What he opposed was priestcraft and superstition, not Brāhmanism; as indeed other reformers had done before him. Probably the great receptivity of Buddhism was one of the causes that led to its decay in India.
Yet Gautama’s victory over one of the most inveterate propensities in human nature—the tendency to seek salvation through a mediatorial caste of priests—was a wonderful achievement. This is proved by the fact that his followers in other countries became re-entangled in a network of priestcraft, even more enslaving than that out of which he had rescued them.
Koeppen, Rhys Davids, and other writers have well shown that the Buddhism of Tibet, with its Pope-like grand Lāmas—its cardinals and abbots, monks and mendicant friars, nuns and novices, canonized saints and angelic hosts, temples and costly shrines, monasteries and nunneries, images and pictures, altars and relics, robes and mitres, rosaries and consecrated water, litanies and chants, processions and pilgrimages, confessions and penances, bell-ringing and incense—is in everything, except doctrine, almost a counterpart of the Romish system. How little could the Buddha have foreseen such a development of his brotherhood of monks, whose chief duties were meditation and itineration!
And what is to be said of the present condition of the Buddhist monkhood? Do we see anywhere evidences of that enlightenment of mind which Buddhism claims as its chief characteristic?
When I was travelling in Ceylon, I met a few learned monks, but the majority seemed to me idle, ignorant, and indifferent.
In Burma the monks are called Pungīs (Phongies), and are a little more active. Every youth in Burma is supposed for a time to inhabit a monastery.
In Tibet the monks are called Lāmas (a lower title being Gelong) and constitute a large proportion of the population. They are slaves to gross superstitions. Some are mere devil-charmers, a belief in the power of evil spirits being the chief religion of the people.
In China the monks are called Ho-shang (or Ho-sang). They constitute the only section of the population who have a right to be called Buddhists, though, after all, they are mere pseudo-Buddhists. Professor Legge informs me that he has known a few learned men among them, and learned works have been written by them. But the general testimony of Europeans in China is that the mass of the monks there are simply drones, or aimless dreamers, who go through their repetitions by rote. Almost all are conspicuous for apathy, inertness, and a vacant idiotic expression of countenance.
Clearly we have in their condition an example of the fact that even moral restraint, if carried to the extreme of extinguishing all the natural affections and desires, must inevitably be followed by a Nemesis. Surely we have in these monkish fraternities an illustration of the truth that any transgression of the laws of nature, common-sense, and reason—any suppression of the primary instincts of humanity, must in the end incur the penalty attached to every violation of the eternal ordinances of God.