LALO, EDOUARD (1823-1892), French composer, was born at Lille, on the 27th of January 1823. He began his musical studies at the conservatoire at Lille, and in Paris attended the violin classes of Habeneck. For several years Lalo led a modest and retired existence, playing the viola in the quartet party organized by Armingaud and Jacquard, and in composing chamber music. His early works include two trios, a quartet, and several pieces for violin and pianoforte. In 1867 he took part in an operatic competition, an opera from his pen, entitled Fiesque, obtaining the third place out of forty-three. This work was accepted for production at the Paris Opéra, but delays occurred, and nothing was done. Fiesque was next offered to the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, and was about to be produced there when the manager became bankrupt. Thus, when nearly fifty years of age, Lalo found himself in difficulties. Fiesque was never performed, but the composer published the pianoforte score, and eventually employed some of the music in other works. After the Franco-German war French composers found their opportunity in the concert-room. Lalo was one of these, and during the succeeding ten years several interesting works from his pen were produced, among them a sonata for violoncello, a “divertissement” for orchestra, a violin concerto and the Symphonie Espagnole for violin and orchestra, one of his best-known compositions. In the meanwhile he had written a second opera, Le Roi d’Ys, which he hoped would be produced at the Opéra. The administration offered him the “scenario” of a ballet instead. Lalo was obliged to be content with this, and set to work with so much energy that he fell ill, the last scenes of the ballet being orchestrated by Gounod. Namouna, the ballet in question, was produced at the Opéra in 1882. Six years later, on the 7th of May 1888, Le Roi d’Ys was brought out at the Opéra Comique, and Lalo was at last enabled to taste the sweets of success. Unfortunately, fame came to him too late in life. A pianoforte concerto and the music to Néron, a pantomimic piece played at the Hippodrome in 1891, were his last two works. He had begun a new opera, but had only written the first act when, on the 23rd of April 1892, he died. This opera, La Jacquerie, was finished by Arthur Coquard, and was produced in 1895 at Monte Carlo, Aix-les-Bains and finally in Paris. Lalo had distinct originality, discernible in his employment of curious rhythmic devices. His music is ever ingenious and brilliantly effective.
LA MADDALENA, an island 2½ m. from the N.E. coast of Sardinia. Pop. (1901) 8361. Napoleon bombarded it in 1793 without success, and Nelson made it his headquarters for some time. It is now an important naval station of the Italian fleet, the anchorage being good, and is strongly fortified. A bridge and an embankment connect it with Caprera. It appears to have been inhabited in Roman times.
LĀMĀISM, a system of doctrine partly religious, partly political. Religiously it is the corrupt form of Buddhism prevalent in Tibet and Mongolia. It stands in a relationship to primitive Buddhism similar to that in which Roman Catholicism, so long as the temporal power of the pope was still in existence, stood to primitive Christianity. The ethical and metaphysical ideas most conspicuous in the doctrines of Lāmāism are not confined to the highlands of central Asia, they are accepted in great measure also in Japan and China. It is the union of these ideas with a hierarchical system, and with the temporal sovereignty of the head of that system in Tibet, which constitutes what is distinctively understood by the term Lāmāism. Lāmāism has acquired a special interest to the student of comparative history through the instructive parallel which its history presents to that of the Church of Rome.
The central point of primitive Buddhism was the doctrine of “Arahatship”—a system of ethical and mental self-culture, in which deliverance was found from all the mysteries and sorrows of life in a change of heart to be reached The “Great Vehicle.” here on earth. This doctrine seems to have been held very nearly in its original purity from the time when it was propounded by Gotama in the 6th century B.C. to the period in which northern India was conquered by the Huns about the commencement of the Christian era. Soon after that time there arose a school of Buddhist teachers who called their doctrine the “Great Vehicle.” It was not in any contradiction to the older doctrine, which they contemptuously called the “Little Vehicle,” but included it all, and was based upon it. The distinguishing characteristic of the newer school was the importance which it attached to “Bodhisatship.” The older school had taught that Gotama, who had propounded the doctrine of Arahatship, was a Buddha, that only a Buddha is capable of discovering that doctrine, and that a Buddha is a man who by self-denying efforts, continued through many hundreds of different births, has acquired the so-called Ten Pāramitās or cardinal virtues in such perfection that he is able, when sin and ignorance have gained the upper hand throughout the world, to save the human race from impending ruin. But until the process of perfection has been completed, until the moment when at last the sage, sitting under the Wisdom tree acquires that particular insight or wisdom which is called Enlightenment or Buddhahood, he is still only a Bodhisat. The link of connexion between the various Bodhisats in the future Buddha’s successive births is not a soul which is transferred from body to body, but the karma, or character, which each successive Bodhisat inherits from his predecessors in the long chain of existences. Now the older school also held, in the first place, that, when a man had, in this