The Contributions of Thomas William Rhys Davids to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

Thomas William Rhys Davids wrote twenty-seven essays for the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. We have arranged them here in the order of subject matter, starting with Buddha, Dhamma, Saṅgha, and following with different articles on the History of Buddhism. It is interesting to note that no other expert in this field was asked to submit material to the Encyclopedia. This is a mark of the great respect that the scholarly community had for Thomas William Rhys Davids. The articles named below are reproduced exactly as they appeared in the Encyclopedia with minor editing for ease of reading.

Contents Buddha ...... 1 Maitreya ...... 12 Buddhism ...... 13 Pāli ...... 28 Nikāya ...... 33 Abhidhamma ...... 34 Jātaka ...... 35 Milinda Pañho ...... 37 Sāriputta ...... 39 Ānanda ...... 40 Devadatta ...... 40 Buddhaghosa ...... 41 Dhammapāla ...... 42 Lumbini ...... 43 Piprāwa ...... 44 Sānchi ...... 46 Ajanta ...... 47 Bharahat ...... 48 Sigiri ...... 49 Mahāvaṃsa ...... 50 Sāsana vaṃsa ...... 50 Jains ...... 51 Asoka ...... 55 Kanishka ...... 56 Lamaism ...... 57 Nāgārjuna ...... 65 Medhankara ...... 66

BUDDHA According to the Buddhist theory (see The circumstances under which the future BUDDHISM), a “Buddha” appears from time to Buddha was born were somewhat as follows.1 time in the world and preaches the true doctrine. In the 6th century B.C. the Aryan tribes had long After a certain lapse of time this teaching is been settled far down the valley of the Ganges. corrupted and lost, and is not restored till a new The old child-like joy in life so manifest in the Buddha appears. In Europe, Buddha is used to Vedas had died away; the worship of nature had designate the last historical Buddha, whose developed or degenerated into the worship of family name was Gotama, and who was the son new and less pure divinities; and the Vedic of Suddhōdana, one of the chiefs of the tribe of songs themselves, whose freedom was little the Sākiyas, one of the republican clans then compatible with the spirit of the age, had faded still existent in India. into an obscurity which did not lessen their value to the priests. The country was politically We are accustomed to find the legendary split up into little principalities, most of them and the miraculous gathering, like a halo, around the early history of religious leaders, governed by some petty despot, whose interests were not often the same as those of the until the sober truth runs the risk of being community. There were still, however, about a altogether neglected for the glittering and dozen free republics, most of them with edifying falsehood. The Buddha has not aristocratic government, and it was in these that escaped the fate which has befallen the reforming movements met with most approval founders of other religions; and as late as the and support. A convenient belief in the doctrine year 1854 Professor Wilson of Oxford read a of the transmigration of souls satisfied the paper before the Royal Asiatic Society of unfortunate that their woes were the natural London in which he maintained that the result of their own deeds in a former birth, and, supposed life of Buddha was a myth, and though unavoidable now, might be escaped in a “Buddha himself merely an imaginary being.” future state of existence by present good No one, however, would now support this view; conduct. While hoping for a better fate in their and it is admitted that, under the mass of next birth, the poor turned for succor and advice miraculous tales which have been handed down in this to the aid of astrology, witchcraft and regarding him, there is a basis of truth already animism—a belief in which seems to underlie sufficiently clear to render possible an all religions, and still survives even in intelligent history. England.2 The inspiriting wars against the

1 Note on the Date of the Buddha.—The now generally Buddha’s death would be 488 B.C., and, as he was accepted date of the Buddha is arrived at by adding eighty years old at the time of his death, the date of his together two numbers, one being the date of the birth would be 568 B.C. The dates for his death and accession of Asoka to the throne, the second being the birth accepted in Burma, Siam and Ceylon are about length of the interval between that date and that of the half a century earlier, namely, 543 and 623 B.C., the death of the Buddha. The first figure, that of the date of difference being in the date of Asoka’s accession. It Asoka, is arrived at by the mention in one of his edicts will be seen that the dates as adopted in Europe are of certain Greek kings, as then living. The dates of these approximate only, and liable to correction if better data last are approximately known; and arguing from these are obtainable. The details of this chronological dates the date of Asoka’s accession has been fixed by question are discussed at length in Professor Rhys various scholars (at dates varying only by a difference Davids’ Ancient Coins and Measures of Ceylon of five years more or less) at about 270 B.C. The second (London, 1877), where the previous discussions are figure, the total interval between Asoka’s accession and referred to. the Buddha’s death, is given in the Ceylon Chronicles 2 See report of Rex. v. Neuhaus, Clerkenwell Sessions, as 218 years. Adding these two together, the date of the September 15, 1906.

1 enemies of the Aryan people, the infidel deniers was the rejoicing when, in about the forty-fifth of the Aryan gods, had given place to a year of her age, the elder sister, Mahā Māyā, succession of internecine feuds between the promised her husband a son. In due time she chiefs of neighboring clans. In literature an age started with the intention of being confined at of poets had long since made way for an age of her parents’ home, but the party halting on the commentators and grammarians, who thought way under the shade of some lofty satin-trees, that the old poems must have been the work of in a pleasant garden called Lumbini on the gods. But the darkest period was succeeded by river-side, her son, the future Buddha, was there the dawn of a reformation; travelling logicians unexpectedly born. The exact site of this garden were willing to maintain these against all the has been recently rediscovered, marked by an world; whilst here and there ascetics strove to inscribed pillar by Asoka (see J.R.A.S., 1898). raise themselves above the gods, and hermits He was in after years more generally known earnestly sought for some satisfactory solution by his family name of Gotama, but his of the mysteries of life. These were the teachers individual name was Siddhattha. When he was whom the people chiefly delighted to honour. nineteen years old he was married to his cousin Though the ranks of the priesthood were Yasodharā, daughter of a Koliyan chief, and forever firmly closed against intruders, a man gave himself up to a life of luxury. This is the of lay birth, a Kshatriya or Vaisya, whose mind solitary record of his youth; we hear nothing revolted against the orthodox creed, and whose more till, in his twenty-ninth year, it is related heart was stirred by mingled zeal and ambition, that, driving to his pleasure-grounds one day, he might find through these irregular orders an was struck by the sight of a man utterly broken entrance to the career of a religious teacher and down by age, on another occasion by the sight reformer. of a man suffering from a loathsome disease, The Sākiya clan was then seated in a tract of and some months after by the horrible sight of country probably two or three thousand square a decomposing corpse. Each time his miles in extent, the chief town of which was charioteer, whose name was Channa, told him Kapilavastu, situate about 27° 37’ N. by 83° 11’ that such was the fate of all living beings. Soon E., some days’ journey north of Benares. Their after he saw an ascetic walking in a calm and territory stretched up into the lower slopes of dignified manner, and asking who that was, was the mountains, and was mostly in what is now told by his charioteer the character and aims of Nepal, but it included territory now on the the Wanderers, the travelling teachers, who British side of the frontier. It is in this part of played so great a part in the intellectual life of the Sākiya country that the interesting the time. The different accounts of these visions discovery was made of the monument they vary so much as to cast great doubts on their erected to their famous clansman. From their accuracy; and the oldest one of all (Anguttara, well-watered rice-fields, the main source of i. 145) speaks of ideas only, not of actual their wealth, they could see the giant Himalayas visions. It is, however, clear from what follows, looming up against the clear blue of the Indian that about this time the mind of the young sky. Their supplies of water were drawn from Rajput must, from some cause or other, have the river Rohini, the modern Kohāna; and been deeply stirred. Many an earnest heart full though the use of the river was in times of of disappointment or enthusiasm has gone drought the cause of disputes between the through a similar struggle, has learnt to look Sākiyas and the neighbouring Koliyans, the two upon all earthly gains and hopes as worse than clans were then at peace; and two daughters of vanity, has envied the calm life of the cloister, a chieftain of Koli, which was only 11 m. east troubled by none of these things, and has longed of Kapilavastu, were the principal wives of for an opportunity of entire self-surrender to Suddhōdana. Both were childless, and great abstinence and meditation.

2 Subjectively, though not objectively, these horse. While Channa was gone Siddhattha visions may be supposed to have appeared to gently opened the door of the room where Gotama. After seeing the last of them, he is Yasodharā was sleeping, surrounded by said, in the later accounts, to have spent the flowers, with one hand on the head of their afternoon in his pleasure-grounds by the river- child. He had hoped to take the babe in his arms side; and having bathed, to have entered his for the last time before he went, but now he chariot in order to return home. Just then a stood for a few moments irresolute on the messenger arrived with the news that his wife threshold looking at them. At last the fear of Yasodharā had given birth to a son, his only awakening Yasodharā prevailed; he tore child. “This” said Gotama quietly, “is a new and himself away, promising himself to return to strong tie I shall have to break.” But the people them as soon as his mind had become clear, as of Kapilavastu were greatly delighted at the soon as he had become a Buddha, — i.e. birth of the young heir, the raja’s only grandson. Enlightened,—and then he could return to them Gotama’s return became an ovation; musicians not only as husband and father, but as teacher preceded and followed his chariot, while shouts and savior. It is said to have been broad of joy and triumph fell on his ear. Among these moonlight on the full moon of the month of sounds one especially attracted his attention. It July, when the young chief, with Channa as his was the voice of a young girl, his cousin, who sole companion, leaving his father’s home, his sang a stanza, saying, “Happy the father, happy wealth and social position, his wife and child the mother, happy the wife of such a son and behind him, went out into the wilderness to husband.” In the word “happy” lay a double become a penniless and despised student, and a meaning; it meant also freed from the chains of homeless wanderer. This is the circumstance rebirth, delivered, saved. Grateful to one who, which has given its name to a Sanskrit work, the at such a time, reminded him of his highest Mahābhinishkramana Sūtra, or Sūtra of the hopes, Gotama, to whom such things had no Great Renunciation. longer any value, took off his collar of pearls Next is related an event in which we may and sent it to her. She imagined that this was the again see a subjective experience given under beginning of a courtship, and began to build the form of an objective reality. Māra, the great daydreams about becoming his principal wife, tempter, appears in the sky, and urges Gotama but he took no further notice of her and passed to stop, promising him, in seven days, a on. That evening the dancing-girls came to go universal kingdom over the four great through the Natch dances, then as now so continents if he will but give up his enterprise.3 common on festive occasions in many parts of When his words fail to have any effect, the India; but he paid them no attention, and tempter consoles himself by the confident hope gradually fell into an uneasy slumber. At that he will still overcome his enemy, saying, midnight he awoke; the dancing-girls were “Sooner or later some lustful or malicious or lying in the ante-room; an overpowering angry thought must arise in his mind; in that loathing filled his soul. He arose instantly with moment I shall be his master”; and from that a mind fully made up—“roused into activity,” hour, adds the legend, “as a shadow always says the Sinhalese chronicle, “like a man who follows the body, so he too from that day is told that his house is on fire.” He called out always followed the Blessed One, striving to to know who was on guard, and finding it was throw every obstacle in his way towards the his charioteer Channa, he told him to saddle his Buddhahood.” Gotama rides a long distance

3 The various legends of Māra are the subject of an exhaustive critical analysis in Windisch’s Māra und Buddha (Leipzig, 1895).

3 that night, only stopping at the banks of the mind of Buddha appear in gorgeous Anomā beyond the Koliyan territory. There, on descriptions as angels of darkness or of light. the sandy bank of the river, at a spot where later To us, now taught by the experiences of piety erected a dāgaba (a solid dome-shaped centuries how weak such exaggerations are relic shrine), he cuts off with his sword his long compared with the effect of a plain unvarnished flowing locks, and, taking off his ornaments, tale, these legends may appear childish or sends them and the horse back in charge of the absurd, but they have a depth of meaning to unwilling Channa to Kapilavastu. The next those who strive to read between the lines of seven days were spent alone in a grove of such rude and inarticulate attempts to describe mango trees nearby, whence the recluse walks the indescribable. That which (the previous and on to Rājagriha, the capital of Magadha, and subsequent career of the teacher being borne in residence of Bimbisāra, one of the then most mind) seems to be possible and even probable, powerful rulers in the valley of the Ganges. He appears to be somewhat as follows. was favorably received by the rāja; but though Disenchanted and dissatisfied, Gotama had asked to do so, he would not as yet assume the given up all that most men value, to seek peace responsibilities of a teacher. He attached in secluded study and self-denial. Failing to himself first to a brāhmin sophist named Ālāra, attain his object by learning the wisdom of and afterwards to another named Udraka, from others, and living the simple life of a student, he whom he learnt all that Indian philosophy had had devoted himself to that intense meditation then to teach. Still unsatisfied, he next retired to and penance which all philosophers then said the jungle of Uruvela, on the most northerly would raise men above the gods. Still spur of the Vindhya range of mountains, and unsatisfied, longing always for a certainty that there for six years, attended by five faithful seemed ever just beyond his grasp, he had disciples, he gave himself up to the severest added vigil to vigil, and penance to penance, penance and self-torture, till his fame as an until at last, when to the wondering view of ascetic spread in all the country round about others he had become more than a saint, his “like the sound,” says the Burmese chronicle, bodily strength and his indomitable resolution “of a great bell hung in the canopy of the skies.” 4 and faith had together suddenly and completely At last one day, when he was walking in a broken down. Then, when the sympathy of much enfeebled state, he felt on a sudden an others would have been most welcome, he extreme weakness, like that caused by dire found his friends falling away from him, and his starvation, and unable to stand any longer he disciples leaving him for other teachers. Soon fell to the ground. Some thought he was dead, after, if not on the very day when his followers but he recovered, and from that time took had left him, he wandered out towards the regular food and gave up his severe penance, so banks of the Neranjarā, receiving his morning much so that his five disciples soon ceased to meal from the hands of Sujātā, the daughter of respect him, and leaving him went to Benares. a neighboring villager, and set himself down to There now ensued a second struggle in eat it under the shade of a large tree (a Ficus Gotama’s mind, described with all the wealth of religiosa), to be known from that time as the poetry and imagination of which the Indian sacred Bo tree or tree of wisdom There he mind is master. The crisis culminated on a day, remained through the long hours of that day each event of which is surrounded in the debating with himself what next to do. All his Buddhist accounts with the wildest legends, on old temptations came back upon him with which the very thoughts passing through the renewed force. For years he had looked at all

4 Bigandet, p. 49; and compare Jātaka, p. 67, line 27.

4 earthly good through the medium of a his former five disciples, and accordingly went philosophy which taught him that it, without to the Deer-forest near Benares where they exception, contained within itself the seeds of were then living. An old gāthā, or hymn bitterness, and was altogether worthless and (translated in Vinaya Texts, i. 90) tells us how impermanent; but now to his wavering faith the the Buddha, rapt with the idea of his great sweet delights of home and love, the charms of mission, meets an acquaintance, one Upaka, a wealth and power, began to show themselves in wandering sophist, on the way. The latter, a different light, and glow again with attractive struck with his expression, asks him whose colors. He doubted, and agonized in his doubt; religion it is that makes him so glad, and yet so but as the sun set, the religious side of his nature calm. The reply is striking. “I am now on my had won the victory, and seems to have come way,” says the Buddha, “to the city of Benares, out even purified from the struggle. He had to beat the drum of the Ambrosia (to set up the attained to Nirvāna, had become clear in his light of the doctrine of Nirvāna) in the darkness mind, a Buddha, an Enlightened One. From that of the world!” and he proclaims himself the night he not only did not claim any merit on Buddha who alone knows, and knows no account of his self-mortification, but took every teacher. Upaka says: “You profess yourself, opportunity of declaring that from such then, friend, to be an Arahat and a conqueror?” penances no advantage at all would be derived. The Buddha says: “Those indeed are All that night he is said to have remained in conquerors who, as I have now, have conquered deep meditation under the Bo tree; and the the intoxications (the mental intoxication orthodox Buddhists believe that for seven times arising from ignorance, sensuality or craving seven nights and days he continued fasting near after future life). Evil dispositions have ceased the spot, when the archangel Brahmā came and in me; therefore is it that I am conqueror! “His ministered to him. As for himself, his heart was acquaintance rejoins: “In that case, venerable now fixed,—his mind was made up,—but he Gotama, your way lies yonder!” and he himself, realized more than he had ever done before the shaking his head, turns in the opposite power of temptation, and the difficulty, the direction. almost impossibility, of understanding and Nothing daunted, the new prophet walked holding to the truth. For others subject to the on to Benares, and in the cool of the evening same temptations, but without that earnestness went on to the Deer-forest where the five and insight which he felt himself to possess, ascetics were living. Seeing him coming, they faith might be quite impossible, and it would resolved not to recognize as a superior one who only be waste of time and trouble to try to show had broken his vows; to address him by his to them “the only path of peace.” To one in his name, and not as “master” or “teacher”; only, position this thought would be so very natural, he being a Kshatriya, to offer him a seat. He that we need not hesitate to accept the fact of its understands their change of manner, calmly occurrence as related in the oldest records. It is tells them not to mock him by calling him “the quite consistent with his whole career that it venerable Gotama”; that he has found the was love and pity for others—otherwise, as it ambrosia of truth and can lead them to it. They seemed to him, helplessly doomed and lost— object, naturally enough, from the ascetic point which at last overcame every other of view, that he had failed before while he was consideration, and made Gotama resolve to keeping his body under, and how can his mind announce his doctrine to the world. have won the victory now, when he serves and The teacher, now 35 years of age, intended yields to his body. Buddha replies by explaining to proclaim his new gospel first to his old to them the principles of his new gospel, in the teachers Ālāra and Udraka, but finding that they form of noble truths, and the Noble Eightfold were dead, he determined to address himself to Path (see BUDDHISM).

5 It is nearly certain that Buddha had a but that of a layman, of a believing householder, commanding presence, and one of those deep, is held in high honor; and a believer who does rich, thrilling voices which so many of the not as yet feel himself able or willing to cast off successful leaders of men have possessed. We the ties of home or of business, may yet “enter know his deep earnestness, and his thorough the paths,” and by a life of rectitude and conviction of the truth of his new gospel. When kindness ensure for himself a rebirth under we further remember the relation which the five more favorable conditions for his growth in students mentioned above had long borne to holiness. him, and that they had passed through a similar After the rainy season Gotama called culture, it is not difficult to understand that his together those of his disciples who had devoted persuasions were successful, and that his old themselves to the higher life, and said to them: disciples were the first to acknowledge him in “I am free from the five hindrances which, like his new character. The later books say that they an immense net, hold men and angels in their were all converted at once; but, according to the power; you too (owing to my teaching) are set most ancient Pāli record—though their old love free. Go ye now, brethren, and wander for the and reverence had been so rekindled when the gain and welfare of the many, out of Buddha came near that their cold resolutions compassion for the world, to the benefit of gods quite broke down, and they vied with each other and men. Preach the doctrine, beauteous in in such acts of personal attention as an Indian inception, beauteous in continuation, beauteous disciple loves to pay to his teacher,—yet it was in its end. Proclaim the pure and perfect life. Let only after the Buddha had for five days talked no two go together. I also go, brethren, to the to them, sometimes separately, sometimes General’s village in the wilds of Uruvelā.”6 together, that they accepted in its entirety his Throughout his career, Gotama yearly adopted plan of salvation.5 the same plan, collecting his disciples round The Buddha then remained at the Deer- him in the rainy season, and after it was over forest near Benares until the number of his travelling about as an itinerant preacher; but in personal followers was about threescore, and subsequent years he was always accompanied that of the outside believers somewhat greater. by some of his most attached disciples. The principal among the former was a rich In the solitudes of Uruvelā there were at this young man named Yasa, who had first come to time three brothers, fire-worshippers and him at night out of fear of his relations, and hermit philosophers, who had gathered round afterwards shaved his head, put on the yellow them a number of scholars, and enjoyed a robe, and succeeded in bringing many of his considerable reputation as teachers. Gotama former friends and companions to the teacher, settled among them, and after a time they his mother and his wife being the first female became believers in his system,—the elder disciples, and his father the first lay devotee. It brother, Kassapa, taking henceforth a principal should be noticed in passing that the idea of a place among his followers. His first set sermon priesthood with mystical powers is altogether to his new disciples is called by Bishop repugnant to Buddhism; every one’s salvation Bigandet the Sermon on the Mount. Its subject is entirely dependent on the modification or was a jungle-fire which broke out on the growth of his own inner nature, resulting from opposite hillside. He warned his hearers against his own exertions. The life of a recluse is held the fires of concupiscence, anger, ignorance, to be the most conducive to that state of sweet birth, death, decay and anxiety; and taking each serenity at which the more ardent disciples aim;

5 Vinaya Texts, i. 97–99; cf. Jātaka, vol. i. p. 82, lines 11– 6 Samyutta, i. 105. 19.

6 of the senses in order he compared all human accordingly started for Kapilavastu, and sensations to a burning flame which seems to be stopped according to his custom in a grove something it is not, which produces pleasure outside the town. His father and uncles and and pain, but passes rapidly away, and ends others came to see him there, but the latter were only in destruction.7 angry, and would pay him no reverence. It was the custom to invite such teachers and their Accompanied by his new disciples, the disciples for the next day’s meal, but they all Buddha walked on to Rajāgaha, the capital of left without doing so. The next day, therefore, King Bimbisāra, who, not unmindful of their Gotama set out at the usual hour, carrying his former interview, came out to welcome him. bowl to beg for a meal. As he entered the city, Seeing Kassapa, who as the chronicle puts it, he hesitated whether he should not go straight was as well-known to them as the banner of the to his father’s house, but determined to adhere city, the people at first doubted who was the to his custom. It soon reached his father’s ears teacher and who the disciple, but Kassapa put that his son was walking through the streets an end to their hesitation by stating that he had begging. Startled at such news he rose up, now given up his belief in the efficacy of seizing the end of his outer robe, and hastened sacrifices either great or small; that Nirvāna to the place where Gotama was, exclaiming, was a state of rest to be attained only by a “Illustrious Buddha, why do you expose us all change of heart; and that he had become a to such shame? Is it necessary to go from door disciple of the Buddha. Gotama then spoke to to door begging your food? Do you imagine that the king on the miseries of the world which I am not able to supply the wants of so many arise from passion, and on the possibility of mendicants?” “My noble father,” was the reply, release by following the way of salvation. The “this is the custom of all our race.” “How so?” rāja invited him and his disciples to eat their said his father. “Are you not descended from an simple mid-day meal at his house on the illustrious line? No single person of our race has following morning; and then presented the ever acted so indecorously.” “My noble father,” Buddha with a garden called Veluvana or said Gotama, “you and your family may claim Bamboo-grove, afterwards celebrated as the the privileges of Kshatriya descent; my descent place where the Buddha spent many rainy is from the prophets (Buddhas) of old, and they seasons, and preached many of his most have always acted so; the customs of the law complete discourses. There he taught for some (Dhamma) are good both for this world and the time, attracting large numbers of hearers, world that is to come. But, my father, when a among whom two, Sāriputta and Moggallāna, man has found a treasure, it is his duty to offer who afterwards became conspicuous leaders in the most precious of the jewels to his father the new crusade, then joined the Sangha or first. Do not delay, let me share with you the Society, as the Buddha’s order of mendicants treasure I have found.” Suddhōdana, abashed, was called. took his son’s bowl and led him to his house. Meanwhile the prophet’s father, Eighteen months had now elapsed since the Suddhōdana, who had anxiously watched his turning-point of Gotama’s career—his great son’s career, heard that he had given up his struggle under the Bo tree. Thus far all the asceticism, and had appeared as a Wanderer, an accounts follow chronological order. From this itinerant preacher and teacher. He sent therefore time they simply narrate disconnected stories to him, urging him to come home, that he might about the Buddha, or the persons with whom he see him once more before he died. The Buddha

7 Cf. Big. p. 99, with Hardy, M.B, p. 191. The Pāli name Samyutta, iv. 19. A literal translation will be found in is aditta-pariyaya: the sermon on the lessons to be Vinaya Texts, i. 134, 135. drawn from burning. The text is Vinaya, i. 34 =

7 was brought into contact,—the same story harvest that I reap is the never-dying nectar of being usually found in more than one account, Nirvāna, Those who reap this harvest destroy but not often in the same order. It is not as yet all the weeds of sorrow.” possible, except very partially, to arrange On another occasion he is said to have chronologically the snatches of biography to be brought back to her right mind a young mother gleaned from these stories. They are mostly told whom sorrow had for a time deprived of reason. to show the occasion on which some Her name was Kisāgotamī. She had been memorable act of the Buddha took place, or married early, as is the custom in the East, and some memorable saying was uttered, and are as had a child when she was still a girl. When the exact as to place as they are indistinct as to time. beautiful boy could run alone he died. The It would be impossible within the limits of this young girl in her love for it carried the dead article to give any large number of them, but child clasped to her bosom, and went from space may be found for one or two. house to house of her pitying friends asking A merchant from Sūnaparanta having them to give her medicine for it. But a Buddhist joined the Society was desirous of preaching to convert thinking “she does not understand,” his relations, and is said to have asked said to her, “My good girl, I myself have no Gotama’s permission to do so. “The people of such medicine as you ask for, but I think I know Sūnaparanta,” said the teacher, “are of one who has.” “Oh, tell me who that is?” said exceedingly violent. If they revile you what will Kisāgotamī. “The Buddha can give you you do?” “I will make no reply,” said the medicine; go to him,” was the answer. She went mendicant. “And if they strike you?” “I will not to Gotama; and doing homage to him said, strike in return,” was the reply. “And if they try “Lord and master, do you know any medicine to kill you?” “Death is no evil in itself; many that will be good for my child?” “Yes, I know even desire it, to escape from the vanities of of some,” said the teacher. Now it was the life, but I shall take no steps either, to hasten or custom for patients or their friends to provide to delay the time of my departure.” These the herbs which the doctors required; so she answers were held satisfactory, and the monk asked what herbs he would want. “I want some started on his mission. mustard-seed,” he said; and when the poor girl At another time a rich farmer held a harvest eagerly promised to bring some of so common home, and the Buddha, wishing to preach to a drug, he added, “You must get it from some him, is said to have taken his alms-bowl and house where no son, or husband, or parent or stood by the side of the field and begged. The slave has died.” “Very good,” she said; and farmer, a wealthy brāhmin, said to him, “Why went to ask for it, still carrying her dead child with her. The people said, “Here is mustard- do you come and beg? I plough and sow and seed, take it”; but when she asked, “In my earn my food; you should do the same.” “I too, friend’s house has any son died, or a husband, brāhmin,” said the beggar, “plough and sow; or a parent or slave?” They answered, “Lady! and having ploughed and sown I eat.” “You What is this that you say? The living are few, profess only to be a farmer; no one sees your but the dead are many.” Then she went to other ploughing, what do you mean?” said the houses, but one said “I have lost a son,” another brāhmin. “For my cultivation,” said the beggar, “We have lost our parents,” another “I have lost “faith is the seed, self-combat is the fertilizing my slave.” At last, not being able to find a rain, the weeds I destroy are the cleaving to single house where no one had died, her mind existence, wisdom is my plough, and its began to clear, and summoning up resolution guiding-shaft is modesty; perseverance draws she left the dead body of her child in a forest, my plough, and I guide it with the rein of my and returning to the Buddha paid him homage. mind; the field I work is in the law, and the He said to her, “Have you the mustard-seed?”

