with his wife and 119,000 concubines. There he receives the monthly reports of the four Maharajas, concerning the progress of good and evil in the world," &c. &c. (3) Buddha's mother, Maya and Mahamaya, the _mater immaculata_ of the Buddhists, died seven days after his birth. Eitel says, "Reborn in Tushita, she was visited there by her son and converted." The Tushita heaven was a more likely place to find her than the Trayastrimsas; but was the former a part of the latter? Hardy gives a long account of Buddha's visit to the Trayastrimsas (M. B., pp. 298-302), which he calls Tawutisa, and speaks of his mother (Matru) in it, who had now become a deva by the changing of her sex. (4) Compare the account of the Arhat's conveyance of the artist to the Tushita heaven in chap. v. The first expression here is more comprehensive. (5) Anuruddha was a first cousin of Sakyamuni, being the son of his uncle Amritodana. He is often mentioned in the account we have of Buddha's last moments. His special gift was the divyachakshus or "heavenly eye," the first of the six abhijnas or "supernatural talents," the faculty of comprehending in one instantaneous view, or by intuition, all beings in all worlds. "He could see," says Hardy, M. B., p. 232, "all things in 100,000 sakvalas as plainly as a mustard seed held in the hand." (6) Eitel gives the name Utpala with the same Chinese phonetisation as in the text, but not as the name of any bhikshuni. The Sanskrit word, however, is explained by "blue lotus flowers;" and Hsuan-chwang calls her the nun "Lotus-flower colour ({.} {.} {.});"--the same as Hardy's Upulwan and Uppalawarna. (7) Perhaps we should read here "to see Buddha," and then ascribe the transformation to the nun herself. It depends on the punctuation which view we adopt; and in the structure of the passage, there is nothing to indicate that the stop should be made before or after "Buddha." And the one view is as reasonable, or rather as unreasonable, as the other. (8) "A holy king who turns the wheel;" that is, the military conqueror and monarch of the whole or part of a universe. "The symbol," says Eitel (p. 142) "of such a king is the chakra or wheel, for when he ascends the throne, a chakra falls from heaven, indicating by its material (gold, silver, copper, or iron) the extent and character of his reign. The office, however, of the highest Chakravartti, who hurls his wheel among his enemies, is inferior to the peaceful mission of a Buddha, who meekly turns the wheel of the Law, and conquers every universe by his teaching." (9) This was Brahma, the first person of the Brahmanical Trimurti, adopted by Buddhism, but placed in an inferior position, and surpassed by every Buddhist saint who attains to bodhi. (10) A common name for the earth below, where, on digging, water is found. (11) The height is given as thirty chow, the chow being the distance from the elbow to the finger-tip, which is variously estimated. (12) A note of Mr. Beal says on this:--"General Cunningham, who visited the spot (1862), found a pillar, evidently of the age of Asoka, with a well-carved elephant on the top, which, however, was minus trunk and tail. He supposes this to be the pillar seen by Fa-Hsien, who mistook the top of it for a lion. It is possible such a mistake may have been made, as in the account of one of the pillars at Sravasti, Fa-Hsien says an ox formed the capital, whilst Hsuan-chwang calls it an elephant (P. 19, Arch. Survey)." (13) That is, in niches on the sides. The pillar or column must have been square. (14) Equivalent to "all through." (15) Has always been translated "heretical teachers;" but I eschew the terms _heresy_ and _heretical_. The parties would not be Buddhists of any creed or school, but Brahmans or of some other false doctrine, as Fa-Hsien deemed it. The Chinese term means "outside" or "foreign;"--in Pali, anna-titthiya,="those belonging to another school." (16) These three predecessors of Sakyamuni were the three Buddhas of the present or Maha-bhadra Kalpa, of which he was the fourth, and Maitreya is to be the fifth and last. They were: (1) Krakuchanda (Pali, Kakusanda), "he who readily solves all doubts;" a scion of the Kasyapa family. Human life reached in his time 40,000 years, and so many persons were converted by him. (2) Kanakamuni (Pali, Konagamana), "body radiant with the colour of pure gold;" of the same family. Human life reached in his time 30,000 years, and so many persons were converted by him. (3) Kasyapa (Pali, Kassapa), "swallower of light." Human life reached in his time 20,000 years, and so many persons were converted by him. See Eitel, under the several names; Hardy's M. B., pp. 95-97; and Davids' "Buddhist Birth Stories," p. 51. (17) That is, walked in meditation. Such places are called Chankramana (Pali, Chankama); promenades or corridors connected with a monastery, made sometimes with costly stones, for the purpose of peripatetic meditation. The "sitting" would be not because of weariness or for rest, but for meditation. E. H., p. 144. (18) The character in my Corean copy is {.}, which must be a mistake for the {.} of the Chinese editions. Otherwise, the meaning would be "a small medusa." (19) The reading here seems to me a great improvement on that of the Chinese editions, which means "Fire Limit." Buddha, it is said, {.} converted this demon, which Chinese character Beal rendered at first by "in one of his incarnations;" and in his revised version he has "himself." The difference between Fa-Hsien's usage of {.} and {.} throughout his narrative is quite marked. {.} always refers to the doings of Sakyamuni; {.}, "formerly," is often used of him and others in the sense of "in a former age or birth." (20) See Hardy, M. B., p. 194:--"As a token of the giving over of the garden, the king poured water upon the hands of Buddha; and from this time it became one of the principal residences of the sage." (21) This would seem to be absurd; but the writer evidently intended to convey the idea that there was something mysterious about the number of the topes. (22) This seems to be the meaning. The bodies of the monks are all burned. Hardy's E. M., pp. 322-324. CHAPTER XVIII KANYAKUBJA, OR CANOUGE. BUDDHA'S PREACHING. Fa-Hsien stayed at the Dragon vihara till after the summer retreat,(1) and then, travelling to the south-east for seven yojanas, he arrived at the city of Kanyakubja,(2) lying along the Ganges.(3) There are two monasteries in it, the inmates of which are students of the hinayana. At a distance from the city of six or seven le, on the west, on the northern bank of the Ganges, is a place where Buddha preached the Law to his disciples. It has been handed down that his subjects of discourse were such as "The bitterness and vanity (of life) as impermanent and uncertain," and that "The body is as a bubble or foam on the water." At this spot a tope was erected, and still exists. Having crossed the Ganges, and gone south for three yojanas, (the travellers) arrived at a village named A-le,(4) containing places where Buddha preached the Law, where he sat, and where he walked, at all of which topes have been built. NOTES (1) We are now, probably, in 405. (2) Canouge, the latitude and longitude of which have been given in a previous note. The Sanskrit name means "the city of humpbacked maidens;" with reference to the legend of the hundred daughters of king Brahma-datta, who were made deformed by the curse of the rishi Maha-vriksha, whose overtures they had refused. E. H., p. 51. (3) Ganga, explained by "Blessed water," and "Come from heaven to earth." (4) This village (the Chinese editions read "forest") has hardly been clearly identified. CHAPTER XIX SHA-CHE. LEGEND OF BUDDHA'S DANTA-KASHTHA. Going on from this to the south-east for three yojanas, they came to the great kingdom of Sha-che.(1) As you go out of the city of Sha-che by the southern gate, on the east of the road (is the place) where Buddha, after he had chewed his willow branch,(2) stuck it in the ground, when it forthwith grew up seven cubits, (at which height it remained) neither increasing nor diminishing. The Brahmans with their contrary doctrines(3) became angry and jealous. Sometimes they cut the tree down, sometimes they plucked it up, and cast it to a distance, but it grew again on the same spot as at first. Here also is the place where the four Buddhas walked and sat, and at which a tope was built that is still existing. NOTES (1) Sha-che should probably be Sha-khe, making Cunningham's identification of the name with the present Saket still more likely. The change of {.} into {.} is slight; and, indeed, the Khang-hsi dictionary thinks the two characters should be but one and the same. (2) This was, no doubt, what was called the danta-kashtha, or "dental wood," mostly a bit of the _ficus Indicus_ or banyan tree, which the monk chews every morning to cleanse his teeth, and for the purpose of health generally. The Chinese, not having the banyan, have used, or at least Fa-Hsien used, Yang ({.}, the general name for the willow) instead of it. (3) Are two classes of opponents, or only one, intended here, so that we should read "all the unbelievers and Brahmans," or "heretics and Brahmans?" I think the Brahmans were also "the unbelievers" and "heretics," having {.} {.}, views and ways outside of, and opposed to, Buddha's. CHAPTER XX KOSALA AND SRAVASTI. THE JETAVANA VIHARA AND OTHER MEMORIALS AND LEGENDS OF BUDDHA. SYMPATHY OF THE MONKS WITH THE PILGRIMS. Going on from this to the south, for eight yojanas, (the travellers) came to the city of Sravasti(1) in the kingdom of Kosala,(2) in which the inhabitants were few and far between, amounting in all (only) to a few more than two hundred families; the city where king Prasenajit(3) ruled, and the place of the old vihara of Maha-prajapti;(4) of the well and walls of (the house of) the (Vaisya) head Sudatta;(5) and where the Angulimalya(6) became an Arhat, and his body was (afterwards) burned on his attaining to pari-nirvana. At all these places topes were subsequently erected, which are still existing in the city. The Brahmans, with their contrary doctrine, became full of hatred and envy in their hearts, and wished to destroy them, but there came from the heavens such a storm of crashing thunder and flashing lightning that they were not able in the end to effect their purpose. As you go out from the city by the south gate, and 1,200 paces from it, the (Vaisya) head Sudatta built a vihara, facing the south; and when the door was open, on each side of it there was a stone pillar, with the figure of a wheel on the top of that on the left, and the figure of an ox on the top of that on the right. On the left and right of the building the ponds of water clear and pure, the thickets of trees always luxuriant, and the numerous flowers of various hues, constituted a lovely scene, the whole forming what is called the Jetavana vihara.(7) When Buddha went up to the Trayastrimsas heaven,(8) and preached the Law for the benefit of his mother, (after he had been absent for) ninety days, Prasenajit, longing to see him, caused an image of him to be carved in Gosirsha Chandana wood,(9) and put in the place where he usually sat. When Buddha on his return entered the vihara, Buddha said to it, "Return to your seat. After I have attained to pari-nirvana, you will serve as a pattern to the four classes of my disciples,"(10) and on this the image returned to its seat. This was the very first of all the images (of Buddha), and that which men subsequently copied. Buddha then removed, and dwelt in a small vihara on the south side (of the other), a different place from that containing the image, and twenty paces distant from it. The Jetavana vihara was originally of seven storeys. The kings and people of the countries around vied with one another in their offerings, hanging up about it silken streamers and canopies, scattering flowers, burning incense, and lighting lamps, so as to make the night as bright as the day. This they did day after day without ceasing. (It happened that) a rat, carrying in its mouth the wick of a lamp, set one of the streamers or canopies on fire, which caught the vihara, and the seven storeys were all consumed. The kings, with their officers and people, were all very sad and distressed, supposing that the sandal-wood image had been burned; but lo! after four or five days, when the door of a small vihara on the east was opened, there was immediately seen the original image. They were all greatly rejoiced, and co-operated in restoring the vihara. When they had succeeded in completing two storeys, they removed the image back to its former place. When Fa-Hsien and Tao-ching first arrived at the Jetavana monastery, and thought how the World-honoured one had formerly resided there for twenty-five years, painful reflections arose in their minds. Born in a border-land, along with their like-minded friends, they had travelled through so many kingdoms; some of those friends had returned (to their own land), and some had (died), proving the impermanence and uncertainty of life; and to-day they saw the place where Buddha had lived now unoccupied by him. They were melancholy through their pain of heart, and the crowd of monks came out, and asked them from what kingdom they were come. "We are come," they replied, "from the land of Han." "Strange," said the monks with a sigh, "that men of a border country should be able to come here in search of our Law!" Then they said to one another, "During all the time that we, preceptors and monks,(11) have succeeded to one another, we have never seen men of Han, followers of our system, arrive here." Four le to the north-west of the vihara there is a grove called "The Getting of Eyes." Formerly there were five hundred blind men, who lived here in order that they might be near the vihara.(12) Buddha preached his Law to them, and they all got back their eyesight. Full of joy, they stuck their staves in the earth, and with their heads and faces on the ground, did reverence. The staves immediately began to grow, and they grew to be great. People made much of them, and no one dared to cut them down, so that they came to form a grove. It was in this way that it got its name, and most of the Jetavana monks, after they had taken their midday meal, went to the grove, and sat there in meditation. Six or seven le north-east from the Jetavana, mother Vaisakha(13) built another vihara, to which she invited Buddha and his monks, and which is still existing. To each of the great residences for monks at the Jetavana vihara there were two gates, one facing the east and the other facing the north. The park (containing the whole) was the space of ground which the (Vaisya) head Sudatta purchased by covering it with gold coins. The vihara was exactly in the centre. Here Buddha lived for a longer time than at any other place, preaching his Law and converting men. At the places where he walked and sat they also (subsequently) reared topes, each having its particular name; and here was the place where Sundari(14) murdered a person and then falsely charged Buddha (with the crime). Outside the east gate of the Jetavana, at a distance of seventy paces to the north, on the west of the road, Buddha held a discussion with the (advocates of the) ninety-six schemes of erroneous doctrine, when the king and his great officers, the householders, and people were all assembled in crowds to hear it. Then a woman belonging to one of the erroneous systems, by name Chanchamana,(15) prompted by the envious hatred in her heart, and having put on (extra) clothes in front of her person, so as to give her the appearance of being with child, falsely accused Buddha before all the assembly of having acted unlawfully (towards her). On this, Sakra, Ruler of Devas, changed himself and some devas into white mice, which bit through the strings about her waist; and when this was done, the (extra) clothes which she wore dropt down on the ground. The earth at the same time was rent, and she went (down) alive into hell.(16) (This) also is the place where Devadatta,(17) trying with empoisoned claws to injure Buddha, went down alive into hell. Men subsequently set up marks to distinguish where both these events took place. Further, at the place where the discussion took place, they reared a vihara rather more than sixty cubits high, having in it an image of Buddha in a sitting posture. On the east of the road there was a devalaya(18) of (one of) the contrary systems, called "The Shadow Covered," right opposite the vihara on the place of discussion, with (only) the road between them, and also rather more than sixty cubits high. The reason why it was called "The Shadow Covered" was this:--When the sun was in the west, the shadow of the vihara of the World-honoured one fell on the devalaya of a contrary system; but when the sun was in the east, the shadow of that devalaya was diverted to the north, and never fell on the vihara of Buddha. The mal-believers regularly employed men to watch their devalaya, to sweep and water (all about it), to burn incense, light the lamps, and present offerings; but in the morning the lamps were found to have been suddenly removed, and in the vihara of Buddha. The Brahmans were indignant, and said, "Those Sramanas take out lamps and use them for their own service of Buddha, but we will not stop our service for you!"(19) On that night the Brahmans themselves kept watch, when they saw the deva spirits which they served take the lamps and go three times round the vihara of Buddha and present offerings. After this ministration to Buddha they suddenly disappeared. The Brahmans thereupon knowing how great was the spiritual power of Buddha, forthwith left their families, and became monks.(20) It has been handed down, that, near the time when these things occurred, around the Jetavana vihara there were ninety-eight monasteries, in all of which there were monks residing, excepting only in one place which was vacant. In this Middle Kingdom(21) there are ninety-six(21) sorts of views, erroneous and different from our system, all of which recognise this world and the future world(22) (and the connexion between them). Each had its multitude of followers, and they all beg their food: only they do not carry the alms-bowl. They also, moreover, seek (to acquire) the blessing (of good deeds) on unfrequented ways, setting up on the road-side houses of charity, where rooms, couches, beds, and food and drink are supplied to travellers, and also to monks, coming and going as guests, the only difference being in the time (for which those parties remain). There are also companies of the followers of Devadatta still existing. They regularly make offerings to the three previous Buddhas, but not to Sakyamuni Buddha. Four le south-east from the city of Sravasti, a tope has been erected at the place where the World-honoured one encountered king Virudhaha,(23) when he wished to attack the kingdom of Shay-e,(23) and took his stand before him at the side of the road.(24) NOTES (1) In Singhalese, Sewet; here evidently the capital of Kosala. It is placed by Cunningham (Archaeological Survey) on the south bank of the Rapti, about fifty-eight miles north of Ayodya or Oude. There are still the ruins of a great town, the name being Sahet Mahat. It was in this town, or in its neighbourhood, that Sakyamuni spent many years of his life after he became Buddha. (2) There were two Indian kingdoms of this name, a southern and a northern. This was the northern, a part of the present Oudh. (3) In Singhalese, Pase-nadi, meaning "leader of the victorious army." He was one of the earliest converts and chief patrons of Sakyamuni. Eitel calls him (p. 95) one of the originators of Buddhist idolatory, because of the statue which is mentioned in this chapter. See Hardy's M. B., pp. 283, 284, et al. (4) Explained by "Path of Love," and "Lord of Life." Prajapati was aunt and nurse of Sakyamuni, the first woman admitted to the monkhood, and the first superior of the first Buddhistic convent. She is yet to become a Buddha. (5) Sudatta, meaning "almsgiver," was the original name of Anatha-pindika (or Pindada), a wealthy householder, or Vaisya head, of Sravasti, famous for his liberality (Hardy, Anepidu). Of his old house, only the well and walls remained at the time of Fa-Hsien's visit to Sravasti. (6) The Angulimalya were a sect or set of Sivaitic fanatics, who made assassination a religious act. The one of them here mentioned had joined them by the force of circumstances. Being converted by Buddha, he became a monk; but when it is said in the text that he "got the Tao," or doctrine, I think that expression implies more than his conversion, and is equivalent to his becoming an Arhat. His name in Pali is Angulimala. That he did become an Arhat is clear from his autobiographical poem in the "Songs of the Theras." (7) Eitel (p. 37) says:--"A noted vihara in the suburbs of Sravasti, erected in a park which Anatha-pindika bought of prince Jeta, the son of Prasenajit. Sakyamuni made this place his favourite residence for many years. Most of the Sutras (authentic and supposititious) date from this spot." (8) See chapter xvii. (9) See chapter xiii. (10) Arya, meaning "honourable," "venerable," is a title given only to those who have mastered the four spiritual truths:--(1) that "misery" is a necessary condition of all sentient existence; this is duhkha: (2) that the "accumulation" of misery is caused by the passions; this is samudaya: (3) that the "extinction" of passion is possible; this is nirodha: and (4) that the "path" leads to the extinction of passion; which is marga. According to their attainment of these truths, the Aryas, or followers of Buddha, are distinguished into four classes,--Srotapannas, Sakridagamins, Anagamins, and Arhats. E. H., p. 14. (11) This is the first time that Fa-Hsien employs the name Ho-shang {.} {.}, which is now popularly used in China for all Buddhist monks without distinction of rank or office. It is the representative of the Sanskrit term Upadhyaya, "explained," says Eitel (p. 155) by "a self-taught teacher," or by "he who knows what is sinful and what is not sinful," with the note, "In India the vernacular of this term is {.} {.} (? munshee (? Bronze)); in Kustana and Kashgar they say {.} {.} (hwa-shay); and from the latter term are derived the Chinese synonyms, {.} {.} (ho-shay) and {.} {.} (ho-shang)." The Indian term was originally a designation for those who teach only a part of the Vedas, the Vedangas. Adopted by Buddhists of Central Asia, it was made to signify the priests of the older ritual, in distinction from the Lamas. In China it has been used first as a synonym for {.} {.}, monks engaged in popular teaching (teachers of the Law), in distinction from {.} {.}, disciplinists, and {.} {.}, contemplative philosophers (meditationists); then it was used to designate the abbots of monasteries. But it is now popularly applied to all Buddhist monks. In the text there seems to be implied some distinction between the "teachers" and the "ho-shang;"--probably, the Pali Akariya and Upagghaya; see Sacred Books of the East, vol. xiii, Vinaya Texts, pp. 178, 179. (12) It might be added, "as depending on it," in order to bring out the full meaning of the {.} in the text. If I recollect aright, the help of the police had to be called in at Hong Kong in its early years, to keep the approaches to the Cathedral free from the number of beggars, who squatted down there during service, hoping that the hearers would come out with softened hearts, and disposed to be charitable. I found the popular tutelary temples in Peking and other places, and the path up Mount T'ai in Shan-lung similarly frequented. (13) The wife of Anatha-pindika, and who became "mother superior" of many nunneries. See her history in M. B., pp. 220-227. I am surprised it does not end with the statement that she is to become a Buddha. (14) See E. H., p. 136. Hsuan-chwang does not give the name of this murderer; see in Julien's "Vie et Voyages de Hiouen-thsang," p. 125,--"a heretical Brahman killed a woman and calumniated Buddha." See also the fuller account in Beal's "Records of Western Countries," pp. 7, 8, where the murder is committed by several Brahmacharins. In this passage Beal makes Sundari to be the name of the murdered person (a harlot). But the text cannot be so construed. (15) Eitel (p. 144) calls her Chancha; in Singhalese, Chinchi. See the story about her, M. B., pp. 275-277. (16) "Earth's prison," or "one of Earth's prisons." It was the Avichi naraka to which she went, the last of the eight hot prisons, where the culprits die, and are born again in uninterrupted succession (such being the meaning of Avichi), though not without hope of final redemption. E. H. p. 21. (17) Devadatta was brother of Ananda, and a near relative therefore of Sakyamuni. He was the deadly enemy, however, of the latter. He had become so in an earlier state of existence, and the hatred continued in every successive birth, through which they reappeared in the world. See the accounts of him, and of his various devices against Buddha, and his own destruction at the last, in M. B., pp. 315-321, 326-330; and still better, in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xx, Vinaya Texts, pp. 233-265. For the particular attempt referred to in the text, see "The Life of the Buddha," p. 107. When he was engulphed, and the flames were around him, he cried out to Buddha to save him, and we are told that he is expected yet to appear as a Buddha under the name of Devaraja, in a universe called Deva-soppana. E. H., p. 39. (18) "A devalaya ({.} {.} or {.} {.}), a place in which a deva is worshipped,--a general name for all Brahmanical temples" (Eitel, p. 30). We read in the Khang-hsi dictionary under {.}, that when Kasyapa Matanga came to the Western Regions, with his Classics or Sutras, he was lodged in the Court of State-Ceremonial, and that afterwards there was built for him "The Court of the White-horse" ({.} {.} {.}), and in consequence the name of Sze {.} came to be given to all Buddhistic temples. Fa-Hsien, however, applies this term only to Brahmanical temples. (19) Their speech was somewhat unconnected, but natural enough in the circumstances. Compare the whole account with the narrative in I Samuel v. about the Ark and Dagon, that "twice-battered god of Palestine." (20) "Entered the doctrine or path." Three stages in the Buddhistic life are indicated by Fa-Hsien:--"entering it," as here, by becoming monks ({.} {.}); "getting it," by becoming Arhats ({.} {.}); and "completing it," by becoming Buddha ({.} {.}). (21) It is not quite clear whether the author had in mind here Central India as a whole, which I think he had, or only Kosala, the part of it where he then was. In the older teaching, there were only thirty-two sects, but there may have been three subdivisions of each. See Rhys Davids' "Buddhism," pp. 98, 99. (22) This mention of "the future world" is an important difference between the Corean and Chinese texts. The want of it in the latter has been a stumbling-block in the way of all previous translators. Remusat says in a note that "the heretics limited themselves to speak of the duties of man in his actual life without connecting it by the notion that the metempsychosis with the anterior periods of existence through which he had passed." But this is just the opposite of what Fa-Hsien's meaning was, according to our Corean text. The notion of "the metempsychosis" was just that in which all the ninety-six erroneous systems agreed among themselves and with Buddhism. If he had wished to say what the French sinologue thinks he does say, moreover, he would probably have written {.} {.} {.} {.} {.}. Let me add, however, that the connexion which Buddhism holds between the past world (including the present) and the future is not that of a metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, for it does not appear to admit any separate existence of the soul. Adhering to its own phraseology of "the wheel," I would call its doctrine that of "The Transrotation of Births." See Rhys Davids' third Hibbert Lecture. (23) Or, more according to the phonetisation of the text, Vaidurya. He was king of Kosala, the son and successor of Prasenajit, and the destroyer of Kapilavastu, the city of the Sakya family. His hostility to the Sakyas is sufficiently established, and it may be considered as certain that the name Shay-e, which, according to Julien's "Methode," p. 89, may be read Chia-e, is the same as Kia-e ({.} {.}), one of the phonetisations of Kapilavastu, as given by Eitel. (24) This would be the interview in the "Life of the Buddha" in Trubner's Oriental Series, p. 116, when Virudhaha on his march found Buddha under an old sakotato tree. It afforded him no shade; but he told the king that the thought of the danger of "his relatives and kindred made it shady." The king was moved to sympathy for the time, and went back to Sravasti; but the destruction of Kapilavastu was only postponed for a short space, and Buddha himself acknowledged it to be inevitable in the connexion of cause and effect. CHAPTER XXI THE THREE PREDECESSORS OF SAKYAMUNI IN THE BUDDHASHIP. Fifty le to the west of the city bring (the traveller) to a town named Too-wei,(1) the birthplace of Kasyapa Buddha.(1) At the place where he and his father met,(2) and at that where he attained to pari-nirvana, topes were erected. Over the entire relic of the whole body of him, the Kasyapa Tathagata,(3) a great tope was also erected. Going on south-east from the city of Sravasti for twelve yojanas, (the travellers) came to a town named Na-pei-kea,(4) the birthplace of Krakuchanda Buddha. At the place where he and his father met, and at that where he attained to pari-nirvana, topes were erected. Going north from here less than a yojana, they came to a town which had been the birthplace of Kanakamuni Buddha. At the place where he and his father met, and where he attained to pari-nirvana, topes were erected. NOTES (1) Identified, as Beal says, by Cunningham with Tadwa, a village nine miles to the west of Sahara-mahat. The birthplace of Kasyapa Buddha is generally thought to have been Benares. According to a calculation of Remusat, from his birth to A.D. 1832 there were 1,992,859 years! (2) It seems to be necessary to have a meeting between every Buddha and his father. One at least is ascribed to Sakyamuni and his father (real or supposed) Suddhodana. (3) This is the highest epithet given to every supreme Buddha; in Chinese {.} {.}, meaning, as Eitel, p. 147 says, "_Sic profectus sum_." It is equivalent to "Rightful Buddha, the true successor in the Supreme Buddha Line." Hardy concludes his account of the Kasyapa Buddha (M. B., p. 97) with the following sentence:--"After his body was burnt, the bones still remained in their usual position, presenting the appearance of a perfect skeleton; and the whole of the inhabitants of Jambudvipa, assembling together, erected a dagoba over his relics one yojana in height!" (4) Na-pei-kea or Nabhiga is not mentioned elsewhere. Eitel says this Buddha was born at the city of Gan-ho ({.} {.} {.}) and Hardy gives his birthplace as Mekhala. It may be possible, by means of Sanskrit, to reconcile these statements. CHAPTER XXII KAPILAVASTU. ITS DESOLATION. LEGENDS OF BUDDHA'S BIRTH, AND OTHER INCIDENTS IN CONNEXION WITH IT. Less than a yojana to the east from this brought them to the city of Kapilavastu;(1) but in it there was neither king nor people. All was mound and desolation. Of inhabitants there were only some monks and a score or two of families of the common people. At the spot where stood the old palace of king Suddhodana(2) there have been made images of the prince (his eldest son) and his mother;(3) and at the places where that son appeared mounted on a white elephant when he entered his mother's womb,(4) and where he turned his carriage round on seeing the sick man after he had gone out of the city by the eastern gate,(5) topes have been erected. The places (were also pointed out)(6) where (the rishi) A-e(7) inspected the marks (of Buddhaship on the body) of the heir-apparent (when an infant); where, when he was in company with Nanda and others, on the elephant being struck down and drawn to one side, he tossed it away;(8) where he shot an arrow to the south-east, and it went a distance of thirty le, then entering the ground and making a spring to come forth, which men subsequently fashioned into a well from which travellers might drink;(9) where, after he had attained to Wisdom, Buddha returned and saw the king, his father;(10) where five hundred Sakyas quitted their families and did reverence to Upali(11) while the earth shook and moved in six different ways; where Buddha preached his Law to the devas, and the four deva kings and others kept the four doors (of the hall), so that (even) the king, his father, could not enter;(12) where Buddha sat under a nyagrodha tree, which is still standing,(13) with his face to the east, and (his aunt) Maja-prajapati presented him with a Sanghali;(14) and (where) king Vaidurya slew the seed of Sakya, and they all in dying became Srotapannas.(15) A tope was erected at this last place, which is still existing. Several le north-east from the city was the king's field, where the heir-apparent sat under a tree, and looked at the ploughers.(16) Fifty le east from the city was a garden, named Lumbini,(17) where the queen entered the pond and bathed. Having come forth from the pond on the northern bank, after (walking) twenty paces, she lifted up her hand, laid hold of a branch of a tree, and, with her face to the east, gave birth to the heir-apparent.(18) When he fell to the ground, he (immediately) walked seven paces. Two dragon-kings (appeared) and washed his body. At the place where they did so, there was immediately formed a well, and from it, as well as from the above pond, where (the queen) bathed,(19) the monks (even) now constantly take the water, and drink it. There are four places of regular and fixed occurrence (in the history of) all Buddhas:--first, the place where they attained to perfect Wisdom (and became Buddha); second, the place where they turned the wheel of the Law;(20) third, the place where they preached the Law, discoursed of righteousness, and discomfited (the advocates of) erroneous doctrines; and fourth, the place where they came down, after going up to the Trayatrimsas heaven to preach the Law for the benefit of their mothers. Other places in connexion with them became remarkable, according to the manifestations which were made at them at particular times. The country of Kapilavastu is a great scene of empty desolation. The inhabitants are few and far between. On the roads people have to be on their guard against white elephants(21) and lions, and should not travel incautiously. NOTES (1) Kapilavastu, "the city of beautiful virtue," was the birthplace of Sakyamuni, but was destroyed, as intimated in the notes on last chapter, during his lifetime. It was situated a short distance north-west of the present Goruckpoor, lat. 26d 46s N., lon. 83d 19s E. Davids says (Manual, p. 25), "It was on the banks of the river Rohini, the modern Kohana, about 100 miles north-west of the city of Benares." (2) The father, or supposed father, of Sakyamuni. He is here called "the king white and pure" ({.} {.} {.}). A more common appellation is "the king of pure rice" ({.} {.} {.}); but the character {.}, or "rice," must be a mistake for {.}, "Brahman," and the appellation= "Pure Brahman king." (3) The "eldest son," or "prince" was Sakyamuni, and his mother had no other son. For "his mother," see chap. xvii, note 3. She was a daughter of Anjana or Anusakya, king of the neighbouring country of Koli, and Yasodhara, an aunt of Suddhodana. There appear to have been various intermarriages between the royal houses of Kapila and Koli. (4) In "The Life of the Buddha," p. 15, we read that "Buddha was now in the Tushita heaven, and knowing that his time was come (the time for his last rebirth in the course of which he would become Buddha), he made the necessary examinations; and having decided that Maha-maya was the right mother, in the midnight watch he entered her womb under the appearance of an elephant." See M. B., pp. 140-143, and, still better, Rhys Davids' "Birth Stories," pp. 58-63. (5) In Hardy's M. B., pp. 154, 155, we read, "As the prince (Siddhartha, the first name given to Sakyamuni; see Eitel, under Sarvarthasiddha) was one day passing along, he saw a deva under the appearance of a leper, full of sores, with a body like a water-vessel, and legs like the pestle for pounding rice; and when he learned from his charioteer what it was that he saw, he became agitated, and returned at once to the palace." See also Rhys Davids' "Buddhism," p. 29. (6) This is an addition of my own, instead of "There are also topes erected at the following spots," of former translators. Fa-Hsien does not say that there were memorial topes at all these places. (7) Asita; see Eitel, p. 15. He is called in Pali Kala Devala, and had been a minister of Suddhodana's father. (8) In "The Life of Buddha" we read that the Lichchhavis of Vaisali had sent to the young prince a very fine elephant; but when it was near Kapilavastu, Devadatta, out of envy, killed it with a blow of his fist. Nanda (not Ananda, but a half-brother of Siddhartha), coming that way, saw the carcase lying on the road, and pulled it on one side; but the Bodhisattva, seeing it there, took it by the tail, and tossed it over seven fences and ditches, when the force of its fall made a great ditch. I suspect that the characters in the column have been disarranged, and that we should read {.} {.} {.} {.}, {.} {.}, {.} {.}. Buddha, that is Siddhartha, was at this time only ten years old. (9) The young Sakyas were shooting when the prince thus surpassed them all. He was then seventeen. (10) This was not the night when he finally fled from Kapilavastu, and as he was leaving the palace, perceiving his sleeping father, and said, "Father, though I love thee, yet a fear possesses me, and I may not stay;"--The Life of the Buddha, p. 25. Most probably it was that related in M. B., pp. 199-204. See "Buddhist Birth Stories," pp. 120-127. (11) They did this, I suppose, to show their humility, for Upali was only a Sudra by birth, and had been a barber; so from the first did Buddhism assert its superiority to the conditions of rank and caste. Upali was distinguished by his knowledge of the rules of discipline, and praised on that account by Buddha. He was one of the three leaders of the first synod, and the principal compiler of the original Vinaya books. (12) I have not met with the particulars of this preaching. (13) Meaning, as explained in Chinese, "a tree without knots;" the _ficus Indica_. See Rhys Davids' note, Manual, p. 39, where he says that a branch of one of these trees was taken from Buddha Gaya to Anuradhapura in Ceylon in the middle of the third century B.C, and is still growing there, the oldest historical tree in the world. (14) See chap. xiii, note 11. I have not met with the account of this presentation. See the long account of Prajapati in M. B., pp. 306-315. (15) See chap. xx, note 10. The Srotapannas are the first class of saints, who are not to be reborn in a lower sphere, but attain to nirvana after having been reborn seven times consecutively as men or devas. The Chinese editions state there were "1000" of the Sakya seed. The general account is that they were 500, all maidens, who refused to take their place in king Vaidurya's harem, and were in consequence taken to a pond, and had their hands and feet cut off. There Buddha came to them, had their wounds dressed, and preached to them the Law. They died in the faith, and were reborn in the region of the four Great Kings. Thence they came back and visited Buddha at Jetavana in the night, and there they obtained the reward of Srotapanna. "The Life of the Buddha," p. 121. (16) See the account of this event in M. B., p. 150. The account of it reminds me of the ploughing by the sovereign, which has been an institution in China from the earliest times. But there we have no magic and no extravagance. (17) "The place of Liberation;" see chap. xiii, note 7. (18) See the accounts of this event in M. B., pp. 145, 146; "The Life of the Buddha," pp. 15, 16; and "Buddhist Birth Stories," p. 66. (19) There is difficulty in construing the text of this last statement. Mr. Beal had, no doubt inadvertently, omitted it in his first translation. In his revised version he gives for it, I cannot say happily, "As well as at the pool, the water of which came down from above for washing (the child)." (20) See chap. xvii, note 8. See also Davids' Manual, p. 45. The latter says, that "to turn the wheel of the Law" means "to set rolling the royal chariot wheel of a universal empire of truth and righteousness;" but he admits that this is more grandiloquent than the phraseology was in the ears of Buddhists. I prefer the words quoted from Eitel in the note referred to. "They turned" is probably equivalent to "They began to turn." (21) Fa-Hsien does not say that he himself saw any of these white elephants, nor does he speak of the lions as of any particular colour. We shall find by-and-by, in a note further on, that, to make them appear more terrible, they are spoken of as "black." CHAPTER XXIII RAMA, AND ITS TOPE. East from Buddha's birthplace, and at a distance of five yojanas, there is a kingdom called Rama.(1) The king of this country, having obtained one portion of the relics of Buddha's body,(2) returned with it and built over it a tope, named the Rama tope. By the side of it there was a pool, and in the pool a dragon, which constantly kept watch over (the tope), and presented offerings to it day and night. When king Asoka came forth into the world, he wished to destroy the eight topes (over the relics), and to build (instead of them) 84,000 topes.(3) After he had thrown down the seven (others), he wished next to destroy this tope. But then the dragon showed itself, took the king into its palace;(4) and when he had seen all the things provided for offerings, it said to him, "If you are able with your offerings to exceed these, you can destroy the tope, and take it all away. I will not contend with you." The king, however, knew that such appliances for offerings were not to be had anywhere in the world, and thereupon returned (without carrying out his purpose). (Afterwards), the ground all about became overgrown with vegetation, and there was nobody to sprinkle and sweep (about the tope); but a herd of elephants came regularly, which brought water with their trunks to water the ground, and various kinds of flowers and incense, which they presented at the tope. (Once) there came from one of the kingdoms a devotee(5) to worship at the tope. When he encountered the elephants he was greatly alarmed, and screened himself among the trees; but when he saw them go through with the offerings in the most proper manner, the thought filled him with great sadness--that there should be no monastery here, (the inmates of which) might serve the tope, but the elephants have to do the watering and sweeping. Forthwith he gave up the great prohibitions (by which he was bound),(6) and resumed the status of a Sramanera.(7) With his own hands he cleared away the grass and trees, put the place in good order, and made it pure and clean. By the power of his exhortations, he prevailed on the king of the country to form a residence for monks; and when that was done, he became head of the monastery. At the present day there are monks residing in it. This event is of recent occurrence; but in all the succession from that time till now, there has always been a Sramanera head of the establishment. NOTES (1) Rama or Ramagrama, between Kapilavastu and Kusanagara. (2) See the account of the eightfold division of the relics of Buddha's body in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xi, Buddhist Suttas, pp. 133-136. (3) The bones of the human body are supposed to consist of 84,000 atoms, and hence the legend of Asoka's wish to build 84,000 topes, one over each atom of Sakyamuni's skeleton. (4) Fa-Hsien, it appears to me, intended his readers to understand that the naga-guardian had a palace of his own, inside or underneath the pool or tank. (5) It stands out on the narrative as a whole that we have not here "some pilgrims," but one devotee. (6) What the "great prohibitions" which the devotee now gave up were we cannot tell. Being what he was, a monk of more than ordinary ascetical habits, he may have undertaken peculiar and difficult vows. (7) The Sramanera, or in Chinese Shamei. See chap. xvi, note 19. CHAPTER XXIV WHERE BUDDHA FINALLY RENOUNCED THE WORLD, AND WHERE HE DIED. East from here four yojanas, there is the place where the heir-apparent sent back Chandaka, with his white horse;(1) and there also a tope was erected. Four yojanas to the east from this, (the travellers) came to the Charcoal tope,(2) where there is also a monastery. Going on twelve yojanas, still to the east, they came to the city of Kusanagara,(3) on the north of which, between two trees,(4) on the bank of the Nairanjana(5) river, is the place where the World-honoured one, with his head to the north, attained to pari-nirvana (and died). There also are the places where Subhadra,(6) the last (of his converts), attained to Wisdom (and became an Arhat); where in his coffin of gold they made offerings to the World-honoured one for seven days,(7) where the Vajrapani laid aside his golden club,(8) and where the eight kings(9) divided the relics (of the burnt body):--at all these places were built topes and monasteries, all of which are now existing. In the city the inhabitants are few and far between, comprising only the families belonging to the (different) societies of monks. Going from this to the south-east for twelve yojanas, they came to the place where the Lichchhavis(10) wished to follow Buddha to (the place of) his pari-nirvana, and where, when he would not listen to them and they kept cleaving to him, unwilling to go away, he made to appear a large and deep ditch which they could not cross over, and gave them his alms-bowl, as a pledge of his regard, (thus) sending them back to their families. There a stone pillar was erected with an account of this event engraved upon it. NOTES (1) This was on the night when Sakyamuni finally left his palace and family to fulfil the course to which he felt that he was called. Chandaka, in Pali Channa, was the prince's charioteer, and in sympathy with him. So also was the white horse Kanthaka (Kanthakanam Asvaraja), which neighed his delight till the devas heard him. See M. B., pp. 158-161, and Davids' Manual, pp. 32, 33. According to "Buddhist Birth Stories," p. 87, the noble horse never returned to the city, but died of grief at being left by his master, to be reborn immediately in the Trayastrimsas heaven as the deva Kanthaka! (2) Beal and Giles call this the "Ashes" tope. I also would have preferred to call it so; but the Chinese character is {.}, not {.}. Remusat has "la tour des charbons." It was over the place of Buddha's cremation. (3) In Pali Kusinara. It got its name from the Kusa grass (the _poa cynosuroides_); and its ruins are still extant, near Kusiah, 180 N.W. from Patna; "about," says Davids, "120 miles N.N.E. of Benares, and 80 miles due east of Kapilavastu." (4) The Sala tree, the _Shorea robusta_, which yields the famous teak wood. (5) Confounded, according to Eitel, even by Hsuan-chwang, with the Hiranyavati, which flows past the city on the south. (6) A Brahman of Benares, said to have been 120 years old, who came to learn from Buddha the very night he died. Ananda would have repulsed him; but Buddha ordered him to be introduced; and then putting aside the ingenious but unimportant question which he propounded, preached to him the Law. The Brahman was converted and attained at once to Arhatship. Eitel says that he attained to nirvana a few moments before Sakyamuni; but see the full account of him and his conversion in "Buddhist Suttas," p. 103-110. (7) Thus treating the dead Buddha as if he had been a Chakravartti king. Hardy's M. B., p. 347, says:--"For the place of cremation, the princes (of Kusinara) offered their own coronation-hall, which was decorated with the utmost magnificence, and the body was deposited in a golden sarcophagus." See the account of a cremation which Fa-Hsien witnessed in Ceylon, chap. xxxix. (8) The name Vajrapani is explained as "he who holds in his hand the diamond club (or pestle=sceptre)," which is one of the many names of Indra or Sakra. He therefore, that great protector of Buddhism, would seem to be intended here; but the difficulty with me is that neither in Hardy nor Rockhill, nor any other writer, have I met with any manifestation of himself made by Indra on this occasion. The princes of Kusanagara were called mallas, "strong or mighty heroes;" so also were those of Pava and Vaisali; and a question arises whether the language may not refer to some story which Fa-Hsien had heard,--something which they did on this great occasion. Vajrapani is also explained as meaning "the diamond mighty hero;" but the epithet of "diamond" is not so applicable to them as to Indra. The clause may hereafter obtain more elucidation. (9) Of Kusanagara, Pava, Vaisali, and other kingdoms. Kings, princes, brahmans,--each wanted the whole relic; but they agreed to an eightfold division at the suggestion of the brahman Drona. (10) These "strong heroes" were the chiefs of Vaisali, a kingdom and city, with an oligarchical constitution. They embraced Buddhism early, and were noted for their peculiar attachment to Buddha. The second synod was held at Vaisali, as related in the next chapter. The ruins of the city still exist at Bassahar, north of Patna, the same, I suppose, as Besarh, twenty miles north of Hajipur. See Beal's Revised Version, p. lii. CHAPTER XXV VAISALI. THE TOPE CALLED "WEAPONS LAID DOWN." THE COUNCIL OF VAISALI. East from this city ten yojanas, (the travellers) came to the kingdom of Vaisali. North of the city so named is a large forest, having in it the double-galleried vihara(1) where Buddha dwelt, and the tope over half the body of Ananda.(2) Inside the city the woman Ambapali(3) built a vihara in honour of Buddha, which is now standing as it was at first. Three le south of the city, on the west of the road, (is the) garden (which) the same Ambapali presented to Buddha, in which he might reside. When Buddha was about to attain to his pari-nirvana, as he was quitting the city by the west gate, he turned round, and, beholding the city on his right, said to them, "Here I have taken my last walk."(4) Men subsequently built a tope at this spot. Three le north-west of the city there is a tope called, "Bows and weapons laid down." The reason why it got that name was this:--The inferior wife of a king, whose country lay along the river Ganges, brought forth from her womb a ball of flesh. The superior wife, jealous of the other, said, "You have brought forth a thing of evil omen," and immediately it was put into a box of wood and thrown into the river. Farther down the stream another king was walking and looking about, when he saw the wooden box (floating) in the water. (He had it brought to him), opened it, and found a thousand little boys, upright and complete, and each one different from the others. He took them and had them brought up. They grew tall and large, and very daring, and strong, crushing all opposition in every expedition which they undertook. By and by they attacked the kingdom of their real father, who became in consequence greatly distressed and sad. His inferior wife asked what it was that made him so, and he replied, "That king has a thousand sons, daring and strong beyond compare, and he wishes with them to attack my kingdom; this is what makes me sad." The wife said, "You need not be sad and sorrowful. Only make a high gallery on the wall of the city on the east; and when the thieves come, I shall be able to make them retire." The king did as she said; and when the enemies came, she said to them from the tower, "You are my sons; why are you acting so unnaturally and rebelliously?" They replied, "If you do not believe me," she said, "look, all of you, towards me, and open your mouths." She then pressed her breasts with her two hands, and each sent forth 500 jets of milk, which fell into the mouths of the thousand sons. The thieves (thus) knew that she was their mother, and laid down their bows and weapons.(5) The two kings, the fathers, thereupon fell into reflection, and both got to be Pratyeka Buddhas.(6) The tope of the two Pratyeka Buddhas is still existing. In a subsequent age, when the World-honoured one had attained to perfect Wisdom (and become Buddha), he said to is disciples, "This is the place where I in a former age laid down my bow and weapons."(7) It was thus that subsequently men got to know (the fact), and raised the tope on this spot, which in this way received its name. The thousand little boys were the thousand Buddhas of this Bhadra-kalpa.(8) It was by the side of the "Weapons-laid-down" tope that Buddha, having given up the idea of living longer, said to Ananda, "In three months from this I will attain to pavi-nirvana;" and king Mara(9) had so fascinated and stupefied Ananda, that he was not able to ask Buddha to remain longer in this world. Three or four le east from this place there is a tope (commemorating the following occurrence):--A hundred years after the pari-nirvana of Buddha, some Bhikshus of Vaisali went wrong in the matter of the disciplinary rules in ten particulars, and appealed for their justification to what they said were the words of Buddha. Hereupon the Arhats and Bhikshus observant of the rules, to the number in all of 700 monks, examined afresh and collated the collection of disciplinary books.(10) Subsequently men built at this place the tope (in question), which is still existing. NOTES (1) It is difficult to tell what was the peculiar form of this vihara from which it gets its name; something about the construction of its door, or cupboards, or galleries. (2) See the explanation of this in the next chapter. (3) Ambapali, Amrapali, or Amradarika, "the guardian of the Amra (probably the mango) tree," is famous in Buddhist annals. See the account of her in M. B., pp. 456-8. She was a courtesan. She had been in many narakas or hells, was 100,000 times a female beggar, and 10,000 times a prostitute; but maintaining perfect continence during the period of Kasyapa Buddha, Sakyamuni's predecessor, she had been born a devi, and finally appeared in earth under an Amra tree in Vaisali. There again she fell into her old ways, and had a son by king Bimbisara; but she was won over by Buddha to virtue and chastity, renounced the world, and attained to the state of an Arhat. See the earliest account of Ambapali's presentation of the garden in "Buddhist Suttas," pp. 30-33, and the note there from Bishop Bigandet on pp. 33, 34. (4) Beal gives, "In this place I have performed the last religious act of my earthly career;" Giles, "This is the last place I shall visit;" Remusat, "C'est un lieu ou je reviendrai bien longtemps apres ceci." Perhaps the "walk" to which Buddha referred had been for meditation. (5) See the account of this legend in the note in M. B., pp. 235, 236, different, but not less absurd. The first part of Fa-Hsien's narrative will have sent the thoughts of some of my readers to the exposure of the infant Moses, as related in Exodus. (Certainly did.--JB.) (6) See chap. xiii, note 14. (7) Thus Sakyamuni had been one of the thousand little boys who floated in the box in the Ganges. How long back the former age was we cannot tell. I suppose the tope of the two fathers who became Pratyeka Buddhas had been built like the one commemorating the laying down of weapons after Buddha had told his disciples of the strange events in the past. (8) Bhadra-kalpa, "the Kalpa of worthies or sages." "This," says Eitel, p. 22, "is a designation for a Kalpa of stability, so called because 1000 Buddhas appear in the course of it. Our present period is a Bhadra-kalpa, and four Buddhas have already appeared. It is to last 236 million years, but over 151 millions have already elapsed." (9) "The king of demons." The name Mara is explained by "the murderer," "the destroyer of virtue," and similar appellations. "He is," says Eitel, "the personification of lust, the god of love, sin, and death, the arch-enemy of goodness, residing in the heaven Paranirmita Vasavartin on the top of the Kamadhatu. He assumes different forms, especially monstrous ones, to tempt or frighten the saints, or sends his daughters, or inspires wicked men like Devadatta or the Nirgranthas to do his work. He is often represented with 100 arms, and riding on an elephant." The oldest form of the legend in this paragraph is in "Buddhist Suttas," Sacred Books of the East, vol. xi, pp. 41-55, where Buddha says that, if Ananda had asked him thrice, he would have postponed his death. (10) Or the Vinaya-pitaka. The meeting referred to was an important one, and is generally spoken of as the second Great Council of the Buddhist Church. See, on the formation of the Buddhist Canon, Hardy's E. M., chap. xviii, and the last chapter of Davids' Manual, on the History of the Order. The first Council was that held at Rajagriha, shortly after Buddha's death, under the presidency of Kasyapa;--say about B.C. 410. The second was that spoken of here;--say about B.C. 300. In Davids' Manual (p. 216) we find the ten points of discipline, in which the heretics (I can use that term here) claimed at least indulgence. Two meetings were held to consider and discuss them. At the former the orthodox party barely succeeded in carrying their condemnation of the laxer monks; and a second and larger meeting, of which Fa-Hsien speaks, was held in consequence, and a more emphatic condemnation passed. At the same time all the books and subjects of discipline seem to have undergone a careful revision. The Corean text is clearer than the Chinese as to those who composed the Council,--the Arhats and orthodox monks. The leader among them was a Yasas, or Yasada, or Yedsaputtra, who had been a disciple of Ananda, and must therefore have been a very old man. CHAPTER XXVI REMARKABLE DEATH OF ANANDA. Four yojanas on from this place to the east brought the travellers to the confluence of the five rivers.(1) When Ananda was going from Magadha(2) to Vaisali, wishing his pari-nirvana to take place (there), the devas informed king Ajatasatru(3) of it, and the king immediately pursued him, in his own grand carriage, with a body of soldiers, and had reached the river. (On the other hand), the Lichchhavis of Vaisali had heard that Ananda was coming (to their city), and they on their part came to meet him. (In this way), they all arrived together at the river, and Ananda considered that, if he went forward, king Ajatasatru would be very angry, while, if he went back, the Lichchhavis would resent his conduct. He thereupon in the very middle of the river burnt his body in a fiery ecstasy of Samadhi,(4) and his pari-nirvana was attained. He divided his body (also) into two, (leaving) the half of it on each bank; so that each of the two kings got one half as a (sacred) relic, and took it back (to his own capital), and there raised a tope over it. NOTES (1) This spot does not appear to have been identified. It could not be far from Patna. (2) Magadha was for some time the headquarters of Buddhism; the holy land, covered with viharas; a fact perpetuated, as has been observed in a previous note, in the name of the present Behar, the southern portion of which corresponds to the ancient kingdom of Magadha. (3) In Singhalese, Ajasat. See the account of his conversion in M. B., pp. 321-326. He was the son of king Bimbisara, who was one of the first royal converts to Buddhism. Ajasat murdered his father, or at least wrought his death; and was at first opposed to Sakyamuni, and a favourer of Devadatta. When converted, he became famous for his liberality in almsgiving. (4) Eitel has a long article (pp. 114, 115) on the meaning of Samadhi, which is one of the seven sections of wisdom (bodhyanga). Hardy defines it as meaning "perfect tranquillity;" Turnour, as "meditative abstraction;" Burnouf, as "self-control;" and Edkins, as "ecstatic reverie." "Samadhi," says Eitel, "signifies the highest pitch of abstract, ecstatic meditation; a state of absolute indifference to all influences from within or without; a state of torpor of both the material and spiritual forces of vitality; a sort of terrestrial nirvana, consistently culminating in total destruction of life." He then quotes apparently the language of the text, "He consumed his body by Agni (the fire of) Samadhi," and says it is "a common expression for the effects of such ecstatic, ultra-mystic self-annihilation." All this is simply "a darkening of counsel by words without knowledge." Some facts concerning the death of Ananda are hidden beneath the darkness of the phraseology, which it is impossible for us to ascertain. By or in Samadhi he burns his body in the very middle of the river, and then he divides the relic of the burnt body into two parts (for so evidently Fa-Hsien intended his narration to be taken), and leaves one half on each bank. The account of Ananda's death in Nien-ch'ang's "History of Buddha and the Patriarchs" is much more extravagant. Crowds of men and devas are brought together to witness it. The body is divided into four parts. One is conveyed to the Tushita heaven; a second, to the palace of a certain Naga king; a third is given to Ajatasatru; and the fourth to the Lichchhavis. What it all really means I cannot tell. CHAPTER XXVII PATALIPUTTRA OR PATNA, IN MAGADHA. KING ASOKA'S SPIRIT-BUILT PALACE AND HALLS. THE BUDDHIST BRAHMAN, RADHA-SAMI. DISPENSARIES AND HOSPITALS. Having crossed the river, and descended south for a yojana, (the travellers) came to the town of Pataliputtra,(1) in the kingdom of Magadha, the city where king Asoka(2) ruled. The royal palace and halls in the midst of the city, which exist now as of old, were all made by spirits which he employed, and which piled up the stones, reared the walls and gates, and executed the elegant carving and inlaid sculpture-work,--in a way which no human hands of this world could accomplish. King Asoka had a younger brother who had attained to be an Arhat, and resided on Gridhra-kuta(3) hill, finding his delight in solitude and quiet. The king, who sincerely reverenced him, wished and begged him (to come and live) in his family, where he could supply all his wants. The other, however, through his delight in the stillness of the mountain, was unwilling to accept the invitation, on which the king said to him, "Only accept my invitation, and I will make a hill for you inside the city." Accordingly, he provided the materials of a feast, called to him the spirits, and announced to them, "To-morrow you will all receive my invitation; but as there are no mats for you to sit on, let each one bring (his own seat)." Next day the spirits came, each one bringing with him a great rock, (like) a wall, four or five paces square, (for a seat). When their sitting was over, the king made them form a hill with the large stones piled on one another, and also at the foot of the hill, with five large square stones, to make an apartment, which might be more than thirty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and more than ten cubits high. In this city there had resided a great Brahman,(4) named Radha-sami,(5) a professor of the mahayana, of clear discernment and much wisdom, who understood everything, living by himself in spotless purity. The king of the country honoured and reverenced him, and served him as his teacher. If he went to inquire for and greet him, the king did not presume to sit down alongside of him; and if, in his love and reverence, he took hold of his hand, as soon as he let it go, the Brahman made haste to pour water on it and wash it. He might be more than fifty years old, and all the kingdom looked up to him. By means of this one man, the Law of Buddha was widely made known, and the followers of other doctrines did not find it in their power to persecute the body of monks in any way. By the side of the tope of Asoka, there has been made a mahayana monastery, very grand and beautiful; there is also a hinayana one; the two together containing six or seven hundred monks. The rules of demeanour and the scholastic arrangements(6) in them are worthy of observation. Shamans of the highest virtue from all quarters, and students, inquirers wishing to find out truth and the grounds of it, all resort to these monasteries. There also resides in this monastery a Brahman teacher, whose name also is Manjusri,(7) whom the Shamans of greatest virtue in the kingdom, and the mahayana Bhikshus honour and look up to. The cities and towns of this country are the greatest of all in the Middle Kingdom. The inhabitants are rich and prosperous, and vie with one another in the practice of benevolence and righteousness. Every year on the eighth day of the second month they celebrate a procession of images. They make a four-wheeled car, and on it erect a structure of four storeys by means of bamboos tied together. This is supported by a king-post, with poles and lances slanting from it, and is rather more than twenty cubits high, having the shape of a tope. White and silk-like cloth of hair(8) is wrapped all round it, which is then painted in various colours. They make figures of devas, with gold, silver, and lapis lazuli grandly blended and having silken streamers and canopies hung out over them. On the four sides are niches, with a Buddha seated in each, and a Bodhisattva standing in attendance on him. There may be twenty cars, all grand and imposing, but each one different from the others. On the day mentioned, the monks and laity within the borders all come together; they have singers and skilful musicians; they pay their devotion with flowers and incense. The Brahmans come and invite the Buddhas to enter the city. These do so in order, and remain two nights in it. All through the night they keep lamps burning, have skilful music, and present offerings. This is the practice in all the other kingdoms as well. The Heads of the Vaisya families in them establish in the cities houses for dispensing charity and medicines. All the poor and destitute in the country, orphans, widowers, and childless men, maimed people and cripples, and all who are diseased, go to those houses, and are provided with every kind of help, and doctors examine their diseases. They get the food and medicines which their cases require, and are made to feel at ease; and when they are better, they go away of themselves. When king Asoka destroyed the seven topes, (intending) to make eighty-four thousand,(9) the first which he made was the great tope, more than three le to the south of this city. In front of this there is a footprint of Buddha, where a vihara has been built. The door of it faces the north, and on the south of it there is a stone pillar, fourteen or fifteen cubits in circumference, and more than thirty cubits high, on which there is an inscription, saying, "Asoka gave the jambudvipa to the general body of all the monks, and then redeemed it from them with money. This he did three times."(10) North from the tope 300 or 400 paces, king Asoka built the city of Ne-le.(11) In it there is a stone pillar, which also is more than thirty feet high, with a lion on the top of it. On the pillar there is an inscription recording the things which led to the building of Ne-le, with the number of the year, the day, and the month. NOTES (1) The modern Patna, lat. 25d 28s N., lon. 85d 15s E. The Sanskrit name means "The city of flowers." It is the Indian Florence. (2) See chap. x, note 3. Asoka transferred his court from Rajagriha to Pataliputtra, and there, in the eighteenth year of his reign, he convoked the third Great Synod,--according, at least, to southern Buddhism. It must have been held a few years before B.C. 250; Eitel says in 246. (3) "The Vulture-hill;" so called because Mara, according to Buddhist tradition, once assumed the form of a vulture on it to interrupt the meditation of Ananda; or, more probably, because it was a resort of vultures. It was near Rajagriha, the earlier capital of Asoka, so that Fa-Hsien connects a legend of it with his account of Patna. It abounded in caverns, and was famous as a resort of ascetics. (4) A Brahman by cast, but a Buddhist in faith. (5) So, by the help of Julien's "Methode," I transliterate the Chinese characters {.} {.} {.} {.}. Beal gives Radhasvami, his Chinese text having a {.} between {.} and {.}. I suppose the name was Radhasvami or Radhasami. (6) {.} {.}, the names of two kinds of schools, often occurring in the Li Ki and Mencius. Why should there not have been schools in those monasteries in India as there were in China? Fa-Hsien himself grew up with other boys in a monastery, and no doubt had to "go to school." And the next sentence shows us there might be schools for more advanced students as well as for the Sramaneras. (7) See chap. xvi, note 22. It is perhaps with reference to the famous Bodhisattva that the Brahman here is said to be "also" named Manjusri. (8) ? Cashmere cloth. (9) See chap. xxiii, note 3. (10) We wish that we had more particulars of this great transaction, and that we knew what value in money Asoka set on the whole world. It is to be observed that he gave it to the monks, and did not receive it from them. Their right was from him, and he bought it back. He was the only "Power" that was. (11) We know nothing more of Ne-le. It could only have been a small place; an outpost for the defence of Pataliputtra. CHAPTER XXVIII RAJAGRIHA, NEW AND OLD. LEGENDS AND INCIDENTS CONNECTED WITH IT. (The travellers) went on from this to the south-east for nine yojanas, and came to a small solitary rocky hill,(1) at the head or end of which(2) was an apartment of stone, facing the south,--the place where Buddha sat, when Sakra, Ruler of Devas, brought the deva-musician, Pancha-(sikha),(3) to give pleasure to him by playing on his lute. Sakra then asked Buddha about forty-two subjects, tracing (the questions) out with his finger one by one on the rock.(4) The prints of his tracing are still there; and here also there is a monastery. A yojana south-west from this place brought them to the village of Nala,(5) where Sariputtra(6) was born, and to which also he returned, and attained here his pari-nirvana. Over the spot (where his body was burned) there was built a tope, which is still in existence. Another yojana to the west brought them to New Rajagriha,(7)--the new city which was built by king Ajatasatru. There were two monasteries in it. Three hundred paces outside the west gate, king Ajatasatru, having obtained one portion of the relics of Buddha, built (over them) a tope, high, large, grand, and beautiful. Leaving the city by the south gate, and proceeding south four le, one enters a valley, and comes to a circular space formed by five hills, which stand all round it, and have the appearance of the suburban wall of a city. Here was the old city of king Bimbisara; from east to west about five or six le, and from north to south seven or eight. It was here that Sariputtra and Maudgalyayana first saw Upasena;(8) that the Nirgrantha(9) made a pit of fire and poisoned the rice, and then invited Buddha (to eat with him); that king Ajatasatru made a black elephant intoxicated with liquor, wishing him to injure Buddha;(10) and that at the north-east corner of the city in a (large) curving (space) Jivaka built a vihara in the garden of Ambapali,(11) and invited Buddha with his 1250 disciples to it, that he might there make his offerings to support them. (These places) are still there as of old, but inside the city all is emptiness and desolation; no man dwells in it. NOTES (1) Called by Hsuan-chwang Indra-sila-guha, or "The cavern of Indra." It has been identified with a hill near the village of Giryek, on the bank of the Panchana river, about thirty-six miles from Gaya. The hill terminates in two peaks overhanging the river, and it is the more northern and higher of these which Fa-Hsien had in mind. It bears an oblong terrace covered with the ruins of several buildings, especially of a vihara. (2) This does not mean the top or summit of the hill, but its "headland," where it ended at the river. (3) See the account of this visit of Sakra in M. B., pp. 288-290. It is from Hardy that we are able to complete here the name of the musician, which appears in Fa-Hsien as only Pancha, or "Five." His harp or lute, we are told, was "twelve miles long." (4) Hardy (M. B., pp. 288, 289) makes the subjects only thirteen, which are still to be found in one of the Sutras ("the Dik-Sanga, in the Sakra-prasna Sutra"). Whether it was Sakra who wrote his questions, or Buddha who wrote the answers, depends on the punctuation. It seems better to make Sakra the writer. (5) Or Nalanda; identified with the present Baragong. A grand monastery was subsequently built at it, famous by the residence for five years of Hsuan-chwang. (6) See chap. xvi, note 11. There is some doubt as to the statement that Nala was his birthplace. (7) The city of "Royal Palaces;" "the residence of the Magadha kings from Bimbisara to Asoka, the first metropolis of Buddhism, at the foot of the Gridhrakuta mountains. Here the first synod assembled within a year after Sakyamuni's death. Its ruins are still extant at the village of Rajghir, sixteen miles S.W. of Behar, and form an object of pilgrimage to the Jains (E. H., p. 100)." It is called New Rajagriha to distinguish it from Kusagarapura, a few miles from it, the old residence of the kings. Eitel says it was built by Bimbisara, while Fa-Hsien ascribes it to Ajatasatru. I suppose the son finished what the father had begun. (8) One of the five first followers of Sakyamuni. He is also called Asvajit; in Pali Assaji; but Asvajit seems to be a military title= "Master or trainer of horses." The two more famous disciples met him, not to lead him, but to be directed by him, to Buddha. See Sacred Books of the East, vol. xiii, Vinaya Texts, pp. 144-147. (9) One of the six Tirthyas (Tirthakas="erroneous teachers;" M. B., pp. 290-292, but I have not found the particulars of the attempts on Buddha's life referred to by Fa-Hsien), or Brahmanical opponents of Buddha. He was an ascetic, one of the Jnati clan, and is therefore called Nirgranthajnati. He taught a system of fatalism, condemned the use of clothes, and thought he could subdue all passions by fasting. He had a body of followers, who called themselves by his name (Eitel, pp. 84, 85), and were the forerunners of the Jains. (10) The king was moved to this by Devadatta. Of course the elephant disappointed them, and did homage to Sakyamuni. See Sacred Books of the East, vol. xx, Vinaya Texts, p. 247. (11) See chap. xxv, note 3. Jivaka was Ambapali's son by king Bimbisara, and devoted himself to the practice of medicine. See the account of him in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xvii, Vinaya Texts, pp. 171-194. CHAPTER XXIX GRIDHRA-KUTA HILL, AND LEGENDS. FA-HIEN PASSES A NIGHT ON IT. HIS REFLECTIONS. Entering the valley, and keeping along the mountains on the south-east, after ascending fifteen le, (the travellers) came to mount Gridhra-kuta.(1) Three le before you reach the top, there is a cavern in the rocks, facing the south, in which Buddha sat in meditation. Thirty paces to the north-west there is another, where Ananda was sitting in meditation, when the deva Mara Pisuna,(2) having assumed the form of a large vulture, took his place in front of the cavern, and frightened the disciple. Then Buddha, by his mysterious, supernatural power, made a cleft in the rock, introduced his hand, and stroked Ananda's shoulder, so that his fear immediately passed away. The footprints of the bird and the cleft for (Buddha's) hand are still there, and hence comes the name of "The Hill of the Vulture Cavern." In front of the cavern there are the places where the four Buddhas sat. There are caverns also of the Arhats, one where each sat and meditated, amounting to several hundred in all. At the place where in front of his rocky apartment Buddha was walking from east to west (in meditation), and Devadatta, from among the beetling cliffs on the north of the mountain, threw a rock across, and hurt Buddha's toes,(3) the rock is still there.(4) The hall where Buddha preached his Law has been destroyed, and only the foundations of the brick walls remain. On this hill the peak is beautifully green, and rises grandly up; it is the highest of all the five hills. In the New City Fa-Hsien bought incense-(sticks), flowers, oil and lamps, and hired two bhikshus, long resident (at the place), to carry them (to the peak). When he himself got to it, he made his offerings with the flowers and incense, and lighted the lamps when the darkness began to come on. He felt melancholy, but restrained his tears and said, "Here Buddha delivered the Surangama (Sutra).(5) I, Fa-Hsien, was born when I could not meet with Buddha; and now I only see the footprints which he has left, and the place where he lived, and nothing more." With this, in front of the rock cavern, he chanted the Surangama Sutra, remained there over the night, and then returned towards the New City.(6) NOTES (1) See chap. xxviii, note 1. (2) See chap. xxv, note 9. Pisuna is a name given to Mara, and signifies "sinful lust." (3) See M. B., p. 320. Hardy says that Devadatta's attempt was "by the help of a machine;" but the oldest account in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xx, Vinaya Texts, p. 245, agrees with what Fa-Hsien implies that he threw the rock with his own arm. (4) And, as described by Hsuan-chwang, fourteen or fifteen cubits high, and thirty paces round. (5) See Mr. Bunyiu Nanjio's "Catalogue of the Chinese Translation of the Buddhist Tripitaka," Sutra Pitaka, Nos. 399, 446. It was the former of these that came on this occasion to the thoughts and memory of Fa-Hsien. (6) In a note (p. lx) to his revised version of our author, Mr. Beal says, "There is a full account of this perilous visit of Fa-Hsien, and how he was attacked by tigers, in the 'History of the High Priests.'" But "the high priests" merely means distinguished monks, "eminent monks," as Mr. Nanjio exactly renders the adjectival character. Nor was Fa-Hsien "attacked by tigers" on the peak. No "tigers" appear in the Memoir. "Two black lions" indeed crouched before him for a time this night, "licking their lips and waving their tails;" but their appearance was to "try," and not to attack him; and when they saw him resolute, they "drooped their heads, put down their tails, and prostrated themselves before him." This of course is not an historical account, but a legendary tribute to his bold perseverance. CHAPTER XXX THE SRATAPARNA CAVE, OR CAVE OF THE FIRST COUNCIL. LEGENDS. SUICIDE OF A BHIKSHU. Out from the old city, after walking over 300 paces, on the west of the road, (the travellers) found the Karanda Bamboo garden,(1) where the (old) vihara is still in existence, with a company of monks, who keep (the ground about it) swept and watered. North of the vihara two or three le there was the Smasanam, which name means in Chinese "the field of graves into which the dead are thrown."(2) As they kept along the mountain on the south, and went west for 300 paces, they found a dwelling among the rocks, named the Pippala cave,(3) in which Buddha regularly sat in meditation after taking his (midday) meal. Going on still to the west for five or six le, on the north of the hill, in the shade, they found the cavern called Srataparna,(4) the place where, after the nirvana(5) of Buddha, 500 Arhats collected the Sutras. When they brought the Sutras forth, three lofty seats(6) had been prepared and grandly ornamented. Sariputtra occupied the one on the left, and Maudgalyayana that on the right. Of the number of five hundred one was wanting. Mahakasyapa was president (on the middle seat). Ananda was then outside the door, and could not get in.(7) At the place there was (subsequently) raised a tope, which is still existing. Along (the sides of) the hill, there are also a very great many cells among the rocks, where the various Arhans sat and meditated. As you leave the old city on the north, and go down east for three le, there is the rock dwelling of Devadatta, and at a distance of fifty paces from it there is a large, square, black rock. Formerly there was a bhikshu, who, as he walked backwards and forwards upon it, thought with himself:--"This body(8) is impermanent, a thing of bitterness and vanity,(9) and which cannot be looked on as pure.(10) I am weary of this body, and troubled by it as an evil." With this he grasped a knife, and was about to kill himself. But he thought again:--"The World-honoured one laid down a prohibition against one's killing himself."(11) Further it occurred to him:--"Yes, he did; but I now only wish to kill three poisonous thieves."(12) Immediately with the knife he cut his throat. With the first gash into the flesh he attained the state of a Srotapanna;(13) when he had gone half through, he attained to be an Anagamin;(14) and when he had cut right through, he was an Arhat, and attained to pari-nirvana;(15) (and died). NOTES (1) Karanda Venuvana; a park presented to Buddha by king Bimbisara, who also built a vihara in it. See the account of the transaction in M. B., p. 194. The place was called Karanda, from a creature so named, which awoke the king just as a snake was about to bite him, and thus saved his life. In Hardy the creature appears as a squirrel, but Eitel says that the Karanda is a bird of sweet voice, resembling a magpie, but herding in flocks; the _cuculus melanoleucus_. See "Buddhist Birth Stories," p. 118. (2) The language here is rather contemptuous, as if our author had no sympathy with any other mode of disposing of the dead, but by his own Buddhistic method of cremation. (3) The Chinese characters used for the name of this cavern serve also to name the pippala (peepul) tree, the _ficus religiosa_. They make us think that there was such a tree overshadowing the cave; but Fa-Hsien would hardly have neglected to mention such a circumstance. (4) A very great place in the annals of Buddhism. The Council in the Srataparna cave did not come together fortuitously, but appears to have been convoked by the older members to settle the rules and doctrines of the order. The cave was prepared for the occasion by king Ajatasatru. From the expression about the "bringing forth of the King," it would seem that the Sutras or some of them had been already committed to writing. May not the meaning of King {.} here be extended to the Vinaya rules, as well as the Sutras, and mean "the standards" of the system generally? See Davids' Manual, chapter ix, and Sacred Books of the East, vol. xx, Vinaya Texts, pp. 370-385. (5) So in the text, evidently for pari-nirvana. (6) Instead of "high" seats, the Chinese texts have "vacant." The character for "prepared" denotes "spread;"--they were carpeted; perhaps, both cushioned and carpeted, being rugs spread on the ground, raised higher than the other places for seats. (7) Did they not contrive to let him in, with some cachinnation, even in so august an assembly, that so important a member should have been shut out? (8) "The life of this body" would, I think, fairly express the idea of the bhikshu. (9) See the account of Buddha's preaching in chapter xviii. (10) The sentiment of this clause is not easily caught. (11) See E. M., p. 152:--"Buddha made a law forbidding the monks to commit suicide. He prohibited any one from discoursing on the miseries of life in such a manner as to cause desperation." See also M. B., pp. 464, 465. (12) Beal says:--"Evil desire; hatred; ignorance." (13) See chap. xx, note 10. (14) The Anagamin belong to the third degree of Buddhistic saintship, the third class of Aryas, who are no more liable to be reborn as men, but are to be born once more as devas, when they will forthwith become Arhats, and attain to nirvana. E. H., pp. 8, 9. (15) Our author expresses no opinion of his own on the act of this bhikshu. Must it not have been a good act, when it was attended, in the very act of performance, by such blessed consequences? But if Buddhism had not something better to show than what appears here, it would not attract the interest which it now does. The bhikshu was evidently rather out of his mind; and the verdict of a coroner's inquest of this nineteenth century would have pronounced that he killed himself "in a fit of insanity." CHAPTER XXXI GAYA. SAKYAMUNI'S ATTAINING TO THE BUDDHASHIP; AND OTHER LEGENDS. From this place, after travelling to the west for four yojanas, (the pilgrims) came to the city of Gaya;(1) but inside the city all was emptiness and desolation. Going on again to the south for twenty le, they arrived at the place where the Bodhisattva for six years practised with himself painful austerities. All around was forest. Three le west from here they came to the place where, when Buddha had gone into the water to bathe, a deva bent down the branch of a tree, by means of which he succeeded in getting out of the pool.(2) Two le north from this was the place where the Gramika girls presented to Buddha the rice-gruel made with milk;(3) and two le north from this (again) was the place where, seated on a rock under a great tree, and facing the east, he ate (the gruel). The tree and the rock are there at the present day. The rock may be six cubits in breadth and length, and rather more than two cubits in height. In Central India the cold and heat are so equally tempered that trees will live in it for several thousand and even for ten thousand years. Half a yojana from this place to the north-east there was a cavern in the rocks, into which the Bodhisattva entered, and sat cross-legged with his face to the west. (As he did so), he said to himself, "If I am to attain to perfect wisdom (and become Buddha), let there be a supernatural attestation of it." On the wall of the rock there appeared immediately the shadow of a Buddha, rather more than three feet in length, which is still bright at the present day. At this moment heaven and earth were greatly moved, and devas in the air spoke plainly, "This is not the place where any Buddha of the past, or he that is to come, has attained, or will attain, to perfect Wisdom. Less than half a yojana from this to the south-west will bring you to the patra(4) tree, where all past Buddhas have attained, and all to come must attain, to perfect Wisdom." When they had spoken these words, they immediately led the way forwards to the place, singing as they did so. As they thus went away, the Bodhisattva arose and walked (after them). At a distance of thirty paces from the tree, a deva gave him the grass of lucky omen,(5) which he received and went on. After (he had proceeded) fifteen paces, 500 green birds came flying towards him, went round him thrice, and disappeared. The Bodhisattva went forward to the patra tree, placed the kusa grass at the foot of it, and sat down with his face to the east. Then king Mara sent three beautiful young ladies, who came from the north, to tempt him, while he himself came from the south to do the same. The Bodhisattva put his toes down on the ground, and the demon soldiers retired and dispersed, and the three young ladies were changed into old (grand-)mothers.(6) At the place mentioned above of the six years' painful austerities, and at all these other places, men subsequently reared topes and set up images, which all exist at the present day. Where Buddha, after attaining to perfect wisdom, for seven days contemplated the tree, and experienced the joy of vimukti;(7) where, under the patra tree, he walked backwards and forwards from west to east for seven days; where the devas made a hall appear, composed of the seven precious substances, and presented offerings to him for seven days; where the blind dragon Muchilinda(8) encircled him for seven days; where he sat under the nyagrodha tree, on a square rock, with his face to the east, and Brahma-deva(9) came and made his request to him; where the four deva kings brought to him their alms-bowls;(10) where the 500 merchants(11) presented to him the roasted flour and honey; and where he converted the brothers Kasyapa and their thousand disciples;(12)--at all these places topes were reared. At the place where Buddha attained to perfect Wisdom, there are three monasteries, in all of which there are monks residing. The families of their people around supply the societies of these monks with an abundant sufficiency of what they require, so that there is no lack or stint.(13) The disciplinary rules are strictly observed by them. The laws regulating their demeanour in sitting, rising, and entering when the others are assembled, are those which have been practised by all the saints since Buddha was in the world down to the present day. The places of the four great topes have been fixed, and handed down without break, since Buddha attained to nirvana. Those four great topes are those at the places where Buddha was born; where he attained to Wisdom; where he (began to) move the wheel of his Law; and where he attained to pari-nirvana. NOTES (1) Gaya, a city of Magadha, was north-west of the present Gayah (lat. 24d 47s N., lon. 85d 1s E). It was here that Sakyamuni lived for seven years, after quitting his family, until he attained to Buddhaship. The place is still frequented by pilgrims. E. H., p. 41. (2) This is told so as to make us think that he was in danger of being drowned; but this does not appear in the only other account of the incident I have met with,--in "The Life of the Buddha," p. 31. And he was not yet Buddha, though he is here called so; unless indeed the narrative is confused, and the incidents do not follow in the order of time. (3) An incident similar to this is told, with many additions, in Hardy's M. B., pp. 166-168; "The Life of the Buddha," p. 30; and the "Buddhist Birth Stories," pp. 91, 92; but the name of the ministering girl or girls is different. I take Gramika from a note in Beal's revised version; it seems to me a happy solution of the difficulty caused by the {.} {.} of Fa-Hsien. (4) Called "the tree of leaves," and "the tree of reflection;" a palm tree, the _borassus flabellifera_, described as a tree which never loses its leaves. It is often confounded with the pippala. E. H., p. 92. (5) The kusa grass, mentioned in a previous note. (6) See the account of this contest with Mara in M. B., pp. 171-179, and "Buddhist Birth Stories," pp. 96-101. (7) See chap. xiii, note 7. (8) Called also Maha, or the Great Muchilinda. Eitel says: "A naga king, the tutelary deity of a lake near which Sakyamuni once sat for seven days absorbed in meditation, whilst the king guarded him." The account (p. 35) in "The Life of the Buddha" is:--"Buddha went to where lived the naga king Muchilinda, and he, wishing to preserve him from the sun and rain, wrapped his body seven times round him, and spread out his hood over his head; and there he remained seven days in thought." So also the Nidana Katha, in "Buddhist Birth Stories," p. 109. (9) This was Brahma himself, though "king" is omitted. What he requested of the Buddha was that he would begin the preaching of his Law. Nidana Katha, p. 111. (10) See chap. xii, note 10. (11) The other accounts mention only two; but in M. B., p. 182, and the Nidana Katha, p. 110, these two have 500 well-laden waggons with them. (12) These must not be confounded with Mahakasyapa of chap. xvi, note 17. They were three brothers, Uruvilva, Gaya, and Nadi-Kasyapa, up to this time holders of "erroneous" views, having 500, 300, and 200 disciples respectively. They became distinguished followers of Sakyamuni; and are--each of them--to become Buddha by-and-by. See the Nidana Katha, pp. 114, 115. (13) This seems to be the meaning; but I do not wonder that some understand the sentence of the benevolence of the monkish population to the travellers. CHAPTER XXXII LEGEND OF KING ASOKA IN A FORMER BIRTH, AND HIS NARAKA. When king Asoka, in a former birth,(1) was a little boy and played on the road, he met Kasyapa Buddha walking. (The stranger) begged food, and the boy pleasantly took a handful of earth and gave it to him. The Buddha took the earth, and returned it to the ground on which he was walking; but because of this (the boy) received the recompense of becoming a king of the iron wheel,(2) to rule over Jambudvipa. (Once) when he was making a judicial tour of inspection through Jambudvipa, he saw, between the iron circuit of the two hills, a naraka(3) for the punishment of wicked men. Having thereupon asked his ministers what sort of a thing it was, they replied, "It belongs to Yama,(4) king of demons, for punishing wicked people." The king thought within himself:--"(Even) the king of demons is able to make a naraka in which to deal with wicked men; why should not I, who am the lord of men, make a naraka in which to deal with wicked men?" He forthwith asked his ministers who could make for him a naraka and preside over the punishment of wicked people in it. They replied that it was only a man of extreme wickedness who could make it; and the king thereupon sent officers to seek everywhere for (such) a bad man; and they saw by the side of a pond a man tall and strong, with a black countenance, yellow hair, and green eyes, hooking up the fish with his feet, while he called to him birds and beasts, and, when they came, then shot and killed them, so that not one escaped. Having got this man, they took him to the king, who secretly charged him, "You must make a square enclosure with high walls. Plant in it all kinds of flowers and fruits; make good ponds in it for bathing; make it grand and imposing in every way, so that men shall look to it with thirsting desire; make its gates strong and sure; and when any one enters, instantly seize him and punish him as a sinner, not allowing him to get out. Even if I should enter, punish me as a sinner in the same way, and do not let me go. I now appoint you master of that naraka." Soon after this a bhikshu, pursuing his regular course of begging his food, entered the gate (of the place). When the lictors of the naraka saw him, they were about to subject him to their tortures; but he, frightened, begged them to allow him a moment in which to eat his midday meal. Immediately after, there came in another man, whom they thrust into a mortar and pounded till a red froth overflowed. As the bhikshu looked on, there came to him the thought of the impermanence, the painful suffering and insanity of this body, and how it is but as a bubble and as foam; and instantly he attained to Arhatship. Immediately after, the lictors seized him, and threw him into a caldron of boiling water. There was a look of joyful satisfaction, however, in the bhikshu's countenance. The fire was extinguished, and the water became cold. In the middle (of the caldron) there rose up a lotus flower, with the bhikshu seated on it. The lictors at once went and reported to the king that there was a marvellous occurrence in the naraka, and wished him to go and see it; but the king said, "I formerly made such an agreement that now I dare not go (to the place)." The lictors said, "This is not a small matter. Your majesty ought to go quickly. Let your former agreement be altered." The king thereupon followed them, and entered (the naraka), when the bhikshu preached the Law to him, and he believed, and was made free.(5) Forthwith he demolished the naraka, and repented of all the evil which he had formerly done. From this time he believed in and honoured the Three Precious Ones, and constantly went to a patra tree, repenting under it, with self-reproach, of his errors, and accepting the eight rules of abstinence.(6) The queen asked where the king was constantly going to, and the ministers replied that he was constantly to be seen under (such and such) a patra tree. She watched for a time when the king was not there, and then sent men to cut the tree down. When the king came, and saw what had been done, he swooned away with sorrow, and fell to the ground. His ministers sprinkled water on his face, and after a considerable time he revived. He then built all round (the stump) with bricks, and poured a hundred pitchers of cows' milk on the roots; and as he lay with his four limbs spread out on the ground, he took this oath, "If the tree do not live, I will never rise from this." When he had uttered this oath, the tree immediately began to grow from the roots, and it has continued to grow till now, when it is nearly 100 cubits in height. NOTES (1) Here is an instance of {.} used, as was pointed out in chap. ix, note 3, for a former age; and not merely a former time. Perhaps "a former birth" is the best translation. The Corean reading of Kasyapa Buddha is certainly preferable to the Chinese "Sakya Buddha." (2) See chap. xvii, note 8. (3) I prefer to retain the Sanskrit term here, instead of translating the Chinese text by "Earth's prison {.} {.}," or "a prison in the earth;" the name for which has been adopted generally by Christian missionaries in China for gehenna and hell. (4) Eitel (p. 173) says:--"Yama was originally the Aryan god of the dead, living in a heaven above the world, the regent of the south; but Brahmanism transferred his abode to hell. Both views have been retained by Buddhism." The Yama of the text is the "regent of the narakas, residing south of Jambudvipa, outside the Chakravalas (the double circuit of mountains above), in a palace built of brass and iron. He has a sister who controls all the female culprits, as he exclusively deals with the male sex. Three times, however, in every twenty-four hours, a demon pours boiling copper into Yama's mouth, and squeezes it down his throat, causing him unspeakable pain." Such, however, is the wonderful "transrotation of births," that when Yama's sins have been expiated, he is to be reborn as Buddha, under the name of "The Universal King." (5) Or, "was loosed;" from the bonds, I suppose, of his various illusions. (6) I have not met with this particular numerical category. CHAPTER XXXIII MOUNT GURUPADA, WHERE KASYAPA BUDDHA'S ENTIRE SKELETON IS. (The travellers), going on from this three le to the south, came to a mountain named Gurupada,(1) inside which Mahakasyapa even now is. He made a cleft, and went down into it, though the place where he entered would not (now) admit a man. Having gone down very far, there was a hole on one side, and there the complete body of Kasyapa (still) abides. Outside the hole (at which he entered) is the earth with which he had washed his hands.(2) If the people living thereabouts have a sore on their heads, they plaster on it some of the earth from this, and feel immediately easier.(3) On this mountain, now as of old, there are Arhats abiding. Devotees of our Law from the various countries in that quarter go year by year to the mountain, and present offerings to Kasyapa; and to those whose hearts are strong in faith there come Arhats at night, and talk with them, discussing and explaining their doubts, and disappearing suddenly afterwards. On this hill hazels grow luxuriously; and there are many lions, tigers, and wolves, so that people should not travel incautiously. NOTES (1) "Fowl's-foot hill," "with three peaks, resembling the foot of a chicken. It lies seven miles south-east of Gaya, and was the residence of Mahakasyapa, who is said to be still living inside this mountain." So Eitel says, p. 58; but this chapter does not say that Kasyapa is in the mountain alive, but that his body entire is in a recess or hole in it. Hardy (M. B., p. 97) says that after Kasyapa Buddha's body was burnt, the bones still remained in their usual position, presenting the appearance of a perfect skeleton. It is of him that the chapter speaks, and not of the famous disciple of Sakyamuni, who also is called Mahakasyapa. This will appear also on a comparison of Eitel's articles on "Mahakasyapa" and "Kasyapa Buddha." (2) Was it a custom to wash the hands with "earth," as is often done with sand? (3) This I conceive to be the meaning here. CHAPTER XXXIV ON THE WAY BACK TO PATNA. VARANASI, OR BENARES. SAKYAMUNI'S FIRST DOINGS AFTER BECOMING BUDDHA. Fa-Hsien(1) returned (from here) towards Pataliputtra,(2) keeping along the course of the Ganges and descending in the direction of the west. After going ten yojanas he found a vihara, named "The Wilderness,"--a place where Buddha had dwelt, and where there are monks now. Pursuing the same course, and going still to the west, he arrived, after twelve yojanas, at the city of Varanasi(3) in the kingdom of Kasi. Rather more than ten le to the north-east of the city, he found the vihara in the park of "The rishi's Deer-wild."(4) In this park there formerly resided a Pratyeka Buddha,(5) with whom the deer were regularly in the habit of stopping for the night. When the World-honoured one was about to attain to perfect Wisdom, the devas sang in the sky, "The son of king Suddhodana, having quitted his family and studied the Path (of Wisdom),(6) will now in seven days become Buddha." The Pratyeka Buddha heard their words, and immediately attained to nirvana; and hence this place was named "The Park of the rishi's Deer-wild."(7) After the World-honoured one had attained to perfect Wisdom, men build the vihara in it. Buddha wished to convert Kaundinya(8) and his four companions; but they, (being aware of his intention), said to one another, "This Sramana Gotama(9) for six years continued in the practice of painful austerities, eating daily (only) a single hemp-seed, and one grain of rice, without attaining to the Path (of Wisdom); how much less will he do so now that he has entered (again) among men, and is giving the reins to (the indulgence of) his body, his speech, and his thoughts! What has he to do with the Path (of Wisdom)? To-day, when he comes to us, let us be on our guard not to speak with him." At the places where the five men all rose up, and respectfully saluted (Buddha), when he came to them; where, sixty paces north from this, he sat with his face to the east, and first turned the wheel of the Law, converting Kaundinya and the four others; where, twenty paces further to the north, he delivered his prophecy concerning Maitreya;(10) and where, at a distance of fifty paces to the south, the dragon Elapattra(11) asked him, "When shall I get free from this naga body?"--at all these places topes were reared, and are still existing. In (the park) there are two monasteries, in both of which there are monks residing. When you go north-west from the vihara of the Deer-wild park for thirteen yojanas, there is a kingdom named Kausambi.(12) Its vihara is named Ghochiravana(13)--a place where Buddha formerly resided. Now, as of old, there is a company of monks there, most of whom are students of the hinayana. East from (this), when you have travelled eight yojanas, is the place where Buddha converted(14) the evil demon. There, and where he walked (in meditation) and sat at the place which was his regular abode, there have been topes erected. There is also a monastery, which may contain more than a hundred monks. NOTES (1) Fa-Hsien is here mentioned singly, as in the account of his visit to the cave on Gridhra-kuta. I think that Tao-ching may have remained at Patna after their first visit to it. (2) See chap. xxvii, note 1. (3) "The city surrounded by rivers;" the modern Benares, lat. 25d 23s N., lon. 83d 5s E. (4) "The rishi," says Eitel, "is a man whose bodily frame has undergone a certain transformation by dint of meditation and ascetism, so that he is, for an indefinite period, exempt from decrepitude, age, and death. As this period is believed to extend far beyond the usual duration of human life, such persons are called, and popularly believed to be, immortals." Rishis are divided into various classes; and rishi-ism is spoken of as a seventh part of transrotation, and rishis are referred to as the seventh class of sentient beings. Taoism, as well as Buddhism, has its Seen jin. (5) See chap. xiii, note 15. (6) See chap. xxii, note 2. (7) For another legend about this park, and the identification of "a fine wood" still existing, see note in Beal's first version, p. 135. (8) A prince of Magadha and a maternal uncle of Sakyamuni, who gave him the name of Ajnata, meaning automat; and hence he often appears as Ajnata Kaundinya. He and his four friends had followed Sakyamuni into the Uruvilva desert, sympathising with him in the austerities he endured, and hoping that they would issue in his Buddhaship. They were not aware that that issue had come; which may show us that all the accounts in the thirty-first chapter are merely descriptions, by means of external imagery, of what had taken place internally. The kingdom of nirvana had come without observation. These friends knew it not; and they were offended by what they considered Sakyamuni's failure, and the course he was now pursuing. See the account of their conversion in M. B., p. 186. (9) This is the only instance in Fa-Hsien's text where the Bodhisattva or Buddha is called by the surname "Gotama." For the most part our traveller uses Buddha as a proper name, though it properly means "The Enlightened." He uses also the combinations "Sakya Buddha,"="The Buddha of the Sakya tribe," and "Sakyamuni,"="The Sakya sage." This last is the most common designation of the Buddha in China, and to my mind best combines the characteristics of a descriptive and a proper name. Among other Buddhistic peoples "Gotama" and "Gotama Buddha" are the more frequent designations. It is not easy to account for the rise of the surname Gotama in the Sakya family, as Oldenberg acknowledges. He says that "the Sakyas, in accordance with the custom of Indian noble families, had borrowed it from one of the ancient Vedic bard families." Dr. Davids ("Buddhism," p. 27) says: "The family name was certainly Gautama," adding in a note, "It is a curious fact that Gautama is still the family name of the Rajput chiefs of Nagara, the village which has been identified with Kapilavastu." Dr. Eitel says that "Gautama was the sacerdotal name of the Sakya family, which counted the ancient rishi Gautama among its ancestors." When we proceed, however, to endeavour to trace the connexion of that Brahmanical rishi with the Sakya house, by means of 1323, 1468, 1469, and other historical works in Nanjio's Catalogue, we soon find that Indian histories have no surer foundation than the shifting sand;--see E. H., on the name Sakya, pp. 108, 109. We must be content for the present simply to accept Gotama as one of the surnames of the Buddha with whom we have to do. (10) See chap. vi, note 5. It is there said that the prediction of Maitreya's succession to the Buddhaship was made to him in the Tushita heaven. Was there a repetition of it here in the Deer-park, or was a prediction now given concerning something else? (11) Nothing seems to be known of this naga but what we read here. (12) Identified by some with Kusia, near Kurrah (lat. 25d 41s N., lon. 81d 27s E.); by others with Kosam on the Jumna, thirty miles above Allahabad. See E. H., p. 55. (13) Ghochira was the name of a Vaisya elder, or head, who presented a garden and vihara to Buddha. Hardy (M. B., p. 356) quotes a statement from a Singhalese authority that Sakyamuni resided here during the ninth year of his Buddhaship. (14) Dr. Davids thinks this may refer to the striking and beautiful story of the conversion of the Yakkha Alavaka, as related in the Uragavagga, Alavakasutta, pp. 29-31 (Sacred Books of the East, vol. x, part ii). CHAPTER XXXV DAKSHINA, AND THE PIGEON MONASTERY. South from this 200 yojanas, there is a country named Dakshina,(1) where there is a monastery (dedicated to) the bygone Kasyapa Buddha, and which has been hewn out from a large hill of rock. It consists in all of five storeys;--the lowest, having the form of an elephant, with 500 apartments in the rock; the second, having the form of a lion, with 400 apartments; the third, having the form of a horse, with 300 apartments; the fourth, having the form of an ox, with 200 apartments; and the fifth, having the form of a pigeon, with 100 apartments. At the very top there is a spring, the water of which, always in front of the apartments in the rock, goes round among the rooms, now circling, now curving, till in this way it arrives at the lowest storey, having followed the shape of the structure, and flows out there at the door. Everywhere in the apartments of the monks, the rock has been pierced so as to form windows for the admission of light, so that they are all bright, without any being left in darkness. At the four corners of the (tiers of) apartments, the rock has been hewn so as to form steps for ascending to the top (of each). The men of the present day, being of small size, and going up step by step, manage to get to the top; but in a former age, they did so at one step.(2) Because of this, the monastery is called Paravata, that being the Indian name for a pigeon. There are always Arhats residing in it. The country about is (a tract of) uncultivated hillocks,(3) without inhabitants. At a very long distance from the hill there are villages, where the people all have bad and erroneous views, and do not know the Sramanas of the Law of Buddha, Brahmanas, or (devotees of) any of the other and different schools. The people of that country are constantly seeing men on the wing, who come and enter this monastery. On one occasion, when devotees of various countries came to perform their worship at it, the people of those villages said to them, "Why do you not fly? The devotees whom we have seen hereabouts all fly;" and the strangers answered, on the spur of the moment, "Our wings are not yet fully formed." The kingdom of Dakshina is out of the way, and perilous to traverse. There are difficulties in connexion with the roads; but those who know how to manage such difficulties and wish to proceed should bring with them money and various articles, and give them to the king. He will then send men to escort them. These will (at different stages) pass them over to others, who will show them the shortest routes. Fa-Hsien, however, was after all unable to go there; but having received the (above) accounts from men of the country, he has narrated them. NOTES (1) Said to be the ancient name of the Deccan. As to the various marvels in the chapter, it must be borne in mind that our author, as he tells us at the end, only gives them from hearsay. See "Buddhist Records of the Western World," vol. ii, pp. 214, 215, where the description, however, is very different. (2) Compare the account of Buddha's great stride of fifteen yojanas in Ceylon, as related in chapter xxxviii. (3) See the same phrase in the Books of the Later Han dynasty, the twenty-fourth Book of Biographies, p. 9b. CHAPTER XXXVI IN PATNA. FA-HIEN'S LABOURS IN TRANSCRIPTION OF MANUSCRIPTS, AND INDIAN STUDIES FOR THREE YEARS. From Varanasi (the travellers) went back east to Pataliputtra. Fa-Hsien's original object had been to search for (copies of) the Vinaya. In the various kingdoms of North India, however, he had found one master transmitting orally (the rules) to another, but no written copies which he could transcribe. He had therefore travelled far and come on to Central India. Here, in the mahayana monastery,(1) he found a copy of the Vinaya, containing the Mahasanghika(2) rules,--those which were observed in the first Great Council, while Buddha was still in the world. The original copy was handed down in the Jetavana vihara. As to the other eighteen schools,(3) each one has the views and decisions of its own masters. Those agree (with this) in the general meaning, but they have small and trivial differences, as when one opens and another shuts.(4) This copy (of the rules), however, is the most complete, with the fullest explanations.(5) He further got a transcript of the rules in six or seven thousand gathas,(6) being the sarvastivadah(7) rules,--those which are observed by the communities of monks in the land of Ts'in; which also have all been handed down orally from master to master without being committed to writing. In the community here, moreover, we got the Samyuktabhi-dharma-hridaya-(sastra),(8) containing about six or seven thousand gathas; he also got a Sutra of 2500 gathas; one chapter of the Parinir-vana-vaipulya Sutra,(9) of about 5000 gathas; and the Mahasan-ghikah Abhidharma. In consequence (of this success in his quest) Fa-Hsien stayed here for three years, learning Sanskrit books and the Sanskrit speech, and writing out the Vinaya rules. When Tao-ching arrived in the Central Kingdom, and saw the rules observed by the Sramanas, and the dignified demeanour in their societies which he remarked under all occurring circumstances, he sadly called to mind in what a mutilated and imperfect condition the rules were among the monkish communities in the land of Ts'in, and made the following aspiration:--"From this time forth till I come to the state of Buddha, let me not be born in a frontier land."(10) He remained accordingly (in India), and did not return (to the land of Han). Fa-Hsien, however, whose original purpose had been to secure the introduction of the complete Vinaya rules into the land of Han, returned there alone. NOTES (1) Mentioned before in chapter xxvii. (2) Mahasanghikah simply means "the Great Assembly," that is, of monks. When was this first assembly in the time of Sakyamuni held? It does not appear that the rules observed at it were written down at the time. The document found by Fa-Hsien would be a record of those rules; or rather a copy of that record. We must suppose that the original record had disappeared from the Jetavana vihara, or Fa-Hsien would probably have spoken of it when he was there, and copied it, if he had been allowed to do so. (3) The eighteen pu {.}. Four times in this chapter the character called pu occurs, and in the first and two last instances it can only have the meaning, often belonging to it, of "copy." The second instance, however, is different. How should there be eighteen copies, all different from the original, and from one another, in minor matters? We are compelled to translate--"the eighteen schools," an expression well known in all Buddhist writings. See Rhys Davids' Manual, p. 218, and the authorities there quoted. (4) This is equivalent to the "binding" and "loosing," "opening" and "shutting," which found their way into the New Testament, and the Christian Church, from the schools of the Jewish Rabbins. (5) It was afterwards translated by Fa-Hsien into Chinese. See Nanjio's Catalogue of the Chinese Tripitaka, columns 400 and 401, and Nos. 1119 and 1150, columns 247 and 253. (6) A gatha is a stanza, generally consisting, it has seemed to me, of a few, commonly of two, lines somewhat metrically arranged; but I do not know that its length is strictly defined. (7) "A branch," says Eitel, "of the great vaibhashika school, asserting the reality of all visible phenomena, and claiming the authority of Rahula." (8) See Nanjio's Catalogue, No. 1287. He does not mention it in his account of Fa-Hsien, who, he says, translated the Samyukta-pitaka Sutra. (9) Probably Nanjio's Catalogue, No. 120; at any rate, connected with it. (10) This then would be the consummation of the Sramana's being,--to get to be Buddha, the Buddha of his time in his Kalpa; and Tao-ching thought that he could attain to this consummation by a succession of births; and was likely to attain to it sooner by living only in India. If all this was not in his mind, he yet felt that each of his successive lives would be happier, if lived in India. CHAPTER XXXVII TO CHAMPA AND TAMALIPTI. STAY AND LABOURS THERE FOR THREE YEARS. TAKES SHIP TO SINGHALA, OR CEYLON. Following the course of the Ganges, and descending eastwards for eighteen yojanas, he found on the southern bank the great kingdom of Champa,(1) with topes reared at the places where Buddha walked in meditation by his vihara, and where he and the three Buddhas, his predecessors, sat. There were monks residing at them all. Continuing his journey east for nearly fifty yojanas, he came to the country of Tamalipti,(2) (the capital of which is) a seaport. In the country there are twenty-two monasteries, at all of which there are monks residing. The Law of Buddha is also flourishing in it. Here Fa-Hsien stayed two years, writing out his Sutras,(3) and drawing pictures of images. After this he embarked in a large merchant-vessel, and went floating over the sea to the south-west. It was the beginning of winter, and the wind was favourable; and, after fourteen days, sailing day and night, they came to the country of Singhala.(4) The people said that it was distant (from Tamalipti) about 700 yojanas. The kingdom is on a large island, extending from east to west fifty yojanas, and from north to south thirty. Left and right from it there are as many as 100 small islands, distant from one another ten, twenty, or even 200 le; but all subject to the large island. Most of them produce pearls and precious stones of various kinds; there is one which produces the pure and brilliant pearl,(5)--an island which would form a square of about ten le. The king employs men to watch and protect it, and requires three out of every ten such pearls, which the collectors find. NOTES (1) Probably the modern Champanagur, three miles west of Baglipoor, lat. 25d 14s N., lon. 56d 55s E. (2) Then the principal emporium for the trade with Ceylon and China; the modern Tam-look, lat. 22d 17s N., lon. 88d 2s E.; near the mouth of the Hoogly. (3) Perhaps Ching {.} is used here for any portions of the Tripitaka which he had obtained. (4) "The Kingdom of the Lion," Ceylon. Singhala was the name of a merchant adventurer from India, to whom the founding of the kingdom was ascribed. His father was named Singha, "the Lion," which became the name of the country;--Singhala, or Singha-Kingdom, "the Country of the Lion." (5) Called the mani pearl or bead. Mani is explained as meaning "free from stain," "bright and growing purer." It is a symbol of Buddha and of his Law. The most valuable rosaries are made of manis. CHAPTER XXXVIII AT CEYLON. RISE OF THE KINGDOM. FEATS OF BUDDHA. TOPES AND MONASTERIES. STATUE OF BUDDHA IN JADE. BO TREE. FESTIVAL OF BUDDHA'S TOOTH. The country originally had no human inhabitants,(1) but was occupied only by spirits and nagas, with which merchants of various countries carried on a trade. When the trafficking was taking place, the spirits did not show themselves. They simply set forth their precious commodities, with labels of the price attached to them; while the merchants made their purchases according to the price; and took the things away. Through the coming and going of the merchants (in this way), when they went away, the people of (their) various countries heard how pleasant the land was, and flocked to it in numbers till it became a great nation. The (climate) is temperate and attractive, without any difference of summer and winter. The vegetation is always luxuriant. Cultivation proceeds whenever men think fit: there are no fixed seasons for it. When Buddha came to this country,(2) wishing to transform the wicked nagas, by his supernatural power he planted one foot at the north of the royal city, and the other on the top of a mountain,(3) the two being fifteen yojanas apart. Over the footprint at the north of the city the king built a large tope, 400 cubits high, grandly adorned with gold and silver, and finished with a combination of all the precious substances. By the side of the top he further built a monastery, called the Abhayagiri,(4) where there are (now) five thousand monks. There is in it a hall of Buddha, adorned with carved and inlaid works of gold and silver, and rich in the seven precious substances, in which there is an image (of Buddha) in green jade, more than twenty cubits in height, glittering all over with those substances, and having an appearance of solemn dignity which words cannot express. In the palm of the right hand there is a priceless pearl. Several years had now elapsed since Fa-Hsien left the land of Han; the men with whom he had been in intercourse had all been of regions strange to him; his eyes had not rested on an old and familiar hill or river, plant or tree; his fellow-travellers, moreover, had been separated from him, some by death, and others flowing off in different directions; no face or shadow was now with him but his own, and a constant sadness was in his heart. Suddenly (one day), when by the side of this image of jade, he saw a merchant presenting as his offering a fan of white silk;(5) and the tears of sorrow involuntarily filled his eyes and fell down. A former king of the country had sent to Central India and got a slip of the patra tree,(6) which he planted by the side of the hall of Buddha, where a tree grew up to the height of about 200 cubits. As it bent on one side towards the south-east, the king, fearing it would fall, propped it with a post eight or nine spans round. The tree began to grow at the very heart of the prop, where it met (the trunk); (a shoot) pierced through the post, and went down to the ground, where it entered and formed roots, that rose (to the surface) and were about four spans round. Although the post was split in the middle, the outer portions kept hold (of the shoot), and people did not remove them. Beneath the tree there has been built a vihara, in which there is an image (of Buddha) seated, which the monks and commonalty reverence and look up to without ever becoming wearied. In the city there has been reared also the vihara of Buddha's tooth, on which, as well as on the other, the seven precious substances have been employed. The king practises the Brahmanical purifications, and the sincerity of the faith and reverence of the population inside the city are also great. Since the establishment of government in the kingdom there has been no famine or scarcity, no revolution or disorder. In the treasuries of the monkish communities there are many precious stones, and the priceless manis. One of the kings (once) entered one of those treasuries, and when he looked all round and saw the priceless pearls, his covetous greed was excited, and he wished to take them to himself by force. In three days, however, he came to himself, and immediately went and bowed his head to the ground in the midst of the monks, to show his repentance of the evil thought. As a sequel to this, he informed the monks (of what had been in his mind), and desired them to make a regulation that from that day forth the king should not be allowed to enter the treasury and see (what it contained), and that no bhikshu should enter it till after he had been in orders for a period of full forty years.(7) In the city there are many Vaisya elders and Sabaean(8) merchants, whose houses are stately and beautiful. The lanes and passages are kept in good order. At the heads of the four principal streets there have been built preaching halls, where, on the eighth, fourteenth, and fifteenth days of the month, they spread carpets, and set forth a pulpit, while the monks and commonalty from all quarters come together to hear the Law. The people say that in the kingdom there may be altogether sixty thousand monks, who get their food from their common stores. The king, besides, prepares elsewhere in the city a common supply of food for five or six thousand more. When any want, they take their great bowls, and go (to the place of distribution), and take as much as the vessels will hold, all returning with them full. The tooth of Buddha is always brought forth in the middle of the third month. Ten days beforehand the king grandly caparisons a large elephant, on which he mounts a man who can speak distinctly, and is dressed in royal robes, to beat a large drum, and make the following proclamation:--"The Bodhisattva, during three Asankhyeya-kalpas,(9) manifested his activity, and did not spare his own life. He gave up kingdom, city, wife, and son; he plucked out his eyes and gave them to another;(10) he cut off a piece of his own flesh to ransom the life of a dove;(10) he cut off his head and gave it as an alms;(11) he gave his body to feed a starving tigress;(11) he grudged not his marrow and his brains. In many such ways as these did he undergo pain for the sake of all living. And so it was, that, having become Buddha, he continued in the world for forty-five years, preaching his Law, teaching and transforming, so that those who had no rest found rest, and the unconverted were converted. When his connexion with the living was completed,(12) he attained to pari-nirvana (and died). Since that event, for 1497 years, the light of the world has gone out,(13) and all living beings have had long-continued sadness. Behold! ten days after this, Buddha's tooth will be brought forth, and taken to the Abhayagiri-vihara. Let all and each, whether monks or laics, who wish to amass merit for themselves, make the roads smooth and in good condition, grandly adorn the lanes and by-ways, and provide abundant store of flowers and incense to be used as offerings to it." When this proclamation is over, the king exhibits, so as to line both sides of the road, the five hundred different bodily forms in which the Bodhisattva has in the course of his history appeared:--here as Sudana,(14) there as Sama;(15) now as the king of elephants;(16) and then as a stag or a horse.(16) All these figures are brightly coloured and grandly executed, looking as if they were alive. After this the tooth of Buddha is brought forth, and is carried along in the middle of the road. Everywhere on the way offerings are presented to it, and thus it arrives at the hall of Buddha in the Abhayagiri-vihara. There monks and laics are collected in crowds. They burn incense, light lamps, and perform all the prescribed services, day and night without ceasing, till ninety days have been completed, when (the tooth) is returned to the vihara within the city. On fast-days the door of that vihara is opened, and the forms of ceremonial reverence are observed according to the rules. Forty le to the east of the Abhayagiri-vihara there is a hill, with a vihara on it, called the Chaitya,(17) where there may be 2000 monks. Among them there is a Sramana of great virtue, named Dharma-gupta,(18) honoured and looked up to by all the kingdom. He has lived for more than forty years in an apartment of stone, constantly showing such gentleness of heart, that he has brought snakes and rats to stop together in the same room, without doing one another any harm. NOTES (1) It is desirable to translate {.} {.}, for which "inhabitants" or "people" is elsewhere sufficient, here by "human inhabitants." According to other accounts Singhala was originally occupied by Rakshasas or Rakshas, "demons who devour men," and "beings to be feared," monstrous cannibals or anthropophagi, the terror of the shipwrecked mariner. Our author's "spirits" {.} {.} were of a gentler type. His dragons or nagas have come before us again and again. (2) That Sakyamuni ever visited Ceylon is to me more than doubtful. Hardy, in M. B., pp. 207-213, has brought together the legends of three visits,--in the first, fifth, and eighth years of his Buddhaship. It is plain, however, from Fa-Hsien's narrative, that in the beginning of our fifth century, Buddhism prevailed throughout the island. Davids in the last chapter of his "Buddhism" ascribes its introduction to one of Asoka's missions, after the Council of Patna, under his son Mahinda, when Tissa, "the delight of the gods," was king (B.C. 250-230). (3) This would be what is known as "Adam's peak," having, according to Hardy (pp. 211, 212, notes), the three names of Selesumano, Samastakuta, and Samanila. "There is an indentation on the top of it," a superficial hollow, 5 feet 3 3_4 inches long, and about 2 1_2 feet wide. The Hindus regard it as the footprint of Siva; the Mohameddans, as that of Adam; and the Buddhists, as in the text,--as having been made by Buddha. (4) Meaning "The Fearless Hill." There is still the Abhayagiri tope, the highest in Ceylon, according to Davids, 250 feet in height, and built about B.C. 90, by Watta Gamini, in whose reign, about 160 years after the Council of Patna, and 330 years after the death of Sakyamuni, the Tripitaka was first reduced to writing in Ceylon;--"Buddhism," p. 234. (5) We naturally suppose that the merchant-offerer was a Chinese, as indeed the Chinese texts say, and the fan such as Fa-Hsien had seen and used in his native land. (6) This should be the pippala, or bodhidruma, generally spoken of, in connexion with Buddha, as the Bo tree, under which he attained to the Buddhaship. It is strange our author should have confounded them as he seems to do. In what we are told of the tree here, we have, no doubt, his account of the planting, growth, and preservation of the famous Bo tree, which still exists in Ceylon. It has been stated in a previous note that Asoka's son, Mahinda, went as the apostle of Buddhism to Ceylon. By-and-by he sent for his sister Sanghamitta, who had entered the order at the same time as himself, and whose help was needed, some of the king's female relations having signified their wish to become nuns. On leaving India, she took with her a branch of the sacred Bo tree at Buddha Gaya, under which Sakyamuni had become Buddha. Of how the tree has grown and still lives we have an account in Davids' "Buddhism." He quotes the words of Sir Emerson Tennent, that it is "the oldest historical tree in the world;" but this must be denied if it be true, as Eitel says, that the tree at Buddha Gaya, from which the slip that grew to be this tree was taken more than 2000 years ago, is itself still living in its place. We must conclude that Fa-Hsien, when in Ceylon, heard neither of Mahinda nor Sanghamitta. (7) Compare what is said in chap. xvi, about the inquiries made at monasteries as to the standing of visitors in the monkhood, and duration of their ministry. (8) The phonetic values of the two Chinese characters here are in Sanskrit sa; and va, bo or bha. "Sabaean" is Mr. Beal's reading of them, probably correct. I suppose the merchants were Arabs, forerunners of the so-called Moormen, who still form so important a part of the mercantile community in Ceylon. (9) A Kalpa, we have seen, denotes a great period of time; a period during which a physical universe is formed and destroyed. Asankhyeya denotes the highest sum for which a conventional term exists;--according to Chinese calculations equal to one followed by seventeen ciphers; according to Thibetan and Singhalese, equal to one followed by ninety-seven ciphers. Every Maha-kalpa consists of four Asankhyeya-kalpas. Eitel, p. 15. (10) See chapter ix. (11) See chapter xi. (12) He had been born in the Sakya house, to do for the world what the character of all his past births required, and he had done it. (13) They could no more see him, the World-honoured one. Compare the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xi, Buddhist Suttas, pp. 89, 121, and note on p. 89. (14) Sudana or Sudatta was the name of the Bodhisattva in the birth which preceded his appearance as Sakyamuni or Gotama, when he became the Supreme Buddha. This period is known as the Vessantara Jataka, of which Hardy, M. B., pp. 116-124, gives a long account; see also "Buddhist Birth Stories," the Nidana Katha, p. 158. In it, as Sudana, he fulfilled "the Perfections," his distinguishing attribute being entire self-renunciation and alms-giving, so that in the Nidana Katha is made to say ("Buddhist Birth Stories," p. 159):-- "This earth, unconscious though she be, and ignorant of joy or grief, Even she by my free-giving's mighty power was shaken seven times." Then, when he passed away, he appeared in the Tushita heaven, to enter in due time the womb of Maha-maya, and be born as Sakyamuni. (15) I take the name Sama from Beal's revised version. He says in a note that the Sama Jataka, as well as the Vessantara, is represented in the Sanchi sculptures. But what the Sama Jataka was I do not yet know. But adopting this name, the two Chinese characters in the text should be translated "the change into Sama." Remusat gives for them, "la transformation en eclair;" Beal, in his first version, "his appearance as a bright flash of light;" Giles, "as a flash of lightning." Julien's Methode does not give the phonetic value in Sanskrit of {.}. (16) In an analysis of the number of times and the different forms in which Sakyamuni had appeared in his Jataka births, given by Hardy (M. B., p. 100), it is said that he had appeared six times as an elephant; ten times as a deer; and four times as a horse. (17) Chaitya is a general term designating all places and objects of religious worship which have a reference to ancient Buddhas, and including therefore Stupas and temples as well as sacred relics, pictures, statues, &c. It is defined as "a fane," "a place for worship and presenting offerings." Eitel, p. 141. The hill referred to is the sacred hill of Mihintale, about eight miles due east of the Bo tree;--Davids' Buddhism, pp. 230, 231. (18) Eitel says (p. 31): "A famous ascetic, the founder of a school, which flourished in Ceylon, A.D. 400." But Fa-Hsien gives no intimation of Dharma-gupta's founding a school. CHAPTER XXXIX CREMATION OF AN ARHAT. SERMON OF A DEVOTEE. South of the city seven le there is a vihara, called the Maha-vihara, where 3000 monks reside. There had been among them a Sramana, of such lofty virtue, and so holy and pure in his observance of the disciplinary rules, that the people all surmised that he was an Arhat. When he drew near his end, the king came to examine into the point; and having assembled the monks according to rule, asked whether the bhikshu had attained to the full degree of Wisdom.(1) They answered in the affirmative, saying that he was an Arhat. The king accordingly, when he died, buried him after the fashion of an Arhat, as the regular rules prescribed. Four of five le east from the vihara there was reared a great pile of firewood, which might be more than thirty cubits square, and the same in height. Near the top were laid sandal, aloe, and other kinds of fragrant wood. On the four sides (of the pile) they made steps by which to ascend it. With clean white hair-cloth, almost like silk, they wrapped (the body) round and round.(2) They made a large carriage-frame, in form like our funeral car, but without the dragons and fishes.(3) At the time of the cremation, the king and the people, in multitudes from all quarters, collected together, and presented offerings of flowers and incense. While they were following the car to the burial-ground,(4) the king himself presented flowers and incense. When this was finished, the car was lifted on the pile, all over which oil of sweet basil was poured, and then a light was applied. While the fire was blazing, every one, with a reverent heart, pulled off his upper garment, and threw it, with his feather-fan and umbrella, from a distance into the midst of the flames, to assist the burning. When the cremation was over, they collected and preserved the bones, and proceeded to erect a tope. Fa-Hsien had not arrived in time (to see the distinguished Shaman) alive, and only saw his burial. At that time the king,(5) who was a sincere believer in the Law of Buddha and wished to build a new vihara for the monks, first convoked a great assembly. After giving the monks a meal of rice, and presenting his offerings (on the occasion), he selected a pair of first-rate oxen, the horns of which were grandly decorated with gold, silver, and the precious substances. A golden plough had been provided, and the king himself turned up a furrow on the four sides of the ground within which the building was supposed to be. He then endowed the community of the monks with the population, fields, and houses, writing the grant on plates of metal, (to the effect) that from that time onwards, from generation to generation, no one should venture to annul or alter it. In this country Fa-Hsien heard an Indian devotee, who was reciting a Sutra from the pulpit, say:--"Buddha's alms-bowl was at first in Vaisali, and now it is in Gandhara.(6) After so many hundred years" (he gave, when Fa-Hsien heard him, the exact number of years, but he has forgotten it), "it will go to Western Tukhara;(7) after so many hundred years, to Khoten; after so many hundred years, to Kharachar;(8) after so many hundred years, to the land of Han; after so many hundred years, it will come to Sinhala; and after so many hundred years, it will return to Central India. After that, it will ascend to the Tushita heaven; and when the Bodhisattva Maitreya sees it, he will say with a sigh, 'The alms-bowl of Sakyamuni Buddha is come;' and with all the devas he will present to it flowers and incense for seven days. When these have expired, it will return to Jambudvipa, where it will be received by the king of the sea nagas, and taken into his naga palace. When Maitreya shall be about to attain to perfect Wisdom (and become Buddha), it will again separate into four bowls,(9) which will return to the top of mount Anna,(9) whence they came. After Maitreya has become Buddha, the four deva kings will again think of the Buddha (with their bowls as they did in the case of the previous Buddha). The thousand Buddhas of this Bhadra-kalpa, indeed, will all use the same alms-bowl; and when the bowl has disappeared, the Law of Buddha will go on gradually to be extinguished. After that extinction has taken place, the life of man will be shortened, till it is only a period of five years. During this period of a five years' life, rice, butter, and oil will all vanish away, and men will become exceedingly wicked. The grass and trees which they lay hold of will change into swords and clubs, with which they will hurt, cut, and kill one another. Those among them on whom there is blessing will withdraw from society among the hills; and when the wicked have exterminated one another, they will again come forth, and say among themselves, 'The men of former times enjoyed a very great longevity; but through becoming exceedingly wicked, and doing all lawless things, the length of our life has been shortened and reduced even to five years. Let us now unite together in the practice of what is good, cherishing a gentle and sympathising heart, and carefully cultivating good faith and righteousness. When each one in this way practises that faith and righteousness, life will go on to double its length till it reaches 80,000 years. When Maitreya appears in the world, and begins to turn the wheel of his Law, he will in the first place save those among the disciples of the Law left by the Sakya who have quitted their families, and those who have accepted the three Refuges, undertaken the five Prohibitions and the eight Abstinences, and given offerings to the three Precious Ones; secondly and thirdly, he will save those between whom and conversion there is a connexion transmitted from the past.'"(10) (Such was the discourse), and Fa-Hsien wished to write it down as a portion of doctrine; but the man said, "This is taken from no Sutra, it is only the utterance of my own mind." NOTES (1) Possibly, "and asked the bhikshu," &c. I prefer the other way of construing, however. (2) It seems strange that this should have been understood as a wrapping of the immense pyre with the cloth. There is nothing in the text to necessitate such a version, but the contrary. Compare "Buddhist Suttas," pp. 92, 93. (3) See the description of a funeral car and its decorations in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxviii, the Li Ki, Book XIX. Fa-Hsien's {.} {.}, "in this (country)," which I have expressed by "our," shows that whatever notes of this cremation he had taken at the time, the account in the text was composed after his return to China, and when he had the usages there in his mind and perhaps before his eyes. This disposes of all difficulty occasioned by the "dragons" and "fishes." The {.} at the end is merely the concluding particle. (4) The pyre served the purpose of a burial-ground or grave, and hence our author writes of it as such. (5) This king must have been Maha-nana (A.D. 410-432). In the time of his predecessor, Upatissa (A.D. 368-410), the pitakas were first translated into Singhalese. Under Maha-nana, Buddhaghosha wrote his commentaries. Both were great builders of viharas. See the Mahavansa, pp. 247, foll. (6) See chapter xii. Fa-Hsien had seen it at Purushapura, which Eitel says was "the ancient capital of Gandhara." (7) Western Tukhara ({.} {.}) is the same probably as the Tukhara ({.}) of chapter xii, a king of which is there described as trying to carry off the bowl from Purushapura. (8) North of the Bosteng lake at the foot of the Thien-shan range (E. H., p. 56). (9) See chap. xii, note 9. Instead of "Anna" the Chinese recensions have Vina; but Vina or Vinataka, and Ana for Sudarsana are names of one or other of the concentric circles of rocks surrounding mount Meru, the fabled home of the deva guardians of the bowl. (10) That is, those whose Karma in the past should be rewarded by such conversion in the present. CHAPTER XL AFTER TWO YEARS TAKES SHIP FOR CHINA. DISASTROUS PASSAGE TO JAVA; AND THENCE TO CHINA; ARRIVES AT SHAN-TUNG; AND GOES TO NANKING. CONCLUSION OR L'ENVOI BY ANOTHER WRITER. Fa-Hsien abode in this country two years; and, in addition (to his acquisitions in Patna), succeeded in getting a copy of the Vinaya-pitaka of the Mahisasakah (school);(1) the Dirghagama and Samyuktagama(2) (Sutras); and also the Samyukta-sanchaya-pitaka;(3)--all being works unknown in the land of Han. Having obtained these Sanskrit works, he took passage in a large merchantman, on board of which there were more than 200 men, and to which was attached by a rope a smaller vessel, as a provision against damage or injury to the large one from the perils of the navigation. With a favourable wind, they proceeded eastwards for three days, and then they encountered a great wind. The vessel sprang a leak and the water came in. The merchants wished to go to the small vessel; but the men on board it, fearing that too many would come, cut the connecting rope. The merchants were greatly alarmed, feeling their risk of instant death. Afraid that the vessel would fill, they took their bulky goods and threw them into the water. Fa-Hsien also took his pitcher(4) and washing-basin, with some other articles, and cast them into the sea; but fearing that the merchants would cast overboard his books and images, he could only think with all his heart of Kwan-she-yin,(5) and commit his life to (the protection of) the church of the land of Han,(6) (saying in effect), "I have travelled far in search of our Law. Let me, by your dread and supernatural (power), return from my wanderings, and reach my resting-place!" In this way the tempest(7) continued day and night, till on the thirteenth day the ship was carried to the side of an island, where, on the ebbing of the tide, the place of the leak was discovered, and it was stopped, on which the voyage was resumed. On the sea (hereabouts) there are many pirates, to meet with whom is speedy death. The great ocean spreads out, a boundless expanse. There is no knowing east or west; only by observing the sun, moon, and stars was it possible to go forward. If the weather were dark and rainy, (the ship) went as she was carried by the wind, without any definite course. In the darkness of the night, only the great waves were to be seen, breaking on one another, and emitting a brightness like that of fire, with huge turtles and other monsters of the deep (all about). The merchants were full of terror, not knowing where they were going. The sea was deep and bottomless, and there was no place where they could drop anchor and stop. But when the sky became clear, they could tell east and west, and (the ship) again went forward in the right direction. If she had come on any hidden rock, there would have been no way of escape. After proceeding in this way for rather more than ninety days, they arrived at a country called Java-dvipa, where various forms of error and Brahmanism are flourishing, while Buddhism in it is not worth speaking of. After staying there for five months, (Fa-Hsien) again embarked in another large merchantman, which also had on board more than 200 men. They carried provisions for fifty days, and commenced the voyage on the sixteenth day of the fourth month. Fa-Hsien kept his retreat on board the ship. They took a course to the north-east, intending to fetch Kwang-chow. After more than a month, when the night-drum had sounded the second watch, they encountered a black wind and tempestuous rain, which threw the merchants and passengers into consternation. Fa-Hsien again with all his heart directed his thoughts to Kwan-she-yin and the monkish communities of the land of Han; and, through their dread and mysterious protection, was preserved to day-break. After day-break, the Brahmans deliberated together and said, "It is having this Sramana on board which has occasioned our misfortune and brought us this great and bitter suffering. Let us land the bhikshu and place him on some island-shore. We must not for the sake of one man allow ourselves to be exposed to such imminent peril." A patron of Fa-Hsien, however, said to them, "If you land the bhikshu, you must at the same time land me; and if you do not, then you must kill me. If you land this Sramana, when I get to the land of Han, I will go to the king, and inform against you. The king also reveres and believes the Law of Buddha, and honours the bhikshus." The merchants hereupon were perplexed, and did not dare immediately to land (Fa-Hsien). At this time the sky continued very dark and gloomy, and the sailing-masters looked at one another and made mistakes. More than seventy days passed (from their leaving Java), and the provisions and water were nearly exhausted. They used the salt-water of the sea for cooking, and carefully divided the (fresh) water, each man getting two pints. Soon the whole was nearly gone, and the merchants took counsel and said, "At the ordinary rate of sailing we ought to have reached Kwang-chow, and now the time is passed by many days;--must we not have held a wrong course?" Immediately they directed the ship to the north-west, looking out for land; and after sailing day and night for twelve days, they reached the shore on the south of mount Lao,(8) on the borders of the prefecture of Ch'ang-kwang,(8) and immediately got good water and vegetables. They had passed through many perils and hardships, and had been in a state of anxious apprehension for many days together; and now suddenly arriving at this shore, and seeing those (well-known) vegetables, the lei and kwoh,(9) they knew indeed that it was the land of Han. Not seeing, however, any inhabitants nor any traces of them, they did not know whereabouts they were. Some said that they had not yet got to Kwang-chow, and others that they had passed it. Unable to come to a definite conclusion, (some of them) got into a small boat and entered a creek, to look for some one of whom they might ask what the place was. They found two hunters, whom they brought back with them, and then called on Fa-Hsien to act as interpreter and question them. Fa-Hsien first spoke assuringly to them, and then slowly and distinctly asked them, "Who are you?" They replied, "We are disciples of Buddha?" He then asked, "What are you looking for among these hills?" They began to lie,(10) and said, "To-morrow is the fifteenth day of the seventh month. We wanted to get some peaches to present(11) to Buddha." He asked further, "What country is this?" They replied, "This is the border of the prefecture of Ch'ang-kwang, a part of Ts'ing-chow under the (ruling) House of Tsin." When they heard this, the merchants were glad, immediately asked for (a portion of) their money and goods, and sent men to Ch'ang-kwang city. The prefect Le E was a reverent believer in the Law of Buddha. When he heard that a Sramana had arrived in a ship across the sea, bringing with him books and images, he immediately came to the seashore with an escort to meet (the traveller), and receive the books and images, and took them back with him to the seat of his government. On this the merchants went back in the direction of Yang-chow;(12) (but) when (Fa-Hsien) arrived at Ts'ing-chow, (the prefect there)(13) begged him (to remain with him) for a winter and a summer. After the summer retreat was ended, Fa-Hsien, having been separated for a long time from his (fellow-)masters, wished to hurry to Ch'ang-gan; but as the business which he had in hand was important, he went south to the Capital;(14) and at an interview with the masters (there) exhibited the Sutras and the collection of the Vinaya (which he had procured). After Fa-Hsien set out from Ch'ang-gan, it took him six years to reach Central India;(15) stoppages there extended over (other) six years; and on his return it took him three years to reach Ts'ing-chow. The countries through which he passed were a few under thirty. From the sandy desert westwards on to India, the beauty of the dignified demeanour of the monkhood and of the transforming influence of the Law was beyond the power of language fully to describe; and reflecting how our masters had not heard any complete account of them, he therefore (went on) without regarding his own poor life, or (the dangers to be encountered) on the sea upon his return, thus incurring hardships and difficulties in a double form. He was fortunate enough, through the dread power of the three Honoured Ones,(15) to receive help and protection in his perils; and therefore he wrote out an account of his experiences, that worthy readers might share with him in what he had heard and said.(15) It was in the year Keah-yin,(16) the twelfth year of the period E-he of the (Eastern) Tsin dynasty, the year-star being in Virgo-Libra, in the summer, at the close of the period of retreat, that I met the devotee Fa-Hsien. On his arrival I lodged him with myself in the winter study,(17) and there, in our meetings for conversation, I asked him again and again about his travels. The man was modest and complaisant, and answered readily according to the truth. I thereupon advised him to enter into details where he had at first only given a summary, and he proceeded to relate all things in order from the beginning to the end. He said himself, "When I look back on what I have gone through, my heart is involuntarily moved, and the perspiration flows forth. That I encountered danger and trod the most perilous places, without thinking of or sparing myself, was because I had a definite aim, and thought of nothing but to do my best in my simplicity and straightforwardness. Thus it was that I exposed my life where death seemed inevitable, if I might accomplish but a ten-thousandth part of what I hoped." These words affected me in turn, and I thought:--"This man is one of those who have seldom been seen from ancient times to the present. Since the Great Doctrine flowed on to the East there has been no one to be compared with Hien in his forgetfulness of self and search for the Law. Henceforth I know that the influence of sincerity finds no obstacle, however great, which it does not overcome, and that force of will does not fail to accomplish whatever service it undertakes. Does not the accomplishing of such service arise from forgetting (and disregarding) what is (generally) considered as important, and attaching importance to what is (generally) forgotten?" NOTES (1) No. 1122 in Nanjio's Catalogue, translated into Chinese by Buddhajiva and a Chinese Sramana about A.D. 425. Mahisasakah means "the school of the transformed earth," or "the sphere within which the Law of Buddha is influential." The school is one of the subdivisions of the Sarvastivadah. (2) Nanjio's 545 and 504. The Agamas are Sutras of the hinayana, divided, according to Eitel, pp. 4, 5, into four classes, the first or Dirghagamas (long Agamas) being treatises on right conduct, while the third class contains the Samyuktagamas (mixed Agamas). (3) Meaning "Miscellaneous Collections;" a sort of fourth Pitaka. See Nanjio's fourth division of the Canon, containing Indian and Chinese miscellaneous works. But Dr. Davids says that no work of this name is known either in Sanskrit or Pali literature. (4) We have in the text a phonetisation of the Sanskrit Kundika, which is explained in Eitel by the two characters that follow, as="washing basin," but two things evidently are intended. (5) See chap. xvi, note 23. (6) At his novitiate Fa-Hsien had sought the refuge of the "three Precious Ones" (the three Refuges {.} {.} of last chapter), of which the congregation or body of the monks was one; and here his thoughts turn naturally to the branch of it in China. His words in his heart were not exactly words of prayer, but very nearly so. (7) In the text {.} {.}, ta-fung, "the great wind,"=the typhoon. (8) They had got to the south of the Shan-tung promontory, and the foot of mount Lao, which still rises under the same name on the extreme south of the peninsula, east from Keao Chow, and having the district of Tsieh-mih on the east of it. All the country there is included in the present Phing-too Chow of the department Lae-chow. The name Phing-too dates from the Han dynasty, but under the dynasty of the After Ch'e {.} {.}, (A.D. 479-501), it was changed into Ch'ang-kwang. Fa-Hsien may have lived, and composed the narrative of his travels, after the change of name was adopted. See the Topographical Tables of the different Dynasties ({.} {.} {.} {.} {.}), published in 1815. (9) What these vegetables exactly were it is difficult to say; and there are different readings of the characters for them. Williams' Dictionary, under kwoh, brings the two names together in a phrase, but the rendering of it is simply "a soup of simples." For two or three columns here, however, the text appears to me confused and imperfect. (10) I suppose these men were really hunters; and, when brought before Fa-Hsien, because he was a Sramana, they thought they would please him by saying they were disciples of Buddha. But what had disciples of Buddha to do with hunting and taking life? They were caught in their own trap, and said they were looking for peaches. (11) The Chinese character here has occurred twice before, but in a different meaning and connexion. Remusat, Beal, and Giles take it as equivalent to "to sacrifice." But his followers do not "sacrifice" to Buddha. That is a priestly term, and should not be employed of anything done at Buddhistic services. (12) Probably the present department of Yang-chow in Keang-soo; but as I have said in a previous note, the narrative does not go on so clearly as it generally does. (13) Was, or could, this prefect be Le E? (14) Probably not Ch'ang-gan, but Nan-king, which was the capital of the Eastern Tsin dynasty under another name. (15) The whole of this paragraph is probably Fa-Hsien's own conclusion of his narrative. The second half of the second sentence, both in sentiment and style in the Chinese text, seems to necessitate our ascribing it to him, writing on the impulse of his own thoughts, in the same indirect form which he adopted for his whole narrative. There are, however, two peculiar phraseologies in it which might suggest the work of another hand. For the name India, where the first (15) is placed, a character is employed which is similarly applied nowhere else; and again, "the three Honoured Ones," at which the second (15) is placed, must be the same as "the three Precious Ones," which we have met with so often; unless we suppose that {.} {.} is printed in all the revisions for {.} {.}, "the World-honoured one," which has often occurred. On the whole, while I accept this paragraph as Fa-Hsien's own, I do it with some hesitation. That the following and concluding paragraph is from another hand, there can be no doubt. And it is as different as possible in style from the simple and straightforward narrative of Fa-Hsien. (16) There is an error of date here, for which it is difficult to account. The year Keah-yin was A.D. 414; but that was the tenth year of the period E-he, and not the twelfth, the cyclical designation of which was Ping-shin. According to the preceding paragraph, Fa-Hsien's travels had occupied him fifteen years, so that counting from A.D. 399, the year Ke-hae, as that in which he set out, the year of his getting to Ts'ing-chow would have been Kwei-chow, the ninth year of the period E-he; and we might join on "This year Keah-yin" to that paragraph, as the date at which the narrative was written out for the bamboo-tablets and the silk, and then begins the Envoy, "In the twelfth year of E-he." This would remove the error as it stands at present, but unfortunately there is a particle at the end of the second date ({.}), which seems to tie the twelfth year of E-he to Keah-yin, as another designation of it. The "year-star" is the planet Jupiter, the revolution of which, in twelve years, constitutes "a great year." Whether it would be possible to fix exactly by mathematical calculation in what year Jupiter was in the Chinese zodiacal sign embracing part of both Virgo and Scorpio, and thereby help to solve the difficulty of the passage, I do not know, and in the meantime must leave that difficulty as I have found it. (17) We do not know who the writer of the Envoy was. "The winter study or library" would be the name of the apartment in his monastery or house, where he sat and talked with Fa-Hsien. 
8390	----	BUDDHISM AND BUDDHISTS IN CHINA BY LEWIS HODOUS, D.D. [Illustration: EX LIBRIS: CHARLES FRANKLIN THWING Western Reserve University Library From the Library of Charles Franklin Thwing Acquired in 1938] PREFACE This volume is the third to be published of a series on "The World's Living Religions," projected in 1920 by the Board of Missionary Preparation of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America. The series seeks to introduce Western readers to the real religious life of each great national area of the non-Christian world. Buddhism is a religion which must be viewed from many angles. Its original form, as preached by Gautama in India and developed in the early years succeeding, and as embodied in the sacred literature of early Buddhism, is not representative of the actual Buddhism of any land today. The faithful student of Buddhist literature would be as far removed from understanding the working activities of a busy center of Buddhism in Burmah, Tibet or China today as a student of patristic literature would be from appreciating the Christian life of London or New York City. Moreover Buddhism, like Christianity, has been affected by national conditions. It has developed at least three markedly different types, requiring, therefore, as many distinct volumes of this series for its fair interpretation and presentation. The volume on the Buddhism of Southern Asia by Professor Kenneth J. Saunders was published in May, 1923; this volume on the Buddhism of China by Professor Hodous will be the second to appear; a third on the Buddhism of Japan, to be written by Dr. R. C. Armstrong, will be published in 1924. Each of these is needed in order that the would be student of Buddhism as practiced in those countries should be given a true, impressive and friendly picture of what he will meet. A missionary no less than a professional student of Buddhism needs to approach that religion with a real appreciation of what it aims to do for its people and does do. No one can come into contact with the best that Buddhism offers without being impressed by its serenity, assurance and power. Professor Hodous has written this volume on Buddhism in China out of the ripe experience and continuing studies of sixteen years of missionary service in Foochow, the chief city of Fukien Province, China, one of the important centers of Buddhism. His local studies were supplemented by the results of broader research and study in northern China. No other available writer on the subject has gone so far as he in reproducing the actual thinking of a trained Buddhist mind in regard to the fundamentals of religion. At the same time he has taken pains to exhibit and to interpret the religious life of the peasant as affected by Buddhism. He has sought to be absolutely fair to Buddhism, but still to express his own conviction that the best that is in Buddhism is given far more adequate expression in Christianity. The purpose of each volume in this series is impressionistic rather than definitely educational. They are not textbooks for the formal study of Buddhism, but introductions to its study. They aim to kindle interest and to direct the activity of the awakened student along sound lines. For further study each volume amply provides through directions and literature in the appendices. It seeks to help the student to discriminate, to think in terms of a devotee of Buddhism when he compares that religion with Christianity. It assumes, however, that Christianity is the broader and deeper revelation of God and the world of today. Buddhism in China undoubtedly includes among its adherents many high-minded, devout, and earnest souls who live an idealistic life. Christianity ought to make a strong appeal to such minds, taking from them none of the joy or assurance or devotion which they possess, but promoting a deeper, better balanced interpretation of the active world, a nobler conception of God, a stronger sense of sinfulness and need, and a truer idea of the full meaning of incarnation and revelation. It is our hope that this fresh contribution to the understanding of Buddhism as it is today may be found helpful to readers everywhere. The Editors. _New York city, December, 1923._ The Committee of Reference and Counsel of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America has authorized the publication of this series. The author of each volume is alone responsible for the opinions expressed, unless otherwise stated. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY II. THE ENTRANCE OF BUDDHISM INTO CHINA III. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF BUDDHISM AS THE PREDOMINATING RELIGION OF CHINA 1. The World of Invisible Spirits 2. The Universal Sense of Ancestor Control 3. Degenerate Taoism 4. The Organizing Value of Confucianism 5. Buddhism an Inclusive Religion IV. BUDDHISM AND THE PEASANT 1. The Monastery of Kushan 2. Monasteries Control Fêng-shui 3. Prayer for Rain (a) The altar (b) The prayer service (c) Its Meaning 4. Monasteries are Supported because They Control Fêng-shui V. BUDDHISM AND THE FAMILY 1. Kuan Yin, the Giver of Children and Protector of Women 2. Kuan Yin, the Model of Local Mother-Goddesses 3. Exhortations on Family Virtues 4. Services for the Dead VI. BUDDHISM AND SOCIAL LIFE 1. How the Laity is Trained in Buddhist Ideas 2. Effect of Ideals of Mercy and Universal Love 3. Relation to Confucian Ideal 4. The Embodiment of Buddhist Ideals in the Vegetarian Sects 5. Pilgrimages VII. BUDDHISM AND THE FUTURE LIFE 1. The Buddhist Purgatory 2. Its Social Value 3. The Buddhist Heaven 4. The Harmonization of These Ideas with Ancestor Worship VIII. THE SPIRITUAL VALUES EMPHASIZED BY BUDDHISM IN CHINA 1. The Threefold Classification of Men under Buddhism 2. Salvation for the Common Man 3. The Place of Faith 4. Salvation of the Second Class 5. Salvation for the Highest Class 6. Heaven and Purgatory 7. Sin 8. Nirvana 9. The Philosophical Background 10. What Buddhism Has to Give IX. PRESENT-DAY BUDDHISM 1. Periods of Buddhist History 2. The Progress of the Last Twenty-five Years 3. Present Activities (a) The reconstruction of monasteries (b) Accessions (c) Publications (d) Lectures (e) Buddhist societies (f) Signs of social ambition 4. The Attitude of Tibetan Lamas 5. The Buddhist World Versus the Christian World X. THE CHRISTIAN APPROACH TO BUDDHISTS 1. Questions which Buddhists Ask 2. Knowledge and Sympathy 3. Emphasis on the Æsthetic in Christianity 4. Emphasis on the Mystical in Christianity 5. Emphasis on the Social Elements in Christianity 6. Emphasis on the Person of Jesus Christ (a) As a Historical Character (b) As the Revealer (c) As the Saviour (d) As the Eternal Son of God 7. How Christianity Expresses Itself in Buddhist Minds 8. Christianity's Constructive Values APPENDIX ONE, Hints for the Preliminary Study of Buddhism in China APPENDIX TWO, A Brief Bibliography BUDDHISM AND BUDDHISTS IN CHINA I INTRODUCTORY A well known missionary of Peking, China, was invited one day by a Buddhist acquaintance to attend the ceremony of initiation for a class of one hundred and eighty priests and some twenty laity who had been undergoing preparatory instruction at the stately and important Buddhist monastery. The beautiful courts of the temple were filled by a throng of invited guests and spectators, waiting to watch the impressive procession of candidates, acolytes, attendants and high officials, all in their appropriate vestments. No outsider was privileged to witness the solemn taking by each candidate for the priesthood of the vow to "keep the Ten Laws," followed by the indelible branding of his scalp, truly a "baptism of fire." Less private was the initiation of the lay brethren and _sisters,_ more lightly branded on the right wrist, while all about intoned "Na Mah Pen Shih Shih Chia Mou Ni Fo." (I put my trust in my original Teacher, Säkyamuni, Buddha.) The missionary was deeply impressed by the serenity and devotion of the worshipers and by the dignity and solemnity of the service. The last candidate to rise and receive the baptism of branding was a young married woman of refined appearance, attended by an elderly lady, evidently her mother, who watched with an expression of mingled devotion, insight and pride her daughter's initiation and welcomed her at the end of the process with radiant face, as a daughter, now, in a spiritual as well as a physical sense. At that moment an attendant, noting the keen interest of the missionary, said to him rather flippantly, "Would you not like to have your arm branded, too?" "I might," he replied, "just out of curiosity, but I could not receive the branding as a believer in the Buddha. I am a Christian believer. To be branded without inward faith would be an insult to your religion as well as treachery to my own, would it not? Is not real religion a matter of the heart?" The old lady, who had overheard with evident disapproval the remark of the attendant, turned to the missionary at once and said, "Is that the way you Westerners, you Christians, speak of your faith? Is the reality of religion for you also an inward experience of the heart?" And with that began an interesting interchange of conversation, each party discovering that in the heart of the other was a genuine longing for God that overwhelmed all the artificial, material distinctions and the human devices through which men have limited to particular and exclusive paths their way of search, and drew these two pilgrims on the way toward God into a common and very real fellowship of the spirit. A Buddhist monk was passing by a mission building in another city' of China when his attention was suddenly drawn to the Svastika and other Buddhist symbols which the architect had skilfully used in decorating the building. His face brightened as he said to his companion: "I did not know that Christians had any appreciation of beauty in their religion." These incidents reveal aspects of the alchemy of the soul by which the real devotee of one religion perceives values which are dear to him in another religion. The good which he has attained in his old religion enables him to appropriate the better in the new religion. A converted monk, explaining his acceptance of Christianity, said: "I found in Jesus Christ the great Bodhisattva, my Saviour, who brings to fruition the aspirations awakened in me by Buddhism." Just as it has been said that they do not know England who know England only, so it may be said with equal truth that they do not know Christianity who know it and no other faith. There are many in China like the old lady at the temple, who have found in Buddhism something of that spiritual satisfaction and stimulus which true Christianity affords, in fuller measure. The recognition of such religious values by the student or the missionary furnishes a sound foundation for the building of a truer spirituality among such devotees. As will be seen in what follows, religion in China is at first sight a mixed affair. From the standpoint of cruder household superstitions an average Chinese family may be regarded as Taoists; the principles by which its members seek to guide their lives individually and socially may be called Confucian; their attitude of worship and their hopes for the future make them Buddhists. The student would not be far afield when he credits the religious aspirations of the Chinese today to Buddhism, regarding Confucianism as furnishing the ethical system to which they submit and Taoism as responsible for many superstitious practices. But the Buddhism found in China differs radically from that of Southern Asia, as will be made clear by the following sketch of its introduction into the Flowery Kingdom and its subsequent history. II THE ENTRANCE OF BUDDHISM INTO CHINA Buddhism was not an indigenous religion of China. Its founder was Gautama of India in the sixth century B.C. Some centuries later it found its way into China by way of central Asia. There is a tradition that as early as 142 B.C. Chang Ch'ien, an ambassador of the Chinese emperor, Wu Ti, visited the countries of central Asia, where he first learned about the new religion which was making such headway and reported concerning it to his master. A few years later the generals of Wu Ti captured a gold image of the Buddha which the emperor set up in his palace and worshiped, but he took no further steps. According to Chinese historians Buddhism was officially recognized in China about 67 A.D. A few years before that date, the emperor, Ming-Ti, saw in a dream a large golden image with a halo hovering above his palace. His advisers, some of whom were no doubt already favorable to the new religion, interpreted the image of the dream to be that of Buddha, the great sage of India, who was inviting his adhesion. Following their advice the emperor sent an embassy to study into Buddhism. It brought back two Indian monks and a quantity of Buddhist classics. These were carried on a white horse and so the monastery which the emperor built for the monks and those who came after them was called the White Horse Monastery. Its tablet is said to have survived to this day. This dream story is worth repeating because it goes to show that Buddhism was not only known at an early date, but was favored at the court of China. In fact, the same history which relates the dream contains the biography of an official who became an adherent of Buddhism a few years before the dream took place. This is not at all surprising, because an acquaintance with Buddhism was the inevitable concomitant of the military campaigning, the many embassies and the wide-ranging trade of those centuries. But the introduction of Buddhism into China was especially promoted by reason of the current policy of the Chinese government of moving conquered populations in countries west of China into China proper, The vanquished peoples brought their own religion along with them. At one time what is now the province of Shansi was populated in this way by the Hsiung-nu, many of whom were Buddhists. The introduction and spread of Buddhism were hastened by the decline of Confucianism and Taoism. The Han dynasty (206 B. C.-221 A. D.) established a government founded on Confucianism. It reproduced the classics destroyed in the previous dynasty and encouraged their study; it established the state worship of Confucius; it based its laws and regulations upon the ideals and principles advocated by Confucius. The great increase of wealth and power under this dynasty led to a gradual deterioration in the character of the rulers and officials. The rigid Confucian regulations became burdensome to the people who ceased to respect their leaders. Confucianism lost its hold as the complete solution of the problems of life. At the same time Taoism had become a veritable jumble of meaningless and superstitious rites which served to support a horde of ignorant, selfish priests. The high religious ideals of the earlier Taoist mystics were abandoned for a search after the elixir of life during fruitless journeys to the isles of the Immortals which were supposed to be in the Eastern Sea. At this juncture there arose in North China a sect of men called the Purists who advocated a return from the vagaries of Taoism and the irritating rules of Confucianism to the simple life practised by the Taoist mystics. When these thoughtful and earnest minded men came into contact with Buddhism they were captivated by it. It had all they were claiming for Taoist mysticism and more. They devoted their literary ability and religious fervor to the spreading of the new religion and its success was in no small measure due to their efforts. As a result of this early association the tenets of the two religions seemed so much alike that various emperors called assemblies of Buddhists and Taoists with the intention of effecting a union of the two religions into one. If the emperor was under the influence of Buddhism he tried to force all Taoists to become Buddhists. If he was favorable to Taoism he tried to make all Buddhists become Taoists. But such mandates were as unsuccessful as other similar schemes have been. In the third century A. D. after the Han dynasty had ended, China was broken up into several small kingdoms which contended for supremacy, so that for about four hundred years the whole country was in a state of disunion. One of the strong dynasties of this period, the Northern Wei (386-535 A. D.), was distinctly loyal to Buddhism. During its continuance Buddhism prospered greatly. Although Chinese were not permitted to become monks until 335 A. D., still Buddhism made rapid advances and in the fourth century, when that restriction was removed, about nine-tenths of the people of northwestern China had become Buddhists. Since then Buddhism has been an established factor in Chinese life. III THE ESTABLISHMENT OF BUDDHISM AS THE PREDOMINATING RELIGION OF CHINA Even the historical influences noted above do not account entirely for the spread of Buddhism in China. In order to understand this and the place which Buddhism occupies, we need to review briefly the different forms which religion takes in China and to note how Buddhism has related itself to them. _1. The World of Invisible Spirits_ The Chinese believe _in_ a surrounding-world of spirits, whose origin is exceedingly various. They touch life at every point. There are spirits which are guardians of the soil, tree spirits, mountain demons, fire gods, the spirits of animals, of mountains, of rivers, seas and stars, of the heavenly bodies and of many forms of active life. These spirits to the Chinese mind, of today are a projection, a sort of spiritual counterpart, of the many sided interests, practical or otherwise, of the groups and communities by whom they are worshipped. There are other spirits which mirror the ideals of the groups by which they are worshipped. Some of them may have been incarnated in the lives of great leaders. There are spirits which are mere animations, occasional spirits, associated with objects crossing the interests of men, but not constant enough to attain a definite, independent life as spiritual beings. Thus surrounding the average Chinese peasant there is a densely populated spirit world affecting in all kinds of ways his, daily existence. This other world is the background which must be kept in mind by one who would understand or attempt to guide Chinese religious experience. It is the basis on which all organized forms of religious activity are built. The nearest of these to his heart is the proper regard for his ancestors. _2. The Universal Sense_ of _Ancestor Control_ The ancestral control of family life occupies so large and important a place in Chinese thought and practice that ancestor worship has been called the original religion of the Chinese. It is certain that the earliest Confucian records recognize ancestor worship; but doubtless it antedated them, growing up out of the general religious consciousness of the people. The discussion of that origin in detail cannot be taken up here. It may be followed in the literature noted in the appendix or in the volume of this series entitled "Present-Day Confucianism." Ancestor worship is active today, however, because the Chinese as a people believe that these ancestors control in a very real way the good or evil fortunes of their descendants, because this recognition of ancestors furnishes a potent means of promoting family unity and social ethics, and, most of all, because a happy future life is supposed to be dependent upon descendants who will faithfully minister to the dead. Since each one desires such a future he is faithful in promoting the observance of the obligation. Consequently, ancestor worship, like the previously mentioned belief in the invisible spiritual world, underlies all other religious developments. No family is so obscure or poor that it does not submit to the ritual or discipline which is supposed to ensure the favor of the spirits belonging to the community. Likewise, every such family is loyal to the supposed needs of its deceased ancestors. In a very intimate way these beliefs are interwoven with the private and social morality of every family or group in Chinese society, and must be taken into account by any one who seeks to bring a religious message to the Chinese people. _3. Degenerate Taoism_ Taoism is that system of Chinese religious thought and practice, beginning about the fifth century B. C., which was originally based on the teachings of Lao Tzu and developed in the writings of Lieh Tzu and Chuang Tzu and found in the Tao Tê Ching. It is really in this original form a philosophy of some merit. According to its teaching the Tao is the great impersonal background of the world from which all things proceed as beams from the sun, and to which all beings return. In contrast to the present, transient, changing world the Tao is unchangeable and quiet. Originally the Taoists emphasized quiescence, a life in accordance with nature, as a means of assimilating themselves to the Tao, believing that in this way they would obtain length of days, eternal life and especially the power to become superior to natural conditions. There is a movement today among Chinese scholars in favor of a return to this original highest form of Taoism. It appeals to them as a philosophy of life; an answer to its riddles. Among the masses of the people, however, Taoism manifests itself in a ritual of extreme superstition. It recommends magic tricks and curious superstitions as a means of prolonging life. It expresses itself very largely in these degrading practices which few Chinese will defend, but which are yet very commonly practiced. _4. The Organizing Value of Confucianism_ Confucianism brought organization into these hazy conceptions of life and duty. It took for granted this spiritual-unspiritual background of animism, ancestor-worship and Taoism, but reshaped and adapted it as a whole so that it might fit into that proper organization of the state and nation which was one of its great objectives. Just as Confucianism related the family to the village, the village to the district, and the district to the state, so it organized the spiritual world into a hierarchy with Shang Ti as its head. This hierarchy was developed along the lines of the organization mentioned above. Under Shang Ti were the five cosmic emperors, one for each of the four quarters and one for heaven above, under whom were the gods of the soil, the mountains, rivers, seas, stars, the sun and moon, the ancestors and the gods of special groups. Each of the deities in the various ranks had duties to those above and rights with reference to those below. These duties and rights, as they affected the individual, were not only expressed in law but were embodied in ceremony and music, in daily religious life and practice in such a way that each individual had reason to feel that he was a functioning agent in this grand Confucian universe. If any one failed to do his part, the whole universe would suffer. So thoroughly has this idea been adopted by the Chinese people that every one joins in forcing an individual, however reluctant or careless, to perform his part of each ceremony as it has been ordered from high antiquity. The emperor alone worshipped the supreme deity, Shang Ti; the great officers of state, according to the dignity of their office, were related to subordinate gods and required to show them adequate respect and reverence. Confucius and a long line of noted men following him were semi-deified [Footnote: Confucius was by imperial decree deified in 1908.] and highly reverenced by the literati, the class from which the officers of state were as a rule obtained, in connection with their duties, and as an expression of their ideals. To the common people were left the ordinary local deities, while all classes, of course, each in its own fashion reverenced, cherished and obeyed their ancestors. It should be remarked at this point that Confucianism of this official character has broken down, not only under the impact of modern ideas, but under the longing of the Chinese for a universal deity. The people turn to Heaven and to the Pearly Emperor, the popular counterpart of Shang Ti. Viewed from another angle, Confucianism is an elaborate system of ethics. In writings which are virtually the scriptures of the Chinese people Confucius and his successors have set forth the principles which should govern the life of a people who recognize this spiritual universe and system. These ethics have grown out of a long and, in some respects, a sound experience. Much can be said in their favor. The essential weaknesses of the Confucian system of ethics lie in its sectional and personal loyalties and its monarchical basis. The spirit of democracy is a deadly foe to Confucianism. Another element of weakness is its excessive dependence upon the past. Confucius reached ultimate wisdom by the study of the best that had been attained before his day. He looked backward rather than forward. Consequently a modern, broadly educated Confucianist finds himself in an anomalous position. He does not need absolutely to reject the wisdom which Confucianism embodies, but he can no longer accept it as a sound, reliable and indisputable scheme of thought and action. Yet its simple ethical principles and its social relationships are basal in the lives of the vast masses of the Chinese. _5. Buddhism an Inclusive Religion._ Upon this, confused jumble of spiritism, superstition, loyalty to ancestors and submission to a divine hierarchy Buddhism was superimposed. It quickly dominated all because of its superior excellence. The form of Buddhism which became established in China was not, to be sure, like the Buddhism preached by Gautama and his disciples, or like that form of Buddhism which had taken root in Burma or Ceylon. Except in name, the Buddhism of Southern Asia and the Buddhism which developed in China were virtually two distinct types of religion. The Buddhism of Burma and Ceylon was of the conservative Hînayâna ("Little Vehicle" of salvation) school, while that of China was of the progressive Mahâyâna ("Great Vehicle" of salvation) school. Their differences are so marked as to be worthy of a careful statement. The Hinayana, which is today the type of Buddhism in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, has always clung closely to tradition as expressed in the original Buddhist scriptures. Its basic ideas were that life is on the whole a time of suffering, that the cause of this sorrow is desire or ignorance, and that there is a possible deliverance from it. This deliverance or salvation is to be attained by following the eightfold path, namely, right knowledge, aspiration, speech, conduct, means of livelihood, endeavor, mindfulness and meditation. To the beatific state to be ultimately attained Gautama gave the name Nirvana, explained by his followers variously either as an utter extinction of personality or as a passionless peace, a general state of well-being free from all evil desire or clinging to life and released from the chain of transmigration. Hinayana Buddhism appeals to the individual as affording a way of escape from evil desire and its consequences by acquiring knowledge, by constant discipline, and by a devotedness of the life to religious ends through membership in the monastic order which Buddha established. It encourages, however, a personal salvation worked out by the individual alone. The Mahâyâna school of Buddhists accept the general ideas of the Hinayana regarding life and salvation, but so change the spirit and objectives as to make Buddhism into what is virtually another religion. It does not confine salvation to the few who can retire from the world and give themselves wholly to good works, but opens Buddhahood to all. The "saint" of Hinayana Buddhism is the _arhat_ who is intent on saving himself. The saint of Mahâyâna Buddhism is the candidate for Buddhahood (Bodhisattva) who defers his entrance into the bliss of deliverance in order to save others. Mahâyâna Buddhism is progressive. It encourages missionary enterprise and was a secret of the remarkable spread of Buddhism over Asia. Moreover, while the Hînayâna school recognizes no god or being to whom worship is given, the Mahâyanâ came to regard Gautama himself as a god and salvation as life in a heavenly world of pure souls. Thus the Mahâyâna type of thinking constitutes a bridge between Hînayâna Buddhism and Christianity. In fact, a recent writer has declared that Hînayâna Buddhists are verging toward these more spiritual conceptions. [Footnote: See Saunders, _Buddhism and Buddhists in Southern Asia,_ pp. 10, 20.] After the death of Sâkyamuni [Footnote: Sâkyamuni is the name by which Gautama, the Buddha, is familiarly known in China.] Buddhism broke up into a number of sects usually said to be eighteen in number. When Buddhism came to China some of these sects were introduced, but they assumed new forms in their Chinese environment. Besides the sects brought, from India the Chinese developed several strong sects of their own. Usually they speak of ten sects although the number is far larger, if the various subdivisions are included. To indicate the manifold differences between these groups in Buddhism would take us far afield and would not be profitable. It will be of interest, however, to consider some of the chief sects. One of the sects introduced from India is the Pure Land or the Ching T'u which holds before the believer the "Western Paradise" gained through faith in Amitâbha. Any one, no matter what his life may have been, may enter the Western Paradise by repeating the name of Amitâbha. This sect is widespread in China. In Japan there are two branches of it known as the Nishi-Hongwanji and the Higashi-Hongwanji with their head monasteries in Kyoto. They are the most progressive sects in Japan and are carrying on missionary work in China, the Hawaiian Islands and in the United States. Another strong sect is the Meditative sect or the Ch'an Men (Zen in Japan). This was introduced by Bodhidharma, or Tamo, who arrived in the capital of China in the year 520 A.D. On his arrival the emperor Wu Ti tried to impress the sage with his greatness saying: "We have built temples, multiplied the Scriptures, encouraged many to join the Order: is not there much merit in all this?" "None," was the blunt reply. "But what say the holy books? Do they not promise rewards for such deeds?" "There is nothing holy." "But you, yourself, are you not one of the holy ones?" "I don't know." "Who are you?" "I don't know." Thus introduced, the great man proceeded to open his missionary-labors by sitting down opposite a wall arid gazing at it for the next nine years. From this he has been called the "wall-gazer." He and his successors promulgated the doctrine that neither the scriptures, the ritual nor the organization, in fact nothing outward had any value in the attainment of enlightenment. They held that the heart of the universe is Buddha and that apart from the heart or the thought all is unreal. They thought themselves back into the universal Buddha and then found the Buddha heart in all nature. Thus they awakened the spirit which permeated nature, art and literature and made the whole world kin with the spirit of the Buddha. "The golden light upon the sunkist peaks, The water murmuring in the pebbly creeks, Are Buddha. In the stillness, hark, he speaks!" [Footnote: K. J. Saunders in _Epochs of Buddhist History._] Such pantheism and quietism often lead to a confusion in moral relations, but these mystics were quite correct in their morals because they checked up their mysticism with the moral system of the Buddha. Still another important sect originated in the sixth century A. D. on Chinese soil, namely, the T'ien T'ai (Japanese Tendai), so called because it started in a monastery situated on the beautiful T'ien T'ai mountains south of Ningpo. Chih K'ai, the founder, realized that Buddhism contained a great mass of contradictory teachings and practice, all attributed to the Buddha. He sought for a harmonizing principle and found it in the arbitrary theory that these teachings were given to different people on five different occasions and hence the discrepancies. The practical message of this sect has been that all beings have the Buddha heart and that the Buddha loves all beings, so that all beings may attain salvation, which consists in the full realization of the Buddha heart latent in them. There was a time when these sects were very active and flourishing in China. At the present time the various tendencies for which they stood have been adopted by Buddhism as a whole and the various sectaries, though still keeping the name of the sect, live peacefully in the same monastery. All the monasteries practice meditation, believe in the paradise of Amitâbha, and are enjoying the ironic calm advocated by the T'ien T'ai. While the struggle among the sects of China has been followed by a calm which resembles stagnation, those in Japan are very active and the reader is referred to the volume of this series on Japanese Buddhism for further treatment of the subject. When Buddhism entered China it brought with it a new world. It was new _practical_ and new spiritually. It brought a knowledge unknown before regarding the heavenly bodies, regarding nature and regarding medicine, and a practice vastly above the realm of magical arts. In addition to these practical benefits, Buddhism proclaimed a new spiritual universe far more real and extensive than any of which the Chinese had dreamed, and peopled with spiritual beings having characteristics entirely novel. In comparison with this new universe or series of universes which Indian imagination had created, the Chinese universe was wooden and geometric. Since it was an organized system and a greater rather than a different one, the Chinese people readily accepted it and made it their own. Buddhism not only enlarged the universe and gave the individual a range of opportunity hitherto unsuspected, but it introduced a scheme of religious practice, or rather several of them, enabling the individual devotee to attain a place in this spiritual universe through his own efforts. These "ways" of salvation were quite in harmony with Chinese ideas. They resembled what had already been a part of the national practice and so were readily adopted and adapted by the Chinese. Buddhism rendered a great service to the Chinese through its new estimate of the individual. Ancient China scarcely recognized the individual. He was merged in the family and the clan. Taoists, to be sure, talked of "immortals" and Confucianism exhibited its typical personality, or "princely man," but these were thought of as supermen, as ideals. The classics of China had very little to say about the common people. The great common crowd was submerged. Buddhism, on the other hand, gave every individual a distinct place in the great wheel _dharma,_ the law, and made it possible for him to reach the very highest goal of salvation. This introduced a genuinely new element into the social and family life of the Chinese people. Buddhism was so markedly superior to any one of the four other methods of expressing the religious life, that it quickly won practical recognition as the real religion of China. Confucianism may be called the doctrine of the learned classes. It formulates their principles of life, but it is in no strict sense a popular religion. It is rather a state ritual, or a scheme of personal and social ethics. Taoism recognizes the immediate influence of the spirit world, but it ministers only to local ideals and needs. In the usages of family and community life, ancestor worship has a definite place, but an occasional one. Buddhism was able to leave untouched each of these expressions of Chinese personal and social life, and yet it went far beyond them in ministering to religious development. Its ideas of being, of moral responsibility and of religious relationships furnished a new psychology which with all its imperfections far surpassed that of the Chinese. Buddhism's organization was so satisfying and adaptable that not only was it taken over readily by the Chinese, but it has also persisted in China without marked changes since its introduction. Most of all it stressed personal salvation and promised an escape from the impersonal world of distress and hunger which surrounds the average Chinese into a heaven ruled by Amitâbha [Footnote: Amitâbha, meaning "infinite light," is the Sanskrit name of one of the Buddhas moat highly revered in China. The usual Chinese equivalent is Omi-To-Fo.] the Merciful. The obligations of Buddhism are very definite and universally recognized. It enforces high standards of living, but has added significance because it draws each devotee into a sort of fellowship with the divine, and mates not this life alone, but this life plus a future life, the end of human activity. Buddhism, therefore, really expresses the deepest religious life of the people of China. It will be worth while to note some illustrations of the conviction of the Chinese people that there are three religions to which they owe allegiance and yet that these are essentially one. They often say, "The three teachings are the whole teaching." An old scholar is reported to have remarked, "The three roads are different, but they lead to the same source." A common story reports that Confucius was asked in the other world about drinking wine, which Buddhists forbid but Taoists permit. Confucius replied: "If I do not drink I become a Buddha. If I drink I become an Immortal. Well, if there is wine, I shall drink; if there is none, I shall abstain." This expresses characteristically the Chinese habit of adaptation. Such a decision sounds quite up to date. The Ethical Culture Society of Peking, recently organized, has upon its walls pictures of Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius and Christ. Its members claim to worship Shang Ti as the god of all religions. An offshoot of this society, the T'ung Shan She, associates the three founders very closely with Christ. It claims to have a deeper revelation of Christ than the Christians themselves. A new organization, the Tao Yuan, plans to harmonize the three old religions with Mohammedanism and Christianity. Buddhism has consistently and continually striven to bring about a unity of religion in China by interpenetrating Confucianism and Taoism. Quite early the Buddhists invented the story that the Bodhisattva Ju T'ung was really Confucius incarnate. There was at one time a Buddhist temple to Confucius in the province of Shantung. The Buddhists also gave out the story that Bodhisattva Kas'yapa was the incarnation of Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism. An artist painted Lao Tzu transformed into a Buddha, seated in a lotus bud with a halo about his head. In front of the Buddha was Confucius doing reverence. A Chinese scholar, asked for his opinion about the picture, said: "Buddha should be seated; Lao Tzu should be standing at the side looking askance at Buddha; and Confucius should be grovelling on the floor." A monument dating from 543 A. D., illustrates this tendency of Buddhism to represent its own superiority in Chinese religious life. At the top of the monument is Brahma, lower down is Sâkyamuni with his disciples, Ananda and Kas'yapa on one face, and on the other Sâkyamuni again, conversing with Buddha Prabhutaratna and worshipped by monks and Bodhisattvas. On the pedestal are Confucian and Taoist deities, ten in number. Thus Buddhism sought to rank itself clearly above the other two religions. From the early days Buddhism regarded itself as their superior and began the processes of interpenetration and absorption. In consequence the values originally inherent in Buddhism have come to be regarded as the natural possession of the Chinese. It does express their religious life, especially in South China, where outward manifestations of religion are perhaps more marked than in the north. IV BUDDHISM AND THE PEASANT In order that, one may realize the place that Buddhism holds in the religious life of the Chinese people as a whole, he must turn to the organizations through which it functions. It is sometimes difficult to estimate the place of Buddhism in China, because it so interpenetrates the whole cultural and social life of the people. It becomes their "way." To see how it touches the life of the average man or woman in various ways will, therefore, be illuminating. The most outstanding evidence of devotion are the many monasteries which dot the land in all Buddhist countries. China is less dominated by them than other lands, yet they form a very important reason for the persistence and strength of Buddhism there. One of the famous old shrines will represent them as a class and give evidence of their importance. _1. The Monastery of Kushan_ Kushan Monastery, located about four hours' ride by sedan-chair from Foochow, is a famous shrine of South China. It occupies a large amphitheater about fifteen hundred feet above the plain, part way up Kushan, the "Drum Mountain," some three thousand feet high. From the top of the mountain on clear days with the help of a glass the blue shores of Formosa may be seen on the eastern horizon. The spacious monastery buildings are surrounded by a grove of noble trees, in which squirrels, pheasants, chipmunks and snakes enjoy an undisturbed life. The ascent to the monastery begins on the bank of the Min River. At the foot of the mountain in a large temple the traveler may obtain mountain chairs carried by two or more coolies. The road, paved with granite slabs cut from the mountain side, consists of a series of stone stairs, which zig-zag up the mountain under the shadow of ancient pine trees. Every turn brings to view a bit of landscape carpeted with rice, or a distant view where mountains and sky meet. A brook rushes by the side of the road. Here it breaks into a beautiful waterfall. There it gurgles' in a deep ravine. The sides of the road are covered with large granite blocks which, loosened from the mountain side by earthquakes, have disposed themselves promiscuously. Their blackened, weather-beaten sides are incised with Chinese characters. One of them bears the words: "We put our trust in Amitâbha." Another immortalizes the sentiments of some great official who has made the pilgrimage to the mountain. Near the monastery stand the sombre dagobas where repose the ashes of former abbots and monastery officials. Not far away on the other side of the road, hidden by trees, is the crematory where the last remains of the brethren are consumed by the flames. As one approaches the monastery he hears the regular sounds of a bell tolled by a water-wheel, reminding the faithful of Buddha's law. He sees monks strolling leisurely about and lay brethren carrying wood, cultivating the gardens, or tending the animals released by pious devotees to heap up merit for themselves in the next world. Just inside the main gate is a large fish pond, where goldfish of great size struggle with one another, and with the lazy turtles, for the round hard cakes purchased from the monks by the merit-seeking devotee. The monastery itself consists of a large group of buildings erected about stone-paved courts, rising in terraces on the mountain side. The large court at the entrance leads to the "Hall of the Four Kings." As one enters the spacious door, he _is_ faced by a jolly, almost naked image of the "Laughing Buddha." This is Maitrêya, the Mea siah of the Buddhists, who will return to the world five thousand years after the departure of Sâkyamuni. In the northern monasteries Maitrêya is often represented as reaching a height when standing of seventy feet or more, which indicates the stature to which man will attain when he returns to earth. On each side of the visitor are two immense images of the Deva kings. In Brahman cosmogony they were the guardians of the world. In this entrance hall of the Buddhist monastery they stand as guardians of the Buddhist faith. In the same hall looking toward the open court beyond is Wei To, another guardian deity of Buddhism. Somewhere near by is Kuan Ti, the god worshipped by the soldiers and merchants. Although a Confucian god, he was early adopted by Buddhist monks into their pantheon and made the guardian of their Order. Beyond this entrance hall is a large stone-paved court. On the right side is a bell-tower whose bell is tolled by a monk who has kept the vow of silence for fourteen years. On the left is a drum-tower. On the right one finds a series of small shrines. A passage way leads to the library where numerous Buddhist writings repose in lacquered cases, some of them written in their own blood by devout monks. On the same side are guest halls, the dining room for three hundred monks, and the spacious, well equipped kitchen with running water piped from a reservoir in the hills above. A store where books, images and the simple requirements of the monks can be obtained is just above the dining room. On the left side of the court are large buildings used as dormitories far the monks, storerooms, and for housing the great printing establishment with its thousands of wooden blocks on which are carved passages from the Buddhist scriptures. Here also are kept the coffins in which the monks are to be burned. On a terrace above the north side of the court rises the main hall, called the "Hall of the Triratna," the Buddhist Trinity, where three gilded images are seated on a lotus flower with halos covering their backs and heads. The center image is that of Sâkyamuni, the Buddha. On his right is Yao Shih, the Buddha of medicine, and on the left, Amitâbha. Quite often these images are said to represent the Buddha, the Law and the Community of Monks. On the altar are candlesticks and a fine incense burner from which curls of smoke arise. An immense lamp hangs from the ceiling. In the rear are banners with praises to Buddha given by pious devotees. The floor is tiled and covered with round mats made of palm fiber on which the monks kneel during worship. Before the mats are low stands for books. On each side of this main hall are the images of nine Buddhist saints (_arhats_), eighteen in all. Behind this large temple opens another court and on a terrace above it stands the hall of the Law with the images of Kuan Yin, the goddess of Mercy, and the twenty-four devas. Here also are small images of viceroys and patrons of the monastery. The hillsides are dotted with numerous temples and shrines. There is one to Chu-Hsi, the great philosopher of the Sung dynasty, who was born in Fukien. In it are preserved a few characters indited by his hand. On the west side of the monastery are large buildings for the housing of animals released by merit-seeking devotees. Here cows, hogs, goats, chickens, geese and ducks spend their old age without fear of beginning their transmigration by forming the main portion of a Chinese feast. The monastery is governed by an abbot, usually a man of good business ability, elected by the monks. Under him are the officers of the two wings or groups of attendants. One set looks after the spiritual interests, of the monks; the-other takes care of their material needs: The monks have worship about two o'clock in the morning and again at about four in the afternoon. The rest of the long day they spend in meditation, or study, in strolling about the mountain side or in sleep. Their life is separated from all stirring contact with the life of the world. _2. Monasteries Control Fêng-shui_ This monastery with its appointments is a good type of the monasteries all over China. It was founded at the request of the inhabitants of the neighborhood, because the dragons of the region used to cause much damage to the crops in the surrounding country. A holy monk came, founded the monastery, and by his good influence so curbed the dragons that the country-side has enjoyed peace ever since and the monastery has prospered. Since the fourth century of our era records show that by the building of monasteries in strategic place's holy monks brought rains and prosperity to various regions, or prevented floods and calamities from damaging the villages. In other words the monasteries are regarded as the controllers of _fêng-shui_ (wind and water). According to the Chinese philosophy winds and water are spiritual forces and may be so controlled by other spiritual forces that instead of bringing harm they will confer benefit upon the people. Floods and dry seasons are so frequent in China that any institution holding out the promise of regulating them would become firmly established in the affection of the people. The monasteries have taken this place. One of the picturesque features of a Chinese landscape is the pagoda. These structures were introduced in the early stages of Buddhism to enshrine the relics of Buddha. It was said that Buddha's body consisted of eighty thousand parts, hence numerous pagodas were erected to shelter these relics. Inasmuch as a pagoda contained the relics of Buddha, it possessed magic power and so came to play a great part in the control of the winds and the rains. The pagoda in China has an odd number of stories varying from three to thirteen. The odd numbers belong to the positive principle in nature which is superior to the negative principle. The pagoda plays quite a part in the festivals of the people. On certain occasions the stories are hung with lanterns and the pagodas are visited by numerous throngs. _3. Prayer for Rain_ Prayers for rain afford such a common illustration of the relation of Buddhism to the life of the peasant that a detailed presentation of such a service may be of seal value. During a prolonged drought in some district of China, when the heat opens gaping cracks in the fields and the grain is drying up, the populace may visit their highest official and apprise him of the dire situation. He often forbids the slaughter of all animals for three days and, in case rain has not thereby come, he goes in person or sends a deputy to the nearest monastery to direct the monks to pray for rain. _(a) The Altar._--On such an occasion the great hall of the Law may be used for the ceremony. Quite often a special altar is erected in an enclosure near the monastery on a platform one foot high and twenty-five feet on each side, overspread by a tent of green cloth. In the center seats are arranged for the presiding monk and his assistants. On each of the four sides of the altar is placed an image of the Dragon King who is supposed to control the rain. If an image is not obtainable a piece of paper inscribed with the name of the dragon may be used. Flowers, fruits and incense are spread before the images. On the doors of the tent are painted dragons with clouds. The tent and altar are green and the monks wear green garments, because green belongs to the spring and suggests rain. For this ceremony the monks prepare themselves by abstinence and cleansing. The presiding monk is one of high moral character and religious fervor. While some monks recite appropriate sutras, two others look after the offerings, the incense, and the sprinkling of water during the ceremony to suggest the coming of rain. The services continue day and night, being conducted by groups of monks in succession. _(b) The Prayer Service._--The ceremonial is opened by a chant as follows: "Pearly dew of the jade heavens, golden waves of Buddha's ocean, scatter the lotus flowers on a thousand thousand worlds of suffering, that the heart of mercy may wash away great calamity, that a drop may become a flood, that a drop may purify mountains and rivers. "We put our trust in the Bodhisattvas and Mahâsattvas that purify the earth." The chant ended, a monk takes a bowl of water and repeats thrice: "We put our trust in the great merciful Kuan Yin Bodhisattva." Then follows the chant: "The Bodhisattva's sweet dew of the willow is able to make one drop spread over the ten directions. It washes away the rank odors and dirt. It keeps the altars clean and pure. The mysterious words of the doctrine will be reverently repeated." This chant ended, the monks intone incantations of Kuan Yin, quite unintelligible even to them, but of magical value. While these are being uttered, the presiding monk and his attendants walk around the altar, while one of them with a branch sprinkles water on the floor. This symbolizes the cleansing of the altar and of the monks from all impurities which might render the ritual ineffective. When the perambulating monks have returned to their place, while the sprinkler continues his duties, the monks repeat the words: "We put our trust in the sweet dew kings, Bodhisattvas and Mahâsattvas." The Bodhisattvas have now come to the purified altar and while the abbot offers incense to them, the monks repeat the words: "The fields are destroyed so that they resemble the back of a tortoise. The demons of drought produce calamity. The dark people [Footnote: A term denoting the Chinese.] pray earnestly while crops are being destroyed. We pray that abundant, limpid liquid may descend to purify and refresh the whole world. The clouds of incense rise." This plaint is repeated thrice and is followed by an invocation: "Wholeheartedly we cast ourselves to the earth, O Triratna, who dost exist eternally in the realm of _dharma_ of the ten directions." The leader remains quiet a long time with his eyes closed, visualizing the Buddhas, the Bodhisattvas, the dragon kings, and the saints, all with their heavenly eyes and ears knowing that this region is afflicted with drought, that an altar has been constructed and that all have come to make petition. This meditation is regarded as of chief importance. It is followed by an announcement to the effect that the sutra praying for rain was given by the Buddha, that a drought is afflicting the land, that the altar has been erected in accordance with the regulations and that prayer is being made for rain. But fearing that something may have been overlooked, the magic formula of "the king of light who turns the wheel" is read seven times so as to remedy such oversight. The altar having thus been cleansed of all impurities, the rain sutra is opened and the one hundred and eighty-eight dragon kings are urged by name in groups of ten to take action. The formula is as follows: "We with our whole heart invite such and such dragon kings to come. We desire that the heart and wisdom which knows others intuitively will move the spirits above to obey the Buddha, to take pity on the people below and to come to our province and send down sweet rain." When the dragons have all been duly invited, the monks chant suitable magical formulas, while the leader sits in meditation visualizing these dragon kings and their tender solicitude for the people in distress. The monastery bell is sounded and the wooden fish is beaten, while drums and cymbals add their effect. The whole is intended to draw the attention of the dragon kings to the drought. Then the fifty-four Buddhas are invited in a similar manner in groups of ten, the sixth group consisting of four. A similar form of address is used and similar magical formulas are recited with the noisy accompaniment. The ceremony concludes by the expression of the hope that the three jewels (Buddha, the Law and the Community of Monks) and the dragon kings will grant the rain. Upon the altar are four copies of an announcement to the dragon kings and Buddhas. On the first day three copies are sent to them through the flames, one to the Buddhas, one to the dragon kings and one to the devas. One copy is read daily and then sent up at the thanksgiving ceremony. The announcement is as follows: "We put our trust in the limitless, reverent ocean clouds, the dragons of august virtue and all their host, all dragon kings and holy saints. Their august virtue is difficult to measure. In accord with the command of Buddha they send liquid rain. May their quiet mercy descend to the altar; may they send down purity and freshness, spreading over the ten directions. We put our trust in the company of dragon kings of the clouds, the saints and the Bodhisattvas." The offerings are made only in the morning inasmuch as the Buddhas, following ancient custom, are not supposed to eat after the noonday meal. Great care is taken that the altar shall not be desecrated by any one who eats meat or drinks wine. The magic formulas of great mercy are uttered or the name of Kuan Yin is repeated a thousand times. The monks, take turn in these services which continue day and night until rain comes. _(c) Its Meaning._--In the religious consciousness of the people is the idea that the drought is a punishment for sin. The altar is made pure and acceptable and sin is removed in various symbolic ways. This fits in with the idea that man is an intimate part of the world order. His sin disturbs the order of nature. Heaven manifests displeasures by sending down calamities upon men. Men should cease their wrongdoing which disturbs the natural order and should also wash away the effects of their sins. The services for rain with their magic formulas help to clear away the consequences of sin and to predispose Heaven to grant its blessings again. _4. Monasteries Are Supported Because They Control Fêng-shui_ The prayers for rain are an important part of the Chinese peasant's world order. Drought is the manifestation of Heaven's displeasure at the infraction of Heaven's laws. It calls for self-examination and repentance. Thus the monastery opens up the windows of the universal order as this touches the humble tiller of the soil. The Buddhist monasteries not only hold services in time of drought, but also in time of flood and at times when plagues of grasshoppers afflict the land, or when diseases afflict human beings. Their adoption of Chinese customs led them to have special ceremonies at the eclipse of the sun and moon, although they knew the cause of the eclipse. Peasants and officials support the monastery because of these services regulating the wind and water influences and through them bringing the people into harmonious relation with the great world of spirits. BUDDHISM AND THE FAMILY One of the criticisms of the Chinese against Buddhism is that it is opposed to filial piety. According to Mencius the greatest unfilial act is to leave no progeny. In spite of this charge Buddhism has done much for the family. It has taken over the ethics of the family, filial piety, obedience and respect for elders, and has made them a part of its system. Transgression of these fundamental duties is visited by dire punishments in the next world. The faithful observance is followed not only by the rewards of the Confucian system, but results in the greatest rewards in the future life. _1. Kuan Yin, the Giver of Children and Protector of Women_ Buddhism has done more. Out of its atmosphere of love and mercy toward all beings has developed Kuan Yin, the ideal of Chinese womanhood, the goddess of Mercy, who embodies the Chinese ideal of beauty, filial piety and compassion toward the weak and suffering. She is especially the goddess of women, being interested in all their affairs. Her image is found in almost every household and her temples have a place in every part of China. A brief history of this deity will enable us to understand the significance of the cult. Kuan Yin started as a male god in India, called Avalôkitêsvara, who was worshipped from the third to the seventh century of our era. He was the protector of sailors and people in danger. In the course of time, either in China or in India, the god became a goddess. Some think that this was due to the influence of Christianity. In China both forms survive, though the goddess is better known. A Buddhist once said that a Bodhisattva is neither male nor female and appears in whatever form is convenient. Kuan Yin is a very popular goddess. Her experiences in Hades are dramatically presented by traveling theatrical companies. Her deeds of mercy are portrayed in art. Her well known story runs as follows: Kuan Yin was the daughter of the ruler of a prosperous kingdom located somewhere near the island of Sumatra. Her birth was announced to the queen by a dream. The little girl ate no meat nor milk. Her disposition was very good. Her intelligence was most extraordinary. Once she read anything she never forgot it. At the age of sixteen her father tried to betroth her to a young prince. She refused and decided to give herself to a life of fasting and abstinence. Angered b-v her obstinacy the father ordered her to take off her court dress and jewels, to put on the garb of a servant and to carry water for the garden. The garden never looked so beautiful. The daughter also looked well and showed no signs of weariness, because the gods assisted her in her work. Relenting a little the king sent an older sister to urge Kuan Yin to accept the husband he had found for her. When she refused, he sent her to a monastery and charged the abbess to treat her harshly, so that she might be forced to return home. Expecting to win the king's favor, the abbess put the most unpleasant tasks on the girl. But again the gods assisted her and made her work light, so that her tasks were always well done and the young woman was cheerful. One day the report came to the king that his daughter was associating with a young monk discussing heterodox doctrines and that she had given birth to a child. This news so enraged the king that he burned the monastery, killing many monks. The princess was captured and brought before him. Inasmuch as she was obdurate, the king ordered her to be executed. The executioner's sword, however, broke into a thousand pieces without doing her any injury. The king then ordered her to be strangled. A golden image sixteen feet high appeared on the spot. The princess laughed and cried: "Where there was no image, an image appeared. I see the real form. When body flesh is strangled, then appear the lights of ten thousand roads." She went to purgatory and purgatory at once changed into paradise. Yama, in order to save his purgatory, sent her back to the world. She appeared at Puto, an island off the coast of Chekiang near Ningpo. Here she rescued sailors and performed many miracles for people in distress. In the meantime the father, who had committed many sins, became sick. His allotted time of life had been shortened by twenty years. Moreover, an ulcer grew on his body for every one of the five hundred monks he had killed when he burned the monastery. A miserable, loathsome old man, he came to an old monk, who was really the princess in disguise, and asked for help. The monk told him that an eye and an arm of a blood relative made into medicine was the only cure for his trouble. The two living daughters were willing to make such an offering, but their husbands would not permit them to do so. The old monk urged the monarch to take up a life of abstinence, to rebuild the monastery he had burned, and to provide money for services to take the five hundred monks whom he had killed through purgatory. He also said that a nun in the convent would offer an arm and an eye. When the monarch entered the monastery, he found hanging before the incense burner an arm and an eye. These were boiled, mixed with medicine and rubbed on the king's body. He soon became well. Further inquiry revealed that these members belonged to his daughter. This is the story of the most popular goddess in China. She is worshipped by her devotees on the first and fifteenth of every month, on the nineteenth of the sixth month, when she became a Bodhisattva, and on the nineteenth of the ninth month, when she put on the necklace. A month after marriage every young bride is presented with an image of the Goddess of Mercy, an incense-burner and candlesticks. This goddess is worshipped whenever trouble comes to man or woman. Her names signify her willingness to listen to all prayers. She is the "one who regards the voice," i.e., prayer; "one who hears the prayers of the world;" "one who regards and exists by himself as sovereign;" "the ancestor of Buddha who regards prayer;" "one who frees from fear;" "Buddha the august king;" "the great white robed scholar;" "great compassion and mercy." _2. Kuan Yin, the Model of Local Mother-Goddesses_ This conception is the creation of the social and religious consciousness of the women in China. It reveals their aspirations for mercy, compassion, filial piety and for the beauty that crowns a well developed character. Such an ideal does not mean that these have been realized in all the numerous homes of the Chinese, but it manifests their sense of such an ideal to be realized in life and their ardent longing for its realization. Mother-goddesses are found all over China and they have all of them been influenced by Kuan Yin. Some of them have originated with actual women who were deified after death. Here is the story of one of these goddesses who presides over the censer in a small temple in Formosa. She was born in the province of Kuangtung. At the age of seven she was adopted by a family as the future wife of their eighteen-year-old son. One day while crossing a river he was drowned. This was a great blow to her. When she was fourteen years old the father of the family died. The two women, thus left alone, wept bitterly day and night. The comfort of relatives was of little avail. The mother was becoming emaciated with grief. The daughter, unable to bear the strain any longer, washed herself, burned incense before the ancestral tablet of her betrothed, and then took this vow: "I am willing to remain a virgin, to apply myself to carrying water and working at the mortar and to serve my mother-in-law. If I cherish any other purpose and change my chastity and obedience, may Heaven slay me and earth annihilate me." When the mother heard this vow she stopped her weeping. Inasmuch as they had no uncle to look after them, they worked day and night. A relative of her future husband gave her one of his sons as an adopted son. The child died after a few months. This was a great grief. Then the mother died. The daughter sold her possessions to obtain money for a proper burial. She had only a coarse mourning cloth for her dress. After a while she adopted a child as her son. When he grew up she found him a wife who served her as faithfully as she had served her mother-in-law. When she was eighty years old, she dreamed that the golden maid and jade messenger of Kuan Yin stood beside her saying: "The court of Heaven has ordered you to become a god (shên)." She died soon after this. She said of herself: "Shang Ti took compassion upon me during my life, because with a firm heart I kept my chastity and served my mother-in-law with complete obedience. Therefore he gave me the office of Kuan Pin. I have performed my duties in several places. Now I am transferred to Formosa." This story and many others like it mirror the moral ideals of the women of China in the midst of their struggles for help and light and guidance. _3. Exhortations on Family Virtues_ The Buddhists issue a large number of tracts. These are very commonly paid for by devotees who make a vow that, if their parent becomes well, they will pay for the printing of several hundred or thousand of these tracts for free distribution. In these tracts are usually many stories illustrating the rewards of filial piety. The story is told in one of them about a Mrs. Chin whose father-in-law being ill was unable to sleep for sixty days. His condition grew worse. Mrs. Chin knelt before Kuan Yin's altar, cut out a piece of flesh from her arm and cooked it with the father's food. His health at once improved and he lived to the age of seventy-seven. Another story is told in the same tract of a woman who cut out a piece of her liver and gave it as medicine to her mother-in-law. These Buddhist tracts take up all the moral habits which make the family and clan strong and stable and surround them by the highest sanctions. A tract picked up in a Buddhist temple at Hangchow purports to be the revelation of the will of Buddha. It urges sixteen virtues. The first is filial piety. The tract says: "Filial piety is the chief of all virtues. Heaven and Earth honor filial piety. There is no greater sin than to cherish unfilial thoughts. The spirits know the beginning of such thoughts. Heaven openly rewards a heart that is filial." The second one mentioned is another important family virtue, namely, reverence: "The saints, sages, immortals and Buddhas are the outgrowth of reverence. The greatest sin is to lack reverence for father and mother. When brothers lack reverence for one another, they harm the hands and feet. When husband and wife lack reverence, the harmony of the household is ruined. When friends do not have reverence, they bring about calamity." Then follow similar exhortations on sincerity, justice, self-restraint, forbearance, benevolence, generosity, absence of pride, covetousness, lying, adultery, mutual love, self-denial, hope for the consolations of religion and for an undivided heart ruled by peace. These are virtues quite essential to the integrity of the family. They are taught, not in the abstract but by the exhibition of shining examples, by vivid representations of the rewards both here and hereafter, and by pictures of awful punishments. So by precept and example, by threat of punishment here and hereafter and by declaration of reward in the future Buddhism has tried to maintain the family virtues of the Confucian system and has attempted to permeate them by the spirit of sacrifice. Still it has always been the sacrifice of the weak for the strong, of the young for the aged, of the low for the high, of women for men. _4. Services for the Dead_ Buddhism very early took over the relatively simple services for the dead and developed them into an elaborate ritual which made very vivid the spiritual universe which Buddhism introduced. In the sixth century a service was held in behalf of the father-in-law of Emperor Ning Ti (516-528 A. D.) for seven times every seven days. He feasted a thousand monks every day, and caused seven persons to become monks. On the hundredth day after the death he feasted ten thousand monks and caused twenty-seven persons to become monks. Since that time services on every seventh day after the decease until the forty-ninth day, when a grand finale ends the ceremonies, have been very popular. The object of such services is to conduct the soul of the dead through purgatory, in order that it may return to life or enter the Western Paradise. This is done by making a pleasing offering to the guardians and officers of purgatory, and to the gods and Bodhisattvas whose mercy saves people. Numerous missives are consigned to the flames, informing the rulers of the nether world about the soul of the dead; offerings of gold and silver, of various articles of apparel, of trunks, houses, and servants are made, all, however, made out of bamboo frames covered with paper. Various powerful incantations are recited which force open the gates of purgatory and let the soul out. The services may be crowded into one day or they may be held on every seventh day until the forty-ninth day, i.e., seven sevens. Various explanations are given' for these services. During the first week the soul of the dead arrives at the "Demon Gate Barrier." Here money is demanded by the demons on the ground that in his last transmigration the deceased borrowed money. Accordingly large quantities of silver shoes [Footnote: The silver used for this purpose is molded, in accordance with ancient usage, in the shape of shoes and carried about in that form by merchants.] must be sent to the dead so that he may settle all claims and avoid beating and inconvenience. During the second week the soul arrives at a place where he is weighed. If the evil outweighs the good, the soul is sawn asunder and ground to powder. In the third week he comes to the "Bad Dog" village. Here good people pass unharmed, but the evil are torn by the fierce beasts until the blood flows. In the fourth week the soul is confronted with a large mirror in which he sees his evil deeds and their consequences, seeing himself degraded in the next transmigration to a beast. In the fifth week the soul views the scenes in his own village. In the sixth week he reaches the bridge which spans the "Inevitable River." This bridge is 100,000 feet high and one and three-tenths of an inch wide. It is crossed by riding astride as on a horse. Beneath rushes the whirl-pool filled with serpents darting their heads to and fro. At the foot of the bridge lictors force unwilling travelers to ascend. The good do not cross this bridge, but are led by "golden youth" to gold and silver bridges which cross the stream on either side of this "Bridge of Sighs." In the seventh week the soul is taken first to Mrs. Wang who dispenses a drink which blots out all memories of the earthly life. Then the individual enters the great wheel of transmigration. This is divided into eighty-one sections from which one hundred and eight thousand small and tortuous paths radiate out into the four continents of the world. The soul is directed along one of these paths and is duly reborn in the world as an animal or as a human being or passes on into the Western Paradise. In imitation of this bridge a bridge is built of tables in front of the home of the dead. At the end the tables are placed upside down and a lantern placed on each table-leg. At night this bridge is illuminated. A company of monks repeat their prayers and incantations, while others mount upon the bridge to impersonate devils. The pious son with the tablet of his deceased parent comes to take his father over the bridge. When his way is disputed by the demons, he falls on his knees and begs and gives them money, negotiating the passage at last with the aid of a large quantity of silver. Another ceremony is the breaking through purgatory. Five supplications duly signed are addressed to the proper authorities, four being suspended at each of the four sides of the table and one at the center. Tiles are then placed over the table or on the ground. After incantations have been repeated to the accompaniment of the sounding of the bell and the wooden fish, the supplications are burned and the tiles are broken as a symbol of breaking through purgatory and of releasing the soul. Thus Buddhism has taken over the most important function of ancestor worship, has extended it and made it more significant to each individual as well as to the family. VI BUDDHISM AND SOCIAL LIFE _1. How the Laity is Trained in Buddhist Ideas_ A common way of emphasizing moral ideas among the people by Buddhist teachers is the use of tracts purporting to have a divine origin. The following gives the substance of such a tract: Not long ago in the province of Shantung, there was a sharp and sudden clap of thunder. After the frightened people had collected their wits, they discovered a small book written in red in front of the house of a certain Mr. Li. Mr. Li picked up the book, copied it and read it reverently. He gave a copy to Mr. Ma, the prefect, but Mr. Ma did not believe in the book. Thereupon Maitrêya, the Messiah of the Buddhists, spoke from the sky as follows: "These are the years of the final age. The people under heaven do not reverence Heaven and Earth, they are not filial to father and mother, they do not respect their superiors. They cheat the fatherless, impose upon the widow, oppress the weak; they use large weights for themselves and small measures for others. They injure the good. They covet for their own profit. They cheat men of money, use the five grains carelessly, kill the cow that draws the plow. This volume is sent for their special benefit. If they recite it they will avoid trouble. If they disbelieve, the years with the cyclical character _Ping_ and _Ting_ will have fields without men to plant them and houses without men to live in them. In the fifth month of these years evil serpents will infest the whole country. In the eighth and ninth months the bodies of evil men will fill the land. "Those who believe this book and propagate its teachings will not encounter the ten sorrows of the age: war, fire, no peace day and night, separation of man and wife, the scattering of the sons and daughters, evil men spread over the country, dead bones unburied, clothing with no one to wear it, rice with no one to eat it, and the difficulty of ever seeing a peaceful year. Sâkyamuni foreseeing this final age sent down this volume in Shantung. The Goddess of Mercy saw the sorrows of all living beings. Maitrêya commanded the two runners of T'ai Shan, the god of the Eastern Mountain, to investigate the conduct of men and as a first punishment to increase the price of rice, and then besides the ten sorrows already mentioned above, to inflict the punishments of flood, fire, wind, thunder, tigers, snakes, sword, disease, famine and cold. The rule of Sâkyamuni which has lasted twelve thousand years is now fulfilled, and Maitrêya succeeds to his place." These sorrows may be escaped by reciting this sutra whose substance we find above. If it is repeated three times the person will escape the calamity of fire and water. If one man passes it on to ten men and ten men pass it on to a hundred, they will escape the calamities of sword, disease and imprisonment, and receive blessings which cannot be measured. He who in addition to repeating the sutra practices abstinence will insure peace for himself. He who presents one hundred copies to others will insure his personal peace. He who presents a thousand copies will insure the peace of his family. He who is attacked by disease, may escape it by taking five cash of the reign of Shun Chih (1644-1661 A. D.), the first emperor of the Ch'ing dynasty, one mace of the seed of cypress, one mace of the bark of mulberry, boil in one bowl of water until only eight-tenths of the water remain, drink and he will become well. In this way the five Buddhist commandments for the laity not to kill any living creature, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to lie, and not to use intoxicating liquor are propagated and made real to the common man. The method is quite efficient. Whole provinces have been put into a panic by such prophecies. _2. Effect of Ideals of Mercy and Universal Love_ The command not to kill any living being has had considerable influence in China. There are volumes of stories telling of the punishments which will be visited upon those who disobey and of the rewards of those who release living animals. Every monastery has a special place for animals thus released by pious devotees. There is a popular story about a fishmonger of the T'ang dynasty who was taken sick and during his illness dreamed that he was taken to purgatory. His body was aflame with fire and pained him as though he were being roasted. Flying fiery chariots with darting flames swept around him and burned his body. Ten thousand fish strove with one another to get a bite of his flesh. The ruler of the lower regions accused him of killing many fish and hence his punishment. For a number of days he was hanging between life and death. His relatives were urged to perform some works of penance. They had his fishing implements burned. With reverent hearts they made two images of Kuan Yin, presented offerings and repented. The whole family performed abstinence, stopped killing living things, printed and gave away over a hundred copies of the Diamond Sutra, and ferried over a large number of souls through purgatory. As a result of their efforts the sick man became well. The following comment was made on the above story by a scholar. If its premises are granted, the conclusion is inevitable: "If the fiery chariots are seal, why does not man see them? If they are false, how is it that man feels the pain? But where do the fiery chariots come from? They come from the heart and head of the one who kills fish. The fire in the heart (heart belongs to the element fire) causes destruction. The chariot fire also causes destruction." This attitude of mercy has been extended to human beings. There are numerous tracts against the drowning of little girls in those regions where this custom is prevalent. One tells the following story: In the province of Kwangtung there lived a Mrs. Chang who daily burned incense and repeated Buddha's name. One day she and her husband died. Much to their surprise and consternation Yama (the potentate of hell) decided that Mr. Chang must become a pig and Mrs. Chang a dog. Mrs. Chang accordingly went to Yama and said, "During life we honored Buddha and so why should we become animals after death?" Yama said, "What use is it to honor Buddha? During life you drowned three girls whom I sent into life. People with the face of a man and the heart of a beast, should they not be punished?" The husband accordingly took on a pig's skin and the wife a dog's. Then by a dream they revealed to their brother Chang number two that, although they repeated Buddha's name, they were not permitted to be reborn as men, because they had drowned little girls. Perhaps the extent of this spirit, of mercy and its possibilities may be illustrated by the reverence for the ox. While there is a great deal of cruelty in China to animals and men, it is rarely that one sees an ox abused. Up to the advent of the foreigner an ox was not killed for meat. In many places in China today the slaughter of an ox would bring the punishments of the law upon the butcher. No doubt this reverence is due to the great Indian reverence for the cow. The law of kindness has been extended to other animals, taking the rather spectacular form of releasing a few decrepit animals and allowing them to spend their last days in a monastery compound. There are many kindly things done in China. The dead are buried, the sick are provided with medicine. Every year numerous wadded garments are given away to poor people. Various groups carrying on a humble ministry of helpfulness have found a real inspiration in the ideals held before them in Buddhism, the rewards promised and punishments threatened. _3. Relation to Confucian Ideals_ Why have not these ideals exercised a larger influence in China? The answer is quite simple. The activities of the monks have been strenuously opposed by the Confucian state system. The philosopher, Chang Nan-hsiian, a contemporary of Chu-Hsi, states concisely for us the differences betwen Confucianism and Buddhism in his comment on a passage in the _Book of Records._ "Strong drink is a thing intended to be-used in offering sacrifices and entertaining guests,--such employment of it is what Heaven has prescribed. But men by their abuse of such drink come to lose their virtue and destroy their persons--such employment of it is what Heaven has annexed its terrors to. The Buddhists, hating the use of things where Heaven sends down its terrors, put away as well the use of them which Heaven has prescribed. "For instance, in the use of meats and drinks, there is such a thing as wildly abusing and destroying the creatures of Heaven. The Buddhists, disliking this, confine themselves to a vegetable diet, while we only abjure wild abuse and destruction. In the use of clothes, again, there is such a thing as wasteful extravagance. The Buddhists, disliking this, will have no clothes but those of a dark and sad color, while we only condemn extravagance. They, further, through dislike of criminal connection between the sexes, would abolish the relation between husband and wife, while we denounce only the criminal connection. "The Buddhists, disliking the excesses to which the evil desires of men lead, would put away, along with them, the actions which are in accordance with the justice of heavenly principles, while we, the orthodox, put away the evil desires of men, whereupon what are called heavenly principles are the more brightly seen. Suppose the case of a stream of water. The Buddhists, through dislike of its being foul with mud, proceed to dam it up with earth. They do not consider that when the earth has dammed up the stream, the supply of water will be cut off. It is not so with us, the orthodox. We seek only to cleanse away the mud and sand, so that the pure water may be available for use. This is the difference between the Buddhists and the Learned School." [Footnote: _Shu King,_ Pt. V, Bk. X, p. 122.] This statement reveals at once the opposition of the sect of the Learned and the influence which Buddhism exerted upon its members. Buddhism while enjoying occasional favor from the state was often zealously persecuted. In 819 Han Yii issued his celebrated act of accusation. In 845 the emperor Wu Tsung issued his decree of secularization. At that time 4600 monasteries and 40,000 smaller establishments were pulled down and 265,000 monks and nuns were sent back to lay life. Their rich lands were confiscated. Under the Ming dynasty, as well as under the Ch'ing dynasty, Buddhism enjoyed a precarious existence. Whether Buddhism would have improved the moral conditions of the Chinese; if it had been given a free hand, is difficult to affirm. Still its failure is at least partly due to the opposition of Confucian orthodoxy. _4. The Embodiment of Buddhist Ideals in the Vegetarian sects_ The state persecutions of Buddhism forced it to leave temporarily its institutional life and trust itself to the people. These persecutions were usually followed by a revival of piety and religion among the people. The Buddhist teachers gathered about themselves a large number of lay devotees who formed societies which practice religious rites in secret. These sects have preserved the genuine Buddhist piety, not only in times of persecution, but at times when the Buddhist organization under imperial favor was departing from its simplicity. A number of these sects have continued under different names for several centuries. For example, the Tsai Li, a society now enjoying a quiet existence in North China, is successor to the White Lotus society. The latter started in the fifth century. Its members sought salvation in the Pure Land of Amitabha. In the eleventh century it enjoyed imperial favor. During the Mongol dynasty it fought against the throne with rebels and placed one of its leaders, Chu Yüan-chang, a monk, on the throne, who became the founder of the Ming dynasty. The sect was soon proscribed and its members persecuted by the government. During the Ch'ing dynasty it took part in a rebellion and was ruthlessly exterminated. At present it goes under the name of _Tsai Li,_ i.e., within the Li or principles of the three religions. It is a mediator among the three religions. There are thirty-one organizations of this sect in Peking and branches throughout North China. The society forbids the use of wine and opium, though it does not forbid the use of meat. It usually has a Buddhist image, Kuan Yin or some other. It uses Buddhist prayers and incantations. The outstanding doctrines held during its long history have been the hope of salvation in the Western Heaven of Amitâbha, the early coming of Maitrêya, the Buddhist Messiah, and the large use of magic formulas and incantations. Another sect which embodies Buddhist ideals is the Chin Tan, the sect of the philosopher's stone or pill of immortality. Its founder was the writer of the Nestorian tablet and so the sect is related to Christianity. It exalts the teaching of universal love. This is one of several examples of a supposed contact between Buddhism and Christianity. These sects of which the two above are examples are present in all parts of China. They obey the five Buddhist commandments for laymen. The members spend much time in fasting and prayer, and in the repetition of Buddhist books. Their lives as a rule are simple and sincere. They are preparing for rebirth in the land of Amitâbha, or are expecting the early coming of the Buddhist Messiah to set this world right. In the meantime, by means of incantations, personal regimen and cooperative action they are doing all they can to usher in a better state. _5. Pilgrimages_ Pilgrimages are very popular in China. The famous Buddhist shrines are Wu T'ai Shan in Shansi, Puto on the coast of Chekiang, Chiu Hua Shan in Anhwei, and Omei Shan in Szechuan. These, one on each side of China, represent the four elements of Buddhist science, wind, water, fire and earth. They are also the centers of the worship of the four great Bodhisattvas, Wenshu, Kuan Yin, Titsang and Puhsien. Besides these large centers there are many others to which pilgrims direct their footsteps. In the spring of the year, when the god of spring covers the earth with a green mantle, when the sky and winds call, many start on their pilgrimage. Many go singly and laboriously, kneeling and bowing every few steps. Others go in happy companies, chaperoned by a pious, village dame, who has organized the group. Some go because their turn has come. They are members of a guild which has a fund devoted to pilgrimages by its members. Some go for the performance of a vow made to Kuan Yin, when the father was sick unto death and the goddess prolonged his life. To others it is the culmination of a pious life. All go for the joy which travel in the spring gives. Puto, an island off the coast of Chekiang, is the goal of many pilgrims from all parts of China. In, the monasteries on the island are about two thousand monks. In the pilgrim season this number is increased to ten thousand monks and thousands of lay pilgrims. A group of pilgrims was going along merrily. The sun was bright, lighting up the white caps on the deep blue sea. Spring was rioting all about. One member was an abbot from Hangchow. A small, humble-looking man with a few straggling long hairs where the mustache usually grows, was a lay Buddhist from Wuchang. One was a bright young monk from Tientsin. Last, but almost omnipresent and always bubbling over, was a servant of the abbot from Hangchow. He was in the presence of divinity and his whole life was heightened for the time being. "Why did you come!" they were asked. "We came to worship the holy mother, Kuan Yin." When they entered a shrine each purchased three sticks, of incense and two candles and reverently placed them before the image of the goddess, kneeling and bowing. Then they sat and partook of the tea offered by the attendant. After paying a small gratuity, they went on to the next shrine. On the way a large black snake as thick as an arm lazily crossed over the road. They stood, reverent and awestruck, until he disappeared in the grass, remarking that this was a good omen. When crossing a sand dune piled up by the winds the abbot from Hangchow remarked that this was called the flying sand, wafted there by the goddess who took pity on some travelers who had been compelled to cross a narrow strait in order to come to a cave. This cave, called Fan Yin Tung, is one of the rifts made by an earthquake and washed out by wind and waves. Below it rushes the tide; from above the sun sends down a few rays. Each pilgrim after offering incense looks into the darkness to see whether he can behold in the dark cavern an image of some Buddha. One sees Kuan Yin and is acclaimed as having had a good vision. Another sees the Laughing Buddha. All exclaim that he has been the most fortunate of all, for this Buddha is the Messiah to come and he who beholds him will be blessed. So from place to place they wander, chatting and seeing the sights of the island. Thus thousands are doing in various parts of China, and in this way strengthening the hold of Buddhism upon themselves and their communities. VII BUDDHISM AND THE FUTURE LIFE Before the advent of Buddhism the Chinese had only a vague idea regarding life after death. The Land and Water Classic mentions the Tu Shuo mountain in the Eastern Sea, under which spirits of the dead live, the entrance guarded by two spirits, Shên Tu and Yü Lei, who are in general control of the demons. In some parts of China the names or pictures, of these spirits are placed on the doors of a house to guard it. The Taoists early developed the idea of a western paradise presided over by the Queen of the West, located at first in the K'un Lun mountains and later in the islands of the Eastern Sea. This heaven, however, was limited to Taoist hermits and mystics. Buddhism made a complete purgatory and heaven known to every one in China. _1. The Buddhist Purgatory_ This is really Buddhism's most noteworthy addition to China's religious equipment; Buddhism lays much stress upon the experiences of a soul immediately after death. Its punishments are well known to every individual. The temple of the City Guardian found in every walled city has a replica of the court in purgatory over which he presides. In the temples of T'ai Shan there is an elaborate exhibit of the tortures inflicted on culprits in purgatory. Every funeral service conducted by Buddhists or Taoists is intended to conduct the soul of the dead through purgatory and pictures vividly the progressive experiences from the first seventh day to the seventh seventh day. On the the seventh month, on the fifteenth day [about August] a special service is held for the souls of the dead in purgatory. Furthermore, every community has a general service [about October] for the souls of those who died a violent death or who have no one to look after them. During the war many services were thus held for those who died on the battlefields of Europe. At such services the scenes in purgatory are vividly portrayed by pictures and figures. The temples distribute tracts with pictures of purgatory so that women may see them and understand. On the stage are often acted powerful plays whose scenes are laid in Hades. This propaganda is perhaps the most efficient of its kind. Purgatory is depicted as consisting of ten courts each surrounded by small hells, where the soul undergoes punishment and cleansing. The fifth court, which may be taken as an example of the other courts, is in charge of Yen Lo or Yama. Yama was once in charge of the first court, but his tender heart pitied the souls who came before him and sent them back to earth. Because of this leniency he was placed in charge of the fifth court. When a soul has passed through the first four courts and it has been discovered that there is no good conduct to its credit, it is led to the fifth court and examined every seven days regarding past conduct. In order to get back to the world of men, it eagerly promises to complete various unfinished vows, such as to repair monasteries, schools, bridges, or roads, to clean wells, to deepen rivers, to distribute good books, to release animals, to take care of aged parents, or to bury them suitably. But it is plainly told that the gods know its artifices, and that now these unfinished tasks can never be completed. The gods have reached the unanimous opinion that no injustice is being done. Accordingly there is no appeal, but each soul is led by attendants with bulls' heads and horses' faces to a tower whence they may see their native village. Its front is in the shape of a bow with a perimeter of twenty-seven miles; its height is four hundred and ninety feet. It is guarded by walls of sword trees. Good men, whose deeds of omission are balanced by the good they have done, return to life. Only souls judged to be evil see their village from this tower. These can see their own families moving about, and can hear their conversation. They realize how they disobeyed the teachings of their elders. They see that the earthly goods for which they have struggled are of no value. Their plottings rise up with lurid reality. They see how they planned a new marriage although already married, how they appropriated fields, state property, and falsified accounts, putting the blame on persons who were dead. While they observe their village they behold their erstwhile friends touch their coffin and inwardly rejoice. They hear themselves called selfish and insincere. But their punishment does not stop here. They behold their children punished by magistrates, their women afflicted with strange diseases, their daughters ravished, their sons led astray, their property taken away, the ancestral house burned and their business ruined. From this tower all passes before them as a lurid dream and they are stricken in heart. About the fifth court are sixteen small hells where the soul is punished. In each one are stakes buried in the ground and fierce animals. The hands and feet of the guilty one are bound to a stake, his body is opened with small knives, and his heart and intestines quickly devoured. In each of these sixteen hells is a certain type of sinner: (1) Those who do not reverence the gods and demons and who doubt the existence of rewards and punishments; (2) those who hurt and kill living beings; (3) those who break their vows to do good; (4) those who resort to heterodox practices and vainly hope to attain eternal life; (5) those who upbraid good men, fear the wicked and hate men because they do not die speedily; (6) those who strive with other people and then put the blame upon them; (7) men who force women; and women who seduce young men, and all who have libidinous desires; (8) those who gain profit for themselves by injuring others; (9) the stingy and those who absolutely disregard others, whether alive or dead, giving them no help in dire need, when they can do so without injury to themselves; (10) those who steal and put the crime upon others; (11) those who requite favors with hate; (12) those whose hearts are perverse and poisonous, who instigate others to do wrong even if they may not have carried out their suggestion; (13) those who tempt others by deceit; (14) those who involve others in their squabbles and in gambling and then themselves win out; (15) those who stubbornly persist in their false ideas, do not repent, and slander others; (16) those who hate good and virtuous men. Besides these sixteen sorts of sinners the fifth court deals with other types of wicked people; those who do not believe in rewards and punishments after death, who hinder good causes, who burn incense without a sincere heart, speak of the sins of others, who burn books that urge men to be good and worship the Great Dipper, but persist in eating meat; those who hate men; who repeat sutras and incantations, and take part in religious ceremonies, but do not fast beforehand; who slander the Buddhist and Taoist religions; who know how to read, but refuse to read the ancient and modern exhortations regarding rewards and punishments; who dig into graves and destroy their marks, who purposely set fire to trees and underbrush, or are careless with fire in their own houses; who shoot arrows at animals with the intent, to kill; who urge and tempt the sick and weak to enter into contests of any kind with themselves; who throw tiles and stones over neighboring walls, poison fish in the river, fire guns, or make nets or traps for birds; who sow salt on the ground, who do not bury dead eats and snakes very deep and thus cause death to those who dig; who cause men to dig the frozen ground in winter or spring (the vapors of earth chill such diggers to death); who tear down adjoining walls and compel their neighbors to move the kitchen stove; who appropriate public highways, lands, close wells and stop gutters. Those who have committed any of the above sins are taken, to the tower whence they can see their own village and then are consigned to the great crying hell, Râurava, that is, the fourth of the Buddhist hot hells. [Footnote: Buddhism distinguishes hot and cold hells. In a country like India severe cold is a serious torture.] Thence they go to their respective small hells. When their time has expired, they are examined in order to see whether they have any other sins which need punishment. Those who have committed any of the above sins may not only escape punishment, but may have their punishment in the sixth court lessened, if they fast regularly on the eighth day of the first month and take a vow not to commit these sins. Some sins, however, cannot be arranged for in such a way, such as the killing of living beings and hurting them; the associating with heretics; committing fornication with women and then poisoning them; committing adultery, violence, envy, or injuring the good name of others; stealing, requiting favors with hatred, and hearing exhortation but not repenting. These are major sins. _2. Its Social Value_ The social value of purgatory is quite plain from the description of the fifth court and of the sinners who are punished therein. Purgatory is the social mirror of China, wherein the consequences of all unsocial acts are pictured in such a vivid way as to deter the individual from committing them. It is effective in China, not only because of the realistic presentation, but because the opinion of the community is against such acts and in favor of repressing them on every occasion. _3. The Buddhist Heaven._ Buddhism brought into China not only a fully developed purgatory but also a heaven which all may enter. The sovereign of the western heaven is Amitâbha (or in Chinese O-mi-to-fo), with whom Kuan Yin, the goddess of Mercy, is usually associated. Amitâbha is explained as meaning "boundless age." The original meaning is "boundless light," which suggests a Persian origin with Mannichean influences. The translations of the Amitâbha sutras were wholly made by natives of central Asia. Amitâbha is one of the thousand Buddhas; he is regarded as the reflex of Sakyamuni and is connected also in his earthly incarnation with a monk called Dharmâkara. This monk desired to become a Buddha. This wish he presented to Lôkês'vararâja asking him to teach him as to what a Buddha and a Buddha country ought to be. Lôkês'vararâja imparted this knowledge. Then the monk after meditation returned having made forty-eight vows that he would not become a Buddha, until all living beings should attain salvation in his heaven. The eighteenth vow expresses his ideal: "O Bhagavat, if those beings who have directed their thought towards the highest perfect knowledge in other worlds, and who, after having heard my name, when I have obtained Bodhi (knowledge), have meditated on me with serene thoughts; if at the moment of their death, after having approached them surrounded by an assembly of monks, I should not stand before them worshipped by them, that is, so that their thoughts should not be troubled, then may I not obtain the highest perfect knowledge." A few extracts from the _Amitâbha Vyûha Sûtra_ will illustrate the Buddhist idea of life in this Pure Land: "In the western region beyond one hundred thousand myriads of Buddhist lands there is a world. Great Happiness by name. This land has a Buddha called Amitâbha. The living beings there do not suffer any pain, but enjoy all happiness. Therefore, it is called the land of Pure Delight ... the land of Pure Delight has seven precious fountains full of water containing the eight virtues. The bottom of these fountains is covered with golden sand. On four sides there are steps made of gold, silver, crystal and glass, precious stones, red pearls, and highly polished agates. In the pools are variously colored, light emitting lotus flowers as large as cart wheels, delicate, admirable, odorous and pure..." "The Buddha of this land makes heavenly music. It is covered with gold. Morning and evening during six hours it rains the wonderful celestial flowers (Erythrina Indica). All the inhabitants of this land on clear mornings after dressing offer these celestial flowers to the hundred thousand myriads of Buddhas of the regions who return to their country at meal time. When they have eaten they go away again." "This country possesses every kind of wonderful varicolored birds, the white egret, the peacock, the parrot, the s'rarika (a long legged bird), the Kalavingka (a sweet voiced bird) ... All these birds, morning and evening during the six hours, utter forth a beautiful harmonious sound. Their song produces the five _indrya_ (roots of faith, energy, memory, ecstatic meditation, wisdom), the five _bala_ (the powers of faith, energy, memory, meditation and wisdom), the seven _bodhyanga_ (the seven degrees of intelligence, memory, discrimination, energy, tranquillity, ecstatic contemplation, indifference), and the eight portions of the correct path _marga,_ (the possession of correct views, decision and purity of thought and will, the ability of reproducing any sound uttered in the universe, vow of poverty, asceticism, attainment of meditative abstraction of self-control, religious recollectedness, honesty and virtue), and such doctrines. When all beings of this land have heard the music, they declare their faithfulness to the Buddha, Dharma and the Sangha (the Buddha, the Law and the community of monks)." As to those who enter this land it says: "All living beings who hear this should make a vow to be born in that land. How can they reach the Pure Land? All very good men will gather in that place ... He whose blessedness and virtue are great can be born into that country. If there is a good man or woman who, on hearing of Amitâbha, takes this name and holds it in his mind one, two, three, four, five, six, or seven days, and his whole heart is not distracted, to that man at death Amitâbha will appear. His heart will not be disturbed. He will at once enter into life in the land of Pure Delight of Amitâbha. I see this blessing and hence utter these words. Those living beings who hear these words should make a vow to be born in that land." _4. The Harmonization of These Ideas with Ancestor Worship_ The extension of life beyond the grave in purgatory, or in the Pure Land and through transmigration was readily accepted in China. Both the new ideas and the disciplines through which to realize them were eagerly adopted, and have held their place to this day. In other lands the creation of a heaven and a hades has weakened the grip of ancestor worship and ultimately displaced it. In China the opposite result has obtained, due, no doubt, to the fact that the family system and along with it the supreme duty of filial piety were fostered by the state and Buddhism and its teachings were permitted only in so far as they bolstered it up. Another reason lies in the agricultural basis of China's civilization, reenforced by the great difficulty of communication, which tended to make the family system dominant in China. Today, the improvement of communication and the introduction of the industrial system of the West with the individual emphasis of modern education are factors which are weakening the family system and with it ancestral worship. VIII THE SPIRITUAL VALUES EMPHASIZED BY BUDDHISM IN CHINA Near the House of Parliament in Peking is located a small monastery dedicated to the goddess of Mercy, Kuan Yin. Before her image the incense burners send forth curling clouds of smoke. The walls are decorated with old paintings of gods and goddesses. The temple with its courtyard has the appearance of prosperity. Its neat reception room, with its tables, chairs and clock, shows the influence of the modern world. Here a monk in the prime of life spent a few months recently lecturing on Buddhism to members of parliament and to scholars from various parts of China. Frequently the writer used to drop in of an afternoon to discuss Buddhism and its outlook. Usually a simple repast concluded these conversations, the substance of which forms the greater part of this section. _1. The Threefold Classification of Men Under Buddhism_ "What does Buddhism do for men?" "There are in the world at least three classes of men. The lowest class live among material things, they are occupied with possessions. Their life is entangled in the crude and coarse materials which they regard as real. A second, higher class, regard ideas as realities. They are not entangled in the maze of things, but are confused by ideas, ascribing reality to them. The third and highest class are those who by meditation have freed themselves from the thraldom of ideas and can enter the sixteen heavens." _2. Salvation for the Common Man_ "What can Buddhism do for the lowest class?" "For this class Buddhism has the ten prohibitions. Every man has in him ten evils, which must be driven out. Three have to do with evil in the body, namely, not to steal, not to kill, not to commit adultery; four belong to the mouth, lying, exaggeration, abuse, and ambiguous talk; three belong to the mind, covetousness, malice, and unbelief." "Is not this entirely negative?" "Yes, but it is necessary, for during the process of eliminating these evil deeds, man acquires patience and equanimity. Buddhism does not stop with the prohibitions. The believer must practice the ten charitable deeds. Not only must he remove the desire to kill living beings, but he must cultivate the desire to save all beings. Not only must he not steal, but he must assist men with his money. Not only must he not give himself to lasciviousness, but he must treat all men with propriety. So each prohibition involves a positive impulse to virtue, which is quite as essential as the refraining from evil." "What energizing power does Buddhism provide?" "First, is purgatory with its terrors. The evil man, seeing the consequences of his acts upon himself, becomes afraid to do them and does that which is good. Then there is transmigration with the danger of transmigration into beasts and insects. Again, there are the rewards in the paradise of Amitâbha. Moreover, there is even the possibility not only of saving one's self, but by accumulated merit of saving one's parents and relatives and shortening their stay in purgatory." _3. The Place of Faith_ "Can any man enter the western paradise of Amitâbha?" "Yes, it is open to all men. The sutra says: 'If there be any one who commits evil deeds, and even completes the ten evil actions, the five deadly sins and the like; that man, being himself stupid and guilty of many crimes, deserves to fall into a miserable path of existence and suffer endless pains during many long ages. On the eve of death he may meet a good and learned teacher who, soothing and encouraging him in various ways, will preach to him the excellent Law and teach him the remembrance of Buddha, but being harassed by pains', he will have no time to think of Buddha.'" "What hope has such a man?" "Even such a man has hope. The sutra says: 'Some good friend will say to him: Even if thou canst not exercise the remembrance of Buddha, utter the name of Buddha Amitabha.' Let him do so serenely with his voice uninterrupted; let him be (continually) thinking of Buddha, until he has completed ten times the thought, repeating 'Namah O-mi-to-fo,' I put my trust in Buddha! On the strength of (his merit of) uttering Buddha's name he will, during every repetition expiate the sins which involve him in births and deaths during eighty millions of long ages. He will, while dying, see a golden lotus-flower, like the disk of the sun, appearing before his eyes; in a moment he will be born in the world of highest happiness. After twelve greater ages the lotus-flower will unfold; thereupon the Bodhisattvas, Avalôkitësvaras and Mahasattva's, raising their voices in great compassion, will preach to him in detail the real state of all the elements of nature and the law of the expiation of sins." "Does faith save such a man?" "Yes, not his own faith, but the faith which prompted the vow of Amitabha. Amitâbha's faith in the possibility of his salvation gives him supreme confidence that he will attain salvation. All he needs is to have the desire to be born in that paradise and to repeat the name of Amitabha." _4. Salvation of the Second Class_ "How do those of the second class attain salvation?" "The men of the second class regard ideas as realities. They are not entangled in the maze of things, but are confused by ideas, regarding them as real. These men do not need images and outward sanctions, but they need heaven and purgatory though regarding them as ideas. By performing the ten good deeds they will obtain a quiet heart, having no fear, and become saints and sages. Among men, saints and sages occupy a high rank, but not so among Buddhists. By merit of good works merely they enter the planes of sensuous desire, the six celestial worlds located immediately above the earth." _5. Salvation for the Highest Class_ "And the third class?" "This class has many ranks. There are those who by the practice of meditation (four _dkyanas_) [Footnote: Dhyana means contemplation. In later times under the influence of the idea of transmigration heavens were imagined which corresponded to the degrees of contemplation.] can enter the sixteen heavens conditioned by form. By the practice of the four _arûpa-dhyânas_ [Footnote: That degree of abstract contemplation from which all sensations are absent.] they enter the four highest heavens free from all sensuous desires and not conditioned by form. These heavens are the anteroom of Nirvana." "What is the driving power in all this?" "It is _vîrya_ or energy." _6. Heaven and Purgatory_ "Do heaven and purgatory exist?" "Heaven and purgatory are in the minds and hearts of men. Really heaven is in the mind of Amitâbha and purgatory exists in the illusioned brains of men." "Does anything exist?" "Nâgârjuna says: 'There is no production, no destruction, no annihilation, no persistence, no unity, no plurality, no coming in and no going forth.'" _7. Sin_ "Does sin exist?" "In the mind of the real Buddhist sin and virtue are different aspects of the all. Sin is illusion; virtue is illusion, There is a higher unity in which they are reconciled." _8. Nirvâna_ _"Do you know of any one who attained Nirvâna?"_ "Yes, I have experienced it. It is not a state beyond the grave. It is a state into which one can enter here." "Can you express this experience in words?" "Impossible. I can only indicate the shore of this great ocean. At first I was in great distress and agony, as though carrying the illusions of the world. Then came a great peace and calm, ineffable, serene, and surpassing the power of language to express." _9. The Philosophical Background_ "What is behind this universe!" "Underlying this universe of phenomena and change there is a unity. It is the basis of all being. It is within all being and all being rests in it. It is because of this common background that men are able to apprehend it. This universal basis we call _dharma,_ or law. Its characteristics are that everything born grows old, is subject to disease and death; that the teachings of Buddha purify the mind and enable it to obtain supreme enlightenment; that all Buddhas by treading the same way of perfection will attain the highest freedom." "You speak of the Buddhist Trinity." "Yes, we have the Dharmakâya. This is the essence-body, the ground of all being, taking many forms, Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, spirits, angels, men and even demons. It is impersonal, all-pervasive. It may be called the first person. The second person is the Sambhogakâya, the body of bliss. This is the heavenly manifestation of Buddha. The third person is the Nirmânakâya. This is the projection of the body of bliss on earth." Some identify this trinity with that of the Christian faith. While there is a resemblance, we should note that the first person of the Buddhist trinity would correspond to God as the absolute or the impersonal background of universal Being. The second corresponds to the glorified Christ and the third to the historic Jesus. There is no counterpart either to God the Father or to the Holy Spirit. "Do you believe in the salvation of all beings?" "Yes, all have the Buddha heart. All living beings will finally become Buddhas." Then turning to a friend of mine the speaker said: "What have you done in Buddhism?" The friend answered: "I have written and translated many books." "I do not mean that," he answered. "What _work_ have you done?" The friend confessed that he had not done much else. Then he said: "Every morning when you awake, reflect deeply and profoundly upon your state before you were born. Think back to that state where your soul was merged with Buddha. Find yourself in that state and you will find ineffable enlightenment and joy." The sun was setting behind the Western hills. The blare of trumpets sounded on the city wall. Outside of the door was the whirling sound of Peking returning home from its mundane tasks and joys. We joined the rushing, restless crowd and still we felt the calm of another world. Has not Christianity a message of balm and peace for these sons of the East who are so sensitive to the touch of the eternal and sublime? _10. What Buddhism Has to Give_ An important government official obliged to deal with many vexatious requests and demands declared: "I could not get through my day's work, if I did not spend an hour every day in meditation, just as Buddha did when he became enlightened." He was asked what he did when he meditated or prayed. "Nothing at all." "Well, about what do you think?" "Of nothing at all. I stop thinking when I engage in religious meditation. Life makes me think too much. I should lose my sanity, if I did not stop thinking and enter into the 'void', whence we all came and into which we all are going to drop back." His Christian inquirer still was unsatisfied by the Buddhist's description of his prayer life, and pressed further for details. "What happens when you meditate or pray?" "Nothing happens, I tell you, except, that I experience a peace which the passing world cannot give and which the passing world cannot altogether take away. The secret of religion is simply to realize that everything is passing away. When you accept that fact, then you become really free. The Christian world seemed to have been tremendously impressed by the slogan of the French soldiers at Verdun, 'They shall not pass!' Perhaps the German soldiers did not pass just then or there. But the French soldiers themselves are all passing away. And everything in the world is passing away. What our Buddhist religion teaches us is: 'Let it pass!' You cannot keep anything for very long. And prayer or meditation is simply to practice yourself in that thought deliberately. Oh, it is a wonderful peace when you fully believe that gospel, and enter into it every day. Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity! Why worry? We do altogether too much worrying. To pray means simply to quit worrying, to quit thinking, to enter into the indescribably passionless peace of Nirvana." Here seemed to be an ardent Buddhist. When asked what he thought as the difference between a Buddhist and a Christian, he answered promptly: "Yes, there is my wife. She is a very good woman. All the neighbors come to her, when there is any one sick or in trouble. So I say to her: 'Wife, I should think you would make a first-class Christian.' But I think she lets herself be worried by altogether too many troubles. She is all the time thinking and fussing and planning. To be sure, it is mostly about other people, But then she does have the children and the house and the relatives and friends and neighbors to look after. Perhaps she really cannot be a Buddhist. Perhaps it is all a matter of temperament. Oh, but I tell you it is great to be a Buddhist, because it gives you such a wonderful peace." IX PRESENT-DAY BUDDHISM: _1. Periods of Buddhist History_ The history of Buddhism in China may be divided into four periods. Buddhism entered China, as we have seen, in the second century B.C. The first period, that of the translation and propagation of the faith, ended in 420 A.D. The second period, that of interpenetration, lasted to the beginning of the T'ang dynasty, 618 A.D. The third, the period of establishment, ended with the close of the five dynasties, in 960 A.D. The fourth period, that of decay, has extended to the present day. _2. The Progress of the Last Twenty-five Years_ There are signs of a revival of Buddhism in China. Whether this is a tide, or a wave, only the future can reveal. In 1893 Dharmapala, an Indian monk, stopped in Shanghai on his way back from the Congress of Religions in Chicago. It was his purpose to make a tour of China, to arouse the Chinese Buddhists to send missionaries to India to restore Buddhism there, and then to start a propaganda throughout the whole world. He addressed the monks of Shanghai. Dr. Edkins, the veteran missionary, acted as his interpreter. Dharmapala was surrounded by a horde of curious monks who were more interested in his strange appearance and in the cost of his garments than they were in his great ideals. They were also feeling the iron heel of the Confucian government and at once inquired about the attitude of the government toward such an innovation. Dharmapala did not go beyond Shanghai. Japanese Buddhists, especially the members of the Hongwanji sect, have taken a deep interest in Chinese Buddhists. Count Otani once visited the chief monasteries of China. Numerous Japanese Buddhists have made such visits. In 1902, the Empress Dowager, fired by a reforming zeal, decided to confiscate Buddhist property and to use the proceeds for the spread of modern education. The Buddhist monasteries put themselves under the protection of Japanese monks in order to hold their property. When by 1906 the Empress Dowager saw the consequences of her edict, she at once issued a new edict, reversing the former one, and the Japanese monks took their departure. The Japanese Buddhists have been fired by missionary zeal for China. In many of the large cities of China are the temples of the Hongwanji sect. Established primarily for the Japanese, these temples are intended to serve as points of departure for a nation-wide missionary work. The twenty-one demands made upon China included two significant items in the last group which the Chinese refused to sign: "Art. 2: Japanese hospitals, churches and schools in the interior of China shall be granted the right of owning land." "Art. 7: China agrees that Japanese subjects shall have the right of missionary propaganda in China." Under Japanese influence there was established in 1907 at Nanking, under the leadership of Yang, a lay Buddhist devotee, a school for the training of Buddhist missionaries. The students were to go to Japan for further training, and the more promising ones were to study in India. This project was discontinued after the death of Yang on account of the lack of funds. When the republic was established Buddhism felt a wave of reform. The monasteries established schools for monks and children. A magazine was published which appeared irregularly for several numbers and then stopped. A national organization was formed with headquarters at Peking. A survey of monasteries was begun. The activities in lecturing and propaganda were increased, but Yuan Shih-kai issued twenty-seven regulations for the control of Buddhist monasteries, which markedly dampened the ardor of the reformers. The world war which accentuated the spirit of nationalism had the added effect of stirring up Buddhist enthusiasm. There are at present signs of new activity among them in China. _3. Present Activities_ While Buddhism may be standing still or even dying in certain parts of China, it is showing signs of new life in the provinces of Kiangsu and Chekiang and in the large cities. Such revival in centers subject to the influence of the modern world shows that Buddhism in China as in Japan has sufficient vitality to adjust itself to modern conditions. Let us consider some of these activities. _(a) The Reconstruction of Monasteries._--During the T'ai Ping rebellion, which devastated China in 1850-1865, the monasteries suffered with the towns. Not only were the monasteries burned to the ground, but their means of support were taken away and the monks were scattered. There are still many of these ruined monasteries in the Yangtze valley and in southern and western China. Quite a number of them have been rebuilt. Perhaps the most notable example is that at Changchow which was destroyed during the rebellion. Today it is the largest monastery in China, having about two thousand monks. In Fukien several new monasteries have been built in the last few decades. In the provinces of Chekiang and Kiangsu, in the large cities and about Peking there are building activities, showing that the monasteries are feeling a new wave of prosperity. T'ai Hsu, one of the leaders' of modern Buddhism, is holding up an ideal program for Buddhism in this time of reconstruction. He proposes that there should be 576 central monasteries, 4608 preaching places, 72 Buddhist hospitals and 72 orphanages. _(b) Accessions._--Regarding the number of monks it is almost impossible to obtain any reliable figures. A conservative estimate, based upon partial returns, makes the number of monks about 400,000 and that of nuns about 10,000. The impression among the Buddhists is that the number of monks is increasing. That is quite probable in view of the rebuilding and repairing which is now in progress. More significant is the number of accessions from the learned class. Many officials, disheartened by the present confused political situation, have sought refuge in the monasteries. Some of them are now abbots of monasteries and are using their influence to build them up. All over China there are Confucian scholars who are giving themselves to the study of Buddhism and to meditation. Some of the Chinese students who have studied in Buddhist universities in Japan are propagating Buddhism by lecture and pen. _(c) Publications._--Quite as significant is the increase in the publication of Buddhist literature of all kinds. Many of the monasteries have printing departments where they publish the sutras needed for their own use. In addition, there are eight or more publishing centers where Buddhist literature is printed. The most famous are Yang's establishment at Nanking, the Buddhist Press in Yangchow and that in Peking. In these establishments about nine hundred different works are being published. The most noteworthy recent publication has been that of the Chinese Buddhist Tripitaka in Shanghai. Among these publications are a few modern issues. The Chung Hua Book Company has published several works on Buddhism. Other books have been issued for the sake of harmonizing Buddhism with western science and philosophy. In this enterprise Japanese influence is visible. In 1921 a Shanghai press published a dictionary of Buddhist terms containing 3302 pages, based on the Japanese Dictionary of Buddhism. Other works also show the influence of Japanese scholarship. Among the publications have appeared two magazines. One published at Ningpo, is called "New Buddhism." This is struggling and may have to succumb. The other is known as the "Sound of the Sea Tide," now published in Hankow. Moreover, in all the large cities there are Buddhist bookshops where only Buddhist works are sold. These all report a good business. This literary activity reveals an interest among the reading classes of China. Few such books are purchased by the monks. The Chinese scholars read them for their style and for their deep philosophy, but also for light and for help in the present distracting political situation of their country. _(d) Lectures._--Along with publication goes the spread of Buddhism by lectures in the monasteries and the cities of China. A few years ago Buddhist sermons, however serious, were only listened to by monks and by a few pious devotees. Today such addresses are advertised and are usually well attended by the intellectuals. Often many women are found listening. Monks like T'ai Hsü and Yuan Ying have a national reputation. Not only monks, but laymen trained in Japan are delivering lectures on the Buddhist sutras. The favorites are the Awakening of Faith and the Suddharma Pundarika sutra. _(e) Buddhist Societies._--With the lectures goes the organization of Buddhist societies for all sorts of purposes. There is a central society in Peking which has branches in every province. The connection is rather loose. Buddhism has never been in favor of centralization. Nor for that matter would the government have allowed it. The chief ends aimed at by these societies are fellowship, devotion, study, propagation, and service. Such societies, often short lived, are springing up in many quarters. They meet for lectures on Buddhism or to conduct a study class in some of the sutras. Occasionally the more ambitious conduct an institute for several months. Some spend part of the time in meditation together. Several schools for children are supported by these societies. They also encourage work of a religious nature among prisoners, distributing tracts and holding services. Such activities are especially appreciated by those who are to suffer the death penalty. The societies are also doing publishing work. The two magazines are supported by the members of the larger societies. _(f) Signs of Social Ambition._--Social work is a prominent feature of some of these Buddhist societies. They have raised money for famine stricken regions, have opened orphanages, and assist in Red Cross work. One of the largest Chinese institutions for ministering to people who are sick and in trouble is located at Hankow. Around a central Buddhist temple is a modern-built hospital, an orphanage and several schools for poor children. It may not maintain western standards of efficiency, but it certainly represents the outreach of modern Buddhism. Perhaps their most far-reaching advance has been made because of the realization that leaders are needed and that they must be trained. Several schools for this purpose have sprung into existence. Such schools are necessarily very primitive and are struggling with the difficulties of finding an adequate staff and equipment and of obtaining the best type of students. Another sign of new life has been the making of programs for the future development of Buddhism. One of the most comprehensive appeared a short time ago. For the individual it proposes the cultivation of love, mercy, equality, freedom, progressiveness, an established faith, patience and endurance. For all men it proposes (1) an education according to capacity; (2) a trade suited to ability; (3) an opportunity to develop one's powers; (4) a chance for enlightenment for all. For society it urges the cultivation of cooperation, social service, sacrifice for the social weal, and the social consciousness in the individual. On behalf of the country it urges patriotism, participation in the government, and cooperation in international movements. For the world it advocates universal progress. As to the universe it specifies as a goal the bringing of men into harmony with spiritual realities, the enlightenment of all and the realization of the spiritual universe. A Buddhist writer sums up the aims of new Buddhism as follows: "Formerly Buddhism desired to escape the sinful world. Today Buddhism not only desires to escape this world of sin, but longs to transform this world of sin into a new world dominated by the ideals of Buddhism. Formerly Buddhism was occupied with erecting and perfecting its doctrines and polity as an organization. Today it not only hopes to perfect the doctrines and polity, but desires to spread the doctrines and ideals abroad so as to help mankind to become truly cultured." _4. The Attitude of Tibetan Lamas_ Not only the Chinese Buddhists, but the Lamas of Mongolia and Tibet are feeling the impulses of the new age. Quite recently an exhibition was held in the Lama temple at Peking which attracted thousands of visitors. Its object was to obtain money to repair the temple, and thus to give its work a fresh impulse. That these impulses are not necessarily hostile to Christianity is shown by a letter written by the Kurung Tsering Lama of Kokonor district to the Rev. T. Sörensen of Szechuan: "I, your humble servant, have seen several copies of the Scriptures and, having read them carefully, they certainly made me believe in Christ. I understand a little of the outstanding principles and the doctrinal teaching of the One Son, but as to the Holy Spirit's nature and essence, and as to the origin of this religion, I am not at all clear, and it is therefore important that the doctrinal principles of this religion should be fully explained, so as to enlighten the unintelligent and people of small mental ability. "The teaching of the science of medicine and astrology is also very important. It is therefore evident if we want this blessing openly manifested, we must believe in the religion of the only Son of God. Being in earnest, I therefore pray you from my heart not to consider this letter lightly. With a hundred salutations." Enclosed with this letter was a poem written in most elegant language. "O thou Supreme God and most precious Father, The truth above all religions, The Ruler of all animate and inanimate worlds! Greater than wisdom, separated from birth and death, Is his son Christ the Lord shining in glory among endless beings. Incomprehensible wonder, miraculously made! In this teaching I myself also believe--As your spirit is with heaven united, My soul undivided is seeking the truth Jesus the Savior's desire fulfilling, For the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven I am praying. Happiness to all." _5. The Buddhist World Versus the Christian World_ Looking back over the last twenty-five years we see rising quite distinctly a Buddhist world growing conscious of itself, of its past history and of its mission to the world. This Buddhist, world has much more of a program than it had twenty-five years ago. Its object is to unite the Mahayâna and the Hînayâna branches of Buddhism and to spread Buddhist propaganda over the world. At present the leadership of this movement is in Japan. It is in part a political movement. There is no question that Christianity is not at all pleasing to the Japanese militarists. It is regarded by them as the advance post of western industrialism and political ambition. Quite naturally such leaders desire to make the Buddhist world a unit. It is also a social movement. The spirit of the Japanese Buddhist has been brought to consciousness by the new position of Japan. Japan is seeking to take its place in the world as a first rate power. By this not only will Japan's industry and commerce profit, but its spiritual values must also be adapted to the world. The movement then has its spiritual side. Japanese travelers and people are going to all parts of the world. They carry with them the religious ideals which have been shaped by Buddhism. Buddhism in the past was one of the great religions of salvation with an inspiring missionary message. It is again awakening to this task of evangelization. Under the leadership of Japanese scholars and religious statesmen the Japanese are seeking to unite the Buddhist world so that it shall become a force in the new world. Japan is thus trying to give back what it has received in the past. At present in Buddhist countries there is a strong force working against this movement. Nationalism is a new force to be reckoned with. Still even with the spirit of nationalism permeating every group, the Buddhist world is getting together and will strive to make its contribution to the life of the whole world. X THE CHRISTIAN APPROACH TO BUDDHISTS _1. Questions Which Buddhists Ask_ Buddhists are approaching Christianity. In many places a spirit of inquiry and interest in the Christian religion is met. It is not necessary that there should be a Buddhist world permanently over against a Christian world. The questions which Buddhists ask a missionary indicate an interest in vital themes. Some of them are as follows: We put our trust in the three Precious Ones. In what do you trust? Is not your Shang Ti (name for God used in China) a being lower than Buddha and just a little higher than a Bodhisattva? Is not Shang Ti the tribal god of the Jews? Do you believe in the existence of _purgatory?_ What sufferings will those endure who do not live a virtuous life? Do you believe in the reality of the Western Paradise? How can one enter it? There being three kinds of merit, by what method is the great merit accumulated? How is the middle and the small merit accumulated? What are the fruits of these proportions of merit and what are they like? Tell me how to believe Christ. What work of meditation do you perform? Is not Buddhism more democratic than Christianity, because it holds out the possibility of Buddhahood to all beings? Is not Buddhism more inclusive, because it provides for the salvation of all beings? _2. Knowledge and Sympathy_ These questions make it plain that the worker who is to deal with Buddhists should have a broad background of general culture. He must be thoroughly humanized. He should have a good knowledge of the history of philosophy and religion, including the work of the modern philosophers. A knowledge of the life of Buddha and of the doctrines of the Hînayâna or Southern Buddhism, as well as the tenets of the Mahayâna should be in his possession. The psychology of religion should interpenetrate his historical learning; the best methods of pedagogy should guide his approach to men. Of course he must speak the language of the Buddhist, not only the spiritual language, but his everyday patois. He will find it an advantage to know some Sanskrit. While this requirement is not very urgent at present, it will rapidly become a necessity for doing the best work. This knowledge should be interpenetrated by a genuine sympathy, that is, imagination tinged with emotion. The worker should be able to view doctrines, values and actions from the point of view of the Buddhist and his past history. He must have a genuine interest in and a great capacity for friendship. The Buddhists are very human, responding to friendship very quickly. Such friendship forms a link between the man and the larger friendship of Christ. _3. Emphasis on the Aesthetic in Christianity_ A Chinese Christian leader described his idea of a church as a place removed from the din of the street, approached by a walk flanked with trees and flowers and adorned within by symbols speaking to the heart of the Chinese. He longed for the mystic silence and the beauty of holiness which would open the windows of the world of spiritual reality and throw its light upon the problems of life. He was asked, "Would you adapt some of the symbols of the Chinese religions?" He said, "Many of those symbols are neutral. They suggest religious emotion. Their character depends upon the content which the occasion puts into them. If the content is Christian then the symbols and emotions will become Christian." Christianity is a religion of beauty. The beautiful in architecture, symbol and ritual, expressing the spiritual universe of the past, present and future, makes a strong appeal to the Chinese heart. It may well be emphasized in the future as never before. _4. Emphasis on the Mystical in Christianity_ Not long ago a Buddhist in one of the large cities of China was converted. He found great joy in the experience which revived him and gathered into unity the broken fragments of his life. He attended church regularly and participated in the prayer meetings. Gradually he discovered that he was not being nourished. He felt his joy slipping away from him and his divided life reinstating itself. He went to Buddhism for consolation. He is not hostile to the church. He appreciates the help he received, but he said that he came for consolation and peace and found the same--hard orthodoxy and morality so familiar to him in Confucianism. While the case of this man may have individual peculiarities, it may be made the starting point for a discussion of the situation in many churches in China. The early message to the Chinese was doctrinal. The false notion of many gods had to be displaced by the idea of the one true God. With this idea of the true God a few other tenets of the Christian religion are often held as dogmatic propositions to be repeated when questions are asked. The great sin preached is the worship of idols. The second part of the Christian message is salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. This salvation is other-worldly to a large extent. The extreme emphasis upon it has made of the church an insurance society, membership in which insures bliss in the world beyond. The third part of the message has been concerned with moral acts, abstinence from opium (liquor and tobacco in some churches), polygamy, and the gross sins. Attendance upon church services, contribution for the support of the church, and the refusal to contribute to idolatry have also been required. The emphasis to a large extent was doctrinal, moral and individual. The result has been a body of people free from the gross sins, but also innocent of the great virtues and individualistic in their outlook upon this world and the next. This emphasis is needed, but in addition there should be the cultivation of the presence of God in the soul by appropriate means. The Christian Church of China should develop a technique of the spiritual life suited to the East. The formation of habits of devotion should be emphasized. Intercessory prayer should be given a larger place. Contemplation and meditation should be regarded not merely as an escape from the turmoil and strife of the world, but as a preparation for the highest life of service and sacrifice. Buddhist mysticism united the whole universe and was the great foundation of Chinese art, literature and morality. The spiritual world of Christianity must likewise seep through into the very thought of Asia and inspire the new art, literature and morality which will be the world expression of a Christian universe. _5. Emphasis on the Social Elements in Christianity_ To the aesthetic and mystical emphasis must be attached a social emphasis. Buddhism is often criticized as not being social. It is a highly socialized religion. It has had a large influence upon social life in the East. This social life is different from ours. We see its wrongs and weaknesses. Likewise do the Buddhists see the materialism and injustice of our social life. Christianity must relate itself to the modern world as it is rising in China and seek not merely to remedy a few wrongs or heal a few diseases, but must release the healing stream into the social life of the East. This will be done and is being done through the Church community which has become conscious of itself, realizing its needs and wants, seeking in an intelligent and systematic way to rehabilitate itself. It is not so much the external unrelated efforts that accomplish the thing needed, but it is rather the community life stirred by ideals and fired by a new dynamic which begins the work of reformation. _6. Emphasis on the Person of Jesus Christ_ _(a) As a Historical Character._--The great asset of the missionary among Buddhists is the historical person of Christ. In contrast to many of the Bodhisattvas, the saviours of the Buddhists, Jesus is a historical character. His life among men was the life of God among men. _(b) As the Revealer._--God is like Christ. Christ reveals God as the complete, the perfect person. He possessed the pure spiritual personality. The chief characteristic of this personality is love. This love conscious of itself finds its highest joy in the well-being of others. This love of God produced human life which, springing from the lowest form, broke through the material elements and is capable of attaining the highest development. Christ reveals to man his heavenly relationship. Man created in the likeness of God stands in the highest relation of one person to another through love. He likens this relation to that of father and son. He lifts man to the fellowship with the divine. Yet such a fellowship that man preserves his personality. Christ reveals man in his relation to men as a brother and the form of love which shall control the relation of man to God as well as man to man. Christ revealed and founded the Kingdom, a society of the saved, dominated by the spirit of the founder and making this spirit of love and service the organizing power in the world. _(c) As the Saviour._--Mahayâna Buddhism emphasized saviourhood. Christ is the saviour of men. In Buddhism the stress is placed upon the merit of the saviour and the saved. There is no question that merit has some value. Yet Christ does not save us by merit, nor do we help to save one another by merit. Salvation is a moral and spiritual process. It is concerned with the biology of the soul. The salvation that we preach is not the salvation by knowledge, or meditation, or merit, but by the interpenetration of Christ's spirit in ours, by the mystic and moral union of our life with his. As Paul says: "That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His suffering." Yet He is not the saviour of the individual alone. He saves the community, the church. Only as His spirit permeates and dominates the community does he find his true self and the real salvation. _(d) As the Eternal Son, of God._--The Mahayâna system does not emphasize the historicity of Amitabha or of the Bodhisattvas. Spiritual truth is the development of the soul. It is not limited by time and place. Likewise Christianity must emphasize the eternal character of Jesus Christ. "The Logos existed in the very beginning, the Logos was with God, the Logos was God." To the Mahâyânist this spiritual history is more real than any fact conditioned by time and place. The Christian worker must learn to understand the import of the Gospel of John. He must see in Jesus Christ "The real Light, which enlightens every man." He must be able to convince himself that the Christ is the fulfillment of the highest aspirations of the Mahâyâna system. _7. How Christianity Expresses Itself in Buddhist Minds_ In 1920 a number of Buddhist monks, under the leadership of Rev. K. L. Reichelt formed a Christian brotherhood. The members of this small brotherhood decided that they must subscribe to vows and they took the four following: "I promise before the Almighty and Omniscient God, that I with my whole heart will surrender myself to the true Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. I will with my whole heart have faith in Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the world who gives completion to the profoundest and best objects of the higher Buddhism. I will live in this faith now and ever after. "I promise solemnly before God with my whole heart to devote myself to the study of the true doctrine and break wholly with the evil manners of the world and show forth in my public and private life that I am truly united with Christ. "I promise that I in every respect will try so to educate myself that I can be of use in the work of God on earth. I will with undivided heart devote myself to the great work; to lead my brethren in the Buddhist Association forward to the understanding of Christ as the only One, who gives completion to the highest and profoundest ideas of Higher Buddhism. "I promise that until my last hour I will work so that out of our Christian Brotherhood there may grow forth a strong church of Christ among Buddhists. I will not permit any evil thing to grow in my heart, which could divide the brotherhood, but will always try to promote the progress of every member in the knowledge of the holy obligations laid down in these vows and our constitution." Such men ought, to make choice Christians. _8. Christianity's Constructive Values_ Buddhism in the course of its long history developed certain religious ideas and values which we find in Christianity. It faced the fact of sin and placed it in the heart. It diagnosed the fundamental instincts of men, sex-appetite, will-to-achieve, and pugnacity. These must be overcome. It regards them as delusions which must be eliminated. Christianity also deals with these instincts. It is under no delusion as to their strength. There are certain tendencies in Christianity which have tried to annihilate them. The central tendency of Christianity, however, recognizing their power for good, seeks to sublimate them and make them serve the individual and society. This attitude of the two religions toward these instincts is fundamentally different. The attitude of Christianity has been justified even in Buddhist lands where the religious life of the people has followed the same line that Christianity advocates. Early Buddhism tried to dissolve man's personality. Later Buddhism corrected this and perhaps has appealed too much to the desire on the part of the individual to enter a heaven which is merely a replica of the earth. Christianity starts with a personal God and holds up before the believer the goal of perfection for his own personality. It finds man without a self and confers a real selfhood upon him. Early Buddhism taught that salvation is accomplished by the individual alone. It denies the possibility and the necessity of help from a divine source. Subsequent history has proved this to have been wrong. In India, Buddhism has been displaced by Hinduism, and in China, and Japan, the Mahâyâna has developed the idea of salvation through another. The great stream of Buddhism has recognized that man by himself is helpless. He must have the help of a divine power in order to obtain salvation. Christianity asserts that salvation is possible only through the intervention of God. The incarnation, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and his work in the world through the Holy Spirit on the one hand are the expression of God's solicitude for man, and, on the other hand, correspond to the deep need which men of all ages have felt, for a power above themselves. From the early stages of magic to the highest reaches of religion we find this constant factor recognized by human groups all over the world. They bear witness to a power above themselves to whom they continually appeal. In Christianity we find this main tendency enunciated most clearly. The individual cannot save himself. Mankind cannot save itself. Both must rely upon the assistance of the divine power which started this universe on its way and which is the ever present creative force. Christianity, moreover, has established the community of believers including all classes and conditions of men. Herein each one may realize himself. Herein also he may realize the kind of community which is friendly to his highest aspirations for himself. Herein he has the opportunity to transmute the instincts above mentioned into forces which make for the larger development of his own person and the well-being of the community. Accordingly, as Christians face Buddhists, they can do so with the consciousness that this great religion has been reaching out after the light which shines brightly in our Christian religion. They have the assurance not only that they have a message which brings fulfilment to the ideas of the Mahâyâna, but also that it has prepared the way for the hearts of the Chinese to receive the highest message of Christianity. APPENDIX I HINTS FOR THE PRELIMINARY STUDY OF BUDDHISM IN CHINA The student should read and inwardly digest the booklet of K. J. Saunders. He should follow the directions given in Appendix One of that book, This procedure is important because the Hînayâna Buddhism and the life of Buddha are the background of Buddhism in China. Then he may take Hackmann's _Buddhism as a Religion_ (No. 15). This will give a general orientation. This may be followed with R. F. Johnston's _Buddhist China_ (No. _20_). Along with this he may read Suzuki's _Awakening of Faith_ (No. 32), and also his _Outlines of Mahâyanâ Buddhism (No._ 33). McGovern's _Introduction to Mahâyanâ Buddhism (No._ 23) will illuminate the philosophical background of Buddhism, and Eliot's _Hinduism and Buddhism_ (No. 13) will add historical perspective. The translation of _Mahdydna Sutras_ by Beal and in the Sacred Books of the East will give him some of the sources for the doctrines held in China. He may begin as the Buddhist missionaries did with the sutra of the Forty-two sections and then take up the Diamond Sutra, and then completing the sutras in Vol. 59 and the Catena of Buddhist Scriptures. For the study of the ethical side he will find De Groot's _Le Code du Mahâyâna en Chine_ very helpful. For the study of the sects Eliot, Vol. III, pp. 303-320 _Northern Buddhism_ (No. 14) will be helpful. In all his study he will find Eitel's _Handbook of Chinese Buddhism_ (No. 12) indispensable. He must, however, make a Chinese index in order to be able to use the book. Contact with monks will be helpful and is quite necessary in order to appreciate the human problems of the work. APPENDIX II A BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. BEAL, S. _Abstract of Four Lectures_ upon _Buddhist Literature_ in _China._ London, Triibner, 1882. Lecture II, on "Method of Buddha's Teaching in the Vinaya Pitaka," and Lecture IV, on "Coincidences Between Buddhism and Other Religions," especially desirable. 2. ---- _Buddhism in China,_ London, S. P. C. K, 1884. The best comprehensive account of Chinese Buddhism, written by an authority. 3. ---- _Catena of Buddhist Scriptures,_ from the Chinese. London, Triibner, 1871. A good introduction to Chinese Buddhism from the sources. 4. ---- _The Romantic Legend of Sâkya Buddha._ London, Triibner, 1875. Recounts Buddha's history from the beginning to the conversion of the Kâsyapas and others. 5. ---- _Texts from the Buddhist Canon Commonly Known_ as _D_ hammapada. London, Triibner, 1878. Pocket edition, 1902. These "Scriptural Texts," translated from the Chinese and abridged, are usually connected with some event in Buddha's history. This translation has Indian anecdotes, illustrating the verses. 6. COULING, S., editor. _The Encyclopaedia Sinica._ Shanghai, Kelly & Walsh, 1917. Contains, on pages 67-75, a number of brief articles upon Buddhism in China. 7. DE QROOT, J. J. M. _Religion of the Chinese._ New York, Macmillan, 1900. Pages 164-223 contain a summary of the main facts about Chinese Buddhism by an authority. 8. ---- _Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China._ 2 vols. J. Müller, Amsterdam, 1903-1904. Treats from sources Confucianism's persecution of Buddhism and other sects. See Vol. II. Index, under Buddhism, p. 572. 9. DORE, HENEI. _Researches into Chinese Superstitions._ 6 vols. Tusewei Press, 1914-1920. A well illustrated miscellany of superstitions of all Chinese religions showing indistinctly their interpenetration by Buddhism. For Buddhism proper, see Vol. VI, pp. 89-233. 10. EDKINS, J. _Chinese Buddhism._ 2d edition. London, Trübner, 1893. A very full account of Buddhism as seen by a Sinologue of the last generation. 11. EITEL, E. J. _Buddhism: Its Historical, Theoretical and Popular Aspects._ Hongkong, Lane, Crawford and Co., 1884. Written by an observant scholar and descriptive of Buddhism of South China especially. 12. ---- _Handbook of Chinese Buddhism._ Presbyterian Mission Press, Shanghai. This is a Sanskrit-Chinese dictionary, a reprint of the second edition of 1888 without the Chinese index necessary for identifying Chinese Buddhist terms. 13. ELIOT, SIR CHARLES. _Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch._ 3 vols. Edward Arnold and Co., 1921. This is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Buddhism by an experienced student. The parts especially related to Chinese Buddhism are Vol. II, pp. 3-106; Vol. Ill, 223-335. 14. JETTY, A. _Gods of Northern Buddhism._ Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1914. This work is helpful in identifying images in the temples, though unfortunately few of those given are Chinese. 15. HACKMANN, H. _Buddhism as a Religion._ London, Probsthain, 1910. Gives a general view of Buddhism from first-hand investigation. For Chinese Buddhism see pp. 200-257. 16. HASTINGS, JAMES. _The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics._ New York, Scribners, 1908. Articles Asvaghosa, Bodhisattva, China (Buddhism in), Mahâyâna Missions (Buddhist). 17. HUME, R. E. _The Living Religions of the World._ New York, Scribners, 1924. A clear comparative study of these religions in the light of Christian standards. 18. INGLIS, J. W. "Christian Element in Chinese Buddhism." _International Review of Missions,_ Vol. V, 1916, pp. 587-602. An excellent article by a veteran missionary and scholar of Manchuria. 19. JOHNSON, S. _Oriental Religions ... China._ Boston, Houghton, Osgood Co., 1878. Pages 800-833 give a comprehensive summary by a student of comparative religion. 20. JOHNSTON, R. F. _Buddhist_ China. New York, Dutton, 1913. A well-written, interesting book. The author knows his subject, and is held in high esteem by Buddhists in China. 21. KEITH, A. BERRIEDALE. _Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon._ Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923. A study of the historic development of the Buddhistic philosophy in India and Ceylon which throws much light on the Mahâyâna. 22. LODGE, J. E. _Chinese Buddhist Art._ Asia, Vol. XIX, June, 1919. Some of the choicest half-tones illustrating its character accompanied by interesting descriptions. 23. McGOVERN, W. M. _An Introduction of Mahâyâna Buddhism._ Dutton, 1922. Though written from the point of view of Japanese Buddhism it gives a good treatment of metaphysical and psychological aspects of the Mahâyâna system. 24. MÜLLER, F. MAX. _Sacred Books of the East._ Vol. XLIX, Buddhist, Mahâyâna Texts. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1894. A book of sources necessary for understanding Northern Buddhism. 25. PARKER, E. H. _China and Religion._ New York, Dutton, 1905. A sketch of Buddhism by a scholar long resident in China is found in Chapter IV. 26. PAUL, C. T. _The Presentation of Christianity to Buddhists._ New York, Board of Missionary Preparation, 1924. A carefully prepared study of Buddhism from the viewpoint of missionaries working in Buddhist lands. 27. REICHELT, K. L. "Special Work Among Chinese Buddhists." _Chinese Recorder,_ Vol. LI, 1920, July issue, pp. 491-497. An article by a pioneer in work among Buddhists, of rare insight and sympathy. 28. RICHARD, T. _The Awakening of Faith in the Mahâyâna Doctrine._ 2d edition. Shanghai, 1918. A loose translation by a very large-hearted and sympathetic student with an irenic spirit. See 32 below. 29. RICHARD, T. _Guide to Buddhahood; Being a Standard Manual of Chinese Buddhism._ Shanghai., 1907. 30. SAUNDERS, K. J. _Epochs of Buddhist History_ (Haskell Lectures), Chicago University Press, 1922. A good summary of the main developments in Buddhism. 31. STAUFFER, M. T. _The Christian Occupation of China._ Shanghai Continuation Committee, 1922. The introductory section contains articles upon China's religions. 32. SUZUKI, T. A'svaghosa's _Awakening of Faith in the Mahâyâna._ Chicago, Open Court Publishing Co., 1900. A far more accurate translation of this work than No. 28 above. 33. ---- Outlines of _Mahâyâna Buddhism._ Chicago, Open Court Publishing Co., 1908. While written from the Japanese point of view it is necessary to the understanding of Chinese Buddhism. 34. WATTERS, T. "Buddhism in China." _Chinese Recorder,_ Vol. II, 1870, pp. 1-7, 38-43, 64-68, 81-88, 117-122, 145-150, Shanghai. A valuable series of articles by an excellent Chinese scholar, discussing the history, persecutions, and various Buddhas of China. 35. WEI, F. C. M. "Salvation by Faith as Taught by the Pure Land Sect." _Chinese Recorder,_ Vol. LI, 1920, pp. 395-401, 485-491. A good article on the sect whose ideas have spread over China and Japan. 36. WIEGER, L. _Bouddhisme Chinois,_ 2 vols. Ho-Kien-Fou, Roman Catholic Press, 1910-1913. This contains the Chinese text and French translation of the life of Buddha as known to China; also the ritual observed in ordination. A useful source book. 
8128	----	In Ghostly Japan Fragment And it was at the hour of sunset that they came to the foot of the mountain. There was in that place no sign of life,--neither token of water, nor trace of plant, nor shadow of flying bird,-- nothing but desolation rising to desolation. And the summit was lost in heaven. Then the Bodhisattva said to his young companion:--"What you have asked to see will be shown to you. But the place of the Vision is far; and the way is rude. Follow after me, and do not fear: strength will be given you." Twilight gloomed about them as they climbed. There was no beaten path, nor any mark of former human visitation; and the way was over an endless heaping of tumbled fragments that rolled or turned beneath the foot. Sometimes a mass dislodged would clatter down with hollow echoings;--sometimes the substance trodden would burst like an empty shell....Stars pointed and thrilled; and the darkness deepened. "Do not fear, my son," said the Bodhisattva, guiding: "danger there is none, though the way be grim." Under the stars they climbed,--fast, fast,--mounting by help of power superhuman. High zones of mist they passed; and they saw below them, ever widening as they climbed, a soundless flood of cloud, like the tide of a milky sea. Hour after hour they climbed;--and forms invisible yielded to their tread with dull soft crashings;--and faint cold fires lighted and died at every breaking. And once the pilgrim-youth laid hand on a something smooth that was not stone,--and lifted it,--and dimly saw the cheekless gibe of death. "Linger not thus, my son!" urged the voice of the teacher;--"the summit that we must gain is very far away!" On through the dark they climbed,--and felt continually beneath them the soft strange breakings,--and saw the icy fires worm and die,--till the rim of the night turned grey, and the stars began to fail, and the east began to bloom. Yet still they climbed,--fast, fast,--mounting by help of power superhuman. About them now was frigidness of death,--and silence tremendous....A gold flame kindled in the east. Then first to the pilgrim's gaze the steeps revealed their nakedness;--and a trembling seized him,--and a ghastly fear. For there was not any ground,--neither beneath him nor about him nor above him,--but a heaping only, monstrous and measureless, of skulls and fragments of skulls and dust of bone,--with a shimmer of shed teeth strown through the drift of it, like the shimmer of scrags of shell in the wrack of a tide. "Do not fear, my son!" cried the voice of the Bodhisattva;--"only the strong of heart can win to the place of the Vision!" Behind them the world had vanished. Nothing remained but the clouds beneath, and the sky above, and the heaping of skulls between,--up-slanting out of sight. Then the sun climbed with the climbers; and there was no warmth in the light of him, but coldness sharp as a sword. And the horror of stupendous height, and the nightmare of stupendous depth, and the terror of silence, ever grew and grew, and weighed upon the pilgrim, and held his feet,--so that suddenly all power departed from him, and he moaned like a sleeper in dreams. "Hasten, hasten, my son!" cried the Bodhisattva: "the day is brief, and the summit is very far away." But the pilgrim shrieked,--"I fear! I fear unspeakably!--and the power has departed from me!" "The power will return, my son," made answer the Bodhisattva.... "Look now below you and above you and about you, and tell me what you see." "I cannot," cried the pilgrim, trembling and clinging; "I dare not look beneath! Before me and about me there is nothing but skulls of men." "And yet, my son," said the Bodhisattva, laughing softly,--"and yet you do not know of what this mountain is made." The other, shuddering, repeated:--"I fear!--unutterably I fear!...there is nothing but skulls of men!" "A mountain of skulls it is," responded the Bodhisattva. "But know, my son, that all of them ARE YOUR OWN! Each has at some time been the nest of your dreams and delusions and desires. Not even one of them is the skull of any other being. All,--all without exception,--have been yours, in the billions of your former lives." FURISODE Recently, while passing through a little street tenanted chiefly by dealers in old wares, I noticed a furisode, or long-sleeved robe, of the rich purple tint called murasaki, hanging before one of the shops. It was a robe such as might have been worn by a lady of rank in the time of the Tokugawa. I stopped to look at the five crests upon it; and in the same moment there came to my recollection this legend of a similar robe said to have once caused the destruction of Yedo. Nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, the daughter of a rich merchant of the city of the Shoguns, while attending some temple- festival, perceived in the crowd a young samurai of remarkable beauty, and immediately fell in love with him. Unhappily for her, he disappeared in the press before she could learn through her attendants who he was or whence he had come. But his image remained vivid in her memory,--even to the least detail of his costume. The holiday attire then worn by samurai youths was scarcely less brilliant than that of young girls; and the upper dress of this handsome stranger had seemed wonderfully beautiful to the enamoured maiden. She fancied that by wearing a robe of like quality and color, bearing the same crest, she might be able to attract his notice on some future occasion. Accordingly she had such a robe made, with very long sleeves, according to the fashion of the period; and she prized it greatly. She wore it whenever she went out; and when at home she would suspend it in her room, and try to imagine the form of her unknown beloved within it. Sometimes she would pass hours before it,--dreaming and weeping by turns. And she would pray to the gods and the Buddhas that she might win the young man's affection,--often repeating the invocation of the Nichiren sect: Namu myo ho rengé kyo! But she never saw the youth again; and she pined with longing for him, and sickened, and died, and was buried. After her burial, the long-sleeved robe that she had so much prized was given to the Buddhist temple of which her family were parishioners. It is an old custom to thus dispose of the garments of the dead. The priest was able to sell the robe at a good price; for it was a costly silk, and bore no trace of the tears that had fallen upon it. It was bought by a girl of about the same age as the dead lady. She wore it only one day. Then she fell sick, and began to act strangely,--crying out that she was haunted by the vision of a beautiful young man, and that for love of him she was going to die. And within a little while she died; and the long- sleeved robe was a second time presented to the temple. Again the priest sold it; and again it became the property of a young girl, who wore it only once. Then she also sickened, and talked of a beautiful shadow, and died, and was buried. And the robe was given a third time to the temple; and the priest wondered and doubted. Nevertheless he ventured to sell the luckless garment once more. Once more it was purchased by a girl and once more worn; and the wearer pined and died. And the robe was given a fourth time to the temple. Then the priest felt sure that there was some evil influence at work; and he told his acolytes to make a fire in the temple- court, and to burn the robe. So they made a fire, into which the robe was thrown. But as the silk began to burn, there suddenly appeared upon it dazzling characters of flame,--the characters of the invocation, Namu myo ho rengé kyo;--and these, one by one, leaped like great sparks to the temple roof; and the temple took fire. Embers from the burning temple presently dropped upon neighbouring roofs; and the whole street was soon ablaze. Then a sea-wind, rising, blew destruction into further streets; and the conflagration spread from street to street, and from district into district, till nearly the whole of the city was consumed. And this calamity, which occurred upon the eighteenth day of the first month of the first year of Meireki (1655), is still remembered in Tokyo as the Furisode-Kwaji,--the Great Fire of the Long-sleeved Robe. According to a story-book called Kibun-Daijin, the name of the girl who caused the robe to be made was O-Same; and she was the daughter of Hikoyemon, a wine-merchant of Hyakusho-machi, in the district of Azabu. Because of her beauty she was also called Azabu-Komachi, or the Komachi of Azabu.(1) The same book says that the temple of the tradition was a Nichiren temple called Hon-myoji, in the district of Hongo; and that the crest upon the robe was a kikyo-flower. But there are many different versions of the story; and I distrust the Kibun-Daijin because it asserts that the beautiful samurai was not really a man, but a transformed dragon, or water-serpent, that used to inhabit the lake at Uyeno,--Shinobazu-no-Ike. 1 After more than a thousand years, the name of Komachi, or Ono-no- Komachi, is still celebrated in Japan. She was the most beautiful woman of her time, and so great a poet that she could move heaven by her verses, and cause rain to fall in time of drought. Many men loved her in vain; and many are said to have died for love of her. But misfortunes visited her when her youth had passed; and, after having been reduced to the uttermost want, she became a beggar, and died at last upon the public highway, near Kyoto. As it was thought shameful to bury her in the foul rags found upon her, some poor person gave a wornout summer-robe (katabira) to wrap her body in; and she was interred near Arashiyama at a spot still pointed out to travellers as the "Place of the Katabira" (Katabira-no-Tsuchi). Incense I see, rising out of darkness, a lotos in a vase. Most of the vase is invisible, but I know that it is of bronze, and that its glimpsing handles are bodies of dragons. Only the lotos is fully illuminated: three pure white flowers, and five great leaves of gold and green,--gold above, green on the upcurling under-surface,--an artificial lotos. It is bathed by a slanting stream of sunshine,-- the darkness beneath and beyond is the dusk of a temple-chamber. I do not see the opening through which the radiance pours, but I am aware that it is a small window shaped in the outline-form of a temple-bell. The reason that I see the lotos--one memory of my first visit to a Buddhist sanctuary--is that there has come to me an odor of incense. Often when I smell incense, this vision defines; and usually thereafter other sensations of my first day in Japan revive in swift succession with almost painful acuteness. It is almost ubiquitous,--this perfume of incense. It makes one element of the faint but complex and never-to-be-forgotten odor of the Far East. It haunts the dwelling-house not less than the temple,--the home of the peasant not less than the yashiki of the prince. Shinto shrines, indeed, are free from it;--incense being an abomination to the elder gods. But wherever Buddhism lives there is incense. In every house containing a Buddhist shrine or Buddhist tablets, incense is burned at certain times; and in even the rudest country solitudes you will find incense smouldering before wayside images,--little stone figures of Fudo, Jizo, or Kwannon. Many experiences of travel,--strange impressions of sound as well as of sight,--remain associated in my own memory with that fragrance:--vast silent shadowed avenues leading to weird old shrines;--mossed flights of worn steps ascending to temples that moulder above the clouds;--joyous tumult of festival nights;--sheeted funeral-trains gliding by in glimmer of lanterns; murmur of household prayer in fishermen's huts on far wild coasts;--and visions of desolate little graves marked only by threads of blue smoke ascending,--graves of pet animals or birds remembered by simple hearts in the hour of prayer to Amida, the Lord of Immeasurable Light. But the odor of which I speak is that of cheap incense only,--the incense in general use. There are many other kinds of incense; and the range of quality is amazing. A bundle of common incense- rods--(they are about as thick as an ordinary pencil-lead, and somewhat longer)--can be bought for a few sen; while a bundle of better quality, presenting to inexperienced eyes only some difference in color, may cost several yen, and be cheap at the price. Still costlier sorts of incense,--veritable luxuries,-- take the form of lozenges, wafers, pastilles; and a small envelope of such material may be worth four or five pounds- sterling. But the commercial and industrial questions relating to Japanese incense represent the least interesting part of a remarkably curious subject. II Curious indeed, but enormous by reason of it infinity of tradition and detail. I am afraid even to think of the size of the volume that would be needed to cover it.... Such a work would properly begin with some brief account of the earliest knowledge and use of aromatics in Japan. I would next treat of the records and legends of the first introduction of Buddhist incense fron Korea,--when King Shomyo of Kudara, in 551 A. D., sent to the island-empire a collection of sutras, an image of the Buddha, and one complete set of furniture for a temple. Then something would have to be said about those classifications of incense which were made during the tenth century, in the periods of Engi and of Tenryaku,--and about the report of the ancient state-councillor, Kimitaka-Sangi, who visited China in the latter part of the thirteenth century, and transmitted to the Emperor Yomei the wisdom of the Chinese concerning incense. Then mention should be made of the ancient incenses still preserved in various Japanese temples, and of the famous fragments of ranjatai (publicly exhibited at Nara in the tenth year of Meiji) which furnished supplies to the three great captains, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Iyeyasu. After this should fol-low an outline of the history of mixed incenses made in Japan,--with notes on the classifications devised by the luxurious Takauji, and on the nomenclature established later by Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who collected one hundred and thirty varieties of incense, and invented for the more precious of them names recognized even to this day,--such as "Blossom-Showering," "Smoke-of-Fuji," and "Flower-of-the-Pure- Law." Examples ought to be given likewise of traditions attaching to historical incenses preserved in several princely families, together with specimens of those hereditary recipes for incense- making which have been transmitted from generation to generation through hundreds of years, and are still called after their august inventors,--as "the Method of Hina-Dainagon," "the Method of Sento-In," etc. Recipes also should be given of those strange incenses made "to imitate the perfume of the lotos, the smell of the summer breeze, and the odor of the autumn wind." Some legends of the great period of incense-luxury should be cited,--such as the story of Sue Owari-no-Kami, who built for himself a palace of incense-woods, and set fire to it on the night of his revolt, when the smoke of its burning perfumed the land to a distance of twelve miles.... Of course the mere compilation of materials for a history of mixed-incenses would entail the study of a host of documents, treatises, and books,--particularly of such strange works as the Kun-Shu-Rui-Sho, or "Incense-Collector's Classifying-Manual";--containing the teachings of the Ten Schools of the Art of Mixing Incense; directions as to the best seasons for incense-making; and instructions about the "different kinds of fire" to be used for burning incense--(one kind is called "literary fire," and another "military fire"); together with rules for pressing the ashes of a censer into various artistic designs corresponding to season and occasion.... A special chapter should certainly be given to the incense-bags (kusadama) hung up in houses to drive away goblins,--and to the smaller incense-bags formerly carried about the person as a protection against evil spirits. Then a very large part of the work would have to be devoted to the religious uses and legends of incense, --a huge subject in itself. There would also have to be considered the curious history of the old "incense-assemblies," whose elaborate ceremonial could be explained only by help of numerous diagrams. One chapter at least would be required for the subject of the ancient importation of incense-materials from India, China, Annam, Siam, Cambodia, Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and various islands of the Malay archipelago,--places all named in rare books about incense. And a final chapter should treat of the romantic literature of incense,--the poems, stories, and dramas in which incense-rites are mentioned; and especially those love-songs comparing the body to incense, and passion to the eating flame:-- Even as burns the perfume lending thy robe its fragance, Smoulders my life away, consumed by the pain of longing! ....The merest outline of the subject is terrifying! I shall attempt nothing more than a few notes about the religious, the luxurious, and the ghostly uses of incense. III The common incense everywhere burned by poor people before Buddhist icons is called an-soku-ko. This is very cheap. Great quantities of it are burned by pilgrims in the bronze censers set before the entrances of famous temples; and in front of roadside images you may often see bundles of it. These are for the use of pious wayfarers, who pause before every Buddhist image on their path to repeat a brief prayer and, when possible, to set a few rods smouldering at the feet of the statue. But in rich temples, and during great religious ceremonies, much more expensive incense is used. Altogether three classes of perfumes are employed in Buddhist rites: ko, or incense-proper, in many varieties--(the word literally means only "fragrant substance"); --dzuko, an odorous ointment; and makko, a fragrant powder. Ko is burned; dzuko is rubbed upon the hands of the priest as an ointment of purification; and makko is sprinkled about the sanctuary. This makko is said to be identical with the sandalwood-powder so frequently mentioned in Buddhist texts. But it is only the true incense which can be said to bear an important relation to the religious service. "Incense," declares the Soshi-Ryaku,(1) "is the Messenger of Earnest Desire. When the rich Sudatta wished to invite the Buddha to a repast, he made use of incense. He was wont to ascend to the roof of his house on the eve of the day of the entertainment, and to remain standing there all night, holding a censer of precious incense. And as often as he did thus, the Buddha never failed to come on the following day at the exact time desired." This text plainly implies that incense, as a burnt-offering, symbolizes the pious desires of the faithful. But it symbolizes other things also; and it has furnished many remarkable similes to Buddhist literature. Some of these, and not the least interesting, occur in prayers, of which the following, from the book called Hoji-san (2) is a striking example:-- --"Let my body remain pure like a censer!--let my thought be ever as a fire of wisdom, purely consuming the incense of sila and of dhyana, (3) that so may I do homage to all the Buddhas in the Ten Directions of the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Sometimes in Buddhist sermons the destruction of Karma by virtuous effort is likened to the burning of incense by a pure flame,--sometimes, again, the life of man is compared to the smoke of incense. In his "Hundred Writings "(Hyaku-tsu-kiri- kami), the Shinshu priest Myoden says, quoting from the Buddhist work Kujikkajo, or "Ninety Articles ":-- "In the burning of incense we see that so long as any incense remains, so long does the burning continue, and the smoke mount skyward. Now the breath of this body of ours,--this impermanent combination of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire,--is like that smoke. And the changing of the incense into cold ashes when the flame expires is an emblem of the changing of our bodies into ashes when our funeral pyres have burnt themselves out." He also tells us about that Incense-Paradise of which every believer ought to be reminded by the perfume of earthly incense: --"In the Thirty- Second Vow for the Attainment of the Paradise of Wondrous Incense," he says, "it is written: 'That Paradise is formed of hundreds of thousands of different kinds of incense, and of substances incalculably precious;--the beauty of it incomparably exceeds anything in the heavens or in the sphere of man;--the fragrance of it perfumes all the worlds of the Ten Directions of Space; and all who perceive that odor practise Buddha-deeds.' In ancient times there were men of superior wisdom and virtue who, by reason of their vow, obtained perception of the odor; but we, who are born with inferior wisdom and virtue in these later days, cannot obtain such perception. Nevertheless it will be well for us, when we smell the incense kindled before the image of Amida, to imagine that its odor is the wonderful fragrance of Paradise, and to repeat the Nembutsu in gratitude for the mercy of the Buddha." 1 "Short [or Epitomized] History of Priests." 2 "The Praise of Pious Observances." 3 By sila is meant the observance of the rules of purity in act and thought. Dhyana (called by Japanese Buddhists Zenjo) is one of the higher forms of meditation. IV But the use of incense in Japan is not confined to religious rites and ceremonies: indeed the costlier kinds of incense are manufactured chiefly for social entertainments. Incense-burning has been an amusement of the aristocracy ever since the thirteenth century. Probably you have heard of the Japanese tea- ceremonies, and their curious Buddhist history; and I suppose that every foreign collector of Japanese bric-a'-brac knows something about the luxury to which these ceremonies at one period attained,--a luxury well attested by the quality of the beautiful utensils formerly employed in them. But there were, and still are, incense-ceremonies much more elaborate and costly than the tea-ceremonies,--and also much more interesting. Besides music, embroidery, poetical composition and other branches of the old-fashioned female education, the young lady of pre-Meiji days was expected to acquire three especially polite accomplishments, --the art of arranging flowers, (ikebana), the art of ceremonial tea-making (cha-no-yu or cha-no-e),(1) and the etiquette of incense-parties (ko-kwai or ko-e). Incense-parties were invented before the time of the Ashikaga shoguns, and were most in vogue during the peaceful period of the Tokugawa rule. With the fall of the shogunate they went out of fashion; but recently they have been to some extent revived. It is not likely, however, that they will again become really fashionable in the old sense,--partly because they represented rare forms of social refinement that never can be revived, and partly because of their costliness. In translating ko-kwai as "incense-party," I use the word "party" in the meaning that it takes in such compounds as "card-party," "whist-party," "chess-party";--for a ko-kwai is a meeting held only with the object of playing a game,--a very curious game. There are several kinds of incense-games; but in all of them the contest depends upon the ability to remember and to name different kinds of incense by the perfume alone. That variety of ko-kwai called Jitchu-ko ("ten-burning-incense") is generally conceded to be the most amusing; and I shall try to tell you how it is played. The numeral "ten," in the Japanese, or rather Chinese name of this diversion, does not refer to ten kinds, but only to ten packages of incense; for Jitchu-ko, besides being the most amusing, is the very simplest of incense-games, and is played with only four kinds of incense. One kind must be supplied by the guests invited to the party; and three are furnished by the person who gives the entertainment. Each of the latter three supplies of incense--usually prepared in packages containing one hundred wafers is divided into four parts; and each part is put into a separate paper numbered or marked so as to indicate the quality. Thus four packages are prepared of the incense classed as No. 1, four of incense No. 2, and four of incense No. 3,--or twelve in all. But the incense given by the guests,--always called "guest-incense"--is not divided: it is only put into a wrapper marked with an abbreviation of the Chinese character signifying "guest." Accordingly we have a total of thirteen packages to start with; but three are to be used in the preliminary sampling, or "experimenting"--as the Japanese term it,--after the following manner. We shall suppose the game to be arranged for a party of six,-- though there is no rule limiting the number of players. The six take their places in line, or in a half-circle--if the room be small; but they do not sit close together, for reasons which will presently appear. Then the host, or the person appointed to act as incense-burner, prepares a package of the incense classed as No 1, kindles it in a censer, and passes the censer to the guest occupying the first seat, (2) with the announcement--"This is incense No 1" The guest receives the censer according to the graceful etiquette required in the ko-kwai, inhales the perfume, and passes on the vessel to his neighbor, who receives it in like manner and passes it to the third guest, who presents it to the fourth,--and so on. When the censer has gone the round of the party, it is returned to the incense-burner. One package of incense No. 2, and one of No. 3, are similarly prepared, announced, and tested. But with the "guest-incense" no experiment is made. The player should be able to remember the different odors of the incenses tested; and he is expected to identify the guest-incense at the proper time merely by the unfamiliar quality of its fragrance. The original thirteen packages having thus by "experimenting" been reduced to ten, each player is given one set of ten small tablets--usually of gold-lacquer,--every set being differently ornamented. The backs only of these tablets are decorated; and the decoration is nearly always a floral design of some sort:-- thus one set might be decorated with chrysanthemums in gold, another with tufts of iris-plants, another with a spray of plum- blossoms, etc. But the faces of the tablets bear numbers or marks; and each set comprises three tablets numbered "1," three numbered "2," three numbered "3," and one marked with the character signifying "guest." After these tablet-sets have been distributed, a box called the "tablet-box" is placed before the first player; and all is ready for the real game. The incense-burner retires behind a little screen, shuffles the flat packages like so many cards, takes the uppermost, prepares its contents in the censer, and then, returning to the party, sends the censer upon its round. This time, of course, he does not announce what kind of incense he has used. As the censer passes from hand to hand, each player, after inhaling the fume, puts into the tablet-box one tablet bearing that mark or number which he supposes to be the mark or number of the incense he has smelled. If, for example, he thinks the incense to be "guest- incense," he drops into the box that one of his tablets marked with the ideograph meaning "guest;" or if he believes that he has inhaled the perfume of No. 2, he puts into the box a tablet numbered "2." When the round is over, tablet-box and censer are both returned to the incense-burner. He takes the six tablets out of the box, and wraps them up in the paper which contained the incense guessed about. The tablets themselves keep the personal as well as the general record,--since each player remembers the particular design upon his own set. The remaining nine packages of incense art consumed and judged in the same way, according to the chance order in which the shuffling has placed them. When all the incense has been used, the tablets are taken out of their wrappings, the record is officially put into writing, and the victor of the day is announced. I here offer the translation of such a record: it will serve to explain, almost at a glance, all the complications of the game. According to this record the player who used the tablets decorated with the design called "Young Pine," made but two mistakes; while the holder of the "White-Lily" set made only one correct guess. But it is quite a feat to make ten correct judgments in succession. The olfactory nerves are apt to become somewhat numbed long before the game is concluded; and, therefore it is customary during the Ko-kwai to rinse the mouth at intervals with pure vinegar, by which operation the sensitivity is partially restored. RECORD OF A KO-KWAI. Order in which the ten packages of incense were used:-- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Names given to the six No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. tablets used, III I GUEST II I III II I III II according to decorative designs on the back: Guesses recorded by nos. on tablet; correct being marked * No. of correct guesses "Gold Chrysanthemum" 1 3 1 2* Guest 1 2* 2 3* 3 3 "Young Bamboo" 3* 1* 1 2* 1* Guest 3 2 1 3 4 "Red Peony" Guest 1* 2 2* 3 1 3 2 3* 1 3 "White Lily" 1 3 1 3 2 2 1 3 Guest 2* 1 "Young Pine" 3* 1* Guest* 3 1* 2 2* 1* 3* 2* 8 (Winner) "Cherry-Blossom -in-a-Mist" 1 3 Guest* 2* 1* 3* 1 2 3* 2* 6 NAMES OF INCENSE USED. I. "Tasogare" ("Who-Is-there?" I. e. "Evening-Dusk"). II. "Baikwa" ("Plum Flower"). III. "Wakakusa" ("Young Grass"). IV. ("Guest Incense") "Yamaji-no-Tsuyu" ("Dew-on-the-Mountain-Path"). To the Japanese original of the foregoing record were appended the names of the players, the date of the entertainment, and the name of the place where the party was held. It is the custom In some families to enter all such records in a book especially made for the purpose, and furnished with an index which enables the Ko-kwai player to refer immediately to any interesting fact belonging to the history of any past game. The reader will have noticed that the four kinds of incense used were designated by very pretty names. The incense first mentioned, for example, is called by the poets' name for the gloaming,--Tasogare (lit: "Who is there?" or " Who is it?")--a word which in this relation hints of the toilet-perfume that reveals some charming presence to the lover waiting in the dusk. Perhaps some curiosity will be felt regarding the composition of these incenses. I can give the Japanese recipes for two sorts; but I have not been able to identify all of the materials named:-- Recipe for Yamaji-no-Tsuyu. Ingredients Proportions. about Jinko (aloes-wood) 4 momme (1/2 oz.) Choji (cloves) 4 " " Kunroku (olibanum) 4 " " Hakko (artemisia Schmidtiana) 4 " " Jako (musk) 1 bu (1/8 oz.) Koko(?) 4 momme (1/2 oz.) To 21 pastilles Recipe for Baikwa. Ingredients Proportions. about Jinko (aloes) 20 momme (2 1/2 oz.) Choji (cloves) 12 " (1 1/2 oz.) Koko(?) 8 1/3 " (1 1/40 oz.) Byakudan (sandal-wood) 4 " (1/2 oz.) Kansho (spikenard) 2 bu (1/4 oz.) Kwakko (Bishop's-wort?) 1 bu 2 sbu (3/16 oz.) Kunroku (olibanum) 3 " 3 " (15/22 oz.) Shomokko (?) 2 " (1/4 oz.) Jako (musk) 3 " 2 sbu (7/16 oz.) Ryuno (refined Borneo Camphor) 3 sbu (3/8 oz.) To 50 pastilles The incense used at a Ko-kwai ranges in value, according to the style of the entertainment, from $2.50 to $30.00 per envelope of 100 wafers--wafers usually not more than one-fourth of an inch in diameter. Sometimes an incense is used worth even more than $30.00 per envelope: this contains ranjatai, an aromatic of which the perfume is compared to that of "musk mingled with orchid- flowers." But there is some incense,--never sold,--which is much more precious than ranjatai,--incense valued less for its com- position than for its history: I mean the incense brought centuries ago from China or from India by the Buddhist missionaries, and presented to princes or to other persons of high rank. Several ancient Japanese temples also include such foreign incense among their treasures. And very rarely a little of this priceless material is contributed to an incense-party,-- much as in Europe, on very extraordinary occasions, some banquet is glorified by the production of a wine several hundred years old. Like the tea-ceremonies, the Ko-kwai exact observance of a very complex and ancient etiquette. But this subject could interest few readers; and I shall only mention some of the rules regarding preparations and precautions. First of all, it is required that the person invited to an incense-party shall attend the same in as _odorless_ a condition as possible: a lady, for instance, must not use hair-oil, or put on any dress that has been kept in a perfumed chest-of-drawers. Furthermore, the guest should prepare for the contest by taking a prolonged hot bath, and should eat only the lightest and least odorous kind of food before going to the rendezvous. It is forbidden to leave the room during the game, or to open any door or window, or to indulge in needless conversation. Finally I may observe that, while judging the incense, a player is expected to take not less than three inhalations, or more than five. In this economical era, the Ko-kwai takes of necessity a much humbler form than it assumed in the time of the great daimyo, of the princely abbots, and of the military aristocracy. A full set of the utensils required for the game can now be had for about $50.00; but the materials are of the poorest kind. The old- fashioned sets were fantastically expensive. Some were worth thousands of dollars. The incense-burner's desk,--the writing- box, paper-box, tablet-box, etc.,--the various stands or dai,-- were of the costliest gold-lacquer;--the pincers and other instruments were of gold, curiously worked;--and the censer-- whether of precious metal, bronze, or porcelain,--was always a chef-d'oeuvre, designed by some artist of renown. 1 Girls are still trained in the art of arranging flowers, and in the etiquette of the dainty, though somewhat tedious, cha-no-yu. Buddhist priests have long enjoyed a reputation as teachers of the latter. When the pupil has reached a certain degree of proficiency, she is given a diploma or certificate. The tea used in these ceremonies is a powdered tea of remarkable fragrance,-- the best qualities of which fetch very high prices. 2 The places occupied by guests in a Japanese zashiki, or reception room are numbered from the alcove of the apartment. The place of the most honored is immediately before the alcove: this is the first seat, and the rest are numbered from it, usually to the left. V Although the original signification of incense in Buddhist ceremonies was chiefly symbolical, there is good reason to suppose that various beliefs older than Buddhism,--some, perhaps, peculiar to the race; others probably of Chinese or Korean derivation,--began at an early period to influence the popular use of incense in Japan. Incense is still burned in the presence of a corpse with the idea that its fragrance shields both corpse and newly-parted soul from malevolent demons; and by the peasants it is often burned also to drive away goblins and the evil powers presiding over diseases. But formerly it was used to summon spirits as well as to banish them. Allusions to its employment in various weird rites may be found in some of the old dramas and romances. One particular sort of incense, imported from China, was said to have the power of calling up human spirits. This was the wizard-incense referred to in such ancient love-songs as the following:-- "I have heard of the magical incense that summons the souls of the absent: Would I had some to burn, in the nights when I wait alone!" There is an interesting mention of this incense in the Chinese book, Shang-hai-king. It was called Fwan-hwan-hiang (by Japanese pronunciation, Hangon-ko), or "Spirit-Recalling-Incense;" and it was made in Tso-Chau, or the District of the Ancestors, situated by the Eastern Sea. To summon the ghost of any dead person--or even that of a living person, according to some authorities,--it was only necessary to kindle some of the incense, and to pronounce certain words, while keeping the mind fixed upon the memory of that person. Then, in the smoke of the incense, the remembered face and form would appear. In many old Japanese and Chinese books mention is made of a famous story about this incense,--a story of the Chinese Emperor Wu, of the Han dynasty. When the Emperor had lost his beautiful favorite, the Lady Li, he sorrowed so much that fears were entertained for his reason. But all efforts made to divert his mind from the thought of her proved unavailing. One day he ordered some Spirit-Recalling-Incense to be procured, that he might summon her from the dead. His counsellors prayed him to forego his purpose, declaring that the vision could only intensify his grief. But he gave no heed to their advice, and himself performed the rite,--kindling the incense, and keeping his mind fixed upon the memory of the Lady Li. Presently, within the thick blue smoke arising from the incense, the outline, of a feminine form became visible. It defined, took tints of life, slowly became luminous, and the Emperor recognized the form of his beloved At first the apparition was faint; but it soon became distinct as a living person, and seemed with each moment to grow more beautiful. The Emperor whispered to the vision, but received no answer. He called aloud, and the presence made no sign. Then unable to control himself, he approached the censer. But the instant that he touched the smoke, the phantom trembled and vanished. Japanese artists are still occasionally inspired by the legends of the Hangon-ho. Only last year, in Tokyo, at an exhibition of new kakemono, I saw a picture of a young wife kneeling before an alcove wherein the smoke of the magical incense was shaping the shadow of the absent husband.(1) Although the power of making visible the forms of the dead has been claimed for one sort of incense only, the burning of any kind of incense is supposed to summon viewless spirits in multitude. These come to devour the smoke. They are called Jiki- ko-ki, or "incense-eating goblins;" and they belong to the fourteenth of the thirty-six classes of Gaki (pretas) recognized by Japanese Buddhism. They are the ghosts of men who anciently, for the sake of gain, made or sold bad incense; and by the evil karma of that action they now find themselves in the state of hunger-suffering spirits, and compelled to seek their only food in the smoke of incense. 1 Among the curious Tokyo inventions of 1898 was a new variety of cigarettes called Hangon-so, or "Herb of Hangon,"--a name suggesting that their smoke operated like the spirit-summoning incense. As a matter of fact, the chemical action of the tobacco- smoke would define, upon a paper fitted into the mouth-piece of each cigarette, the photographic image of a dancing-girl. A Story of Divination I once knew a fortune-teller who really believed in the science that he professed. He had learned, as a student of the old Chinese philosophy, to believe in divination long before he thought of practising it. During his youth he had been in the service of a wealthy daimyo, but subsequently, like thousands of other samurai, found himself reduced to desperate straits by the social and political changes of Meiji. It was then that he became a fortune-teller,--an itinerant uranaiya,--travelling on foot from town to town, and returning to his home rarely more than once a year with the proceeds of his journey. As a fortune-teller he was tolerably successful,--chiefly, I think, because of his perfect sincerity, and because of a peculiar gentle manner that invited confidence. His system was the old scholarly one: he used the book known to English readers as the Yi-King,--also a set of ebony blocks which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese hexagrams;--and he always began his divination with an earnest prayer to the gods. The system itself he held to be infallible in the hands of a master. He confessed that he had made some erroneous predictions; but he said that these mistakes had been entirely due to his own miscomprehension of certain texts or diagrams. To do him justice I must mention that in my own case--(he told my fortune four times),--his predictions were fulfilled in such wise that I became afraid of them. You may disbelieve in fortune-telling,-- intellectually scorn it; but something of inherited superstitious tendency lurks within most of us; and a few strange experiences can so appeal to that inheritance as to induce the most unreasoning hope or fear of the good or bad luck promised you by some diviner. Really to see our future would be a misery. Imagine the result of knowing that there must happen to you, within the next two months, some terrible misfortune which you cannot possibly provide against! He was already an old man when I first saw him in Izumo,-- certainly more than sixty years of age, but looking very much younger. Afterwards I met him in Osaka, in Kyoto, and in Kobe. More than once I tried to persuade him to pass the colder months of the winter-season under my roof,--for he possessed an extraordinary knowledge of traditions, and could have been of inestimable service to me in a literary way. But partly because the habit of wandering had become with him a second nature, and partly because of a love of independence as savage as a gipsy's, I was never able to keep him with me for more than two days at a time. Every year he used to come to Tokyo,--usually in the latter part of autumn. Then, for several weeks, he would flit about the city, from district to district, and vanish again. But during these fugitive trips he never failed to visit me; bringing welcome news of Izumo people and places,--bringing also some queer little present, generally of a religious kind, from some famous place of pilgrimage. On these occasions I could get a few hours' chat with him. Sometimes the talk was of strange things seen or heard during his recent journey; sometimes it turned upon old legends or beliefs; sometimes it was about fortune-telling. The last time we met he told me of an exact Chinese science of divination which he regretted never having been able to learn. "Any one learned in that science," he said, "would be able, for example, not only to tell you the exact time at which any post or beam of this house will yield to decay, but even to tell you the direction of the breaking, and all its results. I can best explain what I mean by relating a story. "The story is about the famous Chinese fortune-teller whom we call in Japan Shoko Setsu, and it is written in the book Baikwa- Shin-Eki, which is a book of divination. While still a very young man, Shoko Setsu obtained a high position by reason of his learning and virtue; but he resigned it and went into solitude that he might give his whole time to study. For years thereafter he lived alone in a hut among the mountains; studying without a fire in winter, and without a fan in summer; writing his thoughts upon the wall of his room--for lack of paper;--and using only a tile for his pillow. "One day, in the period of greatest summer heat, he found himself overcome by drowsiness; and he lay down to rest, with his tile under his head. Scarcely had he fallen asleep when a rat ran across his face and woke him with a start. Feeling angry, he seized his tile and flung it at the rat; but the rat escaped unhurt, and the tile was broken. Shoko Setsu looked sorrowfully at the fragments of his pillow, and reproached himself for his hastiness. Then suddenly he perceived, upon the freshly exposed clay of the broken tile, some Chinese characters--between the upper and lower surfaces. Thinking this very strange, he picked up the pieces, and carefully examined them. He found that along the line of fracture seventeen characters had been written within the clay before the tile had been baked; and the characters read thus: 'In the Year of the Hare, in the fourth month, on the seventeenth day, at the Hour of the Serpent, this tile, after serving as a pillow, will be thrown at a rat and broken.' Now the prediction had really been fulfilled at the Hour of the Serpent on the seventeenth day of the fourth month of the Year of the Hare. Greatly astonished, Shoko Setsu once again looked at the fragments, and discovered the seal and the name of the maker. At once he left his hut, and, taking with him the pieces of the tile, hurried to the neighboring town in search of the tilemaker. He found the tilemaker in the course of the day, showed him the broken tile, and asked him about its history. "After having carefully examined the shards, the tilemaker said: --'This tile was made in my house; but the characters in the clay were written by an old man--a fortune-teller,--who asked permission to write upon the tile before it was baked.' 'Do you know where he lives?' asked Shoko Setsu. `He used to live,' the tilemaker answered, 'not very far from here; and I can show you the way to the house. But I do not know his name.' "Having been guided to the house, Shoko Setsu presented himself at the entrance, and asked for permission to speak to the old man. A serving-student courteously invited him to enter, and ushered him into an apartment where several young men were at study. As Shoko Setsu took his seat, all the youths saluted him. Then the one who had first addressed him bowed and said: 'We are grieved to inform you that our master died a few days ago. But we have been waiting for you, because he predicted that you would come to-day to this house, at this very hour. Your name is Shoko Setsu. And our master told us to give you a book which he believed would be of service to you. Here is the book;--please to accept it.' "Shoko Setsu was not less delighted than surprised; for the book was a manuscript of the rarest and most precious kind,-- containing all the secrets of the science of divination. After having thanked the young men, and properly expressed his regret for the death of their teacher, he went back to his hut, and there immediately proceeded to test the worth of the book by consulting its pages in regard to his own fortune. The book suggested to him that on the south side of his dwelling, at a particular spot near one corner of the hut, great luck awaited him. He dug at the place indicated, and found a jar containing gold enough to make him a very wealthy man." *** My old acquaintance left this world as lonesomely as he had lived in it. Last winter, while crossing a mountain-range, he was overtaken by a snowstorm, and lost his way. Many days later he was found standing erect at the foot of a pine, with his little pack strapped to his shoulders: a statue of ice--arms folded and eyes closed as in meditation. Probably, while waiting for the storm to pass, he had yielded to the drowsiness of cold, and the drift had risen over him as he slept. Hearing of this strange death I remembered the old Japanese saying,--Uranaiya minouye shiradzu: "The fortune-teller knows not his own fate." Silkworms I was puzzled by the phrase, "silkworm-moth eyebrow," in an old Japanese, or rather Chinese proverb:--The silkworm-moth eyebrow of a woman is the axe that cuts down the wisdom of man. So I went to my friend Niimi, who keeps silkworms, to ask for an explanation. "Is it possible," he exclaimed, "that you never saw a silkworm- moth? The silkworm-moth has very beautiful eyebrows." "Eyebrows?" I queried, in astonishment. "Well, call them what you like," returned Niimi;--"the poets call them eyebrows.... Wait a moment, and I will show you." He left the guest-room, and presently returned with a white paper-fan, on which a silkworm-moth was sleepily reposing. "We always reserve a few for breeding," he said;--"this one is just out of the cocoon. It cannot fly, of course: none of them can fly.... Now look at the eyebrows." I looked, and saw that the antennae, very short and feathery, were so arched back over the two jewel-specks of eyes in the velvety head, as to give the appearance of a really handsome pair of eye- brows. Then Niimi took me to see his worms. In Niimi's neighborhood, where there are plenty of mulberrytrees, many families keep silkworms;--the tending and feeding being mostly done by women and children. The worms are kept in large oblong trays, elevated upon light wooden stands about three feet high. It is curious to see hundreds of caterpillars feeding all together in one tray, and to hear the soft papery noise which they make while gnawing their mulberry-leaves. As they approach maturity, the creatures need almost constant attention. At brief intervals some expert visits each tray to inspect progress, picks up the plumpest feeders, and decides, by gently rolling them between forefinger and thumb, which are ready to spin. These are dropped into covered boxes, where they soon swathe themselves out of sight in white floss. A few only of the best are suffered to emerge from their silky sleep,--the selected breeders. They have beautiful wings, but cannot use them. They have mouths, but do not eat. They only pair, lay eggs, and die. For thousands of years their race has been so well-cared for, that it can no longer take any care of itself. It was the evolutional lesson of this latter fact that chiefly occupied me while Niimi and his younger brother (who feeds the worms) were kindly explaining the methods of the industry. They told me curious things about different breeds, and also about a wild variety of silkworm that cannot be domesticated:--it spins splendid silk before turning into a vigorous moth which can use its wings to some purpose. But I fear that I did not act like a person who felt interested in the subject; for, even while I tried to listen, I began to muse. II First of all, I found myself thinking about a delightful revery by M. Anatole France, in which he says that if he had been the Demiurge, he would have put youth at the end of life instead of at the beginning, and would have otherwise so ordered matters that every human being should have three stages of development, somewhat corresponding to those of the lepidoptera. Then it occurred to me that this fantasy was in substance scarcely more than the delicate modification of a most ancient doctrine, common to nearly all the higher forms of religion. Western faiths especially teach that our life on earth is a larval state of greedy helplessness, and that death is a pupa- sleep out of which we should soar into everlasting light. They tell us that during its sentient existence, the outer body should be thought of only as a kind of caterpillar, and thereafter as a chrysalis;--and they aver that we lose or gain, according to our behavior as larvae, the power to develop wings under the mortal wrapping. Also they tell us not to trouble ourselves about the fact that we see no Psyche-imago detach itself from the broken cocoon: this lack of visual evidence signifies nothing, because we have only the purblind vision of grubs. Our eyes are but half- evolved. Do not whole scales of colors invisibly exist above and below the limits of our retinal sensibility? Even so the butterfly-man exists,--although, as a matter of course, we cannot see him. But what would become of this human imago in a state of perfect bliss? From the evolutional point of view the question has interest; and its obvious answer was suggested to me by the history of those silkworms,--which have been domesticated for only a few thousand years. Consider the result of our celestial domestication for--let us say--several millions of years: I mean the final consequence, to the wishers, of being able to gratify every wish at will. Those silkworms have all that they wish for,--even considerably more. Their wants, though very simple, are fundamentally identical with the necessities of mankind,--food, shelter, warmth, safety, and comfort. Our endless social struggle is mainly for these things. Our dream of heaven is the dream of obtaining them free of cost in pain; and the condition of those silkworms is the realization, in a small way, of our imagined Paradise. (I am not considering the fact that a vast majority of the worms are predestined to torment and the second death; for my theme is of heaven, not of lost souls. I am speaking of the elect--those worms preordained to salvation and rebirth.) Probably they can feel only very weak sensations: they are certainly incapable of prayer. But if they were able to pray, they could not ask for anything more than they already receive from the youth who feeds and tends them. He is their providence, --a god of whose existence they can be aware in only the vaguest possible way, but just such a god as they require. And we should foolishly deem ourselves fortunate to be equally well cared-for in proportion to our more complex wants. Do not our common forms of prayer prove our desire for like attention? Is not the assertion of our "need of divine love" an involuntary confession that we wish to be treated like silkworms,--to live without pain by the help of gods? Yet if the gods were to treat us as we want, we should presently afford fresh evidence,--in the way of what is called "the evidence from degeneration,"--that the great evolutional law is far above the gods. An early stage of that degeneration would be represented by total incapacity to help ourselves;--then we should begin to lose the use of our higher sense-organs;--later on, the brain would shrink to a vanishing pin-point of matter;--still later we should dwindle into mere amorphous sacs, mere blind stomachs. Such would be the physical consequence of that kind of divine love which we so lazily wish for. The longing for perpetual bliss in perpetual peace might well seem a malevolent inspiration from the Lords of Death and Darkness. All life that feels and thinks has been, and can continue to be, only as the product of struggle and pain,-- only as the outcome of endless battle with the Powers of the Universe. And cosmic law is uncompromising. Whatever organ ceases to know pain,--whatever faculty ceases to be used under the stimulus of pain,--must also cease to exist. Let pain and its effort be suspended, and life must shrink back, first into protoplasmic shapelessness, thereafter into dust. Buddhism--which, in its own grand way, is a doctrine of evolution--rationally proclaims its heaven but a higher stage of development through pain, and teaches that even in paradise the cessation of effort produces degradation. With equal reasonableness it declares that the capacity for pain in the superhuman world increases always in proportion to the capacity for pleasure. (There is little fault to be found with this teaching from a scientific standpoint,--since we know that higher evolution must involve an increase of sensitivity to pain.) In the Heavens of Desire, says the Shobo-nen-jo-kyo, the pain of death is so great that all the agonies of all the hells united could equal but one-sixteenth part of such pain.(1) The foregoing comparison is unnecessarily strong; but the Buddhist teaching about heaven is in substance eminently logical. The suppression of pain--mental or physical,--in any conceivable state of sentient existence, would necessarily involve the suppression also of pleasure;--and certainly all progress, whether moral or material, depends upon the power to meet and to master pain. In a silkworm-paradise such as our mundane instincts lead us to desire, the seraph freed from the necessity of toil, and able to satisfy his every want at will, would lose his wings at last, and sink back to the condition of a grub.... (1) This statement refers only to the Heavens of Sensuous Pleasure,--not to the Paradise of Amida, nor to those heavens into which one enters by the Apparitional Birth. But even in the highest and most immaterial zones of being,--in the Heavens of Formlessness,--the cessation of effort and of the pain of effort, involves the penalty of rebirth in a lower state of existence. III I told the substance of my revery to Niimi. He used to be a great reader of Buddhist books. "Well," he said, "I was reminded of a queer Buddhist story by the proverb that you asked me to explain,--The silkworm-moth eyebrow of a woman is the axe that cuts down the wisdom of man. According to our doctrine, the saying would be as true of life in heaven as of life upon earth.... This is the story:--"When Shaka (1) dwelt in this world, one of his disciples, called Nanda, was bewitched by the beauty of a woman; and Shaka desired to save him from the results of this illusion. So he took Nanda to a wild place in the mountains where there were apes, and showed him a very ugly female ape, and asked him: 'Which is the more beautiful, Nanda, --the woman that you love, or this female ape?' 'Oh, Master!' exclaimed Nanda, 'how can a lovely woman be compared with an ugly ape?' 'Perhaps you will presently find reason to make the comparison yourself,' answered the Buddha;--and instantly by supernatural power he ascended with Nanda to the San-Jusan-Ten, which is the Second of the Six Heavens of Desire. There, within a palace of jewels, Nanda saw a multitude of heavenly maidens celebrating some festival with music and dance; and the beauty of the least among them incomparably exceeded that of the fairest woman of earth. 'O Master,' cried Nanda, `what wonderful festival is this?' 'Ask some of those people,' responded Shaka. So Nanda questioned one of the celestial maidens; and she said to him:-- 'This festival is to celebrate the good tidings that have been brought to us. There is now in the human world, among the disciples of Shaka, a most excellent youth called Nanda, who is soon to be reborn into this heaven, and to become our bridegroom, because of his holy life. We wait for him with rejoicing.' This reply filled the heart of Nanda with delight. Then the Buddha asked him: 'Is there any one among these maidens, Nanda, equal in beauty to the woman with whom you have been in love?' 'Nay, Master!' answered Nanda; 'even as that woman surpassed in beauty the female ape that we saw on the mountain, so is she herself surpassed by even the least among these.' "Then the Buddha immediately descended with Nanda to the depths of the hells, and took him into a torture-chamber where myriads of men and women were being boiled alive in great caldrons, and otherwise horribly tormented by devils. Then Nanda found himself standing before a huge vessel which was filled with molten metal;--and he feared and wondered because this vessel had as yet no occupant. An idle devil sat beside it, yawning. 'Master,' Nanda inquired of the Buddha, 'for whom has this vessel been prepared?' 'Ask the devil,' answered Shaka. Nanda did so; and the devil said to him: 'There is a man called Nanda,--now one of Shaka's disciples,--about to be reborn into one of the heavens, on account of his former good actions. But after having there indulged himself, he is to be reborn in this hell; and his place will be in that pot. I am waiting for him.'" (2) (1) Sakyamuni. (2) I give the story substantially as it was told to me; but I have not been able to compare it with any published text. My friend says that he has seen two Chinese versions,--one in the Hongyo-kyo (?), the other in the Zoichi-agon-kyo (Ekottaragamas). In Mr. Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translations (the most interesting and valuable single volume of its kind that I have ever seen), there is a Pali version of the legend, which differs considerably from the above.--This Nanda, according to Mr. Warren's work, was a prince, and the younger half-brother of Sakyamuni. A Passional Karma One of the never-failing attractions of the Tokyo stage is the performance, by the famous Kikugoro and his company, of the Botan-Doro, or "Peony-Lantern." This weird play, of which the scenes are laid in the middle of the last century, is the dramatization of a romance by the novelist Encho, written in colloquial Japanese, and purely Japanese in local color, though inspired by a Chinese tale. I went to see the play; and Kikugoro made me familiar with a new variety of the pleasure of fear. "Why not give English readers the ghostly part of the story?"-- asked a friend who guides me betimes through the mazes of Eastern philosophy. "It would serve to explain some popular ideas of the supernatural which Western people know very little about. And I could help you with the translation." I gladly accepted the suggestion; and we composed the following summary of the more extraordinary portion of Encho's romance. Here and there we found it necessary to condense the original narrative; and we tried to keep close to the text only in the conversational passages,--some of which happen to possess a particular quality of psychological interest. *** --This is the story of the Ghosts in the Romance of the Peony- Lantern:-- I There once lived in the district of Ushigome, in Yedo, a hatamoto (1) called Iijima Heizayemon, whose only daughter, Tsuyu, was beautiful as her name, which signifies "Morning Dew." Iijima took a second wife when his daughter was about sixteen; and, finding that O-Tsuyu could not be happy with her mother-in-law, he had a pretty villa built for the girl at Yanagijima, as a separate residence, and gave her an excellent maidservant, called O-Yone, to wait upon her. O-Tsuyu lived happily enough in her new home until one day when the family physician, Yamamoto Shijo, paid her a visit in company with a young samurai named Hagiwara Shinzaburo, who resided in the Nedzu quarter. Shinzaburo was an unusually handsome lad, and very gentle; and the two young people fell in love with each other at sight. Even before the brief visit was over, they contrived,--unheard by the old doctor,--to pledge themselves to each other for life. And, at parting, O-Tsuyu whispered to the youth,--"Remember! If you do not come to see me again, I shall certainly die!" Shinzaburo never forgot those words; and he was only too eager to see more of O-Tsuyu. But etiquette forbade him to make the visit alone: he was obliged to wait for some other chance to accompany the doctor, who had promised to take him to the villa a second time. Unfortunately the old man did not keep this promise. He had perceived the sudden affection of O-Tsuyu; and he feared that her father would hold him responsible for any serious results. Iijima Heizayemon had a reputation for cutting off heads. And the more Shijo thought about the possible consequences of his introduction of Shinzaburo at the Iijima villa, the more he became afraid. Therefore he purposely abstained from calling upon his young friend. Months passed; and O-Tsuyu, little imagining the true cause of Shinzaburo's neglect, believed that her love had been scorned. Then she pined away, and died. Soon afterwards, the faithful servant O-Yone also died, through grief at the loss of her mistress; and the two were buried side by side in the cemetery of Shin-Banzui-In,--a temple which still stands in the neighborhood of Dango-Zaka, where the famous chrysanthemum-shows are yearly held. (1) The hatamoto were samurai forming the special military force of the Shogun. The name literally signifies "Banner-Supporters." These were the highest class of samurai,--not only as the immediate vassals of the Shogun, but as a military aristocracy. II Shinzaburo knew nothing of what had happened; but his disappointment and his anxiety had resulted in a prolonged illness. He was slowly recovering, but still very weak, when he unexpectedly received another visit from Yamamoto Shijo. The old man made a number of plausible excuses for his apparent neglect. Shinzaburo said to him:--"I have been sick ever since the beginning of spring;--even now I cannot eat anything.... Was it not rather unkind of you never to call? I thought that we were to make another visit together to the house of the Lady Iijima; and I wanted to take to her some little present as a return for our kind reception. Of course I could not go by myself." Shijo gravely responded,--"I am very sorry to tell you that the young lady is dead!" "Dead!" repeated Shinzaburo, turning white,--"did you say that she is dead?" The doctor remained silent for a moment, as if collecting himself: then he resumed, in the quick light tone of a man resolved not to take trouble seriously:-- "My great mistake was in having introduced you to her; for it seems that she fell in love with you at once. I am afraid that you must have said something to encourage this affection--when you were in that little room together. At all events, I saw how she felt towards you; and then I became uneasy,--fearing that her father might come to hear of the matter, and lay the whole blame upon me. So--to be quite frank with you,--I decided that it would be better not to call upon you; and I purposely stayed away for a long time. But, only a few days ago, happening to visit Iijima's house, I heard, to my great surprise, that his daughter had died, and that her servant O-Yone had also died. Then, remembering all that had taken place, I knew that the young lady must have died of love for you.... [Laughing] Ah, you are really a sinful fellow! Yes, you are! [Laughing] Isn't it a sin to have been born so handsome that the girls die for love of you? (1) [Seriously] Well, we must leave the dead to the dead. It is no use to talk further about the matter;--all that you now can do for her is to repeat the Nembutsu (2).... Good-bye." And the old man retired hastily,--anxious to avoid further converse about the painful event for which he felt himself to have been unwittingly responsible. (1) Perhaps this conversation may seem strange to the Western reader; but it is true to life. The whole of the scene is characteristically Japanese. (2) The invocation Namu Amida Butsu! ("Hail to the Buddha Amitabha!"),--repeated, as a prayer, for the sake of the dead. III Shinzaburo long remained stupefied with grief by the news of O- Tsuyu's death. But as soon as he found himself again able to think clearly, he inscribed the dead girl's name upon a mortuary tablet, and placed the tablet in the Buddhist shrine of his house, and set offerings before it, and recited prayers. Every day thereafter he presented offerings, and repeated the Nembutsu; and the memory of O-Tsuyu was never absent from his thought. Nothing occurred to change the monotony of his solitude before the time of the Bon,--the great Festival of the Dead,--which begins upon the thirteenth day of the seventh month. Then he decorated his house, and prepared everything for the festival;-- hanging out the lanterns that guide the returning spirits, and setting the food of ghosts on the shoryodana, or Shelf of Souls. And on the first evening of the Ban, after sun-down, he kindled a small lamp before the tablet of O-Tsuyu, and lighted the lanterns. The night was clear, with a great moon,--and windless, and very warm. Shinzaburo sought the coolness of his veranda. Clad only in a light summer-robe, he sat there thinking, dreaming, sorrowing; --sometimes fanning himself; sometimes making a little smoke to drive the mosquitoes away. Everything was quiet. It was a lonesome neighborhood, and there were few passers-by. He could hear only the soft rushing of a neighboring stream, and the shrilling of night-insects. But all at once this stillness was broken by a sound of women's geta (1) approaching--kara-kon, kara-kon;--and the sound drew nearer and nearer, quickly, till it reached the live-hedge surrounding the garden. Then Shinzaburö, feeling curious, stood on tiptoe, so as to look Over the hedge; and he saw two women passing. One, who was carrying a beautiful lantern decorated with peony-flowers,(2) appeared to be a servant;--the other was a slender girl of about seventeen, wearing a long-sleeved robe embroidered with designs of autumn-blossoms. Almost at the same instant both women turned their faces toward Shinzaburo;--and to his utter astonishment, he recognized O-Tsuyu and her servant O- Yone. They stopped immediately; and the girl cried out,--"Oh, how strange!... Hagiwara Sama!" Shinzaburo simultaneously called to the maid:--"O-Yone! Ah, you are O-Yone!--I remember you very well." "Hagiwara Sama!" exclaimed O-Yone in a tone of supreme amazement. "Never could I have believed it possible!... Sir, we were told that you had died." "How extraordinary!" cried Shinzaburo. "Why, I was told that both of you were dead!" "Ah, what a hateful story!" returned O-Yone. "Why repeat such unlucky words?... Who told you?" "Please to come in," said Shinzaburo;--"here we can talk better. The garden-gate is open." So they entered, and exchanged greeting; and when Shinzaburo had made them comfortable, he said:-- "I trust that you will pardon my discourtesy in not having called upon you for so long a time. But Shijo, the doctor, about a month ago, told me that you had both died." "So it was he who told you?" exclaimed O-Yone. "It was very wicked of him to say such a thing. Well, it was also Shijo who told us that you were dead. I think that he wanted to deceive you,--which was not a difficult thing to do, because you are so confiding and trustful. Possibly my mistress betrayed her liking for you in some words which found their way to her father's ears; and, in that case, O-Kuni--the new wife--might have planned to make the doctor tell you that we were dead, so as to bring about a separation. Anyhow, when my mistress heard that you had died, she wanted to cut off her hair immediately, and to become a nun. But I was able to prevent her from cutting off her hair; and I persuaded her at last to become a nun only in her heart. Afterwards her father wished her to marry a certain young man; and she refused. Then there was a great deal of trouble,--chiefly caused by O-Kuni;--and we went away from the villa, and found a very small house in Yanaka-no-Sasaki. There we are now just barely able to live, by doing a little private work.... My mistress has been constantly repeating the Nembutsu for your sake. To-day, being the first day of the Bon, we went to visit the temples; and we were on our way home--thus late--when this strange meeting happened." "Oh, how extraordinary!" cried Shinzaburo. "Can it be true?-or is it only a dream? Here I, too, have been constantly reciting the Nembutsu before a tablet with her name upon it! Look!" And he showed them O-Tsuyu's tablet in its place upon the Shelf of Souls. "We are more than grateful for your kind remembrance," returned O-Yone, smiling.... "Now as for my mistress,"--she continued, turning towards O-Tsuyu, who had all the while remained demure and silent, half-hiding her face with her sleeve,--"as for my mistress, she actually says that she would not mind being disowned by her father for the time of seven existences,(3) or even being killed by him, for your sake! Come! will you not allow her to stay here to-night?" Shinzaburo turned pale for joy. He answered in a voice trembling with emotion:--"Please remain; but do not speak loud--because there is a troublesome fellow living close by,--a ninsomi (4) called Hakuodo Yusai, who tells peoples fortunes by looking at their faces. He is inclined to be curious; and it is better that he should not know." The two women remained that night in the house of the young samurai, and returned to their own home a little before daybreak. And after that night they came every nighht for seven nights,-- whether the weather were foul or fair,--always at the same hour. And Shinzaburo became more and more attached to the girl; and the twain were fettered, each to each, by that bond of illusion which is stronger than bands of iron. 1 Komageta in the original. The geta is a wooden sandal, or clog, of which there are many varieties,--some decidedly elegant. The komageta, or "pony-geta" is so-called because of the sonorous hoof-like echo which it makes on hard ground. 2 The sort of lantern here referred to is no longer made; and its shape can best be understood by a glance at the picture accompanying this story. It was totally unlike the modern domestic band-lantern, painted with the owner's crest; but it was not altogether unlike some forms of lanterns still manufactured for the Festival of the Dead, and called Bon-doro. The flowers ornamenting it were not painted: they were artificial flowers of crepe-silk, and were attached to the top of the lantern. 3 "For the time of seven existences,"--that is to say, for the time of seven successive lives. In Japanese drama and romance it is not uncommon to represent a father as disowning his child "for the time of seven lives." Such a disowning is called shichi-sho made no mando, a disinheritance for seven lives,--signifying that in six future lives after the present the erring son or daughter will continue to feel the parental displeasure. 4 The profession is not yet extinct. The ninsomi uses a kind of magnifying glass (or magnifying-mirror sometimes), called tengankyo or ninsomegane. IV Now there was a man called Tomozo, who lived in a small cottage adjoining Shinzaburo's residence, Tomozo and his wife O-Mine were both employed by Shinzaburo as servants. Both seemed to be devoted to their young master; and by his help they were able to live in comparative comfort. One night, at a very late hour, Tomozo heard the voice of a woman in his master's apartment; and this made him uneasy. He feared that Shinzaburo, being very gentle and affectionate, might be made the dupe of some cunning wanton,--in which event the domestics would be the first to suffer. He therefore resolved to watch; and on the following night he stole on tiptoe to Shinzaburo's dwelling, and looked through a chink in one of the sliding shutters. By the glow of a night-lantern within the sleeping-room, he was able to perceive that his master and a strange woman were talking together under the mosquito-net. At first he could not see the woman distinctly. Her back was turned to him;--he only observed that she was very slim, and that she appeared to be very young,--judging from the fashion of her dress and hair.(1) Putting his ear to the chink, he could hear the conversation plainly. The woman said:-- "And if I should be disowned by my father, would you then let me come and live with you?" Shinzaburo answered:-- "Most assuredly I would--nay, I should be glad of the chance. But there is no reason to fear that you will ever be disowned by your father; for you are his only daughter, and he loves you very much. What I do fear is that some day we shall be cruelly separated." She responded softly:-- "Never, never could I even think of accepting any other man for my husband. Even if our secret were to become known, and my father were to kill me for what I have done, still--after death itself--I could never cease to think of you. And I am now quite sure that you yourself would not be able to live very long without me."... Then clinging closely to him, with her lips at his neck, she caressed him; and he returned her caresses. Tomozo wondered as he listened,--because the language of the woman was not the language of a common woman, but the language of a lady of rank.(2) Then he determined at all hazards to get one glimpse of her face; and he crept round the house, backwards and forwards, peering through every crack and chink. And at last he was able to see;--but therewith an icy trembling seized him; and the hair of his head stood up. For the face was the face of a woman long dead,--and the fingers caressing were fingers of naked bone,--and of the body below the waist there was not anything: it melted off into thinnest trailing shadow. Where the eyes of the lover deluded saw youth and grace and beauty, there appeared to the eyes of the watcher horror only, and the emptiness of death. Simultaneously another woman's figure, and a weirder, rose up from within the chamber, and swiftly made toward the watcher, as if discerning his presence. Then, in uttermost terror, he fled to the dwelling of Hakuodo Yusai, and, knocking frantically at the doors, succeeded in arousing him. 1 The color and form of the dress, and the style of wearing the hair, are by Japanese custom regulated accord-big to the age of the woman. 2 The forms of speech used by the samurai, and other superior classes, differed considerably from those of the popular idiom; but these differences could not be effectively rendered into English. V Hakuodo Yusai, the ninsomi, was a very old man; but in his time he had travelled much, and he had heard and seen so many things that he could not be easily surprised. Yet the story of the terrified Tomozo both alarmed and amazed him. He had read in ancient Chinese books of love between the living and the dead; but he had never believed it possible. Now, however, he felt convinced that the statement of Tomozo was not a falsehood, and that something very strange was really going on in the house of Hagiwara. Should the truth prove to be what Tomozo imagined, then the young samurai was a doomed man. "If the woman be a ghost,"--said Yusai to the frightened servant, "--if the woman be a ghost, your master must die very soon,-- unless something extraordinary can be done to save him. And if the woman be a ghost, the signs of death will appear upon his face. For the spirit of the living is yoki, and pure;--the spirit of the dead is inki, and unclean: the one is Positive, the other Negative. He whose bride is a ghost cannot live. Even though in his blood there existed the force of a life of one hundred years, that force must quickly perish.... Still, I shall do all that I can to save Hagiwara Sama. And in the meantime, Tomozo, say nothing to any other person,--not even to your wife,--about this matter. At sunrise I shall call upon your master." When questioned next morning by Yusai, Shinzaburo at first attempted to deny that any women had been visiting the house; but finding this artless policy of no avail, and perceiving that the old man's purpose was altogether unselfish, he was finally persuaded to acknowledge what had really occurred, and to give his reasons for wishing to keep the matter a secret. As for the lady Iijima, he intended, he said, to make her his wife as soon as possible. "Oh, madness!" cried Yusai,--losing all patience in the intensity of his alarm. "Know, sir, that the people who have been coming here, night after night, are dead! Some frightful delusion is upon you!... Why, the simple fact that you long supposed O-Tsuyu to be dead, and repeated the Nembutsu for her, and made offerings before her tablet, is itself the proof!... The lips of the dead have touched you!--the hands of the dead have caressed you!... Even at this moment I see in your face the signs of death--and you will not believe!... Listen to me now, sir,--I beg of you,-- if you wish to save yourself: otherwise you have less than twenty days to live. They told you--those people--that they were residing in the district of Shitaya, in Yanaka-no-Sasaki. Did you ever visit them at that place? No!--of course you did not! Then go to-day,--as soon as you can,--to Yanaka-no-Sasaki, and try to find their home!..." And having uttered this counsel with the most vehement earnestness, Hakuodo Yusai abruptly took his departure. Shinzaburo, startled though not convinced, resolved after a moment's reflection to follow the advice of the ninsomi, and to go to Shitaya. It was yet early in the morning when he reached the quarter of Yanaka-no-Sasaki, and began his search for the dwelling of O-Tsuyu. He went through every street and side- street, read all the names inscribed at the various entrances, and made inquiries whenever an opportunity presented itself. But he could not find anything resembling the little house mentioned by O-Yone; and none of the people whom he questioned knew of any house in the quarter inhabited by two single women. Feeling at last certain that further research would be useless, he turned homeward by the shortest way, which happened to lead through the grounds of the temple Shin-Banzui-In. Suddenly his attention was attracted by two new tombs, placed side by side, at the rear of the temple. One was a common tomb, such as might have been erected for a person of humble rank: the other was a large and handsome monument; and hanging before it was a beautiful peony-lantern, which had probably been left there at the time of the Festival of the Dead. Shinzaburo remembered that the peony-lantern carried by O-Yone was exactly similar; and the coincidence impressed him as strange. He looked again at the tombs; but the tombs explained nothing. Neither bore any personal name,--only the Buddhist kaimyo, or posthumous appellation. Then he determined to seek information at the temple. An acolyte stated, in reply to his questions, that the large tomb had been recently erected for the daughter of Iijima Heizayemon, the hatamoto of Ushigome; and that the small tomb next to it was that of her servant O-Yone, who had died of grief soon after the young lady's funeral. Immediately to Shinzaburö's memory there recurred, with another and sinister meaning, the words of O-Yone:--"We went away, and found a very small house in Yanaka-no-Sasaki. There we are now just barely able to live--by doing a little private work...." Here was indeed the very small house,--and in Yanaka-no-Sasaki. But the little private work...? Terror-stricken, the samurai hastened with all speed to the house of Yusai, and begged for his counsel and assistance. But Yusai declared himself unable to be of any aid in such a case. All that he could do was to send Shinzaburo to the high-priest Ryoseki, of Shin-Banzui-In, with a letter praying for immediate religious help. VII The high-priest Ryoseki was a learned and a holy man. By spiritual vision he was able to know the secret of any sorrow, and the nature of the karma that had caused it. He heard unmoved the story of Shinzaburo, and said to him:-- "A very great danger now threatens you, because of an error committed in one of your former states of existence. The karma that binds you to the dead is very strong; but if I tried to explain its character, you would not be able to understand. I shall therefore tell you only this,--that the dead person has no desire to injure you out of hate, feels no enmity towards you: she is influenced, on the contrary, by the most passionate affection for you. Probably the girl has been in love with you from a time long preceding your present life,--from a time of not less than three or four past existences; and it would seem that, although necessarily changing her form and condition at each succeeding birth, she has not been able to cease from following after you. Therefore it will not be an easy thing to escape from her influence.... But now I am going to lend you this powerful mamoni.(1) It is a pure gold image of that Buddha called the Sea- Sounding Tathagata--Kai-On-Nyorai,--because his preaching of the Law sounds through the world like the sound of the sea. And this little image is especially a shiryo-yoke,(2)--which protects the living from the dead. This you must wear, in its covering, next to your body,--under the girdle.... Besides, I shall presently perform in the temple, a segaki-service(3) for the repose of the troubled spirit.... And here is a holy sutra, called Ubo-Darani- Kyo, or "Treasure-Raining Sutra"(4) you must be careful to recite it every night in your house--without fail.... Furthermore I shall give you this package of o-fuda(5);--you must paste one of them over every opening of your house,--no matter how small. If you do this, the power of the holy texts will prevent the dead from entering. But--whatever may happen--do not fail to recite the sutra." Shinzaburo humbly thanked the high-priest; and then, taking with him the image, the sutra, and the bundle of sacred texts, he made all haste to reach his home before the hour of sunset. 1 The Japanese word mamori has significations at least as numerous as those attaching to our own term "amulet." It would be impossible, in a mere footnote, even to suggest the variety of Japanese religious objects to which the name is given. In this instance, the mamori is a very small image, probably enclosed in a miniature shrine of lacquer-work or metal, over which a silk cover is drawn. Such little images were often worn by samurai on the person. I was recently shown a miniature figure of Kwannon, in an iron case, which had been carried by an officer through the Satsuma war. He observed, with good reason, that it had probably saved his life; for it had stopped a bullet of which the dent was plainly visible. 2 From shiryo, a ghost, and yokeru, to exclude. The Japanese have, two kinds of ghosts proper in their folk-lore: the spirits of the dead, shiryo; and the spirits of the living, ikiryo. A house or a person may be haunted by an ikiryo as well as by a shiryo. 3 A special service,--accompanying offerings of food, etc., to those dead having no living relatives or friends to care for them,--is thus termed. In this case, however, the service would be of a particular and exceptional kind. 4 The name would be more correctly written Ubo-Darani-Kyo. It is the Japanese pronunciation of the title of a very short sutra translated out of Sanscrit into Chinese by the Indian priest Amoghavajra, probably during the eighth century. The Chinese text contains transliterations of some mysterious Sanscrit words,-- apparently talismanic words,--like those to be seen in Kern's translation of the Saddharma-Pundarika, ch. xxvi. 5 O-fuda is the general name given to religious texts used as charms or talismans. They are sometimes stamped or burned upon wood, but more commonly written or printed upon narrow strips of paper. O-fuda are pasted above house-entrances, on the walls of rooms, upon tablets placed in household shrines, etc., etc. Some kinds are worn about the person;--others are made into pellets, and swallowed as spiritual medicine. The text of the larger o- fuda is often accompanied by curious pictures or symbolic illustrations. VIII With Yusai's advice and help, Shinzaburo was able before dark to fix the holy texts over all the apertures of his dwelling. Then the ninsomi returned to his own house,--leaving the youth alone. Night came, warm and clear. Shinzaburo made fast the doors, bound the precious amulet about his waist, entered his mosquito-net, and by the glow of a night-lantern began to recite the Ubo- Darani-Kyo. For a long time he chanted the words, comprehending little of their meaning;--then he tried to obtain some rest. But his mind was still too much disturbed by the strange events of the day. Midnight passed; and no sleep came to him. At last he heard the boom of the great temple-bell of Dentsu-In announcing the eighth hour.(1) It ceased; and Shinzaburo suddenly heard the sound of geta approaching from the old direction,--but this time more slowly: karan-koron, karan-koron! At once a cold sweat broke over his forehead. Opening the sutra hastily, with trembling hand, he began again to recite it aloud. The steps came nearer and nearer,--reached the live hedge,--stopped! Then, strange to say, Shinzaburo felt unable to remain under his mosquito-net: something stronger even than his fear impelled him to look; and, instead of continuing to recite the Ubo-Darani-Kyo, he foolishly approached the shutters, and through a chink peered out into the night. Before the house he saw O-Tsuyu standing, and O-Yone with the peony-lantern; and both of them were gazing at the Buddhist texts pasted above the entrance. Never before--not even in what time she lived--had O-Tsuyu appeared so beautiful; and Shinzaburo felt his heart drawn towards her with a power almost resistless. But the terror of death and the terror of the unknown restrained; and there went on within him such a struggle between his love and his fear that he became as one suffering in the body the pains of the Sho-netsu hell.(2) Presently he heard the voice of the maid-servant, saying:-- "My dear mistress, there is no way to enter. The heart of Hagiwara Sama must have changed. For the promise that he made last night has been broken; and the doors have been made fast to keep us out.... We cannot go in to-night.... It will be wiser for you to make up your mind not to think any more about him, because his feeling towards you has certainly changed. It is evident that he does not want to see you. So it will be better not to give yourself any more trouble for the sake of a man whose heart is so unkind." But the girl answered, weeping:-- "Oh, to think that this could happen after the pledges which we made to each other!... Often I was told that the heart of a man changes as quickly as the sky of autumn;--yet surely the heart of Hagiwara Sama cannot be so cruel that he should really intend to exclude me in this way!... Dear Yone, please find some means of taking me to him.... Unless you do, I will never, never go home again." Thus she continued to plead, veiling her face with her long sleeves,--and very beautiful she looked, and very touching; but the fear of death was strong upon her lover. O-Yone at last made answer,--"My dear young lady, why will you trouble your mind about a man who seems to be so cruel?... Well, let us see if there be no way to enter at the back of the house: come with me!" And taking O-Tsuyu by the hand, she led her away toward the rear of the dwelling; and there the two disappeared as suddenly as the light disappears when the flame of a lamp is blown out. 1 According to the old Japanese way of counting time, this yatsudoki or eighth hour was the same as our two o'clock in the morning. Each Japanese hour was equal to two European hours, so that there were only six hours instead of our twelve; and these six hours were counted backwards in the order,--9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4. Thus the ninth hour corresponded to our midday, or midnight; half-past nine to our one o'clock; eight to our two o'clock. Two o'clock in the morning, also called "the Hour of the Ox," was the Japanese hour of ghosts and goblins. 2 En-netsu or Sho-netsu (Sanscrit "Tapana") is the sixth of the Eight Hot Hells of Japanese Buddhism. One day of life in this hell is equal in duration to thousands (some say millions) of human years. IX Night after night the shadows came at the Hour of the Ox; and nightly Shinzaburo heard the weeping of O-Tsuyu. Yet he believed himself saved,--little imagining that his doom had already been decided by the character of his dependents. Tomozo had promised Yusai never to speak to any other person--not even to O-Mine--of the strange events that were taking place. But Tomozo was not long suffered by the haunters to rest in peace. Night after night O-Yone entered into his dwelling, and roused him from his sleep, and asked him to remove the o-fuda placed over one very small window at the back of his master's house. And Tomozo, out of fear, as often promised her to take away the o- fuda before the next sundown; but never by day could he make up his mind to remove it,--believing that evil was intended to Shinzaburo. At last, in a night of storm, O-Yone startled him from slumber with a cry of reproach, and stooped above his pillow, and said to him: "Have a care how you trifle with us! If, by to-morrow night, you do not take away that text, you shall learn how I can hate!" And she made her face so frightful as she spoke that Tomozo nearly died of terror. O-Mine, the wife of Tomozo, had never till then known of these visits: even to her husband they had seemed like bad dreams. But on this particular night it chanced that, waking suddenly, she heard the voice of a woman talking to Tomozo. Almost in the same moment the talk-ing ceased; and when O-Mine looked about her, she saw, by the light of the night-lamp, only her husband,-- shuddering and white with fear. The stranger was gone; the doors were fast: it seemed impossible that anybody could have entered. Nevertheless the jealousy of the wife had been aroused; and she began to chide and to question Tomozo in such a manner that he thought himself obliged to betray the secret, and to explain the terrible dilemma in which he had been placed. Then the passion of O-Mine yielded to wonder and alarm; but she was a subtle woman, and she devised immediately a plan to save her husband by the sacrifice of her master. And she gave Tomozo a cunning counsel,--telling him to make conditions with the dead. They came again on the following night at the Hour of the Ox; and O-Mine hid herself on hearing the sound of their coming,--karan- koron, karan-koron! But Tomozo went out to meet them in the dark, and even found courage to say to them what his wife had told him to say:-- "It is true that I deserve your blame;--but I had no wish to cause you anger. The reason that the o-fuda has not been taken away is that my wife and I are able to live only by the help of Hagiwara Sama, and that we cannot expose him to any danger without bringing misfortune upon ourselves. But if we could obtain the sum of a hundred ryo in gold, we should be able to please you, because we should then need no help from anybody. Therefore if you will give us a hundred ryo, I can take the o- fuda away without being afraid of losing our only means of support." When he had uttered these words, O-Yone and O-Tsuyu looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then O-Yoné said:-- "Mistress, I told you that it was not right to trouble this man, --as we have no just cause of ill will against him. But it is certainly useless to fret yourself about Hagiwara Sama, because his heart has changed towards you. Now once again, my dear young lady, let me beg you not to think any more about him!" But O-Tsuyu, weeping, made answer:-- "Dear Yone, whatever may happen, I cannot possibly keep myself from thinking about him! You know that you can get a hundred ryo to have the o-fuda taken off.... Only once more, I pray, dear Yone!--only once more bring me face to face with Hagiwara Sama, --I beseech you!" And hiding her face with her sleeve, she thus continued to plead. "Oh! why will you ask me to do these things?" responded O-Yone. "You know very well that I have no money. But since you will persist in this whim of yours, in spite of all that I can say, I suppose that I must try to find the money somehow, and to bring it here to-morrow night...." Then, turning to the faithless Tomozo, she said:--"Tomozo, I must tell you that Hagiwara Sama now wears upon his body a mamoni called by the name of Kai-On- Nyorai, and that so long as he wears it we cannot approach him. So you will have to get that mamori away from him, by some means or other, as well as to remove the o-fuda." Tomozo feebly made answer:-- "That also I can do, if you will promise to bring me the hundred ryo." "Well, mistress," said O-Yone, "you will wait,--will you not,-- until to-morrow night?" "Oh, dear Yone!" sobbed the other,--"have we to go back to-night again without seeing Hagiwara Sama? Ah! it is cruel!" And the shadow of the mistress, weeping, was led away by the shadow of the maid. x Another day went, and another night came, and the dead came with it. But this time no lamentation was heard without the house of Hagiwara; for the faithless servant found his reward at the Hour of the Ox, and removed the o-fuda. Moreover he had been able, while his master was at the bath, to steal from its case the golden mamori, and to substitute for it an image of copper; and he had buried the Kai-On-Nyorai in a desolate field. So the visitants found nothing to oppose their entering. Veiling their faces with their sleeves they rose and passed, like a streaming of vapor, into the little window from over which the holy text had been torn away. But what happened thereafter within the house Tomozo never knew. The sun was high before he ventured again to approach his master's dwelling, and to knock upon the sliding-doors. For the first time in years he obtained no response; and the silence made him afraid. Repeatedly he called, and received no answer. Then, aided by O-Mine, he succeeded in effecting an entrance and making his way alone to the sleeping-room, where he called again in vain. He rolled back the rumbling shutters to admit the light; but still within the house there was no stir. At last he dared to lift a corner of the mosquito-net. But no sooner had he looked beneath than he fled from the house, with a cry of horror. Shinzaburo was dead--hideously dead;--and his face was the face of a man who had died in the uttermost agony of fear;--and lying beside him in the bed were the bones of a woman! And the bones of the arms, and the bones of the hands, clung fast about his neck. Xl Hakuodo Yusai, the fortune-teller, went to view the corpse at the prayer of the faithless Tomozo. The old man was terrified and astonished at the spectacle, but looked about him with a keen eye. He soon perceived that the o-fuda had been taken from the little window at the back of the house; and on searching the body of Shinzaburo, he discovered that the golden mamori had been taken from its wrapping, and a copper image of Fudo put in place of it. He suspected Tomozo of the theft; but the whole occurrence was so very extraordinary that he thought it prudent to consult with the priest Ryoseki before taking further action. Therefore, after having made a careful examination of the premises, he betook himself to the temple Shin-Banzui-In, as quickly as his aged limbs could bear him. Ryoseki, without waiting to hear the purpose of the old man's visit, at once invited him into a private apartment. "You know that you are always welcome here," said Ryoseki. "Please seat yourself at ease.... Well, I am sorry to tell you that Hagiwara Sama is dead." Yusai wonderingly exclaimed:--"Yes, he is dead;--but how did you learn of it?" The priest responded:-- "Hagiwara Sama was suffering from the results of an evil karma; and his attendant was a bad man. What happened to Hagiwara Sama was unavoidable;--his destiny had been determined from a time long before his last birth. It will be better for you not to let your mind be troubled by this event." Yusai said:-- "I have heard that a priest of pure life may gain power to see into the future for a hundred years; but truly this is the first time in my existence that I have had proof of such power.... Still, there is another matter about which I am very anxious...." "You mean," interrupted Ryoseki, "the stealing of the holy mamori, the Kai-On-Nyorai. But you must not give yourself any concern about that. The image has been buried in a field; and it will be found there and returned to me during the eighth month of the coming year. So please do not be anxious about it." More and more amazed, the old ninsomi ventured to observe:-- "I have studied the In-Yo,(1) and the science of divination; and I make my living by telling peoples' fortunes;--but I cannot possibly understand how you know these things." Ryoseki answered gravely:-- "Never mind how I happen to know them.... I now want to speak to you about Hagiwara's funeral. The House of Hagiwara has its own family-cemetery, of course; but to bury him there would not be proper. He must be buried beside O-Tsuyu, the Lady Iijima; for his karma-relation to her was a very deep one. And it is but right that you should erect a tomb for him at your own cost, because you have been indebted to him for many favors." Thus it came to pass that Shinzaburo was buried beside O-Tsuyu, in the cemetery of Shin-Banzui-In, in Yanaka-no-Sasaki. --Here ends the story of the Ghosts in the Romance of the Peony- Lantern.-- 1 The Male and Female principles of the universe, the Active and Passive forces of Nature. Yusai refers here to the old Chinese nature-philosophy,--better known to Western readers by the name FENG-SHUI. *** My friend asked me whether the story had interested me; and I answered by telling him that I wanted to go to the cemetery of Shin-Banzui-In,--so as to realize more definitely the local color of the author's studies. "I shall go with you at once," he said. "But what did you think of the personages?" "To Western thinking," I made answer, "Shinzaburo is a despicable creature. I have been mentally comparing him with the true lovers of our old ballad-literature. They were only too glad to follow a dead sweetheart into the grave; and nevertheless, being Christians, they believed that they had only one human life to enjoy in this world. But Shinzaburo was a Buddhist,--with a million lives behind him and a million lives before him; and he was too selfish to give up even one miserable existence for the sake of the girl that came back to him from the dead. Then he was even more cowardly than selfish. Although a samurai by birth and training, he had to beg a priest to save him from ghosts. In every way he proved himself contemptible; and O-Tsuyu did quite right in choking him to death." "From the Japanese point of view, likewise," my friend responded, "Shinzaburo is rather contemptible. But the use of this weak character helped the author to develop incidents that could not otherwise, perhaps, have been so effectively managed. To my thinking, the only attractive character in the story is that of O-Yone: type of the old-time loyal and loving servant,-- intelligent, shrewd, full of resource,--faithful not only unto death, but beyond death.... Well, let us go to Shin-Banzui-In." We found the temple uninteresting, and the cemetery an abomination of desolation. Spaces once occupied by graves had been turned into potato-patches. Between were tombs leaning at all angles out of the perpendicular, tablets made illegible by scurf, empty pedestals, shattered water-tanks, and statues of Buddhas without heads or hands. Recent rains had soaked the black soil,--leaving here and there small pools of slime about which swarms of tiny frogs were hopping. Everything--excepting the potato-patches--seemed to have been neglected for years. In a shed just within the gate, we observed a woman cooking; and my companion presumed to ask her if she knew anything about the tombs described in the Romance of the Peony-Lantern. "Ah! the tombs of O-Tsuyu and O-Yone?" she responded, smiling;--" you will find them near the end of the first row at the back of the temple--next to the statue of Jizo." Surprises of this kind I had met with elsewhere in Japan. We picked our way between the rain-pools and between the green ridges of young potatoes,--whose roots were doubtless feeding on the sub-stance of many another O-Tsuyu and O-Yone;--and we reached at last two lichen-eaten tombs of which the inscriptions seemed almost obliterated. Beside the larger tomb was a statue of Jizo, with a broken nose. "The characters are not easy to make out," said my friend--"but wait!".... He drew from his sleeve a sheet of soft white paper, laid it over the inscription, and began to rub the paper with a lump of clay. As he did so, the characters appeared in white on the blackened surface. "Eleventh day, third month--Rat, Elder Brother, Fire--Sixth year of Horeki [A. D. 1756].'... This would seem to be the grave of some innkeeper of Nedzu, named Kichibei. Let us see what is on the other monument." With a fresh sheet of paper he presently brought out the text of a kaimyo, and read,-- "En-myo-In, Ho-yo-I-tei-ken-shi, Ho-ni':--'Nun-of-the-Law, Illustrious, Pure-of-heart-and-will, Famed-in-the-Law,-- inhabiting the Mansion-of-the-Preaching-of-Wonder.'.... The grave of some Buddhist nun." "What utter humbug!" I exclaimed. "That woman was only making fun of us." "Now," my friend protested, "you are unjust to the, woman! You came here because you wanted a sensation; and she tried her very best to please you. You did not suppose that ghost-story was true, did you?" Footprints of the Buddha I I was recently surprised to find, in Anderson's catalogue of Japanese and Chinese paintings in the British Museum, this remarkable statement:--"It is to be noted that in Japan the figure of the Buddha is never represented by the feet, or pedestal alone, as in the Amravati remains, and many other Indian art-relics." As a matter of fact the representation is not even rare in Japan. It is to be found not only upon stone monuments, but also in religious paintings,--especially certain kakemono suspended in temples. These kakemono usually display the footprints upon a very large scale, with a multitude of mystical symbols and characters. The sculptures may be less common; but in Tokyo alone there are a number of Butsu-soku-seki, or "Buddha- foot stones," which I have seen,--and probably several which I have not seen. There is one at the temple of Eko-In, near Ryogoku-bashi; one at the temple of Denbo-In, in Koishikawa; one at the temple of Denbo-In, in Asakusa; and a beautiful example at Zojoji in Shiba. These are not cut out of a single block, but are composed of fragments cemented into the irregular traditional shape, and capped with a heavy slab of Nebukawa granite, on the polished surface of which the design is engraved in lines about one-tenth of an inch in depth. I should judge the average height of these pedestals to be about two feet four inches, and their greatest diameter about three feet. Around the footprints there are carved (in most of the examples) twelve little bunches of leaves and buds of the Bodai-ju ("Bodhidruma"), or Bodhi-tree of Buddhist legend. In all cases the footprint design is about the same; but the monuments are different in quality and finish. That of Zojoji,--with figures of divinities cut in low relief on its sides,--is the most ornate and costly of the four. The specimen at Eko-In is very poor and plain. The first Butsu-soku-seki made in Japan was that erected at Todaiji, in Nara. It was designed after a similar monument in China, said to be the faithful copy of an Indian original. Concerning this Indian original, the following tradition is given in an old Buddhist book(1):--"In a temple of the province of Makada [Maghada] there is a great stone. The Buddha once trod upon this stone; and the prints of the soles of his feet remain upon its surface. The length of the impressions is one foot and eight inches,(2) and the width of them a little more than six inches. On the sole-part of each footprint there is the impression of a wheel; and upon each of the prints of the ten toes there is a flower-like design, which sometimes radiates light. When the Buddha felt that the time of his Nirvana was approaching, he went to Kushina [Kusinara], and there stood upon that stone. He stood with his face to the south. Then he said to his disciple Anan [Ananda]: 'In this place I leave the impression of my feet, to remain for a last token. Although a king of this country will try to destroy the impression, it can never be entirely destroyed.' And indeed it has not been destroyed unto this day. Once a king who hated Buddhism caused the top of the stone to be pared off, so as to remove the impression; but after the surface had been removed, the footprints reappeared upon the stone." Concerning the virtue of the representation of the footprints of the Buddha, there is sometimes quoted a text from the Kwan-butsu- sanmai-kyo ["Buddha-dhyana-samadhi-sagara-sutra"], thus translated for me:--"In that time Shaka ["Sakyamuni"] lifted up his foot.... When the Buddha lifted up his foot all could perceive upon the sole of it the appearance of a wheel of a thousand spokes.... And Shaka said: 'Whosoever beholds the sign upon the sole of my foot shall be purified from all his faults. Even he who beholds the sign after my death shall be delivered from all the evil results of all his errors." Various other texts of Japanese Buddhism affirm that whoever looks upon the footprints of the Buddha "shall be freed from the bonds of error, and conducted upon the Way of Enlightenment." An outline of the footprints as engraved on one of the Japanese pedestals(3) should have some interest even for persons familiar with Indian sculptures of the S'ripada. The double-page drawing, accompanying this paper [Fig.1], and showing both footprints, has been made after the tracing at Dentsu-In, where the footprints have the full legendary dimension, It will be observed that there are only seven emblems: these are called in Japan the Shichi-So, or "Seven Appearances." I got some information about them from the Sho-Eko-Ho-Kwan,--a book used by the Jodo sect. This book also contains rough woodcuts of the footprints; and one of them I reproduce here for the purpose of calling attention to the curious form of the emblems upon the toes. They are said to be modifications of the manji, or svastika, but I doubt it. In the Butsu-soku-seki-tracings, the corresponding figures suggest the "flower-like design" mentioned in the tradition of the Maghada stone; while the symbols in the book-print suggest fire. Indeed their outline so much resembles the conventional flamelet-design of Buddhist decoration, that I cannot help thinking them originally intended to indicate the traditional luminosity of the footprints. Moreover, there is a text in the book called Ho-Kai- Shidai that lends support to this supposition:--"The sole of the foot of the Buddha is flat,--like the base of a toilet-stand.... Upon it are lines forming the appearance of a wheel of a thousand spokes.... The toes are slender, round, long, straight, graceful, and somewhat luminous." [Fig. 3] The explanation of the Seven Appearances which is given by the Sho-Eko-Ho-Kwan cannot be called satisfactory; but it is not without interest in relation to Japanese popular Buddhism. The emblems are considered in the following order:-- I.--The Svastika. The figure upon each toe is said to be a modification of the manji (4); and although I doubt whether this is always the case, I have observed that on some of the large kakemono representing the footprints, the emblem really is the svastika,--not a flamelet nor a flower-shape.(5) The Japanese commentator explains the svastika as a symbol of "everlasting bliss." II.--The Fish (Gyo). The fish signifies freedom from all restraints. As in the water a fish moves easily in any direction, so in the Buddha-state the fully-emancipated knows no restraints or obstructions. III.--The Diamond-Mace (Jap. Kongo-sho;--Sansc. "Vadjra"). Explained as signifying the divine force that "strikes and breaks all the lusts (bonno) of the world." IV.--The Conch-Shell (Jap. "Hora ") or Trumpet. Emblem of the preaching of the Law. The book Shin-zoku-butsu-ji-hen calls it the symbol of the voice of the Buddha. The Dai-hi-kyo calls it the token of the preaching and of the power of the Mahayana doctrine. The Dai-Nichi-Kyo says:--" At the sound of the blowing of the shell, all the heavenly deities are filled with delight, and come to hear the Law." V.--The Flower-Vase (Jap. "Hanagame"). Emblem of muro,--a mystical word which might be literally rendered as "not- leaking,"--signifying that condition of supreme intelligence triumphant over birth and death. VI.--The Wheel-of-a-Thousand-Spokes (Sansc. "Tchakra "). This emblem, called in Japanese Senfuku-rin-so, is curiously explained by various quotations. The Hokke-Monku says:--"The effect of a wheel is to crush something; and the effect of the Buddha's preaching is to crush all delusions, errors, doubts, and superstitions. Therefore preaching the doctrine is called, 'turning the Wheel.'"... The Sei-Ri-Ron says: "Even as the common wheel has its spokes and its hub, so in Buddhism there are many branches of the Hasshi Shodo ('Eight-fold Path,' or eight rules of conduct)." VII.--The Crown of Brahma. Under the heel of the Buddha is the Treasure-Crown (Ho-Kwan) of Brahma (Bon-Ten-O),--in symbol of the Buddha's supremacy above the gods. But I think that the inscriptions upon any of these Butsu-soku- seki will be found of more significance than the above imperfect attempts at an explanation of the emblems. The inscriptions upon the monument at Dentsu-In are typical. On different sides of the structure,--near the top, and placed by rule so as to face certain points of the compass,--there are engraved five Sanscrit characters which are symbols of the Five Elemental Buddhas, together with scriptural and commemorative texts. These latter have been translated for me as follows:-- The HO-KO-HON-NYO-KYO says:--"In that time, from beneath his feet, the Buddha radiated a light having the appearance of a wheel of a thousand spokes. And all who saw that radiance became strictly upright, and obtained the Supreme Enlightenment." The KWAN-BUTSU-SANMAI-KYO says:--"Whosoever looks upon the footprints of the Buddha shall be freed from the results even of innumerable thousands of imperfections." The BUTSU-SETSU-MU-RYO-JU-KYO says:--"In the land that the Buddha treads in journeying, there is not even one person in all the multitude of the villages who is not benefited. Then throughout the world there is peace and good will. The sun and the moon shine clear and bright. Wind and rain come only at a suitable time. Calamity and pestilence cease. The country prospers; the people are free from care. Weapons become useless. All men reverence religion, and regulate their conduct in all matters with earnestness and modesty." [Commemorative Text.] --The Fifth Month of the Eighteenth Year of Meiji, all the priests of this temple made and set up this pedestal-stone, bearing the likeness of the footprints of the Buddha, and placed the same within the main court of Dentsu-In, in order that the seed of holy enlightenment might be sown for future time, and for the sake of the advancement of Buddhism. TAIJO, priest,--being the sixty-sixth chief-priest by succession of this temple,--has respectfully composed. JUNYU, the minor priest, has reverentially inscribed. 1 The Chinese title is pronounced by Japanese as Sei-iki-ki. "Sei-iki"(the Country of the West) was the old Japanese name for India; and thus the title might be rendered, "The Book about India." I suppose this is the work known to Western scholars as Si-yu-ki. 2 "One shaku and eight sun." But the Japanese foot and inch are considerably longer than the English. 3 A monument at Nara exhibits the S'ripada in a form differing considerably from the design upon the Tokyo pedestals. 4 Lit.: "The thousand-character" sign. 5 On some monuments and drawings there is a sort of disk made by a single line in spiral, on each toe,--together with the image of a small wheel. II Strange facts crowd into memory as one contemplates those graven footprints,--footprints giant-seeming, yet less so than the human personality of which they remain the symbol. Twenty-four hundred years ago, out of solitary meditation upon the pain and the mystery of being, the mind of an Indian pilgrim brought forth the highest truth ever taught to men, and in an era barren of science anticipated the uttermost knowledge of our present evolutional philosophy regarding the secret unity of life, the endless illusions of matter and of mind, and the birth and death of universes. He, by pure reason,--and he alone before our time,-- found answers of worth to the questions of the Whence, the Whither, and the Why;--and he made with these answers another and a nobler faith than the creed of his fathers. He spoke, and returned to his dust; and the people worshipped the prints of his dead feet, because of the love that he had taught them. Thereafter waxed and waned the name of Alexander, and the power of Rome and the might of Islam;--nations arose and vanished;-- cities grew and were not;--the children of another civilization, vaster than Romes, begirdled the earth with conquest, and founded far-off empires, and came at last to rule in the land of that pilgrim's birth. And these, rich in the wisdom of four and twenty centuries, wondered at the beauty of his message, and caused all that he had said and done to be written down anew in languages unborn at the time when he lived and taught. Still burn his foot- prints in the East; and still the great West, marvelling, follows their gleam to seek the Supreme Enlightenment. Even thus, of old, Milinda the king followed the way to the house of Nagasena,--at first only to question, after the subtle method of the Greeks; yet, later, to accept with noble reverence the nobler method of the Master. Ululation SHE is lean as a wolf, and very old,--the white bitch that guards my gate at night. She played with most of the young men and women of the neighborhood when they were boys and girls. I found her in charge of my present dwelling on the day that I came to occupy it. She had guarded the place, I was told, for a long succession of prior tenants--apparently with no better reason than that she had been born in the woodshed at the back of the house. Whether well or ill treated she had served all occupants faultlessly as a watch. The question of food as wages had never seriously troubled her, because most of the families of the street daily contributed to her support. She is gentle and silent,--silent at least by day; and in spite of her gaunt ugliness, her pointed ears, and her somewhat unpleasant eyes, everybody is fond of her. Children ride on her back, and tease her at will; but although she has been known to make strange men feel uncomfortable, she never growls at a child. The reward of her patient good-nature is the friendship of the community. When the dog-killers come on their bi-annual round, the neighbors look after her interests. Once she was on the very point of being officially executed when the wife of the smith ran to the rescue, and pleaded successfully with the policeman superintending the massacres. "Put somebody's name on the dog," said the latter: "then it will be safe. Whose dog is it?" That question proved hard to answer. The dog was everybody's and nobody's--welcome everywhere but owned nowhere. "But where does it stay?" asked the puzzled constable. "It stays," said the smith's wife, "in the house of the foreigner." "Then let the foreigner's name be put upon the dog," suggested the policeman. Accordingly I had my name painted on her back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbors did not think that she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of Kobudera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side; and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight-hundred,"--which represent the customary abbreviation of the word yaoya (vegetable-seller),--any yaoya being supposed to sell eight hundred or more different things. Consequently she is now a very curious-looking dog; but she is well protected by all that calligraphy. I have only one fault to find with her: she howls at night. Howling is one of the few pathetic pleasures of her existence. At first I tried to frighten her out of the habit; but finding that she refused to take me seriously, I concluded to let her howl. It would have been monstrous to beat her. Yet I detest her howl. It always gives me a feeling of vague disquiet, like the uneasiness that precedes the horror of nightmare. It makes me afraid,--indefinably, superstitiously afraid. Perhaps what I am writing will seem to you absurd; but you would not think it absurd if you once heard her howl. She does not howl like the common street-dogs. She belongs to some ruder Northern breed, much more wolfish, and retaining wild traits of a very peculiar kind. And her howl is also peculiar. It is incomparably weirder than the howl of any European dog; and I fancy that it is incomparably older. It may represent the original primitive cry of her species,--totally unmodified by centuries of domestication. It begins with a stifled moan, like the moan of a bad dream,-- mounts into a long, long wail, like a wailing of wind,--sinks quavering into a chuckle,--rises again to a wail, very much higher and wilder than before,--breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious laughter,--and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the crying of a little child. The ghastliness of the performance is chiefly--though not entirely--in the goblin mockery of the laughing tones as contrasted with the piteous agony of the wailing ones: an incongruity that makes you think of madness. And I imagine a corresponding incongruity in the soul of the creature. I know that she loves me,--that she would throw away her poor life for me at an instant's notice. I am sure that she would grieve if I were to die. But she would not think about the matter like other dogs,--like a dog with hanging ears, for ex- ample. She is too savagely close to Nature for that. Were she to find herself alone with my corpse in some desolate place, she would first mourn wildly for her friend; but, this duty per- formed, she would proceed to ease her sorrow in the simplest way possible,--by eating him,--by cracking his bones between those long wolf's-teeth of hers. And thereafter, with spotless conscience, she would sit down and utter to the moon the funeral cry of her ancestors. It fills me, that cry, with a strange curiosity not less than with a strange horror,--because of certain extraordinary vowellings in it which always recur in the same order of sequence, and must represent particular forms of animal speech,-- particular ideas. The whole thing is a song,--a song of emotions and thoughts not human, and therefore humanly unimaginable. But other dogs know what it means, and make answer over the miles of the night,--sometimes from so far away that only by straining my hearing to the uttermost can I detect the faint response. The words--(if I may call them words)--are very few; yet, to judge by their emotional effect, they must signify a great deal. Possibly they mean things myriads of years old,--things relating to odors, to exhalations, to influences and effluences inapprehensible by duller human sense,--impulses also, impulses without name, bestirred in ghosts of dogs by the light of great moons. Could we know the sensations of a dog,--the emotions and the ideas of a dog, we might discover some strange correspondence between their character and the character of that peculiar disquiet which the howl of the creature evokes. But since the senses of a dog are totally unlike those of a man, we shall never really know. And we can only surmise, in the vaguest way, the meaning of the uneasiness in ourselves. Some notes in the long cry,--and the weirdest of them,--oddly resemble those tones of the human voice that tell of agony and terror. Again, we have reason to believe that the sound of the cry itself became associated in human imagination, at some period enormously remote, with particular impressions of fear. It is a remarkable fact that in almost all countries (including Japan) the howling of dogs has been attributed to their perception of things viewless to man, and awful,--especially gods and ghosts;--and this unanimity of superstitious belief suggests that one element of the disquiet inspired by the cry is the dread of the supernatural. To-day we have ceased to be consciously afraid of the unseen;--knowing that we ourselves are supernatural,--that even the physical man, with all his life of sense, is more ghostly than any ghost of old imagining: but some dim inheritance of the primitive fear still slumbers in our being, and wakens perhaps, like an echo, to the sound of that wail in the night. Whatever thing invisible to human eyes the senses of a dog may at times perceive, it can be nothing resembling our idea of a ghost. Most probably the mysterious cause of start and whine is not anything _seen_. There is no anatomical reason for supposing a dog to possess exceptional powers of vision. But a dog's organs of scent proclaim a faculty immeasurably superior to the sense of smell in man. The old universal belief in the superhuman perceptivities of the creature was a belief justified by fact; but the perceptivities are not visual. Were the howl of a dog really--as once supposed--an outcry of ghostly terror, the meaning might possibly be, "I smell Them!"-- but not, "I see Them!" No evidence exists to support the fancy that a dog can see any forms of being which a man cannot see. But the night-howl of the white creature in my close forces me to wonder whether she does not _mentally_ see something really terrible,--something which we vainly try to keep out of moral consciousness: the ghoulish law of life. Nay, there are times when her cry seems to me not the mere cry of a dog, but the voice of the law itself,--the very speech of that Nature so inexplicably called by poets the loving, the merciful, the divine! Divine, perhaps, in some unknowable ultimate way,--but certainly not merciful, and still more certainly not loving. Only by eating each other do beings exist! Beautiful to the poet's vision our world may seem,--with its loves, its hopes, its memories, its aspirations; but there is nothing beautiful in the fact that life is fed by continual murder,--that the tenderest affection, the noblest enthusiasm, the purest idealism, must be nourished by the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood. All life, to sustain itself, must devour life. You may imagine yourself divine if you please,--but you have to obey that law. Be, if you will, a vegetarian: none the less you must eat forms that have feeling and desire. Sterilize your food; and digestion stops. You cannot even drink without swallowing life. Loathe the name as we may, we are cannibals;--all being essentially is One; and whether we eat the flesh of a plant, a fish, a reptile, a bird, a mammal, or a man, the ultimate fact is the same. And for all life the end is the same: every creature, whether buried or burnt, is devoured,--and not only once or twice,--nor a hundred, nor a thousand, nor a myriad times! Consider the ground upon which we move, the soil out of which we came;--think of the vanished billions that have risen from it and crumbled back into its latency to feed what becomes our food! Perpetually we eat the dust of our race,--_the substance of our ancient selves_. But even so-called inanimate matter is self-devouring. Substance preys upon substance. As in the droplet monad swallows monad, so in the vast of Space do spheres consume each other. Stars give being to worlds and devour them; planets assimilate their own moons. All is a ravening that never ends but to recommence. And unto whomsoever thinks about these matters, the story of a divine universe, made and ruled by paternal love, sounds less persuasive than the Polynesian tale that the souls of the dead are devoured by the gods. Monstrous the law seems, because we have developed ideas and sentiments which are opposed to this demoniac Nature,--much as voluntary movement is opposed to the blind power of gravitation. But the possession of such ideas and sentiments does but aggravate the atrocity of our situation, without lessening in the least the gloom of the final problem. Anyhow the faith of the Far East meets that problem better than the faith of the West. To the Buddhist the Cosmos is not divine at all--quite the reverse. It is Karma;--it is the creation of thoughts and acts of error;--it is not governed by any providence;--it is a ghastliness, a nightmare. Likewise it is an illusion. It seems real only for the same reason that the shapes and the pains of an evil dream seem real to the dreamer. Our life upon earth is a state of sleep. Yet we do not sleep utterly. There are gleams in our darkness,--faint auroral wakenings of Love and Pity and Sympathy and Magnanimity: these are selfless and true;--these are eternal and divine;--these are the Four Infinite Feelings in whose after-glow all forms and illusions will vanish, like mists in the light of the sun. But, except in so far as we wake to these feelings, we are dreamers indeed,-- moaning unaided in darkness,--tortured by shadowy horror. All of us dream; none are fully awake; and many, who pass for the wise of the world, know even less of the truth than my dog that howls in the night. Could she speak, my dog, I think that she might ask questions which no philosopher would be able to answer. For I believe that she is tormented by the pain of existence. Of course I do not mean that the riddle presents itself to her as it does to us,-- nor that she can have reached any abstract conclusions by any mental processes like our own. The external world to her is "a continuum of smells." She thinks, compares, remembers, reasons by smells. By smell she makes her estimates of character: all her judgments are founded upon smells. Smelling thousands of things which we cannot smell at all, she must comprehend them in a way of which we can form no idea. Whatever she knows has been learned through mental operations of an utterly unimaginable kind. But we may be tolerably sure that she thinks about most things in some odor-relation to the experience of eating or to the intuitive dread of being eaten. Certainly she knows a great deal more about the earth on which we tread than would be good for us to know; and probably, if capable of speech, she could tell us the strangest stories of air and water. Gifted, or afflicted, as she is with such terribly penetrant power of sense, her notion of apparent realities must be worse than sepulchral. Small wonder if she howl at the moon that shines upon such a world! And yet she is more awake, in the Buddhist meaning, than many of us. She possesses a rude moral code--inculcating loyalty, submission, gentleness, gratitude, and maternal love; together with various minor rules of conduct;--and this simple code she has always observed. By priests her state is termed a state of darkness of mind, because she cannot learn all that men should learn; but according to her light she has done well enough to merit some better condition in her next rebirth. So think the people who know her. When she dies they will give her an humble funeral, and have a sutra recited on behalf of her spirit. The priest will let a grave be made for her somewhere in the temple- garden, and will place over it a little sotoba bearing the text,--Nyo-ze chikusho hotsu Bodai-shin (1): "Even within such as this animal, the Knowledge Supreme will unfold at last." 1 Lit., "the Bodhi-mind;"--that is to say, the Supreme Enlightenment, the intelligence of Buddhahood itself. Bits of Poetry I Among a people with whom poetry has been for centuries a universal fashion of emotional utterance, we should naturally suppose the common ideal of life to be a noble one. However poorly the upper classes of such a people might compare with those of other nations, we could scarcely doubt that its lower classes were morally and otherwise in advance of our own lower classes. And the Japanese actually present us with such a social phenomenon. Poetry in Japan is universal as the air. It is felt by everybody. It is read by everybody. It is composed by almost everybody,-- irrespective of class and condition. Nor is it thus ubiquitous in the mental atmosphere only: it is everywhere to be heard by the ear, and _seen by the eye_! As for audible poetry, wherever there is working there is singing. The toil of the fields and the labor of the streets are performed to the rhythm of chanted verse; and song would seem to be an expression of the life of the people in about the same sense that it is an expression of the life of cicadae.... As for visible poetry, it appears everywhere, written or graven,--in Chinese or in Japanese characters,--as a form of decoration. In thousands and thousands of dwellings, you might observe that the sliding- screens, separating rooms or closing alcoves, have Chinese or Japanese decorative texts upon them;--and these texts are poems. In houses of the better class there are usually a number of gaku, or suspended tablets to be seen,--each bearing, for all design, a beautifully written verse. But poems can be found upon almost any kind of domestic utensil,--for example upon braziers, iron kettles, vases, wooden trays, lacquer ware, porcelains, chopsticks of the finer sort,--even toothpicks! Poems are painted upon shop-signs, panels, screens, and fans. Poems are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains, kerchiefs, silk- linings, and women's crepe-silk underwear. Poems are stamped or worked upon letter-paper, envelopes, purses, mirror-cases, travelling-bags. Poems are inlaid upon enamelled ware, cut upon bronzes, graven upon metal pipes, embroidered upon tobacco- pouches. It were a hopeless effort to enumerate a tithe of the articles decorated with poetical texts. Probably my readers know of those social gatherings at which it is the custom to compose verses, and to suspend the compositions to blossoming frees,-- also of the Tanabata festival in honor of certain astral gods, when poems inscribed on strips of colored paper, and attached to thin bamboos, are to be seen even by the roadside,--all fluttering in the wind like so many tiny flags.... Perhaps you might find your way to some Japanese hamlet in which there are neither trees nor flowers, but never to any hamlet in which there is no visible poetry. You might wander,--as I have done,--into a settlement so poor that you could not obtain there, for love or money, even a cup of real tea; but I do not believe that you could discover a settlement in which there is nobody capable of making a poem. II Recently while looking over a manuscript-collection of verses,-- mostly short poems of an emotional or descriptive character,--it occurred to me that a selection from them might serve to illustrate certain Japanese qualities of sentiment, as well as some little-known Japanese theories of artistic expression,--and I ventured forthwith, upon this essay. The poems, which had been collected for me by different persons at many different times and places, were chiefly of the kind written on particular occasions, and cast into forms more serried, if not also actually briefer, than anything in Western prosody. Probably few Of my readers are aware of two curious facts relating to this order of composition. Both facts are exemplified in the history and in the texts of my collection,--though I cannot hope, in my renderings, to reproduce the original effect, whether of imagery or of feeling. The first curious fact is that, from very ancient times, the writing of short poems has been practised in Japan even more as a moral duty than as a mere literary art. The old ethical teaching was somewhat like this:--"Are you very angry?--do not say anything unkind, but compose a poem. Is your best-beloved dead?-- do not yield to useless grief, but try to calm your mind by making a poem. Are you troubled because you are about to die, leaving so many things unfinished?--be brave, and write a poem on death! Whatever injustice or misfortune disturbs you, put aside your resentment or your sorrow as soon as possible, and write a few lines of sober and elegant verse for a moral exercise." Accordingly, in the old days, every form of trouble was encountered with a poem. Bereavement, separation, disaster called forth verses in lieu of plaints. The lady who preferred death to loss of honor, composed a poem before piercing her throat The samurai sentenced to die by his own hand, wrote a poem before performing hara-kiri. Even in this less romantic era of Meiji, young people resolved upon suicide are wont to compose some verses before quitting the world. Also it is still the good custom to write a poem in time of ill-fortune. I have frequently known poems to be written under the most trying circumstances of misery or suffering,--nay even upon a bed of death;-and if the verses did not display any extraordinary talent, they at least afforded extraordinary proof of self-mastery under pain.... Surely this fact of composition as ethical practice has larger interest than all the treatises ever written about the rules of Japanese prosody. The other curious fact is only a fact of aesthetic theory. The common art-principle of the class of poems under present consideration is identical with the common principle of Japanese pictorial illustration. By the use of a few chosen words the composer of a short poem endeavors to do exactly what the painter endeavors to do with a few strokes of the brush,--to evoke an image or a mood,--to revive a sensation or an emotion. And the accomplishment of this purpose,--by poet or by picture-maker,-- depends altogether upon capacity to suggest, and only to suggest. A Japanese artist would be condemned for attempting elaboration of detail in a sketch intended to recreate the memory of some landscape seen through the blue haze of a spring morning, or under the great blond light of an autumn after-noon. Not only would he be false to the traditions of his art: he would necessarily defeat his own end thereby. In the same way a poet would be condemned for attempting any completeness of utterance in a very short poem: his object should be only to stir imagination without satisfying it. So the term ittakkiri--meaning "all gone," or "entirely vanished," in the sense of "all told,"-- is contemptuously applied to verses in which the verse-maker has uttered his whole thought;--praise being reserved for compositions that leave in the mind the thrilling of a something unsaid. Like the single stroke of a temple-bell, the perfect short poem should set murmuring and undulating, in the mind of the hearer, many a ghostly aftertone of long duration. III But for the same reason that Japanese short poems may be said to resemble. Japanese pictures, a full comprehension of them requires an intimate knowledge of the life which they reflect. And this is especially true of the emotional class of such poems,--a literal translation of which, in the majority of cases, would signify almost nothing to the Western mind. Here, for example, is a little verse, pathetic enough to Japanese comprehension:-- ChochO ni!.. Kyonen shishitaru Tsuma koishi! Translated, this would appear to mean only,--"Two butterflies!... Last year my dear wife died!" Unless you happen to know the pretty Japanese symbolism of the butterfly in relation to happy marriage, and the old custom of sending with the wedding-gift a large pair of paper-butterflies (ocho-mecho), the verse might well seem to be less than commonplace. Or take this recent composition, by a University student, which has been praised by good judges:-- Furusato ni Fubo ari--mushi no Koe-goe! (1) --"In my native place the old folks [or, my parents] are--clamor of insect-voices!" 1 I must observe, however, that the praise was especially evoked by the use of the term koe-goe--(literally meaning "voice after voice" or a crying of many voices);--and the special value of the syllables here can be appreciated only by a Japanese poet. The poet here is a country-lad. In unfamiliar fields he listens to the great autumn chorus of insects; and the sound revives for him the memory of his far-off home and of his parents. But here is something incomparably more touching,--though in literal translation probably more obscure,--than either of the preceding specimens;-- Mi ni shimiru Kaze ya I Shoji ni Yubi no ato! --"Oh, body-piercing wind!--that work of little fingers in the shoji!" (2).... What does this mean? It means the sorrowing of a mother for her dead child. Shoji is the name given to those light white-paper screens which in a Japanese house serve both as windows and doors, admitting plenty of light, but concealing, like frosted glass, the interior from outer observation, and excluding the wind. Infants delight to break these by poking their fingers through the soft paper: then the wind blows through the holes. In this case the wind blows very cold indeed,--into the mother's very heart;--for it comes through the little holes that were made by the fingers of her dead child. 2 More literally:--"body-through-pierce wind--ah! --shoji in the traces of [viz.: holes made by] fingers!" The impossibility of preserving the inner quality of such poems in a literal rendering, will now be obvious. Whatever I attempt in this direction must of necessity be ittakkiri;--for the unspoken has to be expressed; and what the Japanese poet is able to say in seventeen or twenty-one syllables may need in English more than double that number of words. But perhaps this fact will lend additional interest to the following atoms of emotional expression:-- A MOTHER'S REMEMBRANCE Sweet and clear in the night, the voice of a boy at study, Reading out of a book.... I also once had a boy! A MEMORY IN SPRING She, who, departing hence, left to the flowers of the plum-tree, Blooming beside our eaves, the charm of her youth and beauty, And maiden pureness of heart, to quicken their flush and fragrance,-- Ah! where does she dwell to-day, our dear little vanished sister? FANCIES OF ANOTHER FAITH (1) I sought in the place of graves the tomb of my vanished friend: From ancient cedars above there rippled a wild doves cry. (2) Perhaps a freak of the wind-yet perhaps a sign of remembrance,-- This fall of a single leaf on the water I pour for the dead. (3)I whispered a prayer at the grave: a butterfly rose and fluttered-- Thy spirit, perhaps, dear friend!... IN A CEMETERY AT NIGHT This light of the moon that plays on the water I pour for the dead, Differs nothing at all from the moonlight of other years. AFTER LONG ABSENCE The garden that once I loved, and even the hedge of the garden,-- All is changed and strange: the moonlight only is faithful;-- The moon along remembers the charm of the time gone by! MOONLIGHT ON THE SEA O vapory moon of spring!--would that one plunge into ocean Could win me renewal of life as a part of thy light on the waters! AFTER FAREWELL Whither now should! look?--where is the place of parting? Boundaries all have vanished;--nothing tells of direction: Only the waste of sea under the shining moon! HAPPY POVERTY Wafted into my room, the scent of the flowers of the plum-tree Changes my broken window into a source of delight. AUTUMN FANCIES (1) Faded the clover now;--sere and withered the grasses: What dreams the matsumushi(1) in the desolate autumn-fields? (2) Strangely sad, I thought, sounded the bell of evening;-- Haply that tone proclaimed the night in which autumn dies! (3)Viewing this autumn-moon, I dream of my native village Under the same soft light,--and the shadows about my home. 1 A musical cricket--calyptotryphus marmoratus. IN TIME OF GRIEF, HEARING A SEMI (CICADA) Only "I," "I,"--the cry of the foolish semi! Any one knows that the world is void as its cast-off shell. ON THE CAST-OFF SHELL OF A SEMI Only the pitiful husk!... O poor singer of summer, Wherefore thus consume all thy body in song? SUBLIMITY OF INTELLECTUAL POWER The mind that, undimmed, absorbs the foul and the pure together-- Call it rather a sea one thousand fathoms deep!(2) 2. This is quite novel in its way,--a product of the University: the original runs thus:-- Nigoréru mo Sumêru mo tomo ni Iruru koso Chi-hiro no umi no Kokoro nari-kere! SHINTO REVERY Mad waves devour The rocks: I ask myself in the darkness, "Have I become a god?" Dim is The night and wild! "Have I become a god?"--that is to say, "Have I died?--am I only a ghost in this desolation?" The dead, becoming kami or gods, are thought to haunt wild solitudes by preference. IV The poems above rendered are more than pictorial: they suggest something of emotion or sentiment. But there are thousands of pictorial poems that do not; and these would seem mere insipidities to a reader ignorant of their true purpose. When you learn that some exquisite text of gold means only, "Evening- sunlight on the wings of the water-fowl,"--or,"Now in my garden the flowers bloom, and the butterflies dance,"--then your first interest in decorative poetry is apt to wither away. Yet these little texts have a very real merit of their own, and an intimate relation to Japanese aesthetic feeling and experience. Like the pictures upon screens and fans and cups, they give pleasure by recalling impressions of nature, by reviving happy incidents of travel or pilgrimage, by evoking the memory of beautiful days. And when this plain fact is fully understood, the persistent attachment of modern Japanese poets--notwithstanding their University training--to the ancient poetical methods, will be found reasonable enough. I need offer only a very few specimens of the purely pictorial poetry. The following--mere thumb-nail sketches in verse--are of recent date. LONESOMENESS Furu-dera ya: Kane mono iwazu; Sakura chiru. --"Old temple: bell voiceless; cherry-flowers fall." MORNING AWAKENING AFTER A NIGHT'S REST IN A TEMPLE Yamadera no Shicho akeyuku: Taki no oto. --"In the mountain-temple the paper mosquito-curtain is lighted by the dawn: sound of water-fall." WINTER-SCENE Yuki no mura; Niwatori naite; Ake shiroshi. "Snow-village;--cocks crowing;--white dawn." Let me conclude this gossip on poetry by citing from another group of verses--also pictorial, in a certain sense, but chiefly remarkable for ingenuity--two curiosities of impromptu. The first is old, and is attributed to the famous poetess Chiyo. Having been challenged to make a poem of seventeen syllables referring to a square, a triangle, and a circle, she is said to have immediately responded,-- Kaya no te wo Hitotsu hazushite, Tsuki-mi kana! --"Detaching one corner of the mosquito-net, lo! I behold the moon!" The top of the mosquito-net, suspended by cords at each of its four corners, represents the square;--letting down the net at one corner converts the square into a triangle;--and the moon represents the circle. The other curiosity is a recent impromptu effort to portray, in one verse of seventeen syllables, the last degree of devil-may- care-poverty,--perhaps the brave misery of the wandering student;--and I very much doubt whether the effort could be improved upon:-- Nusundaru Kagashi no kasa ni Ame kyu nari. --"Heavily pours the rain on the hat that I stole from the scarecrow!" Japanese Buddhist Proverbs As representing that general quality of moral experience which remains almost unaffected by social modifications of any sort, the proverbial sayings of a people must always possess a special psychological interest for thinkers. In this kind of folklore the oral and the written literature of Japan is rich to a degree that would require a large book to exemplify. To the subject as a whole no justice could be done within the limits of a single essay. But for certain classes of proverbs and proverbial phrases something can be done within even a few pages; and sayings related to Buddhism, either by allusion or derivation, form a class which seems to me particularly worthy of study. Accordingly, with the help of a Japanese friend, I have selected and translated the following series of examples,-- choosing the more simple and familiar where choice was possible, and placing the originals in alphabetical order to facilitate reference. Of course the selection is imperfectly representative; but it will serve to illustrate certain effects of Buddhist teaching upon popular thought and speech. 1.--Akuji mi ni tomaru. All evil done clings to the body.* *The consequence of any evil act or thought never,--so long as karma endures,--will cease to act upon the existence of the person guilty of it. 2.--Atama soru yori kokoro wo sore. Better to shave the heart than to shave the head.* *Buddhist nuns and priests have their heads completely shaven. The proverb signifies that it is better to correct the heart,--to conquer all vain regrets and desires,--than to become a religious. In common parlance the phrase "to shave the head" means to become a monk or a nun. 3.--Au wa wakare no hajime. Meeting is only the beginning of separation.* *Regret and desire are equally vain in this world of impermanency; for all joy is the beginning of an experience that must have its pain. This proverb refers directly to the sutra- text,--Shoja bitsumetsu e-sha-jori,--" All that live must surely die; and all that meet will surely part." 4.--Banji wa yume. All things* are merely dreams. *Literally, "ten thousand things." 5.--Bonbu mo satoreba hotoke nari. Even a common man by obtaining knowledge becomes a Buddha.* *The only real differences of condition are differences In knowledge of the highest truth. 6.--Bonno kuno. All lust is grief.* *All sensual desire invariably brings sorrow. 7--Buppo to wara-ya no ame, dete kike. One must go outside to hear Buddhist doctrine or the sound of rain on a straw roof.* *There is an allusion here to the condition of the sbuhhl (priest): literally, "one who has left his house." The proverb suggests that the higher truths of Buddhism cannot be acquired by those who continue to live in the world of follies and desires. 8.--Bussho en yori okoru. Out of karma-relation even the divine nature itself grows.* *There is good as well as bad karma. Whatever hap-piness we enjoy is not less a consequence of the acts and thoughts of previous lives, than is any misfortune that comes to us. Every good thought and act contributes to the evolution of the Buddha-nature within each of us. Another proverb [No. 10],--En naki shujo wa doshi gatashi,--further illustrates the meaning of this one. 9.--Enko ga tsuki wo toran to suru ga gotoshi. Like monkeys trying to snatch the moon's reflection on water.* *Allusion to a parable, said to have been related by the Buddha himself, about some monkeys who found a well under a tree, and mistook for reality the image of the moon in the water. They resolved to seize the bright apparition. One monkey suspended himself by the tail from a branch overhanging the well, a second monkey clung to the first, a third to the second, a fourth to the third, and so on,--till the long chain of bodies had almost reached the water. Suddenly the branch broke under the unaccustomed weight; and all the monkeys were drowned. 10.--En naki shujo wa doshi gatashi. To save folk having no karma-relation would be difficult indeed!* *No karma-relation would mean an utter absence of merit as well as of demerit. 11.--Fujo seppo suru hoshi wa, biratake ni umaru. The priest who preaches foul doctrine shall be reborn as a fungus. 12.--Gaki mo ninzu. Even gaki (pretas) can make a crowd.* *Literally: "Even gaki are a multitude (or, 'population')." This is a popular saying used in a variety of ways. The ordinary meaning is to the effect that no matter how poor or miserable the individuals composing a multitude, they collectively represent a respectable force. Jocosely the saying is sometimes used of a crowd of wretched or tired-looking people,--sometimes of an assembly of weak boys desiring to make some demonstration,-- sometimes of a miserable-looking company of soldiers.--Among the lowest classes of the people it is not uncommon to call a deformed or greedy person a "gaki." 13.--Gaki no me ni midzu miezu. To the eyes of gaki water is viewless.* *Some authorities state that those pretas who suffer especially from thirst, as a consequence of faults committed in former lives, are unable to see water.--This proverb is used in speaking of persons too stupid or vicious to perceive a moral truth. 14.--Gosho wa daiji. The future life is the all-important thing.* *The common people often use the curious expression "gosho-daiji" as an equivalent for "extremely important." 15.--Gun-mo no tai-zo wo saguru ga gotoshi. Like a lot of blind men feeling a great elephant.* *Said of those who ignorantly criticise the doctrines of Buddhism.--The proverb alludes to a celebrated fable in the Avadanas, about a number of blind men who tried to decide the form of an elephant by feeling the animal. One, feeling the leg, declared the elephant to be like a tree; another, feeling the trunk only, declared the elephant to be like a serpent; a third, who felt only the side, said that the elephant was like a wall; a fourth, grasping the tail, said that the elephant was like a rope, etc. 16.--Gwai-men nyo-Bosatsu; nai shin nyo-Yasha. In outward aspect a Bodhisattva; at innermost heart a demon.* *Yasha (Sanscrit Yaksha), a man-devouring demon. 17.--Hana wa ne ni kaeru. The flower goes back to its root. *This proverb is most often used in reference to death,-- signifying that all forms go back into the nothingness out of which they spring. But it may also be used in relation to the law of cause-and-effect. 18.--Hibiki no koe ni ozuru ga gotoshi. Even as the echo answers to the voice.* *Referring to the doctrine of cause-and-effect. The philosophical beauty of the comparison will be appreciated only if we bear in mind that even the tone of the echo repeats the tone of the voice. 19.--Hito wo tasukéru ga sbukhé no yuku. The task of the priest is to save mankind. 20.--Hi wa kiyuredomo to-shin wa kiyedzu. Though the flame be put out, the wick remains.* *Although the passions may be temporarily overcome, their sources remain. A proverb of like meaning is, Bonno no inn o?4omo sara u: "Though driven away, the Dog of Lust cannot be kept from coming back again." 21.--Hotoke mo motowa bonbu. Even the Buddha was originally but a common man. 22.--Hotoke ni naru mo shami wo beru. Even to become a Buddha one must first become a novice. 23.--Hotoke no kao mo sando. Even a Buddha's face,--only three times.* *This is a short popular form of the longer proverb, Hotoke no kao mo sando nazureba, hara wo tatsu: "Stroke even the face of a Buddha three times, and his anger will be roused." 24.--Hotoke tanonde Jigoku e yuku. Praying to Buddha one goes to hell.* *The popular saying, Oni no Nembutsu,--"a devil's praying,"--has a similar meaning. 25.--Hotoke tsukutte tamashii iredzu. Making a Buddha without putting in the soul.* *That is to say, making an image of the Buddha without giving it a soul. This proverb is used in reference to the conduct of those who undertake to do some work, and leave the most essential part of the work unfinished. It contains an allusion to the curious ceremony called Kai-gen, or "Eye-Opening." This Kai-gen is a kind of consecration, by virtue of which a newly-made image is supposed to become animated by the real presence of the divinity represented. 26. Ichi-ju no kage, ichi-ga no nagare, tasho no en. Even [the experience of] a single shadow or a single flowing of water, is [made by] the karma-relations of a former life.* *Even so trifling an occurrence as that of resting with another person under the shadow of a tree, or drinking from the same spring with another person, is caused by the karma-relations of some previous existence. 27. Ichi-mo shu-mo wo hiku. One blind man leads many blind men.* *From the Buddhist work Dai-chi-do-ron.--The reader will find a similar proverb in Rhys-David's "Buddhist Suttas" (Sacred Books of the East), p. 173,--together with a very curious parable, cited in a footnote, which an Indian commentator gives in explanation. 28.--Ingwa na ko. A karma-child.* *A common saying among the lower classes in reference to an unfortunate or crippled child. Here the word ingwa is used especially in the retributive sense. It usually signifies evil karma; kwaho being the term used in speaking of meritorious karma and its results. While an unfortunate child is spoken of as "a child of ingwa," a very lucky person is called a "kwaho-mono,"-- that is to say, an instance, or example of kwaho. 29.--Ingwa wa, kuruma no wa. Cause-and-effect is like a wheel.* *The comparison of karma to the wheel of a wagon will be familiar to students of Buddhism. The meaning of this proverb is identical with that of the Dhammapada verse:--"If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage." 30.--Innen ga fukai. The karma-relation is deep.* *A saying very commonly used in speaking of the attachment of lovers, or of the unfortunate results of any close relation between two persons. 31.--Inochi wa fu-zen no tomoshibi. Life is a lamp-flame before a wind.* *Or, "like the flame of a lamp exposed to the wind." A frequent expression in Buddhist literature is "the Wind of Death." 32.--Issun no mushi ni mo, gobu no tamashii. Even a worm an inch long has a soul half-an-inch long.* *Literally, "has a soul of five bu,"--five bu being equal to half of the Japanese inch. Buddhism forbids all taking of life, and classes as living things (Ujo) all forms having sentiency. The proverb, however,--as the use of the word "soul" (tamashii) implies,--reflects popular belief rather than Buddhist philosophy. It signifies that any life, however small or mean, is entitled to mercy. 33.--Iwashi* no atama mo shinjin kara. Even the head of an iwashi, by virtue of faith, [will have power to save, or heal]. *The iwashi is a very small fish, much resembling a sardine. The proverb implies that the object of worship signifies little, so long as the prayer is made with perfect faith and pure intention. 34.--Jigo-jitoku.* The fruit of ones own deeds [in a previous state of existence]. *Few popular Buddhist phrases are more often used than this. Jigo signifies ones own acts or thoughts; jitoku, to bring upon oneself,--nearly always in the sense of misfortune, when the word is used in the Buddhist way. "Well, it is a matter of Jigo- jitoku," people will observe on seeing a man being taken to prison; meaning, "He is reaping the consequence of his own faults." 35.--Jigoku de hotoke. Like meeting with a Buddha in hell.* *Refers to the joy of meeting a good friend in time of misfortune. The above is an abbreviation. The full proverb is, Jigoku de hotoke ni ota yo da. 36.--Jigoku Gokuraku wa kokoro ni ari. Hell and Heaven are in the hearts of men.* *A proverb in perfect accord with the higher Buddhism. 37.--Jigoku mo sumika. Even Hell itself is a dwelling-place.* *Meaning that even those obliged to live in hell must learn to accommodate themselves to the situation. One should always try to make the best of circumstances. A proverb of kindred signification is, Sumeba, My'ako: "Wheresoever ones home is, that is the Capital [or, imperial City]." 38.--Jigoku ni mo shirts bito. Even in hell old acquaintances are welcome. 39.--Kagé no katachi ni shitagau gotoshi. Even as the shadow follows the shape.* *Referring to the doctrine of cause-and-effect. Compare with verse 2 of the Dhammapada. 40.--Kane wa Amida yori bikaru. Money shines even more brightly than Amida.* *Amitabha, the Buddha of Immeasurable Light. His image in the temples is usually gilded from head to foot.--There are many other ironical proverbs about the power of wealth,--such as Jigoku no sata mo kane shidai: "Even the Judgments of Hell may be influenced by money." 41.--Karu-toki no Jizo-gao; nasu-toki no Emma-gao. Borrowing-time, the face of Jizö; repaying-time, the face of Emma.* [Figs. 2 & 3] *Emma is the Chinese and Japanese Yama,--in Buddhism the Lord of Hell, and the Judge of the Dead. The proverb is best explained by the accompanying drawings, which will serve to give an idea of the commoner representations of both divinities. 42.--Kiite Gokuraku, mite Jigoku. Heard of only, it is Paradise; seen, it is Hell.* *Rumor is never trustworthy. 43.--Koji mon wo idezu: akuji sen ni wo hashiru. Good actions go not outside of the gate: bad deeds travel a thousand ri. 44.--Kokoro no koma ni tadzuna wo yuru-suna. Never let go the reins of the wild colt of the heart. 45.--Kokoro no oni ga mi wo semeru. The body is tortured only by the demon of the heart.* *Or "mind." That is to say that we suffer only from the consequences of our own faults.--The demon-torturer in the Buddhist hell says to his victim:--"Blame not me!--I am only the creation of your own deeds and thoughts: you made me for this!"-- Compare with No. 36. 46.--Kokoro no shi to wa nare; kokoro wo shi to sezare. Be the teacher of your heart: do not allow your heart to become your teacher. 47.--Kono yo wa kari no yado. This world is only a resting-place.* *"This world is but a travellers' inn," would be an almost equally correct translation. Yado literally means a lodging, shelter, inn; and the word is applied often to those wayside resting-houses at which Japanese travellers halt during a journey. Kari signifies temporary, transient, fleeting,--as in the common Buddhist saying, Kono yo kari no yo: "This world is a fleeting world." Even Heaven and Hell represent to the Buddhist only halting places upon the journey to Nirvana. 48.--Kori wo chiribame; midzu ni égaku. To inlay ice; to paint upon water.* *Refers to the vanity of selfish effort for some merely temporary end. 49.--Korokoro to Naku wa yamada no Hototogisu, Chichi niteya aran, Haha niteya aran. The bird that cries korokoro in the mountain rice-field I know to be a hototogisu;--yet it may have been my father; it may have been my mother.* *This verse-proverb is cited in the Buddhist work Wojo Yosbu, with the following comment:--"Who knows whether the animal in the field, or the bird in the mountain-wood, has not been either his father or his mother in some former state of existence?"--The hototogisu is a kind of cuckoo. 50.--Ko wa Sangai no kubikase. A child is a neck-shackle for the Three States of Existence.* *That is to say, The love of parents for their child may impede their spiritual progress--not only in this world, but through all their future states of being,--just as a kubikasi, or Japanese cangue, impedes the movements of the person upon whom it is placed. Parental affection, being the strongest of earthly attachments, is particularly apt to cause those whom it enslaves to commit wrongful acts in the hope of benefiting their offspring.--The term Sangai here signifies the three worlds of Desire, Form, and Formlessness,--all the states of existence below Nirvana. But the word is sometimes used to signify the Past, the Present, and the Future. 51.--Kuchi wa wazawai no kado. The mouth is the front-gate of all misfortune.* *That is to say, The chief cause of trouble is unguarded speech. The word Kado means always the main entrance to a residence. 52.--Kwaho wa, nete mate. If you wish for good luck, sleep and wait.* *Kwaho, a purely Buddhist term, signifying good fortune as the result of good actions in a previous life, has come to mean in common parlance good fortune of any kind. The proverb is often used in a sense similar to that of the English saying: "Watched pot never boils." In a strictly Buddhist sense it would mean, "Do not be too eager for the reward of good deeds." 53.--Makanu tane wa haenu. Nothing will grow, if the seed be not sown.* *Do not expect harvest, unless you sow the seed. Without earnest effort no merit can be gained. 54.--Mateba, kanro no hiyori. If you wait, ambrosial weather will come.* *Kanro, the sweet dew of Heaven, or amrita. All good things come to him who waits. 55.--Meido no michi ni O wa nashi. There is no King on the Road of Death.* *Literally, "on the Road of Meido." The MeldS is the Japanese Hades,--the dark under-world to which all the dead must journey. 56.--Mekura hebi ni ojizu. The blind man does not fear the snake.* *The ignorant and the vicious, not understanding the law of cause-and-effect, do not fear the certain results of their folly. 57.--Mitsureba, hakuru. Having waxed, wanes.* *No sooner has the moon waxed full than it begins to wane. So the height of prosperity is also the beginning of fortunes decline. 58.--Mon zen no kozo narawanu kyo wo yomu. The shop-boy in front of the temple-gate repeats the sutra which he never learned. *Kozo means "acolyte" as well as "shop-boy,""errand-boy," or "apprentice;" but in this case it refers to a boy employed in a shop situated near or before the gate of a Buddhist temple. By constantly hearing the sutra chanted in the temple, the boy learns to repeat the words. A proverb of kindred meaning is, Kangaku-In no suzume wa, Mogyu wo sayezuru: "The sparrows of Kangaku-In [an ancient seat of learning] chirp the Mogyu,"--a Chinese text formerly taught to young students. The teaching of either proverb is excellently expressed by a third:--Narau yori wa narero: "Rather than study [an art], get accustomed to it,"-- that is to say, "keep constantly in contact with it." Observation and practice are even better than study. 59.--Mujo no kaze wa, toki erabazu. The Wind of Impermanency does not choose a time.* *Death and Change do not conform their ways to human expectation. 60.--Neko mo Bussho ari. In even a cat the Buddha-nature exists.* *Notwithstanding the legend that only the cat and the mamushi (a poisonous viper) failed to weep for the death of the Buddha. 61.--Neta ma ga Gokuraku. The interval of sleep is Paradise.* *Only during sleep can we sometimes cease to know the sorrow and pain of this world. (Compare with No. 83.) 62.--Nijiu-go Bosatsu mo sore-sore no yaku. Even each of the Twenty-five Bodhisattvas has his own particular duty to perform. 63.--Nin mite, no toke. [First] see the person, [then] preach the doctrine.* *The teaching of Buddhist doctrine should always be adapted to the intelligence of the person to be instructed. There is another proverb of the same kind,--Ki ni yorite, ho wo toke: "According to the understanding [of the person to be taught], preach the Law." 64.--Ninshin ukegataku Buppo aigatashi. It is not easy to be born among men, and to meet with [the good fortune of hearing the doctrine of] Buddhism.* *Popular Buddhism teaches that to be born in the world of mankind, and especially among a people professing Buddhism, is a very great privilege. However miserable human existence, it is at least a state in which some knowledge of divine truth may be obtained; whereas the beings in other and lower conditions of life are relatively incapable of spiritual progress. 65.--Oni mo jiu-hachi. Even a devil [is pretty] at eighteen.* *There are many curious sayings and proverbs about the oni, or Buddhist devil,--such as Oni no me ni mo namida, "tears in even a devil's eyes;"--Oni no kakuran, "devil's cholera" (said of the unexpected sickness of some very strong and healthy person), etc., etc.--The class of demons called Oni, properly belong to the Buddhist hells, where they act as torturers and jailers. They are not to be confounded with the Ma, Yasha, Kijin, and other classes of evil spirits. In Buddhist art they are represented as beings of enormous strength, with the heads of bulls and of horses. The bull-headed demons are called Go-zu; the horse-headed Me-zu. 66.--Oni mo mi, naretaru ga yoshi. Even a devil, when you become accustomed to the sight of him, may prove a pleasant acquaintance. 67.--Oni ni kanabo. An iron club for a demon.* *Meaning that great power should be given only to the strong. 68.--Oni no nyobo ni kijin. A devil takes a goblin to wife.* *Meaning that a wicked man usually marries a wicked woman. 69.--Onna no ke ni wa dai-zo mo tsunagaru. With one hair of a woman you can tether even a great elephant. 70.--Onna wa Sangai ni iye nashi. Women have no homes of their own in the Three States of Existence. 71.--Oya no ingwa ga ko ni mukuu. The karma of the parents is visited upon the child.* *Said of the parents of crippled or deformed children. But the popular idea here expressed is not altogether in acco~l with the teachings of the higher Buddhism. 72.--Rakkwa eda ni kaerazu. The fallen blossom never returns to the branch.* *That which has been done never can be undone: the past cannot be recalled.--This proverb is an abbreviation of the longer Buddhist text: Rakkwa eda ni kaerazu; ha-kyo futatabi terasazu: "The fallen blossom never returns to the branch; the shattered mirror never again reflects." 73.--Raku wa ku no tane; ku wa raku no tane. Pleasure is the seed of pain; pain is the seed of pleasure. 74.--Rokudo wa, me no mae. The Six Roads are right before your eyes.* *That is to say, Your future life depends upon your conduct in this life; and you are thus free to choose for yourself the place of your next birth. 75.--Sangai mu-an. There is no rest within the Three States of Existence. 76.--Sangai ni kaki nashi;--Rokudo ni hotori nashi. There is no fence to the Three States of Existence;--there is no neighborhood to the Six Roads.* *Within the Three States (Sangai), or universes, of Desire, Form, and Formlessness; and within the Six Worlds, or conditions of being,--Jigokudo (Hell), Gakido (Pretas), Chikushodo (Animal Life), Shurado (World of Fighting and Slaughter), Ningendo (Mankind), Tenjodo (Heavenly Spirits)--all existence is included. Beyond there is only Nirvana. "There is no fence," "no neighborhood,"--that is to say, no limit beyond which to escape, --no middle-path between any two of these states. We shall be reborn into some one of them according to our karma.--Compare with No. 74. 77.--Sange ni wa sannen no tsumi mo horobu. One confession effaces the sins of even three years. 78.--San nin yoreba, kugai. Where even three persons come together, there is a world of pain.* *Kugai (lit.: "bitter world") is a term often used to describe the life of a prostitute. 79.--San nin yoreba, Monju no chie. Where three persons come together, there is the wisdom of Monju.* *Monju Bosatsu [Mandjus'ri Bodhisattva] figures in Japanese Buddhism as a special divinity of wisdom.--The proverb signifies that three heads are better than one. A saying of like meaning is, Hiza to mo danko: "Consult even with your own knee;" that is to say, Despise no advice, no matter how humble the source of it. 80.--Shaka ni sekkyo. Preaching to Sakyamuni. 81.--Shami kara choro. To become an abbot one must begin as a novice. 82.--Shindareba, koso ikitare. Only by reason of having died does one enter into life.* *I never hear this singular proverb without being re-minded of a sentence in Huxley's famous essay, On the Physical Basis of Life:--"The living protoplasm not only ultimately dies and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless constituents, but is always dying, and, strange as the paradox may sound, could not live unless it died." 83.--Shiranu ga, hotoke; minu ga, Gokuraku. Not to know is to be a Buddha; not to see is Paradise. 84.--Shobo ni kidoku nashi. There is no miracle in true doctrine.* *Nothing can happen except as a result of eternal and irrevocable law. 85.--Sho-chie wa Bodai no samatage. A little wisdom is a stumbling-block on the way to Buddhahood.* *Bodai is the same word as the Sanscrit Bodhi, signifying the supreme enlightenment,--the knowledge that leads to Buddhahood; but it is often used by Japanese Buddhists in the sense of divine bliss, or the Buddha-state itself. 86.--Shoshi no kukai hetori nashi. There is no shore to the bitter Sea of Birth and Death.* *Or, "the Pain-Sea of Life and Death." 87.--Sode no furi-awase mo tasho no en. Even the touching of sleeves in passing is caused by some relation in a former life. 88.--Sun zen; shaku ma. An inch of virtue; a foot of demon.* *Ma (Sanscrit, Marakayikas) is the name given to a particular class of spirits who tempt men to evil. But in Japanese folklore the Ma have a part much resembling that occupied in Western popular superstition by goblins and fairies. 89.--Tanoshimi wa hanasimi no motoi. All joy is the source of sorrow. 90.--Tonde hi ni iru natsu no mushi. So the insects of summer fly to the flame.* *Said especially in reference to the result of sensual indulgence. 91.--Tsuchi-botoke no midzu-asobi. Clay-Buddha's water-playing.* *That is to say, "As dangerous as for a clay Buddha to play with water." Children often amuse themselves by making little Buddhist images of mud, which melt into shapelessness, of course, if placed in water. 92.--Tsuki ni murakumo, hana ni kaze. Cloud-wrack to the moon; wind to flowers.* *The beauty of the moon is obscured by masses of clouds; the trees no sooner blossom than their flowers are scattered by the wind. All beauty is evanescent. 93.--Tsuyu no inochi. Human life is like the dew of morning. 94.--U-ki wa, kokoro ni ari. Joy and sorrow exist only in the mind. 95.--Uri no tsuru ni nasubi wa naranu. Egg-plants do not grow upon melon-vines. 96.--Uso mo hoben. Even an untruth may serve as a device.* *That is, a pious device for effecting conversion. Such a device is justified especially by the famous parable of the third chapter of the Saddharma Pundarika. 97.--Waga ya no hotoke tattoshi. My family ancestors were all excellent Buddhas.* *Meaning that one most reveres the hotoke--the spirits of the dead regarded as Buddhas--in one's own household-shrine. There is an ironical play upon the word hotoke, which may mean either a dead person simply, or a Buddha. Perhaps the spirit of this proverb may be better explained by the help of another: Nigeta sakana ni chisai wa nai; shinda kodomo ni warui ko wa nai--"Fish that escaped was never small; child that died was never bad." 98.--Yuki no hate wa, Nehan. The end of snow is Nirvana.* *This curious saying is the only one in my collection containing the word Nehan (Nirvana), and is here inserted chiefly for that reason. The common people seldom speak of Nehan, and have little knowledge of those profound doctrines to which the term is related. The above phrase, as might be inferred, is not a popular expression: it is rather an artistic and poetical reference to the aspect of a landscape covered with snow to the horizon-line, --so that beyond the snow-circle there is only the great void of the sky. 99.--Zen ni wa zen no mukui; aku ni wa aku no mukui. Goodness [or, virtue] is the return for goodness; evil is the return for evil.* *Not so commonplace a proverb as might appear at first sight; for it refers especially to the Buddhist belief that every kindness shown to us in this life is a return of kindness done to others in a former life, and that every wrong inflicted upon us is the reflex of some injustice which we committed in a previous birth. 100.--Zense no yakusoku-goto. Promised [or, destined] from a former birth.* *A very common saying,--often uttered as a comment upon the unhappiness of separation, upon sudden misfortune, upon sudden death, etc. It is used especially in relation to shinju, or lovers' suicide. Such suicide is popularly thought to be a result of cruelty in some previous state of being, or the consequence of having broken, in a former life, the mutual promise to become husband and wife. SUGGESTION I had the privilege of meeting him in Tokyo, where he was making a brief stay on his way to India;--and we took a long walk together, and talked of Eastern religions, about which he knew incomparably more than I. Whatever I could tell him concerning local beliefs, he would comment upon in the most startling manner,--citing weird correspondences in some living cult of India, Burmah, or Ceylon. Then, all of a sudden, he turned the conversation into a totally unexpected direction. "I have been thinking," he said, "about the constancy of the relative proportion of the sexes, and wondering whether Buddhist doctrine furnishes an explanation. For it seems to me that, under ordinary conditions of karma, human rebirth would necessarily proceed by a regular alternation." "Do you mean," I asked, "that a man would be reborn as a woman, and a woman as a man?" "Yes," he replied, "because desire is creative, and the desire of either sex is towards the other." "And how many men," I said, "would want to be reborn as women?" "Probably very few," he answered. "But the doctrine that desire is creative does not imply that the individual longing creates its own satisfaction,--quite the contrary. The true teaching is that the result of every selfish wish is in the nature of a penalty, and that what the wish creates must prove--to higher knowledge at least--the folly of wishing." "There you are right," I said; "but I do not yet understand your theory." "Well," he continued, "if the physical conditions of human rebirth are all determined by the karma of the will relating to physical conditions, then sex would be determined by the will in relation to sex. Now the will of either sex is towards the other. Above all things else, excepting life, man desires woman, and woman man. Each individual, moreover, independently of any personal relation, feels perpetually, you say, the influence of some inborn feminine or masculine ideal, which you call 'a ghostly reflex of countless attachments in countless past lives.' And the insatiable desire represented by this ideal would of itself suffice to create the masculine or the feminine body of the next existence." "But most women," I observed, "would like to be reborn as men; and the accomplishment of that wish would scarcely be in the nature of a penalty." "Why not?" he returned. "The happiness or unhappiness of the new existence would not be decided by sex alone: it would of necessity depend upon many conditions in combination." "Your theory is interesting," I said;--"but I do not know how far it could be made to accord with accepted doctrine.... And what of the person able, through knowledge and practice of the higher law, to remain superior to all weaknesses of sex?" "Such a one," he replied, "would be reborn neither as man nor as woman,--providing there were no pre-existent karma powerful enough to check or to weaken the results of the self-conquest." "Reborn in some one of the heavens?" I queried,--"by the Apparitional Birth?" "Not necessarily," he said. "Such a one might be reborn in a world of desire,--like this,--but neither as man only, nor as woman only." "Reborn, then, in what form?" I asked. "In that of a perfect being," he responded. "A man or a woman is scarcely more than half-a-being,--because in our present imperfect state either sex can be evolved only at the cost of the other. In the mental and the physical composition of every man, there is undeveloped woman; and in the composition of every woman there is undeveloped man. But a being complete would be both perfect man and perfect woman, possessing the highest faculties of both sexes, with the weaknesses of neither. Some humanity higher than our own,--in other worlds,--might be thus evolved." "But you know," I observed, "that there are Buddhist texts,--in the Saddharma Pundarika, for example, and in the Vinayas,--which forbid...." "Those texts," he interrupted, "refer to imperfect beings--less than man and less than woman: they could not refer to the condition that I have been supposing.... But, remember, I am not preaching a doctrine;--I am only hazarding a theory." "May I put your theory some day into print?" I asked. "Why, yes," he made answer,--"if you believe it worth thinking about." And long afterwards I wrote it down thus, as fairly as I was able, from memory. Ingwa-banashi(1) The daimyo's wife was dying, and knew that she was dying. She had not been able to leave her bed since the early autumn of the tenth Bunsei. It was now the fourth month of the twelfth Bunsei, --the year 1829 by Western counting; and the cherry-trees were blossoming. She thought of the cherry-trees in her garden, and of the gladness of spring. She thought of her children. She thought of her husband's various concubines,--especially the Lady Yukiko, nineteen years old. "My dear wife," said the daimyo, "you have suffered very much for three long years. We have done all that we could to get you well,--watching beside you night and day, praying for you, and often fasting for your sake, But in spite of our loving care, and in spite of the skill of our best physicians, it would now seen that the end of your life is not far off. Probably we shall sorrow more than you will sorrow because of your having to leave what the Buddha so truly termed 'this burning-house of the world. I shall order to be performed--no matter what the cost--every religious rite that can serve you in regard to your next rebirth; and all of us will pray without ceasing for you, that you may not have to wander in the Black Space, but nay quickly enter Paradise, and attain to Buddha-hood." He spoke with the utmost tenderness, pressing her the while. Then, with eyelids closed, she answered him in a voice thin as the voice of in insect:-- "I am grateful--most grateful--for your kind words.... Yes, it is true, as you say, that I have been sick for three long years, and that I have been treated with all possible care and affection.... Why, indeed, should I turn away from the one true Path at the very moment of my death?... Perhaps to think of worldly matters at such a time is not right;--but I have one last request to make,--only one.... Call here to me the Lady Yukiko;--you know that I love her like a sister. I want to speak to her about the affairs of this household." Yukiko came at the summons of the lord, and, in obedience to a sign from him, knelt down beside the couch. The daimyo's wife opened her eyes, and looked at Yukiko, and spoke:--"Ah, here is Yukiko!... I am so pleased to see you, Yukiko!... Come a little closer,--so that you can hear me well: I am not able to speak loud.... Yukiko, I am going to die. I hope that you will be faithful in all things to our dear lord;--for I want you to take my place when I am gone.... I hope that you will always be loved by him,--yes, even a hundred times more than I have been,--and that you will very soon be promoted to a higher rank, and become his honored wife.... And I beg of you always to cherish our dear lord: never allow another woman to rob you of his affection.... This is what I wanted to say to you, dear Yukiko.... Have you been able to understand?" "Oh, my dear Lady," protested Yukiko, "do not, I entreat you, say such strange things to me! You well know that I am of poor and mean condition:--how could I ever dare to aspire to become the wife of our lord!" "Nay, nay!" returned the wife, huskily,--"this is not a time for words of ceremony: let us speak only the truth to each other. After my death, you will certainly be promoted to a higher place; and I now assure you again that I wish you to become the wife of our lord--yes, I wish this, Yukiko, even more than I wish to become a Buddha!... Ah, I had almost forgotten!--I want you to do something for me, Yukiko. You know that in the garden there is a yae-zakura,(2) which was brought here, the year before last, from Mount Yoshino in Yamato. I have been told that it is now in full bloom;--and I wanted so much to see it in flower! In a little while I shall be dead;--I must see that tree before I die. Now I wish you to carry me into the garden--at once, Yukiko,--so that I can see it.... Yes, upon your back, Yukiko;--take me upon your back...." While thus asking, her voice had gradually become clear and strong,--as if the intensity of the wish had given her new force: then she suddenly burst into tears. Yukiko knelt motionless, not knowing what to do; but the lord nodded assent. "It is her last wish in this world," he said. "She always loved cherry-flowers; and I know that she wanted very much to see that Yamato-tree in blossom. Come, my dear Yukiko, let her have her will." As a nurse turns her back to a child, that the child may cling to it, Yukiko offered her shoulders to the wife, and said:-- "Lady, I am ready: please tell me how I best can help you." "Why, this way!"--responded the dying woman, lifting herself with an almost superhuman effort by clinging to Yukiko's shoulders. But as she stood erect, she quickly slipped her thin hands down over the shoulders, under the robe, and clutched the breasts of the girl,, and burst into a wicked laugh. "I have my wish!" she cried-"I have my wish for the cherry- bloom,(3)--but not the cherry-bloom of the garden!... I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it!--oh, what a delight!" And with these words she fell forward upon the crouching girl, and died. The attendants at once attempted to lift the body from Yukiko's shoulders, and to lay it upon the bed. But--strange to say!--this seemingly easy thing could not be done. The cold hands had attached themselves in some unaccountable way to the breasts of the girl,--appeared to have grown into the quick flesh. Yukiko became senseless with fear and pain. Physicians were called. They could not understand what had taken place. By no ordinary methods could the hands of the dead woman be unfastened from the body of her victim;--they so clung that any effort to remove them brought blood. This was not because the fingers held: it was because the flesh of the palms had united itself in some inexplicable manner to the flesh of the breasts! At that time the most skilful physician in Yedo was a foreigner, --a Dutch surgeon. It was decided to summon him. After a careful examination he said that he could not understand the case, and that for the immediate relief of Yukiko there was nothing to be done except to cut the hands from the corpse. He declared that it would be dangerous to attempt to detach them from the breasts. His advice was accepted; and the hands' were amputated at the wrists. But they remained clinging to the breasts; and there they soon darkened and dried up,--like the hands of a person long dead. Yet this was only the beginning of the horror. Withered and bloodless though they seemed, those hands were not dead. At intervals they would stir--stealthily, like great grey spiders. And nightly thereafter,--beginning always at the Hour of the Ox,(4)--they would clutch and compress and torture. Only at the Hour of the Tiger the pain would cease. Yukiko cut off her hair, and became a mendicant-nun,--taking the religious name of Dassetsu. She had an ibai (mortuary tablet) made, bearing the kaimyo of her dead mistress,--"Myo-Ko-In-Den Chizan-Ryo-Fu Daishi";--and this she carried about with her in all her wanderings; and every day before it she humbly besought the dead for pardon, and performed a Buddhist service in order that the jealous spirit might find rest. But the evil karma that had rendered such an affliction possible could not soon be exhausted. Every night at the Hour of the Ox, the hands never failed to torture her, during more than seventeen years,-- according to the testimony of those persons to whom she last told her story, when she stopped for one evening at the house of Noguchi Dengozayemon, in the village of Tanaka in the district of Kawachi in the province of Shimotsuke. This was in the third year of Kokwa (1846). Thereafter nothing more was ever heard of her. 1 Lit., "a tale of ingwa." Ingwa is a Japanese Buddhist term for evil karma, or the evil consequence of faults committed in a former state of existence. Perhaps the curious title of the narrative is best explained by the Buddhist teaching that the dead have power to injure the living only in consequence of evil actions committed by their victims in some former life. Both title and narrative may be found in the collection of weird stories entitled Hyaku-Monogatari. 2 Yae-zakura, yaë-no-sakura, a variety of Japanese cherry-tree that bears double-blossoms. 3 In Japanese poetry and proverbial phraseology, the physical beauty of a woman is compared to the cherry-flower; while feminine moral beauty is compared to the plum-flower. 4 In ancient Japanese time, the Hour of the Ox was the special hour of ghosts. It began at 2 A.M., and lasted until 4 A.M.--for the old Japanese hour was double the length of the modern hour. The Hour of the Tiger began at 4 A.M. Story of a Tengu (1) In the days of the Emperor Go-Reizei, there was a holy priest living in the temple of Saito, on the mountain called Hiyei-Zan, near Kyoto. One summer day this good priest, after a visit to the city, was returning to his temple by way of Kita-no-Oji, when he saw some boys ill-treating a kite. They had caught the bird in a snare, and were beating it with sticks. "Oh, the, poor creature!" compassionately exclaimed the priest;--"why do you torment it so, children?" One of the boys made answer:--"We want to kill it to get the feathers." Moved by pity, the priest persuaded the boys to let him have the kite in exchange for a fan that he was carrying; and he set the bird free. It had not been seriously hurt, and was able to fly away. Happy at having performed this Buddhist act of merit, the priest then resumed his walk. He had not proceeded very far when he saw a strange monk come out of a bamboo-grove by the road-side, and hasten towards him. The monk respectfully saluted him, and said: --"Sir, through your compassionate kindness my life has been saved; and I now desire to express my gratitude in a fitting manner." Astonished at hearing himself thus addressed, the priest replied:--"Really, I cannot remember to have ever seen you before: please tell me who you are." "It is not wonderful that you cannot recognize me in this form," returned the monk: "I am the kite that those cruel boys were tormenting at Kita-no-Oji. You saved my life; and there is nothing in this world more precious than life. So I now wish to return your kindness in some way or other. If there be anything that you would like to have, or to know, or to see,--anything that I can do for you, in short,--please to tell me; for as I happen to possess, in a small degree, the Six Supernatural Powers, I am able to gratify almost any wish that you can express." On hearing these words, the priest knew that he was speaking with a Tengu; and he frankly made answer:--"My friend, I have long ceased to care for the things of this world: I am now seventy years of age; neither fame nor pleasure has any attraction for me. I feel anxious only about my future birth; but as that is a matter in which no one can help me, it were useless to ask about it. Really, I can think of but one thing worth wishing for. It has been my life-long regret that I was not in India in the time of the Lord Buddha, and could not attend the great assembly on the holy mountain Gridhrakuta. Never a day passes in which this regret does not come to me, in the hour of morning or of evening prayer. Ah, my friend! if it were possible to conquer Time and Space, like the Bodhisattvas, so that I could look upon that marvellous assembly, how happy should I be!" "Why," the Tengu exclaimed, "that pious wish of yours can easily be satisfied. I perfectly well remember the assembly on the Vulture Peak; and I can cause everything that happened there to reappear before you, exactly as it occurred. It is our greatest delight to represent such holy matters.... Come this way with me!" And the priest suffered himself to be led to a place among pines, on the slope of a hill. "Now," said the Tengu, "you have only to wait here for awhile, with your eyes shut. Do not open them until you hear the voice of the Buddha preaching the Law. Then you can look. But when you see the appearance of the Buddha, you must not allow your devout feelings to influence you in any way; --you must not bow down, nor pray, nor utter any such exclamation as, 'Even so, Lord!' or 'O thou Blessed One!' You must not speak at all. Should you make even the least sign of reverence, something very unfortunate might happen to me." The priest gladly promised to follow these injunctions; and the Tengu hurried away as if to prepare the spectacle. The day waned and passed, and the darkness came; but the old priest waited patiently beneath a tree, keeping his eyes closed. At last a voice suddenly resounded above him,--a wonderful voice, deep and clear like the pealing of a mighty bell,--the voice of the Buddha Sakyamuni proclaiming the Perfect Way. Then the priest, opening his eyes in a great radiance, perceived that all things had been changed: the place was indeed the Vulture Peak,-- the holy Indian mountain Gridhrakuta; and the time was the time of the Sutra of the Lotos of the Good Law. Now there were no pines about him, but strange shining trees made of the Seven Precious Substances, with foliage and fruit of gems;--and the ground was covered with Mandarava and Manjushaka flowers showered from heaven;--and the night was filled with fragrance and splendour and the sweetness of the great Voice. And in mid-air, shining as a moon above the world, the priest beheld the Blessed One seated upon the Lion-throne, with Samantabhadra at his right hand, and Manjusri at his left,--and before them assembled-- immeasurably spreading into Space, like a flood Of stars--the hosts of the Mahasattvas and the Bodhisattvas with their countless following: "gods, demons, Nagas, goblins, men, and beings not human." Sariputra he saw, and Kasyapa, and Ananda, with all the disciples of the Tathagata,--and the Kings of the Devas,--and the Kings of the Four Directions, like pillars of fire,--and the great Dragon-Kings,--and the Gandharvas and Garudas,--and the Gods of the Sun and the Moon and the Wind,--and the shining myriads of Brahma's heaven. And incomparably further than even the measureless circling of the glory of these, he saw --made visible by a single ray of light that shot from the forehead of the Blessed One to pierce beyond uttermost Time--the eighteen hundred thousand Buddha-fields of the Eastern Quarter with all their habitants,--and the beings in each of the Six States of Existence,--and even the shapes of the Buddhas extinct, that had entered into Nirvana. These, and all the gods, and all the demons, he saw bow down before the Lion-throne; and he heard that multitude incalculable of beings praising the Sutra of the Lotos of the Good Law,--like the roar of a sea before the Lord. Then forgetting utterly his pledge,--foolishly dreaming that he stood in the very presence of the very Buddha,--he cast himself down in worship with tears of love and thanksgiving; crying out with a loud voice, "O thou Blessed One!"... Instantly with a shock as of earthquake the stupendous spectacle disappeared; and the priest found himself alone in the dark, kneeling upon the grass of the mountain-side. Then a sadness unspeakable fell upon him, because of the loss of the vision, and because of the thoughtlessness that had caused him to break his word. As he sorrowfully turned his steps homeward, the goblin- monk once more appeared before him, and said to him in tones of reproach and pain:--"Because you did not keep the promise which you made to me, and heedlessly allowed your feelings to overcome you, the Gohotendó, who is the Guardian of the Doctrine, swooped down suddenly from heaven upon us, and smote us in great anger, crying out, 'How do ye dare thus to deceive a pious person?' Then the other monks, whom I had assembled, all fled in fear. As for myself, one of my wings has been broken,--so that now I cannot fly." And with these words the Tengu vanished forever. 1 This story may be found in the curious old Japanese book called Jikkun-Sho. The same legend has furnished the subject of an interesting No-play, called Dai-E ("The Great Assembly"). In Japanese popular art, the Tengu are commonly represented either as winged men with beak-shaped noses, or as birds of prey. There are different kinds of Tengu; but all are supposed to be mountain-haunting spirits, capable of assuming many forms, and occasionally appearing as crows, vultures, or eagles. Buddhism appears to class the Tengu among the Marakayikas. At Yaidzu I Under a bright sun the old fishing-town of Yaidzu has a particular charm of neutral color. Lizard-like it takes the grey tints of the rude grey coast on which it rests,--curving along a little bay. It is sheltered from heavy seas by an extraordinary rampart of boulders. This rampart, on the water-side, is built in the form of terrace-steps;--the rounded stones of which it is composed being kept in position by a sort of basket-work woven between rows of stakes driven deeply into the ground,--a separate row of stakes sustaining each of the grades. Looking landward from the top of the structure, your gaze ranges over the whole town,--a broad space of grey-tiled roofs and weather-worn grey timbers, with here and there a pine-grove marking the place of a temple-court. Seaward, over leagues of water, there is a grand view,--a jagged blue range of peaks crowding sharply into the horizon, like prodigious amethysts,--and beyond them, to the left, the glorious spectre of Fuji, towering enormously above everything. Between sea-wall and sea there is no sand,--only a grey slope of stones, chiefly boulders; and these roll with the surf so that it is ugly work trying to pass the breakers on a rough day. If you once get struck by a stone-wave,--as I did several times,--you will not soon forget the experience. At certain hours the greater part of this rough slope is occupied by ranks of strange-looking craft,--fishing-boats of a form peculiar to the locality. They are very large,--capable of carrying forty or fifty men each;--and they have queer high prows, to which Buddhist or Shinto charms (mamori or shugo) are usually attached. A common form of Shinto written charm (shugo) is furnished for this purpose from the temple of the Goddess of Fuji: the text reads:--Fuji-san chojo Sengen-gu dai-gyo manzoku, --meaning that the owner of the boat pledges himself, in case of good-fortune at fishing, to perform great austerities in honor of the divinity whose shrine is upon the summit of Fuji. In every coast-province of Japan,--and even at different fishing- settlements of the same province,--the forms of boats and fishing-implements are peculiar to the district or settlement. Indeed it will sometimes be found that settlements, within a few miles of each other, respectively manufacture nets or boats as dissimilar in type as might be the inventions of races living thousands of miles apart. This amazing variety may be in some degree due to respect for local tradition,--to the pious conservatism that preserves ancestral teaching and custom unchanged through hundreds of years: but it is better explained by the fact that different communities practise different kinds of fishing; and the shapes of the nets or the boats made, at any one place, are likely to prove, on investigation, the inventions of a special experience. The big Yaidzu boats illustrate this fact. They were devised according to the particular requirements of the Yaidzu-fishing-industry, which supplies dried katsuo (bonito) to all parts of the Empire; and it was necessary that they should be able to ride a very rough sea. To get them in or out of the water is a heavy job; but the whole village helps. A kind of slipway is improvised in a moment by laying flat wooden frames on the slope in a line; and over these frames the flat- bottomed vessels are hauled up or down by means of long ropes. You will see a hundred or more persons thus engaged in moving a single boat,--men, women, and children pulling together, in time to a curious melancholy chant. At the coming of a typhoon, the boats are moved far back into the streets. There is plenty of fun in helping at such work; and if you are a stranger, the fisher- folk will perhaps reward your pains by showing you the wonders of their sea: crabs with legs of astonishing length, balloon-fish that blow themselves up in the most absurd manner, and various other creatures of shapes so extraordinary that you can scarcely believe them natural without touching them. The big boats with holy texts at their prows are not the strangest objects on the beach. Even more remarkable are the bait-baskets of split bamboo,--baskets six feet high and eighteen feet round, with one small hole in the dome-shaped top. Ranged along the sea-wall to dry, they might at some distance be mistaken for habitations or huts of some sort. Then you see great wooden anchors, shaped like ploughshares, and shod with metal; iron anchors, with four flukes; prodigious wooden mallets, used for driving stakes; and various other implements, still more unfamiliar, of which you cannot even imagine the purpose. The indescribable antique queerness of everything gives you that weird sensation of remoteness,--of the far away in time and place,--which makes one doubt the reality of the visible. And the life of Yaidzu is certainly the life of many centuries ago. The people, too, are the people of Old Japan: frank and kindly as children--good children,--honest to a fault, innocent of the further world, loyal to the ancient traditions and the ancient gods. II I happened to be at Yaidzu during the three days of the Bon or Festival of the Dead; and I hoped to see the beautiful farewell ceremony of the third and last day. In many parts of Japan, the ghosts are furnished with miniature ships for their voyage,-- little models of junks or fishing-craft, each containing offerings of food and water and kindled incense; also a tiny lantern or lamp, if the ghost-ship be despatched at night. But at Yaidzu lanterns only are set afloat; and I was told that they would be launched after dark. Midnight being the customary hour elsewhere, I supposed that it was the hour of farewell at Yaidzu also, and I rashly indulged in a nap after supper, expecting to wake up in time for the spectacle. But by ten o'clock, when I went to the beach again, all was over, and everybody had gone home. Over the water I saw something like a long swarm of fire- flies,--the lanterns drifting out to sea in procession; but they were already too far to be distinguished except as points of colored light. I was much disappointed: I felt that I had lazily missed an opportunity which might never again return,--for these old Bon-customs are dying rapidly. But in another moment it occurred to me that I could very well venture to swim out to the lights. They were moving slowly. I dropped my robe on the beach, and plunged in. The sea was calm, and beautifully phosphorescent. Every stroke kindled a stream of yellow fire. I swam fast, and overtook the last of the lantern-fleet much sooner than I had hoped. I felt that it would be unkind to interfere with the little embarcations, or to divert them from their silent course: so I contented myself with keeping close to one of them, and studying its details. The structure was very simple. The bottom was a piece of thick plank, perfectly square, and measuring about ten inches across. Each one of its corners supported a slender slick about sixteen inches high; and these four uprights, united above by cross- pieces, sustained the paper sides. Upon the point of a long nail, driven up through the centre of the bottom, was fixed a lighted candle. The top was left open. The four sides presented five different colors,--blue, yellow, red, white, and black; these five colors respectively symbolizing Ether, Wind, Fire, Water, and Earth,--the five Buddhist elements which are metaphysically identified with the Five Buddhas. One of the paper-panes was red, one blue, one yellow; and the right half of the fourth pane was black, while the left half, uncolored, represented white. No kaimyo was written upon any of the transparencies. Inside the lantern there was only the flickering candle. I watched those frail glowing shapes drifting through the night, and ever as they drifted scattering, under impulse of wind and wave, more and more widely apart. Each, with its quiver of color, seemed a life afraid,--trembling on the blind current that was bearing it into the outer blackness.... Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper and a dimmer sea, and ever separating further and further one from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor frames, and all that is left of their once fair colors, must melt forever into the colorless Void. Even in the moment of this musing I began to doubt whether I was really alone,--to ask myself whether there might not be something more than a mere shuddering of light in the thing that rocked beside me: some presence that haunted the dying flame, and was watching the watcher. A faint cold thrill passed over me,-- perhaps some chill uprising from the depths,--perhaps the creeping only of a ghostly fancy. Old superstitions of the coast recurred to me,--old vague warnings of peril in the time of the passage of Souls. I reflected that were any evil to befall me out there in the night,--meddling, or seeming to meddle, with the lights of the Dead,--I should myself furnish the subject of some future weird legend.... I whispered the Buddhist formula of farewell--to the lights,--and made speed for shore. As I touched the stones again, I was startled by seeing two white shadows before me; but a kindly voice, asking if the water was cold, set me at ease. It was the voice of my old landlord, Otokichi the fishseller, who had come to look for me, accompanied by his wife. "Only pleasantly cool," I made answer, as I threw on my robe to go home with them. "Ah," said the wife, "it is not good to go out there on the night of the Bon!" "I did not go far," I replied;--"I only wanted to look at the lanterns." "Even a Kappa gets drowned sometimes,"(1) protested Otokichi. "There was a man of this village who swam home a distance of seven ri, in bad weather, after his boat had been broken. But he was drowned afterwards." Seven ri means a trifle less than eighteen miles. I asked if any of the young men now in the settlement could do as much. "Probably some might," the old man replied. "There are many strong swimmers. All swim here,--even the little children. But when fisher-folk swim like that, it is only to save their lives." "Or to make love," the wife added,--"like the Hashima girl." "Who?" queried I. "A fisherman's daughter," said Otokichi. "She had a lover in Ajiro, several ri distant; and she used to swim to him at night, and swim back in the morning. He kept a light burning to guide her. But one dark night the light was neglected--or blown out; and she lost her way, and was drowned.... The story is famous in Idzu." --"So," I said to myself, "in the Far East, it is poor Hero that does the swimming. And what, under such circumstances, would have been the Western estimate of Leander?" 1 This is a common proverb:--Kappa mo obore-shini. The Kappa is a water-goblin, haunting rivers especially. III Usually about the time of the Bon, the sea gets rough; and I was not surprised to find next morning that the surf was running high. All day it grew. By the middle of the afternoon, the waves had become wonderful; and I sat on the sea-wall, and watched them until sundown. It was a long slow rolling,--massive and formidable. Sometimes, just before breaking, a towering swell would crack all its green length with a tinkle as of shivering glass; then would fall and flatten with a peal that shook the wall beneath me.... I thought of the great dead Russian general who made his army to storm as a sea,--wave upon wave of steel,--thunder following thunder.... There was yet scarcely any wind; but there must have been wild weather elsewhere,--and the breakers were steadily heightening. Their motion fascinated. How indescribably complex such motion is,--yet how eternally new! Who could fully describe even five minutes of it? No mortal ever saw two waves break in exactly the same way. And probably no mortal ever watched the ocean-roll or heard its thunder without feeling serious. I have noticed that even animals,--horses and cows,--become meditative in the presence of the sea: they stand and stare and listen as if the sight and sound of that immensity made them forget all else in the world. There is a folk-saying of the coast:--"The Sea has a soul and hears." And the meaning is thus explained: Never speak of your fear when you feel afraid at sea;--if you say that you are afraid, the waves will suddenly rise higher. Now this imagining seems to me absolutely natural. I must confess that when I am either in the sea, or upon it, I cannot fully persuade myself that it is not alive,--a conscious and a hostile power. Reason, for the time being, avails nothing against this fancy. In order to be able to think of the sea as a mere body of water, I must be upon some height from whence its heaviest billowing appears but a lazy creeping of tiny ripples. But the primitive fancy may be roused even more strongly in darkness than by daylight. How living seem the smoulderings and the flashings of the tide on nights of phosphorescence!--how reptilian the subtle shifting of the tints of its chilly flame! Dive into such a night-sea;--open your eyes in the black-blue gloom, and watch the weird gush of lights that follow your every motion: each luminous point, as seen through the flood, like the opening and closing of an eye! At such a moment, one feels indeed as if enveloped by some monstrous sentiency,--suspended within some vital substance that feels and sees and wills alike in every part, an infinite soft cold Ghost. IV Long I lay awake that night, and listened to the thunder-rolls and crashings of the mighty tide. Deeper than these distinct shocks of noise, and all the storming of the nearer waves, was the bass of the further surf,--a ceaseless abysmal muttering to which the building trembled,--a sound that seemed to imagination like the sound of the trampling of infinite cavalry, the massing of incalculable artillery,--some rushing, from the Sunrise, of armies wide as the world. Then I found myself thinking of the vague terror with which I had listened, when a child, to the voice of the sea;--and I remembered that in after-years, on different coasts in different parts of the world, the sound of surf had always revived the childish emotion. Certainly this emotion was older than I by thousands of thousands of centuries,--the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral. But presently there came to me the conviction that fear of the sea alone could represent but one element of the multitudinous awe awakened by its voice. For as I listened to that wild tide of the Suruga coast, I could distinguish nearly every sound of fear known to man: not merely noises of battle tremendous,--of interminable volleying,--of immeasurable charging,--but the roaring of beasts, the crackling and hissing of fire, the rumbling of earthquake, the thunder of ruin, and, above all these, a clamor continual as of shrieks and smothered shoutings,--the Voices that are said to be the voices of the drowned., Awfulness supreme of tumult,--combining all imaginable echoings of fury and destruction and despair! And to myself I said:--Is it wonderful that the voice of the sea should make us serious? Consonantly to its multiple utterance must respond all waves of immemorial fear that move in the vaster sea of soul-experience. Deep calleth unto deep. The visible abyss calls to that abyss invisible of elder being whose flood-flow made the ghosts of us. Wherefore there is surely more than a little truth in the ancient belief that the speech of the dead is the roar of the sea. Truly the fear and the pain of the dead past speak to us in that dim deep awe which the roar of the sea awakens. But there are sounds that move us much more profoundly than the voice of the sea can do, and in stranger ways,--sounds that also make us serious at times, and very serious,--sounds of music. Great music is a psychical storm, agitating to unimaginable depth the mystery of the past within us. Or we might say that it is a prodigious incantation, every different instrument and voice making separate appeal to different billions of prenatal memories. There are tones that call up all ghosts of youth and joy and tenderness;--there are tones that evoke all phantom pain of perished passion;--there are tones that resurrect all dead sensations of majesty and might and glory,--all expired exultations,--all forgotten magnanimities. Well may the influence of music seem inexplicable to the man who idly dreams that his life began less than a hundred years ago! But the mystery lightens for whomsoever learns that the substance of Self is older than the sun. He finds that music is a Necromancy;--he feels that to every ripple of melody, to every billow of harmony, there answers within him, out of the Sea of Death and Birth, some eddying immeasurable of ancient pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain: they commingle always in great music; and therefore it is that music can move us more profoundly than the voice of ocean or than any other voice can do. But in music's larger utterance it is ever the sorrow that makes the undertone, --the surf-mutter of the Sea of Soul.... Strange to think how vast the sum of joy and woe that must have been experienced before the sense of music could evolve in the brain of man! Somewhere it is said that human life is the music of the Gods,-- that its sobs and laughter, its songs and shrieks and orisons, its outcries of delight and of despair, rise never to the hearing of the Immortals but as a perfect harmony.... Wherefore they could not desire to hush the tones of pain: it would spoil their music! The combination, without the agony-tones, would prove a discord unendurable to ears divine. And in one way we ourselves are as Gods,--since it is only the sum of the pains and the joys of past lives innumerable that makes for us, through memory organic, the ecstasy of music. All the gladness and the grief of dead generations come back to haunt us in countless forms of harmony and of melody. Even so,--a million years after we shall have ceased to view the sun,--will the gladness and the grief of our own lives pass with richer music into other hearts--there to bestir, for one mysterious moment, some deep and exquisite thrilling of voluptuous pain. 
