Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.6

c7.6

The day was yet to come, when an overpowering hand broke down the partition between India and the west—the hand of Alexander. But this contact of India and Greece belongs to a much later period than that which formed Buddhism: between the death of Buddha and Alexander's Indian expedition there elapsed perhaps about one hundred and sixty years. Who can conceive what might have been, if, at an earlier epoch, when the national life of the Indians might have opened itself more freshly and genially to the influences of a foreign life, such events had overtaken it as this incursion of Macedonian weapons and Hellenic culture? For India Alexander came too late. When he appeared, the Indian people had long since come, in the depth of their loneliness, to stand alone among nations, ruled by forms of life and habits of thought, which differed wholly from the standards of the non-Indian world. Without a past living in their memory, without a present, which they might utilize in love and hate, without a future, for which men might hope and work, they dreamed morbid and proud dreams of that which is beyond all time, and of the peculiar government which is within these everlasting realms. On scarcely any of the creations of the exuberant culture of India, do we find the stamp of this Indian characteristic so sharply, and therefore, too, so enigmatically impressed, as on Buddhism.