CHAPTER V.

BUDDHISM IN INDIA (543 B.C. TO 1000 A.D.).

Buddhism. THE first great solvent of Bráhmanism was the teaching of Gautama Buddha. The life of this celebrated man has three sides, its personal aspects, its legendary developments, and its religious consequences upon mankind. In his own person, Buddha appears as a prince and preacher of ancient India. In the legendary developments of his story, Buddha ranks as a divine teacher among his followers, as an incarnation of Gautama Vishnu among the Hindus, and as a saint of the Christian Buddha. church, with a day assigned to him in both the Greek and

The story of Buddha, modelled

Roman calendars. As a religious founder, he left behind a system of belief which has gained more disciples than any other creed in the world; and which is now more or less accepted by 500 millions of people, or nearly one-half the human race. According to the Páli texts, Buddha was born 622 B.C., and died 543 B.C. Modern calculations fix his death about 480 B.C.2

The story of Buddha's earthly career is a typical one. It is based on the old Indian ideal of the noble life which we have on the epic seen depicted in the Sanskrit epics. Like the Pándavas in type. the Mahábhárata, and like Ráma in the Rámáyana, Buddha is the miraculously born son of a king, belonging to one of the two great Aryan lines, the Solar and the Lunar; in Buddha's case, as in Ráma's, to the Solar. His youth, like that of the epic heroes, is spent under Bráhman tutors, and like the epic heroes he obtains a beautiful bride after a display of unexpected prowess with the bow; or, as the northern Buddhists relate, at an actual swayam-vara, by a contest in arms for the princess. A period of voluntary exile follows an interval of married happiness, and Buddha retires like Ráma to a Bráhman's hermitage in the forest.

Buddha

The sending back of the charioteer to the bereaved father's and Káma. capital forms an episode in the story of both the young princes. As in the Rámáyana, so in the legend of Buddha, it is to the

1 Childers' Dictionary of the Páli Language, s.v. Buddho, p. 96.

2 Oldenberg's Buddha, Sein Leben etc. (Hoey's excellent translation, p. 197). Vide post, p. 153.

EARLY LIFE OF BUDDHA.

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Indian

jungles on the south of the Ganges, lying between the Aryan settlements and the aboriginal races, that the royal exile repairs. After a time of seclusion, the Pándavas, Ráma, and Buddha alike emerge to achieve great conquests; the two The former by force of arms, the last by the weapons of the Spirit. legend. Up to this point the outline of the three stories has followed the same type; but henceforth it diverges. The Sanskrit epics depict the ideal Aryan man as prince, hermit, and hero. In the legend of Buddha, that ideal has developed into prince, hermit, and saint.

of Gau

Gautama, afterwards named Buddha, 'The Enlightened,' Parentage and Siddhártha, 'He who has fulfilled his end,' was the only tama son of Suddhodana, King of Kapilavastu. This prince, the Buddha. chief of the Sakya clan, ruled over an outlying Aryan settlement on the north-eastern border of the Middle Land, about 622 B.C. a hundred miles to the north of Benares, and within sight of the snow-topped Himálayas. A Gautama Rájput of the noble Solar line, he wished to see his son grow up on the warlike model of his race. But the young prince shunned the His lonely sports of his playmates, and retired to solitary day-dreams in youth, at nooks of the palace garden. The king tried to win his son to a practical career by marrying him to a beautiful and talented girl; and the youthful Gautama unexpectedly proved his manliness by a victory over the flower of the young chiefs at a tournament. For a while he forgot his solemn speculations on the unseen, in the sweet realities of early married life.

J-19.

But in his drives through the city he deeply reflected His married life, on the types of old age, disease, and death which met at. 19-29. his eye; and he was powerfully impressed by the calm of a holy man, who seemed to have raised his soul above the changes and sorrows of this world. After ten years, his wife bore to him an only son; and Gautama, fearing lest this new tie should bind him too closely to the things of earth, retired about the age of thirty to a cave among the forest-clad spurs of the Vindhyas. The story of how he turned away from the His Great door of his wife's lamp-lit chamber, denying himself even a parting caress of his new-born babe lest he should wake the sleeping mother, and galloped off into the darkness, is one of the many tender episodes in his life. After a gloomy night ride, he sent back his one companion, the faithful charioteer, with his horse and jewels to his father. Having cut off his long Rájput locks, and exchanged his princely raiment for the rags. of a poor passer-by, he went on alone a homeless beggar. This abandonment of earthly pomp and power, and of loved

Renunciation, at. 29-30.

Buddha's forest life, æt. 30-36 or 29-34.

588 B.C.

tation.

wife and new-born son, is the Great Renunciation which forms a favourite theme of the Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit, Páli, Tibetan, and Chinese. It has furnished, during twenty centuries, the type of self-sacrifice which all Indian reformers must follow if they are to win the trust of the people.

For a time Buddha studied under two Bráhman recluses, near RAJAGRIHA, in Patná District, learning from them that the path to divine knowledge and tranquillity of soul lies through the subjection of the flesh. He then buried himself deeper in the south-eastern jungles, which at that time covered Gaya District, and during six years wasted himself by austerities in company with five disciples. The temple of BUDDH-GAYA marks the site of his long penance. But instead of earning peace of mind by fasting and self-torture, he reached a crisis of religious despair, during which the Buddhist scriptures affirm that the enemy of mankind, Mára, wrestled with him in bodily shape. Torn with doubts as to whether, after all his penance, he was not destined to perdition, the haggard ascetic, in a final paroxysm, fell senseless to the earth.

