Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c10.38

c10.38

The force of existing circumstances and the authority of influential personages might perhaps for a time help to make up for, or conceal the utter want of organization; finally, however, the inherent impossibility of a Church without Church-government, with ordinances which were only applicable to the narrow circle of a côterie, was certain to lead to ever increasingly momentous consequences. Those deeply incisive schisms, which early arose and never disappeared, the weakening of the resistance opposed to the Brahmanism at first so successfully attacked, are phenomena certainly not unconnected with that fundamental defectiveness of Buddhist Church-organization. If at last, after a long death-struggle, Buddhism has vanished from its Indian home, leaving not a trace behind, we venture to think, that in the old rules of the community, in what they say and not less in what they leave unsaid, no small part of the preparatory history leading to that distant future is clearly enough depicted.