Chapter II: Part 2

Then the king knew what manner of son this was, and he perceived that the soothsayers had spoken truth. Of the two alternative futures which they had foretold for him, the king would have preferred that he should become the monarch of the whole world. But the gods knew better. They knew that he was to be not the monarch of the world, but its freer: the sacrifice and renunciation of his life were to strike off from millions the shackles of sin and misery. They knew, moreover, that all the king’s endeavours to turn the Blessed One from his purpose would be vain; yet must the king needs try, and so throughout the prince’s youth every temptation that riches and luxury and pleasure could offer was put in his way. In the life of the Buddha it is easy to separate the wheat from the chaff, the facts from the fairy-tales. The great central truth remains untarnished in spite of all, and so in telling the story we, seeking to show the inspiration of Oriental mysticism, need hardly rob it of the mystic glamour of that poetical embroidery in which the rich imagination of Indian priests has enwrapped it.

Seven days after the birth of her son the beautiful Queen Maya died, and the babe was given over to the care of her younger sister, Prajapati Gautami, who was also one of King Suddhōdana’s wives.

It is strange that in his picturesque Buddhist poem, “The Light of Asia,” Sir Edwin Arnold should have omitted many of the legends with which he must have been familiar, and which would well have fitted the rather sensuous character of his verse. Moreover, he mixes up the stories of the two wives of Prince Siddartha, Yasōdhara and Gopā, and altogether omits any mention of the birth in the Lumbini Garden. Now the Lumbini Garden is one of those places connected with the Buddhist records which have been identified with the utmost certainty. The early Chinese pilgrims were shown the spot, and were careful with accuracy to describe the monuments which now, after all these centuries, the Babu Chandra Mukherji has been able to verify. On the spot where stood the sacred tree under which, grasping one of its boughs, Maya the Queen gave birth to her son, contemporary piety, or perhaps at latest that of King Asōka, who lived two hundred years afterwards, erected a chapel in which stood a sculpture portraying the nativity.

The ruins of the sacred building may yet be seen, and, much damaged, the stone image which it enshrined—a barbaric but expressive group. Hard by there still runs the little stream which Hsüan Chwang tells us was called the “river of oil,” a name which it still bears. Twenty or twenty-five paces from the sacred tree is the tank in which Maya bathed, still full of pure water.

In the days of the Chinese pilgrims there was a great stone pillar which had been erected by King Asōka; but it had been struck by lightning, and lay on the ground when they saw it, split in the middle. The pillar with a perfectly preserved inscription by King Asōka stands close to the temple. But the most striking proof of all is in the name Lumbini, or Lummini, which is preserved to this day as Rummin Dei, the initial R of Sanscrit being changed into L in the Magadhi language of the inscription.

So he who visits the Rummin Dei to-day knows of a certainty that he is standing on the very spot where some twenty-five centuries ago Prince Siddartha was born—he who was to found a religion which, above all others, has, so far as numbers go, dominated mankind. For his disciples have, indeed, been “as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore.”

The years went on and the child grew in grace and beauty of mind and body. His teachers were amazed at the precocity of his knowledge and wisdom. Learning seemed to come to him by instinct, until at last one of his masters said to him: “It is thou that art the Guru, not I.” His stature and strength were phenomenal, qualities upon which tradition was not slack in embroidering. Was he not sixteen, some say eighteen, feet tall, and did he not toss a dead elephant over a moat with as great ease as an ordinary strong man would fling a cat across a ditch?

But with all this he was a child of moods. At an age when other children are careless of aught save their toys and their games, he would lose himself in the solitude of the forests and remain wrapped in thought, deep in meditation. The king, his father, who watched him narrowly, perceived this, and felt that it boded no good for his own dynastic ambition. He thought of the prophecy of the soothsayers, and had a premonition that his son’s greatness would be spiritual rather than temporal. He foresaw that, however much he might try to turn the boy’s thoughts towards the world, his labour would be but vain.

Still, he would leave no stone unturned to win him over by the perfumed softness of Oriental luxury to the pomp and pride of his rank. Three palaces did he build for him, one for each of the three seasons of the year—spring, summer and winter—and the plenishing of these was such as would appeal to every æsthetic sense. The sweetest singers, the daintiest dancers, were enlisted to brighten the life of the palaces. But against all the spells of the enchantresses the young prince, already almost a recluse, was as hard as adamant.

Soon the time came when it was fitting that he should take a wife, and upon this the king and his councillors based their last hope of turning his mind to earthly things. We are told that the prince thought long and anxiously before he could assure himself that marriage would not engross him to such an extent as to rob him of the calm which was needful for the contemplation and the search for wisdom, to which he was minded to dedicate his life.

In the end he consented, but he stipulated that the wife chosen for him should be no ordinary woman, but such a one as might be a spiritual helpmate to him. Caste was not to weigh in the scale. She might be a Kshatriya, a Vaisiya (householder), or even a Sudra (serf). That was of no account. The mind alone, or perhaps rather what we should call the soul, must be the test. It is difficult to imagine the consternation which, if it be true, as it probably is, such a declaration on the part of a royal prince would arouse among the bigoted Brahmans of his father’s court.

