Buddhism in India,

A. D.

5000 monks. In the country identified with Jaipur, on the other hand, the inhabitants were devoted to heresy and war.

Buddhist influence in Northern India seems, during the 7th 629-645 century A.D., to have centred in the fertile plain between the Jumna and the Ganges, and in Behar. At Kanauj (Kanyákubja), on the Ganges, Hiuen Tsiang found a powerful Buddhist monarch, Síláditya, whose influence reached from the Punjab to North-Eastern Bengal, and from the Himálayas to the Narbadá river. Here flourished 100 Buddhist convents and 10,000 monks. But the king's eldest brother had been lately slain by a sovereign of Eastern India, a hater of Buddhism; and 200 temples to the Bráhman gods reared their heads under the protection of the devout Síláditya himself.

634 A.D.

Síláditya appears as an Asoka of the 7th century A.D., and he practised with primitive vigour the two great Buddhist virtues of spreading the faith and charity. The former he Council of attempted by means of a general Council in 634 A.D. TwentySíláditya, one tributary sovereigns attended, together with the most learned Buddhist monks and Bráhmans of their kingdoms. But the object of the convocation was no longer the undisputed assertion of the Buddhist religion. It dealt with the two phases of the religious life of India at that time. First, a discussion between the Buddhists and Bráhman philosophers of the Sankhya and Vaiseshika schools; second, a dispute between the Buddhist sects who followed respectively the Northern and the Southern Canons, known as 'the Greater and the Lesser Vehicle of the Law.' The rites of the populace were of as composite a character as the doctrines of their teachers. On the first day of the Council, a statue of Buddha was installed with great pomp; on the second, an image of the Sun-god; on the third, an idol of Siva.

Síláditya's charity.

Síláditya held a solemn distribution of his royal treasures every five years. Hiuen Tsiang describes how on the plain near Allahábád, where the Ganges and the Jumna unite their waters, the kings of the Empire, and a multitude of people, were feasted for seventy-five days. Síláditya brought forth the stores of his palace, and gave them away to Brahmans and Buddhists, to monks and heretics, without distinction. At the end of the festival, he stripped off his jewels and royal raiment, handed them to the bystanders, and, like Buddha of old, put on the rags of a beggar. By this ceremony, the monarch commemorated the Great Renunciation of the founder of the Buddhist faith. At the same time, he discharged the highest duty inculcated alike by the Buddhist and Bráhmanical religions,

SLOW VICTORY OF BRAHMANISM.

157

of Nal

namely almsgiving. The vast monastery of Nalanda1 formed Monastery a seat of learning which recalls the universities of Medieval anda. Europe. Ten thousand monks and novices of the eighteen Buddhist schools here studied theology, philosophy, law, science, especially medicine, and practised their devotions. They lived in lettered ease, supported from the royal funds. But even this stronghold of Buddhism furnishes a proof that Buddhism was only one of two hostile creeds in India. During the brief period with regard to which the Chinese records afford information, it was three times destroyed by the enemies of the faith.2

of Buddh

Hiuen Tsiang travelled from the Punjab to the mouth of the Mingling Ganges, and made journeys into Southern India. But every-sm and where he found the two religions mingled. Buddh-Gayá, which Bráhmanholds so high a sanctity in the legends of Buddha, had already ism, 629645 A. D. become a great Bráhman centre. On the east of Bengal, Assam had not been converted to Buddhism. In the southwest, Orissa was a stronghold of the Buddhist faith. But in the seaport of Tamlúk, at the mouth of the Húglí, the temples to the Brahman gods were five times more numerous than the monasteries of the faithful. On the Madras coast, Buddhism flourished; and indeed, throughout Southern India, the faith seems still to have been in the ascendant, although struggling against Bráhman heretics and their gods.

Bráhmanism, 700

900 A.D.

During the 8th and 9th centuries A.D., Bráhmanism be- Victory of came the ruling religion. There are legends of persecutions, instigated by Bráhman reformers, such as Kumarila Bhatta and Sankara Achárya. But the downfall of Buddhism seems to have resulted from natural decay, and from new movements of religious thought, rather than from any general suppression by the sword. Its extinction is contemporaneous with the rise of Hinduism, and belongs to a subsequent chapter.