8 “My lord,” she replied, “I have not; the people the Buddha started for Kusinārā. He had not tell me that the living are few, but the dead are gone far when he was obliged to rest, and soon many.” Then he talked to her on that essential afterwards he said, “Ānanda, I am thirsty,” and part of his system, the impermanency of all they gave him water to drink. Half-way things, till her doubts were cleared away, she between the two towns flows the river accepted her lot, became a disciple, and entered Kukushtā. There Gotama rested again, and the “first path.” bathed for the last time. Feeling that he was For forty-five years after entering on his dying, and careful lest Chunda should be mission Gotama itinerated in the valley of the reproached by himself or others, he said to Ganges, not going farther than about 250 miles Ānanda, “After I am gone tell Chunda that he from Benares, and always spending the rainy will receive in a future birth very great reward; months at one spot—usually at one of the for, having eaten of the food he gave me, I am viharas,8 or homes, which had been given to the about to die; and if he should still doubt, say society. In the twentieth year his cousin Ānanda that it was from my own mouth that you heard became a mendicant, and from that time seems this. There are two gifts which will be blest to have attended on the Buddha, being above all others, namely, Sujātā’s gift before I constantly near him, and delighting to render attained wisdom under the Bo tree, and this gift him all the personal service which love and of Chunda’s before I pass away.” After halting reverence could suggest. Another cousin, again and again the party at length reached the Devadatta, the son of the rāja of Koli, also river Hiranyavati, close by Kusinārā, and there joined the society, but became envious of the for the last time the teacher rested. Lying down teacher, and stirred up Ajātasattu (who, having under some Sal trees, with his face towards the killed his father Bimbisāra, had become king of south, he talked long and earnestly with Ānanda Rājagaha) to persecute Gotama. The account of about his burial, and about certain rules which the manner in which the Buddha is said to have were to be observed by the society after his overcome the wicked devices of this apostate death. Towards the end of this conversation, cousin and his parricide protector is quite when it was evening, Ānanda broke down and legendary; but the general fact of Ajātasattu’s went aside to weep, but the Buddha missed him, opposition to the new sect and of his subsequent and sending for him comforted him with the conversion may be accepted. promise of Nirvāna, and repeated what he had so often said before about the impermanence of The confused and legendary notices of the all things,—“O Ānanda! Do not weep; do not journeyings of Gotama are succeeded by let yourself be troubled. You know what I have tolerably clear accounts of the last few days of said; sooner or later we must part from all we his life.9 On a journey towards Kusinārā, a town hold most dear. This body of ours contains about 120 miles north-north-east of Benares, within itself the power which renews its and about 80 miles due east of Kapilavastu, the strength for a time, but also the causes which teacher, being then eighty years of age, had lead to its destruction. Is there anything put rested for a short time in a grove at Pāwā, together which shall not dissolve? But you, too, presented to the society by a goldsmith of that shall be free from this delusion, this world of place named Chunda. Chunda prepared for the sense, this law of change. Beloved,” added he, mendicants a mid-day meal, and after the meal

8 These were at first simple huts, built for the mendicants 9 The text of the account of this last journey is the in some grove of palm-trees as a retreat during the rainy Mahāparinibbāna Suttanta, vol. ii. of the Dīgha (ed. season; but they gradually increased in splendour and Rhys Davids and Carpenter), The translation is in Rhys magnificence till the decay of Buddhism set in. See the Davids’ Buddhist Suttas. authorities quoted in Buddhist India, pp. 141, 142.

9 speaking to the rest of the disciples, “Ānanda society; if so, he would clear them up. No one for long years has served me with devoted answered, and Ānanda expressed his surprise affection.” And he spoke to them at some length that amongst so many none should doubt, and on the kindness of Ānanda. all be firmly attached to the law. But the Buddha laid stress on the final perseverance of About midnight Subhadra, a brāhmin the saints, saying that even the least among the philosopher of Kusinārā, came to ask some disciples who had entered the first path only, questions of the Buddha, but Ānanda, fearing still had his heart fixed on the way to perfection, that this might lead to a longer discussion than and constantly strove after the three higher the sick teacher could bear, would not admit paths. “No doubt,” he said, “can be found in the him. Gotama heard the sound of their talk, and mind of a true disciple.” After another pause he asking what it was, told them to let Subhadra said: “Behold now, brethren, this is my come. The latter began by asking whether the exhortation to you. Decay is inherent in all six great teachers knew all laws, or whether component things. Work out, therefore, your there were some that they did not know, or emancipation with diligence! “These were the knew only partially. “This is not the time,” was last words the Buddha spoke; shortly afterwards the answer, “for such discussions. To true he became unconscious, and in that state passed wisdom there is only one way, the path that is away. laid down in my system. Many have already followed it, and conquering the lust and pride and anger of their own hearts, have become free AUTHORITIES ON THE LIFE OF THE from ignorance and doubt and wrong belief, BUDDHA.— have entered the calm state of universal kindliness, and have reached Nirvāna even in Canonical Pāli (reached their present shape this life. O Subhadra! I do not speak to you of before the 4th century B.C.); episodes only, things I have not experienced. Since I was three of them long: twenty-nine years old till now I have striven (1) Birth; text in Majjhima Nikāya, ed. after pure and perfect wisdom, and following Trenckner and Chalmers (London, Pāli Text the good path, have found Nirvāna.” A rule had Society, 1888–1899), vol. iii. pp. 118–124; also been made that no follower of a rival system in Anguttara Nikāya, ed. Morris and Hardy should be admitted to the society without four (Pāli Text Society, 1888–1900), vol. ii. pp. months’ probation. So deeply did the words or 130–132. the impressive manner of the dying teacher work upon Subhadra that he asked to be (2) Adoration of the babe; old ballad; text in admitted at once, and Gotama granted his Sutta Nipāta, ed. Fausböll (Pāli Text Society, request. Then turning to his disciples he said, 1884), pp. 128–131 ; translation by the same in “When I have passed away and am no longer Sacred Books of the East (Oxford, 1881), vol. with you, do not think that the Buddha has left x. pp. 124–131. you, and is not still in your midst. You have my (3) Youth at home; text in Anguttara Nikāya, words, my explanations of the deep things of i. 145. truth, the laws I have laid down for the society; let them be your guide; the Buddha has not left (4) The going forth; old ballad; text in Sutta you.” Soon afterwards he again spoke to them, Nipāta, pp. 70–74 (London, 1896), pp. 99–101; urging them to reverence one another, and prose account in Dīgha Nikāya, ed. Rhys rebuked one of the disciples who spoke Davids and Carpenter (Pāli Text Society, 1890– indiscriminately all that occurred to him. 1893), vol. i. p. 115, translated by Rhys Davids Towards the morning he asked whether anyone in Dialogues of the Buddha (Oxford, 1899), pp. had any doubt about the Buddha, the law or the 147–149.

10 (5) First long episode; the going forth, years (These three works reproduce and amplify of study and penance, attainment of Nirvāna the above episodes Nos. 1–6; they retain here and Buddhahood, and conversion of first five and there a very old tradition as to arrangement converts; text in Majjhima, all together at ii. 93; of clauses or turns of expression.) parts repeated at i. 163–175, 240–249; ii. 212; Later Pali: The commentary on the Jātaka, Vinaya, ed. Oldenberg (London, 1879–1883), written probably in the 5th century A.D., gives a vol. i. pp. 1–13. consecutive narrative, from the birth to the end (6) Second long episode; from the of the second year of the teaching, based on the conversation of the five down to the end of the canonical texts, but much altered and amplified; first year of the teaching; text in Vinaya, i. 13– edited by Fausböll in Jātaka, vol. i. (London, 44, translated by Oldenberg in Vinaya Texts, i. 1877), pp. 1–94; translated by Rhys Davids in 73–151. Buddhist Birth Stories (London, 1880), pp. 1– 133. (7) Visit to Kapilavastu; text in Vinaya, i. 82; translation by Oldenberg in Vinaya Texts Modern Works: (Oxford, 1881–1885), vol. i. pp. 207–210. (1) Tibetan; Life of the Buddha; episodes (8) Third long episode; the last days; text in collected and translated by W. Woodville Dīgha Nikāya (the Mahāparinibbāna Suttanta), Rockhill (London, 1884), from Tibetan texts of vol. ii. pp. 72–168, translated by Rhys Davids the 9th and 10th centuries A.D. in Buddhist Suttas (Oxford, 1881), pp. 1–136. (2) Sinhalese; episodes collected and Buddhist Sanskrit Texts: translated by Spence Hardy from Sinhalese texts of the 12th and later centuries, in Manual (1) Mahāvastu (probably 2nd century B.C.); of Buddhism (London, 1897, 2nd edition), pp. edited by Senart (3 vols., Paris, 1882–1897), 138–359. summary in French prefixed to each volume; down to the end of first year of the teaching. (3) Burmese: The Life or Legend of Gaudama (3rd edition, London, 1880), by the (2) Lalita Vistara (probably 1st century Right Rev. P. Bigandet, translated from a B.C.); edited by Mitra (Calcutta, 1877); Burmese work of A.D. 1773. (The Burmese is, translated into French by Foucaux (Paris, in its turn, a translation from a Pāli work of 1884); down to the first sermon. unknown date; it gives the whole life, and is the (3) Buddha Carita, by Aśvaghosha, only consecutive biography we have.) probably 2nd century A.D. edited by Cowell (4) Kambojian: Pathama Sambodhian; (Oxford, 1892); translated by Cowell (Oxford, translated into French by A. Leclère in Livres 1894, S.B.E. vol. xlix.); an elegant poem; stops sacrés du Cambodge (Paris, 1906). just before the attainment of Buddhahood.

11 MAITREYA Maitreya is the name of the future Buddha. connection with the word for “love,” which is In one of the works included in the Pāli canon, Mettā in Pāli. This would only be one of those the Dīgha Nikāya, a prophecy is put into the punning allusions so frequent in Indian Buddha’s mouth that after the decay of the literature. religion another Buddha, named Metteyya, will Long afterwards, probably in the 6th or 7th arise who will have thousands of followers century, a reformer in south India, at a time instead of the hundreds that the historical when the incoming flood of ritualism and Buddha had. This is the only mention of the superstition threatened to overwhelm the future Buddha in the canon. For some centuries simple teaching of the earlier Buddhism, wrote we hear nothing more about him. But when, in a Pāli poem, entitled the Anāgata Vaṃsa. In this the period just before and after the Christian he described the golden age of the future when, era, some Buddhists began to write in Sanskrit in the time of Metteyya, kings, ministers and instead of Pāli, they composed new works in people would vie one with the other in the which Maitreya (the Sanskrit form of Metteyya) maintenance of the original simple doctrine, is more often mentioned, and details are given and in the restoration of the good times of old. as to his birthplace and history. These are The other side also claimed the authority of the entirely devised in imitation of the details of the future Buddha for their innovations. Statues of life of the historical Buddha, and have no Maitreya are found in Buddhist temples, of all independent value. Only the names differ. sects, at the present day; and the belief in his The document in which the original future advent is universal among Buddhists. prophecy occurs was put together at some date Authorities.—Dīgha Nikāya, vol. iii., edited during the 1st century after the Buddha’s death by J. E. Carpenter, (London, 1908); “Anagata (see NIKĀYA). It is impossible to say whether Vamsa,” edited by J. Minayeff in Journal of the tradition was, at that time, correct in attributing Pali Text Society (1886); Watters on Yuan it to the Buddha. But whoever chose the name Chwang, edited by Rhys Davids and S. W. (it is a patronymic or family, not a personal Bushell (London, 1904–1905). name), had no doubt regard to the etymological

12 BUDDHISM Buddhism is the name given to the religion disease is painful, death is painful. Union with held by the followers of the Buddha (q.v.), and the unpleasant is painful, painful is separation covering a large area in India and east and from the pleasant; and any craving central Asia. unsatisfied—that too is painful. In brief, the five aggregates of clinging (that is, the Essential Doctrines.—We are fortunate in conditions of individuality) are painful. having preserved for us the official report of the Buddha’s discourse, in which he expounded “Now this is the Noble Truth as to the origin what he considered the main features of his of suffering. Verily! it is the craving thirst that system to the five men he first tried to win over causes the renewal of becoming, that is to his new-found faith. There is no reason to accompanied by sensual delights, and seeks doubt its substantial accuracy, not as to words, satisfaction now here, now there—that is to say, but as to purport. In any case it is what the the craving for the gratification of the senses, or compilers of the oldest extant documents the craving for a future life, or the craving for believed their teacher to have regarded as the prosperity. most important points in his teaching. Such a “Now this is the Noble Truth as to the summary must be better than any that could passing away of pain. Verily! it is the passing now be made. It is incorporated into two away so that no passion remains, the giving up, divisions of their sacred books, first among the the getting rid of, the being emancipated from, suttas containing the doctrine, and again in the the harboring no longer of this craving thirst. rules of the society or order he founded (Saṃyutta, v. 421= Vinaya, i. 10). The gist of it, “Now this is the Noble Truth as to the way omitting a few repetitions, is as follows: — that leads to the passing away of pain. Verily! it is this Noble Eightfold Path, that is to say, Right “There are two aims which he who has Views, Right Aspirations, Right speech, Right given up the world ought not to follow after— conduct, Right mode of livelihood, Right devotion, on the one hand, to those things Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Rapture.” whose attractions depend upon the passions, a low and pagan ideal, fit only for the worldly- A few words follow as to the threefold way minded, ignoble, unprofitable, and the practice in which the speaker claimed to have grasped on the other hand of asceticism, which is each of these Four Truths. That is all. There is painful, ignoble, unprofitable. There is a not a word about God or the soul, not a word Middle Path discovered by the Tathāgata1— a about the Buddha or Buddhism. It seems path which opens the eyes, and bestows simple, almost jejune; so thin and weak that one understanding, which leads to peace, to insight, wonders how it can have formed the foundation to the higher wisdom, to Nirvāna. Verily! it is for a system so mighty in its historical results. this Noble Eightfold Path; that is to say, Right But the simple words are pregnant with Views, Right Aspirations, Right Speech, Right meaning. Their implications were clear enough Conduct, Right Mode of Livelihood, Right to the hearers to whom they were addressed. Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Rapture. They were not intended, however, to answer the questionings of a 20th century European “Now this is the Noble Truth as to suffering. questioner, and are liable now to be Birth is attended with pain, decay is painful, misunderstood. Fortunately each word, each

1 That is by the Arahat, the title the Buddha always uses of himself. He does not call himself the Buddha, and his followers never address him as such.

13 clause, each idea in the discourse is repeated, unsatisfied craving, are each a result of commented on, enlarged upon, almost ad individuality. nauseam, in the suttas, and a short comment in This is a deeper generalization than that the light of those explanations may bring out the 1 which says, “A man is born to trouble as the meaning that was meant. sparks fly upward.” But it is put forward as a The passing away of pain or suffering is said mere statement of fact. And the previous history to depend on an emancipation. And the Buddha of religious belief in India would tend to show is elsewhere (Vinaya ii. 239) made to declare: that emphasis was laid on the fact, less as an “Just as the great ocean has one taste only, the explanation of the origin of evil, than as a taste of salt, just so have this doctrine and protest against a then current pessimistic idea discipline but one flavor only, the flavor of that salvation could not be reached on earth, and emancipation”; and again, “When a brother has, must therefore be sought for in a rebirth in by himself, known and realized, and continues heaven, in the Brahmaloka. For if the fact—the to abide, here in this visible world, in that fact that the conditions of individuality are the emancipation of mind, in that emancipation of conditions, also, of pain—were admitted, then heart, which is Arahatship; that is a condition the individual there would still not have higher still and sweeter still, for the sake of escaped from sorrow. If the five ascetics to which the brethren lead the religious life under whom the words were addressed once admitted me.”2 this implication, logic would drive them also to admit all that followed. The emancipation is found in a habit of mind, in the being free from a specified sort of The threefold division of craving at the end craving that is said to be the origin of certain of the second truth might be rendered “the lust specified sorts of pain. In some European books of the flesh, the lust of life and the love of this this is completely spoiled by being represented present world.” The two last are said elsewhere as the doctrine that existence is misery, and that to be directed against two sets of thinkers called desire is to be suppressed. Nothing of the kind the Eternalists and the Annihilationists, who is said in the text. The description of suffering held respectively the everlasting-life-heresy or pain is, in fact, a string of truisms, quite plain and the let-us-eat-and-drink-for-tomorrow-we- and indisputable until the last clause. That die-heresy.3 This may be so, but in any case the clause declares that the Upādāna Skandhas, the division of craving would have appealed to the five groups of the constituent parts of every five hearers as correct. individual, involve pain. Put into modern The word translated “noble” in Noble Path, language this is that the conditions necessary to Noble Truth, is ariya, which also means make an individual are also the conditions that Aryan.4 The negative, un-Aryan, is used of each necessarily give rise to sorrow. No sooner has of the two low aims. It is possible that this an individual become separate, become an rendering should have been introduced into the individual, than disease and decay begin to act translation; but the ethical meaning, though still upon it. Individuality involves limitation, associated with the tribal meaning, had limitation in its turn involves ignorance, and probably already become predominant in the ignorance is the source of sorrow. Union with language of the time. the unpleasant, separation from the pleasant,

1 One very ancient commentary on the Path has been 2 Mahāli Suttanta; translated in Rhys Davids’ Dialogues preserved in three places in the canon: Dīgha, ii. 305– of the Buddha, vol. i. p. 201 (cf. p. 204). 307 and 311–313. Majjhima, iii. 251, and Saṃyutta, v. 3 See Iti-vuttaka, p. 44; Samyutta, iii. 57. 8. 4See Dīgha, ii. 28; Jātaka, v. 48, ii. 80.

14 The details of the Path include several terms Both in Europe, and in all Indian thought except whose meaning and implication are by no the Buddhist, souls, and the gods who are made means apparent at first sight. Right Views, for in imitation of souls, are considered as instance, means mainly right views as to the exceptions. To these spirits is attributed a Being Four Truths and the Three Signs. Of the latter, without Becoming, an individuality without one is identical, or nearly so, with the First change, a beginning without an end. To hold Truth. The others are Impermanence and Non- any such view would, according to the doctrine soul (the absence of a soul)—both declared to of the Noble (or Aryan) Path, be erroneous, and be “signs” of every individual, whether god, the error would block the way against the very animal or man. Of these two again the entrance on the Path. Impermanence has become an Indian rather So important is this position in Buddhism than a Buddhist idea, and we are to a certain that it is put in the forefront of Buddhist extent familiar with it also in the West. There is expositions of Buddhism. The Buddha himself no Being, there is only a Becoming. The state is stated in the books to have devoted to it the of every individual is unstable, temporary, sure very first discourse he addressed to the first to pass away. Even in the lowest class of things, converts.3 The first in the collection of the we find, in each individual, form and material Dialogues of Gotama discusses, and qualities. In the higher classes there is a completely, categorically, and systematically continually rising series of mental qualities rejects, all the current theories about “souls.” also. It is the union of these that makes the Later books follow these precedents. Thus the individual. Every person, or thing, or god, is Kathā Vatthu, the latest book included in the therefore a putting together, a compound; and canon, discusses points of disagreement that in each individual, without any exception, the had arisen in the community. It places this relation of its component parts is ever changing, question of “soul” at the head of all the points it is never the same for two consecutive moments. deals with, and devotes to it an amount of space It follows that no sooner has separateness, quite overshadowing all the rest.4 So also in the individuality, begun, than dissolution, earliest Buddhist book later than the canon— disintegration, also begins. There can be no the very interesting and suggestive series of individuality without a putting together; there conversations between the Greek king can be no putting together without a becoming; Menander and the Buddhist teacher Nāgasena. there can be no becoming without a becoming It is precisely this question of the “soul” that the different; and there can be no becoming unknown author takes up first, describing how different without a dissolution, a passing away, Nāgasena convinces the king that there is no which sooner or later will inevitably be such thing as the “soul” in the ordinary sense, complete. and he returns to the subject again and again.5 Heracleitus, who was a generation or two After Right Views come Right Aspirations. later than the Buddha, had very similar ideas;1 It is evil desires, low ideals, useless cravings, and similar ideas are found in post-Buddhistic idle excitements, that are to be suppressed by Indian works.2 But in neither case are they the cultivation of the opposite—of right desires, worked out in the same uncompromising way.

1 Burnett, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 149. 4 See article on “Buddhist Schools of Thought,” by Rhys 2 Kathā Up. 2, 10; Bhag. Gita, 2, 14; 9, 33. Davids, in the J.R.A.S. for 1892. 5 Questions of King Milinda, translated by Rhys Davids 3 The Anatta-lakkhana Sutta (Vinaya, i. 13 = Saṃyutta, iii. 66 and iv. 34), translated in Vinaya Texts, i. 100– (Oxford, 1890–1894), vol. i. pp. 40, 41. 85–87; vol. ii. pp. 21–25, 86–89. 102.

15 lofty aspirations. In one of the Dialogues1 of her own life, protects her son, her only son, instances are given—the desire for so let him cultivate love without measure emancipation from sensuality, aspirations towards all beings. Let him cultivate towards towards the attainment of love to others, the the whole world—above, below, around—a wish not to injure any living thing, the desire for heart of love unstinted, unmixed with the sense the eradication of wrong and for the promotion of differing or opposing interests. Let a man of right dispositions in one’s own heart, and so maintain this mindfulness all the while he is on. This portion of the Path is indeed quite awake, whether he be standing, walking, sitting simple, and would require no commentary were or lying down. This state of heart is the best in it not for the still constantly repeated blunder the world.” that Buddhism teaches the suppression of all Often elsewhere four such states are desire. described, the Brahma Viharas or Sublime Of the remaining stages of the Path it is only Conditions. They are Love, Sorrow at the necessary to mention two. The one is Right sorrows of others, Joy in the joys of others, and Effort. A constant intellectual alertness is Equanimity as regards one’s own joys and required. This is not only insisted upon sorrows.4 Each of these feelings was to be elsewhere in countless passages, but of the three deliberately practiced, beginning with a single cardinal sins in Buddhism (rāga, dosa, moha) object, and gradually increasing till the whole the last and worst is stupidity or dullness, the world was suffused with the feeling. “Our mind others being sensuality and ill-will. Right Effort shall not waver. No evil speech will we utter. is closely connected with the seventh stage, Tender and compassionate will we abide, Right Mindfulness. Two of the dialogues are loving in heart, void of malice within. And we devoted to this subject, and it is constantly will be ever suffusing such a one with the rays referred to elsewhere.2 The disciple, of our loving thought. And with that feeling as whatsoever he does—whether going forth or a basis we will ever be suffusing the whole wide coming back, standing or walking, speaking or world with thought of love far-reaching, grown silent, eating or drinking—is to keep clearly in great, beyond measure, void of anger or ill- mind all that it means, the temporary character will.” 5 of the act, its ethical significance, and above all The relative importance of love, as that behind the act there is no actor (goer, seer, compared with other habits, is thus described. eater, speaker) that is an eternally persistent “All the means that can be used as bases for unity. It is the Buddhist analogue to the doing right are not worth the sixteenth part of Christian precept: “Whether therefore ye eat or the emancipation of the heart through love. That drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory takes all those up into itself, outshining them in of God.” radiance and glory. Just as whatsoever stars Under the head of Right Conduct the two there be, their radiance avails not the sixteenth most important points are Love and Joy. Love part of the radiance of the moon. That takes all is in Pāli Mettā, and the Metta Sutta3 says (no those up into itself, outshining them in radiance doubt with reference to the Right Mindfulness and glory—just as in the last month of the rains, just described): “As a mother, even at the risk at harvest time, the sun, mounting up on high

1 Majjhima, iii. 251, cf. Saṃyutta, v. 8. 3 No. 8 in the Sutta Nipāta (p. 26 of Fausböll’s edition). 2 Dīgha, ii. 290–315. Majjhima, i. 55 et seq. Cf. Rhys It is translated by Fausböll in vol. x. of the S.B.E., and by Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 109. Davids’ Dialogues of the Buddha, i. 81. 4 Dīgha, ii. 186–187. 5 Majjhima, i. 129.