There was, however, no need to fear a degrading marriage, for when the maidens of the noble Shakya clan were brought together, Yasōdhara was chosen for her beauty and her sweet nature. And greatly blessed the prince was in his choice, for she believed in him as Kadijah did in Mohammed during the humble days of his life as camel driver, and when after his long self-banishment in the wilderness, he at last entered upon his ministration as Buddha, she with her young son Rahula, followed him as a disciple. But many years were to pass—years fraught with great happenings—before that should take place.

It is my misfortune that I have no first-hand knowledge derived from the study in the originals of those books in which the Buddhist legend is enchased. I am ignorant of Sanscrit, ignorant of Pali—as ignorant, indeed, as those holy monks and priests who drone out their texts without any spark of light as to the meaning of the words which they recite by rote. But, after all, I am not attempting to write any learned treatise on the religion of Buddha, but simply to give some account as best I may of the legends which satisfy the spiritual cravings of millions of those people among whom I have spent several years of my life—legends which have inspired the art of the Far East just as our own beautiful religion has inspired that of the West, and which for old sake’s sake, I have tried to represent in my own Veluvana.

And so I have to cull from a whole garden of books written by French and English scholars what flowers I can, trying to weld together into some harmony of story their many dissonances. The chief difficulty begins with the tales of the marriage or marriages of Prince Siddartha. Not Sir Edwin Arnold alone is responsible for the tangled skein which we have to unravel. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, Rhys Davids, Rockhill, Beal, and many others, have each of them their own version of the traditional events. With fairy-tales that is inevitable, but the salient facts of truth remain, and these are the same in all the books.

On the day of Prince Siddartha’s birth there had appeared a mystic tree, which was called “The Essence of Virtue.” When the prince was twenty years old this tree was blown down and dammed the water which supplied Devadeha, which was the city of King Suprabuddha. In vain did the people try to remove it; but Chandana, the prince’s charioteer, drove him out to a certain garden whence he could hear the cries of the people, and he was about to go to their help when a wounded wild goose, the Hansa of Indian myth, fell at his feet.

The prince took it up and tended it and bound up the wound. Now the goose had been shot by his kinsman Devadatta, and this was the beginning of a great enmity between them. For Devadatta sent a messenger to the prince to demand the bird of him, claiming it as the prize of his bow; but the prince would not yield it up, saying that the bird belonged to him who had saved its life rather than to him who would fain have taken it. From that time forth Devadatta hated him, and appears throughout the whole story of the Buddha’s life, and even in what are known as the “Birth Stories” of previous existences, as his bitter enemy.

Then the prince left the garden, and seizing the tree which had defied all the strength of the people, threw it into the air so that it broke in two, the halves falling on the two different sides of the stream. As, after having performed this feat, he was returning home, he saw a beautiful maiden who was looking out from the terrace in front of her father’s house. The prince stopped his chariot and a great love sprang up between the two. The damsel was Gopā, the daughter of Dandapani, a noble of the Shakya clan.

When King Suddhōdana heard what had happened, he was overjoyed, and asked the father for the maid as a bride for his son. But Dandapani scorned Siddartha as a dreamer of dreams. The Kshatriya was like the Samurai of Japan, whose sword is his soul, and full of this spirit he declared that it would bring shame upon a warrior were he to give his daughter in marriage to one who cared not a jot for those manly sports and contests which beseemed a Kshatriya, but spent his time in idle thought and vain imaginings. If he wanted Gopā, let him prove his mettle; let him fight for her and win her against all comers. So a great tourney was held, of which Gopā was to be the prize.

_See p. 8._

[_To face p. 24._]

The prince and his two kinsmen, Ananda, who loved him and afterwards became his disciple, and Devadatta, the betrayer, with all the young braves of the clan, entered the lists. But it mattered little who opposed him; none could hold his own against Prince Siddartha. Disputing with the most learned Gurus, he was always the conqueror. In manly exercises, horsemanship, wrestling, archery, and many other sports, he defeated all rivals. He alone could bend the mystic bow of the ancient Shakyas, and when he shot an arrow into the air and it fell to earth, from that spot there sprang a jet of healing water, which to this day is shown as the Arrow Fountain. And so Gopā fell a willing prize to the bow and spear of the king’s son whom she loved. But Devadatta, beaten at all points, went his way more than ever bearing hatred and jealousy in his heart.

In spite of all the charms and gentle goodness of his wives, in spite of the arts and graces of the singing and dancing girls of his palaces, Prince Siddartha was haunted by pity for the world’s sin and sorrow, which he divined but which he had not yet seen face to face. The king had been very careful that all ugly and disquieting sights should be kept out of his way. But it was all in vain; sooner or later the revelation must needs come. The four famous drives furnished the certainty. It happened that once, when he was in his chariot with Chandana, his charioteer, on their way to the Lumbini Garden, before coming to the city gate, they met a man bowed, decrepit, toothless, white-haired, tottering feebly with the help of a stick, stumbling at every step. The prince asked Chandana what this meant, and Chandana explained to him the misery of old age. Sadly he turned back, unwilling to go further. Another time they met a leper stricken with foul disease; a third time they were met by wailings and lamentation, men carrying a bier, women weeping and beating their breasts. This was death. Yet once again they drove out, and this time they met a bikshu—a pious mendicant—with his alms-bowl. Poor, indeed, he was and ragged, but in his face was written the calm of holy happiness.

