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116, line 14, for "Brahmânas" read "Brahmanas."

BUDDHA AND EARLY BUDDHISM.

CHAPTER I.

THE RELIGION OF THE RISHI.

IN the year 1805 Mr. Henry Colebrooke first gave to Europe a digest of the. Vedas, the Bible of Englishman and Saxon, of Frank and Slav, of Greek and Roman, of Persian and Hindoo, before these scattered nations had left their frugal home in Bactria. Mr. Colebrooke's Essay1 was received with much incredulity in the learned world; and Professor Whitney remarks that the author himself failed to see the full importance of the discovery. That may well be; but are we not in much the same plight? The Vedas contain the root-idea of most of the dogmas and religious rites of the world; and the hymns of the old Rishis, through German philosophy and less direct channels, are once more powerfully though silently influencing the more thoughtful portion of the great Aryan

race.

In the Vedic hymns two distinct forms of religion are traceable the religion of the prophet (Rishi) and the religion of the priest. The former religion was the earlier; and a Vedic book 2 alludes with regret to those

1 Essays, vol. i. p. 9.

2 Satapath'a Brâhmaṇa, xi. 5.
A

halcyon times when there was only one O'M, and one caste. As the work of Buddha was to restore the religion of the prophet and overturn that of the priest, let us study the Vedic Rishi.

It would astonish most people if they were told what a prominent part the homely word umbrella has played in the world. God and his eternal heaven have been called after it, man's temple and his religion, the monarch and his army. To this day the rulers of Russia, Persia, India, and perhaps Germany and Austria, are called by titles that have the root-word " umbrella.” The visitor to the Indian Museum laughs at the huge umbrella, with its seven silken sunshades, presented by the king of Burmah to our sovereign, little thinking that the deepest questions of metaphysics and theology are intimately connected with that grotesque parasol. In point of fact, an umbrella better than any other object represented the hemispherical canopy that was the Indian idea of heaven. Its stick was God, the "sustainer" of this canopy. And in Vedic days the number of the heavens was seven; hence the seven silken tops of the umbrella of the king of Burmah.

In the Bhagavad Gîtâ the great spiritual enlightenment which it is the object of all devout Asiatics to obtain is called knowledge of the symbol umbrella, knowledge of God and his seven eternal heavens. This knowledge was to be acquired by the practices of the Rishi or prophet. As Buddhism is so bound up with these practices, I will try to make the religion of the Rishi intelligible.

One of the earliest constructed dwellings of the savage man in a cold climate was probably a tiny chamber of boughs and loose stones, with a covering of earth for warmth. Such dwellings are numerous in Lapland; and in the Orkneys and in many parts of Scotland their ruins figure under the title of "Picts' houses." But the tomb of

1 A.U M., monogram of the triad, originally, most probably, Aditi, Varuna, Mitra. A letter is taken from each name.

the Norseman in the same localities was nearly the same as this dwelling-house, and anthropologists now tell us the reason of this. In early ages the tomb of the dead man was the house in which he had lived. The Norsemen and the Picts came originally from Bactria, like other Aryans; it is highly probable, therefore, that the first rude idea of a warm shelter was learned in those frigid highlands.

This Norse tumulus with a small hidden chamber is the counterpart of the Indian stûpa or tope. By the Brahmins it is called C'hattra, umbrella; by the Buddhists, Chaitya, a word that occurs in the Mahâbhârata, and which is also applied to a tree. Chaitya and C'hattra were perhaps once the same word. Customs outlive the accidents that called them into being; and probably when the Bactrians reached the hot climate of India, they by and by discontinued the tumulus as a dwelling-house, but they still retained it as a tomb. Perhaps at first the dwellinghouse was constructed near a tree to combine coolness in summer with warmth in winter. The immense importance of the tree viewed in the light of a temple near a tomb, and also of a burial-place at times, must have had some such origin. To this day the natives of India dwell in hovels, but cluster near the large village-tree in summer for protection against heat and the sun. Students of anthropology are coming to the conclusion that rites to ancestors were the earliest religious rites; and as a certain confusion seems to have existed as to the whereabouts of the dead man and his "shadow," these rites were all based on the idea that he was actually still living in his earthly house, and required food, clothing, slaves, wives, &c. The sepulchral tumulus with its rites is the great temple of Buddhism and the key of its worship, as I shall by and by show.

I now come to an important group of facts :

I. In the Indian religions God is imaged as a man sitting under a tree.

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