partaking of a meal of dried pork which Kunda, a worker in metal, had prepared for him. It is interesting to note that he was particularly anxious that Kunda should not feel any remorse for the accidental result; and he begged his best-loved disciple, Ananda, to assure Kunda that the result was not for harm but for good; and that the result to Kunda himself would be not harm, but blessing. Buddha took more than one journey after the meal which caused his death, and the vehement pain which he suffered at first passed away; and then the end came tranquilly. He had been conducted to a place where two Sâla trees were blooming, though it was not the season for such flowers; "I am weary, Ananda, and would lie down," he said. Presently, after much conversation, Ananda went away, and we read this:

Now the venerable Ananda went into the Vihâra, and stood leaning against the lintel of the door, and weeping at the thought: "Alas! I remain still but a learner, one who has yet but to work out his own perfection. And the Master is about to pass away from me he who is so kind!"

Now the Blessed One called the brethren, and said, "Where then, brethren, is Ananda?"... And the Blessed One called a certain brother, and said, "Go now, brother, and call Ananda in my name, and say, Brother Ananda, the Master calls for thee."

"Very well, brother," said the venerable Ananda, in assent, to that brother. And he went up to the place where the Blessed One was, and when he had come there, he bowed down before the Blessed One, and took his seat respectfully on one side.

Then the Blessed One said to the venerable Ananda, as he sat there by his side: "Enough, Ananda! Do not let yourself be troubled; do not weep! Have I not already, on former occasions, told you that it is in the very nature of all things most near and dear unto us that we must divide ourselves from them, leave them, sever ourselves from them?... For a long time, Ananda, you have been very dear to me by thoughts of love, kind and good, that never varies, and is beyond all measure. You have done well, Ananda! Be earnest in effort, and you too shall soon be free from the great evils-from sensuality, from individuality, from delusion, and from ignorance!"

So did Buddha, in the hour of his approaching dissolution, counsel his best-loved disciple; and not him only; for presently the other brethren came too, and to them also he addressed words of counsel. Ananda lamented that the great Master should die in so poor and mean a place, and even proposed that he should be moved to Benares or some other great city near at hand; but Buddha rejected the idea, and indeed the time was past for such transference. It so happened, however, that the Mallas of Kusinârâ (a neighbouring town) were holding a

meeting in their council chamber; these were summoned, and they came with their wives and families, and to each family in succession Buddha addressed a few words, and they departed with tears. Then lastly he asked all the brethren, whether they had any doubt of the truth of his message, and whether they had anything to ask him. But they had no doubt, nor anything to ask. Just before this, the last convert made by Buddha during his lifetime, Subhadda, had professed his acceptance of Buddha's message, and had entered the Order. And then Buddha uttered his last words, "Hearken, O disciples, I charge you; everything that cometh into being passeth away; strive without ceasing." And then, as we should say, he died; or, as his disciples said, he entered by successive stages into Nirvâna, the final blessedness.

Such was the death, some twenty-three or twenty-four centuries ago, of one of the most loving spirits that ever lived on earth. I have of necessity greatly abridged the narrative; and since I think it may be in the main accepted as true, I have not added to it the few wonders which were introduced into it by his followers in after ages. It was natural for them to think that at such a moment the earth should quake and the heavens thunder, and that Brahmâ Sahampati, the creative Deity, should utter a declaration as to the importance of that moment, when the victorious Buddha was finally perfected.

I have implied that there were qualities in which Buddha fell short. The desires and passions of ordinary men have a certain measure of goodness which he seldom recognised and perhaps in terms denied; and though it would not be right to interpret such a denial too rigidly, it cannot be said that material happiness was any part of the aim which he set before men. Buddha hardly felt the full compass of his assertion, when he said that material happiness is transitory. It is transitory in a certain obvious sense; but it leaves its mark on the soul; and honourable happiness leaves a mark which we should be sorry to dispense with. Yet when we reflect how much dishonourable happiness there is in the world, the happiness of one implying the unhappiness of many, our surprise may be lessened that Buddha condemned the pursuit after material happiness without making any exception to such condemnation.

Even at the present day, how often does the happiness of the rich involve the unhappiness of the poor; and if in the present day, how much more in the age of Buddha, an age in

which the world was full of cruelties, often deliberately perpetrated under the name of justice, to which there is no parallel in the world of to-day; an age in which indifference to the welfare of the stranger and the alien was almost universal! We must not be greatly surprised if Buddha thought that desire and passion, whose fruits in so many instances he saw to be bad, were things intrinsically and always to be avoided. It is permitted to ourselves to hope that we may purify desire and passion without abolishing them; and the experience of the world has advanced so far that we may say that, for their perfect purification, God's help is needed. But the experience of the world had not advanced so far in Buddha's age.

