SIX SOLVENTS OF BRAHMANISM.

131

Those attacks mark out six epochs. First, the religious up- 1. Buddhrising of the non-Aryan and the partially Bráhmanized Aryan ism. tribes on the east of the Middle Land of Bengal; initiated by the preaching of Buddha in the 6th century B.C., culminating in the Buddhist kingdoms about the commencement of our era, and melting into modern Hinduism about the 8th century A.D. Second, warlike inroads of non-Bráhmanical Aryans and Scythic 2. Greeks, races from the west; strongly exemplified by the Greek invasions and Scythians in the 4th century B.C., and continuing under the Greco-Bactrian empire and its Scythic rivals to probably the 5th century A.D. Third, the influence of the so-called aborigines or non-Aryan 3. Nontribes of India and of the non-Aryan low-castes incorporated Aryan into the Hindu community; an influence ever at work—indeed by far the most powerful agent in dissolving Bráhmanism into Hinduism, and specially active after the decline of Buddhism about the 7th century A.D.

tribes.

Fourth, the reaction against the low beliefs, priestly oppres- 4. Hindu sion, and bloody rites which resulted from this compromise sects. between Brahmanism and aboriginal worship. The reaction received an impetus from the preaching of Sankar Achárya, who founded his great Sivaite sect in the 8th century A.D. It obtained its full development under a line of ardent Vishnuite reformers from the 12th to the 16th centuries A.D. The fifth solvent of the ancient Bráhmanical civilisation of 5. MuhamIndia was found in the Muhammadan invasions and the rule madans. of Islám, 1000 to 1765 A.D. The sixth, in the English 6. English. supremacy, and in the popular upheaval which it has produced. in the 18th and 19th centuries. Each of these six epochs will, so far as space permits, receive separate treatment in the following chapters.

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

type.

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.1 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 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 and Káma.

The sending back of the charioteer to the bereaved father's 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

2

1 Childers' Dictionary of the Páli Language, s. v. Buddho, p. 96. Oldenberg's Buddha, Sein Leben etc. (Hoey's excellent translation, p. 197). Vide post, p. 153.

EARLY Life of BUDDHA.

133

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 Sákya 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 Rajput 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.

I-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 tion, at. parting caress of his new-born babe lest he should wake the 29-30. 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

Renuncia

Buddha's forest life,

at. 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 Gayá 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."2

His 'Enlightenment.'

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.

135

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.

Buddha,

Two months after his temptation in the wilderness, Buddha Public commenced his public teaching in the Deer-Forest, on the teaching of 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 valley Provinces. In after ages monasteries marked his halting