16 into the clear and cloudless sky, overwhelms all Fruit, as it is called, of Arahatship. One might darkness in the realms of space, and shines forth fill columns with the praises, many of them in radiance and glory—just as in the night, among the most beautiful passages in Pāli when the dawn is breaking, the morning star poetry and prose, lavished on this condition of shines out in radiance and glory—just so all the mind, the state of the man made perfect means that can be used as helps towards doing according to the Buddhist faith. Many are the right avail not the sixteenth part of the pet names, the poetic epithets bestowed upon emancipation of the heart through love.”1 it—the harbor of refuge, the cool cave, the island amidst the floods, the place of bliss, The above is the positive side; the qualities emancipation, liberation, safety, the supreme, (dhammā) that have to be acquired. The the transcendent, the uncreated, the tranquil, the negative side, the qualities that have to be home of peace, the calm, the end of suffering, suppressed by the cultivation of the opposite the medicine for all evil, the unshaken, the virtues, are the Ten Bonds (Samyojanas), the ambrosia, the immaterial, the imperishable, the Four Intoxications (Āsavā) and the Five abiding, the farther shore, the unending, the Hindrances (Nivaraṇas). bliss of effort, the supreme joy, the ineffable, The Ten Bonds are: (1) Delusion about the the detachment, the holy city, and many others. soul; (2) Doubt; (3) Dependence on good Perhaps the most frequent in the Buddhist text works; (4) Sensuality; (5) Hatred, ill-feeling; is Arahatship, “the state of him who is worthy”; (6) Love of life on earth; (7) Desire for life in and the one exclusively used in Europe is heaven; (8) Pride; (9) Self-righteousness; (10) Nirvāna, the “dying out”; that is, the dying out Ignorance. The Four Intoxications are the in the heart of the fell fire of the three cardinal mental intoxication arising respectively from sins—sensuality, ill-will and stupidity.4 (1) Bodily passions, (2) Becoming, (3) The choice of this term by European writers, Delusion, (4) Ignorance. The Five Hindrances a choice made long before any of the Buddhist are (1) Hankering after worldly advantages, (2) canonical texts had been published or The corruption arising out of the wish to injure, translated, has had a most unfortunate result. (3) Torpor of mind, (4) Fretfulness and worry, Those writers did not share, could not be (5) Wavering of mind.2 “When these five expected to share, the exuberant optimism of hindrances have been cut away from within the early Buddhists. Themselves giving up this him, he looks upon himself as freed from debt, world as hopeless, and looking for salvation in rid of disease, out of jail, a free man and secure. the next, they naturally thought the Buddhists And gladness springs up within him on his must do the same, and in the absence of any realizing that, and joy arises to him thus authentic scriptures, to correct the mistake, they gladdened, and so rejoicing all his frame interpreted Nirvāna, in terms of their own becomes at ease, and being thus at ease he is belief, as a state to be reached after death. As filled with a sense of peace, and in that peace such they supposed the “dying out” must mean his heart is stayed.” 3 the dying out of a “soul”; and endless were the To have realized the Truths, and traversed discussions as to whether this meant eternal the Path; to have broken the Bonds, put an end trance, or absolute annihilation, of the “soul.” It to the Intoxications, and got rid of the is now thirty years since the right interpretation, Hindrances, is to have attained the ideal, the founded on the canonical texts, has been given,

1 Iti-vuttaka, pp. 19–21. 3 Dīgha, i. 74. 2 On the details of these see Dīgha, i. 71–73, translated 4 Saṃyutta, iv. 251, 261. by Rhys Davids in Dialogues of the Buddha, i. 82–84.

17 but outside the ranks of Pāli scholars the old repetition of the point to be explained. It fits the blunder is still often repeated. It should be facts because it is derived from them. And it added that the belief in salvation in this world, cannot be disproved, for it lies in a sphere in this life, has appealed so strongly to Indian beyond the reach of human inquiry. sympathies that from the time of the rise of It was because it thus provided a moral Buddhism down to the present day it has been cause that it was retained in Buddhism. But as adopted as a part of general Indian belief, and the Buddha did not acknowledge a soul, the link Jīvanmukti, salvation during this life, has of connection between one life and the next had become a commonplace in the religious to be found somewhere else. The Buddha found language of India. it (as Plato also found it)1 in the influence Adopted Doctrines.—The above are the exercised upon one life by a desire felt in the essential doctrines of the original Buddhism. previous life. When two thinkers of such They are at the same time its distinctive eminence (probably the two greatest ethical doctrines; that is to say, the doctrines that thinkers of antiquity) have arrived distinguish it from all previous teaching in independently at this strange conclusion, have India. But the Buddha, while rejecting the agreed in ascribing to cravings, felt in this life, sacrifices and the ritualistic magic of the so great, and to us so inconceivable, a power brahmin schools, the animistic superstitions of over the future life, we may well hesitate before the people, the asceticism and soul-theory of the we condemn the idea as intrinsically absurd, Jains, and the pantheistic speculations of the and we may take note of the important fact that, poets of the pre-Buddhistic Upanishads, still given similar conditions, similar stages in the retained the belief in transmigration. This development of religious belief, men’s belief—the transmigration of the soul, after the thoughts, even in spite of the most unquestioned death of the body, into other bodies, either of individual originality, tend though they may men, beasts or gods—is part of the animistic never produce exactly the same results, to work creed so widely found throughout the world that in similar ways. it was probably universal. In India it had In India, before Buddhism, conflicting and already, before the rise of Buddhism, been contradictory views prevailed as to the precise raised into an ethical conception by the mode of action of Karma; and we find this associated doctrine of Karma, according to confusion reflected in Buddhist theory. The which a man’s social position in life and his prevailing views are tacked on, as it were, to the physical advantages, or the reverse, were the essential doctrines of Buddhism, without being result of his actions in a previous birth. The thoroughly assimilated to them, or logically doctrine thus afforded an explanation, quite incorporated with them. Thus in the story of the complete to those who believed it, of the good layman Citta, it is an aspiration expressed apparent anomalies and wrongs in the on the deathbed;2 in the dialogue on the subject, distribution here of happiness or woe. A man, it is a thought dwelt on during life,3 in the for instance, is blind. This is owing to his lust numerous stories in the Peta and Vimāna of the eye in a previous birth. But he has also Vatthus it is usually some isolated act, in the unusual powers of hearing. This is because he discussions in the Dhamma Sangani it is some loved, in a previous birth, to listen to the mental disposition, which is the Karma (doing preaching of the law. The explanation could or action) in the one life determining the always be exact, for it was scarcely more than a position of the individual in the next. These are

1 Phaedo, 69 et seq. The idea is there also put forward in 2 Saṃyutta, iv. 302. connection with a belief in transmigration. 3 Majjhima, iii. 99 et seq

18 really conflicting propositions. They are only most remote animism we find the belief that a alike in the fact that in each case a moral cause person, rapt from all sense of the outside world, is given for the position in which the individual possessed by a spirit, acquired from that state a finds himself now; and the moral cause is his degree of sanctity, was supposed to have a own act. degree of insight, denied to ordinary mortals. In In the popular belief, followed also in the India from the soma frenzy in the Vedas, brahmin theology, the bridge between the two through the mystic reveries of the Upanishads, lives was a minute and subtle entity called the and the hypnotic trances of the ancient Yoga, soul, which left the one body at death, through allied beliefs and practices had never lost their a hole at the top of the head, and entered into importance and their charm. It is clear from the Dialogues, and other of the most ancient the new body. The new body happened to be 2 there, ready, with no soul in it. The soul did not Buddhist records, that the belief was in full make the body. In the Buddhist adaptation of force when Buddhism arose, and that the this theory no soul, no consciousness, no practice was followed by the Buddha’s memory, goes over from one body to the other. teachers. It was quite impossible for him to It is the grasping, the craving, still existing at ignore the question; and the practice was the death of the one body that causes the new admitted as a part of the training of the Buddhist set of Skandhas, that is, the new body with its Bhikshu. But it was not the highest or the most mental tendencies and capacities, to arise. How important part, and might be omitted altogether. this takes place is nowhere explained. The states of Rapture are called Conditions of Bliss, and they are regarded as useful for the The Indian theory of Karma has been help they give towards the removal of the worked out with many points of great beauty mental obstacles to the attainment of and ethical value. And the Buddhist adaptation Arahatship.3 Of the thirty-seven constituent of it, avoiding some of the difficulties common parts of Arahatship they enter into one group of to it and to the allied European theories of fate four. To seek for Arahatship in the practice of and predestination, tries to explain the weight the ecstasy alone is considered a deadly heresy.4 of the universe in its action on the individual, So these practices are both pleasant in the heavy hand of the immeasurable past we themselves, and useful as one of the means to cannot escape, the close connection between all the end proposed. But they are not the end, and forms of life, and the mysteries of inherited the end can be reached without them. The most character. Incidentally it held out the hope, to ancient form these exercises took is recorded in those who believed in it, of a mode of escape the often recurring paragraphs translated in from the miseries of transmigration. For as the Rhys Davids’ Dialogues of the Buddha (i. 84– Arahat had conquered the cravings that were 92). More modern, and much more elaborate, supposed to produce the new body, his actions forms are given in the Yogāvacaras Manual of were no longer Karma, but only Kiriyā, that led Indian Mysticism as practiced by Buddhists, to no rebirth.1 edited by Rhys Davids from a unique MS. for Another point of Buddhist teaching adopted the Pāli Text Society in 1896. In the from previous belief was the practice of ecstatic Introduction to this last work the various phases meditation. In the very earliest times of the of the question are discussed at length.

1 The history of the Indian doctrine of Karma has yet to 2 For instance, Majjhima, i. 163–166. be written. On the Buddhist side see Rhys Davids’ 3 Anguttara, iii. 119. Hibbert Lectures, pp. 73–120, and Dahlke, Aufsätze zum Verständnis des Buddhismus (Berlin, 1903), i. 92– 4 Dīgha, i. 38. 106, and ii. 1–11.

19 Buddhist Texts. The Canonical Books.—It these two schools broke up in the following is necessary to remember that the Buddha, like centuries, into others. Several of them had their other Indian teachers of his period, taught by different arrangements of the canonical books, conversation only. A highly-educated man differing also in minor details. These books (according to the education current at the time), remained the only authorities for about five speaking constantly to men of similar centuries, but they all, except only our extant education, he followed the literary habit of his Pāli Nikāyas, have been lost in India. These day by embodying his doctrines in set phrases then are our authorities for the earliest period of (sūtras), on which he enlarged, on different Buddhism. Now what are these books? occasions, in different ways. Writing was then We talk necessarily of Pāli books. They are widely known. But the lack of suitable writing not books in the modern sense. They are materials made any lengthy books impossible. memorial sentences or verses intended to be Such sūtras were therefore the recognized form learnt by heart. And the whole style and method of preserving and communicating opinion. of arrangement is entirely subordinated to this They were catchwords, as it were, memoria primary necessity. Each sūtra (Pāli, sutta) is technica, which could easily be remembered, very short; usually occupying only a page, or and would recall the fuller expositions that had perhaps two, and containing a single been based upon them. Shortly after the proposition. When several of these, almost Buddha’s time the Brahmins had their sūtras in always those that contain propositions of a Sanskrit, already a dead language. He purposely similar kind, are collected together in the put his into the ordinary conversational idiom framework of one dialogue, it is called a of the day, that is to say, into Pāli. When the suttanta. The usual length of such a suttanta is Buddha died these sayings were collected about a dozen pages; only a few of them are together by his disciples into what they call the longer, and a collection of such suttantas might Four Nikāyas, or “collections.” These cannot be called a book. But it is as yet neither have reached their final form till about fifty or narrative nor essay. It is at most a string of sixty years afterwards. Other sayings and passages, drawn up in similar form to assist the verses, most of them ascribed, not to the memory, and intended, not to be read, but to be Buddha, but to the disciples themselves, were learnt by heart. put into a supplementary Nikāya. The first of the four Nikāyas is a collection We know of slight additions made to this of the longest of these suttantas, and it is called Nikāya as late as the time of Asoka, 3rd century accordingly the Dīgha Nikāya, that is “the B.C. And the developed doctrine, found in Collection of Long Ones” (sci. Suttantas). The certain portions of it, shows that these are later next is the Majjhima Nikāya, the “Collection of than the four old Nikāyas. For a generation or the suttantas of Medium Length”—medium, two the books so put together were handed that is, as being shorter than the suttantas in the down by memory, though probably written Dīgha, and longer than the ordinary suttas memoranda were also used. And they were preserved in the two following collections. doubtless accompanied from the first, as they Between them these first two collections were being taught, by a running commentary. contain 186 dialogues, in which the Buddha, or About one hundred years after the Buddha’s in a few cases one of his leading disciples, is death there was a schism in the community. represented as engaged in conversation on some Each of the two schools kept an arrangement of one of the religious, or philosophic, or ethical the canon—still in Pāli, or some allied dialect. points in that system which we now call Sanskrit was not used for any Buddhist works Buddhism. till long afterwards, and never used at all, so far as is known, for the canonical books. Each of

20 In depth of philosophic insight, in the were found so useful in the early Buddhist method of Socratic questioning often adopted, times, when the books were all learnt by heart, in the earnest and elevated tone of the whole, in and had never as yet been written. And in the the evidence they afford of the most cultured Anguttara we find set out in order first of all the thought of the day, these dialogues constantly units, then all the pairs, then all the trios, and so remind the reader of the dialogues of Plato. But on. It is the longest book in the Buddhist Bible, not in style. They have indeed a style of their and fills 1840 pages 8vo. The whole of the Pāli own; always dignified, and occasionally rising text has been published by the Pāli Text into eloquence. But for the reasons already Society, but only portions have been translated given, it is entirely different from the style of into English. Western writings which are always intended to The next, and last, of these four collections be read. Historical scholars will, however, contains again the whole, or nearly the whole, revere this collection of dialogues as one of the of the Buddhist doctrine; but arranged this time most priceless of the treasures of antiquity still in order of subjects. It consists of 55 Saṃyuttas preserved to us. It is to it, above all, that we or groups. In each of these the suttas on the shall always have to go for our knowledge of same subject, or in one or two cases the suttas the most ancient Buddhism. Of the 186, 175 had addressed to the same sort of people, are by 1907 been edited for the Pāli Text Society, grouped together. The whole of it has been and the remainder were either in the press or in published in five volumes by the Pāli Text preparation. Society. Only a few fragments have been A disadvantage of the arrangement in translated. dialogues, more especially as they follow one Many hundreds of the short suttas and another according to length and not according verses in these two collections are found, word to subject, is that it is not easy to find the for word, in the dialogues. And there are statement of doctrine on any particular point numerous instances of the introductory story which is interesting one at the moment. It is stating how, and when, and to whom the sutta very likely just this consideration which led to was enunciated— a sort of narrative framework the compilation of the two following Nikāyas. in which the sutta is set—recurring also. This is In the first of these, called the Anguttara very suggestive as to the way in which the Nikāya, all those points of Buddhist doctrine earliest Buddhist records were gradually built capable of expression in classes are set out in up. The suttas came first embodying, in set order. This practically includes most of the phrases, the doctrine that had to be handed psychology and ethics of Buddhism. For it is a down. Those episodes, found in two or three distinguishing mark of the dialogues different places, and always embodying several themselves that the results arrived at are suttas, came next. Then several of these were arranged in carefully systematized groups. woven together to form a suttanta. And finally We are familiar enough in the West with the suttantas were grouped together into the similar classifications, summed up in such two Nikāyas, and the suttas and episodes expressions as the Seven Deadly Sins, the Ten separately into the two others. Parallel with this Commandments, the Thirty-nine Articles, the evolution, so to say, of the suttas, the short Four Cardinal Virtues, the Seven Sacraments statements of doctrine, in prose, ran the and a host of others. These numbered lists (it is treatment of the verses. There was a great love true) are going out of fashion. The aid which of poetry in the communities in which they afford to memory is no longer required in Buddhism arose. Verses were helpful to the an age in which books of reference abound. It memory. And they were adopted not only for was precisely as a help to memory that they this reason. The adherents of the new view of

21 life found pleasure in putting into appropriate community just after the earliest period, and verse the feelings of enthusiasm and of ecstasy upon literary life in the valley of the Ganges in which the reforming doctrines inspired. When the 4th or 5th century B.C., if we briefly explain particularly happy in literary finish, or what the tractates in this collection contain. peculiarly rich in religious feeling, such verses The first, the Khuddaka Pātha, is a little tract were not lost. These were handed on, from of only a few pages. After a profession of faith mouth to mouth, in the small companies of the in the Buddha, the doctrine and the order, there brethren or sisters. follows a paragraph setting out the thirty-four The oldest verses are all lyrics, expressions constituents of the human body—bones, blood, either of emotion, or of some deep saying, some nerves and so on—strangely incongruous with pregnant thought. Very few of them have been what follows. For that is simply a few of the preserved alone. And even then they are so most beautiful poems to be found in the difficult to understand, so much like puzzles, Buddhist scriptures. There is no apparent that they were probably accompanied from the reason, except their exquisite versification, why first by a sort of comment in prose, stating these particular pieces should have been here when, and why, and by whom they were brought together. It is most probable that this supposed to have been uttered. As a general rule tiny volume was simply a sort of first lesson such a framework in prose is actually preserved book for young neophytes when they joined the in the old Buddhist literature. It is only in the order. In any case that is one of the uses to very latest books included in the canon that the which it is put at present. narrative part is also regularly in verse, so that The next book is the Dhammapada. Here are a whole work consists of a collection of ballads. brought together from ten to twenty stanzas on The last step, that of combining such ballads each of twenty-six selected points of Buddhist into one long epic poem was not taken till after self-training or ethics. There are altogether 423 the canon was closed. verses, gathered from various older sources, The whole process, from the simple and strung together without any other internal anecdote in mixed prose and verse, the so- connection than that they relate more or less to called ākhyāna, to the complete epic, comes out the same subject. And the collector has not with striking clearness in the history of the thought it necessary to choose stanzas written Buddhist canon. It is typical, one may notice in in the same metre, or in the same number of passing, of the evolution of the epic elsewhere; lines. We know that the early Christians were in Iceland, for instance, in Persia and in Greece. accustomed to sing hymns, both in their homes And we may safely draw the conclusion that if and on the occasions of their meeting together. the great Indian epics, the Mahā-bhārata and These hymns are now irretrievably lost. Had the Rāmāyana, had been in existence when the someone made a collection of about twenty formation of the Buddhist canon began, the isolated stanzas, chosen from these hymns, on course of its development would have been each of about twenty subjects—such as Faith, very different from what it was. Hope, Love, the Converted Man, Times of Trouble, Quiet Days, the Savior, the Tree of As will easily be understood, the same Life, the Sweet Name, the Dove, the King, the reasons which led to literary activity of this Land of Peace, the Joy Unspeakable—we kind, in the earliest period, continued to hold should have a Christian Dhammapada, and good afterwards. A number of such efforts, very precious such a collection would be. The after the Nikāyas had been closed, were Buddhist Dhammapada has been edited by included in a supplementary Nikāya called the Professor Fausböll (2nd ed., 1900), and has Khuddaka Nikāya. It will throw very useful been frequently translated. Where the verses light upon the intellectual level in the Buddhist

22 deal with those ideas that are common to of these speeches, and of the circumstances in Christians and Buddhists, the versions are which they were uttered. Some or all of them easily intelligible, and some of the stanzas may also have been invented. In either case they appeal very strongly to the Western sense of are excellent evidence of the sort of questions religious beauty. Where the stanzas are full of on which discussions among the earliest the technical terms of the Buddhist system of Buddhists must have turned. These ecstatic self-culture and self-control, it is often utterances and deep sayings are attributed to the impossible, without expansions that spoil the Buddha himself, and accompanied by the prose poetry, or learned notes that distract the framework. attention, to convey the full sense of the There has also been preserved a collection of original. In all these distinctively Buddhist stanzas ascribed to his leading followers. Of verses the existing translations (of which these 107 are brethren, and 73 sisters, in the Professor Max Müller’s is the best known, and order. The prose framework is in this case Dr Karl Neumann’s the best) are inadequate preserved only in the commentary, which also and sometimes quite erroneous. The connection gives biographies of the authors. This work is in which they were spoken is often apparent in called the Thera-theri-gāthā. the more ancient books from which these verses have been taken, and has been preserved in the Another interesting collection is the Jātaka commentary on the work itself. book, a set of verses supposed to have been uttered by the Buddha in some of his previous In the next little work the framework, the births. These are really 550 of the folk-tales whole paraphernalia of the ancient ākhyāna, is current in India when the canon was being included in the work itself, which is called formed, the only thing Buddhist about them Udāna, or “ecstatic utterances.” The Buddha is being that the Buddha, in a previous birth, is represented, on various occasions during his identified in each case with the hero in the little long career, to have been so much moved by story. Here again the prose is preserved only in some event, or speech, or action, that he gave the commentary. And it is a most fortunate vent, as it were, to his pent-up feelings in a chance that this—the oldest, the most complete, short, ecstatic utterance, couched, for the most and the most authentic collection of folklore part, in one or two lines of poetry. These extant—has thus been preserved intact to the outbursts, very terse and enigmatic, are charged present day. Many of these stories and fables with religious emotion, and turn often on some have wandered to Europe, and are found in subtle point of Arahatship, that is, of the medieval homilies, poems and story-books. A Buddhist ideal of life. The original text has been full account of this curious migration will be published by the Pāli Text Society. The little found in the introduction to the present writer’s book, a garland of fifty of these gems, has been Buddhist Birth Stories. A translation of the translated by General Strong. whole book is now published, under the The next work is called the Iti Vuttaka. This editorship of Professor Cowell, at the contains 120 short passages, each of them Cambridge University Press. leading up to a terse deep saying of the The last of these poetical works which it is Buddha’s, and introduced, in each case, with necessary to mention is the Sutta Nipāta, the words Iti vuttam Bhagavatā—“thus was it containing fifty-five poems, all except the last spoken by the Exalted One.” These anecdotes merely short lyrics, many of great beauty. A may or may not be historically accurate. It is very ancient commentary on the bulk of these quite possible that the memory of the early poems has been included in the canon as a disciples, highly trained as it was, enabled them separate work. The poems themselves have to preserve a substantially true record of some been translated by Professor Fausböll in the

23 Sacred Books of the East. The above works are to Buddhism. The Pāli text has been edited and our authority for the philosophy and ethics of the work translated into English. the earliest Buddhists. We have also a complete More important historically, though greatly statement of the rules of the order in the Vinaya, inferior in style and ability, is the Mahāvastu or edited, in five volumes, by Professor Sublime Story, in Sanskrit. The story is the one Oldenberg. Three volumes of translations of of chief importance to the Buddhists—the these rules, by him and by the present writer, story, namely, of how the Buddha won, under have also appeared in the Sacred Books of the the Bo Tree, the victory over ignorance, and East. attained to the Sambodhi, “the higher wisdom,” There have also been added to the canonical of Nirvāna. The story begins with his previous books seven works on Abhidhamma, a more births, in which also he was accumulating the elaborate and more classified exposition of the Buddha qualities. And as the Mahāvastu was a Dhamma or doctrine as set out in the Nikāyas. standard work of a particular sect, or rather All these works are later. Only one of them has school, called the Mahā-sanghikas, it has thus been translated, the so-called Dhamma preserved for us the theory of the Buddha as Sangani. The introduction to this translation, held outside the followers of the canon, by published under the title of Buddhist those whose views developed, in after Psychology, contains the fullest account that centuries, into the Mahāyāna or modern form of has yet appeared of the psychological Buddhism in India. But this book, like all the conceptions on which Buddhist ethics are ancient books, was composed, not in the north, throughout based. The translator, Mrs Caroline in Nepal, but in the valley of the Ganges, and it Rhys Davids, estimates the date of this ancient is partly in prose, partly in verse. manual for Buddhist students as the 4th century Two other works, the Lalita Vistara and the B.C. Buddha Carita, give us—but this, of course, is Later Works.—First, the canon, almost all later—Sanskrit poems, epics, on the same of which is now accessible to readers of Pāli. subject. Of these, the former may be as old as But a good deal of work is still required before the Christian era; the latter belongs to the 2nd the harvest of historical data contained in these century after Christ. Both of them have been texts shall have been made acceptable to edited and translated. The older one contains students of philosophy and sociology. These still a good deal of prose, the gist of it being works of the oldest period, the two centuries often repeated in the verses. The later one is and a half, between the Buddha’s time and that entirely in verse, and shows off the author’s of Asoka, were followed by a voluminous mastery of the artificial rules of prosody and literature in the following periods—from Asoka poetics, according to which a poem, a mahā- to Kanishka, and from Kanishka to kāvya, ought, according to the later writers on Buddhaghosa,—each of about three centuries. the Ars poetica, to be composed. These three Many of these works are extant in MS.; but only works deal only quite briefly and incidentally five or six of the more important have so far with any point of Buddhism outside of the been published. Buddha legend. Of these the most interesting is the Milinda, Of greater importance for the history of one of the earliest historical novels preserved to Buddhism are two later works, the Netti us. It is mainly religious and philosophical, and Pakarana and the Saddharma Pundarīka. The purports to give the discussion, extending over former, in Pāli, discusses a number of questions several days, in which a Buddhist elder named then of importance in the Buddhist community; Nāgasena succeeds in converting Milinda, that and it relies throughout, as does the Milinda, on is Menander, the famous Greek king of Bactria, the canonical works, which it quotes largely.

