About the year 500 B.C. there was born a prince in India by the name of Gautama. Gautama saw so much suffering and trouble in the world that he felt it was not right that he himself, just because he by chance had been born rich, should be happy while others were miserable and unhappy. So he gave up the life to which he had been born and brought up, a life of ease and luxury with all its good things, and spent his entire time trying to make things better for his people.
Gautama taught the people to be good; he taught them to be honest; and he taught them to help the poor and unfortunate. After a while people began to call him Buddha, and he was so holy and pure that at last they thought he must be god himself, and so they worshiped him as god.
These people who believed in Buddha were called Buddhists, and many, many Brahmanists left their hideous idols and became Buddhists. You see there was no such thing as a Christian religion as yet, for this was still five hundred years before Christ was born, and Buddhism seemed so much better than Brahmanism that we do not wonder that great numbers of people became Buddhists.
Buddhists thought their religion was so good that they wanted everyone to become Buddhists; so they sent missionaries across country and sea to the island of Japan just as we send Christian missionaries now, and this new religion spread far and wide.
Perhaps you have never met nor seen nor even heard of a Buddhist, and yet to-day there are many more Buddhists on the other side of the world than there are Christians!
About the same time that Gautama was starting Buddhism in India, a man in China, a teacher by the name of Confucius, was teaching the people of China what they ought to do and what they ought not to do. His teachings filled several books and formed what came to be a religion for the Chinese.
Confucius taught his people to obey their parents and teachers and to honor their ancestors. This sounds something like one of the Ten Commandments: “Honor thy father and thy mother.”
Confucius also taught the golden rule, the same golden rule you are taught to-day, only instead of saying, “Do unto others as you would be done by,” he said, “Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you.”
In China there are still as many people who follow the teachings of Confucius as there are Christians in all the rest of the world. So here are two religions each as large or larger than the Christian religion.
China was highly civilized, even at this time, 500 B.C., and many inventions were known and used in that country long before the rest of the world ever heard of them. Yet we know little of China’s history until a great deal later.