8920	----	THE LIGHT OF ASIA By Sir Edwin Arnold This volume is dutifully inscribed to the Sovereign, Grand Master, and Companions of The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India by The Author. Book The First The Scripture of the Saviour of the World, Lord Buddha--Prince Siddartha styled on earth In Earth and Heavens and Hells Incomparable, All-honoured, Wisest, Best, most Pitiful; The Teacher of Nirvana and the Law. Then came he to be born again for men. Below the highest sphere four Regents sit Who rule our world, and under them are zones Nearer, but high, where saintliest spirits dead Wait thrice ten thousand years, then live again; And on Lord Buddha, waiting in that sky, Came for our sakes the five sure signs of birth So that the Devas knew the signs, and said "Buddha will go again to help the World." "Yea!" spake He, "now I go to help the World. This last of many times; for birth and death End hence for me and those who learn my Law. I will go down among the Sakyas, Under the southward snows of Himalay, Where pious people live and a just King." That night the wife of King Suddhodana, Maya the Queen, asleep beside her Lord, Dreamed a strange dream; dreamed that a star from heaven-- Splendid, six-rayed, in colour rosy-pearl, Whereof the token was an Elephant Six-tusked and whiter than Vahuka's milk-- Shot through the void and, shining into her, Entered her womb upon the right. Awaked, Bliss beyond mortal mother's filled her breast, And over half the earth a lovely light Forewent the morn. The strong hills shook; the waves Sank lulled; all flowers that blow by day came forth As 't were high noon; down to the farthest hells Passed the Queen's joy, as when warm sunshine thrills Wood-glooms to gold, and into all the deeps A tender whisper pierced. "Oh ye," it said, "The dead that are to live, the live who die, Uprise, and hear, and hope! Buddha is come!" Whereat in Limbos numberless much peace Spread, and the world's heart throbbed, and a wind blew With unknown freshness over lands and seas. And when the morning dawned, and this was told, The grey dream-readers said "The dream is good! The Crab is in conjunction with the Sun; The Queen shall bear a boy, a holy child Of wondrous wisdom, profiting all flesh, Who shall deliver men from ignorance, Or rule the world, if he will deign to rule." In this wise was the holy Buddha born. Queen Maya stood at noon, her days fulfilled, Under a Palsa in the Palace-grounds, A stately trunk, straight as a temple-shaft, With crown of glossy leaves and fragrant blooms; And, knowing the time some--for all things knew-- The conscious tree bent down its boughs to make A bower above Queen Maya's majesty, And Earth put forth a thousand sudden flowers To spread a couch, while, ready for the bath, The rock hard by gave out a limpid stream Of crystal flow. So brought she forth her child Pangless--he having on his perfect form The marks, thirty and two, of blessed birth; Of which the great news to the Palace came. But when they brought the painted palanquin To fetch him home, the bearers of the poles Were the four Regents of the Earth, come down From Mount Sumeru--they who write men's deeds On brazen plates--the Angel of the East, Whose hosts are clad in silver robes, and bear Targets of pearl: the Angel of the South, Whose horsemen, the Kumbhandas, ride blue steeds, With sapphire shields: the Angel of the West, By Nagas followed, riding steeds blood-red, With coral shields: the Angel of the North, Environed by his Yakshas, all in gold, On yellow horses, bearing shields of gold. These, with their pomp invisible, came down And took the poles, in caste and outward garb Like bearers, yet most mighty gods; and gods Walked free with men that day, though men knew not For Heaven was filled with gladness for Earth's sake, Knowing Lord Buddha thus was come again. But King Suddhodana wist not of this; The portents troubled, till his dream-readers Augured a Prince of earthly dominance, A Chakravartin, such as rise to rule Once in each thousand years; seven gifts he has The Chakra-ratna, disc divine; the gem; The horse, the Aswa-ratna, that proud steed Which tramps the clouds; a snow-white elephant, The Hasti-ratna, born to bear his King; The crafty Minister, the General Unconquered, and the wife of peerless grace, The Istri-ratna, lovelier than the Dawn. For which gifts looking with this wondrous boy, The King gave order that his town should keep High festival; therefore the ways were swept, Rose-odours sprinkled in the street, the trees Were hung with lamps and flags, while merry crowds Gaped on the sword-players and posturers, The jugglers, charmers, swingers, rope-walkers, The nautch-girls in their spangled skirts and bells That chime light laughter round their restless feet; The masquers wrapped in skins of bear and deer. The tiger-tamers, wrestlers, quail-fighters, Beaters of drum and twanglers of the wire, Who made the people happy by command. Moreover from afar came merchant-men, Bringing, on tidings of this birth, rich gifts In golden trays; goat-shawls, and nard and jade, Turkises, "evening-sky" tint, woven webs-- So fine twelve folds hide not a modest face-- Waist-cloths sewn thick with pearls, and sandalwood; Homage from tribute cities; so they called Their Prince Svarthasiddh, "All-Prospering," Briefer, Siddartha. 'Mongst the strangers came A grey-haired saint, Asita, one whose ears, Long closed to earthly things, caught heavenly sounds, And heard at prayer beneath his peepul-tree The Devas singing songs at Buddha's birth. Wondrous in lore he was by age and fasts; Him, drawing nigh, seeming so reverend, The King saluted, and Queen Maya made To lay her babe before such holy feet; But when he saw the Prince the old man cried "Ah, Queen, not so!" and thereupon he touched Eight times the dust, laid his waste visage there, Saying, "O Babe! I worship! Thou art He! I see the rosy light, the foot-sole marks, The soft curled tendril of the Swastika, The sacred primal signs thirty and two, The eighty lesser tokens. Thou art Buddh, And thou wilt preach the Law and save all flesh Who learn the Law, though I shall never hear, Dying too soon, who lately longed to die; Howbeit I have seen Thee. Know, O King! This is that Blossom on our human tree Which opens once in many myriad years-- But opened, fills the world with Wisdom's scent And Love's dropped honey; from thy royal root A Heavenly Lotus springs: Ah, happy House! Yet not all-happy, for a sword must pierce Thy bowels for this boy--whilst thou, sweet Queen! Dear to all gods and men for this great birth, Henceforth art grown too sacred for more woe, And life is woe, therefore in seven days Painless thou shalt attain the close of pain." Which fell: for on the seventh evening Queen Maya smiling slept, and waked no more, Passing content to Trayastrinshas-Heaven, Where countless Devas worship her and wait Attendant on that radiant Motherhead. But for the Babe they found a foster-nurse, Princess Mahaprajapati--her breast Nourished with noble milk the lips of Him Whose lips comfort the Worlds. When th' eighth year passed The careful King bethought to teach his son All that a Prince should learn, for still he shunned The too vast presage of those miracles, The glories and the sufferings of a Buddh. So, in full council of his Ministers, "Who is the wisest man, great sirs," he asked, "To teach my Prince that which a Prince should know?" Whereto gave answer each with instant voice "King! Viswamitra is the wisest one, The farthest-seen in Scriptures, and the best In learning, and the manual arts, and all." Thus Viswamitra came and heard commands; And, on a day found fortunate, the Prince Took up his slate of ox-red sandal-wood, All-beautified by gems around the rim, And sprinkled smooth with dust of emery, These took he, and his writing-stick, and stood With eyes bent down before the Sage, who said, "Child, write this Scripture, speaking slow the verse 'Gayatri' named, which only High-born hear:-- "Om, tatsaviturvarenyam Bhargo devasya dhimahi Dhiyo yo na prachodayat." "Acharya, I write," meekly replied The Prince, and quickly on the dust he drew-- Not in one script, but many characters The sacred verse; Nagri and Dakshin, Ni, Mangal, Parusha, Yava, Tirthi, Uk, Darad, Sikhyani, Mana, Madhyachar, The pictured writings and the speech of signs, Tokens of cave-men and the sea-peoples, Of those who worship snakes beneath the earth, And those who flame adore and the sun's orb, The Magians and the dwellers on the mounds; Of all the nations all strange scripts he traced One after other with his writing-stick. Reading the master's verse in every tongue; And Viswamitra said, "It is enough, Let us to numbers. "After me repeat Your numeration till we reach the Lakh, One, two, three, four, to ten, and then by tens To hundreds, thousands." After him the child Named digits, decads, centuries; nor paused, The round Lakh reached, but softly murmured on "Then comes the koti, nahut, ninnahut, Khamba, viskhamba, abab, attata, To kumuds, gundhikas, and utpalas, By pundarikas unto padumas, Which last is how you count the utmost grains Of Hastagiri ground to finest dust; But beyond that a numeration is, The Katha, used to count the stars of night; The Koti-Katha, for the ocean drops; Ingga, the calculus of circulars; Sarvanikchepa, by the which you deal With all the sands of Gunga, till we come To Antah-Kalpas, where the unit is The sands of ten crore Gungas. If one seeks More comprehensive scale, th' arithmic mounts By the Asankya, which is the tale Of all the drops that in ten thousand years Would fall on all the worlds by daily rain; Thence unto Maha Kalpas, by the which The Gods compute their future and their past." "'Tis good," the Sage rejoined, "Most noble Prince, If these thou know'st, needs it that I should teach The mensuration of the lineal?" Humbly the boy replied, "Acharya!" "Be pleased to hear me. Paramanus ten A parasukshma make; ten of those build The trasarene, and seven trasarenes One mote's-length floating in the beam, seven motes The whisker-point of mouse, and ten of these One likhya; likhyas ten a yuka, ten Yukas a heart of barley, which is held Seven times a wasp-waist; so unto the grain Of mung and mustard and the barley-corn, Whereof ten give the finger joint, twelve joints The span, wherefrom we reach the cubit, staff, Bow-length, lance-length; while twenty lengths of lance Mete what is named a 'breath,' which is to say Such space as man may stride with lungs once filled, Whereof a gow is forty, four times that A yojana; and, Master! if it please, I shall recite how many sun-motes lie From end to end within a yojana." Thereat, with instant skill, the little Prince Pronounced the total of the atoms true. But Viswamitra heard it on his face Prostrate before the boy; "For thou," he cried, "Art Teacher of thy teachers--thou, not I, Art Guru. Oh, I worship thee, sweet Prince! That comest to my school only to show Thou knowest all without the books, and know'st Fair reverence besides." Which reverence Lord Buddha kept to all his schoolmasters, Albeit beyond their learning taught; in speech Right gentle, yet so wise; princely of mien, Yet softly-mannered; modest, deferent, And tender-hearted, though of fearless blood; No bolder horseman in the youthful band E'er rode in gay chase of the shy gazelles; No keener driver of the chariot In mimic contest scoured the Palace-courts; Yet in mid-play the boy would ofttimes pause, Letting the deer pass free; would ofttimes yield His half-won race because the labouring steeds Fetched painful breath; or if his princely mates Saddened to lose, or if some wistful dream Swept o'er his thoughts. And ever with the years Waxed this compassionateness of our Lord, Even as a great tree grows from two soft leaves To spread its shade afar; but hardly yet Knew the young child of sorrow, pain, or tears, Save as strange names for things not felt by kings, Nor ever to be felt. But it befell In the Royal garden on a day of spring, A flock of wild swans passed, voyaging north To their nest-places on Himala's breast. Calling in love-notes down their snowy line The bright birds flew, by fond love piloted; And Devadatta, cousin of the Prince, Pointed his bow, and loosed a wilful shaft Which found the wide wing of the foremost swan Broad-spread to glide upon the free blue road, So that it fell, the bitter arrow fixed, Bright scarlet blood-gouts staining the pure plumes. Which seeing, Prince Siddartha took the bird Tenderly up, rested it in his lap Sitting with knees crossed, as Lord Buddha sits And, soothing with a touch the wild thing's fright, Composed its ruffled vans, calmed its quick heart, Caressed it into peace with light kind palms As soft as plantain-leaves an hour unrolled; And while the left hand held, the right hand drew The cruel steel forth from the wound and laid Cool leaves and healing honey on the smart. Yet all so little knew the boy of pain That curiously into his wrist he pressed The arrow's barb, and winced to feel it sting, And turned with tears to soothe his bird again. Then some one came who said, "My Prince hath shot A swan, which fell among the roses here, He bids me pray you send it. Will you send?" "Nay," quoth Siddartha, "if the bird were dead To send it to the slayer might be well, But the swan lives; my cousin hath but killed The god-like speed which throbbed in this white wing." And Devadatta answered, "The wild thing, Living or dead, is his who fetched it down; 'T was no man's in the clouds, but fall'n 't is mine, Give me my prize, fair Cousin." Then our Lord Laid the swan's neck beside his own smooth cheek And gravely spake, "Say no! the bird is mine, The first of myriad things which shall be mine By right of mercy and love's lordliness. For now I know, by what within me stirs, That I shall teach compassion unto men And be a speechless world's interpreter, Abating this accursed flood of woe, Not man's alone; but, if the Prince disputes, Let him submit this matter to the wise And we will wait their word." So was it done; In full divan the business had debate, And many thought this thing and many that, Till there arose an unknown priest who said, "If life be aught, the saviour of a life Owns more the living thing than he can own Who sought to slay--the slayer spoils and wastes, The cherisher sustains, give him the bird:" Which judgment all found just; but when the King Sought out the sage for honour, he was gone; And some one saw a hooded snake glide forth,-- The gods come ofttimes thus! So our Lord Buddh Began his works of mercy. Yet not more Knew he as yet of grief than that one bird's, Which, being healed, went joyous to its kind. But on another day the King said, "Come, Sweet son! and see the pleasaunce of the spring, And how the fruitful earth is wooed to yield Its riches to the reaper; how my realm-- Which shall be thine when the pile flames for me-- Feeds all its mouths and keeps the King's chest filled. Fair is the season with new leaves, bright blooms, Green grass, and cries of plough-time." So they rode Into a lane of wells and gardens, where, All up and down the rich red loam, the steers Strained their strong shoulders in the creaking yoke Dragging the ploughs; the fat soil rose and rolled In smooth dark waves back from the plough; who drove Planted both feet upon the leaping share To make the furrow deep; among the palms The tinkle of the rippling water rang, And where it ran the glad earth 'broidered it With balsams and the spears of lemon-grass. Elsewhere were sowers who went forth to sow; And all the jungle laughed with nesting-songs, And all the thickets rustled with small life Of lizard, bee, beetle, and creeping things Pleased at the spring-time. In the mango-sprays The sun-birds flashed; alone at his green forge Toiled the loud coppersmith; bee-eaters hawked Chasing the purple butterflies; beneath, Striped squirrels raced, the mynas perked and picked, The nine brown sisters chattered in the thorn, The pied fish-tiger hung above the pool, The egrets stalked among the buffaloes, The kites sailed circles in the golden air; About the painted temple peacocks flew, The blue doves cooed from every well, far off The village drums beat for some marriage-feast; All things spoke peace and plenty, and the Prince Saw and rejoiced. But, looking deep, he saw The thorns which grow upon this rose of life How the sweat peasant sweated for his wage, Toiling for leave to live; and how he urged The great-eyed oxen through the flaming hours, Goading their velvet flanks: then marked he, too, How lizard fed on ant, and snake on him, And kite on both; and how the fish-hawk robbed The fish-tiger of that which it had seized; The shrike chasing the bulbul, which did chase The jewelled butterflies; till everywhere Each slew a slayer and in turn was slain, Life living upon death. So the fair show Veiled one vast, savage, grim conspiracy Of mutual murder, from the worm to man, Who himself kills his fellow; seeing which-- The hungry ploughman and his labouring kine, Their dewlaps blistered with the bitter yoke, The rage to live which makes all living strife-- The Prince Siddartha sighed. "In this," he said, "That happy earth they brought me forth to see? How salt with sweat the peasant's bread! how hard The oxen's service! in the brake how fierce The war of weak and strong! i' th' air what plots! No refuge e'en in water. Go aside A space, and let me muse on what ye show." So saying, the good Lord Buddha seated him Under a jambu-tree, with ankles crossed-- As holy statues sit--and first began To meditate this deep disease of life, What its far source and whence its remedy. So vast a pity filled him, such wide love For living things, such passion to heal pain, That by their stress his princely spirit passed To ecstasy, and, purged from mortal taint Of sense and self, the boy attained thereat Dhyana, first step of "the path." There flew High overhead that hour five holy ones, Whose free wings faltered as they passed the tree. "What power superior draws us from our flight?" They asked, for spirits feel all force divine, And know the sacred presence of the pure. Then, looking downward, they beheld the Buddh Crowned with a rose-hued aureole, intent On thoughts to save; while from the grove a voice Cried, "Rishis! this is He shall help the world, Descend and worship." So the Bright Ones came And sang a song of praise, folding their wings, Then journeyed on, taking good news to Gods. But certain from the King seeking the Prince Found him still musing, though the noon was past, And the sun hastened to the western hills Yet, while all shadows moved, the jambu-tree's Stayed in one quarter, overspreading him, Lest the sloped rays should strike that sacred head; And he who saw this sight heard a voice say, Amid the blossoms of the rose-apple, "Let be the King's son! till the shadow goes Forth from his heart my shadow will not shift." Book The Second Now, when our Lord was come to eighteen years, The King commanded that there should be built Three stately houses, one of hewn square beams With cedar lining, warm for winter days; One of veined marbles, cool for summer heat; And one of burned bricks, with blue tiles bedecked, Pleasant at seed-time, when the champaks bud-- Subha, Suramma, Ramma, were their names. Delicious gardens round about them bloomed, Streams wandered wild and musky thickets stretched, With many a bright pavilion and fair lawn In midst of which Siddartha strayed at will, Some new delight provided every hour; And happy hours he knew, for life was rich, With youthful blood at quickest; yet still came The shadows of his meditation back, As the lake's silver dulls with driving clouds. Which the King marking, called his Ministers: "Bethink ye, sirs I how the old Rishi spake," He said, "and what my dream-readers foretold. This boy, more dear to me than mine heart's blood, Shall be of universal dominance, Trampling the neck of all his enemies, A King of kings--and this is in my heart;-- Or he shall tread the sad and lowly path Of self-denial and of pious pains, Gaining who knows what good, when all is lost Worth keeping; and to this his wistful eyes Do still incline amid my palaces. But ye are sage, and ye will counsel me; How may his feet be turned to that proud road Where they should walk, and all fair signs come true Which gave him Earth to rule, if he would rule?" The eldest answered, "Maharaja! love Will cure these thin distempers; weave the spell Of woman's wiles about his idle heart. What knows this noble boy of beauty yet, Eyes that make heaven forgot, and lips of balm? Find him soft wives and pretty playfellows; The thoughts ye cannot stay with brazen chains A girl's hair lightly binds." And all thought good, But the King answered, "if we seek him wives, Love chooseth ofttimes with another eye; And if we bid range Beauty's garden round, To pluck what blossom pleases, he will smile And sweetly shun the joy he knows not of." Then said another, "Roams the barasingh Until the fated arrow flies; for him, As for less lordly spirits, some one charms, Some face will seem a Paradise, some form Fairer than pale Dawn when she wakes the world. This do, my King! Command a festival Where the realm's maids shall be competitors In youth and grace, and sports that Sakyas use. Let the Prince give the prizes to the fair, And, when the lovely victors pass his seat, There shall be those who mark if one or two Change the fixed sadness of his tender cheek; So we may choose for Love with Love's own eyes, And cheat his Highness into happiness." This thing seemed good; wherefore upon a day The criers bade the young and beautiful Pass to the palace, for 't was in command To hold a court of pleasure, and the Prince Would give the prizes, something rich for all, The richest for the fairest judged. So flocked Kapilavastu's maidens to the gate, Each with her dark hair newly smoothed and bound, Eyelashes lustred with the soorma-stick, Fresh-bathed and scented; all in shawls and cloths Of gayest; slender hands and feet new-stained With crimson, and the tilka-spots stamped bright. Fair show it was of all those Indian girls Slow-pacing past the throne with large black eyes Fixed on the ground, for when they saw the Prince More than the awe of Majesty made beat Their fluttering hearts, he sate so passionless, Gentle, but so beyond them. Each maid took With down-dropped lids her gift, afraid to gaze; And if the people hailed some lovelier one Beyond her rivals worthy royal smiles, She stood like a scared antelope to touch The gracious hand, then fled to join her mates Trembling at favour, so divine he seemed, So high and saint-like and above her world. Thus filed they, one bright maid after another, The city's flowers, and all this beauteous march Was ending and the prizes spent, when last Came young Yasodhara, and they that stood Nearest Siddartha saw the princely boy Start, as the radiant girl approached. A form Of heavenly mould; a gait like Parvati's; the Eyes like a hind's in love-time, face so fair Words cannot paint its spell; and she alone Gazed full-folding her palms across her breasts On the boy's gaze, her stately neck unbent. "Is there a gift for me?" she asked, and smiled. "The gifts are gone," the Prince replied, "yet take This for amends, dear sister, of whose grace Our happy city boasts;" therewith he loosed The emerald necklet from his throat, and clasped Its green beads round her dark and silk-soft waist; And their eyes mixed, and from the look sprang love. Long after--when enlightenment was full-- Lord Buddha--being prayed why thus his heart Took fire at first glance of the Sakya girl, Answered, "We were not strangers, as to us And all it seemed; in ages long gone by A hunter's son, playing with forest girls By Yamun's spring, where Nandadevi stands, Sate umpire while they raced beneath the firs Like hares at eve that run their playful rings; One with flower-stars crowned he, one with long plumes Plucked from eyed pheasant and the junglecock, One with fir-apples; but who ran the last Came first for him, and unto her the boy Gave a tame fawn and his heart's love beside. And in the wood they lived many glad years, And in the wood they undivided died. Lo! as hid seed shoots after rainless years, So good and evil, pains and pleasures, hates And loves, and all dead deeds, come forth again Bearing bright leaves or dark, sweet fruit or sour. Thus I was he and she Yasodhara; And while the wheel of birth and death turns round, That which hath been must be between us two." But they who watched the Prince at prize-giving Saw and heard all, and told the careful King How sate Sidddrtha heedless till there passed Great Suprabuddha's child, Yasodhara; And how--at sudden sight of her--he changed, And how she gazed on him and he on her, And of the jewel-gift, and what beside Passed in their speaking glance. The fond King smiled: "Look! we have found a lure; take counsel now To fetch therewith our falcon from the clouds. Let messengers be sent to ask the maid In marriage for my son." But it was law With Sakyas, when any asked a maid Of noble house, fair and desirable, He must make good his skill in martial arts Against all suitors who should challenge it; Nor might this custom break itself for kings. Therefore her father spake: "Say to the King, The child is sought by princes far and near; If thy most gentle son can bend the bow, Sway sword, and back a horse better than they, Best would he be in all and best to us But how shall this be, with his cloistered ways?" Then the King's heart was sore, for now the Prince Begged sweet Yasodhara for wife--in vain, With Devadatta foremost at the bow, Ardjuna master of all fiery steeds, And Nanda chief in sword-play; but the Prince Laughed low and said, "These things, too, I have learned; Make proclamation that thy son will meet All comers at their chosen games. I think I shall not lose my love for such as these." So 't was given forth that on the seventh day The Prince Siddartha summoned whoso would To match with him in feats of manliness, The victor's crown to be Yasodhara. Therefore, upon the seventh day, there went The Sakya lords and town and country round Unto the maidan; and the maid went too Amid her kinsfolk, carried as a bride, With music, and with litters gaily dight, And gold-horned oxen, flower-caparisoned. Whom Devadatta claimed, of royal line, And Nanda and Ardjuna, noble both, The flower of all youths there, till the Prince came Riding his white horse Kantaka, which neighed, Astonished at this great strange world without Also Siddartha gazed with wondering eyes On all those people born beneath the throne, Otherwise housed than kings, otherwise fed, And yet so like--perchance--in joys and griefs. But when the Prince saw sweet Yasodhara, Brightly he smiled, and drew his silken rein, Leaped to the earth from Kantaka's broad back, And cried, "He is not worthy of this pearl Who is not worthiest; let my rivals prove If I have dared too much in seeking her." Then Nanda challenged for the arrow-test And set a brazen drum six gows away, Ardjuna six and Devadatta eight; But Prince Siddartha bade them set his drum Ten gows from off the line, until it seemed A cowry-shell for target. Then they loosed, And Nanda pierced his drum, Ardjuna his, And Devadatta drove a well-aimed shaft Through both sides of his mark, so that the crowd Marvelled and cried; and sweet Yasodhara Dropped the gold sari o'er her fearful eyes, Lest she should see her Prince's arrow fail. But he, taking their bow of lacquered cane, With sinews bound, and strung with silver wire, Which none but stalwart arms could draw a span, Thrummed it--low laughing--drew the twisted string Till the horns kissed, and the thick belly snapped "That is for play, not love," he said; "hath none A bow more fit for Sakya lords to use?" And one said, "There is Sinhahanu's bow, Kept in the temple since we know not when, Which none can string, nor draw if it be strung." "Fetch me," he cried, "that weapon of a man!" They brought the ancient bow, wrought of black steel, Laid with gold tendrils on its branching curves Like bison-horns; and twice Siddartha tried Its strength across his knee, then spake "Shoot now With this, my cousins!" but they could not bring The stubborn arms a hand's-breadth nigher use; Then the Prince, lightly leaning, bent the bow, Slipped home the eye upon the notch, and twanged Sharply the cord, which, like an eagle's wing Thrilling the air, sang forth so clear and loud That feeble folk at home that day inquired "What is this sound?" and people answered them, "It is the sound of Sinhahanu's bow, Which the King's son has strung and goes to shoot;" Then fitting fair a shaft, he drew and loosed, And the keen arrow clove the sky, and drave Right through that farthest drum, nor stayed its flight, But skimmed the plain beyond, past reach of eye. Then Devadatta challenged with the sword, And clove a Talas-tree six fingers thick; Ardjuna seven; and Nanda cut through nine; But two such stems together grew, and both Siddartha's blade shred at one flashing stroke, Keen, but so smooth that the straight trunks upstood, And Nanda cried, "His edge turned!" and the maid Trembled anew seeing the trees erect, Until the Devas of the air, who watched, Blew light breaths from the south, and both green crowns Crashed in the sand, clean-felled. Then brought they steeds, High-mettled, nobly-bred, and three times scoured Around the maidan, but white Kantaka Left even the fleetest far behind--so swift, That ere the foam fell from his mouth to earth Twenty spear-lengths he flew; but Nanda said, "We too might win with such as Kantaka; Bring an unbroken horse, and let men see Who best can back him." So the syces brought A stallion dark as night, led by three chains, Fierce-eyed, with nostrils wide and tossing mane, Unshod, unsaddled, for no rider yet Had crossed him. Three times each young Sakya Sprang to his mighty back, but the hot steed Furiously reared, and flung them to the plain In dust and shame; only Ardjuna held His seat awhile, and, bidding loose the chains, Lashed the black flank, and shook the bit, and held The proud jaws fast with grasp of master-hand, So that in storms of wrath and rage and fear The savage stallion circled once the plain Half-tamed; but sudden turned with naked teeth, Gripped by the foot Ardjuna, tore him down, And would have slain him, but the grooms ran in, Fettering the maddened beast. Then all men cried, "Let not Siddartha meddle with this Bhut, Whose liver is a tempest, and his blood Red flame;" but the Prince said, "Let go the chains, Give me his forelock only," which he held With quiet grasp, and, speaking some low word, Laid his right palm across the stallion's eyes, And drew it gently down the angry face, And all along the neck and panting flanks, Till men astonished saw the night-black horse Sink his fierce crest and stand subdued and meek, As though he knew our Lord and worshipped him. Nor stirred he while Siddartha mounted, then Went soberly to touch of knee and rein Before all eyes, so that the people said, "Strive no more, for Siddartha is the best." And all the suitors answered "He is best!" And Suprabuddha, father of the maid, Said, "It was in our hearts to find thee best, Being dearest, yet what magic taught thee more Of manhood 'mid thy rose-bowers and thy dreams Than war and chase and world's work bring to these? But wear, fair Prince, the treasure thou halt won." Then at a word the lovely Indian girl Rose from her place above the throng, and took A crown of mogra-flowers and lightly drew The veil of black and gold across her brow, Proud pacing past the youths, until she came To where Siddartha stood in grace divine, New lighted from the night-dark steed, which bent Its strong neck meekly underneath his arm. Before the Prince lowly she bowed, and bared Her face celestial beaming with glad love; Then on his neck she hung the fragrant wreath, And on his breast she laid her perfect head, And stooped to touch his feet with proud glad eyes, Saying, "Dear Prince, behold me, who am thine!" And all the throng rejoiced, seeing them pass Hand fast in hand, and heart beating with heart, The veil of black and gold drawn close again. Long after--when enlightenment was come-- They prayed Lord Buddha touching all, and why She wore this black and gold, and stepped so proud. And the World-honoured answered, "Unto me This was unknown, albeit it seemed half known; For while the wheel of birth and death turns round, Past things and thoughts, and buried lives come back. I now remember, myriad rains ago, What time I roamed Himala's hanging woods, A tiger, with my striped and hungry kind; I, who am Buddh, couched in the kusa grass Gazing with green blinked eyes upon the herds Which pastured near and nearer to their death Round my day-lair; or underneath the stars I roamed for prey, savage, insatiable, Sniffing the paths for track of man and deer. Amid the beasts that were my fellows then, Met in deep jungle or by reedy jheel, A tigress, comeliest of the forest, set The males at war; her hide was lit with gold, Black-broidered like the veil Yasodhara Wore for me; hot the strife waged in that wood With tooth and claw, while underneath a neem The fair beast watched us bleed, thus fiercely wooed. And I remember, at the end she came Snarling past this and that torn forest-lord Which I had conquered, and with fawning jaws Licked my quick-heaving flank, and with me went Into the wild with proud steps, amorously. The wheel of birth and death turns low and high." Therefore the maid was given unto the Prince A willing spoil; and when the stars were good-- Mesha, the Red Ram, being Lord of heaven-- The marriage feast was kept, as Sakyas use, The golden gadi set, the carpet spread, The wedding garlands hung, the arm-threads tied, The sweet cake broke, the rice and attar thrown, The two straws floated on the reddened milk, Which, coming close, betokened "love till death;" The seven steps taken thrice around the fire, The gifts bestowed on holy men, the alms And temple offerings made, the mantras sung, The garments of the bride and bridegroom tied. Then the grey father spake: "Worshipful Prince, She that was ours henceforth is only thine; Be good to her, who hath her life in thee." Wherewith they brought home sweet Yasodhara, With songs and trumpets, to the Prince's arms, And love was all in all. Yet not to love Alone trusted the King; love's prison-house Stately and beautiful he bade them build, So that in all the earth no marvel was Like Vishramvan, the Prince's pleasure-place. Midway in those wide palace-grounds there rose A verdant hill whose base Rohini bathed, Murmuring adown from Himalay's broad feet, To bear its tribute into Gunga's waves. Southward a growth of tamarind trees and sal, Thick set with pale sky-coloured ganthi flowers, Shut out the world, save if the city's hum Came on the wind no harsher than when bees Hum out of sight in thickets. Northward soared The stainless ramps of huge Hamala's wall, Ranged in white ranks against the blue-untrod Infinite, wonderful--whose uplands vast, And lifted universe of crest and crag, Shoulder and shelf, green slope and icy horn, Riven ravine, and splintered precipice Led climbing thought higher and higher, until It seemed to stand in heaven and speak with gods. Beneath the snows dark forests spread, sharp laced With leaping cataracts and veiled with clouds Lower grew rose-oaks and the great fir groves Where echoed pheasant's call and panther's cry Clatter of wild sheep on the stones, and scream Of circling eagles: under these the plain Gleamed like a praying-carpet at the foot Of those divinest altars. 'Fronting this The builders set the bright pavilion up, 'Fair-planted on the terraced hill, with towers On either flank and pillared cloisters round. Its beams were carved with stories of old time-- Radha and Krishna and the sylvan girls-- Sita and Hanuman and Draupadi; And on the middle porch God Ganesha, With disc and hook--to bring wisdom and wealth-- Propitious sate, wreathing his sidelong trunk. By winding ways of garden and of court The inner gate was reached, of marble wrought, White with pink veins; the lintel lazuli, The threshold alabaster, and the doors Sandalwood, cut in pictured panelling; Whereby to lofty halls and shadowy bowers Passed the delighted foot, on stately stairs, Through latticed galleries, 'neath painted roofs And clustering columns, where cool fountains--fringed With lotus and nelumbo--danced, and fish Gleamed through their crystal, scarlet, gold, and blue. Great-eyed gazelles in sunny alcoves browsed The blown red roses; birds of rainbow wing Fluttered among the palms; doves, green and grey, Built their safe nests on gilded cornices; Over the shining pavements peacocks drew The splendours of their trains, sedately watched By milk-white herons and the small house-owls. The plum-necked parrots swung from fruit to fruit; The yellow sunbirds whirred from bloom to bloom, The timid lizards on the lattice basked Fearless, the squirrels ran to feed from hand, For all was peace: the shy black snake, that gives Fortune to households, sunned his sleepy coils Under the moon-flowers, where the musk-deer played, And brown-eyed monkeys chattered to the crows. And all this house of love was peopled fair With sweet attendance, so that in each part With lovely sights were gentle faces found, Soft speech and willing service, each one glad To gladden, pleased at pleasure, proud to obey; Till life glided beguiled, like a smooth stream Banked by perpetual flowers, Yasodhara Queen of the enchanting Court. But innermost, Beyond the richness of those hundred halls, A secret chamber lurked, where skill had spent All lovely fantasies to lull the mind. The entrance of it was a cloistered square-- Roofed by the sky, and in the midst a tank-- Of milky marble built, and laid with slabs Of milk-white marble; bordered round the tank And on the steps, and all along the frieze With tender inlaid work of agate-stones. Cool as to tread in summer-time on snows It was to loiter there; the sunbeams dropped Their gold, and, passing into porch and niche, Softened to shadows, silvery, pale, and dim, As if the very Day paused and grew Eve. In love and silence at that bower's gate; For there beyond the gate the chamber was, Beautiful, sweet; a wonder of the world! Soft light from perfumed lamps through windows fell Of nakre and stained stars of lucent film On golden cloths outspread, and silken beds, And heavy splendour of the purdah's fringe, Lifted to take only the loveliest in. Here, whether it was night or day none knew, For always streamed that softened light, more bright Than sunrise, but as tender as the eve's; And always breathed sweet airs, more joy-giving Than morning's, but as cool as midnight's breath; And night and day lutes sighed, and night and day Delicious foods were spread, and dewy fruits, Sherbets new chilled with snows of Himalay, And sweetmeats made of subtle daintiness, With sweet tree-milk in its own ivory cup. And night and day served there a chosen band Of nautch girls, cup-bearers, and cymballers, Delicate, dark-browed ministers of love, Who fanned the sleeping eyes of the happy Prince, And when he waked, led back his thoughts to bliss With music whispering through the blooms, and charm Of amorous songs and dreamy dances, linked By chime of ankle-bells and wave of arms And silver vina-strings; while essences Of musk and champak and the blue haze spread From burning spices soothed his soul again To drowse by sweet Yasodhara; and thus Siddartha lived forgetting. Furthermore, The King commanded that within those walls No mention should be made of death or age, Sorrow, or pain, or sickness. If one drooped In the lovely Court--her dark glance dim, her feet Faint in the dance--the guiltless criminal Passed forth an exile from that Paradise, Lest he should see and suffer at her woe. Bright-eyed intendants watched to execute Sentence on such as spake of the harsh world Without, where aches and plagues were, tears and fears, And wail of mourners, and grim fume of pyres. `T was treason if a thread of silver strayed In tress of singing-girl or nautch-dancer; And every dawn the dying rose was plucked, The dead leaves hid, all evil sights removed For said the King, "If he shall pass his youth Far from such things as move to wistfulness, And brooding on the empty eggs of thought, The shadow of this fate, too vast for man, May fade, belike, and I shall see him grow To that great stature of fair sovereignty When he shall rule all lands--if he will rule-- The King of kings and glory of his time." Wherefore, around that pleasant prison house Where love was gaoler and delights its bars, But far removed from sight--the King bade build A massive wall, and in the wall a gate With brazen folding-doors, which but to roll Back on their hinges asked a hundred arms; Also the noise of that prodigious gate Opening was heard full half a yojana. And inside this another gate he made, And yet within another--through the three Must one pass if he quit that pleasure-house. Three mighty gates there were, bolted and barred, And over each was set a faithful watch; And the King's order said, "Suffer no man To pass the gates, though he should be the Prince This on your lives--even though it be my son." Book The Third In which calm home of happy life and love Ligged our Lord Buddha, knowing not of woe, Nor want, nor pain, nor plague, nor age, nor death, Save as when sleepers roam dim seas in dreams, And land awearied on the shores of day, Bringing strange merchandise from that black voyage. Thus ofttimes when he lay with gentle head Lulled on the dark breasts of Yasodhara, Her fond hands fanning slow his sleeping lids, He would start up and cry, "My world! Oh, world! I hear! I know! I come!" And she would ask, "What ails my Lord?" with large eyes terrorstruck; For at such times the pity in his look Was awful, and his visage like a god's. Then would he smile again to stay her tears, And bid the vinas sound; but once they set A stringed gourd on the sill, there where the wind Could linger o'er its notes and play at will-- Wild music makes the wind on silver strings-- And those who lay around heard only that; But Prince Siddartha heard the Devas play, And to his ears they sang such words as these:-- We are the voices of the wandering wind, Which moan for rest and rest can never find; Lo! as the wind is so is mortal life, A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife. Wherefore and whence we are ye cannot know, Nor where life springs nor whither life doth go; We are as ye are, ghosts from the inane, What pleasure have we of our changeful pain? What pleasure hast thou of thy changeless bliss? Nay, if love lasted, there were joy in this; But life's way is the wind's way, all these things Are but brief voices breathed on shifting strings. O Maya's son! because we roam the earth Moan we upon these strings; we make no mirth, So many woes we see in many lands, So many streaming eyes and wringing hands. Yet mock we while we wail, for, could they know, This life they cling to is but empty show; 'Twere all as well to bid a cloud to stand, Or hold a running river with the hand. But thou that art to save, thine hour is nigh! The sad world waileth in its misery, The blind world stumbleth on its round of pain; Rise, Maya's child! wake! slumber not again! We are the voices of the wandering wind Wander thou, too, O Prince, thy rest to find; Leave love for love of lovers, for woe's sake Quit state for sorrow, and deliverance make. So sigh we, passing o'er the silver strings, To thee who know'st not yet of earthly things; So say we; mocking, as we pass away, These lovely shadows wherewith thou dost play. Thereafter it befell he sate at eve Amid his beauteous Court, holding the hand Of sweet Yasodhara, and some maid told-- With breaks of music when her rich voice dropped-- An ancient tale to speed the hour of dusk, Of love, and of a magic horse, and lands Wonderful, distant, where pale peoples dwelled And where the sun at night sank into seas. Then spake he, sighing, "Chitra brings me back. The wind's song in the strings with that fair tale. Give her, Yasodhara, thy pearl for thanks. But thou, my pearl! is there so wide a world? Is there a land which sees the great sun roll Into the waves, and are there hearts like ours, Countless, unknown, not happy--it may be-- Whom we might succour if we knew of them? Ofttimes I marvel, as the Lord of day Treads from the east his kingly road of gold, Who first on the world's edge hath hailed his beam, The children of the morning; oftentimes, Even in thine arms and on thy breasts, bright wife, Sore have I panted, at the sun's decline, To pass with him into that crimson west And see the peoples of the evening. There must be many we should love--how else? Now have I in this hour an ache, at last, Thy soft lips cannot kiss away: oh, girl! O Chitra! you that know of fairyland! Where tether they that swift steed of the tale? My palace for one day upon his back, To ride and ride and see the spread of the earth! Nay, if I had yon callow vulture's plumes-- The carrion heir of wider realms than mine-- How would I stretch for topmost Himalay, Light where the rose-gleam lingers on those snows, And strain my gaze with searching what is round! Why have I never seen and never sought? Tell me what lies beyond our brazen gates." Then one replied, "The city first, fair Prince! The temples, and the gardens, and the groves, And then the fields, and afterwards fresh fields, With nullahs, maidans, jungle, koss on koss; And next King Bimbasara's realm, and then The vast flat world, with crores on crores of folk." "Good," said Siddartha, "let the word be sent That Channa yoke my chariot--at noon Tomorrow I shall ride and see beyond." Whereof they told the King: "Our Lord, thy son, Wills that his chariot be yoked at noon, That he may ride abroad and see mankind." "Yea!" spake the careful King, "'tis time he see! But let the criers go about and bid My city deck itself, so there be met No noisome sight; and let none blind or maimed, None that is sick or stricken deep in years, No leper, and no feeble folk come forth." Therefore the stones were swept, and up and down The water-carriers sprinkled all the streets From spirting skins, the housewives scattered fresh Red powder on their thresholds, strung new wreaths, And trimmed the tulsi-bush before their doors. The paintings on the walls were heightened up With liberal brush, the trees set thick with flags, The idols gilded; in the four-went ways Suryadeva and the great gods shone 'Mid shrines of leaves; so that the city seemed A capital of some enchanted land. Also the criers passed, with drum and gong, Proclaiming loudly, "Ho! all citizens, The King commands that there be seen today No evil sight: let no one blind or maimed, None that is sick or stricken deep in years, No leper, and no feeble folk go forth. Let none, too, burn his dead nor bring them out Till nightfall. Thus Suddhodana commands." So all was comely and the houses trim Throughout Kapilavastu, while the Prince Came forth in painted car, which two steers drew, Snow-white, with swinging dewlaps and huge humps Wrinkled against the carved and lacquered yoke. Goodly it was to mark the people's joy Greeting their Prince; and glad. Siddartha waxed At sight of all those liege and friendly folk Bright-clad and laughing as if life were good. "Fair is the world," he said, "it likes me well! And light and kind these men that are not kings, And sweet my sisters here, who toil and tend; What have I done for these to make them thus? Why, if I love them, should those children know? I pray take up yon pretty Sakya boy Who flung us flowers, and let him ride with me. How good it is to reign in realms like this! How simple pleasure is, if these be pleased Because I come abroad! How many things I need not if such little households hold Enough to make our city full of smiles! Drive, Channa! through the gates, and let me see More of this gracious world I have not known." So passed they through the gates, a joyous crowd Thronging about the wheels, whereof some ran Before the oxen, throwing wreaths, some stroked Their silken flanks, some brought them rice and cakes, All crying, "Jai! jai! for our noble Prince!" Thus all the path was kept with gladsome looks And filled with fair sights--for the King's word was That such should be--when midway in the road, Slow tottering from the hovel where he hid, Crept forth a wretch in rags, haggard and foul, An old, old man, whose shrivelled skin, suntanned, Clung like a beast's hide to his fleshless bones. Bent was his back with load of many days, His eyepits red with rust of ancient tears, His dim orbs blear with rheum, his toothless jaws Wagging with palsy and the fright to see So many and such joy. One skinny hand Clutched a worn staff to prop his quavering limbs, And one was pressed upon the ridge of ribs Whence came in gasps the heavy painful breath. "Alms!" moaned he, "give, good people! for I die Tomorrow or the next day!" then the cough Choked him, but still he stretched his palm, and stood Blinking, and groaning 'mid his spasms, "Alms!" Then those around had wrenched his feeble feet Aside, and thrust him from the road again, Saying, "The Prince! dost see? get to thy lair!" But that Siddartha cried, "Let be! let be! Channa! what thing is this who seems a man, Yet surely only seems, being so bowed, So miserable, so horrible, so sad? Are men born sometimes thus? What meaneth he Moaning 'tomorrow or next day I die?' Finds he no food that so his bones jut forth? What woe hath happened to this piteous one?" Then answer made the charioteer, "Sweet Prince! This is no other than an aged man. Some fourscore years ago his back was straight, His eye bright, and his body goodly: now The thievish years have sucked his sap away, Pillaged his strength and filched his will and wit; His lamp has lost its oil, the wick burns black; What life he keeps is one poor lingering spark Which flickers for the finish: such is age; Why should your Highness heed?" Then spake the Prince "But shall this come to others, or to all, Or is it rare that one should be as he?" "Most noble," answered Channa, "even as he, Will all these grow if they shall live so long." "But," quoth the Prince, "if I shall live as long Shall I be thus; and if Yasodhara Live fourscore years, is this old age for her, Jalini, little Hasta, Gautami, And Gunga, and the others?" "Yea, great Sir!" The charioteer replied. Then spake the Prince "Turn back, and drive me to my house again! I have seen that I did not think to see." Which pondering, to his beauteous Court returned Wistful Siddartha, sad of mien and mood; Nor tasted he the white cakes nor the fruits Spread for the evening feast, nor once looked up While the best palace-dancers strove to charm Nor spake--save one sad thing--when wofully Yasodhara sank to his feet and wept, Sighing, "Hath not my Lord comfort in me?" "Ah, Sweet!" he said, "such comfort that my soul Aches, thinking it must end, for it will end, And we shall both grow old, Yasodhara! Loveless, unlovely, weak, and old, and bowed. Nay, though we locked up love and life with lips So close that night and day our breaths grew one Time would thrust in between to filch away My passion and thy grace, as black Night steals The rose-gleams from you peak, which fade to grey And are not seen to fade. This have I found, And all my heart is darkened with its dread, And all my heart is fixed to think how Love Might save its sweetness from the slayer, Time, Who makes men old." So through that night he sate Sleepless, uncomforted. And all that night The King Suddhodana dreamed troublous dreams. The first fear of his vision was a flag Broad, glorious, glistening with a golden sun, The mark of Indra; but a strong wind blew, Rending its folds divine, and dashing it Into the dust; whereat a concourse came Of shadowy Ones, who took the spoiled silk up And bore it eastward from the city gates. The second fear was ten huge elephants, With silver tusks and feet that shook the earth, Trampling the southern road in mighty march; And he who sate upon the foremost beast Was the King's son--the others followed him. The third fear of the vision was a car, Shining with blinding light, which four steeds drew, Snorting white smoke and champing fiery foam; And in the car the Prince Siddhartha sate. The fourth fear was a wheel which turned and turned, With nave of burning gold and jewelled spokes, And strange things written on the binding tire, Which seemed both fire and music as it whirled. The fifth fear was a mighty drum, set down Midway between the city and the hills, On which the Prince beat with an iron mace, So that the sound pealed like a thunderstorm, Rolling around the sky and far away. The sixth fear was a tower, which rose and rose High o'er the city till its stately head Shone crowned with clouds, and on the top the Prince Stood, scattering from both hands, this way and that, Gems of most lovely light, as if it rained Jacynths and rubies; and the whole world came, Striving to seize those treasures as they fell Towards the four quarters. But the seventh fear was A noise of wailing, and behold six men Who wept and gnashed their teeth, and laid their palms Upon their mouths, walking disconsolate. These seven fears made the vision of his sleep, But none of all his wisest dream-readers Could tell their meaning. Then the King was wroth, Saying, "There cometh evil to my house, And none of ye have wit to help me know What the great gods portend sending me this." So in the city men went sorrowful Because the King had dreamed seven signs of fear Which none could read; but to the gate there came An aged man, in robe of deer-skin clad, By guise a hermit, known to none; he cried, "Bring me before the King, for I can read The vision of his sleep"; who, when he heard The sevenfold mysteries of the midnight dream, Bowed reverent and said: "O Maharaj! I hail this favoured House, whence shall arise A wider-reaching splendour than the sun's! Lo! all these seven fears are seven joys, Whereof the first, where thou didst see a flag-- Broad, glorious, gilt with Indra's badge--cast down And carried out, did signify the end Of old faiths and beginning of the new, For there is change with gods not less than men, And as the days pass kalpas pass at length. The ten great elephants that shook the earth The ten great gifts of wisdom signify, In strength whereof the Prince shall quit his state And shake the world with passage of the Truth. The four flame-breathing horses of the car Are those four fearless virtues which shall bring Thy son from doubt and gloom to gladsome light; The wheel that turned with nave of burning gold Was that most precious Wheel of perfect Law Which he shall turn in sight of all the world. The mighty drum whereon the Prince did beat, Till the sound filled all lands, doth signify The thunder of the preaching of the Word Which he shall preach; the tower that grew to heaven The growing of the Gospel of this Buddh Sets forth; and those rare jewels scattered thence The untold treasures are of that good Law To gods and men dear and desirable. Such is the interpretation of the tower; But for those six men weeping with shut mouths, They are the six chief teachers whom thy son Shall, with bright truth and speech unanswerable, Convince of foolishness. O King! rejoice; The fortune of my Lord the Prince is more Than kingdoms, and his hermit-rags will be Beyond fine cloths of gold. This was thy dream! And in seven nights and days these things shall fall." So spake the holy man, and lowly made The eight prostrations, touching thrice the ground; Then turned and passed; but when the King bade send A rich gift after him, the messengers Brought word, "We came to where he entered in At Chandra's temple, but within was none Save a grey owl which fluttered from the shrine." The gods come sometimes thus. But the sad King Marvelled, and gave command that new delights Be compassed to enthrall Siddartha's heart Amid those dancers of his pleasure-house, Also he set at all the brazen doors A doubled guard. Yet who shall shut out Fate? For once again the spirit of the Prince Was moved to see this world beyond his gates, This life of man, so pleasant if its waves Ran not to waste and woful finishing In Time's dry sands. "I pray you let me view Our city as it is," such was his prayer To King Suddhodana. "Your Majesty In tender heed hath warned the folk before To put away ill things and common sights, And make their faces glad to gladden me, And all the causeways gay; yet have I learned This is not daily life, and if I stand Nearest, my father, to the realm and thee, Fain would I know the people and the streets, Their simple usual ways, and workday deeds, And lives which those men live who are not kings. Give me good leave, dear Lord, to pass unknown Beyond my happy gardens; I shall come The more contented to their peace again, Or wiser, father, if not well content. Therefore, I pray thee, let me go at will Tomorrow, with my servants, through the streets." And the King said, among his Ministers "Belike this second flight may mend the first. Note how the falcon starts at every sight New from his hood, but what a quiet eye Cometh of freedom; let my son see all, And bid them bring me tidings of his mind." Thus on the morrow, when the noon was come, The Prince and Channa passed beyond the gates, Which opened to the signet of the King, Yet knew not they who rolled the great doors back It was the King's son in that merchant's robe, And in the clerkly dress his charioteer. Forth fared they by the common way afoot, Mingling with all the Sakya citizens, Seeing the glad and sad things of the town: The painted streets alive with hum of noon, The traders cross-legged 'mid their spice and grain, The buyers with their money in the cloth, The war of words to cheapen this or that, The shout to clear the road, the huge stone wheels, The strong slow oxen and their rustling loads, The singing bearers with the palanquins, The broad-necked hamals sweating in the sun, The housewives bearing water from the well With balanced chatties, and athwart their hips The black-eyed babes; the fly-swarmed sweetmeat shops, The weaver at his loom, the cotton-bow Twangling, the millstones grinding meal, the dogs Prowling for orts, the skilful armourer With tong and hammer linking shirts of mail, The blacksmith with a mattock and a spear Reddening together in his coals, the school Where round their Guru, in a grave half-moon, The Sakya children sang the mantra through, And learned the greater and the lesser gods; The dyers stretching waistcloths in the sun Wet from the vats--orange, and rose, and green; The soldiers clanking past with swords and shields, The camel-drivers rocking on the humps, The Brahman proud, the martial Kshatriya, The humble toiling Sudra; here a throng Gathered to watch some chattering snake-tamer Wind round his wrist the living jewellery Of asp and nag, or charm the hooded death To angry dance with drone of beaded gourd; There a long line of drums and horns, which went, With steeds gay painted and silk canopies, To bring the young bride home; and here a wife Stealing with cakes and garlands to the god To pray her husband's safe return from trade, Or beg a boy next birth; hard by the booths Where the sweat potters beat the noisy brass For lamps and lotas; thence, by temple walls And gateways, to the river and the bridge Under the city walls. These had they passed When from the roadside moaned a mournful voice, "Help, masters! lift me to my feet; oh, help! Or I shall die before I reach my house!" A stricken wretch it was, whose quivering frame, Caught by some deadly plague, lay in the dust Writhing, with fiery purple blotches specked; The chill sweat beaded on his brow, his mouth Was dragged awry with twichings of sore pain, The wild eyes swam with inward agony. Gasping, he clutched the grass to rise, and rose Half-way, then sank, with quaking feeble limbs And scream of terror, crying, "Ah, the pain! Good people, help!" whereon Siddartha ran, Lifted the woful man with tender hands, With sweet looks laid the sick head on his knee, And while his soft touch comforted the wretch, Asked: "Brother, what is ill with thee? what harm Hath fallen? wherefore canst thou not arise? Why is it, Channa, that he pants and moans, And gasps to speak and sighs so pitiful?" Then spake the charioteer: "Great Prince! this man Is smitten with some pest; his elements Are all confounded; in his veins the blood, Which ran a wholesome river, leaps and boils A fiery flood; his heart, which kept good time, Beats like an ill-played drum-skin, quick and slow; His sinews slacken like a bow-string slipped; The strength is gone from ham, and loin, and neck, And all the grace and joy of manhood fled; This is a sick man with the fit upon him. See how be plucks and plucks to seize his grief, And rolls his bloodshot orbs and grinds his teeth, And draws his breath as if 'twere choking smoke. Lo! now he would be dead, but shall not die Until the plague hath had its work in him, Killing the nerves which die before the life; Then, when his strings have cracked with agony And all his bones are empty of the sense To ache, the plague will quit and light elsewhere. Oh, sir! it is not good to hold him so! The harm may pass, and strike thee, even thee." But spake the Prince, still comforting the man, "And are there others, are there many thus? Or might it be to me as now with him?" "Great Lord!" answered the charioteer, "this comes In many forms to all men; griefs and wounds, Sickness and tetters, palsies, leprosies, Hot fevers, watery wastings, issues, blains Befall all flesh and enter everywhere." "Come such ills unobserved?" the Prince inquired. And Channa said: "Like the sly snake they come That stings unseen; like the striped murderer, Who waits to spring from the Karunda bush, Hiding beside the jungle path; or like The lightning, striking these and sparing those, As chance may send." "Then all men live in fear?" "So live they, Prince!" "And none can say, `I sleep Happy and whole tonight, and so shall wake'?" "None say it." "And the end of many aches, Which come unseen, and will come when they come, Is this, a broken body and sad mind, And so old age?" "Yea, if men last as long." "But if they cannot bear their agonies, Or if they will not bear, and seek a term; Or if they bear, and be, as this man is, Too weak except for groans, and so still live, And growing old, grow older, then what end?" "They die, Prince." "Die?" "Yea, at the last comes death, In whatsoever way, whatever hour. Some few grow old, most suffer and fall sick, But all must die--behold, where comes the Dead!" Then did Siddartha raise his eyes, and see Fast pacing towards the river brink a band Of wailing people, foremost one who swung An earthen bowl with lighted coals, behind The kinsmen shorn, with mourning marks, ungirt, Crying aloud, "O Rama, Rama, hear! Call upon Rama, brothers"; next the bier, Knit of four poles with bamboos interlaced, Whereon lay, stark and stiff, feet foremost, lean, Chapfallen, sightless, hollow-flanked, a-grin, Sprinkled with red and yellow dust--the Dead, Whom at the four-went ways they turned head first, And crying "Rama, Rama!" carried on To where a pile was reared beside the stream; Thereon they laid him, building fuel up-- Good sleep hath one that slumbers on that bed! He shall not wake for cold albeit he lies Naked to all the airs--for soon they set The red flame to the corners four, which crept, And licked, and flickered, finding out his flesh And feeding on it with swift hissing tongues, And crackle of parched skin, and snap of joint; Till the fat smoke thinned and the ashes sank Scarlet and grey, with here and there a bone White midst the grey--the total of the man. Then spake the Prince, "Is this the end which comes To all who live?" "This is the end that comes To all," quoth Channa; "he upon the pyre-- Whose remnants are so petty that the crows Caw hungrily, then quit the fruitless feast-- Ate, drank, laughed, loved, and lived, and liked life well. Then came--who knows?--some gust of junglewind, A stumble on the path, a taint in the tank, A snake's nip, half a span of angry steel, A chill, a fishbone, or a falling tile, And life was over and the man is dead. No appetites, no pleasures, and no pains Hath such; the kiss upon his lips is nought, The fire-scorch nought; he smelleth not his flesh A-roast, nor yet the sandal and the spice They burn; the taste is emptied from his mouth, The hearing of his ears is clogged, the sight Is blinded in his eyes; those whom he loved Wail desolate, for even that must go, The body, which was lamp unto the life, Or worms will have a horrid feast of it. Here is the common destiny of flesh. The high and low, the good and bad, must die, And then, 't is taught, begin anew and live Somewhere, somehow,--who knows?--and so again The pangs, the parting, and the lighted pile-- Such is man's round." But lo! Siddartha turned Eyes gleaming with divine tears to the sky, Eyes lit with heavenly pity to the earth; From sky to earth he looked, from earth to sky, As if his spirit sought in lonely flight Some far-off vision, linking this and that, Lost, past, but searchable, but seen, but known. Then cried he, while his lifted countenance Glowed with the burning passion of a love Unspeakable, the ardour of a hope Boundless, insatiate: "Oh! suffering world, Oh! known and unknown of my common flesh, Caught in this common net of death and woe, And life which binds to both! I see, I feel The vastness of the agony of earth, The vainness of its joys, the mockery Of all its best, the anguish of its worst; Since pleasures end in pain, and youth in age, And love in loss, and life in hateful death, And death in unknown lives, which will but yoke Men to their wheel again to whirl the round Of false delights and woes that are not false. Me too this lure hath cheated, so it seemed Lovely to live, and life a sunlit stream For ever flowing in a changeless peace; Whereas the foolish ripple of the flood Dances so lightly down by bloom and lawn Only to pour its crystal quicklier Into the foul salt sea. The veil is rent Which blinded me! I am as all these men Who cry upon their gods and are not heard Or are not heeded--yet there must be aid! For them and me and all there must be help! Perchance the gods have need of help themselves Being so feeble that when sad lips cry They cannot save! I would not let one cry Whom I could save! How can it be that Brahm Would make a world and keep it miserable, Since, if all-powerful, he leaves it so, He is not good, and if not powerful, He is not God?--Channa! lead home again! It is enough I mine eyes have seen enough!" Which when the King heard, at the gates he set A triple guard, and bade no man should pass By day or night, issuing or entering in, Until the days were numbered of that dream. Book The Fourth But when the days were numbered, then befell The parting of our Lord--which was to be-- Whereby came wailing in the Golden Home, Woe to the King and sorrow o'er the land, But for all flesh deliverance, and that Law Which whoso hears, the same shall make him free. Softly the Indian night sinks on the plains At full moon in the month of Chaitra Shud, When mangoes redden and the asoka buds Sweeten the breeze, and Rama's birthday comes, And all the fields are glad and all the towns. Softly that night fell over Vishramvan, Fragrant with blooms and jewelled thick with stars, And cool with mountain airs sighing adown From snow-flats on Himala high-outspread; For the moon swung above the eastern peaks, Climbing the spangled vault, and lighting clear Robini's ripples and the hills and plains, And all the sleeping land, and near at hand Silvering those roof-tops of the pleasure-house, Where nothing stirred nor sign of watching was, Save at the outer gates, whose warders cried Mudra, the watchword, and the countersign Angana, and the watch-drums beat a round; Whereat the earth lay still, except for call Of prowling jackals, and the ceaseless trill Of crickets on the garden grounds. Within-- Where the moon glittered through the laceworked stone, Lighting the walls of pearl-shell and the floors Paved with veined marble--softly fell her beams On such rare company of Indian girls, It seemed some chamber sweet in Paradise Where Devis rested. All the chosen ones Of Prince Siddartha's pleasure-home were there, The brightest and most faithful of the Court, Each form so lovely in the peace of sleep, That you had said "This is the pearl of all!" Save that beside her or beyond her lay Fairer and fairer, till the pleasured gaze Roamed o'er that feast of beauty as it roams From gem to gem in some great goldsmith-work, Caught by each colour till the next is seen. With careless grace they lay, their soft brown limbs Part hidden, part revealed; their glossy hair Bound back with gold or flowers, or flowing loose In black waves down the shapely nape and neck. Lulled into pleasant dreams by happy toils, They slept, no wearier than jewelled birds Which sing and love all day, then under wing Fold head till morn bids sing and love again. Lamps of chased silver swinging from the roof In silver chains, and fed with perfumed oils, Made with the moonbeams tender lights and shades, Whereby were seen the perfect lines of grace, The bosom's placid heave, the soft stained palms Drooping or clasped, the faces fair and dark, The great arched brows, the parted lips, the teeth Like pearls a merchant picks to make a string, The satin-lidded eyes, with lashes dropped Sweeping the delicate cheeks, the rounded wrists The smooth small feet with bells and bangles decked, Tinkling low music where some sleeper moved, Breaking her smiling dream of some new dance Praised by the Prince, some magic ring to find, Some fairy love-gift. Here one lay full-length, Her vina by her cheek, and in its strings The little fingers still all interlaced As when the last notes of her light song played Those radiant eyes to sleep and sealed her own. Another slumbered folding in her arms A desert-antelope, its slender head Buried with back-sloped horns between her breasts Soft nestling; it was eating--when both drowsed-- Red roses, and her loosening hand still held A rose half-mumbled, while a rose-leaf curled Between the deer's lips. Here two friends had dozed Together, wearing mogra-buds, which bound Their sister-sweetness in a starry chain, Linking them limb to limb and heart to heart, One pillowed on the blossoms, one on her. Another, ere she slept, was stringing stones To make a necklet--agate, onyx, sard, Coral, and moonstone--round her wrist it gleamed A coil of splendid colour, while she held, Unthreaded yet, the bead to close it up Green turkis, carved with golden gods and scripts. Lulled by the cadence of the garden stream, Thus lay they on the clustered carpets, each A girlish rose with shut leaves, waiting dawn To open and make daylight beautiful. This was the antechamber of the Prince; But at the purdah's fringe the sweetest slept-- Gunga and Gotami--chief ministers In that still house of love. The purdah hung, Crimson and blue, with broidered threads of gold, Across a portal carved in sandal-wood, Whence by three steps the way was to the bower Of inmost splendour, and the marriage-couch Set on a dais soft with silver cloths, Where the foot fell as though it trod on piles Of neem-blooms. All the walls, were plates of pearl, Cut shapely from the shells of Lanka's wave; And o'er the alabaster roof there ran Rich inlayings of lotus and of bird, Wrought in skilled work of lazulite and jade, Jacynth and jasper; woven round the dome, And down the sides, and all about the frames Wherein were set the fretted lattices, Through which there breathed, with moonlight and cool airs, Scents from the shell-flowers and the jasmine sprays; Not bringing thither grace or tenderness Sweeter than shed from those fair presences Within the place--the beauteous Sakya Prince, And hers, the stately, bright Yasodhara. Half risen from her soft nest at his side, The chuddah fallen to her waist, her brow Laid in both palms, the lovely Princess leaned With heaving bosom and fast falling tears. Thrice with her lips she touched Siddartha's hand, And at the third kiss moaned: "Awake, my Lord! Give me the comfort of thy speech!" Then he-- "What is with thee, O my life?" but still She moaned anew before the words would come; Then spake: "'Alas, my Prince! I sank to sleep Most happy, for the babe I bear of thee Quickened this eve, and at my heart there beat That double pulse of life and joy and love Whose happy music lulled me, but--aho!-- In slumber I beheld three sights of dread, With thought whereof my heart is throbbing yet. I saw a white bull with wide branching horns, A lord of pastures, pacing through the streets, Bearing upon his front a gem which shone As if some star had dropped to glitter there, Or like the kantha-stone the great Snake keeps To make bright daylight underneath the earth. Slow through the streets toward the gates he paced, And none could stay him, though there came a voice From Indra's temple, 'If ye stay him not, The glory of the city goeth forth. Yet none could stay him. Then I wept aloud, And locked my arms about his neck, and strove, And bade them bar the gates; but that ox-king Bellowed, and, lightly tossing free his crest, Broke from my clasp, and bursting through the bars, Trampled the warders down and passed away. The next strange dream was this: Four Presences Splendid with shining eyes, so beautiful They seemed the Regents of the Earth who dwell On Mount Sumeru, lighting from the sky With retinue of countless heavenly ones, Swift swept unto our city, where I saw The golden flag of Indra on the gate Flutter and fall; and lo! there rose instead A glorious banner, all the folds whereof Rippled with flashing fire of rubies sewn Thick on the silver threads, the rays wherefrom Set forth new words and weighty sentences Whose message made all living creatures glad; And from the east the wind of sunrise blew With tender waft, opening those jewelled scrolls So that all flesh might read; and wondrous blooms Plucked in what clime I know not-fell in showers, Coloured as none are coloured in our groves." Then spake the Prince: "All this, my Lotus-flower! Was good to see." "Ay, Lord," the Princess said, "Save that it ended with a voice of fear Crying, `The time is nigh! the time is nigh!' Thereat the third dream came; for when I sought Thy side, sweet Lord! ah, on our bed there lay An unpressed pillow and an empty robe-- Nothing of thee but those!---nothing of thee, Who art my life and light, my king, my world! And sleeping still I rose, and sleeping saw Thy belt of pearls, tied here below my breasts, Change to a stinging snake; my ankle-rings Fall off, my golden bangles part and fall; The jasmines in my hair wither to dust; While this our bridal-couch sank to the ground, And something rent the crimson purdah down; Then far away I heard the white bull low, And far away the embroidered banner flap, And once again that cry, 'The time is come!' But with that cry--which shakes my spirit still-- I woke! O Prince! what may such visions mean Except I die, or--worse than any death-- Thou shouldst forsake me or be taken?" Sweet As the last smile of sunset was the look Siddartha bent upon his weeping wife. "Comfort thee, dear!" he said, "if comfort lives In changeless love; for though thy dreams may be Shadows of things to come, and though the gods Are shaken in their seats, and though the world Stands nigh, perchance, to know some way of help, Yet, whatsoever fall to thee and me, Be sure I loved and love Yasodhara. Thou knowest how I muse these many moons, Seeking to save the sad earth I have seen; And when the time comes, that which will be will. But if my soul yearns sore for souls unknown, And if I grieve for griefs which are not mine, Judge how my high-winged thoughts must hover here O'er all these lives that share and sweeten mine So dear! and thine the dearest, gentlest, best, And nearest. Ah, thou mother of my babe! Whose body mixed with mine for this fair hope, When most my spirit wanders, ranging round The lands and seas--as full of ruth for men As the far-flying dove is full of ruth For her twin nestlings--ever it has come Home with glad wing and passionate plumes to thee, Who art the sweetness of my kind best seen, The utmost of their good, the tenderest Of all their tenderness, mine most of all. Therefore, whatever after this betide, Bethink thee of that lordly bull which lowed, That jewelled banner in thy dreams which waved Its folds departing, and of this be sure, Always I loved and always love thee well, And what I sought for all sought most for thee. But thou, take comfort; and, if sorrow falls, Take comfort still in deeming there may be A way of peace on earth by woes of ours; And have with this embrace what faithful love Can think of thanks or frame for benison-- Too little, seeing love's strong self is weak-- Yet kiss me on the mouth, and drink these words From heart to heart therewith, that thou mayst know-- What others will not--that I loved thee most Because I loved so well all living souls. Now, Princess! rest, for I will rise and watch." Then in her tears she slept, but sleeping sighed-- As if that vision passed again--"The time! The time is come!" Whereat Siddartha turned, And, lo! the moon shone by the Crab! the stars In that same silver order long foretold Stood ranged to say: "This is the night!--choose thou The way of greatness or the way of good To reign a King of kings, or wander lone, Crownless and homeless, that the world be helped." Moreover, with the whispers of the gloom Came to his ears again that warning song, As when the Devas spoke upon the wind: And surely gods were round about the place Watching our Lord, who watched the shining stars. "I will depart," he spake; "the hour is come! Thy tender lips, dear sleeper, summon me To that which saves the earth but sunders us; And in the silence of yon sky I read My fated message flashing. Unto this Came I, and unto this all nights and days Have led me; for I will not have that crown Which may be mine: I lay aside those realms Which wait the gleaming of my naked sword My chariot shall not roll with bloody wheels From victory to victory, till earth Wears the red record of my name. I choose To tread its paths with patient, stainless feet, Making its dust my bed, its loneliest wastes My dwelling, and its meanest things my mates: Clad in no prouder garb than outcasts wear, Fed with no meats save what the charitable Give of their will, sheltered by no more pomp Than the dim cave lends or the jungle-bush, This will I do because the woful cry Of life and all flesh living cometh up Into my ears, and all my soul is full Of pity for the sickness of this world; Which I will heal, if healing may be found By uttermost renouncing and strong strife. For which of all the great and lesser gods Have power or pity? Who hath seen them--who? What have they wrought to help their worshippers? How hath it steaded man to pray, and pay Tithes of the corn and oil, to chant the charms, To slay the shrieking sacrifice, to rear The stately fane, to feed the priests, and call On Vishnu, Shiva, Surya, who save None--not the worthiest--from the griefs that teach Those litanies of flattery and fear Ascending day by day, like wasted smoke? Hath any of my brothers 'scaped thereby The aches of life, the stings of love and loss, The fiery fever and the ague-shake, The slow, dull sinking into withered age, The horrible dark death--and what beyond Waits--till the whirling wheel comes up again, And new lives bring new sorrows to be borne, New generations for the new desires Which have their end in the old mockeries? Hath any of my tender sisters found Fruit of the fast or harvest of the hymn, Or bought one pang the less at bearing-time For white curds offered and trim tulsi-leaves? Nay; it may be some of the gods are good And evil some, but all in action weak; Both pitiful and pitiless, and both As men are--bound upon this wheel of change, Knowing the former and the after lives. For so our scriptures truly seem to teach, That--once, and wheresoe'er, and whence begun-- Life runs its rounds of living, climbing up From mote, and gnat, and worm, reptile, and fish, Bird and shagged beast, man, demon, Deva, God, To clod and mote again; so are we kin To all that is; and thus, if one might save Man from his curse, the whole wide world should share The lightened horror of this ignorance Whose shadow is chill fear, and cruelty Its bitter pastime. Yea, if one might save! And means must be! There must be refuge!" "Men Perished in winter-winds till one smote fire From flint-stones coldly hiding what they held, The red spark treasured from the kindling sun. They gorged on flesh like wolves, till one sowed corn, Which grew a weed, yet makes the life of man; They mowed and babbled till some tongue struck speech, And patient fingers framed the lettered sound. What good gift have my brothers but it came From search and strife and loving sacrifice? If one, then, being great and fortunate, Rich, dowered with health and ease, from birth designed To rule--if he would rule--a King of kings; If one, not tired with life's long day, but glad I' the freshness of its morning, one not cloyed With love's delicious feasts, but hungry still; If one not worn and wrinkled, sadly sage, But joyous in the glory and the grace That mix with evils here, and free to choose Earth's loveliest at his will: one even as I, Who ache not, lack not, grieve not, save with griefs Which are not mine, except as I am man;-- If such a one, having so much to give, Gave all, laying it down for love of men. And thenceforth spent himself to search for truth, Wringing the secret of deliverance forth, Whether it lurk in hells or hide in heavens, Or hover, unrevealed, nigh unto all: Surely at last, far off, sometime, somewhere, The veil would lift for his deep-searching eyes, The road would open for his painful feet, That should be won for which he lost the world, And Death might find him conqueror of death. This will I do, who have a realm to lose, Because I love my realm, because my heart Beats with each throb of all the hearts that ache, Known and unknown, these that are mine and those Which shall be mine, a thousand million more Saved by this sacrifice I offer now. Oh, summoning stars! Oh, mournful earth For thee and thine I lay aside my youth, My throne, my joys, my golden days, my nights, My happy palace--and thine arms, sweet Queen! Harder to put aside than all the rest! Yet thee, too, I shall save, saving this earth; And that which stirs within thy tender womb, My child, the hidden blossom of our loves, Whom if I wait to bless my mind will fail. Wife! child! father! and people! ye must share A little while the anguish of this hour That light may break and all flesh learn the Law. Now am I fixed, and now I will depart, Never to come again till what I seek Be found--if fervent search and strife avail." So with his brow he touched her feet, and bent The farewell of fond eyes, unutterable, Upon her sleeping face, still wet with tears; And thrice around the bed in reverence, As though it were an altar, softly stepped With clasped hands laid upon his beating heart, "For never," spake he, "lie I there again!" And thrice he made to go, but thrice came back, So strong her beauty was, so large his love Then, o'er his head drawing his cloth, he turned And raised the purdah's edge. There drooped, close-hushed, In such sealed sleep as water-lilies know, The lovely garden of his Indian girls; Those twin dark-petalled lotus-buds of all-- Gunga and Gotami--on either side, And those, their silk-leaved sisterhood, beyond. "Pleasant ye are to me, sweet friends!" he said, "And dear to leave; yet if I leave ye not What else will come to all of us save eld Without assuage and death without avail? Lo! as ye lie asleep so must ye lie A-dead; and when the rose dies where are gone Its scent and splendour? when the lamp is drained Whither is fled the flame? Press heavy, Night! Upon their down-dropped lids and seal their lips, That no tear stay me and no faithful voice. For all the brighter that these made my life, The bitterer it is that they and I, And all, should live as trees do--so much spring, Such and such rains and frosts, such wintertimes, And then dead leaves, with maybe spring again, Or axe-stroke at the root. This will not I, Whose life here was a god's!--this would not I, Though all my days were godlike, while men moan Under their darkness. Therefore farewell, friends! While life is good to give, I give, and go To seek deliverance and that unknown Light!" Then, lightly treading where those sleepers lay, Into the night Siddartha passed: its eyes, The watchful stars, looked love on him: its breath, The wandering wind, kissed his robe's fluttered fringe; The garden-blossoms, folded for the dawn, Opened their velvet hearts to waft him scents From pink and purple censers: o'er the land, From Himalay unto the Indian Sea, A tremor spread, as if earth's soul beneath Stirred with an unknown hope; and holy books-- Which tell the story of our Lord--say, too, That rich celestial musics thrilled the air From hosts on hosts of shining ones, who thronged Eastward and westward, making bright the night Northward and southward, making glad the ground. Also those four dread Regents of the Earth, Descending at the doorway, two by two,-- With their bright legions of Invisibles In arms of sapphire, silver, gold, and pearl-- Watched with joined hands the Indian Prince, who stood, His tearful eyes raised to the stars, and lips Close-set with purpose of prodigious love. Then strode he forth into the gloom and cried, "Channa, awake! and bring out Kantaka!" "What would my Lord?" the charioteer replied-- Slow-rising from his place beside the gate "To ride at night when all the ways are dark?" "Speak low," Siddartha said, "and bring my horse, For now the hour is come when I should quit This golden prison where my heart lives caged To find the truth; which henceforth I will seek, For all men's sake, until the truth be found." "Alas! dear Prince," answered the charioteer, "Spake then for nought those wise and holy men Who cast the stars and bade us wait the time When King Suddhodana's great son should rule Realms upon realms, and be a Lord of lords? Wilt thou ride hence and let the rich world slip Out of thy grasp, to hold a beggar's bowl? Wilt thou go forth into the friendless waste That hast this Paradise of pleasures here?" The Prince made answer: "Unto this I came, And not for thrones: the kingdom that I crave Is more than many realms, and all things pass To change and death. Bring me forth Kantaka!" "Most honored," spake again the charioteer, "Bethink thee of their woe whose bliss thou art-- How shalt thou help them, first undoing them?" Siddartha answered: "Friend, that love is false Which clings to love for selfish sweets of love; But I, who love these more than joys of mine-- Yea, more than joy of theirs--depart to save Them and all flesh, if utmost love avail. Go, bring me Kantaka!" Then Channa said, "Master, I go!" and forthwith, mournfully, Unto the stall he passed, and from the rack Took down the silver bit and bridle-chains, Breast-cord and curb, and knitted fast the straps, And linked the hooks, and led out Kantaka Whom tethering to the ring, he combed and dressed, Stroking the snowy coat to silken gloss; Next on the steed he laid the numdah square, Fitted the saddle-cloth across, and set The saddle fair, drew tight the jewelled girths, Buckled the breech-bands and the martingale, And made fall both the stirrups of worked gold. Then over all he cast a golden net, With tassels of seed-pearl and silken strings, And led the great horse to the palace door, Where stood the Prince; but when he saw his Lord, Right glad he waxed and joyously he neighed, Spreading his scarlet nostrils; and the books Write, "Surely all had heard Kantaka's neigh, And that strong trampling of his iron heels, Save that the Devas laid their unseen wings Over their ears and kept the sleepers deaf." Fondly Siddartha drew the proud head down, Patted the shining neck, and said, "Be still, White Kantaka! be still, and bear me now The farthest journey ever rider rode; For this night take I horse to find the truth, And where my quest will end yet know I not, Save that it shall not end until I find. Therefore tonight, good steed, be fierce and bold! Let nothing stay thee, though a thousand blades Deny the road! let neither wall nor moat Forbid our flight! Look! if I touch thy flank And cry, `On, Kantaka! I let whirlwinds lag Behind thy course! Be fire and air, my horse! To stead thy Lord, so shalt thou share with him The greatness of this deed which helps the world; For therefore ride I, not for men alone, But for all things which, speechless, share our pain And have no hope, nor wit to ask for hope. Now, therefore, bear thy master valorously!" Then to the saddle lightly leaping, he Touched the arched crest, and Kantaka sprang forth With armed hoofs sparkling on the stones and ring Of champing bit; but none did hear that sound, For that the Suddha Devas, gathering near, Plucked the red mohra-flowers and strewed them thick Under his tread, while hands invisible Muffled the ringing bit and bridle chains. Moreover, it is written when they came Upon the pavement near the inner gates, The Yakshas of the air laid magic cloths Under the stallion's feet, so that he went Softly and still. But when they reached the gate Of tripled brass--which hardly fivescore men Served to unbar and open--lo! the doors Rolled back all silently, though one might hear In daytime two koss off the thunderous roar Of those grim hinges and unwieldy plates. Also the middle and the outer gates Unfolded each their monstrous portals thus In silence as Siddartha and his steed Drew near; while underneath their shadow lay. Silent as dead men, all those chosen guards-- The lance and sword let fall, the shields unbraced, Captains and soldiers--for there came a wind, Drowsier than blows o'er Malwa's fields of sleep Before the Prince's path, which, being breathed, Lulled every sense aswoon: and so he passed Free from the palace. When the morning star Stood half a spear's length from the eastern rim, And o'er the earth the breath of morning sighed Rippling Anoma's wave, the border-stream, Then drew he rein, and leaped to earth and kissed White Kantaka betwixt the ears, and spake Full sweet to Channa: "This which thou hast done Shall bring thee good and bring all creatures good. Be sure I love thee always for thy love. Lead back my horse and take my crest-pearl here, My princely robes, which henceforth stead me not, My jewelled sword-belt and my sword, and these The long locks by its bright edge severed thus From off my brows. Give the King all, and say Siddartha prays forget him till he come Ten times a prince, with royal wisdom won From lonely searchings and the strife for light; Where, if I conquer, lo! all earth is mine-- Mine by chief service!--tell him--mine by love! Since there is hope for man only in man, And none hath sought for this as I will seek, Who cast away my world to save my world." Book the Fifth Round Rajagriha five fair hills arose, Guarding King Bimbasara's sylvan town; Baibhara, green with lemon-grass and palms; Bipulla, at whose foot thin Sarsuti Steals with warm ripple; shadowy Tapovan, Whose steaming pools mirror black rocks, which ooze Sovereign earth-butter from their rugged roofs; South-east the vulture-peak Sailagiri; And eastward Ratnagiri, hill of gems. A winding track, paven with footworn slabs, Leads thee by safflower fields and bamboo tufts Under dark mangoes and the jujube-trees, Past milk-white veins of rock and jasper crags, Low cliff and flats of jungle-flowers, to where The shoulder of that mountain, sloping west, O'erhangs a cave with wild figs canopied. Lo! thou who comest thither, bare thy feet And bow thy head! for all this spacious earth Hath not a spot more dear and hallowed. Here Lord Buddha sate the scorching summers through, The driving rains, the chilly dawns and eves; Wearing for all men's sakes the yellow robe, Eating in beggar's guise the scanty meal Chance-gathered from the charitable; at night Crouched on the grass, homeless, alone; while yelped The sleepless jackals round his cave, or coughs Of famished tiger from the thicket broke. By day and night here dwelt the World-honoured, Subduing that fair body born for bliss With fast and frequent watch and search intense Of silent meditation, so prolonged That ofttimes while he mused--as motionless As the fixed rock his seat--the squirrel leaped Upon his knee, the timid quail led forth Her brood between his feet, and blue doves pecked The rice-grains from the bowl beside his hand. Thus would he muse from noontide--when the land Shimmered with heat, and walls and temples danced In the reeking air--till sunset, noting not The blazing globe roll down, nor evening glide, Purple and swift, across the softened fields; Nor the still coming of the stars, nor throb Of drum-skins in the busy town, nor screech Of owl and night jar; wholly wrapt from self In keen unraveling of the threads of thought And steadfast pacing of life's labyrinths. Thus would he sit till midnight hushed the world, Save where the beasts of darkness in the brake Crept and cried out, as fear and hatred cry, As lust and avarice and anger creep In the black jungles of man's ignorance. Then slept he for what space the fleet moon asks To swim a tenth part of her cloudy sea; But rose ere the false-dawn, and stood again Wistful on some dark platform of his hill, Watching the sleeping earth with ardent eyes And thoughts embracing all its living things, While o'er the waving fields that murmur moved Which is the kiss of Morn waking the lands, And in the east that miracle of Day Gathered and grew: at first a dusk so dim Night seems still unaware of whispered dawn, But soon--before the jungle-cock crows twice-- A white verge clear, a widening, brightening white, High as the herald-star, which fades in floods Of silver, warming into pale gold, caught By topmost clouds, and flaming on their rims To fervent golden glow, flushed from the brink With saffron, scarlet, crimson, amethyst; Whereat the sky burns splendid to the blue, And, robed in raiment of glad light, the Song Of Life and Glory cometh! Then our Lord, After the manner of a Rishi, hailed The rising orb, and went--ablutions made-- Down by the winding path unto the town; And in the fashion of a Rishi passed From street to street, with begging-bowl in hand, Gathering the little pittance of his needs. Soon was it filled, for all the townsmen cried, "Take of our store, great sir!" and "Take of ours!" Marking his godlike face and eyes enwrapt; And mothers, when they saw our Lord go by, Would bid their children fall to kiss his feet, And lift his robe's hem to their brows, or run To fill his jar, and fetch him milk and cakes. And ofttimes as he paced, gentle and slow, Radiant with heavenly pity, lost in care For those he knew not, save as fellow lives, The dark surprised eyes of some Indian maid Would dwell in sudden love and worship deep On that majestic form, as if she saw Her dreams of tenderest thought made true, and grace Fairer than mortal fire her breast. But he Passed onward with the bowl and yellow robe, By mild speech paying all those gifts of hearts, Wending his way back to the solitudes To sit upon his hill with holy men, And hear and ask of wisdom and its roads. Midway on Ratnagiri's groves of calm, Beyond the city, but below the caves, Lodged such as hold the body foe to soul, And flesh a beast which men must chain and tame With bitter pains, till sense of pain is killed, And tortured nerves vex torturer no more-- Yogis and Brahmacharis, Bhikshus, all-- A gaunt and mournful band, dwelling apart. Some day and night had stood with lifted arms, Till--drained of blood and withered by disease Their slowly-wasting joints and stiffened limbs Jutted from sapless shoulders like dead forks from forest trunks. Others had clenched their hands So long and with so fierce a fortitude, The claw-like nails grew through the festered palm. Some walked on sandals spiked; some with sharp flints Gashed breast and brow and thigh, scarred these with fire, Threaded their flesh with jungle thorns and spits, Besmeared with mud and ashes, crouching foul In rags of dead men wrapped about their loins. Certain there were inhabited the spots Where death pyres smouldered, cowering defiled With corpses for their company, and kites Screaming around them o'er the funeral-spoils; Certain who cried five hundred times a day The names of Shiva, wound with darting snakes About their sun-tanned necks and hollow flanks, One palsied foot drawn up against the ham. So gathered they, a grievous company; Crowns blistered by the blazing heat, eyes bleared, Sinews and muscles shrivelled, visages Haggard and wan as slain men's, five days dead; Here crouched one in the dust who noon by noon Meted a thousand grains of millet out, Ate it with famished patience, seed by seed, And so starved on; there one who bruised his pulse With bitter leaves lest palate should be pleased; And next, a miserable saint self-maimed, Eyeless and tongueless, sexless, crippled, deaf; The body by the mind being thus stripped For glory of much suffering, and the bliss Which they shall win--say holy books--whose woe Shames gods that send us woe, and makes men gods Stronger to suffer than hell is to harm. Whom sadly eyeing spake our Lord to one, Chief of the woe-begones: "Much-suffering sir These many moons I dwell upon the hill-- Who am a seeker of the Truth--and see My brothers here, and thee, so piteously Self-anguished; wherefore add ye ills to life Which is so evil?" Answer made the sage "'T is written if a man shall mortify His flesh, till pain be grown the life he lives And death voluptuous rest, such woes shall purge Sin's dross away, and the soul, purified, Soar from the furnace of its sorrow, winged For glorious spheres and splendour past all thought." "Yon cloud which floats in heaven," the Prince replied, "Wreathed like gold cloth around your Indra's throne, Rose thither from the tempest-driven sea; But it must fall again in tearful drops, Trickling through rough and painful water-ways By cleft and nullah and the muddy flood, To Gunga and the sea, wherefrom it sprang. Know'st thou, my brother, if it be not thus, After their many pains, with saints in bliss? Since that which rises falls, and that which buys Is spent; and if ye buy heaven with your blood In hell's hard market, when the bargain's through The toil begins again!" "It may begin," The hermit moaned. "Alas! we know not this, Nor surely anything; yet after night Day comes, and after turmoil peace, and we Hate this accursed flesh which clogs the soul That fain would rise; so, for the sake of soul, We stake brief agonies in game with Gods To gain the larger joys." "Yet if they last A myriad years," he said, "they fade at length, Those joys; or if not, is there then some life Below, above, beyond, so unlike life it will not change? Speak! do your Gods endure For ever, brothers?" "Nay," the Yogis said, "Only great Brahm endures: the Gods but live." Then spake Lord Buddha: "Will ye, being wise, As ye seem holy and strong-hearted ones, Throw these sore dice, which are your groans and moans, For gains which may be dreams, and must have end? Will ye, for love of soul, so loathe your flesh, So scourge and maim it, that it shall not serve To bear the spirit on, searching for home, But founder on the track before nightfall, Like willing steed o'er-spurred? Will ye, sad sirs, Dismantle and dismember this fair house, Where we have come to dwell by painful pasts; Whose windows give us light--the little light Whereby we gaze abroad to know if dawn Will break, and whither winds the better road?" Then cried they, "We have chosen this for road And tread it, Rajaputra, till the close-- Though all its stones were fire--in trust of death. Speak, if thou know'st a way more excellent; If not, peace go with thee!" Onward he passed, Exceeding sorrowful, seeing how men Fear so to die they are afraid to fear, Lust so to live they dare not love their life, But plague it with fierce penances, belike To please the Gods who grudge pleasure to man; Belike to balk hell by self-kindled hells; Belike in holy madness, hoping soul May break the better through their wasted flesh. "Oh, flowerets of the field!" Siddartha said, "Who turn your tender faces to the sun-- Glad of the light, and grateful with sweet breath Of fragrance and these robes of reverence donned Silver and gold and purple--none of ye Miss perfect living, none of ye despoil Your happy beauty. O, ye palms, which rise Eager to pierce the sky and drink the wind Blown from Malaya and the cool blue seas, What secret know ye that ye grow content, From time of tender shoot to time of fruit, Murmuring such sun-songs from your feathered crowns? Ye, too, who dwell so merry in the trees-- Quick-darting parrots, bee-birds, bulbuls, doves-- None of ye hate your life, none of ye deem To strain to better by foregoing needs! But man, who slays ye--being lord--is wise, And wisdom, nursed on blood, cometh thus forth In self-tormentings!" While the Master spake Blew down the mount the dust of pattering feet, White goats and black sheep winding slow their way, With many a lingering nibble at the tufts, And wanderings from the path, where water gleamed Or wild figs hung. But always as they strayed The herdsman cried, or slung his sling, and kept The silly crowd still moving to the plain. A ewe with couplets in the flock there was. Some hurt had lamed one lamb, which toiled behind Bleeding, while in the front its fellow skipped, And the vexed dam hither and thither ran, Fearful to lose this little one or that; Which when our Lord did mark, full tenderly He took the limping lamb upon his neck, Saying: "Poor woolly mother, be at peace! Whither thou goest I will bear thy care; 'T were all as good to ease one beast of grief As sit and watch the sorrows of the world In yonder caverns with the priests who pray." "But," spake he to the herdsmen, "wherefore, friends, Drive ye the flocks adown under high noon, Since 't is at evening that men fold their sheep?" And answer gave the peasants: "We are sent To fetch a sacrifice of goats five score, And five score sheep, the which our Lord the King Slayeth this night in worship of his gods." Then said the Master, "I will also go." So paced he patiently, bearing the lamb Beside the herdsmen in the dust and sun, The wistful ewe low-bleating at his feet. Whom, when they came unto the river-side, A woman--dove-eyed, young, with tearful face And lifted hands--saluted, bending low "Lord! thou art he," she said, "who yesterday Had pity on me in the fig-grove here, Where I live lone and reared my child; but he Straying amid the blossoms found a snake, Which twined about his wrist, while he did laugh And tease the quick forked tongue and opened mouth Of that cold playmate. But, alas! ere long He turned so pale and still, I could not think Why he should cease to play, and let my breast Fall from his lips. And one said, 'He is sick Of poison'; and another, 'He will die.' But I, who could not lose my precious boy, Prayed of them physic, which might bring the light Back to his eyes; it was so very small That kiss-mark of the serpent, and I think It could not hate him, gracious as he was, Nor hurt him in his sport. And some one said, 'There is a holy man upon the hill Lo! now he passeth in the yellow robe Ask of the Rishi if there be a cure For that which ails thy son.' Whereon I came Trembling to thee, whose brow is like a god's, And wept and drew the face cloth from my babe, Praying thee tell what simples might be good. And thou, great sir, did'st spurn me not, but gaze With gentle eyes and touch with patient hand; Then draw the face cloth back, saying to me, 'Yea, little sister, there is that might heal Thee first, and him, if thou couldst fetch the thing; For they who seek physicians bring to them What is ordained. Therefore, I pray thee, find Black mustard-seed, a tola; only mark Thou take it not from any hand or house Where father, mother, child, or slave hath died; It shall be well if thou canst find such seed.' Thus didst thou speak, my Lord!" The Master smiled Exceeding tenderly. "Yea, I spake thus, Dear Kisagotami! But didst thou find The seed?" "I went, Lord, clasping to my breast The babe, grown colder, asking at each hut-- Here in the jungle and towards the town-- 'I pray you, give me mustard, of your grace, A tola-black'; and each who had it gave, For all the poor are piteous to the poor; But when I asked, 'In my friend's household here Hath any peradventure ever died Husband or wife, or child, or slave?' they said: 'O sister! what is this you ask? the dead Are very many, and the living few!' So with sad thanks I gave the mustard back, And prayed of others; but the others said, Here is the seed, but we have lost our slave.' 'Here is the seed, but our good man is dead!' 'Here is some seed, but he that sowed it died Between the rain-time and the harvesting!' Ah, sir! I could not find a single house Where there was mustard-seed and none had died! Therefore I left my child--who would not suck Nor smile--beneath the wild vines by the stream, To seek thy face and kiss thy feet, and pray Where I might find this seed and find no death, If now, indeed, my baby be not dead, As I do fear, and as they said to me." "My sister! thou hast found," the Master said, "Searching for what none finds--that bitter balm I had to give thee. He thou lovest slept Dead on thy bosom yesterday: today Thou know'st the whole wide world weeps with thy woe The grief which all hearts share grows less for one. Lo! I would pour my blood if it could stay Thy tears and win the secret of that curse Which makes sweet love our anguish, and which drives O'er flowers and pastures to the sacrifice As these dumb beasts are driven--men their lords. I seek that secret: bury thou thy child!" So entered they the city side by side, The herdsmen and the Prince, what time the sun Gilded slow Sona's distant stream, and threw Long shadows down the street and through the gate Where the King's men kept watch. But when they saw Our Lord bearing the lamb, the guards stood back, The market-people drew their wains aside, In the bazaar buyers and sellers stayed The war of tongues to gaze on that mild face; The smith, with lifted hammer in his hand, Forgot to strike; the weaver left his web, The scribe his scroll, the money-changer lost His count of cowries; from the unwatched rice Shiva's white bull fed free; the wasted milk Ran o'er the lota while the milkers watched The passage of our Lord moving so meek, With yet so beautiful a majesty. But most the women gathering in the doors Asked: "Who is this that brings the sacrifice, So graceful and peace-giving as he goes? What is his caste? whence hath he eyes so sweet? Can he be Sakra or the Devaraj?" And others said, "It is the holy man Who dwelleth with the Rishis on the hill." But the Lord paced, in meditation lost, Thinking, "Alas! for all my sheep which have No shepherd; wandering in the night with none To guide them; bleating blindly towards the knife Of Death, as these dumb beasts which are their kin." Then some one told the King, "There cometh here A holy hermit, bringing down the flock Which thou didst bid to crown the sacrifice." The King stood in his hall of offering. On either hand, the white-robed Brahmans ranged Muttered their mantras, feeding still the fire Which roared upon the midmost altar. There From scented woods flickered bright tongues of flame, Hissing and curling as they licked the gifts Of ghee and spices and the soma juice, The joy of Iudra. Round about the pile A slow, thick, scarlet streamlet smoked and ran, Sucked by the sand, but ever rolling down, The blood of bleating victims. One such lay, A spotted goat, long-horned, its head bound back With munja grass; at its stretched throat the knife Pressed by a priest, who murmured: "This, dread gods, Of many yajnas cometh as the crown From Bimbasara: take ye joy to see The spirted blood, and pleasure in the scent Of rich flesh roasting 'mid the fragrant flames; Let the King's sins be laid upon this goat, And let the fire consume them burning it, For now I strike." But Buddha softly said, "Let him not strike, great King!" and therewith loosed The victim's bonds, none staying him, so great His presence was. Then, craving leave, he spake Of life, which all can take but none can give, Life, which all creatures love and strive to keep, Wonderful, dear and pleasant unto each, Even to the meanest; yea, a boon to all Where pity is, for pity makes the world Soft to the weak and noble for the strong. Unto the dumb lips of his flock he lent Sad pleading words, showing how man, who prays For mercy to the gods, is merciless, Being as god to those; albeit all life Is linked and kin, and what we slay have given Meek tribute of the milk and wool, and set Fast trust upon the hands which murder them. Also he spake of what the holy books Do surely teach, how that at death some sink To bird and beast, and these rise up to man In wanderings of the spark which grows purged flame. So were the sacrifice new sin, if so The fated passage of a soul be stayed. Nor, spake he, shall one wash his spirit clean By blood; nor gladden gods, being good, with blood; Nor bribe them, being evil; nay, nor lay Upon the brow of innocent bound beasts One hair's weight of that answer all must give For all things done amiss or wrongfully, Alone, each for himself, reckoning with that The fixed arithmic of the universe, Which meteth good for good and ill for ill, Measure for measure, unto deeds, words, thoughts; Watchful, aware, implacable, unmoved; Making all futures fruits of all the pasts. Thus spake he, breathing words so piteous With such high lordliness of ruth and right, The priests drew back their garments o'er the hands Crimsoned with slaughter, and the King came near, Standing with clasped palms reverencing Buddh; While still our Lord went on, teaching how fair This earth were if all living things be linked In friendliness, and common use of foods Bloodless and pure; the golden grain, bright fruits, Sweet herbs which grow for all, the waters wan, Sufficient drinks and meats. Which when these heard, The might of gentleness so conquered them, The priests themselves scattered their altar-flames And flung away the steel of sacrifice; And through the land next day passed a decree Proclaimed by criers, and in this wise graved On rock and column: "Thus the King's will is: There hath been slaughter for the sacrifice, And slaying for the meat, but henceforth none Shall spill the blood of life nor taste of flesh, Seeing that knowledge grows, and life is one, And mercy cometh to the merciful." So ran the edict, and from those days forth Sweet peace hath spread between all living kind, Man and the beasts which serve him, and the birds, On all those banks of Gunga where our Lord Taught with his saintly pity and soft speech. For aye so piteous was the Master's heart To all that breathe this breath of fleeting life, Yoked in one fellowship of joys and pains, That it is written in the holy books How, in an ancient age--when Buddha wore A Brahman's form, dwelling upon the rock Named Munda, by the village of Dalidd-- Drought withered all the land: the young rice died Ere it could hide a quail; in forest glades A fierce sun sucked the pools; grasses and herbs Sickened, and all the woodland creatures fled Scattering for sustenance. At such a time, Between the hot walls of a nullah, stretched On naked stones, our Lord spied, as he passed, A starving tigress. Hunger in her orbs Glared with green flame; her dry tongue lolled a span Beyond the gasping jaws and shrivelled jowl; Her painted hide hung wrinkled on her ribs, As when between the rafters sinks a thatch Rotten with rains; and at the poor lean dugs Two cubs, whining with famine, tugged and sucked, Mumbling those milkless teats which rendered nought, While she, their gaunt dam, licked full motherly The clamorous twins, yielding her flank to them With moaning throat, and love stronger than want, Softening the first of that wild cry wherewith She laid her famished muzzle to the sand And roared a savage thunder-peal of woe. Seeing which bitter strait, and heeding nought Save the immense compassion of a Buddh, Our Lord bethought, "There is no other way To help this murdress of the woods but one. By sunset these will die, having no meat: There is no living heart will pity her, Bloody with ravin, lean for lack of blood. Lo! if I feed her, who shall lose but I, And how can love lose doing of its kind Even to the uttermost?" So saying, Buddh Silently laid aside sandals and staff, His sacred thread, turban, and cloth, and came Forth from behind the milk-bush on the sand, Saying, "Ho! mother, here is meat for thee!" Whereat the perishing beast yelped hoarse and shrill, Sprang from her cubs, and, hurling to the earth That willing victim, had her feast of him With all the crooked daggers of her claws Rending his flesh, and all her yellow fangs Bathed in his blood: the great cat's burning breath Mixed with the last sigh of such fearless love. Thus large the Master's heart was long ago, Not only now, when with his gracious ruth He bade cease cruel worship of the gods. And much King Bimbasara prayed our Lord-- Learning his royal birth and holy search-- To tarry in that city, saying oft "Thy princely state may not abide such fasts; Thy hands were made for sceptres, not for alms. Sojourn with me, who have no son to rule, And teach my kingdom wisdom, till I die, Lodged in my palace with a beauteous bride." But ever spake Siddartha, of set mind "These things I had, most noble King, and left, Seeking the Truth; which still I seek, and shall; Not to be stayed though Sakra's palace ope'd Its doors of pearl and Devis wooed me in. I go to build the Kingdom of the Law, journeying to Gaya and the forest shades, Where, as I think, the light will come to me; For nowise here among the Rishis comes That light, nor from the Shasters, nor from fasts Borne till the body faints, starved by the soul. Yet there is light to reach and truth to win; And surely, O true Friend, if I attain I will return and quit thy love." Thereat Thrice round the Prince King Bimbasara paced, Reverently bending to the Master's feet, And bade him speed. So passed our Lord away Towards Uravilva, not yet comforted, And wan of face, and weak with six years' quest. But they upon the hill and in the grove-- Alara, Udra, and the ascetics five-- Had stayed him, saying all was written clear In holy Shasters, and that none might win Higher than Sruti and than Smriti--nay, Not the chief saints!--for how should mortal man Be wiser than the Jnana-Kand, which tells How Brahm is bodiless and actionless, Passionless, calm, unqualified, unchanged, Pure life, pure thought, pure joy? Or how should man Its better than the Karmma-Kand, which shows How he may strip passion and action off, Break from the bond of self, and so, unsphered, Be God, and melt into the vast divine, Flying from false to true, from wars of sense To peace eternal, where the silence lives? But the prince heard them, not yet comforted. Book The Sixth Thou who wouldst see where dawned the light at last, North-westwards from the "Thousand Gardens" go By Gunga's valley till thy steps be set On the green hills where those twin streamlets spring Nilajan and Mohana; follow them, Winding beneath broad-leaved mahua-trees, 'Mid thickets of the sansar and the bir, Till on the plain the shining sisters meet In Phalgu's bed, flowing by rocky banks To Gaya and the red Barabar hills. Hard by that river spreads a thorny waste, Uruwelaya named in ancient days, With sandhills broken; on its verge a wood Waves sea-green plumes and tassels 'thwart the sky, With undergrowth wherethrough a still flood steals, Dappled with lotus-blossoms, blue and white, And peopled with quick fish and tortoises. Near it the village of Senani reared Its roofs of grass, nestled amid the palms, Peaceful with simple folk and pastoral toils. There in the sylvan solitudes once more Lord Buddha lived, musing the woes of men, The ways of fate, the doctrines of the books, The lessons of the creatures of the brake, The secrets of the silence whence all come, The secrets of the gloom whereto all go, The life which lies between, like that arch flung From cloud to cloud across the sky, which hath Mists for its masonry and vapoury piers, Melting to void again which was so fair With sapphire hues, garnet, and chrysoprase. Moon after moon our Lord sate in the wood, So meditating these that he forgot Ofttimes the hour of food, rising from thoughts Prolonged beyond the sunrise and the noon To see his bowl unfilled, and eat perforce Of wild fruit fallen from the boughs o'erhead, Shaken to earth by chattering ape or plucked By purple parokeet. Therefore his grace Faded; his body, worn by stress of soul, Lost day by day the marks, thirty and two, Which testify the Buddha. Scarce that leaf, Fluttering so dry and withered to his feet From off the sal-branch, bore less likeliness Of spring's soft greenery than he of him Who was the princely flower of all his land. And once at such a time the o'erwrought Prince Fell to the earth in deadly swoon, all spent, Even as one slain, who hath no longer breath Nor any stir of blood; so wan he was, So motionless. But there came by that way A shepherd-boy, who saw Siddartha lie With lids fast-closed, and lines of nameless pain Fixed on his lips--the fiery noonday sun Beating upon his head--who, plucking boughs From wild rose-apple trees, knitted them thick Into a bower to shade the sacred face. Also he poured upon the Master's lips Drops of warm milk, pressed from his she-goat's bag, Lest, being of low caste, he do wrong to one So high and holy seeming. But the books Tell how the jambu-branches, planted thus, Shot with quick life in wealth of leaf and flower And glowing fruitage interlaced and close, So that the bower grew like a tent of silk Pitched for a king at hunting, decked with studs Of silver-work and bosses of red gold. And the boy worshipped, deeming him some God; But our Lord, gaining breath, arose and asked Milk in the shepherd's lots. "Ah, my Lord, I cannot give thee," quoth the lad; "thou seest I am a Sudra, and my touch defiles!" Then the World-honoured spake: "Pity and need Make all flesh kin. There is no caste in blood, Which runneth of one hue, nor caste in tears, Which trickle salt with all; neither comes man To birth with tilka-mark stamped on the brow, Nor sacred thread on neck. Who doth right deeds Is twice-born, and who doeth ill deeds vile. Give me to drink, my brother; when I come Unto my quest it shall be good for thee." Thereat the peasant's heart was glad, and gave. And on another day there passed that road A band of tinselled, girls, the nautch-dancers Of Indra's temple in the town, with those Who made their music--one that beat a drum Set round with peacock-feathers, one that blew The piping bansuli, and one that twitched A three-string sitar. Lightly tripped they down From ledge to ledge and through the chequered paths To some gay festival, the silver bells Chiming soft peals about the small brown feet, Armlets and wrist-rings tattling answer shrill; While he that bore the sitar thrummed and twanged His threads of brass, and she beside him sang-- "Fair goes the dancing when the sitar's tuned; Tune us the sitar neither low nor high, And we will dance away the hearts of men. "The string o'erstretched breaks, and the music flies, The string o'erslack is dumb, and music dies; Tune us the sitar neither low nor high." "So sang the nautch-girl to the pipe and wires, Fluttering like some vain, painted butterfly From glade to glade along the forest path, Nor dreamed her light words echoed on the ear Of him, that holy man, who sate so rapt Under the fig-tree by the path. But Buddh Lifted his great brow as the wantons passed, And spake: 'The foolish ofttimes teach the wise; I strain too much this string of life, belike, Meaning to make such music as shall save. Mine eyes are dim now that they see the truth, My strength is waned now that my need is most; Would that I had such help as man must have, For I shall die, whose life was all men's hope.'" Now, by that river dwelt a landholder Pious and rich, master of many herds, A goodly chief, the friend of all the poor; And from his house the village drew its name-- "Senani." Pleasant and in peace he lived, Having for wife Sujata, loveliest Of all the dark-eyed daughters of the plain; Gentle and true, simple and kind was she, Noble of mien, with gracious speech to all And gladsome looks--a pearl of womanhood-- Passing calm years of household happiness Beside her lord in that still Indian home, Save that no male child blessed their wedded love. Wherefore with many prayers she had besought Lukshmi, and many nights at full-moon gone Round the great Lingam, nine times nine, with gifts Of rice and jasmine wreaths and sandal oil, Praying a boy; also Sujata vowed-- If this should be--an offering of food Unto the Wood-God, plenteous, delicate, Set in a bowl of gold under his tree, Such as the lips of Devs may taste and take. And this had been: for there was born to her A beauteous boy, now three months old, who lay Between Sujata's breasts, while she did pace With grateful footsteps to the Wood-God's shrine, One arm clasping her crimson sari close To wrap the babe, that jewel of her joys, The other lifted high in comely curve To steady on her head the bowl and dish Which held the dainty victuals for the God. But Radha, sent before to sweep the ground And tie the scarlet threads around the tree, Came eager, crying, "Ah, dear Mistress! look! There is the Wood-God sitting in his place, Revealed, with folded hands upon his knees. See how the light shines round about his brow! How mild and great he seems, with heavenly eyes! Good fortune is it thus to meet the gods." So,--thinking him divine,--Sujata drew Tremblingly nigh, and kissed the earth and said, With sweet face bent: "Would that the Holy One Inhabiting his grove, Giver of good, Merciful unto me his handmaiden, Vouchsafing now his presence, might accept These our poor gifts of snowy curds, fresh made, With milk as white as new-carved ivory!" Therewith into the golden bowl she poured The curds and milk, and on the hands of Buddh Dropped attar from a crystal flask-distilled Out of the hearts of roses; and he ate, Speaking no word, while the glad mother stood In reverence apart. But of that meal So wondrous was the virtue that our Lord Felt strength and life return as though the nights Of watching and the days of fast had passed In dream, as though the spirit with the flesh Shared that fine meat and plumed its wings anew, Like some delighted bird at sudden streams Weary with flight o'er endless wastes of sand, Which laves the desert dust from neck and crest-- And more Sujata worshipped, seeing our Lord Grow fairer and his countenance more bright: "Art thou indeed the God?" she lowly asked, "And hath my gift found favour?" But Buddh said, "What is it thou dost bring me?" "Holy one!" Answered Sujata, "from our droves I took Milk of a hundred mothers newly-calved, And with that milk I fed fifty white cows, And with their milk twenty-and-five, and then With theirs twelve more, and yet again with theirs The six noblest and best of all our herds, That yield I boiled with sandal and fine spice In silver lotas, adding rice, well grown From chosen seed, set in new-broken ground, So picked that every grain was like a pearl. This did I of true heart, because I vowed, Under thy tree, if I should bear a boy I would make offering for my joy, and now I have my son and all my life is bliss!" Softly our Lord drew down the crimson fold, And, laying on the little head those hands Which help the world, he said: "Long be thy bliss! And lightly fall on him the load of life! For thou hast holpen me who am no God, But one thy Brother; heretofore a Prince And now a wanderer, seeking night and day These six hard years that light which somewhere shines To lighten all men's darkness, if they knew! And I shall find the light; yea, now it dawned Glorious and helpful, when my weak flesh failed Which this pure food, fair Sister, hath restored, Drawn manifold through lives to quicken life As life itself passes by many births To happier heights and purging off of sins. Yet dost thou truly find it sweet enough Only to live? Can life and love suffice?" Answered Sujata: "Worshipful! my heart Is little, and a little rain will fill The lily's cup which hardly moists the field. It is enough for me to feel life's sun Shine in my lord's grace and my baby's smile, Making the loving summer of our home. Pleasant my days pass filled with household cares From sunrise when I wake to praise the gods, And give forth grain, and trim the tulsi-plant, And set my handmaids to their tasks, till noon When my lord lays his head upon my lap Lulled by soft songs and wavings of the fan; And so to supper-time at quiet eve, When by his side I stand and serve the cakes. Then the stars light their silver lamps for sleep, After the temple and the talk with friends. How should I not be happy, blest so much, And bearing him this boy whose tiny hand Shall lead his soul to Swerga, if it need? For holy books teach when a man shall plant Trees for the travelers' shade, and dig a well For the folks' comfort, and beget a son, It shall be good for such after their death; And what the books say, that I humbly take, Being not wiser than those great of old Who spake with gods, and knew the hymns and charms, And all the ways of virtue and of peace. Also I think that good must come of good And ill of evil--surely--unto all-- In every place and time--seeing sweet fruit Groweth from wholesome roots, and bitter things From poison-stocks; yea, seeing, too, how spite Breeds hate, and kindness friends, and patience peace Even while we live; and when 't is willed we die Shall there not be as good a `Then' as `Now'? Haply much better! since one grain of rice Shoots a green feather gemmed with fifty pearls, And all the starry champak's white and gold Lurks in those little, naked, grey spring-buds. Ah, Sir! I know there might be woes to bear Would lay fond Patience with her face in dust; If this my babe pass first I think my heart Would break--almost I hope my heart would break! That I might clasp him dead and wait my lord In whatsoever world holds faithful wives-- Duteous, attending till his hour should come. But if Death called Senani, I should mount The pile and lay that dear head in my lap, My daily way, rejoicing when the torch Lit the quick flame and rolled the choking smoke. For it is written if an Indian wife Die so, her love shall give her husband's soul For every hair upon her head a crore Of years in Swerga. Therefore fear I not. And therefore, Holy Sir! my life is glad, Nowise forgetting yet those other lives Painful and poor, wicked and miserable, Whereon the gods grant pity! but for me, What good I see humbly I seek to do, And live obedient to the law, in trust That what will come, and must come, shall come well." Then spake our Lord: "Thou teachest them who teach, Wiser than wisdom in thy simple lore. Be thou content to know not, knowing thus Thy way of right and duty: grow, thou flower With thy sweet kind in peaceful shade--the light Of Truth's high noon is not for tender leaves Which must spread broad in other suns and lift In later lives a crowned head to the sky. Thou who hast worshipped me, I worship thee! Excellent heart! learned unknowingly, As the dove is which flieth home by love. In thee is seen why there is hope for man And where we hold the wheel of life at will. Peace go with thee, and comfort all thy days! As thou accomplishest, may I achieve! He whom thou thoughtest God bids thee wish this." "May'st thou achieve," she said, with earnest eyes Bent on her babe, who reached its tender hands To Buddh--knowing, belike, as children know, More than we deem, and reverencing our Lord; But he arose--made strong with that pure meat-- And bent his footsteps where a great Tree grew, The Bodhi-tree (thenceforward in all years Never to fade, and ever to be kept In homage of the world), beneath whose leaves It was ordained that Truth should come to Buddh Which now the Master knew; wherefore he went With measured pace, steadfast, majestical, Unto the Tree of Wisdom. Oh, ye Worlds! Rejoice! our Lord wended unto the Tree! Whom--as he passed into its ample shade, Cloistered with columned dropping stems, and roofed With vaults of glistening green--the conscious earth Worshipped with waving grass and sudden flush Of flowers about his feet. The forest-boughs Bent down to shade him; from the river sighed Cool wafts of wind laden with lotus-scents Breathed by the water-gods. Large wondering eyes Of woodland creatures--panther, boar, and deer-- At peace that eve, gazed on his face benign From cave and thicket. From its cold cleft wound The mottled deadly snake, dancing its hood In honour of our Lord; bright butterflies Fluttered their vans, azure and green and gold, To be his fan-bearers; the fierce kite dropped Its prey and screamed; the striped palm-squirrel raced From stem to stem to see; the weaver-bird Chirped from her swinging nest; the lizard ran; The koil sang her hymn; the doves flocked round; Even the creeping things were 'ware and glad. Voices of earth and air joined in one song, Which unto ears that hear said: "Lord and Friend! Lover and Saviour! Thou who hast subdued Angers and prides, desires and fears and doubts, Thou that for each and all hast given thyself, Pass to the Tree! The sad world blesseth thee Who art the Buddh that shall assuage her woes. Pass, Hailed and Honoured! strive thy last for us, King and high Conqueror! thine hour is come; This is the Night the ages waited for!" Then fell the night even as our Master sate Under that Tree. But he who is the Prince Of Darkness, Mara--knowing this was Buddh Who should deliver men, and now the hour When he should find the Truth and save the worlds-- Gave unto all his evil powers command. Wherefore there trooped from every deepest pit The fiends who war with Wisdom and the Light, Arati, Trishna, Raga, and their crew Of passions, horrors, ignorances, lusts. The brood of gloom and dread; all hating Buddh, Seeking to shake his mind; nor knoweth one, Not even the wisest, how those fiends of Hell Battled that night to keep the Truth from Buddh: Sometimes with terrors of the tempest, blasts Of demon-armies clouding all the wind, With thunder, and with blinding lightning flung In jagged javelins of purple wrath From splitting skies; sometimes with wiles and words Fair-sounding, 'mid hushed leaves and softened airs From shapes of witching beauty; wanton songs, Whispers of love; sometimes with royal allures Of proffered rule; sometimes with mocking doubts, Making truth vain. But whether these befell Without and visible, or whether Buddh Strove with fell spirits in his inmost heart, Judge ye:--I write what ancient books have writ. The ten chief Sins came--Mara's mighty ones, Angels of evil--Attavada first, The Sin of Self, who in the Universe As in a mirror sees her fond face shown, And crying "I" would have the world say "I," And all things perish so if she endure. "If thou be'st Buddh," she said, "let others grope Lightless; it is enough that thou art Thou Changelessly; rise and take the bliss of gods Who change not, heed not, strive not." But Buddh spake, "The right in thee is base, the wrong a curse; Cheat such as love themselves." Then came wan Doubt, He that denies--the mocking Sin--and this Hissed in the Master's ear: "All things are shows, And vain the knowledge of their vanity; Thou dost but chase the shadow of thyself; Rise and go hence, there is no better way Than patient scorn, nor any help for man, Nor any staying of his whirling wheel." But quoth our Lord, "Thou hast no part with me, False Visikitcha, subtlest of man's foes." And third came she who gives dark creeds their power, Silabbat-paramasa, sorceress, Draped fair in many lands as lowly Faith, But ever juggling souls with rites and prayers; The keeper of those keys which lock up Hells And open Heavens. "Wilt thou dare," she said, "Put by our sacred books, dethrone our gods, Unpeople all the temples, shaking down That law which feeds the priests and props the realms?" But Buddha answered, "What thou bidd'st me keep Is form which passes, but the free Truth stands; Get thee unto thy darkness." Next there drew Gallantly nigh a braver Tempter, he, Kama, the King of passions, who hath sway Over the gods themselves, lord of all loves, Ruler of Pleasure's realm. Laughing he came Unto the Tree, bearing his bow of gold Wreathed with red blooms, and arrows of desire Pointed with five-tongued delicate flame which stings The heart it smites sharper than poisoned barb. And round him came into that lonely place Bands of bright shapes with heavenly eyes and lips Singing in lovely words the praise of Love To music of invisible sweet chords, So witching, that it seemed the night stood still To hear them, and the listening stars and moon, Paused in their orbits while these hymned to Buddh Of lost delights, and how a mortal man Findeth nought dearer in the three wide worlds Than are the yielded loving fragrant breasts Of Beauty and the rosy breast-blossoms, Love's rubies; nay, and toucheth nought more high Than is that dulcet harmony of form Seen in the lines and charms of loveliness Unspeakable, yet speaking, soul to soul, Owned by the bounding blood, worshipped by will Which leaps to seize it, knowing this is best, This the true heaven where mortals are like gods, Makers and Masters, this the gift of gifts Ever renewed and worth a thousand woes. For who hath grieved when soft arms shut him safe, And all life melted to a happy sigh, And all the world was given in one warm kiss? So sang, they with soft float of beckoning hands, Eyes lighted with love-flames, alluring smiles; In dainty dance their supple sides and limbs Revealing and concealing like burst buds Which tell their colour, but hide yet their hearts. Never so matchless grace delighted eye As troop by troop these midnight-dancers swept Nearer the Tree, each daintier than the last, Murmuring, "O great Siddartha! I am thine, Taste of my mouth and see if youth is sweet!" Also, when nothing moved our Master's mind, Lo! Kama waved his magic bow, and lo! The band of dancers opened, and a shape Fairest and stateliest of the throng came forth Wearing the guise of sweet Yasodhara. Tender the passion of those dark eyes seemed Brimming with tears; yearning those outspread arms Opened towards him; musical that moan Wherewith the beauteous shadow named his name, Sighing: "My Prince! I die for lack of thee! What heaven hast thou found like that we knew By bright Rohini in the Pleasure-house, Where all these weary years I weep for thee? Return, Siddartha! ah, return! But touch My lips again, but let me to thy breast Once, and these fruitless dreams will end! Ah, look! Am I not she thou lovedst?" But Buddh said: "For that sweet sake of her thou playest thus Fair and false Shadow, is thy playing vain; I curse thee not who wear'st a form so dear, Yet as thou art, so are all earthly shows. Melt to thy void again!" Thereat a cry Thrilled through the grove, and all that comely rout Faded with flickering wafts of flame, and trail Of vaporous ropes. Next under darkening skies And noise of rising storm came fiercer Sins The rearmost of the Ten, Patigha--Hate-- With serpents coiled about her waist, which suck Poisonous milk from both her hanging dugs, And with her curses mix their angry hiss. Little wrought she upon that Holy One Who with his calm eyes dumbed her bitter lips And made her black snakes writhe to hide their fangs. Then followed Ruparaga--Lust of days-- That sensual Sin which out of greed for life Forgets to live; and next him Lust of Fame, Nobler Aruparaga, she whose spell Beguiles the wise, mother of daring deeds, Battles and toils. And haughty Mano came, The Fiend of Pride; and smooth Self-Righteousness. Uddhachcha; and--with many a hideous band Of vile and formless things, which crept and flapped Toad-like and bat-like--Ignorance, the Dam Of Fear and Wrong, Avidya, hideous hag, Whose footsteps left the midnight darker, while The rooted mountains shook, the wild winds howled, The broken clouds shed from their caverns streams Of levin-lighted rain; stars shot from heaven, The solid earth shuddered as if one laid Flame to her gaping wounds; the torn black air Was full of whistling wings, of screams and yells, Of evil faces peering, of vast fronts Terrible and majestic, Lords of Hell Who from a thousand Limbos led their troops To tempt the Master. But Buddh heeded not, Sitting serene, with perfect virtue walled As is a stronghold by its gates and ramps; Also the Sacred Tree--the Bodhi-tree-- Amid that tumult stirred not, but each leaf Glistened as still as when on moonlit eves No zephyr spills the glittering gems of dew; For all this clamour raged outside the shade Spread by those cloistered stems. In the third watch, The earth being still, the hellish legions fled, A soft air breathing from the sinking moon, Our Lord attained samma-sambuddh; he saw By light which shines beyond our mortal ken The line of all his lives in all the worlds, Far back and farther back and farthest yet, Five hundred lives and fifty. Even as one, At rest upon a mountain-summit, marks His path wind up by precipice and crag Past thick-set woods shrunk to a patch; through bogs Glittering false-green; down hollows where he toiled Breathless; on dizzy ridges where his feet Had well-nigh slipped; beyond the sunny lawns, The cataract and the cavern and the pool, Backward to those dim flats wherefrom he sprang To reach the blue--thus Buddha did behold Life's upward steps long-linked, from levels low Where breath is base, to higher slopes and higher Whereon the ten great Virtues wait to lead The climber skyward. Also, Buddha saw How new life reaps what the old life did sow; How where its march breaks off its march begins; Holding the gain and answering for the loss; And how in each life good begets more good, Evil fresh evil; Death but casting up Debit or credit, whereupon th' account In merits or demerits stamps itself By sure arithmic--where no tittle drops-- Certain and just, on some new-springing life; Wherein are packed and scored past thoughts and deeds, Strivings and triumphs, memories and marks Of lives foregone: And in the middle watch, Our Lord attained Abhidjna--insight vast Ranging beyond this sphere to spheres unnamed, System on system, countless worlds and suns Moving in splendid measures, band by band Linked in division, one yet separate, The silver islands of a sapphire sea Shoreless, unfathomed, undiminished, stirred With waves which roll in restless tides of change. He saw those Lords of Light who hold their worlds By bonds invisible, how they themselves Circle obedient round mightier orbs Which serve profounder splendours, star to star Flashing the ceaseless radiance of life From centres ever shifting unto cirques Knowing no uttermost. These he beheld With unsealed vision, and of all those worlds, Cycle on epicycle, all their tale Of Kalpas, Mahakalpas--terms of time Which no man grasps, yea, though he knew to count The drops in Gunga from her springs to the sea, Measureless unto speech--whereby these wax And wane; whereby each of this heavenly host Fulfils its shining life and darkling dies. Sakwal by Sakwal, depths and heights be passed Transported through the blue infinitudes, Marking--behind all modes, above all spheres, Beyond the burning impulse of each orb-- That fixed decree at silent work which wills Evolve the dark to light, the dead to life, To fulness void, to form the yet unformed, Good unto better, better unto best, By wordless edict; having none to bid, None to forbid; for this is past all gods Immutable, unspeakable, supreme, A Power which builds, unbuilds, and builds again, Ruling all things accordant to the rule Of virtue, which is beauty, truth, and use. So that all things do well which serve the Power, And ill which hinder; nay, the worm does well Obedient to its kind; the hawk does well Which carries bleeding quarries to its young; The dewdrop and the star shine sisterly, Globing together in the common work; And man, who lives to die, dies to live well So if he guide his ways by blamelessness And earnest will to hinder not but help All things both great and small which suffer life. These did our Lord see in the middle watch. But when the fourth watch came the secret came Of Sorrow, which with evil mars the law, As damp and dross hold back the goldsmith's fire. Then was the Dukha-satya opened him First of the "Noble Truths"; how Sorrow is Shadow to life, moving where life doth move; Not to be laid aside until one lays Living aside, with all its changing states, Birth, growth, decay, love, hatred, pleasure, pain, Being and doing. How that none strips off These sad delights and pleasant griefs who lacks Knowledge to know them snares; but he who knows Avidya--Delusion--sets those snares, Loves life no longer but ensues escape. The eyes of such a one are wide; he sees Delusion breeds Sankhara, Tendency Perverse: Tendency Energy--Vidnnan-- Whereby comes Namarupa, local form And name and bodiment, bringing the man With senses naked to the sensible, A helpless mirror of all shows which pass Across his heart; and so Vendana grows-- "Sense-life "--false in its gladness, fell in sadness, But sad or glad, the Mother of Desire, Trishna, that thirst which makes the living drink Deeper and deeper of the false salt waves Whereon they float--pleasures, ambitions, wealth, Praise, fame, or domination, conquest, love; Rich meats and robes, and fair abodes, and pride Of ancient lines, and lust of days, and strife To live, and sins that flow from strife, some sweet, Some bitter. Thus Life's thirst quenches itself With draughts which double thirst; but who is wise Tears from his soul this Trishna, feeds his sense No longer on false shows, fills his firm mind To seek not, strive not, wrong not; bearing meek All ills which flow from foregone wrongfulness, And so constraining passions that they die Famished; till all the sum of ended life-- The Karma--all that total of a soul Which is the things it did, the thoughts it had, The "Self" it wove--with woof of viewless time, Crossed on the warp invisible of acts-- The outcome of him on the Universe, Grows pure and sinless; either never more Needing to find a body and a place, Or so informing what fresh frame it takes In new existence that the new toils prove Lighter and lighter not to be at all, Thus "finishing the Path"; free from Earth's cheats; Released from all the skandhas of the flesh; Broken from ties--from Upandanas--saved From whirling on the wheel; aroused and sane As is a man wakened from hateful dreams; Until--greater than Kings, than Gods more glad!-- The aching craze to live ends, and life glides-- Lifeless--to nameless quiet, nameless joy, Blessed NIRVANA--sinless, stirless rest That change which never changes! Lo! the Dawn Sprang with Buddh's Victory! lo! in the East Flamed the first fires of beauteous day, poured forth Through fleeting folds of Night's black drapery. High in the widening blue the herald-star Faded to paler silver as there shot Brighter and brighter bars of rosy gleam Across the grey. Far off the shadowy hills Saw the great Sun, before the world was 'ware, And donned their crowns of crimson; flower by flower Felt the warm breath of Morn and 'gan unfold Their tender lids. Over the spangled grass Swept the swift footsteps of the lovely Light, Turning the tears of Night to joyous gems, Decking the earth with radiance, 'broidering The sinking storm-clouds with a golden fringe; Gilding the feathers of the palms, which waved Glad salutation; darting beams of gold Into the glades; touching with magic wand The stream to rippled ruby; in the brake Finding the mild eyes of the antelopes And saying, "It is day"; in nested sleep Touching the small heads under many a wing And whispering, "Children, praise the light of day!" Whereat there piped anthems of all the birds! The koil's fluted song, the bulbul's hymn, The "morning, morning" of the painted thrush, The twitter of the sunbirds starting forth To find the honey ere the bees be out, The grey crow's caw, the parrot's scream, the strokes Of the green hammersmith, the myna's chirp, The never finished love-talk of the doves Yea! and so holy was the influence Of that high Dawn which came with victory That, far and near, in homes of men there spread An unknown peace. The slayer hid his knife; The robber laid his plunder back; the shroff Counted full tale of coins; all evil hearts Grew gentle, kind hearts gentler, as the balm Of that divinest Daybreak lightened Earth. Kings at fierce war called truce; the sick men leaped Laughing from beds of pain; the dying smiled As though they knew that happy Morn was sprung From fountains farther than the utmost East; And o'er the heart of sad Yasodhara, Sitting forlorn at Prince Siddartha's bed, Came sudden bliss, as if love should not fail Nor such vast sorrow miss to end in joy. So glad the World was--though it wist not why-- That over desolate wastes went swooning songs Of mirth, the voice of bodiless Prets and Bhuts Foreseeing Buddh; and Devas in the air Cried, "It is finished, finished!" and the priests Stood with the wondering people in the streets Watching those golden splendours flood the sky And saying, "There hath happed some mighty thing." Also in Ran and jungle grew that day Friendship amongst the creatures: spotted deer Browsed fearless where the tigress fed her cubs, And cheetahs lapped the pool beside the bucks; Under the eagle's rock the brown hares scoured While his fierce beak but preened an idle wing; The snake sunned all his jewels in the beam With deadly fangs in sheath; the shrike let pass The nestling finch; the emerald halcyons Sate dreaming while the fishes played beneath, Nor hawked the merops, though the butterflies-- Crimson and blue and amber-flitted thick Around his perch; the Spirit of our Lord Lay potent upon man and bird and beast, Even while he mused under that Bodhi-tree, Glorified with the Conquest gained for all And lightened by a Light greater than Day's. Then he arose--radiant, rejoicing, strong-- Beneath the Tree, and lifting high his voice Spake this, in hearing of all Times and Worlds: Anekajatisangsarang Sandhawissang anibhisang Gahakarakangawesanto Dukkhajatipunappunang. Gahakarakadithosi; Punagehang nakahasi; Sabhatephasukhabhagga, Gahakutangwisang Khitang; Wisangkharagatang chittang, Janhanangknayamajhaga. Many a House of Life Held me--Seeking Ever Him Wrought These Prisons of the Senses, Sorrow-Fraught; Sore was My Ceaseless Strife! But Now, Thou Builder of this Tabernacle--Thou! I Know Thee! Never Shalt Thou Build Again These Walls of Pain, Nor Raise the Roof-Tree of Deceits, Nor Lay Fresh Rafters on the Clay: Broken Thy House is, and the Ridge-Pole Split! Delusion Fashioned it! Safe Pass I Thence--Deliverance to Obtain. Book The Seventh Sorrowful dwelt the King Suddhodana All those long years among the Sakya Lords Lacking the speech and presence of his Son; Sorrowful sate the sweet Yasodhara All those long years, knowing no joy of life, Widowed of him her living Liege and Prince. And ever, on the news of some recluse Seen far away by pasturing camel-men Or traders threading devious paths for gain, Messengers from the King had gone and come Bringing account of many a holy sage Lonely and lost to home; but nought of him The crown of white Kapilavastu's line, The glory of her monarch and his hope, The heart's content of sweet Yasodhara, Far-wandered now, forgetful, changed, or dead. But on a day in the Wasanta-time, When silver sprays swing on the mango-trees And all the earth is clad with garb of spring, The Princess sate by that bright garden-stream Whose gliding glass, bordered with lotus-cups, Mirrored so often in the bliss gone by Their clinging hands and meeting lips. Her lids Were wan with tears, her tender cheeks had thinned; Her lips' delicious curves were drawn with grief The lustrous glory of her hair was hid-- Close-bound as widows use; no ornament She wore, nor any jewel clasped the cloth-- Coarse, and of mourning-white--crossed on her breast. Slow moved and painfully those small fine feet Which had the roe's gait and the rose-leaf's fall In old years at the loving voice of him. Her eyes, those lamps of love,--which were as if Sunlight should shine from out the deepest dark, Illumining Night's peace with Daytime's glow-- Unlighted now, and roving aimlessly, Scarce marked the clustering signs of coming Spring So the silk lashes drooped over their orbs. In one hand was a girdle thick with pearls, Siddartha's--treasured since that night he fled. (Ah, bitter Night! mother of weeping days! When was fond Love so pitiless to love Save that this scorned to limit love by life?) The other led her little son, a boy Divinely fair, the pledge Siddartha left-- Named Rahula--now seven years old, who tripped Gladsome beside his mother, light of heart To see the spring-blooms burgeon o'er the world. So while they lingered by the lotus-pools And, lightly laughing, Rahula flung rice To feed the blue and purple fish, and she With sad eyes watched the swiftly-flying cranes, Sighing, "O creatures of the wandering wing, If ye shall light where my dear Lord is hid, Say that Yasodhara lives nigh to death For one word of his mouth, one touch of him."-- So, as they played and sighed, mother and child, Came some among the damsels of the Court Saying: "Great Princess! there have entered in At the south gate merchants of Hastinpur Tripusha called and Bhalluk, men of worth, Long traveled from the loud sea's edge, who bring Marvellous lovely webs pictured with gold, Waved blades of gilded steel, wrought bowls in brass, Cut ivories, spice, simples, and unknown birds Treasures of far-off peoples; but they bring That which doth beggar these, for He is seen! Thy Lord,--our Lord,--the hope of all the land Siddartha! they have seen him face to face Yea, and have worshipped him with knees and brows, And offered offerings; for he is become All which was shown, a teacher of the wise, World-honoured, holy, wonderful; a Buddh Who doth deliver men and save all flesh By sweetest speech and pity vast as Heaven And, lo! he journeyeth hither, these do say." Then--while the glad blood bounded in her veins As Gunga leaps when first the mountain snows Melt at her springs--uprose Yasodhara And clapped her palms, and laughed, with brimming tears Beading her lashes. "Oh! call quick," she cried, "These merchants to my purdah, for mine ears Thirst like parched throats to drink their blessed news. Go bring them in,--but if their tale be true, Say I will fill their girdles with much gold, With gems that kings shall envy; come ye too, My girls, for ye shall have guerdon of this If there be gifts to speak my grateful heart." So went those merchants to the Pleasure House, Full softly pacing through its golden ways With naked feet, amid the peering maids, Much wondering at the glories of the Court. Whom, when they came without the purdah's folds, A voice, tender and eager, filled and charmed With trembling music, saying: "Ye are come From far, fair Sirs! and ye have seen my Lord-- Yea, worshipped--for he is become a Buddh, World-honoured, holy, and delivers men, And journeyeth hither. Speak! for, if this be, Friends are ye of my House, welcome and dear." Then answer made Tripusha: "We have seen That sacred Master, Princess! we have bowed Before his feet; for who was lost a Prince Is found a greater than the King of kings. Under the Bodhi-tree by Phalgu's bank That which shall save the world hath late been wrought By him--the Friend of all, the Prince of all-- Thine most, High Lady! from whose tears men win The comfort of this Word the Master speaks. Lo! he is well, as one beyond all ills, Uplifted as a god from earthly woes, Shining with risen Truth, golden and clear. Moreover as he entereth town by town, Preaching those noble ways which lead to peace, The hearts of men follow his path as leaves Troop to wind or sheep draw after one Who knows the pastures. We ourselves have heard By Gaya in the green Tchirnika grove Those wondrous lips and done them reverence. He cometh hither ere the first rains fall." Thus spake he, and Yasodhara, for joy, Scarce mastered breath to answer: "Be it well Now and at all times with ye, worthy friends, Who bring good tidings; but of this great thing Wist ye how it befell?" Then Bhalluk told Such as the people of the valleys knew Of that dread night of conflict, when the air Darkened with fiendish shadows, and the earth Quaked, and the waters swelled with Mara's wrath. Also how gloriously that morning broke Radiant with rising hopes for man, and how The Lord was found rejoicing 'neath his Tree. But many days the burden of release-- To be escaped beyond all storms of doubt, Safe on Truth's shore--lay, spake he, on that heart A golden load; for how shall men--Buddh mused-- Who love their sins and cleave to cheats of sense, And drink of error from a thousand springs-- Having no mind to see, nor strength to break The fleshly snare which binds them--how should such Receive the Twelve Nidanas and the Law Redeeming all, yet strange to profit by, As the caged bird oft shuns its open door? So had we missed the helpful victory If, in this earth without a refuge, Buddh Winning the way had deemed it all too hard For mortal feet, and passed, none following him. Yet pondered the compassion of our Lord, But in that hour there rang a voice as sharp As cry of travail, so as if the earth Moaned in birth-throe "Nasyami aham bhu Nasyati loka! Surely I Am Lost, I And My Creatures:" then a pause, and next A pleading sigh borne on the western wind, "Sruyatam dharma, Bhagwat!" Oh, Supreme Let Thy Great Law Be Uttered! Whereupon The Master cast his vision forth on flesh, Saw who should hear and who must wait to hear, As the keen Sun gilding the lotus-lakes Seeth which buds will open to his beams And which are not yet risen from their roots; Then spake, divinely smiling, "Yea, I preach! Whoso will listen let him learn the Law." Afterwards passed he, said they, by the hills Unto Benares, where he taught the Five, Showing how birth and death should be destroyed, And how man hath no fate except past deeds, No Hell but what he makes, no Heaven too high For those to reach whose passions sleep subdued. This was the fifteenth day of Vaishya Mid-afternoon and that night was full moon. But, of the Rishis, first Kaundinya Owned the Four Truths and entered on the Paths; And after him Bhadraka, Asvajit, Bassav, Mahanama; also there Within the Deer-park, at the feet of Buddh, Yasad the Prince with nobles fifty-four Hearing the blessed word our Master spake Worshipped and followed; for there sprang up peace And knowledge of a new time come for men In all who heard, as spring the flowers and grass When water sparkles through a sandy plain. These sixty--said they--did our Lord send forth, Made perfect in restraint and passion-free, To teach the Way; but the World-honoured turned South from the Deer-park and Isipatan To Yashti and King Bimbasara's realm, Where many days he taught; and after these King Bimbasara and his folk believed, Learning the law of love and ordered life. Also he gave the Master, of free gift-- Pouring forth water on the hands of Buddh-- The Bamboo-Garden, named Weluvana, Wherein are streams and caves and lovely glades; And the King set a stone there, carved with this: "Ye dharma hetuppabhawa Yesan hetun Tathagato; Aha yesan cha yo nirodho Ewan wadi Maha samano. "What life's course and cause sustain These Tathagato made plain; What delivers from life's woe That our Lord hath made us know." And, in that Garden--said they--there was held A high Assembly, where the Teacher spake Wisdom and power, winning all souls which heard, So that nine hundred took the yellow robe-- Such as the Master wears,--and spread his Law; And this the gatha was wherewith he closed: Sabba papassa akaranan; Kusalassa upasampada; Sa chitta pariyodapanan; Etan Budhanusasanan. "Evil swells the debts to pay, Good delivers and acquits; Shun evil, follow good; hold sway Over thyself. This is the Way." Whom, when they ended, speaking so of him, With gifts, and thanks which made the jewels dull, The Princess recompensed. "But by what road Wendeth my Lord?" she asked: the merchants said, "Yojans threescore stretch from the city-walls To Rajagriha, whence the easy path Passeth by Sona hither and the hills. Our oxen, treading eight slow koss a day, Came in one moon." Then the King hearing word, Sent nobles of the Court--well-mounted lords-- Nine separate messengers, each embassy Bidden to say: "The King Suddhodana-- Nearer the pyre by seven long years of lack, Wherethrough he hath not ceased to seek for thee-- Prays of his son to come unto his own, The Throne and people of this longing Realm, Lest he shall die and see thy face no more." Also nine horsemen sent Yasodhara Bidden to say, "The Princess of thy House-- Rahula's mother--craves to see thy face As the night-blowing moon-flower's swelling heart Pines for the moon, as pale asoka-buds Wait for a woman's foot: if thou hast found More than was lost, she prays her part in this, Rahula's part, but most of all thyself." So sped the Sakya Lords, but it befell That each one, with the message in his mouth, Entered the Bamboo-Garden in that hour When Buddha taught his Law; and--hearing--each Forgot to speak, lost thought of King and quest, Of the sad Princess even; only gazed Eye-rapt upon the Master; only hung Heart-caught upon the speech, compassionate, Commanding, perfect, pure, enlightening all, Poured from those sacred lips. Look! like a bee Winged for the hive, who sees the mogras spread And scents their utter sweetness on the air, If he be honey-filled, it matters not; If night be nigh, or rain, he will not heed; Needs must he light on those delicious blooms And drain their nectar; so these messengers One with another, hearing Buddha's words, Let go the purpose of their speed, and mixed, Heedless of all, amid the Master's train. Wherefore the King bade that Udayi go-- Chiefest in all the Court, and faithfullest, Siddartha's playmate in the happier days-- Who, as he drew anear the garden, plucked Blown tufts of tree-wool from the grove and sealed The entrance of his hearing; thus he came Safe through the lofty peril of the place And told the message of the King, and hers. Then meekly bowed his head and spake our Lord Before the people: "Surely I shall go! It is my duty as it was my will; Let no man miss to render reverence To those who lend him life, whereby come means To live and die no more, but safe attain Blissful Nirvana, if ye keep the Law, Purging past wrongs and adding nought thereto, Complete in love and lovely charities. Let the King know and let the Princess hear I take the way forthwith." This told, the folk Of white Kapilavastu and its fields Made ready for the entrance of their Prince. At the south gate a bright pavilion rose With flower-wreathed pillars and the walls of silk Wrought on their red and green with woven gold. Also the roads were laid with scented boughs Of neem and mango, and full mussuks shed Sandal and jasmine on the dust, and flags Fluttered; and on the day when he should come It was ordained how many elephants-- With silver howdahs and their tusks gold-tipped-- Should wait beyond the ford, and where the drums Should boom "Siddartha cometh!" where the lords Should light and worship, and the dancing-girls Where they should strew their flowers with dance and song So that the steed he rode might tramp knee-deep In rose and balsam, and the ways be fair; While the town rang with music and high joy. This was ordained and all men's ears were pricked Dawn after dawn to catch the first drum's beat Announcing, "Now he cometh!" But it fell Eager to be before--Yasodhara Rode in her litter to the city-walls Where soared the bright pavilion. All around A beauteous garden smiled--Nigrodha named-- Shaded with bel-trees and the green-plumed dates, New-trimmed and gay with winding walks and banks Of fruits and flowers; for the southern road Skirted its lawns, on this hand leaf and bloom, On that the suburb-huts where base-borns dwelt Outside the gates, a patient folk and poor, Whose touch for Kshatriya and priest of Brahm Were sore defilement. Yet those, too, were quick With expectation, rising ere the dawn To peer along the road, to climb the trees At far-off trumpet of some elephant, Or stir of temple-drum; and when none came, Busied with lowly chores to please the Prince; Sweeping their door-stones, setting forth their flags, Stringing the fruited fig-leaves into chains, New furbishing the Lingam, decking new Yesterday's faded arc of boughs, but aye Questioning wayfarers if any noise Be on the road of great Siddartha. These The Princess marked with lovely languid eyes, Watching, as they, the southward plain and bent Like them to listen if the passers gave News of the path. So fell it she beheld One slow approaching with his head close shorn, A yellow cloth over his shoulder cast, Girt as the hermits are, and in his hand An earthen bowl, shaped melonwise, the which Meekly at each hut-door he held a space, Taking the granted dole with gentle thanks And all as gently passing where none gave. Two followed him wearing the yellow robe, But he who bore the bowl so lordly seemed, So reverend, and with such a passage moved, With so commanding presence filled the air, With such sweet eyes of holiness smote all, That as they reached him alms the givers gazed Awestruck upon his face, and some bent down In worship, and some ran to fetch fresh gifts, Grieved to be poor; till slowly, group by group, Children and men and women drew behind Into his steps, whispering with covered lips, "Who is he? who? when looked a Rishi thus?" But as he came with quiet footfall on Nigh the pavilion, lo! the silken door Lifted, and, all unveiled, Yasodhara Stood in his path crying, "Siddartha! Lord!" With wide eyes streaming and with close-clasped hands, Then sobbing fell upon his feet, and lay. Afterwards, when this weeping lady passed Into the Noble Paths, and one had prayed Answer from Buddha wherefore-being vowed Quit of all mortal passion and the touch, Flower-soft and conquering, of a woman's hands-- He suffered such embrace, the Master said "The greater beareth with the lesser love So it may raise it unto easier heights. Take heed that no man, being 'soaped from bonds, Vexeth bound souls with boasts of liberty. Free are ye rather that your freedom spread By patient winning and sweet wisdom's skill. Three eras of long toil bring Bodhisats-- Who will be guides and help this darkling world-- Unto deliverance, and the first is named Of deep 'Resolve,' the second of 'Attempt,' The third of 'Nomination.' Lo! I lived In era of Resolve, desiring good, Searching for wisdom, but mine eyes were sealed. Count the grey seeds on yonder castor-clump-- So many rains it is since I was Ram, A merchant of the coast which looketh south To Lanka and the hiding-place of pearls. Also in that far time Yasodhara Dwelt with me in our village by the sea, Tender as now, and Lukshmi was her name. And I remember how I journeyed thence Seeking our gain, for poor the household was And lowly. Not the less with wistful tears She prayed me that I should not part, nor tempt Perils by land and water. 'How could love Leave what it loved?' she wailed; yet, venturing, I Passed to the Straits, and after storm and toil And deadly strife with creatures of the deep, And woes beneath the midnight and the noon, Searching the wave I won therefrom a pearl Moonlike and glorious, such as kings might buy Emptying their treasury. Then came I glad Unto mine hills, but over all that land Famine spread sore; ill was I stead to live In journey home, and hardly reached my door-- Aching for food--with that white wealth of the sea Tied in my girdle. Yet no food was there; And on the threshold she for whom I toiled-- More than myself--lay with her speechless lips Nigh unto death for one small gift of grain. Then cried I, 'If there be who hath of grain, Here is a kingdom's ransom for one life Give Lukshmi bread and take my moonlight pearl.' Whereat one brought the last of all his hoard, Millet--three seers--and clutched the beauteous thing. But Lukshmi lived and sighed with gathered life, 'Lo! thou didst love indeed!' I spent my pearl Well in that life to comfort heart and mind Else quite uncomforted; but these pure pearls, My last large gain, won from a deeper wave-- The Twelve Nidanas and the Law of Good-- Cannot be spent, nor dimmed, and most fulfil Their perfect beauty being freeliest given. For like as is to Meru yonder hill Heaped by the little ants, and like as dew Dropped in the footmark of a bounding roe Unto the shoreless seas, so was that gift Unto my present giving; and so love-- Vaster in being free from toils of sense-- Was wisest stooping to the weaker heart; And so the feet of sweet Yasodhara Passed into peace and bliss, being softly led." But when the King heard how Siddartha came Shorn, with the mendicant's sad-coloured cloth, And stretching out a bowl to gather orts From base-borns' leavings, wrathful sorrow drove Love from his heart. Thrice on the ground he spat, Plucked at his silvered beard, and strode straight forth Lackeyed by trembling lords. Frowning he clomb Upon his war-horse, drove the spurs, and dashed, Angered, through wondering streets and lanes of folk. Scarce finding breath to say, "The King! bow down!" Ere the loud cavalcade had clattered by: Which--at the turning by the Temple-wall Where the south gate was seen--encountered full A mighty crowd; to every edge of it Poured fast more people, till the roads were lost, Blotted by that huge company which thronged And grew, close following him whose look serene Met the old King's. Nor lived the father's wrath Longer than while the gentle eyes of Buddh Lingered in worship on his troubled brows, Then downcast sank, with his true knee, to earth In proud humility. So dear it seemed To see the Prince, to know him whole, to mark That glory greater than of earthly state Crowning his head, that majesty which brought All men, so awed and silent, in his steps. Nathless the King broke forth: "Ends it in this, That great Siddartha steals into his realm, Wrapped in a clout, shorn, sandalled, craving food Of low-borns, he whose life was as a god's, My son! heir of this spacious power, and heir Of Kings who did but clap their palms to have What earth could give or eager service bring? Thou should'st have come apparelled in thy rank, With shining spears and tramp of horse and foot. Lo! all my soldiers camped upon the road, And all my city waited at the gates; Where hast thou sojourned through these evil years Whilst thy crowned father mourned? and she, too, there Lived as the widows use, foregoing joys; Never once hearing sound of song or string, Nor wearing once the festal robe, till now When in her cloth of gold she welcomes home A beggar spouse in yellow remnants clad. Son! why is this?" "My father!" came reply, "It is the custom of my race." "Thy race," Answered the King "counteth a hundred thrones From Maha Sammat, but no deed like this." "Not of a mortal line," the Master said, "I spake, but of descent invisible, The Buddhas who have been and who shall be: Of these am I, and what they did I do, And this which now befalls so fell before, That at his gate a King in warrior-mail Should meet his son, a Prince in hermit-weeds; And that, by love and self-control, being more Than mightiest Kings in all their puissance, The appointed Helper of the Worlds should bow-- As now do I--and with all lowly love Proffer, where it is owed for tender debts, The first-fruits of the treasure he hath brought; Which now I proffer." Then the King amazed Inquired "What treasure?" and the Teacher took Meekly the royal palm, and while they paced Through worshipping streets--the Princess and the King On either side--he told the things which make For peace and pureness, those Four noble Truths Which hold all wisdom as shores shut the seas, Those Eight right Rules whereby who will may walk-- Monarch or slave--upon the perfect Path That hath its Stages Four and Precepts Eight, Whereby whoso will live--mighty or mean Wise or unlearned, man, woman, young or old Shall soon or late break from the wheels of life, Attaining blest Nirvana. So they came Into the Palace-porch, Suddhodana With brows unknit drinking the mighty words, And in his own hand carrying Buddha's bowl, Whilst a new light brightened the lovely eyes Of sweet Yasodhara and sunned her tears; And that night entered they the Way of Peace. Book The Eighth A broad mead spreads by swift Kohana's bank At Nagara; five days shall bring a man In ox-wain thither from Benares' shrines Eastward and northward journeying. The horns Of white Himala look upon the place, Which all the year is glad with blooms and girt By groves made green from that bright streamlet's wave. Soft are its slopes and cool its fragrant shades, And holy all the spirit of the spot Unto this time: the breath of eve comes hushed Over the tangled thickets, and high heaps Of carved red stones cloven by root and stem Of creeping fig, and clad with waving veil Of leaf and grass. The still snake glistens forth From crumbled work of lac and cedar-beams To coil his folds there on deep-graven slabs; The lizard dwells and darts o'er painted floors Where kings have paced; the grey fox litters safe Under the broken thrones; only the peaks, And stream, and sloping lawns, and gentle air Abide unchanged. All else, like all fair shows Of life, are fled--for this is where it stood, The city of Suddhodana, the hill Whereon, upon an eve of gold and blue At sinking sun Lord Buddha set himself To teach the Law in hearing of his own. Lo! ye shall read it in the Sacred Books How, being met in that glad pleasaunce-place-- A garden in old days with hanging walks, Fountains, and tanks, and rose-banked terraces Girdled by gay pavilions and the sweep Of stately palace-fronts--the Master sate Eminent, worshipped, all the earnest throng Catching the opening of his lips to learn That wisdom which hath made our Asia mild; Whereto four hundred crores of living souls Witness this day. Upon the King's right hand He sate, and round were ranged the Sakya Lords Ananda, Devadatta--all the Court. Behind stood Seriyut and Mugallan, chiefs Of the calm brethren in the yellow garb, A goodly company. Between his knees Rahula smiled with wondering childish eyes Bent on the awful face, while at his feet Sate sweet Yasodhara, her heartaches gone, Foreseeing that fair love which doth not feed On fleeting sense, that life which knows no age, That blessed last of deaths when Death is dead, His victory and hers. Wherefore she laid Her hand upon his hands, folding around Her silver shoulder-cloth his yellow robe, Nearest in all the world to him whose words The Three Worlds waited for. I cannot tell A small part of the splendid lore which broke From Buddha's lips: I am a late-come scribe Who love the Master and his love of men, And tell this legend, knowing he was wise, But have not wit to speak beyond the books; And time hath blurred their script and ancient sense, Which once was new and mighty, moving all. A little of that large discourse I know Which Buddha spake on the soft Indian eve. Also I know it writ that they who heard Were more--lakhs more--crores more--than could be seen, For all the Devas and the Dead thronged there, Till Heaven was emptied to the seventh zone And uttermost dark Hells opened their bars; Also the daylight lingered past its time In rose-leaf radiance on the watching peaks, So that it seemed night listened in the glens, And noon upon the mountains; yea! they write, The evening stood between them like some maid Celestial, love-struck, rapt; the smooth-rolled clouds Her braided hair; the studded stars the pearls And diamonds of her coronal; the moon Her forehead jewel, and the deepening dark Her woven garments. 'T was her close-held breath Which came in scented sighs across the lawns While our Lord taught, and, while he taught, who heard-- Though he were stranger in the land, or slave, High caste or low, come of the Aryan blood, Or Mlech or Jungle-dweller--seemed to hear What tongue his fellows talked. Nay, outside those Who crowded by the river, great and small, The birds and beasts and creeping things--'t is writ-- Had sense of Buddha's vast embracing love And took the promise of his piteous speech; So that their lives--prisoned in shape of ape, Tiger, or deer, shagged bear, jackal, or wolf, Foul-feeding kite, pearled dove, or peacock gemmed, Squat toad, or speckled serpent, lizard, bat, Yea, or of fish fanning the river waves-- Touched meekly at the skirts of brotherhood With man who hath less innocence than these; And in mute gladness knew their bondage broke Whilst Buddha spake these things before the King: Om, Amitaya! measure not with words Th' Immeasurable; nor sink the string of thought Into the Fathomless. Who asks doth err, Who answers, errs. Say nought! The Books teach Darkness was, at first of all, And Brahm, sole meditating in that Night; Look not for Brahm and the Beginning there! Nor him, nor any light Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes, Or any searcher know by mortal mind, Veil after veil will lift--but there must be Veil upon veil behind. Stars sweep and question not. This is enough That life and death and joy and woe abide; And cause and sequence, and the course of time, And Being's ceaseless tide, Which, ever-changing, runs, linked like a river By ripples following ripples, fast or slow-- The same yet not the same--from far-off fountain To where its waters flow Into the seas. These, steaming to the Sun, Give the lost wavelets back in cloudy fleece To trickle down the hills, and glide again; Having no pause or peace. This is enough to know, the phantasms are; The Heavens, Earths, Worlds, and changes changing them A mighty whirling wheel of strife and stress Which none can stay or stem. Pray not! the Darkness will not brighten! Ask Nought from the Silence, for it cannot speak! Vex not your mournful minds with pious pains! Ah! Brothers, Sisters! seek Nought from the helpless gods by gift and hymn, Nor bribe with blood, nor feed with fruit and cakes; Within yourselves deliverance must be sought; Each man his prison makes. Each hath such lordship as the loftiest ones; Nay, for with Powers above, around, below, As with all flesh and whatsoever lives, Act maketh joy and woe. What hath been bringeth what shall be, and is, Worse--better--last for first and first for last; The Angels in the Heavens of Gladness reap Fruits of a holy past. The devils in the underworlds wear out Deeds that were wicked in an age gone by. Nothing endures: fair virtues waste with time, Foul sins grow purged thereby. Who toiled a slave may come anew a Prince For gentle worthiness and merit won; Who ruled a King may wander earth in rags For things done and undone. Higher than Indra's ye may lift your lot, And sink it lower than the worm or gnat; The end of many myriad lives is this, The end of myriads that. Only, while turns this wheel invisible, No pause, no peace, no staying-place can be; Who mounts will fall, who falls may mount; the spokes Go round unceasingly! If ye lay bound upon the wheel of change, And no way were of breaking from the chain, The Heart of boundless Being is a curse, The Soul of Things fell Pain. Ye are not bound! the Soul of Things is sweet, The Heart of Being is celestial rest; Stronger than woe is will: that which was Good Doth pass to Better--Best. I, Buddh, who wept with all my brothers' tears, Whose heart was broken by a whole world's woe, Laugh and am glad, for there is Liberty Ho! ye who suffer! know Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels None other holds you that ye live and die, And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss Its spokes of agony, Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness. Behold, I show you Truth! Lower than hell, Higher than heaven, outside the utmost stars, Farther than Brahm doth dwell, Before beginning, and without an end, As space eternal and as surety sure, Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good, Only its laws endure. This is its touch upon the blossomed rose, The fashion of its hand shaped lotus-leaves; In dark soil and the silence of the seeds The robe of Spring it weaves; That is its painting on the glorious clouds, And these its emeralds on the peacock's train; It hath its stations in the stars; Its slaves in lightning, wind, and rain. Out of the dark it wrought the heart of man, Out of dull shells the pheasant's pencilled neck; Ever at toil, it brings to loveliness All ancient wrath and wreck. The grey eggs in the golden sun-bird's nest Its treasures are, the bees' six-sided cell Its honey-pot; the ant wots of its ways, The white doves know them well. It spreadeth forth for flight the eagle's wings What time she beareth home her prey; it sends The she-wolf to her cubs; for unloved things It findeth food and friends. It is not marred nor stayed in any use, All liketh it; the sweet white milk it brings To mothers' breasts; it brings the white drops, too, Wherewith the young snake stings. The ordered music of the marching orbs It makes in viewless canopy of sky; In deep abyss of earth it hides up gold, Sards, sapphires, lazuli. Ever and ever bringing secrets forth, It sitteth in the green of forest-glades Nursing strange seedlings at the cedar's root, Devising leaves, blooms, blades. It slayeth and it saveth, nowise moved Except unto the working out of doom; Its threads are Love and Life; and Death and Pain The shuttles of its loom. It maketh and unmaketh, mending all; What it hath wrought is better than hath been; Slow grows the splendid pattern that it plans Its wistful hands between. This is its work upon the things ye see, The unseen things are more; men's hearts and minds, The thoughts of peoples and their ways and wills, Those, too, the great Law binds. Unseen it helpeth ye with faithful hands, Unheard it speaketh stronger than the storm. Pity and Love are man's because long stress Moulded blind mass to form. It will not be contemned of any one; Who thwarts it loses, and who serves it gains; The hidden good it pays with peace and bliss, The hidden ill with pains. It seeth everywhere and marketh all Do right--it recompenseth! do one wrong-- The equal retribution must be made, Though DHARMA tarry long. It knows not wrath nor pardon; utter-true Its measures mete, its faultless balance weighs; Times are as nought, tomorrow it will judge, Or after many days. By this the slayer's knife did stab himself; The unjust judge hath lost his own defender; The false tongue dooms its lie; the creeping thief And spoiler rob, to render. Such is the Law which moves to righteousness, Which none at last can turn aside or stay; The heart of it is Love, the end of it Is Peace and Consummation sweet. Obey! The Books say well, my Brothers! each man's life The outcome of his former living is; The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes The bygone right breeds bliss. That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields The sesamum was sesamum, the corn Was corn. The Silence and the Darkness knew! So is a man's fate born. He cometh, reaper of the things he sowed, Sesamum, corn, so much cast in past birth; And so much weed and poison-stuff, which mar Him and the aching earth. If he shall labour rightly, rooting these, And planting wholesome seedlings where they grew, Fruitful and fair and clean the ground shall be, And rich the harvest due. If he who liveth, learning whence woe springs, Endureth patiently, striving to pay His utmost debt for ancient evils done In Love and Truth alway; If making none to lack, he throughly purge The lie and lust of self forth from his blood; Suffering all meekly, rendering for offence Nothing but grace and good; If he shall day by day dwell merciful, Holy and just and kind and true; and rend Desire from where it clings with bleeding roots, Till love of life have end: He--dying--leaveth as the sum of him A life-count closed, whose ills are dead and quit, Whose good is quick and mighty, far and near, So that fruits follow it. No need hath such to live as ye name life; That which began in him when he began Is finished: he hath wrought the purpose through Of what did make him Man. Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes Invade his safe eternal peace; nor deaths And lives recur. He goes Unto NIRVANA! He is one with life Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be. OM, MANI PADME, OM! the Dewdrop slips Into the shining sea! This is the doctrine of the KARMA. Learn! Only when all the dross of sin is quit, Only when life dies like a white flame spent Death dies along with it. Say not "I am," "I was," or "I shall be," Think not ye pass from house to house of flesh Like travelers who remember and forget, Ill-lodged or well-lodged. Fresh Issues upon the Universe that sum Which is the lattermost of lives. It makes Its habitation as the worm spins silk And dwells therein. It takes Function and substance as the snake's egg hatched Takes scale and fang; as feathered reedseeds fly O'er rock and loam and sand, until they find Their marsh and multiply. Also it issues forth to help or hurt. When Death the bitter murderer doth smite, Red roams the unpurged fragment of him, driven On wings of plague and blight. But when the mild and just die, sweet airs breathe; The world grows richer, as if desert-stream Should sink away to sparkle up again Purer, with broader gleam. So merit won winneth the happier age Which by demerit halteth short of end; Yet must this Law of Love reign King of all Before the Kalpas end. What lets?--Brothers? the Darkness lets! which breeds Ignorance, mazed whereby ye take these shows For true, and thirst to have, and, having, cling To lusts which work you woes. Ye that will tread the Middle Road, whose course Bright Reason traces and soft Quiet smoothes; Ye who will take the high Nirvana-way, List the Four Noble Truths. The First Truth is of Sorrow. Be not mocked! Life which ye prize is long-drawn agony: Only its pains abide; its pleasures are As birds which light and fly, Ache of the birth, ache of the helpless days, Ache of hot youth and ache of manhood's prime; Ache of the chill grey years and choking death, These fill your piteous time. Sweet is fond Love, but funeral-flames must kiss The breasts which pillow and the lips which cling; Gallant is warlike Might, but vultures pick The joints of chief and King. Beauteous is Earth, but all its forest-broods Plot mutual slaughter, hungering to live; Of sapphire are the skies, but when men cry Famished, no drops they give. Ask of the sick, the mourners, ask of him Who tottereth on his staff, lone and forlorn, "Liketh thee life?"--these say the babe is wise That weepeth, being born. The Second Truth is Sorrow's Cause. What grief Springs of itself and springs not of Desire? Senses and things perceived mingle and light Passion's quick spark of fire: So flameth Trishna, lust and thirst of things. Eager ye cleave to shadows, dote on dreams. A false Self in the midst ye plant, and make A world around which seems; Blind to the height beyond, deaf to the sound Of sweet airs breathed from far past Indra's sky; Dumb to the summons of the true life kept For him who false puts by. So grow the strifes and lusts which make earth's war, So grieve poor cheated hearts and flow salt tears; So wag the passions, envies, angers, hates; So years chase blood-stained years With wild red feet. So, where the grain should grow, Spreads the biran-weed with its evil root And poisonous blossoms; hardly good seeds find Soil where to fall and shoot; And drugged with poisonous drink the soul departs, And fierce with thirst to drink Karma returns; Sense-struck again the sodden self begins, And new deceits it earns The Third is Sorrow's Ceasing. This is peace-- To conquer love of self and lust of life, To tear deep-rooted passion from the breast, To still the inward strife; For love, to clasp Eternal Beauty close; For glory, to be lord of self; for pleasure, To live beyond the gods; for countless wealth, To lay up lasting treasure Of perfect service rendered, duties done In charity, soft speech, and stainless days These riches shall not fade away in life, Nor any death dispraise. Then Sorrow ends, for Life and Death have ceased; How should lamps flicker when their oil is spent? The old sad count is clear, the new is clean; Thus hath a man content. The Fourth Truth is The Way. It openeth wide, Plain for all feet to tread, easy and near, The Noble Eightfold Path; it goeth straight To peace and refuge. Hear! Manifold tracks lead to yon sister-peaks Around whose snows the gilded clouds are curled By steep or gentle slopes the climber comes Where breaks that other world. Strong limbs may dare the rugged road which storms, Soaring and perilous, the mountain's breast; The weak must wind from slower ledge to ledge With many a place of rest. So is the Eightfold Path which brings to peace; By lower or by upper heights it goes. The firm soul hastes, the feeble tarries. All Will reach the sunlit snows. The First good Level is Right Doctrine. Walk In fear of Dharma, shunning all offence; In heed of Karma, which doth make man's fate; In lordship over sense. The Second is Right Purpose. Have good-will To all that lives, letting unkindness die And greed and wrath; so that your lives be made Like soft airs passing by. The Third is Right Discourse. Govern the lips As they were palace-doors, the King within; Tranquil and fair and courteous be all words Which from that presence win. The Fourth is Right Behavior. Let each act Assoil a fault or help a merit grow; Like threads of silver seen through crystal beads Let love through good deeds show. Four higher roadways be. Only those feet May tread them which have done with earthly things-- Right Purity, Right Thought, Right Loneliness, Right Rapture. Spread no wings For sunward flight, thou soul with unplumed vans Sweet is the lower air and safe, and known The homely levels: only strong ones leave The nest each makes his own. Dear is the love, I know, of Wife and Child; Pleasant the friends and pastimes of your years; Fruitful of good Life's gentle charities; False, though firm-set, its fears. Live--ye who must--such lives as live on these; Make golden stair-ways of your weakness; rise By daily sojourn with those phantasies To lovelier verities. So shall ye pass to clearer heights and find Easier ascents and lighter loads of sins, And larger will to burst the bonds of sense, Entering the Path. Who wins To such commencement hath the First Stage touched; He knows the Noble Truths, the Eightfold Road; By few or many steps such shall attain NIRVANA's blest abode. Who standeth at the Second Stage, made free From doubts, delusions, and the inward strife, Lord of all lusts, quit of the priests and books, Shall live but one more life. Yet onward lies the Third Stage: purged and pure Hath grown the stately spirit here, hath risen To love all living things in perfect peace. His life at end, life's prison Is broken. Nay, there are who surely pass Living and visible to utmost goal By Fourth Stage of the Holy ones--the Buddhs-- And they of stainless soul. Lo! like fierce foes slain by some warrior, Ten sins along these Stages lie in dust, The Love of Self, False Faith, and Doubt are three, Two more, Hatred and Lust. Who of these Five is conqueror hath trod Three stages out of Four: yet there abide The Love of Life on earth, Desire for Heaven, Self-Praise, Error, and Pride. As one who stands on yonder snowy horn Having nought o'er him but the boundless blue, So, these sins being slain, the man is come NIRVANA's verge unto. Him the Gods envy from their lower seats; Him the Three Worlds in ruin should not shake; All life is lived for him, all deaths are dead; Karma will no more make New houses. Seeking nothing, he gains all; Foregoing self, the Universe grows "I": If any teach NIRVANA is to cease, Say unto such they lie. If any teach NIRVANA is to live, Say unto such they err; not knowing this, Nor what light shines beyond their broken lamps, Nor lifeless, timeless bliss. Enter the Path! There is no grief like Hate! No pains like passions, no deceit like sense! Enter the Path! far hath he gone whose foot Treads down one fond offence. Enter the Path! There spring the healing streams Quenching all thirst! there bloom th' immortal flowers Carpeting all the way with joy! there throng, Swiftest and sweetest hours! More is the treasure of the Law than gems; Sweeter than comb its sweetness; its delights Delightful past compare. Thereby to live Hear the Five Rules aright:-- Kill not--for Pity's sake--and lest ye slay The meanest thing upon its upward way. Give freely and receive, but take from none By greed, or force, or fraud, what is his own. Bear not false witness, slander not, nor lie; Truth is the speech of inward purity. Shun drugs and drinks which work the wit abuse; Clear minds, clean bodies, need no soma juice. Touch not thy neighbour's wife, neither commit Sins of the flesh unlawful and unfit. These words the Master spake of duties due To father, mother, children, fellows, friends; Teaching how such as may not swiftly break The clinging chains of sense--whose feet are weak To tread the higher road--should order so This life of flesh that all their hither days Pass blameless in discharge of charities And first true footfalls in the Eightfold Path; Living pure, reverent, patient, pitiful, Loving all things which live even as themselves; Because what falls for ill is fruit of ill Wrought in the past, and what falls well of good; And that by howsomuch the householder Purgeth himself of self and helps the world, By so much happier comes he to next stage, In so much bettered being. This he spake, As also long before, when our Lord walked By Rajagriha in the Bamboo-Grove For on a dawn he walked there and beheld The householder Singala, newly bathed, Bowing himself with bare head to the earth, To Heaven, and all four quarters; while he threw Rice, red and white, from both hands. "Wherefore thus Bowest thou, Brother?" said the Lord; and he, "It is the way, Great Sir! our fathers taught At every dawn, before the toil begins, To hold off evil from the sky above And earth beneath, and all the winds which blow." Then the World-honoured spake: "Scatter not rice, But offer loving thoughts and acts to all. To parents as the East where rises light; To teachers as the South whence rich gifts come; To wife and children as the West where gleam Colours of love and calm, and all days end; To friends and kinsmen and all men as North; To humblest living things beneath, to Saints And Angels and the blessed Dead above So shall all evil be shut off, and so The six main quarters will be safely kept." But to his own, them of the yellow robe They who, as wakened eagles, soar with scorn From life's low vale, and wing towards the Sun To these he taught the Ten Observances The Dasa-Sil, and how a mendicant Must know the Three Doors and the Triple Thoughts; The Sixfold States of Mind; the Fivefold Powers; The Eight High Gates of Purity; the Modes Of Understanding; Iddhi; Upeksha; The Five Great Meditations, which are food Sweeter than Amrit for the holy soul; The Jhana's and the Three Chief Refuges. Also he taught his own how they should dwell; How live, free from the snares of love and wealth; What eat and drink and carry--three plain cloths, Yellow, of stitched stuff, worn with shoulder bare A girdle, almsbowl, strainer. Thus he laid The great foundations of our Sangha well, That noble Order of the Yellow Robe Which to this day standeth to help the World. So all that night he spake, teaching the Law And on no eyes fell sleep--for they who heard Rejoiced with tireless joy. Also the King, When this was finished, rose upon his throne And with bared feet bowed low before his Son Kissing his hem; and said, "Take me, O Son! Lowest and least of all thy Company." And sweet Yasodhara, all happy now,-- Cried "Give to Rahula--thou Blessed One! The Treasure of the Kingdom of thy Word For his inheritance." Thus passed these Three Into the Path. ------------ Here endeth what I write Who love the Master for his love of us, A little knowing, little have I told Touching the Teacher and the Ways of Peace. Forty-five rains thereafter showed he those In many lands and many tongues and gave Our Asia light, that still is beautiful, Conquering the world with spirit of strong grace All which is written in the holy Books, And where he passed and what proud Emperors Carved his sweet words upon the rocks and caves: And how--in fulness of the times--it fell The Buddha died, the great Tathagato, Even as a man 'mongst men, fulfilling all And how a thousand thousand crores since then Have trod the Path which leads whither he went Unto NIRVANA where the Silence lives. Ah! Blessed Lord! Oh, High Deliverer! Forgive this feeble script, which doth thee wrong. Measuring with little wit thy lofty love. Ah! Lover! Brother! Guide! Lamp of the law! I take my refuge in they name and thee! I take my refuge in they order! OM! The dew is on the lotus!--Rise, Great Sun! And lift my leaf and mix me with the wave. Om Mani Padme Hum, the sunrise comes! The Dewdrop Slips Into The Shining Sea! The End 
14867	----	Faith--Tendency of Ancient and Modern Theories to Lower the General Estimate of Man--The Dignity with which the New Testament Invests Him--The Ethical Tendency of the Doctrine of Evolution--The Opinion Expressed on the Subject by Goldwin Smith--Peschel's Frank Admission--The Pessimistic Tendency of all Anti-Biblical Theories of Man's Origin, Life, and Destiny--Buddha, Schopenhauer, and the Agnostics--The more Hopeful Influence of the Bible--The Tendency of all Heathen Religions and all Anti-Christian Philosophies toward Fatalism--Pantheism and the Philosophy of Spinoza Agreeing in this Respect with the Hindu Vedantism--The Late Samuel Johnson's "Piety of Pantheism," and His Definition of Fatalism--What Saves the Scriptural Doctrine of Fore-ordination from Fatalism--The Province of Faith and of Trust. LECTURE X. THE DIVINE SUPREMACY OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 338 The Claim that Christianity is the only True Religion--The Peculiar Tendencies of Modern Times to Deny this Supremacy and Monopoly--It is not Enough in Such Times to Simply Ignore the Challenge--The Unique Claim must be Defended--First: Christianity is Differentiated from all Other Religions by the Fact of a Divine Sacrifice for Sin--Mohammedanism, though Founded on a Belief in the True God and Partly on the Old Testament Teachings, Offers no Saviour--No Idea of Fatherhood is Found in any Non-Christian Faith--The Gloom of Buddhism and the Terror of Savage Tribes--Hinduism a System of Self-Help Merely--The Recognized Grandeur of the Principle of Self-Sacrifice as Reflected from Christ--Augustine Found a Way of Life only in His Divine Sacrifice--Second: No Other Faith than Christianity is Made Effectual by the Power of a Divine and Omnipotent Spirit--The Well-Attested Fact of Radical Transformations of Character--Other Systems have Made Converts only by Warlike Conquest or by Such Motives as might Appeal to the Natural Heart--Christianity Rises above all Other Systems in the Divine Personality of Christ--The Contrast in this Respect between Him and the Authors of the Non-Christian Systems--His Attractions and His Power Acknowledged by all Classes of Men--The Inferiority of Socrates as Compared with Christ--Bushnell's Tribute to the Perfection of this Divine Personality--Its Power Attested in the Life of Paul--The Adaptation of Christianity to all the Circumstances and Conditions of Life--Abraham and the Vedic Patriarchs, Moses and Manu, David's Joy and Gratitude, and the Gloom of Hindu or Buddhist Philosophy--Only Christianity Brings Man to True Penitence and Humility--The Recognized Beauty and the Convincing Lesson of the Prodigal Son--The Contrast between Mohammed's Blasphemous Suras, which Justify his Lust, and the Deep Contrition of David in the Fifty-first Psalm--The Moral Purity of the Old and New Testaments as Contrasted with all Other Sacred Books--The Scriptures Pure though Written in Ages of Corruption and Surrounded by Immoral Influences--Christ Belongs to no Land or Age--The Gospel Alone is Adapted to all Races and all Time as the Universal Religion of Mankind--Only Christianity Recognizes the True Relation between Divine Help and Human Effort--It Encourages by Omnipotent Co-operation--The All-Comprehensive Presentation of the Gospel. APPENDIX 381 ORIENTAL RELIGIONS AND CHRISTIANITY LECTURE I. THE NEED OF UNDERSTANDING THE FALSE RELIGIONS It is said that the very latest among the sciences is the Science of Religion. Without pausing to inquire how far it admits of scientific treatment, certain reasons which may be urged for the study of the existing religions of the world will be considered in this lecture. It must be admitted in the outset that those who have been the pioneers in this field of research have not, as a rule, been advocates of the Christian faith. The anti-Christian theory that all religions may be traced to common causes, that common wants and aspirations of mankind have led to the development of various systems according to environment, has until recently been the chief spur to this class of studies. Accordingly, the religions of the world have been submitted to some preconceived philosophy of language, or ethnology, or evolution, with the emphasis placed upon such facts as seemed to comport with this theory. Meanwhile there has been an air of broad-minded charity in the manner in which the apologists of Oriental systems have treated the subject. They have included Christ in the same category with Plato and Confucius, and have generally placed Him at the head; and this supposed breadth of sentiment has given them a degree of influence with dubious and wavering Christians, as well as with multitudes who are without faith of any kind. In this country the study of comparative religion has been almost entirely in the hands of non-evangelical writers. We have had "The Ten Great Religions," from the pen of Rev. James Freeman Clarke; "The Oriental Religions," written with great labor by the late Samuel Johnson; and Mr. Moncure D. Conway's "Anthology," with its flowers, gathered from the sacred books of all systems, and so chosen as to carry the implication that they all are equally inspired. Many other works designed to show that Christianity was developed from ancient sun myths, or was only a plagiarism upon the old mythologies of India, have been current among us. But strangely enough, the Christian Church has seemed to regard this subject as scarcely worthy of serious consideration. With the exception of a very able work on Buddhism,[1] and several review articles on Hinduism, written by Professor S.H. Kellogg, very little has been published from the Christian standpoint.[2] The term "heathenism" has been used as an expression of contempt, and has been applied with too little discrimination. There is a reason, perhaps, why these systems have been underestimated. It so happened that the races among whom the modern missionary enterprise has carried on its earlier work were mostly simple types of pagans, found in the wilds of America, in Greenland and Labrador, in the West Indies, on the African coast, or in the islands of the Pacific; and these worshippers of nature or of spirits gave a very different impression from that which the Apostles and the Early Church gained from their intercourse with the conquering Romans or the polished and philosophic Greeks. Our missionary work has been symbolized, as Sir William W. Hunter puts it, by a band of half-naked savages listening to a missionary seated under a palm-tree, and receiving his message with child-like and unquestioning faith. But in the opening of free access to the great Asiatic nations, higher grades of men have been found, and with these we now have chiefly to do. The pioneer of India's missions, the devoted Ziegenbalg, had not been long in his field before he learned the mistake which the churches in Europe had made in regard to the religion and philosophy of the Hindus. He laid aside all his old notions when he came to encounter the metaphysical subtleties of Hindu thought, when he learned something of the immense Hindu literature, the voluminous ethics, the mystical and weird mythologies, the tremendous power of tradition and social customs--when, in short, he found his way hedged up by habits of thought wholly different from his own; and he resolved to know something of the religion which the people of India already possessed. For the benefit of others who might follow him he wrote a book on Hinduism and its relations to Christianity, and sent it to Europe for publication. But so strong were the preconceived notions which prevailed among his brethren at home, that his manuscript, instead of being published, was suppressed. "You were not sent to India to study Hinduism," wrote Franke, "but to preach the Gospel." But Ziegenbalg certainly was not wanting in his estimate of the chief end in view, and his success was undoubtedly far greater for the intelligent plan upon which he labored. The time came when a change had passed over the society which had sent him forth. Others, less friendly than he to the Gospel of Christ, had studied Hinduism, and had paraded it as a rival of Christianity; and in self-defence against this flank movement, the long-neglected work of Ziegenbalg was brought forth from obscurity and published. It is partly in self-defence against similar influences, that the Christian Church everywhere is now turning increased attention to the study of Comparative Religion. In Great Britain a wider interest has been felt in the subject than in this country. And yet, even there the Church has been far behind the enemies of evangelical truth in comparing Christianity with false systems. Dr. James Stalker, of Glasgow, said a few months since that, whereas it might be expected that the advocates of the true faith would be the first to compare and contrast it with the false systems of the world, the work had been left rather to those who were chiefly interested in disparaging the truth and exalting error. Yet something has been done. Such men as Sir Monier Williams, Sir William Muir, Professors Rawlinson, Fairbairn, and Legge, Bishop Carpenter, Canon Hardwick, Doctors Caird, Dodds, Mitchell, and others, have given the false systems of the East a thorough and candid treatment from the Christian standpoint. The Church Missionary Society holds a lectureship devoted to the study of the non-Christian religions as a preparation for missionary work. And the representatives of that Society in the Punjab have instituted a course of study on these lines for missionaries recently arrived, and have offered prizes for the best attainments therein. Though we are later in this field of investigation, yet here also there is springing up a new interest, and it is safe to predict that within another decade the real character of the false religions will be more generally understood. The prejudice which has existed in regard to this subject has taken two different forms: First, there has been the broad assumption upon which Franke wrote to Ziegenbalg, that all knowledge of heathenism is worse than useless. Good men are asking, "Is not such a study a waste of energy, when we are charged with proclaiming the only saving truth? Is not downright earnestness better than any possible knowledge of philosophies and superstitions?" And we answer, "Yes: by all means, if only the one is possible." Another view of the subject is more serious. May there not, after all, be danger in the study of false systems? Will there not be found perplexing parallels which will shake our trust in the positive and exclusive supremacy of the Christian faith? Now, even if there were at first some risks to a simple, child-like confidence, yet a timid attitude involves far greater risks: it amounts to a half surrender, and it is wholly out of place in this age of fearless and aggressive discussion, when all truth is challenged, and every form of error must be met. Moreover, in a thorough study there is no danger. Sir Monier Williams tells us that at first he was surprised and a little troubled, but in the end he was more than ever impressed with the transcendent truths of the Christian faith. Professor S.H. Kellogg assures us that the result of his careful researches in the Oriental systems is a profounder conviction of the great truths of the Gospel as divine. And even Max Müller testifies that, while making every allowance for whatever is good in the ethnic faiths, he has been the more fully convinced of the great superiority of Christianity. Really, those are in danger who receive only the superficial and misleading representations of heathenism which one is sure to meet in our magazine literature, or in works like "Robert Elsmere" and "The Light of Asia." One cannot fail to mark the different light in which we view the mythologies of the Greeks and Romans. If their religious beliefs and speculations had remained a secret until our time, if the high ethical precepts of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius had only now been proclaimed, and Socrates had just been celebrated in glowing verse as the "Light of Greece," there would be no little commotion in the religious world, and thousands with only weak and troubled faith might be disturbed. But simply because we thoroughly understand the mythology of Greece and Rome, we have no fear. We welcome all that it can teach us. We cordially acknowledge the virtues of Socrates and assign him his true place. We enrich the fancy and awaken the intellectual energies of our youth by classical studies, and Christianity shines forth with new lustre by contrast with the heathen systems which it encountered in the Roman Empire ages ago. And yet that was no easy conquest. The early church, when brought face to face with the culture of Greece and the self-assertion of Roman power, when confronted with profound philosophies like those of Plato and Aristotle, with the subtleties of the Stoics, and with countless admixtures of Persian mysticism, had, humanly speaking, quite as formidable a task as those that are presented in the heathen systems of to-day. Very few of the champions of modern heathenism can compare with Celsus, and there are no more subtle philosophies than those of ancient Greece. Evidently, the one thing needed to disenchant the false systems of our time is a clear and accurate knowledge of their merits and demerits, and of their true relation to Christianity. It will be of advantage, for one thing, if we learn to give credit to the non-Christian religions for the good which they may fairly claim. There has existed a feeling that they had no rights which Christian men were bound to respect. They have been looked upon as systems of unmixed evil, whose enormities it were impossible to exaggerate. And all such misconceptions and exaggerations have only led to serious reactions. Anti-Christian writers have made great capital of the alleged misrepresentations which zealous friends of missions have put upon heathenism; and there is always great force in any appeal for fair play, on whichever side the truth may lie. Where the popular Christian idea has presented a low view of some system, scarcely rising above the grade of fetichism, the apologists have triumphantly displayed a profound philosophy. Where the masses of Christian people have credited whole nations with no higher notions of worship than a supreme trust in senseless stocks and stones, some skilful defender has claimed that the idols were only the outward symbols of an indwelling conception of deity, and has proceeded with keen relish to point out a similar use of symbols in the pictures and images of the Christian Church. From one extreme many people have passed to another, and in the end have credited heathen systems with greater merit than they possess. A marked illustration of this fact is found in the influence which was produced by Sir Edwin Arnold's "Light of Asia." Sentimental readers, passing from surprise to credulity, were ready to invest the "gentle Indian Saint" with Christian conceptions which no real Buddhist ever thought of. Mr. Arnold himself is said to have expressed surprise that people should have given to his poem so serious an interpretation, or should have imagined for a moment that he intended to compare Buddhism with the higher and purer teachings of the New Testament. In considering some of the reasons which may be urged for the study of false systems, we will first proceed from the standpoint of the candidate for the work of missions. And here there is a broad and general reason which seems too obvious to require much argument. The skilful general or the civil engineer is supposed, of course, to survey the field of contemplated operations ere he enters upon his work. The late Dr. Duff, in urging the importance of a thorough understanding of the systems which a missionary expects to encounter, illustrated his point by a reference to the great Akbar, who before entering upon the conquest of India, twice visited the country in disguise, that he might gain a complete knowledge of its topography, its strongholds, and its points of weakness, and the best methods of attack. While all religious teachers must understand their tasks, the need of special preparation is particularly urgent in the foreign missionary, owing to his change of environment. Many ideas and methods to which he has been trained, and which would serve him well among a people of his own race, might be wholly out of place in India or China, Ram Chandra Bose, M.A.--himself a converted Brahman--has treated with great discrimination the argument frequently used, that the missionary "need only to proclaim the Glad Tidings." He says: "That the simple story of Christ and him crucified is, after all, the truth on which the regeneration of the Christian and the non-Christian lands must hang, no one will deny. This story, ever fresh, is inherently fitted to touch the dead heart into life, and to infuse vitality into effete nationalities and dead civilizations. But a great deal of rubbish has to be removed in heathen lands, ere its legitimate consequences can be realized. And a patient, persistent study of the false religions, and the complicated systems of philosophy associated with them, enables the missionary to throw out of the way those heaps of prejudices and errors which make it impossible for the story of the cross to reach and influence the heart."[3] It has been very wisely said that "any fragment of truth which lies in a heathen mind unacknowledged is an insuperable barrier against conviction: recognized and used, it might prove a help; neglected and ignored, it is insurmountable."[4] The late Dr. Mullens learned by careful observation, that the intellectual power of the Hindus had been so warped by false reasoning, that "they could scarcely understand how, when two principles are contradictory, one must be given up as false. They are prepared to receive both sides of a contradiction as true, and they feel at liberty to adopt that which seems the most comfortable. And nothing but a full exposure of evil, with a clear statement of the antagonistic truth, will suffice to awaken so perverted an intellect."[5] The missionary has often been surprised to find that the idea which he supposed was clearly understood, was wholly warped by the medium of Hindu thought, as a rod is apparently warped when plunged into a stream, or as a beautiful countenance is distorted by the waves and irregularities of an imperfect mirror. To the preacher, sin, for example, is an enormity in the sight of God; but to his Hindu listener it may be only a breach of custom, or a ceremonial uncleanness. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit, as it is set forth in Paul's Epistles, is to the missionary a union in which his personality is still maintained in blest fellowship with God, while to his audience it may be only that out and out pantheism in which the deity within us supplants all individual personality, and not only excludes all joy, but all responsibility. Professor W.G.T. Shedd has clearly pointed out the fact that the modern missionary has a harder task in dealing with the perversions of the heathen mind than that to which the Apostles of the Early Church were called, owing to the prevalence in India and elsewhere of that pantheism which destroys the sense of moral responsibility. He says: "The Greek and Roman theism left the human will free and responsible, and thus the doctrine of sin could be taught. But the pantheistic systems of the East destroy free will, by identifying God and man; and hence it is impossible to construct the doctrine of sin and atonement except by first refuting the pantheistic ethics. The missionary can get no help from _conscience_ in his preaching, when this theory of God and the world has the ground. But St. Paul appealed confidently 'to every man's conscience in the sight of God,' and called upon the ethics and theology of the Greek and Roman philosophers for a corroboration. The early Apologists, Tertullian and others, did the same thing." The testimonies which have been given within the last few years, by the most intelligent and observing missionaries in Eastern lands, are of such peculiar significance and force, that I shall be justified in quoting a few at some length. Rev. George William Knox, D.D., of Tokio, Japan, in accepting an election to an honorary membership of the American Society of Comparative Religion, wrote, December 17, 1890: "I am deeply in sympathy with the objects of the Society, as indeed every missionary must be. We have practical demonstrations of the value of research into the ethnic religions. Even at home the value of such research has already been great, but in these non-Christian lands it is indispensable. It is true that non-Christian systems, as found among the people, rarely exhibit the forms or the doctrines which we learn from books, but I presume the same would be said by an intelligent Asiatic, were he to study our sacred books and then compare results with much of the religion which calls itself Christian in the West. And yet for the study even of the most debased forms of Christianity in South America or Mexico, let us say, we must needs begin with our sacred books. And so it is with debased Buddhism in Japan. The Buddhism of Ceylon and of the books is unknown to this people, and when it is used as the basis of argument or exposition we do not hit the mark. Yet, after all, our debt is immeasurable to the societies and scholars that have made accessible the sources that have yielded at last such systems as are dominant here. "The study of non-Christian systems is essential to the missionary, even though he does not refer to them in his preaching, but contents himself with delivering the Gospel message. And that is the rule with missionaries, so far as I know. But a knowledge of the native systems is imperative, that we may properly present our own. Otherwise we waste time in teaching over again that which is already fully known, or we so speak that our truth takes on the form of error, or we so underestimate the thought of those whom we address, that the preaching of the wisdom of God sounds in their ears the preaching of foolishness. The adaptation of preaching to the hearers of Asiatic lands is a task that may well make us thankful for every help that may be furnished us.... The missionary is far too apt to come from the West with exalted notions of his own superiority, and with a feeling of condescending pity for men who, perhaps, have pondered the deep things of the universe far more than he. Let him really master a philosophy like the Confucian, and he will better illustrate the Christian grace of humility, and be so much the better prepared for his work. His study will show him how astonishing is the light that has shone upon those men whom he has thought of as wholly in darkness. It will thus show him the true way of approach, and enable him to follow the lines of least resistance. It will also reveal to him what is the essential character of the divine message which he himself bears. He will separate that peculiar and spiritual truth which is the Word of Life, and will bring it as glad tidings of great joy. Surely no man can study these ethnic faiths, no matter with what appreciation of their measure of truth, and rejoicing in it, without a constantly growing conviction that the one power that converts men and establishes God's kingdom on earth is the Word that is eternal, the Son of God. He gathers in Himself all the truth of all the religions, and He adds that divine Salvation and Life for which all the nations have waited, and without which the highest and deepest thought remains unable to bring men into living communion with the God and Father of us all." Rev. Martyn Clark, D.D., Missionary of the Church Missionary Society at Umritsur, India, has given thorough study to the Sanscrit, and has thereby been enabled to expose the fallacies and misrepresentations which the Arya Somaj, in its bitter controversy with the Gospel, has put forth as to the real character of the Vedic literature. No man is better able to judge of the importance of a correct understanding of the errors of the non-Christian systems than he. In a letter accepting an honorary membership of the above-named Society he says: "The object of the Society is one in which I am deeply interested, and I shall at all times do what I can to further its aims. I am convinced that there is much that is helpful to the cause of Christ to be learned in this field of research." Rev. H. Blodgett, D.D., veteran Missionary of the American Board in Peking, in accepting a similar honor, says: "My interest in these studies has been deep and growing. It is high time that such a society as you represent should be formed. The study of Comparative Religion has long enough been in the hands of those who hold all religions to be the outcome of the natural powers of the human mind, unaided by a revelation from God. It is time that those who believe in the revelation from God in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament founded upon the Old, should study the great ethnic religions in the light derived from the Bible." Rev. James S. Dennis, D.D., long a Missionary of the Presbyterian Mission in Beyrout, Syria, says in the same connection: "The great missionary movement of our age has brought us face to face with problems and conflicts which are far more deep and serious than those which confront evangelistic efforts in our own land, and it is of the highest importance that the Church at home should know as fully as possible the peculiar and profound difficulties of work in foreign fields. These ancient religions of the East are behind intrenchments, and they are prepared to make a desperate resistance. Those who have never come into close contact with their adherents, and discovered by experience the difficulty of dislodging them and convincing them of the truth of the Gospel, may very properly misunderstand the work of the foreign missionary and wonder at his apparent failure, or at least his slow progress. But I wonder at the success attained in the foreign field, and consider it far more glorious and remarkable than it is generally accounted to be. A fuller acquaintance with the strength, and resources, and local éclat, and worldly advantages of these false religions, will give the Church at home greater patience and faith in the great work of evangelizing the nations."[6] A specific reason for the study of the non-Christian religions is found in the changes which our intercourse with Eastern nations has already wrought. With our present means of intercommunication we are brought face to face with them, and the contact of our higher vitality has aroused them from the comparative slumber of ages. Even our missionary efforts have given new vigor to the resistance which must be encountered. We have trained up a generation of men to a higher intellectual activity, and to a more earnest spirit of inquiry, and they are by no means all won over to the Christian faith. And there are thousands in India whom a Government education has left with no real faith of any kind, but whose pride of race and venerable customs is raised to a higher degree than ever. They have learned something of Christianity; they have also studied their own national systems; they have become especially familiar with all that our own sceptics have written against Christianity; still further, they have added to their intellectual equipment all that Western apologists have said of the superiority of the Oriental faiths. They are thus armed at every point, and they are using our own English tongue and all our facilities for publication. How is the young missionary, who knows nothing of their systems or the real points of comparison, to deal with such men? It is very true that not all ranks of Hindus are educated; there are millions who know nothing of any religion beyond the lowest forms of superstition, and to these we owe the duty of a simple and plain presentation of Christ and Him crucified; but in every community where the missionary is likely to live there are men of the higher class just named; and besides, professional critics and opposers are now employed to harass the bazaar preacher with perplexing questions, which are soon heard from the lips of the common people. A young missionary recently wrote of the surprise which he felt when a low caste man, almost without clothing, met him with arguments from Professor Huxley. Missionary Boards have sometimes sent out a specialist, and in some sense a champion, who should deal with the more intelligent classes of the heathen. But such a plan is fraught with disadvantages. What is needed is a thorough preparation in all missionaries, and that involves an indispensable knowledge of the forces to be met. The power of the press is no longer a monopoly of Christian lands. The Arya Somaj, of India, is now using it, both in the vernacular and in the English, in its bitter and often scurrilous attacks. One of its tracts recently sent to me contained an English epitome of the arguments of Thomas Paine. The secular papers of Japan present in almost every issue some discussion on the comparative merits of Christianity, Buddhism, Evolution, and Theosophy, and many of the young native ministry who at first received the truth unquestioningly as a child receives it from his mother, are now calling for men whom they can follow as leaders in their struggle with manifold error.[7] Even Mohammedans are at last employing the press instead of the sword. Newspapers in Constantinople are exhorting the faithful to send forth missionaries to "fortify Africa against the whiskey and gunpowder of Christian commerce, by proclaiming the higher ethical principles of the Koran." Great institutions of learning are also maintained as the special propaganda of the Oriental religions. El Azar, established at Cairo centuries ago, now numbers ten thousand students, and these when trained go forth to all Arabic speaking countries.[8] The Sanskrit colleges and monasteries of Benares number scarcely less than four thousand students,[9] who are being trained in the Sankhyan or the Vedanta philosophy, that they may go back to their different provinces and maintain with new vigor the old faiths against the aggressions of Christianity. And in Kioto, the great religious centre of Japan, we find over against the Christian college of the American Board of Missions, a Buddhist university with a Japanese graduate of Oxford as its president. In a great school at Tokio, also, Buddhist teachers, aided by New England Unitarians, are maintaining the superiority of Buddhism over Western Christianity as a religion for Japan.[10] Another reason why the missionary should study the false systems is found in the greatly diversified forms which these systems present in different lands and different ages. And just here it will be seen that a partial knowledge will not meet the demand. It might be even misleading. Buddhism, for example, has assumed an endless variety of forms--now appearing as a system of the baldest atheism, and now presenting an approximate theism. Gautama was certainly atheistic, and he virtually denied the existence of the human soul. But in the northern development of his system, theistic conceptions sprang up. A sort of trinity had appeared by the seventh century A.D., and by the tenth century a supreme and celestial Buddha had been discovered, from whom all other Buddhas were emanations. To-day there are at least twelve Buddhist sects in Japan, of which some are mystical, others pantheistic, while two hold a veritable doctrine of salvation by faith.[11] China has several types of Buddhism, and Mongolia, Thibet, Nepaul, Ceylon, Burmah, and Siam present each some special features of the system. How important that one should understand these differences in order to avoid blundering, and to wisely adapt his efforts! In India, under the common generic name of Hinduism, there are also many sects: worshippers of Vishnu, worshippers of Siva, worshippers of Krishna. There are Sikhs, and Jains, and devil worshippers; among the Dravidian and other pre-Aryan tribes there are victims of every conceivable superstition. Now, a missionary must know something of these faiths if he would fight with "weapons of precision." Paul, in becoming all things to all men, knew at least the differences between them. He preached the gospel with a studied adaptation. He tells us that he so strove as to win, and "not as those who beat the air." How alert were the combatants in the arena from which his simile is borrowed! How closely each athlete scanned his man, watched his every motion, knew if possible his every thought and impulse! Much more, in winning the souls of darkened and misguided men, should we learn the inmost workings of their minds, their habits of thought, and the nature of the errors which are to be dislodged. But how shall the false systems of religions be studied? First, there should be a spirit of entire candor. Truth is to be sought always, and at any cost; but in this case there is everything to be gained and nothing to be lost by the Christian teacher, and he can well afford to be just. Our divine Exemplar never hesitated to acknowledge that which was good in men of whatever nationality or creed. He could appreciate the faith of Roman or Syro-Phoenician. He could see merit in a Samaritan as well as in a Jew, and could raise even a penitent publican to the place of honor. It was only the Pharisees who hesitated to admit the truth, until they could calculate the probable effect of their admissions. The very best experience of missionaries has been found in the line of Christ's example. "The surest way to bring a man to acknowledge his errors," says Bishop Bloomfield, "is to give him full credit for whatever he had learned of the truth."[12] "What should we think," says a keen observer of the work of missions--"what should we think of an engineer who, in attempting to rear a light-house on a sandbar, should fail to acknowledge as a godsend any chance outcropping of solid rock to which he might fasten his stays?"[13] But in urging the duty of candor, I assume that an absolute freedom from bias is impossible on either side. It is sometimes amusing to witness the assurance with which professed agnostics assume that they, and they alone, look upon questions of comparative religion with an unbiased and judicial mind. They have no belief, they say, in any religion, and are therefore entirely without prejudice. But are they? Has the man who has forsaken the faith of his fathers and is deeply sensible of an antagonism between him and the great majority of those about him--has he no interest in trying to substantiate his position, and justify his hostility to the popular faith? Of all men he is generally the most prejudiced and the most bitter. We freely admit that we set out with a decided preference for one religious system above all others, but we insist that candor is possible, though an absolutely indifferent judgment is out of the question. Paul, who quoted to the Athenians their own poet, was fair-minded, and yet no man ever arraigned heathenism so terribly as he, and none was so intensely interested in the faith which he preached. Archbishop Trench, in discussing the exaggerations from which a careful study of the Oriental religions would doubtless save us, says, "There is one against which we are almost unwilling to say a word. I mean the exaggeration of those who, in a deep devotion to the truth as it is in Christ Jesus, count themselves bound, by their allegiance to Him, to take up a hostile attitude to everything not distinctly and avowedly Christian, as though any other position were a treachery to his cause, and a surrender of his exclusive right to the authorship of all the good which is in the world. In this temper we may dwell only on the guilt and misery and defilements, the wounds and bruises and putrefying sores of the heathen world; or if aught better is brought under our eye, we may look askant and suspiciously upon it, as though all recognition of it were a disparagement of something better. And so we may come to regard the fairest deeds of unbaptized men as only more splendid sins. We may have a short but decisive formula by which to try and by which to condemn them. These deeds, we may say, were not of faith, and therefore they could not please God; the men that wrought them knew not Christ, and therefore their work was worthless--hay, straw, and stubble, to be utterly burned up in the day of the trial of every man's work. "Yet there is indeed a certain narrowness of view, out of which alone the language of so sweeping a condemnation could proceed. Our allegiance to Christ, as the one fountain of light and life for the world, demands that we affirm none to be good but Him, allow no goodness save that which has proceeded from Him; but it does not demand that we deny goodness, because of the place where we find it, because we meet it, a garden tree, in the wilderness. It only requires that we claim this for Him who planted, and was willing that it should grow there; whom it would itself have gladly owned as its author, if, belonging to a happier time, it could have known Him by his name, whom in part it knew by his power. "We do not make much of a light of nature when we admit a righteousness in those to whom in the days of their flesh the Gospel had not come. We only affirm that the Word, though not as yet dwelling among us, yet being the 'light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,' had also lighted them. Some glimpses of his beams gilded their countenances, and gave to these whatever brightness they wore; and in recognizing this brightness we are ascribing honor to Him, and not to them; glorifying the grace of God, and not the virtues of man."[14] In marked contrast with this, and tending to an extreme, is the following, from the pen of Bishop Beveridge. It is quoted by Max Müller, in the opening volume of "The Sacred Books of the East," as a model of candor. "The general inclinations which are naturally implanted in my soul to some religion, it is impossible for me to shift off; but there being such a multiplicity of religions in the world, I desire now seriously to consider with myself which of them all to restrain these my general inclinations to. And the reason of this my inquiry is not, that I am in the least dissatisfied with that religion I have already embraced; but because 'tis natural for all men to have an overbearing opinion and esteem for that particular religion they are born and bred-up in. That, therefore, I may not seem biased by the prejudice of education, I am resolved to prove and examine them all; that I may see and hold fast to that which is best.... Indeed, there was never any religion so barbarous and diabolical, but it was preferred above all other religions whatsoever by them that did profess it; otherwise they would not have professed it.... And why, say they, may you not be mistaken as well as we? Especially when there are, at least, six to one against your Christian religion; all of which think they serve God aright; and expect happiness thereby as well as you.... And hence it is that in my looking out for the truest religion, being conscious to myself how great an ascendancy Christianity holds over me beyond the rest, as being that religion whereunto I was born and baptized; that the supreme authority has enjoined and my parents educated me in; that which everyone I meet withal highly approves of, and which I myself have, by a long-continued profession, made almost natural to me; I am resolved to be more jealous and suspicious of this religion than of the rest, and be sure not to entertain it any longer without being convinced by solid and substantial arguments of the truth and certainty of it. That, therefore, I may make diligent and impartial inquiry into all religions and so be sure to find out the best, I shall for a time look upon myself as one not at all interested in any particular religion whatsoever, much less in the Christian religion; but only as one who desires, in general, to serve and obey Him that made me in a right manner, and thereby to be made partaker of that happiness my nature is capable of."[15] Second, in studying the false systems it is important to distinguish between religion and ethics. In the sphere of ethics the different faiths of men may find much common ground, while in their religious elements they may be entirely true or utterly false. The teachings of Confucius, though agnostic, presented a moral code which places the relations of the family and state on a very firm basis. And the very highest precepts of Buddhism belong to the period in which it was virtually atheistic. Many great and noble truths have been revealed to mankind through the conscience and the understanding, and these truths have found expression in the proverbs or ethical maxims of all races. To this extent God has nowhere left himself without witness. But all this is quite apart from a divinely revealed religion which may be cherished or be wholly lost. The golden rule is found not only in the New Testament, but negatively at least in the Confucian classics;[16] and the Shastras of the Hindus present it in both the positive and the negative form. And the still higher grace of doing good to those who injure us, was proclaimed by Laotze, five hundred years before Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount. The immense superiority of the ethical standard in Christianity, lies in its harmony and completeness. Confucius taught the active virtues of life, Laotze those of a passive kind; Christianity inculcates both. In heathenism ethical truths exist in fragments--mere half truths, like the broken and scattered remains of a temple once beautiful but now destroyed. They hold no relation to any high religious purpose, because they have no intelligent relation to God. Christian ethics begin with our relations to God as supreme, and they embrace the present life and the world to come. The symmetry of the divine precept, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself," finds no counterpart in the false religions of the world. Nowhere else, not even in Buddhism, is found the perfect law of love. The great secret of power in Christianity is God's unspeakable love to men in Christ; and the reflex of that love is the highest and purest ever realized in human hearts. Thirdly, the false systems should be studied by the Christian missionary, not for their own sakes so much as for an ulterior purpose, and they should be studied in constant comparison with the religion which it is his business to proclaim. His aim is not that of a savant. Let us not disguise it: he is mainly endeavoring to gain a more thorough preparation for his own great work. The professional scholar at Oxford or Leipsic might condemn this acknowledged bias--this pursuit of truth as a means and not as an end--but if he would be entirely frank, he would often find himself working in the interest of a linguistic theory, or a pet hypothesis of social science. It was in this spirit that Spencer and Darwin have searched the world for facts to support their systems.[17] I repeat, it is enough for the missionary that he shall be thoroughly candid. He may exercise the burning zeal of Paul for the Gospel which he proclaims, if he will also exercise his clear discrimination, his scrupulous fairness, his courtesy, and his tact. Let him not forget that he is studying religions comparatively; he should proceed with the Bible in one hand, and should examine the true and the false together. Contrasts will appear step by step as he advances, and the great truths of Christianity will stand out in brighter radiance, for the shadows of the background. If the question be asked, when and where shall the missionary candidate study the false systems, I answer at once; before he leaves his native land; and I assign three principal reasons. First: The study of a new and difficult language should engross his attention when he reaches his field. This will prove one of the most formidable tasks of his life, and it will demand resolute, concentrated, and prolonged effort. Second: In gaining access to the people, studying their ways and winning their confidence, the missionary will find great advantage in having gained some previous knowledge of their habits of thought and the intricacies of their beliefs. Third: The means and appliances of study are far greater here at home than on the mission fields. A very serious difficulty with most missionaries is the want of books on special topics; they have no access to libraries, and if one has imagined that he can best understand the faiths of the people by personal contact with them, he will soon learn with surprise how little he can gain from them, and how little they themselves know of their own systems. Those who do know have learned for the purpose of baffling the missionary instead of helping him. The accumulation and the arrangement of anything like a systematic knowledge of heathen systems has cost the combined effort of many missionaries and many Oriental scholars; and now, after three generations have pursued these studies, it is still felt that very much is to be learned from literatures yet to be translated. Such as there are, are best found in the home libraries. Let us for a few moments consider the question how far those who are not to become missionaries may be profited by a study of false systems. To a large extent, the considerations already urged will apply to them also, but there are still others which are specially important to public teachers here at home. Dean Murray, in an able article published in the "Homiletic Review" of September, 1890, recommended to active and careworn pastors a continued study of the Greek classics, as calculated to refresh and invigorate the mind, and increase its capacity for the duties of whatever sphere. All that he said of the Greek may also be said of the Hindu classics, with the added consideration that in the latter we are dealing with the living issues of the day. Sir Monier Williams, in comparing the two great Epics of the Hindus with those of Homer, names many points of superiority in the former.[18] It is safe to say that no poems of any other land have ever exercised so great a spell over so many millions of mankind as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, of India, and no other production is listened to with such delight as the story of Rama as it is still publicly read at the Hindu festivals. Of philosophies, no system of India has approached so near to veritable divine revelation as that of Plato, but in variety and subtlety, and in their far-reaching influence upon human life, the Indian schools, especially the Vedanta, are scarcely excelled to this day. And they are _applied_ philosophies; they constitute the religion of the people. Max Müller has said truly that no other line of investigation is so fascinating as that which deals with the long and universal struggle of mankind to find out God, and to solve the mystery of their relations to him. Unfortunately, human history has dealt mainly with wars and intrigues, and the rise and fall of dynasties; but compared with these coarse and superficial elements, how much more interesting and instructive to trace in all races of men the common and ceaseless yearnings after some solution of life's mysteries! One is stirred with a deeper, broader sympathy for mankind when he witnesses this universal sense of dependence, this fear and trembling before the powers of an unseen world, this pitiful procession of unblest millions ever trooping on toward the goal of death and oblivion. And from this standpoint, as from no other, may one measure the greatness and glory of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. To my mind there is nothing more pathetic than the spectacle of world-wide fetichism. It is not to be contemplated with derision, but with profoundest sympathy. We all remember the pathos of Scott's picture of his Highland heroine, with brain disordered by unspeakable grief, beguiling her woes with childish ornaments of "gaudy broom" and plumes from the eagle's wing. But sadder far is the spectacle of millions of men made for fellowship with God, building their hopes on the divinity dwelling in an amulet of tiger's teeth or serpent's fangs or curious shells. And it ought to enlarge our natures with a Christ-like sympathy when we contemplate those dark and desperate faiths which are but nightmares of the soul, which see in all the universe only malevolent spirits to be appeased, which, looking heavenward for a father's face, see, as Richter expressed it, "only a death's head with bottomless, empty sockets" instead of a loving smile.[19] And what a field do the greater but equally false systems present for the study of the human mind and heart! How was it that the simple nature worship of the Indo-Aryans grew into the vast deposit of modern Hinduism, and developed those social customs which have become walls of adamant? How could Buddhism grow out of such a soil and finally cast its spell over so many peoples? What were the elements of power which enabled the great sage of China to rear a social and political fabric which has survived for so many centuries? How was it that Islam gained its conquests, and what is the secret of that dominion which it still holds? These surely are questions worthy of those who are called to deal with human thought and human destiny. And when by comparison we find the grand differentials which raise Christianity infinitely above them all, we shall have gained the power of presenting its truths more clearly and more convincingly to the minds and hearts of men. There are some specific advantages flowing from the study of other religions of which I will give little more than an enumeration. 1. It impresses us with the universality of some more or less distinct conception of God. I am aware that from time to time explorers imagine that they have found a race of men who have no notion of God, but in almost every instance subsequent investigation has found a religious belief. Such mistakes were made concerning the aborigines of Australia, the Dyaks of Borneo, the Papuans, the Patagonians, and even the American Indians. The unity of the race finds a new and striking proof in the universality of religion. 2. The study of false systems brings to light an almost unanimous testimony for the existence of a vague primeval monotheism, and thus affords a strong presumptive corroboration of the Scriptural doctrine of man's apostasy from the worship of the true God. 3. The clearest vindication of the severities of the Old Testament Theocracy, in its wars of extermination against the Canaanites and Phoenicians, is to be found in a careful study of the foul and cruel types of heathenism which those nations carried with them wherever their colonies extended. A religion which enjoined universal prostitution, and led thus to sodomy and the burning of young children in the fires of Moloch, far exceeded the worst heathenism of Africa or the islands of the Pacific. The Phoenician settlements on the Mediterranean have not even yet recovered from the moral blight of that religion; and had such a cultus been allowed to spread over all Europe and the world, not even a second Deluge could have cleansed the earth of its defilement. The extermination of the Canaanites, when considered as a part of one great scheme for establishing in that same Palestine a purer and nobler faith, and sending forth thence, not Phoenician corruption, but the Gospel of Peace to all lands, becomes a work of mercy to the human race. 4. The ethics of the heathen will be found to vindicate the doctrines of the Bible. This is a point which should be more thoroughly understood. It has been common to parade the high moral maxims of heathen systems as proofs against the exclusive claims of Christianity. But when carefully considered, the lofty ethical truths found in all sacred books and traditions, corroborate the doctrines of the Scriptures. They condemn the nations "who hold the truth in unrighteousness." They enforce the great doctrine that by their own consciences all mankind are convicted of sin, and are in need of a vicarious righteousness,--a full and free salvation by a divine power. My own experience has been, and it is corroborated by that of many others, that very many truths of the Gospel, when seen from the stand-point of heathenism, stand out with a clearness never seen before. Many prudential reasons like those which we have given for the study of false systems by missionaries, pertain also to those who remain at home. Both are concerned in the same cause, and both encounter the same assailments of our common faith. We are all missionaries in an important sense: we watch the conflict from afar, but we are concerned in all its issues. The bulletins of its battle-fields are no longer confined to missionary literature; they are found in the daily secular press, and they are discussed with favorable or unfavorable comments in the monthly magazines. The missionary enterprise has come to attract great attention: it has many friends, and also many foes, here at home; it is misrepresented by scoffers at our doors. The high merits of heathen systems, set forth with every degree of exaggeration, pass into the hands of Christian families, in books and magazines and secular papers. Apostles of infidelity are sent out to heathen countries to gather weapons against the truth. Natives of various Oriental lands, once taught in our mission schools perhaps, but still heathen, are paraded on our lecture platforms, where they entertain us with English and American arguments in support of their heathen systems and against Christianity. Young pastors, in the literary clubs of their various communities, are surprised by being called to discuss plausible papers on Buddhism, which some fellow-member has contributed, and they are expected to defend the truth. Or some young parishioner has been fascinated by a plausible Theosophist, or has learned from Robert Elsmere that there are other religions quite as pure and sacred as our own. Or some chance lecturer has disturbed the community with a discourse on the history of religious myths. And when some anxious member of a church learns that his religious instructor has no help for him on such subjects, that they lie wholly outside of his range, there is apt to be something more than disappointment: there is a loss of confidence. It is an unfortunate element in the case that error is more welcome in some of our professedly neutral papers than the truth: an article designed to show that Christianity was borrowed from Buddhism or was developed from fetichism will sometimes be welcomed as new sensation, while a reply of half the length may be rejected. There is something ominous in these facts. Whether the secular press (not all papers are thus unfair) are influenced by partisan hatred of the truth or simply by a reckless regard for whatever is most popular, the facts are equally portentous. And if it be true that such publications are what the people most desire, the outlook for our country is dark indeed. The saddest consideration is that the power of the secular press is so vast and far reaching. When Celsus wrote, books were few. When Voltaire, Hume, and Thomas Paine made their assailments on the Christian faith, the means of spreading the blight of error were comparatively few. But now the accumulated arguments of German infidels for the last half-century may be thrown into a five-cent Sunday paper, whose issue will reach a quarter of a million of copies, which perhaps a million of men and women may read. These articles are copied into a hundred other papers, and they are read in the villages and hamlets; they are read on the ranches and in the mining camps where no sermon is ever heard. It is perfectly evident that in an age like this we cannot propagate Christianity under glass. It must grow in the open field where the free winds of heaven shall smite and dissipate every cloud of error that may pass over it, and where its roots shall only strike the deeper for the questionings and conflicts that may often befall it. Error cannot be overcome either by ignoring it or by the cheap but imbecile scolding of an ignorant pulpit. I cannot express the truth on this point more forcibly than by quoting the trenchant words of Professor Ernest Naville, in his lectures on "Modern Atheism." After having admitted that one, who can keep himself far from the strifes and struggles of modern thought, will find solitude, prayer, and calm activity, pursued under the guidance of conscience, most conducive to unquestioning faith and religious peace, he says: "But we are not masters of our own ways, and the circumstances of the present times impose on us special duties. The barriers which separate the school and the world are everywhere thrown down; everywhere shreds of philosophy, and very often of very bad philosophy, scattered fragments of theological science, and very often of a deplorable theological science, are insinuating themselves into the current literature. There is not a literary review, there is scarcely a political journal, which does not speak on occasion, or without occasion, of the problems relating to our eternal interests. The most sacred beliefs are attacked every day in the organs of public opinion. At such a juncture can men, who preserve faith in their own souls, remain like dumb dogs, or keep themselves shut up in the narrow limits of the schools? Assuredly not. We must descend to the common ground and fight with equal weapons the great battles of thought. For this purpose it is necessary to state questions which run the risk of startling sincerely religious persons. But there is no help for it if we are to combat the adversaries on their own ground; and because it is thus only that we can prove to all that the torrent of negations is but a passing rush of waters, which, fret as they may in their channels, shall be found to have left not so much as a trace of their passage upon the Rock of Ages." The fact that Professor Naville's lectures were delivered in Geneva and Lausanne, to audiences which together numbered over two thousand five hundred people, affords abundant proof that the people are prepared to welcome the relief afforded by a clear and really able discussion of these burning questions. In the ordinary teaching of the pulpit they would be out of place, but every public teacher should be able to deal with them on suitable occasions. In a single concluding word, the struggle of truth and error has become world-wide. There are no ethnic religions now. There is Christianity in Calcutta, and there is Buddhism in Boston. The line of battle is the parallel that belts the globe. It is not a time for slumber or for mere pious denunciation. There must be no blundering: the warfare must be waged with weapons of precision, and then victory is sure. It is well if our missionary effort of a century has drawn the fire of the enemy; it is well if the time has come to hold up the truth face to face with error, and to fight out and over again the conflict of Elijah and the Priests of Baal. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: _The Light of Asia and the Light of the World_. Macmillan & Co.] [Footnote 2: The late Professor Moffat, of Princeton Theological Seminary, published a _Comparative History of Religions_, but its field was too broad for a thorough treatment.] [Footnote 3: _Methodist Quarterly_.] [Footnote 4: Quoted in _Manual of India Missions_.] [Footnote 5: _Manual of India Missions._] [Footnote 6: Similar views, though in briefer terms, have been presented by Rev. William A.P. Martin, D.D., of Peking; Rev. John L. Nevins, D.D., of Chefou; Rev. A.P. Happer, D.D., and Rev. B.C. Henry, D.D., of Canton; Professor John Wortabet, M.D., of Beyrout; Rev. Jacob Chamberlain, D.D., Missionary of the Reformed Church in Madras; Rev. Z.J. Jones, D.D., Missionary of the American M.E. Church at Bareilly, India; Rev. K.C. Chattergee and Ram Chandra Bose, both converts from high caste Hinduism and both eminent ministers of the Gospel in India; and Rev. E.W. Blyden, D.D., the accomplished African scholar of Liberia.] [Footnote 7: The _Japan Mail_ of September 30, 1891, in reviewing the progress of religious and philosophic discussion as carried on by the native press of the Empire, says: "The Buddhist literature of the season shows plainly the extent to which the educated members of the (Buddhist) priesthood are seeking to enlarge their grasp by contact with Western philosophy and religious thought. We happen to know that a prominent priest of the Shinsu sect is deeply immersed in Comte's humanitarianism. In _Kyogaku-roushu_ (a native paper) are published instalments of Spencer's philosophy. Another paper, the _Hauseikwai_, has an article urging the desirability of a general union of all the (Buddhist) sects, such as Colonel Olcott brought about in India between the northern and the southern Buddhists."] [Footnote 8: _Leaves from an Egyptian Note-book._] [Footnote 9: Papers of Rev. Mr. Hewlett in the _Indian Evangelical Review_.] [Footnote 10: In an address given in Tokio, by Rev. Mr. Knapp, of Boston, Buddhists in Japan were advised to build their religion of the future upon their own foundations, and not upon the teachings of Western propagandists.] [Footnote 11: _The Twelve Buddhist Sects of Japan_, by Bunyiu Nanjio, Oxon.] [Footnote 12: Quoted in _Manual of India Missions_.] [Footnote 13: Quoted in _Manual of India Missions_.] [Footnote 14: _Hulsean Lectures_, 1846.] [Footnote 15: Private Thoughts on Religion, Part I., Article 2.] [Footnote 16: Confucius not only taught that men should not do to others what they would not have done to them, but when one of his disciples asked him to name one word which should represent the whole duty of man, he replied "Reciprocity."] [Footnote 17: Whoever will read the Preface of Mr. Spencer's work on Sociology will be surprised at the means which have been used in collecting and verifying supposed facts; a careful perusal of the book will show that all classes of testimony have been accepted, so far as they were favorable. Adventurers, reporters, sailors, and that upon the briefest and most casual observation, have been deemed capable of interpreting the religious beliefs of men. Even Peschel doubts many of their conclusions.] [Footnote 18: See _Indian Wisdom_.] [Footnote 19: Archbishop Trench, after speaking in his Hulsean lectures of the advantages which we may gain from an earnest study of the struggles of thoughtful men, who amid heathen darkness have groped after a knowledge of the true God, and of the gratitude which we ought to feel who have received a more sure word of prophecy, adds in words of rare beauty: "And perhaps it shall seem to us as if that star in the natural heavens which guided those Eastern sages from their distant home, was but the symbol of many a star which, in the world's mystical night, such as, being faithfully followed, availed to lead humble and devout hearts from far-off regions of superstition and error, till they knelt beside the cradle of the Babe of Bethlehem, and saw all their weary wanderings repaid in a moment, and all their desires finding a perfect fulfilment in Him."] LECTURE II. THE METHODS OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN DEALING WITH HEATHENISM The coincidences of our present conquest of the non-Christian races with that to which the Apostolic Church was called are numerous and striking. Not even one hundred years ago was the struggle with heathen error so similar to that of the early Church. To a great extent the missionary efforts of the mediæval centuries encountered only crude systems, which it was comparatively easy to overcome. The rude tribes of Northern Europe were converted by the Christianity of the later Roman Empire, even though they were conquerors. Their gods of war and brute force did not meet all the demands of life. As a source of hope and comfort, their religion had little to be compared with the Christian faith, and as to philosophy they had none. They had inherited the simple nature worship which was common to all branches of the Aryan race, and they had expanded it into various ramifications of polytheism; but they had not fortified it with subtle speculations like those of the Indo-Aryans, nor had their mythologies become intrenched in inveterate custom, and the national pride which attends an advanced civilization. At a later day Christian missionaries in Britain found the Norse religion of the Saxons, Jutes, and Angles, scarcely holding the confidence of either rulers or subjects. They had valued their gods chiefly for the purposes of war, and they had not always proved reliable. The king of Northumbria, like Clovis of France, had vowed to exchange his deities for the God of the Christians if victory should be given him on a certain battle-field; and when he had assembled his thanes to listen to a discussion between the missionary Paulinus and the priests of Woden on the comparative merits of their respective faiths, the high priest frankly admitted his dissatisfaction with a religion which he had found utterly disappointing and useless; and when other chief counsellors had given the same testimony, and a unanimous vote had been taken to adopt the Christian faith, he was the first to commence the destruction of the idols.[20] The still earlier missionaries among the Druid Celts of Britain and France, though they found in Druidism a more elaborate faith than that of the Norsemen, encountered no such resistance as we find in the great religious systems of our day. Where can we point to so easy a conquest as that of Patrick in Ireland, or that of the Monks of Iona among the Picts and Scots? The Druids claimed that they already had many things in common with the Christian doctrines,[21] and what was a still stronger element in the case, they made common cause with the Christians against the wrongs inflicted on both by pagan Rome. The Roman emperors were not more determined to extirpate the hated and, as they thought, dangerous influences of Christianity, than they were to destroy every vestige of Druidism as their only hope of conquering the invincible armies of Boadicea. And thus the mutual experience of common sufferings opened a wide door for the advancement of Christian truth. The conquests of Welsh and Irish missionaries in Burgundy, Switzerland, and _Germany_, encountered no elaborate book religions, and no profound philosophies. They had to deal with races of men who were formidable only with weapons of warfare, and who, intent chiefly on conquest and migration, had few institutions and no written historic records. The peaceful sceptre of the truth was a new force in their experience, and the sympathetic and self-denying labors of a few missionaries tamed the fierce Vikings to whom Britain had become a prey, and whose incursions even the armies of Charlemagne could not resist. How different is our struggle with the races now under the sceptre of Islam, for example--inflated as they are with the pride of wide conquest, and looking contemptuously upon that Christian faith which it was their early mission to sweep away as a form of idolatry! How different is our task in India, which boasts the antiquity of the noble Sanskrit and its sacred literature, and claims, as the true representative of the Aryan race, to have given to western nations their philosophy, their religion, and their civilization! How much more difficult is our encounter with Confucianism, which claims to have laid the foundations of the most stable structure of social and political institutions that the world has ever known, and which to-day, after twenty-five centuries of trial, appeals to the intellectual pride of all intelligent classes in a great empire of four hundred millions! And finally, how different is our task with Buddhism, so mystical and abstruse, so lofty in many of its precepts, and yet so cold and thin, so flexible and easily adapted, and therefore so varied and many sided! The religious systems with which we are now confronted find their counterparts only in the heathenism with which the early Church had to deal many centuries ago; and for this reason the history of those early struggles is full of practical instruction for us now. How did the early Church succeed in its great conquest? What methods were adopted, and with what measures of success? In one respect there is a wide difference in the two cases. The Apostles were attempting to convert their conquerors. They belonged to the vanquished race; they were of a despised nationality. The early fathers also were subjects of Pagan powers. Insomuch as the Roman emperors claimed divine honors, there was an element of treason in their propagandism. The terrible persecutions which so long devastated the early Church found their supposed justification in the plea of self-defence against a system which threatened to subvert cherished and time-honored institutions. Candid writers, like Archdeacon Farrar, admit that Christianity did hasten the overthrow of the Roman Empire. But we find no conquering powers in our pathway. Christianity and Christian civilization have become dominant in the earth. The weakness of the Christian Church in its conquests now is not in being baffled and crippled by tyranny and persecution, but rather in the temptation to arrogance and the abuse of superior power, in the overbearing spirit shown in the diplomacy of Christian nations and the unscrupulous aggressions of their commerce. There is also a further contrast in the fact that in the early days the advantages of frugality and simple habits of life were on the side of the missionaries. Roman society especially was beginning to suffer that decay which is the inevitable consequence of long-continued luxury, while the Church observed temperance in all things and excelled in the virtues which always tend to moral and social victory.[22] On the other hand, we who are the ambassadors to the heathen of to-day, are ourselves exposed to the dangers which result from wealth and excessive luxury. Our grade of life, our scale of expenditure, even the style in which our missionaries live, excites the amazement of the frugal heathen to whom they preach. And as for the Church at home, it is hardly safe for a Persian or a Chinaman to see it. Everyone who visits this wonderful eldorado carries back such romantic impressions as excite in others, not so much the love of the Gospel as the love of mammon. When the Church went forth in comparative poverty, and with an intense moral earnestness, to preach righteousness, temperance, and the judgment to come; when those who were wealthy gave all to the poor--like Anthony of Egypt, Jerome, Ambrose, and Francis of Assisi--and in simple garments bore the Gospel to those who were surfeited with luxuries and pleasures, and were sick of a life of mere indulgence, then the truth of the Gospel conquered heathenism with all that the world could give. But whether a Church in the advanced civilization of our land and time, possessed of enormous wealth, enjoying every luxury, and ever anxious to gain more and more of this present world, can convert heathen races who deem themselves more frugal, more temperate, and less worldly than we, is a problem which remains to be solved. We have rare facilities, but we have great drawbacks. God's grace can overcome even our defects, and He has promised success. But in the proud intellectual character of the systems encountered respectively by the ancient and by the modern Church, there are remarkable parallels. The supercilious pride of Brahminism, or the lofty scorn of Mohammedanism, is quite equal to that self-sufficient Greek philosophy in whose eyes the Gospel was the merest foolishness. And the immovable self-righteousness of the Stoics has its counterpart in the Confucianism of the Chinese literati. A careful comparison of the six schools of Hindu philosophy with the various systems of Greece and Rome, will fill the mind with surprise at the numerous correspondences--one might almost say identities. And that surprise is the greater from the fact that no proof exists that either has been borrowed from the other. The atomic theory of creation advanced by Lucretius is found also in the Nyaya philosophy of the Hindus. The pessimism of Pliny and Marcus Aurelius was much more elaborately worked out by Gautama. The Hindus had their categories and their syllogisms as well as Aristotle. The conception of a dual principle in deity which the early Church traced in all the religious systems of Egypt, Phoenicia, and Assyria, and whose influence poisoned the life of the Phoenician colonies, and was so corrupting to the morals of Greece and Rome, was also elaborated by the Sankhya philosophy of Kapila, and it has plunged Hindu society into as deep a degradation as could be found in Pompeii or Herculaneum.[23] The Indian philosophy partook far more of the pantheistic element than that of Greece. Plato and Aristotle had clearer conceptions of the personality of the deity and of the distinct and responsible character of the human soul than any school of Hindu philosophers--certainly clearer than the Vedantists, and their ethics involved a stronger sense of sin. German philosophy has borrowed its pantheism from India rather than from Greece, and in its most shadowy developments it has never transcended the ancient Vedantism of Vyasa. As in the early centuries, so in our time, different systems of religion have been commingled and interwoven into protean forms of error more difficult to understand and dislodge than any one of the faiths and philosophies of which they were combined. As the Alexandrian Jews intertwined the teachings of Judaism and Platonism; as Manichæans and Gnostics corrupted the truths of the Old and New Testaments with ideas borrowed from Persian mysticism; as various eclectic systems gathered up all types of thought which the wide conquests of the Roman Empire brought together, and mingled them with Christian teachings; so now the increased intercommunication, and the quickened intellectual activity of our age have led to the fusion of different systems, ancient and modern, in a negative and nerveless religion of humanity. We now have in the East not only Indian, but Anglo-Indian, speculations. The unbelieving Calcutta graduate has Hegel and Spinoza interwoven with his Vedantism, and the eclectic leader of the Brahmo Somaj, while placing Christ at the head of the prophets and recognizing the authority of all sacred bibles of the races, called on Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Mohammedans to unite in one theistic church of the New Dispensation in India. Not even the old Gnostics could present so striking an admixture as that of the Arya Somaj. It has appropriated many of those Christian ethics which have been learned from a century of contact with missionaries and other Christian residents. It has approved the more humane customs and reforms of Christendom, denouncing caste, and the degradation of woman. It has repudiated the corrupt rites and the degrading superstitions of Hinduism. At the same time its hatred of the Christian faith is most bitter and intense. And there are other alliances, not a few, between the East and the West. In India and Japan the old Buddhism is compounded with American Spiritualism and with modern Evolution, under a new application of the ancient name of Theosophy. In Japan representatives of advanced Unitarianism are exhorting the Japanese Buddhists to build the religion of the future on their old foundations, and to avoid the propagandists of western Christianity. The bland and easy-going catholicity which professes so much in our day, which embraces all faiths and unfaiths in one sweet emulsion of meaningless negations, which patronizes the Christ and His doctrines, and applies the nomenclature of Christianity to doctrines the very opposite of its teachings, finds a counterpart in the smooth and vapid compromises of the old Gnostics. "Gnosticism," says Uhlhorn, "combined Greek philosophies, Jewish theology, and ancient Oriental theosophy, thus forming great systems of speculative thought, all with the object of displaying the world's development. From a pantheistic First Cause, Gnosticism traced the emanation of a series of æons--beings of Light. The source of evil was supposed to be matter, which in this material world holds light in captivity. To liberate the light and thus redeem the world, Christ came, and thus Christianity was added as the crowning and victorious element in this many-sided system of speculation. But Christ was regarded not so much as a Saviour of individual souls as an emancipator of a disordered kosmos, and the system which seemed to accord great honor to Christianity threatened to destroy its life and power." So, according to some of our Modern Systems, men are to find their future salvation in the grander future of the race.[24] Not only do we encounter mixtures of truth and error, but we witness similar attempts to prove that whatever is best in Christianity was borrowed from heathenism. Porphyry and others maintained that Pythagoras and Theosebius had anticipated many of the attributes and deeds of Christ, and Philostratus was prompted by the wife of Severus to write a history of Appolonius of Tyana which should match the life of Christ. And in precisely the same way it has been variously claimed in our time that the story of Christ's birth, childhood, and ministry were borrowed from Buddha and from Krishna, and that the whole conception of his vicarious suffering for the good of men is a clever imitation of Prometheus Bound. Now, in the earlier conflict it was important to know the facts on both sides in order to meet these allegations of Porphyry, Marinus, and others, and it is equally important to understand the precise ground on which similar charges are made with equal assurance now.[25] The very same old battles are to be fought over again, both with philosophy and with legend. And it is very evident that, with so many points of similarity between the early struggle of Christianity with heathenism and that of our own time, it is quite worth our labor to inquire what were the general methods then pursued. Then victory crowned the efforts of the Church. That which humanly speaking seemed impossible, was actually accomplished. From our finite standpoint, no more preposterous command was ever given than that which Christ gave to his little company of disciples gathered in the mountains of Galilee, or that last word before his ascension on Mt. Olivet, in which He placed under their responsible stewardship, not only Jerusalem, but all Judea and Samaria, and the "uttermost parts of the earth." The disciples were without learning or social influence, or political power. They had no wealth and few facilities, and so far as they knew there were no open doors. They were hated by their Jewish countrymen, ridiculed by the ubiquitous and cultured Greeks, and frowned upon by the conquering powers of Rome. How then did they succeed? How was it that in three or four centuries they had virtually emptied the Roman Pantheon of its heathen deities, and had gained the sceptre of the empire and the world? It is easy to misapprehend the forces which won the victory. The disciples first chosen to found the Church were fishermen, but that affords no warrant for the belief that only untutored men were employed in the early Church, or for the inference that the Salvation Army are to gain the conquest now. They were inspired; these are not; and a few only were chosen, with the very aim of setting at naught the intolerant wisdom of the Pharisees. But when the Gospel was to be borne to heathen races, to the great nations whose arrogance was proportionate to their learning and their power, a very different man was selected. Saul of Tarsus had almost every needed qualification seen from a human point of view. Standing, as he must, between the stiff bigotry of Judaism and the subtleties of Greek philosophy, he was fortunately familiar with both. He was a man of rare courtesy, and yet of matchless courage. Whether addressing a Jewish governor or the assembled philosophers and counsellors of Athens, he evinced an unfailing tact. He knew how to conciliate even a common mob of heathen idolators and when to defy a high priest, or plead the immunities of his Roman citizenship before a Roman proconsul. In tracing the methods of the early Church in dealing with heathenism, we begin, therefore, with Paul; for although he was differentiated from all modern parallels by the fact that he was inspired and endowed with miraculous power, yet that does not invalidate the force of those general principles of action which he illustrated. He was the first and greatest of all missionaries, and through all time it will be safe and profitable to study his characteristics and his methods. He showed the value of thorough training in his own faith, and of a full understanding of all the errors he was to contend with. He could reason with Jews out of their own Scriptures, or substantiate his position with Greeks by citing their own poets. He was certainly uncompromising in maintaining the sovereignty of the one God, Jehovah, but he was not afraid to admit that in their blind way the heathen were also groping after the same supreme Father of all. The unknown God at Athens he accepted as an adumbration of Him whom he proclaimed, and every candid reader must admit that in quoting the words of Aratus, which represent Zeus as the supreme creator whose offspring we are, he conveys the impression of a real resemblance, if not a partial and obscured identity. The essential principle here is that Paul frankly acknowledged whatever glimpses of truth he found in heathen systems, and made free use of them in presenting the fuller and clearer knowledge revealed in the Gospel. No man ever presented a more terrible arraignment of heathenism than that which he makes in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans, and yet, with marvellous discrimination he proceeds, in the second chapter, to show how much of truth God has imparted to the understandings and the consciences of all men. And he seems to imply the Holy Spirit's regenerative work through Christ's atonement, when he maintains that whoever shall, "by patient continuance in well doing, seek glory and immortality," to him shall "eternal life" be given; but "tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doeth evil, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile." Peter was not prepared to be a missionary till he had been divested of his Jewish narrowness by witnessing the power of grace in the Roman centurion at Cesarea. That widened out his horizon immensely. He saw that God in his ultimate plan was no respecter of persons or of races. There has been great difference of opinion as to whether the annual worship of the supreme God of Heaven in the great imperial temple at Peking is in any degree a relic of the worship of the true God once revealed to mankind. Such Chinese scholars as Martin and Legge and Douglass think that it is; others deny it. Some men raise a question whether the Allah of the Mohammedan faith is identical with the Jehovah of the Old Testament. Sales, the profoundest expositor of Islam, considers him the same. Moslems themselves have no doubt of it: the intent of the Koran is that and nothing else; Old Testament teachings are interwoven with almost every sura of its pages. I think that Paul would have conceded this point at once, and would the more successfully have urged the claims of Jesus, whom the Koran presents as the only sinless prophet. Of course Mohammedans do not recognize the Triune God as we now apprehend Him, from the New Testament standpoint; neither did ancient believers of Israel fully conceive of God as He has since been more fully revealed in the person and the sacrifice of his Son--Jesus Christ. Both the teachings and the example of Paul seem to recognize the fact that conceptions of God, sometimes clear and sometimes dim, may exist among heathen nations; and many of the great Christian fathers evidently took the same view. They admitted that Plato's noble teachings were calculated to draw the soul toward God, though they revealed no real access to Him such as is found in Christ. Archbishop Trench, in his Hulsean lectures on "Christ the Desire of the Nations," dwells approvingly upon Augustine's well-known statement, that he had been turned from vice to an inspiring conception of God by reading the "Hortensius" of Cicero. Augustine's own reference to the fact is found in the fourth book of his "Confessions," where he says: "In the ordinary course of study I fell upon a certain book of Cicero whose speech almost all admire--not so his heart. This book contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called 'Hortensius.' But this book altered my affections and turned my prayers to Thyself, O Lord, and made me have other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless to me, and I longed with an incredible burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise that I might return to Thee. For not to sharpen my tongue did I employ that book: nor did it infuse into me its style, but its matter." The "Hortensius" of Cicero has not survived till our time, and we know not what it contained; but we cannot fail to notice this testimony of a mature and eminent saint to the spiritual benefit which he had received at the age of thirty-one, from reading the works of a heathen philosopher. And a most interesting proof is here furnished for the freedom with which the Spirit of God works upon the hearts of men, and the great variety of means and agencies which He employs,--and that beyond the pale of the Christian Church, and even beyond the actual knowledge of the historic Christ. It would be interesting to know whether the regeneration of Augustine occurred just then, when he says in such strong language, that this book altered his affections and turned his prayers unto God, and made him "long with an indescribable burning desire for an immortality of wisdom." All men are saved, if at all, by the blood of Christ through the renewing of the Holy Ghost; but what was the position of such men as Augustine and Cornelius of Cesarea before they fully and clearly saw Jesus as the actual Messiah, and as the personal representative of that Grace of God in which they had already reposed a general faith, is at least an interesting question. Not less positive is the acknowledgment which Augustine makes of the benefits which he had received from Plato. And he mentions many others, as Virgininus, Lactantius, Hilary, and Cyprian, who, like himself, having once been heathen and students of heathen philosophy, had, as he expresses it, "spoiled the Egyptians, bringing away with them rich treasures from the land of bondage, that they might adorn therewith the true tabernacle of the Christian faith." Augustine seems to have been fond of repeating both this argument and this his favorite illustration. In his "Doctrine of Christ" he expands it more fully than in his "Confessions." He says: "Whatever those called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, may have said conformable to our faith, is not only not to be dreaded, but is to be claimed from them as unlawful possessors, to our use. For, as the Egyptians not only had idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel were to abhor and avoid, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver and apparel which that people at its departure from Egypt privily assumed for a better use, not on its own authority but at the command of God, the very Egyptians unwittingly furnishing the things which themselves used not well; so all the teaching of the Gentiles not only hath feigned and superstitious devices, and heavy burdens of a useless toil, which we severally, as under the leading of Christ we go forth out of the fellowship of the Gentiles, ought to abhor and avoid, but it also containeth liberal arts, fitter for the service of truth, and some most useful moral precepts; as also there are found among them some truths concerning the worship of the One God Himself, as it were their gold and silver which they did not themselves form, but drew from certain veins of Divine Providence running throughout, and which they perversely and wrongfully abuse to the service of demons. These, the Christian, when he severs himself from their wretched fellowship, ought to take from them for the right use of preaching of the Gospel. For what else have many excellent members of our faith done? See we not how richly laden with gold and silver and apparel that most persuasive teacher and most blessed martyr, Cyprian, departed out of Egypt? Or Lactantius, or Victorinus, Optatus, Hilary, not to speak of the living, and Greeks innumerable? And this, Moses himself, that most faithful servant of God, first did, of whom it is written, that 'he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.'" Let us for a moment pause and see of what these treasures of Egypt consisted, and especially what Plato taught concerning God. Like Socrates, he ridiculed the absurd but popular notion that the gods could be full of human imperfections, could make war upon each other, could engage in intrigues, and be guilty of base passions. And he earnestly maintained that it was demoralizing to children and youth to hold up such beings as objects of worship. Such was his condemnation of what he considered false gods. He was equally opposed to the idea that there is no God. "All things," he says, "are from God, and not from some spontaneous and unintelligent cause." "Now, that which is created," he adds, "must of necessity be created by some cause--but how can we find out the Father and maker of all this universe? If the world indeed be fair, and the artificer good, then He must have looked to that which is external--for the world is the fairest of creatures, as He is the best of causes." Plato's representation of the mercy of God, of his providential care, of his unmixed goodness, of his eternal beauty and holiness--are well-nigh up to the New Testament standard. So is also his doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The fatal deficiency is that he does not _know_. He has received no divine revelation. "We will wait," he said in another passage, "for one, be it a god or a god-inspired man, to teach us our religious duties, and as Athene in Homer says to Diomede, to take away the darkness from our eyes." And in still another place he adds: "We must lay hold of the best human opinion in order that, borne by it as on a raft, we may sail over the dangerous sea of life, unless we can find a stronger boat, _or some word of God which will more surely and safely carry us_."[26] There is a deep pathos in the question which I have just quoted, "How can we find out the Father and maker of all this universe?" And in the last sentence quoted, Plato seems to have felt his way to the very threshold of the revelation of Christ.[27] Augustine shows a discrimination on this subject too important to be overlooked, when he declares that while the noble philosophy of the Platonists turned his thoughts away from his low gratifications to the contemplation of an infinite God, it left him helpless. He was profited both by what philosophy taught him and by what it could not teach: it created wants which it could not satisfy. In short, he was prepared by its very deficiencies to see in stronger contrast the all-satisfying fulness of the Gospel of Eternal Life. Plato could tell him nothing of any real plan of redemption, and he confesses with tender pathos that he found no Revealer, no divine sacrifice for sin, no uplifted Cross, no gift of the transforming Spirit, no invitation to the weary, no light of the Resurrection.[28] Now, just here is the exact truth; and Augustine has conferred a lasting benefit upon the Christian Church by this grand lesson of just discrimination. He and other Christian fathers knew where to draw the lines carefully and wisely with respect to heathen errors. We often have occasion to complain of the sharpness of the controversies of the early Church, but it could scarcely be otherwise in an age like that. It was a period of transitions and of rude convulsions. The foundations of the great deep of human error were being broken up. It was no time for flabby, jelly-fish convictions. The training which the great leaders had received in philosophy and rhetoric had made them keen dialectics. They had something of Paul's abhorrence of heathen abominations, for they saw them on every hand. They saw also the specious admixtures of Gnosticism, and they met them squarely. Tertullian's controversy with Marcion, Augustine's sharp issue with Pelasgius, Ambrose's bold and uncompromising resistance to Arianism, Origen's able reply to Celsus, all show that the great leaders of the Church were not men of weak opinions. The discriminating concessions which they made, therefore, were not born of an easy-going indifferentism and the soft and nerveless charity that regards all religions alike. They found a medium between this pretentious extreme and the opposite evil of ignorant and narrow prejudgment; and nothing is more needed in the missionary work of our day than that intelligent and well-poised wisdom which considers all the facts and then draws just distinctions; which will not compensate for conscious ignorance with cheap misrepresentation or wholesale denunciation. 1. Now, first of all, in considering the methods of the early Church and its secret of power in overcoming the errors of heathenism, it must be borne in mind that the victory was mainly due to the _moral earnestness_ which characterized that period. In this category we must place the influence which sprang from the martyrdom of thousands who surrendered life rather than relinquish their faith. That this martyr spirit did not always produce a true symmetry of Christian character cannot be denied. The tide of fanaticism swept in, sometimes, with the current of true religious zeal, and inconsistencies and blemishes marred even the saintliest self-sacrifice; but there was no resisting the mighty logic of the spirit of martyrdom as a whole. The high and the low, the wise and the unlettered, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, strong men and delicate women, surrendered themselves to the most cruel tortures for the love of Christ. This spectacle, while it may have served only to enrage a Nero and urge him on to even more Satanic cruelty, could not be wholly lost upon the more thoughtful Marcus Aurelius and others like him. It was impossible to resist the moral force of so calm and resolute a surrender unto torture and death. Moreover, an age which produced such relinquishment of earthly possessions as was shown by men like Anthony and Ambrose, who were ready to lay down the emoluments of high political position and distribute their large fortunes for the relief of the poor; and such women as Paula and others of high position, who were ready to sacrifice all for Christ and retire into seclusion and voluntary poverty--an age which could produce such characters and could show their steady perseverance unto the end, could not fail to be an age of resistless moral power; and it would be safe to say that no heathen system could long stand against the sustained and persistent force of such influences. Were the Christian Church of to-day moved by even a tithe of that high self-renunciation, to say nothing of braving the fires of martyrdom, if it possessed in even partial degree the same sacrifice of luxury and ease, and the same consecration of effort and of influence, the conquest of benighted nations would be easy and rapid. The frugality of the early Christians, the simplicity of life which the great body of the Church observed, and to which even wealthy converts more or less conformed, was also, doubtless, a strong factor in the great problem of winning the heathen to Christ. Probably in no age could Christian simplicity find stronger contrasts than were presented by the luxury and extravagance, the unbridled indulgence and profligacy, which characterized the later periods of the Roman Empire. Universal conquest of surrounding nations had brought untold wealth. The Government had hastened the process of decay by lavish distribution to the people of those resources which obviated the necessity of unremitting toil. It had devoted large expenditures to popular amusements, and demagogues had squandered the public funds for the purpose of securing their own preferment. Over against the moral earnestness of the persecuted Christian Church, there was in the nation itself and the heathenism which belonged to it, an utter want of character or conviction. These conditions of the conquest, as I have already indicated, do not find an exact counterpart with us now. There is more of refined Christian culture than existed in the early Church; probably there is also more of organized Christian effort. In many points the comparison is in our favor, but earnestness, and the spiritual power which attends it, are on a lower grade. There is no escape from the conviction that just here lies the reason why the Christian Church, with all her numbers, her vast material resources, and her unlimited opportunities, cannot achieve a greater success. 2. But, on the intellectual side, and as relating to the methods of direct effort, there are many points in which imitation of the early example is entirely practicable. And first, the wise discrimination which was exercised by Augustine and other Christian leaders is entirely practicable now. There has prevailed in our time an indiscriminate carelessness in the use of terms in dealing with this subject. The strong language which the Old Testament employed against the abominations of Baalism, we have seemed to regard as having equal force against the ethics of Confucius or Gautama. "Heathenism" is the one brand which we have put upon all the non-Christian religions. I wish it were possible to exchange the term for a better.[29] Baalism was undoubtedly the most besotted, cruel, and diabolical religion that has ever existed on the earth. When we carefully study it we are not surprised at the strong language of denunciation which the Old Testament employs. But as I have already shown, we find in the New Testament a different spirit exercised toward the types of error which our Saviour and his disciples were called to meet. There is only gentleness in our Lord's dealings with those who were without the Jewish Church. His strongest denunciations were reserved for hypocrites who knew the truth and obeyed it not. He declared that the men of Nineveh would rise up in judgment against those who rejected the clear message of God's own Son. The man who goes forth to the great mission fields with the feeling that it is his province to assail as strongly as possible the deeply-rooted convictions of men, instead of winning them to a more excellent way, is worse than one who beats the air; he is doing positive harm; he is trifling with precious souls. He does not illustrate the spirit of Christ. The wisest of the early Fathers sometimes differed widely from each other in their methods; some were denunciatory, others were even too ready to excuse. The great African controversialist, Tertullian, was unsparing in his anathemas, not only against heathen customs, which were vile indeed, but against the teachings of the noblest philosophy. He had witnessed the former; he had not candidly studied the latter. With a blind zeal, which has too often been witnessed in the history of good causes, he denounced Plato, Aristotle, and even Socrates with a violence which marred the character of so great a man. On the other hand, Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria were perhaps excessively broad. Of two noted Alexandrines, Archdeacon Farrar says: "They were philosophers in spirit; they could enforce respect by their learning and their large, rounded sympathy, where rhetorical denunciation and ecclesiastical anathemas would only have been listened to with a frown of anger, or a look of disdain. Pagan youths would have listened to Clement when he spoke of Plato as 'the truly noble and half-inspired,' while they would have looked on Tertullian as an ignorant railer, who could say nothing better of Socrates than to call him the 'Attic buffoon,' and of Aristotle than to characterize him as the 'miserable Aristotle.'" Tatian and Hermes also looked upon Greek philosophy as an invention of the devil. Irenæus was more discriminating. He opposed the broad and lax charity of the Alexandrines, but he read the Greek philosophy, and when called to the bishopric of Lyons, he set himself to the study of the Gallic Druidism, believing that a special adaptation would be called for in that remote mission field.[30] Basil was an earnest advocate of the Greek philosophy as giving a broader character to Christian education. There were among the Fathers many different types of men, some philosophically inclined, others better able to use practical arguments. Some were more successful in appealing to the signs of the times, the clear evidences of that corruption and decay to which heathenism had led. They pointed to the degradation of women, the prevalence of vice, the inordinate indulgence in pleasures, the love of excitement, the cruel frenzy of the gladiatorial shows, the unrest and pessimism and despair of all society. One of the most remarkable appeals of this kind is found in a letter of Cyprian to his friend Donatus. "He bids him seat himself in fancy on some mountain top and gaze down upon what he has abandoned (for he is a Christian), on the roads blocked by brigands, the sea beset by pirates, the camps desolated by the horrors of many wars, on the world reeking with bloodshed, and the guilt which, in proportion to its magnitude, was extolled as a glory. Then, if he would turn his gaze to the cities, he would behold a sight more gloomy than all solitudes. In the gladiatorial games men were fattened for mutual slaughter, and publicly murdered to delight the mob. Even innocent men were urged to fight in public with wild beasts, while their mothers and sisters paid large sums to witness the spectacle. In the theatres parricide and infanticide were dealt with before mixed audiences, and all pollution and crimes were made to claim reverence because presented under the guise of religious mythology. In the homes was equal corruption; in the forum bribery and intrigue ran rife; justice was subverted, and innocence was condemned to prison, torture, and death. Luxury destroyed character, and wealth became an idol and a curse."[31] Arguments of this kind were ready enough to hand whenever Christian teachers were disposed to use them, and their descriptions found a real corroboration in society as it actually appeared on every hand. None could question the counts in the indictment. 3. While the Christian Fathers and the missionaries differed in their estimates of heathenism, and in their methods of dealing with it, one thing was recognized by all whom we designate as the great leaders, namely, the imperative necessity of a thorough knowledge of it. They understood both the low superstition of the masses and the loftier teaching of the philosophers. On the other hand, they had the same estimate of the incomparable Gospel of Christ that we have; they realized that it was the wisdom of God and the power of God unto salvation as clearly as the best of us, but they did not claim that it was to be preached blindly and without adaptation. The verities of the New Testament teachings, the transforming power of the Holy Ghost, the necessity for a new birth and for the preternatural influence of grace, both in regeneration and in sanctification, were as strongly maintained as they have ever been in any age of the Church; but the Fathers were careful to know whether they were casting the good seed upon stony places, or into good ground where it would spring up and bear fruit. The liberal education of that day was, in fact, an education along the old lines of heathen philosophy, poetry, history, and rhetoric; and a broad training was valued as highly as it has been in any subsequent period. It was thoroughly understood that disciplined intellect, other things being equal, may expect a degree of influence which can never fall to the lot of ignorance, however sanctified its spirit. There has never been a stronger type of men than the Christian Fathers. They were learned men, for the age in which they lived, and their learning had special adaptations to the work assigned them. Many of them, like Cyprian, Clement, Hilary, Martin of Tours, had been born and educated in heathenism; while others, like Basil, Gregory, Origen, Athanasius, Jerome, and Augustine, though born under Gospel influences, studied heathen philosophy and poetry at the instance of their Christian parents. 4. Some of the leaders familiarized themselves with the speculations of the day, not merely for the sake of a wider range of knowledge, but that they might the more successfully refute the assailants of the faith, many of whom were men of great power. They were fully aware that it behooved them to know their ground, for their opponents studied the points of comparison carefully. The infidel Celsus studied Christianity and its relation to the Old Testament histories and prophecies, and he armed himself with equal assiduity with all the choicest weapons drawn from Greek philosophy. How was such a man to be met? His able attack on Christianity remained fifty years unanswered. To reply adequately was not an easy task. Doubtless there were many, then as now, who thought that the most comfortable way of dealing with such things was to let them alone. But a wiser policy prevailed. Origen was requested to prepare an answer, and, although such work was not congenial to him, he did so because he felt that the cause of the truth demanded it. His reply outlived the attack which it was designed to meet, and in all subsequent ages it has been a bulwark of defence.[32] Origen was not of a pugnacious spirit--it was well that he was not--but with wide and thorough preparation he summoned all his energies to meet the foe. Archdeacon Farrar says of him, that he had been trained in the whole circle of science. He could argue with the pupils of Plato, or those of Zeno, on equal terms, and he deems it fortunate that one who was called, as he was, to be a teacher at Alexandria, where men of all nations and all creeds met, had a cosmopolitan training and a cosmopolitan spirit. No less resolute was the effort of Ambrose in resisting the errors of Arianism, and he also adapted himself to the work in hand. He had not been afraid of Platonism. On the other hand, we are told that Plato, next to his Bible, constituted a part of his daily reading, and that, too, in the period of his ripest Christian experience, and when he carried his studies and his prayers far into the hours of the night. But in dealing with Arianism he needed a special understanding of all its intricacies, and when among its advocates and supporters he encountered a powerful empress as well as her ablest advocates, he had need of all the powers within him--that power of moral earnestness which had led him to give all his property to the poor--that power of strong faith, which prepared him, if need be, to lay down his life--the power of a disciplined intellect, and a thorough knowledge of the whole issue. 5. The early Fathers not only studied the heathen philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, but they learned to employ them, and their successors continued to employ them, even to the Middle Ages, and the period of the Reformation. As an intellectual framework, under which truth should be presented in logical order, it became a strong resource of the early Christian teachers. Let me refer you on this point to the clear statements of Professor Shedd.[33] He has well said that "when Christianity was revealed in its last and beautiful form by the incarnation of the Eternal World, it found the human mind already occupied by human philosophy. Educated men were Platonists, or Stoics, or Epicureans. During the age of Apologetics, which extended from the end of the apostolic age to the death of Origen, the Church was called to grapple with these systems, to know as far as possible what they contained, and to discriminately treat their contents, rejecting some things, utilizing others." "We shall see," he continues, "that Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero exerted more influence than all other philosophic minds united upon the greatest of Christian Fathers, upon the greatest of the School men, and upon the greatest of the theologians of the Reformation, Calvin and Melancthon; and if we look at European philosophy, as it has been unfolded in England, Germany, and France, we can perceive that all the modern philosophic schools have discussed the principles of human reason in very much the same manner in which Plato and Aristotle discussed them twenty-two centuries ago." I need hardly say, in closing, that it is not necessary to borrow from the heathen systems of to-day as extensively as the Fathers did from the systems of Greece and Rome, and it would be discordant with good taste to illustrate our sermons with quotations from the Hindu poets as lavishly as good Jeremy Taylor graced his discourses with gems from the poets of Greece. But I think that we may so far heed the wise examples furnished by Church history as to face the false systems of our time with a candid and discriminating spirit, and by a more adequate knowledge to disenchant the bugbears with which their apologists would alarm the Church. We are entering upon the broadest and most momentous struggle with heathen error that the world has ever witnessed. Again, in this later age, philosophy and multiform speculation are becoming the handmaids of Hindu pantheism and Buddhist occultism, as well as of Christian truth. The resources of the East and the West are combined and subsidized by the enemy as well as by the Church. As in old Rome and Alexandria, so now in London and Calcutta all currents of human thought flow together, and truth is in full grapple with error. It is no time to be idle or to take refuge in pious ignorance, much less to fear heathen systems as so many haunted houses which superstitious people dare not enter--as if the Gospel were not as potent a talisman now as it was ages ago. Let us fearlessly enter these abodes of darkness, throw open the shutters, and let in the light of day, and the hobgoblins will flee. Let us explore every dark recess, winnow out the miasma and the mildew with the pure air of heaven, and the Sun of Righteousness shall fill the world. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 20: _The Norsemen_, Maclear.] [Footnote 21: The Druid bard Taliesen says: "Christ, the Word from the beginning, was from the beginning our teacher, and we never lost His teaching. Christianity was a new thing in Asia, but there never was a time when the Druids of Britain held not its doctrines."--_St. Paul in Britain_, p. 86.] [Footnote 22: Uhlhorn's _Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism_.] [Footnote 23: The same dualism of the male and the female principle is found in the Shinto of Japan. See Chamberlain's translation of the _Kojiki_.] [Footnote 24: The late George Eliot has given expression to this grim solace, and Mr. John Fiske, in his _Destiny of Man_, claims that the goal of all life, from the first development of the primordial cell, is the perfected future man.] [Footnote 25: Voltaire found great delight in the so-called _Ezour Veda_, a work which claimed to be an ancient Veda containing the essential truths of the Bible. The distinguished French infidel was humbled, however, when it turned out that the book was the pious fraud of a Jesuit missionary who has hoped thus to win the Hindus to Christianity.] [Footnote 26: Quoted by Uhlhorn in _The Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism_, p. 70. He also quotes Seneca as saying: "Oh, if one only might have a guide to truth!"] [Footnote 27: Plato showed by his writings and his whole life that he was a true seeker after the knowledge of God, whom he identified with the highest good. Though he believed in an efficient creatorship, he held that matter is eternal. Ideas are also eternal, but the world is generated. He was not a Pantheist, as he clearly placed God outside of, or above, the universe. He regarded the soul of man as possessed of reason, moral sensibility, and appetite. On the doctrine of future immortality Plato was most emphatic. He also believed that the soul in a previous state had been pure and sinless, but had fallen. He taught that recovery from this fallen condition is to be accomplished by the pursuit of philosophy and the practice of virtue (not as merit but as discipline), by contemplating the highest ideal which is the character of God, and by thinking of eternity. Plato regarded suffering as disciplinary when properly improved. True philosophy may raise the soul above the fear of death. This was proved by Socrates. Both Socrates and Plato seemed to believe in a good demon (spirit) whose voice was a salutary and beneficent guide. As to eschatology, Plato looked forward to a heaven where the virtuous soul shall dwell in the presence of God, and in the enjoyment of pure delights. Aristotle's idea of God was scarcely less exalted than that of Plato. He expressed it thus: "The principle of life is in God; for energy of mind constitutes life, and God is this energy. He, the first mover, imparts motion and pursues the work of creation as something that is loved. His course of life must be similar to what is most excellent in our own short career. But he exists forever in this excellence, whereas this is impossible for us. His pleasure consists in the exercise of his essential energy, and on this account vigilance, wakefulness, and perception are most agreeable to him. Again, the more we examine God's nature the more wonderful does it appear to us. He is an eternal and most excellent being. He is indivisible, devoid of parts, and having no magnitude, for God imparts motion through infinite time, and nothing finite, as magnitude is, can have an infinite capacity. He is a being devoid of passions and unalterable."--Quoted in _Indian Wisdom_, p. 125.] [Footnote 28: "Those pages present not the image of this piety, the tears of confession, Thy sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, the salvation of the people, the Bridal city, the earnest of the Holy Ghost, the cup of our redemption. No man sings there, 'Shall not my soul be submitted unto God? for of Him cometh my salvation, for He is my God and my salvation, my guardian, I shall no more be grieved.' No one there hears Him call 'Come unto me all ye that labor.'"--_Confessions_, Bk. vii., xxi. "But having then read those books of the Platonists, and thence being taught to search for incorporeal truth, I saw Thy invisible things, understood by the things which are made; and though cast back, I perceived what that was which, through the darkness of my mind, I was hindered from contemplating, being assured 'that Thou wert and wert infinite, and yet not diffused in space, finite or infinite, and that Thou truly art who art the same ever, in no part nor motion varying; and that all other things are from Thee.... Of these things I was assured, yet too insecure to enjoy Thee. I prated as one skilled, but I had not sought Thy way in Christ our Saviour; I had proved to be not skilled but killed."--_Confessions_, Bk. vii., xx.] [Footnote 29: We may judge of the bearing of the common term heathen as applied to non-Christian nations, when we consider that the Greeks and Romans characterized all foreigners as "barbarians," that Mohammedans call all Christians "infidels," and the Chinese greet them as "foreign devils." The missionary enterprise as a work of conciliation should illustrate a broader spirit.] [Footnote 30: _The Celts_, Maclear.] [Footnote 31: _Lives of the Fathers_, Farrar.] [Footnote 32: "Christianity," says Max Müller, "enjoyed no privileges and claimed no immunities when it boldly confronted and confounded the most ancient and the most powerful religions of the world. Even at present it craves no mercy and it receives no mercy from those whom our missionaries have to meet face to face in every part of the world; and unless our religion has ceased to be what it was, its defenders should not shrink from this new trial of its strength, but should encourage rather than depreciate the study of comparative theology."--_Science of Religion_, p. 22.] [Footnote 33: _History of Christian Theology_, Vol. I., p. 52.] LECTURE III. THE SUCCESSIVE DEVELOPMENTS OP HINDUISM The religious systems of India, like its flora, display luxuriant variety and confusion. Hinduism is only another banyan-tree whose branches have become trunks, and whose trunks have produced new branches, until the whole has become an intellectual and moral jungle of vast extent. The original stock was a monotheistic nature worship, which the Hindu ancestors held in common with other branches of the Aryan family when dwelling together on the high table-lands of Central Asia, or, as some are now claiming, in Eastern Russia. Wherever may have been that historic "cradle" in which the infancy of our race was passed, it seems certain from similarities of language, that this Aryan family once dwelt together, and had a common worship, and called the supreme deity by a common name. It was a worship of the sky, and at length of various powers of nature, _Surya_, the sun: _Agni_, fire: _Indra_, rain, etc. It is maintained by many authors, in India as well as in Europe, that these designations were only applied as names of one and the same potential deity. This is the ground held by the various branches of the modern Somaj of India. Yet we must not suppose that the monotheism of the early Aryans was all that we understand by that term; it is enough that the power addressed was _one_ and personal. Even henotheism, the last name which Professor Max Müller applies to the early Aryan faith, denotes oneness in this sense. The process of differentiation and corruption advanced more rapidly among the Indo-Aryans than in the Iranian branch of the same race, and in all lands changes were wrought to some extent by differences of climate and by environment.[34] The Norsemen, for example, struggling with the wilder and sterner forces of storm and wintry tempest, would naturally differ in custom, and finally in faith, from the gentle Hindu under his Indian sky; yet there were common elements traceable in the earliest traditions of these races, and the fact that religions are not wholly dependent upon local conditions is shown by both Christianity and Buddhism, which have flourished most conspicuously and permanently in lands where they were not indigenous. "In the Vedas," says Sir Monier Williams, "unity in the conception of deity soon diverged into various ramifications. Only a few of the hymns appear to contain the simple conception of one divine, self-existent, omnipresent Being, and even in these, the idea of one God, present in all nature, is somewhat nebulous and undefined." One of the earliest deifications that we can trace was that of _Varuna_, who represented the overhanging sky. The hymns addressed to Varuna are not only the earliest, but they are the loftiest and most spiritual in their aspirations. They find in him an element of holiness before which sin is an offence; and in some vague sense he is the father of all things, like the Zeus whom Paul recognized in the poetry of Greece. But, as already stated, this vague conception of God as one, was already in a transition toward separate impressions of the different powers of nature. If the idea of God was without any very clear personality and more or less obscure, it is not strange that it should come to be thus specialized as men thought of objects having a manifestly benign influence--as the life-quickening sun or the reviving rain. It is not strange that, without a knowledge of the true God, they should have been filled with awe when gazing upon the dark vault of night, and should have rendered adoration to the moon and her countless retinue of stars. If there must be idolatry, let it be that sublime nature worship of the early Aryans, though even that was sure to degenerate into baser forms. One might suppose that the worship of the heavenly bodies would remain the purest and noblest; and yet the sun-worship of the Assyrians and the Phoenicians became unspeakably vile in its sensuousness, and finally the most wicked and abominable of all heathen systems. India in her darkest days never sank so low, and when her degradation came it was through other conceptions than those of nature worship. In the early Vedic hymns are to be found many sublime passages which seem to suggest traces of those common traditions concerning the creation--the Fall of man and the Deluge, which we believe to have been the earliest religious heritage of mankind. They contrast strongly with the later and degrading cosmogonies of degenerate heathen systems, and especially with the grotesque fancies of the subsequent Hindu mythology. In the Xth Mandala of the Rig Veda we find the following account of primeval chaos, which reminds one of the Mosaic Genesis: "In the beginning there was neither aught nor naught, There was neither sky nor atmosphere above. What then enshrouded all the teeming universe? In the receptacle of what was it contained? Was it enveloped in the gulph profound of water? There was then neither death nor immortality. There was then neither day nor night, nor light nor darkness. Only the _Existing One_ breathed calmly self-contained, Naught else but him there was, naught else above, beyond; Then first came darkness hid in darkness, gloom in gloom, Next all was water, chaos indiscreet In which the _One_ lay void, shrouded in nothingness, Then turning inward by self-developed force Of inner fervor and intense abstraction grew." In the early Vedic period many of the corruptions of later times were unknown. There was no distinct doctrine of caste, no transmigration, no mist of pantheism, no idol-worship, no widow-burning, and no authorized infanticide. The abominable tyranny which was subsequently imposed upon woman was unknown; the low superstitions of the aboriginal tribes had not been adopted; nor, on the other hand, had philosophy and speculation taken possession of the Hindu mind. The doctrine of the Trimurti and the incarnations had not appeared.[35] The faith of the Hindus in that early period may be called _Aryanism_, or _Vedism_. It bore sway from the Aryan migration, somewhere about one thousand five hundred, or two thousand, years before Christ, to about eight hundred years before Christ.[36] By that time the priestly class had gained great power over all other ranks. They had begun to work over the Vedas to suit their own purposes, selecting from them such portions as could be framed into an elaborate ritual--known as the Brahmanas. The period during which they continued this ritualistic development is known as the Brahmana period. This extended from about eight hundred to five hundred B.C.[37] These, however, are only the approximate estimates of modern scholarship: such a thing as ancient history is unknown to the Hindu race. This Brahmana period was marked by the intense and overbearing sacerdotalism of the Brahmans, and by an extreme development of the doctrine of caste. Never was priestly tyranny carried to greater length than by these lordly Brahmans of India. One of the chief abuses of their system was their depravation of sacrifice. The earliest conception of sacrifice represented in the Vedas is that of a vicarious offering of Parusha, a Divine being. Very obscure references to this are found in the oldest of the four Vedas, dating probably not later than 1200 B.C. It is brought out still more clearly in a Brahmana which was probably composed in the seventh century B.C. It is there said that the "Lord of creatures offered himself a sacrifice for the Gods." Principal Fairbairn finds Vedic authority for the idea that the creation of the world was accomplished by the self-sacrifice of deity; and Manu ascribes the creation of mankind to the austerities of the gods. Sir Monier Williams, the late Professor Banergea, and many others, have regarded these references to a Divine sacrifice for the benefit of gods and men as dim traces of a revelation once made to mankind of a promised atonement for the sins of the world.[38] But so far as the actual observances of the early Hindus were concerned, they seem to have made their offerings rather in the spirit of Cain than in the faith of Abel. They simply fed the gods with their gifts, and regaled them with soma juice, poured forth in libations; the savor of melted butter also was supposed to be specially grateful. Still there is reason to believe that the piacular idea of sacrifice was never wholly lost, but that the Hindus, in common with all other races, found occasion--especially when great calamities befell them--to appease the gods with the blood of sacrifice. In the early days human sacrifices were offered, and occasionally at least down to a late period.[39] It was a convenient policy of the priesthood, however, to hypothecate the claim for a human victim by accepting the substitution of a goodly number of horses or cows. A famous tradition is given, in the Aitareya Brahmana, of a prince[40] who had been doomed to sacrifice by a vow of his father, but who bought as a substitute the son of a holy Brahman--paying the price of a hundred cows. When none could be found to bind the lad on the altar, the pious father offered to perform the task for another hundred cows. Then there was no one found to slay the victim, and the father offered for still another hundred to do even that. As the victim was of high caste the gods interposed, and the Brahman was still the possessor of a son plus the cattle. The incident will illustrate the greed of the priesthood and the depravation of sacrifice. It had become a system of bargaining and extortion. The sacrifices fed the priesthood more substantially than the gods. There was great advantage in starting with the human victim as the unit of value, and it is easy to see how substitution of animals became immensely profitable. The people were taught that it was possible, if one were rich enough in victims, even to bankrupt heaven. Even demons by the value of their offerings might demand the sceptre of Indra.[41] Hand in hand with this growth of the sacrificial system was the development of caste; the former was done away by the subsequent protest of Buddhism and the philosophic schools; but the latter has remained through all the stages of Hindu history.[42] Such was _Brahmanism_. Its thraldom has never been equalled. The land was deluged with the blood of slain beasts. All industries were paralyzed with discouragement. Social aspiration was blighted, patriotism and national spirit were weakened, and India was prepared for those disastrous invasions which made her the prey of all northern races. It was in protest against these evils that Gautama and many able philosophers arose about 500 B.C. Already the intellectual classes had matched the Brahmans by drawing upon Vedic authority for their philosophy. As the Brahmans had produced a ritual from the Vedas, so the philosophers framed a sort of philosophic Veda in the _Upanishads_. Men had begun to ask themselves the great questions of human life and destiny, "Whence am I? What is this mysterious being of which I am conscious?" They had begun to reason about nature, the origin of matter, the relation of mortals to the Infinite. The school of the Upanishads regarded themselves as an aristocracy of intellect, and held philosophy as their esoteric and peculiar prerogative. It was maintained that two distinct kinds of revelation had been made to men. First, that simple kind which was designed for priests and the common masses, for all those who regarded only effects and were satisfied with sacerdotal assumption and merit-making. But, secondly, there was a higher knowledge which concerned itself with the origin of the world and the hidden causes of things. Even to this day the Upanishads are the Vedas of the thinking classes of India.[43] As the Brahmanas gave first expression to the doctrine of caste, so in the Upanishads we find the first development of pantheism and the doctrine of transmigration. The conclusion had already been reached that "There is only one Being who exists: He is within this universe and yet outside this universe: whoe'er beholds all living creatures as in Him, and Him the universal spirit, as in all, thenceforth regards no creature with contempt." The language of Hindu speculation exhausts its resources in similes by which to represent personal annihilation. Man's origin and relations are accounted for very tersely by such illustrations as these: "As the web issues from the spider, as little sparks proceed from fire, so from the One Soul proceed all breathing animals, all worlds, all the gods, all beings." Then as to destiny: "These rivers proceed from the east toward the west, thence from the ocean they rise in the form of vapor, and dropping again, they flow toward the south and merge into the ocean. And as the flowing rivers are merged into the sea, losing their names and forms, so the wise, freed from name and form, pass into the Divine spirit, which is greater than the great."[44] Another favorite illustration is that of the moon's reflection in the water-jar, which disappears the moment the moon itself is hidden. "If the image in the water has no existence separate from that of the moon," says the Hindu, "how can it be shown that the human soul exists apart from God?" The Mundaka Upanishad, based upon the Atharva Veda (one of the latest,--the Upanishad being later still), contains this account of the universe: "As the spider spins and gathers back (its thread); as plants sprout on the earth; as hairs grow on a living person; so is this universe here produced from the imperishable nature. By contemplation the vast one germinates; from him food (or body) is produced; and thence successively, breath, mind, real (elements) worlds, and immortality resulting from (good) deeds. "The Omniscient is profound contemplation consisting in the knowledge of him who knows all; and from that, the (manifested) vast one, as well as names, forms, and food proceed; and this is truth."[45] It is a great blemish upon the Upanishads, that while there are subtle, and in some respects sublime, utterances to be found here and there, the great mass is fanciful and often puerile, and in many instances too low and prurient to bear translation into the English language. This is clearly alleged by Mr. Bose, and frankly admitted by Max Müller.[46] In the common protest which finally broke down the system of Brahmanical sacrifice, and for a time relaxed the rigors of caste tyranny, Buddhism then just appearing (say 500 B.C.), joined hand in hand with the philosophies. Men were tired of priestcraft, and by a natural reaction they went to an opposite extreme; they were tired of religion itself. Buddha became an undoubted atheist or agnostic, and six distinct schools of philosophy arose on the basis of the Upanishads--some of which were purely rationalistic, some were conservative, others radical. Some resembled the Greek "Atomists" in their theory,[47] and others fought for the authority, and even the supreme divinity, of the Vedas.[48] All believed in the eternity of matter, and the past eternity of the soul; all accepted the doctrine of transmigration, and maintained that the spiritual nature can only act through a material body. All were pessimistic, and looked for relief only in absorption. But the progress of Hindu thought was marked by checks and counter-checks. As the tyranny of the priesthood had led to the protest of philosophy, so the extreme and conflicting speculations of philosophic rationalism probably gave rise to the conservatism of the Code of Manu. No adequate idea of the drift of Hindu thought can be gained without assigning due influence to this all-important body of laws. They accomplished more in holding fast the power of the Brahmans, and enabling them to stem the tide of intellectual rebellion, and finally to regain the sceptre from the hand of Buddhism, than all other literatures combined. Their date cannot be definitely known. They were composed by different men and at different times. They probably followed the Upanishads, but antedated the full development of the philosophic schools. Many of the principles of Manu's Code had probably been uttered as early as the seventh century B.C.[49] The ferment of rationalistic thought was even then active, and demanded restraint. The one phrase which expresses the whole spirit of the laws of Manu is intense conservatism. They stand for the definite authority of dogma; they re-assert in strong terms the authority of the Vedas; they establish and fortify by all possible influences, the institution of caste. They enclose as in an iron framework, all domestic, social, civil, and religious institutions. They embrace not only the destiny of men upon the earth, but also the rewards and punishments of the future life. Whatever they touched was petrified. Abuses which had crept in through the natural development of human depravity--for example, the oppression of woman--the laws of Manu stamped with inflexible and irreversible authority. The evils which grow up in savage tribes are bad enough, the tyranny of mere brute force is to be deplored, but worst of all is that which is sanctioned by statute, and made the very corner-stone of a great civilization. Probably no other system of laws ever did so much to rivet the chains of domestic tyranny.[50] The Code of Manu has been classified as, 1st, sacred knowledge and religion; 2d, philosophy; 3d, social rules and caste organization; 4th, criminal and civil laws; 5th, systems of penance; 6th, eschatology, or the doctrine of future rewards. No uninspired or non-Vedic production has equal authority in India. We can only judge of its date by its relative place among other books. It applies Vedic names to the gods, though it mentions Brahma and Vishnu, but it makes no reference to the Trimurti. Pantheism was evidently in existence and was made prominent in the code. The influence of Manu over the jurisprudence of India was a matter of growth. At first the code appears to have been a guide in customs and observances, but as it gained currency it acquired the force of law, and extended its sway over all the tribes of India. It was not, however, maintained as a uniform code throughout the land, but its principles were found underlying the laws of all the provinces. Its very merits were finally fruitful of evil. Human weal was sacrificed to the over-shadowing power of a system of customs cunningly wrought and established by Brahmanical influence. The author was evidently a Brahman, and the whole work was prepared and promulgated in the interests of Brahmanism as against all freedom of thought. Its support of the Vedas was fanatical. Thus: "A Brahman by retaining the Rig Veda in his memory incurs no guilt, though he should destroy the three worlds." Again: "When there is contradiction of two precepts in the Veda, both are declared to be law; both have been justly promulgated by known sages as valid law." The laws of Manu make no mention of the doctrine of _Bakti_ or faith, and there is no reference to the worship of the _Sakti_; both of these were of later date. The doctrine of transmigration, however, is fully stated, and as a consequence of this the hells described in the code, though places of torture, resolve themselves into merely temporary purgatories, while the heavens become only the steps on the road to a union with deity. There is reason to believe that the practice of employing idols to represent deity was unknown at the time the code was compiled. There is no allusion to public services or to teaching in the temples, the chief rites of religion were of a domestic kind, and the priests of that age were nothing more than domestic chaplains. Manu's theory of creation was this: "The Self-Existent, having willed to produce various beings from his own substance, first with a thought created the waters and placed on them a productive seed or egg. Then he himself was born in that egg in the form of Brahma. Next he caused the egg to divide itself, and out of its two divisions there came the heaven above and the earth beneath. Afterward, having divided his own substance he became half male, half female. From that female was produced Viraj, from whom was created the secondary progenitor of all beings. Then from the Supreme Soul he drew forth Manu's intellect." This mixed cosmogony is supposed to indicate a diversity of authorship. It will be seen that this is much less philosophical than the theory of creation quoted above from the Mundaka Upanishad.[51] If we compare Manu's account with the description of the "Beginning" found in one of the hymns of the Rig Veda,[52] we shall see that there has been a downward trend of Hinduism from the simple and sublime conceptions of the early poets to that which is grotesque, and which has probably been worked over to suit the purposes of the Brahmans. No mythological legend was too absurd if it promoted the notion of the divine origin of the Manus (sages) and the Brahmans. Manu makes much of the Vedic passage which refers to the origin of caste.[53] He maintained that this distinction of caste was as much a law of nature and divine appointment as the separation of different classes of animals. The prominence accorded to the Brahmans was nothing short of divine. "Even when Brahmans employ themselves in all sorts of inferior occupations (as poverty often compels them to do) they must under all circumstances be honored, for they are to be regarded as supreme divinities." "A Brahman's own power is stronger than the power of the king, therefore by his own might he may chastise his foes." "He who merely assails a Brahman with intent to kill him, will continue in hell for a hundred years, and he who actually strikes him must endure a thousand years." It is always the truth that is mingled with the errors of any system which constitutes its life and gives it perpetuity, and there is much in the Code of Manu to be admired. Like the Confucian ethics, it laid its foundations in the respect due from childhood to parents, and in guarding the sanctities of the home. It aimed at fairness between ruler and subject, in an age when over most of the Asiatic continent the wildest caprice of rulers was the law of their respective realms. Manu taught the duty of kings toward their subjects in most emphatic terms. They were to regard themselves as servants, or rather as fathers, of the people; and rules were prescribed for their entire conduct. They were the representatives of deity in administering the affairs of mortals, and must realize their solemn responsibility.[54] It must ever be acknowledged that the Hindu laws respecting property were characterized by wisdom and equity. Taxation was not subject to caprice or injustice; where discriminations occurred they were in favor of the poor, and the heaviest burdens were laid where they should be laid, upon the rich. There were wise adaptations, calculated to develop the industry and self-help of the weakest classes, and care was taken that they never should become oppressive. No political or civic tyranny could be allowed; but that of the priesthood in its relations to all ranks, and that of the householder toward his wife and toward all women, were quite sufficient. In this last regard we scarcely know which was the greater--the heartless wickedness of the Code, or its blind and bigoted folly. How it was that laws could be framed which indicated such rare sagacity, which in many other respects were calculated to build up the very highest civilization, and which, at the same time, failed to foresee that this oppression of woman must result in the inevitable degeneracy of succeeding generations of men, must ever remain a mystery.[55] We have glanced at the purer and simpler Aryanism of the early period, at the bigoted, tyrannical Brahmanism, with its ritual, its sacrifices, its caste. We have merely alluded to the rationalistic reaction of the philosophers and the Buddhists. We shall now see that the Brahman power is not broken, but that it will regain all and more than it has lost, that it will prove elastic enough to embrace all that has gone before; that while Buddhism will be banished, many of its elements will be retained, and the whole woven into one marvellous texture which we will call _Hinduism_.[56] Even during the period of Buddhism's greatest triumphs, say, two or three centuries before Christ, changes of great moment were going on in the Brahmanical faith. The old sacrificial system had lost its power, but the flexible and inexhaustible resources of Brahmanical cunning were by no means dormant. In the border wars of the Aryans, with rival invaders on the one hand, and with the conquered but ever restless aborigines on the other, great and popular heroes had sprung up. The exploits of these heroes had been celebrated in two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the popularity of these poems was immense. The heroes were of the soldier caste, and gave to that caste a prestige which seemed to the Brahmans formidable and dangerous.[57] The divine prerogatives of their order were all in jeopardy. The remedy chosen by the Brahmans was a bold and desperate one. These heroes must be raised out of the soldier caste by making them divine. As such they would hold a nearer relation to the divine Brahmans than to the soldiers. The legends were therefore worked over--Brahmanized--so to speak.[58] Rama, who had overcome certain chieftains of Ceylon, and Krishna, who had won great battles in Rajputana, were raised to the rank of gods and demi-gods. By an equal exaggeration the hostile chiefs of rival invaders were transformed to demons, and the black, repulsive hill tribes, who were involved as allies in these conflicts, were represented as apes. As a part of this same Brahmanizing process, the doctrine of the Trimurti was developed, and also the doctrine of incarnation. Most conspicuous were the incarnations of Vishnu; Rama and Krishna were finally placed among the ten incarnations of that deity. This was a skilful stroke of policy, for it was now no longer the heroes of the soldier caste who had won victory for the Aryans; it was Vishnu, the preserver, the care-taker, and sympathizer with all the interests of mankind. The development of the doctrines of the Trimurti and of incarnation undoubtedly followed both the rise of Buddhism and the promulgation of the Laws of Manu. Meanwhile the Brahmans were shrewd enough to adapt themselves to certain other necessities. The influence of Buddhism was still a force which was not to be disregarded. It had demonstrated one thing which had never been recognized before, and that was the need of a more human and sympathetic element in the divine objects of worship. Men were weary of worshipping gods who had no kindly interest in humanity. They were weary of a religion which had no other element than that of fear or of bargaining with costly sacrifices. They longed for something which had the quality of mercy. Buddha had demonstrated the value of this element, and by an adroit stroke of policy the Brahmans adopted Gautama as the ninth avatar of Vishnu. Meanwhile they adopted the heroic Krishna as the god of sympathy--the favorite of the lower masses who were not too critical toward his vices. We have now reached the fully developed form of _Hinduism_.[59] The Brahmans had embraced every element that could give strength to their broad, eclectic, and all-embracing system.[60] The doctrine of the Trimurti had become a strong factor, as it furnished a sort of framework, and gave stability. As compared with the early Aryanism, it removed the idea of deity from merely natural forces to that of abstract thoughts, principles, and emotions, as active and potent in the world. At the same time it retained the old Vedic deities under new names and with new functions, and it did not abate its professed regard for Vedic authority. The Brahmans had rendered their system popular in a sense with the intellectual classes by adopting all the philosophies. They had stopped the mouth of Buddhist protest by embracing the Buddha among their incarnations. They had shown an advance in the succession of incarnations from the early embodiments of brute force, the fish, the tortoise, the boar, up to heroes, and from these to the ninth avatar, the Buddha, as a moralist and philosopher.[61] They left on record the prediction that a tenth should come--and he is yet to come--who, in a still higher range of moral and spiritual power, should redeem and renovate the earth, and establish a kingdom of righteousness. Meanwhile, in this renaissance of the Hindu faith, this wide, politic, self-adapting system, we find not only Buddhism, Philosophy, the early Aryanism, and the stiff cultus of Brahmanism, but there is also a large infusion of the original superstitions of the Dravidians, Kohls, Santals, and other nature worshippers of the hill tribes. Much of the polytheism of the modern Hindus--the worship of hills, trees, apes, cattle, the sun, the moon, unseen spirits, serpents, etc.--has been adopted from these simple tribes, so that the present system embraces all that has ever appeared on the soil of India--even Mohammedanism to some extent; and as some contend, very much also has been incorporated from the early teachings of the so-called St. Thomas Christians of Malabar. Such is the immense composite which is called Hinduism. It continued its development through the early centuries of the Christian era, and down even to the Middle Ages. Since then there has been disintegration instead of growth. The Brahmans have not only retained the Aryan deities, and extended Vishnu's incarnate nature over the epic heroes, but in the Puranas they have woven into the alleged lives of the incarnate gods the most grotesque mythologies and many revolting vices. It may be interesting to trace for a moment the influence of the different lines of Hindu literature upon the general development of national character. Of course, the early Vedic literature has never lost its influence as the holy and inspired source of all knowledge to the Hindu race; but we have seen how much more potential were the Brahmanas and the Upanishad philosophy drawn from the Vedas, than were those sacred oracles themselves; how the Brahmanas riveted the chains of priestcraft and caste, and how the philosophies invigorated the intellect of the people at a time when they were most in danger of sinking into the torpor of ignorance and base subserviency to ritual and sacrifice; how it gave to the better classes the courage to rise up in rebellion and throw off every yoke, and think for themselves. We have seen how Buddhism by its protest against sacerdotalism crippled for a time the power of the Brahmans and raised a representative of the soldier caste to the chief place as a teacher of men; how its inculcation of pity to man and beast banished the slaughter and cruelty of wholesale and meaningless sacrifice, and how its example of sympathy changed Hinduism itself, and brought it into nearer relations with humanity. Driven from India, though it was, it left an immense deposit of influence and of power. We have seen how, as a counter-check to philosophy and Buddhism, the Code of Manu reasserted the authority of the Vedas, and riveted anew the chains of caste, and how it compensated for its oppressiveness by many wholesome and benign regulations--accomplishing more, perhaps, than all other literatures combined to maintain the stability of Hinduism, through its many vicissitudes, and in spite of the heterogeneous elements which it received and incorporated. Scarcely less important was the influence of the great epics--the Ramayana and the Mahabharata--with their doctrine of Trimurti and the incarnations of Vishnu in the national heroes. This conciliated the soldier caste, subsidized the most popular characters in Hindu tradition, at the same time that it made them tenfold more glorious than before. The Epics widened out the field of Hindu mythology immensely. Never before had there been such a boundless range for the imagination. The early Brahmans had cramped all intellectual growth, and held mankind by the leash of priestly ritual. The philosophies had been too strait and lofty for any but the higher class; Manu's laws had been a stern school-master to keep the people under curbs and restraints; even the Brahmans themselves were the slaves of their own ritual. But all the people could understand and admire Rama's wonderful victories over the demon Ravana. All could appreciate the devotion of the lovely Sita, and weep when she was kidnapped and borne away, like Grecian Helen, to the demon court in Ceylon; and they could be thrilled with unbounded joy when she was restored--the truest and loveliest of wives--to be the sharer of a throne. The Epics took such hold of the popular heart that any fact, any theory, any myth that could be attached to them found ready credence. The Mahabharata especially became a general texture upon which any philosophy, or all the philosophies, might be woven at will. And for a long period, extending from three or four centuries B.C. onward far into the Christian era, it was ever ready to receive modifications from the fertile brain and skilful hand of any devout Brahman. A striking example of this was the introduction of the Bhagavad Gita. When this was composed, somewhere about the second or third century of our era, there was no little conflict between the different schools of philosophy; and its unknown author attempted to unite them all in a poem which should harmonize their contradictions and exalt the virtues of each, and at the same time reiterate all the best maxims of Hinduism. Some centuries later, the pronounced Vedantist Sancarakarya revamped the poem and gave its philosophy a more pantheistic character; later still the demigod Krishna was raised to full rank as the supreme Vishnu--the Creator and Upholder of all things.[62] It is important to notice that in the trend of Hindu literature through so many ages there has been no upward movement, but rather a decline. Nowhere do we find hymns of so pure and lofty a tone as in the early Vedas. No philosophy of the later times has equalled that of the Upanishads and the six Darsanas. No law-giver like Manu has appeared for twenty-four centuries. No Sanskrit scholarship has equalled that of the great grammarian Panini, who lived in the fourth century B.C. And although no end of poetry has succeeded the great Epics, it has shown deterioration. The Puranas, written at a later day, reveal only a reckless zeal to exalt the incarnate deities. They may properly be called histories of the incarnations of Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, and glorifications of Krishna. And the very nature of the subjects with which they deal gives free scope to an unbridled imagination and to the most reckless exaggeration. If anything more were wanting to insure their extravagance, it may be found in the fact that they were inspired by the rivalry of the respective worshippers of different gods. The Puranas mark the development of separate sects, each of which regarded its particular deity as the supreme and only god. The worshippers of Vishnu and the worshippers of Siva were in sharp rivalry, and they have continued their separation to this day.[63] Those who came to worship Vishnu as incarnate in Krishna, gained an advantage in the popular element associated with a favorite hero. Yet this was matched by the influence of the Sankhya philosophy, which assigned to Siva a male and female dualism, a doctrine which finally plunged Hinduism into deepest degradation. It brought about a new development known as Saktism, and the still later and grosser literature of the Tantras. In these, Hinduism reached its lowest depths. The modern "Aryas" discard both the Tantras and the Puranas, and assert that the popular incarnations of Vishnu were only good men. They take refuge from the corruptions of modern Hinduism in the purer teachings of the early Vedas. _The Contrasts of Hinduism and Christianity._ Hinduism has some elements in common with Christianity which it is well to recognize. It is theistic; it is a religion, as distinguished from the agnostic and ethical systems of India and China.[64] Hinduism always recognized a direct divine revelation which it regards with profound reverence; and through all its variations and corruptions it has inculcated in the minds of the Indian races a deeply religious feeling. It has been claimed that it has made the Hindus the most devotional people in the world. Like Christianity, Hinduism appeals to man's intellectual nature, and it is inwrought with profound philosophy. It does not, however, like some modern systems, teach that divine truth has been revealed to man by natural processes; rather it regards the early revelation as having suffered obscuration.[65] It also has its trinity, its incarnations, and its predictions of a Messiah who shall restore the truth and establish righteousness. The Hindu traditions maintain that mankind descended from a single pair;[66] that the first estate of the race was one of innocence; that man was one of the last products of creation; that in the first ages he was upright, and consequently happy. "The beings who were thus created by Brahma are said to have been endowed with righteousness and perfect faith; they abode wherever they pleased, unchecked by any impediment; their hearts were free from guile; they were pure, made exempt from toil by observance of sacred institutes. In their sanctified minds Hari dwelt; they were filled with perfect wisdom by which they contemplated the glory of Vishnu." Hartwell has pointed out the fact that the early Hindu traditions here unite with the Scriptural account in virtually denying all those theories of evolution which trace the development of man from lower animals.[67] But compared with Christianity, its contrasts are far greater than its resemblances. First, as to the nature of God, there is an infinite difference between the cold and unconscious Brahman, slumbering for ages without thought or emotion or any moral attribute, and the God of Israel, whose power and wisdom and goodness, whose mercy and truth and tender compassion, are so constantly set forth in the Bible. The latter compares Himself to a Father who cares for his children, and who has redeemed the world by an infinite sacrifice. Even in the most popular emanation of Brahman--even in Vishnu--there is nothing of a fatherly spirit, no appeal as to children, no kindly remonstrance against sin, no moral instruction, or effort to encourage and establish character, no promise of reward, no enkindling of immortal hope. Second, there is a striking contrast in the comparative estimates which Hinduism and Christianity place upon the human soul. Unlike Buddhism, Hinduism does recognize the existence of a soul, but it is only a temporary emanation, like the moon's reflection in the water. It resembles its source as does the moon's image, but coldly and in a most unsatisfactory sense; there is no capacity for fellowship, and the end is absorption.[68] On the other hand, Christianity teaches us that we are created in God's image, but not that we _are_ his image. We are separate, though dependent, and if reunited to him through Christ we shall dwell in his presence forever. Third, the two systems are in strong contrast in the comparative hopes which they hold out for the future. The doctrine of transmigration casts a gloom over all conscious being; it presents an outlook so depressing as to make life a burden, and the acme of all possible attainment is individual extinction, or what amounts to the same thing, absorption into deity. The logic of it is that it would be better still not to have been born at all. Christianity promises an immediate transfer to a life of unalloyed blessedness, and an endless growth of all our powers and capacities; but why should Hinduism urge the cultivation of that whose real destiny is "effacement?" Hinduism finds the explanation of life's mysteries and inscrutable trials in the theory of sins committed in a previous existence. Christianity, while recognizing the same trials, relieves them with the hope of solutions in a future life of compensating joy. The one turns to that which is past, unchangeable and hopeless, and finds only sullen despair; the other anticipates an inheritance richer than eye hath seen, or ear heard, or heart conceived. Fourth, Hinduism has no Saviour and no salvation. It is not a religion in the highest sense of _rescue_ and reconciliation. It avails us of no saving power higher than our own unaided effort. It implies the ruin of sin, but provides no remedy. It presents no omnipotent arm stretched forth to save. Its fatalism places man under endless disabilities, and then bids him to escape from the nexus if he can; but it reveals no divine helper, no sacrifice, no mediator, no regenerating Spirit. It has no glad tidings to proclaim, no comfort in sorrow, no victory over the sting of death, no resurrection unto Life. Though at a period subsequent to the preaching of the Gospel in India--perhaps the seventh or eighth century A.D.--a doctrine of faith (_Bakti_) was engrafted upon Hinduism, yet it had no hint of a Saviour from sin and death.[69] Fifth, in Hinduism there is no liberty for the free action of the human spirit. Though the life of a Brahman is intensely religious, yet it is cramped with exactions which are not only abortive but positively belittling. The code of Brahmanism never deals with general principles in the regulation of conduct, but fills the whole course of life with punctilious minutiæ of observances. Instead of prescribing, as Christ did, an all-comprehensive law of supreme love to God and love to our neighbor as ourselves, it loads the mind with petty exactions, puerile precepts, inane prohibitions. "Unlike Christianity, which is all spirit and life," says Dr. Duff, "Hinduism is all letter and death." Repression takes the place of inspiration and the encouragement of hope. There are a thousand subtle principles in Hinduism whose influence is felt in society and in the state, and to which the faith and power of the Gospel present the very strongest contrasts. For example, while Christianity has raised woman to a position of respect and honor, and made her influence felt as something sacred and potential in the family and in all society, Hinduism has brought her down even from the place which she occupied among the primitive Aryans, to an ever-deepening degradation. It has made her life a burden and a curse. Pundita Ramabai, in her plea for high-caste Hindu women, quotes a prayer of a child widow in which she asks, "O Father of the world, hast Thou not created us? or has perchance some other God made us? Dost Thou only care for men? O Almighty One, hast Thou not power to make us other than we are, that we too may have some part in the blessings of life?" Even in this last decade of the nineteenth century the priesthood of Bengal are defending against all humane legislation those old customs which render the girlhood of Hindu women a living death.[70] In its broad influence Christianity has raised the once savage tribes of Europe to the highest degree of culture, and made them leaders and rulers of the world; but Hinduism has so weakened and humbled the once conquering Aryans that they have long been an easy prey to every invading race. Christianity shows in its sacred Book a manifest progress from lower to higher moral standards--from the letter to the spirit, from the former sins that were winked at to the perfect example of Christ, from the narrow exclusiveness of Judaism to the broad and all-embracing spirit of the Gospel, from prophecy to fulfilment, from types and shadows to the full light of Redemption; the sacred books of Hinduism have degenerated from the lofty aspirations of the Vedic nature-worship to the vileness of Saktism, from the noble praises of Varuna to the low sensuality of the Tantras, from Vedic conceptions of the creation, sublime as the opening of St. John's Gospel, to the myths of the divine turtle or the boar, or the escapades of the supreme and "adorable Krishna."[71] Christianity breaks down all barriers which divide and alienate mankind, and establishes a universal brotherhood in Christ; Hinduism has raised the most insurmountable barriers and developed the most inexorable social tyranny ever inflicted on the human race. The Hebrew economy also recognized a priestly class, but they were chosen from among their brethren and were only a distinct family; they made no claim to divine lineage, and they were guiltless of social tyranny. Christianity enjoins a higher and purer ethic than it has ever found in the natural moral standards of any people; it aims at perfection; it treats the least infraction as a violation of the whole law; it regards even corrupt thoughts as sins; it bids us be holy even as He is holy in whose sight the heavens are unclean. Hinduism, on the other hand, is below the ethical standard of respectable Hindu society. The better classes are compelled to apologize for it by asserting that that which is debasing in men may be sinless in the gods. The offences of Krishna and Arjuna would not be condoned in mortals; the vile orgies of the "left-handed worshippers" of Siva would not be tolerated but for their religious character. The murders committed by the Thugs in honor of Kali were winked at only because a goddess demanded them. The naked processions of Chaitanya's followers would be dispersed by the police anywhere but in India. It is the peculiar distinction of India that it has been the theatre of nearly all the great religions. Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism have all made trial of their social and political power and have failed. Last of all came Christianity. The systems which preceded it had had centuries of opportunity; and yet Christianity has done more for the elevation of Hindu society in the last fifty years than they had accomplished in all the ages of their dominion. Neither Buddhism nor Mohammedanism had made any serious impression on caste; neither had been able to mitigate the wrongs which Brahmanism had heaped upon woman--Mohammedanism had rather increased them. The horrors of the satti and the murder of female infants--those bitterest fruits of priestly tyranny--were left unchecked until the British Government, inspired by missionary influence and a general Christian sentiment, branded them as infamous and made them crimes. But now even the native sentiment of the better classes in India is greatly changed by these higher influences, and the conventional morality is rising above the teachings of the national religion. Widow-burning and infanticide belong almost wholly to the past. Child-marriage is coming into disrepute, and caste, though not destroyed, is crippled, and its preposterous assumptions are falling before the march of social progress. Perhaps the very highest tribute which Hinduism has paid to Christianity is seen in the fact that the modern Arya Somaj has borrowed its ethics and some of its religious doctrines, and is promulgating them under Vedic labels and upon Vedic authority.[72] It has renounced those corruptions of Hinduism which can no longer bear the light--such as enforced widowhood and the general oppression of woman. It denounces the incarnations of Vishnu as mere inventions, and therefore cuts up by the roots the whole Krishna cult and dissipates the glory of the Bhagavad Gita. It abhors polytheism, and not only proclaims the supremacy of one only true God, self-existent, the creator and upholder of all things, but it maintains that such was the teaching of the Vedas. But although this modern eclectic system adopts the whole ethical outcome of Christian civilization in India for its own purposes, it shows a most uncompromising hostility to Christianity. Though it claims to be positively theistic, it seems ready to enter into alliance with any form of atheism or agnosticism, Eastern or Western, against the spread of Christian influence in India. In speaking of the movement of revived Aryanism I assume that with the more intelligent and progressive classes of India the old Hinduism is dead. Of course, millions of men still adhere to the old corruptions. Millions in the remoter districts would retain the festival of Juggernaut, the hook-swinging, even infanticide and widow-burning, if they dared. The revolting orgies of Kali and Doorga, and the vilest forms of Siva worship, even the murderous rites of the Thugs, might be revived by the fanatical, if foreign influence were withdrawn; but, taking India as a whole, these things are coming to be discarded. The people are ashamed of them; they dare not undertake to defend them in the open day of the present civilization. All intelligent Hindus are persuaded to accept the situation, and look to the future instead of the past. The country is full of new influences which must be counted as factors. British rule is there, and is there to stay. Education has come--good, bad, and indifferent. English University training is bringing forward a host of acute thinkers of native blood. But the forces of Western infidelity are also there, grappling with Western Christianity on Indian soil, and before the eyes of the conquered and still sullen people. The vilest of English books and the worst of French novels in English translations are in the markets. All the worst phases of European commerce are exhibited. The opium monopoly, the liquor traffic, and all the means and methods of unscrupulous money-getting, with the wide-spread example of drinking habits, and unbounded luxury and extravagance. And, in opinions, the war of aggression is no longer on one side only. While the foreigner speaks and writes of superstition, of heathenism, of abominable rites now passing away, the native Hindu press is equally emphatic in its condemnation of what it calls the swinish indulgence of the Anglo-Saxon, his beer-drinking and his gluttony, his craze for money and material power, his disgust at philosophy and all intellectual aspiration, his half-savage love for the chase and the destruction of animal life. Educated Hindus throw back against the charge of idolatry our idolatry of pelf, which, as they claim, eclipses every other thought and aspiration, leads to dishonesty, over-reaching, and manifold crime, and sinks noble ethics to the low level of expediency or self-interest; the conquest is not yet won. A hundred varieties of creed have sprung up beneath this banyan-tree which I have called Hinduism. There are worshippers of Vishnu, of Siva, of Kali, of Krishna as Bacchus, and of Krishna as the supreme and adorable God. There are Sikhs, and Jains, and Buddhists; Theosophists, Vedantic Philosophers, Mohammedans, Brahmos, Parsees, Evolutionists, and Agnostics; Devil-worshippers, and worshippers of ghosts and serpents; but in considering these as forces to be met by Christian influence, we must regard them all as in virtual alliance with each other. They are all one in pride of race and of venerable custom. They are all one in their hatred of foreign dominion, and of the arrogance and overbearing assumption of the European.[73] The Hindu religions, therefore, however divided, and however weak and moribund they may be taken singly, find a real vitality in the union of common interests, in the sentiments of patriotism, in the pride of their philosophy, in the glory of their ancient history as the true and original Aryans, compared with whom Western nations are mere offshoots. Their religious faith is mixed and involved with patriotism, politics, and race prejudice, and on the other hand Christianity in India is handicapped by political and commercial interest and a hated domination. On both sides these combined influences must be considered in estimating the future issues of the great conflict. The question is not how Christianity and Hinduism would fare in a conflict pure and simple, unembarrassed by complications, but how Christianity with its drawbacks is likely to succeed against Hinduism with its manifold intrenchments. But, while weighing well the obstacles, how great are the encouragements! What an auspicious fact that even a hostile organization has appropriated the Christian cultus bodily, and can find no better weapons than its blessed truths. Christianity is felt as a silent power, even though under other names. It is, after all, the leaven that is working all-powerfully in India to-day. There was a period in the process of creation when light beamed dimly upon the earth, though the sun, its source, had not yet appeared. So through the present Hinduism there is a haze of Christian truth, though the Sun of Righteousness is not yet acknowledged as its source. But the Spirit of God broods over the waters, and the true Light of the world will break on India. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 34: The fact that environment has to a certain extent affected the religions of mankind is entirely overworked, when men like Buckle make it formative and controlling.] [Footnote 35: Instead of the later and universal pessimism, there was in the Vedic religion a simple but joyous sense of life.] [Footnote 36: _Hinduism_, p. 31.] [Footnote 37: _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. i., p. 15.] [Footnote 38: _Aryan Witness_, p. 204; also _Hinduism_, p. 36.] [Footnote 39: Ibid., p. 37.] [Footnote 40: A son of Hariscandra. _Hinduism_, p. 37.] [Footnote 41: This is in strong contrast with the Old Testament precepts, which everywhere had greater respect to the heart of the offerer than to the gifts.] [Footnote 42: The Brahmans had found certain grades of population marked by color lines, shaded off from the negroid aborigines to the Dravidians, and from them to the more recent and nobler Aryans, and they were prompt also to seize upon a mere poetic and fanciful expression found in the Rig Veda, which seemed to give countenance to their fourfold caste distinction by representing one class as having sprung from the head of Brahma, another from the shoulders, the third from his thighs, and a fourth from his feet. Altogether they founded a social system which has been the wonder of the ages, and which has given to the _Brahmans_ the prestige of celestial descent. The _Kshatreych_ or soldier caste stands next, and as it has furnished many military leaders and monarchs who disputed the arrogant claims of the Brahmans, conflicts of the upper castes have not been infrequent. The _Vaishya_, or farmer caste, has furnished the principal groundwork of many admixtures and subdivisions, until at the present time there are endless subcastes, to each of which a particular kind of employment is assigned. The _Sudras_ are still the menials, but there are different grades of degradation even among them.] [Footnote 43: _Hindu Philosophy_, Bose, p. 47.] [Footnote 44: _Indian Wisdom_ on the Brahmanas and Upanishads. Also _Hindu Philosophy_, Bose.] [Footnote 45: _Colebrook's Essays_, foot-note, p. 85.] [Footnote 46: See _Introduction to the Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i.] [Footnote 47: Vaiseshika Philosophy, in _Indian Wisdom_.] [Footnote 48: Mimansa Philosophy. Ibid.] [Footnote 49: Sir Monier Williams assigns the Code of Manu _in its present form_ to the sixth century B.C. _Indian Wisdom_, p. 215. Other Oriental scholars consider it older.] [Footnote 50: These tendencies were more intensely emphasized in some of the later codes, which, however, were only variations of the greater one of Manu.] [Footnote 51: See p. 82.] [Footnote 52: Quoted on p. 76.] [Footnote 53: See note, p. 80.] [Footnote 54: Sir Monier Williams declares that some of Mann's precepts are worthy of Christianity. _Indian Wisdom_, p. 212.] [Footnote 55: It should be set down to the credit of the Code of Manu that with all its relentless cruelty toward woman it nowhere gives countenance to the atrocious custom of widow-burning which soon afterward became an important factor in the Hindu system and desolated the homes of India for more than two thousand years. There would seem to be some dispute as to whether or not widow-burning is sanctioned in the Rig Veda. Colebrooke, in his _Essays_ (Vol. I., p, 135), quotes one or two passages which authorize the rite, but Sir Monier Williams (_Indian Wisdom_, p. 259, note) has shown that changes were made in this text at a much later day for the purpose of gaining Vedic authority for a cruel system, of which even so late a work as the Code of Manu makes no mention, and (page 205 Ibid.) he quotes another passage from the Rig Veda which directs a widow to ascend the pyre of her husband as a token of attachment, but to leave it before the burning is begun.] [Footnote 56: As the spread of Buddhism had owed much to the political triumph of King Ashoka, so the revival of Hinduism was greatly indebted to the influence of a new dynasty about a century B.C.] [Footnote 57: _Indian Wisdom_, p. 314.] [Footnote 58: Ibid., p. 317.] [Footnote 59: Brahmanism and Hinduism are often used interchangeably, but all confusion will be avoided by confining the former to that intense sacerdotalism which prevailed during the Brahmana period, while the latter is used more comprehensively, or is referred particularly to the later and fully developed system.] [Footnote 60: _Hinduism_, pp. 12, 13.] [Footnote 61: The Brahmans were careful, however, to brand the Buddha, while admitting him as an avatar. Their theory was that Vishnu appeared in Gautama for the purpose of deluding certain demons into despising the worship of the gods, and thus securing their destruction. This affords an incidental proof that Gautama was regarded as an atheist.--See _Indian Wisdom_, p. 335.] [Footnote 62: See _Aryan Witness_, closing chapter; also _Christ and Other Masters_, p. 198, notes 1, 2, and 3.] [Footnote 63: See _Brahmanism and Hinduism_, Monier Williams.] [Footnote 64: Hardwick traces similarities between Hindu traditions and Christianity in such points as these: 1, The primitive state of man; 2, his fall by transgression; 3, his punishment in the Deluge; 4, the rite of sacrifice; 5, the primitive hope of restoration.--_Christ and Other Masters_, p. 209.] [Footnote 65: The Hindus hold that "truth was originally deposited with men, but gradually slumbered and was forgotten; the knowledge of it returns like a recollection."--_Humboldt's Kosmos_, ii., p. 112.] [Footnote 66: _Professor Wilson's Lectures_, p. 52.] [Footnote 67: _Vishnu Puranas_, p. 45, note 4.] [Footnote 68: Buddhism is still more disheartening, since it denies the separate conscious existence of the ego. There cannot be divine fellowship, therefore, but only the current of thoughts and emotions like the continuous flame of a burning candle. Not our souls will survive, but our Karma.] [Footnote 69: _Christ and Other Masters_, p. 182.] [Footnote 70: Yet in spite of Manu and the inveteracy of old custom, there gleams here and there in Hindu literature and history a bright ideal of woman's character and rank; while the _Ramayana_ has its model Sita, the _Mahabharata_, i., 3028, has this peerless sketch: "A wife is half the man, his truest friend; A loving wife is a perpetual spring Of virtue, pleasure, wealth; a faithful wife Is his best aid in seeking heavenly bliss; A sweetly-speaking wife is a companion In solitude; a father in advice; A mother in all seasons of distress; A rest in passing through life's wilderness." This, however, is a pathetic outburst: the tyranny of the ages remains.] [Footnote 71: Even in the later development of the doctrine of faith (Bakti) Hinduism fails to connect with it any moral purification or elevation. See quotations from Elphinstone and Wilson in _Christ and Other Masters_, p. 234.] [Footnote 72: See a recent _Catechism_ published by the Arya Somaj.] [Footnote 73: The following hymn, quoted from the Arya _Catechism_, reveals the proud spirit of revived Aryanism: "We are the sons of brave Aryas of yore, Those sages in learning, those heroes in war. They were the lights of great nations before, And shone in that darkness like morning's bright star, A beacon of warning, a herald from far. Have we forgotten our Rama and Arjun, Yudistar or Bishma or Drona the Wise? Are not we sons of the mighty Duryodani? Where did Shankar and great Dayananda arise? 'In India, in India!' the echo replies. Ours the glory of giving the world Its science, religion, its poetry and art. We were the first of the men who unfurled The banner of freedom on earth's every part, Brought tidings of peace and of love to each heart."] LECTURE IV. THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND THE NEW TESTAMENT No other portion of Hindu literature has made so great an impression on Western minds as the Bhagavad Gita, "The Lord's Lay," or the "Song of the Adorable." It has derived its special importance from its supposed resemblance to the New Testament. And as it claims to be much older than the oldest of the Gospels or the Epistles, it carries the inference that the latter may have borrowed something from it. A plausible translation has been published in Boston by Mr. Mohini M. Chatterji, who devoutly believes this to be the revealed word of the Supreme Creator and Upholder of the universe.[74] He admits that at a later day "the same God, worshipped alike by Hindus and Christians, appeared again in the person of Jesus Christ," and that "in the Bible He revealed Himself to Western nations, as the Bhagavad Gita had proclaimed Him to the people of the East." And he draws the inference that "If the Scriptures of the Brahmans and the Scriptures of the Jews and Christians, widely separated as they are by age and nationality, are but different names for one and the same truth, who can then say that the Scriptures contradict each other? A careful and reverent collation of the two sets of Scriptures will show forth the conscious and intelligent design of revelation." The fact that the Bhagavad Gita is thoroughly pantheistic, while the Bible emphasizes the personality of God in fellowship with the distinct personality of human souls, seems to interpose no serious difficulty in Mr. Chatterji's view, since he says "'The Lord's Lay' is for philosophic minds, and therefore deals more at length with the mysteries of the being of God." "In the Bhagavad Gita," he says, "consisting of seven hundred and seventy verses, the principal topic is the being of God, while scarcely the same amount of exposition is given to it in the whole Bible;" and he adds, "The explanation of this remarkable fact is found in the difference between the genius of the Hebrew and the Brahman race, and also in the fact that the teachings of Jesus Christ were addressed to 'the common people.'"[75] The air of intellectual superiority which is couched in these words is conspicuous. Mr. Chatterji also finds an inner satisfaction in what he considers the broad charity of the Brahmanical Scriptures. He quotes a passage from the Narada Pancharata which speaks of the Buddha as "the preserver of revelation for those outside of the Vedic authority." And he concludes that when one such revealer is admitted there can be no reason for excluding others; therefore Christianity also should be allowed a place. He declares on Vedic authority that whosoever receives the true knowledge of God, however revealed, attains eternal life. And for a parallel to this he quotes the saying of Christ, that "this is eternal life that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." "The Brahmanical Scriptures," he says, "are of one accord in teaching that when the heart is purified God is seen; so also Jesus Christ declares that the pure in heart are blessed, for they shall see God." Our translator discards the often-repeated theory that the Christian Scriptures have copied the wise sayings of Krishna; and it is very significant that an argument to which superficial apologists constantly resort is discarded by this real Hindu, as he supports the theory that as both were direct revelations from Vishnu, there was in his view no need of borrowing. His contention is that God, who "at sundry times and in divers manners" has spoken to men in different ages, made known his truth, and essentially the same truth, both on the plains of India and in Judea. And he reminds Hindus and Christians alike, that this knowledge of truth carries with itself an increased responsibility. He says: "The man who sees the wonderful workings of the Spirit among the nations of the earth, bringing each people to God by ways unknown to others, is thereby charged with a duty. To him with terrible precision applies the warning given by Gamaliel to the Pharisees, 'Take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do ... lest ye be found to fight even against God.' If one be a Brahman, let him reflect when opposing the religion of Jesus what it is that he fights. The truths of Christianity are the same as those on which his own salvation depends. How can he be a lover of truth, which is God, if he knows not his beloved under such a disguise? And if he penetrates behind the veil, which should tend only to increase the ardor of his love, he cannot hate those who in obedience to the same truth are preaching the Gospel of Christ to all nations. Indeed he ought to rejoice at his brothers' devotion to the self-same God, and to see that he is rendering service to Him by helping others to carry out the behests given to them by the Divine Master. If, on the other hand, he be a Christian, let him remember that while he is commanded to preach repentance and remission of sins in the Saviour Jesus, he is also warned against 'teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.'" All this seems like charity, but really it is laxity. And here is the very essence of Hinduism. Its chief characteristic, that which renders it so hard to combat, is its easy indifference to all distinctions. To reason with it is like grasping a jelly-fish. Its pantheism, which embraces all things, covers all sides of all questions. It sees no difficulties even between things which are morally opposites. Contradictions are not obstacles, and both sides of a dilemma may be harmonized. And to a great extent this same vagueness of conviction characterizes all the heathen systems of the East. The Buddhists and the Shintoists in Japan justify their easy-going partnership by the favorite maxim that, while "there are many paths by which men climb the sides of Fusyama, yet upon reaching the summit they all behold the same glorious moon." The question whether all do in fact reach the summit is one which does not occur to an Oriental to ask. This same pantheistic charity is seen in the well-known appeal of the late Chunder Sen, which as an illustration is worth repeating here: "Cheshub Chunder Sen, servant of God, called to be an apostle of the Church of the New Dispensation, which is in the holy city of Calcutta; to all the great nations of the world and to the chief religious sects in the East and West, to the followers of Moses and of Jesus, of Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, Mohammed, Nanak, and of the various Hindu sects; grace be to you and peace everlasting. Whereas sects, discords, and strange schisms prevail in our father's family; and whereas this setting of brother against brother has proved the prolific source of evil, it has pleased God to send into the world a message of peace and reconciliation. This New Dispensation He has vouchsafed to us in the East, and we have been commanded to bear witness to the nations of the earth ... Thus saith the Lord: 'I abominate sects and desire love and concord ... I have at sundry times spoken through my prophets and my many dispensations. There is unity. There is one music but many instruments, one body but many members, one spirit but many gifts, one blood but many nations, one Church but many churches. Let Asia and Europe and America and all nations prove this New Dispensation and the true fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men.'" This remarkable production--so Pauline in style and so far from Paul in doctrine--seems to possess everything except definite and robust conviction. And its limp philosophy was not sufficient to withhold even Chunder Sen himself from the abandonment of his principles not long afterward. This sweet perfume of false charity, with which he thus gently sprayed the sects and nations of mankind, lost its flavor ere the ink of his message was fairly dry; while he who in similar language announced his call to an Apostleship eighteen centuries ago, is still turning the world upside down. "Charity" is the watchword of indifferentism in the West as well as in the East; and the East and the West are joining hands in their effort to soothe the world into slumber with all its sins and woes unhealed. Some months ago an advanced Unitarian from Boston delivered a farewell address to the Buddhists of Japan, in which he presented three great Unitarians of New England--Channing, Emerson, and Parker--in a sort of transfiguration of gentleness and charity. He maintained that the lives of these men had been an unconscious prophecy of that mild and gentle Buddhism which he had found in Japan, but of which they had died without the sight.[76] Thus the transcendentalism of New England joins hands with the Buddhism and the Shintoism of Japan, and the Brahmanism of Calcutta, and all are in accord with Mr. Chatterji and the Bhagavad Gita. Even the Theosophists profess their sympathy with the Sermon on the Mount, and claim Christ as an earlier prophet. The one refrain of all is "Charity." All great teachers are avatars of Vishnu. The globe is belted with this multiform indifferentism, and I am sorry to say that it is largely the gospel of the current literature and of the daily press. In it all there is no Saviour and no salvation. Religions are all ethnic and local, while the _ignis fatuus_ of a mystic pantheism pervades the world. Mr. Chatterji's preface closes with a prayer to the "merciful Father of humanity to remove from all races of men every unbrotherly feeling in the sacred name of religion, which is but one." The prayer were touching and beautiful on the assumption that there were no differences between truth and error. And there are thousands, even among us, who are asking, "Why may not Christians respond to this broad charity, and admit this Hindu eclectic poem to an equal place with the New Testament?" More or less indifferent to all religions, and failing to understand the real principles on which they severally rest, they are ready to applaud a challenge like that which we are considering, and to contrast it with the alleged narrowness and intolerance of Christian Theism. I have dwelt thus at length upon Mr. Chatterji's introduction, and have illustrated it by references to similar specious claims of other faiths, in order that I might bring into clearer view the main issue which this book now presents to the American public. It is the softest, sweetest voice yet given to that gospel of false charity which is the fashion of our times. Emerson and others caught it from afar and discoursed to a generation now mostly gone of the gentle maxims of Confucius, Krishna, and Gautama. But now Krishna is among us in the person of his most devout apostle, and a strange hand of fellowship is stretched out toward us from the land of the Vedas. It behooves us to inquire, first, into the pantheistic philosophy which underlies these sayings, and to ask for their meaning as applied in real life; and second, we shall need to know something of Krishna, and whether he speaks as one having authority. It should be borne in mind that pantheism sacrifices nothing whatever by embracing all religions, since even false religions are a worship of Vishnu in their way, while Christianity by its very nature would sacrifice everything. According to pantheism all things that exist, and all events that transpire, are expressions of the Divine will. The one only existent Being embraces all causes and all effects, all truth and all falsehood. He is no more the source of good than of evil. "I am immortality," says Krishna. "I am also death." Man with all his thoughts and acts is but the shadow of God, and moves as he is moved upon. Arjuna's divine counsellor says to him: "The soul, existing from eternity, devoid of qualities, imperishable, abiding in the body, yet supreme, acts not nor is by any act polluted. He who perceives that actions are performed by Prakriti alone, and that the soul is not an actor, sees the truth aright." Now, if this reasoning be correct, it is not we that sin; not we that worship; and in the last analysis all religions are alike; they are only the varied expressions of the thought of God. As He manifests his power in nature in a thousand forms, producing some objects that are beautiful to the eye and others that are repulsive, so in his spiritual manifestations He displays a like variety. The ignorance and degradation of fetichism are His, as well as the highest revelations of spiritual truth. A certain class of evolutionists tell us that God contrived the serpent's poison-fang and the mother's tender instinct with "the same creative indifference." And the broad pantheism which overrides the distinctions of eternal right and wrong, and divests God of all moral discriminations, puts Vedantism and Fetichism, Christianity and Witchcraft, upon the same basis. The Bhagavad Gita and the Gospel both enjoin the brotherhood of men, but what are the meanings which they give to this term? What are their aims, respectively? One is endeavoring to enforce the rigid and insurmountable barriers of caste; the other commends a mission of love which shall regard neither Jew nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free. It will become apparent, I think, that there may be parallels or similarities which relate to mere phrases while their meanings are wide apart. Judging from Mr. Chatterji's own stand-point, his work has been well done. He has shown a careful study not only of his own literatures and philosophies, but also of the scriptures of the Old and New Testament--in this respect setting us an example worthy to be followed by Christian scholars. Such a man has in the outset an immense advantage over those who know nothing of the enemies' positions, but regard them only with disdain. Before the high court of public opinion, as represented by our current literature, mere ex-parte assumption will go to the wall, even though it has the better cause, while adroit error, intelligently put and courteously commended, will win the day. This is a lesson which the Christian Church greatly needs to learn. Mr. Chatterji's work is the more formidable for its charming graces of style. He has that same facility and elegance in the use of the English language for which so many of his countrymen, Sheshadri, Bose, Banergea, Chunder Sen, Mozoomdar, and others have been distinguished. He is a model of courtesy, and he seems sincere. But turning from the translator to the book itself, we shall now inquire who was Krishna, Arjuna's friend, what was the origin of the "Lord's Lay," and what are its real merits as compared with the New Testament? Krishna and Arjuna--like Rama Chandra--were real human heroes who distinguished themselves in the wars of the Indo-Aryans with rival tribes who contested the dominion of Northern India. They did not live three thousand years before Christ, as our translator declares, for they belonged to the soldier caste, and according to the consensus of Oriental scholarship the system of caste did not exist till about the beginning of the Brahmanic period--say eight hundred years before Christ. Krishna was born in the Punjab, near Merut, and it was near there that his chief exploits were performed. The legends represent him as a genial but a reckless forester, brave on the battle-field, but leading a life of low indulgence. The secret of his power lay in his sympathy. His worship, even as a heroic demi-god, brought a new and welcome element into Hinduism as contrasted with the remorselessness of Siva or the cold indifference of Brahma. It was the dawn of a doctrine of faith, and in this character it was probably of later date than the rise of Buddhism. Indeed, the Brahmans learned this lesson of the value of Divine sympathy from the Buddha. The supernatural element ascribed to Krishna, as well as to Rama, was a growth, and had its origin in the jealousy of the Brahmans toward the warrior caste. His exaltation as the Supreme was an after-thought of the inventive Brahmans. As stated in a former lecture, these heroes had acquired great renown; and their exploits were the glory and delight of the dazzled populace. In raising them to the rank of deities, and as such appropriating them as kindred to the divine Brahmans, the shrewd priesthood saved the prestige of their caste and aggrandized their system by a fully developed doctrine of incarnations. Thus, by a growth of centuries, the Krishna cult finally crowned the Hindu system. The Mahabharata, in which the Bhagavad Gita was incorporated by some author whose name is unknown, is an immense literary mosaic of two hundred and twenty thousand lines. It is heterogeneous, grotesque, inconsistent, and often contradictory--qualities which are scarcely considered blemishes in Hindu literature. The Bhagavad Gita was incorporated as a part of this great epic probably as late as the second or third century of our era, and by that time Krishna had come to be regarded as divine, though his full and extravagant deification as the "Adorable One" probably did not appear till the author of "Narada Pancharata" of the eighth century had added whatever he thought the original author should have said five centuries before. As it now stands the poem very cleverly weaves into one fabric many lofty aphorisms borrowed from the Upanishads and the later philosophic schools, upon the groundwork of a popular story of which Arjuna is the hero. Arjuna and his four brothers are about to engage in a great battle with their cousins for the possession of an hereditary throne. The divine Krishna, once himself a hero, becomes Arjuna's charioteer, that in that capacity he may act as his counsellor. As the battle array is formed, Arjuna is seized with misgivings at the thought of slaughtering his kindred for the glory of a sceptre. "I cannot--will not fight," he says; "I seek not victory, I seek no kingdom; what shall we do with regal pomp and power? what with enjoyments, or with life itself, when we have slaughtered all our kindred here?" Krishna then enters upon a long discourse upon the duties of caste and the indwelling of the Infinite, showing that the soul, which is a part of deity, cannot be slain though the body may be hewn to pieces. "The wise," he says, "grieve not for the departed nor for those who yet survive. Never was the time when I was not, nor thou, nor yonder chiefs, and never shall be the time when all of us shall not be. As the embodied soul in this corporeal frame moves swiftly on through boyhood, youth, and age, so will it pass through other forms hereafter; be not grieved thereat.... As men abandon old and threadbare clothes to put on others new, so casts the embodied soul its worn-out frame to enter other forms. No dart can pierce it; flame cannot consume it, water wet it not, nor scorching breezes dry it--indestructible, eternal, all-pervading, deathless."[77] It may seem absurd to Western minds that a long discourse, which constitutes a volume of intricate pantheistic philosophy, should be given to a great commander just at the moment when he is planning his attack and is absorbed with the most momentous responsibilities; it seems to us strangely inconsistent also to expatiate elaborately upon the merits of the Yoga philosophy, with its asceticism and its holy torpor, when the real aim is to arouse the soul to ardor for the hour of battle. But these infelicities are no obstacle to the Hindu mind, and the consistency of the plot is entirely secondary to the doctrine of caste and of philosophy which the author makes Krishna proclaim. Gentle as many of its precepts are, the Bhagavad Gita, or the "Lord's Lay," is a battle-song uttered by the Supreme Being while the contending hosts awaited the signal for fratricidal carnage. The grotesqueness which characterizes all Hindu literature is not wanting in this story of Krishna and Arjuna, as given in the great poem of which the Bhagavad Gita forms a part. The five sons of Pandu are representatives of the principle of righteousness, while the hundred brothers of the rival branch are embodiments of evil. Yet, when the victory had been gained and the sceptre was given to the sons of Pandu, they despised it and courted death, though the "Adorable One" had urged them on to strife. Bishma, the leader of the hostile force, in a personal encounter with Arjuna, had been filled so full of darts that he could neither stand nor lie down. Every part of his body was bristling with arrows, and for fifty-eight days he lingered, leaning on their sharp points. Meanwhile the eldest of the victors, finding his throne only a "delusion and a snare," and being filled with remorse, was urged by Krishna to visit his unfortunate adversary and receive instruction and comfort. Bishma, lying upon his bed of spikes, edified him with a series of long and tedious discourses on pantheistic philosophy, after which he asked the tender-hearted Krishna for permission to depart. He is no longer the embodiment of evil: the cruel arrows with which the ideal of goodness had pierced him fall away, the top of his head opens, and his spirit soars to heaven shining like a meteor. How strange a reversal is here! How strange that he who had been the representative of all evil should have been transformed by his suffering, and should have been made to instruct and comfort the man of success. Mr. Chatterji falls into a fatal inconsistency when, in spite of his assumption that this poem is the very word of Krishna spoken at a particular time, in a particular place, he informs us that "all Indian authorities agree in pronouncing it to be the essence of all sacred writings. They call it an Upanishad--a term applied to the wisdom, as distinguished from the ceremonial, part of the Vedas, and to no book less sacred." More accurately he might have said that it is a compend of all Hindu literatures, the traditional as well as the inspired, and with a much larger share of the former than of the latter. Pantheism, which is its quintessence, did not exist in the early Vedic times. Krishna was not known as a god even in the period of the Buddha.[78] And the Epics, which are so largely drawn upon, are later still. And it is upon the basis of the Epics, and the still later Puranas, that the common people of India still worship him as the god of good-fellowship and of lust. The masses longed for a god of human sympathies, even though he were a Bacchus. In the Bhagavad Gita as we now have it, with its many changes, Krishna has become the supreme God, though according to Lassen his actual worship as such was not rendered earlier than the sixth century; and Professor Banergea claims that it "was not at its zenith till the eighth century, and that it then borrowed much from Christian, or at least Hebrew, sources." Webber and Lorinser have maintained a similar view. Krishna as the Supreme and Adorable One has never found favor except with the pantheists, and to this day the worship of the real Krishna as a Bacchus is the most popular of all Hindu festivals, and naturally it is the most demoralizing. We are now prepared to assume that the pantheistic groundwork of the poem on the one hand, and its borrowed Christian conceptions and Christian nomenclature on the other, will explain its principal alleged parallels with the New Testament. With his great familiarity with our Bible, and his rare ability in adjusting shades of thought and expression, Mr. Chatterji has presented no less than two hundred and fourteen passages which he matches with texts from the Bible. Many of these are so adroitly worded that one not familiar with the peculiarities of Hindu philosophy might be stumbled by the comparisons. Mr. R.C. Bose tells us that this poem has wrought much evil among the foreign population of India; and in this country there are thousands of even cultivated people with whom this new translation will have great influence. Men with unsettled minds who have turned away with contempt from the crudities of spiritualism, who are disgusted with the rough assailments of Ingersoll, and who find only homesickness and desolation on the bleak and wintry moor of agnostic science, may yet be attracted by a book which is so elevated and often sublime in its philosophy, and so chaste in its ethical precepts, and which, like Christianity, has bridged the awful chasm between unapproachable deity and our human conditions and wants by giving to the world a God-man. If the original author and the various expositors of the Bhagavad Gita have not borrowed from the Christian revelation, they have rendered an undesigned tribute to the great Christian doctrine of a divine and human mediator: they have given striking evidence of a felt want in all humanity of a _God with men_. If it was a deeply conscious want of the human heart which led the heathen of distant India to grope their way from the cheerless service of remorseless deities to one who could be touched with a feeling of their infirmities, and could walk these earthly paths as a counsellor by their side, how striking is the analogy to essential Christian truth! Let us examine some of the alleged parallels. They may be divided into three classes: 1. Those which are merely fanciful. Nine-tenths of the whole number are of this class. They are such as would never occur to a Hindu on hearing the gospel truth. Only one who had examined the two records in the keen search for parallels, and whose wish had been the father of his thought, would have seen any resemblance. I shall not occupy much time with these. 2. Those resemblances which are only accidental. It may be an accident of similar circumstances or similar causes; it may be a chance resemblance in the words employed, while there is no resemblance in the thoughts expressed. 3. Those coincidences which spring from natural causes. For an example of these, the closing chapter of the Apocalypse speaks of Christ as "the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End." It is a natural expression to indicate his supreme power and glory as Creator and final Judge of all things. In a similar manner Krishna is made to say, "I am Beginning, Middle, End, Eternal Time, the Birth and the Death of all. I am the symbol A among the characters. I have created all things out of one portion of myself." There are two meanings in Krishna's words. He is in all things pantheistically, and he is the first and best of all things. In the tenth chapter he names with great particularity sixty-six classes of things in which he is always the first: the first of elephants, horses, trees, kings, heroes, etc. "Among letters I am the vowel A." "Among seasons I am spring." "Of the deceitful I am the dice." The late Dr. Mullens calls attention to the fact that the Orphic Hymns declare "Zeus to be the first and Zeus the last. Zeus is the head and Zeus the centre." In these three similar forms of description one common principle of supremacy rules. The difference is that in the Christian revelation and in the Orphic Hymns there is dignity, while in Krishna's discourse there is frivolous and vulgar particularity. Let us notice a few examples of the alleged parallels more particularly. In Chapter IX. Krishna says: "Whatever thou doest, whatever thou eatest, whatever thou offerest in sacrifice, etc., commit that to me." This is compared with 1 Corinthians x. 31: "Whether therefore ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." Also to Colossians x. 17: "Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus." Even if there were no pantheistic differential at the foundation of these utterances, it would not be at all strange if exhortations to an all-embracing devotion should thus in each case be made to cover all the daily acts of life. But aside from this there is a wide difference in the fundamental ideas which these passages express. Paul's thought is that of loving devotion to an infinite Friend and Saviour; it is such an offering of loyalty and love as one conscious being can make to another and a higher. But Krishna identifies the giver with the receiver, and Arjuna is taught to regard the gift itself as an act of God. The phrase "commit that to me" is equivalent to "ascribe that to me." In the context we read: "Of those men, who thinking of me in identity (with themselves), worship me, for them always resting in me, I bear the burden of acquisition and preservation of possessions. Even those the devotees of other gods, who worship in faith, they worship me in ignorance." In other words, the worshipper is to make no difference between himself and the Infinite. He is to refer all his daily acts to the Infinite as the real actor, his own personal ego being ignored. This is not Paul's idea; it is the very reverse of it. It could give comfort only to the evil-doer who desired to shift his personal responsibility. Let us consider another alleged resemblance. In the fifth chapter Krishna declares that whoever knows him "attains rest." This is presented as a parallel to the words in Christ's prayer: "This is life eternal that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." In both passages the knowledge of God is made the chief blessing to be sought, but in the one case knowledge means only a recognition of the Infinite Ego as existing in one's personal ego: it is a mere acceptance of that philosophic theory of life. Thus one of the Upanishads declares that "whoever sees all things in God, and God in all things, sees the truth aright;" his philosophy is correct. On the other hand, what Christ meant was not the recognition of a pantheistic theory, but a real heart-knowledge of the Father's character, a loving experience of his divine mercy, his fatherly love, his ineffable glory. The one was cold philosophy, the other was experience, fellowship, gratitude, filial love. What pantheism taught was that God cannot be known practically--that He is without limitations or conditions that we can distinguish Him from our finiteness only by divesting our conception of Him of all that we are wont to predicate of ourselves. He is subject to no such limitations as good or evil. In Chapter IX., Krishna says: "As air existing in space goes everywhere and is unlimited, so are all things in me.... I am the Vedic rite, I am the sacrifice, I am food, I am sacred formula, I am immortality, I am also death; also the latent cause and the manifest effect." To know the God of the Bhagavad Gita is to know that he cannot be known. "God is infinite in attributes," says Mr. Chatterji, "and yet devoid of attributes. This is the God whom the Bhagavad Gita proclaims." By a similar contradiction the more the devout worshipper knows of God the less he knows, because the process of knowledge is a process of "effacement;" the closer the gradual union becomes the fainter is the self-personality, till at length it fades away entirely, and is merged and lost as a drop in the illimitable sea. This is the so-called "rest" which Krishna promises as the reward of knowing him. It is rest in the sense of extinction; it is death; while that which Christ promises is eternal Life with unending and rapturous activity, with ever-growing powers of fellowship and of love. Take another alleged parallel. Chapter VI. commends the man who has reached such a measure of indifference that "his heart is _even_ in regard to friends and to foes, to the righteous and to evil-doers;" and this is held up as a parallel to the Sermon on the Mount, which commends love to enemies that we may be children of the heavenly Father who sendeth rain upon the just and upon the unjust. In the one case the apathy of the ascetic, the extinction of susceptibility, the ignoring of moral distinctions, the crippling and deadening of our noblest powers; in the other the use of these powers in all ways of beneficence toward those who injure us, even as God, though his heart is by no means "even" as between the righteous and the wicked, stills shows kindness to both. Now, in view of the great plausibility of the parallels which are thus presented to the public--parallels whose subtle fallacy the mass of readers are almost sure to overlook--one can hardly exaggerate the importance of thoroughly sifting the philosophy that underlies them, and especially on the part of those who are, or are to become, the defenders of the truth.