mentioned in the Nikâyas as worthy of all respect
but are not prominent in either the earlier or later works, which is only natural, seeing that by their very definition they are self-centred and of little importance for mankind. The idea of the private Buddha however is interesting, inasmuch as it implies that even when the four truths are not preached they still exist and can be discovered by anyone who makes the necessary mental and moral effort. It is also noticeable that the superiority of a supreme Buddha lies in his power to teach and help others. A passionless and self-centred sage falls short of the ideal.
[Footnote 1: The frontier seems to be about Long. 65° E.]
[Footnote 2: See Coedes's views about Śrîvijaya in B.E.F.E.O. 1918, 6. The inscriptions of Rajendracola I (1012-1042 A.D.) show that Hindus in India were not wholly ignorant of Indian conquests abroad.]
[Footnote 3: But the Japanese syllabaries were probably formed under Indian influence.]
[Footnote 4: Probably the Christian doctrine of the atonement or salvation by the death of a deity is an exception. I do not know of any Indian sect which holds a similar view. The obscure verse Rig Veda x. 13. 4 seems to hint at the self-sacrifice of a deity but the hymn about the sacrifice of Purusha (x. 90) has nothing to do with redemption or atonement.]
[Footnote 5: It is possible (though not, I think, certain) that the Buddha called his principal doctrines ariya in the sense of Aryan not of noble. But even the Blessed One may not have been infallible in ethnography. When we call a thing British we do not mean to refer it to the ancient Britons more than to the Saxons or Normans. And was the Buddha an Aryan? See V. Smith, Oxford History of India, p. 47 for doubts.]
[Footnote 6: This is not altogether true of the modern temple ritual.]
[Footnote 7: It is very unfortunate that English usage should make this word appear the same as Brahman, the name of a caste, and there is much to be said for using the old-fashioned word Brahmin to denote the caste, for it is clear, though not correct. In Sanskrit there are several similar words which are liable to be confused in English. In the nominative case they are:
(1) Brâhmanah, a man of the highest caste.
(2) Brâhmanam, an ancient liturgical treatise.
(3) Brahma, the Godhead, stem Brahman, neuter.
(4) Brahmâ, a masculine nominative also formed from the stem Brahman and used as the name of a personal deity.
For (3) the stem Brahman is commonly used, as being distinct from Brahmâ, though liable to be confounded with the name of the caste.]
[Footnote 8: For some years most scholars accepted the opinion that the Buddha died in 487 B.C. but the most recent researches into the history of the Saisunâga dynasty suggest that the date should be put back to 554 B.C. See Vincent Smith, Oxford History of India, p. 52.]
[Footnote 9: This is sometimes rendered simply by desire but desire in English is a vague word and may include feelings which do not come within the Pali tanhâ. The Buddha did not reprobate good desires. See Mrs Rhys David's Buddhism, p. 222 and E.R.E. s.v. Desire.]
[Footnote 10: It is practically correct to say that Buddhism was the first universal and missionary religion, but Mahâvira, the founder of the Jains and probably somewhat slightly his senior, is credited with the same wide view.]
[Footnote 11: It may be conveniently and correctly called Pali Buddhism. This is better than Southern Buddhism or Hînayâna, for the Buddhism of Java which lies even farther to the south is not the same and there were formerly Hînayânists in Central Asia and China.]
[Footnote 12: See Finot, J.A. 1912, n. 121-136.]
[Footnote 13: There is no Indian record of Bodhidharma's doctrine and its origin is obscure, but it seems to have been a compound of Buddhism and Vedantism.]
[Footnote 14: This is proved by coins and also by the Besnagar inscription.]
[Footnote 15: I do not think that this view is disproved by the fact that Patañjali and the scholiasts on Pânini allude to images for they also allude to Greeks. For the contrary view see Sten Konow in I.A. 1909, p. 145. The facts are (a) The ancient Brahmanic ritual used no images. (b) They were used by Buddhism and popular Hinduism about the fourth century B.C. (c) Alexander conquered Bactria in 329 B.C. But allowance must be made for the usages of popular and especially of Dravidian worship of which at this period we know nothing.]
[Footnote 16: Few now advocate an earlier date such as 58 B.C.]
[Footnote 17: His authorship of The Awakening of Faith must be regarded as doubtful.]
[Footnote 18: Much of the Ramayana and Mahabharata must have been composed during this period, both poems (especially the latter) consisting of several strata.]
