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ordinary man views a multiplicity of things, each thing divided and separate from the other. The natural eye takes account only of appearances; it requires the severest discipline for a man to behold the Reality. This is surely Theism in its highest form and conception. It is something

much more than we are wont to mean by that word, for by a Deist or Theist we often describe a person who does not deny the existence of God; who admits it as a sort of ultimate fact, as the Hercules' pillar of the universe. But to the Buddhist, the belief in God is the most awful, and at the same time the most real of all thoughts; one not thrust back into the corner of a mind which is occupied by everything else, but which he thinks demands the highest and most refined exercise of all the faculty that he has. It is something which is to make a change in himself, which is at once to destroy him and to perfect him. And the effect is a practical one. Buddha is ever at rest. Can his worshippers be turbulent? Can he admit any rude or violent passions into his heart? He must cultivate gentleness, evenness, all serene and peaceful qualities, reverence and tenderness to all creatures, or he is not in his rightful state. He is not tempted, or obliged, as the Brahmin is, to look upon any human creature as merely animal, as excluded even from the highest privileges. He denies the natural difference of the Sudra; the poorest man of the vilest race may become one with Buddha. Hence, though he belongs to no priestly family, all his

functions are more essentially those of a priest than the Brahmin's can be. He claims no civil distinction; he is to be reverenced simply as offering up prayers for the peace and prosperity of all other people. He must abstain from much speech. In silence he may best hope to know the Unseen Intelligence. This is one aspect of the doctrine, and surely a very interesting one.

II. But if the Buddhist sage asks himself, 'What is it that I am contemplating: I cannot see it, or hear it, or handle it; I dare not conceive it; it is altogether inconceivable, and yet I know of it only by this mind of mine:' he is likely to find himself in a strange perplexity. Or, if he puts the case thus to himself: The end I propose to myself is to become absorbed, lost, that is to say, nothing. Can it be Something which is to work this result? Can it be Something I am contemplating?' He must say at length No, it is Nothing. Nothing must be the ground of my life, of my being-of the being of all the things I see!' Here is Atheism; a deep, hopeless void, yet touching on the borders of that doctrine which implied real belief in a living Divinity.

The transition to such Atheism is, no doubt, possible in the Brahminical doctrine; but here it is much easier. For the existence of a continuous caste preserves the tradition of a Divinity, invests it with a reality in some sense independent of the mind of the beholder. Here all rests upon that mind. The light seems to be projected from the eye; now it may be a bright sun in the heaven;

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now it may shrink into a speck; now it may vanish altogether. Yet we should draw a wrong inference from the incapacity of the Buddhist in this state of mind to give any form to his belief, if we said that it is wanting. He may even declare in honesty, 'I see nothing,' and the words being the utterance of despair, not of triumph or satisfaction, may themselves contain a sure witness, even to himself, that there is that which no words or thoughts of his can comprehend; an eternal absolute ground of all words and thoughts.

III. And soon the Buddhist discovers an escape from this void of nothingness. He began with looking upon the One Intelligence as alone real; all outward nature he discarded, as merely apparent. But the visible world claims its rights; he cannot disown it; he must, in some way or other, take it into his system. The Intelligence therefore, the pure Buddha, must have a partner of his throne. It is Dharma; the principle of Matter; that out of which all things are formed. But these two powers, Intelligence and Matter, seem essentially opposite: if they are co-workers how can they be reconciled? There must be another power, Sanga, the mediating influence, which binds the informing mind to the dead formless thing upon which it works. This is nearly the explanation which a Buddhist priest gave to the English resident at Nepaul of a subject which has occasioned much controversy. It is borne out by the symbols in the Buddhist temples. They seem contrived to express the idea of some active,

productive power; of some passive, merely receptive power; again, of something which is the joint result of both. If we compare the Buddhist Triad with the Hindoo Triad of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, the Creator, Preserver, Destroyer, we are struck rather by their difference than their resemblance. The powers of preservation and destruction are militant powers; each is continually invading the kingdom of the other: Brahma is looked upon as the common origin of both. Here the Intelligent Power is considered as balancing, or sustaining, the Passive, Material Power; and a third as necessary to their fellowship. The latter idea is, I think, by far the deeper, and more suggestive; but then it is abstract, rather than personal; more of a philosophical speculation; less of a practical belief. And it leads very directly to the next side of Buddhism --what is called its Pantheistic side.

IV. Beginning with the notion that the Intelligence is entirely separated from the worldthat He is One, and it multiform-the Buddhist may arrive, by a series of easy steps, at a conclusion which would seem most opposed to this, that the Intelligence is essentially one with the world: in fact, that it can only be considered as the informing life or soul of the world. As in the case of Brahminism, it may be rightly said that this doctrine was latent in the Buddhist from the first: in other words, that the moment he began to think upon Nature with no other data than the belief which he possessed, he must inevitably ter

minate in this scheme. But it should be said, at the same time, that he has struggled earnestly, even heroically, with this tendency; that his effort to contemplate the pure Essence indicates a genuine desire to see something above the world, not merely dwelling in it and actuating it. However true then it may be that Buddhism often becomes a mere notion of a God diffused through all things, I cannot believe that this is its characteristic principle. To ascertain what that is, we must examine the next allegation respecting it, that it is especially the deification of human saints or heroes.

V. We can scarcely speak of this as a phase of Buddhism. Everywhere you will find certain human beings called Buddhas. You will find Europeans asking such questions as these, When was Buddha born? How many Buddhas are there? And those who are asked seemed not astonished at the inconsistency of the two enquiries, or of either with that idea of a pure essential Intelligence, sometimes the fixed only reality, sometimes so divested of all qualities as to become nothing, sometimes diffused through all things. If you consider the starting point of the doctrine, you will see that the departure from it, which is involved in this notion of human Buddhas, is far less than it seems. The abstracted man was to become one with the Divinity. In the mind of the Hindoo a whole caste is marked out for that glory. But a whole caste evidently does not attain it; there must be immeasurable differences