[79] But turning from particular parallels to a broader comparison, there is a general use of expressions in the New Testament in regard to which every Christian teacher should aim at clear views and careful discriminations; for example, when we are said to be "temples of the Holy Ghost," or when Christ is said to be "formed in us the hope of glory," or it is "no longer we that live, but Christ that liveth in us." It cannot be denied that defenders of the Bhagavad Gita, and of the whole Indo-pantheistic philosophy, might make out a somewhat plausible case along these lines. I recall an instance in which an honored pastor had made such extravagant use of these New Testament expressions that some of his co-presbyters raised the question of a trial for pantheism. But it is one thing to employ strong terms of devotional feeling, as is often done, especially in prayer, and quite another to frame theories and philosophies, and present them as accurate statements of truth. The New Testament nowhere speaks of the indwelling Spirit in such a sense as implies an obliteration or absorption of the conscious individual ego, while "effacement" instead of fellowship is a favorite expression in the Bhagavad Gita. Paul in his most ecstatic language never gives any hint of extinction, but, on the contrary, he magnifies the conception of a separate, conscious, ever-growing personality, living and rejoicing in Divine fellowship for evermore. In the New Testament the expressions of our union with Christ are often reversed: instead of speaking of Christ as abiding in the hearts and lives of his people, they are sometimes said to abide in Him, and that not in the sense of absorption. Paul speaks of the "saints in Christ," of his own "bonds in Christ," of being "baptized in Christ," of becoming "a new creature in Christ," of true Christians as being one body in Christ, of their lives being "hid with Christ in God." Believers are spoken of as being "buried with Christ," "dead with Christ." Every form of expression is used to represent fellowship, intimacy, spiritual union with Him, but always in a rational and practical sense, and with full implication of our distinct and separate personality. The essential hope of the Gospel is that those who believe in Christ shall never die, that even their mortal bodies shall be raised in his image, and that they shall be like Him and shall abide in his presence. On the other hand, "The essence of this pantheistic system," says Mr. Chatterji, "is the denial of real existence to the individual spirit, and the insistance upon its true identity with God" (Chapter IV.). It only remains to be said that, whatever may be the similarities of expression between this Bible of pantheism and that of Christianity, however they may agree in the utterance of worthy ethical maxims, that which most broadly differentiates the Christian faith from Hindu philosophy is the salient presentation of great fundamental truths which are found in the Word of God alone. 1. The doctrine that God in Christ is "made sin" for the redemption of sinful man--that He is "the end of the law for righteousness" for them that believe; this is indeed Divine help: this is salvation. Divinity does not here become the mere charioteer of human effort, for the purpose of coaching it in the duties of caste and prompting it to fight out its destiny by its own valor. Christ is our expiation, takes our place, for our sakes becomes poor that we through his poverty may become rich. What a boon to all fakirs and merit-makers of the world if they could feel that that law of righteousness which they are striving to work out by mortifications and self-tortures had been achieved for them by the Son of God, and that salvation is a free gift! This is something that can be apprehended alike by the philosopher and by the unlettered masses of men. 2. Another great truth found in our Scriptures is that the pathway by which the human soul returns to God is not the way of knowledge in the sense of philosophy, but the way of intelligent confidence and loving trust. "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made." Man by wisdom has never known God. This has been the vain effort of Hindu speculation for ages. The author of the Nyaya philosophy assumed that all evil springs from misapprehension, and that the remedy is to be found in correct methods of investigation, guided by skilfully arranged syllogisms. This has been in all ages the chief characteristic of speculative Hinduism. And the Bhagavad Gita furnishes one of its very best illustrations. Of its eighteen chapters, fifteen are devoted to "Eight Knowledge." And by knowledge is meant abstract speculation. It is a reaching after oneness with the deity by introspection and metaphysical analysis. "Even if thou wert the greatest evil-doer among all the unrighteous," says Krishna, "thou shalt cross over all sins even by the ark of knowledge." "Oh, Arjuna, as blazing fire reduces fuel to ashes, so the fire of knowledge turns all action into ashes." But in the first place a knowledge of the infinite within us is unattainable, and in the second place it could not avail us even if attainable. It is not practical knowledge; it is not a belief unto righteousness. Faith is not an act of the brain merely, but of the whole moral nature. The wisdom of self must be laid aside, self-righteousness cast into the dust, the pride and rebellion of the will surrendered, and the whole man become as a little child. This is the way of knowledge that can be made experimental; this is the knowledge that is unto eternal life. 3. Another great differential of the New Testament is found in its true doctrine of divine co-operation with the human will. Our personality is not destroyed that the absolute may take its place, but the two act together. "For men of renunciation," says the Bhagavad Gita, "whose hearts are at rest from desire and anger, and knowing the only self, there is on both sides of death effacement (of the individual) in the supreme spirit." In such a person, therefore, even on this side of death, there is a cessation of the individual in the supreme. Over against this the Gospel presents the doctrine of co-operative grace, which instead of crippling our human energies arouses them to their highest and best exertion. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." The divine acts with and through the human, but does not destroy it. It imparts the greatest encouragement, the truest inspiration. 4. We notice but one more out of many points of contrast between the doctrines of the Hindu and the Christian Bibles, viz., the difference between ascetic inaction and the life of Christian activity as means of religious growth. I am aware that in the earlier chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna urges Arjuna to valiant activity on the battle-field, but that is for a special purpose, viz., the establishment of caste distinctions. It is wholly foreign to Hindu philosophy; it is even contradictory. The author of the poem, who seems to be aware of the inconsistency of arousing Arjuna to the mighty activities of the battle-field, and at the same time indoctrinating him in the spirit of a dead and nerveless asceticism, struggles hard with the awkward task of bridging the illogical chasm with three chapters of mystification. But we take the different chapters as they stand, and in their obvious meaning. "The man of meditation is superior to the man of action," says Chapter I., 46, "therefore, Arjuna, become a man of meditation." How the man of meditation is to proceed is told in Chapter VI., 10-14. "Let him who has attained to meditation always strive to reduce his heart to rest in the Supreme, dwelling in a secret place alone, with body and mind under control, devoid of expectation as well as of acceptance. Having placed in a clean spot one's seat, firm, not very high nor very low, formed of the skins of animals, placed upon cloth and cusa grass upon that, sitting on that seat, strive for meditation, for the purification of the heart, making the mind one-pointed, and reducing to rest the action of the thinking principle as well as that of the senses and organs. Holding the body, neck, and head straight and unmoved, perfectly determined, and not working in any direction, but as if beholding the end of his own nose, with his heart in supreme peace, devoid of fear, with thought controlled and heart in me as the supreme goal, he remains." How different from all this is that prayer of Christ, "I pray not that Thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldst keep them from the evil." Or those various words spoken to his disciples: "Let your light so shine before men that others seeing your good works shall glorify your Father which is in heaven." "Work while the day lasts, for the night cometh in which no man can work." Who can imagine Paul spending all those years of opportunity in sitting on a leopard skin, watching the end of his nose instead of turning the world upside down! In that true sense in which Christ lived within him, He filled every avenue of his being with the aggressive spirit of God's own love for dying men. The same spirit which brought Christ from heaven to earth sent Paul out over the earth. He was not even content to work on old foundations, but regarding himself as under sentence of death he longed to make the most of his votive life, to bear the torch of the truth into all realms of darkness. He was none the less a philosopher because he preferred the simple logic of God's love, nor did he hesitate to confront the philosophy of Athens or the threatenings of Roman tyrants. He was ready for chains and imprisonment, for perils of tempests or shipwreck, or robbers, or infuriate mobs, or death itself. No Hindu fakir was ever more conscious of the struggle with inward corruption than he, and at times he could cry out, "Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" but he did not seek relief in idleness and inanity, but in what Dr. Chalmers called "the expulsive power of new affections," in new measures of Christlike devotion to the cause of truth and humanity. In a word, Christ and his kingdom displaced the power of evil. He could do all things through Christ who strengthened him. Nor was the peace which he felt and which he commended to others the peace of mere negative placidity and indifference. It was loving confidence and trust. "Be careful for nothing"--we hear him saying to his friends at Philippi--"be careful for nothing; but in all things by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, make known your requests unto God: and the peace of God, which passeth understanding, shall keep your minds and hearts through Christ Jesus." And yet to show how this consists with devout activity, he commends, in immediate connection with it, the cultivation of every active virtue known to men. Thus, "_Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things._" FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 74: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1889.] [Footnote 75: The author seems to overlook the fact that the chief excellence of an evangel to lost men is that it appeals to the masses.] [Footnote 76: Address published in the _Japan Mail_, 1890.] [Footnote 77: There is scarcely another passage in all Hindu literature which is so full of half-truths as this, or which turns the sublime powers of the human soul to so unworthy a purpose.] [Footnote 78: In an enumeration of Hindu gods made in Buddha's time Krishna does not appear.] [Footnote 79: Never before has there been so much danger as now that the lines of truth will be washed out by the flood-tides of sentimental and semi Christian substitutes and makeshifts. As with commodities, so with religion, dilution and adulteration are the order of the day and a little Christianity is made to flavor a thousand shams.] LECTURE V. BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY New interest has recently been awakened in old controversies concerning the relations of Christianity and Buddhism. The so-called Theosophists and Esoteric Buddhists are reviving exploded arguments against Christianity as means of supporting their crude theories. The charge of German sceptics, that Christianity borrowed largely from Buddhism, is made once more the special stock in trade of these new and fanatical organizations. To this end books, tracts, and leaflets are scattered broadcast, and especially in the United States and Great Britain. Professor Max Müller says, in a recent article published in _Longman's New Review_: "Who has not suffered lately from Theosophy and Esoteric Buddhism? Journals are full of it, novels overflow with it, and one is flooded with private and confidential letters to ask what it all really means. Many people, no doubt, are much distressed in their minds when they are told that Christianity is but a second edition of Buddhism. 'Is it really true?' they ask. 'Why did you not tell us all this before? Surely, you must have known it, and were only afraid to tell it.' Then follow other questions: 'Does Buddhism really count more believers than any other religion?' 'Is Buddhism really older than Christianity, and does it really contain many things which are found in the Bible?'" And the learned professor proceeds to show that there is no evidence that Christianity has borrowed from Buddhism. In this country these same ideas are perhaps more widely circulated than in England. They are subsidizing the powerful agency of the secular press, particularly the Sunday newspapers, and thousands of the people are confronting these puzzling questions. There is occasion, therefore, for a careful and candid review of Buddhism by all leaders of thought and defenders of truth. In the brief time allotted me, I can only call attention to a few salient points of a general character. In the outset, a distinction should be drawn between Buddhist history and Buddhist legend, for just at this point the danger of misrepresentation lies. It is true that the Buddha lived before the time of Christ, and therefore anything of the nature of real biography must be of an earlier date than the teachings of Jesus; but whether the _legends_ antedate His life and doctrines is quite another question. The Buddhist apologists all assume that they do, and it is upon the legends that most of the alleged parallelisms in the two records are based. How, then, shall we draw the line between history and legend? The concensus of the best scholarship accepts those traditions in which the northern and southern Buddhist records agree, which the Council of Patna, B.C. 242, adopted as canonical, and which are in themselves credible and consistent with the teachings of Gautama himself. According to this standard of authority Gautama was born about the sixth century B.C., as the son and heir of a rajah of the Sakya tribe of Aryans, living about eighty miles north by northwest of Benares. His mother, the principal wife of Kajah Suddhodana, had lived many years without offspring, and she died not long after the birth of this her only son, Siddartha. In his youth he was married and surrounded by all the allurements and pleasures of an Oriental court. He, too, appears to have remained without an heir till he was twenty-nine years of age, when, upon the birth of a son, certain morbid tendencies came to a climax, and he left his palace secretly and sought true comfort in a life of asceticism. For six years he tried diligently the resources of Hindu self-mortification, but becoming exhausted by his austerities, almost unto death, he abandoned that mode of life, having apparently become atheistic. He renounced the idea of merit-making as a means of spiritual attainment, and he was sorely tempted, no doubt, to return to his former life of ease. But he withstood the temptation and resolved to forego earthly pleasure, and teach mankind what he conceived to be the way of life, through self-control. He had tried pleasure; next he had tried extreme asceticism; he now struck out what he called "The Middle Path," as between self-indulgence on the one hand, and extreme bodily mortification as a thing of merit on the other. This middle ground still demanded abstinence as favorable to the highest mental and moral conditions, but it was not carried to such extremes as to weaken the body or the mind, or impair the fullest operation of every faculty.[80] There can be no doubt that Gautama's relinquishment of Hinduism marked a great and most trying crisis. It involved the loss of all confidence in him on the part of his disciples, for when he began again to take necessary food they all forsook him as a failure. It was while sitting under the shade of an Indian fig-tree (Boddhi-tree) that this struggle occurred and his victory was gained. There his future course was resolved upon; there was the real birth-place of Buddhism as a system. He thenceforth began to preach the law, or what he regarded as the way of self-emancipation, and therefore the way of life. He first sought his five followers, who had abandoned him, and succeeded in winning them back. He gathered at length a company of about sixty disciples, whom he trained and sent forth as teachers of his new doctrines. Yet, still influenced by the old Hindu notions of the religious life, he formed his disciples into an order of mendicants, and in due time he established an order of nuns. It was when Gautama rose up from his meditation and his high resolve under the Bo-tree, that he began his career as "The Enlightened." He was now a Buddha, and claimed to have attained Nirvana. All that has been written of his having left his palace with the purpose of becoming a saviour of mankind, is the sheer assumption of the later legends and their apologists. Buddhism was an after-thought, only reached after six years of bootless asceticism. There is no evidence that when Siddartha left his palace he had any thought of benefiting anybody but himself. He entered upon the life of the recluse with the same motives and aims that have influenced thousands of other monks and anchorets of all lands and ages--some of them princes like himself. Nevertheless, for the noble decision which was finally reached we give him high credit. It seems to have been one of the noblest victories ever gained by man over lower impulses and desires. The passions of youth were not yet dead within him; worldly ambition may be supposed to have been still in force; but he chose the part of a missionary to his fellow-men, and there is no evidence that he ever swerved from his purpose. He had won a great victory over himself, and that fact constituted a secret of great power. Gautama was about thirty-five years of age when he became a Buddha, and for forty-five years after that he lived to preach his doctrines and to establish the monastic institution which has survived to our time. He died a natural death from indigestion at the age of eighty--greatly venerated by his disciples, and the centre of what had already become a wide-spread system in a large district of India. The legends of Buddhism are a very different thing from the brief sketch which I have given, and which is based upon the earlier Buddhist literature. These sprang up after Gautama's death, and their growth extended through many centuries--many centuries even of the Christian era. The legends divide the life of the Buddha into three periods: 1. That of his pre-existent states. 2. That part of his life which extended from his birth to his enlightenment under the Bo-tree. 3. The forty-five years of his Buddhaship. The legends have no more difficulty in dealing with the particular experiences of the pre-existent states than in enriching and adorning the incidents of his earthly life; and both are doubtless about equally authentic. Gautama discarded the idea of a divine revelation; he rejected the authority of the Vedas totally. He denied that he was divine, but distinctly claimed to be a plain and earnest man. All that he knew, he had discovered by insight and self-conquest. To assume that he was pre-existently divine and omniscient subverts the whole theory of his so-called "discovery," and is at variance with the idea of a personal conquest. The chief emphasis and force of his teachings lay in the assumption that he did simply what other men might do; for his mission was that of a teacher and exempler merely. He was a saviour only in that he taught men how to save themselves. The pre-existent states are set forth in the "Jatakas," or Birth Stories of Ceylon, which represent him as having been born five hundred and thirty times after he became a Bodisat (a predestined Buddha). As a specimen of his varied experience while becoming fitted for Buddaship, we read that he was born eighty-three times as an ascetic, fifty-eight as a monarch, forty-three as a deva, twenty-four as a Brahman, eighteen as an ape; as a deer ten, an elephant six, a lion ten; at least once each as a thief, a gambler, a frog, a hare, a snipe. He was also embodied in a tree. But as a Bodisat he could not be born in hell, nor as vermin, nor as a woman! Says Spence Hardy, with a touch of irony: "He could descend no lower than a snipe." Northern legends represent Buddha as having "incarnated" for the purpose of bringing relief to a distressed world. He was miraculously conceived--his mother's side in the form of a white elephant. All nature manifested its joy on the occasion. The ocean bloomed with flowers; all beings from many worlds showed their wonder and sympathy. Many miracles were wrought even during his childhood, and every part of his career was filled with marvels. At his temptation under the Bo-tree, Mara (Satan) came to him mounted on an elephant sixteen miles high and surrounded by an encircling army of demons eleven miles deep.[81] Finding him proof against his blandishments, he hurled mountains of rocks against him, and assailed him with fire and smoke and ashes and filth--all of which became as zephyrs on his cheek or as presents of fragrant flowers. Last of all, he sent his three daughters to seduce him. Their blandishments are set forth at great length in the "Romantic Legend." In the Northern Buddhist literature--embracing both the "Romantic Legend"[82] and the "Lalita Vistara"--many incidents of Buddha's childhood are given which show a seeming coincidence with the life of Christ. It is claimed that his birth was heralded by angelic hosts, that an aged sage received him into his arms and blessed him, that he was taken to the temple for consecration, that a jealous ruler sought to destroy him, that in his boyhood he astonished the doctors by his wisdom, that he was baptized, or at least took a bath, that he was tempted, transfigured, and finally received up into heaven. These will be noticed farther on; it is only necessary to say here that the legends giving these details are first at variance with the early canonical history, and second, that they are of such later dates as to place most of them probably within the Christian era. _The Four Peculiar and Characteristic Doctrines of Buddhism._ 1. Its peculiar conception of the soul. 2. Its doctrine of Trishna and Upadana. 3. Its theory of Kharma. 4. Its doctrine of Nirvana. 1. The Skandas, five in number, constitute in their interaction what all others than Buddhists regard as the soul. They consist of material properties; the senses; abstract ideas; tendencies or propensities; and the mental powers. The soul is the result of the combined action of these, as the flame of a candle proceeds from the combustion of its constituent elements. The flame is never the same for two consecutive moments. It seems to have a perpetuated identity, but that is only an illusion, and the same unreality pertains to the soul. It is only a succession of thoughts, emotions, and conscious experiences. We are not the same that we were an hour ago. In fact, there is no such thing as being--there is only a constant _becoming_. We are ever passing from one point to another throughout our life; and this is true of all beings and all things in the universe. How it is that the succession of experiences is treasured up in memory is not made clear. This is a most subtle doctrine, and it has many points of contact with various speculations of modern times. It has also a plausible side when viewed in the light of experience, but its gaps and inconsistencies are fatal, as must be seen when it is thoroughly examined. 2. The second of the cardinal doctrines is that of Trishna. Trishna is that inborn element of desire whose tendency is to lead men into evil. So far, it is a misfortune or a form of original sin. Whatever it may have of the nature of guilt hangs upon the issues of a previous life. Upadana is a further stage in the same development. It is Trishna ripened into intense craving by our own choice and our own action. It then becomes uncontrollable and is clearly a matter of guilt. Now, the momentum of this Upadana is such that it cannot be arrested by death. Like the demons of Gadara it must again become incarnate, even though it should enter the body of a brute. And this transitional something, this restless moral or immoral force which must work out its natural results somehow and somewhere, and that in embodied form projects into future being a residuum which is known as Kharma. 3. What, then, is Kharma? Literally it means "the doing." It is a man's record, involving the consequences and liabilities of his acts. It is a score which must be settled. A question naturally arises, how the record of a soul can survive when the soul itself has been "blown out." The illustration of the candle does not quite meet the case. If the flame were something which when blown out immediately seized upon some other substance in which the work of combustion proceeded, it would come nearer to a parallel. One candle may light another before itself is extinguished, but it does not do it by an inherent necessity. But this flame of the soul, this Kharma, must enter some other body of god, or man, or beast. Again, the question arises, How can responsibility be transferred from one to another? How can the heavy load of a man's sin be laid upon some new-born infant, while the departing sinner has himself no further concern in his evil Kharma, but sinks into non-existence the moment his "conformations" are touched with dissolution? Buddhism acknowledges a mystery here; no real explanation can be given, and none seems to have been attempted by Buddhist writers. To be consistent, Gautama, in denying the existence of God and of the soul as an entity, should have taught the materialistic doctrine of annihilation. This, however, he could not do in the face of that deep-rooted idea of transmigration which had taken entire possession of the Hindu mind. Gautama was compelled therefore to bridge a most illogical chasm as best he could. Kharma without a soul to cling to is something in the air. It alights like some winged seed upon a new-born set of Skandas with its luckless boon of ill desert, and it involves the fatal inconsistency of investing with permanent character that which is itself impermanent. But the question may be asked, "Do we not admit a similar principle when we speak of a man's influence as something that survives him?" We answer, "No." Influence is a simple radiation of impressions. A man may leave an influence which men are free to accept or not, but it is quite a different thing if he leaves upon a successor the moral liabilities of a bankrupt character. Gautama's own Kharma, for example, ceased to exist upon his entering Nirvana; there was no re-birth; but his influence lives forever, and has extended to millions of his fellow-men. The injustice involved in the doctrine of Kharma is startling. The new-born soul that inherits its unsettled score has no memory or consciousness that connects it with himself; it is not heredity; it is not his father's character that invests him. This Kharma may have crossed the ocean from the death-bed of some unknown man of another race. The doctrine is the more astonishing when we consider that no Supreme Being is recognized as claiming this retribution. There is no God; it is a vague law of eternal justice, a law without a law-giver or a judge. There can therefore be no pardon, no commutation of sentence, no such thing as divine pity or help. The only way in which one can disentangle himself is by breaking forever the connection between spirit and matter which binds him with the shackles of conscious being. 4. Nirvana. No doctrine of Buddhism has been so much in dispute as this. It has been widely maintained that Nirvana means extinction. But T.W. Rhys Davids and others have held that it is "the destruction of malice, passion, and delusion," and that it may be attained in this life. The definition is quoted from comparatively recent Pali translations.[83] Gautama, therefore, reached Nirvana forty-five years before his death. It is claimed, however, that insomuch as it cuts off Kharma, or re-birth, it involves entire extinction of being upon the dissolution of the body.[84] It is held by still others that Nirvana is a return to the original and all-pervading Boddhi-essence. This theory, which is really a concession to the Brahmanical doctrine of absorption into the infinite Brahma, has a wide following among the modern Buddhists in China and Japan. It is a form of Buddhist pantheism. As to the teaching of Gautama on this subject, Professor Max Müller, while admitting that the meta-physicians who followed the great teacher plainly taught that the entire personal entity of an arhat (an enlightened one) would become extinct upon the death of the body, yet reasons, in his lecture on Buddhistic Nihilism, that the Buddha himself could not have taught a doctrine so disheartening. At the same time he quotes the learned and judicial Bishop Bigandet as declaring, after years of study and observation in Burmah, that such is the doctrine ascribed to the great teacher by his own disciples. Gautama is quoted as closing one of his sermons in these words: "Mendicants, that which binds the teacher to existence is cut off, but his body still remains. While his body still remains he shall be seen by gods and men, but after the termination of life, upon the dissolution of the body, neither gods nor men shall see him." T.W. Rhys Davids expresses the doctrine of Nirvana tersely and correctly when he says: "Utter death, with no new life to follow, is, then, a result of, but it is not, Nirvana."[85] Professor Oldenberg suggests, with much plausibility, that the Buddha was more reticent in regard to the doctrine of final extinction in the later periods of his life; that the depressing doctrine had been found a stumbling-block, and that he came to assume an agnostic position on the question. In his "Buddha,"[86] Professor Oldenberg, partly in answer to the grounds taken by Professor Max Müller in his lecture on Buddhistic Nihilism, has very fully discussed the question whether the ego survives in Nirvana in any sense. He claims that certain new translations of Pali texts have given important evidence on the subject, and he sums up with the apparent conclusion that the Buddha, moved by the depressing influence which the grim doctrine of Nirvana, in the sense of extinction, was producing upon his disciples, assumed a position of reticence as to whether the ego survives or not. The venerable Malukya (see p. 275) is said to have plied the Master with questions. "Does the perfect Buddha live on beyond death, or does he not? It pleases me not that all this should remain unanswered, and I do not think it right. May it please the Master to answer me if he can. But when anyone does not understand a matter, then a straightforward man says, 'I do not know that.'" The Buddha replies somewhat evasively that he has not undertaken to decide such questions, because they are not for spiritual edification. The question, What is Nirvana? has been the object of more extensive discussion than its importance demands. Practically, the millions of Buddhists are not concerned with the question. They find no attraction in either view. They desire neither extinction nor unconscious absorption into the Boddhi essence (or Brahm). What they anticipate is an improved transmigration, a better birth. The more devout may indulge the hope that their next life will be spent in one of the Buddhist heavens; others may aspire to be men of high position and influence. The real heaven to which the average Buddhist looks forward is apt to be something very much after his own heart, or at least something indicated by the estimate which he himself places upon his own character and life. There may be many transmigrations awaiting him, but he is chiefly concerned for the next in order. The very last object to excite his interest is that far-off shadow called Nirvana. In estimating the conflict of Christianity with Buddhism we must not take counsel merely of our own sense of the absurdity of Gautama's teachings; we are to remember that in Christian lands society is made up of all kinds of people; that outside of the Christian Church there are thousands, and even millions, who, with respect to faith, are in utter chaos and darkness. The Church therefore cannot view this subject from its own stand-point merely. Let us glance at certain features of Buddhism which render it welcome to various classes of men who dwell among us in Western lands. First of all, the system commends itself to many by its intense individualism. Paul's figure of the various parts of the human frame as illustrating the body of Christ, mutual in the interdependence of all its members, would be wholly out of place in Buddhism. Even the Buddhist monks are so many units of introverted self-righteousness. And individualism differently applied is the characteristic of our age, and therefore a bond of sympathy is supplied. "Every man for himself," appeals to modern society in many ways. Again, Gautama magnified the human intellect and the power of the human will. "O Ananda," he said, "be lamps unto yourselves; depend upon no other." He claimed to have thought out, and thought through every problem of existence, to have penetrated every secret of human nature in the present, and in the life to come, and his example was commended to all, that they might follow in their measure. So also our transcendental philosophers have glorified the powers and possibilities of humanity, and have made genius superior to saintliness.[87] There are tens of thousands who in this respect believe in a religion of humanity, and who worship, if they worship at all, the goddess of reason. All such have a natural affinity for Buddhism. Another point in common between this system and the spirit of our age is its broad humanitarianism--beneficence to the lower grades of life. When love transcends the bounds of the human family it does not rise up toward God, it descends toward the lower orders of the animal world. "Show pity toward everything that exists," is its motto, and the insect and the worm hold a larger relative place in the Buddhist than in the Christian view. The question "Are ye not of more value than many sparrows?" might be doubtful in the Buddhist estimate, for the teacher himself, in his pre-existent states, had often been incarnate in inferior creatures. It is by no means conceded that Jesus, in asking his disciples this question, had less pity for the sparrows than the Buddha, or that his beneficence was less thoughtful of the meanest thing that glides through the air or creeps upon the earth; but the spirit of Christianity is more discriminating, and its love rises up to heaven, where, beginning with God, it descends through every grade of being. Yet it is quite in accordance with the spirit and aim of thousands to magnify the charity that confines itself to bodily wants and distresses, to sneer at the relief which religion may bring to the far greater anguish of the spirit, and to look upon love and loyalty to God as superstition. Is it any wonder that such persons have a warm side toward Buddhism? Again, this system has certain points in common with our modern evolution theories. It is unscientific enough certainly in its speculations, but it gets on without creatorship or divine superintendence, and believes in the inflexible reign of law, though without a law-giver. It assigns long ages to the process of creation, if we may call it creation, and in development through cycles it sees little necessity for the work of God. It can also join hands cordially with many social theories of the day. The pessimism of Buddhists, ancient or modern, finds great sympathy in the crowded populations of the Western as well as the Eastern world. And, almost as a rule, Esoteric Buddhism, American Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism, or whatever we may call it, is a cave of Adullam to which all types of religious apostates and social malcontents resort. The thousands who have made shipwreck of faith, who have become soured at the unequal allotments of Providence, who have learned to hate all who are above them and more prosperous than they, are just in the state of mind to take delight in Buddha's sermon at Kapilavastu, as rehearsed by Sir Edwin Arnold. There all beings met--gods, devas, men, beasts of the field, and fowls of the air--to make common cause against the relentless fate that rules the world, and to bewail the sufferings and death which fill the great charnel-house of existence, while Buddha voiced their common complaint and stood before them as the only pitying friend that the universe had found. It was the first great Communist meeting of which we have any record.[88] The wronged and suffering universe was there, and all "took the promise of his piteous speech, So that their lives, prisoned in the shape of ape, Tiger or deer, shagged bear, jackal or wolf, Foul-feeding kite, pearled dove or peacock gemmed, Squat toad or speckled serpent, lizard, bat, Yea, or fish fanning the river waves, Touched meekly at the skirts of brotherhood With man, who hath less innocence than these: And in mute gladness knew their bondage broke Whilst Buddha spoke these things before the king." There was no mention of sin, but only of universal misfortune! In contrast with the deep shadows of a brooding and all-embracing pessimism like this, we need only to hint at that glow of hope and joy with which the Sun of Righteousness has flooded the world, and the fatherly love and compassion with which the Old Testament and the New are replete, the divine plan of redemption, the psalms of praise and thanksgiving, the pity of Christ's words and acts, and his invitations to the weary and heavy-laden. In one view it is strange that pessimism should have comfort in the fellowship of pessimism, but so it is; there is luxury even in the sympathy of hate, and so Buddhist pessimism is a welcome guest among us, though our Communistic querulousness is more bitter. Once more, Buddhist occultism has found congenial fellowship in American spiritualism. Of late we hear less of spirit-rappings and far more of Theosophy. But this is only the same crude system with other names, and rendered more respectable by the cast-off garments of old Indian philosophy. There is a disposition in the more intellectual circles to assume a degree of disdain toward the crudeness of spiritualism and its vulgar familiarity with departed spirits, who must ever be disturbed by its beck and call; but it is confidently expected that the thousands, nay, as some say, millions, of American spiritualists will gladly welcome the name and the creed of Buddha.[89] It will be idle therefore to assume that the old sleepy system of Gautama has no chance in this wide-awake republic of the West.[90] I have already called attention to the special tactics of Buddhists just now in claiming that Christianity, having been of later origin, has borrowed its principal facts and its teachings. Let us examine the charge. It is a real tribute to the character of Christ that so many sects of false religionists have in all ages claimed Him either as a follower or as an incarnation of their respective deities. Others have acknowledged his teachings as belonging to their particular style and grade. The bitter and scathing calumny of Celsus, in the first centuries of our era, did not prevent numerous attempts to prove the identity of Christ's teachings with some of the most popular philosophies of the heathen world. Porphyry claimed that many of Christ's virtues were copied from Pythagoras. With like concession Mohammedanism included Jesus as one of the six great prophets, and confessedly the only sinless one among them all. Many a fanatic in the successive centuries has claimed to be a new incarnation of the Son of God. Hindus have named Him as an incarnation of Vishnu for the Western, as was Krishna for the Eastern World. As was indicated in the opening of this lecture, the Theosophists are making special claim to Him,[91] and are reviving the threadbare theory that He was a follower of Buddha. So strong an effort is made to prove that Christianity has borrowed both its divine leader and its essential doctrines from India, that a moment's attention may well be given to the question here. One allegation is that the Evangelists copied the Buddhist history and legends in their account of Christ's early life. Another is that the leaders of the Alexandrian Church worked over the gospel story at a later day, having felt more fully the influence of India at that great commercial centre. The two theories are inconsistent with each other, and both are inconsistent with the assumption that Christ Himself was a Buddhist, and taught the Buddhist doctrines, since this supposition would have obviated the need of any manipulation or fraud at any point. In replying as briefly as possible I shall endeavor to cover both allegations. In strong contrast with these cheap assertions of Alexandrian corruption and plagiarism is the frank admission of such keen critics as Renan, Weiss, Volkmar, Schenkel, and Hitzig,[92] that the gospel record as we have it, was written during a generation in which some of the companions of Jesus still lived. Renan says of Mark's Gospel that "it is full of minute observations, coming doubtless from an eye-witness," and he asserts that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written "in substantially their present form by the men whose names they bear." These Gospels were the work of men who knew Jesus. Matthew was one of the Twelve; John in his Epistle speaks of himself as an eye-witness. They were written in a historic age and were open to challenge. They were nowhere contradicted in contemporary history. They fit their environment. How is it with the authenticity of Buddhist literature? Oldenberg says, "For the _when_ of things men of India have never had a proper organ," and Max Müller declares to the same effect, that "the idea of a faithful, literal translation seems altogether foreign to Oriental minds." He also informs us that there is not a single manuscript in India which is a thousand years old, and scarcely one that can claim five hundred years. For centuries after Gautama's time nothing was written; all was transmitted by word of mouth. Buddhists themselves say that the Pali canonical texts were written about 88 B.C.[93] Any fair comparison of the two histories should confine itself to the writings which are regarded as canonical respectively, and whose dates can be fixed. No more importance should be attached to the later Buddhist legends than to the "Apocryphal Gospels," or to the absurd "Christian Legends" which appeared in the middle ages. The Buddhist Canon was adopted by the Council of Patna 242 B.C. The legends which are generally compared with the canonical story of Christ are not included in that Canon, or at most very few of them. They are drawn from certain poetical books written much later, and holding about the same relation to the Buddhist Canon that the "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" of Milton bear to the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Who would think of quoting "Paradise Lost" in any sober comparison of Biblical truth with the teachings of other religions?[94] Even the canonical literature, that which is supposed to contain the true history and teachings of Buddha, is far from authoritative, owing to the acknowledged habit--acknowledged even by the author of the "Dhammapada" of adding commentaries, notes, etc., to original teachings. Not only was this common among Buddhist writers, but even more surprising liberties were taken with the narrative. For example: The legend describing Buddha's leave-taking of his harem is clearly borrowed from an earlier story of Yasa, a wealthy young householder of Benares, who, becoming disgusted with his harem, left his sleeping dancing girls and fled to the Buddha for instruction. Davids and Oldenberg, in translating this legend from the "Mahavagga," say in a note, "A well-known incident in the life of Buddha has evidently been shaped after the model of this story;" and they declare that "_nowhere in the 'Pali Pitakas' is this scene of Buddha's leave-taking mentioned_." As another evidence of the way in which fact and fiction have been mixed and manipulated for a purpose, one of the legends, which has often been presented as a parallel to the story of Christ, represents the Buddha as repelling the temptation of Mara by quoting texts of "scripture," and the scripture referred to was the "Dhammapada." But the "Dhammapada" was compiled hundreds of years after Buddha's death. Besides, there were no "scriptures" of any kind in his day, for nothing was written till two or three centuries later; and worse still, Buddha is made to quote his own subsequent teachings; for the "Dhammapada" claims to consist of the sacred words of the "enlightened one." Most of the legends of Buddhism were wholly written after the beginning of the Christian era, and it cannot be shown that any were written in their present form until two or three centuries of that era had elapsed. T.W. Rhys Davids says of the "Lalita Vistara" which contains a very large proportion of them, and one form of which is said to have been translated into Chinese in the first century A.D., "that there is no real proof that it existed in its present form before the year 600 A.D." The "Romantic Legend" cannot be traced farther back than the third century A.D. Oldenberg says: "No biography of Buddha has come down to us from ancient times, from the age of the Pali texts, and we can safely say that no such biography was in existence then." Beal declares that the Buddhist legend, as found in the various Epics of Nepaul, Thibet, and China, "is not framed after _any_ Indian model of any date, but is to be found worked out, so to speak, among northern peoples, who were ignorant of, or indifferent to, the pedantic stories of the Brahmans. In the southern and primitive records the terms of the legend are wanting. _Buddha is not born of a royal family; he is not tempted before his enlightenment; he works no miracles, and he is not a Universal Saviour._" The chances are decidedly that if any borrowing has been done it was on the side of Buddhism. It has been asserted that thirty thousand Buddhist monks from Alexandria once visited Ceylon on the occasion of a great festival. This is absurd on the face of it; but that a Christian colony settled in Malabar at a very early period is attested by the presence of thousands of their followers even to this day. In discussing the specific charge of copying Buddhist legends in the gospel narratives, we are met at the threshold by insurmountable improbabilities. To some of these I ask a moment's attention. I shall not take the time to discuss in detail the alleged parallels which are paraded as proofs. To anyone who understands the spirit of Judaism and its attitude toward heathenism of all kinds, it is simply inconceivable that the Christian disciples, whose aim it was to propagate the faith of their Master in a Jewish community, should have borrowed old Indian legends, which, by the terms of the supposition, must have been widely known as such. And Buddhist apologists must admit that it is a little strange that the Scribes and Pharisees, who were intelligent, and as alert as they were bitter, should never have exposed this transparent plagiarism. The great concern of the Apostles was to prove to Jews and Gentiles that Jesus was the Christ of Old Testament prophecy. The whole drift of their preaching and their epistles went to show that the gospel history rested squarely and uncompromisingly on a Jewish basis. Peter and John, Stephen and Paul, constantly "reasoned with the Jews out of their own Scriptures." How unspeakably absurd is the notion that they were trying to palm off on those keen Pharisees a Messiah who, though in the outset at Nazareth he publicly traced his commission to Old Testament prophecy, was all the while copying an atheistic philosopher of India! It is equally inconceivable that the Christian fathers should have copied Buddhism. They resisted Persian mysticism as the work of the Devil, and it was in that mysticism, if anywhere, that Buddhist influence existed in the Levant. Whoever has read Tertullian's withering condemnation of Marcion may judge how far the fathers of the Church favored the heresies of the East. Augustine had himself been a Manichean mystic, and when after his conversion he became the great theologian of the Church, he must have known whether the teachings of the Buddha were being palmed off on the Christian world. The great leaders of that age were men of thorough scholarship and of the deepest moral earnestness. Many of them gave up their possessions and devoted their lives to the promotion of the truths which they professed. Scores of them sealed their faith by martyr deaths. But even if we were to accept the flippant allegation that they were all impostors, yet we should be met by an equally insurmountable difficulty in the utter silence of the able and bitter assailants of Christianity in the first two or three centuries. Celsus prepared himself for his well-known attack on Christianity with the utmost care, searching history, philosophy, and every known religion from which he could derive an argument against the Christian faith. Why did he not strike at the very root of the matter by exposing those stupid plagiarists who were attempting to play off upon the intelligence of the Roman world a clumsy imitation of the far-famed Buddha? It was the very kind of thing that the enemies of Christianity wanted. Why should the adroit Porphyry attempt to work up a few mere scraps of resemblance from the life of Pythagoras, when all he had to do was to lay his hand upon familiar legends which afforded an abundance of the very thing in demand? Again, it is to be remembered that Christianity has always been restrictive and opposed to admixtures with other systems. It repelled the Neo-Platonism of Alexandria, and it fought for two or three centuries against Gnosticism, Manichæism, and similar heresies: and the assumption, in the face of all this, that the Christian Church went out of its way to copy Indian Buddhism, must be due either to gross ignorance or to reckless misrepresentation. On the other hand, it is in accordance with the very genius of Buddhism to borrow. It has absorbed every indigenous superstition and entered into partnership with every local religious system, from the Devil Worship of Burmah and Ceylon to the Taouism of China and the Shinto of Japan. In its long-continued contact with Christianity it has changed from the original atheism of Gautama to various forms of theism, and in some of its sects, at least, from a stanch insistance on self-help alone to an out-and-out doctrine of salvation by faith. This is true of the Shin and Yodo sects of Japan. From recognizing no God at all at first, Buddhism had, by the seventh century A.D., a veritable Trinity, with attributes resembling those of the Triune God of the Christians, and by the tenth century it had five trinities with One Supreme Adi-Buddha over them all. Everyone may judge for himself whether these later interpolations of the system were borrowed from the New Testament Trinity, which had been proclaimed through all the East ten centuries before. Buddhism is still absorbing foreign elements through the aid of its various apologists. Sir Edwin Arnold has greatly added to the force of its legend by the Christian phrases and Christian conceptions which he has read into it. Toward the close of the "Light of Asia" he also introduces into the Buddha's sermon at Kapilavastu the teachings of Herbert Spencer and others of our own time. But altogether the most stupendous improbability lies against the whole assumption that Christ and his followers based their "essential doctrines" on the teachings of the Buddha. The early Buddhism was atheistic: this is the common verdict of Davids, Childers, Sir Monier Williams, Kellogg, and many others. The Buddha declared that "without cause and unknown is the life of man in this world," and he recognized no higher being to whom he owed reverence. "The Buddhist Catechism," by Subhadra, shows that modern Buddhism has no recognition of God. It says (page 58): "Buddhism teaches the reign of perfect goodness and wisdom _without a personal God_, continuance of individuality _without an immortal soul_, eternal happiness without a local heaven, the way of salvation without a vicarious saviour, redemption worked out by each one himself without any prayers, sacrifices, and penances, without the ministry of ordained priests, without the intercession of saints, _without divine mercy_." And then, by way of authentication, it adds: "These, and many others which have become the fundamental doctrines of the Buddhist religion, were recognized by the Buddha in the night of his enlightenment under the Boddhi-tree." And yet we are told that this is the system which Christ and his followers copied. Compare this passage with the Lord's Prayer, or with the discourse upon the lilies, and its lesson of trust in God the Father of all! I appeal not merely to Christian men, but to _any_ man who has brains and common-sense, was there ever so preposterous an attempt to establish an identity of doctrines? But what is the evidence found in the legends themselves? Several leading Oriental scholars, and men not at all biased in favor of Christianity, have carefully examined the subject, and have decided that there is no connection whatever. Professor Seydel, of Leipsic, who has given the most scientific plea for the so-called coincidences, of which he claims there are fifty-one, has classified them as: 1, Those which may have been merely accidental, having arisen from similar causes, and not necessarily implying any borrowing on either side; 2, those which seem to have been borrowed from the one narrative or the other; and 3, those which he thinks were clearly copied by the Christian writers. In this last class he names but five out of fifty-one. Kuenen, who has little bias in favor of Christianity, and who has made a very thorough examination of Seydel's parallels, has completely refuted these five.[95] And speaking of the whole question he says: "I think we may safely affirm that we must abstain from assigning to Buddhism the smallest direct influence on the origin of Christianity." He also says of similar theories of de Bunsen: "A single instance is enough to teach us that inventive fancy plays the chief part in them."[96] Rhys Davids, whom Subhadra's "Buddhist Catechism" approves as the chief exponent of Buddhism, says on the same subject: "I can find no evidence of any actual or direct communication of these ideas common to Buddhism and Christianity from the East to the West." Oldenberg denies their early date, and Beal denies them an Indian origin of any date. _Contrasts between Buddhism and Christianity._ Rhys Davids has pointed out the fact that, while Buddhism in some points is more nearly allied to Christianity than any other system, yet in others it is the farthest possible from it in its spirit and its tendency. If we strike out those ethical principles which, to a large extent, are the common heritage of mankind, revealed in the understanding and the conscience, we shall find in what remains an almost total contrariety to the Christian faith. To give a few examples only. 1. Christ taught the existence and glory of God as Supreme, the Creator and Father, the righteous Judge. His supreme mission to reconcile all men to God was the key-note of all His ministry. By His teaching the hearts of men are lifted up above all earthly conceptions to the worship of infinite purity, and to the comforting assurance of more than a father's care and love. Buddhism, on the contrary, knows nothing of God, offers no heavenly incentive, no divine help. Leading scholars are agreed that, whatever it may be now, the original orthodox Buddhism was essentially atheistic. It despised the idea of divine help, and taught men to rely upon themselves. While, therefore, Buddhism never rose above the level of earthly resources, and contemplated only lower orders of being, Christianity begins with God as supreme, to be worshipped and loved with all the heart, mind, and strength, while our neighbors are to be loved as ourselves. 2. Christ represented Himself as having pre-existed from the foundation of the world, as having been equal with God in the glory of heaven, all of which He resigned that He might enter upon the humiliation of our earthly state, and raise us up to eternal life. He distinctly claimed oneness and equality with the Father. Buddha claimed no such antecedent glory; he spoke of himself as a man merely; the whole aim of his teaching was to show in himself what every man might accomplish. Later legends ascribe to him a sort of pre-existence, in which five hundred and thirty successive lives were passed, sometimes as a man, sometimes as a god, many times as an animal. But even these claims were not made by Buddha himself--except so far as was implied by the common doctrine of transmigration. Furthermore, in relation to the alleged pre-existences, according to strict Buddhist doctrine it was not really he who had gone before, it was only a Kharma or character that had exchanged hands many times before it could be taken up by the real and conscious Buddha born upon the earth. Still further, even after the beginning of his earthly life he lived for many years in what, according to his own teaching, was heinous sin, all of which is fatal to the theory of pre-existent holiness. 3. Christ is a real Saviour; His atonement claimed to be a complete ransom from the penalty of sin, and by His teaching and example, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, He overcomes the power of sin itself, transforming the soul into His own image. Buddha, on the other hand, did not claim to achieve salvation for any except himself, though Mr. Arnold and others constantly use such terms as "help" and "salvation." Nothing of the kind is claimed by the early Buddhist doctrines; they plainly declare that purity and impurity belong to one's self, and that no one can purify another. 4. Christ emphatically declared Himself a helper, even in this life: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He promised also to send his Spirit as a comforter, as a supporter of his disciples' faith, as a guide and teacher, at all times caring for their need; in whatever exigency his grace would be sufficient for them. On the contrary, Buddha taught his followers that no power in heaven or earth could help them; the victory must be their own. "How can we hope to amend a life," says Bishop Carpenter, "which is radically bad, by the aid of a system which teaches that man's highest aim should be to escape from life? All that has been said against the ascetic and non-worldly attitude of Christianity might be urged with additional force against Buddhism. It is full of the strong, sweet, pathetic compassion which looks upon life with eyes full of tears, but only to turn them away from it again, as from an unsolved and insoluble riddle." And he substantiates his position by quoting Réville and Oldenberg. Réville reaches this similar conclusion: "Buddhism, born on the domain of polytheism, has fought against it, not by rising above nature in subordinating it to a single sovereign spirit, but by reproving nature in principle, and condemning life itself as an evil and a misfortune. Buddhism does not measure itself against this or that abuse, does not further the development or reformation of society, either directly or indirectly, for the very simple reason that it turns away from the world on principle." Oldenberg, one of the most thorough of Pali scholars, says: "For the lower order of the people, for those born to toil in manual labor, hardened by the struggle for existence, the announcement of the connection of misery with all forms of existence was not made, nor was the dialectic of the law of the painful concatenation of causes and effects calculated to satisfy 'the poor in spirit.' 'To the wise belongeth this law,' it is said, 'not to the foolish.' Very unlike the work of that Man who 'suffered little children to come unto Him, for of such is the kingdom of God.' For children, and those who are like children, the arms of Buddha are not opened." 5. Christ and his disciples set before men the highest motives of life. The great end of man was to love God supremely, and one's neighbor as himself. Every true disciple was to consider himself an almoner and dispenser of the divine goodness to his race. It was this that inspired the sublime devotion of Paul and of thousands since his time. It is the secret principle of all the noblest deeds of men. Gautama had no such high and unselfish aim. He found no inspiring motive above the level of humanity. His system concentrates all thought and effort on one's own life--virtually on the attainment of utter indifference to all things else. The early zeal of Gautama and his followers in preaching to their fellow-men was inconsistent with the plain doctrines taught at a later day. If in any case there were those who, like Paul, burned with desire to save their fellow-men, all we can say is, they were better than their creed. Such was the spirit of the Gospel, rather than the idle and useless torpor of the Buddhist order. "Here, according to Buddhists," says Spence Hardy, "is a mere code of proprieties, an occasional opiate, a plan for being free from discomfort, a system for personal profit." Buddhism certainly taught the repression of human activity and influence. Instead of saying, "Let your light so shine before men that they, seeing your good works, may glorify your Father who is in heaven," or "Work while the day lasts," it said, "If thou keepest thyself silent as a broken gong, thou hast attained Nirvana." "To wander about like the rhinoceros alone," was enjoined as the pathway of true wisdom. 6. Christ taught that life, though attended with fearful alternatives, is a glorious birthright, with boundless possibilities and promise of good to ourselves and others. Buddhism makes life an evil which it is the supreme end of man to conquer and cut off from the disaster of re-birth. Christianity opens a path of usefulness, holiness, and happiness in this life, and a career of triumph and glory in the endless ages to come. Both Buddhism and Hinduism are worse than other pessimistic systems in their fearful law of entailment through countless transmigrations, each of which must be a struggle. 7. Christ, according to the New Testament, "ever liveth to make intercession for us," and the Holy Spirit represents Him constantly as an ever-living power in the world, to regenerate, save, and bless. But Buddha is dead, and his very existence is a thing of the past. Only traditions and the influence of his example can help men in the struggle of life. Said Buddha to his disciples: "As a flame blown by violence goes out and cannot be reckoned, even so a Buddha delivered from name and body disappears and cannot be reckoned as existing." Again, he said to his Order, "Mendicants, that which binds the Teacher (himself) is cut off, but his body still remains. While this body shall remain he will be seen by gods and men, but after the termination of life, upon the dissolution of the body, neither gods nor men shall see him." 8. Christ taught the sacredness of the human body. "Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?" said His great Apostle. But Buddhism says: "As men deposit filth upon a dungheap and depart regretting nothing, wanting nothing, so will I depart leaving this body filled with vile vapors." Christ and His disciples taught the triumphant resurrection of the body in spiritual form and purity after His own image. The Buddhist forsakes utterly and forever the deserted, cast-off mortality, while still he looks only for another habitation equally mortal and corruptible, and possibly that of a lower animal. Thus, through all these lines of contrast, and many others that might be named, there appear light and life and blessedness on the one hand, and gloom and desolation on the other. The gloomy nature of Buddhism is well expressed in Hardy's "Legends and Theories of Buddhism" as follows: "The system of Buddhism is humiliating, cheerless, man-marring, soul-crushing. It tells me that I am not a reality, that I have no soul. It tells me that there is no unalloyed happiness, no plenitude of enjoyment, no perfect unbroken peace in the possession of any being whatever, from the highest to the lowest, in any world. It tells me that I may live myriads of millions of ages, and that not in any of those ages, nor in any portion of any age, can I be free from apprehension as to the future, until I attain to a state of unconsciousness; and that in order to arrive at this consummation I must turn away from all that is pleasant, or lovely, or instructive, or elevating, or sublime. It tells me by voices ever repeated, like the ceaseless sound of the sea-wave on the shore, that I shall be subject to sorrow, impermanence, and unreality so long as I exist, and yet that I cannot cease to exist, nor for countless ages to come, as I can only attain nirvana in the time of a Supreme Buddha. In my distress I ask for the sympathy of an all-wise and all-powerful friend. But I am mocked instead by the semblance of relief, and am told to look to Buddha, who has ceased to exist; to the Dharma that never was in existence, and to the Sangha, the members of which are real existences, but like myself are partakers of sorrow and sin." How shall we measure the contrast between all this and the ecstacies of Christian hope, which in various forms are expressed in the Epistles of Paul; the expected crown of righteousness, the eternal weight of glory; heirship with Christ in an endless inheritance; the house not made with hands; the General Assembly of the first born? Even in the midst of earthly sorrows and persecutions he could say, "Nay, in all things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 80: It is by no means certain that Buddha's followers, in carrying out his system, have not lapsed into the old notions of merit-making asceticism to greater or less extent, and have become virtually very much like the torpid and useless fakirs of the old Hinduism.] [Footnote 81: The _Jataka_ legends of Ceylon, dating in their present form about 500 A.D., greatly enlarge the proportions of this Northern legend, making the elephant over seven thousand miles high, and widening out the surrounding army to one hundred and sixty four miles.] [Footnote 82: Of the _Romantic Legend_ found in Nepaul, Beall's translation is probably the best.] [Footnote 83: See Appendix of _Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated in Buddhism_.] [Footnote 84: See _Buddhism_, pp. 110-115.] [Footnote 85: _Buddhism_, p. 114.] [Footnote 86: Pp. 265-285.] [Footnote 87: It is the boast of the author of _Esoteric Buddhism_, that strange mixture of Western spiritualism with Oriental mysticism, that his system despises the tame "goody, goody" spirit of Christianity, and deals with the endless growth of mind.] [Footnote 88: _Light of Asia_.] [Footnote 89: Mr. Sinnett, in his _Esoteric Buddhism_, expressed the idea that it was high time that the crudities of spiritualism should be corrected by the more philosophic occultism of the East.] [Footnote 90: The points of contact between Buddhism and certain forms of Western thought have been ably treated by Professor S.H. Kellogg, in the _Light of Asia and Light of the World_.] [Footnote 91: A recent tract has appeared, entitled _Theosophy the Religion of Jesus_.] [Footnote 92: Cited by Professor Kellogg.] [Footnote 93: Professor T.W. Rhys Davids, in his introduction to _Buddhism_, enumerates the following sources of knowledge concerning the early Buddhism: 1. The _Lalita Vistara_, a Sanscrit work of the Northern Buddhists "full of extravagant fictions" concerning the early portion of Gautama's life. Davids compares it to Milton's _Paradise Regained_, as a source of history, and claims that although parts of it were translated into Chinese in the first century of our era, there is no proof of its existence in its present form earlier than the sixth century A.D. 2. Two Thibetan versions, based chiefly on the _Lalita Vistara_. 3. The _Romantic Legend_, from the Sanscrit of the Northern Buddhists, translated into Chinese in the sixth century A.D.; English version by Beal published in 1875. This also is an extravagant poem. This and the _Lalita Vistara_ embrace most of the alleged parallels to the Life of Christ. 4. The original Pali text of the _Commentary on the Jatakas_, written in Ceylon probably about the fifth century of our era. Davids considers its account down to the time of Gautama's return to Kapilavastu, "the best authority we have." It contains word for word almost the whole of the life of Gautama given by Turnour, from a commentary on the _Buddhavansa_, "which is the account of the Buddhas contained in the second Pitaka." 5. An account taken by Spence Hardy from Cingalese books of a comparatively modern date. 6. An English translation by Bigandet of a Burmese account, which was itself a translation of unknown date made from a Pali version. 7. An account of the death of Gautama, given in Pali and said to be the oldest of all the sources. It is full of wonders created by the fancy of the unknown author, but differs widely from the fancy sketches of the _Lalita Vistara_ of the North. 8. A translation by Mr. Alabaster of a Siamese account. It does not claim to be exact.] [Footnote 94: T.W. Rhys Davids illustrates the worthlessness of poetic narrations as grounds of argument by quoting from Milton's _Paradise Regained_ this mere fancy sketch of the accompaniments of Christ's temptation: "And either tropic now 'Gan thunder and both ends of heaven; the clouds From many a horrid rift abortive poured Fierce rain with lightning mixed, water with fire In ruin reconciled; nor slept the winds Within their stony caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the vex'd wilderness; whose tallest pines Tho' rooted deep as high and sturdiest oaks, Bowed their stiff necks, loaden with stormy blasts Or torn up sheer. Ill wast Thou shrouded then, O patient Son of God, yet stood'st alone Unshaken! nor yet staid the terror there; Infernal ghosts and hellish furies round Environed Thee; some howl'd, some yell'd, some shriek'd, Some bent at Thee their fiery darts, while Thou Sat'st unappall'd in calm and sinless peace." Book iv.] [Footnote 95: See _National Religion and Universal Religion_, p. 362.] [Footnote 96: _Hibbert Lectures_, 1882.] LECTURE VI. MOHAMMEDANISM PAST AND PRESENT It has been the fate of every great religious teacher to have his memory enveloped in a haze of posthumous myths. Even the Gospel history was embellished with marvellous apocryphal legends of the childhood of Christ. Buddhism very soon began to be overgrown with a truly Indian luxuriance of fables, miracles, and pre-existent histories extending through five hundred past transmigrations. In like manner, the followers of Mohammed traced the history of their prophet and of their sacred city back to the time of Adam. And Mohammedan legends were not a slow and natural growth, as in the case of most other faiths. There was a set purpose in producing them without much delay. The conquests of Islam over the Eastern empires had been very rapid. The success of Mohammed's cause and creed had exceeded the expectations of his most sanguine followers. In the first half of the seventh century--nay, between the years 630 and 638 A.D.--Jerusalem, Damascus, and Aleppo had fallen before the arms of Omar and his lieutenant "Khaled the Invincible," and in 639 Egypt was added to the realm of the Khalifs. Persia was conquered in A.D. 640. It seemed scarcely possible that achievements so brilliant could have been the work of a mere unlettered Arab and his brave but unpretentious successors. The personnel of the prophet must be raised to an adequate proportion to such a history. Special requisition was made therefore for incidents. The devout fancy of the faithful was taxed for the picturesque and marvellous; and the system which Mohammed taught, and the very place in which he was born, must needs be raised to a supernatural dignity and importance. Accordingly, the history of the prophet was traced back to the creation of the world, when God was said to have imparted to a certain small portion of earthy dust a mysterious spark of light. When Adam was formed this particular luminous dust appeared in his forehead, and from him it passed in a direct line to Abraham. From Abraham it descended, not to Isaac, but to Ishmael; and this was the cause of Sarah's jealousy and the secret of all Abraham's domestic troubles. Of course, this bright spark of heavenly effulgence reappearing on the brow of each lineal progenitor, was designed ultimately for Mohammed, in whom it shone forth with tenfold brightness. There is real historic evidence of the fact that the Vale of Mecca had for a long time been regarded as sacred ground. It was a sort of forest or extensive grove, a place for holding treaties among the tribes, a common ground of truce and a refuge from the avenger. It was also a place for holding annual fairs, for public harangues, and the competitive recitation of ballads and other poems. But all this, however creditable to the culture of the Arab tribes, was not sufficient for the purposes of Islam. The Kaaba, which had been a rude heathen temple, was raised to the dignity of a shrine of the true God, or rather it was restored, for it was said to have been built by Adam after a divine pattern. The story was this: At the time of the Fall, Adam and Eve had somehow become separated. Adam had wandered away to Ceylon, where a mountain peak still bears his name. But having been divinely summoned to Mecca to erect this first of earthly temples, he unexpectedly found Eve residing upon a hill near the city, and thenceforward the Valley of Mecca became their paradise regained. At the time of the Deluge the Kaaba was buried in mud, and for centuries afterward it was overgrown with trees. When Hagar and her son Ishmael were driven out from the household of Abraham, they wandered by chance to this very spot, desolate and forsaken. While Hagar was diligently searching for water, more anxious to save the life of her son than her own, Ishmael, boy-like, sat poking the sand with his heel; when, behold, a spring of water bubbled up in his footprint. And this was none other than the sacred well Zemzem, whose brackish waters are still eagerly sought by every Moslem pilgrim. As Ishmael grew to manhood and established his home in the sacred city, Abraham was summoned to join him, that they together might rebuild the Kaaba. But in the succeeding generations apostacy again brought ruin upon the place, although the heathen Koreish still performed sacred rites there--especially that of sevenfold processions around the sacred stone. This blackened object, supposed to be an aërolite which fell ages ago, is still regarded as sacred, and the sevenfold circuits of Mohammedan pilgrims take the place of the ancient heathen rites. Laying aside these crude legends, and confining our attention to probable history, I can only hope, in the compass of a single lecture, to barely touch upon a series of prominent points without any very careful regard to logical order. This will perhaps insure the greatest clearness as well as the best economy of time. And first, we will glance at the personal history of Mohammed--a history, it should be remembered, which was not committed to writing till two hundred years after the prophet's death, and which depends wholly on the enthusiastic traditions of his followers. Born in the year 561 A.D., of a recently widowed mother, he appears to have been from the first a victim of epilepsy, or some kindred affection whose paroxysms had much to do with his subsequent experiences and his success. The various tribes of Arabia were mostly given to a form of polytheistic idolatry in which, however, the conception of a monotheistic supremacy was still recognized. Most scholars, including Renan, insist on ascribing to the Arabians, in common with all other Shemitic races, a worship of one God as Supreme, though the Arabian Allah, like the Baal of Canaan and Phoenicia, was supposed to be attended by numerous inferior deities. Though Islam undoubtedly borrowed the staple of its truths from the Old Testament, yet there was a short confession strikingly resembling the modern creed of to-day, which had been upon the lips of many generations of Arabians before Mohammed's time. Thus it ran: "I dedicate myself to thy service, O Allah. Thou hast no companion except the companion of whom thou art master and of whatever is his." A society known as the "Hanifs" existed at the time of Mohammed's early manhood, and we know not how long before, whose aim was to bring back their countrymen from the degrading worship and cruel practices of heathenism to the purity of monotheistic worship. The old faith had been reinforced in the minds of the more intelligent Arabs by the truths learned from Jewish exiles, who, as early as the Babylonish captivity, had found refuge in Arabia; and it is a striking fact that the four Hanif leaders whom the young Mohammed found on joining their society, were pleading for the restoration of the faith of Abraham. All these leaders refused to follow his standard when he began to claim supremacy as a prophet; three of them were finally led to Christianity, and the fourth died in a sort of quandary between the Christian faith and Islam. The first two, Waraka and Othman, were cousins of Mohammed's wife, and the third, Obadulla, was his own cousin. Zaid, the last of the four, presents to us a very pathetic picture. He lived and died in perplexity. Banished from Mecca by those who feared his conscientious censorship, he lived by himself on a neighboring hillside, an earnest seeker after truth to the last; and he died with the prayer on his lips, "O God, if I knew what form of worship is most pleasing to thee, so would I serve thee, but I know it not." It is to the credit of Mohammed that he cherished a profound respect for this man. "I will pray for him," he said; "in the Resurrection he also will gather a church around him."[97] In spite of his maladies and the general delicacy of his nervous organization, Mohammed evinced in early youth a degree of energy and intellectual capacity which augured well for his future success in some important sphere. Fortune also favored him in many ways. His success as manager of the commercial caravans of a wealthy widow led to his acceptance as her husband. She was fourteen years his senior, but she seems to have entirely won his affections and to have proved indispensable, not only as a patroness, but as a wise and faithful counsellor. So long as she lived she was the good spirit who called forth his better nature, and kept him from those low impulses which subsequently wrought the ruin of his character, even in the midst of his successes. On the one hand, it is an argument in favor of the sincerity of Mohammed's prophetic claims, that this good and true woman was the first to believe in him as a prophet of God; but, on the other hand, we must remember that she was a loving wife, and that that charity which thinketh no evil is sometimes utterly blind to evil when found in this tender relation. We have no reason to doubt that Mohammed was a sincere "Hanif." Having means and leisure for study, and being of a bright and thoughtful mind, he doubtless entered with enthusiasm into the work of reforming the idolatrous customs of his countrymen. From this high standpoint, and free from superstitious fear of a heathen priesthood, he was prepared to estimate in their true enormity the degrading rites which he everywhere witnessed under the abused name of religion. That hatred of idolatry which became the main spring of his subsequent success, was thus nourished and strengthened as an honest and abiding sentiment. He was, moreover, of a contemplative--we may say, of a religious--turn of mind. His maladies gave him a tinge of melancholy, and, like the Buddha, he showed a characteristic thoughtfulness bordering upon the morbid. Becoming more and more a reformer, he followed the example of many other reformers by withdrawing at stated times to a place of solitude for meditation; at least such is the statement of his followers, though there are evidences that he took his family with him, and that he may have been seeking refuge from the heat. However this may have been, the place chosen was a neighboring cave, in whose cool shade he not only spent the heated hours of the day, but sometimes a succession of days and nights. Perhaps the confinement increased the violence of his convulsions, and the vividness and power of the strange phantasmagorias which during his paroxysms passed through his mind. It was from one of these terrible attacks that his alleged call to the prophetic office was dated. The prevailing theories of his time ascribed all such experiences to the influence of supernatural spirits, either good or evil, and the sufferer was left to the alternative of assuming either that he had received messages from heaven, or that he had been a victim of the devil. After a night of greater suffering and more thrilling visions than he had ever experienced before, Mohammed chose the more favorable interpretation, and announced to his sympathizing wife Kadijah that he had received from Gabriel a solemn call to become the Prophet of God. There has been endless discussion as to how far he may have been self-deceived in making this claim, and how far he may have been guilty of conscious imposture. Speculation is useless, since on the one hand we cannot judge a man of that age and that race by the rigid standards of our own times; and on the other, we are forbidden to form a too favorable judgment by the subsequent developments of Mohammed's character and life, in regard to which no other interpretation than that of conscious fraud seems possible.[98] Aside from the previous development and influence of a monotheistic reform, and the favoring circumstance of a fortunate marriage, he found his way prepared by the truths which had been made known in Arabia by both Jews and Christians. The Jews had fled to the Arabian Peninsula from the various conquerors who had laid waste Jerusalem and overrun the territories of the Ten Tribes. At a later day, many Christians had also found an asylum there from the persecutions of hostile bishops and emperors. Sir William Muir has shown how largely the teachings of the Koran are grounded upon those of the Old and New Testaments.[99] All that is best in Mohammedanism is clearly borrowed from Judaism and Christianity. Mohammed was illiterate and never claimed originality. Indeed, he plead his illiteracy as a proof of direct inspiration. A far better explanation would be found in the knowledge derived from inspired records, penned long before and under different names. The prophet was fortunate not only in the possession of truths thus indirectly received, but in the fact that both Jews and Christians had lapsed from a fair representation of the creeds which they professed. The Jews in Arabia had lost the true spirit of their sacred scriptures, and were following their own perverted traditions rather than the oracles of God. They had lost the vitality and power of the truths revealed to their fathers, and were destitute of moral earnestness and all spiritual life. On the other hand, the Christian sects had fallen into low superstitions and virtual idolatry. The Trinity, as they represented it, gave to Mohammed the impression that the Virgin Mary, "Mother of God," was one of the three persons of the Trinity, and that the promise of the coming Paraclete might very plausibly be appropriated by himself.[100] The prevailing worship of pictures, images, and relics appeared in his vision as truly idolatrous as the polytheism of the heathen Koreish. It was clear to him that there was a call for some zealous iconoclast to rise up and deliver his country from idolatry. The whole situation seemed auspicious. Arabia was ripe for a sweeping reformation. It appears strange to us, at this late day, that the churches of Christendom, even down to the seventh century, should have failed to christianize Arabia, though they had carried the Gospel even to Spain and to Britain on the west, and to India and China on the east. If they had imagined that the deserts of the Peninsula were not sufficiently important to demand attention, they certainly learned their mistake; for now the sad day of reckoning had come, when swarms of fanatics should issue from those deserts like locusts, and overrun their Christian communities, humble their bishops, appropriate their sacred temples, and reduce their despairing people to the alternatives of apostacy, tribute, slavery, or the sword. It seems equally strange that the great empires which had carried their conquests so far on every hand had neglected to conquer Arabia. It was, indeed, comparatively isolated; it certainly did not lie in the common paths of the conquerors; doubtless it appeared barren, and by no means a tempting prize; and withal it was a difficult field for a successful campaign. But from whatever reason, the tribes of Arabia had never been conquered. Various expeditions had won temporary successes, but the proud Arab could boast that his country had never been brought into permanent subjection.[101] Meanwhile the heredity of a thousand years had strengthened the valor of the Arab warrior. He was accustomed to the saddle from his very infancy; he was almost a part of his horse. He was trained to the use of arms as a robber, when not engaged in tribal wars. His whole activity, his all-absorbing interest, was in hostile forays. He knew no fear; he had no scruples. He had been taught to feel that, as a son of Ishmael every man's hand was turned against him, and of simple right his hand might be turned against every man. Nor was this all. The surrounding nations, east and west, had long been accustomed to employ these sons of the desert as mercenary soldiers. They had all had a hand in training them for their terrible work, by imparting to them a knowledge of their respective countries, their resources, their modes of warfare, and their points of weakness. How many nations have thus paved the way to their own destruction by calling in allies, who finally became their masters![102] On Mohammed's part, there is no evidence that at the outset he contemplated a military career. At first a reformer, then a prophet, he was driven to arms in self-defence against his persecutors, and he was fortunate in being able to profit by a certain jealousy which existed between the rival cities of Mecca and Medina. Fleeing from Mecca with only one follower, Abu Bekr, leaving the faithful Ali to arrange his affairs while he and his companion were hidden in a cave, he found on reaching Medina a more favorable reception. He soon gathered a following, which enabled him to gain a truce from the Meccans for ten years; and when they on their part violated the truce, he was able to march upon their city with a force which defied all possible resistance, and he entered Mecca in triumph. Medina had been won partly by the supposed credentials of the prophet, but mainly by jealousy of the rival city. Mecca yielded to a superior force of arms, but in the end became the honored capital and shrine of Islam. From this time the career of Mohammed was wholly changed. He was now an ambitious conqueror, and here as before, the question how far he may have sincerely interpreted his remarkable fortune as a call of God to subdue the idolatrous nations, must remain for the present unsettled. Possibly further light may be thrown upon it as we proceed. Let us consider some of the changes which appear in the development of this man's character. If we set out with that high ideal which would seem to be demanded as a characteristic of a great religious teacher, and certainly of one claiming to be a prophet of God, we ought to expect that his character would steadily improve in all purity, humanity, truthfulness, charity, and godlikeness. The test of character lies in its trend. If the founder of a religion has not grown nobler and better under the operation of his own system, that fact is the strongest possible condemnation of the system. A good man generally feels that he can afford to be magnanimous and pitiful in proportion to his victories and his success. But Mohammed became relentless as his power increased. He had at first endeavored to win the Arabian Jews to his standard. He had adopted their prophets and much of the Old Testament teachings; he had insisted upon the virtual identity of the two religions. But having failed in his overtures, and meanwhile having gained superior power, he waged against them the most savage persecution. On one occasion he ordered the massacre of a surrendered garrison of six hundred Jewish soldiers. At another time he put to the most inhuman torture a leader who had opposed his cause; in repeated instances he instigated the crime of assassination.[103] In early life he had been engaged in a peaceful caravan trade, and all his influence had been cast in favor of universal security as against the predatory habits of the heathen Arabs; but on coming to power he himself resorted to robbery to enrich his exchequer. Sales mentions twenty-seven of these predatory expeditions against caravans, in which Mohammed was personally present.[104] The biographers of his early life represent him as a man of a natural kindness of disposition, and a sensitive temperament almost bordering on timidity. Though not particularly genial, he was fond of children, and had at first, as his recorded utterances show, frequent impulses of pity and magnanimity. But he became hardened as success crowned his career. The temperateness which characterized his early pleadings and remonstrances with those who differed from him, gave place to bitter anathemas; and there was rooted in his personal character that relentless bigotry which has been the key-note of the most intolerant system known upon the earth. A still more marked change occurred in the increasing sensuality of Mohammed. Such lenient apologists as E. Bosworth Smith and Canon Taylor have applied their most skilful upholstery to the defects of his scandalous morals. Mr. Smith has even undertaken to palliate his appropriation of another man's wife, and the blasphemy of his pretended revelation in which he made God justify his passion.[105] These authors base their chief apologies upon comparisons between Mohammed and the worse depravity of the heathen Arabs, or they balance accounts with some of his acknowledged virtues. But the case baffles all such advocacy. The real question is, what was the _drift_ of the prophet's character? What was the influence of his professed principles on his own life? It cannot be denied that his moral trend was downward. If we credit the traditions of his own followers, he had lived a virtuous life as the husband of one wife,[106] and that for many years. But after the death of Kadijah he entered upon a career of polygamy in violation of his own law. He had fixed the limit for all Moslems at four lawful wives; and in spite of the arguments of R. Bosworth Smith, we must regard it as a most damning after-thought that made the first and only exception to accommodate his own weakness. By that act he placed himself beyond the help of all sophistry, and took his true place in the sober judgment of mankind. And by a law which is as unerring as the law of gravitation, he became more and more sensual as age advanced. At the time of his death he was the husband of eleven wives. We are not favored with a list of his concubines:[107] we only know that his system placed no limit upon the number.[108] Now, if a prophet claiming direct inspiration could break his own inspired laws for his personal accommodation; if, when found guilty of adultery, he could compel his friend and follower to divorce his wife that he might take her; if upon each violation of purity and decency he did not shrink from the blasphemy of claiming a special revelation which made God the abettor of his vices, and even represented Him as reproving and threatening his wives for their just complaints--if all this does not stamp a man as a reckless impostor, what further turpitude is required? At the same time it is evident that constant discrimination is demanded in judging of the character of Mohammed. It is not necessary to assume that he was wholly depraved at first, or to deny that for a time he was the good husband that he is represented to have been, or that he was a sincere and enthusiastic reformer, or even that he may have interpreted some of his _early_ hallucinations as mysterious messages from heaven. At various times in his life he doubtless displayed noble sentiments and performed generous acts. But when we find him dictating divine communications with deliberate purpose for the most villainous objects, when we find the messages of Gabriel timed and graded to suit the exigencies of his growing ambition, or the demands of his worst passions, we are forced to a preponderating condemnation. The Mohammed of the later years is a remorseless tyrant when occasion requires, and at all times the slave of unbridled lust. Refined and cultivated Mohammedan ladies--I speak from testimony that is very direct--do not hesitate to condemn the degrading morals of their prophet, and to contrast him with the spotless purity of Jesus; "but then," they add, "God used him for a great purpose, and gave him the most exalted honor among men." Alas! it is the old argument so often employed in many lands. Success, great intellect, grand achievements gild all moral deformity, and win the connivance of dazzled minds. In this case, however, it is not a hero or a statesman, but an alleged prophet of God, that is on trial. It is a question difficult to decide, how far Mohammed made Mohammedanism, and how far the system moulded him. The action of cause and effect was mutual, and under this interaction both the character and the system were slow growths. The Koran was composed in detached fragments suited to different stages of development, different degrees and kinds of success, different demands of personal impulse or changes of conduct. The Suras, without any claim to logical connection, were written down by an amanuensis on bits of parchment, or pieces of wood or leather, and even on the shoulder-bones of sheep. And they were each the expression of Mohammed's particular mood at the time, and each entered in some degree into his character from that time forth. The man and the book grew together, the system, through all its history, fairly represents the example of the man and the teaching of the book. Let us next consider the historic character and influence of the system of Islam. In forming just conclusions as to the real influence of Mohammedanism, a judicial fairness is necessary. In the first place, we must guard against the hasty and sweeping judgments which are too often indulged in by zealous Christians; and on the other hand, we must certainly challenge the exaggerated statements of enthusiastic apologists. It is erroneous to assert that Islam has never encouraged education, that it has invariably been adverse to all progress, that it knows nothing but the Koran, or that Omar, in ordering the destruction of the Alexandrian library, is the only historical exponent of the system. Such statements are full of partial truths, but they are also mingled with patent errors. The Arab races in their original home were naturally inclined to the encouragement of letters, particularly of poetry, and Mohammed himself, though he had never been taught even to read, much less to write, took special pains to encourage learning. "Teach your children poetry," he said; "it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom, and makes the heroic virtues hereditary."[109] According to Sprenger, he gave liberty to every prisoner who taught twelve boys of Mecca to write. The Abbasside princes of a later day offered most generous prizes for superior excellence in poetry, and Bagdad, Damascus, Alexandria, Bassora, and Samarcand were noted for their universities.[110] Cordova and Seville were able to lend their light to the infant university of Oxford. The fine arts of sculpture and painting were condemned by the early caliphs, doubtless on account of the idolatrous tendencies which they were supposed to foster; but medicine, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy were especially developed, and that at a time when the nations of Europe were mostly in darkness.[111] Yet it cannot be denied that on the whole the influence of Islam has been hostile to learning and to civilization.[112] The world will never forget that by the burning of the great library of Alexandria the rich legacy which the old world had bequeathed to the new was destroyed. By its occupation of Egypt and Constantinople, and thus cutting off the most important channels of communication, the Mohammedan power became largely responsible for the long eclipse of Europe during the Middle Ages. Moreover, when zealous advocates of the system contrast the barbarism of Richard Coeur de Lion with the culture and humanity of Saladin, they seem to forget that the race of Richard had but just emerged from the savagery of the Northmen, while Saladin and his race had not only inherited the high moral culture of Judaism and Christianity, but had virtually monopolized it. It was chiefly by the wars of the Crusaders that Western Europe became acquainted with the civilization of the Orient. Instead of ignoring the advantages which the East had over the West at that period, it would be more just to inquire what comparative improvements of their respective opportunities have been made by Western Christianity and Eastern Mohammedanism since that time. It would be an interesting task, for example, to start with the period of Saladin and Coeur de Lion, and impartially trace on the one hand the influence of Christianity as it moulded the savage conquerors of the Roman Empire, and from such rude materials built up the great Christian nations of the nineteenth century; and on the other hand, follow the banner of the Crescent through all the lands where it has borne sway: Persia, Arabia, Northern India, Egypt, the Barbary States, East Africa, and the Soudan, and then draw an unbiased conclusion as to which system, as a system, has done more to spread general enlightenment, foster the sentiments of kindness and philanthropy, promote human liberty, advance civilization, increase and elevate populations, promote the purity and happiness of the family and the home, and raise the standards of ethics and true religion among mankind.[113] One of the brilliant dynasties of Mohammedan history was that of the Moors of Spain. We can never cease to admire their encouragement of arts and their beautiful architecture, but is it quite certain that all this was a direct fruit of Islam? The suggestion that it may have been partly due to contact with the Gothic elements which the Moors vanquished, finds support in the fact that nothing of the kind appeared on the opposite coast of Africa. And while the Mohammedan Empire in India has left the most exquisite architectural structures in the world, it is well known that they were the work of European architects. But in considering the influence which Islam has exerted on the whole, lack of time compels me to limit our survey to Africa, except as other lands may be referred to incidentally.[114] That the first African conquests, extending from Egypt to Morocco, were simple warlike invasions in which the sword was the only instrument of propagandism, no one will deny. But it is contended that in later centuries a great work has been accomplished in Western Soudan, and is still being accomplished, by missionary effort and the general advance of a wholesome civilization. Any fair estimate of Mohammedan influence must take account of the elements which it found in Northern Africa at the time of its conquests. The states which border on the Mediterranean had once been powerful and comparatively enlightened. They had been populous and prosperous. The Phoenician colony in Carthage had grown to be no mean rival of Rome's military power. Egypt had been a great centre of learning, not only in the most ancient times, but especially after the building of Alexandria. More western lands, like Numidia and Mauritania, had been peopled by noble races. After the introduction of Christianity, Alexandria became the bright focus into which the religions and philosophies of the world poured their concentrated light. Some of the greatest of the Christian fathers, like Augustine, Tertullian, and Cyprian, were Africans. The foundations of Latin Christianity were laid by these men. The Bishopric of Hippo was a model for all time in deep and intelligent devotion. The grace and strength, the sublime and all-conquering faith of Monica, and others like her, furnished a pattern for all Christian womanhood and motherhood. I do not forget that before the time of the Mohammedan invasion the Vandals had done their work of devastation, or that the African Church had been woefully weakened and rent by wild heresies and schisms, or that the defection of the Monophysite or Coptic Church of Egypt was one of the influences which facilitated the Mohammedan success. But making due allowance for all this, vandalism and schism could not have destroyed so soon the ancient civilization or sapped the strength of the North African races. The process which has permanently reduced so many once populous cities and villages to deserts, and left large portions of the Barbary States with only the moldering ruins of their former greatness, has been a gradual one. For centuries after the Arab conquest those states were virtually shut off from communication with Europe, and for at least three centuries more, say from 1500 down to the generation which immediately preceded our own, they were known chiefly by the piracies which they carried on against the commerce of all maritime nations. Even the Government of the United States was compelled to pay a million of dollars for the ransom of captured American seamen, and it paid it not to private corsairs, but to the Mohammedan governments by which those piracies were subsidized, as a means of supplying the public exchequer. These large amounts were recovered only when our navy, in co-operation with that of England, extirpated the Riff piracies by bombarding the Moslem ports. The vaunted civilizations of the North African states would have been supported by wholesale marauding to this day, had not their piratical fleets been thus summarily swept from the seas by other powers. If Egypt has shown a higher degree of advancement it has been due to her peculiar geographical position, to the inexhaustible fertility of the Delta, and, most of all, to the infusion of foreign life and energy into the management of her affairs. Ambitious adventurers, like the Albanian Mehamet Ali, have risen to power and have made Egypt what she is, or rather what she was before the more recent intervention of the European powers. Even Canon Taylor admits that for centuries it has been necessary to import more vigorous foreign blood for the administration of Egyptian affairs.[115] It will be admitted that Mohammedan conquests have been made in mediæval times, and down to our own age, in Central Africa, and that along the southern borders of Sahara a cordon of more or less prosperous states has been established; also, that the civilization of those states contrasts favorably with the savagery of the cannibal tribes with which they have come in contact. Probably the best--that is to say, the least objectionable--exemplifications of Islam now to be found in the world are seen in some of the older states of Western Soudan. The Mandingo of the central uplands furnished a better material than the "unspeakable Turk," and it would not be quite fair to ascribe all his present virtues to the Moslem rule. But _how_ have these conquests in Central Africa been made? The contention of the apologists for Islam is that recently, at least, and probably more or less in the past, a quiet missionary work has greatly extended monotheism, temperance, education, and general comfort, and that it has done more than all other influences for the permanent extinction of the slave trade! Dr. E.W. Blyden, in answer to the charge that Mohammedan Arabs are now, and long have been, chiefly responsible for the horrors of that trade, and that even when Americans bought slaves for their plantations, Moslem raiders in the interior instigated the tribal quarrels which supplied the markets on the coast, contends that the Moslem conquests do most effectually destroy the trade, since tribes which have become Moslem can no longer be enslaved by Moslems.[116] It is a curious argument, especially as it seems to ignore the fact that at the present time both the supply and the demand depend on Mohammedan influence. As to the means by which the Soudanese States are now extending their power we may content ourselves with a mere reference to the operations of the late "El Mahdi" in the East and the notorious Samadu in the West. Their methods may be accepted as illustrations of a kind of tactics which have been employed for ages. The career of El Mahdi is already well known. Samadu was originally a prisoner, captured while yet a boy in one of the tribal wars near the headwaters of the Niger. Partly by intrigue and partly by the aid of his religious fanaticism he at length became sufficiently powerful to enslave his master. Soon afterward he proclaimed his divine mission, and declared a _Jehad_ or holy war against all infidels. Thousands flocked to his banner, influenced largely by the hope of booty; and ere long, to quote the language of a lay correspondent of the London _Standard_, written in Sierra Leone September 18, 1888, "he became the scourge of all the peaceable states on the right bank of the Upper Niger." Since 1882 he has attempted to dispute the territorial claims of the French on the upper, and of the English on the lower Niger, though without success. But he has seemed to avenge his disappointment the more terribly on the native tribes. The letter published in the _Standard_ gives an account of an official commission sent by the Governor of Sierra Leone to the headquarters of Samadu in 1888, and in describing the track of this Western Mahdi in his approaches to the French territories it says: "The messengers report that every town and village through which they passed was in ruins, and that the road, from the borders of Sulimania to Herimakono, was lined with human skeletons, the remains of unfortunates who had been slain by Samadu's fanatical soldiery, or had perished from starvation through the devastation of the surrounding country. Some of these poor wretches, to judge from the horrible contortions of the skeletons, had been attacked by vultures and beasts of prey while yet alive, and when too near their lingering death to have sufficient strength to beat them off. Around the ruined towns were hundreds of doubled-up skeletons, the remains of prisoners who, bound hand and foot, had been forced upon their knees, and their heads struck off. Keba, the heroic Bambara king, is still resisting bravely, but he has only one stronghold (Siaso) left, and the end cannot now be far off." Samadu's career in this direction having been arrested, he next turned his attention toward the tribes under English protection on the southeast, "where, unfortunately, there was no power to take up the cause of humanity and arrest his progress. Before long he entirely overran and subjected Kouranko, Limbah, Sulimania, Kono, and Kissi. The most horrible atrocities were committed; peaceable agriculturists were slaughted in thousands, and their women and children carried off into slavery. Falaba, the celebrated capital of Sulimania, and the great emporium for trade between Sierra Leone and the Niger, was captured and destroyed; and all the inhabitants of that district, whom every traveller, from Winwood Reade down to Dr. Blyden, has mentioned with praise for their industry and docility, have been exterminated or carried off. Sulimania, which was the garden of West Africa, has now become a howling wilderness." And the writer adds: "The people of the States to the south of Futa Djallon are pagans, and Samadu makes their religion a pretext for his outrages. He is desirous, he says, of converting them to the 'True Faith,' and his modes of persuasion are murder and slavery. What could be more horrible than the story just brought down by the messengers who were with Major Festing? Miles of road strewn with human bones; blackened ruins where were peaceful hamlets; desolation and emptiness where were smiling plantations. What has become of the tens of thousands of peaceful agriculturists, their wives and their innocent children? Gone; converted, after Samadu's manner, to the 'True Faith.' And thus the conversion of West Africa to Islamism goes merrily on, while _dilettante_ scholars at home complacently discuss the question as to whether that faith or Christianity is the more suitable for the Negro; and the British people, dead to their generous instincts of old, make no demand that such deeds of cruelty and horror shall be arrested with a strong hand."[117] Similar accounts of the African _propagandism_ of Islam might be given in the very words of numerous travellers and explorers, but one or two witnesses only shall be summoned to speak of the Mohammedan dominion and civilization in East Africa. Professor Drummond, in giving his impressions of Zanzibar, says: "Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in its morals, a cesspool of wickedness, it is a fit capital to the Dark Continent." And it is the great emporium--not an obscure settlement, but the consummate flower of East African civilization and boasting in the late Sultan Bargash, an unusually enlightened Moslem ruler. Of the interior and the ivory-slave trade pursued under the auspices of Arab dominion the same author says: "Arab encampments for carrying on a wholesale trade in this terrible commodity are now established all over the heart of Africa. They are usually connected with wealthy Arab traders at Zanzibar and other places on the coast, and communication is kept up by caravans, which pass at long intervals from one to the other. Being always large and well-supplied with the material of war, these caravans have at their mercy the feeble and divided native tribes through which they pass, and their trail across the continent is darkened with every aggravation of tyranny and crime. They come upon the scene suddenly; they stay only long enough to secure their end, and disappear only to return when a new crop has arisen which is worth the reaping. Sometimes these Arab traders will actually settle for a year or two in the heart of some quiet community in the remote interior. They pretend perfect friendship; they molest no one; they barter honestly. They plant the seeds of their favorite vegetables and fruits--the Arab always carries seeds with him--as if they meant to stay forever. Meantime they buy ivory, tusk after tusk, until great piles of it are buried beneath their huts, and all their barter goods are gone. Then one day suddenly the inevitable quarrel is picked. And then follows a wholesale massacre. Enough only are spared from the slaughter to carry the ivory to the coast; the grass huts of the village are set on fire; the Arabs strike camp; and the slave march, worse than death, begins. The last act in the drama, the slave march, is the aspect of slavery which in the past has chiefly aroused the passions and the sympathy of the outside world, but the greater evil is the demoralization and disintegration of communities by which it is necessarily preceded. It is essential to the traffic that the region drained by the slaver should be kept in perpetual political ferment; that, in order to prevent combination, chief should be pitted against chief, and that the moment any tribe threatens to assume a dominating strength it should either be broken up by the instigation of rebellion among its dependencies or made a tool of at their expense. The inter-relation of tribes is so intricate that it is impossible to exaggerate the effect of disturbing the equilibrium at even a single centre. But, like a river, a slave caravan has to be fed by innumerable tributaries all along its course, at first in order to gather a sufficient volume of human bodies for the start, and afterward to replace the frightful loss by desertion, disablement, and death." Next to Livingstone, whose last pathetic appeal to the civilized world to "heal the open sore of Africa" stands engraved in marble in Westminster Abbey, no better witness can be summoned in regard to the slave trade and the influence of Islam generally in Eastern and Central Africa than Henry M. Stanley. From the time when he encountered the Mohammedan propagandists at the Court of Uganda he has seen how intimately and vitally the faith and the traffic are everywhere united. I give but a single passage from his "Congo Free State," page 144. "We discovered that this horde of banditti--for in reality and without disguise they were nothing else--was under the leadership of several chiefs, but principally under Karema and Kibunga. They had started sixteen months previously from Wane-Kirundu, about thirty miles below Vinya Njara. For eleven months the band had been raiding successfully between the Congo and the Lubiranzi, on the left bank. They had then undertaken to perform the same cruel work between the Biyerré and Wane-Kirundu. On looking at my map I find that such a territory within the area described would cover superficially 16,200 square geographical miles on the left bank, and 10,500 miles on the right, all of which in statute mileage would be equal to 34,700 square miles, just 2,000 square miles greater than the island of Ireland, inhabited by about 1,000,000 people. "The band when it set out from Kirundu numbered 300 fighting men, armed with flint-locks, double-barrelled percussion guns, and a few breech-loaders; their followers, or domestic slaves and women, doubled this force.... Within the enclosure was a series of low sheds extending many lines deep from the immediate edge of the clay bank inland, 100 yards; in length the camp was about 300 yards. At the landing-place below were 54 long canoes, varying in carrying capacity. Each might convey from 10 to 100 people.... The first general impressions are that the camp is much too densely peopled for comfort. There are rows upon rows of dark nakedness, relieved here and there by the white dresses of the captors. There are lines or groups of naked forms--upright, standing, or moving about listlessly; naked bodies are stretched under the sheds in all positions; naked legs innumerable are seen in the perspective of prostrate sleepers; there are countless naked children--many mere infants--forms of boyhood and girlhood, and occasionally a drove of absolutely naked old women bending under a basket of fuel, or cassava tubers, or bananas, who are driven through the moving groups by two or three musketeers. On paying more attention to details, I observe that mostly all are fettered; youths with iron rings around their necks, through which a chain, like one of our boat anchor-chains, is rove, securing the captives by twenties. The children over ten are secured by these copper rings, each ringed leg brought together by the central ring." By a careful examination of statistics Mr. Stanley estimates that counting the men killed in the raids and those who perish on the march or are slain because supposed to be worthless, every 5,000 slaves actually sold cost over 30,000 lives. But there are Arabs and Arabs we are told. The slave-dealers of East Africa and the barbarous chieftains who push their bloody conquests in Western Soudan are bad enough, it is admitted, but they are "exceptions." Yet we insist that they illustrate the very spirit of Mohammed himself, who authorized the taking of prisoners of war as slaves. Their plea is that they save the souls of those they capture; many of these traders are Mollahs--Pharisees of the Pharisees. Canon Taylor, Dr. Blyden, and others have given us glowing accounts of "Arab missionaries going about without purse or scrip, and disseminating their religion by quietly teaching the Koran;" but the venerable Bishop Crowther, who has spent his whole life in that part of Africa where these conquests are supposed to be made, declares that the real vocation of the quiet apostles of the Koran is that of fetish peddlers.[118] If it be objected that this is the biased testimony of a Christian missionary, it may be backed by the explorer Lander, who, in speaking of this same class of men, says: "These Mollahs procure an easy subsistence by making fetishes or writing charms on bits of wood which are washed off carefully into a basin of water, and drank with avidity by the credulous multitude." And he adds: "Those who profess the Mohammedan faith among the negroes are as ignorant and superstitious as their idolatrous brethren; nor does it appear that their having adopted a new creed has either improved their manners or bettered their condition in life." Dr. Schweinfurth also describes the Mohammedan missionaries whom he found at Khartoum as "polluted with every abominable vice which the imagination of man can conceive of." In answer to various statements which had been published in regard to the rapid missionary progress made by Mohammedans in West Central Africa, Bishop Crowther wrote a letter to the Church Missionary Society at the beginning of 1888, giving the results of his own prolonged observation. He describes the methods used as: 1. War upon the heathen tribes. "If the Chief of a heathen tribe accepts the Koran his people are at once counted as converts and he is received into favor, and is thus prepared to become an instrument in conquering other tribes. But on the refusal to accept the Koran war is declared, the destruction of their country is the consequence, and horrible bloodshed. The aged, male and female, are massacred, while the salable are led away as slaves. One half of the slaves are reserved by the chief, the other half is divided among the soldiers to encourage them to future raids." 2. Another cause of large increase is polygamy. "For although but four lawful wives are allowed, there is unlimited license for concubinage." 3. The sale of charms is so conducted as to prove not only a means of profit but a shrewd propaganda. "When childless women are furnished with these, they are pledged, if successful, to dedicate their children to Islam." And Bishop Crowther verifies the statement made by others in reference to East Africa, that the priests "besides being charm-makers are traders both in general articles and more largely in slaves."[119] We have only time to consider one question more, viz., What is the character of Islam as we find it to-day, and what are its prospects of development? It is a characteristic of our age that no religion stands wholly alone and uninfluenced by others. It is especially true that the systems of the East are all deeply affected by the higher ethics and purer religious conceptions borrowed from Christianity. Thus many Mohammedans of our day, and especially those living in close contact with our Christian civilization, are rising to higher conceptions of God and of religious truth than have been entertained by Moslems hitherto. Canon Taylor, in a little volume entitled "Leaves from an Egyptian Note-Book," has drawn a picture of Islam which Omar and Othman would hardly have recognized. In the first place it should be remembered that, as he confesses, his reputation as a defender of Mohammed and his system had gone before him to Cairo, and that he was understood to be a seeker after facts favorable to his known views. This opened the hearts of friendly Pashas and served to bring out all the praises that they could bestow upon their own faith. It appears accordingly that he was assured by them that polygamy is widely discarded and condemned by prominent Moslems in such cities as Cairo and Alexandria, that many leading men are highly intelligent and widely read, that they profess belief in most of the doctrines held by the Christian Church, that they receive the inspired testimony of the Old and New Testaments--except in so far as they have been corrupted by Christian manipulation. This exception, however, includes all that is at variance with the Koran. They advocate temperance and condemn the slave trade. They encourage the general promotion of education, and what seems to the credulous Canon most remarkable of all is that they express deep regret that Christians do not feel the same charity and fellowship toward Moslems that they feel toward Christians! Now, making all due abatement for the _couleur de rose_ which these easy-going and politic Pashas may have employed with their English champion, it is undoubtedly true that a class of Mohammedans are found in the great cosmopolitan cities of the Levant who have come to recognize the spirit of the age in which they live. Many of them have been educated in Europe; they speak several languages; they read the current literature; they are ashamed of the old fanatical Mohammedanism. Though they cherish a partisan interest in the recognized religion of their country, their faith is really eclectic; it comes not from Old Mecca, but is in part a product of the awakened thought of the nineteenth century. But Canon Taylor's great fallacy lies in trying to persuade himself and an intelligent Christian public that this is Islam. He wearies himself in his attempts to square the modern Cairo with the old, and to trace the modern gentlemanly Pasha, whose faith at least sits lightly upon his soul, as a legitimate descendant of the fanatical and licentious prophet of Arabia. When he strives to convince the world that because these courteous Pashas feel kindly enough toward the Canon of York and others like him, therefore Islam is and always has been a charitable and highly tolerant system, he simply stultifies the whole testimony of history. He tells us that his Egyptian friends complain that "whereas they regard us as brother-believers and accept our scriptures, they are nevertheless denounced as infidels. And they ask why should an eternal coldness reign in our hearts." Probably they are not acquainted with Samadu of Western Soudan and his methods of propagandism. They have forgotten the career of El Mahdi; they are not familiar with the terrible oppression of the Jews in Morocco--with which even that in Russia cannot compare; they have not read the dark accounts of the extortion practised by the Wahábees of Arabia, even upon Moslems of another sect on their pilgrimages to Mecca,[120] nor do they seem to know that Syrian converts from Islam are now hiding in Egypt from the bloodthirsty Moslems of Beyrut. Finally, he forgets that the very "children are taught formulas of prayer in which they may compendiously curse Jews and Christians and all unbelievers."[121] A more plausible case is made out by Canon Taylor, Dr. Blyden, and others on the question of temperance. It is true that Moslems, as a rule, are not hard drinkers. Men and races of men have their besetting sins. Drinking was not the special vice of the Arabs. Their country was too arid; but they had another vice of which Mohammed was the chief exemplar. Canon Taylor is doubtless correct also in the statement that the English protectorate in Egypt has greatly increased the degree of intemperance, and that in this respect the presence of European races generally has been a curse. Certainly too much cannot be said in condemnation of the wholesale liquor trade carried on in Africa by unscrupulous subjects of Christian nations. But it should be remembered that the whiskey of Cairo and of the West Coast does not represent Christianity any more than the Greek assassin or the Italian pickpocket in Cairo represents Islam. Christian philanthropists in Europe and America are seeking to suppress the evil. If Christian missionaries in West Africa were selling rum as Moslem Mollahs are buying and selling slaves in Uganda, if the Bible authorized the system as the Koran encourages slavery and concubinage, as means of propagandism, a parallel might be presented; but the very reverse is true. As a rule Nomadic races are not as greatly inclined to the use of ardent spirits as are the descendants of the ancient tribes of Northern Europe. The difference is due to climate, temperament, heredity, and the amount of supply. The Koran discourages intemperance and so does the Bible; both are disregarded when the means of gratification are abundant. The Moguls of India were sots almost as a rule. Wealthy Persian Moslems are the chief purchasers of the native wines. Lander, Schweinfurth, and even Mungo Parke all speak of communities in Central Africa as wholly given to intemperance.[122] Egyptians even, according to Canon Taylor, find the abundant supplies afforded by Europeans too tempting for the restraints of the Koran. One of the most significant indications that the sober judgment of all enlightened men favors the immense superiority of the Christian faith over all ethnic systems is the fact that even those zealous apologists who have most plausibly defended the non-Christian religions have subsequently evinced some misgivings and have even become advocates of the superior light of Christianity. Sir Edwin Arnold, seeing how seriously some ill-grounded Christian people had interpreted "The Light of Asia," has since made amends by writing "The Light of the World." And E. Bosworth Smith, on reading the extravagant glorification given to Islam by Canon Isaac Taylor, whom he accuses of plagiarism and absurd exaggeration, has come to the stand as a witness against his extreme views. Without acknowledging any important modification of his own former views he has greatly changed the place of emphasis. He has not only recorded his condemnation of Canon Taylor's extravagance but he has made a strong appeal for the transcendent superiority of the Christian faith as that alone which must finally regenerate Africa and the world. He has called public attention to the following pointed criticism of Canon Taylor's plea for Islam, made by a gentleman long resident in Algeria, and he has given it his own endorsement: "Canon Isaac Taylor," says the writer, "has constructed at the expense of Christianity a rose-colored picture of Islam, by a process of comparison in which Christianity is arraigned for failures in practice, of which Christendom is deeply and penitently conscious, no account being taken of Christian precept; while Islam is judged by its better precepts only, no account being taken of the frightful shortcomings in Mohammedan practice, even from the standard of the Koran."[123] No indictment ever carried its proofs more conspicuously on its face than this. E. Bosworth Smith's subsequent tribute to the relative superiority of the Christian faith was given in an address before the Fellows of Zion's College, February 21, 1888. I give his closing comparison entire; also his eloquent appeal for Christian Missions in Africa. "The resemblances between the two Creeds are indeed many and striking, as I have implied throughout; but, if I may, once more, quote a few words which I have used elsewhere in dealing with this question, the contrasts are even more striking than the resemblances. The religion of Christ contains whole fields of morality and whole realms of thought which are all but outside the religion of Mohammed. It opens humility, purity of heart, forgiveness of injuries, sacrifice of self, to man's moral nature; it gives scope for toleration, development, boundless progress to his mind; its motive power is stronger even as a friend is better than a king, and love higher than obedience. Its realized ideals in the various paths of human greatness have been more commanding, more many-sided, more holy, as Averroes is below Newton, Harun below Alfred, and Ali below St. Paul. Finally, the ideal life of all is far more elevating, far more majestic, far more inspiring, even as the life of the founder of Mohammedanism is below the life of the Founder of Christianity. "If, then, we believe Christianity to be truer and purer in itself than Islam, and than any other religion, we must needs wish others to be partakers of it; and the effort to propagate it is thrice blessed--it blesses him that offers, no less than him who accepts it; nay, it often blesses him who accepts it not. The last words of a dying friend are apt to linger in the chambers of the heart till the heart itself has ceased to beat; and the last recorded words of the Founder of Christianity are not likely to pass from the memory of His Church till that Church has done its work. They are the marching orders of the Christian army; the consolation for every past and present failure; the earnest and the warrant, in some shape or other, of ultimate success. The value of a Christian mission is not, therefore, to be measured by the number of its converts. The presence in a heathen or a Muslim district of a single man who, filled with the missionary spirit, exhibits in his preaching and, so far as may be, in his life, the self-denying and the Christian virtues, who is charged with sympathy for those among whom his lot is cast, who is patient of disappointment and of failure, and of the sneers of the ignorant or the irreligious, and who works steadily on with a single eye to the glory of God and the good of his fellow-men, is, of itself, an influence for good, and a centre from which it radiates, wholly independent of the number of converts he is able to enlist. There is a vast number of such men engaged in mission work all over the world, and our best Indian statesmen, some of whom, for obvious reasons, have been hostile to direct proselytizing efforts, are unanimous as to the quantity and quality of the services they render. "Nothing, therefore, can be more shallow, or more disingenuous, or more misleading, than to attempt to disparage Christian missions by pitting the bare number of converts whom they claim against the number of converts claimed by Islam. The numbers are, of course, enormously in favor of Islam. But does conversion mean the same, or anything like the same, thing in each? Is it _in pari materia_, and if not, is the comparison worth the paper on which it is written? The submission to the rite of circumcision and the repetition of a confession of faith, however noble and however elevating in its ultimate effect, do not necessitate, they do not even necessarily tend toward what a Christian means by a change of heart. It is the characteristic of Mohammedanism to deal with batches and with masses. It is the characteristic of Christianity to speak straight to the individual conscience. "The conversion of a whole Pagan community to Islam need not imply more effort, more sincerity, or more vital change, than the conversion of a single individual to Christianity. The Christianity accepted wholesale by Clovis and his fierce warriors, in the flush of victory, on the field of battle, or by the Russian peasants, when they were driven by the Cossack whips into the Dnieper, and baptized there by force--these are truer parallels to the tribal conversions to Mohammedanism in Africa at the present day. And, whatever may have been their beneficial effects in the march of the centuries, they are not the Christianity of Christ, nor are they the methods or the objects at which a Christian missionary of the present day would dream of aiming. "A Christian missionary could not thus bring over a Pagan or a Muslim tribe to Christianity, even if he would; he ought not to try thus to bring them over, even if he could. 'Missionary work,' as remarked by an able writer in the _Spectator_ the other day, 'is sowing, not reaping, and the sowing of a plant which is slow to bear.' At times, the difficulties and discouragements may daunt the stoutest heart and the most living faith. But God is greater than our hearts and wider than our thoughts, and, if we are able to believe in Him at all, we must also believe that the ultimate triumph of Christianity--and by Christianity I mean not the comparatively narrow creed of this or that particular Church, but the Divine Spirit of its Founder, that Spirit which, exactly in proportion as they are true to their name, informs, and animates, and underlies, and overlies them all--is not problematical, but certain, and in His good time, across the lapse of ages, will prove to be, not local but universal, not partial but complete, not evanescent but eternal."[124] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 97: Sprenger's _Life of Mohammed_, pp. 40, 41.] [Footnote 98: It is a suspicious fact that the first chapter of the _Koran_ begins with protestations that it is a true revelation, and with most terrible anathemas against all who doubt it. This seems significant, and contrasts strongly with the conscious truthfulness and simplicity of the Gospel narrators.] [Footnote 99: Nor have later defenders of the system failed to derive alleged proofs of their system from Biblical sources. Mohammedan controversialists have urged some very specious and plausible arguments; for example, Deut. xviii. 15-18, promises that the Lord shall raise up unto Israel a prophet from _among their brethren_. But Israel had no brethren but the sons of Ishmael. There was also promised a prophet like unto Moses; but Deut. xxxiv. declares that "_There arose no Prophet in Israel like unto Moses_." When John the Baptist was asked whether he were the Christ, or Elijah, or "_that prophet_," no other than Mohammed could have been meant by "_that prophet_."] [Footnote 100: Rev. Mr. Bruce, missionary in Persia, states that pictures of the Father, the Son, and Mary are still seen in Eastern churches.--_Church Missionary Intelligencer_, January, 1882.] [Footnote 101: Sales, in his _Preliminary Discourse_, Section 1st, enumerates the great nations which have vainly attempted the conquest of Arabia, from the Assyrians down to the Romans, and he asserts that even the Turks have held only a nominal sway.] [Footnote 102: China owes her present dynasty to the fact that the hardy Manchus were called in as mercenaries or as allies.] [Footnote 103: Dr. Koelle: quoted in _Church Missionary Intelligencer_.] [Footnote 104: Sales: _Koran and Preliminary Discourse_, Wherry's edition, p. 89. One of the chief religious duties under the _Koran_ was the giving of alms (Zakat), and under this euphonious name was included the tax by which Mohammed maintained the force that enabled him to keep up his predatory raids on the caravans of his enemies.] [Footnote 105: _Mohammed and Mohammedanism_, p. 123.] [Footnote 106: Dr. Koelle gravely questions this.] [Footnote 107: One of the most wicked and disastrous of all Mohammed's laws was that which allowed the free practice of capturing women and girls in war, and retaining them as lawful chattels in the capacity of concubines. It has been in all ages a base stimulus to the raids of the slave-hunter. Sir William Muir has justly said, that so long as a free sanction to this great evil stands recorded on the pages of the _Koran_, Mohammedans will never of their own accord cease to prosecute the slave-trade.] [Footnote 108: According to Dr. Koelle, the number of women and children who fell to the prophet's share of captives at the time of his great slaughter of the surrendered Jewish soldiers, was two hundred.] [Footnote 109: _Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ_, p. 112.] [Footnote 110: _Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ_.] [Footnote 111: Ibid, p. 112.] [Footnote 112: Says Sir William Muir: "Three radical evils flow from the faith, in all ages and in every country, and must continue to flow _so long as the Koran is the standard of belief_. _First_, polygamy, divorce, and slavery are maintained and perpetuated, striking at the root of public morals, poisoning domestic life, and disorganizing society. _Second_, freedom of thought and private judgment in religion is crushed and annihilated. The sword still is, and must remain, the inevitable penalty for the denial of Islam. Toleration is unknown. _Third_, a barrier has been interposed against the reception of Christianity. They labor under a miserable delusion who suppose that Mohammedanism paves the way for a purer faith. No system could have been devised with more consummate skill for shutting out the nations over which it has sway from the light of truth. _Idolatrous_ Arabia (judging from the analogy of other nations) might have been aroused to spiritual life and to the adoption of the faith of Jesus. _Mohammedan_ Arabia is to the human eye sealed against the benign influences of the Gospel.... The sword of Mohammed and the Koran are the most stubborn enemies of civilization, liberty, and truth which the world has yet known."--_Church Missionary Intelligencer_, November, 1885.] [Footnote 113: Osborne, in his _Islam under the Arabs_, and Marcus Dodds, in _Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ_, have emphasized the fact that Islam, however favorably it might compare with the Arabian heathenism which it overthrew, was wholly out of place in forcing its semi-barbarous cultus upon civilizations which were far above it. It might be an advance upon the rudeness and cruelty of the Koreish, but the misfortune was that it stamped its stereotyped and unchanging principles and customs upon nations which were in advance of it even then, and which, but for its deadening influence, might have made far greater progress in the centuries which followed. Its bigoted founder gave the _Koran_ as the sufficient guide for all time. It arrested the world's progress as far as its power extended. Very different was the spirit of Judaism. "It distinctly disclaimed both finality and completeness. Every part of the Mosaic religion had a forward look, and was designed to leave the mind in an attitude of expectation." Mohammedanism, in claiming to be the one religion for all men and all time, is convicted of absurdity and imposture by its failures; by the retrograde which marks its whole history in Western Asia. As a universal religion it has been tried and found wanting.] [Footnote 114: It has been claimed that the spread of Mohammedanism in India is far more rapid than that of Christianity. If this were true in point of fact, it would be significant; for India under British rule furnishes a fair field for such a contest. But it so happens that there, where Islam holds no sword of conquest, and no arbitrary power to compel the faith of men, its growth is very slow, it only keeps pace with the general increase of the population. It cannot compare with the advancement of Christianity. I subjoin an extract from Sir W. Hunter's paper in the _Nineteenth Century_ for July, 1888: "The official census, notwithstanding its obscurities of classification and the disturbing effects of the famine of 1877, attests the rapid increase of the Christian population. So far as these disturbing influences allow of an inference for all British India, the normal rate of increase among the general population was about 8 per cent, from 1872 to 1881, while the actual rate of the Christian population was over 30 per cent. But, taking the lieutenant-governorship of Bengal as the greatest province outside the famine area of 1877, and for whose population, amounting to one-third of the whole of British India, really comparable statistics exist, the census results are clear. The general population increased in the nine years preceding 1881 at the rate of 10.89 per cent., the Mohammedans at the rate of 10.96 per cent., the Hindus at some undetermined rate below 13.64 per cent., Christians of all races at the rate of 40.71 per cent., and the native Christians at the rate of 64.07 per cent."] [Footnote 115: _Leaves from an Egyptian Note-book._] [Footnote 116: _Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race_, p. 241.] [Footnote 117: For the full text of the letter to the _Standard_, see _Church Missionary Intelligencer_, December, 1888.] [Footnote 118: _Church Missionary Intelligencer_, 1887, p. 653.] [Footnote 119: See _Church Missionary Intelligencer_, April, 1888.] [Footnote 120: Over against Canon Taylor's glowing accounts of this broad and gentle charity we may place the testimony of Palgrave in regard to the remorseless rapacity practised by the Wahábees upon the Shiyaées of Persia while passing through their territory in their pilgrimages to a common shrine. He tells us that "forty gold tománs were fixed as the claim of the Wahábee treasury on every Persian pilgrim for his passage through R'ad, and forty more for a safe conduct through the rest of the empire--eighty in all.... "Every local governor on the way would naturally enough take the hint, and strive not to let the 'enemies of God' (for this is the sole title given by Wahábees to all except themselves) go by without spoiling them more or less.... "So that, all counted up, the legal and necessary dues levied on every Persian Shiyaée while traversing Central Arabia, and under Wahábee guidance and protection, amounted, I found, to about one hundred and fifty gold tománs, equalling nearly sixty pounds sterling, English, no light expenditure for a Persian, and no despicable gain to an Arab."--Palgrave's _Central and Eastern Africa_, p. 161.] [Footnote 121: Dodds: _Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ_, p. 118.] [Footnote 122: _Church Missionary Intelligencer_, November, 1887.] [Footnote 123: _Church Missionary Intelligencer_, February, 1888, p. 66.] [Footnote 124: _Church Missionary Intelligencer_, April, 1888.] LECTURE VII. THE TRACES OF A PRIMITIVE MONOTHEISM There are two conflicting theories now in vogue in regard to the origin of religion. The first is that of Christian theists as taught in the Old and New Testament Scriptures, viz., that the human race in its first ancestry, and again in the few survivors of the Deluge, possessed the knowledge of the true God. It is not necessary to suppose that they had a full and mature conception of Him, or that that conception excluded the idea of other gods. No one would maintain that Adam or Noah comprehended the nature of the Infinite as it has been revealed in the history of God's dealings with men in later times. But from their simple worship of one God their descendants came gradually to worship various visible objects with which they associated their blessings--the sun as the source of warmth and vitality, the rain as imparting a quickening power to the earth, the spirits of ancestors to whom they looked with a special awe, and finally a great variety of created things instead of the invisible Creator. The other theory is that man, as we now behold him, has been developed from lower forms of animal life, rising first to the state of a mere human animal, but gradually acquiring intellect, conscience, and finally a soul;--that ethics and religion have been developed from instinct by social contact, especially by ties of family and the tribal relation; that altruism which began with the instinctive care of parents for their offspring, rose to the higher domain of religion and began to recognize the claims of deity; that God, if there be a God, never revealed himself to man by any preternatural means, but that great souls, like Moses, Isaiah, and Plato, by their higher and clearer insight, have gained loftier views of deity than others, and as prophets and teachers have made known their inspirations to their fellow-men. Gradually they have formed rituals and elaborated philosophies, adding such supernatural elements as the ignorant fancy of the masses was supposed to demand. According to this theory, religions, like everything else, have grown up from simple germs: and it is only in the later stages of his development that man can be said to be a religious being. While an animal merely, and for a time even after he had attained to a rude and savage manhood, a life of selfish passion and marauding was justifiable, since only thus could the survival of the fittest be secured and the advancement of the race attained.[125] It is fair to say that there are various shades of the theory here presented--some materialistic, some theistic, others having a qualified theism, and still others practically agnostic. Some even who claim to be Christians regard the various religions of men as so many stages in the divine education of the race--all being under the direct guidance of God, and all designed to lead ultimately to Christianity which is the goal. That God has overruled all things, even the errors and wickedness of men, for some wise object will not be denied; that He has implanted in the human understanding many correct conceptions of ethical truth, so that noble principles are found in the teachings of all religious systems; that God is the author of all truth and all right impulses, even in heathen minds, is readily admitted. But that He has directly planned and chosen the non-Christian religions on the principle that half-truths and perverted truths and the direct opposites of the truth, were best adapted to certain stages of development--in other words, that He has causatively led any nation into error and consequent destruction as a means of preparing for subsequent generations something higher and better, we cannot admit. The logic of such a conclusion would lead to a remorseless fatalism. Everything would depend on the age and the environment in which one's lot were cast. We cannot believe that fetishism and idolatry have been God's kindergarten method of training the human race for the higher and more spiritual service of His kingdom. Turning from the testimony of the Scriptures on the one hand and the _à priori_ assumptions of evolution on the other, what is the witness of the actual history of religions? Have they shown an upward or a downward development? Do they appear to have risen from polytheism toward simpler and more spiritual forms, or have simple forms been ramified into polytheism?[126] If we shall be able to establish clear evidence that monotheistic or even henotheistic types of faith existed among all, or nearly all, the races at the dawn of history, a very important point will have been gained. The late Dr. Henry B. Smith, after a careful perusal of Ebrard's elaborate presentation of the religions of the ancient and the modern world, and his clear proofs that they had at first been invariably monotheistic and had gradually lapsed into ramified forms of polytheism, says in his review of Ebrard's work: "We do not know where to find a more weighty reply to the assumptions and theories of those writers who persist in claiming, according to the approved hypothesis of a merely naturalistic evolution, that the primitive state of mankind was the lowest and most debased form of polytheistic idolatry, and that the higher religions have been developed out of these base rudiments. Dr. Ebrard shows conclusively that the facts all lead to another conclusion, that gross idolatry is a degeneration of mankind from antecedent and purer forms of religious worship.... He first treats of the civilized nations of antiquity, the Aryan and Indian religions, the Vedas, the Indra period of Brahmanism and Buddhism; then of the religion of the Iranians, the Avesta of the Parsees; next of the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians, the Canaanites, and the heathen Semitic forms of worship, including the Phoenicians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. His second division is devoted to the half-civilized and savage races in the North and West of Europe, in Asia and Polynesia (Tartars, Mongols, Malays, and Cushites); then the races of America, including a minute examination of the relations of the different races here to the Mongols, Japanese, and old Chinese immigrations."[127] Ebrard himself, in summing up the results of these prolonged investigations, says: "We have nowhere been able to discover the least trace of any forward and upward movement from fetichism to polytheism, and from that again to a gradually advancing knowledge of the one God; but, on the contrary, we have found among all the peoples of the heathen world a most decided tendency to sink from an earlier and relatively purer knowledge of God toward something lower."[128] If these conclusions, reached by Ebrard and endorsed by the scholarly Dr. Henry B. Smith, are correct, they are of great importance; they bring to the stand the witness of the false religions themselves upon an issue in which historic testimony as distinguished from mere theories is in special demand in our time. Of similar import are the well-considered words of Professor Naville, in the first of his lectures on modern atheism.[129] He says: "Almost all pagans seem to have had a glimpse of the divine unity over the multiplicity of their idols, and of the rays of the divine holiness across the saturnalia of their Olympi. It was a Greek (Cleanthus) who wrote these words: 'Nothing is accomplished on the earth without Thee, O God, save the deeds which the wicked perpetrate in their folly.' It was in a theatre at Athens, that the chorus of a tragedy sang, more than two thousand years ago: 'May destiny aid me to preserve, unsullied, the purity of my words, and of all my actions, according to those sublime laws which, brought forth in the celestial heights, have the raven alone for their father, to which the race of mortals did not give birth and which oblivion shall never entomb. In them is a supreme God, and one who waxes not old.' It would be easy to multiply quotations of this order and to show, in the documents of Grecian and Roman civilization, numerous traces of the knowledge of the only and holy God." With much careful discrimination, Dr. William A.P. Martin, of the Peking University, has said: "It is customary with a certain school to represent religion as altogether the fruit of an intellectual process. It had its birth, say they, in ignorance, is modified by every stage in the progress of knowledge, and expires when the light of philosophy reaches its noon-day. The fetish gives place to a personification of the powers of nature, and this poetic pantheon is, in time, superseded by the high idea of unity in nature expressed by monotheism. This theory has the merit of verisimilitude. It indicates what might be the process if man were left to make his own religion; but it has the misfortune to be at variance with facts. A wide survey of the history of civilized nations (and the history of others is beyond reach) shows that the actual process undergone by the human mind in its religious development is precisely opposite to that which this theory supposes; in a word, that man was not left to construct his own creed, but that his blundering logic has always been active in its attempts to corrupt and obscure a divine original. The connection subsisting between the religious systems of ancient and distant countries presents many a problem difficult of solution. Indeed, their mythologies and religious rites are generally so distinct as to admit the hypothesis of an independent origin; but the simplicity of their earliest beliefs exhibits an unmistakable resemblance, suggestive of a common source. "China, India, Egypt, and Greece all agree in the monotheistic type of their early religion. The Orphic hymns, long before the advent of the popular divinities, celebrated the Pantheos, the Universal God. The odes compiled by Confucius testify to the early worship of Shangte, the Supreme Euler. The Vedas speak of 'one unknown true Being, all-present, all-powerful; the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of the universe.' And in Egypt, as late as the time of Plutarch, there were still vestiges of a monotheistic worship. 'The other Egyptians,' he says, 'all made offerings at the tombs of the sacred beasts; but the inhabitants of the Thebaïd stood alone in making no such offerings, not regarding as a god anything that can die, and acknowledging no god but one, whom they call Kneph, who had no birth, and can have no death. Abraham, in his wanderings, found the God of his fathers known and honored in Salem, in Gerar, and in Memphis; while at a later day Jethro, in Midian, and Balaam, in Mesopotamia, were witnesses that the knowledge of Jehovah was not yet extinct in those countries.'"[130] Professor Max Müller speaks in a similar strain of the lapse of mankind from earlier and simpler types of faith to low and manifold superstitions: "Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginning," says the distinguished Oxford professor, "we find it free from many of the blemishes that offend us in its later phases. The founders of the ancient religions of the world, as far as we can judge, were minds of a high stamp, full of noble aspirations, yearning for truth, devoted to the welfare of their neighbors, examples of purity and unselfishness. What they desired to found upon earth was but seldom realized, and their sayings, if preserved in their original form, offered often a strange contrast to the practice of those who profess to be their disciples. As soon as a religion is established, and more particularly when it has become the religion of a powerful state, the foreign and worldly elements encroach more and more on the original foundation, and human interests mar the simplicity and purity of the plan which the founder had conceived in his own heart and matured in his communings with his God."[131] But in pursuing our subject we should clearly determine the real question before us. How much may we expect to prove from the early history of the non-Christian systems? Not certainly that all nations once received a knowledge of the Old Testament revelation, as some have claimed, nor that all races possessed at the beginning of their several historic periods one and the same monotheistic faith. We cannot prove from non-scriptural sources that their varying monotheistic conceptions sprang from a common belief. We cannot prove either the supernatural revelation which Professor Max Müller emphatically rejects, nor the identity of the well-nigh universal henotheisms which he professes to believe. We cannot prove that the worship of one God as supreme did not coexist with a sort of worship of inferior deities or ministering spirits. Almost as a rule, the worship of ancestors, or spirits, or rulers, or the powers of nature, or even totems and fetishes has been rendered as subordinate to the worship of the one supreme deity who created and upholds all things. Even the monotheism of Judaism and of Christianity has been attended with the belief in angels and the worship of intercessory saints, to say nothing of the many superstitions which prevail among the more ignorant classes. We shall only attempt to show that monotheism, in the sense of worshipping _one God as supreme_, is found in nearly all the early teachings of the world. That these crude faiths are one in the origin is only presumable, if we leave the testimony of the Bible out of the account. When on a summer afternoon we see great shafts of light arising and spreading fan-shaped from behind a cloud which lies along the western horizon, we have a strong presumption that they all spring from one great luminary toward which they converge, although that luminary is hidden from our view. So tracing the convergence of heathen faiths with respect to one original monotheism, back to the point where the prehistoric obscurity begins, we may on the same principle say that all the evidence in the case, and it is not small, points toward a common origin for the early religious conceptions of mankind. Professor Robert Flint, in his scholarly article on theism in "The Britannica," seems to discard the idea that the first religion of mankind was monotheism; but a careful study of his position will show that he has in view those conceptions of monotheism which are common to us, or, as he expresses it, "monotheism in the ordinary or proper sense of the term," "monotheism properly so called," "monotheism which excludes polytheism," etc. Moreover, he maintains that we cannot, from historical sources, learn what conceptions men first had of God. Even when speaking of the Old Testament record, he says: "These chapters (of Genesis), although they plainly teach monotheism and represent the God whose words and acts are recorded in the Bible as no mere national God, but the only true God, they do not teach what is alone in the question--that there was a primitive monotheism, a monotheism revealed and known from the beginning. They give no warrant to the common assumption that God revealed monotheism to Adam, Noah, and others before the Flood, and that the traces of monotheistic beliefs and tendencies in heathendom are derivable from the tradition of this primitive and antediluvian monotheism. The one true God is represented as making himself known by particular words and in particular ways to Adam, but is nowhere said to have taught him that He only was God." It is plain that Professor Flint is here dealing with a conception of monotheism which is exclusive of all other gods. And his view is undoubtedly correct, so far as Adam was concerned. There was no more need of teaching him that his God was the only God, than that Eve was the only woman. With Noah the case is not so plain. He doubtless worshipped God amid the surroundings of polytheistic heathenism. Enoch probably had a similar environment, and there is no good reason for supposing that their monotheism may not have been as exclusive as that of Abraham. But with respect to the Gentile nations, the dim traces of this monism or henotheism which Professor Flint seems to accord to Adam and to Noah, is all that we are contending for, and all that is necessary to the argument of this lecture. We may even admit that heathen deities may sometimes have been called by different names while the one source of power was intended. Different names seem to have been employed to represent different manifestations of the one God of the Old Testament according to His varied relations toward His people. There are those who deny this polyonomy, as Max Müller has called it, and who maintain that the names in the earliest Veda represented distinct deities; but, by similar reasoning, Professor Tiele and others insist that three different Hebrew Gods, according to their respective names, were worshipped in successive periods of the Jewish history. It seems quite possible, therefore, that a too restrictive definition of monotheism may prove too much, by opening the way for a claim that even the Jewish and Christian faith, with its old Testament names of God, its angels, its theophanies, and its fully developed trinity, is not strictly monotheistic. For our present purpose, traces of the worship of one supreme God--call it monotheism or henotheism--is all that is required. With these limitations and qualifications in view, let us turn to the history of some of the leading non-Christian faiths. Looking first to India, we find in the 129th hymn of the Rig Veda, a passage which not only presents the conception of one only supreme and self-existing Being, but at the same time bears significant resemblance to our own account of the creation from chaos. It reads thus: "In the beginning there was neither naught nor aught, Then there was neither atmosphere nor sky above, There was neither death nor immortality, There was neither day nor night, nor light, nor darkness, Only the EXISTENT ONE breathed calmly self-contained. Naught else but He was there, naught else above, beyond. Then first came darkness hid in darkness, gloom in gloom; Next all was water, chaos indiscrete, In which ONE lay void, shrouded in nothingness."[132] In the 121st hymn of the same Veda occurs a passage which seems to resemble the opening of the Gospel of St. John. It reads thus, as translated by Sir Monier Williams: "Him let us praise, the golden child that was In the beginning, who was born the Lord, Who made the earth and formed the sky." "The one born Lord" reminds us of the New Testament expression, "the only begotten Son." Both were "in the beginning;" both were the creators of the world. While there is much that is mysterious in these references, the idea of oneness and supremacy is too plain to be mistaken. Professor Max Müller has well expressed this fact when he said: "There is a monotheism which precedes polytheism in the Veda; and even in the invocation of their (inferior) gods, the remembrance of _a_ God, one and infinite, breaks through the mist of an idolatrous phraseology like the blue sky that is hidden by passing clouds."[133] These monotheistic conceptions appear to have been common to the Aryans before their removal from their early home near the sources of the Oxus, and we shall see further on that in one form or another they survived among all branches of the migrating race. The same distinguished scholar traces the early existence of monotheism in a series of brief and rapid references to nearly all the scattered Aryans not only, but also to the Turanians on the North and East, to the Tungusic, Mongolic, Tartaric, and Finnic tribes. "Everywhere," he says, "we find a worship of nature, and the spirits of the departed, but behind it all there rises a belief in some higher power called by different names, who is Maker and Protector of the world, and who always resides in heaven."[134] He also speaks of an ancient African faith which, together with its worship of reptiles and of ancestors, showed a vague hope of a future life, "and a not altogether faded reminiscence of a supreme God," which certainly implies a previous knowledge.[135] The same prevalence of one supreme worship rising above all idolatry he traces among the various tribes of the Pacific Islands. His generalizations are only second to those of Ebrard. Although he rejects the theory of a supernatural revelation, yet stronger language could hardly be used than that which he employs in proof of a universal monotheistic faith.[136] "Nowhere," he says, "do we find stronger arguments against idolatry, nowhere has the unity of God been upheld more strenuously against the errors of polytheism, than by some of the ancient sages of India. Even in the oldest of the sacred books, the Rig Veda, composed three or four thousand years ago, where we find hymns addressed to the different deities of the sky, the air, the earth, the rivers, the protest of the human heart against many gods breaks forth from time to time with no uncertain sound." Professor Müller's whole position is pretty clearly stated in his first lecture on "The Science of Religion," in which he protests against the idea that God once gave to man "a _preternatural_ revelation" concerning Himself; and yet he gives in this same lecture this striking testimony to the doctrine of an early and prevailing monotheistic faith: "Is it not something worth knowing," he says, "worth knowing even to us after the lapse of four or five thousand years, that before the separation of the Aryan race, before the existence of Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin, before the gods of the Veda had been worshipped, and before there was a sanctuary of Zeus among the sacred oaks of Dodona, one Supreme deity had been found, had been named, had been invoked by the ancestors of our race, and had been invoked by a name which has never been excelled by any other name?" And again, on the same subject, he says: "If a critical examination of the ancient language of the Jews leads to no worse results than those which have followed from a careful interpretation of the petrified language of ancient India and Greece, we need not fear; we shall be gainers, not losers. Like an old precious medal, the ancient religion, after the rust of ages has been removed, will come out in all its purity and brightness; and the image which it discloses will be the image of the Father, the Father of all the nations upon earth; and the superscription, when we can read it again, will be, not only in Judea, but in the languages of all the races of the world, the Word of God, revealed where alone it can be revealed--revealed in the heart of man."[137] The late Professor Banergea, of Calcutta, in a publication entitled "The Aryan Witness," not only maintained the existence of monotheism in the early Vedas, but with his rare knowledge of Sanskrit and kindred tongues, he gathered from Iranian as well as Hindu sources many evidences of a monotheism common to all Aryans. His conclusions derive special value from the fact that he was a high caste Hindu, and was not only well versed in the sacred language, but was perfectly familiar with Hindu traditions and modes of thought. He was as well qualified to judge of early Hinduism as Paul was of Judaism, and for the same reason. And from his Hindu standpoint, as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, though afterward a Christian convert, he did not hesitate to declare his belief, not only that the early Vedic faith was monotheistic, but that it contained traces of that true revelation, once made to men.[138] In the same line we find the testimony of the various types of revived Aryanism of our own times. The Brahmo Somaj, the Arya Somaj, and other similar organizations, are not only all monotheistic, but they declare that monotheism was the religion of the early Vedas. And many other Hindu reforms, some of them going as far back as the twelfth century, have been so many returns to monotheism. A recent Arya catechism published by Ganeshi, asserts in its first article that there is one only God, omnipotent, infinite, and eternal. It proceeds to show that the Vedas present but one, and that when hymns were addressed to Agni, Vayu, Indra, etc., it was only a use of different names for one and the same Being.[139] It represents God as having all the attributes of supreme Deity. He created the world by His direct power and for the revelation of His glory to His creatures. Man, according to the Aryas, came not by evolution nor by any of the processes known to Hindu philosophy, but by direct creation from existing atoms. In all this it is easy to see that much has been borrowed from the Christian conception of God's character and attributes, but the value of this Aryan testimony lies in the fact that it claims for the ancient Vedas a clear and positive monotheism. If we consult the sacred books of China, we shall find there also many traces of an ancient faith which antedates both Confucianism and Taouism. The golden age of the past to which all Chinese sages look with reverence, was the dynasty of Yao and Shun, which was eighteen centuries earlier than the period of Confucius and Laotze. The records of the Shu-king which Confucius compiled, and from which unfortunately his agnosticism excluded nearly all its original references to religion, nevertheless retain a full account of certain sacred rites performed by Shun on his accession to the full imperial power. In those rites the worship of One God as supreme is distinctly set forth as a "customary service," thereby implying that it was already long established. Separate mention is also made of offerings to inferior deities, as if these were honored at his own special instance. It is unquestionably true that in China, and indeed in all lands, there sprang up almost from the first a tendency to worship, or at least to fear, unseen spirits. This tendency has coexisted with all religions of the world--even with the Old Testament cult--even with Christianity. To the excited imaginations of men, especially the ignorant classes, the world has always been a haunted world, and just in proportion as the light of true religion has become dim, countless hordes of ghosts and demons have appeared. When Confucius arose this gross animism had almost monopolized the worship of his countrymen, and universal corruption bore sway. He was not an original thinker, but only a compiler of the ancient wisdom, and in his selections from the traditions of the ancients, he compiled those things only which served his great purpose of building up, from the relations of family and kindred, the complete pyramid of a well-ordered state in which the Emperor should hold to his subjects the place of deity. If such honor to a mortal seemed extravagant, yet in his view a wise emperor was far worthier of reverence than the imaginary ghosts of the popular superstitions. Yet, even Confucius could not quite succeed in banishing the idea of divine help, nor could he destroy that higher and most venerable worship which has ever survived amid all the corruptions of polytheism. Professor Legge, of Oxford, has claimed, from what he regards as valid linguistic proofs, that at a still earlier period than the dynasty of Yao and Shun there existed in China the worship of one God. He says: "Five thousand years ago the Chinese were monotheists--not henotheists, but monotheists"--though he adds that even then there was a constant struggle with nature-worship and divination.[140] The same high authority cites a remarkable prayer of an Emperor of the Ming dynasty (1538 A.D.) to show that in spite of the agnosticism and reticence of Confucius, Shangte has been worshipped in the centuries which have followed his time. The prayer is very significant as showing how the One Supreme God stands related to the subordinate gods which polytheism has introduced. The Emperor was about to decree a slight change in the name of Shangte to be used in the imperial worship. He first addressed the spirits of the hills, the rivers, and the seas, asking them to intercede for him with Shangte. "We will trouble you," said he, "on our behalf to exert your spiritual power and to display your vigorous efficacy, communicating our poor desires to Shangte, and praying him graciously to grant us his acceptance and regard, and to be pleased with the title which we shall reverently present." But very different was the language used when he came to address Shangte himself. "Of old, in the beginning," he began,--"Of old in the beginning, there was the great chaos without form, and dark. The five elements had not begun to revolve nor the sun and moon to shine. In the midst thereof there presented itself neither form nor sound. Thou, O spiritual Sovereign! earnest forth in thy presidency, and first didst divide the grosser parts from the purer. Thou madest heaven: Thou madest earth: Thou madest man. All things got their being with their producing power. O Te! when Thou hadst opened the course for the inactive and active forces of matter to operate, thy making work went on. Thou didst produce, O Spirit! the sun and moon and five planets, and pure and beautiful was their light. The vault of heaven was spread out like a curtain, and the square earth supported all on it, and all creatures were happy. I, thy servant, presume reverently to thank Thee." Farther on he says: "All the numerous tribes of animated beings are indebted to Thy favor for their being. Men and creatures are emparadised in Thy love. All living things are indebted to Thy goodness. But who knows whence his blessings come to him? It is Thou, O Lord! who art the parent of all things."[141] Surely this prayer humbly offered by a monarch would not be greatly out of place among the Psalms of David. Its description of the primeval chaos strikingly resembles that which I have quoted from the Rig Veda, and both resemble that of the Mosaic record. If the language used does not present the clear conception of one God, the Creator and the Upholder of all things, and a supreme and personal Sovereign over kings and even "gods," then language has no meaning. The monotheistic conception of the second petition is as distinct from the polytheism of the first, as any prayer to Jehovah is from a Roman Catholic's prayer for the intercession of the saints; and there is no stronger argument in the one case against monotheism than in the other. Dr. Legge asserts that both in the Shu-king and in the Shiking, "Te," or "Shangte," appears as a personal being ruling in heaven and in earth, the author of man's moral nature, the governor among the nations, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the evil.[142] There are proofs that Confucius, though in his position with respect to God he fell short of the doctrine of the ancient sages, yet believed in the existence of Shangte as a personal being. When in old age he had finished his writings, he laid them on an altar upon a certain hill-top, and kneeling before the altar he returned thanks that he had been spared to complete his work.[143] Max Müller says of him: "It is clear from many passages that with Confucius, Tien, or the Spirit of Heaven, was the supreme deity, and that he looked upon the other gods of the people--the spirits of the air, the mountains, and the rivers,[144] and the spirits of the departed, very much with the same feeling with which Socrates regarded the mythological deities of Greece."[145] But there remains to this day a remarkable evidence of the worship of the supreme God, Shangte, as he was worshipped in the days of the Emperor Shun, 2356 B.C. It is found in the great Temple of Heaven at Peking. Dr. Martin and Professors Legge and Douglas all insist that the sacrifices there celebrated are relics of the ancient worship of a supreme God. China is full of the traces of polytheism; the land swarms with Taouist deities of all names and functions, with Confucian and ancestral tablets, and with Buddhist temples and dagobas; but within the sacred enclosure of this temple no symbol of heathenism appears. Of the August Imperial service Dr. Martin thus eloquently speaks:[146] "Within the gates of the southern division of the capital, and surrounded by a sacred grove so extensive that the silence of its deep shades is never broken by the noise of the busy world around it, stands the Temple of Heaven. It consists of a single tower, whose tiling of resplendent azure is intended to represent the form and color of the aerial vault. It contains no image; but on a marble altar a bullock is offered once a year as a burnt sacrifice, while the monarch of the empire prostrates himself in adoration of the Spirit of the Universe. This is the high place of Chinese devotion, and the thoughtful visitor feels that he ought to tread its courts with unsandalled feet, for no vulgar idolatry has entered here. This mountain-top still stands above the waves of corruption, and on this solitary altar there still rests a faint ray of its primeval faith. The tablet which represents the invisible deity is inscribed with the name Shangte, the Supreme Ruler, and as we contemplate the Majesty of the Empire before it, while the smoke ascends from his burning sacrifice, our thoughts are irresistably carried back to the time when the King of Salem officiated as priest of the Most High God. There is," he adds, "no need of extended argument to establish the fact that the early Chinese were by no means destitute of the knowledge of the true God." Dr. Legge, the learned translator of the Chinese classics, shares so fully the views here expressed, that he actually put his shoes from off his feet before ascending the great altar, feeling that amidst all the mists and darkness of the national superstition, a trace of the glory of the Infinite Jehovah still lingered there. And in many a discussion since he has firmly maintained that that is in a dim way an altar of the true and living God. Laotze, like Confucius, was agnostic; yet he could not wholly rid himself of the influence of the ancient faith. His conception of Taou, or Reason, was rationalistic, certainly, yet he invested it with all the attributes of personality, as the word "Wisdom" is sometimes used in the Old Testament. He spoke of it as "The Infinite Supreme," "The First Beginning," and "The Great Original." Dr. Medhurst has translated from the "Taou Teh King" this striking Taouist prayer: "O thou perfectly honored One of heaven and earth, the rock, the origin of myriad energies, the great manager of boundless kalpas, do Thou enlighten my spiritual conceptions. Within and without the three worlds, the Logos, or divine Taou, is alone honorable, embodying in himself a golden light. May he overspread and illumine my person. He whom we cannot see with the eye, or hear with the ear, who embraces and includes heaven and earth, may he nourish and support the multitudes of living beings." If we turn to the religion of the Iranian or Persian branch of the Aryan family, we find among them also the traces of a primitive monotheism; and that it was not borrowed from Semitic sources, through the descendants of Abraham or others, Ebrard has shown clearly in the second volume of his "Apologetics." Max Müller also maintains the identity of the Iranian faith with that of the Indo-Aryans. The very first notices of the religion of the Avesta represent it as monotheistic. Ahura Mazda, even when opposed by Ahriman, is supreme, and in the oldest hymns or gathas of the Yasna, Ahriman does not appear; there are references to evil beings, but they have no formidable head; Persian dualism, therefore, was of later growth. Zoroaster, whom Monier Williams assigns to the close of the sixth century B.C.,[147] speaks of himself as a reformer sent to re-establish the pure worship of Ahura, and Haug considers the conception of Ahura identical with that of Jehovah. High on a rocky precipice at Behistun, Rawlinson has deciphered an inscription claiming to have been ordered by Darius Hystaspes, who lived 500 B.C., which is as clearly monotheistic as the Song of Moses. The Vendidad, which Rawlinson supposes to have been composed 800 years B.C., is full of references to minor gods, but Ahura is always supreme. The modern Parsees of Bombay claim to be monotheistic, and declare that such has been the faith of their fathers from the beginning. A Parsee catechism published in Bombay twenty-five years ago reads thus: "We believe in only one God, and do not believe in any besides Him.... He is the God who created the heavens, the earth, the angels, the stars, the sun, the moon, the fire, the water, ... and all things of the worlds; that God we believe in, Him we invoke, Him we adore." And lest this should be supposed to be a modern faith, the confession further declares that "This is the religion which the true prophet Zurthust, or Zoroaster, brought from God." The Shintoists of Japan, according to their sacred book, the "Kojiki," believe in one self-existent and supreme God, from whom others emanated. From two of these, male and female, sprang the Goddess of the Sun, and from her the royal line of the Mikados. There was no creation, but the two active emanations stirred up the eternally existing chaos, till from it came forth the teeming world of animal and vegetable life. It has often been asserted that tribes of men are found who have no conception of God. The author of "Two Years in the Jungle" declares that the Hill Dyaks of Borneo are without the slightest notion of a divine being. But a Government officer, who for two years was the guest of Rajah Brooke, succeeded after long delay in gaining a key to the religion of these Dyaks. He gives the name of one Supreme being among subordinate gods, and describes minutely the forms of worship. Professor Max Müller, while referring to this same often-repeated allegation as having been applied to the aborigines of Australia, cites one of Sir Hercules Robinson's Reports on New South Wales, which contains this description of the singular faith of one of the lowest of the interior tribes:[148] First a being is mentioned who is supreme and whose name signifies the "maker or cutter-out," and who is therefore worshipped as the great author of all things. But as this supreme god is supposed to be inscrutable and far removed, a second deity is named, who is the _revealer_ of the first and his mediator in all the affairs of men.[149] Rev. A.C. Good, now a missionary among the cannibal tribes of West Africa, stated in the Presbyterian General Assembly at Saratoga in May, 1890, that with all the fetishes and superstitions known among the tribes on the Ogovie, if a man is asked who made him, he points to the sky and utters the name of an unknown being who created all things.[150] When Tschoop, the stalwart Mohican chief, came to the Moravians to ask that a missionary might be sent to his people, he said: "Do not send us a man to tell us that there is a God--we all know that; or that we are sinners--we all know that; but send one to tell us about salvation."[151] Even Buddhism has not remained true to the atheism of its founder. A Thibetan Lama said to Abbé Huc: "You must not confound religious truths with the superstitions of the vulgar. The Tartars prostrate themselves before whatever they see, but there is one only Sovereign of the universe, the creator of all things, alike without beginning and without end." But what is the testimony of the great dead religions of the past with respect to a primitive monotheism? It is admitted that the later developments of the old Egyptian faith were polytheistic. But it has generally been conceded that as we approach the earliest notices of that faith, monotheistic features more and more prevail. This position is contested by Miss Amelia B. Edwards and others, who lean toward the development theory. Miss Edwards declares that the earliest faith of Egypt was mere totemism, while on the other hand Ebrard, gathering up the results of the researches of Lepsius, Ebers, Brugsch, and Emanuel de Rougé, deduces what seem to be clear evidences of an early Egyptian monotheism. He quotes Manetho, who declares that "for the first nine thousand years the god Ptah ruled alone; there was no other." According to inscriptions quoted by De Rougé, the Egyptians in the primitive period worshipped "the one being who truly lives, who has made all things, and who alone has not been made." This one God was known in different parts of Egypt under different names, which only in later times came to stand for distinct beings. A text which belongs to a period fifteen hundred years before Moses says: "He has made all that is; thou alone art, the millions owe their being to thee; he is the Lord of all that which is, and of that which is not." A papyrus now in Paris, dating 2300 B.C., contains quotations from two much older records, one a writing of the time of King Suffern, about 3500 B.C., which says: "The operation of God is a thing which cannot be understood." The other, from a writing of Ptah Hotep, about 3000 B.C., reads: "This is the command of the God of creation, the peaceable may come and issue orders.... The eating of bread is in conformity with the ordinance of God; can one forget that his blessing rests thereupon?... If thou art a prudent man teach thy son the love of God."[152] Professor Ernest Naville, in speaking of this same subject in a course of popular lectures in Geneva, said: "Listen now to a voice which has come forth actually from the recesses of the sepulchre: it reaches us from ancient Egypt. "In Egypt, as you know, the degradation of the religious idea was in popular practice complete. But under the confused accents of superstition the science of our age is succeeding in catching from afar the vibrations of a sublime utterance. In the coffins of a large number of mummies have been discovered rolls of papyrus containing a sacred text which is called 'The Book of the Dead.' Here is the translation of some fragments which appear to date from a very remote epoch. It is God who speaks thus: 'I am the Most Holy, the Creator of all that replenishes the earth, and of the earth itself, the habitation of mortals. I am the Prince of the infinite ages. I am the Great and Mighty God, the Most High, shining in the midst of the careering stars and of the armies which praise me above thy head.... It is I who chastise the evil-doers and the persecutors of Godly men. I discover and confound the liars. I am the all-seeing Avenger, ... the Guardian of my laws in the land of the righteous.' These words are found mingled in the text, from which I extract them, with allusions to inferior deities; and it must be acknowledged that the translation of the ancient documents of Egypt is uncertain enough; still this uncertainty does not appear to extend to the general sense and bearing of the recent discoveries of our _savans_."[153] Professor Flint as against Cudworth, Ebrard, Gladstone, and others, maintains that the Egyptian religion at the very dawn of its history had "certain great gods," though he adds that "there were not so many as in later times." "Ancestor worship, but not so developed as in later times, and animal worship, but very little of it compared with later times." On the other hand, as against Professor Tiele, Miss Amelia B. Edwards, and others, he says: "For the opinion that its lower elements were older than the higher there is not a particle of properly historical evidence, not a trace in the inscriptions of mere propitiation of ancestors or of belief in the absolute divinity of kings or animals; on the contrary ancestors are always found propitiated through prayer to some of the great gods; kings worshipped as emanations and images of the sun god and the divine animals adored as divine symbols and incarnations." Among the Greeks there are few traces of monotheism, but we have reason for this in the fact that their earliest literature dates from so late a period. It began with Homer not earlier than 600 B.C., and direct accounts of the religion of the Greeks are not traced beyond 560 B.C. But Welcker, whose examinations have been exhaustive, has, in the opinion of Max Müller, fairly established the primitive monotheism of the Greeks. Müller says: "When we ascend with him to the most distant heights of Greek history the idea of God as the supreme being stands before us as a simple fact. Next to this adoration of One God the father of men we find in Greece a worship of nature. The powers of nature, originally worshipped as such, were afterward changed into a family of gods, of which Zeus became the king and father. The third phase is what is generally called Greek mythology; but it was preceded in time, or at least rendered possible in thought, by the two prior conceptions, a belief in a supreme God and a worship of the powers of nature.... The divine character of Zeus, as distinguished from his mythological character, is most carefully brought out by Welcker. He avails himself of all the discoveries of comparative philology in order to show more clearly how the same idea which found expression in the ancient religions of the Brahmans, the Sclavs, and the Germans had been preserved under the same simple, clear, and sublime name by the original settlers of Hellas."[154] The same high authority traces in his own linguistic studies the important fact that all branches of the Aryan race preserve the same name for the Supreme Being, while they show great ramification and variation in the names of their subordinate gods. If, therefore, the Indo-Aryans give evidence of a monotheistic faith at the time of their dispersion, there is an _à priori_ presumption for the monotheism of the Greeks. "Herodotus," says Professor Rawlinson, "speaks of God as if he had never heard of polytheism." The testimony of the Greek poets shows that beneath the prevailing polytheism there remained an underlying conception of monotheistic supremacy. Professor Rawlinson quotes from an Orphic poem the words: "Ares is war, peace Soft Aphrodite, wine that God has made Is Dionysius, Themis is the right Men render to each. Apollo, too, And Phoebus and Æschlepius, who doth heal Diseases, are the sun. All these are one." Max Müller traces to this same element of monotheism the real greatness and power of the Hellenic race when he says: "What was it, then, that preserved in their hearts (the Greeks), in spite even of the feuds of tribes and the jealousies of states, the deep feeling of that ideal unity which constitutes a people? It was their primitive religion; it was a dim recollection of the common allegiance they owed from time immemorial to the great father of gods and men; it was their belief in the old Zeus of Dodona in the Pan-Hellenic Zeus."[155] "There is, in truth, but one," says Sophocles, "one only God, who made both heaven and long-extended earth and bright-faced swell of seas and force of winds." Xenophanes says: "'Mongst gods and men there is one mightiest God not mortal or in form or thought. Entire he sees and understands, and without labor governs all by mind." Aratus, whom Paul quotes,[156] says: "With Zeus began we; let no mortal voice of men leave Zeus unpraised. Zeus fills the heavens, the streets, the marts. Everywhere we live in Zeus. Zeus fills the sea, the shores, the harbors. _We are his offspring, too._" The reference made by Paul evidently implies that this Zeus was a dim conception of the one true God. That all branches of the Semitic race were monotheistic we may call not only Ebrard and Müller, but Renan, to witness. According to Renan, evidences that the monotheism of the Semitic races was of a very early origin, appears in the fact that all their names for deity--El, Elohim, Ilu, Baal, Bel, Adonai, Shaddai, and Allah--denote one being and that supreme. These names have resisted all changes, and doubtless extend as far back as the Semitic language or the Semitic race. Max Müller, in speaking of the early faith of the Arabs, says: "Long before Mohammed the primitive intuition of God made itself felt in Arabia;" and he quotes this ancient Arabian prayer: "I dedicate myself to thy service, O Allah. Thou hast no companion, except the companion of whom thou art master absolute, and of whatever is his." The book of Job and the story of Balaam indicate the prevalence of an early monotheism beyond the pale of the Abrahamic church. In the records of the kings of Assyria and Babylonia there is a conspicuous polytheism, yet it is significant that each king worshipped _one God only_. And this fact suggests, as a wide generalization, that political and dynastic jealousies had their influence in multiplying the names and differentiating the attributes of ancient deities. This was notably the case in ancient Egypt, where each invasion and each change of dynasty led to a new adjustment of the Egyptian Pantheon. Rome had many gods, but Jupiter was supreme. Herodotus says of the Scythians, that they had eight gods, but one was supreme, like Zeus. The Northmen, according to Dr. Dascent, had one supreme god known as the "All-fader." The Druids, though worshipping various subordinate deities, believed in One who was supreme--the creator of all things and the soul of all things. Though conceived of in a Pantheistic sense, He was personal and exerted a moral control, as is shown by the famous triad: "Fear God; be just to all men; die for your country." In the highest and purest period of the old Mexican faith we read of the Tezcucan monarch Nezahualcoyotl, who said: "These idols of wood and stone can neither hear nor feel; much less could they make the heavens and the earth, and man who is the lord of it. These must be the work of the all-powerful unknown God, the Creator of the universe, on whom alone I must rely for consolation and support."[157] The Incas of Peru also, though sun-worshippers, believed in a supreme creator who made the sun. The oldest of their temples was reared to the supreme god "Virachoca." And one of the greatest Incas has left his declared belief that "there must be above the sun a greater and more powerful ruler, at whose behest the sun pursues his daily and untiring round."[158] It has been assumed throughout this lecture, that instead of an advance in the religions of men, there has everywhere been decline. Our proofs of this are not theoretic but historic. As an example, all writers are agreed, I believe, that during the historic period the religion of the Egyptians steadily deteriorated until Christianity and Mohammedanism superseded it. In strong contrast with the lofty and ennobling prayer which we have quoted from an ancient Egyptian record, is the degradation of the later worship. On a column at Heliopolis, belonging to the fourth century before Christ, is inscribed this petition: "O thou white cat, thy head is the head of the sun god, thy nose is the nose of Thoth, of the exceeding great love of Hemopolis." The whole prayer is on this low level. Clement, of Alexandria, after describing the great beauty of an Egyptian temple, proceeds to say: "The innermost sanctuary is concealed by a curtain wrought in gold, which the priest draws aside, and there is seen a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent, which wriggles on a purple cover."[159] That the religions of India have degenerated is equally clear. The fact that all the medieval and modern reforms look back for their ideals to the earlier and purer Aryan faith, might of itself afford sufficient proof of this, but we have also abundant evidence which is direct. In the Rig Veda there is little polytheism, and no idolatry. There is no doctrine of caste, no base worship of Siva with the foul enormities of Saktism.[160] In the most ancient times there was no doctrine of transmigration, nor any notion that human life is an evil to be overcome by self-mortification. Woman was comparatively free from the oppressions which she suffered in the later periods. Infanticide had not then been sanctioned and enjoined by religious authority, and widow burning and the religious murders of the Thugs were unknown. And yet so deeply were these evils rooted at the beginning of the British rule in India, that the joint influence of Christian instruction and Governmental authority for a whole century has not been sufficient to overcome them. Buddhism in the first two or three centuries had much to commend it. King Ashoka left monuments of practical beneficence and philanthropy which have survived to this day. But countless legends soon sprang up to mar the simplicity of Gautama's ethics. Corruptions crept in. Compromises were made with popular superstitions and with Hindu Saktism.[161] The monastic orders sank into corruption, and by the ninth century of our era the system had been wholly swept from India. The Buddhism of Ceylon was planted first by the devout son and daughter of a king, and for a time was characterized by great purity and devotion. But now it exists only in name, and a prominent missionary of the country declared, in the London Missionary Conference of 1888, that nine-tenths of the Cingalese were worshippers of serpents or of spirits.[162] The prevailing Buddhism in Thibet, from the eighth to the tenth century, was an admixture with Saktism and superstition. Where the system has survived in any good degree of strength, it has been due either to government support or to an alliance with other religions. The history of Taouism has shown a still worse deterioration. Laotze, though impracticable as a reformer, was a profound philosopher. His teachings set forth a lofty moral code. Superstition he abominated. His ideas of deity were cold and rationalistic, but they were pure and lofty. But the modern Taouism is a medley of wild and degrading superstitions. According to its theodicy all nature is haunted. The ignorant masses are enthralled by the fear of ghosts, and all progress is paralyzed by the nightmare of "fung shuay." Had not Taouism been balanced by the sturdy common-sense ethics of Confucianism, the Chinese might have become a race of savages.[163] The decline of Mohammedanism from the sublime fanaticism of Abu Bekr and the intellectual aspirations of Haroun Al Raschid, to the senseless imbecility of the modern Turk, is too patent to need argument. The worm of destruction was left in the system by the vices of Mohammed himself; and from the higher level of his early followers it has not only deteriorated, but it has dragged down everything else with it. It has destroyed the family, because it has degraded woman. It has separated her immeasurably from the status of dignity and honor which she enjoyed under the influence of the early Christian church, and it has robbed her of even that freedom which was accorded to her by heathen Rome. One need only look at Northern Africa, the land of Cyprian and Origen, of Augustine and the saintly Monica, to see what Islam has done. And even the later centuries have brought no relief. Prosperous lands have been rendered desolate and sterile, and all progress has been paralyzed. In the history of the Greek religion it is granted that there were periods of advancement. The times of the fully developed Apollo worship showed vast improvement over previous periods, but even Professor Tiele virtually admits that this was owing to the importation of foreign influences. It was not due to any natural process of evolution; and it was followed by hopeless corruption and decline. The last days of both Greece and Rome were degenerate and full of depression and despair. It is not contended that no revivals or reforms are possible in heathenism. There have been many of these, but with all allowance for spasmodic efforts, the general drift has been always downward.[164] There is a natural disposition among men to multiply objects of worship. Herbert Spencer's principle, that development proceeds from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, is certainly true of the religions of the world; but his other principle, that development proceeds from the incoherent to the coherent, does not apply. Incoherency and moral chaos mark the trend of all man-made faiths. The universal tendency to deterioration is well summed up as follows by Professor Naville: "Traces are found almost everywhere in the midst of idolatrous superstitions, of a religion comparatively pure and often stamped with a lofty morality. Paganism is not a simple fact; it offers to view in the same bed two currents (like the Arve and the Arveiron)--the one pure, the other impure. What is the relation between these two currents? ... Did humanity begin with a coarse fetishism, and thence rise by slow degrees to higher conceptions? Do the traces of a comparatively pure monotheism first show themselves in the recent periods of idolatry? Contemporary science inclines more and more to answer in the negative. It is in the most ancient historical ground that the laborious investigators of the past meet with the most elevated ideas of religion. Cut to the ground a young and vigorous beech-tree, and come back a few years afterward. In place of the tree cut down you will find coppice-wood; the sap which nourished a single trunk has been divided among a multitude of shoots. This comparison expresses well enough the opinion which tends to prevail among our savants on the subject of the historical development of religions. The idea of one God is at the roots--it is primitive; polytheism is derivative."[165] We have thus far drawn our proofs of man's polytheistic tendencies from the history of the non-Christian religions. In proof of the same general tendency we now turn to the history of the Israelites, the chosen people of God. We may properly appeal to the Bible as history, especially when showing idolatrous tendencies even under the full blaze of the truth. In spite of the supernatural revelation which they claimed to possess--notwithstanding all their instructions, warnings, promises, deliverances, divinely aided conquests--they relapsed into idolatry again and again. Ere they had reached the land of promise they had begun to make images of the gods of Egypt. They made constant compromises and alliances with the Canaanites, and not even severe judgments could withhold them from this downward drift. Their wisest king was demoralized by heathen marriages, and his successors openly patronized the heathen shrines. The abominations of Baal worship and the nameless vices of Sodom were practised under the very shadow of the Temple.[166] Judgments followed upon this miserable degeneracy. Prophets were sent with repeated warnings, and many were slain for their faithful messages. Tribe after tribe was borne into captivity, the Temple was destroyed, and at last the nation was virtually broken up and scattered abroad. There was indeed a true development in the church of God from the Abrahamic period to the Apostolic day. There was a rising from a narrow national spirit to one which embraced the whole brotherhood of man, from type and prophecy to fulfilment, from the sins that were winked at, to a purer ethic and the perfect law of love; but these results came not by natural evolution--far enough from it. They were wrought out not by man, but we might almost say, in spite of man. Divine interpositions were all that saved Judaism from a total wreck, even as the national unity was destroyed. A new Dispensation was introduced, a Divine Redeemer and an Omnipotent Spirit were the forces which saved the world from a second universal apostasy. We come nearer still to the church of God for proofs of man's inherent tendency to polytheism. Even under the new Dispensation we have seen the church sink into virtual idolatry. Within six centuries from the time of Christ and His apostles there had been a sad lapse into what seemed the worship of images, pictures, and relics, and a faith in holy places and the bones of saints. What Mohammed saw, or thought he saw, was a Christian idolatry scarcely better than that of the Arabian Koreish. And, as if by the judgment of God, the churches of the East were swept with a destruction like that which had been visited upon the Ten Tribes. In the Christianity of to-day, viewed as a whole, how strong is the tendency to turn from the pure spiritual conception of God to some more objective trust--a saint, a relic, a ritual, an ordinance. In the old churches of the East or on the Continent of Europe, how much of virtual idolatry is there even now? It is only another form of the tendency in man to seek out many devices--to find visible objects of trust--to try new panaceas for the ailments of the soul--to multiply unto himself gods to help his weakness. This is just what has been done in all ages and among all races of the world. This explains polytheism. Man's religious nature is a vine, and God is its only proper support. Once fallen from that support, it creeps and grovels in all directions and over all false supports. We have not resorted to Divine revelation for proofs except as history. But our conclusions drawn from heathen sources bring us directly, as one face answereth to another face in a glass, to the plain teachings of Paul and other inspired writers, who tell us that the human race was once possessed of the knowledge of One Supreme God, but that men apostatized from Him, preferring to worship the creature rather than the Creator. There are no traces of an upward evolution toward clearer knowledge and purer lives, except by the operation of outward causes, but there are many proofs that men's hearts have become darkened and their moral nature more and more depraved. In all lands there have been those who seemed to gain some glimpses of truth, and whose teachings were far above the average sentiment and character of their times, but they have either been discarded like Socrates and the prophets of Israel, or they have obtained a following only for a time and their precepts have fallen into neglect. It has been well said that no race of men live up to their religion, however imperfect it may be. They first disregard it, and then at length degrade it, to suit their apostate character. Paul's estimate of heathen character was that of a man who, aside from his direct inspiration, spoke from a wide range of observation. He was a philosopher by education, and he lived in an age and amid national surroundings which afforded the broadest knowledge of men, of customs, of religious faiths, of institutions. Trained as a Jew, dealing constantly with the most enlightened heathen, persecuting the Christians, and then espousing their cause, his preparation for a broad, calm, and unerring judgment of the character of the Gentile nations was complete; and his one emphatic verdict was _apostasy_. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 125: Fiske: _The Destiny of Man_, pp. 78-80.] [Footnote 126: We do not care to enter the field of pre-historic speculation where the evolution of religion from totemism or fetishism claims to find its chief support. We are considering only the traditional development of the ancient faiths of man.] [Footnote 127: _Introduction to Christian Theology_, Appendix, pp. 166, 167.] [Footnote 128: Ebrard's _Apologetics_, vols. ii. and iii.] [Footnote 129: _Modern Atheism_, p. 13.] [Footnote 130: _The Chinese_, pp. 163, 164.] [Footnote 131: _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. i., p. 23.] [Footnote 132: Professor Banergea (see _Indian Antiquary_, February, 1875) thinks that this Hindu account of creation shows traces of the common revelation made to mankind.] [Footnote 133: _Science of Religion_, p. 99.] [Footnote 134: _Science of Religion_, p. 88.] [Footnote 135: "The ancient relics of African faith are rapidly disappearing at the approach of Mohammedan and Christian missionaries; but what has been preserved of it, chiefly through the exertions of learned missionaries, is full of interest to the student of religion, with its strange worship of snakes and ancestors, its vague hope of a future life, and its not altogether faded reminiscence of a Supreme God, the Father of the black as well as of the white man."--_Science of Religion_, p. 39.] [Footnote 136: While he maintains that the idea of God must have preceded that of _gods_, as the plural always implies the singular, he yet claims very justly that the exclusive conception of monotheism as against polytheism could hardly have existed. Men simply thought of God as God, as a child thinks of its father, and does not even raise the question of a second.--See _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. i., p. 349.] [Footnote 137: St. Augustine, in quoting Cyprian, shows that the fathers of the Church looked upon Plato as a monotheist. The passage is as follows: "For when he (Cyprian) speaks of the Magians, he says that the chief among them, Hostanes, maintains that the true God is invisible, and that true angels sit at His throne; and that Plato agrees with this and believes in one God, considering the others to be demons; and that Hermes Trismegistus also speaks of one God, and confesses that He is incomprehensible." Angus., _De Baptismo contra Donat_., Lib. VI., Cap. XLIV.] [Footnote 138: _The Aryan Witness_, passim.] [Footnote 139: Aristotle said, "God, though He is one, has many names, because He is called according to the states into which He always enters anew."] [Footnote 140: _The Religions of China_, p. 16.] [Footnote 141: _The Religions of China_, p. 49.] [Footnote 142: "In the year 1600 the Emperor of China declared in an edict that the Chinese should adore, not the material heavens, but the _Master_ of heaven."--Cardinal Gibbons: _Our Christian Heritage_.] [Footnote 143: Martin: _The Chinese_, p. 106.] [Footnote 144: It has been related by Rev. Hudson Taylor that the fishermen of the Fukien Province, when a storm arises, pray to the goddess of the sea; but when that does not avail they throw all the idols aside and pray to the "Great-grandfather in Heaven." Father is a great conception to the Chinese mind. Great-grandfather is higher still, and stands to them for the Supreme.] [Footnote 145: _Science of Religion_, p. 86.] [Footnote 146: _The Chinese_, p. 99.] [Footnote 147: Other writers contend that he was probably contemporaneous with Abraham. Still others think Zoroaster a general name for great prophets. Darmestetter inclines to this view.] [Footnote 148: _Chips from a German Workshop._] [Footnote 149: Archbishop Vaughn, of Sydney, emphatically declares that the aborigines of Australia believe in a Supreme Being.] [Footnote 150: Rev. Mr. Johnson, of Lagos, has expressed a belief that the pagan tribes of West Africa were monotheists before the incursion of the Mohammedans. Rev. Alfred Marling, of Gaboon, bears the same testimony of the Fans.] [Footnote 151: Rev. A.C. Thompson, D.D. _The Moravians_. One of the early converts from among the Ojibwas, said to the missionary, Rev. S.G. Wright: "A great deal of your preaching I readily understand, especially what you say about our real characters. We Indians all know that it is wrong to lie, to steal, to be dishonest, to slander, to be covetous, and we always know that the Great Spirit hates all these things. All this we knew before we ever saw the white man. I knew these things when I was a little boy. We did not, however, know the way of pardon for these sins. In our religion there is nothing said by the wise men about pardon. We knew nothing of the Lord Jesus Christ as a Saviour."] [Footnote 152: Professor Tiele, of Leyden, asserts that "It is altogether erroneous to regard the Egyptian religion as the polytheistic degeneration of a prehistoric monotheism. It was polytheistic from the beginning." But on one of the oldest of Egyptian monuments is found this hymn, which is quoted by Cardinal Gibbons in _Our Christian Inheritance_: "Hail to thee, say all creatures; ... The gods adore thy majesty, The spirits thou has made exalt thee, Rejoicing before the feet of their begetter. They cry out welcome to thee, Father of the fathers of all the gods, Who raises the heavens, who fixes the earth; We worship thy spirit who alone hast made us, We whom thou hast made thank thee that thou hast given us birth, We give to thee praises for thy mercy toward us."] [Footnote 153: _Modern Atheism_, p. 13.] [Footnote 154: _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. ii., pp. 146, 147.] [Footnote 155: _Science of Religion_, Lecture III., p. 57.] [Footnote 156: Acts xvii. 28.] [Footnote 157: Prescott's _Conquest of Mexico_.] [Footnote 158: Réville in his _Hibbert Lectures_ on Mexican and Peruvian religions asserts that polytheism existed from the beginning, but our contention is that One God was supreme and created the sun.] [Footnote 159: De Pressensé: _The Ancient World and Christianity_.] [Footnote 160: Bournouf found the Tantras so obscene that he refused to translate them.] [Footnote 161: T. Rhys Davids: _Buddhism_, p. 208.] [Footnote 162: _Report of Missionary Conference_, vol. i, p. 70.] [Footnote 163: Buddhism, in the _Britannica_.] [Footnote 164: Rev. S.G. Wright, long a missionary among the American Indians, says: "During the forty-six years in which I have been laboring among the Ojibway Indians, I have been more and more impressed with the evidence, showing itself in their language, that at some former time they have been in possession of much higher ideas of God's attributes, and of what constitutes true happiness, immortality, and virtue, as well as of the nature of the Devil and his influence in the world, than those which they now possess. The thing which early in our experience surprised us, and which has not ceased to impress us, is, that, with their present low conceptions of spiritual things, they could have chosen so lofty and spiritual a word for the Deity. The only satisfactory explanation seems to be that, at an early period of their history, they had higher and more correct ideas concerning God than those which they now possess, and that these have become, as the geologists would say, _fossilized_ in their forms of speech, and so preserved."--_Bibliotheca Sacra_, October, 1889.] [Footnote 165: _Modern Atheism_, p. 10.] [Footnote 166: I. Kings, xiv., and II. Kings, xxiii.] LECTURE VIII. INDIRECT TRIBUTES OF HEATHEN SYSTEMS TO THE DOCTRINES OF THE BIBLE I am to speak of certain indirect tributes borne by the non-Christian religions to the doctrines of Christianity. One such tribute of great value we have already considered in the prevalence of early monotheism, so far corroborating the scriptural account of man's first estate, and affording many proofs which corroborate the scriptural doctrine of human apostasy. Others of the same general bearing will now be considered. The history of man's origin, the strange traditions of his fall by transgression and his banishment from Eden, of the conflict of good with evil represented by a serpent, of the Deluge and the dispersion of the human race, have all been the subjects of ridicule by anti-Christian writers:--though by turns they have recognized these same facts and have used them as proofs that Christianity had borrowed them from old myths. The idea of sacrifice, or atonement, of Divine incarnation, of a trinity, of mediation, of a salvation by faith instead of one's own merits, have been represented as unphilosophical, and therefore improbable in the nature of the case. It becomes an important question, therefore, whether other religions of mankind show similar traditions, however widely they have dwelt apart, and however diversified their languages, literatures, and institutions may have been in other respects. And it is also an important question, whether even under heathen systems, the consciousness of sin and the deepest moral yearnings of men have found expression along the very lines which are represented by the Christian doctrines of grace. To these questions we now address ourselves. What are the lessons of the various ethnic traditions? And how are we to account for their striking similarities? The most obvious theory is, that a common origin must be assigned to them, that they are dim reminiscences of a real knowledge once clear and distinct. The fact that with their essential unity they differ from each other and differ from our Scriptural record, seems to rather strengthen the theory that all--our own included--have been handed down from the pre-Mosaic times--ours being divinely edited by an inspired and infallible author. Their differences are such as might have been expected from separate transmissions, independently made. We have, first of all, the various traditions of the Creation. In most heathen races there have appeared, in their later stages, grave and grotesque cosmogonies; and a too common impression is, that these represent the real teachings of their sacred books or their earliest traditions. But when one enters upon a careful study of the non-Christian religions, and traces them back to their sources, he finds more rational accounts of the Creation and the order of nature, and sees striking points of resemblance to the Mosaic record. The story of Genesis represents the "Beginning" as formless, chaotic, and dark. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The heavens and the earth were separated. Light appeared long before the sun and moon were visible, and the day and night were clearly defined. Creation proceeded in a certain order from vegetable to animal life, and from lower animals to higher, and last of all man appeared. In heathen systems we find fragments of this traditional account, and, as a rule, they are more or less clear in proportion to their nearness to, or departure from, the great cradle of the human race.[167] Thus Professor Rawlinson quotes from an Assyrian account of the creation, as found upon the clay tablets discovered in the palace of Assur-bani-pal, a description of formlessness, emptiness, and darkness on the deep--of a separation between the earth and sky--and of the light as preceding the appearance of the sun. That account also places the creation of animals before that of man, whom it represents as being formed of the dust of the earth, and as receiving a divine effluence from the Creator.[168] According to an Etruscan saga quoted by Suidas, God created the world in six periods of 1,000 years each. In the first, the heavens and the earth; in the second, the firmament; in the third, the seas; in the fourth, the sun, moon, and stars; in the fifth, the beasts of the land, the air, and the sea; in the sixth, man. According to a passage in the Persian Avesta, the supreme Ormazd created the visible world by his word in six periods or thousands of years: in the first, the heavens with the stars; in the second, the water and the clouds; in the third, the earth and the mountains; in the fourth, the trees and the plants; in the fifth, the beasts which sprang from the primeval beast; in the sixth, man.[169] As we get farther away from the supposed early home of the race, the traditions become more fragmentary and indistinct. The Rig Veda, Mandala, x., 129, tells us that: "In the beginning there was neither naught nor aught; There was neither day nor night nor light nor darkness; Only the EXISTENT ONE breathed calmly. Next came darkness, gloom on gloom. Next all was water--chaos indiscrete."[170] Strikingly similar is the language quoted in a former lecture from the prayer of a Chinese emperor of the Ming Dynasty. It runs thus: "Of old, in the beginning, there was the great chaos without form and dark. The five elements had not begun to revolve, nor the sun and moon to shine. In the midst thereof there presented itself neither form nor sound. Thou, O Spiritual Sovereign, didst divide the grosser parts from the purer. Thou madest heaven: Thou madest earth: Thou madest man." There is a possibility that these conceptions may have come from Christian sources instead of primitive Chinese traditions, possibly from early Nestorian missionaries, though this is scarcely probable, as Chinese emperors have been slow to introduce foreign conceptions into their august temple service to Shangte; its chief glory lies in its antiquity and its purely national character. Buddhism had already been in China more than a thousand years, and these prayers are far enough from its teachings. May we not believe that the ideas here expressed had always existed in the minds of the more devout rulers of the empire? In similar language, the Edda of the Icelandic Northmen describes the primeval chaos. Thus: "'Twas the morning of time When yet naught was, Nor sand nor sea was there, Nor cooling streams. Earth was not formed Nor heaven above. A yawning gap was there And grass nowhere." Not unlike these conceptions of the "Beginning" is that which Morenhout found in a song of the Tahitans, and which ran thus: "He was; Toaroa was his name, He existed in space; no earth, no heaven, no men." M. Goussin adds the further translation: "Toaroa, the Great Orderer, is the origin of the earth: he has no father, no posterity."[171] The tradition of the Odshis, a negro tribe on the African Gold Coast, represents the creation as having been completed in six days. God created first the woman; then the man; then the animals; then the trees and plants; and lastly the rocks. God created nothing on the seventh day. He only gave men His commandments. The reversal of the order here only confirms the supposition that it is an original tradition. We find everywhere on the Western Hemisphere, north and south, plain recognition of the creation of the world by one Supreme God, though the order is not given. How shall we account for the similarities above indicated, except on the supposition of a common and a very ancient source? Still more striking are the various traditions of the Fall of man by sin. In the British Museum there is a very old Babylonian seal which bears the figures of a man and a woman stretching out their hands toward a fruit-tree, while behind the woman lurks a serpent. A fragment bearing an inscription represents a tree of life as guarded on all sides by a sword. Another inscription describes a delectable region surrounded by four rivers. Professors Rawlinson and Delitzsch both regard this as a reference to the Garden of Eden. "The Hindu legends," says Hardwick, "are agreed in representing man as one of the last products of creative wisdom, as the master-work of God; and also in extolling the first race of men as pure and upright, innocent and happy. The beings who were thus created by Brahma are all said to have been endowed with righteousness and perfect faith; they abode wherever they pleased, unchecked by any impediment; their hearts were free from guile; they were pure, made free from toil by observance of sacred institutes. In their sanctified minds Hari dwelt; and they were filled with perfect wisdom by which they contemplated the glory of Vishnu. "The first men were, accordingly, the best. The Krita age, the 'age of truth,' the reign of purity, in which mankind, as it came forth from the Creator, was not divided into numerous conflicting orders, and in which the different faculties of man all worked harmoniously together, was a thought that lay too near the human heart to be uprooted by the ills and inequalities of actual life. In this the Hindu sided altogether with the Hebrew, and as flatly contradicted the unworthy speculations of the modern philosopher, who would fain persuade us that human beings have not issued from one single pair, and also, that the primitive type of men is scarcely separable from that of ordinary animals...."[172] Spence Hardy, in speaking on this subject, describes a Buddhist legend of Ceylon which represents the original inhabitants of the world as having been once spotlessly pure, and as dwelling in ethereal bodies which moved at will through space. They had no need of sun or moon. They lived in perfect happiness and peace till, at last, one of their number tasted of a strange substance which he found lying on the surface of the earth. He induced others to eat also, whereupon all knew good and evil, and their high estate was lost. They now had perpetual need of food, which only made them more gross and earthly. Wickedness abounded, and they were in darkness. Assembling together, they fashioned for themselves a sun, but after a few hours it fell below the horizon, and they were compelled to create a moon.[173] An old Mongolian legend represents the first man as having transgressed by eating a pistache nut. As a punishment, he and all his posterity came under the power of sin and death, and were subjected to toil and suffering.[174] A tradition of the African Odshis, already named, relates that formerly God was very near to men. But a woman, who had been pounding banana fruit in a mortar, inadvertently entering His presence with a pestle in her hands, aroused His anger, and He withdrew into the high heavens and listened to men no more. Six rainless years brought famine and distress, whereupon they besought Him to send one of His counsellors who should be their daysman, and should undertake their cause and care for them. God sent his chief minister, with a promise that He would give rain and sunshine, and He directed that His rainbow should appear in the sky.[175] The inhabitants of Tahiti have a tradition of a fall which is very striking; and Humboldt, after careful study, reached the conclusion that it had not been derived through any communication with Christian lands, but was an old native legend. The Karens of Burmah had a story of an early temptation of their ancestors by an evil being and their consequent apostasy. Many other races who have no definite tradition of this kind have still some vague notion of a golden age in the past. There has been everywhere a mournful and pathetic sense of something lost, of degeneracy from better days gone by, of Divine displeasure and forfeited favor. The baffled gropings of all false religions seem to have been so many devices to regain some squandered heritage of the past. All this is strikingly true of China. Still more clear and wellnigh universal are the traditions of a flood. The Hindu Brahmanas and the Mahabharata of a later age present legends of a deluge which strikingly resemble the story of Genesis. Vishnu incarnate in a fish warned a great sage of a coming flood and directed him to build an ark. A ship was built and the sage with seven others entered. Attached to the horn of the fish the ship was towed over the waters to a high mountain top.[176] The Chinese also have a story of a flood, though it is not given in much detail. The Iranian tradition is very fragmentary and seems to confound the survivor with the first man of the creation. Yima, the Noah of the story, was warned by the beginning of a great winter rain, by which the waters were raised 19,000 feet. Yima was commanded to prepare a place of safety for a number of chosen men, birds, and beasts. It was to be three stories high, and to be furnished with a high door and window, but whether it was a ship or a refuge on the mountain top does not appear. The same tradition speaks of Eden and of a serpent, but the account is suddenly cut short.[177] The Greek traditions of a flood varied according to the different branches of the Greek nation. The Arcadians traced their origin to Dardanus, who was preserved from the great flood in a skin-covered boat. The Pelasgians held the tradition of Deucalion and his wife, who were saved in a ship which was grounded on the summit of Pindus. As the water receded they sent out a dove to search for land. The Assyrian account, which was found a few years ago on a tablet in the palace of Assur-bani-pal, claims to have been related as a matter of personal experience by Sisit, the Chaldean Noah, who was commanded to construct a ship 600 cubits long, into which he should enter with his family and his goods. At the time appointed the earth became a waste. The very gods in heaven fled from the fury of the tempest and "huddled down in their refuge like affrighted dogs." The race of men was swept away. On the seventh day Sisit opened a window and saw that the rain was stayed, but the water was covered with floating corpses; all men had become as clay. The ship rested on a mountain top, and Sisit sent forth a dove, a swallow, and a raven. The dove and the swallow returned, but the raven was satisfied with the floating carcasses. Sisit went forth and offered sacrifice, around which "the gods hovered like flies." Professor Rawlinson thinks that these accounts and those given in Genesis were both derived from the earlier traditions, the Assyrian version having been greatly corrupted. The Chaldean tradition is slightly different. The Noah of the Chaldeans was commanded in a dream not only to build a ship, but to bury all important documents and so preserve the antediluvian history. As the flood subsided he, his family, and his pilot were transferred to heaven, but certain friends who were saved with them remained and peopled the earth. Among the ancient Peruvians we find a tradition of a great deluge which swept the earth. After it had passed, the aged man Wiracotscha rose out of Lake Titicaca and his three sons issued from a cave and peopled the earth.[178] Hugh Miller and others have named many similar traditions. The fact that in nearly every case those who were rescued from the flood immediately offered piacular sacrifices suggests the recognition in all human history of still another fundamental doctrine of Christianity, the universal sense of sin. This conviction was especially strong when the survivors of a Divine judgment beheld the spectacle of a race swept away for their transgressions; but there are abundant traces of it in all ages of the world. The exceptions are found in those instances where false systems of philosophy have sophisticated the natural sense of guilt by destroying the consciousness of personality. All races of men have shown a feeling of moral delinquency and a corresponding fear. The late C. Loring Brace, in his work entitled "The Unknown God," quotes some striking penitential psalms or prayers offered by the Akkadians of Northern Assyria four thousand years ago. The deep-seated conviction of guilt which is indicated by the old religion of the Egyptians is well set forth by Dr. John Wortabet, of Beyrut, in a pamphlet entitled "The Temples and Tombs of Thebes." He says: "The immortality of the soul, its rewards and punishments in the next world, and its final salvation and return into the essence of the divinity were among the most cherished articles of the Egyptian creed. Here (in the tombs), as on the papyri which contain the 'Ritual of the Dead,' are represented the passage of the soul through the nether world and its introduction into the Judgment Hall, where Osiris, the god of benevolence, sits on a throne, and with the assistance of forty-two assessors proceeds to examine the deceased. His actions are weighed in a balance against truth in the presence of Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom, and if found wanting he is hounded out in the shape of an unclean animal by Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the infernal regions. The soul then proceeds in a series of transmigrations into the bodies of animals and human beings and thus passes through a purgatorial process which entitles it to appear again before the judgment-seat of Osiris. If found pure it is conveyed to Aalu, the Elysian fields, or the 'Pools of Peace.' After three thousand years of sowing and reaping by cool waters it returns to its old body (the preserved mummy), suffers another period of probation, and is ultimately absorbed into the godhead. One of the most impressive scenes in the whole series is that where the soul, in the form of a mummified body, stands before Osiris and the forty-two judges to be examined on the forty-two commandments of the Egyptian religion. Bearing on its face the signs of solemnity and fear, and carrying in its hand a feather, the symbol of veracity, it says among other things: 'I have not blasphemed the gods, I have defrauded no man, I have not changed the measures of Egypt, I have not prevaricated at the courts of justice, I have not lied, I have not stolen, I have not committed adultery, I have done no murder, I have not been idle, I have not been drunk, I have not been cruel, I have not famished my family, I have not been a hypocrite, I have not defiled my conscience for the sake of my superiors, I have not smitten privily, I have lived on truth, I have made it my delight to do what men command and the gods approve, I have given bread to the hungry and drink to the thirsty and clothes to the naked, my mouth and hands are pure.' Now what strikes one with great force in this remarkable passage from the walls of the old sand-covered tombs is the wonderful scope and fulness with which the laws of right and wrong were stamped upon the Egyptian conscience. There is here a recognition, not only of the great evils which man shall not commit, but also of many of those positive duties which his moral nature requires. It matters not that these words are wholly exculpatory; they nevertheless recognize sin." But perhaps no one has depicted man's sense of guilt and fear more eloquently than Dean Stanley when speaking of the Egyptian Sphinx. Proceeding upon the theory that that time-worn and mysterious relic is a couchant lion whose projecting paws were long since buried in the desert sands, and following the tradition that an altar once stood before that mighty embodiment of power, he graphically pictures the transient generations of men, in all the sin and weakness of their frail humanity, coming up with their offerings and their prayers "between the paws of deity." It is a grim spectacle, but it emphasizes the sense of human guilt. Only the Revealed Word of God affords a complete and satisfactory explanation of the remarkable fact that the human race universally stand self-convicted of sin. There is also a tribute to the truth of Christianity in certain traces of a conception of Divine sacrifice for sin found in some of the early religious faiths of men. All are familiar with the difference between the offerings of Abel and those of Cain--the former disclosing a faith in a higher expiation. In like manner there appear mysterious references to a divine and vicarious sacrifice in the early Vedas of India. In the Parusha Sukta of the Rig Veda occurs this passage: "From him called Parusha was born Viraj, and from Viraj was Parusha produced, whom gods made their oblation. With Parusha as a victim they performed a sacrifice." Manu says that Parusha, "the first man," was called Brahma, and was produced by emanation from the "self-existent spirit." Brahma thus emanating, was "the first male," or, as elsewhere called, "the born lord." By him the world was made. The idea is brought out still more strikingly in one of the Brahmanas where the sacrifice is represented as voluntary and all availing. "Surely," says Sir Monier Williams, "in these mysterious allusions to the sacrifice of a representative man we may perceive traces of the original institution of sacrifice as a divinely appointed ordinance, typical of the one great offering of the Son of God for the sins of the world." The late Professor Banergea, of Calcutta, reaching the same conclusion, says: "It is not easy to account for the genesis of these ideas in the Veda, of 'one born in the beginning Lord of creatures,' offering himself a sacrifice for the benefit of deified mortals, except on the assumption that it is based upon the tradition of the 'Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.'" No doubt modern scepticism might be slow to acknowledge any such inference as this; but as Professor Banergea was a high-caste Hindu of great learning, and was well acquainted with the subtleties of Hindu thought, his opinion should have great weight. And when we remember how easily scientific scepticism is satisfied with the faintest traces of whatever strengthens its theories--how thin are some of the generalizations of Herbert Spencer--how very slight and fanciful are the resemblances of words which philologists often accept as indisputable proofs--how far-fetched are the inferences sometimes drawn from the appearance of half-decayed fossils as proofs and even demonstrations of the law of evolution--we need not be over-modest in setting forth these traces of an original divine element in the institution of typical sacrifices among men. It is never safe to assume positively this or that meaning for a mysterious passage found in the sacred books of non-Christian systems, but there are many things which seem at least to illustrate important precepts of the Christian faith. Thus the slain Osiris of the Egyptians was said to enter into the sufferings of mortals. "Having suffered the great wound," so the record runs, "he was wounded in every other wound." And we read in "The Book of the Dead" that "when the Lord of truth cleanses away defilement, evil is joined to the deity that the truth may expel the evil."[179] This seems to denote an idea of vicarious righteousness. The Onondaga Indians had a tradition that the celestial Hiawatha descended from heaven and dwelt among their ancestors, and that upon the establishment of the League of the Iroquois he was called by the Great Spirit to sanctify that League by self-sacrifice. As the Indian council was about to open, Hiawatha was bowed with intense suffering, which faintly reminds one of Christ's agony in Gethsemane. He foresaw that his innocent and only child would be taken from him. Soon after a messenger from heaven smote her to the earth by his side. Then, having drank this cup of sorrow, he entered the council and guided its deliberations with superhuman wisdom.[180] In citing this incident nothing more is intended than to call attention to some of the mysterious conceptions which seem to float dimly through the minds of the most savage races, and which show at the very least that the idea of vicarious sacrifice is not strange to mankind, but is often mysteriously connected with their greatest blessings. The legend of "Prometheus Bound," as we find it in the tragedies of Æschylus, is so graphic in its picture of vicarious suffering for the good of men that infidel writers have charged the story of the Cross with plagiarism, and have applied to Prometheus some of the expressions used in the fifty-third chapter of the Prophecy of Isaiah. We are often told that there is injustice in the very idea of vicarious suffering, as involved in the Christian doctrine of salvation, or that the best instincts of a reasonable humanity revolt against it. But such criticisms are sufficiently met by these analogies which we find among all nations. Let me next call attention to some of the predicted deliverers for whom the nations have been looking. Nothing found in the study of the religious history of mankind is more striking than the universality of a vague expectation of coming messiahs. According to the teachings of Hinduism there have been nine incarnations of Vishnu, of whom Buddha was admitted to be one. But there is to be a tenth avatar who shall yet come at a time of great and universal wickedness, and shall establish a kingdom of righteousness on the earth. Some years ago the Rev. Dr. John Newton, of Lahore, took advantage of this prediction and wrote a tract showing that the true deliverer and king of righteousness had already come in the person of Jesus Christ. So striking seemed the fulfilment viewed from the Hindu standpoint, that some hundreds in the city of Rampore were led to a faith in Christ as an avatar of Vishnu. A remarkable illustration of a felt want of something brighter and more hopeful is seen in the legends and predictions of the Teutonic and Norse religions. The faiths of all the Teutonic races were of the sternest character, and it was such a cultus that made them the terror of Europe. They worshipped their grim deities in the congenial darkness of deep forest shades. There was no joy, no sense of divine pity, no peace. They were conscious of deep and unutterable wants which were never met. They yearned for a golden age and the coming of a deliverer. Baldr, one of the sons of Woden, had passed away, but prophecy promised that he should return to deliver mankind from sorrow and from death. "When the twilight of the gods should have passed away, then amid prodigies and the crash and decay of a wicked world, in glory and joy he should return, and a glorious kingdom should be renewed." Or, in the words of one of their own poets: "Then unsown the swath shall flourish and back come Baldr; With him Hoder shall dwell in Hropter's palace, Shrines of gods the great and holy, There the just shall joy forever, And in pleasure pass the ages." The well-known prediction of the Sibyl of Cumæ bears testimony to the same expectation of mankind. The genuine Sibylline Oracles were in existence anterior to the birth of Christ. Virgil died forty years before that event, and the well-known eclogue _Pollio_ is stated by him to be a transcript of the prophetic carmen of the Sibyl of Cumæ. But for the fact that it has a Roman instead of a Jewish coloring, it might almost seem Messianic. The oracle speaks thus: "The last era, the subject of the Sibyl song of Cumæ, has now arrived; the great series of ages begins anew. The virgin returns--returns the reign of Saturn. The progeny from heaven now descends. Be thou propitious to the Infant Boy by whom first the Iron Age shall expire, and the Golden Age over the whole world shall commence. Whilst thou, O Pollio, art consul, this glory of our age shall be made manifest, and the celestial months begin their revolutions. Under thy auspices whatever vestiges of our guilt remain, shall, by being atoned for, redeem the earth from fear forever. He shall partake of the life of the gods. He shall reign over a world in peace with his father's virtues. The earth, sweet boy, as her first-fruits, shall pour thee forth spontaneous flowers. The serpent shall die: the poisonous and deceptive tree shall die. All things, heavens and earth and the regions of the sea, rejoice at the advent of this age. The time is now at hand."[181] Forty years later the Christ appeared. Whether Virgil had been influenced by Hebrew prophecy it is impossible to say. It may be that the so-called Sibyl had caught something of the same hope which led the Magi of the East to the cradle of the infant Messiah, but in any case the eclogue voiced a vague expectation which prevailed throughout the Roman Empire. In modern as well as in ancient times nations and races have looked for deliverers or for some brighter hope. Missionaries found the Hawaiians dissatisfied and hopeless; their idols had been thrown away. The Karens were waiting for the arrival of the messengers of the truth. The Mexicans, at the time of the Spanish conquest, were looking for a celestial benefactor. The very last instance of an anxious looking for a deliverer is that which quite recently has so sadly misled our Sioux Indians. Mankind have longed not only for deliverers, but also for _mediators_. The central truth of the Christian faith is its divine sympathy and help brought down into our human nature. In other words, mediation--God with man. The faith of the Hindus, lacking this element, was cold and remorseless. Siva, the god of destruction, and his hideous and blood-thirsty wives, had become chief objects of worship, only because destruction and death led to life again. But there was no divine help. The gods were plied with sharp bargains in sacrifice and merit; they were appeased; they were cajoled; but there was no love. But the time came when the felt want of men for something nearer and more sympathetic led to the doctrine of Vishnu's incarnations: first grotesque deliverers in animal shapes, but at length the genial and sympathetic Krishna. He was not the highest model of character, but he was human. He had associated with the rustics and frolicked around their camp-fires. He became Arjuna's charioteer and rendered him counsel and help in that low disguise. He was a sharer of burdens--a counsellor and friend. And he became the most popular of all Hindu deities. The important point in all this is that this old system, so self-sufficient and self-satisfied, should have groped its way toward a divine sympathizer in human form, a living and helpful god among men. Hinduism had not been wanting in anthropomorphisms: it had imagined the presence of God in a thousand visible objects which rude men could appreciate. Trees, apes, cattle, crocodiles, and serpents had been invested with an in-dwelling spirit, but it had found no mediator. Men had been trying by all manner of devices to sublimate their souls, and climb Godward by their own self-mortification; but they had realized no divine help. To meet this want they developed a veritable doctrine of faith. They had learned from Buddhism the great influence and power of one who could instruct and counsel and encourage. Some Oriental scholars think that they had also learned many things from Christian sources.[182] However that may be--from whatever source they had gained this suggestion--they found it to accord with the deepest wants of the human heart. And the splendid tribute which that peculiar development bears to the great fundamental principles of the Christian faith, is all the more striking for the fact that it grew up in spite of the adamantine convervatism of a system, all of whose teachings had been in a precisely opposite direction. It was old Hinduism coming out of its intrenchments to pay honor to the true way of eternal life. Probably the doctrine first sprang from a felt want, but was subsequently reinforced by Christian influences. The late Professor Banergea, in his "Aryan Witness," gives what must be regarded as at least a very plausible account of the last development of the so-called Krishna cult, and of this doctrine of faith. He thinks that it borrowed very much from western monotheists. He quotes a passage from the Narada Pancharata, which represents a pious Brahman of the eighth century A.D., as having been sent to the far northwest, where "white-faced monotheists" would teach him a pure faith in the Supreme Vishnu or Krishna. He quotes also, from another and later authority, a dialogue in which this same Brahman reproved Vyasa for not having celebrated the praises of Krishna as supreme. This Professor Banergea regarded as proof that previously to the eighth century Krishna has been worshipped only as a demigod. But the whole drift of the old Brahmanical doctrines had been toward sacrifice as a debt and credit system, and that plan had failed. It had impoverished the land and ruined the people, and had brought no spiritual comfort. Men had found that they could not buy salvation. Moreover, Buddhism and other forms of rationalistic philosophy, after prolonged and thorough experiment, had also failed. The Hindu race had found that as salvation could not be purchased with sacrifices, neither could it be reasoned out by philosophy, nor worked out by austerities. It must come from a Divine helper. Thus, when Narada had wearied himself with austerities--so we read in the Narada Pancharata--he heard a voice from heaven saying: "If Krishna is worshipped, what is the use of austerities? If Krishna is _not_ worshipped, what is the use of austerities? If Krishna is within and without, what is the use of austerities? If Krishna is _not_ within and without, what is the use of austerities? Stop, O Brahman; why do you engage in austerities? Go quickly and get matured faith in Krishna, as described by the sect of Vishnu who snaps the fetters of the world." "We are thus led," says Professor Banergea, "to the very genesis of the doctrine of faith in connection with Hinduism. And it was admittedly not an excogitation of the Brahmanical mind itself. Narada had brought it from the land of 'the whites,' where he got an insight into Vishnu as the Saviour which was not attainable elsewhere." And he then persuaded the author of one of the Puranas to recount the "Lord's acts"--in other words, the history of Krishna, with the enforcement of faith in his divinity: "Change the name," says Banergea, "and it is almost Christian doctrine."[183] It is an interesting fact that Buddhism, in its progress through the centuries, has also wrought out a doctrine of faith by a similar process. It began as a form of atheistic rationalism. Its most salient feature was staunch and avowed independence of all help from gods or men. It emphasized in every way the self-sufficiency of one's own mind and will to work out emancipation. But when Buddha died no enlightened counsellor was left, and another Buddha could not be expected for four thousand years. The multitudes of his disciples felt that, theory or no theory, there was an awful void. The bald and bleak system could not stand on such a basis. The human heart cried out for some divine helper, some one to whom man could pray. Fortunately there were supposed to be predestined Buddhas.--"Bodisats"--then living in some of the heavens, and as they were preparing themselves to become incarnate Buddhas, they must already be interested in human affairs, and especially the Maitreyeh, who would appear on earth next in order. So Buddhism, in spite of its own most pronounced dogmas, began to pray to an unseen being, began to depend and trust, began to lay hold on divine sympathy, and look to heaven for help. By the seventh century of our era the northern Buddhists, whether influenced in part by the contact of Christianity, or not, had subsidized more than one of these coming Buddhas. They had a complete Trinity. One person of this Trinity, the everywhere present Avolokitesvara, became the chief object of worship, the divine helper on whom all dependence was placed. This mythical being was really the God of northern Buddhism in the Middle Ages, and is the popular sympathizer of all Mongolian races to the present day. In Thibet he is supposed to be incarnate in the Grand Lama. In China he is incarnate in Quanyen, the goddess of mercy. With sailors she is the goddess of the sea. In many temples she is invoked by the sick, the halt, the blind, the impoverished. Her images are sometimes represented with a hundred arms to symbolize her omnipotence to save. Beal says of this, as Banergea says of the faith element of the Krishna cult, that it is wholly alien to the religion whose name it bears: it is not Buddhism. He thinks that it has been greatly affected by Christian influences. Another mythical being who is worshipped as God in China and Japan, is Amitabba, a Dhyana or celestial Buddha, who in long kalpas of Time has acquired merit enough for the whole world. Two of the twelve Buddhist sects of Japan have abandoned every principle taught by Gautama, except his ethics, and have cast themselves upon the free grace of Amitabba. They have exchanged the old atheism for theism. They have given up all dependence on merit-making and self-help; they now rely wholly on the infinite merit of another. Their religious duties are performed out of gratitude for a free salvation wrought out for them, and no longer as the means of gaining heaven. They live by a faith which works by love. They expect at death an immediate transfer to a permanent heaven, instead of a series of transmigrations. Their Buddha is not dead, but he ever liveth to receive into his heavenly realm all who accept his grace, and to admit them to his divine fellowship forever. By a direct and complete imputation they are made sharers in his righteousness, and become joint heirs in his heavenly inheritance. Whatever the genesis of these strange cults which now prevail as the chief religious beliefs among the Mongolian races, they are marvellously significant. They have come almost to the very threshold of Christianity. What they need is the true Saviour and not a myth, a living faith and not an empty delusion. Nevertheless, they prove that faith in a divine salvation is the only religion that can meet the wants of the human soul. There is something very encouraging in these approaches toward the great doctrines of salvation. I do not believe that these sects have come so near to the true Messiah without the influence of the Spirit of God, and without more or less light from Christian sources. But partly they have been moved by those wants which Hinduism and Buddhism could not satisfy. The principle of their faith is worthy of recognition, and the missionary should say as Paul said: "Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you." It is a very significant fact that most of the Brahmo Somajes of India have adopted Jesus Christ as the greatest of the world's prophets. Chunder Sen sometimes spoke of him as a devout Christian would speak. The Arya Somaj would not own His name, but it has graced its Hindu creed with many of His essential doctrines. Quite recently a new organ of the Brahmo Somaj, published at Hyderabad, has announced as its leading object, "to harmonize pure Hinduism and pure Christianity, with Christ as the chief corner-stone." In the exact words of this paper, called _The Harmony_, its aim is "to preach Christ as the eternal Son of God, as the Logos in all prophets and saints before and after the incarnation, as the incarnate, perfect righteousness by whose obedience man is made righteous.... Christ is the reconciliation of man with man, and of all men with God, the harmony of humanity with humanity, and of all humanity with Divinity." This prospectus condemns the average Christianity of foreigners in India--the over-reaching, "beef-eating, beer-drinking" Anglo-Saxon type, "which despises the Hindu Scriptures and yet belies its own;" but it exalts the spotless and exalted Christ and builds all the hopes of humanity upon Him. How will the mere philosopher explain this wonderful power of personality over men of all races, if it be not Divine? But perhaps the most remarkable tribute to the transcendent character of Christ is seen in the fact that _all_ sects of religionists, the most fanatical and irrational, seem to claim Him as in some sense their own. Mormonism, even when plunging into the lowest depths of degradation, has always claimed to rest on the redemption of Jesus Christ. Mohammedanism--even the Koran itself--has always acknowledged Christ as the only sinless prophet. All the others, from Adam to Mohammed, stand convicted of heinous offences, and they will not reappear on earth; while He who knew no sin shall, according to Mohammedan prophecy, yet come again to judge the earth. The worshippers of Krishna, some of whom are found among us in this land, claim Christ as one of the true avatars of Vishnu, and heartily commend His character and His teachings. Our western Buddhists are just now emphasizing the idea that Christ was the sacred Buddha of Palestine, that he studied and taught "the eight-fold path," became an arahat, and attained Nirvana, and that the Christian Church has only misrepresented His transcendent wisdom and purity. The ablest tract on Theosophy that I have yet seen is entitled "Theosophy the Religion of Jesus." How marvellous is all this--that Theosophists, Aryas, Brahmos, Buddhists, Moslems, though they hate Christianity and fight it to the death--still bow before the mild sceptre of Christ. As the central light of the diamond shines alike through every facet and angle, so His doctrine and character are claimed as the glory of every creed. Many types of heathen faiths honor Him, and many schools of philosophic scepticism. Some of the noblest tributes to His unearthly purity have been given by men who rejected His divinity. In spite of itself the most earnest thought of many races, many systems, many creeds, has crystallized around Him. History has made Him its moral centre, the calendar of the nations begins with Him, and the anniversary of His birth is the festival of the civilized world. The prediction that all nations should call Him blessed is already fulfilled. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 167: It is worthy of note that both the Pentateuch and most heathen traditions agree, as to the order or stages of creation, with the geological record of modern science.] [Footnote 168: Rawlinson: _Ancient Monarchies_.] [Footnote 169: Ebrard: _Apologetics_, vol. ii.] [Footnote 170: Williams: _Indian Wisdom_, p. 22.] [Footnote 171: De Quatrefages: _The Human Species_, p. 490.] [Footnote 172: _Christ and Other Masters_, p. 281.] [Footnote 173: _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 66.] [Footnote 174: Ebrard: _Apologetics_, vol. ii.] [Footnote 175: Ibid.] [Footnote 176: _Indian Wisdom_, pp. 32, 393.] [Footnote 177: Ebrard: _Apologetics_, vol. ii.] [Footnote 178: Ebrard: _Apologetics_, vol. iii.] [Footnote 179: De Pressensé: _The Ancient World and Christianity_, p. 87.] [Footnote 180: Schoolcraft: _Notes on the Iroquois_.] [Footnote 181: Quoted by Morgan in _St. Paul in Britain_, p. 23.] [Footnote 182: The full development of the doctrine was not reached till far on in the Christian centuries. Hardwick: _Christ and Other Masters_, p. 204.] [Footnote 183: _Aryan Witness_, closing chapter.] LECTURE IX. ETHICAL TENDENCIES OF THE EASTERN AND THE WESTERN PHILOSOPHIES It is not my purpose to discuss the comparative merits of philosophic systems, but only to consider some practical bearings of philosophy, ancient and modern, upon vital questions of morals and religion. There has been no lack of speculation in the world. For ages the most gifted minds have labored and struggled to solve the mysteries of the Universe and of its Author. But they have missed the all-important fact that with the heart, as well as with the intellect, men are to be learners of the highest wisdom, and that they are to listen to the voice of God not only in nature, but in the soul. So the old questions, still unsolved, are ever asked anew. The same wearying researches and the same confident assertions, to be replaced by others equally confident, are found both in the ancient and in the modern history of mankind. By wisdom the present generation has come no nearer to finding out God than men of the remotest times. The cheerless conclusion of agnosticism was reached in India twenty-four centuries ago, and Confucius expressed it exactly when he said, with reference to the future, "We do not know life; how can we know death?" This same dubious negation probably has the largest following of all types of unbelief in our time. It is not atheism: that, to the great mass of men, is unthinkable; it is easier to assume simply that "we do not know." Yet almost every form of agnosticism, ancient or modern, claims to possess a vast amount of very positive knowledge. Speculative hypothesis never employed the language of dogmatic assurance so confidently as now. Even theosophic occultism speaks of itself as "science." That which strikes one first of all in the history of philosophy is the similarity between ancient and modern speculations upon the great mysteries of the world. 1. Notice with what accord various earlier and later theories dispense with real and personal creatorship in the origin of the universe. The atomic theory of creation is by no means a modern invention, and so far as evolution is connected with that hypothesis, evolution is very old. Mr. Herbert Spencer states his theory thus: "First in the order of evolution is the formation of simple mechanical aggregates of atoms, e.g., molecules, spheres, systems; then the evolution of more complex aggregations or organisms: then the evolution of the highest product of organization, thought; and lastly, the evolution of the complex relations which exist between thinking organisms, or society with its regulative laws, both civil and moral." Between these stages, he tells us, "there is no fixed line of demarcation.... The passage from one to the other is continuous, the transition from organization to thought being mediated by the nerve-system, in the molecular changes of which are to be found the mechanical correlates and equivalents of all conscious processes." It will be seen that this comprehensive statement is designed to cover, if not the creation, at least the creative processes of all things in the universe of matter and in the universe of thought. Mr. Spencer does not allude here to the question of a First Cause back of the molecules and their movements, though he is generally understood to admit that such a Cause may exist. He does not in express terms deny that at some stage in this development there may have been introduced a divine spark of immortal life direct from the Creator's hand. He even maintains that "the conscious soul is not the product of a collocation of material particles, but is in the deepest sense a Divine effluence."[184] Yet he seems to get on without any very necessary reliance upon such an intervention, since the development from the atom to the civilized man is "a continuous process," and throughout the whole course from molecule to thought and moral and social law, "there are no lines of demarcation." He leaves it for the believer in theistic evolution to show when and where and how the Divine effluence is introduced. Similar to this was the theory which the Hindu Kanada propounded more than two thousand years ago. As translated and interpreted by Colebrook, Kanada taught that two earthly atoms concurring by an unseen and peculiar virtue called "adrishta," or by the will of God, or by time, or by competent cause, constitute a double atom of earth; and by concourse of three binary atoms a tertiary atom is produced, and by concourse of four triple atoms a quaternary, and so on.[185] Thus the great earth is produced. The system of Lucretius was much the same, though neither Lucretius nor Spencer has recognized any such force as adrishta.[186] What seems to distinguish Mr. Spencer's theory is the extension of this evolutionary process to mind and spirit in the development of thought and feeling. He does not say that mind resides in the molecules, but that their movements attend (if they do not originate and control) the operation of the mind. Professor Leconte seems to go farther when he says that "in animals brain-changes are in all cases the cause of psychical phenomena; in man alone, and only in his higher activities, psychic changes precede and determine brain changes."[187] We shall see farther on that Mr. Spencer, in his theory of intuition, admits this same principle by logical inference, and traces even man's highest faculties to brain or nerve changes in our ancestors. Kanada also held that mind, instead of being a purely spiritual power, is atomic or molecular, and by logical deduction the mental activities must depend on the condition of the molecules. Ram Chandra Bose, in expounding Kanada's theory, says: "The general idea of mind is that _which is subordinate to substance_, being also found in intimate relations in an atom, and it is itself material." The early Buddhist philosophers also taught that physical elements are among the five "skandas" which constitute the phenomenal soul. Democritus and Lucretius regarded the mind as atomic, and the primal "monad" of Leibnitz was the living germ--smallest of things--which enters into all visible and invisible creations, and which is itself all-potential; it is a living microcosm; it is an immortal soul. These various theories are not parallels, but they have striking similarities. And I believe that Professor Tyndall, in his famous Belfast Address, virtually acknowledges Lucretius as the father of the modern atomic theories. Whether Lucretius borrowed them from India, we shall not stop to inquire, but we may safely assert that modern philosophers, German, French or English, have borrowed them from one or both. It is not my purpose to discuss the truth or falsity of the atomic theory, or the relation of mind to the movements of molecules in the brain; I simply point out the fact that this is virtually an old hypothesis; and I leave each one to judge how great a degree of light it has shed upon the path of human life in the ages of the past, how far it availed to check the decline of Greece and Rome, and how much of real moral or intellectual force it has imparted to the Hindu race. The credulous masses of men should not be left to suppose that these are new speculations, nor to imagine that that which has been so barren in the past can become a gospel of hope in the present and the future. The constant tendency with young students of philosophy, is to conclude that the hypotheses which they espouse with so much enthusiasm are new revelations in metaphysics and ethics as well as in physical science--compared with which the Christian cultus of eighteen centuries is now effete and doomed. It is well, therefore, to know that so far from these speculations having risen upon the ruins of Christianity, Christianity rose upon the ruins of these speculations as, in modified forms, they had been profoundly elaborated in the philosophies of Greece and Rome. Lucretius was born a century before the Christian era, and Democritus, whose disciple he became, lived earlier still. Kanada, the atomist philosopher of India, lived three centuries before Democritus. The early Christian fathers were perfectly familiar with the theories of Lucretius. We are indebted to Jerome for many of the facts which we possess concerning him. Nearly all the great leaders of the church, from Origen to Ambrose, had studied Greek philosophy, some of them had been its devotees before their conversion to the Christian faith. There is at least incidental evidence that the Apostle Paul was versed in the current philosophy as well as in the poetry of Greece. These great men--great in natural powers and in philosophic training--had seen just what the speculations of Democritus, Lucretius, Zeno, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle could do; they had indeed undermined the low superstitions of their time, but they had proved powerless to regenerate society, or even relieve the individual pessimism and despair of men like Seneca, Pliny, or Marcus Aurelius. Lucretius, wholly or partially insane, died by his own hand. The light of philosophy left the Roman Empire, as Uhlhorn and others have clearly shown, under the shadow of a general despair. And it was in the midst of that gloom that the light of Christianity shone forth. Augustine, who had fathomed various systems and believed in them, tells us that it was the philosophy which appeared in the writings and in the life of the Apostle Paul which finally wrought the great change in his career. Plato had done much; Paul and the Cross of Christ did infinitely more. The development of higher forms of life from lower by natural selection, as set forth by the late Charles Darwin, has been supposed to be an entirely new system. Yet the Chinese claim to have held a theory of development which represents the mountains as having once been covered by the sea. When the waters subsided small herbs sprang up, which in the course of ages developed into trees. Worms and insects also appeared spontaneously, like lice upon a living body; and these after a long period became larger animals--beetles became tortoises; worms, serpents. The mantis was developed into an ape, and certain apes became at length hairless. One of these by accident struck fire with a flint. The cooking of food at length followed the use of fire, and the apes, by being better nourished, were finally changed into men. Whether this theory is ancient or modern, it is eminently Chinese, and it shows the natural tendency of men to ascribe the germs of life to spontaneous generation, because they fail to see the Great First Cause who produces them. The one thing which is noticeable in nearly all human systems of religion and philosophy, is that they have no clear and distinct idea of creatorship. They are systems of evolution; in one way or another they represent the world as having _grown_. Generally they assume the eternity of matter, and often they are found to regard the present cosmos as only a certain stage in an endless circle of changes from life to death and from death to life. The world rebuilds itself from the wreck and débris of former worlds. It is quite consistent with many of these systems that there should be gods, but as a rule they recognize no God. While all races of men have shown traces of a belief in a Supreme Creator and Ruler far above their inferior deities, yet their philosophers, if they had any, have sooner or later bowed Him out. 2. Most systems of philosophic speculation, ancient and modern, tend to weaken the sense of moral accountability. First, the atomic theory, which we have just considered, leads to this result by the molecular, and therefore purely physical, origin which it assigns to moral acts and conditions. We have already alluded to Herbert Spencer's theory of intuition. In the "Data of Ethics," page 123, he says: "I believe that the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding nervous modifications, which by continued transmission and accumulation _have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition_, certain emotions corresponding to right and wrong conduct which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility." It appears from this statement that, so far as we are concerned, our moral intuitions are the results of "nervous modifications," if not in ourselves, at least in our ancestors, so that the controlling influence which rules, and which ought to rule, our conduct is a nervous, and therefore a physical, condition which we have inherited. It follows, therefore, that every man's conscience or inherited moral sense is bound by a necessity of his physical constitution. And if this be so, why is there not a wide door here opened for theories of moral insanity, which might come at length to cast their shield over all forms and grades of crime? It is easy to see that, whatever theory of creation may be admitted as to the origin of the human soul, this hypothesis rules out the idea of an original moral likeness of the human spirit to a Supreme Moral Ruler of the universe, in whom righteousness dwells as an eternal principle; and it finds no higher source for what we call conscience than the accumulated experience of our ancestors. The materialistic view recently presented by Dr. Henry Maudsley, in an article entitled, "The Physical Basis of Mind"--an article which seems to follow Mr. Spencer very closely--would break down all moral responsibility. His theory that true character depends upon what he calls the reflex action of the nerve-cells; that acts of reason or conscience which have been put forth so many times that, in a sense, they perform themselves without any exercise of consciousness, are the best; that a man is an instinctive thief or liar, or a born poet, because the proper nervous structure has been fixed in his constitution by his ancestors; that any moral act, so long as it is conscious, is not ingrained in character, and the more conscious it is, the more dubious it is; and that "virtue itself is not safely lodged until it has become a habit"--in other words, till it has become an automatic and unconscious operation of the nerve-cells, such a doctrine, in its extreme logical results, destroys all voluntary and conscious loyalty to principle, and renders man a mere automatic machine. On the other hand Mr. A.R. Wallace, in combating the theory that the moral sense in man is based on the utility experienced by our ancestors, relates the following incident: "A number of prisoners taken during the Santal insurrection were allowed to go free on parole, to work at a certain spot for wages. After some time cholera attacked them and they were obliged to leave, but everyone of them returned and gave up his earnings to the guard. Two hundred savages with money in their girdles walked thirty miles back to prison rather than break their word. My own experience with savages has furnished me with similar, although less severely tested, instances; and we cannot avoid asking how it is that, in these few cases 'experience of utility' have left such an overpowering impression, while in others they have left none.... The intuitional theory which I am now advocating explains this by the supposition that there is a feeling--a sense of right and wrong--in our nature antecedent to, and independent of, experiences of utility."[188] 3. Theories which confound the origin of man with that of brutes, whether in the old doctrine of transmigration or in at least some of the theories of evolution, involve a contradiction in man's ethical history. The confusion shown in the Buddhist Jatakas, wherein Buddha, in the previous existences which prepared him for his great and holy mission, was sometimes a saint and sometimes a gambler and a thief, is scarcely greater, from an ethical point of view, than that which evolution encounters in bridging the chasm between brute instinct and the lofty ethics of the perfected man. The lower grades of animal life know no other law than the instinct which prompts them to devour the types which are lower still. This destruction of the weaker by the stronger pervades the whole brute creation; it is a life of violence throughout. On the other hand, all weaker creatures, exposed to such ravages, protect themselves universally by deception. The grouse shields her young from hawks or other carnivora by running in the opposite direction, with the assumed appearance of a broken wing. The flat fish, to escape its mortal enemies, lies upon the bottom of the stream, scarcely distinguishable in color or appearance from the sand which constitutes its bed. Nature seems to aid and abet its falsehood by the very form which has been assigned to it. And so also the gift of transparency helps the chameleon in seeming to be a part of the green plant, or the brown bark, upon which it lies. And Professor Drummond, in his interesting account of his African travels, describes certain insects which render themselves indistinguishable either in color or in form from the branchings and exfoliation of certain grasses upon which they feed. Deception therefore becomes a chief resource of the weak, while violence is that of the strong. And those which are in the middle of the scale practise both. There are still other animals which are invested with attributes of all that is meanest and most contemptible in character. The sly and insinuating snake gliding noiselessly toward the victim of its envenomed sting--the spider which spreads forth its beautiful and alluring net, sparkling with morning dew, while it lurks in a secret corner, ready to fall upon its luckless prey--the sneaking and repulsive hyena, too cowardly to attack the strong and vigorous, but waiting for the crippled, the helpless, the sick, and dying--if all these are in the school of preparation for that noble stage of manhood when truth and righteousness shall be its crown of glory, then, where is the turning-point? Where do violence, meanness, and deception gradually beam forth into benevolence and truth? "The spider kills the fly. The wiser sphinx Stings the poor spider in the centre nerve, Which paralyzes only; lays her eggs, And buries with them with a loving care The spider, powerless but still alive, To warm them unto life, and afterward To serve as food among the little ones. This is the lesson nature has to teach, 'Woe to the conquered, victory to the strong.' And so through all the ages, step by step, The stronger and the craftier replaced The weaker, and increased and multiplied. And in the end the outcome of the strife Was man, who had dominion over all, And preyed on all things, and the stronger man Trampled his weaker brother under foot." Mr. John Fiske maintains that mankind, during the previous bestial period, were compelled like all other animals to maraud and destroy, as a part of the plan of natural selection in securing the survival of the fittest; the victories of the strong over the weak were the steps and stages of the animal creation in its general advancement. And he further states that, even after man had entered upon the heritage of his manhood, it was still for a time the true end of his being to maraud as before and to despoil all men whose weakness placed them in his power. It was only thus that the steady improvement of the race could be secured; and in that view it was man's duty to consult the dictates of selfishness and cruelty rather than those of kindness. To use Mr. Fiske's own words, "If we could put a moral interpretation upon events which antedated morality as we understand it, we should say it was their duty to fight; and the reverence accorded to the chieftain who murdered most successfully in behalf of his clansmen was well deserved."[189] Much to the same effect writes Professor Leconte. "In organic evolution the weak, the sick, the helpless, the unfit in anyway, perish, _and ought to perish_, because this is the most efficient way of strengthening the _blood or physical nature_ of the species, and thus of carrying forward evolution. In human evolution (which occurs at an advanced stage) the weak, the helpless, the sick, the old, the unfit in anyway, are sustained, _and ought to be sustained_, because sympathy, love, pity, strengthen the _spirit and moral nature_ of the race."[190] There is this difference, however, between this statement and that of Mr. Fiske, that it does not indicate at what point "human evolution" begins; it does not expressly declare that the subject of evolution, even after he has become a man, is still for a time in duty bound to fight in the interest of selfishness and natural selection. Still he reverses the "ought" as he advances from organic to human evolution. According to both authors, when, in view of new environments and new social requirements, it became more advantageous to each individual man that he should cease to maraud, should learn to regard the rights of others, should respect the family relation, and subordinate his selfish interest to the general good; then altruism dawned upon the world, moral principle appeared, and the angel of benevolence and love became enshrined in the human breast. Step by step this favored being, the ideal of natural selection in all her plans, advanced to a stage in which it became incumbent to even subordinate self to the good of others, not only to spare the weak but to tenderly care for them, and even to love those who have treated him with unkindness and abuse. While in the early stages the law of life and progress had been the sacrifice of others for selfish good; now the crowning glory consists in self-sacrifice for the good of all but self. The logical result of this reasoning cannot escape the notice of any who carefully consider it. If, for any reason, any community of human beings should decline in moral and intellectual character until they should finally reach the original state of savagery, it would again become their duty to lay aside all high ethical claims as no longer suited to their condition. The extraneous complications which had grown out of mere social order having passed away, rectitude also would pass away; benevolence, philanthropy, humanity, would be wholly out of place, and however lovely Christian charity might appear from a sentimental point of view, it would be ill adapted to that condition of society. In such a state of things the strong and vigorous, if sacrificing themselves to the weak, would only perpetuate weakness, and it would be their duty rather to extirpate them, and by the survival only of the fittest to regain the higher civilization. I state the case in all its naked deformity, because it shows the confusion and darkness of a world in which God is not the moral centre. And here, as already stated, modern speculation joins hands with the old heathen systems. According to Hindu as well as Buddhist philosophy, this retrograde process might not only carry civilized man back to savagery, but might place him again in the category of brutes. If tendencies control all things and have no limit, why might they not remand the human being to lower and lower forms, until he should reach again the status of the mollusk? Now, over against all the systems which make mind either a product or a phenomenon of matter, we have the Scriptural doctrine that man was created in the image of God. This fact explains the differences which distinguish him from the beasts of the field; for even in his lowest estate he is amenable to the principle of right and wrong. Paul taught, in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, that when men descend to the grade of beasts--and he shows that they may descend even below the dignity of beasts--so far from becoming exempt from moral claims, they fall under increased condemnation. The old Hindu systems taught that there can be no release from the consequences of evil acts. They traced them from one rebirth to another in kharma, as modern speculation traces them physically in heredity. The one saw no relief except in the changes of endless transmigrations, the other finds it only in the gradual readjustment of the nerve-cells. But we know by observation and experience that the spiritual power of the Holy Ghost can transform character at once. No fact in the history of Christianity is more firmly or more widely established than this. The nerve-tissues to the contrary notwithstanding, the human soul may be born again. The persecuting Saul may become at once a chief apostle. The blasphemer, the sot, the debauchee, the murderer, may be transformed to a meek and sincere Christian. Millions of the heathen, with thousands of years of savage and bestial heredity behind them, have become pure and loyal disciples of the spotless Redeemer. The fierce heathen Africaner, as well as the dissolute Jerry McCauley, have illustrated this transforming power. Professor Huxley and others, in our time, are trying to elaborate some basis of ethics independently of religion. But, as a matter of fact, these very men are living on conventional moral promptings and restraints derived from the Bible. The best basis of morals yet known is that of Christianity, and it is from its high and ennobling cultus that even the enemies of the truth are deriving their highest inspiration. Mr. Goldwin Smith, in an able article published in the _Forum_ of April, 1891, on the question, "Will Morality Survive Faith?" shows at least that the best ethics which the world now has are the outcome of religious belief and of Christian belief, and he leads the minds of his readers to gravely doubt whether a gospel of agnostic evolution could ever produce those forces of moral prompting and restraint which the centuries of Christianity have developed. He does not hesitate to assert that those who hold and advocate the modern anti-theistic speculations are themselves living upon the influence of a Christian cultus which has survived their faith. A true test of their principles could only be made when a generation should appear upon which no influence of Christian parents still remained, and in a society in which Christian sentiment no longer survived.[191] It may be said that the _truth_ must be received without regard to the results which may follow. This is admitted, but the same cannot be said of _theories_. If there is perfect harmony between all truths in the physical and the moral world, then all these should have their influence in reaching final conclusions. 4. The philosophies, ancient and modern, have agreed in lowering the common estimate of man as man; they have exerted an influence the opposite of that in which the New Testament pleads for a common and an exalted brotherhood of the race. Hinduism raised the Brahman almost to the dignity of the gods, and debased the Sudra to a grade but a little higher than the brute. Buddha declared that his teachings were for the wise, and not for the simple. The philosophers of Greece and Rome, even the best of them, regarded the helot and the slave as of an inferior grade of beings--even though occasionally a slave by his superior force rose to a high degree. In like manner the whole tendency of modern evolution is to degrade the dignity and sacredness of humanity. It is searching for "missing links;" it measures the skulls of degraded races for proofs of its theories. It has travellers and adventurers on the lookout for tribes who have no conception of God, and no religious rites; it searches caves and dredges lakes for historical traces of man when he had but recently learned to "stand upright upon his hind legs." The lower the types that can be found, the more valuable are they for the purposes required. All this tends to the dishonoring of the inferior types of men. Wherever Christianity had changed the old estimates of the philosophers, and had led to the nobler sentiment that God had made of one blood all nations and races, and had stamped His own image on them all, and even redeemed them all by the sacrifice of His Son, the speculations of sceptical biology have in a measure counteracted its benign influence. They have fostered the contempt of various classes for a dark skin or an inferior civilization. They indirectly encourage those who, with little merit of their own, speak contemptuously of the "Buck Indian," "the Nigger," the "Heathen Chinee." They encourage the "hoodlum," and so far as they have any influence, give an implied sanction to much unrighteous legislation. Even Peschel, who will not be suspected of any bias toward Christianity, has said on this subject: "This dark side of the life of uncivilized nations has induced barbarous and inhuman settlers in transoceanic regions to assume as their own a right to cultivate as their own the inheritance of the aborigines, and to extol the murder of races as a triumph of civilization. Other writers, led away by Darwinian dogmas, fancied that they had discovered populations which had, as it were, remained in a former animal condition for the instruction of our times." And he adds: "Thus in the words of a 'History of Creation,' in the taste now prevalent, 'in Southern Asia and the East of Africa men live in hordes, mostly climbing trees and eating fruit, unacquainted with fire, and using no weapons but stones and clubs, after the manner of the higher apes.' It can be shown," he continues, "that these statements are derived from the writings of a learned scholar of Bonn on the condition of savage nations, the facts of which are based either on the depositions of an African slave of the Doko tribe, a dwarfish people in the south of Shoa, or on the assertions of Bengalese planters, or perhaps on the observations of a sporting adventurer, that a mother and daughter, and at another time a man and woman, were found in India in a semi-animal condition. On the other hand, not only have neither nations, nor even hordes, in an ape-like condition ever been encountered by any trustworthy traveller of modern times, but even those races which in the first superficial descriptions were ranked far below our grade of civilization have, on nearer acquaintance, been placed much nearer the civilized nations. No portion of the human race has yet been discovered which does not possess a more or less rich vocabulary, rules of language, artificially pointed weapons, and various implements, as well as the art of kindling fire.[192]" The assertion has been made again and again that races are found which are possessed of no knowledge or conception of Deity, but this assumption has been thoroughly refuted by Max Müller and many others. There is a very general assumption abroad in the world that bigotry and even bias of judgment belong exclusively to the advocates of religious truth, and that the teachers of agnostic science are, in the nature of the case, impartial and therefore authoritative. But the generalizations which have been massed by non-Christian anthropologists and sociologists are often gleaned and culled under the strongest subserviency to some favorite hypothesis, and that on the most superficial observation and from the most unreliable authorities. De Quatrefages, an anthropologist of profound learning, and certainly with no predilections for Christian theism, in speaking of the alleged evidences given by Sir John Lubbock and Saint-Hilaire to show that many races of men have been found destitute of any conception of Deity, says: "When the writers against whom I am now arguing have to choose between two evidences, the one attesting, and the other denying, the existence of religious belief in a population, it is always the latter which they seem to think should be accepted. More often than not, they do not even mention the contrary evidences, however definite, however authentic they may be. Now, it is evidently much _easier not to see_ than to _discover_ that which may be in so many ways rendered inappreciable to our eyes. When a traveller states that he has proved the existence of religious sentiments in a population which by others has been declared destitute of them, when he gives precise details upon such a delicate question, he has unquestionably at least probability in his favor. I see nothing to authorize this rejection of _positive evidence_ and unconditional acceptance of _negative evidence_. This, however, is too often the case. I might justify this imputation by taking one by one almost all the examples of so-called atheist populations pointed out by different authors."[193] De Quatrefages then proceeds to show how, with respect to American tribes, Robertson is quoted while D'Orbigny is passed in silence, even though he has by the testimony of many authors disproved the statements of Robertson; how Baegert's negative and sweeping statements in regard to the California tribes are accepted, while the very specific testimony of De Mofras in regard both to the fact and to the nature of their worship is rejected. In relation to the Mincopies, Mouat (negative) is adopted against Symes and Day. The Hottentots are adjudged atheistic on the testimony of Le Vaillant, in spite of the united witness of Kolben, Saar, Tachard, Boeving, and Campbell. The Kaffirs are declared to be destitute of religion on the statements of Burchel, while Livingstone and Cazalis have given clear accounts of the religion of the different Kaffir tribes. In a similar manner Professor Flint, of Edinburgh, arraigns Sir John Lubbock and certain other advocates of the atheistic theory concerning savage tribes, for the partiality of their selection of testimony and for the superficial evidence which they accept when favorable to their theories. After reviewing Lubbock's wholesale quotations concerning the Indian tribes of Brazil, he says, "These are Sir John Lubbock's instances from South American tribes. But I find that they are all either erroneous or insufficiently established." And he gives many counter-proofs. "It will never do," he says, "to believe such sweeping statements--sweeping negatives--merely because they happen to be printed." Farther on he adds: "But I think that he (Lubbock) might have told us that Humboldt, whose travels in South America were so extensive, whose explorations were so varied, scientific, and successful, and who certainly was uninfluenced by traditional theological beliefs, _found no tribes and peoples without a religion_; and that Prince Max von Neuwied tells us that in all his many and wide wanderings in Brazil he had found no tribes the members of which did not give manifest signs of religious feelings." In the appendix of the book from which these extracts are made, Professor Flint says: "No one, I think, who has not a theory to maintain can consider the circumstances in which most of the Brazilian Indian tribes are placed without coming to the conclusion that they must have sunk from a higher intellectual and religious level." I have dwelt at length upon these arraignments of the careless and biased utterances of supposed scientists, because it is so much the fashion of our times to support certain theories of anthropology by massing the supposed evidences of man's degradation found, even now, in the environments of savage life. Many readers, apparently dazed by the vast accumulation of indiscriminate and heterogeneous statements which they have no time to examine, yield an easy and blind assent, based either on the supposed wisdom of the writer or upon the fact that so many others believe, and they imagine that no little courage is required on their part to risk the loss of intellectual caste. A vast amount of the thinking of our age, although it claims to be scientific, is really a matter of simple faith--faith in the opinions and dicta of distinguished leaders. And under such circumstances, is it not our privilege and our duty as Christian men to at least challenge and cross-question those theories which depress and dishonor our common humanity before we yield them our assent? The majority of scientists now so confidently assume the certain derivation of man from lower orders of life, that, as Max Müller has expressed it, their intolerance greets "with a perfect howl of derision a man like Virchow," who dares to declare that proof of man's derivation from animals is still wanting. Nevertheless Virchow, himself an evolutionist, maintains his ground, as the following passage quoted some months since from _The London Tablet_ will show: "Some sensation has been caused at the recent Anthropological Congress in Vienna by the speech of the great Berlin biologist, Professor Virchow. About a year ago Virchow, on a similar occasion, made a severe attack on the Darwinian position, and this year he is similarly outspoken. We make the following extracts from his long address to the Congress: "'Twenty years ago, when we met at Innspruck, it was precisely the moment when the Darwinian theory had made its first victorious mark throughout the world. My friend Vogt at once rushed into the ranks of the champions of this doctrine. We have since sought in vain for the intermediate stages which were supposed to connect man with the apes; the proto-man, the pro-anthropos is not yet discovered. For anthropological science the pro-anthropos is not even a subject of discussion. The anthropologist may, perhaps, see him in a dream, but as soon as he awakes he cannot say that he has made any approach toward him. At that time in Innspruck the prospect was, apparently, that the course of descent from ape to man would be reconstructed all at once, but now we cannot even prove the descent of the separate races from one another.[194] At this moment we are able to say that among the peoples of antiquity no single one was any nearer to the apes than we are. At this moment I can affirm that there is not upon earth any absolutely unknown race of men. The least known of all are the peoples of the central mountainous districts of the Malay peninsula, but otherwise we know the people of Terra del Fuego quite as well as the Eskimo, Bashkirs, Polynesians, and Lapps. Nay! we know more of many of these races than we do of certain European tribes. I need only mention the Albanians. Every living race is still human; no single one has yet been found that we can designate as Simian or quasi-Simian. Even when in certain ones phenomena appear which are characteristic of the apes--e.g., the peculiar ape-like projections of the skull in certain races--still we cannot on that account alone say that these men are ape-like. As regards the Lake dwellings, I have been able to submit to comparative examination nearly every single skull that has been found. The result has been that we have certainly met with opposite characteristics among various races; but of all these there is not one that lies outside of the boundaries of our present population. It can thus be positively demonstrated that in the course of five thousand years no change of type worthy of mention has taken place. If you ask me whether the first man were white or black, I can only say I don't know.' "Professor Virchow thus summed up the question as to what anthropological science during the last forty years has gained, and whether, as many contend, it has gone forward or backward. "'Twenty years ago the leaders of our science asserted that they knew many things which, as a matter of fact, they did not know. Nowadays we know what we know. I can only reckon up our account in so far as to say that we have made no debts; that is, we have made no loan from hypotheses; we are in no danger of seeing that which we know over-turned in the course of the next moment. We have levelled the ground so that the coming generation may make abundant use of the material at their disposition. As an attainable objective of the next twenty years, we must look to the anthropology of the European nationalities.'" 5. Another demoralizing type of speculation which has exerted a wide influence in many ages and on many nations is pantheism. By abdicating the place and function of the conscious ego, by making all things mere specialized expressions of infinite Deity, and yet failing to grasp any clear conception of what is meant by Deity, men have gradually destroyed that sense of moral responsibility which the most savage show to have been a common heritage. It is not among the lowest and most simple races that missionaries find the greatest degree of obtuseness and insensibility with respect to sin; it is among populations like those of India, where the natural promptings of conscience have been sophisticated by philosophic theories. The old Vedantism, by representing all things as mere phenomenal expressions of infinite Brahm, tended necessarily to destroy all sense of personal responsibility. The abdication of the personal ego is an easy way of shifting the burden of guilt. The late Naryan Sheshadri declared that one thing which led him to renounce Hinduism was the fact that, when he came to trace its underlying principles to their last logical result he saw no ground of moral responsibility left. It plunged him into an abyss of intellectual and moral darkness without chart or compass. It paralyzed conscience and moral sensibility. It is equally impossible to reason ourselves into any consciousness of merit or demerit, if we are moved only by some vague law of nature whose behest, as described by Mr. Buckle, we cannot resist, whose operations within us we cannot discern, and whose drift or tendency we cannot foresee. It makes little difference whether we build our faith upon the god of pantheism or upon the unknowable but impersonal force which is supposed to move the world, which operates in the same ways upon all grades of existence from the archangel to the mote in the sunbeam, which moves the molecules of the human brain only as it stirs the globules of sap in the tree or plant. It is difficult to see how, upon any such hypothesis, we are any more responsible for our volitions and affections than we are for our heart-beats or respirations. And yet we are conscious of responsibility in the one case and not in the other. Consciousness comes in with tremendous force at just this point, all theories and speculations to the contrary notwithstanding. And we dare not disregard its testimony or its claims. We know that we are morally responsible. 6. Many philosophic systems, ancient and modern, have tended to fill the world with gloomy pessimism. Pessimism is very old and very widespread. Schopenhauer acknowledges his indebtedness to Gautama for much of the philosophy which is known by his name. In Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as in the teachings of the German pessimists, the natural complainings of the human heart are organized into philosophical systems. There is in all human nature quite enough of querulousness against the unequal allotments of Providence, but all these systems inculcate and foster that discontent by the sanctions of philosophy. The whole assumption of "The Light of Asia" is that the power that upholds and governs the world is a hard master, from whose leash we should escape if we can by annihilating our powers and faculties, and abdicating our conscious being; that the world and the entire constitution of things are all wrong; that misery is everywhere in the ascendant, and that man and beast can only make common cause against the tyranny of a reckless fate, and cry out with common voice for some sympathizing benefactor who can pity and deliver. There is no hint that sin has wrought the evil. Man is not so much a sinner as the victim of a hard lot; he is unfortunate, and it is the world that is wrong. Therefore the true end of life is to get rid of the recurrence of life. In much of our modern agnosticism there is the same dark outlook, and agnosticism naturally joins hands with pessimism. Dr. Noah Porter, in one of the series of "Present-Day Tracts," has shown it to be a doctrine of despair. A well-known lecturer who has loudly declaimed against what he considers the remorseless character of the Old Testament, has acknowledged that it is not more cruel than nature; that in the actual world about us we find the same dark mystery, the weak perishing before the strong, the wicked prosperous, the just oppressed, and the innocent given as a prey to the guilty; and his conclusion is that deism is no more defensible than Christianity. His pessimistic estimate of the actual world drives him to a disbelief in a personal God. We do not ignore the sad facts of life; even the Christian is often saddened by the mysteries which he cannot explain. Bishop J. Boyd Carpenter, in speaking of the sad and cheerless spirit of Buddhism, has said: "There are moments in which we are all Buddhists; when life has disappointed us, when weariness is upon us, when the keen anguish born of the sight of human suffering appals and benumbs us, when we are frozen to terror, and our manhood flies at the sight of the Medusa-like head of the world's unappeased and unappeasable agony; then we too are torn by the paroxysm of anguish; we would flee to the Nirvana of oblivion and unconsciousness, turning our back upon what we cannot alleviate, and longing to lay down the burden of life, and to escape from that which has become insupportable."[195] But these are only the dark and seemingly forsaken hours in which men sit in despair beneath the juniper-tree and imagine that all the world has gone wrong. The juniper-tree in Christianity is the exception; the Bo-tree of Buddhism, with the same despondent estimate, is the rule. No divine message came to show the Buddha a brighter side. And the agnostic stops his ears that no voice of cheer may be heard. The whole philosophy of Buddhism and of modern agnosticism is pessimistic. The word and Spirit of God do not deny the sad facts of human life in a world of sin, but they enable the Christian to triumph over them, and even to rejoice in tribulation. 7. And this leads to one more common feature of all false systems, their fatalism. Among the exaggerated claims which are made for heathen religions in our day, it is alleged that they rest upon a more humane philosophy than appears in the grim fatalism of our Christian theology, especially that of the Calvinistic type. Without entering upon any defence of Christian doctrines of one type or another, it would be easy to show that fatalism, complete and unmitigated, is at the foundation of all Oriental religion and philosophy, all ancient or modern pantheism, and most of the various types of agnosticism. While this has been the point at which all infidel systems have assailed the Christian faith, it has nevertheless been the goal which they have all reached by their own speculations. They have differed from Christianity in that their predestinating, determining force, instead of being qualified by any play of free-will, or any feasible plan of ultimate and superabounding good, has been a real fatalism, changeless, hopeless, remorseless. That the distaff of the Fates, and the ruthless sceptre of the Erinnys, entered in full force into all the religions of the Greeks and Romans, scarcely needs to be affirmed. They controlled all human affairs, and even the gods were subject to them. The Sagas of the Northmen also were full of fatalism, and that principle still survives in the folk-lore and common superstitions of all Scandinavian, Teutonic, and Celtic races. The fatalism of the Hindus is plainly stated in the "Code of Manu," which declares that, "in order to distinguish actions, he (the creator) separated merit from demerit. To whatever course of action the Lord appointed each kind of being, that alone it has spontaneously adopted in each succeeding creation. Whatever he has assigned to each at the first creation, noxiousness or harmlessness, gentleness or ferocity, virtue or sin, truth or falsehood, that clings to it."[196] The same doctrine is put in still more offensive form when it is declared that "Manu (here used in the sense of creator) allotted to woman a love of her bed, of her seat, of ornament, also impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, and bad conduct."[197] There would be some relief from this horrible doctrine if in subsequent chapters of Manu there were kindly tokens of grace, or sympathy for woman, or any light of hope here or hereafter; but the whole teaching and spirit of the "Code" rests as an iron yoke upon womanhood, and it is largely a result of this high authority that the female sex has for ages been subjected to the most cruel tyranny and degradation. It might well be said that, in spite of the horrors of infanticide, the most merciful element of Hinduism with respect to woman is the custom by which so large a proportion of female children have been destroyed at birth. The same fatalistic principles affect all ranks and conditions of Hindu society. The poor Sudra is not only low-born and degraded, but he is immovably fixed in his degradation. He is cut off from all hope or aspiration; he cannot rise from the thraldom of his fate. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna declares to Arjuna that it is "Better to do the duty of one's caste Though bad or ill performed, and fraught with evil, Than undertake the business of another, However good it be." Thus even the laws of right and wrong are subordinate to the fatality of caste, and all aspiration is paralyzed. On the other hand, it has been acknowledged repeatedly that the sternest type of Puritan theology, as a moral and political force, is full of inspiration; it does not deaden the soul; it stimulates the action of free-will; its moral earnestness has been a great power in molding national destinies. Mr. Bancroft has not hesitated to declare that the great charters of human liberty are largely due to its strong conception of a divine and all-controlling purpose. Even Matthew Arnold admitted that its stern "Hebraic" culture, as he called it, had wrought some of the grandest achievements of history. But Hindu fatalists, noble Aryans as they were at first, have been conquered by every race of invaders that has chosen to assail them. And no better result could have been expected from a philosophy whose _summum bonum_ is the renunciation of life as not worth living, and the loss of all personality by absorption into the One supreme existence. Buddhism does not present the same fatalistic theory of creation as Brahminism, but it introduces even a more aggravated fatalism into human life. Both alike load down the newly-born with burdens of guilt and consequent suffering transmitted from previous existences. But in the case of Buddhism there is no identity between the sinner, who incurred the guilt, and the recipient of the evil kharma, which demands punishment. Every man comes into the world entangled in the moral bankruptcy of some one who has gone before, he knows not who nor where. There is no consciousness of identity, no remembrance, no possible sense of guilt, or notion of responsibility. It is not the same soul that suffers, for in either case there is no soul; there is only a bundle of so-called skandhas--certain faculties of mind and body newly combined whose interaction produces thought and emotion. Yet there is conscious suffering. Scoffers have long pointed with indignation at the Christian doctrine that a child inherits a moral bias from his parents, but nowadays evolutionists carry the law of heredity to an extreme which no hyper-Calvinist ever thought of, and many cavillers at "original sin" have become eloquent in their praises of Buddhism, which handicaps each child with the accumulated demerit of pre-existent beings with whom he had no connection whatever.[198] The Christian doctrine imputes punishable guilt only so far as each one's free choice makes the sin his own: the dying infant who has no choice is saved by grace; but upon every Buddhist, however short-lived, there rests an heir-loom of destiny which countless transmigrations cannot discharge. In Mohammedanism the doctrine of fate--clear, express, and emphatic--is fully set forth. The Koran resorts to no euphemism or circumlocution in declaring it. Thus, in Sura lxxiv. 3, 4, we read: "Thus doth God cause to err whom he pleases, and directeth whom he pleases." Again, Sura xx. 4, says: "The fate of every man have we bound round his neck." As is well known, fatalism as a practical doctrine of life has passed into all Mohammedan society. "Kismet" (it is fated) is the exclamation of despair with which a Moslem succumbs to adversity and often dies without an effort to recover. In times of pestilence missionaries in Syria have sometimes found whole villages paralyzed with despair. Yielding to the fatalism of their creed, the poor mountaineers have abandoned all means of cure and resigned themselves to their fate. The same fatal paralysis has affected all liberty of thought, all inventiveness and enterprise, all reform of evils, all higher aspiration of the oppressed people. With the lower forms of religious belief, fetishism, animism, serpent worship, demon worship, the case is still worse. The only deities that are practically recognized in these rude faiths are generally supposed to be malevolent beings, who have not only fixed an evil fate upon men, but whose active and continued function it is to torment them. Though there is a lingering belief in a Supreme Being who created all things, yet he is far off and incomprehensible. He has left his creatures in the hands of inferior deities, at whose mercy they pass a miserable existence. Looking at the dark facts of life and having no revelation of a merciful God they form their estimates of Deity from their trials, hardships, fears, and they are filled with dread; all their religious rites have been devised for appeasing the powers that dominate and distress the world. And yet a pronounced agnostic has asked us to believe that even this wide-spread horror, this universal nightmare of heathen superstition, is more humane than the Calvinistic creed. If we inquire into the tendency of all types of ancient or modern pantheism in this particular phase, we shall find them, without exception, fatalistic. They not merely make God the author of sin--they make Him the sinner. Our misdeeds are not our acts, but God's. Thus the vaunted Bhagavad Gita, uniting the Sankhyan and the Vedanta philosophies, makes Krishna say to Arjuna: "All actions are incessantly performed by operation of the qualities of Prakriti (the self-existing Essence). Deluded by the thought of individuality, the soul vainly believes itself to be the doer. The soul, existing from eternity, devoid of qualities, imperishable, abiding in the body, acts not, nor is by any act polluted. He who sees that actions are performed by Prakriti alone, and that the soul is not an actor, perceives the truth."[199] Such is Hindu pantheism. Yet this most inconsistent system charges man with guilt. It represents his inexorable fate as pursuing him through endless transmigrations, holding over him the lash of retribution, while it exacts the very last farthing. Still, from first to last, it is not he that acts, but some fractional part of the One only Existence which fills all space. The philosophy of Spinoza was quite as fatalistic as the Hindu Vedanta. He taught, according to Schwegler, that "The finite has no independent existence in itself: it exists because the unrestrained productive energy of the (infinite) Substance spontaneously produced an infinite variety of particular forms. It has, however, no proper reality; it exists only in and through the Substance. Finite things are the most external, the last, the most subordinate forms of existence into which the universal life is specialized, and they manifest their finitude in that they are without resistance, subject to the infinite chain of causality which binds the world. The divine Substance works freely according to the inner essence of its own nature; individuals, however, are not free, but are subject to the influence of those things with which they come into contact. It follows from these metaphysical grounds," Schwegler continues, "that what is called free-will cannot be admitted. For, since man is only a mode, he, like any other mode, stands in an endless series of conditioning causes, and no free-will can, therefore, be predicated of him." Further on he adds: "Evil, or sin, is, therefore, only relative and not positive, for nothing happens against God's will. It is only a simple negation or deprivation, which only seems to be a reality in our representation."[200] The late Samuel Johnson, in his chapter on "The Morality and Piety of Pantheism," undertakes to defend both the Vedantic and the Spinozan philosophy by pointing out a distinction between an "external compulsion and an inner force which merges us in the Infinite. Though both are equally efficient as to the result, and both are inconsistent with individual freedom, yet real fate is only that which is external.... While destiny or fate in the sense of absolute external compulsion would certainly be destructive, not only of moral responsibility but of personality itself, yet religion or science without fate is radically unsound." Again he adds: "We cannot separate perfection and fate. Deity whose sway is not destiny is not venerable, nor even reliable. It would be a purpose that did not round the universe, a love that could not preserve it. Theism without fate is a kind of atheism, and a self-dominated atheism. But holding justice to be the true necessity or fate, is properly theism, though it refuses the name."[201] The reasoning here reminds one of the conclusions of a still more recent writer, who while condemning what he considers the fatalism of Calvinistic theology, still asserts that its logic leaves no alternative but the denial of a personal God. And an early Buddhist philosopher has left a fragment which gives the very same reason for agnosticism. Thus he says: "If the world was made by God (Isvara) there should be no such thing as sorrow or calamity, nor doing wrong, nor doing right; for all, both pure and impure, deeds must come from Isvara.... If he makes without a purpose he is like a suckling child, or with a purpose, he is not complete. Sorrow and joy spring up in all that lives; these, at least, are not alike the works of Isvara, for if he causes love and joy he must himself have love and hate. But if he loves and hates, he is not rightly called self-existent. 'Twere equal, then, the doing right or doing wrong. There should be no reward of works; the works themselves being his, then all things are the same to him, the maker." This was a Buddhist's answer to the Hindu pantheism, and there follows a reply also to the Oriental dualism which attempted to solve the difficulty by assigning two great first causes, one good and the other evil. "Nay," says this Buddhist philosopher, "if you say there is another cause beside this Isvara, then he is not the end or sum of all, and therefore all that lives may, after all, be uncreated, and so you see the thought of Isvara is overthrown."[202] Thus the same problems of existence have taxed human speculation in all lands and all ages. The same perplexities have arisen, and the same cavils and complaints. There is an important sense in which all forms of materialism are fatalistic in their relation to moral responsibility. James Büchner assures us that "what is called man's soul or mind is now almost universally conceded as equivalent to a function of the substance of the brain." Walter Bagehot, like Maudsley, suggests that the newly born child has his destiny inscribed on his nervous tissues.[203] Mr. Buckle assures us that certain underlying but indefinable laws of society, as indicated by statistics, control human action irrespective of choice or moral responsibility. Even accidents, the averages of forgetfulness or neglect, are the subjects of computation. To support his position he cites the averages of suicides, or the number of letters deposited yearly in a given post-office, the superscription of which has been forgotten. Thus, underlying all human activity there is an unknown force, a vague something--call it Deity, or call it Fate--which controls human affairs irresistibly. It would be amusing, if it were not sad, to see what devices and what names have been resorted to in order to get rid of a personal God. The Hindu Sankhyans ascribed all things to the "Eternally Existing Essence." The Greek Atomists called it an "Inconceivable Necessity;" Anaxagoras, "The World-forming Intelligence;" Hegel, "Absolute Idea;" Spinoza, "Absolute Substance;" Schopenhauer, "Unconscious Will." Spencer finds only "The Unknowable;" Darwin's virtual Creator is "Natural Selection;" Matthew Arnold recognize a "Stream of Tendency not our own which makes for righteousness." Nothing can be more melancholy than this dreary waste of human speculation, this weary and bootless search after the secret of the universe. At the same time a deaf ear is turned to those voices of nature and revelation which speak of a benevolent Creator. But the point to which I call particular attention in this connection is, that these vague terms, whatever else they may mean, imply in each case some law of necessity which moulds the world. They are only the names of the Fates whom all philosophies have set over us. If we have been correct in tracing an element of fatalism through all the heathen faiths, and all ancient and modern philosophies, how is it that the whole army of unbelief concentrate their assailments against divine sovereignty in the Word of God, and yet are ready to laud and approve these systems which exhibit the same things in greater degree and without mitigation? That which differentiates Christianity is the fact that, while it does represent God as the originator and controller of all things, it yet respects the freedom of the human will, which Mohammedanism does not, which Hinduism does not, which ancient or modern Buddhism does not, which Materialism does not. Not only the Word of God but our own reason tells us that the Creator of this world must have proceeded upon a definite and all-embracing plan; and yet at the same time, not only the Word of God, but our own consciousness, tells us that we are free to act according to our own will. How these things are to be reconciled we know not, simply because we are finite and God is infinite. I once stood before the great snowy range of the Himalayas, whose lofty peaks rose twenty-five thousand feet above the sea. None could see how those gigantic masses stood related to each other, simply because no mortal ever has explored, or ever can explore, their awful and unapproachable recesses. So with many great truths concerning the being, attributes, and works of God. One may say that God predetermined and then foresaw what He had ordained; another that He foresaw and then resolved to effect what he had foreseen. Neither is correct, or at least neither can know that he is correct. God is not subject to our conditions of time and space. It is impossible that He, whose knowledge and will encompass all things, should be affected by our notions of order and sequence; there is with Him no before and after. The whole universe, with all its farthest extended history, stood before Him from all eternity as one conception and as one purpose; and the conception and the purpose were one. The too frequent mistake of human formulas is that they undertake to reason out infinite mysteries on our low anthropomorphic lines, one in one extreme and another in another. We cannot fit the ways of God to the measure of our logic or our metaphysics. What we have to do with many things is simply to believe and trust and wait.[204] On the other hand, there are many things of a practical nature which God has made very plain. He has brought them down to us. The whole scheme of grace is an adaptation of the mysteries of the Godhead to our knowledge, faith, obedience, and love. And this leads directly to the chief differential which Christianity presents in contrast with the fatalisms of false systems, viz., that while sin and death abound, as all must see, the Gospel alone reveals a superabounding grace. It is enough for us that the whole scheme is one of Redemption, that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world--nay, that He made the world, and made it for an infinitely benevolent purpose. If dark mysteries appear in the Word or in the world, we are to view them in the light of Calvary, and wait till we can see as we are seen; for this world is Christ's, and will surely subserve His ends, which are those of infinite compassion. Our position, therefore, as before the abettors of heathen or agnostic philosophy, is impregnable: the fatalism is all theirs, the union of sovereign power with infinite love is ours. We have reason as well as they. We realize the facts and mysteries of life as fully as they, but are not embittered by them. We see nothing to be gained by putting out the light we have. We prefer faith to pessimism, incarnate love to the tyranny of "unconscious will." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 184: Quoted in Fiske's _Destiny of Man_, p. 117.] [Footnote 185: See _Indian Wisdom_, p. 82.] [Footnote 186: What Kanada meant by adrishta was a sort of habit of matter derived from its past combinations in a previous cosmos, one or more. The rod which has been bent will bend again, and so matter which has once been combined will unite again.] [Footnote 187: _Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought_, p. 327.] [Footnote 188: _On Natural Selection_, p. 353.] [Footnote 189: _The Destiny of Man_, p. 80.] [Footnote 190: _Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought_, p. 88.] [Footnote 191: Some of Goldwin Smith's utterances are such as these: "If morality has been based on religion there must be reason to fear that the foundation being removed the superstructure will fall. That it has rested on religion so far as the great majority are concerned will hardly be doubted." ... "The presence of this theistic sanction has been especially apparent in all acts and lives of all heroic self-sacrifice and self-devotion." ... "All moral philosophers whose philosophy has been practically effective, from Socrates down, have been religious. Many have tried to find an independent basis but have not been successful--at least have not arrived at any agreement." ... "Thucydides ascribed the fall of Greece to the fall of religion. Machiavelianism followed the fall of the Catholic faith." ... "Into the void left by religion came spiritual charlatanry and physical superstition, such as the arts of the hierophant of Isis, the soothsayer, the astrologer--significant precursors of our modern mediums." ... "Conscience as a mere evolution of tribal experience may have importance, but it can have no authority, and 'Nature' is an unmeaning word without an Author of nature--or rather it is a philosophic name for God." ... "Evolution is not moral, nor can morality be educed from it. It proclaims as its law the survival of the fittest, and the only proof of fitness is survival." ... "We must remember that whatever may be our philosophic school we are still living under the influence of theism, and most of us under Christianity. There is no saying how much of Christianity still lingers in the theories of agnostics." ... "The generation after the next may perhaps see agnosticism, moral as well as religious, tried on a clear field." These utterances are weighty, though detached. We only raise a doubt whether "the generation after the next" will see agnosticism tried on a clear field. On the contrary, it will be surrounded as now, and more and more, by Christian influences, and will still depend on those influences to save it from the sad results of its own teachings.] [Footnote 192: _The Races of Man_, pp. 137, 138.] [Footnote 193: _The Human Species_, p. 478.] [Footnote 194: Mr. John Fiske declares that man is descended from the catarrhine apes.--_Destiny of Man_, p. 19. Professor Le Conte maintains that no existing animal could ever be developed into man. He traces all existing species up from a common stock, of which man is the head. The common line of ancestors are all extinct.--_Evolution in Relation to Religious Thought_, p. 90.] [Footnote 195: _The Permanent Elements in Religion_, p. 154] [Footnote 196: Book II., 13.] [Footnote 197: Book IX., 17.] [Footnote 198: Development by "heredity" and the Buddhist doctrine of transmigration, though both fatalistic, reach that result in different ways; they are, in fact, contradictory. Character, according to Buddhism, is inherited not from parents: it follows the line of affinity.] [Footnote 199: _Indian Wisdom_, p. 152.] [Footnote 200: _History of Philosophy_, pp. 220, 221.] [Footnote 201: _Oriental Religions_--_India_. Part II., p. 44.] [Footnote 202: Beal, _Buddhism in China_, p. 180.] [Footnote 203: _Physics and Politics_.] [Footnote 204: "Probably no more significant change awaits the theology of the future than the recognition of this province of the unknown, and the cessation of controversy as to matters that come within it, and therefore admit of no dogmatic settlement."--Tulloch's _Religious Thought in Britain_, p. 24.] LECTURE X. THE DIVINE SUPREMACY OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. We have in previous lectures instituted brief and partial comparisons between Christianity and particular faiths of the East, but I now propose a general comparative survey. Never before has the Christian Faith been so boldly challenged to show cause for its supreme and exclusive claims as in our time. The early Christians encountered something of the same kind: it seemed very preposterous to the proud Roman that an obscure sect, coming out of despised Nazareth, should refuse to place a statue of its deified Founder within the Pantheon, in the goodly company of renowned gods from every part of the Roman Empire; but it did so refuse and gave its reasons, and it ultimately carried its point. It gained the Pantheon and Rome itself for Christ alone. He was proclaimed as the One Redeemer of the world, and this claim has been maintained from that day to this. "There can be no diversity," said His followers, "for there is no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved. The very genius of Christianity means supremacy and monopoly, for the reason that it is divine and God cannot be divided against Himself." But in our time the whole world is brought very closely together. The religions of men, like their social customs and political institutions, are placed in contact and comparison. The enemies of the Christian faith here, in Western lands, naturally make the most of any possible alliances with other systems supposed to antagonize Christianity; while a multitude of others, having no particular interest in any religion, and rather priding themselves upon a broad charity which is but a courteous name for indifference, are demanding with a superior air that fair play shall be shown to all religions alike. The Church is therefore called upon to defend her unique position and the promulgation of her message to mankind. Why does she refuse to admit the validity of other religions, and why send her missionaries over the earth to turn the non-Christian races from those faiths which are their heritage by birth, and in which they honestly put their trust? Why not respect everywhere that noblest of all man's instincts which prompts him to inquire after God, who hath made of one blood all nations that dwell upon the earth? If the old Hindu pantheism of the Bhagavad Gita taught that the worshippers of other gods were only worshipping the One Supreme Vishnu unawares; if Buddhism forbids its followers to assert that theirs is the only religion, or even that it is the best religion;[205] is it not time that Christians should emulate this noble charity? This plausible plea is urged with such force and volume, it is so backed by the current literature and the secular newspaper press that it cannot be ignored. The time has come when the Church must not only be able to give a reason for the faith she professes, but must assign reasons why her faith should supplant every other. I am aware that many are insisting that her true course is to be found in an intensive zeal in the promulgation of her own doctrines without regard to any other. "Preach the Gospel," it is said, "whether men will hear or whether they forbear." But it must be borne in mind that Paul's more intelligent method was to strive as one who would win, and not as they who beat the air. The Salvation Army will reach a certain class with their mere unlettered zeal. The men who purposely read only One Book, but read that on their knees, doubtless have an important work to do, but the Church as a whole cannot go back to the time when devout zealots sneered at the idea of an educated ministry. The conflict of truth and error must be waged intelligently. There are sufficient reasons for claiming a divine supremacy for the Gospel over all heathen faiths, and the sooner we thoroughly understand the difference, the more wisely and successfully shall we accomplish our work. Wherein, then, consists the unique supremacy of the Christian faith? 1. It alone offers a real salvation. We are not speaking of ethics, or conceptions of God, or methods of race culture, but of that one element which heals the wounds of acknowledged sin and reconciles men to God. And this is found in Christianity alone. There is no divine help in any other. Systems of speculation, theories of the universe, and of our relation to the Infinite are found in all sacred books of the East. There are lofty ethical teachings gathered from the lips of many masters, and records of patient research, cheerful endurance of ascetic rigors, and the voluntary encounter of martyrs' deaths. And one cannot but be impressed by this spectacle of earnest struggles in men of every land and every age to find some way of peace. But in none of the ethnic religions has there been revealed a divine and heaven-wrought salvation. They have all begun and ended with human merit and human effort. Broken cisterns have everywhere taken the place of the One Fountain of Eternal Life. Though all these systems recognize the sin and misery of the world, and carry their estimate of them to the length of downright pessimism, they have discovered no eye that could pity and no arm that could bring salvation. In the silence and gloom of the world's history only one voice has said, "Lo, I come! in the volume of the Book it is written of me." And although men have in all ages striven to rid themselves of sin by self-mortification, and even mutilation, yet the ever-recurring question, "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" was never answered till Paul answered it in his rapturous acknowledgment of victory through the righteousness of Christ. Mohammed never claimed to be a saviour or even an intercessor. He was the sword of God against idolators, and the ambassador of God to believers; but beyond the promise of a sensuous heaven, he offered no salvation. He had no remedy for sin--except that in his own case he claimed a special revelation of clemency and indulgence. Many a wholesome truth derived from the Old Testament scriptures was promulgated to the faithful, but self-righteousness, and especially valor in Mohammedan conquest, was offered as the key to paradise.[206] Doubtless we should view the false systems with discrimination. Like the sublime philosophy of Plato, Mohammedanism does teach an exalted idea of God, and there is, accordingly, a dignity and reverence in its forms of worship. I once witnessed a very imposing spectacle in the great mosque at Delhi, on the Moslem Sabbath. Several hundred Indian Mohammedans were repeating their prayers in concert. They were in their best attire, and fresh from their ablutions, and their concerted genuflections, the subdued murmur of their many voices, and the general solemnity of their demeanor, rendered the whole service most impressive. It contrasted strongly with the spectacle which I witnessed a little later in the temple of Siva, in Benares. The unspeakable worship of the linga, the scattering of rice and flowers and the pouring of libations before this symbol; the hanging of garlands on the horns of sacred bulls, and that by women; the rushing to and fro, tracking the filth of the sacred stables into the trodden ooze of rice and flowers which covered the temple pavements; the drawing and sipping of water from the adjacent cesspool, known as the sacred well; the shouting and striking of bells, and the general frenzy of the people--all this could be considered as nothing short of wild and depraved orgies. If we must choose, give us Islam, whether in contrast with the Siva worship of India or with the tyranny of the witch doctors of interior Africa. Yet, I repeat, Islam has no salvation, no scheme of grace, no great Physician. In visiting any Mohammedan country one is impressed with this one defect, the want of a Mediator. I once stood in the central hall of an imposing mansion in Damascus, around the frieze of which were described, in Arabic letters of gold, "The Hundred Names of Allah." They were interpreted to me by a friend as setting forth the lofty attributes of God--for example, "The Infinite," "The Eternal," "The Creator," "The All-Seeing," "The Merciful," "The Just." No one could help being impressed by these inspiring names. They were the common heritage of Judaism and Christianity before Islam adopted them, and they are well calculated to fill the soul with reverence and awe. But there is another class of names which were predicted by Judaism and rejoiced in by Christianity, but which Islam rejects; for example, "Messiah," "Immanuel," or God with us, "The Son of God," "The Son of Man," "The Redeemer," "The Elder Brother." In a word, Islam has nothing to fill the breach between a holy and just God and the conscience-smitten souls of men. These honored names of Allah are as sublime as the snow-peaks of the Himalayas and as inaccessible. How can we attain unto them? Without a Daysman how shall we bridge the abyss that lies between? Even Israel plead for Moses to speak to them in place of the Infinite, and they voiced a felt want of all human hearts. Yet no religious system but Christianity reveals a Mediator. There is in other faiths no such conception as the fatherhood of God. Though such names as Dyauspater, Zeuspiter or Jupiter, and others bearing the import of father are sometimes found, yet they imply only a common source, as the sun is the source of life. They lack the elements of love and fostering care. There can be no real fatherhood and no spirit of adoption except through union with the Son of God. The idea that re-birth and remission of sin may be followed by adoption and heirship, and joint heirship with the Son of the Infinite, belongs to the Christian faith alone; and the hope and inspiration of such a heritage, seen in contrast with the endless and disheartening prospects of countless transmigrations, are beyond the power of language to describe. It was with infinite reason that Paul was taught to regard his work among the Gentiles as a rescue or a deliverance "from darkness unto light, and from the power of Satan unto God," and it was a priceless boon which enabled him to offer at once the full remission of sins and a part in the glorious inheritance revealed through faith in Christ. Mere ethical knowledge cannot comfort the human soul. Contrast the gloom of Marcus Aurelius with the joy of David in Psalm cxix.; and Seneca, also, with all his discernment, and his eloquent presentation of beautiful precepts, was one of the saddest, darkest characters of Roman history. He was the man who schemed with Catiline, and who at the same time that he wrote epigrams urged Nero onward with flattery and encouragement to his most infamous vices and his boldest crimes. Knowledge of ethical maxims and the power of expressing them, therefore, is one thing, religion is another. Religion is a device, human or divine, for raising up men by a real or a supposed supernatural aid. It ought to reveal God as a helper and a Saviour. It ought to be a provision of grace by which the Just can yet be a justifier of them that are weak and wounded by sin. The ethical systems of the heathen world corroborate the Scriptural diagnosis of man's character and condition, but they fail as prescriptions. So far as divine help and regenerative power are concerned, they leave the race helpless still. Christianity is a system of faith in a moral as well as in an intellectual sense. It inculcates a spirit of loving, filial trust instead of a querulous self-righteousness which virtually chides the unknown Ruler of the universe. According to "The Light of Asia" when the Buddha preached at Kapilavastu there were assembled men and devils, beasts and birds, all victims alike of the cruel fate that ruled the world. Existence was an evil and only the Buddha could be found to pity. But that pity offered no hope except in the destruction of hope, and the destruction of all desire, all aspiration, even all feeling; while Christianity offers a hope which maketh not ashamed, even an immortal inheritance.[207] Hinduism also, like Islam and Buddhism, lacks every element of divine salvation. It is wholly a thing of merit. The infinite Brahm is said to be void of attributes of all kinds. No anthropomorphic conception can be predicated of him. The three Gods of the Trimurti are cold and distant--though for Vishnu in his alleged incarnation of Krishna, a sympathetic nature was claimed at a later day--borrowed, some say, from Buddhism, or, according to others, from Christianity. In the Hindu saint all spiritual power in this life is the merit power of ascetic austerities, all hope for the future world lies in the cleansing efficacy of endless transmigrations of which the goal is absorption into deity. But the difficulty with both Buddhism and Hinduism is that transmigration cannot regenerate. It is only a vague postponement of the moral issues of the soul. There is recognized no future intervention that can effect a change in the downward drift, and why should a thousand existences prove better than one? According to a law of physics known as the persistence of force, a body once set in motion will never stop unless through the intervention of some other resisting force. And this is strikingly true of moral character and the well-known power and momentum of habit. Who shall change the leopard's spots or deflect the fatal drift of a human soul? Remorselessly these Oriental systems exact from Kharma the uttermost farthing. They emphasize the fact that according to the sowing shall be the reaping, and that in no part of the universe can ill desert escape its awards. Even if change were possible, therefore, how shall the old score be settled? What help, what rescue can mere infinitude of time afford, though the transmigrations should number tens of thousands? There is no hint that any pitying eye of God or devil looks upon the struggle, or any arm is stretched forth to raise up the crippled and helpless soul. Time is the only Saviour--time so vast, so vague, so distant, that the mind cannot follows its cycles or trace the relations of cause and effect. In contrast with all this, Christianity bids the Hindu ascetic cease from his self-mortification and become himself a herald of Glad Tidings. It invites the hook-swinger to renounce his useless torture and accept the availing sacrifice of Him who hung upon the Cross. It relieves woman from the power of Satan, as exercised in those cruel disabilities which false systems have imposed upon her, and assigns her a place of honor in the kingdom of God. The world has not done scoffing at the idea of a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of men, and yet it has advanced so far that its best thinkers, even without any religious bias, are agreed that the principle of self-sacrifice is the very highest element of character that man can aspire to. And this is tantamount to an acknowledgment that the great principle which the Cross illustrates, and on which the salvation of the race is made to rest, is the crowning glory of all ethics and must be therefore the germinal principle of all true religion. Christianity with its doctrine of voluntary Divine Sacrifice was no after-thought. Paul speaks of it as "the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations but now is made manifest." It was the one great mystery which angels had desired to look into and for which the whole world had waited in travail and expectation. Christ was "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world," and the entire world-history has proceeded under an economy of grace. And I repeat, its fundamental principle of sacrifice, exemplified as it has been through the Christian centuries, has won the recognition even of those who were not themselves the followers of Christ. "The history of self-sacrifice during the last eighteen hundred years," says Lecky, "has been mainly the history of the action of Christianity upon the world. Ignorance and error have no doubt often directed the heroic spirit into wrong channels, and sometimes even made it a cause of great evil to mankind; but it is the moral type and beauty, the enlarged conception and persuasive power of the Christian faith that have chiefly called it into being; and it is by their influence alone that it can be permanently maintained."[208] Speaking of the same principle Carlyle says: "It is only with renunciation that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.... In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie." And George Sand in still stronger terms has said, "There is but one sole virtue in the world--the Eternal Sacrifice of self." While we ponder these testimonies coming from such witnesses we remember how the Great Apostle traces this wonder-working principle back to its Divine Source, and from that Source down into all the commonest walks of life when he says, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made himself of no reputation, and took on Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross." Or when he reminds the Corinthians that, though Christ was rich, yet for their sake He became poor, that they through His poverty might be rich. In all the Oriental systems there is nothing like this, either as a divine source of all-availing help and rescue, or as a celestial spring of human action. It is through this communicable grace that Christ becomes the Way, the Truth, the Life. Well might Augustine say that while the philosophy of Plato led him to lofty conceptions of God, it could not show him how to approach Him or be reconciled unto Him. "For it is one thing," he says, "from the mountain's shaggy top to see the land of peace and to find no way thither; and in vain to essay through ways impossible, opposed and beset by fugitives and deserters, under their captain the lion and the dragon; and another to keep on the way that leads thither guarded by the host of the heavenly General, where they spoil not that have deserted the heavenly army; for they avoid it as very torment. These things did wonderfully sink into my bowels when I read that _least of Thy Apostles_, and had meditated upon Thy works and trembled exceedingly." While Christianity is wholly unique in providing an objective Salvation instead of attempting to work out perfection from "beggarly elements" within the soul itself, as all heathen systems do, and as all our modern schemes of mere ethical culture do, it at the same time implants in the heart the most fruitful germs of subjective spiritual life. Its superior transformation of human character, as compared with all other cults, is not only a matter of doctrine but also a matter of history. It is acknowledged that Christianity has wrought most powerfully of all faiths in taming savage races as well as individual men, in moulding higher civilizations and inspiring sentiments of humanity and brotherly love. "Christ," says one of the Bampton Lecturers, "is the Light that broods over all history.... All that there is upon earth of beauty, truth, and goodness, all that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage is this gift." And if it be asked how the leaven of Christ's influence has pervaded all society, the answer is that the work is presided over by a divine and omnipotent Spirit who represents Christ, who carries out what He began, who by a direct and transforming power renews and enlightens and prompts the soul. Christianity, then, is not a record, a history of what was said and done eighteen centuries ago: it is not a body of doctrines and precepts: it is the living power of God in the soul of man. The written Word is the sword of this Divine Spirit. The renewed soul is begotten of the Spirit and it is instinct with the indwelling of the Spirit. No other system makes any claim to such an influence as that of the Holy Ghost. Sacred books, written systems of law or ethics would all prove a dead letter--the Bible itself, as well as the Veda, would be a dead letter but for the co-operation of this Divine Spirit. Sacred Scriptures might be venerated, they would not be obeyed. The dead heart must be quickened and renewed and only Christianity reveals the Transforming Power. _Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God._ Instantaneous renewal of the character and the life is not even claimed by other faiths; there is in them nothing like the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, or that of thousands of others well known in the history of Christian experience. There are no such changes in men who, from having led lives of profligacy and irreligion, have turned at once into paths of righteousness--have tamed their wild propensities and submitted themselves to the gentle law of love. But under Christian influence we have seen Africaner the savage transformed to a tractable, humane, and loving disciple. We have seen the wild and bloodthirsty Koord subdued and made as a little child. We have seen the cannibal King Thokambo, of Fiji, turned from his cruelty to a simple, childlike faith, and made to prefer the good of his people to the glory of a powerless sceptre. Whole races, like the Northmen, have been tamed from savagery and made peaceable and earnest followers of Christ. In our own time it has been said of a missionary in the South Pacific Islands, "that when he arrived on his field there were no Christians, and when he closed his labors there were no heathen." The religion of Gautama has won whole tribes of men, Hinduism and Mohammedanism are even now winning converts from fetish-worshipping races, but, so far as I know, none of these faiths have ever made converts except either by war or by the presentation of such motives as might appeal to the natural heart of man; there has been no spiritual transformation. If it be said that the Buddhist Nirvana and the Hindu doctrine of final absorption cannot attract the natural heart, the ready answer is that Nirvana and absorption are not the real inspiration of their respective systems. They are so far removed into the dim future as to exert no practical influence on the great mass of men. The future estate that is really expected and desired is a happy ideal transmigration, and perhaps many of them; and the chief felicity of the Hindu is that no particular estate is prescribed. While the Christian is promised a heaven to which the natural heart does not aspire, the Hindu may imagine and prefigure his own heaven. His next life may be as carnal as the celestial hunting-ground of the Indian or the promised paradise of the Moslem. It may be only the air-castle of a day-dreamer. There is no moral transformation. There is no expulsive power of a new and higher aspiration. Old things have not passed away; nothing has become new. But the grace of God in Christ claims to work an entire change in the desires and aspirations of the heart by the power of the Holy Ghost. Paul found the men of Ephesus highly civilized in a sense, but "dead in trespasses and sins," "walking according to the course of this world, and having their conversation in the lusts of the flesh." But God by His Spirit so "quickened" them that they were able to understand and appreciate one of the most spiritual of all his Epistles. He addressed them as "new creatures," as God's "workmanship," "_created in Christ Jesus unto good works_." As has already been noticed, all theories of moral transformation found in heathen systems require time. The process is carried on by intensive and long-continued thought, or by gradual accumulations of merit. Only the Buddha was enlightened _per sallum_,[209] so to speak. And quite in accord with this view are those modern forms of materialism which maintain that mental and moral habits consist in gradual impressions made in the molecules of the nerve-tissues--that these impressions come at length to determine our acts without the necessity of either purpose or conscious recognition, and that only when right action becomes thus involuntary can character strictly be said to exist.[210] But such theories certainly do not harmonize with the known facts of Christian conversion already alluded to. We do not refuse to recognize a certain degree of truth hidden in these speculations. We are aware that continued thought or emotion promotes a certain habit, and that in the Christian life such habit becomes an element of strength. We also admit that high and pure thought and emotion stamp themselves at length upon our physical nature, and appear in the very expression of the countenance, but when we look for the transforming impulse that can begin and sustain such habitual exercises in spite of the natural sinfulness and corruption which all systems admit, we find it only in the Christian doctrine of the new birth by the power of the Holy Ghost. On these two doctrines of a Divine Vicarious Sacrifice and of the transforming power of a Divine Spirit we might rest our case. It should be sufficient to show, first, that Christianity alone provides a divine salvation in which God is made sin for us; and second, that its power alone, though objective, works in us the only effectual subjective transformation by a direct influence from on high. But there are many other points of contrast in which the transcendent character of Christianity appears. First, an important differential lies in the completeness of the Divine personality of Jesus. Buddhism, Confucianism, and Mohammedanism, were strongly supported by the personality of their founders. We also cheerfully accord to such men as Socrates and Plato great personal influence. They have impressed themselves upon the millions of mankind more deeply than statesmen, or potentates, or conquerors; but not one of these presents to us a complete and rounded character, judged even from a human stand-point. Mohammed utterly failed on the ethical side.[211] His life was so marred by coarse sensuality, weak effeminacy, heartless cruelty, unblushing hypocrisy, and heaven-defying blasphemy, that but for his stupendous achievements, and his sublime and persistent self-assertion, he would long since have been buried beneath the contempt of mankind.[212] Confucius appears to have been above reproach in morals, and that amid universal profligacy; but he was cold in temperament, unsympathetic, and slavishly utilitarian in his teachings. His ethics lacked symmetry and just proportion. The five relations which constituted his ethico-political system were everything. They were made the basis of inexorable social customs which sacrificed some of the tenderest and noblest promptings of the human heart. Confucius mourned the death of his mother, for filial respect was a part of his system, but for his dying wife there is no evidence of grief or regret, and when his son mourned the death of his wife the philosopher reproved him. In all things he reasoned upward toward the throne; his grand aim was to build up an ideal state. He therefore magnified reverence for parents and all ancestors even to the verge of idolatry, but he utterly failed in that symmetry in which Paul makes the duties of parents and children mutual. Under his system a father might exercise his caprice almost to the power of life or death, and a Chinese mother-in-law is proverbially a tyrant. The beautiful sympathy of Christ, shown in blessing little children and in drawing lessons from their simple trust, would have been utterly out of place in the great sage of China. Confucius seems to have troubled himself but slightly, if at all, about the wants of the poor and the suffering; he taught no doctrine of self-sacrifice for the ignorant and the unworthy. His ideal of the "superior man" would have been tarnished by that contact with the lowly and degraded which was the glory of the Christ. And when his cotemporary, Laotze, taught the duty of doing good, even to enemies, he repudiated the principle as uncalled for in the relative duties which should govern mankind.[213] With respect to personality, probably a higher claim has been made for Gautama than for either of the characters who have been named. Sir Edwin Arnold, in his preface to the "Light of Asia," has assigned to him a virtual sinlessness, and such is doubtless the character which his followers would claim for him. But as a model for the great masses of men Gautama was very far from perfection. He had little of the genial sunlight of humanity; in every fibre of his nature he was a recluse; his views of life were pessimistic; he had no glad tidings for the sorrowing; no encouragement for the weary and the heavy laden.[214] His agnosticism was ill adapted to the irrepressible wants of mankind, for they must place their trust in a higher power, real or imagined.[215] But while he cast a cloud over the being of God he drove his despairing countrymen to the worship of serpents and evil spirits. In Ceylon, which is _par eminence_ an orthodox Buddhist country, ninety per cent. of the population are said to be devil worshippers, and the devil jugglers are patronized even by the Buddhist monks.[216] As the philosophy of Gautama was above the comprehension of the common people, so his example was also above their reach. It utterly lacked the element of trust, and involved the very destruction of society. To "wander apart like a rhinoceros" and "be silent as a broken gong" might be practicable for a chosen few, if only self were to be considered, but silence and isolation are not worthy ideals in a world of mutual dependence and where all life's blessings are enhanced by the ministries of the strong to the necessities of the weak. Infinitely higher was the example of Him who said, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;" and who accordingly exhorted his disciples to work while the day lasts. Christ prayed not that they should be taken out of the world, but that they should be kept from the evil. Again the Buddha's life furnished but a poor example in the domestic duties. His abandonment of his wife and child cannot be justified upon any sound theory of life. Whatever may be said of the merits of celibacy in those who are under no marriage vows, the abandonment of sacred relations once formed must be considered a crime against all society. As Mohammed's example of impurity has cast a blight over all Moslem lands, so Gautama's withdrawal from his home has borne, and is still bearing, its evil fruit. In Burmah it is common for a Buddhist who desires a change of wives to abandon his family for the sacred life of a monastery, where, if he remains but a single month, he sunders the old relation and is at liberty to form a new one. Good men are disgusted, but there is the example of "the Blessed One!" It will be admitted that in comparison with Hinduism the Buddhist ethics advanced woman to a higher social condition, but when modern apologists compare Gautama with Christ there are many contrasts which cannot be disguised. In some respects Socrates stands highest among great philosophers. Mohammed's career cost him nothing but gained for him everything that man's earthly nature could desire. Gautama made only a temporary sacrifice; he changed lower indulgences for honor and renown, and died at a ripe old age surrounded by loving friends. But Socrates resolutely and calmly suffered martyrdom for his principles. The sublime dignity and self-control of his dying hours will never cease to win the admiration of mankind; yet Socrates was by no means a complete character. He died unto himself merely. He left no gospel of peace to humanity. His influence, however pure, could not, and in fact did not, become a diffusive and transforming leaven, either in his own or in any subsequent generation. The late Matthew Arnold has said, "The radical difference between Jesus and Socrates is that such a conception as Paul's (conception of faith) would, if applied to Socrates, be out of place and ineffective. Socrates inspired boundless friendship and esteem, but the inspiration of reason and conscience is the one inspiration which comes from him and which impels us to live righteously as he did. A penetrating enthusiasm of love, sympathy, pity, adoration, reinforcing the inspiration of reason and duty does not belong to Socrates. With Jesus it is different. On this point it is needless to argue: history has proved. In the midst of errors the most prosaic, the most immoral, the most unscriptural, concerning God, Christ, and righteousness, the immense emotion of love and sympathy inspired by the person and character of Jesus has had to work almost by itself alone for righteousness, but it has worked wonders."[217] This tribute to the completeness and power of Christ's personality is calculated to remind one of a memorable chapter in the well-known work of the late Dr. Horace Bushnell, entitled, "Nature and the Supernatural." With a wonderful power it portrays Christ as rising above the plane of merely human characters--as belonging to no age or race or stage of civilization--as transcendent not in some of the virtues, but in them all--as never subject to prejudice, or the impulse of passion, never losing that perfect poise which it has been impossible for the greatest of men to achieve--as possessed of a mysterious magnetism which carried conviction to His hearers even when claiming to be one with the Infinite--as inspiring thousands with a love which has led them to give their lives for His cause.[218] I have often thought that one of the most striking evidences of the divine reality of the Christian faith is found in the reflection of Christ's personality in the character and life of the apostle Paul.[219] No one can doubt that Paul was a real historic personage, that from having been a strict and influential Jew he became a follower of Jesus and gave himself to His service with a sublime devotion; that he sealed the sincerity of his belief by a life of marvellous self-denial. He had no motive for acting a false part at such cost; on the contrary, an unmistakable genuineness is stamped upon his whole career. How shall we explain that career? Where else in the world's history have we seen a gifted and experienced man, full of strong and repellant prejudices, so stamped and penetrated by the personality of another? On what theory can we account for such a change in such a life, except that his own story of his conversion was strictly true, that he had felt in his inmost soul a power so overwhelming as to sweep away his prejudices, humble his pride, arm him against the derision of his former friends, and prepare him for inevitable persecution and for the martyr death of which he was forewarned? So vivid were his impressions of this divine personality that it seemed almost to absorb his own. Christ, though He had ascended, was still with him as a living presence. All his inspiration, all his strength came from Him. His plans and purposes centred in his Divine Master, and his only ambition was to be found well-pleasing in his sight. He saw all types and prophecies fulfilled in Him as the Son of God, the fulness of His glory, and the express image of His person. Paul never indulged in any similes by which to express the glory of heaven; it was enough that we should be like Christ and be with Him where He is. The writings of all the apostles differ from the books of other religions in the fact that their doctrines, precepts, and exhortations are so centred in their divine Teacher and Saviour. Buddha's disciples continued to quote their Master, but Buddha was dead. Theoretically not even his immortal soul survived. He had declared that when his bodily life should cease there would be nothing left of which it could be said "I am." But to the vivid and realizing faith of Christ's followers He is still their living Head, their Intercessor, their Guide. His resurrection is the warrant of their future life. He has gone before and will come again to receive His own. Christianity is Christ: all believers are members of His mystic body: the Church is His bride. He is the Alpha and the Omega of the world's history. In the contemplation of His personality as the chief among ten thousand His people are changed into His image as from glory to glory. The ground of salvation in Christianity is not in a church, nor a body of doctrines, not even in the teachings of the Master: it is in Christ Himself as a humiliated sacrifice and a triumphant Saviour. Second, the religion of the Bible differs from every other in its completeness and scope--its adaptation to all the duties and experiences of life and to all races and all conditions of men. It alone is able to meet all the deep and manifold wants of mankind. Hardwick has very aptly pointed out a contrast in this respect between the faith of Abraham and that of the early Indo-Aryan chiefs as portrayed in the Rig Veda. The pressing wants of humanity necessitate a faith that is of the nature of a heartfelt trust. No other can be regarded as strictly religious. Now Abraham's faith was something more than a speculation or a creed. It was an all-embracing confidence in God. He had an abiding sense of His presence and he confided in Him as his constant guide, defender, and friend. His family, his flocks, his relations to the hostile tribes who surrounded him, the promised possession of the land to which he journeyed--all these were matters which he left in the hands of an unseen but ever-faithful friend. His was a practical faith--a real and complete venture, and it involved gratitude and loyalty and love. Abraham's childhood had been spent in the home of an idolatrous father; for Shemite as well as Aryan had departed from the worship of the true God. In Chaldea, as in India, men had come to worship the sun and moon and the forces of nature. But while the Hindu wandered ever farther away from Jehovah, Abraham restored the faith which his ancestors had lost. He had no recourse to Indra or Varuna, he sought no help from devas or departed spirits. He looked to God alone, for he had heard a voice saying, "I am the Almighty God, walk before me and be thou perfect."[220] Under the inspiration of such a summons Abraham became "the father of the faithful." He was the representative and exemplar of real and practical faith, not only to the Hebrew race but to all mankind. He staked his all upon a promise which he regarded as divine and therefore sure. He believed in the Lord and He counted it to him for righteousness. He left home and country and ventured among hostile tribes in an assured confidence that he should gain a possession, though empty-handed, and a countless posterity, though yet childless, and that all this would be granted him not for his own glory, but that all nations might be blest in him. And this subordination of self and this uplifting of his soul to a sublime hope rendered him patient when fulfilment seemed postponed, and strong against temptation when spoils and emoluments were offered him; for in some sense, vague perhaps, he foresaw a Messiah and a Kingdom of Righteousness, and he was girded with confidence to the last, though he died without the sight. We look in vain for anything to be compared with this in the Vedic literature, still less in that of the period of Brahmanical sacerdotalism, or in the still later speculations of the philosophic schools. Real Hinduism is wanting in the element of trust. Its only faith is a belief, a theory, a speculation. It receives nothing and expects nothing as a free gift of God. Sacrificial rites survived in the early Vedic period, but they had lost all prophetic significance. They terminated in themselves and rested upon their own value. There was no remembered promise and no expectation of any specific fulfilment. The Hindu gained simply what he bought with his merit or his offerings, and he had no greater sense of gratitude to deity than to the tradesman of whom he made a purchase in the bazaar. There are, indeed, traces in some of the earliest Vedic hymns of a feeling of dependence upon superior powers, yet the Brahmanical priesthood taught men that he who was rich enough to offer a sacrifice of a hundred horses might bankrupt heaven, and by his simple right of purchase even rob Indra of his throne.[221] As stated in a previous lecture, so far was this system from "the faith which works by love" that even demons, by costly sacrifices might dispute the supremacy of the universe. There is an equally significant contrast between the legislation of Moses and that of Manu. The life and experience of the former are interwoven with his statutes. They are illustrated with references to actual events in the history of the people. The blessings, the trials, the punishments, the victories, the defeats of Israel enter into the texture of the whole Mosaic record: it is full of sympathetic feeling; it takes hold on the actual life of men and therefore is able to reform and elevate them. It brings not only Moses, but Jehovah Himself into personal sympathy with the people. But Manu presents statutes only. Many of these are wholesome as laws, but they are destitute of tenderness or compassion. No indication is given of the author's own experience, and we are left in doubt whether there were not many authors to whom the general name of Manu was applied. There is no inculcation of gratitude and love to God, or any hint of His love to men. No prayer, no song, no confession of dependence, no tribute of praise, no record of trembling, yet trustful, experience. It is all cold, lifeless precept and prohibition, with threats of punishment here and hereafter. Religious exaction is most strict, but there are few religious privileges except for Brahmans, and these they possess by divine birthright. No particular favor is asked from any being in heaven or on earth. With respect to this same element of personal trust, and real, heartfelt experience, contrast David also with any author whose name is given in Hindu literature. He was full of humanity, large-hearted, loving, grateful, and though stained by sin, yet he was so penitent and humble and tender that he was said to be a man after God's own heart. He was a successful warrior and a great king, but he held all his honor and his power as a divine gift and for the Divine glory. Compare the 119th Psalm with the Upanishads, or with any of the six schools of philosophy. The one deals with moral precepts and spiritual aspirations, all the others with subtle theories of creation or problems of the universe. The one is the outflowing of joyous experience found in obedience to God's moral law, and only out of the heart could such a psalm have been written. The law of God had become not a barrier or a hamper, but a delight. Evidently David had found a religion which filled every avenue and met every want of his whole being. Again, only the religion of Christ brings man into his proper relation of penitence and humility before God. It is necessary to the very conception of reconciliation to a higher and purer being that wrong-doing shall be confessed. All the leading faiths of the world have traditions of the fall of man from a higher and holier estate, and most of them--notably Hinduism, Buddhism, ancient Druidism, and the Druse religion of Mount Lebanon--declare that the fall was the result of pride and rebellion of spirit. And of necessity the wrong, if it cannot be undone, must at least be confessed. Self-justification is perpetuation. The offender must lay aside his false estimate of self and admit the justice whose claims he has violated. Even in the ordinary intercourse of men this principle is universally recognized. There can be no reconciliation without either actual reparation or at least a frank acknowledgment. Governmental pardon always implies repentance and promised reform, and between individuals a due concession to violated principle is deemed the dictate of the truest honor. How can there be reconciliation to God, then, without repentance and humiliation? Of what value can heathen asceticism and merit-making be while the heart is still barred and buttressed with self-righteousness? The longer a man approaches the Holiness of Deity with the offerings of his own self-consequence the greater does the enormity of his offence become and the wider the breach which he attempts to close. Even if he could render a perfect obedience and service for the future, he could never overtake the old unsettled score. The prodigal cannot recover the squandered estate or wipe out the record of folly and sin, and if there be no resource of free remission on the one hand, and no deep and genuine repentance on the other, there can be no possible adjustment. The universal judgment and conscience of men so decide. Philosophers may present this method and that of moral culture and assimilation to the character of the Infinite, but practically all men will approve the philosophy taught in Christ's touching parable of the Prodigal Son. The beauty, the force, the propriety of its principles strike the human understanding, whether of the sage or of the savage, like a flash of sunlight, and no human heart can fail to be touched by its lessons. Yet where in all the wide waste of heathen faiths or philosophies is there anything which even remotely resembles the story of the Prodigal? Where is the system in which such an incident and such a lesson would not be wholly out of place? In that ancient book of the Egyptian religion known as "The Book of the Dead," the souls of the departed when arraigned before the throne of Osiris are represented as all joining in one refrain of self-exculpation, uttering such pleas as these: "I have not offended or caused others to offend." "I have not snared ducks illegally on the Nile." "I have not used false weights or measures." "I have not defrauded my neighbor by unjustly opening the sluices upon my own land!" Any sense of the inward character of sin or any conception of wrong attitudes of mind or heart toward God is utterly wanting. It is simply the plea of "not guilty," which even the most hardened culprit may make in court. In one of the Vedic hymns to Varuna there is something which looks like confession of sin, but it really ends in palliation. "It was not our doing, O Varuna, it was necessity; an intoxicating draught, passion, dice, thoughtlessness. The old is there to mislead the young. Even sleep brings unrighteousness." And the remission sought for is not one involving a change of character but only release from an external bond. "Absolve us from the sins of our fathers and from those which we committed with our own bodies. Release Vasishtha, O King, like a thief who has feasted on stolen oxen. Release him like a calf from the rope."[222] In the Penitential Psalms of the ancient Akkadians, who inhabited Northern Assyria in the times of Abraham, and who may have retained something of that true faith from which Abraham's father had declined, we find a nearer approach to true penitence, but that also lacks the inner sense of sin and seeks merely an exemption from punishments. Only in the Old and New Testaments is sin recognized as of the nature of personal guilt. Accordingly, Christianity alone recognizes the fact that right thoughts and motives and a worthy character are the gifts of God. Cicero has truly remarked[223] that men justly thank God for external blessings, but never for virtue, or talent, or character. All that is regarded as their own. And such is the conceit of human self-righteousness in all man-made religions, whether Hindu or Greek, ancient or modern. Philosophy is in its very nature haughty and aristocratic. Even Plato betrays this element. It is only the Christian apostle that is heard to say, with heartfelt emotion, "By the grace of God I am what I am." The Buddha declared that he recognized no being in any world to whom he owed any special reverence; and especially in his later years, when his disciples had come to look upon him as in a sense divine, he regarded himself as the highest of all intelligences on the earth or in the various heavens. Such assumptions in both Buddha and Confucius will explain the fact that for ages both have been virtually worshipped. "At fifteen," said Confucius, "I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty I stood firm. At forty I had no doubt. At fifty I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy I could follow what my heart desired without transgressing what was right."[224] Yet neither of these great teachers claimed to be a divine Saviour. They were simply exemplars; their self-righteousness was supposed to be attainable by all. I cannot do better in this connection than point out a striking contrast in the recorded experiences of two well-known historic characters. Islam honors David, King of Israel, and accords him a place among its accredited prophets. Both David and Mohammed were guilty of adultery under circumstances of peculiar aggravation. Mohammed covered his offence by a blasphemous pretence of special revelations from God, justifying his crime and chiding him for such qualms of conscience as he had. David lay in dust and ashes while he bemoaned not only the consequences of his sin and the breach of justice toward his neighbor, but also the deep spiritual offence of his act. "Against Thee, and Thee only, O God, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight." Profoundest penitence on the one hand and Heaven-daring blasphemy on the other, the Bible and the Koran being witnesses! Another marked distinction is seen in the moral purity of the Christian Scriptures as contrasted with the so-called sacred books of all other religions. That which is simply human will naturally be expected to show the moral taint of lapsed humanity. The waters cannot rise higher than the fountain-head, nor can one gather figs from thistles. In our social intercourse with men we sooner or later find out their true moral level. And so in what is written, the exact grade of the author will surely appear. And it is by this very test that we can with tolerable accuracy distinguish the human from the divine in religious records. It is not difficult to determine what is from heaven and what is of the earth. No enlightened reader of Greek mythology can proceed far without discovering that he is dealing with the prurient and often lascivious imaginings of semi-barbarous poets. He finds the poetry and the art of Greece both reflecting the character of a passionate people, bred under a southern sun and in an extremely sensuous age. If he ventures into the lowest depths of the popular religious literature of Greece or Rome, or ancient Egypt or Phoenicia, he finds unspeakable vice enshrined among the mysteries of religion, and corruptions which an age of refinement refuses to translate or depict abound on every hand. Or apply the same test to the literature of Hinduism, even in its earliest and purest stages. The sacred Vedas, which are supposed to have been breathed into the souls of ancient rishis by direct divine effluence, are tainted here and there by debasing human elements, and that not incidentally but as the very soul of the Hindu system. For example, when the Vedic hymns promise as future rewards the lowest sensual indulgences[225] none can doubt the earthly source of their inspiration. As for the Upanishads, which are regarded as _Sruti_ or inspired, Professor Max Müller, in his Introduction to the first volume of "The Sacred Books of the East," virtually admits the impropriety of translating them for English readers without expurgation. Mr. Ram Chandra Bose, of Lucknow, declares himself unable, for the same reason, to give a full and unabridged account of the ancient Hindu sacrifices.[226] The later literatures of the Puranas and the Tantras are lower still. Anti-Christian Orientalists have so generally conveyed the popular impression that their culled and expurgated translations were fair representations of Hindu literature that Wilson finally felt called upon in the interest of truth and honesty to lift the veil from some of the later revelations of the Puranas, and it is sufficient to say that the Greek mythology is fairly outdone by the alleged and repeated escapades of the chief Hindu deities. The traditions of all ancient religions found on either hemisphere, and the usages observed among savage tribes of to-day all conform to the same low moral gauge. All are as deplorably human as the degraded peoples who devised them. In Mexico and Peru, as well as in Egypt and in Babylonia, base human passion was mingled with the highest teachings of religion.[227] Buddhism has generally been considered an exception to this general rule, and it will be confessed that its influence has been vastly higher than that of the old Hinduism, or the religions of Canaan, or Greece, or Rome, and immeasurably higher in morals than that of Islam; yet even Buddhism has been colored by its European advocates with far too roseate a hue. Sir Edwin Arnold was not the first biographer of Gautama to glorify incidentally the seductive influences of his Indian harem, and to leave on too many minds the impression that, after all, the luxurious palace of Sidartha was more attractive than the beggars' bowl of the enlightened "Tathagata." The Bishop of Colombo, in an able article on Buddhism, arraigns the apologetic translators of Buddhistic literature for having given to the world an altogether erroneous impression of the moral purity of the Sacred Books of Ceylon.[228] The vaunted claim that the early Buddhist records, and especially the early rock inscriptions found in caves, are pure, whatever corruptions may have crept into more modern manuscripts, is well met by letters from a recent traveller, which speak of certain Buddhist inscriptions so questionable in character that they cannot be translated or described.[229] It is scarcely necessary for me to speak of the base appeal to man's low passions found in the Koran. It is only necessary to trace its unmistakable influence in the moral degeneracy of Mohammedan populations in all lands and all ages--destroying the sacredness of the home, degrading woman, engendering unnatural vices, and poisoning all society from generation to generation. It is indeed a hard task for its apologists, by any kind of literary veneering to cover the moral deformity and the blasphemous wickedness which, side by side with acknowledged excellences, mar the pages of the Koran. The soiled finger-marks of the sensual Arab everywhere defile them. Like the blood of Banquo, they defy all ocean's waters to wash them out. It was easy enough for Mohammed to copy many exalted truths from Judaism and Christianity, and no candid mind will deny that there are many noble precepts in the Koran; but after all has been said, its ruling spirit is base. Even its promised heaven is demoralizing. It is characteristically a human book, and very low in the ethical scale at that. Let us now turn to the Bible; let us remember that the Old Testament represents those early centuries when the people of Israel were surrounded by the corruptions of Baal worship, which transcended the grovelling wickedness of all other heathen systems, ancient or modern. Let us bear in mind the kind of training which the nation had received amid the corruptions of Egypt, all rendered more effective for evil by their degrading bondage; and with all these disadvantages in view, let us search everywhere, from Genesis to Malachi, and see if there be one prurient utterance, one sanction for, or even connivance at, impurity in all those records, written by men in different lands and ages, men representing all social grades, all vocations in life, and chosen from among all varieties of association. Who will deny that these men appear to have been raised by some unaccountable power to a common level of moral purity which was above their age, their social standards, their natural impulses, or any of the highest human influences which could have been exerted upon them? They were often called to deal plainly with moral evils. They record instances of grievous dereliction, in some cases the writers were themselves the offenders. But there is always reproof. The story always has a salutary moral. Sin is always shown to be a losing game, a sowing to the wind and a reaping of the whirlwind. It is either followed by severe judgments, or it is repented of with a contrition which bows even a great monarch in dust and ashes. The books of the New Testament were also written in an age of great moral corruption. Judaism was virtually dead; the current religion in the Holy City was "a sad perversion of the truth." Hypocrisy sat in high places when John Baptist came with his protest and his rebukes. The Herods, who held the sceptres of provincial authority, were either base time-servers, or worse, they were monsters of lust and depravity. In the far-off capitals of the dominant heathen races vice had attained its full fruitage and was already going to seed and consequent decay. Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Antioch were steeped in iniquity, while the emperors who wielded the sceptre of the Roman empire were hastening the ruin of the existing civilization. It was in such an age and amid such surroundings that the Gospels and the Epistles came forth as the lotus springs, pure and radiant from the foul and fetid quagmire. What could have produced them? The widely accepted rule that religions are the products of their environments is surely at fault here. Neither in the natural impulses of a dozen Judean fishermen and peasants, nor in the bigoted breast of Saul of Tarsus, could these unique and sublime conceptions have found their genesis. They are manifestly divine. How exalted is the portraiture of the Christ! What human skill could have depicted a character which no ideal of our best modern culture can equal? In all the New Testament there are none but the highest and purest ethical teachings, and even the most poetical descriptions of heaven are free from any faintest tinge of human folly. The Apocalypse is full of images which appeal to the senses, but there is nothing which does not minister to the most rigid purity; while the representations which Paul makes of eternal felicity are strictly and conspicuously spiritual and elevating. Everywhere, from Matthew to Revelations, it is the pure in heart who shall see God, and the inducement held out is to be pure because He is pure. And although the gift of eternal life is a free gift, yet it affords no excuse for laxity. The sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans is a remonstrance against all presumption in those that are "under grace." "Reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Let not sin therefore rule in your mortal body that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead."[230] The religion of the New Testament is a spiritual religion, the resurrection body is a spiritual body; heaven is not an Indian hunting-ground, nor a Vikings Valhalla of shield-clad warriors, nor a Moslem harem. It is a spiritual abode, and its companionships are with God and the Lamb, with the church of the first-born and of saints made perfect. Now, all that we can say of these lofty and pure conceptions is that flesh and blood never revealed them. They are divine. They are out of the range of our native humanity; they are not the things that human nature desires, and it is only by the high culture of transforming grace that human aspirations are raised to their level. In conclusion, there are many points in which Christianity asserts its unique supremacy over all other systems of which there is time but for the briefest mention. It presents to man the only cultus which can have universal adaptation. Christ only, belongs to all ages and all races. Buddha is but an Asiatic, Mohammed is an Arab and belongs only to the East. The religion or philosophy of Confucius has never found adaptation to any but Mongolian races; his social and political pyramid would crumble in contact with republican institutions. On the other hand, the religion of Christ is not only adapted to all races, but it aims at their union in one great brotherhood. Again, Christianity alone presents the true relation between Divine help and human effort. It does not invest marred and crippled human nature with a false and impossible independence, neither does it crush it. Whenever heathen systems have taught a salvation by faith they have lost sight of moral obligation. Weitbrecht and others state this as a fact with the Hindu doctrine of Bakti (faith) adopted in the later centuries; De Quatrefages asserts the same of the Tahitans. But the faith of the New Testament everywhere supposes a Divine and effectual co-operation. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you to will and to do of His good pleasure." It bids men serve not as hirelings, but as sons and heirs; it stimulates hope without engendering pride; it administers discipline, but with a father's love; it teaches that trials are not judgments, but wholesome lessons. Of all religions it alone inculcates a rational and consoling doctrine of Providence. It declares that to the righteous death is not destruction, but a sleep in peace and hope. It bids the Christian lay off his cares and worries--in all things making his requests known unto God with thanksgivings; and yet it enjoins him not to rest in sloth, but to aspire after all that is pure and true and honorable and lovely and of good report in human life and conduct. It saves him from sin not by the stifling and atrophy of any God-given power, but by the expulsive influence of new affections; it bids him be pure even as God is pure. There is in the brief epistle of Paul to Titus a passage which in a single sentence sets forth the way of salvation in its fulness. It traces redemption to the grace of God, and it makes it a free provision for all men; yet it insists upon carefulness and sobriety. Salvation is shown to begin _now_ in the laying aside of all sin and the living of a godly life. Meanwhile it cheers the soul with expectation that Christ shall dwell with the redeemed in triumph, as He once came in humiliation, and it keeps ever in mind the great truth that His mission is not merely to secure for man future exemptions and possessions, but to build up character--character that shall continue to rise and expand forever. _For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; who gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people zealous of good works._ FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 205: _Holy Bible and Sacred Books of the East_, p. 12.] [Footnote 206: Mohammed was once asked whether he trusted in his own merit or in the mercy of God, and he answered, "The mercy of God." But the whole drift of his teaching belied this one pious utterance.] [Footnote 207: Of the terrible darkness and bewilderment into which benighted races are often found Schoolcraft furnishes this graphic and painful picture in the condition of the Iroquois: "Their notions of a deity, founded apparently on some dreamy tradition of original truth, are so subtile and divisible, and establish so heterogeneous a connection between spirit and matter of all imaginable forms, that popular belief seems to have wholly confounded the possible with the impossible, the natural with the supernatural. Action, so far as respects cause and effect, takes the widest and wildest range, through the agency of good or evil influences, which are put in motion alike for noble or ignoble ends--alike by men, beasts, devils, or gods. Seeing something mysterious and wonderful, he believes all things mysterious and wonderful; and he is afloat without shore or compass, on the wildest sea of superstition and necromancy. He sees a god in every phenomenon, and fears a sorcerer in every enemy. Life, under such a system of polytheism and wild belief, is a constant scene of fears and alarms. Fear is the predominating passion, and he is ready, wherever he goes, to sacrifice at any altar, be the supposed deity ever so grotesque. He relates just what he believes, and unluckily he believes everything that can possibly be told. A beast, or a bird, or a man, or a god, or a devil, a stone, a serpent, or a wizard, a wind, or a sound, or a ray of light--these are so many causes of action, which the meanest and lowest of the series may put in motion, but which shall in his theology and philosophy vibrate along the mysterious chain through the uppermost, and life or death may at any moment be the reward or the penalty."--_Notes on the Iroquois_, p. 263.] [Footnote 208: _History of Rationalism_.] [Footnote 209: And even the Buddha had spent six years in self-mortification and in the diligent search for what he regarded as the true wisdom.] [Footnote 210: Henry Maudsley, in _The Arena_ of April, 1891.] [Footnote 211: "Barren Mohammedanism has been in all the higher and more tender virtues, because its noble morality and its pure theism have been united with no living example."--Lecky, _History of Morals_, vol. ii., p. 10.] [Footnote 212: The most intelligent Mohammedans, as we have shown in a former lecture, admit the moral blemishes of his character as compared with the purity of Jesus and only revere him as the instrument of a great Divine purpose. His only element of greatness was success. Even the Koran convicts him of what the world must regard as heinous sin, and presents Jesus as the only sinless prophet.] [Footnote 213: Douglass, _Confucianism and Taouism_.] [Footnote 214: The apologists of Buddhism have made much of the story of a distressed young mother who came to the "Master" bearing in her arms the dead body of her first-born--hoping for some comfort or help. He bade her bring him some mustard seed found in a home where no child had died. After a wearisome but vain search he only reminded her of the universality of death. No hope of a future life and a glad recovery of the lost was given. As an illustration of Buddhism the example is a good one.] [Footnote 215: "Men wanted a Father in heaven, who should take account of their efforts and assure them a recompense. Men wanted a future of righteousness, in which the earth should belong to the feeble and the poor; they wanted the assurance that human suffering is not all loss, but that beyond this sad horizon, dimmed by tears, are happy plains where sorrow shall one day find its consolation."--Renan, _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 42.] [Footnote 216: See report of Missionary Conference, London, 1888, vol. i., p. 70.] [Footnote 217: _St. Paul and Protestantism_, p. 79, quoted by Bishop Carpenter.] [Footnote 218: It is hardly necessary to remind the reader of the well-known tribute which Napoleon, in his conversations with his friends on the island of St. Helena, paid to the transcendent personality of Christ. He drew a graphic contrast between the so-called glory which had been won by great conquerors like Alexander, Cæsar, and himself, and that mysterious and all-mastering power which in all lands and all ages continues to attach itself to the person, the name, the memory of Christ, for whom, after eighteen centuries of time, millions of men would sacrifice their lives.] [Footnote 219: Augustine appears to have been greatly moved by the life as well as by the writings of Paul. In an account given of his conversion to his friend Romanianus, he says, "So then stumbling, hurrying, hesitating, I seized the apostle Paul, 'for never,' said I, 'could they have wrought such things, or lived as it is plain they did live, if their writings and arguments were opposed to this so high a good.'"--_Confessions_, Bk. vii., xxi., note.] [Footnote 220: Genesis, xvii. 1.] [Footnote 221: The doctrine of human merit-making was carried to such an extreme under the Brahmanical system that the gods became afraid of its power. They sometimes found it necessary to send apsaras (nymphs), wives of genii, to tempt the most holy ascetics, lest their austerities and their merit should proceed too far.--_See Article Brahmanism, in the Britannica._] [Footnote 222: Müller, _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. i., p. 40.] [Footnote 223: De Nat. Deorum, iii., 36.] [Footnote 224: _Chips from a German Workshop_, p. 304.] [Footnote 225: See Murdock's _Vedic Religion_, p. 57.] [Footnote 226: _Hindu Philosophy_.] [Footnote 227: The most sacred of human victims offered by the Aztecs were prepared by a month of unbridled lust. See Prescott's _Conquest_.] [Footnote 228: _Nineteenth Century_, July, 1888.] [Footnote 229: Letters of Rev. Pentecost in _The Christian at Work_, 1891.] [Footnote 230: The same principles are set forth with great emphasis in Isaiah, Chap. iii.] APPENDIX BOOKS OF REFERENCE The books relating directly or indirectly to the wide range of topics discussed in the following lectures are too numerous for citation here; but there are some which are so essential to a thorough knowledge of comparative religion and comparative philosophy, that a special acknowledgment is due. "The Sacred Books of the East" are indispensable to one who would catch the real spirit of the Oriental religions. The translations from Hindu, Buddhist, Mohammedan, Confucian, and Zoroastrian literatures, by Max Müller, Rhys Davids, Oldenberg, Fausbôll, Palmer, Darmesteter, Mills, Legge, Buhler, West, Beal, and other able scholars, are invaluable. The various other works of Max Müller, "The Science of Religion," "Chips from a German Workshop," "The Origin and Growth of Religion," "Physical Religion," etc., fill an important place in all study of these subjects. "Indian Wisdom," by Sir Monier Williams, is the most comprehensive, and in many ways the best, of all compends of Hindu religion and philosophy. His abridged work, "Hinduism," and the larger volume entitled "Brahmanism and Hinduism," are also valuable. R.C. Bose has given to the public an able treatise entitled "Hindu Philosophy." Other books on Hinduism to which more or less reference is made, are: "The Vedic Religion," by McDonald; "India and the Indians," by Duff; "The Life and Letters of Colbrooke;" "The Bhagavad Gita," as translated by Chatterji; "The Vishnu Puranas," by Wilson; "The Ramayana," by Griffiths; "Brahmoism," by Bose; "The Oriental Christ," by Mozoomdar; "Christianity and Hindu Philosophy," by Ballantyne. Among the ablest books on Buddhism are: "Buddhism;" "The Growth of Religion as illustrated by Buddhism," and the able article on the same subject in the "Britannica"--all by Rhys Davids. "Buddha: His Life, Character, and Order," by Professor Oldenberg, is a scarcely less important contribution to Buddhist literature. "The Light of Asia," by Sir Edwin Arnold, has done more than any other work to interest Western nations in the legends of Gautama; perhaps no other Oriental character has been more successfully popularized. Of the many efforts to correct the misleading impressions given by this fanciful but really poetic story, "The Light of Asia and the Light of the World," by Dr. S.H. Kellogg, is probably the ablest. Dr. Edkins, in "Chinese Buddhism," and Professor Beal, in "Buddhism in China," have very successfully shown the characteristics of the Chinese types of the system. Spence Hardy, in his "Manual of Buddhism," has rendered a similar service in relation to the Buddhism of Ceylon, while Bigandet has set forth that of Burmah, and Alabaster that of Siam. Sir Monier Williams, in his more recent work, "Buddhism," has done much to counteract the fashionable tendency of most Orientalists to idealize the Buddhist system. Other works relating to Buddhism are, "Mohammed, Buddha, and Christ," by Dodds; "Buddhism (Modern)," by Subhadra; and "Esoteric Buddhism," by Sinnett. Maurice, Bishop Carpenter, Brace, the Bishop of Colombo, Martin, and many others have ably discussed the subject. Of all works on Mohammedanism, Sale's translation of the Koran, with a "Preliminary Discourse," is the most comprehensive and important. Sprenger's "Life of Mohammed, from Original Sources," is perhaps next in rank. "Islam and Mahomet," by Samuel Johnson; "Mohammed and Mohammedanism," by E. Bosworth Smith; "Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race," by E.W. Blyden; and "Leaves from an Egyptian Note-book," by Canon Isaac Taylor, are among the principal apologies for Islam. Gibbon's fifth volume of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" has at least done ample justice to the glory of the Mohammedan conquest. Of those who have ably controverted the claims of Islam, the late Dr. Pfander, of Northern India, will perhaps hold the first rank. Of the three Moulvies who were selected to meet him in public discussion, two are said to have been converted to Christianity by his arguments. The concessions of the Koran to the truths of the Old and New Testaments have been ably pointed out by Sir William Muir in "The Koran," and Dr. E.M. Wherry, in his "Commentary," has established the striking fact, that of all the prophets named in the Koran, including Mohammed, Jesus alone is represented as sinless. The modern apologists of Mohammed and his system have been well answered by Knox in current numbers of the _Church Missionary Intelligencer_. Other works upon the subject are "Islam," by Stobart; "Islam as a Missionary Religion," by Haines; "Essays on Eastern Questions," by Palgrave. Sir William Muir's "History of the Caliphate" is an important and recent work. Confucianism and Taouism may be fairly understood, even by those who have not the time for a careful study of Legge's translations of the Chinese classics, by reference to the following works: "China and the Chinese," by Medhurst; "The Religions of China," by Legge; "The Chinese," by Martin; "Confucianism and Taouism," by Douglass; "Religion in China," by Edkins. The late Samuel Johnson, in his "Oriental Religions," has devoted a large volume to the religions of China, principally to the ethics and political economy of the Confucian system; and James Freeman Clark has given considerable attention to Confucianism as one of "The Ten Great Religions." Zoroastrianism is ably treated by Darmesteter in the Introduction to his translation of the "Zend Avesta." Instructive lectures on the religion and literature of Persia may be found in the first volume of Max Müller's "Chips from a German Workshop;" also in "The Religion of the Iranians," found in Ebrard's "Apologetics," vol. ii. West's and Darmesteter's translations of "Pahlavi Texts," in the "Sacred Books of the East," are also suggestive. In the following discussions, relating broadly to the ancient as well as the modern religions and philosophies of the world, and their contrasts to Christian truth, reference is made directly or indirectly to the following works: "Christ and Other Masters," by Hardwick; "The Ancient World and Christianity," by Edward de Pressensé; "The Religions of the World," by Maurice; "The Aryan Witness," by Banergea; "The Unknown God," by Brace; "The Permanent Elements in Religion," by Boyd Carpenter; "Oriental and Linguistic Studies," by A.D. Whitney; "The Doomed Religions," by Reid; "The Idea of God," by Fiske; "The Destiny of Man," by Fiske; "The Races of Man," by Peschel; "Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion," by Caird; "National Religions and Universal Religions," by Kuenen; "Some Elements of Religion," by Liddon; "Outlines of the History of Ancient Religions," by Tiele; "The Philosophy of Religion," by Pfleiderer; "Our Christian Heritage," by Cardinal Gibbons; "Hulsean Lectures, 1845-6," by Trench; "Hibbert Lectures, 1880," by Renan; "Origins of English History," by Elton; "St. Paul in Britain" (Druidism), by Morgan; "Fossil Men and their Modern Representatives," by Dawson; "Modern Ideas of Evolution," by Dawson; "Marcus Aurelius," by Renan; "Epictetus," Bonn's Library; "Confessions," by St. Augustine; "History of the Egyptian Religion," by Tiele; "Lucretius," Bonn's Library; "Lives of the Fathers," by Farrar; "The Vikings of Western Christendom," by Keary; "Principles of Sociology," by Spencer; "The Descent of Man," by Darwin; "Evolution and Its Relation to Christian Thought," by Le Conte; "History of European Morals," by Lecky; "The Kojiki" (Sacred Books of Shinto), Chamberlain's translation; "The Witness of History to Christ," by Farrar; "Anti-Theistic Theories," by Flint; "The Human Species," by De Quatrefages. 