Then Prince Siddartha knew that he had found his calling. “Vanity of vanities,” said the Jewish preacher some four hundred years before Buddha’s time, “all is vanity.” It was in the spirit of King Solomon that the prince went to his father and prayed to be relieved of all the pomp and burthen of royal state and to be allowed to fly the world in quest of wisdom. But the king would not listen to him, and, on the contrary, caused the gates of Kapilavastu to be closely guarded lest by any chance his son should try to escape.

Let me insert here a wonderful coincidence. At the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth centuries of our era there lived in the monastery of Marsaba, that wonderful laura in the wilderness of Judæa, a monk of great piety and learning, St. John of Damascus, the greatest ecclesiastical writer of his age, and so eloquent a preacher that, like another John, the famous Patriarch of Constantinople, he was known as Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, or Chrysorrhoas, gold-flowing. What, it will be asked, has this Syrian monk to do with Prince Siddartha and the four drives? Listen!

Amongst the many books which St. John of Damascus wrote, or is supposed to have written, is the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. St. John said that he received it from travellers coming from India, and so firmly did he believe in its truth, that at the end of the story he appealed to the two saints for their intercession on his behalf.

Max Müller sums up the tale as follows: “A king in India, an enemy and persecutor of the Christians, has an only son. The astrologers have predicted that he will embrace the new doctrine. His father, therefore, tries by all means to keep him ignorant of the miseries of the world, and to create in him a taste for pleasure and enjoyment. A Christian hermit, however, gains access to this prince, and instructs him in the doctrines of the Christian religion. The young prince is not only baptized, but resolves to give up all his earthly riches; and, after having converted his own father and many of his subjects, he follows his teacher into the desert.”[2]

But that is not all. In the story of Josaphat, as told by St. John, we have also the tale of the drives—with this distinction: Whereas the Buddhist canon, the Lalita Vistara, represents Buddha as seeing on three successive drives, first an old, then a sick, and at last a dying man, St. John makes Josaphat meet two men on his first drive, one maimed, the other blind, and an old man who is nearly dying on the second drive. That is but a slight difference which would be accounted for by oral tradition. The coincidence is striking, and has been pointed out independently by English, French and German scholars; and, as Max Müller says, it is “as clear as daylight” that “Joannes Damascenus took the principal character of his religious novel from the Lalita Vistara.” The first European scholar to notice this was M. Laboulaye.

And now comes the strangest part of the story. So popular did St. John’s tale become, that it was translated into every European language. Barlaam and Josaphat were canonized both in the Eastern and Western Churches. In the Greek Church the 26th of August is their saints’ day, in the Western Church the 27th of November. “If all that is human and personal in the life of St. Josaphat is taken from the Lalita Vistara, what follows? It follows ... that Josaphat is the Buddha of the Buddhist canon. It follows that Buddha has become a saint in the Roman Church; it follows that, though under a different name, the sage of Kapilavastu, the founder of a religion which, whatever we may think of its dogma, is in the purity of its morals nearer to Christianity than any other religion, and which counts even now, after an existence of 2,400 years, 455,000,000 of believers, has received the highest honours that the Christian Church can bestow. And whatever we may think of the sanctity of saints, let those who doubt the right of Buddha to a place among them read the story of his life in the Buddhist canon. If he lived the life that is there described, few saints have a better claim to the title than Buddha; and no one, either in the Greek or Roman Church, need be ashamed of having paid to Buddha’s memory the honour that was intended for St. Josaphat, the prince, the hermit, and the saint.”[3]

One night, when the palace was hushed in sleep, the prince roused his faithful charioteer Chandana, and bade him to saddle his horse Kantaka and prepare to follow him. He passed through the many halls where the women, beautiful and graceful by day, were lying asleep in careless and ugly attitudes. It was the reverse of the medal, the repulsive side of luxury, and the sight filled him with loathing. Accompanied by Chandana, he left the palace and entered the slumbering streets of the city. By a miracle they cheated the watchfulness of the guard at the gate and rode out into the open country. When they had gone some way the prince took off all his jewels and sent Chandana back with injunctions to give them to Prajapati Gautami, who had been a mother to him when her sister Maya died. Then he went on alone into the wilderness. By the way he met a hunter, with whom he exchanged his stately attire for rough countryman’s clothes, and in this fashion entered upon the six years of an asceticism such as the world has perhaps never seen. In his loneliness five men came and joined him as his disciples, sharing the hardships of his self-imposed penance.

