does the life of Shakespeare. If we can imagine Skakespeare's admirers, in the present or the next century, representing Shakespeare as wondrously born, educated with immense expense, and spending years in studying every phase of human life under miraculous conditions; his first play set on the stage by angels, witnessed by monarchs from every part of the world, and causing raptures to innumerable hosts; representing him as hunting, with armies of beaters and rifles of incredible power and value, gigantic stags in boundless parks and forests; tortured by brutal squires, and so on we shall have imagined a parallel to the stories on which The Light of Asia is constructed.

Shakespeare's life was strange enough and memorable enough; so was Gautama's; but the earlier Buddhists had no more idea that its strangeness was external than we have in the case of Shakespeare. What then did Gautama do?

Among many who were seeking, he persuaded himself-persuaded many followers then, persuaded millions since that he had found the secret of sorrow and the way of escape; persuaded them of this, partly by the consistency of the system under which he presented in one light the mass of the facts believed in his day; partly by an extraordinary sympathy or capacity for teaching; partly by a personal sanctity which seemed to prove that he possessed a moral secret. By sanctity here I mean almost entirely two qualities, gentleness and calm. They are the ideal virtues of the Indian mind; they are the two poles of Buddhist morality, and they seem to have been seen in the highest perfection known to India in the person of Gautama.

When we turn to his teaching, the truest thing we can say of it is, that the substance of it is its least valuable part. The addition he made to existing doctrines seems to me to have been small, and to have been mainly false. The doctrine of the series of birth and death, birth and death, as an evil net in which beings were entangled, or a pathless ocean in which they were wandering, subject to disease, old age, and disappointment; the doctrine of action, as a mechanical cause, distinguishable into merit and demerit, as the electric current is into positive and negative, a cause determining the course of a being's wandering in the ocean of rebirth; the doctrine of various grades of life, infra-human, human, and superhuman, not distinguished by indelible characters, but succeeding one another in the career of the same being, who might be demon, animal, man, god, animal, and demon again in turn-these doctrines existed. The strange great moral doctrine of the evilness of taking life-this was in force. The question how to obtain deliverance from the evil and to gain the good, how to be happily born, or, still more, how to escape unhappy birth: this was the question of the day. An elaborate pyschology and an elaborate metaphysical vocabulary were ready to hand. The

methods of sacrifice, of austerity, of meditation or trance-of monastic life, and mendicancy-these were the methods of his day.

None of this was due to Gautama. If it were not, as I understand it is, clear from Brahmanical and Jain works that all this existed, it would still be perfectly certain that no man, even if he could invent, could have popularised any considerable part of this within the utmost time that can be allowed to have elapsed between Gautama's first preaching and the existence of all this in historical Buddhism.

But we may well believe that Gautama was the first to make out of the chaos of thought a system whose internal consistency made it appear true. He made it consistent by casting out elements which were the truest and best. The idea of a Supreme Being-of a personal soul-these, hard to reconcile with the idea of an endless series of existences, and a mechanical Karma; impossible to reconcile with the utter cessation of existence-had to be dropped. And the practice of sacrifices, which witnessed to the responsible character of action, and the possibility of atonement-ideas utterly irreconcileable with Karma, and with non-personality-this had to be fought against. Sacrifices were also inconsistent with the inviolability of life, and the latter doctrine was exaggerated in opposition to them.

Perhaps some social or political antipathies conspired to the disparagement of sacrifices, Brahmin priests, and Brahmin astrologers; though few things among the exaggerations of the early students of Buddhism have been more exaggerated than their estimate of the hostility between Gautama and the Brahmanical system.

Gautama represented, as the central truth of his discovery, the doctrine that suffering is inseparable from existence, this in regard to the sentient being; suffering is inseparable from existence; and, in regard to the outer world, that all things are unabiding.' The next great principle was, that the cause of existence is ignorance ;virtually, ignorance of the unabiding nature of things. Through ignorance of this, we cling to things; we try to enter into relations with them; we create for ourselves a personality, which really is illusory, as are the things on attachment to which it rests. By personality we become agents, and so set in motion that deadly power of Karma which leads to successive births, in various degrees of misery.

Other teachers had said: This life is suffering; but satisfy the gods, and you will obtain a life in their heaven, which will be happy. Gautama said, 'The misery is inherent in existence. End all, and that is bliss.' Buddhism seeks no heaven.

Other teachers had said: This life is illusory, because there is but one true Being, from which we are mistakenly separated or temporarily isolated by the illusion of personal individuality.

Return to the One Being is happiness. Gautama says: There is no being at all that is not illusory. Buddhism seeks no Absorption. Such was Gautama's key to metaphysics.

What was his key to morals?

The Four Noble Truths, about the theory of suffering and escape, lead up to the Eightfold Noble Way, which is the method of escape. Here our teacher is exceedingly disappointing. The eightfold way consists of Right views, Right aims, Right thinking, and so on. At first sight it reminds me of a man in my undergraduate days who was laughed at for having run along the bank coaching' his college boat by crying, 'Row nicely! now do row nicely!' In other places rules are given for some, not, I am pretty sure, for all of these parts of Right conduct'; but they are of extremely little value as principles. They are either mechanical directions, like those for Right meditation, or they are merely restatements of the former principles, as when Right views are explained as believing that all things are uneternal, and that sorrow is inherent in existence.

It is hardly too much to say that the eightfold summary is vain and empty. There are not eight things corresponding to it. What it does embody is not eightfold but onefold, and is the root and essence of all the morals of Gautama, 'Do your best.' 'Strive' was the first and the last word of the Buddha. If you must have an end, strive to attain deliverance from existence; but in any case 'strive.'

