THE

PART I

INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER I

THE SUBJECT DEFINED

'HE interest which the study of Buddhism has aroused of late years in Europe has not been unreasonable, though it has been supported, in too many cases, by very little information. The important literature in which this system is embodied, its earnest moral tone, and the immense numbers of those who have professed it, justly give it a strong claim on men's attention. It is a stupendous fact, which no thoughtful man can contemplate without emotion.

It will no longer be asserted, by any one who is well-informed, that Buddhism reckons at the present day more adherents than any other creed.1

But once

probably it was so, and for many centuries. While Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, were few in number, and before Islam had arisen, vast multitudes in India and in China and the surrounding countries professed to find refuge in the Buddha. It is very

1 See Note A at the end of this chapter.

A

possible, therefore-and it is a startling thoughtthat more men and women have owned the Buddha than have owned, as yet, any other teacher.

Truth is not measured-nor even is significance -by numbers. The small nation, for instance, of Jews, the little cities of Greece, and Rome while still she was confined to Italy, have made contributions to the development of mankind, compared with which the spiritual significance of the multitudes of India or of China is as nothing. But the spectacle of human multitudes is still an impressive and a moving spectacle, often a most pathetic one; and we cannot but ask, with deep interest, what is the nature of that teaching which has attracted so many of our fellowmen ? What are the points kindred with truth, and with the Creator's purpose for man, which have given it a hold on so many hearts?

In such an inquiry we shall be much misled if we start, either with the assumption that what so many have believed must be true, or with the assumption that what has given it a hold on men is that by which it differs from other creeds. It is quite possible in regard to any system, and I think it will be found the case with this, that the elements of good and truth which it contains are not the elements peculiar to it—not its characteristics-but those elements which it shares with other systems.

The dogmas peculiar to Buddhism are the least true, and, I cannot but think, the least winning part of it. Something in its way of presenting some truths

a few out of the many to which human nature everywhere responds-must be the secret of the attractive power which, once at least, it exercised. Which truths these are, and what is that way of presenting them, by which it gained access to the Indian heart, the reader of this book will be, I hope, in a position to judge for himself; so far at least as concerns the limited field over which I propose to conduct him.

For whereas the question is complicated by the great variety of shapes which Buddhism has taken, in the present work, out of all that variety, one clearly marked form is treated of alone. That form has strong claims to be considered the most genuine one; and so, I suppose, that in which what is of the essence of Buddhism can best be studied. I propose to describe the primitive stock and one of its existing branches; to show what Buddhism was in Magadha, the land of its origin, and what it is now in Ceylon. The Buddhism of Ceylon belongs to what is called the Southern School; and in treating of it we leave on one side not only the highly developed system of the Lamaism of Tibet, but also the less widely divergent branches which are found, for instance, in Nepaul, in China, and in Japan. Nor even of the Southern School do I undertake more than what concerns Ceylon. If the system has had a different development in Burma or in Siam, such differences lie outside my scope.

In this narrowness of scope there are, I think, advantages. If the vast extension of Buddhism has aroused

interest in it, the variety of its forms has been a prolific cause of confusion and mistake. Travellers and readers have been bewildered by statements apparently contradictory, made by authorities each of whom was speaking about a different thing. Towards the clearing up of these confusions a step has been taken, whenever a writer, though treating of Buddhism at large, has distinguished with adequate emphasis between the different systems which share that name. I hope even more to emphasise such distinction, by admitting nothing within the covers of my book that is not part of the description or the history of my particular branch.

From that point of view, in which the lover of his kind looks out with emotion upon the teeming myriads of his Buddhist brother men, the range of our present study is a very small one indeed. Out of the four or five hundred millions who are said to be, if not all Buddhists, yet all in some degree affected by Buddhism, the whole Southern group counts only thirty millions, while the Buddhists of Ceylon are less than two millions.

But to the student, to whom Buddhism is primarily a moral and philosophic system, the Ceylon branch of it, though small, is perhaps the best he could study, or at least the one to study first. For it is confessedly among those which have least diverged from the primitive stock, and it has a far longer continuous history than any other.

It is a historical method that we propose here to