[Footnote 19: E.g. the Vyûhas of the Pâncarâtras, the five Jinas of the Mahayanists and the five Sadâśiva tattvas. See Gopinâtha Rao, Elements of Indian Iconography, vol. III p. 363.]
[Footnote 20: I draw a distinction between Śâktism and Tantrism. The essence of Śâktism is the worship of a goddess with certain rites. Tantrism means rather the use of spells, gestures, diagrams and various magical or sacramental rites, which accompanies Śâktism but may exist without it.]
[Footnote 21: According to Census of India, 1911, Assam, p. 47, about 80,000 animists were converted to Hinduism in Goalpara between 1901 and 1911 by a Brahman called Sib Narayan Swami.]
[Footnote 22: It is said that in Burma Hindu settlers become absorbed in the surrounding Buddhists. Census of India, 1911, I. p. 120.]
[Footnote 23: The life and writings of Vasubandhu illustrate the transition from the Hina-to the Mahayana. In the earlier part of his life he wrote the Abhidharmakośa which is still used by Mahayanists in Japan as a text-book, though it does not go beyond Hinayanism. Later he became a Mahayanist and wrote Mahayanist works.]
[Footnote 24: As already mentioned, I think Śâktism is the more appropriate word but Tantrism is in common use by the best authorities.]
[Footnote 25: In India proper there are hardly any Buddhists now. The Kumbhipathias, an anti-Brahmanic sect in Orissa, are said to be based on Buddhist doctrines and a Buddhist mission in Mysore, called the Sakya Buddhist Society, has met with some success. See Census of India, 1911, i. pp. 122 and 126.]
[Footnote 26: See the quotation in Schomerus, Der Śaiva Siddhânta, p. 20 where a Saiva Hindu says that he would rather see India embrace Christianity than the doctrine of Śankara.]
[Footnote 27: Some think that the sect called Nimávats was earlier.]
[Footnote 28: The determination of his precise date offers some difficulties. See for further discussion Book v.]
[Footnote 29: The Kadianis and Chet Ramis in the N.W. Provinces are mentioned but even here the fusion seems to be chiefly between Islam and Christianity. See also the article Râdhâ Soârai in E.R.E.]
[Footnote 30: According to the Census of 1911.]
[Footnote 31: There are curious survivals of paganism in out of the way forms of Christianity. Thus animal sacrifices are not extinct among Armenians and Nestorians. See E.R.E. article "Prayer for the Dead" at the end.]
[Footnote 32: The Buddhism of Siam and Burma is similar but in Siam it is a mediæval importation and the early religious history of Burma is still obscure.]
[Footnote 33: Although stability is characteristic of the Hinayana its later literature shows a certain movement of thought phases of which are marked by the Questions of Milinda, Buddhaghosa's works and the Abhidhammattha Sangaha.]
[Footnote 34: E.g. the way a monastic robe should be worn and the Sîmâ.]
[Footnote 35: I believe this to be the orthodox explanation but it is open to many objections.
(1) It is a mere phrase. If to create means to produce something out of nothing, then we have never seen such an act and to ascribe a sudden appearance to such an act is really no explanation. Perhaps an act of imagination or a dream may justly be called a creation, but the relation between a soul and its Creator is not usually regarded as similar to the relation between a mind and its fancies.
(2) The responsibility of God for the evil of the world seems to be greatly increased, if he is directly responsible for every birth of a child in unhappy conditions.
(3) Animals are not supposed to have souls. Therefore the production of an animal's mind is not explained by this theory and it seems to be assumed that such a complex mind ag a dog's can be explained as a function of matter, whereas there is something in a child which cannot be so explained.
(4) If a new immortal soul is created every time a birth takes place, the universe must be receiving incalculably large additions. For some philosophies such an idea is impossible. (See Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 502. "The universe is incapable of increase. And to suppose a constant supply of new souls, none of which ever perished, would clearly land us in the end in an insuperable difficulty.") But even if we do not admit that it is impossible, it at least destroys all analogy between the material and spiritual worlds. If all the bodies that ever lived continued to exist separately after death, the congestion would be unthinkable. Is a corresponding congestion in the spiritual world really thinkable?]
[Footnote 36: This seems to be the view of the Chândogya Up. VI. 12. As the whole world is a manifestation ol Brahman, so is the great banyan tree a manifestation of the subtle essence which is also present in its minute seeds.]