29527	----	THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE [Illustration: Publisher's logo] THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE BY H. FIELDING 'For to see things in their beauty is to see them in their truth' MATTHEW ARNOLD London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1899 _First Edition, 1898_ _Second Edition, 1898_ _Third Edition, 1899_ DEDICATION TO SECOND EDITION _I dedicate this book to you about whom it is written. It has been made a reproach to me by the critics that I have only spoken well of you, that I have forgotten your faults and remembered only your virtues. If it is wrong to have done this, I must admit the wrong. I have written of you as a friend does of a friend. Where I could say kind things of you I have done so, where I could not I have been silent. You will find plenty of people who can see only your faults, and who like to tell you of them. You will find in the inexorable sequence of events a corrector of these faults more potent than any critics can be. But I am not your critic, but your friend. If many of you had not admitted me, a stranger, into your friendship during my many very solitary years, of what sort should I be now? How could I have lived those years alone? You kept alive my sympathies, and so saved me from many things. Do you think I could now turn round and criticise you? No; but this book is my tribute of gratitude for many kindnesses._ PREFACE In most of the quotations from Burmese books containing the life of the Buddha I am indebted, if not for the exact words, yet for the sense, to Bishop Bigandet's translation. I do not think I am indebted to anyone else. I have, indeed, purposely avoided quoting from any other book and using material collected by anyone else. The story of Ma Pa Da has appeared often before, but my version is taken entirely from the Burmese song. It is, as I have said, known to nearly every Burman. I wanted to write only what the Burmese themselves thought; whether I have succeeded or not, the reader can judge. I am indebted to Messrs. William Blackwood and Sons for permission to use parts of my article on 'Burmese Women'--_Blackwood's Magazine_, May, 1895--in the present work. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. LIVING BELIEFS 1 II. HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT--I. 17 III. HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT--II. 34 IV. THE WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE 46 V. WAR--I. 56 VI. WAR--II. 77 VII. GOVERNMENT 87 VIII. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 102 IX. HAPPINESS 116 X. THE MONKHOOD--I. 127 XI. THE MONKHOOD--II. 153 XII. PRAYER 158 XIII. FESTIVALS 166 XIV. WOMEN--I. 185 XV. WOMEN--II. 205 XVI. WOMEN--III. 224 XVII. DIVORCE 228 XVIII. DRINK 242 XIX. MANNERS 248 XX. 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 256 XXI. ALL LIFE IS ONE 277 XXII. DEATH, THE DELIVERER 302 XXIII. THE POTTER'S WHEEL 322 XXIV. THE FOREST OF TIME 342 XXV. CONCLUSION 348 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE CHAPTER I LIVING BELIEFS 'The observance of the law alone entitles to the right of belonging to my religion.'--_Saying of the Buddha._ For the first few years of my stay in Burma my life was so full of excitement that I had little care or time for any thought but of to-day. There was, first of all, my few months in Upper Burma in the King's time before the war, months which were full of danger and the exhilaration of danger, when all the surroundings were too new and too curious to leave leisure for examination beneath the surface. Then came the flight from Upper Burma at the time of the war, and then the war itself. And this war lasted four years. Not four years of fighting in Burma proper, for most of the Irrawaddy valley was peaceful enough by the end of 1889; but as the central parts quieted down, I was sent to the frontier, first on the North and then on the East by the Chin mountains; so that it was not until 1890 that a transfer to a more settled part gave me quiet and opportunity for consideration of all I had seen and known. For it was in those years that I gained most of whatever little knowledge I have of the Burmese people. Months, very many months, I passed with no one to speak to, with no other companions but Burmese. I have been with them in joy and in sorrow, I have fought with them and against them, and sat round the camp-fire after the day's work and talked of it all. I have had many friends amongst them, friends I shall always honour; and I have seen them killed sometimes in our fights, or dead of fever in the marshes of the frontier. I have known them from the labourer to the Prime Minister, from the little neophyte just accepted into the faith to the head of all the Burmese religion. I have known their wives and daughters; have watched many a flirtation in the warm scented evenings; and have seen girls become wives and wives mothers while I have lived amongst them. So that although when the country settled down, and we built houses for ourselves and returned more to English modes of living, I felt that I was drifting away from them into the conventionality and ignorance of our official lives, yet I had in my memory much of what I had seen, much of what I had done, that I shall never forget. I felt that I had been--even if it were only for a time--behind the veil, where it is so hard to come. In looking over these memories it seemed to me that there were many things I did not understand, acts of theirs and customs, which I had seen and noted, but of which I did not know the reason. We all know how hard it is to see into the heart even of our own people, those of our flesh and blood who are with us always, whose ways are our ways, and whose thoughts are akin to ours. And if this be so with them, it is ten thousand times harder with those whose ways are not our ways, and from whose thoughts we must be far apart. It is true that there are no dark places in the lives of the Burmese as there are in the lives of other Orientals. All is open to the light of day in their homes and in their religion, and their women are the freest in the world. Yet the barriers of a strange tongue and a strange religion, and of ways caused by another climate than ours, is so great that, even to those of us who have every wish and every opportunity to understand, it seems sometimes as if we should never know their hearts. It seems as if we should never learn more of their ways than just the outside--that curiously varied outside which is so deceptive, and which is so apt to prevent our understanding that they are men just as we are, and not strange creations from some far-away planet. So when I settled down and sought to know more of the meaning of what I had seen, I thought that first of all I must learn somewhat of their religion, of that mainspring of many actions, which seemed sometimes admirable, sometimes the reverse, and nearly always foreign to my ideas. It is true that I knew they were Buddhists, that I recognized the yellow-robed monks as followers of the word of Gaudama the Buddha, and that I had a general acquaintance with the theory of their faith as picked up from a book or two--notably, Rhys Davids' 'Buddhism' and Bishop Bigandet's book--and from many inconsequent talks with the monks and others. But the knowledge was but superficial, and I was painfully aware that it did not explain much that I had seen and that I saw every day. So I sent for more books, such books as had been published in English, and I studied them, and hoped thereby to attain the explanations I wanted; and as I studied, I watched as I could the doings of the people, that I might see the effects of causes and the results of beliefs. I read in these sacred books of the mystery of Dharma, of how a man has no soul, no consciousness after death; that to the Buddhist 'dead men rise up never,' and that those who go down to the grave are known no more. I read that all that survives is the effect of a man's actions, the evil effect, for good is merely negative, and that this is what causes pain and trouble to the next life. Everything changes, say the sacred books, nothing lasts even for a moment. It will be, and it has been, is the life of man. The life that lives tomorrow in the next incarnation is no more the life that died in the last than the flame we light in the lamp to-day is the same that went out yesternight. It is as if a stone were thrown into a pool--that is the life, the splash of the stone; all that remains, when the stone lies resting in the mud and weeds below the waters of forgetfulness, are the circles ever widening on the surface, and the ripples never dying, but only spreading farther and farther away. All this seemed to me a mystery such as I could not understand. But when I went to the people, I found that it was simple enough to them; for I found that they remembered their former lives often, that children, young children, could tell who they were before they died, and remember details of that former existence. As they grew older the remembrance grew fainter and fainter, and at length almost died away. But in many children it was quite fresh, and was believed in beyond possibility of a doubt by all the people. So I saw that the teachings of their sacred books and the thoughts of the people were not at one in this matter. Again, I read that there was no God. Nats there were, spirits of great power like angels, and there was the Buddha (the just man made perfect), who had worked out for all men the way to reach surcease from evil; but of God I saw nothing. And because the Buddha had reached heaven (Nirvana), it would be useless to pray to him. For, having entered into his perfect rest, he could not be disturbed by the sharp cry of those suffering below; and if he heard, still he could not help; for each man must through pain and sorrow work out for himself his own salvation. So all prayer is futile. Then I remembered I had seen the young mother going to the pagoda on the hilltop with a little offering of a few roses or an orchid spray, and pouring out her soul in passionate supplication to Someone--Someone unknown to her sacred books--that her firstborn might recover of his fever, and be to her once more the measureless delight of her life; and it would seem to me that she must believe in a God and in prayer after all. So though I found much in these books that was believed by the people, and much that was to them the guiding influence of their lives, yet I was unable to trust to them altogether, and I was in doubt where to seek for the real beliefs of these people. If I went to their monks, their holy men, the followers of the great teacher, Gaudama, they referred me to their books as containing all that a Buddhist believed; and when I pointed out the discrepancies, they only shook their heads, and said that the people were an ignorant people and confused their beliefs in that way. And when I asked what was a Buddhist, I was told that, to be a Buddhist, a man must be accepted into the religion with certain rites, certain ceremonies, he must become for a time a member of the community of the monks of the Buddha, and that a Buddhist was he who was so accepted, and who thereafter held by the teachings of the Buddha. But when I searched the life of the Buddha, I could not find any such ceremonies necessary at all. So that it seemed that the religion of the Buddha was one religion, and the religion of the Buddhists another; but when I said so to the monks, they were horror-struck, and said that it was because I did not understand. In my perplexity I fell back, as we all must, to my own thoughts and those of my own people; and I tried to imagine how a Burman would act if he came to England to search into the religion of the English and to know the impulses of our lives. I saw how he would be sent to the Bible as the source of our religion, how he would be told to study that if he would know what we believed and what we did not--what it was that gave colour to our lives. I followed him in imagination as he took the Bible and studied it, and then went forth and watched our acts, and I could see him puzzled, as I was now puzzled when I studied his people. I thought of him reading the New Testament, and how he would come to these verses: '27. But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, '28. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. '29. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid him not to take thy coat also. '30. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again.' He would read them again and again, these wonderful verses, that he was told the people and Church believed, and then he would go forth to observe the result of this belief. And what would he see? He would see this: A nation proud and revengeful, glorying in her victories, always at war, a conqueror of other peoples, a mighty hater of her enemies. He would find that in the public life of the nation with other nations there was no thought of this command. He would find, too, in her inner life, that the man who took a cloak was not forgiven, but was terribly punished--he used to be hanged. He would find---- But need I say what he would find? Those who will read this are those very people--they know. And the Burman would say at length to himself, Can this be the belief of this people at all? Whatever their Book may say, they do not think that it is good to humble yourself to your enemies--nay, but to strike hard back. It is not good to let the wrong-doer go free. They think the best way to stop crime is to punish severely. Those are their acts; the Book, they say, is their belief. Could they act one thing and believe another? Truly, _are_ these their beliefs? And, again, he would read how that riches are an offence to righteousness: hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of God. He would read how the Teacher lived the life of the poorest among us, and taught always that riches were to be avoided. And then he would go forth and observe a people daily fighting and struggling to add field to field, coin to coin, till death comes and ends the fight. He would see everywhere wealth held in great estimation; he would see the very children urged to do well, to make money, to struggle, to rise in the world. He would see the lives of men who have become rich held up as examples to be followed. He would see the ministers who taught the Book with fair incomes ranking themselves, not with the poor, but with the middle classes; he would see the dignitaries of the Church--the men who lead the way to heaven--among the wealthy of the land. And he would wonder. Is it true, he would say to himself, that these people believe that riches are an evil thing? Whence, then, come their acts, for their acts seem to show that they hold riches to be a good thing? What is to be accepted as their belief: the Book they say they believe, which condemns riches, or their acts, by which they show that they hold that wealth is a good thing--ay, and if used according to their ideas of right, a very good thing indeed? So, it seemed to me, would a Burman be puzzled if he came to us to find out our belief; and as the Burman's difficulty in England was, _mutatis mutandis_, mine in Burma, I set to work to think the matter out. How were the beliefs of a people to be known, and why should there be such difficulties in the way? If I could understand how it was with us, it might help me to know how it was with them. And I have thought that the difficulty arises from the fact that there are two ways of seeing a religion--from within and from without--and that these are as different as can possibly be. It is because we forget there are the two standpoints that we fall into error. In every religion, to the believers in it, the crown and glory of their creed is that it is a revelation of truth, a lifting of the veil, behind which every man born into this mystery desires to look. They are sure, these believers, that they have the truth, that they alone have the truth, and that it has come direct from where alone truth can live. They believe that in their religion alone lies safety for man from the troubles of this world and from the terrors and threats of the next, and that those alone who follow its teaching will reach happiness hereafter, if not here. They believe, too, that this truth only requires to be known to be understood and accepted of all men; that as the sun requires no witness of its warmth, so the truth requires no evidence of its truth. It is to them so eternally true, so matchless in beauty, so convincing in itself, that adherents of all other creeds have but to hear it pronounced and they must believe. So, then, the question, How do you know that your faith is true? is as vain and foolish as the cry of the wind in an empty house. And if they be asked wherein lies their religion, they will produce their sacred books, and declare that in them is contained the whole matter. Here is the very word of truth, herein is told the meaning of all things, herein alone lies righteousness. This, they say, is their faith: that they believe in every line of it, this truth from everlasting to everlasting, and that its precepts, and none other, can be held by him who seeks to be a sincere believer. And to these believers the manifestation of their faith is that its believers attain salvation hereafter. But as that is in the next world, if the unbeliever ask what is the manifestation in this, the believers will answer him that the true mark and sign whereby a man may be known to hold the truth is the observance of certain forms, the performance of certain ceremonies, more or less mystical, more or less symbolical, of some esoteric meaning. That a man should be baptized, should wear certain marks on his forehead, should be accepted with certain rites, is generally the outward and visible sign of a believer, and the badge whereby others of the same faith have known their fellows. It has never been possible for any religion to make the acts and deeds of its followers the test of their belief. And for these reasons: that it is a test no one could apply, and that if anyone were to attempt to apply it, there would soon be no Church at all. For to no one is it given to be able to observe in their entirety all the precepts of their prophet, whoever that prophet may be. All must fail, some more and some less, but generally more, and thus all would fall from the faith at some time or another, and there would be no Church left. And so another test has been made necessary. If from his weakness a man cannot keep these precepts, yet he can declare his belief in and his desire to keep them, and here is a test that can be applied. Certain rites have been instituted, and it has been laid down that those who by their submission to these rites show their belief in the truth and their desire to follow that truth as far as in them lies, shall be called the followers of the faith. So in time it has come about that these ceremonial rites have been held to be the true and only sign of the believer, and the fact that they were but to be the earnest of the beginning and living of a new life has become less and less remembered, till it has faded into nothingness. Instead of the life being the main thing, and being absolutely necessary to give value and emphasis to the belief, it has come to pass that it is the belief, and the acceptance of the belief, that has been held to hallow the life and excuse and palliate its errors. Thus of every religion is this true, that its essence is a belief that certain doctrines are revelations of eternal truth, and that the fruit of this truth is the observance of certain forms. Morality and works may or may not follow, but they are immaterial compared with the other. This, put shortly, is the view of every believer. But to him who does not believe in a faith, who views it from without, from the standpoint of another faith, the whole view is changed, the whole perspective altered. Those landmarks which to one within the circle seem to stand out and overtop the world are to the eyes of him without dwarfed often into insignificance, and other points rise into importance. For the outsider judges a religion as he judges everything else in this world. He cannot begin by accepting it as the only revelation of truth; he cannot proceed from the unknown to the known, but the reverse. First of all, he tries to learn what the beliefs of the people really are, and then he judges from their lives what value this religion has to them. He looks to acts as proofs of beliefs, to lives as the ultimate effects of thoughts. And he finds out very quickly that the sacred books of a people can never be taken as showing more than approximately their real beliefs. Always through the embroidery of the new creed he will find the foundation of an older faith, of older faiths, perhaps, and below these, again, other beliefs that seem to be part of no system, but to be the outcome of the great fear that is in the world. The more he searches, the more he will be sure that there is only one guide to a man's faith, to his soul, and that is not any book or system he may profess to believe, but the real system that he follows--that is to say, that a man's beliefs can be known even to himself from his acts only. For it is futile to say that a man believes in one thing and does another. That is not a belief at all. A man may cheat himself, and say it is, but in his heart he knows that it is not. A belief is not a proposition to be assented to, and then put away and forgotten. It is always in our minds, and for ever in our thoughts. It guides our every action, it colours our whole life. It is not for a day, but for ever. When we have learnt that a cobra's bite is death, we do not put the belief away in a pigeon-hole of our minds, there to rust for ever unused, nor do we go straightway and pick up the first deadly snake that we see. We remember it always; we keep it as a guiding principle of our daily lives. A belief is a strand in the cord of our lives, that runs through every fathom of it, from the time that it is first twisted among the others till the time when that life shall end. And as it is thus impossible for the onlooker to accept from adherents of a creed a definition of what they really believe, so it is impossible for him to acknowledge the forms and ceremonies of which they speak as the real manifestations of their creed. It seems to the onlooker indifferent that men should be dipped in water or not, that they should have their heads shaved or wear long hair. Any belief that is worth considering at all must have results more important to its believers, more valuable to mankind, than such signs as these. It is true that of the great sign of all, that the followers of a creed attain heaven hereafter, he cannot judge. He can only tell of what he sees. This may or may not be true; but surely, if it be true, there must be some sign of it here on earth beyond forms. A religion that fits a soul for the hereafter will surely begin by fitting it for the present, he will think. And it will show that it does so otherwise than by ceremonies. For forms and ceremonies that have no fruit in action are not marks of a living truth, but of a dead dogma. There is but little thought of forms to him whose heart is full of the teaching of his Master, who has His words within his heart, and whose soul is full of His love. It is when beliefs die, and love has faded into indifference, that forms are necessary, for to the living no monument is needed, but to the dead. Forms and ceremonies are but the tombs of dead truths, put up to their memory to recall to those who have never known them that they lived--and died--long ago. And because men do not seek for signs of the living among the graveyards of the dead, so it is not among the ceremonies of religions that we shall find the manifestations of living beliefs. It is from the standpoint of this outsider that I have looked at and tried to understand the soul of the Burmese people. When I have read or heard of a teaching of Buddhism, I have always taken it to the test of the daily life of the people to see whether it was a living belief or no. I have accepted just so much as I could find the people have accepted, such as they have taken into their hearts to be with them for ever. A teaching that has been but a teaching or theory, a vain breath of mental assent, has seemed to me of no value at all. The guiding principles of their lives, whether in accordance with the teaching of Buddhism or not, these only have seemed to me worthy of inquiry or understanding. What I have desired to know is not their minds, but their souls. And as this test of mine has obliged me to omit much that will be found among the dogmas of Buddhism, so it has led me to accept many things that have no place there at all. For I have thought that what stirs the heart of man is his religion, whether he calls it religion or not. That which makes the heart beat and the breath come quicker, love and hate, and joy and sorrow--that has been to me as worthy of record as his hopes of a future life. The thoughts that come into the mind of the ploughman while he leads his team afield in the golden glory of the dawn; the dreams that swell and move in the heart of the woman when she knows the great mystery of a new life; whither the dying man's hopes and fears are led--these have seemed to me the religion of the people as well as doctrines of the unknown. For are not these, too, of the very soul of the people? CHAPTER II HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT--I 'He who pointed out the way to those that had lost it.' _Life of the Buddha._ The life-story of Prince Theiddatha, who saw the light and became the Buddha twenty-five centuries ago, has been told in English many times. It has been told in translations from the Pali, from Burmese, and from Chinese, and now everyone has read it. The writers, too, of these books have been men of great attainments, of untiring industry in searching out all that can be known of this life, of gifts such as I cannot aspire to. There is now nothing new to learn of those long past days, nothing fresh for me to tell, no discovery that can be made. Yet in thinking out what I have to say about the religion of the Burmese, I have found that I must tell again some of the life of the Buddha, I must rewrite this ten-times-told tale, of which I know nothing new. And the reason is this: that although I know nothing that previous writers have not known, although I cannot bring to the task anything like their knowledge, yet I have something to say that they have not said. For they have written of him as they have learned from books, whereas I want to write of him as I have learned from men. Their knowledge has been taken from the records of the dead past, whereas mine is from the actualities of the living present. I do not mean that the Buddha of the sacred books and the Buddha of the Burman's belief are different persons. They are the same. But as I found it with their faith, so I find it with the life of their teacher. The Burmese regard the life of the Buddha from quite a different standpoint to that of an outsider, and so it has to them quite a different value, quite a different meaning, to that which it has to the student of history. For to the writer who studies the life of the Buddha with a view merely to learn what that life was, and to criticise it, everything is very different to what it is to the Buddhist who studies that life because he loves it and admires it, and because he desires to follow it. To the former the whole detail of every portion of the life of the Buddha, every word of his teaching, every act of his ministry, is sought out and compared and considered. Legend is compared with legend, and tradition with tradition, that out of many authorities some clue to the actual fact may be found. But to the Buddhist the important parts in the great teacher's life are those acts, those words, that appeal directly to him, that stand out bravely, lit with the light of his own experiences and feelings, that assist him in living his own life. His Buddha is the Buddha he understands, and who understood and sympathized with such as him. Other things may be true, but they are matters of indifference. To hear of the Buddha from living lips in this country, which is full of his influence, where the spire of his monastery marks every village, and where every man has at one time or another been his monk, is quite a different thing to reading of him in far countries, under other skies and swayed by other thoughts. To sit in the monastery garden in the dusk, in just such a tropic dusk as he taught in so many years ago, and hear the yellow-robed monk tell of that life, and repeat his teaching of love, and charity, and compassion--eternal love, perfect charity, endless compassion--until the stars come out in the purple sky, and the silver-voiced gongs ring for evening prayers, is a thing never to be forgotten. As you watch the starlight die and the far-off hills fade into the night, as the sounds about you still, and the calm silence of the summer night falls over the whole earth, you know and understand the teacher of the Great Peace as no words can tell you. A sympathy comes to you from the circle of believers, and you believe, too. An influence and an understanding breathes from the nature about you--the same nature that the teacher saw--from the whispering fig-trees and the scented champaks, and the dimly seen statues in the shadows of the shrines, that you can never gain elsewhere. And as the monks tell you the story of that great life, they bring it home to you with reflection and comment, with application to your everyday existence, till you forget that he of whom they speak lived so long ago, so very long ago, and your heart is filled with sorrow when you remember that he is dead, that he is entered into his peace. I do not hope that I can convey much of this in my writing. I always feel the hopelessness of trying to put on paper the great thoughts, the intense feeling, of which Buddhism is so full. But still I can, perhaps, give something of this life as I have heard it, make it a little more living than it has been to us, catch some little of that spirit of sympathy that it holds for all the world. Around the life of the Buddha has gathered much myth, like dust upon an ancient statue, like shadows upon the mountains far away, blurring detail here and there, and hiding the beauty. There are all sorts of stories of the great portents that foretold his coming: how the sun and the stars knew, and how the wise men prophesied. Marvels attended his birth, and miracles followed him in life and in death. And the appearance of the miraculous has even been heightened by the style of the chroniclers in telling us of his mental conflicts: by the personification of evil in the spirit Man, and of desire in his three beautiful daughters. All the teacher's thoughts, all his struggles, are materialized into forms, that they may be more readily brought home to the reader, that they may be more clearly realized by a primitive people as actual conflicts. Therefore at first sight it seems that of all creeds none is so full of miracle, so teeming with the supernatural, as Buddhism, which is, indeed, the very reverse of the truth. For to the supernatural Buddhism owes nothing at all. It is in its very essence opposed to all that goes beyond what we can see of earthly laws, and miracle is never used as evidence of the truth of any dogma or of any doctrine. If every supernatural occurrence were wiped clean out of the chronicles of the faith, Buddhism would, even to the least understanding of its followers, remain exactly where it is. Not in one jot or tittle would it suffer in the authority of its teaching. The great figure of the teacher would even gain were all the tinsel of the miraculous swept from him, so that he stood forth to the world as he lived--would gain not only to our eyes, but even to theirs who believe in him. For the Buddha was no prophet. He was no messenger from any power above this world, revealing laws of that power. No one came to whisper into his ear the secrets of eternity, and to show him where truth lived. In no trance, in no vision, did he enter into the presence of the Unknown, and return from thence full of the wisdom of another world; neither did he teach the worship of any god, of any power. He breathed no threatenings of revenge for disobedience, of forgiveness for the penitent. He held out no everlasting hell to those who refused to follow him, no easily gained heaven to his believers. He went out to seek wisdom, as many a one has done, looking for the laws of God with clear eyes to see, with a pure heart to understand, and after many troubles, after many mistakes, after much suffering, he came at last to the truth. Even as Newton sought for the laws of God in the movement of the stars, in the falling of a stone, in the stir of the great waters, so this Newton of the spiritual world sought for the secrets of life and death, looking deep into the heart of man, marking its toil, its suffering, its little joys, with a soul attuned to catch every quiver of the life of the world. And as to Newton truth did not come spontaneously, did not reveal itself to him at his first call, but had to be sought with toil and weariness, till at last he reached it where it hid in the heart of all things, so it was with the prince. He was not born with the knowledge in him, but had to seek it as every other man has done. He made mistakes as other men do. He wasted time and labour following wrong roads, demonstrating to himself the foolishness of many thoughts. But, never discouraged, he sought on till he found, and what he found he gave as a heritage to all men for ever, that the way might be easier for them than it had been for him. Nothing is more clear than this: that to the Buddhist his teacher was but a man like himself, erring and weak, who made himself perfect, and that even as his teacher has done, so, too, may he if he do but observe the everlasting laws of life which the Buddha has shown to the world. These laws are as immutable as Newton's laws, and come, like his, from beyond our ken. And this, too, is another point wherein the parallel with Newton will help us: that just as when Newton discovered gravitation he was obliged to stop, for his knowledge of that did not lead him at once to the knowledge of the infinite, so when he had attained the laws of righteousness, Gaudama the Buddha also stopped, because here his standing-ground failed. It is not true, that which has been imputed to the Buddha by those who have never tried to understand him--that he denied some power greater than ourselves; that because he never tried to define the indefinite, to confine the infinite within the corners of a phrase, therefore his creed was materialistic. We do not say of Newton that he was an atheist because when he taught us of gravity he did not go further and define to us in equations Him who made gravity; and as we understand more of the Buddha, as we search into life and consider his teaching, as we try to think as he thought, and to see as he saw, we understand that he stopped as Newton stopped, because he had come to the end of all that he could see, not because he declared that he knew all things, and that beyond his knowledge there was nothing. No teacher more full of reverence, more humble than Gaudama the Buddha ever lived to be an example to us through all time. He tells us of what he knows; of what he knows not he is silent. Of the laws that he can see, the great sequences of life to death, of evil to sorrow, of goodness to happiness, he tells in burning words. Of the beginning and the end of the world, of the intentions and the ways of the great Unknown, he tells us nothing at all. He is no prophet, as we understand the word, but a man; and all that is divine in him beyond what there is in us is that he hated the darkness and sought the light, sought and was not dismayed, and at last he found. And yet nothing could be further from the truth than to call the Buddha a philosopher and Buddhism a philosophy. Whatever he was, he was no philosopher. Although he knew not any god, although he rested his claims to be heard upon the fact that his teachings were clear and understandable, that you were not required to believe, but only to open your eyes and see, and 'his delight was in the contemplation of unclouded truth,' yet he was far from a philosopher. His was not an appeal to our reason, to our power of putting two and two together and making five of them; his teachings were no curious designs woven with words, the counters of his thought. He appealed to the heart, not to the brain; to our feelings, not to our power of arranging these feelings. He drew men to him by love and reverence, and held them so for ever. Love and charity and compassion, endless compassion, are the foundations of his teachings; and his followers believe in him because they have seen in him the just man made perfect, and because he has shown to them the way in which all men may become even as he is. He was a prince in a little kingdom in the Northeast of India, the son of King Thudoodana and his wife Maia. He was strong, we are told, and handsome, famous in athletic exercises, and his father looked forward to the time when he should be grown a great man, and a leader of armies. His father's ambition for him was that he should be a great conqueror, that he should lead his troops against the neighbouring kings and overcome them, and in time make for himself a wide-stretching empire. India was in those days, as in many later ones, split up into little kingdoms, divided from each other by no natural boundary, overlooked by no sovereign power, and always at war. And the king, as fathers are, was full of dreams that this son of his should subdue all India to himself, and be the glory of his dynasty, and the founder of a great race. Everything seemed to fall in with the desire of the king. The prince grew up strong and valiant, skilled in action, wise in counsel, so that all his people were proud of him. Everything fell in with the desire of the king except the prince himself, for instead of being anxious to fight, to conquer other countries, to be a great leader of armies, his desires led him away from all this. Even as a boy he was meditative and given to religious musings, and as he grew up he became more and more confirmed in his wish to know of sacred things, more and more an inquirer into the mysteries of life. He was taught all the faith of those days, a faith so old that we do not know whence it came. He was brought up to believe that life is immortal, that no life can ever utterly die. He was taught that all life is one; that there is not one life of the beasts and one life of men, but that all life was one glorious unity, one great essence coming from the Unknown. Man is not a thing apart from this world, but of it. As man's body is but the body of beasts, refined and glorified, so the soul of man is but a higher stage of the soul of beasts. Life is a great ladder. At the bottom are the lower forms of animals, and some way up is man; but all are climbing upwards for ever, and sometimes, alas! falling back. Existence is for each man a great struggle, punctuated with many deaths; and each death ends one period but to allow another to begin, to give us a new chance of working up and gaining heaven. He was taught that this ladder is very high, that its top is very far away, above us, out of our sight, and that perfection and happiness lie up there, and that we must strive to reach them. The greatest man, even the greatest king, was farther below perfection than an animal was below him. We are very near the beasts, but very far from heaven. So he was taught to remember that even as a very great prince he was but a weak and erring soul, and that unless he lived well, and did honest deeds, and was a true man, instead of rising he might fall. This teaching appealed to the prince far more than all the urging of his father and of the courtiers that he should strive to become a great conqueror. It entered into his very soul, and his continual thought was how he was to be a better man, how he was to use this life of his so that he should gain and not lose, and where he was to find happiness. All the pomp and glory of the palace, all its luxury and ease, appealed to him very little. Even in his early youth he found but little pleasure in it, and he listened more to those who spoke of holiness than to those who spoke of war. He desired, we are told, to become a hermit, to cast off from him his state and dignity, and to put on the yellow garments of a mendicant, and beg his bread wandering up and down upon the world, seeking for peace. This disposition of the prince grieved his parents very much. That their son, who was so full of promise, so brave and so strong, so wise and so much beloved by everyone, should become a mendicant clad in unclean garments, begging his daily food from house to house, seemed to them a horrible thing. It could never be permitted that a prince should disgrace himself in this way. Every effort must be taken to eradicate such ideas; after all, it was but the melancholy of youth, and it would pass. So stringent orders were given to distract his mind in every way from solemn thoughts, to attempt by a continued round of pleasure and luxury to attract him to more worldly things. And when he was eighteen he was married to his cousin Yathodaya, in the hope that in marriage and paternity he might forget his desire to be a hermit, might feel that love was better than wisdom. And if Yathodaya had been other than she was--who can tell?--perhaps after all the king might have succeeded; but it was not to be so. For to Yathodaya, too, life was a very solemn thing, not to be thrown away in laughter and frivolity, but to be used as a great gift worthy of all care. To the prince in his trouble there came a kindred soul, and though from the palace all the teachers of religion, all who would influence the prince against the desires of his father, were banished, yet Yathodaya more than made up to him for all he had lost. For nearly ten years they lived together there such a life as princes led in those days in the East, not, perhaps, so very different from what they lead now. And all that time the prince had been gradually making up his mind, slowly becoming sure that life held something better than he had yet found, hardening his determination that he must leave all that he had and go out into the world looking for peace. Despite all the efforts of the king his father, despite the guards and his young men companions, despite the beauty of the dancing-girls, the mysteries of life came home to him, and he was afraid. It is a beautiful story told in quaint imagery how it was that the knowledge of sickness and of death came to him, a horror stalking amid the glories of his garden. He learnt, and he understood, that he too would grow old, would fall sick, would die. And beyond death? There was the fear, and no one could allay it. Daily he grew more and more discontented with his life in the palace, more and more averse to the pleasures that were around him. Deeper and deeper he saw through the laughing surface to the depths that lay beneath. Silently all these thoughts ripened in his mind, till at last the change came. We are told that the end came suddenly, the resolve was taken in a moment. The lake fills and fills until at length it overflows, and in a night the dam is broken, and the pent-up waters are leaping far towards the sea. As the prince returned from his last drive in his garden with resolve firmly established in his heart, there came to him the news that his wife had borne to him a son. Wife and child, his cup of desire was now full. But his resolve was unshaken. 'See, here is another tie, alas! a new and stronger tie that I must break,' he said; but he never wavered. That night the prince left the palace. Silently in the dead of night he left all the luxury about him, and went out secretly with only his faithful servant, Maung San, to saddle for him his horse and lead him forth. Only before he left he looked in cautiously to see Yathodaya, the young wife and mother. She was lying asleep, with one hand upon the face of her firstborn, and the prince was afraid to go further. 'To see him,' he said, 'I must remove the hand of his mother, and she may awake; and if she awake, how shall I depart? I will go, then, without seeing my son. Later on, when all these passions are faded from my heart, when I am sure of myself, perhaps then I shall be able to see him. But now I must go.' So he went forth very silently and very sadly, and leapt upon his horse--the great white horse that would not neigh for fear of waking the sleeping guards--and the prince and his faithful noble Maung San went out into the night. He was only twenty-eight when he fled from all his world, and what he sought was this: 'Deliverance for men from the misery of life, and the knowledge of the truth that will lead them unto the Great Peace.' This is the great renunciation. I have often talked about this with the monks and others, often heard them speak about this great renunciation, of this parting of the prince and his wife. 'You see,' said a monk once to me, 'he was not yet the Buddha, he had not seen the light, only he was desirous to look for it. He was just a prince, just a man like any other man, and he was very fond of his wife. It is very hard to resist a woman if she loves you and cries, and if you love her. So he was afraid.' And when I said that Yathodaya was also religious, and had helped him in his thoughts, and that surely she would not have stopped him, the monk shook his head. 'Women are not like that,' he said. And a woman said to me once: 'Surely she was very much to be pitied because her husband went away from her and her baby. Do you think that when she talked religion with her husband she ever thought that it would cause him to leave her and go away for ever? If she had thought that, she would never have done as she did. A woman would never help anything to sever her husband from her, not even religion. And when after ten years a baby had come to her! Surely she was very much to be pitied.' This woman made me understand that the highest religion of a woman is the true love of her husband, of her children; and what is it to her if she gain the whole world, but lose that which she would have? All the story of Yathodaya and her dealings with her husband is full of the deepest pathos, full of passionate protest against her loss, even in order that her husband and all the world should gain. She would have held him, if she could, against the world, and deemed that she did well. And so, though it is probable that it was a great deal owing to Yathodaya's help, to her sympathy, to her support in all his difficulties, that Gaudama came to his final resolve to leave the world and seek for the truth, yet she acted unwittingly of what would be the end. 'She did not know,' said the woman. 'She helped her husband, but she did not know to what. And when she was ill, when she was giving birth to her baby, then her husband left her. Surely she was very much to be pitied.' And so Yathodaya, the wife of the Prince Gaudama, who became the Buddha, is held in high honour, in great esteem, by all Buddhists. By the men, because she helped her husband to his resolve to seek for the truth, because she had been his great stay and help when everyone was against him, because if there had been no Yathodaya there had been perchance no Buddha. And by the women--I need not say why she is honoured by all women. If ever there was a story that appealed to woman's heart, surely it is this: her love, her abandonment, her courage, her submission when they met again in after-years, her protest against being sacrificed upon the altar of her husband's religion. Truly, it is all of the very essence of humanity. Whenever the story of the Buddha comes to be written, then will be written also the story of the life of Yathodaya his wife. If one is full of wisdom and teaching, the other is full of suffering and teaching also. I cannot write it here. I have so much to say on other matters that there is no room. But some day it will be written, I trust, this old message to a new world. CHAPTER III HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT--II 'He who never spake but good and wise words, he who was the light of the world, has found too soon the Peace.'--_Lament on the death of the Buddha._ The prince rode forth into the night, and as he went, even in the first flush of his resolve, temptation came to him. As the night closed behind he remembered all he was leaving: he remembered his father and his mother; his heart was full of his wife and child. 'Return!' said the devil to him. 'What seek you here? Return, and be a good son, a good husband, a good father. Remember all that you are leaving to pursue vain thoughts. You, a great man--you might be a great king, as your father wishes--a mighty conqueror of nations. The night is very dark, and the world before you is very empty.' The prince's heart was full of bitterness at the thought of those he loved, of all that he was losing. Yet he never wavered. He would not even turn to look his last on the great white city lying in a silver dream behind him. He set his face upon his way, trampling beneath him every worldly consideration, despising a power that was but vanity and illusion; he went on into the dark. Presently he came to a river, the boundary of his father's kingdom, and here he stopped. Then the prince turned to Maung San, and told him that he must return. Beyond the river lay for the prince the life of a holy man, who needed neither servant nor horse, and Maung San must return. All his prayers were in vain; his supplications that he might be allowed to follow his master as a disciple; his protestations of eternal faith. No, he must return; so Maung San went back with the horse, and the prince was alone. As he waited there alone by the river, alone in the dark waiting for the dawn ere he could cross, alone with his own fears and thoughts, doubt came to him again. He doubted if he had done right, whether he should ever find the light, whether, indeed, there was any light to find, and in his doubt and distress he asked for a sign. He desired that it might be shown to him whether all his efforts would be in vain or not, whether he should ever win in the struggle that was before him. We are told that the sign came to him, and he knew that, whatever happened, in the end all would go well, and he would find that which he sought. So he crossed the river out of his father's kingdom into a strange country, and he put on the garment of a recluse, and lived as they did. He sought his bread as they did, going from house to house for the broken victuals, which he collected in a bowl, retiring to a quiet spot to eat. The first time he collected this strange meal and attempted to eat, his very soul rose against the distastefulness of the mess. He who had been a prince, and accustomed to the very best of everything, could not at first bring himself to eat such fare, and the struggle was bitter. But in the end here, too, he conquered. 'Was I not aware,' he said, with bitter indignation at his weakness, 'that when I became a recluse I must eat such food as this? Now is the time to trample upon the appetite of nature.' He took up his bowl, and ate with a good appetite, and the fight had never to be fought again. So in the fashion of those days he became a seeker after truth. Men, then, when they desired to find holiness, to seek for that which is better than the things of this world, had to begin their search by an utter repudiation of all that which the world holds good. The rich and worldly wore handsome garments, they would wear rags; those of the world were careful of their personal appearance, they would despise it; those of the world were cleanly, the hermits were filthy; those of the world were decent, and had a care for outward observances, and so hermits had no care for either decency or modesty. The world was evil, surely, and therefore all that the world held good was surely evil too. Wisdom was to be sought in the very opposites of the conventions of men. The prince took on him their garments, and went to them to learn from all that which they had learnt. He went to all the wisest hermits of the land, to those renowned for their wisdom and holiness; and this is what they taught him, this is all the light they gave to him who came to them for light. 'There is,' they said, 'the soul and the body of man, and they are enemies; therefore, to punish the soul, you must destroy and punish the body. All that the body holds good is evil to the soul.' So they purified their souls by ceremonies and forms, by torture and starvation, by nakedness and contempt of decency, by nameless abominations. And the young prince studied all their teaching, and essayed to follow their example, and he found it was all of no use. Here he could find no way to happiness, no raising of the soul to higher planes, but, rather, a degradation towards the beasts. For self-punishment is just as much a submission to the flesh as luxury and self-indulgence. How can you forget the body, and turn the soul to better thoughts, if you are for ever torturing that body, and thereby keeping it in memory? You can keep your lusts just as easily before your eyes by useless punishment as by indulgence. And how can you turn your mind to meditation and thought if your body is in suffering? So the prince soon saw that here was not the way he wanted. His soul revolted from them and their austerities, and he left them. As he fathomed the emptiness of his counsellors of the palace, so he fathomed the emptiness of the teachers of the cave and monastery. If the powerful and wealthy were ignorant, wisdom was not to be found among the poor and feeble, and he was as far from it as when he left the palace. Yet he did not despair. Truth was somewhere, he was sure; it must be found if only it be looked for with patience and sincerity, and he would find it. Surely there was a greater wisdom than mere contempt of wealth and comfort, surely a greater happiness than could be found in self-torture and hysteria. And so, as he could find no one to teach him, he went out into the forest to look for truth there. In the great forest where no one comes, where the deer feed and the tiger creeps, he would seek what man could not give him. They would know, those great trees that had seen a thousand rains, and outlived thirty generations of men; they would know, those streams that flashed from the far snow summits; surely the forest and the hills, the dawn and the night, would have something to tell him of the secrets of the world. Nature can never lie, and here, far away from the homes of men, he would learn the knowledge that men could not give him. With a body purified by abstinence, with a heart attuned by solitude, he would listen as the winds talked to the mountains in the dusk, and understand the beckoning of the stars. And so, as many others did then and afterwards, he left mankind and went to Nature for help. For six years he lived so in the fastnesses of the hills. We are told but very little of those six years, only that he was often very lonely, often very sad with the remembrance of all whom he had left. 'Think not,' he said many years later to a favourite disciple--'think not that I, though the Buddha, have not felt all this even as any other of you. Was I not alone when I was seeking for wisdom in the wilderness? And yet what could I have gained by wailing and lamentation either for myself or for others? Would it have brought to me any solace from my loneliness? Would it have been any help to those I had left?' We are told that his fame as a solitary, as a a man who communed with Nature, and subdued his own lower feelings, was so great that all men knew of it. His fame was as a 'bell hung in the canopy of the skies,' that all nations heard; and many disciples came to him. But despite all his fame among men, he himself knew that he had not yet come to the truth. Even the great soul of Nature had failed to tell him what he desired. The truth was as far off as ever, so he thought, and to those that came to him for wisdom he had nothing to teach. So, at the end of six years, despairing of finding that which he sought, he entered upon a great fast, and he pushed it to such an extreme that at length he fainted from sheer exhaustion and starvation. When he came to himself he recognised that he had failed again. No light had shone upon his dimmed eyes, no revelation had come to him in his senselessness. All was as before, and the truth--the truth, where was that? For this man was no inspired teacher. He had no one to show him the way he should go; he was tried with failure, with failure after failure. He learnt as other men learn, through suffering and mistake. Here was his third failure. The rich had failed him, and the poor; even the voices of the hills had not told him of what he would know; the radiant finger of dawn had pointed to him no way to happiness. Life was just as miserable, as empty, as meaningless, as before. All that he had done was in vain, and he must try again, must seek out some new way, if he were ever to find that which he sought. He rose from where he lay, and took his bowl in his hands and went to the nearest village, and ate heartily and drank, and his strength came back to him, and the beauty he had lost returned. And then came the final blow: his disciples left him in scorn. 'Behold,' they said to each other, 'he has lived through six years of mortification and suffering in vain. See, now, he goes forth and eats food, and assuredly he who does this will never attain wisdom. Our master's search is not after wisdom, but worldly things; we must look elsewhere for the guidance that we seek.' They departed, leaving him to bear his disappointment alone, and they went into the solitude far away, to continue in their own way and pursue their search after their own method. He who was to be the Buddha had failed, and was alone. To the followers of the Buddha, to those of our brothers who are trying to follow his teachings and emulate his example to attain a like reward, can there be any greater help than this: amid the failure and despair of our own lives to remember that the teacher failed, even as we are doing? If we find the way dark and weary, if our footsteps fail, if we wander in wrong paths, did not he do the same? And if we find we have to bear sufferings alone, so had he; if we find no one who can comfort us, neither did he; as we know in our hearts that we stand alone, to fight with our own hands, so did he. He is no model of perfection whom it is hopeless for us to imitate, but a man like ourselves, who failed and fought, and failed and fought again, and won. And so, if we fail, we need not despair. Did not our teacher fail? What he has done, we can do, for he has told us so. Let us be up again and be of good heart, and we, too, shall win in the end, even as he did. The reward will come in its own good time if we strive and faint not. Surely this comes home to all of our hearts--this failure of him who found the light. That he should have won--ah, well, that is beautiful; but that he should have failed--and failed, that is what comes home to us, because we too have failed many times. Can you wonder that his followers love him? Can you wonder that his teaching has come home to them as never did teaching elsewhere? I do not think it is hard to see why: it is simply because he was a man as we are. Had he been other than a man, had truth been revealed to him from the beginning, had he never fought, had he never failed, do you think that he would have held the love of men as he does? I fear, had it been so, this people would have lacked a soul. His disciples left him, and he was alone. He went away to a great grove of trees near by--those beautiful groves of mango and palm and fig that are the delight of the heart in that land of burning, flooding sunshine--and there he slept, defeated, discredited, and abandoned; and there the truth came to him. There is a story of how a young wife, coming to offer her little offerings to the spirit of the great fig-tree, saw him, and took him for the spirit, so beautiful was his face as he rose. There are spirits in all the great trees, in all the rivers, in all the hills--very beautiful, very peaceful, loving calm and rest. The woman thought he was the spirit come down to accept her offering, and she gave it to him--the cup of curdled milk--in fear and trembling, and he took it. The woman went away again full of hope and joy, and the prince remained in the grove. He lived there for forty-nine days, we are told, under the great fig-tree by the river. And the fig-tree has become sacred for ever because he sat there and because there he found the truth. We are told of it all in wonderful trope and imagery--of his last fight over sin, and of his victory. There the truth came to him at last out of his own heart. He had sought for it in men and in Nature, and found it not, and, lo! it was in his own heart. When his eyes were cleared of imaginings, and his body purified by temperance, then at last he saw, down in his own soul, what he had sought the world over for. Every man carries it there. It is never dead, but lives with our life, this light that we seek. We darken it, and turn our faces from it to follow strange lights, to pursue vague glimmers in the dark, and there, all the time, is the light in each man's own heart. Darkened it may be, crusted over with our ignorance and sin, but never dead, never dead, always burning brightly for us when we care to seek for it. The truth for each man is in his own soul. And so it came at last, and he who saw the light went forth and preached it to all the world. He lived a long life, a life full of wonderful teaching, of still more marvellous example. All the world loved him. He saw again Yathodaya, she who had been his wife; he saw his son. Now, when passion was dead in him, he could do these things. And Yathodaya was full of despair, for if all the world had gained a teacher, she had lost a husband. So it will be for ever. This is the difference between men and women. She became a nun, poor soul! and her son--his son--became one of his disciples. I do not think it is necessary for me to tell much more of his life. Much has been told already by Professor Max Müller and other scholars, who have spared no pains to come to the truth of that life. I do not wish to say more. So far, I have written to emphasize the view which, I think, the Burmese take of the Buddha, and how he came to his wisdom, how he loved, and how he died. He died at a great age, full of years and love. The story of his death is most beautiful. There is nowhere anything more wonderful than how, at the end of that long good life, he entered into the Great Peace for which he had prepared his soul. 'Ananda,' he said to his weeping disciple, 'do not be too much concerned with what shall remain of me when I have entered into the Peace, but be rather anxious to practise the works that lead to perfection; put on those inward dispositions that will enable you also to reach the everlasting rest.' And again: 'When I shall have left life and am no more seen by you, do not believe that I am no longer with you. You have the laws that I have found, you have my teachings still, and in them I shall be ever beside you. Do not, therefore, think that I have left you alone for ever.' And before he died: 'Remember,' he said, 'that life and death are one. Never forget this. For this purpose have I gathered you together; for life and death are one.' And so 'the great and glorious teacher,' he who never spoke but good and wise words, he who has been the light of the world, entered into the Peace. CHAPTER IV THE WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE 'Come to Me: I teach a doctrine which leads to deliverance from all the miseries of life.'--_Saying of the Buddha._ To understand the teaching of Buddhism, it must be remembered that to the Buddhist, as to the Brahmin, man's soul is eternal. In other faiths and other philosophies this is not so. There the soul is immortal; it cannot die, but each man's soul appeared newly on his birth. Its beginning is very recent. To the Buddhist the beginning as well as the end is out of our ken. Where we came from we cannot know, but certainly the soul that appears in each newborn babe is not a new thing. It has come from everlasting, and the present life is merely a scene in the endless drama of existence. A man's identity, the sum of good and of evil tendencies, which is his soul, never dies, but endures for ever. Each body is but a case wherein the soul is enshrined for the time. And the state of that soul, whether good predominate in it or evil, is purely dependent on that soul's thoughts and actions in time past. Men are not born by chance wise or foolish, righteous or wicked, strong or feeble. A man's condition in life is the absolute result of an eternal law that as a man sows so shall he reap; that as he reaps so has he sown. Therefore, if you find a man's desires naturally given towards evil, it is because he has in his past lives educated himself to evil. And if he is righteous and charitable, long-suffering and full of sympathy, it is because in his past existence he has cultivated these virtues; he has followed goodness, and it has become a habit of his soul. Thus is every man his own maker. He has no one to blame for his imperfections but himself, no one to thank for his virtues but himself. Within the unchangeable laws of righteousness each man is absolutely the creator of himself and of his own destiny. It has lain, and it lies, within each man's power to determine what manner of man he shall be. Nay, it not only lies within his power to do so, but a man _must_ actually mould himself. There is no other way in which he can develop. Every man has had an equal chance. If matters are somewhat unequal now, there is no one to blame but himself. It is within his power to retrieve it, not perhaps in this short life, but in the next, maybe, or the next. Man is not made perfect all of a sudden, but takes time to grow, like all valuable things. You might as well expect to raise a teak-tree in your garden in a night as to make a righteous man in a day. And thus not only is a man the sum of his passions, his acts and his thoughts, in past time, but he is in his daily life determining his future--what sort of man he shall be. Every act, every thought, has its effect, not only upon the outer world, but upon the inner soul. If you follow after evil, it becomes in time a habit of your soul. If you follow after good, every good act is a beautifying touch to your own soul. Man is as he has made himself; man will be as he makes himself. This is a very simple theory, surely. It is not at all difficult to understand the Buddhist standpoint in the matter. It is merely the theory of evolution applied to the soul, with this difference: that in its later stages it has become a deliberate and a conscious evolution, and not an unconscious one. And the deduction from this is also simple. It is true, says Buddhism, that every man is the architect of himself, that he can make himself as he chooses. Now, what every man desires is happiness. As a man can form himself as he will, it is within his power to make himself happy, if he only knows how. Let us therefore carefully consider what happiness is, that we may attain it; what misery is, that we may avoid it. It is a commonplace of many religions, and of many philosophies--nay, it is the actual base upon which they have been built, that this is an evil world. Judaism, indeed, thought that the world was really a capital place, and that it was worth while doing well in order to enjoy it. But most other faiths thought very differently. Indeed, the very meaning of most religions and philosophies has been that they should be refuges from the wickedness and unhappiness of the world. According to them the world has been a very weary world, full of wickedness and of deceit, of war and strife, of untruth and of hate, of all sorts of evil. The world has been wicked, and man has been unhappy in it. 'I do not know that any theory has usually been propounded to explain why this is so. It has been accepted as a fact that man is unhappy, accepted, I think, by most faiths over the world. Indeed, it is the belief that has been, one thinks, the cause of faiths. Had the world been happy, surely there had been no need of religions. In a summer sea, where is the need of havens? It is a generally-accepted fact, accepted, as I have said, without explanation. But the Buddhist has not been contented to leave it so. He has thought that it is in the right explanation of this cardinal fact that lies all truth. Life suffers from a disease called misery. He would be free from it. Let us, then, says the Buddhist, first discover the cause of this misery, and so only can we understand how to cure it.' It is this explanation which is really the distinguishing tenet of Buddhism, which differentiates it from all other faiths and all philosophies. The reason, says Buddhism, why men are unhappy is that they are alive. Life and sorrow are inseparable--nay, they are one and the same thing. The mere fact of being alive is a misery. When you have clear eyes and discern the truth, you shall see this without a doubt, says the Buddhist. For consider, What man has ever sat down and said: 'Now am I in perfect happiness; just as I now am would I like to remain for ever and for ever without change'? No man has ever done so. What men desire is change. They weary of the present, and desire the future; and when the future comes they find it no better than the past. Happiness lies in yesterday and in to-morrow, but never in to-day. In youth we look forward, in age we look back. What is change but the death of the present? Life is change, and change is death, so says the Buddhist. Men shudder at and fear death, and yet death and life are the same thing--inseparable, indistinguishable, and one with sorrow. We men who desire life are as men athirst and drinking of the sea. Every drop we drink of the poisoned sea of existence urges on men surely to greater thirst still. Yet we drink on blindly, and say that we are athirst. This is the explanation of Buddhism. The world is unhappy because it is alive, because it does not see that what it should strive for is not life, not change and hurry and discontent and death, but peace--the Great Peace. There is the goal to which a man should strive. See now how different it is from the Christian theory. In Christianity there are two lives--this and the next. The present is evil, because it is under the empire of the devil--the world, the flesh, and the devil. The next will be beautiful, because it is under the reign of God, and the devil cannot intrude. But Buddhism acknowledges only one life--an existence that has come from the forever, that may extend to the forever. If this life is evil, then is all life evil, and happiness can live but in peace, in surcease from the troubles of this weary world. If, then, a man desire happiness--and in all faiths that is the desired end--he must strive to attain peace. This, again, is not a difficult idea to understand. It seems to me so simple that, when once it has been listened to, it may be understood by a child. I do not say believed and followed, but understood. Belief is a different matter. 'The law is deep; it is difficult to know and to believe it. It is very sublime, and can be comprehended only by means of earnest meditation,' for Buddhism is not a religion of children, but of men. This is the doctrine that has caused Buddhism to be called pessimism. Taught, as we have been taught, to believe that life and death are antagonistic, that life in the world to come is beautiful, that death is a horror, it seems to us terrible to think that it is indeed our very life itself that is the evil to be eradicated, and that life and death are the same. But to those that have seen the truth, and believed it, it is not terrible, but beautiful. When you have cleansed your eyes from the falseness of the flesh, and come face to face with truth, it is beautiful. 'The law is sweet, filling the heart with joy.' To the Buddhist, then, the end to be obtained is the Great Peace, the mighty deliverance from all sorrow. He must strive after peace; on his own efforts depends success or failure. When the end and the agent have been determined, there remains but to discover the means, the road whereby the end may be reached. How shall a man so think and so act that he shall come at length unto the Great Peace? And the answer of Buddhism to this question is here: good deeds and good thoughts--these are the gate wherein alone you may enter into the way. Be honourable and just, be kind and compassionate, truth-loving and averse to wrong--this is the beginning of the road that leads unto happiness. Do good to others, not in order that they may do good to you, but because, by doing so, you do good to your own soul. Give alms, and be charitable, for these things are necessary to a man. Above all, learn love and sympathy. Try to feel as others feel, try to understand them, try to sympathize with them, and love will come. Surely he was a Buddhist at heart who wrote: 'Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.' There is no balm to a man's heart like love, not only the love others feel towards him, but that he feels towards others. Be in love with all things, not only with your fellows, but with the whole world, with every creature that walks the earth, with the birds in the air, with the insects in the grass. All life is akin to man. Man's life is not apart from other life, but of it, and if a man would make his heart perfect, he must learn to sympathize with and understand all the great world about him. But he must always remember that he himself comes first. To make others just, you must yourself be just; to make others happy, you must yourself be happy first; to be loved, you must first love. Consider your own soul, to make it lovely. Such is the teaching of Buddha. But if this were all, then would Buddhism be but a repetition of the commonplaces of all religions, of all philosophies. In this teaching of righteousness is nothing new. Many teachers have taught it, and all have learnt in the end that righteousness is no sure road to happiness, to peace. Buddhism goes farther than this. Honour and righteousness, truth and love, are, it says, very beautiful things, but are only the beginning of the way; they are but the gate. In themselves they will never bring a man home to the Great Peace. Herein lies no salvation from the troubles of the world. Far more is required of a man than to be righteous. Holiness alone is not the gate to happiness, and all that have tried have found it so. It alone will not give man surcease from pain. When a man has so purified his heart by love, has so weaned himself from wickedness by good acts and deeds, then he shall have eyes to see the further way that he should go. Then shall appear to him the truth that it is indeed life that is the evil to be avoided; that life is sorrow, and that the man who would escape evil and sorrow must escape from life itself--not in death. The death of this life is but the commencement of another, just as, if you dam a stream in one direction, it will burst forth in another. To take one's life now is to condemn one's self to longer and more miserable life hereafter. The end of misery lies in the Great Peace. A man must estrange himself from the world, which is sorrow. Hating struggle and fight, he will learn to love peace, and to so discipline his soul that the world shall appear to him clearly to be the unrest which it is. Then, when his heart is fixed upon the Great Peace, shall his soul come to it at last. Weary of the earth, it shall come into the haven where there are no more storms, where there is no more struggle, but where reigns unutterable peace. It is not death, but the Great Peace. 'Ever pure, and mirror bright and even, Life among the immortals glides away; Moons are waning, generations changing, Their celestial life flows everlasting, Changeless 'midst a ruined world's decay.' This is Nirvana, the end to which we must all strive, the only end that there can be to the trouble of the world. Each man must realize this for himself, each man will do so surely in time, and all will come into the haven of rest. Surely this is a simple faith, the only belief that the world has known that is free from mystery and dogma, from ceremony and priestcraft; and to know that it is a beautiful faith you have but to look at its believers and be sure. If a people be contented in their faith, if they love it and exalt it, and are never ashamed of it, and if it exalts them and makes them happy, what greater testimony can you have than that? It will seem that indeed I have compressed the teaching of this faith into too small a space--this faith about which so many books have been written, so much discussion has taken place. But I do not think it is so. I cannot see that even in this short chapter I have left out anything that is important in Buddhism. It is such a simple faith that all may be said in a very few words. It would be, of course, possible to refine on and gloze over certain points of the teaching. Where would be the use? The real proof of the faith is in the results, in the deeds that men do in its name. Discussion will not alter these one way or another. CHAPTER V WAR--I 'Love each other and live in peace.' _Saying of the Buddha._ This is the Buddhist belief as I have understood it, and I have written so far in order to explain what follows. For my object is not to explain what the Buddha taught, but what the Burmese believe; and this is not quite the same thing, though in nearly every action of their life the influence of Buddhism is visible more or less strongly. Therefore I propose to describe shortly the ideas of the Burmese people upon the main objects of life; and to show how much or how little Buddhism has affected their conceptions. I will begin with courage. I think it will be evident that there is no quality upon which the success of a nation so much depends as upon its courage. No nation can rise to a high place without being brave; it cannot maintain its independence even; it cannot push forward upon any path of life without courage. Nations that are cowards must fail. I am aware that the courage of a nation depends, as do its other qualities, upon many things: its situation with regard to other nations, its climate, its food, its occupations. It is a great subject that I cannot go into. I wish to take all such things as I find them, and to discuss only the effect of the religion upon the courage of the people, upon its fighting capabilities. That religion may have a very serious effect one way or the other, no one can doubt. I went through the war of annexation, from 1885 to 1889, and from it I will draw my examples. When we declared war in Upper Burma, and the column advanced up the river in November, 1885, there was hardly any opposition. A little fight there was at the frontier fort of Minhla, but beyond that nothing. The river that might have been blocked was open; the earthworks had no cannon, the men no guns. Such a collapse was never seen. There was no organization, no material, no money. The men wanted officers to command and teach them; the officers wanted authority and ability to command. The people looked to their rulers to repel the invaders; the rulers looked to the people. There was no common intelligence or will between them. Everything was wanting; nothing was as it should be. And so Mandalay fell without a shot, and King Thibaw, the young, incapable, kind-hearted king, was taken into captivity. That was the end of the first act, brief and bloodless. For a time the people were stupefied. They could not understand what had happened; they could not guess what was going to happen. They expected that the English would soon retire, and that then their own government would reorganize itself. Meanwhile they kept quiet. It is curious to think how peaceful the country really was from November, 1885, till June, 1886. Then the trouble came. The people had by that time, even in the wild forest villages, begun to understand that we wanted to stay, that we did not intend going away unless forced to. They felt that it was of no further use looking to Mandalay for help. We had begun, too, to consider about collecting taxes, to interfere with the simple machinery of local affairs, to show that we meant to govern. And as the people did not desire to be governed--certainly not by foreigners, at least--they began to organize resistance. They looked to their local leaders for help, and, as too often these local governors were not very capable men, they sought, as all people have done, the assistance of such men of war as they could find--brigands, and freelances, and the like--and put themselves under their orders. The whole country rose, from Bhamo to Minhla, from the Shan Plateau to the Chin Mountains. All Upper Burma was in a passion of insurrection, a very fury of rebellion against the usurping foreigners. Our authority was confined to the range of our guns. Our forts were attacked, our convoys ambushed, our steamers fired into on the rivers. There was no safety for an Englishman or a native of India, save within the lines of our troops, and it was soon felt that these troops were far too few to cope with the danger. To overthrow King Thibaw was easy, to subdue the people a very different thing. It is almost impossible to describe the state of Upper Burma in 1886. It must be remembered that the central government was never very strong--in fact, that beyond collecting a certain amount of taxes, and appointing governors to the different provinces, it hardly made itself felt outside Mandalay and the large river towns. The people to a great extent governed themselves. They had a very good system of village government, and managed nearly all their local affairs. But beyond the presence of a governor, there was but little to attach them to the central government. There was, and is, absolutely no aristocracy of any kind at all. The Burmese are a community of equals, in a sense that has probably never been known elsewhere. All their institutions are the very opposite to feudalism. Now, feudalism was instituted to be useful in war. The Burmese customs were instituted that men should live in comfort and ease during peace; they were useless in war. So the natural leaders of a people, as in other countries, were absent. There were no local great men; the governors were men appointed from time to time from Mandalay, and usually knew nothing of their charges; there were no rich men, no large land-holders--not one. There still remained, however, one institution that other nations have made useful in war, namely, the organization of religion. For Buddhism is fairly well organized--certainly much better than ever the government was. It has its heads of monasteries, its Gaing-dauks, its Gaing-oks, and finally the Thathanabaing, the head of the Burmese Buddhism. The overthrow of King Thibaw had not injured any of this. This was an organization in touch with the whole people, revered and honoured by every man and woman and child in the country. In this terrible scene of anarchy and confusion, in this death peril of their nation, what were the monks doing? We know what religion can do. We have seen how it can preach war and resistance, and can organize that war and resistance. We know what ten thousand priests preaching in ten thousand hamlets can effect in making a people almost unconquerable, in directing their armies, in strengthening their determination. We remember La Vendée, we remember our Puritans, and we have had recent experience in the Soudan. We know what Christianity has done again and again; what Judaism, what Mahommedanism, what many kinds of paganism, have done. To those coming to Burma in those days, fresh from the teachings of Europe, remembering recent events in history, ignorant of what Buddhism means, there was nothing more surprising than the fact that in this war religion had no place. They rode about and saw the country full of monasteries; they saw the monasteries full of monks, whom they called priests; they saw that the people were intensely attached to their religion; they had daily evidence that Buddhism was an abiding faith in the hearts of the people. And yet, for all the assistance it was to them in the war, the Burmese might have had no faith at all. And the explanation is, that the teachings of the Buddha forbid war. All killing is wrong, all war is hateful; nothing is more terrible than this destroying of your fellow-man. There is absolutely no getting free of this commandment. The teaching of the Buddha is that you must strive to make your own soul perfect. This is the first of all things, and comes before any other consideration. Be pure and kind-hearted, full of charity and compassion, and so you may do good to others. These are the vows the Buddhist monks make, these are the vows they keep; and so it happened that all that great organization was useless to the patriot fighter, was worse than useless, for it was against him. The whole spectacle of Burma in those days, with the country seething with strife, and the monks going about their business calmly as ever, begging their bread from door to door, preaching of peace, not war, of kindness, not hatred, of pity, not revenge, was to most foreigners quite inexplicable. They could not understand it. I remember a friend of mine with whom I went through many experiences speaking of it with scorn. He was a cavalry officer, 'the model of a light cavalry officer'; he had with him a squadron of his regiment, and we were trying to subdue a very troubled part of the country. We were camping in a monastery, as we frequently did--a monastery on a hill near a high golden pagoda. The country all round was under the sway of a brigand leader, and sorely the villagers suffered at his hands now that he had leapt into unexpected power. The villages were half abandoned, the fields untilled, the people full of unrest; but the monasteries were as full of monks as ever; the gongs rang, as they ever did, their message through the quiet evening air; the little boys were taught there just the same; the trees were watered and the gardens swept as if there were no change at all--as if the king were still on his golden throne, and the English had never come; as if war had never burst upon them. And to us, after the very different scenes we saw now and then, saw and acted in, these monks and their monasteries were difficult to understand. The religion of the Buddha thus professed was strange. 'What is the use,' said my friend, 'of this religion that we see so many signs of? Suppose these men had been Jews or Hindus or Mussulmans, it would have been a very different business, this war. These yellow-robed monks, instead of sitting in their monasteries, would have pervaded the country, preaching against us and organizing. No one organizes better than an ecclesiastic. We should have had them leading their men into action with sacred banners, and promising them heaven hereafter when they died. They would have made Ghazis of them. Any one of these is a religion worth having. But what is the use of Buddhism? What do these monks do? I never see them in a fight, never hear that they are doing anything to organize the people. It is, perhaps, as well for us that they do not. But what is the use of Buddhism?' So, or somewhat like this, spoke my friend, speaking as a soldier. Each of us speaks from our own standpoint. He was a brilliant soldier, and a religion was to him a sword, a thing to fight with. That was one of the first uses of a religion. He knew nothing of Buddhism; he cared to know nothing, beyond whether it would fight. If so, it was a good religion in its way. If not, then not. Religion meant to him something that would help you in your trouble, that would be a stay and a comfort, a sword to your enemies and a prop for yourself. Though he was himself an invader, he felt that the Burmans did no wrong in resisting him. They fought for their homes, as he would have fought; and their religion, if of any value, should assist them. It should urge them to battle, and promise them peace and happiness if dying in a good cause. His faith would do this for him. What was Buddhism doing? What help did it give to its believers in their extremity? It gave none. Think of the peasant lying there in the ghostly dim-lit fields waiting to attack us at the dawn. Where was his help? He thought, perhaps, of his king deported, his village invaded, his friends killed, himself reduced to the subject of a far-off queen. He would fight--yes, even though his faith told him not. There was no help there. His was no faith to strengthen his arm, to straighten his aim, to be his shield in the hour of danger. If he died, if in the strife of the morning's fight he were to be killed, if a bullet were to still his heart, or a lance to pierce his chest, there was no hope for him of the glory of heaven. No, but every fear of hell, for he was sinning against the laws of righteousness--'Thou shalt take no life.' There is no exception to that at all, not even for a patriot fighting for his country. 'Thou shalt not take the life even of him who is the enemy of thy king and nation.' He could count on no help in breaking the everlasting laws that the Buddha has revealed to us. If he went to his monks, they could but say: 'See the law, the unchangeable law that man is subject to. There is no good thing but peace, no sin like strife and war.' That is what the followers of the great teacher would tell the peasant yearning for help to strike a blow upon the invaders. The law is the same for all. There is not one law for you and another for the foreigner; there is not one law to-day and another to-morrow. Truth is for ever and for ever. It cannot change even to help you in your extremity. Think of the English soldier and the Burmese peasant. Can there be anywhere a greater contrast than this? Truly this is not a creed for a soldier, not a creed for a fighting-man of any kind, for what the soldier wants is a personal god who will always be on his side, always share his opinions, always support him against everyone else. But a law that points out unalterably that right is always right, and wrong always wrong, that nothing can alter one into the other, nothing can ever make killing righteous and violence honourable, that is no creed for a soldier. And Buddhism has ever done this. It never bent to popular opinion, never made itself a tool in the hands of worldly passion. It could not. You might as well say to gravity, 'I want to lift this stone; please don't act on it for a time,' as expect Buddhism to assist you to make war. Buddhism is the unalterable law of righteousness, and cannot ally itself with evil, cannot ever be persuaded that under any circumstances evil can be good. The Burmese peasant had to fight his own fight in 1885 alone. His king was gone, his government broken up, he had no leaders. He had no god to stand beside him when he fired at the foreign invaders; and when he lay a-dying, with a bullet in his throat, he had no one to open to him the gates of heaven. Yet he fought--with every possible discouragement he fought, and sometimes he fought well. It has been thrown against him as a reproach that he did not do better. Those who have said this have never thought, never counted up the odds against him, never taken into consideration how often he did well. Here was a people--a very poor people of peasants--with no leaders, absolutely none; no aristocracy of any kind, no cohesion, no fighting religion. They had for their leaders outlaws and desperadoes, and for arms old flint-lock guns and soft iron swords. Could anything be expected from this except what actually did happen? And yet they often did well, their natural courage overcoming their bad weapons, their passionate desire of freedom giving them the necessary impulse. In 1886, as I have said, all Burma was up. Even in the lower country, which we held for so long, insurrection was spreading fast, and troops and military police were being poured in from India. There is above Mandalay a large trading village--a small town almost--called Shemmaga. It is the river port for a large trade in salt from the inner country, and it was important to hold it. The village lay along the river bank, and about the middle of it, some two hundred yards from the river, rises a small hill. Thus the village was a triangle, with the base on the river, and the hill as apex. On the hill were some monasteries of teak, from which the monks had been ejected, and three hundred Ghurkas were in garrison there. A strong fence ran from the hill to the river like two arms, and there were three gates, one just by the hill, and one on each end of the river face. Behind Shemmaga the country was under the rule of a robber chief called Maung Yaing, who could raise from among the peasants some two hundred or three hundred men, armed mostly with flint-locks. He had been in the king's time a brigand with a small number of followers, who defied or eluded the local authorities, and lived free in quarters among the most distant villages. Like many a robber chief in our country and elsewhere, he was liked rather than hated by the people, for his brutalities were confined to either strangers or personal enemies, and he was open-handed and generous. We look upon things now with different eyes to what we did two or three hundred years ago, but I dare say Maung Yaing was neither better nor worse than many a hero of ours long ago. He was a fairly good fighter, and had a little experience fighting the king's troops; and so it was very natural, when the machinery of government fell like a house of cards, and some leaders were wanted, that the young men should crowd to him, and put themselves under his orders. He had usually with him forty or fifty men, but he could, as I have said, raise five or six times as many for any particular service, and keep them together for a few days. He very soon discovered that he and his men were absolutely no match for our troops. In two or three attempts that he made to oppose the troops he was signally worsted, so he was obliged to change his tactics. He decided to boycott the enemy. No Burman was to accept service under him, to give him information or supplies, to be his guide, or to assist him in any way. This rule Maung Yaing made generally known, and he announced his intention of enforcing it with rigour. He did so. There was a head man of a village near Shemmaga whom he executed because he had acted as guide to a body of troops, and he cut off all supplies from the interior, lying on the roads, and stopping all men from entering Shemmaga. He further issued a notice that the inhabitants of Shemmaga itself should leave the town. They could not move the garrison, therefore the people must move themselves. No assistance must be given to the enemy. The villagers of Shemmaga, mostly small traders in salt and rice, were naturally averse to leaving. This trade was their only means of livelihood, the houses their only homes, and they did not like the idea of going out into the unknown country behind. Moreover, the exaction by Maung Yaing of money and supplies for his men fell most heavily on the wealthier men, and on the whole they were not sorry to have the English garrison in the town, so that they could trade in peace. Some few left, but most did not, and though they collected money, and sent it to Maung Yaing, they at the same time told the English officer in command of Maung Yaing's threats, and begged that great care should be taken of the town, for Maung Yaing was very angry. When he found he could not cause the abandonment of the town, he sent in word to say that he would burn it. Not three hundred foreigners, nor three thousand, should protect these lazy, unpatriotic folk from his vengeance. He gave them till the new moon of a certain month, and if the town were not evacuated by that time he declared that he would destroy it. He would burn it down, and kill certain men whom he mentioned, who had been the principal assistants of the foreigners. This warning was quite public, and came to the ears of the English officer almost at once. When he heard it he laughed. He had three hundred men, and the rebels had three hundred. His were all magnificently trained and drilled troops, men made for war; the Burmans were peasants, unarmed, untrained. He was sure he could defeat three thousand of them, or ten times that number, with his little force, and so, of course, he could if he met them in the open; no one knew that better, by bitter experience, than Maung Yaing. The villagers, too, knew, but nevertheless they were stricken with fear, for Maung Yaing was a man of his word. He was as good as his threat. One night, at midnight, the face of the fort where the Ghurkas lived on the hill was suddenly attacked. Out of the brushwood near by a heavy fire was opened upon the breastwork, and there was shouting and beating of gongs. So all the Ghurkas turned out in a hurry, and ran to man the breastwork, and the return fire became hot and heavy. In a moment, as it seemed, the attackers were in the village. They had burst in the north gate by the river face, killed the Burmese guard on it, and streamed in. They lit torches from a fire they found burning, and in a moment the village was on fire. Looking down from the hill, you could see the village rushing into flame, and in the lurid light men and women and children running about wildly. There were shouts and screams and shots. No one who has never heard it, never seen it, can know what a village is like when the enemy has burst in at night. Everyone is mad with hate, with despair, with terror. They run to and fro, seeking to kill, seeking to escape being killed. It is impossible to tell one from another. The bravest man is dismayed. And the noise is like a great moan coming out of the night, pierced with sharp cries. It rises and falls, like the death-cry of a dying giant. It is the most terrible sound in the world. It makes the heart stop. To the Ghurkas this sight and sound came all of a sudden, as they were defending what they took to be a determined attack on their own position. The village was lost ere they knew it was attacked. And two steamers full of troops, anchored off the town, saw it, too. They were on their way up country, and had halted there that night, anchored in the stream. They were close by, but could not fire, for there was no telling friend from foe. Before the relief party of Ghurkas could come swarming down the hill, only two hundred yards, before the boats could land the eager troops from the steamers, the rebels were gone. They went through the village and out of the south gate. They had fulfilled their threat and destroyed the town. They had killed the men they had declared they would kill. The firing died away from the fort side, and the enemy were gone, no one could tell whither, into the night. Such a scene of desolation as that village was next day! It was all destroyed--every house. All the food was gone, all furniture, all clothes, everything, and here and there was a corpse in among the blackened cinders. The whole countryside was terror-stricken at this failure to defend those who had depended on us. I do not think this was a particularly gallant act, but it was a very able one. It was certainly war. It taught us a very severe lesson--more severe than a personal reverse would have been. It struck terror in the countryside. The memory of it hampered us for very long; even now they often talk of it. It was a brutal act--that of a brigand, not a soldier. But there was no want of courage. If these men, inferior in number, in arms, in everything, could do this under the lead of a robber chief, what would they not have done if well led, if well trained, if well armed? Of desperate encounters between our troops and the insurgents I could tell many a story. I have myself seen such fights. They nearly always ended in our favour--how could it be otherwise? There was Ta Te, who occupied a pagoda enclosure with some eighty men, and was attacked by our mounted infantry. There was a long fight in that hot afternoon, and very soon the insurgents' ammunition began to fail, and the pagoda was stormed. Many men were killed, and Ta Te, when his men were nearly all dead, and his ammunition quite expended, climbed up the pagoda wall, and twisted off pieces of the cement and threw them at the troops. He would not surrender--not he--and he was killed. There were many like him. The whole war was little affairs of this kind--a hundred, three hundred, of our men, and much the same, or a little more, of theirs. They only once or twice raised a force of two thousand men. Nothing can speak more forcibly of their want of organization than this. The whole country was pervaded by bands of fifty or a hundred men, very rarely amounting to more than two hundred, never, I think, to five hundred, armed men, and no two bands ever acted in concert. It is probable that most of the best men of the country were against us. It is certain, I think, that of those who openly joined us and accompanied us in our expedition, very, very few were other than men who had some private grudge to avenge, or some purpose to gain, by opposing their own people. Of such as these you cannot expect very much. And yet there were exceptions--men who showed up all the more brilliantly because they were exceptions--men whom I shall always honour. There were two I remember best of all. They are both dead now. One was the eldest son of the hereditary governor of a part of the country called Kawlin. It is in the north-west of Upper Burma, and bordered on a semi-independent state called Wuntho. In the troubles that occurred after the deposition of King Thibaw, the Prince of Wuntho thought that he would be able to make for himself an independent kingdom, and he began by annexing Kawlin. So the governor had to flee, and with him his sons, and naturally enough they joined our columns when we advanced in that direction, hoping to be replaced. They were replaced, the father as governor under the direction of an English magistrate, and the son as his assistant. They were only kept there by our troops, and upheld in authority by our power against Wuntho. But they were desired by many of their own people, and so, perhaps, they could hardly be called traitors, as many of those who joined us were. The father was a useless old man, but his son, he of whom I speak, was brave and honourable, good tempered and courteous, beyond most men whom I have met. It was well known that he was the real power behind his father. It was he who assisted us in an attempt to quell the insurrections and catch the raiders that troubled our peace, and many a time they tried to kill him, many a time to murder him as he slept. There was a large gang of insurgents who came across the Mu River one day, and robbed one of his villages, so a squadron of cavalry was sent in pursuit. We travelled fast and long, but we could not catch the raiders. We crossed the Mu into unknown country, following their tracks, and at last, being without guides, we camped that night in a little monastery in the forest. At midnight we were attacked. A road ran through our camp, and there was a picket at each end of the road, and sentries were doubled. It was just after midnight that the first shot was fired. We were all asleep when a sudden volley was poured into the south picket, killing one sentry and wounding another. There was no time to dress, and we ran down the steps as we were (in sleeping dresses), to find the men rapidly falling in, and the horses kicking at their pickets. It was pitch-dark. The monastery was on a little cleared space, and there was forest all round that looked very black. Just as we came to the foot of the steps an outbreak of firing and shouts came from the north, and the Burmese tried to rush our camp from there; then they tried to rush it again from the south, but all their attempts were baffled by the steadiness of the pickets and the reinforcements that were running up. So the Burmese, finding the surprise ineffectual, and that the camp could not be taken, spread themselves about in the forest in vantage places, and fired into the camp. Nothing could be seen except the dazzling flashes from their guns as they fired here and there, and the darkness was all the darker for those flashes of flame, that cut it like swords. It was very cold. I had left my blanket in the monastery, and no one was allowed to ascend, because there, of all places, the bullets flew thickest, crushing through the mat walls, and going into the teak posts with a thud. There was nothing we could do. The men, placed in due order about the camp, fired back at the flashes of the enemy's guns. That was all they had to fire at. It was not much guide. The officers went from picket to picket encouraging the men, but I had no duty; when fighting began my work as a civilian was at a standstill. I sat and shivered with cold under the monastery, and wished for the dawn. In a pause of the firing you could hear the followers hammering the pegs that held the foot-ropes of the horses. Then the dead and wounded were brought and put near me, and in the dense dark the doctor tried to find out what injuries the men had received, and dress them as well as he could. No light dare be lit. The night seemed interminable. There were no stars, for a dense mist hung above the trees. After an hour or two the firing slackened a little, and presently, with great caution, a little lamp, carefully shrouded with a blanket, was lit. A sudden burst of shots that came splintering into the posts beside us caused the lamp to be hurriedly put out; but presently it was lit again, and with infinite caution one man was dressed. At last a little very faint silver dawn came gleaming through the tree-tops--the most beautiful sight I ever saw--and the firing stopped. The dawn came quickly down, and very soon we were able once more to see what we were about, and count our losses. Then we moved out. We had hardly any hope of catching the enemy, we who were in a strange country, who were mounted on horses, and had a heavy transport, and they who knew every stream and ravine, and had every villager for a spy. So we moved back a march into a more open country, where we hoped for better news, and two days later that news came. CHAPTER VI WAR--II 'Never in the world does hatred cease by hatred. Hatred ceases by love.'--_Dammapada._ We were encamped at a little monastery in some fields by a village, with a river in front. Up in the monastery there was but room for the officers, so small was it, and the men were camped beneath it in little shelters. It was two o'clock, and very hot, and we were just about to take tiffin, when news came that a party of armed men had been seen passing a little north of us. It was supposed they were bound to a village known to be a very bad one--Laka--and that they would camp there. So 'boot and saddle' rang from the trumpets, and in a few moments later we were off, fifty lances. Just as we started, his old Hindostani Christian servant came up to my friend, the commandant, and gave him a little paper. 'Put it in your pocket, sahib,' he said. The commandant had no time to talk, no time even to look at what it could be. He just crammed it into his breast-pocket, and we rode on. The governor's son was our guide, and he led us through winding lanes into a pass in the low hills. The road was very narrow, and the heavy forest came down to our elbows as we passed. Now and again we crossed the stream, which had but little water in it, and the path would skirt its banks for awhile. It was beautiful country, but we had no time to notice it then, for we were in a hurry, and whenever the road would allow we trotted and cantered. After five or six miles of this we turned a spur of the hills, and came out into a little grass-glade on the banks of the stream, and at the far end of this was the village where we expected to find those whom we sought. They saw us first, having a look-out on a high tree by the edge of the forest; and as our advanced guard came trotting into the open, he fired. The shot echoed far up the hills like an angry shout, and we could see a sudden stir in the village--men running out of the houses with guns and swords, and women and children running, too, poor things! sick with fear. They fired at us from the village fence, but had no time to close the gate ere our sowars were in. Then they escaped in various ways to the forest and scrub, running like madmen across the little bit of open, and firing at us directly they reached shelter where the cavalry could not come. Of course, in the open they had no chance, but in the dense forest they were safe enough. The village was soon cleared, and then we had to return. It was no good to wait. The valley was very narrow, and was commanded from both its sides, which were very steep and dense with forest. Beyond the village there was only forest again. We had done what we could: we had inflicted a very severe punishment on them; it was no good waiting, so we returned. They fired on us nearly all the way, hiding in the thick forest, and perched on high rocks. At one place our men had to be dismounted to clear a breastwork, run up to fire at us from. All the forest was full of voices--voices of men and women and even children--cursing our guide. They cried his name, that the spirits of the hills might remember that it was he who had brought desolation to their village. Figures started up on pinnacles of cliff, and cursed him as he rode by. Us they did not curse; it was our guide. And so after some trouble we got back. That band never attacked us again. As we were dismounting, my friend put his hand in his pocket, and found the little paper. He took it out, looked at it, and when his servant came up to him he gave the paper back with a curious little smile full of many thoughts. 'You see,' he said, 'I am safe. No bullet has hit me.' And the servant's eyes were dim. He had been very long with his master, and loved him, as did all who knew him. 'It was the goodness of God,' he said--'the great goodness of God. Will not the sahib keep the paper?' But the sahib would not. 'You may need it as well as I. Who can tell in this war?' And he returned it. And the paper? It was a prayer--a prayer used by the Roman Catholic Church, printed on a sheet of paper. At the top was a red cross. The paper was old and worn, creased at the edges; it had evidently been much used, much read. Such was the charm that kept the soldier from danger. The nights were cold then, when the sun had set, and after dinner we used to have a camp-fire built of wood from the forest, to sit round for a time and talk before turning in. The native officers of the cavalry would come and sit with us, and one or two of the Burmans, too. We were a very mixed assembly. I remember one night very well--I think it must have been the very night after the fight at Laka, and we were all of us round the fire. I remember there was a half-moon bending towards the west, throwing tender lights upon the hills, and turning into a silver gauze the light white mist that lay upon the rice-fields. Opposite to us, across the little river, a ridge of hill ran down into the water that bent round its foot. The ridge was covered with forest, very black, with silver edges on the sky-line. It was out of range for a Burmese flint-gun, or we should not have camped so near it. On all the other sides the fields stretched away till they ended in the forest that gloomed beyond. I was talking to the governor's son (our guide of the fight at Laka) of the prospects of the future, and of the intentions of the Prince of Wuntho, in whose country Laka lay. I remarked to him how the Burmans of Wuntho seemed to hate him, of how they had cursed him from the hills, and he admitted that it was true. 'All except my friends,' he said, 'hate me. And yet what have I done? I had to help my father to get back his governorship. They forget that they attacked us first.' He went on to tell me of how every day he was threatened, of how he was sure they would murder him some time, because he had joined us. 'They are sure to kill me some time,' he said. He seemed sad and depressed, not afraid. So we talked on, and I asked him about charms. 'Are there not charms that will prevent you being hurt if you are hit, and that will not allow a sword to cut you? We hear of invulnerable men. There were the Immortals of the King's Guard, for instance.' And he said, yes, there were charms, but no one believed in them except the villagers. He did not, nor did men of education. Of course, the ignorant people believed in them. There were several sorts of charms. You could be tattooed with certain mystic letters that were said to insure you against being hit, and there were certain medicines you could drink. There were also charms made out of stone, such as a little tortoise he had once seen that was said to protect its wearer. There were mysterious writings on palm-leaves. There were men, he said vaguely, who knew how to make these things. For himself, he did not believe in them. I tried to learn from him then, and I have tried from others since, whether these charms have any connection with Buddhism. I cannot find that they have. They are never in the form of images of the Buddha, or of extracts from the sacred writings. There is not, so far as I can make out, any religious significance in these charms; mostly they are simply mysterious. I never heard that the people connect them with their religion. Indeed, all forms of enchantment and of charms are most strictly prohibited. One of the vows that monks take is never to have any dealings with charms or with the supernatural, and so Buddhism cannot even give such little assistance to its believers as to furnish them with charms. If they have charms, it is against their faith; it is a falling away from the purity of their teachings; it is simply the innate yearning of man to the supernatural, to the mysterious. Man's passions are very strong, and if he must fight, he must also have a charm to protect him in fight. If his religion cannot give it him, he must find it elsewhere. You see that, as the teachings of the Buddha have never been able to be twisted so as to permit war directly, neither have they been able to assist indirectly by furnishing charms, by making the fighter bullet-proof. And I thought then of the little prayer and the cross that were so certain a defence against hurt. We talked for a long time in the waning moonlight by the ruddy fire, and at last we broke up to go to bed. As we rose a voice called to us across the water from the little promontory. In the still night every word was as clear as the note of a gong. 'Sleep well,' it cried--'sleep well--sle-e-ep we-l-l.' We all stood astonished--those who did not know Burmese wondering at the voice; those who did, wondering at the meaning. The sentries peered keenly towards the sound. 'Sleep well,' the voice cried again; 'eat well. It will not be for long. Sleep well while you may.' And then, after a pause, it called the governor's son's name, and 'Traitor, traitor!' till the hills were full of sound. The Burman turned away. 'You see,' he said, 'how they hate me. What would be the good of charms?' The voice was quiet, and the camp sank into stillness, and ere long the moon set, and it was quite dark. He was a brave man, and, indeed, there are many brave men amongst the Burmese. They kill leopards with sticks and stones very often, and even tigers. They take their frail little canoes across the Irrawaddy in flood in a most daring way. They in no way want for physical courage, but they have never made a cult of bravery; it has never been a necessity to them; it has never occurred to them that it is the prime virtue of a man. You will hear them confess in the calmest way, 'I was afraid.' We would not do that; we should be much more afraid to say it. And the teaching of Buddhism is all in favour of this. Nowhere is courage--I mean aggressive courage--praised. No soldier could be a fervent Buddhist; no nation of Buddhists could be good soldiers; for not only does Buddhism not inculcate bravery, but it does not inculcate obedience. Each man is the ruler of his life, but the very essence of good fighting is discipline, and discipline, subjection, is unknown to Buddhism. Therefore the inherent courage of the Burmans could have no assistance from their faith in any way, but the very contrary: it fought against them. There is no flexibility in Buddhism. It is a law, and nothing can change it. Laws are for ever and for ever, and there are no exceptions to them. The law of the Buddha is against war--war of any kind at all--and there can be no exception. And so every Burman who fought against us knew that he was sinning. He did it with his eyes open; he could never imagine any exception in his favour. Never could he in his bivouac look at the stars, and imagine that any power looked down in approbation of his deeds. No one fought for him. Our bayonets and lances were no keys to open to him the gates of paradise; no monks could come and close his dying eyes with promises of rewards to come. He was sinning, and he must suffer long and terribly for this breach of the laws of righteousness. If such be the faith of the people, and if they believe their faith, it is a terrible handicap to them in any fight; it delivers them bound into the hands of the enemy. Such is Buddhism. But it must never be forgotten that, if this faith does not assist the believer in defence, neither does it in offence. What is so terrible as a war of religion? There can never be a war of Buddhism. No ravished country has ever borne witness to the prowess of the followers of the Buddha; no murdered men have poured out their blood on their hearthstones, killed in his name; no ruined women have cursed his name to high Heaven. He and his faith are clean of the stain of blood. He was the preacher of the Great Peace, of love, of charity, of compassion, and so clear is his teaching that it can never be misunderstood. Wars of invasion the Burmese have waged, that is true, in Siam, in Assam, and in Pegu. They are but men, and men will fight. If they were perfect in their faith, the race would have died out long ago. They have fought, but they have never fought in the name of their faith. They have never been able to prostitute its teachings to their own wants. Whatever the Burmans have done, they have kept their faith pure. When they have offended against the laws of the Buddha they have done so openly. Their souls are guiltless of hypocrisy--for whatever that may avail them. They have known the difference between good and evil, even if they have not always followed the good. CHAPTER VII GOVERNMENT 'Fire, water, storms, robbers, rulers--these are the five great evils.'--_Burmese saying._ It would be difficult, I think, to imagine anything worse than the government of Upper Burma in its later days. I mean by 'government' the king and his counsellors and the greater officials of the empire. The management of foreign affairs, of the army, the suppression of greater crimes, the care of the means of communication, all those duties which fall to the central government, were badly done, if done at all. It must be remembered that there was one difficulty in the way--the absence of any noble or leisured class to be entrusted with the greater offices. As I have shown in another chapter, there was no one between the king and the villager--no noble, no landowner, no wealthy or educated class at all. The king had to seek for his ministers among the ordinary people, consequently the men who were called upon to fill great offices of state were as often as not men who had no experience beyond the narrow limits of a village. The breadth of view, the knowledge of other countries, of other thoughts, that comes to those who have wealth and leisure, were wanting to these ministers of the king. Natural capacity many of them had, but that is not of much value until it is cultivated. You cannot learn in the narrow precincts of a village the knowledge necessary to the management of great affairs; and therefore in affairs of state this want of any noble or leisured class was a very serious loss to the government of Burma. It had great and countervailing advantages, of which I will speak when I come to local government, but that it was a heavy loss as far as the central government goes no one can doubt. There was none of that check upon the power of the king which a powerful nobility will give; there was no trained talent at his disposal. The king remained absolutely supreme, with no one near his throne, and the ministers were mere puppets, here to-day and gone to-morrow. They lived by the breath of the king and court, and when they lost favour there was none to help them. They had no faction behind them to uphold them against the king. It can easily be understood how disastrous all this was to any form of good government. All these ministers and governors were corrupt; there was corruption to the core. When it is understood that hardly any official was paid, and that those who were paid were insufficiently paid, and had unlimited power, there will be no difficulty in seeing the reason. In circumstances like this all people would be corrupt. The only securities against bribery and abuse of power are adequate pay, restricted authority, and great publicity. None of these obtained in Burma any more than in the Europe of five hundred years ago, and the result was the same in both. The central government consisted of the king, who had no limit at all to his power, and the council of ministers, whose only check was the king. The executive and judicial were all the same: there was no appeal from one to the other. The only appeal from the ministers was to the king, and as the king shut himself up in his palace, and was practically inaccessible to all but high officials, the worthlessness of this appeal is evident. Outside Mandalay the country was governed by _wuns_ or governors. These were appointed by the king, or by the council, or by both, and they obtained their position by bribery. Their tenure was exceedingly insecure, as any man who came and gave a bigger bribe was likely to obtain the former governor's dismissal and his own appointment. Consequently the usual tenure of office of a governor was a year. Often there were half a dozen governors in a year; sometimes a man with strong influence managed to retain his position for some years. From the orders of the governor there was an appeal to the council. This was in some matters useful, but in others not so. If a governor sentenced a man to death--all governors had power of life and death--he would be executed long before an appeal could reach the council. Practically no check was possible by the palace over distant governors, and they did as they liked. Anything more disastrous and fatal to any kind of good government than this it is impossible to imagine. The governors did what they considered right in their own eyes, and made as much money as they could, while they could. They collected the taxes and as much more as they could get; they administered the laws of Manu in civil and criminal affairs, except when tempted to deviate therefrom by good reasons; they carried out orders received from Mandalay, when these orders fell in with their own desires, or when they considered that disobedience might be dangerous. It is a Burmese proverb that officials are one of the five great enemies of mankind, and there was, I think (at all events in the latter days of the kingdom) good reason to remember it. And yet these officials were not bad men in themselves; on the contrary, many of them were men of good purpose, of natural honesty, of right principles. In a well-organized system they would have done well, but the system was rotten to the core. It may be asked why the Burmese people remained quiet under such a rule as this; why they did not rise and destroy it, raising a new one in its place; how it was that such a state of corruption lasted for a year, let alone for many years. The answer is this: However bad the government may have been, it had the qualities of its defects. If it did not do much to help the people, it did little to hinder them. To a great extent it left them alone to manage their own affairs in their own way. Burma in those days was like a great untended garden, full of weeds, full of flowers too, each plant striving after its own way, gradually evolving into higher forms. Now sometimes it seems to me to be like an old Dutch garden, with the paths very straight, very clean swept, with the trees clipped into curious shapes of bird and beast, tortured out of all knowledge, and many of the flowers mown down. The Burmese government left its people alone; that was one great virtue. And, again, any government, however good, however bad, is but a small factor in the life of a people; it comes far below many other things in importance. A short rainfall for a year is more disastrous than a mad king; a plague is worse than fifty grasping governors; social rottenness is incomparably more dangerous than the rottenest government. And in Burma it was only the supreme government, the high officials, that were very bad. It was only the management of state affairs that was feeble and corrupt; all the rest was very good. The land laws, the self-government, the social condition of the people, were admirable. It was so good that the rotten central government made but little difference to the people, and it would probably have lasted for a long while if not attacked from outside. A greater power came and upset the government of the king, and established itself in his place; and I may here say that the idea that the feebleness or wrong-doing of the Burmese government was the cause of the downfall is a mistake. If the Burmese government had been the best that ever existed, the annexation would have happened just the same. It was a political necessity for us. The central government of a country is, as I have said, not a matter of much importance. It has very little influence in the evolution of the soul of a people. It is always a great deal worse than the people themselves--a hundred years behind them in civilization, a thousand years behind them in morality. Men will do in the name of government acts which, if performed in a private capacity, would cover them with shame before men, and would land them in a gaol or worse. The name of government is a cloak for the worst passions of manhood. It is not an interesting study, the government of mankind. A government is no part of the soul of the people, but is a mere excrescence; and so I have but little to say about this of Burma, beyond this curious fact--that religion had no part in it. Surely this is a very remarkable thing, that a religion having the hold upon its followers that Buddhism has upon the Burmese has never attempted to grasp the supreme authority and use it to its ends. It is not quite an explanation to say that Buddhism is not concerned with such things; that its very spirit is against the assumption of any worldly power and authority; that it is a negation of the value of these things. Something of this sort might be said of other religions, and yet they have all striven to use the temporal power. I do not know what the explanation is, unless it be that the Burmese believe their religion and other people do not. However that may be, there is no doubt of the fact. Religion had nothing whatever--absolutely nothing in any way at all--to do with government. There are no exceptions. What has led people to think sometimes that there were exceptions is the fact that the king confirmed the Thathanabaing--the head of the community of monks--after he had been elected by his fellow-monks. The reason of this was as follows: All ecclesiastical matters--I use the word 'ecclesiastical' because I can find no other--were outside the jurisdiction of civil limits. By 'ecclesiastical' I mean such matters as referred to the ownership and habitation of monasteries, the building of pagodas and places of prayer, the discipline of the monkhood. Such questions were decided by ecclesiastical courts under the Thathanabaing. Now, it was necessary sometimes, as may be understood, to enforce these decrees, and for that reason to apply to civil power. Therefore there must be a head of the monks acknowledged by the civil power as head, to make such applications as might be necessary in this, and perhaps some other such circumstances. It became, therefore, the custom for the king to acknowledge by order the elect of the monks as Thathanabaing for all such purposes. That was all. The king did not appoint him at all. Any such idea as a monk interfering in the affairs of state, or expressing an opinion on war or law or finance, would appear to the Burmese a negation of their faith. They were never led away by the idea that good might come of such interference. This terrible snare has never caught their feet. They hold that a man's first duty is to his own soul. Never think that you can do good to others at the same time as you injure yourself, and the greatest good for your own heart is to learn that beyond all this turmoil and fret there is the Great Peace--so great that we can hardly understand it, and to reach it you must fit yourself for it. The monk is he who is attempting to reach it, and he knows that he cannot do that by attempting to rule his fellow-man; that is probably the very worst thing he could do. And therefore the monkhood, powerful as they were, left all politics alone. I have never been able to hear of a single instance in which they even expressed an opinion either as a body or as individuals on any state matter. It is true that, if a governor oppressed his people, the monks would remonstrate with him, or even, in the last extremity, with the king; they would plead with the king for clemency to conquered peoples, to rebels, to criminals; their voice was always on the side of mercy. As far as urging the greatest of all virtues upon governors and rulers alike, they may be said to have interfered with politics; but this is not what is usually understood by religion interfering in things of state. It seems to me we usually mean the reverse of this, for we are of late beginning to regard it with horror. The Burmese have always done so. They would think it a denial of all religion. And so the only things worth noting about the government of the Burmese were its exceeding badness, and its disconnection with religion. That it would have been a much stronger government had it been able to enlist on its side all the power of the monkhood, none can doubt. It might even have been a better government; of that I am not sure. But that such a union would have meant the utter destruction of the religion, the debasing of the very soul of the people, no one who has tried to understand that soul can doubt. And a soul is worth very many governments. But when you left the central government, and came down to the management of local affairs, there was a great change. You came straight down from the king and governor to the village and its headman. There were no lords, no squires, nor ecclesiastical power wielding authority over the people. Each village was to a very great extent a self-governing community composed of men free in every way. The whole country was divided into villages, sometimes containing one or two hamlets at a little distance from each other--offshoots from the parent stem. The towns, too, were divided into quarters, and each quarter had its headman. These men held their appointment-orders from the king as a matter of form, but they were chosen by their fellow-villagers as a matter of fact. Partly this headship was hereditary, not from father to son, but it might be from brother to brother, and so on. It was not usually a very coveted appointment, for the responsibility and trouble were considerable, and the pay small. It was 10 per cent. on the tax collections. And with this official as their head, the villagers managed nearly all their affairs. Their taxes, for instance, they assessed and collected themselves. The governor merely informed the headman that he was to produce ten rupees per house from his village. The villagers then appointed assessors from among themselves, and decided how much each household should pay. Thus a coolie might pay but four rupees, and a rice-merchant as much as fifty or sixty. The assessment was levied according to the means of the villagers. So well was this done, that complaints against the decisions of the assessors were almost unknown--I might, I think, safely say were absolutely unknown. The assessment was made publicly, and each man was heard in his own defence before being assessed. Then the money was collected. If by any chance, such as death, any family could not pay, the deficiency was made good by the other villagers in proportion. When the money was got in it was paid to the governor. Crime such as gang-robbery, murder, and so on, had to be reported to the governor, and he arrested the criminals if he felt inclined, and knew who they were, and was able to do it. Generally something was in the way, and it could not be done. All lesser crime was dealt with in the village itself, not only dealt with when it occurred, but to a great extent prevented from occurring. You see, in a village anyone knows everyone, and detection is usually easy. If a man became a nuisance to a village, he was expelled. I have often heard old Burmans talking about this, and comparing these times with those. In those times all big crimes were unpunished, and there was but little petty crime. Now all big criminals are relentlessly hunted down by the police; and the inevitable weakening of the village system has led to a large increase of petty crime, and certain breaches of morality and good conduct. I remember talking to a man not long ago--a man who had been a headman in the king's time, but was not so now. We were chatting of various subjects, and he told me he had no children; they were dead. 'When were you married?' I asked, just for something to say, and he said when he was thirty-two. 'Isn't that rather old to be just married?' I asked. 'I thought you Burmans often married at eighteen and twenty. What made you wait so long?' And he told me that in his village men were not allowed to marry till they were about thirty. 'Great harm comes,' he said, 'of allowing boys and girls to make foolish marriages when they are too young. It was never allowed in my village.' 'And if a young man fell in love with a girl?' I asked. 'He was told to leave her alone.' 'And if he didn't?' 'If he didn't, he was put in the stocks for one day or two days, and if that was no good, he was banished from the village.' A monk complained to me of the bad habits of the young men in villages. 'Could government do nothing?' he asked. They used shameful words, and they would shout as they passed his monastery, and disturb the lads at their lessons and the girls at the well. They were not well-behaved. In the Burmese time they would have been punished for all this--made to draw so many buckets of water for the school-gardens, or do some road-making, or even be put in the stocks. Now the headman was afraid to do anything, for fear of the great government. It was very bad for the young men, he said. All villages were not alike, of course, in their enforcement of good manners and good morals, but, still, in every village they were enforced more or less. The opinion of the people was very decided, and made itself felt, and the influence of the monastery without the gate was strong upon the people. Yet the monks never interfered with village affairs. As they abstained from state government, so they did from local government. You never could imagine a Buddhist monk being a magistrate for his village, taking any part at all in municipal affairs. The same reasons that held them from affairs of the state held them from affairs of the commune. I need not repeat them. The monastery was outside the village, and the monk outside the community. I do not think he was ever consulted about any village matters. I know that, though I have many and many a time asked monks for their opinion to aid me in deciding little village disputes, I have never got an answer out of them. 'These are not our affairs,' they will answer always. 'Go to the people; they will tell you what you want.' Their influence is by example and precept, by teaching the laws of the great teacher, by living a life blameless before men, by preparing their souls for rest. It is a general influence, never a particular one. If anyone came to the monk for counsel, the monk would only repeat to him the sacred teaching, and leave him to apply it. So each village managed its own affairs, untroubled by squire or priest, very little troubled by the state. That within their little means they did it well, no one can doubt. They taxed themselves without friction, they built their own monastery schools by voluntary effort, they maintained a very high, a very simple, code of morals, entirely of their own initiative. All this has passed, or is passing away. The king has gone to a banishment far across the sea, the ministers are either banished or powerless for good or evil. It will never rise again, this government of the king, which was so bad in all it did, and only good in what it left alone. It will never rise again. The people are now part of the British Empire, subjects of the Queen. What may be in store for them in the far future no one can tell, only we may be sure that the past can return no more. And the local government is passing away, too. It cannot exist with a strong government such as ours. For good or for evil, in a few years it, too, will be gone. But, after all, these are but forms; the soul is far within. In the soul there will be no change. No one can imagine even in the far future any monk of the Buddha desiring temporal power or interfering in any way with the government of the people. That is why I have written this chapter, to show how Buddhism holds itself towards the government. With us, we are accustomed to ecclesiastics trying to manage affairs of state, or attempting to grasp the secular power. It is in accordance with our ideals that they should do so. Our religious phraseology is full of such terms as lord and king and ruler and servant. Buddhism knows nothing of any of them. In our religion we are subject to the authority of deacons and priests and bishops and archbishops, and so on up to the Almighty Himself. But in Buddhism every man is free--free, subject to the inevitable laws of righteousness. There is no hierarchy in Buddhism: it is a religion of absolute freedom. No one can damn you except yourself; no one can save you except yourself. Governments cannot do it, and therefore it would be useless to try and capture the reins of government, even if you did not destroy your own soul in so doing. Buddhism does not believe that you can save a man by force. As Buddhism was, so it is, so it will remain. By its very nature it abhors all semblance of authority. It has proved that, under temptation such as no other religion has felt, and resisted; it is a religion of each man's own soul, not of governments and powers. CHAPTER VIII CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 'Overcome anger by kindness, evil by good.' _Dammapada._ Not very many years ago an officer in Rangoon lost some currency notes. He had placed them upon his table overnight, and in the morning they were gone. The amount was not large. It was, if I remember rightly, thirty rupees; but the loss annoyed him, and as all search and inquiry proved futile, he put the matter in the hands of the police. Before long--the very next day--the possession of the notes was traced to the officer's Burman servant, who looked after his clothes and attended on him at table. The boy was caught in the act of trying to change one of the notes. He was arrested, and he confessed. He was very hard up, he said, and his sister had written asking him to help her. He could not do so, and he was troubling himself about the matter early that morning while tidying the room, and he saw the notes on the table, and so he took them. It was a sudden temptation, and he fell. When the officer learnt all this, he would, I think, have withdrawn from the prosecution and forgiven the boy; but it was too late. In our English law theft is not compoundable. A complaint of theft once made must be proved or disproved; the accused must be tried before a magistrate. There is no alternative. So the lad--he was only a lad--was sent up before the magistrate, and he again pleaded guilty, and his master asked that the punishment might be light. The boy, he said, was an honest boy, and had yielded to a sudden temptation. He, the master, had no desire to press the charge, but the reverse. He would never have come to court at all if he could have withdrawn from the charge. Therefore he asked that the magistrate would consider all this, and be lenient. But the magistrate did not see matters in the same light at all. He would consider his judgment, and deliver it later on. When he came into court again and read the judgment he had prepared, he said that he was unable to treat the case leniently. There were many such cases, he said. It was becoming quite common for servants to steal their employers' things, and they generally escaped. It was a serious matter, and he felt himself obliged to make an example of such as were convicted, to be a warning to others. So the boy was sentenced to six months' rigorous imprisonment; and his master went home, and before long had forgotten all about it. But one day, as he was sitting in his veranda reading before breakfast, a lad came quickly up the stairs and into the veranda, and knelt down before him. It was the servant. As soon as he was released from gaol, he went straight to his old master, straight to the veranda where he was sure he would be sitting at that hour, and begged to be taken back again into his service. He was quite pleased, and sure that his master would be equally pleased, at seeing him again, and he took it almost as a matter of course that he would be reinstated. But the master doubted. 'How can I take you back again?' he said. 'You have been in gaol.' 'But,' said the boy, 'I did very well in gaol. I became a warder with a cap white on one side and yellow on the other. Let the thakin ask.' Still the officer doubted. 'I cannot take you back,' he repeated. 'You stole my money, and you have been in prison. I could not have you as a servant again.' 'Yes,' admitted the boy, 'I stole the thakin's money, but I have been in prison for it a long time--six months. Surely that is all forgotten now. I stole; I have been in gaol--that is the end of it.' 'No,' answered the master, 'unfortunately, your having been in gaol only makes matters much worse. I could forgive the theft, but the being in gaol--how can I forgive that?' And the boy could not understand. 'If I have stolen, I have been in gaol for it. That is wiped out now,' he said again and again, till at last he went away in sore trouble of mind, for he could not understand his master, nor could his master understand him. You see, each had his own idea of what was law, and what was justice, and what was punishment. To the Burman all these words had one set of meanings; to the Englishman they had another, a very different one. And each of them took his ideas from his religion. To all men the law here on earth is but a reflection of the heavenly law; the judge is the representative of his god. The justice of the court should be as the justice of heaven. Many nations have imagined their law to be heaven-given, to be inspired with the very breath of the Creator of the world. Other nations have derived their laws elsewhere. But this is of little account, for to the one, as to the other, the laws are a reflection of the religion. And therefore on a man's religion depends all his views of law and justice, his understanding of the word 'punishment,' his idea of how sin should be treated. And it was because of their different religions, because their religions differed so greatly on these points as to be almost opposed, that the English officer and his Burman servant failed to understand each other. For to the Englishman punishment was a degradation. It seemed to him far more disgraceful that his servant should have been in gaol than that he should have committed theft. The theft he was ready to forgive, the punishment he could not. Punishment to him meant revenge. It is the revenge of an outraged and injured morality. The sinner had insulted the law, and therefore the law was to make him suffer. He was to be frightened into not doing it again. That is the idea. He was to be afraid of receiving punishment. And again his punishment was to be useful as a warning to others. Indeed, the magistrate had especially increased it with that object in view. He was to suffer that others might be saved. The idea of punishment being an atonement hardly enters into our minds at all. To us it is practically a revenge. We do not expect people to be the better for it. We are sure they are the worse. It is a deterrent for others, not a healing process for the man himself. We punish A. that B. may be afraid, and not do likewise. Our thoughts are bent on B., not really on A. at all. As far as he is concerned, the process is very similar to pouring boiling lead into a wound. We do not wish or intend to improve him, but simply and purely to make him suffer. After we have dealt with him, he is never fit again for human society. That was in the officer's thought when he refused to take back his Burmese servant. Now see the boy's idea. Punishment is an atonement, a purifying of the soul from the stain of sin. That is the only justification for, and meaning of, suffering. If a man breaks the everlasting laws of righteousness and stains his soul with the stain of sin, he must be purified, and the only method of purification is by suffering. Each sin is followed by suffering, lasting just so long as to cleanse the soul--not a moment less, or the soul would not be white; not a moment more, or it would be useless and cruel. That is the law of righteousness, the eternal inevitable sequence that leads us in the end to wisdom and peace. And as it is with the greater laws, so it should, the Buddhist thinks, be with the lesser laws. If a man steals, he should have such punishment and for such a time as will wean his soul from theft, as will atone for his sin. Just so much. You see, to him mercy is a falling short of what is necessary, a leaving of work half done, as if you were to leave a garment half washed. Excess of punishment is mere useless brutality. He recognizes no vicarious punishment. He cannot understand that A. should be damned in order to save B. This does not agree with his scheme of righteousness at all. It seems as futile to him as the action of washing one garment twice that another might be clean. Each man should atone for his own sin, _must_ atone for his own sin, in order to be freed from it. No one can help him, or suffer for him. If I have a sore throat, it would be useless to blister you for it: that is his idea. Consider this Burman. He had committed theft. That he admitted. He was prepared to atone for it. The magistrate was not content with that, but made him also atone for other men's sins. He was twice punished, because other men who escaped did ill. That was the first thing he could not understand. And then, when he had atoned both for his own sin and for that of others, when he came out of prison, he was looked upon as in a worse state than if he had never atoned at all. If he had never been in prison, his master would have forgiven his theft and taken him back, but now he would not. The boy was proud of having atoned in full, very full, measure for his sin; the master looked upon the punishment as inconceivably worse than the crime. So the officer went about and told the story of his boy coming back, and expecting to be taken on again, as a curious instance of the mysterious working of the Oriental mind, as another example of the extraordinary way Easterns argue. 'Just to think,' said the officer, 'he was not ashamed of having been in prison!' And the boy? Well, he probably said nothing, but went away and did not understand, and kept the matter to himself, for they are very dumb, these people, very long-suffering, very charitable. You may be sure that he never railed at the law, or condemned his old master for harshness. He would wonder why he was punished because other people had sinned and escaped. He could not understand that. It would not occur to him that sending him to herd with other criminals, that cutting him off from all the gentle influences of life, from the green trees and the winds of heaven, from the society of women, from the example of noble men, from the teachings of religion, was a curious way to render him a better man. He would suppose it was intended to make him better, that he should leave gaol a better man than when he entered, and he would take the intention for the deed. Under his own king things were not much better. It is true that very few men were imprisoned, fine being the usual punishment, but still, imprisonment there was, and so that would not seem to him strange; and as to the conduct of his master, he would be content to leave that unexplained. The Buddhist is content to leave many things unexplained until he can see the meaning. He is not fond of theories. If he does not know, he says so. 'It is beyond me,' he will say; 'I do not understand.' He has no theory of an occidental mind to explain acts of ours of which he cannot grasp the meaning; he would only not understand. But the pity of it--think of the pity of it all! Surely there is nothing more pathetic than this: that a sinner should not understand the wherefore of his sentence, that the justice administered to him should be such as he cannot see the meaning of. Certain forms of crime are very rife in Burma. The villages are so scattered, the roads so lonely, the amount of money habitually carried about so large, the people so habitually careless, the difficulty of detection so great, that robbery and kindred crimes are very common; and it is more common in the districts of the delta, long under our rule, than in the newly-annexed province in the north. Under like conditions the Burman is probably no more criminal and no less criminal than other people in the same state of civilization. Crime is a condition caused by opportunity, not by an inherent state of mind, except with the very, very few, the exceptional individuals; and in Upper Burma there is, now that the turmoil of the annexation is past, very little crime comparatively. There is less money there, and the village system--the control of the community over the individual--the restraining influence of public opinion is greater. But even during the years of trouble, the years from 1885 till 1890, when, in the words of the Burmese proverb, 'the forest was on fire and the wild-cat slapped his arm,' there were certain peculiarities about the criminals that differentiated them from those of Europe. You would hear of a terrible crime, a village attacked at night by brigands, a large robbery of property, one or two villagers killed, and an old woman tortured for her treasure, and you would picture the perpetrators as hardened, brutal criminals, lost to all sense of humanity, tigers in human shape; and when you came to arrest them--if by good luck you did so--you would find yourself quite mistaken. One, perhaps, or two of the ringleaders might be such as I have described, but the others would be far different. They would be boys or young men led away by the idea of a frolic, allured by the romance of being a free-lance for a night, very sorry now, and ready to confess and do all in their power to atone for their misdeeds. Nothing, I think, was more striking than the universal confession of criminals on their arrest. Even now, despite the spread of lawyers and notions of law, in country districts accused men always confess, sometimes even they surrender themselves. I have known many such cases. Here is one that happened to myself only the other day. A man was arrested in another jurisdiction for cattle theft; he was tried there and sentenced to two years' rigorous imprisonment. Shortly afterwards it was discovered that he was suspected of being concerned in a robbery in my jurisdiction, committed before his arrest. He was therefore transferred to the gaol near my court, and I inquired into the case, and committed him and four others for trial before the sessions judge for the robbery, which he admitted. Now, it so happened that immediately after I had passed orders in the case I went out into camp, leaving the necessary warrants to be signed in my absence by my junior magistrate, and a mistake occurred by which the committal-warrant was only made out for the four. The other man being already under sentence for two years, it was not considered necessary to make out a remand-warrant for him. But, as it happened, he had appealed from his former sentence and he was acquitted, so a warrant of release arrived at the gaol, and, in absence of any other warrant, he was at once released. Of course, on the mistake being discovered a fresh warrant was issued, and mounted police were sent over the country in search of him, without avail; he could not be found. But some four days afterwards, in the late afternoon, as I was sitting in my house, just returned from court, my servant told me a man wanted to see me. He was shown up into the veranda, and, lo! it was the very man I wanted. He had heard, he explained, that I wanted him, and had come to see me. I reminded him he was committed to stand his trial for dacoity, that was why I wanted him. He said that he thought all that was over, as he was released; but I explained to him that the release only applied to the theft case. And then we walked over half a mile to court, I in front and he behind, across the wide plain, and he surrendered to the guard. He was tried and acquitted on this charge also. Not, as the sessions judge said later, that he had any doubt that my friend and the others were the right men, but because he considered some of the evidence unsatisfactory, and because the original confession was withdrawn. So he was released again, and went hence a free man. But think of him surrendering himself! He knew he had committed the dacoity with which he was charged: he himself had admitted it to begin with, and again admitted it freely when he knew he was safe from further trial. He knew he was liable to very heavy punishment, and yet he surrendered because he understood that I wanted him. I confess that I do not understand it at all, for this is no solitary instance. The circumstances, truly, were curious, but the spirit in which the man acted was usual enough. I have had dacoit leaders with prices on their heads walk into my camp. It was a common experience with many officers. The Burmans often act as children do. Their crimes are the violent, thoughtless crimes of children; they are as little depraved by crime as children are. Who are more criminal than English boys? and yet they grow up decent, law-abiding men. Almost the only confirmed criminals have been made so by punishment, by that punishment which some consider is intended to uplift them, but which never does aught but degrade them. Instead of cleansing the garment, it tears it, and renders it useless for this life. It is a very difficult question, this of crime and punishment. I have not written all this because I have any suggestion to make to improve it. I have not written it because I think that the laws of Manu, which obtained under the Burmese kings, and their methods of punishment, were any improvement on ours. On the contrary, I think they were much worse. Their laws and their methods of enforcing the law were those of a very young people. But, notwithstanding this, there was a spirit in their laws different from and superior to ours. I have been trying to see into the soul of this people whom I love so well, and nothing has struck me more than the way they regard crime and punishment; nothing has seemed to me more worthy of note than their ideas of the meaning and end of punishment, of its scope and its limits. It is so very different from ours. As in our religion, so in our laws: we believe in mercy at one time and in vengeance at another. We believe in vicarious punishment and vicarious salvation; they believe in absolute justice--always the same, eternal and unchangeable as the laws of the stars. We purposely make punishment degrading; they think it should be elevating, that in its purifying power lies its sole use and justification. We believe in tearing a soiled garment; they think it ought to be washed. Surely these are great differences, surely thoughts like these, engraven in the hearts of a young people, will lead, in the great and glorious future that lies before them, to a conception of justice, to a method of dealing with crime, very different from what we know ourselves. They are now very much as we were sixteen centuries ago, when the Romans ruled us. Now we are a greater people, our justice is better, our prisons are better, our morality is inconceivably better than Imperial Rome ever dreamt of. And so with these people, when their time shall come, when they shall have grown out of childhood into manhood, when they shall have the wisdom and strength and experience to put in force the convictions that are in their hearts, it seems to me that they will bring out of these convictions something more wonderful than we to-day have dreamt of. CHAPTER IX HAPPINESS 'The thoughts of his heart, these are the wealth of a man.' _Burmese saying._ As I have said, there was this very remarkable fact in Burma--that when you left the king, you dropped at once to the villager. There were no intermediate classes. There were no nobles, hereditary officers, great landowners, wealthy bankers or merchants. Then there is no caste; there are no guilds of trade, or art, or science. If a man discovered a method of working silver, say, he never hid it, but made it common property. It is very curious how absolutely devoid Burma is of the exclusiveness of caste so universal in India, and which survives to a great extent in Europe. The Burman is so absolutely enamoured of freedom, that he cannot abide the bonds which caste demands. He will not bind himself with other men for a slight temporal advantage; he does not consider it worth the trouble. He prefers remaining free and poor to being bound and rich. Nothing is further from him than the feeling of exclusiveness. He abominates secrecy, mystery. His religion, his women, himself, are free; there are no dark places in his life where the light cannot come. He is ready that everything should be known, that all men should be his brothers. And so all the people are on the same level. Richer and poorer there are, of course, but there are no very rich; there is none so poor that he cannot get plenty to eat and drink. All eat much the same food, all dress much alike. The amusements of all are the same, for entertainments are nearly always free. So the Burman does not care to be rich. It is not in his nature to desire wealth, it is not in his nature to care to keep it when it comes to him. Beyond a sufficiency for his daily needs money has not much value. He does not care to add field to field or coin to coin; the mere fact that he has money causes him no pleasure. Money is worth to him what it will buy. With us, when we have made a little money we keep it to be a nest-egg to make more from. Not so a Burman: he will spend it. And after his own little wants are satisfied, after he has bought himself a new silk, after he has given his wife a gold bangle, after he has called all his village together and entertained them with a dramatic entertainment--sometimes even before all this--he will spend the rest on charity. He will build a pagoda to the honour of the great teacher, where men may go to meditate on the great laws of existence. He will build a monastery school where the village lads are taught, and where each villager retires some time in his life to learn the great wisdom. He will dig a well or build a bridge, or make a rest-house. And if the sum be very small indeed, then he will build, perhaps, a little house--a tiny little house--to hold two or three jars of water for travellers to drink. And he will keep the jars full of water, and put a little cocoanut-shell to act as cup. The amount spent thus every year in charity is enormous. The country is full of pagodas; you see them on every peak, on every ridge along the river. They stand there as do the castles of the robber barons on the Rhine, only with what another meaning! Near villages and towns there are clusters of them, great and small. The great pagoda in Rangoon is as tall as St. Paul's; I have seen many a one not three feet high--the offering of some poor old man to the Great Name, and everywhere there are monasteries. Every village has one, at least; most have two or three. A large village will have many. More would be built if there was anyone to live in them, so anxious is each man to do something for the monks. As it is, more are built than there is actual need for. And there are rest-houses everywhere. Far away in the dense forests by the mountain-side you will find them, built in some little hollow by the roadside by someone who remembered his fellow-traveller. You cannot go five miles along any road without finding them. In villages they can be counted by tens, in towns by fifties. There are far more than are required. In Burmese times such roads and bridges as were made were made in the same way by private charity. Nowadays, the British Government takes that in hand, and consequently there is probably more money for rest-house building than is needed. As time goes on, the charity will flow into other lines, no doubt, in addition. They will build and endow hospitals, they will devote money to higher education, they will spend money in many ways, not in what we usually call charity, for that they already do, nor in missions, as whatever missions they may send out will cost nothing. Holy men are those vowed to extreme poverty. But as their civilization (_their_ civilization, not any imposed from outside) progresses, they will find out new wants for the rich to supply, and they will supply them. That is a mere question of material progress. The inclination to charity is very strong. The Burmans give in charity far more in proportion to their wealth than any other people. It is extraordinary how much they give, and you must remember that all of this is quite voluntary. With, I think, two or three exceptions, such as gilding the Shwe Dagon pagoda, collections are never made for any purpose. There is no committee of appeal, no organized collection. It is all given straight from the giver's heart. It is a very marvellous thing. I remember long ago, shortly after I had come to Burma, I was staying with a friend in Toungoo, and I went with him to the house of a Burman contractor. We had been out riding, and as we returned my friend said he wished to see the contractor about some business, and so we rode to his house. He came out and asked us in, and we dismounted and went up the stairs into the veranda, and sat down. It was a little house built of wood, with three rooms. Behind was a little kitchen and a stable. The whole may have cost a thousand rupees. As my friend and the Burman talked of their business I observed the furniture. There was very little; three or four chairs, two tables and a big box were all I could see. Inside, no doubt, were a few beds and more chairs. While we sat, the wife and daughter came out and gave us cheroots, and I talked to them in my very limited Burmese till my friend was ready. Then we went away. That contractor, so my friend told me as we went home, made probably a profit of six or seven thousand rupees a year. He spent on himself about a thousand of this; the rest went in charity. The great new monastery school, with the marvellous carved façade, just to the south of the town, was his, the new rest-house on the mountain road far up in the hills was his. He supported many monks, he gave largely to the gilding of the pagoda. If a theatrical company came that way, he subscribed freely. Soon he thought he would retire from contracting altogether, for he had enough to live on quietly for the rest of his life. His action is no exception, but the rule. You will find that every well-to-do man has built his pagoda or his monastery, and is called 'school-builder' or 'pagoda-builder.' These are the only titles the Burman knows, and they always are given most scrupulously. The builder of a bridge, a well, or a rest-house may also receive the title of 'well-builder,' and so on, but such titles are rarely used in common speech. Even the builder of a long shed for water-jars may call himself after it if he likes, but it is only big builders who receive any title from their fellows. But the satisfaction to the man himself, the knowledge that he has done a good deed, is much the same, I think. A Burman's wants are very few, such wants as money can supply--a little house, a sufficiency of plain food, a cotton dress for weekdays and a silk one for holidays, and that is nearly all. They are still a very young people. Many wants will come, perhaps, later on, but just now their desires are easily satisfied. The Burman does not care for a big house, for there are always the great trees and the open spaces by the village. It is far pleasanter to sit out of doors than indoors. He does not care for books. He has what is better than many books--the life of his people all about him, and he has the eyes to see it and the heart to understand it. He cares not to see with other men's eyes, but with his own; he cares not to read other men's thoughts, but to think his own, for a love of books only comes to him who is shut always from the world by ill-health, by poverty, by circumstance. When we are poor and miserable, we like to read of those who are happier. When we are shut in towns, we love to read of the beauties of the hills. When we have no love in our hearts, we like to read of those who have. Few men who think their own thoughts care much to read the thoughts of others, for a man's own thoughts are worth more to him than all the thoughts of all the world besides. That a man should think, that is a great thing. Very, very few great readers are great thinkers. And he who can live his life, what cares he for reading of the lives of other people? To have loved once is more than to have read all the poets that ever sang. So a Burman thinks. To see the moon rise on the river as you float along, while the boat rocks to and fro and someone talks to you--is not that better than any tale? So a Burman lives his life, and he asks a great deal from it. He wants fresh air and sunshine, and the great thoughts that come to you in the forest. He wants love and companionship, the voice of friends, the low laugh of women, the delight of children. He wants his life to be a full one, and he wants leisure to teach his heart to enjoy all these things; for he knows that you must learn to enjoy yourself, that it does not always come naturally, that to be happy and good-natured and open-hearted requires an education. To learn to sympathize with your neighbours, to laugh with them and cry with them, you must not shut yourself away and work. His religion tells him that the first of all gifts is sympathy; it is the first step towards wisdom, and he holds it true. After that, all shall be added to you. He believes that happiness is the best of all things. We think differently. We are content with cheerless days, with an absence of love, of beauty, of all that is valuable to the heart, if we can but put away a little money, if we can enlarge our business, if we can make a bigger figure in the world. Nay, we go beyond this: we believe that work, that drudgery, is a beautiful thing in itself, that perpetual toil and effort is admirable. This we do because we do not know what to do with our leisure, because we do not know for what to seek, because we cannot enjoy. And so we go back to work, to feverish effort, because we cannot think, and see, and understand. 'Work is a means to leisure,' Aristotle told us long ago, and leisure, adds the Burman, is needed that you may compose your own soul. Work, no doubt, is a necessity, too, but not excess of it. The necessary thing to a man is not gold, nor position, nor power, but simply his own soul. Nothing is worth anything to him compared with that, for while a man lives, what is the good of all these things if he have no leisure to enjoy them? And when he dies, shall they go down into the void with him? No; but a man's own soul shall go with and be with him for ever. A Burman's ideas of this world are dominated by his religion. His religion says to him, 'Consider your own soul, that is the main thing.' His religion says to him, 'The aim of every man should be happiness.' These are the fundamental parts of his belief; these he learns from his childhood: they are born in him. He looks at all the world by their light. Later on, when he grows older, his religion says to him, 'And happiness is only to be found by renouncing the whole world.' This is a hard teaching. This comes to him slowly, or all Buddhists would be monks; but, meanwhile, if he does but remember the first two precepts, he is on the right path. He does do this. Happiness is the aim he seeks. Work and power and money are but the means by which he will arrive at the leisure to teach his own soul. First the body, then the spirit; but with us it is surely first the body, and then the body again. He often watches us with surprise. He sees us work and work and work; he sees us grow old quickly, and our minds get weary; he sees our sympathies grow very narrow, our ideas bent into one groove, our whole souls destroyed for a little money, a little fame, a little promotion, till we go home, and do not know what to do with ourselves, because we have no work and no sympathy with anything; and at last we die, and take down with us our souls--souls fit for nothing but to be driven for ever with a goad behind and a golden fruit in front. But do not suppose that the Burmese are idle. Such a nation of workers was never known. Every man works, every woman works, every child works. Life is not an easy thing, but a hard, and there is a great deal of work to be done. There is not an idle man or woman in all Burma. The class of those who live on other men's labour is unknown. I do not think the Burman would care for such a life, for a certain amount of work is good, he knows. A little work he likes; a good deal of work he does, because he is obliged often to do so to earn even the little he requires. And that is the end. He is a free man, never a slave to other men, nor to himself. Therefore I do not think his will ever make what we call a great nation. He will never try to be a conqueror of other peoples, either with the sword, with trade, or with religion. He will never care to have a great voice in the management of the world. He does not care to interfere with other people: he never believes interference can do other than harm to both sides. He will never be very rich, very powerful, very advanced in science, perhaps not even in art, though I am not sure about that. It may be he will be very great in literature and art. But, however that may be, in his own idea his will be always the greatest nation in the world, because it is the happiest. CHAPTER X THE MONKHOOD--I 'Let his life be kindness, his conduct righteousness; then in the fulness of gladness he will make an end of grief.'--_Dammapada._ During his lifetime, that long lifetime that remained to him after he had found the light, Gaudama the Buddha gathered round him many disciples. They came to learn from his lips of that truth which he had found, and they remained near him to practise that life which alone can lead unto the Great Peace. From time to time, as occasion arose, the teacher laid down precepts and rules to assist those who desired to live as he did--precepts and rules designed to help his disciples in the right way. Thus there arose about him a brotherhood of those who were striving to purify their souls, and lead the higher life, and that brotherhood has lasted ever since, till you see in it the monkhood of to-day, for that is all that the monks are--a brotherhood of men who are trying to live as their great master lived, to purify their souls from the lust of life, to travel the road that reaches unto deliverance. Only that, nothing more. There is no idea of priesthood about it at all, for by a priest we understand one who has received from above some power, who is, as it were, a representative on earth of God. Priests, to our thinking, are those who have delegated to them some of that authority of which God is the fountainhead. They can absolve from sin, we think; they can accept into the faith; they can eject from it; they can exhort with authority; they can administer the sacraments of religion; they can speed the parting soul to God; they can damn the parting soul to hell. A priest is one who is clothed with much authority and holiness. But in Buddhism there is not, there cannot be, anything of all this. The God who lies far beyond our ken has delegated His authority to no one. He works through everlasting laws. His will is manifested by unchangeable sequences. There is nothing hidden about His laws that requires exposition by His agents, nor any ceremonies necessary for acceptance into the faith. Buddhism is a free religion. No one holds the keys of a man's salvation but himself. Buddhism never dreams that anyone can save or damn you but yourself, and so a Buddhist monk is as far away from our ideas of a priest as can be. Nothing could be more abhorrent to Buddhism than any claim of authority, of power, from above, of holiness acquired except by the earnest effort of a man's own soul. These monks, who are so common all through Burma, whose monasteries are outside every village, who can be seen in every street in the early morning begging their bread, who educate the whole youth of the country, are simply men who are striving after good. This is a difficult thing for us to understand, for our minds are bent in another direction. A religion without a priesthood seems to us an impossibility, and yet here it is so. The whole idea and thing of a priesthood would be repugnant to Buddhism. It is a wonderful thing to contemplate how this brotherhood has existed all these many centuries, how it has always gained the respect and admiration of the people, how it has always held in its hands the education of the children, and yet has never aspired to sacerdotalism. Think of the temptation resisted here. The temptation to interfere in government was great, the temptation to arrogate to themselves priestly powers is far, far greater. Yet it has been always resisted. This brotherhood of monks is to-day as it was twenty-three centuries ago--a community of men seeking for the truth. Therefore, in considering these monks, we must dismiss from our minds any idea of priesthood, any idea of extra human sanctity, of extra human authority. We must never liken them in any way to our priests, or even to our friars. I use the word monk, because it is the nearest of any English word I can find, but even that is not quite correct. I have often found this difficulty. I do not like to use the Burmese terms if I can help it, for this reason, that strange terms and names confuse us. They seem to lift us into another world--a world of people differing from us, not in habits alone, but in mind and soul. It is a dividing partition. It is very difficult to read a book speaking of people under strange terms, and feel that they are flesh and blood with us, and therefore I have, if possible, always used an English word where I can come anywhere near the meaning, and in this case I think monk comes closest to what I mean. Hermits they are not, for they live always in communities by villages, and they do not seclude themselves from human intercourse. Priests they are not, ministers they are not, clergymen they are not; mendicants only half describe them, so I use the word monk as coming nearest to what I wish to say. The monks, then, are those who are trying to follow the teaching of Gaudama the Buddha, to wean themselves from the world, 'who have turned their eyes towards heaven, where is the lake in which all passions shall be washed away.' They are members of a great community, who are governed by stringent regulations--the regulations laid down in the Wini for observance by all monks. When a man enters the monkhood, he makes four vows--that he will be pure from lust, from desire of property, from the taking of any life, from the assumption of any supernatural powers. Consider this last, how it disposes once and for all of any desire a monk may have toward mysticism, for this is what he is taught: 'No member of our community may ever arrogate to himself extraordinary gifts or supernatural perfection, or through vainglory give himself out to be a holy man; such, for instance, as to withdraw into solitary places on pretence of enjoying ecstasies like the Ariahs, and afterwards to presume to teach others the way to uncommon spiritual attainments. Sooner may the lofty palm-tree that has been cut down become green again, than an elect guilty of such pride be restored to his holy station. Take care for yourself that you do not give way to such an excess.' Is not this teaching the very reverse of that of all other peoples and religions? Can you imagine the religious teachers of any other religion being warned to keep themselves free from visions? Are not visions and trances, dreams and imaginations, the very proof of holiness? But here it is not so. These are vain things, foolish imaginations, and he who would lead the pure life must put behind him all such things as mere dram-drinking of the soul. This is a most wonderful thing, a religion that condemns all mysticisms. It stands alone here amongst all religions, pure from the tinsel of miracle, either past, or present, or to come. And yet this people is, like all young nations, given to superstition: its young men dream dreams, its girls see visions. There are interpreters of dreams, many of them, soothsayers of all kinds, people who will give you charms, and foretell events for you. Just as it was with us not long ago, the mystery, _what is_ beyond the world, exercises a curious fascination over them. Everywhere you will meet with traces of it, and I have in another chapter told some of the principal phases of these. But the religion has kept itself pure. No hysteric visions, no madman's dreams, no clever conjurer's tricks, have ever shed a tawdry glory on the monkhood of the Buddha. Amid all the superstition round about them they have remained pure, as they have from passion and desire. Here in the far East, the very home, we think, of the unnatural and superhuman, the very cradle of the mysterious and the wonderful, is a religion which condemns it all, and a monkhood who follow their religion. Does not this out-miracle any miracle? With other faiths it is different: they hold out to those who follow their tenets and accept their ministry that in exchange for the worldly things which their followers renounce they shall receive other gifts, heavenly ones; they will be endued with power from above; they will have authority from on high; they will become the chosen messengers of God; they may even in their trances enter into His heaven, and see Him face to face. Buddhism has nothing of all this to offer. A man must surrender all the world, with no immediate gain. There is only this: that if he struggle along in the path of righteousness, he will at length attain unto the Great Peace. A monk who dreamed dreams, who said that the Buddha had appeared to him in a vision, who announced that he was able to prophesy, would be not exalted, but expelled. He would be deemed silly or mad; think of that--mad--for seeing visions, not holy at all! The boys would jeer at him; he would be turned out of his monastery. A monk is he who observes purity and sanity of life. Hysteric dreams, the childishness of the mysterious, the insanity of the miraculous, are no part of that. And so a monk has to put behind him everything that is called good in this life, and govern his body and his soul in strict temperance. He must wear but yellow garments, ample and decent, but not beautiful; he must shave his head; he must have none but the most distant intercourse with women; he must beg his food daily in the streets; he must eat but twice, and then but a certain amount, and never after noon; he must take no interest in worldly affairs; he must own no property, must attend no plays or performances; 'he must eat, not to satisfy his appetite, but to keep his body alive; he must wear clothes, not from vanity, but from decency; he must live under a roof, not because of vainglory, but because the weather renders it necessary.' All his life is bounded by the very strictest poverty and purity. There is no austerity. A monk may not over-eat, but he must eat enough; he must not wear fine clothes, but he must be decent and comfortable; he must not have proud dwellings, but he should be sheltered from the weather. There is no self-punishment in Buddhism. Did not the Buddha prove the futility of this long ago? The body must be kept in health, that the soul may not be hampered. And so the monks live a very healthy, very temperate life, eating and drinking just enough to keep the body in good health; that is the first thing, that is the very beginning of the pure life. And as he trains his body by careful treatment, so does he his soul. He must read the sacred books, he must meditate on the teachings of the great teacher, he must try by every means in his power to bring these truths home to himself, not as empty sayings, but as beliefs that are to be to him the very essence of all truth. He is not cut off from society. There are other monks, and there are visitors, men and women. He may talk to them--he is no recluse; but he must not talk too much about worldly matters. He must be careful of his thoughts, that they do not lead him into wrong paths. His life is a life of self-culture. Being no priest, he has few duties to others to perform; he is not called upon to interfere in the business of others. He does not visit the sick; he has no concern with births and marriages and deaths. On Sunday, and on certain other occasions, he may read the laws to the people, that is all. Of this I will speak in another chapter. It does not amount to a great demand upon his time. He is also the schoolmaster of the village, but this is aside entirely from his sacred profession. Certain duties he has, however. Every morning as the earliest sunlight comes upon the monastery spires, when the birds are still calling to the day, and the cool freshness of the morning still lies along the highways, you will see from every monastery the little procession come forth. First, perhaps, there will be two schoolboys with a gong slung on a bamboo between them, which they strike now and then. And behind them, in their yellow robes, their faces cast upon the ground, and the begging-bowls in their hands, follow the monks. Very slowly they pass along the streets, amid the girls hurrying to their stalls in the bazaar with baskets of fruit upon their heads, the housewives out to buy their day's requirements, the workman going to his work, the children running and laughing and falling in the dust. Everyone makes room for them as they go in slow and solemn procession, and from this house and that come forth women and children with a little rice that they have risen before daylight to cook, a little curry, a little fruit, to put into the bowls. Never is there any money given: a monk may not touch money, and his wants are very few. Presents of books, and so on, are made at other times; but in the morning only food is given. The gifts are never acknowledged. The cover of the bowl is removed, and when the offering has been put in, it is replaced, and the monk moves on. And when they have made their accustomed round, they return, as they went, slowly to the monastery, their bowls full of food. I do not know that this food is always eaten by the monks. Frequently in large towns they are fed by rich men, who send daily a hot, fresh, well-cooked meal for each monk, and the collected alms are given to the poor, or to schoolboys, or to animals. But the begging round is never neglected, nor is it a form. It is a very real thing, as anyone who has seen them go knows. They must beg their food, and they do; it is part of the self-discipline that the law says is necessary to help the soul to humility. And the people give because it is a good thing to give alms. Even if they know the monks are fed besides, they will fill the bowls as the monks pass along. If the monks do not want it, there are the poor, there are the schoolboys, sons of the poorest of the people, who may often be in need of a meal; and if a little be left, then there are the birds and the beasts. It is a good thing to give alms--good for yourself, I mean. So that this daily procession does good in two ways: it is good for the monk because he learns humility; it is good for the people because they have thereby offered them a chance of giving a little alms. Even the poorest may be able to give his spoonful of rice. All is accepted. Think not a great gift is more acceptable than a little one. You must judge by the giver's heart. At every feast, every rejoicing, the central feature is presents to the monks. If a man put his son into a monastery, if he make merry at a stroke of good fortune, if he wish to celebrate a mark of favour from government, the principal ceremony of the feast will be presents to monks. They must be presents such as the monks can accept; that is understood. Therefore, a man enters a monastery simply for this: to keep his body in health by perfect moderation and careful conduct, and to prepare his soul for heaven by meditation. That is the meaning of it all. If you see a grove of trees before you on your ride, mangoes and tamarinds in clusters, with palms nodding overhead, and great broad-leaved plantains and flowering shrubs below, you may be sure that there is a monastery, for it is one of the commands to the monks of the Buddha to live under the shade of lofty trees, and this command they always keep. They are most beautiful, many of these monasteries--great buildings of dark-brown teak, weather-stained, with two or three roofs one above the other, and at one end a spire tapering up until it ends in a gilded 'tee.' Many of the monasteries are covered with carving along the façades and up the spires, scroll upon scroll of daintiest design, quaint groups of figures here and there, and on the gateways moulded dragons. All the carvings tell a story taken from the treasure-house of the nation's infancy, quaint tales of genii and fairy and wonderful adventure. Never, I think, do the carvings tell anything of the sacred life or teaching. The Burmese are not fond, as we are, of carving and painting scenes from sacred books. Perhaps they think the subject too holy for the hand of the craftsman, and so, with, as far as I know, but one exception in all Burma--a pagoda built by Indian architects long ago--you will look in vain for any sacred teaching in the carvings. But they are very beautiful, and their colour is so good, the deep rich brown of teak against the light green of the tamarinds, and the great leaves of the plantains all about. Within the monastery it will be all bare. However beautiful the building is without, no relaxation of his rules is allowed to the monk within. All is bare: only a few mats, perhaps, here and there on the plank floor, a hard wooden bed, a box or two of books. At one end there will be sure to be the image of the teacher, wrought in alabaster. These are always one of three stereotyped designs; they are not works of art at all. The wealth of imagination and desire of beauty that finds its expression in the carved stories in the façades has no place here at all. It would be thought a sacrilege to attempt in any way to alter the time-honoured figures that have come down to us from long ago. Over the head of the image there will be a white or golden umbrella, whence we have derived our haloes, and perhaps a lotus-blossom in an earthen pot in front. That will be all. There is this very remarkable fact: of all the great names associated with the life of the Buddha, you never see any presentment at all. The Buddha stands alone. Of Maya his mother, of Yathodaya his wife, of Rahoula his son, of his great disciple Thariputra, of his dearest disciple and brother Ananda, you see nothing. There are no saints in Buddhism at all, only the great teacher, he who saw the light. Surely this is a curious thing, that from the time of the prince to now, two thousand four hundred years, no one has arisen to be worthy of mention of record beside him. There is only one man holy to Buddhism--Gaudama the Buddha. On one side of the monasteries there will be many pagodas, tombs of the Buddha. They are usually solid cones, topped with a gilded 'tee,' and there are many of them. Each man will build one in his lifetime if he can. They are always white or gold. So there is much colour about a monastery--the brown of the wood and the white of the pagoda, and tender green of the trees. The ground is always kept clean-swept and beaten and neat. And there is plenty of sound, too--the fairy music of little bells upon the pagoda-tops when the breeze moves, the cooing of the pigeons in the eaves, the voices of the schoolboys. Monastery land is sacred. No life may be taken there, no loud sounds, no noisy merriment, no abuse is permitted anywhere within the fence. Monasteries are places of meditation and peace. Of course, all monasteries are not great and beautiful buildings; many are but huts of bamboo and straw, but little better than the villager's hut. Some villages are so poor that they can afford but little for their holy men. But always there will be trees, always the ground will be swept, always the place will be respected just the same. And as soon as a good crop gives the village a little money, it will build a teak monastery, be sure of that. Monasteries are free to all. Any stranger may walk into a monastery and receive shelter. The monks are always hospitable. I have myself lived, perhaps, a quarter of my life in Burma in monasteries, or in the rest-houses attached to them. We break all their laws: we ride and wear boots within the sacred enclosure; our servants kill fowls for our dinners there, where all life is protected; we treat these monks, these who are the honoured of the nation, much in the offhand, unceremonious way that we treat all Orientals; we often openly laugh at their religion. And yet they always receive us; they are often even glad to see us and talk to us. Very, very seldom do you meet with any return in kind for your contempt of their faith and habits. I have heard it said sometimes that some monks stand aloof, that they like to keep to themselves. If they should do so, can you wonder? Would any people, not firmly bound by their religion, put up with it all for a moment? If you went into a Mahommedan mosque in Delhi with your boots on, you would probably be killed. Yet we clump round the Shwe Dagon pagoda at our ease, and no one interferes. Do not suppose that it is because the Burman believes less than the Hindu or Mahommedan. It is because he believes more, because he is taught that submission and patience are strong Buddhist virtues, and that a man's conduct is an affair of his own soul. He is willing to believe that the Englishman's breaches of decorum are due to foreign manners, to the necessities of our life, to ignorance. But even if he supposed that we did these things out of sheer wantonness it would make no difference. If the foreigner is dead to every feeling of respect, of courtesy, of sympathy, that is an affair of the foreigner's own heart. It is not for the monk to enforce upon strangers the respect and reverence due to purity, to courage, to the better things. Each man is responsible for himself, the foreigner no less than the Burman. If a foreigner have no respect for what is good, that is his own business. It can hurt no one but himself if he is blatant, ignorant, contemptuous. No one is insulted by it, or requires revenge for it. You might as well try and insult gravity by jeering at Newton and his pupils, as injure the laws of righteousness by jeering at the Buddha or his monks. And so you will see foreigners take all sorts of liberties in monasteries and pagodas, break every rule wantonly, and disregard everything the Buddhist holds holy, and yet very little notice will be taken openly. Burmans will have their own opinion of you, do have their own opinion of you, without a doubt; but because you are lost to all sense of decency, that is no reason why the Buddhist monk or layman should also lower himself by getting angry and resent it; and so you may walk into any monastery or rest-house and act as you think fit, and no one will interfere with you. Nay, if you even show a little courtesy to the monks, your hosts, they will be glad to talk to you and tell you of their lives and their desires. It is very seldom that a pleasant word or a jest will not bring the monks into forgetting all your offences, and talking to you freely and openly. I have had, I have still, many friends among the monkhood; I have been beholden to them for many kindnesses; I have found them always, peasants as they are, courteous and well-mannered. Nay, there are greater things than these. When my dear friend was murdered at the outbreak of the war, wantonly murdered by the soldiers of a brutal official, and his body drifted down the river, everyone afraid to bury it, for fear of the wrath of government, was it not at last tenderly and lovingly buried by the monks near whose monastery it floated ashore? Would all people have done this? Remember, he was one of those whose army was engaged in subduing the kingdom; whose army imprisoned the king, and had killed, and were killing, many, many hundreds of Burmans. 'We do not remember such things. All men are brothers to the dead.' They are brothers to the living, too. Is there not a monastery near Kindat, built by an Englishman as a memorial to the monk who saved his life at peril of his own at that same time, who preserved him till help came? Can anyone ever tell when the influence of a monk has been other than for pity or mercy? Surely they believe their religion? I did not know how people could believe till I saw them. Martyrdom--what is martyrdom, what is death, for your religion, compared to living within its commands? Death is easy; life it is that is difficult. Men have died for many things: love and hate, and religion and science, for patriotism and avarice, for self-conceit and sheer vanity, for all sorts of things, of value and of no value. Death proves nothing. Even a coward can die well. But a pure life is the outcome only of the purest religion, of the greatest belief, of the most magnificent courage. Those who can live like this can die, too, if need be--have done so often and often; that is but a little matter indeed. No Buddhist would consider that as a very great thing beside a holy life. There is another difference between us. We think a good death hallows an evil life; no Buddhist would hear of this for a moment. The reverence in which a monk--ay, even the monk to-day who was but an ordinary man yesterday--is held by the people is very great. All those who address him do so kneeling. Even the king himself was lower than a monk, took a lower seat than a monk in the palace. He is addressed as 'Lord,' and those who address him are his disciples. Poor as he is, living on daily charity, without any power or authority of any kind, the greatest in the land would dismount and yield the road that he should pass. Such is the people's reverence for a holy life. Never was such voluntary homage yielded to any as to these monks. There is a special language for them, the ordinary language of life being too common to be applied to their actions. They do not sleep or eat or walk as do other men. It seems strange to us, coming from our land where poverty is an offence, where the receipt of alms is a degradation, where the ideal is power, to see here all this reversed. The monks are the poorest of the poor, they are dependent on the people for their daily bread; for although lands may be given to a monastery as a matter of fact, very few have any at all, and those only a few palm-trees. They have no power at all, either temporal or eternal; they are not very learned, and yet they are the most honoured of all people. Without any of the attributes which in our experience gather the love and honour of mankind, they are honoured above all men. The Burman demands from the monk no assistance in heavenly affairs, no interference in worldly, only this, that he should live as becomes a follower of the great teacher. And because he does so live the Burman reverences him beyond all others. The king is feared, the wise man admired, perhaps envied, the rich man is respected, but the monk is honoured and loved. There is no one beside him in the heart of the people. If you would know what a Burman would be, see what a monk is: that is his ideal. But it is a very difficult ideal. The Burman is very fond of life, very full of life, delighting in the joy of existence, brimming over with vitality, with humour, with merriment. They are a young people, in the full flush of early nationhood. To them of all people the restraints of a monk's life must be terrible and hard to maintain. And because it is so, because they all know how hard it is to do right, and because the monks do right, they honour them, and they know they deserve honour. Remember that all these people have been monks themselves at one time or other; they know how hard the rules are, they know how well they are observed. They are reverencing what they thoroughly understand; they have seen their monkhood from the inside; their reverence is the outcome of a very real knowledge. Of the internal management of the monkhood I have but little to say. There is the Thathanabaing, who is the head of the community; there are under him Gaing-oks, who each have charge of a district; each Gaing-ok has an assistant, 'a prop,' called Gaing-dauk; and there are the heads of monasteries. The Thathanabaing is chosen by the heads of the monasteries, and appoints his Gaing-oks and Gaing-dauks. There is no complication about it. Usually any serious dispute is decided by a court of three or four heads of monasteries, presided over by the Gaing-ok. But note this: no monk can be tried by any ecclesiastical court without his consent. Each monastery is self-governing; no monk can be called to account by any Gaing-ok or Gaing-dauk unless he consents. The discipline is voluntary entirely. There are no punishments by law for disobedience of an ecclesiastical court. A monk cannot be unfrocked by his fellows. Therefore, it would seem that there would be no check over abuses, that monks could do as they liked, that irregularities could creep in, and that, in fact, there is nothing to prevent a monastery becoming a disgrace. This would be a great mistake. It must never be forgotten that monks are dependent on their village for everything--food and clothes, and even the monastery itself. Do not imagine that the villagers would allow their monks, their 'great glories,' to become a scandal to them. The supervision exercised by the people over their monks is most stringent. As long as the monks act as monks should, they are held in great honour, they are addressed by titles of great respect, they are supplied with all they want within the rules of the Wini, they are the glory of the village. But do you think a Burman would render this homage to a monk whom he could not respect, who did actions he should not? A monk is one who acts as a monk. Directly he breaks his laws, his holiness is gone. The villagers will have none such as he. They will hunt him out of the village, they will refuse him food, they will make him a byword, a scorn. I have known this to happen. If a monk's holiness be suspected, he must clear himself before a court, or leave that place quickly, lest worse befall him. It is impossible to conceive any supervision more close than this of the people over their monks, and so the breaches of any law by the monks are very rare--very rare indeed. You see, for one thing, that a monk never takes the vows for life. He takes them for six months, a year, two years, very often for five years; then, if he finds the life suit him, he continues. If he finds that he cannot live up to the standard required, he is free to go. There is no compulsion to stay, no stigma on going. As a matter of fact, very few monks there are but have left the monastery at one time or another. It is impossible to over-estimate the value of this safety-valve. What with the certainty of detection and punishment from his people, and the knowledge that he can leave the monastery if he will at the end of his time without any reproach, a monk is almost always able to keep within his rules. I have had for ten years a considerable experience of criminal law. I have tried hundreds of men for all sorts of offences; I have known of many hundreds more being tried, and the only cases where a monk was concerned that I can remember are these: three times a monk has been connected in a rebellion, once in a divorce case, once in another offence. This last case happened just as we annexed the country, and when our courts were not established. He was detected by the villagers, stripped of his robes, beaten, and hunted out of the place with every ignominy possible. There is only one opinion amongst all those who have tried to study the Buddhist monkhood--that their conduct is admirable. Do you suppose the people would reverence it as they do if it were corrupt? They know: they have seen it from the inside. It is not outside knowledge they have. And when it is understood that anyone can enter a monastery--thieves and robbers, murderers and sinners of every description, can enter, are even urged to enter monasteries, and try to live the holy life; and many of them do, either as a refuge against pursuit, or because they really repent--it will be conceded that the discipline of the monks, if obtained in a different way to elsewhere, is very effective. The more you study the monkhood, the more you see that this community is the outcome of the very heart of the people. It is a part of the people, not cut off from them, but of them; it is recruited in great numbers from all sorts and conditions of men. In every village and town--nearly every man has been a monk at one time or another--it is honoured alike by all; it is kept in the straight way, not only from the inherent righteousness of its teaching, but from the determination of the people to allow no stain to rest upon what they consider as their 'great glory.' This whole monkhood is founded on freedom. It is held together not by a strong organization, but by general consent. There is no mystery about it, there are no dark places here where the sunlight of inquiry may not come. The whole business is so simple that the very children can and do understand it. I shall have expressed myself very badly if I have not made it understood how absolutely voluntary this monkhood is, held together by no everlasting vows, restrained by no rigid discipline. It is simply the free outcome of the free beliefs of the people, as much a part of them as the fruit is of the tree. You could no more imagine grapes without a vine than a Buddhist monkhood that did not spring directly from, and depend entirely on, the people. It is the higher expression of their life. In writing this account of the Burmese and their religion, I have tried always to see with my own eyes, to write my own thoughts without any reference to what anyone else may have thought or written. I have believed that whatever value may attach to any man's opinions consists in the fact that they are his opinions, and not a _rechauffé_ of the thoughts of others, and therefore I have not even referred to, or quoted from, any other writer, preferring to write only what I have myself seen and thought. But I cannot end this chapter on the monks of the Buddha without a reference to what Bishop Bigandet has said on the same subject, for he is no observer prejudiced in favour of Buddhism, but the reverse. He was a bishop of the Church of Rome, believing always that his faith contained all truth, and that the Buddha was but a 'pretended saviour,' his teachings based on 'capital and revolting errors,' and marked with an 'inexplicable and deplorable eccentricity.' Bishop Bigandet was in no sympathy with Buddhism, but its avowed foe, desirous of undermining and destroying its influence over the hearts of men, and yet this is the way he ends his chapter: 'There is in that religious body--the monks--a latent principle of vitality that keeps it up and communicates to it an amount of strength and energy that has hitherto maintained it in the midst of wars, revolutionary and political, convulsions of all descriptions. Whether supported or not by the ruling power, it has remained always firm and unchanged. It is impossible to account satisfactorily for such a phenomenon, unless we find a clear and evident cause of such extraordinary vitality, a cause independent of ordinary occurrences of time and circumstances, a cause deeply rooted in the very soul of the populations that exhibit before the observer this great and striking religious feature. 'That cause appears to be the strong religious sentiment, the firm faith, that pervades the mass of Buddhists. The laity admire and venerate the religious, and voluntarily and cheerfully contribute to their maintenance and welfare. From its ranks the religious body is constantly recruited. There is hardly a man that has not been a member of the fraternity for a certain period of time. 'Surely such a general and continued impulse could not last long unless it were maintained by a powerful religious connection. 'The members of the order preserve, at least exteriorly, the decorum of their profession. The rules and regulations are tolerably well observed; the grades of hierarchy are maintained with scrupulous exactitude. The life of the religious is one of restraint and perpetual control. He is denied all sorts of pleasures and diversions. How could such a system of self-denial ever be maintained, were it not for the belief which the Rahans have in the merits that they amass by following a course of life which, after all, is repugnant to Nature? It cannot be denied that human motives often influence both the laity and the religious, but, divested of faith and the sentiments supplied by even a false belief, their action could not produce in a lasting and persevering manner the extraordinary and striking fact that we witness in Buddhist countries.' This monkhood is the proof of how the people believe. Has any religion ever had for twenty-four centuries such a proof as this? CHAPTER XI THE MONKHOOD--II 'The restrained in hand, restrained in foot, restrained in speech, of the greatest self-control. He whose delight is inward, who is tranquil and happy when alone--him they call "mendicant."'--_Acceptance into the Monkhood._ Besides being the ideal of the Buddhists, the monk is more: he is the schoolmaster of all the boys. It must be remembered that this is a thing aside from his monkhood. A monk need not necessarily teach; the aim and object of the monkhood is, as I have written in the last chapter, purity and abstraction from the world. If the monk acts as schoolmaster, that is a thing apart. And yet all monasteries are schools. The word in Burmese is the same; they are identified in popular speech and in popular opinion. All the monasteries are full of scholars, all the monks teach. I suppose much the same reasons have had influence here as in other nations; the desire of the parents that their children should learn religion in their childhood, the fact that the wisest and most honoured men entered the monkhood, the leisure of the monks giving them opportunity for such occupation. Every man all through Burma has gone to a monastery school as a lad, has lived there with the monks, has learnt from them the elements of education and a knowledge of his faith. It is an exception to find a Burman who cannot read and write. Sometimes from lack of practice the art is lost in later manhood, but it has always been acquired. The education is not very deep--reading Burmese and writing; simple, very simple, arithmetic; a knowledge of the days and months, and a little geography, perhaps, and history--that is all that is secular. But of their religion they learn a great deal. They have to get by heart great portions of the sacred books, stories and teachings, and they have to learn many precepts. They have to recite them, too, as those who have lived much near monasteries know. Several times a day, at about nine o'clock at night, and again before dawn, you will hear the lads intoning clearly and loudly some of the sacred teachings. I have been awakened many a time in the early morning, before the dawn, before even the promise of the dawn in the eastern sky, by the children's voices intoning. And I have put aside my curtain and looked out from my rest-house and seen them in the dim starlight kneeling before the pagoda, the tomb of the great teacher, saying his laws. The light comes rapidly in this country: the sky reddens, the stars die quickly overhead, the first long beams of sunrise are trembling on the dewy bamboo feathers ere they have finished. It is one of the most beautiful sights imaginable to see monks and children kneeling on the bare ground, singing while the dawn comes. The education in their religion is very good, very thorough, not only in precept, but in practice; for in the monastery you must live a holy life, as the monks live, even if you are but a schoolboy. But the secular education is limited. It is up to the standard of education amongst the people at large, but that is saying little. Beyond reading and writing and arithmetic it generally does not go. I have seen the little boys do arithmetic. They were adding sums, and they began, not as we would, on the right, but on the left. They added, say, the hundreds first; then they wrote on the slate the number of hundreds, and added up the tens. If it happened that the tens mounted up so as to add one or more to the hundreds, a grimy little finger would wipe out the hundreds already written and write in the correct numbers. It follows that if the units on being added up came to over ten, the tens must be corrected with the grimy little finger, first put in the mouth. Perhaps both tens and hundreds had to be written again. It will be seen that when you come to thousands and tens of thousands, a good deal of wiping out and re-writing may be required. A Burman is very bad at arithmetic; a villager will often write 133 as 100,303; he would almost as soon write 43 as 34; both figures are in each number, you see. I never met a Burman who had any idea of cubic measurement, though land measurement they pick up very quickly. I have said that the education in the monasteries is up to the average education of the people. That is so. Whether when civilization progresses and more education is required the monasteries will be able to provide it is another thing. The education given now is mostly a means to an end: to learning the precepts of religion. Whether the monks will provide an education beyond such a want, I doubt. A monk is by his vows, by the whole tenour of his life, apart from the world; too keen a search after knowledge, any kind of secular knowledge, would be a return to the things of this life, would, perhaps, re-kindle in him the desires that the whole meaning of his life is to annihilate. 'And after thou hast run over all things, what will it profit thee if thou hast neglected thyself?' Besides, no knowledge, except mere theoretical knowledge, can be acquired without going about in the world. You cannot cut yourself off from the world and get knowledge of it. Yet the monk is apart from the world. It is true that Buddhism has no antagonism to science--nay, has every sympathy with, every attraction to, science. Buddhism will never try and block the progress of the truth, of light, secular or religious; but whether the monks will find it within their vows to provide that science, only time can prove. However it may be, it will not make any difference to the estimation in which the monks are held. They are not honoured for their wisdom--they often have but little; nor for their learning--they often have none at all; nor for their industry--they are never industrious; but because they are men trying to live--nay, succeeding in living--a life void of sin. Up till now the education given by the monks has met the wants of the people; in future it will do so less and less. But a community that has lived through twenty-four centuries of change, and is now of the strength and vitality that the Buddhist monkhood is, can have nothing to fear from any such change. Schoolmasters, except religious and elementary, they may cease to be, perhaps; the pattern and ensample of purity and righteousness they will always remain. CHAPTER XII PRAYER 'What is there that can justify tears and lamentations?' _Saying of the Buddha._ Down below my house, in a grove of palms near the river, was a little rest-house. It was but a roof and a floor of teak boarding without any walls, and it was plainly built. It might have held, perhaps, twenty people; and here, as I strolled past in the evening when the sun was setting, I would see two or three old men sitting with beads in their hands. They were making their devotions, saying to themselves that the world was all trouble, all weariness, and that there was no rest anywhere except in observing the laws of righteousness. It was very pathetic, I thought, to see them there, saying this over and over again, as they told their beads through their withered fingers, for surely there was no necessity for them to learn it. Has not everyone learnt it, this, the first truth of Buddhism, long before his hair is gray, before his hands are shaking, before his teeth are gone? But there they would sit, evening after evening, thinking of the change about to come upon them soon, realizing the emptiness of life, wishing for the Great Peace. On Sundays the rest-house, like many others round the village, was crowded. Old men there would be, and one or two young men, a few children, and many women. Early in the morning they would come, and a monk would come down from the monastery near by, and each one would vow, with the monk as witness, that he or she would spend the day in meditation and in holy thought, would banish all thought of evil, and be for the day at least holy. And then, the vow made, the devotee would go and sit in the rest-house and meditate. The village is not very near; the sounds come very softly through the trees, not enough to disturb the mind; only there is the sigh of the wind wandering amid the leaves, and the occasional cry of birds. Once before noon a meal will be eaten, either food brought with them cold, or a simple pot of rice boiled beside the rest-house, and there they will stay till the sun sets and darkness is gathering about the foot of the trees. There is no service at all. The monk may come and read part of the sacred books--some of the Abidama, or a sermon from the Thoots--and perhaps sometimes he may expound a little; that is all. There is nothing akin to our ideas of worship. For consider what our service consists of: there is thanksgiving and praise, there is prayer, there is reading of the Bible, there is a sermon. Our thanksgiving and praise is rendered to God for things He has done, the pleasure that He has allowed us to enjoy, the punishment that He might have inflicted upon us and has not. Our prayer is to Him to preserve us in future, to assist us in our troubles, to give us our daily food, not to be too severe upon us, not to punish us as we deserve, but to be merciful and kind. We ask Him to protect us from our enemies, not to allow them to triumph over us, but to give us triumph over them. But the Buddhist has far other thoughts than these. He believes that the world is ruled by everlasting, unchangeable laws of righteousness. The great God lives far behind His laws, and they are for ever and ever. You cannot change the laws of righteousness by praising them, or by crying against them, any more than you can change the revolution of the earth. Sin begets sorrow, sorrow is the only purifier from sin; these are eternal sequences; they cannot be altered; it would not be good that they should be altered. The Buddhist believes that the sequences are founded on righteousness, are the path to righteousness, and he does not believe he could alter them for the better, even if he had the power by prayer to do so. He believes in the everlasting _righteousness_, that all things work for _good_ in the end; he has no need for prayer or praise; he thinks that the world is governed with far greater wisdom than any of his--perfect wisdom, that is too great, too wonderful, for his petty praise. God lives far behind His laws; think not He has made them so badly as to require continual rectification at the prayer of man. Think not that God is not bound by His own laws. The Buddhist will never believe that God can break His own laws; that He is like an earthly king who imagines one code of morality for his subjects and another for himself. Not so; the great laws are founded in righteousness, so the Buddhist believes, in everlasting righteousness; they are perfect, far beyond our comprehension; they are the eternal, unchangeable, marvellous will of God, and it is our duty not to be for ever fretfully trying to change them, but to be trying to understand them. That is the Buddhist belief in the meaning of religion, and in the laws of righteousness; that is, he believes the duty of him who would follow religion to try to understand these laws, to bring them home to the heart, so to order life as to bring it into harmony with righteousness. Now see the difference. We believe that the world is governed not by eternal laws, but by a changeable and continually changing God, and that it is our duty to try and persuade Him to make it better. We believe, really, that we know a great deal better than God what is good, not only for us, but for others; we do not believe His will is always righteous--not at all: God has wrath to be deprecated; He has mercy to be aroused; He has partiality to be turned towards us, and hence our prayers. But to the Buddhist the whole world is ruled by righteousness, the same for all, the same for ever, and the only sin is ignorance of these laws. The Buddha is he who has found for us the light to see these laws, and to order our life in accordance with them. Now it will be understood, I think, why there is no prayer, no gathering together for any ceremonial, in Buddhism; why there is no praise, no thanksgiving of any kind; why it is so very different in this way from our faith. Buddhism is a wisdom, a seeking of the light, a following of the light, each man as best he can, and it has very little to correspond with our prayer, our services of praise, our meetings together in the name of Christ. Therefore, when you see a man kneeling before a pagoda, moving silent lips of prayer, when you see the people sitting quietly in the rest-houses on a Sunday, when you see the old men telling their beads to themselves slowly and sadly, when you hear the resonant chant of monks and children, lending a soul to the silence of the gloaming, you will know what they are doing. They are trying to understand and bring home to themselves the eternal laws of righteousness; they are honouring their great teacher. This is all that there is; this is the meaning of all that you see and hear. The Buddhist praises and honours the Buddha, the Indian prince who so long ago went out into the wilderness to search for truth, and after many years found it in his own heart; he reverences the Buddha for seeing the light; he thanks the Buddha for his toil and exertion in making this light known to all men. It can do the Buddha no good, all this praise, for he has come to his eternal peace; but it can arouse the enthusiasm of the follower, can bring into his heart love for the memory of the great teacher, and a firm resolve to follow his teaching. The service of his religion is to try and follow these laws, to take them home into the heart, that the follower, too, may come soon into the Great Peace. This has been called pessimism. Surely it is the greatest optimism the world has known--this certainty that the world is ruled by righteousness, that the world has been, that the world will always be, ruled by perfect righteousness. To the Buddhist this is a certainty. The laws are laws of righteousness, if man would but see, would but understand. Do not complain and cry and pray, but open your eyes and see. The light is all about you, if you would only cast the bandage from your eyes and look. It is so wonderful, so beautiful, far beyond what any man has dreamt of, has prayed for, and it is for ever and for ever. This is the attitude of Buddhism towards prayer, towards thanksgiving. It considers them an impertinence and a foolishness, born of ignorance, akin to the action of him who would daily desire Atlas not to allow the heavens to drop upon the earth. And yet, and yet. I remember standing once on the platform of a famous pagoda, the golden spire rising before us, and carved shrines around us, and seeing a woman lying there, her face to the pagoda. She was praying fervently, so fervently that her words could be heard, for she had no care for anyone about, in such trouble was she; and what she was asking was this, that her child, her baby, might not die. She held the little thing in her arms, and as she looked upon it her eyes were full of tears. For it was very sick; its little limbs were but thin bones, with big knees and elbows, and its face was very wan. It could not even take any interest in the wonderful sights around, but hardly opened its careworn eyes now and then to blink upon the world. 'Let him recover, let him be well once more!' the woman cried, again and again. Whom was she beseeching? I do not know. 'Thakin, there will be Someone, Someone. A Spirit may hear. Who can tell? Surely someone will help me? Men would help me if they could, but they cannot; surely there will be someone?' So she did not remember the story of Ma Pa Da. Women often pray, I think--they pray that their husbands and those they love may be well. It is a frequent ending to a girl's letter to her lover: 'And I pray always that you may be well.' I never heard of their praying for anything but this: that they may be loved, and those they love may be well. Nothing else is worth praying for besides this. The queen would pray at the pagoda in the palace morning and evening. 'What did she pray for?' 'What should she pray for, thakin? Surely she prayed that her husband might be true to her, and that her children might live and be strong. That is what women pray for. Do you think a queen would pray differently to any other woman?' 'Women,' say the Buddhist monks, 'never understand. They _will_ not understand; they cannot learn. And so we say that most women must be born again, as men, before they can see the light and understand the laws of righteousness.' What do women care for laws of righteousness? What do they care for justice? What for the everlasting sequences that govern the world? Would not they involve all other men, all earth and heaven, in bottomless chaos, to save one heart they loved? That is woman's religion. CHAPTER XIII FESTIVALS 'The law is sweet, filling the soul with joy.' _Saying of the Buddha._ The three months of the rains, from the full moon of July to the full moon of October, is the Buddhist Lent. It was during these months that the Buddha would retire to some monastery and cease from travelling and teaching for a time. The custom was far older even than that--so old that we do not know how it arose. Its origin is lost in the mists of far-away time. But whatever the beginning may have been, it fits in very well with the habits of the people; for in the rains travelling is not easy. The roads are very bad, covered even with water, often deep in mud; and the rest-houses, with open sides, are not very comfortable with the rain drifting in. Even if there were no custom of Lent, there would be but little travelling then. People would stay at home, both because of the discomfort of moving, and because there is much work then at the village. For this is the time to plough, this is the time to sow; on the villagers' exertions in these months depends all their maintenance for the rest of the year. Every man, every woman, every child, has hard work of some kind or another. What with the difficulties of travelling, what with the work there is to do, and what with the custom of Lent, everyone stays at home. It is the time for prayer, for fasting, for improving the soul. Many men during these months will live even as the monks live, will eat but before mid-day, will abstain from tobacco. There are no plays during Lent, and there are no marriages. It is the time for preparing the land for the crop; it is the time for preparing the soul for eternity. The congregations on the Sundays will be far greater at this time than at any other; there will be more thought of the serious things of life. It is a very long Lent--three months; but with the full moon of October comes the end. The rains then are over; the great black bank of clouds that walled up all the south so long is gone. The south wind has died away, and the light, fresh north wind is coming down the river. The roads are drying up, the work in the fields is over for a time, awaiting the ripening of the grain. The damp has gone out of the air, and it is very clear. You can see once more the purple mountains that you have missed so long; there is a new feeling in the wind, a laughter in the sunshine, a flush of blossom along the fields like the awakening of a new joy. The rains are gone and the cool weather is coming; Lent is over and gladness is returned; the crop has been sown, and soon will come the reaping. And so at this full moon of October is the great feast of the year. There are other festivals: of the New Year, in March, with its water-throwing; of each great pagoda at its appointed time; but of all, the festival at the end of Lent is the greatest. Wherever there are great pagodas the people will come in from far and near for the feast. There are many great pagodas in Burma; there is the Arakan pagoda in Mandalay, and there was the Incomparable pagoda, which has been burnt; there are great pagodas at Pegu, at Prome, at many other places; but perhaps the greatest of all is the Shwe Dagon at Rangoon. You see it from far away as you come up the river, steaming in from the open sea, a great tongue of flame before you. It stands on a small conical hill just behind the city of Rangoon, about two miles away from the wharves and shipping in the busy river. The hill has been levelled on the top and paved into a wide platform, to which you ascend by a flight of many steps from the gate below, where stand the dragons. This entrance-way is all roofed over, and the pillars and the ceiling are red and painted. Here it was that much fighting took place in the early wars, in 1852 especially, and many men, English and Burmese, were killed in storming and defending this strong place. For it had been made a very strong place, this holy place of him who taught that peace was the only good, and the defences round about it are standing still. Upon the top of this hill, the flat paved top, stands the pagoda, a great solid tapering cone over three hundred feet high, ending in an iron fretwork spire that glitters with gold and jewels; and the whole pagoda is covered with gold--pure leaf-gold. Down below it is being always renewed by the pious offerings of those who come to pray and spread a little gold-leaf on it; but every now and then it is all regilt, from the top, far away above you, to the golden lions that guard its base. It is a most wonderful sight, this great golden cone, in that marvellous sunlight that bathes its sides like a golden sea. It seems to shake and tremble in the light like a fire. And all about the platform, edging it ere it falls away below, are little shrines, marvels of carven woodwork and red lacquer. They have tapering roofs, one above another, till they, too, end in a golden spire full of little bells with tongues. As the wind blows the tongues move to and fro, and the air is full of music, so faint, so clear, like 'silver stir of strings in hollow shells.' In most of these shrines there are statues of the great teacher, cut in white alabaster, glimmering whitely in the lustrous shadows there within; and in one shrine is the great bell. Long ago we tried to take this great bell; we tried to send it home as a war trophy, this bell stolen from their sacred place, but we failed. As it was being put on board a ship, it slipped and fell into the river into the mud, where the fierce tides are ever coming and going. And when all the efforts of our engineers to raise it had failed, the Burmese asked: 'The bell, our bell, is there in the water. You cannot get it up. You have tried and you have failed. If we can get it up, may we have it back to hang in our pagoda as our own again?' And they were told, with a laugh, perhaps, that they might; and so they raised it up again, the river giving back to them what it had refused to us, and they took and hung it where it used to be. There it is now, and you may hear it when you go, giving out a long, deep note, the beat of the pagoda's heart. There are many trees, too, about the pagoda platform--so many, that seen far off you can only see the trees and the pagoda towering above them. Have not trees been always sacred things? Have not all religions been glad to give their fanes the glory and majesty of great trees? You may look from the pagoda platform over the whole country, over the city and the river and the straight streets; and on the other side you may see the long white lakes and little hills covered with trees. It is a very beautiful place, this pagoda, and it is steeped in an odour of holiness, the perfume of the thousand thousand prayers that have been prayed there, of the thousand thousand holy thoughts that have been thought there. The pagoda platform is always full of people kneeling, saying over and over the great precepts of their faith, trying to bring into their hearts the meaning of the teaching of him of whom this wonderful pagoda represents the tomb. There are always monks there passing to and fro, or standing leaning on the pillars of the shrines; there are always a crowd of people climbing up and down the long steps that lead from the road below. It is a place I always go to when I am in Rangoon; for, besides its beauty, there are the people; and if you go and stand near where the stairway reaches the platform you will see the people come up. They come up singly, in twos, in groups. First a nun, perhaps, walking very softly, clad in her white dress with her beads about her neck, and there in a corner by a little shrine she will spread a cloth upon the hard stones and kneel and bow her face to the great pagoda. Then she will repeat, 'Sorrow, misery, trouble,' over and over again, running her beads through her fingers, repeating the words in the hope that in the end she may understand whither they should lead her. 'Sorrow, misery, trouble'--ah! surely she must know what they mean, or she would not be a nun. And then comes a young man, and after a reverence to the pagoda he goes wandering round, looking for someone, maybe; and then comes an old man with his son. They stop at the little stalls on the stairs, and they have bought there each a candle. The old man has a plain taper, but the little lad must have one with his emblem on it. Each day has its own sign, a tiger for Monday, and so on, and the lad buys a candle like a little rat, for his birthday is Friday, and the father and son go on to the platform. There they kneel down side by side, the old man and the little chubby lad, and they, too, say that all is misery and delusion. Presently they rise and advance to the pagoda's golden base, and put their candles thereon and light them. This side of the pagoda is in shadow now, and so you can see the lights of the candles as little stars. And then come three girls, sisters, perhaps, all so prettily dressed, with meek eyes, and they, too, buy candles; they, too, kneel and make their devotions, for long, so long, that you wonder if anything has happened, if there has been any trouble that has brought them thus in the sunset to the remembrance of religion. But at last they rise, and they light their little candles near by where the old man and the boy have lit theirs, and then they go away. They are so sad, they keep their faces so turned upon the ground, that you fear there has been something, some trouble come upon them. You feel so sorry for them, you would like to ask them what it all is; you would like to help them if you could. But you can do nothing. They go away down the steps, and you hear the nun repeating always, 'Sorrow, misery, trouble.' So they come and go. But on the festival days at the end of Lent it is far more wonderful. Then for units there are tens, for tens there are hundreds--all come to do reverence to the great teacher at this his great holy place. There is no especial ceremony, no great service, such as we are accustomed to on our festivals. Only there will be many offerings; there will be a procession, maybe, with offerings to the pagoda, with offerings to the monks; there will be much gold-leaf spread upon the pagoda sides; there will be many people kneeling there--that is all. For, you see, Buddhism is not an affair of a community, but of each man's own heart. To see the great pagoda on the festival days is one of the sights of the world. There are a great crowd of people coming and going, climbing up the steps. There are all sorts of people, rich and poor, old and young. Old men there are, climbing wearily up these steps that are so steep, steps that lead towards the Great Peace; and there are old women, too--many of them. Young men will be there, walking briskly up, laughing and talking to each other, very happy, very merry, glad to see each other, to see so many people, calling pleasant greetings to their friends as they pass. They are all so gaily dressed, with beautiful silks and white jackets and gay satin head-cloths, tied with a little end sticking up as a plume. And the girls, how shall I describe them, so sweet they are, so pretty in their fresh dresses, with downcast eyes of modesty, tempered with little side-glances. They laugh, too, as they go, and they talk, never forgetting the sacredness of the place, never forgetting the reverences due, kneeling always first as they come up to the great pagoda, but being of good courage, happy and contented. There are children, too, numbers and numbers of them, walking along, with their little hands clasping so tightly some bigger ones, very fearful lest they should be lost. They are as gay as butterflies in their dress, but their looks are very solemn. There is no solemnity like that of a little child; it takes all the world so very, very seriously, walking along with great eyes of wonder at all it sees about it. They are all well dressed who come here; on a festival day even the poor can be dressed well. Pinks and reds are the prevailing colours, in checks, in stripes, mixed usually with white. These colours go best with their brown skins, and they are fondest of them. But there are other colours, too: there is silver and green embroidery, and there are shot-silks in purple and orange, and there is dark blue. All the jackets, or nearly all the jackets, are white with wide sleeves, showing the arm nearly up to the elbow. Each man has his turban very gay, while each girl has a bright handkerchief which she drapes as she likes upon her arm, or carries in her hand. Such a blaze of colour would not look well with us. Under our dull skies and with our sober lights it would be too bright; but here it is not so. Everything is tempered by the sun; it is so brilliant, this sunlight, such a golden flood pouring down and bathing the whole world, that these colours are only in keeping. Before them is the gold pagoda, and about them the red lacquer and dark-brown carving of the shrines. You hear voices like the murmur of a summer sea, rising and falling, full of laughter low and sweet, and above is the music of the fairy bells. Everything is in keeping--the shining pagoda and the gaily-dressed people, their voices and the bells, even the great bell far beyond, and all are so happy. The feast lasts for seven days; but of these there are three that are greater, and of these, one, the day of the full moon, is the greatest of all. On that day the offerings will be most numerous, the crowd densest. Down below the pagoda are many temporary stalls built, where you can buy all sorts of fairings, from a baby's jointed doll to a new silk dress; and there are restaurants where you may obtain refreshments; for the pagoda is some way from the streets of the city, and on festival days refreshments are much wanted. These stalls are always crowded with people buying and selling, or looking anxiously at the many pretty wares, unable, perhaps, to buy. The refreshments are usually very simple--rice and curry for supper, and for little refreshments between whiles there are sugar-cakes and vermicelli, and other little cates. The crowd going up and down the steps is like a gorgeous-coloured flood, crested with white foam, flowing between the dragons of the gate; and on the platform the crowd is thicker than ever. All day the festival goes on--the praying, the offering of gifts, the burning of little candles before the shrines--until the sun sets across the open country far beyond in gold and crimson glory. But even then there is no pause, no darkness, for hardly has the sun's last bright shaft faded from the pagoda spire far above, while his streamers are still bright across the west, than there comes in the east a new radiance, so soft, so wonderful, it seems more beautiful than the dying day. Across the misty fields the moon is rising; first a crimson globe hung low among the trees, but rising fast, and as it rises growing whiter. Its light comes flooding down upon the earth, pure silver with very black shadows. Then the night breeze begins to blow, very softly, very gently, and the trees give out their odour to the night, which woos them so much more sweetly than the day, till the air is heavy with incense. Behold, the pagoda has started into a new glory, for it is all hung about with little lamps, myriads of tiny cressets, and the façades of the shrines are lit up, too. The lamps are put in long rows or in circles, to fit the places they adorn. They are little earthenware jars full of cocoanut-oil, with a lip where is the wick. They burn very redly, and throw a red light about the platform, breaking the shadows that the moonlight throws and staining its whiteness. In the streets, too, there are lamps--the houses are lined with them--and there are little pagodas and ships curiously designed in flame. All the people come out to see the illuminations, just as they do with us at Christmas to see the shop-windows, and the streets are crowded with people going to and fro, laughing and talking. And there are dramatic entertainments going on, dances and marionette shows, all in the open air. The people are all so happy, they take their pleasure so pleasantly, that it is a delight to see them. You cannot help but be happy, too. The men joke and laugh, and you laugh, too; the children smile at you as they pass, and you must smile, too; can you help it? And to see the girls makes the heart glad within you. There is an infection from the good temper and the gaiety about you that is irresistible, even if you should want to resist it. The festival goes on till very late. The moon is so bright that you forget how late it is, and only remember how beautiful it is all around. You are very loath to leave it, and so it is not till the moon itself is falling low down in the same path whither the sun went before her, it is not till the lamps are dying one by one and the children are yawning very sleepily, that the crowd disperses and the pagoda is at rest. Such is a great feast at a great pagoda. But whenever I think of a great feast, whenever the growing autumn moon tells me that the end of Lent is drawing nigh, it is not the great feast of the Shwe Dagon, nor of any other famous pagoda that comes into my mind, but something far different. It was on a frontier long ago that there was the festival that I remember so well. The country there was very far away from all the big towns; the people were not civilized as those of Mandalay or of Rangoon; the pagoda was a very small one. There was no gilding upon it at all, and no shrines were about it; it stood alone, just a little white plastered pagoda, with a few trees near it, on a bare rice-field. There were a few villages about, dotted here and there in the swamp, and the people of these were all that came to our festival. For long before the villages were preparing for it, saving a little money here, doing a little extra work there, so that they might be able to have presents ready for the monks, so that they might be able to subscribe to the lights, so that they would have a good dress in which they might appear. The men did a little more work at the fields, bamboo-cutting in the forest, making baskets in the evening, and the women wove. All had to work very hard to have even a little margin; for there, although food--plain rice--was very cheap, all other things were very expensive. It was so far to bring them, and the roads were so bad. I remember that the only European things to be bought there then were matches and tinned milk, and copper money was not known. You paid a rupee, and took the change in rice or other commodities. The excitement of the great day of the full moon began in the morning, about ten o'clock, with the offerings to the monks. Outside the village gate there was a piece of straight road, dry and open, and on each side of this, in rows, were the people with their gifts; mostly they were eatables. You see that it is very difficult to find any variety of things to give a monk; he is very strictly limited in the things he is allowed to receive. Garments, yellow garments, curtains to partition off corners of the monasteries and keep away the draughts, sacred books and eatables--that is nearly all. But eatables allow a very wide range. A monk may accept and eat any food--not drink, of course--provided he eat but the one big meal a day before noon; and so most of the offerings were eatables. Each donor knelt there upon the road with his or her offerings in a tray in front. There was rice cooked in all sorts of shapes, ordinary rice for eating with curry, and the sweet purple rice, cooked in bamboos and coming out in sticks. There were vegetables, too, of very many kinds, and sugar and cakes and oil and honey, and many other such things. There were a few, very few, books, for they are very hard to get, being all in manuscript; and there were one or two tapestry curtains; but there were heaps of flowers. I remember there was one girl whose whole offering was a few orchid sprays, and a little, very little, heap of common rice. She was so poor; her father and mother were dead, and she was not married. It was all she could give. She sat behind her little offering, as did all the donors. And my gift? Well, although an English official, I was not then very much richer than the people about me, so my gift must be small, too--a tin of biscuits, a tin or two of jam, a new pair of scissors. I did not sit behind them myself, but gave them to the headman to put with his offerings; for the monks were old friends of mine. Did I not live in one of their monasteries for over two months when we first came and camped there with a cavalry squadron? And if there is any merit in such little charity, as the Burmese say there is, why should I not gain it, too? The monks said my present was best of all, because it was so uncommon; and the biscuits, they said, though they did not taste of much while you were eating them, had a very pleasant after-taste that lasted a long time. They were like charity, maybe: that has a pleasant after-taste, too, they tell me. When all the presents, with the donors behind them, dressed all in their best, were ready, the monks came. There were four monasteries near by, and the monks, perhaps in all thirty, old and young, monks and novices, came in one long procession, walking very slowly, with downcast eyes, between the rows of gifts and givers. They did not look at them at all. It is not proper for a monk to notice the gifts he receives; but schoolboys who came along behind attending on them, they saw and made remarks. Perhaps they saw the chance of some overflow of these good things coming their way. 'See,' one nudged the other; 'honey--what a lot! I can smell it, can't you?' And, '_My mother!_ what a lot of sweet rice. Who gave that? Oh, I see, old U Hman.' 'I wonder what's in that tin box?' remarked one as he passed my biscuits. 'I hope it's coming to our monastery, any way.' Thus the monks passed, paying no sort of attention, while the people knelt to them; and when the procession reached the end of the line of offerings, it went on without stopping, across the fields, the monks of each monastery going to their own place; and the givers of presents rose up and followed them, each carrying his or her gifts. And so they went across the fields till each little procession was lost to sight. That was all the ceremony for the day, but at dusk the illuminations began. The little pagoda in the fields was lighted up nearly to its top with concentric rings of lamps till it blazed like a pyramid of flame, seen far across the night. All the people came there, and placed little offerings of flowers at the foot of the pagoda, or added each his candle to the big illumination. The house of the headman of the village was lit up with a few rows of lamps, and all the monasteries, too, were lit. There were no restaurants--everyone was at home, you see--but there were one or two little stalls, at which you could buy a cheroot, or even perhaps a cup of vermicelli; and there was a dance. It was only the village girls who had been taught, partly by their own mothers, partly by an old man, who knew something of the business. They did not dance very well, perhaps; they were none of them very beautiful; but what matter? We knew them all; they were our neighbours, the kinswomen of half the village; everyone liked to see them dance, to hear them sing; they were all young, and are not all young girls pretty? And amongst the audience were there not the girls' relations, their sisters, their lovers? would not that alone make the girls dance well, make the audience enthusiastic? And so, what with the illuminations, and the chat and laughter of friends, and the dance, we kept it up till very late; and we all went to bed happy and well pleased with each other, well pleased with ourselves. Can you imagine a more successful end than that? To write about these festivals is so pleasant, it brings back so many delightful memories, that I could go on writing for long and long. But there is no use in doing so, as they are all very much alike, with little local differences depending on the enterprise of the inhabitants and the situation of the place. There might be boat-races, perhaps, on a festival day, or pony-races, or boxing. I have seen all these, if not at the festival at the end of Lent, at other festivals. I remember once I was going up the river on a festival night by the full moon, and we saw point after point crowned with lights upon the pagodas; and as we came near the great city we saw a new glory; for there was a boat anchored in mid-stream, and from this boat there dropped a stream of fire; myriads of little lamps burned on tiny rafts that drifted down the river in a golden band. There were every now and then bigger rafts, with figures made in light--boats and pagodas and monasteries. The lights heaved with the long swell of the great river, and bent to and fro like a great snake following the tides, until at length they died far away into the night. I do not know what is the meaning of all these lights; I do not know that they have any inner meaning, only that the people are very glad, only that they greatly honour the great teacher who died so long ago, only that they are very fond of light and colour and laughter and all beautiful things. But although these festivals often become also fairs, although they are the great centres for amusement, although the people look to them as their great pleasure of the year, it must not be forgotten that they are essentially religious feasts, holy days. Though there be no great ceremony of prayer, or of thanksgiving, no public joining in any religious ceremony, save, perhaps, the giving of alms to the monks, yet religion is the heart and soul of them. Their centre is the pagoda, their meaning is a religious meaning. What if the people make merry, too, if they make their holy days into holidays, is that any harm? For their pleasures are very simple, very innocent; there is nothing that the moon, even the cold and distant moon, would blush to look upon. The people make merry because they are merry, because their religion is to them a very beautiful thing, not to be shunned or feared, but to be exalted to the eye of day, to be rejoiced in. CHAPTER XIV WOMEN--I 'Her cheek is more beautiful than the dawn, her eyes are deeper than the river pools; when she loosens her hair upon her shoulders, it is as night coming over the hills.'--_Burmese Love-Song._ If you were to ask a Burman 'What is the position of women in Burma?' he would reply that he did not know what you meant. Women have no position, no fixed relation towards men beyond that fixed by the fact that women are women and men are men. They differ a great deal in many ways, so a Burman would say; men are better in some things, women are better in others; if they have a position, their relative superiority in certain things determines it. How else should it be determined? If you say by religion, he laughs, and asks what religion has to do with such things? Religion is a culture of the soul; it is not concerned with the relationship of men and women. If you say by law, he says that law has no more to do with it than religion. In the eye of the law both are alike. 'You wouldn't have one law for a man and another for a woman?' he asks. In the life of the Buddha nothing is said upon the subject. The great teacher never committed himself to an opinion as to whether men or women were the highest. He had men disciples, he had women disciples; he honoured both. Nowhere in any of his sayings can anything be found to show that he made any difference between them. That monks should be careful and avoid intercourse with women is merely the counterpart of the order that nuns should be careful in their intercourse with men. That man's greatest attraction is woman does not infer wickedness in woman; that woman's greatest attraction is man does not show that man is a devil. Wickedness is a thing of your own heart. If he could be sure that his desire towards women was dead, a monk might see them as much as he liked. The desire is the enemy, not the woman; therefore a woman is not damned because by her man is often tempted to evil; therefore a woman is not praised because by her a man may be led to better thoughts. She is but the outer and unconscious influence. If, for instance, you cannot see a precipice without wishing to throw yourself down, you blame not the precipice, but your giddiness; and if you are wise you avoid precipices in future. You do not rail against steep places because you have a bad circulation. So it is with women: you should not contemn women because they rouse a devil in man. And it is the same with man. Men and women are alike subject to the eternal laws. And they are alike subject to the laws of man; in no material points, hardly even in minor points, does the law discriminate against women. The law as regards marriage and inheritance and divorce will come each in its own place. It is curiously the same both for the man and the woman. The criminal law was the same for both; I have tried to find any difference, and this is all I have found: A woman's life was less valuable than a man's. The price of the body, as it is called, of a woman was less than that of a man. If a woman were accidentally killed, less compensation had to be paid than for a man. I asked a Burman about this once. 'Why is this difference?' I said. 'Why does the law discriminate?' 'It isn't the law,' he said, 'it is a fact. A woman is worth less than a man in that way. A maidservant can be hired for less than a manservant, a daughter can claim less than a son. They cannot do so much work; they are not so strong. If they had been worth more, the law would have been the other way; of course they are worth less.' And so this sole discrimination is a fact, not dogma. It is a fact, no doubt, everywhere. No one would deny it. The pecuniary value of a woman is less than that of a man. As to the soul's value, that is not a question of law, which confines itself to material affairs. But I suppose all laws have been framed out of the necessities of mankind. It was the incessant fighting during the times when our laws grew slowly into shape, the necessity of not allowing the possession of land, and the armed wealth that land gave, to fall into the weaker hands of women, that led to our laws of inheritance. Laws then were governed by the necessity of war, of subjecting everything else to the ability to fight. Consequently, as women were not such good fighters as men, they went to the wall. But feudalism never obtained at all in Burma. What fighting they did was far less severe than that of our ancestors, was not the dominant factor in the position, and consequently woman did not suffer. She has thus been given the inestimable boon of freedom. Freedom from sacerdotal dogma, from secular law, she has always had. And so, in order to preserve the life of the people, it has never been necessary to pass laws treating woman unfairly as regards inheritance; and as religion has left her free to find her own position, so has the law of the land. And yet the Burman man has a confirmed opinion that he is better than a woman, that men are on the whole superior as a sex to women. 'We may be inferior in some ways,' he will tell you. 'A woman may steal a march on us here and there, but in the long-run the man will always win. Women have no patience.' I have heard this said over and over again, even by women, that they have less patience than a man. We have often supposed differently. Some Burmans have even supposed that a woman must be reincarnated as a man to gain a step in holiness. I do not mean that they think men are always better than women, but that the best men are far better than the best women, and there are many more of them. However all this may be, it is only an opinion. Neither in their law, nor in their religion, nor--what is far more important--in their daily life, do they acknowledge any inferiority in women beyond those patent weaknesses of body that are, perhaps, more differences than inferiorities. And so she has always had fair-play, from religion, from law, and from her fellow man and woman. She has been bound by no ties, she has had perfect freedom to make for herself just such a life as she thinks best fitted for her. She has had no frozen ideals of a long dead past held up to her as eternal copies. She has been allowed to change as her world changed, and she has lived in a very real world--a world of stern facts, not fancies. You see, she has had to fight her own way; for the same laws that made woman lower than man in Europe compensated her to a certain extent by protection and guidance. In Burma she has been neither confined nor guided. In Europe and India for very long the idea was to make woman a hot-house plant, to see that no rough winds struck her, that no injuries overtook her. In Burma she has had to look out for herself: she has had freedom to come to grief as well as to come to strength. You see, all such laws cut both ways. Freedom to do ill must accompany freedom to do well. You cannot have one without the other. The Burmese woman has had both. Ideals act for good as well as for evil; if they cramp all progress, they nevertheless tend to the sustentation of a certain level of thought. She has had none. Whatever she is, she has made herself, finding under the varying circumstances of life what is the best for her; and as her surroundings change, so will she. What she was a thousand years ago I do not care, what she may be a thousand years hence I do not know; it is of what she is to-day that I have tried to know and write. Children in Burma have, I think, a very good time when they are young. Parentage in Burma has never degenerated into a sort of slavery. It has never been supposed that gaiety and goodness are opposed. And so they grow up little merry naked things, sprawling in the dust of the gardens, sleeping in the sun with their arms round the village dogs, very sedate, very humorous, very rarely crying. Boys and girls when they are babies grow up together, but with the schooldays comes a division. All the boys go to school at the monastery without the walls, and there learn in noisy fashion their arithmetic, letters, and other useful knowledge. But little girls have nowhere to go. They cannot go to the monasteries, these are for boys alone, and the nunneries are very scarce. For twenty monasteries there is not one nunnery. Women do not seem to care to learn to become nuns as men do to become monks. Why this is so I cannot tell, but there is no doubt of the fact. And so there are no schools for girls as there are for boys, and consequently the girls are not well educated as a rule. In great towns there are, of course, regular schools for girls, generally for girls and boys together; but in the villages these very seldom exist. The girls may learn from their mothers how to read and write, but most of them cannot do so. It is an exception in country places to find a girl who can read, as it is to find a boy who cannot. If there were more nunneries, there would be more education among the women; here is cause and effect. But there are not, so the little girls work instead. While their brothers are in the monasteries, the girls are learning to weave and herd cattle, drawing water, and collecting firewood. They begin very young at this work, but it is very light; they are never overworked, and so it does them no harm usually, but good. The daughters of better-class people, such as merchants, and clerks, and advocates, do not, of course, work at field labour. They usually learn to read and write at home, and they weave, and many will draw water. For to draw water is to go to the well, and the well is the great meeting-place of the village. As they fill their jars they lean over the curb and talk, and it is here that is told the latest news, the latest flirtation, the little scandal of the place. Very few men or boys come for water; carrying is not their duty, and there is a proper place for flirtation. So the girls have the well almost to themselves. Almost every girl can weave. In many houses there are looms where the girls weave their dresses and those of their parents; and many girls have stalls in the bazaar. Of this I will speak later. Other duties are the husking of rice and the making of cheroots. Of course, in richer households there will be servants to do all this; but even in them the daughter will frequently weave either for herself or her parents. Almost every girl will do something, if only to pass the time. You see, they have no accomplishments. They do not sing, nor play, nor paint. It must never be forgotten that their civilization is relatively a thousand years behind ours. Accomplishments are part of the polish that a civilization gives, and this they have not yet reached. Accomplishments are also the means to fill up time otherwise unoccupied; but very few Burmese girls have any time on their hands. There is no leisured class, and there are very few girls who have not to help, in one way or another, at the upkeep of the household. Mr. Rudyard Kipling tells of an astonishing young lady who played the banjo. He has been more fortunate than myself, for I have never had such good luck. They have no accomplishments at all. Housekeeping they have not very much of. You see, houses are small, and households also are small; there is very little furniture; and as the cooking is all the same, there is not much to learn in that way. I fear, too, that their houses could not compete as models of neatness with any other nation. Tidiness is one of the last gifts of civilization. We now pride ourselves on our order; we forget how very recent an accomplishment it is. To them it will come with the other gifts of age, for it must never be forgotten that they are a very young people--only children, big children--learning very slowly the lessons of experience and knowledge. When they are between eight and fourteen years of age the boys become monks for a time, as every boy must, and they have a great festival at their entrance into the monastery. Girls do not enter nunneries, but they, too, have a great feast in their honour. They have their ears bored. It is a festival for a girl of great importance, this ear-boring, and, according to the wealth of the parents, it is accompanied by pwès and other rejoicings. A little girl, the daughter of a shopkeeper here in this town, had her ears bored the other day, and there were great rejoicings. There was a pwè open to all for three nights, and there were great quantities of food, and sweets, and many presents given away, and on the last night the river was illuminated. There was a boat anchored in mid-stream, and from this were launched myriads of tiny rafts, each with a little lamp on board. The lamps gleamed bright with golden light as they drifted on the bosom of the great water, a moving line of living fire. There were little boats, too, with the outlines marked with lamps, and there were pagodas and miniature houses all floating, floating down the river, till, in far distance by the promontory, the lamps flickered out one by one, and the river fell asleep again. 'There is only one great festival in a girl's life,' a woman told me. 'We try to make it as good as we can. Boys have many festivals, girls have but one. It is only just that it should be good.' And so they grow up very quiet, very sedate, looking on the world about them with very clear eyes. It is strange, talking to Burmese girls, to see how much they know and understand of the world about them. It is to them no great mystery, full of unimaginable good and evil, but a world that they are learning to understand, and where good and evil are never unmixed. Men are to them neither angels nor devils, but just men, and so the world does not hold for them the disappointments, the disillusionings, that await those who do not know. They have their dreams--who shall doubt it?--dreams of him who shall love them, whom they shall love, who shall make life one great glory to them; but their dreams are dreams that can come true. They do not frame to themselves ideals out of their own ignorance and imagine these to be good, but they keep their eyes wide open to the far more beautiful realities that are around them every day. They know that a living lover is greater, and truer, and better than any ideal of a girl's dream. They live in a real world, and they know that it is good. In time the lover comes. There is a delightful custom all through Burma, an institution, in fact, called 'courting-time.' It is from nine till ten o'clock, more especially on moonlight nights, those wonderful tropic nights, when the whole world lies in a silver dream, when the little wandering airs that touch your cheek like a caress are heavy with the scent of flowers, and your heart comes into your throat for the very beauty of life. There is in front of every house a veranda, raised perhaps three feet from the ground, and there the girl will sit in the shadow of the eaves, sometimes with a friend, but usually alone; and her suitors will come and stand by the veranda, and talk softly in little broken sentences, as lovers do. There maybe be many young men come, one by one, if they mean business, with a friend if it be merely a visit of courtesy. And the girl will receive them all, and will talk to them all; will laugh with a little humorous knowledge of each man's peculiarities; and she may give them cheroots, of her own making; and, for one perhaps, for one, she will light the cheroot herself first, and thus kiss him by proxy. And is the girl alone? Well, yes. To all intents and purposes she is alone; but there is always someone near, someone within call, for the veranda is free to all. She cannot tell who may come, and some men, as we know, are but wolves in sheep's clothing. Usually marriages are arranged by the parents. Girls are not very different here to elsewhere; they are very biddable, and ready to do what their mothers tell them, ready to believe that it is the best. And so if a lad comes wooing, and can gain the mother's ear, he can usually win the girl's affection, too; but I think there are more exceptions here than elsewhere. Girls are freer; they fall in love of their own accord oftener than elsewhere; they are very impulsive, full of passion. Love is a very serious matter, and they are not trained in self-restraint. There are very many romances played out every day in the dusk beside the well, in the deep shadows of the palm-groves, in the luminous nights by the river shore--romances that end sometimes well, sometimes in terrible tragedies. For they are a very passionate people; the language is full of little love-songs, songs of a man to a girl, of a girl to a man. 'No girl,' a woman once told me, 'no good, quiet girl would tell a man she loved him first.' It may be so; if this be true, I fear there are many girls here who are not good and quiet. How many romances have I not seen in which the wooing began with the girl, with a little note perhaps, with a flower, with a message sent by someone whom she could trust! Of course many of these turned out well. Parents are good to their children, and if they can, they will give their daughter the husband of her choice. They remember what youth is--nay, they themselves never grow old, I think; they never forget what once was to them now is to their children. So if it be possible all may yet go well. Social differences are not so great as with us, and the barrier is easily overcome. I have often known servants in a house marry the daughters, and be taken into the family; but, of course, sometimes things do not go so smoothly. And then? Well, then there is usually an elopement, and a ten days' scandal; and sometimes, too, there is an elopement for no reason at all save that hot youth cannot abide the necessary delay. For life is short, and though to-day be to us, who can tell for the morrow? During the full moon there is no night, only a change to silver light from golden; and the forest is full of delight. There are wood-cutters' huts in the ravines where the water falls, soft beds of torn bracken and fragrant grasses where great trees make a shelter from the heat; and for food, that is easily arranged. A basket of rice with a little salt-fish and spices is easily hidden in a favourable place. You only want a jar to cook it, and there is enough for two for a week; or it is brought day by day by some trusted friend to a place previously agreed upon. All up and down the forest there are flowers for her hair, scarlet dak blossoms and orchid sprays and jasmine stars; and for occupation through the hours each has a new world to explore full of wonderful undreamt-of discoveries, lit with new light and mysterious with roseate shadows, a world of 'beautiful things made new' for those forest children. So that when the confidante, an aunt maybe or a sister, meets them by the sacred fig-tree on the hill, and tells them that all difficulties are removed, and their friends called together for the marriage, can you wonder that it is not without regret that they fare forth from that enchanted land to ordinary life again? It is, as I have said, not always the man who is the proposer of the flight. Nay, I think indeed that it is usually the girl. 'Men have more patience.' I had a Burmese servant, a boy, who may have been twenty, and he had been with me a year, and was beginning to be really useful. He had at last grasped the idea that electro-plate should not be cleaned with monkey-brand soap, and he could be trusted not to put up rifle cartridges for use with a double-barrelled gun; and he chose this time to fall in love with the daughter of the headman of a certain village where I was in camp. He had good excuse, for she was a delicious little maiden with great coils of hair, and the voice of a wood-pigeon cooing in the forest, and she was very fond of him, without a doubt. So one evening he came to me and said that he must leave me--that he wanted to get married, and could not possibly delay. Then I spoke to him with all that depth of wisdom we are so ready to display for the benefit of others. I pointed out to him that he was much too young, that she was much too young also--she was not eighteen--and that there was absolutely nothing for them to marry on. I further pointed out how ungrateful it would be of him to leave me; that he had been paid regularly for a year, and that it was not right that now, when he was at last able to do something besides destroy my property, he should go away. The boy listened to all I had to say, and agreed with it all, and made the most fervent and sincere promise to be wise; and he went away after dinner to see the girl and tell her, and when I awoke in the morning my other servants told me the boy had not returned. Shortly afterwards the headman came to say that his daughter had also disappeared. They had fled, those two, into the forest, and for a week we heard nothing. At last one evening, as I sat under the great fig-tree by my tent, there came to me the mother of the girl, and she sat down before me, and said she had something of great importance to impart: and this was that all had been arranged between the families, who had found work for the boy whereby he might maintain himself and his wife, and the marriage was arranged. But the boy would not return as long as I was in camp there, for he was bitterly ashamed of his broken vows and afraid to meet my anger. And so the mother begged me to go away as soon as I could, that the young couple might return. I explained that I was not angry at all, that the boy could return without any fear; on the contrary, that I should be pleased to see him and his wife. And, at the old lady's request, I wrote a Burmese letter to that effect, and she went away delighted. They must have been in hiding close by, for it was early next morning that the boy came into my tent alone and very much abashed, and it was some little time before he could recover himself and talk freely as he would before, for he was greatly ashamed of himself. But, after all, could he help it? If you can imagine the tropic night, and the boy, full of high resolve, passing up the village street, now half asleep, and the girl, with shining eyes, coming to him out of the hibiscus shadows, and whispering in his ear words--words that I need not say--if you imagine all that, you will understand how it was that I lost my servant. They both came to see me later on in the day after the marriage, and there was no bashfulness about either of them then. They came hand-in-hand, with the girl's father and mother and some friends, and she told me it was all her fault: she could not wait. 'Perhaps,' she said, with a little laugh and a side-glance at her husband--'perhaps, if he had gone with the thakin to Rangoon, he might have fallen in love with someone there and forgotten me; for I know they are very pretty, those Rangoon ladies, and of better manners than I, who am but a jungle girl.' And when I asked her what it was like in the forest, she said it was the most beautiful place in all the world. Things do not always go so well. Parents may be obdurate, and flight be impossible; or even her love may not be returned, and then terrible things happen. I have held, not once nor twice alone, inquests over the bodies, the fair, innocent bodies, of quite young girls who died for love. Only that, because their love was unreturned; and so the sore little heart turned in her trouble to the great river, and gave herself and her hot despair to the cold forgetfulness of its waters. They love so greatly that they cannot face a world where love is not. All the country is full of the romance of love--of love passionate and great as woman has ever felt. It seems to me here that woman has something of the passions of man, not only the enduring affection of a woman, but the hot love and daring of a man. It is part of their heritage, perhaps, as a people in their youth. One sees so much of it, hears so much of it, here. I have seen a girl in man's attire killed in a surprise attack upon an insurgent camp. She had followed her outlawed lover there, and in the mêlée she caught up sword and gun to fight by his side, and was cut down through neck and shoulder; for no one could tell in the early dawn that it was a girl. She died about an hour afterwards, and though I have seen many sorrowful things in many lands, in war and out of it, the memory of that dying girl, held up by one of the mounted police, sobbing out her life beneath the wild forest shadow, with no one of her sex, no one of her kin to help her, comes back to me as one of the saddest and strangest. Her lover was killed in action some time later fighting against us, and he died as a brave man should, his face to his enemy. He played his game, he lost, and paid; but the girl? I have seen and heard so much of this love of women and of its tragedies. Perhaps it is that to us it is usually the tragedies that are best remembered. Happiness is void of interest. And this love may be, after all, a good thing. But I do not know. Sometimes I think they would be happier if they could love less, if they could take love more quietly, more as a matter of course, as something that has to be gone through, as part of a life's training; not as a thing that swallows up all life and death and eternity in one passion. In Burmese the love-songs are in a short, sweet rhythm, full of quaint conceits and word-music. I cannot put them into English verse, or give the flow of the originals in a translation. It always seems to me that Don Quixote was right when he said that a translation was like the wrong side of an embroidered cloth, giving the design without the beauty. But even in the plain, rough outline of a translation there is beauty here, I think: _From a Man to a Girl._ The moon wooed the lotus in the night, the lotus was wooed by the moon, and my sweetheart is their child. The blossom opened in the night, and she came forth; the petals moved, and she was born. She is more beautiful than any blossom; her face is as delicate as the dusk; her hair is as night falling over the hills; her skin is as bright as the diamond. She is very full of health, no sickness can come near her. When the wind blows I am afraid, when the breezes move I fear. I fear lest the south wind take her, I tremble lest the breath of evening woo her from me--so light is she, so graceful. Her dress is of gold, even of silk and gold, and her bracelets are of fine gold. She hath precious stones in her ears, but her eyes, what jewels can compare unto them? She is proud, my mistress; she is very proud, and all men are afraid of her. She is so beautiful and so proud that all men fear her. In the whole world there is none anywhere that can compare unto her. CHAPTER XV WOMEN--II 'The husband is lord of the wife.' _Laws of Manu._ Marriage is not a religious ceremony among the Burmese. Religion has no part in it at all; as religion has refrained from interfering with Government, so does it in the relations of man and wife. Marriage is purely a worldly business, like entering into partnership; and religion, the Buddhist religion, has nothing to do with such things. Those who accept the teachings of the great teacher in all their fulness do not marry. Indeed, marriage is not a ceremony at all. It is strange to find that the Burmese have actually no necessary ceremonial. The Laws of Manu, which are the laws governing all such matters, make no mention of any marriage ceremony; it is, in fact, a status. Just as two men may go into partnership in business without executing any deed, so a man and a woman may enter into the marriage state without undergoing any form. Amongst the richer Burmese there is, however, sometimes a ceremony. Friends are called to the wedding, and a ribbon is stretched round the couple, and then their hands are clasped; they also eat out of the same dish. All this is very pretty, but not at all necessary. It is, indeed, not a settled point in law what constitutes a marriage, but there are certain things that will render it void. For instance, no marriage can be a marriage without the consent of the girl's parents if she be under age, and there are certain other conditions which must be fulfilled. But although there be this doubt about the actual ceremony of marriage, there is none at all about the status. There is no confusion between a woman who is married and a woman who is not. The condition of marriage is well known, and it brings the parties under the laws that pertain to husband and wife. A woman not married does not, of course, obtain these privileges; there is a very strict line between the two. Amongst the poorer people a marriage is frequently kept secret for several days. The great pomp and ceremony which with us, and occasionally with a few rich Burmese, consecrate a man and a woman to each other for life, are absent at the greater number of Burmese marriages; and the reason they tell me is that the girl is shy. She does not like to be stared at, and wondered at, as a maiden about to be a wife; it troubles her that the affairs of her heart, her love, her marriage, should be so public. The young men come at night and throw stones upon the house roof, and demand presents from the bridegroom. He does not mind giving the presents; but he, too, does not like the publicity. And so marriage, which is with most people a ceremony performed in full daylight with all accessories of display, is with the Burmese generally a secret. Two or three friends, perhaps, will be called quietly to the house, and the man and woman will eat together, and thus become husband and wife. Then they will separate again, and not for several days, or even weeks perhaps, will it be known that they are married; for it is seldom that they can set up house for themselves just at once. Often they will marry and live apart for a time with their parents. Sometimes they will go and live together with the man's parents, but more usually with the girl's mother. Then after a time, when they have by their exertions made a little money, they build a house and go to live there; but sometimes they will live on with the girl's parents for years. A girl does not change her name when she marries, nor does she wear any sign of marriage, such as a ring. Her name is always the same, and there is nothing to a stranger to denote whether she be married or not, or whose wife she is; and she keeps her property as her own. Marriage does not confer upon the husband any power over his wife's property, either what she brings with her, what she earns, or what she inherits subsequently; it all remains her own, as does his remain his own. But usually property acquired after marriage is held jointly. You will inquire, for instance, who is the owner of this garden, and be told Maung Han, Ma Shwè, the former being the husband's name and the latter the wife's. Both names are used very frequently in business and in legal proceedings, and indeed it is usual for both husband and wife to sign all deeds they may have occasion to execute. Nothing more free than a woman's position in the marriage state can be imagined. By law she is absolutely the mistress of her own property and her own self; and if it usually happens that the husband is the head of the house, that is because his nature gives him that position, not any law. With us marriage means to a girl an utter breaking of her old ties, the beginning of a new life, of new duties, of new responsibilities. She goes out into a new and unknown world, full of strange facts, leaving one dependence for another, the shelter of a father for the shelter of a husband. She has even lost her own name, and becomes known but as the mistress of her husband; her soul is merged in his. But in Burma it is not so at all. She is still herself, still mistress of herself, an equal partner for life. I have said that the Burmese have no ideals, and this is true; but in the Laws of Manu there are laid down some of the requisite qualities for a perfect wife. There are seven kinds of wife, say the Laws of Manu: a wife like a thief, like an enemy, like a master, like a friend, like a sister, like a mother, like a slave. The last four of these are good, but the last is the best, and these are some of her qualities: 'She should fan and soothe her master to sleep, and sit by him near the bed on which he lies. She will fear and watch lest anything should disturb him. Every noise will be a terror to her; the hum of a mosquito as the blast of a trumpet; the fall of a leaf without will sound as loud as thunder. Even she will guard her breath as it passes her lips to and fro, lest she awaken him whom she fears. 'And she will remember that when he awakens he will have certain wants. She will be anxious that the bath be to his custom, that his clothes are as he wishes, that his food is tasteful to him. Always she will have before her the fear of his anger.' It must be remembered that the Laws of Manu are of Indian origin, and are not totally accepted by the Burmese. I fear a Burmese girl would laugh at this ideal of a wife. She would say that if a wife were always afraid of her husband's wrath, she and he, too, must be poor things. A household is ruled by love and reverence, not by fear. A girl has no idea when she marries that she is going to be her husband's slave, but a free woman, yielding to him in those things in which he has most strength, and taking her own way in those things that pertain to a woman. She has a very keen idea of what things she can do best, and what things she should leave to her husband. Long experience has taught her that there are many things she should not interfere with; and she knows it is experience that has proved it, and not any command. She knows that the reason women are not supposed to interfere in public affairs is because their minds and bodies are not fitted for them. Therefore she accepts this, in the same way as she accepts physical inferiority, as a fact against which it is useless and silly to declaim, knowing that it is not men who keep her out, but her own unfitness. Moreover, she knows that it is made good to her in other ways, and thus the balance is redressed. You see, she knows her own strength and her own weakness. Can there be a more valuable knowledge for anyone than this? In many ways she will act for her husband with vigour and address, and she is not afraid of appearing in his name or her own in law courts, for instance, or in transacting certain kinds of business. She knows that she can do certain business as well as or better than her husband, and she does it. There is nothing more remarkable than the way in which she makes a division of these matters in which she can act for herself, and those in which, if she act at all, it is for her husband. Thus, as I have said, she will, as regards her own property or her own business, act freely in her own name, and will also frequently act for her husband too. They will both sign deeds, borrow money on joint security, lend money repayable to them jointly. But in public affairs she will never allow her name to appear at all. Not that she does not take a keen interest in such things. She lives in no world apart; all that affects her husband interests her as keenly as it does him. She lives in a world of men and women, and her knowledge of public affairs, and her desire and powers of influencing them, is great. But she learnt long ago that her best way is to act through and by her husband, and that his strength and his name are her bucklers in the fight. Thus women are never openly concerned in any political matters. How strong their feeling is can better be illustrated by a story than in any other way. In 1889 I was stationed far away on the north-west frontier of Burma, in charge of some four thousand square miles of territory which had been newly incorporated. I went up there with the first column that ever penetrated that country, and I remained there when, after the partial pacification of the district, the main body of the troops were withdrawn. It was a fairly exciting place to live in. To say nothing of the fever which swept down men in batches, and the trans-frontier people who were always peeping over to watch a good opportunity for a raid, my own charge simply swarmed with armed men, who seemed to rise out of the very ground--so hard was it to follow their movements--attack anywhere they saw fit, and disappear as suddenly. There was, of course, a considerable force of troops and police to suppress these insurgents, but the whole country was so roadless, so unexplored, such a tangled labyrinth of hill and forest, dotted with sparse villages, that it was often quite impossible to trace the bands who committed these attacks; and to the sick and weary pursuers it sometimes seemed as if we should never restore peace to the country. The villages were arranged in groups, and over each group there was a headman with certain powers and certain duties, the principal of the latter being to keep his people quiet, and, if possible, protect them from insurgents. Now, it happened that among these headmen was one named Saw Ka, who had been a free-lance in his day, but whose services were now enlisted on the side of order--or, at least, we hoped so. He was a fighting-man, and rather fond of that sort of exercise; so that I was not much surprised one day when I got a letter from him to say that his villagers had pursued and arrested, after a fight, a number of armed robbers, who had tried to lift some of the village cattle. The letter came to me when I was in my court-house, a tent ten feet by eight, trying a case. So, saying I would see Saw Ka's people later, and giving orders for the prisoners to be put in the lock-up, I went on with my work. When my case was finished, I happened to notice that among those sitting and waiting without my tent-door was Saw Ka himself, so I sent to call him in, and I complimented him upon his success. 'It shall be reported,' I said, 'to the Commissioner, who will, no doubt, reward you for your care and diligence in the public service.' As I talked I noticed that the man seemed rather bewildered, and when I had finished he said that he really did not understand. He was aware, he added modestly, that he was a diligent headman, always active in good deeds, and a terror to dacoits and other evil-doers; but as to these particular robbers and this fighting he was a little puzzled. I was considerably surprised, naturally, and I took from the table the Burmese letter describing the affair. It began, 'Your honour, I, Maung Saw Ka, headman,' etc., and was in the usual style. I handed it to Saw Ka, and told him to read it. As he read, his wicked black eyes twinkled, and when he had finished he said he had not been home for a week. 'I came in from a visit to the river,' he said, 'where I have gathered for your honour some private information. I had not been here five minutes before I was called in. All this the letter speaks of is news to me, and must have happened while I was away.' 'Then, who wrote the letter?' I asked. 'Ah!' he said, 'I think I know; but I will go and make sure.' Then Saw Ka went to find the guard who had come in with the prisoners, and I dissolved court and went out shooting. After dinner, as we sat round a great bonfire before the mess, for the nights were cold, Saw Ka and his brother came to me, and they sat down beside the fire and told me all about it. It appeared that three days after Saw Ka left his village, some robbers came suddenly one evening to a small hamlet some two miles away and looted from there all the cattle, thirty or forty head, and went off with them. The frightened owners came in to tell the headman about it, and in his absence they told his wife. And she, by virtue of the order of appointment as headman, which was in her hands, ordered the villagers to turn out and follow the dacoits. She issued such government arms as she had in the house, and the villagers went and pursued the dacoits by the cattle tracks, and next day they overtook them, and there was a fight. When the villagers returned with the cattle and the thieves, she had the letter written to me, and the prisoners were sent in, under her husband's brother, with an escort. Everything was done as well, as successfully, as if Saw Ka himself had been present. But if it had not been for the accident of Saw Ka's sudden appearance, I should probably never have known that this exploit was due to his wife; for she was acting for her husband, and she would not have been pleased that her name should appear. 'A good wife,' I said to Saw Ka. 'Like many,' he answered. But in her own line she has no objection to publicity. I have said that nearly all women work, and that is so. Married or unmarried, from the age of sixteen or seventeen, almost every woman has some occupation besides her own duties. In the higher classes she will have property of her own to manage; in the lower classes she will have some trade. I cannot find that in Burma there have ever been certain occupations told off for women in which they may work, and others tabooed to them. As there is no caste for the men, so there is none for the women. They have been free to try their hands at anything they thought they could excel in, without any fear of public opinion. But nevertheless, as is inevitable, it has been found that there are certain trades in which women can compete successfully with men, and certain others in which they cannot. And these are not quite the same as in the West. We usually consider sewing to be a feminine occupation. In Burma, there being no elaborately cut and trimmed garments, the amount of sewing done is small, but that is usually done by men. Women often own and use small hand-machines, but the treadles are always used by men only. As I am writing, my Burmese orderly is sitting in the garden sewing his jacket. He is usually sewing when not sent on messages. He seems to sew very well. Weaving is usually done by women. Under nearly every house there will be a loom, where the wife or daughter weaves for herself or for sale. But many men weave also, and the finest silks are all woven by men. I once asked a woman why they did not weave the best silks, instead of leaving them all to the men. 'Men do them better,' she said, with a laugh. 'I tried once, but I cannot manage that embroidery.' They also work in the fields--light work, such as weeding and planting. The heavy work, such as ploughing, is done by men. They also work on the roads carrying things, as all Oriental women do. It is curious that women carry always on their heads, men always on their shoulders. I do not know why. But the great occupation of women is petty trading. I have already said that there are few large merchants among the Burmese. Nearly all the retail trade is small, most of it is very small indeed, and practically the whole of it is in the hands of the women. Women do not often succeed in any wholesale trade. They have not, I think, a wide enough grasp of affairs for that. Their views are always somewhat limited; they are too pennywise and pound-foolish for big businesses. The small retail trade, gaining a penny here and a penny there, just suits them, and they have almost made it a close profession. This trade is almost exclusively done in bazaars. In every town there is a bazaar, from six till ten each morning. When there is no town near, the bazaar will be held on one day at one village and on another at a neighbouring one. It depends on the density of population, the means of communication, and other matters. But a bazaar within reach there must always be, for it is only there that most articles can be bought. The bazaar is usually held in a public building erected for the purpose, and this may vary from a great market built of brick and iron to a small thatched shed. Sometimes, indeed, there is no building at all, merely a space of beaten ground. The great bazaar in Mandalay is one of the sights of the city. The building in which it is held is the property of the municipality, but is leased out. It is a series of enormous sheds, with iron roofs and beaten earth floor. Each trade has a shed or sheds to itself. There is a place for rice-sellers, for butchers, for vegetable-sellers, for the vendors of silks, of cottons, of sugars and spices, of firewood, of jars, of fish. The butchers are all natives of India. I have explained elsewhere why this should be. The firewood-sellers will mostly be men, as will also the large rice-merchants, but nearly all the rest are women. You will find the sellers of spices, fruit, vegetables, and other such matters seated in long rows, on mats placed upon the ground. Each will have a square of space allotted, perhaps six feet square, and there she will sit with her merchandise in a basket or baskets before her. For each square they will pay the lessee a halfpenny for the day, which is only three hours or so. The time to go is in the morning from six till eight, for that is the busy time. Later on all the stalls will be closed, but in the early morning the market is thronged. Every householder is then buying his or her provisions for the day, and the people crowd in thousands round the sellers. Everyone is bargaining and chaffing and laughing, both buyers and sellers; but both are very keen, too, on business. The cloth and silk sellers, the large rice-merchants, and a few other traders, cannot carry on business sitting on a mat, nor can they carry their wares to and fro every day in a basket. For such there are separate buildings or separate aisles, with wooden stalls, on either side of a gangway. The wooden floor of the stalls is raised two to three feet, so that the buyer, standing on the ground, is about on a level with the seller sitting in the stall. The stall will be about eight feet by ten, and each has at the back a strong lock-up cupboard or wardrobe, where the wares are shut at night; but in the day they will be taken out and arranged daintily about the girl-seller. Home-made silks are the staple--silks in checks of pink and white, of yellow and orange, of indigo and dark red. Some are embroidered in silk, in silver, or in gold; some are plain. All are thick and rich, none are glazed, and none are gaudy. There will also be silks from Bangkok, which are of two colours--purple shot with red, and orange shot with red, both very beautiful. All the silks are woven the size of the dress: for men, about twenty-eight feet long and twenty inches broad; and for women, about five feet long and much broader. Thus, there is no cutting off the piece. The _anas_, too, which are the bottom pieces for a woman's dress, are woven the proper size. There will probably, too, be piles of showy cambric jackets and gauzy silk handkerchiefs; but often these are sold at separate stalls. But prettier than the silks are the sellers, for these are nearly all girls and women, sweet and fresh in their white jackets, with flowers in their hair. And they are all delighted to talk to you and show you their goods, even if you do not buy; and they will take a compliment sedately, as a girl should, and they will probably charge you an extra rupee for it when you come to pay for your purchases. So it is never wise for a man, unless he have a heart of stone, to go marketing for silks. He should always ask a lady friend to go with him and do the bargaining, and he will lose no courtesy thereby, for these women know how to be courteous to fellow-women as well as to fellow-men. In the provincial bazaars it is much the same. There may be a few travelling merchants from Rangoon or Mandalay, most of whom are men; but nearly all the retailers are women. Indeed, speaking broadly, it may be said that the retail trade of the country is in the hands of the women, and they nearly all trade on their own account. Just as the men farm their own land, the women own their businesses. They are not saleswomen for others, but traders on their own account; and with the exception of the silk and cloth branches of the trade, it does not interfere with home-life. The bazaar lasts but three hours, and a woman has ample time for her home duties when her daily visit to the bazaar is over; she is never kept away all day in shops and factories. Her home-life is always the centre of her life; she could not neglect it for any other: it would seem to her a losing of the greater in the less. But the effect of this custom of nearly every woman having a little business of her own has a great influence on her life. It broadens her views; it teaches her things she could not learn in the narrow circle of home duties; it gives her that tolerance and understanding which so forcibly strikes everyone who knows her. It teaches her to know her own strength and weakness, and how to make the best of each. Above all, by showing her the real life about her, and how much beauty there is everywhere, to those whose eyes are not shut by conventions, it saves her from that dreary, weary pessimism that seeks its relief in fancied idealism, in a smattering of art, of literature, or of religion, and which is the curse of so many of her sisters in other lands. And yet, with all their freedom, Burmese women are very particular in their conduct. Do not imagine that young girls are allowed, or allow themselves, to go about alone except on very frequented roads. I suppose there are certain limits in all countries to the freedom a woman allows herself, that is to say, if she is wise. For she knows that she cannot always trust herself; she knows that she is weak sometimes, and she protects herself accordingly. She is timid, with a delightful timidity that fears, because it half understands; she is brave, with the bravery of a girl who knows that as long as she keeps within certain limits she is safe. Do not suppose that they ever do, or ever can, allow themselves that freedom of action that men have; it is an impossibility. Girls are very carefully looked after by their mothers, and wives by their husbands; and they delight in observing the limits which experience has indicated to them. There is a funny story which will illustrate what I mean. A great friend of mine, an officer in Government service, went home not very long ago and married, and came out again to Burma with his wife. They settled down in a little up-country station. His duties were such as obliged him to go very frequently on tour far away from his home, and he would be absent ten days at a time or more. So when it came for the first time that he was obliged to go out and leave his wife behind him alone in the house, he gave his head-servant very careful directions. This servant was a Burman who had been with him for many years, who knew all his ways, and who was a very good servant. He did not speak English; and my friend gave him strict orders. 'The mistress,' he said, 'has only just come here to Burma, and she does not know the ways of the country, nor what to do. So you must see that no harm comes to her in any way while I am in the jungle.' Then he gave directions as to what was to be done in any eventuality, and he went out. He was away for about a fortnight, and when he returned he found all well. The house had not caught fire, nor had thieves stolen anything, nor had there been any difficulty at all. The servant had looked after the other servants well, and my friend was well pleased. But his wife complained. 'It has been very dull,' she said, 'while you were away. No one came to see me; of all the officers here, not one ever called. I saw only two or three ladies, but not a man at all.' And my friend, surprised, asked his servant how it was. 'Didn't anyone come to call?' he asked. 'Oh yes,' the servant answered; 'many gentlemen came to call--the officers of the regiment and others. But I told them the thakin was out, and that the thakinma could not see anyone. I sent them all away.' At the club that evening my friend was questioned as to why in his absence no one was allowed to see his wife. The whole station laughed at him, but I think he and his wife laughed most of all at the careful observances of Burmese etiquette by the servant; for it is the Burmese custom for a wife not to receive in her husband's absence. Anyone who wants to see her must stay outside or in the veranda, and she will come out and speak to him. It would be a grave breach of decorum to receive visitors while her husband is out. So even a Burmese woman is not free from restrictions--restrictions which are merely rules founded upon experience. No woman, no man, can ever free herself or himself from the bonds that even a young civilization demands. A freedom from all restraint would be a return, not only to savagery, but to the condition of animals--nay, even animals are bound by certain conventions. The higher a civilization, the more conventions are required; and freedom does not mean an absence of all rules, but that all rules should be founded on experience and common-sense. There are certain restrictions on a woman's actions which must be observed as long as men are men and women women. That the Burmese woman never recognises them unless they are necessary, and then accepts the necessity as a necessity, is the fact wherein her freedom lies. If at any time she should recognise that a restriction was unnecessary, she would reject it. If experience told her further restrictions were required, she would accept them without a doubt. CHAPTER XVI WOMEN--III 'For women are very tender-hearted.' _Wethandaya._ 'You know, thakin,' said a man to me, 'that we say sometimes that women cannot attain unto the great deliverance, that only men will come there. We think that a woman must be born again as a man before she can enter upon the way that leads to heaven.' 'Why should that be so?' I asked. 'I have looked at the life of the Buddha, I have read the sacred books, and I can find nothing about it. What makes you think that?' He explained it in this way: 'Before a soul can attain deliverance it must renounce the world, it must have purified itself by wisdom and meditation from all the lust of the flesh. Only those who have done this can enter into the Great Peace. Many men do this. The country is full of monks, men who have left the world, and are trying to follow in the path of the great teacher. Not all these will immediately attain to heaven, for purification is a very long process; but they have entered into the path, they have seen the light, if it be even a long way off yet. They know whither they would go. But women, see how few become nuns! Only those who have suffered such shipwreck in life that this world holds nothing more for them worth having become nuns. And they are very few. For a hundred monks there is not one nun. Women are too attached to their home, to their fathers, their husbands, their children, to enter into the holy life; and, therefore, how shall they come to heaven except they return as men? Our teacher says nothing about it, but we have eyes, and we can see.' All this is true. Women have no desire for the holy life. They cannot tear themselves away from their home-life. If their passions are less than those of men, they have even less command over them than men have. Only the profoundest despair will drive a woman to a renunciation of the world. If on an average their lives are purer than those of men, they cannot rise to the heights to which men can. How many monks there are--how few nuns! Not one to a hundred. Yet in some ways women are far more religious than men. If you go to the golden pagoda on the hilltop and count the people kneeling there doing honour to the teacher, you will find they are nearly all women. If you go to the rest-houses by the monastery, where the monks recite the law on Sundays, you will find that the congregations are nearly all women. If you visit the monastery without the gate, you will see many visitors bringing little presents, and they will be women. 'Thakin, many men do not care for religion at all, but when a man does do so, he takes it very seriously. He follows it out to the end. He becomes a monk, and surrenders the whole world. But with women it is different. Many women, nearly all women, will like religion, and none will take it seriously. We mix it up with our home-life, and our affections, and our worldly doings; for we like a little of everything.' So said a woman to me. Is this always true? I do not know, but it is very true in Burma. Nearly all the women are religious, they like to go to the monastery and hear the law, they like to give presents to the monks, they like to visit the pagoda and adore Gaudama the Buddha. I am sure that if it were not for their influence the laws against taking life and against intoxicants would not be observed as stringently as they are. So far they will go. As far as they can use the precepts of religion and retain their home-life they will do so; as it was with Yathodaya so long ago, so it is now. But when religion calls them and says, 'Come away from the world, leave all that you love, all that your heart holds good, for it is naught; see the light, and prepare your soul for peace,' they hold back. This they cannot do; it is far beyond them. 'Thakin, we _cannot do so_. It would seem to us terrible,' that is what they say. A man who renounces the world is called 'the great glory,' but not so a woman. I have said that the Buddhist religion holds men and women as equal. If women can observe its laws as men do, it is surely their own fault if they be held the less worthy. Women themselves admit this. They honour a man greatly who becomes a monk, not so a nun. Nuns have but little consideration. And why? Because what is good for a man is not good for a woman; and if, indeed, renunciation of the world be the only path to the Great Peace, then surely it must be true that women must be born again. CHAPTER XVII DIVORCE 'They are to each other as a burning poison falling into a man's eye.'--_Burmese saying._ I remember a night not so long ago; it was in the hot weather, and I was out in camp with my friend the police-officer. It was past sunset, and the air beneath the trees was full of luminous gloom, though overhead a flush still lingered on the cheek of the night. We were sitting in the veranda of a Government rest-house, enjoying the first coolness of the coming night, and talking in disjointed sentences of many things; and there came up the steps of the house into the veranda a woman. She came forward slowly, and then sat down on the floor beside my friend, and began to speak. There was a lamp burning in an inner room, and a long bar of light came through the door and lit her face. I could see she was not good-looking, but that her eyes were full of tears, and her face drawn with trouble. I recognised who she was, the wife of the head-constable in charge of the guard near by, a woman I had noticed once or twice in the guard. She spoke so fast, so fast; the words fell over each other as they came from her lips, for her heart was very full. I sat quite still and said nothing; I think she hardly noticed I was there. It was all about her husband. Everything was wrong; all had gone crooked in their lives, and she did not know what she could do. At first she could hardly tell what it was all about, but at last she explained. For some years, three or four years, matters had not been very smooth between them. They had quarrelled often, she said, about this thing and the other, little things mostly; and gradually the rift had widened till it became very broad indeed. 'Perhaps,' she said, 'if I had been able to have a child it would have been different.' But fate was unkind and no baby came, and her husband became more and more angry with her. 'And yet I did all for the best, thakin; I always tried to act for the best. My husband has sisters at Henzada, and they write to him now and then, and say, "Send ten rupees," or "Send five rupees," or even twenty rupees. And I always say, "Send, send." Other wives would say, "No, we cannot afford it;" but I said always, "Send, send." I have always done for the best, always for the best.' It was very pitiable to hear her opening her whole heart, such a sore troubled heart, like this. Her words were full of pathos; her uncomely face was not beautified by the sorrow in it. And at last her husband took a second wife. 'She is a girl from a village near; the thakin knows, Taungywa. He did not tell me, but I soon heard of it; and although I thought my heart would break, I did not say anything. I told my husband, "Bring her here, let us live all together; it will be best so." I always did for the best, thakin. So he brought her, and she came to live with us a week ago. Ah, thakin, I did not know! She tramples on me. My head is under her feet. My husband does not care for me, only for her. And to-day, this evening, they went out together for a walk, and my husband took with him the concertina. As they went I could hear him play upon it, and they walked down through the trees, he playing and she leaning upon him. I heard the music.' Then she began to cry bitterly, sobbing as if her heart would break. The sunset died out of the sky, and the shadows took all the world and made it gray and dark. No one said anything, only the woman cried. 'Thakin,' she said at last, 'what am I to do? Tell me.' Then my friend spoke. 'You can divorce him,' he said; 'you can go to the elders and get a divorce. Won't that be best?' 'But, thakin, you do not know. We are both Christians; we are married for ever. We were both at the mission-school in Rangoon, and we were married there, "for ever and for ever," so the padre said. We are not married according to Burmese customs, but according to your religion; we are husband and wife for ever.' My friend said nothing. It seemed to him useless to speak to her of the High Court, five hundred miles away, and a decree nisi; it would have been a mockery of her trouble. 'Your husband had no right to take a second wife, if you are Christians and married,' he said. 'Ah,' she answered, 'we are Burmans; it is allowed by Burmese law. Other officials do it. What does my husband care that we were married by your law? Here we are alone with no other Christians near. But I would not mind so much,' she went on, 'only she treads me under her feet. And he takes her out and not me, who am the elder wife, and he plays music to her; and I did all for the best. This trouble has come upon me, though all my life I have acted for the best.' There came another footstep up the stair, and a man entered. It was her husband. On his return he had missed his wife, and guessed whither she had gone, and had followed her. He came alone. Then there was a sad scene, only restrained by respect for my friend. I need not tell it. There was a man's side to the question, a strong one. The wife had a terrible temper, a peevish, nagging, maddening fashion of talking. She was a woman very hard for a man to live with. Does it matter much which was right or wrong, now that the mischief was done? They went away at last, not reconciled. Could they be reconciled? I cannot tell. I left there next day, and have never returned. There they had lived for many years among their own people, far away from the influence that had come upon their childhood, and led them into strange ways. And now all that was left of that influence was the chain that bound them together. Had it not been for that they would have been divorced long ago; for they had never agreed very well, and both sides had bitter grounds for complaint. They would have been divorced, and both could have gone their own way. But now, what was to be done? That is one of my memories: this is another. There was a girl I knew, the daughter of a man who had made some money by trading, and when the father died the property was divided according to law between the girl and her brother. She was a little heiress in her way, owning a garden, where grew many fruit-trees, and a piece of rice land. She had also a share in a little shop which she managed, and she had many gold bracelets and fine diamond earrings. She was much wooed by the young men about there, and at last she married. He was a young man, good-looking, a sergeant of police, and for a time they were very happy. And then trouble came. The husband took to bad ways. The knowledge that he could get money for nothing was too much for him. He drank and he wasted her money, and he neglected his work, and at last he was dismissed from Government employ. And his wife got angry with him, and complained of him to the neighbours; and made him worse, though she was at heart a good girl. Quickly he went from bad to worse, until in a very short time, six months, I think, he had spent half her little fortune. Then she began to limit supplies--the husband did no work at all--and in consequence he began to neglect her; they had many quarrels, and her tongue was sharp, and matters got worse and worse until they were the talk of the village. All attempts of the headman and elders to restrain him were useless. He became quarrelsome, and went on from one thing to another, until at last he was suspected of being concerned in a crime. So then when all means had failed to restore her husband to her, when they had drifted far apart and there was nothing before them but trouble, she went to the elders of the village and demanded a divorce. And the elders granted it to her. Her husband objected; he did not want to be divorced. He claimed this, and he claimed that, but it was all of no use. So the tie that had united them was dissolved, as the love had been dissolved long before, and they parted. The man went away to Lower Burma. They tell me he has become a cultivator and has reformed, and is doing well; and the girl is ready to marry again. Half her property is gone, but half remains, and she has still her little business. I think they will both do well. But if they had been chained together, what then? In Burma divorce is free. Anyone can obtain it by appearing before the elders of the village and demanding it. A writing of divorcement is made out, and the parties are free. Each retains his or her own property, and that earned during marriage is divided; only that the party claiming the divorce has to leave the house to the other--that is the only penalty, and it is not always enforced, unless the house be joint property. As religion has nothing to do with marriage, neither has it with divorce. Marriage is a status, a partnership, nothing more. But it is all that. Divorce is a dissolution of that partnership. A Burman would not ask, 'Were they married?' but, 'Are they man and wife?' And so with divorce, it is a cessation of the state of marriage. Elders tell me that women ask for divorce far more than men do. 'Men have patience, and women have not,' that is what they say. For every little quarrel a woman will want a divorce. 'Thakin, if we were to grant divorces every time a woman came and demanded it, we should be doing nothing else all day long. If a husband comes home to find dinner not cooked, and speaks angrily, his wife will rush to us in tears for a divorce. If he speaks to another woman and smiles, if he does not give his wife a new dress, if he be fond of going out in the evenings, all these are reasons for a breathless demand for a divorce. The wives get cross and run to us and cry, "My husband has been angry with me. Never will I live with him again. Give me a divorce." Or, "See my clothes, how old they are. I cannot buy any new dress. I will have a divorce." And we say, "Yes, yes; it is very sad. Of course, you must have a divorce; but we cannot give you one to-night. Go away, and come again in three days or in four days, when we have more time." They go away, thakin, and they do not return. Next day it is all forgotten. You see, they don't know what they want; they turn with the wind--they have no patience.' Yet sometimes they repent too late. Here is another of my memories about divorce: There was a man and his wife, cultivators, living in a small village. The land that he cultivated belonged to his wife, for she had inherited it from her father, together with a house and a little money. The man had nothing when he married her, but he was hardworking and honest and good-tempered, and they kept themselves going comfortably enough. But he had one fault: every now and then he would drink too much. This was in Lower Burma, where liquor shops are free to Burmans. In Upper Burma no liquor can be sold to them. He did not drink often. He was a teetotaler generally; but once a month, or once in two months, he would meet some friends, and they would drink in good fellowship, and he would return home drunk. His wife felt this very bitterly, and when he would come into the house, his eyes red and his face swollen, she would attack him with bitter words, as women do. She would upbraid him for his conduct, she would point at him the finger of scorn, she would tell him in biting words that he was drinking the produce of her fields, of her inheritance; she would even impute to him, in her passion, worse things than these, things that were not true. And the husband was usually good-natured, and admitted his wrong, and put up with all her abuse, and they lived more or less happily till the next time. And after this had been going on for a few years, instead of getting accustomed to her husband, instead of seeing that if he had this fault he had many virtues, and that he was just as good a husband as she was a wife, or perhaps better, her anger against him increased every time, till now she would declare that she would abide it no longer, that he was past endurance, and she would have a divorce; and several times she even ran to the elders to demand it. But the elders would put it by. 'Let it wait,' they said, 'for a few days, and then we will see;' and by that time all was soothed down again. But at last the end came. One night she passed all bounds in her anger, using words that could never be forgiven; and when she declared as usual that she must have a divorce, her husband said: 'Yes, we will divorce. Let there be an end of it.' And so next day they went to the elders both of them, and as both demanded the divorce, the elders could not delay very long. A few days' delay they made, but the man was firm, and at last it was done. They were divorced. I think the woman would have drawn back at the last moment, but she could not, for very shame, and the man never wavered. He was offended past forgiveness. So the divorce was given, and the man left the house and went to live elsewhere. In a few days--a very few days--the wife sent for him again. 'Would he return?' And he refused. Then she went to the headman and asked him to make it up, and the headman sent for the husband, who came. The woman asked her husband to return. 'Come back,' she said, 'come back. I have been wrong. Let us forgive. It shall never happen again.' But the man shook his head. 'No,' he said; 'a divorce is a divorce. I do not care to marry and divorce once a week. You were always saying "I will divorce you, I will divorce you." Now it is done. Let it remain.' The woman was struck with grief. 'But I did not know,' she said; 'I was hot-tempered. I was foolish. But now I know. Ah! the house is so lonely! I have but two ears, I have but two eyes, and the house is so large.' But the husband refused again. 'What is done, is done. Marriage is not to be taken off and put on like a jacket. I have made up my mind.' Then he went away, and after a little the woman went away too. She went straight to the big, lonely house, and there she hanged herself. You see, she loved him all the time, but did not know till too late. Men do not often apply for divorce except for very good cause, and with their minds fully made up to obtain it. They do obtain it, of course. With this facility for divorce, it is remarkable how uncommon it is. In the villages and amongst respectable Burmans in all classes of life it is a great exception to divorce or to be divorced. The only class amongst whom it is at all common is the class of hangers-on to our Administration, the clerks and policemen, and so on. I fear there is little that is good to be said of many of them. It is terrible to see how demoralizing our contact is to all sorts and conditions of men. To be attached to our Administration is almost a stigma of disreputableness. I remember remarking once to a headman that a certain official seemed to be quite regardless of public opinion in his life, and asked him if the villagers did not condemn him. And the headman answered with surprise: 'But he is an official;' as if officials were quite _super grammaticam_ of morals. And yet this is the class from whom we most of us obtain our knowledge of Burmese life, whom we see most of, whose opinions we accept as reflecting the truth of Burmese thought. No wonder we are so often astray. Amongst these, the taking of second, and even third, wives is not at all uncommon, and naturally divorce often follows. Among the great mass of the people it is very uncommon. I cannot give any figures. There are no records kept of marriage or of divorce. What the proportion is it is impossible to even guess. I have heard all sorts of estimates, none founded on more than imagination. I have even tried to find out in small villages what the number of divorces were in a year, and tried to estimate from this the percentage. I made it from 2 to 5 per cent. of the marriages. But I cannot offer these figures as correct for any large area. Probably they vary from place to place and from year to year. In the old time the queen was very strict upon the point. As she would allow no other wife to her king, so she would allow no taking of other wives, no abuse of divorce among her subjects. Whatever her influence may have been in other ways, here it was all for good. But the queen has gone, and there is no one left at all. No one but the hangers-on of whom I have spoken, examples not to be followed, but to be shunned. But of this there is no manner of doubt, that this freedom of marriage and divorce leads to no license. There is no confusion between marriage or non-marriage, and even yet public opinion is a very great check upon divorce. It is considered not right to divorce your husband or your wife without good--very good and sufficient cause. And what is good and sufficient cause is very well understood. That a woman should have a nagging tongue, that a man should be a drunkard, what could be better cause than this? The gravity of the offence lies in whether it makes life unbearable together, not in the name you may give it. The facility for divorce has other effects too. It makes a man and a woman very careful in their behaviour to each other. The chain that binds them is a chain of mutual forbearance, of mutual endurance, of mutual love; and if these be broken, then is the bond gone. Marriage is no fetter about a man or woman, binding both to that which they may get to hate. In the first Burmese war in 1825 there was a man, an Englishman, taken prisoner in Ava and put in prison, and there he found certain Europeans and Americans. After a time, for fear of attempts at escape, these prisoners were chained together two and two. He tells you, this Englishman, how terrible this was, and of the hate and repulsion that arose in your heart to your co-bondsman. Before they were chained together they lived in close neighbourhood, in peace and amity; but when the chains came it was far otherwise, though they were no nearer than before. They got to hate each other. And this is the Burmese idea of marriage, that it is a partnership of love and affection, and that when these die, all should be over. An unbreakable marriage appears to them as a fetter, a bond, something hateful and hate inspiring. They are a people who love to be free: they hate bonds and dogmas of every description. It is always religion that has made a bond of marriage, and here religion has not interfered. Theirs is a religion of free men and free women. CHAPTER XVIII DRINK 'The ignorant commit sins in consequence of drunkenness, and also make others drunk.'--_Acceptance into the Monkhood._ The Buddhist religion forbids the use of all stimulants, including opium and other drugs; and in the times of the Burmese rule this law was stringently kept. No one was allowed to make, to sell, or to consume, liquors of any description. That this law was kept as firmly as it was was due, not to the vigilance of the officials, but to the general feeling of the people. It was a law springing from within, and therefore effectual; not imposed from without, and useless. That there were breaches and evasions of the law is only natural. The craving for some stimulant amongst all people is very great--so great as to have forced itself to be acknowledged and regulated by most states, and made a great source of revenue. Amongst the Burmans the craving is, I should say, as strong as amongst other people; and no mere legal prohibition would have had much effect in a country like this, full of jungle, where palms grow in profusion, and where little stills might be set up anywhere to distil their juice. But the feelings of the respectable people and the influence of the monks is very great, very strong; and the Burmans were, and in Upper Burma, where the old laws remain in force, are still, an absolutely teetotal people. No one who was in Upper Burma before and just after the war but knows how strictly the prohibition against liquor was enforced. The principal offenders against the law were the high officials, because they were above popular reach. No bribe was so gratefully accepted as some whisky. It was a sure step to safety in trouble. A gentleman--not an Englishman--in the employ of a company who traded in Upper Burma in the king's time told me lately a story about this. He lived in a town on the Irrawaddy, where was a local governor, and this governor had a head clerk. This head clerk had a wife, and she was, I am told, very beautiful. I cannot write scandal, and so will not repeat here what I have heard about this lady and the merchant; but one day his Burman servant rushed into his presence and told him breathlessly that the bailiff of the governor's court was just entering the garden with a warrant for his arrest, for, let us say, undue flirtation. The merchant, horrified at the prospect of being lodged in gaol and put in stocks, fled precipitately out of the back-gate and gained the governor's court. The governor was in session, seated on a little daïs, and the merchant ran in and knelt down, as is the custom, in front of the daïs. He began to hurriedly address the governor: 'My lord, my lord, an unjust complaint has been made against me. Someone has abused your justice and caused a warrant to be taken out against me. I have just escaped the bailiff, and came to your honour for protection. It is all a mistake. I will explain. I----' But here the governor interposed. He bent forward till his head was close to the merchant's head, and whispered: 'Friend, have you any whisky?' The merchant gave a sigh of relief. 'A case newly arrived is at your honour's disposal,' he answered quickly. 'I will give orders for it to be sent over at once. No, two cases--I have two. And this charge is all a mistake.' The governor waved his hand as if all explanation were superfluous. Then he drew himself up, and, addressing the officials and crowd before him, said: 'This is my good friend. Let no one touch him.' And in an undertone to the merchant: 'Send it soon.' So the merchant went home rejoicing, and sent the whisky. And the lady? Well, my story ends there with the governor and the whisky. No doubt it was all a mistake about the lady, as the merchant said. All officials were not so bad as this, and many officials were as strongly against the use of liquor, as urgent in the maintenance of the rules of the religion, as the lowest peasant. It was the same with opium: its use was absolutely prohibited. Of course, Chinese merchants managed to smuggle enough in for their own use, but they had to bribe heavily to be able to do so, and the people remained uncontaminated. 'Opium-eater,' 'gambler,' are the two great terms of reproach and contempt. It used to be a custom in the war-time--it has died out now, I think--for officers of all kinds to offer to Burmans who came to see them--officials, I mean--a drink of whisky or beer on parting, just as you would to an Englishman. It was often accepted. Burmans are, as I have said, very fond of liquor, and an opportunity like this to indulge in a little forbidden drink, under the encouragement of the great English soldier or official, was too much for them. Besides, it would have been a discourtesy to refuse. And so it was generally accepted. I do not think it did much harm to anyone, or to anything, except, perhaps, to our reputation. I remember in 1887 that I went up into a semi-independent state to see the prince. I travelled up with two of his officials, men whom I had seen a good deal of for some months before, as his messengers and spokesmen, about affairs on the border. We travelled for three days, and came at last to where he had pitched his camp in the forest. He had built me a house, too, next to his camp, where I put up. I had a long interview with him about official matters--I need not tell of that here--and after our business was over we talked of many things, and at last I got up to take my leave. I had seen towards the end that the prince had something on his mind, something he wanted to say, but was afraid, or too shy, to mention; and when I got up, instead of moving away, I laughed and said: 'Well, what is it? I think there is something the prince wants to say before I go.' And the prince smiled back awkwardly, still desirous to have his say, still clearly afraid to do so, and at last it was his wife who spoke. 'It is about the whisky,' she said. 'We know that you drink it. That is your own business. We hear, too, that it is the custom in the part of the country you have taken for English officers to give whisky and beer to officials who come to see you--to _our_ officials,' and she looked at the men who had come up with me, and they blushed. 'The prince wishes to ask you not to do it here. Of course, in your own country you do what you like, but in the prince's country no one is allowed to drink or to smoke opium. It is against our faith. That is what the prince wanted to say. The thakin will not be offended if he is asked that here in our country he will not tempt any of us to break our religion.' I almost wished I had not encouraged the prince to speak. I am afraid that the embarrassment passed over to my side. What could I say but that I would remember, that I was not offended, but would be careful? I had been lecturing the prince about his shortcomings; I had been warning him of trouble to come, unless he mended his ways; I had been telling him wonderful things of Europe and our power. I thought that I had produced an impression of superiority--I was young then--but when I left I had my doubts who it was that scored most in that interview. However, I have remembered ever since. I was not a frequent offender before--I have never offered a Burman liquor since. CHAPTER XIX MANNERS 'Not where others fail, or do, or leave undone--the wise should notice what himself has done, or left undone.'--_Dammapada._ A remarkable trait of the Burmese character is their unwillingness to interfere in other people's affairs. Whether it arises from their religion of self-culture or no, I cannot say, but it is in full keeping with it. Every man's acts and thoughts are his own affair, think the Burmans; each man is free to go his own way, to think his own thoughts, to act his own acts, as long as he does not too much annoy his neighbours. Each man is responsible for himself and for himself alone, and there is no need for him to try and be guardian also to his fellows. And so the Burman likes to go his own way, to be a free man within certain limits; and the freedom that he demands for himself, he will extend also to his neighbours. He has a very great and wide tolerance towards all his neighbours, not thinking it necessary to disapprove of his neighbours' acts because they may not be the same as his own, never thinking it necessary to interfere with his neighbours as long as the laws are not broken. Our ideas that what habits are different to our habits must be wrong, and being wrong, require correction at our hands, is very far from his thoughts. He never desires to interfere with anyone. Certain as he is that his own ideas are best, he is contented with that knowledge, and is not ceaselessly desirous of proving it upon other people. And so a foreigner may go and live in a Burman village, may settle down there and live his own life and follow his own customs in perfect freedom, may dress and eat and drink and pray and die as he likes. No one will interfere. No one will try and correct him; no one will be for ever insisting to him that he is an outcast, either from civilization or from religion. The people will accept him for what he is, and leave the matter there. If he likes to change his ways and conform to Burmese habits and Buddhist forms, so much the better; but if not, never mind. It is, I think, a great deal owing to this habit of mind that the manners of the Burmese are usually so good, children in civilization as they are. There is amongst them no rude inquisitiveness and no desire to in any way circumscribe your freedom, by either remark or act. Surely of all things that cause trouble, nothing is so common amongst us as the interference with each other's ways, as the needless giving of advice. It seems to each of us that we are responsible, not only for ourselves, but also for everyone else near us; and so if we disapprove of any act, we are always in a hurry to express our disapproval and to try and persuade the actor to our way of thinking. We are for ever thinking of others and trying to improve them; as a nation we try to coerce weaker nations and to convert stronger ones, and as individuals we do the same. We are sure that other people cannot but be better and happier for being brought into our ways of thinking, by force even, if necessary. We call it philanthropy. But the Buddhist does not believe this at all. Each man, each nation, has, he thinks, enough to do managing his or its own affairs. Interference, any sort of interference, he is sure can do nothing but harm. _You_ cannot save a man. He can save himself; you can do nothing for him. You may force or persuade him into an outer agreement with you, but what is the value of that? All dispositions that are good, that are of any value at all, must come spontaneously from the heart of man. First, he must desire them, and then struggle to obtain them; by this means alone can any virtue be reached. This, which is the key of his religion, is the key also of his private life. Each man is a free man to do what he likes, in a way that we have never understood. Even under the rule of the Burmese kings there was the very widest tolerance. You never heard of a foreigner being molested in any way, being forbidden to live as he liked, being forbidden to erect his own places of worship. He had the widest freedom, as long as he infringed no law. The Burmese rule may not have been a good one in many ways, but it was never guilty of persecution, of any attempt at forcible conversion, of any desire to make such an attempt. This tolerance, this inclination to let each man go his own way, is conspicuous even down to the little events of life. It is very marked, even in conversation, how little criticism is indulged in towards each other, how there is an absolute absence of desire to proselytize each other in any way. 'It is his way,' they will say, with a laugh, of any peculiar act of any person; 'it is his way. What does it matter to us?' Of all the lovable qualities of the Burmese, and they are many, there are none greater than these--their light-heartedness and their tolerance. A Burman will always assume that you know your own business, and will leave you alone to do it. How great a boon this is I think we hardly can understand, for we have none of it. And he carries it to an extent that sometimes surprises us. Suppose you are walking along a road and there is a broken bridge on the way, a bridge that you might fall through. No one will try and prevent you going. Any Burman who saw you go will, if he think at all about it, give you the credit for knowing what you are about. It will not enter into his head to go out of his way to give you advice about that bridge. If you ask him he will help you all he can, but he will not volunteer; and so if you depend on volunteered advice, you may fall through the bridge and break your neck, perhaps. At first this sort of thing seems to us to spring from laziness or from discourtesy. It is just the reverse of this latter; it is excess of courtesy that assumes you to be aware of what you are about, and capable of judging properly. You may get yourself into all sorts of trouble, and unless you call out no one will assist you. They will suppose that if you require help you will soon ask for it. You could drift all the way from Bhamo to Rangoon on a log, and I am sure no one would try to pick you up unless you shouted for help. Let anyone try to drift down from Oxford to Richmond, and he will be forcibly saved every mile of his journey, I am sure. The Burman boatmen you passed would only laugh and ask how you were getting on. The English boatman would have you out of that in a jiffy, saving you despite yourself. You might commit suicide in Burma, and no one would stop you. 'It is your own look-out,' they would say; 'if you want to die why should we prevent you? What business is it of ours?' Never believe for a moment that this is cold-heartedness. Nowhere is there any man so kind-hearted as a Burman, so ready to help you, so hospitable, so charitable both in act and thought. It is only that he has another way of seeing these things to what we have. He would resent as the worst discourtesy that which we call having a friendly interest in each other's doings. Volunteered advice comes, so he thinks, from pure self-conceit, and is intolerable; help that he has not asked for conveys the assumption that he is a fool, and the helper ever so much wiser than he. It is in his eyes simply a form of self-assertion, an attempt at governing other people, an infringement of good manners not to be borne. Each man is responsible for himself, each man is the maker of himself. Only he can do himself good by good thought, by good acts; only he can hurt himself by evil intentions and deeds. Therefore in your intercourse with others remember always yourself, remember that no one can injure you but yourself; be careful, therefore, of your acts for your own sake. For if you lose your temper, who is the sufferer? Yourself; no one but yourself. If you are guilty of disgraceful acts, of discourteous words, who suffers? Yourself. Remember that; remember that courtesy and good temper are due from you to everyone. What does it matter who the other person be? you should be courteous to him, not because he deserves it, but because you deserve it. Courtesy is measured by the giver, not by the receiver. We are apt sometimes to think that this continual care of self is selfishness; it is the very reverse. Self-reverence is the antipode of self-conceit, of selfishness. If you honour yourself, you will be careful that nothing dishonourable shall come from you. 'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;' we, too, have had a poet who taught this. And so dignity of manner is very marked amongst this people. It is cultivated as a gift, as the outward sign of a good heart. 'A rough diamond;' no Burman would understand this saying. The value of a diamond is that it can be polished. As long as it remains in the rough, it has no more beauty than a lump of mud. If your heart be good, so, too, will be your manners. A good tree will bring forth good fruit. If the fruit be rotten, can the tree be good? Not so. If your manners are bad, so, too, is your heart. To be courteous, even tempered, to be tolerant and full of sympathy, these are the proofs of an inward goodness. You cannot have one without the other. Outward appearances are not deceptive, but are true. Therefore they strive after even temper. Hot-tempered as they are, easily aroused to wrath, easily awakened to pleasure, men with the passions of a child, they have very great command over themselves. They are ashamed of losing their temper; they look upon it as a disgrace. We are often proud of it; we think sometimes we do well to be angry. So they are very patient, very long-suffering, accepting with resignation the troubles of this world, the kicks and spurns of fortune, secure in this, that each man's self is in his own keeping. If there be trouble for to-day, what can it matter if you do but command yourself? If others be discourteous to you, that cannot hurt you, if you do not allow yourself to be discourteous in return. Take care of your own soul, sure that in the end you will win, either in this life or in some other, that which you deserve. What you have made your soul fit for, that you will obtain, sooner or later, whether it be evil or whether it be good. The law of righteousness is for ever this, that what a man deserves that he will obtain. And in the end, if you cultivate your soul with unwearying patience, striving always after what is good, purifying yourself from the lust of life, you will come unto that lake where all desire shall be washed away. CHAPTER XX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 'Sooner shall the cleft rock reunite so as to make a whole, than may he who kills any living being be admitted into our society.'--_Acceptance into the Monkhood._ It is very noticeable throughout the bazaars of Burma that all the beef butchers are natives of India. No Burman will kill a cow or a bullock, and no Burman will sell its meat. It is otherwise with pork and fowls. Burmans may sometimes be found selling these; and fish are almost invariably sold by the wives of the fishermen. During the king's time, any man who was even found in possession of beef was liable to very severe punishment. The only exception, as I have explained elsewhere, was in the case of the queen when expecting an addition to her family, and it was necessary that she should be strengthened in all ways. None, not even foreigners, were allowed to kill beef, and this law was very stringently observed. Other flesh and fish might, as far as the law of the country went, be sold with impunity. You could not be fined for killing and eating goats, or fowls, or pigs, and these were sold occasionally. It is now ten years since King Thibaw was overthrown, and there is now no law against the sale of beef. And yet, as I have said, no respectable Burman will even now kill or sell beef. The law was founded on the beliefs of the people, and though the law is dead, the beliefs remain. It is true that the taking of life is against Buddhist commands. No life at all may be taken by him who adheres to Buddhistic teaching. Neither for sport, nor for revenge, nor for food, may any animal be deprived of the breath that is in it. And this is a command wonderfully well kept. There are a few exceptions, but they are known and accepted as breaches of the law, for the law itself knows no exceptions. Fish, as I have said, can be obtained almost everywhere. They are caught in great quantities in the river, and are sold in most bazaars, either fresh or salted. It is one of the staple foods of the Burmese. But although they will eat fish, they despise the fisherman. Not so much, perhaps, as if he killed other living things, but still, the fisherman is an outcast from decent society. He will have to suffer great and terrible punishment before he can be cleansed from the sins that he daily commits. Notwithstanding this, there are many fishermen in Burma. A fish is a very cold-blooded beast. One must be very hard up for something to love to have any affection to spare upon fishes. They cannot be, or at all events they never are, domesticated, and most of them are not beautiful. I am not aware that they have ever been known to display any attachment to anyone, which accounts, perhaps, for the comparatively lenient eye with which their destruction is contemplated. For with warm-blooded animals it is very different. Cattle, as I have said, can never be killed nor their meat sold by a Burman, and with other animals the difficulty is not much less. I was in Upper Burma for some months before the war, and many a time I could get no meat at all. Living in a large town among prosperous people, I could get no flesh at all, only fish and rice and vegetables. When, after much trouble, my Indian cook would get me a few fowls, he would often be waylaid and forced to release them. An old woman, say, anxious to do some deed of merit, would come to him as he returned triumphantly home with his fowls and tender him money, and beg him to release the fowls. She would give the full price or double the price of the fowls; she had no desire to gain merit at another person's expense, and the unwilling cook would be obliged to give up the fowls. Public opinion was so strong he dare not refuse. The money was paid, the fowls set free, and I dined on tinned beef. And yet the villages are full of fowls. Why they are kept I do not know. Certainly not for food. I do not mean to say that an accidental meeting between a rock and a fowl may not occasionally furnish forth a dinner, but this is not the object with which they are kept--of this I am sure. You would not suppose that fowls were capable of exciting much affection, yet I suppose they are. Certainly in one case ducks were. There is a Burman lady I know who is married to an Englishman. He kept ducks. He bought a number of ducklings, and had them fed up so that they might be fat and succulent when the time came for them to be served at table. They became very fine ducks, and my friend had promised me one. I took an interest in them, and always noticed their increasing fatness when I rode that way. Imagine, then, my disappointment when one day I saw that all the ducks had disappeared. I stopped to inquire. Yes, truly they were all gone, my friend told me. In his absence his wife had gone up the river to visit some friends, and had taken the ducks with her. She could not bear, she said, that they should be killed, so she took them away and distributed them among her friends, one here and one there, where she was sure they would be well treated and not killed. When she returned she was quite pleased at her success, and laughed at her husband and me. This same lady was always terribly distressed when she had to order a fowl to be killed for her husband's breakfast, even if she had never seen it before. I have seen her, after telling the cook to kill a fowl for breakfast, run away and sit down in the veranda with her hands over her ears, and her face the very picture of misery, fearing lest she should hear its shrieks. I think that this was the one great trouble to her in her marriage, that her husband would insist on eating fowls and ducks, and that she had to order them to be killed. As she is, so are most Burmans. If there is all this trouble about fowls, it can be imagined how the trouble increases when it comes to goats or any larger beasts. In the jungle villages meat of any kind at all is never seen: no animals of any kind are allowed to be killed. An officer travelling in the district would be reduced to what he could carry with him, if it were not for an Act of Government obliging villages to furnish--on payment, of course--supplies for officers and troops passing through. The mere fact of such a law being necessary is sufficient proof of the strength of the feeling against taking life. Of course, all shooting, either for sport or for food, is looked upon as disgraceful. In many jungle villages where deer abound there are one or two hunters who make a living by hunting. But they are disgraced men. They are worse than fishermen, and they will have a terrible penalty to pay for it all. It will take much suffering to wash from their souls the cruelty, the blood-thirstiness, the carelessness to suffering, the absence of compassion, that hunting must produce. 'Is there no food in the bazaar, that you must go and take the lives of animals?' has been said to me many a time. And when my house-roof was infested by sparrows, who dropped grass and eggs all over my rooms, so that I was obliged to shoot them with a little rifle, this was no excuse. 'You should have built a sparrow-cote,' they told me. 'If you had built a sparrow-cote, they would have gone away and left you in peace. They only wanted to make nests and lay eggs and have little ones, and you went and shot them.' There are many sparrow-cotes to be seen in the villages. I might give example after example of this sort, for they happen every day. We who are meat-eaters, who delight in shooting, who have a horror of insects and reptiles, are continually coming into collision with the principles of our neighbours; for even harmful reptiles they do not care to kill. Truly I believe it is a myth, the story of the Burmese mother courteously escorting out of the house the scorpion which had just bitten her baby. A Burmese mother worships her baby as much as the woman of any other nation does, and I believe there is no crime she would not commit in its behalf. But if she saw a scorpion walking about in the fields, she would not kill it as we should. She would step aside and pass on. 'Poor beast!' she would say, 'why should I hurt it? It never hurt me.' The Burman never kills insects out of sheer brutality. If a beetle drone annoyingly, he will catch it in a handkerchief and put it outside, and so with a bee. It is a great trouble often to get your Burmese servants to keep your house free of ants and other annoying creatures. If you tell them to kill the insects they will, for in that case the sin falls on you. Without special orders they would rather leave the ants alone. In the district in which I am now living snakes are very plentiful. There are cobras and keraits, but the most dreaded is the Russell's viper. He is a snake that averages from three to four feet long, and is very thick, with a big head and a stumpy tail. His body is marked very prettily with spots and blurs of light on a dark, grayish green, and he is so like the shadows of the grass and weeds in a dusty road, that you can walk on him quite unsuspectingly. Then he will bite you, and you die. He comes out usually in the evening before dark, and lies about on footpaths to catch the home-coming ploughman or reaper, and, contrary to the custom of other snakes, he will not flee on hearing a footstep. When anyone approaches he lies more still than ever, not even a movement of his head betraying him. He is so like the colour of the ground, he hopes he will be passed unseen; and he is slow and lethargic in his movements, and so is easy to kill when once detected. As a Burman said, 'If he sees you first, he kills you; if you see him first, you kill him.' In this district no Burman hesitates a moment in killing a viper when he has the chance. Usually he has to do it in self-defence. This viper is terribly feared, as over a hundred persons a year die here by his bite. He is so hated and feared that he has become an outcast from the law that protects all life. But with other snakes it is not so. There is the hamadryad, for instance. He is a great snake about ten to fourteen feet long, and he is the only snake that will attack you first. He is said always to do so, certainly he often does. One attacked me once when out quail-shooting. He put up his great neck and head suddenly at a distance of only five or six feet, and was just preparing to strike, when I literally blew his head off with two charges of shot. You would suppose he was vicious enough to be included with the Russell's viper in the category of the exceptions, but no. Perhaps he is too rare to excite such fierce and deadly hate as makes the Burman forget his law and kill the viper. However it may be, the Burman is not ready to kill the hamadryad. A few weeks ago a friend of mine and myself came across two little Burman boys carrying a jar with a piece of broken tile over it. The lads kept lifting up the tile and peeping in, and then putting the tile on again in a great hurry, and their actions excited our curiosity. So we called them to come to us, and we looked into the jar. It was full of baby hamadryads. The lads had found a nest of them in the absence of the mother, who would have killed them if she had been there, and had secured all the little snakes. There were seven of them. We asked the boys what they intended to do with the snakes, and they answered that they would show them to their friends in the village. 'And then?' we asked. And then they would let them go in the water. My friend killed all the hamadryads on the spot, and gave the boys some coppers, and we went on. Can you imagine this happening anywhere else? Can you think of any other schoolboys sparing any animal they caught, much less poisonous snakes? The extraordinary hold that this tenet of their religion has upon the Burmese must be seen to be understood. What I write will sound like some fairy story, I fear, to my people at home. It is far beneath the truth. The belief that it is wrong to take life is a belief with them as strong as any belief could be. I do not know anywhere any command, earthly or heavenly, that is acted up to with such earnestness as this command is amongst the Burmese. It is an abiding principle of their daily life. Where the command came from I do not know. I cannot find any allusion to it in the life of the great teacher. We know that he ate meat. It seems to me that it is older even than he. It has been derived both by the Burmese Buddhists and the Hindus from a faith whose origin is hidden in the mists of long ago. It is part of that far older faith on which Buddhism was built, as was Christianity on Judaism. But if not part of his teaching--and though it is included in the sacred books, we do not know how much of them are derived from the Buddha himself--it is in strict accordance with all his teaching. That is one of the most wonderful points of Buddhism, it is all in accordance; there are no exceptions. I have heard amongst Europeans a very curious explanation of this refusal of Buddhists to take life. 'Buddhists,' they say, 'believe in the transmigration of souls. They believe that when a man dies his soul may go into a beast. You could not expect him to kill a bull, when perchance his grandfather's soul might inhabit there.' This is their explanation, this is the way they put two and two together to make five. They know that Buddhists believe in transmigration, they know that Buddhists do not like to take life, and therefore one is the cause of the other. I have mentioned this explanation to Burmans while talking of the subject, and they have always laughed at it. They had never heard of it before. It is true that it is part of their great theory of life that the souls of men have risen from being souls of beasts, and that we may so relapse if we are not careful. Many stories are told of cases that have occurred where a man has been reincarnated as an animal, and where what is now the soul of a man used to live in a beast. But that makes no difference. Whatever a man may have been, or may be, he is a man now; whatever a beast may have been, he is a beast now. Never suppose that a Burman has any other idea than this. To him men are men, and animals are animals, and men are far the higher. But he does not deduce from this that man's superiority gives him permission to illtreat or to kill animals. It is just the reverse. It is because man is so much higher than the animal that he can and must observe towards animals the very greatest care, feel for them the very greatest compassion, be good to them in every way he can. The Burman's motto should be _Noblesse oblige_; he knows the meaning, if he knows not the words. For the Burman's compassion towards animals goes very much farther than a mere reluctance to kill them. Although he has no command on the subject, it seems to him quite as important to treat animals well during their lives as to refrain from taking those lives. His refusal to take life he shares with the Hindu; his perpetual care and tenderness to all living creatures is all his own. And here I may mention a very curious contrast, that whereas in India the Hindu will not take life and the Mussulman will, yet the Mussulman is by reputation far kinder to his beasts than the Hindu. Here the Burman combines both qualities. He has all the kindness to animals that the Mahommedan has, and more, and he has the same horror of taking life that the Hindu has. Coming from half-starved, over-driven India, it is a revelation to see the animals in Burma. The village ponies and cattle and dogs in India are enough to make the heart bleed for their sordid misery, but in Burma they are a delight to the eye. They are all fat, every one of them--fat and comfortable and impertinent; even the ownerless dogs are well fed. I suppose the indifference of the ordinary native of India to animal suffering comes from the evil of his own lot. He is so very poor, he has such hard work to find enough for himself and his children, that his sympathy is all used up. He has none to spare. He is driven into a dumb heartlessness, for I do not think he is actually cruel. The Burman is full of the greatest sympathy towards animals of all kinds, of the greatest understanding of their ways, of the most humorously good-natured attitude towards them. Looking at them from his manhood, he has no contempt for them; but the gentle toleration of a father to very little children who are stupid and troublesome often, but are very lovable. He feels himself so far above them that he can condescend towards them, and forbear with them. His ponies are pictures of fatness and impertinence and go. They never have any vice because the Burman is never cruel to them; they are never well trained, partly because he does not know how to train them, partly because they are so near the aboriginal wild pony as to be incapable of very much training. But they are willing; they will go for ever, and are very strong, and they have admirable constitutions and tempers. You could not make a Burman ill-use his pony if you tried, and I fancy that to break these little half-wild ponies to go in cabs in crowded streets requires severe treatment. At least, I never knew but one hackney-carriage driver either in Rangoon or Mandalay who was a Burman, and he very soon gave it up. He said that the work was too heavy either for a pony or a man. I think, perhaps, it was for the safety of the public that he resigned, for his ponies were the very reverse of meek--which a native of India says a hackney-carriage pony should be--and he drove entirely by the light of Nature. So all the drivers of gharries, as we call them, are natives of India or half-breeds, and it is amongst them that the work of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals principally lies. While I was in Rangoon I tried a number of cases of over-driving, of using ponies with sore withers and the like. I never tried a Burman. Even in Rangoon, which has become almost Indianized, his natural humanity never left the Burman. As far as Burmans are concerned, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals need not exist. They are kinder to their animals than even the members of the Society could be. Instances occur every day; here is one of the most striking that I remember. There is a town in Burma where there are some troops stationed, and which is the headquarters of the civil administration of the district. It is, or was then, some distance from a railway-station, and it was necessary to make some arrangement for the carriage of the mails to and from the town and station. The Post-Office called for tenders, and at length it was arranged through the civil authorities that a coach should run once a day each way to carry the mails and passengers. A native of India agreed to take the contract--for Burmans seldom or never care to take them--and he was to comply with certain conditions and receive a certain subsidy. There was a great deal of traffic between the town and station, and it was supposed that the passenger traffic would pay the contractor well, apart from his mail subsidy. For Burmans are always free with their money, and the road was long and hot and dusty. I often passed that coach as I rode. I noticed that the ponies were poor, very poor, and were driven a little hard, but I saw no reason for interference. It did not seem to me that any cruelty was committed, nor that the ponies were actually unfit to be driven. I noticed that the driver used his whip a good deal, but then some ponies require the whip. I never thought much about it, as I always rode my own ponies, and they always shied at the coach, but I should have noticed if there had been anything remarkable. Towards the end of the year it became necessary to renew the contract, and the contractor was approached on the subject. He said he was willing to continue the contract for another year if the mail subsidy was largely increased. He said he had lost money on that year's working. When asked how he could possibly have lost considering the large number of people who were always passing up and down, he said that they did not ride in his coach. Only the European soldiers and a few natives of India came with him. Officers had their own ponies and rode, and the Burmans either hired a bullock-cart or walked. They hardly ever came in his coach, but he could not say what the reason might be. So an inquiry was made, and the Burmese were asked why they did not ride on the coach. Were the fares too high?--was it uncomfortable? But no, it was for neither of these reasons that they left the coach to the soldiers and natives of India. It was because of the ponies. No Burman would care to ride behind ponies who were treated as these ponies were--half fed, overdriven, whipped. It was a misery to see them; it was twice a misery to drive behind them. 'Poor beasts!' they said; 'you can see their ribs, and when they come to the end of a stage they are fit to fall down and die. They should be turned out to graze.' The opinion was universal. The Burmans preferred to spend twice or thrice the money and hire a bullock-cart and go slowly, while the coach flashed past them in a whirl of dust, or they preferred to walk. Many and many times have I seen the roadside rest-houses full of travellers halting for a few minutes' rest. They walked while the coach came by empty; and nearly all of them could have afforded the fare. It was a very striking instance of what pure kind-heartedness will do, for there would have been no religious command broken by going in the coach. It was the pure influence of compassion towards the beasts and refusal to be a party to such hard-heartedness. And yet, as I have said, I do not think the law could have interfered with success. Surely a people who could act like this have the very soul of religion in their hearts, although the act was not done in the name of religion. All the animals--the cattle, the ponies, and the buffaloes--are so tame that it is almost an unknown thing for anyone to get hurt. The cattle are sometimes afraid of the white face and strange attire of a European, but you can walk through the herds as they come home in the evening with perfect confidence that they will not hurt you. Even a cow with a young calf will only eye you suspiciously; and with the Burmans even the huge water buffaloes are absolutely tame. You can see a herd of these great beasts, with horns six feet across, come along under the command of a very small boy or girl perched on one of their broad backs. He flourishes a little stick, and issues his commands like a general. It is one of the quaintest imaginable sights to see this little fellow get off his steed, run after a straggler, and beat him with his stick. The buffalo eyes his master, whom he could abolish with one shake of his head, submissively, and takes the beating, which he probably feels about as much as if a straw fell on him, good-humouredly. The children never seem to come to grief. Buffaloes occasionally charge Europeans, but the only place where I have known of Burmans being killed by buffaloes is in the Kalè Valley. There the buffaloes are turned out into the jungle for eight months in the year, and are only caught for ploughing and carting. Naturally they are quite wild; in fact, many of them are the offspring of wild bulls. The Burmans, too, are very fond of dogs. Their villages are full of dogs; but, as far as I know, they never use them for anything, and they are never trained to do anything. They are supposed to be useful as watch-dogs, but I do not think they are very good even at that. I have surrounded a village before dawn, and never a dog barked, and I have heard them bark all night at nothing. But when a Burman sees a fox-terrier or any English dog his delight is unfeigned. When we first took Upper Burma, and such sights were rare, half a village would turn out to see the little 'tail-less' dog trotting along after its master. And if the terrier would 'beg,' then he would win all hearts. I am not only referring to children, but to grown men and women; and then there is always something peculiarly childlike and frank in these children of the great river. Only to-day, as I was walking up the bank of the river in the early dawn, I heard some Burman boatmen discussing my fox-terrier. They were about fifteen yards from the shore, poling their boat up against the current, which is arduous work; and as I passed them my little dog ran down the bank and looked at them across the water, and they saw her. 'See now,' said one man to another, pausing for a moment with his pole in his hand--'see the little white dog with the brown face, how wise she looks!' 'And how pretty!' said a man steering in the stern. 'Come!' he cried, holding out his hand to it. But the dog only made a splash in the water with her paws, and then turned and ran after me. The boatmen laughed and resumed their poling, and I passed on. In the still morning across the still water I could hear every word, but I hardly took any note; I have heard it so often. Only now when I come to write on this subject do I remember. It has been inculcated in us from childhood that it is a manly thing to be indifferent to pain--not to our own pain only, but to that of all others. To be sorry for a hunted hare, to compassionate the wounded deer, to shrink from torturing the brute creation, has been accounted by us as namby-pamby sentimentalism, not fit for man, fit only for a squeamish woman. To the Burman it is one of the highest of all virtues. He believes that all that is beautiful in life is founded on compassion and kindness and sympathy--that nothing of great value can exist without them. Do you think that a Burmese boy would be allowed to birds'-nest, or worry rats with a terrier, or go ferreting? Not so. These would be crimes. That this kindness and compassion for animals has very far-reaching results no one can doubt. If you are kind to animals, you will be kind, too, to your fellow-man. It is really the same thing, the same feeling in both cases. If to be superior in position to an animal justifies you in torturing it, so it would do with men. If you are in a better position than another man, richer, stronger, higher in rank, that would--that does often in our minds--justify ill-treatment and contempt. Our innate feeling towards all that we consider inferior to ourselves is scorn; the Burman's is compassion. You can see this spirit coming out in every action of their daily life, in their dealings with each other, in their thoughts, in their speech. 'You are so strong, have you no compassion for him who is weak, who is tempted, who has fallen?' How often have I heard this from a Burman's lips! How often have I seen him act up to it! It seems to them the necessary corollary of strength that the strong man should be sympathetic and kind. It seems to them an unconscious confession of weakness to be scornful, revengeful, inconsiderate. Courtesy, they say, is the mark of a great man, discourtesy of a little one. No one who feels his position secure will lose his temper, will persecute, will be disdainful. Their word for a fool and for a hasty-tempered man is the same. To them it is the same thing, one infers the other. And so their attitude towards animals is but an example of their attitude to each other. That an animal or a man should be lower and weaker than you is the strongest claim he can have on your humanity, and your courtesy and consideration for him is the clearest proof of your own superiority. And so in his dealings with animals the Buddhist considers himself, consults his own dignity, his own strength, and is kind and compassionate to them out of the greatness of his own heart. Nothing is more beautiful than the Burman in his ways with his children, and his beasts, with all who are lesser than himself. Even to us, who think so very differently from him on many points, there is a great and abiding charm in all this, to which we can find only one exception; for to our ideas there is one exception, and it is this: No Burman will take any life if he can help it, and therefore, if any animal injure itself, he will not kill it--not even to put it out of its pain, as we say. I have seen bullocks split on slippery roads, I have seen ponies with broken legs, I have seen goats with terrible wounds caused by accidental falls, and no one would kill them. If, when you are out shooting, your beaters pick up a wounded hare or partridge, do not suppose that they wring its neck; you must yourself do that, or it will linger on till you get home. Under no circumstances will they take the life even of a wounded beast. And if you ask them, they will say: 'If a man be sick, do you shoot him? If he injure his spine so that he will be a cripple for life, do you put him out of his pain?' If you reply that men and beasts are different, they will answer that in this point they do not recognise the difference. 'Poor beast! let him live out his little life.' And they will give him grass and water till he dies. This is the exception that I meant, but now, after I have written it, I am not so sure. Is it an exception? CHAPTER XXI ALL LIFE IS ONE 'I heard a voice that cried, "Balder the Beautiful Is dead, is dead," And through the misty air Passed like the mournful cry Of sunward-sailing cranes.' TEGNER'S _Drapa_. All romance has died out of our woods and hills in England, all our fairies are dead long ago. Knowledge so far has brought us only death. Later on it will bring us a new life. It is even now showing us how this may be, and is bringing us face to face again with Nature, and teaching us to know and understand the life that there is about us. Science is telling us again what we knew long ago and forgot, that our life is not apart from the life about us, but of it. Everything is akin to us, and when we are more accustomed to this knowledge, when we have ceased to regard it as a new, strange teaching, and know that we are but seeing again with clearer eyes what a half-knowledge blinded us to, then the world will be bright and beautiful to us as it was long ago. But now all is dark. There are no dryads in our trees, nor nymphs among the reeds that fringe the river; even our peaks hold for us no guardian spirit, that may take the reckless trespasser and bind him in a rock for ever. And because we have lost our belief in fairies, because we do not now think that there are goblins in our caves, because there is no spirit in the winds nor voice in the thunder, we have come to think that the trees and the rocks, the flowers and the storm, are all dead things. They are made up, we say, of materials that we know, they are governed by laws that we have discovered, and there is no life anywhere in Nature. And yet this cannot be true. Far truer is it to believe in fairies and in spirits than in nothing at all; for surely there is life all about us. Who that has lived out alone in the forest, that has lain upon the hillside and seen the mountains clothe themselves in lustrous shadows shot with crimson when the day dies, who that has heard the sigh come up out of the ravines where the little breezes move, that has watched the trees sway their leaves to and fro, beckoning to each other with wayward amorous gestures, but has known that these are not dead things? Watch the stream coming down the hill with a flash and a laugh in the sunlight, look into the dark brown pools in the deep shadows beneath the rocks, or voyage a whole night upon the breast of the great river, drifting past ghostly monasteries and silent villages, and then say if there be no life in the waters, if they, too, are dead things. There is no consolation like the consolation of Nature, no sympathy like the sympathy of the hills and streams; and sympathy comes from life. There is no sympathy with the dead. When you are alone in the forest all this life will come and talk to you, if you are quiet and understand. There is love deep down in the passionate heart of the flower, as there is in the little quivering honeysucker flitting after his mate, as there was in Romeo long ago. There is majesty in the huge brown precipice greater than ever looked from the face of a king. All life is one. The soul that moves within you when you hear the deer call to each other far above in the misty meadows of the night is the same soul that moves in everything about you. No people who have lived much with Nature have failed to descry this. They have recognised the life, they have felt the sympathy of the world about them, and to this life they have given names and forms as they would to friends whom they loved. Fairies and goblins, fauns and spirits, these are but names and personifications of a real life. But to him who has never felt this life, who has never been wooed by the trees and hills, these things are but foolishness, of course. To the Burman, not less than to the Greek of long ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains are full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all kinds of Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and female, now living round about us. Some of them live in the trees, especially in the huge fir-tree that shades half an acre without the village; or among the fernlike fronds of the tamarind; and you will often see beneath such a tree, raised upon poles or nestled in the branches, a little house built of bamboo and thatch, perhaps two feet square. You will be told when you ask that this is the house of the Tree-Nat. Flowers will be offered sometimes, and a little water or rice maybe, to the Nat, never supposing that he is in need of such things, but as a courteous and graceful thing to do; for it is not safe to offend these Nats, and many of them are very powerful. There is a Nat of whom I know, whose home is in a great tree at the crossing of two roads, and he has a house there built for him, and he is much feared. He is such a great Nat that it is necessary when you pass his house to dismount from your pony and walk to a respectful distance. If you haughtily ride past, trouble will befall you. A friend of mine riding there one day rejected all the advice of his Burmese companions and did not dismount, and a few days later he was taken deadly sick of fever. He very nearly died, and had to go away to the Straits for a sea-trip to take the fever out of his veins. It was a very near thing for him. That was in the Burmese times, of course. After that he always dismounted. But all Nats are not so proud nor so much to be feared as this one, and it is usually safe to ride past. Even as I write I am under the shadow of a tree where a Nat used to live, and the headman of the village has been telling me all about it. This is a Government rest-house on a main road between two stations, and is built for Government officials travelling on duty about their districts. To the west of it is a grand fig-tree of the kind called Nyaungbin by the Burmese. It is a very beautiful tree, though now a little bare, for it is just before the rains; but it is a great tree even now, and two months hence it will be glorious. It was never planted, the headman tells me, but came up of itself very many years ago, and when it was grown to full size a Nat came to live in it. The Nat lived in the tree for many years, and took great care of it. No one might injure it or any living creature near it, so jealous was the Nat of his abode. And the villagers built a little Nat-house, such as I have described, under the branches, and offered flowers and water, and all things went well with those who did well. But if anyone did ill the Nat punished him. If he cut the roots of the tree, the Nat hurt his feet; and if he injured the branches, the Nat injured his arms; and if he cut the trunk, the Nat came down out of the tree, and killed the sacrilegious man right off. There was no running away, because, as you know, the headman said, Nats can go a great deal faster than any man. Many men, careless strangers, who camped under the tree and then abused the hospitality of the Nat by hunting near his home, came to severe grief. But the Nat has gone now, alas! The tree is still there, but the Nat has fled away these many years. 'I suppose he didn't care to stay,' said the headman. 'You see that the English Government officials came and camped here, and didn't fear the Nats. They had fowls killed here for their dinner, and they sang and shouted; and they shot the green pigeons who ate his figs, and the little doves that nested in his branches.' All these things were an abomination to the Nat, who hated loud, rough talk and abuse, and to whom all life was sacred. So the Nat went away. The headman did not know where he was gone, but there are plenty of trees. 'He has gone somewhere to get peace,' the headman said. 'Somewhere in the jungle, where no one ever comes save the herd-boy and the deer, he will be living in a tree, though I do not think he will easily find a tree so beautiful as this.' The headman seemed very sorry about it, and so did several villagers who were with him; and I suggested that if the Nat-houses were rebuilt, and flowers and water offered, the Nat might know and return. I even offered to contribute myself, that it might be taken as an _amende honorable_ on behalf of the English Government. But they did not think this would be any use. No Nat would come where there was so much going and coming, so little care for life, such a disregard for pity and for peace. If we were to take away our rest-house, well then, perhaps, after a time, something could be done, but not under present circumstances. And so, besides dethroning the Burmese king, and occupying his golden palace, we are ousting from their pleasant homes the guardian spirits of the trees. They flee before the cold materialism of our belief, before the brutality of our manners. The headman did not say this; he did not mean to say this, for he is a very courteous man and a great friend of all of us; but that is what it came to, I think. The trunk of this tree is more than ten feet through--not a round bole, but like the pillar in a Gothic cathedral, as of many smaller boles growing together; and the roots spread out into a pedestal before entering the ground. The trunk does not go up very far. At perhaps twenty-five feet above the ground it divides into a myriad of smaller trunks, not branches, till it looks more like a forest than a single tree; it is full of life still. Though the pigeons and the doves come here no longer, there are a thousand other birds flitting to and fro in their aerial city and chirping to each other. Two tiny squirrels have just run along a branch nearly over my head, in a desperate hurry apparently, their tails cocked over their backs, and a sky blue chameleon is standing on the trunk near where it parts. There is always a breeze in this great tree; the leaves are always moving, and there is a continuous rustle and murmur up there. A mango-tree and tamarind near by are quite still. Not a breath shakes their leaves; they are as still as stone, but the shadow of the fig-tree is chequered with ever-changing lights. Is the Nat really gone? Perhaps not; perhaps he is still there, still caring for his tree, only shy now and distrustful, and therefore no more seen. Whole woods are enchanted sometimes, and no one dare enter them. Such a wood I know, far away north, near the hills, which is full of Nats. There was a great deal of game in it, for animals sought shelter there, and no one dared to disturb them; not the villagers to cut firewood, nor the girls seeking orchids, nor the hunter after his prey, dared to trespass upon that enchanted ground. 'What would happen,' I asked once, 'if anyone went into that wood? Would he be killed, or what?' And I was told that no one could tell what would happen, only that he would never be seen again alive. 'The Nats would confiscate him,' they said, 'for intruding on their privacy.' But what they would do to him after the confiscation no one seemed to be quite sure. I asked the official who was with me, a fine handsome Burman who had been with us in many fights, whether he would go into the wood with me, but he declined at once. Enemies are one thing, Nats are quite another, and a very much more dreadful thing. You can escape from enemies, as witness my companion, who had been shot at times without number and had only once been hit, in the leg, but you cannot escape Nats. Once, he told me, there were two very sacrilegious men, hunters by profession, only more abandoned than even the majority of hunters, and they went into this wood to hunt 'They didn't care for Nats,' they said. They didn't care for anything at all apparently. 'They were absolutely without reverence, worse than any beast,' said my companion. So they went into the wood to shoot, and they never came out again. A few days later their bare bones were found, flung out upon the road near the enchanted wood. The Nats did not care to have even the bones of such scoundrels in their wood, and so thrust them out. That was what happened to them, and that was what might happen to us if we went in there. We did not go. Though the Nats of the forest will not allow even one of their beasts to be slain, the Nats of the rivers are not so exclusive. I do not think fish are ever regarded in quite the same light as animals. It is true that a fervent Buddhist will not kill even a fish, but a fisherman is not quite such a reprobate as a hunter in popular estimation. And the Nats think so too, for the Nat of a pool will not forbid all fishing. You must give him his share; you must be respectful to him, and not offend him; and then he will fill your nets with gleaming fish, and all will go well with you. If not, of course, you will come to grief; your nets will be torn, and your boat upset; and finally, if obstinate, you will be drowned. A great arm will seize you, and you will be pulled under and disappear for ever. A Nat is much like a human being; if you treat him well he will treat you well, and conversely. Courtesy is never wasted on men or Nats, at least, so a Burman tells me. The highest Nats live in the mountains. The higher the Nat the higher the mountain; and when you get to a very high peak indeed, like Mainthong Peak in Wuntho, you encounter very powerful Nats. They tell a story of Mainthong Peak and the Nats there, how all of a sudden, one day in 1885, strange noises came from the hill. High up on his mighty side was heard the sound of great guns firing slowly and continuously; there was the thunder of falling rocks, cries as of someone bewailing a terrible calamity, and voices calling from the precipices. The people living in their little hamlets about his feet were terrified. Something they knew had happened of most dire import to them, some catastrophe which they were powerless to prevent, which they could not even guess. But when a few weeks later there came even into those remote villages the news of the fall of Mandalay, of the surrender of the king, of the 'great treachery,' they knew that this was what the Nats had been sorrowing over. All the Nats everywhere seem to have been distressed at our arrival, to hate our presence, and to earnestly desire our absence. They are the spirits of the country and of the people, and they cannot abide a foreign domination. But the greatest place for Nats is the Popa Mountain, which is an extinct volcano standing all alone about midway between the river and the Shan Mountains. It is thus very conspicuous, having no hills near it to share its majesty; and being in sight from many of the old capitals, it is very well known in history and legend. It is covered with dense forest, and the villages close about are few. At the top there is a crater with a broken side, and a stream comes flowing out of this break down the mountain. Probably it was the denseness of its forests, the abundance of water, and its central position, more than its guardian Nats, that made it for so many years the last retreating-place of the half-robber, half-patriot bands that made life so uneasy for us. But the Nats of Popa Mountains are very famous. When any foreigner was taken into the service of the King of Burma he had to swear an oath of fidelity. He swore upon many things, and among them were included 'all the Nats in Popa.' No Burman would have dared to break an oath sworn in such a serious way as this, and they did not imagine that anyone else would. It was and is a very dangerous thing to offend the Popa Nats; for they are still there in the mountain, and everyone who goes there must do them reverence. A friend of mine, a police officer, who was engaged in trying to catch the last of the robber chiefs who hid near Popa, told me that when he went up the mountain shooting he, too, had to make offerings. Some way up there is a little valley dark with overhanging trees, and a stream flows slowly along it. It is an enchanted valley, and if you look closely you will see that the stream is not as other streams, for it flows uphill. It comes rushing into the valley with a great display of foam and froth, and it leaves in a similar way, tearing down the rocks, and behaving like any other boisterous hill rivulet; but in the valley itself it lies under a spell. It is slow and dark, and has a surface like a mirror, and it flows uphill. There is no doubt about it; anyone can see it. When they came here, my friend tells me, they made a halt, and the Burmese hunters with him unpacked his breakfast. He did not want to eat then, he said, but they explained that it was not for him, but for the Nats. All his food was unpacked, cold chicken and tinned meats, and jam and eggs and bread, and it was spread neatly on a cloth under a tree. Then the hunters called upon the Nats to come and take anything they desired, while my friend wondered what he should do if the Nats took all his food and left him with nothing. But no Nats came, although the Burmans called again and again. So they packed up the food, saying that now the Nats would be pleased at the courtesy shown to them, and that my friend would have good sport. Presently they went on, leaving, however, an egg or two and a little salt, in case the Nats might be hungry later, and true enough it was that they did have good luck. At other times, my friend says, when he did not observe this ceremony, he saw nothing to shoot at all, but on this day he did well. The former history of all Nats is not known. Whether they have had a previous existence in another form, and if so, what, is a secret that they usually keep carefully to themselves, but the history of the Popa Nats is well known. Everyone who lives near the great hill can tell you that, for it all happened not so long ago. How long exactly no one can say, but not so long that the details of the story have become at all clouded by the mists of time. They were brother and sister, these Popa Nats, and they had lived away up North. The brother was a blacksmith, and he was a very strong man. He was the strongest man in all the country; the blow of his hammer on the anvil made the earth tremble, and his forge was as the mouth of hell. No one was so much feared and so much sought after as he. And as he was strong, so his sister was beautiful beyond all the maidens of the time. Their father and mother were dead, and there was no one but those two, the brother and sister, so they loved each other dearly, and thought of no one else. The brother brought home no wife to his house by the forge. He wanted no one while he had his sister there, and when lovers came wooing to her, singing amorous songs in the amber dusk, she would have nothing to do with them. So they lived there together, he growing stronger and she more beautiful every day, till at last a change came. The old king died, and a new king came to the throne, and orders were sent about to all the governors of provinces and other officials that the most beautiful maidens were to be sent down to the Golden City to be wives to the great king. So the governor of that country sent for the blacksmith and his sister to his palace, and told them there what orders he had received, and asked the blacksmith to give his sister that she might be sent as queen to the king. We are not told what arguments the governor used to gain his point, but only this, that when he failed, he sent the girl in unto his wife, and there she was persuaded to go. There must have been something very tempting, to one who was but a village girl, in the prospect of being even one of the lesser queens, of living in the palace, the centre of the world. So she consented at last, and her brother consented, and the girl was sent down under fitting escort to find favour in the eyes of her king. But the blacksmith refused to go. It was no good the governor saying such a great man as he must come to high honour in the Golden City, it was useless for the girl to beg and pray him to come with her--he always refused. So she sailed away down the great river, and the blacksmith returned to his forge. As the governor had said, the girl was acceptable in the king's sight, and she was made at last one of the principal queens, and of all she had most power over the king. They say she was most beautiful, that her presence was as soothing as shade after heat, that her form was as graceful as a young tree, and the palms of her hands were like lotus blossoms. She had enemies, of course. Most of the other queens were her enemies, and tried to do her harm. But it was useless telling tales of her to the king, for the king never believed; and she walked so wisely and so well, that she never fell into any snare. But still the plots never ceased. There was one day when she was sitting alone in the garden pavilion, with the trees making moving shadows all about her, that the king came to her. They talked for a time, and the king began to speak to her of her life before she came to the palace, a thing he had never done before. But he seemed to know all about it, nevertheless, and he spoke to her of her brother, and said that he, the king, had heard how no man was so strong as this blacksmith, the brother of the queen. The queen said it was true, and she talked on and on and praised her brother, and babbled of the days of her childhood, when he carried her on his great shoulder, and threw her into the air, catching her again. She was delighted to talk of all these things, and in her pleasure she forgot her discretion, and said that her brother was wise as well as strong, and that all the people loved him. Never was there such a man as he. The king did not seem very pleased with it all, but he said only that the blacksmith was a great man, and that the queen must write to him to come down to the city, that the king might see him of whom there was such great report. Then the king got up and went away, and the queen began to doubt; and the more she thought the more she feared she had not been acting wisely in talking as she did, for it is not wise to praise anyone to a king. She went away to her own room to consider, and to try if she could hear of any reason why the king should act as he had done, and desire her brother to come to him to the city; and she found out that it was all a plot of her enemies. Herself they had failed to injure, so they were now plotting against her through her brother. They had gone to the king, and filled his ear with slanderous reports. They had said that the queen's brother was the strongest man in all the kingdom. 'He was cunning, too,' they said, 'and very popular among all the people; and he was so puffed up with pride, now that his sister was a queen, that there was nothing he did not think he could do.' They represented to the king how dangerous such a man was in a kingdom, that it would be quite easy for him to raise such rebellion as the king could hardly put down, and that he was just the man to do such a thing. Nay, it was indeed proved that he must be disloyally plotting something, or he would have come down with his sister to the city when she came. But now many months had passed, and he never came. Clearly he was not to be trusted. Any other man whose sister was a queen would have come and lived in the palace, and served the king and become a minister, instead of staying up there and pretending to be a blacksmith. The king's mind had been much disturbed by this, for it seemed to him that it must be in part true; and he went to the queen, as I have said, and his suspicions had not been lulled by what she told him, so he had ordered her to write to her brother to come down to the palace. The queen was terrified when she saw what a mistake she had made, and how she had fallen into the trap of her enemies; but she hoped that the king would forget, and she determined that she would send no order to her brother to come. But the next day the king came back to the subject, and asked her if she had yet sent the letter, and she said 'No!' The king was very angry at this disobedience to his orders, and he asked her how it came that she had not done as he had commanded, and sent a letter to her brother to call him to the palace. Then the queen fell at the king's feet and told him all her fears that her brother was sent for only to be imprisoned or executed, and she begged and prayed the king to leave him in peace up there in his village. She assured the king that he was loyal and good, and would do no evil. The king was rather abashed that his design had been discovered, but he was firm in his purpose. He assured the queen that the blacksmith should come to no harm, but rather good; and he ordered the queen to obey him, threatening her that if she refused he would be sure that she was disloyal also, and there would be no alternative but to send and arrest the blacksmith by force, and punish her, the queen, too. Then the queen said that if the king swore to her that her brother should come to no harm, she would write as ordered. _And the king swore._ So the queen wrote to her brother, and adjured him by his love to her to come down to the Golden City. She said she had dire need of him, and she told him that the king had sworn that no harm should come to him. The letter was sent off by a king's messenger. In due time the blacksmith arrived, and he was immediately seized and thrown into prison to await his trial. When the queen saw that she had been deceived, she was in despair. She tried by every way, by tears and entreaties and caresses, to move the king, but all without avail. Then she tried by plotting and bribery to gain her brother's release, but it was all in vain. The day for trial came quickly, and the blacksmith was tried, and he was condemned and sentenced to be burnt alive by the river on the following day. On the evening of the day of trial the queen sent a message to the king to come to her; and when the king came reluctantly, fearing a renewal of entreaties, expecting a woman made of tears and sobs, full of grief, he found instead that the queen had dried her eyes and dressed herself still more beautifully than ever, till she seemed to the king the very pearl among women. And she told the king that he was right, and she was wrong. She said, putting her arms about him and caressing him, that she had discovered that it was true that her brother had been plotting against the king, and therefore his death was necessary. It was terrible, she said, to find that her brother, whom she had always held as a pattern, was no better than a traitor; but it was even so, and her king was the wisest of all kings to find it out. The king was delighted to find his queen in this mood, and he soothed her and talked to her kindly and sweetly, for he really loved her, though he had given in to bad advice about the brother. And when the king's suspicions were lulled, the queen said to him that she had now but one request to make, and that was that she might have permission to go down with her maids to the river-shore in the early morning, and see herself the execution of her traitor brother. The king, who would now have granted her anything--anything she asked, except just that one thing, the life of her brother--gave permission; and then the queen said that she was tired and wished to rest after all the trouble of the last few days, and would the king leave her. So the king left her to herself, and went away to his own chambers. Very early in the morning, ere the crimson flush upon the mountains had faded in the light of day, a vast crowd was gathered below the city, by the shore of the great river. Very many thousands were there, of many countries and peoples, crowding down to see a man die, to see a traitor burnt to death for his sins, for there is nothing men like so much as to see another man die. Upon a little headland jutting out into the river the pyre was raised, with brushwood and straw, to burn quickly, and an iron post in the middle to which the man was to be chained. At one side was a place reserved, and presently down from the palace in a long procession came the queen and her train of ladies to the place kept for her. Guards were put all about to prevent the people crowding; and then came the soldiers, and in the midst of them the blacksmith; and amid many cries of 'Traitor, traitor!' and shouts of derision, he was bound to the iron post within the wood and the straw, and the guards fell back. The queen sat and watched it all, and said never a word. Fire was put to the pyre, and it crept rapidly up in long red tongues with coils of black smoke. It went very quickly, for the wood was very dry, and a light breeze came laughing up the river and helped it. The flames played about the man chained there in the midst, and he made never a sign; only he looked steadily across at the purple mountain where his home lay, and it was clear that in a few more moments he would be dead. There was a deep silence everywhere. Then of a sudden, before anyone knew, before a hand could be held out to hinder her, the queen rose from her seat and ran to the pyre. In a moment she was there and had thrown herself into the flames, and with her arms about her brother's neck she turned and faced the myriad eyes that glared upon them--the queen, in all the glory of her beauty, glittering with gems, and the man with great shackled bare limbs, dressed in a few rags, his muscles already twisted with the agony of the fire. A great cry of horror came from the people, and there was the movement of guards and officers rushing to stop the fire; but it was all of no use. A flash of red flames came out of the logs, folding these twain like an imperial cloak, a whirl of sparks towered into the air, and when one could see again the woman and her brother were no longer there. They were dead and burnt, and the bodies mingled with the ashes of the fire. She had cost her brother his life, and she went with him into death. Some days after this a strange report was brought to the palace. By the landing-place near the spot where the fire had been was a great fig-tree. It was so near to the landing-place, and was such a magnificent tree, that travellers coming from the boats, or waiting for a boat to arrive, would rest in numbers under its shade. But the report said that something had happened there. To travellers sleeping beneath the tree at night it was stated that two Nats had appeared, very large and very beautiful, a man Nat and a woman Nat, and had frightened them very much indeed. Noises were heard in the tree, voices and cries, and a strange terror came upon those who approached it. Nay, it was even said that men had been struck by unseen hands and severely hurt, and others, it was said, had disappeared. Children who went to play under the tree were never seen again: the Nats took them, and their parents sought for them in vain. So the landing-place was deserted, and a petition was brought to the king, and the king gave orders that the tree should be hewn down. So the tree was cut down, and its trunk was thrown into the river; it floated away out of sight, and nothing happened to the men who cut the tree, though they were deadly afraid. The tree floated down for days, until at last it stranded near a landing-place that led to a large town, where the governor of these parts lived; and at this landing-place the portents that had frightened the people at the great city reappeared and terrified the travellers here too, and they petitioned the governor. The governor sought out a great monk, a very holy man learned in these matters, and sent him to inquire, and the monk came down to the tree and spoke. He said that if any Nats lived in the tree, they should speak to him and tell him what they wanted. 'It is not fit,' he said, 'for great Nats to terrify the poor villagers at the landing-place. Let the Nats speak and say what they require. All that they want shall be given.' And the Nats spake and said that they wanted a place to live in where they could be at peace, and the monk answered for the governor that all his land was at their disposal. 'Let the Nats choose,' he said; 'all the country is before them.' So the Nats chose, and said that they would have Popa Mountain, and the monk agreed. The Nats then left the tree and went away, far away inland, to the great Popa Mountain, and took up their abode there, and all the people there feared and reverenced them, and even made to their honour two statues with golden heads and set them up on the mountain. This is the story of the Popa Nats, the greatest Nats of all the country of Burma, the guardian spirits of the mysterious mountain. The golden heads of the statues are now in one of our treasuries, put there for safe custody during the troubles, though it is doubtful if even then anyone would have dared to steal them, so greatly are the Nats feared. And the hunters and the travellers there must offer to the Nats little offerings, if they would be safe in these forests, and even the young man must obtain permission from the Nats before he marry. I think these stories that I have told, stories selected from very many that I have heard, will show what sort of spirits these are that the Burmese have peopled their trees and rivers with; will show what sort of religion it is that underlies, without influencing, the creed of the Buddha that they follow. It is of the very poetry of superstition, free from brutality, from baseness, from anything repulsive, springing, as I have said, from their innate sympathy with Nature and recognition of the life that works in all things. It always seems to me that beliefs such as these are a great key to the nature of a people, are, apart from all interest in their beauty, and in their akinness to other beliefs, of great value in trying to understand the character of a nation. For to beings such as Nats and fairies the people who believe in them will attribute such qualities as are predominant in themselves, as they consider admirable; and, indeed, all supernatural beings are but the magnified shadows of man cast by the light of his imagination upon the mists of his ignorance. Therefore, when you find that a people make their spirits beautiful and fair, calm and even tempered, loving peace and the beauty of the trees and rivers, shrinkingly averse from loud words, from noises, and from the taking of life, it is because the people themselves think that these are great qualities. If no stress be laid upon their courage, their activity, their performance of great deeds, it is because the people who imagine them care not for such things. There is no truer guide, I am sure, to the heart of a young people than their superstitions; these they make entirely for themselves, apart from their religion, which is, to a certain extent, made for them. That is why I have written this chapter on Nats: not because I think it affects Buddhism very much one way or another, but because it seems to me to reveal the people themselves, because it helps us to understand them better, to see more with their eyes, to be in unison with their ideas--because it is a great key to the soul of the people. CHAPTER XXII DEATH, THE DELIVERER 'The end of my life is near at hand; seven days hence, like a man who rids himself of a heavy load, I shall be free from the burden of my body.'--_Death of the Buddha._ There is a song well known to all the Burmese, the words of which are taken from the sacred writings. It is called the story of Ma Pa Da, and it was first told to me by a Burmese monk, long ago, when I was away on the frontier. It runs like this: In the time of the Buddha, in the city of Thawatti, there was a certain rich man, a merchant, who had many slaves. Slaves in those days, and, indeed, generally throughout the East, were held very differently to slaves in Europe. They were part of the family, and were not saleable without good reason, and there was a law applicable to them. They were not _hors de la loi_, like the slaves of which we have conception. There are many cases quoted of sisters being slaves to sisters, and of brothers to brothers, quoted not for the purpose of saying that this was an uncommon occurrence, but merely of showing points of law in such cases. One day in the market the merchant bought another slave, a young man, handsome and well mannered, and took him to his house, and kept him there with his family and the other slaves. The young man was earnest and careful in his work, and the merchant approved of him, and his fellow-slaves liked him. But Ma Pa Da, the merchant's daughter, fell in love with him. The slave was much troubled at this, and he did his best to avoid her; but he was a slave and under orders, and what could he do? When she would come to him secretly and make love to him, and say, 'Let us flee together, for we love each other,' he would refuse, saying that he was a slave, and the merchant would be very angry. He said he could not do such a thing. And yet when the girl said, 'Let us flee, for we love each other,' he knew that it was true, and that he loved her as she loved him; and it was only his honour to his master that held him from doing as she asked. But because his heart was not of iron, and there are few men that can resist when a woman comes and woos them, he at last gave way; and they fled away one night, the girl and the slave, taking with them her jewels and some money. They travelled rapidly and in great fear, and did not rest till they came to a city far away where the merchant would never, they thought, think of searching for them. Here, in this city where no one knew of their history, they lived in great happiness, husband and wife, trading with the money they had with them. And in time a little child was born to them. About two or three years after this it became necessary for the husband to take a journey, and he started forth with his wife and child. The journey was a very long one, and they were unduly delayed; and so it happened that while still in the forest the wife fell ill, and could not go on any further. So the husband built a hut of branches and leaves, and there, in the solitude of the forest, was born to them another little son. The mother recovered rapidly, and in a little time she was well enough to go on. They were to start next morning on their way again; and in the evening the husband went out, as was his custom, to cut firewood, for the nights were cold and damp. Ma Pa Da waited and waited for him, but he never came back. The sun set and the dark rose out of the ground, and the forest became full of whispers, but he never came. All night she watched and waited, caring for her little ones, fearful to leave them alone, till at last the gray light came down, down from the sky to the branches, and from the branches to the ground, and she could see her way. Then, with her new-born babe in her arms and the elder little fellow trotting by her side, she went out to search for her husband. Soon enough she found him, not far off, stiff and cold beside his half-cut bundle of firewood. A snake had bitten him on the ankle, and he was dead. So Ma Pa Da was alone in the great forest, but a girl still, with two little children to care for. But she was brave, despite her trouble, and she determined to go on and gain some village. She took her baby in her arms and the little one by the hand, and started on her journey. And for a time all went well, till at last she came to a stream. It was not very deep, but it was too deep for the little boy to wade, for it came up to his neck, and his mother was not strong enough to carry both at once. So, after considering for a time, she told the elder boy to wait. She would cross and put the baby on the far side, and return for him. 'Be good,' she said; 'be good, and stay here quietly till I come back;' and the boy promised. The stream was deeper and swifter than she thought; but she went with great care and gained the far side, and put the baby under a tree a little distance from the bank, to lie there while she went for the other boy. Then, after a few minutes' rest, she went back. She had got to the centre of the stream, and her little boy had come down to the margin to be ready for her, when she heard a rush and a cry from the side she had just left; and, looking round, she saw with terror a great eagle sweep down upon the baby, and carry it off in its claws. She turned round and waved her arms and cried out to the eagle, 'He! he!' hoping it would be frightened and drop the baby. But it cared nothing for her cries or threats, and swept on with long curves over the forest trees, away out of sight. Then the mother turned to gain the bank once more, and suddenly she missed her son who had been waiting for her. He had seen his mother wave her arms; he had heard her shout, and he thought she was calling him to come to her. So the brave little man walked down into the water, and the black current carried him off his feet at once. He was gone, drowned in the deep water below the ford, tossing on the waves towards the sea. No one can write of the despair of the girl when she threw herself under a tree in the forest. The song says it was very terrible. At last she said to herself, 'I will get up now and return to my father in Thawatti; he is all I have left. Though I have forsaken him all these years, yet now that my husband and his children are dead, my father will take me back again. Surely he will have pity on me, for I am much to be pitied.' So she went on, and at length, after many days, she came to the gates of the great city where her father lived. At the entering of the gates she met a large company of people, mourners, returning from a funeral, and she spoke to them and asked them: 'Who is it that you have been burying to-day so grandly with so many mourners?' And the people answered her, and told her who it was. And when she heard, she fell down upon the road as one dead: for it was her father and mother who had died yesterday, and it was their funeral train that she saw. They were all dead now, husband and sons and father and mother; in all the world she was quite alone. So she went mad, for her trouble was more than she could bear. She threw off all her clothes, and let down her long hair and wrapped it about her naked body, and walked about raving. At last she came to where the Buddha was teaching, seated under a fig-tree. She came up to the Buddha, and told him of her losses, and how she had no one left; and she demanded of the Buddha that he should restore to her those that she had lost. And the Buddha had great compassion upon her, and tried to console her. 'All die,' he said; 'it comes to everyone, king and peasant, animal and man. Only through many deaths can we obtain the Great Peace. All this sorrow,' he said, 'is of the earth. All this is passion which we must get rid of, and forget before we reach heaven. Be comforted, my daughter, and turn to the holy life. All suffer as you do. It is part of our very existence here, sorrow and trouble without any end.' But she would not be comforted, but demanded her dead of the Buddha. Then, because he saw it was no use talking to her, that her ears were deaf with grief, and her eyes blinded with tears, he said to her that he would restore to her those who were dead. 'You must go,' he said, 'my daughter, and get some mustard-seed, a pinch of mustard-seed, and I can bring back their lives. Only you must get this seed from the garden of him near whom death has never come. Get this, and all will be well.' So the woman went forth with a light heart. It was so simple, only a pinch of mustard-seed, and mustard grew in every garden. She would get the seed and be back very quickly, and then the Lord Buddha would give her back those she loved who had died. She clothed herself again and tied up her hair, and went cheerfully and asked at the first house, 'Give me a pinch of mustard-seed,' and it was given readily. So with her treasure in her hand she was going forth back to the Buddha full of delight, when she remembered. 'Has ever anyone died in your household?' she asked, looking round wistfully. The man answered 'Yes,' that death had been with them but recently. Who could this woman be, he thought, to ask such a question? And the woman went forth, the seed dropping from her careless fingers, for it was of no value. So she would try again and again, but it was always the same. Death had taken his tribute from all. Father or mother, son or brother, daughter or wife, there was always a gap somewhere, a vacant place beside the meal. From house to house throughout the city she went, till at last the new hope faded away, and she learned from the world, what she had not believed from the Buddha, that death and life are one. So she returned, and she became a nun, poor soul! taking on her the two hundred and twenty-seven vows, which are so hard to keep that nowadays nuns keep but five of them.[1] This is the teaching of the Buddha, that death is inevitable; this is the consolation he offers, that all men must know death; no one can escape death; no one can escape the sorrow of the death of those whom he loves. Death, he says, and life are one; not antagonistic, but the same; and the only way to escape from one is to escape from the other too. Only in the Great Peace, when we have found refuge from the passion and tumult of life, shall we find the place where death cannot come. Life and death are one. This is the teaching of the Buddha, repeated over and over again to his disciples when they sorrowed for the death of Thariputra, when they were in despair at the swift-approaching end of the great teacher himself. Hear what he says to Ananda, the beloved disciple, who is mourning over Thariputra. 'Ananda,' he said, 'often and often have I sought to bring shelter to your soul from the misery caused by such grief as this. There are two things alone that can separate us from father and mother, from brother and sister, from all those who are most cherished by us, and those two things are distance and death. Think not that I, though the Buddha, have not felt all this even as any other of you; was I not alone when I was seeking for wisdom in the wilderness? 'And yet what would I have gained by wailing and lamenting either for myself or for others? Would it have brought to me any solace from my loneliness? Would it have been any help to those whom I had left? There is nothing that can happen to us, however terrible, however miserable, that can justify tears and lamentations and make them aught but a weakness.' And so, we are told, in this way the Buddha soothed the affliction of Ananda, and filled his soul with consolation--the consolation of resignation. For there is no other consolation possible but this, resignation to the inevitable, the conviction of the uselessness of sorrow, the vanity and selfishness of grief. There is no meeting again with the dead. Nowhere in the recurring centuries shall we meet again those whom we have loved, whom we love, who seem to us to be parts of our very soul. That which survives of us, the part which is incarnated again and again, until it be fit for heaven, has nothing to do with love and hate. Even if in the whirlpool of life our paths should cross again the paths of those whom we have loved, we are never told that we shall know them again and love them. A friend of mine has just lost his mother, and he is very much distressed. He must have been very fond of her, for although he has a wife and children, and is happy in his family, he is in great sorrow. He proposes even to build a pagoda over her remains, a testimony of respect which in strict Buddhism is reserved to saints. He has been telling me about this, and how he is trying to get a sacred relic to put in the pagoda, and I asked him if he never hoped again to meet the soul of his mother on earth or in heaven, and he answered: 'No. It is very hard, but so are many things, and they have to be borne. Far better it is to face the truth than to escape by a pleasant falsehood. There is a Burmese proverb that tells us that all the world is one vast burial-ground; there are dead men everywhere.' 'One of our great men has said the same,' I answered. He was not surprised. 'As it is true,' he said, 'I suppose all great men would see it.' Thus there is no escape, no loophole for a delusive hope, only the cultivation of the courage of sorrow. There are never any exceptions to the laws of the Buddha. If a law is a law, that is the end of it. Just as we know of no exceptions to the law of gravitation, so there are no exceptions to the law of death. But although this may seem to be a religion of despair, it is not really so. This sorrow to which there is no relief is the selfishness of sorrow, the grief for our own loneliness; for of sorrow, of fear, of pity for the dead, there is no need. We know that in time all will be well with them. We know that, though there may be before them vast periods of suffering, yet that they will all at last be in Nebhan with us. And if we shall not know them there, still we shall know that they are there, all of them--not one will be wanting. Purified from the lust of life, white souls steeped in the Great Peace, all living things will attain rest at last. There is this remarkable fact in Buddhism, that nowhere is any fear expressed of death itself, nowhere any apprehension of what may happen to the dead. It is the sorrow of separation, the terror of death to the survivors, that is always dwelt upon with compassion, and the agony of which it is sought to soothe. That the dying man himself should require strengthening to face the King of Terrors is hardly ever mentioned. It seems to be taken for granted that men should have courage in themselves to take leave of life becomingly, without undue fears. Buddhism is the way to show us the escape from the miseries of life, not to give us hope in the hour of death. It is true that to all Orientals death is a less fearful thing than it is to us. I do not know what may be the cause of this, courage certainly has little to do with it; but it is certain that the purely physical fear of death, that horror and utter revulsion that seizes the majority of us at the idea of death, is absent from most Orientals. And yet this cannot explain it all. For fear of death, though less, is still there, is still a strong influence upon their lives, and it would seem that no religion which ignored this great fact could become a great living religion. Religion is made for man, to fit his necessities, not man for religion, and yet the faith of Buddhism is not concerned with death. Consider our faith, how much of its teaching consists of how to avoid the fear of death, how much of its consolation is for the death-bed. How we are taught all our lives that we should live so as not to fear death; how we have priests and sacraments to soothe the dying man, and give him hope and courage, and how the crown and summit of our creed is that we should die easily. And consider that in Buddhism all this is absolutely wanting. Buddhism is a creed of life, of conduct; death is the end of that life, that is all. We have all seen death. We have all of us watched those who, near and dear to us, go away out of our ken. There is no need for me to recall the last hours of those of our faith, to bring up again the fading eye and waning breath, the messages of hope we search for in our Scriptures to give hope to him who is going, the assurances of religion, the cross held before the dying eyes. Many men, we are told, turn to religion at the last after a life of wickedness, and a man may do so even at the eleventh hour and be saved. That is part of our belief; that is the strongest part of our belief; and that is the hope that all fervent Christians have, that those they love may be saved even at the end. I think it may truly be said that our Western creeds are all directed at the hour of death, as the great and final test of that creed. And now think of Buddhism; it is a creed of life. In life you must win your way to salvation by urgent effort, by suffering, by endurance. On your death-bed you can do nothing. If you have done well, then it is well; if ill, then you must in future life try again and again till you succeed. A life is not washed, a soul is not made fit for the dwelling of eternity, in a moment. Repentance to a Buddhist is but the opening of the eyes to see the path to righteousness; it has no virtue in itself. To have seen that we are sinners is but the first step to cleansing our sin; in itself it cannot purify. As well ask a robber of the poor to repent, and suppose thereby that those who have suffered from his guilt are compensated for the evil done to them by his repentance, as to ask a Buddhist to believe that a sinner can at the last moment make good to his own soul all the injuries caused to that soul by the wickedness of his life. Or suppose a man who has destroyed his constitution by excess to be by the very fact of acknowledging that excess restored to health. The Buddhist will not have that at all. A man is what he makes himself; and that making is a matter of terrible effort, of unceasing endeavour towards the right, of constant suppression of sin, till sin be at last dead within him. If a man has lived a wicked life, he dies a wicked man, and no wicked man can obtain the perfect rest of the sinless dead. Heaven is shut to him. But if heaven is shut it is not shut for ever; if hell may perhaps open to him it is only for a time, only till he is purified and washed from the stain of his sins; and then he can begin again, and have another chance to win heaven. If there is no immediate heaven there is no eternal hell, and in due time all will reach heaven; all will have learnt, through suffering, the wisdom the Buddha has shown to us, that only by a just life can men reach the Great Peace even as he did. So that if Buddhism has none of the consolation for the dying man that Christianity holds out, in the hope of heaven, so it has none of the threats and terrors of our faith. There is no fear of an angry Judge--of a Judge who is angry. And yet when I came to think over the matter, it seemed to me that surely there must be something to calm him in the face of death. If Buddhism does not furnish this consolation, he must go elsewhere for it. And I was not satisfied, because I could find nothing in the sacred books about a man's death, that therefore the creed of the people had ignored it. A living creed must, I was sure, provide for this somehow. So I went to a friend of mine, a Burman magistrate, and I asked him: 'When a man is dying, what does he try to think of? What do you say to comfort him that his last moments may be peace? The monks do not come, I know.' 'The monks!' he said, shaking his head; 'what could they do?' I did not know. 'Can you do anything,' I asked, 'to cheer him? Do you speak to him of what may happen after death, of hopes of another life?' 'No one can tell,' said my friend, 'what will happen after death. It depends on a man's life, if he has done good or evil, what his next existence will be, whether he will go a step nearer to the Peace. When the man is dying no monks will come, truly; but an old man, an old friend, father, perhaps, or an elder of the village, and he will talk to the dying man. He will say, "Think of your good deeds; think of all that you have done well in this life. Think of your good deeds."' 'What is the use of that?' I asked. 'Suppose you think of your good deeds, what then? Will that bring peace?' The Burman seemed to think that it would. 'Nothing,' he said, 'was so calming to a man's soul as to think of even one deed he had done well in his life.' Think of the man dying. The little house built of bamboo and thatch, with an outer veranda, where the friends are sitting, and the inner room, behind a wall of bamboo matting, where the man is lying. A pot of flowers is standing on a shelf on one side, and a few cloths are hung here and there beneath the brown rafters. The sun comes in through little chinks in roof and wall, making curious lights in the semi-darkness of the room, and it is very hot. From outside come the noises of the village, cries of children playing, grunts of cattle, voices of men and women clearly heard through the still clear air of the afternoon. There is a woman pounding rice near by with a steady thud, thud of the lever, and there is a clink of a loom where a girl is weaving ceaselessly. All these sounds come into the house as if there were no walls at all, but they are unheeded from long custom. The man lies on a low bed with a fine mat spread under him for bedding. His wife, his grown-up children, his sister, his brother are about him, for the time is short, and death comes very quickly in the East. They talk to him kindly and lovingly, but they read to him no sacred books; they give him no messages from the world to which he is bound; they whisper to him no hopes of heaven. He is tortured with no fears of everlasting hell. Yet life is sweet and death is bitter, and it is hard to go; and as he tosses to and fro in his fever there comes in to him an old friend, the headman of the village perhaps, with a white muslin fillet bound about his kind old head, and he sits beside the dying man and speaks to him. 'Remember,' he says slowly and clearly, 'all those things that you have done well. Think of your good deeds.' And as the sick man turns wearily, trying to move his thoughts as he is bidden, trying to direct the wheels of memory, the old man helps him to remember. 'Think,' he says, 'of your good deeds, of how you have given charity to the monks, of how you have fed the poor. Remember how you worked and saved to build the little rest-house in the forest where the traveller stays and finds water for his thirst. All these are pleasant things, and men will always be grateful to you. Remember your brother, how you helped him in his need, how you fed him and went security for him till he was able again to secure his own living. You did well to him, surely that is a pleasant thing.' I do not think it difficult to see how the sick man's face will lighten, how his eyes will brighten at the thoughts that come to him at the old man's words. And he goes on: 'Remember when the squall came up the river and the boat upset when you were crossing here; how it seemed as if no man could live alone in such waves, and yet how you clung to and saved the boy who was with you, swimming through the water that splashed over your head and very nearly drowned you. The boy's father and mother have never forgotten that, and they are even now mourning without in the veranda. It is all due to you that their lives have not been full of misery and despair. Remember their faces when you brought their little son to them saved from death in the great river. Surely that is a pleasant thing. Remember your wife who is now with you; how you have loved her and cherished her, and kept faithful to her before all the world. You have been a good husband to her, and you have honoured her. She loves you, and you have loved her all your long life together. Surely that is a pleasant thing.' Yes, surely these are pleasant things to have with one at the last. Surely a man will die easier with such memories as these before his eyes, with love in those about him, and the calm of good deeds in his dying heart. If it be a different way of soothing a man's end from those which other nations use, is it the worse for that? Think of your good deeds. It seems a new idea to me that in doing well in our life we are making for ourselves a pleasant death, because of the memory of those things. And if we have none? or if evil so outnumbered the good deeds as to hide and overwhelm them, what then? A man's death will be terrible indeed if he cannot in all his days remember one good deed that he has done. 'All a man's life comes before him at the hour of death,' said my informant; 'all, from the earliest memory to the latest breath. Like a whole landscape called by a flash of lightning out of the dark night. It is all there, every bit of it, good and evil, pleasure and pain, sin and righteousness.' A man cannot escape from his life even in death. In our acts of to-day we are determining what our death will be; if we have lived well, we shall die well; and if not, then not. As a man lives so shall he die, is the teaching of Buddhism as of other creeds. So what Buddhism has to offer to the dying believer is this, that if he live according to its tenets he will die happily, and that in the life that he will next enter upon he will be less and less troubled by sin, less and less wedded to the lust of life, until sometime, far away, he shall gain the great Deliverance. He shall have perfect Peace, perfect rest, perfect happiness, he and his, in that heaven where his teacher went before him long ago. And if we should say that this Deliverance from life, this Great Peace, is Death, what matter, if it be indeed Peace? FOOTNOTE: [1] These five vows are: 1. Not to take life. 2. To be honest. 3. To tell the truth. 4. To abstain from intoxicants. 5. Chastity. CHAPTER XXIII THE POTTER'S WHEEL 'Life is like a great whirlpool wherein we are dashed to and fro by our passions.'--_Saying of the Buddha._ It is a hard teaching, this of the Buddha about death. It is a teaching that may appeal to the reason, but not to the soul, that when life goes out, this thing which we call 'I' goes out with it, and that love and remembrance are dead for ever. It is so hard a teaching that in its purity the people cannot believe it. They accept it, but they have added on to it a belief which changes the whole form of it, a belief that is the outcome of that weakness of humanity which insists that death is not and cannot be all. Though to the strict Buddhist death is the end of all worldly passion, to the Burmese villager that is not so. He cannot grasp, he cannot endure that it should be so, and he has made for himself out of Buddhism a belief that is opposed to all Buddhism in this matter. He believes in the transmigration of souls, in the survival of the 'I.' The teaching that what survives is not the 'I,' but only the result of its action, is too deep for him to hold. True, if a flame dies the effects that it has caused remain, and the flame is dead for ever. A new flame is a new flame. But the 'I' of man cannot die, he thinks; it lives and loves for all time. He has made out of the teaching a new teaching that is very far from that of the Buddha, and the teaching is this: When a man dies his soul remains, his 'I' has only changed its habitation. Still it lives and breathes on earth, not the effect, but the soul itself. It is reborn among us, and it may even be recognised very often in its new abode. And that we should never forget this, that we should never doubt that this is true, it has been so ordered that many can remember something of these former lives of theirs. This belief is not to a Burman a mere theory, but is as true as anything he can see. For does he not daily see people who know of their former lives? Nay, does he not himself, often vaguely, have glimpses of that former life of his? No man seems to be quite without it, but of course it is clearer to some than others. Just as we tell stories in the dusk of ghosts and second sight, so do they, when the day's work is over, gossip of stories of second birth; only that they believe in them far more than we do in ghosts. A friend of mine put up for the night once at a monastery far away in the forest near a small village. He was travelling with an escort of mounted police, and there was no place else to sleep but in the monastery. The monk was, as usual, hospitable, and put what he had, bare house-room, at the officer's disposal, and he and his men settled down for the night. After dinner a fire was built on the ground, and the officer went and sat by it and talked to the headman of the village and the monk. First they talked of the dacoits and of crops, unfailing subjects of interest, and gradually they drifted from one subject to another till the Englishman remarked about the monastery, that it was a very large and fine one for such a small secluded village to have built. The monastery was of the best and straightest teak, and must, he thought, have taken a very long time and a great deal of labour to build, for the teak must have been brought from very far away; and in explanation he was told a curious story. It appeared that in the old days there used to be only a bamboo and grass monastery there, such a monastery as most jungle villages have; and the then monk was distressed at the smallness of his abode and the little accommodation there was for his school--a monastery is always a school. So one rainy season he planted with great care a number of teak seedlings round about, and he watered them and cared for them. 'When they are grown up,' he would say, 'these teak-trees shall provide timber for a new and proper building; and I will myself return in another life, and with those trees will I build a monastery more worthy than this.' Teak-trees take a hundred years to reach a mature size, and while the trees were still but saplings the monk died, and another monk taught in his stead. And so it went on, and the years went by, and from time to time new monasteries of bamboo were built and rebuilt, and the teak-trees grew bigger and bigger. But the village grew smaller, for the times were troubled, and the village was far away in the forest. So it happened that at last the village found itself without a monk at all: the last monk was dead, and no one came to take his place. It is a serious thing for a village to have no monk. To begin with, there is no one to teach the lads to read and write and do arithmetic; and there is no one to whom you can give offerings and thereby get merit, and there is no one to preach to you and tell you of the sacred teaching. So the village was in a bad way. Then at last one evening, when the girls were all out at the well drawing water, they were surprised by the arrival of a monk walking in from the forest, weary with a long journey, footsore and hungry. The villagers received him with enthusiasm, fearing, however, that he was but passing through, and they furbished up the old monastery in a hurry for him to sleep in. But the curious thing was that the monk seemed to know it all. He knew the monastery and the path to it, and the ways about the village, and the names of the hills and the streams. It seemed, indeed, as if he must once have lived there in the village, and yet no one knew him or recognised his face, though he was but a young man still, and there were villagers who had lived there for seventy years. Next morning, instead of going on his way, the monk came into the village with his begging-bowl, as monks do, and went round and collected his food for the day; and in the evening, when the villagers went to see him at the monastery, he told them he was going to stay. He recalled to them the monk who had planted the teak-trees, and how he had said that when the trees were grown he would return. 'I,' said the young monk, 'am he that planted these trees. Lo, they are grown up, and I am returned, and now we will build a monastery as I said.' When the villagers, doubting, questioned him, and old men came and talked to him of traditions of long-past days, he answered as one who knew all. He told them he had been born and educated far away in the South, and had grown up not knowing who he had been; and that he had entered a monastery, and in time became a Pongyi. The remembrance came to him, he went on, in a dream of how he had planted the trees and had promised to return to that village far away in the forest. The very next day he had started, and travelled day after day and week upon week, till at length he had arrived, as they saw. So the villagers were convinced, and they set to work and cut down the great boles, and built the monastery such as my friend saw. And the monk lived there all his life, and taught the children, and preached the marvellous teaching of the great Buddha, till at length his time came again and he returned; for of monks it is not said that they die, but that they return. This is the common belief of the people. Into this has the mystery of Dharma turned, in the thoughts of the Burmese Buddhists, for no one can believe the incomprehensible. A man has a soul, and it passes from life to life, as a traveller from inn to inn, till at length it is ended in heaven. But not till he has attained heaven in his heart will he attain heaven in reality. Many children, the Burmese will tell you, remember their former lives. As they grow older the memories die away and they forget, but to the young children they are very clear. I have seen many such. About fifty years ago in a village named Okshitgon were born two children, a boy and a girl. They were born on the same day in neighbouring houses, and they grew up together, and played together, and loved each other. And in due course they married and started a family, and maintained themselves by cultivating their dry, barren fields about the village. They were always known as devoted to each other, and they died as they had lived--together. The same death took them on the same day; so they were buried without the village and were forgotten; for the times were serious. It was the year after the English army had taken Mandalay, and all Burma was in a fury of insurrection. The country was full of armed men, the roads were unsafe, and the nights were lighted with the flames of burning villages. It was a bad time for peace-loving men, and many such, fleeing from their villages, took refuge in larger places nearer the centres of administration. Okshitgon was in the midst of one of the worst of all the distressed districts, and many of its people fled, and one of them, a man named Maung Kan, with his young wife went to the village of Kabyu and lived there. Now, Maung Kan's wife had born to him twin sons. They were born at Okshitgon shortly before their parents had to run away, and they were named, the eldest Maung Gyi, which is Brother Big-fellow, and the younger Maung Ngè, which means Brother Little-fellow. These lads grew up at Kabyu, and soon learned to talk; and as they grew up their parents were surprised to hear them calling to each other at play, and calling each other, not Maung Gyi and Maung Ngè, but Maung San Nyein and Ma Gywin. The latter is a woman's name, and the parents remembered that these were the names of the man and wife who had died in Okshitgon about the time the children were born. So the parents thought that the souls of the man and wife had entered into the children, and they took them to Okshitgon to try them. The children knew everything in Okshitgon; they knew the roads and the houses and the people, and they recognised the clothes they used to wear in a former life; there was no doubt about it. One of them, the younger, remembered, too, how she had borrowed two rupees once of a woman, Ma Thet, unknown to her husband, and left the debt unpaid. Ma Thet was still living, and so they asked her, and she recollected that it was true she had lent the money long ago. Shortly afterwards I saw these two children. They are now just over six years old. The elder, into whom the soul of the man entered, is a fat, chubby little fellow, but the younger twin is smaller, and has a curious dreamy look in his face, more like a girl than a boy. They told me much about their former lives. After they died they said they lived for some time without a body at all, wandering in the air and hiding in the trees. This was for their sins. Then, after some months, they were born again as twin boys. 'It used,' said the elder boy, 'to be so clear, I could remember everything; but it is getting duller and duller, and I cannot now remember as I used to do.' Of children such as this you may find any number. Only you have to look for them, as they are not brought forward spontaneously. The Burmese, like other people, hate to have their beliefs and ideas ridiculed, and from experience they have learned that the object of a foreigner in inquiring into their ways is usually to be able to show by his contempt how very much cleverer a man he is than they are. Therefore they are very shy. But once they understand that you only desire to learn and to see, and that you will always treat them with courtesy and consideration, they will tell you all that they think. A fellow officer of mine has a Burmese police orderly, a young man about twenty, who has been with him since he came to the district two years ago. Yet my friend only discovered accidentally the other day that his orderly remembers his former life. He is very unwilling to talk about it. He was a woman apparently in that former life, and lived about twenty miles away. He must have lived a good life, for it is a step of promotion to be a man in this life; but he will not talk of it. He forgets most of it, he says, though he remembered it when he was a child. Sometimes this belief leads to lawsuits of a peculiarly difficult nature. In 1883, two years before the annexation of Upper Burma, there was a case that came into the local Court of the oil district, which depended upon this theory of transmigration. Opposite Yenangyaung there are many large islands in the river. These islands during the low water months are joined to the mainland, and are covered with a dense high grass in which many deer live. When the river rises, it rises rapidly, communication with the mainland is cut off, and the islands are for a time, in the higher rises, entirely submerged. During the progress of the first rise some hunters went to one of these islands where many deer were to be found and set fire to the grass to drive them out of cover, shooting them as they came out. Some deer, fleeing before the fire, swam across and escaped, others fell victims, but one fawn, barely half grown, ran right down the island, and in its blind terror it leaped into a boat at anchor there. This boat was that of a fisherman who was plying his trade at some distance, and the only occupant of the boat was his wife. Now this woman had a year or so before lost her son, very much loved by her, but who was not quite of the best character, and when she saw the deer leaping into the boat, she at once fancied that she saw the soul of her erring son looking at her out of its great terrified eyes. So she got up and took the poor panting beast in her arms and soothed it, and when the hunters came running to her to claim it she refused. 'He is my son,' she said, 'he is mine. Shall I give him up to death?' The hunters clamoured and threatened to take the deer by force, but the woman was quite firm. She would never give him up except with her life. 'You can see,' she said, 'that it is true that he is my son. He came running straight to me, as he always did in his trouble when he was a boy, and he is now quite quiet and contented, instead of being afraid of me as an ordinary deer would be.' And it was quite true that the deer took to her at once, and remained with her willingly. So the hunters went off to the court of the governor and filed a suit for the deer. The case was tried in open court, and the deer was produced with a ribbon round its neck. Evidence there was naturally but little. The hunters claimed the deer because they had driven it out of the island by their fire. The woman resisted the claim on the ground that it was her son. The decision of the court was this: 'The hunters are not entitled to the deer because they cannot prove that the woman's son's soul is not in the animal. The woman is not entitled to the deer because she cannot prove that it is. The deer will therefore remain with the court until some properly authenticated claim is put in.' So the two parties were turned out, the woman in bitter tears, and the hunters angry and vexed, and the deer remained the property of the judge. But this decision was against all Burmese ideas of justice. He should have given the deer to the woman. 'He wanted it for himself,' said a Burman, speaking to me of the affair. 'He probably killed it and ate it. Surely it is true that officials are of all the five evils the greatest.' Then my friend remembered that I was myself an official, and he looked foolish, and began to make complimentary remarks about English officials, that they would never give such an iniquitous decision. I turned it off by saying that no doubt the judge was now suffering in some other life for the evil wrought in the last, and the Burman said that probably he was now inhabiting a tiger. It is very easy to laugh at such beliefs; nothing is, indeed, easier than to be witty at the expense of any belief. It is also very easy to say that it is all self-deception, that the children merely imagine that they remember their former lives, or are citing conversation of their elders. How this may be I do not know. What is the explanation of this, perhaps the only belief of which we have any knowledge which is at once a living belief to-day and was so as far back as we can get, I do not pretend to say. For transmigration is no theory of Buddhism at all, but was a leading tenet in the far older faith of Brahmanism, of which Buddhism was but an offshoot, as was Christianity of Judaism. I have not, indeed, always attempted to reach the explanation of things I have seen. When I have satisfied myself that a belief is really held by the people, that I am not the subject of conscious deception, either by myself or others, I have conceived that my work was ended. There are those who, in investigating any foreign customs and strange beliefs, can put their finger here and say, 'This is where they are right'; and there and say, 'This belief is foolishly wrong and idiotic.' I am not, unfortunately, one of these writers. I have no such confident belief in my own infallibility of judgment as to be able to sit on high and say, 'Here is truth, and here is error.' I will leave my readers to make their own judgment, if they desire to do so; only asking them (as they would not like their own beliefs to be scoffed and sneered at) that they will treat with respect the sincere beliefs of others, even if they cannot accept them. It is only in this way that we can come to understand a people and to sympathize with them. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the enormous effect that a belief in transmigration such as this has upon the life and intercourse of the people. Of their kindness to animals I have spoken elsewhere, and it is possible this belief in transmigration has something to do with it, but not, I think, much. For if you wished to illtreat an animal, it would be quite easy, even more easy, to suppose that an enemy or a murderer inhabited the body of the animal, and that you were but carrying out the decrees of fate by ill-using it. But when you love an animal, it may increase that love and make it reasonable, and not a thing to be ashamed of; and it brings the animal world nearer to you in general, it bridges over the enormous void between man and beast that other religions have made. Nothing humanizes a man more than love of animals. I do not know if this be a paradox, I know that it is a truth. There was one point that puzzled me for a time in some of these stories of transmigration, such as the one I told about the man and wife being reborn twins. It was this: A man dies and leaves behind children, let us say, to whom he is devoutly attached. He is reborn in another family in the same village, maybe. It would be natural to suppose that he would love his former family as much as, or even more than, his new one. Complications might arise in this way which it is easy to conceive would cause great and frequent difficulties. I explained this to a Burman one day, and asked him what happened, and this is what he said: 'The affection of mother to son, of husband to wife, of brother to sister, belongs entirely to the body in which you may happen to be living. When it dies, so do these affections. New affections arise from the new body. The flesh of the son, being of one with his father, of course loves him; but as his present flesh has no sort of connection with his former one, he does not love those to whom he was related in his other lives. These affections are as much a part of the body as the hand or the eyesight; with one you put off the other.' Thus all love, to the learned, even the purest affection of daughter to mother, of man to his friend, is in theory a function of the body--with the one we put off the other; and this may explain, perhaps, something of what my previous chapter did not make quite clear, that in the hereafter[2] of Buddhism there is no affection. When we have put off all bodies, when we have attained Nirvana, love and hate, desire and repulsion, will have fallen from us for ever. Meanwhile, in each life, we are obliged to endure the affections of the body into which we may be born. It is the first duty of a monk, of him who is trying to lead the purer life, to kill all these affections, or rather to blend them into one great compassion to all the world alike. 'Gayüna,' compassion, that is the only passion that will be left to us. So say the learned. I met a little girl not long ago, a wee little maiden about seven years old, and she told me all about her former life when she was a man. Her name was Maung Mon, she said, and she used to work the dolls in a travelling marionette show. It was through her knowledge and partiality for marionettes that it was first suspected, her parents told me, whom she had been in her former life. She could even as a sucking-child manipulate the strings of a marionette-doll. But the actual discovery came when she was about four years old, and she recognised a certain marionette booth and dolls as her own. She knew all about them, knew the name of each doll, and even some of the words they used to say in the plays. 'I was married four times,' she told me. 'Two wives died, one I divorced; one was living when I died, and is living still. I loved her very much indeed. The one I divorced was a dreadful woman. See,' pointing to a scar on her shoulder, 'this was given me once in a quarrel. She took up a chopper and cut me like this. Then I divorced her. She had a dreadful temper.' It was immensely quaint to hear this little thing discoursing like this. The mark was a birth-mark, and I was assured that it corresponded exactly with one that had been given to the man by his wife in just such a quarrel as the one the little girl described. The divorced wife and the much-loved wife are still alive and not yet old. The last wife wanted the little girl to go and live with her. I asked her why she did not go. 'You loved her so much,' I said. 'She was such a good wife to you. Surely you would like to live with her again.' 'But all that,' she replied, 'was in a former life.' Now she loved only her present father and mother. The last life was like a dream. Broken memories of it still remained, but the loves and hates, the passions and impulses, were all dead. Another little boy told me once that the way remembrance came to him was by seeing the silk he used to wear made into curtains, which are given to the monks and used as partitions in their monasteries, and as walls to temporary erections made at festival times. He was taken when some three years old to a feast at the making of a lad, the son of a wealthy merchant, into a monk. There he recognised in the curtain walling in part of the bamboo building his old dress. He pointed it out at once. This same little fellow told me that he passed three months between his death and his next incarnation without a body. This was because he had once accidentally killed a fowl. Had he killed it on purpose, he would have been punished very much more severely. Most of this three months he spent dwelling in the hollow shell of a palm-fruit. The nuisance was, he explained, that this shell was close to the cattle-path, and that the lads as they drove the cattle afield in the early morning would bang with a stick against the shell. This made things very uncomfortable for him inside. It is not an uncommon thing for a woman when about to be delivered of a baby to have a dream, and to see in that dream the spirit of someone asking for permission to enter the unborn child; for, to a certain extent, it lies within a woman's power to say who is to be the life of her child. There was a woman once who loved a young man, not of her village, very dearly. And he loved her, too, as dearly as she loved him, and he demanded her in marriage from her parents; but they refused. Why they refused I do not know, but probably because they did not consider the young man a proper person for their daughter to marry. Then he tried to run away with her, and nearly succeeded, but they were caught before they got clear of the village. The young man had to leave the neighbourhood. The attempted abduction of a girl is an offence severely punishable by law, so he fled; and in time, under pressure from her people, the girl married another man; but she never forgot. She lived with her husband quite happily; he was good to her, as most Burmese husbands are, and they got along well enough together. But there were no children. After some years, four or five, I believe, the former lover returned to his village. He thought that after this lapse of time he would be safe from prosecution, and he was, moreover, very ill. He was so ill that very soon he died, without ever seeing again the girl he was so fond of; and when she heard of his death she was greatly distressed, so that the desire of life passed away from her. It so happened that at this very time she found herself enceinte with her first child, and not long before the due time came for the child to be born she had a dream. She dreamt that her soul left her body, and went out into space and met there the soul of her lover who had died. She was rejoiced to meet him again, full of delight, so that the return of her soul to her body, her awakening to a world in which he was not, filled her with despair. So she prayed her lover, if it was now time for him again to be incarnated, that he would come to her--that his soul would enter the body of the little baby soon about to be born, so that they two might be together in life once more. And in the dream the lover consented. He would come, he said, into the child of the woman he loved. When the woman awoke she remembered it all, and the desire of life returned to her again, and all the world was changed because of the new life she felt within her. But she told no one then of the dream or of what was to happen. Only she took the greatest care of herself; she ate well, and went frequently to the pagoda with flowers, praying that the body in which her lover was about to dwell might be fair and strong, worthy of him who took it, worthy of her who gave it. In due time the baby was born. But alas and alas for all her hopes! The baby came but for a moment, to breathe a few short breaths, to cry, and to die; and a few hours later the woman died also. But before she went she told someone all about it, all about the dream and the baby, and that she was glad to go and follow her lover. She said that her baby's soul was her lover's soul, and that as he could not stay, neither would she; and with these words on her lips she followed him out into the void. The story was kept a secret until the husband died, not long afterwards; but when I came to the village all the people knew it. I must confess that this story is to me full of the deepest reality, full of pathos. It seems to me to be the unconscious protestation of humanity against the dogmas of religion and of the learned. However it may be stated that love is but one of the bodily passions that dies with it; however, even in some of the stories themselves, this explanation is used to clear certain difficulties; however opposed eternal love may be to one of the central doctrines of Buddhism, it seems to me that the very essence of this story is the belief that love does not die with the body, that it lives for ever and ever, through incarnation after incarnation. Such a story is the very cry of the agony of humanity. 'Love is strong as death; many waters cannot quench love;' ay, and love is stronger than death. Not any dogmas of any religion, not any philosophy, nothing in this world, nothing in the next, shall prevent him who loves from the certainty of rejoining some time the soul he loves. FOOTNOTE: [2] The hereafter = the state to which we attain when we have done with earthly things. CHAPTER XXIV THE FOREST OF TIME 'The gate of that forest was Death.' There was a great forest. It was full of giant trees that grew so high and were so thick overhead that the sunshine could not get down below. And there were huge creepers that ran from tree to tree climbing there, and throwing down great loops of rope. Under the trees, growing along the ground, were smaller creepers full of thorns, that tore the wayfarer and barred his progress. The forest, too, was full of snakes that crept along the ground, so like in their gray and yellow skins to the earth they travelled on that the traveller trod upon them unawares and was bitten; and some so beautiful with coral red and golden bars that men would pick them up as some dainty jewel till the snake turned upon them. Here and there in this forest were little glades wherein there were flowers. Beautiful flowers they were, with deep white cups and broad glossy leaves hiding the purple fruit; and some had scarlet blossoms that nodded to and fro like drowsy men, and there were long festoons of white stars. The air there was heavy with their scent. But they were all full of thorns, only you could not see the thorns till after you had plucked the blossom. This wood was pierced by roads. Many were very broad, leading through the forest in divers ways, some of them stopping now and then in the glades, others avoiding them more or less, but none of them were straight. Always, if you followed them, they bent and bent until after much travelling you were where you began; and the broader the road, the softer the turf beneath it; the sweeter the glades that lined it, the quicker did it turn. One road there was that went straight, but it was far from the others. It led among the rocks and cliffs that bounded one side of the valley. It was very rough, very far from all the glades in the lowlands. No flowers grew beside it, there was no moss or grass upon it, only hard sharp rocks. It was very narrow, bordered with precipices. There were many lights in this wood, lights that flamed out like sunsets and died, lights that came like lightning in the night and were gone. This wood was never quite dark, it was so full of these lights that flickered aimlessly. There were men in this wood who wandered to and fro. The wood was full of them. They did not know whither they went; they did not know whither they wished to go. Only this they knew, that they could never keep still; for the keeper of this wood was Time. He was armed with a keen whip, and kept driving them on and on; there was no rest. Many of these when they first came loved the wood. The glades, they said, were very beautiful, the flowers very sweet. They wandered down the broad roads into the glades, and tried to lie upon the moss and love the flowers; but Time would not let them. Just for a few moments they could have peace, and then they must on and on. But they did not care. 'The forest is full of glades,' they said; 'if we cannot live in one, we can find another.' And so they went on finding others and others, and each one pleased them less. Some few there were who did not go to the glades at all. 'They are very beautiful,' they said, 'but these roads that pass through them, whither do they lead? Round and round and round again. There is no peace there. Time rules in those glades, Time with his whip and goad, and there is no peace. What we want is rest. And those lights,' they said, 'they are wandering lights, like the summer lightning far down in the South, moving hither and thither. We care not for such lights. Our light is firm and clear. What we desire is peace; we do not care to wander for ever round this forest, to see for ever those shifting lights.' And so they would not go down the winding roads, but essayed the path upon the cliffs. 'It is narrow,' they said, 'it has no flowers, it is full of rocks, but it is straight. It will lead us somewhere, not round and round and round again--it will take us somewhere. And there is a light,' they said, 'before us, the light of a star. It is very small now, but it is always steady; it never flickers or wanes. It is the star of Truth. Under that star we shall find that which we seek.' And so they went upon their road, toiling upon the rocks, falling now and then, bleeding with wounds from the sharp points, sore-footed, but strong-hearted. And ever as they went they were farther and farther from the forest, farther and farther from the glades and the flowers with deadly scents; they heard less and less the crack of the whip of Time falling upon the wanderers' shoulders. The star grew nearer and nearer, the light grew greater and greater, the false lights died behind them, until at last they came out of the forest, and there they found the lake that washes away all desire under the sun of Truth. They had won their way. Time and Life and Fight and Struggle were behind them, could not follow them, as they came, weary and footsore, into the Great Peace. And of those who were left behind, of those who stayed in the glades to gather the deadly flowers, to be driven ever forward by the whip of Time--what of them? Surely they will learn. The kindly whip of Time is behind: he will never let them rest in such a deadly forest; they must go ever forward; and as they go they grow more and more weary, the glades are more and more distasteful, the heavy-scented blossoms more and more repulsive. They will find out the thorns too. At first they forgot the thorns in the flowers. 'The blossoms are beautiful,' they said; 'what care we for the thorns? Nay, the thorns are good. It is a pleasure to fight with them. What would the forest be without its thorns? If we could gather the flowers and find no thorns, we should not care for them. The more the thorns, the more valuable the blossoms.' So they said, and they gathered the blossoms, and they faded. But the thorns did not fade; they were ever there. The more blossoms a man had gathered, the more thorns he had to wear, and Time was ever behind him. They wanted to rest in the glades, but Time willed that ever they must go forward; no going back, no rest, ever and ever on. So they grew very weary. 'These flowers,' they said at last, 'are always the same. We are tired of them; their smell is heavy; they are dead. This forest is full of thorns only. How shall we escape from it? Ever as we go round and round we hate the flowers more, we feel the thorns more acutely. We must escape! We are sick of Time and his whip, our feet are very, very weary, our eyes are dazzled and dim. We, too, would seek the Peace. We laughed at those before who went along the rocky path; we did not want peace; but now it seems to us the most beautiful thing in the world. Will Time never cease to drive us on and on? Will these lights _never_ cease to flash to and fro?' Each man at last will turn to the straight road. He will find out. Every man will find out at last that the forest is hateful, that the flowers are deadly, that the thorns are terrible; every man will learn to fear Time. Then, when the longing for peace has come, he will go to the straight way and find it; no man will remain in the forest for ever. He will learn. When he is very, very weary, when his feet are full of thorns, and his back scarred with the lashes of Time--great, kindly Time, the schoolmaster of the world--he will learn. Not till he has learnt will he desire to enter into the straight road. But in the end all men will come. We at the last shall all meet together where Time and Life shall be no more. This is a Burman allegory of Buddhism. It was told me long ago. I trust I have not spoilt it in the retelling. CHAPTER XXV CONCLUSION This is the end of my book. I have tried always as I wrote to remember the principles that I laid down for myself in the first chapter. Whether I have always done so I cannot say. It is so difficult, so very difficult, to understand a people--any people--to separate their beliefs from their assents, to discover the motives of their deeds, that I fear I must often have failed. My book is short. It would have been easy to make a book out of each chapter, to write volumes on each great subject that I have touched on; but I have not done so--I have always been as brief as I could. I have tried always to illustrate only the central thought, and not the innumerable divergencies, because only so can a great or strange thought be made clear. Later, when the thought is known, then it is easy to stray into the byways of thought, always remembering that they are byways, wandering from a great centre. For the Burman's life and belief is one great whole. I thought before I began to write, and I have become more and more certain of it as I have taken up subject after subject, that to all the great differences of thought between them and us there is one key. And this key is that they believe the world is governed by eternal laws, that have never changed, that will never change, that are founded on absolute righteousness; while we believe in a personal God, altering laws, and changing moralities according to His will. If I were to rewrite this book, I should do so from this standpoint of eternal laws, making the book an illustration of the proposition. Perhaps it is better as it is, in that I have discovered the key at the end of my work instead of at the beginning. I did not write the book to prove the proposition, but in writing the book this truth has become apparent to me. The more I have written, the clearer has this teaching become to me, until now I wonder that I did not understand long ago--nay, that it has not always been apparent to all men. Surely it is the beginning of all wisdom. Not until we had discarded Atlas and substituted gravity, until we had forgotten Enceladus and learned the laws of heat, until we had rejected Thor and his hammer and searched after the laws of electricity, could science make any strides onward. An irresponsible spirit playing with the world as his toy killed all science. But now science has learned a new wisdom, to look only at what it can see, to leave vain imaginings to children and idealists, certain always that the truth is inconceivably more beautiful than any dream. Science with us has gained her freedom, but the soul is still in bonds. Only in Buddhism has this soul-freedom been partly gained. How beautiful this is, how full of great thoughts, how very different to the barren materialism it has often been said to be, I have tried to show. I believe myself that in this teaching of the laws of righteousness we have the grandest conception, the greatest wisdom, the world has known. I believe that in accepting this conception we are opening to ourselves a new world of unimaginable progress, in justice, in charity, in sympathy, and in love. I believe that as our minds, when freed from their bonds, have grown more and more rapidly to heights of thought before undreamed of, to truths eternal, to beauty inexpressible, so shall our souls, when freed, as our minds now are, rise to sublimities of which now we have no conception. Let each man but open his eyes and see, and his own soul shall teach him marvellous things. THE END. BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD. 