In the 11th century, it was chiefly outlying States, like Kashmir and Orissa, that remained faithful. When the Muhammadans come permanently upon the scene, Buddhism as a popular faith has almost disappeared from the interior Provinces of India. Magadha, the cradle of the religion, still continued Buddhist under the Pál Rájás down to the Musalman conquest of Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1199 A.D.

1 Identified with the modern Baragáon, near Gayȧ. The Great Monastery can be traced by a mass of brick ruins, 1600 feet long by 400 feet deep. General Cunningham's Ancient Geography of India, pp. 468–470, ed. 1871. 2 Beal's Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese, p. 371, ed. 1871. 3 MS. materials supplied to the author by General Cunningham, to

Buddhism

religion,

1000 A.D.

During nearly a thousand years, Buddhism has been a an exiled banished religion from its native home. But it has won greater triumphs in its exile than it could have ever achieved in the land of its birth. It has created a literature and a religion for nearly half the human race, and has affected the beliefs of the other half. Five hundred millions of men, or forty per cent. of the inhabitants of the world, still acknowledge, with more or less fidelity, the holy teaching of Buddha. Afghánistán, Nepál, Eastern Túrkistán, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, China, Japan, the Eastern Archipelago, Siam, Burma, Ceylon, and India, at one time marked the magnificent circumference Its foreign of its conquests. Its shrines and monasteries stretched in a conquests. continuous line from what are now the confines of the Russian Empire to the equatorial islands of the Pacific. During twenty-four centuries, Buddhism has encountered and outlived a series of powerful rivals. At this day it forms, with Christianity and Islám, one of the three great religions of the world; and the most numerously followed of the three.

Buddhist survivals in India.

The Jains.

In India its influence has survived its separate existence. The Buddhist period not only left a distinct sect, the Jains; but it supplied the spiritual basis on which Bráhmanism finally developed from the creed of a caste into the religion of the people. A later chapter will show how important and how permanent have been Buddhistic influences on Hinduism. The Buddhists in British India in 1881 numbered nearly 3 millions, of whom 3 millions were in British Burma; and 166,892 on the Indian continent, almost entirely in NorthEastern Bengal and Assam. Together with the Jain sect, the Buddhist subjects of the Crown in British India amount to close on four millions (1881).1 The revival of Buddhism is always a possibility in India. This year (1885) an excellent Buddhist journal has been started in Bengalí, at Chittagong.

The Jains number about half a million in British India. Like the Buddhists, they deny the authority of the Veda, except whose Archæological Reports and kind assistance this volume is deeply indebted.

1 The Buddhists proper were returned in 1881 for British India at 3,418,476; of whom 3,251,584 were in British Burma; 155,809 in the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal; and 6563 in Assam. The Jains proper were returned at 448,897 in British India by the Census of 1881. But except in a few spots, chiefly among the spurs of the Himálayas and in Assam and South-Eastern Bengal, the Indian Buddhists may be generally reckoned as Jains.

JAIN DOCTRINES AND TEMPLES.

159

in so far as it agrees with their own doctrines. They disregard sacrifice; practise a strict morality; believe that their past and future states depend upon their own actions rather than on any external deity; and scrupulously reverence the vital principle in man and beast. They differ from the Buddhists chiefly in their ritual and objects of worship. The veneration of good men departed is common to both, but the Jains have expanded and methodized such adoration on lines of their own.

trines.

The Buddhists admit that many Buddhas have appeared in successive lives upon earth, and attained Nirvána or beatific extinction; but they confine their reverence to a comparatively small number. The Jains divide time into Jain docsuccessive eras, and assign twenty-four Jinas, or just men made perfect, to each. They name twenty-four in the past age, twenty-four in the present, and twenty-four in the era to come; and place colossal statues of white or black marble to this great company of saints in their temples. They adore above all the two latest, or twenty-third and twenty-fourth Jinas of the present era-namely, Pársvanáth 2 and Mahávíra.

cities.