24 The latter, in Sanskrit, is the earliest exposition share of the ashes from the cremation pyre of we have of the later Mahāyāna doctrine. Both the Buddha. About 12 miles to the north-east of these books may be dated in the 2nd or 3rd this spot has been found an inscribed pillar, put century of our era. The latter has been translated up by Asoka as a record of his visit to the into English. Lumbini Garden, as the place where the future Buddha had been born. Although more than two We have now also the text of the Prajnā centuries later than the event to which it refers, Pāramitā, a later treatise on the Mahāyāna this inscription is good evidence of the site of system, which in time entirely replaced in India the garden. There had been no interruption of the original doctrines. To about the same age the tradition; and it is probable that the place belongs also the Divyāvādana, a collection of was then still occupied by the descendants of legends about the leading disciples of the the possessors in the Buddha’s time. Buddha, and important members of the order, through the subsequent three centuries. These North-west of this another Asoka pillar has legends are, however, of different dates, and in been discovered, recording his visit to the cairn spite of the comparatively late period at which erected by the Sakiyas over the remains of it was put into its present form, it contains some Konāgamana, one of the previous Buddhas or very ancient fragments. teachers, whose follower Gotama the Buddha had claimed to be. These discoveries definitely The whole of the above works were determine the district occupied by the Sakiya composed in the north of India; that is to say, republic in the 6th and 7th centuries B.C. The either north or a few miles south of the Ganges. boundaries, of course, are not known; but the The record is at present full of gaps. But we can clan must have spread 30 miles or more along even now obtain a full and accurate idea of the the lower slopes of the Himalayas and 30 miles earliest Buddhism, and are able to trace the or more southwards over the plains. It has been main lines of its development through the first abandoned jungle since the 3rd century A.D., or eight or nine centuries of its career. The Pāli perhaps earlier, so that the ruined sites, Text Society is still publishing two volumes a numerous through the whole district, have year; and the Russian Academy has inaugurated remained undisturbed, and further discoveries a series to contain the most important of the may be confidently expected. Sanskrit works still buried in MS. We have also now accessible in Pāli fourteen volumes of the The principal points on which this large commentaries of the great 5th century scholars number of older and better authorities has in south India and Ceylon, most of them the modified our knowledge are as follows: — works either of Buddhaghosa of Budh Gaya, or 1. We have learnt that the division of of Dhammapāla of Kāncipura (the ancient name Buddhism, originating with Burnouf, into of Conjeeveram). These are full of important northern and southern, is misleading. He found historical data on the social, as well as the that the Buddhism in his Pāli MSS., which came religious, life of India during the periods of from, Ceylon, differed from that in his Sanskrit which they treat. MSS., which came from Nepal. Now that the Modern Research.—The striking archaeo- works he used have been made accessible in logical discoveries of recent years have both printed editions, we find that, wherever the confirmed and added to our knowledge of the existing MSS. came from, the original works earliest period. Pre-eminent among these is the themselves were all composed in the same discovery, by Mr William Peppé, on the stretch of country, that is, in the valley of the Birdpur estate, adjoining the boundary between Ganges. The difference of the opinions English and Nepalese territory, of the stūpa, or expressed in the MSS. is due, not to the place cairn, erected by the Sakiya clan over their where they are now found, but to the difference

25 of time at which they were originally republic. They had republics for their neighbors composed. on the east and south, but on the western boundary was the kingdom of Kosala, the Not one of the books mentioned above is modern Oudh, which they acknowledged as a either northern or southern. They all claim, and suzerain power. The Buddha’s father was not a rightly claim, to belong, so far as their place of origin is concerned, to the Majjhima Desa, the king. There were rājas in the clan, but the word middle country. It is undesirable to base the meant at most something like consul or archon. main division of our subject on an adventitious All the four real kings were called Mahā-rāja. circumstance, and especially so when the And Suddhodana, the teacher’s father, was not nomenclature thus introduced (it is not found in even rāja. One of his cousins, named Bhaddiya, the books themselves) cuts right across the true is styled a rāja; but Suddhodana is spoken of, line of division. The use of the terms northern like other citizens, as Suddhodana the Sakiyan. and southern as applied, not to the existing As the ancient books are very particular on this MSS., but to the original books, or to the question of titles, this is decisive. Buddhism they teach, not only does not help us, 3. There was no caste—no caste, that is, in it is the source of serious misunderstanding. the modern sense of the term. We have long It inevitably leads careless writers to take for known that the connubium was the cause of a granted that we have, historically, two long and determined struggle between the Buddhisms—one manufactured in Ceylon, the patricians and the plebeians in Rome. Evidence other in Nepal. Now this is admittedly wrong. has been yearly accumulating on the existence What we have to consider is Buddhism varying of restrictions as to intermarriage, and as to the through slight degrees, as the centuries pass by, right of eating together (commensality) among in almost every book. We may call it one, or we other Aryan tribes, Greeks, Germans, Russians may call it many. What is quite certain is that it and so on. Even without the fact of the existence is not two. And the most useful distinction to now of such restrictions among the modern emphasize is, not the ambiguous and successors of the ancient Aryans in India, it misleading geographical one—derived from would have been probable that they also were the places where the modern copies of the MSS. addicted to similar customs. It is certain that the are found; nor even, though that would be notion of such usages was familiar enough to better, the linguistic one—but the chronological some at least of the tribes that preceded the one. The use, therefore, of the inaccurate and Aryans in India. Rules of endogamy and misleading terms northern and southern ought exogamy; privileges, restricted to certain no longer to be followed in scholarly works on classes, of eating together, are not only Indian Buddhism. or Aryan, but world-wide phenomena. Both the spirit, and to a large degree the actual details, of 2. Our ideas as to the social conditions that modern Indian caste-usages are identical with prevailed, during the Buddha’s lifetime, in the these ancient, and no doubt universal, customs. eastern valley of the Ganges have been It is in them that we have the key to the origin modified. The people were divided into clans, of caste. many of them governed as republics, more or less aristocratic. In a few cases several of such At any moment in the history of a nation republics had formed confederations, and in such customs seem, to a superficial observer, to four cases such confederations had already be fixed and immutable. As a matter of fact they become hereditary monarchies. The right are never quite the same in successive centuries, historical analogy is not the state of Germany in or even generations. The numerous and the middle ages, but the state of Greece in the complicated details which we sum up under the time of Socrates. The Sakiyas were still a convenient, but often misleading, single name

26 of caste, are solely dependent for their sanction one end of the scale were certain outlying tribes on public opinion. That opinion seems stable. and certain hereditary crafts of a dirty or But it is always tending to vary as to the degree despised kind. At the other end the nobles of importance attached to some particular one claimed the superiority. But Brahmins by birth of the details, as to the size and complexity of (not necessarily sacrificial priests, for they the particular groups in which each detail ought followed all sorts of occupations) were trying to to be observed. oust the nobles from the highest grade. They Owing to the fact that the particular group only succeeded, long afterwards, when the that in India worked its way to the top, based its power of Buddhism had declined. claims on religious grounds, not on political 4. It had been supposed on the authority of power, nor on wealth, the system has, no doubt, late priestly texts, where boasts of persecution lasted longer in India than in Europe. But public are put forth, that the cause of the decline of opinion still insists, in considerable circles even Buddhism in India had been Brahmin in Europe, on restrictions of a more or less persecution. The now accessible older defined kind, both as to marriage and as to authorities, with one doubtful exception,1 make eating together. And in India the problem still no mention of persecution. On the other hand, remains to trace, in the literature, the gradual the comparison we are now able to make growth of the system—the gradual formation of between the canonical books of the older new sections among the people, the gradual Buddhism and the later texts of the following extension of the institution to the families of centuries, shows a continual decline from the people engaged in certain trades, belonging to old standpoint, a continual approximation of the the same group, or sect, or tribe, tracing their Buddhist views to those of the other ancestry, whether rightly or wrongly, to the philosophies and religions of India. same source. All these factors, and others We can see now that the very event which besides, are real factors. But they are phases of seemed, in the eyes of the world, to be the most the extension and growth, not explanations of striking proof of the success of the new the origin of the system. movement, the conversion and strenuous There is no evidence to show that at the time support, in the 3rd century B.C., of Asoka, the of the rise of Buddhism there was any most powerful ruler India had had, only substantial difference, as regards the barriers in hastened the decline. The adhesion of large question, between the peoples dwelling in the numbers of nominal converts, more especially valley of the Ganges and their contemporaries, from the newly incorporated and less advanced Greek or Roman, dwelling on the shores of the provinces, produced weakness rather than Mediterranean Sea. The point of greatest strength in the movement for reform. The day weight in the establishment of the subsequent of compromise had come. Every relaxation of development, the supremacy in India of the the old thorough-going position was welcomed priests, was still being hotly debated. All the and supported by converts only half converted. new evidence tends to show that the struggle And so the margin of difference between the was being decided rather against than for the Buddhists and their opponents gradually faded Brahmins. What we find in the Buddha’s time almost entirely away. is caste in the making. The great mass of the The soul theory, step by step, gained again people were distinguished quite roughly into the upper hand. The popular gods and the four classes, social strata, of which the popular superstitions are once more favored by boundary lines were vague and uncertain. At Buddhists themselves. The philosophical basis

1 See Journal of the Pāli Text Society, 1896, pp. 87–92.

27 of the old ethics is overshadowed by new Translations.—Vinaya Texts, by Rhys speculations. And even the old ideal of life, the Davids and Oldenberg, 3 vols., 1881–1885; salvation of the Arahat to be won in this world Dhammapada, by Max Müller, and Sutta and in this world only, by self-culture and self- Nipāta, by Fausböll, 1881; Questions of King mastery, is forgotten, or mentioned only to be Milinda, by Rhys Davids, 2 vols., 1890–1894; condemned. The end was inevitable. The need Buddhist Suttas, by Rhys Davids, 1881 ; of a separate organization became less and less Saddharma Pundarīka, by Kern, 1884; apparent. The whole pantheon of the Vedic Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts, by Cowell and Max gods, with the ceremonies and the sacrifices Müller, 1894—all the above in the “Sacred associated with them, passed indeed away. But Books of the East” ; Jātaka, vol. i., by Rhys the ancient Buddhism, the party of reform, was Davids, under the title Buddhist Birth Stories, overwhelmed also in its fall; and modern 1880; vols, i.-vi., by Chalmers, Neil, Francis, Hinduism arose on the ruins of both. and Rouse, 1895–1897; Buddhism in AUTHORITIES.—The attention of the few Translations, by Warren, 1896; Buddhistische scholars at work on the subject being directed Anthologie, by Neumann, 1892. Lieder der to the necessary first step of publishing the Mönche und Nonnen, 1899, by the same; ancient authorities, the work of exploring them, Dialogues of the Buddha, by Rhys Davids, of analyzing and classifying the data they 1899; Die Reden Gotamo Buddhas, by contain, has as yet been very imperfectly done. Neumann, 3 vols., 1899–1903; Buddhist The annexed list contains only the most Psychology, by Mrs Rhys Davids, 1900. important works. Manuals, Monographs, &c.—Buddhism, Texts.—Pāli Text Society, 57 vols.; Jātaka, by Rhys Davids, 12mo, 20th thousand, 1903; 7 vols., ed. Fausböll, 1877–1897; Vinaya, 5 Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre und seine vols., ed. Oldenberg, 1879–1883; Gemeinde, by Oldenberg, 5th edition, 1906; Dhammapada, ed. Fausböll, 2nd ed., 1900; Der Buddhismus und seine Geschichte in Divyāvadāna, ed. Cowell and Neil, 1882; Indien, by Kern, 1882; Der Buddhismus, by Mahāvastu, ed. Senart, 3 vols., 1882–1897; Edmund Hardy, 1890; American Lectures, Buddha Carita, ed. Cowell, 1892; Milinda- Buddhism, by Rhys Davids, 1896; Inscriptions pañho, ed. Trenckner, 1880. de Piyadasi, by Senart, 2 vols., 1881–1886; Mara und Buddha, by Windisch, 1895; Buddhist India, by Rhys Davids, 1903.

PĀLl Pāli is the language used in daily intercourse The political factor was the rise during the between cultured people in the north of India 7th century B.C. of the Kosala power. Previous from the 7th century B.C. It continued to be used to this the Aryan settlements, along the three throughout India and its confines as a literary routes they followed in their penetration into language for about a thousand years, and is still, India, had remained isolated, independent and though in a continually decreasing degree, the small communities. Their language bore the literary language of Burma, Siam, and Ceylon. same relation to the Vedic speech as the various Two factors combined to give Pāli its Italian dialects bore to Latin. The welding importance as one of the few great literary together of the great Kosala kingdom, more languages of the world: the one political, the than twice the size of England, in the very other religious. center of the settled country, led insensibly but

28 irresistibly to the establishment of a standard of alphabet, and the language expressed in it he speech, and the standard followed was the called the Pāli language. This was so nearly language used at the court at Sāvatthi in the correct that the usage has been followed by Nepalese hills, the capital of Kosala. other European scholars, and is being increasingly adopted. When Gotama the Buddha, himself a Kosalan by birth, determined on the use, for the It receives the support of Mahānāma, the propagation of his religious reforms, of the author of the Great Chronicle, who wrote in living tongue of the people, he and his followers Ceylon in the 5th century A.D. He says (p. 253, naturally made full use of the advantages ed. Turnour) that Buddhaghosa translated the already gained by the form of speech current commentaries, then existing only in Sinhalese, through the wide extent of his own country. A into Pāli. The name here used by the chronicler result followed somewhat similar to the effect, for Pāli is “the Māgadhī tongue,” by which on the German language, of the Lutheran expression is meant, not exactly the language reformation. When, in the generations after the spoken in Migadha, but the language in use at Buddha’s death, his disciples compiled the the court of Asoka, king of Kosala and documents of the faith, the form they adopted Māgadha. With this use of the word, became dominant. But local varieties of speech philologically inexact, but historically quite continued to exist. defensible, may be compared the use of the The etymology of the word Pāli is uncertain. word English, which is not exactly the language It probably means “row, line, canon,” and is of the Angles, or of the word French, which is used, in its exact technical sense, of the not exactly the language of the Franks. language of the canon, containing the The question of Pāli becomes therefore documents of the Buddhist faith. But when Pāli three-fold; Pāli before the canon, the canon, and first became known to Europeans it was already the writings subsequent to the canon. The used also, by those who wrote in Pāli, of the present writer has suggested that the word Pāli language of the later writings, which bear the should be reserved for the language of the same relation to the standard literary Pāli of the canon, and other words used for the earlier and canonical texts as medieval does to classical later forms of it;37 but the usage generally Latin. A further extension of the meaning in followed is so convenient that there is little which the word Pāli was used followed in a likelihood of the suggestion being followed. very suggestive way. The threefold division will therefore be here The first book edited by a European in Pāli adhered to. was the Mahāvaṃsa, or Great Chronicle of For the history of Pāli before the canonical Ceylon, published there in 1837 by Turnour, books were composed we have no direct then colonial secretary in the island. James evidence. None of the pre-Buddhistic sites have Prinsep was then devoting his rare genius to the as yet been excavated; and, with one doubtful decipherment of the early inscriptions of exception, no inscriptions older than the texts northern India, especially those of Asoka in the have as yet been found. We have to argue back 3rd century B.C. He derived the greatest from the state of things revealed in the texts, of assistance from Turnour’s work not only in various dates from 450–250 B.C., and in the historical information, but also as regards the inscriptions from that date onwards. The forms of words and grammatical inflexions. inscriptions have now been subjected to a very The resemblance was so close that Prinsep full critical and philological analysis in called the alphabet he was deciphering the Pāli Professor Otto Franke’s Pali und Sanskrit

37 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1903), p. 398.

29 (Strassburg, 1902). He shows that in the 3rd might fill somewhat more than a hundred pages century B.C. the language used throughout of text. An outline of the history of the Pāli northern India was practically one, and that it alphabet has been given, with illustrations and was derived directly from the speech of the references to the authorities, in Rhys Davids’s Vedic Aryans, retaining many Vedic forms lost Buddhist India, pp. 107–140. in the later classical Sanskrit. His list of such The canonical texts are divided into three forms is much more complete than that given collections called Piṭakas, i.e. baskets. This by Childers in the introduction to his Dictionary figure of speech refers, not to a basket or box in of the Pali Language. which things can be stored, but to the baskets, The particular form of this general speech used in India in excavations, as a means of which was used as the lingua franca, the handing on the earth from one worker to Hindustani of the period, was the form in use in another. The first Piṭaka contains, the Vinaya— Kosala. Franke also shows that there were local that is, Rules of the Order; the second the peculiarities in small matters of spelling and Suttas, giving the doctrine, and the third the inflexion, and that the particular form of the Abhidhamma, analytical exercises in the language used in and about the Avanti district, psychological system on which the doctrine is of which the capital was Ujjeni (a celebrated based. These have now nearly all, mainly pre-Buddhistic city), was the basis of the through the work of the Pali Text Society, been language used in the sacred texts as we now published in Pāli. have them. Long ago Westergaard, Rhys 38 The Vinaya was edited in 5 vols, by H. Davids and Ernst Kuhn, had made the same Oldenberg; and the more important parts of it suggestion, mainly on historical grounds, have been translated into English by Rhys Mahinda, who took the texts to Ceylon, having Davids and Oldenberg in their Vinaya Texts. been born at Vedisa in that district. The careful and complete collection, by Franke, of the The Sutta Piṭaka consists of five Nikāyas, philological evidence at present available, has four principal and one supplementary. The four raised this hypothesis into a practical certainty. principal ones have been published for the Pāli Text Society, and some volumes have been The inscriptions are at present scattered translated into English or German. These four through a number of learned periodicals; a Nikāyas, sixteen volumes in all, are the main complete list of all those that can be authorities for the doctrines of early Buddhism. approximately dated between the 3rd century nd The fifth Nikāya is a miscellaneous collection B.C. and the 2 century A.D. is given in the first of treatises, mostly very short, on a variety of chapter of Franke s book. M. E. Senart has subjects. It contains lyrical and ballad poetry, collected in his Inscriptions de Piyadasi (Paris, specimens of early exegesis and commentary, 1881–1886) those inscriptions of Asoka which lives of the saints, collections of edifying were known up to the date of his work, anecdotes and of the now well-known Jātakas subjecting them to a careful analysis, and or Birth Stories. Of these, eleven volumes had providing an index to the words occurring in by 1910 been edited for the Pali Text Society them. What is greatly needed is a new edition by various scholars, the Jātakas and two other of this work including the Asoka inscriptions treatises had appeared elsewhere, and two discovered during the last twenty years, and a works (one a selection of lives of distinguished similar edition of the other inscriptions. The early Buddhists, and the other an ancient whole of the Pāli inscriptions so far discovered commentary), were still in MS.

38 Westergaard, Über den ältesten Zeitraum der Transactions of the Philological Society (1875), p. 70; indischen Geschichte, p. 87; Rhys Davids, Kuhn, Beiträge zur Pali Grammatik, 7–9.

30 Of the seven treatises contained in the third council under Asoka; and that the canon Abhidhamma Piṭaka five, and one-third of the was then considered closed. No evidence has sixth, had by 1910 been published by the Pali yet been found of any alterations made, after Text Society; and one, the Dhamma Sangaṇi, that time, in Ceylon; but there were probably had been translated by Mrs. Rhys Davids. A before that time, in India, other books, now lost, description of the contents of all these books in and other recensions of some of the above. the canon is given in Rhys Davids’s American Of classical Pāli in northern India Lectures, pp. 44–86. subsequent to the canon there is but little A certain amount of progress has been made evidence. Three works only have survived. in the historical criticism of these books. Out of These are the Milinda-pañha, edited by V. the twenty-nine works contained in the three Trenckner, and translated by Rhys Davids Piṭakas only one claims to have an author. That under the title Questions of King Milinda; the one is the Kathā Vatthu, ascribed to Tissa the Netti Pakaraṇa, edited by E. Hardy for the Pāli son of Moggali,39 who presided over the third Text Society in 1902; and the Petaka Upadesa. council held under Asoka. It is the latest book The former belongs to the north-west, the others of the third Piṭaka. All the rest of the canonical to the center of India, and all three may be dated works grew up in the schools of the Order, and vaguely in the first or second centuries A.D. The most of them appear to contain documents, or first, a religious romance of remarkable interest, passages, of different dates. may owe its preservation to the charm of its style, the others to the accident that they were In his masterly analysis of the Vinaya, in the attributed by mistake to a famous apostle. In introduction to his edition of the text, Professor any case they are the sole survivors of what Oldenberg has shown that there are at least must have been a vast and varied literature. three strata in the existing presentation of the Professor Takakusu has shown the possibility Rules of the Order, the oldest portions going of several complete books belonging to it being back probably to the time of the Buddha still extant in Chinese translations,40 and we himself. Professor Rhys Davids has put forward may yet hope to recover original fragments in similar views with respect to the Jātakas and central Asia, Tibet, or Nepal. the Sutta Nipāta in his Buddhist India, and with respect to the Nikāyas in general in the At p. 66 of the Gandha Vaṃsa, a modern introduction to his Dialogues of the Buddha. catalogue of Pāli books and authors, written in And Professor Windisch has discussed the Pāli, there is given a list of ten authors who legends of the temptation in his Māra und wrote Pāli books in India, probably southern Buddha, and those relating to the Buddha’s India. We may conclude that these books are birth in his Buddha’s Geburt. still extant in Burma, where the catalogue was drawn up. Two only of these ten authors are It seems probable that the Vinaya and the otherwise known. The first is Dhammapala, four Nikāyas were put substantially into the who wrote in Kāñcipura, the modern shape in which we now have them before the Conjevaram in south India, in the 5th century of council at Vesali, a hundred years after the our era. His principal work is a series of Buddha’s death; that slight alterations and commentaries on five of the lyrical anthologies additions were made in them, and the included in the miscellaneous Nikāya. Three of miscellaneous Nikāya and the Abhidhamma these have been published by the Pāli Text books completed, at various times down to the

39 No doubt identical with Upagupta, the teacher of 40 Journal of the Pali Text Society (1905). Pp. 72, 86. Asoka (cf. Vincent Smith, Early History of India, 2nd ed., 1908, and refs.).

31 Society; and Professor E. Hardy has discussed century A.D., and wrote there all his well-known in the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgeni- works. Two volumes only of these, out of about ländischen Gesellschaft (1897), pp. 105–127, twenty still extant in MS., have been edited for all that is known about him. Dhammapala wrote the Pali Text Society. also a commentary on the Netti mentioned About a century before this the Dīpa-vaṃsa, above. The second is Buddhadatta, who wrote th or Island Chronicle, had been composed in Pāli the Jinālankāra in the 5 century A.D. It has verse so indifferent that it is apparently the been edited and translated by Professor J. Gray. work of a beginner in Pāli composition. No It is a poem, of no great interest, on the life of work written in Pāli in Ceylon at a date older the Buddha. than this has been discovered yet. It would seem The whole of these Pāli books composed in that up to the 4th century of our era the Sinhalese India have been lost there. They have been had written exclusively in their own tongue; preserved for us by the unbroken succession of that is to say that for six centuries they had Pāli scholars in Ceylon and Burma. These studied and understood Pāli as a dead language scholars (most of them members of the without using it as a means of literary Buddhist Order, but many of them laymen) not expression. only copied and recopied the Indian Pāli books, In Burma, on the other hand, where Pāli was but wrote a very large number themselves. We probably introduced from Ceylon, no writings are thus beginning to know something of the in Pāli can be dated before the 11th century of history of this literature. Two departments have our era. Of the history of Pāli in Siam very little been subjected to critical study: the Ceylon is known. There have been good Pāli scholars chronicles by Professor W. Geiger in his there since late medieval times. A very Mahāvaṃsa und Dīpavaṃsa, and the earlier excellent edition of the twenty-seven canonical grammatical works by Professor O. Franke in books has been recently printed there, and there two articles in the Journal of the Pali Text exist in our European libraries a number of Pāli Society for 1903, and in his Geschichte und MSS. written in Siam. Kritik der einheimischen Pali Grammatik. Dr Forchhammer in his Jardine Prize Essay, and It would be too early to attempt any estimate Dr Mabel Bode in the introduction to her of the value of this secondary Pāli literature. edition of the Sāsana-vaṃsa, have collected Only a few volumes, out of several hundred many details as to the Pāli literature in Burma. known to be extant in MS., have yet been published. But the department of the chronicles, The results of these investigations show that rd the only one so far at all adequately treated, has in Ceylon from the 3 century B.C. onwards thrown so much light on many points of the there has been a continuous succession of history of India that we may reasonably expect teachers and scholars. Many of them lived in results equally valuable from the publication the various vihāras or residences situate and study of the remainder. The works on throughout the island; but the main center of th religion and philosophy especially will be of as intellectual effort, down to the 8 century, was much service for the history of ideas in these the Mahā Vihāra, the Great Minster, at later periods as the publication of the canonical Anurādhapura. This was, in fact, a great books has already been for the earlier period to university. Authors refer, in the prefaces to their which they refer. The Pāli books written in books, to the Great Minster as the source of Ceylon, Burma and Siam will be our best and their knowledge. And to it students flocked oldest, and in many respects our only, from all parts of India. The most famous of authorities for the sociology and politics, the these was Buddhaghosa, from Behar in North th literature and the religion, of their respective India, who studied at the Minster in the 5 countries.

32 SELECTED AUTHORITIES.—Texts: Pali Text Philology: R. C. Childers, Dictionary of the Society (63 vols., 1882–1908); H. Oldenberg, Pali Language (London, 1872–1875); Ernst The Vinaya Piṭakam (5 vols., London, 1879– Kuhn, Beiträge zur Pali Grammatik (Berlin, 1883); V. Fausböll, The Jātaka (7 vols., 1875); E. Müller, Pali Grammar (London, London, 1877–1897); G. Turnour, The 1884); R O. Franke, Geschichte und Kritik der Mahāvaṃsa (Colombo, 1837); H. Oldenberg, einheimischen Pali-Grammatik und The Dīpavaṃsa (London, 1879); V. Trenckner, Lexicographie, and Pali und Sanskrit Milinda (London, 1880). Translations: Rhys (Strassburg, 1902); D. Andersen, Pali Reader Davids and H. Oldenberg, Vinaya Texts (3 (London, 1904–1907). vols., Oxford, 1881–1885); Rhys Davids, History (of the alphabet, language and Milinda (2 vols., Oxford, 1890–1894), texts): Rhys Davids, American Lectures Dialogues of the Buddha (Oxford, 1899); H. C. (London, 3rd ed., 1908); Buddhist India Warren, Buddhism in Translations (Cambridge, (London, 1903); E. Windisch, Māra und Mass., 1896); Mrs Rhys Davids, Buddhist Buddha; (Leipzig, 1895), and Buddha’s Geburt Psychology (London, 1900) ; K. E. Neumann, (Leipzig, 1908); W. Geiger, Mahāvaṃsa und Reden des Gotamo Buddha (3 vols., Leipzig, Dīpavaṃsa (Leipzig, 1905); E. Forchhammer, 1896-1898); Lieder der Monche und Nonnen Jardine Prize Essay (Rangoon, 1885); Dr (Berlin, 1899); Max Müller and V. Fausböll, Mabel Bode, Sāsanavaṃsa (London, 1897) Dhammapada and Sutta Nipāta (Oxford, 1881).

