Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.5

c7.5

Those upheavals of nature which partitioned off India from the cooler lands of the west and north by a gigantic wall of vast mountains, allotted at the same time to the people, who should first tread this highly favoured land, a *rôle* of detached isolation. The Indian nation, in a manner scarcely paralleled by any other nation in the civilized world, has developed its life out of itself and according to its own laws, far removed alike from the alien and the cognate peoples, who in the west, within the compass of closer mutual relations, have performed the parts to which history called them. India took no share in this work. For those circles of the Indian race, among whom Buddha preached his doctrine, the idea of non-Indian lands had hardly a more concrete signification than the conception of those other worlds, which, scattered through infinite space, combine with other suns, other moons and other hells, to form other universes.