At the end of those six long years of starvation and wretchedness and mortification of the flesh, when the Blessed One, resisting all the temptations of Mara, the evil spirit, and his three beautiful daughters, had reduced his body to a mere shadow, there came a moment when it was revealed to him that not by asceticism alone could he hope to attain his goal. Not in that way could he destroy the power and misery of sin. He determined to go back to the world, not, indeed, as a warrior-prince, a mighty conqueror, but as a poor and humble teacher, striving to bring help and virtue to his fellow-men. A young village maiden, whose name was Sujata, took pity upon his abject state, and brought him bowls of sweet milk to comfort him and restore his wasted strength. Naturally enough, legend worked upon this pretty idyll, telling how Sujata milked a thousand cows, and “with their milk fed five hundred cows, with theirs two hundred and fifty, and so on down to eight. Thus aspiring after quality and sweetness, she did what is called working the milk in.” Then she boiled the milk of the eight cows, and, to the accompaniment of many miracles, fed the Buddha with this restoring essence of milk. (Rhys Davids, “Birth Stories,” Vol. I., page 91, etc.) But his five friends, angry with him for leaving the ascetic life, turned away from him as a renegade and left him.

So the Blessed One departed out of the wilderness and came to Rajagriha and entered the Mrighadeva, the deer forest, hard by the city. There for seven days and nights he sat in meditation under the Bo tree (_Ficus religiosa_), until at the end of that time he became conscious that he had attained the supreme wisdom and was now Buddha. Under that tree he preached the first sermon, and the five friends who had deserted him were converted and came back. Countless numbers of people from the king of that country, Bimbisara, downwards, flocked to listen to his teaching. Among others came his own wife Yasōdhara, bearing him no grudge for having left her, and bringing her young son Rahula. By that name there hangs a tale. When it was told to the Blessed One that a son had been born to him, he answered: “There has been born to me an impediment.” This answer was repeated to King Suddhōdana, and he said, “Let the boy be called Rahula, The Impediment.”

When the king heard that his grandson and his mother had gone to follow in the wake of the Buddha, he was sorely grieved. His son had left him. Eight messengers whom he had sent begging him to return had failed in their mission, and themselves remained as disciples with the Blessed One; and now he had but this child to look to for the perpetuation of his name and of his dynasty. Blind—and no wonder, for who can read the future?—he could not see that this son of his would win for himself and for his father a name beside which all the glory and pride of their Heaven-born ancestors would be but a cloud dispelled by the first ray of morning sun. Three influences have ruled the spirits of men since the dawn of the world—Buddha, Mohammed and One other, the greatest of the three. But that other was God.

What would have been the winning of one or more provinces, what the slaughter of a few hundreds or even thousands of bowmen and spearmen, compared with the conquest of the souls of billions of fellow-creatures through the length and breadth of Asia? The old king’s name lives, but it lives as that of the father of no warrior, but of a great teacher whose doctrine has given peace and happiness to the souls of men instead of shedding the blood which clogs the footsteps of the earthly conqueror.

We, holding fast the Christian creed, may say with confidence that of all mere _men_ who have lived since the creation of the world Buddha was the greatest. Next to him, I should count Confucius, and after Confucius, Mohammed.

Nothing in Buddha’s life seems to me greater than the victory which he achieved over himself when he became convinced of the aimlessness of the ascetic life. He had left his palaces, his wife, and all the pomp of his father’s court, in order to fly from the world and its temptations and lead a life of privation and meditation. After six years he saw the futility of such a life. His aim was to do something that should redeem the world from sin and its miseries. How could solitude, starvation and mere meditation achieve that?

So, in spite of the indignation of the five men who had followed him into the ascetic life, he determined to go back into the world and live for the good of others instead of sitting wrapped in his own thoughts. He believed that he had achieved the great good, and he realized the fact that his attitude was one of utter selfishness, barren of all result, and leading to nothing. The disappointment and the desertion of his five followers must have been bitter. But comfort came to him in time, for they grew to know that he was right and were converted as trusty disciples to his new creed. From the time that he left the shade of the Bodhi tree his ministration began. He knew that he had received the sublime gift of wisdom, and that the gift was not for himself alone, but for the purification and happiness of all mankind. It was no doubt a great struggle to give up the illusion of six long years and the dream of many more. But it was also a great triumph, the turning-point of a life that was so full of destiny.

I have already told how the first Vihara was established in the Veluvana, the pious gift of King Bimbisara, but the chief home of the Buddha was another garden or grove called the Jétavana, which a certain minister named Anatha Pindaka had bought at a great price from Jéta, the son of the King of Sravasti. Here the Buddha dwelt for more than twenty years, and there he uttered the Jātakas, or Birth Stories, which have been preserved mainly thanks to his kinsman Ananda. For it is a strange coincidence that, as in Christianity so in Buddhism, there is no written word by the Master. These Jātakas are of the nature of parables by which the Buddha was wont to illustrate the events of the present by stories of what had taken place in a former state of existence; and as the Buddha’s life was one long struggle against the treacherous designs of his enemy Devadatta, so in the Jātakas we find a constant reference to the feud as having existed in previous incarnations.

