Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and / Topographical with Notices of Its Natural History, Antiquities and / Productions, Volume 1

by Sir James Emerson Tennent

BUDDHISM AND DEMON-WORSHIP.[1]

It is difficult to attempt any condensed, and at the same time perspicuous, sketch of the national religion of Ceylon—a difficulty which arises not merely from the voluminous obscurity of its sacred history and records; but still more from confusion in the variety of forms under which Buddhism exhibits itself in various localities, and the divergences of opinion which prevail as to its tenets and belief. The antiquity of its worship is so extreme, that doubts still hang over its origin and its chronological relations to the religion of Brahma. Whether it took its rise in Hindustan, or in countries farther to the West, and whether Buddhism was the original doctrine of which Brahmanism became a corruption, or Brahmanism the original and Buddhism an effort to restore it to its pristine purity[2],—all these are questions which have yet to be adjusted by the results of Oriental research.[3] It is, however, established by a concurrence of historical proofs, that many centuries before the era of Christianity the doctrines of Buddha were enthusiastically cultivated in Baha, the Magadha, or country of the Magas, whose modern name is identified with the Wiharas or monasteries of Buddhism. Thence its teachers diffused themselves extensively throughout India and the countries to the eastward;—upwards of two thousand years ago it became the national religion of Ceylon and the Indian Archipelago; and its tenets have been adopted throughout the vast regions which extend from Siberia to Siam, and from the Bay of Bengal to the western shores of the Pacific.[4]

1: The details of the following chapter have been principally taken from SIR J. EMERSON TENNENT'S Christianity in Ceylon, ch. v.

2: Those early writers on the religions of India who drew their information exclusively from Brahmanical sources, incline to favour the pretensions of that system as the most ancient of the two. Klaproth, a profound authority, was of this opinion; but in later times the translations of the Pali records and other sacred volumes of Buddhism in Western India, Ceylon, and Nepal, have inclined the preponderance of opinion, if not in favour of the superior antiquity of Buddhism, at least in support of its contemporaneous development. A summary of the arguments in favour of the superior antiquity of Buddhism will be found in the "Notes," &c., by Colonel SYKES, in the 12th volume of the Asiatic Journal—and in the Essai sur l'Origine des Principaux Peuples Anciens, par F.L.M. MAUPIED, chap. viii. The arguments on the side of those who look on Brahmanism as the original, are given by MOUNTSTUART ELPHINSTONE in his History of India, vol. i. b. ii. c. 4. An able disquisition will be found in MAX MÜLLER's History of Sanskrit Literature, pp. 33, 260, &c. Mr. GOGERLY, the most accomplished student of Buddhism in Ceylon, says its sacred books expressly demonstrate that its doctrines had been preached by the twenty-four Buddhas who had lived prior to Gotama, in periods incredibly remote; but that they had entirely disappeared at the time of Gotama's birth, so that he re-discovered the whole, and revived an extinguished or nearly extinct school of philosophy.—Notes on Buddhism by the Rev. Mr. GOGERLY, Appendix to LEE'S Translation of Ribeyro, p. 265.

3: The celebrated temple of Somnauth was originally a Buddhist foundation, and in the worship of Jaggernath, to whose orgies all ranks are admitted without distinction of caste, there may still be traced an influence of Buddhism, if not a direct Buddhistical origin. Colonel Sykes is of opinion that the sacred tooth of Buddha was at one time deposited and worshipped in the great Temple of Calinga, now dedicated to Jaggernath, by the Princes of Orissa, who in the fourth century professed the Buddhist religion. (Colonel SYKES, Notes, &c., Asiatic Journal, vol. xii. pp. 275; 317, 420.)

4: FA HIAN declares that in the whole of India, including Affghanistan and Bokhara, he found in the fourth century a Buddhist people and dynasty, with traditions of its endurance for the preceding thousand years. "As to Hindostan itself, he says, from the time of leaving the deserts (of Jaysulmeer and Bikaneer) and the river (Jumna) to the west, all the kings of the different kingdoms in India are firmly attached to the law of Buddha, and when they do honour to the ecclesiastics they take off their diadems."—See also MAUPIED, Essai sur l'Origine des Principaux Peuples Anciens, chap. ix. p. 209.

Looking to its influence at the present day over at least three hundred and fifty millions of human beings—exceeding one-third of the human race—it is no exaggeration to say that the religion of Buddha is the most widely diffused that now exists, or that has ever existed since the creation of mankind.[1]

1: See ante, [p. 326.] So ample are the materials offered by Buddhism for antiquarian research, that its doctrines have been sought to be identified at once with the Asiatic philosophy and with the myths of the Scandinavians. Buddha has been at one time conjectured to be the Woden of the Scythians; at another the prophet Daniel, whom Nebuchadnezzar had created master of the astrologers, or chief priest of the Magi, as the title is rendered in the Septuagint—[Greek: Archonta Magôi]. An antiquarian of Wales, in devising a pedigree for the Oymri, has imported ancestors for the ancient Britons from Ceylon; and a writer in the Asiatic Researches, in 1807, as a preamble to the proof that the binomial theorem was familiar to the Hindus, has traced Western civilisation to an irruption of philosophers from India, identified the Druids with the Brahmans, and declared Stonehenge to be "one of the temples of Boodh." (Asiat. Res., vol. ii. p. 448.) A still more recent investigator, M. MAUPIED, has collected, in his Essai sur l'Origine des Peoples Anciens, what he considers to be the evidence that Buddhism may be indebted for its appearance in India to the captivity of the Jews by Salmanasar, 729 B.C.; to their dispersion by Assar-Addon at a still more recent period; to their captivity in Babylon, 606 B.C.: their diffusion over Media and the East, Persia, Bactria, Thibet, and China, and the communication of their sacred book to the nations amongst whom they thus became sojourners. He ventures even to suggest a possible identity between the names Jehovah and Buddha: "Les voyelles du mot Buddha sont les mêmes que celles du mot Jéhovah, qu'on prononce aussi Jouva; mais d'ailleurs le nom de Boudda a bien pu être tiré du mot Jeoudda Juda, le dieu de Joudda Boudda."—Chap. ix. p. 235. To account for the purer morals of Buddhism, MAUPIED has recourse to the conjecture that they may have been influenced by the preaching of St. Thomas at Ceylon, and Bartholomew on the continent of India. "Or il nous semble logique de conclure de teus ces faits que le Bouddhisme, dans ses doctrines essentielles, est d'origine Juire et Chrétienne; conséquence inattendue pour la plus de nos lecteurs sans doute."—MAUPIED, ch. ix. p. 257; ch. x. p. 263.

From the earliest period of Indian tradition, the struggle between the religion of Buddha and that of Brahma was carried on with a fanaticism and perseverance which resulted in the ascendancy of the Brahmans, perhaps about the commencement of the Christian era, and the eventual expulsion some centuries later of the worship of their rivals from Hindustan; but at what precise time the latter catastrophe was consummated has not been recorded in the annals of either sect.[1]