Only it would not be right, because he was deficient on the side of trust in God, to put out of sight all that he did on the human side for the advancement of mankind. Can it be said that we of the twentieth century after Christ are beyond the need of such instruction as that which I have quoted from the Dhammapada? Few of us, I think, are beyond being benefited by Buddha's axioms of morality.

After the death of Buddha, his doctrine spread with vigour in the north-east of India, and councils were held for the determination of points of greater or less importance in connexion with the religion. But the adoption of the Buddhist creed by the great king Asoka in the third century before Christ was perhaps the most important of all the events in the early history of Buddhism, that is to say between the death of Buddha and the Christian era. Asoka was the grandson of Chandragupta, to whom ambassadors had come from the Greek king Seleucus Nicator, one of the successors of Alexander. With all his greatness, Asoka's family had originally sprung from the lowest caste, the Sûdras, and thus he had a certain interest in the overthrow of Brahminism. He reigned over all India north of the Vindhya hills, and numerous inscriptions, put up by his command, still remain, and commend to us the precepts of Buddha.

Another powerful king, who in Buddhist writings is known as Milinda, but who was of Greek origin and in his native tongue is known as Menander or Menandros, attached himself to the doctrine at the end of the third century before Christ. The Questions of King Milinda is a famous Buddhist work, translated in the 35th and 36th volumes of Sacred Books of the East. He reigned in the north-west of India. and is said to have made considerable conquests.

Thus, whether by the power of monarchs, or by its own dignity and charm, the Buddhist doctrine and discipline, the Buddhist monasteries and lay communities, made great progress in the world for many centuries after the death of Buddha himself. In the first century of our era Buddhism was carried into China, and had great influence in that country. In the sixth century of our era it was carried into Japan, and from the ninth century onward spread there rapidly. (Lafcadio Hearn's Japan, an Interpretation, pp. 204-5.) Undoubtedly the Buddhist doctrine had power as a missionary creed.

Yet, when we look into it, this power would seem to need something to supplement it. In India (except so far as Burmah and Ceylon are concerned) Buddhism proved after all to be but a transitory phase of belief. For five hundred years it grew; then slowly it began to yield before the ancient Brahmin religion, which had never really vanished from the hearts of the Hindus. As it was not by the help of persecution that Buddhism arose in India, so neither was it through persecution by its enemies that it fell. It fell, we cannot doubt, because it could not unite itself with Brahminism, and Brahminism, with all its faults, was more tangible, more imaginable, than Buddhism. Something there was which needed to be added to Buddhism, before it could deeply affect the popular mind. In China and Japan Buddhism did survive, because it was capable of uniting itself with that ancestor worship which is the heart of the religion of those two great countries. But with China and Japan a future chapter must deal more fully.

CHAPTER IV

ANCIENT RELIGION: PERSIA

TRULY does Darmesteter say of the religion of ancient Persia, "There has been no other great belief in the world that ever left such poor and meagre monuments of its past splendour." Yet the religion of ancient Persia has one claim on our regard which the more famous religions of ancient Greece and Rome have not; it has survived, whereas they have perished. The name of Zeus or Jupiter is no longer honoured by any man as a worthy name of the Supreme Being; but Auramazda, to whom the Persian king Darius, five hundred years before Christ, recorded his devotion on the rocks of Behistun, in cuneiform letters legible to-day and interpreted by scholars, is worshipped at this hour by the community of the Parsis, who mostly have found a refuge in India. Ahura Mazda-Auramazda-Ormuzd; whether it is in one or another of these three forms that the Supreme Being is named and worshipped, the worshipper belongs to the same line of tradition; and that tradition has never quite died out as a living word among men.

But when we ask what is the history of this tradition; when we ask how and at what date it originated, and what we are to think of the famous prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, whose name is so intimately associated with it; when we ask what we are to think of the scarcely less celebrated Magi, who were its priests; when we seek to judge of the real worth of the religion indicated by these names, its power to strengthen the human heart and to direct men's conduct fruitfully and honourably; we find ourselves in a maze of doubt; and the most learned persons, who have solved the enigmas of the language, who have made plain the Avesta and the Pahlavi texts, who have wrested from the cuneiform inscriptions their long-hidden secret-these men, so eminent and so courageous in their researches, have wide differences among themselves as to the century in which