[Footnote 37: The Brihad Ar. Up. knows of samsâra and karma but as matters of deep philosophy and not for the vulgar: but in the Buddhist Pitakas they are assumed as universally accepted. The doctrine must therefore have been popularized after the composition of the Upanishad. But some allowance must be made for the fact that the Upanishads and the earliest versions of the Buddhist Suttas were produced in different parts of India.]
[Footnote 38: Yet many instances are quoted from Celtic and Teutonic folklore to the effect that birds and butterflies are human souls, and Caesar's remarks about the Druids may not be wholly wrong.]
[Footnote 39: Several other Europeans of eminence have let their minds play with the ideas of metempsychosis, pre-existence and karma, as for instance Giordano Bruno, Swedenborg, Goethe, Lessing, Lavater, Herder, Schopenhauer, Ibsen, von Helmont, Lichtenberg and in England such different spirits as Hume and Wordsworth. It would appear that towards the end of the eighteenth century these ideas were popular in some literary circles on the continent. See Bertholet, The Transmigration of Souls, pp. 111 ff. Recently Professor McTaggart has argued in favour of the doctrine with great lucidity and persuasiveness. Huxley too did not think it absurd. See his Romanes Lecture, Evolution and Ethics, Collected Essays, vol. IX. p. 61. As Deussen observes, Kant's argument which bases immortality on the realization of the moral law, attainable only by an infinite process of approximation, points to transmigration rather than immortality in the usual sense.]
[Footnote 40: The chemical elements are hardly an exception. Apparently they have no beginning and no end but there is reason to suspect that they have both.]
[Footnote 41: I know well-authenticated cases of Burmese and Indians thinking that the soul of a dead child had passed into an animal.]
[Footnote 42: Or again, when I wake up in the morning I am conscious of my identity because innumerable circumstances remind me of the previous day. But if I wake up suddenly in the night with a toothache which leaves room for no thought or feeling except the feeling of pain, is the fact that I experience the pain in any way lessened if for the moment I do not know who or where I am?]
[Footnote 43: I believe that a French savant, Colonel Rochas, has investigated in a scientific spirit cases in which hypnotized subjects profess to remember their former births and found that these recollections are as clear and coherent as any revelations about another world which have been made by Mrs Piper or other mediums. But I have not been able to obtain any of Col. Rochas's writings.]
[Footnote 44: I use the word soul merely for simplicity, but Buddhists and others might demur to this phraseology.]
[Footnote 45: But for a contrary view see Reincarnation, the Hope of the World by Irving S. Cooper. Even the Brihad Aran. Upan. (IV. 4. 3. 4) speaks of new births as new and more beautiful shapes which the soul fashions for itself as a goldsmith works a piece of gold.]
[Footnote 46: The increase of the human population of this planet does not seem to me a serious argument against the doctrine of rebirth for animals, and the denizens of other worlds may be supplying an increasing number of souls competent to live as human beings.]
[Footnote 47: Perhaps Russians in this as in many other matters think somewhat differently from other Europeans.]
[Footnote 48: Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 427. The chapter contains many striking instances of these experiences, collected mostly in the west.]
[Footnote 49: Compare St Teresa's Orison of Union, W. James, l.c. p. 408.]
[Footnote 50: Indian devotees understand how either Śiva or Krishna is all in all, and thus too St Teresa understood the mystery of the Trinity. See W. James, l.c. p. 411.]
[Footnote 51: Turîya or caturtha.]
[Footnote 52: Indians were well aware even in early times that such a state might be regarded as equivalent to annihilation. Br. Ar. Up. II. 4. 13; Chând. Up. VIII. ii. 1.]
[Footnote 53: The idea is not wholly strange to European philosophy. See the passage from the Phaedo quoted by Sir Alfred Lyall. "Thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these things trouble her—neither sounds nor sights nor pain nor any pleasure—when she has as little as possible to do with the body and has no bodily sense or feeling, but is aspiring after being.">[
[Footnote 54: Mr Bradley (Appearance and Reality, p. 498) says "Spirit is a unity of the manifold in which the externality of the manifold has utterly ceased." This seems to me one of the cases in which Mr Bradley's thought shows an interesting affinity to Indian thought.]
[Footnote 55: But also sometimes purusha.]
