BUDDHA AND EARLY BUDDHISM. BY ARTHUR LILLIE (LATE REGIMENT OF LUCKNOW). ARuage Tunn With Numerous Ellustrations drawn on the Wood LONDON: TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL. 1881. [All rights reserved.] FIVE hundred and sixty years before Christ a religious reformer appeared in Bengal-Buddha. The following are some of the results due to the sojourn of this one man upon earth : 1. The most formidable priestly tyranny that the world had ever seen crumbled away before his attack, and the followers of Buddha were paramount in India for a thou sand years. 2. The institution of caste was assailed and overturned. 3. Polygamy was for the first time pronounced immoral, and slavery condemned. 4. Woman, from being considered a chattel and a beast of burden, was for the first time considered man's equal, and allowed to develop her spiritual life. 5. All bloodshed, whether with the knife of the priest or the sword of the conqueror, was rigidly forbidden. 6. Also, for the first time in the religious history of mankind, the awakening of the spiritual life of the individual was substituted for religion by body corporate. It is also certain that Buddha was the first to proclaim that duty was to be sought in the eternal principles of morality and justice, and not in animal sacrifices and local formalities invented by the fancy of priests. 7. The principle of religious propagandism was for the first time introduced, with its two great instruments, the missionary and the preacher. 8. By these China, Bactria, Japan, and, indeed, almost all Asia, were by and by converted to the religion of Buddha. 9. It is asserted by calm thinkers like Dean Mansel that within two generations of the time of Alexander the Great the missionaries of Buddha made their appearance at Alexandria. This theory is confirmed-in the East by the Asoka monuments-in the West by Philo. He expressly maintains the identity in creed of the higher Judaism and that of the Gymnosophists of India who abstained from the "sacrifice of living animals "—in a word, the Buddhists. It would follow from this that the priestly religions of Babylonia, Palestine, Egypt, and Greece were undermined by certain kindred mystical societies organised by Buddha's missionaries under the various names of Therapeuts, Essenes, Neo-Pythagoreans, Neo-Zoroastrians, &c. Thus Buddhism prepared the way for Christianity. 10. I think I can show likewise that the missionaries of Buddha evangelised America in the fifth century A.D., and persuaded King Quatzal Coatl to abolish the sacrifice of blood. This shall be proved from the Chinese records and from the abundant Buddhist monuments and symbols-the elephant, the cobra, the figure of Buddha, &c.—found amongst the antiquities of the New World. II. Sir William Jones was of opinion that Woden and Buddha were philologically identical; and the similarity of the mounds, towers, and stone circles of the Indian Buddhists and those of the Norsemen, Angles, Goths, &c., has of late been repeatedly pointed out. The question whether Buddha was the early god of North Europe shall also be considered in these pages. Thus from the thought of one man's brain a religion has arisen which may be said to have covered the globe with its rock temples, and statues, and pillars, and |