When first the Buddha began to preach, women were not admitted into the Holy Order; but there soon came a moment when they, too, yearned to listen to the teaching of the Master. A certain noble of the Shakya clan took his wife and a number of Shakya ladies to sit at the feet of the Blessed One. Among them it is to be inferred were Gopā and others of the Buddha’s wives. But Yasōdhara was not among the very first, for she still longed for her lost husband, and hoped against hope that he might yet come back to her. But when she saw that this could not be, she, too, was converted and became a saint, earning the praise of the Blessed One for her modesty and virtue.

Now Devadatta, seeing the great power of the Tathāgata (Buddha), had, against his will, for it would deprive him of all chance of sovereignty, become a Bhikshu, and carrying the beggar’s bowl, had set up a Vihara in rivalry to that of the Buddha. He, too, must needs convert disciples, both men and women. It chanced that among the latter there was a young married woman, who, though she knew it not, was with child when she joined the sisterhood. When she discovered how matters stood with her, she made no attempt at concealment, but told her superiors of her case. Upon report being made of this to Devadatta, he was wroth, and declared that as she had broken her vows she must be disgraced and banished from the community. In shame and sorrow she came to the Blessed One and laid her case before him.

He was moved with pity, but saw that it would do harm to the Holy Order and give offence to the weaker brethren and sisters if he were to admit a nun who had been rejected as unchaste by Devadatta, unless she could prove her innocence. So he ordered that an inquiry should be made, and upon the assurance of a wise woman, named Visakha, that the girl’s condition was not due to any violation of the rules of the order, but was only the natural result of her marriage before she entered the sisterhood, he accepted her, and when the nun’s child was born, he was known as Kassapa the Prince, and was brought up in royal state. The Master justified his action by the story told in the following Jātaka, which is given at great length by Rhys Davids.

Long ages ago the Bodhisatva came to life as a deer. When he was born he was of a golden colour, his eyes were like round jewels, his horns were white as silver, his mouth was red as a cluster of Kamala flowers, his hoofs were bright and hard as lacquer-work, his tail as fine as the tail of a Tibetan ox, and his body as large as a foal’s. He was known as the Banyan deer, and lived in a forest with an attendant herd of five hundred deer, over which he was king. Near him dwelt another deer, also gold-coloured, with a like herd of deer under him. He was known as the Monkey deer.

Now the King of Benares at that time was a mighty hunter, and made his people neglect their work in order to go and beat for him. So the people took counsel together, and resolved to make an enclosure, driving all the deer into it and giving them over to the king, so that their work should be no longer hindered. So the two herds were driven into the enclosure, and when the king went there, he saw the two gold-coloured deer and granted them their lives. But he, loving venison, would go sometimes to shoot a deer and at other times sent his cook to kill one. At last, when the deer, terrified and often wounded, were in despair, they went to the Bodhisatva and told him of their piteous case. So he made a bargain with the king of the other herd—the Monkey deer—that the two herds should in turn each day by lot send a deer to the place of execution, so that at the least there should be no more wounding.

One day it happened the lot fell upon a hind in the herd of the Monkey deer. But she being great with young, went to the Monkey deer and said: “Lord! I am with young. When I have brought forth my son, we will both take our turn. Order that the turn shall pass me by.” But the Monkey deer refused, saying that he could not make her lot fall upon others, and sent her away.

Seeing that there was no help in him, she appealed to the Bodhisatva, and he took pity upon her, and went himself and put his neck upon the block of execution and lay down. When the cook came and saw that the king of the deer whose life had been promised him was there, he went and told the king, who, seeing the Bodhisatva, said: “My friend, the king of the deer! Did I not grant you your life? Why are you here?” The Bodhisatva answered: “O great king! A hind with young came and told me that the lot had fallen upon her. How could I transfer her miserable lot to another? So I, giving my life for hers, am lying here. Have no suspicion, O mighty king!” Then was the king moved to great compassion, and saying that never, even among men, had he seen so great pity, gave their lives both to him and to the hind. But more than that, after listening to the Bodhisatva, he decreed that no beasts or birds or fish should thenceforth be killed.

After that, the deer, sure of their lives, began to lay waste and eat the crops of the people, so they complained to the king, who bade them begone, for he might give up his kingdom, but not his oath. Then the Banyan deer called together the herds and forbade them to eat the crops; and he sent a message to the husbandmen, telling them that they need put up no fences, but that it would be enough if they tied leaves round the edge of the fields as a sign. But he continued to instruct the deer thus throughout his life, and passed away with his herd according to their deeds. The king also hearkened to the words of the Bodhisatva, and then in due time passed away according to his deeds.

When the Master had finished this story of the Banyan deer he explained its meaning to the assembled disciples.

“He who was then the Monkey deer was Devadatta, his herd was Devadatta’s following, the hind was the Nun, her son was Kassapa the Prince, the King was Ananda, but the royal Banyan deer was myself.” (Rhys Davids, “Birth Stories,” Vol. I., pages 201-210.)