[Footnote 56: Even when low class yogis display the tortures which they inflict on their bodies, their object I think is not to show what penances they undergo but simply that pleasure and pain are alike to them.]
[Footnote 57: The sense of human dignity was strongest among the early Buddhists. They (or some sects of them) held that an arhat is superior to a god (or as we should say to an angel) and that a god cannot enter the path of salvation and become an arhat.]
[Footnote 58: Cf. Bosanquet, Gifford Lectures, 1912, p. 78. "History is a hybrid form of experience incapable of any considerable degree of being or trueness. The doubtful story of successive events cannot amalgamate with the complete interpretation of the social mind, of art, or of religion. The great things which are necessary in themselves, become within the narrative contingent or ascribed by most doubtful assumptions of insight to this actor or that on the historical stage. The study of Christianity is the study of a great world experience: the assignment to individuals of a share in its development is a problem for scholars whose conclusions, though of considerable human interest, can never be of supreme importance.">[
[Footnote 59: The Chinese critic Hsieh Ho who lived in the sixth century of our era said: "In Art the terms ancient and modern have no place." This is exactly the Indian view of religion.]
[Footnote 60: The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 525-527 and A Pluralistic Universe, p. 310.]
[Footnote 61: And in Russia there are sects which prescribe castration and suicide.]
[Footnote 62: This, of course, does not apply to Buddhism in China, Japan and Tibet.]
[Footnote 63: This is not true of the more modern Upanishads which are often short treatises specially written to extol a particular deity or doctrine.]
[Footnote 64: Mahâparinibbâna sutta. See the table of parallel passages prefixed to Rhys Davids's translation, Dialogues of the Buddha, II. 72.]
[Footnote 65: Much the same is true of the various editions of the Vinaya and the Mahâvastu. These texts were produced by a process first of collection and then of amplification.]
[Footnote 66: The latter part of Mahâbhârata XII.]
[Footnote 67: Though European religions emphasize man's duty to God, they do not exclude the pursuit of happiness: e.g. Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647). Question 1, "What is the chief end of man? A. Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.">[
[Footnote 68: Mrs Rhys Davids has brought out the importance of the will for Buddhist ethics in several works. See J.R.A.S. 1898, p. 47 and Buddhism, pp. 221 ff. See also Maj. Nik. 19 for a good example of Buddhist views as to the necessity and method of cultivating the will.]
[Footnote 69: Kaush. Up. III. 8.]
[Footnote 70: The words are kâmacâra and akâmacâra. Chand. Up. 8. 1-6.]
[Footnote 71: Mahâvag. I. 6. E.g. Ajâtasattu (Dig. Nik. 2, ad fin.) would have obtained the eye of truth, had he not been a parricide. The consequent distortion of mind made higher states impossible.]
[Footnote 72: But all general statements about Hinduism are liable to exceptions. The evil spirit Duḥsaha described in the Mârkandeya Purâna (chaps. L and LI) comes very near the Devil.]
[Footnote 73: I can understand that the immediate reality is a duality or plurality and that the one spirit may appear in many shapes.]
[Footnote 74: E.g. Chand. Up. V. 1. 2. Bri. Ar. Up. I. 3. In the Pâñcarâtra we do hear of a jñânabhraṃsa or a fall from knowledge analogous to the fall of man in Christian theology. Souls have naturally unlimited knowledge but this from some reason becomes limited and obscured, so that religion is necessary to show the soul the right way. Here the ground idea seems to be not that any devil has spoilt the world but that ignorance is necessary for the world process, for otherwise mankind would be one with God and there would be no world. See Schrader, Introd. to the Pâncarâtra, pp. 78 and 83.]
[Footnote 75: The Śatapatha Brâhmana has a curious legend (XI. 1. 6. 8 ff.) in which the Creator admits that he made evil spirits by mistake and smites them. In the Kârikâ of Gauḍapâda, 2. 19 it is actually said: Mayaishâ tasya devasya yayâ sammohitaḥ svayam.]
[Footnote 76: He does not say this expressly and it requires careful statement in India where it is held strongly that God being perfect cannot add to his bliss or perfection by creating anything. Compare Dante, Paradiso, xxix. 13-18:
Non per aver a sè di bene acquisto,
ch' esser non può, ma perchè suo splendore
potesse risplendendo dir: subsisto.
In sua eternità di tempo fuore,
fuor d' ogni altro comprender, come i piacque,
s'aperse in nuovi amor l' eterno amore.]