5173	----	This eBook was produced by John B. Hare and proofread by Carrie R. Lorenz. THE RELIGION OF THE SAMURAI A STUDY OF ZEN PHILOSOPHY AND DISCIPLINE IN CHINA AND JAPAN by KAITEN NUKARIYA Professor of Kei-O-Gi-Jiku University and of So-To-Shu Buddhist College, Tokyo 1913 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION (1) The Southern and Northern Schools of Buddhism (2) The Development and Differentiation of Buddhism (3) The Object of this Book is the Explaining of the Mahayanistic View of Life and the World (4) Zen holds a Unique Position among the Established Religions of the World (5) The Historical Antiquity of Zen (6) The Denial of Scriptural Authority by Zen (7) The Practisers of Zen hold the Buddha as their Predecessor, whose Spiritual Level they Aim to Attain (8) The Iconoclastic Attitude of Zen (9) Zen Activity (10) The Physical and Mental Training (11) The Historical Importance CHAPTER I HISTORY OF ZEN IN CHINA 1. The Origin of Zen in India 2. The Introduction of Zen into China by Bodhidharma 3. Bodhidharma and the Emperor Wu 4. Bodhidharma and his Successor, the Second Patriarch 5. Bodhidharma's Disciples and the Transmission of the Law 6. The Second and the Third Patriarchs 7. The Fourth Patriarch and the Emperor Tai Tsung 8. The Fifth and the Sixth Patriarchs 9. The Spiritual Attainment of the Sixth Patriarch 10. The Flight of the Sixth Patriarch 11. The Development of the Southern and the Northern School of Zen 12. The Missionary Activity of the Sixth Patriarch 13. The Disciples under the Sixth Patriarch 14. Three Important Elements of Zen 15. Decline of Zen CHAPTER II HISTORY OF ZEN IN JAPAN 1. The Establishment of the Rin Zai School of Zen in Japan 2. The Introduction of the So To School of Zen 3. The Characteristics of Do-gen, the Founder of the Japanese So To Sect 4. The Social State of Japan when Zen was Established by Ei-sai and Do-gen 5. The Resemblance of the Zen Monk to the Samurai 6. The Honest Poverty of the Zen Monk and the Samurai 7. The Manliness of the Zen Monk and the Samurai 8. The Courage and Composure of Mind of the Zen Monk and the Samurai 9. Zen and the Regent Generals of the Ho-jo Period 10. Zen after the Downfall of the Ho-jo Regency 11. Zen in the Dark Age 12. Zen under the Toku-gawa Shogunate 13. Zen after the Restoration CHAPTER III THE UNIVERSE IS THE SCRIPTURE OF ZEN 1. Scripture is no More than Waste Paper 2. No Need of the Scriptural Authority for Zen 3. The Usual Explanation of the Canon 4. Sutras used by the Zen Masters 5. A Sutra Equal in Size to the Whole World 68 6. Great Men and Nature 7. The Absolute and Reality are but an Abstraction 8. The Sermon of the Inanimate CHAPTER IV BUDDHA, THE UNIVERSAL SPIRIT 1. The Ancient Buddhist Pantheon 2. Zen is Iconoclastic 3. Buddha is Unnamable 4. Buddha, the Universal Life 5. Life and Change 6. The Pessimistic View of Ancient Hindus 7. Hinayanism and its Doctrine 8. Change as seen by Zen 9. Life and Change 10. Life, Change, and Hope 11. Everything is Living according to Zen 12. The Creative Force of Nature and Humanity 13. Universal Life is Universal Spirit 14. Poetical Intuition and Zen 15. Enlightened Consciousness 16. Buddha Dwelling in the Individual Mind Enlightened Consciousness is not an Intellectual Insight 18. Our Conception of Buddha is not Final 19. How to Worship Buddha CHAPTER V THE NATURE OF MAN 1. Man is Good-natured according to Mencius 2. Man is Bad-natured according to Siun Tsz 3. Man is both Good-natured and Bad-natured according to Yan Hiung 4. Man is neither Good-natured nor Bad-natured according to Su Shih 5. There is no Mortal who is Purely Moral 6. There is no Mortal who is Non-moral or Purely Immoral 7. Where, then, does the Error Lie? 8, Man is not Good-natured nor Bad-natured, but Buddha natured 9. The Parable of the Robber Kih 10. Wang Yang Ming and a Thief 11. The Bad are the Good in the Egg 12. The Great Person and the Small Person 13. The Theory of Buddha-Nature adequately explains the Ethical States of Man 14. Buddha-Nature is the Common Source of Morals 15. The Parable of a Drunkard 16. Shakya Muni and the Prodigal Son 17. The Parable of the Monk and the Stupid Woman 18. 'Each Smile a Hymn, each Kindly Word a Prayer' 19. The World is in the Making 20. The Progress and Hope of Life 21. The Betterment of Life 22. The Buddha of Mercy CHAPTER VI ENLIGHTENMENT 1. Enlightenment is beyond Description and Analysis 2. Enlightenment Implies an Insight into the Nature of Self 3. The Irrationality of the Belief of Immortality 4. The Examination of the Notion of Self 5. Nature is the Mother of All Things 6. Real Self 7. The Awakening of the Innermost Wisdom 8. Zen is not Nihilistic 9. Zen and Idealism 10. Idealism is a Potent Medicine for Self -Created Mental Disease 11. Idealistic Scepticism concerning Objective Reality 12. Idealistic Scepticism concerning Religion and Morality 13. An Illusion concerning Appearance and Reality 14. Where does the Root of the Illusion Lie? 15. Thing-in-Itself means Thing-Knowerless 16. The Four Alternatives and the Five Categories 17. Personalism of B. P. Bowne 18. All the Worlds in Ten Directions are Buddha's Holy Land CHAPTER VII LIFE 1. Epicureanism and Life 2. The Errors of Philosophical Pessimists and Religious Optimists 3. The Law of Balance 4. Life Consists in Conflict 5. The Mystery of Life 6. Nature favours Nothing in Particular 7. The Law of Balance in Life 8. The Application of the Law of Causation to Morals 9. The Retribution in the Past, the Present, and the Future Life 10. The Eternal Life as taught by Professor M?nsterberg 11. Life in the Concrete 12. Difficulties are no Match for an Optimist 13. Do Thy Best and Leave the Rest to Providence CHAPTER VIII THE TRAINING OF THE MIND AND THE PRACTICE OF MEDITATION 1. The Method of Instruction adopted by Zen Masters 2. The First Step in the Mental Training 3. The Next Step in the Mental Training 4. The Third Step in the Mental Training 5. Zazen, or the Sitting in Meditation 6. The Breathing Exercise of the Yogi 7. Calmness of Mind 8. Zazen and the Forgetting of Self 9. Zen and Supernatural Power 10. True Dhyana 11. Let Go of Your Idle Thoughts 12. 'The Five Ranks of Merit' 13. 'The Ten Pictures of the Cowherd' 14. Zen and Nirvana 15. Nature and Her Lesson 16. The Beatitude of Zen APPENDIX ORIGIN OF MAN PREFACE INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I REFUTATION OF DELUSIVE AND PREJUDICED (DOCTRINE) CHAPTER II REFUTATION OF INCOMPLETE AND SUPERFICIAL (DOCTRINE) 1. The Doctrine for Men and Devas 2. The Doctrine of the Hinayanists 3. The Mahayana Doctrine of Dharmalaksana 4. Mahayana Doctrine of the Nihilists CHAPTER III THE DIRECT EXPLANATION OF THE REAL ORIGIN 5. The Ekayana Doctrine that Teaches the Ultimate Reality CHAPTER IV RECONCILIATION OF THE TEMPORARY WITH THE REAL DOCTRINE INTRODUCTION Buddhism is geographically divided into two schools[FN#1]--the Southern, the older and simpler, and the Northern, the later and more developed faith. The former, based mainly on the Pali texts[FN#2] is known as Hinayana[FN#3] (small vehicle), or the inferior doctrine; while the latter, based on the various Sanskrit texts,[4] is known as Mahayana (large vehicle), or superior doctrine. The chief tenets of the Southern School are so well known to occidental scholars that they almost always mean the Southern School by the word Buddhism. But with regard to the Northern School very little is known to the West, owing to the fact that most of its original texts were lost, and that the teachings based on these texts are written in Chinese, or Tibetan, or Japanese languages unfamiliar to non-Buddhist investigators. [FN#1] The Southern School has its adherents in Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Anan, etc.; while the Northern School is found in Nepal, China, Japan, Tibet, etc. [FN#2] They chiefly consist of the Four Nikayas: (1) Digha Nikaya (Dirghagamas, translated into Chinese by Buddhaya?as, A.D. 412-413); (2) Majjhima Nikaya (Madhyamagamas, translated into Chinese by Gautama Sanghadeva, A.D. 397-398); (3) Sanyutta Nikaya (Samyuktagamas, translated into Chinese by Gunabhadra, of the earlier Sung dynasty, A.D. 420 479); (4) Anguttara Nikaya (Ekottaragamas, translated into Chinese by Dharmanandi, A.D. 384-385). Out of these Hinayana books, the English translation of twenty-three suttas by Rhys Davids exist in 'Sacred Books of Buddhist,' vols. ii.-iii., and of seven suttas by the same author in 'Sacred Books of the East,' vol. xi. [FN#3] The Southern Buddhists never call their faith Hinayana, the name being an invention of later Buddhists, who call their doctrine Mahayana in contradistinction to the earlier form of Buddhism. We have to notice that the word Hinayana frequently occurs in Mahayana books, while it does not in Hinayana books. [FN#4] A catalogue of the Buddhist Canon, K'-yuen-luh, gives the titles of 897 Mahayana sutras, yet the most important books often quoted by Northern Buddhist teachers amount to little more than twenty. There exist the English translation of Larger Sukhavati-vyuha-sutra, Smaller Sukhavati-vyuha-sutra, Vajracchedika-sutra, Larger Prajna-paramita-hradya-sutra, Smaller Prajna-paramita-hrdaya-sutra, by Max M?ller, and Amitayur-dhyana-sutra, by J. Takakusu, in 'Sacred Books of the East,' vol. xlix. An English translation of Saddharma-pundarika-sutra, by Kern, is given in 'Sacred Books of the East,' Vol. xxi. Compare these books with 'Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism,' by D. Suzuki. It is hardly justifiable to cover the whole system of Buddhism with a single epithet[FN#5] 'pessimistic' or 'nihilistic,' because Buddhism, having been adopted by savage tribes as well as civilized nations, by quiet, enervated people as well as by warlike, sturdy hordes, during some twenty-five hundred years, has developed itself into beliefs widely divergent and even diametrically opposed. Even in Japan alone it has differentiated itself into thirteen main sects and forty-four sub-sects[FN#6] and is still in full vigour, though in other countries it has already passed its prime. Thus Japan seems to be the best representative of the Buddhist countries where the majority of people abides by the guiding principle of the Northern School. To study her religion, therefore, is to penetrate into Mahayanism, which still lies an unexplored land for the Western minds. And to investigate her faith is not to dig out the remains of Buddhist faith that existed twenty centuries ago, but to touch the heart and soul of Mahayanism that enlivens its devotees at the present moment. [FN#5] Hinayanism is, generally speaking, inclined to be pessimistic, but Mahayanism in the main holds the optimistic view of life. Nihilism is advocated in some Mahayana sutras, but others set forth idealism or realism. [FN#6] (1) The Ten Dai Sect, including three sub-sects; (2) The Shin Gon Sect, including eleven sub-sects; (3) The Ritsu Sect; (4) The Rin Zai Sect, including fourteen sub-sects; (5) The So To Sect; (6) The O Baku Sect; (7) The Jo Do Sect, including two sub-sects; (8) The Shin Sect, including ten sub-sects; (9) The Nichi Ren Sect, including nine sub-sects; (10) The Yu Zu Nen Butsu Sect; (11) The Hosso Sect; (12) The Ke Gon Sect; (13) The Ji Sect. Out of these thirteen Buddhist sects, Rin Zai, So To, and O Baku belong to Zen. For further information, see 'A Short History of the Twelve Japanese Buddhist Sects,' by Dr. B. Nanjo. The object of this little book is to show how the Mahayanistic view of life and of the world differs markedly from that of Hinayanism, which is generally taken as Buddhism by occidentals, to explain how the religion of Buddha has adapted itself to its environment in the Far East, and also to throw light on the existing state of the spiritual life of modern Japan. For this purpose we have singled out of thirteen Japanese sects the Zen Sect, [FN#7] not only because of the great influence it has exercised on the nation, but because of the unique position it holds among the established religious systems of the world. In the first place, it is as old as Buddhism itself, or even older, for its mode of practising Meditation has been handed down without much alteration from pre-Buddhistic recluses of India; and it may, on that account, provide the student of comparative religion with an interesting subject for his research. [FN#7] The word Zen is the Sinico-Japanese abbreviation of the Sanskrit Dhyana, or Meditation. It implies the whole body of teachings and discipline peculiar to a Buddhist sect now popularly known as the Zen Sect. In the second place, in spite of its historical antiquity, ideas entertained by its advocates are so new that they are in harmony with those of the New Buddhists;[FN#8] accordingly the statement of these ideas may serve as an explanation of the present movement conducted by young and able reformers of Japanese Buddhism. [FN#8] There exists a society formed by men who have broken with the old creeds of Buddhism, and who call themselves the New Buddhists. It has for its organ 'The New Buddhism,' and is one of the influential religious societies in Japan. We mean by the New Buddhists, however, numerous educated young men who still adhere to Buddhist sects, and are carrying out a reformation. Thirdly, Buddhist denominations, like non-Buddhist religions, lay stress on scriptural authority; but Zen denounces it on the ground that words or characters can never adequately express religious truth, which can only be realized by mind; consequently it claims that the religious truth attained by Shakya Muni in his Enlightenment has been handed down neither by word of mouth nor by the letters of scriptures, but from teacher's mind to disciple's through the line of transmission until the present day. It is an isolated instance in the whole history of the world's religions that holy scriptures are declared to be 'no more than waste[FN#9] paper by religionists, as done by Zen masters. [FN#9] Lin Tsi Luh (Rin-zai-roku). Fourthly, Buddhist as well as non-Buddhist religions regard, without exception, their founders as superhuman beings, but the practisers of Zen hold the Buddha as their predecessor, whose spiritual level they confidently aim to attain. Furthermore, they liken one who remains in the exalted position of Buddhaship to a man bound by a gold chain, and pity his state of bondage. Some of them went even so far as to declare Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to be their servants and slaves.[FN#10] Such an attitude of religionists can hardly be found in any other religion. [FN#10] "Shakya and Maitreya," says Go So, "are servants to the other person. Who is that other person?" (Zen-rin-rui-ju, Vol. i., p. 28). Fifthly, although non-Buddhist people are used to call Buddhism idolatry, yet Zen can never be called so in the accepted sense of the term, because it, having a grand conception of Deity, is far from being a form of idol-worship; nay, it sometimes even took an iconoclastic attitude as is exemplified by Tan Hia, [FN#11] who warmed himself on a cold morning by making a fire of wooden statues. Therefore our exposition on this point will show the real state of existing Buddhism, and serve to remove religious prejudices entertained against it. [FN#11] A Chinese Zen teacher, well known for his peculiarities, who died in A.D. 824. For the details of this anecdote, see Zen-rin-rui-ju, Vol. i., P. 39. Sixthly, there is another characteristic of Zen, which cannot be found in any other religion-that is to say, its peculiar mode of expressing profound religious insight by such actions as the lifting up of a hair-brush, or by the tapping of the chair with a staff, or by a loud outcry, and so forth. This will give the student of religion a striking illustration of differentiated forms of religion in its scale of evolution. Besides these characteristics, Zen is noted for its physical and mental training. That the daily practice of Zazen[FN#12] and the breathing exercise remarkably improves one's physical condition is an established fact. And history proves that most Zen masters enjoyed a long life in spite of their extremely simple mode of living. Its mental discipline, however, is by far more fruitful, and keeps one's mind in equipoise, making one neither passionate nor dispassionate, neither sentimental nor unintelligent, neither nervous nor senseless. It is well known as a cure to all sorts of mental disease, occasioned by nervous disturbance, as a nourishment to the fatigued brain, and also as a stimulus to torpor and sloth. It is self-control, as it is the subduing of such pernicious passions as anger, jealousy, hatred, and the like, and the awakening of noble emotions such as sympathy, mercy, generosity, and what not. It is a mode of Enlightenment, as it is the dispelling of illusion and of doubt, and at the same time it is the overcoming of egoism, the destroying of mean desires, the uplifting of the moral ideal, and the disclosing of inborn wisdom. [FN#12] The sitting-in-meditation, for the full explanation of which see Chapter VIII. The historical importance of Zen can hardly be exaggerated. After its introduction into China in the sixth century, A.D., it grew ascendant through the Sui (598-617) and the Tang dynasty (618-906), and enjoyed greater popularity than any other sect of Buddhism during the whole period of the Sung (976-1126) and the Southern Sung dynasty (1127-1367). In these times its commanding influence became so irresistible that Confucianism, assimilating the Buddhist teachings, especially those of Zen, into itself and changing its entire aspect, brought forth the so-called Speculative philosophy.[FN#13] And in the Ming dynasty (1368-1659) the principal doctrines of Zen were adopted by a celebrated Confucian scholar, Wang Yang Ming,[FN#14] who thereby founded a school, through which Zen exercised profound influence on Chinese and Japanese men of letters, statesmen, and soldiers. As regards Japan, it was first introduced into the island as the faith first for the Samurai or the military class, and moulded the characters of many distinguished soldiers whose lives adorn the pages of her history. Afterwards it gradually found its way to palaces as well as to cottages through literature and art, and at last permeated through every fibre of the national life. It is Zen that modern Japan, especially after the Russo-Japanese War, has acknowledged as an ideal doctrine for her rising generation. [FN#13] See 'A History of Chinese Philosophy,' by Ryukichi Endo, and A History of Chinese Philosophy,' by Giichi Nakauchi. [FN#14] For the life of this distinguished scholar and soldier (1472-1529), see 'A Detailed Life of O Yo Mei� by Takejiro Takase, and also 'O-yo-mei-shutsu-shin-sei-ran-roku.' CHAPTER I HISTORY OF ZEN IN CHINA 1. Origin of Zen in India. To-day Zen as a living faith can be found in its pure form only among the Japanese Buddhists. You cannot find it in the so-called Gospel of Buddha anymore than you can find Unitarianism in the Pentateuch, nor can you find it in China and India any more than you can find life in fossils of bygone ages. It is beyond all doubt that it can be traced back to Shakya Muni himself, nay, even to pre-Buddhistic times, because Brahmanic teachers practised Dhyana, or Meditation,[FN#15] from earliest times. [FN#15] "If a wise man hold his body with its three parts (chest, neck, and head) erect, and turn his senses with the mind towards the heart, he will then in the boat of Brahman cross all the torrents which cause fear. "Compressing his breathings let him, who has subdued all motions, breathe forth through the nose with the gentle breath. Let the wise man without fail restrain his mind, that chariot yoked with vicious horses. "Let him perform his exercises in a place level, pure, free from pebbles, fire, and dust, delightful by its sounds, its water, and bowers; not painful to the eye, and full of shelters and eaves. "When Yoga, is being performed, the forms which come first, producing apparitions in Brahman, are those of misty smoke, sun, fire, wind, fire-flies, lightnings, and a crystal moon. "When, as earth, water, light, heat, and ether arises, the fivefold quality of Yoga takes place, then there is no longer illness, old age, or pain for him who has obtained a body produced by the fire of Yoga. The first results of Yoga they call lightness, healthiness, steadiness, a good complexion, an easy pronunciation, a sweet odour, and slight excretions "(Cvet. Upanisad, ii. 8-13). "When the five instruments of knowledge stand still together with the mind, and when the intellect does not move, that is called the highest state. "This, the firm holding back of the senses, is what is called Yoga. He must be free from thoughtlessness then, for Yoga comes and goes" (Katha Upanisad, ii. 10, 11). "This is the rule for achieving it (viz., concentration of the mind on the object of meditation): restraint of the breath, restraint of the senses, meditation, fixed attention, investigation, absorption-these are called the sixfold Yoga. When beholding by this Yoga, be beholds the gold-coloured maker, the lord, the person, Brahman, the cause; then the sage, leaving behind good and evil, makes everything (breath, organs of sense, body, etc.) to be one in the Highest Indestructible (in the pratyagatman or Brahman) " (Maitr. Upanisad, vi. 18). "And thus it has been elsewhere: There is the superior fixed attention (dharana) for him-viz., if he presses the tip of the tongue down the palate, and restrain the voice, mind, and breath, he sees Brahman by discrimination (taraka). And when, after the cessation of mind, he sees his own Self, smaller than small, and shining as the Highest Self, then, having seen his Self as the Self, he becomes Self-less, and because he is Self-less, he is without limit, without cause, absorbed in thought. This is the highest mystery--viz., final liberation " (Maitr. Upanisad, vi. 20). Amrtab. Upanisad, 18, describes three modes of sitting-namely, the Lotus-seat (Padmasana), the sitting with legs bent underneath; the mystic diagram seat (Svastika); and the auspicious-seat (Bhadrasana);--while Yogacikha directs the choice of the Lotus-posture, with attention concentrated on the tip of the nose, hands and feet closely joined. But Brahmanic Zen was carefully distinguished even by early Buddhists[FN#16] as the heterodox Zen from that taught by the Buddha. Our Zen originated in the Enlightenment of Shakya Muni, which took place in his thirtieth year, when he was sitting absorbed in profound meditation under the Bodhi Tree. [FN#16] The anonymous author of Lankavatara-sutra distinguishes the heterodox Zen from the Hinayana Zen, the Hinayana Zen from the Mahayana Zen, and calls the last by the name of the Buddha's Holy Zen. The sutra is believed by many Buddhists, not without reason, to be the exposition of that Mahayana doctrine which Acvaghosa restated in his Craddhotpada-castra. The sutra was translated, first, into Chinese by Gunabbadra, in A.D. 443; secondly, by Bodhiruci in A.D. 513; and, thirdly, by Ciksanada in A.D. 700-704. The book is famous for its prophecy about Nagdrajuna, which (according to Dr. Nanjo's translation) is as follows: "After the Nirvana of the Tathagata, There will be a man in the future, Listen to me carefully, O Mahatma, A man who will hold my law. In the great country of South, There will be a venerable Bhiksu The Bodhisattva Nagarjuna by name, Who will destroy the views of Astikas and Nastikas, Who will preach unto men my Yana, The highest Law of the Mahayana, And will attain to the Pramudita-bhumi." It is said that then he awoke to the perfect truth and declared: "All animated and inanimate beings are Enlightened at the same time." According to the tradition[FN#17] of this sect Shakya Muni transmitted his mysterious doctrine from mind to mind to his oldest disciple Mahakacyapa at the assembly hold on the Mount of Holy Vulture, and the latter was acknowledged as the first patriarch, who, in turn, transmitted the doctrine to Ananda, the second patriarch, and so till Bodhidharma, the twenty-eighth[FN#18] patriarch. We have little to say about the historical value of this tradition, but it is worth while to note that the list of the names of these twenty-eight patriarchs contains many eminent scholars of Mahayanism, or the later developed school of Buddhism, such as Acvaghosa,[FN#19] Nagarjuna,[FN#20] Kanadeva,[FN#21] and Vasubhandhu.[FN#22] [FN#17] The incident is related as follows: When the Buddha was at the assembly on the Mount of Holy Vulture, there came a Brahmaraja who offered the Teacher a golden flower, and asked him to preach the Dharma. The Buddha took the flower and held it aloft in his hand, gazing at it in perfect silence. None in the assembly could understand what he meant, except the venerable Mahakacyapa, who smiled at the Teacher. Then the Buddha said: "I have the Eye and Treasury of Good Dharma, Nirvana, the Wonderful Spirit, which I now hand over to Mahakacyapa." The book in which this incident is described is entitled 'Sutra on the Great Brahman King's Questioning Buddha to Dispel a Doubt,' but there exists no original text nor any Chinese translation in the Tripitaka. It is highly probable that some early Chinese Zen scholar of the Sung dynasty (A.D. 960-1126) fabricated the tradition, because Wang Ngan Shih (O-an-seki), a powerful Minister under the Emperor Shan Tsung (Shin-so, A.D. 1068-1085), is said to have seen the book in the Imperial Library. There is, however, no evidence, as far as we know, pointing to the existence of the Sutra in China. In Japan there exists, in a form of manuscript, two different translations of that book, kept in secret veneration by some Zen masters, which have been proved to be fictitious by the present writer after his close examination of the contents. See the Appendix to his Zen-gaku-hi-han-ron. [FN#18] The following is the list of the names of the twenty-eight patriarchs: 1. Mahakacyapa. 2. Ananda. 3. Canavasu. 4. Upagupta. 5. Dhrtaka. 6. Micchaka. 7. Vasumitra. 8. Buddhanandi. 9. Buddhamitra. 10. Parcva. 11. Punyayacas. 12. Acvaghosa. 13. Kapimala. 14. Nagarjuna. 15. Kanadeva. 16. Rahulata. 17. Samghanandi. 18. Samghayacas. 19. Kumarata. 20. Jayata. 21. Vasubandhu. 22. Manura. 23. Haklanayacas. 24. Simha. 25. Vacasuta. 26. Punyamitra. 27. Prajnyatara. 28. Bodhidharma. The first twenty-three patriarchs are exactly the same as those given in 'The Sutra on the Nidana of transmitting Dharmapitaka,' translated in A.D. 472. King Teh Chwen Tang Iuh (Kei-toku-den-to-roku), a famous Zen history of China, gives two elaborate narratives about the transmission of Right Dharma from teacher to disciple through these twenty-eight patriarchs, to be trusted without hesitation. It would not be difficult for any scholar of sense to find these statements were made from the same motive as that of the anonymous author who gives a short life, in Dirghagama-sutra, of each of the six Buddhas, the predecessors of Shakya Muni, if he carefully compare the list given above with the lists of the patriarchs of the Sarvastivada school given by San Yin (So-yu died A.D. 518) in his Chuh San Tsung Ki (Shutsu-san zo-ki). [FN#19] One of the founders of Mahayana Buddhism, who flourished in the first century A.D. There exists a life of his translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva in A.D. 401-409. The most important of his works are: Mahayanacraddhotpada-castra, Mahalankara-sutra-castra, Buddha-caritakavya. [FN#20] The founder of the Madhyamika school of Mahayana Buddhism, who lived in the second century A.D. A life of his was translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva in A.D. 401-409. Twenty-four books are ascribed to him, of which Mahaprajñaparamita-castra, Madhyamika-castra, Prajnyadipa-castra, Dvadacanikaya-castra, Astadacakaca-castra, are well known. [FN#21] Sometimes called Aryadeva, a successor of Nagarjuna. A life of his was translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva in A.D. 401-409. The following are his important works: Cata-castra, 'Castra by the Bodhisattva Deva on the refutation of four heretical Hinayana schools mentioned in the Lankatvatara-sutra'; 'Castra by the Bodhisattva Deva on the explanation of the Nirvana by twenty Hinayana teachers mentioned in the Lankavatara-sutra.' [FN#22] A younger brother of Asamga, a famous Mahayanist of the fifth century A.D. There are thirty-six works ascribed to Vasubandhu, of which Dacabhumika-castra, Aparimitayus-sutra-castra, Mahapari-nirvana-sutra-castra, Mahayana-catadharmavidyadvara-castra, Vidya-matrasiddhi-tridaca-castra, Bodhicittopadana-castra, Buddha-gotra-castra, Vidyamatrasiddhivincatigatha-castra, Madhyantavibhaga-castra, Abhidharma-koca-castra, Tarka-castra, etc., are well known. 2. Introduction of Zen into China by Bodhidharma. An epoch-making event took place in the Buddhist history of China by Bodhidharma's coming over from Southern India to that country in about A.D. 520.[FN#23] It was the introduction, not of the dead scriptures, as was repeatedly done before him, but of a living faith, not of any theoretical doctrine, but of practical Enlightenment, not of the relies of Buddha, but of the Spirit of Shakya Muni; so that Bodhidharma's position as a representative of Zen was unique. He was, however, not a missionary to be favourably received by the public. He seems to have behaved in a way quite opposite to that in which a modern pastor treats his flock. We imagine him to have been a religious teacher entirely different in every point from a popular Christian missionary of our age. The latter would smile or try to smile at every face he happens to see and would talk sociably; while the former would not smile at any face, but would stare at it with the large glaring eyes that penetrated to the innermost soul. The latter would keep himself scrupulously clean, shaving, combing, brushing, polishing, oiling, perfuming, while the former would be entirely indifferent to his apparel, being always clad in a faded yellow robe. The latter would compose his sermon with a great care, making use of rhetorical art, and speak with force and elegance; while the former would sit as absolutely silent as the bear, and kick one off, if one should approach him with idle questions. [FN#23] Buddhist historians differ in opinion respecting the date of Bodhidharma's appearance in China. Compare Chwen Fah Chan Tsung Lun (Den bo sho ju ron) and Hwui Yuen (E-gen). 3. Bodhidharma and the Emperor Wu. No sooner had Bodhidharma landed at Kwang Cheu in Southern China than he was invited by the Emperor[FN#24] Wu, who was an enthusiastic Buddhist and good scholar, to proceed to his capital of Chin Liang. When he was received in audience, His Majesty asked him: "We have built temples, copied holy scriptures, ordered monks and nuns to be converted. Is there any merit, Reverend Sir, in our conduct?" The royal host, in all probability, expected a smooth, flattering answer from the lips of his new guest, extolling his virtues, and promising him heavenly rewards, but the Blue-eyed Brahmin bluntly answered: "No merit at all." This unexpected reply must have put the Emperor to shame and doubt in no small degree, who was informed simply of the doctrines of the orthodox Buddhist sects. 'Why not,' he might have thought within himself, 'why all this is futile? By what authority does he declare all this meritless? What holy text can be quoted to justify his assertion? What is his view in reference to the different doctrines taught by Shakya Muni? What does he hold as the first principle of Buddhism?' Thus thinking, he inquired: "What is the holy truth, or the first principle?" The answer was no less astonishing: "That principle transcends all. There is nothing holy." [FN#24] The Emperor Wu (Bu-Tei) of the Liang dynasty, whose reign was A.D. 502-549.] The crowned creature was completely at a loss to see what the teacher meant. Perhaps he might have thought: 'Why is nothing holy? Are there not holy men, Holy Truths, Holy Paths stated in the scriptures? Is he himself not one of the holy men?' "Then who is that confronts us?" asked the monarch again. "I know not, your majesty," was the laconic reply of Bodhidharma, who now saw that his new faith was beyond the understanding of the Emperor. The elephant can hardly keep company with rabbits. The petty orthodoxy can by no means keep pace with the elephantine stride of Zen. No wonder that Bodhidharma left not only the palace of the Emperor Wu, but also the State of Liang, and went to the State of Northern Wei.[FN#25] There he spent nine years in the Shao Lin[FN#26] Monastery, mostly sitting silent in meditation with his face to the wall, and earned for himself the appellation of 'the wall-gazing Brahmin.' This name itself suggests that the significance of his mission was not appreciated by his contemporaries. But neither he was nor they were to blame, because the lion's importance is appreciated only by the lion. A great personage is no less great because of his unpopularity among his fellow men, just as the great Pang[FN#27] is no less great because of his unpopularity among the winged creatures. Bodhidharma was not popular to the degree that he was envied by his contemporary Buddhists, who, as we are told by his biographers, attempted to poison him three times,[FN#28] but without success. [FN#25] Northern Gi dynasty (A.D. 386-534). [FN#26] Sho-rin-ji, erected by the Emperor Hiao Ming of Northern Wei A.D. 497. [FN#27] Chwang-tsz in his famous parable compares a great sage with the Pang, an imaginary bird of enormous size, with its wings of ninety thousand miles. The bird is laughed at by wrens and sparrows because of its excessive size. [FN#28] This reminds us of Nan Yoh Hwui Sz (Nan-gaku-e-shi, died A.D. 577), who is said to have learned Zen under Bodhidharma. He says in his statement of a vow that he was poisoned three times by those who envied him. 4. Bodhidharma and his Successor the Second Patriarch. China was not, however, an uncultivated[FN#29] land for the seed of Zen--nay, there had been many practisers of Zen before Bodhidharma. [FN#29] The translation of Hinayana Zen sutras first paved the way for our faith. Fourteen Zen sutras, including such important books as Mahanapanadhyana-sutra, Dhyanacarya-dharmasanyjnya-sutra, Dhyanacarya-saptatrimcadvarga-sutra, were translated by Ngan Shi Kao (An-sei-ko) as early as A.D. 148-170. Cullamargabhumi-sutra was translated by K' Yao (Shi-yo) in A.D. 185; Dharmatara-dhyana-sutra by Buddhabhadra in A.D. 398-421; Dhyananisthitasamadhi-dharma-parygya-sutra by Kumarajiva in A.D. 402; 'An Abridged Law on the Importance of Meditation' by Kumarajiva in A.D. 405; Pancadvara-dhyanasutra-maharthadharma by Dharmamitra in A.D. 424-441. Furthermore, Mahayana books closely related to the doctrine of Zen were not unknown to China before Bodhidharma. Pratyutpanna-buddhasammukhavasthita-samadhi was translated by K' Leu Cia Chan (Shi-ru-ga-sen) in A.D. 164-186; Vimalakirttinirdeca-sutra, which is much used in Zen, by Kumarajiva in A.D. 384-412; Lankavatara-sutra, which is said to have been pointed out by Bodhidharma as the best explanation of Zen, by Gunabhadra in A.D. 433; Saddharma-pundarika-sutra, in its complete form, by Kumarajiva in A.D. 406; Avatamsaka-sutra by Buddhabhadra in A.D. 418; Mahaparinirvana-sutra by Dharmaraksa in A.D. 423. If we are not mistaken, Kumarajiva, who came to China A.D. 384, made a valuable contribution towards the foundation of Zen in that country, not merely through his translation of Zen sutras above mentioned, but by the education of his disciples, such as Sang Chao (So-jo, died A.D. 414), Sang Shang (So-sho, whose writings undoubtedly influenced later Zen teachers. A more important personage in the history of Zen previous to the Blue-eyed Brahmin is Buddhabhadra, a well-known Zen master, who came over to China A.D. 406. His translation of Dharmatara-dhyana-sutra (which is said to have been preached by Bodhidharma himself when he was in India) and that of Avatamsaka-sutra may be said without exaggeration to have laid the corner-stone for Zen. He gave a course of lectures on the Zen sutra for the first time in China in A.D. 413, and it was through his instruction that many native practisers of Zen were produced, of whom Chi Yen (Chi-gon) and Huen Kao (Gen-ko) are well known. In these days Zen should have been in the ascendant in India, because almost all Indian scholars-at least those known to us-were called Zen teachers-for instance, Buddhabhadra, Buddhasena, Dharmadhi, and some others were all Zen scholars. Chinese Buddhist scholars did no less than Indian teachers toward the uprising of Zen. The foremost among them is Hwui Yuen (E-on, died A.D. 414), who practised Zen by the instruction of Buddhabhadra. He founded the Society of the White Lotus, which comprised eighteen eminent scholars of the age among its members, for the purpose of practising Meditation and of adoring Buddha Amitabha. We must not forget that during the Western and the Eastern Tsin (Shin) dynasties (A.D. 265-420) both Taoism and Buddhism grew prosperous to no small extent. And China produced, on the one hand, Taoists of an eccentric type, such as the Seven Wise Men of the Bamboo Forest, while she gave birth to many recluse-like men of letters, such as Tao Yuen Ming (To-yen-mei, died A.D. 427) and some others on the other. Besides there were some scholars who studied Buddhism in connection with Taoism and Confucianism, and led a secluded life. To the last class of scholars belonged Chwen Hih (Hu dai shi), known as Chwen the Great. He is said to have been accustomed to wear a Confucianist hat, a Buddhist robe, and Taoist shoes. It was in A.D. 534 that he presented a memorial to the Emperor Wu, in which he explained the three grades of good. "The Highest Good consists," says he, "in the emptiness of mind and non-attachment. Transcendence is its cause, and Nirvana is its result. The Middle Good consists in morality and good administration. It results in a peaceful and happy life in Heaven and in Earth. The Lowest Good consists in love and protection of sentient beings." Thus his idea of good, as the reader will see without difficulty, is the result of a compromise of Taoism and Buddhism. Sin Wang Ming (Sin-o-mei, On the Mind-King), one of his masterpieces, together with other minor poems, are still used as a textbook of Zen. This fact unmistakably proves that Taoist element found its way into the constituents of Zen from its very outset in China. All that he had to do was to wait for an earnest seeker after the spirit of Shakya Muni. Therefore he waited, and waited not in vain, for at last there came a learned Confucianist, Shang Kwang (Shin-ko) by name, for the purpose of finding the final solution of a problem which troubled him so much that he had become dissatisfied with Confucianism, as it had no proper diet for his now spiritual hunger. Thus Shang Kwang was far from being one of those half-hearted visitors who knocked the door of Bodhidharma only for the sake of curiosity. But the silent master was cautious enough to try the sincerity of a new visitor before admitting him to the Meditation Hall. According to a biography[FN#30] of his, Shang Kwang was not allowed to enter the temple, and had to stand in the courtyard covered deep with snow. His firm resolution and earnest desire, however, kept him standing continually on one spot for seven days and nights with beads of the frozen drops of tears on his breast. At last he cut off his left arm with a sharp knife, and presented it before the inflexible teacher to show his resolution to follow the master even at the risk of his life. Thereupon Bodhidharma admitted him into the order as a disciple fully qualified to be instructed in the highest doctrine of Mahayanism. [FN#30] King Teh Chwen Tang Luh (Kei-toku-den-to-roku), published by Tao Yuen (Do-gen) A.D. 1004, gives a detailed narrative concerning this incident as stated here, but earlier historians tell us a different story about the mutilation of Shang Kwang's arm. Compare Suh Kas San Chwen (Zoku-ko-so-den) and Hwui Yuen (E-gen). Our master's method of instruction was entirely different from that of ordinary instructors of learning. He would not explain any problem to the learner, but simply help him to get enlightened by putting him an abrupt but telling question. Shang Kwang, for instance, said to Bodhidharma, perhaps with a sigh: "I have no peace of mind. Might I ask you, sir, to pacify my mind?" "Bring out your mind (that troubles you so much)," replied the master, "here before me! I shall pacify it." "It is impossible for me," said the disciple, after a little consideration, "to seek out my mind (that troubles me so much)." "Then," exclaimed Bodhidharma, "I have pacified your mind." Hereon Shang Kwang was instantly Enlightened. This event is worthy of our notice, because such a mode of instruction was adopted by all Zen teachers after the first patriarch, and it became one of the characteristics of Zen. 5. Bodhidharma's Disciples and the Transmission of the Law.[FN#31] [FN#31] For details, see Chwen Tang Luh and Den Ka Roku, by Kei Zan. As for the life of Bodhidharma, Dr. B. Matsumoto's 'A Life of Bodhidharma' may well be recommended to the reader. Bodhidharma's labour of nine years in China resulted in the initiation of a number of disciples, whom some time before his death he addressed as follows: "Now the time (of my departure from this world) is at hand. Say, one and all, how do you understand the Law?" Tao Fu (Do-fuku) said in response to this: "The Law does not lie in the letters (of the Scriptures), according to my view, nor is it separated from them, but it works." The Master said: "Then you have obtained my skin." Next Tsung Chi (So-ji), a nun, replied: "As Ananda[FN#32] saw the kingdom of Aksobhya[FN#33] only once but not twice, so I understand the Law". The master said: "Then you have attained to my flesh." Then Tao Yuh (Do-iku) replied: "The four elements[FN#34] are unreal from the first, nor are the five aggregates[FN#35] really existent. All is emptiness according to my view." The master said: "Then you have acquired my bone." Lastly, Hwui Ko (E-ka), which was the Buddhist name given by Bodhidharma, to Shang Kwang, made a polite bow to the teacher and stood in his place without a word. "You have attained to my marrow." So saying, Bodhidharma handed over the sacred Kachaya, [FN#36] which he had brought from India to Hwui Ko, as a symbol of the transmission of the Law, and created him the Second Patriarch. [FN#32] A favourite disciple of Shakya Muni, and the Third Patriarch of Zen. [FN#33] The: name means I Immovable,' and represents the firmness of thought. [FN#34] Earth, water, fire, and air. [FN#35] (1) Rupa, or form; (2) Vedana, or perception; (3) Samjnya, or consciousness; (4) Karman (or Samskara), or action; (5) Vijnyana, or knowledge. [FN#36] The clerical cloak, which is said to have been dark green. It became an object of great veneration after the Sixth Patriarch, who abolished the patriarchal system and did not hand the symbol over to successors. 6. The Second and the Third Patriarchs. After the death of the First Patriarch, in A.D. 528, Hwui Ko did his best to propagate the new faith over sixty years. On one occasion a man suffering from some chronic disease called on him, and requested him in earnest: "Pray, Reverend Sir, be my confessor and grant me absolution, for I suffer long from an incurable disease." "Bring out your sin (if there be such a thing as sin)," replied the Second Patriarch, "here before me. I shall grant you absolution." "It is impossible," said the man after a short consideration, "to seek out my sin." "Then," exclaimed the master, "I have absolved you. Henceforth live up to Buddha, Dharma, and Samgha."[FN#37] "I know, your reverence," said the man, "that you belong to Samgha; but what are Buddha and Dharma?" "Buddha is Mind itself. Mind itself is Dharma. Buddha is identical with Dharma. So is Samgha." "Then I understand," replied the man, "there is no such thing as sin within my body nor without it, nor anywhere else. Mind is beyond and above sin. It is no other than Buddha and Dharma." Thereupon the Second Patriarch saw the man was well qualified to be taught in the new faith, and converted him, giving him the name of Sang Tsung (So-san). After two years' instruction and discipline, he[FN#38] bestowed on Sang Tsung the Kachaya handed down from Bodhidharma, and authorized him as the Third Patriarch. It is by Sang Tsung that the doctrine of Zen was first reduced to writing by his composition of Sin Sin[FN#39] Ming (Sin zin-mei, On Faith and Mind), a metrical exposition of the faith. [FN#37] The so-called Three Treasures of the Buddha, the Law, and the Order. [FN#38] The Second Patriarch died in A.D. 593--that is, sixty-five years after the departure of the First Patriarch. [FN#39] A good many commentaries were written on the book, and it is considered as one of the best books on Zen. 7. The Fourth Patriarch and the Emperor Tai Tsung (Tai-so). The Third[FN#40] Patriarch was succeeded by Tao Sin (Do-shin), who being initiated at the age of fourteen, was created the Fourth Patriarch after nine years' study and discipline. Tao Sin is said never to have gone to bed for more than forty years of his patriarchal career.[FN#41] In A.D. 643 the Emperor Tai Tsung (627-649), knowing of his virtues, sent him a special messenger, requesting him to call on His Majesty at the palace. But he declined the invitation by a memorial, saying that be was too aged and infirm to visit the august personage. The Emperor, desirous of seeing the reputed patriarch, sent for him thrice, but in vain. Then the enraged monarch ordered the messenger to behead the inflexible monk, and bring the head before the throne, in case he should disobey the order for the fourth time. As Tao Sin was told of the order of the Emperor, he stretched out his neck ready to be decapitated. The Emperor, learning from the messenger what had happened, admired all the more the imperturbable patriarch, and bestowed rich gifts upon him. This example of his was followed by later Zen masters, who would not condescend to bend their knees before temporal power, and it became one of the characteristics of Zen monks that they would never approach rulers and statesmen for the sake of worldly fame and profit, which they set at naught. [FN#40] He died in A.D. 606, after his labour of thirteen years as the teacher. [FN#41] He died in A.D. 651-that is, forty-five years after the death of the Third Patriarch. 8. The Fifth and the Sixth Patriarchs. Tao Sin transmitted the Law to Hung Jan (Ko-nin), who being educated from infancy, distinguished himself as the Abbot of the Hwang Mei Monastery at Ki Cheu. The Fifth Patriarch, according to his biographer, gathered about him seven hundred pupils, who came from all quarters. Of these seven hundred pupils the venerable Shang Sin (Jin-shu) was most noted for his learning and virtues, and he might have become the legitimate successor of Hung Jan, had not the Kachaya of Bodhidharma been carried away by a poor farmer's son of Sin Cheu. Hwui Nang, the Sixth Patriarch, seems to have been born a Zen teacher. The spiritual light of Buddha first flashed in his mind when he happened to hear a monk reciting a sutra. On questioning the monk, be learned that the book was Vajracchedika-prajnya-paramita-sutra,[FN#42] and that Hung Jan, the Abbot of the Hwang Mei Monastery, was used to make his disciples recite the book that it might help them in their spiritual discipline. Hereupon he made up his mind to practise Zen, and called on Hung Jan at the Monastery. "Who are you," demanded the Fifth Patriarch, "and whence have you come?" "I am a son of the farmer," replied the man, "of Sin Cheu in the South of Ta Yu Ling." "What has brought you here?" asked the master again. "I have no other purpose than to attain to Buddhahood," answered the man. "O, you, people of the South," exclaimed the patriarch, "you are not endowed with the nature of Buddha." "There may be some difference between the Southern and the Northern people," objected the man, "but how could you distinguish one from the other as to the nature of Buddha?" The teacher recognized a genius in the man, but he did not admit the promising newcomer into the order, so Hwui Nang had to stay in the Monastery for eight months as a pounder of rice in order to qualify himself to be a Zen teacher. [FN#42] The book was translated into Chinese by Kumarajiva in A.D. 384. 417; also by Bodhiruci in A.D. 509, and by Paramartha in A.D. 592; then by Hiuen Tsang in A.D. 648. Many commentaries have been written on it by the prominent Buddhist authors of China and Japan. 9. The Spiritual Attainment of the Sixth Patriarch. Some time before his death (in 675 A.D.) the Fifth Patriarch announced to all disciples that the Spirit of Shakya Muni is hard to realize, that they should express their own views on it, on condition that anyone who could prove his right realization should be given with the Kachaya and created the Sixth Patriarch. Then the venerable Sung Siu, the head of the seven hundred disciples, who was considered by his brothers to be the man entitled to the honour, composed the following verses: "The body is the Bodhi-tree.[FN#43] The mind is like a mirror bright on its stand. Dust it and wipe it from time to time, Lest it be dimmed by dust and dirt." [FN#43] The idea expressed by these lines is clear enough. Body is likened to the Bodhi-tree, under which Shakya Muni attained to his supreme enlightenment; for it is not in another body in the future existence, but in this very body that one had to get enlightened. And mind is pure and bright in its nature like a mirror, but the dirt and dust of passions and of low desires often pollute and dim it. Therefore one should dust and wipe it from time to time in order to keep it bright. All who read these lines thought that the writer was worthy of the expected reward, and the Fifth Patriarch also, appreciating the significance of the verses, said: "If men in the future would practise Zen according to this view, they would acquire an excellent result." Hwui Nang, the rice-pounder, hearing of them, however, secretly remarked that they are beautiful, but hardly expressive of the Spirit of Shakya Muni, and wrote his own verses, which ran as follows: "There is no Bodhi-tree,[FN#44] Nor is there a mirror stand. Nothing exists from the first What can be dimmed by dust and dirt?" [FN#44] These verses have often been misunderstood as expressive of a nihilistic view, but the real meaning is anything but nihilistic. Mind is pure and bright in its essence. It is always free from passions and mean desires, just as the sun is always bright, despite of cloud and mist that cover its face. Therefore one must get an insight into this essential nature of Mind, and realize that one has no mean desires and passions from the first, and also that there is no tree of Bodhi nor the mirror of Enlightenment without him, but they are within him. Perhaps nobody ever dreamed such an insignificant fellow as the rice-pounder could surpass the venerable scholar in a religious insight, but the Fifth Patriarch saw at once an Enlightened Soul expressed in those lines; therefore he made up his mind to give the Kachaya to the writer, in whom he found a great spiritual leader of future generations. But he did it secretly at midnight, lest some of the disciples from envy do violence to Hwui Nang. He was, moreover, cautious enough to advise his successor to leave the Monastery at once, and go back to the South, that the latter might conceal his Enlightenment until a time would come for his missionary activities. 10. Flight of the Sixth Patriarch. On the following morning the news of what had happened during the night flew from mouth to mouth, and some of the enraged brothers attempted to pursue the worthy fugitive. The foremost among them, Hwui Ming (E-myo), overtook the Sixth Patriarch at a mountain pass not very far from the Monastery. Then Hwui Nang, laying down the Kachaya on a rock by the road, addressed the pursuer: "This is a mere symbol of the patriarchal authority, and it is not a thing to be obtained by force. Take it along with you, if you long for it." Upon this Hwui Ming, who began to be ashamed of his base act, tried to lift the Kachaya, but in vain, for it was, as he felt, as heavy as the rock itself. At last he said to the Sixth Patriarch: "I have come here, my brother, not for the sake of this robe, but for the sake of the Law. Grant my hearty desire of getting Enlightened." "If you have come for the Law," replied Hwui Nang, "you must put an end to all your struggles and longings. Think neither of good nor of evil (make your mind pure from all idle thoughts), then see how is, Hwui Ming, your original (mental) physiognomy!" Being thus questioned, Ming found in an instant the Divine Light of Buddha within himself, and became a disciple of the Sixth Patriarch. 11. The Development of the Southern and of the Northern School of Zen. After the death of the Fifth Patriarch the venerable Shang Siu, though not the legitimate successor of his master, was not inactive in the propagation of the faith, and gathered about him a number of enthusiastic admirers. This led to the foundation of the Northern school of Zen in opposition to the Southern school led by the Sixth Patriarch. The Empress Tseh Tien Wa Heu,[FN#45] the real ruler of China at that time, was an admirer of Shang Siu, and patronized his school, which nevertheless made no further development. [FN#45] The Emperor Chung Tsung (Chu-so, A.D. 684-704) was a nominal sovereign, and the Empress was the real ruler from A.D. 684 to 705. In the meanwhile the Sixth Patriarch, who had gone to the South, arrived at the Fah Sing Monastery in Kwang Cheu, where Yin Tsung (In-shu), the abbot, was giving lectures on the Mahayana sutras to a number of student monks. It was towards evening that he happened to overhear two monks of the Monastery discussing about the flag floating in air. One of them said: "It is the wind that moves in reality, but not the flag." "No," objected the other, "it is the flag that moves in reality, but not the wind." Thus each of them insisted on his own one-sided view, and came to no proper conclusion. Then the Sixth Patriarch introduced himself and said to them: "It is neither the wind nor the flag, but your mind that moves in reality." Yin Tsung, having heard these words of the stranger, was greatly astonished, and thought the latter should have been an extraordinary personage. And when he found the man to be the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, he and all his disciples decided to follow Zen under the master. Consequently Hwui Nang, still clad like a layman, changed his clothes, and began his patriarchal career at that Monastery. This is the starting-point of the great development of Zen in China. 12. Missionary Activity of the Sixth Patriarch. As we have seen above, the Sixth Patriarch was a great genius, and may be justly called a born Zen teacher. He was a man of no erudition, being a poor farmer, who had served under the Fifth Patriarch as a rice-pounder only for eight months, but he could find a new meaning in Buddhist terms, and show how to apply it to practical life. On one occasion, for instance, Fah Tah (Ho-tatsu), a monk who had read over the Saddharma-pundarika-sutra[FN#46] three thousand times, visited him to be instructed in Zen. "Even if you read the sutra ten thousand times," said the Sixth Patriarch, who could never read the text, "it will do you no good, if you cannot grasp the spirit of the sutra." "I have simply recited the book," confessed the monk, "as it is written in characters. How could such a dull fellow as I grasp its spirit?" "Then recite it once," responded the master; "I shall explain its spirit." Hereupon Fah Tah began to recite the sutra, and when he read it until the end of the second chapter the teacher stopped him, saying: "You may stop there. Now I know that this sutra was preached to show the so-called greatest object of Shakya Muni's appearing on earth. That greatest object was to have all sentient beings Enlightened just as He Himself." In this way the Sixth Patriarch grasped the essentials of the Mahayana sutras, and freely made use of them as the explanation of the practical questions about Zen. [FN#46] One of the most noted Mahayana sutras, translated by Dharmaraksa (A.D. 286) and by Kumarajiva (A.D. 406). The reader has to note that the author states the essential doctrine in the second chapter. See " Sacred Books of the East," vol. xxi., pp. 30-59. 13. The Disciples under the Sixth Patriarch. Some time after this the Sixth Patriarch settled himself down at the Pao Lin Monastery, better known as Tsao Ki Shan (So-kei-zan), in Shao Cheu, and it grow into a great centre of Zen in the Southern States. Under his instruction many eminent Zen masters qualified themselves as Leaders of the Three Worlds. He did not give the patriarchal symbol, the Kachaya, to his successors, lest it might cause needless quarrels among the brethren, as was experienced by himself. He only gave sanction to his disciples who attained to Enlightenment, and allowed them to teach Zen in a manner best suited to their own personalities. For instance, Huen Kioh (Gen-kaku), a scholar of the Tien Tai doctrine,[FN#47] well known as the Teacher of Yung Kia[FN#48] (Yo-ka), received a sanction for his spiritual attainment after exchanging a few words with the master in their first interview, and was at once acknowledged as a Zen teacher. When he reached the zenith of his fame, he was presented with a crystal bowl together with rich gifts by the Empress Tseh Tien; and it was in A.D. 705 that the Emperor Chung Tsung invited him in vain to proceed to the palace, since the latter followed the example of the Fourth Patriarch. [FN#47] The Teacher of Tien Tai (Ten-dai, A.D. 538-597), the founder of the Buddhist sect of the same name, was a great scholar of originality. His doctrine and criticism on the Tripitaka greatly influenced the whole of Buddhism after him. His doctrine is briefly given in the second chapter. [FN#48] His Ching Tao Ko (Sho-do-ka), a beautiful metrical exposition of Zen, is still read by most students of Zen. After the death[FN#49] of the Sixth Patriarch (A.D. 713), the Southern Zen was divided into two schools, one being represented by Tsing Yuen (Sei-gen), the other by Nan Yoh (Nan-gaku.) Out of these two main schools soon developed the five[FN#50] branches of Zen, and the faith made a splendid progress. After Tsing Yuen and Nan Yoh, one of the junior disciples of the Sixth Patriarch, Hwui Chung (E-chu), held an honourable position for sixteen years as the spiritual adviser to the Emperor Suh Tsung (A.D. 756762) and to the Emperor Tai Tsung (A.D. 763-779). These two Emperors were enthusiastic admirers of Zen, and ordered several times the Kachaya of Bodhidharma to be brought into the palace from the Pao Lin Monastery that they might do proper homage to it. Within some one hundred and thirty years after the Sixth Patriarch, Zen gained so great influence among higher classes that at the time of the Emperor Suen Tsung (A.D. 847-859) both the Emperor and his Prime Minister, Pei Hiu, were noted for the practice of Zen. It may be said that Zen had its golden age, beginning with the reign of the Emperor Suh Tsung, of the Tang dynasty, until the reign of the Emperor Hiao Tsung (1163-1189), who was the greatest patron of Buddhism in the Southern Sung dynasty. To this age belong almost all the greatest Zen scholars[FN#51] of China. [FN#49] There exists Luh Tan Fah Pao Tan King (Roku-so-ho-bo-dan-kyo), a collection of his sermons. It is full of bold statements of Zen in its purest form, and is entirely free from ambiguous and enigmatical words that encumber later Zen books. In consequence it is widely read by non-Buddhist scholars in China and Japan. Both Hwui Chung (E-chu), a famous disciple of the Sixth Patriarch, and Do-gen, the founder of the Soto Sect in Japan, deny the authority of the book, and declare it to be misleading, because of errors and prejudices of the compilers. Still, we believe it to be a collection of genuine sections given by the Sixth Patriarch, though there are some mistakes in its historical narratives. [FN#50] (1) The Tsao Tung (So-to) Sect, founded by Tsing Yuen (died in A.D. 740) and his successors; (2) the Lin Tsi (Rin-Zai) Sect, founded by Nan Yoh (died in 744) and his successors; (3) the Wei Yan (Yi-gyo) Sect, founded by Wei Shan (Yi-san, died in 853) and his disciple Yen Shan (Kyo-zan, died in 890); (4) the Yun Man (Un-mon) Sect, founded by Yun Man (died in 949); (5) the Pao Yen (Ho-gen) Sect, founded by Pao Yen (died in 958). [FN#51] During the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-906) China produced, besides the Sixth Patriarch and his prominent disciples, such great Zen teachers as Ma Tsu (Ba-so, died in 788), who is probably the originator of the Zen Activity; Shih Teu (Seki-to, died in 790), the reputed author of Tsan Tung Ki (San-do-kai), a metrical writing on Zen; Poh Chang (Hyaku-jo, died 814), who first laid down regulations for the Zen Monastery; Wei Shan (Yi-san), Yang Shan (Kyo-zan), the founders of the Wei Yang Sect; Hwang Pah (O-baku, died in 850), one of the founders of the Lin Tsi Sect, and the author of Chwen Sin Pao Yao, (Den-sin-ho-yo), one of the best works on Zen; Lin Tsi (Rin-zai, died in 866), the real founder of the Lin Tsi Sect; Tung Shan (To-zan, died in 869), the real founder of the Tsao Tung Sect; Tsao Shan (So-zan, died in 901), a famous disciple of Tung Shan; Teh Shan (Toku-san, died in 865), who was used to strike every questioner with his staff; Chang Sha (Cho-sha, died in 823); Chao Cheu (Jo-shu, died in 897); Nan Tsuen (Nan-sen, died in 834); Wu Yeh (Mu-go, died in 823); who is said to have replied, 'Away with your idle thoughts,' to every questioner; Yun Yen (Un-gan, died in 829); Yoh Shan (Yaku-san, died in 834); Ta Mei (Tai-bai, died in 839), a noted recluse; Ta Tsz (Dai-ji, died in 862); Kwei Fung (Kei-ho, died in 841), the author of 'The Origin of Man,' and other numerous works; and Yun Ku (Un-go, died in 902). To the period of the Five Dynasties (A.D. 907-959) belong such teachers as Sueh Fung (Set-po, died in. 908); Huen Sha (Gen-sha, died in 908); Yun Man (Un-mon, died in 949), the founder of the Yun Man Sect; Shen Yueh (Zen-getsu, died in 912), a renowned Zen poet; Pu Tai (Ho-tei, died in 916), well known for his peculiarities; Chang King (Cho-kei, died in 932); Nan Yuen (Nan-in, died in 952); Pao Yen (Ho-gen, died in 958), the founder of the Pao Yen Sect. During the Sung dynasty (A.D. 960-1126) appeared such teachers as Yang Ki (Yo-gi, died in 1049), the founder of the Yang Ki School of Zen; Sueh Teu (Set-cho, died in 1052), noted for poetical works; Hwang Lung (O ryu, died in 1069), the founder of the Hwang Lung School of Zen; Hwang Lin (Ko-rin, died in 987); Tsz Ming (Ji-myo, died in 1040); Teu Tsy (To-shi, died in 1083); Fu Yun (Fu-yo, died in 1118); Wu Tsu (Go-so, died in 1104); Yung Ming (Yo-myo, died in 975), the author of Tsung King Luh (Shu-kyo-roku); Ki Sung (Kai-su, died in 1071), a great Zen historian and author. In the Southern Sung dynasty (A.D. 1127-1279) flourished such masters as Yuen Wu (En-go, died in 1135), the author of Pik Yen Tsih (Heki-gan-shu); Chan Hieh (Shin-ketsu, flourished in 1151); Hung Chi (Wan-shi, died in 1157), famous for his poetical works; Ta Hwui (Dai-e, died in 1163), a noted disciple of Yuen Wu; Wan Sung (Ban-sho), flourished in 1193-1197), the author of Tsung Yun Luh (Sho-yo-roku); Ju Tsing (Nyo-jo), died in 1228), the teacher to Do-gen, or the founder of the So-to Sect in Japan. To this age belong almost all the eminent men of letters,[FN#52] statesmen, warriors, and artists who were known as the practisers of Zen. To this age belongs the production of almost all Zen books,[FN#53] doctrinal and historical. [FN#52] Among the great names of Zen believers the following are most important: Pang Yun (Ho-on, flourished in 785-804), whose whole family was proficient in Zen; Tsui Kiun (Sai-gun, flourished in 806-824); Luh Kang (Rik-ko), a lay disciple to Nan Tsun; Poh Loh Tien (Haku-raku-ten, died in 847), one of the greatest Chinese literary men; Pei Hiu (Hai-kyu, flourished 827-856), the Prime Minister under the Emperor Suen Tsung, a lay disciple to Hwang Pah; Li Ngao (Ri-ko, lived about 806), an author and scholar who practised Zen under Yoh Shan; Yu Chuh (U-teki, flourished 785-804), a local governor, a friend of Pang Yun; Yang Yih (Yo-oku, flourished in 976), one of the greatest writers of his age; Fan Chung Ngan (Han-chu an, flourished 1008-1052), an able statesman and scholar; Fu Pih (Fu shitsu, flourished 1041-1083), a minister under the Emperor Jan Tsung; Chang Shang Ying (Cho-sho-yei, 1086-1122), a Buddhist scholar and a statesman; Hwang Ting Kien (Ko-tei-ken, 1064-1094), a great poet; Su Shih (So-shoku, died in 1101), a great man of letters, well known as So-to-ba; Su Cheh (So-tetsu, died in 1112), a younger brother of So-to-ba, a scholar and minister under the Emperor Cheh Tsung; Chang Kiu Ching (Cho-Kyu-sei, flourished about 1131), a scholar and lay disciple of Ta Hwui; Yang Kieh (Yo-ketsu, flourished 1078-1086), a scholar and statesman. [FN#53] Of doctrinal Zen books, besides Sin Sin Ming by the Third Patriarch, and Fah Pao Tan King by the Sixth Patriarch, the following are of great importance: (1) Ching Tao Ko (Sho-do-ka), by Huen Kioh (Gen-kaku). (2) Tsan Tung Ki (San-do-kai), by Shih Ten (Seki-to). (3) Pao King San Mei (Ho-kyo-san-mai), by Tung Shan (To-zan). (4) Chwen Sin Pao Yao (Den-sin-ho-yo), by Hwang Pah (O-baku). (5) Pih Yen Tsih (Heki-gan-shu), by Yuen Wu (En-go). (6) Lin Tsi Luh (Rin-zai-roku), by Lin Tsi (Rin-zai). (7) Tsung Yun Luh (Sho-yo-roku), by Wan Sung (Ban-sho). Of historical Zen books the following are of importance: (1) King teh Chwen Tan-Luh (Kei-toku-den-to-roku), published in 1004 by Tao Yuen (Do-gen). (2) Kwan Tang Luh (Ko-to roku), published in 1036 by Li Tsun Suh (Ri-jun-kyoku). (3) Suh Tang Luh (Zoku-O-roku), published in 1101 by Wei Poh (I-haku). (4) Lien Tang Luh (Ren-O-roku), published in 1183 by Hwui Wang (Mai-o). (5) Ching Tsung Ki (Sho-ju-ki), published in 1058 by Ki Sung (Kwai-su). (6) Pu Tang Luh (Fu-O-roku), published in 1201 by Ching Sheu (Sho-ju). (7) Hwui Yuen (E-gen), published in 1252 by Ta Chwen (Dai-sen). (8) Sin Tang Luh (Sin-W-roku), published in 1280-1294 by Sui (Zui). (9) Suh Chwen Tang Luh (Zoku-den-to-roku), by Wang Siu (Bun-shu). (10) Hwui Yuen Suh Lioh (E-gen-zoku-ryaku), by Tsing Chu (Jo-chu). (11) Ki Tang Luh (Kei-to-roku), by Yung Kioh (Yo-kaku). 14. Three Important Elements of Zen. To understand how Zen developed during some four hundred years after the Sixth Patriarch, we should know that there are three important elements in Zen. The first of these is technically called the Zen Number--the method of practising Meditation by sitting cross-legged, of which we shall treat later.[FN#54] This method is fully developed by Indian teachers before Bodhidharma's introduction of Zen into China, therefore it underwent little change during this period. The second is the Zen Doctrine, which mainly consists of Idealistic and Pantheistic ideas of Mahayana Buddhism, but which undoubtedly embraces some tenets of Taoism. Therefore, Zen is not a pure Indian faith, but rather of Chinese origin. The third is the Zen Activity, or the mode of expression of Zen in action, which is entirely absent in any other faith. [FN#54] See Chapter VII. It was for the sake of this Zen Activity that Hwang Pah gave a slap three times to the Emperor Suen Tsung; that Lin Tsi so often burst out into a loud outcry of Hoh (Katsu); that Nan Tsuen killed a cat at a single stroke of his knife in the presence of his disciples; and that Teh Shan so frequently struck questioners with his staff.[FN#55] The Zen Activity was displayed by the Chinese teachers making use of diverse things such as the staff, the brush[FN#56] of long hair, the mirror, the rosary, the cup, the pitcher, the flag, the moon, the sickle, the plough, the bow and arrow, the ball, the bell, the drum, the cat, the dog, the duck, the earthworm--in short, any and everything that was fit for the occasion and convenient for the purpose. Thus Zen Activity was of pure Chinese origin, and it was developed after the Sixth Patriarch.[FN#57] For this reason the period previous to the Sixth Patriarch may be called the Age of the Zen Doctrine, while that posterior to the same master, the Age of the Zen Activity. [FN#55] A long official staff (Shu-jo) like the crosier carried by the abbot of the monastery. [FN#56] An ornamental brush (Hos-su) often carried by Zen teachers. [FN#57] The giving of a slap was first tried by the Sixth Patriarch, who struck one of his disciples, known as Ho Tseh (Ka-taku), and it was very frequently resorted to by the later masters. The lifting up of the brush was first tried by Tsing Yuen in an interview with his eldest disciple, Shih Ten, and it became a fashion among other teachers. The loud outcry of Hoh was first made use of by Ma Tsu, the successor of Nan Yoh. In this way the origin of the Zen Activity can easily be traced to the Sixth Patriarch and his direct disciples. After the Sung dynasty Chinese Zen masters seem to have given undue weight to the Activity, and neglected the serious study of the doctrine. This brought out the degeneration severely reproached by some of the Japanese Zen teachers. 15. Decline of Zen. The blooming prosperity of Zen was over towards the end of the Southern Sung dynasty (1127-1279), when it began to fade, not being bitten by the frost of oppression from without, but being weakened by rottenness within. As early as the Sung dynasty (960-1126) the worship of Buddha Amitabha[FN#58] stealthily found its way among Zen believers, who could not fully realize the Spirit of Shakya Muni, and to satisfy these people the amalgamation of the two faiths was attempted by some Zen masters.[FN#59] [FN#58] The faith is based on Larger Sukhavati-vyuha, Smaller Sukhavati-vyuha, and Amitayus-dhyana-sutra. It was taught in India by Acvaghosa, Nagariuna, and Vasubandhu. In China Hwui Yuen (E-on, died in A.D. 416), Tan Lwan (Don-ran, died in 542), Tao Choh (Do-shaku), and Shen Tao (Zen-do) (both of whom lived about 600-650), chiefly taught the doctrine. It made an extraordinary progress in Japan, and differentiated itself into several sects, of which Jodo Shu and Shin Shu are the strongest. [FN#59] It is beyond all doubt that Poh Loh Tien (Haku-raku-ten) practised Zen, but at the same time believed in Amitabha; so also Su Shih (So-shoku), a most noted Zen practiser, worshipped the same Buddha, Yang Kieh (Yo-keteu), who carried a picture of Amitabha wherever he went and worshipped it, seems to have thought there is nothing incompatible between Zen and his faith. The foremost of those Zen masters of the Sung dynasty that attempted the amalgamation is Yung Ming (Yo-myo, died in 975), who reconciled Zen with the worship of Amitabha in his Wan Shen Tung Kwei Tsih (Man-zen-do-ki-shu) and Si Ngan Yan Shan Fu (Sei-an-yo-sin-fu). He was followed by Tsing Tsz (Jo-ji) and Chan Hieh (Shin-ketsu, lived about 1151), the former of whom wrote Kwei Yuen Chih Chi (Ki-gen-jiki-shi), and the latter Tsing Tu Sin Yao (Jo-do-sin-yo), in order to further the tendency. In the Yuen dynasty Chung Fung (Chu-ho, died in 1323) encouraged the adoration of Amitabha, together with the practice of Zen, in his poetical composition (Kwan-shu-jo-go). In the Ming dynasty Yun Si (Un-sei, died in 1615), the author of Shen Kwan Tseh Tsin (Zen-kwan-saku-shin) and other numerous works, writing a commentary on Sukhavati-vyuha-sutra, brought the amalgamation to its height. Ku Shan (Ku-zan, died in 1657), a Zen historian and author, and his prominent disciple Wei Lin (E-rin), axe well known as the amalgamators. Yun Ming declared that those who practise Zen, but have no faith in Amitabha, go astray in nine cases out of ten; that those who do not practise Zen, but believe in Amitabha, are saved, one and all; that those who practise Zen, and have the faith in Amitabha, are like the tiger provided with wings; and that for those who have no faith in Amitabha, nor practise Zen, there exist the iron floor and the copper pillars in Hell. Ku Shan said that some practise Zen in order to attain Enlightenment, while others pray Amitabha for salvation; that if they were sincere and diligent, both will obtain the final beatitude. Wei Lin also observed: "Theoretically I embrace Zen, and practically I worship Amitabha." E-chu, the author of Zen-to-nenbutsu ('On Zen and the Worship of Amitabha'), points out that one of the direct disciples of the Sixth Patriarch favoured the faith of Amitabha, but there is no trustworthy evidence, as far as we know, that proves the existence of the amalgamation in the Tang dynasty. This tendency steadily increasing with time brought out at length the period of amalgamation which covered the Yuen (1280-1367) and the Ming dynasties (1368-1659), when the prayer for Amitabha was in every mouth of Zen monks sitting in Meditation. The patrons of Zen were not wanting in the Yuen dynasty, for such a warlike monarch as the Emperor Shi Tsu (Sei-so), 1280-1294) is known to have practised Zen under the instruction of Miao Kao, and his successor Ching Tsung (1295-1307) to have trusted in Yih Shan,[FN#60] a Zen teacher of reputation at that time. Moreover, Lin Ping Chung (Rin-hei-cha, died in 1274), a powerful minister under Shi Tsu, who did much toward the establishment of the administrative system in that dynasty, had been a Zen monk, and never failed to patronize his faith. And in the Ming dynasty the first Emperor Tai Tsu (1368-1398), having been a Zen monk, protected the sect with enthusiasm, and his example was followed by Tai Tsung (1403-1424), whose spiritual as well as political adviser was Tao Yen, a Zen monk of distinction. Thus Zen exercised an influence unparalleled by any other faith throughout these ages. The life and energy of Zen, however, was gone by the ignoble amalgamation, and even such great scholars as Chung Fung,[FN#61] Yung Si,[FN#62] Yung Kioh,[FN#63] were not free from the overwhelming influence of the age. [FN#60] The Emperor sent him to Japan in 1299 with some secret order, but he did nothing political, and stayed as a Zen teacher until his death. [FN#61] A most renowned Zen master in the Yuen dynasty, whom the Emperor Jan Tsung invited to visit the palace, but in vain. [FN#62] An author noted for his learning and virtues, who was rather a worshipper of Amitabha than a Zen monk. [FN#63] An author of voluminous books, of which Tung Shang Ku Cheh (To-jo-ko-tetsu) is well known. We are not, however, doing justice to the tendency of amalgamation in these times simply to blame it for its obnoxious results, because it is beyond doubt that it brought forth wholesome fruits to the Chinese literature and philosophy. Who can deny that this tendency brought the Speculative[FN#64] philosophy of the Sung dynasty to its consummation by the amalgamation of Confucianism with Buddhism especially with Zen, to enable it to exercise long-standing influence on society, and that this tendency also produced Wang Yang Ming,[FN#65] one of the greatest generals and scholars that the world has ever seen, whose philosophy of Conscience[FN#66] still holds a unique position in the history of human thought? Who can deny furthermore that Wang's philosophy is Zen in the Confucian terminology? [FN#64] This well-known philosophy was first taught by Cheu Men Shuh (Shu-mo-shiku, died in 1073) in its definite form. He is said to have been enlightened by the instruction of Hwui Tang, a contemporary Zen master. He was succeeded by Chang Ming Tao (Tei-mei-do, died in 1085) and Chang I Chwen (Tei-i-sen, died in 1107), two brothers, who developed the philosophy in no small degree. And it was completed by Chu Tsz (Shu-shi, died in 1200), a celebrated commentator of the Confucian classics. It is worthy to note that these scholars practised Meditation just as Zen monks. See 'History of Chinese Philosophy' (pp. 215-269), by G. Nakauchi, and 'History of Development of Chinese Thought,' by R. Endo. [FN#65] He was born in 1472, and died in 1529. His doctrine exercised a most fruitful influence on many of the great Japanese minds, and undoubtedly has done much to the progress of New Japan. [FN#66] See Den-shu-roku and O-ya-mei-zen-sho. CHAPTER II HISTORY OF ZEN IN JAPAN 1. The Establishment of the Rin Zai[FN#67] School of Zen in Japan. [FN#67] The Lin Tsi school was started by Nan Yoh, a prominent disciple of the Sixth Patriarch, and completed by Lin Tsi or Rin Zai. The introduction of Zen into the island empire is dated as early as the seventh century;[FN#68] but it was in 1191 that it was first established by Ei-sai, a man of bold, energetic nature. He crossed the sea for China at the age of twenty-eight in 1168, after his profound study of the whole Tripitaka[FN#69] for eight years in the Hi-yei Monastery[FN#70] the then centre of Japanese Buddhism. [FN#68] Zen was first introduced into Japan by Do sha (629-700) as early as 653-656, at the time when the Fifth Patriarch just entered his patriarchal career. Do-sho went over to China in 653, and met with Huen Tsang, the celebrated and great scholar, who taught him the doctrine of the Dharma-laksana. It was Huen Tsang who advised Do-sho to study Zen under Hwui Man (E-man). After returning home, he built a Meditation Hall for the purpose of practising Zen in the Gan-go monastery, Nara. Thus Zen was first transplanted into Japan by Do-sho, but it took no root in the soil at that time. Next a Chinese Zen teacher, I Kung (Gi-ku), came over to Japan in about 810, and under his instruction the Empress Danrin, a most enthusiastic Buddhist, was enlightened. She erected a monastery named Dan-rin-ji, and appointed I Kung the abbot of it for the sake of propagating the faith. It being of no purpose, however, I Kung went back to China after some years. Thirdly, Kaku-a in 1171 went over to China, where he studied Zen under Fuh Hai (Buk-kai), who belonged to the Yang Ki (Yo-gi) school, and came home after three years. Being questioned by the Emperor Taka-kura (1169-1180) about the doctrine of Zen, he uttered no word, but took up a flute and played on it. But his first note was too high to be caught by the ordinary ear, and was gone without producing any echo in the court nor in society at large. [FN#69] The three divisions of the Buddhist canon, viz.: (1) Sutra-pitaka, or a collection of doctrinal books. (2) Vinaya-pitaka, or a collection of works on discipline. (3) Abhidharma-pitaka, or a collection of philosophical and expository works. [FN#70] The great monastery erected in 788 by Sai-cho (767-822), the founder of the Japanese Ten Dai Sect, known as Den Gyo Dai Shi. After visiting holy places and great monasteries, he came home, bringing with him over thirty different books on the doctrine of the Ten-Dai Sect.[FN#71] This, instead of quenching, added fuel to his burning desire for adventurous travel abroad. So he crossed the sea over again in 1187, this time intending to make pilgrimage to India; and no one can tell what might have been the result if the Chinese authorities did not forbid him to cross the border. Thereon he turned his attention to the study of Zen, and after five years' discipline succeeded in getting sanction for his spiritual attainment by the Hu Ngan (Kio-an), a noted master of the Rin Zai school, the then abbot of the monastery of Tien Tung Shan (Ten-do-san). His active propaganda of Zen was commenced soon after his return in 1191 with splendid success at a newly built temple[FN#72] in the province of Chiku-zen. In 1202 Yori-iye, the Shogun, or the real governor of the State at that time, erected the monastery of Ken-nin-ji in the city of Kyo-to, and invited him to proceed to the metropolis. Accordingly he settled himself down in that temple, and taught Zen with his characteristic activity. [FN#71] The sect was named after its founder in China, Chi I (538-597), who lived in the monastery of Tien Tai Shan (Ten-dai-san), and was called the Great Teacher of Tien Tai. In 804 Den-gyo went over to China by the Imperial order, and received the transmission of the doctrine from Tao Sui (Do-sui), a patriarch of the sect. After his return he erected a monastery on Mount Hi-yei, which became the centre of Buddhistic learning. [FN#72] He erected the monastery of Sho-fuku-ji in 1195, which is still prospering. This provoked the envy and wrath of the Ten Dai and the Shin Gon[FN#73] teachers, who presented memorials to the Imperial court to protest against his propagandism of the new faith. Taking advantage of the protests, Ei-sai wrote a book entitled Ko-zen-go-koku-ron ('The Protection of the State by the Propagation of Zen'), and not only explained his own position, but exposed the ignorance[FN#74] of the protestants. Thus at last his merit was appreciated by the Emperor Tsuchi-mikado (1199-1210), and he was promoted to So Jo, the highest rank in the Buddhist priesthood, together with the gift of a purple robe in 1206. Some time after this he went to the city of Kama-kura, the political centre, being invited by Sane-tomo, the Shogun, and laid the foundation of the so-called Kama-kura Zen, still prospering at the present moment. [FN#73] The Shin Gon or Mantra Sect is based on Mahavairocanabhi-sambodhi-sutra, Vajracekhara-sutra, and other Mantra-sutras. It was established in China by Vajrabodhi and his disciple Amoahavajra, who came from India in 720. Ku kai (774-835), well known as Ko Bo Dai Shi, went to China in 804, and received the transmission of the doctrine from Hwui Kwo (Kei-ka), a, disciple of Amoghavajra. In 806 he came back and propagated the faith almost all over the country. For the detail see 'A Short History of the Twelve Japanese Buddhist Sects' (chap. viii.), by Dr. Nanjo. [FN#74] Sai-cho, the founder of the Japanese Ten Dai Sect, first learned the doctrine of the Northern School of Zen under Gyo-hyo (died in 797), and afterwards he pursued the study of the same faith under Siao Jan in China. Therefore to oppose the propagation of Zen is, for Ten Dai priests, as much as to oppose the founder of their own sect. 2. The Introduction of the So-To School[FN#75] of Zen. [FN#75] This school was started by Tsing-Yuen (Sei-gen), an eminent disciple of the Sixth Patriarch, and completed by Tsing Shan (To-zan). Although the Rin Zai school was, as mentioned above, established by Ei-sai, yet he himself was not a pure Zen teacher, being a Ten Dai scholar as well as an experienced practiser of Mantra. The first establishment of Zen in its purest form was done by Do-gen, now known as Jo Yo Dai Shi. Like Ei-sai, he was admitted into the Hi-yei Monastery at an early age, and devoted himself to the study of the Canon. As his scriptural knowledge increased, he was troubled by inexpressible doubts and fears, as is usual with great religious teachers. Consequently, one day he consulted his uncle, Ko-in, a distinguished Ten Dai scholar, about his troubles. The latter, being unable to satisfy him, recommended him Ei-sai, the founder of the new faith. But as Ei-sai died soon afterwards, he felt that he had no competent teacher left, and crossed the sea for China, at the age of twenty-four, in 1223. There he was admitted into the monastery of Tien Tung Shan (Ten-do-san), and assigned the lowest seat in the hall, simply because be was a foreigner. Against this affront he strongly protested. In the Buddhist community, he said, all were brothers, and there was no difference of nationality. The only way to rank the brethren was by seniority, and he therefore claimed to occupy his proper rank. Nobody, however, lent an ear to the poor new-comer's protest, so he appealed twice to the Chinese Emperor Ning Tsung (1195-1224), and by the Imperial order he gained his object. After four years' study and discipline, he was Enlightened and acknowledged as the successor by his master Ju Tsing (Nyo-jo died in 1228), who belonged to the Tsao Tung (So To) school. He came home in 1227, bringing with him three important Zen books.[FN#76] Some three years he did what Bodhidharma, the Wall-gazing Brahmin, had done seven hundred years before him, retiring to a hermitage at Fuka-kusa, not very far from Kyo-to. Just like Bodhidharma, denouncing all worldly fame and gain, his attitude toward the world was diametrically opposed to that of Ei-sai. As we have seen above, Ei-sai never shunned, but rather sought the society of the powerful and the rich, and made for his goal by every means. But to the Sage of Fuka-kusa, as Do-gen was called at that time, pomp and power was the most disgusting thing in the world. Judging from his poems, be seems to have spent these years chiefly in meditation; dwelling now on the transitoriness of life, now on the eternal peace of Nirvana; now on the vanities and miseries of the world; now listening to the voices of Nature amongst the hills; now gazing into the brooklet that was, as he thought, carrying away his image reflected on it into the world. [FN#76] (1) Pao King San Mei (Ho-kyo-san-mai, 'Precious Mirror Samadhi'), a metrical exposition of Zen, by Tung Shan (To-zan, 806-869), one of the founders of the So To school. (2) Wu Wei Hien Hueh (Go-i-ken-ketsu. 'Explanation of the Five Categories'), by Tung Shan and his disciple Tsao Shan (So-zan). This book shows us how Zen was systematically taught by the authors. (3) Pih Yen Tsih (Heki-gan-shu, 'A Collection and Critical Treatment of Dialogues'), by Yuen Wu. 3. The Characteristics of Do-gen, the Founder of the Japanese So To Sect. In the meantime seekers after a new truth gradually began to knock at his door, and his hermitage was turned into a monastery, now known as the Temple of Ko-sho-ji.[FN#77] It was at this time that many Buddhist scholars and men of quality gathered about him but the more popular he became the more disgusting the place became to him. His hearty desire was to live in a solitude among mountains, far distant from human abodes, where none but falling waters and singing birds could disturb his delightful meditation. Therefore he gladly accepted the invitation of a feudal lord, and went to the province of Echi-zen, where his ideal monastery was built, now known as Ei-hei-ji.[FN#78] [FN#77] It was in this monastery (built in 1236) that Zen was first taught as an independent sect, and that the Meditation Hall was first opened in Japan. Do-gen lived in the monastery for eleven years, and wrote some of the important books. Za-zen-gi ('The Method of Practising the Cross-legged Meditation') was written soon after his return from China, and Ben-do-wa and other essays followed, which are included in his great work, entitled Sho-bo-gen-zo) ('The Eye and Treasury of the Right Law'). [FN#78] The monastery was built in 1244 by Yoshi-shige (Hatano), the feudal lord who invited Do-gen. He lived in Ei-hei-ji until his death, which took place in 1253. It is still flourishing as the head temple of the So To Sect. In 1247, being requested by Toki-yori, the Regent General (1247-1263), he came down to Kama-kura, where he stayed half a year and went back to Ei-hei-ji. After some time Toki-yori, to show his gratitude for the master, drew up a certificate granting a large tract of land as the property of Ei-hei-ji, and handed it over to Gen-myo, a disciple of Do-gen. The carrier of the certificate was so pleased with the donation that he displayed it to all his brethren and produced it before the master, who severely reproached him saying: "O, shame on thee, wretch! Thou art -defiled by the desire of worldly riches even to thy inmost soul, just as noodle is stained with oil. Thou canst not be purified from it to all eternity. I am afraid thou wilt bring shame on the Right Law." On the spot Gen-myo was deprived of his holy robe and excommunicated. Furthermore, the master ordered the 'polluted' seat in the Meditation Hall, where Gen-myo was wont to sit, to be removed, and the 'polluted' earth under the seat to be dug out to the depth of seven feet. In 1250 the ex-Emperor Go-sa-ga (1243-1246) sent a special messenger twice to the Ei-hei monastery to do honour to the master with the donation of a purple robe, but he declined to accept it. And when the mark of distinction was offered for the third time, he accepted it, expressing his feelings by the following verses: "Although in Ei-hei's vale the shallow waters leap, Yet thrice it came, Imperial favour deep. The Ape may smile and laugh the Crane At aged Monk in purple as insane." He was never seen putting on the purple robe, being always clad in black, that was better suited to his secluded life. 4. The Social State of Japan when Zen was established by Ei-sai and Do-gen. Now we have to observe the condition of the country when Zen was introduced into Japan by Ei-sai and Do-gen. Nobilities that had so long governed the island were nobilities no more. Enervated by their luxuries, effeminated by their ease, made insipient by their debauchery, they were entirely powerless. All that they possessed in reality was the nominal rank and hereditary birth. On the contrary, despised as the ignorant, sneered at as the upstart, put in contempt as the vulgar, the Samurai or military class had everything in their hands. It was the time when Yori-tomo[FN#79] (1148-1199) conquered all over the empire, and established the Samurai Government at Kama-kura. It was the time when even the emperors were dethroned or exiled at will by the Samurai. It was the time when even the Buddhist monks[FN#80] frequently took up arms to force their will. It was the time when Japan's independence was endangered by Kublai, the terror of the world. It was the time when the whole nation was full of martial spirit. It is beyond doubt that to these rising Samurais, rude and simple, the philosophical doctrines of Buddhism, represented by Ten Dai and Shin Gon, were too complicated and too alien to their nature. But in Zen they could find something congenial to their nature, something that touched their chord of sympathy, because Zen was the doctrine of chivalry in a certain sense. [FN#79] The Samurai Government was first established by Yoritomo, of the Minamoto family, in 1186, and Japan was under the control of the military class until 1867, when the political power was finally restored to the Imperial house. [FN#80] They were degenerated monks (who were called monk-soldiers), belonging to great monasteries such as En-ryaku-ji (Hi-yei), Ko-fuku-ji (at Nara), Mi-i-dera, etc. 5. The Resemblance of the Zen Monk to the Samurai. Let us point out in brief the similarities between Zen and Japanese chivalry. First, both the Samurai and the Zen monk have to undergo a strict discipline and endure privation without complaint. Even such a prominent teacher as Ei-sai, for example, lived contentedly in such needy circumstances that on one occasion[FN#81] he and his disciples had nothing to eat for several days. Fortunately, they were requested by a believer to recite the Scriptures, and presented with two rolls of silk. The hungry young monks, whose mouths watered already at the expectation of a long-looked-for dinner, were disappointed when that silk was given to a poor man, who called on Ei-sai to obtain some help. Fast continued for a whole week, when another poor follow came in and asked Ei-sai to give something. At this time, having nothing to show his substantial mark of sympathy towards the poor, Ei-sai tore off the gilt glory of the image of Buddha Bhecajya and gave it. The young monks, bitten both by hunger and by anger at this outrageous act to the object of worship, questioned Ei-sai by way of reproach: "Is it, sir, right for us Buddhists to demolish the image of a Buddha?" "Well," replied Ei-sai promptly, "Buddha would give even his own life for the sake of suffering people. How could he be reluctant to give his halo?" This anecdote clearly shows us self-sacrifice is of first importance in the Zen discipline. [FN#81] The incident is told by Do-gen in his Zui-mon-ki. 6. The Honest Poverty of the Zen Monk and the Samurai. Secondly, the so-called honest poverty is a characteristic of both the Zen monk and the Samurai. To get rich by an ignoble means is against the rules of Japanese chivalry or Bushido. The Samurai would rather starve than to live by some expedient unworthy of his dignity. There are many instances, in the Japanese history, of Samurais who were really starved to death in spite of their having a hundred pieces of gold carefully preserved to meet the expenses at the time of an emergency; hence the proverb: "The falcon would not feed on the ear of corn, even if he should starve." Similarly, we know of no case of Zen monks, ancient and modern, who got rich by any ignoble means. They would rather face poverty with gladness of heart. Fu-gai, one of the most distinguished Zen masters just before the Restoration, supported many student monks in his monastery. They were often too numerous to be supported by his scant means. This troubled his disciple much whose duty it was to look after the food-supply, as there was no other means to meet the increased demand than to supply with worse stuff. Accordingly, one day the disciple advised Fu-gai not to admit new students any more into the monastery. Then the master, making no reply, lolled out his tongue and said: "Now look into my mouth, and tell if there be any tongue in it." The perplexed disciple answered affirmatively. "Then don't bother yourself about it. If there be any tongue, I can taste any sort of food." Honest poverty may, without exaggeration, be called one of the characteristics of the Samurais and of the Zen monks; hence a proverb: "The Zen monk has no money, moneyed Monto[FN#82] knows nothing." [FN#82] The priest belonging to Shin Shu, who are generally rich. 7. The Manliness of the Zen Monk and of the Samurai. Thirdly, both the Zen monk and the Samurai were distinguished by their manliness and dignity in manner, sometimes amounting to rudeness. This is due partly to the hard discipline that they underwent, and partly to the mode of instruction. The following story,[FN#83] translated by Mr. D. Suzuki, a friend of mine, may well exemplify our statement: [FN#83] The Journal of the Pali Text Society, 1906-1907. When Rin-zai[FN#84] was assiduously applying himself to Zen discipline under Obak (Huang Po in Chinese, who died 850), the head monk recognized his genius. One day the monk asked him how long he had been in the monastery, to which Rin-zai replied: 'Three years.' The elder said: 'Have you ever approached the master and asked his instruction in Buddhism?' Rin-zai said: 'I have never done this, for I did not know what to ask.' 'Why, you might go to the master and ask him what is the essence of Buddhism?' [FN#84] Lin Tsi, the founder of the Lin Tsi school. "Rin-zai, according to this advice, approached Obak and repeated the question, but before he finished the master gave him a slap. "When Rin-zai came back, the elder asked how the interview went. Said Rin-zai: 'Before I could finish my question the master slapped me, but I fail to grasp its meaning.' The elder said: 'You go to him again and ask the same question.' When he did so, he received the same response from the master. But Rin-zai was urged again to try it for the third time, but the outcome did not improve. "At last he went to the elder, and said 'In obedience to your kind suggestion, I have repeated my question three times, and been slapped three times. I deeply regret that, owing to my stupidity, I am unable to comprehend the hidden meaning of all this. I shall leave this place and go somewhere else.' Said the elder: 'If you wish to depart, do not fail to go and see the master to say him farewell.' "Immediately after this the elder saw the master, and said: 'That young novice, who asked about Buddhism three times, is a remarkable fellow. When he comes to take leave of you, be so gracious as to direct him properly. After a hard training, he will prove to be a great master, and, like a huge tree, he will give a refreshing shelter to the world.' "When Rin-zai came to see the master, the latter advised him not to go anywhere else, but to Dai-gu (Tai-yu) of Kaoan, for he would be able to instruct him in the faith. "Rin-zai went to Dai-gu, who asked him whence he came. Being informed that he was from Obak, Dai-gu further inquired what instruction he had under the master. Rin-zai answered: 'I asked him three times about the essence of Buddhism, and he slapped me three times. But I am yet unable to see whether I had any fault or not.' Dai-gu said: 'Obak was tender-hearted even as a dotard, and you are not warranted at all to come over here and ask me whether anything was faulty with you.' "Being thus reprimanded, the signification of the whole affair suddenly dawned upon the mind of Rin-zai, and he exclaimed: 'There is not much, after all, in the Buddhism of Obak.' Whereupon Dai-gu took hold of him, and said: 'This ghostly good-for-nothing creature! A few minutes ago you came to me and complainingly asked what was wrong with you, and now boldly declare that there is not much in the Buddhism of Obak. What is the reason of all this? Speak out quick! speak out quick!' In response to this, Rin-zai softly struck three times his fist at the ribs of Dai-gu. The latter then released him, saying: 'Your teacher is Obak, and I will have nothing to do with you.' "Rin-zai took leave of Dai-gu and came back to Obak, who, on seeing him come, exclaimed: 'Foolish fellow! what does it avail you to come and go all the time like this?' Rin-zai said: 'It is all due to your doting kindness.' "When, after the usual salutation, Rin-zai stood by the side of Obak, the latter asked him whence he had come this time. Rin-zai answered: "In obedience to your kind instruction, I was with Dai-gu. Thence am I come.' And he related, being asked for further information, all that had happened there. "Obak said: 'As soon as that fellow shows himself up here, I shall have to give him a good thrashing.' 'You need not wait for him to come; have it right this moment,' was the reply; and with this Rin-zai gave his master a slap on the back. "Obak said: 'How dares this lunatic come into my presence and play with a tiger's whiskers?' Rin-zai then burst out into a Ho,[FN#85] and Obak said: 'Attendant, come and carry this lunatic away to his cell.'" [FN#85] A loud outcry, frequently made use of by Zen teachers, after Rin-zai. Its Chinese pronunciation is 'Hoh,' and pronounced 'Katsu' in Japanese, but 'tsu' is not audible. 8. The Courage and the Composure of Mind of the Zen Monk and of the Samurai. Fourthly, our Samurai encountered death, as is well known, with unflinching courage. He would never turn back from, but fight till his last with his enemy. To be called a coward was for him the dishonour worse than death itself. An incident about Tsu Yuen (So-gen), who came over to Japan in 1280, being invited by Toki-mune[FN#86] (Ho-jo), the Regent General, well illustrates how much Zen monks resembled our Samurais. The event happened when he was in China, where the invading army of Yuen spread terror all over the country. Some of the barbarians, who crossed the border of the State of Wan, broke into the monastery of Tsu Yuen, and threatened to behead him. Then calmly sitting down, ready to meet his fate, he composed the following verses "The heaven and earth afford me no shelter at all; I'm glad, unreal are body and soul. Welcome thy weapon, O warrior of Yuen! Thy trusty steel, That flashes lightning, cuts the wind of Spring, I feel." [FN#86] A bold statesman and soldier, who was the real ruler of Japan 1264-1283. This reminds us of Sang Chao[FN#87] (So-jo), who, on the verge of death by the vagabond's sword, expressed his feelings in the follow lines: "In body there exists no soul. The mind is not real at all. Now try on me thy flashing steel, As if it cuts the wind of Spring, I feel." [FN#87] The man was not a pure Zen master, being a disciple of Kumarajiva, the founder of the San Ron Sect. This is a most remarkable evidence that Zen, especially the Rin Zan school, was influenced by Kumarajiva and his disciples. For the details of the anecdote, see E-gen. The barbarians, moved by this calm resolution and dignified air of Tsu Yuen, rightly supposed him to be no ordinary personage, and left the monastery, doing no harm to him. 9. Zen and the Regent Generals of the Ho-Jo Period. No wonder, then, that the representatives of the Samurai class, the Regent Generals, especially such able rulers as Toki-yori, Toki-mune, and others noted for their good administration, of the Ho-jo period (1205-1332) greatly favoured Zen. They not only patronized the faith, building great temples[FN#88] and inviting best Chinese Zen teachers[FN#89] but also lived just as Zen monks, having the head shaven, wearing a holy robe, and practising cross-legged Meditation. [FN#88] To-fuku-ji, the head temple of a sub-sect of the Rin Zai under the same name, was built in 1243. Ken-cho-ji, the head temple of a subsect of the Rin Zai under the same name, was built in 1253. En-gaku ji, the head temple of a sub-sect of the Rin Zai under the same name, was built in 1282. Nan-zen-ji, the head temple of a sub-sect of the Rin Zai under the same name, was erected in 1326. [FN#89] Tao Lung (Do-ryu), known as Dai-kaku Zen-ji, invited by Tokiyori, came over to Japan in 1246. He became the founder of Ken-cho-ji-ha, a sub-sect of the Rin Zai, and died in 1278. Of his disciples, Yaku-o was most noted, and Yaku-o's disciple, Jaku-shitsu, became the founder of Yo-genji-ha, another sub-sect of the Rin Zai. Tsu Yuen (So-gen), known as Buk-ko-koku-shi, invited by Toki-mune, crossed the sea in 1280, became the founder of En-gaku-ji-ha (a sub-sect of the Rin Zai), and died in 1286. Tsing Choh (Sei-setsu), invited by Taka-toki, came in 1327, and died in 1339. Chu Tsun (So-shun) came in 1331, and died in 1336. Fan Sien (Bon-sen) came together with Chu Tsun, and died in 1348. These were the prominent Chinese teachers of that time. Toki-yori (1247-1263), for instance, who entered the monastic life while be was still the real governor of the country, led as simple a life, as is shown in his verse, which ran as follows: "Higher than its bank the rivulet flows; Greener than moss tiny grass grows. No one call at my humble cottage on the rock, But the gate by itself opens to the Wind's knock." Toki-yori attained to Enlightenment by the instruction of Do-gen and Do-ryu, and breathed his last calmly sitting cross-legged, and expressing his feelings in the following lines: "Thirty-seven of years, Karma mirror stood high; Now I break it to pieces, Path of Great is then nigh." His successor, Toki-mune (1264-1283), a bold statesman and soldier, was no less of a devoted believer in Zen. Twice he beheaded the envoys sent by the great Chinese conqueror, Kublai, who demanded Japan should either surrender or be trodden under his foot. And when the alarming news of the Chinese Armada's approaching the land reached him, be is said to have called on his tutor, Tsu Yuen, to receive the last instruction. "Now, reverend sir," said. he, "an imminent peril threatens the land." "How art thou going to encounter it?" asked the master. Then Toki-mune burst into a thundering Ka with all his might to show his undaunted spirit in encountering the approaching enemy. "O, the lion's roar!" said Tsu Yuen. "Thou art a genuine lion. Go, and never turn back." Thus encouraged by the teacher, the Regent General sent out the defending army, and successfully rescued the state from the mouth of destruction, gaining a splendid victory over the invaders, almost all of whom perished in the western seas. 10. Zen after the Downfall of the Ho-Jo Regency. Towards the end of the Ho-Jo period,[FN#90] and after the downfall of the Regency in 1333, sanguinary battles were fought between the Imperialists and the rebels. The former, brave and faithful as they were, being outnumbered by the latter, perished in the field one after another for the sake of the ill-starred Emperor Go-dai-go (1319-1338), whose eventful life ended in anxiety and despair. [FN#90] Although Zen was first favoured by the Ho-jo Regency and chiefly prospered at Kama-kura, yet it rapidly began to exercise its influence on nobles and Emperors at Kyo-to. This is mainly due to the activity of En-ni, known as Sho-Ichi-Koku-Shi (1202-1280), who first earned Zen under Gyo-yu, a disciple of Ei-sai, and afterwards went to China, where he was Enlightened under the instruction of Wu Chun, of the monastery of King Shan. After his return, Michi-iye (Fuji-wara), a powerful nobleman, erected for him To-fuku-ji in 1243, and he became the founder of a sub-sect of the Rin Zai, named after that monastery. The Emperor Go-saga (1243-1246), an admirer of his, received the Moral Precepts from him. One of his disciples, To-zan, became the spiritual adviser of the Emperor Fushi-mi (1288-1298), and another disciple, Mu kwan, was created the abbot of the monastery of Nan-zen-ji by the Emperor Kame-yama (1260-1274), as the founder of a sub-sect of the Rin Zai under the same name. Another teacher who gained lasting influence on the Court is Nan-po, known as Dai-O-Koku-Shi (1235-1308), who was appointed the abbot of the monastery of Man-ju-ji in Kyo to by the Emperor Fushi-mi. One of his disciples, Tsu-o, was the spiritual adviser to both the Emperor Hana-zono (1308-1318) and the Emperor Go-dai-go. And another disciple, Myo-cho, known as Dai-To-Koku-Shi (1282-1337), also was admired by the two Emperors, and created the abbot of Dai-toku-ji, as the founder of a sub-sect of the Rin Zai under the same name. It was for Myo-cho's disciple, Kan-zan (1277 1360), that the Emperor Hana-zono turned his detached palace into a monastery, named Myo-shin-ji, the head temple of a sub-sect of the Rin Zai under the same name. It was at this time that Japan gave birth to Masa-shige (Kusu-noki), an able general and tactician of the Imperialists, who for the sake of the Emperor not only sacrificed himself and his brother, but by his will his son and his son's successor died for the same cause, boldly attacking the enemy whose number was overwhelmingly great. Masa-shige's loyalty, wisdom, bravery, and prudence are not merely unique in the history of Japan, but perhaps in the history of man. The tragic tale about his parting with his beloved son, and his bravery shown at his last battle, never fail to inspire the Japanese with heroism. He is the best specimen of the Samurai class. According to an old document,[FN#91] this Masa-shige was the practiser of Zen, and just before his last battle he called on Chu Tsun (So-shun) to receive the final instruction. "What have I to do when death takes the place of life?" asked Masa-shige. The teacher replied: "Be bold, at once cut off both ties, The drawn sword gleams against the skies." Thus becoming, as it were, an indispensable discipline for the Samurai, Zen never came to an end with the Ho-jo period, but grew more prosperous than before during the reign[FN#92] of the Emperor Go-dai-go, one of the most enthusiastic patrons of the faith. [FN#91] The event is detailed at length in a life of So-shun, but some historians suspect it to be fictitious. This awaits a further research. [FN#92] As we have already mentioned, Do-gen, the founder of the Japanese So To Sect, shunned the society of the rich and the powerful, and led a secluded life. In consequence his sect did not make any rapid progress until the Fourth Patriarch of his line, Kei-zan (1268-1325) who, being of energetic spirit, spread his faith with remarkable activity, building many large monasteries, of which Yo-ko-ji, in the province of No-to, So-ji-ji (near Yokohama), one of the head temples of the sect, are well known. One of his disciples, Mei ho (1277-1350), propagated the faith in the northern provinces; while another disciple, Ga-san (1275-1365), being a greater character, brought up more than thirty distinguished disciples, of whom Tai-gen, Tsu-gen, Mu-tan, Dai-tetsu, and Jip-po, are best known. Tai-gen (died 1370) and big successors propagated the faith over the middle provinces, while Tsu-gen (1332-1391) and his successors spread the sect all over the north-eastern and south-western provinces. Thus it is worthy of our notice that most of the Rin Zai teachers confined their activities within Kamakura and Kyo-to, while the So To masters spread the faith all over the country. The Shoguns of the Ashi-kaga period (1338-1573) were not less devoted to the faith than the Emperors who succeeded the Emperor Go-dai-go. And even Taka-uji (1338-1357), the notorious founder of the Shogunate, built a monastery and invited So-seki,[FN#93] better known as Mu-So-Koku-Shi, who was respected as the tutor by the three successive Emperors after Go-dai-go. Taka-uji's example was followed by all succeeding Shoguns, and Shogun's example was followed by the feudal lords and their vassals. This resulted in the propagation of Zen throughout the country. We can easily imagine how Zen was prosperous in these days from the splendid monasteries[FN#94] built at this period, such as the Golden Hall Temple and the Silver Hall Temple that still adorn the fair city of Kyo-to. [FN#93] So-seki (1276-1351) was perhaps the greatest Zen master of the period. Of numerous monasteries built for him, E-rin-ji, in the province of Kae, and Ten-ryu-ji, the head temple of a sub-sect of the Rin Zai under the same name, are of importance. Out of over seventy eminent disciples of his, Gi-do (1365-1388), the author of Ku-ge-shu; Shun-oku (1331-1338), the founder of the monastery of So-koku-ji, the head temple of a sub-sect of the Rin Zai under the same name; and Zek-kai (1337-1405), author of Sho-ken-shu, are best known. [FN#94] Myo-shin-ji was built in 1337 by the Emperor Hana-zono; Ten-ryu-ji was erected by Taka-uji, the first Shogun of the period, in 1344; So-koku-ji by Yosh-imitsu, the third Shogun, in 1385; Kin-Kaku-ji, or Golden Hall Temple, by the same Shogun, in 1397; Gin-kaku-ji, or Silver Hall Temple, by Yoshi-masa, the eighth Shogun, in 1480. 11. Zen in the Dark Age. The latter half of the Ashikaga period was the age of arms and bloodshed. Every day the sun shone on the glittering armour of marching soldiers. Every wind sighed over the lifeless remains of the brave. Everywhere the din of battle resounded. Out of these fighting feudal lords stood two champions. Each of them distinguished himself as a veteran soldier and tactician. Each of them was known as an experienced practiser of Zen. One was Haru-nobu[FN#95] (Take-da, died in 1573), better known by his Buddhist name, Shin-gen. The other was Teru-tora[FN#96] (Uye-sugi, died in 1578), better known by his Buddhist name, Ken-shin. The character of Shin-gen can be imagined from the fact that he never built any castle or citadel or fortress to guard himself against his enemy, but relied on his faithful vassals and people; while that of Ken-shin, from the fact that he provided his enemy, Shin-gen, with salt when the latter suffered from want of it, owing to the cowardly stratagem of a rival lord. The heroic battles waged by these two great generals against each other are the flowers of the Japanese war-history. Tradition has it that when Shin-gen's army was put to rout by the furious attacks of Ken-shin's troops, and a single warrior mounted on a huge charger rode swiftly as a sweeping wind into Shin-gen's head-quarters, down came a blow of the heavy sword aimed at Shin-gen's forehead, with a question expressed in the technical terms of Zen: "What shalt thou do in such a state at such a moment?" Having no time to draw his sword, Shin-gen parried it with his war-fan, answering simultaneously in Zen words: "A flake of snow on the red-hot furnace!" Had not his attendants come to the rescue Shin-gen's life might have gone as 'a flake of snow on the red-hot furnace.' Afterwards the horseman was known to have been Ken-shin himself. This tradition shows us how Zen was practically lived by the Samurais of the Dark Age. [FN#95] Shin-gen practised Zen under the instruction of Kwai-sen, who was burned to death by Nobu-naga (O-da) in 1582. See Hon-cho-ko-so-den. [FN#96] Ken-shin learned Zen under Shu-ken, a So Ta master. See To-jo-ren-to-roku. Although the priests of other Buddhist sects had their share in these bloody affairs, as was natural at such a time, yet Zen monks stood aloof and simply cultivated their literature. Consequently, when all the people grew entirely ignorant at the end of the Dark Age, the Zen monks were the only men of letters. None can deny this merit of their having preserved learning and prepared for its revival in the following period.[FN#97] [FN#97] After the introduction of Zen into Japan many important books were written, and the following are chief doctrinal works: Ko-zen-go-koku-ron, by Ei-sai; Sho bo-gen-zo; Gaku-do-yo-zin-shu; Fu-kwan-za-zen-gi; Ei-hei-ko-roku, by Do-gen; Za-zen-yo-zin-ki; and Den-ko-roku, by Kei-zan. 12. Zen under the Toku-gana Shogunate. Peace was at last restored by Iye-yasu, the founder of the Toku-gana Shogunate (1603-1867). During this period the Shogunate gave countenance to Buddhism on one hand, acknowledging it as the state religion, bestowing rich property to large monasteries, making priests take rank over common people, ordering every householder to build a Buddhist altar in his house; while, on the other hand, it did everything to extirpate Christianity, introduced in the previous period (1544). All this paralyzed the missionary spirit of the Buddhists, and put all the sects in dormant state. As for Zen[FN#98] it was still favoured by feudal lords and their vassals, and almost all provincial lords embraced the faith. [FN#98] The So To Sect was not wanting in competent teachers, for it might take pride in its Ten-kei (1648-1699), whose religious insight was unsurpassed by any other master of the age; in its Shi getsu, who was a commentator of various Zen books, and died 1764; in its Men-zan (1683-1769), whose indefatigable works on the exposition of So To Zen are invaluable indeed; and its Getsu-shu (1618-1696) and Man-zan (1635-1714), to whose labours the reformation of the faith is ascribed. Similarly, the Rin Zai Sect, in its Gu-do (1579-1661); in its Isshi (1608-1646); in its Taku-an (1573-1645), the favourite tutor of the third Shogun, Iye-mitsu; in its Haku-in (1667-1751), the greatest of the Rin Zai masters of the day, to whose extraordinary personality and labour the revival of the sect is due; and its To-rei (1721-1792), a learned disciple of Haku-in. Of the important Zen books written by these masters, Ro-ji-tan-kin, by Ten-kei; Men-zan-ko-roku, by Men-zan; Ya-sen-kwan-wa, Soku-ko-roku, Kwai-an-koku-go, Kei-so-doku-zui, by Haku-in; Shu-mon-mu-jin-to-ron, by To-rei, are well known. It was about the middle of this period that the forty-seven vassals of Ako displayed the spirit of the Samurai by their perseverance, self-sacrifice, and loyalty, taking vengeance on the enemy of their deceased lord. The leader of these men, the tragic tales of whom can never be told or heard without tears, was Yoshi-o (O-ishi died 1702), a believer of Zen,[FN#99] and his tomb in the cemetery of the temple of Sen-gaku-ji, Tokyo, is daily visited by hundreds of his admirers. Most of the professional swordsmen forming a class in these days practised Zen. Mune-nori[FN#100](Ya-gyu), for instance, established his reputation by the combination of Zen and the fencing art. [FN#99] See "Zen Shu," No. 151. [FN#100] He is known as Ta-jima, who practised Zen under Taku-an. The following story about Boku-den (Tsuka-hara), a great swordsman, fully illustrates this tendency: "On a certain occasion Boku-den took a ferry to cross over the Yabase in the province of Omi. There was among the passengers a Samurai, tall and square-shouldered, apparently an experienced fencer. He behaved rudely toward the fellow-passengers, and talked so much of his own dexterity in the art that Boku-den, provoked by his brag, broke silence. 'You seem, my friend, to practise the art in order to conquer the enemy, but I do it in order not to be conquered,' said Boku-den. 'O monk,' demanded the man, as Boku-den was clad like a Zen monk, 'what school of swordsmanship do you belong to?' Well, mine is the Conquering-enemy-without-fighting-school.' 'Don't tell a fib, old monk. If you could conquer the enemy without fighting, what then is your sword for?' 'My sword is not to kill, but to save,' said Boku-den, making use of Zen phrases; 'my art is transmitted from mind to mind.' 'Now then, come, monk,' challenged the man, 'let us see, right at this moment, who is the victor, you or I.' The gauntlet was picked up without hesitation. 'But we must not fight,' said Boku-den, 'in the ferry, lest the passengers should be hurt. Yonder a small island you see. There we shall decide the contest.' To this proposal the man agreed, and the boat was pulled to that island. No sooner had the boat reached the shore than the man jumped over to the land, and cried: 'Come on, monk, quick, quick!' Boku-den, however, slowly rising, said: 'Do not hasten to lose your head. It is a rule of my school to prepare slowly for fighting, keeping the soul in the abdomen.' So saying he snatched the oar from the boatman and rowed the boat back to some distance, leaving the man alone, who, stamping the ground madly, cried out: 'O, you fly, monk, you coward. Come, old monk!' 'Now listen,' said Boku-den, 'this is the secret art of the Conquering-enemy-without-fighting-school. Beware that you do not forget it, nor tell it to anybody else.' Thus, getting rid of the brawling fellow, Boku-den and his fellow-passengers safely landed on the opposite shore."[FN#101] The O Baku School of Zen was introduced by Yin Yuen (In-gen) who crossed the sea in 1654, accompanied by many able disciples.[FN#102] The Shogunate gave him a tract of land at Uji, near Kyo-to, and in 1659 he built there a monastery noted for its Chinese style of architecture, now known as O-baku-san. The teachers of the same school[FN#103] came one after another from China, and Zen[FN#104] peculiar to them, flourished a short while. [FN#101] Shi-seki-shu-ran. [FN#102] In-gen (1654-1673) came over with Ta-Mei (Dai-bi, died 1673), Hwui Lin (E-rin died 1681), Tuh Chan (Doku-tan, died 1706), and others. For the life of In-gen: see Zoku-ko-shu-den and Kaku-shu-ko-yo. [FN#103] Tsih Fei (Soku-hi died 1671), Muh Ngan (Moku-an died 1684), Kao Tsuen (Ko-sen died 1695), the author of Fu-so-zen-rin-so-bo-den, To-koku-ko-so-den, and Sen-un-shu, are best known. [FN#104] This is a sub-sect of the Rin Zai School, as shown in the following table: TABLE OF THE TRANSMISSION OF ZEN FROM CHINA TO JAPAN. 1. Bodhidharma. 2. Hwui Ko (E-ka). 3. San Tsang (So-san). 4. Tao Sin (Do-shin). 5. Hung Jan (Ko nin). ---THE NORTHERN SECT 6. Shang Siu (Jin-shu). ---THE SOUTHERN SECT 6. Hwui Nang (E-no). ---THE RIN ZAI SCHOOL. 7. Nan Yoh (Nan-gaku). ---10. Gi-ku. ---11. Lin Tsi (Rin-zai). ---21. Yuen Wu (En-go). ---22. Fuh Hai (Bukkai). ---28. Kaku-a. ---THE O BAKU SCHOOL. 42. In-gen. ---25. Hti Ngan (Kyo-an). ---26. Ei-sai. ---THE SO TO SCHOOL. 7. Tsing Yuen (Sei-gen). ---8. Shih Teu (Seki-to). ---11. Tung Shan (To-zan). ---23. Ju Tsing (Nyo-jo). ---24. Do-gen. The O Baku School is the amalgamation of Zen and the worship of Amitabha, and different from the other two schools. The statistics for 1911 give the following figures: The Number of Temples: The So To School 14,255 The Rin Zai School 6,128 The O Baku School 546 The Number of Teachers: The So To School 9,576 The Rin Zai School 4,523 The O Baku School 349 It was also in this period that Zen gained a great influence on the popular literature characterized by the shortest form of poetical composition. This was done through the genius of Ba-sho,[FN#105] a great literary man, recluse and traveller, who, as his writings show us, made no small progress in the study of Zen. Again, it was made use of by the teachers of popular[FN#106] ethics, who did a great deal in the education of the lower classes. In this way Zen and its peculiar taste gradually found its way into the arts of peace, such as literature, fine art, tea-ceremony, cookery, gardening, architecture, and at last it has permeated through every fibre of Japanese life. [FN#105] He (died 1694) learned Zen under a contemporary Zen master (Buccho), and is said to have been enlightened before his reformation of the popular literature. [FN#106] The teaching was called Shin-gaku, or the 'learning of mind.' It was first taught by Bai-gan (Ishi-da), and is the reconciliation of Shintoism and Buddhism with Confucianism. Bai-gan and his successors practised Meditation, and were enlightened in their own way. Do-ni (Naka-zawa, died 1803) made use of Zen more than any other teacher. 13. Zen after the Restoration. After the Restoration of the Mei-ji (1867) the popularity of Zen began to wane, and for some thirty years remained in inactivity; but since the Russo-Japanese War its revival has taken place. And now it is looked upon as an ideal faith, both for a nation full of hope and energy, and for a person who has to fight his own way in the strife of life. Bushido, or the code of chivalry, should be observed not only by the soldier in the battle-field, but by every citizen in the struggle for existence. If a person be a person and not a beast, then he must be a Samurai-brave, generous, upright, faithful, and manly, full of self-respect and self-confidence, at the same time full of the spirit of self-sacrifice. We can find an incarnation of Bushido in the late General Nogi, the hero of Port Arthur, who, after the sacrifice of his two sons for the country in the Russo-Japanese War, gave up his own and his wife's life for the sake of the deceased Emperor. He died not in vain, as some might think, because his simplicity, uprightness, loyalty, bravery, self-control, and self-sacrifice, all combined in his last act, surely inspire the rising generation with the spirit of the Samurai to give birth to hundreds of Nogis. Now let us see in the following chapters what Zen so closely connected with Bushido teaches us. CHAPTER III THE UNIVERSE IS THE SCRIPTURE[FN#107] OF ZEN 1. Scripture is no More than Waste Paper. [FN#107] Zen is not based on any particular sutra, either of Mahayana or of Hinayana. There are twofold Tripitakas (or the three collections of the Buddhist scriptures)-namely, the Mahayana-tripitaka and the Hinayana-tripitaka. The former are the basis of the Mahayana, or the higher and reformed Buddhism, full of profound metaphysical reasonings; while the latter form that of the Hinayana, or the lower and early Buddhism, which is simple and ethical teaching. These twofold Tripitakas are as follows: THE MAHAYANA-TRIPITAKA. The Sutra Pitaka.-The Saddharma-pundarika-sutra, Samdhi-nirmocana-sutra, Avatamsaka-sutra, Prajnyaparamita-sutra, Amitayus-sutra, Mahaparinirvana-sutra, etc. The Vinaya Pitaka.--Brahmajala-sutra, Bodhisattva-caryanirdeca, etc. The Abhidharma Pitaka.--Mahaprajnyaparamita-sutra, Mahayana-craddhotpada-castra, Madhyamaka-castra, Yogacarya bhumi-castra, etc. THE HINAYANA-TRIPITAKA. The Sutra Pitaka.--Dirghagama, Ekottaragama, Madhyamagama, Samyuktagama, etc. The Vinaya Pitaka.--Dharmagupta-vinaya, Mahasamghika-vinaya, Sarvastivada-vinaya, etc. The Abhidharma Pitaka.--Dharma-skandha-pada, Samgiti-paryaya-pada, Jnyanaprasthana-castra, Abhidharma-kosa-castra, etc. The term 'Tripitaka,' however, was not known at the time of Shakya Muni, and almost all of the northern Buddhist records agree in stating that the Tripitaka was rehearsed and settled in the same year in which the Muni died. Mahavansa also says: "The book called Abhidharma-pitaka was compiled, which was preached to god, and was arranged in due order by 500 Budhu priests." But we believe that Shakya Muni's teaching was known to the early Buddhists, not as Tripitaka, but as Vinaya and Dharma, and even at the time of King Acoka (who ascended the throne about 269 B.C.) it was not called Tripitaka, but Dharma, as we have it in his Edicts. Mahayanists unanimously assert the compilation of the Tripitaka in the first council of Rajagrha, but they differ in opinion as to the question who rehearsed the Abhidharma; notwithstanding, they agree as for the other respects, as you see in the following: The Sutra Pitaka, compiled by Ananda; the Vinaya Pitaka, compiled by Upali; the Abhidharma Pitaka, compiled by Ananda--according to Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnyaparamita-castra). The Sutra Pitaka, compiled by Ananda; the Vinaya Pitaka, compiled by Upali; the Abhidharma Pitaka, compiled by Kacyapa according to Huen Tsang (Ta-tan-si-yu-ki). The Sutra Pitaka, compiled by Ananda; the Vinaya Pitaka, compiled by Upali; the Abhidharma Pitaka, compiled by Purna--according to Paramartha ('A Commentary on the History of the Hinayana Schools'). The above-mentioned discrepancy clearly betrays the uncertainty of their assertions, and gives us reason to discredit the compilation of Abhidharma Pitaka at the first council. Besides, judging from the Dharma-gupta-vinaya and other records, which states that Purna took no part in the first council, and that he had different opinions as to the application of the rules of discipline from that of Kacyapa, there should be some errors in Paramartha's assertion. Of these three collections of the Sacred Writings, the first two, or Sutra and Vinaya, of Mahayana, as well as of Himayana, are believed to be the direct teachings of Shakya Muni himself, because all the instructions are put in the mouth of the Master or sanctioned by him. The Mahayanists, however, compare the Hinayana doctrine with a resting-place on the road for a traveller, while the Mahayana doctrine with his destination. All the denominations of Buddhism, with a single exception of Zen, are based on the authority of some particular sacred writings. The Ten Dai Sect, for instance, is based on Saddharma-pundarika-sutra; the Jo Do Sect on Larger Sukhavati-vyuha, Smaller Sukhavati-vyuha, and Amitayus-dhyana-sutra; the Ke Gon Sect on Avatamsaka-sutra; the Hosso Sect on Samdhi-nirmocana-sutra. Zen is based on the highest spiritual plane attained by Shakya Muni himself. It can only be realized by one who has attained the same plane. To describe it in full by means of words is beyond the power even of Gotama himself. It is for this reason that the author of Lankavatara-sutra insists that Shakya Muni spoke no word through his long career of forty-nine years as a religious teacher, and that of Mahaprajnyaparamita-sutra[FN#108] also express the same opinion. The Scripture is no more nor less than the finger pointing to the moon of Buddhahood. When we recognize the moon and enjoy its benign beauty, the finger is of no use. As the finger has no brightness whatever, so the Scripture has no holiness whatever. The Scripture is religious currency representing spiritual wealth. It does not matter whether money be gold, or sea-shells, or cows. It is a mere substitute. What it stands for is of paramount importance. Away with your stone-knife! Do not watch the stake against which a running hare once struck its head and died. Do not wait for another hare. Another may not come for ever. Do not cut the side of the boat out of which you dropped your sword to mark where it sunk. The boat is ever moving on. The Canon is the window through which we observe the grand scenery of spiritual nature. To hold communion directly with it we must get out of the window. It is a mere stray fly that is always buzzing within it, struggling to get out. Those who spend most of their lives in the study of the Scriptures, arguing and explaining with hair-splitting reasonings, and attain no higher plane in spirituality, are religious flies good for nothing but their buzzing about the nonsensical technicalities. It is on this account that Rin-zai declared:[FN#109] 'The twelve divisions of the Buddhist Canon are nothing better than waste paper.' [FN#108] Mahaprajnyaparamita-sutra, vol. 425. [FN#109] Rin-zai-roku. 2. No Need of the Scriptural Authority for Zen. Some Occidental scholars erroneously identify Buddhism with the primitive faith of Hinayanism, and are inclined to call Mahayanism, a later developed faith, a degenerated one. If the primitive faith be called the genuine, as these scholars think, and the later developed faith be the degenerated one, then the child should be called the genuine man and the grown-up people be the degenerated ones; similarly, the primitive society must be the genuine and the modern civilization be the degenerated one. So also the earliest writings of the Old Testament should be genuine and the four Gospels be degenerated. Beyond all doubt Zen belongs to Mahayanism, yet this does not imply that it depends on the scriptural authority of that school, because it does not trouble itself about the Canon whether it be Hinayana or Mahayana, or whether it was directly spoken by Shakya Muni or written by some later Buddhists. Zen is completely free from the fetters of old dogmas, dead creeds, and conventions of stereotyped past, that check the development of a religious faith and prevent the discovery of a new truth. Zen needs no Inquisition. It never compelled nor will compel the compromise of a Galileo or a Descartes. No excommunication of a Spinoza or the burning of a Bruno is possible for Zen. On a certain occasion Yoh Shan (Yaku-san) did not preach the doctrine for a long while, and was requested to give a sermon by his assistant teacher, saying: "Would your reverence preach the Dharma to your pupils, who long thirst after your merciful instruction?" "Then ring the bell," replied Yoh Shan. The bell rang, and all the monks assembled in the Hall eager to bear the sermon. Yoh Shan went up to the pulpit and descended immediately without saying a word. "You, reverend sir," asked the assistant, "promised to deliver a sermon a little while ago. Why do you not preach?" "Sutras are taught by the Sutra teachers," said the master; "Castras are taught by the Castra teachers. No wonder that I say nothing."[FN#110] This little episode will show you that Zen is no fixed doctrine embodied in a Sutra or a Castra, but a conviction or realization within us. [FN#110] Zen-rin-rui-shu and E-gen. To quote another example, an officer offered to Tung Shan (To-zan) plenty of alms, and requested him to recite the sacred Canon. Tung Shan, rising from his chair, made a bow respectfully to the officer, who did the same to the teacher. Then Tung Shan went round the chair, taking the officer with him, and making a bow again to the officer, asked: "Do you see what I mean?" "No, sir," replied the other. "I have been reciting the sacred Canon, why do you not see?"[FN#111] Thus Zen does not regard Scriptures in black and white as its Canon, for it takes to-days and tomorrows of this actual life as its inspired pages. [FN#111] Zen-rin-rui-sha and To-zan-roku. 3. The Usual Explanation of the Canon. An eminent Chinese Buddhist scholar, well known as Ten Dai Dai Shi (A.D. 538-597), arranged the whole preachings of Shakya Muni in a chronological order in accordance with his own religious theory, and observed that there were the Five Periods in the career of the Buddha as a religious teacher. He tried to explain away all the discrepancies and contradictions, with which the Sacred Books are encumbered, by arranging the Sutras in a line of development. His elucidation was so minute and clear, and his metaphysical reasonings so acute and captivating, that his opinion was universally accepted as an historical truth, not merely by the Chinese, but also by the Japanese Mahayanists. We shall briefly state here the so-called Five Periods. Shakya Muni attained to Buddhaship in his thirtieth year, and sat motionless for seven days under the Bodhi tree, absorbed in deep meditation, enjoying the first bliss of his Enlightenment. In the second week he preached his Dharma to the innumerable multitude of Bodhisattvas,[FN#112] celestial beings, and deities in the nine assemblies held at seven different places. This is the origin of a famous Mahayana book entitled Buddhavatamsaka-mahavaipulya-sutra. In this book the Buddha set forth his profound Law just as it was discovered by his highly Enlightened mind, without considering the mental states of his hearers. Consequently the ordinary hearers (or the Buddha's immediate disciples) could not understand the doctrine, and sat stupefied as if they were 'deaf and dumb,' while the great Bodhisattvas fully understood and realized the doctrine. This is called the first period, which lasted only two or three[FN#113] weeks. [FN#112] Bodhisattva is an imaginary personage, or ideal saint, superior to Arhat, or the highest saint of Hinayanism. The term 'Bodhisattva' was first applied to the Buddha before his Enlightenment, and afterwards was adopted by Mahayanists to mean the adherent of Mahayanism in contradistinction with the Cravaka or hearers of Hinayanism. [FN#113] Bodhiruci says to the effect that the preachings in the first five assemblies were made in the first week, and the rest were delivered in the second week. Nagarjuna says that the Buddha spoke no word for fifty-seven days after his Enlightenment. It is said in Saddharma-pundarika-sutra that after three weeks the Buddha preached at Varanasi, and it says nothing respecting Avatamsaka-sutra. Though there are divers opinions about the Buddha's first sermon and its date, all traditions agree in this that he spent some time in meditation, and then delivered the first sermon to the five ascetics at Varanasi. Thereupon Shakya Muni, having discovered that ordinary bearers were too ignorant to believe in the Mahayana doctrine and appreciate the greatness of Buddhahood, thought it necessary to modify his teaching so as to adjust it to the capacity of ordinary people. So he went to Varanasi (or Benares) and preached his modified doctrine--that is, Hinayanism. The instruction given at that time has been handed down to us as the four Agamas,[FN#114] or the four Nikayas. This is called the second period, which lasted about twelve years. It was at the beginning of this period that the Buddha converted the five ascetics,[FN#115] who became his disciples. Most of the �ravakas or the adherents of Hinayanism were converted during this period. They trained their hearts in accordance with the modified Law, learned the four noble truths,[FN#116] and worked out their own salvation. [FN#114] (1) Anguttara, (2) Majjhima, (3) Digha, (4) Samyutta. [FN#115] Kondanynya, Vappa, Baddiya, Mahanana, Assaji. [FN#116] The first is the sacred truth of suffering; the second the truth of the origin of suffering--that is, lust and desire; the third the sacred truth of the extinction of suffering; the fourth the sacred truth of the path that leads to the extinction of suffering. There are eight noble paths that lead to the extinction of suffering--that is, Right faith, Right resolve, Right speech, Right action, Right living, Right effort, Right thought, and Right meditation. The Buddha then having found his disciples firmly adhering to Hinayanism without knowing that it was a modified and imperfect doctrine, he had to lead them up to a higher and perfect doctrine that he might lead them up to Buddhahood. With this object in view Shakya Muni preached Vimalakirtti-nirdeca-sutra[FN#117], Lankavatara-sutra, and other sutras, in which he compared Hinayanism with Mahayanism, and described the latter in glowing terms as a deep and perfect Law, whilst he set forth the former at naught as a superficial and imperfect one. Thus he showed his disciples the inferiority of Hinayanism, and caused them to desire for Mahayanism. This is said to be the third period, which lasted some eight years. [FN#117] This is one of the most noted Mahayana books, and is said to be the best specimen of the sutras belonging to this period. It is in this sutra that most of Shakya's eminent disciples, known as the adherents of Hinayanism, are astonished with the profound wisdom, the eloquent speech, and the supernatural power of Vimalakirtti, a Bodhisattva, and confess the inferiority of their faith. The author frequently introduces episodes in order to condemn Hinayanism, making use of miracles of his own invention. The disciples of the Buddha now understood that Mahayanism was far superior to Hinayanism, but they thought the higher doctrine was only for Bodhisattvas and beyond their understanding. Therefore they still adhered to the modified doctrine, though they did no longer decry Mahayanism, which they had no mind to practise. Upon this Shakya Muni preached Prajnyaparamita-sutras[FN#118] in the sixteen assemblies held at four different places, and taught them Mahayanism in detail in order to cause them to believe it and practise it. Thus they became aware that there was no definite demarcation between Mahayanism and Hinayanism, and that they might become Mahayanists. This is the fourth period, which lasted about twenty-two years. Now, the Buddha, aged seventy-two, thought it was high time to preach his long-cherished doctrine that all sentient beings can attain to Supreme Enlightenment; so he preached Saddharma-pundarika-sutra, in which he prophesied when and where his disciples should become Buddhas. It was his greatest object to cause all sentient beings to be Enlightened and enable them to enjoy the bliss of Nirvana. It was for this that he had endured great pain and hardships through his previous existences. It was for this that he had left his heavenly abode to appear on earth. It was for this that he had preached from time to time through his long career of forty-seven years. Having thus realized his great aim, Shakya Muni had now to prepare for his final departure, and preached Mahaparinirvana-sutra in order to show that all the animated and inanimate things were endowed with the same nature as his. After this last instruction he passed to eternity. This is called the fifth period, which lasted some eight years. [FN#118] Nagarjuna's doctrine depends mainly on these sutras. These five periods above mentioned can scarcely be called historical in the proper sense of the term, yet they are ingeniously invented by Ten Dai Dai Shi to set the Buddhist Scriptures in the order of doctrinal development, and place Saddharma-pundarika in the highest rank among the Mahayana books. His argument, however dogmatic and anti-historical in no small degree, would be not a little valuable for our reader, who wants to know the general phase of the Buddhist Canon, consisting of thousands of fascicles. 4. Sutras used by Zen Masters. Ten Dai failed to explain away the discrepancies and contradictions of which the Canon is full, and often contradicted himself by the ignoring of historical[FN#119] facts. [FN#119] Let us state our own opinion on the subject in question. The foundation of Hinayanism consists in the four Nikayas, or four Agamas, the most important books of that school. Besides the four Agamas, there exist in the Chinese Tripitaka numerous books translated by various authors, some of which are extracts from Agamas, and some the lives of the Buddha, while others are entirely different sutras, apparently of later date. Judging from these sources, it seems to us that most of Shakya Muni's original teachings are embodied into the four Agamas. But it is still a matter of uncertainty that whether they are stated in Agamas now extant just as they were, for the Buddha's preachings were rehearsed immediately after the Buddha's death in the first council held at Rajagrha, yet not consigned to writing. They were handed down by memory about one hundred years. Then the monks at Vaisali committed the so-called Ten Indulgences, infringing the rules of the Order, and maintained that Shakya Muni had not condemned them in his preachings. As there were, however, no written sutras to disprove their assertion, the elders, such as Yaca, Revata, and others, who opposed the Indulgences, had to convoke the second council of 700 monks, in which they succeeded in getting the Indulgences condemned, and rehearsed the Buddha's instruction for the second time. Even in this council of Vaisali we cannot find the fact that the Master's preachings were reduced to writing. The decisions of the 700 elders were not accepted by the party of opposition, who held a separate council, and settled their own rules and doctrine. Thus the same doctrine of the Teacher began to be differently stated and believed. This being the first open schism, one disruption after another took place among the Buddhistic Order. There were many different schools of the Buddhists at the time when King Acoka ascended the throne (about 269 B.C.), and the patronage of the King drew a great number of pagan ascetics into the Order, who, though they dressed themselves in the yellow robes, yet still preserved their religious views in their original colour. This naturally led the Church into continual disturbances and moral corruption. In the eighteenth year of Acoka's reign the King summoned the council of 1,000 monks at Pataliputra (Patna), and settled the orthodox doctrine in order to keep the Dharma pure from heretical beliefs. We believe that about this time some of the Buddha's preachings were reduced to writing, for the missionaries despatched by the King in the year following the council seem to have set out with written sutras. In addition to this, some of the names of the passages of the Dharma are given in the Bharbra edict of the King, which was addressed to the monks in Magadha. We do not suppose, however, that all the sutras were written at once in these days, but that they were copied down from memory one after another at different times, because some of the sutras were put down in Ceylon 160 years after the Council of Patna. In the introductory book of Ekottaragama (Anguttara Nikaya), now extant in the Chinese Tripitaka, we notice the following points: (1) It is written in a style quite different from that of the original Agama, but similar to that of the supplementary books of the Mahayana sutras; (2) it states Ananda's compilation of the Tripitaka after the death of the Master; (3) it refers to the past Buddhas, the future Buddha Maitreya, and innumerable Bodhisattvas; (4) it praises the profound doctrine of Mahayanism. From this we infer that the Agama was put in the present form after the rise of the Mahayana School, and handed down through the hand of Mahasanghika scholars, who were much in sympathy with Mahayanism. Again, the first book of Dirghagama, (Digha Nikaya), that describes the line of Buddhas who appeared before Shakya Muni, adopts the whole legend of Gotama's life as a common mode of all Buddhas appearing on earth; while the second book narrates the death of Gotama and the distribution of his relies, and refers to Pataliputra, the new capital of Acoka. This shows us that the present Agama is not of an earlier date than the third century B.C. Samyuktagama (Samyutta Nikaya) also gives a detailed account of Acoka's conversion, and of his father Bindusara. From these evidences we may safely infer that the Hinayana sutras were put in the present shape at different times between the third century B.C. and the first century A.D. With regard to the Mahayana sutras we have little doubt about their being the writings of the later Buddhist reformers, even if they are put in the mouth of Shakya Muni. They are entirely different from the sutras of Hinayanism, and cannot be taken as the preachings of one and the same person. The reader should notice the following points: (1) Four councils were held for the rehearsal of the Tripitaka namely, the first at Rajagrha, in the year of Shakya Muni's death; the second at Vaisali, some 100 years after the Buddha; the third at the time of King Acoka, about 235 years after the Master; the fourth at the time of King Kanishka, the first century A.D. But all these councils were held to compile the Hinayana sutras, and nothing is known of the rehearsal of the Mahayana books. Some are of opinion that the first council was held within the Sattapanni cave, near Rajagrha, where the Hinayana Tripitaka was rehearsed by 500 monks, while outside the cave there assembled a greater number of monks, who were not admitted into the cave, and rehearsed the Mahayana Tripitaka. This opinion, however, is based on no reliable source. (2) The Indian orthodox Buddhists of old declared that the Mahayana sutras were the fabrication of heretics or of the Evil One, and not the teachings of the Buddha. In reply to this, the Mahayanists had to prove that the Mahayana sutras were compiled by the direct disciples of the Master; but even Nagarjuna could not vindicate the compilation of the doubtful books, and said (in Mahaprajnyaparamita-castra) that they were compiled by Ananda and Manjucri, with myriads of Bodhisattvas at the outside of the Iron Mountain Range, which encloses the earth. Asanga also proved (in Mahayanalankara-sutra-castra) with little success that Mahayanism was the Buddha's direct teachings. Some may quote Bodhisattva-garbhastha-sutra in favour of the Mahayana; but it is of no avail, as the sutra itself is the work of a later date. (3) Although almost all of the Mahayana sutras, excepting Avatamsaka-sutra, treat of Hinayanism as the imperfect doctrine taught in the first part of the Master's career, yet not merely the whole life of Gotama, but also events which occurred after his death are narrated in the Hinayana sutras. This shows that the Mahayana sutras were composed after the establishment of early Buddhism. (4) The narratives given in the Hinayana sutras in reference to Shakya Muni seem to be based on historical facts, but those in the Mahayana books are full of wonders and extravagant miracles far from facts. (5) The Hinayana sutras retain the traces of their having been classified and compiled as we see in Ekottaragama, while Mahayana books appear to have been composed one after another by different authors at different times, because each of them strives to excel others, declaring itself to be the sutra of the highest doctrine, as we see in Saddharma-pundarika, Samdhinirmocana, Suvarnaprabhasottamaraja, etc. (6) The dialogues in the Hinayana sutras are in general those between the Buddha and his disciples, while in the Mahayana books imaginary beings called Bodhisattvas take the place of disciples. Moreover, in some books no monks are mentioned. (7) Most of the Mahayana sutras declare that they themselves possess those mystic powers that protect the reader or the owner from such evils as epidemic, famine, war, etc.; but the Hinayana sutras are pure from such beliefs. (8) The Mahayana sutras extol not only the merits of the reading, but the copying of the sutras. This unfailingly shows the fact that they were not handed down by memory, as the Hinayana sutras, but written by their respective authors. (9) The Hinayana sutras were written with a plain style in Pali, while the Mahayana books, with brilliant phraseology, in Sanskrit. (10) The Buddha in the Hinayana sutras is little more than a human being, while Buddha or Tathagata in the Mahayana is a superhuman being or Great Deity. (11) The moral precepts of the Hinayana were laid down by the Master every time when his disciples acted indecently, while those of the Mahayana books were spoken all at once by Tathagata. (12) Some Mahayana sutras appear to be the exaggeration or modification of what was stated in the Hinayana books, as we see in Mahaparinirvana-sutra. (13) If we take both the Hinayana and the Mahayana as spoken by one and the same person, we cannot understand why there are so many contradictory statements, as we see in the following: (a) Historical Contradictions.--For instance, Hinayana sutras are held to be the first sermon of the Buddha by the author of Saddharma-pundarika, while Avatamsaka declares itself to be the first sermon. Nagarjuna holds that Prajnya sutras are the first. (b) Contradictions as to the Person of the Master.--For instance, Agamas say the Buddha's body was marked with thirty-two peculiarities, while the Mahayana books enumerate ninety-seven peculiarities, or even innumerable marks. (c) Doctrinal Contradictions.--For instance, the Hinayana sutras put forth the pessimistic, nihilistic view of life, while the Mahayana books, as a rule, express the optimistic, idealistic view. (14) The Hinayana sutras say nothing of the Mahayana books, while the latter always compare their doctrine with that of the former, and speak of it in contempt. It is clear that the name 'Hinayana' was coined by the Mahayanists, as there is no sutra which calls itself 'Hinayana.' It is therefore evident that when the Hinayana books took the present shape there appeared no Mahayana sutras. (15) The authors of the Mahayana sutras should have expected the opposition of the Hinayanists, because they say not seldom that there might be some who would not believe in and oppose Mahayanism as not being the Buddha's teaching, but that of the Evil One. They say also that one who would venture to say the Mahayana books are fictitious should fall into Hell. For example, the author of Mahaparinirvana-sutra says: "Wicked Bhiksus would say all Vaipulya Mahayana sutras are not spoken by the Buddha, but by the Evil One." (16) There are evidences showing that the Mahayana doctrine was developed out of the Hinayana one. (a) The Mahayanists' grand conception of Tathagata is the natural development of that of those progressive Hinayanists who belonged to the Mahasamghika School, which was formed some one hundred years after the Master. These Hinayanists maintained that the Buddha had infinite power, endless life, and limitlessly great body. The author of Mahaparinirvana-sutra also says that Buddha is immortal, his Dharma-kaya is infinite and eternal. The authors of Mahayana-mulagata-hrdayabhumi-dhyana-sutra and of Suvarnaprabha-sottamaraja-sutra enumerate the Three Bodies of Buddha, while the writer of Lankavatara-sutra describes the Four Bodies, and that of Avatamsaka-sutra the Ten Bodies of Tathagata. (b) According to the Hinayana sutras, there are only four stages of saintship, but the Mahasamghika School increases the number and gives ten steps. Some Mahayana sutras also enumerate the ten stages of Bodhisattva, while others give forty-one or fifty two stages. (c) The Himayana sutras name six past Buddhas and one future Buddha Maitreya, while the Mahayana sutras name thirty-five, fifty-three, or three thousand Buddhas. (d) The Hinayana sutras give the names of six Vijnyanas, while the Mahayana books seven, eight, or nine Vijnyanas. (17) For a few centuries after the Buddha we hear only of Hinayanism, but not of Mahayanism, there being no Mahayana teacher. (18) In some Mahayana sutras (Mahavairocanabhisambodhi-sutra, for example) Tathagata Vairocana takes the place of Gotama, and nothing is said of the latter. (19) The contents of the Mahayana sutras often prove that they were, composed, or rewritten, or some additions were made, long after the Buddha. For instance, Mahamaya-sutra says that Acvaghosa would refute heretical doctrines 600 years after the Master, and Nagarjuna would advocate the Dharma 700 years after Gotama, while Lankavatara-sutra prophesies that Nagarjuna would appear in South India. (20) The author of San-ron-gen-gi tells us Mahadeva, a leader of the Mahasamghika School, used Mahayana sutras, together with the orthodox Tripitaka 116 after the Buddha. It is, however, doubtful that they existed at so early a date. (21) Mahaprajnyaparamita-castra, ascribed to Nagarjuna, refers to many Mahayana books, which include Saddharma-pundarika, Vimalakirtti-nirdeca, Sukhavati-vyuha, Mahaprajnyaparamita, Pratyutpanna-buddhasammukhavasthita-samadhi, etc. He quotes in his Dacabhumivibhasa-castra, Mahaparinirvana, Dacabhumi, etc. (22) Sthiramati, whose date is said to be earlier than Nagarjuna and later than Acvaghosa, tries to prove that Mahayanism was directly taught by the Master in his Mahayanavataraka-castra. And Mahayanottaratantra-castra, which is ascribed by some scholars to him, refers to Avatamsaka, Vajracchedikka-prajnyaparamita, Saddharmapundarika, Crimala-devi-simhananda, etc. (23) Chi-leu-cia-chin, who came to China in A.D. 147 or A.D. 164, translated some part of Mahayana books known as Maharatnakuta-sutra and Mahavaipulya-mahasannipata-sutra. (24) An-shi-kao, who came to China in A.D. 148, translated such Mahayana books as Sukhavati-vyaha, Candra-dipa-samadhi, etc. (25) Matanga, who came to China in A.D. 67, is said by his biographer to have been informed of both Mahayanism and Hinayanism to have given interpretations to a noted Mahayana book, entitled Suvarnaprabhasa. (26) Sandhinirmocana-sutra is supposed to be a work of Asanga not without reason, because Asanga's doctrine is identical with that of the sutra, and the sutra itself is contained in the latter part of Yogacaryabhumi-castra. The author divides the whole preachings of the Master into the three periods that he might place the Idealistic doctrine in the highest rank of the Mahayana schools. (27) We have every reason to believe that Mahayana sutras began to appear (perhaps Prajnya sutras being the first) early in the first century A.D., that most of the important books appeared before Nagarjuna, and that some of Mantra sutras were composed so late as the time of Vajrabodhi, who came to China in A.D. 719. To say nothing of the strong opposition raised by the Japanese scholars,[FN#120] such an assumption can be met with an assumption of entirely opposite nature, and the difficulties can never be overcome. For Zen masters, therefore, these assumptions and reasonings are mere quibbles unworthy of their attention. [FN#120] The foremost of them was Chuki Tominaga (1744), of whose life little is known. He is said to have been a nameless merchant at Osaka. His Shutsu-jo-ko-go is the first great work of higher criticism on the Buddhist Scriptures. To believe blindly in the Scriptures is one thing, and to be pious is another. How often the childish views of Creation and of God in the Scriptures concealed the light of scientific truths; how often the blind believers of them fettered the progress of civilization; how often religious men prevented us from the realizing of a new truth, simply because it is against the ancient folk-lore in the Bible. Nothing is more absurd than the constant dread in which religious men, declaring to worship God in truth and in spirit, are kept at the scientific discovery of new facts incompatible with the folk-lore. Nothing is more irreligious than to persecute the seekers of truth in order to keep up absurdities and superstitions of bygone ages. Nothing is more inhuman than the commission of 'devout cruelty' under the mask of love of God and man. Is it not the misfortune, not only of Christianity, but of whole mankind, to have the Bible encumbered with legendary histories, stories of miracles, and a crude cosmology, which from time to time come in conflict with science? The Buddhist Scriptures are also overloaded with Indian superstitions and a crude cosmology, which pass under the name of Buddhism. Accordingly, Buddhist scholars have confused not seldom the doctrine of the Buddha with these absurdities, and thought it impious to abandon them. Kaiseki,[FN#121] for instance, was at a loss to distinguish Buddhism from the Indian astronomy, which is utterly untenable in the face of the fact. He taxed his reason to the utmost to demonstrate the Indian theory and at the same time to refute the Copernican theory. One day he called on Yeki-do[FN#122] a contemporary Zen master, and explained the construction of the Three Worlds as described in the Scriptures, saying that Buddhism would come to naught if the theory of the Three Worlds be overthrown by the Copernican. Then Yeki-do exclaimed: "Buddhism aims to destroy the Three Worlds and to establish Buddha's Holy Kingdom throughout the universe. Why do you waste your energy in the construction of the Three Worlds?"[FN#123] [FN#121] A learned Japanese Buddhist scholar, who died in 1882. [FN#122] A famous Zen master, the abbot of the So-ji-ji Monastery, who died in 1879. [FN#123] Kin-sei-zen-rin-gen-ko-roku. In this way Zen does not trouble itself about unessentials of the Scriptures, on which it never depends for its authority. Do-gen, the founder of the Japanese So To Sect, severely condemns (in his Sho-bo-gen-zo) the notions of the impurity of women inculcated in the Scriptures. He openly attacks those Chinese monks who swore that they would not see any woman, and ridicules those who laid down rules prohibiting women from getting access to monasteries. A Zen master was asked by a Samurai whether there was hell in sooth as taught in the Scriptures. "I must ask you," replied he, "before I give you an answer. For what purpose is your question? What business have you, a Samurai, with a thing of that sort? Why do you bother yourself about such an idle question? Surely you neglect your duty and are engaged in such a fruitless research. Does this not amount to your stealing the annual salary from your lord?" The Samurai, offended not a little with these rebukes, stared at the master, ready to draw his sword at another insult. Then the teacher said smilingly: "Now you are in Hell. Don't you see?" Does, then, Zen use no scripture? To this question we answer both affirmatively and negatively: negatively, because Zen regards all sutras as a sort of pictured food which has no power of appeasing spiritual hunger; affirmatively, because it freely makes use of them irrespective of Mahayana or Hinayana. Zen would not make a bonfire of the Scriptures as Caliph Omar did of the Alexandrian library. A Zen master, having seen a Confucianist burning his books on the thought that they were rather a hindrance to his spiritual growth, observed: "You had better burn your books in mind and heart, but not the books in black and white."[FN#124] [FN#124] Ukiyo-soshi. As even deadly poison proves to be medicine in the band of a good doctor, so a heterodox doctrine antagonistic to Buddhism is used by the Zen teachers as a finger pointing to the principle of Zen. But they as a rule resorted to Lankavatara-sutra,[FN#125] Vajracchedika-prajnya-paramita-sutra,[FN#126] Vimalakirtti-nirdeca-sutra[FN#127] Mahavaipulya-purnabuddha-sutra[FN#128] Mababuddhosnisa-tathagata-guhyahetu-saksatkrta-prasannatha-sarvabhodhi sattvacarya-surangama-sutra,[FN#129] Mahapari-nirvana-sutra,[FN#130] Saddharma-pundarika-sutra, Avatamsaka-sutra, and so forth. [FN#125] This book is the nearest approach to the doctrine of Zen, and is said to have been pointed out by Bodhidharma as the best book for the use of his followers. See Nanjo's Catalogue, Nos. 175, 1761 177. [FN#126] The author of the sutra insists on the unreality of all things. The book was first used by the Fifth Patriarch, as we have seen in the first chapter. See Nanjo's Catalogue, Nos. 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. [FN#127] The sutra agrees with Zen in many respects, especially in its maintaining that the highest truth can only be realized in mind, and cannot be expressed by word of mouth. See Nanjo's Catalogue, Nos. 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149. [FN#128] The sutra was translated into Chinese by Buddhatrata in the seventh century. The author treats at length of Samadhi, and sets forth a doctrine similar to Zen, so that the text was used by many Chinese Zenists. See Nanjo's Catalogue, Nos. 427 and 1629. [FN#129] The sutra was translated into Chinese by Paramiti and Mikacakya, of the Tang dynasty (618-907). The author conceives Reality as Mind or Spirit. The book belongs to the Mantra class, although it is much used by Zenists. See Nanjo's Catalogue, No. 446. [FN#130] The author of the book sets forth his own conception of Nirvana and of Buddha, and maintains that all beings are endowed with Buddha-nature. He also gives in detail an incredible account about Gotama's death. 5. A Sutra Equal in Size to the Whole World. The holy writ that Zen masters admire is not one of parchment nor of palm-leaves, nor in black and white, but one written in heart and mind. On one occasion a King of Eastern India invited the venerable Prajnyatara, the teacher of Bodhidharma, and his disciples to dinner at his own palace. Finding all the monks reciting the sacred sutras with the single exception of the master, the King questioned Prajnyatara: "Why do you not, reverend sir, recite the Scriptures as others do?" "My poor self, your majesty," replied he, "does not go out to the objects of sense in my expiration nor is it confined within body and mind in my inspiration. Thus I constantly recite hundreds, thousands, and millions of sacred sutras." In like manner the Emperor Wu, of the Liang dynasty, once requested Chwen Hih (Fu Dai-shi) to give a lecture on the Scriptures. Chwen went upon the platform, struck the desk with a block of wood, and came down. Pao Chi (Ho-shi), a Buddhist tutor to the Emperor, asked the perplexed monarch: "Does your Lordship understand him?" "No," answered His Majesty. "The lecture of the Great Teacher is over." As it is clear to you from these examples, Zen holds that the faith must be based not on the dead Scriptures, but on living facts, that one must turn over not the gilt pages of the holy writ, but read between the lines in the holy pages of daily life, that Buddha must be prayed not by word of mouth, but by actual deed and work, and that one must split open, as the author of Avatamsaka-sutra allegorically tells us, the smallest grain of dirt to find therein a sutra equal in size to the whole world. "The so-called sutra," says Do-gen, "covers the whole universe. It transcends time and space. It is written with the characters of heaven, of man, of beasts, of Asuras,[FN#13l] of hundreds of grass, and of thousands of trees. There are characters, some long, some short, some round, some square, some blue, some red, some yellow, and some white-in short, all the phenomena in the universe are the characters with which the sutra is written." Shakya Muni read that sutra through the bright star illuminating the broad expanse of the morning skies, when he sat in meditation under the Bodhi Tree. [FN#13l] The name of a demon. Ling Yun (Rei-un) read it through the lovely flowers of a peach-tree in spring after some twenty years of his research for Light, and said: "A score of years I looked for Light: There came and went many a spring and fall. E'er since the peach blossoms came in my sight, I never doubt anything at all." Hian Yen (Kyo-gen) read it through the noise of bamboo, at which he threw pebbles. Su Shih (So-shoku) read it through a waterfall, one evening, and said: "The brook speaks forth the Tathagata's words divine, The hills reveal His glorious forms that shine." 6. Great Men and Nature. All great men, whether they be poets or scientists or religious men or philosophers, are not mere readers of books, but the perusers of Nature. Men of erudition are often lexicons in flesh and blood, but men of genius read between the lines in the pages of life. Kant, a man of no great erudition, could accomplish in the theory of knowledge what Copernicus did in astronomy. Newton found the law of gravitation not in a written page, but in a falling apple. Unlettered Jesus realized truth beyond the comprehension of many learned doctors. Charles Darwin, whose theory changed the whole current of the world's thought, was not a great reader of books, but a careful observer of facts. Shakespeare, the greatest of poets, was the greatest reader of Nature and life. He could hear the music even of heavenly bodies, and said: "There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest, But in his motion like an angel sings." Chwang Tsz (So-shi), the greatest of Chinese philosophers, says: "Thou knowest the music of men, but not the music of the earth. Thou knowest the music of the earth, but not the music of the heaven."[FN#132] Goethe, perceiving a profound meaning in Nature, says: "Flowers are the beautiful hieroglyphics of Nature with which she indicates how much she loves us." [FN#132] Chwang Tsz, vol. i., p. 10. Son-toku[FN#133] (Ninomiya), a great economist, who, overcoming all difficulties and hardships by which he was beset from his childhood, educated himself, says: "The earth and the heaven utter no word, but they ceaselessly repeat the holy book unwritten." [FN#133] One of the greatest self-made men in Japan, who lived 1787-1856. 7. The Absolute and Reality are but an Abstraction. A grain of sand you, trample upon has a deeper significance than a series of lectures by your verbal philosopher whom you respect. It contains within itself the whole history of the earth; it tells you what it has seen since the dawn of time; while your philosopher simply plays on abstract terms and empty words. What does his Absolute, or One, or Substance mean? What does his Reality or Truth imply? Do they denote or connote anything? Mere name! mere abstraction! One school of philosophy after another has been established on logical subtleties; thousands of books have been written on these grand names and fair mirages, which vanish the moment that your hand of experience reaches after them. "Duke Hwan," says Chwang Tsz,[FN#134] "seated above in his hall, was" (once) reading a book, and a wheelwright, Phien, was making a wheel below it. Laying aside his hammer and chisel, Phien went up the steps and said: 'I venture to ask your Grace what words you are reading?' The duke said: 'The words of sages.' 'Are these sages alive?' Phien continued. 'They are dead,' was the reply. 'Then,' said the other, 'what you, my Ruler, are reading is only the dregs and sediments of those old men.' The duke said: [FN#134] Chwang Tsz, vol. ii., p. 24. 'How should you, a wheelwright, have anything to say about the book which I am reading? If you can explain yourself, very well; if you cannot, you shall die.' The wheelwright said: 'Your servant will look at the thing from the point of view of his own art. In making a wheel, if I proceed gently, that is pleasant enough, but the workmanship is not strong; if I proceed violently, that is toilsome and the joinings do not fit. If the movements of my hand are neither (too) gentle nor (too) violent, the idea in my mind is realized. But I cannot tell (how to do this) by word of mouth; there is a knack in it. I cannot teach the knack to my son, nor can my son learn it from me. Thus it is that I am in my seventieth year, and am (still) making wheels in my old age. But these ancients, and what it was not possible for them to convey, are dead and gone. So then what you, my Ruler, are reading is but their dregs and sediments." Zen has no business with the dregs and sediments of sages of yore. 8. The Sermon of the Inanimate. The Scripture of Zen is written with facts simple and familiar, so simple and familiar with everyday life that they escape observation on that very account. The sun rises in the east. The moon sets in the west. High is the mountain. Deep is the sea. Spring comes with flowers; summer with the cool breeze; autumn with the bright moon; winter with the fakes of snow. These things, perhaps too simple and too familiar for ordinary observers to pay attention to, have had profound significance for Zen. Li Ngao (Ri-ko) one day asked Yoh Shan (Yaku-san): "What is the way to truth?" Yoh Shan, pointing to the sky and then to the pitcher beside him, said: "You see?" "No, sir," replied Li Ngao. "The cloud is in the sky," said Yoh Shan, "and the water in the pitcher." Huen Sha (Gen-sha) one day went upon the platform and was ready to deliver a sermon when he heard a swallow singing. "Listen," said he, "that small bird preaches the essential doctrine and proclaims the eternal truth." Then he went back to his room, giving no sermon.[FN#135] [FN#135] Den-to-roku and E-gen. The letters of the alphabet, a, b, c, etc., have no meaning whatever. They are but artificial signs, but when spelt they can express any great idea that great thinkers may form. Trees, grass, mountains, rivers, stars, moons, suns. These are the alphabets with which the Zen Scripture is written. Even a, b, c, etc., when spelt, can express any great idea. Why not, then, these trees, grass, etc., the alphabets of Nature when they compose the Volume of the Universe? Even the meanest clod of earth proclaims the sacred law. Hwui Chung[FN#136] (E-chu) is said first to have given an expression to the Sermon of the Inanimate. "Do the inanimate preach the Doctrine?" asked a monk of Hwui Chung on one occasion. "Yes, they preach eloquently and incessantly. There is no pause in their orations," was the reply. "Why, then, do I not hear them?" asked the other again. "Even if you do not, there are many others who can hear them." "Who can hear them?" "All the sages hear and understand them," said Hwui Chung. Thus the Sermon of the Inanimate had been a favourite topic of discussion 900 years before Shakespeare who expressed the similar idea, saying: "And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything." [FN#136] A direct disciple of the Sixth Patriarch. "How wonderful is the Sermon of the Inanimate," says Tung Shan (To-zan). "You cannot hear it through your ears, but you can hear it through your eyes." You should hear it through your mind's eyes, through your heart's eyes, through your inmost soul's eyes, not through your intellect, not through your perception, not through your knowledge, not through your logic, not through your metaphysics. To understand it you have to divine, not to define; you have to observe, not to calculate; you have to sympathize, not to analyze; you have to see through, not to criticize; you have not to explain, but to feel; you have not to abstract, but to grasp; you have to see all in each, but not to know all in all; you have to get directly at the soul of things, penetrating their hard crust of matter by your rays of the innermost consciousness. "The falling leaves as well as the blooming flowers reveal to us the holy law of Buddha," says a Japanese Zenist. Ye who seek for purity and peace, go to Nature. She will give you more than ye ask. Ye who long for strength and perseverance, go to Nature. She will train and strengthen you. Ye who aspire after an ideal, go to Nature. She will help you in its realization. Ye who yearn after Enlightenment, go to Nature. She will never fail to grant your request. CHAPTER IV BUDDHA, THE UNIVERSAL SPIRIT 1. The Ancient Buddhist Pantheon. The ancient Buddhist pantheon was full of deities or Buddhas, 3,000[FN#137] in number, or rather countless, and also of Bodhisattvas no less than Buddhas. Nowadays, however, in every church of Mahayanism one Buddha or another together with some Bodhisattvas reigns supreme as the sole object of worship, while other supernatural beings sink in oblivion. These Enlightened Beings, regardless of their positions in the pantheon, were generally regarded as persons who in their past lives cultivated virtues, underwent austerities, and various sorts of penance, and at length attained to a complete Enlightenment, by virtue of which they secured not only peace and eternal bliss, but acquired divers supernatural powers, such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, all-knowledge, and what not. Therefore, it is natural that some Mahayanists[FN#138] came to believe that, if they should go through the same course of discipline and study, they could attain to the same Enlightenment and Bliss, or the same Buddhahood, while other Mahayanists[FN#139] came to believe in the doctrine that the believer is saved and led up to the eternal state of bliss, without undergoing these hard disciplines, by the power of a Buddha known as having boundless mercy and fathomless wisdom whom he invokes. [FN#137] Trikalpa-trisahasra-buddhanrama-sutra gives the names of 3,000 Buddhas, and Buddhabhisita-buddhanama-sutra enumerates Buddhas and Bodhisattvas 11,093 in number. See Nanjo's Catalogue, Nos. 404, 405, 406, 407. [FN#138] Those who believe in the doctrine of Holy Path. See 'A History of the Twelve Japanese Buddhist Sects,' pp. 109-111. [FN#139] Those who believe in the doctrine of the Pure Land. 2. Zen is Iconoclastic. For the followers of Bodhidharma, however, this conception of Buddha seemed too crude to be accepted unhesitatingly and the doctrine too much irrelevant with and uncongenial to actual life. Since Zen denounced, as we have seen in the previous chapter, the scriptural authority, it is quite reasonable to have given up this view of Buddha inculcated in the Mahayana sutras, and to set at naught those statues and images of supernatural beings kept in veneration by the orthodox Buddhists. Tan Hia (Tan-ka), a noted Chinese Zen master, was found warming himself on a cold morning by the fire made of a wooden statue of Buddha. On another occasion he was found mounting astride the statue of a saint. Chao Chen (Jo-shu) one day happened to find Wang Yuen (Bun-yen) worshipping the Buddha in the temple, and forthwith struck him with his staff. "Is there not anything good in the worshipping of the Buddha?" protested Wang Yuen. Then the master said: "Nothing is better than anything good."[FN#140] These examples fully illustrate Zen's attitude towards the objects of Buddhist worship. Zen is not, nevertheless, iconoclastic in the commonly accepted sense of the term, nor is it idolatrous, as Christian missionaries are apt to suppose. [FN#140] Zen-rin-rui-shu. Zen is more iconoclastic than any of the Christian or the Mohammedan denominations in the sense that it opposes the acceptance of the petrified idea of Deity, so conventional and formal that it carries no inner conviction of the believers. Faith dies out whenever one comes to stick to one's fixed and immutable idea of Deity, and to deceive oneself, taking bigotry for genuine faith. Faith must be living and growing, and the living and growing faith should assume no fixed form. It might seem for a superficial observer to take a fixed form, as a running river appears constant, though it goes through ceaseless changes. The dead faith, immutable and conventional, makes its embracer appear religious and respectable, while it arrests his spiritual growth. It might give its owner comfort and pride, yet it at bottom proves to be fetters to his moral uplifting. It is on this account that Zen declares: "Buddha is nothing but spiritual chain or moral fetters," and, "If you remember even a name of Buddha, it would deprive you of purity of heart." The conventional or orthodox idea of Buddha or Deity might seem smooth and fair, like a gold chain, being polished and hammered through generations by religious goldsmiths; but it has too much fixity and frigidity to be worn by us. "Strike off thy fetters, bonds that bind thee down Of shining gold or darker, baser ore; Know slave is slave caressed or whipped, not free; For fetters tho' of gold, are not less strong to bind." --The Song of the Sannyasin. 3. Buddha is Unnamable. Give a definite name to Deity, He would be no more than what the name implies. The Deity under the name of Brahman necessarily differs from the Being under the appellation of Jehovah, just as the Hindu differs from the Jew. In like manner the Being designated by God necessarily differs from One named Amitabha or from Him entitled Allah. To give a name to the Deity is to give Him tradition, nationality, limitation, and fixity, and it never brings us nearer to Him. Zen's object of worship cannot be named and determined as God, or Brahman, or Amitabha, or Creator, or Nature, or Reality, or Substance, or the like. Neither Chinese nor Japanese masters of Zen tried to give a definite name to their object of adoration. They now called Him That One, now This One, now Mind, now Buddha, now Tathagata, now Certain Thing, now the True, now Dharma-nature, now Buddha-nature, and so forth. Tung Shan[FN#141] (To-zan) on a certain occasion declared it to be "A Certain Thing that pillars heaven above and supports the earth below; dark as lacquer and undefinable; manifesting itself through its activities, yet not wholly comprisable within them." So-kei[FN#142] expressed it in the same wise: "There exists a Certain Thing, bright as a mirror, spiritual as a mind, not subjected to growth nor to decay." Huen Sha (Gen-sha) comparing it with a gem says: "There exists a bright gem illuminating through the worlds in ten directions by its light."[FN#143] [FN#141] Tung Shan Luh (To-zan-roku, 'Sayings and Doings of Ta-zan') is one of the best Zen books. [FN#142] So-kei, a Korean Zenist, whose work entitled Zen-ke-ki-kwan is worthy of our note as a representation of Korean Zen. [FN#143] Sho-bo-gen-zo. This certain thing or being is too sublime to be named after a traditional or a national deity, too spiritual to be symbolized by human art, too full of life to be formulated in terms of mechanical science, too free to be rationalized by intellectual philosophy, too universal to be perceived by bodily senses; but everybody can feel its irresistible power, see its invisible presence, and touch its heart and soul within himself. "This mysterious Mind," says Kwei Fung (Kei-ho), "is higher than the highest, deeper than the deepest, limitless in all directions. There is no centre in it. No distinction of east and west, and above and below. Is it empty? Yes, but not empty like space. Has it a form? Yes, but has no form dependent on another for its existence. Is it intelligent? Yes, but not intelligent like your mind. Is it non-intelligent? Yes, but not non-intelligent like trees and stone. Is it conscious? Yes, but not conscious like you when waking. Is it bright? Yes, but not bright like the sun or the moon." To the question, "What and who is Buddha?" Yuen Wu (En-go) replied: "Hold your tongue: the mouth is the gate of evils!" while Pao Fuh (Ho-fuku) answered to the same question: "No skill of art can picture Him." Thus Buddha is unnamable, indescribable, and indefinable, but we provisionally call Him Buddha. 4. Buddha, the Universal Life. Zen conceives Buddha as a Being, who moves, stirs, inspires, enlivens, and vitalizes everything. Accordingly, we may call Him the Universal Life in the sense that He is the source of all lives in the universe. This Universal Life, according to Zen, pillars the heaven, supports the earth, glorifies the sun and moon, gives voice to thunder, tinges clouds, adorns the pasture with flowers, enriches the field with harvest, gives animals beauty and strength. Therefore, Zen declares even a dead clod of earth to be imbued with the divine life, just as Lowell expresses a similar idea when he says: "Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it that reaches and towers, And groping blindly above it for light, Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers." One of our contemporary Zenists wittily observed that 'vegetables are the children of earth, that animals which feed on vegetables are the grand-children of earth, and that men who subsist on animals are the great-grand-children of earth.' If there be no life in earth, how could life come out of it? If there be no life, the same as the animal's life in the vegetables, how could animals sustain their lives feeding on vegetables? If there be no life similar to ours in animals, how could we sustain our life by subsisting on them? The poet must be in the right, not only in his esthetic, but in his scientific point of view, in saying- "I must Confess that I am only dust. But once a rose within me grew; Its rootlets shot, its flowerets flew; And all rose's sweetness rolled Throughout the texture of my mould; And so it is that I impart Perfume to them, whoever thou art." As we men live and act, so do our arteries; so does blood; so do corpuscles. As cells and protoplasm live and act, so do elements, molecules, and atoms. As elements and atoms live and act, so do clouds; so does the earth; so does the ocean, the Milky Way, and the Solar System. What is this life which pervades the grandest as well as the minutest works of Nature, and which may fitly be said 'greater than the greatest and smaller than the smallest?' It cannot be defined. It cannot be subjected to exact analysis. But it is directly experienced and recognized within us, just as the beauty of the rose is to be perceived and enjoyed, but not reduced to exact analysis. At any rate, it is something stirring, moving, acting and reacting continually. This something which can be experienced and felt and enjoyed directly by every one of us. This life of living principle in the microcosmos is identical with that of the macrocosmos, and the Universal Life of the macrocosmos is the common source of all lives. Therefore, the Mahaparinirvana-sutra says: "Tathagata (another name for Buddha) gives life to all beings, just as the lake Anavatapta gives rise to the four great rivers." "Tathagata," says the same sutra, "divides his own body into innumerable bodies, and also restores an infinite number of bodies to one body. Now be becomes cities, villages, houses, mountains, rivers, and trees; now he has a large body; now he has a small body; now he becomes men, women, boys, and girls." 5. Life and Change. A peculiar phase of life is change which appears in the form of growth and decay. Nobody can deny the transitoriness of life. One of our friends humorously observed: "Everything in the world may be doubtful to you, but it can never be doubted that you will die." Life is like a burning lamp. Every minute its flame dies out and is renewed. Life is like a running stream. Every moment it pushes onward. If there be anything constant in this world of change, it should be change itself. Is it not just one step from rosy childhood to snowy age? Is it not just one moment from the nuptial song to the funeral-dirge? Who can live the same moment twice? In comparison with an organism, inorganic matter appears to be constant and changeless; but, in fact, it is equally subjected to ceaseless alteration. Every morning, looking into the mirror, you will find your visage reflected in it just as it was on the preceding day; so also every morning, looking at the sun and the earth, you will find them reflected in your retina just as they were on the previous morning; but the sun and the earth are no less changeless than you. Why do the sun and the earth seem changeless and constant to you? Only because you yourself undergo change more quickly than they. When you look at the clouds sweeping across the face of the moon, they seem to be at rest, and the moon in rapid motion; but, in fact, the clouds, as well as the moon, incessantly move on. Science might maintain the quantitative constancy of matter, but the so-called matter is mere abstraction. To say matter is changeless is as much as to say 2 is always 2, changeless and constant, because the arithmetical number is not more abstract than the physiological matter. The moon appears standing still when you look at her only a few moments. In like manner she seems to be free from change when you look at her in your short span of life. Astronomers, nevertheless, can tell you how she saw her better days, and is now in her wrinkles and white hair. 6. Pessimistic View of the Ancient Hindus. In addition to this, the new theory of matter has entirely over thrown the old conception of the unchanging atoms, and they are now regarded to be composed of magnetic forces, ions, and corpuscles in incessant motion. Therefore we have no inert matter in the concrete, no unchanging thing in the sphere of experience, no constant organism in the transient universe. These considerations often led many thinkers, ancient and modern, to the pessimistic view of life. What is the use of your exertion, they would say, in accumulating wealth, which is doomed to melt away in the twinkling of an eye? What is the use of your striving after power, which is more short-lived than a bubble? What is the use of your endeavour in the reformation of society, which does not endure any longer than the castle in the air? How do kings differ from beggars in the eye of Transience? How do the rich differ from the poor, how the beautiful from the ugly, bow the young from the old, how the good from the evil, how the lucky from the unlucky, how the wise from the unwise, in the court of Death? Vain is ambition. Vain is fame. Vain is pleasure. Vain are struggles and efforts. All is in vain. An ancient Hindu thinker[FN#144] says: "O saint, what is the use of the enjoyment of pleasures in this offensive, pithless body--a mere mass of bones, skins, sinews, marrow, and flesh? What is the use of the enjoyment of pleasures in this body, which is assailed by lust, hatred, greed, delusion, fear, anguish, jealousy, separation from what is loved, union with what is not loved, hunger, old age, death, illness, grief, and other evils? In such a world as this, what is the use of the enjoyment of pleasures, if he who has fed on them is to return to this world again and again? In this world I am like a frog in a dry well." [FN#144] Maitrayana Upanisad. It is this consideration on the transitoriness of life that led some Taoist in China to prefer death to life, as expressed in Chwang Tsz (Su-shi):[FN#145] "When Kwang-zze went to Khu, he saw an empty skull, bleached indeed, but still retaining its shape. Tapping it with his horse-switch, he asked it saying: 'Did you, sir, in your greed of life, fail in the lessons of reason and come to this? Or did you do so, in the service of a perishing state, by the punishment of an axe? Or was it through your evil conduct, reflecting disgrace on your parents and on your wife and children? Or was it through your hard endurances of cold and hunger? Or was it that you had completed your term of life?' "Having given expression to these questions, he took up the skull and made a pillow of it, and went to sleep. At midnight the skull appeared to him in a dream, and said: 'What you said to me was after the fashion of an orator. All your words were about the entanglements of men in their lifetime. There are none of those things after death. Would you like to hear me, sir, tell you about death?' 'I should,' said Kwang-zze, and the skull resumed: 'In death there are not (the distinctions of) ruler above minister below. There are none of the phenomena of the four seasons. Tranquil and at ease, our years are those of heaven and earth. No king in his court has greater enjoyment than we have.' Kwang-zze did not believe it, and said: 'If I could get the Ruler of our Destiny to restore your body to life with its bones and flesh and skin, and to give you back your father and mother, your wife and children, and all your village acquaintances, would you wish me to do so?' The skull stared fixedly at him, and knitted its brows and said: 'How should I cast away the enjoyment of my royal court, and undertake again the toils of life among mankind?'" [FN#145] 'Chwang Tsz,' vol. vi., p. 23. 7. Hinayanism and its Doctrine. The doctrine of Transience was the first entrance gate of Hinayanism. Transience never fails to deprive us of what is dear and near to us. It disappoints us in our expectation and hope. It brings out grief, fear, anguish, and lamentation. It spreads terror and destruction among families, communities, nations, mankind. It threatens with perdition the whole earth, the whole universe. Therefore it follows that life is full of disappointment, sufferings, and miseries, and that man is like 'a frog in a dry well.' This is the doctrine called by the Hinayanists the Holy Truth of Suffering. Again, when Transcience once gets hold of our imagination, we can easily foresee ruins and disasters in the very midst of prosperity and happiness, and also old age and ugliness in the prime and youth of beauty. It gives rise quite naturally to the thought that body is a bag full of pus and blood, a mere heap of rotten flesh and broken pieces of bone, a decaying corpse inhabited by innumerable maggots. This is the doctrine called by the Hinayanists the Holy Truth of Impurity.[FN#146] [FN#146] Mahasaptipatthana Suttanta, 7, runs as follows: "And, moreover, bhikkhu, a brother, just as if he had been a body abandoned in the charnel-field, dead for one, two, or three days, swollen, turning black and blue, and decomposed, apply that perception to this very body (of his own), reflecting: 'This body, too, is even so constituted, is of such a nature, has not got beyond that (fate).'" And, again, Transience holds its tyrannical sway not only over the material but over the spiritual world. At its touch Atman, or soul, is brought to nothing. By its call Devas, or celestial beings, are made to succumb to death. It follows, therefore, that to believe in Atman, eternal and unchanging, would be a whim of the ignorant. This is the doctrine called by the Hinayanists the Holy Truth of No-atman. If, as said, there could be nothing free from Transience, Constancy should be a gross mistake of the ignorant; if even gods have to die, Eternity should be no more than a stupid dream of the vulgar; if all phenomena be flowing and changing, there could be no constant noumena underlying them. It therefore follows that all things in the universe are empty and unreal. This is the doctrine called by the Hinayanists the Holy Truth of Unreality. Thus Hinayana Buddhism, starting from the doctrine of Transience, arrived at the pessimistic view of life in its extreme form. 8. Change as seen by Zen. Zen, like Hinayanism, does not deny the doctrine of Transience, but it has come to a view diametrically opposite to that of the Hindus. Transience for Zen simply means change. It is a form in which life manifests itself. Where there is life there is change or Transience. Where there is more change there is more vital activity. Suppose an absolutely changeless body: it must be absolutely lifeless. An eternally changeless life is equivalent to an eternally changeless death. Why do we value the morning glory, which fades in a few hours, more than an artificial glass flower, which endures hundreds of years? Why do we prefer an animal life, which passes away in a few scores of years, to a vegetable life, which can exist thousands of years? Why do we prize changing organism more than inorganic matter, unchanging and constant? If there be no change in the bright hues of a flower, it is as worthless as a stone. If there be no change in the song of a bird, it is as valueless as a whistling wind. If there be no change in trees and grass, they are utterly unsuitable to be planted in a garden. Now, then, what is the use of our life, if it stand still? As the water of a running stream is always fresh and wholesome because it does not stop for a moment, so life is ever fresh and new because it does not stand still, but rapidly moves on from parents to children, from children to grandchildren, from grandchildren to great-grandchildren, and flows on through generation after generation, renewing itself ceaselessly. We can never deny the existence of old age and death--nay, death is of capital importance for a continuation of life, because death carries away all the decaying organism in the way of life. But for it life would be choked up with organic rubbish. The only way of life's pushing itself onward or its renewing itself is its producing of the young and getting rid of the old. If there be no old age nor death, life is not life, but death. 9. Life and Change. Transformation and change are the essential features of life; life is not transformation nor change itself, as Bergson seems to assume. It is something which comes under our observation through transformation and change. There are, among Buddhists as well as Christians, not a few who covet constancy and fixity of life, being allured by such smooth names as eternal life, everlasting joy, permanent peace, and what not. They have forgotten that their souls can never rest content with things monotonous. If there be everlasting joy for their souls, it must be presented to them through incessant change. So also if there be eternal life granted for their souls, it must be given through ceaseless alteration. What is the difference between eternal life, fixed and constant, and eternal death? What is the difference between everlasting bliss, changeless and monotonous, and everlasting suffering? If constancy, instead of change, govern life, then hope or pleasure is absolutely impossible. Fortunately, however, life is not constant. It changes and becomes. Pleasure arises through change itself. Mere change of food or clothes is often pleasing to us, while the appearance of the same thing twice or thrice, however pleasing it may be, causes us little pleasure. It will become disgusting and tire us down, if it be presented repeatedly from time to time. An important element in the pleasure we derive from social meetings, from travels, from sight-seeings, etc., is nothing but change. Even intellectual pleasure consists mainly of change. A dead, unchanging abstract truth, 2 and 2 make 4, excites no interest; while a changeable, concrete truth, such as the Darwinian theory of evolution, excites a keen interest. 10. Life, Change, and Hope. The doctrine of Transcience never drives us to the pessimistic view of life. On the contrary, it gives us an inexhaustible source of pleasure and hope. Let us ask you: Are you satisfied with the present state of things? Do you not sympathize with poverty-stricken millions living side by side with millionaires saturated with wealth? Do you not shed tears over those hunger-bitten children who cower in the dark lanes of a great city? Do you not wish to put down the stupendous oppressor--Might-is-right? Do you not want to do away with the so-called armoured peace among nations? Do you not need to mitigate the struggle for existence more sanguine than the war of weapons? Life changes and is changeable; consequently, has its future. Hope is therefore possible. Individual development, social betterment, international peace, reformation of mankind in general, can be hoped. Our ideal, however unpractical it may seem at the first sight, can be realized. Moreover, the world itself, too, is changing and changeable. It reveals new phases from time to time, and can be moulded to subserve our purpose. We must not take life or the world as completed and doomed as it is now. No fact verifies the belief that the world was ever created by some other power and predestined to be as it is now. It lives, acts, and changes. It is transforming itself continually, just as we are changing and becoming. Thus the doctrine of Transience supplies us with an inexhaustible source of hope and comfort, leads us into the living universe, and introduces us to the presence of Universal Life or Buddha. The reader may easily understand how Zen conceives Buddha as the living principle from the following dialogues: "Is it true, sir," asked a monk of Teu tsz (To-shi), "that all the voices of Nature are those of Buddha?" "Yes, certainly," replied Teu tsz. "What is, reverend sir," asked a man of Chao Cheu (Jo-shu), "the holy temple (of Buddha)?" "An innocent girl," replied the teacher. "Who is the master of the temple?" asked the other again. "A baby in her womb," was the answer. "What is, sir," asked a monk to Yen Kwan (Yen-kan), "the original body of Buddha Vairocana?"[FN#147] "Fetch me a pitcher with water," said the teacher. The monk did as he was ordered. "Put it back in its place," said Yen Kwan again.[FN#148] [FN#147] Literally, All Illuminating Buddha, the highest of the Trikayas. See Eitel, p. 192. [FN#148] Zen-rin-rui-shu. 11. Everything is Living according to Zen. Everything alive has a strong innate tendency to preserve itself, to assert itself, to push itself forward, and to act on its environment, consciously or unconsciously. The innate, strong tendency of the living is an undeveloped, but fundamental, nature of Spirit or Mind. It shows itself first in inert matter as impenetrability, or affinity, or mechanical force. Rock has a powerful tendency to preserve itself. And it is hard to crush it. Diamond has a robust tendency to assert itself. And it permits nothing to destroy it. Salt has the same strong tendency, for its particles act and react by themselves, and never cease till its crystals are formed. Steam, too, should have the same, because it pushes aside everything in its way and goes where it will. In the eye of simple folks of old, mountains, rivers, trees, serpents, oxen, and eagles were equally full of life; hence the deification of them. No doubt it is irrational to believe in nymphs, fairies, elves, and the like, yet still we may say that mountains stand of their own accord, rivers run as they will, just as we say that trees and grass turn their leaves towards the sun of their own accord. Neither is it a mere figure of speech to say that thunder speaks and hills respond, nor to describe birds as singing and flowers as smiling, nor to narrate winds as moaning and rain as weeping, nor to state lovers as looking at the moon, the moon as looking at them, when we observe spiritual element in activities of all this. Haeckel says, not without reason: "I cannot imagine the simple chemical and physical forces without attributing the movement of material particles to conscious sensation." The same author says again: "We may ascribe the feeling of pleasure and pain to all atoms, and so explain the electric affinity in chemistry." 12. The Creative Force of Nature and Humanity. The innate tendency of self-preservation, which manifests itself as mechanical force or chemical affinity in the inorganic nature, unfolds itself as the desire of the preservation of species in the vegetables and animals. See how vegetables fertilize themselves in a complicated way, and how they spread their seeds far and wide in a most mysterious manner. A far more developed form of the same desire is seen in the sexual attachment and parental love of animals. Who does not know that even the smallest birds defend their young against every enemy with self -sacrificing courage, and that they bring food whilst they themselves often starve and grow lean? In human beings we can observe the various transformations of the self-same desire. For instance, sorrow or despair is experienced when it is impossible; anger, when it is hindered by others; joy, when it is fulfilled; fear, when it is threatened; pleasure, when it is facilitated. Although it manifests itself as the sexual attachment and parental love in lower animals, yet its developed forms, such as sympathy, loyalty, benevolence, mercy, humanity, are observed in human beings. Again, the creative force in inorganic nature, in order to assert itself and act more effectively, creates the germ of organic nature, and gradually ascending the scale of evolution, develops the sense organs and the nervous system; hence intellectual powers, such as sensation, perception, imagination, memory, unfold themselves. Thus the creative force, exerting itself gradually, widens its sphere of action, and necessitates the union of individuals into families, clans, tribes, communities, and nations. For the sake of this union and co-operation they established customs, enacted laws, and instituted political and educational systems. Furthermore, to reinforce itself, it gave birth to languages and sciences; and to enrich itself, morality and religion. 13. Universal Life is Universal Spirit. These considerations naturally lead us to see that Universal Life is not a blind vital force, but Creative Spirit, or Mind, or Consciousness, which unfolds itself in myriads of ways. Everything in the universe, according to Zen, lives and acts, and at the same time discloses its spirit. To be alive is identically the same as to be spiritual. As the poet has his song, so does the nightingale, so does the cricket, so does the rivulet. As we are pleased or offended, so are horses, so are dogs, so are sparrows, ants, earthworms, and mushrooms. Simpler the body, simpler its spirit; more complicated the body, more complicated its spirit. 'Mind slumbers in the pebble, dreams in the plant, gathers energy in the animal, and awakens to self-conscious discovery in the soul of man.' It is this Creative, Universal Spirit that sends forth Aurora to illuminate the sky, that makes Diana shed her benign rays and �olus play on his harp, wreathes spring with flowers, that clothes autumn with gold, that induces plants to put forth blossoms, that incites animals to be energetic, and that awakens consciousness in man. The author of Mahavaipulya-purnabuddha-sutra expressly states our idea when he says: "Mountains, rivers, skies, the earth: all these are embraced in the True Spirit, enlightened and mysterious." Rin-zai also says: "Spirit is formless, but it penetrates through the world in the ten directions."[FN#149] The Sixth Patriarch expresses the same idea more explicitly: "What creates the phenomena is Mind; what transcends all the phenomena is Buddha."[FN#150] [FN#149] Rin-zai-roku. [FN#150] Roku-so-dan-kyo. 14. Poetical Intuition and Zen. Since Universal Life or Spirit permeates the universe, the poetical intuition of man never fails to find it, and to delight in everything typical of that Spirit. "The leaves of the plantain," says a Zen poet, "unfold themselves, hearing the voice of thunder. The flowers of the hollyhock turn towards the sun, looking at it all day long." Jesus could see in the lily the Unseen Being who clothed it so lovely. Wordsworth found the most profound thing in all the world to be the universal spiritual life, which manifests itself most directly in nature, clothed in its own proper dignity and peace. "Through every star," says Carlyle, "through every grass blade, most through every soul, the glory of present God still beams." It is not only grandeur and sublimity that indicate Universal Life, but smallness and commonplace do the same. A sage of old awakened to the faith[FN#151] when he heard a bell ring; another, when he looked at the peach blossom; another, when he heard the frogs croaking; and another, when he saw his own form reflected in a river. The minutest particles of dust form a world. The meanest grain of sand under our foot proclaims a divine law. Therefore Teu Tsz Jo-shi), pointing to a stone in front of his temple, said: "All the Buddhas of the past, the present, and the future are living therein."[FN#152] [FN#151] Both the Chinese and the Japanese history of Zen are full of such incidents. [FN#152] Zen-rin-rui-shu and To-shi-go-roku. 15. Enlightened Consciousness. In addition to these considerations, which mainly depend on indirect experience, we can have direct experience of life within us. In the first place, we experience that our life is not a bare mechanical motion or change, but is a spiritual, purposive, and self-directing force. In the second place, we directly experience that it knows, feels, and wills. In the third place, we experience that there exists some power unifying the intellectual, emotional, and volitional activities so as to make life uniform and rational. Lastly, we experience that there lies deeply rooted within us Enlightened Consciousness, which neither psychologists treat of nor philosophers believe in, but which Zen teachers expound with strong conviction. Enlightened Consciousness is, according to Zen, the centre of spiritual life. It is the mind of minds, and the consciousness of consciousness. It is the Universal Spirit awakened in the human mind. It is not the mind that feels joy or sorrow; nor is it the mind that reasons and infers; nor is it the mind that fancies and dreams; nor is it the mind that hopes and fears; nor is it the mind that distinguishes good from evil. It is Enlightened Consciousness that holds communion with Universal Spirit or Buddha, and realizes that individual lives are inseparably united, and of one and the same nature with Universal Life. It is always bright as a burnished mirror, and cannot be dimmed by doubt and ignorance. It is ever pure as a lotus flower, and cannot be polluted by the mud of evil and folly. Although all sentient beings are endowed with this Enlightened Consciousness, they are not aware of its existence, excepting men who can discover it by the practice of Meditation. Enlightened consciousness is often called Buddha-nature, as it is the real nature of Universal Spirit. Zen teachers compare it with a precious stone ever fresh and pure, even if it be buried in the heaps of dust. Its divine light can never be extinguished by doubt or fear, just as the sunlight cannot be destroyed by mist and cloud. Let us quote a Chinese Zen poet to see how Zen treats of it:[FN#153] "I have an image of Buddha, The worldly people know it not. It is not made of clay or cloth, Nor is it carved out of wood, Nor is it moulded of earth nor of ashes. No artist can paint it; No robber can steal it. There it exists from dawn of time. It's clean, although not swept and wiped. Although it is but one, Divides itself to a hundred thousand million forms." [FN#153] See Zen-gaku-ho-ten. 16. Buddha Dwelling in the Individual Mind. Enlightened Consciousness in the individual mind acquires for its possessor, not a relative knowledge of things as his intellect does, but the profoundest insight in reference to universal brotherhood of all beings, and enables him to understand the absolute holiness of their nature, and the highest goal for which all of them are making. Enlightened Consciousness once awakened within us serves as a guiding principle, and leads us to hope, bliss, and life; consequently, it is called the Master[FN#154] of both mind and body. Sometimes it is called the Original[FN#155] Mind, as it is the mind of minds. It is Buddha dwelling in individuals. You might call it God in man, if you like. The following dialogues all point to this single idea: On one occasion a butcher, who was used to kill one thousand sheep a day, came to Gotama, and, throwing down his butcher-knife, said "I am one of the thousand Buddhas." "Yes, really," replied Gotama. A monk, Hwui Chao (E-cha) by name, asked Pao Yen (Ho-gen): "What is Buddha?" "You are Hwui Chao," replied the master. The same question was put to Sheu Shan (Shu-zan), Chi Man (Chi-mon), and Teu Tsz (To-shi), the first of whom answered: "A bride mounts on a donkey and her mother-in-law drives it;" and the second: "He goes barefooted, his sandals being worn out;" while the third rose from his chair and stood still without saying a word. Chwen Hih (Fu-kiu) explains this point in unequivocal terms: "Night after night I sleep with Buddha, and every morning I get up with Him. He accompanies me wherever I go. When I stand or sit, when I speak or be mute, when I am out or in, He never leaves me, even as a shadow accompanies body. Would you know where He is? Listen to that voice and word."[FN#156] [FN#154] It is often called the Lord or Master of mind. [FN#155] Another name for Buddha is the Original Mind" (Kechi-myaku-ron). [FN#156] For such dialogues, see Sho-yo-roku, Mu-mon-kan, Heki-gan-shu. Fu-kiu's words are repeatedly quoted by Zen masters. 17. Enlightened Consciousness is not an Intellectual Insight. Enlightened Consciousness is not a bare intellectual insight, for it is full of beautiful emotions. It loves, caresses, embraces, and at the same time esteems all beings, being ever merciful to them. It has no enemies to conquer, no evil to fight with, but constantly finds friends to help, good to promote. Its warm heart beats in harmony with those of all fellow beings. The author of Brahmajala-sutra fully expresses this idea as he says: "All women are our mothers; all men our fathers; all earth and water our bodies in the past existences; all fire and air our essence." Thus relying on our inner experience, which is the only direct way of knowing Buddha, we conceive Him as a Being with profound wisdom and boundless mercy, who loves all beings as His children, whom He is fostering, bringing up, guiding, and teaching. "These three worlds are His, and all beings living in them are His children."[FN#157] "The Blessed One is the mother of all sentient beings, and gives them all the milk of mercy."[FN#158] Some people named Him Absolute, as He is all light, all hope, all mercy, and all wisdom; some, Heaven, as He is high and enlightened; some, God, as He is sacred and mysterious; some, Truth, as He is true to Himself; some, Buddha, as He is free from illusion; some, Creator, as He is the creative force immanent in the universe; some, Path, as He is the Way we must follow; some, Unknowable, as He is beyond relative knowledge; some, Self, as He is the Self of individual selves. All these names are applied to one Being, whom we designate by the name of Universal Life or Spirit. [FN#157] Saddharma-pundarika-sutra. [FN#158] Mahaparinirvana-sutra. 18. Our Conception of Buddha is not Final. Has, then, the divine nature of Universal Spirit been completely and exhaustively revealed in our Enlightened Consciousness? To this question we should answer negatively, for, so far as our limited experience is concerned, Universal Spirit reveals itself as a Being with profound wisdom and boundless mercy; this, nevertheless, does not imply that the conception is the only possible and complete one. We should always bear in mind that the world is alive, and changing, and moving. It goes on to disclose a new phase, or to add a new truth. The subtlest logic of old is a mere quibble of nowadays. The miracles of yesterday are the commonplaces of to-day. Now theories are formed, new discoveries are made, only to give their places to newer theories are discoveries. New ideals realized or new desires satisfied are sure to awaken newer and stronger desires. Not an instant life remains immutable, but it rushes on, amplifying and enriching itself from the dawn of time to the end of eternity. Therefore Universal Life may in the future possibly unfold its new spiritual content, yet unknown to us because it has refined, lifted up, and developed living beings from the am�ba to man, increasing the intelligence and range of individuals, until highly civilized man emerge into the plane of consciousness-consciousness of divine light in him. Thus to believe in Buddha is to be content and thankful for the grace of His, and to hope for the infinite unfoldment of His glories in man. 19. How to Worship Buddha. The author of Vimalakirtti-nirdeca-sutra well explains our attitude towards Buddha when he says: "We ask Buddha for nothing. We ask Dharma for nothing. We ask Samgha for nothing." Nothing we ask of Buddha. No worldly success, no rewards in the future life, no special blessing. Hwang Pah (O-baku) said: "I simply worship Buddha. I ask Buddha for nothing. I ask Dharma for nothing. I ask Samgha for nothing." Then a prince[FN#159] questioned him: "You ask Buddha for nothing. You ask Dharma for nothing. You ask Samgha for nothing. What, then, is the use of your worship?" The Prince earned a slap as an answer to his utilitarian question.[FN#160] This incident well illustrates that worship, as understood by Zen masters, is a pure act of thanksgiving, or the opening of the grateful heart; in other words, the disclosing of Enlightened Consciousness. We are living the very life of Buddha, enjoying His blessing, and holding communion with Him through speech, thought, and action. The earth is not 'the vale of tears,' but the glorious creation of Universal Spirit; nor man 'the poor miserable sinner' but the living altar of Buddha Himself. Whatever we do, we do with grateful heart and pure joy sanctioned by Enlightened Consciousness; eating, drinking, talking, walking, and every other work of our daily life are the worship and devotion. We agree with Margaret Fuller when she says: "Reverence the highest; have patience with the lowest; let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant? Pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn all." [FN#159] Afterwards the Emperor Suen Tsung (Sen-so), of the Tang dynasty. [FN#160] For the details, see Heki-gan-shu. CHAPTER V THE NATURE OF MAN 1. Man is Good-natured according to Mencius.[FN#161] Oriental scholars, especially the Chinese men of letters, seem to have taken so keen an interest in the study of human nature that they proposed all the possible opinions respecting the subject in question-namely, (1) man is good-natured; (2) man is bad-natured; (3) man is good-natured and bad-natured as well; (4) man is neither good-natured nor bad-natured. The first of these opinions was proposed by a most reputed Confucianist scholar, Mencius, and his followers, and is still adhered to by the majority of the Japanese and the Chinese Confucianists. Mencius thought it as natural for man to do good as it is for the grass to be green. 'Suppose a person has happened,' he would say, 'to find a child on the point of tumbling down into a deep well. He would rescue it even at the risk of his life, no matter how morally degenerated he might be. He would have no time to consider that his act might bring him some reward from its parents, or a good reputation among his friends and fellow-citizens. He would do it barely out of his inborn good-nature.' After enumerating some instances similar to this one, Mencius concludes that goodness is the fundamental nature of man, even if he is often carried away by his brutal disposition. [FN#161] Mencius (372-282 B.C.) is regarded as the best expounder of the doctrine of Confucius. There exists a well-known work of his, entitled after his own name. See 'A History of Chinese Philosophy,' by R. Endo, and also 'A History of Chinese Philosophy' (pp. 38-50), by G. Nakauchi. 2. Man is Bad-natured according to Siun Tsz[FN#162] (Jun-shi). The weaknesses of Mencius's theory are fully exposed by another diametrically opposed theory propounded by Siun Tsz (Jun-shi) and his followers. 'Man is bad-natured,' says Siun Tsz, 'since he has inborn lust, appetite, and desire for wealth. As he has inborn lust and appetite, he is naturally given to intemperance and wantonness. As he has inborn desire for wealth, he is naturally inclined to quarrel and fight with others for the sake of gain.' Leave him without discipline or culture, he would not be a whit better than the beast. His virtuous acts, such as charity, honesty, propriety, chastity, truthfulness, are conduct forced by the teachings of ancient sages against his natural inclination. Therefore vices are congenial and true to his nature, while virtues alien and untrue to his fundamental nature. [FN#162] Siun Tsz's date is later by some fifty years than Mencius. Siun Tsz gives the reason why man seeks after morality, saying that man seeks what he has not, and that he seeks after morality simply because he has not morality, just as the poor seek riches. See 'A History of Chinese Philosophy' (pp. 51-60), by G. Nakauchi, and 'A History of Development of Chinese Thought,' by R. Endo. These two theories are not only far from throwing light on the moral state of man, but wrap it in deeper gloom. Let us raise a few questions by way of refutation. If man's fundamental nature be good, as Mencius maintains, why is it easy for him to be vicious without instruction, while he finds it hard to be virtuous even with instruction. If you contend that good is man's primary nature and evil the secondary one, why is be so often overpowered by the secondary nature? If you answer saying that man is good-natured originally, but he acquires the secondary nature through the struggle for existence, and it gradually gains power over the primary nature by means of the same cause, then the primitive tribes should be more virtuous than the highly civilized nations, and children than grownup people. Is this not contrary to fact? If, again, man's nature is essentially bad, as Siun Tsz holds, how can he cultivate virtue? If you contend that ancient sages invented so-called cardinal virtues and inculcated them against his natural inclination, why does he not give them up? If vices be congenial and true to man's nature, but virtues be alien and untrue to him, why are virtues honoured by him? If vices be genuine and virtue a deception, as you think, why do you call the inventors of that deceiving art sages? How was it possible for man to do good before these sages' appearance on earth? 3. Man is both Good-natured and Bad-natured according to Yan Hiung[FN#163] (Yo-yu). According to Yang Hiung and his followers, good is no less real than evil, and evil is no more unreal than good. Therefore man must be double-natured-that is, partly good and partly bad. This is the reason why the history of man is full of fiendish crimes, and, at the same time, it abounds with godly deeds. This is the reason why mankind comprises, on the one hand, a Socrates, a Confucius, a Jesus, and, on the other, a Nero and a Kieh. This is the reason why we find to-day a honest fellow in him whom we find a betrayer to-morrow. [FN#163] Yan Hiung (died A.D. 18) is the reputed author of Tai Huen (Tai-gen) and Fah Yen (Ho-gen). His opinion in reference to human nature is found in Fah Yen. This view of man's nature might explain our present moral state, yet it calls forth many questions bard to answer. If this assertion be true, is it not a useless task to educate man with the purpose of making him better and nobler? How could one extirpate man's bad nature implanted within him at his origin? If man be double-natured, how did he come to set good over evil? How did he come to consider that he ought to be good and ought not to be bad? How could you establish the authority of morality? 4. Man is neither Good-natured nor Bad-natured according to Su Shih (So-shoku).[FN#164] The difficulty may be avoided by a theory given by Su Shih and other scholars influenced by Buddhism, which maintains that man is neither good-natured nor bad-natured. According to this opinion man is not moral nor immoral by nature, but unmoral. He is morally a blank. He is at a crossroad, so to speak, of morality when he is first born. As he is blank, he can be dyed black or red. As he is at the cross-road, he can turn to the right or to the left. He is like fresh water, which has no flavour, and can be made sweet or bitter by circumstances. If we are not mistaken, this theory, too, has to encounter insurmountable difficulties. How could it be possible to make the unmoral being moral or immoral? We might as well try to get honey out of sand as to get good or evil out of the blank nature. There can be no fruit of good or evil where there is no seed of good or bad nature. Thus we find no satisfactory solution of the problem at issue in these four theories proposed by the Chinese scholars--the first theory being incompetent to explain the problem of human depravity; the second breaking down at the origin of morality; the third failing to explain the possibility of moral culture; the fourth being logically self-contradictory. [FN#164] Su Shih (1042-1101), a great man of letters, practiser of Zen, noted for his poetical works. 5. There is no Mortal who is Purely Moral. By nature man should be either good or bad; or he should be good as well as bad; or he should be neither good nor bad. There can be no alternative possible besides these four propositions, none of which can be accepted as true. Then there must be some misconception in the terms of which they consist. It would seem to some that the error can be avoided by limiting the sense of the term 'man,' saying some persons are good-natured, some persons are bad-natured, some persons are good-natured and bad-natured as well, and some persons are neither good-natured nor bad-natured. There is no contradiction in these modified propositions, but still they fail to explain the ethical state of man. Supposing them all to be true, let us assume that there are the four classes of people: (1) Those who are purely moral and have no immoral disposition; (2) those who are half moral and half immoral; (3) those who are neither moral nor immoral; (4) those who are purely immoral and have no moral disposition. Orthodox Christians, believing in the sinlessness of Jesus, would say he belongs to the first class, while Mohammedans and Buddhists, who deify the founder of their respective faith, would in such case regard their founder as the purely moral personage. But are your beliefs, we should ask, based on historical fact? Can you say that such traditional and self-contradictory records as the four gospels are history in the strict sense of the term? Can you assert that those traditions which deify Mohammed and Shakya are the statements of bare facts? Is not Jesus an abstraction and an ideal, entirely different from a concrete carpenter's son, who fed on the same kind of food, sheltered himself in the same kind of building, suffered from the same kind of pain, was fired by the same kind of anger, stung by the same kind of lust as our own? Can you say the person who fought many a sanguinary battle, who got through many cunning negotiations with enemies and friends, who personally experienced the troubles of polygamy, was a person sinless and divine? We might allow that these ancient sages are superhuman and divine, then our classification has no business with them, because they do not properly belong to mankind. Now, then, who can point out any sinless person in the present world? Is it not a fact that the more virtuous one grows the more sinful he feels himself? If there be any mortal, in the past, the present, and the future, who declares himself to be pure and sinless, his very declaration proves that he is not highly moral. Therefore the existence of the first class of people is open to question. 6. There is no Mortal who is Non-Moral or Purely Immoral. The same is the case with the third and the fourth class of people who are assumed as non-moral or purely immoral. There is no person, however morally degraded he may be, but reveals some good nature in his whole course of life. It is our daily experience that we find a faithful friend in the person even of a pickpocket, a loving father even in a burglar, and a kind neighbour even in a murderer. Faith, sympathy, friendship, love, loyalty, and generosity dwell not merely in palaces and churches, but also in brothels and gaols. On the other hand, abhorrent vices and bloody crimes often find shelter under the silk hat, or the robe, or the coronet, or the crown. Life may fitly be compared with a rope made of white and black straw, and to separate one from the other is to destroy the rope itself; so also life entirely independent of the duality of good and bad is no actual life. We must acknowledge, therefore, that the third and the fourth propositions are inconsistent with our daily experience of life, and that only the second proposition remains, which, as seen above, breaks down at the origin of morality. 7. Where, then, does the Error Lie? Where, then, does the error lie in the four possible propositions respecting man's nature? It lies not in their subject, but in the predicate-that is to say, in the use of the terms 'good' and 'bad.' Now let us examine how does good differ from bad. A good action ever promotes interests in a sphere far wider than a bad action. Both are the same in their conducing to human interests, but differ in the extent in which they achieve their end. In other words, both good and bad actions are performed for one end and the same purpose of promoting human interests, but they differ from each other as to the extent of interests. For instance, burglary is evidently bad action, and is condemned everywhere; but the capturing of an enemy's property for the sake of one's own tribe or clan or nation is praised as a meritorious conduct. Both acts are exactly the same in their promoting interests; but the former relates to the interests of a single individual or of a single family, while the latter to those of a tribe or a nation. If the former be bad on account of its ignoring others' interests, the latter must be also bad on account of its ignoring the enemy's interests. Murder is considered bad everywhere; but the killing of thousands of men in a battle-field is praised and honoured, because the former is perpetrated to promote the private interests, while the latter those of the public. If the former be bad, because of its cruelty, the latter must also be bad, because of its inhumanity. The idea of good and bad, generally accepted by common sense, may be stated as follows: 'An action is good when it promotes the interests of an individual or a family; better when it promotes those of a district or a country; best when it promotes those of the whole world. An action is bad when it inflicts injury on another individual or another family; worse when it is prejudicial to a district or a country; worst when it brings harm on the whole world. Strictly speaking, an action is good when it promotes interests, material or spiritual, as intended by the actor in his motive; and it is bad when it injures interests, material or spiritual, as intended by the actor in his motive.' According to this idea, generally accepted by common sense, human actions may be classified under four different heads: (1) Purely good actions; (2) partly good and partly bad actions; (3) neither good nor bad actions; (4) purely bad actions. First, purely good actions are those actions which subserve and never hinder human interests either material or spiritual, such as humanity and love of all beings. Secondly, partly good and partly bad actions are those actions which are both for and against human interests, such as narrow patriotism and prejudiced love. Thirdly, neither good nor bad actions are such actions as are neither for nor against human interests--for example, an unconscious act of a dreamer. Lastly, purely bad actions, which are absolutely against human interests, cannot be possible for man except suicide, because every action promotes more or less the interests, material or spiritual, of the individual agent or of someone else. Even such horrible crimes as homicide and parricide are intended to promote some interests, and carry out in some measure their aim when performed. It follows that man cannot be said to be good or bad in the strict sense of the terms as above defined, for there is no human being who does the first class of actions and nothing else, nor is there any mortal who does the fourth class of actions and nothing else. Man may be called good and bad, and at the same time be neither good nor bad, in that he always performs the second and the third class of actions. All this, nevertheless, is a more play of words. Thus we are driven to conclude that the common-sense view of human nature fails to grasp the real state of actual life. 8. Man is not Good-natured nor Bad-natured, but Buddha-natured. We have had already occasion to observe that Zen teaches Buddha-nature, which all sentient beings are endowed with. The term 'Buddha-nature,'[FN#165] as accepted generally by Buddhists, means a latent and undeveloped nature, which enables its owner to become Enlightened when it is developed and brought to actuality.[FN#166] Therefore man, according to Zen, is not good-natured nor bad-natured in the relative sense, as accepted generally by common sense, of these terms, but Buddha-natured in the sense of non-duality. A good person (of common sense) differs from a bad person (of common sense), not in his inborn Buddha-nature, but in the extent of his expressing it in deeds. Even if men are equally endowed with that nature, yet their different states of development do not allow them to express it to an equal extent in conduct. Buddha-nature may be compared with the sun, and individual mind with the sky. Then an Enlightened mind is like the sky in fair weather, when nothing prevents the beams of the sun; while an ignorant mind is like the sky in cloudy weather, when the sun sheds faint light; and an evil mind is like the sky in stormy weather, when the sun seems to be out of existence. It comes under our daily observation that even a robber or a murderer may prove to be a good father and a loving husband to his wife and children. He is an honest fellow when he remains at home. The sun of Buddha-nature gives light within the wall of his house, but without the house the darkness of foul crimes shrouds him. [FN#165] For a detailed explanation of Buddha-nature, see the chapter entitled Buddha-nature in Sho-bo-gen-zo. [FN#166] Mahaparinirvana-sutra may be said to have been written for the purpose of stating this idea. 9. The Parable of the Robber Kih.[FN#167] Chwang Tsz (So-shi) remarks in a humorous way to the following effect: "The followers of the great robber and murderer Kih asked him saying: 'Has the robber also any moral principles in his proceedings?' He replied: 'What profession is there which has not its principles? That the robber comes to the conclusion without mistake that there are valuable deposits in an apartment shows his wisdom; that he is the first to enter it shows his bravery; that he makes an equal division of the plunder shows his justice; that he never betrays the fellow-robbers shows his faithfulness; and that he is generous to the followers shows his benevolence. Without all these five qualities no one in the world has ever attained to become a great robber.'" The parable clearly shows us Buddha-nature of the robber and murderer expresses itself as wisdom, bravery, justice, faithfulness, and benevolence in his society, and that if he did the same outside it, he would not be a great robber but a great sage. [FN#167] The parable is told for the purpose of undervaluing Confucian doctrine, but the author thereby accidentally touches human nature. We do not quote it here with the same purpose as the author's. 10. Wang Yang Ming (O-yo-mei) and a Thief. One evening when Wang was giving a lecture to a number of students on his famous doctrine that all human beings are endowed with Conscience,[FN#168] a thief broke into the house and hid himself in the darkest corner. Then Wang declared aloud that every human being is born with Conscience, and that even the thief who had got into the house had Conscience just as the sages of old. The burglar, overhearing these remarks, came out to ask the forgiveness of the master; since there was no way of escape for him, and he was half-naked, he crouched behind the students. Wang's willing forgiveness and cordial treatment encouraged the man to ask the question how the teacher could know such a poor wretch as he was endowed with Conscience as the sages of old. Wang replied: "It is your Conscience that makes you ashamed of your nakedness. You yourself are a sage, if you abstain from everything that will put shame on you." We firmly believe that Wang is perfectly right in telling the thief that he was not different in nature from the sages of old. It is no exaggeration. It is a saving truth. It is also a most effective way of saving men out of darkness of sin. Any thief ceases to be a thief the moment he believes in his own Conscience, or Buddha-nature. You can never correct criminals by your severe reproach or punishment. You can save them only through your sympathy and love, by which you call forth their inborn Buddha-nature. Nothing can produce more pernicious effects on criminals than to treat them as if they were a different sort of people and confirm them in their conviction that they are bad-natured. We greatly regret that even in a civilized society authorities neglecting this saving truth are driving to perdition those criminals under their care, whom it is their duty to save. [FN#168] It is not conscience in the ordinary sense of the term. It is 'moral' principle, according to Wang, pervading through the Universe. 'It expresses itself as Providence in Heaven, as moral nature in man, and as mechanical laws in things.' The reader will notice that Wang's Conscience is the nearest approach to Buddha-nature. 11. The Bad are the Good in the Egg. This is not only the case with a robber or a murderer, but also with ordinary people. There are many who are honest and good in their homesteads, but turn out to be base and dishonest folk outside them. Similarly, there are those who, having an enthusiastic love of their local district, act unlawfully against the interests of other districts. They are upright and honourable gentlemen within the boundary of their own district, but a gang of rascals without it. So also there are many who are Washingtons and William Tells in their own, but at the same time pirates and cannibals in the other countries. Again, there are not a few persons who, having racial prejudices, would not allow the rays of their Buddha-nature to pass through a coloured skin. There are civilized persons who are humane enough to love and esteem any human being as their brother, but so unfeeling that they think lower creatures as their proper food. The highly enlightened person, however, cannot but sympathize with human beings and lower creatures as well, as Shakya Muni felt all sentient beings to be his children. These people are exactly the same in their Buddha-nature, but a wide difference obtains among them in the extent of their expressing that nature in deeds. If thieves and murderers be called bad-natured, reformers and revolutionists should be called so. If, on the other hand, patriotism and loyalty be said to be good, treason and insurrection should likewise be so. Therefore it is evident that a so-called good person is none but one who acts to promote wider interests of life, and a so-called bad person is none but one who acts to advance narrower ones. In other words, the bad are the good in the egg, so to speak, and the good are the bad on the wing. As the bird in the egg is one and the same as the bird on the wing, so the good in the egg is entirely of the same nature as the bad on the wing. To show that human nature transcends the duality of good and evil, the author of Avatamsaka-sutra declares that 'all beings are endowed with the wisdom and virtue of Tathagata.' Kwei Fung (Kei-ho) also says: "All sentient beings have the Real Spirit of Original Enlightenment (within themselves). It is unchanging and pure. It is eternally bright and clear, and conscious. It is also named Buddha-nature, or Tathagata-garbha." 12. The Great Person and Small Person. For these reasons Zen proposes to call man Buddha-natured or Good-natured in a sense transcendental to the duality of good and bad. It conveys no sense to call some individuals good in case there is no bad individual. For the sake of convenience, however, Zen calls man good, as is exemplified by Shakya Muni, who was wont to address his hearers as 'good men and women,' and by the Sixth Patriarch in China, who called everybody 'a good and wise one.' This does not imply in the least that all human beings are virtuous, sinless, and saintly-nay, the world is full of vices and crimes. It is an undeniable fact that life is the warfare of good against evil, and many a valiant hero has fallen in the foremost ranks. It is curious, however, to notice that the champions on the both sides are fighting for the same cause. There can be no single individual in the world who is fighting against his own cause or interest, and the only possible difference between one party and the other consists in the extent of interests which they fight for. So-called bad persons, who are properly designated as 'small persons' by Chinese and Japanese scholars, express their Buddha-nature to a small extent mostly within their own doors, while so-called good persons, or 'great persons' as the Oriental scholars call them, actualize their Buddha-nature to a large extent in the whole sphere of a country, or of the whole earth. Enlightened Consciousness, or Buddha-nature, as we have seen in the previous chapter, is the mind of mind and the consciousness of consciousness, Universal Spirit awakened in individual minds, which realizes the universal brotherhood of all beings and the unity of individual lives. It is the real self, the guiding principle, the Original Physiognomy[FN#169] (nature), as it is called by Zen, of man. This real self lies dormant under the threshold of consciousness in the minds of the confused; consequently, each of them is inclined to regard petty individual as his self, and to exert himself to further the interests of the individual self even at the cost of those of the others. He is 'the smallest person' in the world, for his self is reduced to the smallest extent possible. Some of the less confused identify their selves with their families, and feel happy or unhappy in proportion as their families are happy or unhappy, for the sake of which they sacrifice the interests of other families. On the other hand, some of the more enlightened unite their selves through love and compassion with their whole tribe or countrymen, and consider the rise or fall of the tribe or of the country as their own, and willingly sacrifice their own lives, if need be, for the cause of the tribe or the country. When they are fully enlightened, they can realize the unity of all sentient lives, and be ever merciful and helpful towards all creatures. They are 'the greatest persons' on earth, because their selves are enlarged to the greatest extent possible. [FN#169] The expression first occurs in Ho-bo-dan-kyo of the Sixth Patriarch, and is frequently used by later Zenists. 13. The Theory of Buddha-Nature adequately explains the Ethical States of Man. This theory of Buddha-nature enables us to get an insight into the origin of morality. The first awakening of Buddha-nature within man is the very beginning of morality, and man's ethical progress is the gradually widening expression of that nature in conduct. But for it morality is impossible for man. But for it not only moral culture or discipline, but education and social improvement must be futile. Again, the theory adequately explains the ethical facts that the standard of morality undergoes change in different times and places, that good and bad are so inseparably knit together, and that the bad at times become good all on a sudden, and the good grow bad quite unexpectedly. First, it goes without saying that the standard of morality is raised just in proportion as Buddha-nature or real self extends and amplifies itself in different times and places. Secondly, since good is Buddha-nature actualized to a large extent, and bad is also Buddha-nature actualized to a small extent, the existence of the former presupposes that of the latter, and the mess of duality can never be got rid of. Thirdly, the fact that the bad become good under certain circumstances, and the good also become bad often unexpectedly, can hardly be explained by the dualistic theory, because if good nature be so arbitrarily turned into bad and bad nature into good, the distinction of good and bad nature has no meaning whatever. According to the theory of Buddha-nature, the fact that the good become bad or the bad become good, does not imply in the least a change of nature, but the widening or the narrowing of its actualization. So that no matter how morally degenerated one may be, he can uplift himself to a high ethical plane by the widening of his self, and at the same time no matter how morally exalted one may be, he can descend to the level of the brute by the narrowing of his self. To be an angel or to be a devil rests with one's degrees of enlightenment and free choice. This is why such infinite varieties exist both among the good and the bad. This is why the higher the peak of enlightenment the people climb, the more widely the vista of moral possibilities open before them. 14. Buddha-Nature is the Common Source of Morals. Furthermore, Buddha-nature or real self, being the seat of love and the nucleus of sincerity, forms the warp and woof of all moral actions. He is an obedient son who serves his parents with sincerity and love. He is a loyal subject who serves his master with sincerity and love. A virtuous wife is she who loves her husband with her sincere heart. A trustworthy friend is he who keeps company with others with sincerity and love. A man of righteousness is he who leads a life of sincerity and love. Generous and humane is he who sympathizes with his fellow-men with his sincere heart. Veracity, chastity, filial piety, loyalty, righteousness, generosity, humanity, and what not-all-this is no other than Buddha-nature applied to various relationships of human brotherhood. This is the common source, ever fresh and inexhaustible, of morality that fosters and furthers the interests of all. To-ju[FN#170] expresses the similar idea as follows: "There exists the Inexhaustible Source (of morality) within me. It is an invaluable treasure. It is called Bright Nature of man. It is peerless and surpasses all jewels. The aim of learning is to bring out this Bright Nature. This is the best thing in the world. Real happiness can only be secured by it." Thus, in the first place, moral conduct, which is nothing but the expression of Buddha-nature in action, implies the assertion of self and the furtherance of one's interests. On this point is based the half-truth of the Egoistic theory. Secondly, it is invariably accompanied by a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction when it fulfils its end. This accidental concomitance is mistaken for its essence by superficial observers who adhere to the Hedonistic theory. Thirdly, it conduces to the furtherance of the material and spiritual interests of man, and it led the Utilitarians to the confusion of the result with the cause of morality. Fourthly, it involves the control or sacrifice of the lower and ignoble self of an individual in order to realize his higher and nobler self. This gave rise to the half-truth of the Ascetic theory of morality. [FN#170] To-ju Naka-e (died A.D. 1649), the founder of the Japanese Wang School of Confucianism, known as the Sage of Omi. 15. The Parable of a Drunkard. Now the question arises, If all human beings are endowed with Buddha-nature, why have they not come naturally to be Enlightened? To answer this question, the Indian Mahayanists[FN#171] told the parable of a drunkard who forgets the precious gems put in his own pocket by one of his friends. The man is drunk with the poisonous liquor of selfishness, led astray by the alluring sight of the sensual objects, and goes mad with anger, lust, and folly. Thus he is in a state of moral poverty, entirely forgetting the precious gem of Buddha-nature within him. To be in an honourable position in society as the owner of that valuable property, he must first get rid himself of the influence of the liquor of self, and detach himself from sensual objects, gain control over his passion, restore peace and sincerity to his mind, and illumine his whole existence by his inborn divine light. Otherwise he has to remain in the same plight to all eternity. [FN#171] Mahaparinirvana-sutra. Lot us avail ourselves of another figure to explain more clearly the point at issue. Universal Spirit may fitly be likened to the universal water, or water circulating through the whole earth. This universal water exists everywhere. It exists in the tree. It exists in the grass. It exists in the mountain. It exists in the river. It exists in the sea. It exists in the air. It exists in the cloud. Thus man is not only surrounded by water on all sides, but it penetrates his very body. But be can never appease his thirst without drinking water. In like manner Universal Spirit exists everywhere. It exists in the tree. It exists in the grass. It exists in the ground. It exists in the mountain. It exists in the river. It exists in the sea. It exists in the bird. It exists in the beast. Thus man is not merely surrounded by Spirit on all sides, but it permeates through his whole existence. But he can never be Enlightened unless he awakens it within him by means of Meditation. To drink water is to drink the universal water; to awaken Buddha-nature is to be conscious of Universal Spirit. Therefore, to get Enlightened we have to believe that all beings are Buddha-natured--that is, absolutely good-natured in the sense that transcends the duality of good and bad. "One day," to cite an example, "Pan Shan (Ban-zan) happened to pass by a meat-shop. He heard a customer saying: 'Give me a pound of fresh meat.' To which the shopkeeper, putting down his knife, replied: Certainly, sir. Could there be any meat that is not fresh in my shop?' Pan Shan, hearing these remarks, was Enlightened at once." 16. Shakya Muni and the Prodigal Son. A great trouble with us is that we do not believe in half the good that we are born with. We are just like the only son of a well-to-do, as the author of Saddharma-pundarika-sutra[FN#172] tells us, who, being forgetful of his rich inheritance, leaves his home and leads a life of hand-to-mouth as a coolie. How miserable it is to see one, having no faith in his noble endowment, burying the precious gem of Buddha-nature into the foul rubbish of vices and crimes, wasting his excellent genius in the exertion that is sure to disgrace his name, falling a prey to bitter remorse and doubt, and casting himself away into the jaw of perdition. Shakya Muni, full of fatherly love towards all beings, looked with compassion on us, his prodigal son, and used every means to restore the half-starved man to his home. It was for this that he left the palace and the beloved wife and son, practised his self-mortification and prolonged Meditation, attained to Enlightenment, and preached Dharma for forty-nine years; in other words, all his strength and effort were focussed on that single aim, which was to bring the prodigal son to his rich mansion of Buddha-nature. He taught not only by words, but by his own actual example, that man has Buddha-nature, by the unfoldment of which he can save himself from the miseries of life and death, and bring himself to a higher realm than gods. When we are Enlightened, or when Universal Spirit awakens within us, we open the inexhaustible store of virtues and excellencies, and can freely make use of them at our will. [FN#172] See 'Sacred Books of the East,' vol. xxi., chap. iv., pp. 98-118. 17. The Parable of the Monk and the Stupid Woman. The confused or unenlightened may be compared with a monk and a stupid woman in a Japanese parable which runs as follows: "One evening a monk (who was used to have his head shaved clean), getting drunk against the moral precepts, visited a woman, known as a blockhead, at her house. No sooner had he got into her room than the female fell asleep so soundly that the monk could not wake her nap. Thereupon he made up his mind to use every possible means to arouse her, and searched and searched all over the room for some instrument that would help him in his task of arousing her from death-like slumber. Fortunately, he found a razor in one of the drawers of her mirror stand. With it he gave a stroke to her hair, but she did not stir a whit. Then came another stroke, and she snored like thunder. The third and fourth strokes came, but with no better result. And at last her head was shaven clean, yet still she slept on. The next morning when she awoke, she could not find her visitor, the monk, as he had left the house in the previous night. 'Where is my visitor, where my dear monk?' she called aloud, and waking in a state of somnambulation looked for him in vain, repeating the outcry. When at length her hand accidentally touched her shaven head, she mistook it for that of her visitor, and exclaimed: 'Here you are, my dear, where am I myself gone then?" A great trouble with the confused is their forgetting of real self or Buddha-nature, and not knowing 'where it is gone.' Duke Ngai, of the State of Lu, once said to Confucius: "One of my subjects, Sir, is so much forgetful that he forgot to take his wife when be changed his residence." "That is not much, my lord," said the sage, "the Emperors Kieh[FN#173] and Cheu[FN#174] forgot their own selves."[FN#175] [FN#173] The last Emperor of the Ha dynasty, notorious for his vices. His reign was 1818-1767 B.C. [FN#174] The last Emperor of the Yin dynasty, one of the worst despots. His reign was 1154-1122 B.C. [FN#175] Ko-shi-ke-go. 18. 'Each Smile a Hymn, each Kindly Word a Prayer.' The glorious sun of Buddha-nature shines in the zenith of Enlightened Consciousness, but men still dream a dream of illusion. Bells and clocks of the Universal Church proclaim the dawn of Bodhi, yet men, drunk with the liquors of the Three Poisons[FN#176] Still slumber in the darkness of sin. Let us pray to Buddha, in whose bosom we live, for the sake of our own salvation. Let us invoke Buddha, whose boundless mercy ever besets us, for the Sake of joy and peace of all our fellow-beings. Let us adore Him through our sympathy towards the poor, through our kindness shown to the suffering, through our thought of the sublime and the good. "O brother man, fold to thy heart thy brother; Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there; To worship rightly is to love each other, Each smile a hymn, each kindly word a prayer." --Whittier. Let, then, your heart be so pure that you may not be unworthy of the sunshine beaming upon you the light of Universal Spirit. Let your thought be so noble that you may deserve fair flowers blooming before you, reminding you of merciful Buddha. Let your life be so good that you may not be ashamed of yourself in the presence of the Blessed One. This is the piety of Mahayanists, especially of Zenists. [FN#176] Lust, anger, and folly. 19. The World is in the Making. Our assertion is far from assuming that life is now complete, and is in its best state. On the contrary, it is full of defects and shortcomings. We must not be puffed up with modern civilization, however great victory it has scored for its side. Beyond all doubt man is still in his cradle. He often stretches forth his hands to get at his higher ideal, yet is still satisfied with worthless playthings. It is too glaring a fact to be overlooked by us that faith in religion is dying out in the educated circles of society, that insincerity, cowardice, and double-tongue are found holding high positions in almost ever community, that Lucrese and Ezzeling are looking down upon the starving multitude from their luxurious palace, that Mammon and Bacchus are sometimes preying on their living victims, that even religion often sides with Contention and piety takes part in Cruelty, that Anarchy is ever ready to spring on the crowned beings, that philosophy is disposed to turn the deaf ear to the petition of peace, while science provides fuel for the fire of strife. Was the golden age of man, then, over in the remote past? Is the doomsday coming instead? Do you bear the trumpet call? Do you feel the earth tremble? No, absolutely no, the golden age is not passed. It is yet to come. There are not a few who think that the world is in completion, and the Creator has finished His work. We witness, however, that He is still working and working, for actually we hear His hammer-strokes resounding through heaven above and earth beneath. Does He not show us new materials for His building? Does He not give new forms to His design? Does He not surprise us with novelties, extraordinaries, and mysteries? In a word, the world is in progress, not in retrogression. A stream does not run in a straight line. It now turns to the right, now to the left, now leaps down a precipice, now waters rich fields, now runs back towards its source; but it is destined to find its outlet in the ocean. So it is with the stream of life. It now leaps down the precipice of revolution. Now it enriches the fertile field of civilization. Now it expands itself into a glassy lake of peace. Now it forms the dangerous whirlpool of strife. But its course is always toward the ocean of Enlightenment, in which the gems of equality and freedom, jewels of truth and beauty, and treasures of wisdom and bliss can be had. 20. The Progress and Hope of Life. How many myriads of years have passed since the germs of life first made appearance on earth none can tell; how many thousands of summers and winters it has taken to develop itself into higher animals, no scientist can calculate exactly. Slowly but steadily it has taken its swerving course, and ascending stop by step the series of evolution, has reached at length the plane of the rational animal. We cannot tell how many billions of years it takes to develop ourselves and become beings higher than man himself, yet we firmly believe that it is possible for us to take the same unerring course as the organic germs took in the past. Existing humanity is not the same as primitive one. It is quite another race. Our desires and hopes are entirely different from those of primitive man. What was gold for them is now iron for us. Our thoughts and beliefs are what they never dreamed of. Of our knowledge they had almost none. That which they kept in veneration we trample under our feet. Things they worshipped as deities now serve us as our slaves. Things that troubled and tortured them we now turn into utilities. To say nothing of the customs and manners and mode of living which underwent extraordinary change, we are of a race in body and mind other than the primitive forefathers of good old days. In addition to this we have every reason to believe in the betterment of life. Let us cast a glance to the existing state of the world. While the Turco-Italian war was raising its ferocious outcry, the Chinese revolution lifted its head before the trembling throne. Who can tell whether another sanguinary affair will not break out before the Bulgarian bloodshed comes to an end? Still we believe that, as fire drives out fire, to borrow Shakespeare's phrase, so war is driving out war. As an ocean, which separated two nations in the past, serves to unite them now, so a war, which separated two people in the past, brings them to unity now. It goes without saying, that every nation groans under the burden of cannons and warships, and heartily desires peace. No nation can willingly wage war against any other nation. It is against the national conscience. It is no exaggeration to say the world is wholly the ear to hear the news from the goddess of peace. A time will surely come, if our purpose be steady and our resolution firm, when universal peace will be restored, and Shakya Muni's precept, 'not to kill,' will be realized by all mankind. 21. The Betterment of Life. Again, people nowadays seem to feel keenly the wound of the economical results of war, but they are unfeeling to its moral injuries. As elements have their affinities, as bodies have their attractions, as creatures have their instinct to live together, so men have their inborn mutual love. 'God divided man into men that they might help each other.' Their strength lies in their mutual help, their pleasure is in their mutual love, and their perfection is in their giving and receiving of alternate good. Therefore Shakya Muni says: "Be merciful to all living beings." To take up arms against any other person is unlawful for any individual. It is the violation of the universal law of life. We do not deny that there are not a few who are so wretched that they rejoice in their crimes, nor that there is any person but has more or less stain on his character, nor that the means of committing crimes are multiplied in proportion as modern civilization advances; yet still we believe that our social life is ever breaking down our wolfish disposition that we inherited from our brute ancestors, and education is ever wearing out our cannibalistic nature which we have in common with wild animals. On the one hand, the signs of social morals are manifest in every direction, such as asylums for orphans, poorhouses, houses of correction, lodgings for the penniless, asylums for the poor, free hospitals, hospitals for domestic animals, societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, schools for the blind and the dumb, asylums for the insane, and so forth; on the other hand, various discoveries and inventions have been made that may contribute to the social improvement, such as the discovery of the X rays and of radium, the invention of the wireless telegraph and that of the aeroplane and what not. Furthermore, spiritual wonders such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, etc., remind us of the possibilities of further spiritual unfoldment in man which he never dreamed of. Thus life is growing richer and nobler step by step, and becoming more and more hopeful as we advance in the Way of Buddha. 22. The Buddha of Mercy. Milton says: "Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt; Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled. But evil on itself shall back recoil, And mix no more with goodness. If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble." The world is built on the foundation of morality, which is another name for Universal Spirit, and moral order sustains it. We human beings, consciously or unconsciously, were, are, and will be at work to bring the world into perfection. This idea is allegorically expressed in the Buddhist sutra,[FN#177] which details the advent of a merciful Buddha named Maitreya in the remote future. At that time, it says, there will be no steep hills, no filthy places, no epidemic, no famine, no earthquake, no storm, no war, no revolution, no bloodshed, no cruelty, and no suffering; the roads will be paved smoothly, grass and trees always blooming, birds ever singing, men contented and happy; all sentient beings will worship the Buddha of Mercy, accept His doctrine, and attain to Enlightenment. This prophecy will be fulfilled, according to the sutra, 5,670,000,000 years after the death of Shakya Muni. This evidently shows us that the Mahayanist's aim of life is to bring out man's inborn light of Buddha-nature to illumine the world, to realize the universal brotherhood of all sentient beings, to attain to Enlightenment, and to enjoy peace and joy to which Universal Spirit leads us. [FN#177] See Nanjo's Catalogue, Nos. 204-209. CHAPTER VI ENLIGHTENMENT 1. Enlightenment is beyond Description and Analysis. In the foregoing chapters we have had several occasions to refer to the central problem of Zen or Enlightenment, whose content it is futile to attempt to explain or analyze. We must not explain or analyze it, because by doing so we cannot but mislead the reader. We can as well represent Enlightenment by means of explanation or analysis as we do personality by snapshots or by anatomical operations. As our inner life, directly experienced within us, is anything but the shape of the head, or the features of the face, or the posture of the body, so Enlightenment experienced by Zenists at the moment of their highest Samadhi[FN#178] is anything but the psychological analysis of mental process, or the epistemological explanation of cognition, or the philosophical generalization of concepts. Enlightenment can be realized only by the Enlightened, and baffles every attempt to describe it, even by the Enlightened themselves. The effort of the confused to guess at Enlightenment is often likened by the Zenists to the effort of the blind who feel an elephant to know what it looks like. Some of them who happen to feel the trunk would declare it is like a rope, but those who happen to feel the belly would declare it is like a huge drum; while those who happen to feel the feet would declare it is like the trunk of a tree. But none of these conjectures can approach the living elephant. [FN#178] Abstract Contemplation, which the Zenists distinguish from Samadhi, practised by the Brahmins. The author of 'An Outline of Buddhist Sects' points out the distinction, saying: "Contemplation of outside religionists is practised with the heterodox view that the lower worlds (the worlds for men, beasts, etc.) are disgusting, but the upper worlds (the worlds for Devas) are desirable; Contemplation of common people (ordinary lay believers of Buddhism) is practised with the belief in the law of Karma, and also with disgust (for the lower worlds) and desire (for the upper worlds); Contemplation of Hinayana is practised with an insight into the truth of Anatman (non-soul); Contemplation of Mahayana is practised with an insight of Unreality of Atman (soul) as well as of Dharma (thing); Contemplation of the highest perfection is practised with the view that Mind is pure in its nature, it is endowed with unpolluted wisdom, free from passion, and it is no other than Buddha himself." 2. Enlightenment implies an Insight into the Nature of Self. We cannot pass over, however, this weighty problem without saying a word. We shall try in this chapter to present Enlightenment before the reader in a roundabout way, just as the painter gives the fragmentary sketches of a beautiful city, being unable to give even a bird's-eye view of it. Enlightenment, first of all, implies an insight into the nature of Self. It is an emancipation of mind from illusion concerning Self. All kinds of sin take root deep in the misconception of Self, and putting forth the branches of lust, anger, and folly, throw dark shadows on life. To extirpate this misconception Buddhism[FN#179] strongly denies the existence of the individual soul as conceived by common sense-that is, that unchanging spiritual entity provided with sight, hearing, touch, smell, feeling, thought, imagination, aspiration, etc., which survives the body. It teaches us that there is no such thing as soul, and that the notion of soul is a gross illusion. It treats of body as a temporal material form of life doomed to be destroyed by death and reduced to its elements again. It maintains that mind is also a temporal spiritual form of life, behind which there is no immutable soul. [FN#179] Both Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism teach the doctrine of Anatman, or Non-self. It is the denial of soul as conceived by common sense, and of Atman as conceived by Indian heterodox thinkers. Some Mahayanists believe in the existence of real Self instead of individual self, as we see in Mahaparinirvana-sutra, whose author says: "There is real self in non-self." It is worthy of note that the Hinayanists set forth Purity, Pleasure, Atman, and Eternity, as the four great misconceptions about life, while the same author regards them as the four great attributes of Nirvana itself. An illusory mind tends either to regard body as Self and to yearn after its material interests, or to believe mind dependent on soul as Ego. Those who are given to sensual pleasures, consciously or unconsciously, bold body to be the Self, and remain the life-long slave to the objects of sense. Those who regard mind as dependent on soul as the Self, on the other hand, undervalue body as a mere tool with which the soul works, and are inclined to denounce life as if unworthy of living. We must not undervalue body, nor must we overestimate mind. There is no mind isolated from body, nor is there any body separated from mind. Every activity of mind produces chemical and physiological changes in the nerve-centres, in the organs, and eventually in the whole body; while every activity of body is sure to bring out the corresponding change in the mental function, and eventually in the whole personality. We have the inward experience of sorrow when we have simultaneously the outward appearance of tears and of pallor; when we have the outward appearance of the fiery eyes and short breath, we have simultaneously the inward feeling of anger. Thus body is mind observed outwardly in its relation to the senses; mind is body inwardly experienced in its relation to introspection. Who can draw a strict line of demarcation between mind and body? We should admit, so far as our present knowledge is concerned, that mind, the intangible, has been formed to don a garment of matter in order to become an intelligible existence at all; matter, the solid, has faded under examination into formlessness, as that of mind. Zen believes in the identification of mind and body, as Do-gen[FN#180] says: "Body is identical with mind; appearance and reality are one and the same thing." Bergson denies the identification of mind and body, saying:[FN#181] "It (experience) shows us the interdependence of the mental and the physical, the necessity of a certain cerebral substratum for the psychical state-nothing more. From the fact that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow that they are equivalent. Because a certain screw is necessary for a certain machine, because the machine works when the screw is there and stops when the screw is taken away, we do not say that the screw is equivalent of the machine." Bergson's simile of a screw and a machine is quite inadequate to show the interdependence of mind and body, because the screw does cause the machine to work, but the machine does not cause the screw to work; so that their relation is not interdependence. On the contrary, body causes mind to work, and at the same time mind causes body to work; so that their relation is perfectly interdependent, and the relation is not that of an addition of mind to body, or of body to mind, as the screw is added to the machine. Bergson must have compared the working of the machine with mind, and the machine itself with body, if be wanted to show the real fact. Moreover, he is not right in asserting that "from the fact that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow that they are equivalent," because there are several kinds of interdependence, in some of which two things can be equivalent. For instance, bricks, mutually dependent in their forming an arch, cannot be equivalent one with another; but water and waves, being mutually dependent, can be identified. In like manner fire and heat, air and wind, a machine and its working, mind and body.[FN#182] [FN#180] The master strongly condemns the immortality of the soul as the heterodox doctrine in his Sho-bo-gen-zo. The same argument is found in Mu-chu-mon-do, by Mu-so Koku-shi. [FN#181] 'Creative Evolution,' pp. 354, 355. [FN#182] Bergson, arguing against the dependence of the mind on brain, says: "That there is a close connection between a state of consciousness and the brain we do not dispute. But there is also a close connection between a coat and the nail on which it hangs, for if the nail is pulled out, the coat will fall to the ground. Shall we say, then, that the shape of the nail gave the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds to it? No more are we entitled to conclude, because the psychical fact is hung on to a cerebral state, that there is any parallelism between the two series, psychical and physiological." We have to ask, in what respects does the interrelation between mind and body resemble the relation between a coat and a nail? 3. The Irrationality of the Belief of Immortality. Occidental minds believe in a mysterious entity under the name of soul, just as Indian thinkers believe in the so-called subtle body entirely distinct from the gross body of flesh and blood. Soul, according to this belief, is an active principle that unites body and mind so as to form an harmonious whole of mental as well as bodily activities. And it acts through the instrumentality of the mind and body in the present life, and enjoys an eternal life beyond the grave. It is on this soul that individual immortality is based. It is immortal Self. Now, to say nothing of the origin of soul, this long-entertained belief is hardly good for anything. In the first place, it throws no light upon the relation of mind and body, because soul is an empty name for the unity of mind and body, and serves to explain nothing. On the contrary, it adds another mystery to the already mysterious relationships between matter and spirit. Secondly, soul should be conceived as a psychical individual, subject to spacial determinations--but since it has to be deprived by death of its body which individualizes it, it will cease to be individuality after death, to the disappointment of the believer. How could you think anything purely spiritual and formless existing without blending together with other things? Thirdly, it fails to gratify the desire, cherished by the believer, of enjoying eternal life, because soul has to lose its body, the sole important medium through which it may enjoy life. Fourthly, soul is taken as a subject matter to receive in the future life the reward or the punishment from God for our actions in this life; but the very idea of eternal punishment is inconsistent with the boundless love of God. Fifthly, it is beyond all doubt that soul is conceived as an entity, which unifies various mental faculties and exists as the foundation of individual personality. But the existence of such soul is quite incompatible with the well-known pathological fact that it is possible for the individual to have double or treble or multiple personalities. Thus the belief in the existence of soul conceived by the common sense turns out not only to be irrational, but a useless encumbrance on the religious mind. Therefore Zen declares that there is no such thing as soul, and that mind and body are one. Hwui Chung (Ye-chu), a famous disciple of the Sixth Patriarch in China, to quote an example, one day asked a monk: "Where did you come from?" "I came, sir, from the South," replied the man. "What doctrine do the masters of the South teach?" asked Hwui Chung again. "They teach, sir, that body is mortal, but mind is immortal," was the answer. "That," said the master, "is the heterodox doctrine of the Atman!" "How do you, sir," questioned the monk, "teach about that?" "I teach that the body and mind are one," was the reply.[FN#183] [FN#183] For further explanation, see Sho-bo-gen-zo and Mu-chu-mon-do. Fiske, [FN#184] in his argument against materialism, blames the denial of immortality, saying: "The materialistic assumption that there is no such state of things, and that the life of the soul ends accordingly with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy." But we can say with equal force that the common-sense assumption that the life of soul continues beyond the grave is, perhaps, the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of thought, because, there being no scientific evidences that give countenance to the assumption, even the spiritualists themselves hesitate to assert the existence of a ghost or soul. Again he[FN#185] says: "With this illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem with its river of life and its street of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view." This is as much as to say there is not a particle of evidence, scientifically speaking, for the common-sense view of soul, because the poet's description of the New Jerusalem is nothing but the result of the common-sense belief of immortality. [FN#184] 'The Destiny of Man,' p. 110. [FN#185] 'The Destiny of Man,' pp. 110, 111. 4. The Examination of the Notion of Self. The belief in immortality is based on the strong instinct of self-preservation that calls forth an insatiable longing for longevity. It is another form of egoism, one of the relics of our brute forefathers. We must bear in mind that this illusion of the individual Self is the foundation on which every form of immorality has its being. I challenge my readers to find in the whole history of mankind any crime not based on egoism. Evil-doers have been as a rule pleasure-hunters, money-seekers, seekers after self-interests, characterized by lust, folly, and cruelty. Has there been anyone who committed theft that he might further the interests of his villagers? Has there been any paramour who disgraced himself that lie might help his neighbours? Has there been any traitor who performed the ignoble conduct to promote the welfare of his own country or society at large? To get Enlightened, therefore, we have to correct, first of all, our notions concerning Self. Individual body and mind are not the only important constituents of Self. There are many other indispensable elements in the notion of Self. For instance, I have come into existence as another form of my parents. I am theirs, and may justly be called the reincarnation of them. And again, my father is another form of his parents; my mother of hers; his and her parents of theirs; and ad infinitum. In brief, all my forefathers live and have their being in me. I cannot help, therefore, thinking that my physical state is the result of the sum total of my good and bad actions in the past lives I led in the persons of my forefathers, and of the influence I received therein;[FN#186] and that my psychical state is the result of that which I received, felt, imagined, conceived, experienced, and thought in my past existences in the persons of my ancestors. [FN#186] This is the law of Karma. Besides this, my brothers, my sisters, my neighbours--nay, all my follow-men and fellow-women are no other than the reincarnation of their parents and forefathers, who are also mine. The same blood invigorated the king as well as the beggar; the same nerve energized the white as well as the black men; the same consciousness vitalized the wise as well as the unwise. Impossible it is to conceive myself independent of my fellow-men and fellow-women, for they are mine and I am theirs--that is, I live and move in them, and they live and move in me. It is bare nonsense to say that I go to school, not to be educated as a member of society, but simply to gratify my individual desire for knowledge; or that I make a fortune, not to lead the life of a well-to-do in society, but to satisfy my individual money-loving instinct; or that I seek after truth, neither to do good to my contemporaries nor to the future generations, but only for my individual curiosity or that I live neither to live with my family nor with my friends nor with anyone else, but to live my individual life. It is as gross absurdity to say that I am an individual absolutely independent of society as to say I am a husband with no wife, or I am a son to no parents. Whatever I do directly or indirectly I contribute to the common fortune of man; whatever anyone else does directly or indirectly determines my fate. Therefore we must realize that our Selves necessarily include other members of the community, while other members' Selves necessarily comprehend us. 5. Nature is the Mother of All Things. Furthermore, man has come into existence out of Nature. He is her child. She provided him food, raiment, and shelter. She nourishes him, strengthens him, and vitalizes him. At the same time she disciplines, punishes, and instructs him. His body is of her own formation, his knowledge is of her own laws, and his activities are the responses to her own addresses to him. Modern civilization is said by some to be the conquest of man over Nature; but, in fact, it is his faithful obedience to her. "Bacon truly said," says Eucken,[FN#187] "that to rule nature man must first serve her. He forgot to add that, as her ruler, he is still destined to go on serving her." She can never be attacked by any being unless he acts in strict conformity to her laws. To accomplish anything against her law is as impossible as to catch fishes in a forest, or to make bread of rock. How many species of animals have perished owing to their inability to follow her steps! How immense fortunes have been lost in vain from man's ignorance of her order! How many human beings disappeared on earth from their disobedience to her unbending will! She is, nevertheless, true to those who obey her rules. Has not science proved that she is truthful? Has not art found that she is beautiful? [FN#187] Eucken's 'Philosophy of Life,' by W. R. Royce Gibbon, p. 51. Has not philosophy announced that she is spiritual? Has not religion proclaimed that she is good? At all events, she is the mother of all beings. She lives in all things and they live in her. All that she possesses is theirs, and all that they want she supplies. Her life is the same vitality that stirs all sentient beings. Chwang Tsz[FN#188] (So-shi) is right when he says: "Heaven, Earth, and I were produced together, and all things and I are one." And again: "If all things be regarded with love, Heaven and Earth are one with me." Sang Chao (So-jo) also says: "Heaven and Earth are of the same root as we. All things in the world are of one substance with Me."[FN#189] [FN#188] Chwang Tsz, vol. i., p. 20. [FN#189] This is a favourite subject of discussion by Zenists. 6. Real Self. If there be no individual soul either in mind or body, where does personality lie? What is Real Self? How does it differ from soul? Self is living entity, not immutable like soul, but mutable and ever-changing life, which is body when observed by senses, and which is mind when experienced by introspection. It is not an entity lying behind mind and body, but life existent as the union of body and mind. It existed in our forefathers in the past, is existing in the present, and will exist in the future generations. It also discloses itself to some measure in vegetables and animals, and shadows itself forth in inorganic nature. It is Cosmic life and Cosmic spirit, and at the same time individual life and individual spirit. It is one and the same life which embraces men and nature. It is the self-existent, creative, universal principle that moves on from eternity to eternity. As such it is called Mind or Self by Zenists. Pan Shan (Ban-zan) says: "The moon of mind comprehends all the universe in its light." A man asked Chang Sha (Cho-sha): "How can you turn the phenomenal universe into Self ?" "How can you turn Self into the phenomenal universe?" returned the master. When we get the insight into this Self, we are able to have the open sesame to the mysteries of the universe, because to know the nature of a drop of water is to know the nature of the river, the lake, and the ocean--nay, even of vapour, mist, and cloud; in other words, to get an insight into individual life is the key to the secret of Universal Life. We must not confine Self within the poor little person called body. That is the root of the poorest and most miserable egoism. We should expand that egoism into family-egoism, then into nation-egoism, then into race-egoism, then into human-egoism, then into living-being-egoism, and lastly into universe-egoism, which is not egoism at all. Thus we deny the immortality of soul as conceived by common sense, but assume immortality of the Great Soul, which animates, vitalizes, and spiritualizes all sentient beings. It is Hinayana Buddhism that first denied the existence of atman or Self so emphatically inculcated in the Upanisads, and paved the way for the general conception of Universal Self, with the eulogies of which almost every page of Mahayana books is filled. 7. The Awakening of the Innermost Wisdom. Having set ourselves free from the misconception of Self, next we must awaken our innermost wisdom, pure and divine, called the Mind of Buddha,[FN#190] or Bodhi,[FN#191] or Prajnya[FN#192] by Zen masters. It is the divine light, the inner heaven, the key to all moral treasures, the centre of thought and consciousness, the source of all influence and power, the seat of kindness, justice, sympathy, impartial love, humanity, and mercy, the measure of all things. When this innermost wisdom is fully awakened, we are able to realize that each and everyone of us is identical in spirit, in essence, in nature with the universal life or Buddha, that each ever lives face to face with Buddha, that each is beset by the abundant grace of the Blessed One, that He arouses his moral nature, that He opens his spiritual eyes, that He unfolds his new capacity, that He appoints his mission, and that life is not an ocean of birth, disease, old age, and death, nor the vale of tears, but the holy temple of Buddha, the Pure Land,[FN#193] where be can enjoy the bliss of Nirvana. [FN#190] Zen is often called the Sect of Buddha-mind, as it lays stress on the awakening of the Mind of Buddha. The words 'the Mind of Buddha' were taken from a passage in Lankavatara-sutra. [FN#191] That knowledge by which one becomes enlightened. [FN#192] Supreme wisdom. [FN#193] Sukhavati, or the land of bliss. Then our minds go through an entire revolution. We are no more troubled by anger and hatred, no more bitten by envy and ambition, no more stung by sorrow and chagrin, no more overwhelmed by melancholy and despair. Not that we become passionless or simply intellectual, but that we have purified passions, which, instead of troubling us, inspire us with noble aspirations, such as anger and hatred against injustice, cruelty, and dishonesty, sorrow and lamentation for human frailty, mirth and joy for the welfare of follow-beings, pity and sympathy for suffering creatures. The same change purifies our intellect. Scepticism and sophistry give way to firm conviction; criticism and hypothesis to right judgment; and inference and argument to realization. What we merely observed before we now touch with heart as well. What we knew in relation of difference before we now understand in relation of unity as well. How things happen was our chief concern before, but now we consider as well bow much value they have. What was outside us before now comes within us. What was dead and indifferent before grows now alive and lovable to us. What was insignificant and empty before becomes now important, and has profound meaning. Wherever we go we find beauty; whomever we meet we find good; whatever we get we receive with gratitude. This is the reason why the Zenists not only regarded all their fellow-beings as their benefactors, but felt gratitude even towards fuel and water. The present writer knows a contemporary Zenist who would not drink even a cup of water without first making a salutation to it. Such an attitude of Zen toward things may well be illustrated by the following example: Sueh Fung (Sep-po) and Kin Shan (Kin-zan), once travelling through a mountainous district, saw a leaf of the rape floating down the stream. Thereon Kin Shan said: "Let us go up, dear brother, along the stream that we may find a sage living up on the mountain. I hope we shall find a good teacher in him." "No," replied Sueh Fung, "for he cannot be a sage who wastes even a leaf of the rape. He will be no good teacher for us." 8. Zen is not Nihilistic. Zen judged from ancient Zen masters' aphorisms may seem, at the first sight, to be idealistic in an extreme form, as they say: "Mind is Buddha" or, "Buddha is Mind," or, "There is nothing outside mind," or, "Three worlds are of but one mind." And it may also appear to be nihilistic, as they say: "There has been nothing since all eternity," "By illusion you see the castle of the Three Worlds"; "by Enlightenment you see but emptiness in ten directions."[FN#194] In reality, however, Zen[FN#195] is neither idealistic nor nihilistic. Zen makes use of the nihilistic idea of Hinayana Buddhism, and calls its students' attention to the change and evanescence of life and of the world, first to destroy the error of immutation, next to dispel the attachment to the sensual objects. [FN#194] These words were repeatedly uttered by Chinese and Japanese Zenists of all ages. Chwen Hih (Fu-dai-shi) expressed this very idea in his Sin Wang Ming (Shin-o-mei) at the time of Bodhidharma. [FN#195] The Rin-zai teachers mostly make use of the doctrine of unreality of all things, as taught in Prajnya-paramita-sutras. We have to note that there are some differences between the Mahayana doctrine of unreality and the Hinayana doctrine of unreality. It is a misleading tendency of our intellect to conceive things as if they were immutable and constant. It often leaves changing and concrete individual objects out of consideration, and lays stress on the general, abstract, unchanging aspect of things. It is inclined to be given to generalization and abstraction. It often looks not at this thing or at that thing, but at things in general. It loves to think not of a good thing nor of a bad thing, but of bad and good in the abstract. This intellectual tendency hardens and petrifies the living and growing world, and leads us to take the universe as a thing dead, inert, and standing still. This error of immutation can be corrected by the doctrine of Transcience taught by Hinayana Buddhism. But as medicine taken in an undue quantity turns into poison, so the doctrine of Transcience drove the Hinayanists to the suicidal conclusion of nihilism. A well-known scholar and believer of Zen, Kwei Fung (Kei-ha) says in his refutation of nihilism:[FN#196] "If mind as well as external objects be unreal, who is it that knows they are so? Again, if there be nothing real in the universe, what is it that causes unreal objects to appear? We stand witness to the fact that there is no one of the unreal things on earth that is not made to appear by something real. If there be no water of unchanging fluidity, how can there be the unreal and temporary forms of waves? If there be no unchanging mirror, bright and clean, bow can there be the various images, unreal and temporary, reflected in it? If mind as well as external objects be nothing at all, no one can tell what it is that causes these unreal appearances. Therefore this doctrine (of the unreality of all things) can never clearly disclose spiritual Reality. So that Mahabheri-harakaparivarta-sutra says: " All the sutras that teach the unreality of things belong to the imperfect doctrine " (of the Shakya Muni). Mahaprajnya-paramita-sutra says The doctrine of unreality is the entrance-gate of Mahayana." [FN#196] See the appendix, chap. ii., 'The Mahayana Doctrine of Nihilism.' 9. Zen and Idealism. Next Zen makes use of Idealism as explained by the Dharmalaksana School of Mahayana Buddhism.[FN#197] For instance, the Fourth Patriarch says: "Hundreds and thousands of laws originate with mind. Innumerable mysterious virtues proceed from the mental source." Niu Teu (Go-zu) also says: "When mind arises, various things arise; when mind ceases to exist, various things cease to exist." Tsao Shan (So-zan) carried the point so far that he cried out, on hearing the bell: "It hurts, it pains." Then an attendant of his asked "What is the matter?" "It is my mind," said he, that is struck."[FN#198] [FN#197] Appendix, chap. ii., 'The Mahayana Doctrine of Dharmalaksana.' [FN#198] Zen-rin-rui-shu. We acknowledge the truth of the following considerations: There exists no colour, nor sound, nor odour in the objective world, but there are the vibrations of ether, or the undulations of the air, or the stimuli of the sensory nerves of smell. Colour is nothing but the translation of the stimuli into sensation by the optical nerves, so also sounds by the auditory, and odours by the smelling. Therefore nothing exists objectively exactly as it is perceived by the senses, but all are subjective. Take electricity, for example, it appears as light when perceived through the eye; it appears as sound when perceived through the ear; it appears as taste when perceived through the tongue; but electricity in reality is not light, nor sound, nor taste. Similarly, the mountain is not high nor low; the river is not deep nor shallow; the house is not large nor small; the day is not long nor short; but they seem so through comparison. It is not objective reality that displays the phenomenal universe before us, but it is our mind that plays an important part. Suppose that we have but one sense organ, the eye, then the whole universe should consist of colours and of colours only. If we suppose we were endowed with the sixth sense, which entirely contradicts our five senses, then the whole world would be otherwise. Besides, it is our reason that finds the law of cause and effect in the objective world, that discovered the law of uniformity in Nature, and that discloses scientific laws in the universe so as to form a cosmos. Some scholars maintain that we cannot think of non-existence of space, even if we can leave out all objects in it; nor can we doubt the existence of time, for the existence of mind itself presupposes time. Their very argument, however, proves the subjectivity of time and space, because, if they were objective, we should be able to think them non-existent, as we do with other external objects. Even space and time, therefore are no more than subjective. 10. Idealism is a Potent Medicine for Self-created Mental Disease. In so far as Buddhist idealism refers to the world of sense, in so far as it does not assume that to to be known is identical with to be, in so far as it does not assert that the phenomenal universe is a dream and a vision, we may admit it as true. On the one hand, it serves us as a purifier of our hearts polluted with materialistic desires, and uplifts us above the plain of sensualism; on the other hand, it destroys superstitions which as a rule arise from ignorance and want of the idealistic conception of things. It is a lamentable fact that every country is full of such superstitions people as described by one of the New Thought writers: 'Tens of thousands of women in this country believe that if two people look in a mirror at the same time, or if one thanks the other for a pin, or if one gives a knife or a sharp instrument to a friend, it will break up friendship. If a young lady is presented with a thimble, she will be an old maid. Some people think that after leaving a house it is unlucky to go back after any article which has been forgotten, and, if one is obliged to do so, one should sit down in a chair before going out again; that if a broom touches a person while someone is sweeping, bad luck will follow; and that it is unlucky to change one's place at a table. A man took an opal to a New York jeweller and asked him to buy it. He said that it had brought him nothing but bad luck, that since it had come into his possession he had failed in business, that there bad been much sickness in his family, and all sorts of misfortune had befallen him. He refused to keep the cursed thing any longer. The jeweller examined the stone, and found that it was not an opal after all, but an imitation.' Idealism is a most potent medicine for these self-created mental diseases. It will successfully drive away devils and spirits that frequent ignorant minds, just as Jesus did in the old days. Zen makes use of moral idealism to extirpate, root and branch, all such idle dreams and phantasmagoria of illusion and opens the way to Enlightenment. 11. Idealistic Scepticism concerning Objective Reality. But extreme Idealism identifies 'to be' with 'to be known,' and assumes all phenomena to be ideas as illustrated in Mahayana-vidyamatra-siddhi-tridaca-castra[FN#199] and Vidyamatra-vincati-castra,[FN#200] by Vasubandhu. Then it necessarily parts company with Zen, which believes in Universal Life existing in everything instead of behind it. Idealism shows us its dark side in three sceptic views: (1) scepticism respecting objective reality; (2) scepticism respecting religion; (3) scepticism respecting morality. [FN#199] A philosophical work on Buddhist idealism by Vasubandhu, translated into Chinese by Hiuen Tsang in A.D. 648. There exists a famous commentary on it, compiled by Dharmapala, translated into Chinese by Hiuen Tsang in A.D. 659. See Nanjo's Catalogue, Nos. 1197 and 1125. [FN#200] A simpler work on Idealism, translated into Chinese by Hiuen Tsang in A.D. 661. See Nanjo's Catalogue, Nos. 1238, 1239, and 1240. First it assumes that things exist in so far as they are known by us. It is as a matter of course that if a tree exists at all, it is known as having a trunk long or short, branches large or small, leaves green or yellow, flowers yellow or purple, etc., all of which are ideas. But it does not imply in the least that 'to be known' is equivalent to 'to be existent.' Rather we should say that to be known presupposes to be existent, for we cannot know anything non-existent, even if we admit that the axioms of logic subsist. Again, a tree may stand as ideas to a knower, but it can stand at the same time as a shelter in relation to some birds, as food in relation to some insects, as a world in relation to some minute worms, as a kindred organism to other vegetables. How could you say that its relation to a knower is the only and fundamental relation for the existence of the tree? The disappearance of its knower no more affects the tree than of its feeder; nor the appearance of its knower affects the tree any more than that of kindred vegetables. Extreme idealism erroneously concludes that what is really existent, or what is directly proved to be existent, is only our sensations, ideas, thoughts; that the external world is nothing but the images reflected on the mirror of the mind, and that therefore objective reality of things is doubtful-nay, more, they are unreal, illusory, and dreams. If so, we can no longer distinguish the real from the visionary; the waking from the dreaming; the sane from the insane; the true from the untrue. Whether life is real or an empty dream, we are at a loss to understand. 12. Idealistic Scepticism concerning Religion and Morality. Similarly, it is the case with religion and morality. If we admit extreme idealism as true, there can be nothing objectively real. God is little more than a mental image. He must be a creature of mind instead of a Creator. He has no objective reality. He is when we think He is. He is not when we think He is not. He is at the mercy of our thought. How much more unreal the world must be, which is supposed to have been created by an unreal God! Providence, salvation, and divine grace--what are they? A bare dream dreamed in a dream! What is morality, then? It is subjective. It has no objective validity. A moral conduct highly valued by our fathers is now held to be immoral by us. Immoral acts now strongly denounced by us may be regarded as moral by our posterity. Good deeds of the savage are not necessarily good in the eyes of the civilized, nor evil acts of the Orientals are necessarily evil before the face of the Occidentals. It follows, then, that there is no definite standard of morality in any place at any time. If morality be merely subjective, and there be no objective standard, how can you distinguish evil from good? How can you single out angels from among devils? Was not Socrates a criminal? Was not Jesus also a criminal? How could you know Him to be a Divine man different from other criminals who were crucified with Him? What you honour may I not denounce as disgrace? What you hold as duty may I not condemn as sin? Every form of idealism is doomed, after all, to end in such confusion and scepticism. We cannot embrace radical idealism, which holds these threefold sceptical views in her womb. 13. An Illusion concerning Appearance and Reality. To get Enlightened we must next dispel an illusion respecting appearance and reality. According. to certain religionists, all the phenomena of the universe are to succumb to change. Worldly things one and all are evanescent. They are nought in the long run. Snowcapped mountains may sink into the bottom of the deep, while the sands in the fathomless ocean may soar into the azure sky at some time or other. Blooming flowers are destined to fade and to bloom again in the next year. So destined are growing trees, rising generations, prospering nations, glowing suns, moons, and stars. This, they would say, is only the case with phenomena or appearances, but not with reality. Growth and decay, birth and death, rise and fall, all these are the ebb and flow of appearances in the ocean of reality, which is always the same. Flowers may fade and be reduced to dust, yet out of that dust come flowers. Trees may die out, yet they are reproduced somewhere else. The time may come when the earth will become a dead sphere quite unsuitable for human habitation, and the whole of mankind will perish; yet who knows that whether another earth may not be produced as man's home? The sun might have its beginning and end, stars, moons, theirs as well; yet an infinite universe would have no beginning nor end. Again, they say, mutation is of the world of sense or phenomenal appearances, but not of reality. The former are the phases of the latter shown to our senses. Accordingly they are always limited and modified by our senses, just as images are always limited and modified by the mirror in which they are reflected. On this account appearances are subject to limitations, while reality is limitless. And it follows that the former are imperfect, while the latter is perfect; that the former is transient, while the latter is eternal; that the former is relative, while the latter is absolute; that the former is worldly, while the latter is holy; that the former is knowable, while the latter is unknowable. These considerations naturally lead us to an assertion that the world of appearances is valueless, as it is limited, short-lived, imperfect, painful, sinful, hopeless, and miserable; while the realm of reality is to be aspired for, as it is eternal, perfect, comfortable, full of hope, joy, and peace-hence the eternal divorce of appearance and reality. Such a view of life tends to make one minimize the value of man, to neglect the present existence, and to yearn after the future. Some religionists tell us that we men are helpless, sinful, hopeless, and miserable creatures. Worldly riches, temporal honours, and social positions-nay, even sublimities and beauties of the present existence, are to be ignored and despised. We have no need of caring for those things that pass away in a twinkling moment. We must prepare for the future life which is eternal. We must accumulate wealth for that existence. We must endeavour to hold rank in it. We must aspire for the sublimity and beauty and glory of that realm. 14. Where does the Root of the Illusion Lie? Now let us examine where illusion lies hidden from the view of these religionists. It lies deeply rooted in the misconstruction of reality, grows up into the illusive ideas of appearances, and throws its dark shadow on life. The most fundamental error lies in their construing reality as something unknowable existing behind appearances. According to their opinion, all that we know, or perceive, or feel, or imagine about the world, is appearances or phenomena, but not reality itself. Appearances are 'things known as,' but not 'things as they are.' Thing-in-itself, or reality, lies behind appearances permanently beyond our ken. This is probably the most profound metaphysical pit into which philosophical minds have ever fallen in their way of speculation. Things appear, they would say, as we see them through our limited senses; but they must present entirely different aspects to those that differ from ours, just as the vibration of ether appears to us as colours, yet it presents quite different aspects to the colour-blind or to the purblind. The phenomenal universe is what appears to the human mind, and in case our mental constitution undergoes change, it would be completely otherwise. This argument, however, is far from proving that the reality is unknowable, or that it lies hidden behind appearances or presentations. Take, for instance, a reality which appears as a ray of the sun. When it goes through a pane of glass it appears to be colourless, but it exhibits a beautiful spectrum when it passes through a prism. Therefore you assume that a reality appearing as the rays of the sun is neither colourless nor coloured in itself, since these appearances are wholly due to the difference that obtains between the pane of glass and the prism. We contend, however, that the fact does not prove the existence of the reality named the sun's ray beyond or behind the white light, nor its existence beyond or behind the spectrum. It is evident that the reality exists in white light, and that it is known as the white light when it goes through a pane of glass; and that the same reality exists in the spectrum, and is known as the spectrum when it goes through the prism. The reality is known as the white light on the one hand, and as the spectrum on the other. It is not unknowable, but knowable. Suppose that one and the same reality exhibits one aspect when it stands in relation to another object; two aspects when it stands in relation in two different objects; three aspects when it stands in relation to three different objects. The reality of one aspect never proves the unreality of another aspect, for all these three aspects can be equally real. A tree appears to us as a vegetable; it appears to some birds as a shelter; and it appears to some worms as a food. The reality of its aspect as a vegetable never proves the unreality of its aspect as food, nor the reality of its aspect as food disproves the reality of its aspect as shelter. The real tree does not exist beyond or behind the vegetable. We can rely upon its reality, and make use of it to a fruitful result. At the same time, the birds can rely on its reality as a shelter, and build their nests in it; the worms, too, can rely on its reality as food, and eat it-to their satisfaction. A reality which appears to me as my wife must appear to my son as his mother, and never as his wife. But the same real woman is in the wife and in the mother; neither is unreal. 15. Thing-in-Itself means Thing-Knowerless. How, then, did philosophers come to consider reality to be unknowable and hidden behind or beyond appearances? They investigated all the possible presentations in different relationships, and put them all aside as appearances, and brooded on the thing-in-itself, shut out from all possible relationship, and declared it unknowable. Thing-in-itself means thing cut off from all possible relationships. To, put it in another way: thing-in-itself means thing deprived of its relation to its knower--that is to say, thing-knower-less. So that to declare thing-in-itself unknowable is as much as to declare thing-unknowable unknowable; there is no doubt about it, but what does it prove? Deprive yourself of all the possible relationships, and see what you are. Suppose you are not a son to your parents, nor the husband to your wife, nor the father to your children, nor a relative to your kindred, nor a friend to your acquaintances, nor a teacher to your students, nor a citizen to your country, nor an individual member to your society, nor a creature to your God, then you get you-in-yourself. Now ask yourself what is you-in-yourself? You can never answer the question. It is unknowable, just because it is cut off from all knowable relations. Can you thus prove that you-in-yourself exist beyond or behind you? In like manner our universe appears to us human beings as the phenomenal world or presentation. It might appear to other creatures of a different mental constitution as something else. We cannot ascertain how it might seem to Devas, to Asuras, to angels, and to the Almighty, if there be such beings. However different it might seem to these beings, it does not imply that the phenomenal world is unreal, nor that the realm of reality is unknowable. 'Water,' the Indian tradition has it, 'seems to man as a drink, as emerald to Devas, as bloody pus to Pretas, as houses to fishes.' Water is not a whit less real because of its seeming as houses to fishes, and fishes' houses are not less real because of its seeming as emerald to Devas. There is nothing that proves the unreality of it. It is a gross illusion to conceive reality as transcendental to appearances. Reality exists as appearances, and appearances are reality known to human beings. You cannot separate appearances from reality, and hold out the latter as the object of aspiration at the cost of the former. You must acknowledge that the so-called realm of reality which you aspire after, and which you seek for outside or behind the phenomenal universe, exists here on earth. Let Zen teachers tell you that "the world of birth and death is the realm of Nirvana"; "the earth is the pure land of Buddha." 16. The Four Alternatives and the Five Categories. There are, according to Zen, the four classes of religious and philosophical views, technically called the Four Alternatives,[FN#201] of life and of the world. The first is 'the deprivation of subject and the non-deprivation of object' that is to say, the denial of subject, or mind, or Atman, or soul, and the non-denial of object, or matter, or things--a view which denies the reality of mind and asserts the existence of things. Such a view was held by a certain school of Hinayanism, called Sarvastivada, and still is held by some philosophers called materialists or naturalists. The second is the 'deprivation of object and the non-deprivation of subject'--that is to say, the denial of object, or matter, or things, and the non-denial of subject, or mind, or spirit-a view which denies the reality of material object, and asserts the existence of spirit or ideas. Such a view was held by the Dharmalaksana School of Mahayanism, and is still held by some philosophers called idealists. The third is 'the deprivation of both subject and object'--that is to say, the denial of both subject or spirit, and of object or matter-a view which denies the reality of both physical and mental phenomena, and asserts the existence of reality that transcends the phenomenal universe. Such a view was held by the Madhyamika School of Mahayanism, and is still held by some religionists and philosophers of the present day. The fourth is 'the non-deprivation of both subject and object'--that is to say, the non-denial of subject and object--a view which holds mind and body as one and the same reality. Mind, according to this view, is reality experienced inwardly by introspection, and body is the selfsame reality observed outwardly by senses. They are one reality and one life. There also exist other persons and other beings belonging to the same life and reality; consequently all things share in one reality, and life in common with each other. This reality or life is not transcendental to mind and body, or to spirit and matter, but is the unity of them. In other words, this phenomenal world of ours is the realm of reality. This view was held by the Avatamsaka School of Mahayanism, and is still held by Zenists. Thus Zen is not materialistic, nor idealistic, nor nihilistic, but realistic and monistic in its view of the world. [FN#201] Shi-rya-ken in Japanese, the classification mostly made use of by masters of the Rin Zai School of Zen. For the details, see Ki-gai-kwan, by K. Watanabe. There are some scholars that erroneously maintain that Zen is based on the doctrine of unreality of all things expounded by Kumarajiva and his followers. Ko-ben,[FN#202] known as Myo-ye Sho-nin, said 600 years ago: "Yang Shan (Kyo-zan) asked Wei Shan (I-san): 'What shall we do when hundreds, thousands, and millions of things beset us all at once?' 'The blue are not the yellow,' replied Wei Shan, 'the long are not the short. Everything is in its own place. It has no business with you.' Wei Shan was a great Zen master. He did not teach the unreality of all things. Who can say that Zen is nihilistic?" [FN#202] A well-known scholar (1173-1232) of the Anatamsaka School of Mahayanism. Besides the Four Alternatives, Zen uses the Five Categories[FN#203] in order to explain the relation between reality and phenomena. The first is 'Relativity in Absolute,' which means that the universe appears to be consisting in relativities, owing to our relative knowledge; but these relativities are based on absolute reality. The second is 'Absolute in Relativity,' which means Absolute Reality does not remain inactive, but manifests itself as relative phenomena. The third is 'Relativity out of Absolute,' which means Absolute Reality is all in all, and relative phenomena come out of it as its secondary and subordinate forms. The fourth is 'Absolute up to Relativity,' which means relative phenomena always play an important part on the stage of the world; it is through these phenomena that Absolute Reality comes to be understood. The fifth is the 'Union of both Absolute and Relativity,' which means Absolute Reality is not fundamental or essential to relative phenomena, nor relative phenomena subordinate or secondary to Absolute Reality--that is to say, they are one and the same cosmic life, Absolute Reality being that life experienced inwardly by intuition, while relative phenomena are the same life outwardly observed by senses. The first four Categories are taught to prepare the student's mind for the acceptance of the last one, which reveals the most profound truth. [FN#203] Go-i in Japanese, mostly used by the So-To School of Zen. The detailed explanation is given in Go-i-ken-ketsu. 17. Personalism of B. P. Bowne. B. P. Bowne[FN#204] says: They (phenomena) are not phantoms or illusions, nor are they masks of a back-lying reality which is trying to peer through them." "The antithesis," he continues,[FN#205] "of phenomena and noumena rests on the fancy that there is something that rests behind phenomena which we ought to perceive but cannot, because the masking phenomena thrusts itself between the reality and us." Just so far we agree with Bowne, but we think he is mistaken in sharply distinguishing between body and self, saying:[FN#206] "We ourselves are invisible. The physical organism is only an instrument for expressing and manifesting the inner life, but the living self is never seen." "Human form," he argues,[FN#207] "as an object in space apart from our experience of it as the instrument and expression of personal life, would have little beauty or attraction; and when it is described in anatomical terms, there is nothing in it that we should desire it. The secret of its beauty and its value lies in the invisible realm." "The same is true," he says again, "of literature. It does not exist in space, or in time, or in books, or in libraries . . . all that could be found there would be black marks on a white paper, and collections of these bound together in various forms, which would be all the eyes could see. But this would not be literature, for literature has its existence only in mind and for mind as an expression of mind, and it is simply impossible and meaningless in abstraction from mind." "Our human history"--he gives another illustration[FN#208]--"never existed in space, and never could so exist. If some visitor from Mars should come to the earth and look at all that goes on in space in connection with human beings, he would never get any hint of its real significance. He would be confined to integrations and dissipations of matter and motion. He could describe the masses and grouping of material things, but in all this be would get no suggestion of the inner life which gives significance to it all. As conceivably a bird might sit on a telegraph instrument and become fully aware of the clicks of the machine without any suspicion of the existence or meaning of the message, or a dog could see all that eye can see in a book yet without any hint of its meaning, or a savage could gaze at the printed score of an opera without ever suspecting its musical import, so this supposed visitor would be absolutely cut off by an impassable gulf from the real seat and significance of human history. The great drama of life, with its likes and dislikes, its loves and hates, its ambitions and strivings, and manifold ideas, inspirations, aspirations, is absolutely foreign to space, and could never in any way be discovered in space. So human history has its seat in the invisible." [FN#204] 'Personalism,' p. 94. [FN#205] Ibid., p. 95. [FN#206] Ibid., p. 268. [FN#207] Ibid., p. 271. [FN#208] 'Personalism,' pp. 272, 273. In the first place, Bowne's conception of the physical organism as but an instrument for the expression of the inner, personal life, just as the telegraphic apparatus is the instrument for the expression of messages, is erroneous, because body is not a mere instrument of inner personal life, but an essential constituent of it. Who can deny that one's physical conditions determine one's character or personality? Who can overlook the fact that one's bodily conditions positively act upon one's personal life? There is no physical organism which remains as a mere passive mechanical instrument of inner life within the world of experience. Moreover, individuality, or personality, or self, or inner life, whatever you may call it, conceived as absolutely independent of physical condition, is sheer abstraction. There is no such concrete personality or individuality within our experience. In the second place, he conceives the physical organism simply as a mark or symbol, and inner personal life as the thing marked or symbolized; so he compares physical forms with paper, types, books, and libraries, and inner life, with literature. In so doing he overlooks the essential and inseparable connection between the physical organism and inner life, because there is no essential inseparable connection between a mark or symbol and the thing marked or symbolized. The thing may adopt any other mark or symbol. The black marks on the white paper, to use his figure, are not essential to literature. Literature may be expressed by singing, or by speech, or by a series of pictures. But is there inner life expressed, or possible to be expressed, in any other form save physical organism? We must therefore acknowledge that inner life is identical with physical organism, and that reality is one and the same as appearance. 18. All the Worlds in Ten Directions are Buddha's Holy Land. We are to resume this problem in the following chapter. Suffice it to say for the present it is the law of Universal Life that manifoldness is in unity, and unity is in manifoldness; difference is in agreement, and agreement in difference; confliction is in harmony, and harmony in confliction; parts are in the whole, and the whole is in parts; constancy is in change, and change in constancy; good is in bad, and bad in good; integration is in disintegration, and disintegration is in integration; peace is in disturbance, and disturbance in peace. We can find something celestial among the earthly. We can notice something glorious in the midst of the base and degenerated. 'There are nettles everywhere, but are not smooth, green grasses more common still?' Can you recognize something awe-inspiring in the rise and fall of nations? Can you not recognize something undisturbed and peaceful among disturbance and trouble? Has not even grass some meaning? Does not even a stone tell the mystery of Life? Does not the immutable law of good sway over human affairs after all, as Tennyson says- "I can but trust that good shall fall At last-far off-at last, to all." Has not each of us a light within him, whatever degrees of lustre there may be? Was Washington in the wrong when he said: "Labour to keep alive in your heart that little spark of celestial fire called conscience." We are sure that we can realize the celestial bliss in this very world, if we keep alive the Enlightened Consciousness, of which Bodhidharma and his followers showed the example. 'All the worlds in ten directions are Buddha's Holy Lands!' That Land of Bliss and Glory exists above us, under us, around us, within us, without us, if we open our eyes to see. 'Nirvana is in life itself,' if we enjoy it with admiration and love. "Life and death are the life of Buddha," says Do-gen. Everywhere the Elysian gates stand open, if we do not shut them up by ourselves. Shall we starve ourselves refusing to accept the rich bounty which the Blessed Life offers to us? Shall we perish in the darkness of scepticism, shutting our eyes to the light of Tathagata? Shall we suffer from innumerable pains in the self-created hell where remorse, jealousy, and hatred feed the fire of anger? Let us pray to Buddha, not in word only, but in the deed of generosity and tolerance, in the character noble and loving, and in the personality sublime and good. Let us pray to Buddha to save us from the hell of greed and folly, to deliver us from the thraldom of temptation. Let us 'enter the Holy of Holies in admiration and wonder.' CHAPTER VII LIFE 1. Epicureanism and Life. There are a good many people always buoyant in spirit and mirthful in appearance as if born optimists. There are also no fewer persons constantly crestfallen and gloomy as if born pessimists. The former, however, may lose their buoyancy and sink deep in despair if they are in adverse circumstances. The latter, too, may regain their brightness and grow exultant if they are under prosperous conditions. As there is no evil however small but may cause him to groan under it, who has his heart undisciplined, so there is no calamity however great but may cause him to despair, who has his feelings in control. A laughing child would cry, a crying child would laugh, without a sufficient cause. 'It can be teased or tickled into anything.' A grown-up child is he who cannot hold sway over his passions. He should die a slave to his heart, which is wayward and blind, if he be indulgent to it. It is of capital importance for us to discipline the heart,[FN#209] otherwise it will discipline us. Passions are like legs. They should be guided by the eye of reason. No wise serpent is led by its tail, so no wise man is led by his passion. Passions that come first are often treacherous and lead us astray. We must guard ourselves against them. In order to gratify them there arise mean desires-the desires to please sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. These five desires are ever pursuing or, rather, driving us. We must not spend our whole lives in pursuit of those mirage-like objects which gratify our sensual desires. When we gratify one desire, we are silly enough to fancy that we have realized true happiness. But one desire gratified begets another stronger and more insatiable. Thirst allayed with salt water becomes more intense than ever. [FN#209] Compare Gaku-do-yo-jin-shu, chap. i., and Zen-kwan-saku shin. Shakya Muni compared an Epicurean with a dog chewing a dry bone, mistaking the blood out of a wound in his mouth for that of the bone. The author of Mahaparinirvana-sutra[FN#210] has a parable to the following effect: 'Once upon a time a hunter skilled in catching monkeys alive went into the wood. He put something very sticky on the ground, and hid himself among the bushes. By-and-by a monkey came out to see what it was, and supposing it to be something eatable, tried to feed on it. It stuck to the poor creature's snout so firmly that he could not shake it off. Then he attempted to tear it off with both his paws, which also stuck to it. Thereupon he strove to kick it off with both his hind-legs, which were caught too. Then the hunter came out, and thrusting his stick through between the paws and hind-legs of the victim, and thus carrying it on his shoulder, went home.' In like manner an Epicurean (the monkey), allured by the objects of sense (something sticky), sticks to the five desires (the snout and the four limbs), and being caught by Temptation (the hunter), loses his life of Wisdom. [FN#210] The sutra translated by Hwui Yen and Hwui Kwan, A.D. 424-453. We are no more than a species of monkeys, as evolutionists hold. Not a few testify to this truth by their being caught by means of 'something eatable.' We abolished slavery and call ourselves civilized nations. Have we not, nevertheless, hundreds of life-long slaves to cigars among us? Have we not thousands of life-long slaves to spirits among us? Have we not hundreds of thousands of life-long slaves to gold among us? Have we not myriads of lifelong slaves to vanity among us? These slaves are incredibly loyal to, and incessantly work for, their masters, who in turn bestow on them incurable diseases, poverty, chagrin, and disappointment. A poor puppy with an empty can tied to his tail, Thomas Carlyle wittily observes, ran and ran on, frightened by the noise of the can. The more rapidly he ran, the more loudly it rang, and at last he fell exhausted of running. Was it not typical of a so-called great man of the world? Vanity tied an empty can of fame to his tail, the hollow noise of which drives him through life until he falls to rise no more. Miserable! Neither these men of the world nor Buddhist ascetics can be optimists. The latter rigorously deny themselves sensual gratifications, and keep themselves aloof from all objects of pleasure. For them to be pleased is equivalent to sin, and to laugh, to be cursed. They would rather touch an adder's head than a piece of money.[FN#211] They would rather throw themselves into a fiery furnace than to come in contact with the other sex. Body for them is a bag full of blood and pus;[FN#212] life, an idle, or rather evil, dream. Vegetarianism and celibacy are their holy privileges. Life is unworthy of having; to put an end to it is their deliverance.[FN#213] Such a view of life is hardly worth our refutation. [FN#211] Such is the precept taught in the Vinaya of Hinayanists. [FN#212] See Mahasatiptthana Suttanta, 2-13. [FN#213] This is the logical conclusion of Hinayanism. 2. The Errors of Philosophical Pessimists and Religious Optimists. Philosophical pessimists[FN#214] maintain that there are on earth many more causes of pain than of pleasure; and that pain exists positively, but pleasure is a mere absence of pain because we are conscious of sickness but not of health; of loss, but not of possession. On the contrary, religious optimists insist that there must not be any evil in God's universe, that evil has no independent nature, but simply denotes a privation of good--that is, evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound.' [FN#214] Schopenhauer, 'The World as Will and Idea' (R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp's translation, vol. iii., pp. 384-386); Hartman, 'Philosophy of the Unconsciousness' (W. C. Coupland's translation, vol. iii., pp. 12-119). No matter what these one-sided observers' opinion may be, we are certain that we experience good as well as evil, and feel pain and pleasure as well. Neither can we alleviate the real sufferings of the sick by telling them that sickness is no other than the absence of health, nor can we make the poor a whit richer by telling them that poverty is a mere absence of riches. How could we save the dying by persuading them that death is a bare privation of life? Is it possible to dispirit the happy by telling them that happiness is unreal, or make the fortunate miserable by telling them that fortune has no objective reality, or to make one welcome evil by telling one that it is only the absence of good? You must admit there are no definite external causes of pain nor those of pleasure, for one and the same thing causes pain at one time and pleasure at another. A cause of delight to one person turns out to be that of aversion to another. A dying miser might revive at the sight of gold, yet a Diogenes would pass without noticing it. Cigars and wine are blessed gifts of heaven to the intemperate,[FN#215] but accursed poison to the temperate. Some might enjoy a long life, but others would heartily desire to curtail it. Some might groan under a slight indisposition, while others would whistle away a life of serious disease. An Epicure might be taken prisoner by poverty, yet an Epictetus would fearlessly face and vanquish him. How, then, do you distinguish the real cause of pain from that of pleasure? How do you know the causes of one are more numerous than the causes of the other? [FN#215] The author of Han Shu (Kan Sho) calls spirits the gift of Heaven. Expose thermometers of several kinds to one and the same temperature. One will indicate, say, 60°, another as high as 100°, another as low as 15°. Expose the thermometers of human sensibilities, which are of myriads of different kinds, to one and the same temperature of environment. None of them will indicate the same degrees. In one and the same climate, which we think moderate, the Eskimo would be washed with perspiration, while the Hindu would shudder with cold. Similarly, under one and the same circumstance some might be extremely miserable and think it unbearable, yet others would be contented and happy. Therefore we may safely conclude that there are no definite external causes of pain and pleasure, and that there must be internal causes which modify the external. 3. The Law of Balance. Nature governs the world with her law of balance. She puts things ever in pairs,[FN#216] and leaves nothing in isolation. Positives stand in opposition to negatives, actives to passives, males to females, and so on. Thus we get the ebb in opposition to the flood tide; the centrifugal force to the centripetal; attraction to repulsion; growth to decay; toxin to antitoxin; light to shade; action to reaction; unity to variety; day to night; the animate to the inanimate. Look at our own bodies: the right eye is placed side by side with the left; the left shoulder with the right; the right lung with the left; the left hemisphere of the brain with that of the right; and so forth. [FN#216] Zenists call them 'pairs of opposites.' It holds good also in human affairs: advantage is always accompanied by disadvantage; loss by gain; convenience by inconvenience; good by evil; rise by fall; prosperity by adversity; virtue by vice; beauty by deformity; pain by pleasure; youth by old age; life by death. 'A handsome young lady of quality,' a parable in Mahaparinirvana-sutra tells us, 'who carries with her an immense treasure is ever accompanied by her sister, an ugly woman in rags, who destroys everything within her reach. If we win the former, we must also get the latter.' As pessimists show intense dislike towards the latter and forget the former, so optimists admire the former so much that they are indifferent to the latter. 4. Life Consists in Conflict. Life consists in conflict. So long as man remains a social animal he cannot live in isolation. All individual hopes and aspirations depend on society. Society is reflected in the individual, and the individual in society. In spite of this, his inborn free will and love of liberty seek to break away from social ties. He is also a moral animal, and endowed with love and sympathy. He loves his fellow-beings, and would fain promote their welfare; but he must be engaged in constant struggle against them for existence. He sympathizes even with animals inferior to him, and heartily wishes to protect them; yet he is doomed to destroy their lives day and night. He has many a noble aspiration, and often soars aloft by the wings of imagination into the realm of the ideal; still his material desires drag him down to the earth. He lives on day by day to continue his life, but he is unfailingly approaching death at every moment. The more he secures new pleasure, spiritual or material, the more he incurs pain not yet experienced. One evil removed only gives place to another; one advantage gained soon proves itself a disadvantage. His very reason is the cause of his doubt and suspicion; his intellect, with which he wants to know everything, declares itself to be incapable of knowing anything in its real state; his finer sensibility, which is the sole source of finer pleasure, has to experience finer suffering. The more he asserts himself, the more he has to sacrifice himself. These conflictions probably led Kant to call life "a trial time, wherein most succumb, and in which even the best does not rejoice in his life." "Men betake themselves," says Fichte, "to the chase after felicity. . . . But as soon as they withdraw into themselves and ask themselves, 'Am I now happy?' the reply comes distinctly from the depth of their soul, 'Oh no; thou art still just as empty and destitute as before!' . . . They will in the future life just as vainly seek blessedness as they have sought it in the present life." It is not without reason that the pessimistic minds came to conclude that 'the unrest of unceasing willing and desiring by which every creature is goaded is in itself unblessedness,' and that 'each creature is in constant danger, constant agitation, and the whole, with its restless, meaningless motion, is a tragedy of the most piteous kind.' 'A creature like the carnivorous animal, who cannot exist at all without continually destroying and tearing others, may not feel its brutality, but man, who has to prey on other sentient beings like the carnivorous, is intelligent enough, as hard fate would have it, to know and feel his own brutal living.' He must be the most miserable of all creatures, for he is most conscious of his own misery. Furthermore, 'he experiences not only the misfortunes which actually befall him, but in imagination he goes through every possibility of evil.' Therefore none, from great kings and emperors down to nameless beggars, can be free from cares and anxieties, which 'ever flit around them like ghosts.' 5. The Mystery of Life. Thus far we have pointed out the inevitable conflictions in life in order to prepare ourselves for an insight into the depth of life. We are far from being pessimistic, for we believe that life consists in confliction, but that confliction does not end in confliction, but in a new form of harmony. Hope comes to conflict with fear, and is often threatened with losing its hold on mind; then it renews its life and takes root still deeper than before. Peace is often disturbed with wars, but then it gains a still firmer ground than ever. Happiness is driven out of mind by melancholy, then it is re-enforced by favourable conditions and returns with double strength. Spirit is dragged down by matter from its ideal heaven, then, incited by shame, it tries a higher flight. Good is opposed by evil, then it gathers more strength and vanquishes its foe. Truth is clouded by falsehood, then it issues forth with its greater light. Liberty is endangered by tyranny, then it overthrows it with a splendid success. Manifoldness stands out boldly against unity; difference against agreement; particularity against generality; individuality against society. Manifoldness, nevertheless, instead of annihilating, enriches unity; difference, instead of destroying agreement, gives it variety; particularities, instead of putting an end to generality, increase its content; individuals, instead of breaking the harmony of society, strengthen the power of it. Thus 'Universal Life does not swallow up manifoldness nor extinguish differences, but it is the only means of bringing to its full development the detailed content of reality; in particular, it does not abolish the great oppositions of life and world, but takes them up into itself and brings them into fruitful relations with each other.' Therefore 'our life is a mysterious blending of freedom and necessity, power and limitation, caprice and law; yet these opposites are constantly seeking and finding a mutual adjustment.' 6. Nature Favours Nothing in Particular. There is another point of view of life, which gave the present writer no small contentment, and which he believes would cure one of pessimistic complaint. Buddha, or Universal Life conceived by Zen, is not like a capricious despot, who acts not seldom against his own laws. His manifestation as shown in the Enlightened Consciousness is lawful, impartial, and rational. Buddhists believe that even Shakya Muni himself was not free from the law of retribution, which includes, in our opinion, the law of balance and that of causation. Now let us briefly examine how the law of balance holds its sway over life and the world. When the Cakravartin, according to an Indian legend, the universal monarch, would come to govern the earth, a wheel would also appear as one of his treasures, and go on rolling all over the world, making everything level and smooth. Buddha is the spiritual Cakravartin, whose wheel is the wheel of the law of balance, with which he governs all things equally and impartially. First let us observe the simplest cases where the law of balance holds good. Four men can finish in three days the same amount of work as is done by three men in four days. The increase in the number of men causes the decrease in that of days, the decrease in the number of men causes the increase in that of days, the result being always the same. Similarly the increase in the sharpness of a knife is always accompanied by a decrease in its durability, and the increase of durability by a decrease of sharpness. The more beautiful flowers grow, the uglier their fruits become; the prettier the fruits grow, the simpler become their flowers. 'A strong soldier is ready to die; a strong tree is easy to be broken; hard leather is easy to be torn. But the soft tongue survives the hard teeth.' Horned creatures are destitute of tusks, the sharp-tusked creatures lack horns. Winged animals are not endowed with paws, and handed animals are provided with no wings. Birds of beautiful plumage have no sweet voice, and sweet-voiced songsters no feathers of bright colours. The finer in quality, the smaller in quantity, and bulkier in size, the coarser in nature. Nature favours nothing in particular. So everything has its advantage and disadvantage as well. What one gains on the one hand one loses on the other. The ox is competent in drawing a heavy cart, but he is absolutely incompetent in catching mice. A shovel is fit for digging, but not for ear-picking. Aeroplanes are good for aviation, but not for navigation. Silkworms feed on mulberry leaves and make silk from it, but they can do nothing with other leaves. Thus everything has its own use or a mission appointed by Nature; and if we take advantage of it, nothing is useless, but if not, all are useless. 'The neck of the crane may seem too long to some idle on-lookers, but there is no surplus in it. The limbs of the tortoise may appear too short, but there is no shortcoming in them.' The centipede, having a hundred limbs, can find no useless feet; the serpent, having no foot, feels no want. 7. The Law of Balance in Life. It is also the case with human affairs. Social positions high or low, occupations spiritual or temporal, work rough or gentle, education perfect or imperfect, circumstances needy or opulent, each has its own advantage as well as disadvantage. The higher the position the graver the responsibilities, the lower the rank the lighter the obligation. The director of a large bank can never be so careless as his errand-boy who may stop on the street to throw a stone at a sparrow; nor can the manager of a large plantation have as good a time on a rainy day as his day-labourers who spend it in gambling. The accumulation of wealth is always accompanied by its evils; no Rothschild nor Rockefeller can be happier than a poor pedlar. A mother of many children may be troubled by her noisy little ones and envy her sterile friend, who in turn may complain of her loneliness; but if they balance what they gain with what they lose, they will find the both sides are equal. The law of balance strictly forbids one's monopoly of happiness. It applies its scorpion whip to anyone who is given to pleasures. Joy in extremity lives next door to exceeding sorrow. "Where there is much light," says Goethe, "shadow is deep." Age, withered and disconsolate, lurks under the skirts of blooming youth. The celebration of birthday is followed by the commemoration of death. Marriage might be supposed to be the luckiest event in one's life, but the widow's tears and the orphan's sufferings also might be its outcome. But for the former the latter can never be. The death of parents is indeed the unluckiest event in the son's life, but it may result in the latter's inheritance of an estate, which is by no means unlucky. The disease of a child may cause its parents grief, but it is a matter of course that it lessens the burden of their livelihood. Life has its pleasures, but also its pains. Death has no pleasure of life, but also none of its pain. So that if we balance their smiles and tears, life and death are equal. It is not wise for us, therefore, to commit suicide while the terms of our life still remain, nor to fear death when there is no way of avoiding it. Again, the law of balance does not allow anyone to take the lion's share of nature's gifts. Beauty in face is accompanied by deformity in character. Intelligence is often uncombined with virtue. "Fair girls are destined to be unfortunate," says a Japanese proverb, "and men of ability to be sickly." "He makes no friend who never makes a foe." "Honesty is next to idiocy." "Men of genius," says Longfellow, "are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor when it descends to earth is only a stone." Honour and shame go hand in hand. Knowledge and virtue live in poverty, while ill health and disease are inmates of luxury. Every misfortune begets some sort of fortune, while every good luck gives birth to some sort of bad luck. Every prosperity never fails to sow seeds of adversity, while every fall never fails to bring about some kind of rise. We must not, then, despair in days of frost and snow, reminding ourselves of sunshine and flowers that follow them; nor must we be thoughtless in days of youth and health, keeping in mind old age and ill health that are in the rear of them. In brief, all, from crowns and coronets down to rags and begging bowls, have their own happiness and share heavenly grace alike. 8. The Application of the Law of Causation to Morals. Although it may be needless to state here the law of causation at any length, yet it is not equally needless to say a few words about its application to morals as the law of retribution, which is a matter of dispute even among Buddhist scholars. The kernel of the idea is very simple-like seed, like fruit; like cause, like effect; like action, like influence--nothing more. As fresh air strengthens and impure air chokes us, so good conduct brings about good consequence, and bad conduct does otherwise.[FN#217] [FN#217] Zen lays much stress on this law. See Shu-sho-gi and Ei-hei-ka-kun, by Do-gen. Over against these generalizations we raise no objection, but there are many cases, in practical life, of doubtful nature. An act of charity, for example, might do others some sort of damage, as is often the case with the giving of alms to the poor, which may produce the undesirable consequence of encouraging beggary. An act of love might produce an injurious effect, as the mother's love often spoils her children. Some[FN#218] may think these are cases of good cause and bad effect. We have, however, to analyze these causes and effects in order to find in what relation they stand. In the first case the good action of almsgiving produces the good effect of lessening the sufferings of the poor, who should be thankful for their benefactor. The giver is rewarded in his turn by the peace and satisfaction of his conscience. The poor, however, when used to being given alms are inclined to grow lazy and live by means of begging. Therefore the real cause of the bad effect is the thoughtlessness of both the giver and the given, but not charity itself. In the second case the mother's love and kindness produce a good effect on her and her children, making them all happy, and enabling them to enjoy the pleasure of the sweet home; yet carelessness and folly on the part of the mother and ingratitude on the part of the children may bring about the bad effect. [FN#218] Dr. H. Kato seems to have thought that good cause may bring out bad effect when he attacked Buddhism on this point. History is full of numerous cases in which good persons were so unfortunate as to die a miserable death or to live in extreme poverty, side by side with those cases in which bad people lived in health and prosperity, enjoying a long life. Having these cases in view, some are of the opinion that there is no law of retribution as believed by the Buddhists. And even among the Buddhist scholars themselves there are some who think of the law of retribution as an ideal, and not as a law governing life. This is probably due to their misunderstanding of the historical facts. There is no reason because he is good and honourable that he should be wealthy or healthy; nor is there any reason because he is bad that he should be poor or sickly. To be good is one thing, and to be healthy or rich is another. So also to be bad is one thing, And to be poor and sick is another. The good are not necessarily the rich or the healthy, nor are the bad necessarily the sick or the poor. Health must be secured by the strict observance of hygienic rules, and not by the keeping of ethical precepts; nor can wealth ever be accumulated by bare morality, but by economical and industrial activity. The moral conduct of a good person has no responsibility for his ill health or poverty; so also the immoral action of a bad person has no concern with his wealth or health. You should not confuse the moral with the physical law, since the former belongs only to human life, while the latter to the physical world. The good are rewarded morally, not physically; their own virtues, honours, mental peace, and satisfaction are ample compensation for their goodness. Confucius, for example, was never rich nor high in rank; he was, nevertheless, morally rewarded with his virtues, honours, and the peace of mind. The following account of him,[FN#219] though not strictly historical, well explains his state of mind in the days of misfortune: "When Confucius was reduced to extreme distress between Khan and Zhai, for seven days he had no cooked meat to eat, but only some soup of coarse vegetables without any rice in it. His countenance wore the appearance of great exhaustion, and yet be kept playing on his lute and singing inside the house. Yen Hui (was outside) selecting the vegetables, while Zze Lu and Zze Kung were talking together, and said to him: 'The master has twice been driven from Lu; he had to flee from Wei; the tree beneath which he rested was cut down in Sung; he was reduced to extreme distress in Shang and Kau; he is held in a state of siege here between Khan and Zhai; anyone who kills him will be held guiltless; there is no prohibition against making him a prisoner. And yet he keeps playing and singing, thrumming his lute without ceasing. Can a superior man be without the feeling of shame to such an extent as this?' Yen Hui gave them no reply, but went in and told (their words) to Confucius, who pushed aside his lute and said: 'Yu and Zhze are small men. Call them here, and I will explain the thing to them.' [FN#219] The account is given by Chwang Tsz in his book, vol. xviii., p. 17. "When they came in, Zze Lu said: 'Your present condition may be called one of extreme distress!' Confucius replied: 'What words are these? When the superior man has free course with his principles, that is what we call his success; when such course is denied, that is what we call his failure. Now I hold in my embrace the principles of righteousness and benevolence, and with them meet the evils of a disordered age; where is the proof of my being in extreme distress? Therefore, looking inwards and examining myself, I have no difficulties about my principles; though I encounter such difficulties (as the present), I do not lose my virtue. It is when winter's cold is come, and the hoar-frost and snow are falling, that we know the vegetative power of the pine and cypress. This distress between Khan and Zhai is fortunate for me.' He then took back his lute so that it emitted a twanging sound, and began to play and sing. (At the same time) Zze Lu hurriedly seized a shield and began to dance, while Zze Kung said: 'I did not know (before) the height of heaven nor the depth of earth!'" Thus the good are unfailingly rewarded with their own virtue, and the wholesome consequences of their actions on society at large. And the bad are inevitably recompensed with their own vices, and the injurious effects of their actions on their fellow-beings. This is the unshaken conviction of humanity, past, present, and future. It is the pith and marrow of our moral ideal. It is the crystallization of ethical truths, distilled through long experiences from time immemorial to this day. We can safely approve Edwin Arnold, as he says: "Lo I as hid seed shoots after rainless years, So good and evil, pains and pleasures, hates And loves, and all dead deeds come forth again, Bearing bright leaves, or dark, sweet fruit or sour." Longfellow also says: "No action, whether foul or fair, Is ever done, but it leaves somewhere A record-as a blessing or a curse." 9. Retribution[FN#220] in the Past, the Present, and the Future Life. Then a question suggests itself: If there be no soul that survives body (as shown in the preceding chapter), who will receive the retributions of our actions in the present life? To answer this question, we have to restate our conviction that life is one and the same; in other words, the human beings form one life or one self--that is to say, our ancestors in the past formed man's past life. We ourselves now form man's present life, and our posterity will form the future life. Beyond all doubt, all actions of man in the past have brought their fruits on the present conditions of man, and all actions of the present man are sure to influence the conditions of the future man. To put it in another way, we now reap the fruits of what we sowed in our past life (or when we lived as our fathers), and again shall reap the fruits of what we now sow in our future life (or when we shall live as our posterity). There is no exception to this rigorous law of retribution, and we take it as the will of Buddha to leave no action without being retributed. Thus it is Buddha himself who kindles our inward fire to save ourselves from sin and crimes. We must purge out all the stains in our hearts, obeying Buddha's command audible in the innermost self of ours. It is the great mercy of His that, however sinful, superstitious, wayward, and thoughtless, we have still a light within us which is divine in its nature. When that light shines forth, all sorts of sin are destroyed at once. What is our sin, after all? It is nothing but illusion or error originating in ignorance and folly. How true it is, as an Indian Mahayanist declares, that 'all frost and the dewdrops of sin disappear in the sunshine of wisdom!'[FN#221] Even if we might be imprisoned in the bottomless bell, yet let once the Light of Buddha shine upon us, it would be changed into heaven. Therefore the author of Mahakarunika-sutra[FN#222] says: "When I climb the mountain planted with swords, they would break under my tread. When I sail on the sea of blood, it will be dried up. When I arrive at Hades, they will be ruined at once." [FN#220] The retribution cannot be explained by the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul, for it is incompatible with the fundamental doctrine of non-soul. See Abhidharmamahavibhasa-castra, vol. cxiv. [FN#221] Samantabhadra-dhyana-sutra. [FN#222] Nanjo's Catalogue, No. 117. 10. The Eternal Life as taught by Professor Munsterberg. Some philosophical pessimists undervalue life simply because it is subject to limitation. They ascribe all evils to that condition, forgetting that without limitation life is a mere blank. Suppose our sight could see all things at once, then sight has no value nor use for us, because it is life's purpose to choose to see one thing or another out of many; and if all things be present at once before us through sight, it is of no purpose. The same is true of intellect, bearing, smell, touch, feeling, and will. If they be limitless, they cease to be useful for us. Individuality necessarily implies limitation, hence if there be no limitation in the world, then there is no room for individuality. Life without death is no life at all. Professor Hugo Munsterberg finds no value, so it seems to me, in 'such life as beginning with birth and ending with death.' He says:[FN#223] "My life as a causal system of physical and psychological processes, which lies spread out in time between the dates of my birth and of my death, will come to an end with my last breath; to continue it, to make it go on till the earth falls into the sun, or a billion times longer, would be without any value, as that kind of life which is nothing but the mechanical occurrence of physiological and psychological phenomena had as such no ultimate value for me or for you, or for anyone, at any time. But my real life, as a system of interrelated-will-attitudes, has nothing before or after because it is beyond time. It is independent of birth and death because it cannot be related to biological events; it is not born, and will not die; it is immortal; all possible thinkable time is enclosed in it; it is eternal." [FN#223] 'The Eternal Life,' p. 26. Professor Munsterberg tries to distinguish sharply life as the causal system of physiological and psychological processes, and life as a system of interrelated-will-attitudes, and denounces the former as fleeting and valueless, in order to prize the latter as eternal and of absolute value. How could he, however, succeed in his task unless he has two or three lives, as some animals are believed to have? Is it not one and the same life that is treated on the one hand by science as a system of physiological and psychological processes, and is conceived on the other by the Professor himself as a system of interrelated-will-attitudes? It is true that science treats of life as it is observed in time, space, and causality, and it estimates it of no value, since to estimate the value of things is no business of science. The same life observed as a system of interrelated-will-attitudes is independent of time, space, and causality as he affirms. One and the same life includes both phases, the difference being in the points of view of the observers. Life as observed only from the scientific point of view is bare abstraction; it is not concrete life; nor is life as observed only in the interrelated-will-attitude point of view the whole of life. Both are abstractions. Concrete life includes both phases. Moreover, Professor Munsterberg sees life in the relationship entirely independent-of time, space, and causality, saying: "If you agree or disagree with the latest act of the Russian Czar, the only significant relation which exists between him and you has nothing to do with the naturalistic fact that geographically 'an ocean lies between you; and if you are really a student of Plato, your only important relation to the Greek philosopher has nothing to do with the other naturalistic fact that biologically two thousand years lie between you"; and declares life (seen from that point of view) to be immortal and eternal. This is as much as to say that life, when seen in the relationship independent of time and space, is independent of time and space-that is, immortal and eternal. Is it not mere tautology? He is in the right in insisting that life can be seen from the scientific point of view as a system of physiological and psychological processes, and at the same time as a system of interrelated-will-attitudes independent of time and space. But he cannot by that means prove the existence of concrete individual life which is eternal and immortal, because that which is independent of time and space is the relationship in which he observes life, but not life itself. Therefore we have to notice that life held by Professor Munsterberg to be eternal and immortal is quite a different thing from the eternal life or immortality of soul believed by common sense. 11. Life in the Concrete. Life in the concrete, which we are living, greatly differs from life in the abstract, which exists only in the class-room. It is not eternal; it is fleeting; it is full of anxieties, pains, struggles, brutalities, disappointments, and calamities. We love life, however, -not only for its smoothness, but for its roughness; not only for its pleasure, but for its pain; not only for its hope, but for its fear; not only for its flowers, but for its frost and snow. As Issai[FN#224] (Sato) has aptly put it: "Prosperity is like spring, in which we have green leaves and flowers wherever we go; while adversity is like winter, in which we have snow and ice. Spring, of course, pleases us; winter, too, displeases us not." Adversity is salt to our lives, as it keeps them from corruption, no matter how bitter to taste it way be. It is the best stimulus to body and mind, since it brings forth latent energy that may remain dormant but for it. Most people hunt after pleasure, look for good luck, hunger after success, and complain of pain, ill-luck, and failure. It does not occur to them that 'they who make good luck a god are all unlucky men,' as George Eliot has wisely observed. Pleasure ceases to be pleasure when we attain to it; another sort of pleasure displays itself to tempt us. It is a mirage, it beckons to us to lead us astray. When an overwhelming misfortune looks us in the face, our latent power is sure to be aroused to grapple with it. Even delicate girls exert the power of giants at the time of emergency; even robbers or murderers are found to be kind and generous when we are thrown into a common disaster. Troubles and difficulties call forth our divine force, which lies deeper than the ordinary faculties, and which we never before dreamed we possessed. [FN#224] A noted scholar (1772-1859) and author, who belonged to the Wang School of Confucianism. See Gen-shi-roku. 12. Difficulties are no Match for the Optimist. How can we suppose that we, the children of Buddha, are put at the mercy of petty troubles, or intended to be crushed by obstacles? Are we not endowed with inner force to fight successfully against obstacles and difficulties, and to wrest trophies of glory from hardships? Are we to be slaves to the vicissitudes of fortune? Are we doomed to be victims for the jaws of the environment? It is not external obstacles themselves, but our inner fear and doubt that prove to be the stumbling-blocks in the path to success; not material loss, but timidity and hesitation that ruin us for ever. Difficulties are no match for the optimist, who does not fly from them, but welcomes them. He has a mental prism which can separate the insipid white light of existence into bright hues. He has a mental alchemy by which he can produce golden instruction out of the dross of failure. He has a spiritual magic which makes the nectar of joy out of the tears of sorrow. He has a clairvoyant eye that can perceive the existence of hope through the iron walls of despair. Prosperity tends to make one forget the grace of Buddha, but adversity brings forth one's religious conviction. Christ on the cross was more Christ than Jesus at the table. Luther at war with the Pope was more Luther than he at peace. Nichi-ren[FN#225] laid the foundation of his church when sword and sceptre threatened him with death. Shin-ran[FN#226] and Hen-en[FN#227] established their respective faiths when they were exiled. When they were exiled, they complained not, resented not, regretted not, repented not, lamented not, but contentedly and joyously they met with their inevitable calamity and conquered it. Ho-nen is said to have been still more joyous and contented when be bad suffered from a serious disease, because he had the conviction that his desired end was at hand. [FN#225] The founder (1222-1282) of the Nichi Ren Sect, who was exiled in 1271 to the Island of Sado. For the history and doctrine of the Sect, see I A Short History of the Twelve Japanese Buddhist Sects,' by B. Nanjo, pp. 132-147. [FN#226] The founder (1173-1262) of the Shin Sect, who was banished to the province of Eechigo in 1207. See Nanjo's 'History,' pp. 122-131. [FN#227] The founder (1131 1212) of the Jo Do Sect, who was exiled to the Island of Tosa in 1207. See Nanjo's 'History,' pp. 104-113. A Chinese monk, E Kwai by name, one day seated himself in a quiet place among hills and practised Dhyana. None was there to disturb the calm enjoyment of his meditation. The genius of the hill was so much stung by his envy that he made up his mind to break by surprise the mental serenity of the monk. Having supposed nothing ordinary would be effective, he appeared all on a sudden before the man, assuming the frightful form of a headless monster. E Kwai being disturbed not a whit, calmly eyed the monster, and observed with a smile: "Thou hast no head, monster! How happy thou shouldst be, for thou art in no danger of losing thy head, nor of suffering from headache!" Were we born headless, should we not be happy, as we have to suffer from no headache? Were we born eyeless, should we not be happy, as we are in no danger of suffering from eye disease? Ho Ki Ichi,[FN#228] a great blind scholar, was one evening giving a lecture, without knowing that the light had been put out by the wind. When his pupils requested him to stop for a moment, he remarked with a smile: "Why, how inconvenient are your eyes!" Where there is contentment, there is Paradise. [FN#228] Hanawa (1746-1821), who published Gun-sho-rui-zu in 1782. 13. Do Thy Best and Leave the Rest to Providence. There is another point of view which enables us to enjoy life. It is simply this, that everything is placed in the condition best for itself, as it is the sum total of the consequences of its actions and reactions since the dawn of time. Take, for instance, the minutest grains of dirt that are regarded by us the worst, lifeless, valueless, mindless, inert matter. They are placed in their best condition, no matter how poor and worthless they may seem. They can never become a thing higher nor lower than they. To be the grains of dirt is best for them. But for these minute microcosms, which, flying in the air, reflect the sunbeams, we could have no azure sky. It is they that scatter the sun's rays in mid-air and send them into our rooms. It is also these grains of dirt that form the nuclei of raindrops and bring seasonable rain. Thus they are not things worthless and good for nothing, but have a hidden import and purpose in their existence. Had they mind to think, heart to feel, they should be contented and happy with their present condition. Take, for another example, the flowers of the morning glory. They bloom and smile every morning, fade and die in a few hours. How fleeting and ephemeral their lives are! But it is that short life itself that makes them frail, delicate, and lovely. They come forth all at once as bright and beautiful as a rainbow or as the Northern light, and disappear like dreams. This is the best condition for them, because, if they last for days together, the morning glory shall no longer be the morning glory. It is so with the cherry-tree that puts forth the loveliest flowers and bears bitter fruits. It is so with the apple-tree, which bears the sweetest of fruits and has ugly blossoms. It is so with animals and men. Each of them is placed in the condition best for his appointed mission. The newly-born baby sucks, sleeps, and cries. It can do no more nor less. Is it not best for it to do so? When it attained to its boyhood, he goes to school and is admitted to the first-year class. He cannot be put in a higher nor lower class. It is best for him to be the first-year class student. When his school education is over, he may get a position in society according to his abilities, or may lead a miserable life owing to his failure of some sort or other. In any case he is in a position best for his special mission ordained by Providence or the Hum-total of the fruits of his actions and reactions since all eternity. He should be contented and happy, and do what is right with might and main. Discontent and vexation only make him more worthy of his ruin Therefore our positions, no matter, how high or low, no matter how favourable or unfavourable our environment, we are to be cheerful. "Do thy best and leave the rest to Providence," says a Chinese adage. Longfellow also says: "Do thy best; that is best. Leave unto thy Lord the rest." CHAPTER VIII THE TRAINING OF THE MIND AND THE PRACTICE OF MEDITATION 1. The Method of Instruction Adopted by Zen Masters. Thus far we have described the doctrine of Zen inculcated by both Chinese and Japanese masters, and in this chapter we propose to sketch the practice of mental training and the method of practising Dhyana or Meditation. Zen teachers never instruct their pupils by means of explanation or argument, but urge them to solve by themselves through the practice of Meditation such problems as--'What is Buddha?' What is self?' 'What is the spirit of Bodhidharma?' 'What is life and death?' 'What is the real nature of mind?' and so on. Ten Shwai (To-sotsu), for instance, was wont to put three questions[FN#229] to the following effect: (1) Your study and discipline aim at the understanding of the real nature of mind. Where does the real nature of mind exist? (2) When you understand the real nature of mind, you are free from birth and death. How can you be saved when you are at the verge of death? (3) When you are free from birth and death, you know where you go after death. Where do you go when your body is reduced to elements? The pupils are not requested to express their solution of these problems in the form of a theory or an argument, but to show how they have grasped the profound meaning implied in these problems, how they have established their conviction, and how they can carry out what they grasped in their daily life. [FN#229] The famous three difficult questions, known as the Three Gates of Teu Shwai (To Sotsu San Kwan), who died in 1091. See Mu Mon Kwan, xlvii. A Chinese Zen master[FN#230] tells us that the method of instruction adopted by Zen may aptly be compared with that of an old burglar who taught his son the art of burglary. The burglar one evening said to his little son, whom he desired to instruct in the secret of his trade: "Would you not, my dear boy, be a great burglar like myself?" "Yes, father," replied the promising young man." "Come with me, then. I will teach you the art." So saying, the man went out, followed by his son. Finding a rich mansion in a certain village, the veteran burglar made a hole in the wall that surrounded it. Through that hole they crept into the yard, and opening a window with complete ease broke into the house, where they found a huge box firmly locked up as if its contents were very valuable articles. The old man clapped his hands at the lock, which, strange to tell, unfastened itself. Then he removed the cover and told his son to get into it and pick up treasures as fast as he could. No sooner had the boy entered the box than the father replaced the cover and locked it up. He then exclaimed at the top of his voice: "Thief! thief! thief! thief!" Thus, having aroused the inmates, he went out without taking anything. All the house was in utter confusion for a while; but finding nothing stolen, they went to bed again. The boy sat holding his breath a short while; but making up his mind to get out of his narrow prison, began to scratch the bottom of the box with his finger-nails. The servant of the house, listening to the noise, supposed it to be a mouse gnawing at the inside of the box; so she came out, lamp in hand, and unlocked it. On removing the cover, she was greatly surprised to find the boy instead of a little mouse, and gave alarm. In the meantime the boy got out of the box and went down into the yard, hotly pursued by the people. He ran as fast as possible toward the well, picked up a large stone, threw it down into it, and hid himself among the bushes. The pursuers, thinking the thief fell into the well, assembled around it, and were looking into it, while the boy crept out unnoticed through the hole and went home in safety. Thus the burglar taught his son how to rid himself of overwhelming difficulties by his own efforts; so also Zen teachers teach their pupils how to overcome difficulties that beset them on all sides and work out salvation by themselves. [FN#230] Wu Tsu (Go So), the teacher of Yuen Wu (En Go). 2. The First Step in the Mental Training. Some of the old Zen masters are said to have attained to supreme Enlightenment after the practice of Meditation for one week, some for one day, some for a score of years, and some for a few months. The practice of Meditation, however, is not simply a means for Enlightenment, as is usually supposed, but also it is the enjoyment of Nirvana, or the beatitude of Zen. It is a matter, of course, that we have fully to understand the doctrine of Zen, and that we have to go through the mental training peculiar to Zen in order to be Enlightened. The first step in the mental training is to become the master of external things. He who is addicted to worldly pleasures, however learned or ignorant he may be, however high or low his social position may be, is a servant to mere things. He cannot adapt the external world to his own end, but he adapts himself to it. He is constantly employed, ordered, driven by sensual objects. Instead of taking possession of wealth, he is possessed by wealth. Instead of drinking liquors, he is swallowed up by his liquors. Balls and music bid him to run mad. Games and shows order him not to stay at home. Houses, furniture, pictures, watches, chains, hats, bonnets, rings, bracelets, shoes--in short, everything has a word to command him. How can such a person be the master of things? To Ju (Na-kae) says: "There is a great jail, not a jail for criminals, that contains the world in it. Fame, gain, pride, and bigotry form its four walls. Those who are confined in it fall a prey to sorrow and sigh for ever." To be the ruler of things we have first to shut up all our senses, and turn the currents of thoughts inward, and see ourselves as the centre of the world, and meditate that we are the beings of highest intelligence; that Buddha never puts us at the mercy of natural forces; that the earth is in our possession; that everything on earth is to be made use of for our noble ends; that fire, water, air, grass, trees, rivers, hills, thunder, cloud, stars, the moon, the sun, are at our command; that we are the law-givers of the natural phenomena; that we are the makers of the phenomenal world; that it is we that appoint a mission through life, and determine the fate of man. 3. The Next Step in the Mental Training. In the next place we have to strive to be the master of our bodies. With most of the unenlightened, body holds absolute control over Self. Every order of the former has to be faithfully obeyed by the latter. Even if Self revolts against the tyranny of body, it is easily trampled down under the brutal hoofs of bodily passion. For example, Self wants to be temperate for the sake of health, and would fain pass by the resort for drinking, but body would force Self into it. Self at times lays down a strict dietetic rule for himself, but body would threaten Self to act against both the letter and spirit of the rule. Now Self aspires to get on a higher place among sages, but body pulls Self down to the pavement of masses. Now Self proposes to give some money to the poor, but body closes the purse tightly. Now Self admires divine beauty, but body compels him to prefer sensuality. Again, Self likes spiritual liberty, but body confines him in its dungeons. Therefore, to get Enlightened, we must establish the authority of Self over the whole body. We must use our bodies as we use our clothes in order to accomplish our noble purposes. Let us command body not to shudder under a cold shower-bath in inclement weather, not to be nervous from sleepless nights, not to be sick with any sort of food, not to groan under a surgeon's knife, not to succumb even if we stand a whole day in the midsummer sun, not to break down under any form of disease, not to be excited in the thick of battlefield--in brief, we have to control our body as we will. Sit in a quiet place and meditate in imagination that body is no more bondage to you, that it is your machine for your work of life, that you are not flesh, that you are the governor of it, that you can use it at pleasure, and that it always obeys your order faithfully. Imagine body as separated from you. When it cries out, stop it instantly, as a mother does her baby. When it disobeys you, correct it by discipline, as a master does his pupil. When it is wanton, tame it down, as a horse-breaker does his wild horse. When it is sick, prescribe to it, as a doctor does to his patient. Imagine that you are not a bit injured, even if it streams blood; that you are entirely safe, even if it is drowned in water or burned by fire. E-Shun, a pupil and sister of Ryo-an,[FN#231] a famous Japanese master, burned herself calmly sitting cross-legged on a pile of firewood which consumed her. She attained to the complete mastery of her body. Socrates' self was never poisoned, even if his person was destroyed by the venom he took. Abraham Lincoln himself stood unharmed, even if his body was laid low by the assassin. Masa-shige was quite safe, even if his body was hewed by the traitors' swords. Those martyrs that sang at the stake to the praise of God could never be burned, even if their bodies were reduced to ashes, nor those seekers after truth who were killed by ignorance and superstition. Is it not a great pity to see a man endowed with divine spirit and power easily upset by a bit of headache, or crying as a child under a surgeon's knife, or apt to give up the ghost at the coming of little danger, or trembling through a little cold, or easily laid low by a bit of indisposition, or yielding to trivial temptation? [FN#231] Ryo an (E-myo, died 1411), the founder of the monastery of Sai-jo-ji, near the city of Odawara. See To-jo-ren-to-roku. It is no easy matter to be the dictator of body. It is not a matter of theory, but of practice. You must train your body that you may enable it to bear any sort of suffering, and to stand unflinched in the face of hardship. It is for this that So-rai[FN#232] (Ogiu) laid himself on a sheet of straw-mat spread on the ground in the coldest nights of winter, or was used to go up and down the roof of his house, having himself clad in heavy armour. It is for this that ancient Japanese soldiers led extremely simple lives, and that they often held the meeting-of-perseverance,[FN#233] in which they exposed themselves to the coldest weather in winter or to the hottest weather in summer. It is for this that Katsu Awa practised fencing in the middle of night in a deep forest.[FN#234] [FN#232] One of the greatest scholars of the Tokugawa period, who died in 1728. See Etsu-wa-bun-ko. [FN#233] The soldiers of the Tokugawa period were used to hold such a meeting. [FN#234] Kai-shu-gen-ko-roku. Ki-saburo, although he was a mere outlaw, having his left arm half cut at the elbow in a quarrel, ordered his servant to cut it off with a saw, and during the operation he could calmly sit talking and laughing with his friends. Hiko-kuro (Takayama),[FN#235] a Japanese loyalist of note, one evening happened to come to a bridge where two robbers were lying in wait for him. They lay fully stretching themselves, each with his head in the middle of the bridge, that he might not pass across it without touching them. Hiko-kuro was not excited nor disheartened, but calmly approached the vagabonds and passed the bridge, treading upon their heads, which act so frightened them that they took to their heels without doing any harm to him.[FN#236] [FN#235] A well-known loyalist in the Tokugawa period, who died in 1793. [FN#236] Etsu-wa-bun-ko. The history of Zen is full of the anecdotes that show Zen priests were the lords of their bodies. Here we quote a single example by way of illustration: Ta Hwui (Dai-ye), once having had a boil on his hip, sent for a doctor, who told him that it was fatal, that he must not sit in Meditation as usual. Then Ta Hwui said to the physician: "I must sit in Meditation with all my might during my remaining days, for if your diagnosis be not mistaken, I shall die before long." He sat day and night in constant Meditation, quite forgetful of his boil, which was broken and gone by itself.[FN#237] [FN#237] Sho-bo-gen-zo-zui-mon-ki, by Do-gen. 4. The Third Step in the Mental Training. To be the lord of mind is more essential to Enlightenment, which, in a sense, is the clearing away of illusions, the putting out of mean desires and passions, and the awakening of the innermost wisdom. He alone can attain to real happiness who has perfect control over his passions tending to disturb the equilibrium of his mind. Such passions as anger, hatred, jealousy, sorrow, worry, grudge, and fear always untune one's mood and break the harmony of one's mind. They poison one's body, not in a figurative, but in a literal sense of the word. Obnoxious passions once aroused never fail to bring about the physiological change in the nerves, in the organs, and eventually in the whole constitution, and leave those injurious impressions that make one more liable to passions of similar nature. We do not mean, however, that we ought to be cold and passionless, as the most ancient Hinayanists were used to be. Such an attitude has been blamed by Zen masters. "What is the best way of living for us monks?" asked a monk to Yun Ku (Un-go), who replied: "You had better live among mountains." Then the monk bowed politely to the teacher, who questioned: "How did you understand me?" "Monks, as I understood," answered the man, "ought to keep their hearts as immovable as mountains, not being moved either by good or by evil, either by birth or by death, either by prosperity or by adversity." Hereupon Yun Ku struck the monk with his stick and said: "You forsake the Way of the old sages, and will bring my followers to perdition!" Then, turning to another monk, inquired: "How did you understand me?" "Monks, as I understand," replied the man, "ought to shut their eyes to attractive sights and close their ears to musical notes." "You, too," exclaimed Yun Ka, "forsake the Way of the old sages, and will bring my followers to perdition!" An old woman, to quote another example repeatedly told by Zen masters, used to give food and clothing to a monk for a score of years. One day she instructed a young girl to embrace and ask him: "How do you feel now?" "A lifeless tree," replied the monk coolly, "stands on cold rock. There is no warmth, as if in the coldest season of the year." The matron, being told of this, observed: "Oh that I have made offerings to such a vulgar fellow for twenty years!" She forced the monk to leave the temple and reduced it to ashes.[FN#238] [FN#238] These instances are quoted from Zen-rin-rui-shu. If you want to secure Dhyana, let go of your anxieties and failures in the past; let bygones be bygones; cast aside enmity, shame, and trouble, never admit them into your brain; let pass the imagination and anticipation of future hardships and sufferings; let go of all your annoyances, vexations, doubts, melancholies, that impede your speed in the race of the struggle for existence. As the miser sets his heart on worthless dross and accumulates it, so an unenlightened person clings to worthless mental dross and spiritual rubbish, and makes his mind a dust-heap. Some people constantly dwell on the minute details of their unfortunate circumstances, to make themselves more unfortunate than they really are; some go over and over again the symptoms of their disease to think themselves into serious illness; and some actually bring evils on them by having them constantly in view and waiting for them. A man asked Poh Chang (Hyaku-jo): "How shall I learn the Law?" "Eat when you are hungry," replied the teacher; " sleep when you are tired. People do not simply eat at table, but think of hundreds of things; they do not simply sleep in bed, but think of thousands of things."[FN#239] [FN#239] E-gen and Den-to-roku. A ridiculous thing it is, in fact, that man or woman, endowed with the same nature as Buddha's, born the lord of all material objects, is ever upset by petty cares, haunted by the fearful phantoms of his or her own creation, and burning up his or her energy in a fit of passion, wasting his or her vitality for the sake of foolish or insignificant things. It is a man who can keep the balance of his mind under any circumstances, who can be calm and serene in the hottest strife of life, that is worthy of success, reward, respect, and reputation, for he is the master of men. It was at the age of forty-seven that Wang Yang Ming[FN#240] (O-yo-mei) won a splendid victory over the rebel army which threatened the throne of the Ming dynasty. During that warfare Wang was giving a course of lectures to a number of students at the headquarters of the army, of which he was the Commander-in-chief. At the very outset of the battle a messenger brought him the news of defeat of the foremost ranks. All the students were terror-stricken and grew pale at the unfortunate tidings, but the teacher was not a whit disturbed by it. Some time after another messenger brought in the news of complete rout of the enemy. All the students, enraptured, stood up and cheered, but he was as cool as before, and did not break off lecturing. Thus the practiser of Zen has so perfect control over his heart that he can keep presence of mind under an impending danger, even in the presence of death itself. [FN#240] The founder of the Wang School of Confucianism, a practiser of Meditation, who was born in 1472, and died at the age of fifty-seven in 1529. It was at the age of twenty-three that Haku-in got on board a boat bound for the Eastern Provinces, which met with a tempest and was almost wrecked. All the passengers were laid low with fear and fatigue, but Haku-in enjoyed a quiet sleep during the storm, as if he were lying on a comfortable bed. It was in the fifth of Mei-ji era that Doku-on[FN#241] lived for some time in the city of Tokyo, whom some Christian zealots attempted to murder. One day he met with a few young men equipped with swords at the gate of his temple. "We want to see Doku-on; go and tell him," said they to the priest. "I am Doku-on," replied he calmly, "whom you want to see, gentlemen. What can I do for you?" "We have come to ask you a favour; we are Christians; we want your hoary head." So saying they were ready to attack him, who, smiling, replied: "All right, gentlemen. Behead me forthwith, if you please." Surprised by this unexpected boldness on the part of the priest, they turned back without harming even a hair of the old Buddhist.[FN#242] [FN#241] Doku On (Ogino), a distinguished Zen master, an abbot of So-koku-ji, who was born in 1818, and died in 1895. [FN#242] Kin-sei-zen-rin-gen-ko-roku, by D. Mori. These teachers could through long practice constantly keep their minds buoyant, casting aside useless encumbrances of idle thoughts; bright, driving off the dark cloud of melancholy; tranquil, putting down turbulent waves of passion; pure, cleaning away the dust and ashes of illusion; and serene, brushing off the cobwebs of doubt and fear. The only means of securing all this is to realize the conscious union with the Universal Life through the Enlightened Consciousness, which can be awakened by dint of Dhyana. 5. Zazen, or the Sitting in Meditation. Habit comes out of practice, and forms character by degrees, and eventually works out destiny. Therefore we must practically sow optimism, and habitually nourish it in order to reap the blissful fruit of Enlightenment. The sole means of securing mental calmness is the practice of Zazen, or the sitting in Meditation. This method was known in India as Yoga as early as the Upanisad period, and developed by the followers of the Yoga system.[FN#243] But Buddhists sharply distinguished Zazen from Yoga, and have the method peculiar to themselves. Kei-zan[FN#244] describes the method to the following effect: 'Secure a quiet room neither extremely light nor extremely dark, neither very warm nor very cold, a room, if you can, in the Buddhist temple located in a beautiful mountainous district. You should not practise Zazen in a place where a conflagration or a flood or robbers may be likely to disturb you, nor should you sit in a place close by the sea or drinking-shops or brothel-houses, or the houses of widows and of maidens or buildings for music, nor should you live in close proximity to the place frequented by kings, ministers, powerful statesmen, ambitious or insincere persons. You must not sit in Meditation in a windy or very high place lest you should get ill. Be sure not to let the wind or smoke get into your room, not to expose it to rain and storm. Keep your room clean. Keep it not too light by day nor too dark by night. Keep it warm in winter and cool in summer. Do not sit leaning against a wall, or a chair, or a screen. You must not wear soiled clothes or beautiful clothes, for the former are the cause of illness, while the latter the cause of attachment. Avoid the Three Insufficiencies-that is to say, insufficient clothes, insufficient food, and insufficient sleep. Abstain from all sorts of uncooked or hard or spoiled or unclean food, and also from very delicious dishes, because the former cause troubles in your alimentary canal, while the latter cause you to covet after diet. Eat and drink just too appease your hunger and thirst, never mind whether the food be tasty or not. Take your meals regularly and punctually, and never sit in Meditation immediately after any meal. Do not practise Dhyana soon after you have taken a heavy dinner, lest you should get sick thereby. Sesame, barley, corn, potatoes, milk, and the like are the best material for your food. Frequently wash your eyes, face, hands, and feet, and keep them cool and clean. [FN#243] See Yoga Sutra with the Commentary of Bhoja Raja (translated by Rajendralala Mitra), pp. 102-104. [FN#244] Kei-zan (Jo-kin), the founder of So-ji-ji, the head temple of the So To Sect of Zen, who died at the age of fifty-eight in 1325. He sets forth the doctrine of Zen and the method of practising Zazen in his famous work, entitled Za-zen-yo-jin-ki. 'There are two postures in Zazen--that is to say, the crossed-leg sitting, and the half crossed-leg sitting. Seat yourself on a thick cushion, putting it right under your haunch. Keep your body so erect that the tip of the nose and the navel are in one perpendicular line, and both ears and shoulders are in the same plane. Then place the right foot upon the left thigh, the left foot on the right thigh, so as the legs come across each other. Next put your right hand with the palm upward on the left foot, and your left hand on the right palm with the tops of both the thumbs touching each other. This is the posture called the crossed-leg sitting. You may simply place the left foot upon the right thigh, the position of the hands being the same as in the cross-legged sitting. This posture is named the half crossed-leg sitting.' 'Do not shut your eyes, keep them always open during whole Meditation. Do not breathe through the mouth; press your tongue against the roof of the mouth, putting the upper lips and teeth together with the lower. Swell your abdomen so as to hold the breath in the belly; breathe rhythmically through the nose, keeping a measured time for inspiration and expiration. Count for some time either the inspiring or the expiring breaths from one to ten, then beginning with one again. Concentrate your attention on your breaths going in and out as if you are the sentinel standing at the gate of the nostrils. If you do some mistake in counting, or be forgetful of the breath, it is evident that your mind is distracted.' Chwang Tsz seems to have noticed that the harmony of breathing is typical of the harmony of mind, since he says: "The true men of old did not dream when they slept. Their breathing came deep and silently. The breathing of true men comes (even) from his heels, while men generally breathe (only) from their throats."[FN#245] At any rate, the counting of breaths is an expedient for calming down of mind, and elaborate rules are given in the Zen Sutra,[FN#246] but Chinese and Japanese Zen masters do not lay so much stress on this point as Indian teachers. [FN#245] Chwang Tsz, vol. iii., p. 2. [FN#246] Dharmatara-dhyana-sutra. 6. The Breathing Exercise of the Yogi. Breathing exercise is one of the practices of Yoga, and somewhat similar in its method and end to those of Zen. We quote here[FN#247] Yogi Ramacharaka to show how modern Yogis practise it: "(1) Stand or sit erect. Breathing through the nostrils, inhale steadily, first filling the lower part of the lungs, which is accomplished by bringing into play the diaphragm, which, descending, exerts a gentle pressure on the abdominal organs, pushing forward the front walls of the abdomen. Then fill the middle part of the lungs, pushing out the lower ribs, breastbone, and chest. Then fill the higher portion of the lungs, protruding the upper chest, thus lifting the chest, including the upper six or seven pairs of ribs. In the final movement the lower part of the abdomen will be slightly drawn in, which movement gives the lungs a support, and also helps to fill the highest part of the lungs. At the first reading it may appear that this breath consists of three distinct movements. This, however, is not the correct idea. The inhalation is continuous, the entire chest cavity from the lower diaphragm to the highest point of the chest in the region of the collar-bone being expanded with a uniform movement. Avoid a jerking series of inhalations, and strive to attain a steady, continuous action. Practice will soon overcome the tendency to divide the inhalation into three movements, and will result in a uniform continuous breath. You will be able to complete the inhalation in a couple of seconds after a little practice. (2) Retain the breath a few seconds. (3) Exhale quite slowly, holding the chest in a firm position, and drawing the abdomen in a little and lifting it upward slowly as the air leaves the lungs. When the air is entirely exhaled, relax the chest and abdomen. A little practice will render this part of exercise easy, and the movement once acquired will be afterwards performed almost automatically." [FN#247] Hatha Yoga, pp. 112, 113. 7. Calmness of Mind. The Yogi breathing above mentioned is fit rather for physical exercise than for mental balance, and it will be beneficial if you take that exercise before or after Meditation. Japanese masters mostly bold it very important to push forward. The lowest part of the abdomen during Zazen, and they are right so far as the present writer's personal experiences go. 'If you feel your mind distracted, look at the tip of the nose; never lose sight of it for some time, or look at your own palm, and let not your mind go out of it, or gaze at one spot before you.' This will greatly help you in restoring the equilibrium of your mind. Chwang Tsz[FN#248] thought that calmness of mind is essential to sages, and said: "The stillness of the sages does not belong to them as a consequence of their skilful ability; all things are not able to disturb their minds; it is on this account that they are still. When water is still, its clearness shows the beard and eyebrows (of him who looks into it). It is a perfect level, and the greatest artificer takes his rule from it. Such is the clearness of still water, and how much greater is that of the human spirit? The still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things." Forget all worldly concerns, expel all cares and anxieties, let go of passions and desires, give up ideas and thoughts, set your mind at liberty absolutely, and make it as clear as a burnished mirror. Thus let flow your inexhaustible fountain of purity, let open your inestimable treasure of virtue, bring forth your inner hidden nature of goodness, disclose your innermost divine wisdom, and waken your Enlightened Consciousness to see Universal Life within you. "Zazen enables the practiser," says Kei-zan,[FN#249] "to open up his mind, to see his own nature, to become conscious of mysteriously pure and bright spirit, or eternal light within him." [FN#248] Chwang Tsz, vol. v., p. 5. [FN#249] Za-zen-yo-jin-ki. Once become conscious of Divine Life within you, yon can see it in your brethren, no matter how different they may be in circumstances, in abilities, in characters, in nationalities, in language, in religion, and in race. You can see it in animals, vegetables, and minerals, no matter how diverse they may be in form, no matter how wild and ferocious some may seem in nature, no matter how unfeeling in heart some may seem, no matter how devoid of intelligence some may appear, no matter how insignificant some may be, no matter how simple in construction some may be, no matter how lifeless some may seem. You can see that the whole universe is Enlightened and penetrated by Divine Life. 8. Zazen and the Forgetting of Self. Zazen is a most effectual means of destroying selfishness, the root of all Sin, folly, vice, and evil, since it enables us to see that every being is endowed with divine spirituality in common with men. It is selfishness that throws dark shadows on life, just as it is not the sun but the body that throws shadow before it. It is the self-same selfishness that gave rise to the belief in the immortality of soul, in spite of its irrationality, foolishness, and superstition. Individual self should be a poor miserable thing if it were not essentially connected with the Universal Life. We can always enjoy pure happiness when we are united with nature, quite forgetful of our poor self. When you look, for example, into the smiling face of a pretty baby, and smile with it, or listen to the sweet melody of a songster and sing with it, you completely forget your poor self at that enraptured moment. But your feelings of beauty and happiness are for ever gone when you resume your self, and begin to consider them after your own selfish ideas. To forget self and identify it with nature is to break down its limitation and to set it at liberty. To break down petty selfishness and extend it into Universal Self is to unfetter and deliver it from bondage. It therefore follows that salvation can be secured not by the continuation of individuality in another life, but by the realization of one's union with Universal Life, which is immortal, free, limitless, eternal, and bliss itself. This is easily effected by Zazen. 9. Zen and Supernatural Power. Yoga[FN#250] claims that various supernatural powers can be acquired by Meditation, but Zen does not make any such absurd claims. It rather disdains those who are believed to have acquired supernatural powers by the practice of austerities. The following traditions clearly show this spirit: "When Fah Yung (Ho-yu) lived in Mount Niu Teu[FN#251] (Go-zu-san) he used to receive every morning the offerings of flowers from hundreds of birds, and was believed to have supernatural powers. But after his Enlightenment by the instruction of the Fourth Patriarch, the birds ceased to make offering, because be became a being too divine to be seen by inferior animals." "Hwang Pah (O-baku), one day going up Mount Tien Tai (Ten-dai-san), which was believed to have been inhabited by Arhats with supernatural powers, met with a monk whose eyes emitted strange light. They went along the pass talking with each other for a short while until they came to a river roaring with torrent. There being no bridge, the master bad to stop at the shore; but his companion crossed the river walking on the water and beckoned to Hwang Pah to follow him. Thereupon Hwang Pah said: 'If I knew thou art an Arhat, I would have doubled you up before thou got over there!' The monk then understood the spiritual attainment of Hwang Pah, and praised him as a true Mahayanist." "On one occasion Yang Shan (Kyo-zan) saw a stranger monk flying through the air. When that monk came down and approached him with a respectful salutation, he asked: 'Where art thou from? 'Early this morning,' replied the other, 'I set out from India.' 'Why,' said the teacher, 'art thou so late?' 'I stopped,' responded the man, 'several times to look at beautiful sceneries.' Thou mayst have supernatural powers,' exclaimed Yang Shan, 'yet thou must give back the Spirit of Buddha to me.' Then the monk praised Yang Shan saying: 'I have come over to China in order to worship Manyjucri,[FN#252] and met unexpectedly with Minor Shakya,' and, after giving the master some palm leaves he brought from India, went back through the air.'"[FN#253] [FN#250] 'Yoga Aphorisms of Patanyjali,' chap. iii. [FN#251] A prominent disciple of the Fourth Patriarch, the founder of the Niu Teu School (Go-zu-zen) of Zen, who died in A.D. 675. [FN#252] Manyjucri is a legendary Bodhisattva, who became an object of worship of some Mahayanists. He is treated as a personification of transcendental wisdom. [FN#253] Hwui Yuen (E-gen) and Sho-bo-gen-zo. It is quite reasonable that Zenists distinguish supernatural powers from spiritual uplifting, the former an acquirement of Devas, or of Asuras, or of Arhats, or of even animals, and the latter as a nobler accomplishment attained only by the practisers of Mahayanism. Moreover, they use the term supernatural power in a meaning entirely different from the original one. Lin Tsi (Rin-zai) says, for instance: "There are six supernatural powers of Buddha: He is free from the temptation of form, living in the world of form; He is free from the temptation of sound, living in the world of sound; He is free from the temptation of smell, living in the world of smell; He is free from the temptation of taste, living in the world of taste; He is free from the temptation of Dharma,[FN#254] living in the world of Dharma. These are six supernatural powers."[FN#255] [FN#254] The things or objects, not of sense, but of mind. [FN#255] Lin Tsi Luh (Rin-zai-roku). Sometimes Zenists use the term as if it meant what we call Zen Activity, or the free display of Zen in action, as you see in the following examples. Tung Shan (To-Zan) was on one occasion attending on his teacher Yun Yen (Un-gan), who asked: "What are your supernatural powers?" Tung Shan, saying nothing, clasped his hands on his breast, and stood up before Yun Yen. "How do you display your supernatural powers?" questioned the teacher again. Then Tung Shan said farewell and went out. Wei Shan (E-san) one day was taking a nap, and seeing his disciple Yang Shan (Kyo-zan) coming into the room, turned his face towards the wall. "You need not, Sir," said Yang Shan, "stand on ceremony, as I am your disciple." Wei Shan seemed to try to get up, so Yang Shan went out; but Wei Shan called him back and said: "I shall tell you of a dream I dreamed." The other inclined his head as if to listen. "Now," said Wei Shan, "divine my fortune by the dream." Thereupon Yang Shan fetched a basin of water and a towel and gave them to the master, who washed his face thereby. By-and-by Hiang Yen (Kyo-gen) came in, to whom Wei Shan said: "We displayed supernatural powers a moment ago. It was not such supernatural powers as are shown by Hinayanists." "I know it, Sir," replied the other, "though I was down below." "Say, then, what it was," demanded the master. Then Hiang Yen made tea and gave a cup to Wei Shan, who praised the two disciples, saying: "You surpass �ariputra[FN#256] and Maudgalyayana[FN#257] in your wisdom and supernatural powers."[FN#258] [FN#256] One of the prominent disciples of Shakya Muni, who became famous for his wisdom. [FN#257] One of the eminent disciples of Shakya Muni, noted for his supernatural powers. [FN#258] Zen-rin-rui-sku. Again, ancient Zenists did not claim that there was any mysterious element in their spiritual attainment, as Do-gen says[FN#259] unequivocally respecting his Enlightenment: "I recognized only that my eyes are placed crosswise above the nose that stands lengthwise, and that I was not deceived by others. I came home from China with nothing in my hand. There is nothing mysterious in Buddhism. Time passes as it is natural, the sun rising in the east, and the moon setting into the west." [FN#259] Ei-hei-ko-roku. 10. True Dhyana. To sit in Meditation is not the only method of practising Zazen. "We practise Dhyana in sitting, in standing, and in walking," says one of the Japanese Zenists. Lin Tsi (Rin-Zai) also says: "To concentrate one's mind, or to dislike noisy places, and seek only for stillness, is the characteristic of heterodox Dhyana." It is easy to keep self-possession in a place of tranquillity, yet it is by no means easy to keep mind undisturbed amid the bivouac of actual life. It is true Dhyana that makes our mind sunny while the storms of strife rage around us. It is true Dhyana that secures the harmony of heart, while the surges of struggle toss us violently. It is true Dhyana that makes us bloom and smile, while the winter of life covets us with frost and snow. "Idle thoughts come and go over unenlightened minds six hundred and fifty times in a snap of one's fingers," writes an Indian teacher,[FN#260] "and thirteen hundred million times every twenty-four hours." This might be an exaggeration, yet we cannot but acknowledge that one idle thought after another ceaselessly bubbles up in the stream of consciousness. "Dhyana is the letting go," continues the writer--"that is to say, the letting go of the thirteen hundred million of idle thoughts." The very root of these thirteen hundred million idle thoughts is an illusion about one's self. He is indeed the poorest creature, even if he be in heaven, who thinks himself poor. On the contrary, he is an angel who thinks himself hopeful and happy, even though he be in hell. "Pray deliver me," said a sinner to Sang Tsung (So-san).[FN#261] "Who ties you up?" was the reply. You tie yourself up day and night with the fine thread of idle thoughts, and build a cocoon of environment from which you have no way of escape. 'There is no rope, yet you imagine yourself bound.' Who could put fetters on your mind but your mind itself? Who could chain your will but your own will? Who could blind your spiritual eyes, unless you yourself shut them up? Who could prevent you from enjoying moral food, unless you yourself refuse to eat? "There are many," said Sueh Fung (Sep-po) on one occasion, "who starve in spite of their sitting in a large basket full of victuals. There are many who thirst in spite of seating themselves on the shore of a sea." "Yes, Sir," replied Huen Sha (Gen-sha), "there are many who starve in spite of putting their heads into the basket full of victuals. There are many who thirst in spite of putting their heads into the waters of the sea."[FN#262] Who could cheer him up who abandons himself to self-created misery? Who could save him who denies his own salvation? [FN#260] The introduction to Anapana-sutra by Khin San Hwui, who came to China A.D. 241. [FN#261] The Third Patriarch. [FN#262] Hwui Yuen (E-gen). 11. Let Go of your Idle Thoughts.[FN#263] [FN#263] A famous Zenist, Mu-go-koku-shi, is said to have replied to every questioner, saying: "Let go of your idle thoughts." A Brahmin, having troubled himself a long while with reference to the problem of life and of the world, went out to call on Shakya Muni that he might be instructed by the Master. He got some beautiful flowers to offer them as a present to the Muni, and proceeded to the place where He was addressing his disciples and believers. No sooner had he come in sight of the Master than he read in his mien the struggles going on within him. "Let go of that," said the Muni to the Brahmin, who was going to offer the flowers in both his hands. He dropped on the ground the flowers in his right hand, but still holding those in his left. "Let go of that," demanded the Master, and the Brahmin dropped the flowers in his left hand rather reluctantly. "Let go of that, I say," the Muni commanded again; but the Brahmin, having nothing to let go of, asked: "What shall I let go of, Reverend Sir? I have nothing in my hands, you know." "Let go of that, you have neither in your right nor in your left band, but in the middle." Upon these words of the Muni a light came into the sufferer's mind, and he went home satisfied and in joy.[FN#264] "Not to attach to all things is Dhyana," writes an ancient Zenist, "and if you understand this, going out, staying in, sitting, and lying are in Dhyana." Therefore allow not your mind to be a receptacle for the dust of society, or the ashes of life, or rags and waste paper of the world. You bear too much burden upon your shoulders with which you have nothing to do. [FN#264] 'Sutra on the Brahmacarin Black-family,' translated into Chinese by K' Khien, of the Wu dynasty (A.D. 222-280). Learn the lesson of forgetfulness, and forget all that troubles you, deprives you of sound sleep, and writes wrinkles on your forehead. Wang Yang Ming, at the age of seventeen or so, is said to have forgotten the day 'on which he was to be married to a handsome young lady, daughter of a man of high position. It was the afternoon of the very day on which their nuptials had to be held that he went out to take a walk. Without any definite purpose he went into a temple in the neighbourhood, and there he found a recluse apparently very old with white hair, but young in countenance like a child. The man was sitting absorbed in Meditation. There was something extremely calm and serene in that old man's look and bearing that attracted the young scholar's attention. Questioning him as to his name, age, and birthplace, Wang found that the venerable man had enjoyed a life so extraordinarily long that he forgot his name and age, but that he had youthful energy so abundantly that be could talk with a voice sounding as a large bell. Being asked by Wang the secret of longevity, the man replied: "There is no secret in it; I merely kept my mind calm and peaceful." Further, he explained the method of Meditation according to Taoism and Buddhism. Thereupon Wang sat face to face with the old man and began to practise Meditation, utterly forgetful of his bride and nuptial ceremony. The sun began to cast his slanting rays on the wall of the temple, and they sat motionless; twilight came over them, and night wrapped them with her sable shroud, and they sat as still as two marble statues; midnight, dawn, at last the morning sun rose to find them still in their reverie. The father of the bride, who had started a search during the night, found to his surprise the bridegroom absorbed in Meditation on the following day.[FN#265] [FN#265] O-yo-mei-shutsu-shin-sei-ran-roku. It was at the age of forty-seven that Wang gained a great victory over the rebel army, and wrote to a friend saying: "It is so easy to gain a victory over the rebels fortifying themselves among the mountains, yet it is not so with those rebels living in our mind."[FN#266] Tsai Kiun Mu (Sai-kun-bo) is said to have had an exceedingly long and beautiful beard, and when asked by the Emperor, who received him in audience, whether he should sleep with his beard on the comforters or beneath them, be could not answer, since he had never known how he did. Being distracted by this question, he went home and tried to find out how he had been used to manage his beard in bed. First he put his beard on the comforters and vainly tried to sleep; then he put it beneath the comforters and thought it all right. Nevertheless, he was all the more disturbed by it. So then, putting on the comforters, now putting it beneath them, he tried to sleep all night long, but in vain. You must therefore forget your mental beard that annoys you all the time. [FN#266] Ibid. Men of longevity never carried troubles to their beds. It is a well-known fact that Zui-o (Shi-ga)[FN#267] enjoyed robust health at the age of over one hundred years. One day, being asked whether there is any secret of longevity, he replied affirmatively, and said to the questioner: "Keep your mind and body pure for two weeks, abstaining from any sort of impurity, then I shall tell you of the secret." The man did as was prescribed, and came again to be instructed in the secret. Zui-o said: "Now I might tell you, but be cautious to keep yourself pure another week so as to qualify yourself to learn the secret." When that week was over the old man said: "Now I might tell you, but will you be so careful as to keep yourself pure three days more in order to qualify yourself to receive the secret?" The man did as he was ordered, and requested the instruction. Thereupon Zui-o took the man to his private room and softly whispered, with his mouth close to the ear of the man: "Keep the secret I tell you now, even at the cost of your life. It is this-don't be passionate. That is all."[FN#268] [FN#267] This famous old man died in A.D. 1730. [FN#268] Se-ji-hyaku-dan. 12. 'The Five Ranks of Merit.' Thus far we have stated how to train our body and mind according to the general rules and customs established by Zenists. And here we shall describe the different stages of mental uplifting through which the student of Zen has to go. They are technically called 'The Five Ranks of Merit.'[FN#269] The first stage is called the Rank of Turning,[FN#270] in which the student 'turns' his mind from the external objects of sense towards the inner Enlightened Consciousness. He gives up all mean desires and aspires to spiritual elevation. He becomes aware that he is not doomed to be the slave of material things, and strives to conquer over them. Enlightened Consciousness is likened to the King, and it is called the Mind-King, while the student who now turns towards the King is likened to common people. Therefore in this first stage the student is in the rank of common people. [FN#269] Ko-kun-go-i. For further details, see So-to-ni-shi-roku. [FN#268] Ko in Japanese. The second stage is called the Rank of Service,[FN#271] in which the student distinguishes himself by his loyalty to the Mind-King, and becomes a courtier to 'serve' him. He is in constant 'service' to the King, attending him with obedience and love, and always fearing to offend him. Thus the student in this stage is ever careful not to neglect rules and precepts laid down by the sages, and endeavours to uplift himself in spirituality by his fidelity. The third stage is called the Rank of Merit,[FN#272] in which the student distinguishes himself by his 'meritorious' acts of conquering over the rebel army of passion which rises against the Mind-King. Now, his rank is not the rank of a courtier, but the rank of a general. In other words, his duty is not only to keep rules and instructions of the sages, but to subjugate his own passion and establish moral order in the mental kingdom. [FN#271] Bu in Japanese. [FN#272] Ko in Japanese. The fourth stage is called the Rank of Co-operative Merit,[FN#273] in which the student 'co-operates' with other persons in order to complete his merit. Now, he is not compared with a general who conquers his foe, but with the prime-minister who co-operates with other officials to the benefit of the people. Thus the student in this stage is not satisfied with his own conquest of passion, but seeks after spiritual uplifting by means of extending his kindness and sympathy to his fellow-men. [FN#273] Gu-ko in Japanese. The fifth stage is called the Rank of Merit-over-Merit,[FN#274] which means the rank of meritless-merit. This is the rank of the King himself. The King does nothing meritorious, because all the governmental works are done by his ministers and subjects. All that he has to do is to keep his inborn dignity and sit high on his throne. Therefore his conduct is meritless, but all the meritorious acts of his subjects are done through his authority. Doing nothing, he does everything. Without any merit, he gets all merits. Thus the student in this stage no more strives to keep precepts, but his doings are naturally in accord with them. No more he aspires for spiritual elevation, but his, heart is naturally pure from material desires. No more he makes an effort to vanquish his passion, but no passion disturbs him. No more he feels it his duty to do good to others, but he is naturally good and merciful. No more he sits in Dhyana, but he naturally lives in Dhyana at all times. It is in this fifth stage that the student is enabled to identify his Self with the Mind-King or Enlightened Consciousness, and to abide in perfect bliss. [FN#274] Ko-ko in Japanese. 13. 'The Ten Pictures of the Cowherd.'[FN#275] [FN#275] The pictures were drawn by Kwoh Ngan (Kaku-an), a Chinese Zenist. For the details, see Zen-gaku-ho-ten. Besides these Five Ranks of Merit, Zenists make use of the Ten Pictures of the Cowherd, in order to show the different stages of mental training through which the student of Zen has to go. Some poems were written by Chinese and Japanese teachers on each of these pictures by way of explanation, but they are too ambiguous to be translated into English, and we rest content with the translation of a single Japanese poem on each of the ten pictures, which are as follows: The first picture, called 'the Searching of the Cow,' represents the cowherd wandering in the wilderness with a vague hope of finding his lost cow that is running wild out of his sight. The reader will notice that the cow is likened to the mind of the student and the cowherd to the student himself. "I do not see my cow, But trees and grass, And hear the empty cries Of cicadas." The second picture, called 'the Finding of the Cow's Tracks,' represents the cowherd tracing the cow with the sure hope of restoring her, having found her tracks on the ground. "The grove is deep, and so Is my desire. How glad I am, O lo! I see her tracks." The third picture, called 'the Finding out of the Cow,' represents the cowherd slowly approaching the cow from a distance. "Her loud and wild mooing Has led me here; I see her form afar, Like a dark shadow." The fourth 'picture, called 'the Catching of the Cow,' represents the cowherd catching hold of the cow, who struggles to break loose from him. "Alas! it's hard to keep The cow I caught. She tries to run and leap And snap the cord." The fifth picture, called 'the Taming of the Cow,' represents the cowherd pacifying the cow, giving her grass and water. "I'm glad the cow so wild Is tamed and mild. She follows me, as if She were my shadow." The sixth picture, called 'the Going Home Riding on the Cow,' represents the cowherd playing on a flute, riding on the cow. "Slowly the clouds return To their own hill, Floating along the skies So calm and still. The seventh picture, called 'the Forgetting of the Cow and the Remembering of the Man,' represents the cowherd looking at the beautiful scenery surrounding his cottage. "The cow goes out by day And comes by night. I care for her in no way, But all is right." The eighth picture, called 'the Forgetting of the Cow and of the Man,' represents a large empty circle. "There's no cowherd nor cow Within the pen; No moon of truth nor clouds Of doubt in men." The ninth picture, called 'the Returning to the Root and Source,' represents a beautiful landscape full of lovely trees in full blossom. "There is no dyer of hills, Yet they are green; So flowers smile, and titter rills At their own wills." The tenth picture, called 'the Going into the City with Open Hands,' represents a smiling monk, gourd in hand, talking with a man who looks like a pedlar. "The cares for body make That body pine; Let go of cares and thoughts, O child of mine!" These Ten Pictures of the Cowherd correspond in meaning to the Five Ranks of Merit above stated, even if there is a slight difference, as is shown in the following table: THE FIVE RANKS.---THE TEN PICTURES. 1. The Rank of Turning---1. The Searching of the Cow. 2. The Finding of the Cow's Tracks. 2. The Rank of Service---3. The Finding of the Cow. 4. The Catching of the Cow. 3. The Rank of Merit---5. The Taming of the Cow. 6. The Going Home, Riding on the Cow. 4. The Rank of Co-operative Merit---9. The Returning to the Root and Source. 10. The Going into the City with Open Hands. 5. The Rank of Merit-over-Merit---7. The Forgetting of the Cow and the Remembering of the Man. 8. The Forgetting of the Cow and of the Man. 14. Zen and Nirvana. The beatitude of Zen is Nirvana, not in the Hinayanistic sense of the term, but in the sense peculiar to the faith. Nirvana literally means extinction or annihilation; hence the extinction of life or the annihilation of individuality. To Zen, however, it means the state of extinction of pain and the annihilation of sin. Zen never looks for the realization of its beatitude in a place like heaven, nor believes in the realm of Reality transcendental of the phenomenal universe, nor gives countenance to the superstition of Immortality, nor does it hold the world is the best of all possible worlds, nor conceives life simply as blessing. It is in this life, full of shortcomings, misery, and sufferings, that Zen hopes to realize its beatitude. It is in this world, imperfect, changing, and moving, that Zen finds the Divine Light it worships. It is in this phenomenal universe of limitation and relativity that Zen aims to attain to highest Nirvana. "We speak," says the author of Vimalakirtti-nirdeca-sutra, "of the transitoriness of body, but not of the desire of the Nirvana or destruction of it." "Paranirvana," according to the author of Lankavatarasutra, "is neither death nor destruction, but bliss, freedom, and purity." "Nirvana," says Kiai Hwan,[FN#276] "means the extinction of pain or the crossing over of the sea of life and death. It denotes the real permanent state of spiritual attainment. It does not signify destruction or annihilation. It denotes the belief in the great root of life and spirit." It is Nirvana of Zen to enjoy bliss for all sufferings of life. It is Nirvana of Zen to be serene in mind for all disturbances of actual existence. It is Nirvana of Zen to be in the conscious union with Universal Life or Buddha through Enlightenment. [FN#276] A commentator of Saddharma-pundarika-sutra. 15. Nature and her Lesson. Nature offers us nectar and ambrosia every day, and everywhere we go the rose and lily await us. "Spring visits us men," says Gu-do,[FN#277] "her mercy is great. Every blossom holds out the image of Tathagata." "What is the spiritual body of Buddha who is immortal and divine?" asked a man to Ta Lun (Dai-ryu), who instantly replied: "The flowers cover the mountain with golden brocade. The waters tinge the rivulets with heavenly blue." "Universe is the whole body of Tathagata; observed Do-gen. "The worlds in ten directions, the earth, grass, trees, walls, fences, tiles, pebbles-in a word, all the animated and inanimate objects partake of the Buddha-nature. Thereby, those who partake in the benefit of the Wind and Water that rise out of them are, all of them, helped by the mysterious influence of Buddha, and show forth Enlightenment."[FN#278] [FN#277] One of the distinguished Zenists in the Tokugawa period, who died in 1661. [FN#278] Sho-bo gen-zo. Thus you can attain to highest bliss through your conscious union with Buddha. Nothing can disturb your peace, when you can enjoy peace in the midst of disturbances; nothing can cause you to suffer, when you welcome misfortunes and hardships in order to train and strengthen your character; nothing can tempt you to commit sin, when you are constantly ready to listen to the sermon given by everything around you; nothing can distress you, when you make the world the holy temple of Buddha. This is the state of Nirvana which everyone believing in Buddha may secure. 16. The Beatitude of Zen. We are far from denying, as already shown in the foregoing chapters, the existence of troubles, pains, diseases, sorrows, deaths in life. Our bliss consists in seeing the fragrant rose of Divine mercy among the thorns of worldly trouble, in finding the fair oasis of Buddha's wisdom in the desert of misfortunes, in getting the wholesome balm of His love in the seeming poison of pain, in gathering the sweet honey of His spirit even in the sting of horrible death. History testifies to the truth that it is misery that teaches men more than happiness, that it is poverty that strengthens them more than wealth, that it is adversity that moulds character more than prosperity, that it is disease and death that call forth the inner life more than health and long life. At least, no one can be blind to the fact that good and evil have an equal share in forming the character and working out the destiny of man. Even such a great pessimist as Schopenhauer says: "As our bodily frame would burst asunder if the pressure of atmosphere were removed, so if the lives of men were relieved of all need, hardship, and adversity, if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance . . . that they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly. A ship without ballast is unstable, and will not go straight." Therefore let us make our ship of life go straight with its ballast of miseries and hardships, over which we gain control. The believer in Buddha is thankful to him, not only for the sunshine of life, but also for its wind, rain, snow, thunder, and lightning, because He gives us nothing in vain. Hisa-nobu (Ko-yama) was, perhaps, one of the happiest persons that Japan ever produced, simply because he was ever thankful to the Merciful One. One day he went out without an umbrella and met with a shower. Hurrying up to go home, he stumbled and fell, wounding both his legs. As he rose up, he was overheard to say: "Thank heaven." And being asked why he was so thankful, replied: "I got both my legs hurt, but, thank heaven, they were not broken." On another occasion he lost consciousness, having been kicked violently by a wild horse. When he came to himself, he exclaimed: "Thank heaven," in hearty joy. Being asked the reason why he was so joyful, he answered: "I have really given up my ghost, but, thank heaven, I have escaped death after all."[FN#279] A person in such a state of mind can do anything with heart and might. Whatever he does is an act of thanks for the grace of Buddha, and he does it, not as his duty, but as the overflowing of his gratitude which lie himself cannot check. Here exists the formation of character. Here exist real happiness and joy. Here exists the realization of Nirvana. [FN#279] Ki-jin-den. Most people regard death as the greatest of evils, only because they fear death. They fear death only because they have the instinct of self-preservation. Hereupon pessimistic philosophy and religion propose to attain to Nirvana by the extinction of Will-to-live, or by the total annihilation of life. But this is as much as to propose death as the final cure to a patient. Elie Metchnikoff proposes, in his 'Nature of Man,' another cure, saying: 'If man could only contrive to live long enough--say, for one hundred and forty years--a natural desire for extinction would take the place of the instinct for self-preservation, and the call of death would then harmoniously satisfy his legitimate craving of a ripe old age.' Why, we must ask, do you trouble yourself so much about death? Is there any instance of an individual who escaped it in the whole history of mankind? If there be no way of escape, why do you trouble yourself about it? Can you cause things to fall off the earth against the law of gravitation? Is there any example of an individual object that escaped the government of that law in the whole history of the world? Why, then, do you trouble yourself about it? It is no less silly to trouble yourself about death than you do about gravitation. Can you realize that death, which you have yet no immediate experience of, is the greatest of evil? We dare to declare death to be one of the blessings which we have to be thankful for. Death is the scavenger of the world; it sweeps away all uselessness, staleness, and corruption from the world, and keeps life clean and ever now. When you are of no use for the world it comes upon you, removes you to oblivion in order to relieve life of useless encumbrance. The stream of existence should be kept running, otherwise it would become putrid. If old lives were to stop the running stream it would stand still, and consequently become filthy, poisoned, and worthless. Suppose there were only births and no deaths. The earth has to be packed with men and women, who are doomed to live to all eternity, jostling, colliding, bumping, trampling each other, and vainly struggling to get out of the Black Hole of the earth. Thanks to death we are not in the Black Hole! Only birth and no death is far worse than only death and no birth. "The dead," says Chwang Tsz, "have no tyrannical king about, no slavish subject to meet; no change of seasons overtakes them. The heaven and the earth take the places of Spring and Autumn. The king or emperor of a great nation cannot be happier than they." How would you be if death should never overtake you when ugly decrepitude makes you blind and deaf, bodily and mentally, and deprives you of all possible pleasures? How would you be if you should not die when your body is broken to pieces or terribly burned by an accident--say, by a violent earthquake followed by a great conflagration? Just imagine Satan, immortal Satan, thrown down by the ire of God into Hell's fiery gulf, rolling himself in dreadful torture to the end of time. You cannot but conclude that it is only death which relieves you of extreme sufferings, incurable diseases, and it is one of the blessings you ought to be thankful for. The believer of Buddha is thankful even for death itself, the which is the sole means of conquering death. If he be thankful even for death, how much more for the rest of things! He can find a meaning in every form of life. He can perceive a blessing in every change of fortune. He can acknowledge a mission for every individual. He can live in contentment and joy under any conditions. Therefore Lin Tsi (Rin-zai) says: "All the Buddhas might appear before me and I would not be glad. All the Three Regions[FN#280] and Hells might suddenly present themselves before me, and I would not fear. . . . He (an Enlightened person) might get into the fire, and it would not burn him. He might get into water, and it would not drown him. He might be born in Hell, and he would be happy as if he were in a fair garden. He might be born among Pretas and beasts, and he would not suffer from pain. How can he be so? Because he can enjoy everything.'[FN#281] [FN#280] (1) Naraka, or Hell; (2) Pretas, or hungry demons; (3) beasts. [FN#281] Lin Tsi Luk (Rin-zai-roku). APPENDIX ORIGIN OF MAN (GEN-NIN-RON) BY KWEI FUNG TSUNG MIH THE SEVENTH PATRIARCH OF THE KEGON SECT TRANSLATED BY KAITEN NUKARIYA PREFACE Tsung Mih (Shu-Mitsu, A.D. 774-841), the author of Yuen Jan Lun ('Origin of Man'), one of the greatest scholars that China ever produced, was born in a Confucianist family of the State of Kwo Cheu. Having been converted by Tao Yuen (Do-yen), a noted priest of the Zen Sect, he was known at the age of twenty-nine as a prominent member of that sect, and became the Eleventh Patriarch after Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch of the sect, who had come over to China from India about A.D. 520. Some years after he studied under Chino, Kwan (Cho-kwan) the philosophical doctrine of the Avatamsaka School, now known in Japan as the Kegon Sect, and distinguished himself as the Seventh Patriarch of that school. In A.D. 835 he was received in audience by the Emperor Wan Tsung, who questioned him in a general way about the Buddhist doctrines, and bestowed upon him the honourable title of Great Virtuous Teacher, together with abundant gifts. The author produced over ninety volumes of books, which include a commentary on Avatamsaka-sutra, one on Purnabuddha-sutra-prasannartha-sutra, and many others. Yuen Jan Lun is one of the shortest of his essays, but it contains all the essential doctrines, respecting the origin of life and of the universe, which are found in Taoism, Confucianism, Hinayanism, and Mahayanism. How important a position it holds among the Buddhist books can be well imagined from the fact that over twenty commentaries were written on it both by the Chinese and the Japanese Buddhist scholars. It is said that a short essay under the same title by a noted contemporary Confucianist scholar, Han Tui Chi (Kan-tai-shi, who flourished 803-823), suggested to him to write a book in order to make clear to the public the Buddhist view on the same subject. Thus be entitled the book 'Origin of Man,' in spite of his treating of the origin of life and of the universe. Throughout the whole book occur coupled sentences, consisting mostly of the same number of Chinese characters, and consequently while one sentence is too laconic, the other is overladen with superfluous words, put in to make the right number in the balanced group of characters. In addition to this, the text is full of too concise phrases, and often of ambiguous ones, as it is intended to state as briefly as possible all the important doctrines of the Buddhist as well as of the outside schools. On this account the author himself wrote a few notes on the passages that lie thought it necessary to explain. The reader will find these notes beginning with 'A' put by the translator to distinguish them from his own. K. N. ORIGIN OF MAN[FN#282] INTRODUCTION All animated beings that live (under the sun) have an origin, while each of inanimate things, countless in number, owes its existence to some source.[FN#283] There can never be (any being nor) any thing that has (no origin, as there can be no) branch which has no root. How could man, the most spiritual of the Three Powers[FN#284] exist without an origin? [FN#282] The author treats the origin of life and of the universe, but the book was entitled as we have seen in the preface. [FN#283] The same idea and expression are found in Tao Teh King (Do-toku-kyo), by Lao Tsz (Ro-shi, 604-522 B.C.). [FN#284] The Three Powers are-(1) Heaven, that has the power of revolution; (2) Earth, that has the power of production; and (3) Man, that has the power of thought. (It is said),[FN#285] moreover, that that which knows others is intellect, and that that which knows itself is wisdom. Now if I, being born among men, know not whence I came (into this life), how could I know whither I am going in the after-life? How could I understand all human affairs, ancient and modern, in the world? So, for some scores of years I learned under many different tutors, and read extensively (not only) the Buddhist (but also) outside books. By that means I tried to trace my Self, and never stopped my research till I attained, as I had expected, to its origin. [FN#285] The sentence is a direct quotation of Tao Teh King. Confucianists and Taoists of our age, nevertheless, merely know that our nearest origin is the father or the grandfather, as we are descended from them, and they from their fathers in succession. (They say) that the remotest (origin) is the undefinable (primordial) Gas[FN#286] in the state of chaos; that it split itself into the two (different) principles of the Positive and the Negative; that the two brought forth the Three Powers of Heaven, Earth, and Man, which (in their turn) produced all other things; that man as well as other things originated in the Gas. [FN#286] Such a statement concerning the creation of the universe as the one here given is found in I King (Eeki-kyo). The primordial substance is not exactly 'gas,' but we may conceive it as being something like a nebula. (Some)[FN#287] Buddhists, (however), maintain simply that the nearest (origin) is Karma,[FN#288] as we were born among men as the results of the Karma that we had produced in the past existences; and that the remotest (origin) is the Alaya-vijnyana,[FN#289] (because) our Karma is brought forth by illusion, and (illusion by attachment), and so forth, in one word, the Alaya is the origin of life. Although all of (these scholars) claim that they have already grasped the ultimate truth, yet not in fact. [FN#287] Not all Buddhists, but some of them, are meant here-that is, Hinayanists and Dharma-laksanists. [FN#288] According to Hinayanists, Karma (action) is that moral germ which survives death and continues in transmigration. It may be conceived as something like an energy, by the influence of which beings undergo metempsychosis. [FN#289] According to the Dharma-laksana Sect, Alaya-vijnyana (receptacle-knowledge) is the spiritual Substance which holds the 'seeds' or potentialities of all things. Confucius, Lao Tsz, and Shakya, however, were all the wisest of sages. Each of them gave his teachings in a way different from the other two, that they might meet the spiritual needs of his time and fit to the capacities of men. (So that) the Buddhist and the outside doctrines, each supplementing the other, have done good to the multitude. They were all (intended) to encourage thousands of virtuous acts by explaining the whole chain of causality. They were (also intended) to investigate thousands of things, and throw light on the beginning and on the end of their evolution. Although all these doctrines (might) answer the purpose of the sages, yet there must be some teachings that would be temporary,[FN#290] while others would be eternal. The first two faiths are merely temporary, while Buddhism includes both the temporary and the eternal. We may act according to the precepts of these three faiths, which aim at the peace and welfare (of man), in so far as they encourage thousands of virtuous acts by giving warning against evil and recommending good. (But) Buddhism (alone) is altogether perfect and best of all, in investigating thousands of things and in tracing them back to their first cause, in order to acquire thorough understanding of the natures of things and to attain to the ultimate truth. [FN#290] The temporary doctrine means the teaching preached by Shakya Muni to meet the temporary needs of the hearers. The term is always used in contrast with the real or eternal doctrine. Each of our contemporary scholars, nevertheless, adheres to one school of the (above mentioned) teachings. And there are some (even) among the Buddhists who mistake the temporary for the eternal doctrine. In consequence they are never successful in tracing Heaven, Earth, Man, and other things back to their First Cause. But I am now (going to show how) to infer an Ultimate Cause for thousands of things, not only from the Buddhist, but from outsiders' teachings. First I shall treat of the superficial doctrines, and then of the profound, (in order to) free the followers of the temporary faiths from those (prejudices that prove to be) obstructions in their way to the truth, and enable them to attain to the Ultimate Reality. Afterwards I shall point out, according to the perfect doctrine, how things evolved themselves through one stage after another out of the First Cause (in order to) make the incomplete doctrines fuse into the complete one, and to enable the followers to explain the phenomenal universe.[FN#291] [FN#291] A. 'That is, Heaven, Earth, Man, and other things.' This essay is entitled 'Origin of Man,' and it consists of the (following) four chapters: (1) Refutation of Delusive and Prejudiced (Doctrine); (2) Refutation of Incomplete and Superficial (Doctrine); (3) Direct Explanation of the Real Origin; (4) Reconciliation of the Temporary with the Eternal Doctrine. CHAPTER I REFUTATION OF DELUSIVE AND PREJUDICED (DOCTRINE)[FN#292] According to Confucianism[FN#293] and Taoism all sorts of beings, such as men and beasts, were born out of and brought up by the (so-called) Great Path of Emptiness.[FN#294] That is to say, the Path by the operation of its own law gave rise naturally to the primordial Gas, and that Gas produced Heaven and Earth, which (in their turn) brought forth thousands of things. Accordingly the wise and the unwise, the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the happy and the miserable, are predestined to be so by the heavenly flat, and are at the mercy of Time and Providence. Therefore they (must) come back after death to Heaven and Earth, from which (in turn) they return to the (Path) of Emptiness. The main purpose of these[FN#295] (two) outside teachings is simply to establish morals with regard to bodily actions, but not to trace life to its First Cause. They tell of nothing beyond the phenomenal universe in their explanation of thousands of things. Though they point out the Great Path as the origin, yet they never explain in detail (what is) the direct, and (what) the indirect cause of the phenomenal universe, or how it was created, or how it will be destroyed, how life came forth, whither it will go, (what is) good, (what) evil. Therefore the followers of these doctrines adhere to them as the perfect teachings without knowing that they are merely temporary. [FN#292] A. 'Those of Confucianists and Taoists.' [FN#293] Confucianists are not of exactly the same opinion as Taoists respecting the creation. The Great Path here mentioned refers exclusively to Taoism. [FN#294] The Great Path of Emptiness, Hu Wu Ta Tao, is the technical name for the Taoist conception of the Absolute. It is something existent in an undeveloped state before the creation of the phenomenal universe. According to Tao Teh King, it is 'self-existent, unchangeable, all-pervading, and the mother of all things. It is unnamable, but it is sometimes called the Path or the Great.' It is also called the Emptiness, as it is entirely devoid of relative activities. [FN#295] Confucianism mainly treats of ethical problems, but Taoism is noted for its metaphysical speculation. Now I (shall) raise, in brief, a few questions to point out their weaknesses. If everything in the universe, as they say, came out of the Great Path of Emptiness, that Great Path itself should be the cause of (not only) of wisdom, (but) of folly, (not only) of life, (but) of death. It ought to be the source of prosperity (as well as) of adversity, of fortune (as well as) of misfortune. If this origin exist (as it is supposed) to all eternity, it must be possible neither to remove follies, villainies, calamities, and wars, nor to promote wisdom, good, happiness, and welfare. Of what use (then) are the teachings of Lao Tsz and Chwang Tsz?[FN#296] The Path, besides, should have reared the tiger and the wolf, given birth to Kieh[FN#297] and Cheu,[FN#298] caused the premature deaths of Yen[FN#299] and Jan,[FN#300] and placed I[FN#301] and Tsi[FN#302] in their most lamentable condition. How could it be called a noble (path)? [FN#296] One of the greatest Taoist philosophers, and the author of the book entitled after his name. He flourished 339-327 B.C. [FN#297] The last Emperor of the Hia dynasty, notorious for his vices. His reign was 1818-1767 B.C. [FN#298] The last Emperor of the Yin dynasty, one of the worst despots. His reign was 1154-1122 B.C. [FN#299] Yen Hwui (Gan-kai, 541-483 B.C.), a most beloved disciple of Confucius, known as a wise and virtuous scholar. [FN#300] Jan Poh Niu (Zen-pak-giu, 521- . . . B.C.), a prominent disciple, of Confucius, distinguished for his virtues. [FN#301] Poh I (Haku-i), the elder brother of Tsi, who distinguished himself by his faith and wisdom at the downfall of the Yin dynasty. [FN#302] Shuh Tsi (Shiku Sei), the brother of I, with whom he shared the same fate. Again, if, as they say, thousands of things could come naturally into existence without direct or indirect causes, they should come forth in all places where there are neither direct nor indirect causes. For instance, a stone would bring forth grass, while grass would give birth to man, and man would beget beasts, etc. In addition to this they would come out all at the same time, nothing being produced before or after the others. They would come into existence all at the same moment, nothing being produced sooner or later than the others. Peace and welfare might be secured without the help of the wise and the good. Humanity and righteousness might be acquired without instruction and study. One might even become an immortal genius[FN#303] without taking the miraculous medicine. Why did Lao Tsz, Chwang Tsz, Cheu Kung[FN#304] and Confucius do such a useless task as to found their doctrines and lay down the precepts for men? [FN#303] Degenerated Taoists maintained that they could prepare a certain miraculous draught, by the taking of which one could become immortal. [FN#304] Cheu Kung (Shu-ko), a most noted statesman and scholar, the younger brother of the Emperor Wu (1122-1116 B.C.), the founder of the Chen dynasty. Again, if all things, as they say, were made of the primordial Gas (which has no feeling nor will), how could an infant, just born of the Gas, who had never learned to think, or love, or hate, or to be naughty, or wilful (even begin to think or feel)? If, as they may answer, the infant as soon as it was born could quite naturally love or hate, etc., as it wished, it could (as well) gain the Five Virtues[FN#305] and the Six Acquirements,[FN#306] as it wished. Why does it wait for some direct or indirect causes (to gain its knowledge), and to acquire them through study and instruction? [FN#305] (1) Humanity, (2) Uprightness, (3) Propriety, (4) Wisdom, (5) Sincerity. [FN#306] (1) Reading, (2) Arithmetic, (3) Etiquette, (4) Archery, (5) Horsemanship, (6) Music. Again, they might say life suddenly came into existence, it being formed of the Gas, and suddenly goes to naught (at death), the Gas being dispersed. What, then, are the spirits of the dead (which they believe in)? Besides, there are in history some instances of persons[FN#307] who could see through previous existences, or of persons[FN#308] who recollected the events in their past lives. Therefore we know that the present is the continuation of the past life, and that it did not come into existence on a sudden by the formation of a Gas. Again, there are some historical facts[FN#309] proving that the supernatural powers of spirits will not be lost. Thus we know that life is not to be suddenly reduced to naught after death by the dispersion of the Gas. Therefore (matters concerning) sacrifices, services, and supplications (to the spirits) are mentioned in the sacred books.[FN#310] Even more than that! Are there not some instances, ancient and modern, of persons who revived after death to tell the matters concerning the unseen world, or who[FN#311] appeared to move the hearts of their wives and children a while after death, or who[FN#312] took vengeance (on the enemy), or who[FN#313] returned favours (to their friends)? [FN#307] According to Tsin Shu, a man, Pao Tsing by name, told his parents, when he was five years, that he had been in the previous life a son to Li, an inhabitant of Kuh Yang, and that he had fallen into the well and died. Thereupon the parents called on Li, and found, to their astonishment, that the boy's statement was actually coincident with the fact. [FN#308] Yan Hu, a native of Tsin Chen, recollected, at the age of five, that he had been a son to the next-door neighbour, and that he had left his ring under a mulberry-tree close by the fence of the house. Thereupon he went with his nurse and successfully restored it, to the astonishment of the whole family. [FN#309] All the ancient sages of China believed in spirits, and propitiated them by sacrifices. [FN#310] The sacred books of Confucianism, Shu King and Li Ki. [FN#311] Pang Shang, the Prince of Tsi, is said to have appeared after his death. [FN#312] Poh Yiu, of Ching, is said to have become an epidemic spirit to take vengeance on his enemies. [FN#313] According to Tso Chwen (Sa-den), when Wei Wu, a General of Tsin, fought with Tu Hwui, the dead father of his concubine appeared, and prevented the march of the enemy in order to return favours done to him. The outside scholars might ask, by way of objection, if one live as a spirit after death, the spirits of the past would fill up streets and roads, and be seen by men; and why are there no eye-witnesses? I say in reply that (as) there are the Six Worlds[FN#314] for the dead, they do not necessarily live in the world of spirits. (Even as spirits) they must die and be born again among men or other beings. How can the spirits of the past always live in a crowd? Moreover, if (as you say) man was born of (primordial) Gas which gave rise to Heaven and Earth, and which was unconscious from the very beginning, how could he be conscious all on a sudden after his birth? Why are trees and grass which were also formed of the same Gas unconscious? Again, if, (as you say), the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the wise and the unwise, the good and the bad, the happy and the unhappy, the lucky and the unlucky, are predestinated alike by heavenly decree, why are so many destined by heaven to be poor and so few to be rich? Why so many to be low and so few to be high? In short, why are so many destined to be unlucky and so few to be lucky? [FN#314] (1) The heaven, or the world for Devas; (2) the earth, or the world for men; (3) the world for Asuras; (4) the world for Petras; (5) the world for beasts; (6) hell. If it be the will of Heaven to bless so limited a number of persons at all, and to curse so many, why is Heaven so partial? Even more than that! Are there not many who hold a high position without any meritorious conduct, while some are placed in a low one in spite of their keeping to (the rules of) conduct? Are there not many who are rich without any virtues, while some are poor in spite of their virtues? Are there not the unjust who are fortunate, while the just are unfortunate? Are there not the humane, who die young, while the inhuman enjoy long lives? In short, the righteous (are doomed) to perish, while the unrighteous prosper! Thus (we must infer) that all this depends on the heavenly will, which causes the unrighteous to prosper and the righteous to perish. How can there be reward for the good (as it is taught in your sacred books),[FN#315] that Heaven blesses the good and shows grace to the humble? How can there be punishment for the bad (as it is taught in your holy books),[FN#316] that Heaven curses the evil and inflicts punishment on the proud? [FN#315] Shu King and I King. [FN#316] Ibid. Again, if even all such evils as wars, treacheries, and rebellions depend on the heavenly will, those Sages would be in the wrong who, in the statement of their teaching, censure or chastise men, but not Heaven or the heavenly will. Therefore, even if Shi[FN#317] is full of reproofs against maladministration, while Shu[FN#318] of eulogies for the reigns of the wisest monarchs-even if Propriety[FN#319] is recommended as a most effectual means of creating peace between the governors and the governed, while Music[FN#320] (is recommended as a means of) ameliorating the customs and manners of the people--still, they can hardly be said to realize the Will on High or to conform to the wishes of the Creator. Hence you must acknowledge that those who devote themselves to the study of these doctrines are not able to trace man to his origin. [FN#317] Shu King, a famous book of odes. [FN#318] Shu King, the records of the administrations of the wisest monarchs of old. [FN#319] Li Ki, the book on proprieties and etiquette. [FN#320] It is said in Hiao King that music is the best means to improve customs and manners. CHAPTER II REFUTATION OF INCOMPLETE AND SUPERFICIAL (DOCTRINE)[FN#321] There are in the Buddhist doctrines, to state briefly, the five grades (of development), beginning with the most superficial, and ending with the most profound teachings. (They are as follows:) (1) The Doctrine for Men and Devas; (2) the Doctrine of the Hinayanists; (3) the Mahayana Doctrine of Dharma-laksana; (4) the Mahayana Doctrine of the Nihilists[FN#322]; (5) the Ekaydna Doctrine that teaches the Ultimate Reality.[FN#323] [FN#321] A. 'The imperfect doctrines taught by the Buddha.' [FN#322] A. 'These first four doctrines are treated of in this chapter.' [FN#323] A. 'This is mentioned in the third chapter.' 1. The Doctrine for Men and Devas. The Buddha, to meet temporarily the spiritual needs of the uninitiated, preached a doctrine concerning good or bad Karma as the cause, and its retribution as the effect, in the three existences (of the past, the present, and the future). That is, one who commits the tenfold sin[FN#324] must be reborn after death in hell, when these sins are of the highest grade;[FN#325] among Pretas,[FN#326] when of the middle grade; and among animals, when of the lowest grade. [FN#324] (1) Taking life, (2) theft, (3) adultery, (4) lying, (5) exaggeration, (6) abuse, (7) ambiguous talk, (8) coveting, (9) malice, (10) unbelief. [FN#325] There are three grades in each of the tenfold sin. For instance, the taking of the life of a Buddha, or of a sage, or of a parent, etc., is of the highest grade; while to kill fellow-men is of the middle; and to kill beasts and birds, etc., is of the lowest. Again, to kill any being with pleasure is of the highest grade; while to repent after killing is of the middle; and killing by mistake is of the lowest. [FN#326] Hungry spirits. Therefore the Buddha for a temporary purpose made these (uninitiated) observe the Five Precepts similar to the Five Virtues[FN#327] of the outside doctrine, in order to enable them to escape the three (worst) States[FN#328] of Existence, and to be reborn among men. (He also taught that) those who cultivate[FN#329] the tenfold virtue[FN#330] of the highest grade, and who give alms, and keep the precepts, and so forth, are to be born in the Six Celestial Realms of Kama[FN#331] while those who practise the Four[FN#332] Dhyanas, the Eight Samadhis,[FN#333] are to be reborn in the heavenly worlds of Rupa[FN#334] and Arupa. For this reason this doctrine is called the doctrine for men and Devas. According to this doctrine Karma is the origin of life.[FN#335] [FN#327] The five cardinal virtues of Confucianism are quite similar to the five precepts of Buddhism, as we see by this table: VIRTUES.---PRECEPTS. 1. Humanity.---1. Not to take life. 2. Uprightness.---2. Not to steal. 3. Propriety.---3. Not to be adulterous. 4. Wisdom.---4. Not to get drunk. 5. Sincerity.---5. Not to lie. [FN#328] (1) Hell, (2) Pretas, (3) Beasts. [FN#329] A. 'The Buddhist precepts are different from the Confucian teachings in the form of expression, but they agree in their warning against the evil and in encouraging the good. The moral conduct of the Buddhist can be secured by the cultivation of the five virtues of humanity, uprightness, etc., as though people in this country hold up their hands joined in the respectable salutation, while the same object is attained by those of The Fan, who stand with their bands hanging down. Not to kill is humanity. Not to steal is uprightness. Not to be adulterous is propriety. Not to lie is sincerity. Not to drink spirits nor eat meat is to increase wisdom, keeping mind pure.' [FN#330] (1) Not to take life, (2) not to steal, (3) not to be adulterous, (4) not to lie, (5) not to exaggerate, (6) not to abuse, (7) not to talk ambiguously, (8) not to covet, (9) not to be malicious, (10) not to unbelieve. [FN#331] Kama-loka, the world of desire, is the first of the Three Worlds. It consists of the earth and the six heavenly worlds, all the inhabitants of which are subject to sensual desires. [FN#332] The Buddhists taught the four Dhyanas, or the four different degrees of abstract contemplation, by which the mind could free itself from all subjective and objective trammels, until it reached a state of absolute absence of unconcentrated thought. The practiser of the four Dhyanas would be born in the four regions of the Rupa-lokas in accordance with his spiritual state. [FN#333] Namely, the above-mentioned four degrees of contemplation, and other four deeper ecstatic meditations. The practiser of the latter would be born in the four spiritual regions of Arupa-loka in accordance with his state of abstraction. [FN#334] Rupa-loka, the world of form, is the second of the Three Worlds. It consists of eighteen heavens, which were divided into four regions. The first Dhyana region comprised the first three of the eighteen heavens, the second Dhyana region the next three, the third Dhyana region the following three, and the fourth Dhyana region the remaining nine. Arupa-loka, the world of formlessness, is the third of the Three Worlds. It consists of four heavens. The first is called 'the heaven of unlimited space,' the second 'the heaven of unlimited knowledge,' the third 'the heaven of absolute non-existence,' the fourth 'the heaven of neither consciousness nor unconsciousness.' A. 'None of heavens, or of hells, or of the worlds of spirits, is mentioned in the title of this book, because these worlds are entirely different from ours, and absolutely beyond the sight and hearing. Ordinary people know not even the phenomena actually occurring before them; how could they understand the unseen? So I entitled it simply, "The Origin of Man " in agreement with the worldly teachings. Now that I treat, however, of the Buddhist doctrine, it is reasonable to enumerate these worlds in full.' [FN#335] A. 'But there are three sorts of Karmas: (1) The bad, (2) the good, (3) the immovable. There are the three periods for retribution: (1) In this life, (2) in the next life, (3) in some remote future life.' Now let me raise some questions by way of objection. Granting that one has to be born in the Five States of Existences[FN#336] by virtue of Karma produced (in previous lives), is it not doubtful who is the author of Karma, and who the recipient of its consequences? If it might be said that the eyes, ears, hands, and feet produce Karma, then the eyes, ears, hands, and feet of a newly-dead person are still as they were. So why do they not see and hear and thus produce Karma? [FN#336] The states of--(1) heavenly beings, (2) men, (3) beings in hell, (4) hungry spirits, (5) beasts. If it be said that it is the mind that produces Karma (I ask), what is the mind? If you mean the heart, the heart is a material thing, and is located within the body. How can it, by coming quickly into the eyes and ears, distinguish the pleasing from the disgusting in external objects? If there be no distinction between the pleasing and the disgusting, why does it accept the one or reject the other? Besides, the heart is as much material and impenetrable as the eyes, ears, hands, and feet. How, then, can the heart within freely pass to the organs of sense without? How can this one put the others in motion, or communicate with them, in order to co-operate in producing Karma? If it be said that only such passions as joy, anger, love, and hatred act through the body and the mouth and enable them to produce Karma, (I should say) those passions--joy, anger, and the rest--are too transitory, and come and go in a moment. They have no Substance (behind their appearances). What, then, is the chief agent that produces Karma? It might be said that we should not seek after (the author of Karma) by taking mind and body separately (as we have just done), because body and mind, as a whole, conjointly produce Karma. Who, then, after the destruction of body by death, would receive the retribution (in the form) of pain or of pleasure? If it be assumed that another body is to come into existence after death, then the body and mind of the present life, committing sins or cultivating virtues, would cause another body and mind in the future which would suffer from the pains or enjoy the pleasures. Accordingly, those who cultivate virtues would be extremely unlucky, while those who commit sins very lucky. How can the divine law of causality be so unreasonable? Therefore we (must) acknowledge that those who merely follow this doctrine are far from a thorough understanding of the origin of life, though they believe in the theory of Karma. 2. The Doctrine of the Hinayanists. This doctrine tells us that (both) the body, that is formed of matter, and the mind, that thinks and reflects, continually exist from eternity to eternity, being destroyed and recreated by means of direct or indirect causes, just as the water of a river glides continually, or the flame of a lamp keeps burning constantly. Mind and body unite themselves temporarily, and seem to be one and changeless. The common people, ignorant of all this, are attached to (the two combined) as being Atman.[FN#337] [FN#337] Atman means ego, or self, on which individuality is based. For the sake of this Atman, which they hold to be the most precious thing (in the world), they are subject to the Three Poisons Of lust,[FN#338] anger,[FN#339] and folly,[FN#340] which (in their turn) give impulse to the will and bring forth Karma of all kinds through speech and action. Karma being thus produced, no one can evade its effects. Consequently all must be born[FN#341] in the Five States of Existence either to suffer pain or to enjoy pleasure; some are born in the higher places, while others in the lower of the Three Worlds.[FN#342] [FN#338] A. 'The passion that covets fame and gain to keep oneself in prosperity.' [FN#339] A. 'The passion against disagreeable things, for fear of their inflicting injuries on oneself.' [FN#340] A. 'Wrong thoughts and inferences.' [FN#341] A. 'Different sorts of beings are born by virtue of the individualizing Karma.' [FN#342] A. 'Worlds are produced by virtue of the Karma common to all beings that live in them.' When born (in the future lives) they are attached again to the body (and mind) as Atman, and become subject to lust and the other two passions. Karma is again produced by them, and they have to receive its inevitable results. (Thus) body undergoes birth, old age, disease, death, and is reborn after death; while the world passes through the stages of formation, existence, destruction, and emptiness, and is re-formed again after emptiness. Kalpa after Kalpa[FN#343] (passes by), life after life (comes on), and the circle of continuous rebirths knows no beginning nor end, and resembles the pulley for drawing water from the well.[FN#344] [FN#343] Kalpa, a mundane cycle, is not reckoned by months and years. lt is a period during which a physical universe is formed to the moment when another is put into its place. A. "The following verses describe how the world was first created in the period of emptiness: A strong wind began to blow through empty space. Its length and breadth were infinite. It was 16 lakhs thick, and so strong that it could not be cut even with a diamond. Its name was the world-supporting-wind. The golden clouds of Abhasvara heaven (the sixth of eighteen heavens of the Rupa-loka) covered all the skies of the Three Thousand Worlds. Down came the heavy rain, each drop being as large as the axle of a waggon. The water stood on the wind that checked its running down. It was 11 lakhs deep. The first layer was made of adamant (by the congealing water). Gradually the cloud poured down the rain and filled it. First the Brahma-raja worlds, next the Yama-heaven (the third of six heavens of the Kama loka), were made. The pure water rose up, driven by the wind, and Sumeru, (the central mountain, or axis of the universe) and the seven concentric circles of mountains, and so on, were formed. Out of dirty sediments the mountains, the four continents, the hells, oceans, and outer ring of mountains, were made. This is called the formation of the universe. The time of one Increase and one Decrease (human life is increased from 10 to 84,000 years, increasing by one year at every one hundred years; then it is decreased from 84,000 to 10 years, decreasing by one year at every one hundred years) elapsed. In short, those beings in the second region of Rupa-loka, whose good Karma had spent its force, came down on the earth. At first there were the 'earth bread' and the wild vine for them. Afterwards they could not completely digest rice, and began to excrete and to urinate. Thus men were differentiated from women. They divided the cultivated land among them. Chiefs were elected; assistants and subjects were sought out; hence different classes of people. A period of nineteen Increases and Decreases elapsed. Added to the above-mentioned period, it amounted to twenty Increases and Decreases. This is called the Kalpa of the formation of the universe. "Now let us discuss this point. The Kalpa of Emptiness is what the Taoist calls the Path of Emptiness. The Path or the Reality, however, is not empty, but bright, transcendental, spiritual, and omnipresent. Lao Tsz, led by his mistaken idea, called the Kalpa of Emptiness the Path; otherwise he did so for the temporary purpose of denouncing worldly desires. The wind in the empty space is what the Taoist calls the undefinable Gas in the state of Chaos. Therefore Lao Tsz said, 'The Path brings forth one.' The golden clouds, the first of all physical objects, is (what the Confucianist calls) the First Principle. The rain-water standing (on the wind) is the production of the Negative Principle. The Positive, united with the Negative, brought forth the phenomenal universe. The Brahma-raja-loka, the Sumeru, and others, are what they call the Heaven. The dirty waters and sediment are the Earth. So Lao Tsz said, 'One produces two.' Those in the second region of the Rupra-loka, whose good Karma had spent its force, came down upon the earth and became human beings. Therefore Lao Tsz said, 'The two produce three.' Thus the Three Powers were completed. The earth-bread and different classes of people, and so on, are the so-called 'production of thousands of things by the Three.' This was the time when people lived in eaves or wandered in the wilderness, and knew not the use of fire. As it belongs to the remote past of the prehistoric age, previous to the reigns of the first three Emperors, the traditions handed down to us are neither clear nor certain. Many errors crept into them one generation after another, and consequently no one of the statements given in the various works of scholars agrees with another. Besides, when the Buddhist books explain the formation of the Three Thousand Worlds, they do not confine themselves merely within the limits of this country. Hence their records are entirely different from those of the outsiders (which are confined to China). "'Existence' means the Kalpa of Existence that lasts twenty Increases and Decreases. 'Destruction' means the Kalpa of Destruction that lasts also twenty Increases and Decreases. During the first nineteen Increases and Decreases living beings are destroyed; while in the last worlds are demolished through the three periods of distress (1) the period of water, (2) the period of fire, (3) the period of wind. 'Emptiness' means the Kalpa of Emptiness, during which no beings nor worlds exist. This Kalpa also lasts twenty Increases and Decreases." [FN#344] A. 'Taoists merely know that there was one Kalpa of Emptiness before the formation of this present universe, and point out the Emptiness, the Chaos, the primordial Gas, and the rest, naming them as the first or the beginningless. But they do not know that the universe had already gone through myriads of cycles of Kalpas of formation, existence, destruction, and emptiness. Thus even the most superficial of the Hinayana doctrines far excels the most profound of the outside doctrines.' All this is due to Ignorance which does not understand that no bodily existence, by its very nature, can be Atman. The reason why it is not Atman is this, that its formation is, after all, due to the union of matter and mind. Now (let us) examine and analyze (mind and body). Matter consists of the four elements of earth, water, fire, and wind, while mind consists of the four aggregates of perception,[FN#345] consciousness,[FN#346] conception,[FN#347] and knowledge.[FN#348] [FN#345] A. 'It receives both the agreeable and the disagreeable impressions from without.' It is Yedana, the second of the five Skandhas, or aggregates. [FN#346] A. 'It perceives the forms of external objects.' It is Samjnya, name, the third of the five aggregates. [FN#347] A. 'It acts, one idea changing after another.' It is Samskara, the fourth of the five aggregates. [FN#348] A. 'It recognizes.' It is Vijnyana, the last of the five aggregates. If all (these elements) be taken as Atman, there must be eight Atmans (for each person). More than that! There are many different things, even in the element of earth. Now, there are three hundred and sixty bones, each one distinct from the other. No one is the same as any other, either of the skin, hair, muscles, the liver, the heart, the spleen, and the kidneys. Furthermore, there are a great many mental qualities each different from the others. Sight is different from hearing. Joy is not the same as anger. If we enumerate them, in short, one after another, there are eighty thousand passions.[FN#349] [FN#349] Eighty thousand simply means a great many. As things are thus so innumerable, none can tell which of these (without mistake) is to be taken as the Atman. In case all be taken as the Atman, there must be hundreds and thousands of Atmans, among which there would be as many conflicts and disturbances as there are masters living in the one (house of) body. As there exists no body nor mind separated from these things, one can never find the Atman, even if he seeks for it over and over again. Hereupon anyone understands that this life (of ours) is no more than the temporary union of numerous elements (mental and physical). Originally there is no Atman to distinguish one being from another. For whose sake, then, should he be lustful or angry? For whose sake should he take life,[FN#350] or commit theft, or give alms, or keep precepts? (Thus thinking) at length he sets his mind free from the virtues and vices subjected to the passions[FN#351] of the Three Worlds, and abides in the discriminative insight into (the nature of) the Anatman[FN#352] only. By means of that discriminative insight he makes himself pure from lust, and the other (two passions) puts an end to various sorts of Karma, and realizes the Bhutatathata[FN#353] of Anatman. In brief, he attains to the State of Arhat,[FN#354] has his body reduced to ashes, his intelligence annihilated, and entirely gets rid of sufferings. [FN#350] A. 'He understands the truth of misery.' The truth of Duhkha, or misery, is the first of the four Noble Satyas, or Truths, that ought to be realized by the Hinayanists. According to the Hinayana doctrine, misery is a necessary concomitant of sentient life.' [FN#351] A. 'He destroys Samudaya.' The truth of Samudaya, or accumulation, the second of the four Satyas, means that misery is accumulated or produced by passions. This truth should be realized by the removal of passions. [FN#352] A. 'This is the truth of Marga.' The truth of Marga, or Path, is the fourth of the four Satyas. There are the eight right Paths that lead to the extinction of passions; (1) Right view (to discern truth), (2) right thought (or purity of will and thought), (3) right speech (free from nonsense and errors), (4) right action, (5) right diligence, (6) right meditation, (7) right memory, (8) right livelihood. [FN#353] A. 'This is the truth of Nirodha.' Nirodha, or destruction, the third of the four Satyas, means the extinction of passions. Bhutatathati of Anatman means the truth of the non existence of Atma or soul, and is the aim and end of the Hinayanist philosophy. [FN#354] Arhat, the Killer of thieves (i.e., passions), means one who conquered his passions. It means, secondly, one who is exempted from birth, or one who is free from transmigration. Thirdly, it means one deserving worship. So the Arhat is the highest sage who has attained to Nirvana by the destruction of all passions. According to the doctrine of this school the two aggregates, material and spiritual, together with lust, anger, and folly, are the origin of ourselves and of the world in which we live. There exists nothing else, either in the past or in the future, that can be regarded as the origin. Now let us say (a few words) by way of refutation. That which (always) stands as the origin of life, birth after birth, generation after generation, should exist by itself without cessation. Yet the Five Vijnyanas[FN#355] cease to perform their functions when they lack proper conditions, (while) the Mano-vijnyana[FN#356] is lost at times (in unconsciousness). There are none of those four (material) elements in the heavenly worlds of Arupa. How, then, is life sustained there and kept up in continuous birth after birth? Therefore we know that those who devote themselves to the study of this doctrine also cannot trace life to its origin. [FN#355] A. 'The conditions are the Indriyas and the Visayas, etc.' Indriyas are organs of sense, and Visayas are objects on which the sense acts. Five Vijnyanas are--(1) The sense of sight, (2) the sense of hearing, (3) the sense of smell, (4) the sense of taste, (5) the sense of touch. [FN#356] Mano-vijnyana is the mind itself, and the last of the six Vijnyanas of the Hinayana doctrine. A. '(For instance), in a state of trance, in deep slumber, in Nirodha-samapatti (where no thought exists), in Asamjnyi-samapatti (in which no consciousness exists), and in Avrhaloka (the thirteenth of Brahmalokas). 3. The Mahayana Doctrine of Dharmalaksana.[FN#357] This doctrine tells us that from time immemorial all sentient beings naturally have eight different Vijnyanas[FN#358] and the eighth, Alaya-vijnyana,[FN#359] is the origin of them. (That is), the Alaya suddenly brings forth the 'seeds'[FN#360] of living beings and of the world in which they live, and through transformation gives rise to the seven Vijnyanas. Each of them causes external objects on which it acts to take form and appear. In reality there is nothing externally existent. How, then, does Alaya give rise to them through transformation? Because, as this doctrine tells us, we habitually form the erroneous idea that Atman and external objects exist in reality, and it acts upon Alaya and leaves its impressions[FN#361] there. Consequently, when Vijnyanas are awakened, these impressions (or the seed-ideas) transform and present themselves (before the mind's eye) Atman and external objects. [FN#357] This school studies in the main the nature of things (Dharma), and was so named. The doctrine is based on Avatamsaka-sutra and Samdhi-nirmocana-sutra, and was systematized by Asamga and Vasu-bandhu. The latter's book, Vidyamatra-siddhi-castra-karika, is held to be the best authoritative work of the school. [FN#358] (1) The sense of sight; (2) the sense of hearing; (3) the sense of smell; (4) the sense of taste; (5) the sense of touch; (6) Mano-vijnyana (lit., mind-knowledge), or the perceptive faculty; (7) Klista-mano-vijnyana (lit., soiled-mind-knowledge), or an introspective faculty; (8) Alaya-vijnyana (lit., receptacle-knowledge), or ultimate-mind-substance. [FN#359] The first seven Vijnyanas depend on the Alaya, which is said to hold all the 'seeds' of physical and mental objects. [FN#360] This school is an extreme form of Idealism, and maintains that nothing separated from the Alaya can exist externally. The mind-substance, from the first, holds the seed ideas of everything, and they seem to the non-enlightened mind to be the external universe, but are no other than the transformation of the seed-ideas. The five senses, and the Mano-vijnyana acting on them, take them for external objects really existent, while the seventh Vijnyana mistakes the eighth for Atman. [FN#361] The non-enlightened mind, habitually thinking that Atman and external objects exist, leaves the impression of the seed-ideas on its own Alaya. Then the sixth and the seventh[FN#362] Vijnyana veiled with Avidya, dwelling on them, mistake them for real Atman and the real external objects. This (error) may be compared with one diseased[FN#363] in the eye, who imagines that he sees various things (floating in the air) on account of his illness; or with a dreamer[FN#364] whose fanciful thoughts assume various forms of external objects, and present themselves before him. While in the dream he fancies that there exist external objects in reality, but on awakening he finds that they are nothing other than the transformation of his dreaming thoughts. [FN#362] Avidya, or ignorance, which mistakes the illusory phenomena for realities. [FN#363] A. 'A person with a serious disease sees the vision of strange colours, men, and things in his trance.' [FN#364] A. 'That a dreamer fancies he sees things is well known to everybody.' So are our lives. They are no other than the transformation of the Vijnyanas; but in consequence of illusion, we take them for the Atman and external objects existing in reality. From these erroneous ideas arise delusive thoughts that lead to the production of Karma; hence the round-of rebirth to time without end.[FN#365] When we understand these reasons, we can realize the fact that our lives are nothing but transformations of the Vijnyanas, and that the (eighth) Vijnyana is the origin.[FN#366] [FN#365] A. 'As it was detailed above.' [FN#366] A. 'An imperfect doctrine, which is refuted later.' 4. Mahayana Doctrine of the Nihilists. This doctrine disproves (both) the Mahayana and the Hinayana doctrines above mentioned that adhere to Dharma-laksana, and suggestively discloses the truth of Transcendental Reality which is to be treated later.[FN#367] Let me state, first of all, what it would say in the refutation of Dharma-laksana. [FN#367] A. "The nihilistic doctrine is stated not only in the various Prajnya-sutras (the books having Prajnya-paramita in their titles), but also in almost all Mahayana sutras. The above-mentioned three doctrines were preached (by the Buddha) in the three successive periods. But this doctrine was not preached at any particular period; it was intended to destroy at any time the attachment to the phenomenal objects. Therefore Nagarjuna tells us that there are two sorts of Prajnyas, the Common and the Special. The �ravakas (lit., hearers) and the Pratyekabuddhas (lit., singly enlightened ones), or the Hinayanists, could hear and believe in, with the Bodhisattvas or the Mahayanists, the Common Prajnya, as it was intended to destroy their attachment to the external objects. Bodhisattvas alone could understand the Special Prajnya, as it secretly revealed the Buddha nature, or the Absolute. Each of the two great Indian teachers, �ilabhadra and Jnyanaprabha, divided the whole teachings of the Buddha into three periods. (According to �ilabhadra, A.D. 625, teacher of Hiuen Tsang, the Buddha first preached the doctrine of 'existence' to the effect that every living being is unreal, but things are real. All the Hinayana sutras belong to this period. Next the Buddha preached the doctrine of the middle path, in Samdhi-nirmocana-sutra and others, to the effect that all the phenomenal universe is unreal, but that the mental substance is real. According to Jnyanaprabha, the Buddha first preached the doctrine of existence, next that of the existence of mental substance, and lastly that of unreality.) One says the doctrine of unreality was preached before that of Dharma-laksana, while the others say it was preached after. Here I adopt the latters' opinion." If the external objects which are transformed are unreal, how can the Vijnyana, the transformer, be real? If you say the latter is really existent, but not the former,[FN#368] then (you assume that) the dreaming mind (which is compared with Alaya-vijnyana) is entirely different from the objects seen in the dream (which are compared with external objects). If they are entirely different, you ought not to identify the dream with the things dreamed, nor to identify the things dreamed with the dream itself. In other words, they ought to have separate existences. (And) when you awake your dream may disappear, but the things dreamed would remain. [FN#368] A. 'In the following sentences I refute it, making use of the simile of the dream.' Again, if (you say) that the things dreamed are not identical with the dream, then they would be really existent things. If the dream is not the same as the things dreamed, in what other form does it appear to you? Therefore you must acknowledge that there is every reason to believe that both the dreaming mind and the things dreamed are equally unreal, and that nothing exists in reality, though it seems to you as if there were a seer, and a seen, in a dream. Thus those Vijnyanas also would be unreal, because all of them are not self-existent realities, their existence being temporary, and dependent upon various conditions. "There is nothing," (the author of) Madhyamika-castra[FN#369] says, "that ever came into existence without direct and indirect causes. Therefore there is anything that is not unreal in the world." He says again: "Things produced through direct and indirect causes I declare to be the very things which are unreal." (The author of) Craddhotdada-castra[FN#370] says: "All things in the universe present themselves in different forms only on account of false ideas. If separated from the (false) ideas and thoughts, no forms of those external objects exist." "All the physical forms (ascribed to Buddha)," says (the author of) a sutra,[FN#371] "are false and unreal. The beings that transcend all forms are called Buddhas."[FN#372] Consequently you must acknowledge that mind as well as external objects are unreal. This is the eternal truth of the Mahayana doctrine. We are driven to the conclusion that unreality is the origin of life, if we trace it back according to this doctrine. [FN#369] The principal textbook of the Madhyamika School, by Nagarjuna and Nilanetra, translated into Chinese (A.D. 409) by Kumarajiva. [FN#370] A well-known Mahayana book ascribed to Acvaghosa, translated into Chinese by Paramartha. There exists an English translation by D. Suzuki. [FN#371] Vajracchedha-prajnya-paramita-sutra, of which there exist three Chinese translations. [FN#372] A. 'Similar passages are found in every book of the Mahayana Tripitaka.' Now let us say (a few words) to refute this doctrine also. If mind as well as external objects be unreal, who is it that knows they are so? Again, if there be nothing real in the universe, what is it that causes unreal objects to appear? We stand witness to the fact there is no one of the unreal things on earth that is not made to appear by something real. If there be no water of unchanging fluidity,[FN#373] how can there be the unreal and temporary forms of waves? If there be no unchanging mirror, bright and clean, how can there be various images, unreal and temporary, reflected in it? It is true in sooth that the dreaming mind as well as the things dreamed, as said above, are equally unreal, but does not that unreal dream necessarily presuppose the existence of some (real) sleepers? [FN#373] The Absolute is compared with the ocean, and the phenomenal universe with the waves. Now, if both mind and external objects, as declared above, be nothing at all, no- one can tell what it is that causes these unreal appearances. Therefore this doctrine, we know, simply serves to refute the erroneous theory held by those who are passionately attached to Dharma-laksana, but never clearly discloses spiritual Reality. So that Mahabheri-harakaparivarta-sutra[FN#374] says as follows: "All the sutras that teach the unreality of things belong to an imperfect doctrine (of the Buddha). Mahaprajnya-paramita-sutra[FN#375] says: "The doctrine of unreality is the first entrance-gate to Mahayanism." [FN#374] The book was translated into Chinese by Gunabhadra, A.D. 420-479. [FN#375] This is not the direct quotation from the sutra translated by Hiuen Tsang. The words are found in Mahaprajnya-paramita-sutra, the commentary on the sutra by Nagarjuna. When the above-mentioned four doctrines are compared with one another in the order of succession, each is more profound than the preceding. They are called the superficial, provided that the follower, learning them a short while, knows them by himself to be imperfect; (but) if he adheres to them as perfect, these same (doctrines) are called incomplete. They are (thus) said to be superficial and incomplete with regard to the follower. CHAPTER III THE DIRECT EXPLANATION OF THE REAL ORIGIN[FN#376] 5. The Ekayana Doctrine that Teaches the Ultimate Reality. This doctrine teaches us that all sentient beings have the Real Spirit[FN#377] of Original Enlightenment (within themselves). From time immemorial it is unchanging and pure. It is eternally bright, and clear, and conscious. It is also named the Buddha-nature, or Tathagata-garbha.[FN#378] As it is, however, veiled by illusion from time without beginning, (sentient beings) are not conscious of its existence, and think that the nature within themselves are degenerated. Consequently they are given to bodily pleasures, and producing Karma, suffer from birth and death. The great Enlightened One, having compassion on them, taught that everything in the universe is unreal. He pointed out that the Real Spirit of Mysterious Enlightenment (within them) is pure and exactly the same as that of Buddha. Therefore he says in Avatamsaka-sutra[FN#379]: "There are no sentient beings, the children of Buddha, who are not endowed with wisdom of Tathagata;[FN#380] but they cannot attain to Enlightenment simply because of illusion and attachment. When they are free from illusion, the Universal Intelligence,[FN#381] the Natural Intelligence,[FN#382] the Unimpeded Intelligence,[FN#383] will be disclosed (in their minds)." [FN#376] A. 'The perfect doctrine, in which eternal truth is taught by the Buddha.' [FN#377] The ultimate reality is conceived by the Mahayanist as an entity self-existent, omnipresent, spiritual, impersonal, free from all illusions. It may be regarded as something like the universal and enlightened soul. [FN#378] Tathagata's womb, Tathagata being another name for Buddha. [FN#379] The book was translated into Chinese by Buddhabhadra, A.D. 418-420. [FN#380] The highest epithet of the Buddha, meaning one who comes into the world like the coming of his predecessors. [FN#381] The all-knowing wisdom that is acquired by Enlightenment. [FN#382] The inborn wisdom of the Original Enlightenment. [FN#383] The wisdom that is acquired by the union of Enlightenment with the Original Enlightenment. Then he tells a parable of a single grain of minute dust[FN#384] containing large volumes of Sutra, equal in dimension of the Great Chiliocosmos.[FN#385] The grain is compared with a sentient being, and the Sutra with the wisdom of Buddha. Again he says later:[FN#386] "Once Tathagata, having observed every sort of sentient beings all over the universe, said as follows: 'Wonderful, how wonderful! That these various sentient beings, endowed with the wisdom of Tathagata, are not conscious of it because of their errors and illusions! I shall teach them the sacred truth and make them free from illusion for ever. I shall (thus) enable them to find by themselves the Great Wisdom of Tathagatha within them and make them equal to Buddha.' [FN#384] One of the famous parables in the sutra. [FN#385] According to the Buddhist literature, one universe comprises one sun, one moon, one central mountain or Sumeru, four continents, etc. One thousand of these universes form the Small Thousand Worlds; one thousand of the Small Thousand Worlds form the Middle Thousand Worlds; and the Great Thousand Worlds, or Great Chiliocosmos, comprises one thousand of the Middle Thousand Worlds. [FN#386] This is not an exact quotation of the sutra. Let me say (a few words) about this doctrine by way of criticism. So many Kalpas we spent never meeting with this true doctrine, and knew not how to trace our life back to its origin. Having been attached to nothing but the unreal outward forms, we willingly acknowledged ourselves to be a common herd of lowly beings. Some regarded themselves as beasts, (while) others as men. But now, tracing life to its origin according to the highest doctrine, we have fully understood that we ourselves were originally Buddhas. Therefore we should act in conformity to Buddha's (action), and keep our mind in harmony with his. Lot us betake ourselves once more to the source of Enlightened Spirit, restoring ourselves to the original Buddhahood. Let us cut off the bond of attachment, and remove the illusion that common people are habitually given to. Illusion being destroyed,[FN#387] the will to destroy it is also removed, and at last there remains nothing to be done (except complete peace and joy). This naturally results in Enlightenment, whose practical uses are as innumerable as the grains of sand in the Ganges. This state is called Buddhahood. We should know that the illusory as well as the Enlightened are originally of one and the same Real Spirit. How great, how excellent, is the doctrine that traces man to such an origin![FN#388] [FN#387] The passage occurs in Tao Teh King. [FN#388] A. 'Although all of the above-mentioned five doctrines were preached by the Buddha Himself, yet there are some that belong to the Sudden, while others to the Gradual, Teachings. If there were persons of the middle or the lowest grade of understanding, He first taught the most superficial doctrine, then the less superficial, and "Gradually" led them up to the profound. At the outset of His career as a teacher He preached the first doctrine to enable them to give up evil and abide by good; next He preached the second and the third doctrine that they might remove the Pollution and attain to the Purity; and, lastly, He preached the fourth and the fifth doctrine to destroy their attachment to unreal forms, and to show the Ultimate Reality. (Thus) He reduced (all) the temporary doctrines into the eternal one, and taught them how to practise the Law according to the eternal and attain to Buddhahood. 'If there is a person of the highest grade of understanding, he may first of all learn the most profound, next the less profound, and, lastly, the most superficial doctrine-that is, he may at the outset come "Suddenly" to the understanding of the One Reality of True Spirit, as it is taught in the fifth doctrine. When the Spiritual Reality is disclosed before his mind's eye, he may naturally see that it originally transcends all appearances which are unreal, and that unrealities appear on account of illusion, their existence depending on Reality. Then he must give up evil, practise good, put away unrealities by the wisdom of Enlightenment, and reduce them to Reality. When unrealities are all gone, and Reality alone remains complete, he is called the Dharma-kaya-Buddha.' CHAPTER IV RECONCILIATION OF THE TEMPORARY WITH THE REAL DOCTRINE[FN#389] EVEN if Reality is the origin of life, there must be in all probability some causes for its coming into existence, as it cannot suddenly assume the form of body by accident. In the preceding chapters I have refuted the first four doctrines, merely because they are imperfect, and in this chapter I shall reconcile the temporary with the eternal doctrine. In short, I shall show that even Confucianism is in the right.[FN#390] That is to say, from the beginning there exists Reality (within all beings), which is one and spiritual. It can never be created nor destroyed. It does not increase nor decrease itself. It is subject to neither change nor decay. Sentient beings, slumbering in (the night of) illusion from time immemorial, are not conscious of its existence. As it is hidden and veiled, it is named Tathagata-garbha.[FN#391] On this Tathagata-garbha the mental phenomena that are subject to growth and decay depend. Real Spirit, as is stated (in the Acvaghosa's �astra), that transcends creation and destruction, is united with illusion, which is subject to creation and destruction; and the one is not absolutely the same as nor different from the other. This union (with illusion) has the two sides of enlightenment and non -enlightenment,' and is called Alaya-vijnyana. Because of non-enlightenment,[FN#392] it first arouses itself, and forms some ideas. This activity of the Vijnyana is named 'the state of Karma.[FN#393] Furthermore, since one does not understand that these ideas are unreal from the beginning, they transform themselves into the subject (within) and the object (without), into the seer and the seen. One is at a loss how to understand that these external objects are no more than the creation of his own delusive mind, and believes them to be really existent. This is called the erroneous belief in the existence of external objects.[FN#394] In consequence of these erroneous beliefs, he distinguishes Self and non-self, and at last forms the erroneous belief of Atman. Since he is attached to the form of the Self, he yearns after various objects agreeable to the sense for the sake of the good of his Self. He is offended, (however), with various disagreeable objects, and is afraid of the injuries and troubles which they bring on him. (Thus) his foolish passions[FN#395] are strengthened step by step. [FN#389] A. 'The doctrines refuted above are reconciled with the real doctrine in this chapter. They are all in the right in their pointing to the true origin.' [FN#390] A. 'The first section states the fifth doctrine that reveals the Reality, and the statements in the following sections are the same as the other doctrines, as shown in the notes.' [FN#391] A. 'The following statement is similar to the fourth doctrine explained above in the refutation of the phenomenal existence subject to growth and decay.' Compare �raddhotpada-castra. [FN#392] A. 'The following statement is similar to the doctrine of Dharma-laksana.' [FN#393] Here Karma simply means an active state; it should be distinguished from Karma, produced by actions. [FN#394] A. 'The following statement is similar to the second doctrine, or Hinayanism.' [FN#395] A. 'The following statement is similar to the first doctrine for men and Devas.' Thus (on one hand) the souls of those who committed the crimes of killing, stealing, and so on, are born, by the influence of the bad Karma, in hell, or among Pretas, or among beasts, or elsewhere. On the other hand, the souls of those who, being afraid of such sufferings, or being good-natured, gave alms, kept precepts, and so on, undergo Antarabhava[FN#396] by the influence of the good Kharma, enter into the womb of their mothers.[FN#397] [FN#396] The spiritual existence between this and another life. [FN#397] A. 'The following statement is similar to Confucianism and Taoism.' There they are endowed with the (so-called) Gas, or material (for body).[FN#398] The Gas first consists of four elements[FN#399] and it gradually forms various sense-organs. The mind first consists of the four aggregates,[FN#400] and it gradually forms various Vijnyanas. After the whole course of ten months they are born and called men. These are our present bodies and minds. Therefore we must know that body and mind has each its own origin, and that the two, being united, form one human being. They are born among Devas and Asuras, and so on in a manner almost similar to this. [FN#398] A. 'This harmonizes with the outside opinion that Gas is the origin.' [FN#399] (1) Earth, (2) water, (3) fire, (4) air. [FN#400] (1) Perception, (2) consciousness, (3) conception, (4) knowledge. Though we are born among men by virtue of 'the generalizing Karma,'[FN#401] yet, by the influence of 'the particularizing Karma,'[FN#402] some are placed in a high rank, while others in a low; some are poor, while others rich; some enjoy a long life, while others die in youth; some are sickly, while others healthy; some are rising, while others are falling; some suffer from pains, while others enjoy pleasures. For instance, reverence or indolence in the previous existence, working as the cause, brings forth high birth or low in the present as the effect. So also benevolence in the past results in long life in the present; the taking of life, a short life; the giving of alms, richness, miserliness, Poverty. There are so many particular cases of retribution that cannot be mentioned in detail. Hence there are some who happen to be unfortunate, doing no evil, while others fortunate, doing no good in the present life. So also some enjoy a long life, in spite of their inhuman conduct; while others die young, in spite of their taking no life, and so forth. As all this is predestinated by 'the particularizing Karma' produced in the past, it would seem to occur naturally, quite independent of one's actions in the present life. Outside scholars ignorant of the previous existences, relying simply on their observations, believe it to be nothing more than natural.[FN#403] [FN#401] The Karma that determines different classes of beings, such as men, beasts, Pretas, etc. [FN#402] The Karma that determines the particular state of an individual in the world. [FN#403] A. 'This harmonizes with the outside opinion that everything occurs naturally.' Besides, there are some who cultivated virtues in the earlier, and committed crimes in the later, stages of their past existences; while others were vicious in youth, and virtuous in old age. In consequence, some are happy in youth, being rich and noble, but unhappy in old age, being poor and low in the present life; while others lead poor and miserable lives when young, but grow rich and noble when old, and so on. Hence outside scholars come to believe that one's prosperity or adversity merely depends on a heavenly decree.[FN#404] [FN#404] A. 'This harmonizes with the outside opinion that everything depends on providence.' The body with which man is endowed, when traced step by step to its origin, proves to be nothing but one primordial Gas in its undeveloped state. And the mind with which man thinks, when traced step by step to its source, proves to be nothing but the One Real Spirit. To tell the truth, there exists nothing outside of Spirit, and even the Primordial Gas is also a mode of it, for it is one of the external objects projected by the above-stated Vijnyanas, and is one of the mental images of Alaya, out of whose idea, when it is in the state of Karma, come both the subject and the object. As the subject developed itself, the feebler ideas grow stronger step by step, and form erroneous beliefs that end in the production of Karma.[FN#405] Similarly, the object increases in size, the finer objects grow gradually grosser, and gives rise to unreal things that end in the formation[FN#406] of Heaven and Earth. When Karma is ripe enough, one is endowed by father and mother with sperm and ovum, which, united with his consciousness under the influence of Karma, completes a human form. [FN#405] A. 'As above stated.' [FN#406] A. "In the beginning, according to the outside school, there was 'the great changeableness,' which underwent fivefold evolutions, and brought out the Five Principles. Out of that Principle, which they call the Great Path of Nature, came the two subordinate principles of the Positive and the Negative. They seem to explain the Ultimate Reality, but the Path, in fact, no more than the 'perceiving division' of the Alaya. The so-called primordial Gas seems to be the first idea in the awakening Alaya, but it is a mere external object." According to this view (of Dharmalaksana), things brought forth through the transformations of Alaya and the other Vijnyanas are divided into two parts; one part (remaining), united with Alaya and the other Vijnyanas, becomes man, while the other, becoming separated from them, becomes Heaven, Earth, mountains, rivers, countries, and towns. (Thus) man is the outcome of the union of the two; this is the reason why he alone of the Three Powers is spiritual. This was taught by the Buddha[FN#407] himself when he stated that there existed two different kinds of the four elements--the internal and the external. [FN#407] Ratnakuta-sutra (?), translated into Chinese by Jnyanagupta. Alas! O ye half-educated scholars who adhere to imperfect doctrines, each of which conflicts with another! Ye that seek after truth, if ye would attain to Buddhahood, clearly understand which is the subtler and which is the grosser (form of illusive ideas), which is the originator and which is the originated. (Then) give ye up the originated and return ye to the originator, and to reflect on the Spirit, the Source (of all). When the grosser is exterminated and the subtler removed, the wonderful wisdom of spirit is disclosed, and nothing is beyond its understanding. This is called the Dharma-sambhoga-kaya. It can of itself transform itself and appear among men in numberless ways. This is called the Nirmana-kaya of Buddha.[FN#408] [FN#408] Every Buddha has three bodies: (1) Dharma-kaya, or spiritual body; (2) Sambhoga-kaya, or the body of compensation; (3) Nirmana-kaya, or the body capable of transformation. THE END. 