Purged of its wild extravagances, the Lalita Vistara, the story told by Ananda, gives much insight into the purity and sweet reasonableness of the Blessed One’s teaching. Shortly before descending upon earth to be born of Queen Maya, he is seated in the Tsushita (Heaven) surrounded by gods and saints, to whom he delivers this last parting message (I am translating from the version of Foucaux, quoted by Barthélemy St. Hilaire):

“Be careful to avoid all immodesty. All the divine and pure pleasures are the fruit of good work. Take heed, then, of your deeds. If you have not laid up for yourselves these previous virtues, you are hurrying to that goal where, far from happiness, we experience misery and suffer every ill. Desire is neither lasting nor consistent; it is even as a dream, a mirage, the lightning, the foam of the sea. Observe the practice of the Law; the man who faithfully observes these holy practices meets with no evil. Loving tradition, morality and charity, be constant in patience and purity. Act in a spirit of mutual loving-kindness, in a spirit of helpfulness. Remember the Buddha, the Law and the congregation of the faithful. All that you see in me of supernatural power, of science, and of strength is produced by the agency of virtue, which is its cause, and comes from tradition, from morality and from modesty. Do you, too, practise this perfect restraint. It is not by phrases, nor by words, nor by crying that we can attain the doctrine of virtue. Acquire it by deeds; act according to your professions; never cease in making efforts. Not every one who acts is rewarded, but whoso does not act obtains nothing. Beware of pride, of haughtiness, and of arrogance; always gentle, and never straying from the straight path, be diligent in following the road which leads to Nirvana. Bestir yourselves in the search after the Road of Salvation, and with the lamp of wisdom dispel utterly the darkness of ignorance. Rid yourselves of the net of sin which is accompanied by repentance. But what skills it to say more? The Law is full of reason and of purity. When I shall have obtained the supreme intelligence, when the rain of the Law which leads to immortality shall fall, then come back to listen anew to the Law which I shall teach you.”

Then were the Gods consumed by sorrow at the loss of the Blessed One; but he comforted them by leaving in his place the Bodhisatva Maitriya, whom he consecrated by giving him his tiara and his diadem. Maitriya, then, will become Buddha (_vide supra_), when the corrupted world shall have lost all memory of the teaching of Shakya Muni.

* * * * *

The Buddha’s life upon earth was prolonged far beyond the span which is allotted to most men. He was some thirty years old when he first began to preach, and his ministration lasted fifty-three years. Surely it is not irreverent to apply to him the words of the Hebrew Psalmist: “Mark the perfect man and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.” Render “Peace” by “Nirvana,” no bad translation, indeed, and you have the Buddha. When at the last he felt that the dark mystery of death was overshadowing him, and that the end was at hand, he bade Ananda go and tell the Mallas of Kusinārā that their master would pass away at midnight, and invited them to come to him. There was at that time in Kusinārā an old and decrepit man a hundred and twenty years of age, upon whom the people looked as a saint. His name was Subhadra. This venerable man, believing in the greatness of the Blessed One, begged of him the boon of passing away before him; and, this being granted, Subhadra gave up the ghost. But when the assembled Bhikshus, being astonished at this favour, inquired the reason, the Blessed One told two last Birth Stories.

“Bhikshus, in days gone by there lived in a valley a deer, the master of a thousand deer; he was prudent, wide-awake and of quick perception. One day a hunter espied him and told the king. So the king assembled his army and surrounded all the deer and their leader. Then the leader thought: ‘If I do not protect these deer they will all be destroyed.’ So looking about the place in which they were penned, he perceived a torrent flowing through the valley; but the stream was so swift that the deer feared lest it should carry them away. But the leader jumped into the water, and finding foothold in the middle, cried to the herd: ‘Come, jump from the bank on to my back and thence to the other bank; it is the only means of saving your lives; if you do not do this you will surely die!’ The herd of deer obeyed, and though their hoofs striking his back cut the skin and tore the flesh, he never flinched. When as it seemed all the deer had crossed the water, he looked back, and saw a calf that had been left behind and could not cross over. Then, torn and bruised and racked with pain, he took the calf on his back, and crossed the stream with it. All the herd had now passed over, but the great stag knew that death was near, and he cried: ‘May what I have done to preserve the joy of life to these deer and this calf make me cast off sin, and obtain boundless and perfect light; may I become a Buddha, cross over the sea of regeneration to perfection and salvation, and pass beyond all sorrow.’ ...

“What think ye, Bhikshus? I am he who was then the leader of the herd. The deer are now the five hundred Mallas and the fawn is Subhadra.” (Adapted from Rockhill’s “Life of Buddha,” page 137 _et seq._)

One more Jātaka he uttered, and that was the last. He warned his weeping disciples not to mourn for him, or to look upon him as lost, for inasmuch as they had his law and his doctrine, he would still be with them. He spoke to them of the four places where pious men would rear monuments in his honour: (1) The Lumbini Garden, where he was born; (2) the place under the Sacred Fig-tree, where he became Buddha; (3) the Mrighadeva, the deer forest, from where the first sermon was preached; (4) the place where he died at Kusinārā.