When he recovered, the mental struggle had passed. He His spiri- felt that the path to salvation lay not in self-torture in a tual crisis. mountain cave, but in preaching a higher life to his fellowmen. His five disciples, shocked by his giving up penance, forsook him; and Buddha was left in solitude to face the question whether he alone was right and all the devout minds of his age were wrong. The Buddhist scriptures depict him as His temp sitting serene under a fig-tree, while the great Enemy and his crew whirled round him with flaming weapons. "When the conflict began between the Saviour of the World and the Prince of Evil,' says one of their sacred texts,1 the earth shook; the sea uprose from her bed, the rivers turned back to the mountains, the hill-tops fell crashing to the plains, the sun was darkened, and a host of headless spirits rode upon the tempest. From his temptation in the wilderness, the ascetic emerged with his doubts for ever laid at rest, seeing his way clear, and henceforth to be known as Buddha, literally 'The Enlightened."

His 'En lightenment.'

This was Buddha's second birth; and the pipal fig or Bo (Bodhi), literally the Tree of the Enlightenment, under whose spreading branches its pangs were endured, has become 1 The Madhurattha-Vilásiní, Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society, vol. vii. p. 812. Rhys Davids' Buddhism, p. 36.

2 According to the Ceylonese texts, Buddha 'obtained Buddhahood' in 588 B.C. This would make him 34, not 36 years of age. Childers' Páli Dictionary, s.v. Buddho.

POPULAR PREACHING OF BUDDHA.

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the sacred tree of 500 millions of mankind. It is the Ficus religiosa of Western science. The idea of a second birth was familiar to the twice-born Aryan castes of ancient His story India, and was represented by their race-ceremony of in- follows the old Aryan vesting the boy at the close of childhood with the sacred types. thread. In this, as in its other features, the story of Buddha adheres to ancient Aryan types, but gives to them a new spiritual significance. Having passed through the three prescribed stages of the Aryan saintly life,-as learner, householder, and forest recluse,-he now entered on its fourth stage as a religious mendicant. But he developed from the old Bráhmanical model of the wandering ascetic, intent only on saving his own soul, the nobler type of the preacher, striving to bring deliverance to the souls of others.

Two months after his temptation in the wilderness, Buddha Public commenced his public teaching in the Deer-Forest, on the teaching of Buddha, outskirts of the great city of Benares. Unlike the Bráhmans, æt. 36-80. he addressed himself, not to one or two disciples of the sacred caste, but to the mass of the people. His first converts were laymen, and among the earliest were women. After three months of ministry, he had gathered around him sixty disciples, whom he sent forth to the neighbouring countries with these He sends words: 'Go ye now and preach the most excellent Law.' The forth the Sixty. essence of his teaching was the deliverance of man from the sins and sorrows of life by self-renunciation and inward selfcontrol. While the sixty disciples went on their missionary tour among the populace, Buddha converted certain celebrated hermits and fire-worshippers by an exposition of the philosophical side of his doctrine. With this new band he journeyed on to Rájágriha, where the local king and his subjects joined the faith, but where also he first experienced the fickleness of the multitude. Two-thirds of each year he spent as a wandering preacher. The remaining four months of the rainy season he abode at some fixed place, often near Rájágriha, teaching the people who flocked around his little dwelling in the bamboo grove. His five old disciples, who He conhad forsaken him in the time of his sore temptation in the verts the people, wilderness, penitently rejoined their master. Princes, merchants, artificers, Bráhmans and hermits, husbandmen and serfs, noble ladies and repentant courtesans, were yearly added to those who believed.

Buddha preached throughout a large part of Behar, in the Oudh, and the adjacent Districts in the North Western Gangetic Provinces. In after ages monasteries marked his halting

valley

Buddha converts his own family.

He pro

death.

places; and the principal scenes of his life, such as AJODHYA, BUDDH-GAYA, SRAVASTI, the modern SAHET MAHET, RAJAGRIHA, etc., became the great places of pilgrimage for the Buddhist world. His visit to his aged father at Kapilavastu, whence he had gone forth as a brilliant young prince, and to which he returned as a wandering preacher, in dingy yellow robes, with shaven head and the begging bowl in his hand, is a touching episode which appeals to the heart of universal mankind. The old king heard him with reverence. The son, whom Buddha had left as a new-born babe, was converted to the faith; and his beloved wife, from the threshold of whose chamber he had ridden away into the darkness, became one of the first of Buddhist nuns.

The Great Renunciation took place in his twenty-ninth year After silent self-preparation, his public ministry commenced in his thirty-sixth, and during forty-four years he preached to the people. In prophesying his death, he said to his phesies his followers: 'Be earnest, be thoughtful, be holy. Keep stedfast watch over your own hearts. He who holds fast to the law and discipline, and faints not, he shall cross the ocean of life and make an end of sorrow.' He spent his last night in preaching, and in comforting a weeping disciple; his latest Buddha's words, according to one account, were, 'Work out your salvalast words. tion with diligence.' He died calmly, at the age of eighty,1

543 B.C.

Different versions of the Legend.

under the shadow of a fig-tree, at Kusinagara, the modern KASIA, in Gorakhpur District.

Such is the story of Gautama Buddha's life derived from Indian sources, a story which has the value of gospel truth to 31 millions of devout believers. But the two branches even of Indian or Southern Buddhism have each their own version, and the Buddha of the Burmese differs in important respects from the Buddha of the Ceylonese.3 Still wider is the diver

1 According to some accounts; according to others, at about seventy. But the chronology of Buddha's life is legendary.

2 The following estimate is given by Mr. Rhys Davids of the number of the Southern Buddhists, substituting for his Indian figures the results ascertained by the Census of 1881 :

3 The original Páli text of the Commentary of the Fátakhas is assigned