34325	----	============================================================== This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, http://creativecommons.org/ ============================================================== THE ZEN EXPERIENCE _Library Journal_ called it, "The best history of Zen ever written." _The truth of Zen has always resided in individual experience rather than in theoretical writings. To give the modern reader access to understanding of this truth, THE ZEN EXPERIENCE illumines Zen as it was created and shaped by the personalities, perceptions, and actions of its masters over the centuries. Beginning with the twin roots of Zen in Indian Buddhism and Chinese Taoism, we follow it through its initial flowering in China under the First Patriarch Bodhidharma; its division into schools of "gradual" and "sudden" enlightenment under Shen-hsui and Shen-hui; the ushering in of its golden age by Hui-neng; the development of "shock" enlightenment by Ma-tsu; its poetic greatness in the person of Han-shan; the perfection of the use of the koan by Ta-hui; the migration of Zen to Japan and its extraordinary growth there under a succession of towering Japanese spiritual leaders. Rich in historical background, vivid in revealing anecdote and memorable quotation, this long-needed work succeeds admirably in taking Zen from the library shelves and restoring its living, human form. _ BOOKS BY THOMAS HOOVER Nonfiction Zen Culture The Zen Experience Fiction The Moghul Caribbee Wall Street Samurai (The _Samurai_ Strategy) Project Daedalus Project Cyclops Life Blood Syndrome All free as e-books at www.thomashoover.info THE ZEN EXPERIENCE Thomas Hoover SIGNET, SIGNET CLASSICS, MENTOR, PLUME, MERIDIAN AND NAL BOOKS are published in the United States by The New American Library, Inc., 1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019. First Printing, March, 1980 23456789 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bibliography Zen Buddhism--History. Priests, Zen--Biography. ISBN 0-452-25228-8 Copyright ©1980 by Thomas Hoover All rights reserved www.thomashoover.info Key words: Author: Thomas Hoover Title: The Zen Experience Zen History, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Zen History, Seng-Chao, Tao-sheng, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Kuo Hsiang, Nagarjuna, Seng-chao, Tao-Sheng, Bodhidharma, Hui'ko, Seng-Ts'an, Tao-hsin, Fa-jung, Hung-jen, Shen- hsiu, Hui-neng, Ma-tsu, Huai-hai, Nan'chuan, Chao-Chou, P'ang, Han- shan, Huang-po, Lin-Chi, Rinzai, Soto, Tung-shan, Ts'ao-shan, Kuei- shan, Yun-men, Fa-yen, Ta-hui, Eisai, Dogen, Hakuin PERMISSIONS Selections from Zen and Zen Classics, Vols. I and II, by R. H. Blyth (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, copyright © 1960, 1964 by R. H. Blyth, copyright © 1978 by Frederick Franck), reprinted by permission of Joan Daves. Selections from Cold Mountain by Han-shan, Burton Watson, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from The Recorded Sayings of Layman Pang, Ruth Fuller Sasaki et al., trans. (New York: John Weatherhill), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from Anthology of Chinese Literature, Cyril Birch, ed., Gary Snyder, trans. (New York: Grove Press, copyright © 1965 by Grove Press), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from Tao: A New Way of Thinking by Chang Chung-yuan, (New York: Harper & Row, Perennial Library, copyright © 1975 by Chang Chung- yuan), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selection from A History of Zen Buddhism by Heinrich S. J. Dumoulin, Paul Peachey, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selection by Ikkyu from Some Japanese Portraits by Donald Keene (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979), reprinted by permission of author. Selections from Essays in Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki (New York: Grove Press), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selection from The Sutra of Hui-neng, Price and Wong, trans. (Boulder: Shambala Publications), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Philip Yamplosky, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from The Zen Master Hakuin by Philip Yamplosky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from The Golden Age of Zen by John C. H. Wu (Taipei, Taiwan: Hwakang Book Store), reprinted by permission of author. Selections from The Zen Teaching of the Hui Hai on Sudden Illumination by John Blofeld (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1972), reprinjted by permission of publisher. Selections from Zen Master Dogen by Yoho Yukoi (New York: John Weatherhill), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism by Chang Chung- yuan (New York: Vintage, 1969), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from Swampland Flowers by Christopher Cleary (New York: Grove Press, copyright © 1977 by Christopher Cleary), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from The Zen Teaching of Huang Po on the Transmission of Mind by John Blofeld (New York: Grove Press, copyright © 1958 by John Blofeld), reprinted by permission of publisher. Selections from Zen-Man Ikkyu, a dissertation by John Sanford, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, reprinted by permission of author. Selections from Zen is Eternal Life by Roshi Jiyu-Kennett (Dharma Publishing, copyright © 1976 by Roshi Jiyu-Kennett), reprinted by permission of author). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Heartfelt thanks go to Dr. Philip Yampolsky of Columbia University, who reviewed the manuscript in draft and clarified many points of fact and interpretation. I also am indebted to the works of a number of Zen interpreters for the West, including D. T. Suzuki, John Blofeld, Chang Chung-yuan, and Charles Luk. In cases where this finger pointing at the moon mistakenly aims astray, I alone am responsible. CONTENTS Preface to Zen Taoism: The Way to Zen Lao Tzu Chuang Tzu Kuo Hsiang: A Neo-Taoist The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove The Buddhist Roots of Zen The Buddha Nagarjuna Kumarajiva Seng-chao Tao-sheng The Synthesis PART I. THE EARLY MASTERS 1. Bodhidharma: First Patriarch of Zen 2. Hui-k'o: Second Patriarch of Zen 3. Seng-Ts'an, Tao-hsin, Fa-jung, and Hung-jen: Four Early Masters 4. Shen-hsiu and Shen-hui: "Gradual" and "Sudden" Masters 5. Hui-neng: Sixth Patriarch and Father of Modern Zen PART II. THE GOLDEN AGE OF ZEN 6. Ma-tsu: Originator of "Shock" Enlightenment 7. Huai-hai: Father of Monastic Ch'an 8. Nan-ch'uan and Chao-chou: Masters of the Irrational 9. P'ang and Han-shan: Layman and Poet 10. Huang-po: Master of the Universal Mind PART III. SECTARIANISM AND THE KOAN 11. Lin-chi: Founder of Rinzai Zen 12. Tung-shan and Ts'ao-shan: Founders of Soto Zen 13. Kuei-shan, Yun-men, and Fa-yen: Three Minor Houses 14. Ta-hui: Master of the Koan PART IV. ZEN IN JAPAN 15. Eisai: The First Japanese Master 16. Dogen: Father of Japanese Soto Zen 17. Ikkyu: Zen Eccentric 18. Hakuin: Japanese Master of the Koan 19. Reflections Notes Bibliography THE ZEN EXPERIENCE _The sole aim of Zen is to enable one to understand, realize, and perfect his own mind. _Garma C. C. Chang PREFACE TO ZEN _Lao Tzu, Buddha, Confucius _ Some call it "seeing," some call it "knowing," and some describe it in religious terms. Whatever the name, it is our reach for a new level of consciousness. Of the many forms this search has taken, perhaps the most intriguing is Zen. Growing out of the wisdom of China, India, and Japan, Zen became a powerful movement to explore the lesser-known reaches of the human mind. Today Zen has come westward, where we are rediscovering modern significance in its ancient insights. This book is an attempt to encounter Zen in its purest form, by returning to the greatest Zen masters. Zen teachings often appear deceptively simple. This misconception is compounded by the Zen claim that explanations are meaningless. They are, of course, but merely because genuine Zen insights can arise only from individual experience. And although our experience can be described and even analyzed, it cannot be transmitted or shared. At most, the "teachings" of Zen can only clear the way to our deeper consciousness. The rest is up to us. Zen is based on the recognition of two incompatible types of thought: rational and intuitive. Rationality employs language, logic, reason. Its precepts can be taught. Intuitive knowledge, however, is different. It lurks embedded in our consciousness, beyond words. Unlike rational thought, intuition cannot be "taught" or even turned on. In fact, it is impossible to find or manipulate this intuitive consciousness using our rational mind--any more than we can grasp our own hand or see our own eye. The Zen masters devised ways to reach this repressed area of human consciousness. Some of their techniques--like meditation--were borrowed from Indian Buddhism, and some--like their antirational paradoxes--may have been learned from Chinese Taoists. But other inventions, like their jarring shouts and blows, emerged from their own experience. Throughout it all, however, their words and actions were only a means, never an end. That end is an intuitive realization of a single great insight--that we and the world around are one, both part of a larger encompassing absolute. Our rational intellect merely obscures this truth, and consequently we must shut it off, if only for a moment. Rationality constrains our mind; intuition releases it. The irony is that the person glimpsing this moment of higher consciousness, this Oneness, encounters the ultimate realization that there is nothing to realize. The world is still there, unchanged. But the difference is that it is now an extension of our consciousness, seen directly and not analytically. And since it is redundant to be attached to something already a part of you, there is a sudden sense of freedom from our agonizing bondage to things. Along with this also comes release from the constraints of artificial values. Creating systems and categories is not unlike counting the colors of a rainbow--both merely detract from our experience of reality, while at the same time limiting our appreciation of the world's richness. And to declare something right or wrong is similarly nearsighted. As Alan Watts once observed, "Zen unveils behind the urgent realm of good and evil a vast region of oneself about which there need be no guilt or recrimination, where at last the self is indistinguishable from God." And, we might add, where God is also one with our consciousness, our self. In Zen all dualities dissolve, absorbed in the larger reality that simply is. None of these things is taught explicitly in Zen. Instead they are discovered waiting in our consciousness after all else has been swept away. A scornful twelfth-century Chinese scholar summarized the Zen method as follows: "Since the Zen masters never run the risk of explaining anything in plain language, their followers must do their own pondering and puzzling--from which a real threshing-out results." In these pages we will watch the threshing-out of Zen itself--as its masters unfold a new realm of consciousness, the Zen experience. TAOISM: THE WAY TO ZEN Taoism is the original religion of ancient China. It is founded on the idea that a fundamental principle, the Tao, underlies all nature. Long before the appearance of Zen, Taoists were teaching the superiority of intuitive thought, using an anti-intellectualism that often ridiculed the logic-bound limitations of conventional Chinese life and letters. However, Taoism was always upbeat and positive in its acceptance of reality, a quality that also rubbed off on Zen over the centuries. Furthermore, many Taoist philosophers left writings whose world view seems almost Zen-like. The early Chinese teachers of meditation (called _dhyana _in Sanskrit and Ch'an in Chinese) absorbed the Taoist tradition of intuitive wisdom, and later Zen masters often used Taoist expressions. It is fitting, therefore, that we briefly meet some of the most famous teachers of Chinese Taoism. LAO TZU One of the most influential figures in ancient Chinese lore is remembered today merely as Lao Tzu (Venerable Master). Taoist legends report he once disputed (and bettered) the scholarly Confucius, but that he finally despaired of the world and rode an oxcart off into the west, pausing at the Han-ku Pass--on the insistence of its keeper--to set down his insights in a five-thousand-character poem. This work, the Tao Te Ching (The Way and the Power), was an eloquent, organized, and lyrical statement of an important point of view in China of the sixth century B.C., an understanding later to become an essential element of Ch'an Buddhism. The word "Tao" means many, many things--including the _elan vital _or life force of the universe, the harmonious structuring of human affairs, and--perhaps most important--a reality transcending words. Taoists declared there is a knowledge not accessible by language. As the Tao Te Ching announces in its opening line, "The Tao that can be put into words is not the real Tao." Also fundamental to the Tao is the unity of mind and matter, of the one who knows and the thing known. The understanding of a truth and the truth itself cannot be separated. The Tao includes and unifies these into a larger "reality" encompassing both. The notion that our knowledge is distinguishable from that known is an illusion. Another teaching of the Tao Te Ching is that intuitive insight surpasses rational analysis. When we act on our spontaneous judgment, we are almost always better off. Chapter 19 declares, "Let the people be free from discernment and relinquish intellection . . . Hold to one's original nature . . . Eliminate artificial learning and one will be free from anxieties."1 The wise defer to a realm of insight floating in our mind beyond its conscious state. Taoists also questioned the value of social organization, holding that the best government is the one governing least and that "the wise deal with things through non-interference and teach through no-words."2 Taoists typically refused to draw value judgments on others' behavior. Lao Tzu asks, "What is the difference between good and bad?"3 and concludes, "Goodness often turns out to be evil."4 There is complete acceptance of what is, with no desire to make things "better." Lao Tzu believed "good" and "bad" were both part of Tao and therefore, "Even if a man is unworthy, Tao will never exclude him."5 If all things are one, there can be no critical differentiation of any part. This concentration on inner perception, to the exclusion of practical concerns, evoked a criticism from the third-century-B.C. Confucian philosopher Hsun Tzu that has a curiously modern ring of social consciousness. "Lao Tzu understood looking inward, but knew nothing of looking outward. . . . If there is merely inward-looking and never outward-looking, there can be no distinction between what has value and what has not, between what is precious and what is vile, between what is noble and what is vulgar."6 But the refusal of Lao Tzu to intellectualize what is natural or to sit in judgment over the world was the perfect Chinese precedent for Ch'an. CHUANG TZU The second important figure in Taoism is the almost equally legendary teacher remembered as Chuang Tzu, who is usually placed in the fourth century B.C., some two centuries after Lao Tzu. An early historian tells that once Chuang Tzu was invited to the court to serve as a minister, an invitation he declined with a typical story: An ox is selected for a festival and fattened up for several years, living the life of wealth and indulgence--until the day he is led away for sacrifice. At that reckoning what would he give to return to the simple life, where there was poverty but also freedom? In Chuang Tzu's own book of wisdom, he also derided the faith in rationality common to Chinese scholars. To emphasize his point he devised a vehicle for assaulting the apparatus of logic--that being a "nonsense" story whose point could only be understood intuitively., There has yet to be found a more deadly weapon against pompous intellectualizing, as the Ch'an Buddhists later proved with the koan. Chuang Tzu also knew how quickly comedy could deflate, and he used it with consummate skill, again paving the way for the absurdist Zen masters. In fact, his dialogues often anticipate the Zen _mondo_, the exchanges between master and pupil that have comic/straight-man overtones. In this regard, Chuang Tzu also sometimes anticipates twentieth-century writers for the Theater of the Absurd, such as Beckett or Ionesco. Significantly, the Columbia scholar Burton Watson suggests that the most fruitful path to Chuang Tzu "is not to attempt to subject his thoughts to rational and systematic analysis, but to read and reread his words until one has ceased to think of what he is saying and instead has developed an intuitive sense of the mind moving beyond the words, and of the world in which it moves."7 This is undoubtedly true. The effect of comic parody on logic is so telling that the only way to really understand the message is to stop trying to "understand" it. Concerning the limitations of verbal transmission, Chuang Tzu tells a story of a wheelmaker who once advised his duke that the book of ancient thought the man was reading was "nothing but the lees and scum of bygone men." The duke angrily demanded an explanation--and received a classic defense of the superiority of intuitive understanding over language and logic. _I look at the matter in this way; when I am making a wheel, if my stroke is too slow, then it bites deep but is not steady; if my stroke is too fast, then it is steady, but does not go deep. The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart. It is a thing that cannot be put into words; there is an art in it that I cannot explain to my son. That is why it is impossible for me to let him take over my work, and here I am at the age of seventy, still making wheels. In my opinion, it must have been the same with the men of old. All that was worth handing on died with them; the rest, they put into their books.8 _ Chuang Tzu's parable that perhaps best illustrates the Taoist ideal concerns a cook who had discovered one lives best by following nature's rhythms. The cook explained that his naturalness was easy after he learned to let intuition guide his actions. This approach he called practicing the Tao, but it is in fact the objective of Zen practice as well. _Prince Wen Hui remarked, "How wonderfully you have mastered your art." The cook laid down his knife and said, "What your servant really cares for is Tao, which goes beyond mere art. When I first began to cut up oxen, I saw nothing but oxen. After three years of practicing, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. I now work with my spirit, not with my eyes. My senses stop functioning and my spirit takes over."9 _ What he described is the elimination of the rational mind, which he refers to as the senses, and the reliance upon the intuitive part of his mind, here called the spirit. He explained how this intuitive approach allowed him to work naturally. _A good cook changes his knife once a year because he cuts, while a mediocre cook has to change his every month because he hacks. I've had this knife of mine for nineteen years and have cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the edge is as if it were fresh from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints. The blade of the knife has no thickness. That which has no thickness has plenty of room to pass through these spaces. Therefore, after nineteen years, my blade is as sharp as ever.10 _Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu did not see themselves as founders of any formal religion. They merely described the obvious, encouraging others to be a part of nature and not its antagonist. Their movement, now called Philosophical Taoism, was eclipsed during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) in official circles by various other systems of thought, most particularly Confucianism (which stressed obedience to authority-- both that of elders and of superiors--and reverence for formalized learning, not to mention the acceptance of a structured hierarchy as part of one's larger social responsibility). However, toward the end of the Han era there arose two new types of Taoism: an Esoteric Taoism that used physical disciplines to manipulate consciousness, and a Popular Taoism that came close to being a religion in the traditional mold. The first was mystical Esoteric Taoism, which pursued the prolonging of life and vigor, but this gave way during later times to Popular Taoism, a metaphysical alternative to the comfortless, arid Confucianism of the scholarly establishment. The post-Han era saw the Philosophical Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu emerge anew among Chinese intellectuals, actually coming to vie with Confucianism. This whole era witnessed a turning away from the accepted values of society, as the well-organized government of the Han era dissolved into political and intellectual confusion. Government was unstable and corrupt, and the Confucianism which had been its philosophical underpinning was stilted and unsatisfying. Whenever a society breaks down, the belief system supporting it naturally comes under question. This happened in China in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era, and from it emerged a natural opposition to Confucianism. One form of this opposition was the imported religion of Buddhism, which provided a spiritual solace missing in the teachings of Confucius, while the other was a revival among intellectuals of Philosophical Taoism. KUO HSIANG: A NEO-TAOIST In this disruptive environment, certain intellectuals returned again to the insights of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, creating a movement today known as Neo-Taoism. One of the thinkers who tried to reinterpret original Taoist ideas for the new times was Kuo Hsiang (d. ca. 312), who co- authored a major document of Neo-Taoism entitled Commentary on the Chuang Tzu. It focused on the important Taoist idea of _wu-wei_, once explained as follows: " . . .to them the key concept of Taoism, _wu _(literally, nonexistence), is not nothingness, but pure being, which transcends forms and names, and precisely because it is absolute and complete, can accomplish everything. The sage is not one who withdraws into the life of a hermit, but a man of social and political achievements, although these achievements must be brought about through _wu-wei_, 'nonaction' or 'taking no [unnatural] action.' 1,11 This concept of _wu-wei _has also been described as abstaining from activity contrary to nature and acting in a spontaneous rather than calculated fashion. In Kuo Hsiang's words: _Being natural means to exist spontaneously without having to take any action. . . . By taking no action is not meant folding one's arms and closing one's mouth. If we simply let everything act by itself, it will be contented with its nature and destiny. (12) _ Kuo Hsiang's commentary expanded on almost all the major ideas of Chuang Tzu, drawing out with logic what originally had been set in absurdism. Criticizing this, a later Ch'an monk observed, "People say Kuo Hsiang wrote a commentary on Chuang Tzu. I would say it was Chuang Tzu who wrote a commentary on Kuo Hsiang."13 Nonetheless, the idea of _wu-wei_, processed through Buddhism, emerged in different guise in later Ch'an, influencing the concept of "no-mind." THE SEVEN SAGES OF THE BAMBOO GROVE Other Chinese were content merely to live the ideas of Neo-Taoism. Among these were the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, men part of a larger movement known as the School of Pure Conversation. Their favorite pastime was to gather north of Loyang on the estate of one of their members, where they engaged in refined conversation, wrote poetry and music, and (not incidentally) drank wine. To some extent they reflected the recluse ideal of old, except that they found the satisfaction of the senses no impediment to introspection. What they did forswear, however, was the world of getting and spending. Although men of distinction, they rejected fame, ambition, and worldly station. There is a story that one of the Seven Sages, a man named Liu Ling (ca. 221-330), habitually received guests while completely naked. His response to adverse comment was to declare, "I take the whole universe as my house and my own room as my clothing. Why, then, do you enter here into my trousers."14 It is also told that two of the sages (Juan Chi, 210-63, and his nephew Juan Hsien) often sat drinking with their family in such conviviality that they skipped the nuisance of cups and just drank directly from a wine bowl on the ground. When pigs wandered by, these too were invited to sip from the same chalice. If one exempts all nature--including pigs-- from distinction, discrimination, and duality, why exclude them as drinking companions? But perhaps the most significant insight of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove was their recognition of the limited uses of language. We are told, "They engaged in conversation 'til, as they put it, they reached the Unnameable, and 'stopped talking and silently understood each other with a smile.' "1S THE BUDDHIST ROOTS OF ZEN There is a legend the Buddha was once handed a flower and asked to preach on the law. The story says he received the blossom without a sound and silently wheeled it in his hand. Then amid the hush his most perceptive follower, Kashyapa, suddenly burst into a smile . . . and thus was born the wordless wisdom of Zen. The understanding of this silent insight was passed down through the centuries, independent of the scriptures, finally emerging as the Chinese school of Ch'an, later called Zen by the Japanese. It is said the absence of early writings about the school is nothing more than would be expected of a teaching which was, by definition, beyond words. The master Wen-yu summed it up when he answered a demand for the First Principle of Ch'an with, "If words could tell you, it would become the Second Principle." This version of Zen's origin is satisfying, and for all we know it may even be true. But there are other, considerably more substantive, sources for the ideas that came to flower as Ch'an. Taoism, of course, had plowed away at the Confucianist clutter restraining the Chinese mind, but it was Buddhism that gave China the necessary new philosophical structure--this being the metaphysical speculations of India. Pure Chinese naturalism met Indian abstraction, and the result was Ch'an. The school of Ch'an was in part the grafting of fragile foreign ideas (Buddhism) onto a sturdy native species of understanding (Taoism). But its simplicity was in many ways a re-expression of the Buddha's original insights. THE BUDDHA The historic Buddha was born to the high-caste family Gautama during the sixth century B.C. in the region that is today northeast India and Nepal. After a childhood and youth of indulgence he turned to asceticism and for over half a decade rigorously followed the traditional Indian practices of fasting and meditation, only finally to reject these in despair. However, an auspicious dream and one final meditation at last brought total enlightenment. Gautama the seeker had become Buddha the Enlightened, and he set out to preach. It was not gods that concerned him, but the mind of man and its sorrowing. We are unhappy, he explained, because we are slaves to our desires. Extinguish desire and suffering goes with it. If people could be taught that the physical or phenomenal world is illusion, then they would cease their attachment to it, thereby finding release from their self-destructive mental bondage. The Buddha neglected to set down these ideas in written form however, perhaps unwisely leaving this task to later generations. His teachings subsequently were recreated in the form of sermons or sutras. In later years, the Buddhist movement split into two separate philosophical camps, known today as Theravada and Mahayana. The Theravada Buddhists-- found primarily in southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, and Burma--venerate the early writings of Buddhism (known today as the Pali Canon) and tend to content themselves with practicing the philosophy of the Buddha rather than enlarging upon it with speculative commentaries. By contrast, the followers of Mahayana--who include the bulk of all Buddhists in China, Japan, and Tibet--left the simple prescriptions of the Buddha far behind in their creation of a vast new literature (in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese) of complex theologies. Chinese Ch'an grew out of Mahayana, as of course did Japanese Zen. NAGARJUNA After the Buddha, perhaps the most important Buddhist figure is the second-century A.D. Indian philosopher Nagarjuna. Some call him the most important thinker Asia has produced. According to Tibetan legends his parents sent him away from home at seven because an astrologer had predicted his early death and they wished to be spared the sight. But he broke the spell by entering Buddhist orders, and went on to become the faith's foremost philosopher. Today Nagarjuna is famous for his analysis of the so-called Wisdom Books of Mahayana, a set of Sanskrit sutras composed between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100. (Included in this category are The Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines, as well as the Diamond Sutra and Heart Sutra, both essential scriptures of Zen.) Nagarjuna was the originator of the Middle Path, so named because it strove to define a middle ground between affirmation of the world and complete negation of existence. Reality, said Nagarjuna, cannot be realized through conceptual constructions, since concepts are contained inside reality, not vice versa. Consequently, only through the intuitive mind can reality be approached. His name for this "reality" beyond the mind's analysis was _sunyata_, usually translated as "emptiness" but sometimes as "the Void." (_Sunyata _is perhaps an unprovable concept, but so too are the ego and the unconscious, both hypothetical constructs useful in explaining reality but impossible to locate on the operating table.) Nagarjuna's most-quoted manifesto has the logic-defying ring of a Zen : "Nothing comes into existence nor does anything disappear. Nothing is eternal, nor has anything any end. Nothing is identical or differentiated. Nothing moves hither and thither." As the Ch'an teachers interpreted the teaching of _sunyata_, the things of this world are all a mental creation, since external phenomena are transient and only exist for us because of our perception. Consequently they are actually "created" by our mind (or, if you will, a more universal entity called Mind). Consequently they do not exist outside our mind and hence are a void. Yet the mind itself, which is the only thing real, is also a void since its thoughts cannot be located by the five senses. The Void is therefore everything, since it includes both the world and the mind. Hence, _sunyata_. As a modern Nagarjuna scholar has described _sunyata_, or emptiness, it is a positive sense of freedom, not a deprivation _ "This awareness of 'emptiness' is not a blank loss of consciousness, an inanimate space; rather it is the cognition of daily life without the attachment to it. It is an awareness of distinct entities, of the self, of 'good' and 'bad' and other practical determinations; but it is aware of these as empty structures."16 _ The Zen masters found ways to achieve the cognition without attachment postulated by Nagarjuna, and they paid him homage by making him one of the legendary twenty-eight Indian Patriarchs of Zen by posthumous decree. KUMARAJIVA The Indian missionary who transmitted the idea of Emptiness to China was Kumarajiva (344-413), a swashbuckling guru who, more than any other individual, was responsible for planting sophisticated Mahayana Buddhist ideas in Chinese soil. Before telling his story, however, it may be well to reflect briefly on how Buddhism got to China in the first place. Although there are records of a Buddhist missionary in China as early as A.D. 148, historians are hard pressed to find the name of an out- and-out native Chinese Buddhist before sometime in the third century. Buddhism, which at first apparently was confused with Taoism, seems to have come into fashion after the Neo-Taoists ran out of creative steam. Shortly thereafter, around A.D. 209, intelligible Chinese translations of Indian Mahayana sutras finally began to become available. There were many things about Buddhism, however, that rubbed Chinese the wrong way. First there were the practical matters: Buddhism allowed, if not encouraged, begging, celibacy, and neglect of ancestors--all practices to rankle any traditional Chinese. Then there were fundamental philosophical differences: Buddhism offered to break one out of the Hindu cycle of rebirth, something the Chinese had not realized they needed; and Indian thought was naturally geared to cosmic time, with its endless cycles of eons, whereas the Chinese saw time as a line leading back to identifiable ancestors. Early missionaries tried to gain acceptability for Buddhism by explaining it in Taoist terms, including stretching the two enough to find "matching concepts" or ideas with superficial similarity, and they also let out the myth that the Buddha was actually Lao Tzu, who had gone on to India after leaving China. When barbarians sacked the Northern Chinese center of Loyang in the year 313 and took over North China's government, many of its influential Confucianist scholars fled to the south. These emigres were disillusioned with the social ideas of Confucianism and ready for a solace of the spirit. Thus they turned for comfort to Buddhist ideas, but using Neo-Taoist terminology and often treating Buddhism more as a subject for salon speculations than as a religion. By translating Buddhism into a Neo-Taoist framework, these southern intellectuals effectively avoided having to grapple with the new ideas in Buddhist metaphysics. In North China, the Buddhists took advantage of the new absence of competing Confucianists to move into ruling circles and assume the role of the literate class. They preached a simple form of Buddhism, often shamelessly dwelling on magic and incantations to arouse interest among the greatest number of followers. The common people were drawn to Buddhism, since it provided for the first time in China a religion that seemed to care for people's suffering, their personal growth, their salvation in an afterlife. Thus Buddhism took hold in North China mainly because it provided hope and magic for the masses and a political firewall against Confucianism for the new rulers. As late as the beginning of the fifth century, therefore, Buddhism was misunderstood and encouraged for the wrong reasons in both north and south. Kumarajiva, who would change all this, was born in Kucha to an Indian father of the Brahmin caste and a mother of noble blood. When he was seven he and his mother traveled to Kashmir to enter Buddhist orders together. After several years of studying the Theravada sutras, he moved on to Kashgar, where he turned his attention to Mahayana philosophy. At age twenty we find him back in Kucha, being ordained in the king's palace and sharpening his understanding of the Mahayana scriptures. He also, we are told, sharpened his non-Buddhist amorous skills, perhaps finding consolation in the illusory world of the senses for the hollow emptiness of _sunyata_. In the year 382 or 383, he was taken captive and removed to a remote area in northeastern China, where he was held prisoner for almost two decades, much to the dismay of the rulers in Ch'ang-an, who wanted nothing more than to have this teacher (who was by then a famous Buddhist scholar) for their own. After seventeen years their patience ran out and they sent an army to defeat his recalcitrant captors and bring him back. He arrived in Ch'ang-an in the year 401 and immediately began a project crucial to the future of Chinese Buddhism. A modern scholar of Chinese religion tells what happened next. _". . . Chinese monks were assembled from far and near to work with him in translating the sacred texts. This was a 'highly structured project,' suggestive of the cooperative enterprises of scientists today. There were corps of specialists at all levels: those who discussed doctrinal questions with Kumarajiva, those who checked the new translations against the old and imperfect ones, hundreds of editors, sub-editors, and copyists. The quality and quantity of the translations produced by these men in the space of eight years is truly astounding. Thanks to their efforts the ideas of Mahayana Buddhism were presented in Chinese with far greater clarity and precision than ever before. Sunyata--Nagar- juna's concept of the Void--was disentangled from the Taoist terminology that had obscured and distorted it, and this and other key doctrines of Buddhism were made comprehensible enough to lay the intellectual foundations of the great age of independent Chinese Buddhism that was to follow."17 _ The Chinese rulers contrived to put Kumarajiva's other devotion to use as well, installing a harem of ten beautiful young Chinese girls for him, through whom he was encouraged to perpetuate a lineage of his own. This genetic experiment apparently came to nothing, but two native Chinese studying under him, Seng-chao (384-414) and Tao-sheng (ca. 360- 434), would carry his contribution through the final steps needed to open the way for the development of Ch'an. SENG-CHAO The short-lived Seng-chao was born to a humble family in the Ch'ang-an region, where he reportedly got his indispensable grounding in the Chinese classics by working as a copyist. He originally was a confirmed Taoist, but after reading the sutra of Vimalakirti (which described a pious nobleman who combined the secular life of a bon vivant businessman with an inner existence of Buddhist enlightenment, a combination instantly attractive to the practical Chinese), Seng-chao turned Buddhist. In the year 398, at age fifteen, he traveled to the northwest to study personally under the famous Kumarajiva, and he later returned to Ch'ang-an with the master. Conversant first in the Taoist and then in the Buddhist classics, Seng- chao began the real synthesis of the two that would eventually evolve into Ch'an. The China scholar Walter Liebenthal has written that the doctrine of Nagarjuna's Middle Path, sinicized by Seng-chao, emerged in the later Ch'an thinkers cleansed of the traces of Indian origin. He declares, "Seng-chao interpreted Mahayana, [the Ch'an founders] Hui- neng and Shen-hui re-thought it."18 Three of Seng-chao's treatises exist today as the Book of Chao (or Chao Lun), and they give an idea of how Chuang Tzu might have written had he been a Buddhist. There is the distrust of words, the unmistakable preference for immediate, intuitive knowledge, and the masterful use of wordplay and paradox that leaves his meaning ambiguous. Most important of all, he believed that truth had to be experienced, not reasoned out. Truth was what lay behind words; it should never be confused with the words themselves: _"A thing called up by a name may not appear as what it is expected to appear; a name calling up a thing may not lead to the real thing. Therefore the sphere of Truth is beyond the noise of verbal teaching. How then can it be made the subject of discussion? Still I cannot remain silent."19 _ The dean of Zen scholars, Heinrich Dumoulin, declares, "The relationship of Seng-chao to Zen is to be found in his orientation toward the immediate and experiential perception of absolute truth, and reveals itself in his preference for the paradox as the means of expressing the inexpressible."20 Dumoulin also notes that the Book of Chao regards the way to enlightenment as one of gradual progress. However, the idea that truth can be approached gradually was disputed by the other major pupil of Kumarajiva, whose insistence that enlightenment must arrive instantaneously has caused some to declare him the ideological founder of Zen. TAO-SHENG The famous Tao-sheng was the first Chinese Buddhist to advance the idea of "sudden" enlightenment, and as a result he earned the enmity of his immediate colleagues--and lasting fame as having anticipated one of the fundamental innovations of Zen thought. He first studied Buddhism at Lu-shan, but in 405 he moved to Ch'ang-an, becoming for a while a part of the coterie surrounding Kumarajiva. None of his writings survive, but the work of a colleague, Hui-yuan, is usually taken as representative of his ideas. Tao-sheng is known today for two theories. The first was that good deeds do not automatically bring reward, a repudiation of the Indian Buddhist concept of merit. The other, and perhaps more important, deviation he preached was that enlightenment was instantaneous. The reason, he said, was simple: since Buddhists say the world is one, nothing is divisible, even truth, and therefore the subjective understanding of truth must come all at once or not at all. Preparatory work and progress toward the goal of enlightenment, including study and meditation, could proceed step-by-step and are wholesome and worthwhile, but to "reach the other shore," as the phrase in the Heart Sutra describes enlightenment, requires a leap over a gulf, a realization that must hit you with all its force the first time. What exactly is it that you understand on the other shore? First you come to realize--as you can only realize intuitively and directly--that enlightenment was within you all along. You become enlightened when you finally recognize that you already had it. The next realization is that there actually is no "other shore," since reaching it means realizing that there was nothing to reach. As his thoughts have been quoted: "As to reaching the other shore, if one reaches it, one is not reaching the other shore. Both not-reaching and not-not-reaching are really reaching. . . . If one sees Buddha, one is not seeing Buddha. When one sees there is no Buddha, one is really seeing Buddha."21 Little wonder Tao-sheng is sometimes credited as the spiritual father of Zen. He championed the idea of sudden enlightenment, something inimical to much of the Buddhism that had gone before, and he distrusted words (comparing them to a net which, after it has caught the fish of truth, should be discarded). He identified the Taoist idea of _wu-wei_ or "nonaction" with the intuitive, spontaneous apprehension of truth without logic, opening the door for the Ch'an mainstay of "no- mind" as a way to ultimate truth. THE SYNTHESIS Buddhism has always maintained a skeptical attitude toward reality and appearances, something obviously at odds with the wholehearted celebration of nature that characterizes Taoism. Whereas Buddhism believes it would be best if we could simply ignore the world, the source of our psychic pain, the Taoists wanted nothing so much as to have complete union with this same world. Buddhism teaches union with the Void, while Taoism teaches union with the Tao. At first they seem opposite directions. But the synthesis of these doctrines appeared in Zen, which taught that the oneness of the Void, wherein all reality is subsumed, could be understood as an encompassing whole or continuum, as in the Tao. Both are merely expressions of the Absolute. The Buddhists unite with the Void; the Taoists yearn to merge with the Tao. In Zen the two ideas reconcile. With this philosophical prelude in place, we may now turn to the masters who created the world of Zen. PART I THE EARLY MASTERS . . . in which a sixth-century Indian teacher of meditation, Bodhidharma, arrives in China to initiate what would become a Buddhist school of meditation called Ch'an. After several generations as wanderers, these Ch'an teachers settle into a form of monastic life and gradually grow in prominence and recognition. Out of this prosperity emerges a split in the eighth-century Ch'an movement, between scholarly urban teachers who believe enlightenment is "gradual" and requires preparation in traditional Buddhism, and rural Ch'anists who scorn society and insist enlightenment is experiential and "sudden," owing little to the prosperous Buddhist establishment. Then a popular teacher of rural Ch'an, capitalizing on a civil disruption that momentarily weakens the urban elite, gains the upper hand and emasculates urban Ch'an through his preaching that the authentic line of teaching must be traced to an obscure teacher in the rural south, now remembered as the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng. CHAPTER ONE BODHIDHARMA: FIRST PATRIARCH OF ZEN There is a Zen legend that a bearded Indian monk named Bodhidharma (ca. 470-532), son of a South Indian Brahmin king, appeared one day at the southern Chinese port city of Canton, sometime around the year 520. From there he traveled northeast to Nanking, near the mouth of the Yangtze River, to honor an invitation from China's most devout Buddhist, Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty. After a famous interview in which his irreverence left the emperor dismayed, Bodhidharma pressed onward to the Buddhist centers of the north, finally settling in at the Shao-lin monastery on Mt. Sung for nine years of meditation staring at a wall. He then transmitted his insights and a copy of the Lankavatara sutra to a successor and passed on--either physically, spiritually, or both. His devotion to meditation and to the aforementioned sutra were his legacies to China. He was later honored as father of the Chinese _Dhyana_, or "Meditation," school of Buddhism, called Ch'an. Bodhidharma attracted little notice during his years in China, and the first historical account of his life is a brief mention in a chronicle compiled well over a hundred years after the fact, identifying him merely as a practitioner of meditation. However, later stories of his life became increasingly embellished, as he was slowly elevated to the office of First Patriarch of Chinese Ch'an. His life was made to fulfill admirably the requirements of a legend, as it was slowly enveloped in symbolic anecdotes illustrating the truth more richly than did mere fact. However, most scholars do agree that there actually was a Bodhidharma, that he was a South Indian who came to China, that he practiced an intensive form of meditation, and that a short treatise ascribed to him is probably more or less authentic. Although the legend attached to this unshaven Indian Buddhist tells us fully as much about early Ch'an as it does about the man himself, it is nonetheless the first page in the book of Zen. _[Bodhidharma], the Teacher of the Law, was the third son of a great Brahmin king in South India, of the Western Lands. He was a man of wonderful intelligence, bright and far-reaching; he thoroughly understood everything that he had ever learned. As his ambition was to master the doctrine of the Mahayana, he abandoned the white dress of a layman and put on the black robe of monkhood, wishing to cultivate the seeds of holiness. He practiced contemplation and tranquillization; he knew well what was the true significance of worldly affairs. Inside and outside he was transpicuous; his virtues were more than a model to the world. He was grieved very much over the decline of the orthodox teaching of the Buddha in the remoter parts of the earth. He finally made up his mind to cross over land and sea and come to China and preach his doctrine in the kingdom of Wei.1 _ China at the time of Bodhidharma's arrival was a politically divided land, with the new faith of Buddhism often supplying a spiritual common denominator. Bodhidharma happened to appear at a moment when an emperor in the northwest, the aforementioned Wu (reigned 502-49), had become a fanatic Buddhist. Shortly after taking power, Wu actually ordered his imperial household and all associated with the court to take up Buddhism and abandon Taoism. Buddhist monks became court advisers, opening the imperial coffers to build many lavish and subsequently famous temples. Emperor Wu led Buddhist assemblies, wrote learned commentaries on various sutras, and actually donated menial work at temples as a lay devotee. He also arranged to have all the Chinese commentaries on the sutras assembled and catalogued. Concerned about the sanctity of life, he banished meat (and wine) from the imperial table and became so lax about enforcing criminal statutes, particularly capital punishment, that critics credited his good nature with an increase in corruption and lawlessness. While the Taoists understandably hated him and the Confucianists branded him a distracted ineffectual sovereign, the Buddhists saw in him a model emperor. Quite simply, Emperor Wu was to southern Chinese Buddhism what Emperor Constantine was to Christianity. The emperor was known for his hospitality to visiting Indian monks, and it is entirely possible he did invite Bodhidharma for an audience.2 According to the legend, Emperor Wu began almost immediately to regale his visiting dignitary with a checklist of his own dedication to the faith, mentioning temples built, clergy invested, sutras promulgated. The list was long, but at last he paused, no doubt puzzled by his guest's indifference. Probing for a response, he asked, "Given all I have done, what Merit have I earned?" Bodhidharma scowled, "None whatsoever, your majesty." The emperor was stunned by this reply, but he pressed on, trying another popular question. "What is the most important principle of Buddhism?" This second point Bodhidharma reportedly answered with the abrupt "Vast emptiness."3 The emperor was equally puzzled by this answer and in desperation finally inquired who, exactly, was the bearded visitor standing before him--to which Bodhidharma cheerfully admitted he had no idea. The interview ended as abruptly as it began, with Bodhidharma excusing himself and pressing on. For his first miracle, he crossed the Yangtze just outside Nanking on a reed and headed north. The legend of Bodhidharma picks up again in North China, near the city of Loyang. The stories differ, but the most enduring ones link his name with the famous Shao-lin monastery on Mt. Sung. There, we are told, he meditated for nine years facing a wall (thereby inventing "wall gazing") until at last, a pious version reports, his legs fell off. At one time, relates another Zen story, he caught himself dozing and in a fit of rage tore off his eyelids and cast them contemptuously to the ground, whereupon bushes of the tea plant--Zen's sacramental drink-- sprang forth. Another story has him inventing a Chinese style of boxing as physical education for the weakling monks at Shao-lin, thereby founding a classic Chinese discipline. But the most famous episode surrounding his stay at the Shao-lin concerns the monk Hui-k'o, who was to be his successor. The story tells that Hui-k'o waited in the snows outside Shao-lin for days on end, hoping in vain to attract Bodhidharma's notice, until finally in desperation he cut off his own arm to attract the master's attention. Bodhidharma advocated meditation, sutras, and the trappings of traditional Buddhism as a way to see into one's own nature. His legends represent Zen in its formative period, before the more unorthodox methods for shaking disciples into a new mode of consciousness had been devised. However, one of the stories attributed to him by later writers sounds suspiciously like a Zen mondo (the traditional consciousness- testing exchange between master and monk). According to this story, the disciple Hui-k'o entreated Bodhidharma, saying, "Master, I have not found peace of mind. I beg you to pacify my mind for me." Bodhidharma replied, "Bring me your mind and I will pacify it for you." Hui-k'o was silent for a time, finally conceding he could not actually find his mind. "There," said Bodhidharma, "I have pacified it for you." This symbolic story illustrates eloquently the concept of the mind as a perceiver, something that cannot itself be subject to analysis. Logical introspection is impossible. The mind cannot examine itself any more than the eye can see itself. Since the mind cannot become the object of its own perception, its existence can only be understood intuitively, as Hui-k'o realized when he tried to plumb its whereabouts objectively. The actual teachings of Bodhidharma are not fully known. The first notice of the "blue-eyed barbarian" (as later Chinese called him) is in the Chinese Buddhist history entitled Further Biographies of Eminent Priests, usually dated around the year 645, more than a century after he came to China. This biography also contains the brief text of an essay attributed to Bodhidharma. At the time it was compiled, Bodhidharma had not yet been anointed the First Patriarch of Zen: rather he was merely one of a number of priests teaching meditation. Accordingly there would have been no incentive to embellish his story with an apocryphal essay, and for this reason most authorities think it is authentic.4 A later, more detailed version of the essay by Bodhidharma is contained in the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (A.D. 1004). This latter text is usually the one quoted, and it is agreed to be the superior literary document.5 We are in good company if we accept this essay as a more or less accurate record of the thoughts of the First Patriarch. The text that Bodhidharma left was meant to show others the several ways to enlightenment. _There are many ways to enter the Path, but briefly speaking, they are two sorts only. The one is "Entrance by Reason" and the other "Entrance by Conduct._"6_ _ The first of these paths, the Entrance by Reason, might more properly be called entrance by pure insight. The path advocated seems a blending of Buddhism and Taoism, by which the sutras are used as a vehicle for leading the seeker first to meditation, and then to a nonliterary state of consciousness in which all dualities, all sense of oneself as apart from the world, are erased. This is an early and eloquent summary of Zen's objectives. _By "Entrance by Reason" we mean the realization of the spirit of Buddhism by the aid of scriptural teaching. We then come to have a deep faith in the True Nature which is one and the same in all sentient beings. The reason that it does not manifest itself is due to the overwrapping of external objects and false thoughts. When one, abandoning the false and embracing the true, and in simpleness of thought, abides in _pi-kuan _[pure meditation or "wall-gazing"], one finds that there is neither selfhood nor otherness, that the masses and the worthies are of one essence, and firmly holds on to this belief and never moves away therefrom. He will not then be guided by any literary instructions, for he is in silent communication with the principle itself, free from conceptual discrimination, for he is serene and not- acting.7_ Bodhidharma is given credit for inventing the term _pi-kuan_, whose literal translation is "wall-gazing," but whose actual meaning is anyone's guess. _Pi-kuan_ is sometimes called a metaphor for the mind's confrontation with the barrier of intellect--which must eventually be hurdled if one is to reach enlightenment. In any case, this text is an unmistakable endorsement of meditation as a means for tranquilizing the mind while simultaneously dissolving our impulse to discriminate between ourselves and the world around us. It points out that literary instructions can go only so far, and at last they must be abandoned in favor of reliance on the intuitive mind.8 The other Path (or Tao) he described was called the "Entrance by Conduct" and invokes his Indian Buddhist origins. The description of "conduct" was divided into four sections which, taken together, were intended to subsume or include all the possible types of Buddhist practice. _By "Entrance by Conduct" is meant the Four Acts in which all other acts are included. What are the four? 1. How to requite hatred; 2. To be obedient to _karma_; 3. Not to seek after anything; and 4. To be in accord with the _Dharma_.9 _ The first Act of Conduct counseled the believer to endure all hardships, since they are payment for evil deeds committed in past existences. _What is meant by "How to requite hatred"? Those who discipline themselves in the Path should think thus when they have to struggle with adverse conditions: During the innumerable past ages I have wandered through multiplicity of existences, all the while giving myself to unimportant details of life at the expense of essentials, and thus creating infinite occasions for hate, ill-will, and wrong-doing. While no violations have been committed in this life, the fruits of evil deeds in the past are to be gathered now. Neither gods nor men can foretell what is coming upon me. I will submit myself willingly and patiently to all the ills that befall me, and I will never bemoan or complain. In the Sutra it is said not to worry over ills that may happen to you. Why? Because through intelligence one can survey [the whole chain of causation]. When this thought arises, one is in concord with the principle because he makes the best use of hatred and turns it into the service of his advance towards the Path. This is called the "way to requite hatred._"10_ _ The second Rule of Conduct is to be reconciled to whatever comes, good or evil. It seems to reflect the Taoist attitude that everything is what it is and consequently value judgments are irrelevant. If good comes, it is the result of meritorious deeds in a past existence and will vanish when the store of causative karma is exhausted. The important thing to realize is that none of it matters anyway. _We should know that all sentient beings are produced by the interplay of karmic conditions, and as such there can be no real self in them. The mingled yarns of pleasure and pain are all woven of the threads of conditioning causes. . . . Therefore, let gains and losses run their natural courses according to the ever changing conditions and circumstances of life, for the Mind itself does not increase with the gains nor decrease with the losses. In this way, no gales of self- complacency will arise, and your mind will remain in hidden harmony with the Tao. It is in this sense that we must understand the rule of adaptation to the variable conditions and circumstances of life.11 _ The third Rule of Conduct was the teaching of the Buddha that a cessation of seeking and a turning toward nonattachment brings peace. _Men of the world remain unawakened for life; everywhere we find them bound by their craving and clinging. This is called "attachment." The wise, however, understand the truth, and their reason tells them to turn from the worldly ways. They enjoy peace of mind and perfect detachment. They adjust their bodily movements to the vicissitudes of fortune, always aware of the emptiness of the phenomenal world, in which they find nothing to covet, nothing to delight in. . . . Everyone who has a body is an heir to suffering and a stranger to peace. Having comprehended this point, the wise are detached from all things of the phenomenal world, with their minds free of desires and craving. As the scripture has it, "All sufferings spring from attachment; true joy arises from detachment." To know clearly the bliss of detachment is truly to walk on the path of the Tao.12 _ The fourth Rule of Conduct was to dissolve our perception of object- subject dualities and view life as a unified whole. This merging of self and exterior world Bodhidharma calls pure mind or pure reason. _The Dharma is nothing else than Reason which is pure in its essence. This pure Reason is the formless Form of all Forms; it is free of all defilements and attachments, and it knows of neither "self" nor "other."13 _Having set forth this rather elegant statement of Zen and Buddhist ideals, as ascribed to Bodhidharma, it unfortunately is necessary to add that it appears to have been taken directly from the Vajrasamadhi Sutra (attributing quotations from the sutras to Patriarchs was common), with the sole exception of the term _pi-kuan_.14 At the very least, the legend at this time does not portray Bodhidharma as a despiser of the sutras. He was, in fact, using a sutra as a vehicle to promote his practice of intensive meditation. It is not known what role meditation played in Buddhism at this time. However, the scholar Hu Shih questions how well it was understood. "[An early Buddhist historian's] Biographies, which covered the whole period of early Buddhism in China from the first century to the year 519, contained only 21 names of 'practitioners of _dhyana _(meditation)' out of a total of about 450. And practically all of the 21_dhyana _monks were recorded because of their remarkable asceticism and miraculous powers. This shows that in spite of the numerous yoga manuals in translation, and in spite of the high respect paid by intellectual Buddhists to the doctrine and practice of _dhyana_, there were, as late as 500, practically no Chinese Buddhists who really understood or seriously practiced _dhyana _or Zen."15 Perhaps Bodhidharma, arriving in 520, felt his praise of meditation, using the words of an existing sutra, could rouse Chinese interest in this form of Buddhism. As it turned out, he was successful beyond anything he could have imagined, although his success took several centuries. As D. T. Suzuki sums it up, "While there was nothing specifically Zen in his doctrine of 'Two Entrances and Four Acts,' the teaching of _pi-kuan_, wall-contemplation, was what made Bodhidharma the first patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China."16 Suzuki interprets _pi- kuan _as referring to the mind in a thoughtless state, in which meditation has permitted the rational mind to be suppressed entirely. The use of meditation for this goal instead of for developing magical powers, as had been the goal of earlier _dhyana _masters, seems to have been the profound new idea introduced to China by Bodhidharma.17 The passage of Bodhidharma is also swathed in legend. What eventually happened to this traveling Indian guru? Did he die of poison, as one legend says; or did he wander off to Central Asia, as another reports; or did he go to Japan, as still another story would have it? The story that has been the most enduring (recorded in a Sung work, _Ching-te ch'uan-teng-lu_) tells that after nine years at the Shao-lin monastery decided to return to India and called together his disciples to test their attainment. The first disciple reportedly said, "As I view it, to realize the truth we should neither rely entirely on words and letters nor dispense with them entirely, but rather we should use them as an instrument of the Way." To this, Bodhidharma replied, "You have got my skin." Next a nun came forward and said, "As I view it, the Truth is like an auspicious sighting of the Buddhist Paradise; it is seen once and never again." To this Bodhidharma replied, "You have attained my flesh." The third disciple said, "The four great elements are empty and the five _skandhas_ [constituents of the personality: body, feelings, perception, will, and consciousness] are nonexistent. There is, in fact, nothing that can be grasped." To this Bodhidharma replied, "You have attained my bones." Finally, it was Hui-k'o's turn. But he only bowed to the master and stood silent at his place. To him Bodhidharma said, "You have attained my marrow."18 According to a competing story, Bodhidharma died of poisoning at the age of 150 and was buried in the mountains of Honan.19 Not too long thereafter a lay Buddhist named Sung Yun, who was returning to China after a trip to India to gather sutras, met Bodhidharma in the mountains of Turkestan. The First Patriarch, who was walking barefoot carrying a single shoe, announced he was returning to India and that a native Chinese would arise to continue his teaching. Sung Yun reported this to Bodhidharma's disciples on his return and they opened the master's grave, only to find it empty save for the other shoe. How much of the story of Bodhidharma is legend? The answer does not really matter all that much. As with Moses, if Bodhidharma had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. Although his first full biography (ca. 645) makes no particular fuss over him, less than a century after this, he was declared the founder of Zen, provided with a lineage stretching directly back through Nagarjuna to the Buddha, and furnished an exciting anecdotal history. Yet as founders go, he was a worthy enough individual. He does seem to have devised a strain of Buddhist thought that could successfully be grafted onto the hardy native Chinese Taoist organism. He also left an active disciple, later to be known as the Second Patriarch, Hui-k'o, so he must have had either a charismatic personality or a philosophical position that distinguished him from the general run of meditation masters. It is important to keep in mind that Bodhidharma, man and myth, was the product of an early form of Zen. The later masters needed a lineage, and he was tapped for the role of First Patriarch. The major problem with Bodhidharma was that many of his ideas were in direct contradiction to the position adopted by later Zen teachings. For instance, recall that he promoted the reliance on a sutra (the Lankavatara); and he heavily stressed meditation (something later Zen masters would partially circumvent). The Jesuit scholar Heinrich Dumoulin has declared that Bodhidharma's attributed teaching in no way deviates from the great Mahayana sutras.20 It is, in fact, a far cry from later Zen ideas, says John Wu, the Chinese authority.21 Finally, he left no claim to patriarchy, nor did his first biographer offer to do this for him. Perhaps the evolution of Zen is best demonstrated by the slow change in the paintings of Bodhidharma, culminating in the latter-day portrayals of him as a scowling grump. His image became successively more misanthropic through the centuries, perhaps as a way of underscoring the later Zen practice of establishing a rather dehumanized relationship between the Zen master and pupil, as the master shouts, beats a monk, and destroys his ego through merciless question-and- answer sessions. For all we know, the "wall-gazing Brahmin" of ancient China may have had a wry smile to go along with his droll sense of humor. Perhaps it is fitting to close with the most lasting apocrypha associated with his name, to wit the stanza that later masters attributed to him as an alleged summary of his teaching, but which he, promulgator of the Lankavatara Sutra, would undoubtedly have disowned: _A special transmission outside the sutras; No reliance upon words and letters; Direct pointing to the very mind; Seeing into one's own nature._ Chapter Two HUI-K'O: SECOND PATRIARCH OF ZEN Hui-k'o (487-593) first enters the history of Zen as an eager Chinese scholar devoted to meditation. Wishing to become a disciple of the famous Indian monk who had recently installed himself at the Shao-lin monastery, Hui-k'o set up a vigil outside the gate. Time passed and the snows began to fall, but still Bodhidharma ignored him, declaring, "The incomparable doctrine of Buddhism can only be comprehended after a long hard discipline, by enduring what is most difficult to endure and by practicing what is most difficult to practice. Men of inferior virtue are not allowed to understand anything about it."1 Finally Hui-k'o despaired and resorted to an extreme measure to demonstrate his sincerity: he cut off his own arm and offered it to the master. (This act reportedly has been repeated since by an occasional overenthusiastic Zen novice.) Even a singleminded master of meditation like Bodhidharma could not ignore such a gesture, and he agreed to accept Hui-k'o as his first Chinese disciple. Unlike Bodhidharma, Hui-k'o is not a mysterious, legendary figure, but rather is remembered by a detailed history that interacts periodically with known events in Chinese history.2 He came from the Chi family and was originally named Seng-k'o, only later becoming known as Hui-k'o. The most reliable report has him coming from Wu-lao, with a reputation as a scholarly intellectual preceding him. Indeed he seems to have been a Chinese scholar in the finest sense, with a deep appreciation of all three major philosophies: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. It was toward the last, however, that he slowly gravitated, finally abandoning his scholarly secular life and becoming a Buddhist monk. He was around age forty, in the prime of what was to be a very long life, when he first encountered Bodhidharma at the Shao-lin monastery. Whether he lost his arm by self-mutilation, as the later Zen chronicles say, or whether it was severed in a fight with bandits, as the earliest history reports, may never be determined.3 The later story is certainly more pious, but the earlier would seem more plausible. For six years he studied meditation with Bodhidharma, gradually retreating from the life of the scholar as he turned away from intellectualism and toward pure experience. When Bodhidharma finally decided to depart, he called in all his disciples for the famous testing of their attainment recounted in Chapter l.4 Hui-k'o, by simply bowing in silence when asked what he had attained, proved that his understanding of the master's wordless teaching was superior, and it was he who received the Lankavatara Sutra. The event reportedly was sealed by a short refrain, now universally declared to be spurious, in which Bodhidharma predicted the later division of Ch'an into five schools: _Originally I came to this land To transmit the Dharma and to save all from error A flower with five petals opens; Of itself the fruit will ripen.5 _ As the story goes, Hui-k'o remained at the Shao-lin for a while longer and then went underground, supporting himself through menial work and learning about Chinese peasant life firsthand. Reportedly, he wanted to tranquilize his mind, to acquire the humility necessary in a great teacher, and not incidentally to absorb the Lankavatara Sutra. When asked why he, an enlightened teacher, chose to live among menial laborers, he would reply tartly that this life was best for his mind and in any case what he did was his own affair. It was a hard existence, but one he believed proper. Perhaps it was in this formative period that the inner strength of Ch'an's first Chinese master was forged. Hui-k'o's major concern during this period must inevitably have been the study of the Lankavatara Sutra entrusted him by Bodhidharma. The Lankavatara was not written by a Zen master, nor did it come out of the Zen tradition, but it was the primary scripture of the first two hundred years of Ch'an. As D. T. Suzuki has noted, there were at least three Chinese translations of this Sanskrit sutra by the time Bodhidharma came to China.6 However, he is usually given credit, at least in Zen records, for originating the movement later known as the Lankavatara school. As the sutra was described by a non-Ch'an Chinese scholar in the year 645, "The entire emphasis of its teaching is placed on Prajna (highest intuitive knowledge), which transcends literary expression. Bodhidharma, the Zen master, propagated this doctrine in the south as well as in the north, the gist of which teaching consists in attaining the unattainable, which is to have right insight into the truth itself by forgetting word and thought. Later it grew and flourished in the middle part of the country. Hui-k'o was the first who attained to the essential understanding of it. Those addicted to the literary teaching of Buddhism in Wei were averse to becoming associated with these spiritual seers."7 The Lankavatara purportedly relays the thoughts of the Buddha while ensconced on a mountain peak in Sri Lanka. Although the work is notoriously disorganized, vague, and obscure, it was to be the stone on which Hui-k'o sharpened his penetrating enlightenment. The major concept it advances is that of Mind, characterized by D. T. Suzuki as "absolute mind, to be distinguished from an empirical mind which is the subject of psychological study. When it begins with a capital letter, it is the ultimate reality on which the entire world of individual objects depends for its value."8 On the question of Mind, the Lankavatara has the following to say: _. . . the ignorant and the simple minded, not knowing that the world is what is seen of Mind itself, cling to the multitudinousness of external objects, cling to the notions of being and non-being, oneness and otherness, bothness and not-bothness, existence and non-existence, eternity and non-eternity. . . .9 _ According to the Lankavatara, the world and our perception of it are both part of a larger conceptual entity. The teachings of the Lankavatara cast the gravest doubt on the actual existence of the things we think we see. Discrimination between oneself and the rest of the world can only be false, since both are merely manifestations of the same encompassing essence, Mind. Our perception is too easily deceived, and this is the reason we must not implicitly trust the images that reach our consciousness. _. . . [I]t is like those water bubbles in a rainfall which have the appearance of crystal gems, and the ignorant taking them for real crystal gems run after them. . . . [T]hey are no more than water bubbles, they are not gems, nor are they not-gems, because of their being so comprehended [by one party] and not being so comprehended [by another].10 _ Reality lies beyond these petty discriminations. The intellect, too, is powerless to distinguish the real from the illusory, since all things are both and neither at the same time. This conviction of the Lankavatara remained at the core of Zen, even after the sutra itself was supplanted by simpler, more easily approached literary works. As Hui-k'o studied the Lankavatara and preached, he gradually acquired a reputation for insight that transcended his deliberately unpretentious appearance. Throughout it all, he led an itinerant life, traveling about North China. It is reported that he found his way to the capital of the eastern half of the Wei kingdom after its division in the year 534. Here, in the city of Yeh-tu, he taught his version of _dhyana_ and opened the way to enlightenment for many people. Though unassuming in manner and dress, he nonetheless aroused antagonism from established Buddhist circles because of his success, encountering particular opposition from a conventional _dhyana _teacher named Tao- huan. According to _Further Biographies of the Eminent Priests (645)_, Tao-huan was a jealous teacher who had his own following of as many as a thousand, and who resented deeply the nonscriptural approach Hui-k'o advocated. This spiteful priest sent various of his followers to monitor Hui-k'o's teaching, perhaps with an eye to accusing him of heresy, but all those sent were so impressed that none ever returned. Then one day the antagonistic _dhyana_ master met one of those former pupils who had been won over by Hui-k'o's teachings. D. T. Suzuki translates the encounter as follows: _When Tao-huan happened to meet his first messenger, he asked: "How was it that I had to send for you so many times? Did I not open your eye after taking pains so much on my part?" The former disciple, however, mystically answered: "My eye has been right from the first, and it was through you that it came to squint._"11_ _ The message would seem to be that Hui-k'o taught a return to one's original nature, to the primal man without artificial learning or doctrinal pretense. Out of resentment the jealous _dhyana _master reportedly caused Hui-k'o to undergo official persecution. In later years, beginning around 574, there was a temporary but thorough persecution of Buddhism in the capital city of Ch'ang-an. Sometime earlier, an ambitious sorcerer and apostate Buddhist named Wei had decided to gain a bit of notoriety for himself by attacking Buddhism, then a powerful force in Ch'ang-an. In the year 567 he presented a document to the emperor claiming that Buddhism had allowed unsavory social types to enter the monasteries. He also attacked worship of the Buddha image on the ground that it was un-Chinese idolatry. Instead, he proposed a secularized church that would include all citizens, with the gullible emperor suggested for the role of "pope." The emperor was taken with the idea and after several years of complex political maneuvering, he proscribed Buddhism in North China. As a result, Hui-k'o was forced to flee to the south, where he took up temporary residence in the mountainous regions of the Yangtze River. The persecution was short-lived, since the emperor responsible died soon after his decree, whereupon Hui-k'o returned to Ch'ang-an. However, these persecutions may have actually contributed to the spread of his teaching, by forcing him to travel into the countryside. The only authentic fragment of Hui-k'o's thought that has survived records his answer to an inquiry sent by a lay devotee named Hsiang, who reportedly was seeking spiritual attainment alone in the jungle. The inquiry, which seems more a statement than a question, went as follows: _. . . he who aspires to Buddhahood thinking it to be independent of the nature of sentient beings is to be likened to one who tries to listen to an echo by deadening its original sound. Therefore the ignorant and the enlightened are walking in one passageway; the vulgar and the wise are not to be differentiated from each other. Where there are no names, we create names, and because of these names, judgments are formed. Where there is no theorizing, we theorize, and because of this theorizing, disputes arise. They are all phantom creations and not realities, and who knows who is right and who is wrong? They are all empty, no substantialities have they, and who knows what is and what is not? So we realize that our gain is not real gain and our loss not real loss. This is my view and may I be enlightened if I am at fault?12 _ This "question," if such it is, sounds suspiciously like a sermon and stands, in fact, as an eloquent statement of Zen concerns. Hui-k'o reportedly answered as follows, in a fragment of a letter that is his only known extant work. _You have truly comprehended the Dharma as it is; the deepest truth lies in the principle of identity. It is due to one's ignorance that the mani-jewel is taken for a piece of brick, but lo! when one is suddenly awakened to self-enlightenment it is realized that one is in possession of the real jewel. The ignorant and the enlightened are of one essence, they are not really to be separated. We should know that all things are such as they are. Those who entertain a dualistic view of the world are to be pitied, and I write this letter for them. When we know that between this body and the Buddha, there is nothing to separate one from the other, what is the use of seeking after Nirvana [as something external to ourselves]?13 _ Hui-k'o insists that all things spring from the one Mind, and consequently the ideas of duality, of attachment to this or that phenomenon, or even the possibility of choice, are equally absurd. Although he knew all too well that enlightenment could not be obtained from teaching, he still did not advocate a radical break with the traditional methods of the Buddhist _dhyana_ masters. His style was unorthodox, but his teaching methods were still confined to lectures and meditation. This low-key approach was still closer to the tradition of the Buddha than to the jarring techniques of "sudden enlightenment" destined to erupt out of Chinese Ch'an. Toward the end of his life, Hui-k'o was back in Ch'ang-an, living and teaching in the same unassuming manner. His free-lance style seems to have continued to outrage the more conventional teachers, and a later story records a martyr's death for him.14 One day, while a learned master was preaching inside the K'uang-chou Temple, Hui-k'o chanced by and started to chat with the passersby outside. Gradually a crowd started to collect, until eventually the lecture hall of the revered priest was emptied. This famous priest, remembered as Pien-ho, accused the ragged Hui-k'o to the magistrate Che Ch'ung-j'an as a teacher of false doctrine. As a result he was arrested and subsequently executed, an impious 106-year-old revolutionary. Chapter Three SENG-TS'AN, TAO-HSIN, FA-JUNG, AND HUNG-JEN: FOUR EARLY MASTERS _The Fifth Patriarch,Hung-jen (left)_ The master succeeding Hui-k'o was Seng-ts'an (d. 606), who then taught Fa-jung (594-657) and Tao-hsin (580-651), the latter in turn passing the robe of the patriarchy to Hung-jen (601-74). The masters Seng- ts'an, Tao-hsin, and Hung-jen are honored today as the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Patriarchs, respectively, and revered as the torchbearers of Ch'an's formative years. Yet when we look for information about their lives, we find the sources thin and diffuse. One reason probably is that before 700 nobody realized that these men would one day be elevated to founding fathers, and consequently no one bothered recording details of their lives. During the seventh century the scattered teachers of _dhyana _seem to have gradually coalesced into a sort of ad hoc movement--with sizable followings growing up around the better-known figures. A certain amount of respectability also emerged, if we can believe the references to imperial notice that start appearing in the chronicles. It would seem that the _dhyana_ or Ch'an movement became a more or less coherent sect, a recognizable if loosely defined school of Buddhism. However, what the movement apparently was striving to become was not so much a branch of Buddhism in China as a Chinese version of Buddhism. The men later remembered as the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Patriarchs have in common a struggle to bend Buddhist thought to Chinese intellectual requirements, to sinicize Buddhism. Whereas they succeeded only in setting the stage for this transformation (whose realization would await other hands), they did establish a personality pattern that would set apart all later masters: a blithe irreverence that owed as much to Chuang Tzu as to Bodhidharma. When reading the biographies that follow, it is useful to keep in mind that the explicit details may well have been cooked up in later years to satisfy a natural Chinese yearning for anecdotes, with or without supporting information. Yet the fact that the _dhyana _practitioners eventually became a movement in need of a history is itself proof that these men and their stories were not complete inventions. In any case, they were remembered, honored, and quoted in later years as the legendary founders of Ch'an. SENG-TSAN, THE THIRD PATRIARCH (d. 606) The question of the Second Patriarch Hui-k'o's successor was troublesome even for the ancient Ch'an historians. The earliest version of his biography (written in 645, before the sect of Ch'an and its need for a history existed) declares, "Before [Hui-k'o] had established a lineage he died, leaving no worthy heirs." When it later became necessary for Ch'an to have an uninterrupted patriarchy, a revised history was prepared which supplied him an heir named Seng-ts'an, to whom he is said to have transmitted the doctrine.1 The story of their meeting recalls Hui-k'o's first exchange with Bodhidharma, save that the roles are reversed. The text implies that Seng-ts'an was suffering from leprosy when he first encountered Hui-k'o, and that he implored the Master for relief in a most un-Zenlike way, saying: "I am in great suffering from this disease; please take away my sins." Hui-k'o responded with, "Bring me your sins, and I will take them away." After a long silence, Seng-ts'an confessed, "I've looked, but I cannot find them." To which Hui-k'o replied, echoing Bodhidharma's classic rejoinder, "Behold, you have just been cleansed." Another version of the story says Hui-k'o greeted Seng-ts'an with the words, "You are suffering from leprosy; why should you want to see me?" To this Seng-ts'an responded, "Although my body is sick, the mind of a sick man and your own mind are no different." Whatever actually happened, it was enough to convince Hui-k'o that he had found an enlightened being, one who perceived the unity of all things, and he forthwith transmitted to Seng-ts'an the symbols of the patriarchy--the robe and begging bowl of Bodhidharma--telling him that he should take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (the universal truth proclaimed by Buddha), and the Sangha (the Buddhist organization or priesthood). Seng-ts'an replied that he knew of the Sangha, but what was meant by the Buddha and the Dharma? The answer was that all three were expressions of Mind.2 This exchange seems to have taken place while Hui-k'o was in the northern Wei capital of Yeh-tu.3 In later years Seng-ts'an found it necessary to feign madness (to escape persecution during the anti- Buddhist movement of 574), and finally he went to hide on Huan-kung mountain for ten years, where his mere presence reportedly was enough to tame the wild tigers who had terrorized the people there. The only surviving work that purportedly relays his teaching is a poem, said to be one of the earliest Ch'an treatises, which is called the _Hsin-hsin- ming_, or "On the Believing Mind."4 It starts off in a lyrical, almost Taoist, voice worthy of Chuang Tzu, as it celebrates man's original nature and the folly of striving. _There is nothing difficult about the Great Way But, avoid choosing! Only when you neither love nor hate, Does it appear in all clarity. Do not be anti- or pro- anything. The conflict of longing and loathing, This is the disease of the mind. Not knowing the profound meaning of things, We disturb our (original) peace of mind to no purpose.5 _Next, the poem turns to an acknowledgment of the Mahayanist concept of the all-encompassing Mind, the greatest single truth of the universe, and of Nagarjuna's Void, the cosmic emptiness of _sunyata_. _Things are things because of the Mind. The Mind is the Mind because of things. If you wish to know what these two are, They are originally one Emptiness. In this Void both (Mind and things) are one, All the myriad phenomena contained in both.6 _ The poem closes with an affirmation of the Ch'an credo of unity and the absence of duality as a sign of enlightenment. _ In the World of Reality There is no self, no other-than-self. . . . All that can be said is "No Duality!" When there is no duality, all things are one, There is nothing that is not included. . . . The believing mind is not dual; What is dual is not the believing mind. Beyond all language, For it there is no past, no present, no future.7 _ Since the earliest historical sources maintain that Seng-ts'an left no writings, some have questioned the attribution of this lilting work to the Third Patriarch. Whatever its authorship, the real importance of the poem lies in its subtle merging of Taoism and Buddhism. We can watch as the voices of ancient China and ancient India are blended together into a perfect harmony until the parts are inseparable. It was a noble attempt to reconcile Buddhist metaphysics with Chinese philosophical concepts, and it was successful in a limited way. As for Seng-ts'an, the legends tell that he finally was overcome by his longing for the south and, handing down the symbols of the patriarchy to a priest named Tao-hsin, he vanished. TAO-HSIN, THE FOURTH PATRIARCH (580-651) China, whose political turmoil had sent the early Patriarchs scurrying from one small kingdom to another, found unity and the beginnings of stability under a dynasty known as the Sui (581-618), the first in three and a half centuries (since the end of the Han in 220) able to unify the land.8 This brief dynasty (which soon was replaced by the resplendent T'ang) came to be dominated by the Emperor Yang, a crafty politician who maneuvered the throne away from an elder brother-- partially, it is said, by demonstrating to his parents his independence of mind by abandoning all the children he begat in the ladies' quarters. Whereas his father had undertaken the renovation of the North Chinese capital of Ch'ang-an--not incidentally creating one of the glories of the ancient world and the site of the finest moments of the later T'ang Dynasty--Emperor Yang decided to reconstruct the city of Loyang, some two hundred miles to the east. The result was a "Western Capital" at Ch'ang-an and an "Eastern Capital" at Loyang, the latter city soon to be the location of some pivotal episodes in Ch'an history. For the construction of Loyang, a fairyland of palaces and gardens, millions of citizens were conscripted and tens of thousands died under forced labor. Emperor Yang's other monument was a grand canal, linking the Yellow River in the north with the rich agricultural deltas of the Yangtze in the south, near Nanking. The emperor loved to be barged down this vast waterway--journeys that unsympathetic historians have claimed were merely excuses to seek sexual diversions away from the capital. In any case, his extravagances bankrupted the country and brought about his overthrow by the man who would become the founder of the T'ang Dynasty, later to reign under the name of Emperor T'ai-tsung (ruled 626-49). The T'ang is universally regarded as one of the great ages of man, and it is also considered the Golden Age of Ch'an. The founding emperor, T'ai-tsung, was a wise and beneficent "Son of Heaven," as Chinese rulers were styled.9 Under his influence, the capital city of Ch'ang-an became the most cosmopolitan metropolis in the ancient world, with such widespread influence that when the first visiting Japanese came upon it, they were so dazzled they returned home and built a replica for their own capital city. The city was laid out as a grid, with lavish vermilion imperial palaces and gardens clustered regally at one end. Its inhabitants numbered upward of two million, while its international markets and fleshpots were crowded with traders from the farthest reaches of Asia and Europe, echoing with a truly astounding cacophony of tongues: Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Persian, Roman Latin, and Arabic, not to mention the many dialects of Chinese. Christians moved among the Buddhists, as did Muslims and Jews. Artisans worked with silver, gold, jewels, silks, and porcelains, even as poets gathered in wine shops to nibble fruits and relax with round-eyed foreign serving girls. Such were the worldly attractions of Ch'ang-an during the early seventh century. This new sophistication and urbanization, as well as the political stability that made it all possible, was also reflected in the change in Ch'an--from a concern chiefly of nomadic _dhyana _teachers hiding in the mountains to the focus of settled agricultural communities centered in monasteries. The growth in Ch'an toward an established place in Chinese life began to consolidate under the Fourth Patriarch, Tao-hsin, the man whose life spanned the Sui and the early T'ang dynasties. He is best remembered today for two things: First, he was particularly dedicated to meditation, practicing it more avidly than had any _dhyana _master since Bodhidharma; and second, he is credited with beginning the true monastic tradition for Ch'an. His formation of a self-supporting monastic community with its own agricultural base undoubtedly brought Ch'an a long way toward respectability in Chinese eyes, since it reduced the dependence on begging. Itinerant mendicants, even if teachers of _dhyana_, had never elicited the admiration in China they traditionally enjoyed in the Indian homeland of the Buddha. Begging was believed to fashion character, however, and it never disappeared from Ch'an discipline. Indeed, Ch'an is said to have encouraged begging more than did any of the other Chinese Buddhist sects, but as a closely regulated form of moral training. Tao-hsin, whose family name was Ssu-ma, came from Honan, but he left home at seven to study Buddhism and met the Third Patriarch, Seng- ts'an, while still in his teens. When Seng-ts'an decided to drop out of sight, he asked this brilliant pupil to take up the teaching of _dhyana_ and Bodhidharma's Lankavatara Sutra at a monastery on Mt. Lu. Tao-hsin agreed and remained for a number of years, attracting followers and reportedly performing at least one notable miracle. The story says that he saved a walled city from being starved out by bandits by organizing a program of public sutra chanting among its people. We are told that the robbers retired of their own accord while, as though by magic, previously dry wells in the city flowed again. One day not too long thereafter Tao-hsin noticed an unusual purple cloud hanging over a nearby mountain. Taking this as a sign, he proceeded to settle there (the mountain later became known as Shuang-feng or "Twin Peaks") and found the first Ch'an community, presiding over a virtual army of some five hundred followers for the next thirty years. He is remembered today as a charismatic teacher who finally stabilized _dhyana_ teaching. In an age of political turmoil, many intellectuals flocked to the new school of Ch'an, with its promise of tranquil meditation in uneasy times. Tao-hsin apparently encouraged his disciples to operate a form of commune, in which agriculture and its administration were merged with the practice of meditation.10 In so doing, he seems not only to have revolutionized the respectability of _dhyana _practice, but also to have become something of a national figure himself. This, at any rate, is what we may surmise from one of the more durable legends, which has him defying an imperial decree to appear before the emperor, T'ai-tsung. This legend concerns an episode which allegedly took place around the year 645. As the story goes, an imperial messenger arrived one day at the mountain retreat to summon him to the palace, but Tao-hsin turned him down cold. When the messenger reported this to the emperor, the response was to send back a renewed invitation. Again the messenger was met with a refusal, along with a challenge. "If you wish my head, cut it off and take it with you. It may go but my mind will never go." When this reply reached the emperor, he again dispatched the messenger, this time bearing a sealed sword and a summons for the master's head. But he also included a contradictory decree requiring that Tao-hsin not be harmed. When the master refused a third time to come to the palace, the messenger read the decree that his head should be severed. Tao-hsin obligingly bent over, with the command "Cut it off." But the messenger hesitated, admitting that the imperial orders also forbade harming him. On hearing this Tao-hsin reportedly roared with laughter, saying, "You must know that you possess human qualities."11 The Fourth Patriarch's teachings are not well known, other than for the fact that he supposedly devised and promoted new techniques to help novices achieve intensive meditation. The following excerpt of his teaching illustrates his fervor for _dhyana_. Sit earnestly in meditation! The sitting in meditation is basic to all else. By the time you have done this for three to five years, you will be able to ward off starvation with a bit of meal. Close the door and sit! Do not read the sutras, and speak to no man! If you will so exercise yourself and persist in it for a long time, the fruit will be sweet like the meat which a monkey takes from the nutshell. But such people are very rare.12 The de-emphasis on the sutras points the way to later Ch'an. Interestingly, however, the usefulness of sitting in meditation would also come under review in only a few short years, when the new style of Ch'an appeared. The reports of Tao-hsin say that Hung-jen, who was to become the Fifth Patriarch, was one of his followers and grasped the inner meaning of his teaching. It was Hung-jen whom he asked to construct a mausoleum in the mountainside, the site of his final repose, and when it was finished he retired there for his last meditation. After he passed away, his body was wrapped in lacquered cloth, presenting a vision so magnificent that no one could bear to close the mausoleum. Aside from his historical place as the founder of the first real community for Ch'an, there is little that can be said with assurance about Tao-hsin. However, a manuscript discovered early in this century in the Buddhist caves at Tun-huang purportedly contains a sermon by the Fourth Patriarch entitled "Abandoning the Body." _The method of abandoning the body consists first in meditating on Emptiness, whereby the [conscious] mind is emptied. Let the mind together with its world be quieted down to a perfect state of tranquility; let thought be cast in the mystery of quietude, so that the mind is kept from wandering from one thing to another. When the mind is tranquilized in its deepest abode, its entanglements are cut asunder. . . . The mind in its absolute purity is like the Void itself.13 _The text goes on to quote both Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, as well as some of the older sutras, and there is a considerable reference to Nagarjuna's Emptiness. This text, real or spurious, is one more element in the merging of Taoism and Buddhism that was early Ch'an, even as its analysis of the mind state achieved in meditation anticipates later Ch'an teachings. FA-JUNG, THE ST. FRANCIS OF ZEN (594-657) In the parade of Patriarchs, we should not overlook the maverick Fa- jung, a master who was never officially crowned a Patriarch, but whose humanity made him a legend.14 Fa-jung (594-657), whose family name was Wei, was born in a province on the south bank of the Yangtze River and in his early years was a student of Confucian thought. But before long his yearning for spiritual challenge led him to Buddhism. He finally settled in a rock cave in the side of a cliff near a famous monastery on Mt. Niu-t'ou, where his sanctity reportedly caused birds to appear with offerings of flowers. According to the Zen chronicle _Transmission of the Lamp _(1004), sometime between 627 and 649 the Fourth Patriarch, Tao-hsin, sensed that a famous Buddhist was living on Mt. Niu-t'ou and went there to search out the man. After many days of seeking, he finally came upon a holy figure seated atop a rock. As the two meditation masters were becoming acquainted, there suddenly came the roar of a tiger from the bramble farther up the mountain. Tao-hsin was visibly startled, causing Fa-jung--friend of the animals--to observe wryly, "I see it is still with you." His meaning, of course, was that Tao-hsin was still enslaved by the phenomenal world, was not yet wholly detached from his fears and perceptions. After they had chatted a while longer, Fa-jung found occasion to leave his seat and attend nature at a detached location. During his absence Tao-hsin wrote the Chinese character for the Buddha's name on the very rock where he had been sitting. When Fa-jung returned to resume his place, he was momentarily brought up short by the prospect of sitting on the Buddha's name. Expecting this, Tao-hsin smiled and said, "I see it is still with you." He had shown that Fa-jung was still intimidated by the trappings of classical Buddhism and had not yet become a completely detached master of the pure Mind. The story says that Fa-jung failed to understand his comment and implored Tao-hsin to teach him Ch'an, which the Fourth Patriarch proceeded to do. Tao-hsin's message, once again, was to counsel nondistinction, nonattachment, nondiscrimination; he said to abjure emotions, values, striving. Just be natural and be what you are, for that is the part of you that is closest to the Buddhist ideal of mental freedom. _There is nothing lacking in you, and you yourself are no different from the Buddha. There is no way of achieving Buddhahood other than letting your mind be free to be itself. You should not contemplate nor should you purify your mind. Let there be no craving and hatred, and have no anxiety or fear. Be boundless and absolutely free from all conditions. Be free to go in any direction you like. Do not act to do good, nor to pursue evil. Whether you walk or stay, sit or lie down, and whatever you see happen to you, all are the wonderful activity of the Great Enlightened One. It is all joy, free from anxiety--it is called Buddha.15 _ After Tao-hsin's visit, the birds offering flowers no longer appeared: evidence, said the later Ch'an teachers, that Fa-jung's physical being had entirely vanished. His school on Mt. Niu-t'ou flourished for a time, teaching that the goals of Ch'an practice could be realized by contemplating the Void of Nagarjuna. As Fa-jung interpreted the teachings of the Middle Path: _All talk has nothing to do with one's Original Nature, which can only be reached through _sunyata_. No-thought is the Absolute Reality, in which the mind ceases to act. When one's mind is free from thoughts, one's nature has reached the Absolute.16 _Although Fa-jung's teachings happened to be transmitted to Japan in later years, through the accident of a passing Japanese pilgrim, his school did not endure in either country beyond the eighth century. His was the first splinter group of Zen, and perhaps it lacked the innovation necessary to survive, because it clung too much to traditional Buddhism. As Fa-jung's years advanced, he was encouraged to come down from his mountain and live in a monastery, which his better judgment eventually compelled him to do. It is reported that after his final farewell to his disciples he was followed down the mountain by the laments of all its birds and animals. A more ordinary teacher would have been forgotten, but this beloved St. Francis of Zen became the topic of lectures and a master remembered with reverence ever after. HUNG-JEN, THE FIFTH PATRIARCH (601-74) The other well-known disciple of the Fourth Patriarch, Tao-hsin, was the man history has given the title of Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen (601- 74). The chronicles say that he came from Tao-hsin's own province and impressed the master deeply when, at age fourteen, he held his own with the Fourth Patriarch in an introductory interview. As the exchange has been described, Tao-hsin asked the young would-be disciple his family name, but since the word for "family name" is pronounced the same as that for "nature," Hung-jen answered the question as though it had been, "What is your 'nature'?"--deliberately misinterpreting it in order to say, "My 'nature' is not ordinary; it is the Buddha-nature." Tao-hsin reportedly inquired, "But don't you have a 'family name'?" To which Hung-jen cleverly replied, "No, for the teachings say that our 'nature' is empty."17 Hung-jen went on to become the successor to the Fourth Patriarch, with an establishment where several hundred followers gathered. The chronicles have little to say about the actual life and teachings of the Fifth Patriarch, but no matter. His place in history is secured not so much for what he said--there is actually very little that can reliably be attributed to him--but rather for his accidental appearance at the great crossroads of Zen. Hung-jen and his monastery became the symbol of a great philosophical debate that occupied the first half of the eighth century, a conflict to be examined in detail in the two chapters to follow. Suffice it to say here that the chronicles at least agree that he was an eminent priest and well respected, a man to whom an early-eighth-century document attributes eleven disciples of note.18 Among those listed who are particularly important to the events that follow are a monk named Shen-hsiu and another named Hui-neng, the men whose names would one day be associated with a celebrated midnight poetry contest in Hung-jen's monastery. This contest eventually came to symbolize the conflict between the teachings of gradual enlightenment and sudden enlightenment, between intellectual and intuitive knowledge, between sophisticated urban Buddhism and unlettered rural teachers, and between promoters of the abstruse but challenging Lankavatara Sutra sanctioned by Bodhidharma and the cryptic Diamond Sutra. Quite simply, it was a battle between what would eventually be known as the Northern and Southern schools of Ch'an, and it concerned two fundamentally opposing views of the functions of the human mind. As things turned out, the gradual, Northern, Lankavatara Sutra faction went on for years thinking it had won--or perhaps not really aware that there was a battle in progress-- while the anti-intellectual, Southern, Diamond Sutra faction was gathering its strength in the hinterlands for a final surge to victory. When the Southern school did strike, it won the war handily and then proceeded to recast the history of what had gone before, even going so far as to put posthumous words of praise for itself into the mouths of the once-haughty Northern masters. Thus the mighty were eventually brought low and the humble lifted up in the annals of Ch'an. It is to the two masters whose names are associated with this battle that we must turn next. Chapter Four SHEN-HSIU AND SHEN-HUI: "GRADUAL" AND "SUDDEN" MASTERS Whereas the Ch'an Patriarchs of earlier times had been, more often than not, fractious teachers ignored by emperors and gentry alike, the T'ang Dynasty saw Ch'an masters rise to official eminence, receiving honors from the highest office in China. The first half of the eighth century witnessed what was to be the greatest battle within the school of Ch'an, but it was also the time when Ch'an was finally recognized by Chinese ruling circles. The name most often associated with this imperial recognition is the famous, or perhaps infamous, Empress Wu.1 Wu was not born to royalty, but in the year 638, when she was thirteen, she was placed in Emperor T'ai-tsung's harem as a concubine of relatively low rank. Disapproving historians claim that one day she managed to catch the crown prince, the heir apparent to the aging emperor, in what we today might euphemistically call the bathroom, and seduced him at a moment when he was without benefit of trousers. Thus she was already on familiar terms with the next emperor when her official husband, Emperor T'ai-tsung, went to his ancestors in the summer of 649. Although she was only twenty-four years old, custom required that she join all the deceased emperor's concubines in retirement at a monastery--which ordinarily would have been the last anyone heard of her. As it happened, however, the new emperor's first wife was childless, with the effect that he began devoting increasing attention to a favorite concubine. Knowing of the emperor's earlier acquaintance and infatuation with Wu, the barren empress recalled her from the convent, intending to divert the emperor from his current favorite. The cure, however, turned out to be far more deadly than the ailment. Through an intrigue that apparently included murdering her own child by the emperor and then blaming the empress, Wu soon had both the empress and the competing concubine in prison. Not content with mere imprisonment for her rivals, she went on to have them both boiled alive--after first amputating their hands and feet, eliciting a dying curse from the concubine that she would return as a cat to haunt Wu. To escape this curse, Wu permanently banned cats from the imperial compound, and eventually persuaded the emperor to move the government from Ch'ang-an to Loyang, where for the next half century she tried to exorcise the memory of her deed. In late 683 Wu's husband, the emperor, died, and for a time she allowed his son, the true heir, to occupy the throne--until she could find a pretext to take over the government completely. A couple of years after the emperor's death, when Wu was aged sixty, she became infatuated with a lusty peddler of cosmetics and aphrodisiacs, a man whose virility had made him a favorite with various serving ladies around the palace. To give him a respectable post, she appointed him abbot of the major Buddhist monastery of Loyang--enabling him to satisfy, as it were, a double office in the service of the state. His antics and those of his followers did the cause of Buddhism little good over the next few years. When in 695 his arrogance finally became too much even for Wu, she had him strangled by the court ladies and his body sent back to the monastery in a cart. Although Wu is remembered today as an ardent Buddhist, some have suggested that her devotions turned as much to the claims of fortune telling by Buddhist nuns (some of whose organizations in Loyang reportedly ran brothels on the side) as to a pious concern with Indian philosophy. SHEN-HSIU (605-706), THE FIRST "SIXTH PATRIARCH" It is known that around 701 Empress Wu invited an aging Ch'an monk named Shen-hsiu, follower of the Lankavatara school of Bodhidharma, to come north to the imperial capital from his monastery in central China.2 He was over ninety at the time and had amassed a lifelong reputation for his rigorous practice of _dhyana_. Shen-hsiu agreed reluctantly, reportedly having to be carried on a pallet into the presence of the empress. It is said that Wu curtsied to him, an unusual act for a head of state, and immediately moved him into the palace, where he seems to have become the priest-in- residence. As for why Empress Wu would have chosen to honor a lineage of Ch'an Buddhism, it has been pointed out that she was at the time attempting to supplant the established T'ang Dynasty of her late husband with one of her own. And since the T'ang emperors had honored a Buddhist lineage, it was essential that she do the same--but one of a different school. Shen-hsiu was both eminent and unclaimed, an ideal candidate to become the court Buddhist for her fledgling dynasty--which, needless to say, was never established. Nonetheless, Shen-hsiu was given the title of "Lord of the law of Ch'ang-an and Loyang," and he preached to vast crowds drawn from the entire northern regions. To solidify his eminence, Wu had monasteries built in his honor at his birthplace, at his mountain retreat, and in the capital. Shen-hsiu, who briefly reigned as the Sixth Patriarch of Ch'an, was described in the early chronicles as a sensitive and bright child who, out of despair for the world, early on turned away from Confucianism to become a Buddhist monk. At age forty-six he finally found his way to the East Mountain retreat of the Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen, where he studied under the master until achieving enlightenment. As noted previously he was among the eleven most prominent individuals remembered from the monastery of the Fifth Patriarch. He later left the monastery and traveled for almost two decades, during which time another of the students of Hung-jen, Fa-ju, eclipsed him in fame and followers. However, Shen-hsiu seems to have been the best known Master, eventually becoming the titular head of the Lankavatara faction, also to be known as the Northern school--possibly because Shen-hsiu brought it to the urbanized, sophisticated capitals of North China, Loyang and Ch'ang-an. This was Ch'an's most imperial moment, and no less than a state minister composed the memorial epitaph for Shen-hsiu's gravestone. Although his specific teachings are not well known, a verse survives from one of his sermons that seems to suggest that the teachings of Ch'an were really teachings of the mind and owed little to traditional Buddhism. _The teaching of all the Buddhas In one's own Mind originally exists: To seek the Mind without one's Self, Is like running away from the father.3 _ After he died a pupil named P'u-chi (d. 739) carried on his organization in the capital. This was the high point of official Ch'an, signifying the moment of the Lankavatara school's greatest prestige. Perhaps most important, the success of Shen-hsiu was also the success of Ch'an, or what appeared to be success. The sect had risen from being the passion of homeless teachers of _dhyana _to the object of imperial honors in the midst of China's finest moment, the T'ang Dynasty. The T'ang was an era to be remembered forever for its poetry, its art, its architecture, its cultural brilliance.4 Unfortunately for Northern Ch'an, this cultural brilliance was beginning to be the province of groups other than the blueblooded gentry that traditionally had controlled China's culture. The glories of the T'ang were to some degree the creation of the non-gentry, and an outcast warrior would before long bring the government to its knees, even as an obscure Ch'an master from the rural south was soon to erase Shen-hsiu's seemingly permanent place in history. SHEN-HUI (670-762), THE "MARTIN LUTHER" OF CH'AN The David to Shen-hsiu's Goliath was a master with a similar- sounding name: Shen-hui. This theological street fighter was a native of the province of Hupeh, some distance south of the lavish twin T'ang captials of Ch'ang-an and Loyang.5 He began as a Taoist scholar, but later turned to Buddhism, traveling even farther south around his fortieth year to become the disciple of a priest named Hui-neng, whose temple was Ts'ao-ch'i, just north of the southern port city of Canton in Kuangtung province. It will be remembered that Hui-neng (whose legend we will explore in the next chapter) had also been a disciple of the Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen, studying alongside Shen-hsiu. Shen-hui is thought to have studied under Hui-neng for around five years, until the latter's death in 713. After this he traveled about China, ending up at Hua-t'ai, slightly northeast of the capital of Loyang. He seems to have been a man of charismatic presence, one who inspired followers easily. Then, in the year 732, at a convocation of Ch'an worthies at the temple, he mounted the platform and, in a historic moment, declared that the great Ch'an organizations of China, heretofore beholden to Shen-hsiu as Sixth Patriarch, were following a false master.6 The historical significance of this convocation and Shen-hui's attack might be likened to the defiant act of Martin Luther, when he challenged church hierarchy in sixteenth-century Germany. With superb audacity, Shen-hui went on to spell out a new history of Ch'an that supported his claims. His revised chronicle culminated with the name of his old teacher Hui-neng, theretofore an obscure follower of the Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen, whom he declared Sixth Patriarch. He insisted that Shen-hsiu, the man honored by Empress Wu, had posed falsely as the heir of Hung-jen. The Northern school of Shen-hsiu and his heir, P'u-chi, had perpetrated a historical deceit, said Shen-hui, robbing the true Sixth Patriarch, the southerner Hui-neng, of his due recognition. For Shen-hui to have challenged the hand-picked school of the ruling family was an incredibly courageous act, but perhaps one that was just audacious enough to win public sympathy. He touted this new proposition more or less full-time between the years 732 and 745, as he traveled about North China and got to know the officials of the T'ang regime. His political standing gradually improved and he was eventually invited (in 745, at age seventy-seven) to Loyang to assume leadership of the great Ho-tse temple. Although the particular object of his criticism, Shen-hsiu's disciple P'u-chi, had died in 739, Shen-hui's attacks on the lineage continued undiminished. Politics finally caught up with him, however, when a follower of Shen- hsiu's "Northern" Ch'an named Lu I, who just happened to be chief of imperial censors, accused him of plotting against the government (citing as evidence the large crowds he routinely attracted). Finally, Emperor Hsuan-tsung (grandson of Empress Wu) himself summoned Shen-hui from Loyang to Ch'ang-an, where he questioned the master and finally sent him into exile in the deep south. This was about 753. It was at this point that Chinese political history and Ch'an collide, for the throne was soon to need Shen-hui's help. Emperor Hsuan-tsung (reigned 712-756) has been credited by many with the wreck of the T'ang Dynasty. At the beginning of his reign the capital had been in the east at Loyang (where Empress Wu had moved it. to escape her memories), but the aristocracy in the west successfully pressured him to bring it back to Ch'ang-an. In his declining years Hsuan-tsung became infatuated with the wife of his son, a lady now infamous in Chinese history as Yang Kuei-fei. She subsequently was divorced by her husband and became a member of the emperor's harem in 738, coming to enjoy enormous influence in affairs of state. She had first been brought to the emperor's attention by one of her relatives, and in typical Chinese style she procured government posts for all available members of her family. As the poet Tu Fu (712-770) described her machinations: _So many courtiers now throng around the court That honest men must tremble; And it's said that the gold plate from the treasury Has gone to the kinsmen of Lady Yang.7 _Although none of these blood relatives ever rose to the rich opportunities the situation afforded, another of her favorites compensated abundantly for their political ineptitude. His name was An Lu-shan, a "barbarian" of Turkish extraction, born in 703, who first entered China as a slave to an officer in a northern garrison of the empire. After distinguishing himself as a soldier, he came to the attention of Yang Kuei-fei, who was so charmed by the man that she adopted him as her son. Before long he was a familiar figure at the court, reportedly very fat and possessing a flair for entertaining the bored aristocracy by his flippancy. Eventually he was made governor of a frontier province, where under pretense of a foreign threat he proceeded to recruit an army of alarming proportions and questionable allegiance. Meanwhile, back in the capital, Lady Yang and her relatives had taken over the government, whereupon they unwisely decided that An Lu-shan should be brought under firmer control. With their hostility providing him just the pretext needed, he marched his new army toward Ch'ang-an, pausing only long enough to conquer Loyang and proclaim himself emperor. This was in January 756. By July he had also taken Ch'ang-an, from which the royal family had already fled. Conditions deteriorated sufficiently that the troops supporting the throne demanded, and got, the head of Lady Yang Kuei-fei as the price for continued support. (On imperial orders she was strangled by a eunuch.) In the meantime, the imperial T'ang forces found reinforcements, including some Arab mercenaries. After a battle outside Ch'ang-an which left An Lu-shan's forces in disarray, the rebel was murdered, some say by his own son. Soon thereafter the victorious mercenaries sacked and looted Loyang, ending forever its prominence in Chinese history. The government of the T'ang survived, but it was penniless after the many war years in which it could not enforce taxation.8 The time was now 757, some four years after Shen-hui's banishment. The destitute government, desperate for money, decided to set up ordination platforms in the major cities across China and raise cash by selling certificates of investiture for Buddhist monks. (Since entry into the priesthood removed an individual from the tax rolls, it was accepted practice for the Chinese government to require an advance compensation.) Shen-hui's oratorical gifts were suddenly remembered by some of his former followers, and the old heretic was recalled to assist in the fundraising. He was such an effective fundraiser in the ruined city of Loyang that the government commissioned special quarters to be built for him on the grounds of his old temple, the Ho-tse. (He was later to be remembered as the Master of Ho-tse.) The price for his cooperation seems to have been the official acceptance of his version of Ch'an's history. In his battle with the Northern school of Ch'an he had outlived his opponents and through a bizarre turn of events had finally won the day. Solely through his persistence, the obscure Southern Ch'an monk Hui-neng was installed as Sixth Patriarch in Ch'an histories (replacing Shen-hsiu), and one history went so far as to declare Shen-hui himself the Seventh Patriarch. The philosophical significance of what Shen-hui's "Southern" doctrine brought to Ch'an has been described as nothing less than a revolution. A modern Zen scholar has claimed that Shen-hui's revolution produced a complete replacement of Indian Buddhism with Chinese philosophy, keeping only the name. Shen-hui, he claims, swept aside all forms of meditation or _dhyana _and replaced it with a concept called no-mind: the doctrines of "absence of thought" and "seeing into one's original nature."9 Perhaps this philosophical _coup d'etat _may best be understood by comparing the Northern and Southern teachings. The discredited Northern school of Shen-hsiu had preached that the road to enlightenment must be traversed "step by step," that there were in fact two stages of the mind--the first being a "false mind" which perceives the world erroneously in dualities, and the second a "true mind" which is pure and transcends all discriminations and dualities, perceiving the world simply as a unity. One proceeds from the "false mind" to the "true mind" step by step, through the suppression of erroneous thought processes by the practice of _dhyana_ or meditation, in which the mind and the senses slowly reach a state of absolute quietude. The Southern school took issue with this theory of the mind on a number of points. To begin, they said that if there really is no duality in the world, then how can the mind be divided into "false" and "true"? They argued that the answer quite simply is that there is only one mind, whose many functions are all merely expressions of single true reality. The unity of all things is the true reality; our minds are also part of this reality; and upon realizing this, you have achieved the same enlightenment experience once realized by the Buddha. There is no "false mind" and "true mind," nor is there any need for a long program of _dhyana _to slowly suppress false thoughts. All that is needed is to practice "absence of thought" and thereby intuitively to realize a simple truth: One unity pervades everything. This realization they called Buddha-mind, and it could only happen "all at once" (not "step by step"), at any time and without warning. This moment of primal realization they called "seeing into one's original nature." Although Shen-hui is somewhat vague about exactly what practice should replace meditation, the scholar Walter Liebenthal has inferred the following about Shen-hui's attitude toward "sudden enlightenment" as a replacement for meditation: "He seems to have rejected meditation in the technical sense of the word. Instead of methodical endeavors designed to promote religious progress he recommends a change of point of view leading to non-attachment. . . . Non-attachment in this case means that external objects are not allowed to catch our fancy.. . . _ [A] thing recollected is isolated, it is singled out of the whole, and is thus an illusion; for all short of the undifferentiated continuum is illusive. The senses work as usual . . . but 'no desire is aroused.' . . . This change happens suddenly, that is, it is not dependent upon preceding exertions; it can be brought about without first passing through the stages of a career. That is why it is called 'sudden awakening.' _"10 _ _ Liebenthal interprets Shen-hui as saying that whereas the purpose of meditation should be merely to erase our attachment to physical things, it also removes our cognizance of them, which is not necessarily a requirement for nonattachment. It should be possible for us to be aware of the world without being attached to it and enslaved by it. According to Shen-hui's sermon: _ When thus my friends are told to discard as useless all they have learned before, then those who have spent fifty or more, or only twenty years practicing meditation, hearing this, might be very much puzzled. . . . Friends, listen attentively, I speak to you of self- deception. What does self-deception mean? You, who have assembled in this place today, are craving for riches and pleasures of intercourse with males and females; you are thinking of gardens and houses. . . . The Nirvana Sutra says, "To get rid of your passions is not Nirvana; to look upon them as no matter of yours, that is Nirvana._"11_ _ So far so good; but how do we reach this state of recognition without attachment? Apparently the way is to somehow find our original state, in which we were naturally unattached to the surrounding world. The way is to mentally disassociate ourselves from the turmoil of society that surrounds us and look inward, touching our original nature. In this way, both _prajna _and _samadhi_, awareness and noninvolvement, which have been described as the active and passive sides of meditation, are achieved simultaneously. _Now, let us penetrate to that state in which we are not attached. What do we get to know? Not being attached we are tranquil and guileless. This state underlying all motions and passions is called samadhi. Penetrating to this fundamental state we encounter a natural wisdom that is conscious of this original tranquility and guilelessness. This wisdom is called _prajna_. The intimate relation between _samadhi _and _prajna _is thus defined. . . . If now you penetrate to that state in which your mind is not attached, and yet remains open to impressions, and thus are conscious of the fact that your mind is not attached, then you have reached the state of original blankness and tranquility. From that state of blankness and tranquility there arises an inner knowledge through which blue, yellow, red, and white things in this world are well distinguished. That is _prajna_. Yet no desires arise from these distinctions. That is _samadhi_. . . . It follows that freedom from attachment (to external things, which replaces meditation in Ch'an Buddhism), enables you to look into the heart of all the Buddhas of the past, and yet it is nothing else than what you yourselves experience today.12 _ Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about this approach was that it seemed to eliminate the need for all the traditional apparatus of Buddhism. It had little or nothing to do with organized religion, and even less connection with the mountains of Indian philosophy that had gone before. A thousand years of Indian thought had been distilled down to a single truth: The realization of our original nature comprises enlightenment. If this were taken at face value, then there was no longer any need for the Buddhist community, the sutras, the chanting, even meditation. There was, in fact, no longer any need for Buddhism. It had been reduced, as the Chinese scholar Wing-tsit Chan has observed, to a concern for the mind alone. By redefining meditation, Shen-hui had "laid the foundations of Chinese Zen which was no Zen at all."13 As Shen-hui now described meditation or _dhyana_: Sitting motionless is no _dhyana_; introspection into your own mind is no _dhyana_; and looking inward at your own calmness is no _dhyana_.14. . . Here in my school, to have no thoughts is sitting, and to see one's original nature is _dhyana_ (Ch'an).15 What happened to Indian meditation? No wonder the scholar Hu Shih has described this new teaching as a Chinese revolt against Buddhism. The political triumph of Shen-hui made Southern Ch'an the official sect, but it also meant that he, now one of the leading religious figures in China, had necessarily become a part of the ruling establishment. Little wonder that the actual future of Ch'an soon reverted back to rural teachers, men who could more convincingly claim to despise the ways of the world, as they meditated in their secluded mountain retreats far from imperial patronage. Shen-hui's school of "Southern" Ch'an of Ho-tse temple, which had established dominance in the north, was soon to be eclipsed by these new vigorous but unlettered rural Ch'anists.16 Interestingly, the official recognition of the court seemed to quickly extinguish any school of Ch'an that received it. Shen-hsiu was honored by Empress Wu, and his school was then supplanted by that of Shen-hui, whose own imperial recognition and honors were soon to be dust in the history of Ch'an, as the new rural school burst on the scene and effectively took over.17 The disorders surrounding and following the rebellion of An Lu-shan are commonly considered today as signaling the decline of the great age of the T'ang Dynasty. They certainly signified the atrophy of the war-torn North Chinese capitals as the political power in China. Loyang and Ch'ang-an came to be replaced in economic influence by the south, a region relatively untouched by the constant struggles North China had to mount against barbarian invaders. Northern scholars retired to the pastoral south, where they lazed in peaceful gardens and recalled the great poets of the early T'ang. Thus Northern urban Ch'an followed the general demise of North Chinese political strength. Was Shen-hui really the father of the new "meditationless" Ch'an of the mind? Some traditional scholars claim it was not really Shen-hui who revolutionized Ch'an, but rather his master, the Southern teacher Hui- neng. For example, D. T. Suzuki believed that whereas Shen-hui was correct in equating meditation with the primal knowledge of self called _prajna_, he actually taught that this knowledge came about through rational understanding rather than intuition.18 It was Hui-neng, said Suzuki, who correctly understood that _prajna_ was intuition and who knew that it could be realized only through the "sudden" path rather than through the "step-by-step" path. This may well have been true. Just as the Apostle Paul interpreted the teachings of an obscure provincial teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, and popularized them among the urban centers of the Roman Empire, so Shen-hui dispensed the ideas of Hui-neng in northern cities, possibly tempering them where necessary to gain acceptance from the more rationally inclined urban Ch'anists. To continue the analogy, Shen-hui (like Paul) never quotes his mentor directly in his writings--something he certainly would have done if there had been anything to quote--but in a few decades there would be a full autobiography of Hui-neng complete with a "sermon." Shen-hui's own contribution was to open the way for the anti-meditation rural school to take over Ch'an. We may now turn to the legendary Hui-neng, remembered as the "Sixth Patriarch." Chapter Five HUI-NENG: THE SIXTH PATRIARCH AND FATHER OF MODERN ZEN The master honored today as the father of modern Zen was an impoverished country lad from South China, whose attributed autobiography, The Platform Sutra of Hui-neng, is the only "sutra" of Buddhism written by a Chinese.1 In this work, Hui-neng (638-713) told the story of his rise from obscurity to fame. He described his father as a high Chinese official who, unjustly banished and reduced to a commoner, died of shame while Hui-neng was still a small child. To survive, the fatherless boy and his mother sold wood in the marketplace at Han-hai, near Canton in South China. Then one day he chanced to overhear a man reciting a passage from the Diamond Sutra. Hui-neng stopped to listen, and when he heard the phrase "Let your mind function freely, without abiding anywhere or in anything," he was suddenly awakened. Upon inquiry, he discovered that the reciter was a follower of the Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen. This teacher, the stranger said, taught that by reciting the Diamond Sutra it was possible to see into one's own nature and to directly experience enlightenment. The Diamond Sutra (sometimes called the Vajracchedika Sutra) became the passion of Hui-neng as well as the touchstone for the new Chinese Ch'an. An unusually brief work, it has been called the ultimate distillation of the Buddhist Wisdom Literature. The following excerpt is representative of its teaching. _All the mind's arbitrary concepts of matter, phenomena, and of all conditioning factors and all conceptions and ideas relating thereto are like a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, the evanescent dew, the lightning's flash. Every true disciple should thus look upon all phenomena and upon all the activities of the mind, and keep his mind empty and selfless and tranquil.2 _ The Diamond Sutra does not search the philosophic heights of the Lankavatara Sutra, the treatise revered by the early _dhyana _school of Bodhidharma, and precisely for this reason it appealed to the Southern school--whose goal was the simplification of Ch'an. Hui-neng could not resist the call and immediately set out for the East Mountain monastery of the Fifth Patriarch. When he arrived, Hung-jen opened the interview by asking the newcomer his origin. Hearing that he was from the Canton region, the old priest sighed, "If you're from the south you must be a barbarian. How do you expect to become enlightened?" To this Hui-neng shot back, "The people in the north and south may be different, but enlightenment is the same in both regions." Although this impertinence caused the master to immediately recognize Hui-neng's mental gifts, he said nothing and simply put him to work threshing and pounding rice. (This exchange, incidentally, will be recognized as the memorable first encounter between two generations of masters, an obligatory element in all the legends of the early Patriarchs.) For the next eight months, the young novice toiled in obscurity, never so much as seeing the Fifth Patriarch. Then one day the old priest called an assembly and announced that he was ready to pass on the robe of the patriarchy to the one who could compose a verse showing an intuitive understanding of his own inner nature. The disciples talked over this challenge among themselves and decided, "The robe is certain to be handed down to Shen-hsiu, who is head monk and the natural heir. He will be a worthy successor to the master, so we will not bother composing a verse." Shen-hsiu, the same master later exalted by the Empress Wu in Loyang, knew what was expected of him and began struggling to compose the verse. After several days' effort, he found the courage to write an unsigned _gatha _on a corridor wall in the dark of night. _Our body is the Bodhi-tree And our mind a mirror bright. Carefully we wipe them hour by hour, And let no dust alight.3 _When the Fifth Patriarch saw the verse, he convened an assembly in the corridor, burned incense, and declared that they all should recite the anonymous passage. Afterward, however, he summoned Shen-hsiu to his private quarters and inquired if he was author of the verse. Receiving an affirmative reply, the master said, "This verse does not demonstrate that you have yet achieved true understanding of your original nature. You have reached the front gate, but you have not yet entered into full understanding. Prepare your mind more fully and when you are ready, submit another _gatha_." It is a Ch'an commonplace that Shen-hsiu's verse stressed methodical practice and was perfectly logical--just the opposite of the sudden, anti-logical leap of intuition that is true enlightenment. Shen-hsiu departed, but try as he might he could not produce the second _gatha_. In the meantime, Hui-neng overheard the monks reciting Shen-hsiu's lines. Although he recognized that its author had yet to grasp his own original nature, Hui-neng asked to be shown the verse and allowed to do homage to it. After he was led to the hall, the illiterate lad from the barbarian south asked to have a _gatha _of his own inscribed next to the one on the wall. _There is no Bodhi-tree Nor stand of a mirror bright. Since all is void, Where can the dust alight?_4_ _ Although the assembly was electrified by the insight contained in this _gatha_, the diplomatic old Fifth Patriarch publicly declared that its author lacked full understanding. During the night, however, he summoned young Hui-neng to the darkened meditation hall, where he expounded the Diamond Sutra to him and then ceremonially passed to him the robe of Bodhidharma, symbol of the patriarchy. He also advised him to travel immediately to the south, to stay underground for a time in the interest of safety, and then to preach the Dharma to all who would listen. Hui-neng departed that very night, crossing the Yangtze and heading south--the anointed Sixth Patriarch at age twenty-four. When the other monks realized what had happened, they hastily organized a party to retrieve Hui-neng and the Ch'an relics. Finally one of the pursuers, a burly former soldier, reached the new Sixth Patriarch in his hideaway. Suddenly overcome by the presence of Hui-neng, he found himself asking not for the return of the robe but rather for instruction. Hui-neng obliged him with, "Not thinking of good, not thinking of evil, tell me what was your original face before your mother and father were born." This celebrated question--which dramatizes the Zen concept of an original nature in every person that precedes and transcends artificial values such as good and evil--caused the pursuer to be enlightened on the spot. For the next several years Hui-neng sought seclusion, living among hunters in the south and concealing his identity. The legends say his kindly nature caused him sometimes to secretly release animals from the hunters' traps and that he would accept only vegetables from their stewpots. But this life as an anonymous vagabond, a Patriarch while not even a priest, could not be his final calling. One day when the time felt right (in 676, as he neared forty), he renounced the life of a refugee and ventured into Canton to visit the Fa-hsing temple. One afternoon as he lingered in the guise of an anonymous guest, he overheard a group of monks arguing about a banner flapping in the breeze. One monk declared, "The banner is moving." Another insisted, "No, it is the wind that is moving." Although he was only a lay observer, Hui-neng could not contain himself, and he interrupted them with his dramatic manifesto, "You are both wrong. It is your mind that moves." The abbot of the temple, standing nearby, was dumbstruck by the profound insight of this stranger, and on the spot offered to become his pupil. Hui-neng declined the honor, however, requesting instead that his head be shaved and he be allowed to enter Buddhist orders, a priest at last. He was shortly acclaimed by one and all as the Sixth Patriarch, and after a few months in Canton he decided to move to a temple of his own at Ts'ao-ch'i, where he taught for the next four decades. From this monastery came the teachings that would define the faith. The foregoing story, perhaps the most famous in the Zen canon, is drawn mainly from the aforementioned Platform Sutra of Hui-neng, purportedly an autobiography and sermon presented to an assembly in his later years.5 (The setting was a temple near his monastery, where he was invited to lecture one day by the local abbot. It was transcribed by one of his disciples, ince Hui-neng traditionally was said to have been illiterate.) The document has come down to us in three parts. The first part is the story just summarized: a poetry contest at the monastery of the Fifth Patriarch in which the man later to lead Northern Ch'an is humiliated by a bumpkin, who himself must then flee the wrath of the Ch'an establishment and wait for recognition in the south. The second part is a lecture that scholars believe probably represents the general outline of Hui-neng's views on man's original nature. The third part is a highly embellished account of his later years, usually dismissed as the pious invention of a more recent date. The real life of Hui-neng is a historical puzzle that may well never be resolved. For example, it is common to note that the later Ch'an writers took great pains to render Hui-neng as illiterate and unlettered as possible, the more to emphasize his egalitarianism. (This in spite of the fact that the sermon attributed to him refers to at least seven different sutras.) The facts were adjusted to make a point: If a simple illiterate wood peddler could become Patriarch, what better proof that the faith is open to all people? Many of the traditional anecdotes surrounding his early years are similarly suspect, and in fact the most respected Hui-neng scholar has declared, "If we consider all the available material, and eliminate patiently all the inconsistencies by picking the most likely legends, we can arrive at a fairly credible biography of Hui-neng. If, on the other hand, we eliminate the legends and the undocumented references to the Sixth Patriarch, we may conclude that there is, in fact, almost nothing that we can really say about him."6 Yet does it really matter whether the legend is meticulously faithful to the facts? Hui-neng is as much a symbol as a historical individual, and it was essential that his life have legendary qualities. In his case, art may have helped life along a bit, but it was for a larger purpose. The purpose was to formalize the new philosophical ideas of Southern Ch'an. The second part of the Platform Sutra, which details his philosophical position, has been characterized as a masterpiece of Chinese thought, the work not of a scholar but of a natural sage whose wisdom flowed spontaneously from deep within. Yet it is commonly conceded that the uniqueness of his message lies not so much in its being original (which most agree it is not) but in its rendering of the basic ideas of Buddhism into Chinese terms.7 Buddhism itself seems at times to be in question, as the Sixth Patriarch discounts traditional observances, even suggesting that the Buddhist Western Paradise, known as the Pure Land, might be merely a state of mind. _The deluded person concentrates on Buddha and wishes to be born in the other land; the awakened person makes pure his own mind. . . . If only the mind has no impurity, the Western Land is not far. If the mind gives rise to impurities, even though you invoke the Buddha and seek to be reborn in the West, it will be difficult to reach . . . but if you practice straightforward mind, you will arrive there in an instant.8 _Hui-neng also questioned the traditional Ch'an practice of sitting in meditation, declaring it to be more a mind-set than a physical act (if his Sutra is authentic, then he predates his pupil Shen-hui on this point). He also broke it apart into two different categories: the sitting and the meditation. _. . . what is this teaching that we call "sitting in meditation"? In this teaching "sitting" means without any obstruction anywhere, outwardly and under all circumstances, not to activate thoughts. "Meditation" is internally to see the original nature and not become confused.9 _ Elsewhere he is quoted as declaring that protracted sitting only shackles the body without profiting the mind.10 Although Hui-neng severely took to task those who depended on meditation, there is no evidence that he forbade it entirely. What he did reject was a fixation on meditation, a confusion--to use a later Zen expression--of the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself. Even so, this was a radical move. Hui-neng presents us with the startling prospect of a _dhyana _teacher questioning the function of _dhyana_--until then the very basis of the school. Yet the sutra is far from being all negative. It has a number of positive messages, including the following: All people are born in an enlightened state, a condition in which good and evil are not distinguished. Nor are there distracting discriminations, attachments, and perturbations of the spirit in this primal estate. (A very similar view is found throughout the poetry of William Wordsworth, to give only one example from Western thought.11) But if man's original nature is pure and unstained, how then does evil enter into a person's character? He faces this classic theological question head-on: _Good friends, although the nature of people in this world is from the outset pure in itself, the ten thousand things are all within their own natures. If people think of all the evil things, then they will practice evil; if they think of all the good things, then they will practice good. Thus it is clear that in this way all the _dharmas _(aspects of humanity) are within your own natures, yet your own natures are always pure. The sun and moon are always bright, yet if they are covered by clouds, although they are bright, below they are darkened, and the sun, moon, stars, and planets cannot be seen clearly. But if suddenly the wind of wisdom should blow and roll away the clouds and mists, all forms in the universe appear at once. . . . [I]f a single thought of good evolves, intuitive wisdom is born. As one lamp serves to dispel a thousand years of darkness, so one flash of wisdom destroys ten thousand years of ignorance.12 _ As Hui-neng viewed it, there is latent within us all the condition of enlightenment, the state that precedes our concern with good and evil. It can be reclaimed through an intuitive acquaintance with our own inner natures. This is well summarized by the Hui-neng scholar Philip Yampolsky: "The Platform Sutra maintains that the nature of man is from the outset pure, but that his purity has no form. But by self-practice, by endeavoring for himself, man can gain insight into this purity. Meditation, _prajna_, true reality, purity, the original nature, self- nature, the Buddha nature, all these terms, which are used constantly throughout the sermon, indicate the same undefined Absolute, which when seen and experienced by the individual himself, constitutes enlightenment."13 This condition of original innocence that is enlightenment can be reclaimed through "no-thought," a state in which the mind floats, unattached to what it encounters, moving freely through phenomena, unperturbed by the incursions and attractions of the world, liberated because it is its own master, tranquil because it is pure. This is the condition in which we were born and it is the condition to which we can return by practicing "no-thought." Although it happens to be similar to the condition that can be realized through arduous meditation, Hui-neng apparently did not believe that meditation was required. This primal condition of the mind, this glimpse into our original nature, could be realized instantaneously if our mind were receptive. But what is this state called "no-thought"? According to Hui-neng: _To be unstained in all environments is called no-thought. If on the basis of your own thoughts you separate from environment, then, in regard to things, thoughts are not produced. If you stop thinking of the myriad things, and cast aside all thoughts, as soon as one instant of thought is cut off, you will be reborn in another realm. . . . Because man in his delusion has thoughts in relation to his environment, heterodox ideas stemming from these thoughts arise, and passions and false views are produced from them.14 _ Yampolsky characterizes "no-thought" as follows: "Thoughts are conceived as advancing in progression from past to present to future, in an unending chain of successive thoughts. Attachment to one instant of thought leads to attachment to a succession of thoughts, and thus to bondage. By cutting off attachment to one instant of thought, one may, by a process unexplained, cut off attachment to a succession of thoughts and thus attain to no-thought, which is the state of enlightenment."15 Precisely how this condition of "no-thought" enlightenment is achieved is not explained in the Platform Sutra and in fact has been the major concern of Zen ever since. The one thing that all will agree is that the harder one tries to attain it, the more difficult it becomes. It is there inside, waiting to be released, but it can be reached only through the intuitive mind. And it happens suddenly, when we least expect. The master Hui-neng stands at the watershed of Zen history. Indeed he may be the watershed, in the embodied form of a legend. There seems reason to suspect that he was canonized well after the fact, as was Bodhidharma. But whereas Bodhidharma provided an anchor for the original formation of a separate _Dhyana_ sect in Chinese Buddhism, Hui-neng became the rallying symbol for a new type of Ch'an, one wholly Chinese, and one that seemed to discount Bodhidharma's old mainstay, meditation. He became the Chinese answer to the Indian Bodhidharma. Hui-neng redefined the specific characteristics of the Ch'an goal and described in nontheological terms the mind state in which duality is banished. But he failed to go the next step and explain how to get there. All he did was point out (to use the terminology of logic) that meditation not only was not a sufficient condition for enlightenment, it might not even be a necessary condition. What then was required? The answer to this question was to be worked out during the next phase of Ch'an, the so-called Golden Age of Zen, when a new school of Southern Ch'an exploded (to use a common description) in the south and went on to take over all of Ch'an. These new teachers seem to have accepted Hui-neng as their patron, although the direct connection is not entirely clear. These masters learned how to impose a torture chamber on the logical mind, bringing to it such humiliations that it finally annihilated ego or self and surrendered to _prajna_, intuitive wisdom. They devised systematic ways to produce the state of "no-thought" that Hui-neng and Shen-hui apparently could only invoke. PART II THE GOLDEN AGE OF ZEN . . . . in which teachers of rural, Southern Ch'an begin to experiment with new ways to precipitate the "sudden" enlightenment experience, even bringing into question the role of meditation. Along with the search for new techniques goes the attempt to define precisely what enlightenment is and to formalize the transmission process. During this time, Ch'an monasteries become independent organizations and Ch'an a recognized, if eccentric, Buddhist sect. The iconoclastic, self- supporting Ch'an establishments ride out a persecution of Buddhism in the mid-ninth century that effectively destroys all other Buddhist schools in China. This is the great creative era of Ch'an, in which the sect secures its own identity and creates its own texts for use by later generations. Chapter Six MA-TSU: ORIGINATOR OF "SHOCK" ENLIGHTENMENT _Ma-tsu (right) and Layman P'ang_ If Hui-neng was the Sixth Patriarch, then who was the seventh? Although several of his followers are mentioned in the Platform Sutra, the only one who seems to have made any difference in Ch'an history was Shen-hui (670-762), who successfully destroyed the Northern school of Shen-hsiu (605-706) and elevated Hui-neng. Although Shen-hui was given the accolade of Seventh Patriarch in some parts of the north, history was to be written elsewhere. Shen-hui's school of "Southern" Ch'an was soon compromising with the remaining Northern Ch'anists--conceding that the study of the sutras could go along hand in hand with sudden enlightenment--and he seems to have enjoyed a little too much his role as imperial socialite. The only member of Shen-hui's school to realize any historical prominence was Tsung-mi (780-841), whose fame attaches not to his original thought but rather to his scholarly writings describing the various sects of Ch'an.1 A litterateur and friend of the famous poet Po Chu-i (772-846), he also tried unsuccessfully to mediate between the followers of the step-by-step sutra-reading Buddhists of the cities and the all-at-once, anti-literary proponents of sudden enlightenment in the country, but he succeeded only in bringing the history of Northern Ch'an to a dignified close.2 The Chinese scholar Hu Shih skillfully pinpoints why the social success of Shen-hui's new "Southern" school in the north actually contributed to its decline. As he saw it: "The explanation is simple. Zennism could not flourish as an officially patronized religion, but only as an attitude of mind, a method of thinking and a mode of living. An officially patronized teacher of Buddhism is obliged to perform all the traditional rituals and ceremonies which the true Zennist despises. Shen-hui succeeded in establishing Zennism as a state religion, but by so doing he almost killed it. All further development of Chinese Zen had to come from those great teachers who valued simple life and intellectual freedom and independence more than worldly recognition."3 And in fact just such teachers had begun springing up like mushrooms. On lonely mountaintops, teachers of sudden enlightenment were experimenting with new ways to transmit wordless insight. They seem to have despised traditional Buddhism, perhaps partly because Buddhism--by which is meant the cultural elitists and aristocrats in the capitals of Ch'ang-an and Loyang--had so long despised them. (Recall the Fifth Patriarch's greeting to Hui-neng: "If you're from the south, you must be a barbarian.") Although traditional Buddhism (including teachers of _dhyana_) continued to flourish, and the city of Ch'ang-an remained a model for Asian civilization, the political power of the T'ang government in the north gradually withered. And as it declined, so too did the fortunes of the traditional Ch'an establishments that had flourished under imperial patronage. The new Ch'an teachers of the Southern school may have felt smug in their new prestige and independence, but they still were subject to the ingrained Chinese desire for a lineage. (Perhaps in the land of Confucius, spiritual ancestors were essential to dignity.) The triumph of the legend of Hui-neng in the north had not been lost on the Ch'anists elsewhere, and it effectively meant that for any Ch'an school to have respectability nationwide, it had to be able to trace its lineage back to this illiterate southerner and his temple at Ts'ao- ch'i. Unfortunately this turned out to be difficult, since by the time Hui-neng actually came to be recognized as the Sixth Patriarch, he had been dead for half a century and there were few Chinese who even knew firsthand of his existence--and none besides Shen-hui who ever claimed to have studied under him. How then could he be made the founder of the Ch'an schools blooming all over China? The scholar Hu Shih has speculated somewhat knavishly on how Hui-neng's "lineage" may have been created after the fact: "By the last quarter of the eighth century, there began to be a great stampede of almost all the Ch'an schools to get on the bandwagon of the school of Hui-neng. . . . Hui-neng died early in the eighth century, and his disciples were mostly unknown ascetics who lived and died in their hilly retreats. One could easily have paid a visit to some of them. So in the last decades of the century, some of those unknown names were remembered or discovered. Two of the names thus exhumed from obscurity were Huai-jang of the Heng Mountains in Hunan, and Hsing-ssu of the Ch'ing-yuan Mountains of Kiangsi. Neither of these names appeared in earlier versions of Hui-neng's life story."4 These two masters, Nan-yueh Huai-jang (677-744) of Hunan and Ch'ing- yuan Hsing-ssu (d. 740) of Kiangsi, were made the missing links between Hui-neng and the two schools of Ch'an that would one day become Japanese Rinzai and Soto, respectively. Since the lineage most important for the early years of Ch'an's Golden Age was that which would one day be the Rinzai school, the tradition of Huai-jang will be examined here first. As noted above, although the legend says that Huai-jang once studied under the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng, supporting historical evidence is not readily found. However, he is thought to have studied under another follower of the Fifth Patriarch Hung-jen and to have been a part of the general scene of Southern Ch'an.5 His actual function may have been to supply a direct line of descent between Hui- neng and the man who was to be the creator of Rinzai Zen as we know it today. That man is the famous Ma-tsu Tao-i (709-788), who even if not a direct spiritual descendant of Hui-neng was certainly a product of the same exciting period of intellectual ferment. According to the more or less contemporary record left by the northern historian Tsung-mi, Ma-tsu (which means "Patriarch Ma") was a native of Szechuan who was ordained a monk at an early age by a Korean master in his home province.6 Young Ma traveled on, as was common with beginning Ch'an monks, and (so say the later legends) finally came to the monastery of Huai-jang, located on Mt. Nan-yueh. The story of their first encounter became a standard among later Ch'an masters, for it is a particularly effective discrediting of that onetime Ch'an mainstay, meditation, which became anathema to the more revolutionary Southern school. As the story goes, Huai-jang one day came upon Ma-tsu absorbed in meditation and proceeded to question the purpose of his long bouts of _dhyana_. Ma-tsu immediately replied, "I want to become a Buddha, an enlightened being." Saying nothing, Huai-jang quietly picked up a brick and started rubbing it on a stone. After a time Ma-tsu's curiosity bested him and he inquired, "Why are you rubbing that brick on a stone?" Huai-jang replied, "I am polishing it into a mirror." Ma-tsu probably knew by this time that he had been set up, but he had to follow through: "But how can you make a mirror by polishing a brick on a stone?" The celebrated answer was: "How can you become enlightened by sitting in meditation?" The point, driven home time and again throughout the eighth century, was that enlightenment is an active, not a passive, condition. And Ma- tsu himself was to become the foremost exponent of enlightenment as a natural part of life. Ma-tsu always made a profound impression on his contemporaries, and no small part may be attributable to his peculiar physical traits. As _The Transmission of the Lamp _describes him: _In appearance and bearing he was most striking. He glared as a tiger does and he ambled like a cow. He could touch his nose with his tongue, and on the soles of his feet were wheel-shaped marks [physical qualities also attributed to the Buddha]. During the period [of 713-41] he studied the dhyana . . . under Master Huai-jang, who then had nine disciples. Of these only [Ma-tsu] received the sacred mind seal.7 _ However, his real immortality derives from his contribution to the arsenal of methods for shocking novices into enlightenment. It will be recalled that the legendary Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng, neglected to explain exactly what a person should do to "see into one's own nature." Ma-tsu apparently was the first master who developed non-meditative tricks for nudging a disciple into the state of "no-thought." He was an experimenter, and he pioneered a number of methods that later were perfected by his followers and the descendants of his followers. He was the first master to ask a novice an unanswerable question, and then while the person struggled for an answer, to shout in his ear (he liked the syllable "Ho!")--hoping to jolt the pupil into a non-dualistic mind state. Another similar technique was to call out someone's name just as the person was leaving the room, a surprise that seemed to bring the person up short and cause him to suddenly experience his original nature. A similar device was to deliver the student a sharp blow as he pondered a point, using violence to focus his attention completely on reality and abort ratiocination. Other tricks included responding to a question with a seemingly irrelevant answer, causing the student to sense the irrelevancy of his question. He would also sometimes send a pupil on a "goose chase" between himself and some other enlightened individual at the monastery, perhaps in the hope that bouncing the novice from one personality to another would somehow shake his complacency. Whatever the technique, his goal was always to force a novice to uncover his original nature for himself. He did this by never giving a straight answer or a predictable response and therefore never allowing a disciple to lapse into a passive mental mode. Ma-tsu also seems to have simplified the idea of what constitutes enlightenment. As he defined it, "seeing into one's own nature" simply meant understanding (intuitively, not rationally) who you are and what you are. This truth could be taught with whatever method seemed appropriate at a given moment. As Hu Shih so eloquently describes his teaching, _ ". . . any gesture or motion, or even silence, might be used to communicate a truth. [Recall the Buddha once enlightened a follower by holding up a flower.] Ma-tsu developed this idea into a pedagogical method for the new Zen. There is no need to seek any special faculty in the mind for the enlightenment. Every behavior is the mind, the manifestation of the Buddha-nature. Snapping a finger, frowning or stretching the brow, coughing, smiling, anger, sorrow, or desire . . . is the functioning of the Buddhahead: it is the Tao, the Way. There is no need to perform any special act, be it dhyana_ _or worship, in order to achieve the Tao. To be natural is the Way. Walk naturally, sit naturally, sleep naturally, live naturally--that is the Way. Let the mind be free: do not purposely do evil; nor purposely do good. There is no Law to abide, no Buddhahood to attain. Maintain a free mind and cling to nothing: that is Tao._"8_ _ Thus it seems that the most preeminent Ch'an master of the eighth century not only repudiated all the apparatus of traditional Buddhism, he also simplified enlightenment down to a quite secular condition of acceptance of the natural state of human affairs. For instance, although he was familiar with the great Mahayana sutras, Ma-tsu never mentions Hui-neng or the Diamond Sutra. His Ch'an, expressed in simple everyday language, seems merely so many ways of finding out who you are and what you are. Furthermore, there seems to be nothing specifically that you can do to accelerate the occurrence of sudden enlightenment, other than use traditional practices to make your psyche as uncomplicated as possible and then wait for the moment to strike (he, of course, experimented to find ways to accelerate the arrival of that moment). But he has nothing encouraging to say about the effectiveness of meditation as an aid to finding the desired non-rational insight, which he sometimes described using the borrowed term "Tao": _Cultivation is of no use for the attainment of Tao. The only thing that one can do is to be free of defilement. When one's mind is stained with thoughts of life and death, or deliberate action, that is defilement. The grasping of the Truth is the function of everyday-mindedness. Everyday-mindedness is free from intentional action, free from concepts of right and wrong, taking and giving, the finite or the infinite. . . . All our daily activities--walking, standing, sitting, lying down--all response to situations, our dealings with circumstances as they arise: all this is Tao.9 _Ma-tsu eventually left Huai-jang (if, in fact, he ever met him in the first place) and presided over a community of Ch'an disciples at K'ai- yuan temple in Kiangsi. This was to be the incubator for the greatest thinkers of the eighth century, and the setting for some of the finest Ch'an anecdotes. The anecdote, incidentally, is the perfect Ch'an teaching device, since it forces the listener to find its meaning in his own inner experience. The sermon provided the theoretical basis for an idea, but the anecdote showed the theory in action and made the listener share in a real experience, if only vicariously. But first we will begin with a sermon credited to him, in which he summarizes the philosophical position he held. There was nothing particularly new about his understanding; it was his method that was novel. His sermon said, in essence, that reality is merely our mind, and that enlightenment comprised the nonrational recognition of this. _All of you should realize that your own mind is Buddha, that is, this mind is Buddha's Mind. . . . Those who seek for the Truth should realize that there is nothing to seek. There is no Buddha but Mind; there is no Mind but Buddha.10 _ Again there is the counsel against discriminations between good and evil, since the original Mind transcends these: _Do not choose what is good, nor reject what is evil, but rather be free from purity and defilement. Then you will realize the emptiness of sin.11 _This is not a preachment of values; rather it is the insight that there is a reality beyond our puny discriminations. If you can achieve this larger perspective, then good and evil become an inconsequential part of the larger flow of life. His sermon then returns to the theme of the mind as the arbiter of reality, recalling the Void of Nagarjuna and pointing out that even the workings of the mind are ephemeral and possess no self-nature. _Thoughts perpetually change and cannot be grasped because they possess no self-nature. The Triple World [of desire, form, and beyond-form] is nothing more than one's mind. The multitudinous universe is nothing but the testimony of one Dharma [truth]. What are seen as forms are the reflections of the mind. The mind does not exist by itself; its existence is manifested through forms. . . . If you are aware of this mind, you will dress, eat, and act spontaneously in life as it transpires, and thereby cultivate your spiritual nature. There is nothing more that I can teach you.12 _ The essence of this teaching is that reality is, for us, merely what our mind says it is, and "enlightenment" or "becoming a Buddha" is merely coming to terms with ourselves and with this tricky mind that constantly devises our reality for us. This credo is remembered most vividly in two anecdotes that were later enshrined in a famous collection of koans called the Wu-men Kuan (or Mumonkan in Japanese). In both of these anecdotes, Ma-tsu is asked, "What is Buddha?"--meaning what is the spirituality that all seek. In one he replied, "Mind is Buddha" (Mumonkan, Case 30), and in the other anecdote he said, "No mind, no Buddha" (Mumonkan, Case 33), which merely affirms that spirituality is in the mind, and for its realization one must realize the mind.13 In either instance he is merely following the earlier idea that there is no reality and thus no enlightenment outside the mind. These two exchanges are part of a single anecdote of Ma-tsu recorded in the chronicles. _A monk asked why the Master maintained, "The Mind is the Buddha." The Master answered, "Because I want to stop the crying of a baby." The monk persisted, "When the crying has stopped, what is it then?" "Not Mind, not Buddha," was the answer. "How do you teach a man who does not uphold either of these?" The Master said, "I would tell him, 'Not things.' " The monk again questioned, "If you met a man free from attachment to all things, what would you tell him?" The Master replied, "I would let him experience the Great Tao._"14_ _As the scholar John Wu has pointed out, "This dialogue reveals an important secret about Ma-tsu's art of teaching. Sometimes he used a positive formula, sometimes he used a negative formula. On the surface they are contradictory to each other. But when we remember that he was using them in answering persons of different grades of attainments and intelligence, the contradiction disappears at once in the light of a higher unity of purpose, which was in all cases to lead the questioner to transcend his present state."15 Another example of a seemingly contradictory position is recorded as a koan in another famous collection, the Blue Cliff Record (Case 3). In this anecdote, Ma-tsu is asked one day about his health, and he responded with, "Sun-faced Buddhas, Moon-faced Buddhas."16 According to a Buddhist tradition, a Sun-faced Buddha lives for eighteen hundred years, a Moon-faced Buddha lives only a day and a night. Perhaps he was proposing these two contradictory cases to demonstrate the irrelevance of an inquiry after his physical state. It would have been far better if the question had concerned his mind. A story describing how Ma-tsu handled other teachers who wandered by depicts very well the way that he could undermine logic and categorization. In a particularly famous anecdote, a visiting teacher proposed a condition of duality, a condition equivalent to that of a switch that can be either off or on. Having permitted the teacher to adopt this very un-Zen position, Ma-tsu proceeds to demolish him. The story goes as follows: _A monk who lectured on Buddhism came to the Master and asked, "What is the teaching advocated by the Ch'an masters?" Ma-tsu posed a counterquestion: "What teachings do you maintain?" The monk replied that he had lectured on more than twenty sutras and sastras. The Master exclaimed, "Are you not a lion?" The monk said, "I do not venture to say that." The Master puffed twice and the monk commented, "This is the way to teach Ch'an." Ma-tsu retorted, "What way do you mean?" and the monk said, "The way the lion leaves the den." The Master became silent. Immediately the monk remarked, "This is also the way of Ch'an teaching." At this the Master again asked, "What way do you mean?" "The lion remains in his den." "When there is neither going out nor remaining in, what way would you say this was?" The monk made no answer. . . .17 _ Ma-tsu had posed a seemingly unanswerable question, at least a question that logic could not answer. This provocative exchange, later to be known as a mondo, was a new teaching technique that departed significantly from the earlier methods of Hui-neng and Shen-hui, who mounted a platform, gave a sermon, and then politely received questions from the audience. But how did Ma-tsu handle this question when it was presented to him? He fell back on the fact that reality is what we make it, and all things return to the mind. He once handled essentially the same question that he put to the visiting monk, showing how it can be done. His response is the essence of Zen. _A monk once drew four lines in front of Ma-tsu. The top line was long and the remaining three were short. He then demanded of the Master, "Besides saying that one line is long and the other three are short, what else could you say?" Ma-tsu drew one line on the ground and said, "This could be called either long or short. That is my answer._"18_ _Language is deceptive. But if it is used to construct an anti-logical question, it can equally be used to construct an anti-logical reply. Ma-tsu discovered and refined what seems to have eluded the earlier teachers such as Hui-neng and Huai-jang: namely, the trigger mechanism for sudden enlightenment. As noted earlier, he originated the use of shouting and blows to precipitate enlightenment, techniques to become celebrated in later decades in the hands of men such as Huang-po and Lin-chi, masters who shaped the Rinzai sect. As a typical example, there is the story of a monk coming to him to ask, "What was the purpose of Bodhidharma's coming from the West?" which is Ch'an parlance for "What is the basic principle of Zen?" As the monk bowed reverently before the old master waiting for the reply that would bring it all together, Ma-tsu knocked him to the ground, saying, "If I do not strike you, people all over the country will laugh at me." The hapless monk picked himself up off the ground and--suddenly realizing he had just tasted the only reality there is--was enlightened on the spot.19 Obviously, every boxer does not experience enlightenment when he receives a knockout punch. The blow of enlightenment is meant to rattle the questioning mind and to disrupt, if only for an instant, its clinging to abstractions and logic. It seems almost as though enlightenment were a physical phenomenon that sometimes can best be achieved by a physical process--such as a blow or a shout. The violence seemed to work both ways, for the monks often gave him a dose of his own medicine. An example is reported in the following story: _It happened once that his disciple Yin-feng was pushing along a cart, while Ma-tsu was sitting on the road with his feet stretched out. Yin- feng requested him to draw back his feet, but Ma-tsu said, "What is stretched out is not to be drawn back again!" Yin-feng retorted, "Once advanced, there is no turning backward!'' Disregarding the master, he kept pushing the cart until it ran over and injured his feet. Ma-tsu returned to the hall with an axe in his hand, saying, "Let the one who a few moments ago injured my feet with his cart come forward!" Yin- feng, not to be daunted, came forward stretching his neck in front of the master. The master [peacefully] put down his axe.20 _ The significance of this story, if it has any significance, is that it conveys the atmosphere of Ch'an monasteries around 750. It demonstrates that the leader of a monastery had to win his spurs. He had to be tougher, more audacious, and faster than anybody else. During the T'ang it was common to use the ox as a metaphor for all that is uncontrollable in human nature. The ox was not necessarily bad; it just had to be governed. The rigor with which this control was applied at Ma-tsu's monastery is illustrated in the story concerning one of the disciples, a former hunter who Ma-tsu encountered one day working in the monastery kitchen. "What are you doing?" asked the master--a question that never got a straight answer from an enlightened Ch'an monk. "I am herding an ox," the man replied, a metaphorical way of saying he was trying to discipline himself. "And how," shot back Ma-tsu, "do you go about tending it?" The monk replied, "Whenever it starts to go to grass [i.e., self-indulgence], I yank it back by the nostrils [the tender part of the great animal]." To which Ma-tsu admiringly replied, "If you really can do that by yourself, then I may as well retire."21 This story illustrates the emphasis on self-control that was a part of the Ch'an monasteries. Yet self-control was only to be practiced for what it gave in return. There were no value judgments or rules that had to be followed. The point was to do what seemed the most rewarding. For example, there is a story that a local governor asked Ma-tsu, "Master, should I eat meat and drink wine?" The master did not give him a reply that implied a value judgment, but rather outlined the rewards of the two possible paths: "To eat and drink is your natural right, to abstain from meat and wine is your chance for greater blessedness."22 Ma-tsu often used the structure of language, with its natural capacity for parallels, as a teaching tool in itself. _Another time a monk asked, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West?" "What is the meaning [of your asking] at this moment?" replied the Master.23 _ The monk was interested in abstract issues (using the Ch'an metaphor for enlightenment's meaning); Ma-tsu reminded him that the only reality that mattered was his own being, his own needs. And he did it using almost identical language. Ma-tsu was constantly testing his disciples, keeping them on their toes and reinforcing their enlightenment. There is the story that one evening while enjoying the moonlight with three of his disciples (including the two most famous, Huai-hai and Nan- ch'uan), he asked them the question "what should we do right now, this very moment?"--a typical Zen challenge. One of the monks said, "It would be best to be studying the sutras of the ancients who have achieved enlightenment." The monk Huai-hai, who was later to receive Ma-tsu's mantle, countered, "It would be good to practice meditation." At that point Nan-ch'uan, the third monk, simply rose, shook the sleeves of his robe, and silently walked away. Ma-tsu acknowledged this as the right answer and declared, "The sutra scriptures are returnable to the Buddhist canon, and meditation to the undifferentiated ocean, but Nan-ch'uan alone leaps over and transcends these."24 Nan-ch'uan's response was a triumph of physical action and simplicity over religiosity and abstraction. Ma-tsu is reported in the chronicles to have had 139 enlightened disciples, many of whom went on to become Ch'an leaders in their own districts. The most outstanding were the monks Huai-hai and Nan-ch'uan and a layman named P'ang--all three of whom are today remembered in anecdotes that have become Ch'an scriptures. But others were probably just as active and enlightened. Southern Ch'an was expanding, with mountaintop retreats blossoming everywhere. Many teachers probably have been forgotten only because they had no disciples who took the pains to transcribe and preserve their teachings. Ma-tsu himself also apparently wrote nothing, but he was more fortunate in his disciples. In any case, he reportedly died in the typical Ch'an way. He predicted his death a month in advance, and when the time came, he bathed, assumed the meditation posture, and silently passed on. Chapter Seven HUAI-HAI: FATHER OF MONASTIC CH'AN Among the many celebrated disciples of Ma-tsu, the man whose influence has been most pervasive throughout the succeeding centuries was Po- chang Huai-hai (720-814). He is the master credited with founding the first wholly Ch'an monastery, with devising a special set of rules for Ch'an discipline, and with writing a closely argued treatise on sudden enlightenment. Whereas Ma-tsu and others of his disciples such as Nan- ch'uan experimented with ways to help novices break through the barrier of reason, Huai-hai examined the phenomenon of enlightenment itself and described the mental state of preparedness necessary to reach the Other Shore. Huai-hai has been somewhat unjustifiably neglected by the modern Zen movement, perhaps because his expository style did not lend itself to memorable anecdotes or koan cases. The accounts of Huai-hai's origin are contradictory, but he seems to have begun his Buddhist studies early, becoming the pupil of a master named Tao-chih in a small town in the present-day province of Chekiang.1 (It was this master who gave him the religious name Huai-hai, or "Ocean of Wisdom.") After he came to maturity, the story goes, he heard of the great master Ma-tsu in the province of Kiangsi, and he traveled there to study. Among the many anecdotes surrounding Huai-hai's stay with Ma-tsu, perhaps the finest is that of the auspicious first encounter. The story says that when Huai-hai arrived, the old master immediately asked what previous temple he had traveled from, followed by: "What do you come here to find?" Huai-hai replied, "I have come to discover the truth of Buddha." To this Ma-tsu replied, "What can you expect to learn from me? Why do you ignore the treasure in your own house and wander so far abroad?" Understandably puzzled, Huai-hai asked, "What is this treasure that I have been ignoring?" To which came the celebrated reply: "The one who questions me at this moment is your treasure. Everything is complete in it. It is lacking in nothing, and furthermore the things it possesses are inexhaustible. Considering that you can use this treasure freely, why then do you persist in wandering abroad?" It is said that with these words Huai-hai suddenly had an intuitive, non-rational acquaintance with his own mind.2 Among the other classic tales of Huai-hai's apprenticeship under Ma-tsu is the often repeated account of the day the two of them were walking together along a path when suddenly a flock of migratory geese was heard passing overhead. Ma-tsu turned to his pupil and asked, "What was that sound?" Huai-hai innocently replied, "It was the cry of wild geese." Ma-tsu paused and then demanded of his pupil, "Where have they gone?" Huai-hai said, "They have flown away." This was an unacceptably drab, straightforward answer for a Zen man, and in disgust Ma-tsu whirled, grabbed Huai-hai's nose, and twisted it until his disciple cried out in panic, causing Ma-tsu to observe, "So you thought they had flown away. Yet they were here all the time."3 The legends say that this exchange, in the typical harsh style of Ma- tsu, caused Huai-hai to confront his original nature. What Ma-tsu had done was to give his pupil a vivid lesson in the concept of an indivisible unity which pervades the world; things do not come and go-- they are there always, part of a permanent fabric. Huai-hai was being invited to stop viewing the world as a fragmented collection of elements and see it rather as a unified whole. The interactions of master and novice were always dynamic. For example, another story says that one day Ma-tsu asked Huai-hai how he would teach Ch'an. Huai-hai responded by holding up a dust whisk vertically. Ma-tsu continued by asking him, "Is this all there is? Is there nothing more?" Huai-hai replied by throwing down the whisk. (One interpreter has said that raising the dust whisk revealed the mind's function, whereas throwing it down returned function to the mind's substance.)4 According to some versions of this episode, Ma-tsu responded by shouting at the top of his lungs, rendering Huai-hai deaf for three days. This shout is said to have been the occasion of Huai-hai's final enlightenment. Huai-hai seems to have been a kindly man, warm and personable, not given to the roughhouse methods of some of his contemporaries. Instead of flamboyance, we find a friendly type who concentrated on guiding a community of disciples (sometimes called a "Zen forest") and giving a helping hand to all. We will pass over the many other anecdotes involving his stay with Ma-tsu and turn instead to his more significant contributions to the growth of Ch'an.5 These fall into two major categories: First, he founded the first wholly Ch'an monastery and for it formulated a set of monastic rules that are today still respected in Zen monasteries; and second, he was one of the first Southern Ch'an masters to explore the psychology of "sudden enlightenment" and to write a lucid analysis of the mental preparation it required. Before detailing Huai-hai's contribution to monastic Ch'an, perhaps it would be well to recall briefly the character of the traditional Buddhist monastery in China during the T'ang (618-907) era. Buddhist monasteries had long been governed by a set of rules known as the _vinaya_. These rules prescribed everything from the color of the robes for the priesthood to the penalties attached to eating onions or garlic (forbidden primarily because they were thought to be stimulants, not necessarily because of their social liabilities in close quarters). There were also some specific and quite solemn commandments--for example, monks or nuns could be expelled from the community for stealing, killing, lying, or sexual congress. Originating in India, these rules had been subsequently transplanted to China, where they gradually were made even more strict, although their enforcement apparently was not always rigorous. Perhaps because of this laxity the T'ang regime established penalties even more severe than those imposed by the Buddhist authorities. For example, whereas the _vinaya_ indirectly countenanced the eating of meat (through the loophole that all charitable gifts must be accepted since they give the laity merit, and if a gift happened to be meat it still had to be consumed for the sake of the donor), the T'ang government prescribed thirty days of hard labor for monks caught partaking. Since citizens entering Buddhist orders were taken off the tax rolls, the government took pains to ensure that monastic life was rigorous enough to discourage simple tax dodgers.7 Although the Chinese Buddhist schools were almost all members of the side of Buddhism known as Mahayana, they apparently followed the rules of Theravada Buddhism, since the latter were clearer and more easily understood.8 Huai-hai decided to merge the two sets of rules and from them to devise a new set of guidelines specifically for Ch'an, thereby creating a code of monastic discipline that eventually would rule Zen behavior throughout the world. The record concerning how the Ch'an monastic system initially was established is less detailed than we might wish. The legendary Fourth Patriarch, Tao-hsin, was said to have been the first _dhyana_ master to settle down in one place and nurture a band of disciples. _Dhyana_ teachers seem to have allied themselves with the conventional Buddhists in the decades that followed, living in their monasteries much as the hermit crab finds a home in the shells of other species. If their numbers were large they might have their own separate quarters, but they still had to respect the rules of their host sect, which more often than not was the Vinaya school.9 Gradually, however, a transformation occurred, as Ch'an masters became increasingly distinguishable from the leaders of other sects and Ch'an itself grew to increasing proportions, particularly in the south. It is not surprising that the man who made monastic Ch'an a reality was Ma-tsu's pupil Po-chang Huai-hai. In the recorded anecdotes Huai-hai is characterized as a level-headed, pragmatic man whom one can easily imagine having superior administrative ability. As John Wu characterizes his rules, "It was this rule [of Huai-hai] that instituted for the first time the Zen monastic system. In its emphasis on moral discipline and its matter of factness, it is comparable to the Holy Rule of St. Benedict. The duties of the Abbot and various functionaries under him are meticulously defined. The daily life of the monks is regulated in detail. Of particular interest are the rites of taking vows and the universal duty of working in the fields."10 It is difficult to say exactly what was the nature of the rules Huai- hai formulated, since his original precepts have been recast a number of times down through the years, with the earliest surviving version being that preserved in a 1282 Chinese Yuan Dynasty document called "the Holy Rule of Po-chang [Huai-hai]." If we look beyond the details, however, we see that his emphasis on the creation of a self-supporting monastic establishment was in a sense a further sinicization of Indian Buddhism, through the rejection of begging as the primary means of support. (Begging was not abandoned entirely, since it is valuable for teaching humility; instead it was retained in a regulated, symbolic form, but made a second line of economic defense.) The monasteries were intended to survive on their own, since Huai-hai insisted that meditation and worship be integrated with physical labor. Whereas the ideal Indian holy man was one who relied on begging, Huai-hai believed that in China it was holier to work for a living. This was the core of his teachings, as symbolized in his famous manifesto: "A day without work is a day without food." Nothing could have been more sympathetically received among the Chinese, and Huai-hai is probably rightly credited with inoculating Ch'an against the governmental persecution of 845 that destroyed so many other Buddhist sects. He practiced what he preached, and even when he reached old age he continued to toil in the fields. In fact, his disciples finally became so concerned for his health that they took the unprecedented step of hiding his gardening hoe. But true to his rule, he refused to eat until it was returned. Perhaps we can infer something of Huai-hai's regulations from the routine in contemporary Zen monasteries (of the Rinzai sect).11 Monks rise well before light (before they can see the lines in the palm of their hand), and after their morning toilet they gather in the main hall for sunrise devotions--in this case rapid chanting of scriptures, a device more for developing powers of concentration than for piety. They then return to the meditation hall, where chanting resumes. Next comes breakfast, usually plain rice with a modest vegetable garnish, and then back to the meditation hall for ceremonial tea and announcements of the day's schedule. Afterward each monk meets individually with the master in his quarters, where the monk's enlightenment is tested and a koan may be assigned. (The master, incidentally, enjoys a private room; the monks sleep together in a common hall, arranged according to rank.) After this, the monks attend to the garden and grounds of the monastery, and later in the morning there may be begging or visits to lay patrons for donations. After lunch (the main meal; its leftovers are supper) there is more work in the garden of the monastery, planting and harvesting, as well as repairing the buildings or other maintenance chores. Later on there may be more chanting, as well as cleaning and upkeep of the interior of the buildings. And in between there may be meditation. Then as nightfall descends the evening bell rings out to signify the work day's ending. During the evening the monk may meditate more or receive further instruction from the master or his brothers. Finally, late in the evening, to bed--at the end of a long day. It should be noted that there are also many special days on which meals, ceremonies, or activities may assume a different character. It is significant that the monasteries of early Ch'an are said not to have had a Buddha hall or a place for worship; rather they had only a Dharma or lecture hall, in which the master gave a talk, followed by sharp exchanges with his disciples, who often were rowdy and sometimes left at will to demonstrate their independence of mind. These were places of irreverence and unfettered intellectual inquiry; and apparently there was no enforced study of the traditional Buddhist literature. With monasteries of their own where they could do as they pleased, the Ch'an masters found their rebellion complete. Theirs now was an unhampered search for the perennial philosophy. With this in mind we may now turn to the psychological teachings of the lawgiver Huai-hai. Unlike the piecemeal story of his contribution to monastic life, which is preserved in spirit more than in letter, the writings on enlightenment that bear his name are rather firmly attributed. This is, in fact, a significant new aspect of Ch'an history, since his work represents one of the oldest documents actually composed by a master--as compared to a sermon transcribed and edited by some follower. According to the extant writings, after Huai-hai had studied with Ma-tsu for several years, he returned to his home temple to care for his first master, Tao-chih, who was by then aged and ill--an act of duty any Chinese would immediately understand. It was during this return visit with his old master that he composed a treatise setting forth the theoretical basis of sudden enlightenment. It is said that when this document was shown to Ma-tsu, he compared Huai-hai to a great pearl whose luster penetrated all time and space. (Curiously, Ma- tsu himself appears not to have made a great fuss about the meaning of sudden enlightenment, seemingly taking the "theory" for granted and moving along to the "practice.") "The Zen Teaching of Huai-hai on Sudden Illumination" was composed in the form of an imaginary question-and-answer session, in which Huai-hai effectively interviewed himself on the question of sudden enlightenment and the specific problems a person might encounter in trying to prepare for it. He stressed that one of the most important things to do was to suspend making value judgments about things, since this leads almost directly to splitting things into camps of good and bad, likes and dislikes. This opens one to the world of categories and dualities, just the opposite from oneness. According to Huai-hai, the first thing to do is strive for: _. . . total relinquishment of ideas as to the dual nature of good and bad, being and non-being, love and aversion, void and non-void, concentration and distraction, pure and impure. By giving all of them up, we attain to a state in which all opposites are seen as void. . . . Once we attain that state, not a single form can be discerned. Why? Because our self-nature is immaterial and does not catch a single thing foreign to itself. That which contains no single thing is true Reality. . . .12 _ The desire to avoid love and aversion is inextricably tied with the freedom from distinctions, duality, judgments, or prejudices: Wisdom means the ability to distinguish every sort of good and evil; _dhyana_ means that, though making these distinctions, you remain wholly unaffected by love or aversion for them.13 Elsewhere he describes this goal as: _Being able to behold men, women and all the various sorts of appearances while remaining as free from love and aversion as if they were actually not seen at all. . . .14 _In this manner we can operate on the principle of unity, even in a world where appearances have multiplicity. But how exactly can we say that all things are one? It is not something that can be fully understood with the rational mind, and initially it must be taken partly on faith, as a holding action until we can understand it intuitively. His translator John Blofeld uses the traditional Buddhist analogy of the sea, which is both constantly changing and yet eternally changeless: "Contemplation of the movement and shifting composition of sea-waves is a useful symbolical approach; for, not only are the waves and the sea identical in substance, but also a given wave does not preserve its individual identity for a single moment as the water composing it is never for an instant entirely the same; thus, by the time it reaches us from a distance, every drop it contains will be other than the drops composing it when we saw it first. On the other hand, sea-water is sea-water and the wave is entirely composed of that. Each wave is void--a mere fluctuating appearance identical in substance with every other wave and with the entire ocean. . . ."15 Waves are a perfect metaphor for the idea of everything and nothing at once, since they are both ephemeral and part of a larger reality, the sea, out of which they emerge, assume a physical appearance, and then dissolve. They seem to exist, yet you cannot grasp and hold them. They are both existing and nonexistent. Thus they resemble the Void, a kind of energy that manifests itself through diverse illusory objects of the senses, but which is itself ungraspable, changeless unity. With this in mind, perhaps it is easier to understand Huai-hai when he declares: _The nature of the Absolute is void and yet not void. How so? The marvellous "substance" of the Absolute, having neither form nor shape, is therefore undiscoverable; hence it is void. Nevertheless, that immaterial, formless "substance" contains functions as numerous as the sands of the Ganges, functions which respond unfailingly to circumstances, so it is also described as not void.16 _ By focusing on this idea of unity in an Absolute, we also interact with our own perception of time. Since it is important that the mind not dwell on anything, naturally enough this applies to time as well as space. _If you want to understand the non-dwelling mind very clearly, while you are actually sitting in meditation, you must be cognizant only of the mind. . . . Whatever is past is past, so do not sit in judgment upon it; for when minding about the past ceases of itself, it can be said that there is no longer any past. Whatever is in the future is not here yet, so do not direct your hopes and longings towards it; for, when minding about the future ceases of itself, it can be said that there is no future. Whatever is present is now at hand; just be conscious of your non-attachment to everything--non-attachment in the sense of not allowing any love or aversion for anything to enter your mind; for, when minding the present ceases of itself, we may say that there is no present.17 _ He has taken the idea of the "now" to an interesting new dimension. By cutting off thoughts of past and future, you not only save yourself mental anguish, you also no longer need distinguish the idea of the "present" . . . and you have just eliminated a major aspect of attachment. Huai-hai is not blind to the difficulty of such rigorous mind control, and he offers some of the first practical advice from a Ch'an master for controlling the mind. Not surprisingly, it is an admonition to stop trying so hard, to just focus on goals rather than forcing the mind's behavior. For example, if you are meditating and your mind wants to meander and look for something to dwell on, what should you do? _Should your mind wander away, do not follow it, whereupon your wandering mind will stop wandering of its own accord. Should your mind desire to linger somewhere, do not follow it and do not dwell there, whereupon your mind's questing for a dwelling place will cease of its own accord. Thereby, you will come to possess a non-dwelling mind--a mind which remains in the state of non-dwelling. If you are fully aware in yourself of a non-dwelling mind, you will discover that there is just the fact of dwelling, with nothing to dwell upon or not to dwell upon. This full awareness in yourself of a mind dwelling upon nothing is known as having a clear perception of your own mind or, in other words, as having a clear perception of your own nature.18 _ By way of wrapping up his treatise, he summarizes his technique for sudden illumination in a bold manifesto: _You should know that setting forth the principle of deliverance in its entirety amounts only to this--WHEN THINGS HAPPEN, MAKE NO RESPONSE: KEEP YOUR MINDS FROM DWELLING ON ANY THING WHATSOEVER: KEEP THEM FOREVER STILL AS THE VOID AND UTTERLY PURE.19 _Perhaps it is time we asked what exactly is the point of all this. When we have achieved his goal, we have effectively cut off all attachments, rationality, discernment, values, sensations. But why would we want to do this in the first place? Huai-hai answers that by releasing ourselves from this enslaving bondage to our ego and its attachments, we become the masters of our own being, free to experience the world but no longer at its mercy. And furthermore we no longer have even to think about being in the state of "no-thought." It is this natural state of wisdom that is our goal. _Concentration (_dhyana_) involves the stilling of your mind . . . so that you remain wholly unmoved by surrounding phenomena. Wisdom means that your stillness of mind is not disturbed by your giving any thought to that stillness, that your purity is unmarred by your entertaining any thought of purity and that, in the midst of such pairs of opposites as good and evil, you are able to distinguish between them without being stained by them and, in this way, to reach the state of being perfectly at ease and free of all dependence.20 _This is the state called enlightenment, a new way of experiencing reality that relies entirely upon intuition. Then we realize that all this time our rational mind has been leading us along, telling us that appearances are real and yet keeping us from really experiencing things firsthand, since the rational mind believes in names, categories, duality. Consequently, before this sudden moment of intuitive understanding, we saw the world as through a glass darkly, with ourselves as subject and the falsely perceived exterior world as object. After this experience we see things clearly, but we perceive them for what they really are--creations of mind as devoid of genuine substance as the world we create in our dreams or the ocean's waves that we can see but cannot hold. Knowing this, we can regard the world dispassionately, no longer caught in the web of ego involvement that enslaves those not yet enlightened. Since this whole world view only can be understood intuitively, it is not surprising that it must one day "dawn on you" when you least expect, like a sudden inspiration that hits you after logic has failed. Huai-hai's instructions are intended to be preparations for this moment, attributes to adopt that will make you ready and receptive when your "sudden" enlightenment hits. Huai-hai's concept of sudden enlightenment was quite straightforward, and it apparently was not absolutely necessary that meditation be employed. (In fact, he has defined _dhyana _as a state of mind, not an action.) Enlightenment is release from the ego, the primary thing standing in the way of mental peace in a world of getting and spending, of conflict and competition. The ancient Ch'an masters knew well the griefs and mental distress that haunt the heart of man, and thinkers such as Huai-hai explored its cure more fully than we realize today. Chapter Eight NAN-CH'UAN AND CHAO-CHOU: MASTERS OF THE IRRATIONAL Nan-ch'uan P'u-yuan The best-remembered disciple of Ma-tsu was Nan-ch'uan P'u-yuan (748- 835), founder of a famous monastery and a brilliant if short-lived lineage whose finest example was his pupil Chao-chou Ts'ung-shen (778- 897). _The Transmission of the Lamp _reports that Nan-ch'uan was born in the North China province of Honan.1 He began study of meditation at age ten, and according to the _Biographies of Eminent Monks _compiled in the Sung (_Sung kao-seng chuan_) he went to study Buddhism on Mt. Sung, near Loyang, when he was thirty and became a priest of traditional Buddhism, apparently of the Vinaya school.2 After his ordination, he traveled to various of the better-known monasteries, perfected his knowledge of Buddhist scriptures, and landed finally at the mountain establishment of the Ch'an master Ma-tsu. The legend says that although there were eight hundred followers of Ma- tsu, the precocious Nan-ch'uan was immediately elevated to the position of the foremost disciple, and none of the others ventured to debate with him.3 He finally achieved his complete enlightenment under the old master. It is not clear when he arrived or how long he stayed with Ma- tsu, but he reportedly left the monastery in 795--as he neared fifty--and founded his own community on Mt. Nan-ch'uan, a location in Anhwei province north of Kiangsi, building the original lodging with his own hands and attracting several hundred disciples. His most famous follower, aside from the later master Chao-chou, was the layman Lu Hsuan, the provincial governor of the Hsuan district. The story says that after residing in his mountain retreat for thirty years, without once venturing out, he finally acceded to the requests of the governor to come down and teach Ch'an to the people on the plain. He thus enjoyed a great fame as a teacher of Ch'an, although today he is remembered by anecdotes rather than by any attributed writings. The governor seems to have been puzzled by some of the teachings of Seng-chao (384-414), the early, pre-Ch'an Buddhist. He specifically asked Nan-ch'uan the meaning of a statement in The Book of Chao that all things come from the same source and accordingly there can be no difference between right and wrong, which are themselves the same, by virtue of a common origin. The story says that Nan-ch'uan pointed to a patch of peonies in the garden and said, "Governor, when people of the present day see these blossoms, it is as if they see them in a dream."4 The point seerns to be that the unenlightened cannot fully perceive the flower as it really is, cannot experience it directly and purely. Instead it is approached as an object apart from the viewer, the subject. It is not seen as an extension of his or her own reality. The ordinary mind permits this dichotomy of nature, but in the Zen mind, man and flower become one, merged into a seamless fabric of life. This is the kind of statement that in later years would be isolated from the chronicles and made into a "public case" or koan, a teaching device for novices. Its meaning is not meant to be discerned through the logical processes, and even less through the medium of language. When a later master was asked what Nan-ch'uan had meant, he answered with the equally enigmatic "Pass me a brick."5 The other celebrated story about the governor is perhaps easier to understand. The story says that one day Lu Hsuan posed the following problem to Nan-ch'uan: "What if I told you that a man had raised a goose in a bottle, watching it grow until one day he realized that it had grown too large to pass through the bottle's neck? Since he did not want to break the bottle or kill the goose, how would he get it out?" Nan-ch'uan began quietly, "My esteemed governor," and then he shouted, "THE GOOSE IS OUT!" The story says that Lu Hsuan suddenly was enlightened on the spot.6 Nan-ch'uan had shown that one who posed a hypothetical question could be answered by an equally hypothetical response. There is a common Ch'an (and Taoist) reference to a truth being caught in the net of words. Here Nan-ch'uan shows how to extract truth from verbal encumbrances. Another anecdote recounts a similar incident: _A monk said to Nan-ch'uan, "There is a jewel in the sky; how can we get hold of it?" Nan-ch'uan said, "Cut down bamboos and make a ladder, put it up in the sky, and get hold of it!'' The monk said, "How can the ladder be put up in the sky?" Nan-ch'uan said, "How can you doubt your getting hold of the jewel?_"7_ _ Many of his finest exchanges with pupils are preserved in _The Transmission of the Lamp_. For maximum impact it is perhaps best to lean back and let his wordplay wash over the rational mind like a cool, cleansing surf. As with the Taoist Chuang Tzu, the best way to comprehend this antilogical phenomenon is to forget about trying to grasp it intellectually, for only then can we understand. _The Governor said, "There is a piece of stone in my house. Sometimes it stands up and sometimes it lies down. Now, can it be carved into the image of Buddha?" "Yes, it is possible," answered the Master. "But it is impossible to do so?" countered the Governor."It is impossible! It is impossible!" exclaimed the Master.8 _ This dialogue sounds almost as though it were from an undiscovered scene from Waiting for Godot, as Vladimir and Estragon test the meaninglessness of language. And for pure Ionesco, it is hard to top the following incident: _Once Master Nan-ch'uan told Kuei-tsung and Ma-yu that he was going to take them with him to visit Nan-yang Hui-chung, the National Teacher. Before they began their journey, Nan-ch'uan drew a circle on the road and said, "As soon as you give a right answer we will be on our way." Thereupon Kuei-tsung sat down inside the circle and Ma-yu bowed in woman's fashion. The Master said to them, "Judging by this answer, it will not be necessary to go._"9_ _ The attitude of Nan-ch'uan toward conventional pieties, as well as toward the societal, rationalistic concerns of Confucianism, are perhaps best illustrated by the farewell he gave to his distinguished follower: _When Governor Lu was about to return to his office in Hsuan-cheng, he came to bid the Master good-bye. The latter asked him, "Governor, you are going back to the capital. How will you govern the people?" The Governor replied, "I will govern them through wisdom." The Master remarked, "If this is true, the people will suffer for it._"10_ _ Nan-ch'uan had a refreshing lack of pomposity that would have well served a good many other Zen masters, ancient and modern. _When the Master was washing his clothes, a monk said, "Master! You still are not free from 'this'?" Master Nan-ch'uan replied, lifting the clothes, "What can you do about 'this'?_"11_ _This calls to mind the anecdote concerning Alexander the Great, who when asked if he was a god as had been widely reported, responded by suggesting that the question be directed to the man who carried out his chamber pot. His attitude toward the great Ch'an teachers of the past seems similarly lacking in awe. _A monk inquired, "From patriarch to patriarch there is a transmission. What is it that they transmit to one another?" The Master said, "One, two, three, four, five." The monk asked, "What is that which was possessed by the ancients?" The Master said, "When it can be possessed, I will tell you." The monk said dubiously, "Master, why should you lie?" The Master replied, "I do not lie. [The Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng] lied._"12_ _ Nan-ch'uan was accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of Ma-tsu's monastery, a place of shouting, beating, harangues, insults, "mindless" interviews, misleading clues, and mind-fatiguing "irrelevancies." Yet it was all done with a high intensity and intended for the quite noble purpose of forcing a disciple to find his own first nature, his own enlightenment. The monastery as it developed under these wild men of Southern Ch'an was nothing less than a high-pressure cell for those who chose to enter. Although these new techniques for shaking nonintellectual insights into Ch'an novices were essentially the invention of Ma-tsu, they were transplanted, refined, and expanded by men like Nan-ch'uan, whose new monastery seems to have had the same deadly-serious zaniness as Ma-tsu's. Chao-chou Ts'ung-shen Some of the most instructive anecdotes associated with Nan-ch'uan are those involving his star pupil, Chao-chou Ts'ung-shen (778-897), who came to be one of the major figures of the Golden Age of Ch'an and one of the best-remembered of the wild Southern masters. Although his real name was Ts'ung-shen, he is remembered in history (as are many Ch'an masters) by the name of the mountain where he held forth during his mature years. He was born in Ts'ao-chou in Shantung and early on became a novice monk at a local monastery. However, the urge to travel was irresistible and he left before being ordained, arriving at Nan- ch'uan's monastery while still a lad. The traditional first exchange typifies their long and fruitful relationship. Nan-ch'uan opened with the standard question: _"Where have you just come from?" "I have just left Shui-hsiang [named for a famous state of Buddha]." "Have you seen the standing image of Buddha?" "What I see is not a standing image of Buddha but a supine Enlightened One!" "Are you your own master or not?" "Yes, I am. [i.e., I already have a master.]" "Where is this master of yours?" "In the middle of the winter the weather becomes bitterly cold. I wish all blessings on you, sir." At this, Nan-ch'uan decided that this visitor was promising and permitted him to become his disciple.13 _ Chao-chou's strange answer seems to have been his own way of signifying he had chosen Nan-ch'uan as his future master. Nan-ch'uan, for his own part, seems to have recognized in this quizzical repartee all the makings of a great Ch'an worthy. The exploits of Nan-ch'uan and Chao-chou form the core of the great anecdotal literature of Ch'an's Golden Age. Neither was a great innovator, a great writer, or a great organizer, but together they were able to explore the highest limits of the dialogue as a vehicle for enlightenment. And their dialogues, incidentally, did not always necessarily require words. _One day, in the monastery of Nan-chu'an, the monks of the east and west wing had a dispute over the possession of a cat. They all came to Nan-ch'uan for arbitration. Holding a knife in one hand and the cat in the other, Nan-ch'uan said, "If any one of you can say the right thing, this cat will be saved; otherwise it will be cut into two pieces." None of the monks could say anything. Nan-ch'uan then killed the cat. In the evening, when Chao-chou returned to the monastery, Nan-ch'uan asked him what he would have said had he been there at the time. Chao-chou took off his straw sandals, put them upon his head, and walked out. Whereupon Nan-ch'uan commented, "Oh, if only you had been here, the cat would have been saved._"14_ _ Chao-chou's response used no language and was devoid of distinctions, being neither positive nor negative. This is one of the most celebrated stories in _The Transmission of the Lamp_, and one that is probably richer if we avoid subjecting it to too much commentary. The point was specifically intended to be as simple as possible, but this very simplicity is disturbing to the complicated intellectual mind. There is a particularly telling story of the exchange Chao-chou held with Nan-ch'uan concerning the Tao, meaning the way to enlightenment: _When Chao-chou asked his master, "What is the Tao?" the latter replied, "Tao is nothing else than the ordinary mind." "Is there any way to approach it?" pursued Chao-chou further. "Once you intend to approach it," said Nan-ch'uan, "you are on the wrong track." "Barring conscious intention," the disciple continued to inquire, "how can we attain to a knowledge of the Tao?" To this the master replied, "Tao belongs neither to knowledge nor to no-knowledge. For knowledge is but illusive perception, while no-knowledge is mere confusion. If you really attain true comprehension of the Tao, unshadowed by the slightest doubt, your vision will be like the infinite space, free of all limits and obstacles. Its truth or falsehood cannot be established artificially by external proofs." At these words Chao-chou came to an enlightenment. Only after this did he take his vows and become a professed monk.15 _ Nan-ch'uan's assertion that Tao is nothing else than the ordinary mind, but that it cannot be reached by deliberate searching, is the longstanding commonplace of Ch'an. However, he here adds an interesting new assertion: He claims here that although the person finding this enlightenment has no doubt of its reality, it cannot be proved or disproved by any objective tests. There is no way that the enlightened person can be shown objectively to have achieved his goal. The Ch'an masters could test enlightenment by matching the claimant's illogic against their own; if his "craziness" matched, then the disciple passed. But there is, by definition, no objective test of enlightenment. But then, how do you test the ultimate realization that there is nothing to realize other than what you knew all along? Quite simply, the master's intuition is the final authority. Their dialogues frequently were full of electricity, as witness another exchange that ended quite differently: _Chao-chou asked, "Tao is not external to things; the externality of things is not Tao. Then what is the Tao that is beyond things?" The master struck him. Thereupon Chao- chou took hold of the stick and said, "From now on, do not strike a man by mistake." The Master said, "We can easily differentiate between a dragon and a snake, but nobody can fool a Ch'an monk._"10_ _ Chao-chou here seems to be declaring to Nan-ch'uan that his enlightenment is genuine. And Nan-ch'uan, for his part, is asserting that the Master's judgment, not the monk's, is the final criterion. In another incident Chao-chou actually has the last word. _Once Nan-ch'uan said to Chao-chou, "Nowadays it is best to live and work among members of a different species from us." (This recalls the Buddhist proverb: It is easier to save the beasts than to save mankind.) Chao-chou, however, thought otherwise. He said, "Leaving alone the question of 'different,' let me ask you what is 'species' anyway?" Nan-ch'uan put both of his hands on the ground, to indicate the species of the quadrupeds. Chao-chou, approaching him from behind, trampled him to the ground, and then ran into the Nirvana Hall crying, "I repent, I repent." Nan-ch'uan, who appreciated his act of trampling, did not understand the reason of his repentance. So he sent his attendant to ask the disciple what was he repenting for. Chao-chou replied, "I repent that I did not trample him twice over._"17_ _ In spite of such occasional bursts of exuberance, Chao-chou seems overall to have been comparatively mild-mannered for a Ch'an master. He rarely chose to berate or beat his disciples, as did Ma-tsu or his own master, Nan-ch'uan. In many ways, Chao-chou was the finest hope for the lineage of Nan-ch'uan, but he seems not to have been overly concerned with its continuation. In fact, it is somewhat ironic that Huai-hai, who was more an organizer than a creator, ended up with a lineage perpetuating his line down to the present day, whereas Nan-ch'uan's lineage effectively ended with his disciple Chao-chou, although both men were remarkable teachers. In fact, Chao-chou almost never did settle down to run a monastery. After Nan-ch'uan died he resumed his travels and for many years roamed across China, visiting with other Ch'an masters. He seems to have gradually worked his way back north, for it was in the north that he realized his most lasting fame and influence. But his reputation was gained before he had a monastery of his own and without the aid of permanent disciples. The real acclaim seems to have been associated with a journey to a famous Buddhist pilgrimage site, Mt. Wut'ai, in the northeastern edge of Shensi province, where he preached a sermon that brought him wide recognition. Although he loved nothing more than wandering the craggy mountains of China, friends tried to convince him to settle down--as related in an incident when he was near eighty, after many years of wandering: _Once, as he was visiting Chu-yu, the latter said, "A man of your age should try to find a place to settle down and teach." "Where is my abiding place?" Chao-chou asked back. "What?" said his host, "With so many years on your head, you have not even come to know where your permanent home is!" Chao-chou said, "For thirty years I have roamed freely on horseback. Today, for the first time I am kicked by an ass!_"18_ _ He finally did settle down, at eighty, accepting an invitation to come and live at the Kuan-yin monastery in Chao-chou in northeastern China, where he stayed until his death some forty years later. His lack of interest in worldly, administrative details is illustrated by the story that during his forty years as abbot of the monastery he installed no new furnishings and made no attempt to collect alms. Perhaps this tells us why Huai-hai's line won the day. Yet Chao-chou was the popular favorite. His preference for colloquial language endeared him to the people. He tried to demonstrate that enlightenment can be found and subsequently heightened through ordinary everyday activities. The following anecdote suggests his idea of Buddhism had little to do with the Buddha: _Master Chao-chou was asked by a monk, "Who is the Buddha?" "The one in the shrine," was the answer. "Isn't it a clay statue that sits in the shrine?" the monk went on. "Yes, that is right." "Then who is the Buddha?" the monk repeated. "The one in the shrine," replied the Master. A monk asked, "What is my own self?" "Have you finished your rice gruel?" asked the Master. "Yes, I have finished it," replied the monk. "Then go and wash your dishes," said the Master. When the monk heard this, he was suddenly awakened.19 _ The thrust of this anecdote is that through the everyday doing of what needs to be done, we can find authentic values and our original nature. As the modern scholar Chang Chung-yuan points out, "This simple activity of the Ch'an monk, washing the dishes after eating gruel, is the most ordinary thing, the sort of activity that is completely spontaneous and requires no mental effort. While engaged in it, a man is free from assertion and negation."20 When we are doing manual tasks we experience them directly; we do not have to intellectualize about them. This acting without thought, without judgments of good or bad, is in fact a parable of enlightenment. So it was that Chao-chou could so effectively use rote tasks as a teaching device, for they showed a novice how he could free his mind from its enslavement to opinions and values. This stress on the meaningfulness of daily manual activities, as distinct from philosophical speculation, seems to have been the major position of Chao-chou. This attitude is particularly borne out in another celebrated Chao-chou anecdote. _One morning, as Chao-chou was receiving new arrivals, he asked one of them, "Have you been here before?" "Yes," the latter replied. "Help yourself to a cup of tea," he said. Then he asked another, "Have you been here before?" "No, Your Reverence, this is my first visit here." Chao-chou again said, "Help yourself to a cup of tea." The Prior of the monastery took Chao-chou to task, saying, "The one had been here before, and you gave him a cup of tea. The other had not been here, and you gave him likewise a cup of tea. What is the meaning of this?" Chao- chou called out, "Prior!" "Yes," responded the Prior. "Help yourself to a cup of tea!_"21_ _ Behind this possibly deceptive simplicity, however, there must have been a penetrating intelligence, for a very large number of his anecdotes were important enough to become enshrined in those famous collections of koans the Mumonkan and the Blue Cliff Record. One of the best known is the following: _A monk asked, "Since all things return to One, where does this One return to?" "When I was in Tsing-chou, I had a robe made which weighed seven chin [pounds]" replied the Master.22 _The answer is a perfect example of "no-thought," the anti-logic condition in which rationality is disengaged. To attempt to subject it to analysis would be to miss the entire point. An even more famous koan, and one that has become the traditional starting point for beginners, is the following: _A monk asked Chao-chou, "Has a dog the Buddha Nature?" Chao-chou answered, "Mu._"23_ _Here the word _mu_, meaning "nothingness" or "un," is an elegant resolution of a perplexing Zen dilemma. Had Chao-chou answered in the affirmative, he would have been tacitly instigating a dualistic view of the universe, in which a dog and a man are allowed to be discussed as separate objects. But to have responded negatively would have been to even more strongly betray the Zen teaching of the Oneness permeating all things. An answer was called for, but not an explanation. So the master responded with a nonword--a sound that has been adopted in later Zen practice as symbolic of the unity of all things. This wisdom made Chao-chou such a legend in his own lifetime that many monks from the south came north to try to test him, but he always outwitted them, even when he was well past a hundred. Perhaps it would be well to round out his story with a garland of some of the exchanges he had with new monks: _A new arrival said apologetically to the master, "I have come here empty-handed!" "Lay it down then!" said the master. "Since I have brought nothing with me, what can I lay down?" asked the visitor. "Then go on carrying it!" said the master.24 One day Chao-chou fell down in the snow, and called out, "Help me up! Help me up!" A monk came and lay down beside him. Chao-chou got up and went away.25 A monk asked, "When a beggar comes, what shall we give him?" The master answered, "He is lacking in nothing."26 When a monk asked him, "What is the real significance of Bodhidharma's coming from the west?" his answer was, "The cypress tree in the courtyard." When the monk protested that Chao-chou was only referring to a mere object, the Abbot said, "No, I am not referring you to an object." The monk then repeated again the question. "The cypress tree in the courtyard!" said the Abbot once more.27 _ _A monk besought him to tell him the most vitally important principle of Ch'an. The master excused himself by saying, "I must now go to make water. Think even such a trifling thing I have to do in person."28 _Chao-chou was of a unique breed of "Golden Age" masters, who created Ch'an's finest moment. Even Chao-chou knew this, for he is quoted as recognizing that Ch'an had already passed through its most dynamic epoch. _"Ninety years ago," he said, "I saw more than eighty enlightened masters in the lineage of Ma-tsu; all of them were creative spirits. Of late years, the pursuit of Ch'an has become more and more trivialized and ramified. Removed ever farther from the original spirit of men of supreme wisdom, the process of degeneration will go on from generation to generation._"29_ _ Chao-chou died in his one hundred and twentieth year, surely one of the most venerable Ch'an masters. Fortunately his pessimistic assessment of Ch'an's future was only partly correct. Although he himself had no illustrious heirs, there were other Southern Ch'an masters who would extend the lineage of Ma-tsu into what would one day be the Rinzai school, among these a layman named P'ang and the master Huang-po. Chapter Nine P'ANG AND HAN-SHAN: LAYMAN AND POET _Han-shan _ Each of the better-known disciples of Ma-tsu exemplified some particular aspect of Ch'an: Whereas Po-chang Huai-hai advanced Ch'an's organizational and analytical side, Nan-ch'uan embodied the illogical, psychologically jolting approach to the teaching. But what about the Ch'an outside the monasteries? Did Ma-tsu's influence extend to the lay community? Although little has been preserved to help answer these questions, we do have the stories of two Ch'an poets who operated outside the monastic system: Layman P'ang (740?-811) and Han-shan (760?-840?). They were part of a movement called _chu-shih_, lay believers who were drawn to Buddhism but rejected the formal practices, preferring to remain outside the establishment and seek enlightenment on their own.1 However, P'ang studied under Ma-tsu himself, and Han-shan sometimes echoed the master's teachings in his verse. Layman P'ang The man known to history as Layman P'ang was born in the mid-eighth century.2 He grew to manhood in the city of Heng-yang, where his Confucianist father served as a middle-level official. Although he was educated in all the classics, he became a practicing Buddhist early and never faltered in his devotion. Sometime after marrying he became so obsessed with the classic Chinese ideal of a spiritual-poetic hermitage that he actually had a thatched cottage built adjacent to his house. Here he spent time with his wife--and now a daughter and son--meditating, composing poetry, and engaging in characteristically Chinese musings. A story relates that he was sitting in his thatched cottage one day when he became exasperated with the difficulties of his path and declared, "How difficult it is! How difficult it is! My studies are like drying the fibers of ten thousand pounds of flax by hanging them in the sun." His wife overheard this outburst and contradicted him, "Easy, easy, easy. It's like touching your feet to the ground when you get out of bed. I have found the teaching right in the tops of flowering plants." His daughter, Ling-chao, heard both outbursts and showed them the truth with her assertion, "My study is neither difficult nor easy. When I am hungry I eat. When I am tired I rest."3 Then one day, thought to have been sometime between the years 785 and 790, P'ang decided to go the final step and sever his ties with the materialism that weighed him down. After donating his house for a temple, he loaded his remaining possessions into a boat--which he proceeded to maneuver into the middle of a river and sink. We do not know if his wife and son welcomed this final freedom from material enslavement, but his daughter seems to have approved, for she helped him wend his now-penurious way through the world by assisting him in making and selling bamboo household articles. Free at last, P'ang traveled about from place to place with no fixed abode, living, so the legends say, "like a leaf." The image of P'ang and his daughter as itinerant peddlers, wandering from place to place, made a searing impression on the Chinese mind, and for centuries he has been admired in China--admired, but not necessarily emulated. Whom did P'ang go to visit? He seems to have known personally every major Ch'an figure in China. The first master visited was the famous Shih-t'ou (700-790), sometime rival of Ma-tsu. (It will be recalled that the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng, had among his disciples a master called Huai-jang (677-744), teacher of Ma-tsu and head of the lineage of now Japanese Rinzai. Another of the Sixth Patriarch's legendary followers was Hsing-ssu [d. 740], whose pupil Shih-t'ou is connected to the line that became Japanese Soto. Ma-tsu and Shih-t'ou headed the two major movements of Southern Ch'an in the eighth century.)4 In 786 P'ang appeared at the retreat of Shih-t'ou on the mountain called Nan-yueh. He greeted Shih-t'ou by asking him one of the standard Ch'an questions, which Shih-t'ou answered by quietly placing a hand over P'ang's mouth-- causing the Layman's first enlightenment experience. P'ang studied under Shih-t'ou--although probably in a nonmonastic capacity--for some time, until one day Shih-t'ou decided to test him. "Tell me," began Shih-t'ou, "how have you practiced Ch'an after coming here to this mountain?" P'ang shot back in a characteristic manner, saying, "There is really nothing words can reveal about my daily life." Shih-t'ou continued, "It is just because I know words cannot that I ask you now." At this, P'ang was moved to offer a verse: _My daily activities are not unusual, I'm just naturally in harmony with them. Grasping nothing, discarding nothing, In every place there's no hindrance, no conflict. [My] supernatural power and marvelous activity: Drawing water and carrying firewood.(5) _ The declaration that drawing water and carrying firewood were miraculous acts demonstrated P'ang's understanding of "everyday- mindedness"--the teaching of no-teaching, the approach of no-approach.6 The story says that Shih-t'ou acknowledged the Layman's enlightenment, and went on to inquire whether P'ang wished to exchange his pauper's robe of white for a monk's raiment of black. P'ang reputedly answered him with an abrupt "I will do what I like." Apparently concluding that he had absorbed all of Shih-t'ou's teaching, P'ang arose and absented himself, heading for Kiangsi and the master Ma-tsu. P'ang's adventures with Ma-tsu are not particularly well recorded, given the two years he reportedly studied under the master. However, the account of their meeting has become a Ch'an standard. According to the story, P'ang asked Ma-tsu, "What kind of man is he who has no companion among all things?" Ma-tsu answered, "After you swallow all the water in the West River in one gulp, I will tell you." It is said that when P'ang heard this, he was suddenly aware of the essence of Ch'an.7 If this exchange seems puzzling, with its subtle wordplay that weaves in and out between realism and symbolism, what about another recorded exchange between the two: _One day the Layman addressed Ma-tsu, saying: "A man of unobscured original nature asks you please to look upward." Ma-tsu looked straight down. The Layman said: "You alone play marvelously on the stringless ch'in [lute]." Ma-tsu looked straight up. The Layman bowed low. Ma-tsu returned to his quarters. "Just now bungled it trying to be smart," then said the Layman.8 _ The modern master Charles Luk speculates that P'ang's request to Ma-tsu to look up at an enlightened man was intended to trap the old master: "In reply Ma-tsu looked down to reveal the functioning of the enlightened mind. P'ang then praised the master for playing so well on the stringless lute. Thereat Ma-tsu looked up to return functioning to the enlightened mind. . . . In Ch'an parlance, looking down is 'function,' which means the mind wandering outside to deliver living beings, and looking up is returning function to 'substance' (the mind) after the work of salvation has been done. P'ang's act of prostrating is 'function' and Ma-tsu's return to the abbot's room means returning function to 'substance' to end the dialogue, for nothing further can be added to reveal substance and function."9 Although the Layman declined monastic orders, he apparently could hold his own with the best of Ma-tsu's followers, as well as with other Ch'an monks he encountered in his travels. Often monks sought him out merely to match wits. A typical exchange is reported with a follower of Shih-t'ou named P'u-chi, who once came to test P'ang: _One day P'u-chi visited the Layman. "I recall that when I was in my mother's womb I had a certain word," said the Layman. "I'll show it to you, but you mustn't hold it as a principle." "You're still separated from life," said P'u-chi. "I just said you mustn't hold it as a principle," rejoined the Layman. "How can I not be awed by a word that astounds people?" said P'u-chi. "Understanding such as yours is enough to astonish people," replied the Layman. "The very statement 'don't hold it as a principle' has become a principle," said P'u-chi. "You're separated not only by one or two lives," said the Layman. "It's all right for you to reprove a rice-gruel [-eating] monk [like me]," returned P'u-chi. The Layman snapped his fingers three times.10 _ The precise meaning of this exchange will not be tackled here, but P'ang apparently came off on top. Now and then, however, P'ang seems to have been equaled or bested. There is a story of an exchange he had with one of the monks at Ma-tsu's monastery, named Shih-lin. _ One day Shih-lin said to the Layman: "I have a question I'd like to ask. Don't spare your words." "Please go on," said the Layman. "How you do spare words!" exclaimed Shih-lin. "Unwittingly by this discussion we've fallen into a snare [of words]," said the Layman. Shih-lin covered his ears. "You adept, you adept!" cried the Layman.11 _ Another time P'ang is reminiscent of Chao-chou in demonstrating that it is possible to hold one's own without the use of words. _The Layman was once lying on his couch reading a sutra. A monk saw him and said: "Layman! You must maintain dignity when reading a sutra." The Layman raised up one leg. The monk had nothing to say.12 _ Layman P'ang studied under Ma-tsu for two years, but he finally decided to resume his life as a wandering student of Ch'an. He left Ma-tsu declaring the family his source of strength, or so it would seem from his parting verse presented to the master. _I've a boy who has no bride, I've a girl who has no groom; Forming a happy family circle, We speak about Birthless.13 _ And off he went to travel, a completely enlightened man after his stay in Kiangsi. He turned increasingly to poetry during these years of wandering across the central part of China, composing some of his most sensitive verse. One poem in particular seems to capture the carefree spirit of these years of wanderings: _The wise man, perceiving wealth and lust, Knows them to be empty illusion; Food and clothes sustain body and life-- I advise you to learn being as is. When it's time, I move my hermitage and go, And there's nothing to be left behind.14 _ One of Layman P'ang's most enduring companions was the monk Tan-hsia T'ien-jan, known for his irreverence. The following is typical of the exchanges recorded between the two: _When the Layman was walking with Tan-hsia one day he saw a deep pool of clear water. Pointing to it with his hand, he said: "Being as it is we can't differentiate it." "Of course we can't," replied Tan-hsia. The Layman scooped up and threw two handfuls of water on Tan-hsia. "Don't do that, don't do that!" cried Tan-hsia. "I have to, I have to!" exclaimed the Layman. Whereupon Tan-hsia scooped up and threw three handfuls of water on the Layman, saying: "What can you do now?" "Nothing else," replied the Layman. "One seldom wins by a fluke," said Tan-hsia. "Who lost by a fluke?" returned the Layman.15 _ To attempt to explicate this exchange would be to ride the wind. They are in a completely different reality from that in which mere books are written and read. What occupied Madam P'ang during the Layman's wanderings is not known. However, she seems well on the way to enlightenment herself. A story says that one day she went to a Buddhist temple to make an offering of food. The priest asked her the purpose of the offering so that he could post the customary notice identifying the name of a donor and the date and purpose of the gift. This was called "transferring merit," since the knowledge of her good deed would be "transferred" from herself to others. It is reported that Mrs. P'ang took her comb, stuck it in the back of her hair, and announced to the stunned priest, "Transference of merit is accomplished."16 She seemed a part of P'ang's enlightenment, even if not a companion in his travels. Eventually P'ang and his daughter, Ling-chao, ended up back in the north, near Hsiang-yang, the city of his birth, which he had left when a very small child. But instead of moving into the town, they lived in a cave about twenty miles to the south. And to this cave often journeyed a distinguished visitor--Prefect Yu Ti of Hsiang province, an important official who had learned of P'ang's verse and his reputation for Ch'an teaching. Originally a vicious and arrogant dictator who delighted in persecuting Buddhists, he had been converted by a Ch'an monk and had become a strong supporter of the faith. In fact, it is Yu Ti whom we must thank for our knowledge of P'ang, for it was he who collected the poetry and stories of the Layman after his death. P'ang lived in his cave with Ling-chao for two years, and then he suddenly declared that it was time to die. In a dramatic gesture, he assumed a meditating posture and asked Ling-chao to go outside and tell him when the sun reached high noon, at which time he would pass on. She went out, but quickly returned to announce that it was already noon but that there was an eclipse. P'ang jumped up and ran out to see this event, but while he was gone Ling-chao seated herself in his place, folded her hands, and died herself. P'ang returned from her diversionary announcement, saw what had happened, and declared, "Her way was always swift. Now she has gone ahead of me." In respect he postponed his own death for a week.17 Hearing of this episode, Prefect Yu Ti rushed to the scene. The Layman addressed him with, "I pray you to hold all that is thought to be real as empty, and never take that which is empty as being real. Farewell. The world is merely a shadow, an echo."18 He then laid his head on the prefect's knee and died. He left a request that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered across the waters of nearby lakes and rivers. When P'ang's wife heard of the death of her husband and daughter, she said, "That stupid girl and ignorant old man have gone away without telling me. How unbearable."19 She then relayed the news to her son, who was in the fields hoeing. He too subsequently died miraculously, while still standing up. For her own part, Madam P'ang journeyed about the countryside bidding her friends farewell, and then secluded herself, where it was never known. And with her passing ends the saga of Layman P'ang. This real-life individual was honored as China's answer to the mythical Indian businessman Vimalakirti, who combined enlightenment with the life of the market. Han Shan An even more elusive figure is the hermit Han-shan, whose name means "Cold Mountain," the site where he supposedly resided. He is an almost totally lengendary character, for we actually know nothing for sure about when he lived (the current best guess is late eighth to early ninth century). Almost everything known about him has been gleaned from his poems and from a presumably contemporaneous preface to these poems composed by a mysterious hand untraceable to any historical Chinese individual. His was some of the most confessional, yet joyous, verse penned in T'ang China, and he has been claimed by the Ch'anists as one of theirs--although he might just as easily have been a Taoist conversant in Buddhist jargon. Han-shan embodied the archetypal hero of the Chinese imagination: a member of the rural gentry who gave up his staid family life and some sort of scholarly career to become a wandering poet. As he describes his own early life in the years before his wanderings: _From my father and mother I inherited land enough And need not envy others' orchards and fields Creak, creak goes the sound of my wife's loom; Back and forth my children prattle at their play. * * * The mountain fruits child in hand I pluck; My paddy field along with my wife I hoe. And what have I got inside my house? Nothing at all but one stand of books.20_ So we have a gentleman scholar, comfortably well off, with wife and children and an idyllic life undisturbed by the incursions of the world. It is all too perfect by half, and sure enough sometime before his thirtieth year his life was disrupted by an (undescribed) event so catastrophic that his wife and family turned him out: _I took along books when I hoed the fields, In my youth, when I lived with my older brother. Then people began to talk; Even my wife turned against me. Now I've broken my ties with the world of red dust; I spend my time wandering and read all I want. Who will lend a dipper of water To save a fish in a carriage rut.21 _ Just when this sad event took place we do not know. However, by the time Han-shan was thirty he found himself on Cold Mountain, part of the T'ien-tai mountain range and near the town of T'ang-hsing. _Thirty years ago I was born into the world. A thousand, ten thousand miles I've roamed, By rivers where the green grass lies thick, Beyond the border where the red sands fly. I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting. I read books, I sang songs of history, And today I've come home to Cold Mountain To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.22 _ He described his life in the mountains in a number of verses that often seem more Taoist than Buddhist. One of the most lyrical follows: _Ever since the time when I hid in the Cold Mountain I have kept alive by eating the mountain fruits. From day to day what is there to trouble me? This my life follows a destined course. The days and months flow ceaseless as a stream; Our time is brief as the flash struck on a stone. If Heaven and Earth shift, then let them shift; I shall still be sitting happy among the rocks.23 _ He was a contradictory individual, one minute solemn in his search for Mind, and the next minute a buoyant bon vivant, writing verses that seem almost a T'ang version of our own carpe diem: _Of course there are some people who are careful of money, But not I among them. Because I dance too much, my garment of thin cloth is worn. My bottle is empty, for I spurt out the wine when we sing. Eat a full meal. Don't tire your feet. The day when weeds are sprouting through your skull, You will regret what you have been.24 _ The life he describes for himself is one immersed in poetry. He is the compleat poet, whose only concern is writing (not publishing) verse. _Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease-- No more tangled, hung-up mind, I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff, Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.25 _But if his poems were written on a rock cliff, how then were they preserved? Thereon hangs a tale, or more likely a legend. At some unknown time, Han-shan's verses (some three hundred) were collected and supplied with a "preface."26 The person who takes credit for saving Han- shan from a country poet's oblivion identifies himself as Lu-ch'iu Yin, a high official. As it happens, the T'ang Chinese were very fussy about keeping records on such things as high officials, and a Lu-ch'iu Yin is not remembered among their ranks. Consequently, some have speculated that the author of the preface was in fact a Buddhist priest who wished to remain anonymous. At any rate, according to the story, our official first heard of Han-shan upon becoming ill just before a planned trip to a new prefecture and, after failing to be helped by a doctor, was cured by a wandering priest, who then told him that in the prefecture of his destination he would need further protection from bodily ills. Lu-ch'iu Yin asked him for the name of a master, and the priest told him to be on the lookout for two eccentric-appearing kitchen servants at the Kuo- ch'ing monastery dining hall, named Han-shan and Shih-te. When he arrived at his new post, he immediately sought out this monastery and was amazed to learn the story was true. People around the temple said, "Yes, there is a Han-shan. He lives alone in the hills at a place called Cold Mountain, but he often comes down to the temple to visit his friend, Shih-te. The cook, Shih-te, it turned out, saved leftovers for his friend Han-shan, who would come and take them away in a bamboo tube, merrily laughing and joking along the length of the temple veranda as he carted away his booty. Once the monks caught him and exposed his system, but he only laughed all the more. His appearance was that of a starving beggar, but his wisdom was that of a man of enlightenment. Lu-ch'iu Yin anxiously pressed on to the kitchen, where sure enough he found Han-shan and Shih-te, tending the stoves and warming themselves over the fire. When he bowed low to them, they broke into gales of laughter and shouted "HO" back at him. The other monks were scandalized and wondered aloud why a distinguished official would bow to a pair of ne'er-do-wells. But before he could explain, the pair clasped hands and bolted out of the temple. (The giggling Han-shan and Shih-te became a staple of Zen art for a millennium thereafter.) Determined to retrieve them, he arranged for the monastery to provide them permanent accommodations and left a package of clothes and incense for them. When they failed to reappear, he had a bearer carry his gifts and accompany him up into the mountains. Finally they glimpsed Han-shan, who yelled, "Thief! Thief!" at them and retreated to the opening of a cave. He then bade them farewell with, "Each of you men should strive to your utmost!" Whereupon he disappeared into the cave, which itself then closed upon him, leaving no trace. The preface says Han-shan was never seen again. In homage the disappointed Lu-ch'iu Yin had his poems collected from where they had been composed--on scraps of bamboo, wood, stones, cliffs, and on the walls of houses. Thus there came to be the collected _oeuvre _of Han-shan. Han-shan's poems support at least part of this somewhat fanciful story. He does seem to have been Buddhist in outlook, and as one of his translators, Burton Watson, has declared, ". . . to judge from his poetry, Han-shan was a follower of the Ch'an sect, which placed great emphasis on individual effort and was less wary of emotionalism than earlier Buddhism had been. . . . Though he writes at times in a mood of serenity, at other times he appears despondent, angry, arrogant, or wildly elated. . . ,"27 As did Layman P'ang, Han-shan seems to have believed that the Way is found in everyday-mindedness, a point of view most forcefully expounded by Ma-tsu. As Han-shan declares in one of his poems: _As for me, I delight in the everyday Way, Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves. Here in the wilderness I am completely free, With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever. There are roads, but they do not reach the world; Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts? On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night, While the round moon climbs up Cold Mountain.28 _ Many of his verses reinforce the belief that he was indeed a follower of Southern Ch'an. For example, he seemed to believe that the mind itself is the Buddha that all seek. _Talking about food won't make you full, Babbling of clothes won't keep out the cold. A bowl of rice is what fills the belly; It takes a suit of clothing to make you warm. And yet, without stopping to consider this, You complain that Buddha is hard to find. Turn your mind within! There he is! Why look for him abroad?29 _ Interestingly enough, for all his rather traditional Ch'an sentiments and admonitions, he was much more in touch with human concerns than were most followers of Ch'an. For one thing, he lived alone in the mountains, an isolated ascetic cut off from human contact, and the resulting loneliness was something those caught up in the riotous give-and-take of a Ch'an monastery never knew. He gives voice to this loneliness in a touching poem. _I look far off at T'ien-t'ai's summit, Alone and high above the crowding peaks. Pines and bamboos sing in the wind that sways them Sea tides wash beneath the shining moon. I gaze at the mountain's green borders below And discuss philosophy with the white clouds. In the wilderness, mountains and seas are all right, But I wish I had a companion in my search for the Way.30 _ The admission of loneliness and near-despair in many of his verses has always been a troublesome point for Zen commentators. The enlightened man is supposed to be immune to the misgivings of the heart, focused as he is on oneness and nondistinction. But Han-shan worried a good bit about old age, and he also missed his family, as he admits, albeit through the medium of a dream: _Last night in a dream I returned to my old home And saw my wife weaving at her loom. She held her shuttle poised, as though lost in thought, As though she had no strength to lift it further. I called. She turned her head to look, But her eyes were blank--she didn't know me. So many years we've been parted The hair at my temples has lost its old color.31 _ But perhaps it is this non-Ch'an quality, this mortal touch, that elevates Han-shan to the rank of a great lyrical poet. He actually manages to be both a plausible Buddhist and a vulnerable human being. Few other poets in Chinese letters managed to combine genuine Buddhism with such memorable verse. As Burton Watson has observed, "In the works of most first-rate Chinese poets, Buddhism figures very slightly, usually as little more than a vague mood of resignation or a picturesque embellishment in the landscape--the mountain temple falling into melancholy ruin, the old monk one visits on an outing in the hills. Han-shan, however, is a striking exception to this rule. The collection of poetry attributed to him . . . is permeated with deep and compelling religious feeling. For this reason he holds a place of special importance in Chinese literature. He proved that it was possible to write great poetry on Buddhist, as well as Confucian and Taoist, themes; that the cold abstractions of Mahayana philosophy could be transformed into personal and impassioned literature. . . . The language of his poems is simple, often colloquial or even slangy . . . [but] many of his images and terms are drawn from the Buddhist sutras or the sayings of the Southern School of Zen, whose doctrine of the Buddha as present in the minds of all men--of Buddha as the mind itself-- he so often refers to. At the same time he is solidly within the Chinese poetic tradition, his language again and again echoing the works of earlier poets. . . ."32 With Han-shan we return repeatedly to the world of Cold Mountain, which was--as another of his translators, Arthur Waley, has pointed out--as much a state of mind as a locality. It was this, together with his advice to look within, that finally gives Han-shan his haunting voice of Ch'an. He seems not to have cared for the supercilious "masters" who dominated the competitive world of the monasteries. He invited them to join him in the rigorous but rewarding world of "Cold Mountain," where the mind was Buddha and the heart was home. _When men see Han-shan They all say he's crazy And not much to look at-- Dressed in rags and hides. They don't get what I say & I don't talk their language. All I can say to those I meet: "Try and make it to Cold Mountain._"33_ _ Chapter Ten HUANG-PO: MASTER OF THE UNIVERSAL MIND Perhaps the most thoughtful Zen philosopher of them all was Huang-po (d. 850?), who picked up where the earlier teachers had left off and brought to a close the great creative era of Ch'an. He also stood at the very edge of the tumultuous watershed in Chinese Buddhism, barely living past the 845 Great Persecution that smashed the power of all the Buddhist schools except that of the reclusive Southern Ch'anists. Originally named Hsi-yun, the master moved at a young age from his birthplace in present-day Fukien to Mt. Huang-po in the same province, the locale that gave him his Ch'an title. His biography declares that his voice was articulate and mellifluous, his character open and simple.1 He later decided to make a pilgrimage to see the famous Ma-tsu, but when he arrived in Kiangsi he was told that the master had died.2 Po-chang Huai-hai was still there, however, and consequently Huang-po settled down to study with him instead. Huang-po is known to us today primarily through the accident of having a follower obsessed by the written word. This man, Pei Hsiu, was also a high Chinese official who served as governor in two of the provinces where Huang-po at various times resided. He studied under Huang-po both times (all day and night, so he claimed) and later produced an anecdotal summary of the master's teachings now known as _On the Transmission of Mind_.3 This document was extensive, representing one of the most detailed descriptions of an early master's thoughts. Pei Hsiu also reports in his preface (dated 858) that he sent his work back to Kuang T'ang monastery on Mt. Huang-po to have it authenticated by the old monks there who still remembered the sayings of the master.4 By the time of Huang-po the issue of "gradual" versus "sudden" enlightenment was decisively resolved in favor of the latter. He therefore turned instead to two major remaining questions: 1) how enlightenment fits into the mental world, and 2) how this intuitive insight can be transmitted. Before he was through he had advanced these issues significantly and had laid the philosophical basis for the next phase of Ch'an in China--to be dominated by the school of his pupil Lin- chi. Huang-po struggled with a fundamental dilemma of Ch'an: how the wordless wisdom of intuition can be passed from generation to generation. Enlightenment necessarily has to be intuitive, and that means traditional teaching methods are useless. There are no conceptual formulations or "concepts." It is by definition wordless. It has to be realized intuitively by the novice, by himself. The masters had isolated a type of knowledge that words could not transmit. It was this transmission of wordless insight, of Mind, that obsessed Huang-po. His teachings are well summarized by his biographer Pei Hsiu, who declared: "Holding in esteem only the intuitive method of the Highest Vehicle, which cannot be communicated in words, he taught nothing but the doctrine of the One Mind; holding that there is nothing else to teach, in that both mind and substance are void. . . . To those who have realized the nature of Reality, there is nothing old or new, and conceptions of shallowness and depth are meaningless. Those who speak of it do not attempt to explain it, establish no sects, and open no doors or windows. That which is before you is it. Begin to reason about it and you will at once fall into error."5 He seems to have been preoccupied with the issue of transmission even during the early days of studying under Huai-hai. His very first question to the older master reportedly was "How did the early Ch'an masters guide their followers?" Huai-hai answered this very un-Ch'an question with silence, an implied rebuke. When Huang-po pressed the point, Huai-hai called him a disappointing disciple and said he had best beware or he (Huang-po) would be the man who lost Ch'an.6 In a later episode, however, Huai-hai designates Huang-po as a successor in Dharma, via a famous transmission exchange in which Huang- po finally demonstrates wordless communication. _One day Huai-hai asked Huang-po, "Where have you been?" The answer was that he had been at the foot of the Ta-hsiung Mountain picking mushrooms. Huai-hai continued, "Have you seen any tigers?" Huang-po immediately roared like a tiger. Huai-hai picked up an ax as if to chop the tiger. Huang-po suddenly slapped Huai-hai's face. Huai-hai laughed heartily, and then returned to his temple and said to the assembly, "At the foot of the Ta-hsiung Mountain there is a tiger. You people should watch out. I have already been bitten today_."7 _ _This enigmatic utterance by Huai-hai has been taken by many to signify that Huang-po was being acknowledged as a worthy being, perhaps even a successor. The scholar Chang Chung-yuan has observed that the genius of this response was its freedom from the trap of logical assertion or negation.8 The act signified freedom from the alternatives of words or silence. Could it be that with this incident we have finally captured a wordless transmission? Huang-po also had a number of exchanges in later years with Nan-ch'uan (738-824), another of his seniors who had studied at the feet of old Ma-tsu. As the story is reported in _The Transmission of the Lamp_: _Some time later Huang-po was with Nan-ch'uan. All the monks in Nan- ch'uan's monastery were going out to harvest cabbage. Nan-ch'uan asked Huang-po, "Where are you going?" Huang-po answered, "I am going to pick cabbage." Nan-ch'uan went on, "What do you use to pick cabbage?" Huang- po lifted his sickle. Nan-ch'uan remarked, "You take the objective position as a guest, but you do not know how to preside as a host in the subjective position." Huang-po thereupon knocked on the ground three times with his sickle.9 _ When Blofeld translates this puzzling episode from _On the Transmission of Mind_, he comments that he has been unable to find a modern Zen master who could explain its meaning.10 However, Nan-ch'uan's final remark questions the degree of Huang-po's enlightenment, and some assume the latter knocked on the ground to signify defeat.11 As did other masters, Huang-po also employed silence as a teaching device, using it to teach wordless insight by example. One particularly pointed story involves none other than his biographer, the official Pei Hsiu. In Pei Hsiu's introduction to his transcript of Huang-po's teachings he says that they first met in 843 when he invited the master to lecture at Lung-hsing Temple in Chung-ling, the district which he governed. Six years later, in 849, the governor was in charge of Wan- ling, and he again invited the master to come and teach, this time at the local K'ai-yan temple.12 When Huang-po arrived in Wan-ling, for what was to be the second teaching session with Pei Hsiu, the story says that the governor made the mistake of presenting the master with a written exposition of the teachings of Ch'an. Huang-po greeted this with silence, his "exposition" of Ch'an. _The Prime Minister invited the Master to the city and presented his own written interpretation of Ch'an to him. The Master took it and put it on the table. He did not read it. After a short silence, he asked the Prime Minister, "Do you understand?" The minister answered, "I do not understand." The Master said, "It would be better if you could understand immediately through inner experience. If it is expressed in words, it won't be our teaching._"13_ _ _The Transmission of the Lamp_ reports that after this episode at Wan- ling, the spirit of Huang-po's school became widespread south of the Yangtze River.14 This exchange brings out the essence of Huang-po's concerns. His most insistent conviction was that Ch'an cannot be taught, that it must be somehow gained intuitively. He was contemptuous of conceptual thought, believing it to be the greatest hindrance to achieving intuitive insight. The problem is the mistaken belief that Zen can somehow be taught and understood if only one grasps the concepts. But concepts only serve to obstruct intuition; Zen intuition can work only outside concepts. As Huang-po phrased it: _Since Zen was first transmitted, it has never taught that men should seek for learning or form concepts. "Studying the Way" is just a figure of speech. It is a method of arousing people's interest in the early stages of their development. In fact, the Way is not something which can be studied. Study leads to the retention of concepts and so the Way is entirely misunderstood.15 _ The use of the rational mind in the study of Ch'an is only meaningful at the beginning. But once the fish of intuitive insight has been snared in the net of the rational mind's ken, the net must be discarded. Elsewhere he likens the extended use of analytical thought to the shoveling of dung.16 Concepts, it turns out, are only one of the mind's many constructs. The mind also provides our perception of concrete objects, thereby "creating" them to suit its needs. _Hills are hills. Water is water. Monks are monks. Laymen are laymen. But these mountains, these rivers, the whole world itself, together with the sun, moon, and stars--not one of them exists outside your minds! . . . Phenomena do not arise independently, but rely upon (the mental) environment (we create).17 _ Since reality is created by the mind, we will never know what is "real" and what is illusion. Examples of this are commonplace. The electron is both a wave and a particle, depending upon our point of view. Which is "reality"? Furthermore, concepts limit. By treating the world using rational constructs, we force it into a limited cage. But when we deal with it directly, it is much more complex and authentic. To continue the example, the electron may be something much more complex than either a wave or a particle, since it behaves at times like either or both. It may in fact be something for which our rationality-bound mind has no "concept." The illusory world we think we see around us, deceptively brought to us by our untrustworthy senses, leads us to conceptual thought and to logical categories as a means to attempt its "understanding." The resulting intellectual turmoil is just the opposite of the tranquility that is Ch'an. But avoidance of conceptual thought leads to a serene, direct, and meaningful understanding of the world around us, without unsettling mental involvement. _Ordinary people all indulge in conceptual thought based on environmental phenomena, hence they feel desire and hatred. To eliminate environmental phenomena, just put an end to your conceptual thinking. When this ceases, environmental phenomena are void; and when these are void, thought ceases. But if you try to eliminate environment without first putting a stop to conceptual thought, you will not succeed, but merely increase its power to disturb you.18 _ What is worse, reliance on misleading perception blocks out our experience of our own pure mind. _People in the world cannot identify their own mind. They believe that what they see, or hear, or feel, or know, is mind. They are blocked by the visual, the auditory, the tactile, and the mental, so they cannot see the brilliant spirit of their original mind.19 _When he was asked why Zen students should not form concepts as other people do, he replied, "Concepts are related to the senses, and when feeling takes place, wisdom is shut out."20 Huang-po is so adamant against the deceiving world of the senses he even comes down hard on the pleasures of the gourmet. _Thus, there is sensual eating and wise eating. When the body suffers the pangs of hunger and accordingly you provide it with food, but without greed, that is called wise eating. On the other hand, if you gluttonously delight in purity and flavour, you are permitting the distinctions which arise from wrong thinking. Merely seeking to gratify the organ of taste without realizing when you have taken enough is called sensual eating.21 _ The point here seems to be that the use of the senses for pleasure is an abuse and distracts one from the illusion of the world, which itself obscures our mind from us. The ideal man he describes in terms of one who can remain passive even when confronted by a manifestation of good or of evil. He commends the person who has the character to remain aloof, even when in the Buddhist heaven or the Buddhist hell: _If he should behold the glorious sight of all the Buddhas coming to welcome him, surrounded by every kind of gorgeous manifestation, he would feel no desire to approach them. If he should behold all sorts of horrific forms surrounding him, he would experience no terror. He would just be himself, oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the Absolute. He would have attained the state of unconditioned being.22 _ Truth is elusive. It is impossible to find it by looking for it. And the world of the senses and the conceptual thought it engenders are actually impediments to discovering real truth. He provides an analogy in the story of a man who searches abroad for something that he had all along. _Suppose a warrior, forgetting that he was already wearing his pearl on his forehead, were to seek for it elsewhere, he could travel the whole world without finding it. But if someone who knew what was wrong were to point it out to him, the warrior would immediately realize that the pearl had been there all the time.23 _He concludes that the warrior's finding his pearl had nothing to do with his searching for it, just as the final realization of intuitive wisdom has nothing to do with the graduated practice of the traditional Buddhists. _So, if you students of the Way are mistaken about your own real Mind . . . you will indulge in various achievements and practices and expect to attain realization by such graduated practices. But, even after aeons of diligent searching, you will not be able to attain to the Way. These methods cannot be compared to the sudden elimination of conceptual thought, the certain knowledge that there is nothing at all which has absolute existence, nothing on which to lay hold, nothing on which to rely, nothing in which to abide, nothing subjective or objective. It is by preventing the rise of conceptual thought that you will realize Bodhi (enlightenment); and, when you do, you will just be realizing the Buddha who has always existed in your own Mind!24 _ The traditional practices neither help nor hinder finding the way, since they are unrelated to the final flash of sudden enlightenment-- which is in your mind from the beginning, ready to be released. What then did he teach, if there is nothing to be taught? The answer seems to be to stop seeking, for only then does wisdom come. Furthermore, to study a doctrine of nonattachment puts you in the compromising position of becoming attached to nonattachment itself. _If you students of the Way wish to become Buddhas, you need study no doctrines whatever, but learn only how to avoid seeking for and attaching yourselves to anything. . . . Relinquishment of everything is the Dharma, and he who understands this is a Buddha, but the relinquishment of ALL delusions leaves no Dharma on which to lay hold.25 _ But just how does Huang-po manage to practice what he preaches? _. . . [M]ost students of Zen cling to all sorts of sounds and forms. Why do they not copy me by letting each thought go as though it were nothing, or as though it were a piece of rotten wood, a stone, or the cold ashes of a dead fire? Or else, by just making whatever slight response is suited to each occasion?26 _ His final admonitions were organized by Pei Hsiu and summarized in the following list, reported as Huang-po's answer to the question of what guidance he had to offer those who found his teaching difficult. _ I have NOTHING to offer. . . . All you need to remember are the following: First, learn how to be entirely unreceptive to sensations arising from external forms, thereby purging your bodies of receptivity to externals. Second, learn not to pay attention to any distinctions between this and that arising from your sensations, thereby purging your bodies of useless discernments between one phenomenon and another. Third, take great care to avoid discriminating in terms of pleasant and unpleasant sensations, thereby purging your bodies of vain discriminations. Fourth, avoid pondering things in your mind, thereby purging your bodies of discriminatory cognition.27 _ Huang-po struggled mightily with the problem of transmission. Since the doctrine was passed "mind-to-mind," he was obliged to find a transmission that somehow circumvented the need for words, something to bring a novice up against his own original nature. His contribution here was not revolutionary: He mainly advocated the techniques perfected by Ma-tsu, including roars and shouts, beatings, calling out a disciple's name unexpectedly, or just remaining silent at a critical moment to underscore the inability of words to assist. He also used the technique of continually contradicting a pupil, until the pupil finally realized that all his talking had been just so many obscuring concepts. But just what was this mind that was being transmitted? His answer was that nothing was transmitted, since the whole point was just to jar loose the intuition of the person being "taught." _Once Huang-po was asked, "If you say that mind can be transmitted, then how can you say it is nothing?" He answered, "To achieve nothing is to have the mind transmitted to you." The questioner pressed, "If there is nothing and no mind, then how can it be transmitted?" Huang-po answered, "You have heard the expression 'transmission of the mind' and so you think there must be something transmitted. You are wrong. Thus Bodhidharma said that when the nature of the mind is realized, it is not possible to express it verbally. Clearly, then, nothing is obtained in the transmission of the mind, or if anything is obtained, it is certainly not knowledge_."28 He finally concludes that the subject cannot really even be discussed, since there are no terms for the process that transpires. Just as _sunyata_--that "emptiness" or Void whose existence means that conceptual thought is empty and rational constructs inadequate--is not something that can be transmitted as a concept, so too is the Dharma or teaching, as well as Mind, that essence we share with a larger reality. Even statements that concepts are pointless must fall back on language and consequently are actually themselves merely make-do approximations, as are all descriptions of the process of transmission. He finally gives up on words entirely, declaring that none of the terms he has used has any meaning. _A transmission of Void cannot be made through words. A transmission in concrete terms cannot be the Dharma. . . In fact, however, Mind is not Mind and transmission is not really transmission.29 _ He was working on the very real problem of the transmission of understanding that operates in a part of the mind where speech and logic cannot enter. As John Wu has pointed out, in a sense Huang-po had come back full circle to the insights of Chuang Tzu: good and evil are meaningless; intuitive knowledge is more profound than speech-bound logic; there is an underlying unity (for Chuang Tzu it was the Tao or Way; for Huang-po, the Universal Mind) that represents the ineffable absolute.30 In effect, Huang-po laid it all out, cleared the way, and defined Ch'an once and for all. The Perennial Philosophy was never more strongly stated. The experimental age of Ch'an thus drew to a close, its job finished. With his death at the midpoint of the ninth century, there was little more to be invented.31 It was time now for Ch'an to formalize its dialectic, as well as to meet society and make its mark in the world. The first was taken care of by Huang-po's star pupil, Lin-chi, and the second was precipitated by the forces of destiny. The death of Huang-po coincided with a critical instant in Chinese history whose consequences for future generations were enormous. Once before Chinese politics had affected Ch'an, producing a situation in which Southern Ch'an would steal the march on Northern Ch'an. And now another traumatic episode in Chinese affairs would effectively destroy all Buddhist sects except Southern Ch'an, leaving the way clear for this pursuit of intuitive wisdom--once relegated to wandering teachers of _dhyana_--to become the only vital Buddhist sect left in China. As noted previously, resentment toward Buddhism had always smoldered in Chinese society. Periodically the conservative Chinese tried to drive this foreign belief system from their soil, or failing that, at least to bring it under control. The usual complaints revolved around the monasteries' holdings of tax-free lands, their removal of able-bodied men and women from society into nonproductive monastic life, and the monastic vows of celibacy so antithetical to the Chinese ideals of the family. The Ch'an monasteries, deliberately or not, worked hard to defuse many of these complaints. Indeed, some would say that Ch'an managed to change Buddhism into something the Chinese could partially stomach. Ch'anists were just the opposite of parasitical on society, since they practiced Po-chang Huai-hai's injunction of a day without work being a day without food. Also, the unthinking piety of traditional Buddhists was reviled by Ch'anists. Furthermore, Ch'an dispensed with much of the rigmarole and paraphernalia favored by the Buddhist sects that stuck to its Indian origins more closely. The resentment felt toward Buddhists was summarized in a document issued in 819 by a scholar-bureaucrat named Han Yu.32 His recital of Buddhism's failings came down particularly hard on the fact that the Buddha had not been Chinese. Han Yu advocated a complete suppression of this pernicious establishment: "Restore its people to human living! Burn its books! And convert its buildings to human dwellings!"33 As resentment toward the worldly influence of Buddhism grew during the ninth century, there came to power an emperor who decided to act. The Emperor Wu-tsang (r. 841-46) is now thought to have gone mad as a prelude to his persecution of the Buddhists. But his edicts were effective nonetheless. The state had begun tightening its grip on Buddhism when he came into power in 841, but in August 845 he issued the edict that ultimately had the effect of destroying traditional Buddhism and urbanized Northern Ch'an in China. Over a period of two years he destroyed 4,600 big temples and monasteries and over 40,000 smaller temples and retreats. He freed 150,000 male and female slaves or temple attendants and evicted some 265,000 monks and nuns, forcing them back into secular life. (This was out of a total Chinese population estimated to be around 27 million.) And not incidentally, the state reclaimed several million acres of property that had belonged to the monasteries. The effect of this was to obliterate virtually all the great Buddhist establishments, including the Buddhist strongholds in the capitals of Chang-an and Loyang, which were reduced to only two temples and thirty monks in each of the two cities.34 The irony of the Great Persecution was that it actually seemed to invigorate Southern Ch'an. For one thing, these rural Ch'an teachers had long been iconoclasts and outcasts themselves, as they disowned ostentatious temples and even the scriptures. Almost as much a philosophy as a religion, Southern Ch'an had long known how to do without imperial favor and largess. And when a further edict came down demanding that all Buddhist paraphernalia, including statues and paintings, be burned, the outcast Ch'an monasteries had the least to lose, since they had even done a bit of burning themselves--if we are to believe the story of Tan-hsia (738-824), a famous Ch'an monk who once burned a Buddhist statue for warmth. Southern Ch'an teachers just melted for a time back into secular life, from which they had never been far in any case.35 The result of all this was that after 846 the only sect of Buddhism with any strength at all was rural Ch'an. Chinese Buddhism literally became synonymous with Southern Ch'an--a far cry from the almost fugitive existence of the sect in earlier years. And when Buddhism became fashionable again during the Sung, Southern Ch'an became a house religion, as Northern had once been. The result was that Ch'an gradually lost its iconoclastic character. But out of this last phase of Ch'an developed one of the most powerful tools ever for enlightenment, the famous Zen koan, whose creation preserved something out of the dynamism of Ch'an's early centuries. PART III SECTARIANISM AND THE KOAN . . . in which the Ch'an movement diversifies into a variety of schools, each beholden to a master or masters advocating an individualized path to enlightenment. From this period of personality and experimentation gradually emerge two main Ch'an paths, the Lin-chi and the Ts'ao-tung (later called Rinzai and Soto in Japan). The Lin-chi school concludes that enlightenment can be precipitated in a prepared novice through shouts, jolts, and mental paradoxes. The Ts'ao-tung relies more heavily on the traditional practice of meditation to gradually release enlightenment. The faith grows in numbers, but quality declines. To maintain Ch'an's intellectual vigor, there emerges a new technique, called the koan, which uses episodes from Ch'an's Golden Age to challenge novices' mental complacency. This invention becomes the hallmark of the later Lin-chi sect, and through the refinement of the koan technique Ch'an enjoys a renaissance of creativity in China. Chapter Eleven LIN-CHI: FOUNDER OF RINZAI ZEN The Great Persecution of 845 brought to a close the creative Golden Age of Ch'an, while also leaving Ch'an as the dominant form of Chinese Buddhism. In the absence of an establishment Buddhism for Ch'an to distinguish itself against, the sect proceeded to evolve its own internal sectarianism. There arose what are today known as the "five houses," regional versions of Ch'an that differed in minor but significant ways.1 Yet there was no animosity among the schools, merely a friendly rivalry. In fact, the teachers themselves referred back to the prophecy attributed to Bodhidharma that the flower of _dhyana_ Buddhism would one day have five petals. The masters who founded the five schools were all individualists of idiosyncratic character. Yet the times were such that for the most part their flowers bloomed gloriously only a few decades before slowly fading. However, two of the sects did prosper and eventually went on to take over the garden. These two houses, the Lin-chi and the Ts'ao-tung, both were concerned with dialectics and became the forerunners of the two Zen sects (Rinzai and Soto) eventually to flourish in Japan. Of the two, the Lin-chi is most directly traceable back to the earlier masters, since its founder actually studied under the master Huang-po. The master known today as Lin-chi (d. 866?) was born in the prefecture of Nan-hua, in what today is Shantung province.2 He reportedly was brilliant, well behaved, and filled with the filial devotion expected of good Chinese boys. Drawn early to Buddhism, although not necessarily to Ch'an, he shaved his head and became a monk while still young. His early studies were of the sutras, as well as the _vinaya_ or Buddhist rules and the _sastra_ or commentaries. But in his early twenties he decided that he was more interested in intuitive wisdom than orthodoxy and consequently took the road in search of a master. Thus he arrived at the monastery of Huang-po already a fully ordained monk. But his learning was traditional and his personality that of a timorous fledgling monk. For three years he dutifully attended the master's sermons and practiced all the observances of the mountain community, but his advancement was minimal. Finally the head disciple suggested that he visit Huang-po for an interview to try to gain insight. The young man obligingly went in to see the master and asked him the standard opener: "What is the real meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West?" Huang-po's wordless response was to lay him low with a blow of his stick. Lin-chi scurried away in perplexity and related the story to the head disciple, who encouraged him to return, which he did twice more. But each time he received the same harsh reception. He was finally so demoralized that he announced plans to leave the monastery and seek enlightenment elsewhere. The head monk related this to Huang-po together with the opinion that this young novice showed significant promise. So when Lin-chi came to bid Huang-po farewell, the master sympathetically directed him to the monastery of a kindly nearby teacher, the master Ta-yu. Perhaps it was all planned, but when Lin-chi arrived at the second monastery and related his unhappy treatment at the hands of Huang-po the master Ta-yu listened patiently and then declared, "Huang-po treated you with great compassion. He merely wanted to relieve your distress." Upon hearing this Lin-chi suddenly understood that Huang-po was transmitting the wordless insight to him, the understanding that Ch'an lies not in the words produced in the abbot's room but rather in the realization of his intuitive mind. It suddenly was all so obvious that the young monk could not contain his joy and declared, "So Huang- po's Buddhism is actually very simple; there's nothing to it after all!" This struck the master Ta-yu as either impertinent or a significant breakthrough, so he grabbed Lin-chi and yelled, "You scamp! A minute ago you complained that Huang-po's teaching was impossible to understand and now you say there is nothing to it. What is it you just realized? Speak quickly!" (Only in a spontaneous utterance is there real, uncalculated evidence of enlightenment.) Lin-chi's answer was to pummel Ta-yu in the ribs three times with his fist. The older master then discharged him (or perhaps kicked him out) with the observation, "Your teacher is Huang-po, and therefore you do not concern me." Thus the enlightened young novice trudged back up the mountain to Huang-po's monastery. The master greeted him with the puzzled observation: "Haven't you come back a bit too soon? You only just left." In response Lin-chi bowed and said, "It's because you've been so kind to me that I came back so quickly," and he proceeded to relate the story of his sudden enlightenment. To which Huang-po declared, "What a big mouth that old man has. The next time I see him I'll give him a taste of my staff." To this Lin-chi yelled, "Why wait! I can give it to you now," and proceeded to slap the master's face. The startled Huang-po declared, "This crazy monk is plucking the tiger's whiskers." Whereupon Lin-chi emitted the first of what was to be a lifetime of shouts, affirming his wordless insight. The satisfied Huang-po called an attendant and said, "Take this crazy fellow to the assembly hall." This is a perfect example of "sudden" enlightenment that took many years to achieve. Lin-chi had been a plodding, earnest young man until the moment of his "sudden" enlightenment, which occurred over a seemingly uncalculated remark by a teacher not even his own master. In fact, all Huang-po had done was to assail him with a staff. But Lin-chi was transformed suddenly from a milksop to the founder of a school, probably the greatest radicalization since the Apostle Paul was struck down on the road to Damascus.3 Still, Lin-chi's "sudden" enlightenment had come about at the end of a highly disciplined period of preparation. As he later described it: _In bygone days I devoted myself to the _vinaya_ and also delved into the _sutras _and _sastras_. Later, when I realized that they were medicines for salvation and displays of doctrines in written words, I once and for all threw them away, and searching for the Way, I practiced meditation. Still later I met great teachers. Then it was, with my Dharma Eye becoming clear, that I could discern all the old teachers under Heaven and tell the false ones from the true. It is not that I understood from the moment I was born of my mother, but that, after exhaustive investigation and grinding discipline, in an instant I knew of myself.4 _ Like a reformed addict, he railed most against his own recent practices. He proceeded to denounce all the trappings of Buddhism, even the Ch'an Patriarchs themselves, as he shattered the chains of his former beliefs: _Followers of the Way, if you want insight into Dharma as is, just don't be taken in by the deluded views of others. Whatever you encounter, either within or without, slay it at once: on meeting a buddha slay the buddha, on meeting a patriarch slay the patriarch, on meeting an arhat slay the arhat, on meeting your parents slay your parents, on meeting your kinsman slay your kinsman, and you attain emancipation. By not cleaving to things, you freely pass through.5 _ After his enlightenment, he had many exchanges with Huang-po in which he came off ahead as often as not. It is also interesting that many of the interactions involved the manual labor of the monastery, an indication of the significance of work in Ch'an life. One famous joust between Lin-chi and Huang-po went as follows: _One day Master Lin-chi went with Huang-po to do some work in which all the monks participated. Lin-chi followed his master who, turning his head, noticed that Lin-chi was carrying nothing in his hand. "Where is your hoe?" "Somebody took it away." "Come here: let us discuss something," commanded Huang-po and as Lin- chi drew nearer, he thrust his hoe into the ground and continued, "There is no one in the world who can pick up my hoe." However, Lin-chi seized the tool, lifted it up, and exclaimed, "How then could it be in my hands?" "Today we have another hand with us; it is not necessary for me to join in." And Huang-po returned to the temple.6 _ This story can be interpreted many ways. John Wu says, "Obviously he was using the hoe as a pointer to the great function of teaching and transmitting the lamp of Ch'an. . . . [This was] a symbolic way of saying that in a mysterious manner the charge was now in his hands."7 However, as Freud once remarked concerning the celebrated phallic symbolism of his stogie, "Sometimes, madam, it's just a cigar," and one suspects that in this little slapstick episode, the hoe might possibly be just a hoe. Another exchange between Huang-po and Lin-chi may have more dialectical significance. According to the story: _One day Huang-po ordered all the monks of the temple to work in the tea garden. He himself was the last to arrive. Lin-chi greeted him, but stood there with his hands resting on the hoe. "Are you tired?" asked Huang-po "I just started working; how can you say that I am tired?" Huang-po immediately lifted his stick and struck Lin-chi, who then seized the stick, and with a push, made his master fall to the ground. Huang-po called the supervisor to help him up. After doing so, the supervisor asked, "Master, how can you let such a madman insult you like that?" Huang-po picked up the stick and struck the supervisor. Lin-chi, digging the ground by himself, made this remark: "Let all other places use cremation; here I will bury you alive._"8_ _ Of Lin-chi's final quip, which tends to take the edge off a really first-rate absurdist anecdote, John Wu makes the following observation, "This was a tremendous utterance, the first authentic roaring, as it were, of a young lion. It was tantamount to declaring that his old conventional self was now dead and buried, with only the True Self living in him; that this death may and should take place long before one's physical decease; that it is when this death has taken place that one becomes one's True Self which, being unborn, cannot die. From that time on, there could no longer be any doubt in Huang-po's mind that his disciple was thoroughly enlightened, destined to carry on and brighten the torch of Ch'an."9 Whether this is true or not, it does seem clear that Lin-chi's pronounced personality appealed to old Huang-po, who loved to match wits with him as he came and went around the monastery. He even allowed the young master liberties he denied others. For example, Lin-chi once showed up during the middle of a summer meditation retreat, something strictly forbidden. He then decided to leave before it was over, something equally unprecedented: _One day after half the summer session had already passed, Lin-chi went up the mountain to visit his master Huang-po whom he found reading a sutra. Lin-chi said to him: "I thought you were the perfect man, but here you are apparently a dull old monk, swallowing black beans [Chinese characters]." Lin-chi stayed only a few days and then bid farewell to Huang-po, who said: "You came here after the summer session had started, and now you are leaving before the summer session is over." "I came here simply to visit you, Master!" Without ado, Huang-po struck him and chased him away. After having walked a few li, Lin-chi began to doubt his enlightenment in Ch'an, so he returned to Huang-po for the rest of the summer.10 _ Some time after Lin-chi received the seal of enlightenment from Huang- po, he decided to go his own way and departed for the province of Hopei, where he became the priest of a small temple on the banks of a river. This little temple was called "Overlooking the Ford," or _lin- chi_ in Chinese, and it was from this locale that he took his name. After he was there for a time, however, some local fighting broke out, forcing him to abandon his pastoral riverbank location. (This disturbance may well have been connected with the disruptions of the 845 persecution of Buddhism.) But even when in the middle of a war he seems to have always been a man of Ch'an. There is an episode that strongly resembles the eighteenth-century essayist Dr. Samuel Johnson's kicking a stone to refute Berkeley's proposition that matter is nonexistent: _One day the Master entered an army camp to attend a feast. At the gate he saw a staff officer. Pointing to an open-air pillar, he asked: "Is this secular or sacred?" The officer had no reply. Striking the pillar, the Master said: "Even if you could speak, this is still only a wooden post." Then he went in.11 _ Fortunately, Ch'an was not a sect that required a lot of paraphernalia, and Lin-chi merely moved into the nearby town, where the grand marshal donated his house for a temple. He even hung up a plaque with the name "Lin-chi," just to make the master feel at home. But things may have heated up too much, for Lin-chi later traveled south to the prefecture of Ho, where the governor, Counselor Wang, honored him as a master. There is a telling conversation between the two that reveals much about the teaching of Ch'an at the time. Apparently the Ch'anists had completely abandoned even any pretense of traditional Buddhism--again a fortuitous development, considering traditional Buddhism's imminent destruction. _One day the Counselor Wang visited the Master. When he met the Master in front of the Monks' Hall, he asked: "Do the monks of this monastery read the sutras?" "No, they don't read sutras," said the Master. "Then do they learn meditation?" asked the Counselor. "No, they don't learn meditation," answered the Master. "If they neither read sutras nor learn meditation, what in the world are they doing?" asked the Counselor. "All I do is make them become buddhas and patriarchs," said the Master.12 _ Lin-chi eventually traveled on, finally settling at the Hsing-hua temple in Taming prefecture, where he took up his final residence. It was here that a record of his sermons was transcribed by a "humble heir" named Ts'un-chiang. The result was _The Record of Lin-chi_, one of the purest exercises in the dialectics of the nondialectical understanding. But, as Heinrich Dumoulin observed, "Zen has never existed in pure experience only, without admixture of theoretical teachings or methodical practice, as it has sometimes been idealized. It could not exist in that fashion, for mysticism, like all other human experience, is dependent on the actual conditions of human life."13 Indeed, Lin-chi was one of the first to develop what might be called a dialectic of irrationality. He loved categories and analysis in the service of nonconceptual inquiry, and what he created were guides to the uncharted seas of the intuitive mind. Lin-chi is best known for his use of the shout. He shared the concern of Huang-po and Ma-tsu with the problem of wordless transmission and to their repertory of beatings and silences he added the yell, another way to affirm insights that cannot be reasoned. We may speculate that the shout was rather like a watered-down version of the beating, requiring less effort but still able to startle at a critical instant.14 He seems to have been particularly fond of classifying things into groups of four, and one of his most famous classifications was of the shout itself. He once demonstrated the shout to a hapless monk as follows: _The Master asked a monk: "Sometimes a shout is like the jeweled sword of a spirit King [i.e., extremely hard and durable]; sometimes a shout is like the golden-haired lion crouching on the ground [i.e., strong, taut, and powerful]; sometimes a shout is like a weed-tipped fishing pole [i.e., probing and attracting the unwary]; and sometimes a shout doesn't function as a shout. How do you understand this?" As the monk fumbled for an answer, Lin-chi gave a shout.15 _ His philosophy of the shout as a device for cutting off sequential reasoning was thus demonstrated by example. But the question those who relate this story never resolve is: Which of the four shouts was the shout he used on the student? [John Wu in _The Golden Age of Zen _speculates that this shout was of the first category, since it was meant to "cut off" the monk's sequential thought, but that seems a rather simplistic mixing of the metaphorical with the concrete.16) Lin-chi also was not averse to the use of the stick in the pursuit of reality, as the following example illustrates. The story also shows that the use of the stick was meaningful only if it was unexpected. _Once the Master addressed the assembly. "Listen, all of you! He who wants to learn Dharma must never worry about the loss of his own life. When I was with Master Huang-po I asked three times for the real meaning of Buddhism, and three times I was struck as if tall reeds whipped me in the wind. I want those blows again, but who can give them to me now?" A monk came forth from the crowd, answering: "I can give them to you!" Master Lin-chi picked up a stick and handed it to him. When the monk tried to grab it, the Master struck him instead.17 _ There also is a story indicating that Lin-chi believed that when the shout failed to work, the stick might be required. _The Master took the high seat in the Hall. A monk asked, "What about the cardinal principle of the Buddha-dharma?" The Master raised his whisk. The monk shouted. The Master struck him. Another monk asked: "What about the cardinal principle of the Buddha- dharma?" Again the Master raised his whisk. The monk shouted. The Master also shouted. The monk faltered; the Master struck him.18 _ Yet another series of exchanges sounds a similar theme. _The Master asked a monk, "Where do you come from?" The monk shouted. The master saluted him and motioned him to sit down. The monk hestitated. The Master hit him. Seeing another monk coming, the Master raised his whisk. The monk bowed low. The Master hit him. Seeing still another monk coming, the Master again raised his whisk. The monk paid no attention. The Master hit him too.19 _He was also challenged by a nun, one of the few recorded instances of a master actually matching wits with a woman who had taken Ch'an orders. _The Master asked a nun: "Well-come or ill-come?" The nun shouted. "Go on, go on, speak!" cried the Master, taking up his stick. Again the nun shouted. The Master hit her.20 _ What Lin-chi also brought to Ch'an was a dialectical inquiry into the relationship between master and pupil, together with a similar analysis of the mind states that lead to enlightenment. He seems remarkably sophisticated for the ninth century, and indeed we would be hard pressed to find this kind of psychological analysis anywhere in the West that early. The puzzling, contradictory quality about all this is that Lin-chi believed fervently in intuitive intelligence, and in the uselessness of words--even warning that questions were irrelevant: _Does anyone have a question? If so, let him ask it now. But the instant you open your mouth you are already way off.21 _ Among his dialectical creations were various fourfold categorizations of the intangible. We have already seen his four categories of the shout. He also created the four categories of relationship between subject and object, also sometimes called the Four Processes of Liberation from Subjectivity and Objectivity. Some believe this served to structure the "four standpoints or points of view which Lin-chi used in instructing his students."22 Lin-chi's original proposition, the basis of all the later commentary, is provided in _The Record of Lin- chi _as follows: _At the evening gathering the Master addressed the assembly, saying: "Sometimes I take away man and do not take away the surroundings; sometimes I take away the surroundings and do not take away man; sometimes I take away both man and the surroundings; sometimes I take away neither man nor the surroundings._"23_ _As Chang Chung-yuan describes these four arrangements, the first is to "take away the man but not his objective situation," i.e., to take away all interpretation and just experience the world without subjective associations.24 (This is quite similar to the approach of the Japanese haiku poem, in which a description of something is provided completely devoid of interpretation or explicit emotional response.) The second arrangement is to let the man remain but take away objectivity. As John Wu interprets this, "In the second stage, people of normal vision, who see mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers, must be reminded of the part that their own mind contributes to the appearance of things, and that what they naively take for objectivity is inextricably mixed with subjectivity. Once aware of subjectivity, one is initiated into the first stages of Ch'an, when one no longer sees mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers."25 This is merely the Ch'an commonplace that "non-attachment or objectivity liberates one's self from bondage to the outside and thus leads to enlightenment."26 As Dumoulin describes these, "In the first and second stages, illusion departs first from the subject and then from the object; clinging to subjective intellectual perception and to the objective world is overcome."27 Lin-chi's third stage is to "take away both the man and his objective situation. In other words, it is liberation from . . . the attachments of both subjectivity and objectivity. Lin-chi's famous 'Ho!' . . . often served this purpose."28 In a blow of a master's staff or a shout there is nothing one can grasp, either objectively or subjectively. This is the next-to-last stage in the progression toward liberation from the mind's tyranny. In the fourth stage we find the final condition, in which objectivity and subjectivity cease to be distinguishable. What this means is that there is no intellectuation at all, that the world simply is. As Dumoulin declares, "reality is comprehended in its final oneness."29 Or as the story says: Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; during the study of Zen, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers; but when there finally is enlightenment, mountains are again mountains and rivers are rivers. In this final state the distinction and confrontation of subject and object dissolve, as we are finally at one with the nameless world. Another of Lin-chi's famous dialectical categories is his "Fourfold Relationship possible Between Questioner and Answerer or Between Guest and Host." The point of the structure he sets up is to elucidate the interaction of master and novice, but he does so using metaphor of host and guest--where the host represents the universal Self and the guest the ego-form self.30 Lin-chi's sermon on the subject went as follows: _A true student gives a shout, and to start with holds out a sticky lacquer tray. The teacher, not discerning that this is an objective circumstance, goes after it and performs a lot of antics with it. The student again shouts but still the teacher is unwilling to let go. This is . . . called "the guest examines the host." Sometimes a teacher will proffer nothing, but the instant a student asks a question, robs him of it. The student, having been robbed, resists to the death and will not let go; this is called "the host examines the guest." Sometimes a student comes forth before a teacher in conformity with a state of purity. The teacher, discerning that this is an objective circumstance, seizes it and flings it into a pit. "What an excellent teacher!" exclaims the student, and the teacher replies, "Bah! You can't tell good from bad!" Thereupon the student makes a deep bow; this is called "the host examines the host." Or again, a student will appear before a teacher wearing a cangue and bound with chains. The teacher fastens on still more chains and cangues for him. The student is so delighted that he can't tell what is what: this is called "the guest examines the guest._"31_ _In the first category, according to Chang Chung-yuan, the ego meets the universal Self.32 In the second category the universal Self encounters the ego-form self. In the third category, the universal Self of one meets the universal Self of another, and in the fourth category the ego of one encounters the ego of another. Or if we are to interpret this in the concrete, in the first encounter, an enlightened master meets an unenlightened novice; in the second an enlightened novice meets an unenlightened master (which did happen); in the third an enlightened master meets an enlightened novice; and in the fourth category an unenlightened master meets an unenlightened novice, to the mutual delusion of both.33 Lin-chi has been called the most powerful master in the entire history of Ch'an, and not without reason. His mind was capable of operating at several levels simultaneously, enabling him to overlay very practical instruction with a comprehensive dialectic. He believed in complete spontaneity, total freedom of thought and deed, and a teaching approach that has been called the "lightning" method--because it was swift and unpredictable. He was uncompromising in his approach, and he was also extremely critical of the state of Ch'an in his time--a criticism probably justified. He found both monks and masters wanting. It seems that Ch' an had become fashionable, with the result that there were many masters who were more followers of the trend than followers of the Way. So whereas Huang-po often railed against other sects of Buddhism, Lin-chi reserved his ire for other followers of Ch'an (there being few other Buddhist sects left to criticize). He even denounced his own students, who often mimicked his shouting without perceiving his discernment in its use. He finally had to set standards for this, announcing to the assembly one day that henceforth only those who could tell the enlightened from the unenlightened would have the right to shout. _ "You all imitate my shouting," he said, "but let me give you a test now. One person comes out from the eastern hall. Another person comes out from the western hall. At their meeting, they simultaneously shout. Do you possess enough discernment to distinguish the guest from the host [i.e., the unenlightened from the enlightened]? If you have no such discernment, you are forbidden hereafter to imitate my shouting.34 _ His major concern seems to have been that his students resist intellection. Lin-chi himself was able to speculate philosophically while still a natural man, using conceptual thought only when it served his purpose. But perhaps his students could not, for he constantly had to remind them that striving and learning were counterproductive. _"Followers of Tao!" Lin-chi said, "the way of Buddhism admits of no artificial effort; it only consists in doing the ordinary things without any fuss--going to the stool, making water, putting on clothes, taking a meal, sleeping when tired. Let the fools laugh at me. Only the wise know what I mean._"35_ _Or as he said at another time: _The moment a student blinks his eyes, he's already way off. The moment he tries to think, he's already differed. The moment he arouses a thought, he's already deviated. But for the man who understands, it's always right here before his eyes.36 _ The problem, he believed, was that too many teachers had started "teaching" and explaining rather than forcing students to experience truth for themselves. Thus these teachers had no right to criticize their monks, since they themselves had failed in their responsibility. _There are teachers all around who can't distinguish the false from the true. When students come asking about . . . the [objective] surroundings and the [subjective] mind, the blind old teachers immediately start explaining to them. When they're railed at by the students they grab their sticks and hit them, [shouting], "What insolent talk!" Obviously you teachers yourselves are without an eye so you've no right to get angry with them.37 _ And finally, in his old age, Lin-chi became something of a monument himself, a testing point for enlightenment in a world where true teachers were rare. He even complained about it. _Hearing everywhere of old man Lin-chi, you come here intending to bait me with difficult questions and make it impossible for me to answer. Faced with a demonstration of the activity of my whole body, you students just stare blankly and can't move your mouths at all; you're at such a loss you don't know how to answer me. You go around everywhere thumping your own chests and whacking your own ribs, saying, "I understand Ch'an! I understand the Way!" But let two or three of you come here and you can't do a thing. Bah! Carrying that body and mind of yours, you go around everywhere flapping your lips like winnowing fans and deceiving villagers.38 _His school prospered, becoming the leading expression of Ch'an in China as well as a vital force in the Zen that later arose among Japan's samurai. And his dialectical teachings became the philosophical basis for later Zen, something he himself probably would have deplored. (Later teachers seem to have given Lin-chi's categories more importance than he actually intended, for he professed to loathe systems and was in fact much more concerned with enlightenment as pure experience.) In any case, when he decided that his days were through he put on his finest robes, seated himself in the meditation posture, made a brief statement, and passed on. The year is said to have been 866 or 867. Chapter Twelve TUNG-SHAN AND TS'AO-SHAN: FOUNDERS OF SOTO ZEN _Tung-shan_ Virtually all the masters encountered up to this point have been traceable to Ma-tsu, descendant in Dharma of the legendary Huai-jang and his master, the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng. This was the line that became Japanese Rinzai Zen, many centuries later. However, Hui-neng had another follower, a shadowy figure remembered as Ch'ing-yuan Hsing-ssu (d. 740) whose line also was perpetuated to present-day Japan.1 His foremost pupil was Shih-t'ou (700-90), and a common description of the eighth-cen- tury Ch'an establishment was: "In Kiangsi the master was Ma-tsu; in Hunan the master was Shih-t'ou. People went back and forth between them all the time, and those who never met these two great masters were completely ignorant."2 Shih-t'ou jousted with Ma-tsu, and they often swapped students. Ma-tsu sent his pupils on their way with a wink and the advice that Shih-t'ou was "slippery."3 This legendary master was forebear of three of the five "houses" of Ch'an arising after the Great Persecution of 845, although the only one of the three surviving is the Ts'ao-tung, which arose during the later T'ang (618- 907) and early Five Dynasties (907-960) period and remains today as Japanese Soto. One of the cofounders of the Ts'ao-tung house was known as Tung-shan Liang-chieh (807-869), who was born in present day Chekiang but eventually found his way to what is now northern Kiangsi province.4 As did most great masters, he took Buddhist orders early, and one of the most enduring stories of his life has him confounding his elders--an event common to many spiritual biographies. He began as a novice in the Vinaya sect, an organization often more concerned with the letter of the law than its spirit. One day he was asked to recite the Heart Sutra, but when he came to the phrase "There is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind," he wonderingly touched his own face and then inquired of his master, "I have eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and so forth; how, then, can the sutra say there are no such things?"5 The Vinaya master was dumbfounded by his iconoclasm and suggested that his bent of mind would be more readily cultivated in the Ch'an sect. So off he went to Mt. Sung, where he subsequently was ordained at the precocious age of twenty-one. Afterward he traveled across China, typical for young monks of the age. Ironically enough, considering that his line eventually rivaled Ma- tsu's, his first stop was the monastery of Nan-ch'uan, one of the foremost disciples of Ma-tsu. As he arrived, Nan-ch'uan was announcing a memorial service to be conducted the next day on the anniversary of his master's death, a standard Chinese custom. _Nan-ch'uan remarked, "When we serve food for Master Ma-tsu tomorrow, I do wonder whether he will come for it." None of the monks made a reply but [Tung-shan] came forth out of the crowd and said, "As soon as he has companions he will come." Hearing this, Nan-ch'uan praised him: "Although this man is young, he is worthy of being trained.'' [Tung- shan] said to him, "Master, you should not make a slave out of an honorable person._"6_ _Tung-shan studied briefly with Nan-ch'uan making a name for himself in the process and then traveled on. He later landed at the monastery of a teacher named Yun-yen, but after a successful period of study he announced his intention to again continue down the road. Yun-yen, however, protested losing his star pupil. _"After you leave here, it will be very hard for us to see each other again," said Master Yun-yen. "It will be very hard for us not to see each other again," answered [Tung-shan]. . . . Then Yun-yen said to him, "You must be very careful, as you are carrying this great thing." [Tung-shan] was puzzled. Later when he was crossing the water and saw his image reflected, he suddenly understood the teaching of Yun-yen.7 _ By the year 860 Tung-shan had a monastery of his own and was besieged by disciples. He subsequently moved to Tung-shan (Mt. Tung) in what is today Kiangsi province, the locale that provided his historic name. His respect for Yun-yen's enigmatic wisdom was explained years later. _One day, when the Master was conducting the annual memorial service for Master Yun-yen, a monk asked him: "What instruction did you receive from the late Master Yun-yen?" "Although I was there with him, he gave me no instruction," answered the Master. "Then why should you conduct the memorial service for him, if he did not instruct you?" persisted the monk. . . . "It is neither for his moral character nor his teaching of Dharma that I respect him. What I consider important is that he never told me anything openly._"8_ _ Yet Tung-shan does not seem completely against the cultivation of enlightenment, as were some of the other, more radical Ch'anists. Take, for example, the following reported encounter: _A government officer wanted to know whether there was anyone approaching Ch'an through cultivation. The Master answered: "When you become a laborer, then there will be someone to do cultivation._"9_ _ The officer's question would have elicited a shout from Lin-chi, a blow from Huang-po, and advice from Chao-chou to go wash his rice bowl. Although Tung-shan may have avoided the deliberate absurdities of the Lin-chi masters, his utterances are often puzzling nonetheless. Part of the reason is that he preferred the metaphor to the concrete example. Unlike the repartee of the absurdist Lin-chi masters, his exchanges are not deliberately illogical. Instead we find a simple reluctance to say anything straight. But if you follow the symbolic language, you realize it is merely another clever way of never teaching with words, while still using language. His frequent speaking in metaphors can be appreciated by the following exchange, which uses language emeshed in symbols. _ Monk: "With what man of Tao should one associate, so that one will hear constantly what one has never heard?" The Master: "That which is under the same coverlet with you." Monk: "This is still what you, Master, can hear yourself. What is it that one will hear constantly which one has never heard?" The Master: "It is not the same as wood and stone." . . . Monk: "Who is he in our country that holds a sword in his hand?" The Master: "It is Ts'ao-shan." Monk: "Whom do you want to kill?" The Master: "All those who are alive will die." Monk: "When you happen to meet your parents, what should you do?" The Master: "Why should you have any choice?" Monk: "How about yourself?" The Master: "Who can do anything to me?" Monk: "Why should you not kill yourself, too?" The Master: "There is no place on which I can lay my hands._"10 The Ch'an teachers deliberately avoided specifics, since these might cause students to start worrying about the precise definition of words and end up bogged down in conceptual quandries, neglecting their real nature--which cannot be reached using words.11 But further than this, the monk thinks he will trap the master by asking him if his injunction to kill includes his own parents. (Remember Lin-chi's "On meeting your parents, slay your parents.") But Tung-shan answered by accusing the monk--indirectly--of making discriminations. As for self-murder, Tung- shan maintains his immaterial self-nature is indestructible.12 The dialectic of Tung-shan, subsequently elaborated by his star pupil, Ts'ao-shan, represents one of the last great expressions of Chinese metaphysical thought. He defined a system of five positions or relations between the Particular or Relative and the Universal or Absolute, defined as follows.13 In the first state, called the Universal within the Particular, the Absolute is hidden and obscured by our preoccupation with the world of appearances. However, the world of appearances is in fact a part of the larger world of Absolute reality. When we have achieved a true understanding of the objective world we realize that it is no more real than our senses make it, and consequently it represents not absolute reality but merely our perception. This realization leads to the second phase. In the second state, called the Particular within the Universal, we recognize that objective reality must always be perceived through our subjective apparatus, just as the Absolute must be approached through the relative, since all particularities merely exemplify the Absolute. Even good and bad are part of this same Universality. It is all real, but simply that--no values are attached, since it is all part of existence. This, says the scholar John Wu, is the state of enlightenment.14 In dialectical terms, this rounds out the comparison of the Particular and the Universal, with each shown to be part of the other. But they must ultimately be resolved back into sunyata, the Void that encompasses everything. Neither the Universal or Absolute, nor the particulars that give it physical form, are the ultimate reality. They both are merely systems in the all-encompassing Void. The third and fourth stages he defines exemplify achieving enlightenment by Universality alone and achieving enlightenment by Particularity alone. The third stage, enlightenment through Universality, leads one to meditate on the Absolute, upon the single wordless truth that defines the particular around us as part of itself. (It sounds remarkably similar to the Tao.) This meditation is done without props, language, or any of the physical world (the particular) surrounding us. Enlightenment through the Particular, through experience with the phenomenal world, was the fourth stage. This received the most attention from the Lin-chi sect--whose masters would answer the question "What is the meaning of Ch'an?" with "The cypress tree in the courtyard" or "Three pounds of flax."15 At the fifth stage, enlightenment reaches the Void, the state that cannot be contained in a concept, since all concepts are inside it. When you finally reach this state of wordless insight, you realize that both words and wordlessness are merely part of this larger reality. Action and nonaction are equally legitimate responses to the world. Tung-shan demonstrated this when he was asked, "When a snake is swallowing a frog, should you save the frog's life?" To this he answered, "To save the frog is to be blind [i.e., to ultimate oneness and therefore to discriminate between frog and snake]; not to save the frog is not to let form and shadow appear [i.e., to ignore the phenomena].16 Perhaps Tung-shan was demonstrating that he was free of discrimination between either option.17 The question of the subjective and the objective, the Universal and the Particular, permeated Tung-shan's teachings. _Once the Master asked a monk what his name was. The monk answered that his name was so-and-so. The Master then asked: "What one is your real self?" "The one who is just facing you." "What a pity! What a pity! The men of the present day are all like this. They take what is in the front of an ass or at the back of a horse and call it themselves. This illustrates the downfall of Buddhism. If you cannot recognize your real self objectively, how can you see your real self subjectively?" "How do you see your real self subjectively?" the monk immediately asked. "You have to tell me that yourself." "If I were to tell you myself, it would be seeing myself objectively. What is the self that is known subjectively?" "To talk about it in such a way is easy to do, but to continue our talking makes it impossible to reach the truth._"18 There also is a poem, known as the Pao-ching San-mei, traditionally attributed to Tung-shan.19 One quatrain will give the flavor of the verse: _The man of wood sings, The woman of stone gets up and dances, This cannot be done by passion or learning, It cannot be done by reasoning._20 This has been interpreted as the idea of Universality penetrating into Particularity. The wooden man singing and the stone maiden dancing are explained as evidence of the power of Universality.21 Tung-shan had a number of distinguishing qualities. He often used Taoist language in his teachings, quoting Chuang Tzu to make a point. Reportedly he never used the shout or the stick to shock a novice into self-awareness. And whereas his dialogues often used metaphors that at first appear obscure, there are never the deliberate absurdities of the Lin-chi masters, who frequently answered a perfectly reasonable question with a deliberate inanity merely to demonstrate the absurdity of words. Unlike the Lin-chi masters, he seems less concerned with the process of transmission than with what exactly is transmitted. Tung-shan viewed words as did Chuang Tzu, namely as the net in which to catch the fish. Whereas the Lin-chi masters viewed enlightenment as a totality, Tung- shan teachers believed that enlightenment arrived in stages, and they were concerned with identifying what these stages were. This was, in fact, the purpose of his five categories of Particularity and Universality, which became a part of the historic dialectic of Zen enlightenment. Ironically, with the emergence of the idea of stages, we seem back to a concept of "gradual" enlightenment--arrived at because the Chinese mind could not resist theoretical speculations. Tung-shan's deathbed scene was almost worthy of comic opera. One day in the third month of 869 he made known his resolve to die and, shaving his head and donning his formal robes, ordered the gong to be struck as he seated himself in meditation. But his disciples began sobbing so disturbingly that he finally despaired of dying in peace and, opening his eyes, chided them. _Those who are Buddhists should not attach themselves to externalities. This is the real self-cultivation. In living they work hard; in death they are at rest. Why should there be any grief?_22 He then instructed the head monk to prepare "offerings of food to ignorance" for everyone at the monastery, intending to shame all those who still clung to the emotions of the flesh. The monks took a full week to prepare the meal, knowing it was to be his last supper. And sure enough, upon dining he bade them farewell and, after a ceremonial bath, passed on. The most famous disciple of Tung-shan, Master Ts'ao-shan (840-901), was born as Pen-chi on the Fukien coast. Passing through an early interest in Confucianism, he left home at nineteen and became a Buddhist. He was ordained at age twenty-five and seems to have found frequent occasion to Visit Tung-shan. Then one day they had an encounter that catapulted Ts'ao-shan into the position of favored pupil. The exchange began with a question by Tung-shan: _"What is your name?" "My name is [Ts'ao-shan]." "Say something toward Ultimate Reality." "I will not say anything." "Why don't you speak of it?" "It is not called [Ts'ao-shan]._"23 It is said that Tung-shan gave Ts'ao-shan private instruction after this and regarded his capability highly. The anecdote, if we may venture a guess, seems to assert that the Universal cannot be reached through language, and hence he could only converse about his objective, physical form. After several years of study, Ts'ao-shan decided to strike out on his own, and he announced this intention to Tung-shan. The older master then inquired: _ "Where are you going?" "I go where it is changeless." "How can you go where it is changeless?" "My going is no change._"24 Ts'ao-shan subsequently left his master and went wandering and teaching. Finally, in late summer of 901, the story says that Ts'ao- shan one evening inquired about the date, and early the next morning he died. Although the recorded exchanges between Tung-shan and Ts'ao-shan are limited to the two rather brief encounters given, the younger master actually seems to have been the moving force behind the dialectical constructions of the Ts'ao-tung school. The ancient records, such as _The Transmission of the Lamp_, all declare that Ts'ao-shan was inspired by the Five States of Universality and Particularity to become a great Buddhist. As Dumoulin judges, "It was [Ts'ao-shan] who first, in the spirit of and in accordance with the master's teachings, arranged the five ranks in their transmuted form and explained them in many ways. . . . The fundamental principles, however, stem from [Tung- shan], who for that reason must be considered to be their originator."25 The ultimate concern of both the Ts'ao-tung and Lin-chi doctrines was enlightenment. The difference was that Ts'ao-tung masters believed quiet meditation was the way, rather than the mind-shattering techniques of Lin-chi. Ts'ao-tung (Soto Zen) strives to soothe the spirit rather than deliberately instigate psychic turmoil, as sometimes does the Lin-chi (Rinzai). The aim is to be in the world but not of it; to occupy the physical world but transcend it mentally, aloof and serene. A further difference has been identified by the British scholar Sir Charles Eliot, who concludes that whereas Lin-chi "regards the knowledge of the Buddha nature ... as an end in itself, all-satisfying and all-engrossing, the [Ts'ao-tung] . . . held that it is necessary to have enlightenment after Enlightenment, that is to say that the inner illumination must display itself in a good life."26 Thus Eliot suggests the Ts'ao-tung took something of an interest in what you do, in distinction to the Lin-chi school, which preferred to focus on inner wisdom. The Ts'ao-tung sect, at least in its early forms, was fully as dialectical in outlook as was the Lin-chi. In this it was merely carrying on, to some extent, the example of its forebear Shih-t'ou, who was himself remembered as deeply interested in theoretical and intellectual speculations. Today the Ts'ao-tung sect is differentiated from the Lin-chi primarily by its methods for teaching novices. There is no disagreement about the goal, merely about the path. It is interesting that the whole business of the Five Ranks seems not to have survived the Sung Dynasty. Ts'ao-tung's real contribution was essentially to revive the approach of Northern Ch'an, with its stress on meditation, intellectual inquiry, stages of enlightenment, and the idea that Ch'an is not entirely inner- directed but may also have some place in the world at large. This is the real achievement of Ts'ao- tung, and the quality that enabled it to survive and become Soto. Chapter Thirteen KUEI-SHAN, YUN-MEN, AND FA-YEN: THREE MINOR HOUSES _ Yun-men (left) _The "five houses" or sects of Ch'an that arose after the Great Persecution of 845 did not all appear simultaneously, nor did they enjoy equal influence. Whereas the Lin-chi and the Ts'ao-tung were destined to survive and find their way to Japan, the three other houses were treated less kindly by history. Nonetheless, in the search for enlightenment, each of the three other houses contributed techniques, insights, and original ideas that enriched the Zen tradition. It is with the stories of the masters who founded the three extinct houses that we close out the era preceding the Sung Dynasty and the rise of the koan. KUEI-SHAN, FOUNDER OF THE KUEI-YANG SECT This earliest of the five houses was founded by a contemporary of Huang-po and follower of the Ma-tsu tradition known by the name Kuei- shan (771-853). Under his original name, Ling-yu, he left home at fifteen to become a monk, studying under a local Vinaya master in present-day Fukien province. He later was ordained at Hangchow, where he assiduously absorbed the _vinaya _and sutras of both Theravada and Mahayana.1 Then at age twenty-three he traveled to Kiangsi and became a pupil of the famous Ch'an lawgiver Po-chang Huai-hai. The moment of Kuei-shan's enlightenment at the hands of Huai-hai is a Zen classic. As the story goes: _One day as he was waiting upon [Huai-hai], the latter asked him to poke the stove, to see whether there was any fire left in it. Kuei-shan poked but found no fire. [Huai-hai] rose to poke it himself, and succeeded in discovering a little spark. Showing it to his disciple, he asked, "Is this not fire?" Thereupon Kuei-shan became enlightened.2 _Just why this seemingly trivial incident should trigger enlightenment is clearly a matter that must be approached intuitively.3 Kuei-shan received his name from Mt. Kuei, where he was sent to found a monastery by Po-chang Huai-hai. The circumstances of his selection reveal almost more than we would wish to know about the Ch'an monastic world at the beginning of the ninth century. It happened that Huai-hai was considering the idea of founding a new monastery on Mt. Kuei in Hunan province. However, he was uncertain whether the venture would flourish, and consequently he turned for advice to a wandering fortuneteller named Ssu-ma.4 This seer responded that Mt. Kuei was an ideal location and would support fifteen hundred monks. However, Huai- hai himself would not prosper there, since "You are a bony, ascetic man and it is a fleshy, sensuous mountain." The advice was to find somebody else. Huai-hai consented and began calling in his candidates for Ssu-ma to examine. The first to be summoned was the head monk--whom Ssu-ma asked to produce a deep cough and then walk several steps. The wizened old mystic watched carefully and then whispered to Huai-hai that this was not the man. Next to be called in was Kuei-shan, currently administrator of the monastery. Ssu-ma took one look and nodded his approval to Huai-hai. That night Huai-hai summoned Kuei-shan and assigned his new mission: "Go to Mt. Kuei and found the monastery that will perpetuate my teachings." When the head monk discovered he had been passed over he was outraged and at the next morning's convocation demanded that Huai-hai justify this slight. The master replied: _"If you can make an outstanding response in front of the assembly, you shall receive the appointment." [Huai-hai] then pointed to a pitcher and said to him, "Do not call this a pitcher. What, instead, should you call it?" [The head monk] answered, "It cannot be called a wooden wedge." Master [Huai-hai] did not accept this, and turned to [Kuei- shan], demanding his answer. [Kuei-shan] kicked the pitcher and knocked it over. Master [Huai-hai] laughed and said, "Our head monk has lost his bid for Mount Kuei._"5 The head monk's reply had been intellectualizing wordplay, caught up in the world of names and categories. Kuei-shan's reply was spontaneous, wordless, and devoid of distinctions. His was a mind that could transcend rationality. Kuei-shan did establish the monastery and from it a short-lived school. However, Kuei-shan's memory was perpetuated largely through a brilliant pupil later known as Yang-shan (807-883) owing to his founding a monastery on Mt. Yang in Kiangsi province. Together their teachings became known as the Kuei-yang school, the first of the "five houses." The exchanges between Kuei-shan and Yang-shan reported in _The Transmission of the Lamp_ are among the most electric in all Ch'an. In the following they joust over the distinction between function of wisdom (which is revealed through action) and substance or self-nature (which is revealed through nonaction). _Once when all the monks were out picking tea leaves the Master said to Yang-shan, "All day as we were picking tea leaves I have heard your voice, but I have not seen you yourself. Show me your original self." Yang-shan thereupon shook the tea tree. The Master said, "You have attained only the function, not the substance." Yang-shan remarked, "I do not know how you yourself would answer the question." The Master was silent for a time. Yang-shan commented, "You, Master, have attained only the substance, not the function." Master Kuei-shan responded, "I absolve you from twenty blows!_"6 Commentators differ on who won this exchange and whether Kuei-shan was really satisfied. Another story relates similar fast-witted but serious repartee. _Two Ch'an monks came from [a rival] community and said, "There is not a man here who can understand Ch'an." Later, when all the monks went out to gather firewood, Yang-shan saw the two, who were resting; he took a piece of firewood and asked them, "Can you talk (about it)?" As both remained silent, Yang-shan said to them, "Do not say that there is no one here who can understand Ch'an." When he returned to the monastery, Yang-shan reported to the master, "Today, two Ch'an monks were exposed by me." The master asked, "How did you expose them?" Yang-shan related the incident and the master said, "I have now exposed you as well._"7 The translator Charles Luk suggests that Kuei-shan had "exposed" Yang- shan by showing that he still distinguished between himself and the other monks. Yet another story, reminiscent of Nan-ch'uan, further dramatizes the school's teaching of nondiscrimination. The report recounts a present that Kuei-shan sent to Yang-shan, now also a master and co-founder of their school: _Kuei-shan sent [Yang-shan] a parcel containing a mirror. When he went to the hall, [Yang-shan] held up the mirror and said to the assembly, "Please say whether this is Kuei-shan's or Yang-shan's mirror. If someone can give a correct reply, I will not smash it." As no one answered, the master smashed the mirror.8 _ Kuei-shan's answer to one pupil who requested that he "explain" Ch'an to him was to declare: _If I should expound it explicitly for you, in the future you will reproach me for it. Anyway, whatever I speak still belongs to me and has nothing to do with you.9 _This monk, who later became the famous master Hsiang-yen, subsequently burned his sutras and wandered the countryside in despair. Then one day while cutting grass he nicked a piece of broken tile against some bamboo, producing a sharp snap that suddenly triggered his enlightenment. In elation he hurried back to his cell in the abandoned monastery where he was living and burned incense to Kuei-shan, declaring, "If you had broken the secret to me then, how could I have experienced the wonderful event of today."10 The real contribution of the Kuei-yang sect is agreed to be the final distinction Yang-shan made between the Ch'an of meditation (based on the Lankavatara Sutra) and instantaneous Ch'an (that completely divorced from the sutras). In this final revision of Ch'an history, "traditional" or "Patriarchal" Ch'an was redefined as the anti-sutra establishment of the Southern school, while the teaching of the Lankavatara, which actually had been the basis of the faith until the middle of the eighth century, was scorned as an aberration. He emphasized, in a sense, Ch'an's ultimate disowning of Buddhism--through a new, manufactured "history." Kuei-shan died in the prescribed manner: After a ritual ablution he seated himself in the meditation posture and passed on with a smile. He was buried on Mt. Kuei, home of his monastery. His followers and those of his pupil Yang-shan composed the Kuei-yang school, an early attempt to formalize the anti-sutra position of Ma-tsu.11 However, they were supplanted by other much more successful followers of Huai-hai, such as Huang-po and Lin-chi, whose school became the real perpetuator of Ma- tsu's iconoclasm. THE YUN-MEN SECT _ _The Master Yun-men (862/4-949) was born in Kiangsu province (some say Chekiang) to a family whose circumstances forced them to place him in a Vinaya temple as a novice. But his inquiring mind eventually turned to Ch'an, and off he went to a master, with his first target being the famous Mu-chou, disciple of Huang-po. (Mu-chou is remembered as the monk who sent Lin-chi in for his first three withering interviews with Huang-po.) For two days running, Yun-men tried to gain entry to see the master, but each time he was ejected. The third day he succeeded in reaching Mu-chou, who grabbed him and demanded, "Speak! Speak!" But before Yun-men could open his mouth, the master shoved him out of the room and slammed the door, catching his leg and breaking it in the process. The unexpected bolt of pain shooting through Yun-men's body suddenly brought his first enlightenment.12 He journeyed on, studying with several famous masters, until finally he inherited a monastery from a retiring master who sensed his genius. Yun-men was one of the best-known figures from Ch'an's waning Golden Age, and stories of his exchanges with monks became a major source of koans.13 He loathed words and forbade his followers to take notes or write down his sermons. (However, his talks were secretly recorded by a follower who attended in a paper robe and kept notes on the garment.) As did the earlier masters, he struggled mightily with the problem of how to prevent novices from becoming attached to his words and phrases. _ [Yun-men] came to the assembly again and said: "My work here is something that I cannot help. When I tell you to penetrate directly into all things and to be non-attached to them, I have already concealed what is within you. Yet you all continue looking for Ch'an among my words, so that you may achieve enlightenment. With myriad deviations and artificialities, you raise endless questions and arguments. Thus, you merely gain temporary satisfactions from verbal contests, repeatedly quarrel with words, and deviate even further from Ch'an. When will you obtain it, and rest?_"14 He firmly believed that all teaching was useless; that all explanations do more harm than good; and that, in fact, nothing worthwhile can ever be taught. _The Master said, "If I should give you a statement that would teach you how to achieve Ch'an immediately, dirt would already be spread on top of your head. . . . To grasp Ch'an, you must experience it. If you have not experienced it, do not pretend to know. You should withdraw inwardly and search for the ground upon which you stand; thereby you will find out what Truth is._"15 One of Yun-men's sermons reveals much about the growing pains of Ch'an. The seriousness of the novices seems to have been steadily deteriorating, and his characterization of the run-of-the- mill novices of his time presents a picture of waning dynamism. Success was clearly bringing a more frivolous student to the monasteries, and we sense here the warning of a man who rightly feared for the future quality of Ch'an. _Furthermore, some monks, idle and not serious in their studies, gather together trying to learn the sayings of the ancients, and attempt to reveal their own nature through memorizing, imagining, prophesying. These people often claim that they understand what Dharma is. What they actually do is simply talk themselves into endless entanglements and use meditation to pass the time.16 _ He also felt the traditional pilgrimages from master to master had become hardly more than a glorified version of sightseeing. _Do not waste your time wandering thousands of [miles], through this town and that, with your staff on your shoulder, wintering in one place and spending the summer in another. Do not seek out beautiful mountains and rivers to contemplate. . . . [T]he fundamental thing for you to do is to obtain the essence of Ch'an. Then your travels will not have been in vain. If you find a way to guide your understanding under a severe master . . . wake up, hang up your bowl-bag, and break your staff. Spend ten or twenty years of study under him until you are thoroughly enlightened.17 _ He also advised that they try to simplify their search, that they try to realize how uncomplicated Ch'an really is. _Let me tell you that anything you can directly point at will not lead you to the right trail. . . . Besides dressing, eating, moving bowels, releasing water, what else is there to do?18 _ Yun-men was one of the most dynamic masters of the late ninth and early tenth century, providing new twists to the historic problem of nonlanguage transmission. His celebrated solution was the so-called one-word answer. Several of these are preserved in the two major koan collections of later years. Two of the better-known follow: _A monk asked Yun-men, "What is the teaching that transcends the Buddha and patriarchs?" Yun-men said, "A sesame bun._"19_ A monk asked Yun-men, "What is Buddha?" Yun-men replied, "A dried piece of shit._"20_ _ The "one-word" was his version of the blow and the shout. R. H. Blyth is particularly fond of Yun-men and suggests he may have had the keenest intellect of any Ch'an master--and even goes so far as to declare him the greatest man China has produced.21 At the very least Yun-men was in the great tradition of the iconoclastic T'ang masters, with a touch that bears comparison to Huang-po. And he probably was wise in attempting to stop copyists, for his teachings eventually were reduced to yet another abominable system, as seemed irresistible to the Chinese followers of the five houses. A later disciple produced what is known as the "Three propositions of the house of Yun-men." It is not difficult to imagine the barnyard response Yun-men would have had to this "systematization" of his thought.22 The school of this "most eloquent of Ch'an masters" lasted through the Sung dynasty, but its failure to find a transplant in Japan eventually meant that history would pass it by. Nonetheless, the cutting intellect of Yun-men was one of the bright stars in the constellation of Ch'an, providing what is possibly its purest antirational statement. THE FA-YEN SECT The master known as Fa-yen (885-958), founder of the third short-lived house of Ch'an, need not detain us long. Fa-yen's novel method for triggering enlightenment was to repeat back the questioner's own query, thereby isolating the words and draining them of their meaning. It was his version of the shout, the silence, the single word. And whereas the Lin-chi school was concerned with the Four Processes of Liberation from Subjectivity and Objectivity and the Ts'ao-tung school constructed the five relations between Particularity and Universality, the Fa-yen school invented the Six Attributes of Being.23 The Six Attributes of Being (totality and differentiation, sameness and difference, becoming and disappearing) were adapted from the doctrine of another Buddhist sect, and in fact later attempts by one of Fa-yen's disciples to combine Ch'an and Pure Land Buddhism have been credited with accelerating the disappearance of his school. According to _The Transmission of the Lamp_, the master remembered as Fa-yen was born as Wen-i, near Hangchow. He became a Ch'an novice at age seven and was ordained at twenty. Learned in both Buddhist and Confucianist literature (though not, significantly enough, in the Taoist classics), he then got the wanderlust, as was common, and headed south to seek out more Ch'an teachers. He ended up in Kiangsi province in the city of Fuchou, where to escape the floodings of a rainstorm he found himself one evening in a local monastery. He struck up a conversation with the master there, who suddenly asked him: _"Where are you going, sir?" "I shall continue my foot travels along the road." "What is that which is called foot travel?" "I do not know." "Not-knowing most closely approaches the Truth._"24 The _Transmission of the Lamp _states that he was enlightened on the spot and decided to settle down for a period of study. He eventually became a famous teacher himself, shepherding as many as a thousand students at one time. One of his most often repeated exchanges concerned the question of the difference between the "moon" (i.e., enlightenment) and the "finger pointing at the moon," (i.e., the teaching leading to enlightenment). It was a common observation that students confused the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself, which is to say they confused talk about enlightenment with the state. One day a monk came along who thought he was smart enough to get around the dilemma. _A monk asked, "As for the finger, I will not ask you about it. But what is the moon?" The Master said, "Where is the finger that you do not ask about?" So the monk asked, "As for the moon, I will not ask you about it. But what is the finger?" The Master said, "The moon!" The monk challenged him, "I asked about the finger; why should you answer me, 'the moon'?" The Master replied, "Because you asked about the finger._"25 At age seventy-four Fa-yen died in the manner of other great masters, calmly and seated in the meditation posture. Part of the lineage of Shih-t'ou and an offshoot of the branch of Ch'an that would become Soto, he was a kindly individual with none of the violence and histrionics of the livelier masters. However, his school lasted only briefly before passing into history. Nonetheless, a number of disciples initially perpetuated his memory, and his wisdom is preserved in various Sung-period compilations of Ch'an sermons. Chapter Fourteen TA-HUI: MASTER OF THE KOAN To confront the koan--the most discussed, least understood teaching concept of the East--is to address the very essence of Zen itself. In simple terms the koan is merely a brief story--all the encounters between two monks related here could be koans. During the Sung Dynasty (960-1279) these stories were organized into collections, commented upon, and structured into a system of study--which involved meditating on a koan and arriving at an intuitive "answer" acceptable to a Zen master. Faced with the threatening intellectualism of the Sung scholars, Ch'anists created the koan out of the experience of the older masters, much the way a liferaft might be constructed from the timbers of a storm-torn ship. But before we examine this raft, it would be well to look again at the ship. It will be recalled that Ch'an grew out of both Buddhism and Taoism, extracting from them the belief that a fundamental unifying quality transcends all the diversity of the world, including things that appear to be opposite. However, Ch'an taught that this cannot be understood using intellectualism, which rationally makes distinctions and relates to the world by reducing it to concepts and systems. One reason is that all rationality and concepts are merely part of a larger, encompassing Reality; and trying to reach this Reality intellectually is like trying to describe the outside of a building while trapped inside. There is, however, a kind of thought--not beholden to concepts, systems, discriminations, or rationality--that can reach this new understanding. It is intuition, which operates in a mode entirely different from rationality. It is holistic, not linear; it is unself-conscious and noncritical; and it doesn't bother with any of the rational systems of analysis we have invented for ourselves. But since we can't call on it at our pleasure, the next best thing we can do is clear the way for it to operate--by shutting off the rational part of the mind. Then intuition starts hesitantly coming out of the shadows. Now, if we carefully wait for the right moment and then suddenly create a disturbance that momentarily short-circuits the rational mind--the way shock suppresses our sense of pain in the first moments of a serious accident--we may get a glimpse of the intuitive mind in full flower. In that instant we intuitively understand the oneness of the world, the Void, the greater Reality that words and rationality have never allowed us to experience. The Zen teachers have a very efficient technique for making all this happen. They first discredit rationality for a novice by making him feel foolish for using it. Each time the novice submits a rational solution to a koan, he receives a humiliating rebuff. After a while the strain begins to tell. In the same way that a military boot camp destroys the ego and self-identity of a recruit, the Zen master slowly erodes the novice's confidence in his own logical powers. At this point his intuitive mind begins overcoming its previous repression. Distinctions slowly start to seem absurd, because every time he makes one he is ridiculed. Little by little he dissolves his sense of object and subject, knower and known. The fruit now is almost ready to fall from the tree. (Although enlightenment cannot be made to happen, it can be made possible.) Enter at this point the unexpected blow, the shout, the click of bamboo, the broken leg. If the student is caught unawares, rationality may be momentarily short-circuited and suddenly he glimpses--Reality. The irony is that what he glimpses is no different from what he saw before, only now he understands it intuitively and realizes how simplistic and confining are rational categories and distinctions. Mountains are once again mountains; rivers are once again rivers. But with one vital difference: Now he is not attached to them. He travels through the world just as always, but now he is at one with it: no distinctions, no critical judgments, no tension. After all that preparatory mental anguish there is no apparent external change. But internally he is enlightened: He thinks differently, he understands differently, and ultimately he lives differently. Ch'an began by working out the question of what this enlightenment really is. Prior to Ma-tsu the search was more for the nature of enlightenment than for its transmission. This was the doctrinal phase of Ch'an. As time went by, however, the concern shifted more and more from defining enlightenment--which the Ch'an masters believed had been done sufficiently--to struggling with the process. After Ma-tsu, Ch'an turned its attention to "auxiliary means" for helping along transmission: paradoxical words and actions, shouts, beatings, and eventually the koan.1 The koan, then, is the final step in the "auxiliary means." A succinct analysis of the koan technique is provided by Ruth F. Sasaki in _Zen Dust_: "Briefly, [koans] consisted of questions the early masters had asked individual students, together with the answers given by the students; questions put to the masters by students in personal talks or in the course of the masters' lectures, together with the masters' answers; statements of formulas in which the masters had pointed to the profound Principle; anecdotes from the daily life of the masters in which their attitudes or actions illustrated the functioning of the Principle; and occasionally a phrase from a sutra in which the Principle or some aspect of it was crystallized in words. By presenting a student with one or another of these koans and observing his reaction to it, the degree or depth of his realization could be judged. The koans were the criteria of attainment."2 Called _kung-an _in Chinese (meaning a "case" or a problem), the koan was a response to two major challenges that beset Ch'an in the Sung era: First, the large number of students that appeared at Ch'an monasteries as a result of the demise of other sects meant that some new means was needed to preserve personalized attention (some masters reportedly had one thousand or even two thousand followers at a monastery); and second, there was a noticeable decline in the spontaneity of both novices and masters. The masters had lost much of the creative fire of Ch'an's Golden Age, and the novices were caught up in the intellectual, literary world of the Sung, to the point that intellectualism actually threatened the vitality of the sect. The koan, then, was the answer to this dilemma. It systematized instruction such that large numbers of students could be treated to the finest antirational tradition of the Ch'an sect, and it rescued the dynamism of the earlier centuries. Although mention of kung-an occurs in the Ch'an literature before the end of the T'ang era (618-907), the reference was to a master's use of a particularly effectual question on more than one student. This was still an instance of a master using his own questions or paradoxes. The koan in its true form--that is, the use of a classic incident from the literature, posed as a conundrum--is said to have been created when a descendant of Lin-chi, in the third generation, interviewed a novice about some of Lin-chi's sayings.3 This systematic use of the existing literature was found effective, and soon a new teaching technique was in the making. Examples of classic koans already have been seen throughout this book, since many of the exchanges of the early masters were later isolated for use as kung-an. But there are many, many others, Perhaps the best- known koan of all time is the exchange between Chao-chou (778-897) and a monk: _A monk asked Chao-chou. "Does a dog have Buddha nature [i.e., is a dog capable of being enlightened]?" Chao-chou answered, _"Mu _[a word whose strict meaning is "nothingness"]._"4 Quick, what does it mean? Speak! Speak! If you were a Ch'an novice, a master would be glaring at you demanding an immediate, intuitive answer. (A favored resolution of this, incidentally, is simply "Mu," but bellowed with all the force of the universe's inherent Oneness behind it. And if you try to fake it, the master will know.) Or take another koan, drawn completely at random. _When the monks assembled before the noon meal to hear his lecture, the Master Fa-yen [885-958] pointed at the bamboo blinds. Two monks simultaneously went and rolled them up. Fa-yen said, "One gain, one loss._"5 Don't think! Respond instantly! Don't say a word unless it's right, Don't make a move that isn't intuitive. And above all, don't analyze. _ Yun-men [862/4-949] asked a monk, "Where have you come here from?" The monk said, "From Hsi-ch'an." Yun-men said, "What words are being offered at Hsi-ch'an these days?" The monk stretched out his hands. Yun-men struck him. The monk said, "I haven't finished talking." Yun- men then extended his own hands. The monk was silent, so Yun-men struck him._6 You weren't there. You're not the monk. But now you've got to do something to show the master you grasp what went on in that exchange. What was spontaneous to the older masters you must grasp in a secondhand, systematized situation. And if you can't answer the koan right (it should be stressed, incidentally, there is not necessarily a fixed answer), you had best go and meditate, try to grasp it nonintellectually, and return tomorrow to try again. Off you go to meditate on "Mu" or "One gain, one loss," and the mental tension starts building. Even though you know you aren't supposed to, you analyze it intellectually from every angle. But that just heightens your exasperation. Then suddenly one day something dawns on you. Elated, you go to the master. You yell at him, or bark like a dog, or kick his staff, or stand on your hands, or recite a poem, or declare, "The cypress tree in the courtyard," or perhaps you just remain silent. He will know (intuitively) if you have broken through the bonds of reason, if you have transcended the intellect. There's nothing quite like the koan in the literature of the world: historical episodes that have to be relived intuitively and responded to. As Ruth F. Sasaki notes, "Collections of 'old cases,' as the koans were sometimes called, as well as attempts to put the koans into a fixed form and to systematize them to some extent, were already being made by the middle of the tenth century. We also find a few masters giving their own alternate answers to some of the old koans and occasionally appending verses to them. In many cases these alternate answers and verses ultimately became attached to the original koans and were handled as koans supplementary to them."7 Ironically, koans became so useful, indeed essential, in the perpetuation of Ch'an that they soon were revered as texts. Collections of the better koans appeared, and next came accretions of supporting commentaries--when the whole point was supposed to be circumventing reliance on words! But commentaries always seemed to develop spontaneously out of Ch'an. Today two major collections of koans are generally used by students of Zen. These are the Mumonkan (to use the more familiar Japanese name) and the Hekiganroku (again the Japanese name) or _Blue Cliff Record_.8 Masters may work a student through both these collections as he travels the road to enlightenment, with a new koan being assigned after each previous one has been successfully resolved. The _Blue Cliff Record _was the first of the two collections. It began as a grouping of one hundred kung-an by a master named Hsueh-tou Ch'ung-hsien (980-1052) of the school of Yun-men. This master also attached a small poem to each koan, intended to direct the student toward its meaning. The book enjoyed sizable circulation throughout the latter part of the eleventh century, and sometime thereafter a Lin-chi master named Yuan-wu K'o-ch'in (1063-1135) decided to embellish it by adding an introduction to each koan and a long-winded commentary on both the koan and the poem supplied by the previous collector. (In the case of the poem we now have commentary on commentary--the ultimate achievement of the theologian's art! However, masters today often omit Yuan-wu's commentaries, giving their own interpretation instead.9) The commentator, Yuan-wu, was the teacher of Ta-hui, the dynamic master of the Lin-chi lineage whom we will meet here. The Mumonkan, a shorter work, was assembled in 1228 by the Ch'an monk Wu-men Hui-k'ai (1183-1260) and consists of forty-eight koans, together with an explanatory comment and a verse. Some of the koans in the Mumonkan also appear in the _Blue Cliff Record_. The Mumonkan is usually preferred in the Japanese summer, since its koans are briefer and less fatiguing.10 The koan was an invention of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279), an era of consolidation in the Chinese empire after the demise of the T'ang and passage of a war-torn interlude known as the Five Dynasties (907-60). Although Sung Ch'an seemed to be booming, Buddhism in general continued the decline that began with the Great Persecution of 845. For example, the number of registered monks dropped from around 400,000 in 1021 to approximately half that number a scant half-century later.11 But the monks who did come probably had higher education than previously, for the Sung educational system was the world's best at the time. Colleges were established nationwide, not just in the sophisticated metropolitan areas, and scholarship flourished. Whether this was good for Ch'an is not a simple question. The hardy rural monks who had passed beyond the Buddhist scriptures made Ch'an what it was. Could the powers of the antirational be preserved in an atmosphere where the greatest respect was reserved for those who spent years memorizing the Chinese classics? The answer to this was to rest with the koan. The Ch'an master Ta-hui (1089-1163), who perfected the koan technique, was rumored to be a reincarnation of Lin-chi. Born in Anhwei province, located about halfway between the older capitals of the north and the Ch'an centers in the south, he was said to be both pious and precocious, becoming a devoted monk at age seventeen while assiduously reading and absorbing the teachings of the five houses.12 At age nineteen, he began his obligatory travels, roaming from master to master. One of his first teachers reportedly interviewed him on the koans in the collection now known as the _Blue Cliff Record_, but he did so by not speaking a word and thereby forcing Ta-hui to work them out for himself. Ta-hui also experimented with the Ts'ao-tung teachings, but early on began to question the straitlaced, quietistic approach of that house. He finally was directed to the Szechuan teacher Yuan-wu K'o-ch'in of the Lin-chi school, beginning the association that would move him to the forefront of the struggle to save Ch'an via the koan. Ta-hui experienced his first enlightenment under Yuan-wu, in the master's temple in the Northern Sung capital of Pien-liang. As the story is reported: _One day when Yuan-wu had taken the high seat in the lecture hall, he said: "A monk asked Yun-men: 'From whence come all the buddhas?' Yun- men answered: 'The East Mountain walks over the water.' But if I were asked, I would not answer that way. 'From whence come all the buddhas?' A fragrant breeze comes of itself from the south, and in the palace pavilion a refreshing coolness stirs." At these words [Ta-hui] suddenly attained enlightenment.13 _ After this he grew in experience and wisdom, eventually taking over many temple duties from Yuan-wu. He soon became a part of the Ch'an establishment in the north and in 1126 was even presented with an official robe and title from a minister. Then suddenly, in the midst of this tranquillity, outside forces intervened to change dramatically the course of Chinese history. For many years previous, China had been threatened by nomadic peoples from the north and west, peoples whom the Chinese haughtily identified as "barbarians." The Sung emperors, cloistered gentlemen in the worst sense of the term, had maintained peace in their slowly shrinking domain by buying off belligerent neighbors and occasionally even ceding border territories. They thought their troubles finally might be easing somewhat when their hostile neighbors were overwhelmed by a new warring tribe from Manchuria. But after a series of humiliating incidents, the Chinese found themselves with merely a new enemy, this time more powerful than any before. China was at last on the verge of being overwhelmed, something it had forestalled for many centuries. Even the invention of gunpowder, which the Chinese now used to fire rocket- propelled arrows, could not save them. Before long the barbarians marched on the capital, and after some years of Chinese attempts at appeasement, the invaders carried off the emperor and his entire court to Manchuria. The year was 1127, which marked the end of the Chinese dynasty now known as the Northern Sung (960-1127). After this disheartening setback a son of the former emperor moved south and set up a new capital in the coastal city of Hangchow, whose charms the Chinese were fond of comparing favorably with heaven (in the refrain, "Heaven above; Hangchow below"). This new regime, known as the Southern Sung (1127-1279), witnessed yet another transformation of Ch'an. Among other things, Southern Ch'an came to resemble eighth-century Northern Ch'an, in its close association with the court and the intelligentsia. When political discord forced the Northern Sung government to flee south, the master Yuan-wu was assigned a monastery in the southern province of Kiangsi by the emperor, and Ta-hui accompanied him there, again as head monk. After four years, Ta-hui again decided to migrate-- this time alone--to Szechuan and there to build a secluded hermitage. After another move he was summoned in 1137 by the prime minister, himself also a former pupil of Yuan-wu, to come and establish a temple near the new southern capital of Hangchow. Before long he had collected almost two thousand disciples and was becoming known as the reincarnation of Lin-chi, possibly because he was giving new life to the Lin-chi sect. But then his politics got him in trouble and he was banished for almost fifteen years to various remote outposts, during which time he began to write extensively.14 Finally, in 1158, he was ordered back to Hangchow to take over his old temple. Since by then old age was encroaching, he was permitted to retire at this temple and live off imperial patronage. It is said that his pupils swelled to seventeen hundred when he returned and that when he died in 1163 he left ninety- four enlightened heirs.15 Ta-hui is regarded today as the great champion of the koan method, and he was celebrated during his life for a running disagreement he had with the Ts'ao-tung (later Soto) school. In a sense, this dispute drew the distinctions that still divide Zen into two camps. The issue seems to have boiled down to the matter of what one does with one's mind while meditating. The Ts'ao-tung masters advocated what they called Silent Illumination (_mo-chao_) Ch'an, which Ta-hui preferred to call Silent Illumination Heterodox (_mo-chao-hsieh_) Ch'an. The Ts'ao-tung master Cheng-chueh, with whom he argued, believed that enlightenment could be achieved through sitting motionless and slowly bringing tranquillity and empty nonattachment to the mind. The koans were recognized to be useful in preserving the original spirit of Ch'an, but their brain-fatiguing convolutions were not permitted to disturb the mental repose of meditation. Ta-hui, in contrast, believed that this silent meditation lacked the dynamism so essential to the sudden experience of enlightenment. His own approach to enlightenment came to be called Introspecting-the-Koan (_k'an-hua_) Ch'an, in which meditation focused on a koan.16 Another of Ta-hui's objections to the Silent Illumination school seems to have been its natural drift toward quietism, toward the divorcing of men from the world of affairs. This he believed led nowhere and was merely renouncing humanity rather than illuminating it. _These days there's a breed of shaven-headed outsiders [i.e., rival masters] whose own eyes are not clear, who just teach people to stop and rest and play dead. . . . They teach people to "keep the mind still," to "forget feelings" according to circumstances, to practice "silent illumination." . . . To say that when one has put things to rest to the point that he is unawares and unknowing, like earth, wood, tile, or stone, this is not unknowing silence--this is a view of wrongly taking too literally words that were (only) expedient means to free bonds.17 _He seemed to be counseling never to forget that meditation is only a means, not an end. Instead Ta-hui advocated meditating deeper and ever deeper into a koan, focusing on the words until they "lose their flavor." Then finally the bottom falls out of the bucket and enlightenment hits you. This "Introspecting the Koan" form of Ch'an (called Kanna Zen by the Japanese) became the standard for the Rinzai sect, whose students were encouraged to meditate on a koan until it gradually infiltrated the mind. As one commentator has explained, "The essential is to immerse oneself patiently and wholeheartedly in the koan, with unwavering attention. One must not be looking for an answer but looking at the koan. The 'answer,' if it comes, will come of its own accord."18 As described by Ta-hui: _Just steadily go on with your koan every moment of your life. . . . Whether walking or sitting, let your attention be fixed upon it without interruption. When you begin to find it entirely devoid of flavor, the final moment is approaching: do not let it slip out of your grasp. When all of a sudden something flashes out in your mind, its light will illumine the entire universe, and you will see the spiritual land of the Enlightened Ones. . . .19 _ The important thing is to concentrate totally on a koan. This concentration need not necessarily be confined to meditation, as Ta-hui illustrates using one of the more celebrated one-word statements of Yun-men. _A monk asked Yun-Men, "What is Buddha?" Yun-Men said, "A dry piece of shit." Just bring up this saying. . . .Don't ask to draw realization from the words or try in your confusion to assess and explain. . . . Just take your confused unhappy mind and shift it onto "A dry piece of shit." Once you hold it there, then the mind . . . will naturally no longer operate. When you become aware that it's not operating, don't be afraid of falling into emptiness. . . . In the conduct of your daily activities, just always let go and make yourself vast and expansive. Whether you're in quiet or noisy places, constantly arouse yourself with the saying "A dry piece of shit." As the days and months come and go, of itself your potential will be purified and ripen. Above all you must not arouse any external doubts besides: when your doubts about "A dry piece of shit" are smashed, then at once doubts numerous as the sands of the Ganges are all smashed.20 _ Although Ta-hui was a strong advocate of the koan, he was staunchly against its being used in a literary sense. Whenever a student starts analyzing koans intellectually, comparing one against another, trying to understand rationally how they affect his nonrational intelligence, he misses the whole point. The only way it can work is if it is fresh. Only then does it elicit a response from our spontaneous intelligence, our intuitive mind. But the Sung trend toward intellectualism was almost irresistible. The prestige of the Chinese "gentleman"--who could quote the ancient poets, compose verse himself, and analyze enlightenment--was the great nemesis of Ch'an. _Gentlemen of affairs who study the path often understand rationally without getting to the reality. Without discussion and thought they are at a loss, with no place to put their hands and feet--they won't believe that where there is no place to put one's hands and feet is really a good situation. They just want to get there in their minds by thinking and in their mouths to understand by talking--they scarcely realize they've already gone wrong.21 _ Equally bad was the Ch'an student who memorized koans rather than trying to understand them intuitively. _A gentleman reads widely in many books basically in order to augment his innate knowledge. Instead, you have taken to memorizing the words of the ancients, accumulating them in your breast, making this your task, depending on them for something to take hold of in conversation. You are far from knowing the intent of the sages in expounding the teachings. This is what is called counting the treasure of others all day long without having half a cent of your own.22 _Ta-hui rightly recognized in such scholarship an impending destruction of Ch'an's innate vigor. At one point, in desperation, he even destroyed the original printing blocks for the best-known koan collection of the time, the _Blue Cliff Record _compiled by his master, Yuan-wu.23 But the trend continued nonetheless. Ch'an was not over yet, however. It turns out that the sect did not continue to fly apart and diversify as might be suspected, but rather it actually consolidated. Although the Kuei-yang and Fa-yen houses fizzled comparatively quickly, the Yun-men lasted considerably longer, with an identifiable line of transmission lasting virtually throughout the Sung Dynasty. The Ts'ao-tung house languished for a while, but with Silent Illumination Ch'an it came back strongly during the Sung Dynasty. Lin-chi split into two factions in the early eleventh century, when two pupils of the master Ch'u-yuan (986-1036) decided to go their own way, One of these masters, known as Huang-lung Hui-nan (1002-1069), started a school which subsequently was transmitted to Japan by the Japanese master Eisai, where it became known as Oryo Zen. However, this school did not last long in China or Japan, becoming moribund after a few generations. The other disciple of Ch'u-yuan was a master named Yang-ch'i Fang-hui (992-1049), whose school (known in Japanese as Yogi Zen) eventually became the only school of Chinese Ch'an, absorbing all other sects when the faith went into its final decline after the Sung. Ta-hui was part of this school, and it was the branch of the Lin-chi sect that eventually took hold in Japan. In closing our journey through Chinese Ch'an we must note that the faith continued on strongly through the Sung largely because the government began selling ordinations for its own profit. Ch'an also continued to flourish during the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty (1279- 1309), with many priests from Japan coming to China for study. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), it merged with another school of Buddhism, the Pure Land Salvationist sect, and changed drastically. Although Ming-style Chinese Ch'an still persists today, mainly outside China, its practice bears scant resemblance to the original teachings. For the practice of the classical Ch'an described here we must now turn to Japan. PART IV ZEN IN JAPAN . . . in which Ch'an is imported to Japan by traditional Buddhists disillusioned with the spiritual decadence of existing Japanese sects. Through a fortuitous association with the rising military class, Ch'an is eventually elevated to the most influential religion of Japan. Before long, however, it evolves into a political and cultural rather than a spiritual force. Although some Japanese attempt to restore Ch'an's original vigor by deliberately attacking its "High Church" institutions, few Japanese Zen teachers respect its original teachings and practice. Japanese teachers contribute little to the Ch'an (Zen) experience until finally, in the eighteenth century, a spiritual leader appears who not only restores the original vitality of the faith, but goes on to refine the koan practice and revolutionize the relationship of Zen to the common people. This inspired teacher, Hakuin, creates modern Zen. Chapter Fifteen EISAI: THE FIRST JAPANESE MASTER There is a twelfth-century story that the first Japanese monk who journeyed to China to study Ch'an returned home to find a summons from the Japanese court. There, in a meeting reminiscent of the Chinese sovereign Wu and the Indian Bodhidharma some seven hundred years before, Japan's emperor commanded him to describe the teachings of this strange new cult. The bemused monk (remembered by the name Kakua) replied with nothing more than a melody on his flute, leaving the court flabbergasted.1 But what more ideal expression of China's wordless doctrine? As in the China entered by Bodhidharma, medieval Japan already knew the teachings of Buddhism. In fact, the Japanese ruling classes had been Buddhist for half a millennium before Ch'an officially came to their attention. However, contacts with China were suspended midway during this time, leaving Japanese Buddhists out of touch with the many changes in China--the most significant being Ch'an's rise to the dominant Buddhist sect.2 Consequently the Japanese had heard almost nothing about this sect when contacts resumed in the twelfth century. To their amazement they discovered that Chinese Buddhism had become Ch'an. The story of Ch'an's transplant in Japan is also the story of its preservation, since it was destined to wither away in China. Perhaps we should review briefly how traditional Buddhism got to Japan in the first place. During the sixth century, about the time of Bodhidharma, a statue of the Buddha and some sutras were transmitted to Japan as a gift/bribe from a Korean monarch seeking military aid. He claimed Buddhism was very powerful although difficult to understand. Not all Japanese, however, were overjoyed with the appearance of a new faith. The least pleased were those employed by the existing religion, the Japanese cult of Shinto, and they successfully discredited Buddhism for several decades. But a number of court intrigues were underway at the time, and one faction got the idea that Buddhism would be helpful in undermining the Shinto-based ruling clique. Eventually this new faction triumphed, and by the middle of the seventh century, the Japanese were constructing Buddhist temples and pagodas.3 Other imports connected with these early mainland contacts were Chinese writing and the Chinese style of government. The Japanese even recreated the T'ang capital of Ch'ang-an, consecrated at the beginning of the eighth century as Nara, their first real city. The growing Buddhist establishment soon overwhelmed Nara with a host of sects and temples, culminating in 752 with the unveiling of a bronze meditating Buddha larger than any statue in the world. Japan was now awash in thirdhand Buddhism, as Chinese missionaries patronizingly expounded Sanskrit scriptures they themselves only vaguely understood. Buddhism's reputation for powerful magic soon demoralized the simple religion of Shinto, with its unpretentious shrines and rites, and this benign nature reverence was increasingly pushed into the background. The impact of Buddhism became so overwhelming that the alarmed emperor finally abandoned Nara entirely to the Buddhists, and at the close of the eighth century set up a new capital in central Japan, known today as Kyoto. The emperor also decided to discredit the Nara Buddhists on their own terms, sending to China for new, competing sects. Back came emissaries with two new schools, which soon assumed dominance of Japanese Buddhism. The first of these was Tendai, named after the Chinese T'ien- t'ai school. Its teachings centered on the Lotus Sutra, which taught that the human Buddha personified a universal spirit, evidence of the oneness permeating all things. The Tendai school was installed on Mt. Hiei, in the outskirts of Kyoto, giving birth to an establishment eventually to number several thousand buildings. The monks on Mt. Hiei became the authority on Buddhist matters in Japan for several centuries thereafter, and later they also began meddling in affairs of state, sometimes even resorting to arms. Tendai was, and perhaps to some degree still is, a faith for the fortunate few. It did not stress an idealized hereafter, since it served a class--the idle aristocracy-- perfectly comfortable in the present world. In any case, it became the major Japanese Buddhist sect during the Heian era (794-1185), a time of aristocratic rule. The other important, and also aristocratic, version of Buddhism preceding Zen was called Shingon, from the Chinese school Chen-yen, a magical-mystery sect thriving on secrecy and esoteric symbolism. It appealed less to the intellect than did Tendai and more to the taste for entertainment among the bored aristocrats. Although Shingon monasteries often were situated in remote mountainous areas, the intrigue of their engaging ceremonies (featuring efflorescent iconography, chants, and complex liturgies) and their evocative mandalas (geometrical paintings full of symbolism) made this sect a theatrical success. This so-called Esoteric Buddhism of Shingon grew so popular that the sober Tendai sect was obliged to start adding ritualistic complexity into its own practices.4 The Japanese government broke off relations with China less than a hundred years after the founding of Kyoto, around the middle of the ninth century. From then until the mid-twelfth century mainland contacts virtually ceased, and consequently both Japanese culture and Japanese Buddhism gradually evolved away from their Chinese models. The Japanese aristocracy became obsessed with aesthetics, finery, and refined lovemaking accompanied by poetry, perfumes, and flowers.5 They distilled the vigorous T'ang culture to a refined essence, rather like extracting a delicate liqueur from a stout potion. The Buddhist church also grew decadent, even as it grew ever more powerful and ominous. The priesthood became the appointment of last resort for otherwise unemployable courtiers, and indeed Buddhism finally degenerated largely into an entertainment for the ruling class, whose members were amused and diverted by its rites. This carefree aristocracy also allowed increasing amounts of wealth and land to slip into the hands of corrupt religious establishments. For their own part, the Buddhists began forming armies of monks to protect their new wealth, and they eventually went on to engage in inter-temple wars and threaten the civil government. During this time, the Japanese aristocracy preserved its privileged position through the unwise policy of using an emerging military class to maintain order. These professional soldiers seem to have arisen from the aristocacy itself. Japanese emperors had a large number of women at their disposal, through whom they scattered a host of progeny, not all of which could be maintained idle in Kyoto. A number of these were sent to the provinces, where they were to govern untamed outlying areas. This continued until one day the court in Kyoto awoke to find that Japan was in fact controlled by these rural clans and their mounted warriors, the samurai.6 In the middle of the twelfth century, the samurai effectively seized Japan, and their strongman invented for himself the title of _shogun_, proceeding to institute what became almost eight centuries of unbroken warrior rule. The age of the common man had arrived, and one of the _shogun's _first acts was to transfer the government away from aristocratic Kyoto, whose sophisticated society made him uncomfortable, to a warrior camp called Kamakura, near the site of modern Tokyo. The rule of Japan passed from perfumed, poetry-writing aesthetes to fierce, often illiterate swordsmen. Coincident with this coup, the decadence and irrelevance of traditional Buddhism had begun to weigh heavily upon a new group of spiritual reformers. Before long Tendai and Shingon were challenged by new faiths recognizing the existence and spiritual needs of the common people. One form this reformation took was the appearance of new sects providing spiritual comfort to the masses and the possibility of eternal salvation through some simple act, usually the repetition of a sacred chant. One, and later two, such sects (Jodo and Jodo Shin) focused on the Buddhist figure Amida, whose Paradise or "Pure Land" in the hereafter was open to all those calling upon his name (by chanting a sort of Buddhist "Hail Mary" called the _nembutsu_, "Praise to Amida Buddha"). Another simplified sect preached a fundamentalist return to the Lotus Sutra and was led by a firebrand named Nichiren, who also created a chant for his largely illiterate followers. A formula guaranteeing Paradise had particular appeal to the samurai, whose day- to-day existence was dangerous and uncertain. The scandalized Tendai monks vigorously opposed this home-grown populist movement, occasionally even burning down temples to discourage its growth. But the Pure Land and Nichiren sects continued to flourish, since the common people finally had a Buddhism all their own. There were others, however, who believed that the aristocratic sects could be reformed from within--by importing them afresh from China, from the source. These reformers hoped that Buddhism in China had maintained its integrity and discipline during the several centuries of separation. And by fortunate coincidence, Japanese contacts with the mainland were being reopened, making it again allowable to undertake the perilous sea voyage to China. But when the first twelfth-century Japanese pilgrims reached the mainland, they were stunned to find that traditional Buddhism had been almost completely supplanted by Ch'an. Consequently, the Japanese pilgrims returning from China perforce returned with Zen, since little else remained. However, Zen was not originally brought back to replace traditional Buddhism, but rather as a stimulant to restore the rigor that had drained out of monastic life, including formal meditation and respect or discipline.7 Credit for the introduction of Lin-chi Zen (called Rinzai) in Japan is traditionally given to the aristocratic priest and traveler Myoan Eisai (1141-1215).8 He began his career as a young monk in the Tendai complex near Kyoto, but in the summer of 1168 he accompanied a Shingon priest on a trip to China, largely to sightsee and to visit the home of the T'ien-t'ai sect as a pilgrim. However, the T'ien-t'ai school must have been a mere shadow of its former self by this time, and naturally enough Eisai became familiar with Ch'an. But he was hardly a firebrand for Zen, for when he returned to Japan he continued practice of traditional Buddhism. Some twenty years later, in 1187, Eisai again journeyed to China, this time planning a pilgrimage on to India and the Buddhist holy places. But the Chinese refused him permission to travel beyond their borders, leaving Eisai no choice but to study there. He finally attached himself to an aging Ch'an monk on Mt. T'ien-t'ai and managed to receive the seal of enlightenment before returning to Japan in 1191, quite probably the first Japanese ever certified by a Chinese Ch'an master. He was not, however, totally committed to Zen. His Ch'an teacher was also occupied with other Buddhist schools, and what Eisai brought back was a Buddhist cocktail blended from several different traditions.9 But he did proceed to build a temple to the Huang-lung (Japanese Oryo) branch of the Lin-chi sect on the southernmost Japanese island, Kyushu (the location nearest China), in the provincial town of Hakata. Almost as important, he also brought back the tea plant (whose brew was used in China to keep drowsy monks awake during meditation), thereby instituting the long marriage of Zen and tea. Although his provincial temple went unchallenged, later attempts to introduce this new sect into Kyoto, the stronghold of traditional Buddhism, met fierce resistance from the establishment, particularly Tendai. But Eisai contended that Zen was a useful sect and that the government would reap practical benefits from its protection. His spirited defense of Zen, entitled "Propagation of Zen for the Protection of the Country," argued that its encouragement would be good for Japanese Buddhism and therefore good for Japan.10 _As in India, so in China its teaching has attracted followers and disciples in great numbers. It propagates the Truth as the ancient Buddha did, with the robe of authentic transmission passing from one man to the next. In the matter of religious discipline, it practices the genuine method of the sages of old. Thus the Truth it teaches, both in substance and appearance, perfects the relationships of master and disciple. In its rules of action and discipline, there is no confusion of right and wrong. . . . Studying it, one discovers the key to all forms of Buddhism; practicing it, one's life is brought to fulfillment in the attainment of enlightenment. Outwardly it favors discipline over doctrine, inwardly it brings the Highest Inner Wisdom. This is what the Zen sect stands for.11 _ He also pointed out how un-Japanese it would be to deny Zen a hearing: Japan has been open-minded in the past, why should she reject a new faith now? _In our country the [emperor] shines in splendor and the influence of his virtuous wisdom spreads far and wide. Emissaries from the distant lands of South and Central Asia pay their respects to his court. Lay ministers conduct the affairs of government; priests and monks spread abroad religious truth. Even the truths of the Four Hindu Vedas are not neglected. Why then reject the five schools of Zen Buddhism?12 _ Eisai was the classic tactician, knowing well when to fight and when to retire, and he decided in 1199 on a diversionary retreat to Kamakura, leaving behind the hostile, competitive atmosphere of aristocratic Kyoto. Through his political connections, he managed to get installed as head of a new temple in Kamakura, beginning Zen's long association with the Japanese warrior class. Eisai seems to have done well in Kamakura, for not long after he arrived, the current strongman gave him financing for a Zen temple in Kyoto, named Kennin-ji and completed in 1205. Eisai returned the favor by assisting in the repair of temples ravaged by the recent wars. It was reportedly for a later, hard-drinking ruler that Eisai composed his second classic work, "Drink Tea and Prolong Life," which championed the medicinal properties of this exotic Chinese beverage, declaring it a restorative that tuned up the body and strengthened the heart. _In the great country of China they drink tea, as a result of which there is no heart trouble and people live long lives. Our country is full of sickly-looking, skinny persons, and this is simply because we do not drink tea. Whenever one is in poor spirits, one should drink tea. This will put the heart in order and dispel all illness. When the heart is vigorous, then even if the other organs are ailing, no great pain will be felt. . . . The heart is the sovereign of the five organs, tea is the chief of the bitter foods, and bitter is the chief of the tastes. For this reason the heart loves bitter things, and when it is doing well all the other organs are properly regulated. . . . When, however, the whole body feels weak, devitalized, and depressed, it is a sign that the heart is ailing. Drink lots of tea, and one's energy and spirits will be restored to full strength.13 _ This first Zen teacher was certainly no Lin-chi. He was merely a Tendai priest who imported Lin-chi's sect from China hoping to bring discipline to his school; he established an ecumenical monastery at which both Zen and esoteric Tendai practices were taught; he consorted with leaders whose place was owed to a military coup d'etat; and he appeared to advocate Zen on transparently practical, sometimes almost political, grounds. He compromised with the existing cults to the end, even refusing to lend aid to other, more pure-minded advocates of Ch'an who had risen in Kyoto in the meantime.14 But Eisai was a colorful figure whom history has chosen to remember as the founder of Zen in Japan, as well as (perhaps equally important) the father of the cult of tea. Eisai ended his days as abbot of the Kyoto temple of Kennin-ji and leader of a small Zen community that was careful not to quarrel with the powers of Tendai and Shingon, which also had altars in the temple. Eisai's "Zen" began in Japan as a minor infusion of Buddhism's original discipline, but through an accommodation with the warrior establishment, he accidentally planted the seeds of Ch'an in fertile soil. Gradually the number of Zen practitioners grew, as more and more of the samurai recognized in Zen a practical philosophy that accorded well with their needs. As Paul Varley has explained: "Zen . . . stresses cultivation of the intuitive faculties and places a high premium on discipline and self-control. It rejects rational decision- making as artificial and delusory, and insists that action must come from emotion. As such, Zen proved particularly congenial to the medieval samurai, who lived with violence and imminent death and who sought to develop such things as 'spontaneity of conduct' and a 'tranquility of heart' to meet the rigours of his profession. Under the influence of Zen, later samurai theorists especially asserted that the true warrior must be constantly prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of his life in the service of his lord--without a moment's reflection or conscious consideration."15 It can only be ironic that what began in China as a school of meditation, then became an iconoclastic movement using koans to beat down the analytical faculties finally emerged (in an amalgam with other teachings) in Japan as a psychological mainstay for the soldiers of a military dictatorship. There was, however, another Japanese school of Zen that introduced its practice in a form more closely resembling original Ch'an. This was the movement started by Dogen, whose life we may now examine. Chapter Sixteen DOGEN: FATHER OF JAPANESE SOTO ZEN The Soto master Dogen (1200-53) is probably the most revered figure in all Japanese Zen. Yet until recently he has been comparatively unknown abroad, perhaps because that great popularizer of Zen in the West, D. T. Suzuki, followed the Rinzai school and managed to essentially ignore Dogen throughout his voluminous writings. But it was Dogen who first insisted on intensive meditation, who produced the first Japanese writings explaining Zen practice, and who constructed the first real Zen monastery in Japan, establishing a set of monastic rules still observed. Moreover, the strength of his character has inspired many Zen masters to follow. Indeed, it is hard to contradict the scholar Dumoulin, who declared him "the strongest and most original thinker that Japan has so far produced."1 Born January 2 of the year 1200 an illegitimate son of a noble Fujiwara mother and a princely father, Dogen's circumstances from the start were aristocratic.2 Around him swirled the literary life of the court, the powerful centuries-old position of the Fujiwara, and the refined decadence of ancient Kyoto. Although his father died when he was two, his privileged education continued at the hands of his mother and half- brother. He most certainly learned to read and write classical Chinese, as well as to versify and debate--all skills that he would one day put to extensive use. His poetic sensitivity (something traditionally prized by the Japanese above logic and precision of thought) was encouraged by all he met in the hothouse atmosphere of ancient Kyoto. This idyllic, protected life was shattered at age seven with the sudden death of his mother. But she set the course of his life when, at the last, she bade him become a monk and reach out to suffering mankind. A popular tradition has it that at his mother's funeral Dogen sensed in the rising incense the impermanence of all things. After the shock of his mother's death he was adopted by an uncle as family heir and set on the way to a reluctant career in statecraft. But as he approached age twelve, the time when a formal ceremony would signify his entry into the male circle of aristocracy, his reservations overwhelmed him and he slipped away to visit another uncle, a priest living in the foothills of Mt. Hiei. When Dogen begged to be allowed to turn his back on the aristocratic world of Kyoto and fulfill his mother's dying wish by becoming a monk the family was dismayed. But finally they relented, and he was ordained the following year as a Tendai brother on Mt. Hiei. Already a scholar of the Chinese classics, he now turned to the literature of Tendai Buddhism. But soon he was snagged on a problem that has haunted theologians East and West for many centuries. In Christian terms it is the Calvinist question of whether man is already saved by predestination or whether he must earn his salvation. Dogen formulated this in a Buddhist context as follows: _As I study both the exoteric and the esoteric schools of Buddhism, they maintain that man is endowed with the Dharma-nature by birth. If this is the case, why had the Buddhas of all ages--undoubtedly in possession of enlightenment--to seek enlightenment and engage in spiritual practice_?3 In other words, if man already has the Buddha nature, why must he struggle to realize it by arduous disciplines? Conversely, if the Buddha nature must be acquired, how can it be inherent in all things, as was taught? This perplexing paradox, which no one in Japan's Tendai "Vatican" on Mt. Hiei could resolve, finally drove Dogen wandering in search of other teachers. He initially stopped at Eisai's temple, Kennin-ji, long enough to be taught the basics of Rinzai Zen practice, but then he traveled on. Eventually, though, he returned to Kennin-ji, and in 1217, began Zen study under Eisai's disciple, Myozen (1184-1225). Of his relationship with this Rinzai master he later declared: _Ever since I awakened to the Bodhi-mind and sought the supreme Truth I made many visits to Buddhist masters throughout the country. It was thus that I happened to meet the Venerable Myozen at Kennin-ji. Nine years quickly passed as I studied the Way under him. During that period I had the opportunity to learn from him, to some extent, the training methods of the Rinzai Zen sect. To the Venerable Myozen, leading disciple of my late master Eisai, was rightly transmitted the highest supreme Law and he was unparalleled among his fellow disciples in learning and virtue.4 _Dogen may have been impressed as much by the legend of Eisai as by the shouting and beating of the Rinzai sect, for he often sprinkled stories about Eisai through his writings and sermons thereafter. But Dogen still could not find contentment, even with the Rinzai he received at Kennin-ji, and at age twenty-three he resolved to go to China and experience Ch'an teachings firsthand. So in the spring of 1223 he and Myozen shipped out for China, intending to visit Buddhist establishments there. (Another reason for his hasty decision to go to China for study may have been a series of political upheavals involving armed monks, which resulted in some of his high-placed relations being banished--while a series of executions took place.)5 After a rough but speedy voyage across the East China Sea, they arrived at Ming-chou, down the coast from the Sung capital of Hangchow. Myozen could not wait and headed straight for the Ch'an complex on Mt. T'ien- t'ung. However, the more cautious Dogen chose to stay aboard ship until midsummer, easing himself into Chinese life slowly. But even there he experienced an example of Ch'an fervor and devotion that impressed him deeply, if only because it was so different from what he had seen in Japan. This lesson was at the hands of a sixty-year-old Chinese cook from a Ch'an monastery who visited the ship to purchase some Japanese mushrooms. Dogen became involved in an animated conversation with the old monk and, since his monastery was over ten miles away, out of courtesy invited him to stay the night on board ship. However, the old tenzo monk (one in charge of monastery meals) insisted on returning, saying duty called. But, Dogen pressed, surely there must be others who could cook in such a large monastery, and besides cooking was hardly the point of Zen. As Dogen later recalled his own words: _"Venerable sir! Why don't you do_ zazen _[Zen meditation] or study the koan of ancient masters? What is the use of working so hard as a tenzo monk?" On hearing my remarks, he broke into laughter and said, "Good foreigner! You seem to be ignorant of the true training and meaning of Buddhism." In a moment, ashamed and surprised at his remark, I said to him, "What are they?" "If you understand the true meaning of your question, you will have already realized the true meaning of Buddhism," he answered. At that time, however, I was unable to understand what he meant.6_ Such were the exchanges between Japanese Buddhist scholars and Ch'an monastery cooks in the early thirteenth century. In midsummer of 1223, Dogen finally moved ashore and entered the temple on Mt. T'ien-t'ung called Ching-te-ssu. His intense study brought no seal of enlightenment, but it did engender severe disappointment with the standards of Ch'an monasteries in China. Although the school that Dogen found was a branch of Lin-chi traceable back to the koan master Ta-hui, different from the fading school Eisai had encountered, Dogen later would denounce impartially the general run of all Ch'an masters he met in China. _Although there are in China a great number of those who profess themselves to be the descendants of the Buddhas and patriarchs, there are few who study truth and accordingly there are few who teach truth. . . . Thus those people who have not the slightest idea of what the great Way of the Buddhas and patriarchs is now become the masters of monks. . . . Reciting a few words of Lin-chi and Yun-men they take them for the whole truth of Buddhism. If Buddhism had been exhausted by a few words of Lin-chi and Yun-men, it could not have survived till today.7 _ After studying for two years while simultaneously nosing about other nearby monasteries, Dogen finally decided to travel, hoping others of the "five houses" had maintained discipline. (He also seems to have experienced some discrimination as a foreigner in China.) But the farther he went, the more despondent he became; nowhere in China could he find a teacher worthy to succeed the ancient masters. He finally resolved to abandon China and return to Japan. But at this moment fate took a turn that--in retrospect--had enormous importance for the future of Japanese Buddhism. A monk he met on the road told him that T'ien-t'ung now had a new abbot, a truly enlightened master namd Ju-ching (1163-1228). Dogen returned to see and was received warmly, being invited by Ju-ching to ignore ceremony and approach him as an equal. The twenty-five-year-old Japanese monk was elated, and settled down at last to undertake the study he had come to China for. The master Ju-ching became Dogen's ideal of what a Zen teacher should be, and the habits--perhaps even the eccentricities--of this aging teacher were translated by Dogen into the model for monks in Japan. Ju-ching was, above all things, uncompromising in his advocacy of meditation or _zazen_. He might even have challenged Bodhidharma for the title of its all-time practitioner, and it was from Ju-ching's Ch'an (which may also have included koan study) that Dogen took his cue. Although Ch'an was still widespread, Ju-ching seems to have been the only remaining advocate of intensive meditation in China, and a chance intersection of history brought this teaching to Japan. Significantly, he was one of the few Ts'ao-tung masters ever to lead the important T'ien-t'ung monastery, traditionally headed by a member of the Lin-chi school. Ju-ching was a model master: strict but kindly; simple in habits, diet, dress; immune to the attractions of court recognition; and an uncompromising advocate of virtually round-the- clock meditation. But he never asked anything of his monks he did not also demand of himself, even when advanced in years. He would strike nodding monks to refresh their attention, while lamenting that age had so diminished the strength in his arm it was eroding his ability to create good monks. Ju-ching would meditate until eleven in the evening and then be up again by two-thirty or three the next morning, back at _zazen_. He frequently developed sores on his backside from such perpetual sitting, but nothing deterred him. He even declared the pain made him love _zazen _all the more. The story of Dogen's final enlightenment at the hands of Ju-ching is a classic of Japanese Zen. In the meditation hall one early morning all the monks were sitting in meditation when the man next to Dogen dozed off--a common enough occurrence in early-morning sessions. But when Ju- ching came by on a routine inspection and saw the sleeping monk, he was for some reason particularly rankled and roared out, "_Zazen _means the dropping away of mind and body! What will you get by sleeping?" Dogen, sitting nearby, was at first startled, but then an indescribable calm, an ecstatic joy washed over him. Could it be that this was the moment he had been hoping for? Could it be that the fruit had been ready to fall from the tree, with this just the shake needed? Dogen rushed to Ju-ching's room afterward and burned incense, to signify his enlightenment experience. Throwing himself at the master's feet, he declared, "I have experienced the dropping away of mind and body." Ju-ching immediately recognized his enlightenment to be genuine (modern masters reportedly can discern a novice's state merely by the way he rings a gong) and he replied, "You have indeed dropped body and mind." "But wait a minute," Dogen cautioned. "Don't sanction me so easily. How do you really know I've achieved enlightenment?" To which Ju-ching replied simply, "Body and mind have dropped away." Dogen bowed in acknowledgment of his acknowledgment. And thus, in May 1225, was the greatest Zen teacher in Japan enlightened. In the fall Ju-ching conferred upon Dogen the seal of patriarchal succession of his line of the Ts'ao-tung sect.8 Dogen stayed on for two more years studying under Ju-ching, but finally he decided to return again to Japan. When they parted, Ju-ching gave his Japanese protege the patriarchal robe, his own portrait (called _chinso_, a symbol of transmission), and bade him farewell. So did Dogen return to Japan in the fall of 1227, taking with him the koan collection _Blue Cliff Record_, which he copied his last night in China. But he also brought the fire of a powerful idea, pure meditation, that formed the basis for the Japanese Soto school of Zen. Dogen returned to Eisai's old temple of Kennin-ji, where he proceeded to write the minor classic _A Universal Recommendation for Zazen_, introducing the idea of intense meditation to his countrymen. _You should pay attention to the fact that even the Buddha Sakyamuni had to practice_ zazen _for six years. It is also said that Bodhidharma had to do _zazen _at Shao-lin temple for nine years in order to transmit the Buddha-mind. Since these ancient sages were so diligent, how can present-day trainees do without the practice of _zazen_? You should stop pursuing words and letters and learn to withdraw and reflect on yourself. When you do so, your body and mind will naturally fall away, and your original Buddha-nature will appear.9 _ It was the opening shot in a campaign to make pure Zen the meaningful alternative to the decadent traditional Buddhism of the aristocracy and the new Salvationist sect of Pure Land. But first the Japanese had to be taught how to meditate, so he wrote a meditation "handbook" that explained exactly how and where to undertake this traditional Buddhist practice. His directions are worth quoting at length. _Now, in doing _zazen _it is desirable to have a quiet room. You should be temperate in eating and drinking, forsaking all delusive relationships. Setting everything aside, think neither of good nor evil, right nor wrong. Thus, having stopped the various functions of your mind, give up the idea of becoming a Buddha. This holds true not only for _zazen _but for all your daily actions. Usually a thick square mat is put on the floor where you sit and a round cushion on top of that. You may sit in either the full or half lotus position. In the former, first put your right foot on your left thigh and then your left foot on your right thigh. In the latter, only put your left foot on the right thigh. Your clothing should be worn loosely but neatly. Next, put your right hand on your left foot and your left palm on the right palm, the tips of the thumbs lightly touching. Sit upright, leaning to neither left nor right, front nor back. Your ears should be on the same plane as your shoulders and your nose in line with your navel. Your tongue should be placed against the roof of your mouth and your lips and teeth closed firmly. With your eyes kept continuously open, breathe quietly through your nostrils. Finally, having regulated your body and mind in this way, take a deep breath, sway your body to left and right, then sit firmly as a rock. Think of nonthinking. How is this done? By thinking beyond thinking and nonthinking. This is the very basis of _zazen_._10 This first little essay was meant to provide Japan a taste of the real Zen he had experienced in China, and it was the beginning of an astounding literary output. Dogen asserted that since the Buddha had meditated and Bodhidharma had meditated, the most valuable thing to do is meditate. Not surprisingly, he received a cold response from the other schools in Kyoto, both the Tendai sects and the other "Zen" teachers who, like Eisai, taught a "syncretic" Zen of compromise with establishment Buddhism. His rigid doctrine was socially awkward for the syncretic Zen monks at Kennin-ji--who seasoned their practice with chants and esoteric ceremonies--and Dogen finally decided to spare them further embarrassment by retiring to a mountain retreat. Off he went to another temple, An'yoin, where he began to elaborate on the role of meditation in Zen practice, writing another essay, entitled "Bendowa" or "Lecture on Training," designed to provide a more dialectical defense for zazen. Written in the form of eighteen questions and answers, the "Lecture on Training" was intended to further justify the intense meditation he had described earlier. This essay later became the initial section of a massive book today known as the _Shobogenzo _(_Treasure of Knowledge Regarding the True Dharma_), which was guarded as a secret treasure of the Soto school for many centuries. _Question: . . . For most people the natural way to enlightenment is to read the scriptures and recite the nembutsu [Praise to Amida Buddha]. Since you do nothing more than sit cross-legged, how can this mere sitting be a means of gaining enlightenment? Answer: . . . Of what use is it to read the scriptures and recite the _nembutsu_? It is useless to imagine that the merits of Buddhism come merely from using one's tongue or voice; if you think such things embrace all of Buddhism, the Truth is a long way from you. You should only read the scriptures so as to learn that the Buddha was teaching the necessity of gradual and sudden training and that from this you can realise enlightenment; do not read them so as to make a show of wisdom with useless intellection. . . . Just to continually repeat the _nembutsu_ is equally useless, for it is a frog who croaks both day and night in some field. . . . They who do nothing . . . more than study the scriptures . . . never understand this, so just stop it and thereby cure your delusions and doubts. Just follow the teachings of a true master and, through the power of _Zazen_, find the utterly joyful enlightenment of Buddha.11 _ It is not surprising to find Dogen firm in the belief that meditation is superior to the practices of two competing movements: the traditional sutra veneration of the Tendai sect and the Pure Land schools' chanting of the nembutsu to Amida Buddha. But what about the Rinzai Zen teaching that enlightenment is sudden and cannot be induced by gradual practice? He next attacks this position: _Question: Both in India and China, from the beginning of time to the present day, some Zen teachers have been enlightened by such things as the sound of stones striking bamboos, whilst the color of plum blossoms cleared the minds of others. The [Buddha] was enlightened at the sight of the morning star, whilst [his follower] Ananda understood the Truth through seeing a stick fall. As well as these, many Zen teachers of the five schools after the Sixth Patriarch were enlightened by only so much as a word. Did all of them practise _Zazen_? Answer: From olden times down to the present day, all who were ever enlightened, either by colors or sounds, practised _Zazen _without _Zazen_ and became instantaneously enlightened.12_ What exactly is he saying here? It would seem that he is convoluting the early teaching of the Southern sect, which proposed that "meditation" is a mind process that might also be duplicated by other means. Dogen seems to be arguing that zazen is efficacious since all who became enlightened were really "meditating" in daily life, whether they realized it or not. The Southern school claimed that _dhyana_ could be anything and therefore it seemed ancillary; Dogen claims it could be anything and therefore it is essential. Dogen also came back to his original doctrinal dilemma, the question that had sent him wandering from teacher to teacher in Japan while still a youth: Why strive for enlightenment if all creatures are Buddhas to begin with? He finally felt qualified to address his own quandary. _Question: There are those who say that one has only to understand that this mind itself is the Buddha in order to understand Buddhism, and that there is no need to recite the scriptures or undergo bodily training. If you understand that Buddhism is inherent in yourself, you are already fully enlightened and there is no need to seek for anything further from anywhere. If this is so, is there any sense in taking the trouble to practice _Zazen_?