indifference, are not to be found. O Subhadra ! I do not speak to you of things I have not experienced. Since I was twenty-nine years old till now I have striven after pure and perfect wisdom, and following the good path, have found Nirvana." A rule had been made that no follower of a rival system should be admitted to the Society without four months probation. So deeply did the words or the impres sive manner of the dying teacher work upon Subhadra that lie asked to be admitted at once, and Gautama granted his request. Then turning to his disciples he said, " When I have passed away and am no longer with you, do not think that the Buddha has left you, and is not still in your midst. You have my words, my explanations of the deep things of truth, the laws I have laid down for the Society ; let them be your guide ; the Buddha has not left you." Soon afterwards he again spoke to them, urging them to reverence one another, and rebuked one of the disciples who spoke indiscriminately all that occurred to him. To wards the morning he asked whether any one had any doubt about the Buddha, the law, or the Society ; if so, he would clear them up. No one answering, he said, " Beloved mendicants, if you revere my memory, love all the disciples as you love me and my doctrines." Ananda expressed his surprise that amongst so many none should doubt, and all be firmly attached to the law. But Buddha laid stress on the final perseverance of the saints, saying that even the least among the disciples who had entered the first path only, still had his heart fixed on the way to perfection, and constantly strove after the three higher paths. " No doubt," he said, " can be found in the mind of a true disciple." After another pause he said, " Beloved, that which causes life, causes also decay and death. Never forget this ; let your minds be filled with this truth. I called you to make it known to you." These were the last words Gautama spoke ; shortly afterwards he became
unconscious, and in that state passed away.
Part II.—Early Buddhism.
The accounts of Gautama s cremation and of the distri bution of his relics are full of the miraculous, but it seems that the body was burnt with great reverence by the local rajas of Malva. Even before this ceremony had taken place dissensions began to break out in the Society, one member of the order, Subhadra (not the Brahman men tioned above), having even goue so far as to rejoice that now at last they were free from control, and could not always be told to do this, or not to do that. Struck by this language, the chief disciples began at once to consider the expediency of holding a council, where all points of difference should be definitively set at rest. Chief among the leaders was the aged Kasyapa of Uruvela, whose distinguished position before his conversion, and his great learning, were not the only grounds of the respect in which he was held by the infant Society. He had been one of those most intimate with Gautama ; so much so, that on one occasion, when walking together and talking of the deepest truths of their belief, the two friends had entered into a more than usual confidence and intercom munion of thought and feeling, and had then changed robes with one another in token of their sympathy and love. Sariputra and Moggallana were dead ; but Ananda, the beloved disciple, and Upali, who though of low caste origin was looked up to in the Society as the greatest authority on points of conduct and discipline, were of one opinion with Kasyapa as to the advisability of a council. This was agreed upon ; the disciples first separated and went to their homes, and when they met again for the rainy season in that vihara at Rajagriha, which had been the first gift to the Society, the council was held under the presidency of Kasyapa, and with the patronage and assist ance of Ajatasatru, the powerful raja of Magadha. The number of believers present was five hundred, but if any discussion took place no tradition of it has survived. We are only told that at each daily sitting of the council, which lasted seven months, Ananda or Upali repeated some portion of the law, and the whole assembly chanted it after them. A second council is said to have been held one hundred years later in Vaisali, about 70 miles N. of Kajagriha, and another was certainly held about 250 B.C. under the Buddhist emperor Asoka, in his capital Pataliputra, the Palibothra of the Greeks and the modern Patna. There is reasonable ground for belief that the sacred books of the Buddhists at present existing in Ceylon are substantially the same as the canon settled at this last council of Pataliputra, and it is from these books that the modern accounts on which we are as yet obliged to depend purport to have been and, with some alterations and additions, undoubtedly have been derived. The orthodox Buddhists hold the present canon to be identically the same as that settled at the first council of llajagriha ; but the internal evidence of those parts of the canon which have as yet been published tends to show that they cannot possibly have been composed in their present state imme diately after Buddha s death. The date, derived from Ceylon, which is usually assigned to that event is 543 B.C. ; but those scholars who have devoted most attention to the point hold this calculation to contain a certain error of about GO years, and a probable error of 80 to 100 more; so that the date for the death of Buddha would have to be brought forward to 400 B.C., or a few years later. As the date of Asoka s council has been determined with certainty to have been within a year or two of 250 B.C., there remains an interval of a century and a half between the first council and the earliest records now accessible to us, an interval amply sufficient for the growth of the supernatural element which they so largely contain. When these records have been published in the original Pali, it may be possible to decide how far some portions are older than the rest, and how far it is possible to hold that they reproduce any earlier canon ; at present we can only claim in the following brief outline to give an account of Buddhism as it existed 150 years after the decease of its founder. But when it is recollected that Gautama Buddha was himself learned in all the learning of his time ; that he did not leave behind him a number of deeply simple sayings from which his followers subsequently built up a system, but had thoroughly elaborated a system of his own before his mission began ; that during his long career as teacher he had ample time to repeat the principles and details of the system to his disciples over and over again, and to test their knowledge of it ; and finally, that his principal disciples were, like himself, accustomed to the subtlest metaphysical distinctions, and trained to that wonderful command of memory which Indian ascetics then possessed, when these facts are recalled to mind, it will be seen that much more reliance can be placed upon the doctrinal parts of the existing Buddhist canon than upon correspondingly late records of other religions, or on the biographical parts of the Buddhist canon itself.
attempt to solve the problem of the ultimate origin of the kosmos.[1] It takes as its own ultimate fact the existence
of the material world and of conscious beings living- ↑ " When Mfilunka asked Buddha whether the existence of the world is eternal or not eternal he made him no reply ; but the reason of this was, that it was considered by Buddha as an inquiry that tended to no profit." Hardy, M.B., 375. Only a Buddha can comprehend how effects are produced by karma, or how the universe was brought into existence. Ibid., p. 8, note.
