And once more, what resulted from the Buddha’s objection to provide visible images and material objects of worship, with a view to stimulate devotion or aid meditation?
Of course concrete and objective Buddhism of some kind became a necessity. It became essential to make concessions to the weakness and infirmity of human nature, which required external aids, and declined to be devoted to an ideal void, or to meditate on a pure abstraction. Even the Founder of Buddhism himself seems to have felt, as we shall see, that his hold on the memory of his followers would depend on their venerating certain objects and symbols after his death. Unhappily for the purity of Buddhism, but quite in conformity with the inveterate tendencies of humanity, the Buddha’s disciples pushed veneration of external objects to an extreme. They were not contented with mere reverence shown to the relics of the Buddha’s burnt body and the shrines containing them. They worshipped the tree under which he attained Buddhahood, the seat on which he sat, the prints of his feet, his shadow supposed to be impressed on rocks, the utensils he used, the books containing the Law, the wheel which symbolized both the propagation and the character of his doctrine, and finally bowed down before carved representations of his body and images of all kinds. It is remarkable that in Buddhist countries idols are far more numerous than among any other idolatrous people in the world.
Lastly, what resulted from the Buddha’s teaching that the ultimate end to which men’s efforts ought to be directed was Nirvāṇa—that is, the total extinction of all individual existence and personal identity?
Of course men instinctively recoiled from utter self-annihilation, and so the Buddha’s followers ended in changing the true idea of Nirvāṇa and converting it from a condition of non-existence into a state of hazy beatitude in celestial regions, while they encouraged all men—whether monks or laymen—to make a sense of dreamy bliss in heaven, and not total extinction of life, the end of all their efforts.
But it was not only this natural and inevitable recoil to the opposite extreme that ultimately brought about an entire change in primitive Buddhism. Another cause must also be taken into account.
We have already explained the nature of the tie which bound Buddhism to Brāhmanism, from the first day on which Gautama sat as a disciple at the feet of the Brāhman philosophers Udraka and Āḷāra ([p. 29]). Now, although this tie was soon loosened, and although the Buddha struck out a line of his own, and a separation took place, yet the two systems stood on so much common ground that they were always ready to draw together again.
At all events, it is probable that one system never expelled the other, and that the constant attrition and contact which took place between Brāhmanism and Buddhism, led to a considerable splitting up of the original fabric of Buddhism, involving, of course, many divisions and subdivisions of Buddhistic thought, some of which were closely allied to the later developments of Brāhmanical philosophy.
In the Sarva-darṡana-saṅgraha four principal sects of Buddhism are enumerated, which must have taken root early on Indian soil.
These four were the Vaibhāshika, Sautrāntika, Mādhyamika, and Yogāćāra. Of these the first two with their subdivisions[63] were realistic, and were established—though not perhaps thoroughly formulated and systematized—in very early times, long before the council of Kanishka; while the two later schools are described as idealistic, the Mādhyamika being a Buddhistic form of the Vedānta philosophy, and the Yogāćāra agreeing generally with the Yoga system.
Indeed there is good evidence that Buddhism developed in India a greater number of schools and phases of thought than Brāhmanism itself. Some authorities enumerate eighteen divisions (corresponding perhaps to the eighteen original disciples, pp. [47]-73) which existed in king Kanishka’s time—that is, in the first century of our era, while others specify thirty-two; and in the fourth century we find the Chinese traveller Fā-hien ([p. 160]) making allusion to as many as ninety-six (Dr. Legge’s translation, p. 62).