The Jains choose wooded mountains and the most lovely Jain retreats of nature for their places of pilgrimage, and cover them temple with exquisitely-carved shrines in white marble or stucco. Párasnáth Hill in Bengal, the temple city of Pálitána in Káthiáwár, and Mount Abú, which rises with its gems of architecture like a jewelled island from the Rájputána plains, form well-known scenes of their worship. The Jains are a wealthy community, usually engaged in banking or wholesale commerce, devoid indeed of the old missionary spirit of Buddhism, but closely knit together among themselves. Their charity is boundless; and they form the chief supporters of the beast hospitals, which the old Buddhistic tenderness for animals has left in many of the cities of India.

to Buddh.

Jainism is, in its external aspects, Buddhism equipped with Relation a mythology—a mythology, however, not of gods, but of saints. of Jainism But in its essentials, Jainism forms a survival of beliefs ism. anterior to Asoka and Kanishka. According to the old view, the Jains are a remnant of the Indian Buddhists who saved themselves from extinction by compromises with Hinduism, and so managed to erect themselves into a recognised caste.

1 Under such titles as Jagata-prabhu, ‘lord of the world ;' Kshínakarmá, freed from ceremonial acts;' Sarvajna, 'all-knowing;' Adhiswara, 'supreme lord;' Tírthankara, ‘he who has crossed over the world;' and Jina, he who has conquered the human passions.'

2 Popularly rendered Párasnáth.

Jains earlier than

Buddhists?

Antiquity

of the Jains.

According to the later and truer view, they represent in an unbroken succession the Nigantha sect of the Asoka edicts. The Jains themselves claim as their founder, Mahávíra, the teacher or contemporary of Buddha; and the Niganthas appear as a sect independent of, indeed opposed to, the Buddhists in the Rock Inscriptions of Asoka and in the Southern Canon (pitakas).

Mahávíra, who bore also the spiritual name of Vardhamána, 'The Increaser,' is the 24th Jina or 'Conqueror of the Passions,' adored in the present age of Jain chronology. Like Buddha, he was of princely birth, and lived and laboured in the same country and at the same time as Buddha. According to the southern Buddhistic dates, Buddha 'attained rest' 543 B.C., and Mahávíra in 526 B.C. According to the Jain texts, Mahávíra was the predecessor and teacher of Buddha.

A theory has accordingly been advanced that the Buddhism of Asoka (244 B.C.) was in reality a later product than the Nigantha or Jain doctrines.1 The Jains are divided into the Swetámbaras, 'The White Robed,' and the Digambaras, ‘The Naked.' The Tibetan texts make it clear that sects closely analogous to the Jains existed in the time of Buddha, and that they were antecedent and rival orders to that which Buddha established.2 Even the Southern Buddhist Canon preserves recollections of a struggle between a naked sect like the Jain Digambaras, and the decently robed Buddhists. This Digambara or Nigantha sect (Nirgrantha, those who have cast aside every tie') was very distinctly recognised by Asoka's edicts; and both the Swetambara and Digambara orders of the modern Jains find mention in the early copper-plate inscriptions of Mysore, circ. 5th or 6th century A.D. The Jains in our own day feel strongly on this subject, and the head of the community at Ahmadábád has placed many arguments before the writer of the present work to prove that their faith was anterior to Buddhism.

Until quite recently, however, European scholars did not. admit the pretensions of the Jains to pre-Buddhistic antiquity.

1 This subject was discussed in Mr. Edward Thomas' Jainism, or the Early Faith of Asoka; in Mr. Rhys Davids' article in The Academy of 13th September 1879; in his Hibbert Lectures, p. 27; and in the Numismata Orientalia (Ceylon fasciculus), pp. 55, 60.

2 Mr. Woodville Rockhill's Life of the Buddha, from the Bkah-Hgyur and Bstan-Hgyur in variis locis. 1884.

3 See for example the curious story of the devout Buddhist bride from the Burmese sacred books, in Bishop Bigandet's Life of Gaudama, pp. 257-259, vol. i. ed. 1882.