NIKĀYA Nikāya (“collection”) is the name of a unknown, it was a practical necessity to invent division of the Buddhist canonical books. There and use aids to memory. Such were the are four principal Nikāyas, making together the repetition of memorial tags, of cues (as now Sutta Piṭaka (“Basket of Discourses”), the used for a precisely similar purpose on the second of the three baskets into which the canon stage), to suggest what is to come. Such were is divided. The fifth or miscellaneous Nikāya is also these numbered lists of technical ethical by some authorities added to this Piṭaka, by terms. Religious teachers in the West had others to the next. The first two Nikāyas, called similar groups—the seven deadly sins, the ten respectively Dīgha and Majjhima (Longer and commandments, the four cardinal virtues, the Shorter), form one book, a collection of the seven Sacraments, and many others. These are dialogues of the Buddha, the longer ones being only now, since the gradual increase of books, included in the former, the shorter ones in the falling out of use. In the 5th century B.C. in India latter. it was found convenient by the early Buddhists to classify almost the whole of their psychology The third , called the Aṅguttara (Progressive and ethics in this manner. And the Aṅguttara Addition), rearranges the doctrinal matter Nikāya is based on that classification. contained in the Dialogues in groups of ethical concepts, beginning with the units, then giving In the last Nikāya, the Saṃyutta (The the pairs, then the groups of three, four, five, Clusters), the same doctrines are arranged in a &c., up to ten. In the Dialogues the arrangement different set of groups, according to subject. All in such numbered groups is frequent. In an age the Logia (usually of the master himself, but when books, in our modern sense, were also of his principal disciples) on any one point,

33 or in a few cases as addressed to one set of The text of the Dialogues fills about 2000 people, are here brought together. That was, of pages 8vo in the edition prepared for the Pāli course, a very convenient arrangement then. It Text Society, of which five vols, out of six had saved a teacher or scholar who wanted to find been published in 1909, and the first had been the doctrine on any one subject from the trouble translated into English. The Samyutta, of about of repeating over, or getting someone else to the same size, and the Aṅguttara, which is a repeat over for him, the whole of the Dialogues little smaller, have both been edited. Of the or the Aṅguttara. To us, now, the Saṃyutta twenty-two miscellaneous books, twenty have seems full of repetitions; and we are apt to been edited (see Rhys Davids, American forget that they are there for a very good reason. Lectures (1896), pp. 66–79), five have been During the time when the canon was being translated into English and two more into completed there was great activity in learning, German. repeating to oneself, rehearsing in company and See Dīgha Nikāya, ed. Rhys Davids and discussing these three collections. But there Carpenter (3 vols.); Samyutta Nikāya (5 vols.), was also considerable activity in a more literary ed. Leon Feer, vol. vi. by Mrs Rhys Davids, direction. Hymns were sung, lyrics were containing indices; Aṅguttara Nikāya, ed. R. composed, tales were told, the results of some Morris and E. Hardy (5 vols.); all published by exciting or interesting talk were preserved in the Pali Text Society. Also Rhys Davids, summaries of exegetical exposition. A number Dialogues of the Buddha, vol. i. (Oxford, of these have been fortunately preserved for us 1899); A. J. Edmunds, “Buddhist Biblio- in twenty-two collections, mostly of very short graphy,” in Journal of the Pali Text Society pieces, in the fifth or miscellaneous Nikāya, the (1903), pp. 5–12. Khuddaka Nikāya.

ABHIDHAMMA Abhidhamma is the name of one of the three when they were known only by hearsay, the Piṭakas, or baskets of tradition, into which the term Abhidhamma was usually rendered Buddhist scriptures (see BUDDHISM) are “Metaphysics.” This is now seen to be quite divided. It consists of seven works: 1. Dhamma erroneous. Dhamma means the doctrine, and Sanganī (enumeration of qualities). 2. Abhidhamma has a relation to Dhamma similar Vibhanga (exposition). 3. Kathā Vatthu (bases to that of bylaw to law. It expands, classifies, of opinion). 4. Puggala Paññatti (on tabulates, draws corollaries from the ethical individuals). 5. Dhatu Katha (on relations of doctrines laid down in the more popular moral dispositions). 6. Yamaka (the pairs, that treatises. There is no metaphysics in it at all, is, of ethical states). 7. Patthāna (evolution of only psychological ethics of a peculiarly dry ethical states). These have now been published and scholastic kind. And there is no originality by the Pāli Text Society. The first has been in it; only endless permutations and translated into English, and an abstract of the combinations of doctrines already known and third has been published. accepted. The approximate date of these works is As in the course of centuries the doctrine probably from about 400 B.C. to about 250 B.C., itself, in certain schools, varied, it was felt the first being the oldest and the third the latest necessary to rewrite these secondary works. of the seven. Before the publication of the texts, This was first done, so far as is at present

34 known, by the Sarvāstivādins (Realists), who in Abhidhamma then fell out of use in that school, the century before and after Christ produced a though it is still used in the schools that fresh set of seven Abhidhamma books. These continue to follow the original seven books. are lost in India, but still exist in Chinese See Buddhist Psychology by Caroline Rhys translations. The translations have been Davids (London, 1900), a translation of the analyzed in a masterly way by Professor Dhamma Sanganī, with valuable introduction; Takakusu in the article mentioned below. They “Schools of Buddhist Belief,” by T. W. Rhys deal only with psychological ethics. In the Davids, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, course of further centuries these books in turn 1892, contains an abstract of the Kathā Vatthu; were superseded by new treatises; and in one “On the Abhidhamma books of the school at least, that of the Mahā-yāna (great Sarvāstivādins,” by Prof. Takakusu, in Journal vehicle) there was eventually developed a of the Pāli Text Society, 1905. system of metaphysics. But the word

JĀTAKA Jātaka is the technical name, in Buddhist century B.C.; for we find at that date illustrations literature, for a story of one or other of the of the Jātakas in the bas-reliefs on the railing previous births of the Buddha. The word is also round the Bharahat tope with the titles of the used for the name of a collection of 547 of such Jātaka stories inscribed above them in the stories included, by a most fortunate characters of that period.41 conjuncture of circumstances, in the Buddhist The hero of each story is made into a canon. This is the most ancient and the most Bodhisatta; that is, a being who is destined, complete collection of folk-lore now extant in after a number of subsequent births, to become any literature in the world. As it was made at a Buddha. This rapid development of the latest in the 3rd century B.C., it can be trusted not Bodhisatta theory is the distinguishing feature to give any of that modern or European coloring in the early history of Buddhism, and was both which renders suspect much of the folk-lore cause and effect of the simultaneous growth of collected by modern travelers. the Jātaka book. In adopting the folk-lore and Already in the oldest documents, drawn up fables already current in India, the Buddhists by the disciples soon after the Buddha’s death, did not change them very much. The stories as he is identified with certain ancient sages of preserved to us are for the most part Indian renown. That a religious teacher should claim rather than Buddhist. The ethics they inculcate to be successor of the prophets of old is not or suggest are milk for babes; very simple in uncommon in the history of religions. But the character and referring almost exclusively to current belief in metempsychosis led, or matters common to all schools of thought in enabled, the early Buddhists to make a much India, and indeed elsewhere. Kindness, purity, wider claim. It was not very long before they honesty, generosity, worldly wisdom, gradually identified their master with the hero perseverance are the usual virtues praised; the of each of the popular fables and stories of higher ethics of the Path are scarcely which they were so fond. The process must mentioned. have been complete by the middle of the 3rd

41 A complete list of these inscriptions will be found in Rhys Davids's Buddhist India, p. 209.

35 These stories, popular with all, were was put together in the 14th century at especially appreciated by that school of Constantinople by a monk named Planudes, and Buddhists that laid stress on the Bodhisatta he drew largely for his stories upon those in the theory—a school that obtained its chief support, Jātaka book that had reached Europe along and probably had its origin, in the extreme various channels. The fables of Babrius and north-west of India and in the highlands of Phaedrus written respectively in the 1st century Asia. That school adopted, from the early before, and in the 1st century after, the Christian centuries of our era, the use of Sanskrit, instead era, also contain Jātaka stories known in India of Pāli, as the means of literary expression. It is in the 4th century B.C. almost impossible, therefore, that they would A great deal has been written on this curious have carried the canonical Pāli book, question of the migration of fables. But we are voluminous as it is, into Central Asia. Shorter still very far from being able to trace the collections of the original stories, written in complete history of each story in the Jātaka Sanskrit, were in vogue among them. One such book, or in any one of the later collections. For collection, the Jātaka-mālā by Ārya Sūra (6th India itself the record is most incomplete. We century), is still extant. have the original Jātaka book in text and Of the existence of another collection, translation. The history of the text of the though the Sanskrit original has not yet been Pancha-tantra, about a thousand years later, found, we have curious evidence. In the 6th has been fairly well traced out. But for the century a book of Sanskrit fables was translated intervening centuries scarcely anything has into Pahlavi, that is, old Persian. In succeeding been done. There are illustrations, in the bas- centuries this work was retranslated into Arabic reliefs of the 3rd century B.C. of Jātakas not and Hebrew, thence into Latin and Greek and contained in the Jātaka book. Another all the modern languages of Europe. The book collection, the Cariyā piṭaka, of about the same bears a close resemblance to the earlier chapters date, has been edited, but not translated. Other of a late Sanskrit fable book called, from its collections both in Pāli and Sanskrit are known having five chapters, the Pancha Tantra, or to be extant in MS,; and a large number of Pentateuch. Jātaka stories, not included in any formal The introduction to the old Jātaka book collection, are mentioned, or told in full in other gives the life of the historical Buddha. That works. introduction must also have reached Persia by Authorities.—V. Fausböll, The Jātaka, Pāli the same route. For in the 8th century St John of text (7 vols., London, 1877–1897), (Eng. trans., Damascus put the story into Greek under the edited by E. B. Cowell, 6 vols., Cambridge, title of Barlaam and Josaphat. This story 1895-1907); Cariyā Piṭaka, edited by R. became very popular in the West. It was Morris for the Pali Text Society (London, translated into Latin, into seven European 1882); H. Kern, Jātaka-mālā, Sanskrit text languages, and even into Icelandic and the (Cambridge Mass., 1891), English translation, dialect of the Philippine Islands. Its hero, that is by J. S. Speyer, Oxford, 895); Rhys Davids, the Buddha, was canonized as a Christian saint; Buddhist Birth Stories (with full bibliographical and the 27th of November was officially fixed tables) (London, 1880); Buddhist India (chap. as the date for his adoration as such. xi. on the Jātaka Book) (London, 1903); E The book popularly known in Europe as Kuhn, Barlaam und Joasaph (Munich, 1893); Aesop’s Fables was not written by Aesop. It A. Cunningham, The Stūpa of Bharhut (London, 1879).

36 MILINDA PAÑHO (The first part of this article is by Eduard Meyer) Menander (Milinda) was a Graeco-Indian and “Great King”; Menander, who must have dynast. When the Graeco-Indian king reigned a long time, as his portrait is young on Demetrius had been beaten by Eucratides of some coins and old on others, calls himself Bactria, about 160 B.C., and the kingdom of Soter and “Just” (δίκαιος). Their reigns may be Eucratides (q.v.) dissolved after his placed about 140–80 B.C. assassination (c. 150 B.C.), a Greek dynasty Menander appears in Indian traditions as maintained itself in the Kabul Valley and the Milinda; he is praised by the Buddhists, whose Punjab. The only two kings of this dynasty religion he is said to have adopted, and who in mentioned by classical authors are Apollodotus the Milindapañha or Milinda Pañho (see and Menander, who conquered a great part of below), “The Questions of Milinda” (Rhys India. Davids, Sacred Books of the East, xxxv., Trogus Pompeius described in his forty-first xxxvi.) relate his discourses with the wise book (see the prologue) “the Indian history of Nāgasena. According to the Indians, the Greeks these kings, Apollodotus and Menander,” and conquered Ayodhya and Pataliputra Strabo, xi. 316, mentions from Apollodotus of (Palimbothra, modern Patna); so the conjecture Artemita, the historian of the Parthians, that of Cunningham that the river Isamus of Strabo Menander “conquered more tribes than is the Son, the great southern tributary of the Alexander, as he crossed the Hypanis to the east Ganges (near Patna), may be true. The and advanced to the Isamus; he and other kings Buddhists praise the power and military force, (especially Demetrius) occupied also Patalene the energy and wisdom of “Milinda”; and a (the district of Patala near Hyderabad on the Greek tradition preserved by Plutarch (Praec. head of the delta of the Indus) and the coast reip. ger. 28, 6) relates that “when Menander, which is called the district of Saraostes (i.e. one of the Bactrian kings, died on a campaign Syrastene, in modern Gujarat, Brahman after a mild rule, all the subject towns disputed Saurashtra) and the kingdom of Sigerdis (not about the honor of his burial, till at last his ashes otherwise known); and they extended their were divided between them in equal parts.” dominion to the Seres (i.e. the Chinese) and (The Buddhist tradition relates a similar story Phryni (?).” The last statement is an exagger- of the relics of Buddha.) ation, probably based upon the fact that from Besides Apollodotus and Menander, we the mouth of the Indus trade went as far as know from the coins a great many other Greek China. kings of western India, among whom two with That the old coins of Apollodotus and the name of Straton are most conspicuous. The Menander, with Greek legends, were still in last of them, with degenerate coins, seems to currency in Barygaza (modern Broach), the have been Hermaeus Soter. These Greek great port of Gujarat, about A.D. 70 we are told dynasts may have maintained themselves in by the Periplus maris Erythraei, 48. We some part of India till about 40 B.C. But at this possess many of these coins, which follow the time the west, Kabul and the Punjab were Indian standard and are artistically degenerate already in the hands of a barbarous dynasty, as compared with the earlier Graeco-Bactrian most of whom have Iranian (Parthian) names, and Graeco-Indian coins, with bilingual and who seem therefore to have been of Arsacid legends (Greek and Kharoshti, see Bactria). origin (cf. Vincent A. Smith, “The Indo- Apollodotus, who must have been the earlier of Parthian Dynasties from about 120 B.C. to A.D. the two kings, bears the titles Soter, Philopator, 100,” in Zeitschrift der deutschen morgen-

37 landischen Gesellschaft, 1906, lx. 69 sqq.). of the Samvat era (= B.C. 46), is famous by the Among them Manes, two kings named Azes, legend of St Thomas, where he occurs as king Vonones and especially Gondophares or of India under the name of Gundaphar. Soon Hyndophares are the most conspicuous. The afterwards the Mongolian Scyths (called Saka latter, whose date is fixed by an inscription by the Indians), who had conquered Bactria in from the Kabul Valley dated from the year 103 139 B.C., invaded India and founded the great Indo-Scythian kingdom of the Kushan dynasty.

(The second part of this article is by TWRD) The Milinda Pañho is preserved in Pāli, in he occasionally rises into a very real eloquence. Ceylon, Burma and Siam, but was probably The work is several times quoted as authority composed originally in the extreme northwest by Buddhaghosa, who wrote about A.D. 450, of India, and in a dialect spoken in that region. and it is the only work, not in the canon, which Neither date nor author is known; but the receives this honor. nd approximate date must have been about the 2 The Milinda has been edited in Pāli by V. century of our era. The work is entitled Milinda Trenckner, and translated into English by the Pañho—that is, The Questions of King Milinda. present writer, with introductions in which the In it the king is represented as propounding to a historical and critical points made in this article Buddhist Bhikshu named Nāgasena a number are discussed in detail. There is space here to of problems, puzzles or questions in religion mention only one further fact. M. Sylvain Lévy, and philosophy; and as receiving, in each case, working in collaboration with M. Specht, has a convincing reply. shown that there are two, if not three, Chinese It is a matter of very little importance works, written between the 5th and 7th centuries, whether a tradition of some such conversations on the Questions of Milinda. They purport to be having really taken place had survived to the translations of Indian works. They are not, time when the author wrote his book. In any however, translations of the Pāli text. They case he composed both problems and answers; give, with alterations and additions, the and his work is an historical romance, written substance of the earlier part of the Pāli work; to discuss certain points in the faith, and to and are probably derived from a recension that invest the discussion with the interest arising may be older than the Pāli. from the story in which it is set. This plan is AUTHORITIES.—V. Trenckner, Milinda- carried out with great skill. pañho (London, 1880); Rhys Davids, Questions An introduction, giving the past and present of King Milinda (2 vols., Oxford, 1890–1894); lives of Milinda and Nāgasena, is admirably R. Garbe, Beiträge zur indischen adapted to fill the reader with the idea of the Kulturgeschichte (Berlin, 1903, ch. 3, Der great ability and distinction of the two Milinda-pañha); Milinda Prashṇaya, in disputants. The questions chosen are just those Sinhalese, (Colombo, 1877); R. Morns, in the which would appeal most strongly to the Academy (Jan. 11, 1881); Sylvain Lévy, intellectual taste of the India of that age. And Proceedings of the 9th International Congress the style of the book is very attractive. Each of Orientalists (London, 1892), i. 518–529, and particular point is kept within easy limits of Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1891), p. space, and is treated in a popular way. But the 476. earnestness of the author is not concealed; and

38 SĀRIPUTTA Sāriputta was one of the two principal named Aggivessana on the nature of sensations; disciples of Gotama the Buddha. He was born and at the end of that discourse he attained to in the middle of the 6th century B.C. at Nāla, a Arahatship. He is constantly represented as village in the kingdom of Magadha, the modern discussing points, usually of ethics or Bihar, just south of the Ganges and a little east philosophy, either with the Buddha himself, or of where Patna now stands. His personal name with one or other of the more prominent was Upatissa; the name of his father, who was disciples. One whole book of the Saṃyutta is a brahmin, is unknown; his mother’s name was therefore called after his name. Sārī, and it was by the epithet or nickname of A number of stanzas inscribed to him are Sāriputta (that is “Sāri’s son”), that he was best preserved in the Songs of the Elders (Thera- known. He had three sisters, all of whom gāthā), and one of the poems in the Sutta Nipāta subsequently entered the Buddhist Order. is based on a question he addressed to the When still a young man he devoted himself Buddha. Asoka the Great, in his Bhabra Edict, to the religious life, and followed at first the enjoins on the Buddhists the study of seven system taught by Sañjaya of the Belattha clan. passages in the Scriptures selected for their A summary of the philosophical position of this especial beauty. One of these is called The teacher has been preserved in the Dialogue Question of Upatissa, and this poem may be the called The Perfect Net. According to this passage referred to. account his main tendency was to avoid Feeling his end approaching, he went home, committing himself to any decided conclusion and died just six months before the death of the on any one of the numerous points then Buddha, that is, approximately in 480 B.C. He discussed so eagerly among the clansmen in the was cremated with great ceremony, and the valley of the Ganges. ashes placed in a tope or burial-mound. An Early in the Buddhist movement Sāriputta inscribed casket in such a mound at Sanchi had a conversation with one of the men who had opened by Cunningham in February 1851 just joined it; and the Buddhist quoted to him contained a portion of these ashes which had the now famous stanza, “Of all the things that been removed to that spot, in General proceed from a cause, the Buddha the cause Cunningham’s opinion by Asoka. hath told; and he tells too how each shall come BIBLIOGRAPHY.—For the birth, death, to an end—such alone is the word of the Sage.” cremation and relics, see Alex. Cunningham, The result was that Sāriputta, with his friend Bhilsa Topes (London, 1854); Rhys Davids and Kolita and other disciples of Sañjaya, asked for S. W. Bushell, Watters on Yuan Chwang admission, and were received into the Buddhist (London, 1904, 1905). For names of mother and Order. sisters, Therī Gāthā, ed. R. Pischel (London, He rapidly attained to mastery in the 1883). For conversion Rhys Davids and H. Buddhist system of self-training, and is Oldenberg, Vinaya Texts (Oxford, 1881), i. declared to have been the chief of all the 144–151. For attainment of Arahatship, V. disciples in insight. He was present at a Trenckner, Majjhima Nikāya (London, 1888), i. dialogue between the Buddha and a Wanderer 501.

39 ĀNANDA Ānanda was one of the principal disciples of declared to be the chief in some gift, Ānanda is the Buddha (q.v.). He has been called the mentioned five times (which is more often than beloved disciple of the Buddhist story. He was any other), but it is as chief in conduct and in the first cousin of the Buddha, and was service to others and in power of memory, not devotedly attached to him. Ānanda entered the in any of the intellectual powers so highly Order in the second year of the Buddha’s prized in the community. ministry, and became one of his personal This explains why he had not attained to attendants, accompanying him on most of his arahatship; and in the earliest account of the wanderings and being the interlocutor in many convocation said to have been held by five of the recorded dialogues. hundred of the principal disciples immediately He is the subject of a special panegyric after the Buddha’s death, he was the only one delivered by the Buddha just before his death who was not an arahat (Cullavagga, book xi.). (Book of the Great Decease, v. 38); but it is the In later accounts this incident is explained panegyric of an unselfish man, kindly, away. thoughtful for others and popular; not of the Thirty-three verses ascribed to Ānanda are intellectual man, versed in the theory and preserved in a collection of lyrics by the practice of the Buddhist system of self-culture. principal male and female members of the order So in the long list of the disciples given in (Thera Gatha, 1017–1050). They show a gentle the Anguttara (i. xiv.) where each of them is and reverent but simple spirit.

DEVADATTA Devadatta was the son of Suklodana, who Devadatta is said in the tradition to have was younger brother to the father of the Buddha successfully instigated the prince to the (Mahāvastu, iii. 76). execution of his aged father and to have made three abortive attempts to bring about the death Both he and his brother Ānanda, who were of the Buddha (Vinaya Texts, iii. 241–250; considerably younger than the Buddha, joined Jātaka, vi. 131). Shortly afterwards, relying the brotherhood in the twentieth year of the upon the feeling of the people in favour of Buddha’s ministry. Four other cousins of theirs, asceticism, he brought forward four chiefs of the Sākiya clan, and a barber named Upāli, were admitted to the order at the same propositions for ascetic rules to be imposed on time; and at their own request the barber was the order. These being refused, he appealed to admitted first, so that as their senior in the order the people, started an order of his own, and gained over 500 of the Buddha’s community to he should take precedence of them (Vinaya join in the secession. Texts, iii. 228). We hear nothing further about the success or All the others continued loyal disciples, but otherwise of the new order, but it may possibly Devadatta, fifteen years afterwards, having be referred to under the name of the Gotamakas, gained over the crown prince of Magadha, in the Anguttara (see Dialogues of the Buddha Ajātasattu, to his side, made a formal i. 222), for Devadatta’s family name was proposition, at the meeting of the order, that the Gotama. But his community was certainly still Buddha should retire, and hand over the in existence in the 4th century A.D., for it is leadership to him, Devadatta (Vinaya Texts, iii. especially mentioned by Fa Hien, the Chinese 238; Jātaka, i. 142). This proposal was rejected.

40 pilgrim (Legge’s translation, p. 62). And it legends grow, that it is only the latest of these possibly lasted till the 7th century, for Hsūan authorities, Hsūan Tsang, who says that, though Tsang mentions that in a monastery in Bengal ostensibly approaching the Buddha with a view the monks then followed a certain regulation of to reconciliation, Devadatta had concealed Devadatta’s (T. Watters, On Yuan Chwang, ii. poison in his nail with the object of murdering 191). the Buddha. There is no mention in the canon as to how AUTHORITIES.—Vinaya Texts, translated by or when Devadatta died; but the commentary on Rhys Davids and H. Oldenberg (3 vols., the Jātaka, written in the 5th century A.D., has Oxford, 1881–1885); The Jātaka, edited by V. preserved a tradition that he was swallowed up Fausböll (7 vols., London, 1877–1897); T. by the earth near Sāvatthi, when on his way to Watters, On Yuan Chwang (ed. Rhys Davids ask pardon of the Buddha (Jātaka, iv. 158). The and Bushell, 2 vols., London, 1904–1905); Fa spot where this occurred was shown to both the Hian, translated by J. Legge (Oxford, 1886); pilgrims just mentioned (Fa Hien, loc. cit. p. 60; Mahāvastu (ed. Tenant, 3 vols., Paris, 1882– and T. Watters, On Yuan Chwang, i. 390). It is 1897). a striking example of the way in which such

BUDDHAGHOSA Buddhaghosa was a celebrated Buddhist work he afterwards rewrote in Ceylon, as the writer. He was a Brahmin by birth and was born present text (now published by the Pāli Text near the great Bodhi tree at Bodh Gayā in north Society) shows. One volume of the Sumangala India about A.D. 390, his father’s name being Vilāsinī (a portion of the commentaries Kesī. mentioned above) has been edited, and extracts from his comment on the Buddhist canon law. His teacher, Revata, induced him to go to This last work has been discovered in a nearly Ceylon, where the commentaries on the contemporaneous Chinese translation (an scriptures had been preserved in the Sinhalese edition in Pāli is based on a comparison with language, with the object of translating them that translation). into Pāli. He went accordingly to The works here mentioned form, however, Anurādhapura, studied there under Sanghapāla, only a small portion of what Buddhaghosa and asked leave of the fraternity there to wrote. His industry must have been prodigious. translate the commentaries. With their consent He is known to have written books that would he then did so, having first shown his ability by fill about 20 octavo volumes of about 400 pages writing the work Visuddhi Magga (the Path of each; and there are other writings ascribed to Purity, a kind of summary of Buddhist him which may or may not be really his work. doctrine). When he had completed his many It is too early therefore to attempt a criticism of years’ labours he returned to the neighbourhood it. But it is already clear that, when made of the Bodhi tree in north India. acceptable, it will be of the greatest value for Before he came to Ceylon he had already the history of Indian literature and of Indian written a book entitled Nānodaya (the Rise of ideas. So much is uncertain at present in that Knowledge), and had commenced a history for want of definite dates that the commentary on the principal psychological voluminous writings of an author whose date is manual contained in the Piṭakas. This latter approximately certain will afford a standard by

41 which the age of other writings can be tested. date, but possibly of the 15th century, has And as the original commentaries in Sinhalese compiled a biography of him, the Buddhaghos’ are now lost his works are the only evidence we Uppatti, of little value and no critical judgment. have of the traditions then handed down in the See Mahāvaṃsa, ch. xxxvii. (ed. Turnour, Buddhist community. Colombo, 1837); Gandhavaṃsa, p. 59, in The main source of our information about Journal of the Pāli Text Society (1886) Buddhaghosa is the Mahāvaṃsa, written in Buddhghosuppatti (text and translation, ed. by Anurādhapura about fifty years after he was E. Gray, London, 1893); Sumangala Vilāsinī, working there. But there are numerous edited by T. W. Rhys Davids and J. E. references to him in Pāli books on Pāli Carpenter, vol. i. (London, Pāli Text Society, literature; and a Burmese author of unknown 1886).