At the last the Blessed One, uncovering his body, said to the Bhikshus: “Brethren, look well at the Tathāgata’s body, for it is as hard to find a Tathāgata as to see a flower on a fig-tree. Bhikshus! never forget it: decay is inherent to all things!” These were the last words of the Tathāgata. And so in the fullness of time, calm and holy, he entered Nirvana, that state in which all the desires, all the cares and all the sorrows of life have ceased to be. Is not that the ideal of “Peace, perfect peace?”

* * * * *

There is a Japanese proverb which says: “Meeting is the beginning of parting.” Pregnant, indeed, are those six words, for in them are summed up all the sorrows and the one inevitable certainty of life. When the parting with those who are dear to us takes place, how we treasure some trifle which brings to life recollections of the sweet communion of the past! And so it is with those relics of which I spoke at the beginning of this chapter. When Assheton Smith, the famous sportsman, was told that he must take his ailing wife to the South of France, he, being a wealthy man, answered: “That I cannot do, but I can and will bring the South of France to her.” And so there arose that marvellous conservatory, a glass palace, which I remember well, when nearly sixty years ago I used to go and stay with Lord Broughton, Byron’s friend, who rented the place. In our humble way we bring home to ourselves the lands endeared to us by the careless gaiety of former days, scenes which are peopled by the ghosts of old friends whom we conjure up, living once more in the sunshine of happy youth. Is not that the chief sanity of the collector’s madness?

BUDDHA AND ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND CASTE—THE ARYANS

There are few days in the year, even in mid-winter, or, what is worse still, in March, when I cannot sit out in my Veluvana, a sun-trap snugly sheltered from the north and the biting east. It is my thinking-place, and on this 28th of January, for some mysterious reason, with his image before me, my thoughts have been held entirely by the Buddha himself. Not that I am a Buddhist, or in the remotest degree likely to become one, though we hear of convinced followers of that religion even among Englishmen; but, as those who condescend to read me will have guessed, the story of his life has a great attraction for me, and that none the less because it is the record of one of the greatest rebellions that ever took place. Indeed, there is something weirdly fascinating in the history of all revolution even where we most hate it. What show-place can possess greater interest than the tragic collections of the Musée Carnavalet in what was once Madame de Sévigné’s home in Paris? Yet it is made up of relics which make men shudder, especially those few still left who, like myself, long ago knew not a few people who had lived through the days of the Terreur.

I have stood in that house of gruesome memories spellbound by a fascination such as that by which a snake paralyses its victim. In quite another way I am entranced by the upheaval which was the work of the Buddha. There was not the faintest likeness between the two revolutions—indeed, they were diametrically opposites. The one all fury, flame and murder—hatred, the guillotine, and the _noyades_ of the Loire. The other, the calm extinction of all passion, all human desire, all ambition; a life spent in holy contemplation and in the wooing of that supreme wisdom which is virtue.

And yet Martin Luther himself, when he passionately scourged the Pope and his Bishop for the sale of indulgences, was not a more zealous rebel than this calm and contemplative Buddha, who, renouncing all honours and titles and worldly possessions for himself, contented, like St. Francis, to don the monk’s robe and to carry the beggar’s bowl, entered his peaceful protest against the usurpations and pretensions of the crafty Brahmans, who had long since drifted away from the simple and poetically beautiful teaching of the Rig Veda, albeit they acknowledged its authority as Sruti—inspiration, looking upon it as their one inspired sacred Book.[4] In that wonderful collection of hymns and prayers about which I wish to say a few words later there is no allusion to suttee—the awful institution under which widows are burnt with their dead husbands; none to child-marriages, another cruelty; none to caste. All of these were inventions of the Brahmans, and it was upon the doctrine of caste that they founded their claim to superiority over the kings and princes whom they had gradually supplanted.

So long as the king and priest were one—so long, that is to say, as the king conducted the ceremonies and sacrifices of religion—the authority of the king was unchallenged.[5] But there came a moment when the kings grew weary of a tedious ritual and delegated their religious duties to substitutes. That was the opportunity of the priestcraft, who, as the intercessors between the people and their gods—a powerful position indeed—were able to claim a rank higher than that of the king himself. Here was the beginning of Caste. When Buddha entered upon his ministry there were four castes: (1) The Brahmans, or priests; (2) the Kshatriya, the warrior and governing class, to which the kings and princes belonged—a class analogous to the Samurai or Bushi of Japan; (3) the Vaisiyas—farmers, traders, etc. These three classes, all of Aryan descent, were, and are, “the twice-born,” whose second birth is symbolized by their being invested with the sacred cord at an age which more or less corresponds to that of confirmation with us. (4) The Sudras were the fourth class; they were the lowest of all—despised as the descendants of the Dasyu, the enemies of the bright gods, the aborigines who were defeated by the migration of the white Aryan herdsmen descending upon India from the lofty plains of the Pamirs.

