STATUE OF BUDDHA.
When he came to manhood he was struck by the misery of man's life in the world. It appeared to him that the first cause of all that misery was man's selfish wishes, and his desire for all kinds of pleasure. He arrived at the belief that if man could rid himself of these desires his misery would cease. One might think that if this were so the simple remedy for it all would be death. But that was no remedy in the eyes of Buddha, for he firmly believed that this life which we lead here is but one in a cycle, or succession, of lives which each soul has to live through. The only way then by which man's misery could be relieved was that he should strive by all means to rid himself of his desires, to become, as it were, selfless, that is to say a creature not taking any satisfaction in gratifying his natural desires. And so convinced was this young prince, or rajah, that it was thus and thus only that man's grief could be assuaged, that he gave up his princely position, he left wife and child and all his wealth and wandered in poverty about the world preaching this doctrine.
No doubt it was developed by his followers—for he quickly gained a numerous following—beyond his own first ideas. It taught that the final satisfaction and peace of the soul of man was only to be won, after many re-incarnations—that is to say, after living again and again on the earth in different human bodies—by being absorbed into some kind of universal or divine soul which was called Nirvana. In that state the individual self of each soul would be lost, at length, and it might know peace because all selfish desires had gone from it.
Buddhism
What he preached, then, was not quite unselfishness as we understand it; for our unselfishness seems to imply an active concern for the selves of other people. Buddha's idea was much more passive than active. We might better call it selflessness. His great thought was how to get rid of all self, both a man's own self and that of all others. He did, however, devote himself to what we may describe even in our sense as a perfectly unselfish life, for he not only denied himself all but the barest necessities, but went through northern India trying to save other men from what he considered, and pitied, as their misery, by explaining to them how he thought they might escape from it.
The theory of re-incarnation opened a way for the union of Buddhism with the older Brahmanism, for the priests taught that in Buddha himself was the incarnated soul of Vishnu, the supreme spirit of the Brahmans. So they taught, and who was there to contradict them?
For the regulation of social life the maxims of Buddha are such as the highest Christian morality must approve. Hatred was to be conquered by love. Wives, children, and servants were to be treated with wise kindness. After a while, as has happened with other religions, the followers of Buddhism split up into sects, and especially into what were called the Northern and the Southern Churches. Although it was in the north of India that Buddha had preached, it was there that his rules of life were modified and made less severe. The Southern Church observed them more strictly.
In the centuries that followed, the doctrines of Buddha won converts far beyond India itself—in Tibet in the north, in Burma and Siam in the east and south, and so to the Malay Peninsula and to the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Farther west it was carried down into Ceylon.
Whatever, we may think of the religion of Buddha, it is obvious that it was in no sense a "fighting religion." It did not inspire its followers to be soldiers. Perhaps this is the reason why the Hindus never seem to have been able to resist the incursions of warlike neighbours. In the fourth century B.C. came Alexander of Macedon and pushed his wonderful conquests into the very heart of India. His general, Seleucus, organised part of the conquered territory under his rule, but it made little lasting impression on the story of the country. About the middle of the second century A.D., the wild hordes of the Parthians, the people who gave such continual trouble to the mighty Roman Empire, swept into Northern India, and with them they brought Christianity. Christianity, too, came early to that Malabar coast where the Portuguese, more than a thousand years later, found the Moslems in full possession. But Christianity was not imposed by force.