DHAMMAPĀLA Dhammapāla was one of the early disciples Anurādhapura in Ceylon, and the works of the Buddha, and therefore constantly chosen themselves confirm this in every respect. Hsūan as their name in religion by Buddhist novices Tsang, the famous Chinese pilgrim, tells a on their entering the brotherhood. The most quaint story of a Dhammapāla of Kānchipura famous of the Bhikkhus so named was the great (the modern Konjevaram). He was a son of a commentator who lived in the latter half of the high official, and betrothed to a daughter of the 5th century A.D. at the Badara Tittha Vihāra near king, but escaped on the eve of the wedding the east coast of India, just a little south of feast, entered the order, and attained to where Madras now stands. reverence and distinction. It is most likely that this story, whether legendary or not (and Hsūan It is to him we owe the commentaries on Tsang heard the story at Kānchipura nearly two seven of the shorter canonical books, consisting centuries after the date of Dhammapāla), almost entirely of verses, and also the referred to this author. But it may also refer, as commentary on the Netti, perhaps the oldest Hsūan Tsang refers it, to another author of the Pāli work outside the canon. Extracts from the same name. Other unpublished works, besides latter work, and the whole of three out of the those mentioned above, have been ascribed to seven others, have been published by the Pali Dhammapāla, but it is very doubtful whether Text Society. These works show great learning, they are really by him. exegetical skill and sound judgment. But as Dhammapāla confines himself rigidly either to questions of the meaning of words, or to AUTHORITIES.—T.Watters, On Yuan discussions of the ethical import of his texts, Chwang (ed. Rhys Davids and Bushell, very little can be gathered from his writings of London, 1905), ii. 169, 228; Edmund Hardy in value for the social history of his time. For the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlandischen right interpretation of the difficult texts on Gesellschaft (1898), pp. 97 foll.; Netti (ed. E. which he comments, they are indispensable. Hardy, London, Pāli Text Society, 1902), Though in all probability a Tamil by birth, especially the Introduction, passim, Therī he declares, in the opening lines of those of his Gāthā Commentary, Peta Vatthu Commentary, works that have been edited, that he followed and Vimāna Vatthu Commentary, all three the tradition of the Great Minster at published by the Pāli Text Society.

42 Places and developments of significance in the history of Buddhism LUMBINI Lumbini is the name of the garden or grove The existence, a few miles beyond the in which Gotama, the Buddha, was born. It is Nepalese frontier, of an inscribed pillar had first mentioned in a very ancient Pāli ballad been known for some years when, in 1895, the preserved in the Sutta Nipata (verse 683). This discovery of another inscribed pillar at Niglīva is the Song of Nalaka (the Buddhist Simeon), nearby, led to the belief that this other, hitherto and the words put in the mouth of the angels neglected, one must also be an Asoka pillar, and who announce the birth to him are: “The very probably the one mentioned by Hsuan Wisdom-child, that jewel so precious, that Tsang. At the request of the Indian government cannot be matched, has been born at Lumbini, the Nepalese government had the pillar, which in the Sakiya land, for weal and for joy in the was half-buried, excavated for examination; world of men.” The commentaries on the and Dr Führer, then in the employ of the Jātakas (i. 52, 54), and on a parallel passage in Archaeological Survey, arrived soon afterwards the Majjhima (J.R.A.S., 1895, p. 767), tell us at the spot. that the mother of the future Buddha was on her The stone was split into two portions, way from Kapilavastu (Kapilavatthu), the apparently by lightning, and was inscribed with capital of the Sakiyas, to her mother’s home at Pāli characters as used in the time of Asoka. Devadaha, the capital of the adjoining tribe, the Squeezes of the inscription were sent to Europe, Koliyas, to be confined there. Her pains came where various scholars discussed the meaning, upon her on the way, and she turned aside into which is as follows: “His Majesty, Piyadassi, this grove, which lay not far from Devadaha, came here in the 21st year of his reign and paid and gave birth there to her son. All later reverence. And on the ground that the Buddha, Buddhist accounts, whether Pāli or Sanskrit the Sākiya sage, was born here, he (the king) repeat the same story. had a flawless stone cut, and put up a pillar. And A collection of legends about Asoka, further, since the Exalted One was born in it, he included in the Divyāvadāna, a work composed reduced taxation in the village of Lumbini, and probably in the 1st or 2nd century A.D., tells us established the dues at one-eighth part (of the (pp. 389, 390) how Asoka, the Buddhist crop).” emperor, visited the traditional site of this The inscription, having been buried for so grove, under the guidance of Upagupta. This many centuries beneath the soil, is in perfect must have been about 248 B.C. Upagupta preservation. The letters, about an inch in (Tissa: see PĀLI) himself also mentions the site height, have been clearly and deeply cut in the in his Kathā Vatthu (p. 559). The Chinese stone. No one of them is doubtful. But two pilgrims, Fa Hien and Hsuan Tsang, visiting th th words are new, and scholars are not agreed in India in the 5 and 7 centuries A.D., were their interpretation of them. These are the shown the site; and the latter (ed. Watters, ii. adjective vigaḍabhī applied to the stone, and 15–19) mentions that he saw there an Asoka rendered in our translation “flawless”; and pillar, with a horse on the top, which had been secondly, the last word, rendered in our split, when Hsuan Tsang saw it, by lightning. translation” one-eighth part (of the crop).” This pillar was rediscovered under the Fortunately these words are of minor following circumstances. importance for the historical value of this priceless document. The date, the twenty-first

43 year after the formal coronation of Asoka, deity of the place. Except so far as the would be 248 B.C. The name Piyadassi is the excavation of the pillar is concerned the site has official epithet always used by Asoka in his not been explored, and four small stupas there inscriptions when spcaking of himself. The (already noticed by Hsuan Tsang) have not inscription confirms in every respect the been opened. Buddhist story, and makes it certain that, at the AUTHORITIES.—Sutta Nipāta, ed. V. time when it was put up the tradition now Fausböll (London, Pali Text Society, 1884); handed down in the books was current at the Kathā Vatthu, ed. A. C. Taylor (London, 1897); spot. Any further inference that the birth really Jātaka, ed. V. Fausböll, vol. i. (London, 1877); took place there is matter of probability on Divyāvadāna, ed. Cowell and Niel (Cambridge, which opinions will differ. 1886); G. Bühler in the Proceedings of the The grove is situate about 3 m. north of Vienna Academy for Jan. 1897, in Epigraphia Bhagwanpur, the chief town of a district of the Indica, vol. v. (London, 1898) and in the same name in the extreme south of Nepal, just Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1897), p. over the frontier dividing Nepal from the 429. See also ibid. (1895), pp. 751 ff.; (1897) district of Basti in British territory. It is now pp. 615, 644; (1898) pp. 199–203; A. Barth in called Rummin-dei, i.e. the shrine of the the Journal des Savants (Paris, 1897); R. goddess of Rummin, a name no doubt derived Pischel in Sitzungsberichte der Königl, from the ancient name Lumbini. There is a Preussischen Akademie for the 9th July 1903; small shrine at the spot, containing a bas-relief Babu P. Mukherji, Report on a Tour of representing the birth of the Buddha. But the Exploration of the Antiquities in the Terai Buddha is now forgotten there, and the bas- (Calcutta, 1903); V. A. Smith in Indian relief is reverenced only for the figure of the Antiquary (Bombay, 1905). mother, who has been turned into a tutelary

PIPRĀWA Piprāwa is a village on the Birdpur estate in down the centre of the mound. After digging the Basti district, United Provinces, India. It lies through 18 ft. of solid brickwork set in clay a on the Uska-Nepal road at mile 19.75; and massive stone coffer was found lying due about half a mile south of the boundary pillar magnetic north and south. Its dimensions were, numbered 44 on the frontier line between 4 ft. 4 in. by 2 ft. 8¼ in. and 2 ft. 2¼ in. high. British and Nepalese territory. The village is The stone lid of the coffer was split into four celebrated as the site of the following pieces; but the coffer remained perfectly closed, discovery:— so accurately was the lid fitted into flanges on the sides of the box. The pieces were thus firmly In 1896 interest having been aroused by the held in their place, and the contents of the coffer discovery, only twelve miles away, of the were found intact. Buddha’s birthplace (see LUMBINI), William Peppe, then resident manager of the Birdpur These consisted of five vessels, two vases, a estate, opened a ruined tope or burial mound bowl and a casket being made of steatite, and situate at Piprāwa, but nothing of importance the fifth, also a bowl, of crystal. All these was found. In January 1897 he carried the work vessels are beautifully worked, the crystal bowl of excavation farther. A well, 10 ft. sq., was dug especially, with its fish-shaped cover handle,

44 being as a work of art of high merit.42 The coffer discovered in India. Twelve out of the thirteen is of fine hard sandstone of superior quality, and are well-known words, the interpretation of has been hollowed out, at the cost of vast labor which is not open to doubt. One word, rendered and expense, from a solid block of rock. Peppe above by ‘pious work,’ has not been found calculates its weight, lid included, at 1537 lb. It elsewhere, and its derivation is open to is only the great solidity of this coffer which has discussion. The explanation here adopted as preserved the contents. A cover of one of the most probable was put forward by Professor vases was found dislodged and lying on the Pischel of Berlin.45 The phrase ‘pious work’ bottom of the stone coffer. As this cover fits probably had a precise technical connotation very well it must have required a quite violent like the English ‘benefaction.’ shock to remove’ it. This was almost certainly The monument must have been of imposing the shock of an earthquake, and the same shock appearance. The diameter (on the ground level) probably caused the split in the stone lid of the of the dome is 116 ft. For 8 ft. from the summit coffer itself. of the ruin it was not possible to trace the The vessels contained a dark dust, outline. At that point the outer wall, if one may apparently disintegrated ashes, small pieces of so call it, of the solid dome could be traced, and bone, and a number of small pieces of jewelry had a diameter of 68 ft. The dome, therefore, in gold, silver, white and red cornelian, sloped inwards 1 ft. for every 3 ft. in height, in amethyst, topaz, garnet, coral and crystal. Most other words, it was, like all the most ancient of of these are perforated for mounting on threads these artificial burial domes in India, a shallow or wires, and had been, no doubt, originally dome, and cannot have been more than about 35 connected together to form one or more of the ft. high exclusive of the ornament or ‘tee’ on the elaborate girdles, necklaces and breast summit. We have in bas-reliefs of the 3rd ornaments then worn by the women.43 On the century representations of what these bottom of the stone box there was similar dust, ornaments were like—small square erections, pieces of bone and jewelry, and also remains of like a shrine or small temple, surmounted by a what had been vessels of wood. The knob canopy called from its shape a T. They were forming the handle of one of these wooden then more than a third of the height of the dome receptacles was still distinguishable. The total itself. The total height of this Sakiya tope will quantity of scraps of bone may have amounted therefore have been approximately a little under to a wineglassful. 50 ft. It was probably surrounded by a carved wooden railing, but this has long since An inscription ran round one of the steatite disappeared. vases just below the lid.44 The words mean: This shrine for ashes of the Buddha, the Exalted All such monuments hitherto discovered in One, is the pious work of the Sakiyas, his India were put up in honor of some religious brethren, associated with their sisters, and their teacher, not in memory of royal persons, children, and their wives. The thirteen words, in generous benefactors, politicans, or soldiers or a local dialect of Pāli, are written in very ancient private persons, however distinguished. And characters, and are the oldest inscription as yet we need have no hesitation in accepting this as

42 An illustration from a photograph is given in Rhys 44 See illustration ibid., p. 129. Davids’ Buddhist India, p. 131. 45 Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlündischen 43 For figures of the jewelry found see the plate in Mr Gesellschaft, lvi. 157. Peppé’s article, reproduced in Rhys Davids’ Buddhist India, p. 89. For the jewelry of the time, ibid., pp. 90, 91.

45 a monument put up over a portion of the ashes Peppe’s original article is in the Journal of from the funeral pyre of Gotama the Buddha. the Royal Asiatic Society for 1898, pp. 573 sqq. The account of the death and cremation of the Comments upon it, one or two of them Buddha, preserved in the Buddhist canon, states sceptical, are in the same journal 1898, pp. 579, that one-eighth portion of the ashes was 588, 387, 868; 1899, p. 425; 1901, p. 398; 1905 presented to the Sakiya clan, and that they built p. 679; 1906, pp. 149 sqq. See also A. Barth, a thūpa or memorial mound, over it.46 Comptes rendues de l’academie des Mr Peppe presented the coffer and vases inscriptions (1898), xxvi., 147, 233; Sylvain with specimens of the jewelry to the museum at Levy, Journal des savants (1905) pp. 540 sqq.; Calcutta where they still are. He also gave and R. Pischel and Rhys Davids as quoted specimens of the trinkets to the Asiatic Society above. in London.

SĀNCHI Sānchi is a small village in India, at which four points of the compass by gateways some there is now a railway station on the Bombay- 18 ft. high. Both gateways and railing are Baroda line. It is famous as the site of what are elaborately covered with bas-reliefs and almost certainly the oldest buildings in India inscriptions. The latter give the names of the now standing. They are Buddhist topes (Pāli, donors of particular portions of the architectural thūpa; Sanskrit, stūpa), that is, memorial ornamentation, and most of them are written in mounds, standing on the level top of a small the characters used before and after the time of sandstone hill about 300 ft. high on the left bank Asoka in the middle of the 3rd century B.C. of the river Betwa. The monuments are Buddhist, the bas-reliefs The number of topes on this and the illustrate passages in the Buddhist writings, and adjoining hills is considerable. On the Sanchi the inscriptions make use of Buddhist technical hill itself are only ten, but one of these is by far terms. Some of the smaller topes give us names the most important and imposing of all. All of men who lived in the Buddha’s time, and these topes were opened and examined by others give names mentioned among the General Alexander Cunningham and Lieut.- missionaries sent out in the time of Asoka. It is Colonel Maisey in 1851; and the great tope has not possible from the available data to fix the been described and illustrated by them and by exact date of any of these topes, but it may be James Fergusson. This is a solid dome of stone, stated that the smaller topes are probably of about 103 ft. in diameter, and now about 42 ft. different dates both before and after Asoka, and high. It must formerly have been much higher, that it is very possible that the largest was one the top of the tope having originally formed a of three which we are told was erected by terrace, 34 ft. in diameter, on which stood lofty Asoka himself. columns. Cunningham estimates the original The monuments at Sanchi are now under the height of the building as about 100 ft. charge of the archaeological department; they Round the base is a flagged pathway are being well cared for, and valuable surrounded by a stone railing and entered at the photographs have been taken of the bas-reliefs

46 Translated in Rhys Davids’ Buddhist Suttas (Oxford, 1881).

46 and inscriptions. The drawings in Fergusson’s Bibliography.—Alexander Cunningham, work entitled Tree and Serpent Worship are Bhilsa Topes (London, 1854); James very unsatisfactory and his suggestion that the Fergusson, Tree and Serpent Worship (London, carvings illustrate tree and serpent worship is 1873); General F. C. Maisey, Sānchi and its quite erroneous. Remains (London, 1892); Rhys Davids, Buddhist India (London, 1902).

AJANTA Ajanta (more properly Ājūntha) is a village to the back, and 41¼ ft. across, including the in the dominions of the Nizam of Hyderabad in cloister. They were used as chapter-houses for India (N. lat. 20° 32’ by E. long. 75° 48’), the meetings of the Buddhist Order. celebrated for its cave hermitages and halls. The The caves are in three groups, the oldest caves are in a wooded and rugged ravine about group being of various dates from 200 B.C. to 3½ miles from the village. Along the bottom of A.D. 200, the second group belonging, the ravine runs the river Wāgura, a mountain approximately, to the 6th, and the third group to stream, which forces its way into the valley the 7th century A.D. over a bluff on the east, and forms in its descent a beautiful waterfall, or rather series of Most of the interior walls of the caves were waterfalls, 200 ft. high, the sound of which covered with fresco paintings, of a considerable must have been constantly audible to the degree of merit, and somewhat in the style of dwellers in the caves. the early Italian painters. When first discovered, in 1817, these frescoes were in a fair state of These are about thirty in number, excavated preservation, but they have since been allowed in the south side of the precipitous bank of the to go hopelessly to ruin. Fortunately, the school ravine, and vary from 35 to 110ft. in elevation of art in Bombay, especially under the above the bed of the torrent. The caves are of supervision of J. Griffiths, had copied in colors two kinds—dwelling-halls and meeting-halls. a number of them before the last vestiges had The former, as one enters from the pathway disappeared, and other copies of certain of the along the sides of the cliff, have a broad paintings have also been made. These copies verandah, its roof supported by pillars, and are invaluable as being the only evidence we giving towards the interior onto a hall averaging now have of pictorial art in India before the rise in size about 35 ft. by 20 ft. To left and right, of Hinduism. and at the back, dormitories are excavated The expression “Cave Temples” used by opening on to this hall, and in the center of the Anglo-Indians of such halls is inaccurate. back, facing the entrance, an image of the Ajanta was a kind of college monastery. Hsūan Buddha usually stands in a niche. The number Tsang informs us that Dīnnāga, the celebrated of dormitories varies according to the size of the Buddhist philosopher and controversialist, hall, and in the larger ones pillars support the author of well-known books on logic, resided roof on all three sides, forming a sort of cloister there. In its prime the settlement must have running round the hall. afforded accommodation for several hundreds, The meeting-halls go back into the rock teachers and pupils combined. Very few of the about twice as far as the dwelling-halls; the frescoes have been identified, but two are largest of them being 94½ ft. from the verandah illustrations of stories in Ārya Sūra’s Jataka

47 Mālā, as appears from verses in Buddhist Burgess, Cave Temples of India, (London, Sanskrit painted beneath them. 1880) ; J. Griffiths, Paintings in the Buddhist Cave Temples of Ajanta (London, 2 vols., 1896- See J. Burgess and Bhagwanlal Indraji, Inscriptions from the Cave Temples of Western 1897). India (Bombay, 1881); J. Fergusson and J.

BHARAHAT Bharahat or Barhut is a village in the small both. There were four entrances through the state of Nagod in India, lying about 24° 15’ N. railing, facing the cardinal points, and each one by 80° 45’ E., about 110 m. S.W. of Allahabad. protected by the railing coming out at right angles, and then turning back across it in the General A. Cunningham discovered there in shape of the letter L. This gave the whole 1873 the remains of a stūpa (i.e. a burial mound ground plan of the monument, and no doubt over the ashes of some distinguished person) designedly so, the shape of a gigantic swastika which were excavated, in 1874, by his assistant, (i.e. a symbol of good fortune). J. D. Beglar. The results showed that it must have been one of the most imposing and By the forms of the letters of the inscriptions, handsome in India; and it is especially and by the architectural details, the age of the important now from the large number of monument has been approximately fixed in the inscriptions found upon it. The ancient name of 3rd century B.C. The bas-reliefs give us the place has not been yet traced, but it must invaluable evidence of the literature, and also of have been a considerable city and its site lay on the clothing, buildings and other details of the the high road between the ancient capitals of social conditions of the people; of Buddhist Ujjenī and Kosambi. India at that period. The subjects are taken from the Buddhist sacred books, more especially The stupa was circular, 70 ft. in diameter and from the accounts given in them of the life of 42 ft. high. It was surrounded by a stone railing the Buddha in his last or in his previous births. 100 ft. in diameter, so that between railing and stupa there was an open circle round which Unfortunately, only about half the pillars, visitors could walk; and the whole stood and about one-third of the crossbars have been towards the east side of a paved quadrangle recovered. When the stūpa was discovered the about 300 ft. by 310 ft., surrounded by a stone villagers had already carried off the greater part wall. On the top of the stūpa was an ornament of the monument to build their cottages with the shaped like the letter T, and as the base of the stones and bricks of it. The process has gone on stūpa was above the quadrangle, the total height till now nothing is left except what General of the monument was between 50 and 60 ft. Cunningham found and rescued and carried off to Calcutta. Even the mere money value of the But its main interest, to us, lies in the railing. lost pieces must be immense, and among them ‘This consisted of eighty square pillars, 7 ft. 1 is the central relic box, which would have told in. in height, connected by cross-bars about 1 ft. us in whose honor the monument was put up. broad. Both pillars and cross-bars were elaborately carved in bas-relief, and most of See A. Cunningham, The Stūpa of Bharhut them bore inscriptions giving either the name of (London, 1879); T. W. Rhys Davids, Buddhist the donor, or the subject of the bas-relief, or India (London, 1903).

48 SĪGIRI Sīgiri or the Lion’s Rock is the ruin of a Then Kasyapa had his father built up alive into remarkable stronghold 7° 59’ N., and 81° E., 14 a wal1. m. N.E. of Dambulla, and about 17miles nearly Meanwhile Kayapa’s brother had escaped to due W. of Pulastipura, the now ruined ancient India and was plotting a counter revolution. It capital of Ceylon. There a solitary pillar of was then that the parricide prepared his defense. granite rock rises to a great height out of the He utilized his father’s engineers in the plain, and the top actually overhangs the sides. construction of a path or gallery winding up On the summit of this pencil of rock there are round the Sīgiri rock. Most of it was made by five or six acres of ground; and on them, in A.D. bursting the rock by means of wooden wedges, 477, Kasyapa the Parricide built his palace, and through the solid granite, and its outside parapet thought to find an inaccessible refuge from his was supported by walls of brick resting on enemies. ledges far below. It is a marvelous piece of His father Dhātu Sena, a country priest, had, work. Abandoned since 495—for Kasyapa was after many years of foreign oppression, roused eventually slain during a battle fought in the his countrymen, in 459, to rebellion, led them plain beneath—it has, on the whole, well to victory, driven out the Tamil oppressors, and withstood the fury of tropical storms, and is entered on his reign as a national hero. He was now used again to gain access to the top. as successful in the arts of peace as he had been When rediscovered by Major Forbes in 1835 in those of war; and carried to completion, the portions of the gallery where it had been among other good works, an ambitious exposed for so many centuries to the south-west irrigation scheme—probably the greatest feat of monsoon, had been carried away. These gaps engineering that had then been accomplished have lately been repaired, or made passable anywhere in the world. This was the celebrated with the help of iron stanchions; the remains of Kalā Wewa, or Black Reservoir, more than 50 the buildings at the top and at the foot of the m. in circumference, which gave wealth to the mountain have been excavated; and the whole country for two days’ journey north of entrance to the gallery, between the the capital, Anurādhapura, and provided that outstretched paws of a gigantic lion, has been city also with a constant supply of water. laid bare. The fresco paintings in the galleries Popular with the people, the king could not are perhaps the most interesting of the extant control his own family; and as the outcome of a remains. They are older than any others found palace intrigue in 477 his son Kasyapa had in India, and have been carefully copied, and, declared himself king, and taken his father as far as possible, preserved. prisoner. Threatened with death on his refusing See Major Forbes, Eleven Years in Ceylon to say where his treasure lay hid, the old king (London, 1841); H. C. P. Bell. Archaeological told them to take him to the tank. They took him Reports (Colombo, 1892–1906); Rhys Davids, there, and while bathing in the water he let some “Sigiri, the Lion Rock,” in Journal of the Royal of it drop through his fingers, and said, “This is Asiatic Society (1875), pp. 191–220; H. W. my treasure; this, and the love of my people.” Cave, Ruined Cities of Ceylon (London, 1906).

