A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c7.50

c7.50

Gautama, the Sage of the Sakyas, the founder of historical Buddhism, as a philosopher accepted the current Indian ideas concerning rebirth, laying special stress upon the miseries inseparable from the continuance of the chain of existence. As a moralist he taught a system of lofty ethics. His teaching, doctrinal and ethical, was entrusted to an Order of begging friars and nuns, which developed quickly into a highly organized and powerful Society or Church, full of missionary zeal, whose operations extended in due course as far west as Epirus and Cyrene, and as far east as Japan. From the third century before to the fourth century after Christ Buddhism was the predominant, although never the sole, Indian religion, in possession of enormous influence exercised by a disciplined hierarchy and supported by the immense wealth of innumerable monastic foundations.