_ _Answer: This is a very grievous mistake, and even if it should be true and the sages should teach it, it is impossible for you to understand it. If you would truly study Buddhism, you must transcend all opinions of subject and object. If it is possible to be enlightened simply by knowing that the self is, in its self-nature, the Buddha, then there was no need for Shakyamuni to try so diligently to teach the Way.1 _Whether this answer resolves the paradox will be left to the judgment of others. But for all his intensities and eccentricities, Dogen was certainly a powerful new thinker, clearly the strongest dialectician in the history of Japanese Zen. He was also a magnetic personality who attracted many followers, and by 1233 he had so outgrown the space at An'yoin that a larger temple was imperative (which became available thanks to his aristocratic connections). His next move was to Kosho-ji, a temple near Kyoto, where he spent the succeeding ten years in intense literary creativity, where he constructed the first truly independent Zen monastery in Japan, and where he found a worthy disciple, Koun Ejo (1198-1280), who served as head monk and ultimately as his successor. It was here, beginning in 1233, that Dogen finally recreated Chinese Ch'an totally in Japan, right down to an architectural replica of a Sung-style monastery and an uncompromising discipline reminiscent of his old Chinese master Ju-ching. After settling in at Kosho-ji he began, in late 1235, a fundraising drive for the purpose of building the first Zen-style monks' hall (_sodo_) in Japan. He believed that this building, viewed by the lawgiver Po-chang Huai-hai as the heart of a Ch'an monstery, was essential if he were to effectively teach meditation. The doors would be open to all, since the onetime aristocrat Dogen was now very much a man of the people, welcoming rich and poor, monks and laymen, men and women.14 When the meditation hall opened in 1236, Dogen signaled the occasion by posting a set of rules for behavior reminiscent of Huai-hai's laws set down in eighth-century China. A quick skim of these rules tells much about the character of the master Dogen. _No monk shall be admitted to this meditation hall unless he has an earnest desire for the Way and a strong determination not to seek fame and profit. . . . All monks in this hall should try to live in harmony with one another, just as milk blends well with water. . . . You should not walk about in the outside world; but if unavoidable, it is permissible to do so once a month. . . . Keep the supervisor of this hall informed of your whereabouts at all times. . . .Never speak ill of others nor find fault with them. . . . Never loiter in the hall. . . . Wear only robes of plain material. . . . Never enter the hall drunk with wine. . . . Never disturb the training of other monks by inviting outsiders, lay or clerical, into the hall. . . .15 _Dogen maintained this first pure Zen monastery for a decade, during which time he composed forty more sections of his classic Shobogenzo. And during this time the tree of Zen took root in Japanese soil firmly and surely. But things could not go smoothly forever. Dogen's powerful friends at court protected him as long as they could, but eventually his popularity became too much for the jealous Tendai monks on Mt. Hiei to bear. To fight their censure he appealed to the emperor, claiming (as had Eisai before him) that Zen was good for Japan. But the other schools immediately filed opposing briefs with the emperor and the court, culminating in a judiciary proceeding with distinguished clerics being convened to hear both sides. As might have been expected they ruled against Dogen, criticizing him for being obsessed with _zazen _and ignoring the sutras, etc. It probably was this political setback that persuaded him to quit the Kyoto vicinity in 1243 and move to the provinces, where he could teach in peace.16 He camped out in various small Tendai monasteries (where he wrote another twenty-nine chapters of the _Shobogenzo_) until his final temple, called Eihei-ji, or Eternal Peace, was completed in the mountains of present-day Fukui prefecture. This site became the center of Soto Zen in Japan, the principal monastery of the sect. Dogen himself was approaching elder statesmanhood, and in 1247 he was summoned to the warrior headquarters of Kamakura by none other than the most powerful man in Japan, the warrior Hojo Tokiyori. The ruler wanted to learn about Zen, and Dogen correctly perceived it would be unhealthy to refuse the invitation. The warriors in Kamakura would most likely have been familiar with the syncretic Rinzai Zen of Eisai, which focused on the use of the koan. For his own part, Dogen did not reject the koan out of hand (he left a collection of three hundred); rather he judged it a device intended to create a momentary glimpse of satori, or enlightenment, whose real value was mainly as a metaphor for the enlightenment experience--an experience he believed could be realized in full only through gradual practice. _In the pursuit of the Way [Buddhism] the prime essential is sitting (_zazen_). . . . By reflecting upon various "public-cases" (koan) and dialogues of the patriarchs, one may perhaps get the sense of them but it will only result in one's being led astray from the way of the Buddha, our founder. Just to pass the time in sitting straight, without any thought of acquisition, without any sense of achieving enlightenment--this is the way of the Founder. It is true that our predecessors recommended both the koan and sitting, but it was the sitting that they particularly insisted upon. There have been some who attained enlightenment through the test of the koan, but the true cause of their enlightenment was the merit and effectiveness of sitting. Truly the merit lies in the sitting.17 _ Dogen spent the winter of 1247-48 in Kamakura teaching meditation, and was in turn offered the post of abbot in a new Zen monastery being built for the warrior capital. But Dogen politely declined, perhaps believing the Salvationist sects and the syncretic Zen of Eisai were still too strong among the samurai for his pure meditation to catch hold.18 Or possibly he sensed his health was beginning to fail and he wanted to retire to his beloved mountain monastery, where the politics of Kyoto and Kamakura could not reach. Maybe Dogen's many nights of intense meditation in heat and cold had taken their toll, or the long hours of writing and rewriting his manual of Zen had sapped his strength. In any case, his health deteriorated rapidly after Kamakura until finally, in 1253, all realized that the end was near. He appointed the faithful head monk Ejo his successor at Eihei-ji, and on the insistence of his disciples was then taken to Kyoto for medical care. However, nothing could be done, and on August 28 he said farewell, dying in the grand tradition--sitting in _zazen_. In the long run, Dogen seems the one we should acknowledge as the true founder of Zen in Japan; pure Zen first had to be introduced before it could grow. But at the time of Dogen's death it was not at all obvious that Soto Zen, or any Zen for that matter, would ever survive to become an independent sect in Japan.19 Perhaps Dogen felt this too, for his later writings became increasingly strident in their denunciation of the Salvationist sects and the syncretic Rinzai schools. He thought of himself as above sectarianism, claiming that _zazen _was not a sect but rather an expression of pure Buddhism. And perhaps it was after all only an accident that the teacher who had taught him to meditate happened to be a member of the Ts'ao-tung school. After Dogen's death, his small community persevered in the mountains, isolated and at first preserving his teaching. But eventually internal disputes pulled the community apart, and the temple fell inactive for a time. Furthermore, his teaching of intensive meditation was soon diluted by the introduction of rituals from the esoteric schools of traditional Buddhism. In this new form it began to proselytize and spread outward, particularly in provincial areas, where its simplicity appealed to common folk.20 It also welcomed women, something not necessarily stressed in all the Buddhist sects. Although Soto was by this time pretty much a thing of the past in China, with the last recognized Chinese Soto master dying about a century after Dogen, the school prospered in Japan, where today it has three followers for every one of Rinzai. Ch'an still had Rinzai masters in China, however, and in the next phase of Zen they would start emigrating to teach the Japanese in Kamakura. The result was that Soto became the low-key home-grown Zen, while Rinzai became a vehicle for importing Chinese culture to the warrior class. It is to this dynamic period of warrior Rinzai Zen that we must now look for the next great masters. Chapter Seventeen IKKYU: ZEN ECCENTRIC The earliest Japanese masters brought Ch'an from China in the hope that its discipline would revitalize traditional Buddhism. Since Eisai's temple was the first to include Ch'an practice, he has received credit for founding Japanese Rinzai Zen. History, however, has glorified matters somewhat, for in fact Eisai was little more than a Tendai priest who dabbled a bit in Ch'an practice and enjoyed a gift for advancing himself with the Kamakura warlords. Nor was Dogen inspired to establish the Soto sect in Japan. He too was merely a reformer who chanced across a Chinese Soto master devoted to meditation. It was the powerful discipline of meditation that Dogen sought to introduce into Japan, not a sectarian branch of Zen. Only later did Dogen's movement become a proselytizing Zen sect. These and other thirteenth-century Japanese reformers imported Ch'an for the simple reason that it was the purest expression of Buddhism left in China. During the early era Zen focused on Kyoto and Kamakura and was mainly a reformation within the Tendai school. The Japanese understanding of Ch'an was hesitant and inconclusive--to the point that few Japanese of the mid-thirteenth century actually realized a new form of Buddhism was in the making.1 Over the next century and a half, however, a revolution began, as Zen at first gradually and then precipitously became the preoccupation of Japan's ruling class. The Zen explosion came about via a combination of circumstances. We have seen that the warrior ruler Hojo Tokiyori (1227- 63) was interested in the school and offered Dogen a temple in Kamakura, an invitation Dogen refused. However, in 1246 an emigre Ch'an master from the Chinese mainland named Lan-ch'i (1212-78) appeared in Japan uninvited, having heard of Japanese interest in Ch'an. He went first to Kyoto, where he found Zen still subject to hostile sectarianism, and then to Kamakura, where he managed in 1249 to meet Tokiyori. The Japanese strongman was delighted and proceeded to have the temple of another sect converted to a Zen establishment, making Lan-ch'i abbot. Shortly after, Tokiyori completed construction of a Sung-style Zen monastery in Kamakura, again putting Lan-ch'i in charge. This Chinese monk, merely one of many in his native China, had become head of the leading Zen temple in Japan. When word got back, a host of enterprising Chinese clerics began pouring into the island nation seeking their fortune.2 Thus began the next phase of early Japanese Zen, fueled by the invasion of Chinese Ch'an monks. This movement occupied the remainder of the thirteenth century and was spurred along by unsettled conditions in China--namely the imminent fall of the Southern Sung Dynasty to the Mongols and a concurrent power struggle within Ch'an itself, which induced monks from the less powerful establishments to seek greener pastures.3 In 1263 a senior Ch'an cleric named Wu-an (1197-1276) arrived in Kamakura and was also made an abbot by Tokiyori.4 The first monk, Lan-ch'i, thereupon moved to Kyoto and began proselytizing in the old capital. Wu-an subsequently certified Tokiyori with a seal of enlightenment, making the military strongman of Japan an acknowledged Ch'an master. Tokiyori's interest in Zen did not go unnoticed by the warriors around him, and his advocacy, combined with the influx of Chinese monks appearing to teach, initiated the Zen bandwagon in Kamakura. Tokiyori died in 1263, and his young son Tokimune (1251--84), who came to power five years later, initially showed no interest in Zen practice. But he was still in his teens in 1268 when there appeared in Japan envoys from Kublai Khan demanding tribute. The Mongols were at that moment completing their sack of China, and Japan seemed the next step. Undeterred, the Japanese answered all Mongol demands with haughty insults, with the not-unexpected result that in 1274 Kublai launched an invasion fleet. Although his ships foundered in a fortuitous streak of bad weather, the Japanese knew that there would be more. It was then that Tokimune began strengthening his discipline through Zen meditation and toughening his instincts with koans. He studied under a newly arrived Chinese master whose limited Japanese necessitated their communicating through a translator. (When the enlightened Chinese found cause to strike his all-powerful student, he prudently pummeled the interpreter instead.)5 The samurai also began to take an interest in Zen, which naturally appealed to the warrior mentality because of its emphasis on discipline, on experience over education, and on a rough- and-tumble practice including debates with a master and blows for the loser--all congenial to men of simple, unschooled tastes. For their own part, the perceptive Chinese missionaries, hampered by the language barrier, rendered Zen as simplistic as possible to help the faith compete with the Salvationist sects among the often illiterate warriors. In 1281 the Mongols launched another invasion force, this time 100,000 men strong, but they were held off several weeks by the steel-nerved samurai until a typhoon (later named the Kamikaze or "Divine Wind") providentially sank the fleet. The extent to which Zen training aided this victory can be debated, but the courage of Tokimune and his soldiers undoubtedly benefited from its rigorous discipline. The Japanese ruler himself gave Zen heavy credit and immediately began building a commemorative Zen monastery in Kamakura. By the time of Tokimuni's premature death in 1284, Rinzai Zen had been effectively established as the faith of the Kamakura rulers. His successor continued the development of Zen establishments, supported by new Chinese masters who also began teaching Chinese culture (calligraphy, literature, ink painting, philosophy) to the Kamakura warriors along with their Zen. Since the faith was definitely beginning to boom, the government prudently published a list of restrictions for Zen monasteries, including an abolition of arms (a traditional problem with the other sects) and a limit on the number of pretty boys (novices) that could be quartered in a compound to tempt the monks. The maximum number of monks in each monastery also was prescribed, and severe rules were established governing discipline. Out of this era in the late thirteenth century evolved an organization of Zen temples in Kyoto and Kamakura based on the Sung Chinese model of five main monasteries (called the "five mountains" or _gozan_) and a network of ten officially recognized subsidiary temples. Furthermore, Chinese culture became so fashionable in Kamakura that collections of Sung art began appearing among the illiterate provincial warriors--an early harbinger of the Japanese evolution of Zen from asceticism to aesthetics.6 The creation of the _gozan _system at the end of the thirteenth century gave Zen a formal role in the religious structure of Japan. Zen was now fashionable and had powerful friends, a perfect combination to foster growth and influence. On the sometimes pointed urging of the government, temples from other sects were converted to Zen establishments by local authorities throughout Japan.7 The court and aristocracy in Kyoto also began taking an interest in pure, Sung-style Rinzai. Temples were built in Kyoto (or converted from other sects), and even the cloistered emperors began to meditate (perhaps searching less for enlightenment than for the rumored occult powers). When the Kamakura regime collapsed in the mid-fourteenth century and warriors of the newly ascendent Ashikaga clan returned the seat of government to Kyoto, the old capital was already well acquainted with Zen's political importance. However, although Rinzai Zen had made much visible headway in Japan--the ruling classes increasingly meditated on koans, and Chinese monks operated new Sung-style monasteries--the depth of understanding seems disappointingly superficial overall. The _gozan _system soon turned so political, as monasteries competed for official favor, that before long establishment Zen was almost devoid of spiritual content. In many ways, Japanese Zen became decadent almost from the start. The immense prestige of imported Chinese art and ideas, together with the powerful role of the Zen clerics as virtually the only group sufficiently educated to oversee relations with the continent, meant that early on, Zen's cultural role became as telling as its spiritual place. Perhaps the condition of Zen is best illustrated by noting that the most famous priest of the era, Muso Soseki (1275-1351), was actually a powerful political figure. This Zen prelate, who never visited China, came to prominence when he served first an ill-fated emperor-- subsequently deposed--and later the Ashikaga warrior who deposed him. Muso was instrumental in the Japanese government's establishment of regular trade with the mainland. He was also responsible for a revision of the _gozan _administrative system, establishing (in 1338) official Zen temples in all sixty-six provinces of Japan and spreading the power base of the faith. Although Muso is today honored as an important Japanese master, he actually preferred a "syncretic" Zen intermingled with esoteric rites and apparently understood very little of real Zen. A prototype for many Zen leaders to come, he was a scholar, aesthetician, and architect of some of the great cultural monuments in Kyoto, personally designing several of the capital's finest temples and landscape gardens. Thus by the mid-fourteenth century Zen had become hardly more than an umbrella for the import of Chinese technology, art, and philosophy.8 The monks were, by Muso's own admission, more often than not "shaven-headed laymen" who came to Zen to learn painting and to write a stilted form of Chinese verse as part of a _gozan _literary movement. The overall situation has been well summarized by Philip Yampolsky: "The monks in temples were all poets and literary figures.. . . [T]he use of koans, particularly those derived from the [_Blue Cliff Record_], became a literary and educational device rather than a method for the practice of Zen."9 He further notes that ". . . with the _gozan _system frozen in a bureaucratic mold, priests with administrative talents gained in ascendency. In the headquarters temples men interested in literary pursuits withdrew completely from temple affairs and devoted themselves exclusively to literature. To be sure, priests gave lectures and continued to write commentaries. But the _gozan _priests seemed to concern themselves more and more with trivialities. By the mid-fifteenth century Zen teaching had virtually disappeared in the temples, and the priests devoted themselves mainly to ceremonial and administrative duties."10 Authentic Zen practice had become almost completely emasculated, overshadowed by the rise of a Zen-inspired cultural movement far outstripping Chinese prototypes. The political convolutions of fourteenth-century Japan, as well as the organizational shenanigans of the official Rinzai Zen sect, need not detain us further.11 We need only note that the _gozan _system, which so effectively gave Zen an official presence throughout Japan, also meant that the institution present was Zen in name only. Significantly, however, a few major monasteries elected not to participate in the official system. One of the most important was the Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, which managed, by not becoming part of the establishment, to maintain some authenticity in its practice. And out of the Daitoku-ji tradition there came from time to time a few Zen monks who still understood what Zen was supposed to be about, who understood it was more than painting, gardens, poetry, and power. Perhaps the most celebrated of these iconoclastic throwbacks to authentic Zen was the legendary Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481). The master Ikkyu, a breath of fresh air in the stifling, hypocritical world of institutionalized Zen, seems almost a reincarnation of the early Ch'an masters of the T'ang.12 However, his penchant for drinking and womanizing is more reminiscent of the Taoists than the Buddhists. Historical information on Ikkyu and his writings is spread among various documents of uneven reliability. The major source is a pious chronicle allegedly compiled by his disciple Bokusai from firsthand information. Whereas this document has the virtue of being contemporaneous with his life, it has the drawback of being abbreviated and selectively edited to omit unflattering facts. Then there is a collection of tales from the Tokugawa era (1615-1868) which are heavily embellished when not totally apocryphal. The picaresque character created in the Tokugawa Tales led one commentator to liken Ikkyu to the fabulous Sufi philosopher-vagabond Nasrudin, who also became a vehicle to transmit folk wisdom.13 These tales seem to have developed around Ikkyu simply because his devil-may-care attitude, combined with his antischolarly pose, made him a perfect peg on which to hang all sorts of didactic (not to mention Rabelaisian) anecdotes. Finally, there is a vast body of his own poetry and prose, as well as a collection of calligraphy now widely admired for its spontaneity and power. Bokusai's chronicle identifies Ikkyu's mother as a lady-in-waiting at the imperial palace of Emperor Gokomatsu, who chose from time to time to "show her favor." When she was discovered to be with child, the empress had her sent away, charging that she was sympathetic to a competing political faction. Consequently, the master Ikkyu was born in the house of a commoner on New Year's Day of the year 1394, the natural son of an emperor and a daughter of the warrior class. At age five his mother made him acolyte in a Zen monastery, a move some suggest was for his physical safety, lest the shogun decide to do away with this emperor's son as a potential threat. His schooling in this _gozan _era was aristocratic and classical, founded on Chinese literature and the Buddhist sutras. By age eleven he was studying the Vimalakirti Sutra and by thirteen he was intensively reading and writing Chinese poetry. One of his works, written at age fifteen and entitled "Spring Finery," demonstrates a delicate sensibility reminiscent of John Keats: _How many passions cling to this wanderer's sleeves? Multitudes of falling blossoms mark the passion of Heaven and Earth. A perfumed breeze across my pillow; Am I asleep or awake? Here and now melt into an indistinct Spring dream.14 _ The poet here has returned from a walk only to find the perfume of flowers clinging to his clothes, confusing his sense of reality and place. It recalls Keats' nightingale--"Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?" In this early poem we catch a glimpse of the sensualist Ikkyu would one day become. At age eighteen he became a novice to a reclusive monk of the Myoshin- ji branch of Zen in Kyoto; but when his mentor died two years later he wandered for a time disconsolate and suicide-prone. Then at twenty-two he decided to try for an interview with Kaso Soton (1352-1428), the Daitoku-ji-trained master known to be the sternest teacher in Japan. As was traditional, the master at first shut him out and refused an audience. Ikkyu resolved to wait outside until death, "taking the dew for his roof and the grasses for his bed." He slept at night under an empty boat and stood all day in front of Kaso's retreat. After Kaso repeatedly failed to discourage him, even once dousing him with water, the master relented and invited Ikkyu in for an interview. They were made for each other and for many years thereafter Ikkyu and Kaso "pursued deep matters tirelessly." Ikkyu came to revere Kaso, probably one of the few authentic masters of the age, and he stayed to serve this teacher for almost a decade, even though life with Kaso was arduous. Since they lived near a major lake, Ikkyu would each night meditate in a borrowed fisherman's boat until dawn. When his purse "went flat," he would journey to the capital and sell incense or cheap clothing to poor housewives--afterwards returning to the monastery in the same straw sandals, hat, and cloak.15 After three years Kaso gave him the Zen name Ikkyu, a recognition of his progress. Ikkyu's enlightenment occurred in his twenty-sixth year when, while meditating in the boat, he was startled by the cry of a crow. He rushed back at dawn and reported this to his master. Kaso responded, "You have reached the stage of an _arhat _[one who has overcome ego], but not that of a Master, novice." Ikkyu replied, "Then I'm perfectly happy as an _arhat _and don't need to be a Master." Kaso responded, "Well, then, you really are a Master after all."16 Although it was customary for monks to receive a certificate from their master attesting to their enlightenment, the matter of Ikkyu's certificate is problematical. He himself refused to give out certificates, and he is depicted in Bokusai's chronicle as periodically taking out his own and requesting it be destroyed by his disciples-- after which it seemed to miraculously appear again several years later. The quantity of invention and accretion attached to Ikkyu's disappearing certificate has fostered speculation that he never, in fact, actually received a seal. In any case, he probably would have destroyed his own seal of enlightenment in later years. His life grew progressively more unconventional with time, just the opposite of most. Beginning as a classicist in the finest Kyoto tradition, he had gone on to become a spiritual recluse in the mountains under a harsh meditation master. After all this training he then took the road, becoming a wandering monk in the traditional T'ang mode. Well, almost in the traditional mode. He seemed to wander into brothels and wine shops almost as often as into Zen temples. He consorted with high and low, merchant and commoner, male and female. Our record of these explorations, both geographic and social, is in his writings, particularly his poetry. He also harbored a vendetta against the complacency and corruption of Japanese Zen and its masters, particularly the new abbot of Daitoku-ji, an older man named Yoso who had once been a fellow disciple of his beloved Kaso. When Ikkyu was forty-six he was invited by Yoso to head a subtemple in the Daitoku-ji compound. He accepted, much to the delight of his admirers, who began bringing the temple donations in gratitude. However, after only ten days Ikkyu concluded that Daitoku-ji too had become more concerned with ceremony than with the preservation of Zen, and he wrote a famous protest poem as a parting gesture--claiming he could find more of Zen in the meat, drink, and sex traditionally forbidden Buddhists. _For ten days in this temple my mind's been in turmoil, My feet are entangled in endless red tape. If some day you get around to looking for me, Try the fish-shop, the wine parlor, or the brothel.17 _ Ikkyu's attack on the commercialization of Zen was not without cause. The scholar Jan Covell observes that in Ikkyu's time, "Rinzai Zen had sunk to a low point and enlightenment was 'sold,' particularly by those temples associated with the Shogunate. Zen temples also made money in sake-brewing and through usury. In the mid-fifteenth century one Zen temple, Shokoku-ji, furnished all the advisers to the Shogunate's government and received most of the bribes. The imperial-sanctioned temple of Daitoku-ji was only on the fringe of this corruption, but Ikkyu felt he could not criticize it enough."18 Ironically, Ikkyu also attacked the writing of "Zen" poetry--in his poems. He was really attacking the literary _gozan _movement, the preoccupation of monks who forsook Zen to concentrate on producing forgettable verse in formal Chinese. They put their poetry before, indeed in place of, Zen practice. Ikkyu used his poetry (later collected as the "Crazy Cloud Poems" or _Kyoun-shu_) as a means of expressing his enlightenment, as well as his criticism of the establishment. It also, as often as not, celebrated sensual over spiritual pleasures. Whereas the T'ang masters created illogic and struggled with intuitive transmission, Ikkyu cheerfully gave in to the existential life of the senses. In the introduction to one poem he told a parable explaining his priorities. _ Once upon a time there was an old woman who supported a retired hermit for some twenty years. For a long time, she sent a young girl to serve his food. One day she told the girl to throw her arms around the monk and ask him how he felt. When the girl did so, the monk told her, "I am like a withered tree propped up against a cold boulder after three winters without warmth." The girl went back to the old woman and made her report. "Twenty years wasted feeding a phony layman!" exclaimed the woman. Then she ran him off and burnt his hut to the ground. The grandmotherly old woman tried to give that rascal a ladder. To provide the pure monk with a nice bride. If tonight I were to be made such a proposition, The withered willow would put forth new spring growth.19_ A particularly lyrical exploration of sensuality is found in a poem entitled "A Woman's [Body] has the Fragrance of Narcissus," which celebrates the essence of sexuality. _One should gaze long at [the fairy] hill then ascend it. Midnight on the Jade bed amid [Autumn] dreams A flower opening beneath the thrust of the plum branch. Rocking gently between the fairy's thighs.20_ Ikkyu's amours seem to have produced a number of natural progeny. In fact, there is the legend that one of Ikkyu's most devoted followers, a monk named Jotei, was in fact his illegitimate son. According to the Tokugawa Tales, there was a once-rich fan maker in Sakai whose business had declined to the point that he had to sell his shop and stand on the streetcorner hawking fans. Then one day Ikkyu came by carrying some fans decorated with his own famous calligraphy and asked the man to take them on commission. Naturally they all sold immediately and, by subsequent merchandising of Ikkyu's works, the man's business eventually was restored. In gratitude he granted Ikkyu his daughter, from which union sprang Ikkyu's natural son, Jotei. This story is questionable but it does illustrate the reputation Ikkyu enjoyed, both as artist and lover. Furthermore, he wrote touching and suspiciously fatherly poems to a little girl named Shoko. _Watching this four-year-old girl sing and dance, I feel the pull of ties that are hard to dismiss, Forgetting my duties I slip into freedom. Master Abbot, whose Zen is this_?21_ _ When Ikkyu was in his seventies, during the disastrous civil conflict known as the Onin war, he had a love affair with a forty-year-old temple attendant named Mori. On languid afternoons she would play the Japanese _koto _or harp and he the wistful-sounding _shakuhachi_, a long bamboo flute sometimes carried by monks as a weapon. This late- life love affair occasioned a number of erotic poems, including one that claims her restoration of his virility (called by the Chinese euphemism "jade stalk") cheered his disciples. _How is my hand like Mori's hand? Self confidence is the vassal, Freedom the master. When I am ill she cures the jade stalk And brings joy back to my followers.22 _ Ikkyu also left a number of prose fables and sermons that portray a more sober personality than does his often iconoclastic verse. One classic work, written in 1457 and called "Skeletons," has become a Zen classic. In the section given below he explores the Buddhist idea of the Void and nothingness: _Let me tell you something. Human birth is analogous to striking up a fire--the father is flint, the mother is stone and the child is the spark. Once the spark touches a lamp wick it continues to exist through the "secondary support" of the fuel until that is exhausted. Then it flickers out. The lovemaking of the parents is the equivalent of striking the spark. Since the parents too have "no beginning," in the end they, too, will flicker out. Everything grows out of empty space from which all forms derive. If one lets go the forms then he reaches what is called the "original ground." But since all sentient beings come from nothingness we can use even the term "original ground" only as a temporary tag.23 _ It seems unfortunate that Ikkyu's prose is not better known today.24 In fact the best-known accounts of Ikkyu are the apocryphal tales that attached to him during the Tokugawa era. A typical episode is the following, entitled "Ikkyu Does Magic," in which the picaresque Zen-man uses his natural resources to thwart the bluster of a haughty priest from one of the scholarly aristocratic sects--just the thing guaranteed to please the common man. Once Ikkyu was taking the Yodo no Kawase ferry on his way to Sakai. There was a _yamabushi _[mountain ascetic of Esoteric Buddhism] on board who began to question him. _"Hey, Your Reverence, what sect are you?" "I belong to the Zen sect," replied Ikkyu. "I don't suppose your sect has miracles the way our sect does?" "No, actually we have lots of miracles. But if it's miracles, why don't you show the sort of miracles that your people have?" "Well," said the _yamabushi_, "By virtue of my magic powers I can pray up Fudo [a fierce guardian deity of Buddhism] before your very eyes and make him stand right there on the prow of the boat." And, with the beads of his rosary the man began to invoke first Kongo and then Seitaka [Esoteric Buddhist deities]. At this, all the passengers began to look back and forth wondering what was going to happen. Then, just as he had said, there on the prow of the boat, the form of Fudo appeared surrounded by a halo of dancing flames. Then the _yamabushi _made a ferocious face and told him, "You'd all better offer him a prayer." This made the other passengers very uneasy-- all that is but Ikkyu, who was completely unruffled. "Well," spat out the _yamabushi_, "How about you, Zen monk? How are you going to deal with my miracle?" "By producing a miracle of my own. From my very body I will cause water to issue forth and extinguish the flames of your Fudo. You'd better start your prayers up again." And Ikkyu began to pee mightily all over the flames until at last the _yamabushi's _magic was counteracted and the entire image melted away. Thereupon the passengers on the boat all bowed to Ikkyu for his wonderful display.25_ Ironically, the real-life Ikkyu spent his twilight years restoring Daitoku-ji after its destruction (along with the rest of Kyoto) from the ten-year Onin war (1467-77), by taking over the temple and using his contacts in the merchant community to raise funds. He had over a hundred disciples at this time, a popularity that saddened him since earlier (and, he thought, more deserving) masters had had many fewer followers. Thus in the last decade of his life he finally exchanged his straw sandals and reed hat for the robes of a prestigious abbot over a major monastery. His own ambivalence on this he confessed in a poem: _Fifty years a rustic wanderer, Now mortified in purple robes.26 _ Ikkyu's contributions to Zen culture are also significant. He helped inspire the secular Zen ritual known today as the tea ceremony, by encouraging the man today remembered as its founder. He also supported one of the best-known dramatists of the No theater and was himself a master calligrapher, an art closely akin to painting in the Far East and regarded by many as even more demanding.27 He even created a soybean dish (_natto_) now a staple of Zen monastic cuisine. But as his biographer James Sanford has pointed out, the real life of this truly great Japanese master has all but eluded us. His poetry is in classical Chinese and virtually unknown; his prose lies largely unread; and the Tokugawa legend of Ikkyu is almost entirely apocryphal. This last travesty has extended even to fictionalizing his role as a child at the monastery; there is now a popular television cartoon series in Japan about the irrepressible acolyte Ikkyu. Sanford speculates that his attraction for contemporary Japanese is that, in the legend of Ikkyu, "it is possible for the modern Japanese mind to re-discover 'native' examples of, and justification for, individualism-- a term and concept whose full assimilation into modern Japanese culture has for over fifty years been blocked by a legacy of residual Neo- Confucian norms left over from [Japan's repressive past]."28 It does seem true that the Zen-man Ikkyu represents a safety valve in Japanese society, both then and now. He brought the impulsive candor of Zen to the world of affairs, demonstrating by example that after enlightenment it is necessary to return to a world where mountains are again mountains, rivers again rivers. And by rejecting official "Zen," Ikkyu may well have been the most Zenlike of all Japanese masters. Chapter Eighteen HAKUIN: JAPANESE MASTER OF THE KOAN The closing era of the Japanese middle ages, in the decades following Ikkyu's death, is now known as the Century of the Country at War. Japan became a land of quarreling fiefdoms, and Zen, too, drifted for want of leadership and inspiration. The eventual reunification of the country late in the sixteenth century was led by a brutal military strategist named Oda Nobunaga (1534-82). As part of his takeover he obliterated the militaristic Buddhist complex on Mt. Hiei by one day simply slaughtering all its monks and burning the establishment to the ground, thereby ending permanently the real influence of Buddhism in Japanese politics. Nobunaga was succeeded by an even more accomplished militarist, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), who brought to the shogunate a flair for diplomacy and cunning compromise. Hideyoshi solidified Japan only to have yet another warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), maneuver its rule into the hands of his own family--inaugurating the two and a half centuries of totalitarian isolationism known today as the Tokugawa era (1615-1868). He also moved the capital to the city whose modern name is Tokyo, at last leaving historic Kyoto in repose. Under the Tokugawa a new middle class of urban merchants and craftsmen arose, and with it came a version of Zen for common people, with masters who could touch the concerns of the working class. Among these beloved masters must certainly be remembered the monk Takuan (1573- 1645) from Ikkyu's rebuilt Daitoku-ji temple, who introduced Zen teachings to this new audience, and the wandering teacher Bankei (1622- 93), whose kindly, mystical interpretation of oneness through _zazen _earned him wide fame. Overall, however, Rinzai Zen remained spiritually dormant until the middle of the Tokugawa era, when there appeared one of the most truly inspired Zen teachers of all time. The master Hakuin (1686-1769) was born as Sugiyama Iwajiro in Hara, a small village at the base of Mt. Fuji. He was the youngest of five children in a family of modest means, an origin that may have helped him understand the concerns of the poor. As he tells his story, he was seven or eight when his mother took him to hear a priest from the Salvationist Nichiren sect preach on the tormenting Buddhist hells. He was terrified and secretly began day and night reciting the Lotus Sutra (which claims to protect from the perils of fire or water those who chant the proper incantation). The fear of hell, with its boiling caldrons, so permeated his young mind that he even became leary of the traditional Japanese bath, then often taken in a round tub fired from the bottom with wood. He claimed this fear of the bath finally convinced him to become a monk. _One day when I was taking a bath with my mother, she asked that the water be made hotter and had the maid add wood to the fire. Gradually my skin began to prickle with the heat and the iron bath-cauldron began to rumble. Suddenly I recalled the descriptions of the hells that I had heard and I let out a cry of terror that resounded through the neighborhood. From this time on I determined to myself that I would leave home to become a monk. To this my parents would not consent, yet I went constantly to the temple to recite the sutras. . . .1_ But after several years of study and chanting, he was dismayed to find he still felt pain (when he tested himself one day with a hot poker). He resolved to intensify his devotion and at age fifteen he entered a local Zen temple (against his parents' wishes) and was ordained as a monk. Hakuin pursued his study of the Lotus Sutra, the primary scripture venerated at this temple (an illustration of how far Japanese Zen had traveled from its tradition of meditation and koans), but after a year he concluded it was just another book, no different from the Confucian classics. He therefore began to drift from temple to temple until, at nineteen, he experienced another spiritual crisis. In a book of religious biographies he came across the story of the Chinese monk Yen-t'ou (828-87), who had been attacked and murdered by bandits, causing him to emit screams heard a full three miles away. Hakuin was plunged into depression. _I wondered why such an enlightened monk was unable to escape the swords of thieves. If such a thing could happen to a man who was like a unicorn or phoenix among monks, a dragon in the sea of Buddhism, how was I to escape the staves of the demons of hell after I died? What use was there in studying Zen_?2 He thereupon took up his staff and set out as an itinerant seeker, only to meet disappointment after disappointment--until finally he decided to put his future in the hands of chance. One day as the abbot of a temple was airing its library outside, Hakuin decided to select a book at random and let it decide his fate. He picked a volume of biographies of Chinese Ch'an worthies and opening it read of an eleventh-century Lin- chi master who kept awake in meditation by boring into his own thigh with a wood drill. The story galvanized Hakuin, and he vowed to pursue Zen training until enlightenment was his. Hakuin claims that at age twenty-four he had his first really moving satori experience. He was in a temple in Niigata prefecture, meditating on the "Mu" koan (Q: "Does a dog have Buddha-nature? A: "Mu!"), and so intense was his concentration that he even forgot sleeping and eating. Then one day . . . _ Suddenly a great doubt manifested itself before me. It was as though I were frozen solid in the midst of an ice sheet extending tens of thousands of miles. A purity filled my breast and I could neither go forward nor retreat. To all intents and purposes I was out of my mind and the _Mu _alone remained. Although I sat in the Lecture Hall and listened to the Master's lecture, it was as though I were hearing a discussion from a distance outside the hall. At times it felt as though I were floating through the air. This state lasted for several days. Then I chanced to hear the sound of the temple bell and I was suddenly transformed. It was as if a sheet of ice had been smashed or a jade tower had fallen with a crash.3_ Elated with his transformation, he immediately trekked back to an earlier master and presented a verse for approval. The master, however, was not impressed. _The Master, holding my verse up in his left hand, said to me: "This verse is what you have learned from study. Now show me what your intuition has to say," and he held out his right hand. I replied: "If there were something intuitive that I could show you, I'd vomit it out," and I made a gagging sound. The Master said: "How do you understand Chao-chou's _Mu_?" I replied: "What sort of place does _Mu _have that one can attach arms and legs to it?" The Master twisted my nose with his fingers and said: "Here's some place to attach arms and legs." I was nonplussed and the Master gave a hearty laugh.4 _ Again and again he tried to extract a seal from this master, but always in vain. One of these fruitless exchanges even left him lying in a mud puddle. _One evening the Master sat cooling himself on the veranda. Again I brought him a verse I had written. "Delusions and fancies," the Master said. I shouted his words back at him in a loud voice, whereupon the Master seized me and rained twenty or thirty blows with his fists on me, and then pushed me off the veranda. This was on the fourth day of the fifth month after a long spell of rain. I lay stretched out in the mud as though dead, scarcely breathing and almost unconscious. I could not move; meanwhile the Master sat on the veranda roaring with laughter.5 _ He finally despaired of receiving the seal of enlightenment from this teacher, although he did have further spiritual experiences under the man's rigorous guidance--experiences Hakuin interpreted, perhaps rightly, as _satori_. Feeling wanderlust he again took to the road, everywhere experiencing increasingly deep _satori_. In southern Ise he was enlightened when suddenly swamped in a downpour. Near Osaka he was further enlightened one evening in a temple monks' hall by the sound of falling snow. In Gifu prefecture he had an even deeper experience during walking meditation in a monks' hall. He also had a mental and physical collapse about this time, no doubt resulting from the strain of his intensive asceticism. After his father's death in 1716, he studied in Kyoto for a time, but the next year he returned to the Shoin-ji temple near his original home at Hara. Weary of life at thirty-two, he still was undecided about his future. Back at the temple where he had started, he no longer had any idea of what to do. Then a revelation appeared: _One night in a dream my mother came and presented me with a purple robe made of silk. When I lifted it, both sleeves seemed very heavy, and on examining them I found an old mirror, five or six inches in diameter, in each sleeve. The reflection from the mirror in the right sleeve penetrated to my heart and vital organs. My own mind, mountains and rivers, the great earth seemed serene and bottomless. . . . After this, when I looked at all things, it was as though I were seeing my own face. For the first time I understood the meaning of the saying, "The [enlightened spirit] sees the Buddha-nature within his eye._"6_ _ With this dream he finally achieved full _satori_. He resolved that the old ramshackle temple would be his final home. He had found enlightenment there and there he would stay, his own master at last. And sure enough, Hakuin never moved again. Instead, the people of Japan--high and low--came to see him. His simple country temple became a magnet for monks and laymen seeking real Zen. By force of his own character, and most certainly without his conscious intention, he gradually became the leading religious figure in Japan. By the end of his life he had brought the koan practice back to a central place in Zen and had effectively created modern Rinzai. Hakuin was the legitimate heir of the Chinese koan master Ta-hui, and the first teacher since to actually expand the philosophical dimensions of Zen. It will be recalled that Ta-hui advocated "Introspecting-the- Koan" meditation, called _k'an-hua _Ch'an in Chinese and Kanna Zen in Japanese, which he put forth in opposition to the "Silent Illumination" meditation of the Soto school. Hakuin himself claimed that he first tried the quietistic approach of tranquil meditation (albeit on a koan), but he was unable to clear his mind of all distractions. _When I was young the content of my koan meditation was poor. I was convinced that absolute tranquility of the source of the mind was the Buddha Way. Thus I despised activity and was fond of quietude. I would always seek out some dark and gloomy place and engage in dead sitting. Trivial and mundane matters pressed against my chest and a fire mounted in my heart. I was unable to enter wholeheartedly into the active practice of Zen.7 _ Thus Hakuin concluded that merely following Ta-hui's injunction to meditate on a koan was not the entire answer. He then decided the only way that Zen could be linked meaningfully to daily life was if a practitioner could actually meditate while going about daily affairs. This idea was rather radical, although it probably would not have unduly disturbed the T'ang masters. Hakuin was again extending both the definition of enlightenment, as it intersects with the real world, and the means of its realization. He was saying to meditate on a koan in such a manner that you can continue your daily life but be oblivious to its distractions. He invoked the Chinese masters to support the idea. _The Zen Master Ta-hui has said that meditation in the midst of activity is immeasurably superior to the quietistic approach. . . . What is most worthy of respect is a pure koan meditation that neither knows nor is conscious of the two aspects, the quiet and the active. This is why it has been said that the true practicing monk walks but does not know he is walking, sits but does not know he is sitting.8 _ Hakuin redefined meditation to include a physically active aspect as well as merely a quiet, sitting aspect. And under this new definition anyone, even laymen, could meditate at any time, in any place. Hakuin did not exclude sitting in meditation; he tried to broaden the definition to include the kind of thing he believed would really produce meaningful enlightenment. In addition, meditation in action takes away the excuse of most laymen for not practicing introspection-- and what is more, it brings respect from others. _Do not say that worldly affairs and pressures of business leave you no time to study Zen under a Master, and that the confusions of daily life make it difficult for you to continue your meditation. Everyone must realize that for the true practicing monk there are no worldly cares or worries. Supposing a man accidentally drops two or three gold coins in a crowded street swarming with people. Does he forget about the money because all eyes are upon him? ... A person who concentrates solely on meditation amid the press and worries of everyday life will be like the man who has dropped the gold coins and devotes himself to seeking them. Who will not rejoice in such a person_?9 Hakuin realized that meditating in the middle of distractions was initially more difficult--with fewer short-term rewards--than sitting quietly alone. However, if you want to make the heightened awareness of Zen a part of your life, then you must meditate in daily life from the very first. Just as you cannot learn to swim in the ocean by sitting in a tub, you cannot relate your Zen to the world's pressures, stress, and tensions if it is forever sheltered in silent, lonely isolation. If this is difficult at first, persevere and look toward the ultimate rewards. _ Frequently you may feel that you are getting nowhere with practice in the midst of activity, whereas the quietistic approach brings unexpected results. Yet rest assured that those who use the quietistic approach can never hope to enter into meditation in the midst of activity. Should by chance a person who uses this approach enter into the dusts and confusions of the world of activity, even the power of ordinary understanding which he had seemingly attained will be entirely lost. Drained of all vitality, he will be inferior to any mediocre, talentless person. The most trivial matters will upset him, an inordinate cowardice will afflict his mind, and he will frequently behave in a mean and base manner. What can you call accomplished about a man like this_?10 Quietistic meditation is easier, naturally, but a person who practices it will turn out to be just as insecure and petty as someone not enlightened at all. What is equally important, "leisure-time" meditation that separates our spiritual life from our activities is merely hiding from reality. You cannot come home from the job and suddenly turn on a meditation experience. He cites the case of someone who excuses himself to meditate, but who is then so harried and tense it does no good. _Even should there be such a thing as . . . reaching a state where the great illumination is released by means of dead sitting and silent illumination . . . people are so involved in the numerous duties of their household affairs that they have scarcely a moment in which to practice concentrated meditation. What they do then is to plead illness and, neglecting their duties and casting aside responsibilities for their family affairs, they shut themselves up in a room for several days, lock the door, arrange several cushions in a pile, set up a stick of incense, and proceed to sit. Yet, because they are exhausted by ordinary worldly cares, they sit in meditation for one minute and fall asleep for a hundred, and during the little bit of meditation that they manage to accomplish, their minds are beset by countless delusions.11 _ But what is worse, these people then blame their careers, assuming they need more isolation. But this is like the aspiring ocean swimmer in the tub mistakenly desiring less water. _[They] furrow their brows, draw together their eyebrows, and before one knows it they are crying out: "Our official duties interfere with our practice of the Way; our careers prevent our Zen meditation. It would be better to resign from office, discard our seals, go to some place beside the water or under the trees where all is peaceful and quiet and no one is about, there in our own way to practice _dhyana _contemplation, and escape from the endless cycle of suffering." How mistaken these people are_!12 Having determined meditation in the midst of activity is the only meaningful practice, he next addressed the question of how to go about it. He explained that we can do it by making our activities into meditation. _What is this true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong, into one single koan.13 _ He gave an example of how to change the implements of daily living into a Buddhist metaphor, in this case by a warrior's making his clothes, sword, and saddle into a meditation hall of the mind. _Make your skirt and upper garments into the seven- or nine- striped monks' robe; make your two-edged sword into your resting board or desk. Make your saddle your sitting cushion; make the mountains, rivers, and great earth the sitting platform; make the whole universe your own personal meditation cave. . . . Thrusting forth the courageous mind derived from faith, combine it with the true practice of introspection.14 _ If meditation bears no relationship to life, what good is it? It is merely self-centered gratification. This he condemned, pointing out that if everyone did nothing but meditate on his own inner concerns, society at large would fall apart. And ultimately Zen would be blamed. Furthermore, this inner-directed preoccupation with self-awareness is bad Zen. Hakuin similarly taught that a Zen which ignored society was hollow and meaningless, and its monks of no use to anybody. He was particularly stern with conventional Zen students, who were content in their own enlightenment and ignored the needs of others. "Meditation in action" for the monk meant the same as for a layman, with one significant difference. Whereas the layman could bring meditation to his obligatory life of affairs, the monk must bring the life of the world to his meditation. Just to hide and meditate on your own original nature produces inadequate enlightenment, while also shutting you off from any chance to help other people, other sentient beings. The ancient masters knew, said Hakuin, that a person truly enlightened could travel through the world and not be distracted by the so-called five desires (wealth, fame, food, sleep, and sex). The enlightened being is aware of, but not enticed by, sensual gratification. _The Third Patriarch [Seng-ts'an, d. 606] has said: "If one wishes to gain true intimacy with enlightenment, one must not shun the objects of the senses." He does not mean here that one is to delight in the objects of the senses but, just as the wings of a waterfowl do not get wet even when it enters the water, one must establish a mind that will continue a true koan meditation without interruption, neither clinging to nor rejecting the objects of the senses.15 _ But Hakuin asked something of a Zen novice even more difficult than that asked by the Chinese masters of old--who merely demanded that a monk reject the world, turn his back, and shut out its distractions. In contrast, Hakuin insists that he meditate while out in the world, actively immersing himself in its attractions. The older Ch'an masters advised a monk to ignore the world, to treat it merely as a backdrop to his preoccupation with inner awareness; Hakuin says to test your meditation outside, since otherwise it serves for nothing. And today Rinzai monks are expected to silently meditate during all activities, including working in the yard of the monastery, harvesting vegetables, or even walking through the town for their formal begging. Hakuin not only redefined meditation, he also revitalized koan practice among full-time Zen monks and ultimately brought on a renaissance of Rinzai Zen itself. He formalized the idea of several stages of enlightenment (based on his own experience of increasingly deep satori) as well as a practice that supported this growth. But most of all Hakuin was dismayed by what he considered to be the complete misunderstanding of koan practice in Japan. Monks had memorized so many anecdotes about the ancient Chinese masters that they thought they could signify the resolution of a koan by some insincere theatrics. _[0]f the monks who move about like clouds and water, eight or nine out of ten will boast loudly that they have not the slightest doubt about the essential meaning of any of the seventeen hundred koans that have been handed down. . . . If you test them with one of these koans, some will raise their fists, others will shout "_katsu_," but most of them will strike the floor with their hands. If you press them just a little bit, you will find that they have in no way seen into their own natures, have no learning whatsoever, and are only illiterate, boorish, sightless men.16 _ Hakuin breathed new life back into koan theory. For instance, he seems the first Japanese master to take a psychological interest in the koan and its workings. He believed a koan should engender a "great doubt" in the mind of a novice, and through this great doubt lead him to the first enlightenment or _kensho_.17 Initially he had advocated the "Mu" koan for beginners, but late in life he came up with the famous "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"18 As he described this koan in a letter to a laywoman: _What is the Sound of the Single Hand? When you clap together both hands a sharp sound is heard; when you raise the one hand there is neither sound nor smell. . . . This is something that can by no means be heard with the ear. If conceptions and discriminations are not mixed within it and it is quite apart from seeing, hearing, perceiving, and knowing, and if, while walking, standing, sitting, and reclining, you proceed straightforwardly without interruption in the study of this koan, then in the place where reason is exhausted and words are ended, you will suddenly . . . break down the cave of ignorance.. . . At this time the basis of mind, consciousness, and emotion is suddenly shattered.19 _ But this is not the end; rather it is the beginning. After a disciple has penetrated this koan, he receives koans of increasing difficulty. From Hakuin's own experience he knew that _satori _experiences could be repeated and could become ever deeper and more meaningful. Although he himself never chose to overtly systematize and categorize koans, his heirs did not hesitate to do so, creating the structure that is modern Rinzai Zen. How did Zen finally emerge, after all the centuries and the convolutions? As Hakuin's descendants taught Zen, a monk entering the monastery was assigned a koan chosen by the master. He was expected to meditate on this koan until his _kensho_, his first glimmer of satori, which might require two to three years. After this a new phase of study began. The monk was then expected to work his way through a program of koans, requiring as much as a decade more, after which he might meditate on his own, in seclusion, for a time longer.20 The master worked with monks individually (a practice reputedly left over from the time when Chinese-speaking masters had to communicate in writing) via a face-to-face interview (_senzen_) reminiscent of a Marine Corps drill instructor harassing a recruit. The monk would bow to the master, seat himself, and submit his attempt at resolution of the koan. The master might either acknowledge his insight, give him some oblique guidance, or simply greet him with stony silence and ring for the next recruit--signifying an unsatisfactory answer. Hakuin made his disciples meditate; he made them struggle through koan after koan; he made monastic discipline as rigorous as possible; and he taught that it is not enough merely to be interested in yourself and your own enlightenment. But he insisted that if you follow all his teachings, if you meditate the right way and work through increasingly difficult koans, you too can find the enlightenment he found, an enlightenment that expressed itself in an enormous physical vitality. _Even though I am past seventy now my vitality is ten times as great as it was when I was thirty or forty. My mind and body are strong and I never have the feeling that I absolutely must lie down to rest. Should I want to I find no difficulty in refraining from sleep for two, three, or even seven days, without suffering any decline in my mental powers. I am surrounded by three- to five-hundred demanding students, and even though I lecture on the scriptures or on the collections of the Masters' sayings for thirty to fifty days in a row, it does not exhaust me.21 _ Hakuin was a prolific writer and always aware of his audience. For his lay followers, he wrote in simple Japanese and related his teachings to the needs and limitations of secular life. For his monk disciples he wrote in a more scholarly style. And finally, we have many long elegant letters composed for various dignitaries of government and the aristocracy. He also was an artist of note, producing some of the most powerful Zen- style paintings of any Japanese. Like his writings, these works are vigorous, impulsive, and dynamic. He seems to have been an inspiration for many later Zen artists, including Sengai (1750-1837) and the Zen poet Ryokan (1758-1831).22 Hakuin died in his sleep at age eighty-three. During his life he had reestablished Rinzai Zen in Japan in a form fully as rigorous as ever practiced in the monasteries of T'ang and Sung China, and he had simultaneously discovered a way this Zen could be made accessible to laymen, through meditation in activity. Whereas previous Japanese teachers had let koan practice atrophy in order to attract a greater number of followers, Hakuin simultaneously made Zen both more authentic and more popular. His genius thereby saved traditional Zen in its classical form, while at last making it accessible and meaningful in modern life. Chapter Nineteen REFLECTIONS What is the resilience of Zen that has allowed it to survive and flourish over all the centuries, even though frequently at odds philosophically with its milieu? And why have the insights of obscure rural teachers from the Chinese and Japanese Middle Ages remained pertinent to much of modern life in the West? On the other hand, why has there been a consistent criticism of Zen (from early China to the present day) condemning it as a retreat from reality--or worse, a preoccupation with self amidst a world that calls for social conscience? These questions are complex, but they should be acknowledged in any inquiry into Zen thought. They are also matters of opinion: those wishing to see Zen as unwholesome are fixed in their critical views, just as those committed to Zen practice are unshakably steadfast. What follows is also opinion, even though an attempt has been made to maintain balance. SOCIAL CONSCIENCE IN ZEN A distinguished modern Zen master was once asked if Zen followers looked only inward, with no concern for others. He replied that in Zen the distinction between oneself and the world was the first thing to be dissolved. Consequently, mere self-love is impossible; it resolves naturally into a love of all things. Stated in this way, Zen teachings become, in a twinkling, a profound moral philosophy. Where there is no distinction between the universe and ourselves, the very concept of the ego is inappropriate. We cannot think of ourselves without simultaneously thinking of others. Zen is not, therefore, an obsession with the self, but rather an obsession with the universe, with all things--from nature to the social betterment of all. Although Zen initially forces a novice to focus on his own mind, this is only to enable him or her to attain the insight to merge with all things, great and small. True Zen introspection eventually must lead to the dissolution of the self. When this occurs, we no longer need the chiding of a Golden Rule. It is fair to question whether this particular view of social conscience, which might be described as more "passive" than "active," adequately refutes the charge of "me-ism" in Zen. But perhaps less is sometimes more in the long run. There is no great history of Zen charity, but then there have been few if any bloody Zen Crusades and little of the religious persecution so common to Western moral systems. Perhaps the humanism in Zen takes a gentler, less flamboyant form. In the scales of harm and help it seems as noble as any of the world's other spiritual practices. ZEN AND CREATIVITY Zen gained from Taoism the insight that total reliance on logical thought stifles the human mind. Logic, they found, is best suited to analyzing and categorizing--functions today increasingly delegated to the computer. Whereas the logical mode of thought can only manipulate the world view of given paradigm, intuition can inspire genuine creativity, since it is not shackled by the nagging analytical mind, which often serves only to intimidate imaginative thought. Zen struggled relentlessly to deflate the pomposity of man's rationality, thereby releasing the potential of intuition. Although much research has arisen in recent times to pursue the same effect--from "brainstorming" to drugs--Zen challenged the problem many centuries ago, and its powerful tools of meditation and the koans still taunt our modern shortcuts. ZEN AND MIND RESEARCH That Zen ideas should find a place in psychoanalysis is not surprising. Meditation has long been used to still the distraught mind. Japanese researchers have studied the effects of meditation on brain activity for many years, and now similar studies are also underway in the West. The connection between Zen "enlightenment" and a heightened state of "consciousness" has been examined by psychologists as diverse as Erich Fromm and Robert Ornstein. But perhaps most significantly, our recent research in the hemispheric specialization of the brain--which suggests our left hemisphere is the seat of language and rationality while the right dominates intuition and creativity-- appears to validate centuries-old Zen insights into the dichotomy of thought. Zen "research" on the mind's complementary modes may well light the path to a fuller understanding of the diverse powers of the human mind. ZEN AND THE ARTS At times the ancient Chinese and Japanese art forms influenced by Zen seem actually to anticipate many of the aesthetic principles we now call "modern." Sixteenth-century Zen ceramics could easily pass as creations of a contemporary potter, and ancient Chinese and Japanese inks and calligraphies recall the modern monochrome avant-garde. Zen stone gardens at times seem pure abstract expressionism, and the Zen- influenced landscape gardens of Japan can manipulate our perception using tricks only recently understood in the West. Japanese haiku poetry and No drama, created under Zen influence, anticipate our modern distrust of language; and contemporary architecture often echoes traditional Japanese design--with its preference for clean lines, open spaces, emphasis on natural materials, simplicity, and the integration of house and garden. Aesthetic ideals emerging from Zen art focus heavily on naturalness, on the emphasis of man's relation to nature. The Zen artists, as do many moderns, liked a sense of the materials and process of creation to come through in a work. But there is a subtle difference. The Zen artists frequently included in their works devices to ensure that the message reached the viewer. For example, Zen ceramics are always intended to force us to experience them directly and without analysis. The trick was to make the surface seem curiously imperfect, almost as though the artist were careless in the application of a finish, leaving it uneven and rough. At times the glaze seems still in the process of flowing over a piece, uneven and marred by ashes and lumps. There is no sense of "prettiness": instead they feel old and marred by long use. But the artist consciously is forcing us to experience the piece for itself, not as just another item in the category of bowl. We are led into the process of creation, and our awareness of the piece is heightened--just as an unfinished painting beckons us to pick up a brush, This device of drawing us into involvement, common to Zen arts from haiku to ink painting, is one of the great insights of Zen creativity, and it is something we in the West are only now learning to use effectively. ZEN AND PERCEPTION One of the major insights of Zen is that the world should be perceived directly, not as an array of embodied names. As noted, the Zen arts reinforce this attitude by deliberately thwarting verbal or analytical appreciation. We are forced to approach them with our logical faculties in abeyance. This insistence on direct perception is one of the greatest gifts of Zen. No other major system of thought champions this insight so clearly and forthrightly. Zen would have our perception of the world, indeed our very thoughts, be nonverbal. By experiencing nature directly, and by thinking in pure ideas rather than with "internalized speech," we can immeasurably enrich our existence. The dawn, the flower, the breeze are now experienced more exquisitely--in their full reality. Zen worked hard to debunk the mysterious power we mistakenly ascribe to names and concepts, since the Zen masters knew these serve only to separate us from life. Shutting off the constant babble in our head is difficult, but the richness of experience and imagery that emerges is astounding. It is as though a screen between us and our surroundings has suddenly dropped away, putting us in touch with the universe. THE ZEN LIFE The heart of Zen is practice, "sitting," physical discipline. For those wishing to experience Zen rather than merely speculate about it, there is no other way. Koans can be studied, but without the guidance of practice under a master, they are hardly more than an intellectual exercise. Only in formal meditation can there be the real beginning of understanding. Zen philosophy, and all that can be transmitted in words, is an abomination to those who really understand. There's no escaping the Taoist adage, "Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak." Words can point the way, but the path must be traveled in silence. * * * NOTES PREFACE TO ZEN 1. Chang Chung-yuan, Tao: A New Way of Thinking (New York: Perennial Library, 1977), p. 4. 2. Ibid., p. 6. 3. Ibid., p. 50. 4. Ibid., p. 145. 5. Ibid., p. 153. 6. Quoted in Max Kaltenmark, Lao Tzu and Taoism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 20. 7. Burton Watson, Introduction to The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 7. 8. Arthur Waley, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, undated reprint of 1939 edition), p. 15. 9. Gai-fu Feng and Jane English, trans., Chuang Tsu (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 55. 10. Ibid. 309 11. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson, Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 240. 12. Ibid., pp. 243-244. 13. Quoted by Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1948), p. 230. 14. Quoted in ibid., p. 235. 15. D. Howard Smith, Chinese Religions (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), p. 106. 16. Frederick J. Streng, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967), pp. 159-60. 17. Arthur F. Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 63. 18. Walter Liebenthal, Chao Lun: The Treatises of Seng-chao (Hong Kong: hong Kong University Press, 1968), p. 62. 242 / NOTES 10, 11)1(1,, pp. fifi f)7. 20. Helnrich Dumoulin, A History of Zen Badtihism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1000), |i. 60, 21. Quoted by Fung Yu Ian, Short History of (Chinese Philosophy, p, 252, 1. BODHIDHARMA: FIRST PATRIARCH OF ZEN 2. 1. Translated by D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 1 79. This is a translation of a passage from the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp compiled in 1004 by Tao-yuan. A simpler version of the story can be found in the original source document, the Further Biographies of Eminent Priests (Hsu kao-seng chuan), prepared around the year 645 by Tao hsuan, and translated In Cat's Yawn, published by the First Zen Institute of America, New York, 194 7. The story is repeated also in the Ch'uan fg- pao chi, prepared ca, 700 10 by Tu Fei, 2. The fact that this episode does not appear in the earliest story of Bodhidharma's life makes one skeptical about its authenticity. It is known that Emperor Wu welcomed another famous Indian missionary, Paramartha, who landed in Canton in 540 (Smith, Chinese Religions, p. 120). This monk espoused the Idealistic school of Buddhism, which was at odds with the school of Ch'an. It seems possible that the story of Bodhidharma's meeting was constructed to counter the prestige that Wu's Interest undoubtedly gave the Idealistic school. 3. The Buddhist concept of Merit might be likened to a spiritual savings account, Merit accrues on the record of one's good deeds and provides several forms of reward in this world and the next, The Idea that good deeds do not engender Merit seems to have been pioneered by Tao-sheng (ca, 360 434), the Chinese originator of the idea of Sudden Enlightenment, "Emptiness" is, of course, the teaching of the Middle Path of Nagarjuna, The implication that Emperor Wu was startled by this concept is worth a raised eyebrow, Sunyata or "emptiness" was hardly unknown In the Buddhist schools of the time. This whole story is suspect, being first found In the Ch'uan fa-pao chi of Tu Fei (ca. 700 10), but not in the earlier biography, the Hsu kao- seng chuan (Further Biographies of Eminent Priests I, compiled by Tao- hsuan around 645, There is, incidentally, another competing story of a monk named Bodhidharma in China, He was described as a Persian and was reported in Yang I Isuan-chih's Buddhist Monasteries In Loyang (Lo-yang Ch'leh-lan-chi), written In 547, to have been associated with the Yung- ning monastery, which would have been possible only between the years 516 and 528. This Persian figure apparently claimed to be 150 years in age, and he most probably came to China via the trading port of Canton used by Persians. This fact has been used by some to cast doubt on the more accepted story of a South Indian monk named Bodhidharma arriving at Canton between 520 and 525. Perhaps a legendary Persian was transformed into a legendary Indian by the _Dhyana_ school, or perhaps it was a different individual. 4. This is the conclusion of the leading Zen scholar today, Philip Yampolsky, in The Platform Sutra of The Sixth Patriarch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 10. 5. English translations of various versions of this essay may be found In Cat's Yawn by the First Zen Institute of America; In I). T, Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series; and in John C. H. Wu, The Golden Age of Zen (Taipei: United Publishing Center, 1907). Concerning this essay, Philip Yampolsky (private communication) has noted, "Whereas a version exists In The Transmission of the Lamp, various texts have been found in the Tun-huang documents and elsewhere, so that a more complete version is available. It is considered authentic," 6. Suzuki, Essays in Ann Buddhism, First Series, p. 180. 7. Ibid., pp. 180-81. 8. This point is enlarged considerably in an essay attributed to Bodhidharma but most likely apocryphal, which Is translated In D. T, Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Third Series (New York: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1971) pp. 24-30, 9. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p. 181. 10. Suzuki, Ibid. 11. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, pp. 40 50. 12. Ibid., p. 50. 13. Ibid., p. 50. 14. Suzuki translates the passage from the Vajrasamadhi Sutra in Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, pp. 183-84. Portions are as follows: "Said the Buddha: The two entrances are 'Entrance by Reason' and 'Entrance by Conduct,' 'Entrance by Reason' means to have a deep faith in that all sentient beings are identical in essence with the true nature which is neither unity nor multiplicity; only it is beclouded by external objects, The nature in itself neither departs nor comes. When a man in singleness of thought abides in chueh-kuan, he will clearly see into the Buddha-nature, of which we cannot say whether it exists or exists not, and in which there is neither selfhood nor otherness. . . ." Suzuki translates the term chueh-kuan as being "awakened" or "enlightened," 15. Hu Shih, "The Development of Zen Buddhism in China," Chinese Social and Political Science Review, 15,4 (January 1932), p. 483, Philip Yampolsky (private communication) has questioned this generalization of Hu Shih, noting, "There were few practicing 'Zen' Buddhists, but other Chinese Buddhists probably meditated seriously, although not exclusively." 16. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p, 186. 17. See Hu Shih, "Development of Zen Buddhism in China," p. 482: "But the whole system of _dhyana_ practice, even in its concise form as presented in the translated manuals, was not fully understood by the Chinese Buddhists. . . . The best proof of this is the following quotation from Hui-chiao, the scholarly historian of Buddhism and author of the first series of Buddhist Biographies which was finished in 519. In his general summary of the biographies of practitioners of _dhyana_, Hui-chiao said: 'But the apparent utility of _dhyana_ lies in the attainment of magic powers. . .'.'" 18. Suzuki (Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p. 191), points out, "Nagarjuna says in his famous commentary on the Prajnaparamita sutra, 'Moral conduct is the skin, meditation is the flesh, the higher understanding is the bone, and the mind subtle and good is the marrow.' " Since this commentary must have been common knowledge, the interest in Bodhidharma's alleged exchange with his disciples lies in his recasting of a common coinage. 19. From the Ch'uan fa-pao chi (ca. 700-10) of Tu Fei, as described by Yampolsky, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriach. This story happens to parallel closely the posthumous capers ascribed to certain famous religious Taoists of the age. 20. Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, p. 72. 21. Hu Shih, "Development of Zen Buddhism in China," p. 52. 22. 2. HUI-K'O: SECOND PATRIARCH OF ZEN 1. Translated in Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p.190. 2. He is well documented in Tao-hsuan's Hsu kao-seng chuan or Further Biographies of Eminent Priests (A.D. 645). Selected portions of this biography are related in Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch; and Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, which form the basis for much of the historical information reported here. Other useful sources are Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism; and Chou Hsiang- kuang, _Dhyana_ Buddhism in China (Allahabad, India: Indo-Chinese Literature Publications, 1960). 3. The Further Biographies of Eminent Priests by Tao-hsuan declares that bandits were responsible for severing his arm, but the 710 Chuan fa-pao chi of Tu Fei piously refutes this version, presumably since efforts were starting to get underway to construct a Zen lineage, and dramatic episodes of interaction were essential. This later work was also the first to report that Bodhidharma was poisoned and then later seen walking back to India. 4. As reported by Dumoulin (History of Zen Buddhism, p. 73), this story, which is typical of later Ch'an teaching methods, first appears some five hundred years after Bodhidharma's death, in the Ching-te ch'uan- teng-lu (1004). 5. Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, p. 74. 6. D. T. Suzuki, Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930) pp. 4-7. 7. Ibid, p. 59. 8. D. T. Suzuki, Manual of Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 50-51. 9. D. T. Suzuki, The Lankavatara Sutra (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932), p. 79. 10. Ibid., p. 81. 11. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p. 193. 12. Ibid., p. 194. 13. Ibid., pp. 194-95. 14. Chou Hsiang-kuang, _Dhyana_ Buddhism in China, p. 24. 3. SENG-TS'AN, TAO-HSIN, FA-JUNG, AND HUNG-JEN: FOUR EARLY MASTERS 1. As usual, the biography can be traced in three sources. The earliest, the Hsu kao-seng chuan of Tao-hsuan (645), apparently does not mention Seng-ts'an, or if it does so it gives him a different name. However, in the Ch'uan fa-pao chi of Tu Fei (710) he receives a perfunctory biography. The more embellished tale, giving exchanges and a copy of his supposed poem, is to be found in the later work, the Ching-te ch'uan-teng-lu (1004). Dumoulin (History of Zen Buddhism) provides a discussion of the earliest historical notices of Seng-ts'an. The 710 version of the history is translated in Cat's Yawn (p. 14) and the 1004 version is repeated in Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series. 2. Suzuki, who recounts this last story in Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series (p. 195), points out identical insights in the third chapter of the Vimalakirti Sutra. 3. Reportedly Hui-k'o also transmitted his copy of the Lankavatara to Seng-ts'an, declaring that after only four more generations the sutra would cease to have any significance (Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, p. 11). As things turned out, this was more or less what happened, as the Lankavatara was replaced in the Ch'an schools by the more easily understood Diamond Sutra. The Lankavatara school was destined to be short-lived and to provide nothing more than a sacred relic for the dynamic Ch'an teachers who would follow. 4. Suzuki points out (Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p. 196) that the Chinese word _hsin _can mean mind, heart, soul, and spirit, beingall or any at a given time. He provides a full translation of the poem, as does R. H. Blyth in Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1960). 5. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 1, p. 100. 6. Ibid., p. 101. 7. Ibid., p. 103. 8. A detailed discussion of this era may be found in Woodbridge Bingham, The Founding of the T'ang Dynasty (New York: Octagon Books, 1970). 9. His biography may be found in C. P. Fitzgerald, Son of Heaven (New York: AMS Press Inc., 1971), reprint of 1933 Cambridge University Press edition. 10. See Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, p. 78. 11. This story is translated in Cat's Yawn, p. 18. 12. Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, pp. 78-79. 13. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Third Series, p. 28. 14. A lucid account of Fa-jung may be found in Chang Chung-yuan, trans., Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism (New York: Random House, 1969; paperback edition, Vintage, 1971), which is a beautiful translation of portions of The Transmission of the Lamp (Ching-te ch'uan-teng-lu), the text from 1004. This text was a major source for the abbreviated biography given here. 15. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 19. 16. Ibid., p. 5. 17. A version of this exchange is given in Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p. 202. 18. See Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, p. 16. 4. SHEN-HSIU AND SHEN-HUI: GRADUAL" AND "SUDDEN" MASTERS 1. For an excellent biography see C. P. Fitzgerald, The Empress Wu (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1968). Curiously, nowhere in this biography is there mention of her lionizing of the Ch'an master Shen-hsiu, something that figures largely in all Ch'an histories. 2. A biography of Shen-hsiu from Ch'an sources may be found in Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. Further details may be found in Hu Shih, "Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China: Its History and Method," Philosophy East and West, 3, 1 (April 1953), pp. 3-24. See also Kenneth Ch'en, Buddhism in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964). 3. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p. 214. 4. Two books that give something of the intellectual atmosphere of T'ang China are biographies of its two leading poets: Arthur Waley, The Poetry and Career of Li Po (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1950); and A. R. Davis, Tu Fu (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1971). 5. For a detailed biography of Shen-hui, see Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. 6. The scholar who brought the significance of Shen-hui to the attention of the world was Hu Shih, whose landmark English-language papers on Zen are "Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China: Its History and Method" and "The Development of Zen Buddhism in China." These works draw upon the manuscripts discovered this century in the Tun-huang caves in the mountains of far northwest China. These manuscripts clarified many of the mysteries surrounding the early history of Ch'an, enabling scholars for the first time to distinguish between real and manufactured history--since some of the works were written before Ch'an historians began to embroider upon the known facts. A brief but useful account of the finding of these caves and the subsequent removal of many of the manuscripts to the British Museum in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris may be found in Cat's Yawn. The best discussion of the significance of these finds and of Hu Shih's lifelong interpretive work is provided by Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. Regarding the circumstances of this sermon, Walter Liebenthal ("The Sermon of Shen-hui," Asia Major, N.S. 3, 2 [1952], p. 134) says, "There are only two opportunities to deliver addresses in the ritual of Buddhist monasteries, one during the uposatha ceremony held monthly when the pratimoksa rules are read to the members of the community and they are admonished to confess their sins, one during the initiation ceremony held once or twice a year. For the purpose of initiation special platforms are raised, one for monks and one for nuns, inside the compounds of some especially selected monasteries." 7. Quoted in Hilda Hookham, A Short History of China (New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1972; paperback edition, New York: New American Library, 1972), p. 175. 8. Discussions of the adventures of An Lu-shan may be found in most general surveys of Chinese history, including Hookham, Short History of China, Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Kenneth Scott Latourette, The Chinese: Their History and Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1962); John A. Harrison, The Chinese Empire (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1972); and Rene Grousset, The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). 9. This is the interpretation of Hu Shih. For translations of the major works of Shen-hui, see Walter Liebenthal, "The Sermon of Shen-hui," pp. 132-55; and Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. 1., pp. 356-60. Also see Edward Conze, ed., Buddhist Texts Through the Ages (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1954), excerpted in Wade Baskin, ed., Classics in Chinese Philosophy (Totowa, N. J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1974). A short translation is also provided in Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Third Series, pp. 37 ff. The fullest translation of the works of Shen-hui found in the Tun-huang caves is in Jacques Gernet, Entret/ens du Maitre de _Dhyana_ Chen-houei du Ho-tso (Hanoi: Publications de l'ecole frangaise d'Extreme-Orient, Vol. 31, 1949). An English translation of a portion of this text may be found in Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). 10. Liebenthal, "Sermon of Shen-hui," pp. 136 ff. 11. Ibid., p. 144. 12. Ibid., pp. 146, 147, 149. 13. See Hu Shih, "Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China." 14. Hu Shih, "Development of Zen Buddhism in China," p. 493. 15. Hu Shih, "Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China," p. 11. 16. The differences between the Northern and Southern schools of Ch'an during the eighth century are explored in the works of Hu Shih, Philip Yampolsky, and Walter Liebenthal noted elsewhere in these notes. Other general surveys of Chinese religion and culture that have useful analyses of the question include Wing-tsit Chan, Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, pp. 425 ff., D. Howard Smith, Chinese Religions; and Fung Yu-lan, Short History of Chinese Philosophy. 17. A study of the last distinguished member of Shen-hui's school, the scholar Tsung-mi (780-841), may be found in Jeffrey Broughton, "Kuei- feng Tsung-mi: The Convergence of Ch'an and the Teachings" (Ph. D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1975). 18. D. T. Suzuki, "Zen: A Reply to Hu Shih," Philosophy East and West, 3, 1 (April 1953), pp. 25-46. 19. 5. HUI-NENG: THE SIXTH PATRIARCH AND FATHER OF MODERN ZEN 1. A number of English translations of the Platform Sutra are in existence. Among the most authoritative must certainly be counted Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch; and Wing-tsit Chan, The Platform Scripture (New York: St. John's University Press, 1963). A widely circulated translation is in A. F. Price and Wong Mou-Lam, The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-Neng (Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1969). Another well-known version is found in Charles Luk, Ch'an and Zen Teaching: Third Series (New York: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1971). Two lesser-known translations are Paul F. Fung and George D. Fung, The Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch on the Pristine Orthodox Dharma (San Francisco: Buddha's Universal Church, 1964); and Hsuan Hua, The Sixth Patriarch's Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra (San Francisco: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 1971). 2. From the Diamond Sutra, contained in Dwight Goddard, ed., A Buddhist Bible (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 102. Another version may be found in Price and Wong, Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-neng. An extended commentary may be found in Charles Luk, Ch'an and Zen Teaching, First Series, pp. 149-208. Later Ch'anists have maintained that Hung-jen taught both the Diamond Sutra and the Lankavatara Sutra, the respective scriptures of what came to be called Southern and Northern schools of Ch'an. However, most scholars today believe that his major emphasis was on the Lankavatara Sutra, not the Diamond Sutra as the legend of Hui-neng would have. 3. From Price and Wong, Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-neng, p. 15. 4. Ibid., p. 18. 5. The earliest version of the Platform Sutra is that found in the Tun- huang caves and translated by Yampolsky and Chan. This manuscript Yampolsky dates from the middle of the ninth century. A much later version, dated 1153, was found in a temple in Kyoto, Japan, in 1934. This is said to be a copy of a version dating from 967. The standard version up until this century was a much longer work which dates from 1291. As a general rule of thumb with the early Ch'an writings, the shorter the work, the better the chance it is early and authentic. For this reason, the shorter Tun-huang works are now believed to be the most authoritative and best account of the thoughts of the Sixth Patriarch. 6. Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, p. 69. 7. The most obvious problem with attribution of the Platform Sutra to Hui-neng is that many of the sections of the sermon appear almost verbatim in The Sermon of Shen-hui, indicating that either one was a copy of the other or they had a common source (which could have been the simple setting down of a verbal tradition). It has been pointed out that Shen-hui, who praises Hui-neng to the skies in his sermon, never claims to be quoting the master. Instead, he pronounces as his own a number of passages that one day would be found in the work attributed to Hui-neng. The scholar Hu Shih has drawn the most obvious conclusion and has declared that Shen-hui and his school more or less created the legend of Hui-neng--lock, stock, and sutra. Others refuse to go this far, preferring instead to conclude that Shen-hui and Hui-neng are merely two representatives of the same school. 8. Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, p. 157. 9. Yampolsky, Ibid., p. 140 10. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 82. 11. See especially "Intimations of Immortality": Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come . . . 12. Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, pp. 141-42. 13. Ibid., p. 117. 14. From ibid., pp. 138-39. For interpretive comment see D. T. Suzuki, The Zen Doctrine of No Mind (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1972). 15. Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, pp. 116-17. 16. 6. MA-TSU: ORIGINATOR OF "SHOCK" ENLIGHTENMENT 1. See Broughton, Kuei-feng Tsung-mi: The Convergence of Ch'an and the Teachings. It was also around this time that the idea of twenty-eight Indian Patriarchs of Zen, culminating in Bodhidharma, was finally ironed out and made part of the Zen tradition. 2. See Arthur Waley, The Life and Times of Po Chu-i (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949). 3. Hu Shih, "Development of Zen Buddhism in China," p. 497. 4. Hu-Shin, "Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China," p. 18. 5. For some of Huai-jang's attributed teachings, see Charles Luk, The Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching (New York: Grove Press, 1975), pp. 32-37. The reliability of this text should be questioned, however, if we accept Philip Yampolsky's essay in Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, p. 53: "Huai-jang (677-744) . . . is known as a disciple of Hui-neng. Information about him is based on sources composed much later than his death; no mention is made of him in any eighth-century work. . . ." 6. Jeffrey Broughton ("Kuei-feng Tsung-mi," p. 27) points out that Ma- tsu's master's technique for achieving "no-mind" was to chant a phrase until running out of breath, at which time the activities of the mind would seem to terminate--a reaction the more skeptical might call physiological. Breath control and breath exercises, it will be recalled, have always figured largely in Indian meditative practices. 7. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 148. The discussion of Ma-tsu in this volume supplied valuable background for the analysis provided here. 8. Hu Shih, "Development of Zen Buddhism in China," p. 498. 9. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 130. 10. Ibid., p. 149. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. There are many translations of the Mumonkan. One of the more recent and scholarly is by Zenkai Shibayama, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan (New York: New American Library, 1975). 14. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 150. 15. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 95. 16. The most recent and the most detailed translation of the Blue Cliff Record is by Thomas and J. C. Cleary, The Blue CI iff Record, 3 vols. (Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1977). 17. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 151. 18. Ibid., p.151. 19. This story is recounted in Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 100. 20. Ibid., p. 102. 21. Recounted in Ibid., p. 102. 22. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'ari Buddhism, pp. 150-52. 23. Ibid., p. 150. 24. See Luk, Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching, p. 46. 25. 7. HUAI-HAI: FATHER OF MONASTIC CH'AN 1. This location is given by John Blofeld in The Zen Teaching of Hui-Hai on Sudden Illumination (London: Ryder & Co., 1962; paperback reprint, New York: Weiser, 1972), p. 29. Charles Luk (Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching, p. 50) says: "Huai-hai, the Dharma-successor of Ma Tsu, was also called Pai Chang [Po Ch'ang] after the mountain where he stayed at Hung Chou (now Nanchang, capital of Kiangsi province). Pai Chang means: Pai, one hundred, and Chang, a measure of ten feet, i.e., One-thousand-foot mountain." However, Luk identifies the birthplace of Huai-hai as Chang Lo in modern Fukien province, as does Chou Hsiang- kuang in _Dhyana_ Buddhism in China. 2. This story is repeated in various places, including Wu, Golden Age of Zen; and Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Hui Hai on Sudden Illumination. This latter reference is as part of a document known as the Tsung-ching Record, being a recorded dialogue of the master taken down by a monk named Tsung-ching, who was a contemporary of Huai-hai. 3. This story is Case 53 of the Hekiganroku or Blue Cliff Record, a Sung Dynasty period collection of Ch'an stories and their interpretation. The best current translation is probably in Cleary and Cleary, Blue Cliff Record, Vol. 2, p. 357. 4. See Luk, Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching, p. 46. 5. Stories involving him may be found in the Mumonkan, Cases 2 and 40, and in the Hekiganroku or Blue Cliff Record, Cases 53, 70, 71, 72. The most complete accounting of anecdotes may be found in Blofeld, Zen Teachings of Hui-Hai on Sudden Illumination; and Thomas Cleary, Sayings and Doings of Pai-chang (Los Angeles: Center Publicatons, 1979). 6. Kenneth K. S. Ch'en, (The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], p. 95) says, "Besides the Vinaya controlling the conduct of the Buddhist clergy, the basic code governing Buddhist and Taoist monks and nuns during the T'ang Dynasty was the Tao-seng-ke (Rules concerning Buddhist and Taoist clergy), formulated during the Chen-kuan era, probably 637. This Tao- seng-ke is no longer extant, however, but the Japanese work Soni-ryo, which governs the conduct of the community of monks and nuns in Japan, was based on it. Therefore a study of the Soni-ryo would give us a good idea of the contents of the Tao-seng-ke. . . . [Certain] provisions of the T'ang codes superseded the monastic code and called for penalties for offenses which went beyond those specified in the Soni-ryo or the Buddhist Vinaya." 7. For a scholarly discussion of the economic role of Buddhism in T'ang China, see D. C. Twitchett, "Monastic Estates in T'ang China," Asia Major, (1955-56), pp. 123-46. He explains that the T'ang government was always a trifle uneasy about the presence of un-taxed monastic establishments, and not without reason. Buddhism in T'ang China was big business. The large monasteries were beneficiaries of gifts and bequests from the aristocracy, as well as from the palace itself. (Eunuchs, along with palace ladies, were particularly generous.) Laymen often would bequeath their lands to a monastery, sometimes including in the will a curse on anyone who might later wish to take the land away from the church. These gifts were thought to ensure better fortunes in the world to come, while simultaneously resolving tax difficulties for the donor. For the monasteries themselves this wealth could only accumulate, since it never had to be divided among sons. After An Lu- shan's rebellion, a flavor of feudalism had penetrated Chinese society, and huge tracts came to be held by the Buddhist monasteries, to which entire estates were sometimes donated. As a result, the Buddhists had enormous economic power, although we may suspect the iconoclastic _dhyana_ establishments in the south enjoyed little of it. 8. See Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, pp. 102-03. 9. See Heinrich Dumoulin and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, The Development of Chinese Zen (New York: First Zen Institute of America, 1953), p.13. Interestingly, the Vinaya sect, founded by Tao-hsuan (596-667), was primarily concerned with the laws of monastic discipline. The familiarity of Ch'an teachers with the concerns of this sect may have contributed to the desire to create rules for their own assemblies. 10. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 109. 11. See D. T. Suzuki, The Zen Monk's Life (New York: Olympia Press, 1972); Eshin Nishimura, Unsui: A Diary of Zen Monastic Life (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973); Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, pp. 314-362; and Koji Sato, The Zen Life (New York: Weatherhill/Tankosha, 1977). A succinct summary of Zen monastic life is also provided by Sir Charles Eliot in Japanese Buddhism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935), p. 406. 12. See Blofeld, Zen Teaching ofHui Hai on Sudden Illumination, p. 52. 13. Ibid., pp. 60-61. 14. Ibid., p. 48. 15. Ibid., p. 133. 16. Ibid., p. 77. 17. Ibid., p. 55. 18. Ibid., p. 56. 19. Ibid., p. 78. 20. Ibid., p. 54. 8. NAN-CH'UAN AND CHAO-CHOU: MASTERS OF THE IRRATIONAL 1. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 153. 2. Ibid., p. 178. 3. According to a biographical sketch of Nan-ch'uan given by Cleary and Cleary in Blue Cliff Record, p. 262. 4. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 160. This was also incorporated in the Blue Cliff Record as Case 40 (Ibid., p. 292), where the Sung-era commentary is actually more obscure than what it attempts to explain. 5. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 136. 6. Ibid., p. 136. 7. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 3, p. 57. 8. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 159. 9. Ibid., p. 157. This anecdote is also Case 69 of the Blue Cliff Record. 10. Ibid., p. 161. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 162. 13. Ibid., p. 164. Translation of a T'ang text, "The Sayings of Chao- chou," is provided by Yoel Hoffman, Radical Zen (Brookline, Mass.: Autumn Press, 1978). 14. Recounted by Garma C. C. Chang in The Practice of Zen (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 24. This is also Case 14 of the Mumonkan and Cases 63 and 64 of the Blue Cliff Record. 15. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 127. This is also Case 19 of the Mumonkan. 16. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 159. 17. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 129. 18. Ibid., p. 133. 19. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 169. 20. Ibid., p. 140. 21. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 136. 22. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 171. 23. This is Case 1 of the Mumonkan, here quoted from a very readable new translation by Katsuki Sekida, Two Zen Classics: Mumonkan 6- Hekiganroku (New York: Weatherhill, 1977), p. 27. 24. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, pp. 144-45. 25. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 3, p. 77. 26. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 145. 27. Ibid., p. 139. 28. Ibid., p. 146. 29. Ibid., p. 144. 30. 9. P'ANG AND HAN-SHAN: LAYMAN AND POET 1. See Burton Watson, Cold Mountain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 13. This concept of the Zen layman has longbeen a part of Zen practice in Japan, and for this reason both Layman P'ang and the poet Han-shan are favorite Ch'an figures with the Japanese. In fact, the eighteenth-century Japanese master Hakuin wrote a commentary on Han-shan. 2. See Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Yoshitaka Iriya, and Dana R. Frasier, The Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang (New York: Weatherhill, 1971), p. 18. 3. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 145. This story is famous and found in many sources. 4. As evidenced by a common saying of the time: "In Kiangsi the Master is Ma-tsu; in Hunan the Master is Shih-t'ou. People go back and forth between them all the time, and those who do not know these two great Masters are completely ignorant." Yampolsky, Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, p. 55. 5. Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang, p. 46. 6. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 145. 7. See Ibid., p. 175. 8. Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang, p. 47. 9. Luk, Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching, p. 42. 10. Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang, p. 58. 11. Ibid., p. 69. 12. Ibid., p. 71 13. Ibid., p.47. 14. Ibid., p. 88. 15. Ibid., pp. 54-55. The translators explain the last two verses as follows: "This is derived from the old Chinese proverb: 'To win by a fluke is to fall into a fluke' (and thus to lose by a fluke)." Concerning the meaning of this exchange, it would seem that water is here being used as a metaphor for the undifferentiated Void, which subsumes the temporary individuality of its parts the way the sea is undifferentiated, yet contains waves. When Tan-hsia accepts this premise a little too automatically, P'ang is forced to show him (via a splash) that water (and by extension, physical manifestations of the components of the Void) can also assume a physical reality that impinges on daily life. Tan-hsia tries feebly to respond by returning the splash, but he clearly lost the exchange. 16. Ibid. p. 73. 17. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 176. Also see Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Lay man P'ang, p. 75. 18. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 177. 19. Sasaki et al., Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang, p. 42. Watson, Cold Mountain, p. 50. Watson explains that the 20. Arthur Waley, "27 Poems by Han-shan," Encounter, 3, 3 (September 1954), p. 3. 21. opening line about taking along books while hoeing in the field was "From the story of an impoverished scholar of the former Han Dynasty who was so fond of learning that he carried his copies of the Confucian classics along when he went to work in the fields." The last line is "An allusion to the perch, stranded in a carriage rut in the road, who asked the philosopher Chuang Tzu for a dipperful of water so that he could go on living." 22. 23. Ibid., p. 56. 24. 23. Waley, "27 Poems by Han-shan," p. 6. 24. From Wu Chi-yu, "A Study of Han Shan," T'oung Pao, 45, 4-5 (1957), p. 432. 26. Gary Snyder, "Han-shan," In Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature, (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 201. 27. 28. See Ibid., pp. 194-96. 29. 27. See Watson, Cold Mountain, p. 14. Watson says, "Zen commentators have therefore been forced to regard Han-shan's professions of loneliness, doubt, and discouragement not as revelations of his own feelings but as vicarious recitals of the ills of unenlightened men which he can still sympathize with, though he himself has transcended them. He thus becomes the traditional Bodhisattva figure--compassionate, in the world, but not of it." Watson rejects this interpretation. 28. Ibid., p. 67. 29. Ibid., p. 88. 30. Ibid., p. 78. 31. Ibid., p. 81. 32. Ibid., pp. 11-12. 33. Snyder, "Han-shan," p. 202. 10. HUANG-PO: MASTER OF THE UNIVERSAL MIND 1. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 102. 2. This probably was during the last decade of the eighth century, since Ma-tsu died in 788. 3. This volume actually consists of two books, known as the Chun-chou Record (843) and the Wan-iing Record (849). They are translated and published together by John Blofeld as The Zen Teaching of Huang Po. (New York: Grove Press, 1958). This appears to have been the source for biographical and anecdotal material later included in The Transmission of the Lamp, portions of which are translated in Chang Chung-yuan. Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism. Another translation of biographical, didactic, and anecdotal material may be found in Charles Luk, Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching, whose source is unattributed but which possibly could be a translation of the 1602 work Records of Pointing at The Moon, a compilation of Ch'an materials. 4. Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Huang Po, p. 28. 5. Ibid., p. 27. 6. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 103. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 90. 9. Ibid., p. 103. 10. Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Huang Po, p. 99. 11. This gesture of defeat is reported elsewhere to have been a triple prostration. Huang-po apparently claimed victory in these exchanges when he either kept silent or walked away. 12. Wan-ling is reported by Chang Chung-yuan to be the modern town of Hsuan-ch'eng in southern Anhwei province (Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 123). According to The Transmission of the Lamp the prime minister built a monastery and invited Huang-po to come lecture there, which the master did. The monastery was then named after a mountain where the master had once lived. 13. Ibid., p. 104. 14. Ibid. 15. Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Huang Po, p. 55. 16. Ibid., p. 130. 17. Ibid., pp. 81-82. 18. Ibid., p. 44 19. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 87. 20. Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Huang Po, p. 53. 21. Ibid., p. 39. 22. Ibid., p. 46. 23. Ibid., p. 37. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 40. 26. Ibid., p. 61. 27. Ibid., p. 26. 28. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 85. 29. Blofeld, Zen Teachings of Huang Po, p. 50. 30. See Wu, Golden Age of Zen. 31. Chang Chung-yuan reports some disagreement over the actual date of Huang-po's death. It seems that he is reported to have died in 849 in Records of Buddhas and Patriarchs in Various Dynasties, whereas the year of his death is given as 855 in the General Records of Buddhas and Patriarchs. 32. Excerpts from the Han Yu treatise are provided in Edwin O. Reischauer, Ennin's Travels in T'ang China (New York: Ronald Press, 1955), pp. 221 ff. This recounting of a visit by a ninth-century Japanese monk to China reveals indirectly how lacking in influence the Ch'anists actually were. In a diary of many years Ch'an is mentioned only rarely, and then in tones of other than respect. He viewed the Ch'anists warily and described them as "extremely unruly men at heart" (p. 173). However, his trip in China was severely disturbed by the sudden eruption of the Great Persecution, making him so fearful that he actually destroyed the Buddhist art he had collected throughout the country. 33. See Hu Shih, "Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China." 34. See Ibid. 35. Kenneth Ch'en, in "The Economic Background of the Hui-Ch'ang Suppression of Buddhism," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 19 (1956), points out that the imperial decree required the turning in only of statues made from metals having economic value. Those made from clay, wood, and stone could remain in the temples. He uses this to support his contention that the main driving force behind the Great Persecution was the inordinate economic power of the Buddhist establishments. 36. 11. LIN-CHI: FOUNDER OF RINZAI ZEN 1. A discussion of the five houses of Ch'an may be found in Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, pp. 106-22; and Dumoulin and Sasaki, Development of Chinese Zen, pp. 17-32. Useful summaries of their teachings also may be found in Chou Hsiang-kuang, _Dhyana_ Buddhism in China. 2. Accounts of Lin-chi's life are found in The Record of Lin-chi, The Transmission of the Lamp, The Five Lamps Meeting at the Source, and Finger Pointing at the Moon. The most reliable source is probably The Record of Lin-chi, since this was compiled by his follower(s). The definitive translation of this work certainly must be that by Ruth F. Sasaki, The Recorded Sayings of Ch'an Master Lin-chi Hui-chao of Chen Prefecture, (Kyoto, Japan: Institute of Zen Studies, 1975) and recently re-issued by Heian International, Inc., South San Francisco, Calif. Another version, The Zen Teachings of Rinzai, translated by Irmgard Schloegl (Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1976), is less satisfactory. The Lin-chi excerpts from The Transmission of the Lamp may be found in Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism. Excerpts from The Five Lamps Meeting at the Source and Finger Pointing at the Moon are provided in Charles Luk, Ch'an and Zen Teaching, Second Series (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1971). Translations of his sermons, sayings, etc. together with commentary may also be found in Wu, Golden Age of Zen; Chou Hsiang-kuang, _Dhyana_ Buddhism in China; and Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 3. 3. R. H. Blyth is suspicious that Lin-chi's story was enhanced somewhat for dramatic purposes, claiming (Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 3, p. 151), "As in the case of the Sixth Patriarch, [Lin-chi's] enlightenment is recounted 'dramatically,' that is to say minimizing his previous understanding of Zen in order to bring out the great change after enlightenment." 4. Sasaki, Recorded Sayings of Lin-chi, pp. 24-25. 5. Ibid., p. 25. 6. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, pp. 117-18. 7. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 194. 8. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 118. 9. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 195. 10. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 119. 11. Sasaki, Recorded Sayings of Lin-chi, p. 43. 12. Ibid., p. 45. 13. Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, p. 122. 14. Of Lin-chi's shout, R. H. Blyth says (Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 3, p. 154): "[The shout] is a war-cry, but the fight is a sort of shadow- boxing. The universe shouts at us, we shout back. We shout at the universe, and the echo comes back in the same way. But the shouting and the echoing are continuous, and, spiritually speaking, simultaneous. Thus the [shout] is not an expression of anything; it has no (separable) meaning. It is pure energy, without cause or effect, rhyme or reason." 15. After Sasaki, Recorded Sayings of Lin-chi, p. 47. 16. See Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 201. 17. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, pp. 121-22. 18. Sasaki, Recorded Sayings of Lin-chi, p. 4. 19. Ibid., p. 41. 20. Ibid., p. 48. 21. Ibid., p. 2. 22. Ibid., p. 70. 23. Ibid., p. 6. 24. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 98. 25. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, pp. 204-05. 26. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 99. 27. Dumoulin, Development of Chinese Zen, p. 22. 28. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 99. 29. Dumoulin, Development of Chinese Zen, p. 23. 30. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings ofCh'an Buddhism, p. 95. 31. Sasaki, Recorded Sayings o/Lin-chi, pp. 27-28. 32. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 95. 33. Heinrich Dumoulin (Development of Chinese Zen, p. 22) notes that this is merely playing off the well-known "four propositions" of Ind ian Buddhist logic: existence, nonexistence, both existence and nonexistence, and neither existence nor nonexistence. 34. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 202. 35. Ibid., p. 203. 36. Sasaki, Recorded Sayings of Lin-chi. p. 29. 37. Ibid., p. 24. 38. Ibid., p. 38. 39. 12. TUNG-SHAN AND TSAO-SHAN: FOUNDERS OF SOTO ZEN 1. Philip Yampolsky, in Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, alleges that Hsing-ssu was resurrected from anonymity because Shih-t'ou (700- 90) was in need of a connection to the Sixth Patriarch. The mysterious master Hsing-ssu comes into prominence well over a hundred years after his death; his actual life was not chronicled by any of his contemporaries. Neither, for that matter, was the life of his pupil Shih-t'ou, although the latter left a heritage of disciples and a burgeoning movement to perpetuate his memory. 2. Ibid., p. 55. 3. The stories attached to Shih-t'ou are varied and questioned by most authorities. For example, there is the story that he was enlightened by reading Seng-chau's Chao-Jun (The Book of Chao) but that his philosophy came from Lao Tzu. 4. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 58. 5. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 171. 6. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 58. 7. Ibid., p. 60. 8. Ibid., pp. 61-62. 9. Ibid., pp. 64-65. 10. Ibid., p. 76. 11. This is elaborated by Luk, Ch'an and Zen Teaching, Second Series, p. 166. 12. Ibid., p. 174. 13. Extended discussions of this concept are provided by Chang Chung- yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, pp. 41-57; and by Wu, Golden Age of Zen, pp. 177-82. 14. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 179. 15. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 49. 16. See Luk, Chan and Zen Teaching, Second Series, p. 139. 17. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 50. 18. Ibid., p. 69. 19. When R. H. Blyth translates this poem in Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 2, called the Hokyozammai in Japanese, he includes a grand dose of skepticism concerning its real authorship, since he believes the poem unworthy of the master (p. 152). 20. Ibid., p. 157. 21. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 48. 22. Ibid., p. 70. 23. Ibid., p. 71. 24. Ibid., p. 72. 25. Dumoulin, Development of Chinese Zen, p. 26. 30. Eliot, Japanese Buddhism, p. 168. 31. 13. KUEI-SHAN, YUN-MEN, AND FA-YEN: THREE MINOR HOUSES 1. Accounts of the lives and teachings of the masters of the Kuei-yang school can be found in a number of translations, including Chang Chung- yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism; and Luk, Ch'an and Zen Teachings, Second Series. Both provide translations from The Transmission of the Lamp. Other sources appear to be used in Wu, Golden Age of Zen, which includes a lively discussion of Kuei-shan and the Kuei-yang sect. 2. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 159. 3. Charles Luk (Ch'an and Zen Teaching, Second Series, p. 58) makes a valiant try at explication when he says, "[Huai-hai] wanted him to perceive 'that which gave the order' and 'that which obeyed it.' . . . [Huai-hai] continued to perform his great function by pressing the student hard, insisting that the latter should perceive 'that' which arose from the seat, used the poker, raised a little fire, showed it to him and said, 'Is this not fire?' . . . This time the student could actually perceive the reply by means of his self-nature. . . . Hence his enlightenment." 4. See Ibid., p. 58. Ssu-ma seems to have had a good record in predicting monastic success, and he was much in demand. Although the reliance on a fortuneteller seems somewhat out of character for a Ch'an master, we should remember that fortunetelling and future prediction in China are at least as old as the I Ching. 5. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 202. 6. Ibid., p. 204. 7. Luk, Ch'an and Zen Teaching, Second Series, p. 67. 8. Ibid., p. 78. 9. Wu, Golden Age of Zen, p. 167. 10. Ibid., p. 167. 11. John Wu (Golden Age of Zen, p. 165) says, "The style of the house of Kuei-yang has a charm all of its own. It is not as steep and sharp- edged as the houses of Lin-chi and Yun-men, nor as close-knit and resourceful as the house of Ts'ao-tung nor as speculative and broad as the house of Fa-yen, but it has greater depth than the others." 12. See Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 269. Other translations of Yun-men anecdotes, as well as interpretations and appreciations, can be found in Luk, Ch'an and Zen Teaching, Second Series; Chou, _Dhyana_ Buddhism in China; Wu, Golden Age of Zen; and Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 2. 13. He had six koans out of forty-eight in the Mumonkan and eighteen koans out of a hundred in the Hekiganroku. Perhaps his extensive representation in the second collection is attributable to the fact that its compiler, Ch'ung-hsien (980-1025), was one of the last surviving representatives of Yun-men's school. 14. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism p. 284. 15. Ibid., p. 286. 16. Ibid., p. 229. 17. Ibid., p. 228. 18. Ibid., p. 229. 19. Sekida, Two Zen Classics: Mumonkan & Hekiganroku, p. 349. This koan is from Hekiganroku, Case 77. 20. From the Mumonkan, Case 21. The Chinese term used was kan-shin chueh, which Chang Chung-yuan (Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 300) characterizes as follows: "This may be translated either of two ways: a piece of dried excrement or a bamboo stick used for cleaning as toilet tissue is today." 21. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 2, p. 142. 22. Those with insatiable curiosity may consult Wu, Golden Age of Zen, pp. 244 ff. 23. Translations of his teachings from The Transmission of the Lamp are provided by Chang Chung:yuan in Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism and by Charles Luk in Ch'an and Zen Teachings, Second Series. A translation of a completely different source, which varies significantly on all the major anecdotes, is provided in John Wu, Golden Age of Zen. A translation, presumably from a Japanese source, of some of his teachings is supplied by R. H. Blyth in Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 2. Heinrich Dumoulin offers a brief assessment of his influence in his two books: Development of Chinese Zen and History of Zen Buddhism. 24. Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism, p. 238. A completely different version may be found in Wu, Golden Age of Zen, pp. 232-33. 25. Buddhism Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an, p. 242. 26. 14. TA-HUI: MASTER OF THE KOAN 1. See Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, p. 128. 2. Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Zen Dust (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), pp. 10-11. 3. Ibid., p. 10. This individual is identified as Nan-yuan Hui-yang (d. 930). 4. This is Case 1 in the Mumonkan, usually the first koan given to a beginning student. 5. This is Case 26 of the Mumonkan. The version given here is after the translation in Sekida, Two Zen Classics: Mumonkan & Hekiganroku, p. 89. 6. This is Case 54 of the Hekiganroku. The version given is after Ibid., p. 296, and Cleary and Cleary, Blue Cliff Record, p. 362. 7. Isshu and Sasaki, Zen Dust, p. 13. 8. There are a number of translations of the Mumonkan currently available in English. The most recent is Sekida, Two Zen Classics: Mumonkan & Hekiganroku; but perhaps the most authoritative is Zenkei Shibayama, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, trans. Sumiko Kudo (New York: Harper £r Row, 1974; paperback edition, New York: New American Library, 1975). Other translations are Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps, "The Gateless Gate," in Paul Reps, ed., Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Rutland and Tokyo: Tuttle, 1957); Sohkau Ogata, "The Mu Mon Kwan," in Zen for the West (New York: Dial, 1959); and R. H. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 4, "Mumonkan" (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1966). Three translations of the Blue Cliff Record are currently available in English. There is the early and unsatisfactory version by R. D. M. Shaw (London: Michael Joseph, 1961). A readable version is provided in Sekida, Two Zen Classics, although this excludes some of the traditional commentary. The authoritative version is certainly that by Cleary and Cleary, Blue Cliff Record. 9. This is the case with the version provided in Sekida, Two Zen Classics. 10. See Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, p. 128. 11. See L. Carrington Goodrich, A Short History of the Chinese People (New York: Harper & Row, 1943), p. 161. 12. The most comprehensive collection of Ta-hui's writings is translated in Christopher Cleary, Swampland Flowers: The Letters and Lectures of Zen Master Ta Hui (New York: Grove Press, 1977). Excerpts are also translated by Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Second Series. Biographical information may also be found in Isshu and Sasaki, Zen Dust. 13. Translated in Isshu and Sasaki, Zen Dust, p. 163. 14. A work known today as the Cheng-fa-yen-tsang. See Isshu and Sasaki, Zen Dust, p. 163. 15. See Ibid. 16. See Ibid. 17. Translated by Cleary, Swampland Flowers, pp. 129-30. 18. See Sekida, Two Zen Classics, p. 17. 19. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Second Series, p. 103. 20. Cleary, Swampland Flowers, p. 64. 21. Ibid., p. 57. 22. Ibid., p. 14. 25. But he destroyed them in vain. Around 1300 a monk managed to assemble most of the koans and commentary from scattered sources and put the book back into print. The problem continues to this day; there is now available a book of "answers" to a number of koans--Yoel Hoffman, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (New York: Basic Books, 1975). One reviewer of this book observed sadly, "Now if only getting the 'answer' were the same as getting the point." 26. 15. EISAI: THE FIRST JAPANESE MASTER 1. This anecdote is in Martin Charles Collcutt, "The Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1975). 2. Although there were various attempts to introduce Ch'an into Japan prior to the twelfth century, nothing ever seemed to stick. Dumoulin (History of Zen Buddhism, pp. 138-39) summarized these efforts as follows: "The first certain information we possess regarding Zen in Japan goes back to the early period of her history. The outstanding Japanese Buddhist monk during that age, Dosho, was attracted to Zen through the influence of his Chinese teacher, Hsuan-tsang, under whom he studied the Yogacara philosophy (653). . . . Dosho thus came into immediate contact with the tradition of Bodhidharma and brought the Zen of the patriarchs to Japan. He built the first meditation hall, at a temple in Nara. . . . "A century later, for the first time in history, a Chinese Zen master came to Japan. This was Tao-hsuan, who belonged to the northern sect of Chinese Zen in the third generation after Shen-hsiu. Responding to an invitation from Japanese Buddhist monks, he took up residence in Nara and contributed to the growth of Japanese culture during the Tempyo period (729-749). . . . The contemplative element in the Tendai tradition, which held an important place from the beginning, was strengthened in both China and Japan by repeated contacts with Zen. "A further step in the spread of Zen occurred in the following century when I-k'ung, a Chinese master of the Lin-chi sect, visited Japan. He came at the invitation of the Empress Tachibana Kachiko, wife of the Emperor Saga, during the early part of the Showa era (834-848), to teach Zen, first at the imperial court and later at the Danrinji temple in Kyoto, which the empress had built for him. However, these first efforts in the systematic propagation of Zen according to the Chinese pattern did not meet with lasting success. I-k'ung was unable to launch a vigorous movement. Disappointed, he returned to China, and for three centuries Zen was inactive in Japan." Another opportunity for the Japanese to learn about Ch'an was missed by the famous Japanese pilgrim Ennin, who was in China to witness the Great Persecution of 845, but who paid almost no attention to Ch'an, which he regarded as the obsession of unruly ne'er-do-wells. 3. A number of books provide information concerning early Japanese history and the circumstances surrounding the introduction of Buddhism to Japan. General historical works of particular relevance include: John Whitney Hall, Japan, from Prehistory to Modern Times (New York: Delacorte, 1970); Mikiso Hane, Japan, A Historical Survey (New York: Scribner's, 1972); Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan: Past and Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1964); and George B. Sansom, A History of Japan, 3 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958-63). Studies of early Japanese Buddhism may be found in: Masaharu Anesaki, History of Japanese Religion (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1930: reissue, Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1963); William K. Bunce, Religions in Japan (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1955); Ch'en, Buddhism in China; Eliot, Japanese Buddhism; Shinsho Hanayama, A History of Japanese Buddhism (Tokyo: Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, 1966); and E. Dale Saunders, Buddhism in Japan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). 4. In fact, the popularity of esoteric rituals was such that they were an important part of early Zen practice in Japan. 5. This world is well described by Ivan Morris in The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (New York: Knopf, 1964). A discussion of the relation of this aesthetic life to the formation of Japanese Zen may be found in Thomas Hoover, Zen Culture (New York: Random House, 1977; paperback edition, New York: Vintage, 1978). 6. One of the most readable accounts of the rise of the Japanese military class may be found in Paul Varley, Samurai (New York: Delacorte, 1970; paperback edition, New York: Dell, 1972). 7. This theory is advanced eloquently in Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan." In later years the Ch'an sect in China itself actually entered a phase of decadence, with the inclusion of esoteric rites and an ecumenical movement that advocated the chanting of the nembutsu by Ch'anists--some of whom claimed there was great similarity between the psychological aspects of this mechanical chant and those of the koan. 8. Accounts of Eisai's life may be found in Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism; and in Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan." 9. See Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan." 10. See Saunders, Buddhism in Japan, p. 221. 11. Translated in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed. Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 236- 37. 12. Ibid., p. 237. 13. De Bary, Sources of Japanese Tradition, pp. 239-40. 14. Again the best discussion of this intrigue is provided by Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan." 15. 16. Varley, Samurai, p. 45. 17. 17. DOGEN: FATHER OF JAPANESE SOTO ZEN 18. 1. Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, p. 151. This statement may be faint praise, for Japan has never been especially noted for its religious thinkers. As philosophers, the Japanese have been great artists and poets. Perhaps no culture can do everything. 2. Biographical information on Dogen may be found in Hee-Jin Kim, Dogen Kigen--Mystical Realist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975); Yuho Yokoi, Zen Master Dogen (New York: Weatherhill, 1976); and Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism. Translations of his writings maybe found in Dogen Kigen--Mystical Realist and Zen Master Dogen as well as in Jiyu Kennett, Zen is Eternal Life (Emeryville, Calif.: Dharma, 1976); Dogen, Record of Things Heard from the Treasury of the Eye of the True Teaching trans, by Thomas Cleary (Boulder, Colo.: Great Eastern Book Company, 1978); Francis Dojun Cook, How to Raise an Ox (Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1978); and Kosen Nishiyama and John Steven, Shobogenzo: The Eye and Treasury of the True Law (New York: Weatherhill, 1977). 3. Kim, Dogen Kigen--Mystical Realist, p. 25. 4. Yokoi, Zen Master Dogen, p. 28. 5. See Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan." 6. Kim, Dogen Kigen--Mystical Realist, p. 29. 7. Ibid., p. 35. 8. See Yokoi, Zen Master Dogen, p. 32. 9. Ibid., pp. 45--46. 10. Ibid., p. 46. 11. Kennett, Zen Is Eternal Life, pp. 141-42. 12. Ibid., p. 152. 13. Ibid., pp. 150-51. 14. Dogen's attitude toward women was revolutionary for his time. A sampling is provided in Kim, Dogen Kigen--Mystical Realist, pp. 54-55: "Some people, foolish in the extreme, also think of woman as nothing but the object of sensual pleasures, and see her this way without ever correcting their view. A Buddhist should not do so. If man detests woman as the sexual object, she must detest him for the same reason. Both man and woman become objects, thus being equally involved in defilement. . . . What charge is there against woman? What virtue is there in man? There are wicked men in the world; there are virtuous women in the world. The desire to hear Dharma and the search for enlightenment do not necessarily rely on the difference in sex." 15. Yokoi, Zen Master Dogen, pp. 35-36. 16. See Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Training in Medieval Japan," p. 59. 17. Translated in de Bary, Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 1., p. 247. 18. See Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan," p. 62. 19. See Ibid., pp. 62 ff. 20.See Philip Yampolsky, trans., The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 5. 19. IKKYU: ZEN ECCENTRIC 20. 1. This view is advanced convincingly by Collcutt in "Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan," p. 113 ff. 2. Ibid., p. 80. 3. This would seem to be one of the reasons for what became of a host of emigrating Ch'an teachers as sub-sects of the Yogi branch struggled for ascendency over each other. 4. Wu-an's strength of mind is illustrated by a story related in Collcutt, "Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan," p. 84: "Wu-an is said to have shocked the religious sensibilities of many warriors and monks when, in what has been interpreted as a deliberate attempt to sever the connection between Zen and prayer in Japanese minds, he publicly refused to worship before the statue of Jizo in the Buddha Hill of Kencho-ji on the grounds that whereas Jizo was merely a Bodhisattva, he, Wu-an, was a Buddha." 5. Related in Ibid., p. 88. 6. Collcutt ("Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan," p. 114) points out that the warrior interest in Zen and its Chinese cultural trappings should also be credited partly to their desire to stand up to the snobbery of the Kyoto aristocracy. By making themselves emissaries of a prestigious foreign civilization, the warrior class achieved a bit of cultural one-upmanship on the Kyoto snob set. 7. Collcutt ("Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan," p. 106) reports that this conversion of temples to Zen was not always spontaneous. There is the story of one local governor who was called to Kamakura and in the course of a public assembly asked pointedly whether his family had yet built a Zen monastery in their home province. The terrified official declared he had built a monastery for a hundred Zen monks, and then raced home to start construction. 8. A discussion of the contribution of Zen to Japanese civilization may be found in Hoover, Zen Culture. An older survey is D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1959). 9. Yampolsky, Zen Master Hakuin, p. 8. 10. Philip Yampolsky, "Muromachi Zen and the Gozan System," in John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi, eds., Japan in the Muromachi Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 319. 11. One of the best political histories of this era is Sansom, History of Japan. For the history of Zen, the best work appears to be Martin Collcutt, The Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, in press), a revised version of the dissertation cited above. 12. English sources on Ikkyu are less common than might at first be supposed. The most exhaustive study and translation of original Ikkyu writings to date is certainly that of James Sanford, "Zen-Man Ikkyu" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1972). There is also a lively and characteristically insightful essay by Donald Keene, "The Portrait of Ikkyu," in Archives of Asian Art, Vol. 20 (1966-67), pp. 54-65. This essay has been collected in Donald Keene, Landscapes and Portraits (Palo Alto: Kodansha International, 1971). Another work of Ikkyu scholarship is Sonja Arntzen, "A Presentation of the Poet Ikkyu with Translations from the Kyounshu 'Mad Cloud Anthology'" (Unpublished thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1966). 13. See Thomas Cleary, The Original Face: An Anthology of Rinzai Zen (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 13. An example of a Nasrudin-esque parable told about Ikkyu is the story of his approaching the house of a rich man one day to beg for food wearing his torn robes and straw sandals. The man drove him away, but when he returned the following day in the luxurious robe of a Buddhist prelate, he was invited in for a banquet. But when the food arrived Ikkyu removed his robe and offered the food to it. 14. Sanford, "Zen-Man Ikkyu," p. 48. 15. Ibid., p. 68. 16. Ibid. pp. 80-81. 17. Translated by Keene, Landscapes and Portraits, p. 235. Professor Keene (personal communication) has provided a revised and, he believes, more fully accurate translation of this verse as follows: After ten days of living in this temple my mind's in turmoil; Red strings, very long, tug at my feet. If one day you get around to looking for me, Try the restaurants, the drinking places or the brothels. He notes that the "red strings" of the second line refer to the ties of physical attachment to women that drew Ikkyu from the temple to the pleasure quarters. 18. Jon Covell and Yamada Sobin, Zen at Daitoku-ji (New York: Kodansha International, 1974), p. 36. 19. Sanford, "Zen-Man Ikkyu," p. 221. 20. Ibid., p. 226. 21. Ibid., p. 235. 22. Ibid., p. 225. 23. Ibid., pp. 253-54. A translation may also be found in Cleary, Original Face; and in R. H. Blyth and N. A. Waddell, "Ikkyu's Skeletons," The Eastern Buddhist, N.S. 7, 3 (May 1973), pp. 111-25. Also see Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 7. 24. Sanford claims ("Zen-Man Ikkyu," p. 341) that Ikkyu's prose is "almost totally unknown" in Japan. 25. Ibid., pp. 326-27. 26. Ibid., p. 172. 27. Jan Covell (Zen at Daitoku-ji, p. 38) says, "Ikkyu's own ink paintings are unpretentious and seemingly artless, always with the flung-ink technique. His calligraphy is ranked among history's greatest . . ." 32. Sanford, "Zen-Man Ikkyu," p. 342. 33. 21. HAKUIN: JAPANESE MASTER OF THE KOAN 22. 1. Yampolsky, Zen Master Hakuin, p. 116. This is undoubtedly the definitive work by and about Hakuin in English and has been used for all the quotations that follow. Another translation of some of Hakuin's works is R. D. M. Shaw, The Embossed Teakettle (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963). A short translation of Hakuin's writings may be found in Cleary, Original Face. Perhaps the most incisive biographical and interpretive material may be found, respectively, in Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism; and Isshu and Sasaki, Zen Dust. 2. Yampolsky, Zen Master Hakuin, p. 117. 3. Ibid., p. 18. 4. Ibid., pp. 118-19. 5. Ibid., p. 119. 6. Ibid., p. 121. 7. Ibid., pp. 31-32. 8. Ibid., p. 33. 9. Ibid., p. 49. 10. Ibid., p. 33. 11. Ibid., pp. 52-53. 12. Ibid., p. 53. 13. Ibid., p. 58. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 35. 16. Ibid., pp. 63-64. 17. The "great ball of doubt," known in Chinese as i-t'uan, was a classic Zen phrase and has been traced by Ruth Fuller Sasaki (Zen Dust, p. 247) back to a tenth-century Chinese monk, who claimed in a poem, "The ball of doubt within my heart/Was as big as a big wicker basket." Hakuin's analysis of the "great ball of doubt" is translated in Zen Dust, p. 43. 18. Hakuin's invention of his own koans, which were kept secret and never published, is a significant departure from the usual technique of simply taking situations from the classic literature, and demonstrates both his creativity and his intellectual independence. It also raises the question of whether they really were "koans" under the traditional definition of "public case" or whether they should be given a different name. 19. Yampolsky, Zen Master Hakuin, p. 164. 20. The koan system of Hakuin is discussed by Yampolsky in Zen Master Hakuin, p. 15; and by Sasaki, in The Zen Koan, pp. 27-30. 21. Yampolsky, Zen Master Hakuin, p. 32. 22. See D. T. Suzuki, Sengai: The Zen Master (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1971); Burton Watson, Ryokan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); and John Stevens, One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryokan (New York: Weatherhill, 1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY Anesaki, Masaharu. History of Japanese Religion. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1930 (reissue, Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1963). Arntzen, Sonja. "A Presentation of the Poet Ikkyu with Translations from the Kyounshu 'Mad Cloud Anthology.' " Master's thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1966. Baskin, Wade, ed. Classics in Chinese Philosophy. Totowa, N. J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1974. Berry, Thomas. Buddhism. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1975. Bingham, Woodbridge. The Founding of the T'ang Dynasty. New York: Octagon, 1970. Birch, Cyril. Anthology of Chinese Literature. New York: Grove, 1965. Blofeld, John. The Secret and Sublime: Taoist Mysteries and Magic. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973. Blofeld, John, trans. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po. New York: Grove, 1958. ------- The Zen Teaching of Hui Hai on Sudden Illumination. London: Ryder, 1962; paperback reprint, New York: Weiser, 1972. Bloodworth, Dennis. The Chinese Looking Glass. New York: Dell, 1966. Blyth, R. H. Zen and Zen Classics. 7 Vols. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1960-1970. ----- and N. A. Waddell, "Ikkyu's Skeletons," The Eastern Buddhist, N.S. 7, 3. Broughton, Jeffrey. "Kuei-Feng Tsung-Mi: The Convergence of Ch'an and the Teachings." Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1975. Bunce, William K. Religions in Japan. Rutland: Tuttle, 1955. Bynner, Witter. The Jade Mountain. New York: Vintage, 1957. Chai, Ch'u, and Winberg Chai. Confucianism. New York: Barron's Educational Series, 1973. ----- The Humanist Way in Ancient China: Essential Works of Confucianism. New York: Bantam, 1965. Chan, Wing-tsit, trans. The Platform Scripture. New York: St. Johns University Press, 1963. ------A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. ----- "Transformation of Buddhism in China," Philosophy East and West, VII (1957-58) pp. 107-16. Chang, Garma C. C. The Practice of Zen. New York: Harper & Row, 1959; paperback edition, Perennial Library, 1970. Chang, Chung-yuan. Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. ----- Tao: A New Way of Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1975;paperback edition, Perennial Library, 1977. ----- trans. Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism (The Transmission of the Lamp). New York: Random House, 1969; paperback edition, Vintage, 1971. Chatterjee, H., ed. Mula-Madhyamaka-Karika of Nagarjuna. Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962. Chau, Bhikshu Thich Minh. Hsuan Tsang, The Pilgrim Er Scholar. Nha- trang, Vietnam: Vietnam Buddhist Institute, n.d. Chen, C. M. The Lighthouse in the Ocean of Ch'an. Kalimpong: Buddhist Association of the United States, 1965. Ch'en, Kenneth. Buddhism in China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. ----- . Buddhism: The Light of Asia. New York: Barron's Educational Series, Inc., 1968 ----- . The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. ----- . "The Economic Background of the Hui-ch'ang Suppression of Buddhism," Harvard journal of Asiatic Studies, 19, (1956), pp. 67-105. Chiang, Yee. The Chinese Eye. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964. Chou, Hsiang-kuang. _Dhyana_ Buddhism in China. Allahabad, India: Indo- Chinese Literature Publications, 1960. Cleary, Christopher, trans. Swampland Flowers: The Letters and Lectures of Zen Master Ta Hui. New York: Grove, 1977. Cleary, Thomas, trans. The Original Face. New York: Grove, 1978. ----- , Sayings and Doings of Pai-chang. Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1979. ----- , and J. C. Cleary, trans. The Blue Cliff Record. 3 vols. Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1977. Conze, Edward, ed. Buddhist Texts Through the Ages. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1954. Cook, Francis Dojun. How to Raise an Ox. Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1978. Covell, Jon, and Yamada Sobin. Zen at Daitoku-ji. New York: Kodansha International, 1974. Creel, Herrlee G. What Is Taoism? And Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970. Davis, A. R. Tu Fu. New York: Twayne, 1971. Day, Clarence Burton. The Philosophers of China. New York: Philosophical Library, 1962; paperback edition, Secaucus, N. J.: Citadel, 1978. de Bary, William Theodore. The Buddhist Tradition in India, China and Japan. New York: Random House, 1972. de Bary, William Theodore, ed. Sources of Japanese Tradition. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. ----- , Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson. Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. I. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. Dogen, Record of Things Heard from the Treasury of the Eye of the True Teaching. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Boulder, Colo.: Great Eastern Book Co., 1978. Dogen, Trans. Jiyu Kennett. Zen is Eternal Life. Emeryville, Calif.: Dharma, 1976. Dumoulin, Heinrich. A History of Zen Buddhism. New York: Random House, 1963; paperback edition, Boston: Beacon, 1969. ----- , and Ruth Fuller Sasaki. The Development of Chinese Zen. New York: First Zen Institute of America, 1953. Eberhard, Wolfram. A History of China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Eliot, Sir Charles. Japanese Buddhism. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969. Feng, Gai-fu, and Jane English, trans. Chuang Tsu. New York: Vintage, 1974. ----- . Tao Te-Ching. New York: Vintage, 1972. First Zen Institute of America. Cat's Yawn. New York: 1947. Fitzgerald, C. P. China--A Short Cultural History. New York: Praeger, 1961. ----- . The Empress Wu. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1968. ----- . Son of Heaven: A Biography of Li Shih-min, Founder of the T'ang Dynasty. Cambridge: University Press, 1933. Frederic, Louis. Daily Life in Japan at the Time of the Samurai. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972. Fung, Paul F., and George D. Fung, trans. The Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch on the Pristine Orthodox Dharma. San Francisco: Buddha's Universal Church, 1964. Fung Yu-Ian. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 1948; paperback edition, Free Press, 1966. ----- . The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. Gernet, Jacques. "Biographie du Matre Chen-houei de Ho-tso," Journal Asiatique, 249 (1951), pp. 29-60. ----- . "Complement aux Entretiens du Maitre de _Dhyana_ Chen-houei (668-760)," BEFEO, 44, 2 (1954), pp. 453-66. ----- . Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion. Trans. H. M. Wright. New York: Macmillan, 1962. ----- . "Entretiens du Maitre de _Dhyana_ Chen-bouei du Ho-tso," Hanoi, 1949. (Publications de l'ecole frangaise d'Extreme-Orient, Vol. 31). Giles, Herbert A. A History of Chinese Literature. New York: Grove, 1923. Goddard, Dwight, ed. A Buddhist Bible. New York: Dutton, 1938; paperback edition, Boston: Beacon, 1970. Goodrich, L. Carrington. A Short History of the Chinese People, 4th edn. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Graham, A. C. Poems of the Late T'ang. Baltimore: Penguin, 1965. Grousset, Rene. In The Footsteps of the Buddha. New York: Grossman, 1971. ----- . The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Hall, John Whitney. Japan, From Prehistory to Modern Times. New York: Delacorte, 1970. ----- , and Toyoda Takeshi, eds. Japan in The Muromachi Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Hanayama, Shinsho. A History of Japanese Buddhism. Tokyo: Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, 1966. Harrison, John A. The Chinese Empire. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Hoffmann, Yoel. Radical Zen. Brookline, Mass.: Autumn Press, 1978. -------. The Sound of One Hand Clapping. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Hookham, Hilda. A Short History of China. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1972; paperback edition, New York: New American Library, 1972. Hoover, Thomas. Zen Culture. New York: Random House, 1977; paperback edition, Vintage, 1978. Hsuan Hua. The Sixth Patriarch's Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra. San Francisco: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 1971. Hu Shih. "Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China: Its History and Method," Philosophy East and West, 3, 1 (April 1953), pp. 3-24. ----- . "The Development of Zen Buddhism in China," Chinese Social and Political Science Review, 15, 4 (January 1932), pp. 475-505. Inada, Kenneth K. Nagarjuna--A Translation of his Mulamadhyamakakarika With An Introductory Essay. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1970. Ishihara, Akira, and Howard S. Levy, The Tao of Sex. Tokyo: Shibundo, 1968. Kaltenmark, Max. Lao Tzu and Taoism. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969. Kalupahana, David J. Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976. Kato, Bunno, Yoshiro Tamura, and Kojiro Miyasaka, trans. The Threefold Lotus Sutra. New York: Weatherhill/Kosei, 1975. Keene, Donald, "The Portrait of Ikkyu," Landscapes and Portraits. Palo Alto: Kodansha International, 1971. Kim, Hee-jin. Dogen Kigen: Mystical Realist. Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 1975. Kodera, Takashi James. Dogen's Formative Years in China. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Kubose, Gyomay M. Zen Koans. Chicago: Regnery, 1973. Latourette, Kenneth Scott. The Chinese: Their History and Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Lau, D. C. Lao Tzu--Tao Te Ching. Baltimore: Penguin, 1963. ----- . Mencius. Baltimore: Penguin, 1970. Legge, James. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. New York: Dover, 1965. Levenson, Joseph R., and Franz Schurmann. China: An Interpretive History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Liebenthal, Walter. Chao Lun: The Treatises of Seng-chao. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1968. ----- . "Chinese Buddhism During the 4th and 5th Centuries," Monumenta Nipponica, 11 (1955), pp. 44-83. ----- . "The Sermon of Shen-hui," Asia Major, N. S. 3, 2 (1952), pp. 132-55. Ling, Trevor. The Buddha. Baltimore: Penguin, 1973. Luk, Charles. Ch'an and Zen Teachings. 3 vols. London: Rider, 1960-62. ----- . The Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching. New York: Grove, 1975. ----- . The Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra. Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1972. McNaughton, William. The Taoist Vision. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1971. Miura, Isshu, and Ruth Fuller Sasaki. Zen Dust. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Morris, Ivan. The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan. New York: Knopf, 1964. Munro, Donald J. The Concept of Man in Early China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969. Nishimura, Eshin. Unsui: A Diary of Zen Monastic Life. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973. Nishiyama, Kosen, and John Stevens. Shobogenzo: The Eye and Treasury of the True Law. New York: Weatherhill, 1977. Ogata, Sohaku. Zen for the West. New York: Dial, 1959. Pardue, Peter A. Buddhism: A Historical Introduction to Buddhist Values and the Social and Political Forms they have Assumed in Asia. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Price, A. 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New York: Weatherhill, 1976. BOOKS BY THOMAS HOOVER Nonfiction Zen Culture The Zen Experience Fiction The Moghul Caribbee Wall Street _Samurai_ (The _Samurai_ Strategy) Project Daedalus Project Cyclops Life Blood Syndrome All free as e-books at www.thomashoover.info 
34578	----	TRÜBNER'S ORIENTAL SERIES. THE LIFE OR LEGEND OF GAUDAMA _THE BUDDHA OF THE BURMES_ With Annotations. THE WAYS TO NEIBBAN, AND NOTICE ON THE PHONGYIES OR BURMESE MONKS. BY THE RIGHT REVEREND P. BIGANDET, BISHOP OF RAMATHA, VICAR APOSTOLIC OF AVA AND PEGU _IN TWO VOLUMES._ VOL. I. Fourth Edition. LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO. LTD. DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W. 1911. _The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved._ Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh ADVERTISEMENT TO THIRD EDITION. The origin of the present work dates back to the years 1852, 1853, 1854, and 1855, when portions of it appeared in the "Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia," edited by J. R. Logan of Penang (vols. vi., vii., viii., and ix.). The first complete edition was printed at Rangoon in Burmah in 1858, and a second, much enlarged, at the same place in 1866. Very few copies of either of these editions reached Europe, and both are entirely out of print. The present third edition--a faithful reprint of the second--issued, with Bishop Bigandet's sanction, for the benefit of European and American scholars and readers, will, therefore, it is hoped, be gladly received. Buddhism and Gautama, the faith and its founder, whose followers are between four and five hundred millions of the human race, were comparatively unknown in Europe but a generation ago, and yet this great faith had continued for four and twenty centuries to spread over the vast lands of the East, taking deep and enduring root in all, from Bhotan, Nepaul, and Ceylon, over Further India to China Proper, Mongolia, Mantchooria, Tibet, and Japan. Buddhism, as it is found in Burmah, has a particular claim to the attention of a diligent and attentive observer. We there have that religious creed or system as pure from adulteration as it can be after a lapse of so many centuries. Philosophy never flourished in Burmah, and, therefore, never modified the religious systems of the country. Hinduism never exercised any influence on the banks of the Irrawaddy. Chinese and Burmese have often met on battlefields, but the influence of the Middle Kingdom has never established itself in Burmah. In other words, Chinese Buddhism has never been able to penetrate into the customs and manners of the people, and has not attempted to communicate its own religion to its southern neighbours. It would seem that the true form of Buddhism is to be found in Burmah, and that a knowledge of that system can only be arrived at by the study of the religious books of Burmah, and by attentively observing the religious practices and ceremonies of the people. This is what Bishop Bigandet has endeavoured to do throughout his work. Mr. Alabaster, the author of a very popular work on Siamese Buddhism, testifies to the great value of the Bishop's work, which, he remarks, is in one sense complete, for whereas the Siamese manuscript concludes with the attainment of omniscience, the Bishop had materials which enabled him to continue the story to the death of Nirwana (Neibban in the Burmese Pali form). He might have added that the work modestly entitled "Life of Gaudama" is a complete exposition of the great system of Eastern Asia. The metaphysical part, which is the very essence of the system, has received a due consideration, and the body of religious has been fully described. Moreover, the foot-notes help the ordinary reader in understanding clearly the text of the Legend. Professor Albrecht Weber speaks also of the Bishop's work in terms of high commendation (see "Literarisches Centralblatt," 1870, No. 29, reprinted in "Indische Streifen," vol. iii.), whilst a still further testimony is accorded to its importance in the recent appearance of a French translation by Lieutenant Victor Gauvain. LONDON, _December_ 1879. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. Whether Buddhism be viewed in its extent and diffusion, or in the complex nature of its doctrines, it claims the serious attention of every inquiring mind. In our own days it is, under different forms, the creed prevailing in Nepaul, Thibet, Mongolia, Corea, China, the Japanese Archipelago, Anam, Cambodia, Siam, the Shan States, Burmah, Arracan, and Ceylon. Its sway extends over nearly one-fourth of the human race. Though based upon capital and revolting errors, Buddhism teaches a surprising number of the finest precepts and purest moral truths. From the abyss of its almost unfathomable darkness it sends forth rays of the brightest hue. To the reflecting mind, the study of this religious system becomes the study of the history of one of the greatest religious enterprises that has ever been undertaken to elevate our nature above its low level, by uprooting the passions of the heart and dispelling the errors of the mind. A serious observer sees at a glance the dark and humiliating picture of the sad and barren results of the greatest and mightiest efforts of human wisdom, in its endeavours to find out the real cause of all human miseries, and to provide the remedies to cure the moral distempers to which our nature is subject. The fact of man's wretched and fallen condition was clearly perceived by the Buddhist philosopher, but he failed in his attempts to help man out of the difficulties which encompass him in all directions, and to bring him back to the path of truth and salvation. The efforts begun on the banks of the Ganges at an early period, and carried on with the greatest ardour and perseverance, have proved as abortive as those made at a later period throughout Greece and Italy by the greatest and brightest geniuses of antiquity. What a grand and irresistible demonstration both of the absolute inability of man to rescue from evil and attain good, and of the indispensable necessity of divine interference to help him in accomplishing that twofold achievement! It may be said in favour of Buddhism, that no philosophico-religious system has ever upheld, to an equal degree, the notions of a saviour and deliverer, and of the necessity of his mission for procuring the salvation, in a Buddhist sense, of man. The _rôle_ of Buddha, from beginning to end, is that of a deliverer, who preaches a law designed to secure to man deliverance from all the miseries under which he is labouring. But by an inexplicable and deplorable eccentricity, the pretended saviour, after having taught man the way to deliver himself from the tyranny of his passions, only leads him, after all, into the bottomless gulf of total annihilation. Buddhism, such as we find it in Burmah, appears to have retained, to a great extent, its original character and primitive genuineness, exhibiting, as it does, the most correct forms and features of that Protean creed. At the epoch the Burmans left the northern valleys and settled in the country they now inhabit, they were a half-civilised Mongolian tribe, with no kind of worship, except a sort of geniolatry, much similar to what we see now existing among the various tribes bordering on Burmah. They were in the same condition when the first Buddhist missionaries arrived among them. Deposited in this almost virginal soil, the seed of Buddhism grew up freely without encountering any obstacle to check its growth. Philosophy, which, in its too often erratic rambles in search of truth, changes, corrects, improves, destroys, and, in numberless ways, modifies all that it meets, never flourished in these parts; and, therefore, did not work on the religious institutions, which accordingly have remained up to this day nearly the same as they were when first imported into Burmah. The free discussion of religious and moral subjects, which constituted the very life of the Indian schools, and begat so many various, incoherent, and contradictory opinions on the most essential points of religion and philosophy, is the sign of an advanced state of civilisation, such as does not appear to have ever existed on the banks of the Irrawaddy. Owing to its geographical position, and perhaps, also, to political causes, Burmah has ever remained out of the reach of Hindu influence, which in Nepaul has coloured Buddhism with Hindu myths, and habited it in gross forms of idolatry. In China, where there already subsisted at the time of the arrival of the preachers of the new doctrine the worship of heroes and ancestors, Buddhism, like an immense parasitic plant, extended itself all over the institutions which it covered rather than destroyed, allowing the ancient forms to subsist under the disguise it afforded them. But such was not the state of Burmah when visited by the first heralds of Buddhism. The epoch of the introduction of Buddhism in Burmah has hitherto been a matter of conjecture. According to Burmese annals, Boudha-gautha, at the end of the fourth century of our era, brought from Ceylon a copy of the scriptures, and did for Burmah what Fa-Hian, the Chinese pilgrim, accomplished a few years afterwards in India and Ceylon for the benefit of his country. But Burmans maintain that they were followers of Buddha long before that epoch. If an inference may be drawn from analogy, it is probable that they are right in their assertion. China is fully as far from the ancient seat of Buddhism as Burmah. Yet it appears from the Chinese annals that the doctrines of the Indian philosopher were already propagated in some parts of that empire in the middle of the first century of our era, and probably at an earlier date. There is no improbability in concluding that, at least at the same time, Buddhist missionaries had penetrated into this country to propagate their tenets. According to Buddhistic annals, it was after the holding of the 3d Council, 236 after Gaudama's death, 207 B.C., that two missionaries carried religion to Thaton, the ruins of which are still to be seen between the mouths of the Tsitang and Salween rivers, and established Buddhism in Pegu. Be that as it may, we know, from the magnificent Buddhist monuments of Pagan, that that religion had reached, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a degree of splendour that has never since been equalled. The Buddhist scriptures are divided into three great parts, the Thoots or instructions, the Wini or discipline, and the Abidama or metaphysics. Agreeably to this division, the matter of the following pages is arranged under three heads. The Life of Buddha, with some portions of his preaching, will convey notions of his principal teachings and doctrines. It is accompanied with copious annotations intended to explain the text, and to convey detailed notices of the system of Buddhism in general, and particularly as it is found existing in Burmah. We have added a few small dzats, or accounts of some of the former existences of Gaudama, and the summary of two large ones. In the Notice on the Phongyies will be found the chief points of discipline fully explained and developed. We have endeavoured to render as complete as possible the account of the Buddhist Religious, or Phongyies. It is an exposition and practical illustration of the highest results that can be obtained under the influence of the doctrines of the Indian philosopher. In the Ways to Neibban an attempt has been made to set forth and unfold the chief points of metaphysics upon which hinges the whole religious system. We confess that the summary of metaphysics is rather concise. We were reluctant to proceed too far in this subject, which, to the generality of readers, is an uninviting one. A suggestion from Captain H. Hopkinson, Commissioner of the Martaban and Tenasserim Provinces, has induced us to add a few remarks on the names and situations of the principal towns and countries mentioned in the Legend, with the view of identifying them with modern sites and places. It is hardly necessary to state here that the writer, when he undertook this work, had no other object in view than that of merely expounding the religious system of Buddhism as it is, explaining its doctrines and practices as correctly as it was in his power to do, regardless of their merits and demerits. His information has been derived from the perusal of the religious books of the Burmans, and from frequent conversations on religion, during several years, with the best informed among the laity and the religious whom he has had the chance of meeting. The surest way perhaps of coming to at least an exact and accurate knowledge of the history and doctrines of Buddhism would be to give a translation of the Legends of Buddha, such as they are to be met with in all countries where Buddhism has established its sway, and to accompany these translations with an exposition of the various doctrinal points, such as they are held, understood, and believed by these various nations. This has already been done by eminent Orientalists, on Thibetan, Sanscrit, Cingalese, and Chinese originals. A similar work, executed by competent persons among the Shans, Siamese, Cambodians, and Cochin Chinese, would considerably help the savants in Europe, who have assumed the difficult task of expounding the Buddhist system in its complex and multifarious forms, to give a full, general, and comprehensive view of that great religious creed with all its variations. The best way to undermine the foundations of a false creed and successfully attack it, is to lay it open to the eyes of all and exhibit it as it really is. Error never retains its hold over the mind except under the mask of truth which it contrives to assume. When deprived of the mask that has covered its emptiness and unreality, it vanishes away as a phantom and an illusion. We are happy in having an opportunity of returning publicly our thanks to the worthy Commissioner of Pegu, Major A. P. Phayre, for his kind exertions in furthering the publication of this work. Not only is he an eminent Oriental scholar, and profoundly versed in all that has reference to Buddhism, but his great delight is to encourage every effort that tends to unfold and explain a creed which, despite all that has been written about it in the several countries where it flourishes, still contains many mysteries in the parts relating to its history and doctrines that require clearing up. We have, with a deeply-felt distrust of our poor abilities, taken the best portion out of our limited stock of information concerning the Buddhist system as it exists in these parts, and, with a willing heart, presented it to the public. We hope that our example may induce others, whose stores of knowledge on this subject are fuller and richer than ours, to act in a similar spirit in aid of the prosecution of a great object, viz., the acquisition of a correct knowledge of the religion of nearly 300,000,000 of our fellow-men. RANGOON, _October_ 1858. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. The First Edition of the Life of Gaudama being out of print for the last five or six years, we have, at the request of several highly esteemed persons, come to the determination of publishing a second and much-enlarged edition of the same Work. In carrying on the plan of improvement which we had in contemplation, we have been favoured by a happy circumstance. We have, after much labour, found and procured, in the Burmese capital, a very rare palm-leaf manuscript, the contents of which have supplied us with copies and interesting details respecting the sayings and doings of Gaudama. The book is known under the Pali name of Tatha-gatha-oudana, the meaning of which is Joyful Utterance, or Praises, of the Tatha-gatha. The latter expression is one of the many titles given to Gaudama: it means, he who has come like all his predecessors. In the opinion of Buddhists, the Buddhas who appear throughout the duration of a world, or in the various series of succeeding worlds, have all the same mission to accomplish; they are gifted with the same perfect science, and are filled with similar feelings of compassion for and benevolence towards all beings. Hence the denomination which is fitly given to Gaudama, the last of them. In the course of the Work will be found some particulars concerning the author of the manuscript referred to, and the place where it was composed. We have only to state here that we have gathered therefrom much information on the condition of Gaudama, previous to his last existence, on the origin of the Kapilawot country, where he was born, and on the kings he has descended from. We have also met with many new details on the great intellectual working of Gaudama's mind, during the forty-nine days he spent in meditation around the Bodi-tree, particularly on the important theory of the twelve Nidanas, or causes and effects, which, with the four sublime truths, constitutes the very essence of the system. We have also found many important particulars concerning the whereabouts of Gaudama during the first twenty years of his public life, and the conversions he effected whilst engaged in the work of an itinerant preacher. Here, too, we have gleaned and selected a few of the instructions he delivered to the people that crowded about him. The story of Dewadat is narrated at great length. We have carefully written down what is said of the three Assemblies, or Councils, held at Radzagio, Wethalie, and Pataliputra, and what is mentioned of the kings who reigned in Magatha, from Adzatathat to Dammathoka. We have mentioned the great fact of the spread of Buddhism beyond the boundaries of Magatha after the holding of the third Council, taking care to relate what we have found stated concerning its diffusion in Pegu and Burmah. Numerous notes have been added to those of the First Edition, for the purpose of elucidating and explaining, as far as we are able, the principles of Buddhism and whatever is connected with that religious system. RANGOON, _May_ 1866. CONTENTS. LEGEND OR LIFE OF THE BURMESE BUDDHA, CALLED GAUDAMA. PAGE CHAPTER I. Invocation of the Burmese translator -- Slow but steady progress of Phralaong towards the Buddhaship -- Promise made to him by the Buddha Deipinkara -- Origin and beginning of the Kapilawot country and of its rulers -- Birth of Thoodaudana -- His marriage with the Princess Maia -- Rumour of the coming birth of a Buddha -- Phralaong in the seats of Nats -- Dream of Maia -- Conception of Phralaong -- Wonders attending that event. 1 CHAPTER II. Birth of Buddha in a forest -- Rejoicings on that occasion -- Kaladewila -- Prediction of the Pounhas -- Vain efforts of Thoodaudana to thwart the effect of the Prediction. 34 CHAPTER III. A name is given to the child -- Prediction of the Pounhas respecting the child -- Death of Maia -- Miraculous occurrence at the child's cradle -- Adolescence of the Phralaong -- He sees the four signs -- Return from the garden to the royal city. 45 CHAPTER IV. Phralaong leaves his palace, the royal city, and retires into solitude amidst the plaudits of the Nats -- He cuts his fine hair with a stroke of his sword, and puts on the habit of Rahan -- He begs his food at Radzagio -- His interview with the ruler of that place -- His studies under two Rathees -- His fast and penances in the solitude of Oorouwela during six years. 60 CHAPTER V. Thoodzata's offering to Phralaong -- His five dreams -- He shapes his course towards the Gniaong tree -- Miraculous appearance of a throne -- Victory of Phralaong over Manh Nat -- His meditations during forty-nine days near the Bodi tree -- He at last obtains the perfect science -- He overcomes the temptations directed against him by the daughters of Manh -- Buddha preaches the law to a Pounha and to two merchants. 77 CHAPTER VI. Buddha hesitates to undertake the task of preaching the law -- The great Brahma entreats him to preach the law to all beings -- His assent to the entreaties -- Journey towards Migadawon -- He meets Ouppaka -- His first preachings -- Conversion of a young nobleman named Ratha, followed by that of his father and other relatives -- Conversion of several other noblemen -- Instructions to the Rahans -- Conversion of the three Kathabas. 111 CHAPTER VII. Buddha's sermon on the mountain -- Interview of Buddha and King Pimpathara in the vicinity of the city of Radzagio -- Answer of Kathaba to Buddha's interrogation -- Instructions delivered to the king and his attendants -- Solemn entry of Buddha into Radzagio -- Donation of the Weloowon monastery to Buddha -- Conversion of Thariputra and Maukalan -- The Rahans are keenly taunted by the people of Radzagio. 146 CHAPTER VIII. Thoodaudana, desirous to see his son, sends messengers to him -- They become converts -- Kaludari, a last messenger, prevails on Buddha to go to Kapilawot -- His reception -- Conversion of the king and of Yathaudara -- Nanda and Raoula put on the religious habit -- Conversion of Ananda and of several of his relatives -- Temptation of Ananda -- Conversion of Eggidatta -- Story of Tsampooka. 165 CHAPTER IX. A rich man of Thawattie, named Anatapein, becomes a convert -- Story of Dzewaka -- He cures Buddha of a painful distemper -- The people of Wethalie send a deputation to Buddha -- Digression on the manner Buddha daily spent his time -- Settling of a quarrel between the inhabitants of Kaulia and those of Kapilawot -- New converts are strengthened in their faith -- Thoodaudana's death in the arms of his son -- Queen Patzapati and many noble ladies are elevated to the rank of Rahaness -- Conversion of Kema, the first queen of King Pimpathara -- Heretics near Thawattie are confounded by the display of miraculous powers -- Buddha goes to the seat of Tawadeintha, to preach the law to his mother. 194 CHAPTER X. Buddha's proceedings in the seat of Tawadeintha -- His triumphant return to the seat of men, in the city of Thin-ka-tha -- He is calumniated by the heretics of Thawattie -- Eighth season spent in the forest of Tesakala -- Subsequent preachings -- He meets with a bad reception in the Kothambi country -- Dissension among the disciples -- Reconciliation -- Travels of Buddha -- Preaching to a Pounha who tilled a field. 223 CHAPTER XI. Voyage to Tsalia -- Instructions to Meggia -- Raoula is made a professed religious -- Manahan's questions to Buddha -- Misbehaviour of Thouppabuda -- Questions proposed by Nats in the Dzetawon monastery -- Conversion of a Biloo -- Episode of Thirima at Radzagio -- Attention paid to a poor pounha and to a weaver's daughter, on account of their faith -- In the twentieth season, appointment of Ananda to the stewardship -- Conversion of a famous robber. 241 CHAPTER XII. Buddha is slandered in Thawattie -- Questions put to him by a pounha -- Story of Anatapein's daughter -- Conversion of a pounha whose navel emitted rays of light -- Blank in a great part of Buddha's life -- Story of Dewadat -- His jealousy towards Buddha -- His friendship with Prince Adzatathat -- His ambition -- His attempt to kill Buddha -- His miserable end. 256 LEGEND OF THE BURMESE BUDDHA CALLED GAUDAMA. CHAPTER I. _Invocation of the Burmese translator -- Slow but steady progress of Phralaong towards the Buddhaship -- Promise made to him by the Buddha Deipinkara -- Origin and beginning of the Kapilawot country and of its Rulers -- Birth of Thoodaudana -- His marriage with the Princess Maia -- Rumour of the coming birth of a Buddha -- Phralaong in the seat of Nats -- Dream of Maia -- Conception of Phralaong -- Wonders attending that event._ I adore[1] Buddha who has gloriously emerged from the bottomless whirlpool of endless existences, who has extinguished the burning fire of anger and other passions, who has opened and illuminated the fathomless abyss of dark ignorance, and who is the greatest and most excellent of all beings. I adore the Law which the most excellent Buddha has published, which is infinitely high and incomparably profound, exceedingly acceptable, and most earnestly wished-for by Nats and men, capable to wipe off the stains of concupiscence, and is immutable. I adore the Assembly of the Perfect, of the pure and illustrious Ariahs in their eight sublime states, who have overcome all the passions that torment other mortals, by eradicating the very root of concupiscence, and who are famous above all other beings. I undertake to translate from the Pali[2] text the history of our most excellent Phra, from the period he left Toocita,[3] the fourth abode of Nats, to the time he entered into the state of Neibban. Previous, however, to commencing the work, I will relate succinctly what is found in our books respecting the great Being who, by a slow but sure process, was qualifying himself for his great and high destiny. It is stated that all the following particulars were narrated by Gaudama himself to the great disciple Thariputra. For seven thingies of worlds, he who was to become a Buddha felt, during that immense number of revolutions of nature, a thought for the Buddhaship awakening in his soul. This thought was succeeded by a wish, a desire, and a longing for that extraordinary calling. He began to understand that the practice of the virtues of the highest order was requisite to enable him to attain the glorious object of his ardent wishes, and no less than 125,000 Buddhas appeared during that space of time. When the above period had at last come to an end, the inward workings of his soul prompted him to ask openly for the Buddhaship. The period of asking lasted nine thingies of worlds. It was brightened and illustrated by the successive manifestation of 987,000 Buddhas. In the beginning of this latter period, the future Gaudama was a prince of the name of Laukatara, ruler of the Nanda country. At that time there appeared in the country of Kapilawot a Buddha called Thakiamuni Paurana Gaudama. As he happened to travel through the Nanda country, with the twofold object of preaching the law and begging for his food, the ruler Laukatara made great offerings to him. Meanwhile, with a marked earnestness, he solicited at the feet of Thakiamuni the favour of becoming, at some future time, a Buddha like himself. He expressed the wish to be born in the same country, from the same father and mother, to have for his wife the very same queen, to ride the same horse, to be attended by the same companions and the same two great disciples on the right and on the left. To this request Thakiamuni replied in the affirmative, but he added that an immense length of time had still to elapse ere the objects of his petition could be fully granted. A similar application was repeatedly made to all the other succeeding Buddhas, and a like promise was held out to him. The third period of four thingies of worlds was remarkable for the complete absence of all that could enlighten or illustrate the various states of existence. A complete moral and intellectual darkness was spread over all beings, and kept them wrapped up in utter darkness. No Buddhas, no Pitzekabuddhas appeared to illuminate by their doctrine and science the minds of men. No Tsekiawade, or king of the world, made his appearance to infuse life and energy in the midst of the universal slumbering. But the hundred thousand revolutions of nature that followed were more fortunate. There flourished no less than twenty-seven Buddhas, from Tahingara, the first in the series, to Kathaba, the last one immediately preceding Gaudama. During the period when the Buddha named Deipinkara was the teacher of all beings, our future Gaudama was born in the country of Amarawatti, from illustrious and rich parents belonging to the caste of Pounhas. While still a youth, he lost both his parents and inherited their property. In the midst of pleasure and plenty he one day made this reflection:--The riches that I now possess were my parents' property, but they have not been able to save them from the miseries attending death. They will not, alas! afford to me a better and more secure fate. When I go into the grave, they will not come along with me. This bodily frame I am clad in is not worthy to be pitied. Why should I bestow signs of compassion upon it? Filled with impurities, burdened by rottenness, it has all the elements of destruction in the compounded parts of its existence. Towards Neibban I will turn my regards; upon it my eyes shall be riveted. There is the tank in which all the impurities of passion may be washed away. Now I will forsake everything, and go forthwith in search of a teacher that will point out to me the way that leads to the state Neibban. Full of these thoughts, the young man gave away to the needy all that he possessed, reserving nothing to himself. Freed from the trammels of riches, he withdrew into a lonely place, where the Nats had prepared beforehand all that was necessary to minister to his wants. He embraced the profession or mode of life of a Rahan, or perfect. Attired in the dress of his new profession, he lived for some time on this spot under the name of Thoomeda. Displeased, however, with the too easy mode of life he was leading, he left that spot, and contented himself with dwelling under the shade of trees. He, however, went forth from time to time in quest of his food. A few years previous to the retirement of Thoomeda into solitude, he who was to be the Buddha Deipinkara migrated from one of the Nats' seats, and was incarnated in the womb of the Princess Thoomeda, wife of Thoodewa, king of the Ramawatti country. Subsequently he was married to the Princess Padouma, who bore unto him a son, named Oothabakanda. On the same year in which the child was born, the king left his palace on an elephant's back, withdrew into some lonely place, practised during ten months all sorts of self-inflicted penances, and, under the shade of the tree Gniaong Kiat, became a Buddha. On that occasion the earth quivered with great violence, but the hermit Thoomeda, being in ecstasy at that moment, knew nothing of the extraordinary occurrence. On a certain day, Deipinkara was travelling through the country for the twofold purpose of preaching the law and collecting his food. Arrived near a place where the road was very bad, he stopped for a while until the road should be made passable. The people hastened from all parts to come and prepare the road for Deipinkara and his followers. Thoomeda, gifted with the privilege of travelling through the air, happened to pass over the spot where crowds of people were busily engaged in preparing and levelling a road. The hermit alighted on that spot, and inquired of the people what was the reason of their busy exertions. They told him that the most excellent Deipinkara was expected with a large retinue of disciples, and that they strained every nerve to have the road ready for them. Thoomeda begged to be permitted to bear a part in the good work, and asked that a certain extent of the road be assigned to him as his task. His request was granted, and he forthwith set to work with the greatest diligence. It was all but finished when Buddha Deipinkara, followed by forty thousand disciples, made his appearance. Thoomeda, actuated by an ardent desire of testifying his respect to the holy personage, without a moment's hesitation flung himself into the hollow that was as yet not filled, and lying on his belly, with his back upwards, bridged the place, and entreated the Buddha and his followers to cross the hollow by trampling over his body. Great and abundant shall be the merits that I, said he within himself, shall gain by this good work. No doubt I will receive from the mouth of Deipinkara the assurance that I shall, hereafter, obtain the Buddhaship. The Buddha, standing over him, admired the humble and fervent devotedness of Thoomeda. With one glance he perceived all that was going on in the hermit's mind, and with a loud voice, that could be heard by all his disciples, he assured him that four thingies and one hundred thousand worlds hence he would become a Buddha, the fourth that would appear during the world, called Badda. He went on to describe minutely the principal events that were to illustrate his future career. No sooner was this revelation made to him than Thoomeda hastened back to his forest. Sitting at the foot of a tree, he encouraged himself by fine comparisons to the practice of those virtues that were best suited to weaken in him the influence of the passions. In the different existences that followed, Thoomeda, at all the periods of the appearance of some Buddhas, received a confirmation of the promise he had had from the lips of Deipinkara. This present world we live in has been favoured above all others. Already three Buddhas have appeared, viz., Kaukkasan, Gaunagong, and Kathaba. These all belonged to the caste of Pounhas, and he who was to be hereafter our Gaudama, during the many existences he passed through, at the time of the manifestations of those three Buddhas, was always born of the same caste. Kathaba is said to have lived and preached during the ninth andrakap. It was he who, for the last time, assured the future Gaudama that he would obtain the Buddhaship during the tenth andrakap. We will only mention his last existence in the seat of man, previous to the one in which he was to obtain the great prize he had laboured for with so much earnestness during innumerable existences. He became prince under the name of Wethandra, and practised to an eminent, nay heroic, degree the virtues of liberality and charity. To such an extent did he obey the dictates of his liberal heart, that, after having given away all the royal treasures, his white elephant, &c., he did not shrink from parting with his own wife, the Princess Madi, and his two children, Dzali and Gahna. He then died and migrated to the Toocita seat, and enjoyed the blissfulness and felicity of Nats, under the name of Saytakaytoo, during fifty-seven koudes of years. The origin and beginning of the Kapilawot country, as well as of its rulers, are to be alluded to as briefly as possible. In the country of the middle, Mitzimadesa, the kings that ruled from the time of Mahathamadat to that of Ookakaritz, king of Benares, were 252,556 in number. The last-named monarch was married to five wives, and had children by them all. The first queen happening to die, the king became passionately enamoured of a young woman, whom he married. She soon presented him with a son, whom the king, pressed by his young wife's solicitations, declared heir-apparent, to the prejudice of his elder sons. As might have been expected, the four elder sons loudly complained of the preference given to their younger brother. To put an end to these domestic disputes, the king called his four sons and their five sisters, gave them a large retinue, and bade them go in a northerly direction, in search of a spot favourable for building a new city. They followed their father's advice. After long wandering through the forests, they came to a place where lived the Rathee Kapila, who, becoming acquainted with the object of their errand, desired them to stay with him and found a city. He also wished that on the very spot where his hut stood the king's palace should be erected. He predicted that this city would become great, powerful, and illustrious; that it would be a city of peace, since the animals in the forests lived peaceably, without ever attempting to inflict harm on each other. The proposal was cheerfully accepted. All the people set to work with great earnestness. When the work was completed, they offered the new city to Kapila, who was made their teacher. Hence the name of Kapilawottoo, or Kapilawot. The four princes, finding that among their followers there were no daughters of the royal race whom they could marry, resolved, in order to keep pure the blood-royal, to marry their four youngest sisters. The eldest one was raised to the dignity of queen-mother. Ookamukka, the eldest of the brothers, was the first king of Kapilawot. Whilst these things were taking place, the king of Benares, having been attacked with leprosy, had left his throne and retired to a forest north of his capital. There he found his cure under the shade of the kalau tree. At the same time the eldest sister, named Peya, who had become queen-mother, was seized with the same distemper, and went into the same forest. She met with the king, whom she knew not. By his advice she sat under the kalau tree, and the beneficent smell of the leaves soon worked a perfect cure. They were subsequently married, and had a numerous progeny. They settled on this spot, and built the city of Kaulya. The small river Rohani flowed between Kaulya and Kapilawot.[A] [A] When laying before the reader a short and concise account of the being who was to become the Buddha called Gaudama, the writer deems it necessary to make a general observation, which, he hopes, will greatly help the reader to understand correctly several passages of the following pages. Gaudama was a Hindu, brought up by Hindu masters, and initiated in all the knowledge possessed by the society he lived in. He accepted the fabulous genealogies of kings such as they were found in the writings of his days. The same may be said of the erroneous notions respecting our globe, the size and motions of the sun and the moon and other heavenly bodies, the explanations of many natural phenomena, the description of hell, of the seats of reward, &c. Teacher as he was of moral precepts, based upon metaphysical principles, Gaudama concerned himself very little about these things, which, in his eyes, were not worth the consideration of a sage. But he, or more probably his disciples, availed themselves of these notions for resting upon them some portions of their system, and giving them such developments as best suited their views. These notions, though wedded to the religious system originated by Gaudama, do not, strictly speaking, belong to it. They existed before his appearance in the schools of philosophy; they formed a part of the stock of knowledge possessed by the society in which he was reared. To account properly for these particulars and many others belonging to the disciplinary regulations, recourse must be had to the study of the ancient religion of the Hindus, Brahminism. In the account of the foundation of the Kapilawot city, we find that the practice of leaving the eldest sister unmarried, and of the princes marrying their own sisters, is up to this day observed by the royal family of Burmah. The eldest daughter of the reigning monarch is to remain unmarried during her parents' life, and the first queen is often, if not always, the sister or half-sister of the king. The same unnatural practice prevailed in the royal family of the ancient Persians. From Ookamukka, the first king of Kapilawot, to Prince Wethandra, there are but seven successive kings. From Dzali, the son of Wethandra, to Dzeyathana, the great-grandfather of Gaudama, there were 82,002 kings. Let it be borne in mind, that, during that period of time, our Phralaong, or future of Gaudama, was in one of the Nats' seats. The princes of Kapilawot were wont to go and sport on the water of a lake somewhat distant from the city. They at first erected a temporary place of residence in the vicinity of that sheet of water, and finally built a city which received the name of Dewaha. It had likewise its kings of the same Thagiwi race. Dzeyathana, the king of Kapilawot, had a son named Thiahanoo, and a daughter named Yathaudara. Aukaka, king of Dewaha, his contemporary, had also a son and a daughter, Eetzana and Kitzana. Thiahanoo was married to Kitzana, who bore unto him five sons, Thoodaudana, Kanwaudana, Thoukkaudana, Thekkaudana, and Amittaudana; and two daughters, Amita and Pilita. Eetzana, the son of the king of Dewa, married Yathaudara, daughter of Dzeyathana, king of Kapilawot. From this marriage were born two sons, Thoopabuddha and Dantapani, and two daughters, Maia and Patzapati. When Eetzana became king of Dewaha, a considerable error had crept into the calendar. A correction was deemed necessary. There lived a celebrated hermit, or Rathee, named Deweela, well versed in the science of calculation. After several consultations held on this important subject in the presence of the king, it was agreed that the Kaudza era of 8640 years should be done away with on a Saturday, the first of the moon of Tabaong, and that the new era should be made to begin on a Sunday, on the first day of the waxing moon of the month Tagoo. This was called the Eetzana era. On the 10th of the new era, Thoodaudana was born in the city of Kapilawot; and on the twelfth year, Maia was born at Dewaha. In the days of the Buddha Wipathi, the future Maia was then the daughter of a Pounha. Her father, who tenderly loved her, gave her one day a fine nosegay with a great quantity of the choicest perfumes and essences. The young girl, delighted with these articles, hastened to the place where lived Wipathi, and with pious and fervent earnestness laid at his feet all that she had received from her father. Wipathi, admiring the fervent liberality of the damsel, assured her that she would hereafter become the mother of a Buddha, who was to be called Gaudama. When Thoodaudana was eighteen years of age, his father, King Thiahanoo, called eight Pounhas skilled in the science of astrology, and directed them to go with a large retinue and splendid presents in search of a royal princess to be married to his son. The eight Pounhas departed. They visited several countries, but all in vain; they could not find one princess worthy of their master's son. At last they came to the city of Dewaha. They had no sooner arrived in sight of it than they saw many signs which prognosticated that in the city would be found an accomplished princess, in every respect qualified to become the wife of the heir to the throne of Kapilawot. At that time the young Maia had gone to enjoy herself in a garden outside the city. It was situated on a gently sloping ground, covered with all sorts of the finest and rarest trees. A small brook, winding its course in various directions, shed on every hand, from its gently murmuring waters, a delicious freshness. Thither the royal messengers resorted. They found the princess in the midst of her companions, outshining them all in beauty, like the moon among the stars. Admitted into her presence, the head of the deputation attempted to speak and explain the object of his visit; but he was so much overwhelmed by the beauty and the graceful and dignified appearance of the princess, that his voice failed him, and he fainted three times in succession. As each fit came on him several damsels ran to his assistance with pitchers of fresh water, and brought him back to his senses. Having recovered his spirits, the chief Pounha felt encouraged by some graceful and kind words from the lips of the princess. He explained to her, in the choicest expressions, the object of his mission; and with a faltering and timid tone of voice stated to her that he had come to entreat her to accept presents from, and the hand of, Prince Thoodaudana. Meanwhile he poured at her feet the brightest jewels and rarest articles. The princess, with a sweet voice, modestly replied that she was under the protection and care of her beloved parents, whose will she never resisted; that it was to them that this affair should be referred. For her own part, she had but one thing to do--to abide by her parents' wishes. Satisfied with the answer, the Pounhas retired, and hastened to the palace of King Eetzana, to whom they related all that had just happened. The king graciously agreed to the proposal, and, in proof of his perfect satisfaction, sent in return a deputation with many presents to Prince Thoodaudana and his father. As might be expected, the royal messengers were well received at Kapilawot. Thiahanoo and his son set out with a countless retinue for the city of Dewaha. In a grove of mango-trees an immense building was erected, out of the city, for their reception and accommodation; and in the middle of that building a spacious hall was arranged with infinite art for the marriage ceremony. When all the preparations were completed, the bridegroom, attended by his father, King Thiahanoo and the chief of Brahmas, went out to meet the bride, who was coming from the garden, accompanied by her mother and the wife of the great Thagia. Both advanced towards the centre of the hall, near a stand raised for the occasion. Thoodaudana first stretched forth his hand and laid it over that place. Maia gracefully did the same. They then took each other's hands, in token of the mutual consent. At that auspicious moment all the musical instruments resounded, and proclaimed in gladdening airs the happy event. The Pounhas, holding the sacred shell in their hands, poured the blessed water over their heads, uttering all sorts of blessings. The parents and relatives joined in invoking upon the young couple the choicest benedictions. The king, princes, Pounhas, and nobles vied with each other in making presents, and wishing them all sorts of happiness. When the festival was over, Thiahanoo desired to go back to his country with his son and daughter-in-law. This was done with the utmost pomp and solemnity. On his return, he continued to govern his people with great prudence and wisdom, and at last died and migrated to one of the Nats' seats. He was succeeded by his son Thoodaudana, who, with his amiable wife, religiously observed the five precepts and the ten rules of kings. By his beneficence and liberality to all, he won the sincere affection of his people. It was on the twenty-eighth year of the new era that he was married. Soon after, he took for his second wife, Patzapati, the youngest sister of Maia. Thoodaudana's sister, Amitau, was married to Thouppabuddha, the son of king Eetzana. About four thingies,[4] an hundred thousand worlds ago,[5] the most excellent Buddha, who is infinitely wise and far superior to the three orders of beings, the Brahmas, the Nats,[6] and men, received at the feet of the Phra Deipinkara the assurance that he would afterwards become himself a Buddha. At this time he was a Rathee,[7] under the name of Thoomeda. During that immense space of time, he practised in the highest degree the ten great virtues, the five renouncings, and the three mighty works of perfection.[8] Having become a great prince[9] under the name of Wethandra, he reached the acme of self-abnegation and renouncement to all the things of this world. After his death, he migrated to Toocita, the fourth abode of Nats. During his sojourn in that happy place, enjoying the fulness of pleasure allotted to the fortunate inhabitants of those blissful regions, a sudden and uncommon rumour, accompanied with an extraordinary commotion proclaimed the gladdening tidings that a Phra was soon to make his appearance in this world.[B] [B] _Remark of the Burmese translator._--There are three solemn occasions on which this great rumour is noised abroad. The first, when the Nats, guardians of this world, knowing that 100,000 years hence the end of this world is to come, show themselves amongst men with their heads hanging down, a sorrowful countenance, and tears streaming down their faces. They are clad in a red dress, and proclaim aloud to all mortals the destruction of this planet 100,000 years hence. They earnestly call upon men to devote themselves to the observance of the law, to the practice of virtue, the support of parents, and the respect due to virtuous personages. The second occasion is, when the same Nats proclaim to men that a thousand years hence a Buddha or Phra will appear amongst them; and the third is, when they come and announce to men that within a hundred years there will be in this world a mighty prince, whose unlimited sway shall extend over the four great islands. On hearing that a Phra was soon to make his appearance amongst men, all the Nats, the peaceful inhabitants of the fortunate abode of Toocita, assembled in all haste and crowded around Phralaong,[10] eagerly inquiring of him, who was the fortunate Nat to whom was reserved the signal honour of attaining the incomparable dignity of Buddha. The reason which directed their steps towards Phralaong, and suggested their inquiry, was, that in him were already to be observed unmistakable signs, foreshadowing his future greatness. No sooner did it become known that this incomparable destination was to be his happy lot, than Nats from all parts of the world resorted to the abode of Toocita, to meet Phralaong and to congratulate him upon this happy occasion. "Most glorious Nat," did they say to him, "you have practised most perfectly the ten great virtues;[11] the time is now come for you to obtain the sublime nature of Buddha. During former existences, you most rigidly attended to the observance of the greatest precepts, and walked steadily in the path of the highest virtues; you then sighed after and longed for the happiness of Nats and Brahmas; but now you have most gloriously achieved the mightiest work, and reached the acme of perfection. It remains with you only to aspire at the full possession of the supreme intelligence, which will enable you to open to all Brahmas, Nats, and men the way to the deliverance from those endless series of countless existences[12] through which they are doomed to pass. Now the light of the law is extinguished, a universal darkness has overspread all minds. Men are more than ever slaves to their passions; there is a total lack of love among them; they hate each other, keep up quarrels, strifes and contentions, and mercilessly destroy each other. You alone can free them from the vicissitudes and miseries essentially connected with the present state of all beings. The time is at last come, when you are to become a Buddha." Unwilling to return at once a positive answer, Phralaong modestly replied that he wanted some time to inquire particularly into the great circumstances always attending the coming of a Buddha in this world, viz., the epoch or time when a Buddha appears, the place which he chooses for his apparition or manifestation, the race or caste he is to be born from, and the age and quality of her who is to be his mother. As regards the first circumstance, Phralaong observed that the apparition of a Buddha could not have taken place during the previous period[13] of 100,000 years and more that had just elapsed, because during that period the life of men was on the increase. The instructions on birth and death, as well as on the miseries of life, which form the true characteristics of Buddha's law, would not then be received with sufficient interest and attention. Had any attempt been made at that time to preach on these three great topics, the men of those days, to whom those great events would have appeared so distant, could not have been induced to look upon them with sufficient attention; the four great truths would have made no impression on their minds; vain and fruitless would have been the efforts to disentangle them from the ties of passions, then encompassing all beings, and to make them sigh after the deliverance from the miseries entailed upon mankind by birth, life, and death. The period when human life is under a hundred years' duration cannot at all be the proper period for such an important event, as the passions of men are then so many and so deeply rooted that Buddha would in vain attempt to preach his law. As the characters which a man traces over the smooth surface of unruffled water instantly disappear without leaving any mark behind, so the law and instructions that one should attempt to spread on the hardened hearts of men would make no lasting impression upon them. Hence he concluded that the present period, when the life of men was of about a hundred years' duration, was the proper one for the apparition of a Buddha. This first point having been disposed of, Phralaong examined in what part of the globe a Buddha was to appear. His regards glanced over the four great islands[14] and the 2000 small ones. He saw that the island of Dzapoudiba, the southern one, had always been the favourite place selected by all former Buddhas; he fixed upon it, too, for himself. That island, however, is a most extensive one, measuring in length 300 youdzanas, in breadth 252, and in circumference 900. He knew that on that island former Buddhas and semi-Buddhas, the two great Rahandas,[15] or disciples of the right and left, the prince whose sway is universal, &c., had all of them invariably fixed upon and selected that island, and, amidst the various countries on the island, that of Mitzima, the central one, where is to be found the district of Kapilawot. "Thither," said he, "shall I resort, and become a Buddha." Having determined the place which he was to select for his terrestrial seat, Phralaong examined the race or caste from which he was to be born. The caste of the people and that of merchants appeared too low, and much wanting in respectability, and, moreover, no Buddha had ever come out therefrom. That of the Pounhas was in former times the most illustrious and respected, but that of princes, in those days, far surpassed it in power and consideration. He therefore fixed his choice upon the caste of princes, as most becoming his future high calling. "I choose," said he, "prince Thoodaudana for my father. As to the princess who is to become my mother, she must be distinguished by a modest deportment and chaste manners, and must never have tasted any intoxicating drink. During the duration of 100,000 worlds she must have lived in the practice of virtue, performing with a scrupulous exactitude all the rules and observances prescribed by the law. The great and glorious Princess Maia is the only person in whom all these conditions are to be found. Moreover, the period of her life shall be at an end ten months and seven days hence;[16] she shall be my mother." Having thus maturely pondered over these four circumstances, Phralaong, turning to the Nats that surrounded him, anxiously expecting his answer, plainly and unreservedly told them that the time for his becoming Buddha had arrived, and bade them forthwith communicate this great news to all the Brahmas and Nats. He rose up, and, accompanied by all the Nats of Toocita, withdrew into the delightful garden of Nandawon. After a short sojourn in that place, he left the abode of Nats, descended into the seat of men, and incarnated in the womb of the glorious Maia, who at once understood that she was pregnant with a boy who would obtain the Buddhaship. At the same moment also the Princess Yathaudara, who was to be the wife of the son of Maia, descended from the seats of Nats, and was conceived in the womb of Amitau, the wife of Prince Thouppabuddha. At that time the inhabitants of Kapilawot were busily engaged in celebrating, in the midst of extraordinary rejoicings, the festival of the constellation of Outarathan (July-August). But the virtuous Maia, without mixing amidst the crowds of those devoted to amusements, during the seven days that preceded the full moon of July, spent her time among her attendants, making offerings of flowers and perfumes. The day before the full moon she rose up at an early hour, bathed in perfumed water, and distributed to the needy four hundred thousand pieces of silver. Attired in her richest dress, she took her meal, and religiously performed all the pious observances usual on such occasions. This being done, she entered into her private apartment, and, lying on her couch, fell asleep and had the following dream:-- * * * * * Four princes of Nats, of the abode of Tsadoomarit, took the princess with her couch, carried it to the Mount Himawonta,[17] and deposited it on an immense and magnificent rock, sixty youdzanas long, adorned with various colours, at the spot where a splendid tree, seven youdzanas high, extends its green and rich foliage. The four queens, wives of the four princes of Tsadoomarit, approaching the couch where Maia was reclining, took her to the banks of the lake Anawadat, washed her with the water of the lake, and spread over the couch flowers brought from the abode of Nats. Near the lake is a beautiful mountain of a silvery appearance, the summit whereof is crowned with a magnificent and lofty palace. On the east of the palace, in the side of the mount, is a splendid cave. Within the cave, a bed similar to that of the Nats was prepared. The princess was led to that place and sat on the bed, enjoying a delicious and refreshing rest. Opposite this mount, and facing the cave where Maia sat surrounded by her attendants, rose another mount, where Phralaong, under the shape of a young white elephant, was roaming over its sides in various directions. He was soon seen coming down that hill, and, ascending the one where the princess lay on her bed, directed his course towards the cave. On the extremity of his trunk, lifted up like a beautiful string of flowers, he carried a white lily. His voice, occasionally resounding through the air, could be heard distinctly by the inmates of the grotto, and indicated his approach. He soon entered the cave, turned three times round the couch whereupon sat the princess, then, standing for a while, he came nearer, opened her right side, and appeared to conceal himself in her womb. In the morning, having awoke from her sleep, the queen related her dream to her husband. King Thoodaudana sent without delay for sixty-four Pounhas.[18] On a ground lined with cow-dung, where parched rice, flowers, and other offerings were carefully deposited and profusely spread, an appropriate place was reserved for the Pounhas. Butter, milk, and honey were served out to them in vases of gold and silver; moreover, several suits of apparel and five cows were offered to each of them as presents, as well as many other articles. These preliminaries being arranged, the prince narrated to them the dream, with a request for its explanation. "Prince," answered the Pounhas, "banish from your mind all anxious thoughts, and be of a cheerful heart; the child whom the princess bears in her womb is not a girl but a boy. He will, after growing up, either live amongst men, and then become a mighty ruler, whose sway all the human race will acknowledge; or, withdrawing from the tumult of society, he will resort to some solitary place, and there embrace the profession of Rahan. In that condition he will disentangle himself from the miseries attending existence, and at last attain the high dignity of Buddha." Such was the explanation of the dream. At the moment Phralaong entered into Maia's womb, a great commotion was felt throughout the four elements, and thirty-two wonders simultaneously appeared. A light of an incomparable brightness illuminated suddenly ten thousand worlds. The blind, desirous, as it were, to contemplate the glorious dignity of Phralaong, recovered their sight; the deaf heard distinctly every sound; the dumb spoke with fluency; those whose bodies were bent stood up in an erect position; the lame walked with ease and swiftness; prisoners saw their fetters unloosed, and found themselves restored to liberty; the fires of hell were extinguished; the ravenous cravings of the Preithas[19] were satiated; animals were exempt from all infirmities; all rational beings uttered but words of peace and mutual benevolence; horses exhibited signs of excessive joy; elephants, with a solemn and deep voice, expressed their contentment; musical instruments resounded of themselves with the most melodious harmony; gold and silver ornaments, worn at the arms and feet, without coming in contact, emitted pleasing sounds; all places became suddenly filled with a resplendent light; refreshing breezes blew gently all over the earth; abundant rain poured from the skies during the hot season, and springs of cool water burst out in every place, carrying through prepared beds their gently murmuring streams; birds of the air stood still, forgetting their usual flight; rivers suspended their course, seized with a mighty astonishment; sea water became fresh; the five sorts of lilies were to be seen in every direction; every description of flowers burst open, displaying the richness of their brilliant colours; from the branches of all trees and the bosom of the hardest rocks, flowers shot forth, exhibiting all around the most glowing, dazzling, and varied hues; lilies, seemingly rooted in the canopy of the skies, hung down, scattering their embalmed fragrance; showers of flowers poured from the firmament on the surface of the earth; the musical tunes of the Nats were heard by the rejoiced inhabitants of our globe; hundreds of thousands of worlds[20] suddenly approached each other, sometimes in the shape of an elegant nosegay, sometimes in that of a ball of flowers or of a spheroid; the choicest essences embalmed the whole atmosphere that encompasses this world. Such are the wonders that took place at the time Phralaong entered his mother's womb. When this great event happened, four chiefs of Nats, from the seat of Tsadoomarit,[21] armed with swords, kept an uninterrupted watch round the palace, to avert any accident that might prove hurtful to the mother or her blessed fruit. From 10,000 worlds, four Nats from the same seat were actively engaged in driving away all Bilous[22] and other monsters, and forcing them to flee and hide themselves at the extremity of the earth. Maia, free from every disordered propensity, spent her time with her handmaids in the interior of her apartments. Her soul enjoyed, in a perfect calm, the sweetest happiness; fatigue and weariness never affected her unimpaired health. In his mother's womb, Phralaong appeared like the white thread passed through the purest and finest pearls; the womb itself resembled an elegant Dzedi.[23][C] [C] _Remark of the Burmese Translator._--It is to be borne in mind that mothers of Buddhas having had the singular privilege of giving birth to a child of so exalted a dignity, it would not be convenient or becoming that other mortals should receive life in the same womb; they therefore always die seven days after their delivery and migrate to the abode of Nats, called Toocita. It is usual with other mothers to be delivered, lying in an horizontal position, and sometimes before or after the tenth month. But with the mother of a Buddha the case is not the same; the time of her confinement invariably happens at the beginning of the tenth month, and she is always delivered in an erect and vertical position. With the solicitous care and vigilant attention with which one carries about a thabeit[24] full of oil, the great Maia watched all her movements, and during ten months unremittingly laboured for the safe preservation of the precious fruit of her womb. FOOTNOTES [1] All Buddhistic compositions are invariably prefaced with one of the following formulas of worship, always used by writers on religious subjects. The one relates to Buddha alone, and the other to the three most excellent things, ever deserving the highest veneration. The first, always written in Pali, beginning with the words _Namau tassa_, may be translated as follows: I adore thee, or rather adoration to, the blessed, perfect, and most intelligent. Here are proposed to the faith, admiration, and veneration of a true Buddhist, the three great characteristics of the founder of his religion, his goodness and benevolence, his supreme perfection, and his boundless knowledge. They form the essential qualifications of a being who has assumed to himself the task of bringing men out of the abyss of darkness and ignorance, and leading them to deliverance. Benevolence prompts him to undertake that great work, perfection fits him for such a high calling, and supreme science enables him to follow it up with a complete success. They are always held out to Buddhists as the three bright attributes and transcendent qualities inherent in that exalted personage, which are ever to attract and concentrate upon him the respect, love, and admiration of all his sincere followers. The second formula may be considered as a short act of faith often repeated by Buddhists. It consists in saying--I take refuge in Buddha, the Law, and the Assembly. This short profession of faith is often much enlarged by the religious zeal of writers and the fervent piety of devotees. From the instance of this legend we may remark how the compiler, with a soul warmed by fervour is passing high encomiums upon each of the three sacred objects of veneration, or the sacred asylums wherein a Buddhist delights to dwell. There is no doubt that this formula is a very ancient one, probably coeval with the first age of Buddhism. The text of this legend bears out the correctness of this assertion. It appears that the repetition of this short sentence was the mark that distinguished converts. Ordinary hearers of the preachings of Buddha and his disciples evinced their adhesion to all that was delivered to them by repeating the sacred formula. It was then, and even now it is to Buddhists, what the celebrated Mahomedan declaration of faith--there is but one God, and Mahomed is his prophet--is to the followers of the Arabian Prophet. It is extremely important to have an accurate idea of the three sacred abodes in which the believer expects to find a sure shelter against all errors, doubts, and fears, and a resting-place where his soul may securely enjoy the undisturbed possession of truth. They constitute what is emphatically called the three precious things. Phra and Buddha are two expressions which, though not having the same meaning, are used indiscriminately to designate the almost divine being, who after having gone, during myriads of successive existences, through the practice of all sorts of virtues, particularly self-denial and complete abnegation of all things, at last reaches to such a height of intellectual attainment that his mind becomes gifted with a perfect and universal intelligence or knowledge of all things. He is thus enabled to see and fathom the misery and wants of all mortal beings, and to devise means for relieving and filling them up. The law that he preaches is the wholesome balm designed to cure all moral distempers. He preaches it with unremitting zeal during a certain number of years, and commissions his chosen disciples to carry on the same benevolent and useful undertaking. Having laid on a firm basis his religious institution, he arrives at the state of Neibban. Buddha means wise, intelligent. Phra is an expression conveying the highest sense of respect, which was applied originally only to the author of Buddhism, but now, through a servile adulation, it is applied to the king, his ministers, all great personages, and often by inferiors to the lowest menials of Government. The word Phra, coupled with that of Thaking, which means Lord, is used by Christians in Burmah to express the idea of God, the supreme being. From the foregoing lines the reader may easily infer that the author of Buddhism is a mere man, superior to all other beings, not in nature, but in science and perfection. He lays no claim whatever to any kind of superiority in nature; he exhibits himself to the eyes of his disciples as one of the children of men, who has been born and is doomed to die. He carries his pretensions no farther. The idea of a supreme being is nowhere mentioned by him. In the course of his religious disputations with the Brahmins, he combats the notion of a god, coolly establishing the most crude atheism. No one, it is true, can deny that in certain Buddhistic countries the notion of an Adibudha, or supreme being, is to be found in writings as well as popular opinions, but we know that these writings are of a comparatively recent date, and contain many doctrines foreign to genuine Buddhism. This subject will, however, receive hereafter further developments. The Law, the second object of veneration, is the body of doctrines delivered by Buddha to his disciples during the forty-five years of his public career. He came to the perfect knowledge of that law when he attained the Buddhaship under the shade of the Bodi tree. At that time his mind became indefinitely expanded; his science embraced all that exists; his penetrating and searching eye reached the farthest limits of the past, saw at a glance the present, and fathomed the secrets of the future. In that position, unclouded truth shone with radiant effulgence before him, and he knew the nature of all beings individually, their condition and situation, as well as all the relations subsisting between them. He understood at once the miseries and errors attending all rational beings, the hidden causes that generated them, and the springs they issued from. At the same time he perceived distinctly the means to be employed for putting an end to so many misfortunes, and the remedies to be used for the cure of those numberless and sad moral distempers. His omniscience pointed out to him the course those beings had to follow in order to retrace their steps back from the way of error, and enter the road that would lead to the coming out from the whirlpool of moral miseries in which they had hitherto wretchedly moved during countless existences. All that Gaudama said to the foregoing effect constitutes the law upon which so many high praises are lavished with such warm and fervent earnestness. A full and complete knowledge of that law, in the opinion of Buddhists, dispels at once the clouds of ignorance, which, like a thick mist, encompass all beings, and sheds bright rays of pure light which enlighten the understanding. Man is thus enabled to perceive distinctly the wretchedness of his position, and to discover the means wherewith he may extricate himself from the trammels of the passions and finally arrive at the state of Neibban, which is, as it shall be hereafter fully explained, exemption from all the miseries attending existence. The whole law is divided into three parts; the Abidama or metaphysics, Thouts or moral instructions, and the Wini or discipline. According to the opinion of the best informed among Buddhists, the law is eternal, without a beginning or an author that might have framed its precepts. No Buddha ever considered himself, or has ever been looked upon by others, as the inventor and originator of the law. He who becomes a Buddha is gifted with a boundless science that enables him to come to a perfect knowledge of all that constitutes the law: he is the fortunate discoverer of things already existing, but placed far beyond the reach of the human mind. In fact, the law is eternal, but has become, since the days of a former Buddha, obliterated from the minds of men, until a new one, by his omniscience, is enabled to win it back and preach it to all beings. The third object of veneration is the Thanga, or Assembly. The meaning of the Pali word Thanga is nearly equivalent to that of church or congregation. In the time Gaudama lived the Assembly was composed of all individuals who, becoming converts, embraced the mode of living of their preacher, and remained with him, or if they occasionally parted from him for a while, always kept a close intercourse with him, and spent a portion of their time in his company. Having left the world, they subjected themselves to certain disciplinary regulations, afterwards embodied in the great compilation called Wini. The members of the Assembly were divided into two classes; the Ariahs or venerables, who by their age, great proficiency in the knowledge of the law, and remarkable fervour in the assiduous practice of all its ordinances, occupied deservedly the first rank amongst the disciples of Buddha, and ranked foremost in the Assembly. The second class was composed of the Bickus, or simple mendicant Religious. It is difficult to assert with any degree of probability whether the Upasakas, or ordinary hearers, have ever been regarded as members of the Thanga, and forming a portion thereof. The Upasakas were believers, but continued to live in the world, and formed, as it were, the laity of the Buddhistic church. According to the opinion of Buddhists in these parts, the laity is not considered as forming or constituting a part of the Thanga; those only who abandon a secular life, put on the yellow canonical dress, and endeavour to tread in the footsteps of their great teacher, are entitled to the dignity of members of the Assembly, to which a veneration is paid similar to that offered to Buddha and the law. The Ariahs, or venerables, are divided into four classes, according to their greater or less proficiency in knowledge and moral worth. They are called Thotapan, Thakadagan, Anagam, and Arahat. In the class of Thotapan are included the individuals who have entered into the current, or stream, leading to deliverance, or, in other terms, who have stepped into the way of perfection. The Thotapan is as yet to be born four times ere he can obtain the deliverance. Those who belong to the second class glide rapidly down the stream, following steadily the way leading to perfection, and are to be born once more in the condition of Nat, and once in that of man. Those of the third class are to be born once in the condition of Nats. Finally, those of the fourth class have gone over the fourth and last way to perfection, reached the summit of science and spiritual attainments, and are ripe for the state of Neibban, which they infallibly obtain after their death. The Ariahs are again subdivided into eight classes, four of which include those who are following the four ways of perfection; the four others comprehend those who enjoy the reward of the duties practised in following the ways of perfection. [2] The Burmese translator of the Pali text gives us to understand that his intention is not to give the history of our Buddha during the countless existences that have preceded the last one, when he obtained the supreme intelligence. Buddhists keep five hundred and ten histories or legends of Buddha purporting to give an account of as many of his former existences; and to enhance the value of such records, the contents are supposed to have been narrated by Buddha himself to his disciples and hearers. I have read most of them. Two hundred of these fabulous narrations are very short, and give few particulars regarding our Phra when he was as yet in the state of animal, man, and Nat. They are, except the heading and the conclusion, the very same fables and _contes_ to be met with amongst all Asiatic nations, which have supplied with inexhaustible stores all ancient and modern fabulists. The last ten narratives are really very complete and interesting stories of ten existences of Buddha preceding the one we are about to describe, during which he is supposed to have practised the ten great virtues, the acquisition of which is an indispensable qualification for obtaining the exalted dignity of Phra. Some of these legends are really beautiful, interesting, and well-composed pieces of literature. [3] Toocita, or the joyful abode, is one of the seats of the Nats. But in order to render more intelligible several passages of this work, it is almost indispensable to have an idea of the system adopted by Buddhists in assigning to rational beings their respective seats or abodes. There are thirty-one seats assigned to all beings, which we may suppose to be disposed on an immense scale, extending from the bottom of the earth to an incommensurable height above it. At the foot we find the four states of punishment, viz., hell, the states of Athourikes, Preithas, and animals. Next comes the abode of man. Above it are the six seats of Nats. These eleven seats are called the seats of passion, or concupiscence, because the beings residing therein are still subject to the influence of that passion, though not to an equal degree. Above the abodes of Nats we meet with the sixteen seats, called Rupa, disposed perpendicularly one above the other to an incalculable height. The inhabitants of those fanciful regions are called Brahmas, or perfect. They have freed themselves from concupiscence and almost all other passions, but still retain some affection for matter and material things. Hence the denomination of Rupa, or matter, given to the seats. The remaining portion of the scale is occupied by the four seats called Arupa or immaterials, for the beings inhabiting them are entirely delivered from all passions. They have, as it were, broken asunder even the smallest ties that would attach them to this material world. They have reached the summit of perfection; one step farther, and they enter into the state Neibban, the consummation, according to Buddhists, of all perfection. To sum up all the above in a few words: there are four states of punishment. The seat of man is a place of probation and trial. The six abodes of Nats are places of sensual pleasure and enjoyments. In the sixteen seats of Rupa are to be met those beings whose delights are of a more refined and almost purely spiritual nature, though retaining as yet some slight affections for matter. In the four seats of Arupa are located those beings who are wholly disentangled from material affections, who delight only in the sublimest contemplation, soaring, as it were, in the boundless regions of pure spiritualism. [4] Thingie is a number represented by a unit, followed by sixty-four ciphers; others say, one hundred and forty. [5] Buddhists have different ways of classifying the series of worlds, which they suppose to succeed to each other, after the completion of a revolution of nature. As regards Buddhas, who appear at unequal intervals for illuminating and opening the way to deliverance to the then existing beings, worlds are divided into those which are favoured with the presence of one or several Buddhas, and those to which so eminent a benefit is denied. The present revolution of nature, which includes the period in which we live, has been privileged above all others. No less than five Buddhas, like five shining suns, are to shoot forth rays of incomparable brilliancy, and dispel the mist of thick darkness that encompasses all beings, according to their respective laws of demerits. Of these five, four, namely, Kaukassan, Gaunagong, Kathaba, Gaudama, have already performed their great task. The fifth, named Aremideia, is as yet to come. The religion of Gaudama is to last five thousand years, of which two thousand four hundred and eight are elapsed. The names of the twenty-eight last Buddhas are religiously preserved by Buddhists, together with their age, their stature, the names of the trees under which they have obtained the universal intelligence, their country, the names of their father and mother, and those of their two chief disciples. Deinpakara occupies the fourth place in the series. He is supposed to have been eighty cubits high, and to have lived one hundred thousand years. It is not without interest to examine whether there have existed Buddhas previous to the time of Gaudama, and whether the twenty-eight Buddhas above alluded to are to be considered as mythological beings who have never existed. It cannot be denied that mention of former Buddhas is made in the earliest sacred records, but it seems difficult to infer therefrom that they are real beings. 1st. The circumstances respecting their extraordinary longevity, their immense stature, and the myriads of centuries that are supposed to have elapsed from the times of the first to those of Gaudama, are apparently conclusive proofs against the reality of their existence. 2d. The names of those personages are found mentioned in the preachings of Gaudama, together with those individuals with whom he is supposed to have lived and conversed during former existences. Who has ever thought of giving any credence to those fables? They were used by Gaudama as so many means to give extension and solidity to the basis whereupon he intended to found his system. 3d. There are no historical records or monuments that can give countenance to the opposite opinion. The historical times begin with Gaudama, whilst there exist historical proofs of the existence of the rival creed of Brahminism anterior to the days of the acknowledged author of Buddhism. It cannot be doubted that there existed in the days of Buddha, in the valley of the Ganges and in the Punjaub, a great number of philosophers, who led a retired life, devoting their time to study and the practice of virtue. Some of them occasionally sallied out of their retreats to go and deliver moral instructions to the people. The fame that attended those philosophers attracted round their lonely abodes crowds of hearers, eager to listen to their lectures and anxious to place themselves under their direction for learning the practice of virtue. In the pages of this legend will be found passages corroborating this assertion. Thence arose those multifarious schools, where were elaborated the many systems, opinions, &c., for which India has been celebrated from the remotest antiquity. The writer has had the patience to read two works full of disputations between Brahmins and Buddhists, as well as some books of the ethics of the latter. He has been astonished to find that in those days the art of arguing, disputing, defining, &c., had been carried to such a point of nicety as almost to leave the disciples of Aristotle far behind. It has been said that the gymnosophists whom Alexander the Great met in India were Buddhist philosophers. But the particulars mentioned by Greek writers respecting their manners and doctrines contradict such a supposition. They are described as living in a state of complete nakedness, and as refusing to deliver instructions to the messenger of Alexander, unless he consented to strip himself of his clothes. On the other hand, we know that Buddha enjoined a strict modesty on his religious, and in the book of ordinations the candidate is first asked whether he comes provided with his canonical dress. The gymnosophists are represented as practising extraordinary austerities, and holding self-destruction in great esteem. These and other practices are quite at variance with all the prescriptions of the Wini, or book of discipline. It is further mentioned that the Macedonian hero met with other philosophers living in community; but whether these were Buddhists or not, it is impossible to decide. It can scarcely be believed that Buddhism in the days of Alexander could have already invaded the countries which the Grecian army conquered. [6] Nat in Pali means Lord. Its signification is exactly equivalent to that of Dewa, Dewata. The Nats are an order of beings in the Buddhistic system, occupying six seats or abodes of happiness, placed in rising succession above the abode of man. They are spirits endowed with a body of so subtle and ethereal nature as to be able to move with the utmost rapidity from their seat to that of man, and _vice versa_. They play a conspicuous part in the affairs of this world, and are supposed to exercise a considerable degree of influence over man and other creatures. Fear, superstition, and ignorance have peopled all places with Nats. Every tree, forest, fountain, village, and town has its protecting Nat. Some among the Nats having lost their high station through misconduct, have been banished from their seats and doomed to drag a wretched existence in some gloomy recess. Their power for doing evil is supposed to be very great. Hence the excessive dread of those evil genii entertained by all Buddhists. A good deal of their commonest superstitious rites have been devised for propitiating those enemies to all happiness, and averting the calamitous disasters which they seem to keep hanging over our heads. Though the Nats' worship is universal among the Buddhists of all nations, it is but fair to state that it is contrary to the principles of genuine Buddhism and repugnant to its tenets. It is probable that it already existed among all the nations of Eastern Asia at the time they were converted to Buddhism. The tribes that have not as yet been converted to Buddhism have no other worship but that of the Nats. To mention only the principal ones, such as the Karens, the Khyins, and the Singphos, they may differ in the mode of performing their religious rites and superstitious ceremonies, but the object is the same, honouring and propitiating the Nats. This worship is so deeply rooted in the minds of the wild and half-civilised tribes of Eastern Asia, that it has been, to a great extent, retained by the nations that have adopted Buddhism as their religious creed. The Burmans, for instance, from the king down to the lowest subject, privately and publicly indulge in the Nats' worship. As to the tribes that have remained outside the pale of Buddhism, they may be styled Nats' worshippers. Hence it may be inferred that previous to the introduction or the preaching of the tenets of the comparatively new religion in these parts, the worship of Nats was universal and predominating. [7] Raci or Rathee means an hermit, a personage living by himself in some lonely and solitary recess, far from the contagious atmosphere of impure society, devoting his time to meditation and contemplation. His diet is of the coarsest kind, supplied to him by the forests he lives in; the skins of some wild animals afford him a sufficient dress. Most of those Rathees having reached an uncommon degree of extraordinary attainment, their bodies become spiritualised to a degree which enables them to travel from place to place by following an aërial course. In all Buddhistic legends, comedies, &c., they are often found interfering in the narrated stories and episodes. There is no doubt but those devotees who, in the days of Buddha, spent their time in retreat, devoted to study and meditation, were Brahmins. In support of this assertion we have the highest possible native authority, the Institutes of Menoo, compiled probably during the eighth or ninth century before Christ. We find in that work, minutely described, the mode of life becoming a true Brahmin. During the third part of his life, a Brahmin must live as an anchorite in the woods. Clad in the bark of trees or the skins of animals, with his hair and nails uncut, having no shelter whatever but that which is afforded him by the trees of the forest, keeping sometimes a strict silence, living on herbs and roots, he must train himself up to bearing with entire unconcern the cold of winter and the heat of summer. Such is the course of life, according to the Vedas, which the true Brahmin is bound to follow during the third portion of his existence. Some Buddhistic zealots have sometimes endeavoured to emulate the ancient Rathees in their singular mode of life. It is not quite unfrequent in our days to hear of some fervent Phongies who, during the three months of Lent, withdraw into solitude, to be more at liberty to devote their time to study and meditation. This observance, however, is practised by but very few individuals, and that, too, with a degree of laxity that indicates a marked decline of the pristine fervour that glowed in the soul of primitive Buddhists. [8] The three great works are; the assistance afforded to his parents and relatives, the great offerings he had made, coupled with a strict observance of the most difficult points of the law, and benevolent dispositions towards all beings indiscriminately. [9] This extraordinary monarch, called Tsekiawade, never makes his appearance during the period of time allotted to the publication and duration of the religious institutions of a Buddha. [10] Here I make use of the expression Phralaong, or more correctly Phraalaong, to designate Buddha before he obtained the supreme knowledge, when he was, as it were, slowly and gradually gravitating towards the centre of matchless perfection. In that state it is said of him that he is not yet ripe. This word involves a meaning which ought to be well understood. No single expression in our language can convey a correct idea of its import, and for this reason it has been retained through these pages. _Alaong_ is a derivative from the verb _laong_, which means to be in an incipient way, in a way of progression towards something more perfect. A Buddha is at first a being in a very imperfect state; but passing through countless existences, he frees himself, by a slow process, from some of his imperfections; he acquires merits which enable him to rise in the scale of progress, science, and perfection. In perusing the narrative of the five hundred and ten former existences of Gaudama which have come down to us, we find that, when he was yet in the state of animal, he styled himself Phralaong. The Burmese have another expression of similar import to express the same meaning. They say of a being as yet in an imperfect condition that he is soft, tender as an unripe thing; and when he passes to the state of perfection, they say that he is ripe, that he has blossomed and expanded. They give to understand that he who is progressing towards the Buddhaship has in himself all the elements constitutive of a Buddha lying as yet concealed in himself; but when he reaches that state, then all that had hitherto remained in a state of unripeness bursts suddenly out of the bud and comes to full maturity. Similar expressions are often better calculated to give a clear insight into the true and real opinions of Buddhists than a lengthened and elaborate dissertation could do. [11] The ten great virtues or duties are, liberality, observance of the precepts of the law, retreat into lonely places, wisdom, diligence, benevolence, patience, veracity, fortitude, and indifference. The five renouncements are, renouncing children, wife, goods, life, and one's self. [12] Metempsychosis is one of the fundamental dogmas of Buddhism. That continual transition from one existence to another, from a state of happiness to one of unhappiness, and _vice versa_, forms a circle encompassing the Buddhist in every direction. He is doomed to fluctuate incessantly on the never-settled waters of existence. Hence his ardent wishes to be delivered from that most pitiable position, and his earnest longings for the ever-tranquil state of Neibban, the way to which Buddha alone can teach him by his precepts and his examples. This dogma is common both to Brahmins and Buddhists. The originator and propagator of the creed of the latter found it already established; he had but to embody it among his own conceptions, and make it agree with his new ideas. His first teachers were Brahmins, and under their tuition he learned that dogma which may be considered as the basis on which hinge both systems. In fact, the two rival creeds have a common object in view, the elevating of the soul from those imperfections forced upon her by her connection with matter, and the setting of her free from the sway of passions, which keep her always linked to this world. According to the votaries of both creeds, transmigration has for its object the effecting of those several purposes. There is a curious opinion among Buddhists respecting the mode of transmigrations, and there is no doubt it is a very ancient one, belonging to the genuine productions of the earliest Buddhism. Transmigration, they say, is caused and entirely controlled by the influence of merits and demerits, but in such a way that a being who has come to his end transmits nothing of his entity to the being to be immediately reproduced. The latter is a being apart, independent of the former, created, it is true, by the influence of the late being's good or bad deeds, but having nothing in common with him. They explain this startling doctrine by the comparison of a tree successively producing and bearing fruits, of which some are good and some bad. The fruits, though coming from the same tree, have nothing in common, either with each other or with those that were previously grown, or may afterwards grow out of the same plant; they are distinct and separate. So they say, _kan_, or the influence of merits and demerits, produces successively beings totally distinct one from the other. This atheistic or materialistic doctrine is not generally known by the common people, who practically hold that transmigration is effected in the manner professed and taught by Pythagoras and his school. If between the adherents of the two creeds there is a perfect agreement respecting the means to be resorted to for reaching the point when man becomes free from miseries, ignorance, and imperfections, they are at variance as to the end to be arrived to. The Brahmin leads the perfected being to the supreme essence, in which he is merged as a drop of water in the ocean, losing his personality, to form a whole with the Divine substance. This is Pantheism. The Buddhist, ignoring a supreme being, conducts the individual that has become emancipated from the thraldom of passions to a state of complete isolation, called Neibban. This is, strictly speaking, Annihilation. [13] The duration of a revolution of nature, or the time required for the formation of a world, its existence and destruction, is divided into four periods. The fourth period, or that which begins with the apparition of man on the earth until its destruction, is divided into sixty-four parts, called andrakaps. During one andrakap, the life of man increases gradually from ten years to an almost innumerable number of years; and having reached its maximum of duration, it decreases slowly to its former short duration of ten years. We live at present in that second part of an andrakap when the life of man is on the decline and decrease. If my memory serve me right, we have reached at present the ninth or tenth andrakap of the fourth period. Should the calculations of Buddhists ever prove correct, the deluded visionaries who look forward to an approaching Millennium, have still to wait long ere their darling wishes be realised. Though it be somewhat tiresome and unpleasant to have to write down the absurd and ridiculous notions Burmans entertain respecting the organisation of matter, the origin, production, existence, duration, and end of the world, it appears quite necessary to give a brief account, and sketch an outline of their ideas on these subjects. The reader will then have the means of tracing up to their Hindu origin several of the many threads that link Buddhism to Brahminism, and better understand the various details hereafter to be given, and intended for establishing a great fact, viz., the Brahminical origin of the greater part of the Buddhistic institutions. He will, moreover, have the satisfaction of clearly discovering, buried in the rubbish of fabulous recitals, several important facts recorded in the Holy Scriptures. Matter is eternal, but its organisation and all the changes attending it are caused and regulated by certain laws co-eternal with it. Both matter and the laws that act upon it are self-existing, independent of the action and control of any being, &c. As soon as a system of worlds is constituted, Buddhists boldly assert and perseveringly maintain that the law of merit and demerit is the sole principle that regulates and controls both the physical and moral world. But how is a world brought into existence? Water, or rather rain, is the chief agent, operating in the reproduction of a system of nature. During an immense period of time rain pours down with an unabating violence in the space left by the last world that has been destroyed. Meanwhile strong winds, blowing from opposite directions, accumulate the water within definite and certain limits until it has filled the whole space. At last appears on the surface of water, floating like a greasy substance, the sediment deposited by water. In proportion as the water dries up under the unremitting action of the wind, that crust increases in size, until, by a slow, gradual, but sure process, it invariably assumes the shape and proportion of our planet, in the manner we are to describe. The centre of the earth, indeed of a world or system of nature, is occupied by a mountain of enormous size and elevation, called Mienmo. This is surrounded by seven ranges of mountains, separated from each other by streams, equalling, in breadth and depth, the height of the mountain forming its boundaries in the direction of the central elevation. The range nearest to the Mienmo rises to half its height. Each successive range is half the height of the range preceding it. Beyond the last stream are disposed four great islands, in the direction of the four points of the compass. Each of those four islands is surrounded by five hundred smaller ones. Beyond those there is water, reaching to the farthest limits of the world. The great island we inhabit is the southern one, called Dzampoudipa, from the Jambu, or Eugenia tree, growing upon it. Our planet rests on a basis of water double the thickness of the earth; the water itself is lying on a mass of air that has a thickness double that of water. Below this aërial stratum is _laha_, or vacuum. Let us see now in what manner our planet is peopled, and whence came its first inhabitants. From the seats of Brahmas which were beyond the range of destruction when the former world perished, three celestial beings, or, according to another version, six, came on the earth, remaining on it in a state of perfect happiness, occasionally revisiting, when it pleased them, their former seats of glory. This state of things lasts during a long period. At that time the two great luminaries of the day and the stars of night have not as yet made their appearance, but rays of incomparable brightness, emanating from the pure bodies of those new inhabitants, illuminate the globe. They feed at long intervals upon a certain gelatinous substance, of such a nutritious power that the smallest quantity is sufficient to support them for a long period. This delicious food is of the most perfect flavour. But it happens that at last it disappears, and is successively replaced by two other substances, one of which resembles the tender sprout of a tree. They are so nutritious and purified that in our present condition we can have no adequate idea of their properties. They too disappear, and are succeeded by a sort of rice called _Tha-le_. The inhabitants of the earth eat also of that rice. But alas! the consequences prove as fatal to them as the eating of the forbidden fruit proved to the happy denizens of Eden. The brightness that had hitherto encircled their bodies and illuminated the world vanishes away, and, to their utmost dismay, they find themselves, for the first time, sunk into an abyss of unknown darkness. The eating of that coarse food creates fæces and evacuations which, forcing their way out of the body, cause the appearance of what marks the distinction of the sexes. Passions, for the first time, burn and rage in the bosom of those hitherto passionless beings. They are deprived of the power to return to their celestial seats. Very soon jealousy, contentions, &c., follow in the train of the egotistical distinction of _mine_ and _thine_. Finding themselves in the gloom of darkness, the unhappy beings sigh for and long after light, when, on a sudden, the sun, breaking down the barrier of darkness, bursts out, rolling, as it were, in a flood of light, which illuminates the whole world; but soon disappearing in the west below the horizon, darkness seems to resume its hold. New lamentations and bewailings arise on the part of men, when in a short time appears majestically the moon, spreading its silvery and trembling rays of light. At the same time the planets and stars take their respective stations in the sky, and begin their regular revolutions. The need of settling disputes that arise is soon felt by the new inhabitants; they agree to elect a chief, whom they invest with a sufficient authority for framing regulations which are to be obligatory on every member of society, and power for enforcing obedience to those regulations. Hence the origin of society. Men, at first practising virtue, enjoyed a long life, the duration of which reached to the almost incredible length of a thingie. But they having much relaxed in the practice of virtue, it lessened proportionably to their want of fervour in the observance of the law, until, by their extreme wickedness, it dwindled to the short period of ten years. The same ascending and descending scale of human life, successively brought in by the law of merit and demerit, takes place sixty-four times, and constitutes an andrakap, or the duration of a world. It remains only to mention rapidly some particulars regarding the end of a revolution of nature. The cause of such an event is the influence of the demerits, prevailing to such an extent as to be all-powerful in working out destruction. Two solemn warnings of the approaching dissolution of our planet are given by Nats, one nearly 100,000 and the other 100 years before that event. The bearers of such sad news make their appearance on earth with marks of deep mourning, as best suited to afford additional weight to their exhortations. They earnestly call on men to repent of their sins and amend their lives. These last summonses are generally heeded by all mankind, so that men, when the world is destroyed, generally migrate, together with the victims of hell who have atoned for their past iniquities, to those seats of Brahmas that escape destruction. There are three great principles of demerit, concupiscence, anger, and ignorance. The world also is destroyed by the action of three different agents, fire, water, and wind. Concupiscence is the most common, though the less heinous of the three. Next comes anger, less prevailing, though it is more heinous; but ignorance is by far the most fatal of all moral distempers. The moral disorder then prevailing causes destruction by the agency that it sets in action. Concupiscence has for its agency fire; anger, water; ignorance, wind; but in the following proportion. Of sixty-four destructions of this world, fifty-six are caused by conflagration, seven by water, and one by wind. Their respective limits of duration stand as follows: conflagration reaches to the five lowest seats of Brahmas; water extends to the eighth seat, and the destructive violence of the wind is felt as far as the ninth seat. [14] Our planet or globe is composed, according to Buddhists, of the mountain Mienmo, being in height 82,000 youdzanas (1 youdzana is, according to some authorities, equal to little less than 12 English miles) above the surface of the earth, and in depth equal to its height. Around this huge and tall elevation are disposed the four great islands, according to the four points of the compass; and each of these again is surrounded by 500 small islands. The countries south of the great chain of the Himalaya are supposed to form the great island lying at the south. It would be easy to give, at full length, the ridiculous notions entertained by Buddhists of these parts on geography and cosmography, &c., &c.; but the knowledge of such puerilities is scarcely worth the attention of a serious reader, who is anxious to acquire accurate information respecting a religious system, which was designed by its inventor to be the vehicle of moral doctrines, with but very few dogmas. Those speculations upon this material world have gradually found their place in the collection of sacred writings, but they are no part of the religious creed. They are of a Hindu origin, and convey Indian notions upon those various topics. These notions even do not belong to the system as expounded in the Vedas, but have been set forth at a comparatively modern epoch. [15] A Rahanda is a being very far advanced in perfection, and gifted with high spiritual attainments, which impart to his mortal frame certain distinguished prerogatives, becoming almost spirits. Concupiscence is totally extinguished in a Rahanda; he may be said to be fit for the state Neibban. Several classes are assigned to Rahandas alone, according to their various degrees of advancement in the way of perfection. [16] It is an immutable decree that she on whom has been conferred the singular honour of giving birth to a mortal who, during the course of his existence, is to become a Buddha, dies invariably seven days after her delivery, migrating to one of the delightful seats of Nats. The Burmese translator observes that a womb that has been, as it were, consecrated and sanctified by the presence of a child of so exalted a dignity, can never become afterwards the hidden abode of less dignified beings. It must be confessed that the conception of Phralaong in his mother's womb is wrapped up in a mysterious obscurity, appearing as it does to exclude the idea of conjugal intercourse. The Cochin-Chinese in their religious legends pretend that Buddha was conceived and born from Maia in a wonderful manner, not resembling at all what takes place according to the order of nature. [17] The Mount Himawonta is famous in all Buddhistic compositions, as the scene where great and important events have happened. It is in all probability the Himalaya, as being the highest range of mountains ever known to Indian Buddhists. [18] Pounhas are the Brahmins who, even in those days of remote antiquity, were considered as the wisest in their generation. They had already monopolised the lucrative trade of fortune-tellers, astrologers, &c., and it appears that they have contrived to retain it up to our own days. During my first stay in Burmah I became acquainted with a young Pounha, wearing the white dress, and getting his livelihood by telling the horoscopes of newly-born infants, and even grown-up people. I learned from him the mode of finding out by calculation the state of the heavens at any given hour whatever. This mode of calculation is entirely based on the Hindu system, and has evidently been borrowed from that people. Though Brahmins in those days, as in our own, worked on popular ignorance and credulity in the manner abovementioned, we ought not to lose sight of the great fact, borne out by this legend in a most distinct and explicit way, that many among them devoted all their time, energies, and abilities to the acquirement of wisdom, and the observance of the most arduous practices. Their austere mode of life was to a great extent copied and imitated by the first religious of the Buddhist persuasion. Many ordinances and prescriptions of the Wini agree, in a remarkable degree, with those enforced by the Vedas. In the beginning, the resemblance must have been so great as to render the discrepancies scarcely perceptible, since we read in this very work of an injunction made to the early converts, to bestow alms on the Pounhas as well as on the Bickus or mendicant religious, placing them both on a footing of perfect equality. [19] Preitha is a being in a state of punishment and sufferings on account of sins committed in a former existence. He is doomed to live in the solitary recesses of uninhabited mountains, smarting under the pangs of never-satiated hunger. His body, and particularly his stomach, are of gigantic dimensions, whilst his mouth is so small that a needle could scarcely be shoved into it. [20] In the Buddhistic system of cosmogony, 100,000 worlds form one system, subject to the same immutable changes and revolutions as affect this one which we inhabit. They admit, indeed, that the number of worlds is unlimited, but they assert that those forming one system are simultaneously destroyed, reproduced and perfected, by virtue of certain eternal laws inherent in matter itself. [21] Tsadoomarit is the first of the six abodes of Nats. The description of the pleasures enjoyed by the inhabitants of that seat is replete with accounts of the grossest licentiousness. [22] A Palou, or rather Bilou, is a monster with a human face, supposed to feed on human flesh. His eyes are of a deep red hue, and his body of so subtle a nature as never to project any shadow. Wonderful tales are told of this monster, which plays a considerable part in most of the Buddhistic writings. [23] A Dzedi is a religious edifice of a conical form, supported on a square basis, and having its top covered with what the Burmese call an umbrella, resembling in its shape the musical instrument vulgarly called _chapeau chinois_ by the French. On each side of the quadrangular basis are opened four niches, in the direction of the four cardinal points, destined to receive statues of Buddha. This monument is of every dimension in size, from the smallest, a few feet high, to the tallest, of one or two hundred feet high. It is to be seen in every direction, and in the neighbourhood of towns every elevation is crowned with one or several Dzedis. The word Dzedi means a sacred depository, that is to say, a place where relics of Buddha were enshrined. The word has been extended since to places which have become receptacles of the scriptures, or of the relics of distinguished religious, who had acquired eminence by their scientific and moral attainments. In the beginning, those Dzedis were a kind of _tumuli_, or mounds of earth or bricks, erected upon the shrine wherein relics were enclosed. In proportion as the followers of the Buddhistic faith increased in number, wealth, and influence, they erected Dzedis on a grander scale, bearing always a great resemblance in shape and form to the primitive ones. The stupas or topes discovered in the Punjaub, and in other parts of the Indian Peninsula, were real Buddhistic tumuli or Dzedis. During succeeding ages, when relics could not be procured, the faithful continued to erect Dzedis, the sight of which was intended to remind them of the sacred relics, and they paid to those relics and monuments the same veneration as they would have offered to those enriched with those priceless objects. In Burmah, in particular, the zeal, or rather the rage, for building Dzedis has been carried to a degree scarcely to be credited by those who have not visited that country. In the following pages there will be found an attempt to describe the various forms given to those monuments. [24] The thabeit is an open-mouthed pot, of a truncated spheroidical form, made of earth, iron, or brass, without ornaments, used by the Buddhist monks when going abroad, in their morning excursions, to receive the alms bestowed on them by the admirers of their holy mode of life. CHAPTER II. _Birth of Buddha in a forest -- Rejoicings on that occasion -- Kaladewila -- Prediction of the Pounhas -- Vain efforts of Thoodaudana to thwart the effect of the Prediction._ The time of her approaching confinement being close at hand, the princess solicited from her husband, King Thoodaudana, leave to go to the country of Dewah,[1] amongst her friends and relatives. As soon as her request was made known, the king ordered that the whole extent of the road between Kapilawot and Dewah should be perfectly levelled, and lined on both sides with plantain trees, and adorned with the finest ornaments. Jars, full of the purest water, were to be deposited all along the road at short intervals. A chair of gold was made ready for conveying the queen; and a thousand noblemen, attended by an innumerable retinue, were directed to accompany her during the journey. Between the two countries an immense forest of lofty Engyin trees extends to a great distance. As soon as the _cortège_ reached it, five water-lilies shot forth spontaneously from the stem and the main branches of each tree, and innumerable birds of all kinds, by their melodious tunes, filled the air with the most ravishing music. Trees, similar in beauty to those growing in the seats of Nats, apparently sensible of the presence of the incarnated Buddha, seemed to share in the universal joy. On beholding this wonderful appearance of all the lofty trees of the forest, the queen felt a desire to approach nearer and enjoy the marvellous sight offered to her astonished regards. Her noble attendants led her forthwith a short distance into the forest. Maia, seated on her couch, along with her sister Patzapati, desired her attendants to have it moved closer to an Engyin tree (_shorea robusta_), which she pointed out. Her wishes were immediately complied with. She then rose gently on her couch; her left hand, clasped round the neck of her sister, supported her in a standing position. With the right hand she tried to reach and break a small branch, which she wanted to carry away. On that very instant, as the slender rattan, heated by fire, bends down its tender head, all the branches lowered their extremities, offering themselves, as it were, to the hand of the queen, who unhesitatingly seized and broke the extremity of one of the young boughs. By virtue of a certain power inherent in her dignity, on a sudden all the winds blew gently throughout the forest. The attendants, having desired all the people to withdraw to a distance, disposed curtains all round the place the queen was standing on. Whilst she was in that position, admiring the slender bough she held in her hands, the moment of her confinement happened, and she was delivered of a son.[D] [D] On the same day a son was born to Amitaudana, called Ananda. The wife of Thouppaboudha of Dewah was delivered of a daughter, called Yathaudara, who became afterwards the wife of Phralaong. Anouroudha, the son of Thookaudana, was ushered into existence on the same solemn occasion. The above-named Ananda was first cousin to the Buddha, and subsequently became the amiable, faithful, and devoted disciple who, during twenty-five years, attended on the person of Buddha, and affectionately ministered to all his wants. After the death of his mother Maia, Phralaong was nursed and brought up with the greatest care by his aunt Patzapati, sometimes called Gautamee. Four chief Brahmas[2] received the new-born infant on a golden net-work, and placed him in the presence of the happy mother, saying, "Give yourself up, O Queen, to joy and rejoicing; here is the precious and wonderful fruit of your womb."[E] [E] _Remarks of the Burmese Translator._--When children are born they appear in this world covered all over their bodies with impure and disgusting substances. But an exception was made in favour of our infant Phralaong. He was born without the least stain of offending impurity; he was ushered into this world, pure and resplendent, like a fine ruby placed on a piece of the richest cloth of Kathika. He left his mother's womb with his feet and hands stretched out, exhibiting the dignified countenance of a Pundit descending from the place where he has expounded the law. Though both mother and child were exempt from the humiliating miseries common to all other human beings, there came down from the skies upon both, by way of a respectful offering, gentle showers of cold and warm water, succeeding each other alternately in a regular order. From the hands of the four chiefs of Brahmas, four chiefs of Nats received the blessed child, whom they handed over to men, who placed him on a beautiful white cloth. But to the astonishment of all, he freed himself from the hands of those attending upon him, and stood in a firm and erect position on the ground, when casting a glance towards the east, more than one thousand worlds appeared like a perfectly levelled plain. All the Nats inhabiting those worlds made offerings of flowers and perfumes, exclaiming with exultation, "An exalted personage has made his appearance;--who can ever be compared to him? who has ever equalled him? He is indeed the most excellent of all beings." Phralaong looked again towards the three other directions. Raising his eyes upwards, and then lowering them down, he saw that there was no being equal to him. Conscious of his superiority, he jumped over a distance of seven lengths of a foot, in a northern direction, exclaiming,--"This is my last birth; there shall be to me no other state of existence; I am the greatest of all beings."[3] He then began to walk steadily in the same direction. A chief of Brahmas held over his head the white umbrella.[4] A Nat carried the golden fan. Other Nats held in their hands the golden sword, the golden slippers, the cope set with the rarest precious stones, and other royal insignia.[F] [F] _Remarks of the Burmese Translator._--In former existences, our Phralaong is said to have spoken a few words immediately after his birth, viz., when he was Mahauthata and Wethandra. In the first, he came into this world holding in his hands a small plant, which a Nat had brought and placed in his tender hands at that very moment. He showed it to his mother, who asked him what it was. "This is a medicinal plant," replied he, to his astonished mother. The plant was cast into a large jar full of water, and the virtualised liquid ever retained the power of curing every kind of bodily distemper. When he was born, or rather began the existence in which he was called Wethandra, he stretched out his hands asking something from his mother which he might bestow on the needy. The mother put at his disposal one thousand pieces of silver. Thirty-two mighty wonders had proclaimed the incarnation of Phralaong in his mother's womb, and the same number of wonders announced his birth to the earth. Moreover, in that same moment were born the beautiful Yathaudara, Ananda, the son of Amitaudana, the noblemen Tsanda and Kaludari, and the horse Kantika. The great tree Bodi also sprung from the ground, in the forest of Oorouwela, about two youdzanas distant from the city of Radzagio, and in a north-easterly direction from that place, and the four golden vases suddenly reappeared. The inhabitants of Dewah, joining those of Kapilawot, set out for the latter country with the newly-born infant, to whom they rendered the greatest honours. The Nats of the seat of Tawadeintha, on hearing that a son was born to King Thoodaudana, and that under the shade of the tree Bodi[5] he would become a true Buddha with a perfect knowledge of the four great truths, gave full vent to their boundless joy, hoisting unfurled flags and banners in every direction, in token of their indescribable rejoicings. There was a celebrated Rathee, named Kaladewila, who had passed through the eight degrees of contemplation, and who was in the habit of resorting daily to the prince's palace for his food. On that very day, having taken his meal as usual, he ascended to the seat of Tawadeintha,[6] and found the fortunate inhabitants of that seat giving themselves up to uncommon rejoicings. He asked them the reason of such an unusual display of enrapturing transports of exultation. "It is," replied they to the inquiring Rathee, "because a son is born to King Thoodaudana, who will soon become a true Buddha. Like all former Buddhas, he will preach the law and exhibit in his person and throughout his life the greatest wonders and a most accomplished pattern of the highest virtues. We will hear the law from his very mouth." On hearing the answer of the Nats, Kaladewila immediately left the seat of Tawadeintha, and directed his aërial course towards the palace of Thoodaudana. Having entered into the palace and occupied the place prepared for him, he conveyed to the king the good tidings of a son having been born unto him. A few days after this message, the royal child was brought into the presence of his rejoicing father. Kaladewila was present on the occasion. Thoodaudana ordered that the child should be attired with the finest dress, and placed in the presence of the Rathee, in order to pay him his respects. But the child rose up and set his two feet on the curled hair of the venerable personage. The persons present on the occasion, not knowing that a Buddha in his last existence never bows down to any being, thought that the head of the imprudent child would be split into seven parts as a punishment for his unbecoming behaviour. But Kaladewila, rising up from his seat, and lifting up his hands to his forehead, bowed respectfully to the infant Phralaong. The king, astonished at such an unusual condescension from so eminent a personage, followed his example, and out of respect prostrated himself before his son. By virtue of his great spiritual attainments, Kaladewila could recollect at once all that had taken place during the forty preceding worlds, and foresee all that would happen during the same number of future revolutions of nature. On seeing the high perfections shining forth in our Phralaong, he considered attentively whether he would become a Buddha or not. Having ascertained that such a dignity was reserved for him, he wished to know if the remaining period of his own existence would permit him to witness the happy moment when he would be a Buddha. To his deep regret, he foresaw that the end of his life would come before the occurrence of that great event, and that he would have then migrated to one of the seats of Arupa, and be, therefore, deprived of the favour of hearing the law from his mouth. This foresight caused a profound sadness in his heart, and abundant tears flowed from his eyes. But when he reflected on the future destiny of the blessed child, he could not contain within himself the pure joy that overflowed his soul. The people present on the occasion soon observed the opposite emotions which alternately affected the soul of Kaladewila. They asked him the reason of such an unusual occurrence. "I rejoice," said he, "at the glorious destiny of that child; but I feel sad and disconsolate when I think that it will not be given to me to see and contemplate him clothed with the dignity of Buddha. I bewail with tears my great misfortune." With a view of assuaging his sorrow, Kaladewila, casting another glance towards future events, eagerly sought to discover if, among his relatives, there would not be at least one who would be so fortunate as to see Phralaong in the nature of Buddha. He saw with inexpressible delight that his nephew Nalaka would enjoy the blessing denied to himself. Thereupon he went in all haste to his sister's house, inquiring about her son. At his request the lad was brought into his presence. "Beloved nephew," said the venerable Rathee, "thirty-five years hence,[7] the son of King Thoodaudana will become a Buddha; you will contemplate him in that sublime and exalted nature. From this day, therefore, you shall embrace the profession of Rahan." The young man, who descended from a long succession of wealthy noblemen, said within himself, "My uncle, indeed, never says anything but under the impulse of irresistible and cogent motives. I will follow his advice and will become a recluse." He immediately ordered the purchase of the insignia of his new profession, a patta, a thingan,[8] and other articles. His head was shaved, and he put on the yellow garb. Attired in his new dress, he looked all round, and saw that, amongst all beings, the Rahans are by far the most excellent. Then turning towards the place which Phralaong occupied, he prostrated himself five successive times in that direction, rose up, placed the patta in its bag, threw it over his shoulder, and directed his steps towards the solitude of Himawonta, where he devoted himself to all the exercises of his profession. At the time Phralaong became a Buddha, our hermit went to that great master, learnt from him the works that lead to the state of perfect stability of mind, returned back to his solitude, and attained to the perfection of Rahanda by the practice of the eminent works. Seven months after his return, the end of his existence arrived, when, disentangled from all the ties that had hitherto kept him in the world of passions, he reached the happy state of Neibban. FOOTNOTES [1] This country of Dewah is one of the sixteen countries, so much celebrated in the Buddhistic annals, where the greatest religious events have taken place. They are placed in the centre, north, and north-west portions of Hindustan. In this place was born the celebrated Dewadat, who became brother-in-law to Buddha himself. But notwithstanding the close ties of relationship that united him to so saintly a personage, Dewadat is represented as the incarnation of evil, ever opposed to Buddha in his benevolent designs in favour of human kind. At last, in an attempt against his brother-in-law's life, he met with a condign punishment. The earth burst open under his feet, and, surrounded by devouring flames, he rolled down to the bottom of the lowest hell, acknowledging, however, in the accents of a true but tardy repentance, his errors and the unconquerable power of Buddha. Three red-hot iron bars transfix him perpendicularly, hanging him in an erect position, whilst three other bars pierce him through the shoulders and the side. For his repentance he is to be delivered hereafter from those torments, and restored to earth, in order to acquire merits that may entitle him to a better place in future existences. Some accounts mention that he is to become a Pietzega Buddha. This story respecting Dewadat has given rise in Burmah to a very strange misconception. The Burmese, with their usual thoughtlessness, on hearing of the particulars respecting the sufferings and mode of death of our Saviour, concluded that he must have been no other but Dewadat himself, and that, for holding opinions opposite to those of Buddha, he suffered such a punishment. The writer was not a little surprised to find in the writings of the old Barnabite missionaries a lengthened confutation of this erroneous supposition. [2] According to Buddhistic notions, Buddha labours during his mortal career for the benefit of all living beings. His benevolent and compassionate heart, free from all partiality, feels an ardent desire of opening before them the way that leads to deliverance from the miseries of every succeeding existence, and of bringing them finally to the never troubled state of Neibban. Such a generous and benevolent disposition constitutes the genuine characteristic of Buddha. The Brahmas, inhabiting the sixteen seats of Rupa, are all but ripe for obtaining the crowning point of Buddhistic perfection. They only wait for the presence of a Buddha to unloose, by his preachings, the slender ties that keep them still connected with this material world. The Nats, though far less advanced in merits and perfection, eagerly look forward for the apparition of that great personage, who is to point out to them the means of freeing themselves from the influence of passions, and thereby destroying in them the principle of demerits. Men, also, in their state of probation and trial, want the mighty aid of a Buddha, who will enable them by his transcendent doctrine to advance in merits, so as either to arrive at once at the ever-quiescent state of Neibban, or progress gradually on the way. Hence, on his birth, Buddha is ministered to by those three sorts of intelligent beings, who are particularly destined to share in the blessings his coming is designed to shower on them. The mission of a Buddha is that of a saviour. His great object, to make use of a Buddhistic expression, is, during his existence, to procure the deliverance of all the beings that will listen to his instructions and observe the precepts of the law. He is distinguished by feelings of compassion and an ardent love for all beings, as well as by an earnest desire of labouring for their welfare. These are the true characteristics of his heart. In this religious system mention is often made of Pitzegabuddhas, who have all the science and merits of a Buddha, but they are deficient in the above-mentioned qualities, which form, as it were, the essence of a true and genuine Buddha. They are never therefore honoured with the noble appellation of Buddha. [3] The Chinese, Cochin-Chinese, Cingalese, and Nepaulese Legends all agree in attributing to Phralaong the use of reason from the moment he was born, as well as the power of uttering with a proud accent the following words: "I am the greatest of all beings; this is my last existence." To his own eyes he must have appeared in this world without any competitor, since he knew already that he was destined to release countless beings from the trammels of existence, and lead them to a state of perfect rest, screened for ever from the incessant action of merits and demerits. He alone whose mind is deeply imbued with Buddhistic notions can boast exultingly that he has at length arrived at his last existence, and that, within a few years, he will escape out of the whirlpool of endless existences, wherein he has been turning and fluctuating from a state of happiness to one of wretchedness. This perpetual vicissitude is to him the greatest evil, the opposite of which is, therefore, the greatest good. No wonder, then, to hear our Phralaong, who was better acquainted with the miseries attending existence than any one else, exclaiming with the accents of a complete joy--"This is my last existence." The Burmese translator seems delighted to remark that on two former occasions Phralaong, then an infant, had spoken distinct words, which he addressed to his mother. This happened in the beginning of the two existences during which he practised two of the ten great virtues. It took place first on the day he was born to that existence, when, under the name of Mahauthata, he displayed consummate skill and wisdom. The legend of Mahauthata is a very amusing performance, written in a very pure language, and relating stories about as credible as those we read in the Arabian Tales of a Thousand and One Nights. What surprised the writer not a little, was to find, in perusing that composition, a decision given by our Mahauthata, in a case perfectly similar to that which showed forth, in the presence of all Israel, the incomparable wisdom of Solomon. When Phralaong practised the last and most perfect of virtues, liberality, carried to its farthest limits, ending in perfect abnegation of self, and renouncing all that he possessed, he entered, too, into this world with the faculty of speech, and became a prince under the name of Wethandra. The legend of Wethandra is by far the best of all. Taking it as a mere romance, it is replete with circumstantial details well calculated to excite the finest emotions of the heart. The latter part, in particular, can scarcely be read without heart-moving feelings of pity and commiseration, on beholding our Phralaong parting willingly with all his property, with his wife and his lovely children, and finally offering his own person, to satisfy the ever-renewed calls on his unbounded generosity. [4] In Burmah the use of the white umbrella is limited to the king and idols. The former can never move without having some one to hold over his head this distinguishing mark of royalty. Any one who has been introduced into the palace of Amerapoora will not have forgotten how great was his satisfaction on beholding the white umbrella towering above the sides of passages, and moving in the direction he was sitting in. He knew that the time of his expectation was at an end, and that in a moment he would behold the golden face. [5] In glancing over the genealogy of the twenty-eight last Buddhas, the writer has observed that every Buddha has always obtained the supreme intelligence under the shadow of some trees. Our Phralaong, as will be seen hereafter, attained to the exalted dignity of Buddha under the tree Baudhi (_ficus religiosa_), which grew up spontaneously at the very moment he was born. The writer has never been able to discover any well-grounded reason to account for this remarkable circumstance, so carefully noted down, relating the particulars attending the elevation of a being to this high station. For want of a better one, he will be permitted to hazard the following conjecture. Our Phralaong, previous to his becoming a Buddha, withdrew into solitude for the purpose of fitting himself for his future calling, in imitation of all his predecessors, leading an ascetic life, and devoting all his undivided attention and mental energies to meditation and contemplation, coupled with works of the most rigorous mortification. The senses, he knew well, were to be submitted to the uncontrolled sway of reason, by allowing to himself only what was barely requisite for supporting nature. Regardless of every comfort, his mind was bent upon acquiring the sublime knowledge of the principle and origin of all things, on fathoming the miseries of all beings, and on endeavouring to discover the most efficacious means of affording them a thorough relief, by pointing out to them the road they had to follow in order to disentangle themselves from the trammels of existence, and arrive at a state of perfect rest. In common with all other ascetics, our Phralaong had no other shelter against the inclemency of the seasons but the protecting shadow of trees. It was under the cooling and refreshing foliage of the trees of the forests, that he spent his time in the placid and undisturbed work of meditation, acquiring gradually that matchless knowledge and consummate wisdom which he needed for carrying on to perfection the benevolent undertaking he had in contemplation. [6] It is a maxim generally received amongst Buddhists, that he who has far advanced in the way of perfection acquires extraordinary privileges both in his soul and his body. The latter obtains a sort of spiritualised nature, or rather matter becomes so refined and purified that he is enabled to travel over distances with almost the rapidity of the thought of the mind. The former, by the help of continual meditation on the causes and nature of all things, enlarges incessantly its sphere of knowledge. The remembrance of the past revives in the mind. From the lofty position such a being is placed in, he calmly considers and watches the movement of events that will take place in future times. The more his mind expands, and the sphere of his knowledge extends, the greater are the perfections and refinements attending the coarser part of his being. [7] According to the prophecy of Kaladewila, Phralaong is to become Buddha when thirty-five years old. The total duration of his life being eighty years, it follows that he has lived as Buddha forty-five years. The advice of the old Rathee to his nephew Nalaka, to become a Rahan in order to better dispose himself to welcome the coming of Buddha, and listen with greater benefit to his preachings, leads me to make a remark and write down an observation that has been already alluded to. From this passage and many others which the reader will easily notice hereafter, as well as from the example of Buddha himself, one must suppose that at the time Phralaong was born, some institutions, the most important one at least, viz., that of the Rahans, recluses, or monks, already existed in a more or less perfect state. Relying solely on the authority of this Legend, no attempt at denying this supposition can ever be made. Kaladewila speaks of the order of Rahans as of a thing well known. Nalaka sends to the bazaar for the purchase of the dress and other articles he wanted for his new mode of life. Phralaong, on his way to his garden, sees a Rahan, whose habits and manners are described to him by his coachman. Having become Buddha, he meets with ascetics and recluses living in community, leading a life much resembling that which he is supposed to have hereafter instituted, holding but few opinions, which, according to his own standard, were heretical. From these facts flows the natural conclusion that Gaudama is not the inventor or originator of all the Buddhistic disciplinary institutions. He found among the multifarious sects of Brahminism many practices and ordinances which he approved of and incorporated or embodied in his new system. This is another proof, amounting to a demonstration, that Buddhism is an offshoot of the great Hindu system. In this respect, Gaudama borrowed largely from what he found existing in his own days, in the schools he resorted to, and re-echoed many tenets upheld by the masters under whom he studied the sciences and the training to morals and virtue. He enlarged and developed certain favourite theories and principles which had found favour with him; at the same time, for the purpose of leading his disciples to perfection, he enforced many disciplinary regulations, almost similar to those he had been subjected to during the years of his probation. He was certainly an ardent promoter of the perfected and improved system he endeavoured to introduce. [8] The Thingan or Tsiwaran is composed of three parts--the thinbaing, resembling an ample petticoat, bound up to the waist, with a leathern girdle, and falling down to the heels; the kowot, which consists of a sort of cloak of a rectangular shape, covering the shoulders and breast, and reaching somewhat below the knee; and the dougout, which is a piece of cloth of the same shape, folded many times, thrown over the left shoulder when going abroad, and used to sit on when no proper seat has been prepared. The colour of these three pieces, constituting the dress of a recluse, is invariably yellow. The jack-tree supplies the material for dyeing the cloth yellow. In order to maintain a spirit of perfect poverty among the members of the order of the recluse, the Wini prescribes that the tsiwaran ought to be made up with rags picked up here and there, and sewed together. The rule, in this respect, at least as far as its spirit goes, is thoroughly disregarded, and has become almost a dead letter. The hairs of the head and the beard, being too often objects which vanity turns to its own purposes, are, to say the least, mere superfluities. A stern contemner of worldly things must, of course, do away with things which may prove temptations to him, or at least afford him unnecessary trouble. Hence no layman can ever aspire to become a Rahan unless he has previously submitted to the operation of a complete shaving of the head, including even the eye-brows. CHAPTER III. _A Name is given to the child -- Prediction of the Pounhas respecting the child -- Death of Maia -- Miraculous occurrence at the child's cradle -- Adolescence of the Phralaong -- He sees the four signs -- Return from the garden to the royal city._ Five days after the birth of Phralaong, took place the ceremony of washing the head and giving him a name. In the apartment of the palace several kinds of perfumed wood and essences, such as sandal-wood, lignum, aloes, camphor, &c., were strewed profusely, as well as the most exquisitely scented flowers and parched rice. The nogana (a sort of beverage made of milk, sugar, and honey) was prepared in great abundance. One hundred and eighty Pounhas,[1] the most versed in the science of astrology, were invited to partake of a splendid entertainment in the palace. The king made to every one of them costly presents, and desired them to examine carefully all the signs, prognosticating the future destiny of his son. Amidst that crowd of soothsayers, eight Pounhas were present, who explained the dream that Maia had in the beginning of her pregnancy. Seven of them, lifting up the index[2] of each hand of the child, were amazed at the wonderful signs their eyes met. "If this child," said they, "remain in the society of men, he will become a mighty ruler that will bring all nations under his sway; but if he embrace the profession of recluse, he will certainly become a Buddha." They began to foretell the incomparable glory and high honours that would attend his universal reign. The eighth Pounha, named Kauntagnia, the descendant of the celebrated son of Thoodata, and the youngest of all, raised up the index of one hand of the child. Struck with the wonderful and unmistakable signs that forced themselves on his view, he exclaimed, "No! this child will not remain long in the society of men; he will free himself from the vicissitudes[3] and miseries attending the existence of all beings, and will finally become a Buddha." As the child was to be the instrument for promoting the welfare and merits of all mortals, they gave him the name of Theiddat. Seven days after her confinement Maia died, and by the virtue of her merits migrated to the seat of Toocita, and became the daughter of a Nat.[G] Her death was not the result of her delivery, but she departed this world because the term of her life had come. On their return to their home, the Pounhas assembled their children and said to them, "We are already advanced in years. We dare not promise to ourselves that we will ever see the son of King Thoodaudana become a Buddha; but to you such a favour is reserved. Listen respectfully to all his instructions, and endeavour to enter the profession of Rahan without delay, and withdraw into solitude. Let us also all join you in that holy vocation." Three Pounhas refused the invitation, and would not enter the profession. The five others cheerfully gave up everything, and became distinguished members of the ascetic body. [G] Maia was confined in the beginning of the third age. This expression is rather a very loose and general one, and is far from indicating, with any approach to accuracy, the period of Maia's age when she was delivered of her son. The age of man is divided into three parts. The first extends from birth to the sixteenth or eighteenth year; the second goes to the forty-fifth year or thereabout; and the third, from the forty-fifth year to the end of life. Phralaong was born on the 68th year of the Eatzana era, on the 6th after the full moon of the month Katsong. Maia was therefore fifty-six years old. The author of this work strives hard to prove this the age, apparently advanced of Maia, was the best fitted for securing the safety and perfection of the fruit of her womb. King Thoodaudana, hearing of the explanation given by the Pounhas, inquired whether his son was really to become a Rahan. Having been assured that all the signs predicted the future destiny of his son to such a calling, he desired to know what those signs were. He was told that the four following things were the very signs foreshowing the future career of his son, viz., an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a recluse.[4] As soon as his son should successively remark those four signs, he would immediately come to the conclusion that the state of Rahan alone is worthy of the warm admiration and eager wishes of a wise man. King Thoodaudana, who ardently wished to see his son become a great monarch, whose sway would extend over the four great islands and the two thousand smaller ones, gave the strictest orders that none of the four omens should ever meet his eyes. Guards were placed in every direction at distances of a mile, charged with but one care, that of keeping out of his son's sight the appearance of these fatal omens. On that day eighty thousand noblemen, who were present at the great rejoicings, pledged themselves each one to give one of his male children to attend on the royal infant. "If he become," said they, "a mighty monarch, let our sons be ever with him, as a guard of honour to confer additional lustre on his wonderful reign. If he be ever elevated to the sublime dignity of Buddha, let our children enter the holy profession of recluse, and follow him whithersoever he may direct his steps." Thoodaudana, with the tender solicitude of a vigilant father, procured for his beloved offspring nurses exempt from all corporeal defects, and remarkable for their beautiful and graceful appearance. The child grew up, surrounded with a brilliant retinue of numerous attendants. On a certain day happened the joyful feast of the ploughing season. The whole country, by the magnificence of the ornaments that decorated it, resembled one of the seats of Nats. The country people without exception, wearing new dresses, went to the palace. One thousand ploughs and the same number of pairs of bullocks were prepared for the occasion. Eight hundred ploughs, less one, were to be handled and guided by noblemen. The ploughs, as well as the yokes and the horns of the bullocks, were covered with silver leaves. But the one reserved for the monarch was covered with leaves of gold. Accompanied by a countless crowd of his people, King Thoodaudana left the royal city and went into the middle of extensive fields. The royal infant was brought out by his nurses on this joyful occasion. A splendid jambu tree (_Eugenia_), loaded with thick and luxuriant green foliage, offered on that spot a refreshing place under the shade of its far-spreading branches. Here the bed of the child was deposited. A gilt canopy was immediately raised above it, and curtains, embroidered with gold, were disposed round it. Guardians having been appointed to watch over the infant, the king, attended by all his courtiers, directed his steps towards the place where all the ploughs were held in readiness. He instantly put his hands to his own plough; eight hundred noblemen, less one, and the country people followed his example. Pressing forward his bullocks, the king ploughed to and fro through the extent of the fields. All the ploughmen, emulating their royal lord, drove their ploughs in a uniform direction. The scene presented a most animated and stirring spectacle on an immense scale. The applauding multitude filled the air with cries of joy and exultation. The nurses, who kept watch by the side of the infant's cradle, excited by the animated scene, forgot the prince's orders, and ran near to the spot to enjoy the soul-stirring sight displayed before their admiring eyes. Phralaong, casting a glance all round, and seeing no one close by him, rose up instantly, and, sitting in a cross-legged position, remained absorbed as it were in a profound meditation. The other nurses, busy in preparing the prince's meal, had spent more time than was at first contemplated. The shadow of the trees had, by the movement of the sun, turned in an opposite direction. The nurses, reminded by this sight that the infant had been left alone, and that his couch was exposed to the rays of the sun, hastened back to the spot they had so imprudently left. But great was their surprise when they saw that the shadow of the jambu tree had not changed its position, and that the child was quietly sitting on his bed. The news of that wonder was immediately conveyed to King Thoodaudana, who came in all haste to witness it. He forthwith prostrated himself before his son, saying, "This is, beloved child, the second time that I bow to you." Phralaong[5] having reached his sixteenth year, his father ordered three palaces to be built for each season of the year. Each palace had nine stories; and forty thousand maidens, skilful in playing all sorts of musical instruments, were in continual attendance upon him, and charmed all his moments by uninterrupted dances and music. Phralaong appeared among them with the beauty and dignity of a Nat, surrounded with an immense retinue of daughters of Nats. According to the change of seasons he passed from one palace into another, moving as it were in a circle of ever-renewed pleasures and amusements. It was then that Phralaong was married to the beautiful Yathaudara, his first cousin, and the daughter of Thouppabudha and of Amitau. It was in the eighty-sixth year of his grandfather's era that he was married, and also consecrated Prince royal by the pouring of the blessed water over his head. Whilst Phralaong was spending his time in the midst of pleasures, his relatives complained to the king of the conduct of his son. They strongly remonstrated against his mode of living, which precluded him from applying himself to the acquisition of those attainments befitting his exalted station. Sensible of these reproaches, Thoodaudana sent for his son, to whom he made known the complaints directed against him by his relatives. Without showing any emotion, the young prince replied, "Let it be announced at the sound of the drum throughout the country, that this day week I will show to my relatives in the presence of the best masters that I am fully conversant with the eighteen sorts of arts and sciences." On the appointed day he displayed before them the extent of his knowledge; they were satisfied, and their doubts and anxieties on his account were entirely removed. On a certain day Phralaong, desiring to go and enjoy some sports in his garden, ordered his coachman to have his conveyance ready for that purpose. Four horses, richly caparisoned, were put to a beautiful carriage, that resembled the dwelling-place of a Nat. Phralaong having occupied his seat, the coachman drove rapidly towards the garden. The Nats, who knew that the time was near at hand when Phralaong would become a Buddha, resolved to place successively before his eyes the four signs foreshowing his future high dignity. One of them assumed the form of an old man, the body bending forward, with grey hairs, a shrivelled skin, and leaning languidly on a heavy staff. In that attire, he advanced slowly, with trembling steps, towards the prince's conveyance. He was seen and remarked only by Phralaong and his coachman. "Who is that man?" said the prince to his driver; "the hairs of his head, indeed, do not resemble those of other men." "Prince," answered the coachman, "he is an old man. Every born being is doomed to become like him; his appearance must undergo the greatest changes, the skin by the action of time will shrivel, the hairs turn grey, the veins and arteries, losing their suppleness and elasticity, will become stiff and hardened, the flesh will gradually sink and almost disappear, leaving the bare bones covered with dry skin." "What?" said to himself the terrified prince; "birth is indeed a great evil, ushering all beings into a wretched condition, which must be inevitably attended with the disgusting infirmities of old age!" His mind being taken up entirely with such considerations, he ordered his coachman to drive back to the palace. Thoodaudana, having inquired from his courtiers what motive had induced his son to return so soon from the place of amusement, was told that he had seen an old man, and that he entertained the thought of becoming a Rahan.[H] "Alas!" said he, "they will succeed in thwarting the high destiny of my son. But let us try now every means to afford him some distraction, so that he may forget the evil idea that has just started up in his mind." He gave orders to bring to his son's palace the prettiest and most accomplished dancing-girls, that, in the midst of ever renewed pleasure, he might lose sight of the thought of ever entering the profession of Rahan. The guard surrounding his palace was doubled, so as to preclude the possibility of his ever seeing the other signs. [H] In the course of this work the word Rahan is often used. It is of the greatest importance that the reader should firmly seize the meaning that it is designed to convey. We find it employed to designate, in general, the religious belonging either to the Buddhistic or Brahminical sects. When Buddhists happen to mention their brethren of the opposite creed, who have renounced the world and devoted themselves to the practice of religious duties, they invariably call them Rahans. When they speak of Pounhas or Brahmins, who are living in the world, leading an ordinary secular mode of life, they never style them Rahans. Thence we may safely infer that the individuals to whom this denomination was applied formed a class of devotees quite distinct from the laymen. That class, it appears, comprised all the individuals who lived either in community under the superintendence and guidance of a spiritual superior, or privately in forests under the protecting shade of trees, and in lonely and solitary places. The latter religious are, however, generally designated by the appellation of Ascetics and Rathees. They were the forefathers of those fanatics who up to our days have appeared through the breadth and length of the Indian Peninsula, practising penitential deeds of the most cruel and revolting description. They are described by Buddhists as wearing curled and twisted hair, clad in the skins of wild beasts, and not unfrequently quite destitute of any sort of clothing, and in a state of complete nakedness. The former, who lived in community, did not lead the same course of life. We find some communities, the three, for instance, under the guidance of the three Kathabas, in the Ouroowela forest, not far from Radzagio, whose inmates are called either Rahans or Rathees. This indicates that their mode of life partook both of the common and hermitical life, resembling, to a certain extent, that which was observed by the Christian communities of cenobites established in the desert of Upper Egypt during the first ages of our era. Those communities appear to have been the centres in which principles were established, opinions discussed, and theories elaborated. The chiefs enjoyed high reputation for learning. Persons desirous to acquire proficiency in science resorted to their abode, and, under their tuition, strove to acquire wisdom. The following pages of this work will afford several striking illustrations of the view just sketched out. On another day, Phralaong, on his way to his garden, met with the same Nat under the form of a sick man, who appeared quite sinking under the weight of the most loathsome disease. Frightened at such a sight, Phralaong, hearing from the mouth of his faithful driver what this disgusting object was, returned in all haste to his palace. His father, more and more disturbed at the news conveyed to him, multiplied the pleasures and enjoyments destined for his son, and doubled the number of guards that had to watch over him. On a third occasion, whilst the prince was taking a walk, the same Nat, assuming the shape of a dead man, offered to the astonished regards of the prince the shocking sight of a corpse. Trembling with fear, the young prince came back forthwith to his residence. Thoodaudana, being soon informed of what had taken place, resorted to fresh precautions, and extended to the distance of one youdzana the immense line of countless guards set all round the palace. On a fourth occasion, the prince, driving rapidly towards his garden, was met on his way by the same Nat under the meek form of a Rahan. The curiosity of the prince was awakened by the extraordinary sight of that new personage: he asked his coachman what he was. "Prince," answered the coachman, "he is a Rahan." At the same time, though little acquainted with the high dignity and sublime qualifications of a recluse, he was enabled, by the power of the Nats, to praise and extol in dignified language the profession and merits of Rahans. The prince felt instantaneously an almost irresistible inclination to embrace that attractive mode of life. He quietly went as far as his garden. The whole day was spent in all sorts of rural diversions. Having bathed in a magnificent tank, he went a little before sunset to rest awhile on a large well-polished stone table, overshaded by the far-spread branches of beautiful trees hanging above it, waiting for the time to put on his richest dress. All his attendants were busily engaged in preparing the finest clothes and most elegant ornaments. When all was ready, they stood silent round him, waiting for his orders. Perfumes of every description were disposed in a circular row with the various ornaments on the table whereon the prince was sitting. At that very moment a chief Thagia was quietly enjoying a delicious and refreshing rest on the famous stone table called Pantoo Kambala. On a sudden, he felt his seat as it were getting hot. "Lo! what does this mean?" said the astonished Thagia; "am I doomed to lose my happy state?" Having recollected himself, and reflected a while on the cause of such a wonderful occurrence, he soon knew that Phralaong was preparing to put on for the last time his princely dress. He called to him the son of a Nat, named Withakioon, and said to him, "On this day, at midnight, Prince Theiddat is to leave his palace and withdraw into solitude. Now he is in his garden, preparing to put on his richest attire for the last time. Go, therefore, without a moment's delay, to the place where he is sitting, surrounded by his attendants, and perform to him all the required services." Bowing respectfully to the chief of Thagias, Withakioon obeyed, and by the power inherent in the nature of Nats, he was in an instant carried to the presence of Phralaong. He assumed the figure of his barber, and immediately set to work to arrange the turban with as much taste as art round his head. Phralaong soon found out that the skilful hand which disposed the folds of his head-dress was not that of a man, but of a Nat. One fold of the turban appeared like one thousand, and ten folds like ten thousand folds, offering the magical _coup-d'oeil_ of as many different pieces of cloth, arranged with the most consummate skill. The extremity of the turban, which crossed vertically the whole breadth of the countless folds, appeared covered with a profusion of shining rubies. The head of Phralaong was small, but the folds of the turban seemed numberless. How could that be so? It is a wonder surpassing our understanding; it would be rashness and temerity to allow our minds to dwell too much upon it. Having completely dressed, Phralaong[6] found himself surrounded by all sorts of musicians, singers, and dancers, vying with each other in their endeavours to increase the rejoicing. The Pounhas sang aloud his praise. "May he conquer and triumph! May his wishes and desires be ever fulfilled!" The multitude repeated incessantly in his honour stanzas of praises and blessings. In the midst of universal rejoicings, Phralaong ascended his carriage. He had scarcely seated himself on it, when a message, sent by his father, conveyed to him the gladdening tidings that Yathaudara had been delivered of a son. "That child," replied he with great coolness, "is a new and strong tie that I will have to break." The answer having been brought to his father, Thoodaudana could not understand its meaning. He, however, caused his grandson to be named Raoula. Phralaong, sitting in his carriage, surrounded by crowds of people, who rent the air with cries of joy and jubilation, entered into the city of Kapilawot. At that moment a princess, named Keissa Gautami, was contemplating from her apartments the triumphant entrance of Phralaong into the city. She admired the noble and graceful deportment of Prince Theiddat, and exclaimed with feelings of inexpressible delight, "Happy the father and mother who have such an incomparable son! happy the wife who is blest with such an accomplished husband!" On hearing those words, Phralaong desired to understand their meaning and know their bearing. "By what means," said he to himself, "can a heart find peace and happiness?" As his heart was already disentangled from the thraldom of passions, he readily perceived that real happiness could be found but in the extinction of concupiscence, pride, ignorance, and other passions. He resolved henceforth to search ardently for the happy state of Neibban, by quitting the world that very night, leaving the society of men, and withdrawing into solitude. Detaching from his neck a collar of pearls of immense value, he sent it to Keissa Gautami, as a token of gratitude for the excellent lesson she had given him by the words which she had uttered in his praise. The young princess received it as a mark of favour which she imagined Prince Theiddat intended to pay her. Without further notice of her, he retired into his own apartment to enjoy some rest. FOOTNOTES [1] Which of the two systems, Buddhism or Brahminism, is the most ancient? This is a question which learned Orientalists have in former days variously answered. If, however, some credit is to be given to this Legend, and the hero thereof is to be regarded as the author of Buddhism, the solution of that much-controverted question is comparatively easy, and seems to admit of no doubt. Priority of antiquity is decidedly in favour of Brahminism. At the time Buddha was born, and in his own country, we find already subsisting the great politico-religious fabric of Hinduism. The distinction of caste is already mentioned in several passages. We find the Pounhas or Brahmins already monopolising the lucrative trade of soothsaying, and regarded as the best informed among their countrymen. They are treated with great respect and consideration even by proud monarchs, who testify their regard for them by costly presents and every possible mark of distinction. It is true that their caste is not always spoken of with great regard by Buddhist authors; but this is to be attributed to the deadly enmity that prevailed at a later period between those two great rival sects, which have so long struggled for supremacy over the Indian Peninsula. The Brahminical creed is spoken of in very disparaging terms by Buddhists; and, as a matter of course, they have been reciprocally handled severely by their opponents. To those who feel inclined to regard Buddha as but a great reformer of a religious system already existing, the question will not appear cleared of all difficulty. But upon them rests the task of establishing on uncontrovertible grounds their hypothesis, ere any serious attention can be paid to the conclusion they would fain infer in favour of the superior antiquity of Buddhism. As for us, we believe Buddha to be the real author of the great religious system under examination. But, at the same time, we readily concede that many elements found existing in those days were seized upon by Buddha, and skilfully arranged so as to harmonise well with his plans. [2] Superstition and ignorance seem to have been in all ages and under every climate the prolific source of human follies and mental delusions. Man has always been and will ever be the same ridiculously superstitious being, as long as his mind is left to itself, unenlightened by revelation. With few exceptions, the greatest men of Italy and Greece were as superstitious as the _vulgus_, to whom, in every other respect, they were so superior. The resemblance error bears to truth, when human passions have some interest at stake, deceives many; under deceitful appearances it finds its way to the mind, and then clings to the heart. There is in man an innate desire of tearing asunder the thick veil that hides from him the knowledge of future events. Unable to comprehend the perfect economy of an all-wise Providence in the disposition and management of the affairs of this world, he has recourse to the most absurd means for satiating the cravings of his inordinate curiosity. Hence the prevailing superstition of those days, which induced men to believe that Brahmins, on inspecting the inner part of the hand, could discover certain signs, foreshowing the good or bad destiny of every individual. [3] Metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul from one state of existence into another in the same world, is one of the leading dogmas of Buddhism. Many passages of the present work, or rather the Buddhistic system as a whole, can never be understood unless this tenet be always borne in mind. It is by passing through countless existences that a being is slowly purified of his imperfections, and gradually advances in the way of merits and perfection. The sacred writings of Buddhists mention that our Phralaong had to range, during innumerable existences, the whole series of the animal kingdom, from the dove to the elephant, ere he could be born in the state of man, when, in this condition, he, as stated by himself, went often into hell to atone for certain trespassings. Pythagoras had likely borrowed, and received directly or indirectly from the East, this doctrine, which his school re-echoed throughout Greece and Italy. The end of metempsychosis is, according to Buddhists, the state of Neibban. On this point the author of Buddhism has been at variance with other religious schools, which in his own days held and professed the dogma of transmigration. [4] The three first allegorical omens or signs which, according to the foretelling of the Pounhas, were to be seen and observed hereafter by Phralaong, are designed to mean and express the compound of all miseries attending human existence, from the moment man crosses the threshold of life to that of death. The view of these objects was intended to make him disgusted with a state necessarily accompanied with such an amount of wretchedness. He was soon induced by reflection to hold in contempt the things of this world, and consequently to seek with ardour some means of estranging himself from all visible and material objects. The fourth sign, that is to say, the view of a Rahan, or a contemner of this world, aspiring to perfect disengagement from the trammels of passion, and shaping his course towards Neibban, was the very pattern he had to imitate and follow for arriving to that state of perfection which he felt a strong, though as yet somewhat confused, desire of possessing. The Nats or Dewatas are the ever-ready ministers for affording to Phralaong the assistance he requires to reach in safety the Buddhaship. They rejoice at the news of his approaching conception in the womb of Maia; they watch over the mother who is to give birth to so blessed a child; they receive the newly-born infant, and hand him over to men; they baffle, by their almost supernatural power, the obstacles which the worldly-minded Thoodaudana tries to throw in the way of his son's vocation; in a word, their angelical ministrations are always at hand to help and protect our Phralaong, and enable him to reach that state wherein he shall be fully qualified for announcing to men the law of deliverance. The belief in the agency of angels between heaven and earth, and their being the messengers of God for conveying, on solemn occasions, his mandates to men, is coeval, according to sacred records, with the appearance of man in this world. Innumerable are the instances of angelical ministrations mentioned in the holy writ. We look upon angels as mere spiritual substances, assuming a human form, when, by the command of God, they have to bring down to men some divine message. In the system of the Buddhists, Nats are described as having bodies indeed, but of such a pure nature, particularly those inhabiting the superior seats, that they are not only not subjected to the miseries inherent in our nature, but are moreover gifted with such superior attainments as almost to enjoy the perfections and qualifications inherent in the nature of spirits. On this occasion the Nats are endeavouring to make virtue triumph over vice; but, in the course of this legend, we will have several opportunities of remarking a counteraction worked up by evil or wicked Nats for upholding the reign of passion or of sin. In this system the two contending elements of good and evil have each its own advocates and supporters. A Hindu Milton might have found two thousand years ago a ready theme for writing, in Sanscrit or Pali, a poem similar to that more recently composed by the immortal English bard. [5] From what has been already mentioned of the life of our Phralaong, we may see that many particulars regarding his birth and his childhood have been described with sufficient accuracy; but little or nothing is said of his adolescence, at least until the age of sixteen, when he gets united to the famous and youthful Yathaudara. In common with many other great men, almost all the years of the private life of this celebrated and extraordinary personage are wrapped up in a complete obscurity. We may conclude from his great proficiency in the knowledge of those sciences and attainments befitting his high situation, he was not remiss, since he was enabled to set at defiance the greatest masters of those days. In the midst of pleasures he knew how to devote the best part of his time to study, unless we suppose that science was infused into his mind by no exertion of his own. The Burmese have a regular mania for dividing with a mathematical precision what at first appears to admit of no such division. Virtues, vices, sciences, arts, &c., all, in a word, are subjected to a rigorous division, which, if arbitrary in itself, has the great advantage of conferring a substantial help to the memory. [6] The triumphant return of Phralaong from his garden to the city, when he is attired with the richest dress, is commemorated by Buddhists, at least in Burmah, on the day a young boy is preparing to enter into a monastery of recluses for the purpose of putting on the yellow robe, and preparing himself to become afterwards a member of the order, if he feel an inclination to enlist in its ranks. Phralaong was bidding a last farewell to the world, its pomps and vanities. So the youthful candidate is doing who is led processionally through the streets, riding a richly-caparisoned horse, or sitting on an elegant palanquin, carried on the shoulders of men. A description of this ceremony will be found in the notice on the Buddhistic monks or Talapoins. I am obliged to confess that I have found it somewhat difficult to discover any connection between the expressions made use of by Keissa Gautami and the inference drawn therefrom by Phralaong. The explanation of the difficulty may be, however, stated as follows:--Gautami bestows the epithet happy or blessed upon the father and mother as well as on the wife of Prince Theiddat, because she remarked and observed in him those qualities and accomplishments befitting a worthy son and a good husband. The words blessed and happy struck the mind of the future Buddha, attracted his attention, and drew forth his exertions to find out their true import. He asks himself, In what consists true and real happiness? Where is it to be found? By what means can such an invaluable treasure be procured? Can it be conferred upon man by the possession of some exterior object? Can his parents or wife be really happy by the mere accidental ties that connect them with his person? No, answers our young philosopher to himself: Happiness can be procured but by waging war against passions, and carrying it on until their total destruction. Then the victorious soul, sitting calmly on the ruins of her deadly opponents, enjoys in the undisturbed contemplation of truth an indescribable happiness. In this we clearly perceive the unmistakable bearing of Buddhistic morals. It is as it were the embryo of the whole system. King Thoodaudana, influenced by worldly considerations, eagerly wished his son to become a great monarch instead of a poor and humble recluse, even a Buddha. This alone suggests the idea that in those days the _rôle_ of a Buddha was not held in so great an esteem and veneration as it was afterwards. Had it been otherwise, the most ambitious father might have remained well satisfied with the certainty of seeing his own son becoming a personage before whom the proudest monarch would one day lower to the dust their crowned heads. At that time a Buddha, or the personage honoured with that title, was looked upon as a mere sage, distinguished among his fellow-men by his great wisdom and eminent proficiency in the study of philosophy. It is highly probable that this name had been bestowed upon a great many illustrious individuals who lived before the days of Gaudama. Hence the fabricated genealogy of twenty-eight former Buddhas, supposed to have lived myriads of years and worlds previously, including the three that have preceded him during the continuance of this system of nature. Here a superstitious and ill-judged enthusiasm has raised up heaps of extravagancies, setting up a ridiculous theory, designed to connect the _rôle_ of the present Buddha with those of a fabulous antiquity, and give additional lustre to it. There is no doubt that the glowing halo of sacredness and glory, encircling now the name of Buddha, has never adorned that of any former one. It has been created by the extraordinary progress his doctrines made at first in the Indian Peninsula, and next throughout eastern Asia, and kept up by the fervent admiration of his enthusiastic followers. The means resorted to by Thoodaudana to retain his son in the world of passions, and thereby thwart his vocation, could not, we hardly need mention, be approved of by any moralist of even the greatest elasticity of conscience and principles; but they were eminently fitted to try the soundness of Phralaong's calling, and the strong and tenacious dispositions of his energetic mind. They set out in vivid colours the firmness of purpose and irresistible determination of his soul in following up his vocation to a holier mode of life; and what is yet more wonderful, the very objects that were designed to enslave him became the instruments which helped him in gaining and ascertaining his liberty. Magnificent, indeed, is the spectacle offered by a young prince remaining unmoved in the midst of the most captivating, soul-stirring, and heart-melting attractions; sitting coolly on his couch, and looking with indifference, nay, with disgust, on the crowd of sleeping beauties. CHAPTER IV. _Phralaong leaves his palace, the royal city, and retires into solitude, amidst the plaudits of the Nats -- He cuts his fine hair with a stroke of his sword, and puts on the habit of Rahan -- He begs his food at Radzagio -- His interview with the ruler of that place -- His studies under two Rathees -- His fast and penances in the solitude of Oorouwela during six years._ Phralaong had scarcely begun to recline on his couch, when a crowd of young damsels, whose beauty equalled that of the daughters of Nats, executed all sorts of dances to the sound of the most ravishing symphony, and displayed in all their movements the graceful forms of their elegant and well-shaped persons, in order to make some impression upon his heart. But all was in vain; they were foiled in their repeated attempts. Phralaong fell into a deep sleep. The damsels, in their disappointment, ceased their dances, laid aside their musical instruments, and, soon following the example of Phralaong, quietly yielded to the soporific influence caused by their useless and harassing exertions. The lamps, lighted with fragrant oil, continued to pour a flood of bright light throughout the apartments. Phralaong awoke a little before midnight, and sat in a cross-legged position on his couch. Looking all around him, he saw the varied attitudes and uninviting appearance of the sleeping damsels. Some were snoring, others gnashing their teeth, others had their mouths wide open; some tossed heavily from the right to the left side, others stretched one arm upwards and the other downwards; some, seized as it were with a frantic pang, suddenly coiled up their legs for a while, and with the same violent motion again pushed them down. This unexpected exhibition made a strong impression on Phralaong; his heart was set, if possible, freer from the ties of concupiscence, or rather he was confirmed in his contempt for all worldly pleasures. It appeared to him that his magnificent apartments were filled with the most loathsome and putrid carcasses. The seats of passions, those of Rupa and those of Arupa, that is to say, the whole world, seemed, to his eyes, like a house that is a prey to the devouring flames. "All that," said he to himself, "is most disgusting and despicable." At the same time his ardent desires for the profession of Rahan were increasing with an uncontrollable energy. "On this day, at this very moment," said he with an unshaken firmness, "I will retire into a solitary place." He rose instantly and went to the arched door of his apartment. "Who is here watching?" said he to the first person he met. "Your servant," replied instantly the vigilant nobleman Tsanda. "Rise up quickly," replied the prince; "now I am ready to retire from the world and resort to some lonely place. Go to the stable and prepare the fastest of my horses." Tsanda bowed respectfully to his master, and executed his orders with the utmost celerity. The horse Kantika, knowing the intentions of the prince, felt an inexpressible joy at being selected for such a good errand, and he testified his joy by loud neighs; but, by the power of the Nats, the sound of his voice was silenced, so that none heard it. While Tsanda, in compliance with the orders he had received, was making the necessary preparations, Phralaong desired to see his newly born son Raoula. He opened gently the door of the room where the princess was sleeping, having one of her hands placed over the head of the infant. Phralaong, stopping at the threshold, said to himself:--"If I go farther to contemplate the child, I will have to remove the hand of the mother; she may be awakened by this movement, and then she will prove a great obstacle to my departure. I will see the child after I have become a Buddha." He then instantly shut the door and left the palace. His charger was waiting for him. "To your swiftness," said Phralaong to Kantika, "do I trust for executing my great design. I must become a Buddha, and labour for the deliverance of men and Nats from the miseries of existence, and lead them safely to the peaceful shores of Neibban." In a moment he was on the back of his favourite horse. Kantika was a magnificent animal; his body measured eighteen cubits in length, with which his height and circumference were in perfect proportion. The hair was of a beautiful white, resembling a newly cleaned shell; his swiftness was unrivalled, and his neighings could be heard at a very great distance; but on this occasion the Nats interfered, no sound of his voice was heard, and the noise of his steps was completely silenced. Having reached the gate of the city, Phralaong stopped for a while, uncertain as regarded the course he was to follow. To open the gate, which a thousand men could with difficulty cause to turn upon its hinges, was deemed an impossibility. Whilst he was deliberating with his faithful attendant Tsanda, the huge gate was silently opened by the Nats, and a free passage given to him through it. It was in the year 97 when he left Kapilawot. Phralaong had scarcely crossed the threshold of the gate when the tempter endeavoured to thwart his pious design. Manh[1] Nat resolved to prevent him from retiring into solitude and becoming a Buddha. Standing in the air, he cried aloud, "Prince Theiddat, do not attempt to lead the life of a recluse; seven days hence you will become a Tsekiawaday; your sway shall extend over the four great islands; return forthwith to your palace." "Who are you?" replied Phralaong. "I am Manh Nat," cried the voice. "I know," said Phralaong, "that I can become a Tsekiawaday, but I feel not the least inclination for earthly dignities; my aim is to arrive at the nature of Buddha." The tempter, urged onward by his three wicked propensities, concupiscence, ignorance, and anger, did not part for a moment from Phralaong; but as the shadow always accompanies the body, he too, from that day, always followed Phralaong, striving to throw every obstacle in his way towards the dignity of Buddha. Trampling down every human and worldly consideration, and despising a power full of vanity and illusion, Phralaong left the city of Kapilawot, at the full moon of July under the constellation Oottarathan. A little while after, he felt a strong desire to turn round his head and cast a last glance at the magnificent city he was leaving behind him; but he soon overcame that inordinate desire and denied himself this gratification. It is said that on the very instant he was combating the rising sense of curiosity the mighty earth turned with great velocity, like a potter's wheel, so that the very object he denied himself the satisfaction of contemplating came of itself under his eyes. Phralaong hesitated a while as to the direction he was to follow, but he resolved instantly to push on straight before him. His progress through the country resembled a splendid triumphal ovation. Sixty thousand Nats marched in front of him, an equal number followed him, and as many surrounded him on his right and on his left. All of them carried lighted torches, pouring a flood of light in every direction; others again spread perfumes and flowers brought from their own seats. All joined in chorus, singing the praises of Phralaong. The sound of their united voices resembled loud peals of continued thunder, and the resounding of the mighty waves at the foot of the Mount Oogando. Flowers, shedding the most fragrant odour, were seen gracefully undulating in the air, like an immense canopy, extending to the farthest limits of the horizon. During that night, Phralaong, attended with that brilliant retinue, travelled a distance of thirty youdzanas, and arrived on the banks of the river Anauma. Turning his face towards Tsanda, he asked what was the river's name. "Anauma is its name," replied his faithful attendant. "I will not," said Phralaong to himself, "show myself unworthy of the high dignity I aspire to." Spurring his horse, the fierce animal leaped at once to the opposite bank. Phralaong alighted on the ground, which was covered with a fine sand resembling pearls, when the rays of the sun fell upon it in the morning. On that spot he divested himself of his dress, and calling Tsanda to him, he directed him to take charge of his ornaments, and carry them back with the horse Kantika to his palace. For himself, he had made up his mind to become a Rahan. "Your servant too," replied Tsanda, "will become also a recluse in your company." "No," said the prince, "the profession of Rahan does not at present befit you." He reiterated this prohibition three times. When he was handing over to Tsanda his costly ornaments, he said to himself, "These long hairs that cover my head, and my beard too, are superfluities unbecoming the profession of Rahan." Whereupon with one hand unsheathing his sword, and with the other seizing his comely hairs, he cut them with a single stroke. What remained of his hairs on the head measured about one inch and a half in length. In like manner he disposed of his beard. From that time he never needed shaving; the hairs of his beard and those of the head never grew longer during the remainder of his life.[2] Holding his hairs and turban together, he cried aloud, "If I am destined to become a Buddha, let these hairs and turban remain suspended in the air; if not, let them drop down on the ground." Throwing up both to the height of one youdzana, they remained suspended in the air, until a Nat came with a rich basket, put them therein, and carried them to the seat of Tawadeintha. He there erected the Dzedi Dzoulamani, wherein they were religiously deposited. Casting his regards on his own person, Phralaong saw that his rich and shining robe did not answer his purpose, nor appear befitting the poor and humble profession he was about to embrace. While his attention was taken up with this consideration, a great Brahma, named Gatigara, who in the days of the Buddha Kathaba had been an intimate friend of our Phralaong, and who, during the period that elapsed between the manifestation of that Buddha to the present time, had not grown old, discovered at once the perplexity of his friend's mind. "Prince Theiddat," said he, "is preparing to become a Rahan, but he is not supplied with the dress and other implements essentially required for his future calling. I will provide him now with the thinbaing, the kowot, the dugout, the patta, the leathern girdle, the hatchet, the needle, and filter."[3] He took with him all these articles, and in an instant arrived in the presence of Phralaong, to whom he presented them. Though unacquainted with the details of that dress, and untrained in the use of those new implements, the prince, like a man who had been a recluse during several existences, put on with a graceful gravity his new dress. He adjusted the thinbaing round his waist, covered his body with the kowot, threw the dugout over his shoulders, and suspended to his neck the bag containing the earthen patta. Assuming the grave, meek, and dignified countenance of a Rahan, he called Tsanda and bade him go back to his father and relate to him all that he had seen. Tsanda, complying with his master's request, prostrated himself three times before him; then, rising up, he wheeled to the right and departed. The spirited horse, hearing the last words of Phralaong, could no more control his grief.[4] "Alas!" said he, "I will see no more my master in this world." His sorrow grew so great that his heart split into two parts, and he died on the spot. After his death, he became a Nat in the seat of Tawadeintha. The affliction of Tsanda at parting with his good master was increased by the death of Kantika. The tears that streamed down his cheeks resembled drops of liquid silver. Phralaong, having thus begun the life of a recluse, spent seven days alone in a forest of mango trees, enjoying in that retirement the peace and happiness of soul which solitude alone can confer. The place, in the neighbourhood of which he began his religious life, is called Anupyia, in the country belonging to the Malla princes. He then started for the country of Radzagio, travelling on foot a distance of thirty youdzanas. Arrived near the gate of the royal city, Phralaong stopped for a while, saying within himself, "Peimpathara, the king of this country, will no doubt hear of my arrival in this place. Knowing that the son of King Thoodaudana is actually in his own royal city, he will insist upon my accepting all sorts of presents. But now, in my capacity of Rahan, I must decline accepting them, and by the rules of my profession I am bound to go and beg along the streets, from house to house, the food necessary for my support." He instantly resumed his journey, entered the city through the eastern gate, the patta hanging on his side, and followed the first row of houses, receiving the alms which pious hands offered him. At the moment of his arrival the whole city was shaken by a mighty commotion, like that which is felt in the seat of Thoora when the Nat Athoorein makes his apparition in it. The inhabitants, terrified at such an ominous sign, ran in all haste to the palace. Admitted into the presence of the monarch, they told him that they knew not what sort of being had just arrived in the city, walking through the streets and begging alms. They could not ascertain whether he was a Nat, a man, or a Galong. The king, looking from his apartments over the city, saw Phralaong, whose meek deportment removed all anxiety from his mind. He, however, directed a few of his noblemen to go and watch attentively all the movements of the stranger. "If he be," said he, "a Bilou, he will soon leave the city and vanish away; if a Nat, he will raise himself in the air; if a Naga, he will plunge to the bottom of the earth." Phralaong, having obtained the quantity of rice, vegetables, &c., he thought sufficient for his meal, left the city through the same gate by which he had entered it, sat down at the foot of a small hill, his face turned towards the east, and tried to make his meal with the things he had received. He could not swallow the first mouthful, which he threw out of his mouth in utter disgust. Accustomed to live sumptuously and feed on the most delicate things, his eyes could not bear even the sight of that loathsome mixture of the coarsest articles of food collected at the bottom of his patta. He soon, however, recovered from that shock; and gathered fresh strength to subdue the opposition of nature, overcome its repugnance, and conquer its resistance. Reproaching himself for such an unbecoming weakness:--"Was I not aware," said he, with a feeling of indignation against himself, "that when I took up the dress of a mendicant such would be my food? The moment is come to trample upon nature's appetites." Whereupon he took up his patta, ate cheerfully his meal, and never afterwards did he ever feel any repugnance at what things soever he had to eat. The king's messengers, having closely watched and attentively observed all that had happened, returned to their master, to whom they related all the particulars that they had witnessed. "Let my carriage be ready," said the king, "and you, follow me to the place where this stranger is resting." He soon perceived Phralaong at a distance, sitting quietly after his refection. Peimpathara alighted from his conveyance, respectfully drew near to Phralaong, and, having occupied a seat in a becoming place, was overwhelmed with contentment and inexpressible joy to such an extent, indeed, that he could scarcely find words to give utterance to his feelings. Having at last recovered from the first impression, he addressed Phralaong in the following manner:--"Venerable Rahan, you seem to be young still, and in the prime of your life; in your person you are gifted with the most attractive and noble qualities, indicating surely your illustrious and royal extraction. I have under my control and in my possession a countless crowd of officers, elephants, horses and chariots, affording every desirable convenience for pleasure and amusement of every description. Please to accept of a numerous retinue of attendants, with whom you may enjoy yourself whilst remaining within my dominions. May I be allowed to ask what country you belong to, who you are, and from what illustrious lineage and descent you are come?" Phralaong said to himself:--"It is evident that the king is unacquainted with both my name and origin; I will, however, satisfy him on the subject of his inquiry." Pointing out with his hand in the direction of the place he had come from, he said:--"I arrive from the country which has been governed by a long succession of the descendants of Prince Kothala. I have, indeed, been born from royal progenitors, but I have abandoned all the prerogatives attached to my position, and embraced the profession of Rahan. From my heart I have rooted up concupiscence, covetousness, and all affections to the things of this world." To this the king replied:--"I have heard that Prince Theiddat, son of King Thoodaudana, had seen four great signs, portending his future destiny for the profession of Rahan, which would be but a step to lead him to the exalted dignity of a Buddha. The first part of the prediction has been already fulfilled. When the second shall have received its accomplishment, I beg you will show your benevolence to me and my people. I hope my kingdom will be the first country you will direct your steps to, after having acquired the supreme science." To this Phralaong graciously assented. Phralaong, having left the king, resumed his journey, and fell in with a Rathee,[5] or hermit, named Alara, and inquired about the several Dzans. Alara satisfied him on four kinds of Dzans, but as regards the fifth, he was obliged to refer him to another Rathee, named Oudaka, who gave him the necessary explanations. Having nothing more to learn from these masters, Phralaong said to himself, "The knowledge I have thus acquired is not sufficient to enable me to obtain the dignity of Buddha." Whereupon he resolved to devote himself to the Kamatan[6] or meditation on the instability and nothingness of all that exists. To effectuate thoroughly his purpose, he repaired to the solitude of Oorouwela, where he devoted all his time to the deepest meditation. On a certain day it happened that five Rahans, on their way to a certain place to get their food, arrived at the spot where Phralaong lived and had already entered on the course of his penitential deeds. They soon became impressed with the idea that our hermit was to become a Buddha. They resolved to stay with him and render him all the needful services, such as sweeping the place, cooking rice, &c. The time for the six years of meditation was nearly over, when Phralaong undertook a great fast,[7] which was carried to such a degree of abstemiousness that he scarcely allowed to himself the use of a grain of rice or sesame a day, and finally denied himself even that feeble pittance. But the Nats, who observed his excessive mortification, inserted Nat food through the pores of his skin. Whilst Phralaong was thus undergoing such a severe fasting, his face, which was of a beautiful gold colour, became black; the thirty-two marks indicative of his future dignity disappeared. On a certain day, when he was walking in a much enfeebled state, on a sudden he felt an extreme weakness, similar to that caused by a dire starvation. Unable to stand up any longer, he fainted and fell on the ground. Among the Nats that were present, some said, "The Rahan Gaudama is dead indeed;" some others replied, "He is not dead, but has fainted from want of food." Those who believed he was dead hastened to his father's palace to convey to him the sad message of his son's death. Thoodaudana inquired if his son died previous to his becoming a Buddha. Having been answered in the affirmative, he refused to give credit to the words of the Nats. The reason of his doubting the accuracy of the report was, that he had witnessed the great wonders prognosticating his son's future dignity that had taken place, first when Phralaong, then an infant, was placed in the presence of a famous Rathee, and secondly, when he slept under the shade of the tree Tsampoo-thabia. The fainting being over, and Phralaong having recovered his senses, the same Nats went in all haste to Thoodaudana, to inform him of his son's happy recovery. "I knew well," said the king, "that my son could not die ere he had become a Buddha." The fame of Phralaong's having spent six years in solitude, addicted to meditation and mortification, spread abroad like the sound of a great bell,[8] hung in the canopy of the skies. Phralaong soon remarked that fasting and mortification were not works of sufficient value for obtaining the dignity of Buddha; he took up his patta and went to the neighbouring village to get his food. Having eaten it, he grew stronger; his beautiful face shone again like gold, and the thirty-two signs reappeared.[9] The five Rahans that had lived with him said to each other--"It is in vain that the Rahan Gaudama has, during six years of mortification and sufferings, sought the dignity of Buddha; he is now compelled to go out in search of food; assuredly, if he be obliged to live on such food, when shall he ever become a Buddha? He goes out in quest of food; verily, he aims at enriching himself. As the man that wants drops of dew or water to refresh and wash his forehead, has to look for them, so we have to go somewhere else to learn the way to, and the merit of, Dzan, which we have not been able to obtain from him." Whereupon they left Phralaong, took up their pattas and tsiwarans, went to a distance of eighteen youdzanas, and withdrew into the forest of Migadawon, near Baranathee. FOOTNOTES [1] Phralaong having overcome with uncommon fortitude the numberless obstacles which he had encountered on the part of men, will have now to meet another foe, perhaps more formidable, a wicked Nat, or demon. His name, according to its orthography, is Mar or Mara, but the Burmese call him Manh, which means pride. Manh is, therefore, the evil spirit of pride, or rather personified pride, and the enemy of mankind, ever ready to oppose the benevolent designs and generous efforts of Buddha in carrying on his great undertaking, conceived to benefit humanity, by teaching men the way that leads to deliverance from all miseries. The first plan concocted by Manh for stopping, at the very outset, the progress of Phralaong, was to flatter his ambition by promising him _all the kingdoms of this world and their glory_. From that day the tempter never lost sight of the benevolent Buddha, but followed him everywhere, endeavouring to prevent the immense success that was to attend his future mission. The evil propensities which constitute, as it were, the very essence of Manh's nature, are concupiscence, envy, and an irresistible proneness to do harm. The devil indeed could hardly be made up of worse materials. It is really interesting through the course of this Legend to read of the uninterrupted efforts made by the personification of evil to thwart Buddha in all his benevolent designs. The antagonism begins now, but it will be maintained with an obstinate and prolonged activity during the whole life of Buddha. [2] This circumstance explains one peculiarity observable in all the statues representing Buddha. The head is invariably covered with sharp points, resembling those thorns with which the thick envelope of the durian fruit is armed. Often I had inquired as to the motive that induced native sculptors to leave on the head of all statues that sort of inverted nails, without ever being able to obtain any satisfactory answer. It was only after having read this passage of the life of Buddha that I was enabled to account for this apparently singular custom, which is designed to remind all Buddhists of the ever-continued wonder whereby the hairs which remained on Buddha's head never grew longer from the day he cut them with his sword. [3] Every talapoin or recluse must be provided with one needle, wherewith he is to sew his dress, one hatchet to cut the wood he may be in need of, either for erecting a shelter for himself or for other purposes, and one filter to strain the water he intends to drink, that it might be cleared from all impurities, but chiefly of insects or any living body that might be in it, which would expose the drinker thereof to the enormous sin of causing the death of some animal. [4] The various accounts that are given of the horse Kantika, and the grief he feels at parting with his master, grief which reaches so far as to cause his death, may appear somewhat extraordinary, puerile, and ridiculous to every one except to Buddhists. One great principle of that religious system is that man does not differ from animals in nature, but only in relative perfection. In animals there are souls as well as in men, but these souls, on account of the paucity of their merits and the multiplicity of their demerits, are yet in a very imperfect state. When the law of demerits grows weak, and that of merits gathers strength, the soul, though continuing to inhabit the body of animals, has the knowledge of good and evil, and can attain to a certain degree of perfection. Buddhistic writings supply many instances of this belief. Whilst Buddha was in the desert, an elephant ministered to all his wants. As a reward for such a series of services, Buddha preached to him the law, and led him at once to the deliverance, that is to say, to the state of Neibban. When one animal has progressed so far in the way of merits as to be able to discern between good and bad, it is said that he is ripe, or fit to become man. The horse Kantika seems to have reached that state of full ripeness, since, after his death, he passed to the state of Nat. This peculiar tenet of Buddhistic faith accounts for the first of the five great commands, which extends the formal injunction of "thou shalt not kill" to animals. When a candidate is admitted, according to the prescriptions contained in the sacred Kambawa, into the order of Rahans, he is expressly and solemnly commanded to refrain from committing four sins, which would deprive him _de facto_ of the dignity he has been elevated to. The taking away willingly of the life of anything animated, is one of these four trespassings. [5] The fact of Buddha placing himself under the tuition of two masters or teachers, leading an ascetic life, to learn from them notions of the most abstruse nature, establishes, beyond all doubt, the high antiquity of the existence in India of a large number of individuals, who, living in some retired spot, far from the tumult of society, endeavoured, by constant application, to dive into the deepest recesses of morals and metaphysics. The fame of the learning of many among them attracted to their solitude crowds of disciples, anxious to study under such eminent masters. Hence we see some of these Rathees at the head of four or five hundred disciples. There is no doubt that the most distinguished Rathees became the founders of many of those philosophico-religious schools for which India was renowned from the remotest antiquity. Like many others who thirsted for knowledge, Phralaong resorted to the schools of the Rathees, as to the then most celebrated seats of learning. From this fact we may be allowed to draw another inference, which may be considered as a consequence of what has been stated in a foregoing note, regarding the superior antiquity of Brahminism over Buddhism. Phralaong was brought up in the bosom of a society regulated and governed by Brahminical institutions. He must have been imbued from the earliest days of his elementary education with the notions generally taught, viz.: the Brahminical ones. When he grew up and began to think for himself, he was displeased with certain doctrines which did not tally with his own ideas. Following the example of many that had preceded him in the way of innovation, he boldly shaped his course in a new direction, and soon arrived at a final issue on many points, both with his teachers and some of the doctrines generally received in the society in which he had been brought up. We may, therefore, safely conclude that the doctrines supposed to have been preached by the latest Buddha are but an off-shoot of Brahminism. This may serve to account for the great resemblance subsisting between many doctrines of both creeds. The cardinal points on which these two systems essentially differ are the beginning and the end of living beings. Between these two extremes there is a multitude of points on which both systems so perfectly agree that they appear blended together. The Rathees seem, according to the institutes of Menoo, to have been first in observing two practices, much enforced by the Wini in subsequent times. They were supported by the alms bestowed on them by their disciples and the admirers of their singular mode of life. They were courted and esteemed by the world, in proportion to the contempt they appeared to hold it in. Denying to themselves the pleasures which were opposed to their austere life, they observed, as long as they remained Rathees, the rules of the strictest celibacy. Phralaong, preparing himself for his future high calling, began to study the science of _Dzan_ under distinguished masters. What is meant by Dzan? This Pali word means thought, reflection, meditation. It is often designed by the Burmese to mean a peculiar state of the soul that has already made great progress in the way of perfection. Phralaong intended, by placing himself under the direction of those eminent teachers, to learn the great art of training his mind for the obtaining, by constant and well-directed meditations, of high mental attainments. In the book of Buddhistic metaphysics, I have found the science of Dzan divided into five parts, or rather five steps, which the mind has to ascend successively ere it can enjoy a state of perfect quiescence, the highest point a perfected being can arrive at before reaching the state of Neibban. In the first step the soul searches after what is good and perfect, and having discovered it, turns its attention and the energy of its faculties towards it. In the second, the soul begins to contemplate steadily what it has first discovered, and rivets upon it its attention. In the third stage, the soul fondly relishes, and is, as it were, entirely taken with it. In the fourth, the soul calmly enjoys and quietly feasts on the pure truths it has loved in the former state. In the fifth, the soul, perfectly satiated with the knowledge of truth, remains in a state of complete quietude, perfect fixity, unmoved stability, which nothing can any longer alter or disturb. The Burmese and all Buddhists, always fond of what is wonderful, attribute supernatural perfections to those who have so far advanced in mental attainments. Their bodies become, as it were, half-spiritualised, so that they can, according to their wishes, carry themselves through the air from one place to another, without the least hindrance or difficulty. [6] Kamatan means the fixing of the attention on one object, so as to investigate thoroughly all its constituent parts, its principle and origin, its existence and its final destruction. It is that part of metaphysics which treats of the beginning, nature, and end of beings. To become proficient in that science, a man must be gifted with a most extensive knowledge and an analysing mind of no common cast. The process of Kamatan is as follows. Let it be supposed that man intends to contemplate one of the four elements, fire, for instance; he abstracts himself from every object which is not fire, and devotes all his attention to the contemplation of that object alone; he examines the nature of fire, and finding it a compound of several distinct parts, he investigates the cause or causes that keep those parts together, and soon discovers that they are but accidental ones, the action whereof may be impeded or destroyed by the occurrence of any sudden accident. He concludes that fire has but a fictitious ephemeral existence. The same method is followed in examining the other elements, and gradually all other things he may come in contact with, and his final conclusion is, that all things placed without him are destitute of real existence, being mere illusions, divested of all reality. He infers, again, that all things are subjected to the law of incessant change, without fixity or stability. The wise man, therefore, can feel no attachment to objects which, in his own opinion, are but illusions and deception: his mind can nowhere find rest in the midst of illusions always succeeding to each other. Having surveyed all that is distinct of self, he applies himself to the work of investigating the origin and nature of his body. After a lengthened examination, he arrives, as a matter of course, at the same conclusion. His body is a mere illusion without reality, subjected to changes and destruction. He feels that it is as yet distinct from self. He despises his body, as he does everything else, and has no concern for it. He longs for the state of Neibban, as the only one worthy of the wise man's earnest desire. By such a preliminary step, the student, having estranged himself from this world of illusions, advances towards the study of the excellent works which will pave the way to Neibban. The Burmese reckon forty Kamatans. They are often repeated over by devotees, whose weak intellect is utterly incapable of understanding the meaning they are designed to convey to the mind. Notwithstanding his singular aptitude in acquiring knowledge, Phralaong devoted six whole years, in the solitude of Oorouwela, busily engaged in mastering the profound science he aimed at acquiring. It was during that time that he received the visits of five Rahans, whose chief was named Koondanha. They were very probably, like so many of their profession, travelling about in search of knowledge. They placed themselves under the direction of Phralaong, and in exchange for the lessons they received from him, they served him as humble and grateful disciples are wont to attend on a highly esteemed teacher. In this, as well as many other circumstances, we see that, previous to Gaudama's preachings, there already existed in India an order of devotees or enthusiasts, who lived secluded from the world, devoted to the study of religious doctrines and the practice of virtues of the highest order. The order of Buddhistic monks or talapoins, which was subsequently established by the author of Buddhism, is but a modification of what actually subsisted in full vigour in his own country and in his own time. [7] In a Buddhistic point of view the only reason that may be assigned for the extraordinary fast of Phralaong is the satisfaction of showing to the world the display of wonderful action. Fasting and other works of mortification have always been much practised by the Indian philosophers of past ages, who thereby attracted the notice, respect, admiration, and veneration of the world. Such rigorous exercises, too, were deemed of great help for enabling the soul to have a more perfect control over the senses, and subjecting them to the empire of reason. They are also conducive towards the calm and undisturbed state in which the soul is better fitted for the arduous task of constant meditation. The fast of Gaudama, preparatory to his obtaining the Buddhaship, recalls to mind that which our Lord underwent ere He began His divine mission. If the writer, in the course of this work, has made once or twice a remark of similar import, he has done so, not with the intention of drawing a parallel as between facts, but to communicate to the reader the feelings of surprise and astonishment he experienced when he thought he met with circumstances respecting the founder of Buddhism which apparently bore great similarity to some connected with the mission of our Saviour. [8] Bells are common in Burmah, and the people of that country are well acquainted with the art of casting them. Most of the bells to be seen in the pagodas are of small dimensions, and differing in shape somewhat from those used in Europe. The inferior part is less widened, and there is a large hole in the centre of the upper part. No tongue is hung in the interior, but the sound is produced by striking with a horn of deer or elk the outward surface of the lower part. No belfry is erected for the bells; they are fixed on a piece of timber, laid horizontally, and supported at its two extremities by two posts, at such a height that the inferior part of the bell is raised about five feet above the ground. The largest specimens of Burmese art in casting bells of great weight are the two bells to be seen, the one in the large pagoda of Rangoon, called Shway Dagon, and the other at Mingon, about twelve or fifteen miles north of Amerapoura, on the western bank of the Irrawaddy. The first, in the town of Rangoon, was cast in 1842, when King Tharawaddy visited the place, with the intention of founding a new city, more distant from the river, and nearer to the mount upon which rises the splendid Shway Dagon. In its shape and form it exactly resembles the kind of bells above described. Here are some particulars respecting that large piece of metal, collected from the inscription to be seen upon it. It was cast on the fifth day of the full moon of Tabodwai (February), 1203 of the Burmese era. The weight of metal is 94,682 lbs.; its height 9-1/2 cubits; its diameter 5 cubits; its thickness 20 fingers or 15 inches. But during the process of melting, the well-disposed came forward and threw in copper, silver, and gold in great quantities. It is supposed, says the writer of the inscription, that in this way the weight was increased one-fourth. The bell of Mingon was cast in the beginning of this century. In shape and form it resembles our bells in Europe. It is probable that some foreigner residing at Ava suggested the idea of giving such an unusual form to that monumental bell. Its height is 18 feet, besides 7 feet for hanging apparatus. It has 17 feet in diameter, and from 10 to 12 inches in thickness. Its weight is supposed to exceed two hundred thousand English pounds. In the interior large yellowish and greyish streaks indicate that considerable quantities of gold and silver had been thrown in during the process of melting. No idea can at present be had of the power of the sound of that bell, as its enormous weight has caused the pillars that support it partially to give way. To prevent a fatal disaster, the orifice of the bell has been made to rest on large short posts, sunk in the ground and rising about three feet above it. In no respect can these bells bear any comparison with those of Europe. They are mightily rough and rude attempts at doing works on a scale far surpassing the abilities of native workmen, who otherwise succeed tolerably well in casting the comparatively small bells commonly met with in the courtyards of pagodas. [9] One of the genuine characters of Buddhism is correctly exhibited in this observation of Phralaong's respecting fasts, mortifications, and other self-inflicted penances. They are not looked upon as the immediate way leading to perfection, nor as _a portion_ or a part of perfection itself. Such deeds are but means resorted to for weakening passions and increasing the power of the spiritual principle over the natural one: they are preparatory to the great work of meditation or the study of truth, which is the only high-road to perfection. To the sage that has already begun the laborious task of investigating truth, such practices are of no use, and are nowhere insisted on as necessary, or even useful. In the book of discipline, no mention is made of them. The life of the initiated is one of self-denial; all superfluities and luxuries are strictly interdicted; all that is calculated to minister to passions and pleasure is carefully excluded. But the great austerities and macerations practised by the religious of the Brahminical sect are at once rejected by the Buddhist sages as unprofitable and unnecessary to them. The inmates of the Buddhist monasteries in our days are never seen indulging in those cruel, disgusting, and unnatural practices performed from time immemorial by some of their brethren of the Hindu persuasion. This constitutes one of the principal differences or discrepancies between the two systems. With the founder of Buddhism fasts and penitential deeds are of great concern to him who is as yet in the world, living under the tyrannical yoke of passions and the influence of the senses. By him they are viewed as powerful auxiliaries in the spiritual warfare for obtaining the mastery over passions. This point once gained, the sage can at once dispense with their aid as being no longer required. The follower of the Hindu creed looks upon those practices as _per se_ eminently meritorious and capable of leading him to perfection; hence the mania for carrying those observances to a degree revolting to reason, and even to the plain good sense of the people. CHAPTER V. _Thoodzata's offering to Phralaong -- His five dreams -- He shapes his course towards the gniaong tree -- Miraculous appearance of a throne -- Victory of Phralaong over Manh Nat -- His meditations during forty-nine days near the Bodi tree -- He at last obtains the perfect science -- He overcomes the temptation directed against him by the daughters of Manh -- Buddha preaches the law to a Pounha and to two merchants._ At that time, in the solitude of Oorouwela, there lived in a village a rich man, named Thena. He had a daughter named Thoodzata. Having attained the years of puberty, she repaired to a place where there was a gniaong tree, and made the following prayer to the Nat guardian of the place[1]:--"If I marry a husband that will prove a suitable match, and the first fruit of our union be a male child, I will spend annually in alms deeds 100,000 pieces of silver, and make an offering at this spot." Her prayer was heard, and its twofold object granted. When Phralaong had ended the six years of his fasting and mortification, on the day of the full moon of the month Katson, Thoodzata was preparing to make her grateful offering to the Nat of the place. She had been keeping one thousand cows in a place abounding with sweet vines; the milk of those thousand was given to five hundred cows; these again fed with their own milk two hundred and fifty others, and so on, in a diminishing proportion, until it happened that sixteen cows fed eight others with their milk. So these eight cows gave a milk, rich, sweet, and flavoured beyond all description. On the day of the full moon of Katson,[2] Thoodzata rose at an early hour to make ready her offering, and disposed everything that the cows should be simultaneously milked. When they were to be milked, the young calves of their own accord kept at a distance; and as soon as the vessels were brought near, the milk began to flow in streams from the udders into the vessels. She took the milk and poured it into a large caldron, set on the fire which she had herself kindled. The milk began to boil; bubbles formed on the surface of the liquid, turned on the right and sunk in, not a single drop being spilt out; no smoke arose from the fireplace. Four kings of Nats watched about while the caldron was boiling; the great Brahma kept open an umbrella over it; a Thagia brought fuel and fed the fire. Other Nats, by their supernatural power, infused honey into the milk, and communicated thereto a flavour, such as the like is not to be found in the abode of men. On this occasion alone, and on the day Phralaong entered the state of Neibban, the Nats infused honey into his food. Wondering at the so many extraordinary signs which she saw, Thoodzata called her female slave, named Sounama, related to her all that she had observed, and directed her to go to the gniaong tree, and clear the place where she intended to make her offering. The servant, complying with her mistress' direction, soon arrived at the foot of the tree. On that very night Phralaong had had five dreams.[3] 1st, It appeared to him that the earth was his sleeping place, with the Himawonta for his pillow. His right hand rested on the western ocean, his left on the eastern ocean, and his feet on the southern ocean. 2nd, A kind of grass, named Tyria, appeared to grow out of his navel and reach to the skies. 3rd, Ants of a white appearance ascended from his feet to the knee and covered his legs. 4th, Birds of varied colour and size appeared to come from all directions and fall at his feet, when, on a sudden, they all appeared white. 5th, It seemed to him that he was walking on a mountain of filth, and that he passed over it without being in the least contaminated. Phralaong, awaking from his sleep, said to himself, after having reflected for a while on those five dreams,--"Today I shall certainly become a Buddha." Thereupon he rose instantly, washed his hands and face, put on his dress, and quietly waited the break of day, to go out in quest of his food. The moment being arrived to go out, he took up his patta, and walked in the direction of the gniaong tree. The whole tree was made shining by the rays which issued from his person; he rested there for a while. At that very moment arrived Sounama, to clear, according to her mistress' orders, the place for her offering. As she approached, she saw Phralaong at the foot of the tree. The rays of light which beamed out of his person were reflected on the tree, which exhibited a most splendid and dazzling appearance. On observing this wonder, Sounama said to herself: "Of course the Nat has come down from the tree to receive the offering with his own hands." Overcome with an unutterable joy, she immediately ran to her mistress and related her adventure. Thoodzata was delighted at this occurrence, and wishing to give a substantial proof of her gratitude for such good news, she said to Sounama: "From this moment you are no more my servant; I adopt you for my elder daughter." She gave her instantly all the ornaments suitable to her new position. It is customary for all the Phralaongs to be provided, on the day they are to become Buddha, with a gold cup of an immense value. Thoodzata ordered a golden vessel to be brought, and poured therein the nogana or boiled milk. As the water glides from the leaf of the water-lily without leaving thereon any trace, so the nogana slided from the pot into the golden cup and filled it up. She covered this cup with another of the same precious metal, and wrapped up the whole with a white cloth. She forthwith put on her finest dress, and, becomingly attired, she carried the golden cup over her head; and with a decent gravity walked towards the gniaong tree. Overwhelmed with joy at seeing Phralaong, she reverentially advanced towards him, whom she mistook for a Nat. When near him, she placed gently the golden vessel on the ground, and offered him in a gold basin scented water to wash his hands. At that moment, the earthen patta offered to Phralaong by the Brahma Gatikara disappeared. Perceiving that his patta had disappeared, he stretched forth his right hand, and washed it in the scented water; at the same time Thoodzata presented to him the golden cup containing the nogana. Having observed that she had caught the eyes of Phralaong, she said to him: "My Lord Nat, I beg to offer you this food, together with the vessel that contains it." Having respectfully bowed down to him, she continued: "May your joy and happiness be as great as mine; may you always delight in the happiest rest, ever surrounded by a great and brilliant retinue." Making then the offering of the gold cup, worth 100,000 pieces of silver, with the same disinterestedness as if she had given over only the dry leaf of a tree, she withdrew and returned to her home with a heart overflowing with joy. Phralaong rising up took with him the golden cup, and having turned to the left of the gniaong tree, went to the bank of the river Neritzara, to a place where more than 100,000 Buddhas had bathed, ere they obtained the supreme intelligence. On the banks of that river is a bathing-place. Having left on that spot his golden cup, he undressed himself, and descended into the river. When he had bathed, he came out and put on his yellow robe, which in shape and form resembled that of his predecessors. He sat down, his face turned towards the east; his face resembled in appearance a well-ripe palm-fruit. He divided his exquisite fruit into forty-nine mouthfuls, which he ate entire, without mixing any water with it. During forty-nine days he spent round the Bodi tree, Buddha never bathed, nor took any food, nor experienced the least want. His appearance and countenance remained unchanged; he spent the whole time absorbed, as it were, in an uninterrupted meditation. Holding up in his hands the empty golden vessel, Phralaong made the following prayer: "If on this day I am to become a Buddha, let this cup float on the water and ascend the stream." Whereupon he flung it into the stream, when, by the power and influence of Phralaong's former good works, the vessel, gently gliding towards the middle of the river, and then beating up the stream, ascended it with the swiftness of a horse to the distance of eighty cubits, when it stopped, sunk into a whirlpool, went down to the country of Naga, and made a noise, on coming in contact with and striking against the three vessels of the three last Buddhas, viz.: Kaukathan, Gaunagong, and Kathaba. On hearing this unusual noise, the chief of Nagas awoke from his sleep, and said: "How is this? yesterday, a Buddha appeared in the world; today, again, there is another." And in more than one hundred stanzas he sung praises to Buddha. * * * * * On the banks of the river Neritzara there is a grove of Sala trees, whither Phralaong repaired to spend the day under their cooling shade. In the evening he rose up and walked with the dignified and noble bearing of a lion, in a road eight oothabas wide, made by the Nats, and strewed with flowers, towards the gniaong tree. The Nats, Nagas, and Galongs joined in singing praises to him, playing instruments, and making offerings of the finest flowers and most exquisite perfumes, brought from their own seats. The same rejoicings took place in ten thousand other worlds. Whilst on his way towards the tree, he met with a young man, just returning with a grass-load he had cut in the fields. Foreseeing that Phralaong might require some portion of it for his use, he presented him an offering of eight handfuls of grass, which were willingly accepted. Arrived close to the gniaong tree,[4] Phralaong stopped at the south of the tree, his face turned towards the north, when, on a sudden, the southern point of the globe seemed to lower down to the hell Awidzi, the lowest of all, whilst the northern one appeared to reach the sky. Then he said, "Verily this is not the place where I shall become a Buddha." Thence Phralaong went on his right side towards the east of the tree, and standing up, his face turned towards the west, he said, "This is indeed the place where all the preceding Buddhas have obtained the supreme intelligence. Here, too, is the very spot whereupon I shall become a Buddha, and set up my throne." He took, by one of their extremities, the eight handfuls of grass and scattered them on the ground, when, on a sudden, there appeared emerging, as it were, from the bottom of the earth, a throne fourteen cubits high, adorned with the choicest sculptures and paintings, superior in perfection to all that art could produce. Phralaong, then facing the east, uttered the following imprecation: "If I am not destined to become a Buddha, may my bones, veins, and skin remain on this throne, and my blood and flesh be dried up." He then ascended the throne, with his back turned against the tree, and his face towards the east. He sat down in a cross-legged position, firmly resolved never to vacate the throne, ere he had become a Buddha. Such firmness of purpose, which the combined elements could not shake for a moment, no one ought to think of ever becoming possessed of. Whilst Phralaong was sitting on the throne in that cross-legged position, Manh Nat said to himself, "I will not suffer Prince Theiddat to overstep the boundaries of my empire." He summoned all his warriors and shouted to them. On hearing their chief's voice, the warriors gathered thick round his person. His countless followers in front, on his right and on his left, reached to the distance of eighteen youdzanas, and above him to that of nine only. Behind him, they extended to the very limits of the world. The cries of that immense multitude were re-echoed at a distance of ten thousand youdzanas, and resembled the roaring of the mighty sea. Manh Nat rode the elephant Girimegala, measuring in length five youdzanas. Supplied with one thousand right arms, he wielded all sorts of the most deadly weapons. His countless warriors, to avoid confusion, were all disposed in ranks, bearing their respective armour. They appeared like immense clouds, slowly rolling on and converging towards Phralaong. At that time, Nats surrounded Phralaong, singing praises to him; the chief Thagia was playing on his conch, whereof a single blowing resounds for four entire months; the chief Naga was uttering stanzas in his honour; a chief Brahma held over him the white umbrella. On the approach of Manh Nat's army, they were all seized with an uncontrollable fear, and fled to their respective places. The Naga dived into the bottom of the earth, to a depth of five hundred youdzanas, and covering his face with his two wings, fell into a deep sleep. The Thagia, swinging his conch upon his shoulders, ran to the extremity of the world. The Brahma, holding still the umbrella by the extremity of the handle, went up to his own country. Phralaong was, therefore, left alone. Manh Nat, turning to his followers, cried to them, "There is, indeed, no one equal to the Prince Theiddat; let us not attack him in front, but let us assail him from the north side." At that moment, Phralaong, lifting his eyes, looked on his right, left, and front, for the crowd of Nats, Brahmas, and Thagias that were paying him their respects. But they had all disappeared. He saw the army of Manh Nat coming thick upon him from the north, like a mighty storm. "What!" said he, "is it against me alone that such a countless crowd of warriors has been assembled? I have no one to help me, no father, no brothers, no sisters, no friends, and no relatives. But I have with me the ten great virtues which I have practised; the merits I have acquired in the practice of these virtues will be my safeguard and protection; these are my offensive and defensive weapons, and with them I will crush down the great army of Manh." Whereupon he quietly remained meditating upon the merits of the ten great virtues. Whilst Phralaong was thus absorbed in meditation, Manh Nat began his attack upon him. He caused a wind to blow with such an extraordinary violence that it brought down the tops of mountains, though they were one or two youdzanas thick. The trees of the forests were shattered to atoms. But the virtue of Phralaong's merits preserved him from the destructive storm. His tsiwaran itself was not agitated. Perceiving that his first effort was useless, Manh caused a heavy rain to fall with such violence that it tore the earth, and opened it to its very bottom. But not even a single drop touched Phralaong's person. To this succeeded a shower of rocks, accompanied with smoke and fire; but they were changed into immense masses of flowers, which dropped at Buddha's feet. There came afterwards another shower of swords, knives, and all kinds of cutting weapons, emitting smoke and fire. They all fell powerless at the feet of Phralaong. A storm of burning ashes and sand soon darkened the atmosphere, but they fell in front of him like fragrant dust. Clouds of mud succeeded, which fell like perfumes all round and over Phralaong. Manh caused a thick darkness to fill the atmosphere, but to Phralaong it emitted rays of the purest light. The enraged Manh cried to his followers, "Why do you stand looking on? Rush at once upon him and compel him to flee before me." Sitting on his huge elephant, and brandishing his formidable weapons, Manh approached close to Phralaong and said to him, "Theiddat, this throne is not made for you; vacate it forthwith; it is my property." Phralaong calmly answered, "You have not as yet practised the ten great virtues, nor gone through the five acts of self-denial; you have never devoted your life to help others to acquire merits; in a word, you have not yet done all the needful to enable you to attain the supreme dignity of Phra. This throne, therefore, cannot be yours." Unable to control any longer his passion, Manh threw his formidable weapons at Phralaong; but they were converted into garlands of beautiful flowers, that adapted themselves gracefully round his body. His sword and other weapons, that could cut at once through the hardest rocks, were employed with no better success. The soldiers of Manh, hoping that their united efforts would have a better result, and that they could thrust Phralaong from his throne, made a sudden and simultaneous rush at him, rolling against him, with an irresistible force, huge rocks, as large as mountains; but by the virtue of their opponent's merits, they were converted into fine nosegays, that gently dropped at his feet. At that time the Nats, from their seats, looked down on the scene of the combat, suspended between hope and fear. Phralaong at that moment said to Manh: "How do you dare to pretend to the possession of this throne? Could you ever prove, by indisputable evidence, that you have ever made offerings enough to be deserving of this throne?" Manh, turning to his followers, answered: "Here are my witnesses; they will all bear evidence in my favour." At the same moment they all shouted aloud, to testify their approval of Mania's words. "As to you, Prince Theiddat, where are the witnesses that will bear evidence in your favour and prove the justness of your claim to the possession of this throne?" Phralaong replied: "My witnesses are not like yours, men or any living beings.[5] The earth itself will give testimony to me. For, without alluding even to those offerings I have made during several previous existences, I will but mention the forty-seven great ones I made whilst I lived as Prince Wethandra." Stretching out his right hand, which he had kept hitherto under the folds of his garments, and pointing to the earth, he said with a firm voice: "Earth, is it not true that at the time I was Prince Wethandra I made forty great offerings?" The earth replied with a deep and loud roaring, resounding in the midst of Manh's legions, like the sound of countless voices, threatening to spread death and destruction in their ranks. The famous charger of Manh bent his knees, and paid homage to Phralaong. Manh himself, disheartened and discomfited, fled to the country of Wathawatti. His followers were so overpowered by fear that they flung away all that could impede their retreat, and ran away in every direction. Such was the confusion and disorder that prevailed that two warriors could not be seen following the same course in their flight. Looking from their seats on the defeat of Manh and the glorious victory of Phralaong, the Nats[6] rent the air with shouts of exultation. The Brahmas, Nagas, and Galongs joined the Nats in celebrating his triumph over his enemies. They all hastened from more than ten thousand worlds to pay their respects and offer their felicitations, presenting him with flowers and perfumes, saying: "Victory and glory to Phralaong! Shame and defeat to the infamous Manh!" It was a little while before sunset when Phralaong had achieved his splendid victory over his proud foe. At that time he was wrapped up, as it were, in the profoundest meditation. The extremities of the branches of the Bodi tree[7] fell gently over him, and, by their undulations, seemed caressing, as it were, his tsiwaran; they resembled so many beautiful nosegays of red flowers that were offered to him. At the first watch of the night Phralaong applied all the energies of his powerful mind to ascertain the laws of the causes and effects, in order to account for all that is in existence. He argued in the following manner: "Pain and all sorts of miseries do exist in this world. Why do they exist? Because there is birth. Why is there birth? Because there is conception. Now conception does take place, because there is existence, or that moral state produced by the action or influence of merits and demerits. Existence is brought in by _Upadan_, or the combining of affections calculated to cause the coming into existence. The latter has for its cause the desire. The desire is produced by sensation. The latter is caused by the contact. The contact takes place because there are the six senses. The six senses do exist, because there is name and form, that is to say, the exterior sign of the ideal being and the type of the real being. Name and form owe their existence to erroneous knowledge; the latter in its turn is produced by the imagination, which has for its cause ignorance."[8] Having followed in his mind the succession of the twelve causes and effect, and reached the last link of that chain, Phralaong said to himself: "Ignorance, or no science, is the first cause which gives rise to all the phenomena I have successively reviewed. From it springs the world and all the beings it contains. It is the cause of that universal illusion in which man and all beings are miserably lulled. By what means can this ignorance be done away with? Doubtless by knowledge and true science. By means of the light that science spreads I clearly see the unreality of all that exists, and I am freed from that illusion which makes other beings to believe that such thing exists, when, in reality, it does not exist. The imagination, or the faculty to imagine the existence of things which do not exist, is done away with. The same fate is reserved to the false knowledge resulting therefrom to the name and form, to the six senses, to contact, to sensation, to desire, to conception, to existence, to birth, and to pain or miseries." * * * * * Then Phralaong says to himself: "The knowledge of the four great truths is the true light that can dispel ignorance and procure the real science, whereby the coming out from the whirlpool of existences, or from the state of illusion, can be perfectly effected. These four truths are: 1, The miseries of existence; 2, The cause productive of misery, which is the desire, ever-renewed, of satisfying oneself without being able ever to secure that end; 3, The destruction of that desire, or the estranging oneself from it, is the important affair deserving the most serious attention; 4, The means of obtaining the individual annihilation of that desire is supplied solely by the four Meggas, or highways, leading to perfection. But these Meggas can be followed only by those who have a right intention, a right will, and who, throughout life, exert themselves to regulate their action, conduct, language, thought, and meditations." It was then that the heart of Phralaong acquired an unshakable firmness, a perfect purity or exemption from all passions, an unutterable meekness, and a strong feeling of tender compassion towards all beings. When these fundamental truths had been known, felt, and relished,[9] Phralaong's mind, casting a glance over the past, was able to discover at once all that had taken place during the countless states of his former existences. He recollected the name he had borne, those of his parents, the places he had seen and visited, the caste he had belonged to, and all the chief events that had marked the course of his progress through the continual migrations. He likewise saw reflected, as in a mirror, the former conditions of existence of all other beings. The immense development and expansion of his mind, which enabled him to fathom the depth of the past, happened during the first watch of the night. He applied now all the expanded powers of his incomparable mind to take a correct survey of all the beings now in existence. He glanced over all those that were in hell, and the other three states of punishment, those living on earth, and those dwelling in the twenty-six superior seats. He at once understood distinctly their state, condition, merits, demerits, and all that appertained to their physical and moral constitutive parts. This labour occupied his mind up to midnight. Urged by the merciful and compassionate dispositions of his soul, Phralaong often revolved within himself the following: "All is misery and affliction in this world; all beings are miserably detained in the vortex of existences; they float over the whirlpool of desire and concupiscence; they are carried to and fro by the fallacious cravings of a never-obtained satisfaction. They must be taught to put an end to concupiscence by freeing themselves from its influence. Their minds must be imbued with the knowledge of the four great truths. The four ways that I have discovered shall inevitably lead men and Nats to that most desirable end. These ways ought to be pointed out to them, that, by following them, men and Nats may obtain the deliverance." Whilst these thoughts thronged through his mind, a little before break of day, in the 103rd year of the Eatzana era, on the day of the full moon of Katson, the perfect science broke at once over him: he became the Buddha. When this great wonder took place, ten thousand worlds were shaken twelve times with such a violence as to make hairs stand on one end. These words, "Most excellent being," were heard throughout the same series of worlds. Magnificent ornaments decorated all places. Flagstaffs appeared in every direction, adorned with splendid streamers. Of such dimensions were they that the extremities of those in the east reached the opposite side of the west; and those in the north, the southern boundary. Some flags, hanging from the seats of Brahmas, reached the surface of the earth. All the trees of ten thousand worlds shot out branches, loaded with fruits and flowers. The five sorts of lilies bloomed spontaneously. From the clefts of rocks beautiful flowers sprang out. The whole universe appeared like an immense garden, covered with flowers; a vivid light illuminated those places, the darkness of which could not be dispersed by the united rays of seven suns. The water, which fills the immensity of the deep, at a depth of eighty-four thousand youdzanas, became fresh and offered a most agreeable drink. Rivers suspended their course; the blind recovered their sight, the deaf could hear, and the lame were able to walk freely. The captives were freed from their chains and restored to their liberty. Innumerable other wonders took place at the moment Phralaong received the supreme intelligence. He said then to himself, "Previous to my obtaining the supreme knowledge, I have, during countless generations, moved in the circle of ever-renewed existences, and borne-up misery. Now I see this distinctly. Again, I perceive how I can emancipate myself from the trammels of existence, and extricate myself from all miseries and wretchedness attending generation; my will is fixed on the most amiable state of Neibban. I have now arrived to that state of perfection that excludes all passions." It was at the full moon of the month Katson, when these memorable occurrences took place, and it was daylight when Phralaong at last obtained the fulness of the Buddhaship. After this glorious and triumphant achievement, Phralaong, whom from this moment we must call Phra or Buddha, continued to remain on the throne, in a cross-legged position, with a mind absorbed in contemplation during seven days. Mental exertion and labour were at an end. Truth in its effulgent beauty encompassed his mind and shed over it the purest rays. Placed in that luminous centre, Phra saw all beings entangled in the web of passions, tossed over the raging billows of the sea of renewed existences, whirling in the vortex of endless miseries, tormented incessantly and wounded to the quick by the sting of concupiscence, sunk into the dark abyss of ignorance, the wretched victims of an illusory, unsubstantial, and unreal world. He said then to himself: "In all the worlds there is no one but me who knows how to break through the web of passions, to still the waves that waft beings from one state into another, to save them from the whirlpool of miseries, to put an end to concupiscence and break its sting, to dispel the mist of ignorance by the light of truth, to teach all intelligent beings the unreality and nonexistence of this world, and thereby lead them to the true state of Neibban." Having thus given vent to the feelings of compassion that pressed on his benevolent heart, Phra, glancing over future events, delighted in contemplating the great number of beings who would avail themselves of his preachings, and labour to free themselves from the slavery of passions. He counted the multitudes who would enter the ways that lead to the deliverance, and would obtain the rewards to be enjoyed by those who will follow one of those ways. The Baranathee country would be favoured first of all with the preaching of the law of the wheel. He reviewed the countries where his religion would be firmly established. He saw that Maheinda, the son of king Asoka, would carry his law to Ceylon, two hundred and thirty-six years after his Neibban. When these and other subjects were fully exhausted, the most excellent Phra came down from his throne and went to a distance of ten fathoms from the Bodi tree, in a north-east direction. There he stood, his eyes fixedly riveted on the throne, without a single wink, during seven consecutive days, given up to the most intense and undisturbed meditation. The Nats, observing this extraordinary posture, imagined that he regretted the throne he had just vacated, and that he wanted to repossess himself of it. They concluded that, such being the case, Prince Theiddat had not as yet obtained the Buddhaship. When the period of seven days was over, Buddha, who knew the innermost thoughts of the Nats, resolved to put an end to their incredulous thinking respecting his person. For that purpose, he had recourse to the display of miraculous powers.[10] He raised himself high up in the air, and, to their astonished regards, he wrought at once more than a thousand wonders, which had the immediate effect of silencing all their doubts, and convincing them that he was indeed the Buddha. Having come down to the place which he had started from, for the display of prodigies, Buddha went to the north of the tree Bodi at a distance of only two fathoms from it. He spent this time in walking to and fro from east to west, during seven days, over a road, prepared for that purpose by the Nats. He was engaged all the while in the work of the sublimest contemplation. He then shaped his course in a north-west direction, at a distance of thirteen fathoms from the sacred tree. There stood a beautiful house, shining like gold, resplendent with precious stones. It was a temporary residence, purposely prepared for him by the Nats. Thither he repaired, and sat down in a cross-legged position during seven days. He devoted all his time to meditating on the Abidamma, or the most excellent science. This science is divided into seven books. Phra had already gone over the six first and fully mastered their contents, but the six glories had not as yet shot forth from his person. It was only after having mastered the contents of the last division, named Pathan, divided into twenty-four parts, that the six glories appeared. Like the great fishes that delight to sport only in the great ocean, the mind of Buddha expanded itself with indescribable eagerness, and delighted to run unrestrained through the unbounded field opened before him by the contents of that volume. Brown rays issued from his hairs, beard, and eyelids. Gold-like rays shot forth from his eyes and skin; from his flesh and blood dashed out purple beams, and from his teeth and bones escaped rays, white like the leaves of the lily; from his hands and feet emanated rays of a deep-red colour, which, falling on the surrounding objects, made them appear like so many rubies of the purest water. His forehead sent forth undulating rays, resembling those reflected by cut crystal. The objects which received those rays appeared as mirrors, reflecting the rays of the sun. Those six rays of various hues caused the earth to resemble a globe of the finest gold. Those beams at first penetrated through our globe, which is eighty-two thousand youdzanas thick, and thence illuminated the mass of water which supports our planet. It resembled a sea of gold. That body of water, though four hundred and eighty thousand youdzanas thick, could not stop the elastic projection of those rays, which went forth through a stratum of air nine hundred and sixty thousand youdzanas thick, and were lost in the vacuum. Some beams, following a vertical direction, rushed through the six seats of Nats, the sixteen of Brahmas, and the four superior ones, and thence were lost in vacuum. Other rays, following a horizontal direction, penetrated through an infinite series of worlds. The sun, the moon, the stars appeared like opaque bodies, deprived of light. The famous garden of Nats, their splendid palace, the ornaments hanging from the tree Padetha were all cast into the shade and appeared obscure, as if wrapped up in complete darkness. The body of the chief Brahma, which sends forth light through one million of systems, emitted then but the feeble and uncertain light of the glowworm at sunrise. This marvellous light, emanating from the person of Buddha, was not the result of vowing or praying; but all the constituent parts of his body became purified to such an extent by the sublime meditation of the most excellent law that they shone with a matchless brightness. Having thus spent seven days in that place, close to the Bodi tree, he repaired to the foot of another gniaong tree, called adzapala, or the shepherds' tree, so called because, under its cooling shade, shepherds and their flocks of goats rested during the heat of the day. It was situated at the east of the Bodi, at a distance of thirty fathoms. There he sat in a cross-legged position, during seven days, enjoying the sweetness of self-recollection. It was near to that place that the vile Manh, who, since his great attack on Buddha, had never lost sight of him, but had always secretly followed him with a wicked spirit, was compelled to confess that he had not been able to discover in that Rahan anything blamable, and expressed the fear of seeing him at once pass over the boundaries of his empire. The tempter stooped in the middle of the highway, and across it drew successively sixteen lines, as he went on reflecting on sixteen different subjects. When he had thought over each of the ten great virtues, he drew, first, ten lines, saying: "The great Rahan has indeed practised to a high degree those ten virtues. I cannot presume to compare myself to him." In drawing the eleventh, he confessed that he had not, like that Rahan, the science that enabled to know the inclinations and dispositions of all beings. In drawing the twelfth, he said that he had not as yet acquired the knowledge of all that concerns the nature of the various beings. Drawing the four remaining lines, he confessed successively that he did not feel, like that Rahan, a tender compassion for the beings yet entangled in the miseries of existence, nor could he perform miracles, nor perceive everything, nor attain to the perfect and supreme knowledge of the law. On all these subjects he avowed his decided inferiority to the great Rahan. Whilst Manh was thus engaged with a sad heart in meditating over those rather humiliating points, he was at last found out by his three daughters, Tahna,[11] Aratee, and Raga, who had for some time been looking after him. When they saw their father with a downcast countenance, they came to him, and inquired about the motive of his deep affliction. "Beloved daughters," replied Manh, "I see this Rahan escaping from my dominion, and notwithstanding my searching examination, I have not been able to detect him in anything reprehensible. This is the only cause of my inexpressible affliction." "Dear father," replied they, "banish all sorrows from your mind, and be of a good heart; we will very soon find out the weak side of the great Rahan, and triumphantly bring him back within the hitherto unpassed limits of your empire." "Beware of the man you will have to deal with," replied Manh. "I believe that no effort, however great, directed against him, will ever be rewarded with success. He is of a firm mind and unshaken purpose. I fear you shall never succeed in bringing him back within my dominions." "Dear father," said they, "we women know how to manage such affairs; we will catch him like a bird in the net of concupiscence; let fear and anxiety be for ever dispelled from your heart." Having given this assurance, forthwith they went to Buddha, and said to him, "Illustrious Rahan, we approach you respectfully and express the wish of staying with you, that we may minister to all your wants." Without in the least heeding their words, or even casting a glance at them, the most excellent Buddha remained unmoved, enjoying the happiness of meditation. Knowing that the same appearance, face, and bodily accomplishments might not be equally pleasing, they assumed, one the appearance of a heart-winning young girl, another that of a blooming virgin, and the third that of a fine middle-aged beauty. Having thus made their arrangements, they approached Buddha, and several times expressed to him the desire of staying with him and ministering to his wants. Unmoved by all their allurements, Buddha said to them, "For what purpose do you come to me? You might have some chance of success with those that have not as yet extinguished the fire of passion, and rooted it from their heart; but I, like all the Buddhas, my predecessors, have destroyed in me concupiscence, passion, and ignorance. No effort, on your part, will ever be able to bring me back into the world of passions. I am free from all passions, and have obtained supreme wisdom. By what possible means could you ever succeed in bringing me back into the whirlpool of passions?" The three daughters of Manh, covered with confusion, yet overawed with admiration and astonishment, said to each other, "Our father forsooth had given us a good and wise warning. This great Rahan deserves the praises of men and Nats. Everything in him is perfect; to him it belongs to instruct men in all things they want to know." Saying this, they, with a downcast countenance, returned to their father. It was in that very same place, at the foot of the adzapala gniaong, that a heretic Pounha, named Mingalika, proud of his caste, came with hasty steps, speaking loudly, and with little respect approached the spot where Buddha was sitting.[12] Having entered into conversation with him, the Pounha heard from his mouth instructions worthy of being ever remembered. He said to Buddha, "Lord Gaudama, I have two questions to put to you. Whence comes the name Pounha? What are the duties to be performed in order to become a real Pounha?" Buddha, penetrating with the keen eye of wisdom into the innermost soul of his interlocutor, answered, "The real and genuine Pounha is he who has renounced all passions, put an end to concupiscence, and has entered the ways leading to perfection. But there are others, who are proud of their origin, who walk hastily, speak with a loud voice, and who have not done what is needful to destroy the influence of passions. These are called Pounhas because of their caste and birth. But the true sage avoids everything that is rash, impetuous or noisy: he has conquered all his passions, and put an end to the principle of demerits. His heart loves the repetition of formulas of prayers, and delights in the exercise of meditation. He has reached the last way to perfection. In him there is no longer wavering, or doubt, or pride. This man really deserves the name of Pounha, or pure: he is indeed the true Pounha according to the law." The instruction being finished, the Pounha rose respectfully from his place, wheeled to the right and departed. Buddha continued the sublime work of contemplating pure truth through the means of intense reflection. Having remained seven days in that position, Buddha arose in an ecstasy and went to the south-eastern side of the Bodi tree, to a distance of an oothaba (1 oothaba=to 20 tas, 1 ta=to 7 cubits), on the sixth day after the full moon of Nayon. On that spot there was a tank called Hidza-lee-dana. On the bank of that tank, he sat under the shade of the Kiin tree, in a cross-legged position during seven days, enjoying the delight of meditation. During those seven days rain fell in abundance, and it was very cold. A Naga, chief of that tank, would have made a building to protect Buddha against the inclemency of the weather, but he preferred, in order to gain greater merits, to coil himself up sevenfold round his person, and to place his head above him, with his large hood extended. When the seven days were over and the rain had ceased, the Naga quitted his position; then assuming the appearance of a young man, he prostrated himself before Buddha and worshipped him. Buddha said: "He who aims at obtaining the state of Neibban ought to possess the knowledge of the four roads leading thereto, as well as that of the four great truths and of all laws. He ought to bear no anger towards other men, nor harm them in any way soever. Happy he who receives such instructions." Buddha moved from that place, and went to the south of the Bodi tree, to a distance of forty fathoms. At the foot of the linloon tree he sat in a cross-legged position, having his mind deeply engaged in the exercise of the sublimest contemplation. In that position he spent seven entire days, which completed the forty-nine days which were to be devoted to reflection and meditation around the Bodi tree. When this period of days was over, at daybreak, on the fifth day after the full moon of Watso, he felt the want of food. This was quickly perceived by a Thagia, who hastened from his seat to the spot where Buddha was staying, and offered him some Thit khia fruits, others say Kia-dzoo fruits, to prepare his system to receive more substantial food. After he had eaten them, the same celestial attendant brought him some water to rinse his mouth, and to wash his face and hands. Buddha continued to remain in the same position under the cooling and protecting shade of the linloon tree. To consecrate, as it were, and perpetuate the remembrance of the seven spots occupied by Buddha during the forty-nine days that he spent round the tree Bodi, a Dzedy was erected on each of those seven places. King Pathenadi Kosala surrounded them with a double wall, and subsequently King Dammathoka added two others. There were only three openings, or gates, to penetrate into the enclosed ground, one on the north, another on the east, and the third on the south. The river Neritzara rolls its deep blue waters in a south-eastern direction from the Bodi tree, to a distance of eight oothabas from it. On the eastern bank of that stream another Dzedy has been erected on the spot where, previous to his becoming a Buddha, he had eaten the forty-nine mouthfuls of the delicious Nogana offered to him by the pious Thoodzata. Whilst Buddha was sitting in a cross-legged position under the linloon tree, two brothers named Tapoosa and Palekat, merchants by profession, arrived with five hundred carts in the Oorouwela forest, at the very place where Buddha was staying. They had sailed from their native town, called[13] Oukkalaba, which lies in a south-eastern direction from the Mitzima country, bound for the port of Adzeitta. After landing, they hired five hundred carts to carry their goods to a place called Soowama. They were on their way to their destination when they arrived in the Oorouwela forest. Great was their surprise when they saw on a sudden all their carts unable to move, and arrested by some invisible power. A Nat who had been formerly their relative stopped by his power the wheels of the carriages. Surprised at such a wonder, the merchants prayed to the Nat who was guardian of that place. The Nat, assuming a visible shape, appeared before them and said to them: "The illustrious Buddha who by the knowledge of the four great truths has arrived to the nature of Phra, is now sitting at the foot of the linloon tree. Go now to that place, and offer him some sweet bread and honey; you shall derive therefrom great merits for many days and nights to come." The two brothers, joyfully complying with the Nat's request, prepared the sweet bread and honey, and hastened in the direction that had been indicated to them. Having placed themselves in a suitable position and prostrated themselves before Buddha, they said: "Most glorious Phra, please to accept these offerings; great merits doubtless will be our reward for many days to come." Buddha had no patta to put those offerings in, for the one he had received from the Brahma Gatigara had disappeared when Thoodzata made him her great offerings. Whilst he was thinking on what he had to do, four Nats came and presented him each with one patta, made of nila or sapphire stone. Phra accepted the four pattas, not from motives of covetousness, but to let each Nat have an equal share in such meritorious work. He put the four pattas one in the other, and by the power of his will they on a sudden became but one patta, so that each Nat lost nothing of the merit of his offerings. Buddha received the offerings of the two merchants in that patta, and satisfied his appetite. The two brothers said to Buddha: "We have on this day approached you, worshipped you, and respectfully listened to your instructions; please to consider us as your devoted followers for the remainder of our lives."[14] They obtained the position of Upathaka. They continued addressing Buddha, and said: "What shall we henceforth worship?" Buddha, rubbing his hand over his head, gave them a few of the hairs that had adhered to his fingers, bidding them to keep carefully those relics. The two brothers, overjoyed at such a valuable present, most respectfully received it, prostrated themselves before Buddha, and departed. FOOTNOTES [1] The Nats or Dewatas play a conspicuous part in the affairs of this world. Their seats are in the six lower heavens, forming, with the abode of man and the four states of punishment, the eleven seats of passions. But they often quit their respective places, and interfere with the chief events that take place among men. Hence we see them ever attentive in ministering to all the wants of the future Buddha. Besides, they are made to watch over trees, forests, villages, towns, cities, fountains, rivers, &c. These are the good and benevolent Nats. This world is also supposed to be peopled with wicked Nats, whose nature is ever prone to the evil. A good deal of the worship of Buddhists consists in superstitious ceremonies and offerings made for propitiating the wicked Nats, and obtaining favours and temporal advantages from the good ones. Such a worship is universal, and fully countenanced by the talapoins, though in opposition to the real doctrines of genuine Buddhism. All kinds of misfortunes are attributed to the malignant interference of the evil Nats. In cases of severe illness that have resisted the skill of native medical art, the physician gravely tells the patient and his relatives that it is useless to have recourse any longer to medicines, but a conjuror must be sent for to drive out the malignant spirit, who is the author of the complaint. Meanwhile directions are given for the erection of a shed, where offerings intended for the inimical Nat are deposited. A female relative of the patient begins dancing to the sound of musical instruments. The dance goes on, at first in rather a quiet manner, but it gradually grows more animated until it reaches the acme of animal frenzy. At that moment the bodily strength of the dancing lady becomes exhausted; she drops on the ground in a state of apparent faintness. She is then approached by the conjuror, who asks her if the invisible foe has relinquished his hold over the diseased. Being answered in the affirmative, he bids the physician give medicines to the patient, assuring him that his remedies will now act beneficially for restoring the health of the sick, since their action will meet no further opposition from the wicked Nat. Ignorance brings everywhere superstition in its train. When man is unacquainted with the natural cause that has produced a result, or an effect, which attracts powerfully his mind's attention and affects him to a great degree, he is induced by his own weakness to believe in the agency of some unknown being, to account for the effect that he perceives. He devises the most ridiculous means for expressing his gratitude to his invisible benefactor, if the result be a favourable one; and has recourse to the most extravagant measures to counteract the evil influence of his supposed enemy, if the result be fatal to him. Having once entered into the dark way of superstition, man is hurried on in countless false directions by fear, hope, and other passions, in the midst of the daily occurrence of multifarious and unforeseen events and circumstances. Hence the expression or manifestation of his superstition assumes a variety of forms, and undergoes changes to an extent that baffles every attempt at either counting their numberless kinds or following them up through their ever-changing course. In addition to the stores of superstitions bequeathed by the generation that has preceded him, man has those of his own creation; and the latter, if the thought of his mind and the desires of his heart could be analysed, would be found far exceeding the former in number. Having spent many years in a country where Buddhism has prevailed from time immemorial, and observed the effects of superstition over the people in their daily doings, the writer has come to the conclusion that there is scarcely an action done without the influence of some superstitious motive or consideration. But the most prolific source of superstition is the belief in the existence of countless good and evil Nats, with whom the imagination of Buddhists has peopled this world. It can scarcely be understood how the followers of an atheistical creed can make, consistently with their opinions, an attempt at prayer. Such an act of devotion implies the belief in a being superior to men, who has a controlling power over them, and in whose hands their destinies are placed. With a believer in God, prayer is a sacred, nay, a natural duty. But such cannot be the case with atheists. Despite the withering and despairing influence of atheism, nothing can possibly obliterate from the conscience and heart of man that inward faith in a supreme being. The pious Thoodzata has in view the attainment of two objects: she prays, without knowing to whom, that by the agency of some one she might obtain the objects of her petition; she is anxious to show her gratitude when she sees that her prayer has been heard. Her faith in the _quasi_ omnipotence of the genii makes her address thanks to them. The Nat is not the person to whom her prayer appears directed, but he is rather a witness of her petition. The Burmese, in general, under difficult circumstances, unforeseen difficulties, and sudden calamities, use always the cry, _Phra kaiba_--God assist me--to obtain from above assistance and protection. Yet that Phra cannot be their Buddha, though he be in their opinion the Phra _par excellence_, since they openly declare that he in no way interferes in the management of this world's affairs. Whence that involuntary cry for assistance, but from the innate consciousness that above man there is some one ruling over his destinies? An atheistical system may be elaborated in a school of metaphysics, and forced upon ignorant and unreflecting masses, but practice will ever belie theory. Man, in spite of his errors and follies, is naturally a believing being; his own weakness and multiplied wants ever compel him to have recourse to some great being that can help and assist him, and supply, to a certain extent, the deficiency which, in spite of himself, he is compelled to acknowledge existing in him as a stern and humiliating reality. [2] The Burmese, like all trans-Gangetic nations, divide the year into twelve lunar months of twenty-nine and thirty days alternately. Every third year they add one month, or as they say, double the month of Watso (July). The year begins on, or about, the 12th of April. The days of worship are the days of the four quarters of the moon; but the days of the new and full moon seem to have preference over those of the two other quarters, which latter are scarcely noticed or distinguished from common days. It was on the day of the full moon of April that Thoodzata made her grand offering. [3] The Burmese translator, not having given in his remarks the explanation or interpretation of Phralaong's five dreams, it seems rather presumptuous to attempt doing a thing, the neglect of which, on the part of the author, may be attributed either to voluntary omission or to incapacity and inability. Let us try to make up, in part, for the deficiency. The first dream prognosticated the future greatness of Phralaong, whose sway, by the diffusion of his doctrines throughout the world, was to be universal, extending from one sea to the other sea. The grass growing out of his navel and reaching to the sky was indicative of the spreading of his law, not only amongst the beings inhabiting the seat of men, but also amidst those dwelling in the abodes of Nats and Brahmas. The ants covering his legs offer an enigma, the explanation of which is reserved to some future Oedipus. As to the birds of various colours, gathering round him, from the four points of the compass, and on a sudden becoming all white, by their contact with him, they represent the innumerable beings that will come to hear the preaching of the future Buddha with divers dispositions, and different progress in the way of merits, and will all be perfected by their following the true way to merit, that he will point out to them. The fifth dream in which Phralaong thought he was walking on a mountain of filth, without being in the least contaminated by it, foreshowed the incomparable perfection and purity of Buddha, who, though remaining in the world of passions, was no more to be affected by their influence. [4] We have now reached the most interesting episode of Phralaong's life. He is to become a perfected Buddha under the shade of the gniaong or banyan tree (_ficus indica_, _ficus religiosa_). There are two circumstances attending that great event, deserving peculiar notice. The first is the preference given to the east over the three other points of the compass, and the second, the mighty combat that takes place between Phralaong and the wicked Nat Manh, or Mar. I notice the first circumstance because it agrees with the tradition prevailing amongst most nations previous to or about the coming of our Lord, that from the east there was to come an extraordinary personage, who would confer on the human race the greatest benefits, and cause the return of happy times, like the golden age so much celebrated by poets. The Roman historian Suetonius bears testimony to the existence of that tradition as being universally known in his own days. It is not impossible that the same notion, not unknown in the far east, might have induced Phralaong to look towards the east at the supreme moment when perfect intelligence was to become his happy lot. It may be said in opposition to this supposition, that the splendour and magnificence of the sun, emerging from the bosom of night, and dispelling darkness by pouring a flood of light on the face of the earth, restoring nature to life and action, was a sufficient inducement to Phralaong for giving preference to the east. But to an ascetic like him, who is convinced that this world is a mere illusion, such a consideration would weigh very little on his mind, and would not be a sufficient motive to induce him to give so marked a preference to the east. The second circumstance remarkable for the time it occurred, is the great combat between Phralaong and Manh. The first is the personification of goodness and benevolence towards all beings; the second is the personification of consummate wickedness. The contest is to take place between the good principle on the one hand, and the evil one on the other. Phralaong, on his becoming Buddha, will preach a law designed to dispel mental darkness, to check vicious passions, to show the right way to perfection, to unloose the ties that keep beings in the wretched state of existence, and enable them to reach safely the peaceful shores of Neibban. Manh, the devil himself, the father of darkness, of lies and deceit, delights in seeing all beings plunged into the abyss of vices, carried out of the right way by the impetuous and irresistible torrent of their passions, and doomed to turn for ever in the whirlpool of endless existences. He looks upon himself as the king of this world, and proudly exults in contemplating all beings bending their neck under his tyrannical yoke, and acknowledging his undisputed power. Now the moment approaches when a mighty antagonist will contend with him for the empire of the world. His mission will be to labour incessantly for the delivery of all beings from the grasp of their mortal enemy, and set them free from the tyranny of passions. Manh is enraged at the audacious pretensions of Phralaong. Hence the gigantic efforts he makes to maintain his rights, and retain possession of his empire. At the time Phralaong left the world to become a Rahan, Manh endeavoured to dissuade him from attempting such a design. But on this occasion, the tempter summons all his forces to avert, by an irresistible attack, the deadly blow soon to be levelled at him. It is needless to add that the reader, in perusing the detailed account of the attack of Manh against Phralaong, ought to bear in mind that it exhibits throughout but an allegory of the opposition of evil to good. The victory of Phralaong over Manh exemplifies the final triumph of truth over error. When the contest was nearly over, Phralaong objected to the claims of Manh to the possession of his throne, on the ground that he never had practised the ten great virtues, nor performed works of kindness, charity, and benevolence, which alone can entitle a being to obtain the Buddhaship. It is to be borne in mind that these qualifications form the real characteristics of a Buddha, together with the possession of the supreme intelligence. In this system, they admit that there exist certain beings called Pitzega-Buddhas, who possess all the knowledge and science of a genuine Buddha, but as they are divested of those benevolent feelings which induce the former to labour earnestly for the benefit and salvation of all beings, they cannot be assimilated to the real Buddhas. The cross-legged position which our Buddha has always taken in preference to any other, whilst he spent forty-nine days at the foot of and in various places round the Bodi tree, is, as every one knows, peculiar to and a favourite with all Asiatics. But with him, it is the fittest position for meditation and contemplation. Hence most of the statues or images of Gaudama exhibit or represent him in the cross-legged position which he occupied when he attained the Buddhaship. As this event is by far the most important of his life, it is but natural that this great occurrence should ever be forced upon the attention and memory of his followers, by objects representing him on that most important stage of his last existence. It is not unusual to meet with statues of Gaudama, sometimes of colossal dimensions, representing him in a reclining position. This is the peculiar situation he occupied when he died. Hence those two most common images of Gaudama are designed to remind his followers of the two greatest circumstances of his life, viz., his becoming Buddha, and his entering the state of Neibban. Here again one is forcibly compelled to reflect on the singular _rôle_ attributed to those Pitzega-Buddhas. They possess all the science of a Buddha, but are deficient in that kindness, benevolence, and zeal which prompt the real Buddhas to labour so strenuously for the deliverance of all beings. They appear only in those ages of darkness and ignorance which are not to be brightened and enlightened by the presence of a Buddha. They are like smaller luminaries, shedding a pale light among men to prevent their sinking into an unfathomable abyss of ignorance; they maintain on earth some sparks of the knowledge of fundamental truths, which otherwise would be completely obliterated from the memory of men. Not unlike the prophets of old, they prepare men in an indirect manner for the coming of the future deliverer. Their mission being at an end, when a Buddha is to come among men, they disappear, and none of them is to be seen either in the days of Buddha or during all the time his religion is to last. [5] The witness whom Phralaong summoned in support of his claim to the undisturbed possession of the throne was the earth itself. It maybe from the example that was set on this occasion that Buddhists have borrowed the habit of calling the earth as a witness of the good works they have done or are doing. I will briefly relate what is done and said on such occasions. During my former residence in Burmah I observed on a certain occasion, when taking my evening walk, about ten or twelve persons of both sexes assembled on a rather retired spot in the vicinity of a pagoda. As they appeared all quite attentive, I came near to them to see what was the cause that had brought them thither, and what occurrence seemed to rivet their attention. As I was known to some of them, they were not frightened by my sudden apparition. On my asking them the motive of their assembling here at a late hour, they said that, having buried yesterday a child two years old, they came to make some offerings of boiled rice, plantains, and other fruits, to propitiate the Nat of the place. Having asked them to repeat the formula they had uttered on the occasion, they kindly complied with my request. Here is the substance of that formula. "Believing in the three precious things, Buddha, the Law, and the Assembly of the perfect, I make this offering, that I may be delivered from all present and future miseries. May all beings existing in the four states of punishment reach the fortunate seats of Nats. I wish all my relatives and all men inhabiting this and other worlds to have a share in this meritorious work. O earth and you Nats, guardians of this place, be witness to the offering I am making." On uttering these last words, the offerer of the present, or a talapoin, sent for this purpose, pours down some water on the ground. [6] As the Nats and all other beings are to be benefited by the preachings of Buddha, it is but natural that they all join in singing his praises and exalting his glorious achievements. The Nagas and Galongs are fabulous animals, which are often mentioned in the course of this Legend. It has been observed in a former note that, according to the Buddhistic notions, animals are beings in a state of punishment, differing from man, not in nature, but in merits. Some of them, having nearly exhausted the sum of their demerits, begin to feel the influence of former merits. They are supposed to have, to a certain extent, the use of reason. No wonder if they rejoice at seeing the triumph of him who is to help them in advancing towards a condition better than their present one. [7] The banyan tree, at the foot of which Phralaong obtains perfect intelligence, is occasionally called throughout this narrative the Bodi tree. The word Bodi means wisdom, science, or knowledge. The Burmese, in their sacred writings, always mention the tree by that name, because, under its shade, perfect science was communicated to Phralaong. It is supposed to occupy the very centre of the island of Dzampudiba. During all the while Phra or Buddha (let us call him now by that name) remained under that tree his mind was engaged in the most profound meditation, which the gigantic efforts of his enemy could scarcely interrupt. It is not to be inferred from the narrative in the text that supreme intelligence was communicated suddenly or by miraculous process to our Buddha. He was already prepared, by former mental labours, for that grand result; he had previously capacitated himself, by studies and reflection, for the reception of that more than human science; he required but a last and mighty effort of his intelligence to arrive finally at the acme of knowledge, and thereby to become a perfect Buddha. That last effort was made on this occasion, and crowned with the most complete success. He gained the science of the past, present, and future. It would be somewhat curious to investigate the motives that have determined Buddhists to give to that sacred tree the name of Bodi. At first sight one will infer that such a name was given to the tree because, under its refreshing and cooling shade the Bodi, or Supreme intelligence, was communicated to Phralaong. The occurrence, however extraordinary it be, is scarcely sufficient to account for such an appellation. Bearing in mind the numerous and striking instances of certain revealed facts and truths, offered to the attention of the reader of this Legend, in a deformed but yet recognisable shape, it would not be quite out of the limits of probability to suppose that this is also a remnant of the tradition of the tree of knowledge that occupied the centre of the garden of Eden. [8] The theory of the twelve causes and effects is, in itself, very abstruse, and almost above the comprehension of those uninitiated in the metaphysics of Buddhists. I will attempt to analyse it in as simple and clear a way as possible. This theory is very ancient, probably coeval with the first ages of Buddhism. It forms this basis of its ontology and metaphysics in the same manner as the four great and transcendent truths are the foundation whereupon rests the system of morals. It is probable that Gaudama, in his preachings, which were very simple, and within the reach of ordinary minds, never formulated his doctrine on this essential point in such a dry and concise manner. But the seed was sown, and the germ deposited here and there in his instructions. His immediate disciples, in endeavouring to give a distant shape to their master's doctrines, gradually framed the formula or theory just stated. It, in fact, presents the very characteristics of a system elaborated in a philosophical school. In taking our departure from the first cause, which is _Awidza_, or ignorance, or the wanting in science, or no knowledge, we have to follow the different stages and conditions of a being until it reaches decrepitude, old age, and death. When we speak of ignorance, or no science, we must not suppose the material existence of a being that ignores. But we must take ignorance in an abstract sense, deprived of forms, and subsisting in a manner very different from what we are wont to consider ordinary beings. A European has a great difficulty in finding his way through a process of reasoning so extraordinary, and so different from that positivism which he is used to. But with the Buddhist the case is widely different. He can pass from the abstract to the concrete, from the ideal to the real, with the greatest ease. But let us follow the scale of the causes and effects, upon which there are twelve steps. From ignorance comes _Sangkara_, that is to say, conception or imagination, which mistakes for reality what is unreal, which looks on this world as something substantial, whilst it is, indeed, nothing but shadow and emptiness, assuming forms which pass away as quick as the representations of theatrical exhibitions. Sangkara, in its turn, begets _Wignian_, or knowledge, attended with a notion of sentiment, implying that of soul and life, in an abstract sense. From Wignian proceeds _Namrup_, the name and form, because knowledge can have for its object but name and form, &c., or, to speak in the language of Buddhists, things that are external and internal. But let it be borne in mind that what is herein meant is but the individuality of an ideal being. The name and form give birth to the _Chayatana_, six senses, or seats of the sensible qualities. To our division of the five ordinary senses Buddhists add the sixth sense of Mano, or the heart, the internal sense. Through the senses we are put in communication or contact with all objects; hence the six senses give rise to the sixth cause _Pasa_, which means, properly speaking, contact. From this cause flows the seventh one, called _Wedana_, or sensation, or, more generally still, sensibility. In fact, there can be no contact from which there will not result some sensation, either pleasant or unpleasant, _Wedana_ gives infallibly rise to _Tahna_, or passion, or desire, or inclination. From this point the series of causes and effects is comparatively easy, because it presents conditions essentially connected with a material object. By Tahna we ought not to understand only the mere inclination that the sexes have one for the other, but the general propensity created in a being by any contact whatever, or perhaps, as usual with Buddhists, the desire taken in an abstract sense. The immediate result from Tahna is _Upadan_, the attachment, or the conception. It is that state in which the desire adheres to something, assumes a shape. It is, in fact, the being conceived. From the state of conception the being passes into that of _Bawa_, or existence, or that condition which is created and made by the influence of former good or bad deeds preceding birth, which is but the apparition of the being into this world. _Dzati_, or birth, is the eleventh cause. It is the ushering of a being into the world. There are six ways by which a being comes into this world, viz., those of Nat, Man, Assura, Preitta, animal, and the inhabitant of hell. Birth is accomplished in four different manners, by humidity, an egg, a matrice, and metamorphosis. The twelfth and last step in the ladder of the causes and effects is decrepitude and death. In fact, every being that is born must grow old, decay, and finally die. Such is the process followed by Buddhists in attempting to account for all that exists. What effect could such a reasoning have over the mind of the generality of hearers it is difficult to say. But we may rest assured that, though these principles existed, as an embryo, in the discourses of the author of Buddhism, they were never laid before the generality of hearers in that crude scholastic form. Such abstruse ideas, when analysed and commented upon by Buddhist doctors, gave rise to the most opposite conclusions. The materialist school based its revolting doctrines upon that theory; we may add that the opinions of that school are generally held in Burmah, and by the great mass of Buddhists. Some other doctors reasoned in the following manner: Ignorance supposes two things, a being ignoring and a thing ignored, that is to say, man and the world. They admitted the eternity of a soul which had to pass through the series above enumerated. With them metempsychosis was a process exactly similar to that imagined by the Brahmins. As to the world, it was, to them, an unreality. Knowledge enabled them to come to the position of understanding and believing that there is no such thing as what we by mistake call world. The latter opinion, which seems to admit of a principle existing distinct from matter, is opposed to the former and general one, which supposes that spirit is but a modification of matter. We deliberately make use of the doubt, implying expression, at the head of the preceding sentence, respecting the real opinions of the latter school, because, in their way of arguing, it is impossible not to come to the painful conclusion that they ignore, or do not admit, a distinction between spirit and matter. [9] In a work different from that which has been translated is found a more developed exposition of the four great and sublime truths. We think that the reader will like to see in what manner Buddhists themselves understand this important subject, which is, with them, the foundation of their doctrine on morals. There are four great truths: pain, the production of pain, the destruction of pain, and the way leading to that destruction. What is pain, which is the first of the great truths? It is birth, old age, sickness, death, the coming in contact with what we dislike, the separation from what we feel an attachment for, the illusion which begets false knowledge. All that is pain. What is the production of pain, the second sublime truth? It is the desire which incessantly longs for an illusory satisfaction, which can never be obtained. That desire is a perpetually renewed craving, coveting objects here and there, and never satiated. Such is the cause productive of pain; such is the prolific source of all miseries. What is the destruction of pain, which is the third great truth? It is the doing away with that desire which always shows itself, searches after this or that object, is always attended with feelings of pleasure, or some other sensations. It is the perfect and entire stifling of that craving which always covets, and is never satiated. The estranging oneself from that desire and that craving, the complete destruction of both, constitutes the third great truth. What is the way leading to the destruction of that desire, which is the fourth great truth? The way which one has to follow, in order to obtain that most desirable result, is that which the wise man invariably follows, when he is with an intention, will, diligence, action, life, language, thought, and meditation, always pure and correct. The four truths are exceedingly praised by Buddhists. They constitute what is emphatically called the law of the wheel, incessantly revolving upon itself, and always presenting successively those four points to the attentive consideration and affectionate piety of the faithful. They are the offensive weapons wherewith passions are attacked and destroyed: they are the sword that cuts asunder the link that retains a being in the circle of existences. The revelation, or manifestation of those truths, is the great work that a Buddha has to perform. When it is made, all beings in their respective seats rejoice in an extraordinary manner. Inanimate nature even partakes in the universal joy. The earth shakes with a great violence, and the greatest prodigies proclaim aloud the fortunate manifestation of a law which opens to all beings the way leading to deliverance. The preaching of that doctrine took place for the first time in the forest of Migadawon, not far from Baranathee, in the presence and for the benefit of the five Rahans, who had attended on Buddha, during the six years of mortification which he spent to prepare and qualify himself for the Buddhaship. [10] Buddhists allow to their Buddha the power of working wonders and miracles. How is this power conferred upon him? This is a difficulty they cannot explain satisfactorily. The science of Buddha makes him acquainted with all the laws regulating nature, that is to say, the _ensemble_ of the animate and inanimate beings constituting a world; but one is at a loss to find the origin of that power which enables him, as often as he likes, to suspend the course of those laws. Be that as it may, certain it is that Buddha resorted always, during the course of his preachings, to miracles, in order to convince those who seemed to listen with rather an incredulous ear to his doctrines. Miracles were used successfully, as powerful and irresistible weapons, against certain heretics, the Brahmins, in particular, who taught doctrines opposed to his own. They often accompanied his preachings, for increasing faith in the heart of his hearers. [11] The great tempter had been foiled in all his attempts to conquer Buddha. In the sadness of his heart he was compelled to acknowledge the superiority of his opponent and confess his defeat. His three daughters came to console him, promising that they would, by their united efforts, overcome the firmness of the great Rahan, by awakening in his heart the fire of concupiscence. The names of those three daughters of Manh denote concupiscence. These new enemies of Buddha, therefore, are mere personifications of the passion of lust. Pride, personified in Manh, had proved powerless against the virtue of Buddha; he is now assailed from a different quarter; the attack is to be directed against the weakest side of human nature. But it is as successless as the former one: it affords to Buddha another occasion for a fresh triumph. [12] In Burmah the originator of the great Buddhistic system is called Gaudama, and this appellation, according to many, appears to be his family name. When he is called Rahan Gaudama, it means the ascetic belonging to the family of Gaudama. In Nepaul, the same personage is known under the name of Thakiamuni, that is to say, the ascetic of the Thakia family. Those who refused to believe in Buddha and his doctrines, those who held tenets disagreeing with his own, and professed what, in the opinion of their adversaries, was termed a heretical creed, invariably called Buddha by his family name, placing him on the same level with so many of his contemporaries who led the same mode of life. The Siamese give the appellation of Sammana Khodom to their Buddha, that is to say, Thramana Gaudama, or Gautama. The Sanscrit word Thramana means an ascetic who has conquered his passions and lives on alms. Gaudama belonged to the Kchatria caste. Kings and all royal families in those days came out of the same caste. Hence his father Thoodaudana was king of the country of Kapilawot, anciently a small state, north of Goruckpore. The young Pounha, not unlike the young man mentioned in the gospel, had, by the preachings of Gaudama, become acquainted with all the laws and practices relating to the general duties and obligations incumbent on men in general. He might have perhaps added that he had observed all those precepts from his youth, or, at least, that he was sure now, with the additional light he had received from his eminent teacher, to observe faithfully all the injunctions mentioned in the course of the lecture: but he was not satisfied with an ordinary proficiency in virtue and observances; he aimed at superior attainments; he wished to obtain the greatest perfection, that is to say, that of Brahmas. In what does such a perfection consist? The book of metaphysics informs us that the five states of Dzan, or contemplations, are enjoyed by the beings located in the sixteen seats of Brahmas, in the following order. The first state, or that of consideration, is shared by all the beings inhabiting the three first seats of Brahmas. Their occupation is to consider the various subjects the mind has to dwell on. The second Dzan, or reflection, is reserved for the beings occupying the next three seats. Those beings have no more to look out for subjects of meditation. Their sole occupation is to dive into truth and fathom its depth and various bearings. The third state of Dzan procures the pleasure which is derived from the contemplation of truth, and belongs to the beings of the three seats, superior to those just alluded to; in the fourth Dzan is enjoyed a placid happiness, which is the result of the possession of truth; it is reserved for the beings of the three next seats. The fifth Dzan, or perfect stability, is the happy lot of the beings living in the five last seats. Those fortunate inmates are so entirely rooted in truth, and so perfectly exempt from all that causes mutability, that they arrive at a state of complete fixity, the whole of their soul being riveted on truth. Apology is certainly due to the reader, who is but slightly initiated in such abstruse subjects, for laying before him particulars with which he is so unfamiliar; but this trouble must be borne up by him who desires to obtain access into the gloomy sanctuary of Buddhism. [13] The episode of these two merchants is well known to the inhabitants of the Irrawaddy valley. In three different manuscripts which the writer has had in his hands, he has found it related with almost the same particulars. Oukkalaba, the place the two young men started from, was situated probably on the spot now occupied by the village of Twaintay, or not far from it. How far that place was from the sea in those remote times it is not possible to ascertain with precision. Certain it is, that it was a port from which vessels sailed across the Bay of Bengal. The port of Eedzeitha has not as yet been identified with any known locality. It was situated in all probability between the mouth of the Krichna and that of the Hoogly. One of the manuscripts mentions that when Gaudama handed over to the two merchants eight hairs of his head, he bade them, on their arrival in their country, deposit the hairs on a small hill called Seingouttara, where the relics of the three former Buddhas of our period had been enshrined. They were twenty-seven days in reaching Maudin or Cape Negrais, rather a long voyage. Having come to their own place, they related to the governor all the particulars of their interesting journey. The latter, without loss of time, assembled the people and set out in search of the Seingouttara mount. All the eminences were cleared of their brushwood, but the mount could not be discovered. Not knowing what to do, they consulted the Nats on that affair. At last, through their assistance, the mount was found out. But when they inquired about the place of the relics of the three former Buddhas, the Nats of Yesapan, Inandra, and Gauveinda confessed that they knew nothing on the subject, but referred the inquirers to other Nats older than they, viz.: those of Deckina, Yauhani, Maubee, Ameisa, and Tsoolay, who at once pointed out the spot which they were so eagerly searching after. This spot is no other than the one over which stands and towers the lofty and massive Shoay Dagon. They erected a Dzedy, in which they enshrined the relics they had brought with them, the eight hairs of Buddha. This story is doubtless the foundation on which rests the popular belief that those very hairs are to this day in the interior of that monument, and the true source from which has originated the profound veneration which, in our own days, Buddhists, from all parts of Burmah, Siam, and the Shan states, pay by their pilgrimages and offerings to the Dagon Pagoda. [14] Upasaka is a Pali word which is designed to mean those persons who, having heard the instructions of Buddha, and professed a faith or belief in him and his doctrines, did not enter the profession of Rahans. Hence they are quite distinct from the Bikus or mendicants, who formed the first class of the hearers of Buddha, and renounced the world in imitation of their great master. The Upasakas were therefore people adhering to the doctrines of Buddha, but as yet remaining engaged in the ordinary pursuits of life. The two brothers became disciples of Buddha, but not of the first class, since they did not embrace the more perfect mode of life of the ascetics. This is the first instance in this legend of an allusion being made to relics, that is to say, to objects supposed to be surrounded with a certain amount of sacredness, and esteemed on that account to be worthy of receiving from devotees respect and veneration. The two young converts, not as yet confirmed in the new faith they had embraced, thought they wanted some exterior object to which they might hereafter direct their homage and offer their respects. They were as yet far from being acquainted with the sublime science of their eminent teacher, who, disregarding matter and all its modifications, could not but feel quite indifferent respecting the pretended value of relics of even the most sacred character. How is it that the stern moralist, the contemner of this illusory world, could think of giving a few hairs of his head to two new young converts, that they might use them as objects of worship? Buddha doubtless knew exactly and appreciated admirably the wants and necessities of human nature as it is, and will very likely ever be to the end of ages. Men are led, actuated, impressioned, and influenced by the senses; in fact, it is through their senses that the knowledge of things is conveyed to their minds. He gave to his imperfectly instructed disciples a thing that would serve to vivify and reanimate in their memory the remembrance of Buddha, and of the instructions they had heard from him. Those grossly-minded hearers asked for an object they might carry about with them and worship. Buddha, out of deference for their weak intellect, gave them a few hairs of his head, the sight of which was designed to maintain in their souls a tender affection for the person of him these things had belonged to. This subject will receive hereafter the further treatment it deserves when we come to examine the nature of the worship paid by Buddhists to the images of Gaudama, and to the relics and Dzedis. CHAPTER VI. _Buddha hesitates to undertake the task of preaching the law -- The great Brahma entreats him to preach the law to all beings -- His assent to the entreaties -- Journey towards Migadawon -- He meets Ouppaka -- His first preachings -- Conversion of a young nobleman named Ratha, followed by that of his father and other relatives -- Conversion of several other noblemen -- Instructions to the Rahans -- Conversion of the three Kathabas._ Having come to the end of his great meditations,[1] Buddha left this spot and returned to the place called Adzapala, where he revolved the following subject in his mind:--"The knowledge," said he, "of the law and of the four great truths, which I alone possess, is very hard to be had. The law is deep; it is difficult to know and understand it; it is very sublime, and can be comprehended only by the means of earnest meditation. It is sweet, filling the soul with joy, and accessible only to the wise. Now all beings are sunk very low by the influence of the five great passions; they cannot free themselves from their baneful operation, which is the source of all mutability. But the law of mutability is the opposite of the law of Neibban or rest. This law is hard to be understood. If I ever preach that law, beings will not be able to understand me, and from my preaching there will result but a useless fatigue and unprofitable weariness," Buddha thus remained almost disinclined to undertake the great duty of preaching the law. The great Brahma, observing what was taking place in Buddha's soul, cried out: "Alas! all mankind are doomed to be lost. He who deserves to be worshipped by all beings now feels no disposition to announce the law to them." He instantly left his seat, and having repaired to the presence of Phra, his cloak over his shoulders with one extremity hanging backward, he bent his knee, lifted up his joined hands to the forehead before the sage, and said to him: "Most illustrious Buddha, who art adorned with the six glories, do condescend to preach the most excellent law; the number of those buried under the weight and filth of passions is comparatively small; if they do not listen to the law there will be no great loss. But there is an immense number of beings who will understand the law. In this world there are beings who are moderately given up to the gratification of sensual appetites; and there are also a great many who are following heretical opinions to whom the knowledge of truth is necessary, and who will easily come to it. Lay now open the way that leads to the perfection of Ariahs; those perfections are the gates to Neibban." Thus he entreated Buddha. This Brahma had been in the time of Buddha Kathaba a Rahan, under the name of Thabaka, and was transferred to the first seat of Brahma for the duration of a world. On hearing the supplications of that Brahma, Buddha began to feel a tender compassion for all beings. With the keen eyes of a Buddha he glanced over the whole world. He discovered distinctly those beings who were as yet completely sunk in the filth of passions, those who were but partly under the control of passions, and those whose dispositions seemed to be more promising. He then made to the chief of Brahmas the solemn promise that he would preach his law to all beings. Satisfied with the answer he had received, the chief rose up, withdrew respectfully at a proper distance, and turning on the right, left the presence of Buddha and returned to his own seat. Another thought preoccupied the mind of Buddha. "To whom," said he, "shall I announce the law?" Having pondered a while over this subject, he added: "The Rathee Alara of the Kalama race is gifted with wisdom and an uncommonly penetrating mind; passions have scarcely any influence over him. I will first preach to him the most excellent law." A Nat then said to Phra that Alara had died seven days ago. Buddha, to whom the past is known, had already seen that Alara was dead. He said: "Great indeed is the loss Alara has met with; he would have doubtless been able to understand right well the law I intended to preach to him. To whom shall I go now?" Having paused a while, he added: "The Rathee Oodaka, son of Prince Rama, has a quick perception; he will easily understand my doctrine; to him I will announce the law." But the same Nat told him that Oodaka had died the night before last, at midnight. "O! great is the loss that has come upon Oodaka; he would have easily acquired the knowledge of the perfect law." Buddha considered a third time, and said to himself: "To whom shall I go to preach the law?" After a moment's delay he added: "Many are the services I received in the wilderness from the five Rahans who lived with me.