The Religions of India c19.150

c19.150

The geographical growth of formal Buddhism is easily sketched. After the first entrance into Kashmeer and Ceylon, in the third century B.C., the progress of the cult, as it now may be called, was steadily away from India proper. In the fifth century A.D., it was adopted in Burmah,² and in the seventh in Siam. The Northern school kept in general to the ‘void’ doctrine of Nāgārjuna, whose chief texts are the Lotus and the Lalita Vistara, standard works of the Great Vehicle.³ In Tibet Lamaism is the last result of this hierarchical state-church.⁴ We have thought it much more important to give a fuller account of early Buddhism, that of Buddha, than a full account of a later growth in regions that, for the most part, are not Indic, in the belief that the Pāli books of Ceylon give a truer picture of the early church than do those of Kashmeer and Nepāl, with their Çivaite and Brahmanic admixture. For in truth the Buddhism of China and Tibet has no place in the history of Indic religions. It may have been introduced by Hindu missionaries, but it has been re-made to suit a foreign people. This does not apply, of course, to the canonical books, the Great Vehicle, of the North, which is essentially native, if not Buddhistic. Yet of the simple narrative and the adulterated mystery-play, if one has to choose, the former must take precedence. From the point of view of history, Northern Buddhism, however old its elements, can be regarded only as an admixture of Buddhistic and Brahmanic ideas. For this reason we take a little more space, not to cite from the Lotus or the grotesque Lalita Vistara,¹ but to illustrate Buddhism at its best. Fausböll, who has translated the dialogue that follows, thinks that in the Suttas of the Sutta-nipāta there is a reminiscence of a stage of Buddhism before the institution of monasteries, while as yet the disciples lived as hermits. The collection is at least very primitive, although we doubt whether the Buddhist disciples ever lived formally as individual hermits. All the Samanas are in groups, little ‘congregations,’ which afterwards grew into monasteries.