We talk glibly enough of Caste, yet there are not many of us who have any glimmering of light as to its real meaning or origin. The majority of Europeans speak of the word as if it were of Hindu origin, whereas it is simply a Portuguese word signifying race or family. In its present sense, indeed, it is of quite modern birth, for the old Portuguese Barbosa, writing in the sixteenth century, only uses the word _casta_ in the sense of family, speaking of men and women _de boa casta_, of good family. When he wished to indicate the mysterious divisions of Indian society, he used the word _leis_, laws, _leis de gentios_, laws of the heathen. (Sir Henry Yule’s glossary.) Apart from the word, we are apt to speak of Caste as if it were an institution, respectable at any rate on account of its hoary antiquity. Old it certainly is, yet it was not known to the sacred poets of the Rig Veda.

The word which comes nearest to caste in Sanskrit is “Varna” (colour), and in the early days of the Aryan invasion of India there were only two classes: the white conquerors and the “Dasyu,” or enemies, who were black, and, as the conquered people, looked down upon. What we call caste, then, which was originally a question of skin, had already in the Buddha’s time, five centuries before our era, become far more complicated than that. Ethnologically, the division between the white man and the black, the Arya and the Dasyu, the conqueror and the conquered, was as sharp as ever. But whereas the dark man remained as he was—the lowest of the castes—political reasons and the lust of power had subdivided the conquering race into three distinct classes, and, as I have said above, it was upon that subdivision that the Brahmans laid the “precious corner-stone” of their priestly tyranny.

When the glorious young prince, a Kshatriya and the heir to the throne, the incomparable scholar and athlete, the man whom men envied and women loved, cast aside his royal rank and went forth into the wilderness, taking upon himself all the burthens and privations of the poorest and meanest, in order that for them he might work, striving for the good of all mankind without distinction of colour or race, the Brahmans were forced to see in him a hostile champion, armed to attack their stronghold. He went further than this: he denied the divine authority of the Veda, without which the whole structure of Brahmanism crumbles to dust, and so he finally was branded as a heretic.

What cannot fail to excite surprise is the fact that although Buddhism “became the state religion of India under Asōka, the Constantine of India, in the middle of the third century B.C.” (Max Müller), and was only declining in the seventh century A.D., caste should not utterly have disappeared. But that was not the case—on the contrary, it has become more and more involved, for there are now not only the three divisions of the twice-born Aryas, and the outcast Sudras, but there are, moreover, the subdivisions to which professions and occupations have given rise; the goldsmith, for example, looking down upon the bootmaker and leather worker, and he, in his turn, refusing to hold communion with some craftsman whose superior he deems himself to be. No wonder caste has been described as “a standing puzzle to governors and the despair of all employers of labour.” Life is, indeed, complicated when the shadow of a man of meaner birth falling upon a boiling pot defiles the food which it contains by an impurity which is almost worse than poison. As in an Oriental household, perhaps even in a European household, it has been said that no matter how low a menial may be, there is always someone a step lower to whom by payment he may assign some of his duties; so below the Sudras there is the Pariah, the outcast, who, as the word implies, should carry a bell to give timely warning of the approaching contamination of his shadow.

Max Müller, in his “Chips from a German Workshop,” quotes a table by Berghaus showing the relative numbers of the people professing the chief religions into which the world is divided. Nothing can better show the extent of the influence which Buddhism, with an advantage of 500 years and more over Christianity, 1,100, and more, over Mohammedanism, has exercised upon mankind.

Buddhists 31.2
Christians 30.7
Mohammedans 15.7
Brahmanists 13.4
Various heathens 8.7
Jews 0.3

In a note, Max Müller adds that: “As Berghaus does not distinguish the Buddhists in China from the following of Confucius and Lao Tze, the first place on the scale belongs really to Christianity. It is difficult in China to say to what religion a man belongs, as the same person may profess two or three. The Emperor himself, after sacrificing to the ritual of Confucius, visits a Tao-ssŭ Temple, and afterwards bows before an image of Fo in a Buddhist chapel.”

_After a copyright photograph by Elliott & Fry, London._

[_To face p. 52._]

_Ex Oriente lux._ We see from this table that all the chief religions of the world have their rise, like the sun, in the East.

I have observed with no little astonishment that certain pundits of to-day speak in somewhat offensively patronizing tones of Max Müller, as if he were a thing of the past, all very well in his day, but not up to date, and already superseded. As to that, whether his theories upon the subject of mythology and comparative religion were sound or not, I am not competent to judge; but I feel that if others have pushed his work a step further than the point at which he left it, we may fairly ask whether, without his great labours, these sages would have attained their own success. There is no finality in science, and a Newton or a Faraday is in no way dethroned if others have built on the foundations which he laid. The world does not stand still, and it is the common fate of the pioneer that some new man should go beyond what he has reached. However that may be, the collating, translating and editing of the sacred books of India, and the editing of the thirty volumes of the sacred books of the East, including Chinese and Arabic works, were a colossal labour—the work of a lifetime, which has been of national and international value. All honour to the workman!