[2] I will repay their good offices to me, by preaching to them the law, but where are they now?" His penetrating regards soon discovered them in the solitude of Migadawon. Having enjoyed himself in the place Adzapala, Buddha went on towards the country of Baranathee. All the former Buddhas travelled through the air, but our Buddha, who had merciful designs over Upaka, went on foot. On his way to the village of Gaya, at a distance of three gawots from the Bodi tree, Buddha went to rest, at midday, for a while under the cooling shade of a tree. There he was seen by the heretic Rahan Upaka, who, approaching near him, said, "O Rahan, all your exterior bespeaks the most amiable qualities; your countenance is at once modest and beautiful. Under what teacher have you become a Rahan? To what law or doctrine have you given preference in your arduous studies?" Buddha answered: "Upaka, I have triumphed over all the laws of mutability; I am acquainted with all the laws that rule this universe, and the beings existing therein; from concupiscence and other passions I am wholly disengaged. I have come to preach the most excellent law to all beings, and teach them the four great truths I alone am acquainted with. I will beat the great drum of the law. I have no teacher, and among Nats and men there is none equal to me. Because of my victory, I have been named Zeena. Now I am proceeding to the country of Baranathee, for the sake of preaching the law." Upaka replied, "You are certainly the illustrious Gaudama." He then shook his head, turned away from the road, and went to the village of Wingaha. The instructions, however, germinated as good seed in the soul of Upaka, and were the foundation of his subsequent conversion, which happened as follows:--After this interview with Gaudama, Upaka dwelt as a hermit in the village of Wingaha, where a shed was erected for his dwelling. A hunter brought him support. It happened that the hunter being engaged in a hunting excursion, his daughter went to the hermit's cell, to carry him his food. Upaka was smitten by the beauty of the damsel. He stretched himself on his belly and said to himself, "I will take no food, nor change this position, unless I obtain the object of my wishes." He stayed for several days in that position without uttering a word, or making a single movement, or taking any food. At last the hunter returned, and went forthwith to the hermit's cell to inquire about the cause of his strange behaviour. He pulled him by the feet, calling him aloud by the name of hermit; after a while a sepulchral groan was heard, indicating that he was still alive. The good hunter affectionately entreated him to mention to him what he wanted; that he was ready to give him anything that he would ask. The hermit a second time made a prolonged groan, as a man endeavouring to gather strength. He then mentioned to the hunter the passion he had for his daughter, and swore that he would die on the spot if his demand were rejected. The father having given his consent, Upaka rose up, and was soon married to Tsawama, who after due time presented him with a son. It happened that Tsawama soon began to dislike her husband, and poured upon him on every occasion all sorts of abuse. Unable to bear any longer the unpleasant behaviour of his wife, Upaka said to himself, "I have here neither friend nor supporter: I will go to my friend Dzina; he will receive me with kindness." Hereupon he departed, inquiring everywhere about his friend Dzina. At last he arrived at the place where Buddha was staying with his disciples. Some of them, hearing Upaka inquiring with a loud voice about his friend Dzina, took him into the presence of Buddha, who, understanding at once the sad and painful state of the old man, kindly asked what he wanted. Upaka replied that he desired to become a Samanay under his direction. Buddha, to try his disposition, said to him, "You are too old, Upaka, to enter upon the course of the severe life of a Samanay, and conform to the enjoined practices." But the latter renewing his entreaties, he was admitted among the members of the assembly. He became an Anagam, died and migrated to one of the seats of Brahmas. After a short stay up there, he obtained the deliverance. His son was Thoobadda, who became afterwards an illustrious convert. Buddha continued his way towards Baranathee, and soon reached the solitude of Migadawon, a little distant from Baranathee, and went to the place where lived the five unbelieving Rahans. When they saw him coming at a distance, they said to each other, "The Rahan Gaudama is in search after disciples; he has just performed penitential deeds, and he is looking out for alms and clothes. Let us pay no respect to him in the way of going out to meet him, of receiving the tsiwaran from his hands, of presenting him water to wash his feet and preparing a place to sit on; let him sit wherever he pleases." Such was the plan they concerted among themselves. But when Buddha drew near, they could adhere no longer to their resolution. They rose up and went out to welcome his arrival. One took the tsiwaran from his hands, another the patta, a third one brought water for the washing of the feet, and a fourth one prepared a becoming place to rest. Buddha sat in the place that had been prepared for him. They called him by the name of Gaudama and other appellations, usually bestowed on ordinary Rahans. Buddha meekly replied to them, "Do not call me any longer by the name of Gaudama, or any other title bestowed on an ascetic. I have become a Rahanda; I alone am acquainted with the four fundamental truths. Now I am come to preach to you the true law. Listen, O Rahans, to my words; I will lead you to the true state of Neibban. My law will make you acquainted not only with the truths to be known, but at the same time point out to you the duties you have to perform, in order to obtain the state of Arahat. There are four ways leading to perfection. He who steadily follows them will enjoy the rewards and merits gained by his exertions. In that position he will see distinctly his own self; the light of Neibban will break forth upon him. But in order to obtain the great results I set forth before you, he must forsake his house and the world, and become a Rahan." The unbelieving Rahans persisted in not acknowledging him as a Buddha, and reproached him with going about in search of disciples and in quest of alms. The same preaching was repeated by Buddha, and the same answer was returned by his incredulous hearers. At last Buddha, assuming a lofty and commanding tone, said to them, "I declare unto you that I am a Buddha, knowing the four great truths and showing the way to Neibban." The hitherto unbelieving ascetics humbled themselves, and declared their belief in him and in all that he had taught. From that moment they entered on the four ways of perfection. The day was that of the full moon of Watso. The preaching began at the moment when half the disc of the sun was visible on the western horizon, and half that of the moon was above the eastern horizon. When completed, the sun had just disappeared, and the moon's entire globe was visible on the horizon. The five first converts were named Kautagnya, Baddiha, Wappa, Mahanan, and Asadzi. The Nats, guardians of the country of Baranathee[3] and Migadawon, hearing the sublime instructions delivered by Buddha on this occasion, cried aloud, "The law which the most excellent Buddha preaches is such as no man, Pounha or Brahma, can teach." Their united voices were heard in the lowest seat of Nats; the inhabitants of that seat, catching their words, repeated them, and they were heard by those of the next seat, and so on, until they reached the seats of Brahmas, and were re-echoed through 10,000 worlds. A mighty commotion was felt all over these worlds. The five at first unbelieving, but now believing Rahans obtained the perfection of Thautapati. Buddha often repeated to those that approached him, "Come to me; I preach a doctrine which leads to the deliverance from all the miseries attending existence." On that day, being the full moon of Watso, eighteen koodes (18,000,000,000) of Nats and Brahmas who had heard his preachings obtained the deliverance. The conversation of those five Rahans exhibited to the world the splendid and wonderful sight of six Rahandas assembled in the same place. At that time, whilst Buddha was in the Migadawon grove, the memorable conversion of a young layman took place. There was in the country of Baranathee the son of a rich man, named Ratha. He was of very gentle and amiable disposition. His father had built for him three palaces for each season of the year. A crowd of young damsels, skilful in the art of playing on all sorts of musical instruments, attended him in each of those palaces. Ratha spent his time in the midst of pleasure and amusements. On a certain day, while surrounded with female dancers and singers, he fell into a deep sleep. The musicians, following his example, laid aside their instruments, and fell asleep too. The lamps, filled with oil, continued to pour a flood of light throughout the apartments. Awaking sooner than usual, Ratha saw the musicians all asleep round him in various and unseemly situations. Some slept with wide-opened mouths, some had dishevelled hair, some were snoring aloud, some had their instruments lying on themselves, and others by their sides. The whole exhibited a vast scene of the greatest confusion and disorder. Sitting on his couch in a cross-legged position, the young man silently gazed with amazement and disgust over the unseemly spectacle displayed before him; then he said to himself, "The nature and condition of the body constitute indeed a truly heavy burden; that coarser part of our being affords a great deal of trouble and affliction." Whereupon he instantly arose from his couch, put on his gilt slippers, and came down to the door of his apartment. The Nats, who kept a vigilant watch, lest any one should oppose him in the execution of his holy purpose, kept open the door of the house, as well as the gate of the city. Ratha, free from all impediments, directed his steps towards the solitude of Migadawon. At that time Buddha, who had left his sleeping place at a very early hour, was walking in front of the house. He saw at a distance a young man coming in the direction he was in. He instantly stopped his pacing, and going into his own apartment, sat as usual on his seat, awaiting the arrival of the young stranger, who soon made his appearance and stated modestly the object of his visit. Buddha said to him, "O Ratha! the law of Neibban is the only true one: alone it is never attended with misery and affliction. O Ratha! come nearer to me; remain in this place; to you I will make known the most perfect and valuable law." On hearing these kind and inviting expressions, Ratha felt his heart overflow with the purest joy. He instantly put off his slippers, drew nearer to Buddha, bowed down three times before him, withdrew then to a becoming distance, and remained in a respectful attitude. Buddha began to preach the law, unfolding successively the various merits obtained by alms-giving, by a strict performance of all duties and practices of the law, and, above all, by renouncing the pleasures of this world. During all the while the heart of the young visitor expanded in a wonderful manner: he felt the ties that hitherto had bound him as it were to the world gradually relaxing and giving way before the unresisting influence of Buddha's words. The good dispositions of the young hearer were soon remarked by Buddha, who went on explaining all that related to the miseries attending existence, the passions tyrannising over the soul, the means wherewith to become exempt from those passions, and the great ways leading to perfection. After having listened to that series of instructions, Ratha, like a white cloth that easily retains the impressions of various colours printed upon it, felt himself freed from all passions, and reached at once the state of Thautapati. Ratha's mother, not meeting her son early, went up as usual to his apartment, and, to her great surprise, found him gone; moreover she observed unmistakable marks of his sudden and unexpected departure. She ran forthwith to her husband, and announced to him the sad tidings. On hearing of such an unlooked-for event, the father sent messengers in the direction of the four points of the compass, with positive orders to search incessantly after his son, and leave no means of inquiry untried. As to himself he resolved to go to the solitude of Migadawon, in the hope of finding out some track of his son's escape. He had scarcely travelled a limited distance, when he observed on the ground the marks of his son's footsteps. He followed them up, and soon came in sight of Buddha's resting-place. Ratha was at the time listening with deepest attention to all the words of his great teacher. By the power of Buddha he remained hidden from the eyes of his father, who came up, and, having paid his respects to Gaudama, eagerly asked him if he had not seen his son. Gaudama bade him sit down and rest after the fatigue of his journey. Meanwhile he assured him that he would soon see his son. Rejoiced at such an assurance, Ratha's father complied with the invitation he had received. Buddha announced his law to this distinguished hearer, and soon led him to the perfection of Thautapati. Filled with joy and gratitude, the new convert exclaimed, "O illustrious Phra, your doctrine is a most excellent one; when you preach it, you do like him who replaces on its basis an upset cup; like him, too, who brings to light precious things, which had hitherto remained in darkness; like him who points out the right way to those that have lost it; who kindles a brilliant light in the middle of darkness; who opens the mind's eyes that they might see the pure truth. Henceforth I adhere to you and to your holy law; please to reckon me as one of your disciples and supporters." This was the first layman that became a disciple of Gaudama, in the capacity of Upasaka.[4] Whilst Buddha was busily engaged in imparting instruction to Ratha's father, the young man had entered into a deep and solemn meditation over some of the highest maxims he had heard from his great teacher. He was calmly surveying, as it were, all the things of this world; the more he progressed in that great work, the more he felt there was in himself no affection whatever for anything. He had not yet become a Rahan, nor put on the Rahan's dress. Phra, who attentively watched all the movements of his pupil's mind, concluded from his present dispositions that there could be no fear of his ever returning into the world of passions. He suddenly caused by his mighty power the son to become visible to his father's eyes. The father, perceiving on a sudden his son sitting close by him, said, "Beloved son, your mother is now bathed in tears, and almost sinking under the weight of affliction caused by your sudden departure; come now to her, and by your presence restore her to life, and infuse into her desolated soul some consolation." Ratha, calm and unmoved, made no reply, but cast a look at his master. Buddha, addressing Ratha's father, said to him, "What will you have to state in reply to what I am about to tell you? Your son knows what you know; he sees what you see; his heart is entirely disentangled from all attachment to worldly objects; passions are dead in him. Who will now ever presume to say that he ought to subject himself again to them and bend his neck under their baneful influence?" "I have spoken rashly," replied the father; "let my son continue to enjoy the favour of your society; let him remain with you for ever and become your disciple. The only favour I request for myself is to have the satisfaction of receiving you in my house with my son attending you, and there to enjoy the happiness of supplying you with your food." Buddha by his silence assented to his request. No sooner had his father departed than Ratha applied for the dignity of Rahan, which was forthwith conferred upon him. At that time there were in the world seven Rahandas. On the following morning, Gaudama, putting on his yellow tsiwaran, and carrying the patta under his arm, attended by the Rahan Ratha, sallied from his house, and went, according to his promise, to the place of Ratha's father, to receive his food. He had scarce entered the house and occupied the seat prepared for him, when the mother of the new Rahan and she who was formerly his wife came both to pay him their respects. Buddha preached to them the law, explaining in particular the three[5] principal observances becoming their sex and condition. The effect of the preaching was immediate and irresistible: they became exempt from all sins, and attained the state of the perfect, of Thautapati, and became, among the persons of their sex, the first Upasakas. They desired to be ranked among his disciples, and devoted themselves to his service. They were the first persons of their sex who took refuge in the three precious things, Buddha, his law, and the assembly of the perfect. Gaudama and his faithful attendant, having eaten the excellent and savoury food prepared for them, departed from the house and returned to the monastery. Four young men[6] belonging to the most illustrious families of Baranathee, and formerly connected with Ratha by the ties of intimate friendship, having heard that their friend had shaved his head and beard, had put on a yellow dress and become a Rahan, said among themselves: "Our friend has withdrawn from the society of men, given up all pleasures, and has entered into the society of Rahans. There can be no doubt but the law of Wini[7] is most excellent and sublime, and the profession of Rahan most perfect." Whereupon they came to the place their friend resided in, prostrated themselves before him, as usual in such circumstances, and sat down at a respectful and becoming distance. Ratha took them before Buddha, praying him to deliver to those who had been his friends in the world the same instructions he had received from him. Gaudama willingly assented to his request, and forthwith began to explain to them the nature and abundance of merits derived from alms-giving. He initiated them into the knowledge of the chief precepts and observances of the law. These young hearers received with a cheerful heart his instructions, and felt within themselves an unknown power, dissolving gradually all the ties that had hitherto retained them in the world of passions. Delighted at remarking so good dispositions in those young men, Gaudama explained to them the higher doctrine of the four great and fundamental truths which lead to perfection.[8] When the preaching was over, they applied for and obtained the dignity of Rahans. There were at that time eleven Rahandas in the whole world. Fifty other young men of good descent, who had been the companions of Ratha while in the world, having heard that their friend had left the world, had put on the yellow garb and become Rahan, said to each other: "The law which our friend listened to may not be a bad one; the profession he has entered into may not be as despicable as many people are wont to assert." They resolved to judge for themselves and to be eye-witnesses to all that had been said on the subject. They set out for the monastery Ratha was living in, came into his presence, paid their respects to him, and stopped at a proper distance in a respectful posture. Hatha led them to his great teacher, humbly craving for his former friends the same favour he had done to him. Buddha graciously assented to the request, and imparted instruction to his young hearers, with such a happy result that they instantly applied for admittance to the dignity of Rahans. This favour was granted to them. The total number of Rahandas was thereby raised to sixty-one. On a certain day, Gaudama called his disciples into his presence,[9] and said to them: "Beloved Rahans, I am exempt from the five great passions which, like an immense net, encompass men and Nats. You too, owing to the instructions you have received from me, enjoy the same glorious privilege. There is now incumbent on us a great duty, that of labouring effectually in behalf of men and Nats, and procuring to them the invaluable blessing of the deliverance. To the end of securing more effectually the success of such an undertaking, let us part with each other and proceed in various and opposite directions, so that not two of us should follow up the same way. Go ye now and preach the most excellent law, expounding every point thereof, and unfolding it with care and attention in all its bearings and particulars. Explain the beginning, the middle, and the end of the law to all men, without exception; let everything respecting it be made publicly known and brought to the broad daylight. Show now to men and Nats the way leading to the practice of pure and meritorious works. You will meet, doubtless, with a great number of mortals, not as yet hopelessly given up to their passions, and who will avail themselves of your preaching for reconquering their hitherto forfeited liberty, and freeing themselves from the thraldom of passions. For my own part, I will direct my course towards the village of Thena situated in the vicinity of the solitude of Ooroowela." At that time the wicked Nat Manh came into the presence of Buddha, and tempted him in the following manner: "Men and Nats," said he, "have the five senses; through those five senses passions act upon them, encompass their whole being, and finally keep them bound up with the chains of an unresistible slavery. As to you, Rahan, you are not an exception to that universal condition, and you have not yet outstepped the boundaries of my empire." Phra replied: "O vile and wretched Nat! I am well acquainted with the passions men and Nats are subjected to. But I have freed myself from them all, and have thereby placed myself without the pale of your empire; you are at last vanquished and conquered." Manh, yet undismayed, replied: "O Rahan, you may be possessed of the power of flying through the air; but even in that condition, those passions which are inherent in the nature of mortal beings will accompany you, so that you cannot flatter yourself of living without the boundaries of my empire." Phra retorted: "O wicked Nat, concupiscence and all other passions I have stifled to death in me so that you are at last conquered." Manh, the most wretched among the wretched, was compelled to confess with a broken heart that Phra had conquered him, and he instantly vanished away. Full of fervour in preaching the law, the Rahans saw themselves surrounded with crowds of converts, who asked for the dignity of Rahan. They poured in daily from all parts, into the presence of Buddha to receive at his hands the much-longed-for high dignity.[10] Buddha said to them, "Beloved Rahans, it is painful and troublesome both to you and to those who desire to be admitted into our holy brotherhood to come from such a great distance to me. I now give to you the power of conferring the dignity of Patzin and Rahan on those whom you may deem worthy to receive it. This is the summary way you will have to follow on such occasions. Every candidate shall have his hair and beard shaved, and shall be provided with the tsiwaran of yellow colour. These preliminaries being arranged, the candidate, with the extremities of the kowot thrown over his shoulders, shall place himself in a squatting position, his joined hands raised to the forehead, repeating three times, 'I adhere to Buddha, to the law, and to the assembly of the perfect.'" Gaudama, assembling again round him the Rahans, said to them, "Beloved Rahans, it is owing to my wisdom, aided by constant reflection and meditation, that I have at last reached the incomparable state of Arahatapho; endeavour all of you to follow my example, and arrive at last at the same state of excellence and perfection." The vile and wretched Nat Manh appeared again before Buddha, striving to tempt him in the same manner as before. Buddha, discovering the snares laid down by the tempter, returned the same reply. Finding himself discovered, Manh vanished from his presence. Having spent his first lent[11] in the solitude of Migadawon, Phra shaped his course in the direction of the forest of Ooroowela. On his way to that place he stopped for a while in a jungle, and sat under a tree, to enjoy some rest under its cool shade. At that time thirty young noblemen had come to the jungle to indulge in sports and diversions. Each of them had brought his wife, with the exception of one, who, having no wife, was accompanied by a harlot. During the night the harlot rose up unperceived, picked up the best articles belonging to the parties, and carrying them with her, took to her heels through the dense forest. In the morning the thirty young noblemen, rising up, soon perceived the havoc made in the richest articles of their dress, and set out in search of her who they suspected had done the mischief. They came by chance to the spot where Gaudama was sitting in a cross-legged position, and inquired from him whether he had seen a woman passing by. Buddha said to them, "Which, in your opinion, is the best and most advantageous thing, either to go in search of yourselves or in search of a woman?" They replied, "Of course it is preferable to look after ourselves." "If so," replied Buddha, "stay with me for a while; I will preach my law to you, and, with its help, you will arrive at the knowledge of self, and thence at perfection." They cheerfully assented to his request, listened attentively to his instructions, and obtained the state of perfect believers, but in various degrees, according to their respective dispositions. They gave up the habit of drunkenness they had hitherto indulged in, and persevered in the observance of the five great precepts. [It is to be remarked, adds the Burmese translator, that this happy result was secured to the fortunate hearers by the influence of good works made during former existences.[12]] Gaudama, having so happily completed the conversion of those young noblemen, rose up and continued his journey in the direction of the forest of Ooroowela. At that time there were three distinguished and far-famed teachers who presided over a vast number of Rathees or disciples leading an ascetic life. They were named Ooroowela Kathaba, Nadi Kathaba, and Gaya Kathaba. The first had under him five hundred disciples, the second three hundred, and the third two hundred. Buddha went up to the monastery of Ooroowela Kathaba, and said to him, "I carry but a few articles with me, and need but a small place to rest in; I beg of you to be allowed to spend the night only in your kitchen." Kathaba answered: "Since you have so few things with you, I willingly allow you to accommodate yourself in the best way you can in the cook-room; but I must inform you that the Naga guardian of the place is an animal of a very wicked temper, powerfully strong, and having a most deadly venom." "I fear not the Naga," replied Buddha; "I am well satisfied with your allowing me a place in the cook-room." Whereupon he entered into the kitchen, sat down in a cross-legged position, and, keeping his body in an erect posture, remained absorbed, as it were, in the deepest contemplation. The Naga soon appeared, and irritated at seeing that a stranger presumed to remain in a place committed to his care, resolved to drive out the intruder. He began to vomit a cloud of smoke which he directed at the face of the stranger. Buddha said to himself, "I will do no harm to that Naga; I will leave intact his skin, flesh, and bones; but I will conquer him with the very same weapons he uses against me." Whereupon he emitted by his own power such a volume of thick smoke as soon to silence his adversary, and oblige him to have recourse to more effectual means of attack. He vomited out burning flames. Phra opposed flames far more active and destructive than those of the Naga. They shone forth with such an uncommon brightness as to attract a number of Rathees, who stood motionless, admiring the beautiful countenance of Buddha, and wondering at his matchless power. The Naga, vanquished, gave up the contest, and left to Buddha the undisputed possession of the cook-room during the whole night. In the morning opening his patta, Phra thrust in the terrified Naga, and brought it to Ooroowela Kathaba, who, surprised at the power of the stranger, said, "This Rahanda cannot as yet be compared to me." He desired him to stay in his monastery, promising to supply him with food as long as he should be with him. Phra accepted the proffered invitation, and fixed his residence in the midst of a grove little distant from the cell of Kathaba. Whilst he was there, four chiefs of Nats of the seat of Tsadoomarit came at midnight to the spot where rested Phra. They were very handsome, and a bright hue, encompassing their bodies, filled the grove with a resplendent light. Kathaba, surprised, came to Buddha, and said to him, "Great Rahan, the hour of taking your food is at hand; your rice is ready, come and eat it. How is it that at midnight there was such an uncommon splendour? One would have thought that the whole forest in the neighbourhood was lined with immense fires, spreading a blaze of light." Phra answering said, "This wonder was caused by the presence of four chiefs of Nats that came to visit me and hear my preachings." Kathaba said to himself, "Great indeed must be the virtue of this Rahan, since Nats come to see him and acknowledge him for their teacher. He is not yet, however, my equal." Buddha ate his rice, and went back to the same place. On another occasion, in the middle of the night, the chief of Thagias came to the grove of Buddha, and by his power caused a flood of light similar to that produced by a thousand lighted fires to pour its effulgent rays in every direction. In the morning, Kathaba went to the great Rahan inviting him to come and eat his rice. Meanwhile he asked him the reason of the wonderful light that had been kept up about from midnight until morning, which surpassed in brilliancy that which had been seen on a former occasion. Phra told him that he had been visited by the chief of Thagias, who came for the purpose of hearing his instructions. Kathaba thought within himself: "Great indeed is the glory and dignity of this Rahan, but he is not as yet a Rahanda." Phra ate his food, and continued to stay in the same grove. On another occasion, at the same late hour, Phra received the visit of the chief of the Brahmas. The flood of light that was sent forth by his body surpassed in effulgent splendour all that had been seen. Kathaba came as usual, in the morning, to invite the great Rahan to come and take his food, requesting him at the same time to inform him of the cause of the great wonder that had just taken place. Phra told him that the chief of Brahmas had waited upon him to listen to his preachings. Kathaba wondered the more at the dignity of this great Rahan, who attracted round him so eminent a visitor. But he said within himself: "This Rahan is not yet a Rahanda that can be compared to me." Phra partook of his food, and continued his stay in the same grove. On a certain day, the people of the country had prepared offerings on a large scale to be presented to Kathaba. On hearing this welcome news, the Rathee thought within himself as follows: "The people are disposing everything to make large offerings to me. It is as well this Rahan should not be present on the occasion. He might make a display of his power in the presence of the multitude, who, taken up with admiration for his person, would make great offerings to him, whilst I should see my own decrease in a proportion. To-morrow I will contrive in such a way as to prevent the great Rahan from being present." Buddha discovered at a glance all that was going on in Kathaba's mind. Unwilling to offer any annoyance to his host, he conveyed himself to the island of Ootoogara, where he collected his meal, which he came to eat on the banks of the lake Anawadat. He spent the whole day there, and by his miraculous power he was back to his grove at an early hour on the following day. The Rathee came as usual, to invite him to partake of his meal that was ready, and inquired from him why he had not made his appearance on the day previous. Buddha, without the least emotion that could betray an angry feeling, related to Kathaba all that had passed in his mind, and informed him of the place he had been to. Kathaba, astonished at what he heard, said to himself: "The knowledge of this Rahan is transcendent indeed, since he is even acquainted with the thoughts of my mind; his power too is wonderfully great; but withal, he is not as yet a Rahanda comparable to me." Buddha, having eaten his meal, withdrew to his grove. On a certain day Buddha wished to wash his dress. A Thagia, knowing the thought that occupied his mind, dug a small square tank, and approaching him respectfully, invited him to wash his tsiwaran therein. Buddha then thought: Where shall I find a stone to rub it upon? The Thagia, having brought a stone, said to him: "Illustrious Phra, here is a stone to rub your tsiwaran on." He thought again: Where is a proper place to dry it upon? The Nat that watched the tree Yekada caused it to bend its branches, and said: "My lord, here is a fit place to hang up your tsiwaran." He thought again: Where is a fit spot to extend my clothes upon? The chief of Thagias brought a large and well-polished stone, and said: "O illustrious Phra, here is a fit place to lay your tsiwaran upon." In the morning, Kathaba repaired as usual to his guest's place, to invite him to take his meal. Surprised at what he perceived, he said to Buddha: "O Rahan, formerly there were here neither tank nor stone; how is it that they are here now? How is it, moreover, that the tree Yekadat is now bending down its branches?" Phra related then to the Rathee all that had happened, informing him that the chief of Thagias and one Nat had done all those works for him, and ministered to all his wants. Kathaba wondered more than before at the great virtue and surpassing excellency of the great Rahan; but he persisted in his former opinion, that the great Rahan was not a Rahanda that could equal him. Buddha, having taken his meal, returned to his grove. On another occasion, the Rathee went to Buddha's place, to invite him to come and partake of his meal. "Very well," said Buddha, "I have a small business to do now; go beforehand, and I will follow you a few moments hence." Whereupon Kathaba went back to his cell. As to Phra, he went to pluck a fruit from the jambu tree, and arrived at the eating place before Kathaba could reach it. The Rathee, on arriving there, was quite surprised to find Phra already waiting for him. "How is this?" said he, with an unfeigned feeling of surprise, "and by what way did you come and contrive to arrive here before me?" Phra said to him: "After your departure, I plucked one fruit from a jambu tree, and yet I have reached this spot sooner than you. Here is the fruit I have brought. It is as full of flavour as it is beautiful; allow me to present you with it, that you may eat it." "O! no, great Rahan," replied the Rathee, "it is not becoming that I should eat it, but rather keep it for yourself." He thought within himself: "Wonderful is indeed the power and eminent excellency of that great Rahan; but he is not as yet a Rahan that can be ranked to me." Phra ate his rice, and returned to his grove. On another day, Phra gave a fresh proof of his miraculous power, by bringing to Kathaba a mango fruit, plucked from a mango tree growing near the jambu tree, and so went on for several days, bringing fruits that grew at the extremity of the southern island. On another day, Phra ascended to the seat of Tawadeintha, and brought therefrom a beautiful water-lily, and yet arrived at the place where his meal was ready before Kathaba himself. The latter, quite amazed at seeing a flower from the Nat country, thought within himself: "Wonderful, indeed, is the power of that great Rahan, who has brought here, from the seats of Nats, a beautiful lily in such a short space of time; but he is not as yet equal to me." On a certain day, the Rathees were busy splitting firewood. They got a large log of wood upon which their united efforts could make no impression. Kathaba thought within himself: "The great Rahan is gifted with mighty power; let us try him on this occasion." He desired Gaudama to split the hard log. Gaudama split it in a moment in five hundred pieces. The Rathees then tried to light up the fuel, but they could not succeed. Kathaba requested his guest to come to their assistance. In an instant, the five hundred pieces were set in a blaze, and presented the terrifying sight of five hundred large fires. The Rathees begged the great Rahan to extinguish those fires which threatened a general conflagration. Their request was instantaneously granted; the five hundred fires were extinguished. During the cold season in the months of January and February, when a heavy cold dew falls, the Rathees amused themselves with plunging and swimming in the river Neritzara. Phra caused five hundred fires to blaze out on the banks of the river. The Rathees, coming out of the stream, warmed themselves by the side of those fires. They all wondered at the astonishing power of the great Rahan. But Kathaba persisted in saying that he was not a Rahanda like him. On a certain day, a great rain poured in torrents, so that the water overflowed all the country, but it did not reach the spot Gaudama stood upon. He thought within himself: It is good that I should create a beautiful dry road in the midst of the water. He did so, and walked on the dry road, and clouds of dust rose in the air. Kathaba, much concerned regarding the fate of his guest, took a boat, and, with the assistance of his disciples, pulled in the direction of Buddha's grove; but what was their surprise, when reaching the spot they found, instead of water, a firm dry road, and Buddha calmly walking to and fro. "Is it you, great Rahan," cried Kathaba, "whom we see here?" "Yes," replied Gaudama, "it is I indeed." He had scarcely returned this answer, when he rose in the air and stood for a while above the boat. Kathaba thought again within himself: "Great indeed must be the perfections and attainments of the great Rahan, since water even cannot harm him, but he is not yet a Rahanda like me." Phra, who knew what was taking place in Kathaba's mind, said to himself: Long time has this Rathee kept thinking within himself: This Rahan is great, but I am still greater than he; it is time now that I should inspire him with fear and surprise. Addressing Kathaba, he said: "Rathee, you are not a Rahanda that has arrived to the perfection of Arahat; you have never performed the meritorious actions of the four ways to perfection; you are not, therefore, a Rahanda. But I have, during former existences, carefully attended to those practices which have enabled me to reach perfection, and finally obtain the Buddhaship." Astonished at such an unexpected declaration, Kathaba humbled himself, fell on his knees, and prostrated himself at the feet of Buddha, saying: "Illustrious Phra, I wish to become Rahan under your direction." Phra replied: "Kathaba, you have under you five hundred Rathees, go and inform them of all that has happened." Whereupon Kathaba went to the place where the Rathees had assembled, and said to them: "I wish to place myself under the direction of the great Rahan." The five hundred Rathees told him that they were willing to follow his example, since he had been hitherto to them such an excellent teacher. They rose up, and, collecting their utensils, such as the twisted hairs, and forked staff, the hairy girdle, the honey filtre, &c., flung them into the river; then they came, and, prostrating themselves at the feet of Buddha, craved admittance to the dignity of Rahans. Nadi Kathaba, seeing the utensils floating on the water and carried down by the stream, called his followers and said to them: "Some misfortune must have befallen my elder brother; let us go and see what has happened." They were no sooner arrived, than Kathaba related to them all that had just taken place. Nadi Kathaba went forthwith to Buddha's cell, attended all his disciples. Falling all at the feet of Phra, they declared their readiness to become his disciples, and applied for the dignity of Rahan. Gaya Kathaba, who lived a little below the place of Nadi Kathaba, seeing on the surface of the water the utensils of the followers of both his brothers floating in the direction of the stream, hastened, with his two hundred disciples, to the place of Ooroowela Kathaba. On his being informed of all that had occurred, he and his followers threw themselves at Gaudama's feet, praying for admittance into the order of Rahans. They were all admitted. The conversion of Ooroowela Kathaba was brought about by the display, on the part of Buddha, of no less than three thousand five hundred and sixty wonders.[13] FOOTNOTES [1] I have, except on one occasion, always made use of the terms meditation and contemplation to express the inward working of Buddha's mind during the forty-nine days he spent at the foot of the banyan tree. But the Burmese translator most commonly employs a much stronger expression, conveying the idea of trance and ecstasy. Hence after having remained seven days on the same spot, deeply engaged in considering some parts of the law he was soon to preach, it is said of him that he comes out from a state of perfect ecstasy. This expression implies a state of complete mental abstraction, when the soul, disentangled from the trammels of sense, raises itself above this material world, contemplates pure truth and delights in it. All her faculties are taken up with the beauty and perfection of truth; she clings to it with all her might, regardless of all the illusions this world is filled with. This situation of the soul is much esteemed by all fervent Buddhists. It is the lot of but a few privileged Rahans, who have made great progress in perfection, and obtained an almost entire mastery over their passions and senses. This great gift is, as one may well imagine, ardently coveted by many, who, though not possessing it, lay claim to it on false pretences. This being a sin devotees who relish a contemplative life are very liable to, which the framer of the regulations of the Buddhist monks has pronounced as _ipso facto_ excluding from the society all those who would falsely claim the possession of uncommon spiritual attainments which they have not. In the book of ordination used for the admission of candidates to the order of Rahans or talapoins, this sin is the last of the four offences which deprive a member of the order of his dignity, and cause his expulsion from the society. [2] The five Rahans alluded to are the very same individuals who met Phralaong in the solitude at the time he was undergoing a great fast and performing all sorts of works of self-denial and corporal austerities in the most rigorous manner. During all the time he spent in those hard exercises of strict mortification, to conquer his passions and secure the complete triumph of the mind over the senses, he was assisted in all his wants by those five Rahans, who rendered to him the usual services disciples are wont to perform to their teacher. When they saw Phralaong at the end of his mighty efforts in that great struggle resuming the habits of a mendicant, they left him at once, unwilling to believe that he would ever become a Buddha. Our Phra, not unmindful of the good services he had received from them, resolved to impart first to them the blessings of his preachings. Alara and Oodaka, his two first teachers in the science of Dzan, were destined to be the first who would have heard the good news had they not been dead. Gratitude seems to have been the first and main motive that induced him to select as the first objects of his mission the very same persons who had been instrumental in furthering his efforts to acquire the Buddhaship. The unpleasant epithet of heretic is given to those five Rahans, as well as to another named Upaka, as designed to mean that they held tenets at variance with those of Buddha, and refused to acknowledge him as possessed of the perfect intelligence. Buddhists, in their writings, invariably call their opponents by the name of holders of false doctrines. The Brahmins or Pounhas who refused to seek refuge in Buddha, his law, and the assembly of his disciples, are spoken of as professors of heterodoxical doctrines. From the narrative of this Legend we may conclude, with a probability amounting almost to certitude, that Buddha in his preachings addressed himself first to the Brahmins, as being by their caste the most influential portion of the Hindu community. Those that are called by the name of Pounhas are the Brahmins living in the world and following the ordinary pursuits of life. Those that are mentioned by the names of Rahans and Rathees are probably Brahmins, or at least belong to some other distinguished caste like that of the Kchatrias, but are members of some religious order or ascetics. They were in those days men whom, in imitation of the ancient Greeks, we may call philosophers, and who belonged to one or other of the branches into which the great Indian school was divided. We may conjecture that at that time India exhibited a scene much resembling that which Greece subsequently offered to the eyes of the observer in the days of Socrates and Plato, when schools of philosophy were to be met with in every direction. The Hindu philosophers, favoured by climate and their ardent imagination, carried much further than the Greek wise men, both in theory and practice, the discussion of dogmas and the fervour of religious practices. If credit is to be given to our Legend in a historical point of view, we may safely conclude that such was the state of India when Buddha began his preachings. His first hearers were Rahans, Rathees, and Pounhas, that is to say, the most learned and wisest men in those days. The latter in particular seemed at first disinclined to offer opposition to Buddha; they listened to him as to a distinguished philosopher; his arguments were examined, discussed, and answered by them in the best way they could. In that polemical warfare, arguments were at first the only offensive and defensive weapons used and handled by the combatants on both sides. Buddha's two favourite doctrines of Atheism and Neibban, which established the two broad lines of separation between the two systems, begat much discussion and created some animosity between him and his adversaries. But what widened the gap between the two parties, and placed them in a hostile array against each other, was the broad principle of equality amongst men, latent in the bosom of Buddha's doctrines, and levelled at the distinction of castes. Buddha preached to men of all conditions without exception; he opened before all the ways that lead to Neibban; made no distinction between man and man, except that which is drawn by virtue and vice, merits and demerits. He allowed every one to approach him and take rank among his disciples; faith in his doctrine entitled any man to be numbered amidst his followers; the entrance into the order of Rahans or perfect was open to all those who, by their meritorious actions and renouncing the world, qualified themselves for this dignity. This principle, which put on a footing of equality men of all castes and nations, and recognised no real superiority but that which is conferred by virtue and merit, could not prove agreeable to the proud Brahmins. It provoked, by its gradual development, the animosity of the opponents of Buddha's doctrines. The battle of arguments, after having raged with various success, was afterwards converted into one of a bloody character, which ended in the total extermination or expulsion of the Buddhists from the Indian peninsula. [3] The mission of Buddha is not, as previously observed, confined to men living on earth, but it extends its beneficial action over all the beings inhabiting the six seats of Nats and sixteen of Brahmas. Those beings, the latter in particular, are much advanced in perfection, but they are not yet ripe for the sublime state of Neibban. Though freed, at least the Brahmas, from the influence of passions, they retain as yet some inclination for matter; they want the help of a Buddha to break at once the few slender ties that retain them in the state of existence. The first preaching of Buddha was rewarded with the conversion of five Rahans, and of a countless number of Nats and Brahmas. Such a plentiful harvest he could scarcely anticipate to reap; and the beginning of his career, attended with such wonderful success, amply repaid him for the extraordinary exertions he made in order to qualify himself for the Buddhaship. The author of the Legend remarks, with an unfeigned pleasure, that owing to the conversion of the five Rahans, the worlds witnessed the beautiful sight of six Rahandas congregated on the same spot. The Rahanda has attained the summit of perfection; he has arrived at the last existence; his death will relieve him from the burden of existence, and open to him the way leading to perfect rest, to complete abstraction--in a word, to Neibban. The Rahandas rank first among the disciples and hearers of Buddha; they constitute the _élite_ of his followers, and form the most distinguished portion of the assembly or congregation of the perfect. We have already stated that the members composing the assembly of the hearers were divided into distinct sections, and formed different degrees, according to the difference of their respective progress on the way of perfection. [4] It may be interesting to give an abridgment of an instruction or sermon delivered by Gaudama to a Nat. It will be as a fair specimen of other similar performances. The Nat made his appearance at nightfall, and respectfully entreated Buddha to deliver certain instructions which would enable men to come to the understanding of many points of the law on which they had hitherto fruitlessly meditated. Buddha was then in the monastery of Dzetawon, in the country of Thawattie. This sermon is supposed to have been repeated by Ananda, who had heard it from the mouth of Buddha himself. It is, according to the Burmese, the most excellent sermon; it contains thirty-eight points. "Young Nat," said Buddha, "here are the most excellent things men and Nats ought to attend to, in order to capacitate themselves for the state of Neibban: to shun the company of the foolish; to be always with the wise; to proffer homage to those that are deserving of it; to remain in a place becoming one's condition; to have always with one's self the influence of former good works; steadily to maintain a perfect behaviour; to be delighted to hear and see much, in order to increase knowledge; to study all that is not sinful; to apply one's self to acquire the knowledge of Wini. Let every one's conversation be regulated by righteous principles; let every one minister to the wants of his father and mother; provide all the necessaries for his wife and children; perform no action under the evil influence of temptation; bestow alms; observe the precepts of the law; assist one's relatives and friends; perform no actions but such as are exempt from sin; be ever diligent in such avoiding, and abstain from intoxicating drink. Let no one be remiss in the practice of the law of merits. Let every one bear respect to all men; be ever humble; be easily satisfied and content; gratefully acknowledge favours; listen to the preaching of the law in its proper time; be patient; delight in good conversation; visit the religious from time to time; converse on religious subjects; cultivate the virtue of mortification; practise works of virtue; pay attention always to the four great truths; keep the eyes fixed on Neibban. Finally, let one in the middle of the eight afflictions of this world be, like the Rahanda, firm, without disquietude, fearless, with a perfect composure. O young Nat, whoever observes these perfect laws shall never be overcome by the enemies of the good: he shall enjoy the peace of Ariahs." Within a narrow compass, Buddha has condensed an abridgment of almost all moral virtues. The first portion of these precepts contains injunctions to shun all that may prove an impediment to the practice of good works. The second part inculcates the necessity of regulating one's mind and intention for a regular discharge of the duties incumbent on each man in his separate station. Then follows a recommendation to bestow assistance on parents, relatives, and all men in general. Next to that, we find recommended the virtues of humility, resignation, gratitude, and patience. After this, the preacher insists on the necessity of studying the law, visiting religious, conversing on religious subjects. When this is done, the hearer is commanded to study with great attention the four great truths, and keep his mind's eye ever fixed on the happy state of Neibban, which, though as yet distant, ought never to be lost sight of. Thus prepared, the hearer must be bent upon acquiring the qualifications befitting the true sage. Like the one mentioned by the Latin poet, who would remain firm, fearless, and unmoved, even in the midst of the ruins of the crumbling universe, the Buddhist sage must ever remain calm, composed, and unshaken among all the vicissitudes of life. Here is again clearly pointed out the final end to be arrived at, viz., that of perfect mental stability. This state is the foreshadowing of that of Neibban. [5] From the perusal of this Legend, it can be remarked that Buddha, in the course of his preachings, withheld from no one the knowledge of his doctrine, but, on the contrary, aimed at popularising it in every possible way. In this respect he widely differed from the Brahmins, who enveloped their tenets in a mysterious obscurity, and even in that state of semi-incomprehensibility, condescended to offer them to the consideration of but a few selected adepts. But Buddha followed quite an opposite course. He preached to all without exception. On this occasion we see him engaged in explaining to the mother and wife of Ratha duties truly becoming their sex and position. He warned them against the danger of speaking too much, or speaking hastily and with a tone of dissatisfaction. He desired them to be always cool and moderate in their conversation, and to take a pleasure in conversing on religious topics, such as the practice of the ten great duties, the merits of almsgiving, and on the other precepts of the law. He showed to them the unbecomingness of inconsistency in speaking, and finally concluded by exhorting them to allow wisdom to guide them in the right use of the faculty of speech. Every one will agree in this that the lecture was a very appropriate one, and would suit women of our days as well as those of Buddha's times. It is not easy to determine whether these two female converts became Rahanesses by forsaking the world and devoting all their time to religious observances, or simply believed in Buddha's doctrines and continued to live in the world. The Burmese translator makes use of expressions liable to both interpretations. I feel inclined to adopt the second supposition. They became female Upasakas, and continued to live in the world. We shall see, hereafter, that Gaudama's aunt, Patzapati, was the first, after much entreating, who was allowed to become a Rahaness. The great former of the Buddhistic disciplinary regulations has also laid down rules for the institution and management of an order of female devotees, to match, as it were, with that of talapoins. Hence in almost all countries where Buddhism flourishes, there are to be met houses and monasteries which are the abodes of those pious women, who emulate Rahans in the strict observance of practices of the highest order. Their dress, except the colour, which is white, is quite similar to that of talapoins; their head is shaved; they live in strict continence as long as they continue to wear the dress of their profession. They have certain formulas of prayer to repeat every day several times. Their diet is the same as that of talapoins; they are forbidden to take any food after midday. I am not aware that they render any service to society in the way of keeping schools for the benefit of female children. They live on alms freely bestowed on them by their co-religionists. The Burmese honour them with the title of Mathi-la-shing, which means ladies of the religious duties. The order of those female devotees is now much on the decline; the inmates of houses are but few, enjoying a very small share of public esteem and respect. They are generally looked upon with feelings akin to those entertained towards beggars. In the Wini, or book of discipline, the relations that are allowed to subsist between the two orders of male and female devotees are minutely described and clearly laid down, so as to prevent the evils that might result from a familiar and unnecessary intercourse. Thoroughly acquainted with the weakest side of human nature, the author of the Wini has legislated on that subject with the utmost circumspection. He allowed rather aged Rahans to be the spiritual advisers of the Rahanesses, but he denies them the leave of ever going to their houses under any pretext whatever. When the latter want to hear preaching or receive some advice from the Rahans, they resort in broad daylight to the monastery, are permitted to stay in a large hall open to the public, at a considerable distance from him whom they desire to consult. Having briefly and with becoming reverence made known the object of their visit, and received some spiritual instructions, they immediately return to their own place. The same reflection may be applied to the conversion of Ratha's father. It is said that he was the first convert out of the body of laymen. He does not appear to have forsaken the world and become a first-class convert. He became a Thautapati, and at once entered one of the four ways leading to perfection, but remained in the world. [6] The conversion of Ratha and of his young friends shows to us distinctly the tendency of Buddha's preachings, and their effect over those who believed in him. Ratha is represented as a young worldly-minded man, who, in the midst of riches, has denied himself to no kind of pleasure. He feels that the enjoyments he was so fond of can in no manner satisfy the cravings of his heart: he is disgusted at them, and resolves to withdraw into solitude, with the intention of placing himself under the direction of some eminent teacher, and learn from him the way to happiness. He hopes that the study of philosophy will lead him to true wisdom and the acquirement of the means that may render him happy. He luckily falls in with Buddha, who explains to him that the senses are the instruments through which passions act upon and tyrannise over the soul, by keeping it in a painful subjection to matter. He points out to him the necessity of freeing himself from their control. This principle of Buddhism, which aims at disengaging the soul from matter, isolating it from all that proves a burden to it, and delivering it from the tyrannical yoke of concupiscence, is in itself perfectly correct, but, carried beyond its legitimate consequences, it becomes false and absurd. According to Buddhists, the soul, disentangled from all that exists, finds itself alone without any object it can adhere to; folding itself up into its own being, it remains in a state of internal contemplation, destitute alike of all active feelings of pleasure and pain. This doctrine was known in the time of Buddha, as far as the principle is concerned. The Rathees and other sages in those days upheld it both in theory and practice; but, on the consequences, the originator of Buddhism was at issue with his contemporaries, and struck out a new path in the boundless field of speculative philosophy. [7] The Wini is one of the great divisions of Buddhistic sacred writings. The Pitagat, or collection of all the Scriptures, is divided into three parts--the Thouts, containing the preachings of Buddha, the Wini, or book of the discipline, and the Abidama, or the book of Metaphysics. That compilation is supposed to embody the doctrines of Buddha in a complete manner. These books have not been written by Buddha himself, since it is said of him that he never wrote down anything. The first Buddhistic compositions were certainly written by the disciples of Phra, or their immediate successors. But there arose some disputes among the followers of Buddha, as to the genuineness of the doctrines contained in the various writings published by the chief disciples. To settle the controversy, an assembly or council of the most influential members of the Buddhistic creed, under the presidency of Kathaba, was held about three months after Gaudama's demise. The writings regarded as spurious were set aside, and those purporting to contain the pure doctrines of Phra were collected into one body, and formed, as it were, the canon of sacred books. The matter so far was settled for the time being, but the human mind, when unrestrained by authority, acted in those days with the same result as it does in our own times. Various and different were the constructions put on the same text by the expounders of the Buddhistic law. All parties admitted the same books, but they dissented from each other in the interpretation. Some of the books hitherto regarded as sacred were altered or rejected altogether to make room for the works of new doctors. Confusion prevailed to such an extent, that an hundred years later a second council was assembled for determining the authenticity of the real and genuine writings. A new compilation was made and approved of by the assembly. The evil was remedied; but the same causes that had exercised so baneful an influence previously to the time of the second council soon worked again and produced a similar result. Two hundred and thirty-five years after Gaudama's death a third council was assembled. The books compiled by the second council were revised and apparently much abridged, and with the sanction of the assembled fathers a new canon of scriptures was issued. The Pitagat in its present shape is regarded as the work of this last assembly. All the books are written in the Pali or Magatha language. In the beginning of the fifth century of our era, according to our author's computation, a learned man, named Boudagautha, went to Ceylon, and brought back to Burmah a copy of the collection of the Pitagat. Then he introduced into this country the alphabet now in use, and translated into the vernacular a portion of the scriptures. This important subject shall receive hereafter fuller development. [8] The four principles or truths so often alluded to in the course of this work ought to be well understood, in order to get a clear insight into the system under consideration. These four truths are as follows:--1. There are afflictions and miseries attending the existence of all beings. 2. There are passions and, in particular, concupiscence, which are the causes of all miseries. 3. There is Neibban, which is the exemption of all passions, and, consequently, the deliverance from all miseries. 4. There are the four ways or high roads leading to Neibban. Here is the summary of the sublime knowledge and transcendent science possessed by a Buddha: these four fundamental truths form the four features or characteristics of his law; they safely guide man in the way to deliverance. The Buddhist sage, who longs to become perfect, must study with attention the position of all beings in this world, survey with a patient regard their diversified conditions, and fathom the depth of the abyss of miseries in which they are miserably sunk. A vague, general and superficial knowledge of these miseries is insufficient to create that perfect acquaintance with human wretchedness. He ought to examine one after the other those series of afflictions, until he feels, as it were, their unbearable weight pressing over his soul. This first step having been made by the means of reflection, meditation, and experience, the sage, standing by the side of all miseries that press upon all beings, as a physician, by the bed of a patient, inquires into the cause of such an awful moral disorder. He soon discovers the generating causes of that universal distemper; they are the passions in general; or rather, to speak more in accordance with Buddhistic expressions, concupiscence, anger, and ignorance are the springs all demerits flow from, are the impure sources wherefrom originate all the miseries and afflictions this world is filled with. The destruction of those passions is the main and great object he has in view. He, therefore, leaves the world and renounces all pleasures and worldly possessions, in order to extinguish concupiscence; he practises patience under the most trying circumstances, that anger may no longer have any power over him; he studies the law, and meditates on all its points, in order to dispel the dark atmosphere of ignorance by the bright light of knowledge. Having advanced so far, the sage has not yet reached the final object of his desires; he has not yet attained to the end he anxiously wishes to come to. He is just prepared and qualified for going in search of it. Neibban, or the _absolute_ exemption and _permanent_ deliverance from the four causes productive of existence, or of a state of being, is the only thing he deems worthy to be desired and earnestly longed for. The sage, perceiving such a desirable state, sighs after it with all the powers of his soul. Neibban is to him what the harbour is to the storm-beaten mariner, or deliverance to the worn-out inmate of a dark dungeon. But such a happy state is, as yet, at a great distance; where is the road leading thereto? This is the last truth the sage has to investigate. The four roads to perfection are opened before him. These he must follow with perseverance; they will conduct him to Neibban. They are a perfect belief, a perfect reflection, a perfect use of speech, and a perfect conduct. [9] Buddha, having trained up his disciples to the knowledge of his doctrines as well as to the practice of his ordinances, elevates them to the dignity of preachers, or, to be more correct, makes them fellow-labourers in the arduous task of imparting to mankind the wholesome knowledge of saving truths. An unbounded field is opened before him; the number of beings who are designed to partake of the blessings of his doctrines is incalculably great. His own efforts will not prove adequate to the difficulties such a mighty undertaking is encompassed with; he joins to himself fervent disciples that have reached all but the farthest limit of perfection by the thorough control they have obtained over their passions; he considers them as instruments well fitted for carrying into execution his benevolent designs, and entrusts them with the mission he has entered upon. By adopting such a step, the wise founder of Buddhism establishes a regular order of men, whom he commissions to go and preach to all living creatures the doctrines they have learnt from him. The commission he imparted to them was evidently to be handed down to their successors in the same office. He may now die, but he is sure that the work he has begun shall be carried on with zeal and devotedness by men who have renounced the world and given up all sorts of enjoyments, that they might engage in the great undertaking with a heart perfectly disentangled from all ties and impediments of every description. In entrusting his disciples with the important duty of teaching mankind, Buddha, obeying the impulse of his universal charity, desires them to go all over the world and preach all the truth to all mortals. He distinctly charges them to announce openly and unreservedly all that they have heard from him. In these instructions the plan of Buddha is clearly laid down, and the features of the mission he assumes distinctly delineated. His object is to spread his doctrines all over the world and to bring all beings under his moral sway. He makes no distinction between man and man, nation and nation. Though belonging by birth to a high caste, he disregards at once those worldly barriers whereby men are separated from each other, and acknowledges no dignity but that which is conferred by virtue. Bold, indeed, was the step that he took in a country where the distinction of caste is so deeply rooted in the habits of the people, that all human efforts have, hitherto, proved abortive in destroying it. It has already been hinted in a foregoing note that Gaudama placed himself on a new ground, in opposition to the Brahminical doctrines. He, doubtless, cautiously avoided to wound directly the feelings of his antagonists; but, at the same time, he adroitly sowed the seed of a mighty revolution, that was to change, if left to grow freely, the face of the Indian peninsula. His doctrine bore two characteristics, that were to distinguish it essentially from that of his adversaries; it was popular and universal, whereas that of his opponents was wrapped up in a mysterious obscurity, and unfolded completely only to a privileged caste. Another great difference between the two systems is this: Buddha paid little attention to the dogmatical portion of religion, but laid the greatest stress on morals. The dogmas are few and little insisted on. He aimed at correcting the vices of the heart, but exerted himself little to redress the errors of the mind. [10] In these new instructions delivered to the Rahans, Buddha gives them the power of receiving into the ranks of the assembly those of their converts who should prove foremost in understanding the law and observing its highest practices. He empowers them to confer on others the dignity of Rahans, and admit them to the various steps that lead to that uppermost one. To observe uniformity in the reception of candidates to the various orders, Buddha laid down a number of regulations embodied in the Kambawa, or book used as a sort of ritual on the days of admission of candidates to the dignity of Patzins and Rahans. The contents of this small but interesting work may be seen in the notice on the order of talapoins, or Buddhist monks, inserted at the end of this volume. That the reader may have now an idea of the general purpose and object of these regulations, I will sketch a slight outline of them. The candidate, who seeks for admission among the members of the order, has to appear before an assembly of Rahans, presided over by a dignitary. He must be provided with the dress of the order, and a patta or the pot of a mendicant. He is presented to the assembly by a Rahan, upon whom devolves the important duty of instructing him in all that regards the profession he is about to embrace, and lead him through the ordeal of the ceremony. He is solemnly interrogated before the assembly on the several defects and impediments which incapacitate an individual for admission into the order. On his declaring that he is free from such impediments, he is, with the consent of the assembled fathers, promoted to the rank of Patzin. But before he is allowed to take his place among his brethren, he is instructed in the four principal duties he will have to observe, and warned against the four capital sins, the commission of which would deprive him of his high and holy character, and cause his expulsion from the society. It is supposed that the candidate, previous to his making application for obtaining the dignity of Rahan, has qualified himself by study and a good life for admittance among the perfect. By surrounding the admission of candidates into the ranks of the order with a display of ceremonies, the shrewd framer of these regulations intended to encircle the whole body with a halo of dignity and sacredness, and at the same time to provide, as far as human wisdom allows, against the reception of unworthy postulants. Hitherto Buddha had reserved to himself alone the power of elevating hearers or converts to the dignity of Rahans; now he transfers to his disciples that power and bids them use it as they had seen him do, in behalf of those whom they deem worthy applicants. He has established a society, and striven to infuse into it all the elements necessary for keeping it up hereafter, and securing its existence and permanency. He sets up a kind of ecclesiastical hierarchy, which is to be perpetuated during the ages to come by the same means and power that brought it into existence. Having put such a power into the hands of his disciples, Buddha very properly exhorts them to emulate him in his efforts to become perfect. He sets himself as a pattern of perfection, and bids them all imitate the examples he places before them. He shows briefly to them by what means he has attained the state of Arahatapho, and stimulates them to the adopting of similar means. The word Arahatapho is composed of two words--arahat, which means perfect, and pho or phola, as the orthography indicates, which means reward, merit. The state of Arahatapho is that in which a man enjoys the merits or reward of perfection, which he has reached by the practice of virtue, and particularly the acquirement of wisdom or knowledge of the highest points of the law. It is used often in opposition to the word Arahatamegata, which signifies the ways or roads leading to perfection. [11] I have translated by _lent_ the Burmese expression Watso, which is but the Pali term Wasa, Burmanised. The word "lent," which has been adopted, is designed to express not the real meaning of Wasa, but to convey to the reader's mind the idea of a time devoted to religious observances. Wasa means a season, but it is intended to designate the rainy season, which in those parts of the Peninsula where Buddha was residing begins in July and ends in November. During that period the communications between villages and towns are difficult, if not impossible. The religious mendicants were allowed in former times, very likely from the very days of Buddha, to retire into the houses of friends and supporters, from which they went forth occasionally begging their food. In the beginning, those who were admitted in the society did not live in community, as was afterwards done in those countries where Buddhism has been of a long time in a flourishing condition. They were allowed to withdraw into solitude, and lead an ascetic life, or to travel from one place to another to preach the law and make converts. This work could not be well done during the rainy season. Hence the disciples, while as yet few in number, gathered round their master during that period to hear instructions from him, and practise virtue under his immediate superintendence. They lived with him during all the time the rainy season lasted. This was called to spend the season. In the course of this Legend, the same expression is often met with. It is said of Buddha that he spent a season in such a place, another in another place, to indicate that he stayed in one place during the rainy season, which precluded the possibility of doing the duties of an itinerant preacher. When the religious order became regularly constituted, and the basis it was to stand on was fairly laid down, the ever-increasing number of members made them feel the want of secluded places where they could live in community, and at the same time quite retired from the world. Houses or monasteries were erected for receiving the pious Rahans. The inmates of those dwellings lived under the direction of a superior, devoting their time to study, meditation, and the observances of the law. They were allowed to go out in the morning very early, to beg and collect the food they wanted for the day. Such is the state the religious are living in up to our own time in Burmah, Ceylon, Thibet, Siam, and in the other countries where Buddhism has been firmly established. The religious season, or lent, lasts three months. It begins in the full moon of Watso (July) and ends at the full moon of Thadinkiout (October). The keeping of the season in Burmah is as follows:--On the days of the new and full moon crowds of people resort to the pagodas, carrying offerings of flowers, small candles, oil, &c. A great many are found to spend the night in the bungalows erected, chiefly for that purpose, in their immediate vicinity. Women occupy bungalows separated from those of men. It must be admitted that there, as in churches, they far outnumber the men. On such occasions, religion appears to be rather the pretext than the real object of such assemblies. With the exception of old men and women, who are heard to converse on religious topics, and repeat some parts of the law, or recite some praises in honour of Buddha, the others seem to care very little for religion. The younger portion of the weaker sex freely indulge in the pleasure of conversation. It is quite a treat to them to have such a fine opportunity of giving full scope to their talkative powers. During that season the pious faithful are charitably inclined to bestow alms on the Rahans. All the necessaries of life pour with abundance and profusion into the monasteries. Besides alms-giving and resorting to the pagodas, some fervent laymen practise abstinence and fasting to a certain extent; these, however, are but few. During that period the Buddhist recluses are often invited to go to certain places, prepared for the purpose, to preach the law to and receive alms from crowds of hearers who are gathered thither on such occasions. Talapoins are generally seated on an elevated platform, facing the congregation; they keep their large fans before the face through modesty, to save themselves from the danger of looking on some tempting object. They repeat in chorus certain passages of the life of Buddha, enumerate the five great precepts and other observances of the law. The whole preaching generally goes on in Pali, that is to say, in a language unknown to the congregation. When they have done their duty they withdraw, followed by a great number of their disciples, carrying back to the monasteries all the offerings made by the faithful. It happens also, although but seldom in our days, that some fervent recluses withdraw during the whole or a part of the lent season into solitary places, living by themselves, and devoting all their time to reading the books of the law, and meditating on the most important points and maxims of religion. [12] The remarks of the Burmese translator afford me an opportunity of explaining one of the leading tenets of the Buddhistic creed. All beings in this world are subjected to the double influence of their merits and demerits. The good influence predominates when the sum of merits surpasses that of demerits, and it is superseded by the latter when the contrary takes place. This principle once admitted, Buddhists explain the good or evil that befalls every individual in every conceivable state of existence. Is a man dead, he is attended on his way to another state of being both by his merits and demerits, who, like two inseparable companions, follow him whithersoever he goes. Should the sum of demerits prove greater, he is forced into hell, or into some other state of punishment, to bear sufferings proportionately to his offences, until he has fully paid off his debt, or, to speak the language of Buddhists, until the sum of his demerits be quite exhausted. If, on the contrary, at the moment of his death the influence of merits be the strongest, he is directed into a state of happiness, pleasure, and enjoyment, say in one of the seats of Nats or Brahmas, and remains there as long as the action of the good influence lasts. When it is over he comes again into the abode of man, or in a state of probation, when he has to labour anew for amassing new and greater merits, that will hereafter entitle him to a higher reward than the one he had previously enjoyed. From the foregoing observations it is evident that the idea of a Supreme Being rewarding the good and punishing the wicked is carefully excluded, and all foreign interference on this subject entirely done away with. Another conclusion flowing from the same source is, that there is no eternity of reward or punishment, but both last for a longer or shorter period, in proportion to the sum of merits and demerits, and consequently to the power of each influence respectively. It may be asked what becomes of the sum of demerits and its consequent evil influence, whilst the superior good influence prevails? The sum of demerits remains all the while entire and undiminished; the operation of the evil influence is suspended, and has no power whatever, its own being checked by a greater one. But the sum of merits being exhausted, and its inherent action at an end, the opposite one is set at liberty, and acts on the individual proportionately to its own strength, and lasts until it is all exhausted. As man can never be without some merits or demerits, good or bad deeds, he must be either in a state of reward or punishment; this is, if I may say so, the mainspring that moves all beings into the whirlpool of countless existences, wherein they meet happiness or unhappiness according to their deserts. The being that tends strongly and perseveringly through his various existences towards perfection, weakens gradually, and finally destroys in himself the law of demerits; he ascends steadily the steps of the ladder of perfection by the practice of the highest virtues. Having reached its summit, there is no more reason for his going through other existences, and he steps at once into the state of Neibban. On the above principle Buddhists account for all the various phases of human existence. Is a child born from rich, great, and distinguished parents, does he become a wealthy and powerful man, does he become a king or a nobleman, &c.--he is indebted for all that to merits acquired during former existences. Is another child born in a low, poor, and wretched condition, is he born with bodily or intellectual defects and imperfections, &c., &c.--his former demerits are the principle and cause of all his subsequent misfortunes. The doctrine of merits and demerits, and of their concomitant influences, has been fully illustrated in the person of Buddha himself during his former existences. He said of himself to his disciples that he had passed with various fortune through the range of the animal kingdom, from the dove to the elephant; that being man he had been often in hell, and in various positions of riches and poverty, greatness and meanness, until by his mighty efforts he at last freed himself from all evil influence, and reached his present state of perfection. He is supposed to have recounted to his disciples on different occasions five hundred and ten of his former existences. [13] It has been asserted in a former note that the preachings of Buddha were accompanied with miracles, to impart an additional weight and an irresistible evidence to his doctrines. This assertion is fully corroborated by all the particulars attending the conversion of the three Kathabas and their disciples. On this occasion Buddha met with the greatest amount of stubborn resistance on the part of Ooroowela Kathaba. There is no doubt but our great preacher resorted to every means of persuasion to carry conviction to the mind of his distinguished hearer. He had, however, to deal with a man full of his own merits and excellence, who thought himself far superior to every one else. His best arguments proved powerless before a self-conceited individual, who was used to give and not to receive instruction, and enjoyed a far-famed celebrity. Buddha was compelled to resort to his unbounded power of working miracles, and with it overcame at last the obstinate and blind resistance of the proud Rathee. No conquest had ever been so dearly bought; but it proved well worth the extraordinary efforts made to obtain it. Kathaba became one of the most staunch adherents of Buddha, and one of the most fervent disciples, who laboured hard for the propagation of Buddhism. He is the most celebrated of all Buddhistic monks, and to his name is ever prefixed the distinguished epithet of Maha, which means great. After Gaudama's demise, he became the patriarch of the Buddhists. By his care and exertions, a council of five hundred Rahans was assembled at Radzagio, under the reign of King Adzatathat, to condemn the unbecoming language used by some false or imperfectly taught converts, who wished to shake off, on many points, the authority of Buddha. In the episode of the conversion of the three Kathabas, the attentive reader cannot fail to have observed one particular that throws some light on the position several heads of philosophical schools occupied in the days that saw the origin of Buddhism. Those sages lived in retired places, far from the bustle and tumult of the world. It is probable that at first they were alone, or with but a few other individuals who delighted in the same mode of life. Their time was entirely taken up with study and meditation. The object of their studies and reflections was the boundless field of metaphysics and morals. Their diet was plain, and their abstemiousness carried to a degree Hindu devotees and fanatics are alone capable of reaching. The fame of the proficiency of some of those individuals in science and virtue soon attracted to their solitude numbers of pupils, eager to place themselves under the tuition and discipline of masters so eminent in every respect. The three Kathabas must have been celebrated throughout the country, since we find them at the head of so many disciples. Humility has never been the _forte_ of the heathen sages, either in or out of India. Conceit and self-esteem were fostered in their souls by the consciousness of their own superiority and excellence, by the praises lavished on them by their disciples, and not a little by the seclusion from society to which they voluntarily resigned themselves. Spiritual pride, like a cunning foe, occupied in the heart the place vacated by passions of a coarser nature and less delicate tinge. The conduct of the elder Kathaba fully bears out the truth and correctness of the above assertion. CHAPTER VII. _Buddha's sermon on the mountain -- Interview of Buddha and King Pimpathara in the vicinity of the city of Radzagio -- Answer of Kathaba to Buddha's interrogation -- Instructions delivered to the king and his attendants -- Solemn entry of Buddha into Radzagio -- Donation of the Weloowon monastery to Buddha -- Conversion of Thariputra and Maukalan -- The Rahans are keenly taunted by the people of Radzagio._ Accompanied by his thousand followers, Phra went to the village of Gayathitha. This village stands on the bank of the river Gaia. Close to it, there is a mountain resembling in appearance an elephant's head. On the top of the mountain stands a large rock, wide enough to accommodate Buddha and all his attendants. He ascended the mountain with his disciples, and, having reached its summit, sat down. Summoning all his disciples, he said to them: "Beloved Bickus, all that is to be met with in the three abodes of men, Nats, and Brahmas, is like a burning flame. But why is it so? Because the eyes are a burning flame; the objects perceived by the eyes, the view of those objects, the feeling created by that view, are all like a burning flame. The sensations produced by the eyes cause a succession of pleasant and painful feelings, but these are likewise a burning flame. What are the causes productive of such a burning? It is the fire of concupiscence, of anger, of ignorance, of birth, of death, of old age, and of anxiety. Again, the ear is a burning flame; the sounds, the perception of the sounds, the sensations caused by the sounds, are all a burning flame; the pleasure or pain produced by the sounds are also a burning flame, which is fed by the fire of concupiscence, anger, ignorance, birth, old age, death, anxiety, tears, affliction, and trouble. Again, the sense of smelling is a burning flame; the odours, the perception of odours, the sensations produced by odours, are all a burning flame; the pleasure and pain resulting therefrom are but a burning flame, fed by concupiscence, anger, ignorance, birth, old age, death, disquietude, tears, affliction, and sorrow. Again, the taste is a burning flame; the objects tasted, the perception of those objects, the sensations produced by them, are all a burning flame, kept up by the fire of concupiscence, anger, ignorance, birth, old age, death, anxiety, tears, affliction, and sorrow. Again, the sense of feeling, the objects felt, the perception of those objects, the sensations produced by them, are a burning flame; the pleasure and pain resulting therefrom are but a burning flame, fostered by concupiscence, anger, ignorance, birth, old age, death, anxiety, tears, affliction, and sorrow. Again, the heart is a burning flame, as well as all the objects perceived by it, and the sensations produced in it; the pleasure and pain caused by the heart are too a burning flame, kept up by the fire of concupiscence, anger, ignorance, birth, old age, death, disquietude, tears, affliction, and sorrow. Beloved Bickus, they who understand the doctrine I have preached, and see through it, are full of wisdom and deserve to be called my disciples. They are displeased with the senses, the objects of the senses, matter, pleasure and pain, as well as with all the affections of the heart. They become free from concupiscence, and therefore exempt from passions. They have acquired the true wisdom that leads to perfection; they are delivered at once from the miseries of another birth. Having practised the most excellent works, nothing more remains to be performed by them. They want no more the guidance of the sixteen laws, for they have reached far beyond them."[1] Having thus spoken, Buddha remained silent. His hearers felt themselves wholly disentangled from the trammels of passion, and disengaged from all affections to material objects, and they who had been but Rahans became Rahandas. Whilst the most excellent Phra was enjoying himself in the place of Gayathitha, he recollected that, at the time when he was but a Phralaong, being near the mountain Pantawa, he had received from King Pimpathara an invitation to come to his own country and preach the law. Accompanied with his thousand Rahandas, he set out for the country of Radzagio. Having arrived at a small distance from the royal city he went to the Latti grove, about three gawots from Radzagio, a place planted with palm trees. The king, having heard of his arrival, said to his people: "The descendant of a long succession of illustrious princes, the great Rahan Gaudama, has entered into our country, and is now in the grove of palm trees, in the garden of Tandiwana." The happy news was soon re-echoed throughout the country. The people said among themselves: "The great Gaudama is come indeed. He is perfectly acquainted with all that relates to the three states of men, Nats, and Brahmas; he preaches a sublime and lovely law; the morals that he announces are pure, like a shell newly cleansed." Pimpathara, placing himself at the head of 120,000 warriors, surrounded by crowds of nobles and Pounhas, went to the garden of Tandiwana, where Phra was seated in the middle of his disciples. He paid his respects by prostrating himself before him, and then withdrew to a becoming distance. The countless crowd followed the example of their monarch, and seated themselves at a becoming distance. Some of them remained conversing with Buddha, and heard from him words worthy to be ever remembered; some others, having their hands joined to the forehead, remained in a respectful attitude; some were praising his illustrious ancestors; others remained modestly silent. All of them, perceiving the three Kathabas close to the person of Phra, doubted whether Gaudama was their disciple, or they, his disciples. Buddha, seeing at once what thought occupied the mind of the warriors, noblemen, and Pounhas, addressed the elder Kathaba, called Ooroowela Kathaba, and said to him: "Kathaba, you who lived formerly in the solitude of of Ooroowela, answer the question I am now putting to you. You were formerly a teacher of Rathees, who practised works of great mortification, to such an extent that their bodies were emaciated by self-inflicted penances: what has induced you to give up the sacrifices you were wont to make?" "Blessed Buddha," answered Kathaba, "I have observed that exterior objects, the sounds, the taste, the gratification of the senses, are but miserable filth; and, therefore, I take no more delight in the offering of small and great sacrifices." Buddha replied, "Kathaba, if you be no longer pleased with what is beautiful to the eyes, pleasant to the ear, palatable to the taste, and agreeable to the gratification of the senses, in what do you presently find pleasure and delight?" Kathaba answered, "Blessed Buddha, the state of Neibban is a state of rest, but that rest cannot be found as long as we live under the empire of senses and passions. That rest excludes existence, birth, old age, and death; the great mental attainments alone lead thereto. I know and see that happy state. I long for it. I am, therefore, displeased with the making of great and small sacrifices." Having thus spoken, Kathaba rose up, worshipped Buddha by prostrating himself before him, and touching with his forehead the extremities of his feet, and said, "O most excellent Buddha, you are my teacher, and I am your disciple." All the people, seeing what Kathaba had done, knew that he was practising virtue under the direction of Gaudama.[2] Phra, who was acquainted with their innermost thoughts, knew that they were longing to hear the preaching of the law. As he had always done, he began to preach to them the virtue of liberality in almsgiving, and then unfolded before them, with matchless eloquence, the advantages of leaving the world, &c. The hearers felt an inward delight in all that was said to them. Observing the favourable impression made upon them, Gaudama continued to instruct them on the four laws, regarding the miseries of this world, the passions, the practice of excellent works, and the ways to perfection. At the conclusion of these instructions, the king and 100,000 of the assembly, like a piece of white cloth which, when plunged into dye, retains the colour it receives, obtained instantly the state Thautapan.[3] As to the 10,000 remaining hearers, they believed in the three precious things in the capacity of Upathakas. The ruler of the country of Magataritz, King Pimpathara, having obtained the state of Thautapan, said to Gaudama, "Illustrious Buddha, some years ago, when I was but a crown prince of this country, I entertained five desires, which were all happily accomplished. Here are the five desires--I wished to become king; I desired that the Phra, worthy of receiving the homage of all men, should come into my kingdom; that I might have the privilege of approaching him; that he might preach his doctrine to me; and, finally, that I might thoroughly understand all his preaching. These five wishes have been fully realised. Your law, O most excellent Buddha, is a most perfect law. To what shall I liken it as regards the happy results it produces? It is like replacing on its proper basis a vase that was bottom upwards, or setting to light objects hitherto buried in deep darkness; it is an excellent guide that shows out the right way; it is like a brilliant light, shining forth and dispelling darkness. Now I take refuge in you, your law, and the assembly of the perfect. Henceforth I will be your supporter, and to-morrow I will supply you and your disciples with all that is necessary for the support of nature." Buddha, by his silence, testified his acceptance of the offered favour. Whereupon the king rose up, prostrated himself before him, and, turning on the right, left the place, and returned to his palace. Early in the morning Pimpathara ordered all sorts of eatables to be prepared. Meanwhile he sent messengers to Buddha to inform him that his meal was ready. Buddha, rising up, put on his dress, and, carrying his patta, set out for Radzagio, followed by his one thousand disciples. At that time a prince of Thagias, assuming the appearance of a handsome young man, walked a little distance in front of Buddha, singing to his praise several stanzas. "Behold the most excellent is advancing towards Radzagio with his one thousand disciples. In his soul he is full of meekness and amiability; he is exempt from all passions; his face is beautiful, and shines forth like the star Thigi; he has escaped out of the whirlpool of existences, and delivered himself from the miseries of transmigration. He is on his way to the city of Radzagio attended by a thousand Rahandas." (The same stanza is thrice repeated.) "He who has obtained the perfection of Ariahs, who has practised the ten great virtues, who has a universal knowledge, who knows and preaches the law of merits, who discovers at once the sublime attainments, the most perfect being, the most excellent, is entering into the city of Radzagio attended by a thousand Rahandas." The inhabitants of the city, seeing the beautiful appearance of that young man, and hearing all that he was singing aloud, said to each other, "Who is that young man whose countenance is so lovely, and whose mouth proclaims such wonderful things?" The Thagia, hearing what was said of him, replied, "O children of men! the most excellent Phra whom you see is gifted with an incomparable wisdom; all perfections are in him; he is free of all passions; no being can ever be compared to him; he is worthy to receive the homage and respect of men and Nats; his unwavering mind is ever fixed in truth; he announces a law extending to all things. As for me, I am but his humble servant."[4] Having reached the king's palace, Buddha was received with every demonstration of respect, and led to the place prepared for him. Pimpathara thought within himself of the thing which could prove acceptable to Phra, in order to offer it to him. He said within himself, "My garden, which is situated near the city, would doubtless be a very fit place for Buddha and his followers to live in. As it lies not far from the city, it would be a place of easy resort to all those who should feel inclined to visit Buddha and pay him their respects; it is, moreover, far enough off, so that the noise and cries of the people could not be heard therein. The place is peculiarly fitted for retreat and contemplation; it will assuredly prove agreeable to Buddha." Whereupon he rose up, and, holding in his hand a golden shell like a cup, he made to Phra a solemn offering of that garden which was called Weloowon.[5] Gaudama remained silent, in token of his acceptance of the gift. He preached the law and left the palace. At that time he called his disciples and said to them, "Beloved Rahans, I give you permission to receive offerings." In the country of Radzagio there was a heterodox Rahan named Thindzi, who had under him five hundred and fifty disciples. Thariputra and Maukalan were at that time practising virtue under the guidance of that master. Here is the way they became Rahans. When they were but laymen, under the names of Oopathi and Kaulita, on a certain day, surrounded by two hundred and twenty companions, they went to the top of a lofty mountain to enjoy the sight of countless multitudes of people sporting and playing in the surrounding flat country. While they were gazing over the crowds of human beings they said to each other, "In a hundred years hence all these living beings shall have fallen a prey to death." Whereupon they rose up and left the place, but their minds were deeply preoccupied with the idea of death. While the two friends were walking silently together, they began at last to communicate to each other the result of their reflections. "If there be," said they, "a principle of death, a universal tendency towards destruction, there must be, too, its opposite principle, that of not dying and escaping destruction." On that very instant they resolved to search ardently for the excellent law that teaches the way of not dying, and obtain the state of perfect fixity and immutability. In those parts there lived six heterodox teachers who were named Mekkali, Gau, Sala, Thindzi, Jani, and Ganti; among them Thindzi was the only one who, with his disciples, wore white clothes. They went to the place where lived the Rahan Thindzi, placed themselves under his direction, and put on the dress of Rahan. Within three days they acquired the science, wisdom, and knowledge of their teacher without having as yet reached the object of their eager pursuit. They said to Thindzi, "Teacher, is this all that you know? And have you no other science to teach us?" "I have indeed," replied the teacher, "taught you all the knowledge I possess." Finding nothing satisfactory in the answer, the two friends said, "Let us continue seeking for the law that has reality in itself; the first that shall have discovered it shall, without delay, communicate it to the other." On a certain morning one of Gaudama's disciples named Athadzi, having put on his religious habit, and carrying his patta on his left arm, went out to receive his rice. Everything about his person was noble and graceful; his countenance and behaviour were at once gentle and dignified, whether he walked or stopped, looked forward to the right or the left, or sat in a cross-legged position. The false Rahan Oopathi, who became afterwards Thariputra, perceiving the Rahan Athadzi with such a meek and dignified deportment, said to himself, "Such a Rahan is assuredly worthy to receive offerings: he has doubtless attained perfection. I will go to him and ask him, in case he has had a teacher, who is that distinguished instructor under whom he practises virtue; and in case of his being himself a teacher, what is the doctrine that he teaches. But it is not becoming to put to him any question whilst he is on his way to beg alms. I will follow at a distance." Athadzi, having collected alms, left the city and went to a small dzeat, where he sat down and ate his meal. Oopathi followed him thither. Having entered into the dzeat, he rendered to him the services that a disciple usually pays to his teacher. When the meal of Athadzi was over, he poured water over his hands, and with a heart overflowing with joy, he conversed with him for a while. He withdrew then to a becoming distance, and addressed him as follows: "Great Rahan, your exterior is full of meekness and benevolence; your countenance bespeaks the purity and innocence of your soul; if you be a disciple, pray under what teacher have you become a Rahan? Who is your guide in the way to perfection? and what is the doctrine he is preaching to you?" "Young Rahan," replied Athadzi, "have you not heard of the illustrious Buddha, the descendant of a long succession of great monarchs, who has entered the profession of Rahan? I have become Rahan under him; he is my teacher; to his doctrine I cling with all the energy of my soul." "What is the doctrine of that great master?" asked Oopathi. "I am but a novice in the profession," replied modestly Athadzi, "and am as yet imperfectly acquainted with the doctrine of my teacher. The little, however, I know, I will freely communicate to you." Oopathi entreated him to do so. Athadzi replied, "The law which I have learned at the feet of Buddha explains all that relates to matter, to the principles that act upon it, to passions, and to the mind; it makes man despise all that is material, conquer his passions, and regulate his mind." On hearing this doctrine, Oopathi felt the ties of passions gradually relaxing and giving way; his soul became, as it were, disentangled from the influence of the senses. He became enamoured with such a pure and perfect law, and obtained the condition of Thautapan. Convinced that he had at last found what he had hitherto searched after in vain, the law of Neibban, he went without delay to his friend, to make him share in the beneficial result of his fortunate discovery. Kaulita, perceiving his friend coming up to him with a rejoicing countenance, indicative of the happiness his soul was inwardly enjoying, asked him if he had found what he had hitherto vainly looked for. Oopathi related to him all the particulars of his conversation with the Rahan Athadzi. Whereupon Kaulita became instantly a Thautapan. Both resolved to leave their teacher Thindzi, and go immediately to place themselves under the guidance of Buddha. Three times they applied for permission to execute their design, and three times it was denied them. At last they departed, each with his two hundred and twenty companions. Thindzi, enraged at being left alone, died, vomiting blood from his mouth. When the two friends and their followers were drawing near to the place of Weloowon, Phra assembled all his disciples and said to them, "Behold these two friends coming up to me; they will become my two beloved disciples; their minds are acute and penetrating; they actually take delight in the law of Neibban; their thoughts are converging towards that great centre of truth; they come to me, and they will become my two most excellent disciples." While he was speaking, the two friends crossed the threshold of the monastery, and prostrated themselves at the feet of Buddha, humbly craving the favour of being admitted among his disciples to practise virtue under his immediate direction. On this occasion Phra uttered the following words: "O Bickus, come to me; I preach the most excellent law: apply yourselves to the practice of the most perfect works, which will put an end to all miseries." A suit of dress and a patta were handed to each of the two friends, that were henceforth to be called Thariputra and Maukalan, and they became members of the assembly. Having put on the new dress, they appeared to the eyes of all with the decent and dignified deportment of Rahans that had sixty years of profession. Their followers became Bickus of the second order. Seven days after, Maukalan became a Rahanda; but it took fifteen days for Thariputra to obtain the same favour. The two new converts were elevated to the dignity of disciples of the right and of the left; that is to say, they obtained precedence over all others. The distinction thus granted to Thariputra and Maukalan excited a feeling of jealousy among the disciples of Buddha. In their conversations they complained to each other of the preference given to those who had just been admitted among the members of assembly. They went so far as to say that Buddha had acted in this case under the influence of human considerations. These remarks were brought to the notice of Buddha, who assembled his disciples, and said to them, "Beloved Bickus, my conduct in this instance has not been guided by unworthy motives; I have acted as I ought to have done. In the days of the Phra Anaumadathi, the two friends were leading the life of ascetics. They paid the greatest respect and veneration to the then existing Buddha, and entreated him, by repeated supplications, to hold out to them the solemn promise that they would become the disciples of the right and of the left of some future Buddha. Anaumadathi replied to them that the object of their wishes should be granted unto them when the Buddha Gaudama would appear in the world. This is, beloved Bickus, the reason that has influenced me in elevating to the first rank the two new converts." The answer completely satisfied the disciples, and effectually silenced all murmurs. Further particulars regarding the promise that these two illustrious friends received in the time of the Buddha Anaumadathi may be read, with circumstantial details, in the book called Apadan-tera. The inhabitants of the Magatha country, seeing that so many persons, chiefly belonging to the first families, were embracing the profession of Rahans, said amongst themselves, "Behold how the Rahan Gaudama, by his preachings, causes the depopulation of the country, and forces countless wives to the unwished-for state of widowhood. A thousand Rathees have embraced the profession of Rahans; all the disciples of Thindzi have followed their example; many others will soon tread in their footsteps. What will become of our country?" With these and other expressions, they gave vent to their hatred of the Rahans, and endeavoured to pour over them all kinds of ridicule and abuse. They concluded by saying, "The great Rahan has come to the city of Radzagio, which is like a cow-pen, surrounded by five hills;[6] he has now with him the disciples of Thindzi; who will be the next to go to him?" The Rahans, hearing all that was said against them, went to Buddha and related to him all that they had heard. To console them, Buddha said, "Beloved Bickus, the abuses, sarcasms, and ridicule levelled at you shall not last long; seven days hence all shall be over. Here is the reply you will make to the revilers: Like all his predecessors, Buddha is striving to preach a most perfect law; by the means of the truths which he proclaims for the benefit of all, he brings men over to himself. What shall it avail any man to feel envious at the success he obtains by so legitimate a means?" The same torrent of ridicule having been poured on the Rahans, when they went out, they followed the advice of their great teacher, replied in the manner they had been taught to do, and the storm was soon over. The people understood that the great Rahan was preaching a perfect law, and that he never resorted but to fair means to attract disciples round his person. Here ends the narrative of the conversion and vocation of Thariputra and Maukalan. FOOTNOTES [1] The philosophical discourse of Buddha on the mountain may be considered as the summary of his theory of morals. It is confessedly very obscure and much above the ordinary level of the human understanding. The hearers whom he addressed were persons already trained up to his teaching, and therefore prepared for understanding such doctrines. Had he spoken in that abstruse style to common people, it is certain he would have missed his aim and exposed himself to the chance of not being understood. But he addressed a select audience, whose minds were fully capable of comprehending his most elevated doctrines. He calls his disciples Bickus, or mendicants, to remind them of the state of voluntary poverty they had embraced when they became his followers, and to impress their minds with contempt for the riches and pleasures of this world. He lays it down as a great and general principle that all that exists resembles a flame that dazzles the eyes by its brilliancy and torments by its burning effects. Here appears the favourite notion of Buddhism that there is nothing substantial and real in this world, and that the continual changes and vicissitudes we are exposed to are the cause of painful sensations. Buddha reviews the six senses (the heart, according to his theory, is the seat of a sixth sense) in succession, and as they are the channels through which affections are produced on the soul, he compares to a burning flame the organs of the senses, the various objects of the action of the senses, the results painful or agreeable produced by them. Hence he fulminates a general and sweeping condemnation against all that exists out of man. The senses, being the means through which matter influences the soul, share in the universal doom. Buddha sets forth the causes productive of that burning flame. They are--first, the three great and general principles of demerits, viz., concupiscence, anger, and ignorance. In the book of Ethics these three principles are explained at great length; they are represented as the springs from which flow all other passions. In a lengthened digression the author aims at simplifying the question, and endeavours to show, by a logical process, that ignorance is the head source from which concupiscence and passion take their rise. It is, therefore, according to Buddhists, into the dark recess of ignorance that metaphysicians must penetrate in order to discover the first cause of all moral disorders. Every being has his mind more or less encompassed by a thick mist that prevents him from seeing truth. He mistakes good for evil, right for wrong; he erroneously clings to material objects that have no reality, no substance, no consistence; his passions are kept alive by his love or hatred of vain illusions. The flame is, moreover, fed by birth, old age, death, afflictions, &c., which are as many _foci_ wherefrom radiate out on all surrounding objects fires which keep up the general conflagration. But they play only a secondary action, dependent on the three great causes of all evils just alluded to. What causes birth, old age, and death? inquires the Buddhist. The law of merits and demerits is the immediate answer to the question; it might be added thereto, the necessity of acquiring merits and gravitating towards perfection. A man is born to innumerable succeeding existences by virtue of his imperfections, and that he might acquire fresh merits by the practice of virtue. By birth, a being is ushered into a new existence or into a new state, where the burning flame which is supposed to spread over all that exists exercises its teasing and tormenting influence over him. Old age and death are two periods when a radical change operates upon a being, and places him in a different situation where he experiences the baneful effects of the conflagration. "Blessed are they," says Buddha, "who understand this; they are full of wisdom; they become displeased with all passions and with all the things they act upon. The causes of existences being done away with, they have reached the terminus of all possible existences; one step more and they find themselves placed beyond the influence of the power of attraction that retains forcibly all beings in the vortex of existences, and brings them towards the centre of perfection; they are in fact entering into the state of Neibban." [2] From the purport of Kathaba's reply to Buddha's question, it may be inferred with certainty that the Rathees were in the habit of making sacrifices or burnt-offerings. These sacrifices again were distinguished into two classes; the one, including the small or daily ones, and the other, the great burnt-offerings, made on solemn occasions. That these sacrifices were not performed by the killing and immolating of animals, there can be no doubt, as such an act would have been contrary to the tender regard they always had for the life of animals. The institutes of Menu come to our help to elucidate this point. The Brahmin is enjoined, according to that compilation of laws, to make burnt-offerings of clarified butter and other articles to the manes of his ancestors. Agreeably to this regulation, Kathaba performed those rites, which, in the opinion of Buddha, were perfectly useless, since they could not be the means of elevating the performer to the knowledge and perfection requisite for obtaining what he always calls _per excellence_ the deliverance. Kathaba is rather obscure in his answer. It seems that he intended to acknowledge that, notwithstanding the sacrifices and burnt-offerings he had made, and upon the value of which he had laid much stress, concupiscence and other vicious propensities were still deeply rooted in him; that, through the channel of his senses, exterior objects continued to make impressions on his soul. He had, therefore, become disgusted with practices which could not free him from the action and influence of passions and matter. In the opinion of Buddha, the observance of exterior religious rites can never elevate man to the sublime knowledge of pure truth, which alone does confer real perfection to him who has become a true sage, and is deemed worthy of obtaining the deliverance. A serious application of the mind to the meditation of the law and the nature of beings, is the only way leading to the acquirement of true wisdom. As long as Kathaba was contented with material acts of worship, and his mind's attention was engrossed with those vain ceremonials, he had not as yet entered in the way of perfection. He had hitherto missed the true path; he had wandered in the broad road of error, encompassed by mental darkness, and deceived by perpetual illusions. His extensive knowledge had served but to lead him in the wrong direction. He wanted the guidance of Buddha to enable him to retrace his steps and find the right way. He had to become sensible of the truth of the great fundamental maxims of all real wisdom, viz., that in this world all is subjected to change and to pain; and that all beings are mere illusions, destitute of all reality. [3] To complete what has already been stated respecting the Ariahs or venerables in a foregoing note, the following is added. The reader must bear in mind that the Ariahs are divided into four classes, named--Thautapan, Thakadagam, Anagam, and Arahats, and according to the particular position occupied by the beings of those states, each class is subdivided into two: Thus, for instance, Thautapatti Megata means he who has entered and is walking, as it were, in the way of the perfection of Thautapan; and Thautapatti-pho indicates those who enjoy the merits and blessings of the state of Thautapan; and so with the three superior stages of perfection. To obtain the state of Thautapan, a man must have left the direction followed up by all creatures and entered into the direction or way that leads to deliverance. He will have yet to go through 80,000 kaps or durations of worlds, and must be born seven times more in the state of man and Nat before he be a perfected being, ripe for the state of Neibban. Those who have reached the state of Thakadagam shall have to pass through 60,000 kaps, and be born once in the state of Nat and once in the state of man, before they be perfected. Those who have obtained the third step of Anagam have to travel through 40,000 kaps, and are no more to undergo the process of birth at the end of that period they are perfected. The fourth stage of perfection, that of Arahat, is the highest a being can ever obtain. The fortunate Arahat is gifted with supernatural powers. At the end of 20,000 kaps he is perfected, and reaches the state of deliverance. Those four states are often called the four great roads leading to deliverance or to Neibban. It may be asked whether the state of Thautapan is the first step reached by every one that adheres to Buddha's doctrines or whether it is the one that requires a certain progress in the way of believing and practising? It seems, from the narrative of the conversion of King Pimpathara and his followers, that the state of Thautapan is the reward of those who have shown a more than common proficiency and fervour in adhering to Buddha and his doctrines, but not the first step to enter into the assembly of the faithful and become a member thereof. One may be a simple hearer, or Upathaka, believing in the three precious things, without attaining that of Thautapan. On this occasion, the king and 100,000 of his warriors and noblemen became Thautapans, whereas the remaining 10,000 became believers and members of the assembly without reaching any further. The first entered into the stream or current leading to perfection. The latter were fervent believers, observed the five precepts, but in no way aspired to the attainment of the doctrines of a higher order. [4] Is not that young man doing the duty of forerunner of Buddha on the occasion of his solemn entry into the city of Radzagio? The narrative of the donation of the grove or garden of Weloowon by King Pimpathara to Buddha, discloses the manner in which Buddhistic monks have become holders, not as individuals, but as members of society, of landed properties. Buddha and his disciples at first had no place as a body or a society to live in; hitherto he had taken up his quarters in any place where people were willing to receive him. He must have often been put to great inconvenience, particularly after the accession of new disciples, who daily crowded about him. The pious king felt the disadvantage the society was labouring under: he resolved to give them a place where the assembly might live and remain. The donation was as solemn as possible. It transferred to Buddha the property of the garden, without any condition, for ever. The donation, on the other hand, was fully accepted. This is, I believe, the first instance of an act of this description. The grove and monastery of Weloowon is much celebrated in Buddha's life. In Burmese towns a particular spot is allowed for the building of houses or monasteries for Buddhistic recluses or monks. It is somewhat isolated from all other buildings, and forms, as it were, the quarter of the yellow-dressed personages. Here is a general description of one of these buildings. They are of an oblong-square shape, raised about eight or ten feet above the ground, and supported on wooden posts, and sometimes, though seldom, on brick pillars. The frame of the edifice is of wood, and planks form the wall. Above the first roof rises a second one of smaller dimensions, and a third one, yet smaller than the second. This style of roofing a building is allowed only for pagodas, Talapoins' houses, and royal palaces. The place between the soil and the floor is left open and never converted to any use. A flight of steps, made of wood or bricks, leads to the entrance of the edifice, the interior whereof is generally divided as follows:--One vast hall designed for the reception of visitors, and used also as a schoolroom for the boys who go to learn the rudiments of reading, writing, and sometimes ciphering. Except on grand occasions, the Talapoins generally stay in that hall, doing away with their time in the best way they can, occasionally reading books, counting their beads, chewing betel, and very often sleeping. At the extremity of the hall there is a place raised one or two steps above the level. A portion of that place is left vacant, and reserved for the sittings of the Talapoins, when they receive visitors; the other portion, which extends to the wall, is occupied by idols or representations of Buddha, raised on pedestals, and sometimes placed on shelves, with the few implements required for exterior worship. There, too, are to be seen a few trunks ornamented with sculptures and gildings, and containing books belonging to the monastery. The hall and the place as far as the walls occupy just one-half of the oblong-square. The other half, parallel to the first, is occupied by rooms intended for the storing of alms, and as dormitories for the inmates of the house. In some, monasteries the ceiling is painted and partly gilt. The cook-room, when there is one, is connected with the extremity of the square opposite to the one occupied by the idols. It is generally on the same level with the floor of the building. Government has nothing to do with the erection, repairs, and maintenance of these edifices. They are erected and kept up by private individuals, who deem it very meritorious to build such places. Those whose piety actuates and prompts them to undertake such an expensive work assume the title of Kiaong Taga, which means supporter of a pagoda or Talapoins' residence. They are proud of such distinction, cause themselves to be called by that title, and always make it to follow their names in signing any paper or document. The above descriptive sketch of a monastery is rather incomplete, if applied to those found in the large places of Burmah proper, and particularly in the capital. Some of them are laid out on a scale of vastness and magnificence difficult to realise by those who have not examined them. A large open gallery runs all round the building; a second one of a rectangular shape, but protected by the roof, forms, as it were, on the four sides the _vestibulum_ to the central portion of the edifice. It is the place where the Phongies spend the greater part of their time, either in talking with the numerous idlers that visit them, or in teaching children. Large shutters separate this from the open verandah; they may be thrown all open by pushing forward the lower part, the upper one remaining fixed by hinges, and so may be opened to the height required to protect the inmates from the rain and the sun. The central hall, by far the finest and loftiest of the building, is reserved for the idols and all the implements of worship, and the boxes containing the books of the monastery, commonly put together in a very disordered way. The ceiling is gilt and adorned, often with taste and elegance. A partition divides the hall into two equal parts. The one towards the east is for some huge statue of Gaudama, and smaller ones with many articles of worship. The other, facing the south, is used for several purposes; sometimes as dormitories for the Talapoins. The posts supporting the interior part are six or eight in number, and offer the finest specimens of teak timber I have ever seen, some being fully sixty and seventy feet high. In some of these monasteries the best parts of the interior are gilt, and sometimes the exterior sides; the ornaments of the extremities of the roof and the space between the roofs are covered with gold leaves. In those two places too are displayed carvings, which reflect great credit on the skill of native workmen, and elicit the admiration of foreigners. One of these monasteries called the kioung-dau-gye, near the place where the Arracan idol is, and another close to the place where the supreme head of Talapoins is living, are the finest and largest specimens of monasteries the writer has ever seen in Burmah. [5] On the occasion of the presentation to Buddha of the Weloowon monastery, and of the lands attached to it, by King Pimpathara, there was observed a curious ceremony, often alluded to in Buddhist writings. He held in his hands a golden pitcher full of water, which he kept pouring down on the ground, whilst he pronounced the formula of donation. This is a ceremony of Indian origin, which, with many others, has been imported into these parts along with the religious doctrines. It is intended to be an exterior sign of, or testimony to, the offering that is made on the occasion. When it is performed, the parties pronounce a certain formula, calling the Nats, guardians of the place, to witness the act of donation, and, in particular, the Nat that is supposed to rule over the earth; and at the same time the offerer, not satisfied with receiving for his own benefit the merits of his pious liberality, expresses the earnest desire that all men, or rather all beings, should share with him in the blessings he expects to reap from his good deed. The generous and liberal disposition of the donor, it may be observed, exhibits the truly pleasing display of an amount of charity and brotherly love scarcely to be expected from the followers of an erroneous creed. The ceremony, therefore, has a twofold object, conferring unreserved and absolute efficiency on the act of donation, and dividing or apportioning the merits of the good work among all beings. In perusing attentively the contents of this legend, the reader will easily follow the gradual development of the Buddhist religious system, and, in particular, the establishment of most of the disciplinary regulations in full force in our own days in most of the countries where that form of religion has obtained a long standing and a predominating footing. At first the religious that constituted the body of the followers of Buddha were few, and could easily, in the company of their eminent teacher, procure, in accordance with the vow of strict poverty they had made, shelter, food, and raiment. There was no need for them to accept, in the shape of donation, anything beyond what was absolutely necessary for the wants of the day. We may conjecture that their leader watched with a jealous care over his religious on this point, to establish them in the spirit of poverty and of a thorough contempt for the things of this world. But the society or fraternity growing numerous, the dependence on the daily offerings appeared not to meet in sufficient manner the real necessities it felt, particularly as regards shelter. This want was quickly perceived and keenly felt by the pious King Pimpathara, who came to the resolution of presenting Buddha and his followers with a proper place to withdraw to at all times, but particularly during the wet season, when the pouring of the annual rains puts a check of four months to the religious peregrinations of the preachers. The same motives that induced Buddha to accept the proffered royal gift influenced him likewise to grant to his religious the dangerous, it is true, but the absolutely necessary permission of receiving offerings of houses and lands. From that time, the religious communities have made use of the privilege granted to them in all the places where they have been established. In Burmah this favour has not been abused, and the religious body, though never standing in want of anything required for the daily use, cannot be said to be wealthy. Having not to cast in the scales of the political balance the weight of riches, and the preponderance essentially attending the possession of them, their influence in the political affairs is not, at least exteriorly, felt. [6] In his Archaeological Survey Report, General Cunningham has supplied us with an accurate description of the position and ruins of the celebrated city of Radzagio. His own measurements of the old ramparts, that are still visible, agree to a surprising degree with those of the two Chinese pilgrims, Fa-Hian and Hwen-Tsan, who visited the same spot in the fourth and sixth century of our era. The city was situated in a valley, surrounded by five hills, which are named Gigakuta, Isigli, Wibhara, Wipula, and Pandawa. It was five miles in circumference. This is meant for the circuit of the inner wall. The exterior one was nearly nine miles. On the southern face of the Wibhara mountain is the famous cave at the entrance of which was held the first Buddhist council, not long after the cremation of Buddha's remains. There is no doubt that the heights were, in the palmy days of Buddhism, covered with Buddhistic monuments. As the place was subsequently occupied by Brahmins and Mussulmans, the Dzedis and monasteries have been mercilessly pulled down to furnish materials for musjids, tombs, and temples. The eminences are now covered with Mussulman tombs, which occupy the places formerly adorned with pagodas. Springs of hot water were numerous in the vicinity of the city. The writer has only met once in Buddhistic compositions an allusion to that natural phenomenon so beneficial to people living in hot climates. The modern Rajghir, both by name and situation, brings to our recollection the celebrated capital of Magatha, so famous in Buddhistic annals. As the extent of Radzagio has been so accurately determined by ancient and modern visitors, one can well afford to laugh at the immensely exaggerated number of houses that are supposed by certain Burmese writers to have composed the city. CHAPTER VIII. _Thoodaudana, desirous to see his son, sends messengers to him -- They become converts -- Kaludari, a last messenger, prevails on Buddha to go to Kapilawot -- His reception -- Conversion of the king and of Yathaudara -- Nanda and Raoula put on the religious habit -- Conversion of Ananda and of several of his relatives -- Temptation of Ananda -- Conversion of Eggidatta -- Story of Tsampooka._ Whilst the most excellent Phra remained in the Weloowon monastery, enjoying himself in the midst of his disciples and the crowds of hearers that daily resorted thither to listen to his preachings, his father Thoodaudana[1] who had ever been anxiously and sedulously gathering every possible information respecting his son, from the time he withdrew into solitude, and performed during six years the hardest works of bodily mortification, was then informed that his son had already begun to preach the most perfect law, and was actually staying in the city of Radzagio. He felt then an irresistible desire to see him once more before his death. He therefore ordered a nobleman of his court into his presence, and said to him: "Nobleman, take with you a retinue of a thousand followers, and go forthwith to the city of Radzagio. Tell my son that I am now much advanced in years, that I long to see him once more before I die; desire him, therefore, to come over with you to the country of Kapilawot." The nobleman, having received the royal message, took leave from the king, and attended by a thousand followers, set out for Radzagio. When he drew near to the Weloowon monastery, he found it crowded with an innumerable multitude of people, listening with a respectful attention to Buddha's instructions. Unwilling to disturb the audience, the nobleman delayed for a while the delivery of his royal master's message. Halting at the verge of the crowd, he, with his followers, eagerly lent the utmost attention to all that Buddha was saying. They at once obtained the state of Arahat, and applied for admission into the order of Rahans. The favour was granted. To obtain pattas and tsiwarans for so great a number of applicants, Buddha stretched his right arm, when there appeared at once the pattas and dresses required. The new converts put on the dress of their order, when they all appeared with the dignified countenance and meek deportment of Rahans who had had sixty years of profession. Having arrived at the exalted state of Ariahs, they became indifferent and unconcerned about all the things of this material world, and the king's mandate was entirely lost sight of. The sovereign of Kapilawot, seeing that his nobleman did not return from the country of Magatha,[2] and that no news was heard of him, despatched a second messenger with an equal number of followers on the same errand. They all were taken up with Buddha's preachings and became Rahandas. The same thing happened to seven messengers successively sent to Radzagio for the same purpose. They, with their respective retinues, became converts of the first class. Disappointed at seeing that none of the messengers had returned to bring him any news regarding his son, King Thoodaudana exclaimed: "Is there no one in my palace that bears any affection unto me? Shall I not be able to get a person who could procure for me some information respecting my son?" He looked among his courtiers and selected one, named Kaludari, as the fittest person for such a difficult errand. Kaludari had been born on the same day as Buddha: with him he had spent the age of his infancy, and lived on terms of the most sincere friendship. The king said to him: "Noble Kaludari, you know how earnestly I long to see my son. Nine messengers have already been sent to the city of Radzagio to invite my son to come over to me, and none of them has as yet come back to me, to bring information respecting the object of my tenderest affections. I am old now, and the end of my existence is quite uncertain; could you not undertake to bring my son over to me? Whether you become Rahan or not, let me have the happiness of contemplating once more my beloved son ere I leave this world." The nobleman promised to the king to comply with his royal order. Attended by a retinue of a thousand followers, he set out for the city of Radzagio. Having reached the Weloowon monastery, he listened to Buddha's preachings, and, like the former messengers, he became at once a Rahanda with all his followers. Gaudama, having obtained the Buddhaship, spent the first season (Lent) in the solitude of Migadawon. Thence he proceeded to the solitude of Ooroowela, where he remained three months, until he had completed the work of converting the three Kathabas. It was on the full moon of Piatho (January) that he entered into the city of Radzagio, accompanied by his thousand disciples. He had just stayed two months in that place, so that there were five months since he had left the country of Baranathee. Seven days after Kaludari's arrival, the cold season being nearly over, the new convert addressed Buddha as follows: "Illustrious Phra, the cold season is over, and the warm season has just begun; this is now the proper time to travel through the country; nature wears a green aspect; the trees of the forests are in full blossom; the roads are lined to right and left with trees loaded with fragrant blossoms and delicious fruits; the peacock proudly expands its magnificent tail; birds of every description fill the air with their ravishing and melodious singing. At this season heat and cold are equally temperate, and nature is scattering profusely its choicest gifts." By such and similar allurements Kaludari endeavoured to dispose Buddha to undertake a journey to Kapilawot. Gaudama hearing all these words said: "What means this? To what purpose are uttered so many fine expressions?" Kaludari replied: "Your father, O blessed Buddha, is advanced in years; he has sent me to invite you to come over to Kapilawot, that he might see you before his death. He and your royal parents will be rejoiced at hearing your most excellent law." "Well," said Buddha, "go and tell the Rahans to hold themselves ready for the journey." It was arranged that ten thousand Rahandas from Magatha and ten thousand from Kapilawot would accompany the illustrious traveller. The distance between the two countries is sixty youdzanas.[3] Sixty days were to be employed in going over that distance, so they were to travel at the rate of but one youdzana a day. Kaludari was anxious to go and inform the king of the happy issue of his negotiation. He flew through the air, and in a short time reached the palace of the lord of Kapilawot. The king, seeing him, was exceedingly glad; he desired the illustrious Rahan to sit in a becoming place, and gave orders that his patta should be filled with the choicest dishes from the royal table. Meanwhile Kaludari related to the king all the circumstances attending his journey. When he had spoken, Thoodaudana desired him to take his meal. Kaludari begged to be excused, saying that he would go and take his meal in the presence of Buddha. "Where is he now?" replied the king. "Mighty lord," answered Kaludari, "Buddha, accompanied by twenty thousand Rahandas, is on his way to this country, to pay a visit to his royal father; on this very day he has left the city of Radzagio." Thoodaudana was exceedingly pleased; he said again to Kaludari, "Eat your meal here, and please to take another meal to my son; I wish to supply him daily with food during his journey." Kaludari acceded to the king's request. When his meal was over, they cleansed his patta with the most exquisite perfumes, and afterwards filled it with the best and choicest eatables. The patta was then respectfully handed to the aërial messenger, who, in the presence of a large crowd of people, rose in the air with the patta under his arm, and in an instant arrived in presence of Gaudama, to whom he offered the vessel containing the delicious food from his father's table. Buddha received the food with pleasure, and ate it. The same thing was daily performed during all the time the journey lasted. Kaludari went every day to the palace through the air, ate his meal there, and brought that of his distinguished instructor, who during all the way partook of no other food but that which was brought over to him from his father's palace. Every day Kaludari carried news of the progress of Buddha's journey. By this means he increased in the heart of all an ardent desire of seeing him, and disposed every one to wait on the great Gaudama with favourable and good dispositions. The services rendered on this occasion by Kaludari were much valued by Buddha himself, who said: "Kaludari is disposing the people to welcome our arrival; he is therefore one of the most excellent among my disciples." The princes and all the members of the royal family, having heard of Gaudama's arrival, consulted among themselves as to the best means of paying due respect to the noble and illustrious visitor. They selected the grove of Nigraudatha[4] as the fittest place to receive him with his disciples. The place was properly cleared and made ready for the long-expected company. The inhabitants of the country, attended with their richest dress, carrying flowers and perfumes, went out to meet Buddha.[5] Children of both sexes opened the procession; they were followed by the children of the noblest families; next came all the persons belonging to the royal family. All went to the grove of Nigraudatha, where Buddha had just arrived with the twenty thousand Rahans that accompanied him. The princes, secretly influenced by pride, thus thought within themselves: This Prince Theiddat is younger than we all; he is but our nephew, let the young people prostrate themselves before him; as to ourselves, let us remain sitting down behind them. This was quickly perceived by Buddha, who said to himself: My relatives refuse to prostrate themselves before me; I will now even compel them to do so. Whereupon he entered into ecstasy, rose in the air, and standing over the heads of his relatives, as a person shaking dust over them, he exhibited to their astonished regards, on a white mango-tree, wonders of fire and water. Thoodaudana, surprised at such a wonderful display of supernatural power, exclaimed: "Illustrious Buddha, on the day you were born they brought you to the presence of the Rathee Kaladewela, to do homage to him; on that occasion, having seen you placing your two feet on the Rathee's forehead, I prostrated myself before you for the first time. On the day of the ploughing solemn rejoicings, you were placed under the shade of the tree Tsampoothapye. The sun by its daily motion had caused the shadows of all surrounding trees to change their direction; that of the tree under which you were placed alone remaining unmoved. I prostrated myself a second time before you; and now, at the sight of this new wonder, I again bow down to you." The example of the king was instantly imitated by all the princes, who humbly bowed down to Buddha. Satisfied with having humbled his proud relatives, Buddha came down and sat in the place prepared for him. He then caused a shower of red rain to pour down over the assembled multitudes. It had the virtue to wet those who liked it, and not to wet those who disliked it. "This is not," said Buddha, "the only time when such a wonder has happened; the same thing took place once during one of my former existences, when I was Prince Wethandra." He went on, relating the most interesting circumstances of that former state of existence. The whole assembly now delighted at hearing his preachings and witnessing the display of his power. They all withdrew when the preaching was over, and retired to their respective places, without, however, inviting Buddha to come and take his meals in their houses. On the following morning, Buddha set out with his twenty thousand followers to get his meal. When he had arrived at the gate of the city, he stood for a while, deliberating within himself whether he would go to the palace to receive his meal, or go from street to street to beg for it. He paused for a while, reflecting on the course of conduct that had been followed by all the former Buddhas. Having known that they all, without exception, had been in the habit of going out from house to house in quest of their food, he resolved at once to follow their example. Whereupon he entered the city and began to perambulate the streets in search of his food. The citizens, from the various stories of their houses, were looking out with amazement at such an unusual sight. "How is this?" said they; "we see Prince Raoula and his mother Yathaudara going out attired in the richest dresses, sitting in the most elegant conveyance, and now Prince Theiddat[6] is appearing in the streets with his hair and beard shaved, and his body covered with a yellow dress befitting a mendicant. Such a thing is unbecoming indeed." Whilst they were holding this language, on a sudden, rays of the purest light shot forth from the body of Buddha, and illuminated all the objects around his person. At this unexpected sight, they all joined in praising and extolling the virtue and glory of Buddha. King Thoodaudana was soon informed that his son was perambulating the streets of the city in the dress of a mendicant. Startled at such a news, he rose, and seizing the extremity of his outer garment, ran to the encounter of his son. As soon as he saw him he exclaimed: "Illustrious Buddha, why do you expose us to such a shame? Is it necessary to go from door to door to beg your food? Could not a better and more decent mode be resorted to for supplying your wants?" "My noble father," said Buddha, "it is meet and convenient that all Rahans should go out and beg their food." "But," replied the monarch, "are we not the descendants of the illustrious Prince Thamadat? There is not a single person in our illustrious race that has ever acted in such an indecorous manner." Buddha retorted, "My noble father,[7] the descent from the glorious princes Thamadat is something that belongs both to you and your royal family: the lineage of a Buddha is quite different from that of kings and princes; it bears no resemblance to it. Their ways and manners must essentially differ from those of princes. All former Buddhas have always been in the habit of thus going out in search of their food." Then stopping his course and standing in the street, he uttered the following stanzas, "My noble father, it is not proper that I should ever neglect the duty of receiving alms; it is an action good in itself, tallying with truth, deserving of great merits, and productive of happiness in this and future existences." When he had spoken, his father obtained the state of Thautapan. He went to the palace with his father, saying, "Those who go to beg food according to the injunction and prescription of the law, are doing well, and prepare themselves for a state of happiness both for the present and future: those who do go begging, but without any regard to the ordinances of the law, ought to refrain from doing so." He was speaking in that way when he entered the palace. His aunt Gaudamee became a Thautapan. His father, after this second preaching, reached the state Thagadagan. Thoodaudana invited Phra and his followers to ascend to the upper part of the palace and partake of the meal prepared for them. When the meal was over, all the ladies of the palace came to pay their respects to Buddha. Some of them urged the Princess Yathaudara to do the same. But she refused to comply with their request, in the hope that a greater deference would be shown to her, and Buddha would come and visit her in her apartments. Perceiving her studied inattendance, Phra said to his father, "My noble father, I will go and visit the princess, and will, without saying a single word, make her pay obedience to, and prostrate herself before me." King Thoodaudana took up the patta, and accompanied his son to the princess's apartments, together with his two disciples, Thariputra and Maukalan. Buddha had scarcely been seated on the place destined to him, when Yathaudara threw herself at Buddha's feet, and placing her two hands on both ankles, touched repeatedly the upper part with her forehead. Meanwhile Thoodaudana mentioned to his son the respectful and affectionate regard she had ever entertained for his person. "Since she heard," added the king, "that you had put on the yellow robe, she would wear only clothes of that colour; when she knew that you took but one meal a day, that you slept on a small and low couch, and gave up, without regret, the use of perfumes, she instantly followed your example, ate but one meal a day, slept on a low couch, and gave up without grief the use of essences." "Illustrious monarch," replied Buddha, "I do not wonder at the practices of late observed by the Princess Yathaudara; in former times, when her merits were as yet only few and imperfect, she was living at the foot of a certain mountain, and knew, even then, how to behave with becomingness, and attend with a strict regard to all religious duties." This very day, that is to say, the second day after the full moon of Katson, was fixed as the time for the taking place of five grand ceremonies. Nanda,[8] the younger brother of Buddha, was to have his head washed, to put on the thingkiit, or royal head ornament, to be raised to the dignity of crown prince, to be put in possession of his own palace, and to be married. When Phra was leaving the palace, he bade the young prince take his patta and follow him. Nanda instantly complied with the request, and departed. He was just leaving the palace, when the young lady he was to marry heard the sound of the steps and of the voice of her lover. She was then busily engaged in combing her beautiful and shining black hair. With the left hand drawing aside her hair, and with the right leaning on the window-frame, she, with a sweet yet tremulous voice, eagerly recommended him soon to return. She then continued to follow him with anxious eyes until he could be seen no longer. Meanwhile, resting against the window-side, she had her heart full of ominous forebodings. Nanda would have gladly given back the patta to his owner; but as he felt backward to hand it over to him, he followed Buddha as far as the monastery. Though he had no intention of becoming Rahan on his way to that place, yet, despite of his former dispositions, he entered into the society of the perfect. So that on the second day after Phra's arrival at Kapilawot, Nanda became a Rahan. Some other writings mention that this happened only on the third day. On the seventh day after Phra had entered into the city of Kapilawot, the mother of Raoula, Princess Yathaudara, put on her son the choicest ornaments, and sent him to Phra, saying previously to him: "Dearest son, he whom you see surrounded by twenty thousand Rahandas, whose face resembles gold, and whose body is similar to that of the chief of Brahmas, is indeed your father. He was formerly the owner of the four gold vases which disappeared on the very day he withdrew into solitude; go to him now, and say respectfully, that, being at present crown prince of this kingdom, destined to succeed your grandfather on the throne, you wish to become possessed of the property that will fall to you in right of inheritance." The young prince departed. Having come into the presence of Buddha, he endeavoured, with the simplicity and amiability becoming a young lad, to ingratiate himself in his father's favour, and said how happy he was to be with him, adding many other particulars befitting his age and position. Buddha, having eaten his meal and performed his usual devotions, rose up and departed. Raoula followed behind, saying: "Father, give me my inheritance." Buddha appearing neither displeased nor vexed at such a demand, none of his followers durst tell the young prince to desist from his apparently rude behaviour, and go back to the palace. They all soon reached the monastery. Phra thus thought within himself: Raoula is asking from me perishable things, but I will give him something more excellent and lasting. I will make him partaker of those goods I have gathered at the foot of the Bodi tree, and thereby will provide for him a better inheritance for the future. Whereupon he called Thariputra, and said to him: "Beloved disciple, the young Prince Raoula asks from me a worldly inheritance, which would avail him nothing, but I wish to present him with something more excellent, an imperishable inheritance; let him become a Rahan." Maukalan shaved the head of Raoula and attired him with the tsiwaran. Thariputra gave him the first instructions. When hereafter he became Patzing, Kathaba trained him up to the duties of his new profession. King Thoodaudana had seen his first son Prince Theiddat leave the palace and all the attracting allurements of a brilliant court; despite of all his precautions, he subsequently witnessed his going into a solitude and becoming a Rahan. Next to him, his younger son Nanda, though assured by the promises of soothsayers of becoming a great and mighty ruler, had joined the society of Rahans. These two events had deeply afflicted him. But, on hearing that his grandson had also become a Rahan, he could no longer keep his affliction within himself. "I had," said he, "hoped that my grandson would succeed me on the throne; this thought consoled me for the loss of my two sons. What will become of my throne? Now the royal succession is at an end, and the line of direct descendants is for ever cut and irrevocably broken asunder." Thoodaudana obtained the state of Anagam. He said to himself: It is enough that I should have had so much to suffer and endure on the occasion of my two sons and my grandson becoming Rahans; I will spare to other parents a similar affliction. He went to Buddha's place, and having paid him his respects in a becoming manner, asked him to establish a regulation forbidding any son to become Rahan, unless he had the consent of his parents. Buddha assented to his father's wish and preached to him the law. When the instruction was finished, the king bowed to him, rose up, turned on the right, and departed. Buddha, calling immediately the Rahans, said to them: "Beloved Bickus, no one is to be admitted to the profession of Rahan, ere he has obtained the consent of his parents: any one that shall trespass this regulation shall be guilty of a sin." On a certain day, Phra having eaten his meal at his father's palace, the king related to him the circumstance of a Nat, who, whilst he was undergoing great austerities in the solitude, had come and conveyed the report of his son having succumbed under the hardships of mortification; but he would never give credit to such a rumour, as he was certain that his son could not die ere he had become a Buddha. "My illustrious father," replied Buddha, "you are much advanced in merits; there is no wonder at your not believing a false report; but even in former ages, when your merits were as yet very imperfect, you refused to believe your son was dead, though in proof of this assertion bones were exhibited before you in confirmation of the report." And he went on relating many particulars that are to be found in the history of Maha Damma Pala. It was at the conclusion of this discourse that the king became Anagam. Having thus firmly established his father in the three degrees of perfection, Buddha returned to the country of Radzagio. During this voyage, the most excellent Phra arrived at the village of Anupya, in the country of the Malla Princes. In the neighbourhood of the village there is a grove of mango-trees. To that place he withdrew with his twenty thousand disciples, and enjoyed himself in that secluded and delightful retreat. While he dwelt on that spot, the seed of the law that he had planted in his native city was silently taking deep root in the hearts of many. His uncle Thekkaudana had two sons, named Mahanan and Anooroudha. On a certain day Mahanan said to his younger brother: "From among the several families of the royal race, many persons have left the world and embraced the religious profession under the guidance of Buddha. Our family is the only one that has not as yet given any member to the assembly. I will make you a proposal: either you will become an ascetic, and leave me your inheritance; or I will myself take that step, and make over to you all that I possess." Anooroudha at once accepted the proposal. When the intentions of the two brothers became known, five young princes, their playmates and relatives, named Bagoo, Kimila, Baddya, Ananda,[9] and Dewadat, desired to join them in their pious design. Having put on their finest dress, they went into the country, having no other attendant but Oopali, their barber. They shaped their course in the direction of Anupya. Being at a small distance from the mango-trees' grove, the young princes stripped themselves of their rich dresses, and gave them all to the barber, as an acknowledgment of his services. The latter at first accepted them, and was preparing to return, when the following thought occurred to his mind: "If I go back to Kapilawot with these fine and rich apparels, the king and the people will believe that I have come by foul means in possession of so many valuables, and I shall certainly be put to death. I will follow my masters, and never leave them." Hereupon he returned in all haste and joined them at the very moment they were disposing themselves to enter into the Anupya mango-trees' grove. Oopali was admitted into their company, and ushered along with them into Buddha's presence. Having paid their respects in the usual manner, they applied for the dignity of members of the assembly. Their request was granted. But previous to passing through the prescribed ceremonies, the princes said one to another: "Great indeed and deeply rooted is the pride of princes: it is extremely difficult to shake it off, and free oneself of its tyrannical exactions. Let Oopali be first ordained; we will have an opportunity of humbling ourselves by prostrating ourselves before him." Their request was granted. After having paid their respects to the newly ordained convert, they were likewise admitted among the members of the assembly. Their proficiency in spiritual progress was not the same. During the second Lent, which they spent in the Weloowon monastery, Baddya, Bagoo, and Kimila reached the culminating point of perfection by becoming Rahandas. Ananda became Thautapatti. Anooroudha greatly advanced in the higher path of metaphysics. As to Dewadat, he never attained more than the Laukithamabat. A little while after the conversion of the royal princes, Buddha left Anupya, continued his voyage to Radzagio, and forthwith retired into the Weloowon monastery to spend his second Lent. The time was chiefly employed in training up the new converts in the knowledge of the great truths, and in the practice of virtue. His son Raoula, about eight years old, evinced the greatest dispositions. His attainments were far above his age, and often elicited the admiration of the Rahans. On a certain occasion Buddha overheard them expressing their astonishment at the surprising progress Raoula was making in his studies. Coming among them as if perchance, Phra asked them what was the subject of their conversation. They answered that they were praising and extolling the wonderful abilities of Raoula, and his matchless good dispositions. Thereupon Buddha remarked that this was not to be wondered at. Then he related to them the dzat Miga, by which he showed to them that during former existences Raoula had distinguished himself in a conspicuous manner by his excellent and admirable dispositions. As a reward for his good behaviour and high mental qualifications, he was made Patzin. His mind continuing to expand in an almost miraculous manner, he became a Rahanda with myriads of Nats. During the same season, Buddha often went to Radzagio to beg his food. There was in that city a flower-seller, who was wont to bring eight bouquets every day to the king, and receive in return from the royal hands eight pieces of silver. On a certain day, as he was coming from the country into the town with his usual supply of flowers for the king, he happened to see Buddha in the streets at a moment when, by a miraculous display of his power, the six glories beamed out of his body. He then said to himself: "I wish to go and offer these flowers to Buddha. But the king will doubtless be much angry with me. He may have me arrested, thrown into prison, and put to death for having failed in offering him the usual present. Despite the great danger that hangs over me, I will go to Buddha and offer him my flowers. Great, indeed, and lasting shall be the merits I will gain; they will follow me during countless existences." With a heart full of joy, Thoomana, for such is his name, went to the resting-place where Buddha was seated, surrounded by crowds of people, and laid the flowers at his feet. With a marked satisfaction, Gaudama accepted the offer. Thoomana went home and related to his wife what had just happened. The latter, irritated partly by the fear of the king's wrath, and partly by the loss of the money she daily received, began to abuse her husband in the coarsest language. She was so much maddened by passion that she in all haste went to the king, denounced her husband, and instantly sued for a divorce. Pimpathara revolted at such an act of unparalleled audacity, ordered her to withdraw from his presence and go back to her house. Meanwhile he commanded one of his courtiers to order the flower-seller to come to the palace on the following day. As a matter of course, the royal request was punctually complied with. In the presence of the assembled courtiers, the king highly praised the conduct of Thoomana, and instantly rewarded him with great liberality. As Thoomana had offered to Buddha eight bunches of flowers, the king, to acknowledge in a distinct manner such an offering, gave him eight elephants, eight horses, eight slaves, eight bullocks, eight thousand pieces of silver, and the revenue of eight villages. Buddha likewise exceedingly extolled the meritorious behaviour of Thoomana in the presence of the people, and said that during a whole world he would be exempt from the four states of punishment, enjoy happiness in the seat of man and in those of Nats, and finally become a Pitzega-buddha. The value of the offering, though little in itself, became great by the imminent risks he voluntarily exposed himself to. He made his offering, though he was certain of incurring on that account the ruler's displeasure. When the season of retirement was over, Gaudama travelled through different places. He went to Patzanawonta in the Dzetia country, thence he passed into the Bisakila forest, and returned to Radzagio, in the grove of Yin-daik trees, near the burial-place. Whilst Buddha was in the splendid Dzetawon monastery, just presented to him, a strong temptation came upon Ananda to renounce his calling and return into the world. He went so far as to tell some of his brethren that he recollected the promise of a prompt return which he made to his young bride Dzanapada-kaliani, and that now he wished to fulfil it by immediately going back into his palace, and resuming his former mode of life. This was soon reported to Gaudama, who resorted to the following expedient to crush in the bud the rising temptation. He took Ananda by the arm, rose with him in the air, and led him in the direction of the Nats' seat of Tawadeintha. On their way, Buddha, by a miraculous process, exhibited to the eyes of his companion the sight of an immense forest in conflagration. On the burnt stump of a tree he showed him a female monkey horribly mutilated, having her tail, ears, and nose cut off. At such a sight the horrified Ananda turned away his eyes in disgust. A little while after this, Buddha exhibited before him the dazzling and heart-captivating sight of a long array of five hundred matchless beauties. They were daughters of Nats going to pay their respects to the great Thagia. Ananda was gazing at them with silent but enraptured feelings. Buddha said to him: "Do you believe those beauties before you to be equal to Dzanapada?" "She is no more to these perfect forms," answered he, "than the bleeding female monkey we have left behind us is to her." "All these celestial damsels," said Buddha, "I shall give to you, provided you agree to remain in the monastery for some years longer." "Willingly do I accept the proposal," replied Ananda; "I will stay cheerfully in the monastery on such favourable terms." Whereupon both returned to the monastery. * * * * * The members of the assembly soon became acquainted with what had passed between the master and the disciple, and keenly taunted Ananda with their sarcastic remarks upon the daughters of Nats. Ashamed of himself, Ananda withdrew into solitude. There he devoted himself to reflection and penitential deeds, and finally annihilated the evil desires of his unsubdued passion. When the inward struggle was over and peace had been restored in him, Ananda went to Buddha's presence, and stated his willingness to dwell for ever in a monastery and lead a religious life. Meantime he released him from the promise he had made to him respecting the celestial beauties. Buddha was much pleased at such a happy change. He said to the assembled religious: "Previous to this occurrence, Ananda resembled a badly-roofed house, which lets in the rain of passions; but now it is similar to a well-roofed building, which is so well protected that it is proof against the oozing of passions." Whereupon he related the following story concerning a former existence of Ananda. A merchant named Kappaka had a donkey which he used to carry goods from place to place. Having one day come near a place covered with trees, Kappaka unloaded his animal, to allow him some time to rest and graze. Meanwhile, a female donkey was likewise grazing in the neighbourhood. Its presence was quickly detected by Kappaka's animal. When the moment of departure had come, the latter, attracted by the female, kicked furiously at his master, and would not allow the load to be replaced on its back. The merchant, enraged at this unusual freak, began to threaten the rebellious beast, and then to hit it with the whip as hard as he could. At last the poor animal, unable to bear any longer the blows, mentioned to his master the cause of his unusual behaviour. Kappaka told him that if he would but continue his voyage, he would give him at the end of the journey several fine females, much superior to the one he was now coveting. The proposal was accepted. At the end of the journey Kappaka said to the beast: "I will keep my promise with you: but I must inform you that your daily provender shall not be increased; you will have to share it with your companion. Subsequently you will have little ones to provide for and maintain, but your daily ration shall not be increased in the least; you shall have to work for me as much as you do at present, and also to provide for the maintenance and support of your family." The donkey, after a few moments of reflection, thought it was better to remain as he was; and from that moment he was entirely cured of his inordinate inclination. At the conclusion of the narration, Buddha said: "The male donkey was he who has now become Ananda; the female donkey, Dzanapa-kaliani; and Kappaka is now the most excellent Phra, who is the teacher of men, Nats and Brahmas." Buddha, whilst at Wethalie, went out through the country, and in all the places that he visited preached to the crowds of hearers. It was during one of his benevolent errands that he met with a celebrated Pounha, named Eggidatta, who with a great many disciples led an ascetic life, after having been formerly, first, the chief Pounha of King Kothala, and next of his son. Buddha earnestly desired the conversion of so distinguished a personage. Maukalan was at first despatched to that famous hermit, to attempt to bring him over to his master; but he utterly failed. The reception he at first met with was anything but pleasant. The work was to be done and perfected only by the irresistible eloquence of the great preacher. Buddha soon came up to the entrance of Eggidatta's cell. He began to upbraid the Rathee for teaching his disciples to worship mountains, trees, rivers, and all that exists in nature. He then initiated him in the knowledge of the four great truths. Eggidatta, seeing the truth, at once became a convert with all his disciples. When this great spiritual conquest was achieved, Buddha returned to Radzagio, and spent the third season in the Weloowon or bamboo-grove monastery. It was during the three months of the rainy season that Buddha imparted, in a more complete manner, to his disciples the knowledge and science which during his peregrinations he had but superficially conveyed to them. At the same time, he carefully trained them up in the practice and observance of those disciplinary regulations which were intended as a means to subdue passions, to estrange them from the world and all its attractions, and to lead a spiritual life. During his stay in the monastery, among the many instructions that he gave to his disciples, I will relate the particulars that he mentioned respecting the former doings and the final conversion of the Rahanda Tsampooka.[10] In the days of the Buddha Kathaba, Tsampooka, or rather the being who in the present existence is called by that name, put on the religious dress in the Thawatie country. He lived in a fine monastery, and had for his supporters the best and richest people of the place. One day, a Rahan, belonging to another country, came to his monastery and begged the favour to be allowed to live therein for some time. The heartless Tsampooka denied him admittance into the interior of the building, but tolerated his staying in the verandah during the cold season. The people, however, actuated by better feelings than those of their teacher, brought regularly food for the head of the house, as well as for the stranger, for whom they felt great affection. The spiteful Tsampooka could not bear to see the people showing marks of kindness and benevolence towards his hated guest. On one occasion he forgot himself so far as to abuse him, by repeating the following coarse expressions: Eat dirt, go naked, and sleep on the bare ground. Such an inhuman behaviour soon met with a condign punishment. The wretched Tsampooka had at first to endure horrible torments in hell. On his return to the seat of man on earth, he was born from respectable parents, but he was always prone from his infancy to indulge in the lowest habits. He would secretly steal away, and actually satiate the cravings of hunger by eating the most disgusting things; he would not wear clothing, but ran about in a state of nakedness; he would only sleep on the ground. His parents, after many fruitless attempts to correct him, resolved to make him over to the heterodox ascetics. These received him; but he would not eat in the company of his brethren, nor go to beg with them. He, from the moment they were absent, went to devour the refuse he could find. His eccentric and disgusting habits were soon found out, and his new friends said one to the other: "Let this man be no longer allowed to live with us. Should the disciples of the Rahan Gaudama hear that one of our company is behaving in such a manner, our brotherhood would become a laughing-stock to them." He was, therefore, expelled from this place. Tsampooka went to take his abode on a rock near the place that served as receptacle to the sewers of Radzagio. On that rock he remained in the most fatiguing posture; he leaned on his right hand which rested on the rock, and also on his right knee; the left leg was stretched and the left arm raised up. He kept his mouth opened. When the people asked him why he remained with his mouth wide open, as a man who is incessantly drawing air into his lungs, he answered that, refraining from the use of coarse food, he was feeding on air only: when questioned about the singular position of his two legs, he answered, that, were he to stand on both legs, the earth would instantly shake. He had been during fifty-five years in that sad position, when Gaudama, moved with compassion at his pitiable condition, went in person to convert him. He began to relate to him all that he had done during former existences, mentioning in particular the sin he had been guilty of towards a brother hermit. At this unexpected declaration, Tsampooka humbled himself. Buddha then preached to him his law. The repenting Tsampooka firmly believed in all that was said to him. He then rose up, and, with a heart overflowing with joy, instantly left his place, followed his new master, and soon became a Rahanda. His proficiency in science and virtue was such that he soon occupied a distinguished rank among the members of the assembly. FOOTNOTES [1] In glancing over the episode of Thoodaudana's deputation to his son, to invite him to come and visit his native country, the reader is almost compelled to confess that the motive that influenced the king was only inspired by the natural feeling of beholding once more, before he died, him whose fame, spread far and wide, rendered him an object of universal admiration. Was the monarch induced by considerations of a higher order to send for Buddha? There is no distinct proof in support of this supposition. He was his father, and he but obeyed and followed the impulse of his paternal heart. He entertained a high sense of his son's distinguished qualifications. He had faith in the wonderful signs foretelling his future matchless greatness. He desired, therefore, to honour him in an extraordinary way, on the very spot where he had been born. But he appeared to concern himself very little about the doctrines he was preaching with a success never before equalled. The king exhibited a great amount of worldly-mindedness, until his mind had been enlightened by the oral instructions of the great reformer. It is difficult, if not impossible, to form an accurate idea of the effect produced on the mass of the people by Buddha's preachings. We see that eminent and zealous reformer surrounded by thousands of distinguished disciples in the country of Radzagio. These converts belonged chiefly to the class of anchorites and philosophers, already alluded to in foregoing notes as existing at the time Buddha began to enter the career of preaching. But the great bulk of the populations of the various places he visited seemed to have received for a long time little or no impressions from his discourses. The opponents of Buddha, the Brahmins in particular, exercised a powerful influence over the public mind. They used it most effectually for retaining their ancient hold over the masses. It required the extraordinary display of the greatest wonders to break through the almost insuperable barriers raised by his enemies. From that period we see the people following Buddha, crowding round him, and showing unmistakable signs of belief in him. The only explanation to account for this undeniable result is the philosophical method adopted by Buddha in expounding the principles of his system. His mode of proceeding in the gradual development of his ideas retained the abstruseness peculiar to subjects discussed in schools of philosophy. The technical terms so familiar to scholars prove enigmatical to the uninitiated _vulgus_. It takes a long time before maxims elaborated by scholars are so far popularised as to be understood by the unlearned, which in every age and country have always constituted the great mass of the people. If the mind of the generality of men is unable to comprehend at first a system of doctrines, based on metaphysics, we cannot wonder at the slow progress made by the preachings of the great philosopher: but the working of wonders is a tangible fact operating upon the senses of the multitude, eliciting their applauses, and disposing them to yield an implicit faith to all the instructions imparted by the wonderful being that is gifted with supernatural powers. Feelings, and not reason, become the foundation of a belief which grows stronger in proportion to the mysterious obscurity that encompasses the proposed dogmas, when supported by wonderful deeds. At the time Thoodaudana sent messengers to his son, the great work of conversion was carried on with a most complete and hitherto unheard-of success. The hall of the Weloowon monastery was too small for the thousands that flocked thither to hear Gaudama. Outside its precincts, crowds stood motionless, listening with unabated attention to the discourses that fell from his lips. So crowded was the audience that the messengers had no chance to make their way to the presence of the preacher. Struck with the intense attention paid to what was said by their master's son, they too wished to make themselves acquainted with the subjects of the instruction. What was listened to from motives of mere curiosity, soon made a deep impression upon their mind. The magic power of the irresistible eloquence of Buddha worked a thorough change almost instantaneously in their dispositions, and they became converts. So perfect was their conversion, that they forgot for the sake of truth the very object of their mission. They became at once members of the Assembly, and took rank among the Rahans. They attained the state of Ariahs, and were foremost among the perfect. The great attainments arrived at by the Ariahs communicate to the material portion of their being such an extraordinary amount of amazing virtues or properties, that it becomes so refined as to partake, to a certain degree, of a spiritual nature. Hence we see the Rahandas going over immense distances through the air, and performing deeds of a supernatural order. The power of working miracles is, therefore, inherent in perfection; and it is greater or smaller in proportion to the degree of perfection possessed by individuals. We find that power expanded in Buddha to an unlimited extent, because his mental attainments were boundless. [2] Magatha is a country in the north of India. It occupied nearly the same extent of territory as that now called North Behar in Bengal. The Pali or sacred language of the southern Buddhists is often called the language of Magatha. Hence we may infer that it was the common language of that country. It is probable that the Pali language was extensively spoken in the days of Gaudama, and it was the channel through which he and his disciples long after him conveyed their religious instructions to the multitude of converts. The Pitagat, or the last amended collection of sacred writings, is written in Pali, which is looked upon in Ceylon, Nepaul, Burmah, and Siam as the language of sacred literature. Except in some old manuscripts, where the old square Pali letters are used, the Burmese employ their common alphabetic characters for writing Pali words. The words, having to pass first through a Burmese ear, and next being expressed by Burmese letters, undergo great changes. To such an extent does the metamorphosis reach, that very often they are scarcely recognisable. The Burmans, however, deserve great credit for having, in very many instances, retained in their orthography of Pali words letters which, though not at all sounded, indicate to the eye the nature of the word, its origin, and its primitive form. In the southern parts of Burmah the Pali language is learned but not studied, used, but not understood by the inmates of monasteries. They are all obliged to learn certain formulas of prayers to be daily recited in private, and, on great and solemn occasions, to be chanted aloud in the presence of a crowd of pious hearers. The writer, anxious to acquire some knowledge of the sacred language, often visited those monks, who, among their brethren, enjoyed a certain fame for learning, with the express intention of becoming a humble student, under the direction of one of the best informed of the society. He was thoroughly disappointed to find those who proffered their services in great earnest quite ignorant, and utterly incapable of giving him the least assistance. The Burmese have translated in their vernacular tongue most of the sacred writings. In many instances the translation is not exactly what we call interlineary, but it approaches to it as nearly as possible. Two, three, or four Pali words are written down, and the translation in Burmese follows with a profusion of words which often confuses and perplexes the reader; then come again a few other Pali words, accompanied also with the translation, and so on throughout the whole work. The art of translating well and correctly from one language into another is not so common as many persons may imagine. In a good translator are required many qualifications which are not to be easily met with, particularly in a Burman, to whom we may give credit for knowing well his own tongue, but who, without detracting from his literary attainments, is certainly an indifferent Pali scholar. These translations may convey, perhaps, the general meaning of the original, but, as regards the correct meaning of each term, it is a luxury ever denied to the reader of such crude and imperfect compositions. [3] It is difficult to ascertain exactly the length of the measure called youdzana, formerly used to indicate land distances. It varies from five to twelve English miles. In measuring the distance from Radzagio to the Brahmin village of Nalanda, the birthplace of Thariputra, which is one youdzana, General Cunningham has found it to be seven miles. This would induce us to hold as certain that at the epoch when Fa-Hian visited the place, the youdzana was equal to seven miles or forty Chinese _li_. But this would not prove that the more ancient youdzana was not shorter than the one used in the time of the Chinese pilgrim. Several authors maintain that such is the case. It appears, likewise, that the length of that measure of distance has varied with localities and places to such an extent that it has been found in some countries to be equal to more than twelve miles. We believe that when that measure of distance is mentioned in this work, one would not be far from the truth in estimating its length six or seven English miles at the utmost. [4] The attentive reader of this work cannot fail to remark the general tendencies of Buddhism to isolation, retirement, and solitude. In a retired position, the mind is less distracted or dissipated by exterior objects; it possesses a greater share of self-control, and is fitter for the arduous work of attentive reflection and deep meditation. Whenever Buddha, attended by his followers, reaches a place where he is to stay for a while, a grove outside the city is invariably selected. Thither the great preacher retires, as to a beloved solitude. He enjoys it beyond all that can be said. Alone with his spiritual family, unconcerned about the affairs of this world, he breathes at ease the pure atmosphere of a complete calm; his undisturbed soul soars freely in the boundless regions of spiritualism. What he has seen and discovered during his contemplative errands he imparts with a placid countenance and a mild voice to his disciples, endeavouring thereby to make them progress in the way of knowledge and perfection. In those solitary abodes of peace Buddha was willing to receive all those who wished for instruction. They were all, without distinction of rank or caste, admitted into the presence of him who came professedly to point to men the way to happiness, helping them to disentangle themselves from the trammels of passions. He preached to all the most excellent law. The tendency to retreat and withdrawal from worldly tumult is, in our own days, conspicuous in the care taken by Buddhistic monks to have their houses built in some lonely quarter of a town, assigned exclusively for that special purpose, or, as is oftener the case, in fine places at a small distance from the walls. Some of those groves, in the centre of which rise the peaceful abodes of Rahans, the writer has often seen and much admired. In towns or large villages, where the ground is uneven, the small heights are generally crowned with the dwellings of religious. [5] The narrative of Buddha's reception in his father's royal city suggests two reflections. The first is, that the saying _Nemo Propheta in suâ patriâ_ was as true in the days of Gaudama as it has been in subsequent ages. The mountains of Kapilawot had often re-echoed the praises of Buddha and the recital of his wonderful doings. The splendid retinue of twenty thousand distinguished converts that attended his person, the hitherto unwitnessed display of miraculous powers, &c.,--all these peculiarly remarkable circumstances seemed more than sufficient to secure for him a distinguished reception among his kinsmen, who ought to have been proud of being connected with him by the ties of relationship. Such, however, was not the case. Actuated by the lowest feelings of base jealousy, his relatives refused to pay him the respect he was so well entitled to. Their wretched obduracy was to be conquered by the awe and fear his miraculous power inspired. The second reflection suggested by the recital of the ceremonies observed on the occasion of Buddha's reception in his native country is the truly pleasing fact of seeing the weaker sex appearing in public divested of the shackles put upon it by oriental jealousy. In Burmah and Siam the doctrines of Buddhism have produced a striking, and, to the lover of true civilisation, a most interesting result, viz., established the almost complete equality of the condition of women with that of men. In those countries women are not miserably confined in the interior of their houses, without the remotest chance of ever appearing in public. They are seen circulating freely in the streets; they preside at the _comptoirs_, and hold an almost exclusive possession of the bazaars. Their social position is more elevated in every respect than that of the persons of their sex in the regions where Buddhism is not the predominating creed. They may be said to be men's companions, and not their slaves. They are active, industrious, and by their labours and exertions contribute their full share towards the maintenance of the family. The marital rights, however, are fully acknowledged by a respectful behaviour towards their lords. In spite of all that has been said by superficial observers, I feel convinced that manners are less corrupted in those countries where women enjoy liberty, than in those where they are buried alive by a barbarous and despotic custom in the grave of an opprobrious and vice-generating slavery. Buddhism disapproves of polygamy, but it tolerates divorce. In this respect the habits of the people are of a damnable laxity. Polygamy is very rare in Burmah among the people. This nefarious and anti-social practice is left to the magnates of the land, from the king down to a petty myowon, who make a part of their greatness consist in placing themselves above public opinion, above moral and religious precepts, for enjoying the unrestrained gratification of the basest appetite. Though divorce be a thing of common occurrence, it is looked upon as an imperfection, merely tolerated for the sake of human frailty. [6] Buddhist monks, out of humility and contempt for all worldly things, do not allow hairs or beard to grow. They walk barefooted, wearing a yellow dress of the simplest make. They are bound to live on the alms that are freely bestowed upon them. The regulations of the Wini are, in this respect, most explicit, and leave no room for false interpretation. A Rahan, having renounced the world, and divested himself of all worldly property, is bound by his professional vows to rely for his daily food on what he may obtain by begging. Hence the appellatio of Bickus, or mendicants, always bestowed on them by Gaudama, whenever he addresses them in particular on certain points regarding their profession. In Burmah, as soon as the day begins to dawn, a swarm of yellow-dressed monks sally forth from their abode with the patta under the left arm, and perambulate the streets in quest of food. They never ask for anything; they accept what is voluntarily tendered to them, without uttering a single word of thanks, or even looking at their generous benefactors. This action of bestowing alms on the Rahans is deemed a most meritorious one. The offerer, therefore, becomes liberal, not on account of the person he is assisting, but because of the abundant merits he hopes to derive from the act. This notion agrees very well with the leading tenets of Buddhism. [7] The answer of Buddha to his royal father is a most remarkable one, and deserves the attention of the observer. The great moralist does away with all the prerogatives man may derive from birth, rank, and riches. Law alone can confer titles of true greatness and genuine nobility. The fervent and zealous observers of the law are alone entitled to the respect of their fellow-men. The begging of alms may be, in the eyes of worldlings, a low and mean action, but it becomes a most dignified one, because it is enforced by the law. This lofty principle boldly establishes the superiority of virtue upon the strongest basis, and sanctions the moral code he was destined to publish to men and saddle on their conscience. The criterion of all that is good, excellent, praiseworthy, and meritorious is no more to depend on the arbitrary and very often erroneous views of men, but must rest upon the immutable tenets of the eternal law, discovered, revived, and published by the omniscient Buddha. This truth, like a flash of light, illuminated the king's mind, and, at this first preaching of his son, he attained the first of the four states of perfection. The princes Thamadat and Thoodaudana boast to have descended from are, according to Buddhistic sacred books, the princes who were elected to hold supreme power at the very moment the words _mine_ and _thine_ began to be heard amongst men, after they had eaten the rice called Tsale, and become subject to passions, that is to say, at the origin of society, in the beginning of the world. The kings of Burmah, down to the present occupant of the throne, who are descended, in their opinion, from the Kapilawot line of kings, lay claim to the same distinction. The writer has heard the present King of Burmah very coolly stating as a matter of fact, which no one could think of contradicting, that he was descended from the Thamadat's royal line. The Princess Yathaudara, mentioned in this narrative, had been the wife of Buddha, ere he had withdrawn into solitude and renounced the world. A son had just been born to him when he left his father's palace. His name was Raoula. The doctrine of the influence of merits gathered during former existences is forcibly illustrated in the case of Yathaudara, who, unmindful of the position she occupied in former years, did not hesitate to fling herself at Buddha's feet, acknowledging him to be worthy of all honour and veneration. Her former merits disposed her to view in him, who had been her husband, the extraordinary personage who was to lead men through the path of virtue to the deliverance. [8] Nanda was Buddha's younger brother, or rather half-brother. His mother was Patzapati, the younger sister of Maia. Since Buddha had renounced the world, Nanda had become the presumptive heir to the crown of Kapilawot. His conversion grieved the king much, who, to prevent the recurrence of such an event, exacted from the great reformer that in after times no one could be admitted into the society of the perfect, without having previously obtained the consent of his parents; failing such a condition, the act of admission should be considered as null and void. Hence, we read in the book of ordination, or admittance to the dignity of Rahan, that the person directed by the president of the assembly to examine the candidate never omits to inquire of him whether he has obtained the consent of his parents. The conversion of Raoula followed that of Nanda. Of this new and distinguished convert no mention is made afterwards in the course of this work. He must, in all likelihood, have become a celebrated member of the assembly, as he was trained up to the functions and duties of his profession by the greatest and most renowned disciples, such as Maukalan, Thariputra, and Kathaba. In the history of Buddhism, the Dzetawon monastery is not inferior in celebrity to that of Weloowon. Therein Gaudama announced during a certain night the thirty-six beatitudes of the law to a Nat that had come and requested him to make him acquainted with the most perfect points of his law. In the division of the scriptures called Thoots, or sermons, we see that the most important have been delivered in the hall of that monastery. Here is another instance of a donation of landed property to a religious corporation. In the first case, the gift had been made to him and to his actual followers. But in this circumstance, Phra desires the rich and pious benefactor to make the donation, not only in behalf of self and the present assembly, but also in that of all future members, who might resort to this place. In a Buddhistic point of view, we may conclude that the advice given to the donor was intended as a means of multiplying the sum of the merits of his liberality, which must be commensurate with the number of the individuals to whom it is designed to be extended. According to the principle respecting property, which from immemorial time has prevailed under almost all despotic governments in Asia, which recognises the head of the state as the sole, real, and absolute owner of the soil, it is evident that the act of donation was, legally speaking, a declaration or a statement of the disposal an individual made of the rights such as he had them, viz., those of use, in favour of a religious body. The landed property, thus conferred, acquired a kind of sacredness which preserved it from the grasp of even the most rapacious ruler. On the other hand, the religious body had no right or power whatsoever to sell or dispose of that property. In a corporation constituted as the assembly of the disciples of Buddha was, and is in our own days, the society alone could have the possession and management of immovable properties given to monasteries. Donations of this kind must have stood good as long as there were members of the Buddhistic religious family willing and ready to maintain their rights. Nothing short of a complete revolution in the political state of the country, or the prolonged absence of the individuals vested with the right of occupation, could put an end to the effect of those deeds of donation. In Burmah, the Buddhist monks possess nothing beyond the ground upon which stands the monastery. From certain inscriptions found in the midst of the ruins of the temples at Pagan, it is evident that in the palmy days of that city donations of landed properties, such as paddy-fields, fruit-trees, bullocks, and peasants, were made to monasteries and temples. But for the last three or four hundred years, no vestiges of such deeds have ever been found. So far as I have been able to make inquiries, I am not aware that the order has ever become possessor of lands. In Ceylon such is not the case, at least was not when the English occupied the island. Extensive tracts of valuable lands were in the hands of the Talapoins, who thereby obtained over the people the twofold influence conferred by wealth and religion. [9] Ananda, whose conversion is here mentioned, was the son of Amitaudana, a brother of King Thoodaudana, and, therefore, first cousin to Gaudama. He is one of the best known disciples of the celebrated philosopher of Kapilawot. He has gained his well-earned fame, less by the shining attainments of his intellect than by the amiable qualities of a loving heart. He bore to Buddha the most affectionate regard and the warmest attachment from the very beginning of his conversion. The master repaid the love of the disciple by tokens of a sincere esteem and tender affection. Though it was a long period afterwards ere Ananda was officially appointed to minister unto the personal wants of Buddha, yet the good dispositions of his excellent heart prompted him to serve Buddha on all occasions, and in every way that was agreeable to him. He became the medium of intercourse between his beloved master and all those that approached him. When he had to communicate orders or give directions to the religious, or when some visitors desired to wait on him, Ananda was the person who transmitted all orders, and ushered visitors into the presence of the great preacher. Dewadat was both first cousin to Buddha and his brother-in-law. His father was Thouppabudha, Maia's brother. He was brother of the Princess Yathaudara, who had married our Gaudama, when he was crown prince of Kapilawot. Hereafter, we shall have the opportunity of seeing that his moral dispositions were very different from those of the amiable Ananda. [10] The story of Eggidatta gives us an insight into one of the tenets which was held by that ascetic. His interlocutor reproached him with worshipping mountains, trees, forests, rivers, and the heavenly bodies. From the expressions made use of by the Burmese translator, the writer is inclined to believe that a direct allusion is made to pantheistic opinions. We know that most of the Indian schools of philosophy have based their various systems of metaphysics upon that most erroneous foundation. According to pantheists, this world is not distinct from the essence of God; all that exists is but a manifestation or a development of the substance of God. This world is not the work of God, existing as distinct from its Maker, but it is God manifesting Himself substantially in all things. Who could, then, wonder at the conduct of Tsampooka? He worshipped God, or rather that portion of the supreme Being he saw in the great and mighty subjects that surrounded him and attracted his notice. Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, and his unfortunately too numerous followers in this century, have recast into a hundred different moulds the pantheistic ideas of the Hindu philosophers, and offer to the intelligence of their hearers and readers, through an almost unintelligible language, the same deadly food which has finally produced on the Hindu mind the sad results which we witness. If we were better acquainted with the variety of doctrines which the Hindu philosophers have exhibited in the field of metaphysics, we would be soon convinced that the modern metaphysicians, who have placed themselves out of the pale of revelation, have not advanced one step in that science, and that the divergence in their opinions is but a faithful representation of the confusion which for more than two thousand years prevailed on the banks of the Ganges among their predecessors in the same speculative studies. It appears that Tsampooka was in his days what the Jogies or Hindoo penitents are up to our time. He remained on his rock, in the most difficult position, for the space of fifty-five years, exhibiting himself to the crowd, and aiming at winning their admiration by the incredible sufferings that he voluntarily submitted to. His apparent sanctity was made up of very doubtful materials. He passed himself off for a man who could remain without eating, and who was gifted with supernatural powers. Plain humility, which is nothing but the result of the true knowledge of self, was not the favourite virtue of our spiritual quack. CHAPTER IX. _A rich man of Thawattie, named Anatapein, becomes a convert -- Story of Dzewaha -- He cures Buddha of a painful distemper -- The people of Wethalie send a deputation to Buddha -- Digression on the manner Buddha daily spent his time -- Settling of a quarrel between the inhabitants of Kaulia and those of Kapilawot -- New converts are strengthened in their faith -- Thoodaudana's death in the arms of his son -- Queen Patzapati and many noble ladies are elevated to the rank of Rahaness -- Conversion of Kema, the first queen of King Pimpathara -- Heretics near Thawattie are confounded by the display of miraculous powers -- Buddha goes to the seat of Thawadeintha, to preach the law to his mother._ When Buddha was in the country of Radzagio, a certain rich merchant, named Anatapein, came to Radzagio, with five hundred carts loaded with the most precious goods, and took his lodging in the house of an intimate friend. Whilst living with his friend, he heard that Gaudama had become a Buddha. Suddenly, he was seized with an earnest desire of seeing him and hearing his doctrine. On a certain day, he rose at an early hour, and perceived, reflected through the lattices of the window, some rays of an uncommon brightness. He went in the direction of the light to the place where Buddha was preaching the law. He listened to it with great attention, and, at the end of the discourse, he obtained the state of Thautapan. Two days after, he made a great offering to Buddha and to the assembly, and requested him to come to the country of Thawattie. The request was granted. The distance to Thawattie is forty-five youdzanas. Anatapein spent enormous sums that one monastery should be erected at each youdzana distance. When Buddha was approaching, the pious merchant arranged as follows for the reception of the distinguished visitor, and presenting to him a splendid monastery called Dzetawon, which he had made ready for him. He sent first his son, richly attired, with five hundred followers, belonging to the richest families; then followed his two daughters with five hundred girls, all decked with the most costly ornaments. Every one carried flags of five different colours. These were followed by five hundred dames, having the rich man's wife at their head, each carrying a pitcher of water. Last of all, came Anatapein, with five hundred followers, all wearing new dresses. Gaudama let the crowd walk in front, and he followed attended by all the Rahans. When he entered the grove, he appeared as beautiful as the peacock's tail when completely expanded. Anatapein asked Gaudama how he wished the donation should be made and effected? "Let the monastery be offered," said Buddha, "to all the Rahans that may come in future to this place from what quarter soever." Thereupon, the rich man, holding a golden vessel of water, poured its contents on the hands of Buddha, saying: "I present this monastery to Buddha and to all the Rahans that may come hereafter to reside therein." Buddha said prayers and thanks in token of his accepting the offering. Seven days were devoted to making this great offering, and during four months uninterrupted rejoicings went on in commemoration of this great and solemn donation. For the purchase of the place, and the expenses of the ceremony, enormous sums were lavished. During the era of former Buddhas this very place had always been purchased and offered to them and their disciples. [_N.B._--Here is found narrated in full the history of a celebrated physician named Dzewaka. As such story has no reference whatever to Buddha's career, I will give but a very succinct account of it.] At a certain time,[1] when Buddha lived in the city of Radzagio, the country of Wethalie was made rich, gay, and attractive by the presence of a famous courtesan. A nobleman of Radzagio, who had just returned from that country, narrated to the king all that he had seen at Wethalie, and induced the monarch to set up, in his own kingdom, some famous courtesan, who would be skilful in music and dancing, as well as attractive by the form and accomplishments of her person. Such a person having been procured, she was, by the munificence of the king, placed on a most splendid footing, and one hundred pieces of silver were to be paid for each evening's visit. The king's son being rather assiduous in his visits to her place, she became pregnant. Aware of her state, the courtesan affected to be sick until her confinement. She directed her servant to throw out the newly-born infant, on a heap of rubbish, in some lonely and distant place. The next morning the king's son, going out with some attendants, chanced to pass close to the spot where the infant had been deposited. His attention having been attracted by the noise of crows hovering close by, he went to see what it was. To his great surprise, he saw an infant, yet breathing, half buried in rubbish. Taken with the beauty of this little creature, the prince ordered the child to be carried to the palace, where he was brought up with the greatest care and attention. He was named Dzewaka, which means life, because the prince, when he found him, inquired if he was alive. The young lad, having reached the years of discretion, was unwilling to remain in the palace, not occupied with any business. In order to afford relief and comfort to his fellow-creatures, he resolved to study medicine. He repaired to Benares, placed himself under the direction of a famous physician, and soon became eminent by his extreme proficiency in the profession. Having left his master, and begun practice in his own name and for his own account, Dzewaka worked the most wonderful cures, which soon procured to him unbounded wealth and an extraordinary reputation. Dzewaka was at the height of his fame, when, on a certain day, Buddha happened to be troubled with bellyache. He called Ananda and said that he wanted some medicine to relieve him from pain. Ananda went to the place where lived the celebrated Dzewaka, and informed him of Buddha's complaint. The doctor ordered first a rubbing of oil, which was to be repeated three days after. This remedy not having a full effect, Dzewaka took three lily flowers, whereupon he spread several powders, and came to Buddha, saying, "Most glorious Phra, here is one lily flower, please to smell it; this will be followed by ten motions. Here is a second one; the smelling thereof will produce a similar effect; and this one will cause the same result." Having handed over the three flowers, the doctor paid his respects to Buddha, turned to the right, and left the monastery. When he was crossing the gate, he thought within himself, "I have given a medicine calculated to cause thirty motions, but as the complaint is rather of a serious and obstinate character, twenty-nine motions only will take place; a warm bath would be required to produce the thirtieth;" and with this reflection he departed. Buddha, who saw all that passed in the doctor's mind, called Ananda and directed him to prepare a warm bath. A little while after, Dzewaka came back to Buddha, and explained to him his prescription. Buddha was soon restored to his former health, and Dzewaka told him that the people were preparing to make him offerings. Maukalan went to the son of Thauna, a rich man, to get some rice from a field that had been watered with milk. The owner gave rice to Maukalan and urged him to partake of it, assuring him that there was some other in reserve for Buddha; Maukalan assented. After the meal, his patta was cleaned with perfumed water, and filled with the choicest food. Maukalan took it to Buddha, who ate it. Afterwards he preached the law to the king and to an immense crowd; amongst them was Thauna's son. They all obtained the first degree of perfection, but Thauna reached at once the state of Arahat. Dzewaka came again to Buddha's presence, and requested the favour of presenting him with two splendid pieces of cloth, which he had received in present from a king whom he had cured of a most distressing distemper. Moreover, he wished that the Rahans should be allowed to receive clothes of a better sort than those they were wont to wear. Buddha received the two pieces and preached the law to the donor, who attained the state of Thautapan. Dzewaka, rising from his place, wheeled to the right and departed. A little while after, Gaudama called the Rahans and said to them, "Beloved Bickus, now I give permission to the faithful to make offerings of cloth for your dress.[2] Whoever is pleased with his present dress, let him wear it; whoever is disposed to receive some other from the people, let him do so. But I must praise you for having hitherto been satisfied with the ancient dress." The people of the city having heard of the permission given to the Rahans, offered at once more than one hundred thousand pieces of cloth. Their example was followed by the people of the country, who made offerings to the same amount. A little while after this, Buddha received a deputation from the Wethalie people, inviting him to visit their country. Here is the reason of the invitation. The country was very rich and flourishing. The Malla princes governed it each in turn for a certain space of time. On a sudden a terrific pestilence desolated the land, which was in a short time strewed with dead bodies in every direction. In the midst of so great a calamity some advised to propitiate the Nats, by making offerings to them; others said that recourse must be had to the great teachers; a third party insisted upon calling to their aid the great Gaudama, who had appeared in this world for the purpose of saving mankind. The last opinion prevailed. Having ascertained that he lived at Radzagio, a great number of princes, pounhas, and nobles went to Radzagio, with great presents for King Pimpathara, to induce him to allow the great teacher to come to their country. The object of their mission having become known, Buddha agreed to go. He sallied forth from the Weloowon monastery, attended by the king as far as the southern bank of the Ganges. Having reached the northern one, he was received with every possible mark of the highest respect and veneration. As soon as he set his feet in the country, a heavy rain fell which almost deluged the land. The water carried away the dead bodies. The atmosphere was purified, the pestilence ceased, and all the sick recovered. On the fifth day after the full moon of Nayon (June), Buddha having conferred such a favour to the people of Wethalie, left that country and returned to Radzagio, which he reached on the full moon of Watso (July), just in time to spend the fourth season in the Weloowon monastery. Here is inserted a short sketch of the manner in which Buddha spent his days during the rainy season, as the translator has found in one of the manuscripts before him. Each day was divided into five parts, and a certain occupation was reserved to each part. 1. Buddha generally rose at an early hour, a little after daybreak, washed his face, rinsed his mouth, and dressed. He then retired into a private apartment. With his all-seeing eyes, he glanced over all creatures, carefully examined the amount of their merits and demerits, and the real nature of their dispositions. The reason for his taking a survey of the state and condition of all beings was to ascertain the dispositions of the various beings, and discern those who were prepared to hear the preaching of truth from those who, on account of their demerits, were as yet unprepared for receiving beneficially for themselves such a great favour. When this was done, he put on his full canonical dress, and, with the mendicant's pot under his arm, he sallied forth in quest of his food. He invariably directed his steps towards those places where he knew that his preachings would be heard with beneficial results. Sometimes he went alone; at other times he was attended with a certain number of his disciples. His countenance bespoke an unaffected modesty and an inimitable mildness. Occasionally he allowed a display of wonders to take place. Musical instruments emitted, of themselves, sweet tunes, which, revealing to the people the coming of Buddha, rejoiced their heart and disposed them to bestow abundant alms, and to hear the preaching of the law. Some of the hearers became Upasakas, others Thautapans, &c., &c., agreeably to every one's disposition. Then he returned to his monastery. 2. As soon as he had arrived, he washed his feet, and during the ablution he had his disciples assembled round him, and said to them, "Beloved Bickus, be ever watchful and attentive, with a mind ever prone to reflection. It is exceedingly difficult to obtain the nature of man,[3] to hear the law, to become perfect, to obtain the state of Rahanda, and to arrive to the condition of a Buddha." He then pointed out to them some subjects of meditation. Many of the disciples devoted themselves to mental labour; some combined together manual and mental exertions; others withdrew to lonely places at the foot of certain trees, and into the caves of neighbouring hills. Buddha then took his meal, and retired for awhile alone into his own private apartment. When he arose a little after mid-day, he anew contemplated all beings, and fixed his attention on those that were to come and receive his instructions. He soon came out, and at once began to impart instructions to all those that had arrived, from what place soever. When the instruction was completed, the people withdrew. 3. After the people's departure, Buddha bathed and took a walk in the open verandah of the monastery. His mat, cushion, &c., were spread in a becoming and open place. The Rahans hastened at that hour to come and communicate freely the result of their mental exertions. When they wanted any explanation, they were encouraged to put him questions, which were instantly answered; and they received submissively the answers which he condescended to give to them. This exercise lasted until it was dark. The disciples retired from their master's presence. 4. After their departure, the Nats and other celestial beings were admitted. Buddha conversed with and instructed them until nearly midnight. 5. Buddha then walked awhile to relieve his limbs from extreme lassitude, and went into his apartment to take some rest. He rose very early, and began to review the beings who, during the days of former Buddhas, had distinguished themselves by their exertions in the path of virtue and in the high mental attainments. During one of his usual benevolent errands through the country, Gaudama converted Ouggasena, his wife and companions. Here is an abridged narrative of that event. Ouggasena was the son of a rich man. In the time of his youth a company of comedians came to Radzagio and exhibited during seven days in the presence of King Pimpathara and his court. Our young man, along with many of his companions, attended the exhibition. On a sudden, he became passionately enamoured of a rope dancing-girl, who performed many feats with accomplished grace and uncommon address. Despite his parents' remonstrances and entreaties, he sacrificed to his ungoverned passion all considerations, and he married the damsel. In his new situation, he had no alternative but to learn the art of rope-dancing, tumbling feats, and standing in various attitudes on the extremity of posts or masts, sometimes sixty cubits high. During his noviciate, he had to bear the laughter and taunts of his wife and of his new friends. By dint of exertion he became proficient in the art of performing tumblers' feats with a surprising agility. One day it was announced at the sound of the drum that Ouggasena was to perform on the top of a post sixty cubits high. An immense crowd of citizens went out with great eagerness to see the performance. When the amusements had just begun, Buddha happened to pass by with a number of disciples. He desired Maukalan to go ahead, and begin to preach to Ouggasena. Soon he came up himself in person, and converted the juggler, who forthwith descended from his mast, prostrated himself before Buddha, and asked to be admitted as a member of the assembly. After further instructions he obtained the science of Rahanda. His wife and all the company became likewise converts.[4] Buddha had now fulfilled the promise he had formerly made to the ruler of Radzagio, to spend three consecutive seasons in his royal city. He went over to the Wethalie country, and fixed his residence in a fine place, in the midst of a forest of sala-trees, called Mahawon. Whilst he enjoyed himself in that place, a quarrel took place between a portion of the people of Kappila and that of Kaulia, who lived on both banks of the little river Rauhani. The cause of the dispute was the irrigation of paddy-fields. The small river had been duly barred, but on account of an unusual drought there was not water enough to supply the quantity required for the fields on both banks. One party wanted to have all the water, the other demurred. Hence a dispute arose which, wildfire-like, spread from the banks of the stream all over both countries. A general appeal to arms ensued, and, in a short time, both armies stood facing each other in battle array. At an early hour Buddha, having risen from his couch, cast, as usual, a glance over all beings. He soon saw the feud that existed between the country of his birth and that of Kaulia. Moved with compassion over the miseries which that people, blinded by a furious passion, were bringing upon themselves, he went through the air, and stood over and above the stream which separated the two armies. Rays of glory, beaming out of his person, soon attracted general attention. Both parties laid down their arms and prostrated themselves, worshipping him. He said to them, "Princes and warriors, hearken to my words. Which is the most valuable, a small quantity of water or the lives of countless beings, and, in particular, the lives of princes?" They answered, "Of course the lives of princes and warriors are most valuable." "If so," retorted Buddha, "lay aside your passion, conquer your anger, throw away your weapons of destruction, love each other, and live in peace." Both parties, by a low and prolonged tone of voice, expressed their deep regret at what they had done, and their sincere desire to follow his instructions. He preached to them the law in such an impressive and convincing manner that on the spot two hundred and fifty noblemen of Kappila and the same number of Kaulia asked for admittance among the members of the assembly. The instruction they had heard, and which had determined their vocation, had not had time to cast deep roots in their hearts. They soon regretted their home, their families, and their former gay life. Buddha, who saw what was going on in their souls, said to them, "Will you come with me, and enjoy yourselves on the green banks of the beautiful lake Kontala?" They joyfully accepted the proposal. By the power inherent in his nature, Buddha took them through the air, and soon reached the lake. They alighted on its banks. Delighted with the beautiful scenery that surrounded them, and ignorant of the new objects which they saw, they interrogated Buddha about the names of the new plants and fruits which they perceived. Gaudama condescended to answer all their questions. While thus engaged they saw the king of the birds of the lake resting on the branch of a tree. On a sudden five hundred birds of the same kind came crowding round their chief, and, by their cries and various attitudes, testified the happiness which they felt at being in his company. The new converts wondered at the admirable instinct of those birds, and communicated to each other their mutual surprise. As an accomplished teacher, Buddha availed himself of the opportune moment, and said to them in a mild manner, "Beloved disciples, what you see now and admire is the lively and true image of my family." So effectually was the instruction conveyed that they all at once became Thautapan, and no longer thought of returning into the world. By the virtue inherent in their new position, they were enabled to fly through the air, and they returned with Buddha into the Mahawon residence. On their arrival, Buddha began his fifth season in that same place. It was in the middle of that season, in the month of Wakhaong (August), that he heard that his father had been seized with a violent distemper, which left him no rest either day or night. Sensible of his approaching end, Thoodaudana ardently wished to see his son for the last time. In the morning, at the hour when Buddha was reviewing all beings, and examining with a compassionate heart their respective condition, he saw the sad and painful position of his royal father. He instantly summoned, by the means of Ananda, a select band of disciples, and flying through the air, alighted with his company in front of the palace. Without a moment's delay he ascended to the upper apartments, and sat on a place prepared for him, near the head of the couch upon which lay the royal patient. Buddha, recollecting himself awhile, and then laying one of his hands on his father's head, said, "By the virtue of the merits I have acquired during countless existences, by the power of the fruits gathered during forty-nine days round the tree Bodi, let this head be forthwith relieved from all pain." It happened so in the twinkling of an eye. Nan, or Nanda, the younger brother of Buddha, the son of his aunt Patzapati, holding the right hand of his father, said with a fervent earnestness, "By the merits that I have obtained at the feet of Buddha, let this right hand be freed from all pain." And perfect cure instantly followed. Ananda, Phra's first cousin, held the left arm. Thariputra laid his hand on the back, Maukalan grasped the feet. All of them with a similar faith uttered such like prayers, and the same happy result invariably followed. Thoodaudana was delivered from all pain. But he continued to remain very weak. Buddha, profiting by that favourable opportunity, preached to his father the law of mutability, and gave him many and truly seasonable instructions on that most important subject. With such a persuasive language did he expound this favourite doctrine that his father became at once a Rahanda. At the same time he distinctly informed him that seven days hence the end of his life would inevitably happen. Thoodaudana, perfectly prepared for the new change, that is to say, for death, by his son's instructions, and thoroughly resigned, saw before him the true state of Neibban, and said, "Now I clearly perceive the instability of all things. I am free from all passions. I am completely disentangled from the trammels of existence." Rocking himself in the bosom of these comforting truths, he spent happily the few days he had yet to live. On the last day, and for the last time, he paid his respects to Buddha by worshipping him. Sitting then on his couch, the royal patient humbly asked pardon in the presence of all his attendants for all offences he had committed by thoughts, words, and deeds. Having performed this act of sincere humility, he consoled his wife Patzapati, who sat bathed in tears, as well as the other members of the royal family, and several times repeated before them the great truth--that all beings, when they come into existence, have within, inherent in their nature, a principle of death that hurries them to their end and dissolution; that the same principle that has brought near and united beings together is always opposed, and at last overpowered by the opposite one that tends to separate them. He then placidly lay on his couch, and gently breathed his last in the day of the full moon of Wakhaong, on a Saturday, at the rising of the sun, in the year of the Eetzana, era 107, at the advanced age of ninety-seven years. Gaudama, after his father's demise, when all the Rahans were assembled round the deathbed, said to them: "Beloved Bickus, behold my father's remains. He is no longer what he was a little while ago. He has undergone the change. No one can offer an effectual and lasting resistance to the principle of death, inherent in all beings. Be diligent in the practice of good works: follow steadily the four roads leading to perfection." After this lecture, he consoled his aunt Patzapati and the other ladies of the court, who, with dishevelled hair, were wailing aloud and striking their breasts. He minutely explained to them the consequences resulting from the great principle of mutability, which pervades all beings and infallibly leads them to destruction by the separation of their constitutive parts. When the instruction was finished, Buddha directed Kathaba to go and prepare the spot on which the funeral and cremation of the corpse were to take place. Aided by Thariputra, he washed the corpse, which was subsequently placed in great state, on a magnificent and lofty catafalco, raised for the purpose. The princes of Thekkara, Thoopawa, and Weritzara, came to attend the royal funeral and offer presents. The corpse was carried processionally through the principal streets of the city at the sound of all musical instruments. Buddha, in person, received the corpse, and laid it on the funeral pile. To no one else would he leave the honourable and pious task of setting fire to it. On that occasion there took place an indescribable outburst of wailings and lamentings. The impassible Buddha preached the law on that occasion. He left aside all praises in behalf of the deceased. He was satisfied with announcing the law; and countless beings, both among men and Nats, obtained the deliverance. After the loss of her royal husband, Queen Patzapati, profoundly impressed with all that she had seen and heard, desired to renounce the world and embrace a religious mode of life. For that purpose she came to the presence of Buddha, and asked three times the permission to follow her inclination and become Rahaness. Three times the solicited favour was denied her. Buddha then left his own native country and returned to Wethalie, fixing his abode in the Gutagaia-thala monastery, in the Mahawon forest. Buddha had not been long in this place when he had to grant the request which he at first refused to his aunt Patzapati. The wives of the princes of the Kappila and Kaulia countries, who, to the number of 500, had recently renounced the world, desired also to follow the example set before them by their husbands. They went to the queen's apartments and communicated to her their design, entreating her to help them in obtaining the object of their wishes. Patzapati not only promised them her support, but expressed the determination to join their company. As a token of the sincerity and earnestness of their resolution, all the ladies, without the least hesitation, cut their beautiful black hair, put on a dress in accordance with their pious intentions, and resolutely set out on foot in the direction of the Wethalie country. Unused to such bodily exertions, the pious pilgrims suffered much during their long journey. At last, worn out with fatigue, covered with dust, they arrived near the Mahawon monastery. They respectfully stopped at the gate, and requested an interview with Ananda. The latter, having ascertained from their own mouth the object of their pious and fatiguing errand, hastened into the presence of Buddha, and entreated him to grant the earnest and praiseworthy demand of his aunt and of the other ladies, her companions. On hearing the request, Buddha, for a while, remained silent, as if deliberating on the answer he had to give. Then he said: "Ananda, it is not expedient to allow women to embrace the religious state; otherwise my institutions shall not last long." Ananda, undismayed by that reply, respectfully reminded Buddha of all the favours he had received from Patzapati, who had nursed and brought him up with the utmost care and tenderness, from the day his mother died, when he was but seven days old, and represented with a fervent earnestness the good dispositions of the pious postulants. Buddha's scruples were overcome by the persuasive language of the faithful Ananda. He asked whether women could observe the eight precepts: and added, that in case they would consent to bind themselves to a correct observance of them, they might be admitted as members of the assembly. Fully satisfied with the answer he had obtained, the venerable Ananda saluted Buddha, and hastened to the gate of the monastery, where his return was impatiently awaited. On hearing the good news, Patzapati, in the name of her companions, spoke to Ananda: "Venerable Ananda, we all rejoice that the favour so often asked for has been at last granted unto us. As a young maid, who has bathed, and washed her hair, is anxiously desirous to put on her fine ornaments, as she receives with delight the beautiful and fragrant nosegays that are offered to her, so we are longing for the eight precepts, and wish for admittance into the assembly." They all promised to observe the rules of their new profession to the end of their lives. Yathaudara and Dzanapada-kaliani were among these converts. They all, owing to their former meritorious works, became subsequently Rahandas. One of the new female converts seemed to have retained as yet a certain admiration of and fondness for her handsome features, and secretly prided herself on her beauty. Buddha, who quickly perceived the latent enemy lurking in the folds of her heart, resorted to the following expedient to correct her. On a certain day, when the proud and vain woman was in his presence, he created in an instant a consummate beauty, who as much exceeded her in perfection of form as the snow-white swan surpasses the black crow. Whilst she looked on this suddenly appearing rival with somewhat jealous eyes, Buddha caused the beauty of his creation to appear on a sudden very old, with a wrinkled face and an emaciated frame, and to exhibit on her person all the various and disgusting inroads which the most loathsome diseases make on the human body. The change acted as an electric shock on the young religious woman. When Gaudama perceived the change, and that she was so horrified at such a sight that she was nearly fainting, he said to her: "Behold, my daughter, the faithful foreshowing of what shall inevitably happen to that form you are so proud of." He had scarcely spoken those words, when she was instantly and for ever cured of her vanity. Buddha left Wethalie and went on the Makula mountain, where he spent his sixth season. During his stay in that place thousands of people were converted and obtained the deliverance. At the end of that season, Buddha went to Radzagio, and stayed in the Weloowon monastery. It was at that time that Kema, the first queen of King Pimpathara, proud of her rank, youth, and beauty, was at last converted. Up to that time she had obstinately refused to see Buddha and hear his doctrine. On a certain day, the queen went to visit a garden which was in the neighbourhood of the Weloowon grove. By a contrivance of the king, her husband, she was brought, almost against her will, into the presence of Buddha, who worked out the spiritual cure of her foolish vanity by a process similar to the one above mentioned. He caused a beautiful female of his creation to pass successively, in the queen's presence, through the various stages of old age, disease, and death. Her mind having been thus well prepared to hear his instructions, Buddha gave her a lengthened explanation of the miseries attending the body. It had the desirable effect to convert her in so perfect a manner that she entered into the current of perfection, and became Thautapan. After having obtained the consent of her lord, she was, upon her pressing solicitations, admitted into the religious order. She became a Rahanda, and among the female members of the assembly she ranked as the disciple of the right. Such a glorious charge was owing to her former merits. On a certain day, a rich man of the country of Radzagio went to enjoy himself on the banks of the river Ganges. That man was not a disciple of Buddha, nor did he hold the doctrines of the opposite party. He steered a middle course between both doctrines, with a mind disposed, however, to embrace such opinions as should appear to him based on the best and strongest evidence. Chance offered him a favourable opportunity to acknowledge the superiority of Buddha over his opponents. He saw a log of sandal-wood floating on the stream, took it up, and had a beautiful patta made of it. When finished, he wrote upon it these words, "He who can fly in the air let him take it." The patta was raised on the top of a succession of hampers, tied together, and sixty cubits high. Some heretics living in the neighbourhood asked on successive occasions the rich man to get down the patta for them; he answered them that he would give it only to him who by flight could reach it. The head man of those heretics feigned to prepare himself to fly; but when he was extending his arms, and raising one of his feet, his disciples, according to a preconcerted plan, seized him, saying, "It is not becoming that you should exert yourself for such a trifle." But the wily rich man could not be thus deceived; he persisted in his former resolution, and for six days resisted all their entreaties. On the seventh day Maukalan happened to go to that place in search of his food. He was informed of all that had just happened. He was, moreover, told that the rich man and all his family would become disciples under him who could by flight possess himself of the sandal-wood patta. Maukalan was ready, for the glory of Buddha, to raise himself in the air, but his companion refused to allow him to do it, saying that such an easy work could easily be accomplished by one less advanced in merits. Maukalan agreed to his proposal. Whereupon entering into the fourth state of Dzan, his companion rose in the air, carrying with the toes of one of his feet an enormous rock three-quarters of a youdzana wide. The whole space between him and the bystanders appeared darkened. Every one was half dead with fear, lest, perhaps, it should fall over his head. Maukalan's companion had the rock split into two parts, and his person then appeared to the view of the assembled crowd. After having during a whole day exhibited such a mighty power, he caused the rock to fall on the place he had taken it from. The rich man bade him come down, fully satisfied with the display of such power. The sandal-wood patta was taken down, filled with the best rice, and presented to him. The Rahan received it and went back to his monastery. Many persons living at a distance from the place where the wonder had been exhibited, followed him to the monastery, begging him to show some other signs. As they approached the monastery, Buddha hearing the noise, inquired what it was. He was informed of all the particulars of the event that had just taken place. He called the Rahan into his presence, took the patta, had it broken into pieces and reduced to dust.[5] He then forbade the Rahan ever to make such a display of his power. The heretics soon heard of the prohibition issued by Gaudama to his disciples. They thought that no one would dare to match them in the display of wonders, and that they could easily ascertain their superiority over him. The ruler of Radzagio, hearing of this news, went to Buddha and inquired as to his motive for such a prohibition. Buddha told him that the prohibition regarded his disciples only, but not himself. The heretics, informed of this, said, "What will become of us? Gaudama himself will show signs." They held a council among themselves as to what was to be done. Gaudama told the king that in four months he would make a grand display of his miraculous power in the country of Thawattie, as it was in that place that all former Buddhas had in former ages showed signs. The heretics from that day never lost sight of Buddha for a moment; they followed him day and night. They gave orders that a large and extensive covered place should be prepared for them, where they might show their power and outshine that of the Rahan Gaudama. Buddha having said that he would select the spot where a white mango-tree stood for the scene of his miracles, the heretics caused the total destruction of all mango-trees in that direction. On the full moon of Tabaong (February), Gaudama left Radzagio, attended by a large retinue of disciples. He went to preach in different parts. On the seventh of the waxing moon of Watso he entered the country of Thawattie. A gardener gave him by way of present a large mango fruit. Ananda prepared the fruit and Buddha ate it. When this was done, the stone was handed to Ananda with an injunction to plant it in a place prepared to receive it. When planted, Buddha washed his hands over it, and on a sudden there sprang up a beautiful white mango-tree, fifty cubits high, with large branches loaded with blossoms and fruits. To prevent its being destroyed, a guard was set near it by the king's order. Dismayed at such a wonderful sign, the heretics fled in every direction to conceal their shame and confusion. Their head man, named Pourana, took from a husbandman a large jar with a rope, tied up the vessel with one extremity of the rope, passed the other round his neck, and flinging first the jar and next himself into the river, where the water was very deep, he was drowned, and went to the lowest hell, called Awidzi. Buddha created in the air an immense road, reaching east and west to the extremities of the world. When the sun began to verge towards the west, he thought the time had come to ascend to that road in the presence of an immense crowd, that covered an area of thirty-six youdzanas, and there make a display of his wonderful powers. He was on the point of crossing the threshold of the building that had been erected for him by the care of Nats, when a female convert, named Garamie, who had become an Anagam, came into his presence, and after the usual prostrations said to him, "Glorious Buddha, it is not necessary that you should take the trouble of working wonders; I, your servant, will do it." "What wonder will you work, my daughter, Garamie?" replied Buddha. "I will," said Garamie, "fill up the space with water, and plunging into the water in an eastern direction, I will come back, and reappear in the west like a water-fowl. On my appearance before the crowd they will ask, What is this water-fowl? And I will answer to them, that this water-fowl is Garamie, the daughter of the most excellent Buddha. This is the wonder I will accomplish. The heretics, on seeing it, will say to themselves, If such be the power of Garamie, how much greater and more wonderful must be that of Buddha himself?" "I know," said Buddha, "that you have such a power, but it is not for your sake that these crowds have been gathered together;" and he refused the solicited permission. Garamie said to herself, Buddha would not allow me to work this great wonder, but there is some one else that can do greater things than I; perhaps Buddha will not be so inflexible with them as he is with me. She then withdrew to a becoming place. Buddha thought within himself, There are many among my disciples who can make a display of great wonders; it is meet that the crowds should be aware of it, and see how, with hearts stout as that of the lion, they are ready to perform the most wonderful feats. He said aloud, "Who are they that can do wonders? let them come forward." Many came into his presence with a lion-like boldness and a thundering voice, craving for the honour of displaying supernatural powers. Among them was a rich man, named Anatapein; a female child, called Tsera; a grown-up woman, and Maukalan. They volunteered their services to perform the most extraordinary wonders, in order both to frighten the heretics, and make them understand that, if such a power belonged to the disciples, what that of Buddha himself must be. But Buddha would not accept their proffered services, and said to them that the people had not been assembled there for their sake, but for his; and that to him alone was reserved the task of enrapturing the crowds by the great wonders he was preparing to show. Addressing Maukalan, he said to him that, being a Buddha, he could not leave to others the trouble of performing his own duty. In a former existence, when he was a bullock, he drew from a muddy place a heavily-laden cart, to save a Brahmin's property and rejoice his heart. Buddha ascended to the immense road which he had created in the air in the presence of the crowd, that filled a place of eighteen youdzanas in breadth and twenty-four in length. These wonders which he was about to display were the result of his own wisdom, and could not be imitated by any one. He caused a stream of water to issue from the upper part of his body and flames of fire from the lower part, and on a sudden the reverse to take place; again fire issued from his right eye, and streams of water from his left eye, and so on from his nostrils, ears, right and left, in front and behind. The same wonder too happened in such a way that the streams of fire succeeded the streams of water, but without mingling with each other. Each stream in an upward direction reached the seats of Brahmas; each stream in a downward direction penetrated as far as hell; each in a horizontal direction reached the extremities of the world. From each of his hairs the same wonderful display feasted the astonished eyes of the assembled people. The six glories gushed, as it were, from every part of his body, and, made it appear resplendent beyond description. Having no one to converse with, he created a personage, who appeared to walk with him. Sometimes he sat down, while his companion was pacing along; and at other times he himself walked, whilst his interlocutor was either standing or sitting. All the while Buddha put to him questions which he readily answered, and in his turn replied to the interrogations that were made to him. At intervals Phra preached to the crowd, who were exceedingly rejoiced, and sung praises to him. According to their good dispositions, he expounded the various points of the law. The people who heard him and saw the wonderful works he performed, obtained the understanding of the four great principles. Buddha, having completed the twofold work of preaching to the crowds, and exciting their respect and admiration by the most astonishing display of the most extraordinary miracles, began to think within himself as follows: To what place have all former Buddhas resorted after the display of signs, and spent the season? He saw by a stretch of his incomparable foresight that all of them had gone to the seat of Tawadeintha, in the Nats' country, to announce the perfect law to their mothers. He resolved to go thither too. With one step he reached the summit of the mountain Ugando, at a distance of 160,000 youdzanas, and another step carried him to the top of the Mienmo mountain. This was done without any effort on the part of Buddha. Those mountains lowered their summits to the very spot where he was standing, and rose up again to resume their lofty position. Buddha found himself brought almost instantaneously to the seat of Tawadeintha.[6] He took his position on the immense rock Pantukambala. When he lay extended there upon his tsiwaran, the huge mass on a sudden contracted itself to the very narrow dimensions of his dress. The people who had seen Buddha, and who could not now descry him, found themselves in a state of bereavement, as if the sun and the moon had disappeared from the sky. They gave full vent to their cries and lamentations, saying: We are now deprived of the blessed presence of him who is the most excellent among the three sorts of beings, men, Nats, and Brahmas. Some said he has gone to this place; some replied, no, he has gone to that place. Many of the people, who had just arrived from different parts of the country, were exceedingly grieved, because they could not see him. They all repaired before Maukalan, to ascertain from him what place Buddha had gone to. Maukalan knew it, but he wished to leave to Anourouda the honour of satisfying their curiosity. The latter said to them that Buddha had gone to the seat of Tawadeintha to preach the law to his mother, and spend there one season on the rock of Pantukambala. He added, that he would be back in three months hence, on the day of the full moon of Thadin-kioot (October). They came to the spontaneous resolution to remain on that very spot, and not to return to their homes, until they had seen Buddha a second time. They erected temporary sheds; and, though the place was small for such a countless multitude, they managed to accommodate themselves in the best way they could. Previous to his departure, Buddha had enjoined on Maukalan to remain with the people and preach to them the law. Maukalan faithfully complied with the request, and during three consecutive months instructed the people, and answered all their questions. The rich man Anatapein fed the Rahans and the assembly abundantly during the whole time. FOOTNOTES [1] It is impossible to assign the motive that induced the compiler of Buddha's life to insert in his work a long episode on the celebrated physician Dzewaka. The story is in itself uninteresting, and throws no light whatever on the history of the supposed originator or reformer of Buddhism. For this reason it has been thought quite unnecessary to give a complete translation of the whole passage. The name of Dzewaka is quite familiar to the adepts of the medical art in Burmah. Many times the writer has made inquiries respecting the works of the Hippocrates of India, but he has never been able to meet with mention of or allusion to such compositions. Hence he has been led to suppose that the father of medicine in these countries has left behind him no writings to embody the results of his theoretical and practical favourite pursuits. Surgery appears to have been no novelty with our great doctor, since we see him on an occasion extracting from the body of a prince, by means of an incision, a snake that put his life in peril. The numerous quacks who in Burmah assume the name of physicians, and are ever ready to give medicines in all cases, even the most difficult and complicated, are ignorant of the very elements of the surgical art. They possess a certain number of remedies, made up of plants, which, when applied under proper circumstances and in certain cases, work wonderful cures. But the native physicians, unable in most instances to discern the true symptoms of diseases, prescribe remedies at random, and obtain, in too many cases, results most fatal to the unfortunate patient. In medicine as well as in religion, ignorance begets superstition and recourse to magical practices. We may positively assert that the black art is, with native practitioners, an essential concomitant to the practice of medicine. When a physician has exhausted the limited stock of remedies that he possesses, and he finds, in spite of his exertions, that the disease bids defiance to his skill, he gravely tells the relatives of the patient that some evil spirit is interfering with his remedies, and that he must be expelled ere there can be any chance of relieving the sufferer and obtaining his recovery. Whereupon a shed is erected with the utmost speed on a spot close to the house of the patient. Offerings of rice, fruits, and other articles are made to the pretended evil spirit, who is supposed to have got hold of the sufferer's body. Dances of the most frantic character are carried on by his relatives. Males will only officiate in default of females; preference is always given to the latter. Young girls, say the Burmese, are the fittest persons for the occasion, as it is supposed that the evil Nat is more effectually and easily propitiated by the power of their charms. This exercise lasts until, strength at last failing them, they drop down in a state of complete exhaustion and prostration. They appear as if they had entirely lost their senses. In that state they are supposed to be inspired by the evil spirit. Interrogated by the physician on the nature of the disease, and the proper remedies to be applied for eradicating it, they give answers, or rather they become channels through which the spirit, satisfied with the offerings made in his honour, condescends to declare that he has now left the patient, and that by placing him under a certain treatment, which he fails not to indicate, he will soon recover his health. Occurrences of this nature are exceedingly common. They are called by the natives festivals of the _Nat-pan_, or of the possessing spirit. [2] The first followers of Buddha, observing a mode of life much resembling that of the Rathees, had hitherto made use of the dress they had purchased previous to their leaving the world. But when they became professed members of the new society, they were subjected to the observance of the vow of strict poverty, and had to depend entirely on public charity for the obtaining of the required food and raiment. The old clothes brought at the time of their entering the society were worn out and unfit to be put on. Others were to be provided for by some means that would not wound the delicate feeling of absolute poverty. The only one that occurred was the willing and liberal dispositions of the lay members of the Buddhist community. This new source of abundant alms was opened by our Buddha himself, on the occasion of the offering made by Dzewaka. Desiring likewise to do away with the scruples many religious might entertain respecting the lawfulness or unlawfulness of receiving articles of dress, Gaudama laid it down as a regulation that all the religious could lawfully accept all that might be willingly offered them by the faithful. In the foregoing pages we have seen the founder of Buddhism granting to his followers permission to receive houses and landed properties presented to communities. Now the same legislator, adhering to the same principle, gives a fuller development thereto, and extends to articles necessary for dress the leave to receive offerings of this description, proffered by the faithful to the religious. In the book of Buddhist ordinations, or promotion to the degree of Patzin, mention is made of these two sorts of permissions given to the Rahans. [3] It was at that moment that Gaudama delighted to reveal to his disciples the most startling points of his doctrine, and made them familiar with certain tenets upon which he laid much stress. He wished that what he looked upon as subjects of the greatest importance, should be come familiar to them. No doubt he intended that those favourite topics should become the spiritual food upon which his disciples' minds should feed during the hours devoted to meditation. Those who are uninitiated in the doctrines of Buddhism will not understand the meaning of such an expression. It is difficult to obtain the nature of man. Such language is, however, in perfect accordance with the principles of that system. A being, who is in one of the four states of punishment, that of an animal, for instance, shall have, in many instances, to pass through an immense number of various existences, ere he can escape from the circle of animal existences, and at last emerge into that of man. To give us an idea of the excessive difficulties a being has to encounter, they make use of the following comparison. Let us suppose that a needle be dropped from one of the seats of Brahmas, and at the same time a man on earth be keeping another needle with the point upwards. It will be more easy for the two needles' extremities to come in contact one with the other, than it will be to a being in the condition of animal to reach the state of man. On the same principle one can easily imagine what mighty efforts must be made during countless existences ere a simple man can obtain all the qualifications necessary for enabling him to become a Buddha. The theory of Gaudama, on this point, resembles much that of some modern thinkers who preach the perfectibility of man to an almost infinite degree. [4] The conversion of Ouggasena and of his companions, procured by the direct intervention of Buddha himself, is another instance of the truly liberal spirit which animated the great preacher. His law was intended for all without exception. The profession of these individuals whom he so peculiarly selected was far from being a respectable one. The proud Brahmin would not have condescended to take notice of people who, in his opinion, had degraded themselves so low. But the new teacher, though born from parents belonging to a high caste, entirely free from the prejudices inculcated by the narrow spirit of caste, rose himself to such a high position as to look upon man, whatever his condition or position might be, as a fellow-being fully entitled to the benefit of his instructions. This is one of the most striking features of his preachings, its universality as regards persons and places. It enables us to account for the rapid and astonishing diffusion of his doctrines through so many countries. It constitutes the essential and capital difference between the two great systems which, in days long passed by, have contested for the religious supremacy over the Indian peninsula. In the subsequent story of Thoodaudana's illness, we see Buddha first, then Ananda, Thariputra, and Maukalan relieving the illustrious patient from his bodily distemper, by invoking, not the interference of a supreme Being, whom they ignore, but a certain power or influence connected with former good deeds. A great, nay, a miraculous, effect is produced by the agency of a cause which no one but a Buddhist can understand. He has recourse to _kan_, or the influence resulting from meritorious actions, as to a mighty agent who has the power to work any desired result whatever. But how a man can by his own will control the influence of his good actions, so as to produce a grand effect in no way short of a miracle, is a thing which can in no rational way be explained or accounted for. [5] The rebuke given by Buddha to the disciple who had, without permission, made such a display of miraculous power, intended though it was for the promotion of his glory, was designed to operate as a salutary check on the pride that might find its way into the heart of even the most privileged beings. Such a lesson was deemed of the greatest importance, since we find in the book of Buddhistic ordinations the sin of boasting of or pretending to the power of working wonders, &c., ranked among the four capital sins, excluding a Rahan for ever from the society of the perfect, and depriving him of his rank and dignity. Buddha, it seems, wished to reserve to himself alone the honour of working miracles, or to give the permission, when circumstances should require it, to some of his disciples to do the same in his name and for the exaltation of his religion. The following story of Purana and his five associates holds a prominent rank among the events that have rendered Buddha so celebrated. Gaudama, as it has been already mentioned in some foregoing notes, was an ascetic who had studied philosophy under eminent masters who belonged to the Brahminical school. In many of his opinions, as well as in his mode of life, there was no perceptible difference between him and the followers of the Brahmins. The writings of the latter, as well as those of the earliest Buddhists, exhibit to us the sight of a great number of schools; where opinions on ontology, morals, and dogmas, &c., at once various, multifarious, and opposite, were publicly taught. Then the human mind, left to its own resources, launching forth into the boundless field of speculative philosophy, ran in every direction, searching after truth. The mania for arguing, defining, drawing conclusions, &c., in those days, prevailed to an extent scarcely to be credited. Many centuries before Aristotle wrote the rules of dialectics, the Indian philosophers had carried the art of reasoning to a great degree of nicety and shrewdness. Witness the disputes and discussions between the Brahmins and the immediate disciples of Buddha. When our Phra began to attract about his person crowds of hearers and disciples; when his opinions on the end of man were understood and appreciated; when the system of castes received the first shock from the new but rapidly progressing doctrine; when the eyes and hearts of the people were slowly at first, and rapidly afterwards, centred on the new preacher and his disciples; when at last alms, that had hitherto flowed into the abodes of the Brahmins, began to enter into new channels and carry their substantial produce to the door of the followers of the new sect, then jealousy and other passions began to agitate the hearts of those who had hitherto retained an undisputed sway over the credulity of the people. They tried, if credit be given to the works of Buddhists, every effort and devised every means in order to oppose the progress of the new doctrine. In this instance, Purana and his friends, assisted, as the Buddhists pretend, by the agency of the evil one, wished to enter into discussion with Buddha and to surpass him in the display of miraculous power. The contest was to take place in the country of Thawattie, in the presence of the king and of a countless multitude assembled for the purpose. Purana, as usual with Buddhists in regard to those who held opinions different from their own, is styled a heretic. Of the opinions of the enemies of Buddha nothing is said in the present work, but the writer has had the opportunity of perusing another work where a slight allusion is made to those six holders of heterodox doctrines. Their opinions were at variance on the beginning of this world, the eternity of matter, the existence of the soul, and a first principle, creator of all that exists. We may infer therefrom that they were heads or chiefs of various schools, who, though not agreeing among themselves upon purely speculative doctrines, united and combined against the common enemy. A detailed account of the doctrines held by these six heretics would prove highly interesting, as it would throw some light on the very obscure and imperfectly known history of Indian philosophy, in the days when Buddhism assumed the shape of a religious system. To those who are unacquainted with Indian literature, the great progress made by Hindus in philosophical sciences at such an early period may appear somewhat doubtful: but modern discoveries made all over the Indian peninsula leave not the least doubt respecting this startling assertion. At a period when Greece and the other regions of Europe were sunk in a state of complete ignorance, most of the branches of literature were successfully cultivated on the banks of the Ganges. The study of philosophy always supposes a great intellectual advancement. There would, therefore, be no rashness whatever in asserting that the present state and condition of India, as regards literary progress, are much below the mark that was attained at such a remote period. The epoch of literary decadence began with the devastating expeditions of the fanatical Moslem in the tenth century. It is probable, too, that the religious and sanguinary conflicts between the Buddhists and Brahminists have had their share in bringing about a similar result. The latter, having obtained the ascendancy over their adversaries, became more bigoted. They would no longer tolerate, to the same extent as before, the liberty of elaborating new systems, lest some successful philosopher might hereafter propagate opinions at variance with their own, undermine the mighty fabric of their creed, and endanger the holding of that absolute sway and paramount influence they had recovered, after centuries of a deadly contest with the disciples of the philosopher of Kapilawot. [6] The preachings of Buddha were not to be confined to the narrow limits of man's abode; they were designed to reach much further. All beings living in the six seats of Nats were to share with men the blessings of the publication of the perfect law. It has been already stated at length, in a foregoing note, that the condition of Nats is merely a state of pleasure and enjoyment allotted to those who in former existences had done some meritorious work. The fortunate inhabitants of these celestial regions remain in those seats until the sum of their respective merits being, as it were, exhausted, they return to the abode of man, the true place of probation for all beings living therein. The condition of Nat, therefore, is not a permanent one; the Nat, after his time of reward is over, has to migrate to our terrestrial abode, begin a new existence, and endeavour to advance himself in the way of perfection by the practice of virtue. He is as yet very far from the state of Neibban. Like man, he has to learn the sublime law, and to become acquainted with the roads leading to the four high perfections. Buddha, who came to announce the law of salvation to all beings, could not but go to the seats of Nats, and teach them the way to free themselves from the turmoil of never-ending existence. The preachings of Buddha for three consecutive months were attended with a success that must have exceeded his most sanguine expectations. Millions of Nats were converted, and forthwith obtained the deliverance. Others less advanced in merits obtained the first, or second, or third state of perfection. During his stay in the other seats of Nats, Buddha gave a decision on the merits of almsgiving, which is certainly to the advantage of the yellow-dressed Bickus, but appears somewhat opposed to all principles of justice and reason. In his opinion the inward dispositions of him who gives alms has nothing to do with the merits resulting from such a good work. Those merits are strictly proportionate to the degree of sanctity or perfection of him who receives alms. Such doctrine, destructive of the purest and noblest motives that can actuate man to do good, is openly upheld now both in theory and practice by the Buddhist monks. When they receive alms from the admirers of their saintly mode of life, they never think of returning thanks to those who so liberally administer to all their material wants; they content themselves with saying, Thadoo, thadoo; that is to say, Well, well; and the pious offerer withdraws perfectly satisfied and happy, relying on the merits he has gained on this occasion, and longing for another opportunity of doing the like. The liberality of the laity towards the religious is carried to an excess scarcely to be credited. Government do not interfere in the maintenance of the perfect, and yet they are abundantly supplied with all the necessaries, nay, the luxuries, of life. They live on the fat of the land. That the crowds of people might be better prepared for hearing the sacred law and obtaining a correct understanding of it, Buddha charges Maukalan to a regular fast, or at least abstinence, carried to a considerable degree. A free and copious use of nourishing substances unfits man for mental exertions, occasions in him heaviness and supineness, enervates and weakens the vigour of the intellect, and gives to matter a preponderating influence over the soul. The advice will hold good everywhere, but it becomes particularly pressing and stringent when addressed to an audience of Buddhists, who require the full force of their mind to be able to understand the various bearings of a doctrine resting on the most abstruse principles, the end of which too is to disentangle the soul from the influence of materiality. Up to this day in Burmah there are some remnants of the observance of fast during the three months of Lent, when the law is oftener expounded to and better observed by religious people. The obligation of fasting during the days of the quarters of the moon is generally admitted, and some few observe it, if not always, at least from time to time. The generality of the Burmese people entirely disregard fasting. Curious but interesting is the reply Buddha gave to Thariputra, who rejoiced exceedingly because men and Nats vied with each other in paying great honours to him. He unhesitatingly states: Blessed are all those who rejoice on his account. By this joy we ought not to understand the transient and momentary affection of the heart, elicited by some pleasing and agreeable occurrence; but the kind of joy alluded to is a rational, philosophical, and religious one, having its origin, first, in a full and perfect knowledge of Buddha's transcendent excellence, rendering his person an object of the highest admiration; and, second, in a lively confidence in his benevolence and goodness towards all beings, which urge him to labour for their deliverance from all miseries and their guidance to a state of peace and rest. Such a joy, diffused over the heart, creates an ardent love for Buddha and his doctrine; that affection rests, not on Buddha, as a mere individual, but on him who is the personification of a saviour of all beings. It implies faith in him and his preachings, as well as a strong confidence in his power and willingness to confer the greatest possible benefits. Hence there is no wonder to hear Buddha declaring all those blessed who on that solemn occasion rejoiced in him. CHAPTER X. _Buddha's proceedings in the seat of Tawadeintha -- His triumphant return to the seat of men, in the city of Thin-ka-tha -- He is calumniated by the heretics of Thawattie -- Eighth season spent in the forest of Tesakala -- Subsequent preachings -- He meets with a bad reception in the Kothambi country -- Dissension among the disciples -- Reconciliation -- Travels of Buddha -- Preaching to a Pounha who tilled a field._ While Buddha was in the seat of Tawadeintha all the Nats came from more than ten thousand worlds to his presence; but the glory that always encompasses their bodies disappeared, or was completely outshone by that of Buddha's person. His mother, a daughter of Nats, came from the seat of Toothita to see her son and hear his instructions. She sat on his right. Two sons of Nats stood by the right and left of his mother. The crowd was so great that it covered a surface of eighteen youdzanas. In that immense assembly two Nats were conspicuous by their particular demeanour and position. One of them stood so close to Buddha as to touch almost one of his knees, the other was standing in a respectful position afar off. Buddha asked the latter what he had done to deserve the place he occupied. He answered that, during former existences, he had made abundant alms indeed, but his merits had been comparatively small, because he had not done those good works to persons eminent for their sanctity. The same question was put to the other Nat, who said that he was, in a former existence, living in very narrow circumstances, but that he had had the good fortune of giving alms, according to his limited means, to persons who were much advanced in merits. With a voice that was heard by the crowds on the seat of men, Buddha proclaimed the immense advantage of giving alms to and supporting the Rahans and those advanced in perfection. They were, said he, like good seed sown on a good field, that yields an abundance of good fruits. But alms given to those who are as yet under the tyrannical yoke of passions are like a seed deposited in a bad soil; the passions of the receiver of alms choke, as it were, the growth of merits. At the conclusion, the two Nats obtained the reward of Thautapan. The crowds on earth had also the benefit of hearing his instructions. Whilst Buddha was in the middle of the Nats, he announced the law of Abidama to his mother. Having to go about to get his food, Buddha created a likeness of another Buddha, whom he commissioned to continue the preaching of the Abidama. As to himself, he went to the mountain of Himawonta, ate the tender branches of a certain tree, washed his face in the lake Anawadat, and partook of the food he received from the Northern Island. Thariputra went thither to render him all necessary services. When he had eaten his meal, he called Thariputra, and desired him to go and preach the law of Abidama to five hundred Rahans, who were present when the display of wonders took place, and were much pleased with it. In the time of the Buddha Kathaba those five hundred Rahans were bats, living in a cave much resorted to by Rahans, who were wont to repeat the Abidama. Those bats contrived to retain a certain number of words, the meaning whereof they could not understand. When they died, they were transferred into one of the seats of Nats; and when they became men anew, they had the good fortune to be born from illustrious parents, in the country of Thawattie, and when Phra showed his powers, they were much pleased. They became Rahans under Thariputra, and were the first to understand perfectly the sublime law of Abidama. As to Buddha, he returned to the seat of Tawadeintha and continued the instructions, where the Buddha of his creation had left them. At the end of three months' preaching, an innumerable number of Nats knew and understood the four great principles. As to his mother, she obtained the perfection of Thautapan. The time when Buddha was to return to the seat of men was near at hand. The crowds, eager to know the precise time when Buddha was to come back among them, went to Maukalan to ascertain from him the precise day on which they would be blessed with his presence. "Well," said Maukalan to the people, "in a very short time I will give you an answer on the subject of your inquiry." That very instant he plunged to the bottom of the earth and reappeared, but when he was at the foot of the Mienmo mountain, he ascended, in the view of the crowd whom he had left, and soon arrived in the presence of Buddha, to whom he explained the object of his errand. "My son," answered Buddha, "in what country does your brother Thariputra spend his season?" "In the city of Thin-ka-tha," replied Maukalan. "Well," said Buddha, "seven days hence, at the full moon of Thadin-kioot (October), I will descend near the gate of Thin-ka-tha city; go and tell the people that those who desire to see me must go to that country, distant thirty youdzanas from Thawattie. Let no one take any provision; but by a rigorous abstinence let them dispose themselves to hear the law that I will preach." Maukalan, having paid his respects to Buddha, returned to the place where the assembled multitude anxiously waited for him. He related to them all the particulars regarding his interview with Buddha, and conveyed to them the much-wished-for intelligence of his speedy return on earth. On the day of the full moon of Thadin-kioot (October), Buddha disposed himself to go down to the seat of men. He called a prince of Thagias and directed him to prepare everything for his descent. Complying with his request, the Thagia prepared three ladders or stairs, one made of precious stones, occupying the middle; one on the right made of gold; and a third, made of silver, on the left. The foot of each ladder rested on the earth, near to the gate of Thin-ka-tha city, and their summits leaned on the top of the Mienmo mountain. The middle ladder was for Buddha, the golden one for the Nats, and that of silver for the Brahmas. Having reached the summit of the steps, Buddha stopped awhile, and resolved to make a fresh display of his power. He looked upwards, and all the superior seats of Brahmas were distinctly descried; on his looking downwards, his eyes could see and plunge into the bottom of the earth to the lowest hell. The Nats of more than a thousand systems could see each other. Men could perceive Nats in their fortunate seats, and Nats saw men in their terrestrial abode. The six glories streamed forth with an incomparable splendour from Buddha's person, which became visible to all the crowds. There was not one who did not praise Buddha. Having the Nats on his right, and the Brahmas on his left, the most glorious Phra began his triumphant coming down. He was preceded by a Nat, holding a harp in his hands and playing the most melodious tunes; another Nat fanned him; a chief of Brahmas held over him a golden umbrella. Surrounded with that brilliant _cortège_, Buddha descended near the gate of Thin-ka-tha city, and stopped there for awhile. Thariputra came forthwith into the presence of Buddha, paid him his respects at a becoming distance, and said, with a heart overflowing with joy: "On this day, O most glorious Buddha, all the Nats and men are showing their love to you." Buddha replied: "Blessed is Thariputra, and blessed are all those who rejoice on my account. Men and Nats love him who is acquainted with the sublime law, who has put an end to his passions, and who has attained to the highest state of contemplation." At the end of his discourse, innumerable beings understood the four great principles, and the five hundred Rahans whom Thariputra was commissioned to instruct reached the state of Arahat. On the spot where all Buddhas set their feet, when coming from the seat of Tawadeintha, a dzedi[1] has always been erected. Buddha, on leaving Thin-ka-tha, shaped his course towards Wethalie, and took his abode in the Dzetawon monastery. The fame of the wonders he had performed increased his reputation, and elicited from the people fresh tokens of respect and veneration. Alms poured from all quarters into the monastery; the liberality of the people towards his person and that of his disciples expanded in a wonderful manner. The heretics, who swarmed in Wethalie and its neighbourhood, became exceedingly jealous of Buddha's successes. The loss which they sustained in the donations of the people added fuel to the inward discontent. They resolved to devise some means to lower the character of Buddha in the opinion of the people. After a long deliberation, they fixed on the following plan:--A certain woman of great beauty, but of a rather doubtful character, was induced to join them in accusing Gaudama of having violated her. She contrived to assume the appearance of a person in a state of pregnancy, and, covering herself with a piece of red cloth, she went about the town spreading evil reports respecting Buddha's character. She had the impudence even to go into the Dzetawon monastery, and ask Buddha to provide a place for her approaching confinement, and likewise maintenance for herself and the child she was by him pregnant with. Such an infamous calumny did not, however, move him in the least. Conscious of his innocence, he lost nothing of his usual composure and serenity. But by the interference of the Thagia the slander was made manifest. Two mice bit the strings that kept tied up on the abdomen the apparatus designed to prop up the deceit, and, on a sudden, the whole fell on the ground, proclaiming at once the innocence of the sage and smiting his enemies with confusion. Every one present on the occasion gave vent to his just indignation at such a base attempt on the part of the heretics. But Buddha meekly replied that what had just happened was a righteous retribution for a misbehaviour of his own during a former existence. At that time, he was on a certain day under the influence of liquor, when he chanced to meet on his way a Pitzegabuddha. Without any reason or provocation, he abused the holy man with the lowest and coarsest expressions, and went so far as to tell him that his whole life was but a series of hypocritical actions. Turning then towards his disciples, he added, with a grave countenance, that what they had now witnessed was the just punishment inflicted on him under the influence of the demerit created and generated by his former evil doing. The eighth season was spent in the grove or forest of Tesakala, and when the rains were over, the most excellent Phra travelled throughout the country, preaching and teaching the right way to many. Countless converts entered one of the four ways, and many obtained at once the deliverance. In the town of Santoo-maragiri, he was preaching to the benefactors who had fed him and his disciples. Among the hearers were two persons, Nakoulapita and Nakoulamata, husband and wife, belonging to the pounha race. During a great many successive former existences they had had the good fortune to be father, mother, uncle, aunt, &c., to Buddha. During the present existence the feeling of affection towards him with whom they had been so long and so intimately connected was powerfully awakened and glowed in their hearts. Under the influence of that natural, kindly, and tender feeling, they came forward, and prostrating themselves before Gaudama, said to him: "Dear son, how is it that you have been away from us for so long a while? We are so happy to see you after so long an absence." Buddha, remaining indifferent to such a scene and language, knew at once what were the real wants of that good couple, and in what manner he could acknowledge the great favours he had during former existences received at their hands. He preached to them the most excellent law. They were thoroughly converted. The next morning they had the happiness to supply their great teacher and his company with the choicest food. Meanwhile they addressed to him the following request: "During many existences we both have always been happily united: not a word of complaint or quarrel has ever passed between us. We pray that in our coming existences the same love and affection may ever unite us together." Their request was affectionately granted, and Buddha, in the presence of a large assembly, pronounced them blessed and happy amongst all men and women. The son of the ruler of the country where these things happened was, to his great affliction, childless. He invited Buddha to come and partake of his hospitality in his house. The offer was accepted. Great preparations were made for the reception of the illustrious visitor. The prince had some of his own clothes laid on the way that Buddha was to follow, in the hope that by treading over them he might communicate a certain virtue, whereby he would have the object of his earnest desire realised. On his arrival near the entrance of the house, Buddha stopped and refused to proceed farther. Meanwhile, he beckoned Ananda to remove the clothes. This was done accordingly, to the prince's deep disappointment. After the meal, Gaudama explained to him that he and his wife during a former existence had lived on eggs and had killed many birds. Their present barrenness was the just punishment of their former trespassing; but their actual good dispositions having atoned for the past transgressions, they would be blessed with children. Both were overjoyed at this news. They believed in Buddha, obtained the state of Thautapan, and thereby entered into the current of perfection. Their faith in Buddha's word procured for them so happy a result. During all the time that elapsed after the rain, Buddha travelled through the country, engaged on his usual benevolent errand, and converting many among men and Nats. In the country of Garurit, in a village of pounhas called Magoulia, the head man, one of the richest in the place, had a daughter whose beauty equalled that of a daughter of Nats. She had been in vain asked in marriage by princes, nobles, and pounhas. The proud damsel had rejected every offer. On the day that her father saw Gaudama, he was struck with his manly beauty and meek deportment. He said within himself: "This man shall be a proper match for my daughter." On his return home he communicated his views to his wife. On the following day, the daughter having put on her choicest dress and richest apparels, they all three went with a large retinue to the Dzetawon monastery. Admitted to the presence of Buddha, the father asked for his daughter the favour of being allowed to attend on him. Without returning a word of reply, or giving the least sign of acceptance or refusal, Buddha rose up and withdrew to a small distance, leaving behind him on the floor the print of one of his feet. The pounha's wife, well skilled in the science of interpreting wonderful signs, saw at a glance that the marks on the print indicated a man no longer under the control of passions, but a sage emancipated from the thraldom of concupiscence. She communicated her views to her husband, who had the impudence to go to Buddha's presence and renew the same offer. Buddha meekly replied: "Pounha, I neither accept nor decline your offer; in your turn, listen to what I have to say." He then went on to relate how he had left the world, resisted Manh's temptation, lived in solitude for six years, and freed himself from the net of passions. He concluded by stating that, having become a Buddha, he had for ever conquered all passions. At the conclusion of the instruction, both father and mother became established in the state of Thautapan. The damsel was highly offended at the refusal she experienced, and retained a strong feeling of hatred towards him who had declined her proffered favours. Her father took her into the Kothambi country, where she was offered to the ruler, who, smitten with her charms, elevated her to the rank of first queen. In the country of Kothambi, there lived three rich men. These three men fed during the rainy season every year five hundred hermits, who came from the Himalaya range for the purpose of obtaining their maintenance. These charitable laymen went over to Wethalie for the purpose of trade. There they met Buddha, and earnestly pressed him to come to their country and preach the law. The invitation was accepted. They returned home, and built for the accommodation of the illustrious visitor each of them one monastery. When all was ready, Buddha went to Kothambi, attended by five hundred disciples. He spent there the ninth season. During his stay he dwelt by turns in each of the three monasteries, and was abundantly supported by the rich man in whose monastery he took his abode. In the country of Kothambi there were as yet few disciples or believers in Buddha; but the number of holders of false doctrines was exceedingly great. Secretly supported by the first queen, and actuated by jealousy against the new-comer, they reviled him and his disciples in every possible way, and did their utmost to destroy in public opinion his rising fame. Whenever they met Buddha's disciples, they abused them with the coarsest language. Unable to bear any longer so many insults, Ananda, in the name of his brethren, went to Buddha, and asked him to remove to some other place, where they would receive a becoming treatment. "But," said Buddha, "if we be ill-treated in the new place we go to, what is to be done?" "We shall proceed to some other place," replied Ananda. "But," retorted Buddha, "if in that new place we be likewise reviled, what then?" "We shall," replied Ananda, "remove to some other place." Buddha remained silent for awhile, and, casting a gentle glance on Ananda, said to him: "A little patience will save us the trouble of so many travels, and certainly procure for us here what we may perhaps vainly look for anywhere else. By patience and endurance the wise man conquers all his enemies. Behold the war-elephant; he plunges into the thickest of the raging conflict, regardless of the darts and arrows flying in every direction, and carries all before him. I, too, the most excellent Buddha, shall certainly stay here, diligently preach the most excellent law, and perseveringly labour to disentangle men from the net of passions. In no way shall I care for the abuses they may pour on me and my disciples." Not long after this a trifling accident kindled the fire of dissension among the members of the assembly. The subject was, as usual, of a trifling nature. It was concerning a point of discipline of scarcely any importance, infringed unintentionally by a Rahan. He was accused by one of his brethren of having committed a sin. But he replied that, having done an act in which his will had not participated, he did not consider himself guilty. Each disputant attracted to his party some religious who supported his view of the case. The Kothambi Rahans seem to have been the cause of the disunion which prevailed in the community, and soon, like a devouring flame, extended to the female portion of the assembly. In vain Gaudama interfered, and exhorted the two parties to patience, union, and charity. In his presence the parties were silent, but in his absence the quarrel grew worse. At last his entreaties were unheeded, and discord continued to rend asunder the bond of unity. Disgusted with such a state of things, Buddha preached to the most distinguished members of the assembly the blessings of peace and concord. Such men as Baddia, Kimila, and Anourouddha, treasured up in their heart the instructions of their great master. But others continued the dispute. Meanwhile he resolved to separate himself for a time from all company, and to go to a lonely spot to enjoy the happiness of peace and meditation. He shaped his course towards the village of Palelayaka, where he received his food, and went into a grove of sala-trees, to fix his residence at the foot of one of those trees. The villagers, hearing of his intention, hastened to the spot, and built a hermit's hut for his use, and promised to supply him daily with his food. It was in this place that, delighting in the contemplation of unclouded truth, Gaudama spent the tenth season alone. The rich men of the Kothambi country, hearing that Buddha had departed because of the dissension that took place among the Rahans, became indignant. They openly declared their fixed intent of refusing to give anything for the maintenance of the Rahans, until they agreed among themselves, and became reconciled with their teacher. The timely threat had the desired effect. The disputants felt the unpleasant seriousness of their uneasy position. They could hold on no longer. The Rahans came to an agreement among themselves, and promised that after the season they would go to Buddha and solicit his pardon. In the forest of Paleliaka there lived a certain elephant, much advanced in merits, which went to Buddha, and, during three months, ministered to all his wants, as a most affectionate and devoted disciple would do towards a beloved master. The three months of Lent being completed, the rich man Anatapein made earnest inquiries with Ananda, respecting the place Buddha had withdrawn to, and charged him to invite the great preacher to come back to Thawattie, and live as usual in the Dzetawon monastery. Complying with the pious wishes of the rich man, Ananda took with himself five hundred Rahans, and went to the solitude of Paleliaka. He was likewise followed by the five hundred refractory Rahans of Kothambi, who had come to Wethalie. The ruler of the country and Anatapein had refused at first to receive them. But the prohibition had been removed on account of their repentance. He approached alone the place where Buddha was living. After the usual prostrations, Gaudama inquired whether he had come alone. He replied that there were with him many of his faithful disciples and the Kothambi Rahans. The latter came with the express purpose of asking his pardon, and a firm resolution to yield henceforward a perfect obedience to all his commands. Buddha desired them to appear in his presence. They came, were there well received, and their misbehaviour was forgiven. Gaudama explained to them the great advantage of shunning bad company and of living in retirement. The hearers were fully converted and established in the state of Thautapan. Buddha, on his return to Wethalie, continued preaching in every direction, and led to the deliverance a great number of men, Nats, and Brahmas. The stay in the Dzetawon monastery was not very long. Buddha went into the Magatha country, to a pounha village, named Nala. Not far from that village there is the Deckinagiri, or southern mountain, with a monastery. In that place Buddha spent the eleventh season.[2] His supporters were the pounhas of the village. The chief occupation of those men was the tillage of the fields. Gaudama took a particular pleasure during his daily walks in conversing with them, when he met them engaged in their daily labours. One day Buddha went into the fields, where he met a pounha, with whom he began to converse, in the intention of ultimately preaching to him the holy law. He spoke at first on the subject of his daily labour, his bullocks, his plough, the seed, and the harvest, which supplied the pounha and his family with their daily food during the year. He added: "I, too, am a labourer, provided with the seed and all the implements necessary for carrying on tillage." The pounha, surprised at what he heard, asked Buddha in what place he had left his bullocks, the seed, the plough, &c. The latter coolly replied: "All these things are with me at present. Hearken, O pounha, to what I am about to state. The seed is that fervent desire, that benevolent disposition, which prompted me at the foot of the Buddha Deipinkara to ask for the Buddhaship: it is the science which I have gathered under the tree Bodi. The rain water is that uninterrupted series of good works performed by me, until I have become a Buddha. They have been as the means of watering the good seed which was in me. The knowledge, or science, and wisdom are as the yoke, as well as the plough-shaft. The heart, or the knowing principle which is in me, represents the reins that serve to guide the bullocks. The teeth of the plough represent the diligence that must be used in attending to the eradicating of the principle of demerits and of bad works. The plough-handle represents the guiding principle of the law, which enables me to remove all that is bad, and promote what is good. The food which you, O pounha, derive from your exertions, represents the pure relish which is tasted by him who is bent on avoiding evil and doing good. When you make use of the plough, you cut or uproot all bad weeds. So it is with him who is penetrated with the full meaning of the four great truths; he cuts and uproots from himself the wicked inclinations and low propensities that are in him. When the labour of the field is over, you unyoke your bullocks and leave them to go whithersoever they please; so it is with the wise man. By application to invigorating the principle of good that leads to perfection, he lets go the opposite principle which gives rise to all imperfections. The bullocks have to work hard to complete the work of tillage. So the sage has to struggle hard, to till perfectly and cultivate thoroughly the soil of his own being, and reach the happy state of Neibban. The husbandman who labours so much for bringing his field into a position to receive the seed, and in every way to favour its growth, is imitated by the true sage who endeavours to free himself from the miseries attending existence, to advance in the way of merits by the practice of good works, and who thirsts after the happy condition of the perfect. He who works in the field is sometimes disappointed, and feels occasionally the pangs of hunger. He who works in the field of wisdom is exempt from all miseries and afflictions. He eats the fruit of his labour. He is fully satiated when he beholds Neibban. It is in this manner, O pounha, that I am a true husbandman, and am always provided with all the implements necessary for the tillage of man's soul." The pounha, delighted with such doctrine, became a convert, and professed his belief in Buddha, the law, and the assembly. Subsequently he applied for admittance into the assembly, and by energetic efforts in the arduous work of meditation, he became at last a Rahanda. When the rains were over, Buddha travelled through the country, preaching the most excellent law, with the happiest results. He went to the town of Satiabia, in the Kosala country. There he received from a pounha of Waritzaba an invitation to go to that place. The invitation was graciously accepted. In that town he spent the twelfth season. A great many pounhas were enlightened and converted by professing their firm adherence to the three precious things. The vile Manh Nat did his utmost to thwart the beneficial results of Buddha's preachings. A great dearth prevailing in the country, he did all that he could to starve the most excellent Buddha and all his followers. But he was frustrated in his iniquitous design by the charity of five hundred horse merchants, who had come from Outharapata, and were then staying in Waritzaba. Buddha, leaving this country, shaped his course through the great Mantala country; he travelled by the shortest route, a distance of 500 youdzanas. He started on the day after the full moon of Tabodway, and spent nearly five months in this voyage. He reached the banks of the Ganges at Gayagati, where he crossed the mighty stream and went to Benares. He had not been long in that city, when he recrossed the Ganges and went to Wethalie, dwelling in the Gootagarathala monastery. Thence he went into Thawattie, preaching through all the places he visited. When he was in the Dzetawon monastery, he delivered the Maha Rahula instruction for the benefit of his son Rahula, who then was eighteen years old. FOOTNOTES [1] The religious edifices that are to be met with in all parts of Burmah deserve a particular notice. They are called dzedis in all the Buddhist writings of the Burmese, but the people generally speak of them under the appellation of Payas or Phras, which, in this instance, is merely a title of honour of a religious character. Dzedis, in the earliest days of Buddhism, were sacred tumuli raised upon a shrine, wherein relics of Buddha had been deposited. These structures were as so many lofty witnesses, bearing evidence to the presence of sacred and precious objects, intended to revive in the memory of the faithful the remembrance of Buddha, and foster in their hearts tender feelings of devotion and a glowing fervour for his religion. From the perusal of this legend, it will appear that dzedis were likewise erected on the tombs of individuals who, during their lifetime, had obtained great distinction by their virtues and spiritual attainments among the members of the assembly. Buddha himself ordered that a monument should be built over the shrine containing the relics of the two great disciples, Thariputra and Maukalan. In Burmah, no dzedis of great dimensions and proportions have ever been erected on the ashes of distinguished Phongyies. In some parts, however, particularly in the upper country, there may be seen here and there some small dzedis, a few feet high, erected on the spot where have been deposited the remains of some saintly personages. These monuments are little noticed by the people, though, on certain occasions, a few offerings of flowers, tapers, &c., are made around and in front of them. Similar kinds of religious edifices have been built sometimes also to become a receptacle of the Pitagat, or collection of the holy scriptures. One of the finest temples of Ceylon was devoted to that purpose. There was also one in the ancient city of Ava, but I am not aware that there is any of this kind at Amarapoora. Finally, dzedis have been erected for the sole purpose of harbouring statues of Gaudama; but there is every reason to believe that this practice gained ground in subsequent ages. When a fervent Buddhist, impelled by the desire of satisfying the cravings of his piety and devotion, wished to build a religious monument, and could not procure relics, he then remained contented by supplying the deficiency with images of Buddha representing that eminent personage, in attitudes of body that were to remind Buddhists of some of the most striking actions of his life. In many instances, dzedis have been built up, not even for the sake of sheltering statues, but for the pious purpose of reminding the people of the holy relics of Buddha, and, as they used to say, for kindling in the soul a tender feeling of affectionate reverence for the person of Buddha and his religion. If what is put forward as a plea for building pagodas be founded on conviction and truth, we must conclude that the inhabitants of the valley of the Irrawaddy are most devotedly religious, as the mania for building dzedis has been, and even now is, carried to such a pitch as to render almost fabulous the number of religious buildings to be seen on an extent of above seven hundred miles as far as Bhamo. As Buddhism was imported from India into Eastern Asia there is no doubt that the style of architecture adopted in the erection of religious edifices came from the same quarter. To the native genius of the Burmese we may allow the merit of ornamental architecture for the great monasteries, and a few details of the exterior decorations of the religious monuments; but no one will take offence at refusing to the tribes that occupy the basin of the Irrawaddy the merit of originating the plan of such monuments as those to be seen in some parts of the country. It is much to their credit that they have been able to raise such mighty fabrics with the imperfect knowledge they possess and the very limited means at their disposal. The resemblance that exists between the much-defaced Buddhist monuments yet to be met with in some parts of India and at Java, and those now studding the banks of the Irrawaddy, leaves no doubt respecting the origin of the shape and form of such monuments. At first sight, the traveller in Burmah believes that there is a great variety in the shape and architecture of pagodas. He is easily led astray by many fantastical ornaments that have been added by inexperienced natives to religious monuments. After, however, a close examination of those edifices, it seems that they can be arranged into three distinct classes, to which those presenting minor differences may be referred. The first class comprises those which have a cone-like appearance, though much enlarged in the direction of the base. These are without niches, or rather ought to be without niches, as the small ones to be seen added to those monuments indicate that they are no essential appendage of the building, but rather the fanciful and tasteless work of some devotees. The pagodas of Rangoon, Pegu and Prome offer the finest specimens of this order of edifices. The second class includes those of a dome-like shape. They are not common in Burmah. The finest and grandest specimen is that of the Kaong-hmoo-dau, or great meritorious work, situated west of the ancient city of Tsagain. In the third class we may place all the pagodas that approximate to the temple form; that is to say, all those that offer the shape of a more or less considerable rectangle, with a large hall in the centre and several galleries running throughout. Upon this rectangle a conical structure is raised, ending as usual with the tee or umbrella. The most remarkable and perfect specimens of this kind are to be seen at Pagan, which may be aptly styled the City of Pagodas. The cone-shaped pagoda invariably rests on a quadrangular basis a few feet high. The body of the cone in its lower part is an hexagon or octagon, broad at first, then gradually and regularly decreasing to two-thirds of its height. Upon it rises the regular cone, which ends in a point covered with the gilt umbrella. The architectural ornaments of such structures are circular, bold and round lines or mouldings; above this, to the place where the cone begins, are sculptures, representing leaves shooting from the middle part, one half upwards and the other half downwards. That part is often divested of such ornaments, as is the case with the Shoaydagon. On the sides of the cone are horizontal lines grouped together; each group is separated by a considerable distance, then comes a sculptured foliage, different from the one already mentioned, but disposed in a like manner. In the middle of the four sides of the base, particularly in the one facing the East, the Burmese have introduced the practice of making small niches for receiving the statues representing Buddha in a cross-legged position. A portico leads to them. On the four angles of the base they likewise place griffins or sometimes fantastic figures of monsters. Small dzedis are often disposed on the lower parts of the hexagon or octagon. This kind of pagoda being naturally destitute of all ornaments, and standing over a tomb or a shrine, as a pillar that has gradually assumed the shape above described, is a very ancient one, and probably coeval with the earliest Buddhist religious monuments. The second class of religious edifices is that of those that exhibit a dome-like appearance. They are rather uncommon in Burmah. They rest on a square basis. The lower part is adorned with a few mouldings, but the greatest part offers a perfectly even superficies. The umbrella that is placed on them partakes somewhat of the appearance of the monument it is destined to crown. It considerably expands in the horizontal direction, and has a very ungraceful appearance. The Kaong-hmoo-dau in the neighbourhood of Tsagain rests on a basis about 18 or 20 feet high; the dome, according to an inscription, is 153 feet high, the diameter, at the lowest part, is nearly 200 feet. The whole was formerly gilt. The four sides of the square are lined with small niches, each tenanted by a small statue of Gaudama. Separated from the square by an open and well-paved gallery that runs all round the edifice, are disposed in a row eight hundred and two small pillars of sandstone, about 6 feet high, with their upper part perforated, so as to afford room sufficient to receive a lamp on festival days. Splendid must be the effect produced during a dark night by so many lamps, pouring a flood of light that illuminates on all sides the massive edifice. Whether the monument was built about three hundred years ago, as stated to the writer by one of the guardians, or, as it is most probable, only repaired and adorned at that time, certain it is that this kind of religious edifice is very ancient, and very likely not inferior in antiquity to those above referred to. Another of a similar form, but of much smaller dimensions, is to be seen at Bhamo, not far from the eastern gate. The third class of pagodas comprises all those that are generally of a square form, not made of a solid masonry, but with openings or doors, a room, galleries, &c., for receiving statues of Gaudama. They are all surmounted with the usual conical structure, which is, it seems, the essential appendage to all dzedis. These edifices, in my opinion, are not to be considered as tumuli or topes, but rather as places of worship, and sanctuaries for the reception of the statues of Gaudama. The monuments are, I suspect, of a comparative modern origin; they have not the plainness and simplicity of the tumuli which agree so well with the simplicity of the religious form of worship of primitive Buddhism. They are not made to answer the purpose for which dzedis were primitively raised. They must have been erected at times when Buddhist worship, emerging from its primeval sternness of form, assumed proportions and developments congenial to the taste and wants of large religious communities. This class of temples offers a great variety of forms as to the size, dimensions, and details of architecture. But they may be all brought to this general outline. From the square body of the temple diverge, in the direction of the four points of the compass, porticoes; the one facing the east is always the largest and best adorned; sometimes there is but one portico, that of the east, and there are only doors in the middle of the three other sides. From these porticoes the galleries converge towards the centre of the temple, where are statues. In the large and magnificent pagodas of Pagan, galleries with vaults in the pointed style run all round the building. Some of those stupendous structures have two stories, and it is only on the second that the conical part rests, which is the essential complement of every religious building. On one of the middle-sized pagodas rises, instead of a cone, an obelisk, with ornaments that appear to resemble hieroglyphic figures. Some of those obelisks swell considerably towards the middle of their height. Great was the surprise and astonishment of the writer, when he observed in the same place, among the prodigious number of pagodas, in a more or less advanced state of decay, one, not considerable by its dimensions, nor in a much-ruined condition, that exhibited the solitary instance of a regular pyramid. [2] The few particulars that have been gathered respecting the mode that Buddha followed in disseminating his doctrines, exhibit him in the light of a zealous and indefatigable preacher. We see him passing from one place to another with the sole purpose of instructing the ignorant and pointing out to them the way leading to the deliverance. Bebar and Oude appear to have been the seat of his labours, and the scene on which he acted in behalf of all, without any distinction of condition, caste, or sex. Individuals in the humblest walks of life, men engaged in wicked practices, women of an abandoned character, were all, to an equal degree, the object of his tender solicitude. They were all summoned to come to his feet and partake in the blessings that he had in store for them. Gaudama was to an eminent degree an earnest and fervent propagandist. This is a striking feature in his character, which distinguishes him not only from all his contemporaries, but also from all the philosophers that have appeared throughout the Indian peninsula. All these sages aimed at becoming the heads of schools, but none of them thought of promulgating a code of morals intended for the whole human race. Gaudama has the honour of being the first who, with enlarged views, looked upon his fellow-men as equally entitled to the benefit of his instructions. His love of all men prompted him to undergo all sorts of fatigue, to procure for them what he imagined to be a great boon. In making this statement we have no intention to pass an opinion on the doctrines of the founder of Buddhism; we merely bring forward to the notice of the reader a peculiar characteristic of that sage, which, in our humble opinion, helps to account for the extraordinary spread of Buddhism from the banks of the Oxus to the Japanese archipelago. The tenets of that creed have become popular, because they were intended for all. False though they be, particularly in what has a reference to dogmas, they were accepted by the masses, because there were no other proffered to them. The disciples of Gaudama must have been well received in the various places they went to, for they showed a disposition of mind quite unknown in those days, viz., a lively interest in the welfare of all. This zeal, which appeared so conspicuously in Gaudama and during the first ages of Buddhism, has become all but totally extinct. There is no desire on the part of those who in our days follow that creed to propagate its tenets among other nations or tribes. CHAPTER XI. _Voyage to Tsalia -- Instructions to Meggia -- Raoula is made a professed religious -- Manahan's questions to Buddha -- Misbehaviour of Thouppabuda -- Questions proposed by Nats in the Dzetawon monastery -- Conversion of a Biloo -- Episode of Thirima at Radzagio -- Attention paid to a poor pounha and to a weaver's daughter on account of their faith -- In the twentieth season, appointment of Ananda to the stewardship -- Conversion of a famous robber._ After a rather short stay in Thawattie, Buddha went to the town of Tsalia. The inhabitants built for him a monastery on a hill not far from the town, and liberally supplied him with all that he wanted. Pleased with the good reception the people gave him, Gaudama spent on that spot the thirteenth season. He went to receive his food in the village of Dzantoo. Thence travelling through the country, he reached the banks of the river Kimikila and enjoyed himself in a beautiful grove of mango-trees. The disciple Meggia, being too much taken up with the beauty of the place, eagerly wished to remain here for some time. As a punishment for such an inordinate attachment to a particular spot, he who had renounced the world and the gratification of passions, felt on a sudden a strange change pass over him. A flood of concupiscence inundated his soul. Buddha, who saw what was taking place in Meggia, gave him an instruction on contempt for the things of this world, and entirely cured him of his great spiritual distemper. Thence he proceeded to Thawattie into the Dzetawon monastery, where he spent the fourteenth season. The great disciple Thariputra, with five hundred religious, was spending the season in a neighbouring village. The people were so much pleased with him and his company, that they offered to each of them a piece of yellow silk. Some religious, jealous of the great disciple, came to Buddha and accused him of covetousness. Buddha fully justified his great companion and commended the liberality of the donors, who had thus an opportunity of gratifying their liberality and gaining merits. The Thamane Raoula was then twenty years old. Having reached the canonical age, he was elevated to the dignity of Patzin. The young religious could scarcely defend himself from a certain feeling of vanity on account of his father's dignity and his own personal mien and bearing, which he was very fond of admiring. Buddha was intimately acquainted with what was going on in Raoula's soul. He preached to him the contempt of self and of all varieties of form. The instruction was so impressive that it led the young hearer to the state of Rahanda. On a certain night when Raoula was sleeping near the door of Gaudama's private apartment, Manh Nat, wishing to frighten the young Rahanda, created the likeness of an elephant, which, keeping his trunk over his head, suddenly made a frightful noise. Buddha, who was inside, saw clearly that this was only a temptation of the vile Manh. He said to him, "O wretched one, are you not aware that fear is no longer to be found in him who has become a Rahanda?" Manh, being discovered, vanished away, covered with shame and confusion at the abortiveness of his malicious attempt. In the same year, Buddha went to Kapilawot, which is in the Thekka country, and took up his residence in the Nigranda monastery, situated close to the banks of the river Rohani. At that place he spent the fifteenth season. On a certain day, his cousin Mahanan, the son of Thoodaudana, came to the monastery, and having paid his respects to his illustrious relative, took the liberty to propose to him the four following questions:--1. In what consists the fulfilment of the religious duties? 2. What is meant by the religious disposition? 3. What is the real renouncing? 4. What is the true knowledge? Buddha replied in the following manner: "The fulfilment of the religious duties consists in observing carefully the five precepts obligatory on all men. The religious disposition is but a loving inclination and affection for all that refers to Buddha and the law that he has published. He who possesses it experiences a continual longing for the acquisition of merits. The renouncing is that disposition a man is habitually in when he finds his pleasure in parting with his riches for the purpose of relieving the needy and bestowing alms on the members of the assembly. Finally, wisdom consists in making one's self perfectly acquainted with what can procure merits for the present and the future; under its influence man acts up to that knowledge, and also attends with the utmost diligence to what may put an end to the law of miseries." Even among his nearest relatives, Buddha was doomed to meet with the bitterest enemies. Thouppabuda, who was at once his uncle and his father-in-law, bore to him a deadly hatred, and secretly harboured in his heart a sentiment of revenge, for two principal reasons, because his daughter Yathaudara had been abandoned by Gaudama, when he left his palace and began the life of an ascetic; and also for having admitted his own son Dewadat among the members of the assembly. Having been informed that on the following day Buddha would direct his steps towards a certain quarter of the town to beg his food, Thouppabuda partook largely of intoxicating liquor, to nerve himself for the execution of the design he had in his mind, and went out in the direction in which Gaudama was expected to come. As soon as he saw him drawing near, he planted himself in the middle of the road, barring the passage, and loading his great relative with abuses. Buddha stopped awhile without showing the least sign of emotion. Then turning to Ananda, he said, "Great is the crime of my uncle; seven days hence he shall be swallowed up alive by the earth at the foot of the great staircase of his palace." On this fearful prediction being reported to Thouppabuda, he laughed and stated that he would stay during eight days in the upper story of his palace, and belie his nephew's prediction. Despite the precautions that he took, the fatal prediction was literally fulfilled. The unfortunate unrepenting prince saw the earth burst open under his feet, and he was precipitated to the very bottom of the Awidzi hell. Buddha took advantage of the awful punishment that had befallen a prince of his family to exhort Mahanan to seek a firm asylum in the three precious things, to bear a sincere love and an affectionate fondness to all that related to the law and its practices. Up to the present period of his life, Buddha had reserved to himself the right of preaching the law to and extolling the merits of those who had brought him his food, after having partaken of their liberal donation. This instruction may be properly called the sermon of thanksgiving. It is called Anou-mau-dana. Now he allowed his disciples to do the like, and repay the generosity of their benefactors by distributing unto them the knowledge of truth. At that time Buddha preached the four laws of A-sa-wan, or the four bands that retain a being in the vortex of existences. From Kapilawot Buddha returned to Thawattie in the Dzetawon monastery. At that time a Nat had proposed four questions to his companions which they had not been able to answer. They were subsequently communicated to all the denizens of the six seats of Nats, but no one had been able to solve the difficulty. Not knowing what to do, they agreed to refer the particulars to the most excellent Buddha, then in the Dzetawon monastery. A deputation was forthwith sent to him with the view of proposing to him the puzzle, and entreating him to condescend to give the much-desired solution. The members of the deputation having duly paid their respects, said to him, "O most excellent Phra, which is the best thing to be bestowed in alms? Which is the most savoury and relishing of all things? Which is the most pleasurable? Which is the best and the fittest thing to put an end to passions?" To these four questions Buddha answered by one word--"The law." Addressing himself both to the Nats and to his assembled disciples, he added, "The giving of alms, though good in itself, cannot introduce a being into the path that leads to the deliverance. The law alone can afford such a benefit. The preaching of the law, and the exertions in communicating its knowledge to others, are therefore the most excellent alms. All that in this world confers pleasure to the senses is but a means to plunge man into the vortex of existences, and thereby into all miseries. On the contrary, the hearing of the law rejoices the heart to such an extent as often to open a spring of joyful tears; it destroys concupiscence, and leads gradually out of the whirlpool of existences. It establishes man in the state of Arahat, which is the end of all passions. The law, therefore, is the most savoury, the most pleasing thing, leading beings to the cessation of all miseries. You, my beloved disciples, exert yourselves in making known by your preaching the said law to all beings. This is the most excellent alms that you can bestow on the beings that inhabit the three different states of men, Nats, and Brahmas." Buddha soon left Thawattie and went to Alawee. A Biloo was in the habit of eating every day some children of that place. Owing to the ravenous and horrible appetite of the monster, all the children had been eaten up; there remained only the child of the king, who was on the following day to be given over to him. Buddha reviewed, as usual, on a certain morning the condition of all beings. He saw the sad position of the king of Alawee and of his son. He resolved to proffer assistance to both, and also to convert the Biloo. He arrived in the country of Alawee, where he was received with every mark of respect. He forthwith went into the forest where the monster lived. At first he met with a most determined and violent opposition. But, opposing to his enraged antagonist meekness, patience, and kindness, Buddha gradually softened that terrible nature. Concealing affectedly the change which was taking place in him, almost against his perverse inclination, the Biloo said to Buddha, "I have put certain questions to many famous ascetics, but they have not been able to answer them. On seeing their utter incapacity, I have seized them, torn their bodies in pieces, and flung their quivering limbs into the Ganges. Such shall be your fate, O Gaudama, if your science fails you on this occasion. By what means can a man get out of the stream or current of passions? How can he cross over the sea of existences? How can he free himself from the evil influence? How shall he be able to purify himself from the smallest stain of concupiscence?" Buddha replied: "Listen, O Biloo, to my words; my answer shall fully satisfy you. By faith in and affection for the three precious things, man escapes from the current of passions. He who applies himself with a diligent earnestness to the study of the law of merits passes over the sea of existences. He who strives to practise the works that procure merits frees himself from evil influence, and from the attending miseries. Finally, the knowledge of the four meggas or ways to perfection procures perfect exemption from the least remnant of concupiscence." The Biloo, delighted with what he had heard, believed in Buddha, and soon was firmly established in the state of Thautapan. On that spot, where so glorious and unexpected a conversion had taken place, a monastery was erected. Buddha spent herein the sixteenth season. As usual, myriads of Nats and men who had heard his preachings obtained the deliverance. From Alawee Buddha went to Radzagio, and spent the seventeenth season in the Weloowon monastery. During that season a famous courtesan, named Thirima, sister of the celebrated physician Dzewaka, renowned all over the country for her wit and the incomparable charms of her person, wished to show her liberality to the disciples of Buddha. Every day a certain number of them went to her dwelling to receive, along with their food, abundant alms. One of the pious mendicants, in an unguarded moment, moved by an unholy curiosity, looked at her, and was instantly smitten by her charms. The mortal wound was widened and deepened by a fortuitous occurrence. On a certain day Thirima fell sick. But she did not relax in her daily work of charity. Weak though she was, and in her _negligée_, she insisted on the mendicants being introduced into her room, that she might pay her respects to them. The unfortunate lover was among the company. Her incomparable charms were heightened by her plain dress and drooping attitude. The poor lover went back with his brethren to the monastery. The arrow had penetrated to the core of the heart. He refused to take any food, and during some days completely estranged himself from the society of his brethren. While the intestine war raged in his bosom, Thirima died. Buddha, desirous to cure the moral distemper of the poor religious, invited King Pimpasara to be present when he should go with his disciples to see the remains of Thirima. On the fourth day after Thirima's death he went to her house with his disciples. There her body was laid before them, with a livid appearance, and all swollen. Countless worms already issuing out through the apertures, rendered the sight loathsome, whilst a horrible stench almost forbade a standing close to it. Buddha coolly asked the king, "What is that object which is stretched before us?" "Thirima's body," replied the king. "When she was alive," retorted Buddha, "people paid a thousand pieces of silver to enjoy her for a day. Would any one take her now for half that sum?" "No," replied the king; "in all my kingdom there is not one man who would offer the smallest sum to have her remains; nay, no one could be found who would be willing to carry her to any distance unless compelled to do so." Buddha, addressing the assembly, said, "Behold all that remains of Thirima, who was so famous for her personal attractions! What has become of that form which deceived and enslaved so many? All is subjected to mutability; there is nothing real in this world." On hearing the instruction, eighty-two thousand persons obtained the knowledge of the four truths. The Rahan who, because of his passion, would not eat his food, was entirely cured of his moral distemper, and firmly established in the state of Thautapan. All this happened whilst Buddha spent his seventeenth season in the bamboo-grove monastery. When the season was over, he went, as usual, to preach in every direction, and returned to Thawattie, to the Dzetawon monastery. His stay in that place was not long. He undertook another voyage to Alawee. He was received with the greatest demonstrations of joy by the people, who gladly ministered to all his wants. On a certain day, when he was to receive large offerings from the people and preach to them, it happened on that occasion that a poor pounha, who was very desirous to hear his instructions, was informed at an early hour of that very day that one of his cows had gone astray from the herd and could not be found. Hereupon he felt greatly aggrieved. He was afraid to let go the golden opportunity to hear the instruction. However, he trusted that by making the utmost diligence he would be back in time. He ran in all haste until he found the strayed animal and brought it back. It was nearly midday when he returned to the town. Though pressed with the pangs of hunger and overwhelmed with fatigue, he went straight forward to the place where the congregation was assembled. The offerings had been brought a long while ago; the people out of respect stood motionless, with their hands joined, in the presence of Buddha, who, contrary to the general expectation, remained perfectly silent. With his supernatural vision he had seen the perfect dispositions of the poor pounha. He would have him to share in the blessing of his instruction. As soon as the pounha had taken his place among the hearers, Buddha, casting a benevolent glance towards him, beckoned him to come near his person. Meantime, he ordered some of his disciples to bring the poor man some food, because he was very hungry; and he would not condescend to begin the instruction till the man had been relieved from the pangs of hunger by a good meal. When the preaching was over, several Rahans ridiculed the attention paid by their master to a common man. Buddha, knowing their innermost thoughts, spoke to them by way of an instructive rebuke: "Beloved sons, you seem to be surprised at my behaviour towards that poor pounha. But I had perceived at once the super-excellent dispositions of that man, his craving for the holy law, and his lively and strong faith in me, which prompted him to lay no stress on hunger, nor on fatigue, and to make no account of his personal discomforts, in order to satisfy his earnest longings for the law." On that occasion an immense number of hearers were converted. Buddha went to a monastery built on a hill, near the town of Tsalia, where he spent the eighteenth season. In that town there was a weaver, who had one daughter, who followed the same profession as her father. The damsel was very desirous to hear Buddha's preachings; but on the day when Buddha was to come into the town to deliver instructions to the people, it happened she had to finish the weaving of a piece of cloth that was urgently required by the owner. She then said to herself: I will exert myself with so much diligence that I will be enabled both to finish my work and listen to my teacher's preaching. She set instantly to work, wound up the thread on the quill, and took it with her, to carry it to the shed where her father's loom was. On her way to the shed, she had to pass near the place where a motionless congregation stood before Buddha, eagerly waiting for the words that were to fall from his mouth. She laid aside her quill, loaded with thread, and squatted timidly behind the last rank of the congregation. Buddha had seen at a glance the perfect dispositions of the young girl. It was chiefly for her benefit that he had undertaken a long journey and come over to that place. As soon as he saw her, he made her draw nearer to him. The injunction was joyfully complied with. With an encouraging tone of voice, Buddha asked her whence she came and whither she was going. The damsel modestly answered that she knew whence she came, and also whither she was going; at the same time, she added that she was ignorant of the place she came from, and of the place she was going to. On hearing this apparently contradictory answer, many of the hearers could scarcely refrain from giving vent to indignant feelings. But Buddha, who had fathomed the girl's wisdom, prayed them to be silent. Then, turning towards his young interlocutor, he desired her to explain the meaning of her answer. She said: "I know that I come from my father's house, and that I go to our loom-shed; but what existence I have come from to this present one, this I am entirely ignorant of. I am likewise uncertain about the existence that shall follow this one. About these two points I am completely ignorant; my mind can discover neither the one nor the other." Buddha extolled the wisdom of the damsel, and forthwith began his instruction. At the conclusion, she was firmly grounded in the state of Thautapan. She withdrew immediately, took up her quill, and went to the shed. It happened that her father was asleep, with his hand on the loom's handle. She approached the loom, and began to arrange the thread. Her father, awaking suddenly, pushed inadvertently the part of the loom his hand was laid upon, and struck his daughter in the chest. She fell down and instantly expired. Overwhelmed with grief, the unfortunate father poured a flood of tears over the lifeless corpse of his daughter. Unable to console himself, he rose up and went to Buddha, in the hope of receiving some comfort at his feet. Buddha affectionately received him, and, by his good instructions, relieved him from the load that pressed on his heart, and gradually enlightening his mind by the preaching of the four great truths, he gently infused into his heart and his soul that sweet joy which wisdom alone can impart. The weaver resolved to abandon the world, asked for admittance into the assembly, and not long after became a Rahanda. This conversion was followed by that of a great many others. Buddha returned to Radzagio, and spent the nineteenth season in the Weloowon monastery. The season being over, Buddha went into the districts of Magatha, preaching in all places. Previous to that time, there lived at Radzagio a rich man who had an only daughter, who was brought up with the greatest care and the utmost fondness. She lived in the upper apartments of a splendid dwelling. On a certain day, at an early hour in the morning, she was looking on the people that flocked from the country into the town. She saw among many a young hunter driving a cart loaded with venison. She much admired his fine, energetic appearance. She was instantly enamoured of him, and made all the necessary arrangements to elope with him. She succeeded, married the hunter, and had by him a large family. Passing on one day through a forest, the most excellent Buddha chanced to meet with a deer which was caught in the net of a hunter. Moved with feelings of commiseration, he helped the poor beast to get out of the meshes. After this benevolent action, he went to rest under a tree. The hunter soon made his appearance, and to his great dismay at once discovered that some one had deprived him of his prey. Whilst he was looking about, he saw Buddha, in his yellow dress, calmly resting under the shade of a large tree. "This," said the hunter to himself, "is the man who has done the mischief; I will make him pay dear for his undue interference." Hereupon he hastily took up an arrow and placed it on the bow, with the intention of shooting dead the evildoer. But despite his exertions, heightened by the thirst for revenge, he could not succeed; both his hands were seized with a sudden quivering, and his feet appeared as if nailed to the ground. He stood motionless in that attitude. Absorbed in meditation, Buddha was not aware what was going on so close to him. The sons of the hunter as well as their wives grew very much troubled that their father did not return at the usual hour from visiting his nets. They feared that some untoward accident had overtaken him. They armed themselves and went in search of him. They soon came to the spot where they saw the sad position of their father. At the same moment, perceiving a yellow-dressed individual, they hastily concluded, that, by the power of some charms, he had brought their father into this miserable condition. They made up their mind to kill him. But whilst they were preparing to put their cruel design into execution, their hands, suddenly benumbed, could not grasp the weapons, and they all stood motionless and speechless. Awaking at last from contemplation, Buddha saw the hunter and all his family standing before him. Taking compassion on them, he restored them to their ordinary condition, and preached to them. They all fell at his knees, craved his pardon, believed in him, and became fervent Upasakas. Buddha returned to Thawattie to spend the twentieth season in the Dzetawon monastery. It was at that period that there happened a remarkable change in the management of the domestic affairs of Gaudama. Up to the present time, no one among the religious had been specially appointed to attend on Buddha and administer to his wants. But some of them, as circumstances occurred, undertook the agreeable and honourable duty of serving him. However human nature will occasionally let appear, even in the best of men, some marks of its innate imperfections. On two occasions, the Rahans who followed Buddha and carried his mendicant's pot and a portion of his dress wished to go in one direction, whilst Buddha desired them to follow in another. They had the imprudence to part company with him. Both paid dearly for their disobedience. They fell into the hands of robbers, who took away all that they had, and beat them severely on the head. This twofold act of insubordination painfully affected Buddha. He summoned all the religious into his presence, and declared that, being old, he wished to appoint one of them to the permanent office of personal attendant on himself. Thariputra and Maukalan immediately tendered their services with a pious and loving earnestness. But Buddha declined to accept their offer, as well as that of the eighty principal disciples. The reason was, that their services were required for preaching to the people, and labouring with him for the dissemination of the true science among men. Some of the disciples urged Ananda to volunteer his services; but out of modesty he remained silent. Then he added that, should Buddha be willing to accept his humble services, he knew his heart's dispositions and his willingness to attend on him on all occasions; he had but to signify his good pleasure. As to him, he would be too happy to accept the office. Buddha expressed his readiness to confer on him the honourable employment. He was formally appointed and nominated Phra's attendant, and, during the twenty-five remaining seasons, he acted as the beloved and devoted attendant on Buddha's person. Through him alone visitors were ushered into Buddha's presence, and orders were communicated to the members of the assembly. Gaudama was then fifty-five years old. On a certain day he went to the village of Dzantoo for the purpose of collecting alms. Manh Nat, his inveterate foe, entered into the heart of all the villagers to prevent them from giving alms to the mendicant. He succeeded so well in his wicked design that no one noticed Gaudama's passage through the street, nor gave him alms. When he drew near to the gate, Manh stood by the side of the street, and asked him, with a sarcastic tone, how he felt under the pangs of hunger. Buddha replied to him, that he could, by entering into the state of perfect trance, remain, like the great Brahma, without using material food, feeding only, as it were, on the inward happiness created by the immediate sight of unclouded truth. Five hundred young virgins, who happened to return from the country into the place, prostrated themselves before Buddha, listened to his instructions, and reached the state of Thautapan. On leaving the place, Buddha happened to travel through a forest, which had become an object of terror to all the people of Kothala, as being the favourite haunt of Ougalimala, a notorious robber and murderer. The ruler of the country, Pasenadi, had heard from the windows of his palace the cries of his alarmed subjects. Despite the many remonstrances that were made concerning the dangers of such an attempt, Buddha went straight forward to the den of the formidable man, who, enraged at such presumptuous boldness, was preparing to make him pay dear for his intrusion. But he had to deal with an opponent that could not easily be frightened. To his threats and attempts to inflict harm Gaudama opposed the meekest composure, the mildest expressions, and an invincible patience. Softened by the kindness of his opponent, Ougalimala altered the tone of his voice, and showed signs of respect to Buddha. The latter, quickly perceiving the change that had taken place in the robber's soul, preached to him the law, and made of him a sincere convert. Coming out from the forest which had been the scene of so many crimes, he followed Buddha, with the behaviour of an humble disciple. The people of Kosala could scarcely give credit to the change that had taken place in Ougalimala. In a short time he became a Rahanda, and died not long after he had become perfect. The members of the assembly were, on a certain day, talking among themselves about the place he had probably migrated to. Buddha, who had overheard their conversation on this subject, said to them: "Beloved Bickus, the Rahan Ougalimala, who died a little while after his conversion, has reached the deliverance. His conversion was at once prompt and perfect. He was very wicked previous to his conversion, because he never cohabited except with wicked and perverse associates, the company of whom led him into all sorts of disorders. But he no sooner had the good fortune to meet me, hear my instructions, and converse with you, than he at once believed in my doctrine, adhered to me with all his might, and entered into the way leading to perfection. He laboured strenuously to destroy in himself the law of demerits, and thus rapidly reached the summit of perfection." CHAPTER XII. _Buddha is slandered in Thawattie -- Questions put to him by a pounha -- Story of Anatapein's daughter -- Conversion of a pounha whose navel emitted rays of light -- Blank in a great part of Buddha's life -- Story of Dewadat -- His jealousy towards Buddha -- His friendship with Prince Adzatathat -- His ambition -- His attempt to kill Buddha -- His miserable end._ While the most excellent Buddha was in the Dzetawon monastery, the heretics of Thawattie made another attempt to lower, nay, to destroy his reputation. They prevailed upon Thondarie, a woman entirely devoted to their interests, to spread the rumour that she had spent a night in the apartments of Buddha. When the calumny had been noised abroad, they suborned a gang of drunkards, to whom they promised a large sum of money, if they would do away with the instrument of the slander. They accordingly selected a favourable opportunity, killed Thondarie, and threw her body into a cluster of bushes close to the monastery. When the crime had been perpetrated, the heretics raised a cry all over the country inquiring about Thondarie. She could nowhere be found. Search was made in every direction, until at last, by the secret directions of their emissaries, the body was found on the spot where it had been apparently concealed. The party hostile to Buddha laid the crime at his door. The king of the country, urged on by them, ordered a strict inquiry to be made. The infamous trick was at last discovered in the following manner. The perpetrators of the deed happened to go into a drinking-place. Heated by the liquor they had taken, they began to accuse each other of having killed Thondarie. Their conversation was overheard by one of the king's servants, who had them arrested and led to the palace. The king said to them, "Wicked men, is it true that you have killed the woman Thondarie?" They answered, "It is true we have killed her." "Who advised you to commit the murder?" "The Deitty teachers, who have paid us one thousand pieces of silver." Indignant at such a horrible deed, the king ordered the murderers and their advisers to be put to death. Their punishment consisted in their being buried in the earth up to their waist. They were subsequently covered with a heap of straw, which being set fire to, they were burnt to death. Buddha told his disciples that what had happened on this melancholy occasion was but a just retribution for his having in a former existence been drunk, and in that state abused and slandered a holy personage. In one of his preaching excursions, Gaudama converted a distinguished pounha, who asked him, "Illustrious Buddha, what has the great Brahma done to merit the extraordinary glory that encompasses his person and the unsurpassed felicity that he enjoys?" To whom he answered, "The great Brahma, during several existences, has bestowed abundant alms on the needy, delivered many people from great perils, and delighted in giving instruction to the ignorant. Such meritorious deeds have procured for him the transcendent rank that he occupies, and secured to him for an immense period of time the matchless happiness that he possesses." Two rich men, one of Thawattie, and the other a denizen of the Ougga city, had in their youth, when engaged in their studies, promised each other that he who should have a daughter would give her in marriage to the son of the other. When they had grown up, the rich man of Thawattie became a disciple of Buddha, but his friend followed the teachings of the heretics. In due time Anatapein, for such was the name of the former, had a beautiful daughter. His friend Ougga had also a fine grown-up son. It came to pass that Ougga on a certain day arrived from his place with five hundred carts of goods to Thawattie, for the purpose of trading. He lodged, as a matter of course, in his friend's house. During the conversation Ougga reminded his host of their former promise, and declared that he would be too happy to have it fulfilled without delay. Anatapein, having consulted his wife and daughter, and secured their consent, agreed to the proposal that was made to him. The pious rich man, however, was somewhat concerned respecting the dangers of his daughter's position in the midst of upholders of false doctrines. He gave her a retinue of female attendants, who could, by their advice and conversation, maintain intact in her the faith in Buddha. When the bride arrived, after a long journey, to Ougga's city, she was desired by her father-in-law to go in the company of his wife to pay her respects to his teachers, who were sitting quite naked, with dishevelled hairs, in the midst of the most disgusting uncleanness, under a shed prepared for them. Unused to such an unsightly and revolting display, the modest girl recoiled back with a becoming horror, refusing even to cast a look at them. Enraged at the contempt shown to his teachers, the unnatural father-in-law threatened to send her away from his house, as being an unsuitable match for his son. Firm in her faith, she withstood all the efforts that were made to induce her to alter her resolution and pay attention to such individuals. She went back into her apartments. Having somewhat recovered her spirits, and regained her usual calm and serene composure, the pious young lady began, in the presence of her mother-in-law and other ladies of the town, to praise and extol the glory, modesty, meekness, and all the other qualifications which adorned her great teacher and his disciples. The hearers were delighted at all that they heard, and expressed an eager desire to see them and hear their instructions. On that very day the compassionate Buddha was at an early hour, as usual, reviewing the beings dwelling on the island of Dzampoudipa, endeavouring to discover those that were well disposed to hear the truth. His searching glance soon discovered what was going on in the house of the rich man Ougga, and the good dispositions of many of its inmates. "Thither," said he, "I shall hasten to preach the law, for many shall be converted." Hereupon he summoned five hundred disciples to attend him. They all took their pattas and other articles. With his company he flew through the air, and soon alighted in the courtyard of the rich man's house. All were rejoiced to see Buddha and his disciples. They lent a most attentive ear to his instructions. The rich man, his household, and a great number of the people of the town were converted. Anouroudha was left at Ougga to complete, perfect, and extend the good work so happily begun. Buddha in all haste returned to Thawattie. At that time a great noise was made throughout the country on account of a certain pounha whose navel emitted a sort of light in the shape of a moon. He belonged to the party of unbelievers. He was led by them into every village and town, as a living proof of the power they possessed. At last his friends introduced him into the Dzetawon monastery. He was no sooner introduced into Buddha's presence, when the prodigy suddenly ceased. He went away somewhat annoyed at his misfortune; but he had scarcely crossed the threshold of the monastery when the light reappeared. Three times he came before the great preacher, and three times the light was completely eclipsed. No doubt could be entertained that there was in Buddha some secret power superior to the one he possessed. The pounha was at once disconcerted and bewildered. In his ignorance he attributed the accident to some superior magical formula possessed by Buddha, and asked him to teach him the said formula. Buddha said to him, "O pounha! I possess no charm; I ignore all magical formulas. There is in me but one virtue; it is that which I have gathered at the foot of the Bodi tree during the forty-nine days that I have spent there in the deepest meditation. As to what attracts now the attention of the people in your person, you are indebted for it to the offering of a gold coronet, in the shape of a moon, you made to a Buddha during a former existence. The reward bestowed on you for such a good work is but a transient one. It can afford you no real, substantial, and lasting happiness. Hearken to my doctrine; it will confer on you a never-ending recompense." He went on explaining to him many points of the law. The pounha believed in Buddha; nay, he applied for the dignity of Rahan, and finally became a Rahanda. _N.B_.--The history of Buddha offers an almost complete blank as to what regards his doings and preachings during a period of nearly twenty-three years,[1] beginning with the twenty-first season, when he was fifty-six years old, and ending with the forty-fourth season, having reached the patriarchal age of seventy-nine years. So entirely are we kept in ignorance of the important transactions that took place during so long a portion of Buddha's life, that the writer, after having vainly consulted several manuscripts, is reluctantly obliged to come to the same conclusion as that which the Burmese authors have arrived at, viz., that there is a complete disagreement as to even the names of the places where Buddha spent the twenty-three remaining seasons. Out of regard for the rich man Anatapein, who for so many years had been one of his most liberal supporters, Buddha spent the greatest part of the remaining seasons in the Dzetawon monastery. During the few others he seems to have stayed at or near Radzagio, chiefly in the Weloowon monastery. The amount of seasons spent by our Phra from the time he obtained the Buddhaship till his death is forty-five. I find related, as a fact worthy of notice, the donation by a rich widow of Wethalie, named Wisaka, of the celebrated Pouppayon monastery. It was situated not far from the Dzetawon, in an eastern direction from that famous place. It is mentioned that when Phra sallied from the Dzetawon monastery by the eastern gate, the people of the country knew that he was going to dwell for awhile in the Pouppayon monastery; when, on the other hand, he was observed to leave it by the northern gate, all the people understood that he was undertaking a journey through the country for the purpose of preaching. The epoch of this donation is not certain. It appears from some particulars indirectly alluded to that it must have taken place when Buddha was sixty years old. In following our manuscript, we find inserted in this place the detailed accounts respecting Dewadat, related by Buddha himself in the Dzetawon monastery, in the presence of a large party of his disciples. The fact of Buddha mentioning the name of Adzatathat as king of Radzagio, leaves no doubt respecting the time when the awful punishment is supposed to have been meted out to Dewadat, on account of the many heinous sins laid to his charge. Adzatathat, having murdered his father Pimpathara, by starving him to death in a prison, became king of Radzagio, and succeeded him when Buddha was nearly seventy-two years old. He was already king, as the sequel will show, when Dewadat was as yet his spiritual adviser. It is probable that the following narrative was made not more than two years after the above date. When the most excellent Buddha was in the Dzetawon monastery, alluding to the sad fate that had fallen Dewadat, he related the causes that had brought on this dreadful occurrence. At a certain time, when Buddha was spending a season in the Kosamby country, the people came in great numbers every day to the monastery to bring abundant alms, and pay their respects to him and the assembly. On certain occasions they made inquiries about the most distinguished members of the assembly, such as Thariputra, Maukalan, Anouroudda, Ananda, Bagoo, Kimila, and others, giving utterance to the feelings of admiration and love they entertained towards them. But they never took the least notice of Dewadat. The latter keenly resented the studied slight; the more so, because he thought that in his capacity of member of the assembly and of his royal descent, he was entitled to as much consideration as many others, who in this twofold respect were greatly his inferiors. He resolved to leave the company of Buddha and go to some other place. He went to Radzagio and ingratiated himself in the favours of the young Prince Adzatathat, son of King Pimpathara, The young prince, taken up with the grave manners of the new-comer, acknowledged him as his teacher, and built for him a monastery on the Yauthitha hill, close to the city. Some years afterwards Buddha came to Radzagio to spend a season in the Weloowon monastery. Dewadat went to his monastery. Having paid his respects in the usual manner and occupied a becoming place, he three times requested the permission of having an assembly or thinga of his own, quite distinct from the other, which was under the immediate management of Buddha. On this point he three times received a direct refusal to his demand. From that day the jealousy he entertained towards Buddha waxed to a base envy, which soon generated in his soul a deadly hatred against him. He made up his mind to break with Buddha all ties of spiritual relationship, and to become the chief of a new religious body. To succeed in his impious design he required the support of the secular arm. The king of Magatha was in favour of Buddha, but his son had warmly espoused the cause of Dewadat. In such a position, the evil-disposed Dewadat advised Prince Adzatathat to compass the destruction of his father, in order to become king. The ambitious son followed the detestable advice, and put an end to his father's life by starving him to death in a prison, in spite of his own mother's exertions to save her royal husband's life. It was in the thirty-seventh season of Buddha's public mission that Adzatathat ascended the throne of Magatha. Under the new king's auspices, Dewadat carried everything before him with a high hand. Assured of the new king's support, he hired thirty bowmen and promised them an ample reward if they killed Buddha. The ruffians gladly agreed to the proposal. But when they were on the point of committing the crime, they felt themselves overawed by the presence of Buddha. Instead of executing the order they had received, they fell at his feet, craved his pardon, listened to his preaching, and were converted one after the other. Disappointed on this point, Dewadat designed another plan to rid himself of the great preacher. He watched the moment when Buddha was walking at the foot of a hill, named Weitsa-gout. From the summit he rolled a large stone that was to crush his enemy. Fortunately on its way down the hill's side it met with a small obstacle, on which it split into several parts. One splinter alone hurt the toe of one of Buddha's feet, and severely bruised it. On hearing of such a nefarious and cowardly attempt, the disciples hastened to the spot and conveyed their beloved master to his monastery. They offered to keep guard round his person, to prevent the repetition of other attempts on his life. But Buddha said to them that no mortal had the power to hurt him so far as to cause his death. He thanked them for this new token of their affectionate regard towards him, and bade them return to their respective places. The celebrated physician Dzewaka, having been sent for, applied a bandage, which, being removed on the following morning, it was found, to the surprise and joy of all present, that the injured toe was perfectly cured. On another occasion Dewadat made a last attempt on Buddha's life, in the suburbs of Radzagio, by the means of an elephant, infuriated and maddened by strong liquor forced into his throat. The animal was let loose in one of the streets which Gaudama was perambulating gathering alms in his mendicant's pot. But far from doing any injury to Buddha, the elephant, having come into his presence, stood for awhile, and then knelt before him in token of respect. In this manner Dewadat signally failed in this last wicked attempt. Dewadat differed from his cousin on some points of discipline; and this difference occasioned the schism that he meditated to establish.[2] He had proposed to Buddha to make it obligatory on all Rahans to live in forests at the foot of certain trees; not to receive food from the people in their own places, but to use only as articles of food such things as they could procure by their exertions; to use robes made up of rags collected in the dust of public thoroughfares, and not such as might be offered by pious laymen; to abstain from fish and meat; and to dwell in unroofed places. Gaudama positively refused to accede to his demands. Meanwhile he meekly warned him against the sin of schism, telling him that the commission of such an offence would throw the perpetrator into the hell Awidzi for a whole revolution of nature. Deaf to such a salutary warning, Dewadat precipitated himself into schism. He gained over to his party five hundred inexperienced Rahans of the Witzi country, and with them dwelt in the monastery of Gayathitha. He signally failed in his attempt to draw Ananda to his side. Thariputra, by the advice of Buddha, went to Dewadat's place. Profiting from the time he was asleep at a distance, he prevailed upon the five hundred Rahans to abandon schism and return to Buddha, the centre of unity, who was then in the Dzetawon monastery in Wethalie. Rising from his sleep, Dewadat fell into a paroxysm of rage at the trick played on him. He instantly resolved to start for the Dzetawon monastery, to have his revenge on Buddha for the injury done unto him. He was carried in a litter. Messenger after messenger informed Buddha of the approach of his antagonist. But he calmly said to his disciples: "Beloved sons, do not trouble yourselves. Dewadat shall not see my face nor enter the precincts of this place." Information was, in haste, conveyed that Dewadat had actually reached the tank close to the monastery, and was resting a while under the shade of a tree. Gaudama calmly gave the same assurance to his trembling disciples. But the moment of a terrible punishment was at hand. Dewadat, quitting his couch, stood up for a while, to refresh his wearied limbs. But he was seen by his astonished and bewildered companions gradually sinking into the earth, first up to his knees, then to his navel, and finally to his shoulders. At that moment he humbled himself, confessed his fault, acknowledged and proclaimed the glory of Buddha. He then disappeared, wrapt in flame, and fell to the bottom of the hell Awidzi. His punishment consists in having his feet sunk ankle-deep in a burning ground; his head is covered with a red-hot pan, that caps his head down to the lobe of the ears; two huge red-hot iron bars transfixt him horizontally from right to left, two from back to front, and one impales him from top to bottom. He shall have to suffer in that frightful position during a revolution of nature. But, for his tardy and sincere repentance, he shall be delivered, and, by his exertions in practising virtue, he shall become a Pitzegabuddha, under the name of Atisara. Adzatathat ruled over the two countries of Enga and Magatha. His mother was Waydahi, the sister of King Pathenadi, who ruled over the two countries of Kaci and Kosala. Adzatathat, who was of a bellicose temper, quarrelled with his uncle on account of some districts in Kaci, which he seized by force of arms. Unable to resist the army of his nephew, Pathenadi offered to the invader the hand of his daughter Watzera-komma. The offer was accepted, and a reconciliation followed. Three years afterwards, Pathenadi lost his throne, which was seized by Meittadoubba, a son he had had by a concubine. Pathenadi went to Radzagio to ask assistance against the usurper from his son-in-law. But he died on his way to that place. It was under the rule of Meittadoubba, in the forty-fourth season, that occurred the total destruction of the Thagiwi princes of Kosala and Kapilawot by the ambitious Adzatathat. Buddha spent the forty-fourth season in the Dzetawon monastery. When the season was over, he went to dwell in the Weitzagout monastery, near Radzagio. While he was in that place, there was spread a rumour that Adzatathat entertained hostile feelings towards Wethalie. Buddha then foretold that as long as the princes of Wethalie would be united and avoid internal strife and contention, they would be more than a match for their enemy; but should quarrel take place among them, they and their country would fall an easy prey to the invader. These words, which fell from Buddha's mouth, were not forgotten by a pounha who was one of Adzatathat's ministers. He planned, with his royal mother's consent and secret encouragement, the destruction of the rulers of Wethalie, and the conquest of that country, by contriving to sow the seed of dissension among the Letziwi princes. His plan met with complete success some years later, about three years after Gaudama's Neibban, as we shall have the opportunity of relating. FOOTNOTES [1] This short summary of Buddha's life, indicating but little more than the names of the places where he had spent twenty seasons, and leaving us in the dark as to all the particulars regarding the twenty-three other seasons, is another illustration of the assertion, made in some foregoing passages, that the present compilation is very concise and imperfect, supplying us with but an outline of Buddha's proceedings during the course of his preachings. He reached the age of eighty. According to the authority of this legend, Buddha lived forty-five years after he had obtained the Buddhaship. He was therefore thirty-five when he began his public life and entered the career of preaching the law. It is not in my power to say anything positive respecting the antiquity of this work, but the statement of the main facts is borne out by the united testimony of the Buddhistic works existing in various parts and in different languages of Eastern Asia. If it be true that our Buddha lived so long, we must believe that his time during the last twenty-five years was employed in the same benevolent undertaking, viz., to preach the sacred law and point out to beings the way that shall lead them to the deliverance. Many volumes are full of the disputes on religious subjects between Buddha and the heretics, that is to say, his opponents. We may conclude that those controversies took place during the latter part of Buddha's life, as it cannot be doubted that they increased in proportion to the progress the new doctrines made among the people. If, however, we are in great part kept in the dark respecting the doings of the great reformer during a long period of his public life, we are amply compensated by the account of many interesting circumstances that occurred chiefly during the last year of his earthly career. [2] Dewadat, in insisting upon the adoption of regulations of a more rigid character, intended to imitate, to a certain extent, the conduct of the mendicants of the opposite party. He aimed at rivalling them in the practice of austere observances. It does not appear that he innovated in the dogmas that he had learned at the school of his great teacher. As his royal pupil, Adzatathat, had hitherto supported the party of the pounhas, it is not improbable that Dewadat wished to lessen the differences between the practices and observances of the two parties, to render them less perceptible, and by doing so, to prepare the way, by gradual approximation, for a complete fusion. He exhibited himself in the character of a rigid reformer, who was displeased with the too lenient tenor of the disciplinary regulations instituted by Buddha. Be that as it may, it is certain that jealousy in the beginning inspired him with the idea of separating from the assembly. This first step led him farther than he at first contemplated. He wished to set up an assembly, or thinga of his own, and thereby to place himself on a footing of equality and rivalry with his cousin. Meeting with greater resistance than he expected, and being convinced that he could not succeed so long as Buddha should be alive, he did not shrink from making several attempts on his life. It is a fact worthy of notice that the disturbances which took place subsequently in the Buddhist society had their origin, in most instances, in points of discipline of a trivial importance, which were altered or rejected by a fraction of the assembly, whilst they were upheld with the utmost tenacity by the greater portion of the Rahans, as having been established by Gaudama. This observation will be fully corroborated by the particulars that we shall relate on the subject of the councils or meetings held after Gaudama's death. END OF VOL. I. Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. Edinburgh & London Trübner's Oriental Series. [Illustration] KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO. LTD DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, LONDON, W. "A knowledge of the commonplace, at least, of Oriental literature, philosophy, and religion is as necessary to the general reader of the present day as an acquaintance with the Latin and Greek classics was a generation or so ago. Immense strides have been made within the present century in these branches of learning; Sanskrit has been brought within the range of accurate philology, and its invaluable ancient literature thoroughly investigated; the language and sacred books of the Zoroastrians have been laid bare; Egyptian, Assyrian, and other records of the remote past have been deciphered, and a group of scholars speak of still more recondite Accadian and Hittite monuments; but the results of all the scholarship that has been devoted to these subjects have been almost inaccessible to the public because they were contained for the most part in learned or expensive works, or scattered throughout the numbers of scientific periodicals. Messrs. Trübner & Co., in a spirit of enterprise which does them infinite credit, have determined to supply the constantly-increasing want, and to give in a popular, or, at least, a comprehensive form, all this mass of knowledge to the world."--_Times._ The late Oriental scholar, Mr. Romesh C. Dutt, C.I.E., says:-- "I wish to say a word about this series, because I am in a special degree indebted to it. Professor Max Müller, who has, by his lifelong labours, done more than any living scholar to elucidate ancient Hindu literature and history, has now conceived the noble idea of enabling English readers to go to the fountain source, and consult Oriental works in a series of faithful translations. More than thirty volumes, translated from the Sanscrit, Chinese, Zend, Pahlair, Pàli, Arabic, &c., have already been published, and more volumes are expected. I take this opportunity to own my great indebtedness to the volumes of this series which relate to Indian History. I have freely quoted from them--allowing myself the liberty of a verbal alteration here and there; and I have seldom thought it necessary to consult these original Sanscrit works which have been translated in this faithful and valuable series." * * * * * In Two Volumes, post 8vo, cloth, pp. 426 and 460, price 25s. net. ALBÊRÛNÎ'S INDIA. AN ACCOUNT OF THE RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, GEOGRAPHY, CHRONOLOGY, ASTRONOMY, CUSTOMS, LAWS, AND ASTROLOGY OF INDIA ABOUT A.D. 1030. An English Edition, with Notes and Indices. By DR. EDWARD C. SACHAU, Professor in the Royal University of Berlin, and Principal of the Seminary for Oriental Languages; Member of the Royal Academy of Berlin, and Corresponding Member of the Imperial Academy of Vienna Honorary Member of the Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, London, and of the American Oriental Society, Cambridge, U.S.A. EXTRACT FROM PREFACE. Albêrûnî, or, as his compatriots called him, Abû Raihân, was born A.D. 973, in the territory of modern Khiva, then called Khwârizm, or Chorasmia in antiquity. Early distinguishing himself in science and literature, he played a political part as councillor of the ruling prince of his native country of the Ma'mûni family. In the opening of his book Albêrûnî gives an account of the circumstances which suggested to him the idea of writing the [Greek: Indiká]. Once the conversation with a friend of his, else unknown, ran on the then existing literature on the history of religion and philosophy, its merits and demerits. When, in particular, the literature on the belief of the Hindus came to be criticised, Albêrûnî maintained that all of it was second-hand and thoroughly uncritical. To verify the matter, his friend once more examines the books in question, which results in his agreeing with our author, and his asking him to fill up this gap in the Arabic literature of the time. The book he has produced is not a polemical one. He will not convert the Hindus, nor lend a direct help to missionary zealots. He will simply describe Hinduism, without identifying himself with it. He takes care to inform the reader that he is not responsible for whatsoever repugnant detail he has to relate, but the Hindus themselves. He gives a repertory of information on Indian subjects, destined for the use of those who lived in peaceable intercourse with them, and wished to have an insight into their mode and world of thought. The author has nothing in common with the Muhammadan Ghâzî who wanted to convert the Hindus or to kill them, and his book scarcely reminds the reader of the incessant war between Islam and India, during which it had been prepared, and by which the possibility of writing such a book had first been given. It is like a magic island of quiet, impartial research in the midst of a world of clashing swords, burning towns, and plundered temples. The object which the author had in view, and never for a moment lost sight of, was to afford the necessary information and training to "_any one_ (in Islam) _who wants to converse with the Hindus, and to discuss with them questions of religion, science, or literature, on the very basis of their own civilisation_." In general, it is the method of our author not to speak himself, but to let the Hindus speak, giving extensive quotations from their classical authors. He presents a picture of Indian civilisation as painted by the Hindus themselves. Many chapters, not all, open with a short characteristic introduction of a general nature. The body of most chapters consists of three parts. The first is a _précis_ of the question, as the author understands it. The second part brings forward the doctrines of the Hindus, quotations from Sanskrit books in the chapters on religion, philosophy, astronomy, and astrology, and other kinds of information which had been communicated to him by word of mouth, or things which he had himself observed in the chapters on literature, historic chronology, geography, law, manners, and customs. In the third part he does the same as Megasthenes had already done; he tries to bring the sometimes very exotic subject nearer to the understanding of his readers by comparing it with the theories of ancient Greece, and by other comparisons. In the disposition of every single chapter, as well as in the sequence of the chapters, a perspicuous, well-considered plan is apparent. There is no patchwork nor anything superfluous, and the words fit to the subject as close as possible. He does not blindly accept the traditions of former ages; he wants to understand and to criticise them. He wants to sift the wheat from the chaff, and he will discard everything that militates against the laws of nature and of reason. He criticises manuscript tradition like a modern philologist. He sometimes supposes the text to be corrupt, and inquires into the cause of the corruption; he discusses various readings, and proposes emendations. He guesses at _lacunæ_, criticises different translations, and complains of the carelessness and ignorance of the copyists. This valuable and interesting work has been out of print for many years, and second-hand copies have been very difficult to obtain even at a high premium. At the urgent request of many scholars and students both in England and India, the publishers have decided to issue the present reprint at a cheaper price than the original edition. * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. viii. and 270, cloth, price 6s. INDIAN POETRY: CONTAINING "THE INDIAN SONG OF SONGS." From the Sanskrit of the "Gita Govinda" of Jayadeva; Two Books from "The Iliad of India" (Mah[.a]bhârata), "Proverbial Wisdom" from the Shlokas of the Hitopadesa, and other Oriental Poems. By SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, M.A., K.C.I.E., C.S.I., &c., &c. CONTENTS. The Indian Song of Songs-- Introduction. Hymn to Vishnu. Sarga the First--The Sports of Krishna. Sarga the Second--The Penitence of Krishna. Sarga the Third--Krishna Troubled. Sarga the Fourth--Krishna Cheered. Sarga the Fifth--The Longings of Krishna. Sarga the Sixth--Krishna made Bolder. Sarga the Seventh--Krishna supposed False. Sarga the Eighth--The Rebuking of Krishna. Sarga the Ninth--The End of Krishna's Trial. Sarga the Tenth--Krishna in Paradise. Sarga the Eleventh--The Union of Radha and Krishna. Miscellaneous Oriental Poems-- The Rajpoot Wife. King Saladin. The Caliph's Draught. Hindoo Funeral Song. Song of the Serpent Charmers. Song of the Flour-Mill. Taza ba Taza. The Mussulman Paradise. Dedication of a Poem from the Sanskrit. The Rajah's Ride. Two Books from "The Iliad of India." The Great Journey. The Entry into Heaven. The Night of Slaughter. The Morning Prayer. Proverbial Wisdom from the Shlokas of the Hitopadesa. OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. "In this new volume Sir Edwin Arnold does good service by illustrating, through the medium of his musical English melodies, the power of Indian poetry to stir European emotions. 'The Indian Song of Songs' is not unknown to scholars. Sir Edwin Arnold will have introduced it among popular English poems."--_Times._ "Complete mastery of the English language, combined with genuine poetic fervour, has enabled the translator of 'The Indian Song of Songs' to spread before his readers a feast of dulcet sounds and lyrical language. Music seems to flow from his pen as naturally as rain from the cloud or song from the throat of the thrush."--_Morning Post._ "The poem abounds with imagery of Eastern luxuriousness and sensuousness; the air seems laden with the spicy odours of the tropics, and the verse has a richness and a melody sufficient to captivate the senses of the dullest."--_Standard._ * * * * * Third Edition. Post 8vo, pp. viii.-464, cloth, price 16s. THE S[=A]NKHYA APHORISMS OF KAPILA, With Illustrative Extracts from the Commentaries. Translated by J. R. BALLANTYNE, LL.D., late Principal of the Benares College. Edited by FITZEDWARD HALL. "The work displays a vast expenditure of labour and scholarship, for which students of Hindoo philosophy have every reason to be grateful to Dr. Hall and the publishers."--_Calcutta Review._ * * * * * Fourth Edition. Post 8vo, cloth, pp. xxiv.-310, price 16s. THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA. BY A. BARTH, Member of the Société Asiatique of Paris. Authorised translation by Rev. J. Wood, Edin. India has not only preserved for us in her Vedas the most ancient and complete documents for the study of the old religious beliefs founded on nature-worship, which, in an extremely remote past, were common to all the branches of the Indo-European family; she is also the only country where these beliefs, in spite of many changes both in form and fortune, continue to subsist up to the present time. Whilst everywhere else they have been either as good as extinguished by monotheistic religions of foreign origin, in some instances without leaving behind them a single direct and authentic trace of their presence, or abruptly cut short in their evolution and forced to survive within the barriers, henceforth immovable, of a petty Church, as in the case of Parseeism,--in India alone they present up to this time, as a rich and varied literature attests, a continuous, self-determined development, in the course of which, instead of contracting, they have continued to enlarge their borders. It is owing in a great measure to this extraordinary longevity that such an interest attaches to the separate and independent study of the Hindu religions, irrespective altogether of the estimate we may form of their dogmatic or practical worth. Nowhere else do we meet with circumstances, on the whole, so favourable for the study of the successive transformations and destiny, so to speak, of a polytheistic idea of the universe. * * * * * Post 8vo, cloth. pp. cviii.-242 and viii.-370. Two volumes, price 24s. SI-YU-KI. BUDDHIST RECORDS OF THE WESTERN WORLD. Translated from the Chinese of HUIEN TSIANG (A.D. 629). By SAMUEL BEAL, B.A. (Trin. Col., Camb.), R.N. (Retired Chaplain and N.I.), Professor of Chinese, University College, London; Rector of Wark, Northumberland, &c. The progress which has been made in our knowledge of Northern Buddhism during the last few years is due very considerably to the discovery of the Buddhist literature of China. This literature (now well known to us through the catalogues already published) contains, amongst other valuable works, the records of the travels of various Chinese Buddhist pilgrims who visited India during the early centuries of our era. These records embody the testimony of independent eyewitnesses as to the facts related in them, and having been faithfully preserved and allotted a place in the collection of the sacred book of the country, their evidence is entirely trustworthy. It would be impossible to mention _seriatim_ the various points of interest in these works, as they refer to the geography, history, manners, and religion of the people of India. The reader who looks into the pages of this book will find ample material for study on all these questions. But there is one particular that gives a more than usual interest to the records under notice, and that is the evident sincerity and enthusiasm of the travellers themselves. Never did more devoted pilgrims leave their native country to encounter the perils of travel in foreign and distant lands; never did disciples more ardently desire to gaze on the sacred vestiges of their religion; never did men endure greater sufferings by desert, mountain, and sea than these simple-minded, earnest Buddhist priests. And that such courage, religious devotion, and power of endurance should be exhibited by men so sluggish, as we think, in their very nature as the Chinese, this is very surprising, and may perhaps arouse some consideration. * * * * * In Two Volumes, post 8vo, pp. xii.-336 and x.-352, cloth, price 21s. MEDIÆVAL RESEARCHES FROM EASTERN ASIATIC SOURCES. FRAGMENTS TOWARDS THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY OF CENTRAL AND WESTERN ASIA FROM THE THIRTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. BY E. BRETSCHNEIDER, M.D., Formerly Physician of the Russian Legation at Pekin. EXTRACT FROM PREFACE The subjects dealt with in the two volumes form a carefully revised and improved edition of three essays gathered into one collection, viz.:-- 1. Notes on Chinese Mediæval Travellers to the West, 1875. 2. Notices of the Mediæval Geography and History of Central and Western Asia, 1876. 3. Chinese Intercourse with the Countries of Central and Western Asia during the Fifteenth Century, 1877. Since the first publication of these papers, large additions have been made to the stock of our knowledge regarding the regions of Central Asia which, previously to the Russian occupation of these tracts, had been inaccessible to scientific exploration. Thus new light has been thrown upon many interesting geographical questions suggested by the narratives of mediæval travellers, or hitherto based only upon more modern but vague and dubious Chinese accounts. To bring the new edition of those former researches up to the present advanced state of knowledge on the subject, I had to study a vast amount of literature, written for the greater part in Russian, which has come to light, on Central Asia, and was obliged to read through a great number of works and papers, some of them published in Russian Turkestan, and, therefore, difficult to obtain. In general, all reading accessible to me bearing on the subject has been made use of for the elucidation of mediæval geographical questions arising out of my researches. * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. xii.-164, cloth, price 10s. 6d. THE HISTORY OF ESARHADDON (Son of Sennacherib), KING OF ASSYRIA, B.C. 681-668. Translated from the Cuneiform Inscriptions upon Cylinders and Tablets in the British Museum Collection; together with a Grammatical Analysis of each Word, Explanations of the Ideographs by Extracts from the Bi-Lingual Syllabaries, and List of Eponyms, &c. BY E. A. WALLIS BUDGE, M.A., Litt.D., D.Lit., Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum. "Students of scriptural archæology will also appreciate the 'History of Esarhaddon.'"--_Times._ "There is much to attract the scholar in this volume. It does not pretend to popularise studies which are yet in their infancy. Its primary object is to translate, but it does not assume to be more than tentative, and it offers both to the professed Assyriologist and to the ordinary non-Assyriological Semitic scholar the means of controlling its results."--_Academy._ "Mr. Budge's book is, of course, mainly addressed to Assyrian scholars and students. They are not, it is to be feared, a very numerous class. But the more thanks are due to him on that account for the way in which he has acquitted himself in his laborious task."--_Tablet._ * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. xlviii.-398, cloth, price 12s. THE ORDINANCES OF MANU. Translated from the Sanskrit, with an Introduction. By the late A. C. BURNELL, Ph.D., C.I.E. Completed and Edited by E. W. HOPKINS, Ph.D., of Columbia College, N.Y. "This work is full of interest; while for the student of sociology and the science of religion it is full of importance. It is a great boon to get so notable a work in so accessible a form, admirably edited, and completely translated."--_Scotsman._ "Few men were more competent than Burnell to give us a really good translation of this well-known law book, first rendered into English by Sir William Jones. Burnell was not only an independent Sanskrit scholar, but an experienced lawyer, and he joined to these two important qualifications the rare faculty of being able to express his thoughts in clear and trenchant English.... We ought to feel very grateful to Dr. Hopkins for having given us all that could be published of the translation left by Burnell."--F. MAX MÜLLER in the _Academy_. * * * * * Third Edition. Post 8vo, cloth, pp. vi.-216, price 6s. THE BHAGAVAD G[=I]T[=A]; or, THE SACRED LAY. A SANSKRIT PHILOSOPHICAL POEM. Translated, with Notes, BY JOHN DAVIES, M.A. (Cantab.) Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, of the Cambridge Philological Society, &c., and (sometime) Rector of Walsoken, Norfolk. I. Introduction. II. Translation. III. Appendix. (i) On the date at which the Bhagavad G[=i]t[=a] was probably written, and on the theory that it was written under an influence derived from a knowledge of Christian doctrines. (ii) The traditional line of descent of the Lunar Dynasty. (iii) Collation of two MSS. with the Bonn edition of the Bhagavad G[=i]t[=a], and the readings of other editions and MSS. In preparing this translation of the Bhagavad G[=i]t[=a], the author had before him the Greek translation of Galanos, and the Italian version of Stanislao Gatti, both supplied by Dr. Reinhold Rost. The author also consulted the French version of Burnouf, the Latin version of Lassen, and the English versions of Mr. Thomson and K. T. Telang. The notes of Lassen have given valuable aid, as well as a paper on the Bhagavad G[=i]t[=a], read before the "Akademie der Weissenschaften" of Berlin in 1826 by W. van Humboldt, which contained a scholarly review of the doctrines contained in the poem. The author has also consulted a MS. copy of the Commentary on the Bhagavad G[=i]t[=a], written by ['S]r[=i]dhara, and, by the kindness of Dr. Rost, another commentary, attributed to ['S]ankara, but written by ['S]ankara Ananda Saraswati (quot. at Ananda), and called T[=a]tparya Bodhin[=i]. * * * * * Second Edition. Post 8vo, cloth, pp. viii.-152, price 6s. HINDU PHILOSOPHY. THE S[=A]NKHYA K[=A]RIK[=A] OF [=I]['S]WARA KRISHNA. An Exposition of the System of Kapila, with an Appendix on the Ny[=a]ya and Vai['s]eshika Systems. BY JOHN DAVIES, M.A. (Cantab.) Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, of the Cambridge Philological Society, &c., and (sometime) Rector of Walsoken, Norfolk. EXTRACT FROM PREFACE. I wish to present to my readers the philosophy of Kapila as it has been set forth by his Indian exponent, [=I]['s]wara Krishna. The system of Kapila, called the S[=a]nkhya or Rationalistic, in its original form, and in its theistic development by Patarijali, contains nearly all that India has produced in the department of pure philosophy. Other systems, though classed as philosophic, are mainly devoted to logic and physical science, or to an exposition of the Vedas. The system of Kapila may be said to have only an historical value, but on this account alone it is interesting as a chapter in the history of the human mind. It is the earliest attempt on record to give an answer, from reason alone, to the mysterious questions which arise in every thoughtful mind about the origin of the world, the nature and relations of man, and his future destiny. It is interesting also and instructive to note how often the human mind moves in a circle. The latest German philosophy, the system of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, is mainly a reproduction of the philosophic system of Kapila in its materialistic part, presented in a more elaborate form, but on the same fundamental lines. In this respect the human intellect has gone over the same ground that it occupied more than two thousand years ago, but on a more important question it has taken a step in retreat. Kapila recognised fully the existence of a soul in man, forming indeed his proper nature--the absolute ego of Fichte--distinct from matter and immortal; but our latest philosophy, both here and in Germany, can see in man only a highly developed physical organisation. "All external things," says Kapila, "were formed that the soul might know itself and be free." "The study of psychology is vain," says Schopenhauer, "for there is no Psyche." * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. 432, cloth, price 16s. A CLASSICAL DICTIONARY OF HINDU MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION, GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, AND LITERATURE. BY JOHN DOWSON, M.R.A.S., Late Professor of Hindustani, Staff College. "This not only forms an indispensable book of reference to students of Indian literature, but is also of great general interest, as it gives in a concise and easily accessible form all that need be known about the personages of Hindu mythology whose names are so familiar, but of whom so little is known outside the limited circle of _savants_."--_Times._ "It is no slight gain when such subjects are treated fairly and fully in a moderate space; and we need only add that the few wants which we may hope to see supplied in new editions detract but little from the general excellence of Mr. Dowson's work."--_Saturday Review._ * * * * * Revised Edition in Two Volumes, post 8vo, pp. xxx.-390; xiv.-364, cloth, price 21s. A HISTORY OF CIVILISATION IN ANCIENT INDIA. BASED ON SANSKRIT LITERATURE, BY ROMESH CHUNDER DUTT, C.I.E. Of the Indian Civil Service, and of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law, Member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. VOL. I.--B.C. 2000 TO 320; VOL. II.--B.C. 320--A.D. 1000. EXTRACT FROM PREFACE. The method on which this work has been written is very simple. My principal object has been to furnish the general reader with a practical and handy work on the Ancient History of India--not to compose an elaborate work of discussions on Indian Antiquities. To study clearness and conciseness on a subject like this was not, however, an easy task. Every chapter in the present work deals with matters about which long researches have been made, and various opinions have been recorded. It would have afforded some satisfaction to me to have given the reader the history of every controversy, the account of every antiquarian discovery, and the pros and cons of every opinion advanced. But I could not yield to this temptation without increasing the work to three or four times its present humble size, and thus sacrificing the very object with which it is written. To carry out my primary object I have avoided every needless discussion, and I have tried to explain as clearly, concisely, and distinctly as I was able each succeeding phase of Hindu civilisation and Hindu life in ancient times. But, while conciseness has been the main object of the present work, I have also endeavoured to tell my story so that it may leave some distinct memories on my readers after they have closed the work. For this reason, I have avoided details as far as possible, and tried to develop, fully and clearly, the leading facts and features of each succeeding age. Repetition has not been avoided where such repetition seemed necessary to impress on my readers the cardinal facts--the salient features of the story of Hindu civilisation. "Mr. Dutt has attempted to popularise learned researches, and has undertaken a patriotic work, and in many respects none could he better prepared for the task than he.... As far as possible he allows the original texts to speak for themselves; his book is thus filled with extracts selected and translated with care; and the extracts are connected together by analyses and résumés in which we always find what is necessary, and seldom what is superfluous. He has written with enthusiasm, in a language clear and correct, and without that needless display of erudition which tires more than it instructs. On the whole I know of no work which enables one better to enter into the spirit of ancient Indian thought, or which is more fascinating reading."--M. BARTH, _in Revue Critique, Paris_. (Translated.) * * * * * In One Volume, post 8vo, cloth, pp. xvi.-224, price 7s. 6d. LAYS OF ANCIENT INDIA. Selections from Indian Poetry rendered into English Verse. BY ROMESH CHUNDER DUTT, C.I.E. Barrister-at-Law, and of the Indian Civil Service; Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, and of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Author of "A History of Civilisation in Ancient India," &c. EXTRACT FROM PREFACE. The time has come for placing before English readers a carefully prepared book of selections from the entire range of Ancient Indian Poetry. Such a book of selections should convey something not only of the beauty of Indian poetry in general, but also of the distinctive features of the poetry of each special period--something of the freshness and simplicity of the Vedic Hymns, the sublime and lofty thought of the Upanishads, the unsurpassed beauty of Buddhist precepts, and the incomparable richness and imagery of the later or classical Sanscrit poetry. And it seems to me that such a book, comprising specimens from the literature of successive periods, is likely to give the English reader a general bird's-eye view of Indian poetry, Indian thought, and Indian religion. * * * * * Revised Edition. Post 8vo, pp. 276, cloth, price 7s. 6d. RELIGION IN CHINA. BY JOSEPH EDKINS, D.D., PEKING. Containing a Brief Account of the Three Religions of the Chinese, with Observations on the Prospects of Christian Conversion amongst that People. "Dr. Edkins has been most careful in noting the varied and often complex phases of opinion, so as to give an account of considerable value of the subject."--_Scotsman._ "As a missionary, it has been part of Dr. Edkins' duty to study the existing religions in China, and his long residence in the country has enabled him to acquire an intimate knowledge of them as they at present exist."--_Saturday Review._ "Dr. Edkins' valuable work, of which this is a second and revised edition, has, from the time that it was published, been the standard authority upon the subject of which it treats."--_Nonconformist._ "Dr. Edkins ... may now be fairly regarded as among the first authorities on Chinese religion and language."--_British Quarterly Review._ * * * * * New and Revised Edition. Post 8vo, pp. xxiv.-420, cloth, price 18s. CHINESE BUDDHISM. A VOLUME OF SKETCHES, HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. BY J. EDKINS, D.D. Author of "China's Place in Philology," "Religion in China," &c., &c. "It contains a vast deal of important information on the subject, such as is only to be gained by long-continued study on the spot."--_Athenæum._ "Upon the whole, we know of no work comparable to it for the extent of its original research, and the simplicity with which this complicated system of philosophy, religion, literature, and ritual is set forth."--_British Quarterly Review._ "The whole volume is replete with learning.... It deserves most careful study from all interested in the history of the religions of the world, and expressly of those who are concerned in the propagation of Christianity. Dr. Edkins notices in terms of just condemnation the exaggerated praise bestowed upon Buddhism by recent English writers."--_Record._ * * * * * Third Edition. Post 8vo, cloth, pp. xxiv.-268, price 9s. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANISHADS AND ANCIENT INDIAN METAPHYSICS. As exhibited in a series of Articles contributed to the _Calcutta Review_. BY ARCHIBALD EDWARD GOUGH, M.A., Lincoln College, Oxford; Principal of the Calcutta Madrasa. EXTRACT FROM PREFACE. Those interested in the general history of philosophy will find in it an account of a very early attempt, on the part of thinkers of a rude age and race, to form a cosmological theory. The real movement of philosophic thought begins, it is true, not in India, but in Ionia; but some degree of interest may still be expected to attach to the procedure of the ancient Indian cosmologists. The Upanishads are so many 'songs before sunrise'--spontaneous effusions of awakening reflection, half poetical, half metaphysical--that precede the conscious and methodical labour of the long succession of thinkers to construct a thoroughly intelligible conception of the sum of things. For the general reader, then, these pages may supply in detail, and in the terms of the Sanskrit texts themselves, a treatment of the topics slightly sketched in the third chapter of Archer Butler's first series of 'Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy.' The Upanishads exhibit the prehistoric view of things in a na[=i]vely poetical expression, and, at the same time, in its coarsest form. Any translations will be found to include the whole of the Mu[n.][d.]aka, Ka[t.]ha, ['S]vet[=a]['s]vatara, and M[=a][n.][d.][=u]kya Upanishads, the greater part of the Taittir[=i]ya and B[r.]ihad[=a]ro[n.]yaka, and portions of the Chh[=a]ndogya and Kena, together with extracts from the works of the Indian schoolmen. * * * * * Third Edition. Post 8vo, cloth, pp. xvi.-428, price 16s. ESSAYS ON THE SACRED LANGUAGE, WRITINGS, AND RELIGION OF THE PARSIS. By MARTIN HAUG, Ph.D., Late of the Universities of Tübingen, Göttingen, and Bonn; Superintendent of Sanskrit Studies, and Professor of Sanskrit in the Poona College. EDITED AND ENLARGED BY DR. E. W. WEST. To which is added a Biographical Memoir of the late Dr. HAUG by Prof. E. P. EVANS. I. History of the Researches into the Sacred Writings and Religion of the Parsis, from the Earliest Times down to the Present. II. Languages of the Parsi Scriptures. III. The Zend-Avesta, or the Scripture of the Parsis. IV. The Zoroastrian Religion, as to its Origin and Development. "'Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsis,' by the late Dr. Martin Haug, edited by Dr. E. W. West. The author intended, on his return from India, to expand the materials contained in this work into a comprehensive account of the Zoroastrian religion, but the design was frustrated by his untimely death. We have, however, in a concise and readable form, a history of the researches into the sacred writings and religion of the Parsis from the earliest times down to the present--a dissertation on the languages of the Parsi Scriptures, a translation of the Zend-Avesta, or the Scripture of the Parsis, and a dissertation on the Zoroastrian religion, with especial reference to its origin and development."--_Times._ * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. viii. and 346, cloth, price 10s. 6d. MANAVA-DHARMA-CASTRA: THE CODE OF MANU. ORIGINAL SANSKRIT TEXT, WITH CRITICAL NOTES. BY J. JOLLY, PH.D., Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Wurzburg; late Tagore Professor of Law in the University of Calcutta. The date assigned by Sir William Jones to this Code--the well-known Great Law Book of the Hindus--is 1250-500 B.C., although the rules and precepts contained in it had probably existed as tradition for countless ages before. There has been no reliable edition of the Text for Students for many years past, and it is believed, therefore, that Prof. Jolly's work will supply a want long felt. * * * * * Second Edition. Post 8vo, pp. xii.-512, cloth, price 16s. FOLK-TALES OF KASHMIR. BY THE REV. J. HINTON KNOWLES, F.R.G.S., M.R.A.S., &c. (C.M.S.) Missionary to the Kashmirs. EXTRACT FROM PREFACE. Kashmir as a field of folk-lore literature is, perhaps, not surpassed in fertility by any other country in the world; and yet, while every year witnesses the publication of books on the subject from Bengal, Bombay, Madras, Porjáb, and other parts, this field, ripe for the harvest, has remained almost ungleaned. No doubt its isolated position and the difficulty of its language have had something to do with this apparent neglect. No apology will be needed for the presentation of this book to the public. The great interest and importance attaching to the folk-tales of any people is manifest from the great attention devoted to them by many learned writers and others. Concerning the style and manner of the book, however, I would ask my readers to be lenient with me. I have sought not so much to present these tales in a purely literary form as to give them in a fair translation, and most of the work was done by lamp-light after an ordinary amount of missionary work during the day. However, such as it is, I sincerely hope it will prove a real contribution towards that increasing stock of folk-lore which is doing so much to clear away the clouds that envelop much of the practices, ideas, and beliefs which make up the daily life of the natives of our great dependencies, control their feelings, and underlie many of their actions. * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. ix.-281, cloth, price 10s. 6d. THE SARVA-DARSANA-SAMGRAHA; OR, REVIEW OF THE DIFFERENT SYSTEMS OF HINDU PHILOSOPHY. BY MADHAVA ACHARYA. Translated by E. B. COWELL, M.A., Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Cambridge, and A. E. GOUGH, M.A., Professor of Philosophy in the Presidency College, Calcutta. This work is an interesting specimen of Hindu critical ability. The author successively passes in review the sixteen philosophical systems current in the fourteenth century in the South of India; and he gives what appears to him to be their most important tenets. "The translation is trustworthy throughout. A protracted sojourn in India, where there is a living tradition, has familiarised the translators with Indian thought."--_Athenæum._ * * * * * Five Volumes, post 8vo, cloth, price 21s. each. ORIGINAL SANSKRIT TEXTS _On the Origin and History of the People of India: Their Religion and Institutions._ Collected, Translated, and Illustrated. BY J. MUIR, C.I.E., D.C.L., LL.D., PH.D. Third Edition, Re-written, and greatly Enlarged. Vol. I.--Mythical and Legendary Accounts of the Origin of Caste, with an Inquiry into its Existence in the Vedic Age. Vol. II.--Inquiry whether the Hindus are of Trans-Himalayan Origin, and akin to the Western Branches of the Indo-European Race. Vol. III.--The Vedas: Opinions of their Authors and of later Indian Writers on their Origin, Inspiration, and Authority. (Out of print.) Vol. IV.--Comparison of the Vedic with the later representations of the principal Indian Deities. Vol. V.--Contributions to a knowledge of the Cosmogony, Mythology, Religious Ideas, Life, and Manners of the Indians in the Vedic Age. * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. xliv.-376, cloth, price 14s. METRICAL TRANSLATIONS FROM SANSKRIT WRITERS. With an Introduction, many Prose Versions, and Parallel Passages from Classical Authors. BY J. MUIR, C.I.E., D.C.L., LL.D., PH.D. "... An agreeable introduction to Hindu poetry."--_Times._ "... A volume which maybe taken as a fair illustration alike of the religious and moral sentiments and of the legendary lore of the best Sanskrit writers."--_Edinburgh Daily Review._ * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. lxv.-368, cloth, price 14s. TIBETAN TALES DERIVED FROM INDIAN SOURCES. Translated from the Tibetan of the KAH-GYUR. BY F. ANTON VON SCHIEFNER. Done into English from the German, with an Introduction, BY W. R. S. RALSTON, M.A. "Mr. Ralston, whose name is so familiar to all lovers of Russian folk-lore, has supplied some interesting Western analogies and parallels, drawn, for the most part, from Slavonic sources, to the Eastern folk-tales, culled from the Kahgyur, one of the divisions of the Tibetan sacred books."--_Academy._ "The translation ... could scarcely have fallen into better hands. An Introduction ... gives the leading facts in the lives of those scholars who have given their attention to gaining a knowledge of the Tibetan literature and language."--_Calcutta Review._ "Ought to interest all who care for the East, for amusing stories, or for comparative folk-lore."--_Pall Mall Gazette._ * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. xvi.-224, cloth, price 9s. UDÂNAVARGA. A COLLECTION OF VERSES FROM THE BUDDHIST CANON. Compiled by DHARMATRÂTA. BEING THE NORTHERN BUDDHIST VERSION OF DHAMMAPADA. Translated from the Tibetan of Bkah-hgyur, with Notes, and Extracts from the Commentary of Pradjnavarman, BY W. WOODVILLE ROCKHILL. "Mr. Rockhill's present work is the first from which assistance will be gained for a more accurate understanding of the Pali text; it is, in fact, as yet the only term of comparison available to us. The 'Udauavarga,' the Thibetan version, was originally discovered by the late M. Schiefner, who published the Tibetan text, and had intended adding a translation, an intention frustrated by his death, but which has been carried out by Mr. Rockhill.... Mr. Rockhill may be congratulated for having well accomplished a difficult task."--_Saturday Review._ * * * * * Fifth Edition. Post 8vo, pp. xv.-250, cloth, price 7s. 6d. OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGION TO THE SPREAD OF THE UNIVERSAL RELIGIONS. BY C. P. TIELE, Doctor of Theology, Professor of the History of Religions in the University of Leyden. Translated from the Dutch by J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, M.A. "Few books of its size contain the result of so much wide thinking, able and laborious study, or enable the reader to gain a better bird's-eye view of the latest results of investigations into the religious history of nations. As Professor Tiele modestly says, 'In this little book are outlines--pencil sketches, I might say--nothing more.' But there are some men whose sketches from a thumb-nail are of far more worth than an enormous canvas covered with the crude painting of others, and it is easy to see that these pages, full of information, these sentences, cut and perhaps also dry, short and clear, condense the fruits of long and thorough research."--_Scotsman._ * * * * * Four Volumes Ready. Volume V. in the Press. Post 8vo, cloth, price 10s. 6d. each. THE SHÁHNÁMA OF FIRDAUSÍ. Done into English by ARTHUR GEORGE WARNER, M.A., AND EDMOND WARNER, B.A. February 25th of the present year (1910) is the nine hundredth anniversary of the completion of the Sháhnamá. Its author, the Persian poet Firdausí, spent over thirty laborious years in its composition, only to experience, when the task had been achieved, a heart-breaking disappointment well worthy of inclusion in any record of the calamities of authors. His work has survived the test of time, and by general consent is accounted to be one of the few great epics of the world. Geographically and in some other respects it may be said to stand half-way between the Epics of Europe and those of India. In its own land it has no peer, while in construction and subject-matter it is unique. Other Epics centre round some heroic character or incident to which all else is subservient. In the Sháhnamá there is no lack either of heroes or of incidents, but its real hero is the ancient Persian people, and its theme their whole surviving legendary history from the days of the First Man to the death of the last Sháh in the middle of the seventeenth century of our Era. It is the glory of the Persian race that they alone among all nations possess such a record, based as it is on their own traditions and set forth in the words of their greatest poet. In another sense, too, the Sháhnamá is unique. The author of the other great Epics tell us little or nothing of their own personalities or of their sources of information. Their works are fairy palaces suspended in mid air; we see the result, but know not how it was achieved. The author of the Sháhnamá takes us into his confidence from the first, so that in reading it we are let into the secret of epic-making, and can apply the knowledge thus gained to solve the problem of the construction of its great congeners. To the student of comparative mythology and folk-lore, to the lover of historic romance or romantic history, and to all that are fond of tales of high achievements and the gests of heroes, the Sháhnamá is a storehouse of rich and abundant material. To set forth a complete presentment of it with the needful notes and elucidations is the object of the present translation, made from two of the best printed texts of the original--that of Vullers and Landauer, and that of Turner Macan. * * * * * Third Edition. Post 8vo, cloth, pp. xxiv.-360, price 10s. 6d. THE HISTORY OF INDIAN LITERATURE. BY ALBRECHT WEBER. Translated from the Second German Edition by JOHN MANN, M.A., and THÉODOR ZACHARIAE, Ph.D., with the sanction of the Author. Dr. BUHLER, Inspector of Schools in India, writes:--"When I was Professor of Oriental Languages in Elphinstone College, I frequently felt the want of such a work to which I could refer the students." Professor COWELL, of Cambridge, writes:--"It will be especially useful to the students in our Indian colleges and universities. I used to long for such a book when I was teaching in Calcutta. Hindu students are intensely interested in the history of Sanskrit literature, and this volume will supply them with all they want on the subject." Professor WHITNEY, Yale College, Newhaven, Conn., U.S.A., writes:--"I was one of the class to whom the work was originally given in the form of academic lectures. At their first appearance they were by far the most learned and able treatment of their subject; and with their recent additions they still maintain decidedly the same rank." "Is perhaps the most comprehensive and lucid survey of Sanskrit literature extant. The essays contained in the volume were originally delivered as academic lectures, and at the time of their first publication were acknowledged to be by far the most learned and able treatment of the subject. They have now been brought up to date by the addition of all the most important results of recent research."--_Times._ * * * * * Second Edition. Post 8vo, pp. xxxii. and 330, cloth, price 7s. 6d. MASNAVI I MA'NAVI: THE SPIRITUAL COUPLETS OF MAULÁNA JALÁLU-'D-DIN MUHAMMAD I RU'MI. Translated and Abridged by E. H. WHINFIELD, M.A., Late of H.M. Bengal Civil Service. EXTRACT FROM AUTHOR'S PREFACE. This is the book of the Masnavi. It contains the roots of the roots of the roots of the Faith, and treats of the mysteries of "Union" and "Certitude." Thus saith the feeble slave, in need of the mercy of God, whose name be praised, Muhammad, son of Muhammad, son of Husain, of Balkh, of whom may God accept it,--"I have exerted myself to enlarge this book of poetry in rhymed couplets, which contains strange and rare narratives, beautiful sayings and recondite indications; a path for the devout, and a garden for the pious; short in its expressions, but having numerous applications." The author goes on to state that he wrote his book at the instance of Shaikh Hasan, son of Muhammad, "a Chief of the Gnostics (_'Arif[=i]n_) and a leader of right direction and of sure knowledge;" and concludes with a prayer that it may prove "a blessing to those who are possessed of insight, the godly, the spiritual, and the heavenly-minded, the men of light who keep silence and observe, who are absent in spirit though present in the body, very kings though clothed in rags, true nobles among the people, endued with virtues, the lights of guidance." * * * * * Post 8vo, cloth, pp. xxxii.-336, price 10s. 6d. THE QUATRAINS OF OMAR KHAYYÁM. The Persian Text with an English Verse Translation. BY E. H. WHINFIELD, M.A., Late of the Bengal Civil Service. EXTRACT FROM THE INTRODUCTION. Ghiás uddin Abul Fath Omar bin Ibrahim al Khayyám was a native of Nishapúr, one of the principal cities of Khorásan. According to the Preface of the Calcutta MS., he died in 517 A.D., during the reign of Sultan Sarjar. The date of his birth is nowhere mentioned, but he was contemporary with Nizám ul Mulk, the celebrated Wazir of the Seljuk kings, Alp Arslan and Malik Shah. This edition contains the Persian test of 500 quatrains based on a collation of eight authorities, together with English verse translations. * * * * * Second Edition, Revised. Post 8vo, cloth, pp. viii.-124, price 5s. THE QUATRAINS OF OMAR KHAYYÁM. Translated into English verse, BY E. H. WHINFIELD, M.A., Late of the Bengal Civil Service. This edition contains 267 of the best quatrains in the larger edition, carefully revised. * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. vi.-368, cloth, price 14s. MODERN INDIA AND THE INDIANS. BEING A SERIES OF IMPRESSIONS, NOTES, AND ESSAYS. BY SIR MONIER WILLIAMS, D.C.L., Hon. LL.D. of the University of Calcutta, Hon. Member of the Bombay Asiatic Society, Boden Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford. Fifth Edition, revised and augmented by considerable Additions, with Illustrations and a Map. "In this volume we have the thoughtful impressions of a thoughtful man on some of the most important questions connected with our Indian Empire.... An enlightened observant man, travelling among an enlightened observant people, Professor Monier Williams has brought before the public in a pleasant form more of the manners and customs of the Queen's Indian subjects than we ever remember to have seen in any one work. He not only deserves the thanks of every Englishman for this able contribution to the study of Modern India--a subject with which we should be specially familiar--but he deserves the thanks of every Indian, Parsee or Hindu, Buddhist and Moslem, for his clear exposition of their manners, their creeds, and their necessities."--_Times._ * * * * * Post 8vo, pp. xii.-72, cloth, price 5s. THE SATAKAS OF BHARTRIHARI. Translated from the Sanskrit BY THE REV. B. HALE WORTHAM, M.R.A.S., Rector of Eggesford, North Devon. "A very interesting addition to Trübner's Oriental Series."--_Saturday Review._ "Many of the Maxims in the book have a Biblical ring and beauty of expression."--_St. James' Gazette._ * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES 1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_. 2. Footnotes have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the end of the chapter. 3. Obvious punctuation errors have been silently corrected. 4. The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these letters have been replaced with transliterations. 5. The words coup-d'oeil and Oedipus use an oe ligature in the original. 6. The letters with diacritical marks are enclosed within square braces. 7. Numbers of the form "9-1/2" represent fractional numbers where whole number 9 is followed by hyphen and the fraction 1/2. 8. The following misprints have been corrected: "similiar" corrected to "similar" (page x) "savans" corrected to "savants" (page xiv) "Rasula" corrected to "Raoula" (page xx) "ntellectual" corrected to "intellectual" (Ch. I, ftn. 1) "siting" corrected to "sitting" (page 69) "amuesment" corrected to "amusement" (page 69) "Guadama" corrected to "Gaudama" (page 75) "ocurrence" corrected to "occurrence" (Ch. V, ftn. 1) "substantinl" corrected to "substantial" (page 81) "undescribable" corrected to "indescribable" (page 100) "Pathanadi" corrected to "Pathenadi" (page 107) "Ooodaka" corrected to "Oodaka" (page 113) "Rathans" corrected to "Rahans" (Ch. VI, ftn. 2) "succesively" corrected to "successively" (page 121) "possesssed" corrected to "possessed" (page 132) "drunkennness" corrected to "drunkenness" (page 136) "Tsadoumaritz" corrected to "Tsadoomarit" (page 139) "Rathan" corrected to "Rahan" (page 142) "Adzatatha" corrected to "Adzatathat" (Ch. VI, ftn. 13) "perfect on" corrected to "perfection" (Ch. VII, ftn. 3) "morever" corrected to "moreover" (page 157) "eft" corrected to "left" (page 162) "Buddah" corrected to "Buddha" (Ch. VIII, ftn. 9) "pracittioners" corrected to "practitioners" (Ch. IX, ftn. 1) "stockof" corrected to "stock of" (Ch. IX, ftn. 1) "Patzati" corrected to "Patzapati" (page 208) 9. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.