Public forth the Sixty. forest recluse, he now entered on the fourth stage as a religious mendicant. But he developed from the old Brahmanical 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 commenced his public teaching in the Deer-Forest, on the outskirts of the great city of Benares. Unlike the Bráhmans, 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, He sends whom he sent forth to the neighbouring countries with these words: Go ye now and preach the most excellent Law.' The 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 some 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 king and all his subjects joined the new 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 had forsaken him in the time of his sore temptation in the 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, Oudh, and the adjacent Districts in the NorthWestern Provinces. Monasteries marked during ages his halting-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 He converts the people, and his Own family. death. 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 thirtieth year. After silent self-preparation, his public ministry commenced when he was about thirty-six, and during forty-four years he preached to the people. In prophesying his death, he said to his He profollowers: 'Be earnest, be thoughtful, be holy. Keep stedfast phesies his 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 words, according to one account, were, 'Work out your salva- Buddha's tion with diligence.' He died calmly, at the age of eighty,1 1 last words. under the shadow of a fig-tree, at Kusinagara, the modern KASIA, in Gorakhpur District. The Fo-wei-kian-king,2 or 'Dying Instruction of Buddha,' translated into Chinese between 397 and 415 A.D. from a still earlier Sanskrit text, gives to the last scene a somewhat different, although an equal, beauty. It was now in the middle of the night,' it says, 'perfectly quiet and still; for the sake of his disciples, he delivered a summary of the law.' After laying down the rules of a good life, he revealed the inner doctrines of his faith. From these I select a few sentences. 'The heart is lord of the senses: govern, therefore, your heart; watch well the heart.' text of 'Think of the fire that shall consume the world, Chinese and early seek deliverance from it.' 'Lament not my going Buddha's away, nor feel regret. For if I remained in the world, then dying diswhat would become of the church? It must perish without course. fulfilling its end. From henceforth all my disciples, practising their various duties, shall prove that my true Body, the Body The of the Law (Dharmakaya), is everlasting and imperishable. doctrines The world is fast bound in fetters; I now give it deliverance, as a physician who brings heavenly medicine. Keep your mind on my teaching; all other things change, this changes not. No more shall I speak to you. I desire to depart. I desire the eternal rest (Nirvána). This is my last exhortation.' The secret of Buddha's success was, that he brought spiritual 1 According to some accounts; according to others, at about seventy. But the chronology of Buddha's life is legendary. Translated in Appendix to the Catalogue of the Manuscripts presented by the Japanese Government to the Secretary of State for India, and now in the India Office.-Concluding letter of Mr. Beal to Dr. Rost, dated 1st September 1874, sec. 5. of Buddha. Law of The liberation of deliverance to the people. He preached that salvation was equally open to all men, and that it must be earned, not by propitiating imaginary deities, but by our own conduct. He thus cut away the religious basis of caste, of the sacrificial ritual, and of Bráhman supremacy as the mediators between God and man. He taught that sin, sorrow, and deliverance, the state of a man in this life, in all previous and in all future lives, are the inevitable results of his own acts (Karma). He thus applied the inexorable law of cause and effect to the soul. What a man sows, that he must reap. As no evil remains without punishment, and no good deed without reward, it follows that neither priest nor God can prevent each act bearing its own consequences. Misery or happiness in this life is the unavoidable result of our conduct in a past life; and our actions here will determine our happiness or misery in the life to come. When any creature dies, he is born again in some higher or lower state of existence, according to his merit or demerit. His merit or demerit consists of the sum total of his actions in all previous lives. By this great law of Karma, Buddha explained the inequalities and apparent injustice of man's state in this world as the unavoidable consequence of acts in the past; while Christianity compensates those inequalities by rewards in the future. A system in which our whole well-being, past, present, and to come, depends on ourselves, leaves little room for a personal God. But the atheism of Buddha was a philosophical tenet, which does not weaken the sanctions of right and wrong.1 Life, according to Buddha, must always be more or less. painful; and the object of every good man is to get rid of the evils of existence by merging his individual soul into