49 MAHĀVAṂSA Mahāvaṃsa or the Great Chronicle, a to an epic poem, of the adventures and reign of history of Ceylon from the 5th century B.C. to that prince, a popular hero, born in adversity, the middle of the 5th century A.D., written in Pāli who roused the people, and drove the Tamil verse by Mahānāma of the Dīghasanda invaders out of the island. Finally we have short Hermitage, shortly after the close of the period notices of the subsequent kings down to the with which it deals. In point of historical value author’s time. it compares well with early European The Mahāvaṃsa was the first Pāli book chronicles. In India proper the decipherment of made known to Europe. It was edited in 1837, early Indian inscriptions was facilitated to a with English translation and an elaborate very great extent by the data found only in the introduction, by George Turnour, then colonial Mahāvaṃsa. It was composed on the basis of secretary in Ceylon. Its vocabulary was an earlier works written in Sinhalese, which are important part of the material utilized in now lost, having been supplanted by the Childer’s Pali Dictionary. Its relation to the chronicles and commentaries in which their sources from which it drew has been carefully contents were restated in Pāli in the course of th discussed by various scholars and in especial the 5 century. The particular one on which our detail by Geiger. It is agreed that it gives a Mahāvaṃsa was mainly based was also called reasonably fair and correct presentation of the the Mahāvaṃsa, and was written in Sinhalese tradition preserved in the lost Sinhalese prose with Pāli memorial verse interspersed. Mahāvaṃsa; that, except in the earliest period, The extant Pāli work gives legends of the its list of kings, with the years of each reign, is Buddha and the genealogy of his family; a complete and trustworthy; and that it gives sketch of the history of India down to Asoka; an throughout the view, as to events in Ceylon, account of Buddhism in India down to the same of a resident in the Great Minster at date; a description of the sending out of Anurādhapura. missionaries after Asoka’s council, and See The Mahāvaṃsa, ed. by George Turnour especially of the mission of Mahinda to Ceylon; (Colombo, 1837): ed. by W. Geiger (London, a sketch of the previous history of Ceylon; a 1908); H. Oldenberg, in the introduction to his long account of the reign of Devānam-piya edition of the Dīpavamsa (London, 1879); 0. Tissa, the king of Ceylon who received Franke, in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Mahinda, and established Buddhism in the Morgenlandes (1907); W Geiger, Dīpavamsa island; short accounts of the kings succeeding und Mahāvamsa (Leipzig, 1905, trans. by Ethel him down to Duṭṭha Gāmīni (Dadagamana or M. Coomaraswamy, Colombo, 1908). Dutegamunu); then a long account, amounting

SĀSANA VAṂSA Sāsanavaṃsa is a history of the Buddhist is based on the Mahāvaṃsa, and other well- order in Burma, which was composed, in that known Ceylon works; and has no independent country, by Paññā-sāmi in 1851. It is written in value. The latter part of the work, about three- Pāli prose; and is based on earlier documents, fifths of the whole, deals with Buddhism in in Pāli or Burmese, still extant, but not yet Burma, and contains information not obtainable edited. The earlier part of the work deals with elsewhere. Down to the 11th century the account the history of Buddhism outside of Burma. This is meagre, legendary and incredible. After that

50 date it is sober, intelligible and in all probability most part with minor questions relating to rules mostly accurate. This portion occupies about of the order, there being a tendency, as one hundred pages 8vo in the excellent edition relaxations of the rules crept in with the lapse of the text prepared for the Pāli Text Society in of time, to hark back to the original simplicity. 1897 by Dr Mabel Bode. It shows a continuous Of differences in matters of doctrine there is no literary effort through the eight and a half mention in this manual. Dr Bode has prefixed centuries, and constantly renewed ecclesiastical to her edition a detailed summary of the controversy. The latter is concerned for the contents of the book.

JAINS Jains are the most numerous and influential pristine purity and gradually died away, the sect of heretics, or nonconformists to the smaller school of the Jains, less diametrically Brahmanical system of Hinduism, in India. opposed to the victorious orthodox creed of the They are found in every province of upper Brahmans, survived, and in some degree took Hindustan, in the cities along the Ganges and in its place. Calcutta. But they are more numerous to the Jainism purports to be the system of belief west—in Mewar, Gujarat, and in the upper part promulgated by Vaddhamāna, better known by of the Malabar coast—and are also scattered his epithet of Mahā-vīra (the great hero), who throughout the whole of the southern peninsula. was a contemporary of Gotama, the Buddha. They are mostly traders, and live in the towns; But the Jains, like the Buddhists, believe that and the wealth of many of their community the same system had previously been gives them a social importance greater than proclaimed through countless ages by each one would result from their mere numbers. In the of a succession of earlier teachers. The Jains Indian census of 1901 they are returned as being count twenty-four such prophets, whom they 1,334,140 in number. Their magnificent series call Jinas, or Tīrthankaras, that is, conquerors or of temples and shrines on Mount Abu, one of leaders of schools of thought. It is from this the seven wonders of India, is perhaps the most word Jina that the modern name Janinas, striking outward sign of their wealth and meaning followers of the Jina, or of the Jinas, is importance. derived. This legend of the twenty-four Jinas The Jains are the last direct representatives contains a germ of truth. Mahā-vīra was not an on the continent of India of those schools of originator; he merely carried on, with but slight thought which grew out of the active changes, a system which existed before his philosophical speculation and earnest spirit of time, and which probably owes its most religious inquiry that prevailed in the valley of distinguishing features to a teacher named the Ganges during the 5th and 6th centuries Pārṣwa, who ranks in the succession of Jinas as before the Christian era. For many centuries the predecessor of Mahā-vīra. Pārṣwa is said, in Jainism was so overshadowed by that the Jain chronology, to have been born two stupendous movement, born at the same time hundred years; before Mahā-vīra (that is, about and in the same place, which we call Buddhism, 760 B.C.); but the only conclusion that it is safe that it remained almost unnoticed by the side of to draw from this statement is that Pārṣwa was its powerful rival. But when Buddhism, whose considerably earlier in point of time than Mahā- widely open doors had absorbed the mass of the vīra. Very little reliance can be placed upon the community, became thereby corrupted from its details reported in the Jain books concerning

51 the previous Jinas in the list of the twenty-four Like the Buddhist scriptures, the earliest Jain Tīrthankaras. The curious will find in them books are written in a dialect of their own, the many reminiscences of Hindu and Buddhist so-called Jaina Prākrit; and it was not till legend; and the antiquary must notice the between A.D. 1000 and 1100 that the Jains distinctive symbols assigned to each, in order to adopted Sanskrit as their literary language. recognize statues of the different Jinas, other- Considerable progress has been made in the wise identical, in the different Jain temples. publication and elucidation of these original The Jains are divided into two great authorities. But a great deal remains yet to be parties—the Digambaras, or Sky-clad Ones, done. The oldest books now in the possession of the modern Jains purport to go back, not to and the Swetāmbaras, or the White-robed Ones. the foundation of the existing order in the 6th The latter have only as yet been traced, and that century B.C., but only to the time of doubtfully, as far back as the 5th century alter Bhadrabahu, three centuries later. The whole of Christ; the former are almost certainly the same the still older literature on which the revision as the Nigaṇṭhas, who are referred to in then made was based, the so-called Pūrvas, numerous passages of the Buddhist Pāli have been lost. And the existing canonical Piṭakas, and must therefore be at least as old as books, while preserving a great deal that was the 6th century B.C. In many of these passages probably derived from them, contain much later the Nigaṇṭhas are mentioned as contempor- material. The problem remains to sort out the aneous with the Buddha; and details enough are older from the later, to distinguish between the given concerning their leader Nigaṇṭha Nāta- earlier form of the faith and its subsequent putta (that is, the Nigaṇṭha of the Jñātṛika clan) developments, and to collect the numerous data to enable us to identify him, without any doubt, for the general, social, industrial, religious and as the same person as the Vaddhamāna Mahā- political history of India. vīra of the Jain books. This remarkable confirmation, from the scriptures of a rival Professor Weber gave a fairly full and religion, of the Jain tradition is conclusive as to carefully-drawn-up analysis of the whole of the the date of Mahā-vīra. The Nigaṇṭhas are more ancient books in the second part of the referred to in one of Asoka’s edicts (Corpus second volume of his Catalogue of the Sanskrit Incriptionum, Plate x.x.). Unfortunately the MSS. at Berlin, published in 1888, and in vols. account of the teachings of Nigaṇṭha Nāta-putta xvi. and xvii. of his Indische Studien. An given in the Buddhist scriptures are, like those English translation of these last was published of the Buddha’s teachings given in the first in the Indian Antiquary, and then Brahmanical literature, very meagre. separately at Bombay, 1893. Only a small beginning has been made in editing and Jain Literature.—The Jain scriptures translating these works. The best précis of a themselves, though based on earlier traditions, long book can necessarily only deal with the are not older in their present form than the 5th century of our era. The most distinctively more important features in it. And in the choice sacred books are called the forty-five Āgamas, of what should be included the précis-writer consisting of eleven Angas, twelve Upangas, will often omit the points some subsequent ten Pakiṇṇakas, six Chedas, four Mūla-sūtras investigator may most especially want. All the older works ought therefore to be edited and and two other books. Devaddhi Gaṇin, who occupies among the Jains a position very translated in full and properly indexed. The similar to that occupied among the Buddhists Jains themselves have now printed in Bombay by Buddhaghosa, collected the then existing a complete edition of their sacred books. But traditions and teachings of the sect into these the critical value of this edition, and of other editions of separate texts printed elsewhere in forty-five Āgamas. India, leaves much to be desired.

52 Professor Jacobi has edited and translated wealthy and important body in widely separated the Kalpa Sūtra, containing a life of the founder parts of India. of the Jain order; but this can scarcely be older th Jainism.—The most distinguishing outward than the 5 century of our era. He has also peculiarity of Mahā-vīra and of his earliest edited and translated the Āyāranya Sutta of the followers was their practice of going quite Svetambara Jains. The text, published by the naked, whence the term Digambara. Against Pāli Text Society, is of 140 pages octavo. The this custom, Gotama, the Buddha, especially first part of it, about 50 pages, is a very old warned his followers; and it is referred to in the document on the Jain views as to conduct, and well-known Greek phrase, Gymnosophist, used the remainder consists of appendices, added at already by Megasthenes, which applies very different times, on the same subject. The older aptly to the Nigaṇṭhas. Even the earliest name part may go back as early as the 3rd B C century . ., Nigaṇṭha, which means “free from bonds,” may and it sets out more especially the Jain doctrine not be without allusions to this curious belief in of tapas or self-mortification, in contra- the sanctity of nakedness, though it also alluded distinction to the Buddhist view, which to freedom from the bonds of sin and of condemned asceticism. The rules of conduct in transmigration. The statues of the Jinas in the this book are for members of the order. Jain temples, some of which are of enormous Dr. Rudolf Hoernle edited and translated an sire, are still always quite naked; but the Jains ancient work on the rules of conduct for themselves have abandoned the practice, the laymen, the Uvāsaga Dasāo.47 Professor Digambaras being sky-clad at meal-time only, Leumann edited another of the older works, the and the Svetāmbaras being always completely Aupapātika Sūtra, and a fourth, entitled the clothed. And even among the Digambaras it is Dasa-vaikālika Sūtra, both of them published only the recluses or Yatis, men devoted to a by the German Oriental Society. Professor religious life, who carry out this practice. The Jacobi translated two more, the Uttarā- lay disciples—the Srāvakas—do not adopt it. 48 dhyāyana and the Sūtra Kritānga. Finally, Dr. The Jain views of life were, in the most Barnett has translated two others in vol. xvii. of important and essential respects, the exact the Oriental Translation Fund (new series, reverse of the Buddhist views. The two orders, London, 1907). Thus about one-fiftieth part of Buddhist and Jain, were not only, and from the these interesting and valuable old records is first, independent, but directly opposed the one now accessible to the European scholar. The to the other. In philosophy the Jains are the most sect of the Svetambaras has preserved the oldest thorough-going supporters of the old animistic literatures. Dr. Hoernle has treated of the early position. Nearly everything, according to them, history of the sect in the Proceedings of the has a soul within its outward visible shape—not Asiatic Society of Bengal for 1898. Several only men and animals, but also all plants, and scholars—notably Bhagvanlāl Indraji, Mr. 49 even particles of earth, and of water (when it is Lewis Rice and Hofrath Buhler —have treated cold), and fire and wind. The Buddhist theory, of the remarkable archaeological discoveries as is well known, is put together without the lately made. These confirm the older records in hypothesis of “soul” at all. The word the Jains many details, and show that the Jains, in the use for soul is Jīva, which means life; and there centuries before the Christian era, were a is much analogy between many of the

47 Published in the Bibliotheca Indica, Calcutta, 1888. 49 The Hatthi Gumphā and three other inscriptions at 48 These two, and the other two mentioned above, form Cuttack (Leyden, 1885); Sravana Belgola inscriptions vols. i. and ii. of his Jaina Sutras, published in the (Bangalore, 1889); Vienna Oriental Journal, vols, ii.– v.; Epigraphia Indica, vols, i–vii. Sacred Books of the East (1884, 1895).

53 expressions they use and the view that the introductions to the works referred to above. ultimate cells and atoms are all, in a more or less Professor Jacobi, who is the best authority on modified sense, alive. They regard good and the history of this sect, thus sums up the evil and space as ultimate substances which distinction between the Mahā-vīra and the come into direct contact with the minute souls Buddha: “Mahā-vīra was rather of the ordinary in everything. And their best-known position in class of religious men in India. He may be regard to the points most discussed in allowed a talent for religious matters, but he philosophy is Syād-vāda, the doctrine that you possessed not the genius which Buddha may say “Yes” and at the same time “No” to undoubtedly had . . . . The Buddha’s philosophy everything. You can affirm the eternity of the forms a system based on a few fundamental world, for instance, from one point of view, and ideas, whilst that of Mahā-vīra scarcely forms a at the same time deny it from another; or, at system, but is merely a sum of opinions different times and in different connections, (pannattis) on various subjects, no fundamental you may one day affirm it and another day deny ideas being there to uphold the mass of it. This position both leads to vagueness of metaphysical matter. Besides this . . . it is the thought and explains why Jainism has had so ethical element that gives to the Buddhist little influence over other schools of philosophy writings their superiority over those of the in India. Jains. Mahā-vīra treated ethics as corollary and subordinate to his metaphysics, with which he On the other hand, the Jains are as was chiefly concerned.” determined in their views of asceticism (tapas) as they were compromising in their views of ADDITIONAL AUTHORITIES.—Bhadrabāhu’s philosophy. Any injury done to the “souls” Kalpa Sutra, the recognized and popular being one of the worst of iniquities, the good manual of the Svetambara Jains, edited with monk should not wash his clothes (indeed, the English introduction by Professor Jacobi most austere will reject clothes altogether), nor (Leipzig, 1879); Hemacandra’s “Yoga even wash his teeth, for fear of injuring living S’āstram,” edited by Windisch, in the things. “Subdue the body, chastise thyself, Zeitschrift der deutschen morg. Ges. for 1874; weaken thyself, just as fire consumes dry “Zwei Jaina Stotra,” edited in the Indische wood.” It was by suppressing, through such Studien, vol. xv. ; Ein Fragment der Bhagavatī, self-torture, the influence on his soul of all by Professor Weber; Memoires de l’Academie sensations that the Jain could obtain salvation. de Berlin (1866); Nirayāvaliya Sutta, edited by It is related of the founder himself, the Mahā- Dr. Warren, with Dutch introduction vīra, that after twelve years’ penance he thus (Amsterdam, 1879); Over de godsdienstige en obtained Nirvāna (Jacobi, Jaina Siūtras, i. 201) wijsgeerige Begrippen der Jainas, by Dr. before he entered upon his career as a teacher. Warren (his doctor-dissertation, Zwolle, 1875); And through the rest of his life, till he died at Beiträge zur Grammatik des Jaina-prākrit, by Pāvā, shortly before the Buddha, he followed Dr. Edward Müller (Berlin, 1876); the same habit of continual self- mortification. Colebrooke’s Essays, vol. ii. Mr. J. Burgess has The Buddha, on the other hand, obtained an exhaustive account of the Jain Cave Temples Nirvāna in his 35th year, under the Bo tree, after (none older than the 7th century) in Fergusson he had abandoned penance; and through the rest and Burgess’s Cave Temples in India (London, of his life he spoke of penance as quite useless 1880). from his point of view. See also Hopkins’ Religions of India There is no manual of Jainism as yet (London, 1896), pp. 280–96, and J. G. Bühler published, but there is a great deal of On the Indian Sect of the Jainas, edited by J. information on various points in the Burgess (London, 1904).

54 ASOKA Asoka was a famous Buddhist emperor of the dome erected over the ashes of India who reigned from 264 to 228 or 227 B.C. Konāgamana, the Buddha, another to the Thirty-five of his inscriptions on rocks or pillars birthplace of Gotama, the Buddha (q.v.). Three or in caves still exist (see INSCRIPTIONS: very short ones are dedications of caves to the Indian), and they are among the most use of an order of recluses. remarkable and interesting of Buddhist The rest either enunciate the religion as monuments (see BUDDHISM ). explained above, or describe the means adopted Asoka was the grandson of Chandragupta, by the king for propagating it, or acting in the founder of the Maurya (Peacock) dynasty, accordance with it. These means are such as the who had wrested the Indian provinces of digging of wells, planting medicinal herbs, and Alexander the Great from the hands of trees for shade, sending out of missionaries, Seleucus, and he was the son of Bindusāra, who appointment of special officers to supervise succeeded his father Chandragupta, by a lady charities, and so on. The missionaries were sent from Champa. The Greeks do not mention him to Kashmir, to the Himalayas, to the border and the Brahmin books ignore him, but the lands on the Indus, to the coast of Burma, to Buddhist chronicles and legends tell us much south India and to Ceylon. And the king claims about him. that missions sent by him to certain Greek kingdoms that he names had resulted in the folk The inscriptions, which contain altogether there conforming themselves to his religion. about five thousand words, are entirely of religious import, and their references to worldly The extent of Asoka’s dominion included all affairs are incidental. They begin in the India from the thirteenth degree of latitude up thirteenth year of his reign, and tell us that in to the Himalayas, Nepal, Kashmir, the Swat the ninth year he had invaded Kalinga, and had valley, Afghanistan as far as the Hindu Kush, been so deeply impressed by the horrors Sind and Baluchistan. It was thus as large as, or involved in warfare that he had then given up perhaps somewhat larger than, British India the desire for conquest, and devoted himself to before the conquest of Burma. conquest by “religion.” What the religion was He was undoubtedly the most powerful is explained in the edicts. It is purely ethical, sovereign of his time and the most remarkable independent alike of theology and ritual, and is and imposing of the native rulers of India. “If a the code of morals as laid down in the Buddhist man’s fame,” says Köppen, “can be measured sacred books for laymen. by the number of hearts who revere his He further tells us that in the ninth year of memory, by the number of lips who have his reign he formally joined the Buddhist mentioned, and still mention him with honor, community as a layman, in the eleventh year he Asoka is more famous than Charlemagne or became a member of the order, and in the Caesar.” At the same time it is probable that, thirteenth he “set out for the Great Wisdom” like Constantine’s patronage of Christianity, his (the Sambodhi), which is the Buddhist technical patronage of Buddhism, then the most rising term for entering upon the well-known, and influential faith in India, was not unalloyed eightfold path to Nirvana. One of the edicts is with political motives, and it is certain that his addressed to the order, and urges upon its vast benefactions to the Buddhist cause were at members and the laity alike the learning and least one of the causes that led to its decline. rehearsal of passages from the Buddhist See also Asoka, by Vincent Smith (Oxford, scriptures. Two others are proclamations 1901); Inscriptions de Piyadasi, by E. Senart commemorating visits paid by the king, one to

55 (Paris, 1891); chapters on Asoka in T. W. Rhys and Buddhist India (London, 1903); V.A. Davids’s Buddhism (20th ed., London, 1903), Smith, Edicts of Asoka (1909).

KANISHKA Kanishka, a king of Kabul, Kashmir, and Testament and Septuagint in Greek. This north-western India in the 2nd century A.D., was change of the language used as a medium of a Tatar of the Kushan tribe, one of the five into literary intercourse was partly the cause, partly which the Yue-chi Tatars were divided. His the effect, of a complete revulsion in the dominions extended as far down into India as intellectual life of India. The reign of Kanishka Madura, and probably as far to the north-west was certainly the turning-point in this as Bokhara. Private inscriptions found in the remarkable change. It has been suggested with Punjab and Sind, in the Yusufzai district and at great plausibility, that the wide extent of his Madurā, and referred by European scholars to domains facilitated the incursion into India of his reign, are dated in the years five to twenty- Western modes of thought; and thus led in the eight of an unknown era. It is the references by first place to the corruption and gradual decline Chinese historians to the Yue-chi tribes before of Buddhism, and secondly to the gradual rise their incursion into India, together with of Hinduism. Only the publication of the books conclusions drawn from the history of art and written at the time will enable us to say whether literature in his reign that render the date given this hypothesis—for at present it is nothing the most probable. more—is really a sufficient explanation of the very important results of his reign. Kanishka’s predecessors on the throne were Pagans; but shortly after his accession he In any case it was a migration of nomad professed himself, probably from political hordes in Central Asia that led, in Europe, to the reasons, a Buddhist. He spent vast sums in the downfall of the Roman civilization; and then, construction of Buddhist monuments; and through the conversion of the invaders, to under his auspices the fourth Buddhist council, medieval conditions of life and thought. It was the council of Jālandhara (Jullunder) was the very same migration of nomad hordes that convened under the presidency of Vasumitra. led, in India, to the downfall of the Buddhist At this council three treatises, commentaries on civilization; and subsequently, after the the Canon, one on each of the three baskets into conversion of the Saka and Tatar invaders, to which it is divided, were composed. King medieval Hinduism. As India was nearer to the Kanishka had these treatises, when completed starting-point of the migration, its results were and revised by Asvaghosha, written out on felt there somewhat sooner. copper plates, and enclosed the latter in stone AUTHORITIES.—Vincent A. Smith, The boxes, which he placed in a memorial mound. Early History of India (Oxford, 1908); “The For some centuries afterwards these works Kushan Period of Indian History,” in J.R.A.S. survived in India; but they exist now only in (1903); M. Boyer, “L’Epoque de Kaniska,” in Chinese translations or adaptations. We are not Journal Asiatique (1900); T. Watters, On Yuan told in what language they were written. Chwang (London, 1904, 1905); J. Takakusu, It was probably Sanskrit (not Pāli, the “The Sarvastivadin Abhidharma Books,” in language of the Canon)—just as in Europe we Journal of the Pāli Text Society (1905), esp. pp. have works of exegetical commentary 118–130; Rhys Davids, Buddhist India composed, in Latin, on the basis of the (London, 1903), ch. xvi., “Kanishka.”

56 LĀMĀISM Lāmāism is the system of doctrine partly is capable of discovering that doctrine, and that religious, partly political. Religiously it is the a Buddha is a man who by self-denying efforts, corrupt form of Buddhism prevalent in Tibet continued through many hundreds of different and Mongolia. It stands in a relationship to births, has acquired the so-called Ten primitive Buddhism similar to that in which Pāramitās or cardinal virtues in such perfection Roman Catholicism, so long as the temporal that he is able, when sin and ignorance have power of the pope was still in existence, stood gained the upper hand throughout the world, to to primitive Christianity. The ethical and save the human race from impending ruin. But metaphysical ideas most conspicuous in the until the process of perfection has been doctrines of Lāmāism are not confined to the completed, until the moment when at last the highlands of central Asia, they are accepted in sage, sitting under the Wisdom tree acquires great measure also in Japan and China. It is the that particular insight or wisdom which is called union of these ideas with a hierarchical system, Enlightenment or Buddhahood, he is still only and with the temporal sovereignty of the head a Bodhisat. The link of connection between the of that system in Tibet, which constitutes what various Bodhisats in the future Buddha’s is distinctively understood by the term successive births is not a soul which is Lāmāism. Lāmāism has acquired a special transferred from body to body, but the karma, interest to the student of comparative history or character, which each successive Bodhisat through the instructive parallel which its history inherits from his predecessor; in the long chain presents to that of the Church of Rome. of existences. The central point of primitive Buddhism was Now the older school also held, in the first the doctrine of “Arahatship”—a system of place, that, when a man had, in this life, attained ethical and mental self-culture, in which to Arahatship, his karma would not pass on to deliverance was found from all the mysteries any other individual in another life—or in other and sorrows of life in a change of heart to be words, that after Arahatship there would be no reached here on earth. This doctrine seems, to rebirth; and, secondly, that five thousand years have been held very nearly in its original purity after the Buddha had proclaimed the Dhamma from the time when it was propounded by or doctrine of Arahatship, his teaching would Gotama in the 6th century B.C. to the period in have died away, and another Buddha would be which northern India was conquered by the required to bring mankind once more to a Huns about the commencement of the Christian knowledge of the truth. era. The leaders of the Great Vehicle urged their Soon after that time there arose a school of followers to seek to attain, not so much to Buddhist teachers who called their doctrine the Arahatship, which would involve only their “Great Vehicle.” It was not in any contradiction own salvation, but to Bodhisatship, by the to the older doctrine, which they attainment of which they would be conferring contemptuously called the “Little Vehicle,” but the blessings of the Dhamma upon countless included it all, and was based upon it. The multitudes in the long ages of the future. By distinguishing characteristic of the newer thus laying stress upon Bodhisatship, rather school was the importance which it attached to than upon Arahatship, the new school, though “Bodhisatship.” they doubtless merely thought themselves to be carrying the older orthodox doctrines to their The older school had taught that Gotama, logical conclusion, were really changing the who had propounded the doctrine of central point of Buddhism, and were altering Arahatship, was a Buddha, that only a Buddha

