“The royal families, the warriors, who, it may be supposed, strenuously supported the priesthood so long as it was a question of robbing the people of their rights, now that this was effected turned against their former allies, and sought to throw off the yoke that was likewise laid upon them. These efforts were, however, unavailing: the colossus was too firmly established. Obscure legends and isolated allusions are the only records left to us in the later writings of the sacrilegious hands which ventured to attack the sacred and divinely consecrated majesty of the Brahmans; and these are careful to note at the same time the terrible punishments which befel those impious offenders” (Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 19).
The circumstances, however, that the Buddhist writings were from the first in vernacular dialects, not in Sanskrit,[51] and that the mythical matter which accumulated round the story of the Buddha is in the main aboriginal, and largely common to the myth of Krishna,[52] go to prove that Buddhism spread specially in the non-Aryan sphere.[53] Its practical (not theoretic)[54] atheism seems to have rested fundamentally on the conception of Karma, the transition of the soul, or rather of the personality, through many stages up to that in which, by self-discipline, it attains the impersonal peace of Nirvana; and of this conception there is no trace in the Vedas,[55] though it became a leading tenet of Brahmanism.
To the dissolvent influence of Greek culture may possibly be due some part of the success of Buddhism before our era, and even later. Hindu astronomy in the Vedic period was but slightly developed (Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 246, 249, 250); and “it was Greek influence that first infused a real life into Indian astronomy” (Id. p. 251; cp. Letronne, Mélanges d’Érudition, 1860 (?), p. 40; Narrien, Histor. Acc. of Orig. and Prog. of Astron., p. 33, and Lib. Use. Kn. Hist. of Astron., c. ii). This implies other interactions. It is presumably to Greek stimulus that we must trace the knowledge by Aryabhata (Colebrooke’s Essays, ed. 1873, ii, 404; cp. Weber, p. 257) of the doctrine of the earth’s diurnal revolution on its axis; and the fact that in India as in the Mediterranean world the truth was later lost from men’s hands may be taken as one of the proofs that the two civilizations alike retrograded owing to evil political conditions. In the progressive period (from about 320 B.C. onwards for perhaps some centuries) Greek ideas might well help to discredit traditionalism; and their acceptance at royal courts would be favourable to toleration of the new teaching. At the same time, Buddhism must have been favoured by the native mental climate in which it arose.
The main differentiation of Buddhism from Brahmanism, again, is its ethical spirit, which sets aside formalism and seeks salvation in an inward reverie and discipline; and this element in turn can hardly be conceived as arising save in an old society, far removed from the warlike stage represented by the Vedas. Whatever may have been its early association with Brahmanism[56] then, it must be regarded as essentially a reaction against Brahmanical doctrine and ideals; a circumstance which would account for its early acceptance in the Punjaub, where Brahmanism had never attained absolute power and was jealously resisted by the free population.[57] And the fact that Jainism, so closely akin to Buddhism, has its sacred books in a dialect belonging to the region in which Buddhism arose, further supports the view that the reaction grew out of the thought of a type of society differing widely from that in which Brahmanism arose. Jainism, like Buddhism, is substantially atheistic,[58] and like it has an ancient monkish organization to which women were early admitted. The original crypto-atheism or agnosticism of the Buddhist movement thus appears as a product of a relatively high, because complex, moral and intellectual evolution. It certainly never impugned the belief in the Gods; on the contrary, the Buddha is often represented as speaking of their existence,[59] and at times as approving of their customary worship;[60] but he is never said to counsel his own order to pray to them; he makes light of sacrifice; and above all he is made quite negative as to a future life, preaching the doctrine of Karma in a sense which excludes individual immortality.[61] “It cannot be denied that if we call the old Gods of the Veda—Indra and Agni and Yama—Gods, Buddha was an atheist. He does not believe in the divinity of these deities. What is noteworthy is that he does not by any means deny their bare existence.... The founder of Buddhism treats the old Gods as superhuman beings.”[62] Thus it is permissible to say both that Buddhism recognizes Gods and that it is practically atheistic.
“The fact cannot be disputed away that the religion of Buddha was from the beginning purely atheistic. The idea of the Godhead ... was for a time at least expelled from the sanctuary of the human mind,[63] and the highest morality that was ever taught before the rise of Christianity was taught by men with whom the Gods had become mere phantoms, without any altars, not even an altar to the unknown God” (Max Müller, Introd. to the Science of Religion, ed. 1882, p. 81. Cp. the same author’s Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 300.)
“He [Buddha] ignores God in so complete a way that he does not even seek to deny him; he does not suppress him, but he does not speak of him either to explain the origin and anterior existence of man or to explain the present life, or to conjecture his future life and definitive deliverance. The Buddha knows God in no fashion whatever” (Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Le Bouddha et sa Religion, 1866, p. v).
“Buddhism and Christianity are indeed the two opposite poles with regard to the most essential points of religion: Buddhism ignoring all feeling of dependence on a higher power, and therefore denying the very existence of a supreme deity” (Müller, Introd. to Sc. of Rel., p. 171).
“Lastly, the Buddha declared that he had arrived at [his] conclusions, not by study of the Vedas, nor from the teachings of others, but by the light of reason and intuition alone” (Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 48). “The most ancient Buddhism despises dreams and visions” (Id., p. 177). “Agnostic atheism ... is the characteristic of his [Buddha’s] system of philosophy” (Id., p. 207).
“Belief in a Supreme Being, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, is unquestionably a modern graft upon the unqualified atheism of Sákya Muni: it is still of very limited recognition. In none of the standard authorities ... is there the slightest allusion to such a First Cause, the existence of which is incompatible with the fundamental Buddhist dogma of the eternity of all existence” (H. H. Wilson, Buddha and Buddhism, in Essays and Lectures, ed. by Dr. R. Rost, 1862, ii, 361. Cp. p. 363).
On the other hand, the gradual colouring of Buddhism with popular mythology, the reversion (if, indeed, this were not early) to adoration and worship of the Buddha himself, and the final collapse of the system in India before the pressure of Brahmanized Hinduism, all prove the potency of the sociological conditions of success and failure for creeds and criticisms. Buddhism took the monastic form for its institutions, thus incurring ultimate petrifaction alike morally and intellectually; and in any case the normal Indian social conditions of abundant population, cheap food, and general ignorance involved an overwhelming vitality for the popular cults. These the orthodox Brahmans naturally took under their protection as a means of maintaining their hold over the multitude;[64] and though their own highest philosophy has been poetically grafted on that basis, as in the epic of the Mahâbhârata and in the Bhagavat Gita,[65] the ordinary worship of the deities of these poems is perforce utterly unphilosophical, varying between a primitive sensualism and an emotionalism closely akin to that of popular forms of Christianity. Buddhism itself, where it still prevails, exhibits similar tendencies.[66]