life, attained to Arahatship, his karma would not pass on to any other individual in another life—or in other words, that after Arahatship there would be no rebirth; and, secondly, that four thousand years after the Buddha had proclaimed the Dhamma or doctrine of Arahatship, his teaching would have died away, and another Buddha would be required to bring mankind once more to a knowledge of the truth. The leaders of the Great Vehicle urged their followers to seek to attain, not so much to Arahatship, which would involve only their own salvation, but to Bodhisatship, by the attainment of which they would be conferring the blessings of the Dhamma upon countless multitudes in the long ages of the future. By thus laying stress upon Bodhisatship, rather than upon Arahatship, the new school, though they doubtless merely thought themselves to be carrying the older orthodox doctrines to their logical conclusion, were really changing the central point of Buddhism, and were altering the direction of their mental vision. It was of no avail that they adhered in other respects in the main to the older teaching, that they professed to hold to the same ethical system, that they adhered, except in a few unimportant details, to the old regulations of the order of the Buddhist mendicant recluses. The ancient books, preserved in the Pāli Pitakas, being mainly occupied with the details of Arahatship, lost their exclusive value in the eyes of those whose attention was being directed to the details of Bodhisatship. And the opinion that every leader in their religious circles, every teacher distinguished among them for his sanctity of life, or for his extensive learning, was a Bodhisat, who might have and who probably had inherited the karma of some great teacher of old, opened the door to a flood of superstitious fancies.
It is worthy of note that the new school found its earliest professors and its greatest expounders in a part of India outside the districts to which the personal influence of Gotama and of his immediate followers had been confined. The home of early Buddhism was round about Kosala and Magadha; in the district, that is to say, north and south of the Ganges between where Allahabad now lies on the west and Rajgir on the east. The home of the Great Vehicle was, at first, in the countries farther to the north and west. Buddhism arose in countries where Sanskrit was never more than a learned tongue, and where the exclusive claims of the Brahmins had never been universally admitted. The Great Vehicle arose in the very stronghold of Brahminism, and among a people to whom Sanskrit, like Latin in the middle ages in Europe, was the literary lingua franca. The new literature therefore, which the new movement called forth, was written, and has been preserved, in Sanskrit—its principal books of Dharma, or doctrine, being the following nine: (1) Prajñā-pāramitā; (2) Gaṇḍa-vyūha; (3) Daśa-bhūmīś-vara; (4) Samādhi-rāja; (5) Lankāvatāra; (6) Saddharma-puṇḍarīka; (7) Tathāgata-guhyaka; (8) Lalita-vistara; (9) Suvarṇa-prabhāsa. The date of none of these works is known with any certainty, but it is highly improbable that any one of them is older than the 6th century after the death of Gotama. Copies of all of them were brought to Europe by Mr B. H. Hodgson, and other copies have been received since then; but only one of them has as yet been published in Europe (the Lalita Vistara, edited by Lofmann), and only two have been translated into any European language. These are the Lalita Vistara, translated into French, through the Tibetan, by M. Foucaux, and the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka, translated into English by Professor Kern. The former is legendary work, partly in verse, on the life of Gotama, the historical Buddha; and the latter, also partly in verse, is devoted to proving the essential identity of the Great and the Little Vehicles, and the equal authenticity of both as doctrines enunciated by the master himself.
Of the authors of these nine works, as of all the older Buddhist works with one or two exceptions, nothing has been ascertained. The founder of the system of the Great Vehicle is, however, often referred to under the name of Nāgārjuna, whose probable date is about A.D. 200.
Together with Nāgārjuna, other early teachers of the Great Vehicle whose names are known are Vasumitra, Vasubandhu, Āryadeva, Dharmapāla and Guṇamati—all of whom were looked upon as Bodhisats. As the newer school did not venture so far as to claim as Bodhisats the disciples stated in the older books to have been the contemporaries of Gotama (they being precisely the persons known as Arahats), they attempted to give the appearance of age to the Bodhisat theory by representing the Buddha as being surrounded, not only by his human companions the Arahats, but also by fabulous beings, whom they represented as the Bodhisats existing at that time. In the opening words of each Mahāyāna treatise a list is given of such Bodhisats, who were beginning, together with the historical Bodhisats, to occupy a position in the Buddhist church of those times similar to that occupied by the saints in the corresponding period of the history of Christianity in the Church of Rome. And these lists of fabulous Bodhisats have now a distinct historical importance. For they grow in length in the later works; and it is often possible by comparing them one with another to fix, not the date, but the comparative age of the books in which they occur. Thus it is a fair inference to draw from the shortness of the list in the opening words of the Lalita Vistara, as compared with that in the first sections of the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka, that the latter work is much the younger of the two, a conclusion supported also by other considerations.