It is the most consistent, the most pitiless-shall I say the most desperate ?-assertion that was ever made, that man has no help to look for, but must help himself. Effort,' ' exertion,'' self-training, these words represent Gautama's key to morals.

6

Utterly unimportant for practical value in comparison with thesanction and the motive of morals are the pictures of virtue and the exhortations to it. In these Gautama must have excelled; his tact and sympathy are proved by many beautiful instances; he had wonderful facility in bringing illustrations, fables, popular stories. and sayings to bear, perhaps in composing brief and striking utterances in verse; and it is impossible to doubt that he urged his exhortations with the utmost grace and tenderness. Some historical personage at least there must have been, who was held to have realised the ideal teacher under the name of Gautama. Thenceforward all that successive teachers could add or repeat, in commendation of the favourite virtues of gentleness and calm, was gathered to his writings and ascribed to him.

The Buddhist records are not without some instances of real examples of virtue in historical lives; but the fatal defect of the whole literature, from this point of view, is that the immense majority of the lessons of virtue are fictitious; entirely dissociated from this life in which we really live, and connected with that series. VOL. XXIV.-No. 137.

K

of former births by a belief in which the sense of the paramount responsibility of this life is destroyed.

From the good rules and good advice which Buddhism provides little could in any case be expected, when no adequate prospect is held out in the future, and no divine assistance is offered to man's weakness; but even more ruinous, in practice, is the conviction that the present life is not all-important, but a trifling unit in an immense series, incapable of resisting in any degree the consequences of the actions of past lives, and entailing consequences on a future existence which has only a very shadowy continuity with the present.

Now, in Ceylon, when a criminal is asked why he committed the crime, he will reply, 'I suppose it is from evil-doings in a former birth that this fault has happened to me;' and if then asked, 'Will you not suffer for it in another birth,' he will reply, 'It will not be I that will suffer.' For the shadowiness of the continuity is a dogma. of Buddhism; the succeeding being, in the next birth, is 'Na ca so, na ca añño': Not the same and not another'!

Before I leave the subject of morals, I must touch on another matter. The moral teaching of the Buddhist writings is on the whole good. In later Buddhist books there is a good deal that is impure; there are bad stories among the Játakas, but on the whole the tone is good, though far from uniformly elevated. The character of the Buddha-except as related in the Lalita Vistara class of biographies, which, to enhance his renunciation, represent him, in luscious descriptions, as having been a gross voluptuary-the historical character of Gautama is unstained, except by pride. But the Vinaya Pitaka, or books of discipline, contain passages which, while they condemn what is wrong, exhibit a degradation of the moral sense that would have seemed incredible. There is a long passage in the Párájika book which I can only describe as the most coldblooded collection of moral horrors that ever was put together. The only defence urged of it is that to be sure of preventing sin you must specify every possible form of it, lest any form of it, remaining unforbidden, should be thought lawful. The explanation is genuine, as regards the enumeration in equal detail of sins against the seventh commandment as of those against the eighth; but what a dreary unreality of moral feeling any such system reveals; what can be hoped of a moral system, which must enumerate all the possible forms and conditions of theft, lest any theft should seem to have been left unforbidden?

But I am sorry to say I must deal more fully with this matter in the interests of truth.

What do I charge upon this passage? First, that it is an unnecessary emuneration of the forms and details of vice, which can only do harm to readers; unnecessary, inasmuch as many of the things specified are utterly outside the reach of any vileness, except

the vileness of the imagination. Secondly, that in the grouping and proportionate blame assigned to different offences an almost inhuman want of moral sense is displayed. Thirdly, that with few exceptions each instance of wickedness specified is said to have been committed by some Buddhist monk. I know that this is a mere conventional formula; but it is not so read by Buddhists. What must be the effect on a Buddhist reader's idea of sin to read: 'At that time a certain monk committed such and such an hideous offence. They asked the Buddha whether it was allowable or not. He replied: It is a fault'?

What do I assert about the passage which contains all this? That it is a genuine part of the Sacred Books of Buddhism; is maintained by the most learned Ceylon Buddhists to be the very words of Buddha (nothing would induce me to believe that the Buddha ever saw it); and is defended, not as being recent, secondary, or secret, but only on the ground I have already mentioned; that it has been for twenty-two centuries and more on the threshold of the Sacred Books of Buddhism, and has provoked from Buddhists no remonstrance, no qualifying or apologetic commentary.

What do I infer from this? That the boasted morality of Buddhism has not deeply affected for good the moral tone of Buddhists at any time since it has been a prevalent religion, and that the monks, the custodians of it, have been less affected than others.

It is, I think, to be regretted that in the volume of the Sacred Books of the East which professes to contain the first part of the Vinaya Pitaka, this passage is not referred to. It is not of its omission that I complain; no printer would print it. What I complain of is, that it is not mentioned: that the omission is not stated or explained at the place where it occurs, nor explicitly stated anywhere; and that there is not a hint from first to last in the volume that any passage of this objectionable character exists. I do not for a moment suppose that the translators wished to conceal this part, or any part, of the matter which they have omitted-for they have omitted a large amount, some quite unobjectionable. The grounds on which they have omitted in the English Sacred Books much which is printed in Professor Oldenberg's Pali edition of Vinaya Pitaka may be gathered from the two prefaces, and are, I believe, these: Professor Oldenberg, of whom and of whose work and personal courtesy to myself I would speak with the greatest respect, believes that these instances, or specifications, or examples of the application of rules, called in Pali Matikápadáni,' are a later portion of the book, later than another portion, the Pátimokkha, which is now found along with them, and which contains the general rules. I have no doubt he is right in a certain sense: the general rules must have