57 the direction of their mental vision. It was of no Saddharma-puṇḍarīka; (7) Tathāgata- avail that they adhered in other respects in the guhyaka; (8) Lalita-vistara; (9) Suvarṇa- main to the older teaching, that they professed prabhāsa. The date of none of these works is to hold to the same ethical system, that they known with any certainty, but it is highly adhered, except in a few unimportant details, to improbable that any one of them is older than the old regulations of the order of the Buddhist the 6th century after the death of Gotama. mendicant recluses. Copies of all of them were brought to Europe The ancient books, preserved in the Pāli by Mr B. H. Hodgson, and other copies have Piṭakas, being mainly occupied with the details been received since then; but only one of them of Arahatship, lost their exclusive value in the has as yet been published in Europe (the Lalita eyes of those whose attention was being Vistara, edited by Lofmann), and only two have directed to the details of Bodhisatship. And the been translated into any European language. opinion that every leader in their religious These are the Lalita Vistara, translated into circles, every teacher distinguished among French, through the Tibetan, by M. Foucaux, them for his sanctity of life, or for his extensive and the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka, translated into learning, was a Bodhisat, who might have and English by Professor Kern. The former is who probably had inherited the karma of some legendary work, partly in verse, on the life of great teacher of old, opened the door to a flood Gotama, the historical Buddha; and the latter, of superstitious fancies. also partly in verse, is devoted to proving the It is worthy of note that the new school found essential identity of the Great and the Little its earliest professors and its greatest Vehicles, and the equal authenticity of both as expounders in a part of India outside the doctrines enunciated by the master himself. districts to which the personal influence of Of the authors of these nine works, as of all Gotama and of his immediate followers had the older Buddhist works with one or two been confined. The home of early Buddhism exceptions, nothing has been ascertained. The was round about Kosala and Magadha; in the founder of the system of the Great Vehicle is, district, that is to say, north and south of the however, often referred to under the name of Ganges between where Allahabad now lies on Nāgārjuna, [below] whose probable date is the west and Rajgir on the east. The home of the about A.D. 200. Great Vehicle was, at first, in the countries Together with Nāgārjuna, other early farther to the north and west. Buddhism arose teachers of the Great Vehicle whose names are in countries where Sanskrit was never more known are Vasumitra, Vasubandhu, Āryadeva, than a learned tongue, and where the exclusive Dharmapāla and Guṇamati—all of whom were claims of the Brahmins had never been looked upon as Bodhisats. As the newer school universally admitted. The Great Vehicle arose did not venture so far as to claim as Bodhisats in the very stronghold of Brahminism, and the disciples stated in the older books to have among a people to whom Sanskrit, like Latin in been the contemporaries of Gotama (they being the middle ages in Europe, was the literary precisely the persons known as Arahats), they lingua franca. attempted to give the appearance of age to the The new literature therefore, which the new Bodhisat theory by representing the Buddha as movement called forth, was written, and has being surrounded, not only by his human been preserved, in Sanskrit—its principal companions the Arahats, but also by fabulous books of Dharma, or doctrine, being the beings, whom they represented as the Bodhisats following nine; (1) Prajñā-pāramitā; (2) existing at that time. Gaṇḍa-vyūha; (3) Daśa-bhūmiś-vara; (4) Samādhi-rāja; (5) Lankāvatāra; (6)

58 In the opening words of each Mahāyāna especial reverence to Manju-śrī as the treatise a list is given of such Bodhisats, who personification of wisdom, and to were beginning, together with the historical Avalokiteśwara as the personification of Bodhisats, to occupy a position in the Buddhist overruling love. The former was afterwards church of those times similar to that occupied identified with the mythical first Buddhist by the saints in the corresponding period of the missionary, who is supposed to have introduced history of Christianity in the Church of Rome. civilization into Tibet about two hundred and And these lists of fabulous Bodhisats have now fifty years after the death of the Buddha. a distinct historical importance. For they grow The way was now open to a rapid fall from in length in the latter works; and it is often the simplicity of early Buddhism, in which possible by comparing them one with another men’s attention was directed to the various to fix, not the date, but the comparative age of parts of the system of self-culture, to a belief in the books in which they occur. Thus it is a fair a whole pantheon of saints or angels, which inference to draw from the shortness of the list appealed more strongly to the half-civilized in the opening words of the Lalita Vistara, as races among whom the Great Vehicle was now compared with that in the first sections of the professed. A theory sprang up which was Saddharma-puṇḍarīka, that the latter work is supposed to explain the marvelous powers of much the younger of the two, a conclusion the Buddhas by representing them as only the supported also by other considerations. outward appearance, the reflection, as it were, Among the Bodhisats mentioned in the or emanation, of ethereal Buddhas dwelling in Saddharma-puṇḍarīka, and not mentioned in the skies. These were called Dhyāni Buddhas, the Lalita Vistara, as attendant on the Buddha and their number was supposed to be, like that are Manju-śrī and Avalokiteśvara. That these of the Buddhas, innumerable. Only five of saints were already acknowledged by the them, however, occupied any space in the followers of the Great Vehicle at the beginning speculative world in which the ideas of the later of the 5th century is clear from the fact that Fa Buddhists had now begun to move. But, being Hien, who visited India about that time, says Buddhas, they were supposed to have their that “men of the Great Vehicle” were then Bodhisats; and thus out of the five last Buddhas worshipping them at Mathura, not far from of the earlier teaching there grew up five mystic Delhi (F. H., chap. xvi.). These were supposed trinities, each group consisting of one of these to be celestial beings who, inspired by love of five Buddhas, his prototype in heaven the the human race, had taken the so-called Great Dhyāni Buddha, and his celestial Bodhisat. Resolve to become future Buddhas, and who Among these hypothetical beings, the therefore descended from heaven when the creations of a sickly scholasticism, hollow actual Buddha was on earth, to pay reverence to abstractions without life or reality, the him, and to learn of him. The belief in them particular trinity in which the historical Gotama probably arose out of the doctrine of the older was assigned a subordinate place naturally school, which did not deny the existence of the occupied the most exalted rank. Amitābha, the various creations of previous mythology and Dhyani-Buddha of this trinity, soon began to fill speculation, but allowed of their actual the largest place in the minds of the new school; existence as spiritual beings, and only deprived and Avalokiteśwara, his Bodhisat, was looked them of all power over the lives of men, and upon with a reverence somewhat less than his declared them to be temporary beings liable, former glory. It is needless to add that, under like men, to sin and ignorance, and requiring, the overpowering influence of these vain like men, the salvation of Arahatship. Among imaginations, the earnest moral teachings of them the later Buddhists seem to have placed Gotama became more and more hidden from their numerous Bodhisats; and to have paid

59 view. The imaginary saints grew and Yogāchchāra Bhūmi Śāstra, in the 6th century flourished. Each new creation, each new step in A.D. Hsuan Tsang, who travelled in the first half the theory, demanded another, until the whole of the 7th, found the monastery where Asanga sky was filled with forgeries of the brain, and had lived in ruins, and says that he had lived one the nobler and simpler lessons of the founder of thousand years after the Buddha.50 Asanga the religion were hidden beneath the glittering managed with great dexterity to reconcile the stream of metaphysical subtleties. two opposing systems by placing a number of Still worse results followed on the change of Śaivite gods or devils, both male and female, in the earlier point of view. The acute minds of the the inferior heavens of the then prevalent Buddhist pundits, no longer occupied with the Buddhism, and by representing them as practical lessons of Arahatship, turned their worshippers and supporters of the Buddha and attention, as far as it was not engaged upon their of Avalokiteśvara. He thus made it possible for hierarchy of mythological beings, to questions the half-converted and rude tribes to remain of metaphysical speculation, which, in the Buddhists while they brought offerings, and earliest Buddhism, are not only discouraged but even bloody offerings, to these more congenial forbidden. We find long treatises on the nature shrines, and while their practical belief had no of being, idealistic dreams which have as little relation at all to the Truths or the Noble to do with the Bodhisatship that is concerned Eightfold Path, but busied itself almost wholly with the salvation of the world as with the with obtaining magic powers (Siddhi), by Arahatship that is concerned with the perfect means of magic phrases (Dhārani), and magic life. circles (Maṇḍala). Only one lower step was possible, and that Asanga’s happy idea bore but too ample was not long in being taken. The animism fruit. In his own country and Nepal, the new common alike to the untaught Huns and to their wine, sweet and luscious to the taste of savages, Hindu conquerors, but condemned in early completely disqualified them from enjoying Buddhism, was allowed to revive. As the any purer drink; and now in both countries stronger side of Gotama’s teaching was Śaivism is supreme, and Buddhism is even neglected, the debasing belief in rites and nominally extinct, except in some outlying ceremonies, and charms and incantations, districts of Nepal. But this full effect has only which had been the especial object of his scorn been worked out in the lapse of ages; the Tantra , began to spread like the Bīrana weed warmed literature has also had its growth and its by a tropical sun in marsh and muddy soil. As development, and some unhappy scholar of a in India, after the expulsion of Buddhism, the future age may have to trace its loathsome degrading worship of Siva and his dusky bride history. The nauseous taste repelled even the had been incorporated into Hinduism from the self-sacrificing industry of Burnouf, when he savage devil worship of Āryan and of non- found the later Tantra books to be as immoral as they are absurd. “The pen,” he says, “refuses Āryan tribes, so, as pure Buddhism died away to transcribe doctrines as miserable in respect of in the north, the Tantra system, a mixture of form as they are odious and degrading in magic and witchcraft and sorcery, was respect of meaning.” incorporated into the corrupted Buddhism. Such had been the decline and fall of The founder of this system seems to have Buddhism considered as an ethical system been Asanga, an influential monk of Peshawar, before its introduction into Tibet. The manner who wrote the first text-book of the creed, the

50 Watters’s On Yūan Chwāng, edited by Rhys Davids and Bushell, i. 210, 356, 271.

60 in which its order of mendicant recluses, at first related to have brought with them sacred relics, founded to afford better opportunities to those books and pictures, for whose better who wished to carry out that system in practical preservation two large monasteries were life, developed at last into a hierarchical erected. These are the cloisters of La Brang monarchy will best be understood by a sketch (Jokhang) and Ra Moché, still, though much of the history of Tibet. changed and enlarged, the most sacred abbeys in Tibet, and the glory of Lhasa. The two Its real history commences with Srong Tsan queens have become semi-divine personages, Gampo, who was born a little after 600 A.D., and are worshipped under the name of the two and who is said in the Chinese chronicles to have entered, in 634, into diplomatic Dārā-Eke, the “glorious mothers,” being relationship with Tai Tsung, one of the regarded as incarnations of the wife of Śiva, emperors of the Tang dynasty. He was the representing respectively two of the qualities founder of the present capital of Tibet, now which she personifies, divine vengeance and known as Lhasa; and in the year 622 (the same divine love. The former is worshipped by the year as that in which Mahomet fled from Mongolians as Okkin Tengri, “the Virgin Mecca) he began the formal introduction of Goddess”; but in Tibet and China the role of the Buddhism into Tibet. For this purpose he sent divine virgin is filled by Kwan Yin, a the minister Thumi Sambhota, afterwards personification of Avalokiteśvara as the looked upon as an incarnation of Mañju-śrī, to heavenly word, who is often represented with a India, there to collect the sacred books, and to child in her arms. learn and translate them. Srong Tsan Gampo has also become a saint, Thumi Sambhota accordingly invented an being looked upon as an incarnation of alphabet for the Tibetan language on the model Avalokiteśvara; and the description in the of the Indian alphabets then in use. And, aided ecclesiastical historians of the measures he took by the king, who is represented to have been an for the welfare of his subjects do great credit to industrious student and translator, he wrote the their ideal of the perfect Buddhist king. He is first books by which Buddhism became known said to have spent his long reign in the building in his native land. The most famous of the of reservoirs, bridges and canals; in the works ascribed to him is the Mani Kambum, promotion of agriculture, horticulture and manufactures; in the establishment of schools “The Myriad of Precious Words”—a treatise and colleges; and in the maintenance of justice chiefly on religion, but which also contains an and the encouragement of virtue. But the degree account of the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, and of the closing part of the life of Srong of his success must have been slight. For after Tsan Gampo. He is also very probably the the death of himself and of his wives Buddhism author of another very ancient standard work of gradually decayed, and was subjected by succeeding kings to cruel persecutions; and it Tibetan Buddhism, the Samatog, a short digest was not till more than half a century afterwards, of Buddhist morality, on which the civil laws of under King Kir Song de Tsan, who reigned Tibet have been founded. It is said in the Mani 740–786, that true religion is acknowledged by Kambum to have fallen from heaven in a casket the ecclesiastical historians to have become (Tibetan, samatog), and, like the last- firmly established in the land. mentioned work, is only known to us in meagre abstract. This monarch again sent to India to replace the sacred books that had been lost, and to invite King Srong Tsan Gampo’s zeal for Buddhist pandits to translate them. The most Buddhism was shared and supported by his two distinguished of those who came were Śānta queens, Bribsun, a princess from Nepal, and Rakshita, Padma Sambhava and Kamala Śīla Wen Ching, a princess from China. They are

61 for whom, and for their companions, the king It was followed by more than a century of built a splendid monastery still existing, at civil disorder and wars, during which the exiled Samje, about three days’ journey south-east of Buddhist monks attempted unsuccessfully Lhasa. It was to them that the Tibetans owed the again and again to return. Many are the stories great collection of what are still regarded as of martyrs and confessors who are believed to their sacred books—the Kandjur. have lived in these troublous times, and their It consists of 100 volumes containing 689 efforts were at last crowned with success, for in the century commencing with the reign of works, of which there are two or three complete Bilamgur in 971 there took place “the second sets in Europe, one of them in the India Office introduction of religion” into Tibet, more library. A detailed analysis of these scriptures especially under the guidance of the pandit has been published by the celebrated Hungarian scholar Csoma de Körös, whose authoritative Atīsha, who came to Tibet in 1041, and of his work has been republished in French with famous native pupil and follower Brom Ston. complete indices and very useful notes by M. The long period of depression seems not to have Leon Feer. These volumes contain about a been without a beneficial influence on the dozen works of the oldest school of Buddhism, persecuted Buddhist church, for these teachers the Hīnayāna, and about 300 works, mostly are reported to have placed the Tantra system more in the background, and to have adhered very short, belonging to the Tantra school. But more strongly to the purer forms of the the great bulk of the collection consists of Mahāyāna development of the ancient faith. Mahāyāna books, belonging to all the previously existing varieties of that widely For about three hundred years the Buddhist extended Buddhist sect; and, as the Sanskrit church of Tibet was left in peace, subjecting the originals of many of these writings are now lost, country more and more completely to its the Tibetan translations will be of great value, control, and growing in power and in wealth. not only for the history of Lāmāism, but also for During this time it achieved its greatest victory, the history of the later forms of Indian and underwent the most important change in its Buddhism. character and organization. After the reintroduction of Buddhism into the “kingdom The last king’s second son, Lang Darma, of snow,” the ancient dynasty never recovered concluded in May 822 a treaty with the then its power. Its representatives continued for emperor of China (the twelfth of the Tang some time to claim the sovereignty; but the dynasty), a record of which was engraved on a country was practically very much in the stone put up in the above-mentioned great condition of Germany at about the same time— convent of La Brang (Jokhang), and is still to be chieftains of almost independent power ruled seen there.51 He is described in the church from their castles on the hill-tops over the chronicles as an incarnation of the evil spirit, adjacent valleys, engaged in petty wars, and and is said to have succeeded in suppressing conducted plundering expeditions against the Buddhism throughout the greater part of the neighboring tenants, whilst the great abbeys land. The period from Srong Tsan Gampo down were places of refuge for the studious or to the death of Lang Darma, who was murdered religious, and their heads were the only rivals to about A.D. 850, in a civil war, is called in the the barons in social state, and in many respects Buddhist books “the first introduction of the only protectors and friends of the people. religion.”

51 Published with facsimile and translation and notes in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1879–1880, vol. xii.

62 Meanwhile Jenghiz Khan had founded the principal lines on which his reformation Mongol empire, and his grandson Kublai Khan proceeded are sufficiently attested. became a convert to the Buddhism of the He insisted in the first place on the complete Tibetan Lamas. He granted to the abbot of the carrying out of the ancient rules of the order as Sākya monastery in southern Tibet the title of to the celibacy of its members, and as to tributary sovereign of the country, head of the simplicity in dress. One result of the second of Buddhist church, and overlord over the these two reforms was to make it necessary for numerous barons and abbots, and in return was every monk openly to declare himself either in officially crowned by the abbot as ruler over the favor of or against the new views. For extensive domain of the Mongol empire. Thus Tsongkapa and his followers wore the yellow was the foundation laid at one and the same or orange-colored garments which had been the time of the temporal sovereignty of the Lāmas distinguishing mark of the order in the lifetime of Tibet, and of the suzerainty over Tibet of the of its founder, and in support of the ancient emperors of China. rules Tsongkapa reinstated the fortnightly One of the first acts of the “head of the rehearsal of the Pātimokkha or “disburden- church” was the printing of a carefully revised ment” in regular assemblies of the order at edition of the Tibetan Scriptures—an Lhasa—a practice which had fallen into undertaking which occupied altogether nearly desuetude. He also restored the custom of the thirty years and was not completed till 1306. first disciples to hold the so-called Vassa or Under Kublai’s successors in China the yearly retirement, and the public meeting of the Buddhist cause flourished greatly, and the order at its close. In all these respects he was Sākya Lāmas extended their power both at simply following the directions of the Vinaya, home and abroad. The dignity of abbot at Sākya or regulations of the order, as established became hereditary, the abbots breaking so far probably in the time of Gotama himself, and as the Buddhist rule of celibacy that they remained certainly handed down from the earliest times married until they had begotten a son and heir. in the piṭakas or sacred books. But rather more than half a century afterwards Further, he set his face against the Tantra their power was threatened by a formidable system, and against the animistic superstitions rival at home, a Buddhist reformer. which had been allowed to creep into life again. Tsongkapa, the Luther of Tibet, was born He laid stress on the self-culture involved in the about 1357 on the spot where the famous practice of the pāramitās or cardinal virtues, monastery of Kunbum now stands. He very and established an annual national fast or week early entered the order, and studied at Sākya, of prayer to be held during the first days of each Brigung and other monasteries. He then spent year. This last institution indeed is not found in eight years as a hermit in Takpo in southern the ancient Vinaya, but was almost certainly Tibet, where the comparatively purer teaching modelled on the traditional account of the of Atīsha (referred to above) was still prevalent. similar assemblies convoked by Asoka and About 1390 he appeared as a public teacher and other Buddhist sovereigns in India every fifth reformer in Lhasa, and before his death in 1419 year. Laymen as well as monks take part in the there were three huge monasteries there proceedings, the details of which are unknown containing 30,000 of his disciples, besides to us except from the accounts of the Catholic others in other parts of the country. His missionaries—Fathers Hue and Gabet—who voluminous works, of which the most famous describe the principal ceremonial as, in outward are the Sumbun and the Lam Nim Tshenpo, exist appearance, wonderfully like the high mass. in printed Tibetan copies in Europe, but have In doctrine the great Tibetan teacher, who not yet been translated or analyzed. But the had no access to the Pāli Piṭakas, adhered in the main to the purer forms of the Mahāyāna

63 school; in questions of church government he mythology of the Great Vehicle, would be took little part, and did not dispute the titular superior to the latter, as the spiritual supremacy of the Sākya Lāmas. But the effects representative of Avalokiteśvara. But of his teaching weakened their power. The practically the Dalai Lāma, owing to his “orange-hoods,” as his followers were called, position in the capital,52 has the political rapidly gained in numbers and influence, until supremacy, and is actually called the Gyalpo they so overshadowed the “red-hoods,” as the Rinpotshe, “the glorious king”—his companion followers of the older sect were called, that in being content with the title Pantshen Rinpotshe, the middle of the 15th century the emperor of “the glorious teacher.” When either of them China acknowledged the two leaders of the new dies it is necessary for the other to ascertain in sect at that time as the titular overlords of the whose body the celestial being whose outward church and tributary rulers over the realm of form has been dissolved has been pleased again Tibet. These two leaders were then known as to incarnate himself. the Dalai Lāma and the Pantshen Lāma, and For that purpose the names of all male were the abbots of the great monasteries at children born just after the death of the Gedun Dubpa, near Lhasa, and at Tashi Lunpo, deceascd Great Lāma are laid before his in Farther Tibet, respectively. Since that time survivor. He chooses three out of the whole the abbots of these monasteries have continued number; their names are thrown into a golden to exercise the sovereignty over Tibet. casket provided for that purpose by a former As there has been no further change in the emperor of China. The Chutuktus, or abbots of doctrine, and no further reformation in the great monasteries, then assemble, and after discipline, we may leave the ecclesiastical a week of prayer, the lots are drawn in their history of L m ism since that date unnoticed, ā ā presence and in presence of the surviving Great and consider some principal points on the Lāma and of the Chinese political resident. The constitution of the Lāmāism of today. And first child whose name is first drawn is the future as to the mode of electing successors to the two Great Lāma; the other two receive each of them Great Lāmas. It will have been noticed that it 500 pieces of silver. was an old idea of the northern Buddhists to look upon distinguished members of the order The Chutuktus just mentioned correspond in as incarnations of Avalokiteśvara, of Mañju-śrī, many respects to the Roman cardinals. Like the or of Amitābha. These beings were supposed to Great Lāmas, they bear the title of Rinpotshe or possess the power, whilst they continued to live Glorious, and are looked upon as incarnations in heaven, of appearing on earth in a of one or other of the celestial Bodhisats of the Nirmānakāya, or apparitional body. Great Vehicle mythology. Their number varies from ten to a hundred; and it is uncertain In the same way the Pantshen Lāma is whether the honor is inherent in the abbacy of looked upon as an incarnation, the Nirmāna- certain of the greatest cloisters, or whether the kāya, of Amitābha, who had previously Dalai Lāma exercises the right of choosing appeared under the outward form of Tshonkapa them. Under these high officials of the Tibetan himself; and the Dalai Lāma is looked upon as hierarchy there come the Chubil Khāns, who fill an incarnation of Avalokiteśvara. Theoretic- the post of abbot to the lesser monasteries, and ally, therefore, the former, as the spiritual are also incarnations. Their number is very successor of the great teacher and also of large; there are few monasteries in Tibet or in Amitābha, who occupies the higher place in the

52 This statement representing the substantial and Chinese in India, and of 1904, when the British historical position, is retained, in spite of the crises of expedition occupied Lhasa and the Dalai Lāma fled to March 1910, when the Dalai Lāma took refuge from the China.

64 Mongolia which do not claim to possess one of 1859). See also Bushell, “The Early History of these living Buddhas. Tibet,” in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Besides these mystical persons there are in Society, 1879–1880, vol. xii.; Sanang Setzen’s the Tibetan church other ranks and degrees, History of the East Mongols (in Mongolian, corresponding to the deacon, full priest, dean translated into German by J. Schmidt, and doctor of divinity in the West. At the great Geschichte der Ost-Mongolen); “Analyse du yearly festival at Lhasa they make in the Kandjur,” by M. Léon Feer, in Annales du cathedral an imposing array, not much less Musée Gaimet (1881); Schott, Ueber den magnificent than that of the clergy in Rome; for Buddhismus in Hoch-Asien; Gutzlaff, the ancient simplicity of dress has disappeared Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches; Hue and in the growing differences of rank, and each Gabet, Souvenirs d’un voyage dans la Tartarie, division of the spiritual army is distinguished in le Tibet, et la Chine (Paris, 1858); Pallas’s Tibet, as in the West, by a special uniform. The Sammlung historischer Nachrichten uber die political authority of the Dalai Lāma is confined Mongolischen Völkerschaften; Bābu Sarat to Tibet itself, but he is the acknowledged head Chunder Das’s “Contributions on the Religion also of the Buddhist church throughout and History of Tibet,” in the Journal of the Mongolia and China. He has no supremacy over Bengal Asiatic Society, 1881; L. A. Waddell, his co-religionists in Japan, and even in China The Buddhism of Tibet (London, 1895); A. H. there are many Buddhists who are not Francke, History of Western Tibet (London, practically under his control or influence. 1907); A. Grünwedel, Mythologie des Buddhismus in Tibet und der Mongolei (Berlin, The best work on Lāmaism is still Köppen’s 1900). Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche (Berlin,

NĀGĀRJUNA Nāgārjuna was a celebrated Buddhist Of the works he probably wrote one was a philosopher and writer. He is constantly quoted treatise advocating the Mādhyamaka views of in the literature of the later schools of which he is the reputed founder; another a long Buddhism, and a very large number of works in and poetical prose work on the stages of the Sanskrit is attributed to him. None of these has Bodhisattva career; and a third a voluminous been critically edited or translated; and there is commentary on the Mahāprajñā-pārāmitā much uncertainty as to the exact date of his Sutra. Chinese tradition ascribes to him special career, and as to his opinions. The most knowledge of herbs, of astrology, of alchemy probable date seems to be the early part of the and of medicine. Two medical treatises, one on 3rd century A.D. He seems to have been born in prescriptions in general, the other on the the south of India, and to have lived under the treatment of eye-disease, are said, by Chinese patronage of a king of southern Kosala, the writers, to be by him. Several poems of a modern Chattisgarh. Chinese and Tibetan didactic character are also ascribed to him. The authorities differ as to the name of this best known of these poems is The Friendly monarch; but it apparently is meant to represent Epistle addressed to King Udayana. A an Indian name Sātavāhana, which is a dynastic translation into English of a Tibetan version of title, not a personal name. this piece has been published by Dr Wenzel.

65 AUTHORITIES.—H. Wenzel, Journal of the Geschichte des Buddhismus in Indien, trans. Pali Text Society (1866), pp. 1–32; T. Watters, Anton Schiefner (Leipzig, 1869); W. On Yuan Chwdng, ed. by Rhys Davids and S. Wassiljew, Der Buddhismus (Leipzig, 1860). W. Bushcll (London, 1904–1905). Tāranātha’s

MEDHANKARA Medhankara was the name of several Siddhi. The fourth was the celebrated scholar to distinguished members, in medieval times, of whom King Parākrama Bahu IV. of Ceylon the Buddhist order. The oldest flourished about entrusted in 1307 the translation from Pāli into A.D. 1200, and was the author of the Vinaya Sinhalese of the Jātaka book, the most Artha Samuccaya, a work in the Sinhalese voluminous extant work in Sinhalese. The fifth, language on Buddhist canon law. Next to him a Burmese, was called the Sangharaja Nava came Araññaka Medhankara, who presided Medhankara, and wrote in Pāli a work entitled over the Buddhist council held at Polonnaruwa, the Loka Padīpa Sura, on cosmogony and allied then the capital of Ceylon, in 1250. The third subjects. Vanaratana Medhankara, flourished in 1280, See the Journal of the Pāli Text Society, and wrote a poem in Pāli, Jina Carita, on the 1882, p. 126; 1886, pp. 62, 67, 72; 1890, p. 63; life of the Buddha. He also wrote the Payoga 1896, p. 43; Mahāvaṃsa, ch. xl., verse 85.

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