the universal soul. This is Nirvána, literally 'cessation.' Some Buddhists explain it as absolute annihilation, when the soul Nirvana. is blown out like the flame of a lamp. Others hold that it is the extinction of the sins, sorrows, and selfishness of individual life; the final state of union and communion with the Supreme, or the absorption of the individual soul into the divine essence. The fact is, that the doctrine underwent processes of change and development like all theological dogmas. But the earliest idea of Nirvána,' says one of the greatest authorities on Chinese Buddhism, 'seems to have included in it no more than the enjoyment of a state of rest consequent on the extinction 1 'Buddhism,' says Mr. Beal, Catena of Buddhist Scriptures, p. 153, 'declares itself ignorant of any mode of personal existence compatible with the idea of spiritual perfection, and so far, it is ignorant of God.' of all causes of sorrow.' 1 The great practical aim of Buddha's teaching was to subdue the lusts of the flesh and the cravings of the mind; and Nirvána has been taken to mean the extinction of the sinful grasping condition of heart which, by the inevitable law of Karma, would involve the penalty of renewed individual existence. The pious Buddhist strove to reach a state of quietism or holy meditation in this world, and looked forward to an eternal calm in a world to come. Buddha taught that this end could only be attained by the Moral practice of virtue. He laid down eight precepts of morality, code. with two more for the religious orders, making ten commandments (dasa-síla) in all. He arranged the besetting faults of mankind into ten sins, and set forth the special duties applicable to each condition of life; to parents and children, to pupils and teachers, to husbands and wives, to masters and servants, to laymen and the religious orders. In place of the Brahman rites and sacrifices, Buddha prescribed a code of practical morality as the means of salvation. The three essential features of that code were-control over self, kindness to other men, and reverence for the life of all sentient creatures. Buddhism. He urged on his disciples that they must not only follow Missionary the true path themselves, but that they should preach it to all aspects of mankind. Buddhism has from the first been a missionary religion. One of the earliest acts of Buddha's public ministry was to send forth the Sixty; and he carefully formulated the four chief means of conversion. These were companionship with the good, listening to the Law, reflection upon the truths heard, and the practice of virtue. He also instituted a religious Order, one of whose special duties it was to go forth and preach to the nations. While, therefore, the Brahmans kept their ritual for the twice-born Aryan castes, Buddhism addressed itself not only to those castes and to the lower mass of the people, but to all the non-Aryan races throughout India, and eventually to the whole Asiatic world. 543 B.C. (?) On the death of Buddha, five hundred of his disciples met The First Council, in a vast cave near Rájágriha, to gather together his sayings. This was the First Council. They chanted the lessons of their master in three great divisions-the words of Buddha to Beal: Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese, p. 157, ed. 1871; and the Buddhist Tripitaka, App., Letter to Dr. Rost, sec. 6. Max Müller deals with the word from the etymological and Sanskrit side in his Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i. pp. 279, 290, ed. 1867. But see, specially, Childers' Páli Dictionary, s.v. Nilbánam, pp. 265-274. his disciples; his code of discipline; and his system of doctrine. These became the Three Collections of Buddha's teaching; and the word for a Buddhist Council means literally 'a singing together.' A century afterwards, a Second Council, of seven hundred, was held at Vaisali, to settle disputes 443 B.C. (?) between the more and the less strict followers of Buddhism. It condemned a system of ten 'Indulgences' which had grown up; but it led to the separation of the Buddhists into two hostile parties, who afterwards split into eighteen sects. Second Third Council, 244 B.C. (?) During the next two hundred years Buddhism spread over Buddhist Northern India, perhaps receiving a new impulse from the Greek kingdoms in the Punjab. About 257 B.C., Asoka, the King of Magadha or Behar, became a zealous convert to the faith. Asoka was grandson of Chandra Gupta, the adventurer in Alexander's camp, and afterwards the ally of Seleukos (see post, p. 160). Asoka is said to have supported 64,000 Buddhist priests; he founded many religious houses, and his kingdom is called the Land of the Monasteries (Vihára or Behar) to this day. 6 Much learning has been expended upon the age of Asoka, and various dates have been assigned to him. But, indeed, all Buddhist dates are open questions, according to the system of chronology adopted. The middle of the 3rd century B. C. may be taken as the most likely era of Asoka. The following table from General Cunningham's Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, p. vii. (1877), exhibits the results of the latest researches on this subject:— |